Hermes is a messenger. He can go where others can't, travel freely between realms that others find impassable.
Once he sneaks in to look at the Fates' weaving and sees a peculiar tangle in their loom, just a glimpse before they chase him out. An ugly loop. They'd have trimmed that away if they could, snuffed out whatever mortal did whatever it was that caused such a snarl.
So it must be that they can't cut it.
Hermes thinks about that a lot, about that tangle looping huge and ungainly from the future of the tapestry to the past, and one day he tries it.
Calliope is not a particularly good mother. The Thracian fellow doesn't seem any great shakes at parenting either. Hermes isn't sure who raised the lad the first time around. This time it was him. Maybe there is a way to thread the needle. Maybe if Orpheus grew up more trusting, more secure, he'd believe Hermes, when he said it was a test, not a trap.
He should have known it wouldn't be that simple. There wasn't just one loop, in the tapestry. How many threads before he succeeds? Or before he gives up? Fifty? A hundred, two hundred?
A thousand?
The Fates glare at him whenever they're in the same room, now. They know it's his doing. He just doesn't care that much about their handiwork or about their glares.
The Fates are sabotaging him, he thinks.
It's getting harder every iteration to affect things, make them go differently. He finds himself saying something he said last time or the time before, finds himself absentmindedly retracing his steps. He can still try new things, with effort, but the effort is enough that he's limited to one or two points of divergence each time. At least, the big divergences; he can make little changes in his delivery when he speaks. Tweak his gestures. He pays a lot of attention to exactly how his voice rises and falls, when he tells Orpheus the story of Hades and Persephone. Maybe there's a way to get it across just so.
He doesn't know where Eurydice is before the point at which she arrives at the station. She doesn't talk about it, even if he asks her point-blank. Orpheus isn't curious enough to pry, or, if he is, doesn't report back to Hermes about anything she says. This makes it basically impossible, at least on his limited budget of changes he can make to the timeline, to do anything to change her upbringing. He's limited almost exclusively to talking to Orpheus. He's less and less convinced that the boy's childhood matters at all. He makes smaller loops, just the few months where Eurydice is in the picture.
The thing is, he can avert the tragedy.
He can step outside the station and chase Eurydice away, and she and Orpheus will never meet, never love.
He can - after a few false starts learning how mortals manage this - help the girl find firewood and food, skipping off to distant jungles where Persephone's visits are of less consequence and back with an armful of bananas and a sling full of logs.
If he's emphatic enough while Orpheus is deep in creative flow, he can interrupt the songwriting to alert the boy to more immediate and physical needs - and then he goes to help her forage, and he and Eurydice die, but together, like old age come a bit early.
There are a dozen ways to interrupt the story before it sets up its miserable fall.
And if Hermes does any of that, Orpheus can't complete the song. He needs to fall in love, he needs to know loss, and only then will the right notes and the right words reach his lips. Without that song no one, not Zeus and not Demeter and not Aphrodite and certainly not Hermes, can resolve the tension. The seasons swing more and more wildly.
Sometimes the world ends in fire, as Persephone evades her husband. The world is choked in kudzu and smothered in pollen. The sun beats down hotter and heavier. Steamy summer storms can't suck enough warmth out of the air. The animals that can live like this at all overpopulate and then die to disease in their billions. Eventually the tinderbox catches, and the survivors are smothered in smoke or roasted alive.
Sometimes it ends in ice, if Hades chains her down and keeps her at his side. Persephone shrivels to a shadow of herself, marinated in wine and so lost from everything that once brought her joy that it's not clear if she could create spring again given the chance. The seas recede and the glaciers advance and every leaf on every tree blows away to crumble to dust, every waiting seed in the earth perishes without a glimpse of the dawn, and the world is buried in snow.
The only thing he can't do is let the lovers in the underworld make it all the way back to the station. Too much direct involvement from Hermes during the walk invalidates the conditions of the test. He can't get Hades to have so much as a civil conversation with him, even if he goes back farther than usual and lives out the decades before Orpheus's birth on rails and tries to find an opportune moment; so the original trial is the only one that Hades ever sets.
Sometimes Orpheus barely makes it out of the underworld. Sometimes he gets all the way to the station, but turns around just a split second too soon. Sometimes he gives up in the middle of the hike to Hadestown; a half-Muse can go longer than an ordinary human being without food or warmth, or he'd never get so distracted from such concerns in the first place, but if Hermes mistimes his interruptions, Orpheus'll be running on fumes when he needs his strength to walk, to sing, to endure, to turn around and lead the dead home - and he'll collapse, and Eurydice will watch from a few meters back, unable to move forward or make her voice heard in his ear.
Hermes does eventually think of asking Orpheus about it. It's his entire divergence for the loop, forcing his way through a conversation that isn't the same bedtime stories and avuncular advice he's been dispensing on every trip around the timeline, but he tries.
Orpheus is a good boy, and in his own field, he's a god-touched genius. But he's a little simple - simple in a good way, a pure and beautiful way, part of why Eurydice loves him, part of why Hermes can't leave him to his tragic downfall, but... well, it's hard for him to understand the concept. Hard for him to figure out why Hermes can't just warn him (Hermes always warns him), or can't just go ask his uncle Hades to be reasonable, or can't just - and Hermes has tried all of that. Hermes has tried so many things. This time he's trying asking Orpheus and it doesn't help at all.
How many threads were there? He tries to get another look at the loom, but he's on such thick rails now. He can still tweak exact word choice. Emphasis. It's a test, he says. It's a test, he tries the next time. It's a test, he repeats, trying for gentle confidence. It doesn't work. Nothing he tries in that vein sticks with Orpheus as long as it has to, long enough to get him all the way to the end of the line, long enough to let Eurydice follow him into the light of the sun.
Hermes tries letting the world end a few more times. Slight variations. Can he steer Persephone to run away, and then be caught? Does that change anything, if Hades drags her down below while she cries for her mother and begs for her father and pleads under the eyes of all the gods for rescue? The world still ends. The folks up on Olympus must be excited to start over. They must be longing to try doing something with some kind of fire nymph or some kind of ice spirit as the dominant species on the face of the Earth. They just needed an excuse.
Hermes, straining against the railroad tracks woven into his life with every breath, attempts letting Orpheus be dragged up by his absentee mother and his disinterested father and whoever else was around. It's so hard, even though this is how it was the first time around. Orpheus isn't Hermes's son. What happens? If he stands in the right places to see the key moments go by, how are they lined up? - but the boy comes by the station one day and Hermes snaps right back into the pattern. Orpheus doesn't notice anything odd about acting so familiar with this god he's never met before. It doesn't wind up making any difference.
Gods don't get bored in the same way humans do. But there is something sort of like it, in the weariness Hermes feels at the thought of trying again.
He isn't ready to give up, though.
He winds back. Back and back and back, to the day he was born, the precocity of his youth. He thinks about things that aren't Orpheus, lives on rails that aren't quite so deeply carved into him. No one returns his meaningful looks, even if they're a little too meaningful. Nobody but the Fates. Did the Fates use to have any particular opinion on Hermes, before? Before the tangle? Even they can't see infinitely ahead. It can't have been woven in already, the first time he did this - can it? But they know now.
The long running start pushes him into the timeline with a sort of vigor that he didn't think he could still muster. He'll be back on the railroad soon, back on the cable-thick thread that governs his path forward, but it weighs lightly on him now. He lays helpful tidbits for himself, for Orpheus. Hermes smooths the road around the back. Maybe, if Orpheus's feet are that little bit less tired, if he's gotten there that two minutes sooner, maybe he won't look around over his shoulder. Hermes gets books. Maybe, if Orpheus knows just one or two more stories to draw on, he'll have the strength to see the test through to the end. Hermes, escorting souls where they all wind up in the end, makes an effort to smile and provide a kind word. Maybe, if there's an echo of a whisper of softness in the hearts of Eurydice's fellow dead, they'll find some way of their own to help that they can't think up without it.
It doesn't work.
Tighter loops. More heroics to try any variant, any change of wording he can slip through the gaps in the snarl of his own making. Is Orpheus on rails too? Does he feel the hand of fate on his cheek, pushing his face to look behind? Does he feel the weight of destiny in his heart when he tries, all alone, to find trust and certainty? Sometimes it seems that way. Hermes is too familiar by now with the exact twitches of Orpheus's eyes, the studied steadiness of his hands on the lyre, to feel like the boy is acting much more freely than he is.
Of course, Hermes could just stop. He could just let it end where it ends, and carry on from there. Let Orpheus drown in his own misery and failure while spring comes again and the gods have to wait for another excuse to wipe clean the slate and start afresh. Or he could let Orpheus fail earlier, fail to write the song just-so with the experience of love and pain to give it timbre and bittersweetness, and watch it all disintegrate in a whirl of flame, and see what comes next, the way all his relatives seem raring to do.
How many threads were in that tangle? Does it matter? Is he foredoomed to give up, or prophesied to succeed? Probably if it was either the Fates wouldn't be so cross with him. His would be just another curious ripple in their many-dimensional textile. They'd know where he'd wind up, and he'd get there one way or another. Hermes thinks they must just... not know.
This would be heartening, if Hermes thought they might not know because it was truly undetermined if he'd ever get the thread through the ever-shrinking needle's eye. But he doubts it. He thinks it more likely that they knew he would give up, but didn't know when. Didn't know how many times he'd make the loop. Didn't know how much extra golden god-thread they'd have to spin to accommodate him. But he'd give up sooner or later, all the same.
Not this time, though.
He tries asking more people for advice. Persephone, when she drops by. Euyridice, once he works out how he can get her alone - it's easier to wrangle deviations from his pattern, entire conversations' worth, when not all the major players are present at once. Of course no one has any experience with this sort of thing and no one has anything helpful to offer. He does get a new ending when Persephone is so horrified by the story of eternal winter as to skip out on her marriage early, but what follows is hardly better as a place to leave the timeline lie than what he gets in an ordinary loop.
Hermes winds up with half a word of advice pieced together from everyone whose opinion he seeks. Not everything he tries has to be aimed straight at his goal. He could try stranger things, farther afield. Hermes doesn't think it'll help - if it doesn't matter who brings up Orpheus, what matters the price of tea in China? - but it's worth a try.
Tea has never been more expensive. Six governments are toppled ahead of schedule. Zeus has a new favorite nymph and Hera is in an uproar felt the world over. Ships sink. Forests burn. Bananas rot in the queerest places. Will any of this change anything? Will all his casual aimless destruction perturb anything where it matters?
It's storming brutally when the lovers make their trek home. Orpheus has ice in his hair and his clothes are dripping with sleet, when he turns his head again.
Hermes takes a loop off.
He goes to visit Selene, on the moon. Resolutely, the whole loop through, he refuses to leave. She hints that he's overstayed his welcome, but there is plenty of moon for him to kick his way across.
He hasn't been to all the craters yet, when he sees the colors of the Earth above shift into a perfect spring green.
He checks. Orpheus is where he always is. Alone, like he always is.
Lachesis confronts him.
It's not an obvious confrontation from the outside. She does it in broad daylight at the station where anyone could see, and it looks like two old friends catching up while her sisters look on, her and Hermes trading gentle barbs about an inside joke - but for her glare.
Hermes suggests she and her sisters could just let him win. She storms off. The rails tighten. He can feel them constricting around his teeth when he has to deviate from the script to acknowledge she was ever there at all.
Hermes tries going forward, after the next time Eurydice is sucked back into the Underworld. Forward far enough that Orpheus is long gone. Far enough that the coastline is changed and the hills are smoother and the trees are all replaced with similar newer trees. Far enough that Hermes can slide through a crowd and see what the return of spring has brought.
There are still humans. That's something. He hadn't been sure.
But it doesn't have anyone who counts Orpheus as their ancestor, has Eurydice's name on their family stele.
He goes back again.
He gets closer than he ever has. Orpheus is gritting his teeth, clenching his hands, staring at a wall when he can't bear to keep scrunching his eyes shut, waiting - shaking and sobbing, but waiting - for Eurydice to catch up and put her hand on his shoulder.
Hermes, watching from around the corner, sees Atropos's scissor too late. Eurydice, resurrected, crumples to the floor, dead. Orpheus spins and stumbles to collapse over her fallen form and he wails.
The Fates won't let him have it.
Well. He won't let them have it either.
Hermes goes back again.