KOOKI'S GREEK MYTHOLOGY PHASE OFF THE SHITS

This AU is pure shipping, but one I probably won't fic. Not because it's a bad concept, but because it just feels so... typical, y'know? Modern reimaginings of Hades and Persephone are a dime a dozen, and I genuinely adore the original story (mostly thanks to OSP's retelling of it), so this AU feels almost inevitable - taking the core concept of "king of the underworld kidnaps a nature god to be his spouse" and, as expected, putting a spadesgore twist on it. Because I am nothing if not predictable.

Art for this AU will be added Eventually, when I have the time to illustrate everything I want to. For now, it's text only.

Once upon a time, there lived two ancient gods of nature: Toriel, and Asgore. Each ruled for half of the year, sharing responsibility and duty so neither would become overwhelmed by the sheer scope of their divine domain. Together, they kept the world alive and fed, the crops plentiful and the people happy. However, not all things stay simple. After their eldest son had ascended to godhood himself, claiming a domain outside of his parents', Toriel slowly began to drift away from her fated partner. One September eve, just as Asgore was about to take on the divine duty as he did every year, Toriel decided to have her feelings known, and their marriage was ended through verbal agreement. Toriel left that night to a faraway temple, and Asgore was left alone. He had only managed a few weeks by himself before loneliness started to eat away at him.

Slowly, the weather got colder and harsher, and plants started to wither. First their leaves growing yellow, then golden, then red. Eventully, their leaves falling off altogether, leaving the stems black, crooked and unfruitful. Unprepared for this sudden change, people started to die, the human population so used to an eternal spring that few had enough food to ration through what seemed like an apocolypse to them. The pantheon of the sky quickly came down to Earth in search of the gods they appointed to taking care of nature and preventing this sort of thing, but when they found Toriel in a human disguise taking care of an orphaned child in a secluded temple, they knew the other one was to blame. To their shock, though, this was entirely unintentional on Asgore's part. When confronted, he nearly burst into tears out of guilt. He'd been trying to make everything grow as normal, but no matter how hard he tried, it just didn't work. His sadness was too overwhelming, he'd lost his entire family in only a few weeks, and didn't even have anyone to blame but himself.

As the gods deligated in a desperate bid to save what was left of humanity, Rouxls (a god of messengers, poetry and trickery of a lighthearted nature) got the idea to head to the underworld and just bring a couple humans back. Surely, if they were already dead, they couldn't die a second time, right? Unfortunately, the ruler of the underworld refused to let ANYONE leave, divine or not, and Rouxls ended up his prisoner, alongside the rest of the dead. He didn't STAY for long, though. He quickly caught onto the fact that the king of the dead was oddly captivated by the other things showing up in his domain, now. He wasn't just recieving humans, wilted and withered plants and crops started showing up all over his throne room, and though anyone else might find them repulsive, he found them quite beautiful, for they didn't have an interest in leaving or growing - never leaving him behind. Rouxls eventually informed the King of who had sent these flowers, embelishing the tale that the certain someone was sending them to the King deliberately, and ended up striking a deal with the King for his freedom.

Once on the surface world again, Rouxls found Asgore as pitifully alone as he was before, trying to bring the Earth back to life, and failing. Discreetly, Rouxls wrapped the chain that had kept him trapped around Asgore's ankle, and once the lock clicked in place, he was dragged down into the bowels of the Earth in an instant. Rouxls was free, but one of the gods of nature wasn't anymore. Eventually, the months had passed and Toriel reclaimed her duty as the mother of Earth, ushering back a spring that had humans celebrating like never before. There was an active discussion among the gods, some urging Toriel to not leave nature unattended anymore, arguing that it was her duty alone to keep everything alive now, while some very specific gods argued to the contrary. Clarice (who's family had stepped up to the roles of gods of the cold and the snow) didn't like the idea of her domain being taken away so quickly, and insisted that with or without Asgore, Toriel shouldn't be solely responsible for all life, if only for Clarice's benifit alone.

The arguing escalated for 6 months, and by the time September rolled around again, Toriel was in dire need of another break. Before she disappeared again, the others insisted she at least smooth things out between her and Asgore as to not cause another semi-apocalypse, but the strangest thing happened... Asgore didn't show up. He was always diligent about his godly duties, and when he failed to be found even when the gods actively searched for him, people knew something was wrong. As the goddess of fall (inappropriately named December) took on her role again, humans began more actively preparing for the winter they now expected, while the gods were in an utter panic over one of them missing. Rouxls spoke up at an innapropriate time, that no-one seemed this pressed when HE HIMSELF went missing for a while, and it was fairly easy to connect the dots and piece together that Asgore had been trapped in the underworld.

Rouxls tried to warn them, that the King was awfully temperamental and wouldn't let them leave if they entered, but several of the gods were determined to go in anyway. Clarice, goddess of the cold, who wanted the new status quo of the changing seasons to continue (which could only happen if Toriel didn't rule by herself, ergo Asgore was necessary); Rudy, god of festivities, who was genuinely worried about his friend being a prisoner of death even when immortal; and Undyne, goddess of rivers and waterfalls who was mentored by Asgore and wanted him to reclaim his godly duties WITHOUT ushering in winter again. Surprisingly, instead of finding the barran and lifeless underworld they expected, the trio had found that the world of the dead was more like a lush garden than any kind of prison.

The dead informed them that, while the surface world was full of strife and confusion, the underworld had gained a second monarch. The King was, at first, quite sullen and awkward around Asgore, after having realised Rouxls tricked him into believing the god of nature was secretly his admirer or something, but eventually Asgore opened up to him, genuinely. The underworld was where everything abandoned went, where the dead would finally rest once their descendants forgot them, where the discarded and rotten lay for all eternity, and the King didn't seem any better. Wrapped up in chains and trapped here originally as a punishment, Asgore quickly learned that all the King really desired was company - company that desired him in return. In a cruel twist of fate, Asgore felt as if he belonged here better than on the surface, and with barely any convincing at all, he promised to the King that he would stay in the underworld with him. In only a few weeks, grass and flower buds had started growing where there was previously only ash and soot, and well into July the underworld resembled the eternal spring of the surface.

Reaching the throne room, all three of the gods had their grievances and concerns ready to be told when they found the couple. Clarice primarily objected via appeal to nature - the underworld isn't SUPPOSED to have anything alive in it, why grow flowers here? She insisted it be better for Asgore to stay on the surface, even if nothing grew, because it was his divine duty to stay by Toriel, their divorce wasn't supported by any of the gods yet. Rudy appealed to emotion, insisting the surface world still needed Asgore and that abandoning it and leaving it for dead only really benifits one person - King - and not even Asgore. Reconciling with Toriel may be difficult but, he argued, it was worth a shot to bring life back to the world he'd left behind. Undyne argued for Asgore's independance, that he didn't NEED anyone else to be a king and provider, and that he could learn to nurture the surface all on his own. It would generally just make things way less complicated than if his powers kept relying on him being in love with someone.

While Asgore was clearly torn between everything his friends had said and everything he'd come to love about the underworld, the King stepped in as an uninvited speaker. He was appalled, for one, that HIS desires on the matter hadn't been considered by any of them, and moreover, he argued none of them cared about ASGORE's feelings, either. All three of them wanted to push him into the direction that suited their narratives best because they knew Asgore wanted to avoid further conflict and tragedy at all costs. He (correctly) accused each of them of projecting their own feelings onto a problem that doesn't concearn them - Clarice as a control freak who feels the need to keep everything in a stasis, including marriage, Rudy as a self-pitying husband who feels his duty to his offspring more than he feels love for his spouse, and Undyne as a lonesome warrior attached to her independance as a crutch due to her emotional distance from the people around her.

Had Asgore not been there, the King would've beheaded them all in an instant, but with a bit of calming everyone down, Asgore eventually found a way to meet everyone's wants, in one way or another. He agreed to face Toriel one more time, to "smooth things over", or rather, get a proper divorce in the eyes of the heavenly court, as well as going back up to the surface as winter settles in, to give humans hope that spring would return and to spend time with the heavenly pantheon that used to welcome him. The other gods seemed satisfied with this, while the King of the underworld seemed very... distressed. He insisted Asgore must stay, as he ate the fruit of the dead, it makes him PART of the dead. In another act of reading his boyfriend like a book empathy and understanding for the lonely King, Asgore saw through the demands as desperation to not be abandoned all over again.

To represent his love, Asgore made a new flower, the golden flower. It blooms with or without sunlight, it can thrive even in the darkest cave, and it's vines spread like the chains of the underworld. Most importantly, though, there was always more of them. Their seeds were so sticky and abundant that even if one flower wilts away, three more will bloom, symbolising Asgore's loyalty to the only god that bothered to listen and love him when he needed it most. In his absence, the King still had the flowers as a symbol of Asgore's promise to return, and earned himself the nickname of Spade when he'd purposfully uproot the flowers just to watch them grow again in spite of his attempt to stop them.

From then on, Asgore would return to the surface at the end of every year, bringing presents to humans as a sign of hope, and celebrating even the darkest of times with the other gods, after which the days would gradually become longer and longer again. In the underworld, he and Spade ruled as dual Kings, one tending to the loved and lost souls while the other acted as the judge and the jury for the sinful and decrepit souls that earned their abandonment from humanity fair and square. Even now, the gods of nature never really abandoned their duties, as death is part of nature just as much as life is. The mother leaves her nest every six months, meaning her children have to beome self-sufficient eventually, and the father tends to everything that's left of humanity even after their last days in the Sun.

As it's probably very obvious, this AU differs a LOT both from the Hades and Persephone myth as well as the UT/DR source material. This is mostly because it just... doesn't make sense for someone to panic over Asgore's loss the way Demeter does over the loss of Persephone in the "original" myth. Demeter specifically is a goddess that was scorned by her own brothers, and thus didn't want to marry Persephone off to anyone. As her only daugher, she loved Persephone more than life itself, literally, as she was willing to doom the earth to an eternal winter if she didn't get her back. On the one hand, this is completely understandable from her perspective, but on the other hand I can't quite put into words how this... doesn't seem fully reciprocated on Persephone's part. She misses her mother even in the original myth, yes, but never to the extent that she fights to leave the underworld for her. She seems fine with staying with Hades until she's told that everything up above is dying because of her absance.

The storybook I had as a kid of this myth painted Hades in a horrible light, making him that Satan archetype people assume a god of the underworld HAS to be. Even back then, though, I felt a weird empathy towards Hades...? My preference for villains shining even in my earliest years. He kind of just seemed to be making childish demands out of some kind of deep loneliness, and even though the story framed Persephone as unhappy, the fact that it still ended with her marrying Hades kind of gave me this vague hope that things wouldn't STAY bad between them. Because, like, metatextually I knew it was just a kid's book, and you don't end a kids book on an unhappy ending, right? I thought that, after hundreds of years of the same seasonal cycle they'd both get more comfortable with it, Hades wouldn't be as demanding when if he knew Persephone would always come back, and Persephone had time away from the depressing world of the dead to spend time with her mother.

That childish reframing of the story kind of mixed itself into this AU I feel, like... even if Spade is a bad person, he still deserves to not feel left behind by his spouse, right? And, to top it all off, the only person I could think to put in the role of "temperamental mother goddess of nature" was TORIEL, and. She would NOT be as depressed at the loss of her husband as Demeter was at the loss of her daughter, for obvious reasons, so I kind of had to finesse a plot around that, as if it were the core conflict. So, it kind of seemed natural to me that Asgore would choose to stay among the dead and abandoned because, as far as heaven is concearned, he might as well be.

This also very unequivically leans more heavily into the telling of the story where Persephone and Hades are equals as rulers in the underworld. Not only because that story is more interesting in that telling imo, but also because I just Love being able to make a setting where Asgore and Spade are dual kings. It shows up in a few of my AUs, but it always feels really satisfying to me because it feels like perfectly slotting together two opposite sides of a sliding scale, like you bent a line into just the right shape for its opposite ends to click into place. They balance each other out, Spade as cruel and goal-oriented, while Asgore is kind and pragmatic. I think they'd rule better together than they would alone, and I think they're both generally just in need of some TLC to make them bearable in a narrative.