<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b9/31/78/b93178dc9f345235e356d2cbc063fe03.jpg)</div><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 12pt;"> Cassandra</span><br/><strong>Blessed By::</strong>Apollo<br/><strong>Location::</strong>Swimming pool<br/><strong>Company::</strong>Apollo, open.<br/><strong>Date/Time::</strong>20th, morning,<br/><strong>Mood::</strong>paying attention, mostly. Getting a little bit worked up.<br/><strong>Wearing::</strong>white one piece swimsuit<br/><strong>TRIGGER WARNINGS::</strong><br/><br/>"Yeah. From a really long time ago. It's not always an easy relationship. Complicated is a major understatement. Major big. "<br/><br/>Wrinkling her nose, Cassandra tilted her head, staring past, through Apollo. "Happy? What is happy? Sometimes I wish that I could just seal myself up in some ancient library and read all my favorite books for the rest of my life. And.... Being with a partner is usually more joy than sorrow. Usually. It's complicated and risky. What is happy? How long do you expect it to last? How many times do you dust yourself off and try again?<br/><br/>It's not that I don't like you. You seem okay, past the hand kissing. That's more like... First date kinda stuff, not 'hey welcome to the village'. No, I don't like your name. I don't like being surprised by running into reminders. But that's not your fault."<br/><br/>She started laughing, low and bitter and laced with just the faintest edge of hints of madness. She'd had.... A really long life. As her favorite word of the day, complicated. "Even in a world where the Blessed are making a resurgence, people don't react well when I announce that I'm three thousand damn years old. That I married a God, for all the joy it brought me. When they notice that I don't age, at all.<br/><br/>Sure, just be you works for normal people. Not ancient cursed Greeks from the early Iron Age! So yes, I have to leave. I'm not something most mortals can comfortably wrap their heads around. My very nature is a challenge. How long could you love someone who doesn't age a day when you're getting older and slower and things hurt and she's still a bloody immortal twentysomething that you fell in love with ten or twenty or thirty years ago? Twenty mere years to me is like two years to a mortal! Thirty years is less than a hundredth of my lifetime! "<br/><br/>She stared at the... Not a child, certainly. Though most of the Blessed seemed like children to her, from her utterly alien perception. Young adult? Was that the term for one so relentlessly optimistic without having any of the facts? But it was rare that people threw Cassandra off stride, but his apparently sincere belief that he was an actual demigod certainly managed.<br/><br/>"Your.... Father. As in...... The Apollo? I...... He's still fathering children in this day and age? I.... Oh. Well..... I guess that makes me your stepmother? Wow. That's something I haven't done in 2,800 years. Ok. So. Uh, hi. I'm Cassandra, and I married your father something like three thousand, two hundred years ago. Nice to meet you."<br/>