help help help
i don't want to be here
One of my professors is from Hungary, and today I spoke with him in Hungarian for the first time. I haven't had a chance to speak with him since school started, but today we actually spoke, and he guessed my name right. I guess it's hard when there are so many students.
What is everyone going to be for Halloween? Brother, are we still doing a party?
[Every penstroke of the letter pained her physically. Somehow, Hebe held in tears for as long as possible, but a few tears escaped toward the end, splattering on the paper. Pondering if it was best to burn it and rewrite it, she worried her lip to the point that it bled. She felt like the worst person in the world, just the worst. Was someone's love really worth abandoning her family, if only for a little while, to be happy?
You're so selfish she chided herself angrily, pausing with the letter before a lit candle. But rather than burning it, Hebe set to folding it up in a nice envelope. The letter would find itself on the kitchen table later on, but before venturing downstairs, she snuck as quietly as possible into her brother's room to kiss them goodbye. Neither stirred, thankfully, and so on quiet feet, she left. With the kitten stowed away in her handbag, she bid her house farewell and disappeared into the night for Raven's house.
The letter reads ( as follows: )[ filter; menelaus & demeter ]
I'm so so so so sorry
[ filter; raven ]
I'll be there in fifteen minutes.
[ filter; hyacinth ]
I'm making a horrible mistake, but I need you to tell me it'll be okay.
[Apprehension was all that Hebe felt upon watching Raven's fight from high up in the stands, Merlin to one side. Very little had been said to him out of worry and fear. It wasn't in her to behave like a good wife that day -- she'd been in pain all morning, thinking of Raven and how he'd fare in the fight.
When he fell, she didn't cry. She didn't blink. Instead, she'd sat there completely still, her mind replaying the scene over and over. Raven had lost. But so had the other man, which should've meant she was to be happy. Feeling anything but happy, she'd moved the moment they'd removed Raven from the sand. She had to see him. Had to feel him, make sure if he was dead or alive because she couldn't be certain. Disbelief had her running out to a place where she could openly weep, where no one could see her.
The next two nights, Hebe would suffer from horrible dreams. Dreams in which Raven died all over again. Dreams where her father abandoned her for Ganymede. Alone and without anybody she trusted enough to run to now that Artemis and Apollo were dead, she'd curled up in her bed and cried herself to sleep.]
[When Hebe dreamed, it wasn't of her mother, but her father. She was stuck in a pool of red, clear liquid that wasn't clear to her until she tasted it: wine. In real life she was a fairly good swimmer, but in this dream she flailed like a man overboard, taking in gulps of wine that grew more sour by the swallow.
And sitting up on the rim of the pool was -- who was it? Somehow without seeing their face, she knew it was her father. And next to him... she had a strange feeling she knew him. Upon trying to call out to her father, he and the boy only laughed. He called out out something to her, but she couldn't hear, could only see his lips move.
When she figured out it was Ganymede next to him, she was shooting up in bed in the dark, her lips opened in a wordless, soundless scream.
Hebe didn't cry, not like she might have months ago, but she did curl up on her side like a child, silently watching the wall until an hour later, she finally drifted back to sleep to dream of nothing at all.]