Queen Harmonia, despite being an Olympian goddess, was a flatteringly good mourner. From her disheveled appearance to her heartbreaking weeping, everything was so...well, perfectly balanced. Hades wanted to enlist her to teach the mortals the proper way to grieve. If they took a page from her book, his river wouldn't be so gummed up all the time. Mourning, however, was not a natural talent for anyone. This could only mean one thing. She'd obviously had way too much practice.
Hades tried, but he couldn't help but feel some sympathy towards the goddess. She was one of Aphrodite's million kids and Zeus's billion grandchildren, and if memory served, she was Netgirl. Hades had met Hephaestus. Being Netgirl in and of itself, couldn't have been easy. Then there was the arranged mortal marriage where.…..Zeus had given her to him as a bride before he was a snake, right? Hades nearly asked the question out loud, but stopped himself. He really didn't want to know.
Hades didn't understand the whole marriage as a prize thing his brother kept doing with his progeny anyway. Livestock made good prizes. Shiny gold things made good prizes. Shiny gold livestock made good prizes. An unwilling goddess's hand in marriage? Why didn't Zeus just throw a bunch of his thunderbolts at both their heads and feed them to Charybdis? Same prize value. Less money and man hours.
It was troubling to Hades that anything should drive a goddess to a state of such despondence, and the remark about her children concerned him. The occasional mortal child lost to an Olympian was not strange. But the way she said it implied all of them. Something seemed very off there. "Surely not all of them?" Hades asked. Not that he was becoming invested in this at all. He wasn't. Hades wouldn't do that. It was just for the purpose of clarification...wait.
“You have my sympathy, but I cannot grant your request,” Hades said, “Your...husband's time on earth is over. Yours, however, is not. I cannot allow you to go with him any further.”
She was a goddess whose parentage meant deep roots. If Hades let her go, not only would it break rules, and Underworld principles, it would also undoubtedly lead to more drama with the Olympians, and that was something Hades desperately wanted to avoid. Life and death were better when the two avoided mixing. Besides, Hades did not want to set a precedence. Well, actually, he already kind of had, but that was a bit different, and if he were lucky Harmonia wouldn't play that card.
Hades then added a bit more gently, “He may be all you have left right now, but you have a whole immortal lifetime to live. You'll find other things to live for.” She seemed decent enough. She obviously had a lot of empathy. There were probably tons of gods and mortals who would benefit from her company as soon as the mourning period passed.