She didn't leave. Instead she just stood there holding it out to him for seconds that felt like hours. Hades nearly reached for her hand at the last moment. The look on her face, and the hand just hanging there. It wasn't just that it made him feel terrible. It was worse than that. He could tell that her face might fall, and the weak part of himself didn't want it to. But Hades refused to put up with that. He couldn't survive with that. So Hades watched for her hand to fall and looked away from her face in that moment. It didn't help the ache. But it didn't make it worse.
She still didn't leave. Hades had never been smiled at like that before. He was a bit transfixed by it. Hades had expected to find all kinds of things in the Underworld. But not any warm ones. Suddenly he could see exactly why she belonged in the land of the dead, and that made him sad. He wished she'd stop. “I'm more used to the dark,” he said. Hades nearly told her that he did expect the beautiful things to bite, and that she had only caught him at one irregular slip, but he thought better of it. Instead he just nodded, and listened.
Hades was not sure what 'crunchy' meant in that context, but he had met her parents and encountered a few of her siblings, and he could definitely see how she differed from most of them. It didn't floor him half as much as her admitting that she cried though. He had no idea how to respond to something like that. People didn't just admit those things to strangers, especially ones with power over them. She didn't know what kind of a king Hades was. But she'd admitted it anyway, and that didn't make sense. He did not like the mental image of her crying. Hades knew that logically it should not bother him, but it didn't seem to care what Hades knew logically. He agreed with her end assessment. If Hades could find a way to make things better for his subjects, to make the realm better for them, that was what he wanted to do. He wanted this Philotes to keep smiling like that. He just didn't want her to keep doing it at him.
He hadn't wanted to give her his name, because then she might use it, but the titles didn't sound right then either. Hades didn't feel like he'd earned them down there yet. He would, and soon. But not yet. “Hades,” he said after a moment. Hades couldn't keep standing there, there were other things to look at, so he started walking away from the river. It was becoming more and more clear that the goddess had no intention of going, but after Hades had already let her hand fall like that, and after she had told him that she was the sort to cry over social encounters, he couldn't bring himself to leave her. Reluctantly, Hades gestured that she could walk with him and keep talking if she wanted to.