Hades just stared at her. Both eyes were wide, but one was slightly more narrowed than the other. He rested his lips on his knuckles while he listened to the goddess roar like the river behind them. The more she spoke, the more confused Hades became. It was like they were talking about two different things. This was one of the reasons he didn't like talking. It was removed, but not in the way that made things further away.
Hades hadn't said the people were barely functional, or a mess. He'd said the place was, and that was definitely true, no matter what the goddess with all her unbridled native pride thought. She was suggesting that a dilapidated run down structure could not be dilapidated or run down if it was still in use. That hanging the bridles neatly along the wall of a stable fixed the broken stall doors and made the place less muddy. The thing that made messes messes was that they could be spotted immediately, and Hades had spotted it everywhere. And even if he hadn't, Hades would still know. She could show him a streamlined thing for every disorderly one, and he'd still know. The place was him. He was the place. Even before. But this wasn't something Hades could ever tell her. “I'm not an Olympian,” he said.
As for how demanding and heavy handed Hades was being, he hadn't demanded a single change yet, and he certainly didn't intend to do so without consulting anyone first. She'd actually been far more demanding than him. He hadn't told her what to do at all, but she hadn't stopped telling him since they'd met. She was upset with him for judging after a few days, but she assumed he was a certain way after a few minutes and had made it her mission to correct him before she had even determined how far off he was.
Hades hadn't been speaking of them as a collective mass, he'd been speaking more individually like he'd thought she'd been doing. He wasn't going to force a change that no one wanted or was willing to enact. That would be a terrible idea. If no one wanted it, it was obviously the wrong change. He'd meant if one or two were against it, he wasn't going to just roll over because she thought he should just because they were such self sufficient independent individuals. Which he never said they weren't.
After she stopped speaking, Hades waited a few moments to make sure she was actually finished. It was hard to tell when she was actually finished sometimes. He didn't feel like he understood her well enough to come up with a counter argument, and he didn't really want to. He didn't want to have a lengthy argument with a random friendship goddess who didn't leave. If Hades was going to fight, he wasn't going to do it with words.
He blinked. “I never said they didn't,” Hades said. His eyes grew even wider but his tone was softer than before. “I'm sorry you thought I did.” That was all. Hades hadn't been belittling her family, or saying they should be dismissed or forgotten, he'd been belittling the thing that was his father. His eye twitched. That was the admirable thing about her speech. It said she thought the people there were worth defending, at even the slightest possibility of being threatened. That was something Hades could use better than her words themselves.