Hearing the word repeated back at him made it sound much worse. Hades cringed a little. He'd never used that word out loud before. He could take it back. Say he'd used the wrong word accidentally. That he hadn't been communicating right. Just because she was who she was, and he'd figured out who she was didn't mean that he felt the way he felt. Maybe he just thought he felt the way he'd felt, because he'd watched these things but never experienced anything like them before, and now he was having trouble labeling things accurately. Like when you see a caterpillar for the first time and think it's a worm. Or see a butterfly and don't think it used to be a caterpillar. Hades throat had closed up before when he'd said that word, but it wasn't closed anymore. He could take it back.
He didn't. Instead Hades nodded and stared at the statues like this inaccurate representation of his brother held all of the secrets in the universe if he just bore into it with his eyes hard enough. Hades would rather look at the statue than at his actual brother. He could trust the statue to be inaccurate, and for its expression never to move. Hades became very aware of his own breathing.
If he had known Zeus wasn't actually looking at him, Hades would have felt like he could look. But he didn't. Instead he looked at the statues. He opened his mouth to answer and hesitated. “If I did....” Hades asked, “what could I do about it?”