Melinoe visibly perked up at the offer of more tea and the possibility of sweets. It wasn’t in her yet to doubt the claims of others so in her mind she was already thinking that if his wife was a ‘very, very good cook’ then those had to be the best sweets ever. She considered it and decided that she’d been conciliatory enough, accepting the invitation was a due reward. So she placed the empty cup in the crook of her arm and stretched her hand to slip into his.
“Yes, please. Thank you.” What a nice family. Thanatos, Phobetor and now Hypnos were quickly becoming her favorite people. The Judges of the dead weren’t usually so kind, and nothing to say of the Titans and the myriad of other folk that lived in the Underworld who never seemed to have either the time or inclination to answer her questions. His wife would probably be equally lovely if the trend was maintained. She craned her head to look around to see if said spouse was around but saw no one, more’s the pity.
Tactfully, she didn’t ask where Hypnos’s wife was. She was a child of a home where the mother was gone for most of the year, as far as she was concerned that might or might not be a perfectly average arrangement for other couples. Persephone’s long absences were the norm, her presence the anomaly. Some questions were not meant to be asked. The rest of Hypnos’s family, however, she considered fair game.
“Why does Thanatos refuse to sleep in a bed?” It was something she’d posed to the god himself and even to her own father but had yet to actually get an answer. Considering Hypnos was the god of sleep and Thanatos’s own twin, she had an optimistic outlook that here she might find her answer as to why she so often woke up to find Thanatos sleeping on a sofa when there were plenty of empty guest rooms. Sometimes he didn’t even make it to a sofa or a divan and she would have to step over him if he was blocking the way.