Not having realized that she was not alone in her bedroom, Melinoe flinched under the covers before the sound of her name and the familiar quality of the voice registered, soothing the immediate dread that the flowers had followed her out of the nightmare. She relaxed but didn’t say anything for a long moment, trying to get her panicky heart to realize the danger was over and done with and to stop trying to make a break out of her ribcage. The sticky vestiges of sleep were being peeled off, making it easier to remember what was real and what was the product of one seriously awful session of an overactive imagination.
After about ten seconds she began squirming, seeking an opening in the sheets until finally her head popped out into view, hair tousled and defiant of gravity like Medusa’s famous snakes, albeit with much less impressive success in its ability to inspire terror. Her throat still hurt and felt scrapped dry, so all she did was finish breaking free from the cocoon and crawled on hands and knees until she reached her father’s side and without so much as a ‘may I’, curled up to his leg, face turned towards his knee rather than inward. Melinoe sniffled once, chest jerking in the deep, noisy inhale and swallowed to ease the asperity in her throat.
She wasn’t a chatty child, though that wasn’t to say that she uncommunicative with her feelings or too shy to indicate when she wanted something. Only that she thought about what to say carefully before she said it, so that it came out right. Perhaps it was unsurprising she’d developed that habit what with her father and Thanatos being the two people she most observed and ergo, learned from.
“I had a bad dream.” She said, lacking the vocabulary to express how bad, but getting the point across with stark simplicity. There were no tears or huskiness, she just sounded tired from lack of sleep and being emotionally wrung out. Though she’d been born divided to have both black and white limbs, even the dark side of her body seemed ashen underneath. She felt cold, and still lonely, and the only thing that was helping was to rub her cheek against her father’s thigh, confirming physically that he was there and not an illusion.
Melinoe didn’t question how he’d known to come into her room, he was usually so busy with the day to day work of running a kingdom not only of the dead but of the many other creatures that inhabited the Underworld. He had come, and that was what was important to her. If a little wound in her chest bled when she remembered that her mother wouldn’t come, Melinoe declined acknowledging it.