For ten long seconds, nothing happened. It felt longer. Hades sat there, perfectly still in the dark. Then the knee beneath his hand writhed away. He watched the squirming mass pop up from beneath the sheets. She was so small. It always struck him, how small she was. Hades didn't think he'd ever been that small. How could nightmares be that cruel? Cruel enough to reach out and touch someone so young. Someone so small. Someone so innocent. Hades understood the importance of nightmares. He thought they were extremely important. Just not tonight. Not when Melinoe was whimpering like that. Children should not be kept in darkness. It was almost enough to make him want to send her with Persephone. But he wouldn't be able to protect her there, and Olympus had a worse kind of darkness. The kind that pretended it was something else.
While Melinoe crawled towards him, Hades reached out on an impulse and brushed his hand down through the strands of hair that were trying to escape in all directions. First the black side, than the white. When Hades touched her hair that way, he felt things. Things that Hades kept to himself. Things that that the awful doubt ever present at the back of his mind tried their best to eat away. Hades was not a miser with his great wealth. But he was a miser with these things. They were more important than wealth. He couldn't ever let them truly out of the box, or acknowledge this truth, but he knew it.
Hades gently, slowly, rubbed his hand up and down her back while she buried herself in his knee. The words broke through the weight of silence, and the atmosphere shifted. Hades nodded. Then he realized that she couldn't see a nod in that position. He kept brushing his hand up and down her back for a second while he waited for the new atmosphere to settle. “It will be alright,” Hades said. “That dream was a lie. It will be alright. I'm here. I'll always be here.”
Then he gently pried her from his knee, and scooped her up into his arms. Hades carried her out of her room and back to the study. Together, they pulled a blanket over Than's legs. Then Hades carried her up the stairs to his bedroom. It wouldn't be empty that night. He tucked her into his bed, and laid by her until she drifted back to sleep. As he closed his eyes, Hades wished with everything he had that she was his.