[closed/complete] Characters: Lethe (lethe) & Mnemosyne (mnemonically) Date/Time: June 21st, at night Location: Mnemosyne's old room at the inn. Rating: PG Warnings: N/A Summary: Just talks of life and love between sisters~
Mnemosyne knew that when she married Morpheus it would mean having a husband who could possibly be gone for weeks at a time. He was an ambassador, after all. An impressive representative for their region. Overall, she was proud to call herself the wife of such a man and she was the sort of person who could easily deal with being on her own. However, it would have been a lie to say she didn't occasionally miss him, especially since they had only been married for six months. She knew the situation with Camelot was difficult for him and she only hoped that he didn't strangle anyone while he was gone. For herself, she decided to deal with missing him by visiting her family. They had each other, but in the back of her mind she always liked to think that they were always doomed without her. It was nice to check up on them every now and again.
Even in a time where troubling rumors were starting to spread a bit too quickly, the woman could find a bit of happiness in how the inn never really seemed to change. It was always exactly how she remembered. Even her family and her old room remained the same. Curling on her side happily in her bed, Mnemosyne attempted to tug her blanket up over her shoulder.... Only to find that it wouldn't budge. She tried again, but there was a weight. Sighing, she could already guess what had happened. Without even opening her eyes yet, she sat up in her bed and tossed a pillow at the girl hiding at the foot.
"What's wrong now, Lethe?"
Lethe didn't like to sleep alone, not when so much haunted her in the darkest hours of the night, but now that she was seventeen the excuses to wriggle her way into her parents' bed were wearing thin and it was becoming more difficult to justify bothering her sisters when she couldn't dare whisper a hint of what was wrong. It was no longer the stories of ghosts and monsters of her childhood that kept her awake, shivering under her covers with terrified excitement, but the pressure of reality that was much more difficult to escape and that much more of a threat. Fairy tales were for children, she knew better now than to believe, yet she still desperately grasped to the delusions of the horrors that couldn't actually hurt her to ignore the inevitability of what would.
If only if she had been smart like her eldest sister, could maintain some amount of self-control. Mnemosyne was everything she could never be, knew she'd always be measured against, and Lethe was always left intimidated and feeling small in her presence. Yet it had been too long since she last seen her sister, even longer than the last she'd heard anything from Hades (had he finally abandoned her for something better?) But there was one thing they shared that night: loneliness, and Lethe sought out her sister's comfort by silently slipping into her room and curling up at her feet.
Yet not much ever passed by Mnemosyne for too long, and Lethe halfheartedly tossed the pillow back her direction. "Can't sleep."
Grabbing the pillow as it was tossed back toward her, Mnemosyne sighed. Lazily, she stretched and yawned. While she hoped that this minor interruption to her sleep would not last too long, she was already accepting the fact that she might not be getting back to sleep so soon. It was something she was used to dealing with amongst her sisters and even in her new home with Morpheus. He never seemed to sleep in general.
"Lethe, kappas aren't real," she assumed. Lethe was the one person in her life who she could never really read like she could the others. New secrets and thoughts, old secrets and thoughts, nothing could have been hidden from her if she wanted to know something. It was only when it came to her sister that she found herself stumped.
However, rather than ever let that get to her, she found ways around it. And one way simply being paying attention to what was going on in her sister's life. What she was talking about, etc.. The most recent topic had been the kappas. "Even if they were, you're too old. They would go after Nikolas first."
"I know," Lethe sighed reluctantly, wishing her worries could be so easily soothed as when she was a child. How many times did Mnemosyne have to convince her after one of Hel's horrific tales that there was nothing lurking behind her doors and that the sounds outside the windows were just the wind? But they both were grown now, her sister responsibly and respectfully married and Lethe wondered how much longer until the others were as well. How much longer could she play out her love affair with the Admiral before everything came crashing down and her dishonour revealed? And yet she'd follow it all the way until the conclusion (there was nothing she could take back now), would accept him every time he dropped by at his convenience as he never allowed it to leave the inn.
Yet she dared wish for more. Merlin, the foreigner that both her father and Morpheus had warned her to avoid-- and how she tried so hard to listen and failed-- had given her advice that seemed both laughably bad and yet intriguing enough to keep her awake. Was she that desperate? But Hades wasn't a stupid man, and her goal wasn't to trap him with faked pregnancies that would surely backfire. Maybe it was foolish love, but she feared speaking a word of it would make him abandon her all the faster.
Rolling onto her side, Lethe stared at what she could make out her sister through the darkness. "How do you make a man love you?" she asked quietly, hesitantly.
"That's-" She started and then paused when she realized she was talking before really taking in what Lethe had just said to her. She was surprised to say the least. That was certainly not something she was expecting to come out of her sister's mouth. Taken back just a tiny bit, she tilted her head, a small smile curling on her lips. Well... Then again, Lethe was seventeen. Perhaps deep down even her strange sisters were still normal enough.
Coming up with an answer was a bit more difficult. In her own experience she had never made anyone love her. There were plenty of men that she couldn't even stand, and it had been more like her to do just the opposite. With Morpheus, the two of them happened to just get along well enough. Things just sort of fell into place from their friendship.
"You don't," she finally decided. "You just be yourself and if they don't love you then so be it. They weren't worth the trouble to begin with." Perhaps her ideologies laughed in the face of most traditions where one should try and be a perfect bride for her potential suitor, but she had always been an unconventional sort of girl.
Of course she expected nothing less than an overly sensible answer from her sister, but Lethe still wasn't quite satisfied. Surely there had to be something else she could do, something between the range of simply waiting for him to make a move that wasn't likely to come and practically blackmailing the man. "If he does... But then how do you know?" she wondered aloud, resting her head on Mnemosyne's feet.
Mnemosyne's grin softened even more. She scooted a bit and leaned forward, running a few fingers through her sisters hair. "If he does, then he'll find a way to let you know. And if he doesn't..." She hesitated to continue, knowing that the words that would follow could have unforeseen consequences when it came to Lethe. Or any woman, really. It had been easy for herself, but she was just rather forward thinking and what others thought of her did not bother her as a teenager. Still, it was the best way to go about the situation in her mind. It just made the most sense.
"If you love someone, then you be very clear with him about how you feel and what you need to know from him."
If he didn't, Lethe was uncertain what options that left her, and her stomach twisted uncomfortably. Even if she were forward enough to get the message across, she was almost too afraid of the answer-- didn't want to know the truth if that meant confirming she was nothing but a temporary fix for him. She was still young and of course her heart would recover, but her honour would never. Not even Mnemosyne could fix that, and Lethe wiggled under the covers to lay alongside her sister, pressing her damp cheeks to the older girls' shoulder.
"Oh," she finally breathed more than spoke. "How did you know you loved Morpheus?"
She wasn't sure if there was ever really a point in which she could say she definitively decided that she loved Morpheus. While that was something she would have to think about in the back of her mind, she didn't allow that to be spoken. In fact, she smiled all the same thinking of the memories she had shared with the man. She was very happy with him and they knew each other well. And in the end, if that wasn't a kind of love, she didn't know what was.
"He always makes me smile, even when he's being grumpy," Mnemosyne answered, just as happily tossing an arm around her sister. "And I appreciate that he's not an idiot." Ending up with a man who wasn't quite as smart as her was inevitable. However, Morpheus had one of the best heads on his shoulders out of all the other men she had met. The choice made sense based on that.
Love was an abstract concept that Lethe wasn't quite certain of, unsure how she was supposed to know when she felt it. She listened carefully to Mnemosyne's fond reminiscing of her husband to attempt understanding, but found she could not quite relate it to her own experience with Hades beyond neither man being stupid. But Hades was not Morpheus (she wondered briefly what the ambassador would think if he knew), and she certainly was not her sister (who would no doubt tell her husband if she found out.)
The Admiral had never cared to make her smile or even so much bothered asking how she felt or about her day, didn't handle her with the gentle care that most thought she needed, but at least he always left her thoroughly satisfied. Young and inexperienced as Lethe was, she knew not to confuse sex with love, no matter how much she enjoyed his frequent visits and sulked the time between them.
There wasn't much else of their relationship, though they reached a level of comfortable familiarity in their routine that left Lethe wanting more. But the man had never so much as spent the night before... Not that she ever asked him to. And maybe before dwelling on such faraway hopes about love and marriage, she should invite him to sleep in her room. It was a risk she was willing to take, made her realize there was a lot more she'd risk if he'd ask.
Snuggling closer against her sister, intertwining their legs and clasping fingers together, Lethe's light laughter tickled at the hair of Mnemosyne's neck. "But you love me?" she asked wistfully, knowing her sister quite regularly regarded her as an idiot.
She had never been one to mind physical contact unless it was with someone she really didn't like. In Lethe's case, she was always all too happy to accept her sister's cuddles, finding them comforting herself. It was something else familiar. And also, being one of the few who knew that Morpheus was indeed a closet cuddler, it was nice to have someone to fill the void while he was away.
"Always," Mnemosyne laughed back, giving her sister a peck on the forehead. Lethe was... well, it wasn't so much that she considered her dumb, but she was always a bit more spacey. It never bothered Mnemosyne as much as the same behavior would have from someone else. Perhaps it was because she was her sister. If they couldn't look out for each other, then there was something wrong with the world.
Letting her eyes slip shut again, a grin remained on her face. "Now let's get some sleep, okay?"