WHO: Melpomene, open to the Muses but can stand alone WHEN: Monday through to now WHERE: Urania's WHAT: Melpomene feels terrible WARNINGS: Grief, self destructive thoughts
There weren’t many flavours of grief Melpomene hadn’t tasted before. There weren’t many ways she hadn’t drowned in agony.
Losing a child wasn’t new. Grief reopening scars that past loss had carved in her wasn’t new either.
But losing a lover first, then an acolyte, then her child, all at once, all together. It was enough to undo a soul.
Euripidean choruses sometimes described the bond created during childbirth as terrible: terribly tender, terribly strong, simple terrible. She had been torn open so Telos could be born, it seemed only right she tear herself open in his loss. She tore at her clothes and her hair and her skin but sisterly hands grabbed hers before she could attempt to dig her ribcage open. Urania had hidden all the knives in her apartment. Her sisters were firm, gentle, horrified. Her sisters were always there to stop her.
She remained whole. And because she couldn’t break herself open and let the grief out, it turned inward, it burrowed deep, it ate her heart from the inside. Melpomene fell into long periods of silence, a whispered word or two all she could manage. She fell into long periods of sleep or sleep-like absences.
Sometimes she stared at her hands, caught in the deepest of horrors for what they had done. For the actions she could not take back. Cutting Tragos had not stopped Kaden running with Telos, had only led to Tragos’ death.
She should have bled out with him, over his body. She should have died from the wound through which she’d lost Telos the first time.
She couldn't take it back. His mortal life was over, at her hands. And he'd taken her son with him, and his mortal life. She hated him, terribly. She loved him, terribly.
She deserved this pain, this punishment, this agony.
Her whole body cried out for her son, screaming round the echo chamber of her heart. Her breasts burned, and though pumping helped the physical discomfort a little, the act itself was utterly devastating. The milk her body produced for him had nowhere to go but down the drain – she refused to store it in Urania’s freezer, she couldn’t bear to look at it – and every time she pumped she would lock herself up in the bedroom and want to die for a solid half an hour at a time.
Not that she didn’t want to die, the rest of the time.
She barely ate, barely drank, barely spoke. Though the fury of her grief burned like a funeral pyre, she felt the rest of her self fading around it, till grief was all she was.
By the time she’d come back after her last birth, the year she trekked back across the scarred plains and deserted farms of Oklahoma to find the town she used to live abandoned, the last time she’d felt like this, a vessel for her grief and nothing else, it had been midsummer, 1939.
Weeks later, the world had been at war.
She felt the parallels keenly, as she lay in Urania's spare bed and faced the star chart on the ceiling, eyes unfocused and unseeing. Perhaps another war was coming, perhaps the world would start again to destroy itself in earnest.
Maybe it would. Maybe it wouldn't. She couldn't care. Melpomene's need to tear something open and destroy it began and ended only with herself.