WHO: Melpomene, Apollo WHEN: Wednesday night WHERE: Melpomene's WHAT: 'I hope they both haunt you' WARNINGS: Nothing new
Slowly, the fraction of Telos’ life that he and Melpomene had been separated for was getting smaller. He had just made it past six weeks, which meant his time with Kaden was down to a third of his life. Apollo had been the one to mention this, to remind her that it would keep shrinking and shrinking, till it was practically nothing at all.
It was logical, she could see that, but it didn’t make her feel better. “Is that how you feel about your time in Tartarus?” she snapped, and he gave her a sharp warning look, like sudden sunstrike on a windshield.
The half hour of solid screaming from Telos they'd just survived had frayed both their mental states. (Melpomene couldn't help but think; would Kaden have been able to translate this cry? Was Telos missing him?)
It was like Apollo, to want to heal over the wounds and move beautifully on, but he couldn’t heal the damage inside Melpomene and she knew it bothered him. Part of her thought: good, good, it should bother him, it should bother everyone.
And another part of her, a vast and bottomless scared ache in her wanted to stay silent, cooped up inside Telos’ room with him, with Nikkos at the door and Kratos or Apollo or one of her sisters out in the living room. For the first time in a long time, this part of her was afraid to speak, afraid to act, knowing that any action she caused would ripple out into the world, would build and build, a tsunami taking on an uncontrollable life of its own, and come back on her - which she told herself she could survive - and on Telos - which she had discovered, painfully, that she couldn't.
One wave had already hit, and Melpomene knew enough to assume that as bad as things were, they could always get worse. There was always a dark darker than the dark you knew.
What if she was so much of a bitch to Apollo he decided she was too much to handle, for instance?
“I’m sorry,” she said, at the wounded, warning look on Apollo’s face, reaching to lift his hand and press her lips against it. “I know you’re only trying to make me feel better.”
He pulled her closer, wrapping his arms around them both – Telos was sleeping in a wrap now, bound to her chest – and kissed the top of her head. She clung, and cried, but tried desperately to keep it quiet, to keep her heaving chest still, so Telos wouldn't wake.
She tried, for Apollo’s sake, to tell herself: in all their long, long lives, two weeks was nothing. The wound it left would one day be nothing.
But no matter how many times she whispered it to herself, it never became true.
If two weeks would never be nothing, then nine months stood no chance of fading into oblivion either. Eight months, three weeks, three days has passed since the first day she met Tragos to the last. She’d been his muse for two hundred and sixty nine days from the moment he picked up her knife and plunged it into Andre’s neck to the moment he wrenched the knife from her hand and plunged it into his own.
Well after Apollo had left, and after Telos and Kratos were both asleep, Melpomene stepped quietly out into the living room (the dying room) and lowered herself to the floor, lying prone beneath her bookshelf with her hand pressed over her neck. She could feel her own heart beating beneath her hand, as she’d felt his, dying, beneath her hand. She could feel her whole body, sick and shaking.
The months she’d known Tragos would never, never be nothing.
He could have been so much. He had been becoming so much. Bold and cocky and ambitious and now nothing but ash.
And all traces of the damage she'd done to him were burnt to ash, except where they lived in her memory. Her sharp and ever-present memory. I hope he haunts you Marcie had said.