WHO: Melpomene and Apollo WHEN: Friday, 16th July WHERE: Melpomene’s place WHAT: A ritual of purification WARNINGS: Blood, self harm, violence, and some truly horrific behaviour
There were cracks in Melpomene’s hands, and the pressure she exerted on them, and the soap she used, these made it worse, but the physical pain was part of the ritual. On good days, she made her palms bleed.
The first libation she’d poured to Tragos had been two days after her meeting with Qebhet. She’d asked Kratos to leave, she’d put Telos down for a nap, and then she’d knelt beside the spot where Tragos had died. The stream of red wine poured messily from her shaking hands, hitting the carpet as his blood had, a red stain against the soft gray.
With a voice choked with sobs, she’d spoken to him. Broken sentences, struggling to tell him the truth.
She hadn’t wanted him to die. She loved him and viciously hated him. She wanted him to suffer deeply, she wanted him held safe in her arms. She’d wanted more, more of him, all of him. She wanted him to see her, more of her, all of her. She slammed her fists against the carpet and cried till she was empty, and at the end of it… all she had was a wine-and-tear stained carpet, and a sore, sore throat, sore head, sore hands.
It wasn’t enough. From the beginning she knew it wasn’t enough. Melpomene dragged herself to the kitchen to fill a pot with water and grabbed a towel, and lowered herself to her knees again and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, till no more wine could be beaten out of the carpet. Till the muscles in her shoulders were as sore as her throat. Till it felt like her tears had clawed open her face.
Two days later she’d tried it again, to the same results. It was another failed confessional, another failed rite of purification.
In the old days she would have used blood. Slaughtered a young pig and had someone holy pour it over her head, to wash the blood guilt away. But who in this city was that holy? Who among them still had the divinity they once had? Who had the power?
Zeus, perhaps. Zeus Katharsios, who understood this deep, wretched guilt and how to purify it. Some days, Melpomene longed for her father.
Telos is that holy she thought to herself one evening, as the light on the balcony turned golden. Telos was on his back on a blanket Thalia had given her, on one of the loungers she was straddling, facing him. His fist was clutched around a wooden ring with a bell on it and every time he shook it, it jingled, and he laughed. Holy.
Not holy like the gods once were. Holy like Tragos should have been. Holy like her grief was. A holiness like nothing she’d felt in this land before.
It felt like blasphemy, defiance, hubris. It felt like it would end in ruin. It felt pure and true. It felt right.
When she'd been pregnant, she'd thought of Telos as Ares' son, the pride around her pregnancy centred on the idea that she was carrying Ares' child. He'd been an idea - no, he'd been a story, a story she told herself about war and change, about pushing the world to its limits to see the truth of humanity underneath. She’d named him in a way she wanted Ares’ to approve of, she’d wanted to raise him in a way that would elevate her high in Ares’ eyes.
(But she’d slipped in that name, Dale, at the last moment. A name that was incongruous with all the others, with every thought she'd had for him. A name that had nothing to do with war at all, nothing to do with tragedy. A name she didn't regret, one bit.)
When Telos Andreas Dale Morning smiled at her with that light behind his grey eyes, when he laughed, when he babbled, when his face was overcome by concentration as pushed himself up on his strong little arms, she wanted to be the one sitting at his feet, listening to him, to his story. He was the only thing that mattered. There was something in him that none of the gods had, something more important than power and status.
Something unique.
Something she was terrified of destroying.
That was the real tragedy; seeing the truth of his holiness only after she’d promised his fate to Ares.
Fear had ruled her in the beginning, when she could not be in this apartment alone, when she needed Kratos here, and Nikkos, or Apollo, or a sister, or anyone, anyone who would come. But grief had been poisoning fear slowly, and day by day the fear rotted away, till it was a carcass, rotting deep in the pit of her stomach. It couldn’t raise her heart into panic anymore, but a dead thing was no less real a thing for being dead, and it existed, rotting, still.
Grief cut a deep path in her, one she followed, day after day after day. The cracks in her palms were a map of these new paths. Unused to manual labour, unused to this demanding ritual of grief, they never got a chance to heal.
She should have turned to Apollo. Like Zeus he, too, had that power. He’d been the one holding the bleeding piglet over the head of Orestes at Delphi, and if he could cleanse the miasma caused by matricide out of Orestes then he could cleanse her of her - what could she even call it, filicide? - of Tragos.
But… Melpomene knew how he felt about Tragos’ death.
And Zeus wasn’t around.
And she didn’t think any of her sisters would, these days, consent to wash her in the blood of a sacrificed piglet, and bless her as they washed the blood from her hair and her hands with purified water.
So Melpomene continued to perform a ritual that continued to fail her, because she could see no other way forward.
Her repetition carried on, until night fell on the sixteenth of July, one year to the day from the night Ares had sent young Ronan to drive her to the arena. One year to the day since she’d let her knife slip into his grasp and he killed, instead of being killed. One year to the day since he knelt in the blood soaked sand and pledged his allegiance, until his dying day.
Melpomene’s eyes burned with tears, her knees ached against the carpet, her throat was raw from wailing. The air smelled of spilled wine and wet carpet and above all else, the air smelled of the blood she’d spilled as she sliced the blade that had ended Tragos’ life through her palm. She meant to slash both, but the blade had gone deep, and her hand wouldn’t close around the hilt any longer. Her arm shook with deep tremors, and the sickness of that rotting, dead thing in her stomach rose to the back of her throat.
She let the knife drop onto the deep wine stain of the carpet and pressed her bloody hand against it, letting the pain draw a deeper cry from her lungs. The searing pain of the blade and the wine-soaked carpet against her fresh wound made her feel like she’d set her hand on fire; pain licked all the way up her arm.
Something had to give. Something had to crack, to shatter. Somehow, she had to claw her heart open and dig out the rot. Somehow she had to atone.
She shook, tears cutting rivers down the side of her face, and with a dramatic surge of strength she ripped her dress from her chest with her good hand. The fabric tore and she panted, a wounded animal of a woman, a grieving widow beside a coffin, tapping into that ancient, unifying river of grief that flowed heavy through everyone who loved. With a wail, Melpomene raised her hand high above her head and closed her eyes, letting the blood drip down onto her forehead, feeling it tickle as it reached her hair.
“Please, Zeus Katharsios,” she begged, her eyes squeezed shut as blood ran over them, mixing with her tears. “Please, Tragos polytropos,” the epithet was wrenched from her lips, much turned, by gods, by circumstance, an epithet used for Odysseus, both men whose course had been ravaged by the gods - Melpomene choked on a sob as she felt blood on her face, as she’d felt it the night Ronan killed Andre and became Tragos, as she’d felt it the night Tragos killed himself and became a stranger to her, unknowable and unreachable in death.
“Telos,” she gasped, and her next words were spoken without air. “Telos, please, forgive me.” What life she’d bought him into, what twisting, turning, unpredictable life lay ahead of him. She just wanted to watch him laugh - why couldn’t she have foreseen his laugh?
She gasped again but this time it was because a fist had seized her wrist, and her eyes flew open. Apollo stood over her, a look of alarm on his face. “What are you doing, Melpomene?”
“Get out,” she rasped the command, trying in vain to pull out of his grip, one eye squinted shut against the blood. “Apollo, get out. No, I need this, no - Apollo - stop!” she growled through her grief-ravaged throat as he pulled her to her feet, and pulled open her bloody hand.
“Melpomene, enough,” he said, firmly, pressing a thumb across her palm and making her wince in pain, but the thumb covered the wound and instantly it began knitting back together. She sagged into him a little, out of weakness more than any need for support, and he wrapped a firm arm around her back. Looking down at the mess on the floor, he knew what this was about. Knew this was the spot where Tragos died, saw the knife that killed him laying in a position of honour, where his head had been, covered in Melpomene’s own blood.
“It’s over,” he told her, his voice rock hard. “You have grieved enough. You have torn your own life apart enough. You have locked yourself in this apartment long enough. It’s time to stop. It’s time to come back to me and your sisters. You are not going to hurt yourself any more over him. Do you understand me, Melpomene?” Her head was bowed against his chest, but he thought she did. Her blood-streaked hair was trembling. “It’s over,” he told her again. Let him state it so clear and true there’d be no doubt in her mind that he was writing her a brighter future. “You’re going to leave him behind, tonight. Right here and right now, you’re going to leave him behind.”
Melpomene stopped trembling at his words.
She went very, very still. Eyes wide open, even the one that stung with blood, she stared at the stained patch of carpet. At the knife. She stared and saw neither, because the memory that hit her was too damn strong.
Slowly, she peeled herself out of Apollo’s grip, and because it was slow, he let her. Because she was quiet, he let her.
With a shallow, blood-flavoured breath Melpomene bent down and picked up the knife.
“Right here,” she whispered, turning to face him. One thick curl of hair cut her face in half, stuck to her skin with tears and blood. “Right fucking here, you said. You knew.” Though her voice started as barely a whisper, the accusation turned it viciously into a weapon, aimed directly at Apollo, the look on her face one of perfect clarity.
Of hurt. Of horror. Of realisation.
“You,” she growled, stepping forward. “When you had the gun to Tragos’ neck, you told him, ‘you’re going to die here, right fucking here!” she slashed the air with the knife, pointing behind her, to the bookshelf where Apollo had had Tragos pinned. “Not ‘right now’. No. Right here. You saw where he was going to die. And you! You warned me, when you pressed the knife back into my hand after --- you said ‘whatever happens with this knife...’ and YOU KNEW HOW HE WAS GOING TO DIE!”
He’d seen it coming. He’d seen it all coming and he’d let it all happen. Because Tragos belonged to Ares and Apollo hated any hold Ares had over her, he always had -
He always would.
Ares’ son Apollo called him. And Telos, sometimes, but he’d never called him nephew.
With the back of her knife hand, Melpomene wiped the tears from her cheeks, wiped the blood from her cheeks.
Oh, something was over, alright.
“You knew he was going to take Telos,” her voice was hollow now, clear and cold. “And you wanted him gone. That’s why you never found him. Not because Ares was the better hunter. Because you wanted him gone.”
“Melpomene,” he said darkly, but she didn’t hear a word of it. “That is not true.”
“Don’t you speak to me of truth,” Melpomene couldn’t even look at him anymore, she closed her eyes but -
No. No she should look at him. She should see him, for everything he was, even if it shattered the ground beneath her.
Fuck piglet’s blood - Melpomene opened her eyes and was hit by a cleansing wash of rage, the focal point of which was the heartbreaking truth that he’d seen Tragos’ death happen, and he’d sat back, and let it happen to him, and left the blindfold tied neatly over Melpomene’s eyes.
But he wouldn’t see this coming.
Fast as thought, she moved, arm up, lashing forward, and brought the knife point down straight into his eye.
The knife pierced his eye. She felt it. But he moved fast as light and caught her arm, and with a violent twist he flung her backward and she hit the couch with a jolt. The knife hit the carpet, and Apollo stood over her, one hand pressed over his right eye.
Melpomene knew, from every story she ever heard, and every story she ever told; you don’t lash back against the gods.
She put her hands down against the cushions and moved to the edge of the couch, away from him, without taking her eyes off him.
She’d only escaped Aphrodite’s wrath after she pulled a knife on her because of Ares’ intervention, she knew that. And there was no one, no one, to intervene now.
The Muses had argued with Apollo before. They’d yelled at him, stopped speaking to him. But none of them, ever, had raised a weapon against him.
The knowledge was an anchor and chains around her, keeping her down.
Apollo moved and she flinched, but he was only wiping the blood from his eye. “Every choice I’ve made,” he said, inspecting the blood on his hand and wiping it off on the inside of his shirt, “has been for your own good. You’d know that, in your heart, if it wasn’t so confused. This has not been your year, Melpomene, but through everything I’ve loved you.” He blinked his wounded eye open and it was wounded no more, Apollo Vindonnus, his new eye a perfect baby blue, paler than the other, weeping blood.
“The only good I’ve felt this year,” Melpomene whispered, her tears back, blurring her vision. “Has been when that child through that door laughs. Don’t you speak to me of good. You were against his life from the start. You fought Ares to avenge my pregnancy, Apollo, don’t think I’ve forgotten that!”
She shouldn’t have forgotten it, ever.
That night, she’d been so mad at him. He’d been beaten raw by Ares and turned up on her doorstep to prove to her what lengths he’d go for her. But it wasn’t for her; it was for some version of her, untouched by Ares. Some version of her he’d been trying since then to get back.
Strip away her acolyte. Strip away her son.
Fuck, she’d made one of the better decisions of her life that night; she’d walked out of the house, and met Alan. Who’d left her, in the end, because she couldn’t leave Apollo.
“No, I know you haven’t forgotten that,” Apollo stepped closer, reaching down to cup her chin in his hand and tilt her face up toward him. “You put a knife through my eye, Melpomene,” he said. Gods, that unnatural, baby blue… That barely restrained anger. She could feel it in his hand, despite the featherlight way he was holding her. “Don’t forget what I could do to you if I didn’t love you so much.”
He dropped her chin and stepped away, bristling with unspent fury, and ripped a tea towel from her oven door so hard the towel cracked like a whip. He ran the towel under the cold tap, and washed the blood from his face and his hands.
Melpomene didn’t move, or speak, and barely breathed. All she could think was what she would do if he took one step toward Telos’ room… She would rip out his eyes with her bare hands and let what punishment was coming to her come. But he wasn’t taking one step closer to her son.
He didn’t. He dropped the stained towel into the sink where it seeped red into the water pooling round the plughole. And then with one last unreadable glance at her, he left.
She should have yelled at him, she knew it, as she got up to bolt her door behind him. She should have screamed. She should have - the memory flooded back of Marcie in this very doorway.
I denounce you as my father! Marcie had screamed. You taint me and everyone you touch! And Telos will be tainted too!
“I denounce you,” Melpomene whispered at the closed, locked door. “You taint me and everyone you touch. I denounce you-” Her voice broke in a sob, and she, like Apollo, turned to the sink to wash the blood from her shaking hands, the final act in the ritual of purification.
Or it was. It used to be. Back in the old days, when piglet’s blood was all it took.
Drying her hands on her torn dress, Melpomene paced back into Telos’ room where the white noise machine she had going had done its job, and drowned out her cries from the other room. Telos was still sleeping, and that was good, because if he’d been awake she would have needed to hold him, and right now, Melpomene needed both of her hands to pack.
She did not know what it was going to take to make her clean again. She did not know if such a thing was possible. But if it was… she knew it could never happen here.