There were some days that were made for showers and there were some days that weren’t.
In the middle of last summer, her world, already fragile, had shattered when she plunged the knife into her lord Apollo’s eye. Her Musagetes. Her first teacher. Leader and protector and love. She had lived every day since under that shadow, awaiting retribution, and every day since it hadn’t come.
A few months earlier, in the spring, her world had been torn apart, as swift as a knife through a boy's hamstring. Melpomene believed in ghosts, and unfinished business, and retribution. Just because the boys were dead did not mean the story was over. Something would come of this.
A few weeks before that, she had made Ares a promise about Telos’ future. It had been made blind to what was coming, just as every oath ever made in the history of oaths was made blind to what was coming, but oaths didn’t give a shit about changes of heart and she knew Ares himself would suffer no such sentimentality.
She still had years before the third doom would come to pass, but the first two… no one could say. The one person she trusted to untangle the lay of the future for her was the one person she feared the most.
Some days, days like this, when it felt as though the future was rushing at her too fast, how was she supposed to close a door between herself and her son and shower? Her son, who would be the one to pay for all her choices. If ghosts didn’t get him, Apollo would, if Apollo didn’t get him, then on his fifteenth birthday, Ares’ war machine would take him. At her most hopeful, she – Telos – had fourteen years and three months left, at the outside.
On her darkest days, she thought she should have turned that knife on herself instead of Tragos, and let him and his brother escape with her son. Maybe they would have been able to give Telos a life. Instead, he had three dooms hanging over his head and a mother too aware of these dooms to shower.
But today was not her darkest day, simply a hard one. And Melpomene did get dressed, because there was still room yet inside her for a desire for sweet cheesy, even with all the impending dooms weaving one over the other to create something that was going to steal her son away from her.
That’s what six months of retributionless days did, they carved out, one after another, enough space for a life. Enough space to want things, like hot food delivered by a man whose inherent, unstoppable goodness was bleeding into her life as sure as Tragos’ life bled into her carpet. Enough to plait her hair into a fat braid, so though it was unwashed, it would not look wild. Melpomene tried not to look too wild when Alan or her sisters were coming over. (Though she put in different amount of effort for different sisters. Erato, for example, inspired more than a brush through her hair. Erato did not deal with grim very well, and Melpomene did not deal with Erato not dealing with grim very well, and she was trying not to let any of her sisters become a trial, and that meant not being a trial herself, as best she could.)
But when Alan’s voice combined with the familiar feel of him signaled his arrival at her door, Melpomene had to wonder. Perhaps it wasn’t just six months worth of retributionless days that were slowly carving out a new life. Perhaps it was him. His pull. His self. His story.
Back in the summer, she’d wondered (and it’d hurt, the wondering; it’d hurt, the hope) if his story might be stronger than hers, in the end. She still wondered this, and it still hurt.
And this, this hurt in the same way: Alan remained convinced that Telos’ fate was his own.
But if Melpomene could believe him all the time, it would have been easier to shower.
“I didn’t shower,” she said as she opened the door, because she had not lied to Alan— or even withheld the truth— for many months. “But I did force Telos into a bath this morning, so my arms are very clean.”
She smiled at him, too. It had taken her a long time to work her way back to easy smiles with Alan, ones that weren’t crowded with meaning and overwhelming with emotion, but this one was easy. Tired. A little wry. Quite hungry. But easy.