Dante Lot (unseen_miami) wrote in olympian_rewind, @ 2011-03-21 21:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | children, dante lot, hades |
Who: Hades (with Dasha)
What: Nonsense ending
Where: His house
When: Some time after his scene with Heph
Warnings: none
It was late evening. The sun would be coming up in a few hours.
It had also been a few hours since Hades’ sleep interrupting watch had woken him from his slumber, buzzing him away as soon as his heartbeat had begun to pick up. In the near total darkness of their bedroom, as he ran his fingers softly through his wife’s long black hair, he couldn’t remember if the on-coming dream had been a good or a nightmare and that pleased him nearly as much as basking in the gentle spring feeling that surrounding his sleeping wife.
After years of trial and error, he may have managed to get his pulse monitor ploy to work for him. At least at a satisfactory level.
But like all good things, it came to an end as the stillness of his peaceful home broke with a gentle whimper.
Hades pulled himself away from Persephone and turned his gaze to the two baby monitors that sat atop the nightstand.
Green or yellow?
With another whimper, he stood up and left the room. Green. Dasha’s monitor but he wasn’t overly surprised that the incoherent whimper had been hers. Delaney had long since learned to use her yellow monitor set to beckon her parents to her by name. He frowned as he swiftly went to his youngest child’s room. What was surprising was that she whimpered at all.
His frowned deepened. Dasha laid curled up in her crib that she was getting much too big for whimpering in tears. His paternal heart ached in his chest as he neared her slowly. “Little girl,” he softly called to her, “Precious little girl…”
Her little tear strewn face lifted at the sound of his voice and she pushed off her fleece blanket, reaching out to him with grabby hand.
Hades nodded and scooped her up from her crib, blanket and all, and sat her on his lap against his chest on the window seat overlooking the backyard and greenhouse. The curtains to her room were open, not that it would matter to an outside observe as all the windows were tinted. But for them, it allowed the moonlight to bathe the pale skin she nuzzled against as she wiped her tears along her father’s bare chest in a soft glow and spackled against the glitter effect of her blanket. “Are you going to stop crying now?” he asked in whisper into her ear.
She shook her head no.
“If I turned on Uncle Vad-vad’s Crazy-Holographic-Amaze-a-tron, would you stop crying?” Hades didn’t know why Delaney had named her sister’s toy that but Dasha had seemed to approve at the time. But now she shook her head no again.
Hades rubbed her back through the blanket. He really wished the people he cared about the most would stop crying so much. He couldn’t take it. It was like a knife being driven through his chest and twisted, slowly, while flesh eating beetles made of salt were poured onto the wound. He needed her to stop crying before he could help her with why she was… His brain was beginning to fail to process anything but her tears. “If I put one of your silly hats on you, would you stop crying for Daddy?”
Dasha seemed to consider it for a moment and murmured, “Hop-hop…”
Placing a kiss to the stop of her curly head, he rose again and found her her hat that had long floppy bunny ears on it. He had never questioned why Delaney had used the phrase ‘Uncle Vad-vad’ in the name of the toy. It was what Dasha would probably call him with her new habit of doubling sounds. Carefully he put the hat on her head and loosely Velcroed it under her chin.
She pulled away as the floppy ears fell around her and wiped her face with them.
For a moment, her father stood stunlocked by the sheer adorableness couple with sadness of the image that was before him before regaining control of himself and walking them both to the window seat, “Did you have a bad dream?” Now he could deal with causes.
She nodded, the floppy ears flapped wildly with the motion.
“I have them, too. But you’re lucky. You have silly hats and daddies to be here with you,” Hades whispered again into her ear. “Want me to hold you until you go back to sleep?”
She shook her head no again.
Hmm. Hades considered his daughter, who maybe she have asked for her koala hat with how she clung to him. Clearly, she didn’t want him to let her go. “Want me to hold you until your Mum wakes up?”
Again she nodded and much the same, Hades was always whipped in the face by the flight of bunny ears.
Not that he especially care as he went back to rubbing her back even while his gaze shifted to the outside world. To how the moonlight danced along the glass of Persephone’s greenhouse, how long the shadows were that fell from his necromantic work shed, long since abandoned but locked up for emergencies. His previous life was catching up with him. For over five decades he had been able to put his life as a deity behind him, to live as a human mortal with a new chance at a new life and new identity.
All given up when he had found Dionysus and his welcome in Miami…
His earlier life was catching up with him. He thought of himself in his own name and spoke in his native tongue… The familiar bonds of marriages wrapped around his soul and his domain existed in microcosm before him.
The grand house with gardens around it.
Administrating brutal justice to those who cry out.
All of it was a proxy for what he had lost.
All except for his children…
He sighed a little and boosted Dasha higher on his chest. “Let me tell you a story, Little girl. Once upon a time there was a prince…” All fairy tales were about princes. Kings never appeared as protagonists in fairy tales. Not even supporting casts. “and he had everything he dreaded. His kingdom was a place everyone wanted to avoid, his subjects wanted to escape it for foreign lands that were cruel to them. Even his family turned away from him and the princess? She wanted to escape like his subjects. And there were terrible monsters there. The prince would do anything to be free…”
The little girl stared at him with her bright black eyes twinkling in the moonlight like little onyx gems with rapt attention. Her whole face was consumed with a pitiful frown.
Hades continued, “Then one day, a wicked wizard came and punished all the prince’s family. He cast spells to break their homes into pieces and made them run away and the prince did nothing to help them. He was glad. They had forgotten him after all, what else had they forgotten? They probably deserved it, he thought. But then the wizard’s mean dragon came to the prince and tried to chase him out, too.”
“Uh huh…” Dasha urged him on.
Hades brought his eyes back to his daughter and pushed the rabbit ears from her face; he wasn’t completely sure she understood what he was saying but he continued anyway. Maybe she just liked the sound of the story, “The prince told the princess to never come back to the kingdom and he tried to free his subjects but it didn’t work…In exile, he wasn’t happy but he was free. Free to do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted for the first time ever. Then he found his family and they didn’t want to be away from him. They even wanted to be around him and try to help him be happy. The princess clung to him. She didn’t want to escape him. And his ungrateful subjects called out for his help but…”
“Den wha?” she asked quietly.
He knew she was parroting the words ‘Then what’, but having used them correctly albeit pronounced wrong, he humored her, “The prince was scared.”
“No scared Dada,” she commanded in her best serious voice and then hugged him as tightly as her chubby little arms could manage, “Wuv you.”
Her command shook him to his core. She was less than fifteen months old and unlike Delaney, didn’t have a magically enhanced brain. Her astuteness caught him completely by surprised but maybe he had misunderstood, reading himself and his own problems into his daughter’s words, “What do you mean, little girl?”
She frowned mightily. Her whole face scrunched up in her clear displeasure at his conclusion, an expression he was certain she stole from her older sister. With another, harder hug, she said, “No be scared, Dada. Wuv you.”
It seemed her astuteness would continue to surprise him tonight but he would take it as a sign. Dasha was his child of hope, proof that things could get better, that he wasn’t trapped in the words, and prophecies, and curses bestowed on him. Now she was telling him not to be afraid. Who was he to question the child who shouldn’t be? Who had every single thing working against her existence? In light of her presence, reclaiming part of the Underworld and bringing comfort to his dead seemed simple.
He held her tight to his chest with a small smile, “Alright. You win. Want me to tell you another story? Got a good one about a little rabbit princess…”
Dasha smiled now and nodded.
Hades could humor her until the morning came or she fell asleep. After all, she had humored him. Humored him and cut through his bullshit like only a toddler could do.
Summary: Dasha wakes up in the middle of the night and Hades goes to her to tell her a story to soothe her. In return, Dasha tells him what he should do with his life.