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"Melinoë."
Zagreus shuffles behind her. It's been a few days since his—discovery, and now that the revelation has well and truly sunken into his bones, he sees it the best time to tell Melinoë what else he saw in those notes of his father's.
Melinoë freezes. She had been suspicious of this moment coming ever since she had found him crumpled by his bed the other day, head buried in the sheets, strangled sobs coming from his throat. Nyx lied to me, he'd said. Father lied to me.
Me, he'd said, but she knew he meant us. From birth they'd been bound together, swept into the same box, even when Lord Hades took him away for his princely duties-in-training. It was almost inexplicable—almost, if Melinoë hadn't known there was something cut out of them as children, cut clean as if with a surgeon's hand.
When they were young, sometimes, after rough-housing, they would sit by the banks of the Styx and watch the Shades creep out of the blood-red waters. Once, Melinoë confessed to him something that Zagreus was never capable of scraping clean from his mind.
"Zagreus," she says, and he stiffens. Rarely does she use his full name.
"Those... letters I found the other night. On Father's desk."
The dread creeps up Melinoë's neck like a stalking spider.
"It wasn't just my name in there."
Zagreus holds his breath a moment, trying to gauge her reaction. She doesn't budge. He continues.
"Yours was there, too. Right next to mine. Right next to... hers." He almost—almost—begins to shed tears again.
"Do you remember anyone?" she'd said. "From when you were a baby?"
Naturally, Zagreus scoffed. "I don't remember anything from when I was a baby."
Melinoë hummed. "There used to be someone," she mused. "I can't remember their face or who they were or why. But they were there."
"We're siblings, Meli. Real siblings. And this, this Persephone, she's our mother, and—,"
"And what, Zag?" Melinoë shouts so loudly that even the immortal walls of the House of Hades seem to tremble.
Zagreus is deer-eyed. He should have expected this. Part of him did. But there's that nagging part of his brain always telling him to have hope.
"I was going...," He swallows, reasserting his resolve. "I was planning to look for her. To leave."
Melinoë laughs a laugh that sounds like a dying cry.
Zagreus tried to see his reflection in the Styx and failed. Melinoë faked shoving him in, and giggled when he yelped.
"Our mother? You want to find the mother who abandoned us?" Smokelike energy boils around her. Zagreus hasn't seen her this angry at him like this since they were very young. It was scary, then, watching her features shift and swirl in unknowable patterns and shapeless forms. He isn't scared of it anymore. But his chest does ache.
"Don't you think she left us here for a reason? That she wanted to get rid of us? That she never wanted us?" Melinoë's pitch is hysterical, voice frayed at the edges. "Why else would she leave, Zagreus?"
"I don't know, Meli," says Zagreus in a tone that matches hers, but he wishes it didn't. "But I'm going to leave and find her and find out and you—,"
"Hey!" Zagreus shouted. "If you do that again, I'm gonna tell Nyx!"
"Oh, don't be such a baby." Melinoë stood, offering a hand. "Come on, I'm hungry. Let's see what's in the lounge today."
Zagreus, on the brink of tears, offers to her a hand.
"You can come with me," he says. "Come with me, Meli."
Melinoë laughs another withering cry.
"No," she says. "I won't see a mother who hates me. And don't come crying back to me when she looks you in the eye and turns away."
Zagreus leaves in silence. Melinoë collapses to the floor and weeps.