Chapter Text
He falls, for a while.
Cold pressing from all sides like those tales of buried snow, endless dark prying his eyelids open with what couldn’t not be his penance.
There is gurgling, he thinks.
There is gurgling, and it takes too long to note it as his; too long, to register the way his lungs refuse to expel, the way his airway’s filled with an incompressible something that reminds him too much of the food he hasn’t had in… forever, actually.
Less to vomit, he rationalises. If he’s still able to vomit after.
Some part of him’s still tremoring at exactly what Poseidon has in store, but a larger fraction of him supposes it’ll nothing he doesn’t deserve, and even as water continues to push through all the defenses he doesn’t have he manages to spare a thought for his wife and his men, throwing ‘m sorry ‘m sorry ‘m sorry into the nothing before the ocean folds him back into—
——
“An eye for an eye, coward.”
——
—the ocean folds him into… something.
Something.
He distantly notes the way his face burns colder than before, how the water in his lungs stays even as the moisture on his cheek breezes away, Aeolus’s winds carrying the echo of pitched laughter down a cliff.
The fact that he’s alive is almost surprising.
Almost, before he remembers Poseidon’s not so merciful as to give him a quick death.
“This was much more entertaining when you fought back, coward.”
Poseidon’s booming laugh comes from somewhere too close to his face; it takes a moment more to feel the water flooding half his head, the blurry world spinning paint-y as a shipwreck when said water slides ‘round his wrists again, drags him out of wherever he was, and—
“I had hoped you would fight more, frankly,” Poseidon echoes from somewhere to his front, too much like how Polities had echoed off Polyphemus’ walls, and that’s when he realises that that this— this—
“—see it, do you not?” The Ocean’s voice is pitched so, so deep. “This was my son’s abode. Fitting, for the fate you will too suffer.”
Will you blind me too? He wants to ask. Will you take the life I might have had, in exchange for the one he has lost?
All that comes out is a wretched choking noise.
He sort of wants to cry.
Maybe he is already crying; maybe he just can’t feel it through the seawater staining his freezing face, but that thought is discarded when something shifts in Poseidon’s darkened eyes like a snake curled to strike.
“Blinding you is far too kind a torture, nonetheless. You have grown too used to physical pain, as much a coward as you are, and—“ that smile carries too many teeth— “You deserve much, much worse.”
“—ou want all the power, you must carry all the blame!”
Just get it over with, he sighs, even as the wretched animal in his gut keens, as the exhale chokes in his throat.
The understanding that he hasn’t been breathing for the past few minutes comes late as the years he’s lost at sea, but the thought has hardly the time to settle before it’s cold and it’s dark and it’s Polites and Eurylochus and Diomedes and Circe and Telemachus and Penelope and
he
is
Odysseus of Ithaca closes his eyes.
It is not quite him that opens them again.