Work Text:
παραδίδω - to deliver, give over, or surrender
Home.
A concept, that he had long been pulled away from for the sake of claiming victory for his people. A plea, desperation in the sword and the white-knuckled grip of hands aboard his ship with his command. A promise, swearing to return to his homeland when his duty was done, returning to his son and wife.
Penelope.
A concept, the concept, his wife and his life, the only thing that had kept him going for these twenty forsaken years. A plea, the plea on his lips every day and night of please let me see her, please let me reach her, to the tune of his steps and the beating of his heart. A promise, his promise: I will see her again.
A concept, a plea, a promise.
It had seemed so far away for twenty years. And even now, he can scarcely believe it: he sits on the edge of their wedding bed, watching his wife bustle about the room as she summons servants, to send missives, to deal with the consequences of the king’s return. Things meant for his idle hands to do, but instead of that, Odysseus sits on the end of their wedding bed and watches. Just watches, watches his wife, in their home, finally, after twenty god-forsaken years–
Penelope catches his eye across the room. She smiles. Odysseus’s breath catches, and then he exhales in a rush. Reminding himself that this is real. He is home. She is here. Their son is waiting outside of these walls. His safety has never been paramount– only theirs, only ever theirs– but… he is home. He is safe, and so are they.
He barely knows what to do with the concept.
For so long, he’s lived without safety. He hasn’t known that luxury in twenty years. He has been terrified for his family’s safety for even longer, since his first chaste intimacy with Penelope, ever since he had held Telemachus in his arms as a wailing bundle of blood and skin. And he had returned to his palace to witness the absolute– bile spewed by his would-be replacements. The threats of his nightmares, the kinds that had plagued him ever since leaving home, made vocal to his ears. And he had assured their safety: the siege that had followed haunts him even now in the aches in his fingers and arms and the blood coating his hands.
But… had he? The anxiety lingers, in the way he jumps at every intrusion into their sanctimonious space. Penelope sees it, because she has always seen all; she guides them away from kneeling at his feet to prepare a bath and send for food, as he twitches at every noise, every word, every movement not his own or hers. He is poised, as he has been, for– for seven years? Eight years? He barely remembers– to jump into ruthlessness with a blade in his hands if given the chance. If necessity demands it.
He will fight for his life, his home, and his wife. He knows nothing else, now.
“Odysseus.”
He looks up immediately, tearing his gaze away from his palms. There’s an apology on his lips, on his face, knowing he’s missed something said to him that’s infinitely more important than this own thoughts, but he doesn’t get the chance to say anything before she continues.
“The baths have been prepared,” she says quietly. Pointed, but calm. He wonders if she can see the terror in him. She always has seen it all. “Come, husband.” Her eyes gleam with the words, merriment and care and love. His breath catches again, like he’s still in some newfound fondness, and he would laugh at himself if not for the fact that Penelope offers her hands to him in expectation of him taking them.
And he hesitates. He hates himself for it, but he does.
There is still blood on his hands, after all.
His fingers are half extended before he recognizes, remembers; he looks at the dried red-turned-rust smearing his work-scarred palms and crusted beneath bitten nails. He is not the man he had been when he had left. He is not the man she’d fallen in love with and seen off for war. He’d tried to tell her. He’d tried to–
“Odysseus,” Penelope repeats. Her voice is firm. She demands his attention, and his action. He looks up at her face, her beautiful face– aged, now, no longer the fresh-faced love he’d left at the docks in a tearful goodbye. “Come with me,” she says, so he does.
His hand in hers feels right, should feel right, could feel right… but the life of so many men taints and flakes beneath their palms. It itches between his fingers. He wants to take her face between his hands and hold her, and kiss her, and more, always more. But there is still so much blood, and he doesn’t dare desecrate her anymore than he has already. Than he has already…
“Penelope…” he starts, uncertain, but she squeezes his hand tightly, and asks:
“When was the last time you had a bath?”
His dirtied hands cease to matter. They are such a small thing, unimportant. He turns his head to sniff at his shoulder, but his chiton is splattered in gore. And he knows what else she sees, looking at him: a gaunt face– less from hunger these days, but wearied by loss and life and time, so much time. Unkempt hair, longer than deemed proper, tangled and matted by the salt of the sea and travel across it. Equally as wild hair across his chin and jaw as if he had been living in the forest instead of on the water. Dark smudges under his eyes from not daring to sleep in fear of the nightmares come to collect while he rests. Half-healed wounds, from friction, from splinters, from rope, from fights. Short, chipped nails. The slump in his spine. All a far cry from being the grand king he had once taken such pride in as he’d left for war–
“A proper one,” Penelope continues easily. Her hand does not leave his. “One you could enjoy, take in. Not one of necessity in cleaning over the side of your ship.”
Odysseus swallows, and forces the admission to his lips. “I don't know.” Ogygia, surely, for– for all of his hate for the place– there had been no lack of creature comforts. Running water and an array of food. But it had always felt… off, dinners tasteless and sunshine muted. Perfect, but at an angle he had never quite been able to figure out. The idea of chasing the thought had always been there and gone as soon as he would think of it. Calypso’s doing, no doubt.
Penelope nods, unbothered by this terrible truth. “Some things have changed in the twenty years since you last visited our bath. So, I think you will find you will luxuriate more than ever, husband.”
Despite it all, his lips twitch. Husband. He will never tire of hearing that from her lips. Even if he is not the husband he had once been before, she still calls him that. For that, his heart still sings.
“I’m in your hands,” he says out loud, and he is.
She leads him to the bathing tub, different now than he remembers: it is beautiful, a terracotta looking thing, simple but stating its grandeur simply by being in their home. It is a little deeper and a little wider, and he can see the steam gently wafting from the water even as they cross the humid room hand in hand.
“I had it commissioned,” Penelope says, offhand, as they approach, “when I heard news that the victory at Troy had been secured.”
“Ah…”
“So it has seen less use than I had originally intended, but I admit I’ve enjoyed it almost enough for the two of us.”
He can picture it: her body as bare as a newborn babe, fair-skin stark as she lay lounging against the fired clay. The water gleaming across her skin, smooth against her, caressing her like he has so longed to do. The curl of a damp tendril escaping the messy twist of hair pinned carelessly atop her head. Chin tipped back, breathing in the oils and salts, a bead of sweat on her brow.
For a moment, he is jealous of this beautiful, unyielding bathtub. Such a thing, to have his wife so safe within its arms all these years.
“– but I will be very pleased to see you in it,” Penelope says, and when he meets her gaze again, her eyes are sparkling playfully. “Prove to me it was worth waiting for.”
Odysseus laughs– suddenly unsure of when he had last done that with sincerity, too– and reaches to undo the pin on his chiton. “If I had known you wished for my return only to see me languishing in a bath…”
“Then I suspect you would have left Troy before the work was done,” Penelope jokes, and before he can get far on his clothing, reaches past his hands to finish the clasp. He falters, for a moment, close to telling her that such a thing is beneath her, that, if anything, it should be the other way around, but… he knows arguing with her would be foolish. It had been from the beginning.
Another smile. A twisting of lips that feels foreign, and dangerous, and wrong, but he can’t help it around her. He never had been able to. “It might have inspired some… expediency,” he says, and sees her lips curve into a familiar, sly smile before she steps out of view.
“Only some,” she repeats, as she tasks herself with undressing him.
He’s so caught up in the moment, in this tiny, inconsequential moment of being, here, home, with her– he forgets the weight of the past twenty years. He forgets what he carries, both in mind and in body. He feels her fingers falter as she exposes the red winding injury along his back, the vein-like fractals that spread from shoulder to shoulder and curve to hug his spine. He hears her breath catch at the expanse of the scars left by Zeus's rage, and he feels the heat of the lightning awash over his skin as his men scream in horror behind him.
“But we’ll die.”
“… I know.”
He had turned his back to their deaths. Unable to face his own choice even as the deck had splintered beneath his feet. But Zeus had made certain to leave a reminder nonetheless, never aching, never fading, but there. Odysseus will carry it for the rest of his life.
He would have without the physical scars, but… his penance to bear. A small thing, after everything else that had happened that day. Sometimes he forgets that the physical reminder is still there, like now, as Penelope pauses for a beat, and he opens his mouth to say something–
– but she doesn’t linger on the spider-like marks across his skin. Instead, he feels the pass of her fingers over the old wound nestled where the lightning had not, in some twisted sense, later touched: the scar from the sword that had pierced him from the hand of his own crew.
“Mutiny,” he finds himself saying, as if it is the most important of the two. “They mutinied.”
Penelope doesn’t say anything. Her hands linger at the old wound. Her fingers trace the edges of it like she is committing it to memory. (He knows that she probably is.) She is quiet for a moment, and another, and then her palm presses over the wound. She leaves it there for another breath, and then caresses the line of the lightning scar, chasing it with the heel of her hand. “And this?”
“The gods.”
He answers with honesty, no trace of want to lie to her. He is– terrified, to tell her his many truths. To lay bare his guilt and shame. It scares him more than maybe anything has scared him in this life. But to lie has never been a thought, right from the moment of stepping inside of their room for the first time in twenty years. She deserves that, after everything. He wants to give it to her as much as he trembles at the thought.
“Does it hurt?” she asks, and Odysseus shakes his head.
“It doesn’t.”
Her fingertips trace the line of the scar again, feather-light and leaving gooseflesh in their wake. He swallows, and does not shudder only by the grace of– well. The grace of some gods, he thinks sardonically, and then Penelope removes her hand.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” she says with the same no-nonsense tone of earlier. Like she has not just lain him bare in their bathing room, even as the rest of his chiton only now falls to the floor.
He steps out of it and, with the rest of his meager attire long since discarded back in their room, steps into the tub instead. The water is steaming hot, a balm to his aching body and strung tight nerves. Modesty forgotten again with the heat licking up his calves, he groans as he sinks into the water as much as he can. The smell of oil assails his senses further as he settles, knees pressed against the side of the tub. For the first time since coming home, he feels his body relax. His head falls back. He closes his eyes to savor this, just for a moment.
He can hear Penelope behind him, around him, bustling around the room again. Movement, things being shifted and prepared. He has barely been able to take his eyes off of her since returning to their room, but now he permits a moment. He is helpless to anything but the heat of the bath and the unlocking of overworked muscles. He breathes out in a rush, and then opens his eyes to find his wife kneeling next to the bath. There is a bar of pressed oil in her hands, and a cloth and pumice in the other.
Before he can do much than smile at the tableau, she reaches forward to begin to help bathe him.
So muzzy is his head in this moment of unbelievable calm that he doesn’t entirely notice what she is doing. She dips the cloth in the water and has wetted down most of his skin before he remembers the state he is in. He remembers the blood just as Penelope’s careful hands wring a wash of water from the cloth along his neck, and he looks down at the water to watch it stain red as it collects back in the tub.
“Penelope,” he croaks. He clutches at the hand near his shoulder. “You shouldn’t–”
“Whyever not?”
“I’m–” He struggles for a word that could possibly condense the mess he is, now. There isn’t a single word in any language, he doesn’t think, to suffice. If there is, he certainly does not know it.
“A little blood and salt would not have me from you, husband.” He falters, trying to force his tongue into an argument. A plea. Something to stop her from tainting herself as he has been. “Besides,” Penelope continues lightly, “as a woman, one with a private bath and varying scruples, you know I became desensitized to blood in the water long ago.”
Odysseus’s cheeks heat in the steam. He lets her pull her hand from under his, even as he murmurs in halfhearted protest.
“You have never taken offense to helping me clean up during those times, so why should I?”
“It’s…” His mind wanders, lost in the memories of a pained Penelope, worry not born for their bed but her agony. Helping her to the bath to wash. Helping her with his own fingers stained red with her moans echoing the air around him. Scandal teased with mischievousness, when he had taken an active approach in helping with her monthly menses. “… it’s mostly not my own,” he murmurs, even though she will have already gathered that from his lack of fresh wounds.
“And I am glad for it,” she says. “I would not have it the other way around,” she says fiercely, and contrary to her tone, gently starts to scrub.
He lets her. He cannot argue with her. So he lets her, letting himself take in as much of this moment as his gnawing mind allows. It is still… difficult, to reconcile all of this. Especially when he catches sight of the blood diffusing in the water. But Penelope’s hands are so steady, and the familiarity of the smell of the olive oil is so strong it aches in his body and blood and bones. Different to the pain of deft fingers working into aching muscles and long healed injuries.
As it turns out, the wound from mutiny does still ache with touch. The injury was in a location where he could not reach, and no one’s hands had strayed his skin since.
Or– well, never long enough for him to notice the pain, anyway. Calypso had been fond of the lightning fractals, tracing her fingers along it if she caught him in a moment of half undress. She had always twittered on about its beauty, and his strength, as if she would ever know the reason for its existence. She would not know it had been from weakness. He had never shared, would not have under duress, even, and he had learned only a few months in that she would not come near him if he had made himself particularly filthy for a week or so. She had learned that he would avail himself of the hot springs only if she respected his personal space. Just like she had learned he would only eat if she did not push on concepts of his life, that he would only engage her in conversation if she did not insult the name of his wife or his fallen friends and his promise to return home.
The two of them had reached a sort of compromise during those seven years. An unwanted coexistence, but a coexistence nonetheless. But she had never laid hands on the usual scars of war, uninterested and unallowed, so the spark of pain in the old wound is a surprise. Odysseus says nothing of the pain. Even still, Penelope’s hands do not linger over it before she moves on to wash another soiled part of his body.
They do not speak– there is so much to say, and yet the silence is so comfortable– so comfortable that Odysseus feels himself start to drift. Bobbing up and down on the water, drifting, but no longer moorless. Not tethered to a barely cobbled raft or the wind bag, but bound once again to his wife and his son. The waves soothe him to sleep like they had long before he had met Poseidon on the sea. He drifts and dozes, consciousness broken by calloused hands and the smell of olive and rust. By nightmares and memories alike.
“… I once pretended to be afraid of the water,” he says eventually, when Penelope has moved onto his hair. She pauses, as water trickles down his jaw, and he stares groggily into the bath. “There was a siren masquerading as you.” Even half asleep, he hears the disgust in his own voice. Even now, he remembers that encounter as much as he does the ones that had gone badly for them. The rage in his body, and how he had barely managed to stay his hand until he had gotten the information he’d needed. To pretend to be his wife, his Penelope– some things were truly unforgivable.
“Sirens?”
“Trying to lure us,” he says, sitting up a little. “Singing their songs. Tempting us with their beauty.”
“And it took my form?” Penelope asks with humor in her voice. “Something to admit, my love?”
He shoots her a look over his shoulder. It pulls uncomfortably on his hair as she’s trying to detangle it. He’s going to have to have it shorn, he decides, and perhaps his glance comes out slightly exasperated as well as amused. “That you are my everything? My dreams and my fantasies.” He shares a soft smile with her, and turns his head so she can rinse his hair free of oil again. “That a siren holds nothing to your beauty and kindness. That their willingness to attempt such a deception damned them long before we snarled them in our nets. They paid the price for their disrespect.”
Penelope hums a note that may be agreement. Maybe it is just wishful thinking. She continues, asking, “and what did you do with these cunning nymphs who dared to tempt you with my form?”
“We killed them.” His jaw clenches. Penelope’s hands do not falter. “Cut off their tails and threw them back in the sea.” Even now, even saying the words out loud to his wife, Odysseus finds that he still holds no guilt for that day. The one thing he does not lose sleep over at night. Funny. He supposes even the most heinous of men get reprieve every now and again.
He snorts, very softly, and clutches at the edge of the tub beneath his hands.
Penelope rests both hands on his shoulders. She leans in over his right shoulder, close enough to once again smell her familiar fragrance oil over the smell of the bath. “Their singing must have been atrocious,” she says lightly, and curls a loose piece of his hair around her finger.
His exhale turns to one of almost laughter. He turns his head to face her again. “No one could ever hold a candle to you, dear heart.”
She laughs, and retreats again. “Well, I do admit to having some ability when I’m in the water,” she says, “but I’m not sure singing is really part of my repertoire.”
“I have heard you sing before. Many times. It’s beautiful.”
“You are biased.”
“I’m not.”
“I could shriek like a drowning cat and you would still say it’s beautiful.”
“It would be,” he retorts, and he’s right: it would be, and she would be. Always, forever. Beautiful, his Penelope.
She laughs, and kisses the top of his hair– that still has to be an impossible mess, even now– before she stands. “You are biased,” she repeats happily. “Husband mine. Come along,” she says again, brandishing a linen towel, and like before, Odysseus does.
His body creaks as he rises from the water. He does not miss Penelope’s look of concern as she steps forward to dry him with the towel, but it’s lost by directing his own attention to the fogged up looking glass across the way. He waits until she has mostly finished before gently taking the linen from her, and he continues to dry himself as he steps over to the glass. A swipe of the towel reveals his face looking back at him, weary eyes watching as he towels his own messy hair. He wonders, really, if he looks any better than he had sixty minutes ago. He can’t see where it might have made much improvement.
Penelope’s face looms into the mirror beside his. She stretches to rest her chin on his shoulder, and wraps her arms around him. Their eyes meet in the mirror. “How long have I prayed for this night,” she says softly, and squeezes her arms around his bare waist. “To have you in my arms. Odysseus.”
He abandons the linen. He stares beseechingly at her reflection looking back at him. “I took so long. Penelope, I–” He doesn’t have the words. There are not enough, and nothing strong enough, and– and his tongue is tied in ribbons, as tattered as the rest of him.
“Hush, love.”
“I’m so sorry.” He clasps his hand atop hers, for a moment, before the apology whips words into action. He twists around, faster than he should in the heat of this bath. His head spins as his hands shake, and he falls, subservient, to his knees in front of her. “I’m so sorry, Pen.” He holds her hand between his, encompassing them like a prayer. He bows his head and begs her forgiveness for– for the time, for the distance, for things she cannot know. “To leave you was travesty from the moment we knew I must go, but for you to be alone– for me to not have returned until… until now, like this–”
“Odysseus.” Her free hand rests lightly upon the top of his hair, and scratches lightly at his scalp. “Love. I would wait until the end of time for you.”
“You should not have had to,” he says crisply, fighting the taste of tears on his tongue.
“Just as you should not have had to suffer the way you have.” Penelope pulls her hand away. He lets his fall useless to his knees. But she kneels in front of him, too, taking both of his hands again to hold tightly in hers. “And I have not been alone. You have been with me, each and every day. In these walls. In Telemachus, your son. In the bed you carved for me with your love, Odysseus. I would not be without you. I could not be without you, no matter how many years have gone by.”
The tears fall. He cannot stop them. Traitorous things, when his face has already been dried. But he never had been able to withhold his emotions. Unbecoming, for a man. Penelope had always said she admired it in him, though.
“Is this where either of us imagined ourselves?” Penelope continues. “No, perhaps we didn’t. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. You came home, Odysseus. You came back to me. You came back.”
“You don’t know what I did,” he whispers. Things he had tried to tell her. Things he is terrified to. “You don’t know what I sacrificed. You didn’t see the people I sacrificed–”
“You making it home does not invalidate their sacrifices,” she interrupts, taking his face in her hand. She forces him to meet her gaze like this, eye to eye. Level. “Just like their sacrifices do not invalidate you making it home. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, Odysseus.”
“But…”
“Two things can be true.” She swipes at his tears, and pats his face with a little more force. “Do you understand me, my love?”
“But they died,” he murmurs. “I made it home, but they died.”
“You made it home, and they died.” Now she takes his face in both of her hands. Tilts his head so he’s looking at her again. Her grip is more gentle. Her words are softer. “I don’t know what happened while you were gone, love. One day, when you are ready– only when you’re ready, Odysseus– I want to share in that pain with you. I want to share in your triumphs, and your losses. I want to bear your scars alongside you. I am your wife,” she says determinedly, when Odysseus opens his mouth to interrupt. “I want every part of you. I want your shame, and your guilt. And I want your happiness, too, husband, for you have returned to me. We will mourn those losses, and carry them with us everyday. But we will have our happiness again. We have been waiting.” She nods, and leans in to kiss between his eyes. “I will not see it taken from us ever again, not even by your own mind.” She pulls back, simply holding his hands in hers again. “Do you understand me?” she asks again, and Odysseus shudders beneath her gaze.
He cannot stop the tears. He is home, his wife is holding him, and speaking to him so gently. And he cannot stop the tears.
Odysseus shudders, and fractures, and falls. He curls forward to bury his face in her lap, their hands still clutched between them. His hides his tears against his own skin and her wrinkled chiton and– and gives into the gut-wrenching sobs that have been building in his throat for years.
There has not been much able to break him. Fractures, many, yes. Stinging eyes and bile in his throat, vomiting over the side of the ship in his shock. The grief and guilt he has carried for twenty years, yes. There, always there, but something packed away to revisit in the deep of night when sleep evaded. Often nightmares, but few tears. It had never been that he hadn’t been in touch with his emotions, after everything, because he was. But he had known that if he broke while still on his journey, there would be doubt he’d ever recover. Therefore, he could not allow himself to break.
The one time he had had found him on the edge of a cliff, begging for all of it to end. The guilt, the longing, the aching, the journey. His pain. Wavering at the edge of the sea, tears pouring down his face. The faces of everyone he loved taunting him in the waves, begging him to come home. Falling to his knees with a crumbling of shale and soul, hands in his hair and despair in his heart. Pleading for something to take him away. Screaming with all of the air in his lungs that had been left traumatized and broken.
You don’t know what I’ve gone through. You don’t know what I’ve sacrificed.
Even now, he doesn’t know how he’d gotten off that ledge. Calypso, undoubtedly, but he can’t remember a single thing she’d said, or done, to draw him back. He would have stayed sobbing on the ledge until he died, one way or the other. There had been no hope left in his body at all. And he doesn’t remember… he remembers Calypso bundling him up inside her home… wiping his tears… tucking him into her arms and holding him as he’d cried… vague things. Hazy and nearly forgotten. He had stayed in that fugue right up until the shock of his departure had snapped him out of it again.
That had been the last time he’d wept in earnest. The Underworld had held him, head in his hands and in a tangle of bowed spines and limbs in the quarters of his ship, Hector’s son and Polites and his mother and crew outside of the shutters haunting his thoughts. But he had not been a changed man then. He had still known hope. He had seen it through by only bending, not breaking. So, Ogygia had been the first, and only, and last time that Odysseus had wept.
Now it explodes from him in a rush, every sorrow and every pain. He cannot breathe for the squeeze of it clenching his lungs, and his heart, and he chokes and sobs over everything he has been through. Part of it still feels blasphemous, to cry when he has made it home. But there is no stopping it now. Like the bag of wind, there is no stopping it. Only riding it out to meet its end, for better or worse.
He gives himself into it. He gives himself into Penelope completely.
She holds him as he does. She strokes his hair. She rubs his back while whispering sweet things that he cannot understand over the agony of giving in. Unlike his, her hands still do not falter.
He is grateful.
Time is an indeterminate thing with grief. He is already familiar with that, but he is still at a loss for the passage of it when he finally resurfaces, hiccoughing himself into submission. He frees his hands from Penelope’s to rub at his eyes and shakes as he sits back. His spine aches from the position he’s been bowed into. His body creaks again, audibly suffering in its own way. Now he winces from the pain. Penelope helps to ease him back, tucking his damp hair behind his ears.
What a mess. A beautiful one, to be home and with her, but a mess all the same.
He makes himself meet her gaze, sheepish and uncomfortable. He knows what she’s seeing now: wet cheeks, a puffy face, red eyes. No trace of strength left in him as he sits back on his ankles, and lets his shoulders sag. A king brought low. “… I’m sorry.” His voice rasps. He tries to clear his throat softly, but it feels thick with grief even still. “Penelope…”
“I’m not.” She thumbs against his tears. “I would not see you suffer, but I would have you share. Besides,” she adds, and looking closer, Odysseus is half amazed to see a slight flush to Penelope’s cheeks. “I can think of worse things, than having my naked husband before me.” She fixes her own hair, and smiles at him. It is as coy as it once had been, twenty years ago, and yet still tinged with more sadness than Odysseus can process right now.
But it makes him laugh. A sharp, wavering noise of amusement huffs from his mouth, even in this state of slight disbelief. He knows it is partially a distraction, but… it works. He does prefer a compliment and gentle teasing more than being a sobbing mess on the tiled floor. “Ha… ah.” He braces a hand on her knee. Leans forward to pass his lips against her jaw. “There are definitely worse things,” he jokes, and noses against her ear. He feels her shudder as he kisses there too. “Than my casual nudity.”
“I have missed this view,” she says. “Amongst others.” She rests her hand against his still damp cheek, and rests her temple against his. “But let me hold for you tonight, husband. Together, in our bed. I only wish to have you in my arms.”
“Then you shall have it,” Odysseus promises. “Anything and everything you want.”
“That goes both ways, too, husband. No matter when. No matter what, Odysseus. I’m here for you.”
For the first time in twenty years, he can respond. “I’m here with you,” Odysseus murmurs, and turns his face into her hair once again.