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Chapter Text

When Odysseus’s consciousness pieced itself back together, the first thing it latched onto was heat.

Ogygia was a paradise in every sense of the word, sculpted and smoothed to perfection. The edges of rocks were dull and harmless, the waves on its crystally clear beaches always gentle and lapping. A world without pain, and bursting with it despite. He had never known greater agony than on its rich soil. Calypso never understood it, her too-wide smiles always faltering when he told her that her island, full of everything anyone could ask for, was empty. Entirely, nauseatingly empty of anything he could want.

How could explain that he wanted not for peace, for the artificial serenity of her prison, but for home? That he would trade her sparkling white shores for Ithaca’s ragged cliffs in an instant, her temperate skies for its storms and winds? Ogygia’s sun could never imitate the warmth of Penelope’s arms, its night skies the perfect black of her hair. 

And their child. No wonder of the world could compare to the feeling of those perfect, shining eyes blinking up at him with such trust. Their Telemachus, who would tug at his clothes with little hands to bring him closer, who would sleep only when held and explore the world with such light, laughing curiosity. His son. To leave him that cursed day, crying and reaching for him with the confusion of a boy too young to understand war but who knew they were being left behind nonetheless, had been akin to tearing his own heart from his chest. Odysseus would have left it there in its entirety if he could, sheltered by the two he loved most in the world where they could see how it beat only for them.

Surrounded by sickening divinity, the damned thing thumped sluggishly in his own chest, without the reprieve of physical pain to distract from the rot inside.

His body had grown so accustomed to a world dulled of feeling that the burn of sun against his skin was enough of a shock to startle breath back into his lungs. Odysseus snapped his eyes open with the desperation of a drowning man taking his first breath above water — and was met with a blinding light. He raised a hand to shield his face on instinct, and felt it scrape against sand harshened by fragments of seashell and rock.

Sand.

The last thing Odysseus had felt against his back was the splintered wood of his makeshift raft, pummeled by Charybdis and then abandoned wholly after-

He sat bolt upright. The god of the sea had bled beneath his own trident, golden, divine ichor steaming in the salted air, had looked up at him with unnatural eyes and sharp teeth bared before he turned and- The memory failed. Ithaca had been there, its shore so close he could make out the shape of his beloved palace by the cliffs, and the sensation of being pulled back, of the ground disappearing from beneath him, and then nothing.

Odysseus was not in Ithaca, he knew this as certainly as he knew his wretched lungs still held breath. He was not in Ogygia either, though that comfort was a hollow one. Agonisingly close to home, and something had pulled him away again. A scream built in his lungs and tore out of him. It echoed harmlessly across the water, the ocean placid and smug in its victory.

Was this Poseidon’s work? Had the god managed a final act of vengeance, throwing him across the seas so that he may never reach home? Cursed to roam aimlessly forever, always out of reach of those he loved most. Penelope. Telemachus. A wife he would never see again, a boy he never got to raise. Already fourteen, and only fourteen still, who would never know his own father.

His cry finished in a dry heave, having nothing for his body to expel but so nauseous with horror and grief he almost died from it. How much more could the fucking fates expect him to endure? Ten years of war. Three years at sea — six hundred men lost. A year on her island. A duel with a fucking god, and still they did not permit him to rest.

When his body stopped convulsing, Odysseus pushed unsteadily to his feet, squinting to make out his surroundings in the blazing sun. To his eyes the land was unfamiliar — to his bones, dread was an old friend. Dry rock sprouted from the earth like growths, meagre wildlife shrivelled and decaying. A place forsaken by the gods almost as much as he was.

Athena. He had thought — foolishly, perhaps — that she had answered his prayers on Ogygia. When Hermes had arrived, cryptic and incomprehensible, Odysseus had let himself hope. That he could go home, and that his goddess had not abandoned him entirely. Too late did he understand the god’s warnings — there were always more uncharted waters. Always more challenges and obstacles in his path. Perhaps they had freed him only for their own entertainment, to watch him run to Ithaca and pull him back out of reach time and time again, like a dog to a bone.

“Hey!”

He turned at the sound of the voice, gruff and furious. Two men lumbered toward him from across the beach, his enhanced hearing that had lingered even when the rest of his goddess’s gifts had pulled away easily picking up the jarring clatter of their armour, shining with reflected sunlight. Odysseus noted their approach with vague disinterest — they were stockily built, muscled frames obvious even from a distance, but he had just fought a god. He’d kill these men with his bare hands if he had to.

They stopped in front of him with their weapons drawn, twin swords pointed at him in hostility. Stupid, he thought. At least one of them should be carrying a spear. To pair fighters who shared strengths rather than ones who could cover each other’s weaknesses — such as a short reach —  was an oversight that reeked of carelessness.

“You trespass, stranger,” one spat, baring his teeth. “Only a fool would dare spy on King Antinous’s lands.” Antinous. The name held no familiarity to him. Odysseus didn’t deign the blades with a second glance, his mind spinning as he tried to place their accents. Long-ignored dread coiled along his spine, hissing its demands for attention.

“Trespass where?” His voice was hoarse, scraping through his throat like nails. The assumption that he was a spy was nearly amusing — as battered as he was sure he appeared, he should have been taken for a shipwreck survivor or stray traveller. He abandoned any esteem he might have held for the men’s mental capabilities when they seemed thrown by his question, the shorter of the two shooting questioning glances to the first who had spoken.

The guard squinted at him with obvious suspicion, his straw-coloured hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. “You stand in the noble kingdom of Thrace.”

Whatever words followed were lost to him, because Odysseus finally understood the uneasy recognition that had burned beneath his skin since he’d woken. He had heard that accent before — from the mouths of desperate men before they had fallen to his blade, on the bloodied lands of Troy. The phantom smell of war blocked out all else, filling his senses with the bitterness of blood, sweat, and plague.

The men were no longer talking, their grips tight on their weapons as they stared him down incredulously, a broken sound crackling through the air. Odysseus realised a moment later it was his own laughter, destroyed and hysterical as it fought its way out from his lungs. Every single one of his men was dead. In four years, he had lost every brother in arms, every friend, every familiar face that had kept him sane during the war, just so that he could get home.

And he was a single day’s travel from where he’d started. Less, even, and in the wrong fucking direction. 

His hands ran over his face in disbelieving despair, his soul lurching as if it could pull him out of this nightmare. He stopped laughing only out of exhaustion, his lungs spasming in ragged breaths as they forfeited the battle. Numbness set in instead — Odysseus hardly noticed when violent hands gripped his arms, the bite of a blade at his back barely worthy of attention. None of it mattered.

None of it could, not anymore. He would let these incompetent fools drag him along, since he’d been dropped so carelessly at their feet. When strangers lurk around the isle, Hermes had said. For whatever reason, it was important to the fates that this should happen. If they wished only to torment him he would have awoken on Troy’s shores, or Ogygia’s.

It did not matter where they left him. It did not matter if guards hauled him away at swordpoint, or if another god stood in his way.

Odysseus’s heart continued to beat for only two reasons. As long as Penelope lived, as long as Telemachus lived, he had a home to return to. He would throw himself against any obstacle between them until it fucking killed him.

***

Thrace was a misery of a place.

His memories of Ithaca were full of laughter, of easy conversation and the sound of children playing in the fields. By comparison, Thrace was near silent. The servants shot him uneasy looks as he was led through the grounds, shuffling past with their shoulders drawn in, taking up as little space as possible. All greenery was brown and shrivelled, the bushes so dry they would crack with a strong breeze — the gods-cursed drought ever more prevalent on palace grounds.

Odysseus breathed in air so thick with humidity and tension he could have choked on it. The palace itself seemed caught on a precipice, the land beneath it a misstep away from crumbling to nothing. Darkness hung opaquely in the halls as the guards pushed him deeper into the fortress’s underbelly, each path twisting further into obscurity and away from the light of the sun, as if the torches themselves were subdued, flickering with dying embers.

The first man — Eurymachus, if the others’ deferential whispering was anything to go by — led the small group, having been joined by more armoured bodies upon breaching the palace gates. Bronze surrounded him on all sides, a cage of bladed threats. Odysseus let them shove him along, humouring their posturing and self-importance as much as he could bear.

Eurymachus threw an arm out without warning, stopping them all in their tracks. He turned, scowling. “His Majesty occupies the path. You are not worthy of his presence, stranger,” he sneered, and Odysseus fought the urge to roll his eyes. A king who would not face his own prisoners was no king at all. ‘Worthy of his presence.” Like they hadn’t personally dragged him into this.

From somewhere out of sight, a young voice reached his ears. Uncertain and pitched like a boy’s, something in its cadence had his subdued heart stirring. 

“-something about Sparta, and alliances that could cause trouble? They might have mentioned war, but they lost me there. The war is over, is it not?”

Alliances? War? Odysseus could have laughed again. Four years without him since the razing of Troy, and people spoke as if their recovering nations stood on the brink of conflict once more. What little he’d seen of Thrace’s palace hadn’t suggested a thriving kingdom by any means, but he hadn’t expected the situation to be so dire. Then again, perhaps he was placing too much faith in the words of a child. The hesitance of his words, the naivety of his sentiment — they did not speak of high intelligence.

He dismissed his concerns for the time as a gruff reply came — from the king, he assumed — too low to be made out, followed by receding footsteps. Now cleared of his esteemed presence, the guards resumed their procession down the hallway, Eurymachus at the lead. 

Odysseus barely had time to clear the corner before a blur of red crashed into him. His hands went out on instinct, wrapping around a pair of narrow shoulders. An almost feverish warmth spread through his chest where a boy precariously leaned, his feet caught underneath himself unsteadily. 

“Easy, kid,” he murmured — the softest words he’d spoken since before Ogygia. Since the underworld, in truth. The child was light enough that helping him up was all but effortless, wild black curls tumbling further over a pale face at the movement.

Golden eyes snapped to his, a shock as sudden and vicious as winter diving from Ithaca’s cliffs. The haze of disbelief and numb apathy that had descended vanished with clarity sudden enough to be dizzying. Their shape, their colour, the startling intelligence in them — Penelope herself might as well have been staring him down.

Red fabric obscured the lower half of his face, matching with the robes he was wrapped in. Odysseus couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think except to search for anything in the boy’s face. Anything, to convince himself those weren’t really Penelope’s eyes, that his memory was clouded after all these years — but every glance only proved further intoxicating. They darted across his face in turn, sharp and analytical — gods above.

The sharp bite of bronze at his back urged him forward. Odysseus resisted as long as he could afford to, caught on the boy’s eyes like game in a trap. Something about the way they shifted their gaze left him feeling flayed raw, burning even as he was pulled further down the hall.

For the first time since waking on Thrace’s shores, Odysseus felt truly alive. His wife’s voice was in his ear, gentle and breathtakingly sharp all the same.

Would you give up so easily, love?

***

The bars of his cell clanged jarringly as they were forced back in place.

Muted apathy had been chased out of him by that single, startling gaze, leaving a trembling rush in its wake. His heart pounded against his ribs with uncomfortable force, muscles tense with the urge to rip apart anyone who would stand in his way. Odysseus had been so close, and he needed to go home. An urgency blossomed, itching beneath his skin with the need to leave. He was a week’s travel from Ithaca — every minute he spent behind these bars was another that delayed his homecoming.

Even then, he forced himself to be still. Acting rashly had never won him any favours. You are here for a reason, something whispered, sounding painfully like the faded echo of someone he’d once worshipped, in another life. Not yet, it insisted when his eyes followed the back of the leaving guard, mind spinning for ways to get him to turn around or misplace his keys. Not yet.

Odysseus bit his tongue and finally settled with the rough stone against his back, sliding down to the ground. The movement made dust flair around him in an impact cloud, speckled with red sand. He let his head thump back to the wall, and resolved to wait.

Penelope. Telemachus.

The names warmed his every waking moment since he’d left, blotted out at night only by terrors of storms and monsters. He clung to them as a shipwreck survivor did to driftwood, rolling the syllables over his tongue. They tasted of home. Every memory of light and love he basked in was paired with one of war and blood — remember what awaits you, pleaded his heart. Remember what you must do to reach it, hissed his mind.

Odysseus breathed through the familiar pain aching through him, and closed his eyes until he could pretend the weight on his chest was a swaddled child, one whose name was not grief.

***

Nobody came until the following morning.

The shuffling of uncertain footsteps pulled Odysseus from uneasy sleep, fully awake before any shadow breached the dungeon entrance. A girl appeared before his bars, slight, underfed, kneeling with a tray in both hands. Grey skirts collected dirt where they dragged along the floor, hems fraying. A servant. Some part of his mind prickled with the difference in dress from the boy in the hallway, from the lengths to the colours, but he pushed it aside for the time being.

It wasn’t his concern.

“Excuse me,” Odysseus started, pitying but unsurprised when the girl startled away as if she’d been hit, eyes wide as they met his. “I wondered when I might meet with your king.” He gestured to the cell around him as she stared blankly. “Plead my case.”

The girl blinked at him — slowly, as if he were particularly dim — and shook her head.

“You do not wish to meet with him.” She spoke quietly, but with impressive resolve. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, glancing nervously to the entrance. “Not now.”

Now?

Odysseus raised an eyebrow, inviting her to elaborate, but fear of disobedience won out over sympathy. The tray dropped the remaining distance to the ground, and its bearer vanished out of sight in a flurry of a grey, like dissipating storm clouds. His hiss of frustration whistled through his teeth, and he slumped back against the wall. 

Dull pain ached through his muscles, protesting hours — decades — spent in discomfort as if that battle was not long lost. Somewhere along the way, his skill for coaxing information from softer sources had rusted. Inconvenient, if his contact with the outside world was limited to servants for the time being.

And Telemachus? a traitorous voice within him whispered. The girl was not much older than he would be, and she couldn’t so much as look at you without terror. Have you spent so long in cruelty you will not know to be gentle with your own child? Will you watch him flinch from your hands?

Odysseus could not do right by his son if he was dead. He exiled that sour, familiar fear to the far reaches of his mind, and focused on what was definite.

He had escaped Calypso. Defeated Charybdis, then the sea god in turn. Awoken on the shores of Thrace to hostile guards, and been thrown in dungeons for the crime of existing on enemy land. The tension in the air was obvious to anyone with a pulse, paired with the terror of servants and the behaviour of the men — an unreliable king, prone to tempers or cruelty. 

Half-heard words drifted back to him in memory, lilting. Alliances. War. Vividly, the boy’s eyes flashed through the darkness of his imagination, sharper than any blade. Odysseus sat up, tension snapping back into his frame like a plucked chord. His words had been clumsy, dripping of naivety and ignorance — and the child had been anything but. It was only the briefest of interactions, but Odysseus had survived this long only from assessing his opponents at a glance.

The difference between the air-headed picture he’d built for himself and the sharp analyst he’d met was so jarring his thoughts caught on the moment as if on thorns, and it took an almost physical effort to push them through.

Political turmoil could drain the life of any palace, he remembered clearly how subdued Ithaca’s halls had been, those terrible weeks between Helen's disappearance and the official call to arms. But his guards had never hesitated to cross his path, and his servants had not flinched at sudden movements. 

Whatever was wrong, its rot began here.

Perhaps it was unimportant. Perhaps all Odysseus needed to do was wait for the right moment to disappear, and he’d be on a ship to Ithaca before the dust even settled. But something had brought him here. He intended to find out why.

His thoughts crept back to the boy as if caught in a riptide, dissecting each second of their meeting as they grew muddied and sluggish. Honey-gold eyes flickered in Odysseus’s mind even as he let himself drift off to sleep, burning through the darkness like a hearth.

Chapter Text

Hunger settled into his bones with ease, making itself as comfortable as an old friend. Meals were delivered sporadically, none of their carriers lingering for conversation, and in between the brusqueness of the encounters and their scarcity, Odysseus had the incredulous feeling that he’d been all but forgotten about.

Not now, the girl who’d served him his first day had said. Something had to have happened, a shock to the system of the palace brutal enough to send it reeling. The servants who brought him food did so with stiff, trembling frames, moving with the uncertainty of children who had not received instructions but were terrified of doing the wrong thing.

Odysseus busied himself with plans.

A palace this tense would be child’s play to push into disarray, but if all went well he wouldn’t have to. Scheming had gotten him far in the past, yet he found himself entertaining the rare possibility of a simple escape. The guards would have to bring him out eventually, and so long as he didn’t make himself out to be a threat he shouldn’t have any trouble finding the right moment to run, maybe taking a few men down if necessary, and disappear into the harbor.

He had been in far worse situations, lied and manipulated and killed his way out of far tighter binds. If he truly wanted to, he could be out of this palace within the hour. Lure a guard in with a commotion, the monster hissed, the thoughts flashing through his mind almost dizzyingly fast. Coax him into arms reach, hold him hostage against the bars with a blade fashioned from a broken bowl or tray until another produces keys. Fight your way through the rest.

Admittedly crude, a violent tear to freedom instead of the stealthy disappearances he was fond of. Or he could play the longer game, grow closer with the servants until one took pity and provided something he could use. Countless possibilities, each smoothing out before him like the threads of Penelope’s looms.

And yet. And yet, Odysseus remained rooted in his cell, because something would not let him leave. A delusion, most likely. His father’s madness finally catching up to him, reading signs where there were none to be found. Wait, it whispered, and said little else.

Wait.

***

Familiar footsteps tugged him out of the land between thought and sleep, the shuffling pattern having embedded itself in his memory on instinct.

Odysseus pushed himself upright with one arm, ignoring the ache in his joints in favour of keeping his posture open and non-threatening. With a murmuring of fabric, the servant girl from the first day walked stiffly into view, her knuckles white against the edges of the tray as she knelt to deliver it.

Her task done, she stilled, her eyes downcast and fixed on the dusty stone at her knees.

“The councillors are dead.” 

Odysseus froze, and the air in his lungs ceased to exist. “You wondered,” she continued, her words brittle and wooden, “why you should not wish for an audience with the king.” Finally, she dragged her eyes from the floor to meet his — both bloodshot, one blackened, the look in them as sharp as bronze. “And so I am telling you. The councillors are dead. He killed them.”

Her voice was raw with fury — and, inexplicably, grief. Odysseus set that aside for the moment to let the enormity of her words sink in. An entire council, dead. If he had thought Thrace on the brink of collapse before-

It would only be a matter of days before the palace came down around them. Why? He couldn’t imagine a faster political suicide, or a more definite way to lose the support of his people and the trust of his workers. He’d suspected the king to be unstable, but even a precariously balanced vase did not shatter unless it was pushed. Lilting, stumbling words flashed through his memory too fast for him to remember their details or their owner before they sunk back into the fog.

Odysseus made himself focus on the girl in front of him before his thoughts spiralled out of control.

“Only the councillors?” he risked, voicing a sinking suspicion.

The girl scoffed, the sound wet with unshed tears. “Of fucking course not. He killed anyone who even looked suspicious, or like they might not be completely thrilled with his stunning decision making. And who do you think bore the brunt of that? Not that you’ll hear anything. Who would care about a few hung servants when the great and almighty councillors are dead?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, more weary than surprised. It was always the weakest who suffered most from the whims of power. “They didn’t deserve that.”

The girl hesitated, momentarily taken aback, before she wiped roughly at her face with a stained sleeve. “Don’t be too sorry. You’ll join them soon enough.” There wasn’t all that much sympathy in her words, but Odysseus hadn’t expected any.

As coldly as he knew he was handling this, there was an advantage here. Whatever fear had held her back before had been replaced with the fury and desperation of cornered prey — she could give him something to work with without even realising, or for the joy of spiting her old master.

“Your king kills all of his captives, then?” he risked pushing a little further, applying more weight on a cracking surface.

That got a strange reaction. The girl’s expression twisted, something genuine cutting through her bitterness.

“No,” she said, finally, the word all but gritted out. “There are… others.” Without being goaded, her wrath flared again, her hands gesturing wildly in the air. “That’s why this whole godsdamned place is falling apart to start with. The fool risks the ire of the Achaean forces constantly by taking their own. Peasants, nobles, even some heirs, as some kind of convoluted revenge for our loss in the war. Like our honour could be regained with the defeat of untrained youths. The Greeks are noticing, and they’re not fucking happy, which means the people are worried about another war, because that went so well the first time, which means the councillors are upset-” She stopped suddenly, her lips tugging at the edge with what would have been amusement if she didn’t look moments away from ripping her own hair out. “Were. I suppose they were upset.”

Something about Sparta, and alliances that could cause trouble? They might have mentioned war, but they lost me there. The fragmented, nonsensical conversation snapped into place with startling clarity. Childlike naivety and stunningly sharp eyes — well. That was certainly interesting. More than ever, Odysseus was certain he’d stepped foot on a battlefield, caught at the end of a game of strategy racing headfirst into its violent finale.

And only now could he see who the players were.

“Why keep them here, if they create such risk?” Surely killing them would send the same message, and from the sounds of it they had been in the palace too long to be explained by a ransom demand-

The servant levelled him an unimpressed look, and his stomach dropped in sudden, nauseous understanding. Why steal nobles? Why keep them dressed like that? The discrepancy between his uniform and that of the girl’s was no longer possible to ignore, despite his stomach’s lurch of unease. Vivid red, demanding the eye’s attention at first glance when servants were meant to fade into the background. The band that obscured his face while the rest of him remained exposed, the message dehumanisingly clear — the person behind it was not the object of attention, so much as the body itself.

Antinous, a fool by his own right who’d never so much as stepped foot on a battlefield, wanted his own war prizes.

“It’s not like he makes that much of an effort to keep them hidden,” she continued, suddenly sounding more exhausted than anything, her shoulders slumped with resignation. “Rumours will spread to the other side eventually. Either he’s very confident the Greeks will not risk another war so soon after Troy or-”

“He wants them to know it was him,” Odysseus finished, the words sour on his tongue. “A vengeance he cannot claim is an unsatisfying one.” I am the infamous- the cruel voice of memory began to mock, and he strangled it ruthlessly.

The servant girl hummed in apathetic agreement — he doubted his reasoning mattered much to her, in the end. Grief had a way of straightening priorities. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes as if trying to force her mind out of her own skull and heaved an exaggerated sigh.

“I have to go. If I’m caught lingering here too long I might be killed a whole week earlier. Can’t have that, now, can we?” She didn’t so much as glance at him, clearly talking more to herself. With a muted storm of dust, she straightened wearily to her feet and made for the exit.

Just a few steps from the stone arch, she paused, and threw a last few words over her shoulder, almost as an afterthought.

“They’ll bring you to a feast tonight. Final meal. You’re dead come dawn.”

***

True enough, guards clattered unceremoniously into the dungeons a few hours later, just as the last of the day’s light began to wither through the wall’s narrow slits.

Just three, and Odysseus let them manhandle him out of the cell as if he were terribly outnumbered. Dawn. One last night to get out of this.

His plan was, at its core, laughably simple. He was already underestimated, more of a nuisance to get rid of than a real threat, and that meant all he had to do was wait for the right moment. There would be nothing but air for them to try and restrain by the time they realised he really should not have been left unbound.

A map of the route he was being dragged along neatly carved itself into his memory without any conscious effort, and he let himself use the walk as an opportunity to lazily take in his surroundings. No clear opening, not yet, but he wasn’t concerned. A palace on the verge of collapse, overworked and undertrained guards, lingering fear and resentfulness inducing careless mistakes — the path to freedom had been carved out for him before he’d ever stepped foot on Thrace’s shores. 

Not for the first time, Odysseus was content to sit back and let his enemies run themselves into the ground.

They arrived at the throne room with little fanfare, what he assumed had once been a dramatic and malicious show of power now little more than a half-forgotten technicality. Its long tables were already full of men, half out of armour with their weapons strewn carelessly at their feet —they spared him glances that ranged from apathetic, to amused, to disgusted. 

One feature of the hall caught his attention enough that he nearly scraped his shin open on the bench he was shoved into, much to the entertainment of his entourage. 

The throne was occupied by Antinous, the thrice-damned fool. His jaw was tense, his posture forcefully relaxed — the frame of a man holding onto to power by a thread. But far more interesting was the flash of red fabric at his side, curled stiffly on a kline with slight hands on the strings of a lyre. Its music was smothered by the raucous atmosphere, gentle notes buried deep under grating laughter. The boy from the hall did not look down at them, honey-brown eyes flitting only between his instrument and the man towering above him with a muscled frame drawn tight enough to snap. 

A child who, if his suspicions were correct, had orchestrated the collapse of a kingdom. A child who wouldn’t leave it alive.

Odysseus averted his gaze with an uncomfortable churning in his gut. You cannot save everybody, he reminded himself.  Do you save anyone, though? an unhelpful voice offered, for once sounding more incredulous than vicious, and was pointedly ignored.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” The voice was slimy, dripping with something that made Odysseus fight a recoil of revulsion. He turned to find Eurymachus leaning across the table — far too close to him — his breath sour and rancid. “Our king’s taste cannot be faulted. That one’s special, too,” he said, hunger undisguised, “He might even share.”

The strategist in him wanted to speak, to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth to ask what made the boy special — the father in him was preoccupied with smothering the urge to wring the guard’s neck. The two compromised at a dark stare, his hands twitching for want of a sword as the man in front of him slumped back to his seat with a grin, his armour clattering harshly through the swelling conversation. 

They, his mind caught, a few beats too late, and realised with numb horror more red-clad children were flitting between the tables, refilling wine and dodging stray hands all the while. Under the table, Odysseus clenched his fists tight enough to carve bloody crescents into his palms.

For the sake of making it through the meal without wrecking his own plan with unadulterated — satisfying, the monster in him insisted — violence, he tuned out the conversation as it grew progressively lewder, burning holes into the wooden grain with the intensity of his stare.

Until-

“- now or never, brat might be too destroyed after tonight!” the man to his left finished, his elbow slamming into Odysseus’s side as he gestured wildly and jerked his head with a grin at the boy playing the lyre. The men around him exploded into laughter, their wine spilling across the table as they waved their cups in careless mirth. Disgust rose through Odysseus like a tide, his mouth filling with the taste of bile.

The kid couldn’t have been older than fifteen. He’d known of relations with boys even younger, and it never failed to make him feel sick. Those men weren’t fueled by love, or even desire. To go after anyone that young was only ever for a sense of power, to delight in the feeling of having someone weaker at their mercy.

A man under his command would have lost his tongue for such a comment. 

With no command, and caged in by armed men, Odysseus could only grit his teeth.

Until Eurymachus stood up.

His grin was crooked, its teeth stained with wine. “Only one way to find out,” he crowed, and pushed away from the table toward the steps, the anticipatory silence of held breaths blanketing the hall in his wake. 

Leave him alone, some part of Odysseus snarled, his hand clenching on the wood so tightly his knuckles went white. That was a child. One that had doubtlessly already been hurt, and was surrounded by men that seemed to enjoy nothing more than to do so. Every muscle in his body grew tenser as Eurymachus climbed the steps, his restraint stretched to the edge of snapping entirely.

He couldn’t do anything. He shouldn’t, not when the easiest way to get himself free was to let the guards underestimate him, to use the distraction of drunk men at the end of the feast as his opportunity to escape — neither of which would work if he drew attention to himself.

The boy stilled as Eurymachus approached, his eyes widening with fear so stark Odysseus could see it from clear across the hall. They realised at the same time the king would do nothing to stop this, vile as he was, and his chest seized at the resignation in the drop of those small shoulders. The child flinched when the guard’s hand landed on his thigh, the discordant sound of the lyre swallowed by the uproar of laughter as the strings of Odysseus’s heart were tugged just as ruthlessly.

He could not let this happen. His eyes closed as he prayed a silent apology for his family, for risking his return yet again because of his foolish mercy, but he couldn’t. Not to a boy young enough to be his own son. Fuck his plan. He’d make another one.

The last his self control shattered, and Odysseus slammed his fist into the nearest guard’s face. He had only a moment to indulge in the satisfaction of cartilage and bone crunching beneath his hand before the others reacted, jumping up and swarming him in unco-ordinated surprise. He let the first tackle him to the floor, using the other man’s momentum to twist on top of him as they fell, landing with the sound of shoulderblades colliding with stone.

It was all so painfully mortal. So much time had passed since Odysseus had faced a threat as simple as other men, faceless enemies hidden behind bronze. He lost himself in it, sinking into what had come to him as naturally as breathing on Troy’s bloodied lands, almost savouring the routine of a fight that could be won with things as simple as muscle and blade.

Admittedly — he got carried away. As cathartic as it would have been to snap the necks of each loathsome creature around him, if he let himself get as far as killing any guard his escape would get that much more complicated. Some instinct tugged his gaze upward, back to the boy with the lyre. 

Wide brown eyes watched him with bird-like focus — not frightened, he noted, curious. But Odysseus lacked the time to investigate further. Eurymachus had deserted the child’s kline for a place in the swarm of armoured bodies between them, and so his task was accomplished.

Odysseus let himself falter, holding still for just long enough for a stray hand to rip him back into the fight, and clenched his jaw with familiar restraint against the blows that rained down on him.

Rough hands shoved him unceremoniously back onto the bench. Odysseus bit back a grunt at the handling, half of his body burning with sensitive, rapidly developing bruises. He wiped at his split lip with his newly bound hands, cursing himself for his own heart’s weakness. Still, the way the boy had looked at him, stunned by the distraction but safe — as safe as Odysseus could get him, anyway — wouldn’t let him regret it. Such a small mercy, in what was sure to be a life of cruelty.

A single good deed would not wash the blood from his hands — but maybe he could bear to look his son in the eyes, when they met again. He settled into his seat, the ache in his limbs already fading from memory, and resigned himself to spend the rest of the evening ignoring the insults thrown his way.

The music picked up again.

It had lingered in the back of Odysseus’s mind for most of the evening, a pleasant distraction when he could hear it over the din of his detestable company — the boy was obviously very talented, though his playing was restrained with the stiffness of one performing at swordpoint — but now it cut through the noise like his ears had reconstructed themselves to hear it.

A simple melody, much gentler than the stories of war and bloody victories the king tended to favour, filled the air like early morning mist. Odysseus’s heart stuttered in his chest. It had been years, a lifetime, since he’d heard that song, but something in his bones would always recognise its own.

Those notes were beautifully, undeniably, Ithacan.

The boy looked back at him, strumming the strings with an ease and fluidity that had been lacking in his previous songs. The piece was softly played, but seemed to swell and fill the air until everything else faded into the background. Odysseus felt it like a rush of pure air through his abused lungs, sweet and full of life, even as fresh sorrow tugged at him.

A native. The servant had told him about the raids — and he had not even considered his own homeland.

The idea of an Ithaca that was hurt in his absence, that had suffered losses he could not predict and threats he could not protect it from was almost too much to bear. All that had kept him going in over a decade of pain had been the idea of home, whole and perfect and waiting for him. If he’d let himself consider any alternative, the unmooring from his only anchor would have left him dead.

Penelope and Telemachus had to be safe. This was a law written too deep into the fabric of the world itself, into the marrow of his own bones, to ever be threatened. But if any of his own subjects had been taken, this danger had already strayed far too close to them.

He met the boy’s eyes.

For just a moment, the hall itself seemed to fade around them, the fragile connection suspended in time as if preserved in his goddess’s domain. Nothing existed except the song, and woven through it, the bone-deep need to go home. The longing was thick enough to choke on, vicious and suffocating as it burned through him like nothing. Its flames consumed the palace whole, and with it every distraction.

Odysseus was leaving tonight, if he had to rip the stone walls apart with his bare hands to do so. And — logic be damned — he was taking that child with him. Even here, even after everything — he had a duty to his people. To those he had sworn to protect.

Newfound resolve thrumming through his veins like a second heartbeat, he turned back to the table. He found the world off-balance. Or, it seemed as if it had been so for so long that once righted, Odysseus no longer knew how to stand, like walking on land after months at sea. The meal continued like a river after its dam had crumbled, but its details were lost to him, every sound and feeling muted through a pulsing haze.

“There’s an unguarded window by the kitchens.”

The words came so unexpectedly Odysseus froze, body tensing ingrained instinct, though they were barely loud enough to be audible. His gaze snapped to the side, and fixed on the girl serving wine. Her eyes were pointedly trained on the chalice in front of him, the movement of her lips obscured along with the lower half of her face. Carefully, he relaxed his posture, angling himself away from her in pretended inattention while he brought his ear level to her mouth.

“They will bring you past it on the way to your execution,” she continued, her whispers sharp with urgency and green eyes tight with unreadable emotion. “If you can fight off your escorts and get past the guards at the perimeter, you might live past morning.”

Crucial information. Freely offered.

“Why?” he breathed, masking the question by passing his bound hands over his mouth as if wiping away the lingering blood. The girl hesitated at his side a moment longer, her pause almost imperceptible, before turning to leave.

“We repay our debts.”

Chapter Text

There was someone in his dungeon.

Uneven breathing had pulled Odysseus from his thoughts. He blinked, thinking he’d imagined the sound, before it came again, shallow and ragged, each exhale fighting its way into open air. His head tilted to the side with detached curiosity, eyes seeking out the familiar outline of a servant girl on instinct – perhaps she’d had a crisis of conscience after all. 

But the figure that passed through the shadowed entrance was not that of a servant, and his heartbeat thrummed in anticipation at its form. 

The number of times he’d seen this boy could have been counted on one hand – and still Odysseus could have picked his outline out of a thousand. 

With his back to the dungeon entrance, the lyre-player stopped, stumbling into unstable stillness, so unlike the easy grace and smooth movement he’d come to associate with him. The tremors shaking his frame were clear even through the darkness. The strain of his breathing, Odysseus recognised as thready and floaty with the panic of a  soldier who’d started a fight he knew he could not win, a sound which had been as familiar as the wind, a lifetime ago.

A nameless slave boy had no reason to be so interesting. With his easy manipulation of the Thracian king, his Ithacan songs – and now what he could only assume to be a brazen escape – Odysseus couldn’t help but be taken with him. A boy after his own heart.

“You’re in the wrong cage, songbird,” he called, amused despite himself. The feeling twisted slightly with guilt when the kid startled with a flinch, snapping towards him as if expecting an attack. Odysseus crushed it down as best he could. He’d already resolved himself to helping the child home, it would only hinder them both if he let himself grow too attached. He steadfastly ignored the voice that proclaimed it a lost cause, refusing to dwell on how it almost seemed to carry his Penelope’s amused lilt.

Still, this boy was clearly not supposed to be here, and he could respect any kid brave enough to rebel in a situation so dangerous. How he’d slipped past the dungeon guards was beyond him, but Odysseus found it in himself to be impressed anyway. Flighty, though, he thought, noting the anxious twitching in the boy’s fingers. A songbird indeed.

Pulled forward by a curiosity he couldn’t make sense of, he moved to his feet. The gridded cell bars were cold through his tunic as he propped his arms against them, tilting his head at the shadow of a child before him.

“If you’re trying to fly away, I’d recommend climbing through the window by the kitchens.” We repay our debts. If Odysseus could share information the boy knew to be accurate, it would serve well in establishing the trust necessary to get him to follow him out of the kingdom – assuming the captives shared information.

The boy only stared.

“It might be a tight fit, but the security was loosest there,” he continued. Distantly, he hoped he hadn’t been entirely lied to by a girl that did not, truly, owe him anything. Regardless, the lyre-player continued to stare as if Odysseus had grown two heads.

“Why?” he breathed, just when the silence had stretched to nearly unbearable lengths.

And that- was not a question he could answer. ‘I swore to protect you’ would only earn justified suspicion, nevermind that the boy was young enough to never have known him as King. “Why what?”

“Why are you helping?” the boy stressed, hands clenching at his sides as his whole body tensed in defense. “I know you distracted the guards in the hall, and now you’re-” he cut himself off with a frustrated jerk of his wrist. “Why?”

Odysseus bit back a sigh, but considered the question while trying to make out more of the boy’s details through the dark – he could just about see what seemed to be mud smeared across his skin. “Because I can. Consider it my good deed for the year. I can’t claim any moral high ground-” and wasn’t that an understatement “-but I’m not in the habit of letting children suffer. If I can help it.” The gleaming white of an infant’s swaddled curling in the wind cut through his memory with a viciousness undulled by time – he had no right to claim kindness. 

Guilt, however, he’d earned enough of to torture Tartarus’s damned for millenia.

The boy said nothing for a stretch of time, the silence considering. Then – as sharply and stiffly as a puppet suddenly reanimated – he turned and walked out. Walked away, Odysseus hoped, to hide somewhere out of danger or make it out of the palace entirely. 

But the soft shuffle of footsteps halted just out of sight, followed by the faintest sounds of struggle. Concern didn’t have time to rise before-

Keys.

The sound was unmistakable, and Odysseus stared without comprehension as the boy appeared before him once more, beelining for his cell door. The lock rattled through the thick silence – then gave way with a shriek of metal.

Silhouetted by the waxing moon, the lyre-player stood in the open door, a figure carved from obsidian. Odysseus stepped closer as if tugged by rope woven through his ribs, closing the distance between them for the first time since their first meeting. And, from this close-

The smears across the boy’s skin were not mud.

He would have recognised that clumped, flaking texture anywhere, had felt it dry on his battle-leathers more times than he could count.

Blood.

The boy couldn’t have been more soaked if he’d bathed in a river of it. Delicate fragments of bone glittered through his drenched hair like ornament jewels, stuck in place with matted clots. It covered his face and neck as gruesomely as if his throat had been slashed, the smears across his cheeks uncannily like warpaint, streaked through with tears.

And despite it all, the eyes that looked up at him were heart-stoppingly hollow, wrung dry with a shield of apathy.

Unexpected terror ripped through him with enough force to leave him breathless – so much blood, for a child so small – but reason strangled it down. If the boy was injured enough to have lost that much, he would not still be standing. Still-

“Are you hurt?”

Round eyes stared up at him, unblinking. Unnatural stillness had snaked around the boy’s frame the moment he had approached, like the air before a storm. A breathless silence passed, stretched taut with tension, before he spoke.

“I killed the king.”

The king. A brute with the muscle of two warriors combined, armed to the teeth and cloaked in guards. Could you? Odysseus thought.

He looked at the child before him. Really looked, for perhaps the first time.

A boy who’d lied well enough to convince a man made of more tricks than truth. Who would free a stranger without reason, without promise of aid or guarantee of safety. A boy who stood who stood closer to him than countless would dare, crowned in a wreath of blood. Meeting his eyes without a whisper of fear. 

Yes. I believe you could.

“I’m sure he deserved it,” Odysseus managed, reeling from the whirlwind of a child in front of him – one who’d ripped straight through his defences without even trying, plucking them apart in his clever hands like cobwebs. How dangerous. How fascinating.

The boy’s expression twitched with something that could almost have been a smile, the movement causing a miniscule fleck of blood to break off from his brow and land the the sheen of his eye. 

The boy did not seem to notice – still unblinking.

“He did.”

Slow as honey, his eyes slid to the dungeon entrance. “You should go. Before the guards notice.”

Odysseus nodded before the words caught up with him, grappling with the terrifying knowledge he might just agree to anything this child asked of him.

“Come with me.”

Golden eyes snapped back to him with an almost violent sharpness, that trance-like haze finally breaking with surprise. “Come with me,” he repeated, pushing insistence into his words. There was no world in which he left this boy behind, but with everything considered – he didn’t like his odds of trying to force him. The clumping brain matter still tangled in his hair told the story of how well that tended to go. “I’m headed to Ithaca – that’s where you’re from, isn’t it? Is anyone waiting for you back home?”

He was young enough that his father might have been on Odysseus’s crew, if he had orphaned this child, if that was how Antinous had gotten him-

“I- Yes. My mother.” Thank the gods. He did not miss the omission of father, but- someone. He still had someone. 

You have robbed your people of six hundred husbands, brothers — but you could bring home someone’s son.

If he hadn’t- Well. Odysseus couldn’t be sure how well Telemachus would’ve taken the presence of another child in their palace, but Penelope would have understood.

“Good. I imagine she’d be glad to have you back.”

Emotion entered the boy’s bloodstained face in a flood as his expression crumbled, his shoulders slumping as if his entire chest had caved in on itself. “I can’t,” he choked, so strangled with pain Odysseus’s heart lurched behind his ribs. “I can’t leave them.”

Too late, he remembered the flashes of red disappearing between tables at the feast, the girl with shining green eyes. “Then we’ll get them out as well.” A foolish promise to make, no doubt – but sometime when he wasn’t looking, it would seem his heart had become a thing that bled, no matter how hard he had tried to armour it.

“We can’t. The guards will stop us and we can’t-” more of a spasm than an expression crossed the boy’s face, cutting his words short. “We can’t fight them.” 

Children against grown, trained men. They’d never even stood a chance. But those beasts would not find him so easy to push around. His hand twitched for want of a sword at the thought.

Odysseus tilted his head to the side, his posture relaxing as he considered, his mind tracing the familiar patterns of thought that came with battle strategy as easily as the muscle memory of wielding a sword. “How many men did the king have under his command?” Did. Because the king had been murdered by a boy he’d had every advantage over – that was a lesson in itself on how much weight to give to things as flimsy as odds.

A little shadow divot appeared between the child’s brows in thought – he resisted the urge to smooth out the crease with more willpower than it should have taken. “Thirty guards,” he said at length. “Maybe fifteen more staying as guests, but still loyal.” Any loyalty to a king like that was as good as throwing yourself in front of a sword, Odysseus thought.

Forty-five. Forty-five overconfident, and if tonight's feast was any indication, wine-drunk, fools between them and freedom. Armed fools, admittedly, but fools nonetheless. “I’ll handle the men. You get your friends out safely.”

He tried not to take too much offense to the stark lack of faith in the boy’s eyes as he stared back at him.

“You-” he accented the stressed syllable with a glance over and around him as if to say ‘and what army?’ “-plan to fight nearly fifty men, alone?”

If it would get him home? Countless. Odysseus shrugged easily. He had no need to fake any bravado – he’d feel more threatened by the enigma of a boy before him than he would any of them, who’d faced no greater foe than ambushed and outnumbered children in years.

For a long, stretching moment, the child only stared up at him. Odysseus could almost see the thoughts flashing through those golden eyes, faster than even he could keep up with – it gave him the ridiculous impulse to tug lightly at one of those stray curls, to see what secrets he could coax out of that sharp little mind.

The moment passed. “Okay,” the boy said at last, more air than word, hanging between them with the finality of a swinging sword.

Odysseus hadn’t realised quite how desperate he’d been to get that agreement until the relief flowed through him, potent enough to wipe his mind clean of anything else. With that insistent concern out of the way, the gears of strategy began to turn.

The main objective: get them both out of this palace, and on a ship home. To that end: find the other captives and release them. Limited obstacles.

Simple.

Before that, though – his eyes caught on the minute trembling beneath the boy’s skin, and reached out from some long-buried instinct to soothe it. He caught the motion before it truly began. As fearless as he already was, standing unguarded with a strange man in a dark dungeon, Odysseus couldn’t think of a single worse thing to do in this situation than try to touch him.

Already enough skin was showing to make something sour curdle in his gut. His hands had unclasped his cloak before his mind had even completed the thought. “Here.”

The boy only looked at the fabric without comprehending – gods, how long had he been wearing that wretched thing – before Odysseus continued. “You seem-” words abandoned him ruthlessly and without warning, “Cold.”

Despite the clumsiness of his phrase, the boy accepted the chlamys with something unreadable in his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispered, voice tight, and Odysseus’s chest ached through his ribs. It was such a meagre kindness. 

He turned away as the child dressed, mostly to allow him some privacy, however delayed, but also to hide the tightness of his jaw as his fury rose, hot and vicious. Thinking of anything that might have happened to one of his own subjects in this cursed place made him want to tear down its walls with his bare hands, to send the root of such senseless cruelty to Tartarus where it belonged.

Images flashed one after the other before his eyes of those responsible – the king on his throne, the guards and vile jeers, the laughing crowd, the men guarding the dungeon-

He stopped. Turned once the sound of rustling fabric ceased, and valiantly didn’t react to the sight of the boy swaddled in a cloak much too large for him, looking impossibly younger than before.

“How did you get past the guards outside?”

The child blinked in surprise, as if the impossible feat had been all but forgotten about.

“I think my friend poisoned them.”

Odysseus’s thoughts screeched to a halt. “Poisoned?”

“Not, dead poisoned-” he started, as if the concern was for their wellbeing and not for the fact that another child shared the insanity of this makeshift escape plan, “just- sleeping. Or very drunk. I think she did that to a lot of the guards, actually.” 

Incredulity aside, Odysseus favourably recalculated their odds of making it out of the palace. “Well,” he said, feeling as if this entire conversation was akin to missing a step on a staircase and dropping into open air. “All the better, I suppose.”

Whether the boy had anything else to say, he would never know, because at that moment shouts reached them through the crumbling stone, the damning sounds of a raised alarm. All around them, noise erupted in muffled bursts, his trained ears picking up the clang of drawn weapons clear through the halls.

A battle was brewing in the palace, and just like always, Odysseus knew exactly what he was fighting to protect. 

Almost unconsciously, his shoulders tensed, his body shifting minutely to hold itself with an alert readiness for bloodshed that had sunk beneath his skin somewhere on the lands of Troy and never quite left. He jerked his head toward the entrance, half question and half command, and the boy fell into step behind him.

The suffocating blackness of the dungeon fell away to the red-tinted darkness of the halls, his own senses sharpening as they adjusted to the new light.

He saw the undefined shapes at their feet a heartbeat before he recognised what he was looking at. The guards slumped by the arch did in fact seem somewhere between drunk and poisoned. Their heads lolled to the side, skin sallow and slack over their bones – dead to the world.

And yet not dead enough.

They couldn’t be left alive. Odysseus knew this, as well as he knew that he didn’t want the child to see him kill unconscious men. He’d swore never to again, after Troy – but he’d sworn many things, then. Almost all had crumbled under the weight of time like sand. The underworld alone had kept countless in its grasp long after he’d resurfaced.

“Turn around,” he commanded, the steel in his voice only just enough to hide the plea behind the words. The boy looked at him, gaze heavy with an understanding that cut him to the bone, and obeyed. Odysseus had only a moment to marvel at the trust it must have taken for a child so hurt to turn his back on a stranger before he dedicated himself to his task.

The sword was unbalanced in his palm, its weight clumsy and unfamiliar. It was more than enough.

The blade cut through the air – and then flesh – as easily as it always had, as if he were carving the world itself beneath it. And then it was done, simple as the cutting of thread.

He spared a moment to ensure his hands were not bloodied before reaching out to pull the child from where he faced the wall – pointless as the gesture was, with the boy bloodier than he possibly could be – and led him away from the dungeons, using his own frame at the boy’s back to keep him from looking behind until the corpses were out of sight.

It wasn’t long before the unmistakable sound of footsteps shrieked through his attention, forcing him to a halt. Without thinking, Odysseus yanked the kid behind him, the cold focus of combat seeping through his mind. Anger coloured it like a snarl at the unconscious gasp at his back, the part of his soul that remembered the weight of a child in his arms and the fierceness of that devotion baring its teeth.

Two men appeared from around the corner, and froze, incompetent enough to be stopped short by surprise. The first of the two drew breath, as if to call for help. 

Odysseus had no intention of letting him.

It was pathetically easy. He shot forward, and the men didn’t even have time to draw their own blades before he cut through them, dulled by wine and the complacency of years hurting weaker targets. They slumped to the ground with a hollow clatter of armour, choking on their final breaths as black blood stained all it touched.

When he pulled back, wiping his sword clean with a motion so practiced he might as well have been born knowing it, all he could summon was disgust. The feeling stuttered and died when he turned, smothered by flickering reflections of torchlight in wide, shining eyes  – painfully like Penelope’s, now that they were out of the thickest of the dark. The rusted smears across the child’s skin stood out in stark contrast to his pallor, glaring evidence of brutality he should never have been near.

He hardly seemed to breathe as Odysseus approached, his expression as still and unreadable as stone. So much for not making him scared of you, his mind taunted. 

“You alright?” he managed finally, inadequate as it was. If the kid decided to take off running in the opposite direction, he was uncomfortably uncertain of his ability to find him again in the winding, unfamiliar halls. But he only nodded, the movement slow and soundless. 

There was more to say – but no time. More men could be coming, and he wouldn’t keep the boy in the path of danger any longer than necessary. 

They kept close to the wall as Odysseus kept his senses sharp for any approaching threat, his hearing picking up on every distant footfall and sharp command. He wove a map of each in his mind, tracking their positions like pieces on a board as they moved through the palace. Openings swelled and shrunk in tandem as he guided them through the safest passages, avoiding encounters like a dancer on hot coals.

A sudden warmth around his arm made Odysseus look down — then still. 

The boy leaned against him like all his strength had been sapped out of him, his small hands gripping his tunic in a way that made him look so young his chest ached. His free hand twitched with the subconscious urge to run his fingers through the boy’s curls, to pull him under his cloak as a bird might under a wing and keep him far out of danger’s reach.

But he wouldn’t.

Not your son, an unforgiving voice bit out within him. You have no right.

He let his hand drop to the boy’s shoulder anyway, too selfish to pull away entirely. That trust, fragile as it was, was intoxicating, and Odysseus spent the moments until the child leaned back struggling to breathe under the weight of memories of an infant, separated from him by more than distance and decades, that would sleep so easily in his arms, that would stop fussing only when he could grasp his father’s tunic in that tiny, demanding grip. One he’d always been powerless to resist.

The boy pulled away both after an eternity and far too soon – Odysseus nearly bit through his lip before he was sure his body would not betray him with something like a sob.

Unable to trust his voice, he wordlessly motioned them both forward. He threw himself with renewed violence at every unfortunate soul to cross their path, the need to bring this child somewhere safe quickly thrumming in his veins. The urgency only swelled as the boy’s breaths grew more laboured, his steps stumbling – they could not slow, not lest they wished to be swarmed, but the child wouldn’t last much longer at this pace without collapsing entirely.

Too soon, Odysseus was forced to a halt when a small hand grasped his sleeve, pulling him back with a gasped “Stop.” His heart lurched to see the kid stumble, leaning against the wall like he would fall without its support. His hands went out to catch him instinctively, stopping just shy of making contact – if he held on now, there was no telling when he’d be able to let go. “I can’t- You have to go without me.” Everything in Odysseus’s body recoiled from the thought, hissing like a feral beast, even as the boy continued. “We’ll both get caught like this.” Better to be caught together when I can protect you, he thought desperately. As if you have ever protected anyone, memory replied.

“I’m not leaving you here to die.” He put as much conviction into the words as he could muster, as if he could imprint them firmly behind the kid’s skull.  “I’ll carry you.”

“And fight with me on your back?” the boy asked, too out of breath to sound as skeptical as he likely intended. Odysseus tried not to take too much offense to it — but he couldn’t weigh much more than a sack of flour, small and starved as he was. “No. Go.”

He couldn’t have pulled away if the world itself were collapsing around him, his resolve wound itself through his body like ropes of stone, chaining him in place. “Not happening, kid.”

Despair and frustration flashed through those golden eyes in equal measure. Even in the dim light, Odysseus could practically see the arguments he was holding back in the tense line of his jaw, the pressure building like a roaring current against a dam- Until his attention snapped upwards. He followed the boy’s gaze and found nothing but stone, with rafter beams disappearing into shadowed corners as if swallowed whole by the void beyond the reach of flickering torches.

“The ceiling,” the boy breathed, attention fixed in realisation. Realisation of what, though, was beyond him. “I- I can go through there.” What? His alarmed concern must have shown through, because the kid sighed with exasperation. “Just help me up.”

The next moment he was scrambling up a decorative pedestal, hardly seeming to notice how he swayed precariously over the edge with exhaustion. Odysseus was at his side before he realised he was moving, his heart in his throat as he watched him struggling to lift himself from one of the rafters, arms visibly trembling from the strain even as Odysseus tried to take some of the weight – a difficult task, when he couldn’t tell where the kid was going.

And then he was gone. Between one moment and the next, his small frame disappeared into the darkness like Nyx herself had reached out to cradle him in her loving hands, tucked away in the safety of obscurity.

Odysseus’s heart dropped into his stomach for a beat as the boy was wrenched out of his sight, but a small, bloodied face breached the shadows again – an admittedly terrifying sight in usual circumstances, yet one he couldn’t help but find comforting. He wrangled his racing heartbeat back under control, forcing himself to admit the child was safer out of reach than out in the open.

Safer without you, and your cursed presence. “I am… not going to fit through there. Are you sure you’ll be alright by yourself?”

The boy nodded, a wet curl slipping down his forehead and leaving a crimson mark in its wake. “They couldn’t get to me here even if they found me. I’ll go to the others, you- um,” he bit back the end of that sentence, painfully young in his hesitation.

Every guard in this palace would be dead before sundown. Odysseus knew his task.

“Alright,” he managed, even as tension coiled round his spine at the thought of separating in such a place. “Just stay safe. I’ll meet you in the throne room after.”

The boy nodded again, and Odysseus felt the loss of his presence before he even saw it, like a taut cord severed – then he was gone for good, melting back into the darkness like a crow against the night.

Chapter Text

Odysseus cut through the guards like a gardener hacked at stray weeds — with an ease that teetered on the edge of boredom, coloured only with occasional annoyance. 

A lingering discomfort occasionally pulled his gaze upwards, as if he could catch a glimpse of his lyre-player in the shadows. His searches came up empty, as he knew they would. That boy had made it impressively far without getting into trouble – Odysseus could only pray he would manage a little longer until they reunited. 

Another unease persisted. However inconsequential it seemed, and however reluctant he was to offer his own until they were out of danger, Odysseus couldn’t shake the fact that he had never asked the boy his name. It wouldn't have changed anything – or at least, it shouldn’t have – and yet the thought persisted.

It was too late regardless, with nothing left to do but finish his extermination. Then he could have the boy safely within reach again, and they would have time for all the idle conversation they liked.

Odysseus slowed, eliminating all sound from his movements and retreating into the shadows as shuffling of conversation reached his ears. Talking meant conscious enough to fight back, and that he would be outnumbered. He noted the facts with about as much interest as one did the weather.

“-ripped apart,” one was saying, his voice pitched low and emphasised like a child telling a ghost story. “As if some beast had appeared in his chambers-”

“Oh, please,” another cut in. “More likely one of his whores struck him when he was too sated with pleasure to move-”

“You didn’t see it!” the first interrupted, almost frantic, and Odysseus’s hand tightened across the hilt of his sword as fury slicked hot through his veins. The group came into sight, creeping along in some imitation of stealth. “I did, and I tell you that no whore could have managed that. Nothing of this world, that is certain.” The man speaking was the shortest of the three, and if his voice was any indication, the youngest.

“You imagine the gods sent one of their monsters, then?” Another, his shoulders broad and loose with the ease that came from an intimidating frame. His voice was deep, and laden with mockery. “And then vanished it without claiming credit?”

“I imagine it is still here! You saw the bodies in the halls-”

“Killed by swords, fool. Not claws.” The second spoke up again, his frame wiry and uneven, as if the man had been unnaturally stretched.

Odysseus did not move from his place, satisfied with letting them come to him.

“Still. Can’t you see that this is retribution? For too long our king pillaged Achaea, and slaves could be dismissed but heirs? Of kings favoured by the gods?”

Something cold and icy slid down Odysseus’s spine, his breath stuttering in his chest.

Tension spread through their ranks as his mind spun. The servant girl had said heirs, but he had thought- lower nobility, perhaps, or wealthy merchants. 

Children of kings. Agamemnon and his cursed blood would never be called favoured, Diomedes had no children before the war, so who-

Favoured by the gods. Are you truly such a fool as to need it spelled out further? How many of your brothers in arms were blessed with such patronage?

Odysseus’s entire body seized with tension, a thought just brushing the surface but still trapped behind towering walls of denial and poisonous dread.

No.

His sword was in his hand and craving through the air before his mind could dare to drag him over the precipice of realisation, catching on flesh and muscle and tearing through both alike. The small, superstitious guard fell first, eyes wide with ungodly terror. Good, something in the depths of his mind whispered. Let him learn what form a true monster takes.

Odysseus slammed the only survivor against the wall, his sword pressed firmly enough against the guard’s trembling throat that blood spilled, black and reflective as it soaked under his armour.

“Which ones?” he snarled, low and feral, as monstrous as he had ever sounded. The guard only stared back, wild-eyed and silent. “You said your king stole Greek heirs. Which fucking ones?”

Barely even a gurgle in response, choked and incredulous. “How the fuck would I know, you think I keep a list of all the whores in this palace?” Something purely dangerous must have shown in his expression, the violent curtain beneath which he hid a terror so suffocating it would consume him alive, as the guard continued, as frantic as prey in a predator’s jaws.

“I- the Ithacan, I know, but the others-”

He didn’t feel the force in the shock of lighting that shot through him, only the scrape of his blade along the wall and the hollow thud of a skull falling to the stone below.

Telemachus.

His Telemachus.

The infant he had left swaddled in beloved Penelope’s arms, safe on Ithaca’s shore – here? In this cursed place? 

The idea was too terrible, too unthinkable to bear- 

His stomach lurched violently. He had not wanted to think it. He had known, he had been told that Greek nobles were held captive in this palace, and his stubborn refusal to relinquish the idea of his family waiting for him at home had blinded him to the possibility.

Odysseus had languished uselessly in the dungeons, and done nothing, while only a few halls away his child-

His thoughts halted as if seized by the throat.

What had those monsters done?

Armour clattered behind him, and he thrust his sword backwards without even turning, finding the weak spot between plates of bronze as if guided by a divine hand, his vision blurred. A face floated through it, pale and bloody but with eyes as familiar as time and a mind that had sent him reeling.

The memories shot through his mind like arrows, each sharper than the last. 

A child, manhandled and thrown into his path so carelessly, blinking up at him like he was surprised to even be caught. A child, wide-eyed and trembling in dungeons, who he’d almost left behind. A child, curling around his arm like it was the only comfort he’d had for far too long. A child, trapped and terrified of a man with vile hands looming over him in a hall full of beasts.

His son, disappearing into the ceiling after Odysseus had let him leave.

He wrenched his sword out of the vermin’s chest, ignoring the pained groan that said he was leaving it to suffer a slow death. Good. Let them all fucking rot if it got Telemachus back even a moment faster.

The halls flew past him in blurs of red and black, every thing in his way a walking corpse. Telemachus was here, he was in this palace and none of these men deserved the mercy of the quick deaths Odysseus gave them, but he couldn’t afford to waste time when his son was still in danger. The thought pushed him forward with a ruthless strength he hadn’t even known himself capable of, a vicious wrath writhing in his chest that was overshadowed only by the desperation of his terror.

Every wrong turn pulled his tension tighter, building in his lungs like a scream, a crescendo. He was past fury. What coursed through his veins had transcended it, burning with the kind of destructive, divine wrath only the gods could lay claim to. Odysseus tore through the palace like a storm, a massacre in his wake.

A distant sound of commotion reached him through the walls, and Odysseus changed direction without a second thought. It carried him back to the throne room, its wooden doors flying open beneath his hands-

The world around him fizzled out to nothing. Where before he’d been subconsciously estimating routes, keeping part of his attention fixed on threats or obstacles that had the misfortune of coming his way, there was only silence.

Every single part of him was fixed on the sight in front of him like time itself had stopped to scream its injustice.

Eurymachus was kneeling, his meaty arms extended to the ground, his weight shifted so that his iron grip could press down. Beneath him, small and limp and motionless like he was already- Like his son was-

A howl ripped through Odysseus, feral and monstrous and everything he would be if only it would protect his child, and before he remembered moving he was across the room, tearing the beast away from his son with desperate, inhuman strength. His sword punched through the man’s back as easily as if he were already a shade, wrenching through his ribs until he was all but torn in half.

Odysseus threw what was left of him to the side, wishing he could have drawn it out but too filled with fervent need to spend another second away from the boy on the ground. He turned, hardly daring to breathe, trying to brace himself for the worst and knowing it would kill him anyway, and found a pair of golden eyes – and oh, gods, those eyes how had he not known?

Alive. The relief almost sent him to his knees. Hurt, but undeniably, divinely alive.

“Telemachus?” Maybe he was wrong. Maybe they were all wrong, and his son was still on Ithaca, safe behind their own walls and every guard they could spare-

The boy went still as a hunted wounded animal, Penelope’s eyes fixed wide. Oh, gods. “The guards- They said Greek nobles had been captured but- I never thought-” Words spilled out of him without rhyme nor reason, as if so much emotion had collected in his chest that it was bursting out, splitting at the seams and spilling out unpolished into the air.

“My boy,” he breathed, the delight of seeing own son mixing with a horror so profound he was able to remain standing only because his limbs seemed to have locked together. “Oh, gods- It is you, isn’t it?”

His boy, it was him, of course it was him — sucked in a breath of surprise, and Odysseus choked on a sob. His son. 

And then- then terror – his body recognised it even as his mind put up futile denial – filled his child’s face like a fist through precious glass and the moment shattered with it. Telemachus recoiled, pushing himself to his feet with trembling limbs-

And ran.

Some strangled cry was torn out of him as the hand of agony gouged his heart from his chest – Odysseus felt the separation like the severing of a spinal cord, at once paralysing and burning with a greater pain than he had ever felt.

“Telemachus!” he managed, the only word he was sure to recognise as his thoughts screamed in tandem. “Wait, no-” his voice broke, breathless and desperate and keening with pain. “Please!”

He couldn’t even say what it was he was begging for – the Gods, to let him have this? Telemachus, to forgive him? To hate him and stay despite? 

There was no answer.

Only terror was able to pull him forward like icy fingers intertwined through his ribs, and he stumbled to the empty doors of the throne room, his eyes burning and vision cloudy. But it didn’t matter how fast he ran, nor the size of the physical distance between them – the thing to outrun was Odysseus, and he could not leave himself behind, however hard he tried. He had spent so long fighting to return to his family, no matter the cost – that he had become something too terrible to recognise. 

The hall was deserted, empty of everything but the bodies he’d left behind. And- and there might still be guards in the palace, or some other lurking threat, and his son was gone and Odysseus couldn’t see him-

“Telemachus?” he pleaded, voice so destroyed it was hardly recognisable. Only silence, cruel and merciless. “My son, please, I’m so sorry.” He threw the apology out into the emptiness that used to harbour his child, as if the air could hold any precious traces, made holy by the boy’s presence.

There.

A hitched sob, muffled by wood but loud and clear as the crack of thunder to Odysseus. His gaze snapped to its source as if pulled there by a divine hand. And for a moment, nothing else in the world existed. 

His vision tunnelled as he all but threw himself towards the storage cupboard, his torturous limbs only making it half the way before collapsing beneath his weight.

He dropped to his knees and all but crawled the remaining distance to the door, his nails cracking against the stone.

Odysseus was desperation come alive – he would claw at this barrier like a beast shut out if the gouges would bring him that much closer to his son. This was not a fight he knew how to win. There was no strategy to devise, nothing to kill. That that was all he still knew how to do was another blow to his battered and wretched heart, black and bleeding in his chest.

That this should be his son’s first impression of him – gods, Telemachus had seen him kill those men, Odysseus had let his son be exposed to such violence and cruelty when he was still so young. That his son had known cruelty more intimately than the fates ever should have allowed.

“Sweetheart?” The endearment left his mouth crude and ragged, falling desperately short of the softness his boy deserved. “Are you hurt? I- I understand if you do not want to be near me, that’s alright-” Odysseus could feel his soul straining against the words with almost childish despair, as if it could change reality with enough tearful cries of ‘No! It’s not supposed to be like this!’, “- but we’ll need to find you a physician, or anybody who can help if you will not have me.”

Bruises would be spreading like stains across Telemachus’s neck by now, and he’d been so unsteady when Odysseus had scared him away, skulls were terrifyingly fragile, especially at that age, and if he’d been bleeding Odysseus wouldn’t have been able to know with the evidence of brutality obscuring all else.

Silence from the other side of the door, broken only by crying, soft enough his son must have been trying to smother the sound, trembling and weak as it already was. Odysseus let his head fall against the wood as he shook, his hand curling against the grain as if it could reach through the barrier his son had hidden from him behind.

“Gods, Telemachus, I’m so sorry.” As if any apology could ever come close. “None of this should have happened, I should have been here for you so much sooner.” And then, because the words had been burning beneath his skin since Odysseus had learned the truth, since he’d first heard his voice, seen those eyes, since the day Telemachus had been born, “I love you.”

The quiet breaths he held onto like a lifeline stuttered with a strangled sound, and Odysseus braced himself, futile as it was against the boy who held his entire heart in his clever hands.

Let Telemachus hate him. Let his son hate him for the rest of their lives, but please, if the gods had any mercy, let the boy know how loved he was.

“You were at the feast,” Telemachus said at last, and took all the air from Odysseus’s lungs with him. “You saw what Eurymachus did.”

The accusation lodged itself between his ribs and spiked through his entire body with pain. You saw, his mind echoed, over and over again like cawing birds circling overhead.

You saw. You saw. You saw.

And when the feast ended – you let them take him away. To that monster’s bed.

A ruined noise clawed its way out of his lungs, broken and wounded. “I did not know.” And it was no excuse, barely even a paltry explanation for why he had left his son to suffer for so long, but- “I swear to you, Telemachus, I did not know it was you. I woke up on that beach after leaving-” Calypso’s name died in his mouth, the memory of the sharpness of her smile, her eager hands and relentless pursuit amplifying the horror of his son’s hurt until he choked on it. “I thought it was another test from the gods. I only realised too late, when we had already separated. I should have torn the palace apart before I ever let any of them near you, and I would have, I did not know,” he forced himself to continue, breathless. He’d had so much time to escape the dungeon, to steal his son away before anyone even noticed they were missing, before he was hurt even worse, and his own stubborn ignorance had betrayed him.

“But you know now!” Telemachus sobbed, his son was crying and Odysseus was still helpless on the other side of the door. He leaned closer, as if it would do anything to bridge the distance between them. “You know now and you’re still here.” Telemachus wanted him to leave. And- And Odysseus would do anything that trembling voice asked of him, but his bones had calcified where he knelt and to move would shatter him to dust. 

“Why?” his son despaired, and the world tilted violently on its axis.

The question would not process, stuck in his mind without freeing his tongue. 

“Why?” Because it was unthinkable not to be. Because if he had even tried to leave his body would have mutinied against him.  “All I have wanted since I left for Troy was to be at your side again. It is still all that I want. You are still all that I want.”

“How?” His son’s voice cracked down the middle, and his own heart splintered with it. “How could you still want me when I’m just… just this?”

Odysseus’s chest cracked with pain, his lungs constricting.

“You’re everything,” he forced out, needing it to be said more than he needed to breathe. “You’re my son. There is nothing they could do to make me forsake you, nothing you could do that would make me love you less. You are what matters most to me in the world.”

The silence that stretched before Telemachus answered constricted around him like a serpent, tightening with agony with each passing moment.

“You aren’t angry?” his son asked, quiet and trembling, just when he thought his heart could not break any further.

“Not with you. Never with you.”

Telemachus’s breathing grew even more ragged, his inhales all but gasps and for a moment he was terrified he’d said the wrong thing. Then the wood seemed to give way before his hands, and-

Odysseus remembered the sacking of Troy only in pieces. The hidden vaults of memory reluctantly harboured flashes of blood, of screaming, the roar of a devouring fire against the black of night.

But he remembered the sunrise.

A glow he’d refused to let himself acknowledge, focused only on the fight in front of him, and then the next, and the next. It had spread across the sky all the same, lightening an all-consuming dark into a tapestry of gentle blues and pinks. Rosy-fingered dawn had arrived, and with her she had brought salvation, the undeniable confirmation that he had survived the night-  survived the war.

The sun had lit up the sky, and Odysseus had stood in its light ruined and unworthy, destruction at his back, and known he was going home.

The miracle in front of him swayed slightly on his feet, and Odysseus was reaching for his son before he’d given his hand permission to move. 

Telemachus crumbled into his arms, and the world seemed to shatter and mend itself again in an instant, every broken shard coming together in a mosaic ever more painful and beautiful than before.

“Telemachus,” he breathed, as if it was the only word his silver-tongue would ever know how to speak again. His son wrapped around him like a drowning man clinging to driftwood, face pushed into his shoulder like he could hide there forever, like he still trusted Odysseus to keep him safe despite how he had done nothing but fail since the boy was born. Sobs wracked the small frame in his embrace, each convulsing through his body as he gasped for breath – it was, Odysseus thought, the single most heartbreaking sound he’d ever heard.

“Don’t go.” His son’s words were choked, strained with desperation and hiccuping with his trembling breaths, and they speared through Odysseus’s heart more sharply than any blade could. “Please. I can’t- don’t leave. Please,” Telemachus begged, for something he should have always had without question.

“I won’t. Never again.” Odysseus had his son in his arms. He would tear the world apart before he let go.

“Please,” Telemachus said again, and the pain between his ribs swelled to wash his vision white. His boy’s hands tightened their grip at his back until his nails nearly drew blood, and Odysseus tried to press them even closer.

“I’m staying,” he said, with as much conviction as if he could weave the tapestry of the fates with his words alone. Or at least, he thought he did, with all the emotion in his body strangling the breath from him. “I’m staying with you, no matter what. You’re everything, sweetheart.” Telemachus burrowed further against him, his body still trembling as the fabric beneath grew damp from his tears. 

For a moment, there was only the sounds of their own breathing, ragged against the still air, and the faint rustling of Odysseus’s cloak, still swamping his boy’s frame.

“Say it again?” Telemachus’s voice was so quiet the air nearly swallowed it whole, fragile and tentative and Odysseus would have given him anything.  “That you love me?”

No words had ever come to him so easily.