Work Text:
As she takes apart the day’s weaving her hands have accomplished, Penelope remembers the early days of her marriage, the explosive arguments that raged from peristyle to gardens to bedchamber, their passions too wild, too unrestrained, too much.
“Two clever people married to each other is a poor idea,” Odysseus would say, once they had collapsed in sweat and giggles, the ferocity of disagreements forgotten; until she reminded him that it had been his idea, in truth, and the cycle would spin anew.
And now, now that every creeping coward for miles circles her like a pack of hungry dogs - now Penelope dreams of pulling his bow from the wall, forsaking the string as she has been forsaken, and clubbing them all to death with their own impotence, all the fierce rage of a decade and more released in a howling lust for blood; instead she pulls the threads free with a woman’s patience, one by one, careful not to let them snap (as though they were his lifeline, as though they were hers).
Sometimes she still does not believe, despite all the proofs, despite the bow and the bed, despite the reflections of her son in his face, that Odysseus has truly returned to her, that this rangy stranger who walks beside her might be the same man who left her a long score of years before.
Each moment of silence that passes between them reinforces it, for when was he ever silent, her king, he who chattered like a magpie, who loved the sound of his own voice above all things other than her own? Until - he looks at her sideways, slant, and says in a voice brimming with innocence, “I could use a new tunic, wife - will you weave me one?” and then, oh, then she knows him as her own trickster even as he breaks, even as the lines in his face come alive with laughter (even as he kisses away the protest of her open mouth, swallowing her suppressed giggles as a man starved).