Work Text:
Someone was whistling a Spartan lullaby.
For a brief moment, Penelope thought, her weaving on pause, Oh, he has returned!.
But a note passed, then another, another whole line and Penelope knew it wasn't.
Penelope had grown up hearing that tune; her mother and her mother's women, singing the words to her as she and her sister found it difficult to sleep, and knew what a woman humming it sounded like.
But women didn't sing it here; they had a different set of lullabies.
"Are they all about ships and the sea," she had teased Odysseus, his hands on her belly, him on his knees as he looked up at her, and she curled fingers into the tight curls that coiled around the sharp angles of his cheek.
"Sometimes, they're about olives," Odysseus had said, and turned to kiss her palm. "We are very proud of our olives."
"Unlike mine," she said, and felt him go still, stricken that he might have insulted her and she'd laughed and stroked her thumb across his cheek in a sweep. Who cared about Spartan olives? Sparta exported very little except the best of fighters. "Mine are about being fleet of foot, and running in the hills, running like the goats."
"Pray do not persuade our daughter to run before she can crawl, I will never catch up to her," Odysseus said, and she had laughed, again.
"Our son will never run away except to you," she said.
She had sung this to Telemachus, before he had been born, while Odysseus had hoped openly for a daughter with her eyes, and she'd hoped for a son with his hair and his smile.
When Telemachus had been born, she had sung it to him to lull him to sleep, enough that Odysseus had started to whistle it around their home, and she could hear it echo in the atrium, enhancing her husband lower pitched whistle.
Instead, it was another man whistling it.
Telemachus, she realised with a jolt. Enough time had passed, Telemachus was grown, tall as her when she hadn't been looking - and Odysseus had been gone long enough that Telemachus whistling sounded not like the high little panpipes a shepherd played to amuse himself in the long hours of childhood sheep-watching, but now deep and sonorous enough to sound like a man grown.
"Please, Hera," she said, turning her shuttle in her hand. "Goddess of marriage and wives, if it might please you to bring him home."
There was no answer, as there never was, for the Goddess, Queen of Olympus, never answered her.
Penelope exhaled, and then got to her feet, to stretch her back and look out to the yard, and perhaps to see what Telemachus was up to.
Except the man crossing below her window was not her son.
Eurymachus glanced up at her window, and even though he could not see her from behind her curtain, he waved anyway. just in the lee of the curving annex, there was the golden glint of hair. Melantho, her maid, was staring towards Eurymachus.
She withdrew without touching the cloth, and sat back down at her loom, staring at the white threads of fine linen. Eurycleia had been dissatisfied with Melantho of late, tsking that she had been often absent from her duties. Penelope recalled the way the girl had been often late to attend to her morning duties.
The shuttle bit into her palm, and Penelope had to make herself open her hand; she had not realised when she had clenched it so hard it left lines. Her weaving was a mess, but the excuse of her Spartan upbringing could only stretch credulity so far.
"If it pleases the Gods, if it pleases Zeus," she breathed, "Please let my husband return to my arms before Telemachus teaches it to his own child and wife. Let Odysseus return home before someone else grows to learn that song."
The whistling started up again.
Penelope started to unpick her weaving.