Chapter Text
No one writes poems about the living and the loving after war; you just do it.
When Odysseus married Penelope, they sat in the fire every single day.
After their wedding, they had four years together. Four blissful years, three of them without Telemachus, the fourth with him. Those were the happiest years of his life.
He would work, during the day, building up the docks and drawing out the goats, herding and trading and fighting, enamored with his own youth. Every evening, he would light a fire and sit with her. Penelope would weave and he would ask questions and she would answer them, and he would fall in love with her a little bit more.
He would teach her to sail and to ignore prophets, and she would teach him about inlay and selvage. He was amazed at everything that she knew and she was delighted by his confidence. She was more brilliant than him, he knew from the start, and he loved her for it.
He was a sailor, but Penelope was a weaver, and a genius one at that. He couldn’t even see the tapestry until it was hung. She made art out of undyed wool.
Every evening after he returns, they sit in the firelight.
He did not sit in firelight with Calypso. He did not linger with her at all. He wants to say all seven of those years were misery, but is he that awful of a liar?
He would spend weeks alone, sometimes even months. He would forage for food and hunt game and build traps that caught her up. She would laugh at these things and wriggle free and he would grind his teeth. One day his trap would work, and as Hephaestus did with Hera, she would be forced to bow to him, to let him go. One day she would know what it was to be a prisoner.
In between his fits of pique and fits of revenge, though, it was dreamy. He hunted and practiced shooting. His aim became deadly accurate. It reminded him of the times when he was a child, when he would become angry and run from home with Polites and hunt. It reminded him of how he scared his mother to death like that. It reminded him of simpler times.
That was the only thing that was simple with her. She would try to get him to live with her. He would refuse. She would come sit in the cave he found. He would move. She would speak to him and he would reply, only when he was feeling gracious. She refused to hate him, no matter how awful he was. That annoyed him.
Sometimes she was kind, or funny, but he could not forget the base thing she was: a goddess, who had been living so long in her own power that she could not imagine not getting her way.
There had only ever been one 'her' for him, and it took Calypso too long to understand that. He would tell her that 'she' used to love the ocean, and he would see the confusion in her face until Calypso realized he had to be speaking about Penelope. He was always talking about Penelope. It soured her mood. He didn't dislike that.
He did not dislike the industry, but he disliked the rest. He disliked being busy for her enjoyment. He disliked that she enjoyed the things he made, that she smiled as though he was making them for her. He was making them for his own sanity.
Penelope was nothing like Calypso, and he was grateful. The memories were haunting and she never asked. He didn’t ask about the suitors, she didn’t ask about Calypso, and they acknowledged to each other in the silence of the firelight that they were even more the same now then they had been before. They had both been warriors, prisoners, and now they were both sailors and weavers. She wove tapestries and he wove stories as a terrible poet.
He didn’t need poetry. He was alive.