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He gasps awake.
The threads of his nightmare thin and disperse and he doesn’t grasp at the ends like he sometimes does, reaching for faces he can’t tell if he wants to remember or forget. A biting breeze floods in through their open balcony door, the thin curtain being sucked in through the doorway. The first of Dawn's rosy fingers cast soft shadows on the floor of the room he knows so well. He could navigate the room with his eyes closed. He came here in his dreams nearly every night for twenty years.
He turns to Penelope as he catches his breath, the curve of her chest rising and falling peacefully as she sleeps. He’d never seen her so exhausted as she was when he’d first returned here. The dark circles under her eyes could never hope to dim her beauty, but it hurt his heart to see her like that. But little by little, night by night, her vigor is returning.
Odysseus doesn’t know if he can say the same for himself.
Sleep usually evades him on nights like these, after leaving him in a rush after a particularly nasty nightmare. Sometimes he is content to lay in bed, comforted by his wife's rhythmic breathing beside him and the steady whisper of the sea outside their window, on other nights he walks the palace halls, fingertips dragging along the sturdy stonework of the walls. He shifts and his back seizes, his breath leaves him in a soft grunt, as if punched out.
These nights look a little different.
Every muscle in his body tenses as he writhes, trying and failing to find a position that doesn’t feel like he’s twisting something important in his body.
He curls in on himself and sucks in a loud breath, holds it for as long as he can, and blows it out. He draws his knees closer to his chest as he exhales and turns his head further into the pillow, bracing himself against the throbbing behind his eyes. The tension cramps his right leg and the old wound from where the boar tore through him. He clutches his thigh and presses into the thickest part of the scar with his thumbs for some relief, but none comes. The pain twists and throbs and lets up for nothing.
When the cramp subsides, he sits up, and the long scar under his ribs catches too, pain flaring as if the injury were fresh instead of nearly ten years old.
“Husband?” Penelope’s voice rasps from behind him, thick with sleep. “Are you well?”
He can only shake his head, vision clouding with tears that shouldn’t be there. His breaths are coming painfully and dizzyingly quick as he presses a hand to the old scar like he’s physically holding himself together. Another breeze catches inside and he shivers violently, the sheen of sweat on his skin chilling him to the bone.
She’s up at his side in an instant, hand ghosting over his shoulder as he shakes. “Are you sick?” She takes his face in her hands and turns it this way and that, examining him.
“No,” he whispers, hoarsely. He swallows and grimaces. “Yes." Tears sting his eyes. "I don't know."
The mattress dips as she shifts next to him and her warm hand rests on his shoulder. He nearly melts into it. “Do you think you can go back to sleep?” she whispers. Another wave of nausea rolls through him and he shakes his head, lips pressed together.
She winds her arms around him and presses a kiss to his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she says into his skin. “I’m going to go down the hall to grab a few things. Don’t move.” He gives her a weak smile as she leaves the room, fully intending to disobey. He might feel like the dust on the Trojan battlefield, but his subjects still have requests to be made, disagreements to be settled in court.
His arms shake as he pushes himself up into a sitting position and he swallows a few times to quell the nausea. Everything hurts and he groans, rolling his neck back and forth a few times, to no avail. Shivers wrack his body and he clutches the coverlet, mustering up the will to get out of bed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He might have jumped at her voice, if he’d had any energy to do so. He blinks at her. She stands in the doorway, arms full of extra blankets. The light from the hall shines into their room, casting her shadow onto the tiles between them.
“I have to get dressed for court,” he says, voice gruff.
Penelope barks out a laugh and he fights not to flinch away as she approaches his side of the bed. “No way in Tartarus you’re holding court today.”
“Penelope—“
“No.” She drops the blankets at the end of the bed and puts both of her hands on his shoulders, using his weakness to her advantage and pushing him back onto the bed. “I ran Ithaca without you for twenty years, I can stand to do so for another day.”
“Penelope,” he grunts.
“Or perhaps Telemachus can run the show today and I can stay here with you. He’s been sitting through enough sessions to know what he’s doing by now.” She piles the blankets on him one by one and his teeth chatter, the rest of his body aching. “Yes,” she says, “that’s what we’ll do.” Her fingers brush over his forehead, push his hair out of his face. “Stay here. I’ll be back.”
She’s back in minutes, but it feels like hours. His whole body aches and his limbs are heavy in a way they haven’t ever been before. “It’s settled,” she says, rounding the corner and climbing back into bed beside him. He hums, but it sounds suspiciously akin to a whimper. Her fingers thread through his hair and he tucks his face fully into the crook of her neck
It's silent for a few moments, the sound of their breaths filling the gaps between them. “What did you do when you had days like this in Troy? Or at sea?” her voice is quiet, scratchy at the edges.
He thinks of staggering back to his tent at the end of a long day and peeling off his armor to stand shaking in a sweaty tunic. Asking Diomedes to cover for him so he could leave the evening festivities early to rest in his tent. Or, on worse days, purposefully underperforming on the battlefield so as to be turned away, so he could limp back to the camp with his life still intact. “I made it work.”
He groans as she massages the scar under his ribs. Her deft, strong fingers press into the tissue and the injury feels so real, so new, like if he looked down he might still see the tip of Eurylochus’ sword sticking out.
A pit roils in his gut and he shudders. “It’s alright,” Penelope murmurs, her breath warm behind his ear. A sound, deep and guttural tears its way from his body and he heaves a hiccuping gasp. She shushes him. “It’s okay,” she says, but it’s not, is it? He can remember it, clear as if it were yesterday.
It hurt. Perhaps this is the extent of his memory of the event itself, as he’s certain he lost consciousness the moment Eurylochus cried out, dropping to his knees beside him and leaning all of his weight onto Odysseus’ wound.
He woke on the island, that god-forsaken island. Can’t you all see, he wanted to scream, these cattle will be the death of us all! He didn’t, though. His mouth is so dry and his head is spinning and he hurts, it all hurts. He won’t survive this one. He can’t. His luck has finally, finally run out.
And then Zeus came. Of course he did. Such a sin as slaughtering the Sun God’s cattle would not, could not go unpunished. But did he have to—
Odysseus gasped. He clung to a ruined piece of wood that could have been a mast or any number of important pieces of his ruined ship.
He drifted.
He drifted for a long, long time.
Her perfume almost smells like Penelope’s.
It had been so long— nearly fourteen years. To think he could have forgotten—
The goddess’ fingers press—
He cries out, unable to hold it back any longer.
“I'm sorry, I’m sorry, I know—“
“Penelope.” Her name on his lips may well be his only fuel.
“You’re alright,” she says. “I have you, you’re alright. You’re safe.”
He clutches at the coverlet over his chest as another sob wracks his chest. Maybe if he just closes his eyes—
Her hand threads though the hair at the nape of his neck and tugs, the sharp sting in his scalp, bringing the rest of his aching body to the front of his mind. His scars, the creaking of his joints, the bone-chilling cold—
But through it all, there is Penelope.
It’s her hand in his hair, her lap his head rests in, her perfume that he keeps getting wafts of.
“It’s okay,” she soothes. Pain splits his skull in half and a pathetic whimper escapes his lips. “I’m sorry my love—“
“I hate this—“ he gasps, the three measly words are enough to send another explosion through his head. “I hate it, I hate—“
“I know,” she scoots down on the bed to wrap her arms around him properly. “What hurts worst?” she whispers against his ear. He presses in closer to her.
“My head,” he whispers back. Her fingers answer him, pressing into the back of his neck and his forehead.
“Try to sleep, my love. Just close your eyes.”
Keep your eyes open.
His eyes are so heavy. Everything is so heavy.
Just keep your eyes open.
Nine days. Nine days and eleven years.
Keep your eyes open.
Twenty years.
Odysseus, wake up, they’re opening the bag, wake up!
When he’d learned to sail in Ithaca’s kind harbors, he’d dreamed of the day he’d be called Captain.
Now, he resented it.
Drowning seemed like a horrible way to die. He would know. He’d seen enough of it. Woken up with phantom water pouring into his lungs faster than he could call out for help. Dreamt of gilded voices luring him into the water and clawed fingers dragging him under.
His crew had accepted their own deaths long before Odysseus had, and much longer still before their times had come. The moment they’d seen the unmanned ship, still floating with the current, they’d known.
Sirens.
They’d torn off chunks of beeswax to shove into their ears with their jaws set in grim lines. Nobody spoke. Nobody rowed.
When they slaughtered the sirens, they’d done so with frightened brutality. Draining the sirens' lifeblood like an abscess. They’d laughed.
And then they’d turned.
He’d saved them.
He’d saved them.
Except—
No mortal can battle Scylla and live, much less Charybdis.
He’d had to.
He’d had to.
And yet–
Eurylochus. Eurylochus who’d encouraged the idea of leaving half the remaining men on Circe’s island, who’d willingly accepted their fate as they sailed upon the sirens’ territory. It was Eurylochus who thrust his sword through Odysseus’ side.
It hurts so much.
He lost days to that pain, floating in and out of consciousness. And then there was the fever. And then there was the sea.
Blue and blue and blue as far as he could see, and further. In hindsight, he doesn’t know why he kept clinging to the destroyed hunk of wood that was once the mast of his ship. It would have been so easy to just… let go. Let the water close over his head. Take one deep breath and wrestle with it for a moment— his death— and then give in. Join the ranks of the dead. It would have been so easy.
It would be so easy.
But Penelope was waiting.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
He can’t keep her waiting.
Afternoon sunlight falls in sharp beams across the coverlet and over their faces. The light doesn’t stab straight into his skull anymore. His stomach pangs with the ache of hunger, but the starbursts in his joints have mostly dissolved.
“Hey,” her voice is soft and sweet. He could listen to her speak for the rest of his life. He hums into the blankets. “How do you feel?”
“Better,” he says. “Hungry.”
She shifts on the bed, untangling her limbs from his. “Let’s fix that.”
“Wait,” he catches her hand and squeezes.
Her eyes search his. She’s as beautiful as she ever was and his heart swells nearly out of his chest with gratitude and love. She smiles at him. “Thank you.”