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When Odysseus came to dull awareness, he was standing alone on a raft in the open ocean—it was something very similar to the things he’d made as a child on the rocky beaches of Ithaca, wood roped together tightly but without any decoration. It didn’t have a sail, and he wasn’t even carrying oars. If he wanted to move in any direction, his only choice would be to paddle with his hands like a dog. The water was gentle, for now, and he had strong enough balance from years at sea to sway with the rise and fall of his little lifeboat with scarcely a thought.
He seemed shorter than usual. He often felt like a small man next to Penelope, and next to many of his soldiers, but he didn’t usually feel that way when he was alone—the sea was a cruel master, but Odysseus had cut his teeth on captaining ships. He knew the ocean, knew the tricks its massive waves and horizon and its fickle, fickle god could play on a man’s sense of himself. But he was only a fish in the water, not a shark. He was only a puppy bounding out from the watchful gaze of his pack on paws bigger than his brain, his everpresent hubris urging him right into the jaws of a bear or the talons of an eagle—but he was not that boy anymore.
His memories still held that reckless little prince on the dark water, always daring and always watching the easy line of the horizon far above him; he watched in a mix of awe and pity for that boy, now. He was just a boy in the huge world, just a prince of a small kingdom, and he dared to think he could conquer it all. He had the mixed blessing and curse of being unharmed as of yet—Odysseus longed for such freedom, such certainty that his choices would always be the right ones and that he would stay pure and innocent and true. But he could see the future of that boy stretching out before him, all the awful dark years that bridged the gap between them—and yet there was still so much unseen. That thought did not bring excitement or curiosity to him now as it would have before. It brought only terror so constant that it had long since settled into resignment.
A tiny voice in his brain told him: the future is not foretold yet. But he didn’t believe that, anymore. The gods would have their way, and he was too small and far too human to defy them again—if he still had any hope of getting home, he needed to play by their rules.
But he was a boy on the open ocean on a handmade raft, and there was a monster approaching (there always was, in these kinds of stories):
It resembled a large rock, sticking up towards the sky as gray as Lady Hera’s eyes. The black waves leapt onto the sides of it, and Odysseus’s raft was drawn closer by the tide. He felt the intractible urge to paddle away—or jump off and swim, if he must—but his hands couldn’t provide enough force to reverse the strength of the water pulling him uncaringly nearer and nearer. The rock was huge and tapered at the top, pale as bone. It resembled nothing so much as a white tooth—a predator’s, sharp and serrated to tear flesh to pieces. Not even wolves had teeth that deadly—teeth that specialized to kill (they were more than capable of killing, if they were in the position to do so, but they were many other good things, too). Only sharks did.
The tide increased in force, dragging Odysseus in brisk enough circles to whip his hair about his face and shoulders. The water spat at him with vitriol. It stung when it hit his hands, his arms, his cheeks, and he was forced to close his eyes and fall to his knees, clinging almost reverently to the raft that could be his salvation but more than likely would only fall apart in the whirlpool. Helplessness struck into every cell of his body. When he’d faced storms before—other than Poseidon’s, of course—he’d had plenty enough seafaring knowledge to avoid or outlast them, bending the water and wind to his own whim or at the very most of his desperation—it couldn’t be called desperation, really, not now that Odysseus had been well-educated in what real desperation felt like—he and his crew had been more than capable of going belowdeck and waiting for clearer skies. But he was on a raft. He realized, suddenly, like the break of the sun’s rays between a gap in dark clouds: all of his power, all of his strength and skill, his mind and his matter—it was all untouchable to him now. The absence of resources had multiplied him by zero, and now he was nothing.
More shark teeth appeared from the water as his raft drew him close. But not quite like they appeared, more as if they had always been there and he had just overlooked them before. He didn’t see how that would’ve been possible—he’d learnt as a child to scan the trees for owls, and to know which ones were normal birds and which were Athena in her animal form, even when in the darkest of nights when she was trying to hide from him, as a test. His eyes were sharp. But the teeth were sharper, it seemed.
The raft dragged to a sudden stop on… something. There must have been a rock in the water that he’d unwittingly be pulled onto. The force leftover from all of the spinning rotated the ship hard enough to splash water onto Odysseus’s hands as he held onto the raft. He would take the blessing that the waves hadn’t entirely knocked the little thing over—even though his own plot at Troy should’ve taught him that you really should actually look a gift horse in the mouth, he was still far too used to his patron goddess casting miracles to aid him to not understand that the gods tended to conform things to the way they desired them, regardless of whether the short-sighted mortals living so far below them could understand what that way might be. Poseidon was not his friend anymore, but he hadn’t killed him, either. It stood to reason—at least, something like reason—that he wouldn’t let him die tonight; if Odysseus knew anything about gods, he could expect that Poseidon had already written his death sometime in the future and would never let him die before that point just as he would never let him escape that foretold fate.
Odysseus stared up at the rocks stretching up straight in front of him—was it just his mind playing tricks on him, or did they curve like true teeth in a jaw? They certaintly did curve. If you drew a straight line from his position to the horizon—you could stop sooner than that, of course, but there was no other landmark on the open ocean to point to in a direction such as this—you would see that the medial spikes were farther back and the lateral ones closer. As if he was already inside of the monster’s mouth and some second an undiscernable time from now he would be swallowed whole.
But there! To his left!
There was a siren. A siren Odysseus recognized, in fact. It was the very one that had imitated Penelope and tried to lure him to his own drowning what felt like a lifetime ago—it looked very much like her, but there were small differences. Like regular owls and Athena’s form, the differences were so negligible that they would be difficult to describe. A subtly-shifted mannerism, a hair out of place. Even—gods, how long had it been (ten years at Troy, three more to get to Ogygia, and then (…))? It didn’t matter, either way; there was no amount of time that would cause him to forget his beloved’s face. He remembered her in every dream and almost every waking moment, keeping her memory alive—and keeping himself alive with it.
Her tail sliced through the water as she swam closer, a beautiful nightmare fashioned specifically to torment him. He didn’t have earplugs, he realized in horror. She would sing to him, and he would have no defense for it. He would have no choice but to follow her, to be with her there on the island—no, in the waves.
But she didn’t speak.
She was curved up like a cobra with her forearms folded in front of her on his raft, but she still didn’t speak, merely smiling pleasantly—as if he didn’t know Penelope’s rogueish grins better than that—and tilting her head. Her throat was beautiful, pale and golden-honeyed in the light. The sky was still dull gray, but she must have brought light from somewhere—some magical light of her own, some gap in the illusion the siren had crafted.
“Penelope?” he said, knowing it wasn’t really her.
She didn’t answer—gods, he needed to hear her voice. Even knowing that the siren’s voice would drown him—he would drown without it too, wouldn’t he? He was sure of that. He needed to hear his wife’s voice, even if it wasn’t real. He needed it like a drowning man needed air. He would choke on the air, but he needed it regardless, desperately so.
“Penelope,” he pleaded at her. “Penelope, please, Penelope—Penelope?”
But she didn’t say a thing.
STOP SAYING HER NAME.
The wind was freezing as it lashed against his skin. When he looked back, the gray sky was suddenly shot through with electric blue—bright as sunrise arriving in all of its magnificent fury, or a lightning bolt amid the storm. Odysseus turned away from it. He focused instead of the face of the siren in front of him still. She was beautiful, truly. Nearly as stunning as the gods themselves, or maybe more; it would be tantamount to blasphemy to say so out loud, of course, but the liar king of Ithaca could keep the sacrilegious strength of his love to himself. Penelope had been raised alongside Helen, her cousin that a thousand ships had launched to lay claim to, and yet she knew Odysseus thought she was the most beautiful woman to ever exist. This siren was not quite as beautiful as the real Penelope. Because, well, she was a siren.
Her disguise was very convincing, but there was something false ringing through it—Odysseus knew Penelope well enough to know exactly how she would behave when he finally returned home.
In his wildest fantasies, she'd race straight into his arms and let him hold her until he was fully satisfied that she really was real and there at last. But those were only fantasies—and, to be fair to Odysseus, it was his mind that wanted that sort of greeting, that certainty that she still loved him despite the decade and change they'd been parted, but his heart was true. Some lovely woman might run up to her long-awaited husband in that manner, and perhaps that husband would be very happy with her, but that woman wasn't Penelope and that husband was certainly not Odysseus. His heart knew that Penelope would be suspicious of him, would play her games to determine his motivations or if anything had made him not the man she had loved most before—in his darker moments, Odysseus was nearly convinced that she would find him lacking. At this point, who wouldn't? He had been a sly fox, a clever man always watching the horizon, but he had always been gentle and kind, too. The sacker of cities, the bards had called him—but he was a fighter and a lover both. He still wanted to be kind, even knowing that it would only cause him pain in the end (everything did, now—so what was the point?). All he wanted was his wife at his side and his son in his arms; Telemachus was a growing boy, now, but Odysseus still couldn't help but picture him the same age as he had been when he'd left (the same age as Astyanox, once son of Hector). And, no matter how big he was, Odysseus was still a strong man, an archer with no difficulty pulling back a war bow. Better his strength be used for holding his son than for killing another man's.
The jaws of the ocean still did not close on him. The siren did not pull him in. He stood there, his body taut as a wire about to snap, pulled between the twin dangers—both deaths seemed inevitable. He wanted to scream at them, ask why they were so set on torturing him, making him face his own doom but not allowing it to end. Odysseus wanted nothing more than to live, but not like this. Not like this.
I WILL TAKE IT ALL AWAY.
YOU, THE BEST OF THE GREEKS, NEITHER MAN NOR MYTH ARE YOU—FOR BOTH MAN AND MYTH WANT ME, AND YOU REFUSE TO. YOU WHO CHASES THE GODS, YOU WOULD DENY ME STILL?
I CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU. YOU WANT TO BE GOOD FOR ME, DON’T YOU, MY LOVE?
I CAN MAKE YOU INTO A GOD. THEN, YOU WILL NOT DENY ME—YOU WILL UNDERSTAND YOUR FATE AND YOUR ROLE AS PERFECT AMONG MEN, MY BEAUTIFUL COMPANION. I HAVE NOT KNOWN KIND MEN BEFORE. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE POWERFUL.
The siren dragged him under.
YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER.