Monster

When the skies above Ithaka fall to pieces, goddess bright-eyed Athena may just need to do the same.

She feels the rifts the lightning is ripping into the fabric of the air and the shudders of every stone, root, and limb in the rolling fallout of the strike. Her sacred olive tree in the center of the palace shudders the most violently.

There is no need to check on her hero, who has a wife to cling to now, and Athena herself can easily reassemble herself far, far away from the storm, so why does she keep hearing his voice and keep flickering and fragmenting and falling down until she is with him, below the canopy of the tree and grasping at the trembling branches in a desperate attempt to…

“Make it stop.”

Odysseus sits up in the bed, wide-eyed and alert even if the panic shakes his frame with every thunderroll, mirroring her own flinches.

“I can't,” he smiles tiredly. “Sometimes Penelope can, but she is with Chtimene on Same this moon. I am sorry if I called out your name in my dreams; I did not mean to force you to be here.” 

His eyes wander over the shattered half of her face and take on a determined hue. The lessons she has taught him with cruelty have at least managed to burn away his hesitation and deference. The leaves of her tree still rustle and tremble below her fingertips when Odysseus unclasps her hands from the bark and buries his face in the place where she had no heart, breathing in deeply.

Another lightning strike, another violent shudder, and he bumps his nose into her bronze, looks up into her eyes, annoyed, and she banishes her armor instantly out of reflex and shame.

“Better!” he nods. And “lie with me.”

She has become quite adept at sinking for him.

The mortal bed is too small for her frame, so she once more shrinks her form to fit. But when she tries to mold even more, his eyes and the hand he puts on her scarred cheek and his thoughts echoing in her head all scream, “Don't you dare,” and his voice says out loud, "Not even your magic could ever let me forget the night Ilion burned.”

The lightning flashes overhead, and with every flinch and every quake she acknowledges she is shifting closer. 

He presses first her hand – the one that is not buried in his curls to soothe him in turn when the thunder strikes – then he begins to touch her contours through the linen, to stroke her arms, her hips, her abdomen, and the place where she had no heart. His thoughts are focused when he swipes his thumb across her lips, wills them to open, and follows his digit with his tongue. It too helps her focus herself in the midst of the churning storm.

He takes fistfuls of the thin fabric covering her and slides them up and out of the way, and when he reaches her chest, she simply lets the material dissolve, and he looks torn between annoyance and excitement. But then he lowers his hand between her legs and finds… nothing.

“You did not wish me to change,” she whispers.

“I prefer what you have become on your own, without your magic.”

He pushes her on her back and traces her scars all down her form with fingers and lips, and his breathing grows heavy and deep while she watches his human body take control over his mind. 

A thunderstrike, and she still flinches. Odysseus lifts his head from her lap and studies her face, his eyes clouded over with a desire she cannot match. She feels… incomplete in comparison.

He fixes her with the same gaze that she has observed in him over the many years of their… acquaintance. She is a puzzle to solve now, like the stone walls of Ilion, and he smiles when her observation echoes in his mind.

“You have always accessed my thoughts with ease, Thea mou,” he chuckles. “Can you not do the same with my feelings?”

She can, but in all her aeons of existence she has never thought…

He places kisses all over her form until he reaches her neck. He parts her legs and positions himself between them, pressing and sliding against her marble surface that he cannot ever breach. His mouth reaches her ear, and he thinks more than breathes: “Are you not curious, Wisdom?”

She would like to blame the lightning and the need to be made of something other than terror when it strikes. She would like to blame it on Odysseus, the monster she has shaped, who has passed beyond human doubt and now commands gods to his will. But in truth, she can only blame her true self that was unable to resist the connection to a mind that lied to her and called her prideful and lonely. 

She brushes her fingertips against his temples and he lowers his forehead to hers and…

Goddess bright-eyed Athena's mind bursts into a kaleidoscope of colors. She feels as if she is thrown backwards in her mind and falling. But she is also still there and feels smooth and cool stone under their hands that still yields softly when pressed. She is not sure any longer where both of them begin and end. Her form is not made to feel this way, yet they still rush and slide and build up and explode and love, love, love…

The thunder rolls tame and timid over the Ionian Sea. Goddess bright-eyed Athena lies in the arms of the hero she designed and who escaped her net, and waits for Eos to arrive. Her forehead is pressed to his, her form is drenched in human liquids, and all she can focus on is the depth of his eyes and their mind.

His hands are buried in her shining hair, and from his fingertips sweet magic flows as he whispers, "Let me share the suffering with you.”