Chapter Text
"Wait," the king of the seas' eyes widened, "Wait! Ah-"
The scream that was torn from Poseidon's throat was of raw agony—a sound Odysseus had waited ten years to hear. The trident's forks had sunk deep, and for one glorious moment, the Earthshaker was just a being in pain.
In pain and at Odysseus' feet.
Ichor flew into the air: golden, radiant. Warm as it landed on his skin. almost hot. What little landed on his lips felt like embers. What little landed in his mouth burned.
It splattered his clothes, his hands and mixed with the salt and water being washed on the deck.
The God panted, gasped; chest heaving. His eyes were dark, furious and fixed on Odysseus.
It was a gaze Odysseus met, feeling nothing but satisfaction.
"How does it feel to be helpless?" He pulled the trident into the air, the forks tearing divine skin and sending gold flying, splattering him and the deck as it withdrew. "How does it feel to know pain!"
Odysseus felt vindictive. It coursed through him like fire, like grief. Like the grief he felt grow with every man he lost. Every night he wept for Penelope, for Telemachus, for home. Every moment of despair—it all poured out of him.
He didn't hear the words he snarled out, only the emotions he'd so long buried. Pulling the weapon free, feeling the blood of the immortal mark him and stabbing.
The gasp of pain was the only response to his words.
Odysseus felt his chest heave as he brought the trident up once more. His arms ached. His lungs burned.
He didn't stop.
"Look what you turned me into!" he continued, voice hoarse, cracking. Ash on his tongue. The trident cut through flesh. "Look what we've become!"
"–enough!" The Stormbringer shouted darkly. His voice reverberating, shaking the air in Odysseus' lungs.
"All of the pain that I've gone through—"
"Stop!" The downed God snarled, hand clawing at the deck, sending splinters through the air.
"Haven't I suffered enough?"
"Sto-op!"
The warrior felt the wind shift. The storm intensified, answering its master's fury.
He didn't care.
He was beyond caring.
"You didn't stop when I begged you!" He snarled as he plunged the weapon once more.
Briliant, blinding light came out of the wound—light diferent from that of ichor. it felt pure, divine, all consuming.
Odysseus threw an arm up to sheild his eyes.
The ship groaned beneath him.
The wind howled.
When he could see again, his hand—the one that had been clamped over the trident wrapped itself around something else. A small arm. Thin.
Delicate.
Small. Terrifyingly so.
Dark hair plastered to a pale face was all he remembered glimpsing. The boy was small not yet passed his first decade. His limbs thin, his skin almost translucent. Naked as the day he was born-
A- a child?
"Nooo!" Responded the God's voice, a look of shock and amazed horror on his face.
A father's instincts.
Odysseus did not dare look down at the naked child he was holding hostage, gaze still fixed on the downed God with an arm half extended towards them.
His eyes were locked on the dagger Odyseus was holding under the child's chin.
The child gasped, the sound louder than the smashing waves to the mortal king's ears. Odysseus felt the small chest heave against his forearm, felt the staccato of breaths.
The dark haired child squirmed, heels hiting his captor's thighs just above the knees.
"Don't move." the king of Ithica entoned flatly. In the tone of the monster he had become.
"Release him," the God said, his dark, cold fury behind a mask of eery calm, before pulling the trident out of his abdomen with a wet sickening sound, the wound made with this weapon of power still bleeding sluggishly. Golden droplets fell, dripping on the deck. Pooling at the God's feet.
"δαδ!" the child screamed in a high pitched voice, the babbled word nearly incomprehensible. Was the child attempting to sy the word 'will'?
"Now," the God continued.
The earth trembled, the sound of shifting islands audible to mortal ears.
"Move and the child dies," the monster in human form said. "Or should I say—your child."
Odysseus felt a sickly rictus contort his lips into something he did not recognise.
He laughed.
Poseidon's eyes were fixed on the blade.
The blade at the boy's throat.
The perfect little boy he had just birthed. The one that had just come from him, torn by this human's rage, in one divine fragment born from the wounds inflicted by this human.
"Stop this farce," the words escaped him, reverberating with the possessive power of the sea, rolling like the waves shaped by the wind, "listen to me, little king."
He rose, ichor pooling under him.
"You have done what no mortal has ever done," came with a crack of thunder, clouds gathering overhead. "You stole my weapon of power. You wounded me." He bore his essence over the mortal, not daring to move closer, knowing the mortal king was still well enough to steal this child from him. "But if you dare so much a make my son bleed. I will reserve to you a fate infinitely worse than death. I swear this on the Styx"
"Did you not say that ruthlessness was merely mercy upon ourselves?"
Poseidon felt the sea freeze, the waves still, the fauna cower.
"I will take this as renoucement of parenthood," Poseidon rumbled in response, feeling a mountain skid accross land, sensing a tsunami form, six waves carying promise and destruction in all directions.
"What?" came the mortal's astonished, stummped response.
"You helped create him. And now?" Poseidon informed the lowly Ithacan, "You would kill him."
"No," the warrior-king said ghostly, "-not possible."
The child screamed out incomprehensible babble again, small limbs hitting the Ithacan king, sea-green ever changing eyes fixed on him, slowly turning the dark blue of the deep.
Poseidon inched forwards.
He saw the mortal's hold tighten in response.
"Move or he di-es," the mortal said, voice breaking on the last word, his eyes wide and wild.
The sea God straightened, "So you have made you choice," he declared.
The child squirmed again, hitting the mortal in the crotch.
Making Odysseus shout, loosening his grip and curling him over.
Small feet thumped on the planks, rushing over towards the King of the Seas before turning to face the mortal, standing before his father in a protective stance, his arms spread wide.