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The first time he calls upon Athena it is a quiet prayer in the cast shadows of a luxurious bedroom. He's given in, worn down over months and months on the island.
Maybe, he thinks, Calypso will let down if he gives her what she wants. Maybe, if he beds her she'll stop touching him so often otherwise.
He doesn't want to of course, his skin prickles as he slowly takes off his garb. He closes his eyes, refusing to see his bare form and hers in the dim candlelight. He doesn't even really believe it'll help against her insisted attempts at seduction and romance, he's just too tired to fight her anymore.
He whispers it then, under his breath as he is pulled onto the covers, “Oh goddess of wisdom, please, save me.”
She never comes. Odysseus wakes early, aware from the moment the first rays of sun hit his face that she's really abandoned him, that she will not come save him.
When he shifts in the bed, attempts to slip out, careful and light, Calypso reaches for his arm, mumbling and still gladly asleep, and pulls him close.
The second time he does it is nearly a year later. Or maybe it's already been years, it gets hard to tell in the continued monotony.
Calypso has been the same story over and over again, and that same tiredness has started to settle deep into his bones making it's home there.
He has gotten to a point where he doesn't care that if Athena has been hearing him she'll surely find him pathetic, crying for her help over and over again like an infant for its mother.
He whispers prayers under his breath at every unwanted touch, every moment of quiet resignation, in his darkest moments when he has crept into a corner where Calypso cannot find him, and he gets to weep without being caught in her embrace.
He apologizes, he bargains, he pleads, he cries. But, she never comes. He has to conclude she is either far more cruel than he's ever seen the depths of, or she is not there.
It has been a long time since he's been certain she isn't watching him.
(He doesn't consider the alternative, because thinking of it makes him want to scream until his throat hurts.)
He still prays, there's not much else he can do.
He screams her name the first time he has a breakdown, along the names of his long dead comrades, begging for his wife and son, praying in vain for rescue. Calypso is there, she looks scared, it does not stop her from smothering him.
He learns to go limp in her embrace. She'll hold him until he stops, no matter how he tries to injure her, and he does not want to be held.
When he starts thinking of ending his own life, when he holds up a blade and stares into it for too long, he imagines what she would think.
She'd be bitter and disappointed, probably. He thinks about meeting his son instead.
Calypso has started keeping the knives away from him. Odysseus wonders if she genuinely believes she's subtle about it.
His sword was one of the first things she took away.
(It's a shame, he remembers some very flavorful ways to do the act from the war.)
Reminding himself why he needs to keep going has become a ritual, one he repeats silently in his mind when morning light wakes him, and as the sun is setting at night when he slips into bed with the goddess of the island.
He needs to return to his wife. He needs to meet his son. He'll almost be a grown boy by now. Odysseus has to live to discover what he is like.
The cliffs are calling to him, the waves beneath waiting patiently for him below.
He keeps going for a while, stumbling through the motions of the day to day that he wishes he didn't know by heart by now. Trying not to spend too much time alone, but not too much time with Calypso either.
But, eventually he ends up there.
The waves are beating relentlessly against the cliff face, he thinks he can see sharks.
At least one god is here to see him. And he's been waiting for this moment.
Calypso is there, she reminds him of his dead friends, she touches him, she tries to take him away from the ledge.
For the first time in years he refuses to let her push him around.
Lightning strikes in the distance. That's two gods, if he flatters himself.
There is a familiar feeling at the back of his mind.
It's been years, it's been so long it takes him a moment to notice it at all, and when he does it takes him a few moments to decipher why it is so familiar, why it sends his head spinning with relief.
She's watching him. He knows she's watching him.
The feeling is faint and distant and distorted and Odysseus clings to it like a lifeline turning his face to the stormclouds and screaming her name, sobbing and devolving into blabbering.
Please please please.
He needs to get off this island, he needs to get home.
The presence in the back of his mind stays as he finally lets himself be taken back to Calypso’s cabin, it stays as she fetches him dry clothes and worries over him until he puts them on.
It only disappears as they eventually, inevitably, end up in the bedroom. He wonders if Calypso thinks she's helping, as she often does.
“Not tonight,” he pleads with her, eyes of a goddess heavy on him. Athena's always been icky around ‘the intercourse’ to an extent he in the past found quite humorous, and Odysseus isn't sure she'd stay. She doesn't need to see this. He doesn't want her to see this.
He can see the disappointment in Calypso’s eyes, like a dejected puppy, “Okay. If that's what you need,” she chirps, and he knows she'll get twice as desperate tomorrow and the day after and after that.
But, he can deal with that tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.
She stays until he falls asleep, Calypso’s arms wrapped around him like a vice.
“I don't want this, Athena,” he prays, “please,” he mumbles, voice raw.
When that familiar feeling is gone by morning he doesn't dare to hope.
—-- ~^-^~ —---
Athena and Telemachus have been getting along surprisingly well.
Odysseus cannot help but think he is soft, too soft for a warrior, as he proudly demonstrates new manoeuvres, or shows the delicate crafts he's attached to the hilt of his sword, but, Athena doesn't seem to mind. She comes by often.
(It's okay, for as long as Odysseus lives he'll make sure his son will never have to fight like he had. He only hopes that after he dies Athena will never abandon Telemachus like she had her previous protege. He doesn't think she will.)
His first weeks back home have been a whirlwind filled mostly with not insignificant amounts of crying and their little family stumbling to reassert a new status quo.
Odysseus still hears them, Polities’ gentle laughter, the drowning choked off screams of his men. Even Poseidon on occasion.
But, looking in his wife's eyes, spending time discovering the new her (because she too has had to become hardened over the years) and the new him (because he hasn't really gotten the chance anywhere on his journey) he thinks he can see the beauty in life like this, or at least keep living one day after another.
It's a sunny day of spring. The plants in the courtyard are starting to show their bright colours. Many of them are different from when he last saw them bloom, many of them are the same too.
Telemachus has run off, he has decided to fetch something or another, Odysseus believes it was food, but it still gets hard sometimes to keep his head together.
It leaves him and the tall goddess in the garden alone. Odysseus is content to sit in silence, expecting and welcoming it, but Athena does not, breaking it with a voice too quiet for the mentor he remembers.
"I'm sorry I didn't come earlier,"
Half her face is a charred mess of sensitive tissue, ragged lines of lightning zig zagging across her skin, but it pulls together in a skewed but genuine expression of.. something.
The divine shape of her eye is now discoloured oddly, he knows she's been struggling to see through it, although nobody has dared to breach the topic.
Looking into it is like looking into the core of a wholly different type of violent thunderstorm, the kind of which Odysseus has only ever seen twice.
He knows she got the injury while saving him, and one glance at it will dispel all doubts about who caused it.
(Odysseus absentmindedly wonders if that makes him a better father than the king of the gods himself, but, he's tempted the gods too much in his lifetime to linger on the line of thought.)
"I prayed to you for seven years," he eventually answers, his voice cracking and raw, "hoping you could save me."
There is a pain in her eyes he is wholly unfamiliar with.
"I know,"
Of course she knows, time is a mirror to her divine power.
Odysseus glances away, unable to look her in the eye any longer, he's scared of what he'll find if he looks at her face. Pity? Discomfort? Disgust?
No, Athena has changed so much, and she's changed for the better, kinder and more compassionate and more expressive too. When they met she had her moments, fond glances and small smiles, little signs that told him she cared about him too, but now she almost seems human.
He doesn't think she'll look down on him, but he still does not want to see what hides inside her head, he has no doubt she knows everything.
(All the things he's done, all the things that were done to him.)
They've both changed.
She never used to do hugs, it used to be a little game between the two of them. He'd attempt to ambush her and trap her in his arms and she'd teleport away at the last second, telling him to be faster next time.
Everything is different now.
He sways, hesitating only a moment before collapsing against her side, it's a small contact, a little awkward with her armour and all, and Odysseus almost immediately regrets it. He doesn't draw away.
Athena startles, she makes a noise most comparable to a hoot, but she does not distance herself either. Instead, after a few very long seconds she too relaxes, and ever so slowly, ever so carefully places an arm around him, her hand hesitantly coming to rest on his shoulder.
(It's a gesture very familiar from himself when he was younger, an affection she would on occasion tolerate. He has seen his son do it too, and wonders with a pain in his heart where he got it from.)
They sit in silent comfort until Telemachus comes back, neither of them cry.