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His curls drip water into his eyes, salt staining his lips. He breathes, deep and slow, trying to stop his body from preparing for pain that isn’t coming.
It’s fine. He’s safe here.
As safe as he can be, at least.
The turquoise sea stretches out before him, smooth as glass. There are never any waves in Calypso’s ocean. The water hardly even laps at his shoulders, his presence the only thing sending ripples through the silky color. It’s perfect.
Too perfect. Everything here is too perfect. Even the sand beneath his feet is so smoothly ground it hardly feels like anything at all.
He dunks his head under again, trying to lose himself to the weightless feeling. He stays under until his lungs burn. Considers staying under until he’s dead.
His head breaks the surface, the taste of salt on his tongue. Someone calls for him-
“Captain!”
He flinches, the word echoed by the voices of dying, desperate men.
“Captain! Captain!”
“Odysseus!” Eurylochus calls, and he turns. His brother stands in the shallows, sea foam bumping against his calves.
“Yes?” His voice is rough with disuse, words slipping away whenever he tries.
Eurylochus purses his lips, hands hanging awkwardly by his sides without his sword to rest them on. The weapon sits on the shore, above the waterline, beside Odysseus’s.
He can’t be without it anymore.
“You’ve been in the water a while,” Eurylochus says finally.
The reasons float through his mind. It reminds me of home. The salt tastes like Penelope. I keep trying to drown myself and let Poseidon win. I can’t stop thinking that my son learned to swim without me there to teach him. “It feels nice,” he replies instead, stretching out in the water. The blue closes over his head for a moment before he stands again, shaking his curls out.
Eurylochus’s dark eyes narrow with worry. “The men are worried about you,” he forces out hesitantly.
I’m worried about you, is what he wants to say.
Odysseus runs his tongue over his teeth, swirling his hands through the crystal turquoise. “The men are welcome to join me.”
Eurylochus hesitates for a moment before sighing heavily, wading out to join him. Similar to Odysseus, he doesn’t bother taking off his chiton- the island heat will dry it quick enough. “Are you still hurting?” he asks quietly, once he’s close enough. Odysseus slips back, floating on his back as he stares up at the cloudless sky.
Cloudless. Completely cloudless. The king of the gods won’t hurt him here.
“Yes,” he says finally. It feels like an admission of weakness. That his body, despite having healed, would still ache with pain that would not dissipate nor fade with time. He spent ten years in war- the concept of pain that stays long past when the wound has healed is no unfamiliar concept. Still. His pain isn’t from war, and some significant part of him burns with shame at the idea of having lasting effects from something so humiliating.
Eurylochus is quiet for a time. “I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
He blinks the salt out of his eyes. “Apologize.”
Eurylochus opens his mouth, then closes it without a word. Whatever he was going to say he lets drift away in the water. “It wasn’t your fault,” he murmurs instead.
“It wasn’t my fault, no. But it was my choice.”
Eurylochus presses his brows together, running a hand over his shorn hair, slowly beginning to grow out once more. He’ll need to cut it again soon, Odysseus thinks idaly. His own hair drifts in long waves around his head in the water, brushing past his shoulders now when he stands.
“You didn’t really have much of a choice,” Eurylochus says finally.
He closes his eyes. “Of course I didn’t. Doesn’t change much, does it?”
“No,” his brother admits. “For someone loved by the gods-”
He winces at that phrase now, the words bringing a far more visceral thought to mind.
“...sorry,” Eurylochus breathes.
“It’s fine,” he replies. Or at least, tries to. Instead what comes out is a mix of choked words and a barely concealed sob. Eurylochus reaches out in the water, linking their hands together.
Odysseus takes a breath. Two.
Then he forces his head under the water once more, salt stinging his eyes as the waves envelop him.
His lungs aren’t even burning when Eurylochus pulls him back into the air.
“Don’t,” he warns softly, oh so softly. “Ody, don’t.”
“I won’t.” It might be a lie. Who’s to say?
“Your wife is waiting for you,” Eurylochus reminds him. He flinches.
Penelope.
Oh, Penelope.
What would she think if she could see him now? How could he stand to have her look at him with that disgusting, cloying pity that slipped into Eurylochus’s gaze, the shock and horror echoed in his crew’s whenever he caught their eyes on him.
There’s a reason he’s been avoiding his men.
They watched- oh, gods, they watched...
He forces out a breath. “I know,” he says softly.
“Do you?”
His wife shouldn’t be. That’s what he knows. He isn’t worthy of her waiting for him. He isn’t the man she married- he’s weak, pathetic, a blood-soaked killer who can’t even protect himself.
What would she think if she could see him now? What would his son?
His son, his darling child who’s grown up all without him. Could he ever live with himself if Telemachus ever found out anything he’d done? If he found out his father was a murderer, a killer, a plaything of the gods?
Did he even want to go home, at this point? Knowing the shame and guilt and disgust it would bring?
“Odysseus,” Eurylochus says softly, drawing him out of his thoughts. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
He dunks his head under once more, to hide the salty tracks of his tears. His curls pool around him, drifting in the waves. “Why would you assume such a thing?”
“Ody,” his brother insists, seeing through his flippancy in an instant. “You’re going to go home. To your family. To your wife and son- you’ve spent thirteen years telling everyone as much, don’t lose sight of that now.”
“I almost stopped you from seeing yours,” he mumbles.
“What?”
He swallows painfully, curling his arms around himself. Tracing the electric scars Zeus left upon his skin. “I almost stopped you from seeing yours. When Ze- when he told me to choose, I was so close to... I almost...” He holds back a sob. “What would I have told Ctimene?” he whispers. “Eurylochus, what would I have told my sister?”
His brother runs a hand through his tangled, salt-soaked hair. “It doesn’t matter. Because I’m alive, and you won’t have to tell her a thing.”
Odysseus hears him, knows that logically, but his mind won’t stop dragging him down that path, forcing himself to imagine how his sister’s face would crumble when Odysseus told her her husband was dead. How her willow-bark eyes would turn venomous when she found out it was his doing.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes, and the truth is he isn’t even sure he knows who he’s saying it to.
“Don’t say that,” Eurylochus says softly, echoing Odysseus’s own words as he pulls Odysseus against his chest. The embrace is almost enough to feel safe.
Almost.
“What am I supposed to do, ‘Lochus?” he whispers against his brother’s shoulder. “What do I do now?”
Eurylochus is silent for a moment. “What you always do,” he says finally. “Find a way out.”
Odysseus stares out across that impossibly perfect sea, and doesn’t tell his brother that he isn’t sure there is one.