Chapter Text
It was a lonely night on the cliffs of Ithaca, a venue and a feeling both that Penelope had gotten used to over the years. It was less that the cliffs were unpopular and more that Ithaca was small, and most who would go to walk along the cliffs were the young men. There were very few young men left in Ithaca with the time for it, as any strong enough to lift a shield and young enough to survive the sea travel had been taken to Troy years ago. Now, there were three kinds of men left on the island: the old, who had no energy for scrambling over rocks and wind-twisted trees, the ones still young enough to listen when their mothers forbade them from doing dangerous things, and, much to Penelope’s misery, the ones growing fat and drunk in her courtyard. Most of the women besides preferred the rocky beaches, where they could gather away from their husbands' empty houses and fathers’ watchful eyes to talk and swim together.
So, Penelope was alone, as she often was.
The wind snagged her hair, teasing thin, curling strands out from under her hairpins to dance with it behind her head against the dark sky. Clouds had gathered in the afternoon, but none that threatened a storm. The sea was calm and gray beneath all of it, like the smooth inside of a shell.
She used to come out to the cliffs every night, when the news of Troy’s defeat had reached the island. As more and more ships returned from the war to nearby villages and islands, she had to be prevented from setting up camp on them, just so she would be the first to spot her husband’s ship.
Eventually, when those men from the nearby villages and islands came to her doors grinning and bearing gifts, it became harder and harder to slip away. There was always the worry of being followed, there was always the worry of being trapped alone on the rocks with whoever followed her. There was always the worry of the cold grins, the grasping hands. It scared her more than the long fall to the waves.
A wave crashed on the rock far below. The distant spray of it gripped her around the arms like Posiedon’s own hands. She looked out to the horizon, as she had done for hundreds of nights. She waited, she would wait, always. She promised it to herself, the way she did with every exhale. Penelope blinked, squinting her eyes against the wind, and-
There was a ship on the horizon.
Penelope didn’t move. She didn’t lean forward, didn’t gasp or try to get a better vantage point. The only thing that moved was the curling strands of hair, twisting behind her as the wind curled around Ithaca. The ship had white sails, with a complex pattern painted on them in black. Odysseus always said the contrast made them easy to spot, but tricked the eye and made them a more difficult target. He’d joked with her about the stories of warriors setting their arrows ablaze to destroy a ship’s sails.
“Just a waste of a good arrow, if you ask me. I bet you anything not one person setting fire to an arrow has ever had to sit down and make one.” His eyes were beautiful in the firelight. He smiled and ducked his head when she said as much.
Odysseus’s ship was on the horizon. Athena’s owl on the front sail was bowed out, taut in the favorable wind. The tiny specks of the oars flickered above the waves.
Penelope was rooted to the spot like one of the twisting trees. Her eyes stung, but she couldn’t blink, terrified the temporary break of her attention would wipe the distant ship away, turn the speck of it into just another patch of water. When she finally did, the enduring sight of those sails forced a breathless laugh from her lungs. Odysseus. Odysseus. She was saved. For a perfect moment, she stood and watched the ship grow closer. She would run to the harbor when it got close enough, when she was sure. She imagined the dry wood under her feet as she ran. She would swim out to the boat if she had to. If it meant seeing him just a moment sooner. She imagined the men driven from her halls, the safety of her chambers renewed finally, finally.
There weren’t any tears. She had shed more than enough. The smile that crept across her face was the widest it had been in years, though, and it felt like the world was cracking her open again, the warmth and light falling on her for the first time since her husband had gone to war.
The strands of hair dancing in the wind dropped onto the back of her neck. The faint sea spray went stagnant as the air died around her. For a horrible second, between one breath and the next, the sky turned into a corpse around her. Her eyes fixed on the tiny ship in the distance. Odysseus. Its white and black sail had fallen flat. Even the steady flickering of the oars faltered.
And then, the world lurched.
Penelope screamed as the howling wind nearly dragged her over the edge of the cliff. The air was twisting, curling around her like it meant to tear itself apart. It writhed and darted like fish fleeing a trap. She wrapped her arms around a gnarled pine tree, and her plea to the Gods to spare her was drowned out by the horrible gale. She could only turn her eyes to the horizon, squinting against the dust and drops of salt water. She searched, desperately, for those bright sails.
Time didn’t freeze. The world didn’t slow to a standstill around her. There was no fanfare or swell of noise. There was only a wave. There was a wave crashing over the splintered remains of her husband’s ship, and then it was gone. It dissolved into the flurry of white water, and disappeared.
Her scream felt like part of the sudden storm. It tore itself out of her, out of the tiny crack she had let form in her soul. The light and warmth were flushed away by it. The salt, the dust and harsh air, it washed over her and scoured it all away.
When it was over, minutes or hours or years later, the world found her clinging to her tree with bloodied arms, torn up from the rough bark. She was slumped like a corpse, draped on the cliffs like someone freshly washed up from the storm. It found her crying in earnest for the first time in years. Odysseus was dead. She had seen him die, felt him die. He died within her. She cried until she was empty of it, until the only thing left was two dead things, her and her Odysseus. She turned her eyes to the ocean as it leapt and splashed this way and that, recovering from the sudden onslaught. There wasn’t any debris in it, nothing for survivors to cling to, no raft, no hope.
Penelope peeled herself off the tree. The blood dripping down to her fingertips was the only warmth she felt. She grew up next to the ocean, she knew shipwrecks, she knew storms. A storm like that was nothing she’d seen before. She knew, like a stone settling cold in her heart, that it had to be the Gods. If a God wanted someone dead, with a show of power so great, they were gone.
Unable to bear it a second longer, she turned away from the cruel, empty sea.
Standing on the rocks, framed like a stain on white fabric in front of the clouded sky, there was a man. Penelope startled, suddenly and painfully aware of every point of weakness in her body. Antinous was looking past her, out towards the horizon. Despite his wind-torn clothing and wild hair, he looked more calm and sturdy than she had ever known him to be. He wasn’t even smiling. His face, so typically twisted into a sneer that haunted her sleep, was placid. There was only a ghost of a smile, something self-assured. Certain.
“Hell of a show, ay Penelope?”
Her cheeks stung. Her eyes hurt from the tears. Her arms still bled. Odysseus was probably still drowning, breathing the same heaving, desperate breaths as her.
“Which one of us gets the honor, do you think? Of announcing the king is dead. More proper for his Queen to do it, isn’t that right?” A thin-fingered, wine-stained hand scratched his beard. “Such a shame. So close to home. So close to seeing his poor abandoned wife again…”
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.
“Oh, don’t be too torn up about it. I bet he was fucking the poor Trojan girls just as hard as he ever fucked you. I bet your son’s got some siblings running around back there. Just as fucking pathetic as he is.” His eyes turned to hers. They were as sharp as a hunting dog’s, bright and eager. He took a step towards her, foot crunching on the rough gravel.
“Don’t come near me.” It was a rasping, dying thing. Still, she refused to plead.
“Or what?” His voice was even and calm, almost comforting. “No threat of a jealous husband coming home to wring my neck about it now. No threat at all.”
Her nails dug into her palms.
“Tell you what,” he said slowly, like he was coaxing a child, “It’s only fair, with how long I’ve been waiting. But I’ll be gentle with you if you don’t make this difficult for me.”
It must have been Zeus. That was her only thought in the tiny breath of time between when he started towards her and when he was grabbing her. It was just like the cruel god in the stories, turning into beautiful swans and bulls before ruining girls’ lives. Maybe Zeus, for her, had turned into a wrecked boat on the horizon.
Antinous’s hand was rough and too-tight around her arm, and whatever was left inside her heart snapped.
Athena, her heart called out, favor me now.
She grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it with all her strength. He grunted, forced down to one knee to keep his bones from snapping. His other hand snapped towards her as he tried to rear himself back to his feet, digging his fingers into the meat of her thigh. Before he could gain any purchase on her, she turned and swung the leg he was already tugging at, using his own strength and all her weight to slam the bone of her knee into his jaw.
The shock of the pain made his grip loosen, but she didn’t wait for him to recover.
“It’s tempting to use that second to, y’know, take a breath.” A much younger Odysseus’s voice rang in her ears like a bell. She could see his face, teenaged and glowing in the afternoon sun of their childhood. “But you can’t wait for them to get back up. That’s when you press them. Nobody else has learned that yet. That’s how I keep beating all of my father’s friends. Even though they’re bigger than me.” He’d grinned at her, as arrogant as he’d ever be. “I think they’ll always be bigger than me. But I know that I’ll always find a way to beat them.”
She landed on Antinous like a bolt of lightning, driving her elbow into the side of his head over, and over, and over. On the third strike, it came back bloody.
“Penelo-”
She struck him again with it, aiming downwards. Aiming to crush his head against the rocks below.
“Stop it! Get off-”
He bucked, tearing at her clothing with his hands, but he was weaker than before. Blood seeped from his hair onto his face. Her arm was lanced up and down with pain. It felt like the bones all the way up to her shoulder were shattering. Her body ached at her to stop. She didn't listen. She switched to the other arm instead, hitting him with a closed fist. His shoulders jerked at the insides of her thighs, but she bore down on him all the same. When her fist felt inadequate, she grabbed one of the bloodied stones next to his head. With both hands, she grasped it, even as her arms shook. He only had the chance to look up at it and let out half of a scream, a plea, before she brought it down like a wave over a sinking ship.
He writhed once more, then jerked, then went still beneath her.
She was alone on the cliffs again. The wind was dead around her, her hair falling messy around her shoulders like dry seaweed draped rotting on the beach. Antinous was still bleeding, eyes open and staring at the sky.
Penelope had once asked her husband what it was like to kill. They were young, then, but the battles he’d fought were still vicious and bloody. He’d come back from them a successful prince to the eyes of Ithaca, and a harrowed, scared man to the arms of his wife. He’d gone quiet when she asked him, eyes closed and brow tightly drawn.
“It’s easy.” He said, quietly, as if to keep the Gods from hearing him. “It’s like my hands were meant to do it. That’s the worst part.”
She looked down at her hands. One was still gripping the bloodied stone, the one that had saved her, that had damned her. They weren’t shaking, not the way Odysseus had shook in her arms when he came home, when he told her the terrible things he’d done in the name of his father, of his future kingdom. Her hands were as still and dead as Antinous’s.
“You did well.” A woman’s voice, husky and scratched through with age. Penelope turned, too tired to lift her eyes from the dark skinned, battle-scarred hands, one wrapped placidly around a golden spear, one resting calmly at her side, framed by white linen. She had one ring on her middle finger, an owl’s face staring back at Penelope. “I know of very few mortals who could have done better, considering your circumstances.”
“They’ll hang me for this.”
Athena clicked her tongue, reaching for Penelope’s chin and tipping it, forcing the tired woman to meet her eyes. The gray of them, shaded by her gilded helmet, was cold and ever-changing like the clouds. Their intensity almost hurt to look into, but Penelope did it anyway. She was an empty thing. Hollow. Nothing could hurt her now. Athena smiled a little as she spoke. “Don’t give up so easily, Odysseus’s wife. A different fate is only one good plan away.”
“Odysseus is dead.”
“But you’re alive, as is your son, and your house. And you’ve proven you’re willing to fight to keep it that way.”
“Odysseus is dead.” She spat the word. Penelope knew better than to speak to Gods that way, she knew the stories of mortals being cursed for their insolence and rudeness, but she couldn’t bring herself to be the polite, accommodating face she put on every day for years. Not now. Not anymore.
Athena, white dress fluttering in non-existant wind, knelt before her. She seemed to float above the stone, never quite touching the dirt and blood. None of it stained her. The scarred hand on her chin moved to cup her cheek. “And who knows that? What mortals alive-” Athena tapped her spear to Antinous’s unmoving chest, “-know about that?”
Penelope’s brown eyes met gray again. “Me.” She looked to Antinous. Athena’s spear gleamed gold and true. “Just me.”
“I can’t fix your problems for you, faithful wife. But I can guide you. And for your husband’s service in my name, and in recognition of your bravery in battle, I will do what is in my power to assist you, whatever plan you make.”
It was a weighty thing, the favor of a Goddess. Penelope let herself sag under it, from the relief of it as well as the pressure. She sat, and she thought. She and Odysseus were both plotters, schemers. They had bonded over it as children and later, used it to secure their marriage. The two of them found out early that they approach the practice differently, though. Odysseus could think on his feet. He could spin a trap for just about anybody to fall into , and even he wouldn’t have the whole picture in his head before he started speaking. He was quick about it, but sometimes it was too quick, and he’d fall into his own trap along with whoever he was trying to trick.
Penelope, on the other hand, was slow. Her plans came together like a forged weapon. She couldn’t lie on the spot like her husband, but unlike him, her plans in their careful construction and consideration only caught their intended prey. And they never drew her further in than she could pull herself out. Given enough time, Odysseus used to joke she could even trick the Gods if she’d wanted to. She’d told him to lower his voice.
Now there was a Goddess standing beside her, and a corpse at her feet, and the wreckage of her husband’s ship on the horizon.
“My Goddess?” She said, idly chipping a drop of dry blood off her arm.
“Yes?”
“Is it true what my husband used to say, that you can change a person’s appearance?”