Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

After it all, Athena seeks out Telemachus. He might just be the only friend she has in this world, and she doesn’t have to look into his mind to know that he feels the same.

He’s standing on the balcony, looking out at the kingdom below. It’s the same place his father used to stand when he would ask for her advice, back when he was still her Warrior of The Mind.

No, she corrects herself. When he was still her friend.

Telemachus turns his head to face her. He really does look like his father, she thinks, when he squints his eyes at her as if trying to see past the mortal form she’s created for herself. Somehow, the dried blood that cakes his face and clothing makes the resemblance even more apparent.

Hello, she wants to say. It’s only one word, but it gets lodged in her throat and she chokes around the bulk of it. She gives up and tries to smile at him instead, but it feels more like a grimace. Mercifully, Telemachus saves her from the burden of having to be the one to speak first. “He’s home,” he says, and she can imagine how oddly the words must taste in his mouth. He had spent so long telling her about what he knew of him, theorizing on what he was like, faithfully echoing every story that his mother had been willing to share.

In return, She told him about her friend. She had never made any mention of his identity, and he never seemed to be able to connect the dots, so she indulged herself. She had told him about as much about his father as her pride would allow her to. Which, admittedly, was not much. She could barely speak of him without his last words to her rattling in her head:

You’re alone.

And even back then, she had known that he was right. That fact had made her angrier than anything else. So she left.

And now, no thanks to her, he had finally gotten home. It had taken him ten years, and she could have gotten him home in two, even against the will of all the gods he’d managed to piss off, but he had still done it.

Without her.

So she sighs, and says: “Yes. He is home.”

Telemachus might know her better than any being in the world, mortal and divine alike. He might know her better than she knows herself, the way he looks at her.

If he had been anyone else’s son, she knows, she wouldn’t have let him help her.

“Your friend,” says Telemachus. “It’s him, isn’t it? My father?”

“It was,” she says.

He must notice her usage of the past tense, from the way he grimaces, but he doesn’t say anything about it. Instead, he looks at her for another moment, with the same piercing gaze as his father, and asks: “What was he like?”

“You can find out for yourself, you know.”

“Back when you knew him, I mean.”

His phrasing feels like the thunder that Zeus had used to strike her down.

“He was a lot like you,” she says. “Restless. Excitable. Smarter than I had thought mortals capable of being. Soft-hearted, even despite my best efforts. Before I met him, I had never known someone could be so loyal. Everything he did, he did with you and your mother in mind. It was frustrating, really.”

He scoffs a laugh at that.

“But the war changed him, and each successive loss that he suffered changed him again. I could not tell you what he is like now. You will have to let him be the one to tell that story.”

“What even happened to you two?”

“Your father… All he wanted was a friend. At the time, it was a role that I had thought to be below me.”

He frowns. “But you’re my friend!” He pauses, considers. Wilts a little, like an under-watered flower. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder in what she hopes to be a reassuring gesture. “I am. But ten years ago, it was not a word I would have used to describe myself. I had thought our relationship to be strictly teacher-student. And, in the end… I pushed him too far.” Her voice cracks at the admission. Trying to hide her moment of weakness, she turns away from Telemachus and towards the glow of the setting sun. “He found himself at odds with a child of Poseidon: a cyclops. He blinded him, but he let him live. A mistake, yes, but… I was too harsh. He was grieving, and I— in his time of need, I abandoned him, and I have regretted it every day since.

He is silent for a long moment, before he pinches his lips together in an odd sort of grimace. “And that’s why you…” he trails off, vaguely gesturing towards her face, towards the scar over her right eye.

She knows what he means. “Yes,” she says. “I asked my father to release him from his imprisonment on Calypso’s island, and he… did not take to it kindly.”

When Athena had nowhere else to go, she’d shown up at the palace, more vulnerable and more scared than she had ever been, keeled over from the force of her physical and emotional wounds. It was Telemachus that had taken care of her. He didn’t ask, even though she could plainly see how badly he had wanted to. He had helped her stand fully and snuck her past the suitors, patient when she couldn’t move more than a couple steps at a time. He had given her his bed and slept on the floor, instantly at her side when she woke up in the middle of the night overwhelmed by the feeling of lightning in her veins.

Gods couldn’t die, but they could wish that they did.

Telemachus’ voice, so much like his father’s, pulls her from her thoughts. “He let him go, though, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

His face steels into an expression painfully like the one his father would wear when he had formulated a plan. Then, he smiles, self-satisfied even before he’s actually done anything. Another tendency he gets from his father.

“I can talk to him for you,” he offers. The cold, calculating part of her thinks that even after her best efforts, he is still as naïve as ever. She is quick to shut down this train of thought. His soft-heartedness, a near-twin to the same feature she had beaten out of his father, was one of his best qualities. It’s a mistake she refuses to make again.
“Some relationships cannot be fixed,” she says.

“You fought the king of the gods for him!” He cries. “You’re the goddess of wisdom! And you’re so cool! Who wouldn’t want to be your friend?”

Most people, she thinks bitterly, your father chief among them. Instead, she says: “Your father made his choice, and I will respect it.”

Telemachus frowns, but he nods his assent, and says nothing more. Instead, they slip into a companionable silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

She had been there, the day he was born. Childbirth had never been her domain, and she’d said as much to Odysseus, but when he had gripped at her clothes with the palest face she had ever seen him wear and all but begged for her to be there, she had obliged.

She had been appalled, when she had seen Penelope laid bare on the bed, face shining with both sweat and tears as she’d screamed in pain.

Odysseus had looked at her, eyes wide in fear as he silently begged her for help, as if she knew what to do, but she was frozen in place, only able to let Penelope squeeze her hand as another wave of pain washed over her, only able to offer her words of encouragement that were foreign to her tongue.

Two mortals and a goddess. All three of them known for their wit and their schemes, and then, none of them had known exactly what to do, bound together in a moment that was somehow both divine and desperately human.

She had apologized for it later, after the boy was washed and dried and snuggled safely in his mother’s arms, and they had both shrugged it off, given her matching grins, and offered to let her hold their newborn son.

She’d never held a baby before. Penelope had to guide her hands into the right place before Odysseus deposited the baby into her arms. She had still almost dropped him, expecting him to be lighter than he was.

Even when he was minutes old, he’d still had that same gleam in his eyes as his father. That gleam, of course, had long since disappeared whenever Odysseus looked at her. She hadn’t seen it in his eyes in many long years, and when she notices it in Telemachus, she wants to cry, even though she can count on one hand the number of times she has indulged herself in that way ever before. She had always considered it too human.

“Athena?”

“Yes, Telemachus?” Her voice is strained.

“What if… what if I’m not the son he wanted?”

She can’t stop herself from laughing at that. His face falls even further, into an open-mouthed look of desperation and horror, and she stops at once, her fingertips ghosting the skin of his forearm in an attempt to bring him comfort. “You are far too much like your father for him to ever hate you. Even if you weren’t, he loves you, and he has loved you since before you were born.” She pauses for a moment. “Has your mother told you,” she says, delicately, “of how your father left for Troy?”

He nods. “The plow, right?”

“Yes.”

When the time came to make good on the oath Odysseus himself had suggested, he had resisted. He feigned madness, plowing the fields naked and screaming at the top of his lungs. The man that had come to collect him had taken the infant Telemachus from the safety of his mother’s arms and placed him in the plow’s direct path. He stopped instantly, sending the Achaean soldier a withering glare as he swept up his son, cooing at him with a sweetness she hadn’t expected from someone so furious.

“Your father would have done anything to stay at home, with your mother, and with you. And now, after twenty years, he is home. I think, if anything, he is worried you will not care for him.”

“Still,” he says, blowing an errant strand of hair out of his face. “I worry.”

“I know you do. But so does he.”

He drops his head onto her shoulder, which she struggles to believe is comfortable, but she indulges him nonetheless. They stand like that for some time, looking out and the land that Odysseus built up and Telemachus will someday inherit. She will help him settle into the role as king, just as she helped his father.

It’s enough.

Chapter Text

Hours later, when Telemachus starts punctuating his sentences with yawns and Athena is finally able to stronghold him into getting some much-needed rest, she sees her oldest friend standing in the threshold of the house, leaning against the archway that leads indoors. He’s cleaned the blood off himself and changed into clothes better befitting a king, and he gives his son a warm smile and a squeeze of the shoulder before they pass each other, Odysseus taking his son’s spot beside the goddess. He looks lighter, both physically and emotionally, than the last time she’d seen him

.

“Goddess,” he says. Never once has he called her that. In the early days, she despised his lack of formality, but now, its presence makes her heart ache.

“Odysseus.” The name feels foreign in her mouth.

“I’m not sure I know what to think of your relationship with my son,” he admits. He doesn’t face her, only looks out at the kingdom the way Telemachus had only moments ago. Helios’ chariot has long since descended below the horizon, and Selene has replaced him, moving through the starry sky with grace.

“I know him better than you do,” she says, before she can think any better. She thinks that he’ll flinch away at that, look at her with hatred and vitriol in his eyes, but he only nods, understanding. 

“What is he like?”

“He asked me the same thing about you.”

“And?”

“He’s so much like you that it hurts,” she says, smiling despite herself. “Too smart for his own good. Cocky. Unflinchingly loyal. Compassionate. He’s a good kid. Penelope did a good job.”

“It seems like I have a lot of catching up to do,” he says with a self-deprecating laugh. Then, for the first time in the conversation, he turns to look at her. They had spoken before, briefly, after he had killed all of the suitors and before his reunion with Penelope, but she had been able to tell how distracted he had been. Not that she blamed him.

 Now, though, he looks, really looks, and he sees precisely what she wishes he wouldn’t. “What happened to your eye?”

She had known that question was coming, but it still catches her off-guard. She takes a breath, then two, and responds: “I had petitioned for your release from Calypso’s island.”

He flinches at the mention of the name, but then he’s looking at her, with that same assessing gaze he’d always had, the one he’d passed down to his son, and he asks: “Why?”

“You called,” she says, shrugging in an attempt to dismiss the whole ordeal. “It was only right that I should answer.”

“I didn’t think you were listening,” he admits.

“I was,” she says. What she doesn’t mention is how eagerly she had waited for him to reach out to her, the restless nights she had spent worrying about him, even when she couldn’t find it within herself to reach into his mind and see him or his thoughts. She had hated thinking about him, but she couldn’t quite banish him from her thoughts. He would reach out when he was ready, she knew, and so she was left in the odd purgatory of her restless waiting. 

And, just like the rest of the people Odysseus had left behind, she waited, and waited, and— 

Well, eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore, so she sought out Telemachus. Bright-eyed Telemachus, who was so much like the father he had never met before today. Telemachus, who had begun to fill the gaping hole in her heart that Odysseus had vacated, when she had flinched away from him in his time of need.

She shakes her head at the thought, trying to purge it. “My father proposed a… a game, of sorts. I won, and I, being who I am, was a little too eager to rub it in. So he—” she stops abruptly, bringing her fingertips up to brush the rough, marred skin of the scar. It’s fresh enough that it still aches at the contact, the lasting remnants of her father’s fury. “Gods can’t die,” she says, “but they can get close. I suppose he had wanted to remind me that even despite my divinity, I was not invulnerable.” She sees the guilt written on his face, so she presses on: “It’s alright, though. I showed up here, and Telemachus helped me.”

He narrows his eyes at that, then relaxes, but she can still see the dregs of his wariness in his expression. “When did you…” He doesn’t have to finish the question— she knows what he wanted to say. When did you befriend my son? When did you replace me?

“About a week before your release. I… well, I missed you—” (what a terrible way to put the force of her longing into words) “—and I wanted to check on your family. Imagine my surprise when I see your son getting into a fight.”

If he notices her barebones admission of guilt, he doesn’t say anything of it. Instead, he cracks a smile, every bit the proud father that he had never been allowed to be before. “ That’s my boy.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t exactly win, and his form was—” she cuts herself off when he shoots her a half-hearted glare. “He is very brave, you know. You have every reason to be proud of him.”

“He shouldn’t have needed to be brave.”

She nods her agreement. He wants to say something else, she knows, so she doesn’t make any attempts to fill the subsequent silence. He has never been able to tolerate the quiet for so long, and she knows he will burst eventually.

It’s barely thirty seconds before he does. Even after all these years, she still knows him. Embarrassingly, she is comforted by the thought. Perhaps the length of ten years has not separated them as much as she would have assumed.

“I’m still mad at you, you know.”

And there it is.

“You left me ,” he spits. He takes a step towards her, and they’re nearly chest to chest, his hot breath mixing with her own. She has to will herself to be still, not to flinch away from him. She will not abandon him again, not even when she finds herself at the end of his exacting fury. “I had suffered the loss of some of my best friends, and all you could think to do was reprimand me for my shortcomings. Tell me what a failure I was, a waste of space, and effort, and time. And here you are, after ten years, teaching my son everything you taught me, as if nothing had ever happened at all, and I’m so afraid that you will make him into what you made me .”

His unsaid words linger in the air. A monster. She could offer a rebuttal, tell him either that he is not a monster or that it was the world that molded him into one, not her, but she doesn’t. She had practiced this conversation before, shouting it at the walls of her Olympian palace, and now that she’s here, looking the man that she once considered to be her greatest failure in the eye, there will not be a redo. She has one chance to amend her wrongs, she knows.

“I was wrong,” she says, carefully. It might be the first time in her long years that she has said as much. In any other scenario, it would have been as painful as a knife twisted into her chest, making her bleed gold, but now, it was almost freeing. A weight off her shoulders. She continues: “I was wrong to leave you, wrong to say all those things that I did, and even if I had meant it all at the time, I was wrong to believe as much. And as for your son…” she trails off, considering. “I care for him, just as I should have shown you that I cared for you. I will not abandon him like I abandoned you, old friend.”

Something in his expression changes at the term of endearment, his face going slack, and he takes a step backwards, swaying on his feet, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “Friend?” He echoes, his voice breaking on the word.

She feels her lips tug upwards in a smile as she nods, slowly.

He dives forward and takes her in his arms, burying his head in the crook between her neck and shoulders as only Telemachus had done before, and it is only when she feels something wet drop onto her bare skin that she realizes he is crying. Awkwardly, she wraps her arms around him, one hand rubbing what she hopes to be soothing circles on his back as she waits for him to regain himself.

It is several minutes before the violent shaking of his body subsides and he stands to his full height, averting his gaze from the goddess that had just held him in her arms. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he has the decency to look embarrassed as he takes a single step away from her. “I just… I have wanted to hear you say that for so long.”

“You have no need to apologize,” she says. “I am only sorry that I did not say it sooner. If I had been less prideful… it could have spared a lot of lives.”

“It seems to be a flaw that both of us share. If I had done as you had advised and killed the Cyclops, I would have gotten home years earlier.”

“That much is true. But it doesn’t mean you must abandon mercy and hope altogether. It simply means it was not the right for that moment, for that enemy.”

“Mercy has gotten me nowhere,” he says, nearly snarling, in the same low voice he had used to address the suitors as he slaughtered them one by one. If Athena was anyone other than the Goddess of Wisdom and War Strategy, she would have found it frightening. “It is Ruthlessness that got me home.”

“And do you now intend to carry that with you for the rest of your life?” She asks. “Don’t you wish to know peace again, after all these years?”

“Of course I do. But for twenty years, there has always been a catch, an addendum, some other monster to defeat or some problem to solve or someone to kill. I struggle to believe that this is the end of it all.”

She wants to promise him that it will be, that she will make sure of it personally, but she stays silent.

“I want so badly for all of it to be over,” he continues, leaning against the marble railing of the balcony. “To put down the sword, to forget the blood that stains my hands. But if someone comes along and threatens my family again, I have no qualms with showing them exactly who I am, and what I am capable of.”

“Very well, then.” She looks into his eyes, the very ones that have gone from a warm brown to a furious red, reflecting all the bloodshed he has seen in his life, some that he has caused and more that he has witnessed, and the realization hits her with the force of ten thousand of Zeus’ lightning bolts. She nearly crumbles where she stands.

He is her greatest failure, indeed, but not in the way that she once thought. 

She should have protected him. Of course, she couldn’t have prevented all of the heartache and loss he has suffered, but she could have at least shared it with him. Stood by his side, offered him her aid and her protection, been with him as he braved stronger storms than any mortal reasonably could.

But some mistakes cannot be fixed. And, even if they could, Odysseus has expressed his disinterest in becoming her Warrior of The Mind once again, and she intends to honor his decision. But it does not mean she needs to close the door between them once again.

“If,” she says, “by some miracle, you can find it within yourself to forgive me for my tresspasses, I would quite like to be your friend again.”

He grins at her, his slightly-askew teeth on full display, the same bright, blinding smile that he’d passed down to his son, the same one she had never thought she would see again. Then, he moves his hand towards her, clenched into a fist, a silent offering equivalent to her sacred olive branch. This is an odd sort of mortal custom, and she has always thought as much, but it is one she knows— it was one of the first things Odysseus had taught her. 

She bumps her knuckles against his, firm and brief, before pulling away.

“Goddess and man,” he says, emotion thick in his voice like a syrup, “bestest of friends.”

She laughs at that, and he joins in. By the time they fall silent, Odysseus has wrapped his cape around himself tightly, clearly falling victim to Aeolus’ cold evening breeze. Athena smiles.

“It is getting late,” she says. “I’m sure your wife waits for you.

“She says she wants to see you.”

“I will speak to her tomorrow. Go.”

And he does.

Chapter Text

When Odysseus turns his back to his old (new, again?) patron, he doesn’t quite know what to think. He should still be mad at her, he knows. He is mad at her. 

She had abandoned him, flinched away from his anger and his grief, and that was the first of many events that had led to his metamorphosis, his transformation into a man that he sometimes didn’t recognize. She answered when he called out for her in his most desperate moment, crying on the cliffside he was seconds away from jumping off of, just to escape the wretched, bubbly woman that had kept him captive for the better part of a decade. She fought for him, put her life and her pride on the line for his benefit. She helped his son. She is turning him into a weapon, teaching him the same terrible lessons she taught his father, the ones that rang in his head ceaselessly even after they’d had their bitter ending. She knows better now. She had always wanted to change the world, and now, with her new Warrior of the Mind, she could make it into that place she had spoken of: one where war and violence weren’t first instincts, one where kindness and courtesy were commonplace, one where a father wouldn’t be forced to leave his wife and son and spend ten years at war.

He can’t deny the pride that had swelled in his chest to see his son, fully grown and fully decked out in her armor, bearing the divine protection that he himself had once had, the same sort of near-invulnerability that he had briefly felt again while fighting against the suitors, but had brushed off as a side-effect of the kind of all-consuming rage he’d never had before, the one that he only now recognizes as Athena’s blessing.

But still, proud of his son as he is, he can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt to see them together on the balcony, Telemachus cracking a stupid joke and Athena huffing and lightly pushing him. He can’t help but wonder if things would have been different, if this version of the goddess had been his teacher. If he wouldn’t have become the monster that he did.

But he supposes that it’s of no use, dwelling on past events when, for the first time in twenty years, he can see his future laid out in front of him, a future of comfort, of hope, and of love. It doesn’t matter what he had to do to get there, the people that he had seen killed, the people that he killed, the gods that he’d angered. All that matters is the fact that he’s here, in the palace he built, with the wife he loves and that, miraculously, loves him in return, with their son that is going to become a better man than Odysseus ever was, with the help of the goddess that they both consider a friend. 

And it’s enough.

Chapter Text

For as long as Athena had known him, Odysseus had always been eager. It was a trait she had been aware of from the moment they’d first met, when he’d been fourteen and he’d somehow seen through the goddess’ tricks and matched them with his own, looking upon divinity for the first time in his life with a wide, boastful grin on his face.

He was a natural-born warrior, possessing gifts of cunning and creativity even before the goddess had stepped in to guide him. She had always known that he was destined to be a hero whose story would be told for millennia after his death.

So, three years later, when he had thrown it all out the window in favor of acting like a lovesick fool, she had been both surprised and annoyed. By this point, he knew her well enough to know that she never truly strayed far from him, so all he had to do was whisper her name and wait. When she appeared, he threw himself to his knees, grasping at her skirts like a child.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she had huffed, beginning to turn away from him. “What is the matter with you?”

“I’m in love!” He had cried, looking up at her with those wide eyes of his, pulling gently on the soft material of her dress in an attempt to keep her in place. “Her name’s Penelope, she’s a princess of Sparta, she’s so smart and so perfect and I need to marry her so badly, I think I’m going to go insane.”

Athena already thought he had gone insane. For a moment, she just looked at him, not knowing what to do or why this man (still a boy, really, from the way he was conducting himself) had thought fit to ask for romantic advice from a virgin goddess.

“Please, Athena!” He had begged.

“And how do you propose I help you?” She’d challenged. “What’s your plan?” 

He had stopped at that, releasing her skirts from his grip, and stood. He had just about grown to his full stature, now about an inch or two taller than her chosen mortal form. “I don’t have one,” he’d admitted, sheepishly. “I was kinda hoping you could help me out with that.” And when those big, brown eyes met hers again, she hadn’t quite been able to say no.

This was how the Goddess of Wisdom found herself in Penelope of Sparta’s bedroom. She had yelped when she’d seen her, nearly falling from her seat at the loom. “Who are you?” She’d demanded.

Athena hadn’t thought it fit to answer such a ridiculous question, so she’d nodded her head towards the tapestry the young girl had been working on only moments ago. “You are very talented,” she’d said, in lieu of a proper introduction.

And somehow, Penelope had understood. She’d scrambled to her knees, bowing her head in supplication. “Pallas Athena,” she had whispered. Then, as if she hadn’t quite been able to help herself, she looked up, squinting at the goddess. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

She sighed inwardly, regretting her agreement to play the messenger amongst mortals. For matters of the heart, no less. “I have come at the behest of a student of mine, Odysseus of Ithaca. He—”

“And what does he say?” Penelope demanded, jumping up to her feet again.

“You would know, if you hadn’t interrupted me,” she snapped, regretting it instantly when the girl flinched and took a step back. “He wanted me to ask if… if you would like to meet with him. Tonight, in the gardens.”

The Spartan princess had practically jumped out of her skin in her excitement, rushing to grasp Athena’s hands, taking a moment to remember exactly whose company she was in and pull away, blushing furiously. “I am sorry,” she’d said, bowing deeply once she’d recovered. “I am just… excited.”

Athena, having the domain she did, did not know much about love, nor did she wish to. What she did know, however, was that Penelope made her Warrior of the Mind incredibly happy, from the way he had laughed and smiled during their training the next day, moving with a skip in his step. And, for that, she was thankful.

While she had still been recovering from her injuries, she had seen Penelope again for the first time in nearly two decades, at the Prince’s insistence. He wasn’t aware that they knew each other, and Athena hadn’t exactly wanted to take a knife to a still-bleeding wound, but he had been so excited, and his smile had been so much like his father’s that she couldn’t bring herself to say no.

So he had led her into the grand hall, where the Queen of Ithaca sat alone, eyes widening in recognition once the goddess crossed the threshold that led into the room. Over the course of twenty years of separation, husband and wife had both developed the markings of age they didn’t quite yet have: greying hair, sagging skin, dark undereyes, an expression more tired than any mortal should ever reasonably have. Despite it all, Penelope smiled, and Athena smiled back, even as she flinched at the unpracticed movement and the way that it tugged at her healing wounds.

“Athena,” the Prince had said, punctuating his sentence with a grand sweeping gesture towards his mother, “this is Penelope, the Queen of Ithaca. Mother, this is Athena. My friend.”

Penelope had risen from her seat at the head of the table and rushed to the goddess, throwing her arms around her tightly. At first, Athena had flinched away, the burns and cuts still semi-fresh on her skin, but then had returned the embrace.

“What happened to you?” The mortal woman asked when she pulled back, her hand coming up to cup the bruised cheek.

“Nothing that you need to worry about,” Athena had replied. She could tell that the woman hadn’t believed her, but she had at least been merciful enough to let the topic rest.

If Telemachus had thought anything about this interaction, he hadn’t said anything, only excused himself with a grin and a thumbs up offered to his friend.

They had talked until the earliest hours of the morning, goddess and mortal, working together to unweave the burial shroud for Odysseus’ still-living father. Penelope had asked about Odysseus, and Athena could only bring herself to provide purposefully vague answers. Penelope, perceptive as she was, likely put many of the pieces together by herself, so she’d let her husband’s old mentor direct the topic away from him and towards the issue of the suitors infesting their house like mites. Penelope had confided in the goddess, and Athena had been able to offer comfort in what was perhaps the only way she knew how: in proposing a solution. She hadn’t told Penelope exactly what to do, only steered her in the right direction. The challenge had been entirely the Queen’s, and it had done precisely what it was designed to do: stall for time.

So, when the sun rises over Ithaca for the first time since the King’s return, and the Queen seeks out Athena in her temple, pouring sweet-smelling libations and whispering a quick prayer, she answers quickly in a flash of feathers. Penelope looks up at her and smiles. “I wanted to thank you,” she says. “For bringing him back to me.”

“You have nothing to thank me for. It was all him.”

She, like her husband and their son, has a very distinct smile. It isn’t boastful or eager like theirs, but rather a quiet acknowledgement of her ability to see through the goddess’ carefully-crafted facade. She had met only one other mortal that could do the same: Odysseus. She was convinced that Telemachus would somehow learn, as well. If he could do it already, he hadn’t let on.

“No,” Penelope says. “It wasn’t. I know what you did. What you sacrificed.”

The scar over Athena’s eye seems to burn anew, and she has to press the tips of her fingers to the cool marble of the altar to ground herself. “Telemachus told you.” 

“He did.”

She tells her the same thing she told her husband: “He called. I answered.”

“Most gods wouldn’t have done that.”

“Most gods haven’t known Odysseus.”

Athena supposes that her statement is only partially true. Yes, all the Olympians know of Odysseus, purely because they find him to be entertaining to watch, but none of them know him the way she does. They weren’t there when he was young, didn’t see his raw, unpolished cunning, the way he smiled like he was in the presence of a close friend, not the cold and distant Goddess of Wisdom. They weren’t there when they fought after the Cyclops had crushed his men into the ground, didn’t stand at the edge of his wit’s sword, didn’t get peeled open by his prying eyes and his cutting words. They have never been seen, never been known , like Odysseus saw and knew Athena.

She suspected they had never even known anything of the sort.

“You know,” Penelope says, from where she still kneels at the altar, “I had never known why Odysseus cared for you so much. It was obvious that you didn’t quite care for him the same way he cared about you.” She stops for a moment, considers. “But you do. Care for him, I mean. And I think you always have.”

“I’m beginning to think the same thing,” Athena admits. “Odysseus was the first friend I’d ever had. And friendship is… a purely mortal thing. I had never thought gods had use for them, until I had one and lost him.”

“He told me you had worked it out.”

“We have. But, when I look at him, I still cannot help but see each individual failure I made that made him into what he is today.”

“He is my husband,” Penelope said, her voice sharper than Athena had ever heard it. “He always has been, and he always will be.”

“Yes. But he is also… different.”

“He did what he had to.”

“And I cannot help but think of a world where he didn’t have to do any of it. A world where I could have protected him from it all.”

“That world is not ours.”

Athena smiles, despite herself. “He told me the same thing. And perhaps you are right. Perhaps my energy could be better used thinking of the future.” Of Telemachus , she does not say, but Penelope nods in understanding regardless of her omission.

“I consider myself very lucky to have my son in such good hands.”

I hope I do not ruin him, Athena thinks, though she does not say as much out loud. I could not live with myself if I made the same mistakes twice.

Penelope rises and takes the goddess’ hands in hers, giving them an affectionate but brief squeeze before dropping them. “I trusted you with my husband’s life, and now I trust you with my son’s. I have every bit of faith that, with your guidance, Telemachus will grow to be a better person and ruler than Odysseus and I could have ever been.”

Athena prepares herself for a rebuttal, prepared to say that it wasn’t their fault, that Odysseus was torn forcefully away from his home and his family, and that Penelope was left trying to keep the kingdom from caving in on itself for twenty years at the same time she was trying to protect her and her son, but Penelope has already offered a brief bow and turned away from her, making her way back towards her family.

It’s a wonder, Athena thinks with a fond smile, how this family always manages to sneak in the last word.