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Chapter Text

It had been too fast and too slow at the same time when she’d seen.

“Aishhh,” Odysseus groans, pinned to the ground.

Diomedes bears witness to the moment Selene’s light threw Odysseus’ shadow into sharp relief, knife raised, sees it once, twice, three times. She rages.

Already, she has a slender, calloused hand over her thick shoulder, pinning the other bulky arm to the ground with a well-placed knee over its forearm.

Her other hand holds a dagger to Odysseus’ throat. Already, the danger has passed.

And yet.

Diomedes’ dark skin gleams in the moonlight, along with the grief and anger in her eyes.

“What the fuck?” she demands, digging her knee into the lines of blue beneath the skin, bringing life to the body of this horrible, gorgeous, two-faced, lying woman.

Odysseus gives a low groan, and swallows against the blade.

Diomedes tightens her grip on her shoulder, and is given another groan for her trouble, quieter and breathier.

“Stop that,” she orders, dagger biting in on a slip of her grip.

Blood rolls off to the side of Odysseus’ neck, and Diomedes is rewarded for her accidental show of force with a whimpering moan, Odysseus’ horsetail-lashed eyes falling shut, fightless.

“Answer me,” she commands, heat pooling in her gut when Odysseus breathes a wispy “Yes.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

She almost tries to shake her head no, before giving up with a whine when the blade bites further into her skin, tears shining in her eyes. Diomedes burns, set alight in more ways than one.

“You pathetic, traitorous bitch,” she snaps, her weight bearing down on trapped limbs.

Odysseus cries out at the pressure, throat bare now that the knife has withdrawn. The fire gets hotter.

“I…” she intones, low and rumbling. “didn’t ask you… a yes or no question.” 

A slow tear rolls down Odysseus’ cheek just before Diomedes’ teeth clamp down on her neck.

She bucks beneath Diomedes, the docile trance broken.

“Stop!” she gasps, body twisting away from the sensation.

She shakes and pushes until she’s dislodged the knee in her arm, and uses all the force she’s got to throw her away.

She struggles to her elbows, breathless and trembling.

Her teeth shine red, stained with blood under the light of the moon where she crouches, muscles taut like a predator ready to pounce.

Odysseus is a weak, weak woman.

Her head drops back at the sight, clit throbbing. The motion bares her throat again.

She almost doesn’t care.

But rather than those sharp teeth in her neck, making her feel alive, there’s a hand dragging her to standing by a harsh grip around her jaw.

She gasps as she’s pulled to her feet, and she nearly falls over.

“Pull it together,” Dio hisses in her ear.

“I— I’m sor—” she starts, voice high, almost light.

“Don’t lie to me, Odysseus. I’m not in the mood for your games.”

Fuuuck.

“Fuck,” she says, sucking her teeth. “Hey, Dio, you know I—”

“Do I?” she interjects again. “Do I know anything about you at all, daughter of Anticlea?

“Yes,” she says, voice still airy and sweet, not brassy, not honest.

Diomedes socks her in the stomach and watches her double over.

“What do I know?”

Her answer is a wheezing “Stop.” but Diomedes has long since learned that stop, like any of her other lies, is just a word to her. She doesn’t mean it.

What does any of it mean?

“You’re so disingenuous,” she bites out, eyes welling with sorrow. “Tell me it hasn’t all been real, so I can think you never gave a shit.”

“Dio—”

“Tell me you wouldn’t care for me as you have, and then turn around and give it all up in a moment.”

“Stop—”

“Tell me it wouldn’t have hurt you to watch me bleed.”

“What does it matter?!” Odysseus chokes out. “You hurt me anyway.”

“I hurt you??” she hisses, incredulous.

“You overcome me, Diomedes,” she laments. “Your soul alters my own. You surround me. You consume my reason. I’ve only ever felt anything like it once.”

“Your lady wife.”

“My Penelope,” she groans. “Oh, I miss her like a limb. She would have won the war by now, she would have been home to me. You take my mind from task matters as swiftly and completely as she does. She would love you, as I do.”

“You dare speak of love?” Diomedes demands, enraged once more.

Her nails sink into the thin skin of Odysseus’ face, drawing blood and staining her nails as well.

“No, I don’t.” she moans, hiding her face with the hand that isn’t clinging to Diomedes’ clothing to stay upright. “Oh, my soul, my soul, my poor most feeble soul. I need you gone, so I can think. I need you here, so I can feel. I want so desperately for home, but you bring it with you. I cannot fight like a woman starved when my soul is being fed. You nourish me.”

The decadent arch of her dark upper lip curls in disgust.

“You nauseate me.”

“A matter of course—” Here, her voice is low and strong. “I am nauseating.”

And there’s the honesty.

Diomedes is oddly sickened to hear it.

“Oh, gracious, kind Diomedes, forgive a weary woman her fault and folly, this once!” she begs, hand slipping lower to clutch at her hip, rubbing sensuously.

Always neglecting, of course, to mention all the times Diomedes had calmly gone along with being swept up in her bullshit.

And still, Diomedes is weary too, and fault and folly is human nature. Odysseus plays every game known to man at once. Dio, she’s only human.

If she wants to haggle for a screaming burn between her legs over a whip whistling for her back, who is Diomedes to deny her?

“You owe me… dearly for this favor.”

“Anything you want,” she says, smiling with wolf teeth.

“You pay tonight.”

“You ask my body of me?” she gasps, feigning surprise.

“For tonight, because you asked it of me, and then never again. I respect your lady wife too much for that, daughter of Anticlea. Lies fall from your lips as easy as breathing; I’ll take you apart, and by the end of the night, we’ll see if you’ve the wherewithal to lie to me, you fork-tongued seductress.”

Diomedes considers tying her up, but in the end just shoves her in front on the path, hoisting the Palladium once more.

Chapter Text

They pass the sentries with no trouble, and make it back to camp. Odysseus, out of habit, turns toward her tent, and Diomedes snatches her back by the hair, heedless of her cry.

“Come, you venomous creature. I swear I’ll file your fangs tonight.”

Odysseus, with head hung low and eyes already glazed, can’t help a moan.

“Hush,” Diomedes snaps. “Does this look like any sort of a tent to you?”

Odysseus, steps unsteady, is the first into the tent, and Diomedes pushes her down onto the bed.

She shucks off her clothes, revealing small, plush breasts, and wide, swooping hips, and folds them as neatly as always.

Then she climbs onto the bed on her front, shoving Odysseus’ legs apart and pushing her clothes up, exposing gently curling pubes and a red clit.

She could go lower than that, really get in, but she has a plan, and that’s not it.

“Oh!” she laughs, dizzy with glee. “You’re gonna feel this everywhere in the morning!”

She presses a kiss to Odysseus’ hipbone while her hand pushes up under the clothes, resting between Ody’s massive tits. She rubs her knuckles slowly into that left breast, and her mouth falls open around a moan just as Diomedes bites down on her hip.

She cries out, thick thighs clamping around Dio’s neck.

She pins her legs down, shifts, gives the lower end of her clit a kitty lick, and grins at the sound it buys, doing it again.

She continues until Odysseus is gasping, and her arms twitch with restraining her urge to shove Diomedes’ head away, clawing at the sheets.

There’s a debt to pay… and it hurts so good.

“Dio— oh, my Dio!!” she cries, throwing her head back as she gets closer. “There! There, there, there!!”

She comes like she hasn’t since she left Ithaca, since Penelope draped her over her lap and worked a weaver’s strong, clever fingers over her nipples until she shook apart under her hands.

But she is not considerate, kind Penelope, and Odysseus answers to Diomedes tonight. With a final twisting of her tongue, she wrings one last gush of release out of Odysseus, along with a sweet whine.

Then she drags her trembling form up from the sheets, and sits her up against her own body. 

She pours oil over her thigh to smooth the slide, and then sets Odysseus atop it, bare.

She kisses the taste of Odysseus’ own release into her pliant mouth, while lifting her by the hips and thrusting her hip and thigh up into that oversensitive clit at the same time as she lowers her down, getting her clothes filthy with the oil and her fluids.

Odysseus jolts, and then gives out a throaty sound very like a sob when the stimulation continues. Diomedes, with tongues and teeth, isn’t kissing her gently. She’s kissing like she wants to drag that “most feeble soul” out through her mouth… she bets she could.

Diomedes can tell the moment when the pain turns into even higher pleasure, because Odysseus goes back from sobbing to gasping, her mouth falling open even wider.

She slides her hands up the sides of Odysseus’ long underlayer and forces tan hips down against a dark plane of muscle and oil again and again, and Odysseus cries out, her full-body shaking causing further stimulation as her head lolls.

Her throat is bare, and the skin around the mark from before is slowly darkening. The temptation is too great.

She sinks her teeth into the previous wound, and Ody’s whole body goes taut for three seconds before that addictive form goes limp, followed by her thigh dripping anew.

Diomedes almost thinks she’s come so hard she passed out, but when she shuffles to wake her, it wrings out a moan.

She lays a filthy slap on ample rear, and feels Ody’s clit throb.

“So you’re still with us, after all,” she murmurs into a swiftly reddening ear.

“Dio, don’t—” she starts, slurring her words, cutting off when Diomedes pours more oil onto her skin, pooling slightly in the juncture of her hip and thigh, lifting her knee to slide Odysseus forward into the dip with a punched-out groan. “Please—!”

Diomedes grabs her by the ass and pushes her sensitivity into full contact with slicked skin. Odysseus moans like a dying thing. She can’t fight a grin, something like bloodlust without the blood, but sharper than plain lust.

Her hand slips lower, beneath Odysseus’ thigh, and along with her kneading grip pulling a groan from kiss-bitten lips, she herself grinds forward into the dry contact, the slicking from her cunt enough to make it smoother, but still rough, still good, so good.

She moans aloud, hands shaking for the second time tonight.

Her forehead drops onto Odysseus’ shoulder as she just rolls her tan hips back and forth, never giving her a break from the stimulation.

When she comes for the third time, it’s with a scream.

Diomedes is loath to take a pause, but has to when she gets her next idea. While unconventional, it would give her back a slight reprieve from supporting the weight of two ripped soldiers.

She lays Odysseus down on her front, touch almost dipping into gentle. It pulls soft whimpers from her pink lips. With a light nip at her ear, she retreats from the top of the bed.

She lays her head on Ody’s back, and holds down a hip with one hand.

With the other, she reaches beneath her bedmate and drags a knuckle roughly under her clit.

Predictably, Odysseus bucks with a cry.

Diomedes is ready. She’s not stopping. She goes on.

With just a twist of the knuckle, she pulls a whine from a shaking Ody. It’s not enough.

Diomedes had planned for this. She still hasn’t come yet, and the desire was mounting everywhere in her body.

Her hands, the ones that hold Odysseus, poor, dear, hypersensitive Odysseus… well, they shake.

So she tries to hold her hand completely still beneath Odysseus… as a soldier, queen, and soldier queen well aware that tension makes you shake even worse.

When her knuckle begins to vibrate directly into Odysseus’ clit, she is immediately rewarded with quickening breath. When she moves the knuckle in small, shaking circles, Odysseus cries out once more.

“Oh—!! Oh!!” she slurs in a wail, drool and tears soaking the pillow and her dripping cunt soaking the sheets.

No longer thinking clearly enough to hold still at the moment, she twists and struggles, clawing at the bed to get away from the stimulation, and Diomedes bites down on the skin of her back just where it starts to curve out to meet her ass.

She goes limp again, almost not breathing this time, but Diomedes has had ten years. She is hip to her body’s every fucking game.

She patiently laves her tongue over the wound, cherishing iron on her tongue, familiar and real, blood never lies, just waiting until Odysseus’ consciousness surfaces again.

When she tenses, just slightly, Diomedes can’t help a smile.

“Gotcha,” she grins.

Then she switches up the rhythm.

The quick, small touches turn to rolling, alternating ministrations, and Odysseus falls apart for it.

“Dio!” she wails. “No! Please! Please!”

Tense and shaking, she sobs her way to release.

Diomedes has never felt so alive.

Of course, the night goes on.

Diomedes swore at the beginning of this that Odysseus would be too undone to lie by the end, and at the moment, she still had all her clothes on.

An Odysseus who can contain herself, an Odysseus who can speak? Is an Odysseus who can bargain is an Odysseus who can — and who will — lie, cheat, and steal.

That’s not good enough.

Four is a start, but Diomedes will have her silver tongue made of lead by the end of this.

Chapter Text

Now, after taking a second to catch her breath and get inspired again, she knows what to do.

Rubbing thoroughly all the way, she divests Odysseus of her clothing. Laying Odysseus on her back again, she roves her hands lightly over vast, curving planes of tan skin. Then she’s digging her hands into stubborn, knotted muscle to moans and low protests until Odysseus submits, trembling and boneless.

And when she’s gone up and down thick, gorgeous limbs, wrung moans and gasps out of a freshly marked-up throat, she goes from kneeling above Odysseus to resting on her soft belly, grinding down onto the open space beneath her chest and stealing her breath with the pressure.

She ruts down and digs her blunt-nailed fingers into ample bosom, moaning and pulling moans from the enchantress beneath her.

She is a maddening creature, but it hardly matters. In here,  Diomedes doesn’t have to pretend she’s not as mad as her mother when Odysseus is keening and clawing at her sides, leaving gray-white lines down the dry skin over her ribs.

She can hear a familiar whispered jab from Patroclus, the only other dark skinned girl in the commanders’ circle, about being ashy on the battlefield and adding to the thick dust, and she laughs, still perched on a whining Queen.

That she can see the dust from the camp is so… I charge her come see it herself.

The torture she seeks to inflict bounds back on her. So fascinating— spellbinding.

She backs up, sitting on wide, arcing hips now, then bows her head and kisses the tender inside of her breast, nuzzling into the space. She breathes in and it’s just— her.

She’s distracted, and she’s pissed, and Odysseus threw her so far off today, but it’s the familiarity of perfume and honey over sweat, and it’s good. It’s so good, because it’s her.

She licks up the sweat forming on reddened skin, and leaves bites in a line while slowly moving upward.

When she reaches a puffy nipple, the first thing she does is lave her tongue over it, sliding her hips back until she rests on Odysseus’ thighs, before sucking deeply. Odysseus tries to move an arm, but the limb is too sore, too relaxed, and her will too weak.

She can feel the pressure of Dio up against her, leaning forward over her hips, buzzing everywhere in her body, and it’s so good.

Another swiping curl of her tongue, and the pleasure is tilting into pain, the mind melt of this overwhelming, outright agonizing pleasure being her blessedly, cursedly lenient punishment.

This soldier wages war on the body of an enemy who lives and has not fallen, but gasps and emits death rattles like she has.

Oh, how I love her.

“Dio,” she begs through kiss-bitten lips, trying to move her arms, stiff and sore from tensing and relaxing, and this time succeeding. The younger woman looks up, moving just her eyes, and with a mouthful of tit, she doesn’t look particularly inclined to let go.

She presses trembling hands to the sides of Diomedes’ face, and tries to establish eye contact to give her begging a chance to succeed.

“Dio, let go, please. A break,” she pleads. “Just a break. I’ll take it so good, I already have been, right? Just a break?”

Diomedes, with a pop of suction breaking, does release her nipple, but the sigh of relief she gives is stolen by another gasp when she covers her clit with her palm, rubbing heavy circles into her sensitivity.

Diomedes scoots back further, pushing thick, muscular thighs apart with her knees as she lays her head down, indulging herself briefly in mouthing at decadent rolls. Odysseus feasts at this war she wants no part in like she’s reminding everyone she is a queen, and she does so with great joy at each rare opportunity.

Delicious. I want to eat her whole.

Where before, only Diomedes’ eyes could reap the succulent rewards, now she can touch. Now, she gets to taste.

It’s almost worth it.

“Convince me,” she says.

“Con—? Hahh—!!” a harsher press makes her see stars for a second. “Please, what—? What do you mean?!”

“Convince me to stop,” she threnes, a sharp look in her eyes, to contrast with her laying her head on soft belly. “Use every trick you have. Convince me.”

What?!

“I— I’m here because I convinced you to sleep with me instead of taking your revenge in public. So I — ah! — Please! I want to give you your due, for the punishment for my treachery could have been the lash or the stone, and yet you have been good to me.”

“Mn.”

“But this grows exhausting, and even the cool air brushing against my heated skin causes me great pain. Every time the pleasure crests, I feel I die a small death. You’ll have me, you do have me, you have had me—! I beg of you, great Diomedes, this last shred of mercy, no!”

She sobs, dry-eyed and breathless, as Dio buries her head between her folds and presses the flat of her tongue to the hypersensitive underside of her clit, back to kitty licking like she was at the start, and this time laying absolute waste to a body twice as sensitive.

Odysseus trembles and keens and begs, and Diomedes simply relishes in it, and makes her come so hard she starts crying again, tears and snot on her face as she shakes uncontrollably.

Her cunt drips with her ecstatic overwhelm while her eyes continue to spill over. Diomedes would have her fill of come and tears, but she finds she doesn’t want to move. Instead, she drinks the replenishment of her soul in release, cradling Odysseus’ hips in her hands.

Then Diomedes, less than inclined to give her a second to catch her breath, nonetheless needs to breathe herself, and while she breathes deeply, she keeps a grip on lovely, wide hips so tight Ody starts squirming against it, nipping bruises into the soft crease of hip and thigh.

She’s certain she’ll have handprint-shaped bruises come morning, through the haze.

Somehow, she can’t bring herself to mind.

As Diomedes lowers her head and presses biting kisses to the sweaty, shaking expanse of her thighs, focusing on showy, she can’t really bring herself to mind that either.

When the bruise she knows is blooming on her neck is under her armor tomorrow, she’ll think of it with the same fluttering feeling she gets when she thinks of Penelope.

It’ll scare her, more than anything has in a while.

But she’s not aware enough to be scared right now and Diomedes looks delicious laid hungrily between her legs. Ody wants to bite, return the fervor she’s been met with, give Dio everything, but she’s flat on her back and she can’t.

So she lifts her heavy head further, and she reaches down with shaking hands and tugs at the roots of locked hair, forcing her to raise her head.

Their eyes meet for a single second.

Dio flashes bloody teeth in a positively predatory smile.

Odysseus moans aloud, head dropping back onto the pillow.

“You greedy bitch,” she gripes. “I knew from the start of this horrifically god-touched war that a stonefaced little thing like you had to be incredibly pent up, but by Olympus—”

Diomedes laughs, bittersweet.

“You call me stonefaced, but it’s you who sees through all my masks.”

“Well, clearly I didn’t see through this one well enough.”

But Odysseus—? She stokes the madness like no other. It has been hers to command, given freely. How can she not know that which is of me, when she knows me? How can she claim to not know me.

“What? This is exactly—?”

“—or I’d have just taken my lashing—”

Confused and offended, she just clamps onto the nearest thigh to shut her up, and is met with a gorgeous cry for her efforts. She’s delicious, and her drink is not enough. Diomedes mourns her her own broken heart as she craves the distillation of Odysseus’ soul.

Still… What does she mean by “mask”? I’m punishing her how she asked.

“You call me stonefaced, but it’s you who sees through all my masks.”

“Well, clearly I didn’t see through this one well enough or I’d have just taken my lashing—”

Interruption ignored, Diomedes cuts her off by biting into her thigh in a way that makes her shout, in obviously natural pain and a surprising pleasure whose reason fucking eluded her!

She goes at it open-mouthed like she’s trying to get the largest chunk she can of a fucking goat leg, and somehow the mind-bending pressure isn’t breaking skin.

“Agh,” she grunts weakly, voice stolen from her by… by any number of things.

As the burning, screaming feeling recedes, she twitches and trembles, and Diomedes just. keeps. talking.

“You can have a lashing, too, if you want it,” she says, soft and confused.

What grounds have you for confusion? Odysseus thinks spitefully. I want to know why I still lie beneath you when you’ve already had your way with me.

“I rather thought the bites and the onslaught of feeling would be sufficient?” she grunts, before biting into the opposite thigh.

Odysseus moans again.

“…I could eat you whole,” Diomedes murmurs when she lets go.

“Please…” she chokes out, turning her head away.

“Please, what?”

She turns her head farther, deferentially baring her neck to the feeding lioness above her.

The animal urge to eat her throat resurfaces.

I want so deeply to consume you in your entirety. I want to eat you whole. I want to snap your throat. I need you to want to consume me. I need to give my heart to you and watch you eat it raw. Even now, I wish you’d tear it from my chest.

For the submission, Diomedes is gracious, and presses a hot, heavy, distracting kiss to her jaw, rubbing at her clit with only two light, slow fingers, taking her so high she goes limp again.

Diomedes gives her everything as kindly as she can, and when Odysseus comes, it’s with a moan of her name.

“My Diomedes,” she whines. “So good to me.”

Diomedes kisses the words right out of her mouth.

“You know it’s not over?” she asks softly, moved to gentleness, if only for a moment.

Tears well in hazel eyes, and she laughs weakly.

“Why should it be?” she smiles, wiping at her eyes before she pushes her shaking form up, relaxing into Diomedes and opening her mouth up to an all-encompassing kiss.

Strong hands slip beneath her shoulders and hold her up, and Diomedes, kissing and licking into her mouth, finally met with a reaction that makes sense, gives her a little break.

In her head, she holds a goblet to the lips of her captive captor. Inside the cup is the distillation of her soul.

Chapter Text

When soothing pets turn again to heated groping, Odysseus could cry from how close it already pushes her. The pressure on her shoulders needs basically no time to take her from molten and honeyed to trembling with renewed arousal.

“Don’t, don’t,” she whimpers, swatting blindly when she feels Dio’s hand press on her thigh and start to slide up.

“Odysseus,” she says, in a warning tone.

“I know, I know, I said. I won’t struggle, and I won’t fuss. This is… this is a punishment.”

Diomedes almost continues in her pattern, the established penance being paid in burning nerves, when Odysseus chokes out bitterly: “And oh, my Lady, I am punished.”

With a growl, she backhands Odysseus, eliciting a yelp.

“You’ll live,” she says coldly. “Never for a moment is it in question that you’ll live.”

Odysseus bares her teeth and growls, struggling like she swore she wouldn’t, always lying, and Diomedes grabs her by the throat and shakes.

She bucks and snarls, and she only stops when Diomedes presses down with her hand till she can’t breathe.

Why am I still in this bed when we already—? Oh, I just can’t breathe!

There’s a horrible, hot flush in her cheeks, and her eyes ache in her head.

She can’t keep still, and she can’t calm down, and everything aches, and it’s only getting worse—

Let go! she swears she shrieks, but it tears its way out of her throat as a hateful, painful, wordless sob.

She’s gonna kill me. Oh, gods, she’s gonna kill me.

The fear is psychedelic, and she’s so angry, but the fear combined with stupid, stupid trust is such a drug that she can’t make herself fight. The urge to submit and let go of the pain is too strong.

With a pitiful whine and a constricted throat, her mind cracks and she falls still, furious, awake but not.

When she submits, still glaring up hatefully, Diomedes shoves a leg between her thighs, swapping it out for the hold on her throat.

In no time, she’s ripping another climax out of her with none of her earlier gentling while she pants and cusses and damns her name with torn words that fall loose and rough from kiss-bitten lips.

She’s too riled up to care.

Beautiful.

How dare—?

She bites into the side of her pale throat mindlessly and can’t help the animal urge to shake her.

Odysseus beats at her sides with frantic fists, gasping and writhing.

“No, no, no, no, stop!”

It breaks through to her at last.

With a gasp, she throws herself off Odysseus, and nearly off the bed.

She looks down at her ravaged, bare form, and she’s gorgeous, but she’s crying like she’s dying, and Diomedes hadn’t noticed.

Her eyes flick up on instinct, skyward. She doesn’t feel Athena. She wants Odysseus’ neck between her teeth— she is not her mother, because she is unforsaken.

She is favored, actually, and she will remain so, so she must… must control herself.

Odysseus is crying hard, and she herself only notices when she goes to hide her face and recoils from the moisture.

This is not what I do to people when I’m controlling myself.

She shakes and sobs, and Diomedes, who knew before they started that this was what was being asked of her, nevertheless felt in that moment that the lash might have been better.

Odysseus wraps her arms around herself and weeps, unable to cover the lovely, trembling curves that escape the bruising hold of her arms.

Diomedes, sane enough to be remorseful, reaches for her wrists first, pulling them down slowly and baring her wrecked expression.

“Don’t,” she chokes out, bowing her head and hugging herself tighter.

Dio is… torn, knowing too much about her to truly feel that leaving her be is a good idea. And sure enough, when she pulls away hesitantly, Odysseus sobs harder, releasing herself to cling to Diomedes’ work-sore wrists, shaking her head.

“Don’t go,” she wails, Diomedes sending an alarmed glance at the door of the tent.

“Ok,” she murmurs, shushing her. “Come on, baby.”

Odysseus curls into herself, and Diomedes tugs her shuddering form onto her lap, feeling rather sore and wilted herself.

She bows her head and plants a kiss on the top of Odysseus’.

“You’re lovely,” she murmurs, laying her head on Dio’s chest. “Sweeter than I deserve.”

“You cried like I was killing you.”

“A fate I earned.”

“Odysseus…” she tries, shifting anxiously, only to freeze when she cries out, tears falling from her eyes anew.

Diomedes is twice as aware of her aches as she was a moment ago, and then the awareness doubles again. She feels like a monster, but she can’t keep this position up.

When she turns her focus back to Odysseus, there are tears in her eyes. Her breath stutters over itself, rushed and stumbling inhales tripping on unsteady, harsh exhales, and her legs defy all attempts at stillness.

“Please don’t move,” she begs. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Please!”

“Just give me a second, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Her eyes fall shut, and she hangs her head. Her begging turns to supplication, prostration.

“Please,” she whispers.

“I’ll be gentle.”

“Please.”

“So gentle.”

“Please.”

“You won’t feel a thing.”

“Please.”

“I have to.”

“Please.”

“I need to.”

“Please.”

Diomedes, feeling evil, shifts her legs apart, trying to minimize stimulation, but when Odysseus hisses sharply and starts crying again, she has to just finish the motion, sliding out from beneath her and vacating the bed entirely in one complicated motion.

She tries to move her neck, but the bruise is too tender. She tries to move her arms, but they’re sore from exertion, and she has a horrible urge to reach down and bring herself off one last time for some relief, but the last bit of her mind that’s still rational knows that won’t fix anything.

She doesn’t know where Diomedes is, and—

“Dio?” she asks, in the smallest voice Diomedes has ever heard from her.

A ragged sigh tears its way out of her.

“I’m here,” she says, barely breathing.

With a hesitant glance, she reaches out and lays a single hand on her stomach, pressing into the skin over her womb.

The pressure is a great, sighing relief, and she gives a pitiful moan.

“Please…”

She reaches down to lay both her hands, trembling with exertion enough to override an archer’s steadiness, over Diomedes’.

“Please…”

Diomedes presses harder, and her breathing suffers slightly, but the feeling goes away.

“Thank you,” she sobs. “I’m sorry.”

At least, this time, it’s not a lie.

Chapter Text

“Don’t,” Dio murmurs, laying her head down on their joined hands.

Odysseus wants to eat her up.

“I know this is what you asked for, but—”

What? she thinks, lifting her head in surprise.

“What I asked for?” she demands, and then gasps when the pressure abates. “No, come back—”

It returns, and her head drops back onto the pillow.

“What do you mean ‘what I asked for’, Dio?” she asks, looking at the top of the tent and breathing very carefully.

“You brought me in here, Odysseus, and took advantage of my sympathy,” she laments, dragging full, soft lips up her side.

“And I let you, because I’ve never learned a lesson in my life.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

She snarls, cutting her eyes at the trickster laid out beneath her. This is the woman she hasn’t killed for her treachery, lain bare and whipped for her crimes.

“I mean I should have yoked you to the Palladium and driven you like a cow for all the ways you’ve betrayed me tonight. I should have killed you where you stood, and I still should,” she swears, voice choked up.

Odysseus tears up as well, as confused as she’s ever been in her life.

“What..?”

“You asked me to punish you without an audience, to torture you, knowing that before I could truly hurt you, my weakness for you would surpass the strength of my rage.”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb, Ody,” she pleads, kneeling beside the bed in a mockery of prayer. “I can’t take it. Not after you’ve stolen a favor from me for the second time tonight.”

“Girl, what are you talking about?” she groans, legs still spread as she attempts to avoid the stimulation that Diomedes is sure returns every time she moves.

She bares her throat, and the marks Dio has left on her throat are a stark contrast to the tan sky they are stars in. She has never wanted to touch the stars before.

“This. All of this,” she groans, lifting her head. “Before an audience, bullwhip in hand, I don’t have to stand over you and tell myself when to cease my blows. I’m playing my role, swallowed by a crowd of rowdy, united women who will stop me when they see fit. Every other word out of your mouth is a lie. How can I know what’s right? I don’t want to harm you, out there or in here, to kneel above you while you beg to be freed or to feel a whip in my hand like a parody of my sword. I just want you to be good to me. I gave you what you asked for, and now—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“What?”

“You hurt me. You know you hurt me. I didn’t ask you to hurt me, Dio. Why would I do that? I avoid pain whenever possible. You know this.”

“Then… then what?” she asks, baffled. “Don’t assume I know anything.”

“I offered myself to you as a form of penance, to pay you back. I expected to use my hands or my mouth on you, let you between my legs if I had to. Instead, you've pinned me down and had your way with me for hours now, and barely even gotten yourself off at all. By this time, I thought I’d be sore, but asleep. This… this wasn’t what I asked for at all.”

“What?” Diomedes says.

“I would never have chosen this over the lash,” she breathed softly, a single tear falling from her eye. “I’d have sooner fallen upon my own sword than come here had I known. And I know how unfair it is to say you should’ve known that, but you should’ve known that.”

“I…” don’t even have anything to say to that. A warm body has never been the solution to any of our problems, that she’d have the audacity to ask that…

Why would I forgive her an attempt on my life for the chance to get her to give me head? Why would she think I’d forgive an attempt on my life for the chance to give … well, actually.

Then Odysseus grins, and her heavy head goes light with a mix of emotions.

“I didn’t ask you to stop when you first got to work down there because I thought you were trying to get me to relax.”

“Relax?” she asks, incredulous despite herself.

“Yes. I figured it was the least you could do for a partner, no matter how badly they’d wronged you. Accursed Palamedes herself prepped me before she dishonored me. But then you kept going, and I had questions, but I couldn’t breathe, much less stop you. You didn’t pause for more than a second till the third or fourth time I came. And by then, whew. Talking was off the table.”

“You’re so terrible,” Diomedes groans, digging her face into Odysseus’ belly. “You’re telling me I spent the last however long blindly torturing you, and you had no warning, and the only thing you have to say for it is a comparison to Palamedes, who knows no peace in death for the wrongs she committed against you, and ‘whew’? You must be joking.”

“It was kinda hot,” she shrugs.

It’s a joke. It’s clearly a joke. Diomedes wants to laugh.

She bursts into tears, shaking her head, curses falling from her lips with abandon.

Odysseus is surprised, to be completely honest. She lifts her head a bit, supporting it with her left hand as she reaches toward Diomedes with her right.

“What ails you, lovest?”

“You bitch,” she sobs, apropos of nothing. “You fucking bitch.”

“Wow, okay, name calling? Grow up.”

“Be for real, Odysseus,” she moans, tears dripping steadily down her face. “You… you never…”

“Dio, listen,” she murmurs, cupping her face with a shaking hand. “It wasn’t what I expected, and it was certainly an impressive, possibly oppressive experience, but I think you’ve had much worse than positively mind blowing sex happen to you tonight, hm darling?”

She huffs, wiping at her face roughly.

“Don’t be so…”

“So what? Lovely? Beautiful? Gracious? Lovely? Did I say lovely?”

“Odysseus!” she protests, pressing her palm-heels into her closed eyes. “Don’t be so elusive.”

Her eye twitches at being seen through, but she smiles past it.

“Whatever do you mean, darling?”

“I can usually hear when you’re lying, which I guess is a pretty useless skill if I can’t stop an attempt on my very life with it, but don’t disrespect me by just lying to my face like I can’t tell!”

That damn murder attempt.

The feelings it stirs up inside her regarding Diomedes are all so… inconvenient.

She lets her head fall back.

“Look, Dio, I—”

“Odysseus, please.”

“Darling—”

“Please.”

She sighs, turning her face away from Diomedes’ blurry gaze.

“Don’t ask me why I tried to kill you,” she says, so softly Diomedes has to strain to hear it. “I don’t have an answer.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Diomedes says, breathing with great intention, trying to stave off the tightness in her chest.

She sighs deeply, and presses her lips to Ody’s abdomen, breathing her in.

The urge to tear through her stomach and eat all her vital organs has hardly subsided, but Athena turned away from her mother for shit like this, and she cannot love Diomedes like she loved Tydeus, who she left to die.

“What, then—?” Odysseus demands, impatient as ever, but a little nervous, too.

Diomedes looks up curiously, and her eyes look hunted.

“I was going to ask… why not fight back harder, when you were caught?”

“What?”

Chapter Text

“Why not—?”

“No, I heard you the first time. What—? What does it even matter?”

“It matters a great deal, for reasons I’m sure you can see.”

She directs a fearful glance at the sky beyond their tent.

She knows they could be heard by forces greater than them no matter where they go. These fabric walls are less than nothing to the ears of the gods that rule over the world around them.

And you know it better than I do, she thinks.

She sees the shine of madness in her eyes, and she thinks she knows what it means. But Diomedes is cleverer than that. She wouldn’t sin against her body and her own. Not like her mother.

The man Tydeus ate had killed her, she recalls, a cold tongue of fear lacing through her.

Diomedes’ eyes rove over her throat hungrily.

Athena’s name almost crosses her mind in prayer.

“Dio, please. You know as well as I that what you say and how you say it is a great deal more important than why, and that the very same goes for what you do. What I did… you did what you were supposed to.”

“A master strategist like you is better than suppositions.”

“You know I speak truth.”

“Out there,” she whispers, steeling herself. “Not in here.”

“Dio—”

“The gods are great and generous with us,” she murmurs, ignoring Odysseus’ alarmed stare. “We beg that they hear our plea and permit us to govern each other, within the walls of our two tents, and the walls of our two hearts.”

The smell of myrtle and seafoam fills the room as thunder cracks outside, and their eyes flash at each other, owl-grey.

The concentrated prayers of two of Athena’s heroes have been answered, even as they offend Aphrodite, and invade her precious Troy. There may well be a trick.

She can’t be bothered to examine it, if there is.

“You’d expose a weakness to Aphrodite, who loves Troy and favors the child of her blood, Aeneas, who fights among them?”

Though apparently Odysseus can.

Bastard, she thinks.

“For you? Of course.”

With the weight of that blessing upon them, Diomedes bows her head, and returns to laying kisses on Odysseus’ midsection as she shivers beneath the gentle touch.

“Answer me,” she offers, as close as she’s been to anyone since cool, cunning Sthenelus cradled her silently in the wake of the victory over Thebes.

Sthenelus, her sister-in-arms, who warned her in no uncertain terms of the dangers of getting close to Odysseus.

Oh well, it hasn’t killed her yet.

Not for lack of trying, though. Unless…

Odysseus moans softly, sinking her hand into the loosed locs that fan out over her stomach.

“Dio…”

“Speak freely. Justify yourself, daughter of Anticlea. Speak with honesty. I’m inclined to grant you mercy further than you’ve earned, selfishly and jealously enough.”

“I was frightened,” she admits.

Diomedes hums lowly, and she blushes.

“I’d figured.”

“But not like—”

She gives a groan of frustration.

“It was foolish, and I know that now. I knew it immediately after I’d done it. But I didn’t lie, when I told you I feared that I was underperforming because of you.”

“You’d crush any obstacle to get to your Penelope," Diomedes knows.

“You’re more than an obstacle to me,” Odysseus chokes out like it pains her to say. “You endeared yourself to me undetected, and with inordinate speed. I didn’t even notice that I loved you until long after it had begun."

“You pride yourself on seeing everything, and I—”

“Snuck past my every defense without ever meaning to, without even needing to try. That’s—”

The tremble has returned to her hands now, and she takes handfuls of Diomedes’ long hair into them, clutching but not pulling.

Satisfied she’s getting somewhere, Dio rewards her compliance by pressing into the contact with a catlike sigh.

“You’ve spent ten years at war.”

“As have you,” Odysseus says bitterly.

They both know it’s been more than ten years of war for her. She came of age at war. Odysseus is untanned and uncalloused in comparison to her.

“Yet somehow you balk at the prospect of being a murderer.”

She flinches beneath her, and then, from her place against her stomach, Diomedes feels her heart skip a beat.

It’s the second reaction in as many seconds that hasn’t been so smothered as to be unreadable, and the urge returns to be the most unkind version of herself.

She sits up, and Odysseus’ hands fall to her sides. She leans down, and lays front-to-front with her only ally and her only enemy in the same breath.

The next words are said directly into her ear.

“How many have you felled this year, Odysseus? This month? This week? Face it. We’re at war. You’re a killer, now and forever. For honor, for your legacy, for power, for the freedom of your own wife’s cousin. Isn’t all of that enough to set aside your… meager morals?”

Odysseus lies… very still.

“Diomedes,” she says, tone perfectly even, with an almost hidden undercurrent of tension. “I believe I have made my feelings on the war effort very clear in the past.”

“And if I said I disagreed?”

“My answer would not change.”

“Really?”

Her touch grows sultry, and her heterochromic eyes shine. The way they lay, pressed against each other from neck to foot, is suddenly very heated.

“What are you..?”

She really wishes everything Odysseus did didn’t get to her so much. All she does is play games.

She’s sore from the exertion of all she’s done these last few hours, and she’s so very exhausted.

“Now, Odysseus, I don’t think you quite understand what I’m offering here. The agreed penance was your body. I’m willing to exchange that, something I’m sure must pain you, for some honest answers off your lying fucking tongue. I suggest you comply.”

Odysseus clicks her tongue.

“Such an inconsiderate partner, Diomedes,” she groans softly, her skin heating where they touch.

They touch everywhere.

“I see you, even though you don’t want to see yourself. You don’t want Penelope’s wife, Telemachus’ mother, to be a murderer.”

She makes a choked, enraged sound. Diomedes snarls, and she falls silent.

“You’ve absolved yourself of the guilt of killing at war, because hey, you don’t want to be here. It’s the gods, it’s Agamemnon, it’s Palamedes. Sure. But when we’re alone on our way back from a retrieval mission and you pull a knife on me, that’s not Palamedes. That’s not Agamemnon. That’s not even the gods. That’s you, Odysseus. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Odysseus stops breathing.

Diomedes leans back, and looks down curiously, but she’s literally just laying there open-eyed. She looks dead.

She blinks after several seconds, and her facial expression morphs into utter anguish.

“What?”

Something in Diomedes’ chest twists, and she forges on.

“What’s wrong with you?” she hisses directly into Odysseus’ ear.

“What?!” she gasps, barely coherent.

Her eyes well and spill over within seconds, and finally, finally, Diomedes gets something honest from her.

Chapter Text

She talks through tears, her words barely understandable at first.

“I don’t know!” is the first thing Dio can parse.

“Not good enough,” she says immediately.

It takes Odysseus’ proverbial knees out from under her, and she takes gasping breaths, grasping the hand over her throat in such a way that it’s clear she was trying to reach for her neck itself.

She feels unsafe, Diomedes realizes.

Good. So do I.

Diomedes has this sudden awareness that she’s never touched so much of Odysseus at once.

Then she has another sudden awareness that she’s never been so aggressive in their interactions before.

She’d thought— she’d been trying to—…

She knows the likelihood of a person being able to mete out impartial punishment as an injured party. But she’s done it before.

Why, with Odysseus, can she not—?

It’s always something different with you.

She pulls away from Odysseus as if burned, and attempts to compile her thoughts appropriately. For the moment, she sits up on her hips in an echo of their earlier carnage and carnality.

She’s suddenly very glad that the Palladium has been hidden under a layer of fabric, because catching a glimpse of it out of the corner of her eye would just be more embarrassing now, considering how she’s done nothing to display a shred of wisdom since they entered this tent.

Odysseus grabs for her own neck like a lifeline, despite how tender and sore the skin there must be considering more of it is purple than pale. She wheezes and coughs.

Was I choking her out?

“I don’t know how to say what…” she sobs. “I don’t… I wanted… I wanted to feel safe. It’s not really you, I just got scared. I scared myself. When all of this is over, we’re both going home. I don’t want to leave part of my heart behind here. What use is my heart in the pocket of the reigning queen of Argos, who does not have need for it?”

“What use? Fool, what use is my blood on your hands?”

She cries harder at that, hiding her face with her hands.

“Diomedes, you haven’t done anything strange or unsupposed tonight,” she chokes out. “And yet, I feel surprised every time you speak.”

Diomedes raises an eyebrow at her.

“You’re right about me, you know?” she says, in blank terror, avoiding her gaze. “I’m wrong. I’m fucked up. What kind of madwoman sees love and fears it?”

“No,” Diomedes says, sure of one thing. “That’s very sensible. Love got us here. Love has us on the banks of this accursed river, because Paris and fools of his ilk do not think to fear love. Love can bring much suffering.”

“I don’t want you to suffer,” she admits, looking up with teary eyes. “It scares me, to love you… but you understand. You’ve already been burned.”

“…You have hurt me deeply, tonight,” she admits in return, bringing them close again. “I have been weaker for you, and trusted you, more than anyone, except perhaps Sthenelus. Like you said, I have always tried to see everything, but you snuck past my every defense…”

“And you didn’t notice,” Odysseus finishes.

“Not until you raised a hand to me, meaning to kill me, and I couldn’t kill you for it.”

Odysseus’ eyes search over her face for a hint of a lie, and find nothing. Her heart cracks.

“Oh, Dio…” she croons, bringing her hands to either side of her face.

Her blue-gray eye is on the opposite side from Odysseus’, so Athena’s blessing meets Athena’s blessing when they stare at each other’s faces like this.

“I love you,” Diomedes says, a single tear falling from her still-brown eye. “I trusted you to have my back. I believed in you, and you let me down.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, leaning up to kiss her gently on the cheek. “I’m so very sorry, dear. I don’t…”

An idea begins to form in her head.

“Let me… Diomedes, let me try something.”

She looks down suspiciously.

“Speak.”

“Seeing as we lay here already… might we do this the way I intended?”

Diomedes looks at her with apprehension.

“Which would be..?”

“You beneath me, having me however you wanted to. The route I intended made this much more of a… trust exercise, of sorts, rather than a punishment. My penance.”

“I watched you go under, lose your voice and your protests,” she says. “How can I… how can I trust that you won’t hurt me while I’m under, even just as retaliation for the things I’ve done to you tonight?”

“I don’t know,” she says, smiling. “I can tell you that I won’t, but as you’ve said, ‘every other word out of my mouth is a lie’. Would you be willing to try it anyway?”

Her eyes narrow in suspicion, but at last, she leans down, breathing her in before she rolls off to lay beside her.

Odysseus sits up with a wolf’s grin, and Diomedes can’t help a laugh.

“What, you terrible woman?” she asks, impossibly soft.

“I don’t even want you under,” she smiles, shuffling around the bed before pressing a kiss to her hip as a callback to the ‘punishment’. “You’ll be so lovely when you sing.”

When the imparting press of teeth against bone makes her gasp softly, mismatched and mischievous eyes shine up to match her own.

Then, Odysseus lays between her legs, pillowing her head on a lovely, thick thigh.

“Be good to me?” Diomedes asks softly, tangling a hand into curly brown hair.

Odysseus presses a kiss to her inner thigh, and delights in the shiver it elicits.

“Of course.”

Diomedes laughs again, and lays her head back on the pillow.

Odysseus sucks a bruise into her hipbone, and then takes her by the waist with both hands, before setting eagerly to the task of marking up dark thighs to match her own, in feeling if not in color.

The pressure required to bruise their shared thick skin, she knows, is incredible, and Diomedes clearly likes it, lying pliant on her back as Odysseus feasts upon a lean cut of Achaean warrior.

Chapter Text

She perfumes her own skin with honey — frivolously and pettily bought and bargained for, her fuck you(one of many) to the war effort — despite the way the insects flock here as they had at home. A flyswat is never far, she’ll say. But Diomedes? She tastes of the salt water she bathes in and a sheen of sweat, and something earthier, flesh, warm and alive.

“Oh, you’re utterly delectable, aren’t you, darling?” she murmurs, drinking the scent in, and Diomedes moans aloud.

“Ody…” she whines, squirming with anticipation.

“Shhh,” she shifts closer to the spot where Diomedes wants her, and presses lips to skin, relishing the intimacy.

She tangles deft fingers in her bush and tugs lightly, just to see what she’ll get for it.

Diomedes trembles, breath hitching, and the sound would’ve gotten her going again if she’d come a single time less.

Beautiful, she thinks, and says it.

“Beautiful, darling. Sooo gorgeous.”

Diomedes spreads her legs farther, turning her face away and covering it with an arm.

Odysseus laughs.

“You awful tease,” she complains.

“Am I, now?”

“For as long you aren’t putting that silver tongue to work, y— ah!”

Odysseus licks at her folds and greedily partakes of the sweet nectar that drips from her, grazing the base of her clit with her teeth.

There’s a shiver, but the reaction is less somehow.

“Not quite right, darling?” she quips.

“To the left,” she breathes, like they’re adjusting a tapestry.

Well, Odysseus will adjust something, alright.

With great enthusiasm, she sets to the task of making Diomedes forget her volume. At the moment, the Argive queen is too quiet for her tastes.

With a hand on her hip and another on her ass, she can’t move away when Odysseus locks her lips over her clit and kitty licks until she groans.

“Slow— slow down!” she gasps, and Odysseus does, breathing deeply through her nose as she adjusts the pace.

She glances up, and Diomedes’ eyes are beautifully half-lidded.

“Oh, there it is. Good girl,” she says, reaching down to sink a hand into Odysseus’ curly hair and pull her up for a kiss, strong, warm arms coming around her neck to cling tightly.

Odysseus moans into the kiss as Diomedes grabs her ass and kneads the flesh with warm hands, her grip tight.

“Thought you said you’d make me sing?” Diomedes asks through gasps, coming up for breath after a solid minute of plundering Odysseus’ mouth.

Odysseus shakes her head, burying her face in Diomedes’ neck with a supplicate kiss to the skin beneath her lips.

“What— whatever you want,” she gasps against her.

“I heard you the first time…”

And yet… 

“Whatever?”

“Anything.”

Diomedes kisses her deeply once more and pulls away, Odysseus chasing her heat.

“Anything, you say?”

She moans wordlessly.

“Good. The best you’ve been all night. So good to me, hon. Get back down there,” she smiles, slapping her ass for good measure, met with the added bonus of another filthy moan.

Athena herself could walk in right now and Diomedes could only be glad it was at least unlikely, because then she would have to grapple with not caring.

Bet that’s what my mother said, comes to her mind unbidden.

Odysseus licks up the side of her clit, and Athena and Tydeus are suddenly gone from her mind.

And if any of the women outside come lumbering in to complain about the noise, wiping sleep from their eyes to be replaced by shock… This had been rumored for years, even if it wasn’t true until just now.

In new heights of — admittedly characteristic by now, in the context of Odysseus — shamelessness, she’d be forced to shrug.

She leans back on her elbows and watches the show as Odysseus lowers her head without protest even after all her big talking just moments before, and she strays to the left with the tongue against her clit.

She’s… she’s really fucking good at this, holy shit.

It’s hard to think against the ebb and flow of perfect pressure, but she doesn’t want to lose her voice.

“Such a good listener,” she says, just to have something to say. “Such a lovely girl.”

Odysseus moans directly against her clit and she hisses, head dropping back.

“Lovely,” she repeats. “Beautiful.”

She presses and sucks with abandon, and the weakness in Diomedes’ limbs is too much to ignore. She tries to hold still, but the waves of pleasure are… pure revelry.

With a glint in her eyes, Odysseus sucks deeply, and Diomedes shudders, unable to tame the shake in her legs.

It’s good, it’s so good, but after a while, she realizes she’s not getting any closer.

“Odysseus, try something else.”

She pauses for a few seconds, thinking, and Diomedes feels her clit throbbing everywhere in her body, a deprived gasp forcing its way out of her.

Then she shifts on the bed, pushing her thighs apart more and sliding further to the right. Then she lowers her head again, and from the first hesitant press of her tongue, it’s different.

Something about the angle is so good she can’t keep quiet, slapping a hand over her mouth to muffle the moan that escapes it.

Odysseus presses the flat of her tongue to the widest area she can, and laves her tongue heavily up the side of her clit.

“Yes,” she moans, free hand fisting the sheets.

Odysseus pins her down by the stomach, and then does something incredible with her tongue, and Diomedes bites down on the hand over her mouth to keep quiet.

…The pain makes it better, even.

Odysseus pulls off, lips glistening with her juices, sighing deeply.

“Hey, don’t do that,” she says, eyes focused again and shining with mirth. “I said I’d make you sing, didn’t I? Don’t I deserve a reward for making you feel so good, darling?”

Diomedes, the nautical rhythm snatched from her, releases her hand and bares her teeth.

“Hell no! I— ah!”

Odysseus had deceptively chosen that very moment to work actual magic against her clit with her hand, and if she hadn’t strangled the moan that escaped her throat to the best of her abilities, it may very well have been a scream.

Seconds later, she’s trembling through her third orgasm of the night, and she’s this close to forgetting every wrong Odysseus has ever wrought against her.

“More,” she begs. “More.”

Chapter Text

“No,” Odysseus shushes. “Take a second to recover.”

“M-more,” she insists, shaking.

“No, no,” she says softly, caressing her face with her clean hand.

“You said I could— You said I could have what I wanted!” she gasps out, accusatory.

She’s not ready.

“Here, baby,” she says, pressing two slick fingers to her lips.

Diomedes looks up at her with dazed, confused eyes.

“What—? What are you..?” she purses pretty lips.

She holds off on pushing deeper for just a second, letting her slur the words out.

Then she presses more insistently, waiting until Dio opens. When she does, Odysseus pushes in as her mouth falls open around a moan.

“Suck.”

Diomedes, eyes half-lidded, brings a hand to her wrist and clings to it as she licks the fingers clean of her own fluids.

“Beautiful.”

Withdrawing her hand, Odysseus straddles her hips in yet another mirror of the night’s earlier activities, sucking and biting at her neck as she squirms.

“Please, please,” Diomedes says soon, hands roaming her back and sides with no coordination and an unshakable tremble.

“Please what?” she asks, pulling back gently as Diomedes clings to her.

“Please,” she pants.

“Use your words, darling.”

“Pl— please make me come. I— I need it, Odysseus, please,” she begs, a tear falling from her dark eye.

She likes it to the left, Odysseus thinks, reaching down with her left hand to give her some pressure.

Diomedes gasps, head falling back.

“Yes,” she moans, breathing shallowly. “There, that’s— it’s so good, I—”

Odysseus bites gently at her ribs, before moving toward her breasts and sucking and nipping at the sensitive area beneath them.

Diomedes shivers and squirms, panting heavily.

Odysseus rolls her tongue over one pebbled nipple, eliciting a shudder from her target.

Beautiful.

She sucks gently, and with a graze of teeth, has Diomedes bucking up into her hand, whole body overcome with sensation.

“Odysseus,” she moans, covering her mouth, trying desperately to muffle it. “Odysseus.”

That— that monster pulls her hand away just as the peak is right there, and everything that was warm and honeyed is suddenly cold and sharp.

“No!” she exclaims, desperate. “Why—?!”

She reaches down to do it herself, and there are the offending hands, and now they’re taking hold of her wrists and pinning them down.

“What are you doing?” she demands, out of breath from overwhelm.

“Shhh,” Odysseus soothes, placing a gentle hand on her lower abdomen. “You’ll understand soon.”

She lied, again.

“That’s not what I want,” she reminds Odysseus indignantly, her eyes betraying her in pricking with tears, and her voice betraying her with its shake. “You said I’d have you how I want.”

“Trust me, baby, you’re really gonna want this the way I do it,” she says, pulling away again.

Diomedes convulses, robbed of the everything that she was just hurtling toward. Odysseus still has her wrists pinned above her head, and she’s stronger than this.

Odysseus, who she’d overpowered with ease mere hours before. Odysseus, who’s been so… so mean.

She moans, and the mournful sound crashes against the sharp sea rocks of a gods-honest sob.

I’ll kill her, she thinks, choking back another despite the bitter cold gnawing at her soul. I’ll kill her so dead, oh fuck. 

“Let me come, Odysseus, please,” she begs, helpless before the mind that could think her way out of the opposite torture.

Her own cutthroat, sharp brilliance is dulled, here, Athena’s blessing useless against its mirror. She’d let her guard down, again.

When will she learn?

“Please…”

“No,” she shushes, almost condescending, like Diomedes is a child, like Diomedes isn’t a killer, like Diomedes couldn’t—

I couldn’t kill her.

Something inside her very being shifts.

“Please, Odysseus, don’t— don’t take this from me,” she begs. “Let me have it.”

“No,” she shushes again. Diomedes tries to pull her wrists away again, wanting more than anything now to just do it herself, for the sake of getting it done and picking up the shards of her self respect later.

Odysseus holds her in place easily with a mocking smile.

Her breathing speeds up, a mix of desperation and hatred. She wants Odysseus inside her, resting against her soul. She wants Odysseus far, far away, out of reach where Diomedes can’t use her to make bad fucking decisions.

But she’s not far enough, and she’s sure as hell not close enough, so that damn smirk just hovers above her with the approximate care of a marble statue.

“Please, don’t insult my intelligence, Diomedes. You know as well as I that if you truly meant to leave, I couldn’t stop you.

Is that… true?

Odysseus watches the battle unfold behind her eyes, intrigued.

The question of “Could I go?”

Maybe that was a mean thing to tell her. It wasn’t something she could’ve figured out on her own, I don’t think, she muses, so maybe it wasn’t for her to know.

Tremors run up and down Diomedes’ body, and Odysseus can’t bring herself to care.

Her hands shake and twitch, and they arm

Diomedes’ earlier inclination to get her off as many times as she could regardless of whether or not she was up to it was hot, but her clit still aches as she leans down on strong wrists and pulls away when Diomedes’ breathing gets good and heavy.

“I… I can’t,” she protests, breath coming  short and shallow. “Odysseus, please don’t take it, it’s too much, I can’t!”

Odysseus pulls away, and Diomedes emits the beginning of a wailing scream.

She shoves three fingers down her throat and presses her into the bed by planting her other hand on her stomach.

Her hands come down to try and find release, but Odysseus is on top of her by that time, laid front to front with her struggling victim and her tied aggressor in the same breath.

I can’t stop. If I do, it’s my ass.

Breathing heavily herself from exertion, Odysseus’s heartbeat is loud in her ears.

Fuck.