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Telemachus was gone.
A writhing, merciless darkness had swallowed him whole, and Odysseus could not reach him. His limbs were mountainously heavy, and however hard he strained his movements were sluggish and far, far too slow.
The water was black and churning, and something was restraining Odysseus, and Telemachus was suffering somewhere below. The wooden deck below his feet was swaying, the details and lines shifting into some inscrutable mass.
His son had disappeared, reaching for him in terror with shining honey-coloured eyes as the wave crested and broke over him.
This time, he knew, this time Telemachus was truly gone, there would be no miracle, Odysseus would not catch him before he sunk and there was nothing he could do but watch as-
Odysseus choked down a scream as he woke.
His muscles had locked in place with terror, his body wracked with tremors that would not dissipate.
Penelope stirred at his side, reaching for him on instinct before she was fully conscious. “My love?” she murmured, her voice still heavy with sleep but eyes slowly brightening with awareness.
“I’m alright,” he whispered back, though the strain of his voice betrayed him. “I just- I just need to go check on Telemachus.”
Warm, aching understanding flickered through his beloved wife’s expression, and she squeezed his hand once before letting him go. Countless nights had unfolded like this, countless more would.
Odysseus eased out of bed, the cold of the palace floors jarring after the warmth of his wedding bed. He focused on the sensation to ground him as he walked, using every scrap of self-restraint not to break out into a run.
The walk to Telemachus’s room was ingrained in his bones – the short distance had never felt so stretched before. He nodded to the guards as he approached, and they stepped aside without a word. They, too, understood what this routine was.
The doors gave way before him, then shut decisively at his back.
His eyes locked on an empty bed, and his heart dropped out of his chest.
The covers were thrown back, the darkness suffocating where the moonlight could not reach, and his son was not-
“Father?”
A small, unsteady voice from the balcony. Odysseus turned, and there, Telemachus sat against the balcony.
Only a few steps away.
Familiar terror released its vice-grip on his heart, the pounding in his ears quietened. So dizzy with relief he could barely stand, Odysseus approached the balustrades.
The boy had his knees pulled up against his chest, the soft white of his sleeping clothes fluttering gently against the breeze. His arms were bared to the winter night, slight fingers gripping his forearm in a way that seemed painful.
It was uncomfortably cold.
“You’ll catch a chill,” was all he managed, his heart in his throat.
Telemachus only shook his head, his eyes – red-rimmed, his chest ached for his son – sliding back out to the horizon. “It… helps.”
“The cold?” Odysseus tried, feeling like he was navigating a battlefield blind. He wanted so badly to help – there was so little he could do.
“The sky. It was the first thing I saw after- after their ship.” Telemachus tucked his face in further behind his arms, eyes shining with a melancholy too deep for a face so young. “I couldn’t find it in Charybdis. Couldn’t find a way out.”
The words struck him somewhere between the ribs, sticking in his lungs like a thorn.
Gods, his voice was so quiet, barely above a whisper, and so easily swallowed by the depth of the night. The raiders were dead – his love had seen to it, had whispered her bloody feat to him as she drifted to sleep against his chest and he had loved her so fiercely for it – but their scars lingered.
Tentatively, Odysseus opened his arms. Telemachus did not always wish to be touched in these states, but the distance between them ached.
Telemachus’s face crumpled with tears when his eyes flickered back to him, and he threw himself into the embrace with a strangled sob. Odysseus immediately wrapped his arms around him, cradling the back of his head with one hand while the other traced gentle circle’s into his son’s back. Trembling, Telemachus cried openly into his shoulder, hands clutched tightly in the fabric at his back.
He pressed his son as close to him as he could, as if he could shield him from threats that were long past and from any yet to come. For now, all he could do was keep his son warm.
“It’s okay,” he whispered, over and over again against his boy’s hair. He choked back an ‘I’m here’ – Odysseus had been there, too, while Telemachus suffered, and had solved nothing. It likely would not be the comfort he intended it as. Words failing, he pressed a kiss to his son’s temple.
They stayed like that for a small eternity, holding on so tightly his muscles grew sore, but Telemachus’s shaking subsided, his breaths came and went more easily. Odysseus almost thought he’d fallen asleep before he spoke up again.
“Why did you come see me?” The question was barely audible, but his heart cracked at the sound of it anyway.
“I was worried. I’m glad I did.”
“I’m keeping you awake.”
Odysseus didn’t need to see his face to imagine his expression, that same confused twist of his brow when he was cared for more than he could rationalise, the one that always hurt so much to see.
“I don’t want to be asleep if you’re hurting, kid.” He twisted a strand of Telemachus’s hair between his fingers – black again, that beautiful shade he shared with Penelope. It shimmered like ink against his palm.
“I’m not. The raiders, they’re- they’re gone, and we’re not even at sea, so this is stupid I don’t know why I-” He choked on another smothered cry and pushed his face further against Odysseus’s shoulder.
He gripped his son tighter, trying in vain to control his breathing so his boy would not notice how close he was to coming apart himself.
“Telemachus,” he murmured against his hair, so full of love and grief he could barely speak. “Are we in Troy?”
The question caught him off guard enough that he stilled, then hesitantly shook his head as best he could manage in the restricting hold.
“And yet,” Odysseus continued, willing his voice to remain steady, “I still dream of the war. There are no enemy soldiers left to fight-” there are none left alive “-and yet it often feels as though they remain in front of me.”
Telemachus shifted slightly – considering, though still unconvinced.
“I also dream of Charybdis.” That startled him, and Odysseus now had to find a way to finish speaking while looking into watery honey-brown eyes, blinking up at him with such trust it hurt. “I dream of losing you beneath the waves. I hold you in my arms now – and still I am terrified of it.”
“Oh.” His son’s voice was soft, and so terribly sad. Odysseus would have burned the world to ash if it would make that pain disappear. “How do we make it stop?”
He hated how he had to answer that. If there were some cure, some magical artifact he could travel the world to find and defeat monsters to obtain that would make it stop for his child he would do so in a heartbeat. But there was none, and there never would be.
“We cannot, in truth,” Odysseus admitted, though the words burned as they left him. There was a quiet hitching of breath, a tightening of small hands at his back before he could finish. “But we can make it better. The nightmares will not be so strong, one day, nor so frequent, and you will learn to feel safe again. We all will.
We each have our fears, and our memories that haunt our sleeping hours, and I promise you, my heart, you will never have to face yours alone.”
Tears were seeping through the fabric by his shoulder, warm against the chill of the air.
“And if sitting out here to watch the sky helps, even if only slightly, then there is no place I would rather be.”
“You’ll stay?” Telemachus asked, and gods his voice was still trembling and rough around the edges with desperation and there was nothing in the world that could have made Odysseus leave his side.
“Of course.” Anything, kid. Anything you want from me, it’s yours. It has always been yours.
He pulled back a margin, tears drying in streaks across his face – still full with childhood. Telemachus was still so young. It was easy to forget, with his shining intelligence and quips and the power of his magic, but he was so small. He still fit so perfectly in Odysseus’s arms, as if he had been moulded only to hold this boy.
Telemachus shifted, breaths shaky as he turned his head to rest his ear over Odysseus’s heart. Almost deliriously, he wondered if son could hear how much it beat for him, drumming the rhythm of his name.
His eyes found the sky again, even as his blinking grew more sluggish with exhaustion. Hand trembling, Odysseus wove his fingers into his hair, tracing his fingers in soothing patterns.
“Sleep,” he whispered, the world silenced of wind or rustling or birds, a held breath for the sanctity of the moment. “I’ll be here.”
Above them, the stars shone twice as bright.