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The first year he tries resisting. It doesn’t help.
The next he stops, and whispers Penelope’s and Telemachus’ names to will himself asleep in Calypso’s arms.
The third he gives up on begging her to let him go. Sixteen years he’s spent with one single-minded focus, sacrificing what will to get home. A distant part of himself, the one that still rages beneath the enchantments, screams at him not give up hope here.
The fourth he takes to wandering the shores of Ogygia; he can walk the short outline from sunrise to sunset in the summer days, and be back in the cave by Calypso’s nightly call. Those days, he’s not sure whether he takes more solace in the endless horizon that blankets the cherished sight of his family, or her hand on his cheek promising him all would be alright in Penelope’s voice. He’s scaring himself.
The fifth year he’s sure he’s gone mad. He stands at the cliff edge and listens to the waves crashing against rocks; the ground seems to rock beneath his planted feet, the churning water holds the screams that reverberated in Polyphemus’ cave, the agony of the six he sacrificed. The sight of his comrades falling under the Thunder-Bringer’s wrath dance in the foam caps that spray to the sky when they hit the cliff, making the ground shake beneath his feet. Calypso calls for him sweetly, and coos songs of romance through the night, but she cannot keep him away from the water after the sun has risen.
The sixth he thinks non-stop about Telemachus. He’d turn nineteen that year, barely younger than him when he’d set out for Troy. Is he married? Is he taking good care of his mother? Does he remember him at all? Does he think he’s abandoned them–like he abandoned his men (“But we’ll die”–“I know.”)? (Monster. Monster). They scream it at him. He tries reaching for them, to touch their image in the water, but his fingers pause before they reach the surface–his leash has lengthened no great amount. He starts thinking of throwing himself off the cliff. Would it break the spell?
In the seventh, his fallen friends invade his dreams, and he stops sleeping again. He lies in Calypso’s arms, and chants Penelope’s name like a mantra, willing his eyes open so he does not see Eurylachus choking on his own blood again. The images quickly follow him into the waking world, and so does the screaming, non-stop, six hundred men weeping and wailing and calling for him, begging him to help, “Captain!–”
Even Calypso’s hand in his, singing enchantments into his ears don’t quiet what his world has become. He cannot turn without seeing Elenor, Perimedis, Lycaon, Amphialos, Alkimos. He cannot breathe without Polites’ final breath rattling its way through his ribs. He hardly hears Calypso pleading with to away from the cliff edge anymore—his ears are entirely filled with the screams of his dying friends, of his faults.
He wants to scream, for the memories that crush him, for the enchantments that bind him from the only thing that made all those sacrifices worthwhile. He screams.
*
Athena!
Let him go, please. Let him go.
*
He feels something nearly akin to fear when Calypso tells him he may leave. He wonders nearly whether this is yet another spell, if he’s not going to open his eyes and find her clothed in Penelope’s skin. But the pain in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks when she tells him of Hermes’ visit reveals its truth to him.
He knows she loves him. Some part of him loves her too, in the way one must love the only living creature they’ve seen in the last seven years. It’s not in any way enough for him, though she may have attempted to make do.
Penelope’s waiting.
For twenty years, two decades away from her side. The longing to see her once more has not dulled with time, rather sharpening with acute desperation with each passing day.
And here is another hope, a final chance, brought by the messenger god and, he is starting to suspect, his long-estranged patron.
He knows Calypso loves him. She brings him supplies to last weeks he hopes not to need while he builds a roughly lashed raft, and ties knots where he directs her. A small part of him thinks of how long she’s been here alone and mourns. The larger part of him wants to see the last of her, wants to leave behind the screams, the memories, her hand on his face as his mind fogst.
He sets out, finally, finally, first and final stop Ithaca. Penelope. Telemachus.
He slays those who stand in his path. Those he doesn’t he avoids, single-minded, laser-focused. Ithaca, home is nearly within sights, glittering on the horizon like a coveted jewel so long bereft from.
I’m almost there, my love—
*
Between one breath and the next, the ocean beneath him spins.
*
“Morning sleepyhead, you’ve been resting for a while.”
No. No, no, no—
“…Tell me though, who’s Penelope?”
“My wife.”
She schools her face from the slight upset quickly, just as she had the first time. Calypso looks no different than when he left her merely days ago, but he feels different—different aches, the rope burns on his wrists from his crew’s lashing him to the statue in their mutiny, the clawing of his stomach after nine days adrift.
“I’ve got all you could want here—” she begins, the melody of her voice familiar, too familiar.
“No, there’s something wrong here,” he says, but she only smiles, taking his trembling hands in her own.
“It’s alright dear, you’re safe now. No one comes or goes here—my island is completely unknown.”
He tries pulling away. He remembers doing that a lot, and suddenly he wants to scream. “I know,” he gasps, “I’ve met you—we’ve done all this before.” She keeps smiling at him with that pitying smile that had first picked him up from the shores and clothed and fed him. He is suddenly seized with a sudden desperation. He knows what comes next. “There’s something wrong—”
“You’re mine” she coos, and his eyelids begin to fall. “till the end of time”.
He falls under.
*
He doesn’t give up, though the desperation that seizes him is so much stronger now, his home another seven years away. Is this another spell of Calypso? A trick of the god’s? Athena wouldn’t betray him like this, would she? Would Hermes?
He tries to tell Calypso, but she seems to think they’re the ravings of a madman and offers him placating smiles and draughts of calming wine.
The first year he resists her. He tells her she agreed to let him go, that she helped him leave. That if she loves him truly she’d let him leave.
She replies, “Why would you want to leave? This is paradise, my dear.”
He tries screaming. He shouts himself hoarse, scares half the birds on the island; Athena, Athena, Athena! It’s no use. She’s not listening, and it seems as though Calypso’s little island isn’t significant enough to fall within the sight of a passing diety.
The second he stops calling for aid. Calypso seems to take this as a sign, and takes him to bed every night. He starts letting her, too—what does it matter, at this point? He’s already spent seven years in this place.
The third he throws himself off the cliff edge. She jumps after him, and breaks his fall with immortal bones. He nurses her to health with a sickening amalgamation of guilt and revulsion he can’t begin to parse through.
The fourth he gets used to the spell’s newly shrunk boundaries. He can no longer reach the water, though the sound of its waves reach his ears still. Calypso is always within reach, and she takes his pleading and explaining with an even smaller grain of salt. He tries to show her that something has gone wrong, that he’s not supposed to be here, now, but he had worked so hard to not remember anything of his first stay, he cannot prophecy anything. The caution that warrs with the hope in his heart that he only has three more years to go commits him to keep a journal of the island’s everyday happenings, of the things Calypso says and does, and memorizing the words he’s written every nightfall. (Because what if this happens again? What if there’s no end?)
The fifth she lets him back to the water, though remains by his side ever-watchful. He starts talking back to the voices in the waves, screams catching in his ears, his throat. Two more years.
The sixth he breaks again, shouts at Calypso and tells her he will never love her the way she wants him to, that in a year’s time a god will come and demand his release. That her obsession with him is futile, will yield her nothing. She doesn’t speak to him for a week, but then her passions only increase, as though the threat of a limit on their time together has scared her. Like she knows it's possible.
The seventh he doesn’t let an hour pass without praying to his goddess. He calls to Hermes as well, their names on his tongue even as Calypso sings him to oblivion. When the god finally visits, Calypso comes to see him with a paled face.
“You were telling the truth. You’ve been through this before.” Odysseus feels tears gather at his eyes. Fourteen years he’s spent on this island, and he is so close, so, so close. “Oh, Ody, I am so sorry—for not believing you,” she is crying as well. That part of his heart that has not rotted to mercilessness pities the crumpling of her expression. “I know how unhappy you’ve been here. I’m not sorry for loving you—but to think that you’ve spent fourteen years in torment when I’ve only ever known half of it…”
“Did Hermes say anything else, when he came?” he asks, when it seems she’s too overcome to continue. She shakes her head.
“Only that the gods have decreed I must release you,” and her voice turns bitter.
He turns away and nods, looking towards the woods. “Then I have a raft to build. Hermes will come see me again, before I reach Ithaca. I will ask him for aid then.”
She doesn’t doubt him, this time.
*
Hermes opens his mouth to speak, but Odysseus knows what he’s going to say. “I know, I can’t open this bag.”
He closes it, and blinks. “How—”
“Hermes,” he says, urgently. “I was in this exact same spot seven years ago. You told me my path was dangerous, and I told you I would do whatever it took to make it home. When Ithaca came into my sights, the world seemed to eclipse, and I found myself back on Calypso’s eyes, seemingly seven years in the past. It is as though I was sent back in time.”
Hermes listens to him, uninterrupting till he’s finished. He is blindingly terrified of those golden eyes squinting with disbelief, but Hermes’ face only sets with more gravity as he continues speaking. He replies, then, “That is a dire tale, old friend. For if it is true what you have said, it is not you who have been thrown in the past—after all, you have memories of all that originally transpired and there are no two Odysseus’ on this ship right now.”
Realization dawns. “It is the world—”
“Yes, the world itself, spun backwards, all the gods themselves turned back—whatever—”
He quiets. Odysseus starts, “I have only a few days till I reach Ithaca. I do not know whether my destination is what triggered this, but if there is but a chance that I could make it this time…”
“Then you must do whatever it takes. For if you do not set out full speed ahead, your home will be lost to you anyways.”
“Then I must go.”
Hermes nods, uncharacteristically grim. “And I will find out what has happened, and put an end to it.”
He disappears, and Odysseus readies his sails. Penelope’s waiting. He’s waited.
*
Olympus shakes with the sound of the gods’ fighting. They argue and shout over each other, less a war council than a near all-out brawl.
“Bring Poseidon, then!” Athena calls, eyes swimming with storm clouds. “Who else holds such a grudge against him to do such a thing.”
Aphrodite hums, “But to throw the whole world into reverse for the sake of one son’s sight—it seems a little much, even for Poseidon, no?”
“That’s supposing he even has the power to do such a thing—speaking of, how are you so sure that he’s not just lying?” Ares counters. “It’s an absurd claim.”
Hermes puffs his chest. “I vouch for him—are you questioning my honesty?”
“Your honesty?” Apollo laughs and Hermes starts forward.
Zeus stands. “Enough! I will summon Poseidon. We will get to the bottom of this. If it is true that the little hero is lying, then you two,” and he points to his daughter and son with the same finger that rains devastating bolts of lightening upon those who incur his wrath, “will bear the consequences with him.”
Poseidon arrives quickly. His teeth curl back at the sight that awaits. “What is this?” he asks.
“Your mortal problem has become all our problem,” Apollo says, leaning back on his throne. “Hermes here claims that Odysseus has been stuck in a time loop of a sorts that turns the events of the world backwards, with only his mind safe from its touch.”
“Which would mean that we all here have repeated the last seven years unwittingly, stuck with everything other than him,” Hera muses. Poseidon turns his eyes to her.
“You cannot possibly,” he grits out,“believe that I would do such a thing against the Pantheon.”
Ares’ eyes gleam. “An unintentional side-effect of your little war on the hero, then?”
He shakes his head. “If I had such a power, perhaps!”
Ares nods, but Athena’s expression only grows more thunderous. “You are the only one with so mighty a grudge against the hero, though enough power you may not have. Then the question is who you could have possibly conspired with…”
*
Ithaca is in sights. “I’m on my way, love, I’m almost there,” he calls. Don’t be scared now, I’m almost there—
Whirlpools, beneath him. The sky eclipses. He manages a final, “Penelope!”, before the world succumbs to darkness…
*
“Morning sleepyhead!—”
“I’ve been resting for a while, I know, I know,” he cries, burying his face into sand and ripping away from her hands. “You are Calypso and I am stuck on this island till the god Hermes will come and release me by the decree of the Olympians in seven years time. You will fall in love with me in that time and live to regret it the rest of your days.”
She is silent. Then, “Are you an oracle?”
He shakes his head and tells her everything, of his journey and the fourteen years he’s spent here. He describes her cave, the cliffs, the songs she favors before sleep. She continues to stare at him with an undecipherable look and so he says, “I will write down everything that is to happen tomorrow from sunrise to sunset from that which I remember. We will look at it tomorrow evening, and if what I have written is true, then you must believe me.”
Finally, she nods, acquiescing. Then she takes his hand again and leads him inland. He doesn’t resist, but before he falls asleep, he writes down the length of the morrow on a scrap of paper she gives him, praying to unlistening gods that he has not forgotten a thing.
The next day transpires as he has recalled, something he had almost thought his luck would not allow. Calypso’s brows furrow and darken as she reads the writing by candlelight, and when she’s done she draws him close. “If I am to give you up in seven years, should not I take whatever I can now in this short time?”
He shakes his head, a heart so full of grief every action feels heavy. “Calypso, I have known you for fourteen years. In both times I was here, I was miserable, so lost and so grieved that even you let me go willingly, such was your love for me. Spare us both the grief, my dear, and help me.” Her eyes leak with tears, and he wipes them away. “Please, Calypso, please. I know you are lonely, but I also know you are not cruel. I cannot remain here forever, your memory reset every decade.”
She is nodding, and his heart leaps and jumps. “I will help you, for the sake of this great love you say I could have held. Already I…I want to keep you, but the thought of you unhappy to no end breaks my heart.” He sees her wavering expression and he grips her hand suddenly, tightly, as if to will her to understand his plight. “I thought you were my saving grace when you washed up ashore, you know? My dream come true…I’ve been alone for so, so long.” Her voice breaks and she begins to cry. He holds her, now, and lets her sob herself to sleep.
The morning comes and they set to work. He begins to build his raft while Calypso sets to dismantling the enchantments keeping him here. It takes her the better part of the morning, and then she starts collecting supplies for his journey. His heart swells with his love for her, nothing close to the kind he has for Penelope and rife with grief and pain and revulsion, but it is still a sort of love, he thinks. Some part of him thinks, this one has hardly even done anything to him. He tries not to think too hard on it, anyways.
When his raft is finally finished, they stand together at the shore, looking out towards the horizon line. His heart beats with a fury—he is far closer than he was any of the other times. She cautions him, “You are not traveling with the gods’ favor this time. Your route will be unknown, and dangerous.”
“I know,” he says, steadily. “But I have time.” Something that these loops have taught him, then. Patience. (Though he’s somehow more desperate than ever.) “And I know the way ahead.”
“Take care of the water, of Poseidon. His grief will be nearer in mind than your last attempts,” she continues. “I have polished your sword and imbued it with strength—keep it always close at hand.” He nods, clutches her hand in gratitude. Her eyes start to water again. “I hope that you reach your Penelope soon.” And then she turns away from him and walks inland.
Odysseus climbs onto the raft and sets out into the open sea, for what he hopes is the last time.
*
He avoids Charybdis, like last time. He sails quickly and navigates the rough seas that greet him, not stopping for anything.
He has been away from home for nearly thirty years.
When Poseidon greets him he is ruthless. More than he had thought he could be. He isn’t sure what has forced him back into time again and again but all his logic can only point to the screaming and writhing god beneath him, begging him for mercy.
He demands to be sent back home. The god bathed in his own ichor finally acquiesces. But he’s not done.
*
Once Ithaca’s walls are bathed with blood and Penelope and their son safely in his arms, he cleans the kingdom’s nearly empty coffers to organize an offering to Athena the likes of which have never been seen before. When he prays to her, he thinks, “There is something you should know”.
Penelope is concerned, he knows. It has only been thirteen years for her, but it has been decades for him and he cannot—“I have to do this, to ensure I can remain with you.”
He doesn’t know if it's love for him or just pure nostalgia that she does not call him outright mad. “I trust you,” she says simply, and Odysseus’s heart overflows.
Athena answers. The first thing she asks is, “How did you escape Ogygia on your own?”
“The nymph herself set me free,” he answers. It is evening, and darkness has set over the gardens. The only thing that assures him it is the goddess before him is the candle he holds in his hand, the acrid smell of ozone that seeps off her, and that she has explicably chosen to appear when he was walking under the shade of an olive tree. “Athena, something is very, very wrong.”
He tells her what happened on the island, what he told Hermes, everything he suspects, the odd things Poseidon had said while he was screaming in pain (‘too soon’). He doesn’t expect his ex-mentor’s eyes to soften and suspiciously water as he continues his tale, but it is nearly gratifying.
“Odysseus, I…can’t help but feel like I led you astray.” Resolve reestablishes itself in her steely gray eyes. “What you have said is most troubling. I will call together the Pantheon at once. From what you have said, we now have a longer deadline to solve this problem—nevertheless, I shall make haste.”
She disappears, and Odysseus continues pacing the twilit gardens.
*
Olympus shudders with the sound of the gods’ rage.
*
Odysseus carefully extricates himself from their bed when he hears the tell-tale sounds of Athena in the back of his mind. After tucking the covers back around Penelope, he walks to the balcony and looks out over the seas. It has been a year—he still has not been able to bring himself to go into the water. A far cry from the championed swimmer he once was. He’s been pleased to see a fourteen-year-old Telemachus quickly begin to excel in the water, though he often has to push down memories of divine threats before he can applaud him.
When she appears before him, she is clothed in full battle regalia. He has not seen her like this before, not even those nights in Troy where they would be up till the candles burned low strategizing. She answers the questions in his eyes soon enough.
“Olympus is at war. Tensions were already high after Troy, so it is no shock, really, after what you have revealed of Poseidon’s treachery that the gods are now at each others throats again.”
Odysseus is so, so weary. “Athena, why are you telling me this?”
She blinks, surprised. “I thought you would like to know.”
“Goddess,” he hesitates. “I should be almost fifteen years older than I am.” She doesn’t say anything. “I’m going to go back inside, to my wife.” I have so much lost time to make up for, he doesn’t say though she hears it anyway.
“Very well,” she replies softly, softer than he thinks she’s ever spoken to him, and he wonders if goddesses ever feel something like pity. When she vanishes, she leaves only a feather from her helmet’s plume behind.
Odysseus leaves it where it is, and goes back inside to rejoin Penelope.