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It’s a Bad Night for both of them. Bad Nights have gotten rarer and rarer as years passed, but they still happen, and tonight it’s happened to them both.
Odysseus’ issues are more concrete, in a way. As long as he has eyes on Penelope, as long as he’s awake, he’s okay. He won’t sleep, and absolutely cannot rest while Penelope (or any other woman) is in the room, but as long as he’s awake, he can handle himself. He stands against a wall and watches her weave from the corners of his eyes, mostly focused on the door.
Penelope’s issues are… vaguer. There is no one incident she can point to and say “There, right there, I was hurt and that hurt lingers.” She shouldered years of building terror and mounting tension, hearing her housemaids get assaulted and being unable to protect them, knowing what would happen to her as soon as she remarried, or took too long to remarry-
The point is, while Odysseus’ Bad Nights are sharply defined, Penelope’s are not. Her hypervigilance comes in the form of keeping a knife in reach, needing eyes on the way into the room, and not letting anyone haunt the shadowed corners.
(No weapon ever protected Odysseus from Calypso, which is a minor blessing now that he’s home; he’s dangerous enough when he wakes from a nightmare unarmed, if he had learned to keep a weapon in reach like Penelope had- it’s best not to think about possible consequences.)
So, Penelope sits at her loom and weaves something simple and soothing, and Odysseus sits away from her and watches her and the door equally. They aren’t sleeping, but they’re calm.
The Bad Nights used to be worse.
Odysseus used to be unable to sleep at all while next to Penelope, and when exhaustion finally put him down, if he woke next to her he would panic hard upon waking. He would spend his nights roaming the palace, and would be in the bed he fought so hard to return to only when Penelope fell asleep or woke up.
Penelope used to wake in terror. If Odysseus was in bed, she would calm quickly enough, but if he wasn’t… more than once Odysseus had found her in her weaving room, undoing her current project with wild desperation. Penelope worked on habit during her Bad Nights, and habit dictated she unweave her work, buy herself a little more time each night.
Bad Nights aren’t that bad, now.
Odysseus still takes walks at night, but he comes back to sleep in their bed, and actually stays put more often than not, feeling safe with Penelope next to him.
Penelope, similarly, weaves in the dark. She does not unweave, but the motion of creation is soothing when her hands itch and ache with anxiety.
Tonight, they wait in her weaving room. Odysseus curtails his fear with vigilance, and Penelope with weaving. They will both be tired and sore in the morning, but they will be suffering together, and when night falls again, they will both be tired enough to simply rest for a few hours instead of fleeing.
“Do you want to go to bed?” Penelope asks.
Odysseus shakes his head.
“Me neither.”
They return to silence. In a few hours, she will ask it again, and she and Odysseus will agree to try and get some sleep. It won’t really work, but it will be better than staying awake all night, and “better” is worth more than “nothing” as they’ve learned.
Odysseus will kiss her hands, and Penelope will laugh at him with her snorting human laugh, and they will be able to function more-or-less as they should.
It will be a quiet relief to everyone, compared to how it used to be.