Antistrophe

Written for PeppyBismilk, January 2026.

What no one tells you about Elysium is that it is so loud. The clash of steel and roars of battle rise from secluded glades and the gigantic stadium alike. Peace is hard to come by, even in one’s endless rest.

Yet, Penelope finds it. She walks the fields until the battle cries are not louder than the larks soaring overhead through the blue-green skies. Gently the river Lethe laps at the mossy shores, and she considers it, as she often does. But then, if she forgets, the only version of the story left would be his.

Odysseus lets his footfall be heard. His plodding steps speak of duty, of obligation. She is weary before she turns around.

“Penelope,” he says.

Despite it all, her heart leaps at the sound. His voice, rich and smooth as wine, and just as bitter to the taste—she understands all too well how he tricked, convinced, cajoled, conquered. Even the smile he flashes her way—which she knows, she knows is guilt rather than pleasure to see her—weakens her knees and makes her want to fall into arms that won’t catch her.

She wills herself to stand firm. “I hear you are reckoning with your past.”

Pleasantries discarded, he meets her eyes with sharpness equal to her own. She hopes what she sees in his eyes is a glimmer of appreciation, but she knows hope for what it is. If anyone ever dared to ask Penelope what battle she’d fought that earned her a spot in Elysium, she would simply tell them that she was married to Odysseus.

“Where’d you hear that?” he asks, his voice carrying a light humour not matched by his eyes.

She gestures vaguely. “Shades talk. They say you’ve been to see Scylla, Circe.”

His lack of reaction is calculated. He never makes a move that is not.

“So, Odysseus. Reckon with me.”

He sighs. “Penelope.”

She waits for him to continue. Raising an eyebrow, she folds her arms over her chest. He seems to be at a loss for words, but she knows that act like the back of her hand.

Shaking his head, he drops his hands to his side. “What do you want me to say?”

Sourly, she snorts. “Is that how you’ve been handling this? Don’t tell me Circe fell for that.”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. It would be comfortable enough for them to sit in the grass, but she makes no move for it herself.

“I know,” he says, quietly, as if someone else were around by whom he didn’t want to be heard, “that you and I have had it hard–”

At this, she laughs out loud. Ringing, echoing laughter. The larks’ song seems to harmonise with her for a moment. “What have you and I had, Odysseus? What have we had?”

He might truly be at a loss for words. It’s hard to tell with him.

Though time is hard to track, Odysseus does not visit her often. When he does, he comes with pleasantries, with platitudes. All so he can go back to his witches at the Crossroads and tell them how difficult it is with her, how trying, how onerous it is to trudge down to Elysium to share a few empty words with her, how much he needs their enchanting hands to soothe him.

He might protest, but he was a born soldier. Athena is goddess of war as well as wisdom, after all. He had always viewed her as an enemy combatant, their every interaction a battle he could win or lose.

She doesn’t really belong in Elysium, she thinks. She is too weary of battle to find glory in it.

“I was magnificent,” she seethes through gritted teeth. “Maybe I was no great beauty, but I was better. I was brilliant.”

“I know,” he murmurs.

“No, you don’t. Athena chose me too, you know. I ruled a kingdom alone. You fought with a sword, I fought with a loom, but I fought.”

He nods. “It was hard for you.”

Nothing in this moment could enrage her more than pity. A hoarse scream wells up in her throat, and she quashes it down furiously. “This is not about how hard it was.”

“What is it about, then?”

She takes in the sight of him. Handsome, tired, anxious to be done with this. Gods, she could scream. “Did you ever once,” she asks, holding his gaze in a challenge, “think of me with love in your heart?”

Never has she seen Odysseus so utterly without pretence. Layers upon layers fall from him, the various armours of words and guile he crafted so carefully disappearing to leave only the shade of a man. He seems smaller, impossibly.

Solemnity lines his face; as a shade, he appears younger than he was at death, but now age sits in his countenance in a way she isn’t sure she saw even in his older living days. When he lifts his head, his sea-blue eyes are dull—neither sparkling with wit, nor alive with magic.

“More than once,” he whispers. He does not step closer to her, nor take her hand. He stands still, looking at Penelope rather than through her for the first time in her memory. “I neglected to tell you.”

She tries to sound nonchalant, failing to bite back tears. “I wouldn’t have believed you anyway.”

Odysseus moves, closing the distance between them. He traces her jawline with reverent fingers, calloused and worn. The harder Penelope tries to stop crying, the harder the tears come. She grits her teeth. “Athena matched us well,” she says, her voice thick. “It’s a shame she’s no Aphrodite.”

He chuckles. She looks up at him, and still she wants to scream until her throat is shredded into tatters. She knows he did not try to get home to her, at least not hard enough. She knows he did not want her more than he wanted adventure and other lovers and time to be a man without the obligations of a king, husband, and father. She knows he did not think of the cost paid to secure him that life.

His eyes grow watery, looking down at her as she looks back. She only wastes a second wondering why. She is tired of trying to figure him out, of waiting for him to come up with a plan before speaking, of waiting for him, of waiting for him.

“Tell me,” she commands.

Lies have always come easily to him. He pauses now, as if unsure of how to tell the truth. “You and I could have been something remarkable together. We could’ve conquered the world.”

“I didn’t want to conquer the world.”

He smiles. “Nor I.” The smile fades. “Would that I could have given you what you wanted.”

Birdsong on the breeze fills a long moment between them. There is an ache in Penelope’s stomach that has been so constant she forgets it’s there—hunger so persistently unsatisfied that she never feels it, except when the possibility of satiation rears its head.

“What did I want, Odysseus?”

The lines in his face ease. The breeze carries the scent of the salt sea from him to her, and behind it, the earthy smell of myrtle. His hand cups her face and she remembers—it is not the Lethe’s fault she forgot—why she cared. Despite it all, why it was always him that she wanted. This, the adoration, the touch that makes her feel there’s no other woman above earth or below. The look in his eyes she knows, she knows is for her alone, the look that tells her Athena made him wise enough to see what is in front of him. No witch or goddess could be to him what she is, and no man alive or dead could be to her what he is. For better or worse, they belong to each other. They’ve had enough of worse. As he presses his forehead to hers, she hopes—though she knows hope for what it is—that this is the start of better.

“Someone to put you first.” His voice crackles like a hearth fire, and though shades feel nothing, she feels heat radiate from him, warming the deathly cold out of her.

She closes her eyes. “You still can give me that.”

“Aye,” he whispers into her lips, kissing her with the strength of a lost soul returned from a long voyage.

The softly murmuring Lethe trickles downstream, and with their arms wrapped around each other, Odysseus and Penelope stand in silence at its banks, listening as it passes them by.