I was listening to Epic: the Musical: The Challenge and had the thought: what if Odysseus was just a little too late in coming back from Poseidon’s last challenge on the shore?
(if I had more time and my life wasn’t actively on fire right now, I would write it. Since I don’t have the time but the idea wouldn’t leave me, have a tumblr fic:)
Odysseus gets waylaid one last time by Poseidon the day that Penelope gives her challenge to the suitors. Athena can’t help Odysseus in this latest weaving from the fates, but she can’t leave her clever weaver Penelope to face the suitors alone, either.
Each of the suitors try their hand at the bow, and rarely at the twelve axes. Athena watches for the doors, tries to see if Odysseus will arrive on time, perhaps at the last minute - he always did like his dramatics. It would be just like him to wait until Penelope has called for one more, after all are finished, one who feels confident he can succeed when the others have failed.
Athena watches until all the suitors have tried their hand at the bow and lost. Some had been able to string the bow and shoot an arrow, though it never made it through all the axes. Others failed to string the bow at all. Antinous gets the closest, making it through nine axes, but he fails too. (Thankfully. Athena is not yet intervening, per se, since she’s still recovering and cannot bring her full power to bear without the fates retaliating against her for it. But calling on the little spirits of Ithaka lurking behind the pillars of the main hall to make sure the arrows don’t fly true wouldn’t be intervening.)
The moods of the suitors grow stormy. They start to mutter about how this is an unfair trial. How Penelope has set them up for failure. How this challenge had never been possible at all.
Athena waits until Penelope calls for a second time, for any others to stand up. Though she looks, the doors never open. No one is in the shadows under a hooded cloak, disguise on, bright eyes gleaming and waiting for the perfect moment to reveal himself.
It’s just her, and Penelope, and the handful of guards who will do their duties and die in the process of stopping 108 vengeful suitors.
She realizes Odysseus will not make it on time. So she stands up, before Penelope has to ask for a third time, and this time she lets the illusion fall heavily around her. When Athena walks up to the dais of the bow, she is in the guise of a young man, mere years into adulthood, with an archer’s back and arm muscles. She makes sure the cloak is plain without ornament, that her hair is short but tidy. She makes sure her eyes are grey, still, but a normal grey that wouldn’t be out of place on a mortal.
The suitors all jeer at this young man that they don’t recognize. They think he’s from some young merchant family, because after ten years they would know all the noble’s boys who attend this court. They look at his plain cloak and sandals and laugh behind their hands about how some young whelp too wet behind the ears wants his chance at glory.
Athena only has eyes for the bow. She remembers this bow. Odysseus has used it since he was a young man new to his throne, and always made stringing it look easy. She’d taught him this. She can see it in her mind’s eye, where her illusioned hands overlap with his in the places where his fingers have made grooves in the wood, over the years.
She strings the bow.
The suitors stop laughing. (Less than half had been able to string the bow. And here’s this young stripling, barely an adult, too lean to have experience with a sword, stringing the bow like it’s another day on the range.)
Athena turns to select an arrow. This, too, is part of Penelope’s trick, and she is so proud of her clever weaver for it. Many of the arrows in the bundle are usable, but only one is right for this. She picks it up.
When she looks up, Penelope’s eyes have gone wide - just a little, because Penelope is still a queen in the court she’s ruled by herself for twenty years. But Athena has known her since she was a young woman being wooed by a young Odysseus, and Penelope looks the same now as when Athena had surprised her young warrior’s new bride with a blessing. Startled, unbelieving, wary of something that looks too good to be true. (Penelope thinks Athena might be Odysseus. If he’d gotten his damned timing right, it might be Odysseus standing here. Athena’s blood boils.)
She can’t give away the game too soon. Maybe any moment now, Odysseus will fling open the doors, see a young man with no great noble house behind him try to shoot with his bow. Odysseus would not raise his voice, if he were still in costume, but he would surely slip closer to where Athena stands in her guise, waiting for the moment where the young man fails so he could have his turn.
But the doors don’t open. The room has fallen truly silent, now, only the shifting of Penelope’s guards making a noise, the sweep of their sandals on the stone floor.
Another moment of stalling, and the suitors may actually start shouting, and that would be counter productive. Athena raises the bow. She draws back the arrow in the same movement. Steadies her hand.
It still draws and pulls the same way as it had, when Odysseus had asked her to demonstrate the trick Penelope is asking for with his bow.
Athena has failed him before, but not again.
She lets the arrow fly. It strikes true, and the matter is done: Athena is engaged to Penelope.
The suitors are in an uproar, but Athena has no eyes for them. Just for Penelope, who looks - she wipes away the anger from her face before it can settle, and Athena wants to smile. She doesn’t, because the queen will take it as an insult, but oh does she want to.
“What is your name, honorable warrior?” Penelope asks, overly formal and respectful of her, and Athena remembers that she is in the illusion of a young man with no marker of his house. She doesn’t know who she is.
She doesn’t want to catch Penelope flat-footed. “Glaukopis,” Athena says. It’s an old moniker of hers, familiar. But Penelope doesn’t catch it - or, no, she’s too clever for that. She must not believe it.
(Penelope just thinks it’s a fake name given by the “young man” because he doesn’t want to embarrass himself in front of all the suitors with a commoner’s name.)
(Athena did take on the form of a young man (androgynous enough for a maiden goddess) so you can’t really blame her.)
—
Penelope is devastated because she really thought it would work. But there’s not enough time to really wonder how to get herself out of this situation because everything goes to hell - the suitors are not happy that this seemingly adolescent boy (who came from nowhere!) just won the hand of the queen they’ve been fighting each other for, for 10 years!
When the suitors attack Penelope, her guards are there to stop it. When the suitors attack the young man who’s just won Penelope’s hand - well, he uses a spear too well to not be someone’s noble or merchant-prince son. He had called himself Bright-Eyed earlier - he does have grey eyes. And the way he wields the spear - it’s the exact same way that Odysseus used to, which Telemachus is now copying from someone other than his tutors in court.
“Where did you say you were from again?” Penelope asks, when the suitors are dead or fled, and Glaukopis shakes his head. But for a moment his eyes flash gold. Penelope is not sure if she was meant to catch it, but she did. That explains things.
Penelope thinks she knows what’s going on, now. What the hell are the gods doing here? To make fun of the mortals again?
Penelope is trying to figure out a way out of this engagement with a random god who is not their patroness Athena, when old man Odysseus in his disguise runs up the stairs, asking if he’s too late.
He is.
Odysseus asks who the arrogant man lusting after his wife is, so he can cut the bastard down.
Young man Glaukopis (Athena), looks very offended at the idea of sex (maiden goddesses, you know), and now Odysseus recognizes her because this is a disguise she’s used before. And Athena still glares at him the same way, no matter that she’s wearing the face of a young man.
Cue Odysseus realizing he’s offended Athena again. He calls out her name - her full title - and Athena knows the game is up (the ruse has done its job) and lets the illusion go.
She’s still injured, no helmet, one eye covered in bandages to let the nerves there heal, but she’s unmistakable.
Penelope makes a sound like she’s choking, though, and Odysseus’s attention is pulled away from what the hell is Athena doing here? almost immediately.
Thus distracted, Penelope and Odysseus have a big heart-felt reunion. The guards and Telemachus clean up the suitor massacre. Athena is about to sneak away when Penelope asks what took Odysseus so long.
He tells her.
“I love you,” she tells him, “but you did what?”
(Some time later, Penelope and Odysseus have their private reunion, but Penelope is still pissed at him. So for the next few weeks afterwards, Odysseus is trying to platonically seduce both his patroness (who he’s just reconciled with, and inadvertently insulted again after she saved Penelope in Odysseus’s place) and romantically seduce his wife (who’s pissed it took him 10 years to get back - “I told you to listen to Athena always! And then what do you do? Kill the son of Poseidon while she isn’t looking??”) while the girls take a long vacation. Telemachus is just enjoying watching his parents and Aunt Athena get along again.)
