The cot creaked beneath your combined weight, linen sheets tangled around your calves, still warm with the echo of his touch. One arm was flung across his chest, the other tucked behind his head, and his gaze—restless, flint-bright—was fixed on the ceiling above. Something distant had settled into him. Like his spirit had wandered somewhere far beyond the canvas of the tent.

His hand lifted—dragged once along your hip, almost absently, petting some old, familiar beast.

“My wife. She had this way,” Odysseus said suddenly, voice quiet, not slurred but worn, "Of looking at me like she’d already seen the road I’d take—walked it herself, and come back before I’d even set foot.”

You lay in bed, bare beside him.

“Not like the men here do. Not the way Menelaus does, or Diomedes. Or you.” He shifted. “You think I’m clever.”

You don’t speak. You’ve learned not to, with him. When Odysseus talks like this, you let him. It’s the only way he ever tells the truth—indirectly, around corners, through the threads of other people.

He smiled at the ceiling like it had said something he found funny. “She never did.”

You shifted your gaze to him now. You could feel the place where your thighs still touched. Could still feel him on you, in you, beneath your fingernails, breath fading from where it had once been frantic. He hadn’t kissed you. Not really, or like a man starved for it. He’d held you like a man afraid of being forgotten.

“She had hands like olive branches,” he murmured. “Tied back her hair with strips of sea-blue linen. She sang under her breath while she wove, not loud enough to follow, but enough to make you lean in.”

Odysseus stopped, and his mouth twisted, as if he could the thing he wasn’t saying. "You remind me of her."

His fingers still. Silence, again. Thick, cloying.

"That is why you are here. You know that, don't you?"

It's not cruel, the way he says it. Not warm either. True. Brutally so. So, Odysseus does not ask you to stay. He never does. But he doesn’t move when you shift closer either, doesn’t flinch when your thigh brushes his.

You weren't Penelope. And he knows that. But you are a replacement of her, physical where memory should be.

He breathed out through his nose—sharp, bitter. The sound of a man laughing at the edge of his own cruelty.

"...And you will be nothing more than that. A reminder."