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phantomdecibel · 1 year

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I was bullied into both finishing and posting this /j

But in all seriousness, special thanks to @hahahaghosty, who both came up with the idea and encouraged me to finish this! There’s a couple of references to their writing in here lol, they’ve got such great ideas –

ALSO I don’t think it’s stated outright in this fic, because I hadn’t really decided until after having finished writing, but the blanket is blue! Another brilliant addition from Ghosty :)

…I didn’t do. literally any research into like. houses and shit from ancient greece sorry –

There was a blanket, tucked away in the very back of Telemachus’s closet, ratty and tattered, colour faded and dull. It has been there for as long as he can remember, a universal constant he’d never bothered to learn the origins of.

It was one of the few truths he knew with absolute certainty; his mother loved him with all her heart, the suitors were parasitic pigs, and there would be and always has been an old, moth-eaten blanket buried away in the back of his closet. Anything else could shift like the winds, but those facts held firm.

As a child, Telemachus used to pull it out. On cold nights when his usual covers weren’t enough, on days when his mother’s suitors were particularly nasty or when life was just too loud, he would pull it out, wrap the small thing over his head and shoulders, and use it to block out the rest of the world. Or, as he got older, he would bundle it up and curl himself around it, hugging it tight while his mother weaved and unweaved in her own room, and wonder not where it came from, but why it was in /his/ room.

Eventually, he tucked it back away in its special little corner, and forgot about it.

___________

When Telemachus is fourteen years old, so much more bitter yet not, at the same time, his mother Penelope, queen of Ithaca, makes him clean his own room instead of having one of the maids do it, as punishment for losing his temper and shouting at a group of the suitors constantly stalking the halls. Telemachus complained, and dragged his heels, and pouted in his best imitation of a seal pup’s large, watery eyes, but his mother did not change her mind.

It’s not all so bad, he can’t help but think to himself, even as he keeps up the petulant act. At least here, cleaning his room, he doesn’t have to worry about being bothered by the suitors. Still – it wouldn’t do to let his mother win! He would not enjoy the excuse to spend all day hidden away in his room out of spite.

His room isn’t particularly messy, and Telemachus knows where everything goes anyways. Of course he does! It’s his room, he’s lived here all his life! There’s his bed, in the corner under the window, the pile of damaged training swords right by his desk, and –

…

…and the ratty, tattered blanket tucked away in the back of his closet, dull with age.

Gently, Telemachus pulled it free, unfolded it and held it out at arm’s length. He hadn’t thought of it in years, not since one of the suitors had caught him hiding beneath it when the world had just been too loud and subsequently mocked him, loudly and to the others, for still needing a blanky even at the age of eight. His mother had been quick to put an end to that, to run her fingers fondly over its fraying edges and the missing chunk of its corner and tell him in no uncertain terms that he had nothing to be embarrassed about, but the damage had been done. Telemachus had tucked the blanket away, and refused to look at it again. Eventually, he’d just forgotten it existed.

Now, holding his old source of comfort, Telemachus didn’t feel embarrassed. Instead, all he felt was the burning coals of anger. Anger at the suitors for their jeers and taunts, anger at his father for not being around to deal with the… pests, and anger at himself, for letting the comments of some jerk he didn’t even care for the opinion of ruin something that had only ever been undeniably good, comforting, familiar. It made his hands clench where he held the old blanket, and his lips twisted into a sneer against his will.

With a deep breath and all the grace of the prince he was trained to be, Telemachus pushed the feelings aside, moving to throw himself down on his bed, blanket held in a white-knuckled grip against his chest. Where had the blanket come from? It had just… always been there. Telemachus could remember it’s frayed edges, the spots where something had chewed small holes through it (he frowned, then, fingers tracing the damage, and resolved to ask his mother to mend it later), and the way a square had been cut away from one of its corners. He could remember long, lonely nights huddled underneath it, and using it as a sail for his little play boats when he would pretend to be his father, coming home from the war to drive the suitors from the house.

…he could not remember the first time pulling it from the back of his closet (or putting it there in the first place, either). He could not remember what it would have once looked like when it was still new and beautiful, what its texture had been like before getting washed one too many times and losing the softness he imagined it once had. He could not remember the blanket as anything other than what it was now, and suddenly, he was curious.

It was his, obviously, or else it wouldn’t be in his closet. But – who had given it to him? His mother, one of the suitors back when he was still a child (and okay, ew, that was such a gross thought)? Or had one of the maids simply found it laying around once, and mistaken it as something that belong to him? Some childish part of him offered up the idea that it had been a gift from the gods – but he’d quickly dismissed the thought. The gods had never favoured Telemachus in the way they favoured his father, and even if they had, a precious gift like that wouldn’t have been left to collect dust the way this blanket had.

Maybe, maybe his mother would know? She was the queen, after all, she knew practically everything. She had to, to take care of Ithaca in his father’s absence.

Mind made up, Telemachus dragged himself up from his bed and, blanket still balled to his chest, made his way out of his room.

It was still the middle of the day, and so Telemachus knew exactly where to find his mother. All day, every day she sat in the same room, weaving the funeral shroud for his father. It had made him so angry at first, one of the only times he had ever felt mad towards his mother. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, his father, wasn’t dead! He was coming back to them, to mother to Telemachus, so there wasn’t any need for a shroud! But his anger had never stopped his mother from sitting down to work on it, and she never seemed to finish, anyways, and the shroud never seemed to grow, and whenever he asked about it she just smiled and winked and kept weaving. Whatever she was doing she was buying them time, held the suitors just that smallest bit at bay, so Telemachus had (eventually) let it go.

Even now, years after she’d started it (and now, a bit older and a bit wiser, Telemachus knew that it shouldn’t have taken so long, let alone years), his mother sat before her loom. Telemachus hovered in the doorway for a few moments, until she glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him, gesturing him further into the room.

Telemachus made his way to her side, and slumped to the floor, back resting against her legs and chair. For a moment they were silent, until his mother stopped her weaving, and a gentle hand landed on his head.

“Have you finished cleaning your room?” she asked, voice soft and melodic. Telemachus shook his head silently, careful not to dislodge her hand. “Then what bothers you, my son?”

Unsure how to start, Telemachus picked at the seam of his chiton while his mother waited ever patiently. Eventually, he settled for handing her the blanket.

“I –” he started, nervously glancing back up at her. Some small, illogical part of him worried she would mock him for still having the tattered cloth, even though he knew, logically, that she his would never. “I found that in my closet – and I was wondering, if you knew where it came from?” in the silence that followed as she unfolded the blanket he hastened to add a quick “I can’t remember,”.

“You wouldn’t,” his mother rasped, and Telemachus glanced back up at the trembled in her voice. She held the blanket in her lap like it were glass, like it would unravel just at her touch alone, yet were precious enough an object that that was something to fear. Telemachus frowned at the way her eyes glossed over, nose scrunching up. Was she going to cry? He hadn’t wanted to make her sad, just find out where it had come from! “You would’ve been too young.”

“When I got it?”

“Given,” his mother corrected. She let go of the blanket to move a hand back to his hair, and Telemachus twisted around towards her. “It was a gift, when you were just a baby.”

“A gift?” Telemachus parroted, looking up at her with wide eyes. Who’d knew! He wondered who it was from, an old family friend, maybe? Someone who wasn’t around anymore, if her expression was anything to go by. “From who?”

“…”

“Mother?” he prompted when the silence grew too long. “Who was it a gift from? Do you know?”

Her wet, sad eyes bored down at him, and suddenly Telemachus felt a lot less excited. Still, there was a tenderness in the lines of her face, some sort of bittersweet fondness as she shook the dust out of the blanket much more efficiently than Telemachus himself had been able to, and swung it gently over his shoulders. His mother dropped her gaze as she smoothed at his shoulders, but Telemachus just kept staring up at her. She sighed, and finally smiled gently, sadly, as her hands stilled.

“It was a gift,” she repeated with a world-weary sigh. “From your father –”

“What!” Telemachus surged back to life, clutching at his mother’s hands. “Really!?”

“Yes,” she chuckled ruefully. “When I told him that I was pregnant – he was so excited. So nervous, he was so scared he wouldn’t be a good father. Eventually,” she chuckled again, but the memory was fonder, warmer, less melancholy. “Well, it only took a few days for me to get fed up with his worrying, kicked him out of the house. Your uncles Polites and Eurylochus were a bit fed up with him too, I guess, because they dragged him out to the market and left him there for the day. When he came back, he had that with him.”

Once again, his mother fussed with the blanket thrown over his shoulders, as if she was trying to swaddle Telemachus like the baby he’d once been. Telemachus himself couldn’t bring himself to move, couldn’t bring himself to say anything. The blanket had been a gift from his father. Telemachus sucked in a breath and held it, like any more noise would shatter the fragile atmosphere and his mother would stop talking, and the blanket would once again be tucked away and forgotten.

“Odysseus – your father, well, he said it was for you, but I wore it like a shawl for the first few months. I’m pretty sure I only stopped once we’d set up your nursery, and then we just left it in your cradle until you were born,” one of her hands, Telemachus’s own now wrapped loosely around her wrist, reached up to thumb under his eye. And oh, he hadn’t even realized it until she was wiping them away that those stubborn tears had begun to fall. They dripped slow, slow, slow down his face, and left the aftertaste of salt burning at the corners of his lips. His mother’s own misty eyes were compassionate, and her smile shone with understanding. “We used it to carry you everywhere, me and your father, and your uncles Polites and Eurylochus, too. They all adored you, I was worried you’d never learn to walk with how often you were being bundled up and carried around, between the four of us. Or – well,” her already soft voice softened more. “That’s how it would have been. You were still so small, when they had to leave.

“I didn’t realize you still had it,” she murmured. “Or we would have had this conversation much sooner.”

Telemachus shuddered, lack of oxygen leaving him lightheaded and unsteady, and forced himself to breathe again. Finally he freed his mother’s wrists, one hand still holding his face and the other still at his shoulder, to scrub the tears from his face. They didn’t stop falling – but the motion broke his eye contact with his mother and made him feel just that little bit better.

There was the shuffling of his mother’s dress, and the scrape of her chair as it dragged against the floor. Before he could look up again he was being pulled snug against her chest, wrapped up in her arms like when he was a child, naïve and with no understanding of why his father wasn’t, couldn’t be, around. The motion just made him sniffle more, and Telemachus wormed his way further under her chin to try and drown out the pounding of his heart.

“The day they had to leave,” his mother started again, so quietly Telemachus almost missed it, if not for the gentle hum in her throat from where his face was pressed against it. “I wrapped you up, carried you down to the pier to see them off. Your father spent every moment he could just holding you, talking to you, in those moments you were his entire world. Polites complained until Eurylochus dragged him away that he hadn’t gotten to hold you as much as he wanted to, because Odysse – your father was ’hogging’ you. He didn’t want to let you go.”

There was some sort of joke there, one she’d never explained to him. Telemachus hugged her tighter, imagining the scene play out in his head, the father he barely knew refusing to let him go before the last second until he stepped onto that cursed boat, the uncles he’d heard of much less frequently but still enough to feel like he knew them to some degree promising to look after each other, promising to bring his father home. All of them smiling at him in the way he’d only ever had his mother to describe to him, his father’s crooked-but-honest smirk, Uncle Polite’s beaming grin, the slight uptick to his Uncle Eurylochus’s lips. And he imagined his father, smiling but sad, tired, all the same, as he said goodbye to Telemachus’s mother, kissed Telemachus himself on the forehead. Telemachus imagined them sailing off, imagined just that one boat despite being able to list the exact number of men they had left with off the top of his head. And he tried to imagine them sailing back home, too.

“Your father loves you, my son,” his mother murmured into his ear, holding him in her arms. Telemachus couldn’t help but wonder what his father’s hugs would be like. “Never doubt that.”

___________________

Somewhere far, far away, a man sits crumpled on the shore of a remote island, cold water lapping at his bare feet. As the sun sits high above his head he pulls from his belt one of the few items he hadn’t lost when he was shipwrecked here; a small square of cloth, battered and torn and faded from the years at sea.

He held the cloth gently, cupped between his hands, and ran his calloused thumb over the unravelling edge.

And at the shore of the accursed island with no way off and rapidly dwindling hope of ever escaping this oasis prison, last remnant of the family he’d left behind clutched between trembling fingers, the man crumbled some more and sobbed into his knees.

#the odyssey #telemachus #penelope #odysseus #but he's only there at the end-#hmmmm tagging this as #epic the musical #bc thats what got me into this shit #writing #love this or hate this blame ghosty-#/j /j lmao

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