Chapter Text
Spring comes to Troy and her besiegers, sweeping out the sick of winter with warm breezes. With it comes more skirmishes, as soldiers on both sides emerge from hibernation. Even that can’t tamp down the excitement of the season. The worst of the storms are over, leaving lengthening days and temperate weather. Barley fields, planted in autumn, grow heavy, while freshly sown wheat and millet sprout young and green. Lambs and new wine, brought to term over winter, fill the camp with a riotous cacophony of shrill bleating and happy men.
In the midst of this, Odysseus stews alone in his unpleasant little hut, shutting out the fresh air, glad sounds, and warm evening sun. Right now, the sun, the happiness, and the air only seem to worsen his foul mood. Right now, he’d like to be in Ithaka, to be watching the fishermen pull in heavy nets, the children splashing in the harbor’s calm waters, Penelope putting away the heavy wool himatia for the year.
He tries to not think about Penelope too much, but then he fears that he’ll forget her, and thinks of nothing else for days. He worries about Telemachus, if he’ll know him when he sees him again, who has protected him and guided him through the little terrors of childhood. If (he tries very hard to not think about this) he has made it unscathed through all the illnesses that snatch away so many children. Eight years is a long, long time. He cannot know what he’ll find when (if) he makes it home. Somedays, he struggles to imagine returning home at all.
He can justify everything he’s done here to himself and to others. He has become what he needs to be to survive, to drag himself through this war, to bring this war to a close. He does not regret how he’s managed to survive. The only problem is that some days, he’s not sure who exactly has survived. The Odysseus who held his son tight, trying to memorize his exact warm weight, who had kissed his wife goodbye, who’d barely restrained himself from jumping overboard and swimming back to shore as he’d left—that man feels perilously distant from today’s Odysseus. It was easier, he thinks, for that old version of Odysseus to become this scheming, slaughtering soldier than it will be for this creature to become a man again. Even if he can fold himself back into something like the man who left Ithaka, he does not know how he will explain himself. What stories of the war can he tell without giving everything away? He will return home and Penelope will see straight through him, just as she always has.
His gloomy thoughts are interrupted as the door swings open, revealing Diomedes singing a short skolion:
“σύν μοι πῖνε, συνήβα, συνέρα, συστεφανηφόρει,
σύν μοι μαινομένῳ μαίνεο, σὺν σώφρονι σωφρόνει.”
Most days, Odysseus would savor the rare chance to see him like this, loose-limbed and foolish from wine. As it stands, his mood only sours more. Drunk though he is, Diomedes seems to notice. His smile, odd and crooked, he closes the door behind him and sits close beside Odysseus.
“No appetite for festivities today, eh?” he asks, warm against him.
“Not particularly,” he says shortly, standing up and pacing as far away as the confines of the hut will allow him. Diomedes lets him go without protest, his gaze still uncomfortably sharp and steady.
Diomedes is, he reflects, the perfect example of what he will never be able to explain. How would he explain to Penelope that he’d spent most of the war sleeping with the king of Argos when he could scarcely explain why he’d done so to himself? How could he tell stories of his time at Troy to anyone else without it becoming obvious how absurdly intertwined he’d become with the other man? How could he make any of it make sense without laying out the horrible ways they’d come together at the start of the war? Someday quite soon, they’ll both go home. They’ll never see each other again, most likely, and Odysseus will still carry Diomedes with him for the rest of his life.
“I think we should end this,” he says, speaking before he’s had the chance to really process what he’s saying.
“Oh?” Diomedes says, looking, at most, faintly amused.
“It’s run its course, I think,” he says nonsensically. If Diomedes chooses to press any further on this, he has no idea what he’ll say, and he doesn’t want to find out. He just—he is so far from home and from himself. Ithaka feels like a half-remembered dream some days and Diomedes is here, solid and strange and too close. He makes the war feel realer than home sometimes.
Diomedes surveys him for a long moment, eyes too soft. He stands with a half-smile and gives Odysseus a companionable pat on the shoulder, as he would any of his men.
“I’ll see you at the commanders’ meeting in the morning,” he says and leaves Odysseus alone again in his hut.
—
Odysseus half-expects that Diomedes will forget or ignore their conversation, and they’ll have to have it all over again, this time with an explanation he still feels less than equipped to give. As the days go on, it becomes clear that Odysseus was wrong. Diomedes is perfectly friendly in public and still sits by him in meetings, still backs him in some conversations and mocks him in others, but never once does he visit Odysseus late at night, never does he even sit too close or let a gaze linger or an innuendo slip through.
It's disorienting, frankly. If he’d taken the time to imagine how it would go before ending an eight-year-long…arrangement, he’d have assumed it would be horribly uncomfortable. He’d be apologetic, but resolute, while Diomedes would be coldly furious, all cutting remarks and blank stares to avoid seeming like he cared. It would take ages for them to find their footing around each other again.
More fool him—it’s only him who’s been left stumbling. When Diomedes speaks to him the exact same way he’s addressed him for eight years, Odysseus fumbles through his expected lines. He does not know how to stand around him, how to be near him, how to interact with him physically in the way he’d interact with any other man. He thinks about him constantly, while Diomedes appears to not give a single shit about any of it.
Before, if asked, he’d have said that of course Diomedes cared about whatever was going on between the two of them, even if he’d never say as such. Neither of them would talk about it, but they’d both showed in actions, time and again, that they cared more about it than they ought to. He still cares too much now, realizing that Diomedes apparently feels the same way about him as he feels about baths: nice enough to have, but not worth fussing over if not available.
—
The other commanders have to know something, of course. It’s next to impossible to keep any sort of a secret in a place like this—old women have nothing on soldiers when it comes to gossip. He can’t imagine Diomedes told anyone, other than maybe Sthenelus, who regards him with the same distant distaste he always has. So it’s all him, he supposes, it’s him and his inability to act how he should around Diomedes that’s to blame. It was him who started this, who’d dragged Diomedes into bed with him in some foolish yearning for comfort, and it was him who’d ended it, chasing after normalcy, and now it is him who’s looking too much while avoiding eye contact, who stands too close out of habit and scuttles away like he was burnt. It’s his own fault that he has to endure Achilles and Patroclus whispering to each other, Menelaus’s compassionate glances, and Agamemnon’s uncomfortable pauses. Or perhaps he’s imagining things, perhaps he’s paranoid, perhaps nothing is happening at all. It’s entirely a self-made problem and all the more frustrating for it.
It's not as if there’s nothing else to do. It’s spring: there are towns to be raided and skirmishes to be fought. He kills men in their own streets, drags captives out of their homes, negotiates humiliating surrenders with lords with no choices left. Half-eaten meals, broken down doors, children screaming. During the first years of the war, he’d struggled with battles like those, seeing Penelope in the face of every woman, Telemachus in every infant, Ithaka in every ruined town. It doesn’t bother him anymore, except for when it does, when it becomes the only thing he can think about, when it swallows him whole and sets him stalking through the camp for the whole night, unable to sleep. But it doesn’t bother him much anymore.
He's not doing very well as a commander lately. He’s tired, he’s on edge, he’s angry. And he’s so, so sick of war. He’s been at war longer than he’d been married when he’d set out. He’d been comfortable with the repeating cycles of peaceful years. The world turned and the same events came again and again, and all was well. Nothing really changes during peace. War has cycles, too—the raids of spring, great battles of summer, stockpiling of autumn, and waiting of winter. But each cycle at war, each turn of the great gory wheel, is worse than the last. Each year stretches longer, each day weighs on him more heavily.
For the first few years, he’d thought that Diomedes was the one unchanging, unchangeable landmark. He’d known war the way the rest of them had known peace—what could one more campaign do to him? How could another battle on the bloody pile alter him? He knows better now—knows him better now. Imperceptible, he thinks, to most, this war is wearing on Diomedes, grinding him down, hollowing him out, leaving him colder and stonier every year. Odysseus has made him worse, he thinks. He’s certainly not made him any better.
—
He fucks up, eventually. The two of them had been sent off by Agamemnon together, as they always are, because Odysseus has allowed them to become twisted together irrevocably, to become a vicious pair of hunting dogs for their great and noble king. Before he came to Troy, Odysseus is pretty sure Diomedes had a reputation for honorable conduct in warfare. He’d fixed that quickly, dragging him into murder before he’d even dragged him into his bed. Or was it the other way around? Could Odysseus have backed off before the killing blow, paid some price for his deeds, and found a better way to survive this war, if Diomedes hadn’t hidden the body for him? Or were they corrupting each other, destroying each other, two rats in a pit, gnawing on each other to survive?
Regardless, he fucks up. He’s supposed to be soothing the ego of some backwater lord with a fat stockpile of grain and a high opinion of himself. Odysseus should thrive here, in a courtroom full of social climbers and parasites and arrogant bastards, all ripe for the conning, but he simply cannot. He stumbles over words, he’s cutting when he should be ingratiating and ingratiating when he should be cutting. He looks at this little, provincial court, full of peace and petty politics, and feels utterly disconnected from it. None of it feels real, not really, not the way a squalid hut on a desecrated shoreline does.
It's good they’re sent in pairs, at least. Diomedes covers for his mistakes, as best he can. They reach a deal with the lord. He could have gotten a better deal, he knows he could have, if he hadn’t been worrying over a former lover, like an idiot maiden. And not even a man worth worrying over, but the worst man he knows besides himself, a man as incapable of love as he is of mercy, a man who shared his bed for eight years and left without a second thought—
“What the fuck was that?” Diomedes asks, voice more worried than his words would imply. He’s come into Odysseus’s room in the palace without knocking. “Look, I know spring is always hard for you, but you can’t pull shit like that. Be as miserable as you want at Troy, but you have to keep it together when we’re on missions. Act like that in the wrong room and you’ll get us both killed, you know that.”
“What do you mean, spring is hard? Look, I’m glad you’ve adjusted so very easily to things between us being different, I’m delighted that you don’t give a shit, but some of us—I’m still getting used to it. Figuring out how to work with you now.”
“What, you think you’ve forgotten how to talk like a normal person because we stopped fucking?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot you, of course, are the foremost expert on what I’m thinking and doing. Why, great sage, who knows me better than I know myself, am I like this?”
Diomedes rolls his eyes and shrugs. “I probably do know you better than you know yourself at this point. You know me better than I know myself. We don’t have to like it, but it’s true. But you know, it’s just how you get in the spring.”
“How I get in the spring?”
Diomedes makes his way to a chair covered in exquisitely carved ivory and sits down delicately. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. Every year when the crops pop up and the storms stop, you’re just…off. You talk too much about home, you don’t talk about it at all, you avoid me, you barely let me out of your sight, you don’t sleep, you’re irritable and distracted and paranoid. This year is worse than usual, but it’s nothing new. You were off before you ended things and you’re off now.”
He looks at the floor, face carefully blank. “And of course, I give a shit. I just…you aren’t going to hear anything I could say while you’re like this. You always seem better by summer. I figured one of us would make a move then and things would get back to normal. I’m not sure what I’ll do if they don’t.”
Odysseus takes a moment to digest that. He examines how Diomedes has acted through that lens and admits, begrudging even to himself, that it makes sense. When Odysseus gets in one of his moods, Diomedes never changes his behavior around him. The only thing Odysseus hates more than being unable to control his emotions is having others be able to tell that he can’t control his emotions, and the only thing he hates more than that is being treated differently because of that. If Diomedes was treating this as just one of the moods Odysseus gets into sometimes, doing nothing different would be the right thing to do.
Which leads to the second issue. It is unsettling to realize that Diomedes knows something about Odysseus and how his mind works that Odysseus hadn’t been consciously aware of. The only comfort is that it’s Diomedes who knows this, whose mind is not exactly a mystery to him these days. If he hadn’t been trapped in his spiraling thoughts of loathing and longing and betrayal, he could have anticipated everything that Diomedes had done.
“Huh,” is all he manages to say. His body is still tense for a fight, and his thoughts still swirl and spike, but he has some distance from them. He can understand their patterns and try to not give in.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. Forget about this whole conversation. Just, whatever you need to do, don’t get like that on a diplomatic mission again. Maybe don’t go on any until summer,” Diomedes says, looking tired. He starts for the door.
“Wait,” Odysseus says, grabbing Diomedes by the arm. “I’m…sorry.”
Diomedes lets out a startled laugh.
“I imagine this isn’t pleasant for you, so—well, you know.”
Diomedes studies his face and nods. “Thanks, I suppose.”
Odysseus does his best to give a winning smile. “You know, we could—want to skip ahead to the summer?” he asks, tilting his head to the bed.
“How about you ask me again tomorrow?” he says, smiling.
“I will,” Odysseus promises. He isn’t settled, his mind is still disjointed and unfamiliar, but the odd logic that had led him to end things with Diomedes no longer feels as real and urgent as it had. He doesn’t know how he’ll survive this war, but he does not want to survive it alone. If he’s corrupting Diomedes, if Diomedes is corrupting him, if they’re both in it together, if every awful thing his mind thinks about Diomedes and about himself is true, he still does not want to be alone.
Diomedes pauses for a moment, expression melancholy, before kissing Odysseus softly, hand warm and firm on the back of his neck. It’s not the sort of thing the two of them do outside of bed. Diomedes seems to know this, face going cold and blank as he quickly leaves.
—
Will he be like this in the spring in Ithaka? Will he carry this rage and weariness in his soul all the days of his life? Before, he thinks, he’d been prone to moods, to feeling rather more than he should. But he could always hide it, control it, ignore it—except with Penelope. Never once has he been able to hide anything from her. He is so afraid to return home.