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Her husband eats beside her.
His teeth tear into fresh bread and hot roast fowl, sopping up gravy with his calloused and trembling hands, licking his fingers clean. Crumbs and drippings cling to his wiry beard and disappear into the field of salt and pepper. He chews loudly and grabs more from serving trays with an open fist and nothing else.
Odysseus eats like a man starved.
He is, Penelope thinks with a quivering lip. He is starving, and half mad, and ragged beyond the worst she could imagine— and he is home, he is home, he is home.
Penelope catches the sob halfway out of her throat. Relief and love had brought on a flood she had not been able to yet stifle. It consumes her, and she lets it, because the ache behind her eyes and the sting of her cheeks assures her that she is not dreaming.
Wild eyes— so familiar, so tired— flick in her direction. Scanning for danger. Identifying threats. Then settle onto her face and soften. There’s a slow dawning of recognition she can see as he gazes at her. His journey has taken much from him, but never what he felt for her.
It’s been so long.
His greasy fingers twitch against the table, eager to touch her, but too ashamed to do so. He turns over his palms and studies the mess of them, washed of blood but stained all the same. His reflection scorns him from his polished plate. His shoulders, already so heavy, sag under another few invisible pounds.
“Odysseus,” she breathes, tenderly touching the length of his forearm toward his wrist, relishing the pulse she found there. I am beating, his veins cry out to her, and I am yours.
“I’m sorry,” he manages, voice cracking, “I must look like an animal like this. Looking upon it must disturb you.”
“My love, I have counted your ribs while you clung to me. You are haggard. You are tired, and hungry.” Her head finds his shoulder, nuzzling. He still smells of salt and iron. Later she will convince him to bathe, scrub the dirt and the anguish from his flesh personally if she must, as best as she is able. The guilt will never fully leave him. “And you are King. Do as you like.”
Penelope beckons a servant to refill the wine and the bread for the third time that evening. She cleans her husband’s face with a handkerchief, brushing away any scraps, stopping only a moment to enjoy the warmth of how he presses his jaw into her touch.
“Where is our son?” rasps Odysseus.
“Our son,” she hums, “is handling matters of burials and next of kins for our…guests.”
“Let them rot.”
“If only, dear husband.”
He exhales for a long moment, melting against her. There is a twitch in his jaw— humour that has been twisted in his years away into self deprecation. “…I fear I scared the servants with such awful manners. I spent so long surviving, I had no need for such trivial things as etiquette. I really am embarrassed, my heart, that this is the man I present to you. I am more beast than anything now.”
Never had she heard such drivel, not even from the mouths of the vile suitors who had plagued the halls of her home. Odysseus was her match in mind and body. He was no more a beast than she, and if that was the case, then she was surely just as bad.
Penelope grabs a leg of wild rabbit with both hands and shoves the meat unceremoniously into her mouth. It’s hot and fatty, and tastes better than anything she had eaten in two decades.
Odysseus gapes at her. “…Pen—.”
“We will be beasts together,” she announces through the chewed rabbit. “For who am I if not your matching half? Now eat.”
It burns, but she does not stop. Tomorrow her tongue will be sore and numb, and he will fret the way he used to over every little scrape and bruise she would get, and she will remind him that she often raced her brothers as a young child and received much worse from that roughhousing.
Another twitch, right at the corner of his lips. A pull. A smile. A laugh. A laugh. The sound muses yearn for, teeming with memories. It sounds no different than it did on their wedding night. He has not been so changed in the little things, and it sets her heart alight with mirth. Hope wraps itself around them both, and the air sticks in her lungs.
He laughs until he can’t anymore, eyes wet and chest heaving. Odysseus feels everything so strongly now. The lines around his eyes crinkle as he gazes at her. They are not young, not anymore, and they never will be again, but Penelope still feels as flustered as their first meeting.
“I have missed you,” he tells her, voice catching, “so much. So very much. You and our boy, you were all I wanted, all I dreamed about.”
“As were you for me. My King, my lover, my Odysseus. You can breathe now, dearest, you are home. I won’t let you go again.”
“Promise me you aren’t a dream.”
“I am not a dream,” she vows, cupping his face. He does not mind the oil on her hands from their dinner. “We will sleep tonight and wake in each other’s arms tomorrow, and every day for the rest of our mortal lives.”
“In our bed,” Odysseus states firmly, eyes sliding closed as she holds him.
“Our immovable bed,” she agrees. She steals a kiss, quick, lest she be tempted never to stop. “We will take our breakfast there, and linger together until the sun is high above us.”
“Until the sun sets again,” argues her husband, turning his face into her palm and pressing his lips to the skin.
“For as long as you will hold me,” she relents with a chuckle.
“Forever,” he pleads. His voice reverberates against her. “And I will brush your hair myself, and braid flowers into it as I did when I courted you. We will eat and drink and dance, and I will spend every moment making up for the years I left you both alone. All that time…”
“Odysseus,” Penelope chokes, pressing close, stealing his lips again when he turns to her, “we have time now. We have all the time in the world.”