Archive of Our Own ^beta

   The blood ran down his hands in rivulets. It laid splattered against his chest and face. He felt it cracking as his nose scrunched in anger as his hands slipped down the arrow he was trying to notch. The anger in his veins made him want to snap the arrow in half; just like he’d do to every fucking suitor that dared to walk through his doors and desicrate his home. 

   Suitors ran underneath him like ants scurrying away from a flood: lost, confused, with no leader. He’s pretty sure the first man he took out was the one they were all following, however reluctantly that was. Now he watched from the beam in the ceiling as they scrambled to form some sort of defense against him. He chuckled to himself, cheek bones crinkling and canines showing manically at the thought that these puny insects thought they could take on him. The man who conquered seas, gods, and monsters to reach his home.

   Speaking of which, he’d seen Penelope at the beginning as he launched his first shot. He almost had missed, having caught her eye for the first time in 20 years. His breath was stolen from his lungs when he realized just how… empty she looked. He saw his own sadness and loneliness reflected in her eyes. Yet she was standing tall and regal, just like she’d always been, while he sat crouching in the ceiling beams like an angry leopard waiting for its next kill.

   He finally got the arrow notched in his bow - standing to his full height, he pulled back and took aim at the first ant running beneath him and pierced the flint through his chest.  He huffed as he ran across the beams to another shadow laden spot; even 10 years ago he would have been able to catch the man in his throat, but age was rearing its ugly fangs and the chest was a much wider target for the time being. It didn’t matter much. The man was still dead either way, blood pooling on the wood floors as gurgled gasps leave his corpse. Fuck. It’ll take so much to clean all this in the morning.

   As he reached another corner of the room, a commotion to the side caught his attention. Some panic induced rivalry, from the looks of it. 5 men all surrounded a younger one who seemed to be blocking the weapons room. The monster in the rafters arched his eyebrow, intrigue getting the better of him as he tried to understand the motives of the young man who was only partially visible to him. Who would be blocking the weapons? Shouldn’t they all be scrambling for them? He’d left the door unlocked on purpose after all. No fun in an open slaughter. The brave ones who were willing could go toe to toe with the man who’d taken on Poseidon, should they wish. 

   The man watched as one of the older pieces of garbage got a good hit on the kid, whipping his head to the side as a spray of blood landed on the wall next to him. The reaper in the shadows cringed, knowing that hurt like a bitch, but hoping, for the sake of the kid, that he got back up. A punch to the gut squashed that hope as the poor kid knelt to his knees and gagged. Not a single arrow had flown since the man began watching the altercation, too engrossed in whatever was happening here. 

   One of the little ants grabbed the kid by his hair, ripping him forward till he laid on the ground on his stomach. He was still coughing, blood being evident on the ground from an undoubtedly broken nose. The killer watched from behind as two of the cockroaches grabbed the kids arms and turned him around, kneeling him in front of a burly man with one too many unearned scars. He could see the kid better now from this angle. The little one's white and gold garments were splattered with blood flecks, both his own and, now noticed by the man, the few men who lay with dead eyes in the hallway behind the kid. 

   A sense of overwhelming pride washed over the reaper as he realized this kid had been taking on the ants by himself from the ground. Presumably the boy's sword was tossed not too far from where the altercation was occurring, seemingly knocked out of his hands at some point. 

   The older shits were talking, but over the clamoring and screaming from the fucking children behind him, the man couldn’t hear what was being said. He almost felt bad when he stood up, knowing he had wasted too much time not killing each son of a bitch in this sanctuary. He was unable, though, to waste the arrows to take down the men surrounding the boy when he had much bulkier men to take down first to avoid hand to hand. As he placed his hand on his knee, red dying his skin in the shape of his fingers, he chanced one more look towards the little one.

   Both of the boy’s arms were held to the side as he sat kneeling before the flaming pile of shit before him, his head bowed defiantly. A sword was placed under his chin and raised, forcing him to lift his head and glare at the man before him. 

   The man in the rafters gasped, losing his balance before grabbing on to the mast he had been leaning against. The boy’s curly brown hair framed his face as it fell to his chin. His eyes held a venom passed on from father to son in perfect replicas of his mother’s. His slightly upturned nose held a defiance against the man in front of him that the shadow in the ceiling had had turned against him numerous times before. A smirk, showing a canine and crinkling his cheek muscle was a direct mirror of the one the man had sported mere minutes ago. The boy… was a spitting image of Penelope and the killer.

   The man in question notched a bow and released it with such ease that between one breath and the next the offending ant with the sword was dead with a stick launched through his throat. Like the leopard he was, the man jumped from the roof, landing in a perfect crouch next to an abandoned sword. He grabbed it, keeping it loose to his side as he slowly stood, letting the tip drag on the ground. The maniacal look in his eyes was back as they seemed to glow red with his fury as he slowly left the shadows of the room. He kept his head low, eyes locked on to the two ants holding the boy’s arms hostage. 

   When they locked eyes with the demon that had just dropped from the ceiling, they released the boy and stepped back, panic and fear racing through their soon to be empty veins. 

   “Old King” one whispered in shock.

   “King Odysseus” the other announced in horror. 

   Odysseus stalked the two men as they backed up along the hall, keeping his eyes locked on them as he cut down the other two rushing him from the sides with two slashes of his sword. They were standing one second and dead the next as he continued his trek. 

   The boy had folded in on himself as soon as his arms were released, a hand reaching up to his throat to check for injuries. As Odysseus came to stand beside him, the boy looked up. The man’s eyes were much softer as they gazed down at the spitting image of his wife. With his left hand, Odysseus reached for the boy and offered help with standing. The boy took the offered hand hesitantly. Clasping his much smaller hand in the calloused, scarred, and bloody one of the man, his eyes shifted from where their hands met to the blood splattered face of the man he’d hoped to see his entire life.

   “Dad…?” he muttered, unsure if his thinking was correct, even with the whispered names behind him.

   “My boy. I’m home” Odysseus said, a single tear carving a clean line through the blood on his cheek, lips upturned just slightly in the corners. As Telemachus stood on solid legs, his father passed him the sword laying in the hallway. A simple nod was all it took for Telemachus to drop his stance and wield the weapon. Odysseus smirked and relaxed his position, dropping into nearly a perfect mirror of his son, sword tip pointed directly at one of the suitor’s hearts. 

   “Nobody. Touches my boy.” he growls. As father and son leap towards the ants infesting their home, an owl, once sitting in the window as a passive observer, stretches her wings and takes flight towards the window above the courtyard, landing in an old olive tree next to a woman hiding with her tapestry.