Glinting eyes and broken mirror

Telemachus was happy. But it was a strange happiness – trepidatious, almost fearful. A happiness that smelled of blood and had the aftertaste of death. His father had returned! And he… he… this incredible, heroic man had killed one hundred and eight suitors in a single night. Of course, they had deserved it, in many ways, but… but… Telemachus had lived alongside these men for most of his conscious life. And when he first saw his father, drenched in the blood of others, with a strange, scarlet gleam from the torchlight in his eyes, Telemachus first thought he was not a man. Some mystical being, a fiend, a monster, bringing doom to all living things. As if the gods had finally grown wrathful at the violation of the law of hospitality and had sent down punishment upon the suitors. Only when his father stepped into the light and his eyes ceased their frightening crimson shine did Telemachus notice the familiar features in his face. The very ones he saw in the mirror, the ones his mother noted in him. "You have your father's eyes," she would say. "And his nose, and his chin." For a moment, it seemed to Telemachus that Death itself was looking at him through his own eyes. And then his father smiled: "Son…" And embraced him with bloodied hands. And in that moment, standing amidst mountains of corpses in the arms of a man who looked too much like the monsters Telemachus had dreamed of fighting, he felt that same trepidatious happiness again. Then he saw, over his father's shoulder, a broken body with empty, dead eyes and an arrow in its neck. Antinous.

***

Telemachus, scrubbed clean after the night's slaughter and still haunted by the phantom smell of blood, sat before his bronze mirror, combing his damp, freshly-washed hair. He was trying to comprehend what had happened. He had never encountered death so closely before. His mother's suitors had never gone beyond cuffs and threats, and the body of his grandmother, who had thrown herself from a cliff into the sea out of longing for her son, was never found. Telemachus had never thought in his life that he would see so many corpses, carelessly piled atop one another like sacks of grain. And so much blood that it would flow across the palace floors in a scarlet river. His sandals had disgustingly stuck and squelched in it when he had to help his father drag the bodies to the sea. There were too many to bury or burn. And most of them didn't deserve a proper burial anyway. But their faces… their eyes… His eyes… A cool draft came from the window, shadows from the oil lamp danced on the walls, and the polished metal disc of the mirror was hazy in the semi-darkness. Telemachus's pale face seemed to emerge from swirling shadows reaching for him from all sides. The shadows twisted into the faces of the suitors: grey, bloodied, grotesquely distorted by death. Accusing. As if he were somehow guilty of their deaths, of the fact that his father had spared no one… And then, in this deathly greyness, flickering scarlet sparks of alien eyes flared up. Antinous smirked at him from the mirror, looming over Telemachus's shoulder in the reflection, as if to say: Did you really think you could get rid of me so easily? He didn't look dead. The same swarthy and self-assured, with a disheveled lion's mane of hair and a scar above his brow. Only the arrow protruded from his neck in its silent finality, and blood, black in the gloom, slowly seeped from the wound. Telemachus even glanced behind him, almost expecting the dead suitor, thrown into the sea, to have somehow miraculously revived and returned to claim what was his. But the half-dark room was empty, and only the lamp's flame trembled timidly, struggling to push back the encroaching shadows. Antinous was only in the reflection. He smirked at Telemachus from there, lightly and cheerfully, just like before, as if he held no regret for his own death. And he threw a phantom arm around Telemachus's neck, half in an embrace, half in a hold. Just like before. Telemachus almost felt the warmth of his body, almost caught the resinous, spicy scent of myrrh and sandalwood from his skin, the smell of wine on his breath. And the world overturned into shards of memory.

***

Telemachus is sixteen again.Around him is the noise and clamor and clinking of goblets from another suitors' feast, and Antinous sits him down next to himself for the first time, an arm around his neck—half an embrace, half a hold so he can't escape. "You know the host must sit with his guests at the feast, right?" smiles the main ringleader among the suitors, and for the first time, Telemachus feels that very frightened, trepidatious happiness. Antinous—the big, adult, dangerous Antinous—had noticed him! Paid attention to him not as a child, a nuisance underfoot, but as the master of the palace! Telemachus had never felt like the master in his own home, overrun by loud, insolent strangers; he was used to slipping away from them along the walls or hiding in his room, just as his mother locked herself in her chambers. But everything changed. Telemachus is sixteen and they pour him barely watered wine, like for an adult, and the suitors around him joke, sometimes at his expense, sometimes with him, and laugh uproariously, while the main hall of the palace spins around his dizzy head. And he isn't at all sure that Antinous's whisper, "You know, you're as beautiful as your mother," isn't just his imagination. Telemachus is sixteen and for the first time he feels like he belongs in the company of grown men, and not just among women and servants. And it's so easy to ignore the unfamiliar hot hands lingering too long on his back and seemingly accidentally sliding lower. Antinous smiles: "You know, if she doesn't choose me, I know who I'll go to." And he laughs, as if it's just a drunken joke. Telemachus is seventeen when he habitually leans into those unfamiliar hands, greedily choking on the scent of wine, myrrh, and sandalwood, and doesn't pull away when Antinous leans closer to relay another bawdy joke. He's seventeen and no longer feels superfluous here. The suitors take him to their training sessions and joint hunts, and he almost forgets that they are strangers he is supposed to hate. His mother purses her lips disapprovingly, but Telemachus calls it a stratagem of war, a study of the enemy. Cunning is more important than valor. That, at least, he had managed to glean from the endless stories about his ever-absent father. But he doesn't realize that he himself has been caught by a stratagem. Caught by the feeling of hot lips on his, by how a hot, hard body presses him into the wall, by kisses that feel like bites, and by a feverish whisper in the darkness, "I won't give you to anyone. I'll take you with me, steal you if I have to." Caught by that very unfamiliar and frightening happiness of feeling so important to someone, so precious and needed. Telemachus melts from it, from the hot hands on his body, from the unveiled hunger in another's eyes. Is this love? Or are they just using each other? Antinous for release in the long struggle for the throne, and Telemachus to feel needed and important in someone else's eyes, other than his detached, grief-sunken mother's. Telemachus doesn't think about it while a hot body presses him into the long-rumpled sheets yet again. He likes it too much. Every thrust, every bite, even the roughness and the pain—every movement filled with his lover's attention. And while Antinous, in the throes of passion, whispers that he will definitely take him away from the island if he loses, Telemachus himself contemplates that when he ascends the throne, he will need an advisor. Or a general. Or a captain of the guard… The other suitors quickly become a hindrance, squandering the island's already limited resources on their feasts. Antinous doesn't even try to restrain them, mockingly hinting that it's the host's duty—and Telemachus learns to snap back, baring his teeth at him and the others for the first time. Their arguments quickly turn into fights, and his mother finally smiles, reassured, unaware of what happens later in the night, and whose hands tend to the bruises that those same hands inflicted. They use each other again, releasing built-up tension, seeking a new balance between the grown wolf-cub and the mature wolf unwilling to acknowledge the new strength of the former youth. Even Athena, the goddess who suddenly appeared to aid Telemachus, suspects nothing of what is truly happening. But with her training, the prince finally feels he has a chance to gain his general, and not be carried off the island as a prize. And then his father returns, and everything shatters.

***

The bronze mirror was not a fragile object. It was impossible to shatter a plate of polished metal. But Telemachus awoke from his half-trance to a soft, plaintive sound. A fine web of cracks had appeared on the bronze mirror. Antinous in the reflection smirked at him even wider and punched the mirror from the inside again. "I'll take you with me," his words echoed in Telemachus's memory. But that was impossible, wasn't it? Telemachus, disbelieving, reached his palm toward the polished surface. His reflection did not mimic him. Antinous's did. A dark hand from the depths of the misty bronze, as if from the depths of the underworld, laid itself upon his trembling palm from the other side. And it held no warmth. Only the cold of the polished metal, still incredibly smooth despite the cracks. As if they were from within. As if Antinous truly was trying to break through to him… …or to take him away.