This is a disclaimer.
AN: You'd think I had enough AUs already... if you want to read the snippet that started this 'verse, head over to my lj. Link's in my bio.
Queen of all my dreams
He had always been her servant. His father, too, was a favourite of hers, sneaky, clever, brave, resourceful. His mother she loved as a sister; they were worthy of each other, Penelope and Odysseus, and their son, she was sure, would grow to be worthy of them.
She'd come to them often after her brother's servants began their campaign, to see the boy, keep an eye on both mother and child even as she helped the father. She'd never been as cruel or capricious as her sister Aphrodite: loyalty and love were rewarded with loyalty and love.
Love? Bah. A boyish infatuation, that's all it was. Glances, smiles quickly smothered when she entered a room, eyes following her when she left. A boyish infatuation.
Then that awful mess her brother's servants had made of Ilium took up all her attention, and after that Odysseus himself… the man was just incapable of staying out of trouble. Athena had no idea how he did it. Eventually, she admitted to herself that she couldn't just sit around watching him all day, waiting to perform some miracle for him.
The Gods help those who help themselves! her father had thundered at some family gathering or other, waving his sloshing wine cup, and everyone in the room had rolled their eyes and gone back to their meals, but now Athena thought back to it, and grinned. Well, why not?
The plan had gone well. All her plans did; wasn't she the Goddess of wisdom as well as war? Ares, poor bloodthirsty fool, had never understood how to combine the two, but that was why he always lost to her, after all.
Anyway. The plan had gone well. Odysseus had come home at last, Penelope was blissfully happy, Telemachos had a father again. There was no reason for Athena to stay. None at all. But Penelope begged her to, and Odysseus joined in, and so she relented.
He never said a word, just sat at the table watching her, silent, maybe a little amused, as if he could tell that something had changed.
As if he'd heard her heart skip a beat when they met again at last; as if he felt her eyes on him the way his had so often been on her.
Telemachos was a boy no longer, taller than she was now, broad-shouldered, longish thick dark hair, beautiful brown eyes flecked with hazel-gold. Voice like silk would sound… no, velvet. Dark and heavy and smooth as sin. Eyelashes far too long for a man, and hands rough with calluses, quick and strong.
She needed to have a word with Aphrodite about this. It was ridiculous. He was a mortal, for heaven's sake! And she did have a reputation to uphold.
(True, she had no idea who started that ridiculous rumour that she was eternally virgin – come to think of it, probably Aphrodite herself – but if it made them all happy, why bother arguing with it?)
In the end, it was all so simple, quick and easy as falling asleep. Falling into him instead…
A scene from one of Eros' stories, this, a wrong turn in darkened gardens, a bathing pool she hadn't noticed before. He'd never learned to school his features, hide his emotions. She saw desire burn in his eyes before he turned his back, stuttered out an apology for disturbing her.
Athena barely heard him. The world had narrowed, shrunk, tightened, centering around this one garden, this little pool, him and her, and suddenly she saw her fate as clearly as if Lachesis had told her of it.
Her fate, and his, and maybe that of all the world.
His skin was warm when she rested her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades, warm and sticky with sweat, and she traced her fingertips down his spine, slowly, lightly, tracing ridges and hollows. He shivered with the slight touch, and slowly turned.
Silk-wrapped steel, a voice that sounded like Aphrodite whispered in her mind as her hands flattened over his chest, as his heart beat against her palm, as his arms tightened around her and his mouth came down on hers. Did I not tell you, sister, that you too would fall? All serve me eventually. Mortal or Olympian, man or woman, all serve me soon or late. Even you, Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom though you are.
In the pale cool dawn, as they parted, she tugged him close. "Come to me again tonight," she ordered, smiling lips still swollen with his kisses, and he smiled.
"Your servant, Lady," he said, and then, taking her hand, kissed it softly. "Always your servant."
It wasn't the sort of thing that stayed secret for long. Penelope thinned her lips but didn't say anything, and Odysseus just chuckled. Athena's servants, whether priestess or warrior, merely smiled. Their mistress long been sensible, detached, too rational for her own good. Now, though…
Father sulked for weeks when she told him of Telemachos, asked him to grant her lover immortality. "And eternal youth," Athena added sweetly as his face lit up with sadistic glee, and Hera snickered when he glared.
"Just do it," she said. "You've had your fun with poor Eos. If anyone should be sitting around up here thinking up new ways to torment your multitude of bastard brats, it should be me."
But she winked at Athena as she said it.
"Immortality?" Tel said disbelievingly. "Me? But, Lady…"
"No buts," she said, kneeling by him, taking his hands in hers, tilting her head back to look into his eyes. "No buts. Stay with me, Tel. Be my consort. Be mine, forever."
"Pallas," he tried again, and it was the first time he'd spoken her name, called her anything but my lady. "Pallas, I – my father –"
"Your father is my servant, too," Athena pointed out, rather acidly. "After all I've done for him, he can spare me his son, don't you think?"
For the first time, his lips twitched into a half-smile. "Well…"
"Be my consort, Tel," she repeated softly. "You're my closest friend, my best advisor, my lord and my love. I want no other by my side or in my bed, ever again. Stay with me."
"You're mad," he said. "You'll tire of me in a few decades."
"You think so, Prince Telemachos?"
"I hope not, Pallas Athena."
Immortality, once granted, cannot so easily be taken away, any more than many of the powers that come with it. But they can be diminished; for as all people know, the Gods draw what powers they have from the worship and belief of their followers.
Eventually, the Olympians were replaced in the hearts and minds of men by the God of the Hebrews, and with him this Christ whom so many of them began to turn to. In Rome itself, the great city that was heir to Ilium itself, the Christian cross was raised, and Athena found her family gathered at the Moirae, pale and worried.
"There's death and then there's death, you know," Atropos croaked, not very helpfully.
Clothos shook her shining hair back from her face. "First lesson in humanity. Things change. Deal with it."
Behind her, Athena heard Tel choke back a laugh. She, too, was smiling a little. She'd seen this coming long before any of them, and she and Tel had been living as humans for some time now, mostly in Egypt. It was warm there, and sunny. Alexandria was beautiful.
(And Cleopatra had long ago given them the most beautiful house there, when Tel agreed to let Rome believe her child was his in order to protect the country. Athena had teased him once or twice about his willingness to help a damsel in distress, and he always laughed at her. "I suppose you would rather I was more like Ares? He'd just bed them.")
"But-" Father was protesting.
"You can cross the River any time you want, Lord," Atropos said. "You wouldn't even have to die first."
"Athena?" Artemis said, demanding rather than asking advice, as always. Imperious young huntress.
Athena straightened a little. "Stay if you wish to. Go if you wish to. All I am sure of is that we here will never again have a say in the ordering of the world."
Lachesis chuckled, warm and gently, a mother's laughter at the antics of her child. "Pallas speaks well. But then, she was always the most sensible of the lot of you, the only one not obsessed with her own petty wars and triumphs. There comes a battle, my lord Gods, a battle in which will be decided the fate of all this world. You care little for it, I know, other than as a stage upon which you play out your own dramas, but when the time of Christ has almost passed, when this new religion falls… then even you will have to choose a side."
She fell silent then, measuring and measuring, the thread of a man's life, and the sound of Atropos' shears snipping shut echoed loudly around the hall.
"For every new religion brings its own demons," she said at last, and far away in Nicomedia, an Emperor died.