He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go.
~Tapestry, Carole King
She spends the remainder of the afternoon with one of the books Hermes brought her – years ago, on the mortal scale, back when she was still anguished by Drake's departure – and works her way through the lines she's all but memorized by now.
Whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
It was Drake who had first introduced her to the foreign terms that she encountered time and time again in Milton's book, words like heaven and hell and Satan; he had patiently explained Christianity, explained that in his time people worshipped one God, not many different gods. She hadn't understood it.
Even Milton, in his book about one God, called upon the many different gods she knew. Sing, heavenly muse, he began, and Calypso often wondered whether Milton might have been a demigod, because despite the story of Adam and Eve and the fall of Satan from the place called heaven, the place Drake had once compared to Ogygia, Milton often referred back to the gods. It was both comforting and unnerving.
Calypso had asked Hermes once about the very title of the book, Paradise Lost. It had seemed to her that Satan was better off out of heaven. He certainly hadn't lost much of a paradise. Drake's God had always seemed cold and unforgiving.
Perhaps in that way Drake's God was like her gods. Calling her an ingrate for making one mistake – sufficient to have stood, though free to fall – set up to fail, forced to pick a side and picking the wrong one.
And being punished for it for all eternity.
Perhaps Ogygia wasn't a paradise. Perhaps it was a hell.
They therefore, as to right belonged,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if Predestination overruled
Their will.
Yes, all well and good for God, who could punish the fallen angels for choosing to revolt. All well and good for Zeus, who could punish her for siding with her father all those millennia ago.
"It was your choice," she imagines Zeus-or-God saying. "You could have disobeyed your father and sided with the gods."
But she didn't, and now because of one choice she is trapped. She has apologized time and time again, to no avail, because the gods are cold and unforgiving. She may have had a choice once.
She doesn't have one now.
Refuse to love this boy and be stuck with him forever, or fall in love with him and never see him again. She'll be unhappy either way.
She feels another ripple in Ogygia's threads, drawing her attention out the door of her cave and onto the boy. He's wandering aimlessly down the beach, occasionally tossing bits of scrap metal into the spray. Calypso laughs humorlessly. Iris doesn't care about Ogygia.
The boy gives up eventually. He wanders back to the shore and sits in the sand. But it's as though something within him won't let him keep still; in a split second he's on his feet again. He reaches into his toolbelt and pulls something out of it. Then his hands are flying faster than Calypso would have thought possible. She has no idea what he's doing, but she's transfixed by the motion.
Until he turns slightly, giving her a profile view. He's made a spear.
Is he going to try to kill her?
Calypso thinks back frantically to their earlier conversation, trying to remember whether she'd mentioned that she is immortal.
She has no idea what would happen if he stabs her with his spear. She wouldn't die, obviously, but she imagines it would hurt.
But instead of walking towards the cave, he turns back to the ocean. The ocean?
He wades in a few feet, but not far enough to be forced back onto the island by the rushing current. Calypso spent her first few centuries on Ogygia trying (in vain) to swim away and can recall all to well the pain of coughing water out of her lungs while the hot sand scorched her back. A half dozen meters away from the shoreline and the current would overwhelm the boy. It might even kill the demigod.
On second thought, maybe she should encourage him to try to swim to freedom.
But no, he stays where he is in the shallows and shoves his spear down into the water. What…?
He's trying to fish, she realizes. He's doing a terrible job of it; the way he's thrashing about in the water he'll probably scare off anything he might have caught.
Calypso has a fishing line in her cave. She doesn't use it much; it reminds her too much of all the seafaring heroes that have wound up on Ogygia, but maybe she should lend it to the boy.
She may hate him, but she can't let him starve.
And so she purses her lips and makes her way to the kitchen. The island knows what she wants to do; Ogygia's invisible forces clear Calypso's books off the table before she even asks.
"Flour," Calypso tells them, and the forces provide it for her.
Even three thousand years later she still has no idea where these ingredients come from; Calypso can grow her own produce, sure, and sometimes she'll catch small game in a trap, but she doesn't grow wheat, much less have a mill, and yet Ogygia seems to have an endless supply of flour for her bread.
It's one of the mysteries of the island, she supposes.
"Salt, yeast, oil," she says, and they appear before her, more mysteries.
Calypso prepares her work area and begins mixing ingredients. She adds water from the well in the garden and kneads the dough against the table, pounding it rhythmically against the table.
Then she divides it into two loaves – one for him, one for her – and leaves it to rise.
She should leave him with just bread. It's enough so he won't be hungry, but if he wants a healthful meal he can figure it out for himself.
Ogygia is displeased with Calypso's reasoning. Help him help him help him, the wind whispers, and Calypso looks out the window one last time. The boy is still stabbing his spear at the water at random. He looks frustrated.
Help him help him help him.
"Fine!" Calypso snaps at the wind. "Have it your way."
And she heads to the garden to gather vegetables to make a stew.
By the time the stew is ready and the bread baked it's nearly sundown and the boy has given up on fishing. He sits down on the sand again and puts a hand against his stomach, a pained expression on his face. Hunger.
So Calypso fills a basket with the bread and the stew and a canteen of well water and marches out to the beach. The boy must hear her footsteps, but he doesn't turn around.
"Here," she says, shoving the basket at him so hard she nearly throws it. "Don't even think about coming anywhere near my cave tonight."
Then she runs away before he can say anything.
She watches him from behind the curtains at the cave entrance. He lifts up the bread and inspects it as though it might be poisoned. She almost laughs, but stops herself.
She watches him eat. He looks lonely, the way she imagines she always looks. A part of her wants to walk over and sit with him.
As soon as the thought crosses her mind she shoves it back out again. She cannot go sit with him. She cannot become friends with him. She cannot fall in love with him or he will break her heart.
No, she will not sit with him.
But for the quickest moment, she wonders whether the pain of a broken heart might be worth it if it spares her the pain of watching him waste away alone.
A/N: Seriously though, Uncle Rick, where the Hades is Calypso getting all this flour from to bake her bread?
Oh and I don't own Paradise Lost. I just figured Calypso must be doing something with her time other than gardening and baking and making clothes. Also I really wouldn't recommend reading Paradise Lost in your free time because it's honestly more boring than spending 3000 years on a desert island.
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