Chapter Text
Odysseus had been missing for seven years, and Telemachus was getting sick and tired of all the podcast weirdos trying to get him or his mom to endorse whatever pet theory they came up with to explain the disappearance.
You see, Odysseus Laerson was a well-known army general who, post-retirement, went to speak at international conferences. During the latest of these, his plane had gone down, never to be recovered. Dozens of conspiracy theorists had scoured his life trying to come up with a reason, convinced it had to be government malfeasance. During their scouring, they’d inevitably come calling to the house of his wife and son. Each one with a more ridiculous theory than the last.
The next one to come knocking was going to get a broken nose, this Telemachus swore.
“There was someone skulking around the house, Peisi,” he was saying, pacing a bald spot in his best friend’s living room carpet.
Peisistratus, lounging on the couch, eyed the joint in Telemachus’ hand.
“You sure you didn’t just overindulge?” he asked. “You know Nausicaa and her…experiments. I wouldn’t put it past her to have accidentally created ‘paranoia: the plant.’”
Telemachus waved him off. “Nah, I was completely sober. I ran out a few days ago, and my medical card is still in limbo. Hence why I needed to buy from your sketchy-ass roommate.”
“Heard that!” Nausicaa called from the other room.
“Love you, don’t murder me in my sleep!” Telemachus called back to her.
“So, the skulking?” Peisistratus asked, bringing the topic back around.
“Yeah. That. I saw a van that passed my house like five times, and the dude driving was just staring at the door. Fucking creepy, honestly.” He paused to take a drag of the joint. “It was a pretty cool van, though. Had a sick mural of a wizard riding a direwolf.”
“Well, at least it’s distinctive. That way if you’ve gotta call the cops again, you got something to give ‘em,” Peisistratus noted brightly.
Telemachus laughed, finally sitting down, tossing one arm over the back of the couch. “You’re probably right. Good thing for overconfident assholes who don’t realize a custom paint job just means a spotlight on you when you do something nefarious.”
Peisistratus handed him a ginger ale- blackberry, his favorite flavor- and they settled in to watch whatever musical Peisistratus insisted was going to be the next Hamilton. Something about an alien hive-mind destroying a small town.
Okay, it was pretty funny.
A few hours later he was dragging himself through the door to his and his mom’s house, glaring at the van parked down the road. It was not nearly as inconspicuous as it thought it was, sitting on the side of the road with that eye-searing mural on it. Whatever; as long as it wasn’t in their driveway, the cops wouldn’t do shit. As he very well knew, because they’d practically stopped coming out period.
His mom was bent over the kitchen table, ironing around ten thousand tiny fabric squares.
“New commission?” he asked.
She hummed in confirmation. “Someone wants a quilt patterned with all fifty states, with state birds and state flowers to accompany them. Apparently, they had one like that from their grandmother, but it got stolen.”
“Yeowch. Both it getting stolen, and your poor hands.”
“They’re paying good money for it,” Penelope said with a grin. “If my hands get too sore, I might just dip into your stash,” she joked, elbowing Telemachus in the side.
“Mother!” he fake-admonished, hand to his chest like a scandalized church lady.
Penelope cackled, going back to her work, ironing and pinning fabric with a practiced ease that came with a lifetime of work in the fiber arts and textiles.
He kissed the top of her head and went to fix them dinner. He’d taken over a lot of the house chores, since his worsening migraines meant he wasn’t really able to work that much. The weed helped the pain, but he didn’t trust himself to drive on it, and most employers frowned on showing up to work smelling like cannabis. He did still work two-three days a week, handing out samples at the grocery store in walking distance, but that wasn’t a whole lot of income. Most of it went to doctor’s bills and pot.
He kept dinner simple, just broccoli-stuffed chicken they bought in bulk, and some mac’n’cheese. Filling, tasty, easy.
The van was still there after they ate. Telemachus glared at it from between the slats of the blinds on the kitchen window. Frustration mounting, he flipped the blinds closed and stomped to his room to grab a pre-roll Nausicaa had given him.
He had the lighter to the tip of it when he finally snapped.
Abandoning the joint on his bedside table, he marched out the front door and right up to the driver’s side window. He slapped the glass with his palm until the person inside finally rolled it down.
“Hey,” the man behind the wheel said, grinning lazily as he waved. He was surprisingly buff for someone who stalked people from a van, and surprisingly pretty. He was black, with locs pulled into a neat ponytail, one ear full of piercings, as well as one through his lip. His eyes were two slightly different shades of brown; the right one had more depth and movement to it, leading Telemachus to assume the left might be a glass eye.
“What the fuck do you want?” Telemachus begged. “Can’t you guys leave us alone? We don’t know what happened to my dad, okay?”
“That’s what you would say,” a voice piped up from the back.
“Eury, shut the hell up,” pretty man said, turning to glare at someone Telemachus couldn’t see from the angle he had.
The man turned back to Telemachus. “Ignore him, what were you saying?”
“I was telling you to kindly fuck off,” Telemachus snapped. “You’re like the hundredth group of conspiracy whackos to show up to pester us. I don’t care how many followers your damn podcast has, this is my life, alright?”
“How’d he know about the podcast?” a third person asked, also from the back of the van.
“How many of you assholes are in there?” Telemachus groaned, throwing his hands up in frustration.
“Just the three of us. Amphi, you aren’t helping either.”
“Sorry.”
“I’m Antinous,” the pretty man said, reaching his hand out of the windows for a handshake. Reluctantly, Telemachus took it. “And this isn’t the best place to have this discussion, I don’t think. How about we drive down to that cute café I saw not too far. Purrcolate, I think it was called?”
“I’m not getting in a van with three strange men, I’m not that stupid,” Telemachus told him. “Also that’s a cat café, it has a ten-dollar entry fee.”
“Oh shit, yeah! Let’s go see some cats!” the third person- Amphi, or whoever- cheered.
He fought his way up from the back, scrambling over audio equipment to plop himself down on the passenger seat. He was also black, though lighter-skinned than Antinous, and his hair was a puffball of a ponytail. He was also much skinnier, though it was more like a lean and trim kind of skinny, not the same scrawny and bony as Telemachus was.
“Amphinomus, at your service,” he said brightly. “Eurymachus is the grumpy asshole who’s still hiding in the back. Anyways, we run a podcast all about missing 411 cases, and we just wanted to interview you guys. We won’t push any of that conspiracy garbage on you. I mean, a vast majority of these cases have simple, mundane explanations.”
“Speak for yourself,” grumbled Eurymachus from the back.
“Eury, shut the fuck up!” Antinous and Amphinomus shouted at him in unison.
“Listen. To. Me,” Telemachus growled, leaning into the window to speak directly to Antinous. “I gave my statement already. Seven years ago, when my dad first went missing. I know about as much as any true-crime amateur with a microphone and a laptop does, and that hasn’t changed. You three have been stalking my home for three days now, and I am sick and tired of this whole circus. Back the fuck off and leave me and my mom alone.”
“You’ve got some bite, Little Wolf,” Antinous said with a raised eyebrow. “You sure I can’t buy you a coffee, at least?”
His eyes flicked down Telemachus’ body, then back to his face, lazy grin ticking up a few notches.
“N-no!” Telemachus sputtered. “Fuck all the way off!”
With that, he turned his heel and stomped away, back into his house. He was going to ignore how horribly red his entire being had become.