In the movies, it's always an invasion. Us against them. And they've got tech that far surpasses ours. We fight in the streets and a ragtag group finds a weak spot that the advanced beings have
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The audacity of mortals to love what they must hate.
To yearn for a moment, and yet not belong in it. To want to let go and yet unable to.
Ha. The dead surely have an unfortunate amount of time to regret things.
Trapped in this broken hallow, I had mistaken humility for the absence of pride. How foolish.
"Pátrokleos."
Achilleús whispered my name in broken sobs as he cradled my cold body in laps. So gently , so cruelly. Hot perturbed tears dropped onto the pale face of my corpse and flowed down. For a moment it felt like my own tears. How funny.
How pitiful.
Just this morning, I had begged for him armour, to wear it in his place and lead the troops as him. For ten years the Greeks had besieged Troy, and for ten years Hektor, prince of that city, had held its walls against us. But Achilleús, insulted by our king, had withdrawn from battle. His wounded honour had become a wound through which our army bled.
Men were dying.
I told him I would save the ships.
It was true.
I told him I would drive the Trojans back.
It was true.
But beneath those noble truths lay another, small and ravenous. I wanted to know what it meant to be Achilleús.
I had knelt beside dying men, washed their wounds, swallowed their cries. I had ridden horses into battle, severed limbs, driven arrows through hearts. I had lived in the shadow of Achilleús and called it devotion. And it was devotion. Every tender, terrible moment of it. But shadows, too, belong to the sun.
And I had wanted to burn.
Achilleús had made room for me when the world had cast me out. Beside his fire. At his table. In his bed. He had never asked me to earn what he so carelessly gave.
How I loved him for it. How I resented him.
He remembered our laughter, our quarrels, the mornings when I stole his blankets and he threatened to throw me into the sea.
I remembered them too. But I remembered also the envy that had lain beside us like a third body. The bitterness I swallowed when kings praised him. The shame of being loved by a man whose greatness made my own feel so terribly small.
Those memories belonged to me alone. And how I resented him for remembering nothing of them.
How cruel, that two men may inhabit the same moment and carry away two different wounds. He had never known. I had never told him. Yet I blamed him for failing to see what I had hidden. Perhaps that was my first pride, believing my silence ought to have been understood.
He fastened the bronze himself. "Drive them from the ships," he said. "Then return."
His fingers lingered upon a strap already tightened.
I promised. And for one glorious afternoon, I wore his name. The Trojans fled before the golden crest. The Greeks cried Achilleús, Achilleús, and I let the borrowed syllables fill every hollow place within me.
But the strength was mine. The spear was mine. The victory was mine. Only the name belonged to another.
I saved the ships.
I could have returned.
I did not.
Was that my failure? Or had I chosen it? An intentional failure is not truly a failure, is it?
Oh, what a miserable little mercy pride makes of language.
I knew the road back. I knew the voice waiting at its end. I knew every step toward Troy was a step away from him. And still, I walked.
No.
I ran.
For glory does not always drag a man unwillingly to his grave. Sometimes it takes his hand. Sometimes he holds on.
And I held on.
Until Hektor.
Hektor. The one who holds fast. The prince who had held Troy against a thousand spears drove his own through me. And as my blood seeped into the earth, he stripped the bronze from my body.
I had worn another man's name into battle and I died hearing my own.
And Hektor took the bronze.
How strange that an armour made to protect a man should outlive every man who believed in its protection.
"Pátrokleos." Achilleús called again.
I had returned to him after all.
Not upon my feet, not carrying the victory I had so desperately wanted him to witness, but cold and bloodied across his lap. He held my hands as though death were a bargain he could undo by refusing to release them.
I reached for his face.
Nothing.
"Pátrokleos." My name broke against his teeth.
I had wanted his glory. Now I wanted his grief.
His hands trembled against my face. Those terrible hands, made to break men, now struggled to brush the blood from my lips without hurting me.
His hands trembled against my face. Those terrible hands, made to break men, now struggled to brush the blood from my lips without hurting me.
I wanted to laugh. Even now, beloved, you are afraid of breaking me.
I reached for him.
My fingers passed through his golden hair like moonlight through water.
Again.
And again.
He did not turn.
How cruel that I had spent my life trying to stand where he stood, only to find him kneeling where I could no longer reach.
He pressed my cold fingers to his mouth.
"Please."
Such a little word. How many men had begged it of him? How many fathers had fallen at his feet while he guarded his honour as though it were dearer than their sons?
Now he offered that same word to the dead. I had thought humility meant kneeling before greatness. I had not known greatness could be brought to its knees by love.
I wished I had never worn the armour. Then I remembered the battlefield. The fleeing Trojans. The thunder of hooves. The glorious instant when I had believed myself sufficient. And I wished to wear it once more.
Both desires remained. Death had made neither less true.
How fragile the boundary between glorious grief and grievous glory, when one man's triumph becomes another man's ruin.
How fragile the boundary between glorious grief and grievous glory, when one man's triumph becomes another man's ruin.
Then Achilleús rose.
I saw a man wearing his grief as I had worn his bronze. Neither fitted as well as we pretended.
He killed.
The rivers choked on the dead. The earth drank until it could drink no more. His spear wrote my name upon bodies that had never known me.
Was this love? Was this glory?
How fragile the boundary between glorious grief and grievous glory, when both are written in blood.
And I followed.
A ghost pursuing a man who pursued a memory.
I called his name until I understood what silence meant to the dead.
Then, beneath the walls of Troy, Hektor appeared.
And now he held something else.
Hektor wore the armour I had died inside. The armour that had carried Achilleús's name now carried my blood.
Three men. One borrowed shape. And not one of us had escaped it.
Achilleús began to run.
I knew that run.
Achilleús, who had once held me, was running toward the man who had taken that life away.
Achilleús, who had once held me, was running toward the man who had taken that life away.
And I, who had held his name for one glorious afternoon, could hold nothing at all.
I had spent my life trying to become the man whose name I wore.
And now, watching Achilleús pursue the image of himself, I wondered whether either of us had ever known what we wanted. Perhaps that was our tragedy.
Not that we had traded places. But that having stood where the other stood, neither of us had learned how to turn back.
The stars would return that night.
They would shine above Troy as though nothing had changed. As though the dead were not dead, and the living had not already begun to follow.
I reached my hands toward him.
"Achilleús!"
He did not turn.
Neither had I.
And beneath the indifferent heavens, as the distance between the two warriors narrowed, I could no longer tell whether he was running toward the man who had killed me, the man he had once been, or the life we had already lost.
Who are you chasing, Achilleús?
In competition
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