Chapter Text
Diomedes does not sleep well in the luxuriously soft bed, adorned with a brightly embroidered coverlet depicting Ariadne lamenting on the beach. He would, he unhappily suspects, sleep better in Odysseus’ bed, but sleeping with him now seems ill-advised. If he seems more settled in the morning, if he stops looking at Diomedes like he is by turns a traitor and a tragic maiden, if he can hold it together when they speak to the lord, then maybe. Until then, Diomedes will try to soothe any feathers Odysseus might ruffle, subtly get him to eat, and do what he can to keep the soldiers (and the other commanders) from noticing that he’s been off. Odysseus has done so for him before, when his own strangeness turns troublesome, and they both will do so again. Pretending that everything is normal so that, eventually, it will be.
And it will be normal soon. He has seen this happen seven times before, and he feels confident it’ll play out the same way again. Come summer, the Scamander will run red with blood and Odysseus will be in Diomedes’ bed. Nothing ever changes at Troy.
But it will soon. Two years and the war will end, one way or another. The thought of what comes next, of the long years of peace and prosperity, of marriage and kingship, of a quiet death and an Argive grave, loom before him. He does not want to die, but he does wonder, sometimes, if it would be for the best for him to be killed at Troy.
The thing is, Diomedes isn’t a person—or, at least, he’s not a person the way everyone else seems to be people. He’s a soldier instead, and even before he was a soldier, he was training to be one, and it feels like there are fundamental things that define other people—desires, instincts, relationships—that simply are not a part of him. He does not react how he should, for good and for ill. He might not be as great a hero as Achilles, but he knows he is a better soldier. He knows how to command men, how to organize a camp, how to scout, how to kill. In exchange, he doesn’t know how to live a normal life. It is a trade-off he’s happy with, more or less. He simply suspects that this is a trade-off that will go poorly for Argos in the long run.
Of course, how he feels, what he wants, none of that really matters. He’ll do his duty, fight this war, rule Argos, and do whatever else Athena asks of him. It doesn’t matter if sometimes, he has a selfish wish that the war would never end. Not really, though, it’s not that he never wants to stop fighting. He just doesn’t want to leave the little world that war creates, the world he was raised to live in, the world he understands. On a night like this, tired of war and diplomacy and just about everything else, he can admit to himself that some part of that desire—and it’s a larger part than he cares to think about—is just the desire for Odysseus to stick around.
Doesn’t matter, of course. One day very soon, if they both survive, Odysseus will go home to his beautiful wife and his beloved island, and the only time he’ll think about Diomedes will be when he tells war stories to his son. Meanwhile, Diomedes will go back to a wife who hates him and a city that barely accepts him as king, and he’ll think about Odysseus every fucking day.