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The light was blinding. Patroclus squeezes Achilles’ hand and his eyes shut, waiting for the golden glare to fade.
When he opens his eyes again, the darkness - and Achilles - are gone. He sits up, looks around, and finds himself somewhere profoundly unfamiliar. Is he dreaming? Just seconds ago, he had been with Achilles, united in death as they should have been. Yes. He remembers Achilles’ words: When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together. He had done it, he realized with a start. Not only that, he had gotten Thetis to recognize him as someone who was important to Achilles–
Achilles.
Where was Achilles now? And, more importantly for the moment, where was Patroclus? Daylight floods into the room and Patroclus leaves the spot he had occupied for who-knows-how-long, walking over to the window on legs that feel like they belong to anyone but him. He had never been as sure-footed as Achilles–
For a moment, he bans thoughts of Achilles from his mind and looks out of the window, down into the street.
It is bustling, and loud, and shrill. This isn’t what he knows. This isn’t the war camp in Troy, or Peleus’ estate in Phthia.
Patroclus puts his hand against the glass and almost flinches back at how cool the surface is.
What had happened to him? Why was he here when he should be ashes, mingled with Achilles’?
Had the same fate befallen Achilles? Was he somewhere in this place, staring out of a window and trying to understand how unfamiliar everything was?
Achilles. No matter how hard he tried to keep his mind from wandering, something in his chest ached for his friend, his partner for the better part of his life. Things had always been more than fine with Achilles around. Confident Achilles, surefooted Achilles, who always knew what to say, and who had put Patroclus under his spell the moment Patroclus had first laid his eyes on him.
He distantly remembers the feeling of the bay leaves under the tips of his fingers as he clutched onto the garland, and then Achilles, his face bright with victorious joy wearing the same garland on his head.
The ache in his heart intensifies, and he feels the sudden urge to leave this place.
He spins around and finds his reflection staring back at him. He recognizes himself, but like everything else Patroclus encountered since he woke up, something about his reflection is woefully unfamiliar. His hair is still the same, dark eyes looking at him, framed by bushy brown eyebrows. He sniffles at the sight and runs a hand through his hazel locks, watching mesmerized as his reflection does the same. It is then that it strikes him:
He isn’t a ghost. He is flesh, bone, and color, and vividly himself still. He flexes his fingers, and then takes a step forward, once again pressing his hand against the glass. Imagines Achilles on the other side of the mirror, their hands touching through the material the way they touched in death when Patroclus wasn’t as corporal as he is now.
The ache returns to his chest, and it feels hot and searing, like desire.
Curious, Patroclus tugs up the hem of the shirt that has found its way onto his body and stares at his chest. There is a glow under his skin, right on his heart, and he watches, once again mesmerized, as it pulses with the beating of his heart.
Patroclus took himself in for a few more minutes, digging through the foggy haze of his mind.
“I am made of memories,” he reminds himself, the words zipping and zapping through his clouded consciousness like Zeus’ lightning.
The clothes on his body feel uncomfortable, tight and— They are exactly what the people on the street are wearing.
“It’s probably as good as anything,” Patroclus mutters to himself. He would still look lost, though - because he was.
His hand wanders to his chest again, the pulsing warmth on his heart reassuring him that he would come to find what he is looking for – Achilles.
Little else had ever mattered to Patroclus, and little else still mattered to him now.
He wonders if Achilles would still realize Patroclus’ success in mingling their ashes as Achilles had charged him with once Patroclus stands in front of him.
I have done it, Patroclus would declare. His greatest victory in life, in death, after death, was to do as Achilles had charged him.
Finally, he steps back from the mirror, and tries to ignore the other mysteries of the room he has found himself in.
In any other situation, he would have stayed to make sense of his surroundings and maybe even try to lift the mystery of his reappearance on earth after he had died … a long time ago. All that still made very little sense to him, but there were more pressing matters.
Where was Achilles? Was he in one of the rooms next to Patroclus’? Was he on the other side of this strange city? On the other side of the world?
Or was this Thetis’ doing? Had she decided to keep them separated after all, just in a way that wouldn’t allow either of them to object to it? Had Patroclus not reunited them in death - after death - after all?
All those thoughts make his head and his heart ache.
So, he gathers all his bravery and steps outside of the room. He finds a bundle of keys stuck in the door’s keyhole and grabs it, yanking the keys free. They are heavy and warm in his hand as if someone had just recently left them there. He finds a slit in his clothes and tugs the keys inside, feeling them rest against his leg.
When he steps into the same street he had observed from his window, he stands in the doorway to the house he just exited and looks at the people. He has the unsatisfying and troubling urge to blend in - so much so that a person who had never laid eyes on him before would not be able to tell he was lost. Maybe even so much so that Achilles would not recognize him.
The same would not apply to Patroclus. Patroclus had memorized every inch of Achilles, and now that he was standing on the street, with a purpose, these memories returned to him.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
Yes. Patroclus knew Achilles better than he knew himself. It should have concerned him, back when he had first met Achilles, who had taken a liking to him against all odds, against what his mother and father had clearly wished for him.
Achilles, who had made space for Patroclus in his life when Patroclus had been undeserving of it, and who had gone as far as declaring him Philtatos.
Most beloved.
Patroclus honored this title, still.
Once he found Achilles, there would be very little between them and happiness, Patroclus realized.
For a moment, he thought about Thetis, who had always been watching them, disapproving of every second Achilles spent being a boy instead of the warrior that his godly mother had declared him.
It was good, Patroclus thought, that now, there were no more Trojan wars to be fought.
Now, the only thing that mattered was whatever Patroclus and Achilles declared to matter.
Patroclus didn’t know where he was headed, he realized, but he reached for the warm comforting glow inside his chest and mumbled about finding Achilles before he took a step forward and let the crowd on the stream swallow him up like a fish in a stream.
Nobody knew him here. Nobody would know Achilles either.
It was ideal, really, if still incomprehensible to Patroclus.
He should be dead.
Yet, he was not.
He looked around and soaked in the surroundings. The air was damp like it used to be back at home, and Patroclus wonders briefly where he is.
People here didn’t speak the language he spoke, though he could understand their words nonetheless.
Next to him, a woman is talking into a tiny metallic box, laughing about something.
Patroclus follows the sea of people into a giant plaza, where he finally notices a building that looks vaguely like the temple buildings at home.
A huge banner hanging from one of the pillars advertises a Greek exhibit.
Hope blooms in Patroclus’ chest. This is something he knows. And perhaps, it is also something that Achilles knows.
Until now, Patroclus hadn’t allowed himself the thought of Achilles not having been granted the same fate.
Perhaps his friend, his partner, wasn’t here, and would instead only continue to exist in Patroclus’ memories, the very things Patroclus was made of.
He pushes the thought aside and wades across the plaza to the building, climbing the steps to the entrance.
A man dressed in black awaits him. “Welcome to the British Museum,” he greets Patroclus, who was just about to go inside.
Instead, Patroclus’s hand hangs mid-air over the doorknob. “British?” he echoes, and the man gives him a funny look.
“Aye,” he confirms. “Enjoy your stay.”
Patroclus hopes he does, and he finally enters the museum.
The inside is foreign again, but Patroclus moves towards a woman standing in the far corner of the room almost mechanically.
“Excuse me,” he manages, the words rolling from his tongue foreign in his ears, “where can I find the Greek exhibit?”
The woman gives him a once-over, and then points to a door to their right. “Through there,” she says curtly, and Patroclus barely manages a smile as the glow in his chest seems to intensify. He wonders if the woman can see it through his clothes the way Patroclus can feel it pulsing.
It is then he realizes that he must be close to finding what he’s looking for.
Achilles is close. Almost as close as they had been in death.
Patroclus doesn’t think. He runs towards the entrance to the exhibit - and then stops short.
The first room of the exhibit is flooded with light from various windows, and the light bounces off of various glass display cases that are holding various artifacts.
Patroclus didn’t recognize very many of them, but the sight of them made him feel like he had finally reached a place that he understood since he had woken up from his eternal rest.
Again, he lets the crowd of people filing into the room behind him push him into the room as he marvels at all the things that the museum has collected.
He hears people discussing the things on display, some talking about how it was sad that they were taken from their place of origin while others argued that “ancient Greece” wouldn’t miss them.
Finally, Patroclus turns to one of the pairs and smiles apologetically. “Sorry,” he says, “What’s the date today?”
The boy in front of him looks at him quizzically. “Don’t you have a phone?” He sneers, but before Patroclus can think about the fact that he doesn’t know what a phone is and why he should have one in the first place, another boy chimes with a “July 6th, 2022.”
None of that means anything to Patroclus, but he just nods and steps aside, reading one of the signs on a glass display - that denotes the thing inside as being from ancient Greece.
It was an everyday item that Patroclus remembers holding and using-
But that appeared to have been a long time ago.
So-
He must have been with Achilles in eternal rest for quite some time. If not, after all, enough to truly be eternal.
Hm.
Patroclus tries to shake the feeling of discomfort while he continues to wander through the exhibition with no idea as to how much time passes while he soaks everything in.
Eventually, he wanders into a hall that was just vases, on little pillars - but no glass cases.
People were gathering around some of them, discussing the little figurines painted in black on the terracotta.
Just one vase is not surrounded by a crowd.
In front of it stands a person, long blond hair reaching to their shoulders, and they are clad in a white shirt and white fitting trousers, a book bag slung over their shoulders. Could that be-?
Curious, Patroclus joins the stranger in front of the vase.
The plaque mounted to the pillar reads “The ashes of Achilles and Patroclus”.
Oh.
“Do you think—” someone speaks up next to him, “that the ashes are still in there?”
Patroclus doesn’t have an answer to that.
He can hear the stranger shift next to him, but his eyes are glued to the sign and to the- the urn above.
“What’s your name?”
“Pat—” Patroclus starts, but the stranger interrupts him.
Patroclus finds himself in an embrace, and it feels like—
Achilles. Achilles is crushing him with his entire godly, immortal, and mortal weight.
“Patroclus,” he whispers into Patroclus’ shoulder, enunciating every syllable as he used to when they were younger.
He was always better with words than Patroclus.
“Achilles,” he returns after his brain has somehow, inexplicably, realized that Achilles was as much flesh, bone, and color as Patroclus himself was.
Achilles steps back, holds Patroclus at arm’s length and then smiles his most carefree and brightest smile. “You’re alive,” he says. From his mouth, it’s a fact. A mystery that doesn’t need explaining, and his face says it all.
Achilles is happy.
“Name one hero who was happy.
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
Patroclus almost winces as the memory flashes through his mind, and he knows he had been staring at Achilles for a few seconds when he comes to.
“Patroclus-?”
Patroclus blinks. He has done it. He has mingled their ashes, as Achilles had charged him, so they could be together in death.
He had, after all, been the reason Achilles was happy. He had sworn it to Achilles so many days ago, and he had kept his promise.
“How do you feel?” he asks, taking a cautious step back from the urn at last.
Achilles’ smile only brightened. "I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
Then, he interrupts himself, and reaches out, cupping Patroclus’ face with both hands. “And you?” he asks back, in a voice so gentle that it brings tears to Patroclus’ eyes, “How do you feel?”
Just like they had always been, Achilles’ fingers are warm and slightly sticky on Patroclus’ skin, and immediately, the scent of honeyed dates wafts into his nose.
“I don’t know,” Patroclus admits. His feelings are overwhelming him, and all that matters is Achilles, standing there in front of him.
Achilles nods, then lets go of him, and turns, facing their urn again. He reaches around Patroclus and tugs him into his side, a muscular arm resting on his back.
“You did it,” he notes, in a soft voice.
There are other people in the room with them, Patroclus recalls as he stares at the black outlines against the terracotta. They depict hands, he suddenly realizes, reaching for each other, like Patroclus had reached for Achilles in death - and like Achilles had reached for him.
“Yes,” Patroclus returns, leaning his head on Achilles’ shoulder. “I did.”
They are standing there, arm in arm, and Patroclus thinks about what a picture they must be making - and about how they, in spite of everything that had happened to them in their first lifetime, were together again.
He inhales sharply. Honeyed dates, salt water, and a warm breeze - Achilles’ breath in his hair.
“Do you think,” he says, trying to match Achilles’ tone, “that she can see us here?”
The arm across Patroclus’ back flexes, and Patroclus can feel his lover’s fingers digging into his shoulder before the grip eases.
“No,” Achilles says finally. From his mouth, it sounds like a declaration, as if Thetis wouldn’t dare to step near them in this lifetime. “She cannot.”
Before Patroclus can say anything, Achilles lets go of him once again, and then his slightly sticky fingers close around Patroclus’ hand while the other reaches for the small leather bag he was carrying, gently lifting the strap over Patroclus’ head. The small bag rests against his hip, and Patroclus runs a thumb across the leather strap.
“Come,” Achilles says, and this time it sounds like a plea.
Don’t leave me here, Patroclus.
Patroclus wouldn’t dare.
They walk only for a moment, and then, in the shade of the museums’ giant pillars, Achilles takes a step, leans in, and kisses Patroclus flush on the lips.
Something explodes inside Patroclus, and his knees go weak with the force of it, so he wraps his arms around Achilles’ neck and deepens the kiss.
‘Try and take this from us,’ he dares in his thoughts, unsure if any of the forces that had caused him and Achilles so much pain such a long time ago could even hear him. ‘Try and challenge our love. I have fought a battle once, and now that I am stronger, I might just fight one again.’
But there is no thunder rumbling, no lightning flashing, and no waves rolling that inform Patroclus of any angered god, and so, when he and Achilles finally pull apart, he inhales deeply. “No one,” he says softly, “can see us here. None of them.”
No expectations, no overbearing parents. No exile.
Just him, and Achilles.
Achilles chuckles lowly. “I missed you,” he says. “But I never doubted you for a second, Patroclus. I knew when I made you swear it that you would keep your word to me.”
He was smiling again. The sunlight caught in his eyes and made them sparkle, and Achilles leaned his head back and stared up at the sky.
Patroclus stands there and watches Achilles. Surefooted, brave, honest- Happy Achilles.
And yet, he remembers King Peleus’ words as clear as the sky above them.
“The boy is an exile with a stain upon him. He will add no luster to your reputation, ” King Peleus had said, and he had put Patroclus in his place with that single sentence.
And yet, it seemed as if Achilles had never wanted or needed the glory that his parents attributed to him. He had said the same to his father then, too: “I do not need him to.”
Patroclus wasn’t needed as a means to make Achilles more powerful than he was already destined to be.
Achilles merely needed him to be happy.
“And now?” Patroclus asks into the silence. “Where do we go from here?”
The grin hasn’t left Achilles’ lips as he faces Patroclus again. “Home,” he says as if there had never been any other option. As if he knew exactly where home was. “Did you bring the keys?”
Patroclus nods. They are still in his pocket, and he feels them, cool metal, through the fabric of his clothes. He reaches into his pocket and pulls them out.
“Good,” Achilles mutters and then reaches for Patroclus’ hand. “At least the gods had as much sense as to grace us with a roof over our heads,” he adds, as he tugs Patroclus towards the plaza.
“I was worried we would be separated forever,” Patroclus says.
“So was I, when you didn’t wake up for several days,” Achilles returns.
What?
Patroclus stops short. “Say that again.”
Achilles stops, too, and he stumbles backward slightly, as if Patroclus was a tree, rooted into the earth, and not even the strength of a great warrior could move him from his spot.
And Patroclus very much feels like a tree as his brain struggles to comprehend the fact that maybe it wasn’t him who had been looking for his soulmate.
“I was worried about losing you,” Achilles says, but his voice seems to break more and more with every syllable, “when you didn’t wake up for several days.”
He takes another step back and lets go of Patroclus’ hand again.
“Patroclus,” he says, firmly, his voice having found foot again, and again, he is sounding the name out ever so carefully. “There are things beyond human comprehension. Like this- Whatever this is that we managed to make happen for us. People aren’t just reborn and then appear hundreds if not thousands of years and miles away from where their home once was.”
Achilles reaches into the bag he had previously entrusted Patroclus with and pulls out a notebook. “I have theories-” he starts, and then he stops, smiling when Patroclus blinks into the distance. “There you are,” he mutters, and it sounds like Patroclus was the most beautiful thing Achilles had ever laid his eyes on.
“You see, I don’t think our ashes are still in that urn in the museum - if that is the vessel we were buried in in the first place.”
Patroclus flexes his fingers. “S-so?”
“Doesn’t it make sense?” Achilles asks slowly, and Patroclus can see a hint of concern flashing over his features.
Slowly, he shakes his head.
Achilles exhales lowly. “Someone unearthed our ashes and brought us here. And if - and this is only an assumption, Patroclus-”
Again, every syllable is so crystal clear from Achilles’ lips.
Pa-tro-clus. He had never slurred it once.
“If you were truly wishing that we would wake up one day so we could be together again, then that is what set this action in motion.”
So Patroclus was the one who had wished? Had Achilles not wanted to be happy after all? Had all of this been for naught?
“But-” Patroclus says slowly, his mind still caught up on the maybes that had just been unearthed in this theory. “If you’re right, why did it take us-”
Patroclus didn’t have the words for this.
“So long?” Achilles shakes his head. He doesn’t know either. Instead, he gently reaches for Patroclus’ hand again, the other roughly stuffing the notebook he had pulled from it back into the bag. “Let’s go,” he says, his voice shaking, “home.”
Patroclus lets himself be pulled along. Achilles’ grip on his hand doesn’t hurt, and Patroclus feels his insides warm with comfort at the fact that they are finally reunited.
“Why do you think it took me longer to wake up?” he asks into the silence between them.
Achilles doesn’t answer for a while, but the silence that still lasts between them tells all.
“My heritage,” he finally answers, very carefully.
Ah, yes.
Thetis.
“Your mother,” Patroclus clarifies, his heart stinging.
Achilles inclines his head, and then, unprompted, he comes to a stop, turns, and reaches into the pocket of Patrocus’ pants, pulling out the bundle of keys. He handles them as if he had done this a few times, and the door to the house gives a click as it opens.
Unfamiliarity greets them like a gust of wind as Achilles gives the door a push. “Welcome home,” he says, and when he turns, he is smiling - once again.
Patroclus inhales sharply. “I suppose,” he murmurs.
This is only home because Achilles is here.
“I’m sorry,” Achilles then offers, out of the blue. “I know talking about her upsets you.”
“I’m sorry too,” Patroclus returns in the same breath. “For making you think I’m upset.”
Patroclus wasn’t upset. He hadn’t been upset in a long time, in fact, and he sure wouldn’t start being upset now.
“It’s just- Somehow I feel like we don’t belong here- Like I don’t belong here.”
Like I’m not worthy enough to be here with you, he wants to add, but he doesn’t.
“We don’t belong here,” Achilles agrees as if it was a revelation, the smartest thing anyone had ever said to him. “We belong to what people now call history.”
History.
“Is that why someone stole our ashes?”
Achilles only nods, then grabs Patroclus’ arm and tugs him over the doorway before he pushes the door to the house shut. “People have written books about- People we knew.”
He looks away for a split second, and that betrays him.
“Us, too?”
Slowly, Achilles nods. “Try not to think about it too much. Nobody really knows us.”
That night, they are laying on the cold concrete roof of the house they had both woken up in, tracing the lines of each other’s bodies and those of the constellations in the sky.
Achilles has not mentioned any mind-boggling theories about how they had gotten to where they are now, and Patroclus has not thought about how there had been a chance for him to fail at fulfilling Achilles’ last request.
His fingers are exploring Achilles’ skin, his mind screaming at him about how this was real and how he had managed not to be a disappointment once again.
Achilles has his eyes closed
His face is smooth. His features are drawn with a firm hand; nothing awry or sloppy, nothing too large—all precise, cut with the sharpest of knives. And yet the effect itself is not sharp
He was soft, but he was real.
And he was in love with Patroclus.
Achilles cracks an eye open against the lights illuminating the roof from below them. He sighs softly and turns to his side, sliding an arm over Patroclus’ body and burying his face in the crook of Patroclus’ neck.
After a moment, Patroclus returns the gesture and gently pulls Achilles closer.
Their limbs slide against one another, on paths that they had traced so many times before, yet still were not old .
“Thank you,” Patroclus whispers into the silence, the only noise around them the soft whirring of electric lamps and the occasional piece of strangers’ conversation, carried to their hideout by the wind, “for waiting for me.”
Huffing softly, Achilles untangles himself from their embrace, limbs no longer interlocked. “You would have done the same,” he says, leaving no space for arguments.
“I think I was waiting for you, too,” Patroclus adds. “Without you, I would have been nothing.”
With you, I am the best I could be.
Instead of a verbal response, Achilles’ lips ghost kisses along Patroclus’ jaw in the featherlightest touches.
“You would never have been nothing,” he says, determined. “I have found you in the last life, and in this. I would have found you in any other and you would have been something to me.”
“Something like a friend?”
A kiss on his jaw.
“Something like a lover?”
Another kiss. “More,” Achilles insists, smoothing a warm finger over Patroclus’ brows as they knit with worry.
“Philtatos,” he says in a gentle voice, sounding out the syllables like he does for Patroclus’ name. “That, and nothing less.”
He is certain with his tongue as he is with his feet, and Patroclus stares up at the sky. “I did not ruin your reputation in the last life,” he says, and knowing they are nobodies now, he adds, “What if I do it in the next?”
“I may be my mother’s and my father’s son. I may have been a great warrior. I may have had a reputation. But it died with me, and now it is nothing to me anymore. I do not need to be anyone, and I also do not need you to be anyone. You have nothing to prove to me anymore. You have done all I could have ever asked of you and more. You have honor, Patroclus, and though you may try to deny it to the rest of our granted days, nobody can take it from you.”
Achilles reaches for their hands again, and interlocks their fingers. “Just accept it. You can write your own stories, now,” he whispers, sounding in awe – as if he had just realized that he, too, could do so.
“It is a funny thing,” he notes, and shakes his head. “Stop worrying,” he then admonishes sternly, and reaches for his bag that he had carelessly flung to the side as soon as they had discovered the roof.
He flips it open and pulls out a battered copy of some book, his fingers running over the pages.
“What is that?” Patroclus asks, peeking over his shoulder.
“Some girl in the park was reading it on my way to the museum,” Achilles says, laughing a little. “It made her cry, and so she-” He exhales and brushes dirt from the cover. “She threw it away, and she was very angry at something when she walked away.”
He waits a moment, before he says, “I think I understand. If I had to live through what happened to us through the words of another, I would have lost my mind, too.”
He cranes his neck to kiss Patroclus’ jaw again. “We know how the story goes,” he muses. “But perhaps, we should-”
Achilles clears his throat, and begins to read:
“My father was a king and the son of kings. ”