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It started just before he died, Hektor believes. The overthinking, that is.
(You’ve been an authority on overthinking things your entire life, he can imagine Andromache telling him with a smirk if she was here. But search after search after search of the plains of Elysium has assured him that she is not, and he can only beg that his wife has love and support in the company Asphodel has to offer. He would be there if he could.)
(And she’d be right, but his overthinking has never been like this before.)
It started, he believes, in that moment under the walls of Troy, before the sight of Achilles, that last blow that finally breached his rabid, rotting resolve, but after realizing he was alone.
And he had been. Alone. As he’d never been before. Every man and ally of Troy was safe behind her broad walls and every god who’d ever loved him fell deaf to his prayers. Hektor was alone and he could feel it in the marrow of his bones.
And he had started to think.
What if he followed the rest of them behind the walls, as his parents begged? Was he bound to take responsibility for the damned strategy he’d insisted on the night prior? Would his people destroy him for the ruin he’s caused if he returned to them now? Would he do it himself if they didn’t? Could he make a deal with Achilles? Did he really have to die here? Could he give back Helen with all the wealth they had left to finally end this wretched war? Was he wrong to believe that such an offer would be in vain, and the Achaeans would raze them no matter the ransom? How could he even consider that Achilles might bargain with him, or that he could escape this fight? Would the gods-?
He’d been cut short then. And all he thought was, Run. Run, run, run-!
Then death.
Then the indescribable span of time he spent as a shattered shade trapped on the surface, tortured dead amongst tortured living, those long weeks before finally he was buried.
Then the Underworld.
Hermes had led his soul below the surface, a flitting rush of vivid orange, an out of place vibrancy in the deepening darkness of death. He chattered rapidly all the while, each word running into the last until the waves of them washed over Hektor incomprehensibly. He thinks he remembers the god telling him that he almost stole Hektor’s body from the Achaeans, then decided not to, or was told not to, or something. He might have misconstrued or entirely imagined it. He had been in a daze, at the time.
He didn’t notice Hermes depart, but the next moment he was no longer beside him. Hektor waited at the head of the Styx.
Faded shades lingered, whisper quiet, spread along the bank with him. He wondered if, when they looked at him, they found the same indistinct, translucent form he saw when he looked back. They only gathered tighter when a boat came sweeping elegantly up the river, stopping at the dock that formed the sole distinction on their bank.
Hektor joined them and paid his coin as toll. He sat in Charon’s boat with the rest of the shades in a shell shocked silence.
He remained so until the first stop.
With a well practiced dip of his oar, Charon stopped his boat at another dock nestled in soothing greenery Hektor would have never expected from the Underworld. He only barely had time to wonder at their route and at how long it might take to reach where they would wait to be placed before the ferryman nudged him with his oar. It caught him so off guard that he had needed a second nudge before getting to his feet.
When he could only gaze up at the god in dim confusion, the rings on his bony hand glinted brilliantly as he gestured to the otherworldly verdure before them.
Hektor had blinked.
Once again pulling his oar around to steer him, Charon pressed his back towards the dock. Hektor managed to gather himself quickly enough this time to climb from the boat without too much prodding necessary.
He looked around, still desperately uncertain. Blue gray stones formed solid, if worn architecture across the landscape, decorated lushly with sheets of ivy. Milky white mist rose from wildly winding channels in the earth, and Hektor slowly understood himself to be looking at the river Lethe.
“This is Elysium,” Hektor had said. Charon groaned.
“This- There has to be some mistake,” he forced out, finally beginning to remember himself well enough to struggle out of the fog over his soul and register what was truly going on. “I haven’t even been judged yet. I shouldn’t be here.”
The ferryman looked away in apparent disinterest, unblinking eyes flashing from under the dark rim of his hat as he returned to the prow of his boat.
“Wait-” He took one hasty step back up the dock, alarmed, before Charon hit the planks just beyond his toes with the edge of his oar in a single, sharp rap. He stopped in his tracks and took that step back again for good measure. Hektor knew better than to go against the will of the gods. He was taught better, and he had learned better first hand those few rare times when his teachings had proven not enough.
“Please, I don’t belong here,” Hektor tried desperately. Charon simply stared back in return, neither cruel nor kind, gazing right through him. Then, without another sound, he had turned away and pushed the ferry from the dock, continuing on and leaving Hektor alone at the gates of Elysium.
And so.
Hektor has remained ever since.
He finds some of his siblings in his initial circuits of this new home of his, those that went down to death before him. He takes a measure of comfort that they have found peace in the blessings of Elysium, but he does not linger with them long. He cannot.
They greet him with love and hospitality, but he sees the hollow despair in their eyes when they first look upon him and he hears the unspoken words that form in the awkward silences between them. The truth stalks him like his shadow once did, looming over him and every familiar soul who shares his company. They all know what his presence here means. Hektor is dead, and it can only be a matter of time now before Troy falls.
Hektor can only take so many reminders of that truth himself. He avoids the others, just for a moment. To change tracks, he resolves himself to find the dock in the Styx again, still disquieted by his arrival here.
Through muted conversations, Hektor discovers that the reason he was delivered to Elysium outright is not that they neglected to judge him, as he first assumed, but rather that they decided his judgment before he even reached the Underworld. No shade is present for their assessment, he learns, even those who must wait. The judges have all the knowledge they need and the dead only find out the verdict when they’re ferried there. A ruling so fast that it comes before the shade it concerns is rare, but precedented.
It marks a hero, some whisper to him, dragging back up every failed expectation Hektor had hoped to distract himself from, the reason he’d ventured to the dock at all.
Hektor flees the place, yet can’t find the strength to rejoin the other Trojans- the shades of his family. He tucks himself away from them for a while; he needs distance and he needs time.
In the intermediary, some seek him out regardless. Some who he’s seen down here, some he hasn’t. They’re still dying up there, after all. The ones who follow after him look at him differently than the ones who came before, but it still hurts.
It is Paris, at one point.
A wild cry of his name sends Hektor shooting to his feet, and the next thing he knows, a tangle of long limbs and scattered curls barrels into him and embraces him. After the moment he needs to understand, he sighs, “Oh, Paris...” as he has so many countless times before.
“I missed you, I missed you...” his brother half sobs, arms so tight around Hektor’s back that it would be hard to breathe if he’d needed to. He rubs his palms over the backs of Paris’s shoulder blades and lets him grieve over his soul as he once grieved over his corpse. Let this be a greater comfort than that had been.
Hektor has wondered if Paris would survive the war he helped shape, but it seems that was not to be.
He doesn’t quite know what to make of the outpour of emotion from Paris. Hektor had thought that he might have come to resent him, given Hektor’s mounting bitterness towards him in the last few years of their lives. In calmer moments, he’d tried to treat his brother more kindly, but it hardly feels like any compensation.
He’d lashed out at Paris so many times then, when the ruthless fury that the battlefield forced him to summon overflowed like bile flooding his throat, more than he could contain in his trembling muscles and bloodied spears. It’d spilled over onto Paris whenever he was near, though he bore it with grace, that errant rage.
Hektor doesn’t want to be angry anymore. Now it just hurts. Down here at last, violence is no longer demanded of him, and the slow fade of nine years worth of stress and aggression has wiped out much of his hostility. Looking back with a new clarity on his scorn of Paris, Hektor feels some parts certainly were not warranted and others truly were, but he has lost his taste for any of it.
He simply indulges his embrace until he eventually pulls back.
“I killed Achilles,” Paris tells him abruptly, uncharacteristically grim. “I managed to avenge you in the end, if it brings you any comfort.”
Hektor knows this, foresaw it in the final moment of his life. With the aid of Lord Apollo, Paris destroyed Achilles outside the gates of Troy just as Hektor knew he would.
“It does bring me a sort of comfort, though I’m not sure what that says about me.” Paris, for his part, looks more settled at that, as if his words have snagged at some thread of his being just so as to unravel a tangled knot snared within him.
“Then maybe that’s why I-” He gives a tiny shake of his head. “No, never mind.” His expression twists through complex arrays Hektor can’t interpret quickly enough before settling in a smile far more laden with sadness than Paris’s usual sparkling grins. “I’m just glad to see you again.”
They try to navigate more stiff, awkward conversation before parting ways. There is so much to say and no way to say it now. Still, that’s not much different than what he’s felt with all the shades he’s spoken too so far, and he hopes it will fade with time.
He returns to keeping mostly to himself for some indeterminate amount of time.
And then- well, it’s obvious.
Hektor finally gathers with his family properly when it happens. When Troy falls, Hektor answers the obligation he feels to help guide his people from the fates they’ve met into these fields of paradise. So many come, all at once, shaking, weeping, and mourning their lives severed in the savage sack of Troy.
In a wretched, morbid butchery of what he holds most dear, Hektor’s family rapidly expands within Elysium as it is snuffed out on the surface. What should have been tender, if bittersweet reunions, sour viciously in these circumstances until they sear away at them all.
At first, under tacit agreement, no one speaks of what happened in Troy. The new dead are loath to reveal the horrors, though whether it is for their own sake or for the sake of those who died before it all came to pass, Hektor does not know. From the looks he receives from some, he thinks at least a few mean to spare him the grim details of their fates.
For better or for worse, those efforts are in vain.
Enough Achaeans follow his people down that word of all that happened soon sweeps through Elysium with the inescapable ruin of a ravenous wildfire. When the rumors have echoed in all their ears, no matter how unwelcome, more Trojans speak of what happened, what they endured, and what they failed to endure. At a point, it is better for them all to know such pains with certainty from their loved ones than to fear the possibilities voiced by their enemies.
His allies speak. His people speak. His family speaks. Hektor listens. Hektor weeps.
It carves away at him from the inside to know, though he also knows that’s not what any of them intend. But it hollows him out to the point that he thinks the shell of this form must be razor thin, more pitiful armor than even his bare skin once could have served as.
Hektor sways heavier than he should when his brother Deiphobus knocks his shoulder into his, as he’s done so many times before. His hand shakes when he ruffles it through his sister Polyxena’s hair while trying to make her smile. His voice cracks when he welcomes his mother Hecuba, shuddering under the weight of her loving, sorrowful smile.
Not everyone joins them. Some, but not all. A sparse, spare few have survived, but the others must have been sent to other planes of the Underworld. He sees no true rhyme or reason to the souls in his company and those absent when he looks around, but he only looks for a heartbeat before he stops looking.
He can’t- It brings a sudden, striking, nauseating agony that he barely chokes down, all ensnared with blazing bright heartache and shame. The pain is more wild and frightening than that of any blow he’s ever taken and he refuses to even think of passing judgment that could never be anything other than hateful.
Whatever judgment actually dictates this place has already been doled out and Hektor has already accepted that he simply does not understand it. He will not look around and wonder. He would drive himself mad with that.
When the tide of new souls abates, Hektor withdraws once more, wounded with the weight of it all. He refuses to question whether those around him deserve Elysium, but questioning himself is a different matter. It happens without his intention. To his own detriment (he knows, he knows), he wonders if he did the right things. He wonders if he could have done anything differently to have prevented all this. If he’d returned Helen, if he’d pulled back to the walls, pleased the right gods, fought harder, done better-
His soul rests in Elysium. And truly, he does not understand the judgment that put him here, but... he must have done something right to have earned it. Surely he at least understands that much? But if that’s true, he can’t figure out what it could have been. Nothing he can entertain as something he did right can measure up to his countless failures, at least, not in his eyes.
It’s useless contemplation, but in death, Hektor can’t figure out how to make himself useful, so apparently useless is all he can manage.
I think too much, Hektor thinks.
And so, while as much of the House of Troy as lingers in Elysium begins to settle, Hektor weaves his way through paradise alone. He explores, he tells anyone who asks. He drifts, he knows in his heart.
Eventually, looking for a point that might defend his pointless roaming, he claims a little glade he’s passed through a number of times. A bent over oak tree stands nestled in a curve of the Lethe, roots drinking deep from its pearly waters. Two doors cap off opposite walls, but the room appears quiet, the only shades are dim passersby.
When he tires of idle milling about, he takes to idle sitting about. The familiarity of a place returned to, at least, proves a balm to his worn out mind. Hektor finds his way back with ease whenever he longs to.
It occurs to him to sleep at one point to force his mind to rest for a while and so some portion of eternity might pass him by. And so, he sleeps once and only once. It goes by dreamlessly and undisturbed, but he wakes so unbelievably disoriented and displaced that he feels viciously sick with it. It stings terror all through his insides like a coat of nettles until enough helpless time passes that he can at length shake it off and thank whatever god that sleep is no more than a luxury to a shade.
The experience rattles him out of any idleness for a while, and he leaves his little clearing to return to aimless searching for a time.
(In truth, it’s no different than wasting away under his tree, save for the walking, but he tries not to think about that.)
He comes across, in his wanderings, a quiet little chamber off the beaten path. He’s come to recognize such pockets of peace as rather rare given the battle hungry masses housed by Elysium, so it makes him pause, already more inclined to linger. He quickly surveys what he has found, gaze still taking in one channel of the Lethe when a hard edged “Oh,” issues from the other side of the room.
Hektor turns and goes rigid at the sight. It’s not unusual or untoward for him to find himself passing through a glade some shade has settled in, but this is not such a nondescript encounter. He returns the tense, guarded stare of Patroclus, who watches him acutely while saying, “To think I’d see you here.”
To think. Hektor’s path has not crossed with any shades of the Achaeans thus far, despite that Elysium must hold its fair share of them. Given the never constant, ever shifting paths of paradise, he reasoned that Elysium must have a way to keep its shades where they want to be, for him to have remained apart from his enemies all this time.
It makes the present company all the more disconcerting, since he certainly hadn’t sought him out (though he worries it appears that way to Patroclus). A subconscious desire? A whim of fate?
Hektor shifts his weight back further into the doorway where he still stands, fighting a grimace. “I didn’t intend to intrude. Excuse me, I’ll leave you.”
Patroclus’s eyes track him, forgiving enough of his presence so far that he has neither risen nor armed himself. “If it pleases you,” he replies languidly, making Hektor hesitate. That is not the hostile answer he expected, and well likely deserves.
“I would have thought that would please you,” Hektor admits, studying the warrior before him.
His nose twitches, he huffs, then at last, he turns his gaze elsewhere. “Well. It already seems you have no interest in attacking me, and beyond that, you can do what you will. I care not.”
Hektor considers that answer, curiously noncommittal. He doesn’t seem... to want him gone. If he did, it would be easy, even expected for him to demand his absence, and if he doesn’t want that, Hektor can’t help but wonder if he wants something else.
He should still leave, no matter how strangely Patroclus is acting. If he does want something to do with Hektor, it is distinctly possible he should try to avoid such a thing at all costs. Nevertheless, it takes effort to stifle the curiosity stirring within him.
“I hope you’ll pardon me for passing through, then,” is his eventual compromise, unable to bring himself to simply turn around and leave the way he came, and too well mannered to invite himself into the company of a man he killed. Instead, he decides to proceed as he would have if he’d stumbled upon any other faceless, nameless shade, and makes his way to the door across the room when Patroclus only hums in response.
He pauses once, across a small bridge, to examine a statue nestled in amongst the foliage. The cold marble stands at a grand height, towering over Hektor, colossal in its heroic proportions. The canopy of the trees obscures the face, shrouding the subject in anonymity. A monument to a hero, devoid of a person.
“How interesting for you to turn up in this little corner fit only for loneliness,” Patroclus comments from behind him, staring at him once more when Hektor turns back to him. His eyes are blatantly critical, analytical, and Hektor returns the look with precise evenness.
“Is that what this is?” he retorts, too cynically, perhaps, to be polite. Patroclus smiles at him in reply, all teeth, only abrasive, angry humor.
“You tell me, my guest.”
Hektor raises a brow at the address, though he grasps the intention. To return his own sharp edged gibe. Apparently the Achaean has wondered what led him to this glade as well. Is it that he is well suited to a place of loneliness?
“Maybe so. But then again, you have a guest, so perhaps it isn’t.”
Patroclus quirks an eyebrow, then cocks his head with a noise of consideration. “Perhaps not. Especially considering how you’re lingering. Tell me, what brings the prince of Troy so far from the company of his kith and kin? Surely there must be at least a few more of the Trojans decent enough to have earned Elysium.”
Hektor tests the edges of his teeth with the tip of his tongue, swallows, and steadies himself. He will not deign to reply to that question, nor react to the barbs not so hidden within it.
Instead, turning around fully now, he retorts with his own flinty inquiry. “Why do you want me here?”
Patroclus smiles again, this time appearing as though he finds what he said genuinely amusing. “How highly you must think of yourself!” he crows, eyes crinkled. “What in the world makes you believe that I want you here?”
Hektor has many many flaws that batter down his ailing sense of self worth in his mind, but a superiority complex is not one he counts among them. “I simply can’t think of another reason that you would tolerate the presence of your murderer here,” he states honestly.
Patroclus purses his lips, seeming to concede that to an extent. “Do I want you here?” he muses aloud, sounding earnestly thoughtful. “Well.” He gestures sweepingly beside himself. “How about you join me properly and we both find out?”
He considers this silently.
Slowly, cautiously, Hektor makes his way back over to the stretch of shore Patroclus has claimed, stopping a few paces away. He sits gingerly, folding his legs neatly beneath him and keeping his back straight as Patroclus’s gaze marks him all the while.
Still leveling that stare at him, he observes, “You look quite different than how you did on the battlefield. Certainly different than I expected.”
Hektor returns both the gaze and the sentiment. “As do you. I imagine we all do.”
Patroclus sits in a loose, inelegant sprawl on the ground, though he does manage to lend the posture a degree of grace. Though other faint whispers of shades drift slowly around the room, Patroclus is situated in every way that projects that this place is his.
“I’m not so sure about that,” he replies, rolling his head. “I know at least some look much the same as they once did, given that they brawl for bloodshed just as much as they did in the war. I can’t imagine actively choosing to tangle myself up in conflict over and over for eternity.”
“You and me both.” Hektor knows well what Patroclus means. He’s seen much of the same sort in his wanderings. Some Elysian shades entertain their time with violence, taking advantage of their eternal, deathless state to battle within the perpetual knots of combat they bring about at no cost and with no cause.
Patroclus huffs out an amused noise. “I always see their like bunched together like idiot cattle. I don’t have the slightest what it is, but it seems like having numbers turns them even more brutish than when they’re alone.”
Hektor considers that. “There’s something to be said for how being around the ones you know makes it easier for the blood to boil. Always, I felt that I fought more violently with my allies on the crowded battlefield than on my own in isolated duels. More at work and more at stake.”
With a thoughtful hum, Patroclus says, “I’ve known the same feeling. There’s truth to that, I’ll admit, but I’m not sure those belligerents deserve that much credit. Regardless, it makes them exceedingly pitiful company, though,” he declares derisively. “What a joke, that one of the most tolerable conversations I've had down here is with the very man who murdered me up there.”
“What, do you expect an apology?” Hektor bites out impulsively, then wishes the next moment that he’d bitten his tongue. Patroclus arches a brow at him, gaze challenging.
“What a strange notion. I don’t think it would make a difference to me if I got an apology from you or not. What’s done is done, and I can hardly claim you killed me without cause.” Hektor shifts in place, trying to resituate into the comfort he’d found before, such that it was. “Though, what would you do if I did expect one? If I demanded you answer for what you did to me, would you?”
Hektor suppresses a sigh. This is why he should have kept quiet. “I don’t know.”
“Do you regret killing me?” Patroclus asks, tone perfectly neutral.
Hektor looks away. His immediate instinct is to say yes, and once he tries to pull back from that, it’s promptly replaced by the urge to declare no, and he decides then that he’d best think a touch more before answering.
He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth as he compresses the whole of the war down until it fits inside his head, where he turns it over in his mind.
In the end, what he says is, “I cannot bring myself to regret killing you, but I regret that I needed to kill you.”
Patroclus nods solemnly, as if he’s given the only sensible answer there is.
“I regret that you needed to die in the way I regret that the war happened at all. If the war hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have needed to kill you. If it hadn’t happened, perhaps my actions and my mistakes wouldn’t have come at such a high cost. I regret the war and all it forced of me, even if I can’t regret doing those things that were forced. Do you know the feeling?” he can’t help but ask.
“To an extent,” Patroclus allows, hand raised to set his forefinger over his lip. “Regret is not the word I would use myself. Rather, I feel that I wish that the war hadn’t happened, I wish those I killed didn’t need to die, and, to be quite honest, I do wish I hadn’t died either. But I hear what you mean by regret. I can understand why you say it.”
“A reasonable way to see it, likely more sensible than my own, but no other word serves me.” If only. “The irony doesn’t escape me that, to try to prevent death, I needed to cause it. So, I can’t say there’s nothing about your death I regret. After all, isn’t the only reason I sought to kill you rather than allow the deaths of my companions, the chance of how we lived our lives?”
Patroclus braces his elbow on his leg and leans his chin down into his hand to better peer at his face. “Is that so?”
Hektor hums. “I killed you because, if I didn’t, the people I loved around me would have died. My brothers, my friends; I loved them because I lived alongside them. I read to my brothers in their beds when they were little and I played games with them on rainy days that kept us inside. I laughed with my friends over drinks and took every chance I could to show them around the city. I did my best to love them in the ways I know, but I wonder if the only worthwhile thing I ever knew was how to kill.”
His hands twitch and he feels leather and bronze and polished wood shaped for his palms. “Was I good for anything else? Of all the skills I learned, did throwing a spear and swinging a sword and heaving a shield eclipse them all? Certainly bedtime stories and dice games helped no one once the war arrived. Tender gestures didn’t do them any good then, my family and friends. Only blood and bronze could do anything for them.”
“And what a sickening thing, to be worth only violence. All I could do was cause more of the destruction I wanted to prevent. Truly, if I had lived alongside you, would I have come to love you just as much as I love my companions I fought and died for? But I didn’t and I killed you and I fear I’m a heartless man. What else can I be when my love neither benefited the people in my care nor spared the ones I had the power to destroy? What worth can I claim it had, when it gave, at best, empty hope?”
An extended silence makes its home in the absence of his words and Patroclus stares unblinkingly at him.
(He... didn’t mean to get so caught up in that.)
“You think too much,” Patroclus declares bluntly.
Hektor heaves a sigh and rolls his shoulders back. “I know.”
“I have no answers for you, Prince of Troy,” Patroclus informs him, though Hektor hadn’t expected any. “My mind doesn’t linger on such things. Though, it’s only because my own strife lies elsewhere. In truth, I’m just as guilty of thinking too much.”
“Do tell me if you ever find a cure.”
That earns a smirk. “You’d best do the same.” A quiet pause follows. “You could always drink,” Patroclus suggests then, and they both look to the Lethe.
The silent, misty river abruptly seems alive in this land of the dead, with a presence of its own born from its acknowledgement, unshakably threatening. Hektor leans away from the shore subconsciously. “Have you?” he asks without looking away.
“A couple of times,” he answers. “It was... strange in a way I didn’t anticipate.” Hektor tears his gaze away to look questioningly towards him at that. Patroclus’s eyes trace the ethereal mist tumbling endlessly over itself, echoing the river’s silence. Whatever he means by that is not Hektor’s to know, and so is not his to ask for either.
“Would you ever drink the rest away?” Hektor asks him instead, holding no expectation for an answer. Clearly, Patroclus remembers enough to remain himself, enough to even recognize Hektor. He suspects he must not have drunk much, if even the memory of his own death remains.
“No,” Patroclus intones slowly, still watching the river. “I won’t drink again.”
Hektor has not swallowed the Lethe’s draught since coming to Elysium. He hasn’t spared it much thought; why bother when even a fleeting consideration sits thorny and unforgiving under his skin. In truth, he can imagine it’d be quite soothing to forget his life and let it be carried away on the current, but at his core, he finds it unacceptable. He needs to remember. He refuses to forget.
“I won’t drink. Not as things are now,” he tells the empty air more so than Patroclus.
“Well then,” Patroclus replies anyway. “It seems we’re meant to slog through our miseries on our own then. Too foolish to take the easy way out.”
“Or too stubborn.” Patroclus grins, but when he makes no move to continue the conversation, Hektor takes the dismissal and rises fluidly to his feet. “You’ve been a far more courteous host to me than you had any reason to, and I’m grateful.” He swallows the impulse to apologize for speaking out of term, if he could call it that. Too little too late.
“I move about, but if I can return the favor, you’re most likely to find me in a glade where the Lethe cradles a stooping tree and the white flowers grow in the cracks at the doorways.” Elysium is dreamily inconsistent, yet he’s found he can find most places he can picture. “You’re welcome there.”
Patroclus laughs low in his chest for a moment, but not, he believes, at Hektor’s expense. “How generous. I shall keep it in mind. Farewell, Hektor.”
He looks over the statue once more as he departs.
Hektor finds the company of Patroclus again on three subsequent occasions. The Achaean takes time, at one point, to discuss Achilles and the griefs that compounded between them as the war progressed, in a very roundabout way. Hektor listens carefully and quietly and learns at length that, for one reason or another, Achilles is nowhere to be found in Elysium.
Hektor shares his sympathy, genuine and honest, over longing for a soul fated not to share their afterlife. He deliberately skirts around his... distaste for Achilles specifically, as well as his personal pleasure at learning of his absence, despite that Patroclus can certainly guess as much. No need to ignore that such a feeling has its place; it’s only a moot point here.
Each time, Hektor makes a point to remind Patroclus that he may visit his own corner of Elysium, though the invitation remains unused. Their conversations, though bearing a strange, unique intimacy, shared, after all, between two who caused each others’ deaths, don’t settle Hektor.
He tries repeatedly to forgo his own glade to stay with his family in the section of Elysium the Trojans have carved out as their own. Graceful buildings and columned halls house his people, but Hektor has not stayed in any long enough to call one his own. He tries to put on a brave face around his family and not disrupt their peace and happiness, which seems to convince some more than others.
He longs to mend his relationships that the war strained and damaged, yet the strife continuing to eat at him diverts his efforts. The best he can give is scattered gestures. He gently includes Paris where he can. When Hektor encourages him to bring out his lyre and sing, he always gives earnest praise to his beautiful music. He finds Polydamas to offer him a place among them and never interrupts him when he speaks. He lets Troilus win when they play draughts.
He can only hope they recognize the raw remorse he yearns to convey with the acts.
Hektor knows in the pit of his stomach that he should talk more openly with them, and make an effort to settle comfortably in their company as they deserve, but as always, the thought of taking his blood and bruises and brokenness to them makes him balk and tremble.
He at least tries a couple times, he can console himself.
Perhaps inevitably, Hektor first turns to the only one he could turn to for his whole life. He seeks out his father, Priam.
The noble king of Troy does not look as aged as he did when Hektor last saw him alive. Elysium has soothed away many of his years so that he appears as he did at the last extent of his adulthood, still wise with years but not yet burdened with old age. Hektor remembers him like this and thinks it suits him well, this balance point between strength and experience, although it felt strange to adjust to at first.
He still looks significantly older than Hektor, who looks the same as the day he died. But of course, he died long before the chance to grow old.
He trails after his father into his little study, attempting to ignore echoing memories of doing much the same before embroiling them both in hours of strategizing and debating Troy’s future. He’d simply requested Priam’s company for a while. Benign, not weighted. Not dire.
He forces himself to relax, which he doesn’t find particularly relaxing.
“What weighs so heavily on your heart, Hektor?” Priam asks him, busying himself with clearing scraps of parchment off a padded chair as Hektor settles into the adjacent seat.
“Is it so obvious that something does?” he replies. A joke, in truth, because he knows without a doubt that it is.
Priam sets the parchments on his desk and turns back to him with a rueful grin. “Yes, it is,” he rumbles, a hint of amused and feigned exasperation in his voice. He leaves his desk but doesn’t take the now open chair, instead standing right before Hektor. He sets his worn, steady hands between Hektor’s broad shoulders, curling towards the back of his neck when Hektor leans in to set his forehead against the center of Priam’s chest.
“You are my son,” he tells him, even and deep, “as you always have been and always will be. I will always know when you are hurting, dear child.”
For a reckless, painful moment, Hektor finds himself wondering if he would have stood on the other end of such a bond had his son had the chance to grow up. The moment the thought forms, he tries desperately to smother it, suffocate it, before it has the chance to gain the precious little purchase it would need to tear him apart.
With shivery fingers, he reaches to clutch at Priam’s hands where they rest over his shoulders. He’s beyond grateful that his father can’t see the way he screws his eyes shut to hold back tears, laid low by the sudden reminder of his son.
He can’t think of Scamandrius now. He can’t. It will break him to pieces when he is already so fragile. He can only bear so much at once. He won’t let that anguish consume him now.
Priam stands steady without a word as Hektor slowly scrapes his composure back together, finding some semblance of calm once again. He lets his arms drop heavily back at his sides, listening to the faint rasp of dry skin as his palms slide away from his father’s hands to fall down into his lap. He doesn’t fully straighten, but retreats from leaning against Priam. Even in the span of those silent moments, Hektor feels as if exhaustion has managed to steal away every drop of strength he mustered just prior.
Only when Hektor goes lax does Priam stir. A solemn, soothing noise issues from his throat as his hands lift to frame the back of his head, gentle pressure through his thick hair. “Would that I could do anything to keep you from suffering so, Hektor. Let me help. What pains you so deeply?”
“The war,” Hektor tells him, his voice pulling thick and visceral through his throat like some part of his insides is coming up with it. “I know it lies in the past now, but I can’t leave it behind. It plagues my mind.”
Priam pulls back, returning to the chair he cleared, sitting to meet Hektor’s tired gaze at eye level. Hektor got his dark brown eyes from him. “The war forced you through many horrors. Which ones hold your attention so fiercely?”
Hektor swallows. Answering that comes harder. Stinging shame comes with the thought of voicing his doubts about his actions, especially to his family. Even to his father. He fought for them with everything he had, with everything they deserved, and to even insinuate that he could have ever considered doing anything less feels like betrayal. He couldn’t have, some part of him feels deadly certain of that, but he knows it will echo in the sound of his words anyway.
He owed his people far more than hesitation and soft hearted excuses, so he gave them far more. Forced himself to, every time. How poorly it reflects on him, to be filled with second guesses now.
“Horrors...” he echoes. “I committed horrors. I told myself then that it was to protect the people I loved from far worse horrors. But I didn’t. I did horrible things and I let horrible things happen. What could be worse... than the ruin I spread, in hand with my failure to make it worth anything at all?”
Hektor stares down at his open hands before shutting his eyes, faint patterns fine as the sand of Troy’s beaches or the dust of her battlefield shifting across the dark of his eyelids.
“All the death and destruction... what was there to show for it? Nine years, I suppose, if I flatter myself in thinking that my actions helped keep the Achaeans at bay that long in any considerable way. But does that matter for anything when everything I tried to save still came to ruin in the end?”
“You don’t care for the honor and glory you gained?” Priam asks him, his voice something Hektor can’t interpret.
“Glory.” He opens his eyes, staring into nothing. “I suppose this is glory- Elysium. It doesn’t feel how I thought it might.”
“What does it feel like?”
Hektor blinks but does not focus, the room a blur of colors around him. “Nothing. Nothing I can sense. Nothing that feels worth anything.”
He scowls then, swings his head like a horse bitten by flies, and tries to ground himself. Even still, the memory of armor and sweat and blood heavy on his back feels far more real than the scratch of upholstery beneath his knees.
“I couldn’t stop the war. I couldn’t win the war. Or, at least- I didn’t.” Whether he could have is less simply stated. “And so, when I look back on it all, all I can see is that I made it worse. In my heart, I can’t bear the thought of doing anything less, even if it all happened again, and yet, each thing feels like it was a senseless- horror. Every part feels so wretched no matter what way I look at it. Inescapable yet pointless. The only options were the most abhorrent.”
He twitches. He feels the bite of a bear trap around him. He feels the futility of pawing forward. In reaching the furthest, it hurts the most.
“Was it worth anything? The choices I made... Did I do anything right?”
“What you did for Troy, for us, was well and beyond what could have been asked of you, my son. Your efforts are beyond reproach.” And Hektor barely keeps from snorting with laughter because he has done nothing but reproach his own efforts for so long now, and his refusal to do what was asked of him is amongst his greatest failings. Andromache, Polydamas- Priam himself had begged Hektor to come inside the walls and he’d refused.
Hektor wishes he could believe his father, but he can’t, not even for a moment.
It must show on his face, however, even though he says none of this. Priam sighs wearily, an exceedingly familiar sound. “These things don’t need to stalk you through the afterlife. You are not bound to fight for us anymore.” Priam means it as a comfort, Hektor knows, but that truth sits uncomfortable under his skin. Certainly the war no longer owned him, but what could follow after? What should he bend his efforts to now, now that his people no longer need him?
“You can focus, now, on things the war never allowed for,” his father says and Hektor listens, stomach knotted with starvation for any sort of answer. “There are countless ways you can spend your time in this peace. The war stole so much from you,” he says as if he mourns it all, “but it can’t touch you now. What did you long to do, then, with idle moments we all prayed for?”
“I-” and Hektor’s voice cracks, sharp, stark, and devastated. What he would have done without the war. He recognizes Priam’s intent, knows what his answer should be. To play that board game he enjoyed in youth again, to read the books that started to pile up on his shelf, to compete in athletic games, to race his siblings, to dance, to laugh, to do any of the things now in reach.
And yet, unerringly, his mind turns to dearest Andromache, his darling Scamandrius. He misses them. The grief remains a rampaging, ravenous rend inside him, waiting ever patiently for its next chance to devour him whole. He wants, as he has for so long, to raise a family in peace and happiness.
He shakes with the guilt of knowing the blood and ruin that befell them because of who and how he is.
“Oh, child,” Priam groans from under the weight of his devastated stare, rising at once. And again, he stands before Hektor, pulling him now into a tight embrace, curled around him protectively.
“I’m sorry,” Hektor chokes out.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he insists, hands rubbing gentle strokes against his back. “You are a gentle thing, when you are allowed to be,” his father murmurs to him like he is still a little boy. “I only wish the world had treated you more gently in return.”
Hektor swallows. Repeats- “I’m sorry.”
Priam only shakes his head sadly. Silence fills the room for a long while. When Hektor finally breaks it, his words are polite and reserved once again. Priam makes a point to assure him that they can always talk whenever he might want. His sincerity in imploring him to reach out should he become too overwhelmed makes Hektor want to curl in on himself in shame, already so sure he can’t find it in himself to do this again, now that he has fled this heart wrenching vulnerability.
Nevertheless, he approaches Kassandra at a point in time.
It is not the first time he has done so, when he came to her with grief and remorse and shame bleeding from his tongue, spilling from the open wounds of his apologies. Death made obvious the truth of his sister’s prophecies and the incredible folly of their dismissal. She uttered gentle things that first time, explaining the reality of Apollo’s curse, pardoning his unwilling disbelief.
He had tried, in life, to always treat her kindly, hissing rebukes at whoever ridiculed her. Still, he could only do so much to mitigate the scorn of Troy at her apparent madness, and he, too, privately grieved what seemed to be the broken pieces of her mind. Foolish ignorance.
He has, of course, approached her between that first time and now, less formally, simply trying to engage with her as family, trying to make up for the way the house ostracized her while they yet lived. A promise, for whatever it was worth, to give her the familiar affection she’s deserved for so long and to never fall back on old habits at her expense.
Hektor still feels guilty despite it all, guilty guilty guilty.
He swallows, tracing teeth with tongue, facing Kassandra now, wondering what to start with. She does not take the burden from him, glancing his way and waiting for him without a word. He has not dredged this up before, believing that Kassandra should not have to be reminded of the prophecies and visions that plagued her in life, and really, she shouldn’t. Even now that Hektor has finally dragged these bruisingly heavy thoughts up out of his heart, through his throat, to where they now sit waiting in his mouth, he still feels like he’s doing wrong.
“Forgive me,” he begins, slowly, and (he’s pretty sure) he means it as a preemptive apology for what he’s about to say. Kassandra’s eyes focus on him, without reply or rebuke, waiting patiently, equanimously.
“Do you know if there was ever any other fate for Troy?” he says. Other than the one that came to pass, he does not say. Already the words ache in his teeth and jaw like unyielding crags of rocks in his mouth that his bones clack into with each syllable he forms, and already his meaning is plenty clear.
A look of revelation comes over Kassandra, then morphs into sorrow and sympathy. Her head tilts, though that piercing gaze remains fixed on Hektor. He bites back a shaky sigh of relief that the question did not seem to claw up old and ruthless memories, though part of him still loathes himself for being selfish enough to take that risk at all, just for the sake of easing his mind.
Or is he just acting overdramatic? Kassandra, along with a fair number of his other siblings, has told him in the past that she is there for him, and she will listen if he ever needs to talk. Is this within his rights, and only his damnable pride has kept him from acting for so long?
Ugh, circles and circles.
“Troy was fated to fall,” Kassandra answers, quietly, tenderly.
Hektor licks his lips. Swallows. It is the answer he expected, but he also expected it to lift some of the weight in his chest. It has not.
“Do you know if it was in spite of, or because of our choices?” Hektor asks and he hates himself. He hates that he asked, he hates that it slipped out without his intention, he hates that it matters to him at all, that nothing can satisfy him, that this pursuit chips away endlessly, that it’s the most pointless things that he can’t leave behind.
Kassandra frowns even deeper. She looks so sad. “I don’t know,” she says, and that, too, is the answer he expected.
Sighing, closing her vivid eyes, she reaches up and puts her slender hands soothing at the sides of his neck. The very tips of her longest fingers rest steadying at his nape. “Hektor,” she breathes. “You wound yourself, holding yourself responsible for forces you could have never controlled. Please, don’t bury yourself in guilt.” If they were alive, she would have felt his pulse flutter under her palm. There’s nothing to feel, now.
“I’m trying,” he promises, though it comes out half a plea, and it probably says more than a stuttering heartbeat ever could have. He’s trying. He’s failing but he’s trying.
“I know,” she tells him, and Hektor wonders if she also knows that it’s not enough, that he can’t escape the trap of his mind, keeps choking on his what ifs, no matter how hard he tries.
That he leaves unspoken, simply indulging silently for a minute or two when Kassandra starts to drum her fingertips oh so lightly over the tops of his shoulders. The sensation is strange, and yet, in its own way, a kind comfort. Then he thanks her and excuses himself and wonders what the point of any of this is.
Hektor does all he can to maintain his effort to stay with his family, but each passing day chafes more under his skin and even his more distant siblings come to notice the way he grows skittish and unfocused. The thoughts that refuse to give him peace grind painfully against his family’s well meaning expectation of his contentment.
He steals time alone despite the guilt of it. By himself, at least, there’s no reason to pretend he can’t tear his mind away from the grim and broken pieces of the war. He fools no one when he returns and Hektor can do nothing but hate himself for it.
At last, there is an abrupt moment he can’t even remember anymore that he realizes that his self imposed presence is doing more ill than good and he needs to leave. He takes the next chance and makes his excuses and flees to his quiet curve in the river, promising himself all the while that once he’s had time to think this all through, he can go back and be with his loved ones without making them all worry.
Now, his thoughts are so very loud and seize him and demand of him whether he makes room for them or not, so he might as well.
Once he has only those thoughts for company, he works his jaw and clenches his fists and tries ceaselessly to claw himself from this tangled thicket, thorns hooked like barbs in his flesh. They cling as if they’d wither and die without him kept prisoner, desperate and desolate and sorrowful in their own right.
He decides, at one point or another, to take a bath. It’s not a necessity as it once was; it’s not as if shades acquire dirt or sweat, but Hektor has always felt at ease in the water. Whether he hopes it will lend new clarity to his musings or that it will wipe that all away for a while, he doesn’t know. Certainly, he would take either in a heartbeat.
But then, he looks at the Lethe and the notion starts to collapse. Still its waters frighten him. He knows not to drink from its shores, but if he should wade out, would it take from him just the same? Could the touch of the Lethe on his skin wash away memories against his will, bound by its nature, or even worse, could it find some longing to forget buried inside him and erase right through the resolve he’s refused to give up?
Hektor finds himself shivering, and for the next while, he can’t bring himself to come any closer to the river’s edge than a few feet, unsure of what, exactly, it is that he doesn’t trust.
In the end, he gets no closer to bathing than untying his hair, which he can’t bother to right afterwards.
And so he sits and sometimes paces and he thinks and thinks and thinks in the silence by himself for the gods only know how long. Hektor can’t so much as guess, but it’s been long enough thinking alone that it catches him entirely off guard when he’s interrupted. He’d forgotten when he last considered someone could even do that.
It is by chance that Hektor sees Paris take in the sight of him, whatever sight he makes for, by now.
By chance, the groan of hidden gears and the grating metallic slither come from the door that Hektor is already facing. It would have taken time for him to have torn free of his thoughts that weigh like sand burying him alive in an ever sinking pit, each and every granule scraping past him in his attempts to extradite himself.
It would have taken time for that to be enough to let him turn and look at the opposite door, had Paris happened to come through that one.
As it is, his brother arrives in his field of view and Hektor has the opportunity to watch as Paris sets his eyes on him. He is smiling when the door reveals him and he first catches sight of him, a casual, idle thing, so familiar to Paris’s features and to Hektor’s heart. Then when he looks, the smile falters, not entirely disappearing, but only lingering through the grace of the habits of his lips. His eyes flicker disbelief, alarm, and confusion.
Then he smiles again, not the same. It returns fabricated, feigned, and just a little furious.
Hektor does not know what he’s seen.
Approaching, his brother gives the space an appraising look, though Hektor cannot help but believe he is avoiding the sight of him. “Is this where you’ve been holed up all this time? It’s been too long, none of us have seen you in quite a while.”
Hektor suppresses a wince. It has been a while, it has been too long. And truly, he has no excuse. He can’t justify this distance he’s put between himself and the ones he loves most and it aches in his throat. “Forgive me,” he requests sincerely. “I needed some time to myself.” Paris scans him searchingly at that, head quirked to one side.
“...Understandable,” he declares like a man who does not actually understand and is about to make that a problem.
“I’m glad to see you, though,” Hektor tells him, which may or may not be true. He couldn’t say.
Crossing the space between them, Paris settles himself at Hektor’s side, arms crossed with a casual air that Hektor again notes as somewhat feigned.
“What’s wrong? Here we sit in paradise, but you look like a man haunted. What’s bothering you so much?” Paris pries lightly, but with a soberness to his side eyed stare that proves his sincerity. In a vain effort to put himself back in order, Hektor goes through the equally vain motions of taking in and releasing a breath.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” he elects to admit.
Paris blinks his uncomprehension, then graces the room around them with a questioning once over. He favors Hektor with a raised brow and parted lips, ready to ask.
“No,” Hektor answers first. “I don’t understand why I’m in Elysium.”
Paris’s other eyebrow joins the first in trying to climb his forehead and he looks on edge in his confusion now. Wary, suddenly. “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he says, even though it seems that he might now.
For lack of anything else, Hektor continues to clarify. “It’s simply... I keep coming back to the thought, but each time I do, I can’t wrap my mind around it. I can’t understand why I was sent to Elysium. I don’t feel like I belong here, like I’ve done anything to deserve it.”
There is a quiet pause following Hektor’s words, mildly spoken but earnestly meant.
Abruptly, Paris shoves himself to his feet, snorting like a bull about to charge and Hektor might find himself gored on his horns should he fail to flee fast enough.
“How can you even say that?!” Paris demands.
Hektor, now the one taken aback and bewildered, blinks up at Paris and at this sudden display. Has he gotten so bad that his thoughts can ensnare him so that the rest of the world passes by unheeded? Because- did he miss something?
“How can you think you don’t belong in Elysium, that you don’t deserve it?” he bellows, and Hektor can only blink, hopelessly confused.
Hektor’s known Paris to lose his temper with him on occasion, he’s done so in the past, and it’s often on someone’s behalf, usually Hektor’s. Paris has lashed out at him, wild and upset, for pushing himself too far before. This is not the same thing. Paris is furious.
At Hektor.
“I didn’t mean...” he tries, but fails to finish. He doesn’t even know what Paris thought he meant.
“That’s ridiculous! Fuck- you’re a hero, Hektor! If anyone deserves to be here, it’s you. Don’t you even realize all the things you accomplished, how great you are?! That you wouldn’t be good enough for Elysium is a farce, if their standards were that damn high, this place would be empty,” he finishes in a snarl.
Hektor doesn’t know what’s going on. Is Paris... trying to defend him? Angry at anyone who would imply he might be unworthy of Elysium, even if it’s Hektor himself? But if he is, why does it feel like... this? Vicious? He feels stepped on and clawed at, ground down.
“I’m not trying to be... ungrateful for being here,” Hektor attempts to defend himself, hating how wounded he sounds. “It’s just something that keeps eating at my thoughts. I know it’s n-”
“Well it shouldn’t be. I can’t think of anything more stupid to worry about,” Paris declares and an ugly sound bursts from Hektor, upset buried under offense.
“Fine,” Paris spits, “let me put your thoughts at ease.” And Hektor can only continue to scramble after whatever piece he’s missing that might make all this make sense.
“I’m here, shouldn’t that be proof enough?” Hektor searches his twisted face frantically, feeling lost and upset and- gods- “As big of a fuck up as I am, I still ended up here? If you shouldn’t be in Elysium then- damn- just throw me in the worst punishment Tartarus has to offer right now because I sure as hell wouldn’t make the mark!”
Now, wait. What? Wait, wait wait-!
Shoving himself to his feet now, Hektor rushes out, “Wait- Paris! I didn’t say anything like that, I-”
“But it’s true!” Paris yowls. “I can’t compare to you, anyone with half a brain can see that. If anyone doesn’t belong here, it’s me, and yet here we both are, so you’re fine, Hektor, you don’t have a thing to worry about.” He hisses out the words like he would be spitting venom if he had any in these fangs he’s bared.
Frustration and a pain he can’t place pound within his temples. “I wasn’t comparing us, that’s not what I meant, I only-”
“That’s how this shit works, Hektor!” Paris rages. “They compare all of us to pick out the great from the wretches and then leave us to whatever we deserve for the rest of eternity. It’s- Tell me! Tell me. Is there someone who’s insisted you shouldn’t be here? Some cruelty you’ve heard that’s made you doubt if you’re worthy? Tell me and I’ll put any of that to rest, I swear it.”
Some weight sinks down in Hektor and it takes effort not to visibly wilt. He can taste the irreparable turn their exchange just took in the tension between them. Disinclined and ill equipped to lie, Hektor knows that the only answer he has is the one Paris does not want.
Pursing his lips, steeling himself, he shakes his head and replies, “They’re my own concerns,” and does not flinch at the answering look of frustrated disgust.
“Fucking unbelievable,” Paris says, half to himself. “That’s really the reason for all this?!” he demands, gesturing to Hektor as a whole which he spares a moment to consider quite insulting.
“You hide away from everyone, including your own family,” which wounds him to the core, “you look like you’re fading away already,” which hurts even though he has no real control over that, “you can’t even be bothered to keep your hair up,” which- is that really relevant? “and you can’t even accept that what you’re worrying over is nonsense!” which he wants so badly to do. “You’re a mess, Hektor!” Paris concludes, which- Well.
“Paris, I’m trying-”
“No, you’re not!” he cuts across, and that riles him.
“Shut your mouth!” he barks at his brother, fiery blooded. “Don’t say things you don’t know anything about! Don’t seek me out just to insult me.”
Paris scoffs and tosses back his whole head with the roll of his eyes. “If you’re trying, that only makes this more pitiful,” he mutters under his breath, though still much too loud for any intention of sparing Hektor the words.
Adrenaline and stress (his old friends) feel ringing and overwhelming without a heartbeat to race and without lungs to heave. “How dare you?”
“Are you really going to tell me you haven’t been sitting here all this time, wasting all of yourself on useless conjecture over everything you can’t do anything about, making yourself feel worse and worse because you can’t put this away to be with us where you belong?”
Hektor recoils like he’s been struck, snarling in fury and fear, feeling for all the world that he is back on a battlefield, feeling every bruising moment that he is ever so slowly crushed to blood and gore under the weight of his doom. The feeling of dying even in every moment he lived. He wants to flee from this ugly truth Paris has dumped at his feet, for what he has said is exactly what he has done.
He can’t deny it. All he can say is, “That doesn’t mean I’m not trying.” Paris’s face transforms abruptly, the blaze of his fury snuffed out in an instant to leave behind stony resignation, as if, for all the insistence about his worth, he’s just given up on him. “I am trying, I’m not-”
“What, Hektor? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying...” And words flee him.
Finally, at last, Paris has stepped back, given him room to speak, and Hektor finds himself empty handed. His lips hang parted, eyes flickering all over Paris, fibers of his mind caught and cramped even as he tries harder than ever to drive them to action. What is he trying to do, this is simple. He’s trying; he knows that, he’s trying so fucking hard- Just what is he trying to do? It’s something, he knows there’s something, there must be something.
“I’m trying- I’m trying...”
“You’re failing,” Paris states, flat and ugly. “Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re failing. Unless you’re trying to give up entirely and abandon everything worthwhile. Then great work.”
Hektor watches him, silent. Paris gazes back until he shakes his head. “I can’t stomach this shit anymore.” He turns to the door.
Hektor flinches and shudders. “Paris, please,” he begs, stepping after him. “Let me- We need to talk-!”
“No!” Paris whirls around to scream at him. “I won’t suffer seeing you throw yourself away like this another second!”
As if in agreement with Paris’s fury, the door slams shut louder than it ever has when he departs.
Hektor stares, frozen in the middle of the shattered aftermath.
It occurs to him, in a distant sort of way, that it might feel better to scream, bury his head and his arms and rage incoherently until there’s nothing left. It also occurs to him to cry, to sob out his stress and hurt now that he is once again alone.
He does neither of these things, though he has no reason not to, simply staring, fixed, at the nothingness before his spot on the ground. (He doesn’t remember sitting.)
Time passes, and Hektor begins to pick apart everything he might have done wrong, because that’s all he’s good for these days.
(or nights.)
For once, however, Hektor can’t quite bring himself to believe he was fully in the wrong. For the most part. In regards to the argument, specifically. That wasn’t entirely his fault.
His own pitiful and wounded state that underlaid it, however, Hektor cannot and will not blame on anything but himself. Indeed, the accusations Paris hurled at him, no matter the brutality behind them, all struck home with faultless precision, marking and piercing his each and every failure that spiralled so out of control that they consumed everything else he might have once been.
He tenderly gathers up each failing, rendered with new clarity courtesy of Paris, and arrays them out in front of him to be considered, nestled in with his already expansive collection. The exercise, he has hoped, would give him some insight on how to bear them all and keep moving in some way, with all their punishing weight and cutting edges.
However, the only conclusion he’s drawn from it is that there are far too many to manage, and no way to carry them and still be whole.
Mmph. Those- all are his alone, but Hektor decides he’s not exclusively responsible for the argument.
Not for the way it went to shit, anyway. Paris had been the first to ask about what was bothering him, which he was under no obligation to do, and Hektor can’t see his answer as rude or overpresumptuous. If Paris hadn’t wanted to confront his uncertainty, he’d had plenty of room to navigate away from it and leave it lying. He chose to pick a fight.
Likewise, the personal insult that Paris clearly took from his words, Hektor can’t shoulder the blame for. It wasn’t as if there was no other way to interpret his words than as a condemnation of his brother. Paris’s wild indignation came from something in himself, not something Hektor forced upon him.
And that is as much concession as Hektor finds he can give himself. For even then, if he had figured out what raw nerve inside Paris, what festering wound he guarded that he accidentally dug into, he could have prevented everything from collapsing between them. He could have stopped his brother, in all his pain, from storming away from him and anything to do with him.
But it’s too late now.
Perhaps it’s the price he’s to pay, for all he did before. Why should Paris listen to him, when he spent blood filled days reviling him and all he couldn’t truly be blamed for? Perhaps it’s only his debt of viciousness that’s now been repaid. Or maybe Paris was willing to give him the undeserved chance anyway, but after so long of neglecting him, Hektor didn’t understand his little brother anymore. Maybe he made some vital misstep in his blind callousness.
Does he understand any of them now? Did he forget, during the war, who his brothers and sisters are, who his parents and friends are? Did he lose them when he only let himself know war? He should have devoted more to them. He certainly lost them when the unquenchable bloodlust of battle swallowed their lives.
Hektor...
Did he know them when he watched them fall?
He can see them dying now, before his eyes. So many died beside him, cut down away from loving wives and caring children, away from peace and plenty. He’ll never know how many took blows aimed at him. Too many. He knows that; too many. Did he know them as they died in his place? Does he know how they suffered?
A long, low hum.
How might they all have died... Skewered on a spear. Yes, he knows that one. Achilles taught him that one. (Maybe he’s forgotten? He can’t feel his neck, he can’t feel anything.) Struck by an arrow... he’d only been grazed. Severed by a sword. He was cut, but never so deep. Slaughtered under a boulder- he knows that one too. Apollo robbed Ajax of what should have been his kill, in truth.
“You know you’re safe here...”
Safety was a distant luxury dreamed of. Safety was only as true as the plies of his shield were thick. More than once, he had flung it out on his arm, swerving his body away to evade a spear that punched through them all. He can’t recall the feeling of how to move like that now. Would it have had the force to punch through his chest plate and into his bowels if he hadn’t?
“What am I supposed to do with you?”
As if there was anything else but all this. He knows he slept, he knows he paused, he knows he returned to Troy at times, but those moments feel as insubstantial and unreal as spider’s silk around his fingers. The days were so long and he can see them now and he sees them unbroken. Each merging to the next, an endless tapestry of violence. He walks there, within it, because he knows it. What else does he know more than this.
An exhale. Half muttered- “Your hair is even longer than I realized.”
This... His hair?
Hektor pauses at that, attempting to wrap his mind around it. Paris had mentioned his hair. He shifts his arm back slightly and feels loose strands brush his elbow with electric lucidity.
His hair is unbraided.
That's... embarrassing, he thinks without any room in himself to actually feel embarrassed.
Hektor stirs at last, feeling as though he’s turned to stone and must crack through the shell that’s formed around him to become human once more, each shard cutting him as it breaks loose and falls away. He’s never felt so brittle.
Shifting his spine, Hektor finally acknowledges Patroclus sitting loosely next to him. He lifts a hand to brush his hair back over his shoulder and manages to force out with a pathetically stilted voice, “Forgive- my impropriety. I’m being a poor host. I’m in... a poor state to see guests right now.”
“Clearly. You look like shit,” Patroclus informs him.
“You look...” Hektor pauses for an unnervingly long time, old and ugly memories stealing words from his tongue as they claw to reclaim him. “Well,” he finishes, (ignoring Patroclus’s likely accurate assertion) because now that he’s finally looking at him, it’s obvious. He looks solid and strong, vivid such that Hektor couldn’t pick him out from the living, if he didn’t know. He is not how he once was.
The Myrmidon seems to consider commenting on it for a moment, but fails to elaborate. Hektor doesn’t have it in him to continue inquiring.
“What happened?” Patroclus prods. “I’ve never seen you look so bad before.”
Hektor looks down at his hands, mere suggestions of his flesh, simply a dark lens through which he looks at the grass below. He thinks that if Elysium had a breeze, he would have already faded away in its embrace.
“I had an argument with my brother,” he offers, long past the point of worrying to death over whether it is a cruel burden on others to hear him voice his troubles. He wonders what that says about him.
Patroclus gives the reasonable response of, “Which one?”
“Paris.”
“Paris? Didn’t you want to talk with him?”
Hektor nods. He doesn’t remember telling Patroclus that, but it is true nonetheless. “Yes. It didn’t go well.”
Patroclus gives him a disparaging once over, as seems to be his way. “It seems like you still need to do some talking, then, and not just arguing.”
“He refused to. And demanded not to see me again.”
Lip curling slightly, Patroclus raises a brow at him. “What, and that’s it? Rolling over? Just leaving it at that?” he scathes.
Hektor’s brows twitch down.
Finally, since the gods only know how long ago, Hektor reaches around to brace his hands against his back and stretches out his spine. Ow. He rubs his eyes and focuses his gaze ahead of him, grounding himself.
He fights to ignore how heavy and numb his limbs feel when he shifts them. This was... new. Worse. Typically, his musings keep him constantly strained and riddled with grief, ever winding himself up tighter, more painfully. But this- his memories had eaten him whole, but then dragged him down to some place where he didn’t feel a thing. Still, he feels their sinking weight on him as he tries to cut himself free.
When did Patroclus even get here? This- scares him.
He licks his lips. “It’s not your place to decide what I do,” he informs Patroclus.
“By all means, your stupid mistakes are yours to make,” he jabs back. “Tell me, do you stay all alone because you flee all your family once they show the slightest bit of tooth?”
Hektor clicks his tongue once, now cutting his glare at Patroclus. He refuses to answer that.
"Why did you come here?" he demands instead, raw and sharp, since finally he’s found emotion to fill his voice, no longer flat and empty. Patroclus at least has the decency to look a touch ashamed, seeming to realize then that he had found Hektor in bleak, broken pieces, and once he’d managed a semblance of composure, had promptly started to reproach him for not doing enough.
Patroclus frowns faintly and settles back into a more relaxed posture, and Hektor can feel him retreat from digging into his still open wounds. “Forgive me. I just intended to visit you and talk for a while again. It’d been a while. You invited me to seek you out each time, but I never bothered, and I recently thought that that was rude of me.”
Hektor sighs. “It’s not unappreciated,” because truly, it’s not, “even though I’m hardly good conversation at the moment.” He drags a hand through his hair, scratching his scalp with his nails. “I don’t think now’s the best time to stay, though.”
Patroclus looks at him quietly, brown eyes through dark lashes, for a long while at that. “I don’t intend to overstay my welcome,” he acquiesces gently, “but you seem... truly unwell. Worryingly so. What do you intend to do now?”
An unpleasant, tingling sensation has settled over him, like his whole body is waking up after going numb, everything twisted into the wrong position for too long. He wants an answer to that that feels like enough. He wants, for once, to be enough.
“I just need some time to think.”
Patroclus looks him over, somber and sharp eyed. “If you do, then fine, take the time you need, but it seems like having time to think has been treating you very poorly.”
Hektor allows himself a long moment with his eyes squeezed shut.
“I have tried... many other things.” It’s not a lie. He has tried. He has tried. “I just need some time to think,” he echoes.
Hektor pushes himself up all at once. The motion hurts in a way he can’t explain, but he doesn’t process the pain fast enough for it to keep him sitting. He stands in effort both to show Patroclus he can gather himself again and also to make it true. His chest tightens to think of drifting back into that trap of dazed recollection once more, and if he has to carve a rut across his clearing pacing to avoid it, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
It does work, more or less, after Patroclus quietly departs. The motion keeps him better aware of his surroundings, at least, though it can’t always prevent his thoughts from tumbling into incoherence. Sometimes the endless stalk back and forth works him into an anxious mess, palms screaming for a spear, jaw begging for a fight, and he has to sit down near his oak tree once more.
It hardly marks an improvement, though. Hektor’s pacing and sitting in turns are just enough to keep him steady, afloat instead of dragged further under. Not better, just not worse. He’s given up thoughts of figuring everything out for the moment, just to spare himself the disappointment and shame. He starts to think of finding Paris, but wonders if he even could, or if Elysium would twist his path ever away, attuned to Paris’s wish to be rid of him.
And so, he isn’t expecting when Paris comes through his door once more, tense where he stands unaccompanied.
When his gaze lights upon Hektor, the rapid transformation of his expression is so very similar to the one it took the last time, only his anger doesn’t beat out his concern quite so easily now.
They both battle there on his face as he approaches, stiff and silent.
“Changed your mind then, did you?” Hektor says, and- shit. Paris halts. He didn’t want to start like that, but he didn’t recognize the bitterness aching angrily in his hands and in his throat until just now. He shakes his head faintly and swallows dryly. Tries again. “I didn’t think you wanted to come here again.”
Paris meets his gaze for half a moment to glare half heartedly before averting his eyes once more. “You wanted to talk to me,” he mumbles out in frustration. Hektor blinks at him. He- did... though that had seemed to matter not a whit to Paris when he’d stormed off with all the fury of a slighted goddess. (Had Aphrodite taught him that?) What changed?
Paris looks him over, as if expecting something Hektor hasn’t recognized. “You asked of me, so I came, alright? You don’t have to act so surprised.” Despite the admonishment, Hektor arches his brows in disbelief. Still, he feels too lost to know what to reply. Paris had already rejected that request.
“Patroclus told me you asked for me.”
“Ah-” he lets slip.
The Achaean took it upon himself to go shoving into Hektor’s personal matters, apparently. Hektor fights a grimace and a brewing internal debate over whether to thank him or curse him for it. He suspects only time will give him the answer to that.
Hektor stiffens his spine and frowns. “I didn’t mean for him to do that. We spoke, but I didn’t ask that of him.” What brashness must have sent him demanding of his family under the lie of Hektor’s request.
Paris scowls fiercely and bristles restlessly on the spot. “What a farce,” he mutters. “Tell him to piss off and keep to himself then.”
“Paris...” That’s more than was warranted.
“Sorry to disturb you, then, since you didn’t really want me here,” Paris snaps. “I’ll leave you to your wallowing.”
“Paris, wait-” And thank the gods, his brother pauses, glancing back sharp eyed. “He was right regardless. I do want to talk to you. And if you’re willing, then... please, stay.” He sweeps a welcoming gesture before him.
For several long moments Paris hesitates, looking cagey and upset. Yet, it seems enough has changed, no matter Patroclus’s scheme, for Paris to remain where before he took off. “He was right about you looking like a disaster, at least.” Hektor wrinkles his nose, irritated that Patroclus would tell any of them that, but he won’t fight it if Paris’s grumblings are his last token effort to be difficult as he gives into Hektor’s request.
He closes the distance left between them, but stays on his feet in front of Hektor.
“Well. I’m here,” he declares. Hektor shifts. This still won’t be remotely easy. “What do you want to talk about?”
Hektor stays seated. He could rise to meet Paris at eye level, but any little thing that might keep this from devolving into the aggression of the last time, he’ll try. “I just want to better understand the argument we had and set things right,” he begins, words meticulously chosen. “I’m not sure what made you so upset, but I want to know. If I... exceeded my bounds with what I said, then I’m sorry, but I can’t see how I did. So if you would explain it to me...”
Paris rearranges his shoulders primly. The curve of his lips betrays a more earnest concern. “-You shouldn’t worry about not deserving Elysium.”
Hektor resists the urge to roll his eyes back in frustration. That wasn’t the answer to what he asked, but fine, they can start here instead.
“Why?” he asks. “And-” he adds immediately, before the whole disaster has the chance to repeat itself- “I don’t mean why you believe I deserve to be here. I mean, why do you think it’s not... in my rights to worry about it? You can say it’s not logical, but fears often aren’t. So what is it that upsets you about the fact that it worries me?”
A riled, unintelligible groan sounds from Paris, followed by, “I just-!” before he stops. Hektor can see him grinding his teeth as he glares an impressive hole into the far wall. He thinks and Hektor waits. If patience can get him the truth of this mess, he’ll wait for eternity.
In the end, what comes is, “I’m the one who should be worried about deserving a place in Elysium, alright? I just-” He makes a funny noise in his throat, face screwed up. “What right do you have to worry about that when you’re perfect?” And there Paris stops, because apparently, somehow, that’s it. He concludes there with a dramatic cross of his arms, prickly and petulant.
Hektor stares at him in utter disbelief.
Eventually the silence drags on long enough for Paris’s admittedly minimal patience to crack and for him to throw another desperate glare in his direction. “What? You’re the one who wanted to know so badly! Say something!”
“Paris...” Hektor intones slowly and incredulously, “I failed at everything I tried to do.”
Paris lurches back, blinking rapidly like Hektor just hit him between the eyes. He looks at Hektor like he can’t comprehend what he just said.
“You... That’s not true.”
Hektor sighs.
Apparently having processed his words well enough now to rear back into his act of righteous anger, Paris pulls back his lips to snarl with a toss of his head. Hektor recalls the kind of noble and ornery young stallions he once became so renowned for taming and fears he’ll prove less capable of bringing around this beast that stampedes in his brother now.
Paris stamps his foot. At least he isn’t able to break his rib cage if he kicks him like a horse could.
“That’s bullshit! You know that’s not true! You were the perfect older brother,” he insists again, “the heir, the crown prince of Troy, the one with all the regard of mother and father, all of which you deserved!”
Hektor allows his eyes to drift shut for a drawn out, though not particularly restful, moment. He can feel an ache forming between his temples. “A prince who never took the throne,” he corrects him. “I died without taking any burden from our parents’ shoulders. I failed to become what they raised me to be. And I failed as a brother too.”
Paris makes a wild, incensed noise, but Hektor will have him listen. “So many of our brothers died in battle while I yet lived, so many who I couldn’t save and many of those who I couldn’t even avenge. And the rest of our siblings I doomed to their brutal ends when I died. I couldn’t protect any of you, the thing I should have done before all else.”
Paris fixes an appalled stare on him, searching for something he presumably does not find. “But it’s- You were beloved by the gods, even the heavens favored you!”
“Not enough to answer my prayers. Whatever it was they wanted from me, I couldn’t satisfy. They left me to my death and my city to burn just the same.”
Shifting this way then that, Paris seems a heartbeat away from frantic pacing. Voice near in pieces, he rushes on, “You- you had the perfect marriage to the perfect wife with a perfect son-”
“And Andromache was stolen from her home and taken as spoils by the Achaeans because I wasn’t there to protect her. Scamandrius-” Hektor’s voice breaks. Tears well in his eyes, ready and eager to spill over when next he blinks. Scamandrius-
He can barely force out, “My son was thrown from the city walls when he was hardly more than two because I couldn’t save him.” He blinks. The tears fall and do not stop.
Paris is frozen. Not the slightest movement. Here in death, not even his chest stirs with his breath. Not a strand of his hair shifts within the motionless air. Paris stands a statue and watches him cry. He doesn’t try to argue anymore of his supposed perfection.
Hektor figures he’ll refute the rest of it for him anyway, to get it over with.
“I commanded the Trojan army and all our allies, but my decisions led them to slaughter. I should have protected the women and children who relied on us, but I couldn’t stop them from being brutalized. I needed to save Troy, and instead- I let her burn.”
It’s easier to talk through tears with no need to breathe, he finds. Easier, but not easy.
“I failed. At all of it, Paris. At everything I needed to succeed in.”
Hektor longs for the surface, for the birds and bugs that once sounded in the air, for the wind that once rushed past their ears. Maybe it’s fitting though, for the silence down here to be as dead as they are.
Paris sits down heavily in front of him, still staring. He looks shaken to the core. Hektor wipes the tears from his face with the back of his knuckles. A dull ache has settled behind his eyes. Gods above, he’s so tired.
“You’re being so cruel to yourself, Hektor,” Paris tells him at length. His voice is tiny and vulnerable and injured, but he sounds like he believes the words. “All that stuff wasn’t because of you, you aren’t to blame. After all, I’m the one who caused the war, the damned-”
“You didn’t cause the war,” Hektor breathes out so very heavily.
Paris crashes to a complete halt, sputtering. His slack jaw works wordlessly, a fitting match for the rings of white Hektor can see surrounding his irises, and were this conversation anything other than what it is, he wouldn’t hesitate to poke fun at how much he looks like a fish.
As it is, the reaction burns Hektor like acid.
“You didn’t cause the war, Paris,” he repeats somberly, before Paris gets anywhere near composing himself enough to reply. “Your actions instigated the war, but didn’t cause it. It was never so simple. The Achaeans wanted war with Troy, and if it wasn’t you, it would have been something else. Some other justification to besiege us just the same. And it was the gods that engineered what did happen. They use and abandon us mortals in turn, and you can’t be blamed for the interference they had in your life.”
Paris’s gaze flays him where he sits. He looks as though Hektor’s words landed as a blow, that they’ve pulled the world from under his feet and left him alone, heaped where he’s fallen to the ground. His eyes gleam wet. “But- but, you- you said-”
-that he wished Paris had died unwed, that he’d never been born at all, that he was a curse, a ruin, the shame of Troy- he’d said so many terrible things.
“I know. I’m sorry. I failed you too,” he tells his brother.
Paris gapes, stunned.
“But this- I-” And Paris says no more, because there he starts bawling.
Hektor pushes himself forward to close the gap between them. Paris swipes furiously at the flood of tears and tries to keep speaking, but the sobs devour his words before they can form. Hektor tries to soothe him with a hand on his arm and quiet little hushes until Paris abandons whatever he is failing to voice and yields to his crying.
He bundles up Paris in his arms, hugging tight around his back, and lets his shoulder soak up his tears. This, at least, Hektor knows he can do. He knows how to hold out for his siblings when the world has beaten them down, broken them in ways he couldn’t protect them from.
He will always know this.
Paris seems torn between huddling into him as though to weather a storm, and keeping them apart. His hands clutch anxiously in the front of Hektor’s clothes, too uncertain to wrap around his form. He braces his forehead against Hektor’s collarbone but refuses to nuzzle in, even when his whole body shakes with strained energy.
Hektor croons and tries to get him to relax, but the only answer he receives is more sobs.
Paris shakes his head, rolling down on his collar, then begins to lift back. Hektor tries to shift his hand to cup the back of his head, but Paris’s persistence dislodges him, dragging himself away. Face hidden by frantic hands battling his tears, he ends up arranged haphazardly beside Hektor, close enough to knock knees.
He bites his tongue and waits for him as Paris lowers his hands and locks his fingers together in a desperate bid to steady himself, eyes fiercely focused where they glare at the ground, as though if he gives even an inch, whatever words he seeks to hunt down will escape his grasp.
“Don’t you dare say this because you think you need to take the blame for yourself. I- won’t let you,” he asserts, words still hitched and labored. “The things you said to me back then- you were never unfair, you were always right to criticize me, you were always right. I was awful, no matter how you’ve convinced yourself this was all your fault.”
“It wasn’t right of me-” Hektor tries to argue, but stops when Paris shakes his head fiercely, black curls flying.
“You can’t just do this because you hate yourself.”
Hektor pauses, taking in every inch of his brother, strung tight with shame and reluctance. “I’m sorry, Paris,” he starts to his evident confusion, “I’ve been cruel to you, to all of you, with the way I’ve curled in on myself. You weren’t wrong to accuse me of abandoning the place I belong just to rip myself apart. I- didn’t know what else to do,” he can’t help but murmur, still miserably uncertain of how to move on.
“But know that I don’t abuse the thought of you to do it. I would never. I don’t say what I told you out of some sense of self deprecation, you mean more to me than that,” Hektor declares, forcing his voice to ring clear and unyielding, refusing to allow Paris to recoil away from it in denial.
“I say the truth because I care about you and no, I wasn’t fair to you. The way I treated you at the end was a vicious cruelty and I won’t let you believe it was right. You deserved better. Let me apologize for putting so much careless blame and rage on you before, because I am sorry. I hold you dear to me, no matter how I feel about myself.”
Paris sits like a frayed bowstring drawn, made only of tension and ready to snap. Hektor brushes a finger softly over his jaw, but Paris only flickers his gaze to him for a splinter of a moment before looking away once more. There is fear there.
“Even if... I didn’t cause- the war, I still don’t deserve this.” And in the way his form cringes away from Hektor as he speaks, he knows he means the comfort and affection he longs to provide.
“Why?” Hektor whispers. Implores.
Paris squirms in place. “Even then, I’m still not... a good person.”
Oh, Paris.
Hektor wraps his arm around to cradle the opposite side of Paris’s head in his hand, adding the slightest pressure to invite him back to his shoulder. Paris goes. Hektor has never felt all at once so young and yet so old.
“Oh, Paris.” Hektor tilts his head back and closes his eyes. He feels the merged lines of their forms, every inch that Paris leans against him, not with the same warmth it would have if they still lived but not empty either. Something remains in the connection, maybe something even closer, in the tentative, vulnerable contact of their battered souls.
“Little sheep,” he decides to say and a hitched sob escapes Paris in instant reply to the sound of it. It’s been so long since he’s voiced the nickname, half an endearment, half a tease. It was the attempt of a much younger Hektor to shift the decidedly less innocuous jabs of their siblings at Paris’s humble upbringing in a kinder direction. Long abandoned, but never fully forgotten.
“So gentle hearted and quick to love. Always so caring towards the feelings of those around you. Always wise to what might make someone smile. You’re devoted and kind and never want to do any harm. You are so bright with love and laughter that warms the world around you. You’re passionate in everything you pursue, never half hearted. And you’re unyielding, steadfast in the face of anything, in your loyalty to who you are. The precious person you are.”
He holds his brother to him. “You are good. And I am sorry I spent so long treating you like you weren’t.”
Paris shivers in silence. Hektor shifts his curls between his fingers. Still Paris does not look at him, but Hektor can see him now staring ahead, unseeing with eyes so wide. He doesn’t shut them now, trying to force out Hektor and his words and his sincerity to some place they can’t reach him. They do, now.
“I’m sorry,” Hektor sighs. “I tried to do better by you while I still stayed with everyone. I tried to show how I still love you. I should have done more.”
Paris jolts, and “I didn’t-” escapes him before he cuts himself short. At last, Paris swings his head up to look Hektor in the eye, something raw and blindingly intense blooming across his face. He looks at Hektor as if in epiphany, some realization that looks as devastating as beloved. Like a broken bone set, the agony that resuscitates the clarity and healing.
“Paris?” Hektor murmurs. Pleads. He didn’t...?
“I didn’t notice,” he gasps like a confession.
Hektor shudders. “I should have done more.”
“No-” Paris snaps out instantly, shaking his head wildly again. “You shouldn’t have- I should have- I should’ve cared more, I should have noticed-” Thick, shining tears well in his eyes all over again. “I shouldn’t have trapped myself believing I can’t- be worth... You already- You don’t need to-” Paris stops, squeezes his eyes shut with a tiny shake of his head, then chokes out, “Thank you,” before he starts sobbing once more.
This time, he embraces Hektor fully when he falls into his open arms.
Hektor rocks them forward and back in the slightest of sways while time flows by unheeded.
When he pulls back, it’s no longer shrinking away, recoiling from Hektor, only easing into a distance where words can find the room to form between them once more. “Stupid, noble Hektor,” he begins, still damp with tears, making something fragile flutter inside him. “Do you only ever reserve kindness like that for others? You do know... that no one thinks you’re the one who caused all this, right? We all want the best for you. No one blames you for the things that happened or scorns you for thinking you failed.”
Hektor worries his lip between his teeth, trying to ignore his flush of guilt. “I know. I know everyone has been nothing but gentle and generous with me, I just... I wish it was enough, I want it to be enough to me, but it’s not.”
Relief stings him when Paris shows none of the offense he might have taken at that, still concerned and tender. “It’s not how we see you that’s the point,” he concludes. “It’s your own heart that needs to be swayed.”
“I’m trying to do that.”
“How?” Paris searches him, bright eyed. “What have you been trying to do, Hektor?” he asks once again, sincerity soothing where accusation once boiled.
Once again, Hektor tries to answer. “I’m... trying to think things through,” he manages this time. “To understand. What I did in the past, why I did it, what consequences it had, and what it says about me. But even when I try, they never line up.”
Paris purses his lips and looks him over. “It seems like they have lined up for you. It’s just, um, not very good. What you said about... that you failed, isn’t that how you understand it? I think that’s the problem. It’s that; what are you trying to do about that?”
Hektor shakes his head broadly, scowling at nothing. “I’m trying-! Ugh-” Will his thoughts ever stop chasing themselves in circles? Paris’s words feel as frustrating as they are true. “I’m trying- to not care! If... what happened was decided in the past and I’ve decided how I feel about it now, I’m trying to leave it. I’m trying to find something to move on to, I’m trying figure out something else to be, even though I have fuck all to show for it.” Always, always, the thoughts and fears stalk him.
“What you’re trying to do is figure out what to try to do,” Paris supplies.
Hektor scrunches up his nose. With a faint whine, he utters, “It sounds particularly pathetic when you say it like that.” A little, wavering laugh rises from Paris.
“I’m trying- to find what my purpose is now,” Hektor attempts to rephrase. “Protecting Troy... Whether I failed at it or not, it’s long past now. And now I don’t know what else to do with myself.”
When Hektor shifts to meet his brother’s gaze, Paris catches him there. He holds him down with his stare, transforming as he watches into one of comprehension and raw, open grief. Hektor blinks and a phantom sensation of holding his breath makes itself at home in his hollow chest, as much where his heart once was as his lungs.
“Oh, Hektor... Is that- is that what this is about?” Hektor shifts, uncertain and uncomfortable, but there is no accusation woven through the anguish in his voice, in his eyes.
Hektor doesn’t know what he’s seen.
“You... A purpose doesn’t define you, Hektor. It never has. You’re so much more than that.” The bone deep instinct of an older brother begging him to do anything and everything to wipe that look of desperate sadness from Paris’s face wars with a heart felt impression that staying quiet is truly the best he can do in this.
The former yields to the latter and Hektor waits in silence for Paris’s judgment.
“No wonder you don’t believe you deserve Elysium. The fact that you couldn’t stop Troy from burning... The way you said everything you told me, that you couldn’t protect me and our siblings, that you didn’t take the throne, that you couldn’t save-” Paris stops there. Hektor dimly thinks he might feel himself shivering.
“You see all those things as purposes you failed at, they’ve been eating at you like that all this time. And saving Troy envelopes them all. When we lived, you let that become your purpose, that blotted out everything else about you, and you’re still doing it now.”
Hektor is certainly shivering now. He trembles under the effort it takes to keep himself steady, to hold back the urge to lash out like a wounded beast and flee this scrutiny that feels as comforting as being carved apart by a dull spear. Yet even still, he needs to give this chance its right to breathe, lest he not get another one again.
Nevertheless, it is with an evident undercurrent of defensive pain that he replies, “What else could I have done? It had to be more important than anything else, Troy mattered to me more than anything, and there was no room for anything else once I put that first. And the city needed me to be that purpose, so I was, and I couldn’t be anything else after that. I couldn’t afford to have done less, when even everything wasn’t enough.”
“I’m not blaming you, Hektor,” Paris says, his voice somehow soothing in its desperate softness. “I understand why you did it, and it wasn’t only because of you. The city, our people and allies- myself among them- demanded everything from you. They- We... took everything you could give and then more. We forced that purpose onto you, and certainly we would have suffered more if you hadn’t accepted it so fully, even though I desperately wish you hadn’t needed to.”
“Then?” Hektor questions harshly, fighting for composure. “Yes, I failed to protect my home and, in that, failed at so much more. If you see that, then what? Will you try to convince me that- somehow, I didn’t fail? I beg you not to, Paris.” He squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t doubt your intentions are good, but please, don’t. You can’t.”
“Fine,” he says far more gently than Hektor expected, as if making some inconsequential allowance to an upset child. “You failed. You couldn’t fulfill that purpose. After all, Troy burned. What I mean is that there’s so much more to it than that. To you. You- you don’t have a purpose.” Hektor flinches. “Not inherently. A purpose is what you make of it. You made that your purpose, but that doesn’t make you who you are, it’s not what damns or blesses you.”
Paris gazes at him as though he looks through him, something more than seeing past the faded shell of his shade. “You overlook so much when you focus on that alone. What you did is only part of the picture. You deserve so much credit for who you are. You’re not a failure; you’re not the defender of Troy, you’re not the prince, you’re not the heir, you’re not the commander- you’re Hektor, you’re Hektor, nothing else is enough to encompass you. And can’t you see it? You’re wonderful.”
“Hektor, you are- you are... You’re the way you carried Polyxena around on your shoulders when she got lonely over Polydorus spending more and more time away from her. You’re the way you read your books late at night, making time even when your days were too busy. You’re the way you defended Helen and became a friend to her even when you could have disdained her, the way you got so nervous that you kept yourself and father awake with your fretting the whole night before you married Andromache. You’re the way you loved your horses and treated even your animals with every respect. You’re the way you taught me and so many of our siblings the constellations from atop the city walls.”
Paris’s lower lip trembles, but his gaze does not falter, pinning him, crushing him. “Can’t you see? These are what make you who you are, the way your eyes crinkle when you laugh, the way you touch someone’s shoulder when you walk by, the way you look after who you love. Dear brother, lovely Hektor, these things matter. They matter so much.”
Hektor’s lips part, but he cannot speak. Paris sounds so certain. That they matter, that they matter. Are these the things that make a difference? Does he have the right to hold them closest to the ghost of his heart, after everything?
“Can’t you see that you deserve to be here?”
“I don’t know,” Hektor whispers tremulously. “This is... I’m- I don’t know-” His voice breaks.
Paris draws them close, tucking himself up under where Hektor dipped his head, overwhelmed. He thinks he hears himself whimper minutely, shaken too deeply to think. He can do no more than clutch at Paris, anchoring himself to him as he’s strangled with the full brunt of his exhaustion and pain, uncertainty and despair. He feels overwrought and shattered, but in an inevitable way. Like a hard, fired vessel, terracotta walls already webbed with cracks, finally nudged just right for the perilous tension to release in countless shards across the floor.
It is a blessing, in that way, even while it hurts.
“You don’t need a purpose anymore,” Paris states, muffled, yet everything Hektor can hear. “Or, you don’t have to find a grand one. You can let your purpose be to just... be. To just exist for yourself. That’s alright. You can rest now, Hektor.”
Oh-
One loud sob breaks free.
“You belong here in Elysium. I’ll convince you of it, in time,” Paris promises into his chest. In time. Hektor clings to that. In time. He can bear no more now, but Paris can tell. So he lets himself just sit wordlessly, trying to find himself again.
Eventually, his mind begins to pull itself back together again, and he does what he can in face of the momentous task of processing all... this. With Paris back in his arms, he thinks of what brought him here and frowns slightly. He pets his hair without thinking.
“You said you fear you don’t deserve Elysium either,” Hektor pulls them back around. It’s too important to be left behind. “You’re already here. Irrefutably, the judges of the Underworld have decided that you are a good enough person to belong here. Does that bring you no comfort?”
Paris huff and frowns. “I’ve thought it’s as likely as anything that I’m here for killing Achilles. There’s no way to know if their official verdict has even the slightest to do with if I’m a good person or not.”
“Is that not what you’ve been arguing?”
Paris levels an unwavering stare at him. “Do you care about the reasons for their judgment?”
It’s a complicated question, but Hektor doesn’t have to pause to find an answer he already knows. “No.”
“Exactly,” Paris agrees with a wave of his hand. “I haven’t the slightest clue how we and every other soul are placed, what makes the difference between paradise and punishment. We’ll never know, and I won’t pretend I do. You don’t care about it, and why would you? That’s all already been irrevocably decided.” The corners of his mouth tug down.
“It’s you who’s not convinced of your place in Elysium, so it’s your reasons I care about. I argue to persuade you that you’re a good person, not to persuade whoever doles out judgment down here. They’ve already decided. Do you really believe I care about their feelings more than yours?”
“No, I don’t,” Hektor tells him calmly without missing a beat. “I’ve heard your words, Paris, and I’ve felt that you meant them for me. I am listening and I am learning. Your...” with a hint of amusement, he echoes, “persuading isn’t for nothing, though this will take more time to heal. What I thought is... you might be arguing the same about the reasons for the official placement for your own sake. From the way you spoke when we fought, it seemed as though it mattered to you, regardless of if it did to me. Their opinions of you seemed very significant to you.”
Paris blinks in surprise, then looks away at that. “...The opinions other people have of me, of what kind of person I am, matter to me a great deal. But not theirs.”
Something ratchets tight within Hektor’s chest. “Paris...”
He picks anxiously at the fine gold chains around his wrists. “I- I’m sorry, Hektor. When you said- then... that you felt like you didn’t deserve Elysium... it scared me. I didn’t feel like you would have taken the chance to scorn me as even less worthy, but I felt that you could. And that the chance was there at all... made me lash out. I wanted to do it myself before you’d ever get the opportunity. I thought it would hurt less.”
His voice drops to a frail whisper. “I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing you condemn me, even when I already believed I deserved it, so I just- did it myself. But all it accomplished was trampling all over your feelings when you were already hurt. The Underworld judges I couldn’t care less about... but it was your opinions- just the possibility of your opinions that I cared about more than what you truly felt. And to such a horrible end. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Hektor.”
Hektor swallows achingly, wounded with the knowledge now that Paris expected violence and vitriol in his words then, and not without reason. And that, even after all their cruelty towards him in life, it’s the opinions of the ones he holds dear that matter to Paris.
“Dear Paris...” he implores. “I didn’t realize... Please, tell me what I can do.”
A stuttered little laugh replies. “You’ve done enough,” Paris sighs out, “despite that- despite that I didn’t bother to explain myself well enough until now. It’s not as though you’ve deferred to the judges, as if only they can decide if there’s good in me. It didn’t sound like you were speaking on their behalf as you reassured me.”
“I can speak for no one but myself,” he answers honestly.
Paris smiles at him so bittersweet and tender, glowingly heartfelt. “And there’s nothing greater you can do for me. You’ve already-” He breaks off with another breath of laughter and a shake of his head. “You’ve been persuasive in your own right.”
Hektor takes what comfort he can in knowing, in his apologies and attempts to make amends, he’s given Paris something he needed. It doesn’t feel like enough, but he supposes it isn’t. Not yet. There run wounds too deep for one person alone to heal, and certainly not in one sitting.
“No one in the world could convince me you don’t belong here,” he assures his brother. “And I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re by my side now.” Paris shuts his eyes without a word. The quiet cradles them both.
“I wish it was as easy as this,” Paris says after a while, then interrupts himself with a snort. “If I ignore what a joke it is to call any of this easy. But, still... I wish I didn’t know this’ll all be so hard for so much longer before this is righted. I wish it hurt less.”
Hektor thinks to himself that, perhaps instead of death being the end of life, as was always said, that death is the first and only chance mortals ever have to recover from life. But the thought feels too morbid to voice, and he considers that it’s not quite true. Life isn’t solely pain. For them to have something they must recover from means they must have gained something worthwhile just the same.
“Peace will come. Not perfection, but we’ve known happiness before, so we’ll be able to settle in it again, eventually. It will hurt, but...” Hektor studies Paris. “Here we still are.”
Paris sighs and nods in agreement. If hurt was enough to tear them apart, certainly they would never have made it this far.
For a while, they sit together in silence, wounded, yet adjusting to a new clarity after so, so long.
Paris foretells his intent to break the quiet by shifting in place restlessly, throwing sideways glances at him. “Ugh,” is what does it. “You should let me braid your hair back. It’s a mess,” Paris gripes thickly. His hair. That’s the second time Paris has mentioned it.
“Why does it matter to you?” Hektor asks, not irritably, not defensively, sincerely seeking to understand why Paris finds it noteworthy. Noteworthy even when emotions are at their highest.
Paris avoids his gaze.
Several quiet moments pass where he seems to debate with himself. Hektor does not disturb his grappling. At length, he says, “You preferred to wear it back when we were alive.”
Another pause, weighted this time.
“Your hair was undone the last time I saw you,” Paris continues stiffly, and exceedingly gingerly. “It came loose behind the chariot. They didn’t tie it again before- your pyre.”
Hektor watches him. Paris does not look back, gaze fixed rigidly on the distance. These are simple facts that Paris has laid before him, but it's easy enough to read between the lines and understand. He looks the same as he did in death and defeat and it must sit sick and loathsome in Paris to be reminded of the fate he suffered.
He understands.
Hektor brushes such thoughts away then tips his head to one side. “Sure. Go for it. You’ve come in here and harassed me this whole time, after all, so I think the least I’m owed is a little pampering.”
Paris scowls. “You know, I actually wanted to do it before you opened your damn mouth.”
Hektor laughs deep in his chest and Paris rearranges himself behind him.
“Need a comb,” he mutters, then picks one up from beside them. The realm of Elysium will generally provide such trifling things as they are wanted, though it’s a service Hektor has taken precious little advantage of. Paris starts to pull it smoothly through his hair since, despite his nagging, it isn’t actually messy.
He lets the strands settle loose over his shoulders and starts the braid low, as Hektor always wore it, save for on the battlefield.
Hektor lets his eyelids droop tiredly as Paris fiddles with his hair, the roiling tide of his emotions finally brought to enough peace to cede to the weight of exhaustion draped over him. He manages to keep the wanderings of his thoughts blessedly benign, stirring here, then there, then returning to the plait his brother carefully weaves.
Indulging a whim, Hektor turns to look at Paris which he answers with an aggravated yelp, fumbling as the motion pulls his hair from his fingers. “Don’t do that! I need to actually be able to see what I’m doing!” he berates, tugging on the reclaimed hair for good measure, and Hektor turns back around with a smile.
“I wanted to see if you still stick your tongue out while doing things like this,” he informs him as Paris works to salvage the disrupted end of the braid. He does; the very tip of his tongue had been poking out between his pursed lips when he looked.
Paris punches his back and Hektor jumps slightly with a chuckle.
There’s a strip of leather sitting beside them when Paris reaches the end, down near the small of his back, and he uses it to tie it off. He feels him examine it with a critical eye, and then he swings around to do the same in the front. He nods once, then flops out onto his back, apparently satisfied with his good work.
Hektor grabs one of his splayed out arms and slings it over Paris’s chest to make room to lay out beside him. This was disgustingly exhausting. He flicks his braid to the side so it won’t dig into his back.
They lay there for a while until Paris musters the willpower to drag himself over and drop his head on Hektor’s shoulder instead. Older brother, snug furniture; if there’s a difference, no one’s bothered to tell any of Hektor’s siblings.
In recompense, Hektor manhandles Paris listless arm again until it rests over his chest where the weight is most comfortable.
“This... was horrible, actually?” Paris decides aloud.
Hektor releases a long, low groan of agreement. Extremely necessarily and deeply beneficial and just awful.
“Fuck. We’ll go back, but I need a damn nap first.” Hektor manages a grunt of distaste at the notion of sleeping. At least they’re in agreement to go back later. This- this was...
He feels frighteningly fragile. That if someone even looked at him just so, it would break something inside him. He can’t go back now, gods, not now. He needs time, but not to think, for once. Just time to b-
Well. He can’t say time to breathe. Perhaps he just needs time to be. Just that. And some part of him knows Paris feels the same, right now.
So might as well.
“Do you think, when we get back, there will be enough people yelling at me for running away that all of their voices will harmonize and it’ll actually sound really nice?” Hektor posits blearily.
Paris tips his head back, digging into Hektor’s chest, so he can just barely see him upside down, eyes rolled all the way up. “Well, if there’s going to be a harmony, it’ll have to work with you screaming, because Deiphobus is going to break both your legs for it. What do you think that’ll be, C sharp?” Paris waves a hand around airily, as if already composing to the sound.
Hektor blinks and barely manages to get his eyes back open. “Oh, fuck that shit.”
Soon, Paris dozes on his shoulder as Hektor stares hazily at the distant rocky ceiling that has long since replaced the sky.