Chapter Text
It began with a growl in the middle of the night.
Springtime in Tegea saw long afternoons that wound down into restless evenings. The air was light as snow, the wind abundant - but always, it bordered between warm and too fucking hot.
He woke up thirsty. He wondered how many people were awake at this exact time, sitting up in bed with the sheets crumpled in between their fingers. Glancing outside the window and meeting the half-moon with heavy-lidded eyes, he grinned.
He whispered the prayer of acknowledgment his mother had taught him.
“It does not rhyme,” she’d said, fingers combing through his hair.
His head tilted to the side by habit, imagining cool skin on his too-warm scalp.
“Not all prayers have to rhyme, my little love.”
There was a spare second between the last syllable of the incantation - and empty silence. One could hear the world in those instances; instances of complete solitude.
He left his heart room to ache in that unobservable silence - a second when the gods were not watching him.
Then he nodded at his queen, matched his smile to her own. And went down to the kitchens to quench his thirst.
“Back again?” It was Cook, arms folded across his bulky chest.
In the year since the launch of the prince’s campaign, Patroclus had found within the palace a second refuge. That refuge, of course, was where he spent his meals. But he was not used to eating alone, not even now. Not even after so much time had passed. Mealtimes were familial events, periods of gathering. They were accompanied with the sounds of clinking cutlery scraping against plates. Of cups being filled and emptied out.
Now he set his lone cup on the wooden counter and filled it himself. He took a sip and eyed Cook nervously.
It was not that he was afraid of Cook. No, it was not that at all.
“I heard that you killed your wife, Cook. Is that true?”
The older man began to glower, yet there was a hint of humor behind his black eyes.
“Keep your foreign nose out of it, prince’s brat.”
“I can keep my nose out of the mixing bowl, Cook, but certainly not your personal affairs.”
He hooted with laughter as he was chased out of the kitchen, a towel slapping at him as if to ward off the night’s ghosts.
How he loved the kitchen, really he did. And all of its occupants, whether they wished his demise or not.
Bright laughter, against the backdrop of flowering trees. The air was perfumed with new blossoms; they called it the second snowfall, for white petals lay atop the ground like a bed of winter, the very last of it seeping through the cracks and melting away under the young sun.
He felt it leave his skin - felt it leave the faces of the people in the palace. Like a spell come undone, fatigue left the bones and made way for new beginnings.
Early in the morning, the washerwomen wrung out their clothes outside the palace windows. And he would wake up an hour early to see them go about their work, the great sound of the heaving fabric, the trail of the water.
It reminded him of afternoons in his sister’s domain.
“They say she is the loveliest dancer in all the empire.”
“Oh? Is that what they say?”
It was not that Patroclus liked to eavesdrop. It was not that at all. He paused in his wanderings, conversation floating and finding him, as it often did.
It amused Orestes to hear the palace gossip, trivial though it was.
That afternoon he could go to him and say, “Here is what the washerwomen think of your betrothed.” But there were other times - when he would rather keep it to himself. Like a secret whispered in his ear, no matter that the women did not realize he was listening.
They spoke of their lives outside the city proper, about the new baby, the grandchild who had started school, the nephew who had cut his foot and contracted gangrene. He stood with one hand on the stone wall, as though stone could absorb their words and make them a part of him. His fingertips were warm and tingly.
The palace of Tegea was a vast puzzle that fit together in ways he could not begin to comprehend. He had understood his sister’s domain. Briseis commanded a household that ran like a water clock, everything in its own interval, its own place. Here, he did not know who he would encounter with the rounding of a corner, whose eyes he would meet, whether they were welcoming or the opposite. He did not know where he belonged.
It had been this way ever since Achilles’ departure.
But he did not like to think of that.
“You are quiet tonight, Patroclus.”
He did not stir. His eyes were on the lyrist’s fingers, dexterous as a spider’s leg along the web. Tonight they played Europa and the Bull - an ominous melody unmatched in its beauty - one of Orestes’s favorites. It was unaccompanied by other instruments, and the lingering silence it stirred left a mark on his heart.
He shrugged one shoulder, did not look at Orestes.
“I wonder what it would be like if this song had lyrics.”
Orestes’s amusement came in a slow wave, the seconds his eyes remained on Patroclus’s face. He had never known the prince to laugh, and yet he was one who accepted a jest as easily as any other.
A difficult man to read - and that was why Achilles had disliked him, because they were one and the same.
Patroclus couldn’t help a small scoff, thinking about it. Every time he thought of Achilles his hand curled into his side, as though grasping at some missing thread he could not find.
He could see the other courtiers stifling yawns - eyelids growing heavy. But sleep would not find him, not yet. There was something about music that forbade him to stop listening. Every note, he hung on to as though it would help him remember someone else who had played for him once.
He waited for it. And there it came, when everyone else was set to retire, when activity began to die down for the night.
Pylades was always watching him.
It did not make his skin crawl like it used to. Instead, it was something to be expected. Perhaps the only constant in this dream he could not awaken from.
He raised his eyes and met Pylades’s gaze.
The man blinked once, but did not dart away like he would have before. They regarded each other for a moment.
When the brazier was put out and the courtyard bathed in darkness, Patroclus got up. He hesitated, hands coming to smooth out wrinkles in his tunic that were not there.
He knew he could hear the footsteps only because their owner wanted to be heard.
“What do you want from me, Pylades?” he asked, without glancing back.
As he asked every night.
Again, there was no answer.
The prince’s companion trailed behind him to his chamber, where the footsteps ceased.
Before he shut the door, he peeked out at Pylades, who leaned against the wall and waited for him to withdraw. So they would belong to separate worlds again, his in the prince’s eye and Pylades in the man’s shadow.
Patroclus pressed his cheek against the door and studied the man.
“Are you unhappy?”
That warranted a flicker of interest.
“That he will marry her soon?”
Sometimes he wracked his brain to recall what Pylades’s voice sounded like. He could not remember ever hearing it.
The man did not reply, but his shoulders stooped a little. Perhaps Patroclus was imagining it.
“Perhaps it is not because he will marry her. Perhaps you wonder if he will love her.”
This time, a crease between the eyebrows, visible even in the waning light.
Patroclus matched the man’s frown, wishing he knew what to say. It was unlikely that Pylades followed him for words of comfort. It was unlikely that the man wanted any of his sympathy. But why?
He only knew it was not the prince’s command. It was not Orestes’s way.
The edge of the door was pressing into his cheek, making it hurt. He pulled away and sighed. “Good night.”
He could not bring himself to undress for bed. He sat for a long time on the edge of the mattress, wondering why it was so different here in Tegea. Had he not been alone in Opus as well? What difference did it make?
Not for the first time, his hand itched for a quill.
But if he had ever gathered the courage to write to Briseis, it went away in the night.
The words simply would not come.
No matter how many prayers his mother had taught him. No matter that Uncle Lycurgus had shown him how to speak to the gods, the correct movements of the lips, the focusing of the mind.
They did not hear him. Was he a heretic for thinking so?
To say that he missed them was inaccurate.
How could one miss a phantom limb?
He turned his head expecting it to be there, only to find a stump.
That was the worst of it. The way he would round a corner expecting to see Achilles’s silhouette, expecting to run to him.
And the shock of each morning when the greeting never came.
Somewhere out there, his warrior had a map. Somewhere on the northern front in an endless battle; perhaps even when the worst of it happened, he could unfurl the wings of his kite and fly away in the nick of time. But what did Patroclus know of war?
It began with a growl in the middle of the night.
Naturally, he went to her. He was afraid of his mother at nighttime - the way she would rave and throw her hands up to the moon - not his mother who sang him songs and placed stars on his tunic. But a creature with a face he did not know.
Briseis, he was never afraid of.
Even now when she did not want to talk to him, and all he ever managed was to make her angry. She loved Lykaia best, who was not a nuisance and who understood her.
Sometimes he wished he was Lykaia, but he was not. He was only Patroclus.
He tugged at her blanket first to let her know he was there. He heard her sigh, both resigned and sleepy. But nighttime lent her a softness she did not have in the day, and it was only a moment before he clambered into her arms.
“What?” Briseis grumbled, but her surly tone did not match the way she clung to him as hard as he clung to her.
Soon enough, her irritation sank away.
“Goose pimples,” she commented, and rubbed his arms to warm him.
“I’m not a goose!” he protested, and she laughed.
He turned his face to the star-washed sky. Their skin was tinged blue, hands joined together like siblings in myth.
“I think I forgot to say the prayer,” he mumbled, allowing his worry to sound out.
“That’s why she -”
“It is not your fault, Patroclus,” Briseis cut him off.
“There is no use in prayer.”
He could not bring himself to tell her that he had always been searching for the right one. As though the right words would cure their mother of her affliction and bring her back to them as she could be, gentle and loving and familiar. But the truth was, she had never been familiar. Not as Briseis was. Even though Briseis scorned him in daytime and loved her handmaidens over him, she was always herself. He had never feared her.
He felt the question in his throat, swept it around his mouth like rocks.
“... Is it because I’m not Opheltes?”
Briseis stiffened instantly. Her eyes found him, the first anger rising.
“What did you say?”
“Opheltes.”
Silence.
It was a name he knew was forbidden, but not why. It was a name that slipped out when Uncle Lycurgus brought him to temple only to catch himself at the last moment. Opheltes haunted the corridors of the temple with the soul of his laughter; the divine magic he had been born to.
Opheltes was brave, and brilliant, and beautiful.
Opheltes was dead.
And he, Patroclus, had replaced him.
It was his name on Opheltes’ grave marker, because the wrong son had died. It had driven his mother mad.
If he could only be Opheltes. Then everything would be alright.
“Say it,” Briseis nudged him, her hand over his.
He did not want to.
“Say it,” she pressed, voice insistent.
He wet his lips.
“I’m Patroclus,” he whispered.
“Patroclus,” she echoed.
He was Patroclus. He was only Patroclus.
The name sounded out again, eyes squeezed shut. He hadn’t realized a tear had rolled along his cheek, like the memory made tangible and cleansed.
Patroclus, the way Achilles said it, all wrong, in his harsh foreign syllables.
He’d always known who he was from that moment on.
And now - only he could make it reality.