the song of achilles quotes, but from happy moments, they grow sadder and sadder until you are crying: a thread

“Come,” he said.
“Where?” I was wary; perhaps now I would be punished for suggesting deceit.
“To my lyre lesson. So, as you say, it will not be a lie. After, we will speak with my father.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Why not?” He watched me, curious.

Something in the way he spoke it drained the last of my anger from me. I had minded, once. But who was I now, to begrudge such a thing?
As if he heard me, he smiled, and his face was like the sun.

This feeling was different. I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This and this and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not-

-have to worry that I was too slender or too slow. This and this and this! I taught him how to skip stones, and he taught me how to carve wood. I could feel every nerve in my body, every brush of air against my skin.

“Do you want to be a god?” It was easier this time.
“Not yet,” he said.
A tightness I had not known was there eased a little. I would not lose him yet.

I felt a tug on my foot. It was Achilles, grinning at me from the floor.

“Patroclus.” Pa-tro-clus.

The sun sank below Pelion’s ridges, and we were happy.

As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.

We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.
Later, Achilles pressed close for a final, drowsy whisper. “If you have to go, you know I will go with you.” We slept.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

I thought, This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old.

I reached for his hand and took it. “I have no need to forgive you. You cannot offend me.” They were rash words, but I said them with all the conviction of my heart.

I could barely remember that only the night before we had spit olive pits at each other, across the plate of cheeses that Phoinix had left for us. That we had howled with delight when he had landed one, wet and with bits of fruit still hanging from it, in my ear.

When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.

He is half of my soul, as the poets say.

I reached for his hand, and he gripped it. “Be careful,” he said.
“I will.”
There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.

My head drops back against the ground, and the last image I see is of Hector, leaning seriously over me, twisting his spear inside me as if he is stirring a pot. The last thing I think is: Achilles.

A fierce red rage comes, and he almost kills him there. But he would have to let go of me. He cannot. He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of his chest, like the wings of a moth. An echo, the last bit of spirit still tethered to my body. A torment.

Achilles weeps. He cradles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name. I see his face as if through water, as a fish sees the sun. His tears fall, but I cannot wipe them away. This is my element now, the half-life of the unburied spirit.

He weeps as he lifts me onto our bed. My corpse sags; it is warm in the tent, and the smell will come soon. He does not seem to care. He holds me all night long, pressing my cold hands to his mouth.

But already he is waking. “Patroclus! Wait! I am here!”
He shakes the body beside him. When I do not answer, he weeps again.

Priam’s eyes find the other body, mine, lying on the bed. He hesitates a moment. “That is—your friend?”
“Philtatos,” Achilles says, sharply. Most beloved.

When they are gone, he slumps next to me, his face against my belly. My skin grows slippery under the steady fall of his tears.

The next day he carries me to the pyre. Briseis and the Myrmidons watch as he places me on the wood and strikes the flint. The flames surround me, and I feel myself slipping further from life, thinning to only the faintest shiver in the air. I yearn for the darkness and silence-

-of the underworld, where I can rest.
He collects my ashes himself, though this is a woman’s duty. He puts them in a golden urn, the finest in our camp, and turns to the watching Greeks.
“When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear.

We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

“I have done it,” she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. ACHILLES, it reads. And beside it, PATROCLUS.
“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”

in the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.