Chapter Text
They called him Aristos Achaean, the man who took Hector’s life.
What did it say about the Greeks? That the very best of them would sit idle as they fell to slaughter, would come only to the defense of a man who had already perished? Hector had never seen his face, only glimpses of his brilliant armor flashing like the wings of a phoenix as legions of Trojans fell before his ashen spear. When word came that he was the meteor barreling toward the city walls, leaving a path of torn destruction behind him like the arrow that pierces flesh, his brother Deiphobus told him: “That is Aristos Achaean. He is coming for you.”
Not the city, not the people. You.
When he could not run anymore, Hector faced the best of the Greeks, the one who had come for his blood in the spirit of vengeance. For the first and last time, he beheld the warrior they said was invincible, who was supposedly a child of gods, who had broken so many of Priam’s sons. The chase had not tired him, like it had Hector; red blood beat below his skin and his limbs trembled, but Hector knew it was with an electric, tireless rage. Cold blue eyes pinned his enemy through bruised, bloodshot sockets. He wielded the spear the way a beast bared its fangs.
“There are no pacts of faith between lions and men,” he said.
He knew how to pierce his own armor. It was over before Hector caught his breath.
--
Every hour that delayed Hector’s funeral was agonizing. Each time Achilles lashed his corpse to his wheels to drag it around his camp, Hector looked on and bemoaned his regrets. It was a cruel mockery of life, like a fish gasping on land at the mercy of its captor. He watched Achilles, starved and encrusted with the rotten blood of Trojan battalions, stalking around like an untamed beast. His face, which was once said to rival that of Aphrodite’s beloved Paris, had become gaunt and haggard with loss. He was a dead man walking in every way.
Hector could have fallen victim to the same fate, if the Achaean army had not kept him from claiming the corpse of Patroclus. He knew his spirit was no greater than the man who desecrated his body before the eyes of his family, denying them peace in their grief. He would have inflicted the same upon him if he had the chance. Would he have become the same feral creature that keeps him from joining the shades now?
The meaningless war, and its twisted mercies.
--
Elysium is not what Hector pictured all his life, the vision he held onto as he prayed to the gods and gave thanks to Apollo and Zeus for keeping Ilium safe and bountiful. It is lush and green, abundant in riches both natural and manmade. That much he had predicted. But it is so -- so empty. Reserved only for the greatest heroes, the bravest of a race that is naturally cautious. Some of Hector’s brothers greet him when he arrives, but not nearly as many as he was anticipating. It strikes him that he will likely never see Andromache again. The very thought completely drains the luster from the paradise around him.
In the dim, hollow light, his regrets outshine the bounty of Elysium. He remains haunted by visions of shattered shields, of friends rent in half by Greek bronze, of his infant son recoiling in terror from his own father’s helm. The raw hate behind the reddened eyes of Achilles burns brightest in his mind. What pain could have driven him to such ferocity? What exactly had Hector taken from him in slaying Patroclus?
It may be far too late, but boundless eternity seemed a good time to make amends. Surely the best of the Greeks is somewhere in this realm of heroes, and Hector has little better to do with his ceaseless time than seek him out.
--
It is near impossible to gauge time in Elysium, but Hector is beginning to think his search is taking too long. He hasn’t encountered Achilles, but neither has he heard anyone speak of him. The man claimed so many lives at once that he turned the waters of the Scamander to a bloody crimson -- a legend like that should be easy to find. But there is not a single vestige of him. If not for the omega-shaped spear point that followed Hector to the underworld, he may as well have imagined him.
He is close to forgetting the endeavor entirely when he hears something unusual for Elysium: a familiar voice. He follows the sound of bitter muttering to a misty glade, carved into sharp angles by the Lethe. At the crest of a grassy hill sits --
Hector stops abruptly, then turns around and heads back the way he came.
--
Hector cannot help peering into the glade whenever he comes across it. He could not believe his eyes at first; Patroclus, the man who turned the tide of the Trojan War. More than Hector, more than even Achilles. The gravest error that Hector ever made, the seal on the order of his own doom. Here he is, alone in paradise just like his killer.
And he is alone, every time Hector sees him. The way he spoke of Achilles in his last breaths, the way that Achilles’s voice ripped into jagged pieces when he laid Hector’s unforgivable sin at his feet...the two must have been close. Where is Achilles? Why are they not together?
Hector steels himself and approaches Patroclus, crossing the stone bridge over the river of oblivion. Patroclus halts his muttering, his dark gaze rising from the newcomer’s feet to his face.
For a moment, the two men regard each other in silence with unreadable expressions. Then Patroclus reaches behind himself, pulling a smooth metal object from the folds of his cloak and offering it up. “You found me. I’ve been meaning to return this to you.”
Hector recognizes the broken point of his own spear. The last time he saw it, he had just buried it deep into another man’s chest. “I thought you would be angry,” he says, making no move to take it. “You certainly did not hold back when last we met.”
Patroclus sighs and sets the spearpoint down. “If this meeting had come a little sooner, perhaps I would be. Anger burns hot, then burns out. Why have you come here, Prince of Troy?”
Hector hesitates. “I should have heeded you. You spoke true when you predicted my death at the hands of Achilles.”
The name makes Patroclus wince, almost imperceptibly. “There was nothing you could have done. You must know that you sealed your own fate the instant you executed mine.”
“I tried to reason with him.”
Patroclus scoffs. “As did I.”
“Where is he?”
“Oh, I’m sure he is dead by now.”
“You have not seen him.”
“He must think that I abandoned him,” Patroclus says under his breath, as though speaking to himself. “As though I had any other choice.”
Hector looks at him, tensing his jaw. He turns aside. “I will leave you.”
Patroclus does not acknowledge him, speaking to himself without raising his head as Hector backs away.
--
Perhaps it is guilt that urges Hector back to Patroclus’s glade. Perhaps it is pity. But under the surface of the obvious, the place where Hector’s heart once was aches with an ineffable compulsion to return again and again. As time passes, more of Hector’s comrades and family trickle into the afterlife: his father Priam, Glaucus, who lost his life in the battle for the body of Achilles, and eventually Paris, who started it all. Hector does not want for company, and yet...there is something incomplete that only speaking with Patroclus can provide.
Sometimes he looks up when Hector enters, but most of the time he carries on with his musings as though he were still alone. This time, he nods at Hector in greeting and gestures to a spot on the stone circle beside him. Hector pauses, fighting with himself, and then gratefully kneels on the ground.
“I have been meaning to ask you something, Prince of Troy,” Patroclus says when he is settled. “Who was it who took down Achilles, in the end? For they said only you wielded the strength for such a feat.”
Hector shakes his head. “No, I stood no chance against his rage. It was my brother, Paris. Struck him with an arrow in the heel, he said.”
“Paris? Tsch.” Patroclus scoffs. “That is almost embarrassing for Achilles. Aristos Achaean, bested by that cowardly peacock.”
“The others told me that Achilles was...different, after my funeral,” Hector says, clearing his throat. “The fury that terrified us all was smothered to ash. He put up little fight, before the end. Almost as if he were…”
“Asking for it?” Patroclus supplies. “The fool. Feeding right into the Fates’ design. What was it all for, then? If he was always just going to give up? He sacrificed so much for glory, only to let himself be killed by such a weakling.” He shakes his head, clearing away his regrets as he remembers Hector’s presence. “You will forgive me if I have nothing kind to say about your brother.”
The statement startles Hector into a sharp chuckle, his shoulders shaking with rare laughter. “I will, and you are hardly the only one. He is my family, and I was bound to protect him, but there were many occasions when I nearly throttled him myself.”
“You should have. Would have saved us all quite a bit of trouble.”
Hector laughs again. “Something tells me that it wouldn’t have put a stop to the fighting.”
Patroclus sighs. “You speak true. Only one man’s death could have broken the endless deadlock of that wretched war. And it was not Paris.”
Hector understands his meaning instantly, and bows his head. When he speaks again, his voice is quieter. “I suppose it would sound disingenuous if I told you I regret the way I slew you.”
“Indeed, it would, and I don’t want you to,” Patroclus says. “War is brutal. I knew that when I put Achilles’s armor on. Regrets are meaningless now.”
Hector hums. He wonders if he could say the same to Achilles, if he saw him now.
“And you can hardly take credit for my defeat, besides,” Patroclus adds. “When it was Apollo who shattered my defenses for you.”
Hector cracks a smile. “They said that Apollo guided the arrow that pierced Achilles, as well.”
Patroclus sighs theatrically. “I don’t know why we mortals bother with fighting at all.”
“No,” Hector agrees. “Neither do I.”
--
Patroclus seems a fraction less despondent when Hector visits him, after that. He still hasn’t risen from his spot on the ground, and he is far from content, but the occasional company seems to distract him from his churning thoughts for a time.
Hector sits down across from him, holding a sheet of dried meat that the Stygian boatman offered him earlier like he was doling out rations. “Have you gotten any of these strange gifts, too?” he asks.
Patroclus rummages for a goblet of deep red liquid, too bright to be wine. “Supplements for those who care to challenge the champions. I have no need for them.”
“Nor I,” Hector agrees. “Jerky was never much to my tastes, anyway. Andromache and I always preferred a good roasted fish.”
“Andromache?” Patroclus inquires.
Hector catches himself. Is it possible that this is the first time he’s brought her up? “My...my wife,” he says. “She was a good woman, but judged unfit to join the ranks of heroes. She must be roaming the Asphodel meadows…”
“I never knew you were married.”
“I was,” Hector says, looking down at his hands. “We had a son. Astyanax. He was but a babe when I perished. I often think of him, and wonder what kind of man he’s become.”
Patroclus is quiet. Bittersweet silence perfuses the air like the mist from the river.
“Were you ever married?” Hector asks at length. Did you leave anybody behind? is what he cannot say.
Patroclus breathes a sardonic chuckle. “No, I was not. Not in title, anyway. I had a rather different kind of bond in my life.”
Hector recalls the bereaved scream that ripped across the battlefield, that pierced the walls of Troy when Patroclus’s body was brought to the Achaean camp. He remembers the bloodshot, tear-streaked face that dealt his death without mercy. “You and Achilles,” he says simply.
“He was most beloved to me,” Patroclus says with a sigh. “I never wanted to leave him. But he gave me no choice. And now...now he has left me.”
“Somehow, I doubt that. That man would have split the very heavens if it could have brought you back,” Hector says. “We cannot always know what others are thinking.”
“That is true, I suppose. I could not guess his thoughts often, in the late years of the war. Not the way I used to be able to.”
“Did the war change him much?”
Patroclus looks weary, like a much older man. “Yes.”
“Tell me about him.”
It is a strange request, and Hector is not sure what made him ask it. Perhaps he is moved by the shared misery of spending eternity apart from the one they love. Perhaps he is still haunted by that predator’s gaze, constantly wondering about the man that was once behind it. Patroclus looks at him like he’s grown a second head, but then he shrugs and shares little details of his life before Troy. Achilles was an accomplished lyrist, and Patroclus regrets that his hands will be known forever as the hands of a killer when they could create such beautiful sounds. He had been a prince from a land called Phthia, and loved his father, Peleus. The longer Patroclus speaks of him, the lines of his face become shallower and more lively. His bitter tone steadily gives way to fondness, the affection he has held onto all this time shining through his words. By the time he tires of speaking, it is hard for Hector to reconcile the account with the inhuman creature he met that day on the battlefield.
Hector finally begins to grasp what he had taken from Achilles. In one horrible strike of his spear, he shattered the spirit of a man who had once been a carefree boy, a devoted son, a tender partner. He extinguished the life of one with such love in his heart, who he has learned far too late is so much like himself. Patroclus said that regrets are meaningless in the afterlife, but Hector is overcome in an instant.
He stands suddenly, and Patroclus blinks at him. “There must be a way to make this right. Achilles belongs in Elysium, at your side. The only way the three of us will ever have peace is if he is returned there.”
Patroclus’s expression shutters again. “Oh, are you just going to go and fetch him for me, then? How bold.”
“I...I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Hector says, shaking his head. “But there must be a way. There has to be. I must try.”
“By all means,” Patroclus says, waving his hand. “You are most welcome to share in my futile endeavors.”
Hector stares at him for a minute, then turns to leave, filled with a sense of purpose for the first time since he met with Achilles’s spear.