When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.

"There is no one like you," I said, at last.
He regarded me a moment, in silence. "So?"
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.

"I hoped that you would come," he said. My stomach rolled, awash with nerves and relief at once. I drank him in, the bright hair, the soft curve of his lips upwards. My joy was so sharp I did not dare to breathe.

My body felt hollow in its relief, as if a storm had gone through.

His eyes were unwavering, green flecked with gold. A surety rose in me, lodged in my throat. I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

If he had looked at me then, I would have broken. I would have begun to weep and never stopped.

His eyes, green as spring leaves, met mine. "Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this."

He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.

I learned to sleep through the day so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

Give us both peace. Burn me and bury me. I will wait for you among the shades.

"It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after."

Her mouth tightens. "Have you no more memories?"
I am made of memories.
"Speak, then."

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. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms.

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.