@achillespelides
Six years. He had been dead for six years. Achilles hadn’t lived long after him, long enough for his funeral, enough to kill Hector and countless others, but he was long gone from this world that Patroclus still called home. A home he couldn’t touch, one that he would never communicate within, one that would never perceive him, but home nonetheless. There was nowhere else.
As time passed, he felt himself growing less and less human, as though he were little more than a thought, a whisp of existence. Did he really exist? All he had was to watch, to think, to remember. He did all of these things. He thought of everything, parsing through his memories like they were precious candy drops, he’d let himself have a few, as a treat. He’d think of Achilles on those summer nights, sprawled out in the cave, of Achilles’ smile and how the sun caught the green of his eyes. He would even think of his rage, of his pride, and miss that too. What he wouldn’t give to hear his voice, to hear his name on his lips, no, he’d take any name. He’d take just a glimpse of him and feast on that for years.
He felt so unhuman, so unlike a being that actually existed, that when Thetis came he had forgotten to hope. He only thought of Achilles, of the stories etched into his tomb (it was not yet theirs), and of how wrong he was remembered. He seized on his chance to right the tale, to share how Achilles’ hair bounced as he ran, how Achilles smelled in the morning, how he would light up by the water on Pelion or how he would press his nose into his cheek through fits of giggles. There was so much about Achilles, so much that was far more important than the ruin he had sewn in his grief.
And then, his name. He saw it in the stone and for a moment, he didn’t understand. He waits for you. In an instant, all that he had forgotten, how to feel, to hope, to exist, rushed back to him and he was there. Achilles was there, he knew him instantly, he knew before he even registered where he was, before his thoughts caught up with what had just occurred. He was no longer on earth, he was with Achilles though, and that’s all that mattered, that’s all he could register. He reached his arms around him and held him more tightly than he ever had in life, saying nothing, unsure if this was real.














