#troyfallen

he lounges in their quarters, undisturbed by the war which rages well beyond them, laid out as though the strife of troy is not but a background thought. his annoyance with the king of men — cowardly, fiendish agamemnon — is written 'cross his features in furrowed brows and narrowed eyes, yet such vanishes once he registers the other's presence, pulled from his thoughts back to the present. he props himself up on his elbows, cracks a smile, and regards patroklos with the same boyish delight that they had as children. ❝ what do you fancy tonight, friend ?? ❞ asks achilles, ❝ i was thinking... cards to pass the time, a strum of the lyre, even a spar if you're willing. ❞ a snort and he adds, in only good nature, ❝ maybe you can land a good blow on me this time. ❞

The tempers run sour among the camp as Patroklos walks through it, checking in with the other Myrmidons before he goes back to the quarters he shares with Achilles. There is far more anger than he himself feels entirely comfortable with among the Greeks, but the Myrmidons stand strong. As always for Patroklos, they are steadfast. It's a small thing, and yet it helps soothe Patroklos' troubled mind as he travels through camp.

It's nice to see how quickly Achilles' annoyed demeanor evaporates when he spots him, and Patroklos' expression eases into a gentle smile.

he   squints.   percy   could   answer   this   one   of   two   ways   -   he   could   be   honest   and   mention   that   he   was   doing   a   bit   of   both,   which   was   surely   going   to   make   the   conversation   go   * nowhere,   or   he   could   be   either   a   dickhead   or   come   off   as   a   nice   person.   either   way,   he   really   did   put   his   foot   in   his   own   mouth   by   not   watching   his   tone.   * oops.

it   was   hard   -   sometimes   the   other   demigods   * really   couldn't   understand   much   about   how   the   mortals   lived   -   percy   would   thank   * every   star   in   the   sky   that   he   was   completely   and   regularly   kept   up   to   date   with   pop   culture   due   to   his   mom   and   paul.   he   was   being   truthful   -   the   other   hero   looked   conspicuous   * enough,   almost   to   the   point   where   he   looked   like   one   of   the   superheroes   in   his   comics   trying   * too   hard   to   fit   in.

but   …   his   tone   was   shit.   he   * knew   that.   it   wasn't   something   he   was   unaware   of,   and   it   had   literally   come   back   to   * bite   him   in   the   ass   more   times   than   he   wanted   to   admit   to.   he   just   ...   keeps   doing   it.   it's   -   well.   it's   a   little   funny.

he gives the other a once-over. his eyes trail down the other man's figure then skirt 'round the silhouette, then fix not on the eyes but on the bridge of the nose. on what new soldiers call the button ( put a godly bullet there, and they're dead before they hit the ground ). it's a good way to avoid eye-contact. close enough that the average person might even mistake it as such.

❝ nice arm, ❞ begins the disaster pretending to be a person. ❝ bet it hurts like hell to get hit by it. ❞ a pause, then a question - ❝ ever get phantom pains under that thing while you have it on ?? ❞

@troyfallen !!

         in  his  life  there  was  many  who  would  surpass  him:   those  with  storms  held  in  their  fingertips,  those  with  the  power  of  darkness,  and  those  will  the  weight  of  rage  hanging  around  their  necks.  james  was  intimately  familiar  with  that  type  of  noose,  he  wore  it  every  day. 

          head  inclined  slightly  as  the  opposite  took  him  in,  eventually  settling  for  peering  right  through  him.  in  pools  of  emerald  he  saw  curiosity  and  the  eternal  youth  of  a  man  stuck  in  time.  agonies  shared,  even  among  strangers.

    an  attempt  at  informality,  he  looked  down  to  the  sparkling  silver  of  his  arm.  illusively  beautiful  in  moonlight,  the  plates  shifted  as  he  turned  palm  upward,  examining  it  with  the  air  of  a  man  who  often  preferred  to  pretend  it  did  not  exist.  ❝   i  bet  it  does.   ❞ 

          a  low,  distant  laugh  and  he  turned  to  find  the  gaze  of  the  blonde  once  more—  the  figure  was  statuesque  in  his  defiance,  a  quality  james  could  admire.  ❝   it  hurts  constantly.   ❞  there is humanity beneath the metal. the  smile  that  cuts  across  his  lips  is  like  a  crack  slicing  through  glass,  it  does  very  little  to  impact  the  rest  of  his  weathered  features.  the  metal  arm:  an  eternal  engraving  dedicated  to  the  hands  that  had  taken  him  apart  countless  times  and  done  very  little  to  prevent  pain.  the  agony  of  their  invasion  was  a  purgatory  created  to  atone  for  the  rivers  of  blood  that  once  painted  it. 

his trust in chiron's choice of teachers is rapidly dwindling. even though it's not really the centaur's fault that tanner is so awful at this, it's not encouraging that none of them seem to be actually teaching him anything. despite being cleared by the medics, "as good as it's going to get" they said unless the god of healing himself or his son came down, the demigod is hardly in admirable shape. the constant chill plaguing him burns off whatever he wolfs down in meals and flight still seemed to be the only true exercise he could do without immediately feeling like he was going to pass out.

maybe it wasn't yet clear that swords are not the weapon for him. or maybe achilles was just his last chance and the cabins were taking advantage. prototyping proper blades to attach to his wings would likely entertain athena's lot until they could figure out the correct speed, angle of attack, whatever needed to keep him from flipping head over heels at the moment of impact.

to the smith's credit, this shortsword is pleasantly light. tanner can actually swing it and block achilles before the master's training weapon connects. he still bears several bruises where he hadn't moved in time - marks that would be disabling if not fatal in an actual fight. there's a reason why his survival tactic in the underworld was ducking and running. his latest trick at bending light to blind opponent or vanish from sight entirely is only good for retreat. inevitably there would come a time when he couldn't just flee.

logically he knows he can't really hurt achilles. any campers attempting to work with him still wore armor and used blunted blades. but tanner has never really struck another being. something in him shies away from it, pulls already meager punches. striking with purpose, to make contact, to harm...he hadn't taken the opening like he should have. frustration with himself, with achilles for making another snide comment, sparks quickly to outright fury in his chest. the bronze sword suddenly vibrates in hand, humming, flashing to an unnatural blue before promptly shattering into tiny shards.

❝ i've heard your husband speak of you on many an occasion, ❞ begins the specter, allowed to roam - if only for a little while longer, to attend to the wishes of his wayward spirit before confronting that long stay in elysium - by fair hades and thanatos. achilles, still donned in the shade of the armor which he died in, his eyes hidden 'neath his helm but his intrigue ever apparent, regards the great queen of ithaca with curiosity abundant. ❝ i must say, the king of ithaca's descriptions do you justice. you are just as fair as he's described. ❞ a pause. a beat. ❝ i'll assure you as well: odysseus is not dead, last i heard. i doubt he would perish and not persuade thanatos to grant him one last look at you, queen penelope. ❞

What she would give to see her husband now, even as just a specter, just an image for a moment. Penelope does not look much changed from when Odysseus left for the shores of Troy-- such is the nature of those half-divine, but it is a fate that Achilles now shares with her in another way entirely.

"He did the same of you, in whatever messages we got between us," she says quietly. Few and far between during the war, but enough for her to feel the absence when they stopped. She stills her hands unthreading the work she had done at her loom, turning to fully face Achilles' shade. "You are Achilles, are you not? We met once. In Sparta." When the vow was sworn by all in attendance, when she'd finally left her home to start her life with Odysseus. Centuries ago, it feels like. Lifetimes.

❝ so, ❞ begins the once-greatest of the dead greeks, ❝ what about the morgue was enough to... entice you to work here, exactly ?? i'd hardly consider working around the dead particularly entertaining. ❞

incoming letter ... @troyfallen. received!

❝ it's nothing ... fanciful. ❞ head tips up from your task, eyes narrowing as you pause in the sentence. a lapse in your train of thought as you struggle, briefly, for the correct word. a more animated gesture than you're used to, but you're also not used to others watching you work. not with scalpel at hand, not yet, but as you're filling out identifying paperwork on a fresh cadaver.

❝ death has never been scary to me. ❞ gentle scratches of the ball point pen in your hand upon paper. ❝ the macabre always interested me — not like, just skulls and blood. more the preservation of the body after dying. ❞

fingers press into the nose bridge of the eye shield upon your face, sliding it back into proper position. ❝ it's hard to explain. i think there's a comfort in knowing that you're going to be in good hands when you die. ❞

oh. what was that meme he'd heard from the hermes cabin? and that was the moment he knew he fucked up.

most people were naturally curious. the adhd just doubled that and took away a filter that might have prevented this whole situation. not that tanner wanting to know more about achilles' life was a bad thing - was it? - and the whole story was remarkably convoluted. he struggled to follow it and couldn't comprehend half the decisions made. if anyone deserved a plague it would be agamemnon not the entire army. why the gods interfered at all ( and why they hadn't really done so since ) is something achilles likely can't answer at all.

the entire thing seems to boil down to honor. a foreign concept to a child that has never had any so it hardly seems worth being so stubborn it got people killed. especially someone the man must have cared for and still did if the way achilles talked about patroclus was anything to go by. equally unfamiliar to tanner. though now he wonders why the gods hadn't raised the other too. maybe things like love didn't matter to them like it did to mortals. that would certainly explain a lot.

when the tale reaches its climax, tanner had interrupted. yes he knows nothing of warfare nor the culture so many many years ago but dragging a corpse around could have hardly been necessary. right? he sputters, feathers fluffing up in a surge of anxiety driven by the very real probability that achilles hero of greece was going to hit him. or kill him. both? feet pinwheel in a cartoonish way, blessedly catching on air to put some vertical distance between them even if he was still very much within range of a thrown spear.