Between Lions and Men

35: in his great grief

Achilles

"You promise you'll come right back?"

"I promise, why are you so sad, prince? It's only a week. You know my father likes to make a show of parenting me," he said, dark lashes brushing his soft cheeks as he stared up at the heavens. We were on my father's rooftop. Like we were not supposed to be. And yet we were. Constantly.

"I just miss you."

"Well it's just a week, I'll miss you too. But I have father's permission to stay here, for the rest of the school year," he said, rolling a bit to look at me. "Why are you so sad?"

"When you're here it's different. When you're not I just—I forgot what it was like to be alone. I turn around and you're not there for me to say whatever is in my head. And everyone else winds up getting tired of me running everywhere, and cross with me for not being tame."

"I like you wild, prince," he said, a smile then, on his usually melancholy face. Not a sly smile either, a real one. Of happiness.

"That's why I need you here. I feel so alone when you're away. It's not the same, even with everyone around me I feel like the only person in the universe. When you're around it's us and then the universe rushes up to meet us."

"Well, then, I won't leave you, ever. I'll write you every single day, and when I'm back I'll camp in your room to make up for it," he said, grinning again.

"Swear it? You won't leave me? And find new friends, better ones, and decide not to come back?" I ask.

"I swear it. On every star in the heavens, even the ones we can't see," he said, and then he reached out his hand across to me. I lay mine in it. Cool, and gentle. I didn't know holding someone's hand could feel like that. I knew I liked him close. I knew I liked the feel of his warm skin against mine.

We had long held a daily game. He would steal some belonging from my room, and I would chase him through every single hall and then catch him and fish it out of his pocket or from his shirt. For us both, it soon became the pure joy of clumsily grappling with the other. My first trials at sliding my hands under his clothes, so carefree and quick in youth when neither of us knew what it meant or why our faces were so pleasantly flushed after such a game.

"You swear you won't leave me?" my cold hands on his, gripping his fingers there in the dark.

"I swear it." Soft glittering black eyes. I had never seen black eyes of a mortal before, my father had light eyes like mine. I thought they were prettiest thing I had ever seen. I thought that he was the prettiest thing I had ever seen.

"You liar," I whisper, in his ear, as I gently use a damp, warm cloth to wipe the blood splattered on his sweet face. "You rotten, fucking, liar."

I whisper the words in his ear, then kiss his now so cold skin, gently. Then I press my face to his as tears well down my eyes. I thought I was done with them. Clearly not. I don't know how so. There's nothing but emptiness in me now. A well that will never be filled no matter how much blood is shed. It's like I'm drifting through space with nothing to hold me down anymore. Nothing to come back to. He's not waiting for me.

I go on washing his chest. I wrapped his wounds with the bandages that we had, and I dressed him in clean clothes, and lay a sheet over him. Now I'm getting the last of the caked blood off his soft skin.

"Do you remember the day you got that?" I ask, tracing a ridged white scar just beneath his left collarbone. "We were out riding. And your horse stopped at a fence and threw you on it. It was just a nail, but the wind was knocked out of you and for a minute I was sure your neck was broken. When you came to I was crying and holding you in the grass. Then I kissed you for an hour. I hadn't kissed you in a week, we were scared." We didn't know what it meant then. It felt right but everything in the world said it was wrong. But we couldn't stop ourselves either. My mother was the first to know. "Why him?" was all she could say to me for weeks. My reply was always the same "Because I love him." She eventually was all right with that. My father? I suppose he always knew, now that I think of it.