Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Nine, soon to be ten, years of war, and today had been one of the worst days of this whole, long, unpleasant affair. Not the worst, certainly, for there were others far more worthy of that title. But with the way Paris' throat still ached where his now-lost helmet strap had dug into it earlier today, the way Hektor had been so implacable and insulted him...

He might have the right, but that didn't make it hurt any less.

Rubbing his throat absently as he closed the door behind him, Paris asked for a bath to be drawn and to arrange for an evening meal. He didn't feel like going to the hall right now, even if it was possible Hektor had taken their father's command that everyone eat in their houses as literally as possible. Hektor was, after all, not the only one who might either pointedly ignore him, as if he was no more than air, or just as pointedly confront him, such as when a loyal guard dog corners a figure skulking around the house's courtyard in the middle of the night, refusing the intruder to gracefully retreat after his scheme has been exposed; just so would he surely be cornered tonight if he ventured into the hall.

He'd rather avoid such pointless confrontations; they'd just spoil his appetite. Admittedly, eating in the privacy of his and Helen's home didn't mean there would be no confrontations at all. But when he sat down at the table, Helen already waiting, the brief glance she shot him and the gentle slope of her shoulders told him she, too, was content to eat alone with him. So that, at least, they wouldn't argue about.

They didn't argue about anything at all, at first. Helen didn't really acknowledge him past her initial glance as he sat down, but one of her feet was just barely beyond the toes of his. By the stiff weight of her fingers, however, Paris knew to let that be the closest point of contact for now. Instead he satisfied the hunger that had nothing to do with his stomach by glancing up now and again to take in the sweeping line of Helen's pale throat, a necklace of gold and carmine beads shaped as acorns accentuating the column's length, as well as the fine thrust of her nose, the thick, long lashes lowered over her storm-cloud coloured eyes.

In the light of the lamps around them, Helen was soft, glowing gently, as well as sharply outlined, like a mountain backlit during sunset.

"I would've thought you'd seen more than enough of me today not to stare as much as you are," Helen commented after a bite of bread, without looking up as she scooped up a spoonful of rich stew.

"I could spend every moment of every day of my life with you, and there would always be something new to observe, as well as something I have forgotten what it looked like since I last laid my eyes on you, though it be only a heartbeat since I did so."

"You keep saying that."

"And it's true," Paris replied mildly, smiling when Helen now straightened up to pin him with a stare.

After a beat, Helen sniffed, but she didn't refute him. She knew very well he meant it, and how he meant it. It was meant in ways barely any mortal alive could know, and no one at all, alive or dead, could refute. Helen might not have the crushing, all-encompassing presence of the Deathless Ones, but her beauty was as captivating in the same way as those of the goddesses he'd stood in front of. Even now – no, perhaps especially now, so long past the event – that was true.

"Be that as it may. There's little need to watch so avidly when you clearly aren't losing me, though by rights you should have. You lost against Menelaos, didn't you? What do the Trojans, breakers of horses, and their many allies, say about this?"

Helen wouldn't admit to it, but there was a certain, restless edge to the way she dropped her spoon from her grip, polished ivory clattering against silver. Her gaze was hooded as she stared at him, and Paris pressed his lips together, thinning his smile just a shade. He couldn't quite tell what answer she wanted, and even less what she'd think of the answer he would give.

"My terms for the duel was for someone to lose; Menelaos specified it should be by death." Dropping his gaze from Helen's to the stew in its silver bowl, etched with running ivy and heavy clusters of grapes, Paris rubbed his thumb over one of the gilded clusters. "I don't know if you saw, or someone told you, but the day's fighting ended after Helenos told Hektor that the gods wouldn't let him die today, so he could challenge the greatest of the Achaeans currently on the field to a duel and would be guaranteed not to lose; Telamonian Ajax answered his challenge. He still---"

Paris exhaled hotly. It didn't matter. Hektor was fine, though his throat had been crimson and the blood had stained him down over the bronze lamelles of his shirt all down the chest.

"He was injured, but our Helenos hadn't been wrong, so he walked off the duel as dark fell – unfortunately, so did Teucer's brother. Afterwards, Father called for an assembly among the leaders. Antenor argued we should hand you back, though not because I supposedly lost my duel, but rather because apparently the Trojans broke the terms of the oath Father swore together with Agamemnon?" Rolling his eyes, Paris frowned, looking up to meet Helen's gaze again, finding one of her thick, dark eyebrows arched. "I have no idea what happened there, my desire. Anyway, I refused."

Helen's stormy gray eyes darkened as she narrowed her eyes, lashes trembling briefly as they lowered over the shining curve of her irises. "So despite that the oath was broken, even if not by you, and you lost the duel, you'd refuse to willingly honour an oath you're bound by?"

"I didn't die," Paris pointed out, stirring the stew. The bruises on his throat throbbed like the last, dying embers of a fire. "In fact, neither of us spilled so much as a drop of each other's blood. By Menelaos' own stipulations, I didn't lose, and Lady Aphrodite herself took me off the field – why should I concede? I'm not responsible for what someone else does, and I'm not going to insult my goddess, nor my desire and love for you, by giving up what I've been given without being made to do so. Father didn't gainsay my refusal at the gathering earlier, and as I said, the only one to raise his voice in protest was Antenor."

Helen stared at him silently for a long moment. Just as she drew breath, undoubtedly to castigate him for the failures she saw and his stubbornness in honouring things she thought less important, though even she would surely agree not insulting Aphrodite wasn't not important, Paris spoke up again.

"Tell me truly, Helen, hiding nothing in your heart; if I should have let Menelaos' victory rule, though he won by my stipulations and not the ones he added, would the war have been decided? Would they, my desire, you who know these matters better than I, and see them more clearly, sharing spirit and sensibilities with the likes of dear, honoured Hektor and other men besides, have left with you alone?"

Helen ground her teeth, the subtle shifting of her jaw pulling on her soft lips in captivating ways. After another moment, she glanced aside, frowning.

"... No."

"Why, then, should I willingly give up what joy I, and we, have, no matter how strained, if the only way to avoid ruin is for us to persevere over the army outside our walls?" Paris asked, spreading both hands wide.

"You shouldn't." A corner of Helen's eye twitched as she startled, though whether it was for what she said or the vehemence with which it was said, Paris wasn't sure. Helen probably wasn't either. But of course she didn't stop there, rallying as she pinned him with a sharp stare. "But Alexander, my Paris; you should fight for it---"

"And haven't I? Don't I?" Paris arched his brows as he spoke, sweeping one hand in to touch his chest. His tone was too soft to be a challenge, but he couldn't quite help the trace of something firm in it. In this, at least here in front of Helen, he would have to insist. "Sometimes – quite often, I think – even in the way you mean and Hektor and the rest want me to. But even when I'm not, it's still fighting, I should think. Isn't it?"

Closing her eyes, Helen sighed and was silent for a long moment.

"Yes." She said it slowly and reluctantly, lips pressed thin on the end of that single word as if to belatedly strangle it. "You should still be more willing to fight in the way I mean, the way I---"

Want, or need, you to, was perhaps what Helen meant to say, but as she opened her eyes and her gaze caught in his, she didn't voice it aloud. Didn't, for once, thrust it out before her at him like any other warrior thrust violence before him with his sword. Maybe she did want and need him to do so, but a part of her, the beautiful, self-consciously ugly part of Helen, daughter of Zeus, that was greedy, wanted him to fight for her far more in the manner he usually did. Refusing to give her up without being made to, bending to her in all ways but in this one thing.

So Paris smiled and cocked his head. "It's not what or who I am, Helen."

"No. It isn't," she agreed, and the edge in her voice, so often there, was soft.

"And since it isn't," Paris said, reaching a hand across the table with a soft jingling of gold meeting gold, his palm facing up, "will you let me get you ready for bed, later? It's been a long, partially unpleasant day, and even with there being no battle tomorrow, the next few days seem to me they promise to be equally unpleasant."

Was he hoping to once more join with his wife in bed? Of course. But he also merely wanted the pleasure of sliding Helen’s jewellery off her neck and wrists, of undoing the tie of her hair and run a comb through the thick, dark tresses, soft as they were. After a moment, Helen sighed and slipped her hand into his, wrapping around it.

"All right."

The next day, Paris found out Chromios and Echemmon had fallen, as well as one of his half-brothers. Staring down at the funeral pyre from the top of the Dardanian gate as it was arranged, with the wailing cries of his mother and sisters in his ears, along with that of Demokoon's mother, he scrubbed his face. It'd been a while since any of his full brothers had died, and though Chromios and Echemmon were at least only a handful of years younger than he, compared to little Troilos, Paris was still a little nauseous.

Out near the pyre, Hektor stood talking with Deiphobos, Polydamas and Helikaon. Nibbling on a knuckle, Paris wondered if he should go down there. Not to approach Hektor immediately, but when the others had left... But no. Probably best he didn't; Hektor had been downright pleasant as they left Troy yesterday, his wish for their relationship to return to what it had once been sitting warmly in Paris' chest, and perhaps it was better to leave it with that for now.

His brother was under so much pressure, and Paris didn't really wish to invite Hektor's ire back on him, whether he deserved it in the moment or not. Throwing a last glance at his brothers and then the funeral pyre, he turned to go back up to the palace.

Paris went out with the army in the morning the next day. Not so much for any lingering sense of unease, and certainly not because either his brother's or his wife's frustration the other day had awakened any sense of shame for his lacking martial spirit. If that was so, he'd have long since gained it at their urgings. But he also certainly didn't enjoy aggravating them so, so he went, staying mostly on a chariot together with Lykaon through the fighting that day. It wasn't bad. It was also not at all pleasant, and he let Lykaon deal with stripping any of the corpses of his kills; Lykaon could have the armour and weapons from all of them, if he wanted.

He was glad when the sun burned too low in the sky for either side to keep pushing. Eyeing the walls of Troy in the distance, bleeding gold down its smooth marble cladding and half-blinding the eyes even this late in the day, Paris smiled as he half-listened to Hektor call for a meal for the army right out here on the field.

Among the dead?

Nose curling, Paris frowned. He'd rather been looking forward to getting back to Troy. He’d been looking forward, in fact, to having a nice, warm bath, and then sit in the hall, on a proper chair, to eat.

He supposed he could stay for the meal, at least.

"Hektor!"

A runner came barrelling through the last few rows of gathered men, a smile on his face as he threw an arm back towards the way he'd come. "My prince! Thracians led by Rhesus are arriving!"

"Ah, finally," Hektor grunted, rubbing his jaw. "It's the next to last day of his projected arrival. Well, lead them over here and make sure there's food enough for our newly arrived allies, too."

Paris went to find Lykaon, still not quite able to believe he was actually and finally back home and delighting in that longed-for but before seemingly impossible reality. He ran into Harpalion first, however, and Paris found himself smiling as the Prince of Pala lit up warmly at the sight of him, his dark eyes catching sparks from one of the nearby fires someone had already lit.

"Alexander," Harpalion greeted, his hand warm and steady as it closed around Paris', now long since familiar since their first meeting. "Would you like to eat with us?"

That hand went from his up to his elbow, Harpalion's thumb lying warmly in the crook of his elbow. Paris found his annoyance at Hektor's decision melting, just as oil softens and warms when placed near the fire, turning pale and transparent from the heat. His stance, too, melted, as he leaned into the hand on his arm, and Harpalion's smile deepened into a grin as he obligingly slid his hand further up, to curve around Paris' shoulders.

"I think I would, yes," Paris said cheerily, stretching himself up to brush a kiss to Harpalion's slightly scratchy jaw.

The next few hours were very pleasant indeed, and certainly didn't just involve a meal around a friendly fire, Harpalion seated next to him. Perhaps Harpalion wasn't as good with his flesh and blood cock as Helen had become with her ivory one, but it was definitely worth it. Paris still would prefer a proper bed for the rest of the night, however, and with how Hektor had demanded guards to keep watch the whole night in the city, he should have no trouble getting back in. With that thought, he kissed Harpalion's sleep-soft lips and got up, winding through the rather haphazard encampments back towards Troy.

There were fires near the bottom of Ilos' tomb, winking like the stars above – had there been a gathering there? This late? Didn't anyone know how to attend sweet sleep around here?

"Alexander."

"Fuck!" Whipping around, heart in his throat and hand to his chest, Paris blinked up at Hektor. "Hektor. What are you doing, stealing through the night like this and scaring anyone walking peacefully by?"

Paris flashed his brother a grin, though in the darkness it was difficult to tell if Hektor was in a mood to be teased, or if he'd soured his oldest brother's heart when it was already so late in the night. His brother snorted short and sharp. Under the gleam of moonlight, the narrowing flash of his eyes was clear as day.

"You ask this, when you were nowhere to be found among the commanders when I called for a gathering, this night presenting us with an opportunity after pressing the Achaeans hard. Where have you been? Did you steal back to Troy and your far too soft and perfumed bed?" Hektor's tone sharpened through his speech, and the way he looked him up and down when he said bed made it clear he wasn't talking of the bed as a bed, to sleep in.

"Hektor," Paris said patiently, though not without a little toss of his head, "you have caught me come walking from the east, towards Troy, not from it. How can I have been to the city before this, then? Besides, why would you ask me of my whereabouts for such a meeting, when you have never before desired my input for martial matters – and rightly, as we both know it."

He smiled, then, soft and warm, for it was indeed the truth and he didn't mind it being so. They all had their strengths. Forget his martial ability on the battlefield, or his lack or not thereof; why would Hektor ever ask him about advice in such a manner?

"You have other voices, far better suited, to give you such advice," he continued, eyeing his brother. Hektor was a tall, stiff figure in the dark, arms now crossed over his chest but at least inclining his head in agreement. "I've merely been enjoying the prince of Pala's hospitality this evening, and his father lent you his ear in answer to your call, didn't he? This being what I've been doing, I was, yes, intending now to go back to Troy. You surely don't need all of us to sleep out here, and I'll come meet you at dawn."

The moment he admitted to wanting to go back to Troy, Hektor's expression shuttered, and it took everything in Paris to keep talking with the breezy tone he'd taken and not rush through it. Hektor snorted harshly again, shaking his head.

"Absolutely not. While you're right that I didn't need you to be at the gathering, this?" Hektor shook his head, spreading his hands to gesture between Paris himself and the mostly silent camp around them. "Paris, lazy and soft – what sort of impression will it give, both to our far-flung allies and the men at large, if one of Troy's princes go back to the city now? Even you, no especially you, should have little trouble to sleep on the ground and show those less used to it how easy it is."

Even with the insult, his brother's voice softened past its initial edge. Hektor meant that last as praise, remarkably enough.

Paris stared. Could, for a moment, do nothing but that.

Hektor meant to praise him for having had to sleep in a peasant's rough bed in his childhood home – no, he meant to praise him for sleeping in a slave herdsman's bed after his parents had more need of him to help with his father's allotment from the royal herds than tending their own small number of livestock. Hektor meant to praise what had been only necessity, and unwilling such. The hut his father had helped him build for use as shelter when the weather was bad, or nothing more but the ground itself, a blanket if it was chilly. What was there to praise in that? Enduring discomfort because he had no choice?

Why should he have to suffer an uncomfortable bed now that he had the option of a good mattress, pillows, and fine linen? There was no virtue in suffering! Especially that which came with no choice. And yes, to be sure, he could now choose to willingly be uncomfortable, but Paris saw little sense in it and had even less want of it.

"Are our allies and men children, to need parents to show them the way?" Paris shook his head, his voice light – almost teasing – while he kept himself from crossing his arms over his chest and instead smoothed out his tunic. "Honoured brother, not a man here cares about any example I might set. In fact, if you let me go to Troy to spend the night as I wish, you might even quell any grumbling from the masses; they will certainly not wish to do as I do!"

"Alexander. This is no time for levity," Hektor snapped, his expression darkening until it matched the darkness around them, moonlit though it be. "You and I both know what you're capable of. Show it, for once in your life, for longer than---"

The thunder of hooves splintered the night, and in the distance near the edge of the camp and quickly receding into the dark, there was the flash of something white.

"Murder! Ambush! Where are the guards!?"

Hektor cursed and ran off towards the Thracian encampment – whoever had been shouting had been doing so in Thracian. Paris watched his brother sprint off as the camp came alive around them while the surviving Thracians kept shouting and cursing. Groaning, heart and stomach both heavy, Paris scrubbed his face and reluctantly walked over to where he knew Hektor had made his camp and where, then, most of the rest of his brothers would be and where there'd be a bed for him, too.

He supposed he could stay out here tonight, if there was much sleep to be had at all after this, that was. But Hektor couldn't convince him to repeat it.

The next day, Paris rather wished he had gone back to bed – his real, actual bed. Staring at Hektor's back as his brother stalked off as he called for the men Paris had ended up alone to lead with Deiphobos and Helenos gone – and where Aineias had disappeared he didn't know – Paris shook himself off and followed. The litany of insults rang through his head, all of them familiar enough, but they had otherwise always come when he was right then failing in some way.

It shouldn't matter that Hektor had cursed him out with no real reason. It didn't matter, for the battle was still raging, and he needed to follow Hektor and the rest, but his heart and feet were both heavy. Not even the way Menelaos had stared at him over Peisander's corpse and across a distance short enough Menelaos could have closed if it he wanted and yet he'd turned away, letting the opportunity go, could do much to cheer Paris up.

It didn't get better from there.

"Hektor!"

He hadn't seen Ajax throw the stone. He'd only seen Kebriones lashing the horses to tear off away from the front lines in company with a few others while Glaukus and Sarpedon shouted to hold the line. He'd followed. Even angry and still heart-sick over the unnecessary tongue lashing, how could he not follow? Yet now, sick to his stomach as he clattered to a kneel next to his brother where the others had gently laid him down along a less muddy part of the Skamander's shore, Paris regretted following.

"Hektor, you---"

Throat closing up, Paris reached out a shaking hand and brushed his fingers along the rim of Hektor's helmet. The bronze was sun-warmed and blazing hot in comparison to Hektor's clammy forehead. There was an unnatural inwards bend of his chest armour around the right collarbone; some of the scales had been ripped away from the leather underneath. Others were merely bent, but nothing could disguise that the whole area was curved like the bottom of a bowl, and Paris was going to throw up.

His brother was pale as death itself, almost greenish in the light, and blood seeped up from around the collar of the scale shirt. A shadow fell over them and Paris twitched, looking up as Kebriones knelt down on Hektor's other side. Flashing him a thin, grim smile, Kebriones gently splashed their brother's face with water – despite having been insensate moments before and deaf to any calls, Hektor lurched awake now.

"Hektor---!"

"Prince Hektor!"

A chorus of voices filled the air, but brilliant Hektor was glassy eyed and unresponsive as he twisted up on his knees, then fell forward, only catching himself at the last moment with his hands. He heaved, and there was a muted, terrifying grinding noise somewhere under his chest armour while he vomited, and it was red, red, red; heart-blood black as night.

Kebriones and Paris almost didn't catch him in time to keep Hektor from face planting and grinding his weight on top of his shattered chest when he collapsed. Pale and shaking both of them, Paris caught Kebriones' wide-eyed stare as they carefully turned Hektor over, to lie on his back again. After a moment, they rolled their brother onto his side instead, hoping that might ease the weight on his heart and injury both.

"What do we do?" Paris asked, trembling hands hovering over his brother's head and shoulders, not daring to touch.

"Thersilochos has gone back to Troy to find a healer," Kebriones replied, but his voice and expression both spoke of his doubt. Their gazes met, and Kebriones' smile was more of a grimace. "May Lord Apollo of the Silver Bow keep his hand over him until then."

A god's care was surely needed, with an injury like this. Apollo would surely look out for Hektor, but that certainty sat pale and wavering in Paris' heart, like the weak winter sun fails to warm even in the middle of the day when it has finally crawled up over the horizon. Time crept terribly slowly as they waited for Tersilochos to come back with the healer. Paris didn't need to look up to hear it when the Trojan lines broke and they were driven back out past the Achaeans' wall.

As if the people's distress, more than that of his brothers’, had reached down into the deathly depths of Hektor's unconsciousness Hektor lurched into another gasping cough suddenly. He spat out another mouthful of too-dark blood, then stared at Paris' hands where he'd helped keep Hektor half-reclining, as if not quite seeing them.

"Hektor?" Kebriones called quietly, but while Hektor's glassy hazel eyes slowly tracked sideways, not quite to look over at Kebriones behind him, when his gaze focused a shade more it was on Paris' face.

"Hektor," Paris said softly, coaxing and helplessly worried – and rather displeased to even have to be worried right then, angry as he still was, and then immediately guilty for the same – because Hektor couldn't keep himself up. "How are you feeling?"

His brother's mouth moved soundlessly at first. Then he tried to reach out with the hand he wasn't currently half lying on, and caught himself with a low, chest-deep groan, such as a bull makes in the last of his struggles to protect his herd against a flock of wolves, all nipping and tearing at him. He'd tried to move the arm on the side part of his chest seemed to be caved in.

"You," Hektor muttered, voice rough and wet with the blood still slowly rising from within, staining his teeth, his mouth. "Go--- go back, A-alex--- Alekos."

"I'm not going back until we've got a healer to look after you and see if it's safe to mov---"

"Paris, lazy, pretty Paris---"

"All right." Snapping to his feet fast enough Hektor would've pitched onto the ground if he wasn't caught – to a muted, pained groan Paris refused to acknowledge though his heart trembled. Smiling tightly down at Kebriones, Paris turned away. "I'm going back, it seems. Please look after our honoured brother, Kebriones."

Eyes burning with wet heat, Paris stalked back towards the slowly disintegrating Trojan lines around the ditch, and was thus not present to see when Apollo himself came to – thankfully – once more take Hektor's care in his divine hands. That was the one relief, even when his heart still stung; that Hektor lived to stalk over this battlefield once more. Would live to go home to his wife and child and to their parents, come evening.

Except Hektor did not.

With the deafening agreement of the whole army ringing in his ears, Paris whipped around from the core group of commanders, Trojans and allies both, gathered around his brother and stalked off. A second night on the ground, after Achilles had sounded like that. When several men had died to the bellowing roars from the son of Peleus, a sound that must’ve been empowered by the will of one of the Deathless Ones? He refused.

"Alexander!" Lykaon's voice cut through the din, and Paris slowed his steps.

Well, maybe he could eat dinner out here with Lykaon, even if the idea of remaining on the battlefield right now turned his stomach to vinegar. Turning around, Paris was unfortunately faced with Deiphobos instead of Lykaon, who was instead standing somewhere a short distance beyond his most odious brother.

"Paris," his brother sneered, looking him up and down. "Where were you going? Back to Troy, despite our successes behind the wall and by the ships of the Achaeans today?"

"Yes," Paris snapped, smiling sweetly at Deiphobos, "I am, for it's been a long day and I want a real bed."

He gave Lykaon a farewell wave over Deiphobos' shoulder and whipped back around, ignoring Deiphobos throwing jeers after him as he shoved himself in the direction of Troy. He'd talk to Lykaon later.

Entering the city with others, though these men had been sent to fetch supplies for the evening meal, Paris worked his way up to the palace and his and Helen's house.

"Alexander?" Helen looked up from the basket she stood bent over with Korinsia, sorting through several skeins of similarly but not exactly the same purple wool. "Has the army returned for the evening?"

She hadn't heard anyone return, she meant, and her gaze narrowed, but it wasn't the same sort of needle-sharp disappointment and anger as she'd carried about her yesterday. It was more thoughtful; a question, asking several things. Paris sighed, putting his helmet on the floor by the door as the rack for the armour was in another room. He hadn't wanted to wait to see his wife, the lamp-light golden on her pale skin and in her dark hair. It made her look warm.

"No," Paris said, and gratefully smiled at Astyanassa as she came over to help him out of the armour. "Because my honoured brother, in his great wisdom, thinks he will gain something by once more camping outside even after swift-footed Achilles' companion fell today. Helen, he stood by the ditch and in truth, a god must've shouted with him as he shrieked, exactly like a mourning mother bird might as she sits on the branch by her empty nest, the broken shells scattered on the ground below as some ravager has raided her precious burden and widowed her of her children – and each time he shouted he caused such confusion I saw at least a handful men kill themselves with their own weapons."

Shuddering, Paris scrubbed his face, then instantly dropped his hands with a grimace. He was dusty and sticky, and he preferred not to think about what caused said dry tackiness. He almost jumped out of his skin when Helen laid a hand to his cheek, having missed her step close as Astyanassa and Korinsia took his armour back to the rack.

"I see," she said, stroking his cheek while her expression was as distant as a mountaintop veiled in clouds. "And why have you come, abandoning your brothers and the people?"

"Helen," Paris protested, stomach twisting around itself. "You can't mean you agree with the idea of staying out on the field instead of withdrawing and, in the morning, fighting either from the walls or with their protection close by? It's madness!"

She stared at him and after a beat she sighed, glancing away. As if it cost her much, and each word pained her, she said; "Such would be the better course of action, I can't deny it. But to meet the grieving son of Peleus boldly would be a feat of great valour."

"Sparta or Troy, either would surely count itself rich and fortunate if you'd been born a man to take spear and sword to their defense," Paris said, laughing until something hurt in his chest and Helen silenced him with a kiss. Drawing breath when she drew back, Paris slumped into her cradling hands. "That wasn't why I came back. I want a bath, and I want to sleep in a real bed – I suppose I will be going back before dawn has risen, so if Hektor sees me, he'll have nothing to complain about."

"You're as tender-skinned as a virgin who's never stepped out of her father's house," Helen replied, but there was a lilt to her voice and the tap to his lips was playful. The light in her gray eyes was surprisingly fond as she looked him over. "Well, a warrior deserves a good meal, bath, and a good night's sleep, having worked long and hard."

Relaxing, Paris smiled up at Helen and pulled her down into another kiss while the bath he'd been fantasizing about almost the whole day was prepared.

Chapter Text

He wished he could claim to have earnestly overslept, but having declared he would be up before dawn, his body followed that command. It was still dark when Paris woke, and he left the soft, sweet-smelling bed and his warm wife only very reluctantly. Angry as she so often was these days, sleep always turned Helen into something voraciously possessive, and now was no exception; Helen's arm was a vice around his waist and there was a threatening tightening around his curls from the hand that had wormed itself under his neck.

Helen scrunched her nose as he wiggled free, a gleam of her eyes under fluttering lashes. And unfortunately, as she caught sight of him, she let go with a little nod.

That, more than anything, was the reason he went at all. Paris didn't have the heart to endure the swift return of Helen's edge after the last two days, and so would rather do what would please her as much as the same would please Hektor, without being herded into it while chased by more insults.

The camp sprawled out vast in front of him after he passed the river and he slowed to a walk to navigate the scattered encampments. It didn't take long to find the knot of his brothers, half and full both, and even in the dark it was easy to pick Hektor out. Because of where he slept, surrounded by the rest, but also for the unfamiliar shadow of Achilles' armour piled beside the bedroll.

Eyeing the shadowy lump, Paris pressed his lips thin and made to stride past. Yet, he somehow veered sideways anyway, steps slowing with his detour and as he dragged himself to stand reluctantly by Hektor's side.

His brother was peaceful and almost soft in sleep, head pillowed on his arms. He looked gentle, and something sour bubbled up through Paris' throat at the thought. No gentleness had been afforded him yesterday, though he'd done nothing anyone else had or hadn't been doing that day. Hektor must've been truly exhausted even now, for while he usually slept lightly and woke easily, his brother remained quiescent as Paris stood there. Slowly, he kneeled down, reaching out with no thought to what he wanted. If he accidentally woke his brother now Hektor would probably curse him out, knowing what he'd done and finding no pleasure in Paris willingly coming back this early.

Curling his fingers in against his palm where it hovered over his brother, Paris grimaced. In the darkness, it was hard to see anything but stark contrasts; Hektor's skin pale against his dark hair, the thrust of his brother's nose against the dark fabric (purple, in the light) of his tunic. The solid weight of his muscled arm, clutching the blanket he was covered with as if it was a shield and might protect him the same way. Or perhaps his body was missing the presence of Andromache, clutching the blanket to himself as a replacement for his wife.

Neither Hektor nor Andromache should have to be sleeping alone tonight, yet here they were, Hektor inflicting this on both himself and his wife, as well as the rest of them, for little reason. A creeping urge to wake Hektor up filled Paris up like a cup being poured full, but even if it wasn't too late to move the army before dawn, he was also tired of sharp words.

Still, in this soft, private darkness, there were words on the tip of his tongue, long swallowed. Watching Hektor's relaxed profile, beloved still, guilt, frustration and certainty all wound together into a good, sturdy rope, twined about him.

(About his neck.)

"Should I have wanted your future throne, Hektor?" Paris whispered, fingers twitching with the desire to touch, but that would wake his brother up. He tucked his fingers back in against his palm and even more tightly this time to avoid risking a stray brush. "Should I have wanted our father's kingdom? Where would that have left you? Left all of our brothers, never mind those older than I aside from yourself?"

His older brother frowned vaguely, mouth pulling down at the corners. Paris suppressed hysterical laughter that hurt just merely by the way its thwarted vibrations clawed at his chest. He rubbed at an eye with the heel of his hand.

"Oh, I'm sorry for clearly annoying you even while you're asleep, the mere sound of my voice aggravating you, but you must understand – I could have. Queen Hera of the Golden Throne offered me---" Sighing, Paris bit his lip, then his tongue when that wasn't enough. Swallowed down a throatful of knives. "And you would have chosen Lady Athena. But you can't delude me into thinking that wouldn't have brought war to Troy. Not with what she was offering. What both of them were offering."

Smothering an unexpected sniffle behind his hand, Paris stood up. He'd been tempted, if he was supposed to be honest. Honest like he hadn't been while telling first Hektor and his parents of the Judgement when he came back to Troy with Helen, then told of it to everyone who'd been in the sacred district’s square during Menelaos and Odysseus' embassy. He'd only ever mentioned Aphrodite's gift. It'd served him better, served Aphrodite and him and Helen much better, to only reveal what Aphrodite had offered him.

It wasn't like the other two gifts mattered any longer afterwards, lost like any divine goodwill those two goddesses might ever have harboured for Troy.

But briefly, very briefly, he'd almost wanted to give the apple to Hera, hearing what she was offering for it. It'd been easy to imagine himself on such a throne as she was promising, the glow of it heady in his mind.

But even before hearing Aphrodite out, that desire had already died. He didn't care about any of that. He was perfectly pleased with his life as it was, and didn't need a throne. Aphrodite was his goddess before he gave her the apple, and her offering someone like Helen, offering something that promised a connection like that – surely she'd chosen the offer with care.

He would have chosen Aphrodite even without the gift, for the apple was hers by right, but the gift had been sweet indeed, and much more charming than any of the others.

Still.

It was only later he'd realized what he could have taken. From his father, from Hektor, from whatever favourite – Troilos, Mestor? – who might have been made crown prince if Hektor was somehow not available. Troy was Hektor's life, aside from his Andromache and the rest of his family. How could Paris wish for Hektor to have any less than that? Hektor was, would be, a good ruler, even if he was a bit too bull-headed sometimes.

"Would you have hated me more, or less, blamed me more, or less, if I'd taken your throne, Hektor? Would you have forced us to stay out here tonight, if I had? Not that you'd have been alive for it, I don't think."

His heart quivered at thought, and Hektor remained asleep. Paris squatted there for several minutes, studying his sleeping brother, to make sure of that. Even the darkness wouldn't be able to hide Hektor's tells if he had woken up at some point during this stupid, meaningless not-conversation. Paris could read him far too well for that, but also – Hektor just wasn't that great at pretence. Even if he'd wanted to try to appear asleep, Paris would have known if he wasn't. Staring hard at the sloping curve of cheek that was pale as lime-washed walls in the dark, at the shadow of eyelashes, laying so sweetly near the top of Hektor's cheeks, Paris ignored how his stomach twisted.

Wetting his lips, he stood up, turned around and stalked over to a nearby little hillock. It was better Hektor hadn't heard any of that, for it would change absolutely nothing. Perhaps at best he would've gotten another wish for his death to have happened in the past, to have freed them all of his, if not cursed, then becursing, existence.

And then Hektor could sneer at him when he finally broke and started crying instead of waving the whole thing off, smoothing it over or laughing about it. Then Hektor would tell him he'd never really wan---

"Shit."

Paris had to stop, hands pressed to his face, so he didn't stumble around and trip over someone – Deiphobos, if he was truly unfortunate – as the tears spilled over.

He wouldn't have minded it if was Lykaon, but he was sleeping on the other side of Hektor, so there was no chance, or risk, of him stumbling over Lykaon right now. Sucking in a couple breaths, Paris pinched the base of his nose and scrubbed his face. Maybe he should just have stayed in bed. In his actual, comfortable bed, and only left it come dawn. Helen's displeasure and a couple displeased words from Hektor and looks from whoever else noticed might have been better worth it than this.

Shaking his head, Paris carefully laid his weapons down before he sat down himself, wrapped in the blanket he'd brought. Given the look of the sky, he'd get to doze for perhaps another hour or so.

He didn't think it'd matter for his mood for the day to come. And that was soon proven true enough as Achilles stormed the battlefield like Ares himself.

Where, by the curses of the Sun Goddess of the Earth, had Hektor gone?

Paris had lost him somewhere between Hektor rushing at Achilles and Polites putting a gutted Polydoros on his chariot to drive the child's corpse back to Troy. Polydoros. What the fuck had Polydoros been doing out on the battlefield? Hands shaking, yet the grip he had on his bow so tight his fingers were cramping, Paris splashed across the Skamander's ford, jostled by others around him.

"Lykaon, did you see--- Lykaon?"

Staggering to a stop against the heaving stream of men rushing past him towards the city, Paris whipped around. Had Lykaon fallen behind?

He'd stayed next to Lykaon the whole day today, though there'd been little chance for more than a word or two exchanged, and Lykaon had still been right next to him merely steps away from the shore when they reached the ford. Now, he was no longer there, and Paris had trouble merely staying on his feet against the crush of bodies as he looked around without moving, forget trying to fight his way back towards and across the ford again.

His stomach sank at the idea, nausea churning like rotten seaweed, washed back out into the water by a high wave from where it'd laid, black and stinking in the sun on the beach, in the gleaming shallows. Achilles was on the other side. But so was both Hektor and Lykaon, and he---

Shouts rose around him, and Paris looked around, startled to realize the air was murky and thick on this side of the river, like a fog had descended yet was shy of the Skamander's clear, glittering waters; on the other side of the ford, the sky was high and clear and the sun shone.

One of the Deathless Ones who attended to the Achaeans must’ve pulled it down against the fleeing Trojans and their allies, to give glory to Achilles. The men fleeing from the river and Achilles slowed down with their sight hampered, and though it was for no good reason Paris was still glad. It meant he could more easily work himself away from the ford, but upstream along the river, until he could look out over it and back towards the ford itself, hoping to spot either Hektor or Lykaon.

He didn't find his oldest brother.

He did find Lykaon, down by the ford on the other side of the river, kneeling at Achilles' feet.

Over the panicked din and with this distance, Paris couldn't hear any of what his brother might have said, nor what Achilles said in response, but he didn't need to. He was frozen stiff, unable to move even for his bow, as his blameless half-brother, already having suffered Achilles once, shuddered at whatever the son of Peleus said and slumped, letting go of Achilles' knees and his great, flashing spear – he even spread his arms wide, so thoroughly had he given up.

It wasn't the now-freed spear Achilles used; he drew his sword with lazy firmness, his expression a cold sneer as he plunged the gleaming bronze blade almost down to the hilt into Lykaon's neck.

Blood poured down the blade, dyeing the ground and Lykaon's back crimson. Blood poured down Lykaon's front as he coughed, once, twitching arms falling with heavy bonelessness against his body. Achilles yanked his sword back, and Lykaon swayed, then fell to the ground.

No.

Shuddering, Paris squeezed his eyes shut. Nausea and a wet, sick heat pressing against the back of his eyes both rose up, and he squeezed his nails into his shaking palms. There were still people daring to rush past Achilles, if less than before he'd reached the ford, and despite the thick haze laying on the other side. If he waited a moment or two, until Achilles was distracted, perhaps he could fetch the body...

Opening his eyes again, Paris stared, staggering forward half a step and then immediately freezing, as Achilles tossed Lykaon's body right into the water, away from the ford and downstream.

The river was deeper on both sides, he wouldn't – how was he supposed to find him? To bring him back for burial?

Laothoe had lost both of her sons, now. Paris stared at the blood-streaked surface of the Skamander without quite seeing it. Belatedly, he turned away, not knowing what else to do but knowing the longer he stayed the greater was the risk. Yet, he'd half-shambled merely a few steps away when a deep voice, bull-like in its roar and weighted like a summer storm as it blows in from the ocean rose up from the river behind him.

"For shame! Swift-footed Achilles, son of Silver-footed Thetis; I have given you plenty of warning to heed the word of a god. For shame! God of the Silver Bow, offspring of Zeus – you have not attended the will of your father ardently enough! The son of Kronos called you to guard the Trojans and defend them, until Hyperion at last has finished his course, and where have you gone?"

With the bellowing came the sense of a vast upsurge, blanketing the very air. It was near impossible to breathe, but Paris turned into the weight anyway, and saw Achilles landing with a splash in the middle of the ford just as the river itself came to meet him.

Up rose Skamander, rose Xanthos, beloved foster-son of Zeus himself, the waters surging around his snake-like, finned and scaled tail. Not a fish was left in the dry riverbed upstream; they swam and leapt among the watery veils, twining around the dead and living both caught in the red-tinged waters. The river god roared like the bull he half seemed to be, great, heavy horns thrusting forth from his head and bull-like ears turned back as he spewed all the dead Achilles had felled in his waters onto the banks of the river and carefully pushed the living upstream, where the riverbed was dry, so they could stagger up on the banks themselves.

Paris wasn't the only one who stared, unable to move for the sight, as Achilles staggered under the hammering waves pouring down on him. Stared as Achilles attempted to use a branch to pull himself up, but the whole tree feel under the tearing water and the son of Peleus had to leap free of the river entirely.

But Skamander wasn't well-pleased merely chasing Achilles out of his waters; the god, waters rising up into a roar as it followed him, poured out onto the plain itself. Achilles barely kept ahead of the furious river god, half-drowned by the rising wave hounding him every other step. Others staggered as water flooded around their feet, Achaeans pulled down while Trojans were left standing. The air was still too heavy to breathe, despite Paris' growing distance to the chase out on the plain. With a numb, shaking hand, he wiped off his face, startled to find it spattered wet from the river rising up.

For some reason, Achilles suddenly turned around, meeting Skamander's rising wave. Yet he was quickly forced to give up while Xanthos' bellowed for his brother Simoeis to join him. The sound rattled Paris' bones, the divine fury tasting like something nutty and burnt. Paris laughed incredulously, but his amusement lodged in his throat as fire, within a heartbeat going from embers to great, roaring walls of it, surged up and beat at Skamander's waters.

Achilles had gods to see to his safety, those stronger than a river god, even if Xanthos himself, greater than any mortal son of a god, could have killed the son of Peleus easily.

Staying here would be foolish. Paris glanced to the rows of dead scattered thick on the Skamander's banks, on both sides of the river. There was no time. Not now. Not when the raging walls of flame, great as the divine walls of Troy itself, was beating the river back, from Achilles as well as the plain and the Achaeans. He'd have to come here tonight instead and hope he could find his brother.

Whipping around, Paris was relieved to see the mist on this side had lifted, yet it was a relief that evaporated like that divine mist almost immediately, for where the fuck was Hektor?

Paris staggered through the open Skaean gates as one among many, but didn't remain milling about down there. Nor did he continue back up towards the palace, and not just because he wanted to delay having to tell Laothoe her last living son was dead. Eyeing the stairs up to the top of the Skaean gates, Paris went a little further along the walls and took another set of stairs up to the top instead.

That was when he found Hektor, barely visible at this angle, standing firm by the Skaean gates and guarding the retreat of others. Even when the last few staggered past and, out on the plain, far upstream towards Thymbra, the gleam that must be Achilles even though there was little reason for him to be all the way out there, turned back towards Troy, Hektor stood fast. Worrying his lip, Paris leaned out over the smooth, golden marble, listening to their father entreat Hektor to come inside.

Yet Hektor, ridiculous, unbending Hektor, did not.

Curse his brother and his stupid honour! And his stupid pride, too, for that matter.

He couldn't be serious. To face Achilles now, raging over the loss of Patroklos as he was? Hektor didn't even listen to their mother when she, too, begged. Paris, nails scraping over the marble, wondered if he could find some harmless yet still injurious spot on his brother to sink an arrow in, to force him to retreat behind the walls. He had only just taken his bow in hand, still contemplating this traitorous course of action, when a great, startled cry went from the watching crowd and his brother – did turn to flee.

He leapt like a startled doe towards the Skaean gates, but Achilles was quicker, spear flashing in the light as it flew through the air – and missed. Hektor, somehow, was quick and fleet enough of foot to dodge. Achilles darted over to pick up his spear, a moment not long enough for Hektor to take advantage of Achilles' distraction.

A second time Hektor tried for the gates, and a second time the spear flew, yet Hektor avoided it once again. Hektor wasn't normally very fleet of foot. That he was keeping out of Achilles' reach like this, was surely thanks to Apollo. Perhaps he could keep doing so until they could force Achilles back far enough? They wouldn't need that many, just a few good archers, and by now, though no one was moving and everyone was quiet aside from the pleading of the king and queen, there were enough men up on the walls there should be enough archers present.

Hektor tried for the Skaean gates a third time and Paris wheeled around on his heel. This could work. He'd just..!

Paris' vague hope died when Hektor for some reason suddenly stopped. Stopped trying to get back to safety, stopped trying to run, and instead turned back to face Achilles. Paris still couldn't see the fight very well from his chosen spot, but neither could he make himself move for a better vantage point. Spears flashed, neither hitting, and then the two lunged at each other with their swords.

Bronze rang against bronze, sunlight flashing in what polished bits of metal was still clear of blood and dust.

Paris blinked, and in that single moment, so fleeting it shouldn't have been able to change anything, his parents screamed.

He barely heard or saw anything at all, then. Couldn't hear the words in the wails rising in the air. Couldn't see any details as down below Achaeans crept close now that the battle was done, poking at his brother's corpse with spears now that he could not defend himself. Vaunting over him when they had done nothing to cause Hektor to lie on the ground.

Paris blinked again, and Achilles was mounting his chariot.

With Hektor tied to it.

Another blink, five arrows scattered on the marble at his feet, his shaking hand, clutching the sixth one, only steadying as he laid the arrow to the string. Achilles urged his horses into motion, and Hektor, stalwart, great-hearted Hektor, naked and streaked with blood just as a newborn babe pulled from his mother's labour-laden womb, was dragged over the ground, rocks tearing at his soft flesh. His dark hair streaked out behind him as the braid slowly unravelled.

He was going to kill him.

Who did Achilles think he was? Did he not have Patroklos' corpse in his camp to be buried? How dare he steal Hektor and refuse them the mourning and burial he was granting himself! Paris drew the arrow back, vision threatening to blur. He was going to kill him.

A large hand closed, gently yet heavier than Mount Ida herself, around his fingers clutching the end of the arrow.

"It's not time yet," Apollo murmured, sun-bright and towering behind him. "And if you fire, the goddesses raging against Troy will undoubtedly be petty enough to ensure you hit your brother, dealing him yet another wound. They won't be willing to let you so much as scratch even just the chariot, though I should ensure the shot straight and swift."

"But---"

"Later. We will have him later," Apollo promised, thunderous darkness in his resonant voice.

Paris nearly pitched over the battlements when the god left, so great was the absence of his presence. Catching himself, Paris sank down to his knees, pressing his forehead to the warm marble as he shook.

Tears spilled over, scalding hot and silent, while Paris distantly listened to the wailing shrieks of his mother, his sisters, and other voices raises in grief. He sat there, leaning against the warm marble, until the noise of the grieving crowd, family as well as citizens, was more distant. Sat there as the sun slowly cooled as it sank towards the horizon. His cheeks were hot and crusty, and he felt empty, yet far too heavy. Sniffling, he straightened up, rubbed his face and got to his feet. As much as he'd rather return to his home, he at least had to search out Laothoe. If she didn't already know Lykaon was dead, someone needed to tell her.

Pausing in his descent down the wall, Paris cast a glance up at the sky. It burned with orange and red, a bleeding fire somewhere just out of view. It was too late to try and look for Lykaon's body now. It'd have to be in the morning.

Gut churning the whole way through the city, up the citadel hill, and deep into the palace where Laothoe had her set of rooms, Paris smiled faintly at the servant who opened the door. She didn't let him in any further, but Paris didn't mind as he stood in the doorway, waiting. When Laothoe came hurrying across the room, her large, dark eyes, so very expressive, darkened with a thunderous flash. Paris' gut twisted and shot up into his throat in response.

"Why isn't my son with you?" Laothoe demanded, trembling hands twisting in her skirt. "I don't know why he keeps insisting on staying by your side, even when the war you started got him taken and sold into slavery, but as he does, having forgiven you – where is he, Alexander?"

She knew, of course. No one might truly have noticed Lykaon's lack of presence just yet and connected it to the most probable outcome and come to tell her before Paris did so, but now that he stood before her, his lone presence told her everything.

His soles itched to turn him around and walk away, words unsaid as if that might spare them both the truth. But even as his heart trembled, wishing to retreat, Paris couldn't do that to her.

"He lies by the ri---!"

The slap rocked through him much like the passing force of the spear Menelaos had thrown had, though one left greater injury than the other. His cheek throbbed, hot for another reason now, and Paris closed his eyes but stayed where and as he was while Laothoe snarled.

"You saw him fall, and you dare come before me without my son? My, my last living son and now he--- he... What h-happened? H-how did--- did i-it..."

Her fury collapsing, tears swam in her dark eyes, so much like Lykaon's. Paris was going to throw up.

"We were fleeing with the rest," he said slowly, gripping a wrist with his other hand behind his back as he gave Laothoe a pained little smile. "While Achilles was chasing the army. The crowds... we got separated, I managed to cross the river before he did. Before Achilles caught up---"

Laothoe's sob ripped through the air much like her slapping him just before had. Taking a breath, Paris pressed on. "Achilles killed him. Despite Lykaon supplicating him. He threw the body into the river like he did to anyone he killed there, and I feared him lost. But the river god himself confronted the son of Peleus, and all the dead were thrown up on the bank. I'll... I'll go out tomorrow morning to find Lykaon's body. I promise."

"Leave," Laothoe snapped wetly, her glare as fierce as any angry goddess', "and don't come back unless it be with my son."

If only Hektor's body was that easy to retrieve.

Chapter Text

Paris' head was empty of all thoughts but the crushing knowledge that Lykaon's body would be so much easier to retrieve than Hektor's, if only thanks to the mindfulness of the river god.

Leaving Laothoe's apartment, he turned his eyes away from the glares of any brothers he met, walking too quickly to be easily stopped if they should be of a mind to. Echoes of mourning drifted down the corridors, though where, exactly, they came from was hard to pinpoint. Before he left the palace, he stopped a servant and told her to tell his father that Lykaon, too, was dead. One among many. So very many, but of all those lost today, Hektor, Polydoros and Lykaon each lay like anchor stones in Paris' gut, grinding against his heart as he stepped inside his own part of the palace.

If there was anyone on the bottom floor, Paris didn't see them; he barely paid enough attention to not repeatedly stumble up the stairs. If he opened the door or it was opened for him, he couldn't remember. All he knew as he stepped inside was Helen seated next to her loom, hands still around a distaff, spindle laying lone and unmoving at her feet.

"Helen," Paris breathed, his voice hitching in the middle into a nearly voiceless, strangled little thing.

His wife, the daughter of dark-clouded Zeus, looked up, her gaze endless and soft, her face empty yet open. Her fingers twitched where she clutched the distaff, and Paris sucked in a shaking breath and crossed the floor, collapsing at her feet with no care for the impact on his knees to the plastered floor. He buried his face in her lap and wept again. Helen was quiet and tearless above him, but the hand that slowly crept up into his hair trembled as she trailed her fingers through his curls.

"He's dead."

Even muffled by her skirts, saying it had Paris shaking, for it seemed like admitting something not even watching Achilles drag off his brother's corpse, the ground ripping at his flesh, had made real. Had there even been anything left of his brother when Achilles reached the Achaean camp? Or by the point he reached his own camp within it?

"He is," Helen agreed, a slight hitch in her quiet, bronze-belled voice, but otherwise clear and firm.

Confirmation and agreement of an undeniable truth.

"H-he's dead, and I thought--- Helen, I was sure I'd die before him, if I thought about, about death at, a-at all."

"Oh, Alexander."

There was a weight in that soft exhale of his name, matched to the weight grinding Paris' heart to dust in his chest. It was a weigh that said his brother would never had let such a thing happen, despite all the harsh words. Paris was no longer sure he believed that – he hardly deserved it to be true – but it had certainly once been true.

Hektor stepping in the way for him, gently pushing him aside, or pushing him behind him. Hektor, who had been there from the beginning, protecting him even before he'd had more reason than his kind, honourable heart.

Hektor steadying him when he'd accidentally run into him while being too wide-eyed at the crowds milling around the Skaean Gates on their way out to the grounds where the funeral games were held. His unknown brother's amused rebuke – not towards the slave that, however accidentally, had run into a prince and a member of the family that owned him, but rather at one of his own brothers. The way Hektor had helped him up after he lost to him in the wrestling, his amusement warm and not sneering as he congratulated him on having gotten so far on strength alone, but it took more than strength sometimes to win. (And Hektor had taken his own loss to Sarpedon with easy grace, acknowledging the greater skill and strength of the son of Zeus.) How his unknown brother had stepped forward, raising his own voice, to interrupt Deiphobos' loud, sneering conversation with his gaggle of his companions after Paris had been crowned winner of the whole games, and had led his brother off to continue the argument elsewhere.

The way Hektor had stepped in to shield him from further attacks as he reached the shrine, before his foster father caught up to them. Hektor teaching him to ride, and attempting to teach him to drive a chariot; taking the time, not leaving Paris to learn such knowledge as was so integral to the Trojan royal family from the hands of the stable master, however knowledgeable. His brother's little smile through the song Paris had composed himself and performed during Hektor's and Andromache's wedding. The one Hektor understood without being told, even when it was about Teucer and Batia's courting and eventual happy marriage, was for him and his new bride.

Hektor shoving his shield in front of him to deflect a javelin. Hektor throwing himself forward over the battlements, face pale and hazel eyes wide, wild, as he grabbed Paris' forearm before he fell out of reach. An accident, but one that might have spelled his death if it weren't for Hektor, or, if Hektor had missed, his goddess.

Even in the face of the last few days of bitter, sharp words, Paris couldn't help but cling to what Hektor also had said. That he wished for them to reconcile, after it was all over.

He'd wished---

And now they wouldn't. Shoulders shaking, Paris hid the ugly tears in the fine linen of Helen's skirts and the heaving of his shoulders with the drape of his curls until he was empty, slack as he rested against her legs.

"Do you think... I chose wrong?"

It was the wrong question to ask, even when half-smothered in Helen's lap. Her sweet thighs so very soft under his cheek and their strength hidden under the drape of the fabric. Thighs he was very, very fond of to have around him; his waist, his hips, his face and shoulders. But the words spilled out anyway, a sour whisper.

Should he have lied?

"... Are you asking because you indulged yourself and your goddess over the truth, or are you asking for hope in the face of loss?" Helen asked, her hand in his hair closing around a fistful of curls.

Closing his eyes, Paris shook his head against the grip, a tingle sparking down his spine at the slight pull.

"You know as well as I do, and if you don't I will be plain, hiding nothing in my heart; the apple was Aphrodite's by rights, regardless of my desires. To award it elsewhere would've been an insult greater than any I could or already have dealt, to immortal gods and grain-eating mortals both. Too, you're worth it, all of it, and to pretend otherwise would be to offer insult to you, too, as well as to Zeus the Highest, but---"

"But a king can have whatever woman that resides in his lands or others that he desires, whether she be called the wife of another man or not. A warrior with the strength and blessing to always carry victory with him can take whatever he, too, desires. Divine Alexander, beautiful as any of the divine ones---"

Helen tugged on his hair, just a little. Her other hand brushed his forehead, skating down the side of his face until she could press her thumb to his bottom lip. She didn't push past the soft willingness to give for that potential intrusion. She merely rested it there, her hand trembling. She was frowning fiercely, generous lips pressed thin in her displeasure of saying any of this, of admitting to yet. Yet, admit she did, and when she spoke again there was an abyss in the soft whisper of her voice.

"My Alexander. My heart. Sweetest fruit borne of Aphrodite and Dionysos' bountiful, wild gardens. My divine father promised me kleos in war, and your desires would surely have brought you to Sparta's threshold no matter what. Come as a conqueror taking his geras, come as a king asking his tribute to be paid... I confess I'd rather have the lover that did come, tempting me to take. And as for your brother, would choosing another of the goddesses have saved him? Do you truly believe that, Alexander?"

"No," Paris whispered, twisting the fistfuls of soft, purple linen he was clutching.

No, he didn't. Like he'd said to his sleeping brother, he would have chosen Hera, and Hera was promising him his brother's throne, his father's kingdom, and then also so much more than that. What place did his older brother have in that choice?

"No," Helen agreed, sighing, and with a last little tug, let go of his hair only to smooth her hand over the tresses again.

Mercifully, she didn't say any of the things she could have – maybe she might, in a few more moments, but Paris didn't want to hear it. Couldn't listen to it. Not tonight, not with Hektor dead, Achilles having dragged him away after his chariot to tear his brother's body apart. Not with Lykaon laying cold and bloodless on the banks of the Skamander, the only one of the two that could be given a funeral come tomorrow. The images kept assaulting his heart and eyes both, as soon as he closed his eyes, and Paris shuddered. Shifting his weight, he pressed a kiss to one of Helen's thighs, where the dip of fabric between them offered a temptation.

"Alexander," Helen hissed, a hitch in her breath even as she tangled a hand in his hair again, threatening to pull him away. "Your brothers just died---"

"And that's why," Paris pleaded, squeezing the fine curve of Helen's calves through the fabric of her dress as he looked up. "Please, Helen. I don't--- don't want to think any more. Let me put my heart, my hands and my mouth, to something to please someone, as little as I currently can."

Helen's gray eyes shimmered like the sky at noon as they stared at each other. She squirmed underneath him, just a tiny shift of her weight, then touched his cheek.

"You'll be thinking of nothing," she promised, pulling him up to his feet and leading the way.

Around noon the next day, Paris found Lykaon's corpse some distance down the river from where he'd originally died. He carried him back, since he'd walked out here to begin with, knowing there was no point in asking anyone to drive a chariot for him. Lykaon was buried together with Polydoros in the first funeral held that day, brothers next to each other. In the second funeral the first grandsons of Priam to fall in the war, Laogonos and Dardanos, were buried.

Paris would've kept to the outer edges of both – Bias' wet, red-swollen stare promised violence if he came too close to that grieving father, at the very least. But Laothoe had found him before the fire really began to take on Polydoros and Lykaon's joint pyre and dragged him forward with a vicious hiss that he had to look at what he'd done.

As if he didn't know.

How could he not know, whether he let people see that he knew or not? There was no point in letting them see, not before and not now. Not with the looks they gave him, not with the insults that had been flung against his back and to his face for a little less than ten years. He didn't want to give them the satisfaction.

So Paris mostly retreated to his and Helen's apartments, even for the meals. Helen didn't seem to mind, and since there were no assault attempts from the Achaeans, she also didn't mind he didn't leave during the day.

The first few days dragged; a wounded deer pulling her leg behind her after she'd struggled free of the hunter's snare, knowing her next step might be her last for her lack of speed and agility, yet she kept walking, for what else could she do? Sitting with his lyre in his lap, Paris wasn't sure he played it as often, or as long, as he was sure he did, by the looks he caught Helen giving him more than once. Which was the only reason he realized he'd simply been... sitting there, hands on smooth wood and against silent strings. He often caught himself wondering why Hektor hadn't come to insult him back onto the walls, and then he sat there, heart chill, as he remembered. They didn't hear anything from the palace itself, but even just the courtyard outside seemed oppressively quiet, the people who crossed it like fleet-footed ghosts afraid to make a sound.

His dreams, when he slept, were haunted. Hektor taking the sword from Deiphobos while he clung to the altar and driving it into his chest himself. Hektor and his father at the embassy, snagging him by the collar as he turned to the people and tossed him to them, letting them tear him limb from limb. A strange, wavering dream of first his father's hands on him, too small and weak to move, those hands huge, choking him, then Hektor, small as Paris had never seen him, being the one to do it.

He dreamed of Sparta, too. Or rather, of the journey there. Drowning in a storm that never happened. Menelaos, the moment they met, somehow knowing what he was there for, was there for too, and instead of the pleased joy of Paris having taken him up on his invitation at last, he received a sword to the chest, Helen standing cold and yet hungry beside her husband as she watched. He dreamed of Menelaos returning that first evening after he'd left for Crete, to find him with his face buried between Helen's thighs, or the two of them spilled out on the couch, her large, slender hand around his cock. Helen again let her husband kill him, even as she demanded her release, or dragged him into his own.

Exhausted and light-headed, Paris could barely keep track of what time it was when he was awake, but on the fourth day he watched his mother cross the courtyard towards Hektor's mansion trailed by three maids, and swallowed heavily.

Of course Andromache hadn't been seen since Hektor had fallen, so hopefully his mother could do something for his sister-in-law, but... How were his parents doing? He didn't have the – courage, he supposed – strength to face his father, but he did want to seek out his mother, even if he hadn't been sure when might be the best moment to do so.

But now he'd surely gotten a perfect opportunity. Setting his lyre aside, Paris watched until he spotted Hekuba coming back outside, and slipped downstairs and out.

As he caught up to his mother some distance from the doors, Paris briefly had to squeeze his hands into fists before he summoned a smile for her. His mother looked as if she had aged a decade or more merely by the deep shadows under her eyes and the deepened lines about her mouth. Her hair seemed to have half become silver in only the last few days, though even with all this she was a graceful, stern line, whipping around when she heard his approaching steps. Paris almost faltered, but the flash through her green eyes drew him forward anyway.

"Mother..."

"Oh, my son."

Hekuba sighed, gesturing him close enough so she could pull him in for a hug. All three of her servants were staring at him with hard, narrow gazes, and Paris closed his eyes and just soaked up the warmth of his mother's arms around him until she stirred, pulling back to kiss his brow.

"How are you doing?" Paris asked, and winced as his mother pressed her lips thin, pressing her hands a little tighter against his cheeks where she was still cradling his face.

"You would ask me this, child? Oh, Alexander, my womb's most heaviest burden!" Hekuba cried, her voice thickening through each syllable until she fell silent, though it was clear she wasn't finished speaking. She looked him up and down, still cradling his face, and then closed her eyes, yet immediately opened them again, dark green gaze wandering over Paris' face. "Where is that radiant smile of yours?"

The question was so soft, yet it felt like Paris had been stabbed. Prickling tension pressed against the guard of his lashes, threatening to spill over – he wasn't even sure why – and he turned his head to kiss the ball of his mother's thumb. She sighed, a trembling little thing, and released him.

"My heart delights in your warmth and life, in your joy, but my mind knows it would've been better if you had perished as a babe, whether in your father's arms or on the mountain."

Hekuba shuddered and the gaze that'd slipped off over Paris' shoulder snapped back to his face, as if only that sight would assure his mother he was still there. Only then could Paris manage to offer up a small smile for her, earnest and warm. His mother flinched while her green eyes took on a shimmering sheen, though no tears fell. With a sigh, she pressed a slim, strong hand to her chest.

"Yet, what mother would wish for such an outcome? Even now, I want you here, I want you near, happy to have had you returned to Troy and to my arms. But I can't look at you right now, my eyes, my Alexander. Go."

Paris went.

He wasn't quite sure what happened to the rest of that day. Or the one after. He slept, yet still couldn't sleep, his dreams no less haunted than the first few days.

Again, most often by Hektor; Hektor repeatedly attempting to reach the gates, Paris this time stood above them so he could see it all up close; Hektor walking out of the city to simply lay down on the ground behind Achilles' waiting chariot; Hektor, naked and hair free, dragged away from the city, gore already streaking the ground. Hektor, too, stepping forward while Paris crouched on the altar, and instead of drawing Deiphobos back, he instead stepped in front of the blade. But Paris dreamed of the night-swathed empty orchard Lykaon had disappeared in, too. Dreamed of walking in that suddenly-endless labyrinth of trees, searching for his brother.

Sometimes the hours before Lykaon had gone out there seemed to be the last time Paris had actually seen his brother. It seemed as if the last twelve days before Achilles killed him had been a dream and he'd never come home at all.

If only; at least if Lykaon was still elsewhere, all of them unknowing of his fate, he might still be alive. As it was, the grief for Lykaon was more melancholy, a wound neatly scabbed over compared to the loss of Hektor, gaping and deep. Lykaon's funeral had finished the grieving Paris could admit had already taken place; the twelve days of Lykaon being home now seemed more like a ghost come to visit the living, but a ghost that, for once, could be embraced.

He dreamed, too, of Sparta again, but compared to the first few days of muddled nightmares of repeated death, the visions were kinder and yet no less cutting.

A bedroom draped in night as he stood watching the rising moon, and the one who came up behind him from the bed, wrapping strong arms around him and kissed his cheek with sleep-warm breath and skin, wasn't Helen but Menelaos. He dreamed of the hall of Sparta during a meal, the last dredges of it all around them while wine was enjoyed and he let his lyre fill the air with music. Both the king and queen of Sparta smiled at him when he finished and came over to sit with them.

Were those dreams better than the nightmares of Hektor sacrificing himself for him, the nightmares where they all killed him? Paris couldn't tell, whether in the light of day or when he lay in bed, having been tossed from his restless sleep to stare up at the dark ceiling above.

Paris was vaguely aware of Helen pulling him from the bed, at least once a day, though whether he ate when she did so, or did anything at all, he simply couldn't remember. She let him sleep with his face in the generous swell of her breasts, or let him curl up, his back to her front and one of her arms around his waist. For the first time ever, she might have touched his cheek and wondered why he was so quiet, but answering her would've meant opening his mouth to sob, and so he just looked away. Or perhaps he stared emptily at her until she sighed and left him wherever he was sitting, on a chair or in their bed.

There was an ache in his limbs, in his chest.

Inside his brain.

Yet, as hours and days slipped past, the ache turned into a restless crawling. As rosy morning light teased the gaps in the shutters, Paris blinked awake and rolled over, pressing his face into the smooth, shadowed hollow of Helen's white throat.

"... What day is it?"

"Eleven days since Hektor fell," Helen answered, soft and rough, and not only from sleep.

"I left you alone," Paris said, frowning against Helen's soft skin. "I didn't mean to, but I..."

"So what are you doing now?"

Helen's fingers were soft as she combed them through his curls, digging down to scratch her nails over his scalp. Shivering at the sensation, marvelling that he even felt it, for he seemed to have felt nothing at all in the week since he could last properly remember anything at all, Paris exhaled warmly. Pressing a kiss to Helen's throat, he shivered again for the soft feel, for the way his lips moulded to the long, lean line, making them tingle. It was like waking up, but he was still so very tired.

"I'm going down to Aphrodite's temple, and afterwards... Afterwards, I'd like to sing for you."

Abruptly, Helen's arm around his waist and her hand in his hair tightened. The breath that rose up through the column of her throat and washed over the top of his head shuddered just like the last leaf that clings to its branch on an old oak, battered as it is by strengthening autumn winds; all its companions have let go to carpet the ground around the tree's roots, but the very last one, though it tremble and shake, still clings. So Helen did too, before she pushed him to get up.

"It's been too quiet," she said, an answer that wasn't one, an agreement that wasn't one, too, either, and sat him down to comb his hair for him.

Paris couldn't remember Helen doing that beyond their first few years in Troy, before the Achaeans landed on Troy's shores. The sensation sat light on his scalp and heart both through breakfast, where Paris could even taste the food even if he perhaps ate less than he ought to, distracted by the pit still lurking in his gut. He was distracted, too, by Helen herself, morning light haloing her and making both her skin and eyes glow.

She could have been fiercely scowling and would yet have been a soothing sight for the heart. His smile took root and bloomed out, small like the first flowers in too-early spring, growing quickly in the warming sunlight yet threatened by the crushing cold of the nights, but still they flower. Helen sighed, rolled her eyes, but was herself the one to hand him myrrh and honey from their stores. Paris wandered slowly down to the sacred precinct, seeing little but his own feet and the stones underneath where they stepped, but as he walked in under the roof of Aphrodite's temple, the scent of myrrh and roses embracing him and sliding warm down into his lungs, some tension in his shoulders unwound.

Gently putting the little jar of honey on the narrow altar and lighting the incense, Paris closed his eyes and just stood there for a few moments. The stone pressed against his soles, the air was sweet and alive, and he---

"My lady, it hurts too much," Paris whispered, a wet tremble in his voice. "Worse than anything else so far, though I know what heartache feels like, and I don't know how..."

To stop feeling it. He didn't know how it could feel this much, when he hadn't even known Hektor as long as he should have. When the last ten years had been a trial all their own between them, though worse in the last couple years than the beginning.

"Well-crowned, golden Aphrodite, I miss him. And what does it--- d-does it matter, that Apollo promised I could kill his killer, when my brother lies alone at his killer's feet and there is-i... is probably little to nothing left of him? What does spilling Achilles' blood matter if it doesn't get my brother back?"

"Oh, Alexander." Aphrodite's breath was sweet as warm summer as it wafted over him. The goddess herself was a ripple of pink and blue fabric, her arms smooth and pale as they wrapped around Paris' shoulders, her fingers light against his cheek. "Even the blessed gods feel the loss of a man such as Hektor, breaker of horses, and Father Zeus himself is desirous of your brother getting a proper burial. And know, my dove, if it should ease your heart, that Hektor's corpse is being safeguarded, kept untouched by myself as well as Apollo, until such a time the son of Thetis can be made to let the body go."

"Oh." His shuddering exhale seemed as if it had been punched out of him, and Paris was allowed to turn in Aphrodite's arms to cling to her for a brief moment. "Thank you."

"As I said," she hummed, pressing a kiss to his forehead before taking him by the cheeks. "Know you will be able to lament your Hektor and give him to the fire."

Aphrodite left and Paris went back, fetching the lyre she'd gifted him before he sat down next to where Helen worked. He played for his wife as well as for his goddess the rest of that day, wondering quietly if he should tell anyone what the goddess had told him. He didn't get the chance to, in the end. The very next day, as evening approached, Priam demanded a wagon be made ready. He didn't come home until next morning, though despite the promises of the gods most feared neither he nor Idaios would be coming home again at all.

Yet, at the point in the day when it was so early the sun was barely colouring the sky, never mind having cleared the horizon, his father came home, with Hektor.

The whole city seemed to be wailing when Idaios brought the wagon to a halt.

Hovering at the edges with Dios, Pammon and Polites as Hektor's bier was lifted down from the wagon and carried inside, a bed arranged in a room near the entrance hall, Paris ignored the looks several of his brothers shot him. Deiphobos looked like he was terribly desirous of storming over and chucking him out of the room, even, but as their mother stepped up to the head of the bed, pale, shaking hands cradling Hektor's head, he turned away. Paris didn't move from where he'd put himself up against the wall. It didn't give him a very good view of his brother, but from the glimpses he'd gotten, Aphrodite had spoken the truth.

Not that he hadn't believed her, but actually seeing Hektor laying on the bed, his hair glossy, his skin tanned and unmarked by any scars or wounds that hadn't graced his body before Achilles and all those Achaean soldiers showed what their courage was worth, was different. Hektor really would get to go into the afterlife untouched, as perfect and invincible in death as he hadn't been in life.

Paris didn't hear a word of what anyone said as he stood in that room. The wailing was a buzz in his ears, the words all melting together. No one noticed when he slipped out, skin too tight and strangely light-headed. Hektor would be put on the pyre tomorrow, and after that there would be days and days of ceremonies around the burned remains.

There was no doubt in Paris' mind that Hektor would be buried as if he'd been the king of Troy, not merely still their father's crown prince. He'd be present for all of that.

For now...

For now, Paris went back when it was long past midnight, stepping on soft, bare feet over the plastered floor until his knees hit the bed. In the darkness, the paleness of Hektor's skin was that of moonwashed indifference, the eye unable to tell colour from colour instead of the ashen tint of death. The cool skin under his fingers as Paris feathered a touch down to Hektor's hand revealed the truth, despite the relaxed expression on his brother's face.

"Hektor..." Paris' voice echoed in the sparsly furnished room, too large for the space, and Paris stuttered to a stop with a hitch in his breath and voice both. "We've already been here, haven't we? And you're just--- just as silent now as you were last... fuck, last time."

Suddenly Paris was laughing, wet and wavering. The sound clawed itself out of his chest until he was shaking with it as it rattled him. Paris sank to his knees, burying his face against the edge of the mattress just beyond Hektor's slack yet curling-stiff hand. Soon the fabric was wet under his face.

"I should've woken you, shouldn't I? Perhaps getting you yelling at me one more time would've been better than not... not having talked to you at all aside from those last few insults. Hektor--- How could you have gone before me? I thought... I really did think, I'd be dying before you. That you'd let me. That that was what you wanted. You practically threw me at Menelaos, after all."

Pushing himself upright with a heavy sway, like a poppy where the wind has howled through the field it grows in, almost tearing the flower's head off the stem, yet it clings on even as its full of rain, drooping with its weight, so Paris sat upright but remained on his knees, looking up at his brother's still form on the bed.

This time, no matter how loud he talked, if he shook him, he wouldn't wake. Another wet laugh burst out, stuttering into a sob.

"And yet you also... You didn't agree with Antenor. You didn't argue with Father. You came to chase me back out onto the field, but you wanted us to talk about everything, after. So why are you dead, brother? What can we talk about, if you're not going to wake up and tell me you still--- that you might..."

The words got stuck, sticky and thorny.

Hektor had wanted to reconcile. He'd said so himself, yet the insults his brother had thrown at his face last they exchanged words, insults he hadn't done anything to deserve in the moment, burned. Was it merely Hektor's stalwart sense of duty for his family that had had him say he wanted to reconcile, and not for any lingering love of his brother?

Paris sucked in a trembling breath and wiped his face. Slowly, he got back onto his feet, reaching out with trembling hands to take his brother's rough jaw and cheeks in his hands.

"You were there from the very beginning I stepped foot in Troy. I hope... I hope you didn't regret it."

Quivering underneath the sudden ache in his heart, Paris leaned forward to press a kiss, warm lips to cool skin, to Hektor's forehead, then turned around and left. He curled himself in against Helen's back when he could finally slip back into bed, burying his face against her shoulder and half hidden underneath the loose braid her hair was tied back in. She smelled of warm skin and the very last traces of lotus perfume; Paris breathed the scents in and closed his eyes.

Chapter Text

He didn't fall back into the empty hole in his heart as the funeral rites for Hektor were held over the next twelve days. In some ways, Paris almost wished he could, but now that he'd stepped out of it the ache in his chest was a distant throb, not the reverberating shocks of an earthquake sending him tumbling into a yawning crack unexpectedly having opened at his feet.

Paris watched his grieving parents. Watched a hollow-eyed Andromache clinging to the young Skamandrios in her arms, protesting quietly his mother held him too tightly yet never asking to be let down. He watched Helen, dark-eyed like an oncoming storm. He watched his sisters, and his brothers.

Listened to them mutter how Hektor's killer deserved to have the same indignities visited upon himself for, at least, the same amount of time. Listened to more than one of them insist they would kill Achilles. That they would challenge him to a duel and, by the grace of the lord of the silver bow, of the stormgod of the army, of Apollo – Apollo who hadn't been able to protect Hektor until it was too late – kill him, bringing great glory to themselves, to their father, and to Troy. Paris thought of standing on the sun-warmed battlements with an arrow nocked to the string, and remembered the mountain-weight of the divine hand that stole all the energy from the arrow.

Not yet. Not yet, not yet, not yet. They couldn't kill Achilles yet.

Despite what Apollo had said, Paris couldn't see how he might ever have a better chance than the one he'd had up on the wall that day. How could he do – even with bow and arrow and thus not what his brothers thought they could accomplish – what Hektor hadn't? He didn't mistrust the lord of the silver bow, but as yet another day of funerary rites passed, his oldest brother indeed treated as if he'd been Troy's king in truth and not just in promise, Paris couldn't see how it'd happen.

Yet, watching Priam’s pale, bruised face, his straggling hair and deep wrinkles, Paris found himself for once searching his father out in the empty hours of early evening, before the old king of Troy retired fully for the night.

"Alexander," his father greeted from the couch he was half-lying heavily on as Paris stepped into the room.

There was only one oil lamp lit, drawing the shadows long and deep, smothering his father almost entirely. It made the man look larger than he was, hid his age and the weakness that'd come with both well-earned years lived and the cruel weight of grief.

"Father," Paris murmured, stepping up to the couch and about to kneel before it – it seemed most fitting, and perhaps it'd soothe his father's potential temper. Instead, a broad, but wrinkled, hand caught him by the elbow.

"Sit. What are you, a slave to kneel before me, your own father?"

Paris' lips spasmed. Just a twitch, a tiny one, and not enough to pull it out of the soft, vague smile he'd had on his lips when he entered. So he sat, taking his father's hand on his elbow in both of his own. Priam's hand was broader than his, his fingers thicker, but just as long. They were proportional to his thicker frame in a way that yet revealed a grace in how well-built his features were. Even old, even broken by grief, King Priam of Troy, son of Laomedon, shone with a subtle, divine beauty in the serious, gentle lines of his face.

"I am my father's son, of course," Paris said mildly, lightly squeezing the hand he was holding.

"Indeed."

Priam's voice was grave, and so was his expression as he took Paris by the chin with his other hand, gently and very barely tilting his head this way and that.

"None could deny it, for not only are your features mirrored in mine, but the beauty of the line of Dardanos, that Father Zeus gifted his son and was taken by in Ganymede, is clearer in you, most beautiful as you are, our Alexander, than they are in any of my children aside from Troilos, his charming youth lost to us." Grunting, Priam glanced away and then back. "If only you weren't, then matters would have been simple. Very simple. But how could I kill not just my own blood, but that of my dear Hekuba's? And so here you are still, delicate as a young vine who should easily be ravaged by frost, while the hardy growth of Hektor, my eldest and finest, is dead."

"Father---"

"Quiet." Gently, Priam let go and lightly patted Paris' cheek before he looked away. This time, he didn’t look back. "There has been joy only you could bestow to this life, my heart's most heaviest burden, but it changes nothing. Now, you came here, despite that you likely knew the state of my heart since the moment Achilles’ sword pierced gleaming Hektor's throat. So speak your mind, and hide nothing."

Trying to will his voice and heart both into cooperating, for he had known something like this would happen, would be said to his face, if he came here, Paris nodded. Straightening up, he blinked away the threatening swell of tears and squeezed the hand he still had between his, for even as his father had turned his face away and let his hand drop from his face, he hadn't fully withdrawn.

"I confess to a failing hand while I was up on the walls watching the son of Peleus drag my brother away; I had an arrow on the string and couldn't fire it. But I promise you, Father, the next arrow I fire at the so-called greatest of the Achaeans will be his doom."

Next to him, Priam twitched, growing pale as he pressed his lips together. Snapping his face forward again to pin Paris with wide-eyed stare, Priam's expression quickly hardened, and he pulled his hand free.

"What, like you're the only one among my sons, among the worthy warriors sacred Ilion still has in her defense, to promise me this gift, far too late?" Scowling now, Priam slapped Paris' cheek – not hard, but Paris was so startled he swayed back with a jerk, voiceless as his father continued; "And certainly not among the best of sons I have left, either. Alexander, beautiful as a god, you're not a warrior – I know that, and in my heart I can't fault you this.

"But your promises are empty, and you should be ashamed to give such a vaunting promise, even if the bow is your weapon far more than the sword or spear. As if the son of Peleus will let himself be caught by such a weapon."

"Father, Apaliunas---"

"Protected and cared for our Hektor until he didn't. Now Hektor is dead, even with the stormgod of the army, Apaliunas of the Silver Bow, to hold his hand over him, to guide him. Don't insult your brother or the god, Alexander. Leave my sight."

The brief touch of calloused, aged fingertips to Paris' cheek burned as much as the slap his father had delivered to that very same cheek.

Pressing his lips together into a thin smile, Paris nodded and stood up, not looking back as he left his father on the couch. He supposed it was ridiculous to have tried to offer his father such a promise before he could deliver the result.

Who would believe such a thing when none had managed so far?

Helen was seated in the bedchamber, letting Astyanassa comb out her hair, when Paris came back. He dropped onto the bed like a deer falling to the forest floor, having dragged the javelin a hunter has managed to pierce her through with for many leagues and now finally exhausted in her flight.

"What happened?" Helen asked, not yet turning around; Paris could tell her eyes were closed as Astyanassa worked the comb through her hair, and the sliver of her face he could see was sweetly relaxed.

"Ah," Paris exhaled in an explosive huff into the bedding before he rolled over onto his side, giving Helen a smile just as she glanced over her shoulder at him, one lovely, thick eyebrow arched. "I went to talk to my father. More to the point, I went to my father to tell him I'm going to kill Achilles."

Helen blinked, and the gently dancing light from the nearest oil lamp seemed to make her eyes flash, like lightning across the sky.

"Alexander. We both know – all of Troy and their many-tongued allies, as well as the vast Achaean armies, too, know – you aren't at all capable of going up against a warrior like the son of silver-footed Thetis, so how can you promise---"

Helen stopped, blinking again. Waving Astyanassa away, she turned around in her seat. She stared at him, her silvery gaze growing heavier and heavier, as if there was perhaps a full goddess in this room, and the thrill of potential weight to the presence of the daughter of Zeus caught heavy in Paris' chest. He smiled at her, slow and easy, arching his brows as they stared at each other while he propped his head up by a hand at his cheek. She didn't need that gesture, really. Helen was smart, and more specifically, Helen saw things. In the moment she'd stopped speaking, she'd understood what he'd actually been saying.

"What god told you this?"

"Lord Apaliunas of the Silver Bow stopped my hand when I, in my heart sore with yearning to pay Achilles for the indignities he was already visiting upon my brother's corpse, was about to fire an arrow at his retreating back, when he was dragging Hektor away. He told me we couldn't kill Achilles yet."

"I see," Helen replied, voice and breath both steady as she exhaled something that wasn't quite a sigh. In the golden lamplight, Helen's eyes burned moonlight-cold, but there were spots of heat faintly growing on her cheeks. "You will kill him."

"I'll kill him," Paris agreed, and with his head still propped up by a hand, he nodded rather awkwardly in acquiescence of what was as much a statement as a demand.

His breath caught and his cock twitched when Helen rose up from the stool, practically storming up to the bed, her shadow looming up against the wall behind her. She pinned him under her, and it was quite late before they were done.

The evening of the thirteenth day since Hektor had been returned to them, the day after his brother's bones were interred, Amazons came down from across the Simoeis. The sky was painted in streaks of orange and red, reflected in the waters of the bay like blood spilled as Queen Penthesileia, flanked by two of her warriors, were shown in before the king and queen of Troy.

"I am the daughter of bloody Ares and Queen of Themiscyra, the nymph Otrera, ruling, as you know, over an Amazon city on the horn of the land that guards the Black Sea, having established this city in the name of Amazonian strength myself," Penthesileia announced as she bent her head in greeting, her bronze-belled voice ringing firmly throughout the hall. "We, too, have dealt with these Achaean invaders, keeping them from our Thracian shores.

"And I deem, that though sacred Ilion has clashed with my sisters in understandable alliance with those lands closer to you in distance than Themiscyra, the bond between the rulers of Troy and the Amazon line is more enduring than that. One of my own sisters by the very same father has place among your royal ancestors, and it would be a stain on my name not to defend such kinship while I seek kleos in the name of my father and mother, to elevate my name for all time."

"My lady," Priam replied, first standing up and then plain walking around the table to take the Amazon queen's hand in his own. There was a soft, breathless hope in his voice, though Paris wasn't looking at his father, so he only heard it, not saw what might be reflected of it in his face. "Queen Myrina, wife of the first man to call this land his own and father to Batia, the wife of Dardanos, son of Zeus, is indeed our shared blood. My daughter, there will be strife aplenty on the plain below, but if you dare seek it, warrior daughters of Ares as you and yours are, I am grateful for your aid. Please, sit, and your sisters will be provided for as well."

Penthesileia dipped her head in acquiescence, and even bent to press a surprisingly gentle kiss to Priam's aged cheek. The woman was like a blade, honed and ready; her body was all strong, lean lines interrupted only by the firmly thick weight of muscle at her thighs and arms. Her dark brown hair was braided, and it swung gaily over her strong back as she seated herself after greeting Hekuba.

"Stunning."

That being Paris' thought as well, for the first moment after he heard it he didn't even recognize as something he had heard. Instead he reckoned it as his own thoughts, loud in his head. But then he caught on to the fact that he certainly had heard that word said aloud, if murmured only very quietly. Glancing sidelong, a smile tugging on his lips to see Helen sit with her cup held in thoughtless distraction to her lips without drinking, her gaze at once both softly distracted and sharply attentive.

"She really is," Paris agreed brightly, laughing quietly when his wife twitched in her seat, cup tapping against her lips. The glare Helen shot him was pink-cheeked, and Paris batted his lashes, smile irrepressible. "Who wouldn't think she is? Those are some very impressive arms, aren't they?"

"... Yes," Helen reluctantly agreed, still blushing as she looked back at Penthesileia. She bit her lip, and Paris burned with the need to lean in and replace her teeth with his own, but even if they weren't in public, with the way Helen's expression quickly sobered, her mind was elsewhere. "But that's not important, aside from what the strength of those arms imply. With her arrival, daughter of Ares as she is, perhaps the armies can meet out on the battlefield once more. The added forces she brought are surely a boon, but if she is a warrior to match her appearance and the name of her father, she alone will be worth as much as the whole Amazon force."

Sighing, Paris straightened up properly and picked his own cup back up. "You have eyes for these things, Helen, so you're undoubtedly right. I don't see what it will help, in truth. But as it should perhaps give me the chance I need, with Apaliunas' aid, I'll go out there along with her if it comes to that."

"What did you expect?" Helen asked, her tone briefly growing sharp as she eyed him, as always never pleased with his willing lack of desire to venture forth on the battlefield. "That, regardless of the weapon you used, you'd be able to take Achilles from the wall? Bow and arrow might fell swift-footed Achilles, especially with the aid of Apollo, but never, I deem, from such a location."

Reaching out, the little clap Helen smacked against Paris' cheek was sharp, but almost playful. "Don't be ridiculous, Alexander."

Sighing, he raised his cup in defeat and drank. Helen was undoubtedly right.

With Queen Penthesileia and her Amazons, the Trojans and the rest of the allied forces were once more emboldened to strike out on the plain. Priam wanted blood in payment for the loss of Hektor, and so no longer raised any quelling voice on the contrary. His council of elders might have, but enough either wished the same as the king, for the same or similar reasons. Or they saw a greater chance of survival at this point in direct, full confrontation rather than remaining near and on the walls.

Paris didn't much agree, but knowing Helen was right, and wishing to whet his arrows with Achilles' blood in payment for Hektor, for Troilos and for Lykaon, and all the rest, he went when the rest of the army left.

The week that passed was as exhausting, ugly, and bloody as any had been whenever the army left the sanctity of the divinely-build walls. There was still a rising hope among everyone to accompany the meaningless violence. Penthesileia was a star, a blazing fire, as she tore across the battlefield, single-handedly making up for the losses of Hektor and Sarpedon both. On the third day, she and Achilles met for the first time by the Skamander's ford. Paris was planted some distance away up on Ilos' tomb and so he saw little else but the flashing of spears and swords in the late afternoon light, but what he did see was as when a raging river meets a rock.

The daughter or Ares and the son of Thetis were evenly matched, and only darkness parted the two of them. That was a scene that kept repeating itself until the tenth day of Penthesileia's arrival, and Paris didn't even realize something had changed before a roaring ripple surged through the whole plain and both armies.

At first he thought Penthesileia had fallen – what else could have happened, after all? And yet, helplessly following the pull to try to do what he could to win her corpse back, instead he caught sight of the daughter of Ares as she repeatedly lunged at Telamonian Ajax, alive and well. His body and shield both were towering bulwarks, and in his shadow were Antilochos and Teucer, yet the latter wasn't wielding his bow to attempt an opportunistic shot at the Amazon queen, nor even any of her sisters closest to her.

He couldn't, because his hands were busy as both he and Antilochos helped Achilles in his retreat. Achilles, who had one leg dragging after him as he limped towards his chariot, a gleam of white bone and a river of red pouring down that fair, strong thigh and down half his face.

Paris could hardly breathe. Without thought, he pulled an arrow from his quiver, wanting---

But no. He instantly knew the shot would be useless, at least if he wanted to hit Achilles. Ajax, Antilochos and Teucer were all in the way, never mind all the other bodies between him and that small knot of men. Even as Paris considered this, the battlefield shifted around him, the fighting bodies all moving together as if by some grace to give him as clean a shot as he might wish.

Not at Achilles, still, but any good archer took a shot they were given. And so Paris had the arrow on the string in the next heartbeat, angling his shot as Ajax stepped forward on the slow retreat back towards Achilles' chariot, and let the arrow go.

He didn't expect much, in truth, but he quietly thanked both Artemis and Apollo, watching as his clean line of sight became chaos again, as the arrow skimmed the very edge of Ajax's great shield as it was lifted up just enough in defense against a hacking slice from Penthesileia's axe for the arrow to scrape along the underside of Ajax's arm and bury itself in his side under the armpit, where the chest armour didn't cover him.

It wasn't deep enough. Not to reach anything really important, but Ajax still lurched back and Penthesileia immediately leaped forward, hungry like a lion.

Diomedes rushed up to aid Ajax's flagging cover, though it wasn't enough to deter the Amazon Queen in the least. She lost three of her Amazons in her attempted pursuit of Achilles, but the Achaeans paid dearly for those losses as well, even as Achilles left the field alive.

That evening it wasn't just the main hall in the palace, but the whole city, that teemed with breathless noise and excitement. None before the Amazon daughter of Ares had ever driven fleet-footed Achilles off the battlefield with such injuries. It was late when Paris left the hall with Helen beside him, and though it wasn't quiet outside, for the noise of relieved, hopeful excitement from the city drifted up from below the citadel hill, it was yet a shocking difference to what they'd left behind.

Breathing in the sweet summer night air, a hint of dry grass and rotting seaweed both clinging to it, Paris exhaled, and laughed.
"You ever thought you'd see such a day?"

The bitter ache that it had come too late sat like a stone somewhere behind Paris' heart, pulling on it. In return his head was light from the wine, and one had to appreciate gifts when they came. Otherwise... he would probably find himself back in that hole, and Paris wasn't sure he could survive it a second time.

"Never," Helen said, something complicated in her gaze but an undeniable pleasure colouring her voice. "Achilles not only driven off the battlefield, but injured in such a way, too – and all by a woman's strength."

"Exactly! And with the messenger that arrived the other day, we should be joined by our kin and his Aethiopians within the week!"

A miracle, frankly. Compared to the repeated and very firmly stated denials from Aunt Astyoche, if not directly her husband, no answer had come since Priam had sent a messenger to his distant nephew in the third year of the war. Whether it was because the messenger had never arrived, or Memnon's reply had gotten lost in turn, or because the silence itself was the answer to the request, none had expected the travel-worn herald that'd appeared the other day, even less his response.

"Who knows," Paris continued cheerfully as he opened the door to their apartments and let Helen in first, a teasing grin pulling on his lips, "perhaps fate and future can be changed more than just the once, and the Amazon Queen will fell Achilles, like a lioness takes a buck too sure of himself as he strides out from the protection of the forest, delighting in his crown of horns and his own graceful strength, completely overlooking the danger lurking in the tall grass – so she will take him, where no man has managed to do so. It'd be quite beautiful, I think."

"Only you would willingly give up the glory of such a kill, and to a woman."

"A woman, but one that has spent her time to learn the sword and spear and axe and, like many amazons do, prove well that any woman can learn the same skill and strength as a man, and use it in the same way. What shame is there, if I should lose the chance to avenge Hektor to her?"

"Isn't that more proof that, as a man, you can and ought to be more willing than you are, more often than not?" his wife challenged, her voice growing sharp and her expression dark as she slowed her stride to look over her shoulder at Paris, and he could feel her eyes on him still as he strolled past her.

"Helen," Paris said with sweet patience, not at all about to let her arch tone or sharp eyes or what she was saying ruin his mood this evening. He turned around on the first step of the stairs, now eye to eye with his wife as she still stood on the floor. Taking one of the tresses that framed her face in hand, Paris lifted it to his lips and kissed the silken strands. "Is such not simply even greater proof that, if you'd been raised with sword in hand like your brothers, you could have taken glory by your own hand and strength, like any of us men do?"

Pausing, lips still kissing the cool silk of Helen's hair, Paris eyed the daughter of dark-clouded Zeus and white-armed Leda with a low-lashed, darkly warm look in his eyes as he continued; "In fact, you being how and as you are, calling loud-thundering Zeus your divine father, I would expect you could stand right next to Queen Penthesileia as one of her sisters in arms, far outstripping the greatest of warriors, never mind myself. And I’d be glad to leave such things to you, who know to appreciate them, though I see little reason to do so. If you should wish me to sing of your glory, I'd be pleased to do so, enjoying the strength of your arm."

He winked, and Helen scoffed. Yet, though she rolled her eyes, there was a light in the luminous gray of them as her watched him, and there was a faint flush staining her snow-white cheeks.

"That's ridiculous, Alexander."

"Is it? My wife, my desire, you have the strength of any of the god-born ones, and your heart yearns for renown in ways no women but Amazons might lay claim to – how could you not fit among their ranks?" Winding the dark tress of hair around his fingers, Paris leaned forward until his lips brushed along Helen's cheek, then the shell of her ear. "What couldn't you claim, in such fashion? Wealth and kingdoms would surely be yours, earned and rewarded by your strength and skill, while your sisters would honour you and the world would know your name in more ways than the well-earned fame of your blossoming face and deep bosom."

There was a large, sleek hand gripping his thigh, now, bunching up the fall of his tunic. Nails prickled his skin, and Paris wet his lips – as well as Helen's ear, close as he was. The hand twitched, grip tightening. Paris glanced sidelong, meeting Helen's gaze in the edge of his own, and her eyes were dark, a tension there that matched the twist in his own gut.

"And if I should want not just the armour of those who fell to my blade, nor just wealth and kingdoms, but such gifts as any of the greatest warriors are rewarded?" Helen asked, a danger in her voice and grip both as she squeezed his thigh, sliding her hand up and in under the fall of fabric. With her other hand, she took hold of one of his wrists.

"An Amazon queen can have whatever she wants, can't she?"

Paris' breath caught as Helen's eyes flashed, a glittering bolt of lightning across a thinly clouded sky.

"Indeed," she agreed, voice almost sweet as she turned him around, letting go of his thigh in that motion but keeping hold of his wrist as she turned that arm up behind his back, gentle but firm.

Helen herded him up the stairs like that, and Paris' blood was buzzing in his ears as they stepped into their bedchamber.

Two days later, one of which where Achilles had remained in the Achaean camp after he was wounded, the losses mounting as Penthesileia led the Trojans and their allies out on the field, Penthesileia lay cold and purple-draped on top of a funeral pyre. The Amazons were staying, those who were still alive, aside from an honour guard to take their queen's ashes back to their city, and to send the sad news to Penthesileia's mother in Themiscyra.

Paris watched silently as the fire slowly took root, the scent of smoke and burning wood mingling with that of fragrant pine.

He had perhaps let his thoughts and hopes get away from him. But if even a warrior like Penthesileia could neither take Achilles herself, nor, in the almost two weeks she had been with them give him the chance he needed – what hope was there? He really had thought... Helen's hand around his was cool and firm; she squeezed only once, then let go, but not before he'd looked up to meet her gaze. She glanced away, and as he followed her gaze it led back to the Hellespontine gate.

It didn't make sense. Except it did; the part of the city that was closest to this gate was the sacred precinct. It was, perhaps, indeed time to go ask Apollo for direction.

Giving Helen a small, thin smile before he let her continue back to the palace with the others later, Paris veered off and entered the temple of Skamandrian Apollo, split in half and shared with his sister. The altar was simple and worn, standing exactly the same as it'd been built by the inhabitants of Taruwisa when Leto had come with her young twins and been welcomed by Xanthos.

The temple smelled of sun-warmed stone, incense, and something burnt.

It smelled like death.

Frowning, Paris breathed in, nose curling. Had the scent from the funeral pyre worked its way in here? He hadn't smelled it this strongly when they walked across the square.

By the point he knelt before Apollo's statue, smooth, polished stone gilded on the horns of the deer, the curved points jutting out on the god's headwear and the point of the single arrow he wielded in one hand, Paris was hard pressed not to heave as breathed in the scent of rot, the sweetness of overripe, infected flesh.

It wasn't the funeral pyre.

"My lord---"

Wheezing, Paris closed his eyes, having to take a moment to catch himself against the pedestal that portrayed the god's animal, letting the god himself stand on top of it. Swallowing down nausea, Paris shook his head like he'd been doused in ice-cold water. He left one hand against the cool stone and laid the other on his own knee to help steady himself. He breathed through the stink, that of a dead body left out in the sun for days and days, where flies and maggots feast on the fat and slick, swollen flesh, and understood.

"Lord Apaliunas," Paris whispered, his voice yet carrying in the shadowed temple. "Stormgod of the army, Plague-bringer, the first after the river god Skamander and next to his sister and mother to be given an altar among the Teukrians; what now? You said we were to kill Achilles, but the best time seems to have come and then passed. How do I accomplish avenging Hektor and Troilos on their killer like this?"

"Soon."

The proclamation, ringing through Paris' whole body like a sword struck against a shield, setting the metal rim to vibrating with the force of the strike, yet it carried not at all beyond the faint, sweet-scented breath curling over the shell of Paris’ ear. The temple was quiet around Paris even as the air trembled, displaced for the weight of the god as he stepped into the mortal realm. Apollo's hands were hot like sun-warmed stone as he slid them down Paris' arms, gently squeezing his elbows.

"For two weeks, I petitioned my royal father, Zeus the highest, for the death I had been promised since the butcher of Phthia murdered my son and thought to get away with sacrilege in my very temple with no punishment. Each day, the golden scales fell in favour of the son of Thetis, despite his ill treatment of the dead. But, no more."

Apollo burned bright behind Paris, setting the gilded parts of his own statue ablaze with his light. The heat of the god fanned the stink of plague-rot, but now Paris' mouth and nose both were too dry for it to bother him.

A light, long-fingered hand trailed up his throat and took a delicate grip on his chin. Slowly, his head was tilted back, and Paris was surrounded by a curtain of sun-gold as thick, pale-blond tresses fell around him. Apollo's eyes were a solid, blazing sky-blue threatening to bleed over into black as their gazes met.

Paris shuddered, and didn't dare to close his eyes.

"Achilles' fate is coming for him. Within a week, the blood of that sacrilegious child killer, the one who would not respect the rites due to the dead and give an honourable warrior like Hektor to his family for burial, will stain our arrows, Alexander. Go out with the army whenever they go; when another mortal son of the divine has fallen to that murderer's spear, for he has apparently not gained enough kleos yet to take with him into the Underworld, then he will be ours. Do you understand?"

"... I do, my lord," Paris whispered, gut in knots.

Another mortal son of the divine? Who with such a parentage was even left among the Trojan forces?

Was Aineias to fall next? Ileus, even though he no longer joined the army since two years back? Was Apollo pronouncing the death of yet another of his sons, or that of Aphrodite's? There was no sign to be seen in that cool face where rage burned bright.

"Good."

Apollo's breath was gilded-sweet as it washed over Paris' face, and he could smell – taste – nothing but the god's divine sweetness even before their lips met. The kiss burned, but in a good way, hot as it seared through him. Apollo straightened up from the setting-sun arc he'd contorted his body into as he loomed over Paris' kneeling body, took a step back, and disappeared.

Shuddering, Paris fell forward, desperately sucking in too-shallow, shaking breaths as he lay curled around himself.

The stink of diseased death had been burned away; the temple smelled of the god, then smelled of plain, mortal incense, the scent so thin it seemed offensive to Paris' nose, though it was fine myrrh and frankincense.

Paris was still breathing the last traces of Apollo's golden rage two days later, when the Aithiopians arrived. They were led by Memnon, son of the goddess of the dawn and Tithonos, the king of Troy's very own older brother.

He'd forgotten they were coming.

The son of Eos was golden brown with his tan, his hair long and dark, both it and his thick beard braided and curled. He gleamed in the bright afternoon sunlight, taller than anyone else around, tall enough to overtake both Helen and Aineias, broad-shouldered and strong. Paris swallowed down something that tasted too-sweet, a threat of rot, as Memnon took his uncle's aged hands between his own fine, strong ones and promised to defend his kin and ancestral city.

"Alexander?" Helen murmured beside him, thick eyebrow arched even before their gazes met.

"It's nothing," he replied with a little shake of his head, leaning in to steal a kiss to her soft, finely-curved cheek.

Helen's sharp gaze flicked between him and Memnon where he was talking with his father, and whatever she saw, they didn't talk about it. She merely frowned, touching the back of his hand, and turned forward again.

Five days.

Five days of battle. Memnon had sent the older son of Nestor, Sthenelos – and Diomedes, when he came to his companion's defense – as well as Menestheus off the battlefield, alive but injured. Memnon and Achilles had clashed twice, and the first time the king of the Aithiopians had been injured in the thigh, though the very next morning he'd been fine, much like Achilles had been off the battlefield only one day when Penthesileia injured him. Yesterday, Memnon had killed some young Achaean commander, who'd come to Nestor's aid after Paris had – once again, and he felt almost bad about it, but what was that old man doing on the battlefield, on the front lines, anyway? – killed one of his horses.

Paris hadn't seen it, already leaving, but he'd been drawn back in the uproar that followed. Achilles had torn up the battlefield to retake the corpse, and today...

Today was almost like the day after Patroklos had been killed.

Even far from Achilles, the air of the battlefield was oppressive, and Paris felt vaguely nauseous. Something was happening today. Memnon had briefly led them across the ford, glowing in the morning sunlight as if it was blessing him. Paris didn't like it. It reminded him too much of Hektor, though there was no sense of Apollo's blessing in the glare flaring off from the gleaming bronze scales of Memnon's chest armour, nor the polished curve of his helmet. The cause was rather Memnon's divine mother, perhaps, or her brother.

Paris stood upon Batieia, squinting against the glare of the sun as it turned past noon's pole. He fired an arrow that took a handsome Achaean in the shoulder – he was pretty sure it was one of the sons of Theseus, for the man who came to protect him from having his life's breath fully stolen by a nearby spear or sword and sent him off the battlefield looked very similar to him. Further out on the field, closer to the ford they'd been forced back behind, Memnon had deprived Telamonian Ajax of both his spears. They were facing each other with swords, and seemed rather evenly matched, neither giving ground, but neither, too, able to push the other back or get past the other's shield. It was, almost, beautiful; the son of Telamon was an ox, his movements heavy but no less graceful for that, in the way a mountain was. The son of Eos and Tithonos was a lion, strong and heavily built but yet more sleeker than his opponent, certain and firm in his strikes.

Off to the side of them, lurking by Ajax's chariot, stood a slender, dark shadow, his bow held half-ready, an arrow dangling from his fingers. Teucer. He'd twice been about to properly nock that arrow, and twice resisted, fighting with himself to not deprive his brother of his kill or the glory of it, of insinuating his brother needed Teucer to interfere.

Paris hadn't yet taken aim at his cousin, but it was a near thing. He thought he could make the shot from here, really---

"Memnon!"

Achilles had clearly tired of driving the stragglers across the ford. Or, more correctly, tired of slaughtering those too isolated from the bulk of the army to make the crossing and had caught up.

Ajax stepped back and Memnon let him, turning to face Achilles with a toss of his head that rippled his braids and his beautifully tended beard. Paris' gut twisted, fingers so tight on the arrow he was gripping his knuckles ached.

A mortal son of the divine had to fall by Achilles' hands before Achilles himself would fall.

And though Paris had seen Ileus almost face that fate as they retreated across the ford today, the glare of the sun had speared Achilles in the eyes and Ileus had slipped away. Another man had paid the price of Achilles’ rage.

A week, Apollo had said. The time was up, and the only mortal son of the divine standing there to face Achilles, proud and certain, was Memnon.

And Paris... Paris felt guilty for how much he wanted it. Hektor would finally be avenged. Hektor, Lykaon, Troilos, Mestor, and everyone else. Memnon didn't deserve to die just for this, but Memnon was reaching for glory like all the rest of the princes and kings on this battlefield, and he knew what might come of it.

The battle lines stuttered, halting in their business as all attention turned, helpless to the energy gathering around the two demigods, towards Achilles and the nephew of Priam. They even made it a proper duel, exchanging the throw of spears first. Memnon got the first cast, and it did nothing for the numb weight in Paris' gut. Black tar dripped down his spine as Memnon threw and Achilles' shield rang, metal struck with metal, and the spear even bounced off.

Achilles threw his spear; it flew as if it was an arrow, as if it wasn't as large and heavy as it was, and it tore through Memnon's shield, catching him in the side. Not enough to kill him, but it wasn't relief that sat bitter on Paris' tongue to be swallowed down as both men drew their swords, lunging forward at each other.

One strike; it reverberated through the air, sticking in Paris' chest.

Two strikes; a quick parry-feint that slid the blades together, sparks falling in a shower along the bronze, fizzling in the summer-dry grass.

Three strikes; Memnon stepped sideways out of the thrust and it should have been enough. But Achilles was fast, faster than his fellow demigod. He twisted around like a striking snake, a flicker of bronze and unevenly-chopped hair, and lunged forward, pressing past Memnon's guard and shield, thrusting clean through the chest armour.

For a moment, Achilles was pressed as close as a lover to his opponent, who fell against him with a shudder, head falling forward. The sun caught in bronze, in something liquid dark as it poured down Achilles' shoulder, dripped down his back. With a heave, Achilles shoved Memnon off himself, and the king of Aithiopia tipped slowly backwards, slack and heavy. He slammed to the ground with a meaty thump and a faint, clattering ringing from the scales of his chest armour.

That sound hung in the air for a moment, filling the stillness. Then Achilles laughed, shaking the blood off his sword as he looked around.

"Any who wish to try to take the armour and body from me is free to make the attempt," he called as he stepped forward to claim his prize while a ripple went through the men around him, especially the Aithiopians.

They stepped forward as Achilles knelt, unconcerned for the threat of them. His armour caught the light, a rainbow flicker somehow reflecting in the blood staining his shoulder. Blood shouldn't reflect a rainbow. And Paris shouldn't be able to see that at this distance. The air grew thick, and from above them all a rainbow arc shot down from the sky with an unholy, discordant shriek accompanying the glittering spear of light.

In the next moment Achilles was flying through the air, slamming hard enough into Telamonian Ajax the huge man actually staggered, and by Memnon stood a woman dressed in the delicate, flushed colours of the dawn.

There was nothing delicate about the expression on her face, however. Paris didn't need to be close to see that.

"My son! Unlucky me who bore you, mortal as you are!" Eos wept as she gathered her son in her arms, spilled over her lap. "My son, my child, your father's gift to me, cut short in the flower of life. You had so many with you, and none of them--- Not a one of them, could stand beside you to ward off this fate!"

Eos shook, swaying over Memnon's corpse where it lay like a babe in her lap and arms. She was a star on the battlefield, overwhelming in her presence; anyone too close and not having retreated quickly enough was on the ground, bleeding from the eyes and mouth, regardless of what side they professed to belong to. The light seemed pale around her, making her glow all the brighter – except no. Paris glanced up, somehow finding the strength to look away from the grieving goddess, and saw stars on each horizon. The sun was a wan disc in the sky, and growing dimmer yet. Eos' own brother was grieving with his sister.

The goddess of the dawn slowly stood up with her son still in her arms, tears pouring down her fair cheeks. She turned her red, glowering grief not on the Achaeans, but the gathered Trojans and their allies.

"If you will not protect my son – your king, that I gave to you and who has led you fairly! – in mortal life, then you will follow him in death!"

Eos lifted up from the ground, and with her over half the Aithiopians present, shrieking, took to the air – as birds.

The sky was heaving, filled with the screaming of birds and the rustle of their wings as the goddess disappeared with her son. The battlefield was still for a stunned moment after, everyone staring at each other, at the sky, and at the trampled, shimmering spot Eos had knelt in. A fine jangle of shifting bronze drew attention as Achilles stepped forward, picking up his giant spear.

"As I have lost the rightful reward such a warrior's armour should have been to me, I'll take that kleos from the men still living," he declared, immediately lunging forward and scattering the Trojans and their allies like sheep.

There were too many people, moving too much. Even this elevated spot couldn't give Paris a good shot. Frowning, he looked around, hands tight on his bow.

Achilles – and the army with him – would kill as many as they could, all the way up to Troy's walls. If he retreated to the Scaean gates, he could make the retreat of some of them more safe, and perhaps... The Scaean gates, after all, had been where Hektor had fallen. It would only be right if Achilles found himself dying there, too, unable to take the city even now.

Without lingering further, Paris ran down Batieia and back towards the city, shouting for the gates to be opened and planting himself there, right next to one of the two huge sphinxes that guarded the doors.

The retreat was a mess; Achilles tore across the battlefield much like a herding dog would chase its sheep, and the disparate army of Troy was very much like sheep, right then. Penthesileia turning up and then falling, Memnon coming on her heels – hope had been poured into their wine like water until there was little wine left to be found when each time the cup had been upended.

Paris squinted into the distance, stone against his shoulder, and picked off another Achaean while a near-hysterical Aethiopian soldier, one of the few left, ran past him. His layered tunic and skirt that seemed more like it was made of strips than anything else, so deep was the fringe, rippled about his knees near hypnotically. Several more, Trojan, Dardanian and others from their allies near them, ran past him, and Achilles came ever closer.

This would be it. It must be.

Achilles, towering in the mourning half-light, cut another fleeing Aethiopian down, and Paris gritted his teeth. He'd be close enough very soon. But he moved like the wind, fleet-footed like none other, and though Paris knew his skill, he also knew he couldn't pin the son of silver-footed Thetis without aid.

"Kill him, my archer."

Apollo stepped in behind him, and light bloomed in Paris' veins, spilling out like gold and replacing his blood.

"Kill him for your brothers, kill him for my sons," Apollo whispered, laying a light hand on Paris' elbow and his voice ringing like deep-roaring lion, proud and furious, in the canyons of a mountain. "No one will stop us, this time."

Mestor, rightly proud and skilled, yet killed among the sheep and cattle like he was nothing but one of them while aiding in Aineias' escape. Troilos, too young, murdered at Apollo's altar like an obscene sacrifice, hacked apart as if the ghost of a thirteen year old could ever be a threat to his killer. Polydoros, a little older but not by much; either way not old enough for Priam to allow him out onto the battlefield unless desperation should squeeze them all far tighter than the loss of Hektor already had. The others, before Hektor himself fell; among them Lykaon. Paris' heart stuttered again at the thought of him. Three of the quintuplets, old enough, certainly, but they had found no bodies while searching the battlefield. They must be dead, though. That was the only possible answer to what had happened to the three of them. Something they'd only realized a day or so after Achilles' furious rampage across the battlefield.

That day had been very long. Especially considering--- Hektor. Paris swallowed down a shudder, unable to finish that thought, unable to think about all the things attached to that name, and focused on Achilles instead, quick even when burdened by his armour. He needed to be brought to a standstill. He needed to be killed.

It was not hard, in the end. Not with a prayer on his lips and a god – their god, the stormgod of the army, lord of the silver bow – at his back.

Paris fired his first arrow, knowing he needed Achilles slowed down. The only way to do that would be to repeat what had happened to Diomedes, weeks and weeks past. He just needed to be quicker than Achilles. Strike him before Achilles saw, and if he couldn't, then he'd trust Apollo to see him - them – through to the goal.

The god's hands burned, light yet heavy, where one rested on his elbow, the other at his waist.

Achilles saw him. He turned around just after killing his current – opponent wasn't even the right word, here – prey, and saw him, but then clearly saw the god, too.

A flicker of some expression across his face, yet even so Achilles lunged forward, quick as lightning, too quick for Paris to adjust. But Apollo nudged the arrow onto a new path to make up for swift-footed Achilles' speed. It sheared right through that slice of unprotected skin the heavy greave didn't cover, that the leather of the sandal couldn't protect, piercing Achilles' ankle. A little further and it would have pinned Achilles to the ground, too. Achilles staggered, unable to hold up under his torn tendon.

Wounded and nearly immobile, but not dead. Not yet.

Paris nocked his second arrow.

He held it for a second, and the memory of Hektor fleeing this monster when he knew Hektor would not normally ever run from anyone, and had, however glancingly, met Achilles in battle before, was sick and acid in his thoughts, in his heart, in his gut. If Paris would have thought any of them should die at all, either of the two of them, he would have thought he would be the first to fall. But Hektor wouldn't have allowed that, not even when he'd several times just recently rather wished for his little brother's death. Because Hektor would not let any of his family die if he could stop it. And so it was instead Hektor that was dead, because Hektor could not hide, not before it was too late, even when that would save his own life.

Stiffening trembling fingers, stilling the bow, Paris let the second arrow fly. Divinely crafted armour was no match for divine strength, for as the arrow sped true by Paris' skill, Apollo drove it in and through.

Achilles toppled to the ground with the whole weight of the Achaean army in his great body, and, with a fleeting, terribly gentle brush of divine fingertips over his heart, Paris slumped against sunwarmed stone in the wavering twilight as Apollo disappeared, tasting iron and triumph on his tongue, feeling hollow.

Hektor was, after all, still dead.

Chapter Text

"If he was capable of killing Achilles all this time, why didn't he do so sooner?"

Around a number of disassembled chariots to be tended for maintenance while the Achaeans mourned their greatest warrior now fallen, stood Deiphobos with a few other brothers, half-brothers, and peers. He wasn't particularly quiet as Paris passed, but it wasn't a sentiment Paris hadn't heard muttered in his wake any number of times in merely the past twelve days.

Ignoring them, Paris continued away from the palace's stable courtyard, passed between the chariot storage buildings and out onto the central courtyard, drenched in golden sunlight.

Indeed, why hadn't he?

But rather the question was; how could he have?

It wasn't like he hadn't tried when the opportunity presented itself, even before Hektor was killed. If any arrow even touched the son of Thetis and Peleus, the armour deflected it with the impenetrability of a mountain standing against a storm.

Once, though, he had left a pretty little scratch on Achilles' cheek.

Mostly, it was as if he lost all his skill in the moment he fired at Achilles. The arrows wouldn't find their target; at best they would steal the life-breath of some other man. Not that Achilles was the only one, though it was the most obvious, like looking into a still, clear lake compared to a sprightly little mountain stream when trying to catch one's own reflection, when it came to Achilles.

An arrow in Agamemnon's arm, below the shoulder protection; another in Meriones' hand as they inadvertently fired at each other, each aiming for someone else; Nestor's oldest son, once almost taken by an arrow to the throat, but not quite deadly deep enough to send him to Hades. He'd caught the sons of Asklepios with an arrow each to a knee, one after the other; he had taken the eye of a commander named Guneus, wherever he lived in the lands of Achaea; Paris had, once again, almost snatched the lives from Phidippus and Antiphos with careful aim and intent. Not because they, as the sons of the king of Kos and the islands around there ought to have been one of Troy’s natural allies even if they each had been one of Helen's suitors, but rather because they had certainly received his father's herald on the matter, taken the gold given in the promise of aid – and then never fulfilled it.

Paris could, frankly, more easier count those among the Achaean kings and princes he hadn't injured in some manner than he could not. That didn't change that Achilles had somehow been the most untouchable of them all, and not just because of his speed or the shining armour he'd arrived at their shores with, never mind the set he'd worn after Hektor took his original set of armour off Patroklos.

"He was untouchable, my dove," Aphrodite announced softly where she was suddenly walking alongside him. She wound her soft, white arm around his shoulders with an ease that lightened Paris' heart.

"My lady..?"

There was a weight to that statement that had nothing to do with armour or speed – or even, perhaps, potential divine protection when both of those qualities failed.

"A year before the first muster of the Achaean forces, Thetis received prophecy that her son had two possible fates," Aphrodite continued, a small, dismissive moue to her sea-shell pink lips. "If he didn't participate in the war, he would live a long life, one gifted with many descendants, but he’d die unknown, with little kleos. If he came to the shores of Troy, his life would be short, and great; undying kleos would be his."

"He chose the latter," Paris commented, pressing in a little closer to his goddess, who tightened her arm around his shoulders in response, a pleased glitter in her deep green eyes.

If he could've had the choice of Achilles, instead of the one he did have... The thought collapsed immediately, his heart quavering. If such a split fate would've meant staying under the yoke of slavery if he chose a long life over that of undying kleos, the choice was clear. No matter how pleasant many-fountained Ida might be, and so the company of the nymphs, and, especially, at least in the beginning, Oinone's, he couldn't countenance it.

Not if it meant no access to the perfumes, jewellery and fine, brightly coloured fabrics could have like this. Not if it meant no Hektor, no Lykaon. Not if it meant no Helen.

… And, he would easily admit, not if it meant not meeting Menelaos, however briefly they had touched with no hostility between them.

No, he wouldn't have chosen differently from Achilles. Not if it meant staying a slave.

"He did, against his divine mother's wishes and her attempts at ensuring he wouldn't have a choice to make." Aphrodite nodded as she led the way through the walled little courtyard and into his and Helen's extended part of the palace. "But because of that choice, there was never a chance Achilles would've fallen before the right time. Even if he had come to Troy without divine armour, and not been gifted new such from the skilled hands of Hephaistos when he lost his father's armour. Even if he had no weapons but those of lesser make, if he'd played Ares' games without a stitch on his body; he simply wouldn't have died before the kleos he was due had come to him."

Paris nodded, sighing. Of course, Achilles had come with such gifts to Troy; divine armour, replaced with new; a spear they all heard tell was the work of Chiron; divine horses gifted his father at his wedding by Poseidon. The son of Thetis and Peleus was also a great warrior, and so, whether by divine favour or his own great skill and strength, simply hadn't needed the safety his choice had granted him.

"I just wish..."

Paris’ thoughts wavered back over the past twelve days.

His father coming down the stairs from the Skaean gates to meet him as Paris retreated back inside, incredulous joy warring with the crushed hopes of his nephew's death. Those broad, gently wrinkled hands clutching his shoulders, but even as Priam praised him, there was a darkness in his eyes, that same, unstained sea-green as Paris' own. The grip on his shoulders had quickly become too tight as his father quietly wondered why he did not always show equal valour as he had in this moment.

He didn't wonder why Paris hadn't killed Achilles earlier, no. He asked something that was, by all accounts, reasonable, and Paris knew it. But... his father had never looked at him without that darkness in his eyes, even when his hands remained gentle, his voice fond.

His mother had met him out on the central courtyard, rushing forward to clutch his cheeks, asking him if he was all right, if it really was true what he'd done. Paris didn't doubt Hekuba's care for him, but there was always a desperation in her touch, a guilt.

The less said about his siblings, the better. Polyxena was the only one who had expressed nothing but surprisingly vicious joy at his success, with no further feelings on the matter. Even the brothers – that were still alive – Paris had most often gotten along well with shared the sentiment Deiphobos had throw against his back just earlier. Not uttered with the same sneering rancor, perhaps, but it was still there. Paris didn't even begrudge them, no matter how impossible what they wished for was. The tension, like from a badly wound rope soon set to fray and snap if put under the wrong stress, that had been there from the beginning, though smoothed away into a kind ease with some of his siblings, was now entrenched too deep.

Maybe if he'd been here from the beginning, maybe if his mother hadn't had that dream, he could have had something more. Maybe then he also didn't have sometimes think of firm, calloused hands, tired faces and bent backs and a tiny, one-building home. All of that which had, despite everything, held love for a small child and a young teen, though he wasn’t Agelaos and Ulilawiya’s own.

Aphrodite stopped them before the door to his and Helen’s apartments, turning him around to face her. Her hands on his cheeks were warm and soft, cupping him as gently as a girl picking flowers for a sacrificial garland, or to make a crown for her sweetheart, might pinch off blossoms in the flowering meadow, anxious to cause no damage in her work.

"My dove, while the mortals might not appreciate this feat of yours, coming at the only moment it could, alongside Apollo and the spirits of his son and your brothers, know I, too, am pleased." Aphrodite leaned in and down to press a kiss to his forehead, soft and lingering. When she continued speaking, her lips brushed against his skin. "Hektor was a fine man and good husband, who deserved more than he was given by the Fates, so to see him avenged, knowing the son of Peleus would be – no, undoubtedly was – insulted by his avenger being who and what he is, understanding none of the worth and the delight of you, I take joy in it."

What Aphrodite was responding to wasn't exactly what he'd meant or what he'd wished for, but Paris still smiled, eagerly pressing a hand to the back of one of Aphrodite's. It was still a joy he soaked up, for her pleasure was always sweet, and he lived for pleasing her.

"I couldn't ask for more than to bring you delight and joy, my lady, and I don't really care if none of them understand. As long as I avenged Hektor, I'm content."

Her smile curved like a bow against his forehead, then Aphrodite straightened up and left, strolling across the courtyard in a sweet-smelling, sun-lit flutter. She disappeared at the gate out onto the central courtyard, and Paris went inside.

A week later the Achaeans were still quiet, but a force arrived unexpectedly from Mysia. Paris leaned against the window, arms crossed over his chest, while below his father greeted the son of Telephos and Aunt Astyoche. Another cousin come. This one, though, had been entirely unexpected, unlike the less-expected but lately informed arrival of Memnon. Not that Telephos and Aunt Astyoche hadn't sent reinforcements, led by the sons of Arsinoos as they were and come a little before most of the rest last year. But that force hadn't been anything official, as such. Chromis and Ennomos had revealed that after Telephos came to Teuthrania's aid and rebuffed that mistaken Achaean attack and been injured by Achilles, he'd promised the Achaeans he would lend no aid to the Trojans.

The force the sons of Arsinoos thus led was entirely voluntary, though it hadn't come without some pointed comments from Telephos, uttered to the open air, regarding his wife's concern for her natal family's safety. Still, since then Aunt Astyoche had been rebuffing her brother's hopeful requests for further aid.

And yet here was Eurypylos.

Had he taken this upon himself? Had his parents relented? Had Priam found some way to convince his sister to convince her husband, if the son didn't need to be convinced, but had rather been kept from his desire to come and win glory for himself and his parents? There was no telling; Eurypylos' face spoke of nothing but determination and quiet pleasure at having arrived.

In the light, his cousin blazed. Not as much as Hektor had, not at all as much as either Aineias, Penthesileia or Memnon either, for that matter. So much less than Helen, of course, who was possessed of her divine father's lightning charge simmering within her limbs, in the gleam of her pale eyes. But some traces of divine ancestry through his grandfather could yet be seen in Eurypylos, too, and he was tall and broad-shouldered, his jaw firm. The sunlight caught a surprising hint of red in his brown hair, turning the already rich, ruddy shade into something that almost blazed.

Blinking, Paris looked away. Then back, watching out of the corner of his eye as his father led Eurypylos towards the palace, and out of Paris' view from this vantage point.

The red in his cousin's hair made his thoughts wander to another man whose hair blazed in the sunlight, but even brighter than that deep, ruddy tint. Was Eurypylos' eyes pale? Did he share his mother's naiad-nymph green eyes, or something browner, from his father maybe? Did they look at all like the summer brown, amber-glowing eyes of Menelaos when he stood in the light?

Heart twinging, Paris closed his eyes. It wasn't that long since he'd been relatively close to Menelaos physically. It was much, much longer since such physical proximity had been anything but hostile.

He tried not to think too much about the younger son of Atreus. There was no point to it. Yet now, his heart and mind both wandered, for Eurypylos' broad-faced handsomeness seemed to share in some angles a similarity to Menelaos. His cousin, of an age to Paris himself if he remembered right, would be a little older than Menelaos had been when Paris had come to Sparta, fifteen years back. Again, the similarities between them were most certainly probably entirely illusory, except for what the ties of the same divine ancestry lent. Yet Paris couldn't help but compare Eurypylos' clear, untroubled face, unmarked by wrinkles, and find himself looking at Menelaos' similarly unburdened features.

Menelaos had had such a pleasant laugh, and his hands---

"Alexander? Are you okay?"

Shuddering upright as he opened his eyes and pushed away from the window, Paris smiled down at the frowning Polyxena. His little sister was one of the few who'd still look at him with such earnest, heartfelt concern.

"I'm fine, merely lost in thought. Shall we go greet our cousin?"

Smiling brightly at Polyxena, he wound her arm in the crook of his elbow and set off, laughing softly at her annoyed huff at being carted off.

The next day there was a war council.

"---an opportunity we've almost squandered in the soon to be near a month since Achilles fell. Further, as strong Polites, as always swift on his feet, has found out for us the son of Telamon has fallen as well. Each a bulwark to the Achaeans, now no longer able to defend them. Despite our losses, grave as they've been, isn't this a great chance to free ourselves of the flies attempting to swarm a corpse not yet dead?" Uncle Asios barked, slapping his thigh.

Hekuba's older brother was a whip of a man, corded muscles in his arms and legs and a few, fine wrinkles worked into his face. He was the oldest of the warriors who still took to the field or the wall, insisting on it even if he didn't enter battle every day when there was an exchange of arms several days in a row. Despite being in his mid-sixties, his eyes were clear and bright, his strength of hand certain; being the son of a nymph daughter of the great river Sangarios, he was bestowed a certain gift of vitality.

"I agree," Agenor announced where he stood near the wall, arms crossed over his chest.

"Agenor!" Antenor glared at his son, and Paris rubbed his mouth, not quite smiling behind it.

Not that he actually agreed with Agenor or his uncle, if only because both of them meant they should push out onto the field. But even so, Antenor's frustration was pleasing to Paris’ heart, as much of a thorn in his side as the old man had always been. A respectable number of Antenor's sons agreed with him. Or at least wouldn't disagree with their father's opinion and arguments in council, or anywhere anyone who wasn't of their family might hear them say anything else, but certainly not all of them. Agenor was usually one of the ones who, if not agreeing with his father, at least didn't disagree. Until now.

"No, Father. Those rabid dogs has as of late killed many of my brothers – your sons, honoured Father – and as Lord Asios says, this is an opportunity, with their greatest warriors now having gone below the dark earth. What better time to push and avenge my brothers as well as all our kin and fallen comrades from our windy Ilion as well as Taruwisa and beyond?"

"I say listen to him – to them both," Eurypylos declared as he stepped up, back straight and chin raised, spreading his hands.

Again the light falling in through the windows brought Paris to mind of lighter, paler hair, but still with that lovely reddish tint. Eurypylos was taller, but not broader than Menelaos, however.

"You have suffered losses, grave losses, as of late, where even the greatest defender of his city has fallen and been treated not as if he was a royal son with great accomplishments in defending family and home behind him, but as less than a dog. And while I cannot claim to be the son of the divine, such as both the fair Amazon queen and glorious Memnon of Aithiopia both were, Herakles himself is yet my paternal grandfather, and he was the strongest of demigods to walk among mortal men.

"My mother has a mother's heart, and this was why she has been holding me back, not for any lack of trust in the strength of my arm or my skill in the games of Ares. I won't claim to contend with the daughter of Ares and the son of glorious Dawn, but my abilities aren't insignificant, and my forces are willing and fresh, ready to defend our kin and countrymen from these invaders by driving them from your shores."

Ah. Hand briefly pressed to his chest, Paris had to admit that Eurypylos fairly glowed in the light as he spoke.

His eyes sparkled, his confidence reverberating outwards like the shock of an earthquake shatters the land in waves, as if solid ground might be nothing more but unsteady sea in the hands of the Earthshaker himself. Menelaos had never been quite that impressive a speaker, but his quiet firmness had something to say for itself, too.

No matter.

"Your arrival has surely been a gift sent by the storm-god of the army as much as by your parents, cousin," Paris said as he stepped up, smiling up at Eurypylos. "And none, least of all I, would claim not to be thankful, or hopeful, knowing you come ready for war. But even if Achilles and Telamonian Ajax are now both dead, their losses weighing heavily on the whole Achaean army, surely we might have better chance defeating our enemies by using the walls as they were intended.

"With such strength joined to ours and keeping to the divinely-built walls, what force could we not withstand, whatever the Achaeans might throw at it, or pray for? Let them hurl their bodies against the marble, and let us rain down arrows and javelins, protecting the gates; concentrating our forces in such wise should let us easily turn away a wavering force, one that can be discouraged by just another gentle push."

A murmur rippled through the chamber, though Paris couldn't quite judge the quality of it. His father, at least, seemed like he might agree. If Priam spoke up, his council would follow him, and that might be enough to sway the men who would actually be fighting.

"How dare you so boldly suggest we retreat like fawns into the forest?" Deiphobos scoffed loudly, and Paris didn't move at first, but slowly turned to look over his shoulder. His brother's smile was more a baring of teeth, his eyes dark with scorn and impatience. "The killer of Achilles himself – is this all you amount to, brother? Your strong arm, with the gods' blessing, bent the bow and fired the arrow, yet now that you can take the second shot and kill the stag, not just injure it, you hesitate?"

The thing with Deiphobos was, he could be eloquent, sometimes. Often, he didn't bother. Often, he foundered over the words, having little patience for finer speech. And then there were moments like these, where what he wanted aided him in being persuasive instead of his wants tripping him up, or making him feel it wasn't worth it.

"With our cousin here, with the Achaean losses, it's now we should push forward, to avenge the fallen and finally drive these rabid dogs away."

"Then you should do so," Paris said lightly, even as he turned on his heel. "But if the army leaves the wall behind, you do it without me."

The army, of course, left the wall behind. Paris had, of course, not at all expected his silly ultimatum to weigh anything against the desires of many others. It wasn't an ultimatum at all, really; it was just him saying what he would, and wouldn't, do. The wall was right there! They'd lasted for nine years, relying on it! And though Eurypylos was a warrior in the same vein as Mestor and Hektor, as Paris watched the distant dust clouds rising into the sky from one of the windows that looked out over the citadel hill in the right direction of the plain, all he could think of was that Hektor, too, had fallen.

To Achilles, yes, and Achilles was no longer alive, but that didn't leave the Achaeans with no great warriors. Diomedes, uncouth and faint of spirit in the face of a wound delivered by arrow – by Paris – as he was, was a starving lion, claws and teeth sharp. Agamemnon wielded his weapons well, too.

"It's now the second day they're out there, and Eurypylos has proven an able warrior," Helen said behind him, standing by her loom. "Why are you still here, Alexander? Why are you being like this once more, voiding the kleos and goodwill you gained by felling such a warrior as the son of Peleus himself, such a shadow and bane to Troy as he was?"

"I care little for the kleos – it's meaningless to me, and I'll let the generations to come sing of such an accomplishment as they will, or not. As for the latter..." Laughing, Paris turned around, leaning back against the windowsill. "You have ears as much as I do, wife. My desire, yours are even sharper than mine, I should think. What goodwill? So why should I participate in actions that might get us killed even faster, instead of one that might, if the gods smile on us, let us not just last longer, but survive?"

"Whether on the wall or on the field, they'd last longer with you there. You well know it, for your skill isn't insignificant, especially with the weapon you do prefer – so use it, lightening your father's heart, pleasing mine, and aiding your city!" Helen reprimanded sharply, turning around after she'd batted her latest row into place. Her thick brows were knitted above her flashing gray eyes, a storm brewing in her heart that Paris could taste like thunder about to be unleashed. His skin prickled.

"Would it?"

"What now?" Helen scoffed, though the sharp tilt of her brows and the harsh turn of her mouth both softened slightly in confusion.

"Would me going out there do any of those things, Helen? What would it accomplish? What's the point?" Paris asked, spreading his hands wide. "If Hektor wasn't enough, if Sarpedon wasn't enough, if neither Penthesileia nor Memnon were enough, exemplary warriors all of them, and three of them mortal offspring of deathless gods, then what am I supposed to do? They all fall, again and again, each time they come..."

"Alexander---"

Helen didn't continue. Her frown was completely different now, and it was she who looked away first, lips pressed thin.

She knew something.

Of course white-armed Helen, daughter of Zeus, knew something; she saw much, and understood even more. But she knew something, and Paris' smiled tightly, his heart and gut both heavy at the sudden understanding. Yet somehow that avoidant turn of gaze drew words out of him he wouldn't otherwise have said, wouldn't otherwise dare think half as articulately outside of the half-awake haze in the middle of the night, having woken from a dream.

"And besides... I can't help but hope, that if my mother's dream omen wasn't fulfilled by me and the apple I gifted, then, perhaps…"

His chest hurt. His smile did too, as he pulled his hands back in pressing both of them, palms down and spread flat, to his chest.

"Perhaps, as ridiculous as it is, if I don't go out, if none of us do, if we keep to the wall in stubborn, practical defense that confers no glory, perhaps the destruction I am meant to bring to Troy, if all this already doesn't count, might be an ignoble fading as this war leads to nothing. As old age takes all of us before the Achaeans leave in vain or Troy falls to their spears, earlier deaths all forgotten in the emptiness of such an endless wa---"

"Enough."

Helen's eyes were wide, her mouth not wide open only for the grace of tension that kept her face frozen. Slowly, incredulous shock bled over into outrage, into rage, as Helen sharply shook her head, chest trembling with her heaving breath.

"Is this how my husband should speak? Is this how he should speak of all those who have died so far, offering their lives to retake or help keep what you have gained, wanting it all to be dragged out so long as to mean nothing, those deaths?

"Is this how you should speak about me, who has gained a name, painful and shameful as it is, from this war he now wants to peter out into nothing? A name heightened to glories no other mortal woman could call her own, a name far beyond what even my beauty gained it, even if that kleos, too, is more than any woman should have. And you would have it all mean nothing?"

Paris shivered under Helen's stare, sliding sideways and away from the window behind him while she stalked forward, her eyes ablaze and her pale face glowing.

There was no question she was the mortal daughter of Zeus in that moment, a divine rage charging her every step and thickening the air. She caught up to him before he could push off the wall and move past her into the room, even though Paris also had no real intent of escaping her – no conscious such, anyway.

It was difficult not to be filled with a primal, unthinking need to flee right then, just as he had wished to do, not even getting as far as he did just now, when Hermes and the three goddesses came before him.

"Helen---"

"No," Helen snapped, crowding him up against the wall as she caught one of his placating hands mid-air between them, pressing it against the wall over his head. Her other grabbed him by the chin and tugged his face up to meet her storming, cloud-gray eyes, dark with her fury. "Saying such things, do you think me not worth it, despite what you said before?"

"What?" With Helen's fingers digging into his jaw, it was a little difficult to speak, but Paris managed. "Of course not. What does that have to do with wishing for such an end to the war?"

He couldn't even manage anything beyond bafflement, so confused was he. What did anything of what he'd said had to do with not thinking Helen worth it? If that was true, he would've given her up long since, if he could've stomached the idea of insulting Aphrodite in such a way. Which, really, Paris could not, so he supposed he would've insisted on not giving his wife up either way.

"Alexander, you..." Helen stared down at him, her eyes still blazing. "What am I to do with you? Why... no, how are you like this? A man and yet not, lighter than air even though you're capable of bringing down a storm of hail, but you don't value it. Fifteen years, and I still don't understand it. Or you, a delight and frustration in turn."

Her fingers on his chin lightened enough to caress instead of grip, and Paris shivered, lashes fluttering. Helen made a noise in the back of her throat and lunged forward, her kiss half teeth.

Later, with twilight staining the sky outside the bedchamber’s window and Helen heavy where she was sprawled on top of him, her pretty ivory toy still buried inside his yielding body, Paris wasn't so much exhausted into sleep as floating in the pleasant haze of lingering pleasure. She was still pinning his arms above his head, rolling her hips every now and then though they were both shuddering from oversensitivity at every slight press and brush against and into tender places.

"Go out with the army tomorrow," Helen whispered against his throat, making the words a kiss against skin that was bruising. "For me, my Alexander."

Still riding the gleaming arc of pleasure that had surged so many times Paris wasn't quite sure he'd ever come that much before, with Helen's thrumming words a quiet demand, Paris had no defenses left.

"If you want," he said in a breathy murmur, turning his head to kiss Helen’s temple while he draped his arms around her shoulders in a loose embrace.

Slowly, Helen finally let go, though merely so she could wind her arms around him in return.

It was only when she gently bit where she'd been kissing, and then rose up to take his mouth in another kiss, that Paris realized what he'd agreed to.

Chapter Text

The Achaeans still couldn't seem to hold fast against Eurypylos.

Paris was pleasantly surprised. Yet there was still a knot in his gut. Penthesileia had held the battlefield with more or less outstanding success for longer. Memnon too. Was this to be the change, or merely another link in a chain that they already knew what it looked like?

Cursing as he missed Eumelos – as a flicker of something flashed through the air just after he fired and his arrow went a shade off-course from where and how he'd aimed it – Paris surveyed the field spreading out before him. Grass and untilled ground and scattered trees. The river was behind them, for Eurypylos had pushed the Achaeans back across the ford and then led the Trojans and their allies to follow. Paris didn't like it. Nothing good ever seemed to come of pushing across Skamander's ford.

He wished he hadn't come out here. He wished Helen hadn't said what she said, when she did so, to convince him to do so.

He cared little for his own kleos; he knew it was empty and pointless. It was as a sheep wanders past a freshly-killed deer, taken down by some clever predator but chased away before it could eat its fill, and the sheep will not touch it though it be a good meal, for the sheep has a meadow full of sweet grass and the bloody meat is meaningless as something to fill its stomach with. He simply truly did not care. What he considered important laid far outside the sphere of battle, such as men ought to care for. It was also because, and he knew it well – kleos was given by those around you, family and community, and Paris had hardly endeared himself to those in these matters, no matter his potential skill when he did do so.

Helen, though. His shining, divine wife, lovely, long-robed Helen, cared for her kleos. Kleos she could only gain indirectly, kleos she shouldn't have, kleos given her name for her beauty and not her actions and accomplishments in battle, as she might wish. She was worth it, was worth it all, and knowing what she thought on the matter, though it meant little for himself...

Paris hadn't been able to refuse her, when she asked like that, having bent him to her will after their bodies and hearts had mingled. And so he'd come out here, though sore unwilling.

Cresting a slight rise on this side of the river, Paris paused as the battlefield heaved, the Achaeans turning back around. Sunlight flashed across the bronze armour of the princes and kings, slid warmly down the leather and glared brightly in the quilted linen of the warriors of lesser means, the peasants with even less. Among them, the light played along the reddish-blond instead of reddish-brown tail of tied-back hair as its owner whipped around, shoulder-to-shoulder with a much shorter as well as broader man.

Odysseus, Paris barely paid attention to aside from firing an arrow near reflexively, though it twanged harmlessly off the king of Ithaka's shoulder guard. Menelaos, tall enough to either see over the heads or around the shoulders of the men around him to meet Paris' gaze, he couldn't turn away from.

Aside from the duel and the brief moment they were surprisingly close on the battlefield on that exhausting, long day Patroklos died, Paris hadn't really seen him, even less passed close by. Before that, the closest they'd been had been during the embassy. And before that... Sparta. Fifteen years ago. Even across the distance between them, small yet vast enough to seem an entire ocean, Paris could see the lines carved into Menelaos' face, lines that hadn't been there fifteen years ago. He carried them with grace, and Paris' fingers itched to run along them like he'd run his hands down Menelaos' shoulders and arms, caressing his face, all those years ago.

Impossible, of course, and not just for the hungry flash of rage twisting Menelaos' face after a moment of almost soft blankness as they stared at each other. Menelaos shoved the man in front of him aside, drawing breath, but movement in the edge of Paris' vision had him whipping around, sharply firing the arrow that'd hung limply from his fingertips as he and Menelaos stared at each other.

It wasn't Teucer. It also wasn't Meriones, and neither was it even any of the common soldiers, whether with javelin or those that carried bow and arrow, or slings. Wielding a bow that seemed slightly too large for him, was a warrior dressed in gleaming bronze armour like any of the other kings and princes, but it was someone Paris had never seen before.

Not that it'd matter in a moment; the stranger had frozen, his own arrow not yet nocked where it dangled from his fingers, feather to the string. They both knew Paris' arrow would---

A shimmer in the air. Light glancing off gilded bronze, reflecting rainbow as tasselled snakes flickered restlessly about an armoured chest. A large, curling crest of gold set the ivory and bronze helmet alight as gorgon-crested Pallas Athena turned her head, gleaming gray eyes narrowed as Paris met her gaze, heart cold in his chest.

The goddess turned the arrow away and was gone.

The distraction cost him; the warrior nocked his arrow and fired, though it wasn't a very good shot. If Paris hadn't been struck still by the sight of the goddess as a shepherd might when unexpectedly coming across a snake, green at the sight of it as it rises from a tumble of stones and unable to move at first, he might have avoided the arrow entirely. He still twisted away, but the three-barbed arrow-point scored the back of his hand as it flew past, twanging off the shin-guard of someone behind Paris before it disappeared among the crush.

It shouldn't have been much of a wound. It wasn't much of a wound; it was barely a scratch, a couple drops of blood beading up and no more than that. Yet, as Paris reached for a second arrow, the same as his opponent did, apparently intent on trying to finish this instead of moving on, a biting chill cut up through Paris' arm.

His fingers cramped as his breath knotted up in his chest, lungs aching. Pain lashed out down his spine and up into his head, spreading outwards from his left arm like a lightning-caused wildfire in high summer.

It hurt.

"M-my lady---"

His mouth was too dry. His tongue thick and clumsy, too stiff from the sudden desert in his mouth and throat, and even those few syllables seized up his face from the pain of speaking. He couldn't move. He could barely even see, his vision blurring with the rise of a screaming pressure behind his eyes and a thumping burn in his heart, only spreading the pain further and faster.

"I am so sorry, my dove," golden Aphrodite whispered, the silver bell of her voice carrying a barely-there tremble as she bent in over Paris' head behind him, her arms a warm mist wrapped around his torso as she pressed a kiss to his forehead, right below the rim of his helmet.

The fall of the goddess' dark tresses around his face obscured the arrow aimed unerringly at Paris' pain-frozen form. Aphrodite's kiss ensured he felt none of the pain as the arrow pierced his eye and went deeper. There might have been someone shouting his name, a shocked thread of anger – grief? – in his voice, but Paris didn't know any more than that.

Helen knew something was wrong before it became clear what, exactly, was wrong.

Maybe that was overly generous towards herself. But also – why would it be? She might not be gifted with mantic powers, but Helen knew she saw far more than most, gifted with prophecy or not. So this morning as she watched her husband dress in his armour, she'd thought of Hektor, staying outside the walls. She'd thought of calling Alexander insensitive to nemesis, and how that would come back to him.

Maybe she was just feeling guilty. There was, certainly, a hard, tiny little knot of it in her gut. For her Alexander, as little as he understood it given how little he valued it himself, still was one of the few who took her desire for kleos seriously. Wanting too much, wanting things you shouldn't. Of course Alexander understood. But that was no reason to feel guilty for having asked him to go out onto the battlefield for her – it was what he was supposed to do!

She should've used that approach earlier, in truth, if it could've had a quicker and more consistent result than either hard insults or sweet words had both produced.

Maybe---

Scoffing at herself, Helen gave up her position at her loom. She was getting no work done, and what little she had gotten done was sloppy; she'd have Elektra unravel it. Perhaps today was a day for spinning, instead. Yet, she'd barely turned to pick up the basket when the clatter of hooves and wheels on the flagstones outside drew her attention, and as Helen drifted towards the window, she knew what she would find.

Polites, already off the chariot, bent down to pick up the lifeless, handless, corpse of her husband.

Helen had taken a step away from the window before she realized it, her gut crawling. She felt no satisfaction and she felt no grief, for she couldn't be happy Alexander was dead, yet to grieve him was an insult to so many. But that he'd gotten his hands cut off... It could only be Menelaos who had done it, for who else should be allowed to touch the corpse in such a manner? Who else had the right? Helen's heart quavered. Alexander had done nothing she hadn't. Alexander might have been able to go home, and to rely on his family to close ranks behind him, but he, really, had done nothing she hadn't.

She had taken that hand willingly. She had taken what their stunning Trojan guest had offered, and she'd done so willingly. Eagerly, even, if she was supposed to be honest.

Menelaos might just as well cut off her hands. Shuddering, Helen dug her nails into her palms, then wrung her hands until she was rubbing her wrists in turn. What a thing to think, that her first husband would do such a thing to her. That her Menelaos would do that. To her.

Maybe it was just the guilt.

Hand pressed to her mouth, Helen stepped back up to the window, but Polites and his empty burden had already left the courtyard.

She'd gotten him killed.

She'd gotten Alexander killed, because she'd asked him to go out on that battlefield for her. And not because it was what he should do, as a son of Troy and as her husband. Not really. Helen could still so clearly remember the sick chill that'd choked her when Alexander wished for the war to drag on for so long it'd be meaningless, old age and habit wearing them all down and making a mockery of what ought to have been glorious, for all its pain and tears.

Such an outcome wasn't possible, for she knew very well what her divine father had told her. Yet Alexander had said it with such hope, and it'd sickened her. And now---

"My lady? What's happened?" Korinsia asked from where she stood by the basket with the most recent piles of wool to be carded and spun, her old slave's wrinkled brow knitted, her voice soft and dry.

"Alexander is dead," Helen said, her voice hollow, as she slowly turned away from the window, and Korinsia sank down to the floor in shock.

She didn't wait to be fetched, if anyone would. Besides, who knew if either coming down, or not coming down, on her own would count for or against her, in such case? Instead, Helen left what'd been her home for the last fifteen years and walked back into the palace as the army filtered back inside the city, and it didn't take much searching to find the room Alexander had been put in, near the entrance of the main hall.

She passed her father-in-law standing in the shadows between the hall and the adjacent room, with a blank, grimly distant expression on his face. He was squeezing his hands far too tightly by his sides, and his mouth, though pressed ever so thin, trembled. Priam didn't see her at all before he finally turned around and left.

The room itself wasn't empty, but it was also not crowded. Pammon, Polites and Dios were all here, and though it was rather expected, Helen still found herself surprisingly pleased. Pammon and Polites' wives stood behind them, with little Priam clutching his father's hand. Kassandra, incomprehensibly, stood next to Laodike, with Polyxena on her other side. Laodike smiled faintly when she spotted her, arching her brows in invitation, but Helen shook her head. There were a few others in here, but Helen wasn't caring to pay enough attention to mark them. Aineias and Eurydike followed Helen inside, and maybe it was her closeness to the two them that kept Hekuba from glaring at her. She wouldn't have cared if she had.

Alexander looked small where he lay on the bed, emptied of both psyche and that nearly inexhaustible fount of energy and cheerful lightness he'd taken with him everywhere. His hair had been arranged to partially cover one side of his face, and quite artfully so.

It was still obvious what had killed him, by the shadow of the sunken eyelid under the spill of curls.

A blanket was pulled up to his waist, and hid the lack of hands. Helen's heart was squeezed as if by some giant Cyclop's fist, and she had to look away.

The mourning women clustered around Hekuba seemed muted even as their voices rose. There was some lack of intensity that everyone pretended not to notice as Hekuba stepped up to stroke a pale, shaking hand lightly down the pale brown tresses of her son's hair. Of the boy who shouldn't ever have grown old enough to be able to grow his hair out that long.

Helen knew she should have been first, but her mother-in-law hadn't even glanced to her before she stepped up. It didn't matter.

"Alexander – oh, my child! Dead! Fairest and brightest of my children, you have been taken from me, and grief upon grief are the burdens you leave behind for your mother, instead of tending to me in my old age! The hand of Heaven is in our suffering, and I knew it well upon the night I bore you forth; if only I had taken the both of us, you wet with birth, myself weighted by exhaustion, down into the black earth that very same night, to be embraced by the Sun Goddess of the Earth. That would have been the better thing, so I wouldn't have lived to see the loss of so many of my sons, the loss of my husband when the Achaeans tear through our city, the loss of my daughters – loss unending!"

As the mourning women raised an accompanying wail, Hekuba bent down to kiss Alexander's pale brow. Helen, watching the corpse of her husband closely, saw her mother-in-law whisper wordlessly against that smooth, untroubled skin. Heard her breath just barely form the words that to not have seen him home again after she lost him the first time would've been the greater loss.

Hekuba drew back, veil pulled over her head and weeping – yet she had the strength to shoot a narrow, wet-eyed stare at Helen as she strode forward. She took her Alexander by the head and smoothed the hair away, so she could see the ruin of his eye.

She wouldn't hide from it. She wouldn't hide from any of it.

"Divine Alexander, beautiful as a god, most charming of the children of Priam – you have called yourself my husband, and you have answered as I called you the same. Husband, my husband, to you and I a bitter blow this your wretched death is; wretched the both of us, that I followed you to Troy, and would that I had died before that, snatched by the Hounds of Zeus or dashed upon the waves as the ship that brought such ruin to us, to Troy, and to Achaea, pitched me over the side instead of carrying me safely back to your home together with you!

"Troy's greatest defender is gone, that man of my brothers-in-law most dearest to my heart, and with you, too, now gone, who would offer me a kind thought, whether Trojan or Danaan? They all shudder at me! And yet we have to live through what Zeus the highest, leader of the Fates, has apportioned to us, and see it through to the end."

Hiding her hands among the folds of her dress as she stepped away, Helen was empty. Empty of grief, of tears, her cheeks and eyes dry. Because crushing weight in her gut wasn't grief. It was barely even guilt any more.

It was something worse.

Something she had been sure she'd long since discarded the possibility of, for how Alexander had been acting throughout the war; loss. Even as her gaze was laid on the corpse of her former husband, beautiful even in the ruin of death, as she retook her place she glanced to her side, expecting to see---

What was no longer there.

What could no longer be there.

How could her heart have the temerity to miss him? At all, let alone already? Grinding her teeth and digging her nails into her palms did nothing. Watching as Polyxena took a step forward, intending to speak and then breaking down in tears, did nothing.

All it did was make the bubbling, sucking tar pit in her gut deeper. Alexander had always been so sweet. Polyxena had loved him.

Kassandra took her little sister in her arms, and instead Laodike slipped forward. It was impossible to tell what she thought, but though she barely touched Alexander's head, the light from the lamps caught a faint, brief glimmer of wetness in her eyes. Helen didn't hear her sister-in-law speak. She wasn't paying attention any more, and left as soon as she might; Alexander would be put upon a funeral pyre tomorrow evening and she had little desire to re-enter this room until then. Or even then.

At least that's what Helen had thought.

The evening dragged the tar in her gut out of her and spilled it to coat everything. The rooms of what had once been a home were empty in ways Helen had never expected them to be, and that somehow felt like more of a betrayal than having left Sparta at all.

She wandered back and forth, not quite able to settle. Her steps and thoughts both were interrupted by Elektra coming in with Laodike at her heels, and Helen closed her eyes, turning her face away from the one of the closest companions she still had here in Troy.

"Oh, Helen," Laodike whispered, taking her hands in hers. "How are you?"

"I don't know," Helen replied, surprising herself to be as honest as that – she'd thought, she'd intended, to present herself more grieving of the loss. Alexander was still Laodike's brother, sharing the same parents, whatever else her feelings might have ended up about him being.

"Then there's two of us," Laodike said, with the same faint, kind of halting smile she'd given Helen earlier in the room Alexander's corpse was laid out in on her face. "Let me help you get ready for bed."

Helen let her. It was rather pleasant, to lean back into Laodike's hands instead of any of her slaves’, even Korinsia's. Laodike did it because she wanted to, whatever else she felt. Helen's heart beat slowly, sick and swollen, as she sent Laodike off.

Inevitably, her thoughts wandered back to what she'd been thinking about before.

Soon enough, it wouldn't matter what she felt about these rooms. With Alexander dead, there was little reason to indulge him or honour the goddess by not breaking a marriage golden Aphrodite herself had ordained. Not that potentially doing such had hindered voices such as Antenor's from arguing Helen should be sent back to her first husband within the last few months as well as early on in the war. But Priam had never given in – not even when Alexander had lost his duel with Menelaos, even if Aphrodite had saved him.

Now, though, there was no reason not to send her over to the Achaean camp. Helen stared up at the dark ceiling where she was laid out on a couch instead of the bed, and shifted her jaw. She knew her being sent back would probably not convince the Achaeans to leave. Not now, so late into everything. Not so close to a potential victory that wasn't so difficult to see. And most of the army wouldn't greet her happily, but Menelaos--- she wanted to see his relieved face. Maybe that would remind her heart and mind both that there was nothing to miss in these rooms, in that bed, or in her hands.

Scrubbing her face, Helen turned over. She hadn't been able to sleep in the bed – too large, too cold even in summer, too empty – but perhaps sleep was not for her at all this night.

She'd not thought of her first husband much for years and years, because she had cares enough. Thinking about what she didn't have wouldn't bring her any closer to it. She didn't like much to torture herself when she didn't know how long she would have Alexander or for how much more she wouldn't have Menelaos. But now – it was over now. Troy hadn't fallen yet, but for her – how could it not be over, now?

By mid-afternoon the next day, Helen had stopped herself far too many times from leaving her rooms to go down to that other room. Maybe it had something to do with the funeral pyre slowly being built, while the other dead were being gathered up as well. The thought of fire destroying Alexander's body seemed antithetical to what he was. The empty body on that bed was even more contrary to Alexander's nature, however.

Once again, she was getting no weaving done.

"My lady," Astyanassa murmured as she came up to her, eyebrows arched and a look on her fair face Helen recognized.

"What is it?"

"At first I thought nothing of it, overhearing a couple of the servants talking," Astyanassa said with a shake of her head, sorely testing Helen's patience for this roundabout approach. "But then, on the way back here, I passed by one of Queen Hekuba's sons, talking with some others. He said that even if his father might be minded to send you back, he would oppose it because it'd be a loss, this late in the war and with such great Achaean warriors dead. He also said he thought it'd be shameful to leave his brother's wife a widow for long, when there are unmarried brothers to marry you to."

Staring at her slave for several long moment, Helen pressed her lips thin. "Go back out. I want to know if you can find any others saying similar things. Elektra, Panthalis, you go as well. Spread out through the palace."

If any others harboured such ambition, they would surely know better than to talk about it aloud, or at least, where others could hear. But if any of them still were, she wanted to know who, and how many. Who was more important, however.

"If you don't know which of Hekuba's sons you overheard, find out," Helen added grimly.

If, among Hekuba's other, still alive sons, it was some of the younger ones, that was awkward but probably not very dangerous. Among Priam’s unwed sons of other women, Helen wasn't sure any of them would be a credible threat to any legitimacy or weight to such a desire.

Marry her!

When most of them had spent fifteen years quietly – or not so quietly – furious about Alexander insisting on his marriage. Yes, of course some of that would be jealousy, it was inevitable. But that such sentiment might carry them through denying what now more than ever should be done, was infuriating.

Two hours later Helen stood before her purple web with an empty, all-consuming buzz in her ears such as when rowdy children have disturbed a bee hive with sticks, beating and shaking it until the whole hive comes pouring out in furious search of the assailant, filling the air with a steady, threatening hum – so there was little space for anything else in Helen's mind.

Her slaves had found that five of Priam's sons had voiced the same desire; Archemachus and Deiopites were sons of concubines, if none of the enslaved ones, and thus not even sons of secondary wives and posed little threat. Hipponous, what with being younger than Alexander by five years, and Helen with no memory of him being particularly favoured with his father among the sons of Hekuba, was probably equally no true threat. But threat wasn't the only thing that mattered, for to voice these things anywhere outside the locked chambers of their own hearts and minds before Alexander was even put to the pyre was insultingly shameless.

She wouldn't have worried, even so – but the last two who shared the same ambition were Deiphobos and Helenos. Grinding her teeth, Helen stared at nothing but couldn't clear her mind enough to stave off the flood of little moments where she'd caught Deiphobos staring at her. Or at Alexander while she sat beside him, with an ugly envy on his face, terribly disguised. Helenos, in contrast, she could find little moments she’d seen in watch her. Not none, but that was to be expected.

Him speaking up was most surprising of all, for he’d seen how he watched Andromache. Perhaps one was just as good as the other.

"Fetch warm water," she proclaimed, brushing a shaking hand down the rich, purple fabric of the cloak still attached the loom, not yet finished, sour fury and insulted chill twisting up her gut. "Enough for an ewer-full, and a basin. Do we have any of the pure rose water?"

"A jar, still, my lady," Panthalis said softly, her eyes wide and her face a little pale where she stood in the edge of Helen's field of vision.

"Then put it in the water. Bring the rose oil as well, and a comb. The finest of his tunics and shoes, the jewellery as well. And take this thing off the loom – Korinsia, sit down."

Helen caught her oldest, if not quite by age then by time spent with her, slave trying to struggle up from where she'd been sitting carding wool. She'd still not recovered from the shock of Alexander's death yesterday, and privately, Helen thought she might never. Korinsia had taken a strange and immediate liking to Alexander, even as early as back in Sparta.

"Allow me, little Helen," Korinsia requested, her voice thin and face exhausted.

What else could Helen do, but acquiesce to her, if with a frown?

She had Astyanassa help Korinsia carry the water and the clothes as she strode down to the room Alexander's body lay in. It was close enough to when she would need to clean and clothe his body for the funeral anyway, so staying there a little longer would be unremarkable. Andromache had, of course, spent almost all the time with her husband's body between them getting it back and it being put on the funeral pyre. But that was Andromache, and that was Hektor. Helen... had felt no desire, no need, no grief enough for such a thing.

The shameless and embarrassing empty ache in her chest could not be soothed by spending time with Alexander's corpse, after all. For no matter how beautiful his body still was in death, there was no point without the spirit to light it up from within.

The room was deathly quiet when she stepped inside, and despite the protests, at least from Korinsia, she sent the women away. She would do this herself.

She'd taken Alexander into her bed, into her heart, by herself; she'd also taken his hand by herself, and so she would dress him for the last time she would see him by herself as well. Arranging the clothes on the bench, Helen paused at the cloak, stroking a hand over a stretch of it.

The wool was so fine, and she knew it was as much of a waste to consign it to the fire as Alexander's fine tunic that lay beside it. The cloak wasn't even finished.

Memnon and Achilles were half-done, with nothing below their waists done with the way her hands had been disobeying her lately. Thus Antilochos, who she'd intended to be at their feet, was lost entirely. The last completely finished scenes she'd woven in had been Alexander and Apollo shooting Achilles, paired with her brothers leading her from Aphidna. But finished or not, Helen couldn't imagine letting this cloak be brought out of Troy.

It didn't matter if it should be by Menelaos' hands, though he surely deserved it, or someone else's; this cloak would remain here. And what better use, who better to wear it, than this poor, sweet husband of hers?

Helen walked over to the bed, putting the filled basin on the floor. Decisively she yanked the blanket off – and froze.

Alexander had his hands back. There was barely the thinnest of a pale scar circling each wrist to mark where they'd been reattached, to mark that they'd been hacked off.

The air smelled very faintly of a divine sweetness Helen had breathed in many times with her face buried in Aphrodite's fair neck or generous bosom. Pressing her lips thin, Helen stripped the corpse without paying any further attention, but as she put the wet, rose-smelling cloth to his skin, she looked her second, now former, husband over properly.

Abrasions from being dragged during the fight over his corpse had been smoothed out into bare redness. The ruined eye socket, where Philoctetes' killing arrow had struck, had been healed as well. He looked much like Hektor had, protected and healed from any of the indignities the Achaeans and Achilles had dealt him.

Her Alexander, however, didn't have even a sliver of his older brother's authoritative royalty in death, a dim dignity Hektor's heroism had wrapped about him after he'd finally been brought back to Troy. Even so, with his body restored the plaintive unfairness was clear to see. It would have frustrated her just days before.

Now, Helen stared down at Alexander and found no other emotions than exhaustion and that clinging sense of emptiness.

Alexander hadn't been a warrior, no matter his skill with his bow or acceptable ability with sword and spear, and he'd never pretended to be. Hadn't wanted to be, and while a scrap of frustrated scorn pushed itself up amid the quiet sense of loss, it couldn't overwhelm it. He'd been something she'd found charming until he should've been something else, and perhaps it was at least impressive he had stayed true to himself as well as not just survived, but lived, for this long. The former had probably a lot to do with the latter.

And for all what Helen had hoped and others had said through the years, with her – now former – husband dead she was still not leaving Troy.

She'd known that she wouldn't, despite all the talk that it'd be better if she went back to Menelaos. Alexander was but a single man; for all those comments, no one had ever pushed past his refusals to give her up.

That had been part of the reason for the first seed of her bubbling anger at Alexander failing to step into a role he ought to. If he should refuse to give her back to Menelaos – not that she'd actually wanted otherwise initially, even as worried as she'd been, was, for Menelaos' safety – Alexander should then fight for it. For her.

Fought he had, if often unwillingly, his opinions on war not very fitting for a man.

And in the end, Alexander's wants and decisions didn't even matter for why she was in Troy. Maybe that was ungenerous – maybe Priam would put his foot down about the matter, like he'd never done with Alexander. But that at least five of Priam's sons had already voiced their desire to take her as his wife, with Alexander not even buried – certainty sat heavy and sick in her gut. She'd always known how this would go, but pretended not to. Alexander's firm denial of giving her up had been easier. It had been something to blame.

"Why this, then?" Helen whispered as she put the last earring into his ear and then tucked a long, curling tress behind Alexander's ear, light catching in the gold she'd dressed him in and in his softly pale brown hair. "It might not be further abroad in this land that should've stayed unfamiliar to me in its entirety, but I am still to be given over to another Trojan prince, for your greed?"

"Oh, not I, Helen." Aphrodite stepped out of the air with a shift of sweet-smelling fabric, no disguises this time. Her smile was sharp but the fingers briefly coming to rest on top of Helen's by Paris' ear were light and soft. "Mortals are capable of giving in to their desires without me, responsible as you all are either way. Quite a few have lusted after you since you arrived, too, as expected. But only one can prevail, especially so in the face of the weight of this decision."

Helen didn't waver under Aphrodite's divine stare, the weight of it burning the top of her head. But finally, she had to bend, turning away to make sure the belt was tied properly. Alexander was dressed in purple and soft, dark rose, in a sea-silk belt and white gazelle leather shoes. She'd made sure the jewellery brought down that he now wore were his favourite pieces.

Only one thing had she saved for herself, selfish as it was. That was the double-headed eagle medallion, the one Priam had once scratched his newborn son's name into the back of.

"I thought---"

"Troy would never have given you up willingly as soon as you stepped inside its walls, as little as the Achaeans could allow you to flee their shores," Aphrodite said, bluntly interrupting her. "But it's very handy to have been able to deny that, isn't it?"

Helen refused to blush under Aphrodite's tiny, mocking smile. Instead she looked up with a glare, though by now it wasn't Aphrodite she was angry at.

"It should be over."

Aphrodite paused in lightly brushing Alexander's cheeks, healing the remaining abrasions a little more and truly making it seem if he really was just sleeping, a pleasant dream colouring his skin with a delicate little flush. The goddess didn't so much as glance at her while she touched her lips and then pulled off one of her rings. It was gold and the stone shimmered blue-green – Helen had never seen its like. But it seemed right that Alexander should wear a ring like that, matching his now-closed eyes, though only one carried that unspoiled colour any more. Aphrodite picked up one of Alexander's hands with dainty carefulness, as if he was the woman between them, and pushed the ring onto his finger, to join the one already there.

"Don't cling too much to should. You know it's not that easy. For what it's worth, I won't approve no matter who Priam gives you to. And whoever wins, you won't have to suffer him for long." Aphrodite leaned in across Alexander's body and kissed Helen's cheek before she disappeared.

Helen closed her eyes, left alone in this room thick with incense to cover what ought to have been a growing scent of death. Of course her father-in-law, though he'd been so kindly to her in the years since she arrived, would end up giving her away. She'd known that, too, the second she heard Deiphobos' name, no matter if all the ones who might wish to claim her had spoken where her slaves could hear, or not.

Biting down on a sigh, Helen opened her eyes again.

Alexander might mean nothing to most of the Deathless Ones, mean a mess of complication for everyone still alive inside Troy's walls. But Aphrodite, terrible as she was, really had doted on him in a manner attraction had little place in, for all of Helen's no longer so recent accusation. Her former husband wasn't Hektor, yet ambrosia had been used to keep even the bare suggestion of approaching decay away until the funeral this evening.

It really had been easy, to be able to hide behind Alexander's refusal to give her up.

Easy not only for her alone, and Helen wondered, a tightness in her chest and about her mouth as she touched that soft, prettily flushed cheek and bent down to press a kiss to cool, but yet surprisingly supple lips, what they would excuse themselves with now.