( closed ) everyone's a building burning

[heelies]

CHARACTERS: Achilles, Patroclus, Olivia
DATE: After the fire
WARNINGS: Nothing right now
SUMMARY: A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

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[heelies]

[As when dawn reaches its rosy fingers across the sky to reveal to man all to which he was blind during the night, so too does recognition strike Achilles. In his ebullience, just as in his rage, he had thought only of himself and assumed that all around him would bend to his selfsame wants. Yet now he sees that he was wrong. Well does he remember the jealousy that had burned in her bosom upon his recounting of the years passed upon Scyros, but then she had borne this fire for another woman: that his love for Patroclus might sear her heart in this same way had not occurred to him, for men and women are such separate matters.]

Olivia... Patroclus is my kin - we were boys together in my father's house, and later under the tutelage of Chiron upon Mount Pelion. He is my brother in arms, who lent himself in loyal service to me when for Ilios I set sail in the fleet of fifty ships granted by Peleus. For nine long years we let rage our spears across Dardanus' plain and tended to the wounds of our comrades the Myrmidons as well as one another's. For these same nine years we took pride in the treasures we pried from the bloody jaws of battle. Through all of these trials and triumphs he has stayed steady by my side.

Yet you speak true, for such words cannot hope to describe all that he is to me, just as it would be inadequate to call a storm that which rends the heavens in twain to unleash a torrent of rain and a fury of thunder hurled by Zeus almighty. Truly Patroclus is my second self, inside whose breast beats half of my heart. This I burned upon his funeral pyre, and this I poured into the golden urn alongside his precious ashes.

[He can see how each truth he inflicts upon her flays her flesh and rends her tender heart, yet he cannot still his tongue. Out here, where the world is shrouded in a pall of snow, the silence is made palpable, but he strives nonetheless to reach her with his words.]

Indeed, I believed that never again would I love nor feel my heart fill with joy - for how can a broken vessel hold any water? I had only my fate to look forward to, that I might meet the shade of my dear companion upon the Acheron's far shore. Yet then I was blown off course, and thus we collided as perhaps we never were meant to do.

[Perhaps in the beginning she has served as a distraction, someone lovely and warm in whose fleeting company he could delight while still he staved off the end of mortality. Then slowly and all at once this had changed: although she could not replace the missing half of his heart, she had patched what remained of it and so gave it use once more. At present he takes a step nearer, his hands purposing to take hold of hers once more.]

You are my wife, dear Olivia - I love you no less today than I did yesterday.

[winces]

[ there is a numbness creeping upon her unlike any she had ever felt before. she can count the number of times she'd fallen in love on one hand, and each had gone and passed like the setting sun. each time her heart had broken, but as the world continued to spin and the sun continued to rise, she had learned, too, to spin and rise again. and though each love is different, and she knows as well as anyone that one can never truly compare to the other, she had never once thought it possible to hold two loves at once, when her heart at times feels unable to contain even just the one. here again she feels her heart breaking, but a part of her is beginning to wonder if it had not already been doing so in these past few weeks, where here now the final pieces seem to splinter off, leaving behind a hollowness that threatens to consume.

achilles, too, had been a lovely distraction. a balm to soothe her aching heart, when another among them had left her broken and healing. he was perfect in every which way, delighting her with affection, spoiling her with attention. he was the exact combination of everything she had been too ashamed to ever ask for in another, and that large, selfish part of her indulged where a wiser woman might have stepped back to better assess it all.

perhaps she only has herself to blame. perhaps if she had been stronger, smarter, less selfish — perhaps she could have spared them both. ]

But still, you love him more...

[ her words now are not confused, not edged with the sharpness of accusation. now they are quiet and cold, like the winter dessert around them.

half my heart, he said. my second self.

there remains between them a foot or two of empty space, breached only by his hands hoping to meet hers. but her limbs feel heavy, and her heart heavier still. she cannot bring herself to reach out and take what she no longer feels is hers. ]

What is a wife to you, Achilles? [ it seems now all she can ask for is clarification, enlightenment. but never before had she thought that their views did not align, or that he might consider one to be mutually exclusive from the other.

she realizes her mistake now, of course, and though a large part of her already knows... still she seeks to hear it, woven with the words she has thus far become so susceptible to. ]

[heelies]

[They are once more shivering wet and cold in the verdant hush of the forest surrounding Oska, and he cannot adequately explain to her the heft of his love nor the customs inside which his heart is accustomed to operating. So too are they are one more in their shared chamber in the castle, dancing wordlessly in one another's embrace to stitch shut the silence as their disparate tongues could not. Then they had relied on touch where words had failed, but now she will not allow him this comfort: between them the air grows ever more brittle and his hands fall empty by his sides.

Achilles, she calls him - not her lord, nor her love, nor her song. Uttered thus his name is a hard bud unwilling to bloom.

It is once more all of the mornings he had awakened to find her gone from his bed, when first she had been granted a glimpse of the path Fate had set for her, the woman she would become and the family she would have without him. It is the night she had brought her daughter before him, and the night she had lent herself as a crutch that he might hobble back to town with his wounds mended but his pride mangled still. Between them he feels every fracture that ever has run through their hearts, each compounding the other to split ever wider until there remains naught but what is broken.]

A man requires a wife that he might find comfort in her embrace and support in her words. By his side she is faithful and obedient, and if the gods so bless their union she shall bear for him strong sons and beautiful daughters. All this you have given me but for children of our own - dare I dream that still we might have time to make this so?

[He steps forward again, but this time it is not her hands for which he reaches, but her hair, that which he had fallen in love with first. His fingers trace over one of the soft strands, as he has done so many times before, never failing to delight in how fine it feels beneath his touch. He rues now how in the calamity of the fire he had missed his chance to watch her comb her hair and fix it into braids, as has grown into a part of his own morning routine in the home they had here begun to make, the home that now is little more than ashes and ruined timbers.]

I know how your heart aches, but is it not enough that I love you? No matter my love for Patroclus, he cannot be my wife - for this task, there exists only you.

[winces]

[ once more he reaches for her, and this time she does not shy away. in truth, his movement allows for her a distraction that she might look elsewhere than the intensity of passion that burns in his eyes, the very same stare that would always make her so weak in the knees. she watches as his fingers dance over a lock of her hair, unbraided and fallen from the haphazard bun she'd hastily piled on top of her head since that morning's chaos. similar strands fall all around her face, in pastel rivulets down the length of her back, like the leaves of autumn that signal an end to spingtime and summer. it is a touch she is able to tolerate, for she feels nothing but a ghost of the touches she would often crave.

in her ears, his words ring like distant church bells, a sound that must have once been meant to be placating and welcoming, now somber and dull with obligation.

comfort, he says. comfort in her embrace, support in her words. obedient.

faithful.

when she finally speaks again, it is with the slow uncertainty of someone who is clearly struggling to understand, yet with a guarded hesitation of someone who also realizes she may not want to. ]

So I am... your wife, [ she says, and never before has a word uttered by her mouth sounded so despicable before, ] while he is... your soulmate.

[ there is a hollow pang in her chest that threatens to weaken her knees in another way. her mind swims and her breathing grows thing with this revelation, and still, somehow, she finds the ability to continue to speak. ]

And you mean now to — to have us both?

[heelies]

[His fingers tangle deep in her hair, brushing now against the curve of her skull, no longer a mere shadow of his affection, for entwined with her hesitation grows his desperation to keep her in his grasp. They are once more dancing by the flickering light of a dozen bonfires upon the shores of Nalawi, and once more entangled in one another's embrace atop his cloak where it unfurls over the grass. Thank the gods for your stubbornness, she had said, and he answered, Are you now glad that you gave into the desires of your heart? They are once more curled together in the cramped tent which housed them all across Zeta-12; and in his grand bed in Oska, surrounded by the trinkets with which she had given the space the feeling of home; and in the bed they had left for the last time this morning, in which they usually lingered well after the sun has risen. She is dancing, and he alone is her enchanted audience; she is weaving flowers through his hair and laughing for the absurdity of such a thing; she is clinging to him fiercely and crying not because he had been lost but because he is alive, and her tears streak through the dust which the collapsed cavern did pour upon him, so like a cleansing rain they are.

And through all of this, she is radiant. Through all of this, she is his.

All these moments he feels slip through his fingers like the silky strands of her hair. In the pit of his stomach grows apprehension for her words which are as embers dulling upon the hearth, and at once he wonders if when she turns to go he will be able to draw her back this time.]

I know not how I can live any other way. I can leave off loving you no more than I can leave off loving him - what doctor has yet invented the tool precise enough that I might choose which pieces of my heart to excise and which to keep?

[Such is his selfishness, which long has shadowed his every step. This too he cannot let go of.]

[winces]

[ had it really only been four months since their fateful union? four and some change, if one were to count her extra two there upon the shores of nalawi where she'd been left to sit and daydream of their times together, the gentle and heated moments they'd so tenderly shared in the first exciting few steps of their dance. sixteen weeks hardly seemed like enough to encompass all that they'd gone through, the very definition of a whirlwind romance that had started off so perfectly, the only suitable ending would be that it not have one at all.

thrice their fates had threatened to divide them, and each time they held onto each other with more fervor and more desperation than the last. there by the quiet stream of zeta-12 where he confessed himself a man made weak by her love, the temptation of which drew him further from his glory, and thus from his own inevitable death. next still when she cried into the press of their palms upon his knee, and his soothing words reassured her that her future has yet arrived to snatch her love away from him and onto another man. and finally when the living embodiment of that future love arrived here, flesh and bone, they had both swallowed down the grim reminder with warm acceptance and more determination than ever to enjoy the time they have been blessed with now.

this again he might feel yet another test to the strength of their love, and yet another more for them to conquer together under the shield of their blissful and blatant disregard of fate, but for all her perceptiveness olivia cannot see where these moments might be similar. never before had he asked her to share that honored mantle of his. never before had she felt herself bereft of his whole heart. ]

I-I don't understand, I...

[ at last her body remembers how to cry again, and suddenly her vision blurs as her eyes well up once more. the realization of the destination of this conversation has begun to hit her, full force, and her body has grown too weak to fend for itself. ]

I would — I would never ask this o-of you, I—

[ surely he knows. surely he knows how selfish a creature she is as well? how much she needs for him to be hers, only hers, just as much as he once declared into the night just outside that once-standing saloon how desperately he wished to prove she were his and only his. she knows he knows, having felt that very same despair and grief and rage at just the thought of another laying hands and lips and heart where there should only be hers.

how, then? ]

How can you ask this of me?

[heelies]

[He watches her crumble apart like the beaten face of a sea cliff that submits at last to the persistent pressure of the waves that day by day have worn it down and wedged into its faults to crack them open ever wider - and just as man is helpless to halt nature's intentions, so too does he feel helpless to hold her together. He has only his hand in her hair, and the other now upon her waist, where always it has seemed to fit just so.

Presently Achilles realizes that never before has he been so frightened by the prospect of losing anyone apart from Patroclus. Long has he worried that his father would reach the end of his life, the news of which he would receive on foreign shores flung so far from his dear native land, from where he cannot see even the faint glow of the funeral pyre - yet Peleus had lived a full and honorable life, and thus his time was due to come. Achilles would grieve but he would then straighten his shoulders and move forward, for he was no longer a boy tethered to his father's side.

Briseis he had lamented when wide-ruling Agamemnon had stolen the girl from his bed, but his quarrel with the son of Atreus stemmed not from the fear that his spear-bride might never return to his embrace, but rather from the fury over his wounded pride. Deidamia he had left behind as easily as his fifty ships had left behind their wakes as their prows carved the wine-dark waves, frightened more by the threat of his fading glory than by the loss of his fledgling family.

Yet now looms the same presentiment to overshadow his heart as once it had when burned the beaked ships and he waited outside his tent for the glinting of armor that would signal Patroclus' return. No such signal ever came. So too might he wait in vain for some sign that Olivia's heart shall turn, that she shall acquiesce to his will.]

Will you not be faithful by my side as you have vowed by granting that I may call you my wife, and I your husband? What would you have me do, Olivia? Am I to hide the love that lives within my breast? Am I to deny that which is most true inside my heart?

[His voice cracks upon the jagged edge of his agony as the hull of a ship would crack upon the rocks that jut from the shoreline. How strange it is that something that was meant to bring joy can summon with it such sorrow, just as the shadow cast by a candle is inextricable from its flickering light. How strange it is too that his heart can be at once so swollen with not just one love but two, yet so hollow for all this.]

[winces]

[ where his words had once been the calming song to soothe her ailing heart, they now strike her where it hurts the most, far deeper than her healer's hands can reach. his plea here, his attempt at an appeal — it stings worse than any injury she's ever acquired, and she recoils from the brunt of it with so much force that he might as well have struck her himself. ]

Faithful?

[ her voice pitches once more in her disbelief, weighted only by her extreme flaring of indignation. she is at once incredulous and disappointed, pained and alarmed. ]

You.. You want me to be faithful? While you—?

[ her words cut off, her hands flinging back towards the camp he had carefully created for them, wherein a home that should have been just theirs waits a man who has already achieved what she sees now was never meant to be hers. for while patroclus fills the hollow half of achilles' heart, she realizes all along she'd only meant to be the cradle that supports it.

is this the life she's meant to have? is this the kind of love she deserves? one of loneliness and afterthoughts, of staring at the backs of giants who remain just a little too out of her reach.

twice before she thought she could be fine with it. that she would not mind, so long as he was happy, to remain the the harbor to his sailing ship, left behind to do little more than sit and wait and be content.

but his love has made her even more selfish, bolstered a belief that she might not only be worth more, but deserved more, and to suddenly have that ripped out from her hands feels so incredibly cruel. she thought, for a moment there, that that feeling might finally be hers to keep. ]

No...

[ she takes a step back, and snow crunches beneath her feet. her hands reach out, not towards him, but against him, like a shield that shivers delicately in the winter wind. ]

I can't...

[ another step back, and then another, and slowly but surely each one after that grows steadier, more determined. she looks at him, just one last time, and tries to remember how happy he had made her. how happy yet they could have been.

somehow it only makes this hurt more. ]

...I won't.

[ there is some sweet sort of irony here, that through his love she has finally learned to speak up for what she wants... yet what she wants, he cannot give. ]

I'm sorry.

[ and she is, too, for all of it, for none of it, for her strength and her weakness and his love and his loves and all the things she is now turning her back to and running from. ]

[heelies]

[As Olivia pulls away from him, his lips part that he might sway her once more.

He wants to tell her of how he needs both her love and Patroclus' to hold steady his heart. Man requires the sun that he may live, for without its light he is lost in the thick shroud of darkness through which he cannot see, and from the barren soil no fruits are borne upon which he can sate his hunger. Yet so too does he require a hearth to which to return at the day's close, upon which dances a hearty fire that keeps him warm and wreathes him in comfort. How is he meant to endure absent either?

He wants to tell her too of how he loves her as never he has loved a woman. This he learned as their love unfolded like a flower that as it blooms reveals more of its petals: for while he had loved Deidamia, and Briseis, and other girls whom he had taken to bed, these were as strangers when compared to Olivia. Each had been someone whom he was with, but never something he was a part of. Each was someone whom he lay beside but to whose heart he never listened closely while his own beat so fiercely.

Yet his tongue in this moment is a dullard of a smith, in whose forge no tools of any utility are shaped, and in the silence she turns and flees.

On the night when appeared Lucina, that emissary of a far future, that portent of a life beyond their too ephemeral embrace, they had later lain together, Olivia and he. Then his name had broken upon her lips in the way that the blessed blood spilled of oxen's throats is poured upon an altar, as if to promise that such reverence was reserved for him alone, and in this love Achilles had exulted.

There is nothing he might say now to breathe into her heart the same feeling, the feeling that he is hers alone to love, for such a feeling is naught but a lie when behind him waits Patroclus, now more than mere ashes sealed within an urn, more than a memory that beats within his breast. When he tries her name nonetheless, it is weak as it unfurls from his tongue. In the sterile silence of the snow, its flight seems cut short.]

Olivia!

[On she runs, and were he to give chase he would easily catch her. Yet what can he say that she might return with him to what he had hoped to make into their home? What more can he say when already he has exhausted all his words?]

Olivia, wait!

[While she fades ever smaller, his swift feet stay frozen like tree trunks rooted in the earth. Left upon his palm is the soft memory of her hip, and in his fingers the ghost of her hair where once he stroked it. Achilles does not watch her vanish from his sight, for he turns and goes to his tent. Like the wine-dark waves when lashed by wind he moves, and his grief is plain upon his countenance as would be the imprint of lightning where it strikes against the storm-bruised sky.]

[achaean]

[ Patroclus drowns out the noise with his thoughts, pacing in their small tent that Olivia should be upset with Achilles and he knows not why. After all, she had wanted to be married! He knew that for sure, one did not simply refuse a marriage by a Prince of Phthia, a commander of armies, a worlds-renowned hero as Achilles is. Surely she is angry at something else, he thinks. The idea of marriage on another planet, or perhaps she is insulted by the idea of a brideprice. Perhaps on her world, the groom's family lavishes the bride in gifts. That can be arranged-- Patroclus can assist Achilles in retrieving gifts until she is sated.

He is in the middle of plotting when Achilles returns to their tent, ego bruised and looking crestfallen. His face, in mirror to his friend's, contorts and disfigures itself into a pained expression. He makes his way over to Achilles, raises hands to his shoulders in a steadying position. ]

You could not sway Olivia?

[ Worried as he is, he is even more worried still. Perhaps Patroclus should have acted as mediator, stepped in between them to sugar Achilles' words which are sometimes prone to bend under his moods. ]

Tell me this, what is it that her heart desires? I shall help you to find it, and we shall together persuade her return to your house. I meant her no insult, but I fear her wrath is a cause of my misunderstanding. I will find her and make amends, if only you will first enlighten me as to what grievous thing I have said.

[heelies]

[As a man would hold fast to the ruined timbers of his ship that he might spare himself from drowning, so too does Achilles clasp his companion's hand there where it rests upon his shoulder. The tears that have gathered in his eyes at last grow too heavy for his eyelashes to hold, and so they fall as rain would burst from a storm-swollen cloud. Patroclus speaks and all the while he shakes his head, mired still in disbelief: never has it been he who is left behind in his lover's wake.]

It shall not be enough - no matter how fully swells my love for her, it shall never be enough while still you hold my heart too. This she has made quite plain. It matters not that I love her as ever man has loved his wife, nor that I have cherished her more each day since first we lay together upon the shores of Nalawi. All the moments we have shared in one another's company are now as nothing to her, worth no more than the soot upon the hearth!

[For in her words, he loves Patroclus more. In his thinking he cannot love one more and another less, for no fair comparison can be drawn between the two, just as man cannot declare whether bread or wine is best when he requires both to sustain himself. The two loves that beat within his breast are of separate strains, the love one has for his wife and the love one has for his brother in arms, his second self. He cannot say how it is that both may nestle side by side; he knows only that this is so.]

What Olivia desires is that I harbor only her within my heart. Thus no love-sweet words shall ever persuade her. Death itself, which conquers even the best of men and kidnaps them into the house of Hades, had not the strength to take away my love for you. Just as I have loved you even after you were cast through death's hated gates, so shall I love you after I too have gone by that same grim path. Nor would I choose to leave off loving you if I could, as this would make a traitor of me.

[His words pour forth like the spray of the sea, the froth formed of its waves as upon the rocks they crash, carrying all at once his anguish, his confusion, his indignation.]

[achaean]

[ Patroclus does not understand, even as Achilles recounts for him this story, even as he watches his tears roll fat down his cheek. He thinks that perhaps Achilles has gone a bit mad in his grief, as what he is saying makes very little sense. Whoever heard of a woman so jealous to refuse her husband to love anyone else, even a Therapon who could not rightfully usurp her position and who would not even want to? Why else would he be so excited, marrying her off to Achilles as he is? ]

Do you not find this explanation unreasonable as I?

[ He brushes the tears away from Achilles' face, hand tracing down his arm and finally settling Achilles' into his palms, threading their fingers the way they fit best as two threads on a loom. ]

Surely there must be some other, and this merely a facade. How could she hope to control your heart when it is not something that can be contained even by its owner? It is an absurd notion, Achilles, you must ask her what truly strikes doubt in her mind for you.

[ He squeezes Achilles' hands then, and thinks of other things that might be the matter. After all, Achilles has a large heart with room and appetite for many, and if Patroclus felt any guilt for being the party standing in between the marriage, it's dissipated into a fine mist at the notion that Achilles would not just so easily love another after the wedding. So readily indeed is he struck by Eros' arrows that Patroclus would be unsurprised to find a whole quiver with Achilles' name engraved on the side. ]

Will you not give her chase? This is of utmost importance, Achilles.

gently welcomes you back from vacation

[heelies]

[Weighed down by sorrow as a branch is burdened by fruits, his gaze falls to the floor beside the humble hearth, where remains the cup from which Olivia had only begun to sip. What few possessions they had together managed to salvage from the blaze sit bundled beside his god-burnished armor and shield, there in the corner opposite the beds he had fashioned. All appears ready to welcome her home - some shade of home - waiting for her to pass once more through the tent's entrance as Achilles fears she never shall.

Again he shakes his head, and his fingers tighten in his friend's.]

What other reason could there be? Just yesterday all was well, and ere sleep shrouded our eyes for the night we lay together as is the way between man and wife. What more has changed between then and now, but for your return to my side? Is it the prospect of living in this hut that turns her from my arms, now that the house in which once we were guests has turned to cinders? No, this cannot be, for she and I have together shared meaner dwellings than this.

[He breathes in a breath as sharp as the jagged rocks that jut forth from the sea. His nostrils fill with the reminder of the meal that Patroclus still prepares, but where before his heart swelled with contentment for the new house he would settle, it now sinks in despair.]

I have neither appetite for supper, nor thirst for wine - for a man as wretched as I, no pleasure shall come of these. I had thought this night would be one of thanksgiving, yet now my joy has turned to grief, and I find myself as shocked as the farmer whose crops waste to seed at once. How swiftly man's fortune turns!