messageforyou | For refusetofight

For refusetofight

Through the smoky miasma, thick and smelling of conflict and heat and pressure, on the other side is a forest. This one is less garish, less saturated than the rest of Tír na nÓg. Two fae creatures, odd feathered humanoids that resemble crows with cracked and broken beaks, sit at the rocks around a steaming hot spring, soap and strigils beside them.

The fae are seemingly mute, but won't allow Achilles to leave without a thorough wash. The sort that practically scrapes a whole layer of skin off, the sort where they insist on his hair to be cleaned and his nail beds scrubbed. His white tunic is whisked off to be burned, and only once he is deemed fit by the fae attendants to be properly cleaned of the remnants of the Morrígan does one bring the clothes he left behind with Hermes. They're neatly folded, but Hermes' scarf sits on top like a nest, holding Achilles' ring, his bracelet, and the stone with a hole in the middle. The scarf smells distinctly of Hermes, like cleverness and courage and Greece. Almost like Hermes is trying to give Achilles his blessing and support, even when they can't see each other before his trial.

After he's clean and dressed, the bath attendants point in the direction he's meant to walk, a plunge into the dark woods. There's the soft giggling of children within.

In the woods, children from all across time and the world huddle together. A boy holds a fist of straws, and each of the children draw a straw at once. They mumble amongst themselves, checking the straws, and three boys have the shortest one.

"Seems unfair to make him convince Stab," says a girl with messy red braids and two missing teeth.

"If you want a mulligan, you gotta give up treats until the next hunt," a blond boy with gray eyes and a short straw says, waving it in her face. She wrinkles her nose.

"I didn't say I want a mulligan!"

"Then shoo!"

As Achilles approaches, the children with longer straws scatter into the woods, some laughing. Three boys remain. One boy, with pale skin, ragged dirty blond hair and crooked teeth, wearing an oversized sweater and shorts and no shoes and a canvas bag big enough on him to almost drag on the ground. A second boy, skin dark as jet and head shaved, a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck, wearing loose sweatpants and an old linen button-down with sneakers with a check drawn on. A third boy, the smallest of them, maybe close to Lyra's age, looking like one of the people from the far east but with a permanent glower in his face, sitting on the ground and looking a little like he's drowning in the adult-sized jacket draped around him.

The blond boy jumps up on a tree stump to greet Achilles at eye level, putting his hands on his hips and smirking. "Hello, grownup! Here starts your trials! I call being the judge."

"Don't be silly. It's not a court trial." The boy in the button down approaches, holding an aluminum can colored bright red. He pops the tab, a sickly sweet smell rising in the air as the liquid inside hisses, and he holds the can out to Achilles. "My dad said men welcome each other with a beer, but if you get to Birdy she's going to make you drink a lot, so here's a coke instead."

The boy in the button down strategically stands between Achilles and the smallest boy. The smallest boy makes no movement to greet Achilles, instead staying on the ground, glowering at him with dark eyes.

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Achilles watches Ember’s practiced, almost ceremonial motions with keen interest. As the coffee’s aroma blooms into the air, it’s an odd complement to the smoke. Nutty, earthy and warm. An appropriate offering to a guest.

He holds the cup in his palms and looks down at the liquid, rich and dark as wine. He breathes in the steam and, after Ember proves its safety, Achilles takes an exploratory sip. It’s just as she says: bitter at first, but not unpleasant. Not harsh and caustic like Birdy’s vodka.

He wonders if, in all his travels, Hermes has ever had coffee. “Which land do you come from?”

"A place called Colombia," Ember says, sipping her own coffee slowly with an appreciative hum. "Your people and mine wouldn't know of each other's existence until millennia after your death. The ocean's expanse between us is simply too vast to cross."

She gestures to the window. It shows the expanse of mountains and rainforest that Achilles and Scout had to scale.

"It's a land of great natural beauty. Unparalleled beauty. The mountains and thick forests make it difficult to navigate consistently, so we have many small villages outside of our major cities that have no contact with others." Ember swirls the coffee in her cup, her one cloudy eye fixed to Achilles. "The land also makes conflict intractable. No one can tame the land enough to build decisive strongholds, but also no one can move through the land easily enough to stamp out enemy footholds in regions. For many years, my war might as well have not existed for the people in the capital, but it remained burning like a stubborn fire in the mountains, and I imagine it remained burning still long after my death."

A nationwide stalemate, and not a dull one either. A violent one that of course hurt the most vulnerable.

He nods, wondering if Colombia is part of Coyote’s lands … or what other sorts of gods might reside there, deep in the jungle’s vegetation.

“I’ve never seen a land so verdant, so bountiful.” Achilles can’t begin to imagine how he would fight a war in a place like this. No horses could pass, much less a chariot. There’s scarcely room to swing a sword and not enough sight lines for archers to find, much less hit their target. Perhaps Odysseus would imagine some clever strategies. Traps and ambushes.

He takes another sip of coffee, committing the flavor to memory. It’s unlikely he’ll taste it again. Not for a very long time. “Your people must have wanted for nothing. What sparked such a lasting war?”

"On the contrary, our bounty was our downfall." She looks out the window. Her expression might be described as thoughtful, though it's hard to tell. "There aren't many places in the world with mountains so high topped with thick wet jungle. Our land serves to grow plants that can be turned to unique luxuries, medicines, and drugs. Substances that can do anything from keep you awake through the night to strike you mad with euphoria and energy."

She turns the cup of coffee in her hands and takes a long sip before looking at Achilles once more. "Wealthy foreign powers of all kinds wanted the fruit of our land, and as the value of it grew, my people argued bitterly about how resources and land should be divided and used, and foreigners intervened in our politics for their own favor brazenly. Factions were created, tensions grew, and eventually exploded into violence that swept the nation."

She puts her cup down. "Most men I fought with or against considered themselves ideologues, battling for a better, fairer world with every slaughtered family. It's a cowardly, self-aggrandizing fiction. Once war broke, most people were only in it to grab as much power and wealth for themselves as they could."

“Ah. Greed,” he says, as if it were the name of a familiar friend. Achilles went to Troy in search of renown, but plenty of his peers were just as eager for riches—from slain enemies or villages raided along the Troad.

The way Ember describes her war is more complex—a matter of maintaining power over land and its people, not a simple incursion to be withdrawn after goods and slaves have been taken. It’s more akin to a strange kind of siege, but the land itself is the impenetrable fortress.

“You did not fight for ideals, and I do not imagine you sought power or wealth.” Ember’s home in this realm is lovely, but not overly grandiose. “What drove you to fight so fiercely, and for so long?”

Ember bobs her head slowly, because Achilles has the right of it. She takes another sip of her coffee before putting the cup down, leaning back in her seat.

"It was all I knew."

She reaches into the folds of her shawl, and pulls loose a long, looping necklace that hadn't been visible before. On first glance, it might look like a pearl necklace. But these are no pearls. Each white little ornament on the necklace is a tooth.

"Like you, I lost a lover I adored, give or take at the age you did. I believed my world was over." As she speaks, she takes a specific tooth in hand, a slightly warped molar. She rubs it between her fingers slowly, worshipful, as if it were a rosary. "She died of illness that would have been treatable had we been in the capital. She had a son from a previous relationship, and I decided to give everything up to move to the capital and become a civilian to give him a good life."

Her fingers find the next tooth in the line. A front tooth, with the slightest chip in it, just enough to make it appear crooked. "I despised it. Despised the city, despised the people, despised the work I was allowed to do. Like I was wearing shoes two sizes too tight every day." She pinches the front tooth between her fingers. "The boy became a man, and he attended schooling to become a doctor. He wanted to help people, as his mother had yearned to do. He was shot and killed in a mugging gone wrong."

She drops the necklace against her chest. If Achilles squints, he might see that every single one of them has a symbol scratched in the surface, different letters from her native tongue.

"No ideal or greed brought me back to the jungle. I had simply lost the reason why I'd tolerate the only other life I could have."

“I’m sorry you knew that pain. I would not wish such a loss on anyone.” He watches her find each keepsake, an odd choice by Greek standards, but Achilles knows that grief demands strange rituals.

“Lamb is much the same, and I believe that is why he thrives here. Few people understand what it is to fight so ferociously from such a young age.”

He sighs and shakes his head, rubs his brows with a thumb and index finger. “And I am not one of them. My ignorance only brought him more pain. It’s as you say: I am not a good father.”

He looks down at his cup of coffee to see his own reflection peering back up from the dark liquid. “Perhaps Lamb despised his life in Epirus—the same as you and your capital—but I don’t think so. It was painful, but he still knew love. I don’t believe he would discard something so hard-won.”

Ember grunts in acknowledgement of his sympathy. The only sign of her feelings is how she handles the necklace of teeth. She thoughtfully rubs each tooth between her fingers, one by one, row by row, as she stares and listens to Achilles.

"Tell me what you know of his life in Epirus," she says, leaning back in her chair as she continues down the string of teeth. "And what he's said of it to you."

She picks up her cigar, still burning in its ceramic dish, and puffs it through the hole in her cheek. Her eye is fixed on Achilles. It's difficult to tell what she's thinking, but her shoulders are more relaxed than when the conversation started.

Achilles takes another sip of his coffee as he considers where to begin.

“He didn’t know how to rule a kingdom, of course. My father could have mentored the lad, but he wanted nothing to do with him.” He winces, both at the bitterness of the coffee, and the words leaving his mouth. “I believe the concubine Lamb took from Troy grudgingly taught him the ways of statecraft and—given the tales of his brutality in battle—he was not well-liked by his peers.”

He takes a breath and his tone warms slightly. “But his slaves and house staff respected him; Lamb looked after them in his own way. They cared for him through his constant pain—old wounds from the war.”

Achilles swallows and runs a thumb along the rim of his cup. “He lost two young sons and blamed himself for their deaths. He cherishes his surviving boy. A good lad. Lamb had taken a new wife before the Morrígan took his name. I’m told she’ll give birth to a daughter.”

Ember hums softly and nods her head, sipping her coffee as she listens. She doesn't react visibly, not to the news of his grandfather's rejection or his concubine's bitter charity or his lost children.

"I find that people who are used to being afraid don't tend to be any more afraid of those that are widely feared by those used to safety," she muses. "And there's security in being familiar with fear."

It was certainly easier for her to get along with people used to dealing with soldiers and warlords rampaging through their homes than it was to do so with people in the capital who'd never had to throw a punch. She imagines it was similar for Lamb with slaves and concubines.

"He gets along with the quieter children," she says. "There are many who like the security of being near an adult, but panic if that adult pays too much direct attention to them. Lamb doesn't mind when those children just watch him craft or try to craft in the same space as he does." She tips her head to the side. "He understands them better than most. The shy, creative, sensitive sorts. The kind who don't tend to get along with other children their age."

He nods, thinking of Stab’s reaction to his assistance. Achilles’ urge is always to help and nurture, but Pyrrhus knows what it is to go without those things. He knows that gentleness can be as scary as—perhaps scarier than violence.

“Ah. Well. That means he’s needed here, too,” he sighs, almost willing to admit that the Morrígan was justified in plucking Pyrrhus from his life. Almost.

“But it remains that he’s not like you or the lads. Or Birdy and Honey. He’s not a shade yet. He lives on time borrowed from the Fates.” His eyes return to Ember and after a long pause, he asks with earnest curiosity: “If Lamb was your son, what would you wish for him? This place of death and reprieve, or his last years of life?”

"I had many sons. Daughters, as well. None from my womb, but plenty nonetheless," Ember says, finishing her coffee. The teeth of her necklace click together as she moves. "Each of them carved their own way, or they died trying. I'd expect they would do as they did in life in Lamb's place."

She fingers the teeth looped around her neck again. The necklace is so long that its loops rest on her breasts. Her weathered fingers run from tooth to tooth, a silver-capped premolar, a crooked canine, an incisor missing its tip. "But this isn't about what I would want for my child. It is about what it would take to give him the choice."

She stares at Achilles through her single clouded eye as she picks up her cigar again. She doesn't puff it yet, letting it glow between her fingers. "I'm curious. Have you ever made a sacrifice? I don't mean putting in effort for a goal, or giving up what did not matter to you in the first place, or not realizing what you were risking." Not the years spent at Troy fighting, not leaving behind Pyrrhus, not losing Pat to his own stubborn pique. "I mean, have you ever been faced with a choice between losing something important to you, or giving up on getting something you dearly want? And then made the decision and lived with the consequences?"

This question is met with a long silence. More people have made sacrifices for him: his mother suffered the mortal world to secure his legacy, she prostrated herself before the likes of Zeus. Pat took up his armor to drive away the Trojans. Pyrrhus avenged his death at Troy.

He drains the last of his coffee and drums fingers on his cup.

“I gave my place in Elysium to Patroclus. He deserved the honor. In exchange for this, I swore to serve the House of Hades. Bending the knee to a strict master aggravated my pride but …” It still doesn’t measure up to the sacrifices others made, he knows. “It was what I needed. The work proved important, and led to a reunion with my beloved.”

Ember puts her cigar to the hole in her cheek and takes a breath. The end of it glows. She holds that breath, then exhales, the smoke curling around her face.

"You made a sacrifice for your lover, then."

She leans forward, resting her elbows on the table and steepling her fingers. Her single, cloudy eye focuses entirely on Achilles' face. She allows the silence to linger for a moment.

"If I asked you to make one for your son, would you be able to do it?"

“Yes.” Their last meeting on the trireme—Pyrrhus standing in the moonlight, bloody and betrayed—is still burned into his memory. It will be for eternity. Achilles worked so hard to make everything right, but he failed again. It was hubris, assuming he would master fatherhood as quickly as combat.

“Yes, I would. He’s sacrificed so much for me—I owe it to him to do the same.” He leans forward to place his empty cup on her table and settles back in his chair, face set and determined. “What would you ask of me, Miss Ember?”

It's hard to really read her expression, but her lips turn slightly upward. She places her cigar on the ash tray and pushes it and her coffee cup to the side.

"You have beautiful eyes. They must have been in pristine condition when you died, with your age and blood. Excellent vision."

She makes a beckoning gesture to the side. The shadows move again, but there's a stinging, electric quality in the air now.

A finely polished wooden box appears on the table. Next to the box, a silver spoon with one serrated edge, glowing with verdant power and warm to the touch. It's a utensil forged using fae magic of some kind, the sort that is meant specifically for the dead.

"I want one of them," Ember says.

His face remains neutral. The sacrifice would be greater if he were alive, but not insurmountable. It may have simply made him less deadly in battle, and rendered his own failure, his own imperfection grotesquely visible. Achilles’ eyes—a turbulent blue like the sea, like his mother’s—flit over the tools, then back to Ember.

“A fitting request.” His jaw sets and he plucks up the spoon to examine it more closely. “One of Lamb’s eyes was ruined—due to my poor decisions.”

The silver feels a certain way against his fingers. Like it might slowly erode his shade’s flesh if he holds it too long. “I don’t suppose you would consider giving it to him. If such a thing can be arranged.”

Ember huffs a rough, breathy chuckle. Her lips upturn further, just enough to allow her golden teeth to flash.

“I was planning to already. The living need eyes more than us. But I wanted to see if you would agree to an old woman’s gruesome demand without the reason.”

She nods towards the box. She rests a hand on the human bone making her walking stick head. “Just put it in there, and my pixie can do the rest.”

This is all he needed to confirm his decision. It’s a very good thing that both of their lives were so violent and that Achilles’ hand is so deft:

With no further preamble, he works the spoon under his right eyelid, tearing through the resistance of muscle and tissue. An indescribable, chthonic smell competes with coffee and tobacco as the spoon cauterizes the edges of his shade. It’s excruciating, but not in the same way as a living wound; there is no blood. Fibers of his essence snap apart like thousands of static shocks against the serrated teeth. He bites down hard against the pain, but he doesn’t stop until the eye is severed loose.

Smoke coils from his now-empty socket and through his sagging eyelid as he places his right eye in the offered box. Morbidly, he still sees through it after a fashion—vague strokes of light and shadow, dizzyingly out of sync with his remaining eye. Achilles closes the box, relieved by the complete darkness it affords.

He wordlessly sets the spoon beside it, the silver now tarnished by whatever magical processes carved his shade.

Ember watches impassively, as if she's seen this sort of macabre spectacle many times before. Maybe she has.

When the box closes, it glows. Like it's alive.

She pushes herself up from her seat. She does it quicker than her age would imply. She stands tall as she leans on her cane and walks to Achilles' end of the table.

"Well done." She beckons to the side, then a patch is put in her palm. "This should ease some discomfort. People will struggle to speak to you if the wound is laid bare." She places the patch herself, sticking fast to Achilles' skin. Her hands are dry and rough, but precise as she does so.

His empty socket is filled by a cold numbness and he’s acutely aware of the blind side of his vision. The patch doesn’t alleviate this discomfort, but Ember is correct; Achilles has seen men with missing eyes and averted his own in revulsion.

It’s only now that he considers how Pat and Hermes might respond to his mutilation. Or poor Lyra … Styx.

But he’ll suffer that fresh pain when it comes. Right now there’s the important matter of Ember’s judgment. “And your decision? Will you allow me to see Lamb? Will you permit him to leave if he wishes?”

"I will no longer stand in your way. The rest is up to you and him."

She leans on her cane, nodding towards the box on the table. "Take it and bring it to him. He's behind the house, sleeping in a hammock with his little dog. The Bodach will show you the way."

The shadow slips over the floor. It leads into the sun-soaked kitchen, through a door that lets out to a porch with a magnificent view of the mountains. And on the porch, a colorful woven hammock is hooked up, and Pyrrhus sleeps on it with his fluffy dog on his chest. He's peaceful, his face smooth. The hand injured by Medea hangs off the side of the hammock, all the tainted flesh replaced by fresh wood, like a tree had grown over his wound and replaced his skin. The other hand rests on the fluffy dog, and the only outward sign of his injured eye is the slight depression of one of his eyelids.

“Thank you, Miss Ember,” Achilles says politely, as if they’d only shared a friendly cup of coffee, and he didn’t just gouge his own eye out. He takes the box in hands and finds it hums with distracting energy, as if his eye yearns to stitch itself back to his shade.

He follows the shadow outdoors, quietly thankful when the verdant mountain air cleanses his senses of the thick scent of Ember’s cigars.

Achilles pauses at the sight of his son; he’s never seen Pyrrhus look so serene but for once when he was a newborn babe, asleep in his mother’s arms. He swallows hard. What if this is the best place for him?

Well. Regardless, of his choice or his fate, his son deserves this gift.

Achilles approaches the hammock and, in spite of his better judgment, grazes the flat of his knuckles along the man’s cheek. “Pyrrhus,” and then, in case that name is somehow lost to him, “Lamb?”

The fluffy dog remembers (?) Achilles. It perks up as soon as Achilles approaches, tail immediately wagging and chest puffed proudly. As if to say, You told me to watch him, and I did!!

Pyrrhus takes a moment to stir. His remaining working eye moves under his lid. He curls his fingers in the dog's fur. Then he opens his eyes.

He starts, instinctively moving to sit up but the hammock threatens to drop him if he does. He grips the edge, blinking as he processes what's before him.

"Father?" Pyrrhus' damaged eye is gray and degraded, obviously blind. But his other eye is still alert, confused, cautious, "Why are--how are you here?" He shakes his head as if to force himself to wake up faster. "What happened to your face? Your eye?"

“When I heard you were taken from Greece, I followed,” he says, helping to steady the swing of the hammock. “With some divine assistance.”

Maybe the fluffy dog is part of that? Whatever the creature actually is, it gets a smile and an appreciative scratch behind the ears. Good pup.

“I was worried. Particularly after how we parted ways.” He reaches down and takes Pyrrhus’ hand, examining the strange bark growing over his flesh. Fae magic? “Forgive me, lad. I’m not the father I hoped I would be.”

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