This is the fifteen minute product of my watching Troy and realizing just how much James was like Achilles. Also, it's been far too long since I've written anything James and Lily, even if this is more about James. So please, read, review, and let me know what you think.
ACHILLES
Once, a very long time ago, James Cerf Potter read a book.
It was a long book, thank you very much, that was written in a strange form of English that James didn't fully understand. The words were written in strange segments, not paragraphs but small sections of lines grouped together. Even though he had to ask his father every few pages what a particular phrase meant, James finished the entire story in the summer between his first and second year at Hogwarts. It was a thrilling, engrossing epic about honor, glory, war, and even a little bit about love. It was about the mightiest warrior to ever walk the earth—Achilles.
For many years, James admired Achilles. He had, after all, superhuman strength, superior skills with the sword and spear, and the favor of the gods. He was a fighter, determined to find glory, full of pride and the sense that honor was more valuable than wealth. James read that book so many times that his copy started to fall apart—the pages slipping out, his untidy scribbles jotted down in the margins, dog-eared corners, frayed edges, and a creased binding. In fact, James read it so many times that he bought a copy for himself every year on his birthday. To the young, teenage Potter, Achilles was everything he wanted to be.
That was until, James got older.
He lived through a few war-torn years, watched his family die, his friends get injured, the girl he loved reject him. The desire for glory, for honor—the same traits that had gotten him in Gryffindor—began to wane. He saw what a thirst for blood did to you. It turned you, twisted you, contorted you, made you the very worst version of yourself. He saw what pride did to you. It cost you friendships, lost you duels, got you in trouble, made you hated and scorned by those you revered above all others. But, mostly, he saw what fighting did to you. It was bloody and draining. It ended lives and friends. It wasn't the glorified, heroic, romanticized tale that he'd read about. It was indescribably cruel and unimaginably awful.
Blood, dirt, death.
James decided he didn't want to have that much in common with Achilles anymore. But as seventeen-year-old James Potter became experienced in the arena of heartache and struggles, he saw that he was more like Achilles than he realized. He was prideful, often to the point of obstinacy. He wanted to be remembered, so much so that he had helped forge a map that would bear his name for decades to come. He wanted to be the best, had to. But there was one way that James was like Achilles more than any other. They shared desires, strengths, ambitions, but they also shared one fatal weakness.
For the great Achilles, it had been his heel, the only part of his body that had not been dipped into the river by the goddess.
For the incorrigible James, it was Lily Evans. She knocked him speechless, ripped him of the ability to act like a normal human being, made him prone to cursing, hexing, tripping, spilling, and injury. Around her, he acted like an idiot.
Maybe a weakness wasn't so bad after all. Maybe it only made him human.
Maybe James was okay with being like Achilles.
After all, that gorgeous redhead would have been well worth any war.
A/N: Sorry it's been so long.
Sunny Days,
AIT