Of A Warrior
Disclaimer: I do not own…

Warriors are not only men of men, they are flesh and metal together. The line that serves to pry the fingers from the hilt of a blade is smoothed over like sand by every moment or image withheld from battle. Warriors are seething masses of nostalgia, of memories, and each one binds them closer to the wound and to the pain that caused it in the first place. Warriors are a rare breed when searching for the pure, and Achilles is one of them. He knows it like he knows the texture of a spear in hand or a shield pressed to his back. It's a familiar truth, warm and certain, and he has little to regret since he knows the path that will bring him what he wants: glory, which he has, and immortality, which is never ascertained. At the onset of this evening, he changes his routine and sits at one of the fires with his men, the ones who matter most because they are equals – men forged by the same carving hand of war – the hand of Ares. Achilles thinks of Patroclus, but thinks of him idly, just in the same manner as the way he palms his friend's beads time and time again. Warriors know the universal truth of the blade – that by the blade both pain and pleasure and hurt and satisfaction are brought about. And as a warrior, Achilles knows that on Hector's blade his cousin has been taken from him – pain ­- and that on his own blade he has taken Hector – vengeance. In this, he is satisfied, because he is a warrior and not a lover in his essence, though either has qualities of the other, and he can now begin to smother his rage.

Warriors are men determined by the necessity of their circumstances. For the most part, they are not born knowing that they have been wrought to take life in the name of their cause: they grow and are nurtured just as any other, but when the need is imminent, they will not deny the primal aspect of their humanity. They take up the weapon and assume themselves, and become the men that they are. Warriors are not soldiers, because soldiers are defined and thought of as mindless peons, when warriors know and fight and live their lives in name of a transforming cause that is worn like a fur-lined cape across the backs of their shoulders. Warriors are not mere men, and fear nothing but the possibility of not doing what they have been born to do.

So when she steps back into the tent after night falls (she always stays inside at night because she is afraid, afraid that though she is visibly under his protection, the men will forget themselves and seek to take her from him), he does not shy – in any sense of the word – away from asking her what has made him furious.

"Why did you run?"

She takes a handful of Greek pistachio nuts from the platter and goes to crouch on a layer of folded fabrics, her straight limbs curling inward and giving the appearance that she is curling into herself, when, in fact, she is. He takes her silence not as an answer but as a weight to her answer, and she cracks open several nuts without once looking him in the eye, though he follows her every movement with the lazy watchfulness of a blue-eyed cat.

Then, she begins to mumble slowly and in quiet desperation, her words directed into her lap. "I knew you to be this man." She looks up at him a single time, ten casts her free hand about the room. "I knew before all this that you were a warrior, that your hands are made for killing. I knew this." It is as if she is more trying to convince herself of her own words than to explain to him, so he probes unforgivingly, but not cruelly.

"And?"

Briseis wrings her hand helplessly, spilling nuts into the sand, before she catches herself at the pathetic motion and holds herself with a spontaneous regal air, trying to channel her cousin's widow. She sounds shamed, but before all else, undecided. "And I still did not resist…" She shrugs at him, her sharp collarbones ticking out at the movement.

He rolls his eyes because he is not concerned with a woman's traditionally petty qualms concerning intimacy. Achilles does not care to consider what baggage she believes comes along with it, though there is a palpable sense of baggage between them, whatever it may be. "I would say differently: your resistance in just about every matter has made many lives difficult." His words are light, but his eyes tell a different tale.

Where Briseis might have immediately taken up the torch and started sniping back at him, the circumstances issue a call for her honour. She will not humour him, and she fixes him with a long, unforgiving stare that leaves eons of maturity quelling behind her pupils. "You murdered my cousin." It is a flat truth.

"He murdered mine – a boy untested in battle." Achilles' voice carries a sharp edge to it, a kind of teeth behind tightened lips.

She ventures further into explaining her actions to him, because she feels that she has to, though she does not understand why. "You murdered my cousin…I could not lie idle and wait to welcome his murderer back into my arms!" Briseis sounds desperate, a shade of confused, as if willing him to lend her his reasoning so she may end this terrible crisis of ethics and conscience that she has been suffering through.

With a short bark of a laugh, he notes, "Your courage displays itself again." Achilles' eyes are bright and alive, as if he is invigorated by her every outburst, soaking it up like spilt blood upon the dust.

Briseis, by contrast, darkens, and responds more to herself, "Courage or not, this remains a miserable place."

"Is it so miserable?" He suddenly moves to her side and she watches him approach openly, as if she were a wounded animal that will not fight its predator because there is no purpose in it. His fingers lightly touch upon her chin, and bring her reluctant eyes up to his own. "Don't concern yourself with the affairs of weapons, or life and death. It's out of your hands, and it always has been." His hand lightly dusts upon her skin to cup the curve of her cheek, to touch the tendrils of her dark curls upon the back of his hand.

That, she has nothing to say to, mostly because it's the truth, so he takes the chance to slide his hand down the smooth column of her neck and slip his fingers underneath the cloth of her dress. Even still she has little to say, and all of it is kept vaulted behind those dark eyes – but he likes it better when she's open and fiery and unafraid. Achilles considers absently if he might have made the wrong decision with her cousin but then promptly dismisses it, in favour of coaxing her out of herself with lips on lips and skin on skin.

It works, because for Briseis, the sensation is just as it was before this terrible day. She drudges up the past night and immerses herself in it, in love, and in him.

A warrior is not only a lover of the sword, but the perfect warrior is a shrewd tactician. Just as a warrior is separate from a soldier – the soldier knows no art or skill or pattern behind the movement of his sword or spear or axe, he only reacts…and hopes that his reaction will be favoured by the fates. A warrior leaves no choice to the hands of the fates and instead calculates and considers –sometimes within hours and sometimes within seconds- in order to ensure that the is no decision to be made but that he will be victorious.

Priam, the old – and, by Achilles' approximation, foolish – king of Troy visits his tent and kisses his hands, and Achilles tucks this occasion into the back of his mind. Without his own consent, Achilles finds himself out of his own control –humanized- and looks on the face of his enemy Hector only to see both an equal and a beloved relation of his own beloved—beloved? Achilles tucks both the moment of his humanity and his slip of the tongue in his mind as well. And, earlier, when Briseis slipped out from under the covers and from the weight of his arms to dress and nearly throw herself outside of his tent, he thought naught of it, until he stepped out himself and witnessed her kneeling in the wet sand by the water, retching into the waves – and that, he tucked into his mind as well. And when their eyes caught each other once she had run her face and hands through the seawater and even Achilles himself felt something inside him soften like he had never known, he noted it closest of all.

And when Priam lays eyes upon his niece in the Greek camp, Achilles involuntarily summons up these tucked-away notes from the recesses of his mind and makes a shrewd and tactical decision – he lets her go. This is not the only decision he makes, evidently, because no warrior would deny himself permanently of what he desires, wants or loves, but he realizes what must be done for both he and his lover to be satisfied. And so he clasps her hands and gives her a token – Patroclus' beads – and then she goes, a dazed look in her eyes and a knowing look in his.

Because Achilles is a warrior, and this is what a warrior is.