When you reach the underworld, you feel no sadness. Instead, the feeling that rushes over you is unmistakably relief. It is the second time you encounter the river Styx in person, though you do not remember the first, when your mother dipped you in, holding you by the heel. Perhaps then you felt some young version of fear, dangling over the murky, swirling waters, but now, when Charon takes you over, you feel no terror, no dread.
You are only eager for the crossing, because you know he will be there.
As the other shore comes into view, you make out the figures of many people you don't know, and a few that you do. You see Ajax's hulking figure and gentle hands, and you wonder if you will ever earn forgiveness for leaving all who fought beside you to die. You wonder if you will even try.
But of course, you will. He will ask you to, and he is the one person you can never refuse. The one time you refused him was the one thing you would undo if you could change the course of your life just once.
Startlingly, he is not there, waiting to greet you.
You expected that he would be. You did not believe that he should be, not after Hector, after Briseis, not after sending him to his death over your arrogance and pride—but he has always cared for you, unfathomably and beyond reason. You gave him reason after reason to leave, piling each new burden upon him like stones in his pockets, and still he stood by your side, held your hand, ran his fingers through your bloody hair and washed it clean as you spoke to him of killing.
This is why you expected him to be here. You remember the day they brought back his body and the day they burned it. You remember the days between. You know that he is gone, that he should be there, and that he must know you are coming soon. He must know that you could not ever have let Hector live, and because of your revenge, you follow Hector across the river Styx.
And yet, he is not here.
You understand. You ended his life. You stole his slow smile, his gentle eyes and kind hands, his somber mouth and his boundless heart from the world. Perhaps he has finally found the thing that he cannot forgive you for; you have done it, you have finally crossed the last line, and there is nothing more for you but regret. In this moment, you feel that eternity in the afterlife is not long enough to encompass your regret, your endless aching and itching to do things over and set things right. You lived nearly your whole life able to reach out and puck from the world anything you ever wanted, and now that you want to go back in time and do things over, it feels as if the force of your desire alone should get you back there.
Yet time waits for no man, and it certainly doesn't turn backward.
This is the darker part of the underworld—not the darkest, but a hell of its own. Misery hangs in the air like a thick fog, and the rock above and below is as dark as night, shot through only with thin cracks of glowing molten rock, lighting the milling shades in an eerie glow. You cannot see walls in any direction; every way you turn simply fades into heavy gloom. The only feature of the landscape is the unforgiving river, glinting darkly.
He must be in Elysium, for he deserves nothing less. He deserves to walk the eternal fields of happiness among heroes, to laugh, to drink, to run, to feel Helios' sun on his face and the feel of grass beneath his feet. Even the most unfair god must give him that.
You know that you could follow him there. You could ascend to Elysium as the son of a goddess, as a hero. Aristos achaion, best of the Greeks. You do not deserve a place among them, but your mother has secured one for you. You could take it.
You find that you cannot bring yourself to do it.
He is the only person in the world that you understand as fully and completely as you understand yourself; he is the subject you dedicated yourself to learning, lesson by lesson, year after year. You know that if he wished to see you, he would be waiting right here, in the sorrow-steeped darkness, watching for when you stepped off the boat onto the rocky shore. If he is not here, it means he has no wish to see you. If he has no wish to see you, you have no wish to go to Elysium.
The shades of this dark in-between realm are not the sinners, but the unsettled. They are the souls waiting for something—a lover, a relative, an enemy. They are not at peace with the way they died, or perhaps the people they left behind, or they cannot yet bear to face true death: going away to where they are destined to spend their eternity. They wail, they moan, they clutch one another, tears wetting their fingers; they roam sullenly with their heads bowed low.
You belong with them, you fit right in. The sufferers, the ones tortured not from without but from within.
You sit at the edge of the river, watching the Charon row away from you, and you regret it, everything from the moment you chose to go to Troy. It is easy to regret it, looking back. You didn't know what would happen to you, or to him, and now you do, and you wish it hadn't happened. You tell yourself it was an inevitable decision with the knowledge you had then, with the yearning for adventure and glory that burned in your veins, an unquenchable fire, but you don't manage to convince yourself, and you don't think you would convince anyone else, either.
Time passes. You're not sure how long it is and you do not care. There is nothing left inside of you to care with; your heart has always been in his hands and he is not here to remind you to feel with it.
Charon comes and goes, adding more shades to the shores of the underworld, vessel slipping silently through the currents. Sometimes the ferryman watches you as he approaches slowly and sends you vaguely curious looks over his shoulder as he leaves.
Whispers swirl around you, reaching you in the fog, wondering what you're doing here, why you do not leave. Most of them know who you are when they see you; those who don't soon find out. You glow faintly, a golden light surrounding you, just barely visible—your god's blood, your hero's status, enveloping you.
Who is the man, some wonder, who stays here when he has the choice to leave? Why does he not seek the fields of Elysium?
Those who know you do not wonder. They know who you wait for. They do not come to speak with you, to tell you where he is or what he may have said as he passed through, they simply let you sit there by the edge of the river, looking down.
The currents seem sluggish to the eye, but they have a viciousness, a poison in them that you can sense coldly creeping over you when you peer into their depths. You have heard stories of when men have seen when they make the mistake of wading into these dark waters, and you do not have any desire to repeat them.
Yet, even though you do not even drag your finger across the surface, the river finds a way to ensnare you. It is the river Styx, and you should have known that it would.
The water seems to clear before you, to smooth out like a clean stone slate. It does not spread farther in any direction than you can extend your arms—it does not have to, for this meager surface is enough to keep you prisoner to this spot by its shore as if chained.
It's him.
Of course, it is him.
He has the same deep eyes, the same thick, dark curls. His warm brown skin, marked with a few small scars, which you have traced so many times the sight of them calls the feeling of his skin to your fingertips. You are so enchanted by his familiar weighty gaze, the thinness of his wrists, the wonder of him whole and moving and speaking that you do not realize at first. He is not in Elysium. You have never seen Elysium, you have only heard of it in stories, and none from any man who has actually visited and returned—if such a man exists, you have not heard of him. It cannot be Elysium simply because you recognize it: it is just outside the camp you left behind, not so far from where both your blood and his has sunken into the dust among the blood of so many other men.
It is your tomb, the two of yours—it must be, for you demanded that your ashes be mingled when your body was burned—and yet only your name is carved into it.
Cold curdles in your stomach, heavy and hard. He is stuck. He's trapped. He is unable to even reach you where you linger, aching for him with every heartbeat, because he cannot move to the underworld.
Beside him sits your mother.
She is speaking, but you do not register the words. Your whole being is attuned to him, the movement of his expression, searching him for feeling. Is he miserable, trapped there among the living? Is he asking your mother to help him? Is he fighting with your mother?
There appears to be no tension between him and your mother, and you should know. You have always known him like you know the lines of your own palm. You can read it in the way he sits, the way his shoulders slump, the way his gaze rests thoughtfully on your mother's face. You cannot find the same care for your mother. You think that if she came to speak to you, you would spit at her feet; you cannot help thinking his death could have somehow been averted by her power.
Your mother stops speaking, and he looks away from her, his eyes closing briefly. You recognize this, too—the darkness of his lashes fanning out over his cheeks, the crease between his brows when he thinks. Then, after a moment, it eases, smooths out, he opens his eyes. This expression more than anything else about him you remember: he is thinking about you. It is likely he is speaking of you, you think, and then you see, like a dream or a memory, his lips form the shape of your name.
Achilles.
He speaks of you to your mother, and he does not stop for a long, long time. You can tell because the spark in his eyes never falters. Occasionally his hands will twitch, as if he considers gesturing to emphasize his words, but chooses not to. His words stall for long moments before he resumes, his brow wrinkling again. You long to reach for his face, to cradle it and press a kiss there, where his brows draw together, where his mouth turns down, where his fingers twitch, until he relaxes into you, until the pain leaves him, until he breathes in a steady rhythm against you.
You watch him for as long as he speaks, without stopping. When Charon comes, you do not look up. When Charon leaves, you do not look up. When someone taps you on the shoulder, you do not look up.
Achilles, a voice says, and you know it well. Briseis, who was far better to him than you ever were in your last years of life. Briseis, who said to his face what others did not dare to, though everyone knew it to be true: that it was your fault he died. That he died for your reputation, dashed against the hard edges of your arrogance.
You still do not look up, but you say, Briseis.
She asks why you are here, and you tell her it is because he is not, yet.
Achilles, she says again, he came before either of us.
You shake your head, and finally look up at her. He cannot cross.
The knowledge seems to suck the light in her eyes, snuff it out, leaving it cold and hopeless. You understand. This is what life and afterlife is without him—nothing at all. Empty and wrong, hollow. You wait for her to blame you again, for her to scream and pull at your hair and claw at this ghostly form you have with her own ghostly nails. You wait for the sting.
She does not. Perhaps she can see there is nothing that can bring you lower—not the pain of her words or the insult of her slap, not the loss of Elysium nor the whips of Tartarus.
Nothing matters but that you cannot reach him.
When Briseis touches you, it is not the slap of her palm, it is not the scrape of her nails. It is the caress of her fingers on your shoulder, then the whisper of her arms around you.
She whispers, I'm sorry.
You feel as if the pain inside you will render you immobile, will crack you in half like brittle rock. You shake in her arms. You don't think she ever loved him as much as you did, it was impossible for anyone else to ever be so devoted as you were, as you are, but in this moment it does not matter. She is another soul who loved him, and the only one who can fathom the torment of it.
I am too, you whisper back.
She lays her head on your shoulder. You wish that you still had a mortal body, so that you could cry. Instead, you close your eyes as she squeezes your hand once and vanishes into the gloom, leaving nothing but the phantom sensation of her sympathy behind you.
You wish for it all to end. You do not want Elysium and you do not want an eternity at all. You want your afterlife to be over completely, but the afterlife is everlasting. There is no suicide in the underworld.
But a man will find a way to kill his soul if he is so desperate to, you must believe this. You must believe this because there is no way you can go on, not without him, you must believe it because it must be true.
There is always the river Styx. You have heard stories of when men have seen when they make the mistake of wading into these dark waters, and you think that now, you may have a desire to repeat them.
You turn back to the shore and watch the currents eddy and swirl, deadly beneath a rippling surface. You can imagine it swallowing your ghostly form whole, setting you to the truest torments of the underworld: the torments of your own mind. You imagine yourself disintegrating in the riptides, torn phantom limb from phantom limb, and you yearn for the searing pain like you yearn for a lover.
You reach out. You ready yourself for stunning cold and feverish horrors as your fingertips hover over the surface of the river.
The ripples smooth out again. Flat as a wooden board.
This time it is your mother alone, and she stares up at you with hard purpose that tells you immediately she is trying to speak to you personally.
Achilles, she says, my son. Why are you not in Elysium? I know that you are able.
You do not think you should have to say anything; you know that she can guess at it. You say anyway, he is not here. He cannot cross.
If he cannot cross, you cannot spend your eternity waiting for him, Thetis tells you, and you want to claw your way to her and seize her power in your own hands, twist it into knots. What good is her divinity if she will not even use it for the things that matter most? He would not want you to waste away here.
You care what he would want for you, of course you do. But you tell her the truth: I cannot. Without him, eternal pleasure is eternal pain.
That is it. That is all there is to say.
Her frown deepens, and then her face disappears from the water before you.
More time passes, but no matter how long you stare into the river Styx, you do not catch any more of him. It is torment, knowing the river can do this for you and it will not. It is agonizing. You drop stones in, hoping that in the circular ripples, you will see his clever, honest eyes; you leave the shore and return, hoping a scene will unfold itself before you when you kneel again.
And still, you are grateful for the single conversation you have been privy to. It means that when you enter the river of Styx and feel your soul peeled from existence, you will leave with this image of him in your mind, and not the last time you ever saw him in life: his limp, cleaned corpse, a gaping hole in his stomach, laid on stacked wood, flames beginning to consume his dark curls.
You reach again for the river, and that is when Charon returns.
When the passenger steps off the boat, something tugs at you, as if your name has been whispered across a long distance, as if it is reaching you distorted, through water.
When the passenger approaches you, there are no questions, no doubts in your mind. It is as if your name is being shouted by a man standing beside you.
"Achilles," the passenger says.
It's him.
Patroclus.
You find you cannot move to stand, to turn and embrace him, to fall on your knees and beg him to allow you to stay by his side, to cry that every moment apart from him, both dead and alive, has destroyed you slowly, terribly, by a thousand cuts.
You try to turn and your heel slips against the hard, slippery rock along the edge of the river Styx.
For a moment you are sure you can catch your balance, because you always have. You are Aristos achaion, best of the Greeks, and you do not falter or fall.
You do not catch yourself.
He catches you.
His fingers close around yours, he pulls you forward, and then you are in his arms.
He is, to you, as solid as if you were both still living, as real as if you were still holding each other on sunny riverbanks, avoiding the call of war.
"Patroclus," you say, choked, into his shoulder. You have so many things to say: I love you and I cannot exist without you and I have never been more sorry. But it does not matter; you need no words to communicate with him; you never have. He understands all of them in the press of your hands on his face, in the breaks in your voice, the way you tremble in his arms. "Patroclus," you say again. It is the only thing you know, his name. It is the only thing you need to know.
He says, "Achilles." It is all he needs to say; you understand what he means just as well as you always have. It's in his blinding smile, his shining eyes, in the tightness of his hold on you.
He looks into your eyes, and golden light spills around you, eclipsing every wandering shade and shred of thick fog, blurring everything but him, standing before you, his hands clasping yours. It is as if the euphoria that has burst inside of you is too immense to be contained in your chest and has overflowed into the underworld around you.
When the light clears, grass ripples beneath your feet, stretching in every direction, dotted with white and yellow flowers, with the slightly glowing forms of shades in the distance. The sky stretches, blue and endless, above you.
He stands beside you.
"Elysium," he says.
You gaze at him, at the way the breeze ruffles his hair. It was Elysium the moment he stepped off the ferry, and it would still Elysium with him beside you if you had both been sent to Tartarus.
"I was waiting for you."
