The Song of Patroclus

Chapter 6

Be happy ur being blessed with this amazing artwork😩. Creds to @tamllama on twt.

—

Our friendship came all at once after that. It washed over us like the waves I heard crashing against the shore. We laughed and we jumped and we swam and we played.

Every moment I had with him was shadowed by a feeling. It came swiftly and did not budge to leave.

It drowned me, with how quickly and powerfully it came. It flooded my senses and contaminated my body until it was all I could feel. But it was not drowning. Drowning was fearful, it was dreadful. This feeling was freeing, it made me feel like I could leap over mountains and drain oceans.

This and this and this, he said to me.

We sat in the music room for hours on end. I always asked him to play. He did not. He always shook his head and said;

"Play again." And so I did. I played again and again until his heart was content.

—

It was late summer, over a year after I met Patroclus, that he told me the reason for his exile. Told me of the boy he killed. We were sitting atop an oak tree, me listening quietly while his honey-laced voice explained the scenario.

I had but one question when he was finished;

"Why did you not say that you were defending yourself?"

"I don't know."

"Or you could have lied. Said you found him already dead." He was silent for a second.

"You would not have lied," He finally said. Maybe it was meant to be an attack, or maybe a question, or simply just a statement.

"No."

"What would you have done?" It was easy to give someone else advice to fix the past. What would I have done? Would I have lied to my father? Would I have done what Patroclus had done, sacrificed my royal status for the truth?

Truthfully, I answered, "I don't know. I can't imagine it. The way the boy spoke to you. No one has ever tried to take something from me."

It was true. You would not want to make a man mad when his mother is the legendary goddess Thetis.

"Never?"

"Never," I finished, but I felt he deserved a better answer. "I don't know. I think I would be angry."

—

My father finally grew a liking towards Patroclus. He allowed Patroclus to sit next to me at dinner, to speak his mind as he wished. He never did. He simply stared at the visiting kings or the food.

My father bid him the name Skops. Owl, for his big eyes. I must say, the name was fairly accurate.

After those dinners, we would follow father to his chamber. Fire bright in the fireplace, dark dulling the silver room. He would tell us stories of his glory years and of others'. It was these moments where Patroclus actually spoke his mind.

One day, when father was telling us he had once fought beside Heracles, Patroclus responded with a story of his own. He said he had seen Philoctetes, the hier of Heracles' bow. My eyebrows creased. He had never told me the story. My father smiled.