But I did.
I did, and it was going to destroy me.
Achilles exhaled slowly and looked down at the ground.
“My mother—Thetis—was warned I would live a short life,” he said suddenly. “Glorious, but brief.”
His voice dropped, almost lost beneath the rustle of the olive branches. He studied his hands again, then let them fall. “She tried to save me … dipped me in the Styx. Hid me behind false names and in strange cities. But you can’t outmaneuver prophecy … not when Olympus is watching.”
He looked so human in that moment. Not the polished legend whispered about in palace corridors, not the ruthless soldier they called invincible. Right now, he was just a man, shaped by a destiny he never asked for.
“So I stopped running,” he said. “If I’m to die young, then let it be spectacular. Fire in my lungs, blood on my blade. I’ll carve my name into history—not as a ruler. As areckoning.”
He paused, breath shifting as his gaze lifted toward the pale curve of the moon.
“You know I helped him,” Achilles said quietly. “Menelaus. I helped cast out the same gods who cursed me. Drove them from Sparta until not even their shadows dared linger.”
A dozen questions surged up in me, how, why, what price he’d paid, but they tangled on my tongue. I couldn’t force a single one out. His words wrapped around me, dark and compelling, and I was too caught in the sound of them to speak.
A muscle in his cheek tightened, regret flickering like embers in ash. “I thought it would save us. Save me.” He exhaled roughly. “But I think it’s too late. Whatever destiny they gave me, it’s already set.” He swallowed, tension working down his throat, and for a moment he looked impossibly young … too young for the doom he was convinced the gods had marked him with.
“But sometimes,” he whispered, “sometimes I wonder what I could’ve been. If the gods had passed me over. If I’d lived quietly.” His eyes dropped to mine, raw longing tucked in their depths. “If I’d found someone worth living for.”
My chest tightened. “You don’t seem afraid of death, Captain.”
“I’m not. When death is promised before your first breath, you learn to make peace with it. Dance with it. Laugh in its face.” His voice softened. “But I do fear something else.”
“What?”
“Being forgotten.” His jaw clenched again, his breath leaving him in a low exhale. “That my name will disappear like smoke. That I’ll die screaming into silence.” He stepped closer, heat pouring off him like a forge stoked too high. “So I make them remember. I train. I fight. I burn. And I hope … that when the end comes, someone will speak my name and it will still mean something.”
Then, softer, almost wary, “Do you want to be remembered, Helena?”
The question rooted itself in my chest. I looked down at my hands. Pale in the moonlight.
“I don’t know,” I said. But even as I said it, the lie cracked open. “That’s not true.”
His silence tugged the truth from my lips.
“I think … if saving my people were not my destiny … I would still want to matter. But not to a city. Not to the gods. To someone. Even if it’s only for a moment.” My voice thinned. “I want someone to look at me and see—not a beautiful face. Not a prize. Just me.”
The words spilled out, and once they were loose, I couldn’t take them back.
He didn’t mock me. He stepped close enough that I could see the flecks in his storm-blue eyes. “I see you, Helena.”
Just like that, the world felt quieter, and even more dangerous. Not because he lied … but because he didn’t.
My eyes slid shut, like the words had struck somewhere too tender to bear. Gods, I knew better.
The air between us thrummed with a kind of silence that didn’t feel empty. It felt expectant. Fragile. Burning. His voice still echoed through me, threading into all the places I’d tried to protect.
I see you, Helena.
It would’ve been easier if he’d laughed. If he’d scoffed or turned away. But he didn’t. He looked at me as if I was something beyond my face, beyond the destiny others had created for me. As if I meant something.
And that … that was the cruelest part.
I didn’t know why I spoke. Maybe because he’d stripped himself bare first. Maybe because I wanted him to understand the cage waiting for me. Or maybe, worse, because some part of me wanted him to know the one piece of me Menelaus could never touch.
