I really love your gods and monsters series. It is such beautiful writing and I love how you portray them all. Would you ever consider doing a story of Achilles and Patroclus? Either way you are a fantastic writer.

shanastoryteller:

When he was younger, he was a girl.

His mother told him it was an act, that to keep himself safe
he had to grow out his hair and wear dresses and answer to a different name. He
likes his name, so he hadn’t liked that part, but everything else – well, that
was fine.

He liked being a boy, but he liked being a girl too, liked
it when merchants called him little miss, when women admired his soft skin and
shiny hair, liked how pretty he was, felt more at ease dying yearn with the
women than he thinks he ever would running with the boys.

But.

Sometimes he did want to run with them, sometimes he liked
the trimness of his waist and how broad his shoulders were, liked the way he
filled out his favorite dresses even when his mother told him it made him look
too much like a boy and to pick another. It was not quite either and yet both,
and when he tried to untangle it he just gave himself a headache, so he
stopped. He didn’t like the fake name, and being called ‘she’ never really felt
right, even though he adored it when people called him Miss or Lady or Ma’am.

Achilles decides around the time he’s a teenager that it
doesn’t make a difference. He is who he is, and that’s all that matters.

It’s not long after this that pretty much everything else he
thought he knew gets thrown into chaos.

His mother always said they were hiding. It never occurred
to him to wonder what it was they were hiding from.

~

“You have the hand of destiny upon you!” Zeus bellows,
looming over him with skin like copper and eyes like grave soil.

Achilles thinks he mostly has the village’s eyes on him,
since Zeus had triumphantly stripped him in the middle of the village square,
which Achilles had thought to be rather unnecessary.

Everyone thought he was a girl, and knew he had a penis, so
he’s not really sure what Zeus was trying to prove. Now he’s just naked and
cold.

“You will turn the tides of the war! The heavens have
foretold it!” Zeus proclaims.

“Uh,” he says, “I think you have the wrong person.” He’s
been raised as a girl his whole life. The only weapon he knows how to wield is
a knife, and only then in the kitchen.

“I do not,” Zeus says “If you do not fight, the world will
be forced into ruin.”

Achilles really doesn’t see how the world is his problem.

“If you do not fight,” the king of the gods continues,
lower, more menacing than he feels is really necessary, “then Patroclus will suffer
a horrible fate caused by your inaction.”

~

When Achilles is thirteen, a young man arrives, dark skin
and hair and eyes. He bows before his mother and says he has been sent to serve
them by Achilles’s father, Peleus. Achilles knows he has a father, of course,
but he can’t remember him.

“What crime have you committed?” Thetis asks contemptuously,
“I know a punishment when I see it.”

Patroclus doesn’t answer.

“Fine,” his mother says, “you belong to my son now.” She
walks away, but Achilles stays behind. His hair is long, and one of the older
girls had braided flowers into it. His dress is dirty though, and that doesn’t
normally bother him. But he’s not normally in front of people who look like
Patroclus.

He’s been wondering if he actually liked boys, or if he was
just getting caught up with all his girl friends who liked boys, and talked
about it all the time.

Good to know he absolutely, definitely likes boys.

“Lord Achilles,” the man says, getting on bended knee in
front of him. “I am yours to command.”

He wrinkles his nose, and adjusts the straps of his dress,
more out of something to do with his hands than anything else. “I’m a Lady,” he
says, then crosses his arms, and puts nose in the air. “Follow me then. You
will help me and mother mix the dyes.”

Patroclus doesn’t say anything at all, but Achilles can feel
the man’s presence at his back.

Things are different after that. Thetis refuses to
acknowledge Patroclus’s existence, so it is Achilles who gives the orders, who
tells him to help them carry the baskets of yarn, who tells him to gather the
berries they need to make the dye. He’s mostly silent, but sometimes Achilles
catches a hint of what he thinks might be a smile.

Years pass, and Patroclus is always there. When they spend
days by the river they’ll talk of the village, of the customers, of anything
and everything they can think of. Patroclus still refuses to speak in Thetis’s
presence, but outside of it he’s warm and easy and has a smile like the rising
sun.

Achilles is sixteen, and his days are what they’ve always
been. His mother’s sternness, dyeing and weaving clothes to sell, running wild
thought the village with his friends. And Patroclus, there to witness it all,
to smile at him and offer his arm for Achilles to steady himself on when they
walk down steep hills, solid and there.

“Your bodyguard doesn’t talk much,” one of his friends
remarks one day, curiosity making her eyes sparkle.

“Who?” he says, then looks behind them to where Patroclus
follows a half dozen steps behind. Achilles has tried to get him to keep pace
with them before, but it never sticks. “He’s not my bodyguard.”

She looks at him as if he’s slow. “He’s a warrior that spends
his day doing what you tell him to do. He’s not a servant, he’s choosing to listen to you.”

Is he a warrior? He’s built like one, certainly, but
Achilles has never seen him take up a weapon. “Mother said he was sent here as
a punishment.”

“Some punishment,” she snorts, “He looks at you like you’re
his salvation. You might want to do something about that.”

He pretends to misunderstand her and changes the subject.
She sighs and lets him, but she’s not fooled.

Patroclus is still as achingly handsome as he was three years
ago. Achilles has grown up, isn’t a kid anymore. He knows he’s beautiful, he
knows by the glances and comments of the men and women around him that he’s
beautiful.

But Patroclus has never called him beautiful, has always
just been his companion, his friend, his confident.

Achilles doesn’t think he’s willing to lose that, not just
on a chance he could get something different.

Patroclus is too precious to gamble away on hope.

~

Achilles isn’t inclined to believe the words of a man who
strips him in front of his village and makes grand proclamations in lieu of
simple conversation. But he is the king of the gods, so he can’t really be
dismissed either.

He does what he promised Patroclus he wouldn’t do – he
leaves the village. His mother is weeping, and his friends wring their hands, a
fear in all their faces that he feels but does his best not to show.

He has to know. He has to be sure.

It takes him four days to travel to nearest great temple
dedicated to Apollo. He waits until the moon is high in the sky, until Apollo
won’t be busy harnessing the sun. He walks into the temple, looks at the
statues, the offerings, the smoldering candles belonging to holy men who spent
all day sitting and praying, waiting for a sign.

Achilles doesn’t have time for that. He places his hand on
his hip and looks up at the ceiling. “So is it true, or not? If you want me to
do something, you’re going to have to tell me yourself.”

“You are impudent, Lady Achilles,” a voice like melody says
in his ear, and he whirls around.

Apollo stand in front of him, golden and bright, like he’s
swallowed the sun instead of simply mastered it. Achilles considers bowing, but
decides that gods have caused him too much trouble to be worth the trouble. “Is
it true? If I stay out of the war, will Patroclus die?”

The god of prophecy says nothing for a long moment. Then he
sighs, and sits, looking more like an old man than an all-powerful being. “If
you attempt to stay out of the war’s path, Patroclus will – have a much more
difficult time, a more painful time. But all things must die, Achilles. I am
not Hades, and I cannot tell you in what manner Patroclus will make his end.
But your lives are linked, and the direction his life takes depends on the
choices you make.”

Well, fuck.

“What am I supposed to do?” he demands. “I was raised as a
woman. I cannot fight, I am not strong, I know nothing of battle. Am I meant
simply go out there and die?”

“No,” Apollo says, “you are not meant to die.”

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