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“die with me,” whispers achilles. they’re 19 and in love and sitting in the back of pat’s old pick-up truck, staring at the stars, and all pat can wonder is if they’re staring back down at him. them. “if i die - pat, are you listening? if i were to die first, i don’t want to leave you alone in this shithole. what kind of boyfriend would i be if that happened, you know?”
pat thinks, through the haze of sprite and vodka and spiced rum, that achilles himself is both horribly insensitive and unlike any narcissist pat has ever met in his life. he still loves him. he still nods, despite the ridges in the bed of his truck digging into his spine.
“what if i died first? what if after all your planning, after all your talk of you goin’ first, what if it was me?” pat asks back, after carefully rolling the words behind his teeth for several long seconds. the silence is too stifling, too oppressive. achilles is waiting for an answer pat can’t give, not in this lifetime or the next or all the lifetimes that came before.
(the stars laugh at him. pat is so drunk.)
“i’d be angry.”
“angry?” pat asks, turning his face from the laughing cosmos. in all his time with achilles, he’s never seen him angry. not once. not even when agamemnon took breseis by the hair and tossed her into his own unused locker in the eleventh grade, or when chiron decided it’d be interesting as a senior prank to put conditioner on the stairs, where pat fell and broke his arm. “why would anger be your first response?”
“i don’t know,” achilles says back, voice hoarse with both emotion and the three drinks he’d swallowed down far too quickly to be healthy. “i don’t know a lot of things in life, not compared to you, but i know in my bones i’d be angry. angry enough to tilt the moon from its axis.”
pat turns away. faces the stars. they don’t laugh at him this time, but he almost wishes they did, almost wishes they could reach out and brush the hair from his eyes and whisper the secrets of his own mortality.
wishes they could take the self-deprecation right out of two 19 year old boys with the weight of the heavens on their shoulders.