Adrianus "Achilles" Leventis (chink_in_armor) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2016-05-02 00:12:00 |
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Current mood: | angry |
Current music: | "War" by Hurts |
Who: Achilles, Paris, and Helen
What: PTSD flares it’s ugly head and Achilles’ emotions become out of control
Where: Park near memorial, Paris and Helen’s apartment
When: Monday
Warnings: RAGE
With all the comings and goings of their pantheon as of late, Achilles had finally started to break down that wall that he’d boarded himself up with. The wounds that had inflicted him were just festering each day, building up all those raw emotions he’d locked out of his system. He found himself in another world (one entirely of his own making) trying to crawl back out of the dirt and live again.
He sat on the park bench watching a young man in uniform walk down the pathway with what appeared to be his wife. They laughed, they cried, and they held onto each other as if nothing else mattered but the moments with one another. Achilles’ eyes diverted away from them, that stem of jealousy bubbling up inside and lashing out. War made men or it made cowards. It changed everything between one’s future and one’s past, and Achilles had seen far too many. He stood then, turning away from the future he saw in those two people, a future he never got to have. A future that had been ripped away. He was so engrossed in his own thoughts that he didn’t feel the presence of another as they ran past him, shoving their body into his shoulder and kept going. There up ahead was yet another pair of lovers. As he focused to watch, he felt that jealousy from earlier turn to anger.
There ahead of him was the beautiful Helen.
The face who started a war and her boy prince at her side. Paris. The two pretended not to notice (or they were just both too blind to even care) as they set off to their apartment. Achilles wasn’t sure why he followed, but that bloodlust anger pulled him by a string and led him to their doorstep. He knocked, ages and ages of pain suddenly building up and boiling over. Paris wasn’t who he hated right now, but he was a Trojan---and too many Trojan’s had let him fall.
When Paris opened the door, he snorted a laugh. This was Achilles? This was the man that had taken his brother and helped bring down Troy? Paris would never admit to himself that he was the reason the whole damned war had started in the first place. Nothing had mattered but Helen, and now that they’d found each other again, he was just as blind to anything that didn’t involve the two of them. They were practically joined at the hip. He had to know where she was at all times, because with her husband and all these other Greeks coming into town, his paranoia was high. The sight of Achilles however was a temptation he couldn’t pass up. He had taken him down anyway right? (Paris was too arrogant to say he’d had a little help). “What the hell are you doing here, Achilles? You better not be here to take Helen back to that coward Menelaus!” He looked around behind the Achaean warrior but found the entryway black. He snorted a laugh again and shoved the door in his face, but it was blocked. Achilles still hadn’t said a word, he just stood there staring like he could bore a hole straight through him. Paris waved his hand in his face, and then a smack on the cheek and a poke in his chest. “Are you deaf or something?” But Paris wouldn’t quit taunting, he paraded around trying to find anything to make the silent warrior budge. So he hit below the belt when he mentioned Polyxena. That gaged a reaction. Achilles’ eyes flashed.
“What? Does that sting?” Paris said tilting his head to the side. “She never loved you you know.” Paris could have been talking about the past, not the present, but it was a nerve that was still bleeding out inside Achilles’ heart. That tomb inside him had just opened up and he came at Paris like a chariot on fire, the power of a ten horses pulling it across a track. All Achilles could see was the flash of his past, back in Troy with the sand under his feet and the hot sun on his back. It was so sudden, and the erratic pull of his emotions. He wasn’t even sure there was still anger so deep, but there it was choking Paris’ neck between his two hands. The two struggled back and forth. Something in Achilles just wanted to see his eyes snap from his head until there was no air left in his lungs. It wasn’t even Paris Achilles was trying to rid himself of, it was the years of grief, the times he couldn’t hear the backfire of a car without thinking there was a gun to his back, the explosions that plagued his mind every day, or the centuries of lost sleep. It was all the times he was promised a chance at happiness and never took it, or the times he did and it slipped from his fingers. It was all the brothers and comrades he’d lost, or the old frail men some of them were today. It was the wars he fought, and the wars he could never fight again.
Paris’ face started to turn blue. He couldn’t taunt the warrior anymore, just look and flail as he tried unsuccessfully to free himself. He hadn’t lived through what Achilles had, he’d been a pampered spoiled brat that got everything he could ever want by taking it from others. Enchanted under that same curse as his beloved Helen, he cared even less for anyone else. He hadn’t been through another war or the post traumatic stress that Achilles had. He hadn’t lost anyone dear until his brother. He’d never even gotten to really apologize for that. So, in the same way that he’d gotten his revenge by slipping an arrow through Achilles’ physical weakness, now the famed warrior was getting his----only his was the revenge on his own pain and loss.