you'll have to excuse me / i know it's so off

“You have hairier feet than a satyr.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Achilles, they’ve got hooves.”

“Hairier than a satyr’s ass, then. And they stink.”

Patroclus sits up in the dark, rubbing at a pain in his hip from where a stone has announced its presence through their bedding. Achilles shifts uneasily, trying not to get kicked in the face or kneed in the ribs. A prolonged period in an enclosed space with his cousin seems at the moment on par with improbably slippery boulders or vanishing banquets in the ranks of strangely mundane torment.

“Fine, I give up. Heads on opposite sides plainly isn’t working.”

“As predicted! I’m a prophet too, then, I’ll start taking offerings in the morning.”

This night has felt impossibly long for a late summer on the coast; after a long day’s labor a man would ordinarily like nothing more than to curl up on the ground under whatever shelter afforded itself. But too much idleness in the daytime makes them slack and restless and more quarrelsome than ever. Remarks had been exchanged, not even in the heat of real antipathy but as lightly as the young hero could have pleased, and something in Patroclus’ heart had gotten bruised in a way he couldn’t acknowledge while still laying claim to being sensible. The physical bruises hadn’t been a treat either, but such were the love-tokens of overconfident gods’ sons, who always tease roughly. And so their usual accommodations had become far from accommodating, all surly reluctance to touch skin against skin and restless gangling and sweaty crooks of elbows. (“Why such modesty, son of Menoetius?” Achilles had gibed when they’d first huddled down under the terms of this compromise, and had promptly gotten his revenge by farting all night under the cowhides.)

“It’s not – seemly. If we sleep facing the same way, I can guarantee you’ll be plastered against my thighs all night,” he protests, not for the first time since nightfall.

“Oh, and you wouldn’t object to vice versa? To hell with seemly, my knees are getting cold.”

(Like that’s not an argument they’ve had before. Achilles flops an arm back over both of them, a cue for still more tossing and turning.)

The summer night has fallen hard on them, wind-whipped and resolving at intervals into sharp brief showers smelling like new iron. He can’t give him the cold shoulder forever, no matter what he’s done, and schooling Achilles in the concept of dumb insolence in all its futility might not be the best thing for him.

“I’ll keep my tackle to myself and you’ll do the same, eh?”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Achilles rolls over, and he can feel him grinning in the dark like the warmth of a sunbeam. Patroclus gives in and presses his face to his neck, smelling the red-gold salt of his unbraided hair.