Disappointment is a daunting thing.

One could believe they can live with that feeling, that ache of what is not there, but once it floods the thoughts and that a numbness to the heart it burns like a flame that refuses to boil the water.

Every new land brought that hope, that prayer to the gods that perhaps his father stood at the port with arms widened- greeting him with a bright smile that the statues did not bear.

Fantasies were a dangerous thing for anyone.

Menelaus brought him no solace besides bed and food, only empty words he’d heard by other men and women. His father was of intelligence, he would persevere through the storms Poseidon wrought.

You knew his struggles, a child of Nestor where your kin left for the gates of Troy like his own father. A companionship he did not intend, nor know if he wished for- he wanted your healing as much as his own. In ways he was not sure how to gain.

He could look to stars and your hand would guide him to the constellations, to those etched into the sky where their voices lay quiet but their stories a roar of what was and how.

He didn’t wish for a life in the stars, he did not wish for fame or glory, even through these voyages with you. He wanted that smile on his mother’s face, the glimmer within her dark eyes as her lips spelt his father’s name.

He wanted you to smile the same, to see the crinkle of eyes and the curve of your lips as you and he celebrated the smallest of things.

You and he sat on the roof of the Spartan palace, where Menelaus and Helen lie and where Paris had stolen her from his beddings. He wondered that feeling, of knowing someone there then gone the next.

He pointed to the sky above, curtained by black yet like holes through the silks stars shown above. Gods staring down to you and he, features perfectly etched where he did not know where the jaw or eyes lay in the sky.

“Tell me that one.”