You find him awake again.

Not thrashing, not cursing—not yet—but awake. Awake in the quiet, in the way a storm is awake beneath the skin of the sea. He sits where you left him, unbound now—because he does not need to be. The tent holds him better than chains, pride sharper than any blade, and there is nowhere for him to run. Not here. Not in your camp.

Achilles' wrists rest on his knees, gauntlets still streaked with the old blood you have not yet ordered washed away. His hair is half-shadowed by the torchlight, sea-gold and salt-thick, clinging to his jaw. One cheekbone bears the dark smudge of a bruise—your doing, perhaps. One of your men’s. It hardly matters. It’s not the first mark on him. It will not be the last.

He doesn’t look at you when you enter. He is watching the flame. The oil lamp sways faintly in the breeze that slithers beneath the tent flaps, and Achilles follows its motion like it’s something sacred, something worth answering.

“You’ve come to gloat,” he says at last. Not a question. His voice is low, careful. Clipped by pride. Shaped by something older.

You do not answer. You simply set down the basin. Warm water. A cloth folded clean. Bread, broken from your own meal, still soft at the center. It is not a feast. But it is not cruelty.

Achilles lifts his eyes then.

For a moment, neither of you speak. The flickering of the lamp, the distant sound of armor being oiled, the faint whistle of breath from the horses beyond—it all hums around the silence.

“I thought it would be Paris,” he says, with a tilt of his head, as though musing over the weather. “Or some nameless coward with a bow.” He glances down at his palms. “Not Hector of Troy, the golden son.”

Your jaw twitches. His words are not meant to wound, not truly. But they find the seam of something anyway.

"You bled," you say.

Achilles' lips quirk—barely. Not quite a smile.

“I bleed prettily, or so they say.” He leans back on his elbows, every inch of him carved from some god-made arrogance, even now. “Is this where you parade me through the city? Let the women see their monster. Let the priests offer libations. Let your father hang laurels on your shoulders.”

He tilts his head again. The firelight dances across his neck.

“Or will you keep me here, like some hound at your heels? A trophy. A terror tamed.”

He spat the word. You step closer.

Your hand reaches for the cloth, dips it into the water, wrings it out. You do not speak. But your fingers are steady when they reach his jaw, thumb pressing beneath the bruise.

He watches you, eyes narrowed, unreadable.

“You mean to break me?” he murmurs, voice low again. “I think not even the gods could manage it.”

You press the cloth to his skin. Warm water, slow strokes, careful as though he were made of something delicate. Porcelain, glass, myrrh.

Something taut between you. Not hatred. Not yet. Not only. It is the thing that exists between two men who understand war, and worse—understand each other?

“Why am I alive?” he asks, suddenly. The question is almost childlike in its honesty.

You wring out the cloth again. Watch the water drip.

You speak of how killing would be easy. Of how you were not a butcher.

Achilles laughs—sharp, bright, cutting. “Then what are you, Trojan?”

You do not answer.

He watches you, sneering. Something wild in it—wounded.

“What are you, if not a figure of doom?"