Chapter Text
In life, Rhea has had many moments of regret.
Moments that, if she had the chance, she would travel back and rewrite. She would take a knife and rip the woven fabric of the Fates and place her own stitching there instead, painstakingly taking on the weight of all time– past, present and future– just to weave her own needle through the torn cloth.
This moment was Rhea’s biggest regret.
Bigger than promising to see her mom again, bigger than trusting Luke, bigger than letting Bianca join the quest… bigger than anything she had ever regretted before.
Troilus had run up to her, up to where Hecuba and Rhea were enjoying a rather terse morning meal together in the palace’s gardens, and asked about going on a ride. Said that his older sister wants to ride and that he’ll be her escort. He said that he was taking his bow and knife and the stallion that Leto gave him. Said that he’ll be back soon and that he’ll bring them both back some flowers.
And they had believed him.
Why wouldn’t they believe him?
Would you think them terrible mothers for believing their son? Or would they’ve been terrible mothers for their disbelief? Rhea knows which one would have meant her heart would not have been broken in two, torn apart, and stood upon, the most sacred love of a mother defiled and disgraced.
The way her son had been hunted down, defiled and disgraced in the temple.
And Rhea had been breaking bread with Hecuba the entire time.
Troilus– her baby– had died and she hadn’t even known. It had been hours after her son had been hunted down– like an animal, like it was all a game for that beast named Achilles– that Apollo had shown up with a corpse and fury in his eyes.
Her husband had appeared cradling their son’s brutalized little body. Rhea saw him covered in blood, blood that still seemed to leak from his slit throat.
Like a stuck pig, she thought hysterically. Like a sacrificial swine.
Hecuba screamed first, collapsing in on herself like a demolished tower, clawing and grasping at her chest as if to reach her still-beating heart and stop it. Gone was the proud Queen of Ilium.
Rhea… Rhea was silent as she knelt down next to her baby, silent like she didn’t want to wake him up from his sleep. He looked like he was sleeping; she remembered Apollo carrying him to bed like this only a few months ago. She pulled him from Apollo’s arms just like she did then, holding his head close to her chest as if her heartbeat could lull him to even deeper sleep.
“Who?” She asked as she pet his sticky hair. Her voice was barely a whisper, barely audible compared to Hecuba’s howls. “Why?”
“Achilles,” Apollo answered. His voice was broken, nothing like the usual perfect croon but now something akin to the scratch of a broken violin, to an out-of-tune piano, an instrument that needed repair but was also irreparable. “I couldn’t…”
Couldn’t stop him? Couldn’t help him? Couldn’t save him?
“Why?” Rhea repeated.
Quietly, there was a storm brewing over the land and sea. The sun had disappeared in mere seconds, the sea had gone dangerously still, and every soldier had paused with an intangible fear. The Achaeans knew they were prey, knew that something greater than them wished to hunt, to tear and rip and bite, until they were gone, but none of them could identify the predator.
“I was on Olympus with my Father,” Apollo looked lost in his own fury, his own confusion and guilt and anger and youth. His eyes were a maelstrom of rose, yellow, and white gold, mixing and unmixing on themselves as his own body was little more than a shape of light. “He didn’t pray to me. I didn’t know until he desecrated my temple. I only realized when he was dead. He desecrated my temple by killing my son .”
The last word was hissed out, like a snake with a rattle before it struck, like the thunderous cry of a trumpet before battle, like the sound of a lit string slowly being dragged towards the dynamite.
Rhea kissed the crown of her baby’s head and let it explode.
The rain fell with the heavens, fell with her tears, fell like her son’s body. It was tame, almost.
Almost.
The land that the Acheans had built their camp upon was flat, yes, but there was the slightest incline that the fields funneled the rain back towards the ocean through, and the camp was right next to that beach.
Rhea could feel the storms as easily as she could feel the shaken earth, as easily as the coordinates of a ship and the ripples of a river. Wilusa did not receive much rain, not like how New York would easily rain double, maybe even triple the amount as here. They weren’t prepared for the deluge.
The rain continued to fall.
The rain, Rhea decided, would continue to fall for as long as she wept.
In one day, Wilusa would have as much rain as it would have in a month. After seven days, it would have felt as much rain as it would have in one year.
Modern cities have the infrastructure to deal with these kinds of storms, but even then it becomes strained and starts to flood.
Wilusa had no such infrastructure.
By the time Rhea had washed the blood off her son, King Priam had been staring nervously at the sky.
By the time Hecuba had pulled herself together enough to help prepare the body, Prince Odysseus had sent a message to the palace informing them that the Acheans would be performing sacrifices and that to please the gods, they could not fight for three days and three nights.
By the time the pyre had been built, Olympus had scattered in whispers and rumors, fingers being pointed as to who had started the unending rain.
Rhea felt like time was slipping through her fingers all over again, sand under her fingernails alongside the blood. With each blink, it was as if she had simply appeared in a new place; numbness had spread through her entire body, and she could not feel herself move.
Yet, she felt herself weep, and the skies weep with her.
Occasionally, she felt her husband return to her; the way he would hold her as she wept and cradle her face, the way he spoke of telling Olympus that the rain was his doing, the way that he spoke of how when the Acheans defiled his temple they took several of his priests and worshippers as war prizes, the way that he spoke of their children at home.
Their children at home.
Olivia and Antipater had no idea that their brother was dead.
How would she explain that their brother was dead?
She knew her daughters would want revenge.
Rhea wants revenge, more than what she has already gotten now.
If this was ten years ago, Rhea would have picked up her sword and cut a line straight through the Achean defenses until she could face Achilles herself.
She wasn’t that reckless teenager anymore.
As much as she wanted to march onto the battlefield and die avenging her son, she had her daughters to live for. She had her husband, her home, her friends, her family .
After seven days and seven nights of weeping, she stopped.
The city had flooded, but it did not matter to Rhea. The clouds were gone, and now the sun beat down on the land below mercilessly, causing the puddles to stink and everything to rot.
Coldly, Rhea realized that between her wetness and Apollo’s heat, the lands of Troy would fester. They had no way to clean out the foulness from the water, to preserve their food or to stop the waterlogged skin from becoming diseased. The Acheans may have moved their camp to higher ground, and the Trojans may have deepened their waterways, but that did not stop the damage caused by the rain.
Rhea could almost hear the prayers the mortals sent out, begging for the rain to stop, for the sun to dry them, for the gods to take mercy on them all.
But she was above it all.
They did not show her son mercy.
Mortals have never shown her any mercy at all.
She walked on top of the water, away from the city. Away from the pettiness of Hecuba and the fear in Priam’s eyes, away from all the mortals. She walked up the tallest hill, following the overflowing river into the forest’s depths. This was a place of nature, thick with the taste of Artemis’, Dionysus’, and Pan’s domains. Naiads and Dryads curled up in the trees and waters out of the corner of her eye, but they paid her no attention, she felt as drenched in casual divinity as one of them.
Rhea passingly wondered if that was because of her veil or the way that the rain had easily warped to her will. She dismissed the thought as easily, not wanting to know.
At the top of the hill, she could see the city and the camp, and the near three miles between them. Such a small distance between two peoples who would tear each other apart.
She sat down on a rock at the highest peak and simply stared at the world below her.
“You have stopped crying,” Apollo said, appearing to sit down next to her.
Her temper flared, “No shit.”
“Rhea,” His eyes were just as bloodshot as hers. “You know you did not cry alone.”
“I’m sorry,” She really was. She had been selfish in her grief, pushing him away. “We should have cried together.”
“The entire world cried with you,” He shook his head. “I am your husband, you should not see me cry.”
Rhea’s laugh was broken and ragged, but it was still a laugh. When she reached out to her husband, she cradled his face just like he had held her earlier that day. “I want to see you, Apollo, all of you, always.”
His face glowed brighter, impossibly so. For a moment, she thought she was looking at pure light, but then she finally saw what was in the light. He was the light.
And the light wept .
This time, Rhea held her husband.
Sea and sun melded together and grieved.
Briefly, a few more drops fell from the sky as the sun flared, sending mortals scattering.
Then, it passed.
“Achilles will die by my hand,” Apollo promised her.
“I want him to suffer first,” She said.
She had suffered , she didn’t say. Troilus had suffered .
“Then he will,” He said it simply as if it were no great feat.
Rhea shook her head, “You forget his mother. She has been a nuisance this entire war, and if she finds out that we have killed her son, her revenge will be on par to my own.”
“You know something,” Apollo tilted his head, or, rather, the light bent in a way that meant Rhea could almost see his features twist in curiosity and bloodlust.
Rhea’s reflexes were quick; no number of years living as a queen would soften her palms from her callouses. The little white-bellied mouse had no chance.
It squeaked and twisted in her hand, but she didn’t let it go, murmuring soft coos to calm it. It tried and failed to bite the finger that petted it. She remembered being twelve and resisting the world of the gods the same way, but it was no use.
“The flood will bring a plague.” It was a fact, and Apollo knew it as easily as she did. “I will go down to the Achean camp and tell them to return all the war prizes they took from your temple.”
His heat gently licked her upper arm, almost like a hand gripping it, “They will refuse.”
She grinned grimly, “I know.”
“To insult me thus once more is grounds for severe punishment,” You could hear the amusement in his voice. “None will find the plague a disproportionate response to our son’s death.”
“There is no such thing as a proportionate response,” She snarled, still handling the little rodent gently. “There is honor, and a lack of it. They have no shame, they only have hubris.”
The words she says are loaded. Τιμη, honor, is something beyond pride; it is your only worth in society, and when she says that they lack it, she calls them worth less than the dirt beneath her feet. Shame, αιδὼς, is the desire to gain and maintain honor; it is the societal norms and the laws that give every mortal a reason not to fall to the fatal flaw of hubris, of ύβρις.
One of Apollo’s titles was the Punisher of Hubris. When they married, Apollo swore to share his titles with her.
She could feel the blood pumping in the body of the little mouse, the way its heart raced. As she handed it over to her husband, she felt the blood sour and decay when he kissed its head. She took the poor little thing back from him, giving her own kiss in apology for using it as a vehicle of destruction.
“Go to Achilles,” She commanded it, placing it back down on the ground.
“Will you be well to meet with Agamemnon?” Apollo asked her. He gently pulled her body to be flush against his, comforting her.
Will she be well to meet with the man who ordered her son to be hunted down? He did not ask.
“Yes,” She had no choice but to be. “I have an in with one of their generals. Prince Odysseus and I know each other. He… will listen to me.”
She almost said that he owes her, but he doesn’t. Odysseus and she were two travelers who diverged on the same road. She had briefly given him a faster journey, but he had given her hospitality in return.
A dark part of her hissed and spat that he owed her for participating in this war, for being a general. She ignored it, remembering her own days as a soldier. She, too, followed orders and gave them.
Odysseus had killed no children, so she had no quarrel with him.
“I will be with you, watching,” Apollo promised.
“You are always with me,” She replied, leaning back against him.
“Not enough,” He said, voice thick. “Not when it counts.”
“It’s my fault,” Rhea squeezed his hand. “He protected his sister because I taught him to risk himself to help others with my stupid stories. He wanted to be a hero.”
“He is a hero,” Apollo sighed. “It’s my fault. I’m his father, I should have taught him how to fight better.”
Guilt suffocated them both.
“It’s not your fault,” Rhea tried not to let more tears fall. She had cried too long already; her body may be numb, but her head ached nearly as much as her heart.
“It’s not yours either,” Apollo rubbed soothing circles against her arm. In his eyes, Rhea only saw a rainbow, a full spectrum of light that had been dimmed. “The Fates said that if he made it to twenty, so then Wilusa would live forever.”
Rhea froze. “Cities don’t live forever.”
“I know.”
“Did you know this prophecy then?”
“No,” Apollo shook his head. “Not until his pyre had turned to ash. Hecuba remembered it then, Kassandra had told her the day Troilus had been born.”
A strangled sob escaped her throat, little more than an animalistic keening. “My baby was born dead.”
“No!” Apollo grasped at her. “Don’t say that! Don’t you dare say that!”
Rhea knew she looked horrible, hair unclasped and down, pale and flushed, with eyes of a crazed creature. “Apollon,” She said her husband’s name with her full weight of truth pushed into it. “Our son was destined to die, and there was nothing we could do about it.”
Once upon a time, a teenager had accepted their Fate and walked towards it. Once again, a child walked death with more bravery and honor than a thousand gods.
She could see his face fall, fading into something incomprehensible and broken and then reforming once again. “The rest of our children will die too.”
Rhea knew that, yet it burned in her.
“I will die too,” She responded instead.
“
A life given is a life taken- that is always true, and balance is always required. It is not always Life and Death- sometimes it is a babe’s life and a mother’s life in devotion. Balance comes with life, and death comes with balance. Grieve and be grieved, for you must live and let live.”