toastiegf

[elissastillstands]

Bitter Myths

Fandom: Star Trek: Discovery Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Word count: 2,783 Relationships: Michael Burnham/Philippa Georgiou Summary: Patroclus fell on the field of battle, and Achilles mourned. 

As a strong tree which stood proud and graceful—having weathered many ills and many lightning-laced storms in the grip of winter, and was just now glowing in full bloom—is snapped by a sudden gust, and falls mightily, its glory of flowers now covered in dust, so too did Patroclus fall.

No matter what Achilles does, Patroclus falls.

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15896385

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Patroclus fell on the field of battle, and Achilles mourned.

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"Wait, Michael, you use the holosuite?" Tilly asks, her eyes widening in delight when she sees the sliver of the program chip in Michael's hand. "Oh my gosh, what program do you use? We should do the Old Earth adventure ones together; they have one about spies in the 20th century—"

"I'm not interested in those programs."

"Which programs do you like, then?"

Michael's fingers curl around the chip protectively, possessively. "It's a copy of a program we had on the Shenzhou," she says at last. "Lieutenant Commander Stamets helped me salvage it from the ship's black box."

"Oh, that's amazing. What is it?"

"It was one of Captain Georgiou's favorites." She has practiced to keep her voice from snagging on the syllables of Philippa's title, and she only needs a breath's pause when she continues, "It is a simulation of the Iliad, an epic poem from Earth's ancient Greece."

"That sounds so cool! I've heard of the Iliad—isn't it about a war, or something?"

Michael forces her lips to smile faint in Tilly's direction. "Or something."

-----

As a strong tree which stood proud and graceful—having weathered many ills and many lightning-laced storms in the grip of winter, and was just now glowing in full bloom—is snapped by a sudden gust, and falls mightily, its glory of flowers now covered in dust, so too did Patroclus fall.

No matter what Achilles does, Patroclus falls.

Achilles knows. Achilles has gone through the motions of the story time and time again. She forbids Patroclus from going in her place. She rushes out onto the field of battle in her wake. They fight back-to-back-on the battlefield. She is always too late—by hours or by minutes or by a split second drawn out into an eternity, Patroclus still falls. It will always be Achilles' fault that Patroclus falls. She spins out strategies like the finest wool, shrieks at the gods for their malice until her voice is hoarse, soaks her hands in phantom blood and dust and weeps until bile rises in her throat and chokes her, and Patroclus still falls. 

And then she starts the program again.

She hacks the program after the twelfth try. Patroclus does not fall, and the shock of it makes her scream at the computer to end the simulation. She slides down to the floor and lies there, curled and trembling in the cold, leaf-like. Patroclus is a story, and Philippa—

Philippa fell.

Michael wipes her cheeks dry and rises to her feet, reaching to restart the program once more.

-----

"Can I play it with you?" Tilly asks.

Michael's first instinct is to snarl like a lion protecting her young, but Tilly's smile is bright and earnest, and curious besides. "If you want," she manages to say. She does not blame her voice for its reluctance, for wanting to cradle what little she has left of Philippa close, as if the stories were gold, or silver tripods miraculously crafted.

"You'll have to explain the story to me, because I don't know anything about old Greeks."

Poets were the guests of kings because stories were—are—power. Stories die if they are untold, but when given voice, they turn clumsy words to birds and bid them fly to rest heavy and piquant on human tongues. The most powerful beings in the Iliad were poets. Helen of Sparta, who told Priam the names of the Achaeans ranged before them like grains of barley settling into fresh furrows and wove the stories of heroes into undying wool, was a poet. Michael has never considered herself a storyteller, but she tries, for Tilly's sake.

"Tell me what's going on in here," Tilly mutters into her ear, fiddling with her greaves after they enter the program.

"I picked Antilochus and Thrasymedes for us. We're high-ranking Achaeans, Greek soldiers, serving under Achilles, who is one of the main heroes for the Greek side. The man armoring himself right now is Patroclus, Achilles' mentor and most trusted friend—" she breaks off then, her words failing her as her limbs do every time.

"Wait, what happens to him?" Tilly gasps. "Oh, no, Michael, does he die?"

"You'll see," Michael says hoarsely.

-----

Saru buzzes at her quarters. She lets him in, and he steps through the threshold and stands in silence, his stance uncertain, searching. Her eyes fall to the briefcase in his hand, and her lungs feel as though they have been burst and pulled from the carapace of her chest.

"Saru, no, I've told you—"

"She would want you to have this, Michael," he says, and his voice is gentle.

"You—you deserve it more than I do—"

"No." The word is clipped. "No, I don't. Michael—" he sighs in soft clicks and holds out the telescope. "This is yours—once both of yours, now yours. It was a travesty for me to take it."

Michael swallows hard. She takes the case, and the metal seems to buzz beneath her hands with the memory of old constellations and falling stars. 

"Thank you, Saru."

"Until tomorrow, Michael.”

He leaves.

-----

"They—they were in love," Antilochus whispers to Thrasymedes as they watch Achilles mourning, covering himself in dust. 

She does not know why she said that, other than the heavy knowledge that stories die when they are not told. Did anyone ever know to say that, to whisper the truth among themselves like the hiss of embers dying, like breath long escaped over the teeth of lovers lying in the sand?

Her voice breaks, more than it had when she announced Patroclus' death to the leader of the Myrmidons, and the crying and shouting is too much for her to bear right then. She calls for the computer to end the program, half-fearing that she could not be heard over the grief around her, and then she is kneeling on the floor of the simulation room, her hands shaking just so. Tilly sits down in front of her and grips her hands with warm, dry palms.

"He loved him," Michael says without looking up. “He loved him, and now he’s dead.” She is no poet—the grammar of Standard is a sloppy, broken thing in her mouth, pronouns and antecedents too imprecise for any clarity of communication, and a cloying anger wells up her throat at the dull blade of language. 

Tilly's eyes are wide, her lips working silently. "Michael, were you and Captain Georgiou—"

"No!" Michael barks, flinching at the words—too ugly, too flat, too imprecise. "I—we—"

She shakes her head silently, because words can go no further.

-----

Patroclus fell on the field of battle, and Achilles mourns.

-----

"We were together," Michael says into the dark of their room, after Tilly tells the computer to turn off the lights. "For years."

Tilly is silent for a moment. "How did you keep it a secret?"

"We didn't. Our whole ship knew, both of our families knew, Starfleet knew, everyone knew. But after she died, and I was sentenced. And they tried to make our story more—palatable." Michael's lips twist. "The heroic captain and the mutineer. Much easier than two women who cared for each other."

"That's—kind of awful."

"It is their story."

As a strong tree which stood proud and graceful—having weathered many ills and many lightning-laced storms in the grip of winter, and was just now glowing in full bloom—is snapped by a sudden gust, and falls mightily, so too did Philippa fall, and now what they had is covered in dust.

"Why do you go into the holosuite?" Tilly asks suddenly. "Michael, that program is hard to watch, much less—participate in. Is it to remember her, or something?"

Michael almost laughs at that—as if there were ever a time when she did not remember Philippa, the sweet lines on her face and the honey of her skin, the rumble of her laughter through the bones of her ribs, the falling. 

"Or something," she says.

She tells Tilly about the captain then—about how they had grated against each other when Michael first came onboard the Shenzhou, but quickly became close; how funny the captain was, how brilliant and sharp. It is no different than the information in her official biography, but the words still are slow to come to her, smoke-dull and inelegant.

Stories are heavy work. 

-----

Stamets and Dr. Culber sometimes are waiting outside to use the holosuite when she exits from the program. When Culber first came back, she had helped Stamets encode a simulation that could ease him back into the setting of linear time, little by little.

The lieutenant commander still comes into their shifts with red eyes and shaking hands. I still dream about him dead. I still wake up, and he's right next to me, and I still think he's dead, he had snapped at her when she first asked. That's not something that just gets better, Burnham. That's not something you can just forget.

"Where are you two going now?" Michael asks, pocketing her chip.

"A little cafe on Alpha Centauri," Culber tells her with a wink. "It was where we first fell in love."

"It was where we first met," Stamets says. "I thought you were obnoxious; there was no love to be found there." His words are not so much a correction as a fond second telling.

"Enjoy your date," she tells them warmly.

Culber's gaze is soft, and Stamets smiles, a departure from his usual single nod, and his eyes are only touched with pink today. His fingers wrap even more tightly around his husband's hand. There is recognition strung between them now. Tilly must have told them. Isn't that why stories are told, so that they can be sung time and time again until the bowl of the sky rings?

The word for glory in the Iliad is kleos. It means that which is heard. 

-----

The next time Tilly enters the program with her, Michael jumps to the funeral of Patroclus. She and Tilly sit on the rust ground and listen to the lamentations of the living, and Michael closes her eyes as Achilles sings in a shattered voice.

"It was his fault," Michael says into the wind, "that Patroclus died."

"No," Tilly says. "No, it wasn't."

"I loved her."

Tilly nods. "You love her."

She sets her hand on Michael's shoulder, and Michael slumps, stricken by the present tense. Patroclus fell on the field of battle, and Achilles lives.

From the corner of her eye, she sees Achilles lead the sacrifices out, sees the blade glint in his hand. Michael had never played the program to here before, and though she knows the story, knows the weight of words like "retribution," she is abruptly furious. She wrenches herself up and dashes to the control panel. Her fingers fly across the interface like eagles hunting for their young, eating up every line of code in their path and spitting them back out, tearing up flesh to feed the future, and the sound of her heart is lead in her ears because all she can think of is how much she hates these bitter myths, these grief lessons, because the necessity of tragedy is not the truth, only yet another story, and people should never be slaughtered for a grieving man's pride, because Philippa is dead and was—is��will always be more than her death, more than grief and anger and a love in the past tense—

Achilles releases the captives, and bids them to return as princes to Troy. 

The Achaeans mill about in confusion before Achilles orders for the funeral games to go on, and they disband, heading for the chariot races. "She never let me play Patroclus," Michael says when they are alone at last in the center of the Achaean camp. She lies back, letting her eyes flutter shut. "She would never play the story, either—we'd always end up fighting for the Trojan side, and strategizing how to win. Or sneaking Cassandra out for a picnic, or weaving with Andromache, or—or challenging Agamemnon for command of the Greeks. Challenging Odysseus to a game of chess! He—maybe it’s because it hasn’t been invented for over a thousand years, but he's so bad at chess—"

The laughter breaks out of her, unstoppable, and she turns to grin at Tilly and lets her cheeks grow wet with tears, light like the fingers of dawn.

-----

As a strong tree which stands proud and graceful, Achilles starts—

Mourning and singing and telling have ever been closely entwined, she reminds herself.

—as a tree which stands proud and graceful, having weathered many ills and many lightning-laced storms in the grip of winter, Patroclus glowed in full bloom, and the sudden gust which felled her does not diminish her glory, and when spring comes again, the flowers will grow around her. 

-----

"Burnham, wait a moment," Stamets calls after her.

He takes out a holochip from his pocket and sets it on the conference table. "I thought you might be—" he stumbles for a moment before hurrying on, "—interested in this. I had a bit of code lying around in dev to tweak into a holo program. Hugh said that I should try my hand at things other than astromycelial engineering, and I had to remind him that I actually am highly proficient in all the science disciplines. Actually, you know what? Consider it a favor to me, if you beta it."

The lieutenant leaves without further comment.

Michael picks up the clip, weighs it in her hand like a coin of bronze. She goes to the holosuite to run the program, and the gray of the walls is turned to the gold of dust in sunlight. The blue and silver of her uniform is jarring against the warmth of a Greek agora—Stamets must not have finished coding the personal costumes.

There is a poet in the center of the agora, and listeners milled around her like ants as she sang of heroes before the war, and how they were each the breath of the other. On the hills around the city, the olive trees are in bloom, their petals sweet snow.

Michael sits, and listens, and breathes.

-----

"I don't know Homer, but this—was not in Iliad," Tilly says slowly.

"How do you know that it wasn't in the Iliad?" Michael asks, brushing her curls out of her eyes. They are sitting in a Trojan courtyard, and children run all about them in clothing worn but carefully patched. They play with toy swords and laugh as they canter on wooden horses, and women with hair knotted like wasps' waists sit on the windowsills and talk about the sky and the things hidden in the mountains. "Maybe it was."

Two little girls come up to them, with spears of twigs and ivy leaves, and Michael and Tilly laugh and pretend to shield themselves.

"Would you take a story as ransom for our lives, my ladies?" Michael asks, holding up her hands in surrender.

The victorious warrior plants her spear in the ground. "What kind of story?"

"An adventure story," Tilly says. "One with heroes and monsters.

"What kind of adventure?"

Tilly pauses, and Michael jumps in. "I'll tell you." 

She lowers her voice to a conspiratorial murmur, and the girls lean in eagerly. "Once upon a time, there were two lovers who went into the desert, to save the spirits of the cliffs by breaking a cursed drought of 89 years—"

"How did they do it?" one of the girls asks.

"Tell us!" the other one says.

"Tell us!" the first girl echoes. 

Michael smiles. Her chest aches as she whispers, "With lightning."

-----

They are Antilochus and Thrasymedes and Alcimedon and Eudorus and many others besides. They end the war. They flee from a razed Troy, carrying on their backs the girls with their ivy spears. They sign a treaty, and the Hellespont is filled with ships that do not carry soldiers.

They build a city on the banks of the river Po and call it Rema Magna, and populate it with shepherds and poets and weavers and potters and singers and artists who carve joyful effigies of life on tomb stelae and priests who draw honey from bee-towns, with the Latini and Rutuli and Etrusci, and there is never a war with which to found Rome.

They sing of heroes beyond the beginnings and ends of war, of pale flowers on a strong tree, and through their tellings these things are both sweet and bitter.

Achilles lives, and tells what the poets do not.