Authors Note: Hi! I had a lovely lady by the penname of TamLin write these following chapters which I just fell in love with! All credit goes to her for the writing, I just edited. It's a recap of the fic, but she did such a phenominal job I had to post it! Any reviews your guys and gals write will be forwarded! Enjoy!

"Aeneas wants us to move." I picked absently at the weft of my dress, long fingers distracted as I sat on the uneven floor of the cave. The cold had seeped up through the rock in the dim, cool interior, so far from the sun and I was cold.

But - I was always cold these days. More stone than flesh…

"Every spring he starts this" I continued. Fingers pick-pick-picking. I shook my head, or at least started to but this was an old conversation and I didn't finish the move. "He wants us to be a nation again. A people our children can be proud of. He wants us to have high walls and storied buildings and gardens that grow more than food. I told him no last year. You remember that. We were so small and so lost and broken. We weren't strong enough to leave what little we still had and chase dreams."

There was a long pause in the waiting stillness and I finally confessed: "I don't believe in dreams anymore."

The smile was bitter, wry and I didn't apologize.

Not to him. Instead, after a minute, I picked up my thread of thought again and continued. "But this year he's not the only one that's restless. And I'm - I'm afraid that if we don't do something soon, we'll become nobodies." I raised my eyes from my busy hands in the fabric across my leg. "I don't want your son to grow up not knowing who he is. What he is." My voice almost broke and so I simply lowered it to a whisper. "You were always so proud of your people. Your country. I don't want him to forget." I pressed my lips together and waited for that impossible pressure in my chest to ease. Just a bit. Than I swallowed and blinked at the tears that hadn't fallen, just clouded my vision. "I want him to be proud too."

It hurt. It hurt so badly. I was trying to do what I thought he would want. Trying to raise our son the way I should. But - it was so hard to do it alone. I rested my head against the smooth surface of the large urn in front of me with its painted scenes of battle and glory. It was so hard to do this alone.

I had come to my husband when I was only fourteen. Still so young and so used to being surrounded by my family and their protection and guidance. And despite his many absences and the way I'd grown to handle things for myself as the years went on, I'd always known that he'd be back. Eventually. That, at the end, I would be by his side again and I could lay down the burden of ruling. Even a princess rules over people and places. How much more so the Crown Princess of mighty Troy? Especially after Hecuba had died and I had taken her place as the most powerful female amoung the ruling class. I had been good at it. I hadn't enjoyed it. But I had known my duty and I had been capable. It had been bearable. Because of my husband. My Hector.

Because I always knew he would be home soon…

I shut my eyes.

"Two years" I whispered it against the hard surface of the pottery. "Two years without you. I don't know how I've made it this far. I don't know how I'm supposed to make it any farther." I wrapped my arms around the urn and rested my cheek against its cold, unyielding surface. As close as I ever found myself to being in his arms now. My husband. My love and my friend and my champion. Two years dead, his city fallen and burned by enemy hands, his wife and child, his people, hiding in the mountains like wild animals. My heart was with him, in that urn. Burned to ashes along with his body and bones. I should have died when he did. I would have died. But -

But for our son. Our beautiful, laughing Astyanax. My bright little boy…

The only reason I rose in the morning.

But today was mine. Ours. Today was the day my world had ended. Two years ago. Today. When that beast had taken my life and the light of the world from me. When he had dragged all that was good and noble in this world through the dirt with his little pig face so small and so set. Today my people left me alone and Astyanax stayed with his aunt. Today was my day - and Hector's day. And the world left us alone.

Last year I had spent all day in this cave. Curled around his urn. Weeping and sleeping. A sad, pathetic example but it had been all right. Only my dead husband had seen. And he loved me for all of me. Even my weaknesses.

Today - I still cried. But than I brushed my cheeks dry with the backs of my hands and gave his urn - all that I had left of him - a weak smile. I still didn't know what to do about Aeneas. He had good points. But he was young and rash and thought things would be easier than they were too. I would have to make a decision soon. My people looked to me now as much as Paris. Maybe more. For my son, not my little brother in law, was the ruler of Troy now. For all he didn't know it yet.

I brushed absently at the damp pottery. The way I would brush uselessly at my tears when they had wet my husband's tunic.

"It's all right" I told him. Playing both the role of the lost one and the soother. There was no one else to anymore. "I'll be all right. For our son. Because you always thought I was stronger than I am." The vase received another weak smile. "I just miss you. There isn't a moment I don't still miss you."

The sun was still in the sky when I carefully left the small, hidden cave. I would not risk my husband's ashes. I could not bear to lose that last part of him. The main Greek host was long gone. Their damage done. Our city burned to the ground. My heart murdered and desecrated. Our people driven into hiding. But there was a Greek settlement where our city had once stood now. To keep us from going back and rebuilding. So that Troy would never again be a threat to the Achaian powers. And there was troops stationed in the Greek settlement. They hunted us still. Not content to leave a single Trojan alive and capable of thinking thoughts that were not bound to the house of Atreus.

I knew what they would do if they found my husband's ashes. And I would rather they found me than take that last piece of him away.

The pastures we kept our horses in were nearby and I walked that way automatically. I had always found Hector's great war horses intimidating. But they were a part of him. Sometimes I think they still missed him too. And so we were together in that at least. I took off my sandals as I walked. Perhaps not the wisest of things but if I watched where I stepped I would be all right. The sun-warmed grass under my feet felt good and reminded me of when I had still been a child. Astyanax took after me in that. You couldn't keep sandals on his feet for more than a handful of minutes no matter what you tried. He was always bolting off, chubby legs already growing long, bare feet gleefully slapping away at whatever surface he was escaping over. The thought made me smile as I walked, my thoughts turned inward and so I missed the way the horses were acting strangely.

It was foolish. In my world, now, there was no one left to save me. I should have always been aware of my surroundings. I was prey, not protected. But - so often I thought if I were caught, and fought hard enough, maybe they would end this for me. Kill me. And than it would hardly be my fault if my son was left an orphan.

They were a coward's thoughts. Weak thoughts. And not worthy of my son or the trust my husband had always placed in me. But - sometimes - I was weak. And a coward. And I didn't pay attention.

So it wasn't until I heard the moan that I realized I wasn't alone in the pastures. Or that the horses had all gravitated with curiosity toward the lower field. But once I was looking I could see there was a man lying on his face in the grass down there and my heart skipped unsteadily. I didn't know why. I honestly didn't give it thought. Someone must have fallen from one of the horses and they were hurt and so I dropped my sandals and picked up the fabric of my dress and I ran down to where they were.

Sometimes, as a woman, you become a mother first in your thoughts and notice everything else later. I knew he was hurt from the awkward way his large body was cast on the grass and I thought, if he was not even moving, that perhaps it was very bad. He'd hit his head on a stone or the horse he'd fallen from had accidentally clipped him with the side of its hoof perhaps. We had so little you could do for a man when his head had been cracked. Even less now that we were so far from our temples of Apollo and that god's healing priests had all been killed anyway. We had never tried to replace them. The sun god had loved a place. Not a people. And even than he had let his holy city fall to barbarians.

His brightest warrior fall to them…

Unless one of our young girls caught his eye, I thought bitterly, Apollo surely didn't care for us anymore.

And than I was kneeling next to the fallen man and rolling him over and I saw that at least one of the gods did care. Because they were laughing at me.

The man on the ground in front of me made a noise when I moved him. One of those familiar bitten back noises of discomfort more than true pain. Drunks made noises like that the morning after. But I barely heard it. Because…

Oh gods…

Because he was Hector.

He wasn't Hector. I knew that even before I'd moved him. He was leaner than my Hector. His hair too close too short to curl in unruly, forgotten waves. He was missing the familiar little scar near his eyebrow. Across his nose. His face was shaven. And yet…

And yet…

It was Hector's face. I would know those cheekbones from the thousand kisses I had sprinkled across them in our years together. That nose, so masculine and somehow proud and rough. The low, dark brows over the shut eyes rimmed in dark lashes. Those lips - how many times had those lips touched me - touched my skin. I knew the brush of that lower lip all the way to the core of my bones…

Without his hair to hide it, his odd right ear stood out, to my eyes, even more. And as my eyes swept the rest of his body, throat, chest, impossibly long legs clad in some kind of leggings… I knew that body. Leaner than I remembered. Missing scars where I remembered them that I could see. But I remembered that body with such a punch of sensation that my body actually felt the blow land against my heart and the air flew out of me with a quiet sound.

And than, unmerciful gods, his eyes opened. And I saw all of my husband and nothing of him in those familiar, impossible dark depths.

He said something. I'm sure of it. But I didn't hear it. Because, for the first time since my son's birth, I was screaming. I had not even screamed when my husband had fallen in front of my eyes on the battlefield. But I screamed now. Hand over my mouth, scuttling backward like a child facing the nightmare her parents had sworn wasn't true - I screamed.

And than I ran.

Andromache. Wife of the great Hector, tamer of horses. Queen of all that was left of Troy. Steady pillar of stoic support and decisions for a wandering lost people. And I fled as if Hades had set his very hound on my heels with orders to drag me, mangled, back to Tartarus.

I have never known such terror. I have never run mindless before. But I did than.