Archive of Our Own ^beta

With heroic quests to save stranger’s lives becoming somewhat of a weekly occurrence, Pythagoras was aware he ought to have known better than this by now. Forgetting his knife at home was not a smart move if it was almost ninety percent certain he would be attacked, and his intelligence was something he usually took pride in. But they had been leaving in a hurry and he’d just had a big revelation about that particular triangle that had kept him up half the night and he really couldn’t be expected to think of trivial things like weapons at a time like that, could he?

From the way Jason was scowling at him, he thought that maybe their opinions on this subject differed slightly.

“A stick? Again?” Jason asked, shooting a pointed look at Pythagoras’s hands, in which he was still holding the admittedly quite useless branch he’d picked up when their three attackers had ambushed them. Jason had chased all of them away in under a minute, of course.

“Yes.” He tried to sound as sure of himself as he could manage. He just wasn’t very good at pretending to be confident about something he knew was nonsense. “I needed to defend myself.”

“They had swords!” Jason waved his own around for emphasis. “Where’s your knife?”

Pythagoras hesitated, knowing Jason didn’t want to hear the only answer he had to that question. Apparently, he ddin’t need to say anything anyway.

“Pythagoras,” Jason sighed, his frown more worried than disapproving by now. “You really need to stop forgetting that thing. Take the bandit’s sword for now.”

Pythagoras picked up the discarded sword and gave it an experimental swing. He had no idea how he managed it, but it accidentally slipped out of his hand and only missed Jason because that man had amazing reflexes and stepped out of the way at exactly the right moment. The sword ended up somewhere in a bush, but Pythagoras hardly noticed, because he was too busy tripping over himself to apologise. “Oh Gods, Jason, I’m so sorry!”

Jason let out a startled laugh. “Alright, that’s it. When we’re back in Atlantis, I’m teaching you how to use one of these things, even if it’s the last thing I do.”

“It very well might be,” Pythagoras warned him dejectedly.

***

It would have been easier if he could just bore people to death by talking about triangles, like Hercules had suggested many times. Triangles were so much more reliable than swords. They would never slip out of his grip and almost kill his best friend, nor would they ever betray him in any other way that would cause him to be dragged away from his precious mathematics and the safety of his home by said best friend on a free afternoon.

“Is this really necessary?” he asked again. They were in a deserted courtyard in a part of the city he had not often been before. Jason had said he’d spent all morning looking for an open space large enough to practice, and Pythagoras appreciated the effort, but he also hated Jason a little bit for pressuring him into this. Well, as much as it was possible to hate Jason, anyway, which wasn't a lot.

“I don’t think this is necessary,” he added.

“Oh, come on. Humour me.” Jason grinned at him and handed him one of the two wooden swords he’d carried with him. Pythagoras accepted it warily, and then promptly almost dropped it onto the cobblestones of the courtyard when Jason put his own sword down briefly and shrugged his tunic off.

“What are you doing?”

Jason threw his shirt into a corner and picked up his sword. “It’s hot,” he said innocently.

Pythagoras was inclined to agree, be it for reasons that did not have any relation to the weather whatsoever. He tried to fight his blush. “Show off,” he mumbled, just a little bit too loud.

Jason chuckled, jumping up and down a few times to loosen his muscles. “Well, if two men are going to be sword fighting, a little nakedness usually makes it a lot more comfortable for everyone.”

Oh, for the love of the Gods. Pythagoras had come here afraid that he might trip and accidentally injure Jason, but now he had something quite different to worry about. It seemed Jason was out to kill him and the worst part was that Jason was likely not even aware of what he was doing.

“Let’s get started,” Jason said. “You know how to hold a sword, right?”

“Yes. Hercules showed me a long time ago.” Adopting the right pose was actually the easy part. It was simply a bit of theory, something that could be practiced and learned. The part where he had to move, the part that had to come from experience and intuition, that was the dangerous bit. He was about as graceful during a fight as he was on the dancefloor, which said a lot, considering he’d once broken a girl’s foot during a dance when he was thirteen.

“Good,” Jason said. “Then I won’t have to show you.”

Pythagoras very briefly considered doing it wrong, just to get Jason to maybe stand behind him and adjust his arm or hips a little bit, but he dismissed that thought as soon as it entered his head. Not only would that be wrong, but he would also come across as even more of a klutz than he already seemed to be.

“Okay. Now I’m going to attack you, and you need to defend yourself. Ready?”

Pythagoras nodded, and before he knew it, Jason was all up in his personal space and Jason’s wooden sword was at his throat. He let out a surprised whimper and Jason stepped back.

“Sorry. In a real fight your opponent won’t double check if you’re good to go either. Let’s try again.”

This time, Pythagoras managed to block two swings before Jason poked his stomach with the tip of his sword. The third time went marginally better again, but the fourth time Jason moved as if to hit him from the right and then suddenly made his sword fly around and stop only a couple of centimetres from Pythagoras’s unprotected left side. In a real fight, there would have been two Pythagorases.

“Keep focused!” Jason warned. Pythagoras wanted to tell him how difficult that simple task was when he was fighting a very attractive half naked man who he knew would never hurt him, but he held his tongue.

“Hercules told you there’s nobody more useless with a sword than I am,” he said instead.

“That doesn’t mean anything. He said the same thing about me not an hour before I slew the Minotaur.”

“That’s different.”

“Different how?”

“You’re you.”

Jason raised his eyebrows. “Well, you’re you too, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s change this up a little. You attack me.”

Pythagoras sighed, gripped his sword a little tighter and did as asked. Jason hit him twice in the chest and once in the side before he decided to try a different tactic. He started out with a few weak swings, all of which Jason blocked with ease. Just when Jason thought he’d figured out the pattern, however, he lifted his sword up high and-

And tripped. For a moment he thought he would fall over, but Jason caught him around his middle. Pythagoras’s right hand, the one still holding the sword, landed on Jason’s shoulder, luckily without hitting anyone on the head, and his other hand ended up lower. Significantly lower.

“Oh,” he breathed.

Jason was looking at him with wide eyes. “Wrong sword.”

It was a very bad joke, but Pythagoras couldn’t manage much more than a breathless chuckle anyway. He looked down and realised with a start that he hadn’t moved his hand yet and oh Gods, why did these things always happen to him? He jerked away as if he suddenly felt the burn, took a big step backwards and clasped his hands behind his back, just to make sure they didn’t end up anywhere they didn’t belong ever again.

Jason was still staring at him. Oh, he’d probably done something monumentally stupid in the past to deserve this from the Gods. How he wished they would just smite him already.

“You’re blushing,” Jason suddenly said, stepping closer. Pythagoras felt like running away, but he didn’t want to make the situation even more awkward than it was, so he just leant back slightly and intertwined his fingers around the sword behind his back.

“Yes,” he admitted, because it would be pointless to deny something so obvious. “I’m sorry for… groping you.”

Jason took another step closer. He was almost in Pythagoras’s personal space again and he sort of looked like he was hiding a grin. That couldn’t be right.

“Groping me?” Jason repeated, and there was definitely amusement in his voice.

Pythagoras swallowed with great difficulty. “It was an accident,” he explained. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”

Jason just looked at him for a long moment. “What if…” he said, slowly, suddenly sounding almost as unsure as Pythagoras. “What if I wanted it to?”

Pythagoras knew an open mouth wasn’t an attractive look on him, but he couldn’t help it. “I- I don’t, er. What?”

Jason was slowly but steadily turning red. He was blushing, Pythagoras’s brain told him, even though that did not make any sense at all. Why was Jason blushing?

“I did not mean that the way it sounded,” Jason blurted. “I mean, I sort of did, but I don’t just want you to grope me. I want to grope you too. No! Shit, that’s not what I mean either.”

“Er,” Pythagoras repeated. He was starting to doubt whether he deserved all the praise he got for his brilliance if he couldn’t even string together a simple sentence. But if he was brutally honest with himself, the words weren’t really the problem. He just didn’t know what in the name of the Gods he should be saying.

Jason seemed to suffer from the same problem, but he didn’t let that stop him from talking a great deal anyway. “What I meant,” he bravely tried again, “is that I like you, Pythagoras. I really like you. Oh, why the hell am I telling you this now? I sound like a toddler. Anyway, I like you, and I’d like to- Well, not grope, exactly, because that sounds a little-”

Pythagoras would swear for years afterwards that he had no idea what possessed him in that moment, when he surged forward and prevented Jason from digging an even bigger hole for himself by pressing their lips together. And it was true, really, because he wasn’t quite sure what had made him do it - maybe he just was a bit high on sword fighting and Jason telling him he liked him over and over again - but in truth, it didn’t matter much what the catalyst had been. All that really mattered was that Jason hummed approvingly and responded after the first half second of shock, and that two wooden swords clattered to the floor, one not long after the other.

Before long, all thoughts of practice were gone and replaced by those of another, much more satisfying physical activity.