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The first Asterius hears about Theseus, he’s this huge tool that his sister is interested in. Ariadne is, unfortunately, incredibly attracted to utter douchebags, so it isn’t that surprising. She mentions him during one of their awkward weekly skype sessions.
(Asterius isn’t invited to the awkward weekly family zoom meetings, on account of the, ah, circumstances of his paternity. Apparently, the instant he’d been born, there’d been no doubt as to who wasn’t the father.)
“—and, like, he seems pretty superficial, but I dunno, I think his heart is in the right place?” She sighs, and it makes his computer speakers go all staticy. “Like, he keeps talking about his gains, or whatever, but he helped my friend move and practically lifted her bed all by himself so…?”
“What does he look like?” Asterius has a sneaking suspicion on what his sister is actually interested in.
“Well,” She begins, “He’s built. Not as much as you, but like, you know, definitely what you’d call swole. Grade-A himbo meat, right there. Blonde hair, square jaw, super tan, but not in a weird way, you know?”
“Uh-huh.” So it was just physical, alright. Whatever, so long as she was happy. “He tall?”
She laughs. “Ha! No, he’s like five foot six, or something, but he, I dunno, seems tall?” She shrugged. “Like, I’m taller than him technically, but he’s taller than me in vibe?”
“Huh.” Asterius shrugs, and scratches at the side of his nose. He kinda wants to get his septum pierced, but Ariadne is pretty squeamish about that sorta thing, so he doesn’t bring it up. “How’s everything else with you?”
“Oh, same old, same old,” She says, as if he has any idea what the fucking routine is. She’s in college, so there’s a limit to what she can get up to, but like… That’s the thing, right, is that despite being related, they weren’t really raised together, and she tends to forget that, and just assume that she knows everything about him. And that he knows everything about her, in turn, like actual siblings. “You still working at that gym?”
He hasn’t worked at the gym in months. “Yeah, it’s pretty boring, but the money is decent.” He shrugs. “How are your classes going?”
--
There’s not really a good way to tell your family, such as they are, that your job is working in a fight club.
Okay, nominally, Asterius’ job is helping teach advanced after-hours MMA classes with hands-on experience, but like, c’mon. He’s taken martial arts classes before, those usually don’t involve betting and a variable payout.
He’s suited to it, at least—Asterius has been able to take a punch and go about his business for most of his life, and he’s always been incredibly muscular. Now he gets to punch back, and gets paid pretty well for it.
Like he’s not wearing jewel-encrusted watches or whatever it is that though super rich boxers wear, but it pays rent and he bought a new laptop with the money.
He doesn’t love it, or anything—it’s fine—but like, he has no other skills whatsoever. College wasn’t even on the table, and he’d gotten his GED at the first opportunity and left that godforsaken barn of a house on the first train out.
As it stands, Asterius lives a pretty simple life at the moment. It’s very relaxing, all told. Except for the blood sport.
He rents the cheapest place he could find, which was a little guest house on the edge of town attached to a dairy farm. Three hundred a month, plus helping out around the barn, moving and making haybales, and wrangling any livestock that got loose.
(The fences weren’t great. Livestock got loose a decent amount, but Asterius was big and strong and good with animals, so it wasn’t too bad unless it was raining, or something.)
Once the chores are done, he drives forty-five minutes into the city, gets in a few hours at the gym, and calls the guy who calls himself his manager to double check on schedules and strategy. Pollox generally has his own shit going on—something about his sister and her new husband, Asterius isn’t opening that can of worms—but unlike the other weird guys who practically live in velour tracksuits and offered to be his manager, he doesn’t seem like he’s gonna go to jail for fraud, and they got a contract in writing that laid out how they were gonna split the money.
(The sister of one of the guys at Asterius’ gym is a paralegal, and he got her to look it over just to make sure he wasn’t getting screwed. He wasn’t.)
So, like, granted, he is making his living doing very illegal, underground fights, but it’s not unpleasant. There’s something really nice about meeting someone, man to man, in the ring, sizing them up, and just beating the stuffing out of each other. It’s weirdly intimate, in a way—there are some things you can only learn about someone when you meet them on equal footing and just wail on each other til neither of you can walk straight.
There’s a calm in that, the same way that there’s a calm when he has to try and get a bull back into its pen without being gored.
And given his track record with fighting and not getting gored by bulls, he’s pretty damn good at both.
--
It’s a few weeks later the next time Asterius hears about Ariadne’s boyfriend.
“We went to the corn maze!” She says, brightly. “He is so bad a directions, gods, I had to look at the map the whole time and guide us through.”
“Huh,” Asterius grunts, but so that it’s an assent. His opponent two nights ago got in a lucky shot at his face, damn near cracked his cheekbone. Not only does he have a frankly impressive black eye, at the moment, but talking isn’t really working well.
“It was one of those haunted ones, you know?” She giggles. “Like, we went during the day, because he’s not great with being startled, so they weren’t doing the jump out at you part, but they still had all the props out and stuff, it was really cool.”
“Oh yeah?” It comes out as more of a slurred series of vowels than an actual word, but Ariadne seems to get the gist.
“We ended up eating so many fried twinkies, right, and then we went to the pumpkin patch part of the farm—it was one of those that does both, you know? And we tried to pick out a pumpkin together, but he kept finding the biggest ones and lifting them to show off to me. He’s so funny, Asterius!”
It’s good that his sister likes this guy so much, but other than ‘works out a lot’, ‘kinda a douche’, and ‘bad at directions’, he’s heard nothing about his personality in the slightest. Like yeah, he could probably sketch the dude with relative anatomical accuracy, but like, what did he do? Did he have any hobbies?
Asterius musters up a grin. It made his lip split open.
“What is up with your face?!” Ariadne shrieks, seemingly just noticing that he was beat all to hell. To be fair, the lighting is weird at the moment, because in this room all he’s got is a table lamp, and the sun has set, so it’s a very careful setup to get half-decent lighting but no weird glare.
“It’s nothing,” Asterius says, “Accident at work, is all.”
“How does an accident at the gym do that?” She blinks, shaking her head a little bit. “You aren’t in any trouble, are you?”
“I’m not in trouble,” He says, “Really, c’mon, Ariadne, you know me, I’m not involved in anything.”
Yeah, it’s a lie, but she wouldn’t get it—wouldn’t get why he’d want to keep doing it, even as it hurt him. Also, considering that she’s still on very good terms with both her parents, it’s not really an imposition to not open up all the way.
They had very different childhoods.
--
“He’s graduating, and I can’t—he said we could try long distance, but he’s going all the way to—“ She hiccups, then takes another sip from her mason jar that’s half-full of cheap red wine. “—to, you know, that city with the—the statue thing—”
“… Rhodes?”
“No, uh, the other one. With the—with the—” She sighs, it isn’t coming to her. “They’ve got some kinda hotshot kuh-nee-see-all-oh-gee school?” She sounds the word out, putting stress on every syllable, because she’s too drunk to really make the word ‘kinesiology’ work the way it should. “I dunno, like, he said that he could do long distance, but I dunno if I wanna do long distance, you know?”
“Uh-huh.” Asterius didn’t know. Most potential partners tended to get turned off by the fights or the farming. And then there were some folks who were into his muscles and only his muscles, which had started out nice but got really uncomfortable really fast.
(People didn’t tend to go for him on online dating, either. He looked too mean, apparently, and since he didn’t really go for people who were seriously into that sort of thing… it was just all dead ends, really.)
“So I told him that I couldn’t do long-distance and you know what he says to me? He says that I can come with! Like I’ll just—like I’ll just drop everything and move across the country with him!”
They’d been dating for months. “Isn’t this your last semester? Aren’t all your classes online, anyway?”
She sighs. “Yeah, but like…” She takes a long sip of her wine, and blinks for a moment. “What was I saying? Oh yeah. He’s not really… long-term material? Like you look at him, and you don’t think ‘damn we should get a mortgage’, you think ‘I bet he’s a blast at parties’, you know?”
Asterius, who didn’t know, nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“And like, we’d never discussed it, but we weren’t exclusive.” There’s, like, no wine left in her mason jar, and she’s been steadily slugging it down the whole conversation. She’s long since stopped thinking before she speaks, Asterius figures, because generally, she tended to word things so they fell more in her favor. “Like, I could see him eyeing up Phaedra before we got together, and then after he would still do the eyes at her, and I think he had something with whats-his-face, like, you know, that guy on campus with the hair?”
Asterius had no idea who she was talking about. “Sure.”
“And, like, I didn’t cheat, by Dy just kept being there when I needed him, and like, I dunno, feelings happened, so I really think we should break up?”
“Wait,” Asterius asked, “Who’s Dy?”
“C’mon, I told you—“ She hiccupped again. “—I told you about Dy, right? Dionysus, my weed guy? He plans the best parties, makes killer drinks, and like, I think I might actually be in love with him, you know? Like, love-love.”
“… Are you sure?”
Ariadne blinks at him, owlishly. “Yeah, I think I am, you know? He’s like Theseus’s half-cousin, I dunno, I just think—” She sighs, dreamily. “I just think he’s neat, you know? And, like, you look at that guy, and you know he can lay pipe, know what I’m saying?”
“Gods preserve me.” Asterius muttered.
“He wears sweats, like, all the time, right, sometimes they’re real warm, and if he goes commando—” She cuts herself off. “Like, the length of my forearm, I’m just saying.”
Asterius can feel himself blushing. Also, he has no idea what one would do with a forearm-length cock. At that point it just seems a bit inconvenient to the whole sexual enterprise; more painful than anything, for both parties. But what did he know.
Oh gods, but he needs to think about something else. “You think I should get my septum pierced?”
“Hell yeah, that’d be sick!” Ariadne says. But then—“Did you know that Dy has a Jacob’s ladder?”
“How do you even—” Asterius reconsiders where he was going with this. He’d really like less talk about Ariadne’s weed guy’s cock, please and thanks. “You should probably go to sleep, and then break up with Theseus in the morning.”
She nods at him, decisively. “You’re right.”
She closes the laptop instead of actually hanging up the call, so Asterius is left looking at a completely black screen for a few moments before clicking the little red icon.
Yeesh.
Ariadne was something else when she got drunk, that was for damn sure.
--
Nothing much happens in Asterius’ life for the next few weeks. He fights, he pays rent, he spends time with the cows—everything’s normal, and settled in a way that is very comforting.
Ariadne gets together with her weed guy, Dionysus, which seems a little suspect, but as long as she’s happy, you know, he’s not gonna raise a fuss or anything.
He ends up getting his septum pierced, a big, gold hoop that brushes against the top of his upper lip when he talks. It’s less painful than he thought it’d be, but it still hurts for a while. Ariadne freaks out when she sees him next, because it kinda changes the entire shape of his face.
(“But in a good way!” She makes sure to clarify, “It’s just—like—it’s pretty big, is all, are you sure?”
It’s a bit late for that line of questioning, anyway. He knew how big it was before they put it in his face, after all. “I’m sure.”)
He ends up taking a few weeks off of the fights to let it heal, and gets one of those bar things to put in for at the gym and while he’s working. He’s seen what happens to fighters who have metal in their face during a fight, especially those that tend to be shaped like handles.
Like, Asterius is doing alright financially—alright enough to take time off and not starve, at least—but he’s not doing ‘emergency facial surgery’ alright. He’s doing ‘take an uber home from work sometimes’ alright.
But whatever.
Life’s good, for a given value of good.
--
Pollox calls him one day, when he’s doing squats at the gym. The barbel is loaded to 550lbs—a little higher than normal, but not majorly (gradual muscle was the key to agility, after all)—and he’s just settling into it when his phone rings. It takes a minute or do to get everything set down somewhere it won’t irreparably damage, but then he answers.
“Hello, this is Asterius?” He winces a bit; that’s probably not professional, but the only people who call him are his half-sister, his manager, and Io, the lady who owns the dairy farm he lives at.
“Yeah, As, hey—” Pollox sounds like he’s driving, eating, and itemizing his taxes, all at once, as usual. “—you’ve got a new guy tomorrow, some out of towner from back east. Cage match, ten rounds, two minutes each, KO or tap, none of this first blood shit, alright? 10k if you win, two if you lose, and each of you gets a flat ten percent of tickets because you’re main event, alright? Seven fights on the undercard, but one’a them’s a mixed-tag and the other is some kinda all-ladies bikini thing to first blood, so that should go quick.”
“Right.” Gods, the all-ladies bikini thing was so Attitude era, but those were some vicious chicks, so there was probably a wrestling scout there tonight, or something. “Anything else I should know?”
“Kid you’re goin’ against looks like a fuckin’ truck and hits like one, and he’s smarter than he looks. ‘Bout your age, maybe a little older, an’ he talks a lotta shit, but don’t underestimate him.” Pollux made a sound like an angry cat, suddenly. “Look, I gotta go, some motherfuckers don’t understand that the speed limit is the slowest you should drive on the godsdamn fuckng interstate—” The call cuts off.
Huh, Asterius thinks, alright. It’s been a while since he’s had a real challenge.
--
“Iiiinnnn the left corner, weighing 190 pounds of pure muscle, the out-of-towner who’s really been making a mess of things here, lately, the bad boy who traded Greek life for martial strife, with two TKO’s in his debut week and an hour-long iron man match to his name, iiiit’s Theseus!”
Huh, Asterius thinks, after he’s moved past the questionable wordplay, that name sounds familiar. Where does he know it from— Ah, it’ll come to him, it’s time for him to get to his corner.
“AAAAND in the right corner, the beast from back east, the cream of the crop at the top of the card, our reigning champion, weighing in at 290 pounds of pure, grade-A beef, with over seventy wins on record and fifty-three of those in a streak, built like a brick shithouse in summer, it’s ASSSSS-TERIUS!”
He tries not to wince. This isn’t the worst fighter introduction he’s had, but the guy with the DJ setup in the back of the packed warehouse tended to get a bit too creative.
Asterius climbs the chicken wire of the cage that’s hastily been set up around the ring and vaults over into his corner. His opponent—some tan guy wearing a fucking mini-skirt and bike shorts, what the hell—does likewise, with a little more posing.
Asterius isn’t expecting an easy fight, considering Pollux’s warning, but he’s still expecting to win.
But standing across from that dipshit in the mini-skirt, he reconsiders. Not because of the guy’s affect, but… His eyes. There’s something dangerous in those eyes. Something wild, that Asterius doesn’t see very often.
And then the guy’s opening move is to try and choke him out with his legs, so Asterius gets serious pretty fast.
--
It’s a hard fight. Asterius locks in some early arm-bars and a frankly absurd amount of tackles into the metal cage surrounding the arena, but Theseus is fast, and more focused on grappling than he is punching, at least for the first half of the fight.
By the time the bell rings signaling the end of round five, Asterius is bleeding pretty heavily from a cut on his forehead, it feels like one of his ribs is cracked, and this shaping up to be an excellent fight.
Theseus is all cut up from getting bull-rushed into chicken wire a fair few times, he’s starting to move a little slower, and he’s covered in sweat. Glistening, Asterius thinks, for a brief moment as he slugs down some cold water, and wipes at his face.
It’s kinda hot, actually, how the guy’s hair is all messed up and he’s getting blood over everything and his grin has turned just the right sort of manic. Asterius figures thinking that’s hot is kinda fucked up, but whatever.
Their eyes meat, and it lasts a little too long to be not a thing. Theseus blinks at him, and an actual, genuine smile unfurls across his face. Blood dribbles out of his lower lip. There’s a cut right across the bridge of his nose, and the swelling has gone down enough thanks to a little ice that his eyes are starting to blacken.
Gods, Asterius thinks, swishing water in his mouth and spitting out blood onto the concrete on the outside of the cage, this is gonna be great.
--
Theseus, essentially, gets lucky.
That whole going ten rounds thing ended up being bullshit. But after twenty minutes and change of beating the shit out of each other, they’re both getting really slow, and really sloppy.
Asterius throws a punch that goes a little wild and almost dislocates his thumb on the side of the cage. Theseus tries some fancy diving headbutt, but aims wrong, and ends up scraping the entire front of his body down the middle of the canvas ring. His creamy, pleated mini-skirt is spotted with blood, wrinkled in weird spots, and now a much dingier shade of cream. The bike shorts underneath are slightly torn, which was exacerbated by Asterius deadlifting him and tossing him into the side of the cage. Both Theseus and the cage made a very satisfying noise at that.
Not in a hot way, more in a fighty way.
The way Theseus comes back and uses his momentum against him to get him into an absolutely nuts arm lock, though? That is pretty hot.
They end up going eleven rounds with no clear winner, but halfway through round twelve, Asterius knows that he’s gonna lose. And soon.
Like, he’s not gonna tap out, or anything—he only taps if he’s sure that breaking out will actively injure the other person, like in an out of work for months sorta way, rather than a cracked rib sorta way—but there is, legitimately, no goddamn way he can win this thing.
Not because Theseus is better—all told, they’re pretty evenly matched, balance each other well—but because Asterius has taken a couple too many hits to the head and everything’s starting to fade out at the edges. Turns out that charging headlong at dudes when there were walls in the way was a bad idea.
Theseus probably notices, he’s a pretty smart fighter, but he doesn’t let up, or anything. It’s a sign that he’s winning, after all.
They’re both covered in each other’s blood at this point, practically. It’s turned from beating on each other to submissions, at least, which is slower and safer and if only he could let go of his pride and goddamn tap—
But that’s the thing.
He can’t, really.
It’s not even really a pride thing, it’s a stubbornness thing. He’s stuck it out this long, might as well see it to its conclusion.
Theseus tries a figure-four leg-lock, which is damn-near deadly because the man has clearly not been skipping leg day. Asterius manages to break it by digging his hand into the meat of Theseus’ calf and clawing at it, which makes the muscle involuntarily spasm, for an instant.
He manages to turn over and start to crawl away, drawing inches closer to the wire of the cage to pull himself back to standing, when Theseus gets both knees on his back and wraps his arm around his neck in a rear naked choke.
“Tap.” The other man says. His breath is coming in sharp wheezes, but his voice is otherwise steady. “You’ve a concussion. You must concede.”
“I know,” Asterius huffs out. Talking is rough, but since it’s an arterial choke, it’s not impossible. Black is encroaching on his vision. “Not gonna.”
Theseus makes a sound that’s somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “Gods, you are stubborn.”
“Heard… that one… before,” Asterius manages out, before he can’t talk anymore, on account of being completely unconscious.
--
He wakes up in the locker room, after the fight. It feels kinda like he’s been hit by a truck. He’s laid out on a bench, but it can’t have been more than five minutes since the end of the fight, since the blood still feels wet, rather than sticky or flaky. He sits up a little too fast, and wants to throw up.
“Woah, okay, we need to get you to a hospital.” mini-skirt guy—what was his name, right, Theseus, like Ariadne’s ex—“If anything else, my stubborn friend, we both need tetanus shots!”
“I got one last year,” Asterius says, blinking sluggishly, “They last for ten years now.”
“Well,” Theseus says, still sounding pretty strained, but trying to put up a good front, “I didn’t, did I? And you need to get that concussion looked at!”
“I’ll be fine.” He won’t be, but he’s never really been a brain trust, anyway. It’s not a big deal, really—
“Asterius!” Theseus says, sounding completely scandalized. “If you do not go, then I shan’t, either! Blood poisoning is a mere trifle—”
“Yeah,” Asterius says, “Okay, fine. I’ll order us an uber.”
--
There’s only one guy who consistently drives in this part of town at this time of night, so Asterius isn’t really surprised when Charon shows up in his sensible station wagon, stylized flames painted up the side, behind the wheels.
Asterius isn’t sure if it’s an irony thing, or completely sincere. Or if he just got the car second hand and couldn’t be bothered. Charon was kinda hard to parse.
“We must—” Theseus says, biting off his words, “We must put down a jacket, or something!”
“Hrrrrgh,” Charon groans, indifferent. “Hmmmmrgh?”
“It’s fine, he doesn’t care about blood,” Asterius says. “He’s chill, don’t worry.”
“Chill—Chill!” Theseus practically shrieks, “We need to get to the hospital to make sure you won’t die, we don’t need chill!”
“Oh,” Asterius says, somewhat distantly, “You don’t have to worry about that, he drives really fast.”
“Hhhhhhhhargh,” Charon agrees, nodding slightly, and pulling them into traffic.
“… Look,” Asterius says, “I feel like I know you from somewhere? But I’m not sure where.”
“Well,” Theseus says, “I grew up in Athens, went to school there, studied sports medicine—”
“Huh.” Things click together. “Did you date someone named Ariadne?”
“… Y-esssss?” Theseus drags the word out, a bit. “This past year, but we broke up some months ago.”
“She’s my sister, kinda.”
“Oh, gods,” Theseus mutters. “She didn’t, ah, she didn’t mention any other siblings. Other than Phaedra.”
Asterius shakes his head, not particularly surprised. “It’s not—she’s the only one of them I talk to, anyway.”
Theseus blinks at him. “What? I can give you her sister’s information—or I guess it’d be your sister’s information, I mean—”
“… It’s really better if you don’t.” Asterius leans his head back and stares, briefly, at the soft gray roof of the car. “We haven’t been—I’d rather you didn’t.”
Theseus looks at his face, searchingly, for a moment. “Gotcha.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes, Asterius staring at the ceiling of the car and occasionally stealing a glance or two at Theseus, Theseus looking out into the road, streetlights bouncing off the flecks of blood still on his badly-washed face. He’s wearing an opened jean jacket over the mini-skirt, but didn’t manage to put on a shirt before the uber arrived.
(Asterius changed into some sweats and swapped out his nose ring for the gold hoop; he’s also not wearing a shirt, but more because he’s really sore, and couldn’t be bothered to work out the mechanics of putting one on in a way that didn’t involve using his shoulders.)
Theseus shifts how he’s holding the quickly melting ice pack to his nose. It’s helping the swelling a lot, which means that he’s now sporting two major shiners, dark purple ringing the inside of his eye socket.
He takes a deep breath, and words start coming out of him in an absolute deluge. “Okay, I told myself that I wasn’t going to do this while you had a concussion but I just wanted to say that that was one of the best bouts of my life and that I like the cut of your jib, friend.”
“You aren’t so bad yourself,” When Theseus begins to visibly wilt, Asterius continues. “I-I mean, you really kicked my ass back there, and that was the most fun I’ve had at work in months.”
“… Really?” Theseus says. Then, “Wait—this is your job?”
“This and the farm, but that’s less of a job and more of a rent thing.” Asterius shrugs. “I’m not really—look, I’m not really—let’s just not, okay? I barely know you.”
Asterius isn’t an idiot, but he knows exactly how smart he isn’t. That has, over the course of his life, been made very clear to him, mostly by other people.
“Rrrrggghhhhh?” Charon asks, from the front seat.
“Nah, it’s fine, go ahead,” Asterius replies.
“Wha—”
“Yyyyrchhhhh,” Charon replies, pulling out a large vape and, after a moment, filling the cabin of the car with dark purple smoke, before cracking his window so it can escape. It doesn’t really smell like anything, other than ozone, but it clings in the air for a few spare moments.
“We are going to the hospital, right?” Theseus says, after the air is clear. “It’s just—I’m new in town, so I don’t really recognize everything, and I don’t know if they’ll be in my network—”
“I don’t actually have insurance?” Asterius tries. “We’re going to one of the good, all-night urgent cares, though.”
“You don’t have insurance?” Theseus looks absolutely scandalized. “But you—it’s your job! Were my vocation something so rife with danger, I’d—”
“Okay,” Asterius cuts him off. “I’m gonna level with you, because this isn’t any of your business. One, I’m usually a lot better at winning fights, you just put up a very good challenge. Two, it’s not like I can get it through work. And three, I’ve got a lot of preexisting conditions.”
Theseus blinks at him. “… Such as?”
Asterius really doesn’t want to get into it. Why the hell did he mention that? Gods, he’s such an idiot sometimes. “Can we not, right now?”
Theseus, at the very least, seems to realize that he’s overstepped. “I understand.”
Asterius nods. “Good.”
It takes a few minutes more, mostly spent in awkward silence, before they arrive at the clinic.
--
Asterius sits in the small clinic room, his frame too large for the plastic-y examination bench he’s perched on the end of. He can hear the paper crinkling loudly every time he shifts.
The concussion test, at least, went well and went fast. His eyes are apparently behaving the way they should, he can walk in a straight line without getting dizzy, and he can still remember what he ate for breakfast last Sunday and who the current president is, so while he got, to quote the clinician, ‘his bell rung real good’, he didn’t manage to mess anything up.
They still insist on getting him a tetanus shot, despite the fact that those are supposedly good for ten years, and he got one last year after an accident when he was tinkering with the engine of the ancient tractor that was out behind his rented house, but whatever. Given the givens, it’s like fifty bucks, because he doesn’t have insurance, but he can actually afford it.
(The buried lede here is that before he started doing the fights as a regular thing, there’s no way he could. Last year, when he had to get it, he ended up having to get Ariadne to venmo him twenty bucks, no questions asked.)
When he finally gets back to the waiting room, he’s pleasantly surprised to find Theseus there, waiting for him, sprawled open in one of the too-small plastic chairs, looking almost washed out in the fluorescent light.
“Huh,” Asterius says to himself, “You’re still here.”
“Wha—Of course I’m still here! You think me a knave?” Theseus looks positively scandalized. Asterius is beginning to realize that it’s one of his default expressions; it’s a bit endearing, all told. “I could not let my new, dear friend find himself alone at this dark hour of night!”
“…Thanks?” That doesn’t quite feel like the whole story.
“...I may have, perhaps, mistakenly been out too late to re-enter my dorm, as well, so I have nowhere to be.”
“Ah.” Asterius isn’t quite sure what comes over him, but—“Want to come back to mine? I’ve got a couch, at the very least, and it is a Friday night, so you shouldn’t miss class, or anything.”
“Alas, I have no car.”
Asterius sighs. “We’ll get a ride back to the warehouse, and I’ll drive us, okay?”
Theseus looks at him, sharply. “Did you end up having a concussion?”
“No.”
His face clears. “Well, alright then.”
--
Theseus knocks out about five minutes into the long drive, classic rock radio playing faintly in the background of the car. It’s a Friday night, but it’s also, like, two in the morning, so it’s when they do the late-night call-in show. Not Delilah—she’s truly the purview of soft-rock radio—but a local guy who gives awful advice and then plays some Led Zeppelin, or something.
“—and, like, I’m just not sure what to do!” The caller wails, obviously incredibly drunk.
“Uh, have you tried not living with your ex?”
“My name’s on the lease!”
“You could evict him?”
“That sounds kinda mean…”
“Look,” The radio host says, “You need to, like, get your stuff together. I’m gonna play you this song, and then you’re gonna go up to your ex, and you’re gonna say ‘stop drinking orange juice from the carton or I’m evicting you’, okay?”
“O-okay.” There’s an audible gulp on the other end of the line. “I’m gonna do it, I swear!”
“Awesome!” The call disconnects. “And now, my dudes, let me spin you up—oh, what is it they wanted—John Tesh???? Okay, we’re, uh, we’re not gonna do that. Let’s do some Rush, alright, that’s gotta be close enough.”
In no way is ‘Tom Sawyer’ close to John Tesh at all, but to be fair, it is way more suited to the overall vibes of the evening.
--
When he pulls up to the house, and shuts the car off, he sort of awkwardly pats Theseus on the shoulder to wake him up. The guy doesn’t move, so it turns into more of a shove.
“We’re here.”
“Ye gods, man, is this going to be a murder?” Theseus says, jokingly, but then his eyes widen. “I mean—I did not ask you how you wish to be referred!”
“What you’ve been using is fine, don’t worry.”
“It’s just that—I don’t want to assume; I may be a strapping young man of broad taste, but respect is truly the foundation of any deep friendship.”
“Is this?” Asterius asks, staring out the windshield of the car. The headlights were off, but it was far enough away from the city that the starlight was enough. “A deep friendship, I mean?”
“… I’d quite like it to be?”
“When we first met—less than six hours ago—I was contractually obligated to beat the shit out of you.” Asterius sighs. “I’m not saying no, I just saying—I dunno what I’m saying.”
“Um.” Theseus says, “Let’s come at this with fresh eyes in the morning.”
“That’s probably a good—let’s go in, okay.”
“Right.”
--
“I’m sorry, friend, but there’s no way that sofa has adequate lumbar support.” He’s not wrong, but it still kinda stings.
“I was planning on taking it.” Asterius is going to fall asleep the minute he gets vaguely horizontal, at this point.
“But—You’re taller and larger than I, friend!” Theseus gasps. “Why, even if that sofa were the size for sleeping, it would be against my medical oaths for me to even think to allow you to do that!”
“I guess I can take the floor, then?” Asterius shrugs like it isn’t an imposition. It kinda is, but whatever. “Or I can go out to, uh, the barn.”
“That’s—ach—tch—“ Theseus looks like a mix between apoplectic and dumbstruck. “We’re sharing the bed, and that’s final!”
“I mean,” Asterius says, because gods know he isn’t gonna turn down sharing his bed with a handsome man if the other party is absolutely insisting on it, “If you’re sure? It’s a queen size, so it might be a little tight?”
Theseus nods, righteous indignation burning in his eyes. “Sleeping together will truly tighten the bonds of our friendship!”
Well, yeah, but probably not like that. “… Sure.”
--
It’s awkward, mostly because of how not awkward it is. After throwing a pair of ancient sweats at Theseus (“Could I prevail upon you for some pajamas, my friend?” What a maroon. Gods, he’s cute.), Asterius hops in the shower quickly, before changing into some very comfortable flannel pants, an incredibly faded t-shirt he got at a thrift store, and combing his hair out while Theseus showers, himself.
When they actually get into bed together, it’s very strange, because they, on instinct, gravitate to different sides of the bed. Despite the fact that Asterius has very seldom shared a bed with anyone, and is a habitual sleeper in the middle, which is where the Asterius-shaped dent is in his mattress. But with Theseus, it’s like he automatically gravitates to one side.
Asterius fiddles for a moment with his phone, turning the alarm off, and says, “Ah, goodnight?”
“Good night, Asterius.” It comes out so soft and so close and so domestic that Asterius is pretty sure he blushes so hard it could be seen from space, so he reaches over to the nightstand and turns the light off.
It is, he realizes much later, probably not a normal thing to share a bed with a man you've just met, after you've beaten the shit out of each other. Oh well, he's had worse beginnings.
--
They don’t wake up ‘tangled up in each other’. That’s the sort of thing that usually requires falling asleep while cuddling, and waking up incredibly sore form someone lying on your arm all night.
Asterius wakes up on his back. Theseus has, somehow, migrated during the night to sleep plastered on top of his body, head resting on his chest and legs crowding his. Theseus has, also, somehow managed to steal all the blankets, which is a bit annoying, because the heating in the house isn’t that great, all told.
He reaches a hand out to grab his phone from the nightstand, disconnecting it from the charger and checking the time. A little after ten. Lacking anything better to do, he checks his email.
He doesn’t want to get up, doesn’t want to extricate himself from Theseus’ hold. He’s comfortable, like a heated, weighted blanket. Asterius wouldn’t mind waking up like this more often.
Oh jeez, he thinks, letting his phone droop towards his face as he stares up at the popcorn ceiling of his room, that’s putting the cart before the horse, isn’t it? He hasn’t even made a move, and he’s already thinking about how nice it would be to wake up next to this guy for the rest of forever.
Theseus huffs in his sleep, which ends up blowing his morning breath essentially into the direction of his face. It’s decidedly unpleasant, but in a lived-in sort of way, like how Ariadne used to step out of her shoes once she got home, just leaving them strewn in the front hallway, and he always used to trip over them.
Theseus huffs again, a little louder, and his eyes are squinting, face scrunching up a little at a time before relaxing again.
Before Asterius has even completed the thought, he brings a hand up and just sort of pets the other man’s hair.
“Wha—” Theseus manages, eyes still closed.
“Gotta get up and wrangle the cows,” Asterius says, trying to manhandle him off without copping a feel. “You stay here, alright? I’ll get some coffee made.”
“Mmm,” Theseus says, allowing himself to be turned over, “Sounds lovely.” He still hasn’t opened his eyes.
“Yeah.” Asterius gives him a few pats on the shoulder, finally extricating himself from the hold. “You sleep in, king.”
“Mmmm..”Theseus mumbles. “Like the way that sounds.”
That’s good, because Asterius has no fucking idea where it came from, but if he likes it, then it’s okay.
Asterius pads out to the kitchen and pours water into the coffee maker, enough for about four cups, before busting out his reusable filter and the can of dark-roast, pre-ground coffee. Once that gets going, he throws on his work shoes and goes out to wrangle up all the cows from the milking barn, and move them back to their normal grazing field.
It’s overcast and damp, but not quite chilly. His feet get stuck in the mud a few times, but since he tucked his pants into his shoes, and he’s long-since developed a sixth sense with regards to avoiding cow pats, it’s not too much of an imposition.
“C’mon girls,” He says, softly, holding open the fence to their grazing land, “Let’s all get in here, okay? Get you some food.”
One of the cows moos at him. By the shape of the white on her nose, and the tag on her ear, he’s pretty sure it’s Clytemnestra, one of the older cows, nearing twelve, not one of the ones that’s been born since he’s been living on the farm.
He’d remember, because Io always got him to help with the births, since it really was a two-person maneuver most of the time—one to catch and one to dry. He always got the job of catching.
(She’d done it on her own before he’d moved in, but that had involved a fair few calls to specialized vets at very inopportune hours of the night and very high fees.)
After he gets the cows shut into their grazing field, he walks the fences, as he does every morning. There’s a decent electric fence on the property boundary, to keep any of the animals from getting into the road or getting into somebody else’s land, but on the farmland itself, the fences around the smaller pastures are just kinda okay.
The cows are secure, both their grazing land and the pasture around their sleeping barn, as are all the hens. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the bulls.
They’ve only got a couple, thankfully, because Io sells the bullocks when they’re of age to stud, but still. Three full-grown bulls are not anything to get complacent about.
Specifically, three grown bulls are not something to get complacent about when the fence is broken.
Naturally, the first thing Asterius does is go to the nearby shed, grab a drill, a shit-ton of screws, and some lumber, and fix the damn fence, reenforcing the area around the break. Luckily, they didn’t take out one of the posts, just the crosspieces, so he doesn’t have to break out the cement.
Then he goes to the barn and counts the bulls.
Unfortunately, out of the three, there’s only two, sleeping soundly. They all share the barn and pasture, and it’s large enough that they have their own space, outside of the barn, which helps reduce fights.
The next thing Asterius does is walk the bull pasture, which is fairly large, and hopes it’s just behind a tree or something. No dice.
At that point he goes to where the break in the fence was, and just kinda walks in a straight line towards the edge of the property. Lo and behold, in the small stretch of woods, the bull is calmly chewing on some wildflowers in the shade of a tree, looking fairly docile.
That’s the thing about bulls, though. They’re docile until they very suddenly aren’t.
Shit, there’s two ways to go about this, and one of them involves doing something very stupid. Luckily, since he’s got a strapping young man staying over, he doesn’t have to just open the gate, wander off, and hope the other bulls don’t wake up. Theseus can help.
The bull looks to be pretty settled in in one place at the moment, so Asterius tramps back across the farm to his little house, and pours himself a cup of coffee. Theseus is staring, blankly, at the contents of his fridge.
“My dear friend, how on earth do you live without whey protein?”
Asterius blinks. “… This is a dairy farm. We make milk. That’s… where whey comes from?”
Theseus nods. “Fair enough.” He grabs a banana from the fruit bowl. “If I may, did we. Ah. Was I plastered to your side like a particularly greedy limpet when you awoke?”
“You were.”
“Then I must apologize! My friend, I had no intention of making you uncomfortable with my subconscious affections!” Theseus blushes. “Pray, please forget that such an event ever—”
“Don’t think I will.” Asterius is legitimately shocked that sentence came out of his mouth. “I-I mean, I wasn’t, uh—” He coughs, mostly to cover up his blush. “I actually liked it. Anyway, can you come and help me with something?”
“What do you need help with?”
Asterius tells him. Then he goes and changes into actual work-pants, because this is solidly not something he wants to do in his pajamas.
--
“Friend, this seems like a misguided idea.”
“King, all you have to do is open the gate when you see me coming with him, and close it once I run out, okay?” Asterius scratches at his neck. “You have the safe job.”
“But you could get hurt!”
“I mean, yeah?”
“I may have only known you scant hours, but I truly cannot overstate how dear you are to me, Asterius!” Theseus doesn’t even seem to notice how hard and how sudden Asterius blushes at that. Chances are he could be seen from space. “I don’t think I could live with myself if you were to be injured by such a foul fiend!”
Gods. Asterius doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I, uh, I appreciate that, but I can’t, like, not, so…”
“Would that all were as committed to their duties as you, noble Asterius.” Theseus nods. “I appreciate your point, however, and trust that you will be able to take care of yourself.”
Asterius nods. “Good. Uh, thanks, by the way. So you know the plan?”
“Yes.”
“See you in a bit then.” Asterius heads off to where he last saw the bull.
--
It’s still there, luckily.
Somewhat less luckily, it’s way less chilled out than it was before.
“Ah, shit,” Asterius says, taking stock of the situation. The bull is, unfortunately, facing him. On one hand, it means that it’s a straight shot back to the gate. On the other, well…
It means it’s a straight shot back to the gate, and he’s in the way, so the only way he can manage to keep it going this way is to bait it.
Asterius is tempted to break eye contact, to look back at the five-hundred or so meters that he’s going to have to run, but that would be a bad idea. The bull huffs, angrily, once, tossing its head slightly as its horns catch the sunlight.
Almost, Asterius thinks. Not quite, he’s not quite hooked yet. A little more, but don’t let him—
The bull huffs again, front hoof pawing at the ground. Asterius counts down from five in his head, pivots his feet without breaking eye contact, and bursts into a dead sprint.
He doesn’t risk a look back, but judging by the noise, the bull is on his ass like white on rice.
“NOW!” He yells, the instant he breaks free of the tree line, and can barely make out Theseus opening the gate in the distance.
Three hundred meters. Two. One fifty.
The bull is literally hot on his heels, but he’s in the home stretch, and luckily, there’s only so much longer he’ll have to run this fast, because he’s burning out quick.
In the scant seconds between the gate being fully open and him and the bull passing through, he realizes that there’s no way this thing is getting calmed down while he’s still in the pen.
“SHUT.” He yells, running full speed towards the edge of the enclosure, quite a ways away from where the fence broke.
He’s going to have to jump it.
Gods, he hates doing this.
He gets his hands out in front of him, because gods know he isn’t going to stop and try to plant himself when a dumb, angry, one-ton beast with horns is chasing him, he adjusts his gait, his hands hit the fence, and he vaults over it.
It takes a decent amount of steps to fully arrest his momentum, and the bull slams into the fence, which, thank the gods, doesn’t break.
He comes to a stop a few feet away from Theseus, breathing heavily and kinda wanting to die. His body was not meant for a couple minutes of non-stop life or death sprinting. “You…” He manages to get out, “You closed… the gate, right?”
“By the gods, Asterius, you could have died!” Theseus jogs over and begins awkwardly yet gently patting him down for injuries. “I thought that all we’d have is one perfect night together, and then you’d be snatched away!” Theseus coughs, and looks away, blushing. He doesn’t move his hands, though, which have turned into more of a grab, at this point. “And, ah, yes, your steers are all shut up where they belong now.”
“Okay, one, they’re only used for stud, so they aren’t steers. That’s why they’re so aggressive.” Now that that’s out of the way—because it would absolutely drive him up a wall otherwise—they can start addressing the elephant in the room. The metaphorical room. Because they’re outside. “And two, uh, can you, I dunno, clarify that ‘perfect night’ thing? Because you’ve been dropping a lot of big circular hints, and I just want to make sure we’re on the same page?”
“I—that is to say—” Theseus’ mouth worked for a moment without any sound coming out. “Gods, you’re really going to make me say it, aren’t you?”
“King, I just need you to be straight with me about what it is you want?”
“Oh, my dear Asterius, I could never be straight about anything!” He grins a little, and it’s only slightly forced. “I think that—I’ve something to confess.” Theseus takes a deep breath. “I must inform you, Asterius, that ever since we touched each other as only men could, in the throes of combat, I have had a deep appreciation for you that has only grown with each passing instant that we spend together.”
“Okay,” Asterius says, “But do you mean as a friendship thing, or something else?”
“I will take whatever crumbs that you are willing to give me.”
“That’s… not helpful, king. Are you or are you not saying that you want to date me?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Theseus nods. “Yes.”
“I’d, uh, I’d also really like that.” Theseus breaks out in a wide smile at those words, eyes practically glowing with joy. “Do you wanna, I dunno, get lunch, maybe? There’s this really nice place on the edge of town—”
“Asterius.” Theseus says, looking him straight in the eyes, “I would very much like to kiss you before then.”
“Well, shit, okay,” Asterius feels himself blush, super hard. “I’m not going to stop you.”
They both lean in, and their lips meet for the first time of many in the ensuing years. It is, if nothing else, the beginning of their story.