Fortune favors the brave

Pairing: Gender neutral reader/Telemachus (childhood friends to lovers) Synopsis: Telemachus was always reckless, and you were always the one who went in after him out of the water, out of trouble, out of whatever he'd thrown himself into this time. He gave you a blade for it when you were kids, half a joke, half a promise neither of you understood yet. Years later, you kneel before Penelope and swear an oath to protect her son.

Tags: Major fluff, and a bit of angst, no smut! WC: 2k A/N: Hii! This is my first Tumblr one-shot I've had in mind for a while now! I've been sitting here thinking about Tom Holland's version of Telemachus for quite some time, and I wanted to write for him. Enjoy!

Below the palace, two boys dared each other to swim out past the rocks where the current was mean and fast. Telemachus always thought he was brave, so he always went first. He was reckless, which made you chase after him every time, because someone had to.

"You'll be the death of me, Tel!" You hauled him out of the sea, dragging him by his tunic. "No!" He coughed up the Ionian sea that was in his lungs, then grinning like an idiot afterward. "You almost died, that doesn't count as winning." Your face deadpanned, arms crossed.

"It counts a little." He said with a sarcastic glint in his voice.

"It counts zero." You shook your head. "You'll be the reason I won't die, and that's different." Telemachus pats your back, walking off after you let him go by his tunic, but you didn't trust him to walk back by himself, so you helped him through the sand that was beneath your feet. The two of you sat on the rocks after, salt drying stiff in your hair, and Telemachus was still shaking a little from the cold or from almost drowning, you couldn't tell, and he wouldn't have admitted either. So you scooted a little closer for his comfort, an arm around him so that you and he would share body heat so that he wouldn't die from the cold.

He fumbled at his belt with fingers clumsy and pulled free a small, plain blade his father Odysseus had given him. He turned it over once in his hands like he was arguing with himself. He held it out, not looking at you directly, like it embarrassed him a little with a red tint in his cheeks. "Here. Take it," his voice trembled.

"...Why?" you looked at it, confused.

"'Cause you keep saving my life, and you don't even have a knife. That's stupid." He didn't turn back; he just kept staring out the other way in the distance, then looked at you. "Just take it." He pushed it into your hand before you could argue more, closing your fingers around the hilt himself, quick, like he'd change his mind if he thought about it too long.

"That doesn't even make sense." You're baffled by him.

"It makes sense to me." He said firmly.

You almost laughed. Instead, as you shoved the blade into your belt, still warm from his hand, and told yourself it was just nothing but a joke.

But you didn't know how literal that joke would become years later.

By the time you were both grown, the job became real, assigned by the queen of Ithaca, Penelope. She didn't trust most, but she did trust you, who would throw himself in front of the blade for her son without waiting to be ordered to. You took the oath while standing in the huge throne where the queen was. Telemachus, your childhood best friend, smiled and looked at you from the side, which made you bite the inside of your cheek while your cheeks burned red. A few hours later, Telemachus slipped out, and you followed. You found him sitting on a rock, looking at the beauty of Ithaca's shoreline as the sunset followed and the birds in the distance. You almost didn't sit down. Instead, you sat yourself onto the rock beside him, close enough that your shoulder nearly touched his, and neither of you moved to fix that. "You always like to disappear, huh?… Right when everyone's looking for you." You glanced over to him.

"I like it out here better." He didn't look over. His eyes stayed on the horizon, on the place where the sea made you think you could easily get lost by the sirens. "Easier to think."

"Think about what?" you asked.

He was quiet long enough that you thought he might not answer.

"My father," he sighed. "It's been years. Years, and there's still no word. Some nights I convince myself he's on his way home right now, that he'll walk through the gate tomorrow with some ridiculous story. And some nights- " He stopped and then continued with some tears in his eyes forming.

"Some nights I think he's dead, and everyone around me is too afraid to say it, and I'm the only one who lets myself think it, and that makes me feel like I'm betraying him just by thinking it." His jaw tightened. "My mother won't say it. Antonius and the other suitors circling her like she's already a widow won't say it out loud either, not where I can hear. I can see it on their faces. Like they're just waiting for me to give up so they can stop pretending to wait." You didn't say anything right away, but thought deeply about what to say next to him. You just shifted closer, until your arm pressed against his, where you could feel how warm he was, like a wolf lying with its pack.

"I don't know if he's alive, but-" "I won't pretend I do. But I know you're not betraying him by being honest about how much it hurts not knowing. That's not the same as giving up on him." You sigh. Telemachus scoffed. "You always seem to know what to say. Wise eyes, Athena's eyes."

"I've had practice. Nineteen years of practice, technically." That got a real smile out of him, small and tired, and you counted it as a win.

Your shoulders relaxed, and your tone softened."Remember when we were kids, and you used to make me stand on the shoreline with you and look for his ship? Every single sail on the horizon, you'd swear was his."

"I remember you making me laugh. Every time." He glanced over at you then, something a small smile forming. "You never once told me to stop looking."

"You need to have hope long enough to see the next day; otherwise, having no hope will swallow you alive." You felt like Athena giving wisdom to somebody who was lost. It was almost dark, with the sun already set, and neither of you moved to go back inside.

"I have something for you," you spoke, because the silence was killing you two, too warm, and you needed somewhere to put your hands. You reached into the fold of your cloak and drew out his old blade, the one he gave you as a gift for saving his life as kids when you pulled him out onto the shore since he couldn't swim. Telemachus turned his head now, looking at the blade in your hands, then up at you like you were crazy. "That's the one you nearly took my ear off with. We were what, ten?"

"Eleven. And you deserved it, you'd just said my jabs at you looked like a weak goat," you scoffed, pointing the blade at him, making circular motions toward the open distance. "You did. I swear, I would always have to correct your posture sometimes. But it's the small things that make a difference." He was already reaching for the blade when your hands touched, and something sparked low in your chest, quick and bright like Hephaestus hammering his tools.

"You kept this? I thought you would've sold it for money." He turned the blade over slowly once it was in his hands. His thumb traced the dull edge where the two of you had hacked at it against rocks and each other for a summer straight when you were twelve, then found the small nick you made on it near the hilt. The leather wrap on the grip had worn soft and dark with age, loosely to the memory of smaller hands than his were now. He held it up, angling it so what was left of the sunlight caught along the flat of it, and for a moment he didn't say anything at all, just looked at it like he was reading something written there only the two of you could translate.

"I keep everything that matters." You reached out for the blade when you touched his hand and didn't pull back. You could feel his fingers tighten the grip of his blade as his fingers closed properly around the hilt. The two of you stayed like that a beat too long, close enough that you could feel the warmth off his skin and see every small shift in his face as he looked between the blade and you. The last of the light caught him in a way that made it hard to think straight. His hair had gone loose and curling in the sea air, dark against the fading orange of the sky, and there was a softness to his face in this light that the throne room never let anyone see the furrow that lived between his brows when he was troubled had eased now just for you. His eyes weren't hard the way they had to be around the palace.

They were open, warm, brown, gone almost amber where the sunset touched them, watching you like you were the only steady thing on that whole shoreline. A faint scar through one eyebrow from some childhood mishap you couldn't quite place anymore, and a small, unguarded curve at the corner of his mouth that hadn't fully decided yet whether it wanted to be a smile. "You're staring," Telemachus said, low, like he didn't quite trust the words to carry farther than you. "So are you." You whisper back to him. He set the blade down on the stone between them, carefully, like it mattered where it landed. "Say something before I do something stupid." He spoke.

"What kind of stupid?" You raised an eyebrow. That got the smile out of him, except this time it didn't stay small. He moved just enough that the distance between your shoulder and his mouth closed by half, and his hand came up, not to your face yet, just resting against the side of your jaw.

Your glance at his lips now whispers."Tel..."

"You always call me that when you're nervous." His thumb moved, just slightly, along your cheekbone. "You've done it since we were kids."

"No, I don't-" You tried shifting away.

"You are." He wasn't smiling anymore, something in him that had been building since long before tonight, since the throne room, since the shoreline when you were both kids.

"Nineteen years, and I've never once had the nerve. I keep thinking the gods will run out of ways to take me before I get the chance." He shook his head slightly.

"They haven't yet." You reply to him.

"No," he agreed, and closed the last of the distance himself.

He kissed you slowly, mouth soft against yours at first, like he wanted to memorize it before it could slip past him the way everything else in his life seemed to. The stubble along his jaw was rough against your skin when he tilted his head deeper into it, and his curls fell forward, brushing your temple. His hand slid from your jaw into your hair, fingers curling like he needed something to hold onto, too. Your hand found the front of his tunic, holding onto something solid, because the ground under you didn't feel entirely trustworthy anymore. Then you pulled back, gasping for the air that left both of your mouths.

"So," he said, a little breathless, a little wrecked, "Was that the stupid thing?"

"I hadn't decided yet." Your hand hadn't let go of his tunic, laughing a little, leaning your head on his shoulder while you two looked out in the distance.

"Good." He said it to please himself. "Someone had to."