"God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live." - Stephen King
I.
Jason is six when he learns to swim.
The water is cold beneath his feet and he pulls back into the warmth of the sand, but his father laughs and tosses him in. He chokes and comes up sputtering, gasping for air, as his father lifts him up and lets him catch his breath before dropping him in again. His feet kick, struggling to find the bottom as his arms flail like a turtle turned on it's back, but finally he finds a rhythm, a pattern to the water and his frenzied movements.
"Hephaestus landed on an island." His father tells him later when he's sloppily paddling in a circle like a confused puppy. "If he'd fallen into the sea he would have drowned." It's another of his father's stories, full of strange names and stranger places, heroes and gods and words he can't pronounce, and he ignores the comment, blinking the water and sunlight out of his eyes to focus.
"Why do I have to learn to swim?" He spits out a mouthful of the ocean, and his father's eyes take on a thoughtful look, strangely old and wise at the same time, his voice touched with sadness.
"So when you fall into the water, you won't drown."
He should have understood then or at least suspected. It was never if he fell. It was always when.
II.
Atlantis is and always was, a tragedy. Conceived in the mind of Plato or merely lost within the memory of men, it was never more than a tale of sadness, of suffering and misery, and lives swept into the sea over a day and a night. Myth or reality, it's ending was laid in stone, set with the foundations of the earth by whatever gods may be.
"Is it possible to escape fate?" He asks quietly, and his eyes follow the swirl of the Oracle's hand in the bowl, the sweep of crimson that laps against the sides, a fraction of a second too quick for it to run over. She doesn't lift her head and his eyes trace the marks on her back and hands, ancient runes outlaid in flesh and blood, devotion to the gods inked and stamped into living flesh.
"No, Jason." She says softly and the red spills over, a single drop splashing against the floor. "It is not."
He doesn't curse her this time, because he's already done that so many times already, nor does he pull away when she takes his hand, dripping scarlet water over his fingertips like blood. But he wonders, for the first time, if both of them weren't cursed from the beginning.
III.
Mythology is never embedded in Jason's life as deeply as it is in his father's. He absorbs it, like a sponge to water, retaining a few drops and forgetting the rest, while his father breathes it, deep into his lungs, and drowns on it, a thousand forgotten gods and a hundred cursed mortals. To Jason they're stale and dry, violent fairy tales with little to interest a child. Perhaps if he'd had his father longer he would have remembered more, but as it was the stories linger in their frailest form, wispy shadows lurking in darkness, only recognized when he sees their proof in flesh, alive, in front of him.
They are nothing like the stories his father told.
There is no horror in the minotaur's face when it dies, a naked, broken man with suffering etched into his face. Pasiphaë did not cradle him as a child, and if there was a time before his madness, before the men and women turned to scattered bones on the floor, it was long forgotten even then. And Oedipus, the laughing baby with the swollen foot, lay juxtaposed with the image of a man, eyes put out and bleeding from all he'd set into motion. Only it was never his fault, at all, because Oedipus, helpless infant that he'd been then, would never have lived if he hadn't found him. And Circe, enchantress of men, was little more than a reflection, run through with a sword, and as lifeless as the broken shards of her magic.
But Hephaestus, god of the forge, remains only a myth, shrouded memory of his father's voice telling tales, and water beneath his hands. In the end, he can never remember if Hephaestus was hero, if he was hurled from Olympus with the brand of a lightning bolt seared into his skin, the fall shattering fragile bone, a punishment for trying to spare his mother, or merely a tragic victim, a deformed, frail thing deemed imperfect and thrown away with disgust by a mother who should have cared, who should have comforted him and tried to bind and straighten twisted limbs and jutting spine, held his hands and helped him learn to walk. He wonders if it even mattered, if hero and victim even mean different things, and if Hephaestus choked on water, if he struggled for land, and if it wouldn't have been better for him simply to drown.
"They say Hephaestus was cast from Olympus when Hera saw he was lame." Pythagoras says softly, head propped on his arms, breath stirring the papers in front of him. A lone triangle flutters slightly like the wings of a moth before falling back to the surface of the table.
He shrugs.
"The gods destroy what embarrasses them."
"No." Pythagoras doesn't lift his head. "They threw him out because they thought he wasn't strong enough to survive all the trials of life."
At the close of the story there's a golden chair, sorcery and hatred forged in darkness beneath the earth, and Hera sits in it, imprisoned and entrapped, with voiceless screams and hollow eyes, watching Hephaestus, watching her son. Maybe she pleads with him, some lingering maternal instinct, or callous self-interest, begging to be free. But the answer is still the same.
"I have no mother."
And it's then, when he looks into Pasiphaë's eyes, wide and frozen, with the sword through her chest, that Jason finally understands that it doesn't matter why Hephaestus fell, only that he did.
IV.
The gods love broken things, because they're broken themselves, so powerful and yet so weak, so easily tempted by a beautiful face or gentle voice, their heads effortlessly turned by a mortal.
To be touched by the gods is to be both blessed and cursed. He's more than a man and less than a god which means he is nothing at all, like water in their hands, spilled out and forgotten when there's nothing more to give. He's learned to kill, and he's remarkably skilled at it, talented at the intricate art of releasing spirit from body with the plunge of a blade. The boy that couldn't drive the blade through the heart of the queen to spare his friends is long gone, worn down to a soul as scarred as the arms that weild the sword. But it's one thing to kill an enemy, and quite another to kill a friend.
Later, as he frantically scrubs at Medusa's blood, thick and crimson across his hands, turning the water to scarlet, he thinks that he should have tried, at least, should have prevented, if not Medusa's turning, than her fate. Medusa, kind, gentle soul that she was, deserved better, and she was victim, always victim, and never hero, nothing more than a memory of crumbled stone and the distorted reflection of a monster in the silver of a shield. He doesn't lift his head when he hears Hercules's footsteps, hands still resting in the water, skin raw and scarlet.
"I'm sorry." He says numbly, and it's almost a relief when Hercules strikes him in the mouth, the sudden pain and trickle of salty crimson against his tongue. The bowl comes down with him in a splash of liquid and his hands spread out wide, water slipping between each finger like sand through an hourglass, as he catches his fall. When Hercules hits him again he doesn't even raise his hands, offering no defense as Pythagoras shouts, trying to pull Hercules away before he kills him.
It would have been fitting, he thinks later, to murder one friend and die at the hand of another. But the gods, wherever they are, only laugh.
V.
The end comes quickly, it seems, even if it's been building, a little at a time, with each wave that came closer to Atlantis's walls. There's nothing that can be done, and nothing that should be done, because it always was meant to end this way, waiting for this day all along. There is no use for heroes, not now, and not ever again.
There's a boat, at the water's edge, small and just enough to hold three, but Hercules isn't there, never would be, because Atlantis slipping beneath the sea could never drown a man already dead inside. He's somewhere back there, in an empty tavern, drunk and mourning, and Jason know he'll never get him to listen, not after what he did to Medusa.
"I'll get him." Pythagoras says quickly, and he's climbing out of the boat before he can stop him, with the water sloshing at his ankles, and Jason's hand falls short of grabbing his arm, centimeters shy of pulling him back. He stands, just out of reach, eyes clear and wide, as Jason's mind searches for a prayer and the name of a god he hasn't already cursed and fails.
"Don't worry, Jason." His voice is steady and he thinks he could live a hundred years and never have that sort of courage, that it should have been Pythagoras and not he who was touched by the gods so long ago, for surely he would have done better, would have been better for it. He opens his mouth to protest, a voiceless plea that sticks like a blade in his throat as his hand reaches, and Pythagoras steps back, swallowed up by the crowd and disappearing within it.
He doesn't see him again.
Pythagoras dies, he assumes, drowned in the sea, or crushed in the masses trying to press against the fury of the water, or cut down like chaff at the entrance to a field he won't cross, or even of old age, a withered hand still clutching a scroll with his beloved triangles. It doesn't seem to matter which, because he was dead long before Jason learned his name in school, and as much of a ghost as the crumbled walls of Atlantis.
There's a horrible cracking, like a thousand bones breaking all at once as the city falls and the water surges as Jason clings to the side of the boat and howls, like a wounded animal, like the broken thing the gods made out of him, and it's meaningless, all meaningless, because someone touched by the gods can never drown, but everyone else can.
VI.
It ends as it began: when his eyes open into a clear blue sky without a cloud, and his hands grasp for water and find only sand. There's no one near him, only voices off in the distance, and he knows no matter how far he looks he'll never find his home again, either of them, because one is long forgotten and the other has been torn away. It might be England, or maybe some other place in the Ancient World, or even Atlantis again, reborn in some twisted cycle that never ends, like a ring turned around a finger, taunting and tormenting. It doesn't matter.
The sunlight burns his eyes but he stares up into it, at the vastness of space and the faces of gods who only watch and fail to answer, and it no longer matters if he's hero or victim or both because he's fallen and broken and alone.
Hephaestus falls from Olympus and there is no one to catch him when he lands. But he didn't simply fall.
He was thrown.