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Techno used to hate the ocean when he was younger. He never lived close to it, so any time his uncle insisted he and his cousin come along for his diplomatic meetings—which he always alleged was a way for young aristocrats to get acquainted with others their age, forge stronger ties with other kingdoms. It always felt more like he was being paraded around, something to be sold off soon enough in exchange for a better trade agreement or a promise of ally-ship in war—he'd get horribly dizzy while traveling through it, not to mention how scared he was of falling overboard, with only the barest idea of how to swim and never in waters as deep as those.
That's until he met Phil. The ocean became a synonym of him, of seeing him soon. A reminder of memories of being pulled into the ocean, Phil laughing at how offended he got; of finding pretty, shiny shells to see how bright Phil's eyes would get when he saw the gifts; of sitting in the warm sand, a hand in his, a whisper of a vow that he would never be alone again.
Funny that Phil was also the reason he'd started to despise the sea again.
He looked down at the water in the bottom of the ciffside, the Antarctic was different than that little Mediterranean island where they'd met. The water freezing cold and unforgiving. Phil would have chewed his ear out for sitting so close to the edge of it, too bad, he should have come back sooner if he didn't want him to do anything stupid.
His sulking was interrupted by a clattering close behind him. He didn't startle, there was only one person around that walked around quietly enough for him not to have noticed their approach.
The clattering was the surprising part, actually. He turned around to see Chayanne, kicking at the armor he had just gotten rid of—an old thing he had been using while training lately, what was he even doing wearing it out here?—and kicking at it. He did not need to curse, Techno could see the kick had hurt his own foot more than it would even damage the metal plate by the angry way he tried to do it again.
He really was becoming more like Phil every day.
"What happened to you?"
Chayanne huffed, arms crossed as he slumped next to Techno.
For a teenager, Chayanne didn't really tend to be this angsty and angry. Techno frowned, looking him over, managing to catch the edge of what looked suspiciously like a bruise forming in the side of Chayanne's face that was turned away from him.
Techno grabbed his chin, knowing he was more likely to bolt that to listen if he asked him to show him, and making him turn so he could check over the bruise. An ugly dark purple spreading over his left eye. "Who did that?"
Chayanne slapped his hands away, predictably. Face still contorted in anger and movements harsh as he signed. "No one. I'm fine."
"You have a black eye, kid, I'm not an idiot."
He got an eye roll for that. He chose to ignore it.
"Was it one of them?"
Chayanne didn't answer.
Techno took a deep breath. The suitors were the reason he was here in the first place, he had wanted to get away from them for just a few hours. They were getting worse, day by day, more insistent, pushier.
"You need to stop listening to them." It is so unfair to ask that of Chayanne, but he couldn't let him go around picking fights with people that were not only stronger and older than him, but that had no regards for honor. He would end up getting himself killed.
"They were talking about you." Chayanne looked at him and Techno could see the same helplessness that he felt at seeing him hurt and unable to actually do anything to fix it.
It was less surprising than he'd like that the suitors had been talking about him. Techno hoped it wasn't anything too bad, but he knew it probably had been, considering how distressed the kid was. "Then it is my problem, not yours. Let me handle it."
Chayanne's eyes drifted to Techno's leg, to the brace attached to it through flesh and bone. Techno quickly covered it under his cloak, but they both know what he is thinking.
Can you?
When he was younger he might have been able to. There was a reason he hadn't been allowed to go into battle, that Phil had taken his place when the war started, it wasn't sustainable to expect him to be in battle for that long with his injury, but he still knew how to fight. He still trained, he could have taken at least some of the suitors out if they had tried anything back then.
He was not going to delude himself thinking he could do that now. He was older, he didn't have the energy and strength he had back then, and most importantly, the brace had not been taken care of in long enough that it was impossible for him to even stand up for too long without it being terribly obvious that there was something wrong with it.
"They wouldn't talk like that if dad was here." Chayanne's hands were shaking as he signed, the anger threatening to explode out of him.
Techno was pretty sure Chayanne barely remembered what Phil looked like by now, he had been so young when he left. Still, his presence loomed over him, expectations of what he would become, if he would live up to Phil's name, none heavier than his own.
"Did I ever tell you what happened to my leg?"
"Only that you fell down the stairs." Chayanne started to list. "And Steve tried to play tug-of-war with it. And you got ran over by a particularly heavy tricycle—
"Yeah, yeah, okay. Did I ever tell you the actual story?"
Chayanne looked unsure. To be fair, Techno had told him plenty of stories. It had been the only way he knew how to bond with the kid he suddenly had to take care of on his own.
He did eventually shake his head.
"I wanted to wait for your dad to tell you. It's a bit unfair that he can't tell you his side." Knowing Phil, he would have tried to avoid it anyway. "But since he decided to take the long way round, I guess it falls on me."
Like all good stories, this one starts with a boar—
"Really?" Chayanne eyed Techno's tusks.
"Do you want the story or not?"
The boar was a gift from a goddess. The nearby city had proved itself loyal to her, and so, in exchange, she gave them their most sacred animal.
Unfortunately, gods aren't great at gift giving, they tend to forget what mortals like—despite how often the answer is directly given to them through their prayers—and how mushy and delicate they are. The boar was a massive beast, bigger than any animal had the right to naturally be, and the forest around it did not have enough food to keep up with it.
Soon, the forest started to die off, the hunt dwindling as animals were forced to leave or be starved out by the boar. The inhabitants of the city realized that they would have to kill it, or it would consume everything on its way until even the grass that their flocks ate from were gone and the rivers they drank of had dried.
A hunting party was formed, ready to take on the beast. The king that that city belonged to, however, forbid them from going after the animal until his son got all the way there from the capital, wanting him to have the glory of taking the boar down.
They tightened their belts and waited, as there was nothing they could do against the king.
At that time, a young man, set to marry the prince, had been visiting the city waiting for his fiance. He was the son of a courtesan that had fallen for the goddess of love, and had grown tired of being seen only for the beauty his godly parent provided, he'd been aching to prove himself for years, and thought it would be a good idea to do so now. A new pelt would be a good wedding gift, after all.
He ignored the fearful whispers, the warnings to everyone not to go out to the forest, much less alone, and made his way into it.
Chayanne's eyes widened, thinking he knew where this would go. "So the boar messed up your leg?"
"Not exactly." Techno grimaced, the boar would probably have been less brutal.
The young man was smart, and one of the best fighters in his kingdom. He knew he could take on the beast. It was no easy task, but in the end when the boar was felled he only had a couple of scrapes and bruises to account for.
As soon as its last breath had left it, the goddess that gifted the boar to the city appeared in front of him, eyes dark and screeching in such a way that he believed for a moment the Eumenides themselves had come down to punish him.
"You find fun in killing my creatures?" She raged. "We shall see if you are so different from them, until someone recognizes you, you will take its place."
And so, the young man was transformed into a boar, tusks and fur growing in before he could utter a single word in his own defense.
"Did it feel weird?"
"Honestly it was kind of peaceful." Not having thumbs did suck, though.
When the people in the city realized he was gone, and had left to fight the boar, they assumed he'd died. The boar still going around the forest seemed to confirm their suspicions.
By the time the prince got to the city, he had already been informed of his fiance's death. Heartbroken and blinded by rage, he didn't stop to speak to anyone before grabbing his weapons and making for the forest, intending on slaughtering the monster that had taken the one he loved from him.
When he saw him, the boar laid down, believing the prince would see something seemed weird and investigate before attacking him. But the prince was so furious, that when he saw the boar laying down he only thought of how easy of a target it would be, the first arrow landing at the animal's hip.
The boar would not fight back, no matter what the prince did, so arrow after arrow pelted it. Luckily, or unluckily, the prince wanted to make it suffer just as much as he himself was, so he did not go for the kill, instead he focused most of his hits in the leg he'd already hit, getting the boar's knee and ankle too, piercing through tendon and bone.
Once the boar was too exhausted and hurt to try to dodge the attacks, the prince approached, a knife in hand to either finish it off or continue to torment it. As he got closer, though, a glint in the boar's mane stopped him.
His fiance's people had a tradition of making each other jewelry when they were asking for another's hand in marriage, and the bead, golden and carefully braided into the boar's mane, was an intricate one, the patterns of which the prince remembered carving himself.
As soon as he recognized the jewel, the boar transformed, and in its place laid his fiance, leg torn and bleeding.
"Shit." Chayanne paused for a moment, trying to process what he'd been told before signing again. "My dad did that?"
"He did."
"Were you not scared of him?"
"For a bit, but I knew he didn't mean to hurt me." Techno had just been kind of jumpy for a while. Phil, on the other hand, had been devastated. The memories were a bit blurry from the pain, but he still remembered that being one of the only times he'd seen Phil cry. "He fixed it, anyway."
Phil had spent months pouring over books, making prototypes, testing what enchantments could work, until he'd managed to make the brace Techno still wore. He wouldn't have been able to walk again without it.
Chayanne frowned, scrunching up his nose as he thought. He was making the same face Phil made whenever he didn't really like an answer he was given, but was trying to hold himself back from fighting about it.
"I know you want to prove yourself, and I know you are trying to protect me." He didn't like admitting that was what was happening, that he was so weak right now that Chayanne felt he had to help him, but the kid needed to hear this as bluntly as possible. "But nothing good is going to come from getting yourself killed for it."
When Phil first left, Techno didn't expect to get that attached to Chayanne. He helped take care of him before Phil left, and was incredibly glad they had an heir and he didn't have to worry about where they'd get a child from, but Techno was always more of an uncle, not a parent. Too awkward to even really know what to do to entertain the kid when left with him for too long.
He didn't know what he'd do if something happened to Chayanne now.
"Your home country has jewelry for important occasions and… mourning shawls?" Chayanne raised an eyebrow. Seems he also got the same ability to avoid any important conversations that his father had.
Techno let him, he knew the message was heard anyway. "Seems so."
"Do none of the suitors know?" Techno had told him the story of Penelope plenty times, of course he recognized what Techno was doing, insisting on weaving a funeral shawl before he'd pick a new husband.
"Don't know if you've noticed, but they aren't the smartest people."
Chayanne huffed a laugh.
Techno relaxed, it was good to see that his kid could still smile. Even if it did turn a bit sad.
"You really think he'll be back?"
"He promised." Techno answered, like that settled it. Phil had promised him he would come back to them, so he would.
Techno would wait. No matter how long it took.