Autonomy

“P-Paxton- this is not funny.” he tried not to stutter, his emotions starting to overwhelm him. “You know-I was sitting there first-and-and” he began to say, but that’s when it hit him, how much he had failed his brother time and time again. “N-nevermind.” 

“No, finish what you were going to say Everett.”

Bloodletting. He couldn’t be serious. “I was there first.” 

“Yet here am I, now.”

“If you will not move will you at least pass me my book that you seem to be half sitting on.”  she said not bothered to get into an argument over a seat, despite it’s prime positioning in the sun. 

He picked up the book and looked at the cover. He smiled and looked up at her.

“Ways in Which to Gain Friends and Acquire Influence...are you so lonely?”

      Iapetus grimaced. “Lovely.” He sighed, stabbing his spear into the ground and turning his attention fully to his son. “How have you been? We didn’t get to see you after… everything. Your mother worried.” So did I, he thought, but he wasn’t about to share that.

He scoffed but soon grew quite and there was only left, in that silence between father and son, the sound of whatever else there was about them--and son looking on father and father looking son.

After a time he spoke. He touched his stomach as he did.

“She needn’t have.”

      “Lucky thing I don’t care what one might think,” he replied, a bit surprised to see his second-eldest. When had he last seen Paxton? It had been… months. “I’m surprised you’re out and about. Slip your leash?”

“Slip your leash. You would be surprised at how true your words actually are...”--he smiled, and it was a devilish one.

“Then would you indulge me and explain why you seem so drawn to that seat?” Panya gestured to the seat and played with the sheathed dagger unthreateningly between her two index fingers.

“Why does one want anything? Because others want it as well.”

He gestured behind him. The chair, himself as well, facing away from a balcony view: and the horizon itself being some blend of red and yellow, somesuch blue at the fringes. It was beautiful, but he had turned the chair from it.

“I’ve noticed many come to sit here and look out at the sun as it sets, so I thought I’d do that myself, but to spite them, face away.

“Boredom inspires odd entertainments.”

      The whistle of wind, the sound of wood splintering. 

      He smiled like a demon. 

      Isiah Balor was well-known as more than a fair swordsman. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but that was a personal preference; it hadn’t stopped him from training through his youth until his body ached and his hands were calloused all over from sword-handling. He’d been… disinterested in the possibility of ever losing another fight. (The Titanomachy was still vivid in his mind.) He was good with a sword. Very good. He put the fear of gods in men’s mortal souls. 

      But this? The spear? This was his weapon. Combining precision with his almost-inhuman strength, marrying brutality with efficiency—this was the weapon he was made for. Five faraway targets pierced right through the red center could attest to as much. 

( PIERCER, they had called him. )

      Sensing movement behind him, he turned sharply. Sixth spear in hand, the muscles of his back tense and his shoulders slowly reddening under the sun, he looked like—

      “Yes?”

He looked at the spear in his father’s hand and he grinned.

“One might think you are compensating for something with such a weapon as that.”

“Make sure you are around when I do. I’d hate for you to miss it.”

“And for when I kill her.”

Haddock grinned, a rarity in itself, followed by a bout of foreign laughter. “I am unsure, as bitches can tend to pack a larger bite.”

“Now there’s something to tell Eva next you see her.”

He smiled and there was a certain warmth to it; himself feeling somesuch sympathy for the Argo he thought not too unlike his own younger brother.

“You’re not much of a talker, are you?”