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Being experienced in something didn’t make it any less spectacular, Hector found, pacing restlessly outside the birthing room. Five in and he was just as antsy to meet this child as he had been all the others. Five in also made this birth easy and quick, but Hector held himself back from barging in at the sound of fresh infant cries until the midwife opened the door to grant him entry.
He flew to the bedside—his wife, tired and sweaty and smiling, handed the bundle of cloth tucked to her chest over to him. He brightened when the baby didn’t even fuss much at being passed about; Temenus had screamed like a dying thing every time his father held him for the first six months of his life, and it cut deeply. He tucked the baby into the crook of his arm and lifted it up to kiss its forehead, breathing in the scent of new life and feeling this one settle into its place in his heart with same weight and enormity as had the others. “Beautiful,” he whispered, his cheek pressed to the child’s face, one hand tangling with his wife’s.
“Another boy,” said the midwife. “You have a name?”
His wife squeezed his hand before he could speak and shot him a weary look. “Eugenides.”
Hector’s heart shattered.
Eugenides was light in Hector’s arms for a seventeen-year-old boy—eighteen, he amended in his head as he gingerly climbed the steps that led to Eddis’ library. Another birthday spent in a prison cell. The boy made a soft sound of pain and Hector paused with his foot on the next stair, waiting, listening. Eugenides drew in a shaky, shuddering breath but otherwise didn’t stir. Hector waited another minute, resting his cheek on the top of his son’s greasy, unwashed hair, listening to the rattle in his chest before continuing to climb.
News traveled faster than he could walk while carrying such a precious, fragile burden, and a dozen men waited at the landing to lend a hand to lean on, to hold out their arms to relieve him. Hector glared at them all until they backed up to let him pass. “I have him,” he said gruffly, careful to keep his voice even, when a couple stepped forward to offer to carry Eugenides a stretch. He’d always been a small thing, his youngest son, slight, reedy, slippery, and it was no trouble to carry him now despite the strain to the knee Galen suspected was going arthritic. Everyone in the palace would be lucky if Hector ever let go of him again.
He'd lifted Eugenides into his arms with the boy’s head resting against his left shoulder, both arms curled against his stomach as if it pained him. By the time he mounted the last of the stairs, Eugenides seemed to have roused just enough to recognize his father by scent, the way an infant does, burrowing his face deeper into Hector’s shoulder and shaking, tangling weak fingers into Hector’s tunic. Hector paused again, heedless of the men behind him, cheek pressed again to the top of his head. He lowered his voice and murmured as gently as he could, “I have you, my boy. I have you.”
It had been a few years since he’d done this; his knee was worse and Eugenides had put on a lethal amount of muscle and a healthy layer of fat since then. Hector still managed to lift his battered son easily after the king’s trial, and easier still without Eugenides fighting him or being a dead weight in his arms. He still counted himself lucky the only person close enough to catch his tiny groan was Eugenides himself. He rolled his eyes when he felt Eugenides exhausted smirk where he’d pressed his face into Hector’s neck.
His answering huff ruffled Eugenides’ short curls. The right arm flopped his way, and he ducked his head and shifted so Eugenides could wrap it around his shoulder without accidently hooking him. “A day’ll come when you can’t simply throw me over your shoulder like a sack of flour and cart me wherever you want,” he felt more than heard his son grumble, words slurred, a cut lip smearing blood into Hector’s skin.
Hector only rolled his eyes and tightened his hold, making no protest to the sack of flour comment when he instead had his son cradled in his arms like the sacred gift he had always been. “Slight as you are? I’ll be dead first.”
“Bastard,” Eugenides mumbled fondly, and let his eyes slip the rest of the way closed.
When Hector opened his eyes, the sky was deep blue overhead, and his bad knee no longer throbbed. He noted the lack of it before anything else, before he understood his chest was not tight and his arms did not ache and the wound he remembered taking below his ribcage seemed to be gone, before he registered the absence of the smell of sweat and blood and vomit and death that followed every marching army. And only then did he sense the presence of someone else, and hear the chuckle of the man beside him.
“You are not who I expected to see,” he told the god he found himself face to face with when he turned his head, accusation coloring the words more heavily than perhaps was wise of someone in his position.
Eugenides chuckled again and shrugged, offering a hand up. “I may have stolen away before my cousin to fetch you in his stead.”
Hector sat up, eying the hand suspiciously before brushing his fingers over the close-cropped curls of the other familiar body lying beside his.
“He’ll be well,” the thief of thieves said before he could ask, wiggling his outstretched fingers. “All will be well, you stubborn man, beloved of those who are mine. Now come along; I’ll steal you if I must, but I’d rather be gone before Natosa arrives. Think of how funny her confusion would be if she doesn’t find you waiting with the rest.”
It…would be funny, a soldier’s last chance to cheat death. Hector took the hand and pulled himself upright and out of his body, soul melting into a sense of the warmth tucked safely into a god’s arms, ferried away by the sound of a laughter that sounded suspiciously familiar to his ear.
The body had been washed and redressed in Hector’s ceremonial best for the pyre, but it didn’t stop Eugenides from being able to feel the ghost of his blood on his hand, tacky and hot. It shouldn’t have looked like every other man’s blood, he’d thought distantly when he first realized Hector wasn’t getting up. It should have looked different somehow, so he’d be able to see traces of his father on every Mede who had managed to land a blow, to make sure they were all as dead as Eugenides could make them, and then maybe more, somehow.
Death and blood loss had washed out Hector’s dark skin, making him look unlike himself as the soldiers bearing his body approached. Eugenides’ hand clenched tightly down on Irene’s, who held his with her right and Helen’s with her left and would likely lose feeling in both before the fire started. Somehow Eugenides already felt the ash of the pyre weighing down his stomach, coating his lungs, his throat, the inside of his mouth. He was choking on it.
The choking sensation only grew stronger when the men grew closer. He couldn’t stand it. He was releasing Irene’s hand and moving forward before he realized what he was doing, calling for them to wait. The men paused, confused, but obediently scattered when Eugenides waved them off and carefully tucked his right arm under Hector’s knees, his left behind his shoulders.
He’d always made it look so easy, over the years. How had he done it? The weight in Eugenides’ arms staggered him, nearly sending him back to the ground as he lifted. His legs shook, in grief or effort, it all felt the same in the end. Hector’s head lolled back and Eugenides made a quiet noise and tried to shuffle the body into a more comfortable position. Another pair of brown hands gently lifted Hector’s head and placed it against Gen’s shoulder. He looked up Helen, his eyes flooding, and she rested a hand on his back, nodding, not bothering to hold back her own tears. Gen nodded back and turned away, bearing the body the last dozen steps to the pyre.
It had been years since Eugenides had wished for two hands as fervently as he did the now that his children were born. As it was, he was firmly stuck only being able to kidnap one at a time until they were old enough to walk properly.
He didn’t pay much attention to which infant he swiped from the blanket laid out in the garden as he walked past, without his attendants or guards, because finding an excuse to bend over or pretend to stumble when flanked by men who shouted in alarm if he stubbed his toe made this kind of thievery near impossible. He left his signet ring on the blanket where the baby had been sat, because he wasn’t interested in stirring any kind of panic when the nursemaid looked up from mashing carrots and honey into yogurt and noticed only one charge where she should have two. When he was safely away from scolding distance, he looked down at his stolen bounty and smiled until he could feel his own eyes crinkling where wrinkles would surely form early. “Ah, good morning to you, my perfect boy.”
Hector giggled and babbled “baba,” which Eugenides had decided as soon as the two had started saying it was probably supposed to be him, before reaching up a questing hand to pull on his beard. Eugenides gave an exaggerated yelp to make Hector giggle again and lifted the child up to press his lips briefly to his forehead, breathing in the smell of sunshine and clean infant.
“Now, we don’t have much time before your nurse chases after us or the guards figure out where I’ve gone, so let’s make the most of it. I think when I last left off, I was fighting back-to-back with your grandfather against, oh, let’s say one—no, two--dozen Mede soldiers and your mother was still in the tent…”