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It’s important, Adam had been told many, many times by many, many people, that he learns to pace himself in all aspects of life.
Despite the occasional evidence otherwise, he’s not stupid – he’s relatively aware of the space he takes up in the world, both literally and figuratively, and of his place in the world in question. He always had been, no matter where in the universe he’d found himself, and the lessons attached to that had been many and close together, hurtful but memorable. He needs to take it easy; try to tone himself down in favour of whatever is needed of him at the time. The frequent failures he’d experienced in that particular department had left him jittery and anxious in more ways than he’d care to admit and he’s almost taken aback by his own thorough lack of surprise when that particular personal terror chases him all the way back to Eternia. It had, after all, started back at home.
“I’m only saying,” his mother is, indeed, saying, “that not every little bout of trouble needs a prince to fix it. Not even if he’s the,” she falters, still apparently unused to the name her son’s alter ego is widely known for across the land, and finally settles for, “the Champion of Eternia.”
“But they asked for me.” Of all the things from his home that he’d missed on Earth, Adam had never expected having his clothes tailored to be anywhere on the list, but here he is, lifting whatever limb he’s asked for by the (currently absent) seamstress’s small robotic assistants as they measure every centimetre of him, holding all sorts of fabrics and colours up to his eyes, his hair, his arms. A not insignificant part of ruling is the way one presents themselves, he knows, and it had been a long time since Eternia had seen its royal family at its best – or, in fact, at all. “I only just got back. I wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”
“Ruling inevitably means disappointing someone on occasion, sweetheart.”
That had been another persistent lesson everywhere he had gone – ‘you can’t please everyone’. He knows this as well, at least in theory, but, “If someone is in danger, it’s my duty to protect them, isn’t it?” He reaches up to tug at the golden circlet tangled in his hair. “As a future king must.”
The thought startles him as soon as he voices it. Pace yourself, he thinks again, this is too big and you’re overstepping and you’re doing too much and—
“Adam?”
It should be embarrassing how quickly the sound of his name gets him to relax when it’s coming from that particular source. Oddly enough, it’s not – he’s not capable of anything but being disarmed and sincere in Teela’s presence and it doesn’t help that she doesn’t seem to mind it.
“In here!”
“They’re waiting for you!”
“A moment, please!”
His mother sighs and catches him by the wrist when he hops off of the raised platform by the seamstress’s desk. “A future king must be mindful of all of his priorities and where they stand.” She lets go an instant later, having likely noticed the way his eyes dart towards the door. “Go. Just— don’t forget yourself.”
“I wouldn’t,” Adam vows fervently. It’s the truth; he can’t imagine forgetting any aspect of himself when he can already feel the tendrils of power rushing through him, eager and curious and impatient in a way only magic can be. He wants it out, wants it free and flowing out of him. He just wants and it scares him more than any amount of forgetting himself ever could. “Never.”
“Ah, there you are.” Teela marches in, just unceremonious enough to force him into relative relaxation again, and Adam grins when she motions him outside, lips pressed into a thin line – she hates being made to wait and he loves to be urged along when it’s her doing it, his time organised into the neat little boxes of whatever danger awaits them now.
“Here I am.”
~.~
“You wouldn’t happen to be hiding anything from me, would you?”
“Hm? No. Why would you think that?”
Teela assesses her fellow traveller as he makes his way back to their tent, biting back a smile when he stifles a curse at the thorny bushes that catch on his minimal clothing. He doesn’t seem to notice that nothing actually ever scratches him, any wounds he might sustain only ever showing up when he dismisses the abilities that the transformation grants him, so she dutifully does her routine check when he comes close enough, picking loose leaves from the waves of his hair, one hand settling on the cross-shaped gem on his chest. He sways towards her as if on instinct and it’s strangely enthralling; having this much power over something this powerful. As enthralling as it is frightening.
Adam is mortifyingly open with his affection – mortifying for everyone around him, that is, as he doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by his own sincerity and her assumption that she’d be able to simply look from a distance, harmless in her own feelings, had crashed and burned in the fact of the intensity that he’d responded to the attention with. The look he gives her now, unguarded and open, makes her want to cower like Cringer does, but she doesn’t have the privilege of Adam magicking an armour around her heart like he does around his overgrown cat; doesn’t have anything to fall back on in the event that something goes wrong again.
“Not much of a reason, really. It’s just—” She searches her mind for a turn of phrase that he seems to love a lot. “—a vibe.”
A frantic energy to him that she doesn’t understand and he doesn’t seem to fully embrace, either. A recklessness that had gone from tentative experimentation to a habit, explosive and dangerous even if it is helpful in battle. Something that no one wants to address, lest of all Adam, ever reluctant to stand taller than he thinks he should – or even as tall as he is, truly – but that seems to be growing as time goes on.
“Compelling evidence.”
“Don’t start. You know what I mean.” She should let go, likely; withdraw into whatever safety there is to be found in the denial of whatever it is that had crackled to life between them. “You’ve been shifty.”
The look she receives in return is thoroughly unimpressed. “Shifty.”
“Extremely.”
“Could it be that you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop?”
Teela grimaces before she can help herself. “What sort of idiom—”
“It means,” he hurries to explain, colour rising in his cheeks, “that you think there’s some unidentified danger inevitably coming and you’re anxious about it.”
“But I am. There is always some unidentified danger coming. Shoes have been dropping on us for days.”
“I’m not the one dropping them,” Adam mutters, lowering his head in defeat when it dawns on him that the metaphor had somewhat disintegrated along the way. “There’s nothing wrong is what I’m saying. Not in here, with us. There are dangers for us to take care of, but,” one large hand lands heavily on her shoulder in what he likely imagines is a reassuring manner, “it’s never something to do with us. What would I have to hide from my second in command?”
Had it been anyone else, she would have suspected him of flattery for the sake of distraction, especially when those big, imploring eyes seek hers out, the question there so straightforward that it’s enough to lower her defences entirely.
“I don’t know,” she admits, “but you’d better not be.”
He salutes, form charmingly awful despite his solemn expression. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.”
Teela allows herself a laugh as she shoves him away, more playful than she would ever dare to be back in polite society, but the shadow she has a glimpse of every now and again still works in his expression, tucked in behind the bright smile she knows so well, and the expression he’d used no longer feels quite as ridiculous. There’s a strange, gnawing anxiety in the core of her that leaves her hanging and breathless, as if she’d been tugged off the ground and suspended mid-air, uncertain of what will follow. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
~.~
There doesn’t seem to be a limit to the things that he can do.
It’s a disturbing discovery in the places it makes his imagination reach if in nothing else. It had truly clicked in that forest when his hands had stilled the rapidly spinning blades of the ship hovering towards him, but he’d been desperate then, doing everything in his presumed power to save those who matter. In turn, it had hardly mattered that he might fail; it had been imperative to try.
It had been no trouble at all – the power wants nothing more than to be used. It burns under his skin, surging to life at every opportunity, and he’s not particularly fond of the things it makes him, immovable and invulnerable whenever he’s fully focused on the fight at hand. His body hardly feels like his own, his opponents slamming into him like one would into a brick wall.
It’s both intolerably nice and deeply distressing when he thinks about it too long, which is his main activity during the nights; endless hours spent looking up at the high ceiling of his childhood bedroom while sleep evades him, replying in his mind this fight or that and, once the hour grows sufficiently late, that night, the one on Snake Mountain when that same power had lashed out of him to save and destroy at the same time, his father disappearing from his sight as soon as the rubble had started falling.
Those particular nights never end well. The guilt and the anger suffocate him almost as much as the urge to just do something, even now that it’s too late, and that’s when the electricity thrumming through his veins tends to make itself known again, convincing him that he can do anything; can fix any disaster, put any mess into order, if only he were to use it.
It doesn’t work quite like that, of course. If it did, the consequences of it would not have killed his father. He feels half a god when he uses it but, as he’d been swiftly reminded the very first time he’d shared that sentiment, he isn’t one at all. He’s just a man.
So when he ends up on the training grounds again, many years after he’d last been taught the art of combat, he trains without a hint of magic on his side.
That had been the intention, at least.
“This is stupid,” Teela says, forcing him into a headlock before he can truly make sense of where his limbs are and where they’re supposed to be if he’s to defend himself. “What could you possibly want to prove? You’re not losing the sword ever again anyway.”
“The sword is not—” He catches himself just in time. She had been there for that final fight, had seen the blade shattered and him extracting it from himself to fight without it, but she’d had plenty to worry about; the chances of her having grasped the semantics of it all are low to none. “It’s not about the sword.”
“Then what is it about?” She grunts as soon as he frees himself and flips them around, mindful enough of his weight on top of her that he’s all too easy to topple a moment later, breath leaving his lungs in a rush when Teela presses him into the soft flooring and straddles his chest with a self-satisfied smile. “Why would you want to learn anything more than what it gives you built in?”
“I’m only a man,” he shrugs, smiling when she frowns down at him, annoyed to have her own words thrown back at her. “Without the power, that is. And with it, nothing can hurt me or move me out of the way or,” his hand curls around Teela’s wrist rests against his shoulder, smiling when he sees her freeze and then consciously get herself to relax, “truly touch me at all.”
It is provocation and he’s all too thrilled to see it responded to, his Captain’s eyes widening with intrigue, fingers tightening around the side of his neck. “You don’t feel that?”
“I do,” he says, surprised by how hushed the reassurance is on its way out, awed and appreciative. “Very— directly. It’s not that way when I’m him.”
“But you are him.”
He thinks of the way things feel after a transformation – subdued, in a way, like every touch is filtered through a distance that he can’t quite cross no matter what he does. It’s frustrating as it’s one of the few times when Teela seems to lower her guard, treating him like something paradoxically fragile. She’s far less thoughtful but far more evasive when it’s Adam she’s talking to, as if he’s capable of causing more damage to some unnamed part of her than the version of him who can lift an aircraft with one hand. Insisting that they’re one and the same in spite of that feels far more confusing precisely because of that, but he’d long since given up trying to decipher the roadmap to her heart through what he thinks makes sense.
“Yes.” It’s a wonder how defeated a single syllable can sound. “I suppose I am.”
~.~
Adam is the vessel.
He’s rather casual about it when he confesses to it, but Teela can practically see the tension radiating out of his very being along with the power coursing through his veins, still sending zaps of electricity down his arms as he gesticulates and does his best to explain himself. It’s a disquieting and yet mesmerising sight – the warm hazel of his eyes is replaced by something as bright as sunlight, shimmering beneath the distress of his furrowed brows. She wonders if he knows; if he’s ever looked in the mirror and been faced with a near-stranger staring back at him. This had the secret that she’d feared, she supposes. The quiet anxiety crawling through their every interaction had manifested itself in a blurted-out confession when she’d noticed that he’d remained— empowered even as he’d propped his weapon on the tree next to him.
“The Sorceress told me,” he says now, sounding almost guilty of all things. “When the Sword was broken and I thought I was dying. It makes me stronger, of course, but it’s not what holds the power.” A beat of heavy, miserable silence. “I am.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Her mind awakens from its stupor, latching onto the new angle regarding the safety of the royal family as if she’d been programmed into it. “It means you can be invulnerable even if you’re attacked without warning.”
If anything, he looks even more frustrated – hurt, almost. “It’s not all I want to be.” He falters, grimacing as if the words escape him. “When I first felt it, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. It’s what every child dreams of, right? Saving the world you’re destined to rule because you’re the legendary fighter bound to protect it. And I do love it! I do, it’s just—” A hand flails around, as directionless as he likely feels. “What else would be there if I let it be everything there is?”
She thinks back to everything they’d gone through since the moment she’d found him: the sheer volume of the work that it had taken to bring Eternia to its previous glory and eliminating all the threats to its future prosperity and all the effort that it still takes to put out every small fire they can find here and there. She thinks of Adam’s joy at being called to help, as if the only measure of worth he’d found in life is in being useful to his people. He would not say it – is unlikely to even think it in such explicit terms – but chances are, it’s out of fear that he’d end up isolated again, deemed more useful as a protector of the peace rather than a man quietly frantic in his attempts to retain some part of himself that serves only him and no one else for a change.
And so, “You don’t need to,” Teela hurries to say, “let it, that is. You can do both.” She gathers her own strength before she can continue. Being brave, she’d found, is the only thing to do when one is about to give the same advice to someone else. She places a hand on his forearm, hold tightening even as she feels the unseen power that they talk about so nonchalantly seep right into her as well, skirting the surface of her very being as if she’s being asked whether she can take it – him – for what it is. The answer to that had never truly changed, no matter how hard she’d tried to convince herself otherwise. To have access to any part of it feels forbidden, somehow, as if she’d crossed a line that might anger a god or two, but all of a sudden, it’s perfectly clear why Adam struggles so much. It’s difficult to let go of the euphoria it causes and she fervently hopes that it doesn’t show on her face; the same reverence that everyone has for the Champion of Eternia and that they let go off far too soon when it’s Adam they come into contact with. This time will be different, she resolves, and it’ll be different because of her.
Teela shifts closer still, so far into his space that the magic hisses to life between them, only growing when he leans in as well, the golden waves framing his face brushing her cheeks as the worshipful look in his brightened eyes blurs from the proximity, irises brimming with something he can’t quite contain. “I can help you.”
It’s an ambitious promise, but one she’s all too eager to make, Teela thinks, and when he finally kisses her, the rest of the world seems to drown and fade away, bathed in nothing but blinding light.