Thanks to everyone who read and to Rillia for reviewing.
Harper grinned and scooted backwards cautiously along the narrow access corridor. Once he was—
The panel above him was pulled away abruptly and he was swung up and out by the collar of his shirt.
"You know, this would be a lot easier if you were dumber," Harper complained, dangling a few inches from the ground in Tyr's grip. He didn't bother struggling; by this point Tyr was compensating automatically for his trick of slipping out of his overshirt, and he hadn't had time to come up with any new variants recently. Well, okay, he had one idea, but he hadn't had time to build what he needed yet so that was pretty solidly irrelevant. And he didn't have—would never have, in these kind of matches—anything like the positioning to kick Tyr hard enough to make him loosen his hold.
Tyr snorted and set him back on the deck before replacing the panel. "Arms up, professor."
"Once again, in a real—"
Tyr came at him, and he brought his arms up automatically to deflect the blow. Not that he wasn't glad that Tyr was roughhousing with him again after a solid week of treating him more like some kind of weirdly breakable crystal than an actual person, but he'd have been absolutely perfectly just fine if he'd stuck to the familiar nudges and cuffs and hadn't gone all the way straight back to sparring matches.
Harper was debating his odds of slipping around Tyr and making a mad dash for the door when the kid-alarm sounded, and he halted immediately and slapped Tyr's arm. "Catch up with you in a bit, big guy."
Tyr nodded, already turning for the door, and for an instant Harper considered tagging after him. Tyr probably wouldn't even notice, and he was a little curious. But that was so far out of line it wasn't worth more than that single moment's thought, and he went to grab some food and then see what he had that that might work as a nerve zapper.
Tyr still hadn't reappeared by the time he'd decided that he'd need to invent a few more specialized components before he'd be comfortable actually using what he was building, and with a frown he decided to hunt Tyr down and see what was up. There was nothing that had to be done, and if Tyr got growly about it Harper could always claim he wanted to steal Tyr's body armor for some upgrades. Which he still did, now that he thought about it.
It didn't look like Tyr had bothered with breakfast which was pretty unusual for him, and Harper wasn't surprised to find him doing his damnedest to destroy one of the machines in the gym. He'd already succeeded with another and given that his blades were up and he didn't even glance over when Harper entered—and there was no chance in the universe he hadn't noticed—Harper went and grabbed him some water and a couple protein bars and then let him be.
At least until dinnertime, where he found Tyr halfway through destroying a third machine, soaked in sweat and the bottle and bars untouched. At which point, shit, because even Harper could tell that his swings were starting to get off center.
He sighed as he watched Tyr go. Smart kludges didn't mess with angry Nietzscheans.
Then again, smart kludges didn't mess with Nietzscheans at all.
He'd long since crossed that bridge.
He grabbed the water and all but stomped his way across the room. Tyr should hear him coming regardless, but he wasn't going to take chances. Especially after what happened on Rhahat. Especially since Tyr was genuinely, seriously, starting to look uncoordinated. "Tyr? Come on, time for a break."
Tyr's hand slammed into the machine a little bit harder than before to Harper's eye, and Harper winced as he realized that the wetness marring the matte edge of the dark machine had to be spots of blood. Then again, even Tyr couldn't go on for hours like this without doing some damage to himself despite the wraps around his hands.
He held out the water. "You know, if you break all your toys, you won't have anything to play with while I fix them."
Tyr's head twitched fractionally in his direction.
"Come on." He took another step towards Tyr, still holding the water out. "Please?"
Another hit, but this one was finally marginally lighter, and Tyr straightened a little even as he let his hands fall to his sides. "You shouldn't be here, professor."
"Shit." That wasn't just a little bit of blood, now that Tyr had stopped it was pretty obvious that his wraps were soaked with blood and Harper didn't even want to think about what that meant for the state of his knuckles. It wasn't something that Harper had ever seen a Nietzschean let happen, and if Tyr's blades weren't up he'd probably be beside him and grabbing an arm right about now. He was still kind of tempted to do just that despite old instincts, the water bottle in his hand more than half-forgotten. "You shouldn't be here either, you should be in medical." He sucked in his breath as the obvious occurred to him. "Is the kid okay? Did something happen?"
The little professor was still chattering at him as he finished the job of taping up the tender new skin on the back of the fingers Tyr had pulled out from under the regen unit, but Tyr had stopped paying attention. He couldn't believe that he'd lost control like that. He'd thought to work off a little of his anger following Olma's...declaration...and if pressed he wouldn't have been able to say that he'd been at it for more than two or three hours never mind all day. Never mind to the point of destroying the skin on almost all of his fingers despite having wrapped them. Judging by the way his head felt he was in need of some of that water that Harper had been trying to push on him earlier as well. Not to mention food.
"Tyr? Hey." Harper shook his wrist lightly. "Come on, other hand. Seriously, what happened that messed you up so bad? You said the kid was fine."
"I—yes. Tamerlane is fine," Tyr repeated the answer to the first—and completely understandable—question that Harper had asked. It was something that he could still say with certainty given that Olma had presented the boy to him during the first part of their conversation. He flexed the hand that Harper had just finished with cautiously, ignoring Harper's immediate protest. Unlike his engineer he was not human, and some of the requirements for healing did not apply nearly as strenuously to him.
"So what's wrong, then?" Harper asked.
Tyr felt his jaw clench, his second hand partially outstretched, and only the tug of bandages reminded him that he couldn't fully make a fist yet. He wasn't completely immune to the need to rest and heal. And as it was his blades twitched hard enough to make Harper flinch back which had never been his intention. "Peace, Harper, you're in no danger." He took a stabilizing breath and brought them down again before reaching out the rest of the way.
"Yeah, I know. Still creepy." Harper shook his head and shifted back over and went to work on Tyr's unbandaged hand. "Bad, then."
"She has decided that conversations of any regularity engender too much risk and that from this point on I will simply receive the occasional message as to his well being." With no indication as to what frequency 'occasional' might entail or how he would contact them in case of emergency. He made himself take another deep breath as anger rose again. How was he supposed to—
"What?" Harper looked up at him for a moment. "That's bullshit. I mean, he's your kid. You should be able to talk to him whenever you want. And anyway, you're his dad. Isn't he going to want to talk to you?"
Tyr opened his mouth and closed it again. He understood her reasoning. He did. What Tamerlane was, the promise he held, it wasn't worth risking him just for—
"Tyr?" Harper shook his wrist again lightly. "Hey. What's up?"
"It is complicated."
"Good news, we're in the middle of a space run with a good week to go, and you have to sit still until I finish this hand up anyway."
Tyr stared at him for a moment and the ghost of a chuckle escaped despite the situation. "You are a menace, professor."
"Yep. So?"
Tyr could—probably—end this line of questioning for the time being, but Harper was who he was and unlikely to forget. And he had a fair point about the two of them being stuck here for a bit. And realistically, who else was Tyr going to talk to? "Tamerlane is...special," he said slowly. "Genetically speaking."
"I've seen your pictures and he's not sporting three heads, so what's 'special' in this case?"
Tyr frowned. That was exactly what he did not wish to discuss. Although... "Are you actually interested in Nietzschean genetics and the surrounding politics?"
"Heck no, I think you're all nuts about that stuff, but since you brought it up it must matter."
Considering that Harper had to have lost just about every genetic lottery humans had these days with the obvious exception of intelligence Tyr found that attitude more than a little absurd, but it did serve his purposes. "To a Nietzschean, it certainly matters. To you?" He shrugged. It wasn't strictly true, but the possibility of Tamerlane uniting the Nietzschean people was still many years in the future. "Suffice to say that there are certain Prides that would expend great effort to locate and take him for their own purposes, and because of that it is necessary to take certain precautions. For Olma to keep him hidden where he is, with her."
"Hm." Harper finished taping up the last finger and then scooted back a little, bringing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them. "And this is somehow different from the fact that he's your son and some lunatic thought you'd be a good figurehead?"
"The reasoning is similar," Tyr admitted.
"So why don't you just bring him—them—here? Nobody's going to take you without a hell of a fight, and it'd be an even worse if they tried to take your kid."
It was an honest assessment, and a true one as well. "I had considered it at one point," Tyr admitted, "but..." He shook his head. "He is safer where he is."
"Then we'll go visit and you can argue with her in person where she can't just disconnect."
That was not an entirely inaccurate assumption about how their conversation had ended this morning, another thing that had fanned Tyr's anger, but he shook his head again. "Harper, think. Making a deliberate visit to him would put him in far more danger than our conversations ever did. I don't even dare choose a trade route that would take me to him."
Harper scoffed. "Trust in the Harper, the Harper is good. If you can tell me where, I can drop us out of slipstream anywhere in the universe and have an entirely legitimate malfunction to blame. Promise."
