if you'd be my bodyguard, i could be your long-lost pal
Addam can protect Hugo from things he'd never dreamed of. Not just Aspars and unreachable shelves, but politics, and nastiness, and brothers.
He's never thought of himself as the protecting type - and maybe that goes back to his mother, died nearly the moment he arrived, while his father was off offaling, or maybe it's just the nature of the granting to each individual their own respective gifts. Alrest's view to humans is oddly poetic, ironically dramatic, like that. And Addam didn't have brothers.
Bestow upon Addam some strength, alright. Give him a bit of an all-rounder's forward thinking. Provide him a dosage of laughter over sorrow, except when the sorrow is all he can manage.
Addam himself is an opportunist, a giver, an understander by way of careful listening, all effortful (though he can, quite often, be lackadaisical). He's nothing preternatural and nothing presupposed. He's no one who thinks very much of himself, but doesn't doubt unduly, either. Steady on, son of man and woman. Steady on, golden man.
And then there's the son of something greater. Hugo is so sturdy a lad, knowing exactly where his future's headed even if it might take a certain turn once it gets there, whilst Addam is gangly and undirected, destined for nothing as his uncle would have it and of no complaint at all concerning that fact.
It doesn't occur to Addam for quite some time that his very existence as one outside of the usual royal, imperial streams is something to be cherished, to be yearned for. Cheeky turnabout, rather: Addam himself is the gift, the prize - never the paragon - of Torna.
So, then. What of Mor Ardain's second sun's second son? Meek, did they make him? Frail and put-to-pastured?
No. No, that couldn't be the boy that was born four years on from Addam. Never so.
Bestow upon Hugo some strength, indeed. Give him a bit of an emperor's traditional thinking. Provide him a dosage of humor in tension, except when the tension is all he can manage.
Hugo doesn't speak his mind in that way. He's been shepherded to repression of all sorts of opinions, from large to small, and as a teenage boy, this stifles him quite a bit, indeed. But he wouldn't know - he's been trained not to realize that, too.
Hugo doesn't know what he doesn't know. Only the faintest internal inkling, and not a past generation's Aegaeon, might go so far as to hint to him that he might need to.
Addam's only had Azurda to guide him in notions of respectability, so he doesn't take so seriously all the scripts that Hugo does; that is to say, Hugo's rather bought into all this belief about how important such and such a senator is, and what it means to greet she but not he, how one must appear in the morning but never at night, how one must be grateful for their lodging and chambers but never too grateful, to be seen as green and gauche.
Mor Ardain is more about pride than ceremony, but there's still a fair share of ceremony they've got to be proud of.
And pride can be a giving thing, of course; think of a proud generosity. It can be. Not to say that it always will be. But for Hugo? Oh, yes.
Domnhall...always Domnhall, the veritable portent and harbinger of doom. Hugo can neither confirm nor deny whether or not his brother was once a happy child that appreciated his junior sibling - surely nothing so trite as that he was disappointed to learn of his shrunken share of parental and public attention?
(Surely not that Domnhall had ever had a child's feelings, just like that.)
He'd have to have been gunning for the throne since birth, very nearly, in order for that to be the principal motivator.
But it's not about Domnhall. It's about Hugo. It's about Addam. It's about Addam, and Hugo. It's not about their countries.
It's about how nothing is hardly ever about anyone, real people, when royalty and nobility are involved. Both the boys are indeed subconsciously scared for the ways in which it might - will - change them, in that adolescent fear of the unknown that plagues us all even though we really don't know it.
(If Domnhall ever was a child, then there's something in the promise of the throne that can change anyone, and will. But Aegaeon can't, or won't, tell.)
Too mature for their own personal good. Oh, yes, Hugo's heard it. Not from anyone who's supposed to be permitted to speak with him, but from palace staff, some exceptionally pensive soldiers, even the citizens of Alba Cavanich bustling about town.
Maybe Addam isn't so much too mature. Maybe Addam's more a mixed bag of things he should know and things he shouldn't.
That's what makes him such a divine - not to say divinely-ordained - friend. He's the got the spirit to pop right back up, when stunted, and the fierce desire to adapt his own gravity to the stakes of the people around him. If Hugo will be serious, then Addam will be serious. If Hugo will catch the glint of a smile, then grinning Addam will be too.
If Hugo should disappear from the eyes of Alrest, then Addam's eyes would draw desolate, too.
Addam's not an empty innocent, either; he needs no guaranteed protection from the whims of the world. But even if he won't admit it to himself, the hurt and the sadness he can feel, Hugo will stand against the storm with him.
It matters, to be alone, when you're an adult. It matters even more when you're not one, quite yet.
But there are no bullies for either Addam or Hugo to stand against, for the other. There are no forces equal to their own fates. There are no common actors in their joint assimilate-disparate scenarios. There are only echoes of similarities held in unfisted hands.
It comes across, however, all the same. The fierceness, the force of magnetism, is curled like a Scorpox in wait for anything to dare cross their dear companionship; Addam doesn't know how strongly he feels for Hugo until he sees Hugo, so distant from him, bearing the weight of that covetous crown. Hugo, perhaps, always knows it, but is not permitted to acknowledge, and would not wish to, in this odd creation of regal fear.
Distance. It's the enemy of any young budding relationship. Addam shoots up in height, while Hugo recedes in roundness of face, but they do it so rapidly and so separately from each other that time is lost so very quickly even if only a month or two at a time.
Four years of a friendship to precurse the next (last) set of four. That's only forty-eight months. Only twenty-four meetings.
Just about one for every one of Addam's coming-age years. Often, just the smaller share of an hour, or diagonal seats at an international summit with spirits just mollified enough for young boys to attend. The kind of thing seemingly only reinforced by petty happenstance. Why shouldn't their friendship have been lost, immediately, to time?
Because it is that simple and that serious. Because straightforwardness is a quality that one can be very soon prised and pressured to lack. Because they protect each other's spirits, simply by the so very human act of being; and by finding each other, again and again, despite the awkward and untended nature of their circumstance.
Not in all universes, no. Perhaps many of them, yes.
But Addam misses Hugo like a part of himself, and Hugo never feels safer than when he can find and flank Addam, understanding sought so nearby.