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If Phil were a little less ... impressed by the emperor, he might actually be insulted by the choice of training partners he was issued. Certainly he’s slighter than he used to be, and his limbs don’t have decades of battle etched into them the way his mind still thinks they do - but he’d stayed wiry all his life, and the training sword they’d lent him was a well-balanced thing, and no self-respecting warrior would be caught so off-guard that they’d let the fucking interns of this army take that blade from them. Honestly. Phil puts himself through the motions - lets himself learn the feel of this blade and, more than anything, the way his body does and doesn’t react any more. He gives one shaggy blonde-haired kid an impromptu haircut and gets called a cunt for it. Laughter has always come easier with a sword in hand, no matter that this training field is dusted in snow rather than gravel, no matter that he can’t quite find his footing in a twenty-year-old chest. When he’s through with the weaker disciples - honestly - and the Antarctic air thunders through his chest, brisk, invigorating, he glances about, wondering who, exactly, he should complain to - and spots the emperor himself gazing down at him from one of the viewing platforms. Hulking. Cloaked in layers, while Phil has bared his shoulders to the cold in the hopes it’ll make this sluggish fucking body wake up and get the memo that he knows what he’s doing. Eyes boring into and through him, with something in them that Phil thinks - surely he can’t tell from this distance - he barely knows this man - something in them that Phil thinks might just be surprise.
Phil grins, a sharp-toothed thing, and gestures to the training partners Technoblade had seen fit to gift him with. (Teenagers and runts and fools. Phil had been all of those things, once, but it hadn’t stopped him.) (And okay, realistically it was probably one of Technoblade’s staffers who’d done the assignment.) “Not your finest, mate?” he dares to call out, and at least he still knows how to project his voice - send it echoing across the ice like a lash of lightning. What kinda general would he be, if he didn’t have a good enough yell?
The emperor - Technoblade - tilts his head slightly, doesn’t otherwise react. Phil quite frankly has no fucking clue if it’s a deliberate poker face or if this guy just ... doesn’t emote; he remembers the depths to those eyes, though, the steadiness in them. “You’re bleeding,” Technoblade responds, and it’s a low rumble of a thing - fucking hell, by the way, who allowed his voice to go that low, to play in the gravel like that, to send a heat squirming through Phil’s stomach despite the chill? - and the emperor lifts a hand to his shoulder, pats it gently, faintly clumsily. Like he doesn’t know what to do with his body, the shape of it. Phil’s known people like that before - unerringly self-possessed of their body in battle, almost clumsy outside of it - and, for a brief moment, finds himself endeared.
He mirrors the motion, feels the warm wet touch of blood. More embarrassing than anything. “I was warming up,” he says, and cringes at the slight whine to his voice - he sounds like the twenty-year-old prince just barely graduated from his teenage years, not like a man who has known war, who has seen his own blood only slightly less than he has spilled others’, who Technoblade could see as some kind of equal. He sounds maddeningly pathetic. Still, he holds the training sword, gives a demonstrative sweep around the grounds. “Got my snow legs. If you couldn’t tell.”
“Clearly,” Technoblade says, dry and quiet; across the open arena, it shouldn’t be able to sound that familiar, that intimate. Phil has the sudden and deeply embarrassing realisation that not only does he want to jump this man’s bones, he also kind of likes him. Like a kid with a puppy crush. When he was younger - nineteen, twenty, twenty-two - he used to blush a lot; he hopes, cheeks suddenly burning, that the emperor will chalk it up to the cold.
“I’ll send some others down,” Technoblade says, now faintly stilted. There’s a shift in the way he stands, but Phil can’t label it - he’s grown uncomfortable, maybe? “Try not to maim too many of ‘em.”
“I make no promises, my liege,” Phil says sardonically. He can’t help himself: he sinks into a low, sweeping bow, like any supplicant to their emperor lord. It was meant to be teasing. He finds, bent in place, that this man could - given a few months - command a deeper loyalty than Phil has ever sworn to anyone except his wife.
(Gods, he hopes she - He doesn’t - He can’t think about that. He made his decision. He chose to throw his lot in with the Empire)
Technoblade’s gaze lingers on him, hot like a brand. When Phil stands from the bow, the emperor is gone.
(The prince, Phil, had fought like a demon made clumsy - like some creature of war trapped in a soft, round body. Techno had watched the way laughter came to him as he fought. There was something old and vicious to it, that clear peal of a cackle, an unforgiving joy that could only be expressed through steel and bloody iron.
Then he’d looked up at Techno - round-faced, but those blue eyes flashing like something forged in war. Out of place in the rest of him. It was impossible to reconcile, and so Techno hadn’t even tried, had looked away. This prince wasn’t his. Would never be. He hadn’t chosen to be here, didn’t know what he was getting into, knew Techno only as that bloodthirsty creature the messengers had made him - or, worse, knew that Techno was a mediocre emperor at best. Was too soft on his subjects. Was too close with his head advisors. Would rather sit around a table with Niki and Sneeg at his side than command them to go to war. Techno was always going to be too much for some and not enough for others; he hated that he was making it this kid’s problem.
And yet Phil, Philza, had stared at him like someone hungry. Like someone faintly pleased, in a place they knew better than to show to the world. Then he had turned back to his battle, and slipped like a clumsy child on a patch of ice, and moved like a war machine whose only language was the sword.
Techno didn’t know what to make of him. Shouldn’t want him. He was twenty, for Krist’s sake, had the round face of a boy. No matter that he had the cold, calculating eyes of a man.
No matter that he laughed as he fought - brilliant, sharp, impossible.)