16th Glade 4623
It had been a few days of being on the road with Ajax, and things were going tolerably well. Hakon was disused to traveling with people who were not members of the Scarlet Watch, and had expected that being with Ajax would be annoying. He thought that Ajax would whine about the pace, would throw a fit about Hakon's choice of lodging or choice of food being the cheapest available bed and the cheapest available hot meal, respectively, but if the lad was upset about it, he didn't let on.
Hakon had not yet brought Ajax in to who exactly they were hunting. There hadn't been a good time to have the conversation, and also he had some misgivings about involving him more than was necessary. Andros had asked Hakon to teach him to fight, but he hadn't started doing that, either. Putting his hands on Ajax or having him swing a weapon around under Hakon's tutelage felt weird. Intimate. The thought of it made his heart beat faster in a way that he felt wasn't appropriate.
Ajax wasn't his boyfriend, or even his friend. He was his friend's grandson, a criminal whose theft Hakon was overlooking solely out of friendship and a curiosity to see if Ajax could acquit himself in some way and prove useful. The boy had been quiet, for the most part, which Hakon didn't mind. Beyond giving him a greeting in the morning and some cursory chitchat during meals, Ajax wasn't chatty, and Hakon was not overly garrulous, so they coexisted in companionable silence, or a silence that Hakon thought companionable.
On the third day, though, something seemed different. Ajax's eyes were red-rimmed; he'd been crying. He attributed it to a bit of a cold, the kind many people got at the start of Glade, but Hakon observed him carefully during the morning's ride and found no other evidence of a cold. No sniffles, no cough, no sneezing.
The obvious conclusion was that he was making Ajax miserable, which he didn't particularly care about, but he didn't want the boy to run back to Andros and say he'd treated him poorly again. With that eventuality in mind, Hakon broke their morning silence.
"You were lying about having a cold. Is my company so abominable that I bring you to tears? Did I do something to make you worried?" Both questions were asked sincerely and without rancor.
If he'd done something wrong, he wanted to know.