SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 762: His Only Family

The ship had been droning on for a good while now, her six wings holding steady against a sky gone the flat white of nothing, and Trafalgar had found himself a quiet room near the middle of her to wait out the crossing.

He was halfway through a plate of something warm when the drone shifted, went even and hands-free, and he knew without looking that Alfred had done what Alfred always did the moment the weather allowed it. Set the old girl to fly herself, and gone wandering.

Sure enough, the door slid back a breath later and the airship captain ambled in, coat open at the throat, wearing the look of a man who'd just handed the hard part of his work to the machine and felt no guilt about it.

"There he is." Alfred dropped into the seat across from him uninvited. "The conquering hero, hiding in the galley eating my stores."

"Your stores are awful." Trafalgar pointed at the plate with his fork. "This is the least awful thing on the ship, and even it's putting up a fight."

"That's honest highland food, that is." Alfred said it with the pride of a man who'd had nothing to do with cooking it. "Not everyone gets to eat like a lord every night of the week."

One of the crew leaned in through the door, a young man with wind-chapped hands, and set a fresh bowl at Trafalgar's elbow and a mug in front of Alfred before slipping out again.

"Good lad." Alfred wrapped both hands around the mug. "That one I trained myself. Knows to put something warm in front of me before I've asked for it. Half of running a ship is teaching people to read your mind so you never have to open your mouth."

"And the other half?"

"Complaining about the half you already did." He drank and sat back, pleased with himself.

Trafalgar ate for a moment and watched the old man across the table. He had known Alfred as long as he had known anything in this world. The man had flown him to more places than he could count, needled him through most of them, and never once treated him the way the rest of the family did, as a piece on a board or a problem to manage. There were not many like that.

"Tell me something." He set his fork down. "You've been flying this continent longer than I've been alive. Does it feel to you like it's heading somewhere bad, or does it always feel like this?"

Alfred huffed. "It always feels like this, and it's always heading somewhere bad. Those two aren't opposites." He turned the mug slowly in his hands. "I've flown through three of these quiet stretches where everyone smiles at Councils and swears the peace will hold. Every one of them was people catching their breath before the next bad thing came. The families are circling each other again. You can feel it in the air the way you feel weather coming. Your father feels it too, or he'd not be shifting you around the board like he is."

"That obvious?"

"To me. I've hauled enough of you Morgains around to know the look of a house getting ready for something." He shrugged. "But that's well above my pay, and I like it there. I fly the ship. I leave the scheming to the ones who enjoy it."

Trafalgar considered him a moment, then asked the thing that had been sitting at the back of his head.

"Do you have any of your own? Family, I mean." It struck him that in all these years he'd never once thought to ask. "A wife somewhere, children, someone waiting on you when you land. I don't think you've ever said."

Something crossed the old man's face, there and gone, and for a breath he did not reach for a joke. Rare enough to mark.

"No." Then the crooked smile came back around. "Well. That's not quite true."

He laid one weathered hand flat on the table, palm down, the way a man touches a thing he loves, and tipped his head at the hull around them, at the hum of her running up through the floor and into their bones.

"She's my family. This girl, right here. Every bolt and beam of her." He said it plainly, stripped of the theater he wrapped around most things. "I never married, never had children. There's no one standing at a window watching for a ship to come over the ridge in the dark. I've got her instead. And believe me, she's more loyal than most of the people you'll ever meet who have faces."

Trafalgar looked at the walls with new eyes. He'd ridden in this ship a hundred times and never once thought of her as a person. Which was, he suspected, the whole difference between him and the man across the table.

"You talk about her like you built her yourself."

"That's because I mostly did." And there it was, the light coming up behind Alfred's eyes, a man handed the one subject he would never tire of. "Not on my own, mind. A ship like this isn't something one pair of hands throws together in a shed. Six wings, the mana engines, the defenses laced through every plate of her. That took help. Real help, from someone who knew exactly what he was doing."

"Someone."

"Your grandfather." Alfred said it with a weight that caught Trafalgar off guard. "Armand du Morgain. There's a name that means a great deal more to me than it does to most people who say it." He turned the mug again. "The two of us built this ship between us, a long time ago now. Half the things keeping her in the sky were his idea. People hear Morgain patriarch and they picture blood and war and cold rooms. I knew a different man. One who'd spend months in a workshop arguing wing spans with a pilot."

Trafalgar had not expected that, and his face gave it away. His grandfather was a figure of stories more than a person, a name spoken with a certain hush, the patriarch who'd held the seat before Valttair. To hear him painted as a man who tinkered with engines beside a friend tilted something in him.

"I never knew that about him."

"There's a great deal you never knew about him." Alfred drained the last of the mug and set it down, and the grin that came up now had a hook in it, a man who knew exactly how good the rest of the story was and meant to make him wait for it. "And how I came to have her at all, how a pilot with nothing to his name ended up flying the finest ship in Morgain skies, well. That's a longer tale than one mug pays for."

He pushed back from the table and got to his feet, joints complaining the whole way up.

"So." He looked down at Trafalgar, far too pleased with himself. "Do you want to hear how I got my hands on this old girl, or not?"