SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 764: The Last Passenger

The old man didn't answer.

He turned the mug slow in his hands, and for a while the only sound was the ship breathing around them, the wind sliding along the hull somewhere far off.

Whatever Trafalgar had braced for, it wasn't this. Alfred always had something to say. A joke, a jab, a fresh complaint about his knees. The quiet coming off him now put ten years on his face in the space of a breath.

"You know," Alfred said at last, and he wasn't looking at Trafalgar anymore, only at the middle of the table, "I've never told you a single thing about your father. Not once, in all the years I've been hauling you across the sky." He let it sit. "Your real one, I mean. Not the one whose name you wear."

Trafalgar went still.

They had never touched this. Not once. He'd known for years that Alfred had been there at the very start, that of everyone in his life the old pilot sat closer to the beginning of him than almost anyone breathing. And in all that time neither of them had said the name aloud, by some agreement neither had ever bothered to put into words.

"Magnus," Trafalgar said. It came out lower than he meant.

"Your father." Alfred nodded, slow, as if the word carried weight. "I flew that man more miles than I've flown you, and that's saying plenty." A dry breath left him, almost a laugh and almost not. "Your uncle sat you down and gave you the bones of it, I'd wager. That there was a brother. SSS talent, same as you. Free-spirited, principled, no use for a throne." He glanced up. "Close?"

"That's most of it."

"That's the version that fits on a page." Alfred shook his head. "Let me give you the rest, seeing as I'm one of the few left who had it firsthand."

He set the mug down and folded his hands, and something in him warmed and ached in the same motion.

"Your father was the best man I ever knew and the most impossible, both at once, every hour of the day." The fondness came up plain now. "Armand had the whole of Morgain sitting on his shoulders and wanted nothing so badly as for one of his sons to take the weight when the time came. Mordrek couldn't. And Magnus?" He huffed. "Magnus could have carried it one-handed. That was the joke of the thing. More raw talent than the rest of that family stacked together, and not one splinter of interest in a single stone of the place. Hand that man a throne and he'd have passed you the crown to hold while he finished his drink."

Trafalgar felt the corner of his mouth tug without permission. He owned almost nothing of his father that was truly his. A ring. A few secondhand stories told with careful faces. This was the first time a living soul had made the man sound like a person instead of a wound.

"He wandered," Alfred went on. "Clear off the edge of every map there was. Gone for stretches so long I stopped waiting on him, and every time, right when I'd made my peace with never seeing him again, there he'd be at some landing field grinning like he'd only nipped out for the afternoon." The smile went thin. "And you've got his face, kid. Down to the bone. Some days I catch you at the wrong angle and it knocks the wind straight out of me."

The old man went quiet again, and Trafalgar felt the story bend toward the part with teeth in it. He'd carried one single fact about his father his whole life, handed to him in a cold corridor by Valttair, laid down flat as a paving stone. He said it now, because the quiet was pulling it out of him.

"Valttair told me he died." He heard how thin his own voice came out. "Protecting me. That's what I was handed. That's the whole of what I've got."

When Alfred answered he met Trafalgar's eyes straight on, and not a trace of the usual mischief lived anywhere in him.

"That's the story that got told." Gentle, which from Alfred was almost worse than a shout. "Maybe your uncle even believes it. I couldn't say what that man believes. But I was on that platform, kid. I was the one who carried you home, a squalling scrap of a thing bundled up against the cold, and I'll tell you now, plain as I know how. The last time I ever laid eyes on Magnus du Morgain, he was very much alive."

The words dropped into Trafalgar and kept dropping, finding no floor to catch on. Alive, then. Not dead in some last heroic stand the way he'd always been told, but alive, and then gone, and in nineteen years not one whisper of where.

"He left," Trafalgar said slowly, the truth of it forming even as he spoke. "He left me here. And he walked away."

"He did." Alfred's voice had gone rough at the edges. "Why he did it, I can't tell you. Where he went, I've no idea, and believe me, I've spent longer than you've been alive wanting both answers. Magnus had his reasons, and he took the most of them with him when he went."

Trafalgar sat with it while the floor of everything he'd thought he knew tilted quietly under him. And of all the questions climbing up his throat at once, one shouldered to the front. The one he had never, in his whole life, had anyone alive to ask.

"That last day." His voice was barely there. "When he gave me up. When he left." He looked at the old man across the table. "Did he say anything?"

Something moved behind Alfred's eyes, old and heavy and long kept from the light.

"Aye," he said quietly. "He did. And I've carried it on my own for nineteen years."