SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 765: Stand by the Boy

Alfred didn't tell it straight away. He sat with it a while longer, the way a man lingers at the top of a cold stair he's been putting off. He started talking, and his voice dropped into something younger and farther away, and the room around them thinned out until it was gone.

Nineteen years, gone in a breath.

It had been this ship. A smaller room near the stern, back when the paint was newer and Alfred's knees still did as they were told.

Rain hammered the hull in the dark, the Morgain seat an hour out and closing, and Magnus du Morgain stood in the low lamplight with a bundle held to his chest that undid everything Alfred had thought he understood about the night.

"You want to run that by me again," Alfred said. "Slowly. I've flown you drunk. I've flown you bleeding. I've flown you halfway to places that don't have names on any chart. I have never once flown you carrying a baby, and here you are telling me where we're headed with it."

Magnus looked down at the small face against him. Black hair, even then, and against all the noise of the storm, fast asleep.

"His name is Trafalgar," Magnus said quietly.

"That's not what I asked." Alfred crossed the little room. "Magnus. Where are you going? Because you've got the look of a man who's already left, and he's only being polite enough to finish the conversation first."

A tired smile touched the corner of Magnus's mouth. It got nowhere near the rest of him.

"I can't tell you that."

"Can't, or won't?"

"Both. Take your pick. It comes out the same in the end."

Alfred's jaw worked. His eyes went from the bundle to his friend and back, and the thing he'd been circling finally tore its way out of him.

"You're leaving him." Not a question. "With them. You mean to hand your own son to that house and walk off into the rain without once looking back." His voice climbed. "Do you have the first idea what a place like Morgain does to a motherless, fatherless child with a name that buys him nothing? I've been with this family for decades. I know exactly what they are. Cold to the bone and twice as patient. They'll take him apart just to learn what he's made of, and call it raising him. That's the life you're signing him up for."

"I know," Magnus said.

The two words came out so level that Alfred lost his own next breath.

"I know all of it." Magnus lifted his eyes, and there was something in them the old pilot would spend the rest of his life failing to put a word to. Not grief. Something the far side of it. "I know what they'll do to him. I know every cold year he's got coming. I know more about what waits for that boy than any man alive should have to carry in his chest." He drew the bundle a fraction closer. "And I'm still telling you it's the best door left open to him. The safest one there is, by a long way."

"Safest." Alfred said it like a curse. "You're calling that house safe."

"Set against everything else?" Something moved behind Magnus's face and was gone. "Yes. And that's the most I can give you, so please stop pulling on the thread. There are things I can't say to you. Not to keep them from you. To keep you clear of them."

Alfred stood there with his fists half-closed and nowhere to put them. Outside, the storm hurled itself against the hull, and the black stone of the Morgain seat was climbing out of the snow somewhere ahead in the dark, and not one part of it could he slow by a heartbeat.

"Why bring me into it at all," he said, lower now. "If it's already decided. If it's all locked shut. Why me?"

Magnus closed the last of the distance between them. And with no warning at all he held the child out, the whole small warm weight of him, and set him into Alfred's arms.

Alfred took him, because there was nothing else a man could do. The baby stirred, made a small sound, and went quiet against his chest.

"Because you're the one man in this whole rotten arrangement who wants nothing from him," Magnus said. "Not his blood, not his talent, none of the things the rest of them will come sniffing after. You'll look at that boy and see a boy. You've no idea how rare that is, old friend. It's the rarest thing there is."

Alfred looked down at the face in his arms and felt something in his chest give way and stay given.

"Magnus."

"One thing." Magnus's voice held low and even, but his hand had come to rest on the child's head, and it plainly did not want to leave again. "I'm not going to ask you to protect him. You're a pilot, not a swordsman, and I'd far rather you lived. I won't ask you to raise him, or save him, or fight anyone's war for him." His eyes came up and caught Alfred's, and for the first time the calm in them split along the seam. "But when it gets hard for him, and it will get hard, be there. Stand by the boy. That's the whole of it. When the worst of it finds him, don't let him face it believing not a soul in the world is on his side." A breath. "Promise me that much."

And Alfred, who had argued with this man across half a continent and lost most of the arguments, found he had nothing left in him to argue with.

"I promise," he said.

Magnus looked at his son one last time. He said no goodbye, not to the boy and not to the friend holding him. He only ran his thumb once across the small forehead, the way a man memorizes a thing he knows he will never lay eyes on again.

He stepped back into the dark of the little room, and the shadows took him, and by the time the ship touched down on Morgain stone, Magnus du Morgain was gone.

No one ever saw him again.

The ship hummed on around them. The cold mug sat forgotten in Alfred's hands, and every one of the years came back into his face at once.

For a while neither of them said a word. Trafalgar sat unmoving, the whole of it sinking into him, this new and impossible weight, his father's voice reaching him at long last through the one man who'd kept it nineteen years without spending a syllable of it.

Then Alfred looked up, straight at him, and the old dry edge came back into his voice, worn paper-thin over something that was not dry in the least.

"So." He set the mug down. "Not an hour ago you asked me what I'd do if this family ever turned on itself. If it came down to the worst of it, what would old Alfred do." He held Trafalgar's eyes and did not blink. "You've had my answer since before you could talk, kid. I gave it to your father in a room two decks below the one you're sitting in. And I've kept it every single day since, whether you ever knew I was keeping it or not."