SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 774: Lights Over Euclid

The water was hot enough to pull the ache of the road and the mine and the cold castle out of both of them at once. Trafalgar lay back against the sloped end of the tub, and Aubrelle leaned into his chest, her back to him, the two of them fitting together the way they'd learned to over the last years.

For a while neither of them said anything. The house had gone quiet around them, the water lapping soft against the sides, the light low and gold.

He wrapped his arms around her from behind and rested his chin against her wet hair.

"Tired?" he murmured.

"If that's your way of asking whether I've the energy left to keep going," she said, a smile in her voice, "I could be talked into thinking about it."

He huffed against her hair. "I meant in general."

"Ah." She let a breath out slow, and some of the tension he hadn't noticed she was carrying went with it. "In general, now that I'm home, I'm well. It was a long month. Longer than I let my father see." Her hand found his forearm where it crossed her, and held it. "I'm glad to be back with all of you. That's the whole of it."

He tightened his arms a fraction, which was about as much as he'd say aloud on the subject of having missed her.

The room was theirs alone. Pipin wasn't perched anywhere near, gone from her shoulder and from the sill both, and Trafalgar knew by now what that meant. Dismissed, or off wandering. The bird spent more of his hours out in the open than folded away, whether she had need of his eyes or none, because he simply liked it out there.

"What are you seeing right now?" he asked.

"Euclid." Her face turned, following nothing, her red eyes half-lidded with something close to contentment. "Pipin's up over the city. High. Looking down at how much of it there is now." A soft wonder crept into her voice. "You see it best at night, you know. All the lights still burning, scattered right across the dark, reaching further out every time I look. It never used to stretch half so far."

Trafalgar looked at the side of her face and at no city at all.

"Doesn't it frighten you?" he said. "Lying here blind, with me at your back and no one watching. I could try anything."

"You do try anything. Constantly." Her mouth curved. "What exactly am I meant to be frightened of, at this point?"

He laughed, low, the sound of it moving through his chest and into her back.

She shifted then, turning in the water to face him, and there was something brave in the small act of it, because with Pipin a whole city away she couldn't see him do it, couldn't see his face when she arrived. She found him by touch instead, her hands sliding up his chest until they came to rest on his shoulders.

He knew she couldn't see him. He put both hands to her waist anyway, certain of exactly where she was, drew her in, and leaned down to find her mouth with his.

She kissed him back, unhurried, warm and sure, and for a moment there was only that.

She eased back down against him after, her head finding the crook of his shoulder.

"You'll have to leave soon," she said, quieter now. "For the training. How long will you be gone this time?"

"I don't know yet." His thumb moved slowly along her arm. "I have to speak with them first, see how the whole thing's meant to run before I can give you an answer." He paused, something surfacing at the back of his mind. "Which reminds me. Silas never came to find me. I haven't laid eyes on him anywhere in the house since I got back." A small frown. "That isn't like him."

"Do you want me to send Pipin to look?" she offered. "He should be in his room, shouldn't he."

"Leave it. I'll go and see him in the morning." He let his head fall back against the rim of the tub. "I've got Arthur to sit down with regardless, find out how badly the place fell to pieces without me here to hold it together. Tomorrow can carry the lot of it."

"Tomorrow," she agreed, and there was a smile in it. "Tonight you're mine, and you're wrinkling up like old fruit, and I would very much like to sleep in a real bed."

"Demanding."

"Always."

Morning came grey and ordinary. By the time Trafalgar had dressed and made his way down, the house was already moving with it, and Cynthia had been true to every word.

The front rooms stood aired, the good linens were out, and there was a particular tautness in the staff that came of a woman having been up since before dawn making certain not a thing was out of place.

The knock at the front door came mid-morning. Trafalgar went to answer it himself, because he knew precisely who it would be, and he wanted to see the boy's face when a lord opened his own door for him.

He got his wish, though the face on the other side of it wasn't quite the one he remembered.

Bartholomew had grown. That was the first thing. The nervous, hunched boy from the Academy had shot up and filled out somewhere in the last stretch, and the result was almost unfair. Pale hair swept back off a face made for a poster, golden eyes, tall and lean in a way that would have half the Academy walking into walls. He looked, frankly, like a model who'd taken a wrong turn on the way to somewhere important.

He also looked like he'd sprinted the final length of the road. He was flushed and out of breath, a sheen of sweat across his brow despite the cold, and his glasses sat crooked over his nose from the hurry of it. He nudged them straight with one finger, the gesture so exactly the Bartholomew that Trafalgar knew that the whole model illusion cracked straight down the middle.

"Hi, Trafalgar," he said.