SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 777: Nothing Serious

"Has something serious happened?"

Trafalgar heard the word homunculus and felt the muscles across his shoulders pull tight, because in his experience a report on a thing like that rarely came bearing good news.

"No, no. Nothing of the sort, you can put that away." Barth waved both hands, quick to head him off. "Everything's fine. I only wanted to bring you up to speed on where it all stands, since keeping an eye on her is half the reason I'm at the Academy in the first place." He took a sip of tea, steadier now that he was on solid ground. "She's under control. Truly. If you passed her in a corridor you'd take her for any other girl in the place. Nothing about her draws a second look."

"And Selara?"

"That's the part that's kept it quiet." Barth set the cup down. "The two of them are inseparable. The girl helps her with everything, trails after her, won't leave her side for more than a room's length. Anyone watching sees a director and her ward, nothing stranger than that." A small, thoughtful pause. "If I didn't know what she was, honestly, I'd swear the two of them were mother and daughter. It sits that easily on both of them."

Trafalgar turned that over. The girl was one of the loose threads left trailing out of the whole Aurevane business, a thing built in a laboratory and later walked out of one, tied to Esmond's older work and to a good many people who would sleep easier if she stayed lost. He would rather keep eyes on her than have her surface somewhere he hadn't set her down himself.

"Has anyone else shown an interest in her?" he asked. "Or in Selara?"

"Not that I've caught," Barth said. "And I have been looking. If someone's watching, they're better at it than I am. But I'll know the day that changes."

Trafalgar let out a slow breath, and the tension he'd been holding since Barth said the word went out of him with it.

"So you carried that word into my sitting room," he said, "and made me brace for a catastrophe, only to tell me everything's fine."

"You asked whether it was serious." Barth pointed out, with the small courage of a man on firm footing. "I told you it wasn't. That's because of what you pulled on me outside."

"You did." Trafalgar shook his head, the corner of his mouth moving. "Good work, then. Keep watching. Keep it quiet. And the moment any of that changes, I hear about it first."

He'd braced for the roof to cave in and gotten a status report instead. He would take it. In his life, boring news was the rarest sort there was.

That was the moment Cynthia decided she'd waited long enough.

She'd sat through the tea and the business with the patience of a woman biding her time, but her brother was under her roof for the first time in months, and there were things a sister needed to know that had not one thing to do with any homunculus.

"Right. That's the work handled." She leaned forward, and something in the air shifted the way it does just before an ambush. "Now the part that matters. You're at the Academy day in and day out, surrounded by people. Is there anyone?"

Barth blinked. "Anyone what?"

"Don't play thick with me, it insults us both." Her eyes narrowed with pure sisterly menace. "A colleague. Another teacher. Someone who's caught your eye that you've been too much of a coward to do a thing about. You've gone and grown into a face people walk into walls over, so don't sit there and tell me not one soul has noticed."

The colour that climbed Barth's face this time put the earlier blush to shame.

"There's... no. No one." He fumbled it, and every word dug the hole a little deeper. "It's not... I mean, there are people, obviously there are people, it's a whole Academy full of them, but it's not like that. I've been busy. There's the watching to do, and my classes, and..."

"He's got someone," Cynthia informed the room, satisfied.

"I do not have someone!"

"There's a woman he can't get to the end of a sentence about, at the very least," Mayla put in warmly, a hand resting on her belly, having the time of her life. "Which is close enough for me."

Even Aubrelle, spared the sight of the poor man going the shade of a ripe plum, tilted her head with a small knowing smile. "You're pausing in all the wrong places, Barth. I don't need eyes for that one."

"For what it's worth," Trafalgar added, not looking up from his tea, "he already told me the students talk a lot about his appearance. So whoever she is, she has competition."

Barth put his face in both hands. "I hate every single one of you."

"You adore us." Cynthia patted his shoulder with the fondness of a woman who has thoroughly won. "We'll have it out of you before you leave. You've got days yet."

Barth looked seriously prepared to climb out the nearest window.

His reprieve came from the doorway, where a figure had appeared without a single one of them hearing her arrive, which, with this particular visitor, was entirely ordinary.

She stood in black. Black hair falling loose, black eyes, clothes the same lightless shade from collar to boot, the whole of it thrown into relief against skin pale as milk. She took in the room, the tea, the flustered young man and the grinning women, with the flat patience of someone who had walked in on far stranger scenes than this.

"May I come in?" Rhosyn said.

Trafalgar was already on his feet, and whatever ease had filled the room a moment before went careful at the edges. Rhosyn did not pay social calls. Rhosyn turned up when there was a reason for it. The last time she had walked out of nowhere like this, she had handed him a Primordial who wanted to break him down and build something harder out of the pieces. He had learned to read her arrivals the way other men read weather.

"You're always welcome here." He met her black eyes. "Has something happened?"