SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”I imagine I’ve got all the time in the world.” Trafalgar pushed the empty bowl aside and leaned back. ”Well. Until we reach Euclid, anyway. After that I want to see my wives, if I’m honest with you. But until then?” He spread his hands. ”I’m all yours.”

Alfred’s face pulled sideways. ”Don’t say it like that. Somebody hears you, they’ll get the wrong idea about the two of us.”

”And what idea’s that, you old pervert?” Trafalgar snorted. ”Wherever your mind just wandered off to, haul it back. There’s only room in my head for my wives, and you didn’t make the list.”

”Now that’s good to hear.” Alfred barked a laugh and lowered himself back into the seat across from him, careful with it, the way a man moves when his body has started sending him a bill for every hard year. For a moment he only looked at the hull around them, fond and far away.

”You know, I hardly speak to your grandfather these days.” Something wistful crept under the gruff. ”Told you as much a while back. I hope you passed along my greetings, last time the two of you were in a room.”

”I did.” Trafalgar tipped his head. ”He grunted. From Armand I’ve learned to file that under warmth.”

”From Armand that’s practically an embrace.” Alfred’s mouth creased. ”He’s buried up to his ears in Council work now, of course. Older than dirt and still can’t sit through a full meal. Sages this, votes that.” He waved a knotted hand. ”Listen to me, rambling like an old fool. You asked about the ship.”

”I did.”

”Right.” And the fondness in him found its home at last. ”Here’s the thing you’ve got to understand about me, kid. I never set out to be a lord’s driver, ferrying important backsides from one cold castle to the next. No offense to the backside currently aboard.”

He tapped his heel against the floor, and the low hum of the ship answered him through the plates.

”What I wanted, from back when I was young enough to be stupid about it, was the finest ship ever to hang in the sky. Not a pretty one for show, but a real one, something that could carry a war on its back and fly home to brag about it. A man like me owns nothing the world can’t take back on a whim. I wanted one thing in this life that was mine and answered to me alone, not to a house or a border or whoever happened to be sitting a throne that year. A ship like that isn’t a tool, kid. It’s the closest a nobody ever comes to owning a name of his own.”

Trafalgar frowned. ”Wars? I had you pegged as the last man alive who’d want a thing to do with that. You told Moses to his face you were happy staying out of everyone’s fights.”

”Now, aye.” Alfred allowed it with a tilt of his head. ”Now I keep my nose in my own cockpit and my mouth shut, on account of Valttair and I never much caring for the sight of each other, and a clever man doesn’t go picking fights with the hand that clears his sky. But your grandfather was a different animal entirely. Armand and me go back further than your whole family tree, near enough. Thick as thieves, the pair of us. Brothers of different mothers, if you take my meaning. Not a drop of shared blood between us, and more shared history than most real brothers ever scrape together.”

”We were both young once, hard as that is to picture now.” A dry glint came into him. ”Him the heir to a Great House with the whole weight of Morgain hung round his neck. Me a pilot with a loud mouth, a knack for engines, and a ship held together with hope and bad welds. We’d no business crossing paths at all. But we did, and we got on, and one drunk night I told him the exact thing I’ve just told you. That I was going to build the greatest vessel this continent had ever seen, war-worthy, mine, or go down trying in a lesser one.” He shook his head slowly. ”Most men would’ve laughed me straight out of the room. Armand didn’t. Armand asked me how big.”

”And you built her.”

”Yes, we built her.” The correction came fast and firm, the same one from before. ”Over more years than I’ll own up to. His resources, his family’s craftsmen, half his ideas laced into every system she runs on. The six wings. The mana drives. Defenses that’ll shrug off a hit that would gut anything else up here.” His palm pressed flat to the floor again, proprietary and gentle. ”There were stretches where I think that workshop was the happiest either of us ever got. Two grown men arguing about ballast until the candles burned down to nothing. He had a whole house sitting on his shoulders. For a few hours in that shed, I gave him somewhere to set it down.” He smiled at something on the far side of the years. ”And in forty years the man never once treated me like hired help. You’ve no notion how rare that is, coming from someone who sat where he sat.”

The old man went quiet after that, turning the last of his drink in the mug, somewhere years away from the deck they sat on.

Trafalgar let him have the moment, and turned the whole of it over in his own head. A war vessel, built for a friend who now sat among the Sages. A pilot who had loved the grandfather and could barely stand the son. And a house that, by Alfred’s own reading of the sky earlier, was quietly gathering itself for something.

He thought about the mine. About Rivena. About Valttair sliding his own children across a board and calling the whole bloody thing strategy.

”Alfred.” His voice came out lower than before, the humor gone from it. The old pilot glanced up at the change in it. ”Say it goes bad. Say the family turns on itself, the way you’ve been circling all afternoon without landing on it.” He held the old man’s eyes. ”If it ever came to that. What would you do?”