Weakest Beast Tamer Gets All SSS Dragons

Ren had been cursing himself for a while.

Not out loud… The internal kind, the kind one did when tracing the chain of decisions that had brought them to a specific point and finding at each step a previous version of themselves who had made a choice with good intentions and insufficient information about the consequences.

The Ren who had made a promise to Liora.

The Ren who had made a promise to Larissa.

The Ren who had assumed things would resolve themselves.

The Ren who had made a promise to Luna.

The Ren who had believed that being kind and not leaving anyone out was simply the right approach, and that the complications would come later, and that later was a future problem.

Okay… The future had arrived.

His parents were in the room collecting the last of their things. They had been at the castle since after the battle, first because neither of them had moved from Ren’s side while he was unconscious, which had been its own extended and difficult period, and then because the castle’s staff treated them as VIPs and neither of them had found sufficient reason to argue with that. But the house in the noble district that Ren had bought for them had been sitting empty for weeks with employees who hadn’t been paid, and Ren was going to return to the academy soon, which meant the natural moment to leave was this one.

His mother folded clothes with the efficiency of someone who had done this in enough different spaces to have developed a system. His father verified that nothing had been left behind with the expression of someone who was actually thinking about something else entirely but needed his hands occupied while he did it.

The embraces arrived the way they always arrived, with the warmth of people who had known you before you were anyone and who therefore carried a version of you that no one else was ever going to have. His mother took his face between her hands and looked at him the special way she checked that he remained still the same person. His father gave him the kind of pat on the back that fathers gave when they had too much to say and didn’t know how to say any of it and the pat had to carry all of it.

But…

“Dad.”

Reed stopped with the bag halfway lifted.

“Can you stay for a moment?”

Reed looked at Fern.

Fern glanced at Reed.

Then she looked at Ren with the expression of someone who had understood exactly what this was about and had decided it could wait in the next room.

“Call me when you’re done,” she said, and walked out with the bag Reed had left halfway and with the composure of someone who was ‘not even’ slightly curious.

Reed sat down.

Ren sat across from him.

♢♢♢♢

Inside Reed Patinder’s head, there was cursing as well.

Quieter than Ren’s internal cursing, but with the same structure: a chain of moments where he had assumed that the difficult father conversations were going to arrive in forms he had seen in other fathers and had more or less prepared himself for, and that instead they were arriving in forms for which no preparation existed because his son was not the kind of situation for which manuals had been written.

Ren began to talk.

Reed listened.

Three girls. Promises that had grown in the course of things and had run into each other. The crucial point: he didn’t want two of them to step away from his life if he chose one.

Reed processed that for a moment.

Internally he thought that this would have been a more manageable situation if Ren had brought it to Fern, who had opinions about everything and delivered them with a clarity that Reed had always admired and occasionally found exhausting. But Ren had brought it to him. And that specifically, the fact that it was him Ren had chosen to ask, made him feel like Ren was still the small boy he had taught to read, and not the person the highest-ranked officials of the city now requested audiences with.

If he wanted to keep feeling like Ren’s father, not just technically, but genuinely, he couldn’t fail him in this.

He opened his mouth.

Ren kept explaining before he could speak, because Ren always explained more than he needed to when he was nervous, and what arrived over the next several minutes was the complete picture with all of its colors. All three of them. What had happened during the crisis and the internal connection he had felt when their energies aligned in the way they had. What he had said to each of them and what he believed each of them felt, and what he believed he felt, described with the particular awkwardness of someone working through emotions they don’t yet have a fully acceptable vocabulary for, because using certain words still made him feel shy, but the shape of what he meant was coming through regardless.

What was also clear was how much all three of them had done for him. The weight of that was present in everything he said.

Reed listened to all of it.

He could see his son’s situation clearly enough. Actually… Three girls was few, relative to the options that existed, since even when Ren wasn’t home, nobles continued arriving at the house with offers and their daughters, the kind that came packaged with large sums and rare materials and promises of mansions and strategic alliances. Fern was curt with all of them in a way that Reed found, privately, deeply satisfying. She minimized every offer as something Ren could easily obtain on his own and that he was simply above, which was her way of communicating that no one in this house was for sale. Reed agreed with her entirely. But he still couldn’t help being impressed by the scale of what people were offering.

Yet those weren’t THE three girls his son was talking about.

When Ren finished, there was silence.

Then Reed was still organizing his thoughts when the next difficult question arrived.

“Did you ever think about anyone else besides Mom?”