#mary geoise

[gav-san]

The Figarland Retention Strategy: 1/3

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Garling Figarland x Reader, 18+ Based on this: prompt Length 15K+

Summary: The pay was unreasonable, the child was famously difficult, and the Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights was, unfortunately, exactly as advertised. You came to the Governess interview in the wrong coat, said the wrong things, and got the job anyway. You were going to do good work, save your money, and leave. The position was temporary. The child had other ideas. So, it turns out, did his father.

Next

The other candidates had worn the exclusive white overcoat that signaled their nobility.

You thought about this afterward.

About how every other woman who had sat in that chair before you had arrived in pristine silk and inherited standards, pearls at their throats, hands folded as though already practicing for a life of quiet, decorative service. How they had answered every question with “Yes, my lord” and “Of course, my lord,” and had probably gone home to cry into very expensive pillows about not getting the position.

It was hard to feel much sympathy for women who had never needed a position in their lives. The pandering had been obvious to anyone paying attention.

You hadn’t worn the Celestial Dragon covering yourself. You had always found it too cumbersome, and so you had come in your traveling coat instead, the one with the worn elbows. Experience had taught you that employers who could look past that kind of detail were the only ones worth working for. Besides, you suspected it served a quiet purpose for discerning households: a simple way to tell the difference between someone who genuinely needed the work and someone who only wanted access to the men inside.

A family that didn’t care how it treated its paid staff wasn’t worth your time, regardless.

Not that your own standing was anything to boast about. You may have technically counted among the Celestial Dragons, but the right lineage carried a great deal more nuance than most people outside realized. Even Mary Geoise had its hierarchies, its quiet inner circles, its unspoken rankings. And the money, as it always did, flowed toward the families who truly ruled her.

You could coast along on your stipend, certainly. But a stipend didn’t give you what you actually wanted.

And what you wanted, unfortunately, required competing for the most exclusive positions in the city. Which, for an unmarried woman, meant governess work. There wasn’t much else on offer, and you had long since made your peace with that particular injustice.

What you had not made your peace with was the Figarland family.

They were among the best-paying households with an open position, and that fact made you cringe every time you thought about it. But you were between placements, and your mother had recently redoubled her efforts to see you respectably married off, and sometimes a woman simply had to choose her battles. You had bitten the bullet and submitted your application before you could talk yourself out of it.

You wished now that you had worn the coat.

Sitting alone in the small clerk’s office they had parked you in, shivering in the cold that seemed to seep straight through the walls, you had at least assumed the housekeeper would conduct the first discussion. A secretary, perhaps. Someone administrative and reasonably human.

It had not occurred to you, not seriously, that the Supreme Commander himself would be personally overseeing the selection process for his heir’s governess.

Clearly, you had thought wrong.

He was larger than you had expected. That was the first thing. You had seen men who carried authority like a coat they could take off at the end of the day, and you had seen men who were simply built from it, the way iron was built into a ship. Garling Figarland was the latter. He sat behind the desk the way other men stood at the head of armies, utterly still, one broad hand resting flat against the surface, and the sheer size of him made the chair look incidental. His sharp eyes had been on you since the moment you entered. They had not moved once. They had also not, in that entire span of time, looked anything other than unhappy.

You had done your research. Supreme Commander. Holy Knight of the highest honor. Eternal Bachelor. Reportedly terrifying. The kind of man who made other powerful men sweat through expensive shirts just by entering a room. Probably nearly forty.

The research had not mentioned that he was also, and you noted this privately, astoundingly handsome. You filed it immediately into a drawer you intended never to open again, extraordinarily good-looking in a way that felt almost aggressive, like he hadn’t chosen it so much as imposed it on the world, but it was the mandate of some god. Hair bright gold, eyes dark garnet, an impressively immaculate scruff along a jaw sharp enough to be considered a weapon. He towered over you and your worn brown coat and looked equally unimpressed by both.

Which brought you neatly to your problem. He had no mistress of the house to act as buffer, no wife to more or less absorb the ambient chaos of a bachelor’s household. Just reportedly ten concubines and, more alarmingly, three noble mistresses he rotated on a whim. Three gorgeous, wealthy, privileged Celestial Dragon women who simply stayed available for him. Bachelors were notoriously careless about what their staff was expected to navigate, and you had learned that lesson once already.

If you were being fully honest with yourself, you were here to fail. Not because you were in any danger of his attention with your perfectly plain demeanor, but because women in these households had a habit of deciding you were competition. Which perhaps some governesses were, but not you. You had places to be. Oceans to sail. Supreme Commanders to disappoint.

“You understand,” he said, “that this is not a temporary arrangement. The Figarland household requires stability. Consistency. A presence that will not—” a pause, measured, the kind that made the air feel smaller, as though the silence between each word was something he expected you to sit inside and consider, “—fluctuate.”

“I fluctuate constantly,” you said pleasantly. “I’m very honest about that upfront.”

The silence was enormous.

Garling Figarland looked at you the way a man might look at something that had crawled out from under a very expensive piece of furniture.

“Then why,” he said, “are you here?”

Not a question. An indictment.

You had prepared an answer for this. Something professional. Something that demonstrated self-awareness and reframed the fluctuation as adaptability, actually, which was a desirable quality in a governess and not a liability at all. You had references. A very solid letter from the Donquixote household, one from the Roswards, and a third from a family whose name you had been asked in writing never to repeat publicly but whose children you had successfully taught to read despite their father’s firm belief that literacy was a phase. Your credentials were genuinely good. You had spent years working with the children of noble houses across the Holy Land, specifically because children were honest and adults were exhausting. You had a gift for the work, the real kind, the kind that couldn’t be manufactured or performed. You did have pride about that, despite your best efforts not to.

You had the whole answer right there, loaded and ready.

What came out instead was: “I think your son needs someone who isn’t afraid of him.”

Another silence.

But this one had a different tenor than the last. Instead of staring at you with those gemstone-hard eyes, Garling Figarland raised one hand and ran it slowly down his jaw.

“My son,” he said carefully, “is three years old.”

“I know.”

This was an understatement.

What you knew, gathered through the remarkably efficient gossip network that connected every nursemaid, lady’s companion, and household secretary in the Holy Land, was that Shamrock Figarland had gone through six caregivers in eight months. That he did not sleep, or did not sleep in any pattern a person could reasonably plan around. That he screamed with a commitment that suggested genuine artistic vision. That he had once bitten a woman of impeccable pedigree and extensive references hard enough to leave a mark that lasted a week, and she had resigned on the spot, packed her things the same afternoon, and relocated entirely out of Mary Geoise. The story had gone around the nursemaid network like wildfire. The bite had nearly become something of a legend.

None of this had discouraged you. If anything, it had made the picture clearer.

“He’s not a bad child,” you said. You said it the same way you said most things you were certain of, without emphasis, because it didn’t seem to require any. “Being bad and being frightened look identical from the outside, but they’re not the same thing. He doesn’t have the language for what he’s feeling yet, so he’s using what he has. Children usually do.”

You had spent enough years in enough fine houses to know the difference. The children who were actually cruel were a different thing entirely. Shamrock Figarland, by every account, was simply a small person in an unsteady world, doing the only thing that had ever gotten him a reaction.

“An…absent mother, a busy father,” you continued, not unkindly, “and a rotation of strangers who kept leaving. That would unsettle anyone. He needs consistency more than he needs discipline, and he needs someone who won’t flinch when he tests them.” You paused. “He will test them.”

You were aware, dimly, that you had entirely abandoned the professional register you had walked in with. You were also aware that you didn’t particularly mind. If this lost you the position, it would only confirm that it hadn’t been worth having.

Your smile, when it came, was the one thing about you that was genuinely nice, and it arrived the way it always did when you thought about what it actually meant to help a child find their footing. Not performed for the man across the desk, but in real delight at the idea of helping someone.

Something moved across Garling Figarland’s face. Brief, and controlled, and gone so quickly you might have imagined it.

“Fine,” he said. “You’re hired.”

You blinked.

“I’m sorry?”

He looked at you as though you had asked him to repeat himself in a foreign language, and he found the request mildly offensive.

“The salary,” he said, “is—”

He named a number.

You kept your expression very still. You had a great deal of practice keeping your expression very still.

It was an absurd number. It was a number that implied either profound desperation or a complete absence of any lived understanding of what things actually cost, and given that this was a man who had grown up at the absolute apex of the highest caste in the world, you suspected the latter. It was not a number you had seen in your years of reviewing household postings. It was a number that, if you stayed even two years, made your travel fund look not only achievable but frankly generous.

It was also, unfortunately, attached to this job.

You accepted it in an embarrassingly short amount of time because you were, when reduced to your essentials, a little bit greedy and entirely a fool for a good opportunity.

“That’s acceptable,” you said, with great dignity.

“You’ll have rooms in the east wing. Full access to household staff. Tuesdays and Thursdays, the boy dines and trains with me in the mornings. You are not required to be present until after.” He turned a page. “Any personal time off is to be submitted in writing, one week in advance.”

“Understood.”

“Your duties end at nine in the evening. What you do after that is your own business.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I don’t require personal devotion from my staff. I do, however, require certain boundaries.”

“Fortunate,” you said brightly. “Personal devotion isn’t really my offering, but I do love a good boundary.”

He gave you a look that suggested he was privately reassessing several of his recent decisions. One brow rose, slowly, before he continued.

“Discretion is not optional here. As a member of this household, you will be privy to things that many would consider valuable. There is no shortage of people who would use proximity to my son, my estate, or myself to their own ends.” His eyes settled on you with the full weight of whatever it was he used instead of warmth. “Don’t disappoint me, governess.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at you for a long moment.

You looked back. Over the years of working in Celestial Dragon households you had developed a very special kind of face. Warm but unreadable. Present without performing presence. Attentive in a way that gave absolutely nothing away. It was, you had discovered, one of your more useful professional tools. Certain kinds of people found it deeply unsettling, the way a locked door was unsettling to someone accustomed to walking through whatever they liked.

Garling Figarland, you would come to learn, was exactly that kind of person.

The muscle in his jaw shifted almost imperceptibly.

“You’ll start Monday,” he said.

Shamrock Figarland was small for his age, serious-faced, and had his father’s eyes in a way that was almost unsettling. Not just the color of them, but the quality, that same patient, measuring weight, the sense of something behind them that was already deciding. He stood in the nursery doorway on your first morning and looked at you the way a very small general might regard contested territory.

You sat down on the floor.

This was, in your experience, the most important thing you could do. Adults were always above children. Looming over them, announcing themselves from great heights, expecting to be received. You sat down cross-legged on the nursery rug and let your eyes travel along the shelves and said, to no one in particular, “Hm. What’s that one?”

A pause.

“A horse,” said Shamrock. Very careful. Like a question that had been disguised as an answer, waiting to see what you would do with it.

“Mm.” You tilted your head. “It’s got a funny expression.”

The silence stretched. Then, with the caution of a small person who had been disappointed enough times to start managing his own expectations, he came and sat down beside you. Not close. A respectful distance. The kind of distance that left room to retreat without embarrassment.

He looked at the horse.

“Father gave it to me,” he said.

“Did he pick it himself, do you think? Or did someone pick it for him?”

Shamrock considered this with the full gravity it apparently deserved. “Father doesn’t give gifts he didn’t pick himself.”

“Interesting point,” you said.

You sat there for a while after that. Just the two of you on the rug, no agenda, no performance, the morning light coming in unhurried across the floor.

He didn’t bite you.

By the end of the first day, you were on a first-name basis. By the end of the week, he had shown you every single toy he owned, in order of importance, with a seriousness that suggested this was not a casual tour but a formal presentation of his most significant holdings. By the end of the month, he had started appearing at the nursery door in the mornings, a small sentinel in his nightshirt, watching the length of the hall. When you came around the corner, he would turn and run back inside with great urgency, and you would arrive to find him arranged on the rug with a wooden horse, deeply, unconvincingly involved in play and not waiting for you.

You found this so genuinely endearing that composing your face before you opened the door became a necessary part of the morning routine.

Routine became life, and Shamrock was quick to attach himself to you: the rare adult with enough composure and steel to find him a smart child, but not be personally challenged by the oftentimes too cunning things that fell from his mouth—someone constant and unmoving with their own beliefs.

But you, too, had been that same child once. Parents too busy with the easier children, the ones with more potential. And the thing about Garling Figarland was that he didn’t seem to be a bad father, but he wasn't actually around very much.

This was something you had not fully appreciated before accepting the position. The Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights was busy, which was an understatement. He was a man of enormous institutional weight, and that weight required constant application. He left before dawn on most days. He returned at hours that varied from late to what time is it actually to occasionally not at all, in which case a member of the household staff would quietly inform you. You would tell Shamrock in the morning that Father had an important engagement, and he would nod very seriously, like he’d been practicing accepting this for years.

Which, you supposed, he had been.

The two days a week he was home for breakfast: Tuesdays and Thursdays, Commander’s days, the ones where you were expressly not required, you sometimes heard them from the east wing if the windows were open. Shamrock’s voice, high and rapid, poured out a week’s worth of stories. Garling’s voice, lower, the words indistinct, but present. You mostly stayed at the estate because your mother didn’t dare come and fetch you, and it was all good.

It was fine. It was a perfectly functional household. You were not a part of the family; you were an employee, and this distinction was clear and comfortable and required no examination.

You mostly noticed Garling Figarland the way you noticed architectural details in a house you were renting.

The way he moved, for instance, that economy of motion, nothing wasted, like he’d stripped everything back to pure function. The way he listened when Shamrock talked, that absolute stillness that could have been coldness and was actually, you had come to understand, attention. The way he sometimes appeared in the nursery doorway on his days home, very quietly, just to check, and Shamrock would be absorbed in something and not notice, and Garling would stand there for a moment with an expression you had no category for, and then leave.

You noticed these things the way you noticed that the east wing got good morning light, the cook made exceptional coffee, and the garden was best in the hour before the heat.

But it wasn’t until Shamrock fell ill that things for you took a turn with his father.

Fever up in the night, the kind that came fast and ran hot, and by the time you’d been woken by the sound of him calling out and made it to the nursery, he was burning and confused and reaching for you with both hands.

“’m okay,” he kept saying, which he was absolutely not.

“I know,” you said, which was a lie for his benefit, and got to work.

You knew what you were doing. You’d managed childhood fevers before. Cool cloths, fluids, monitoring, and patience. You weren’t panicked, you were focused, which was a different state entirely, and you were so focused that you didn’t hear the door until Garling said, from very close behind you,

“What happened?”

You didn’t startle much, which was its own small achievement.

“Fever. Came up around two. He’s okay—it’s not that high, it just moved fast. I’m bringing it down.”

He paused, thinking about it, like he hadn’t known what to do to help until he saw you comforting his child.

Then Saint Figarland was beside you, kneeling on the other side of the bed, and he put his hand on Shamrock’s forehead with a kind of careful awkwardness, like he was afraid of how he’d do it.

Shamrock, half-asleep, turned his head toward his father.

“Papa,” he murmured. And then, almost in the same breath: “Mama’s here.”

The silence was very soft.

You kept your eyes on the cool cloth you were wringing out, staying focused and busy enough to pretend you didn’t hear.

“I’m here,” said Garling, after a moment. His voice was calibrated, less cool than normal. Careful in a different way than usual.

You stayed until the fever broke, which took until nearly four in the morning. Garling stayed too, though you’d expected him to leave once he’d confirmed the situation was managed, but he didn’t. He stayed on the other side of the bed, and you worked in a silence that was not uncomfortable exactly but had a weirdness to it, with him there.

When Shamrock finally fell into a proper sleep, deep and even, you both stood up, and the room suddenly felt much smaller than it had.

“I should—”

“I’ll call back the doctor—”

You both paused.

“Well handled, governess,” he said, filling the silence before you could. You nearly stumbled, avoiding his gaze.

“It’s—It’s just my job.”

“It’s— “ He stopped. Started again. “It was the middle of the night. Not quite your obligation.”

“Children don’t respect business hours.” You gathered the bowl and the soiled cloths. “He’ll want broth in the morning. Best if he stays in bed and reads. Light day.”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’ll tell the cook.”

“I already sent a note.” You said quickly. “The staff will be on standby as well.”

Garling looked at you with that recalibrating expression, the one you’d learned to read somewhat. You could guess he probably hadn’t had much softness in his life, the way you kept doing things slightly outside his predictive model.

That really wasn’t your concern, though.

“Good night, Commander,” you said, and went back to the east wing, and stood in your room for a moment breathing the way you did when you’d been very focused and suddenly had permission to be less so.

You thought about his face in the nursery doorway. The expression you had no category for.

You filed it in the drawer. The one you didn’t open.

And after that, Shamrock started calling you Mama more.

It slipped out one evening when he was most of the way to sleep, and you were reading to him, his eyes at half-mast, his breathing already going slow and deep, and he murmured it the way children did when they were too tired to maintain whatever small careful structures they had built around themselves. A word that lived somewhere below intention.

You kept reading. You didn’t pause, didn’t soften, didn’t make it into a moment, because making it into a moment would have meant acknowledging it, and acknowledging it in front of him would have cracked something open that you didn’t have the right to crack.

But it kept happening after that.

Not always. Rarely in front of anyone else. Only in the quiet spaces: the last few minutes before sleep, the grey sick-day afternoons when he was too energetic and wanted to be held and had no energy left for dignity, the small sharp moments when he had hurt himself and was silently trembling, as a child determined not to cry in front of someone they were still deciding whether to trust. In those moments, it slipped out of him like water finding the cracks in something, easy and unstoppable and entirely without fanfare.

And every time it did, something in your chest did something you chose, firmly and repeatedly, not to examine too closely.

He was not exactly yours. And you couldn’t stay forever. Those two facts sat at the bottom of everything like stones, and you had made a practical decision early on not to stand on them any longer than you had to. You would do the best with what you had. You would be consistent, present, and good at your job. The rest of it you folded up and put somewhere else.

Instead, in your free time, you turned your considerable attention to learning the Figarland Estate.

The layout first. It was old money, enormous, not showy, just simply more of everything, more hallways, more staircases, more rooms whose purposes were not immediately obvious. The staff next. Hessa, the housekeeper, was severe and had clearly decided long ago that warmth was an inefficiency, and ran both the servants and the slaves with a precision that was, whatever else you thought of it, genuinely impressive. The butlers who attended to the master’s personal affairs were polished and close-mouthed. The groundskeepers kept to themselves.

The house ran, in short, like a very expensive clock. Better than most you’d worked in.

Your other concerns about the household, the bachelor's concerns, and the three-rotating-mistresses concerns did not exactly materialize for a long time. Not visibly, at any rate. Not in any way that touched you or your wing of the estate directly. What you eventually heard came through the kitchen, in the comfortable sideways manner that kitchen gossip always traveled, and only after you had quietly crossed the six-month mark and been deemed, apparently, trustworthy enough to be included.

“I heard from a girl who works over at House Topman,” Cressida, one of the kitchen maids, said with a sideways look at Anton, a footman who looked at her in rapt attention, “that Lady Veria and Lady Mellian got into it again. Apparently, no one was saying what it was about, but.” She raised her brows. “It seemed fairly clear.”

You sat in your corner with your bread and your tea and your expression of polite neutrality, technically excluding yourself from the conversation while reaping every benefit of it. The early breakfast hour was the only time in the day when the hired staff and the slaves properly mingled, and gossip was as reliable as the sunrise. It was, you had come to think, a small mark of something in Garling Figarland’s character that his people kept his affairs as quiet as they did.

One of the bakers snorted into her mug.

“They always argue. Doesn’t mean anything.”

A laundry woman nodded, tearing her bread. “It never does. As soon as one of them gets conceited enough to start carrying complaints to the master, she’s gone. Happens every time.”

Around the table, nearly fifteen people nodded with the comfortable synchrony of a group confirming something they had all already known for years.

“Besides,” the baker added, “none of them can touch Lady Ossia. She’s been the longest running by a good margin.” She paused, seemingly for effect. “I once heard him say she was almost as pretty as the prize he lost at God Valley.”

This landed with a ripple of knowing looks around the table.

You chewed your bread thoughtfully. That was framed to sound romantic. It did not, on reflection, sound especially romantic. It sounded like the sort of thing a man said when he had organized his feelings about a lost opportunity into a very tidy silver lining and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

The head cook sighed.

“Don’t let the head butler hear any of this,” the cook said, with the firm authority of someone who had spent twenty years deciding what did and did not leave her kitchen. “And those of you who are slaves shouldn’t be talking at all. Imagine if any of this got back upstairs.” She fixed the room with a look that communicated, without ambiguity, that she would personally be very disappointed.

The table didn’t fall silent but was quieter.

The conversation drifted after that, softened into smaller things. Complaints about the linens, about one of the footmen who kept leaving doors open, about whether the new oil the cook had ordered was as good as the last. You finished your bread at a civilized pace, said nothing that could be quoted back to anyone, and excused yourself with enough time to be at the nursery before Shamrock woke.

The upper floor was quiet in the mornings. That was one of the things you had come to appreciate about it. The light came in long and unhurried through the hall windows, and the carpets swallowed your footsteps.

You heard Hessa before you saw her.

And then you heard the other voice, and slowed.

“—completely unacceptable, the amount of time I’ve been kept waiting in that sitting room—”

She was, you noted, as you came around the corner and found them in the corridor outside the master’s private study, very pretty. Lady Veria was perhaps a couple of years older than you, with the kind of looks that had clearly been a significant life advantage, and were accustomed to continued use. Dark hair arranged in elaborate coils, a dressing gown that cost more than your last six months combined, and a face currently assembled into an expression of beautiful, furious indignation.

Hessa stood opposite her with the expression of a woman who had long since made her peace with whatever this was.

Lady Veria’s eyes found you.

The silence shifted.

“Who,” she said, like she was selecting a weapon, “is that?”

“Saintess Veria.” Hessa’s voice was professionally smooth. “This is the miss who serves as Master Shamrock’s governess. She is a member of the Celestial Dragon community herself, and a valued member of this household’s staff.”

Veria looked at you the way she might look at something she had found on the sole of a very nice shoe.

“The governess,” she repeated. “What is she doing on this floor?”

“Her duties occasionally require—”

“This floor,” Lady Veria said, with the crisp clarity of someone accustomed to being the only woman in a distinct radius, “is not the nursery floor.”

You opened your mouth, decided against it, and closed it again. Hessa was handling this. You were going to let Hessa handle it.

“I was on my way up,” you said pleasantly instead.

“Then perhaps,” said Lady Veria, “you should continue on your way. Don’t stench up the place."

She was working up to something else, you could tell, some additional clarification of the hierarchy she had decided was operating here, when a sound came from the end of the corridor.

The nursery door opened, and there was a pattering of feet.

Shamrock stood at the top of the stairs, his red hair disordered from sleep, blanket trailing from one fist, blinking at the assembled group in the hall with his father’s eyes and an expression of profound, three-year-old seriousness.

Lady Veria’s face transformed. The indignation folded away with impressive efficiency and was replaced by something warm and practiced and very, very deliberate. She made haste to the stairs.

“Oh,” she said softly, in a voice that had clearly been designed for exactly this kind of moment. She crouched to his level, hands clasped, the picture of gentle femininity. “Hello, little one. Aren’t you sweet.”

Shamrock looked at her.

She smiled her practiced smile.

He looked at her with steady, assessing coolness.

Then he looked past her, down the corridor, to you. And his face did the thing it did in the mornings, the thing you had to compose your own face to receive, and he padded down the hall in his bare feet with his blanket and walked directly past Lady Veria and pressed himself against your side.

You put your hand on his head without thinking.

The hall was very quiet.

Lady Veria straightened slowly. What was on her face now was not pretty, not practiced, and not remotely directed at Shamrock.

“You have,” she began, and her voice had shed all the warmth of the previous thirty seconds entirely, “clearly overstepped something in this child’s upbringing if he can’t even—”

“Lady Veria.”

The voice came from the far end of the hall.

Garling Figarland had a quality, when he entered a room or corridor or any given space, of making that space feel immediately smaller. He walked toward you all with no express speed and no singular expression, and yet Lady Veria went very still.

“Garling.” She adjusted, voice softening. Smoothed her expression back into something approaching composed. “I was only—”

“It’s time for us to have our conversation.” He stopped. He did not look at you or Shamrock, but somehow the look he gave Lady Veria communicated that he had seen the entire shape of the last several minutes regardless. “Hessa, thank you. Governess, take my son to breakfast. That’ll be all.”

Hessa departed with quiet efficiency, looking extremely glad to be leaving.

“Come,” Garling said to Lady Veria, and it was not a request. He turned and began walking back down the corridor.

Lady Veria looked at you one more time. Then she followed him, her white coat trailing behind her, her back very straight, the set of her shoulders communicating an entire grievance she had apparently decided to save for later.

Shamrock watched them go.

Then he looked up at you.

“Breakfast?” he said.

“Breakfast,” you agreed.

It would be only a day later that word came down through the household that Saintess Veria had departed Mary Geoise entirely.

The kitchen had opinions. The laundry had opinions. Anton, the head footman, had an opinion and the good sense not to share it above a whisper. The consensus, delivered in the comfortable certainty of people who had watched this pattern repeat itself before, was that the master had simply grown tired, as he always did, and that Lady Veria had pushed her timing poorly.

This was not wrong, exactly. It was simply incomplete.

Because only you, Veria and Hessa had been in that corridor.

Only you and Hessa had seen the precise sequence of it, the dismissal, the crouching, the practiced warmth that Shamrock had walked directly past on his way to you. Only you and Hessa had been there when Lady Veria’s composure had come apart at the seams and shown what was underneath.

No one approached Shamrock Figarland without permission. That was a rule as settled and immovable as anything else in this household, and everyone from the head butler down to the newest kitchen girl understood it without needing to be told twice.

That evening, Hessa paused at the nursery door on her rounds and gave you a look. Not long. Not warm, exactly, because warmth was not Hessa’s language. But it was steady, and it was considering, and it lasted a beat longer than it needed to.

You found yourself wondering, as she moved on down the corridor without a word, whether the dismissal had been entirely about Shamrock. Whether Garling Figarland had come around that corner, taken in the full shape of what was happening in his hallway, and made a decision that covered more ground than anyone had said aloud.

You didn’t examine that thought too closely either.

You were getting quite good at that. But you were also very sure that if you stayed here longer than a year, you might as well be signing on for the next ten. You were becoming attached to Shamrock, and not only him, but to the calm, peaceful existence where you could do as you wished, and were protected for it.

It was time to go.

You had prepared a very professional resignation. You were genuinely proud of it. It was clearly worded, appropriately formal, cited your original stated intentions without melodrama, expressed sincere gratitude to the household for the opportunity, and included two weeks’ notice and a carefully vetted list of three recommended replacements, each with annotated credentials and a brief note on temperament. You had spent an evening on it. You had rewritten the closing paragraph twice.

It was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent resignation letter.

Garling read it without expression.

This was not unusual. You had cataloged Garling Figarland’s face over eleven months with the patient attention of someone who had learned early that reading the room in this household meant reading him, and what you had found was a range of approximately five expressions.

There was that assessment, which was the default, the steady measuring look he turned on most things, including you. There was displeasure, which was quieter than you had initially expected and more effective for it. There was the specific, deliberate blankness he deployed around Shamrock, an absence of his usual weight that you understood, after some months, was the closest he came to softening. The fourth was a sort of false bravado, used mostly around his colleagues, though they were often more given to his displeasure. He never let them on his estate, and if they dared come, they were quickly expelled.

And there was the fifth one, the one you had privately labeled recalibrating, which appeared briefly and with great control on the rare occasions that reality declined to behave in accordance with his expectations.

He finished reading, then set the letter down on the desk with care, squarely, as though every placement mattered.

Then he looked at you.

“No,” he said.

You blinked, taken aback.

“I’m sorry?”

“The answer is no.” He folded his hands on the desk. “Your contract is subject to review at the twelve-month mark. You are aware of this.”

“I am,” you said carefully. “I’m also aware that the review is a formality and that either party may—”

“I’m raising your salary.”

The sentence arrived without preamble and sat there in the air between you.

You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside the study window, Mary Geoise continued its eternal, pristine afternoon.

“That’s—” you started. “Not what I said—”

He cut you off.

“—And you’ll have Sundays entirely your own, not subject to written request.”

“Sir—”

“The east wing rooms will be formally designated yours for the duration of your employment rather than as a temporary allocation. You’ll be free to come and go as you choose.” He picked up his pen. “I’d like the replacement list for my records in the event of an emergency, but won’t be needing it, as you’ll be staying.”

You sat across from him in the very good chair they kept for guests, with your professional resignation centered on his desk between you, and understood that he had already taken your carefully prepared argument apart before you had opened your mouth to make it. The way a man disassembles a weapon he has no intention of allowing to be fired.

You were doing the recalibrating now, running the mental arithmetic of a revised approach, and he gave you that somewhat placating smile meant to assure you of good intentions he surely didn’t have. There was something almost kind about it, which made it worse.

You smiled your own lying smile back.

“With all due respect, Supreme Commander, my leaving isn’t up for debate.”

You weren’t terribly surprised when Garling’s expression evened out into something cooler and more settled. Unlike another employer, who might have argued or pleaded or appealed to sentiment, he simply reached into his desk drawer and produced a large folder. He set it between you with the unhurried confidence of a man laying down a hand he had been quietly holding for some time.

Upon opening it, you found every single review you had ever submitted arranged in orderly fashion, the pages crisp and tabbed, and what must have been his own annotations written in a precise, narrow hand alongside your entries. Color-coded, you noticed. The man had color-coded your work.

He had found your weekly reviews important enough not only to keep, but to study, which was fairly incredible and entirely within his personality. And he deployed this great reservoir of accumulated knowledge to precisely the effect he intended.

“Shamrock’s language development has improved forty percent,” he said. “His sleep disruptions have decreased by more than half. His—” a brief pause, the kind that suggested he was choosing his phrasing with deliberate care “—biting incidents have ceased entirely.”

“I know,” you said. “I was there.”

“You’ve also,” he continued, setting your resignation aside with a gesture that treated it as a procedural formality rather than a decision, “been teaching him to read.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“He wanted to learn.”

“He’s four.”

“He’s ready.” You paused. “He’s very smart. Like his father, I think. He needs…he needs things to work on. He gets destructive when he’s bored.”

Something moved across Garling’s face again. That fast thing. You were getting better at catching it.

“What would it take,” he said, “to extend your contract?”

You braced yourself.

“It’s not really about—”

He gave you a scathing look.

“Name a number.”

You opened your mouth. Closed it.

He named one first. Higher than your current salary. Higher than anything any other governess, and perhaps even every other private tutor in Mary Geoise had. It was genuinely unreasonable. It was a number that made your travel fund laugh and sit down.

“That’s—” you started.

“I’m aware it’s generous.” He looked a touch smug, which made your hackles rise. You weren’t something he could just buy.

“It’s not about the money,” you said, which was partly true. "I have a plan. I am not a permanent fixture, Saint Garling. I never intended to be. Shamrock deserves someone who—"

"Shamrock," said Garling Figarland, "asks for you when he has nightmares."

The room went very quiet.

"He told me," he continued, not looking at you, looking at some point just past your shoulder, "that you are not afraid of the dark because you have seen all the interesting things that live there." A pause. "He has been sleeping with his curtains open since October."

You were familiar with emotional leverage as a professional instrument. You had used it yourself, gently, in the service of coaxing a small boy through any number of difficult things.

You had not expected the Supreme Commander to use it on you.

It seemed, frankly, a little underhanded.

It was also working, which was the more pressing problem, because you were attached to Shamrock in a way that had long since stopped being strictly professional, and you knew it. You had taught him that. You had sat with him in the dark and had an entire conversation about constellations and the difference between darkness-as-absence and darkness-as-space, and Shamrock had listened with his whole entire self. The way he did when something was quietly reorganizing his understanding of the world. And apparently, he had told his father about it afterward. Which meant Garling had sat and listened to a five-year-old explain cosmological philosophy with that same still, patient face, and had remembered it, and was using it now.

Damn it.

"One more year," you said, holding up a finger. "I'll stay one more year."

Garling nodded and picked up his pen. Clearly, the matter was settled.

You walked out of the study and stood in the corridor for a moment, with the shame of winning a battle but completely having lost the long war.

The thought arrived with great clarity and no fanfare whatsoever: I am going to be here for the rest of my life.

You dismissed this as hysterical.

Then you went to check on Shamrock.

Hessa had served the Figarland household for twenty years. She had learned, in that time, to read the Supreme Commander's silences the way a sailor reads weather. Not what was present, but what was coming.

He had called for her after the evening report, which was unusual. He had asked her, without preamble, what she thought of the governess.

Hessa took a moment. Not because she didn't have an answer, but because she wanted to give him the right one.

"She is singular," she said. "In twenty years, I have not seen her quality in this house. She is patient without being soft, and firm without being unkind, and the young lord has flourished under her." A pause. "She is also genuinely good, my lord. Not performing goodness. Actually good. That is rarer than the rest of it."

Garling was quiet for a moment.

"Ensure every aspect of her position here is comfortable," he said. "Her rooms are to be updated, discreetly. Her family is welcome on the estate whenever she wishes it, and the arrangements should be made easily when she asks." He set his pen down. "She is to be understood by all staff as second in this household. Any request she makes is to be treated accordingly. If she asks for an audience with me, she is to be shown in."

Hessa kept her face composed. "Yes, my lord."

"I would also like you to learn what you can of her, quietly. Her comforts. Her preferences. Anything that would make her situation here more agreeable."

There was a pause. The kind that had weight to it.

Hessa had served twenty long years. She had held her tongue through most of them. She chose her words now with the care of someone who understood exactly how many she was permitted.

"My lord," she said. "Forgive me. The governess holds considerable influence over the young lord. To also give her the ear of this house, the resources of it, a position beneath only yourself." She met his eyes briefly. "Is it wise, to invest so much in a woman who already has so much power here?"

Garling looked at her for a long moment.

"She is no social climber, and I think she hardly tolerates me," he said, "since the first month she was here, she simply wanted to do a good job and make some money. I am simply ensuring she has no reason to leave when she’d accomplished the latter."

Hessa said nothing.

"That will be all," said Garling, and picked up his pen.

Hessa saw herself out and kept her thoughts to herself, which was what years of service had taught her to do.

She did, however, allow herself one small, private conclusion, somewhere between the study door and the end of the corridor.

The governess, she thought, had absolutely no idea. And if she did… well, she’d probably be gone.

More time passed, and Shamrock flourished.

Three became four with a vocabulary that had expanded considerably and a sudden, intense obsession with maps that you suspected was genetic. Four became almost five with a marked decrease in biting anyone at all, which you counted as a professional triumph, and the development of very strong opinions about which stories were worth hearing twice and which were not. He had inherited his father’s capacity for sustained silence, and his father’s eyes and, you were increasingly certain, absolute loyalty to whatever he had decided to be loyal to.

He had decided to be loyal to you. There was nothing you could do about it, and you had stopped trying. Garling himself seemed to have no real problem with it either, since you were fairly loyal and extremely discreet to the house and himself.

He seemed to have a real degree of respect for you in most regards.

For example, you had legitimate reasons for being in the study, Shamrock had left a book there and you’d come to retrieve it and Garling was at his desk and you knocked, and he said come in without looking up, and you crossed to the small table by the window where Shamrock had left the book, and that was when you noticed the papers on the corner of Garling’s desk.

Your reports. The ones you wrote every month about Shamrock’s progress, his moods, his development—standard professional practice, which other parents had mostly ignored.

His were annotated to absurd degrees. Small notations in the margins, neat and precise, in Garling’s hand. Dates cross-referenced. Questions. A small mark next to the line where you’d written ‘He told me he wants to see the sea properly, not from the castle. I think this is worth honoring when he’s older.’, and beside it, in the margin: ‘Agreed’.

You picked up the book.

“Sorry to interrupt, Supreme Commander,” you said.

“It’s fine,” he said, still not looking up.

You stood there for one moment longer than necessary.

“He’s doing very well,” you said. “You should know that, not just from the reports. He’s thriving. Whatever you’re doing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it’s working. He talks about those days.”

You expected a nod, or even a look for interrupting him.

Garling only looked up, giving you his full attention.

This was the thing about his looking at you directly: it had weight. It was a quality of attention you had to be prepared for, and you had not prepared for this, and so you just stood there in it, holding a child’s book about sea creatures.

And he actually started talking with you.

“He talks about your lessons every day,” Garling said. “In significant detail. You should know that.”

“Oh,” you said, which was not a sentence.

“He talks about you,” he clarified, with the air of someone completing a painful but necessary task, “considerably more than he talks about anything else.”

The room was doing the small-feeling thing again. The thing it had started doing. You were beginning to understand this was not the room’s fault.

“Uh, well, that sounds very boring,” you laughed awkwardly, “I should—” you started.

“There’s a Holy Knight induction,” he said abruptly. Like he’d interrupted himself. “In six weeks. It’s…customary for the Commander’s household to attend. In some capacity.”

You looked at him.

“You are not obligated,” he said. “As staff.”

“Right.”

“But you would be—” A pause. Something was working behind his expression. “Welcome. If you wish to attend. As part of the above-stairs staff. Speak to Hessa, and she’ll arrange it. She can also arrange a more formal outfit, paid for by the estate, of course.”

The silence was very loud.

“With Shamrock,” you added.

He stopped. His jaw tightened fractionally. “If you desire.”

You thought about the drawer and everything in it. You thought about March flowers and annotated reports and six o’clock mornings and a small boy who had somehow rebuilt himself around you without you noticing until it was far too late.

“I’ll consider it. Thank you, that’s exceedingly generous of you,” you said.

Something happened to Garling Figarland’s face. You didn’t have a category for it, which meant it was new, which meant it was something he hadn’t shown you before.

“You’re welcome,” he said. Carefully. Like he was approaching something that might startle.

“Shamrock will love coming,” you said, equally careful. “He’d be devastated if he didn’t.”

“...Of course.”

“And I’m still leaving eventually.” You said it clearly, not unkindly. “I want to see things. I’ve always wanted to see things. I haven’t stopped wanting that.”

“I know,” he said.

“You know.”

“You mentioned it in the interview.” A pause. “I have a reasonably good memory.”

You looked at him for a long moment.

“Six weeks,” you said.

“Yes.”

You left the study. You went to the east wing. You stood in your very comfortable room with its very good morning light. You thought about a travel fund that could now, honestly, buy a fleet, and one small boy who called you Mama in the dark, and a man who had defended you over his mistress, and said it was just being a good employer, and had apparently very expressive acts of generosity.

You thought: I don’t actually have to choose. I could probably leave temporarily and—

This was a new thought. You turned it over.

You could go and come back. You could see things and have things to come back to. These were not, you realized with the mild embarrassment of someone who has been operating on a false binary for four years, mutually exclusive.

You were not, in the end, bad at this.

You were just…slow.

Maybe. Or excessively cautious over something you hadn’t wanted to take out of a drawer quite yet, and wouldn’t still do so yet either.

More time passed.

For the Figarland household, time left its own small marks.

Saintess Mellian separated from Garling quietly, with no clear incident and no drama, which was almost more unsettling than the alternative. The staff accepted it with the practiced equanimity of people who had learned not to ask questions, and the general consensus was simply that it had run its course. These things did. Then came word, filtering through the kitchen in careful pieces, that even Lady Ossia, steady and longest-lasting mistress and once rumored, in more ambitious circles, once a genuine candidate for marriage, was losing ground. Losing his interest, in the incremental way that apparently characterized the end of most things with Garling Figarland.

You noted this the way you noted most things in this household. Filed it. Did not examine it.

What you did notice, more concretely, was that the Supreme Commander had taken to working from home with increasing frequency. It was a small change. He had always maintained a study here, always conducted some business from the estate, but there was a shift in the pattern, a different weight to his presence in the house on days you had previously come to expect him absent. You noticed it because Shamrock noticed it, and Shamrock’s moods were something you tracked the way a sailor tracked weather.

And then the missive arrived.

Formal, through the head butler, as these things were done in this household. A simple amendment to the terms of your employment, effective immediately. Family members were permitted to visit you at the Figarland Estate, upon reasonable advance notice to the household staff, for personal visits of appropriate duration.

You read it twice.

You thought about your mother, who had not stopped writing letters at regular, relentless intervals since you had taken the position. You thought about the eligible sons she kept mentioning, each one described with the optimism of a woman who had successfully married off three daughters already and was not prepared to let the fourth become a cautionary tale. You thought about her most recent letter, which had suggested, in language that was almost diplomatic, that your extended absence from polite society was beginning to look willful.

It was willful. That was rather the point.

You were the youngest. The only one of four sisters still unmarried, still unengaged, still apparently a problem to be solved. You were also, by the honest accounting your mother occasionally let slip between lines of careful encouragement, no great beauty and no great fortune, which meant her ambitions on your behalf had to be calibrated accordingly.

Which meant anyone.

Which meant events and introductions and unexpected dinners that turned out to have a very specific purpose that no one mentioned until you were already seated.

You had come to verbal blows with your parents about it more than once. With your mother in particular, who approached the subject of your future with the focused persistence of someone who had decided love was a luxury and security was a virtue, and that you would thank her eventually.

Working at House Figarland had, among its many professional merits, placed a very effective and socially acceptable barrier between you and all of that. You could not attend events you were not in the city to attend. You could not be sat next to eligible men you were too occupied to meet. And living in the same city as your family while successfully seeing almost none of them was a logistical achievement you were quietly proud of. You saw Martha, the sister closest to you in age and the one least likely to report back in detail, and that was sufficient.

You took the pitiful path and invited only your sister, Martha.

She arrived on a Thursday, which was a day Garling was occupied elsewhere in the estate, and you met her at the gate rather than have her escorted through the main entrance and subjected to Hessa’s assessment before you’d even had a chance to say hello. Martha had your mother’s eyes and your father’s nose and a way of looking at things that meant she was already forming opinions before she had finished looking at them.

She stood in the entrance of the east wing and looked at your rooms for a long moment.

“This,” she said, “is not some plain servant's room.”

“They’re perfectly standard for the household.”

“There’s silk in this sitting room.”

“Many staff quarters have—”

“It’s bigger than my sitting room,” Martha said, “and my fiancé owns a boat.”

“This is the Figarland Estate. What did you expect?”

You made tea that Hessa had generously brought you, for some odd reason, and despite your protests.

Martha sat in the very nice armchair by the window. She looked out at the manicured grounds of the Figarland Estate like she had thought something, but that discovering something new was rearranging her understanding of everything.

“So,” she said.

“So.”

"So, what is the infamous Supreme Commander, the dashing Garling Figarland, like?"

"Professional," you said. "And a good father, when he's present."

"That's not what I asked." She said, slightly annoyed.

"It's what I answered."

Martha looked at you over the rim of her cup. You had grown up with that look. You were immune to it.

"The salary," she said, trying a different approach.

"—Is fair compensation for the work."

"Is it the number you told me when you took the position?"

A pause. "It's been reviewed since then."

Martha turned her cup slowly in her hands. "How many times?"

"Martha."

"I'm only asking. How many times has your salary been reviewed in less than three years?"

"The terms of my employment are private."

"You have Sundays off." She said it carefully, like she was setting something fragile on a table. "We visit on Sunday. I have friends with governesses. They don't have Sundays."

"The household is generous."

"Your family can visit you here. Here, in his home." A small pause. "That's quite generous."

"It's a large estate, there's ample—"

"My beloved, occasionally oblivious sister." She cut you off, not unkindly. "I only wonder if you realize how much interest you could cultivate here, if you wanted to."

"Interest?" You raised a skeptical brow, glancing toward the pristine maze of rose hedges, and up at the glitteringly white mansion that lay just beyond.

Just what did your sister think you were up to, playing governess to House Figarland?

"I am afraid I don't follow. Tending to the little lord has me quite occupied."

Your sister lifted her rare Wanoese blue cup, expression thoughtful.

"Have you considered—I mean, it wouldn't be the strangest thing, to turn a little of that cunning wit of yours toward the father of your ward."

"Saint Figarland? My employer?" You snorted. "You truly know nothing of him if you think Garling Figarland would spare a single glance at me."

She just watched you.

"At best, he begrudgingly tolerates me, as I am the only governess on the holy land his son took a liking to. I am a glorified nanny."

She smiled into her cup.

"Of course. Though it is a little funny—the notoriously discerning Saint Figarland, giving you the run of his house. His housekeeper serving you…Even having your favorite tea in stock and..." A gentle shrug. "You seem genuinely happy here. That's lovely. I mean that."

"Enjoying my job isn't remarkable."

Martha set her cup down. Her voice, when it came, was gentle enough that it almost caught you off guard.

"Is there anything about the position you haven't mentioned? To me, I mean. You know I wouldn't—I'm not looking to make anything into something it isn't. I'm only asking because you're my sister."

You put your cup down with a little more force than intended.

"There is nothing to tell."

"Alright." She nodded, easy as anything. "I only wanted you to know you could."

"You will still come to my wedding, right?" She added, almost as an afterthought.

"Of course."

"And you'll be able to get away? No conflicts with the household schedule?"

"I will make it work."

"Good." She smoothed her skirts and rose, pressing a kiss to your cheek with all the warmth of someone who had just had a perfectly ordinary visit. "I'll write you the details when they're settled. Bring a nice dress."

"I have nice dresses."

"A nicer one," she said cheerfully, and left you alone with the rose hedges and the remains of your tea and the quiet of someone who had just lost an argument they were never technically having. “I know you can pay for it now.”

Shamrock had a gift for asking questions at the precise moment you were trying to think about something else.

"Who was the lady?"

"My sister." You smoothed the page of the book you had no longer been reading. "Martha, the one who visits. You'll like her, I think. She talks a great deal."

He considered this with the gravity that he applied to most things. "Like you?"

"I don't talk a great deal."

He looked at you.

"I talk an appropriate amount."

"What did she come for?"

"To visit me. Sisters do that." You set the book aside. "She's getting married soon. She came to tell me in person I’d better show up in person, or she’d be angry."

Shamrock went very still. You recognized it. It preceded requests.

"Can I come?"

You blinked.

"To the wedding?"

"Yes."

"Shamrock—"

"I've never been to a wedding."

"They are not as remarkable as you're imagining. And this wedding is below your station, and rather… plain.."

"Can I come?"

You looked at him for a moment. He looked back, immovable as a small, well-dressed cliff. Thick as one too, when he wanted to be about your differences in status.

"You may ask your father," you said, with great reluctance. "But I want you to understand that it is very likely he will say no, and I don't want you to be disappointed, and I need you to accept his answer gracefully either way. Do you understand?"

"Yes," said Shamrock, and it was clear he had already stopped listening.

You did not expect to be summoned before the day was out.

Supreme Commander Figarland was at his desk, which was where he always was, and he looked up when you entered with the same expression he always had, which was to say, almost none at all.

"Shamrock tells me your sister is to be married."

"...Yes, Sir."

“Congratulations are in order.”

“Thank you. I suppose he’s?”

He nodded once.

"He's asked to attend."

"I told him it was your decision and that he should be prepared for—"

"Take four guards." He had already looked back down at his papers. "For Shamrock. The estate you'll be traveling to—write the address for the head of security, they'll coordinate in advance." A brief pause, his pen moving. "I'll arrange additional staff so you may enjoy the event properly. And have them bring a gift for your sister."

You stood there for a moment, parsing the last part.

"That…yes. Of course." Something tightened briefly in your throat. "Thank you, Supreme Commander."

You turned to go.

"Also, governess."

You stilled.

"Yes?"

He hadn't looked up. His pen had, however, stopped moving.

"Address me by my name. I’d like to call you by your own."

The room was very quiet. The kind of quiet that had texture to it.

"Of—of course." Your voice came out more careful than you intended. "Saint Garling."

It sat differently in the air than Supreme Commander did. You weren't sure you had an adequate word for the difference.

He made a low sound—not quite acknowledgment, not quite dismissal—and his pen resumed. You saw yourself out, closing the door with great deliberateness behind you, as though if you were precise enough about it, you might feel less like the ground had shifted slightly underfoot.

In the hallway, Shamrock was waiting, having clearly not wandered off to play as instructed.

You looked down at him.

He looked up at you.

He broke into a rare, brilliant smile. "He said yes."

"He said yes," you confirmed, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was simply relief that you would not have to manage his disappointment.

You were aware you were doing it, the thing where you repeated words back while your mind was somewhere else entirely. You had done it occasionally when you were very tired, or when something had caught you so off guard that the rest of you needed a moment to catch up.

Shamrock didn't notice. He had taken your hand and was already pulling you back toward the east wing, already talking, something about what one wore to a wedding and whether he would need new shoes and if your sister's husband was going to be boring.

"Most husbands are not boring," you said, automatically. “At least not if it’s a love marriage.”

"Father isn't boring." He said, and it almost sounded like he was trying to make a point of it.

“Your father isn’t looking to be married."

Shamrock paused.

“But he wouldn’t be boring if he were.”

"No," you agreed. "He wouldn’t.”

“Address me by my name.” Garling had said, making you flush.

You had stared at him like a woman who had never heard language before. You had stammered. You, who prided yourself on composure, who had once spoken calmly to a visiting Admiral while Shamrock had been quietly sick on your shoes. You had stood in that study with your mouth slightly open like a fish that had found itself unexpectedly on land.

Saint Garling.

It had felt strange in your mouth. Not wrong, precisely. Strange.

"Will there be dancing?" Shamrock asked, and you broke from the thought.

"At a wedding? Yes, usually."

"Will you dance?"

"That depends on whether anyone asks me."

He considered this with great seriousness. "I'll ask you."

Something in your chest shifted, gentle and inconvenient. "Then I suppose I will dance."

He seemed satisfied with this. He let go of your hand to run the last few steps to his room, and you followed at a more measured pace, and you did not think about the study, or the instruction, or the precise, unremarkable tone in which it had been delivered.

“I’d like to call you by your own.”

You thought about it a great deal, and that damned drawer almost felt like it was starting to burst at the seams.

The report on your sister's marriage was thorough, as all his reports always were.

Garling read it twice. The wedding had gone well, on the whole. The guards had been unobtrusive. His gift had been well received by the bride, which was the intended effect. Shamrock had been on his best behavior for the majority of the event and had made a favorable impression on the family.

He set the report down.

He picked it up again and reread the final section.

Then he summoned his son.

Shamrock stood before the desk with his hands clasped behind his back, which was either a sign of contrition or a sign that he had decided contrition was the appropriate performance for the moment. Even after four years, Garling could not always tell the difference.

"The report from your security detail," Garling said, "notes that you interrupted no fewer than four separate gentlemen who approached your governess to dance."

"She'd been on her feet a long time," Shamrock said sharply, clearly prepared for this. Garling couldn't help but admire the audacity. Grown men faced him with more fear than his little son. “And she didn’t like the men. She said so several times, but her family kept sending them over.”

Garling could allow that then, but his son wasn’t cleared quite yet.

"It also notes that you spent the final portion of the evening petitioning her loudly to leave, while she was in conversation with her mother."

Shamrock's jaw set in a way that was, unfortunately, familiar. "She wanted to go."

"Did she say so?"

“Not in so many words,” Shamrock admitted.

Garling stared him down.

"That was not your determination to make. This was her family's party, and you were a guest."

“She was almost in tears, but didn’t say anything.” A pause. "I did the gentlemanly thing."

Garling regarded his son for a long moment. "You behaved selfishly. You were a guest at a private family event, and you made yourself the center of it. Your governess was gracious enough not to correct you publicly, which is more than you deserved. You will write her a letter of apology before dinner."

"Yes, Father."

"And you will not interfere in her private time again."

Something crossed Shamrock's face. Not defiance, exactly. Something more considered than defiance. "A Figarland," he said, carefully, "should do whatever is necessary to secure a valued member of the family."

Garling was quiet for a moment. "She is not a member of this family. She is an employee."

"To you." Shamrock met his eyes with an equanimity that had no business being on a child's face. "I secured her anyway."

Garling stared him down.

"...What did you do?"

The silence that followed was downright arrogant..

"Shamrock."

"She promised she'd stay on," he said, without any particular guilt. "Until I enter the Holy Knights full-time. I asked her, and she said yes." A small pause. "She made me ask nicely."

Garling looked at his son for a long moment.

"When," he said, "did you do this?"

"When her mother was trying to get her to agree to an arranged marriage." Shamrock tilted his head slightly. "I didn't want her to leave."

The study was very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the east wing, Garling could distantly hear staff in the corridor, the ordinary sounds of the household continuing its ordinary business.

"Write the letter," he said finally.

"Yes, Father."

"You may go."

Shamrock went, unhurried, with the smug bearing of a kid who knew the difference between a reprimand and a defeat. He’d won. Garling noted it was probably the first time he hadn’t capitulated and fully stood his ground.

Nothing before had been worth it.

But you had.

Garling looked back down at the report.

Shamrock… entering Holy Knights full-time.

Years then.

He did not examine too closely the sliver of dread that struck his gut. He had plenty of time.

You had not, this year, prepared a resignation. You were aware of what this meant. You were choosing not to acknowledge what it meant.

“I’ve decided on staying,” you said, before he could speak.

Garling looked up from the papers on his desk.

“I’m staying another year,” you said. “But I want a five percent raise, and I want it acknowledged that this is still temporary. I have places to be…eventually.”

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. So brief you would later wonder if you’d imagined it.

“Thirty percent,” he said. “Same terms as last year.”

You glared.

“You can’t negotiate up when I give you a number.”

“I just did.”

“That’s not—!” You stopped. Looked at him. “Why?”

“You’ve begun teaching him mathematics.”

“He asked.”

“He told me last Thursday that fractions are just ‘division wearing a different hat.’”

You had said exactly that. You’d been eating an apple and explaining, and it had come out, and Shamrock had looked at you like you’d handed him a key.

“He’s going to be exceptional,” you said, because you believed it completely.

“Yes,” said Garling, looking at you steadily. “He is.”

You bit your lip.

“Ten percent.”

“Fifteen.” He said, and it was final.

He signed the paper. You signed the paper. It was very normal. You made to leave.

“Shamrock,” Garling said, not looking up from the desk, and still stopping you in your tracks, “has asked me whether you celebrate your birthday.”

You went still.

“I wasn’t sure,” he continued, “if it was our place to know.”

It was the most indirect question you’d ever heard a direct man ask.

You told him.

He nodded and wrote something. Not on the contract, something else, something he set aside without showing you.

“Good night, Commander,” you said.

“Good night,” he said.

You went back to the east wing and updated your travel fund calculations.

You were, at this rate, going to be able to buy a ship.

She arrived looking insufferably well-rested, which was the specific indignity of a honeymoon, and you told her so at the door.

"You look like yourself," Martha said, hugging you.

"You look smug."

"I'm a married woman. I'm allowed." She pulled back to look at you with the critical eye of someone who had shared a mirror with you for fifteen years. "Have you been sleeping?"

"I sleep fine."

"You have a line right here." She pressed a finger between your brows. You batted her hand away.

"That's called a face. I've always had it. Sit down."

She sat, accepted her tea, and spent a very pleasant twenty minutes telling you about the coast, the food, her husband's ongoing war with an aggressive seagull, and the state of your mother's garden, which had apparently taken a dramatic turn since the spring. You told her about Shamrock's recent attempts to train a stray cat, which had gone about as well as could be expected, and she laughed until she spilled slightly, which was satisfying.

She took a sip, and paused.

“Is this… a Flevance blend? One of your favorites right?”

You hummed, realizing it probably was.

“Yes, but this is the House blend. A new one, if I recall right."

It was then your sister set down her cup. You recognized this—a lifetime of recognizing this.

"We need to talk," she said.

Martha only set things down when she was preparing to say something she wanted both hands free for, as though the argument ahead required her full physical commitment. You had seen it before examinations, before family dinners, before the time she told you at age twelve that your favorite dress had actually been hers first, and she wanted it back.

"You remember Saintess Veria," she said, in the tone of someone setting a card face-up on the table.

You paused. Head tilting. The mistress. The one who had spoken to Shamrock looked him over like he was a pet to own, and said something you were still choosing not to repeat in polite company.

"...yes, and?"

"I met her." She looked at you, perfectly level. "More or less banished to the world below. And from what she told me, it was because Saint Figarland was irate that she insulted his governess." A pause. "You. She said she was cut off for the boy, but apparently, he was furious about what she said to you."

"She spoke to Shamrock," you said. "Directly, and poorly. That was a firm boundary. And Sir Garling has a duty to protect his staff from his personal affairs."

"Mm." Martha's head tilted in a way that suggested she had filed your answer and found it insufficient. "Saintess Mellian also left Mary Geoise. Married off to some lesser merchant, and rumor has it your employer more or less quietly encouraged her family to arrange it."

You considered this with genuine blankness. "Huh. Why?"

Your sister looked at you with the patient, luminous expression of someone waiting for a very slow sunrise.

"Why do you think?"

"I genuinely don't know. Mellian barely interacted with our household."

"Did you hear about how she spoke about you to Garling, and in society?"

You opened your mouth.

You closed it.

Martha picked her cup back up, the picture of serenity. "I'm just saying," she said, pleasantly, "that there seems to be a lot of women leaving Mary Geoise lately. And the one thing they appear to have in common is that they were rude about Garling Figarland’s governess." She sipped. "Professionally speaking."

"That is a coincidence."

"A remarkable one."

"Martha."

"He likes my teaching style," you said, taking a sip of tea.

"No, you witless creature." Your sister's brows crossed. She held up a finger. "You start working for him, and within a year, one mistress is banished after crossing you." A second finger. "Another speaks badly of you, and she's next to go." A third. "Suddenly the housekeeper the the Figarland house has your preferred tea brand just available? Are you seeing the pattern?"

"That Saint Garling dislikes people who are rude to his staff?"

"Oh, for the love of—" Martha set her cup down again, both hands, full commitment. "These aren't common women. These were gorgeous, devastating, goddess-in-the-bedroom material. The absolute cream of Mary Geoise. And they crossed you, a governess, and now they're gone."

"He's a busy man. He can only spare so much time. And he still has a mistress."

"Rumor is that even Ossia's bedroom visits are growing sparse."

"Like I said. Busy."

"Or," Martha said, picking her cup back up with the slow satisfaction of a lawyer resting her case, "he is a very motivated man with a new and specific interest. There is a difference. There is a considerable—"

The door opened.

Shamrock appeared in the gap and looked between you both. He seemed to recognize that he walked into a conversation and was deciding whether it was useful to him. He then apparently decided it was, because he crossed directly to you and leaned against your chair with his full weight, as was his habit.

"You've been in here a long time," he informed you.

"I have a guest."

He looked at Martha. Martha looked at him. Something passed between them.

"You're the sister," he said, “The bride. You came back.”

"You're the little lord," she said. “Good to see you again.”

"Shamrock," he corrected, with dignity.

"Martha," she returned, with equal gravity.

He seemed to accept this. He looked back at you. "Are you almost done?"

"We were in the middle of a conversation."

"You looked like you wanted to leave it." He said, giving Martha a look.

You opened your mouth. Closed it.

The absolute betrayal of a child who had known you too long.

Your sister watched this exchange with an expression of such profound secondhand fondness that it briefly distracted her from her appointed mission of dismantling your entire worldview over afternoon tea. Only briefly.

"You love him," she said. Quietly, like it wasn't an ambush.

You paused. Shamrock looked up at you as he stole a biscuit from the table.

"Of course I do." Simple. True. "He's mine." And then, because you heard yourself: "That is, I'm his governess. His nursemaid. That's what I meant by—"

"He called you Mama at my wedding." She turned to him.

He nodded with great solemnity.

"She's my mom." He said without reservation.

"I am not—" You huffed.

It wasn't right of her, giving him the word like that, setting it down between you where he could see it. "He is six, and Uncle Carion had just spun him around three times, he didn't know what he was—"

"He is a very smart six," Martha said. "He knew."

"He's just being—"

"If you say thorough," your sister said, very pleasantly, "I will pour this tea directly onto you."

You closed your mouth.

Shamrock had tilted his head up to look at you. He had your sister's certainty, you noticed, not any of your arguments. The expression of someone who considered a puzzle very nearly finished and was waiting, with great patience, for you to turn the last piece yourself.

He had, you realized with some dim alarm, his father's face right now.

"Your father," you told him, for no reason and about nothing, "is an excellent employer."

Shamrock considered this.

"He let me stay up past bedtime to wait for you on Tuesday," he said.

You looked at him. "Why were you waiting for me on Tuesday?"

"You were late with your errands." The matter-of-fact simplicity of a child reporting an observed fact. "Father said you were probably fine, but we could wait anyway. We played cards." A small pause. "He kept looking at the door."

Your sister made a sound into her cup that she disguised, very poorly, as a cough.

“That is—” your voice was very measured— “he was just—”

“He let me win,” Shamrock added. “He doesn’t usually let me win. He says it’s dishonest.” His small face was entirely earnest. “He was distracted.”

You looked at your sister.

She looked back at you, eyes bright, absolutely incandescent with the effort of keeping her face neutral.

"Don't," you said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"Martha."

"I'm sitting here. Quietly. Drinking my tea." She did so, with great performative innocence. "Please, continue. You were saying something about excellent employers."

You looked down at Shamrock, who was still watching you with that patient, unsettling attentiveness, the puzzle piece held loosely in his small hand.

"He was being courteous," you said. "It was late. It's a large estate. It's standard—"

"He kept looking at the door," Shamrock repeated, helpfully.

"You said that already."

"You didn't respond to it."

"I'm responding to it now. It was—" You stopped. Started again. "He was probably expecting a report from the security detail—"

"He had me give the report," said Shamrock. "I told him you'd gone to the east market and then the dressmaker, and you always take a long time at the dressmaker. He said yes. Then he looked at the door again."

The room was very quiet.

Your sister had stopped even pretending to drink her tea. She was simply holding the cup, watching you, with the soft and merciless expression of someone who loved you very much and was absolutely not going to save you from this.

"He looked at the door," you said, carefully, "because he is a thorough man who—"

"You keep saying thorough," Martha said flatly, like you want to say something else."

Shamrock tilted his head up at you. His father's eyes. His father's patience. Six years old and already in possession of a stillness that had no business belonging to a child.

"I like it when you're home," he said simply. "I think Father does too."

You looked at him for a long moment.

He looked back, guileless, waiting, the last piece still extended.

"Finish your biscuit," you said finally, which was not an answer, and all three of you knew it.

Shamrock finished his biscuit.

Martha, with the grace of a woman who knew when she had won, finally lifted her cup and drank. She had the audacity to look serene about it.

The garden continued being beautiful and unhelpful.

“On the subject of mothers,” she said, eventually, in the careful tone of someone turning a corner they had been planning since they arrived.

You closed your eyes briefly. “Yes.”

“She’s been asking about you. Specifically, about when you intend to appear publicly again. There are several events this season, and your absence is becoming difficult for her to explain.”

“I work. That explains it.”

“She’s running out of patience with that explanation.” Martha set her cup down again, this time gently, which meant she was being serious. “She’s been talking about writing to the household directly. To arrange a meeting.”

The air in the room shifted.

“She wouldn’t.”

“She mentioned Lord Garling by name,” Martha said, “and called him approachable.”

You sat with that for a moment. You thought about your mother in this house, in front of Garling Figarland, with her opinions about your future and her cheerful, unstoppable agenda. You thought about what that conversation would look like. You thought about how long it would take for you to die of it.

“One,” you said.

Martha blinked. “Sorry?”

“One ball. One matchmaking event, this season, I’ll appear, I’ll be civil, I’ll let her introduce me to whomever she’s decided is suitable, and then I'll be done, and she lets me work in peace until Shamrock is of age. That’s the offer.”

Martha’s face arranged itself into the expression of someone who had come hoping for exactly this outcome and had the wisdom not to look too pleased about it.

“I’ll tell her,” she said simply.

“One,” you repeated. “I mean it, Martha.”

“One,” she agreed, and picked up her tea.

Shamrock perked up, which put him at a more acceptable conversational height. He looked between the two of you with the focused attention of a child sensing mischief. One who had sensed something interesting was happening and had every intention of meddling for his benefit.

“What’s a ball?” he said.

You went still.

Martha’s expression flickered, and you gave her a look.

“It’s a party,” you said. “A formal one.”

“Why are you going?”

“Because my mother asked me to.”

Shamrock looked at Martha. Martha, a woman who had never once in her life been able to leave well enough alone, said, “It’s so she can meet someone. To get married.”

Shamrock looked at you.

You looked at Martha with an expression you hoped conveyed the full depth of your feelings.

“Married,” Shamrock repeated. His voice had gone very careful. Very measured. You knew that voice. It was his father’s voice, scaled down, deployed when he was working something out and did not want to make a mistake. “If you get married,” he said, slowly, “does that mean you go away?”

Martha struck.

“Yes. I mean, little lord, it’s not like she can marry your father and stay here forever.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Shamrock’s eyes widened, almost bugging, as if the revelation had shocked him to his core.

“Martha,” you said, standing, “let me show you to the gate. I think your visit is going very well and has reached a very natural conclusion.”

“I only—”

“It’s been so lovely. Come along.”

You returned Martha to the front entrance with a firmness that she recognized, because she had seen it their entire childhood, and she had the decency to look at least partially apologetic as she pressed a kiss to your cheek and was gently but definitively put back outside.

You stood in the corridor for a moment, then you went back to the sitting room.

Shamrock was still in there, looking at the place Martha had been sitting with an expression that was working very hard at neutral and not quite achieving it.

You sat down in the chair across from him.

“I’m probably not getting married,” you said.

He looked at you. “Probably?”

“Almost certainly not. I’m going to the party because my mother will cause problems if I don’t, and I’ll meet whoever she’s decided I should meet, and it will be fine, and then I’ll come home.” You paused. “Here. Back here.”

Shamrock was quiet for a moment, turning this over. “But someday you’ll go,” he said. “You told me before. You want to travel.”

You had told him that. In pieces, over time, the way you told him most things, because he asked real questions and deserved real answers. He had an almost inconvenient memory.

“Yes,” you said. “Someday. When you’re older.”

“How much older?”

“Old enough not to need a governess anymore.”

He thought about this with the seriousness he gave most things. “Can I come?”

Something in your chest did the thing. You had been managing it for over a year, and it still caught you off guard sometimes.

“I’ll probably be going alone,” you said, gently. “You’ll have things here. Your father. Your studies. You’ll be a Figarland, with Figarland responsibilities.” You kept your voice even, warm, the same tone you always used when something mattered. “But I’ll tell you about all of it when I get back. Every island.”

Shamrock looked at his book. His finger was still holding the page.

“I don’t want you to go alone,” he said, very quietly. Not a complaint. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way he stated most things.

You reached over and straightened the collar of his jacket, which didn’t need straightening, but gave both of you a moment.

“I know,” you said. “We’ve still got time.”

Shamrock turned a page he hadn’t read yet. You could tell because his eyes weren’t moving.

“If you did get married,” he said, with the elaborate casualness of someone who had been sitting on a question for several minutes, “would you bring your husband? When you travel?”

You huffed.

“That’s generally how it works, yes. If I got married.”

“Which you’re probably not.”

“Almost certainly not.”

He nodded, slowly, as though filing this away somewhere important. Then he opened to the correct page and actually began reading, and the subject appeared, for the moment, closed.

You finished your tea.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, Garling Figarland dined with his son.

It had been the arrangement since before you arrived, and you had come to understand it as one of the few fixed and immovable things in Shamrock’s week. Whatever else shifted, whoever came and went, those mornings belonged to the two of them. Shamrock treated them with a quiet seriousness that told you everything you needed to know about how much they mattered to him.

You were never present. That was the arrangement, and you respected it without reservation. And that was important, for it gave Shamrock time to conspire with his father over your importance. His good nature was very dependent on his governess’s continued presence. Many breakfasts had passed, not with the pettier gossip of Mary Geoise, as most would expect, but rather on the topic of you. It seemed for both, you were the gossip of choice.

Shamrock set his fork down with the precision he had inherited from his father and looked across the table.

“Her sister came to visit,” Shamrock said. “Her name is Martha. There are four sisters in total. She’s the youngest.”

Garling said nothing. Shamrock understood this about his father, that silence meant continue.

“Her mother writes letters about getting married. She doesn’t want to.” A pause, weighted with personal grievance. “She’s going to a ball.”

Garling’s eyes lifted from his plate. Just slightly. “Is she?”

“Her mom wants her to find a husband,” Shamrock said, with the flat certainty of a verdict already delivered. “I don’t want her to find one.”

“No.” Garling picked up his cup. Set it down without drinking from it. “Neither do I.”

Shamrock looked at his father. His father looked at his breakfast. Something passed between them that neither of them chose to comment on.

“She wants to travel,” Shamrock continued. “When I’m old enough not to need a governess anymore. She wants to see the oceans. She said she’d write me about every island.” He picked up his fork. Put it back down. “She has a book in her rooms with maps in it. Circles on all the places she wants to go. I saw it once when I was sick.” He looked up. “I don’t think she minds that I know.”

Something moved across Garling’s face. Brief and unguarded.

“She’s never mentioned it,” he said. Quiet. Almost to himself.

“She wouldn’t,” Shamrock said, without hesitation, with the confidence of a very intelligent child. “She doesn’t talk about herself very much. You have to listen for the small things.”

Garling was still for a moment.

Then he looked at his son with an expression that was difficult to name, something that sat between recognition and something considerably more inconvenient.

“I’m too little,” Shamrock said, arriving at his point with characteristic directness. “I can’t marry her. I know that’s not how it works.” He met his father’s eyes without any uncertainty at all. “But you are not too little.”

There was a pause.

“No,” Garling agreed. “I’m not.”

“So you should marry her instead.”

The dining room was very quiet.

“Before someone at the ball does,” Shamrock added, in the same tone and with the same expression that his father used when making a point he felt should have been obvious from the beginning.

Garling looked at his son for a long moment. At the carefully contained indignation in that small, serious face. At the set of his jaw, which was, at nearly five years old, already a very recognizable jaw.

He looked back down at the table.

There was a great deal he could have said. Reasonable things. Measured things. The kinds of things a man said when a feeling had become inconvenient, and he had decided that inconvenience was a sufficient reason to set it aside.

He reached for his cup again.

“She probably won’t find anyone,” Shamrock continued, pressing his advantage with the focused patience of someone who had inherited a great deal of persistence and knew how to use it. “She said she’s almost certainly not getting married. But almost certainly isn’t certainly.” The pause that followed was precise. Deliberate. “And she’d stay if she had a reason. She’d stay forever.”

Garling set the cup down.

He looked at his son. At the careful hope behind those eyes, held very still, the way Shamrock held things he wasn’t yet certain he was allowed to want.

“Finish your breakfast,” he said.

Shamrock picked up his fork, watching his father’s face with the patience of someone fully prepared to wait.

“Father.”

Garling met his eyes.

“I heard you,” said Garling Figarland.

And something in the way he said it, the warning, made Shamrock pick up his fork and eat his breakfast without another word.

[soundbuster]

Why the World Nobles fear Zaza.

It's fitting that the World Nobles are terrified of the rain god Zaza as the sky is the one thing not below them.

They see themselves as gods in the summit of the world, so the idea of a force being above them is a constant disproof of their divinity.

Back to what Killingham said, those born "above the clouds" will be terrified of factors they cannot control.

Same can be said for Nika, the 'sun god,' another deity associated with the sky.

What god fears Heaven?

[bakkfity]

Slave Rosinante AU

One day this week, while I was on my way home, I suddenly realized something... Doflamingo was already at Mary Geoise sometime before Rosinante arrived, and I had a very upsetting thought. We never found out what happened to Homing's head. In a normal situation, it would’ve been cremated or buried... But we’re talking about the Celestial Dragons here, and uhhhhh... I just knew I had to do this. Here’s what I think happened to Donquixote Homing’s head. :) Everyone has to understand why leaving the Holy Land is a terrible decision. You are a GOD, not a filthy human. It’s a good reminder, isn’t it?

There’s no doubt Rosinante was severely punished after this… it’s honestly heartbreaking.

Taglist: @shallowoak, @t3atgirl, @cliwa, @tavsianus, @coolsycamore, @dancemrsandman, @inkpendragon, @okthumbsupemoji, @farttartt, @0solarstar0, @sl33pyk1ttycat, @asksdc--lorddio--and--jojo, @kayessbeebeebeee, @mort-alicious, @legandsofpissvantris, @1000sunnyships, @marmota, @phantom-txt, @hi-im-your-friend-now, @ybrnj2000, @moldychefboyardeecan, @zomboba, @petalpoet, @floristoflillys, @okthumbsupemoji, @waytoosentientforthis, @boredposts, @stickydreamerdonutgarden, @jinx-ami98, @toypoz, @fresh-riss, @swordsonnet-bardofwar, @coolsycamore, @featheredmoonwings, @beepbeepimasheep123, @deepkoalaruins, @isahuesman, @thesmolestsage, @anime-fan-isa-art, @tempestuosagamer, @unresponsiveblockofice¸@jukimonium, @6percentage, @zola-exp, @who-ah, @purplelove411, @baghlinjo, @bluecate006, @rabbitsartcorner, @roombagod75, @cunningflower, @kitschie, @adorablemew, @glucosegaurdian, @otiofthebag, @snazzynewton, @sermocinatrix, @kitsunespawz

[moth-in-black]

What's your favorite place between these? 👀

Credits: 0nepiece_ita

[saaronies-the-dolly]

Wake up, One Piece is becoming more realistic every damn day. The White House is Mary Geoise, the Trump administration are the 5 elders, the billionaires are the celestial dragons, and the navy is the ICE agents. So next time you sit down to watch One Piece, instead of viewing it as a different world, compare it to what you saw on the news the other day.

[nagorii]

hiii, I created a shamrock playlist on spotify! i wanted it to have a gloomy, dark and taunted vibe, since we dont really know much of him right now. I honestly don't want him to be plain as a character and just be bad like garling but we'll see. Hope you like It!

I'm working on a shuggy and a mishanks playlist too and i'll eventually make a shanks one as well! ♥️

[daniknowsmanga]

What I Think We’ll Learn In Brook’s Backstory

Hi all! We are right in the middle of the epic battle between Imu & Loki

But after a quick interlude with our beloved Soul King Brook!

In this latest chapter we get to see the beginning of his backstory (no no no the other backstory)

And we see that he used to be part of Thriller Bark Kingdom of Esperia’s Battle Convoy & the teacher of Gunko Princess Shuri

Now first off my first theory about what we’re going to see is how Brook got his scar

He’s 20 here right? And we know sometime after this he became a part of the Rubar Pirates

Where we can see his pretty face has a nasty jagged scar that he keeps even in death

But who do I think gives it too him? Well just wait I’m getting there

Now I’m pretty sure Oda is doing something clever with King Reuvan

Looks like a real nasty piece of work, sorta evil and we even see him toy with the idea of executing Brook…..but we later see that the pair have a friendly enough relationship and in the present day Brook had mention he owed Reuvan for saving his life

I think King Reuvan is a case of Beauty and the Beast, he looks mean and ugly but is a good person and as we see he’s a loving father to Shuri

Now onto my 2nd main theory here we know that Shuri apparently killed him but why?

I think Princess Shuri was manipulated into killing her father so that she and someone else could attain the position of celestial dragons

I think she or someone else killed King Reuvan and Brook found his body

Shuri or the other person makes Brook the offer to come with them to Mary Geoise

Brook obviously refused and they did battle where Brook was scarred and left defeated as the World Government did a buster call and destroyed Esperia

He became a pirate and we know his tale from there

But why did the World Government want King Reuvan dead?

Because I believe the king was hiding a secret his true name was Davey.D.Reuvan a descendant of Davey.D.Jones

But I believe the reason Reuvan saved or took care of Brook is his youth is because Brook is also part of the Davey Clan

But onto the final theory who was the person who I believe either helped Shuri or killed Reuvan herself? The one who I think branded Brook with his scar?

Queen Candelle

The former leader of Brook’s battle convoy, the woman both Reuvan & Brook were in love with, the Beauty to Reuvan’s beast

I believe she betrayed her husband to the world government in exchange for her and her daughter getting a taste of a better life on Mary Geoise

But I don’t think she survives, I think Brook very much like he did to the Moulan Family cut her in a way after she defeated him

She and Shuri leave the port of Esperia before the buster call only to then realize Brook had cut her deep, she dies and Shuri is forced to go to Mary Geoise herself where we know Imu takes a special interest in her

And as I alluded earlier I believe Esperia becomes Thriller Bark especially since I also believe we saw King Reuvan much earlier than we thought

Well i did say he was a beast

[ghomor]

Question: Did Doflamingo already know about Mary Geoise’s “national treasure” when he left the Celestial Dragon’s with his family?

Or did he learn about it during his brief time spent in Mary Geoise after showing Homing’s head to the Celestial Dragons? According to the wiki, it says that he “managed to flee with knowledge of the Celestial Dragons’ national treasure,” so I wanted to know how accurate this is, and if anyone can point me in the direction of the panel/chapter that states or hints at this.

Mostly, I’d like to hear anyone’s thoughts/opinions/theories on when exactly Doflamingo learned about the national treasure. I can imagine him leaving Mary Geoise the first time with knowledge about the Donquixote family’s claim on Dressrosa because it’s a “family thing,” but for me it’s difficult to imagine him gatekeeping Mary Geoise’s secret at the age of eight. It is One Piece though, and it is Doflamingo, so I could just be in denial.