There's Always Work After Work - 3
I flinched under the Emperor's sudden emotional assault, but I steeled my resolve all over again.
I was willing to admit that the Emperor's life was about as far from restful as a life could get. As he'd said himself, when the Crown Princess was born the abdication had been imminent, so of course he hadn't been able to rest—and when he'd married the Empress, he'd been under constant siege from the Second Prince, so how was he supposed to take a break then? Beyond those two occasions, I had never once heard of the Emperor actually resting.
But just because the Emperor had no vacation time did not mean I was legally obligated to grind myself into dust alongside him. A civil servant's honeymoon leave and parental leave were rights protected by both law and custom. If you were a human being, you were obligated to defend your rights.
Without rights, you're just a slave.
This was a matter of my future and my dignity. One wrong move and the day might come when calling myself a slave stopped being a self-deprecating joke and became my actual self-introduction.
So I cooled the fire that had been rising in my chest and put my brain to work. If the Emperor was coming at me with an emotional attack, then I would answer not with logical argument but with emotion of my o—
"Of course, the fact that I couldn't rest and the fact that you can't rest are two different matters entirely."
Before I could finish organizing my thoughts, the Emperor spoke first.
This was unsettling. Instead of wallowing in his own misery at a moment like this, he was acknowledging mine? What kind of buildup was he planning that he would open with that?
"An emperor is the one who bears responsibility for the Empire. He is a unique, irreplaceable existence—the idea of taking ordinary rest is unimaginable. If I were to let personal desires pull me away from the documents on my desk, every soul besides myself would suffer for it."
Having said that, the Emperor cast a bitter look at the mountain of papers piled on his desk.
As a fellow civil servant, that gaze stabbed me right in the chest, and I bit my lip. This damn bastard was even fluent in nonverbal communication.
"But a minister, Minister, can be replaced. Finding talent as capable as you may be difficult—but the duties you perform can be entrusted to someone else."
I nodded on pure instinct. Unlike the Emperor, who sat at the absolute summit of command, the ministers beneath him might be precious, but they were not unique. Even if one of them stepped away for a while, the Empire's talent pool and its bureaucracy could fill the gap without much trouble.
And not long after that, a deep, seething rage rolled in.
And this bastard knew that.
A bastard who knew full well I could be replaced had still been working me like this the whole time.
The chest I had just barely managed to calm was catching fire all over again. Even if he'd driven me without knowing, I wouldn't have been inclined to forgive him—but now that he'd openly admitted he'd done it knowing, forgiveness was even further out of the question.
"Which is precisely why I tried to guarantee you your leave. Even during your Academy posting, I made sure you rested as much as possible during the breaks, and after the wedding I refrained from summoning you—that sort of thing."
I simply stayed quiet and listened, curious to see how far he would run his mouth.
Guaranteed my leave, my ass. The number of times work had exploded and dragged me under even while I was on vacation was not one or two.
Is his memory just that bad?
Had he eaten something wrong back in the days when he was suffering through the Second Prince's carriage-terrace wine sets? If this was a side effect of that, I could at least understand it.
Understanding and forgiveness, of course, were entirely separate issues.
"Unfortunately, I couldn't always guarantee it."
Ah. Never mind.
His next remark killed my theory about the Emperor's early-onset dementia.
"But Minister."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Have I ever disrupted your leave for a personal reason? For something trivial?"
"That is…"
For a moment, the words stuck in my throat. That my leave had been interrupted at the drop of a hat was a fact both of us knew and the Emperor himself acknowledged—but had my vacation ever actually been broken by something petty, or by an imperial whim?
No?
I ransacked my memory at speed, but nothing came up.
Why is there nothing?
Shit, that couldn't be right. There should have been at least one.
I was confused. Taking the most recent case, the Ecumenical Council incident—that had been a business trip forced on me by the Pope's invitation. The Emperor had actually shown a little consideration, telling me to go enjoy a honeymoon with Trixie while I was at it. He had never deliberately set out to screw me over.
And after I'd returned home, I'd been able to enjoy the honeymoon leave that the trip had postponed, in full. There had been no nightmare of, Well, since it's already delayed, why don't you just work a little longer?
"I swear it upon Enen and the Great Emperor—I have never summoned you for a matter that did not require you. Only after long and careful deliberation, when the judgment came down that no one but you would do, did I make those unavoidable decisions."
As if driving a spike through my confusion, the Emperor invoked Enen and the Great Emperor to insist on his own innocence.
"Minister. Earlier I said that an emperor cannot rest easily because he is an irreplaceable existence."
"Yes. You did, Your Majesty."
"Yes—an irreplaceable existence. I only used you in those cases. I only called for you when the Empire and its people would fall into suffering without you."
I could feel the corner of my eye starting to twitch. So that was why this bastard had been so ready to admit his own failings and my suffering out loud—he'd been laying the groundwork to use it like this.
"I'm not saying I was justified. In effect, I was shifting onto a minister duties that an emperor alone ought to bear—so how could I stand proud as Emperor? However kindly you put it, I crushed a loyal subject's rightful privileges with my own hands for the sake of the Empire."
Stop.
Now even my hands were trembling.
Please shut up, you wicked bastard. What kind of knife were you about to throw this time, saying things like that?
"Even so, I cannot guarantee you complete leave. For the Imperial Family and the Empire. For the peace of the people and the continent."
The Emperor's hands settled naturally onto my shoulders.
A chill ran down my spine of its own accord. The touch of his hands on my shoulders felt exactly like a farmer fitting a plow onto an ox.
"It may be hard for you today. For a year or so, it may torment you not to hear the babbling of children you couldn't bear to have out of your sight."
But—the Emperor added, and continued with a resolute look in his eyes.
"We have to suffer now so that our children can be happy in the future. If Armain seizes Leon alone, Armain will challenge the Empire again someday. If Leon becomes unstable, the eastern border will grow restless. If we get drunk on the peace and happiness of the present, our children will have to bear the pain of the future as the price."
At those words, I couldn't even muster the will to argue. What the Emperor had said wasn't about his own convenience or about messing with me—it was a call for us, as parents, to sacrifice for the happiness and peace of the next generation. How were you supposed to refute a cause like that?
No matter how new a parent you were, once you wore the name of parent, you had no choice but to put your children first. With a child's future on the table, there wasn't a person alive who would say, I don't give a damn about that—just give me my leave, you son of a bitch.
"I cannot promise you leave, Minister—but I can swear that I will pass a peaceful Empire to the Crown Princess. That your children will serve in government offices, not on the front lines. Because we are going to make it so."
"I am truly humbled by Your Majesty's words…"
Damn it. And in the middle of all that, my kids were already locked into working in government offices?
On top of that, this bastard had carefully referred to himself as "I" the whole time, never as the imperial "We." Looking back on it, he hadn't been appealing to me as Emperor at all—he'd been appealing to me as a fellow father.
Intelligent bastard…
A monster of a man who'd survived the Second Prince even back when he had no backing…
I was starting to think the day I outmatched this bastard in intelligence or rhetoric would never come.
The minister who had come in full of spite left with a powerless gait.
Done.
Once I confirmed that the sound of his footsteps was fading, I let out a breath of relief.
Success. It had run longer than I'd expected, but I had safely persuaded the minister and sent him on his way.
As I thought—this was the right approach.
Cases where the minister's leave had been broken were frequent, but he had never shown anger like this before. That meant he wasn't angry simply because his vacation had been ruined.
And figuring out why he was angry had been simple. For a man enjoying his honeymoon, raising a child, and with a third wedding ahead of him, the only thing he would react this sensitively to was family.
I'm in the same position, so of course I understood.
What husband in this world, what father, would want to leave his family behind and drown in work? Being in the same situation myself, I could understand the minister's heart.
And so I persuaded him with the sense of mission I carried. The resolve I renewed every time I longed for a quiet day with the Empress, every time I wanted to hold the Crown Princess and take a walk—I spoke that resolve to the minister.
That we had to suffer now so that the children of the future could be happy.
Thank goodness the minister is a family man too.
If he had still been unmarried, that argument would never have landed.
No—if the minister had been unmarried in the first place, would he ever have gotten leave at all?
…When you marry, the things you have to carry only multiply.
And if you had six wives, that was six times the duty pressing down on your shoulders.
He had brought it on himself, so I trusted he would endure it on his own.
I sat jammed into a corner of the banquet hall and just kept pouring wine down my throat. At this point I felt like I was operating at about 0.05 of the Wise Duke.
I was going insane. I had gone in ready to flip the table for real this time—and instead of flipping anything, I had been crushed under a flawless cause and come back like this.
I could lose my mind.
And right before I left the Solar Hall, the Emperor had even handed me a medal, saying that since I was already there I might as well take it with me.
Until a few hours ago, it had been a decoration held by only four people in the entire Empire—a symbol of honor that, across three hundred years of imperial history, fewer than a hundred people had ever been allowed to possess.
The Lisizariune Knights.
It was far too grand a thing for someone like me to be holding, and a dry laugh slipped out of me.
No matter how much of a power player I was in the current court, this was not a medal you received just for being influential. If becoming a member of the Lisizariune Knights were translated into the world I came from before I transmigrated, it would be roughly equivalent to being enshrined in the Confucian shrine among the great sages.
No—I was a martial man, so maybe the military hall of worthies? Wait, did a military hall of worthies even exist?
What does it matter.
The fact that everything had gone spectacularly sideways wasn't going to change either way.
…What am I supposed to tell Rory?
I held back the sigh that wanted to burst out and cracked open a new bottle of wine.
What the hell was I supposed to do? What kind of courage to be hated did a man need to tell his wife, with the wedding right in front of them, something like, Once the wedding's over, I'm going on a business trip to another country. I don't know when I'll be back.
Life is absolute shit.
To make my wife cry in the present for the sake of my children's future. Life was far too cruel.