I Am Succeeding as Family Head — 5
I didn't think I had ever truly regarded my father as a father. At some point I had stopped even speaking with him; I never wanted to face him at all. We had exchanged words in person in this life, yet seeing him like this felt strangely new. This was the man who had always demanded his family maintain a noble's dignity — and here he was, drinking cheap swill.
A dry snort escaped me, and I felt a gaze settle squarely on me.
"How did you know to come here?"
"I already knew. Would it not be stranger if I didn't?"
In this twisted family, where watching and checking one another passed for tradition, a conversation like this was, if anything, the most natural thing in the world. That my information kept slipping out the door was perhaps only to be expected.
Was my father aware of it, I wondered — aware of how wrong it was that this reality, where the abnormal unfolded as though it were routine, had come to feel normal?
Liquor streamed from the tilted bottle and filled his glass to the brim. As that crisp pouring sound seeped into the silence, my father's pursed lips loosened and his eyes narrowed open. No doubt he was deducing why I had come.
He would arrive at the reason soon enough, but I opened the real business a little faster. "I take it you're not unaware of what Yuria has been doing lately."
She had already ascended to the seat of family head. She had weathered enough backroom warfare to be sick of it, and hurting her own family was a craft she had practiced since childhood. This was not ignorance of Yuria's doings — it was pretense, a deliberate act of not-knowing. That was Taylor for you. This damned house would put a blade in its own parents if it served a purpose.
My father met my eyes and gave a small nod. "I knew even that she meant to kill me."
"You knew, and still you pretended not to?"
"It's not that I intended to oblige her with my death — and since I survived, there was nothing worth saying. Tell me, have you still not cast off that naive delusion of yours?"
Naive delusion. The words drew a faint laugh out of me. Once, hearing that would have filled me with a desperate need to argue back — defiance, maybe. There had been things I did, once, to prove I was not weak. No one living would remember them now, and there was no longer any need for such displays, was there?
"Letting go isn't easy."
"You have always been this way. You were never suited to the Taylors."
"Perhaps that's because I take after our mother."
My father's hand froze mid-motion as I murmured it, filling his empty glass. The hand hung suspended in the air a moment, then lowered; I watched him set the glass down with a dull thud. Above it, cold eyes fixed on me.
So even my father reacted to the name of our mother. Then Yuria really was the twisted one — at the very least, it was certain the word mother still held meaning for him.
Whether he had loved her, I couldn't say. Theirs had been closer to a marriage of state; all I knew was that she had borne Yuria and me, and died while I was still young. Did he grieve? I didn't know that either. He was a man who had never once shown a flicker of his own feelings.
Across every one of my lives, my father had never killed me with his own hands. But his stance had been unwavering all the same: when I died, he took no action worth the name, presiding over everything with cold detachment — standing aside, tacitly permitting, all of it.
"...If you mean to idle the hour away with pointless talk, stop. You didn't come here to discuss the seat of family head in any case."
"Is that so? I intended to explain directly, in case you were unaware. How fortunate."
"One trip to the North and you've grown insolent. Did you take on the Archduke's temperament along with everything else?"
"I merely thought that what is good should be learned — when the need arises."
The liquor burned going down. I had never been much of a drinker. But in a moment like this, not drinking made me feel as though I would suffocate. It was always this way when I spoke with my father. The old tension and pressure were gone, but the memories were not: my father's gaze as I lay dying, looking at me as though I were merely pathetic, and then the turn of his back as he walked away.
...Not that it weighed on me much. It was simply true that I held no warmth for my father or for Yuria. Why else had I come here? In the end, I too had come to use my father. To fight a war worthy of the name Taylor, I had had to remake my own heart first.
"The North. The South. And the Imperial Family."
I spread my fingers as I spoke. I wasn't asking him to pass judgment on the pillars of support I had secured. It was an announcement: his era was drawing to a close. These were the places where a head of House Taylor ought to wield power in his own right — and my father's age was quietly fading into dusk. Yuria had already swept the interior of the ducal mansion; the world beyond it could fairly be called mine. All he held now was the empty title itself.
Perhaps he understood my meaning. A thin smile crossed his face — and then his brow knotted. "So you've come to ask for the seat of family head now? The boy who used to hide from Yuria has turned remarkably insolent. Asking the family head himself to surrender the seat — even Yuria hasn't dared that yet."
"I'm not asking. Why would I beg for a seat I intend to take regardless? I'm not so great a fool as to miss the point that a legitimately won seat matters above all."
"Then why come all this way to see me?"
"To warn you. Because come tomorrow, you may no longer be family head at all."
I knew Yuria's advance had stalled, if only briefly. She likely knew by now that I had visited the Imperial Palace, and she would soon begin to move. I had gone to the palace even as the nobles circulated their strange rumors — and the fact that nothing came of it could only mean the Imperial Family trusted me. I had a fair idea of what Yuria would do next. Something close to the extreme: the act that would open this war of succession in earnest.
That was why I had sought my father out today. Perhaps, if not today, there would be no conversation at all — so I had resolved to treat it as a final farewell. I looked now at the old man whose hair had gone white at the temples. He must sense it himself by now. That Yuria had begun aiming for his neck was something he could grasp with only a little thought.
"You know that Yuria is warped, don't you?"
"...I know."
"Then consider this your warning. No one can say what she might do — it may be time for you to step aside. And there was something else I wished to tell you: what I have resolved to do."
What I had resolved. It lay at the precise opposite of the creed my father had kept his entire life.
The eyes that had studied me for a long moment flickered with something new. In the deepening silence came once more the sound of liquor filling a glass — and out of that short quiet, my father spoke.
"You have always moved against my wishes, ever since you were young. Is that your intent again this time — forgetting how many times I impressed it upon you?"
"It is."
"Defiance, at your age. You truly don't grasp how pitiable your notions are, do you? Do you imagine House Taylor will stand as it does now, forever, built on ideas like those?"
"And what, precisely, does 'as it does now' mean?"
A laugh bled out through the corner of my twisted mouth. As it does now could not simply mean the house's standing. Was it right for family to kill one another to climb? Was it right to drive a knife into one's own parents, should the need arise? I could not understand it. All those who never understood this lie dead by now — but that it was wrong, of that I was certain.
"This isn't defiance. I intend simply to do what I believe is right."
"You are wrong."
"Then the one who is wrong would be you, Father."
The eyes that met mine were cold. These were the eyes I had always feared and fled from, yet I felt not the faintest tremor now. Those frozen blue eyes — so like Yuria's — were simply laughable. Nothing more than the mutterings of a mere old man stubbornly insisting that wrong was right. What had I ever been afraid of? There was nothing left worth fearing. The boy I used to be had simply been frightened of shadows. Quietly, I offered that glare a smile.
"I hope you don't die. Please — live long, and watch me become the family head with your own eyes."
"..."
"Only then will you be able to watch me bring down, with these very hands, everything you spent your life building."
The traditions you raised up, and the countless cruelties and customs committed beneath tradition's name. House Taylor needed none of it anymore. What was done to me at Yuria's hands would never happen again. The future I had drawn for myself bore no resemblance to the Taylor I had watched across a hundred lives. And if, at the end of it, he lives to see House Taylor collapse under the name of treason — what will you say to me then? I truly hoped you would live long and hale. Because you did nothing to me, I intended to do nothing to you.
Nothing at all.
I would raise no act against you whatsoever. So surely all that remains to you is to watch.
With a heavy crack, my father's hand came down on the table, his eyes thinning to slits. As though seized by rage, his trembling hand had gone white.
"...You have gone too far, Robert Taylor."
"There is no calling it back now. Seize me here, lock me away somewhere if you like — the current has already begun to flow."
Such is the nature of a current. Like a wave whose beginning no one can trace, it swells without warning into a towering deluge and sweeps a man away. So too would end the life of a man who treasured the name Taylor above family itself, who had lived for the house and nothing besides. It was already fated — fated even had I never claimed the seat. Hadn't his ruin been sealed from the moment he handed Yuria the title of heir? I had watched it play out more than enough times across a hundred lives. The only difference would be that the house he had built over a lifetime would crumble by my hand.
"So rest now, Father. It has long since left your hands."
The seal I had received in the North lay against my chest. The divine power bestowed by the Saintess dwelled in my body, and the imperial artifact Mirazen had given me rested in my breast. So long as those powers stood behind me, no matter how long things dragged on here, the generations would turn regardless. Renald was moving even at this very hour — meeting my father had been for one purpose only: a final farewell.
My father, still glaring, worked his lips faintly. "Do you know what it is you are doing?"
"Of course I do."
I knew better than anyone what I meant to do. It was not the answer he wanted. No matter how many times you turned it over, you would never understand what I do — and from the start, I never wanted your understanding, not from a man watching me topple traditions stacked across centuries.
I poured the liquor until it crested the rim of the glass, then raised it, swaying perilously at the edge of spilling. And then, quietly, I spoke to my father.
"I am succeeding as head of House Taylor, Father."
The liquor sliding down my throat was no longer hot. If anything, it was so cold it felt as though my whole body would freeze over, and I shuddered at the chill. Breathing out a cloud of cold air, I gave a small laugh as I watched my father stare at me, dumbstruck.
The title of family head had never meant anything to me. That was all there was to it. I simply meant to take the seat — though perhaps, to you, I look like a villain come to raze everything you built.
The last image I carried away of my father was a shrunken one.
More so than any moment I could remember.