Walking was an engineering problem, and Alex had decided, somewhere around month eight, that engineering problems were the one category of disaster he was actually qualified to solve.
He'd watched Eclipse walk approximately four hundred times. Foot placement, weight transfer, the precise moment the upper body had to stop arguing with the lower body and just let momentum do the work. He had a complete theoretical framework.
The practical implementation was, predictably, an absolute mess.
Attempt one lasted a full second and a half before his legs held an emergency vote and unanimously decided to stop participating in this experiment. He went down sideways into the rug and lay there, staring at the ceiling, recalculating his life choices.
'Humbling. Truly humbling. Antonio Moretti, brought low by a rug. I've been in gunfights in three countries and the thing that floors me is a rug. I want this on the record somewhere.'
He got up.
Attempt two made it three whole steps before the same committee reconvened with the same verdict.
He got up again, mildly annoyed now, the way he used to get annoyed at locks that wouldn't pick on the first try. By attempt seven he'd diagnosed the actual flaw, he kept bracing for the fall instead of committing to the step, and the bracing was causing the fall, and by attempt nine he'd made it halfway across the room before his legs, with enormous reluctance, agreed this was apparently happening now.
He reached the far wall.
He turned and looked back at the distance covered.
'...Acceptable. Could be better. Will be better. The bracing instinct is the enemy and I know what the enemy is now, which means the enemy has already lost, it just doesn't know it yet.'
He'd wanted to do this alone, mostly so nobody could watch him fail eight times in a row, but Eclipse walked in on attempt six and ruined that plan completely.
She froze in the doorway, hands half-raised like she wanted to catch him and was physically restraining herself from doing it, watching him pick himself up off the floor with the focused horror of someone watching a loved one make terrible decisions they are not allowed to interrupt. The expression on her face was doing several things at once, none of them subtle.
She didn't say anything. She just watched him cross the room, and when he turned around she was still there with that same look, somewhere between pride and pure dread.
He walked back. Shakier this time. He didn't grab the furniture, on principle.
Eclipse made her favorite frustration noise, the exhale-syllable hybrid, and looked at the ceiling like it owed her a specific and detailed explanation for why it had allowed this to happen.
'She's impossible. She came in here, she watched me fall down six times, she didn't say a word, she didn't try to help because she understood somehow that helping would be the wrong move, and now she's furious at the ceiling about it. That's a very specific and very strange form of respect and I don't have a file for it.'
His legs gave out around the same time his patience did, so he sat. Eclipse plopped down next to him and handed him one of the small wooden shapes she carried around and had never once explained the purpose of.
He held his.
She held hers.
They sat there in companionable silence, which lasted exactly as long as it took Eclipse to start narrating, in extensive and inaccurate detail, why the shapes were important. He didn't understand half of it. He didn't need to. It was the most fun he'd had all week, and his week's competition had been limited to learning to clap.
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'She's also very good at this,' he thought, watching her gesture wildly with a wooden triangle. 'Whatever this is. The filling a room thing. The "making a person feel like they're the only audience worth having" thing. I know grown men who've tried to do that and couldn't. She does it without thinking about it. That's either a gift she was born with or something she learned from someone very good, and either way I find it extremely inconvenient that I can't tell her so yet.'
...
He saw his father clearly for the first time while standing somewhere he absolutely was not supposed to be.
Not forbidden, exactly. Nobody had thought to forbid it, because nobody had clocked that he was mobile yet, which he privately filed as a serious intelligence failure on the palace's part and an outstanding opportunity on his. The nursemaid had been busy with laundry. The door had been left open three inches. The rest had taken care of itself.
He made it fourteen steps down the corridor before he heard the voice.
Not raised. Not performing. That was the interesting part, the voice didn't need to command silence anymore, it simply arrived and silence followed it out of habit. The kind of authority that had stopped requiring an audience somewhere along the way and just was, the way weather was, the way stone was.
He stopped. Pressed himself against the wall behind a tapestry that hung down to about chin height on him.
'Interesting. Very interesting. Let's see what you do when you think nobody's watching.'
He peered around the edge.
The man was tall in the way that read as permanent rather than achieved, like his body had decided early what it was going to be and never apologized for it since. Black hair. He'd seen that same shade in a mirror last month and filed the resemblance with some satisfaction. A face that had probably been striking twenty years ago and had since settled into something that held its shape but carried more weight than it had been built for.
He was standing outside a door at the end of the hall. Hand raised, mid-knock.
Not knocking.
Just standing there, hand frozen in the air, looking at the door with an expression Alex had no file for. Not grief, he'd catalogued grief plenty of times, used it himself when useful, knew the way it sat in the jaw and the eyes and the particular set of the shoulders. Not anger. Not calculation. Not the careful blankness of a man performing composure for an audience.
Something quieter than all of those. Something that had given up trying to be anything other than what it was, because there was nobody watching to perform for.
'He made the choice. And now he's standing outside the door of the one he didn't choose, alone, in an empty hallway, where nobody's supposed to see him do it. And he comes back. That's the part that matters — he's done this enough times that the standing has become practiced, which means this isn't a moment of weakness, it's a ritual. He's built this into his schedule somehow. He allows himself this much and no more, and then he leaves, and the leaving is probably just as practiced as the standing.'
A servant turned the corner at the far end. The king's hand dropped instantly. His whole posture shifted back into the version of himself other people were allowed to see, smooth as pulling on a coat, not a seam showing. He turned and walked off without a backward glance.
The corridor emptied out again.
Alex looked at the door the king hadn't knocked on.
'Filed: Valerius's residence. He comes here. Doesn't knock. Stands long enough for it to mean something, then leaves the moment there's a witness. He does this often enough that the standing is practiced. He doesn't hate him. He's never hated him. That's the shape of it.'
Reading rooms for a living taught you that monstrous things were usually done by people with reasons you could follow, even if you didn't like where they led. Antonio Moretti had sat across tables from men who'd done terrible things and understood them completely, understood the logic, traced the steps, seen every junction where a different road had been available and watched why it hadn't been taken. He'd never found that comforting. Understanding didn't change the outcome. It just meant you couldn't pretend the thing was simple.
He found it, now, even less comforting than usual.
'He loves all of them. He just can't do a thing about the shape of it. The system's bigger than he is and he knows it, and he keeps showing up anyway. Empty corridors. Doors he won't knock on. He builds the grief into the schedule and he honors it and he doesn't let anyone see him do it, and I don't know if that's discipline or cowardice or some third thing that only makes sense from inside a life I haven't lived yet. Probably all three. Most things are all three.'
He stood in the tapestry's shadow a moment longer, then turned and made his way back, carefully, before the laundry finished and someone noticed that the heir to the throne had gone for an unauthorized stroll.
He thought about it again at three in the morning, staring at the dark, with the specific restlessness of a man who'd just added a complicated new piece to a map that was already getting crowded.