Ethan

"I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. You deserved better than this."

Repeated apologies, and he puzzled out the truth of Father's Associates, their under the table dealings. All masked in card game; Chain Winch. He taught him, finally, after quadrums of asking. Though, Father never let him listen in on his meetings with the Associates.

"Ethan?"

Ethan listened to the darkness all around him, embracing him as she had before.

"Ethan?"

But that doesn't sound like Mother.

"Mr. Rilannan?" a different voice mused.

Ethan blinked at the usage of his name and lifted his cheek out of his palm. Jestirian lowered his hand from his shoulder. He met the gaze of his class teacher, Mr. Tuchena, who held his I-Pen against the holoboard, where numerous passages took up every corner. "Is Edevic Theory not firing off your brain?" Tuchena asked, not unkindly. "Usually students in my class take longer to fall asleep."

Some people in the back giggled at the humour, but Ethan eyed Jesti, who leaned away from him, almost into Urtovan, who sat beside him with his own disinterested expression. Ethan reactivated his tablepad with a shake of his head, and Tuchena continued the lesson.

"You hit your chair and fell asleep," Jesti muttered under his breath.

"I'm bored," Ethan half-lied, and it slipped off his tongue. "If I wanted to know this stuff, I'd ask my father." He copied the passages onto his tablepad. He rested his cheek back onto his palm again, listening to the droning noises around him. Darkness fluttered as Tuchena switched to a different slide on the holoboad, where their tablepads picked up and projected in front of them in dedicated worksheets and everyone else around him obeyed and dove into their work. It droned into silence against a black hole, and he tilted further into his palm.

His compearl chirped in his ear.

It insisted, and he obeyed it instead. He got up out of his chair, leaving his worksheet behind to shuffle through the lane of tables and headed down the steps of the lecture atrium. Tuchena glanced up with a raised eyebrow. "Mr.Rilannan, where are you going?"

"Going to answer a call, I'll be right back," he said cooly, leaving the class and closing the door behind him. He sighed, and tapped his compearl. "Keren, what do I keep telling you about calling me while we're both at school?"

"I'm sorry, Ethan," Keren whispered.

"Are you in class?" Ethan mumbled and leaned against the wall.

"No... we're in the lunch block. I thought you were too, that's why I called."

Ethan breathed out a sigh, then lifted himself off the wall. "What's the problem?"

Keren fell silent on the other end, and he heard his nervous shuffles. "Um... I would've called Mom, right? But... I didn't want to bother her but I forgot... my lunch."

Ethan blinked. "You forgot your lunch? Keren, Mom packed your lunch." Irritation grappled onto his throat as he rubbed his fingers across the bridge of his nose. Great...

"You sighed, are you mad at me?"

"I'm going to be mad if you keep calling me at school."

"... but you said that last time and you sound about the same."

Ethan stood in the empty corridor, and rolled his eyes as he headed for his locker. He tapped in his code, and opened it to grab his bag. The school alarm rang through the hall, and his classmates left the room to shuffle through their own lockers for their next class. He gave the schedule menu shuffling on his locker screen, but ignored it to bring out his bag and closed the door with his foot. "Meet me outside your school. I'm bringing you food."

"Is it—"

"You're going to eat what you get."

Keren fell silent.

It'd take too much time to go between the collegiate and the feeder school as he left through Hall A and out into the courtyard. Starcross players practiced their plays, but he ignored them. It was a nice day, and he skipped the next class to rush to Keren's school further down the block. He spotted Mrs. Beylett supervising the children on their rest block, and came to a stop when he heard his brother.

Keren waved him down, alone, before rushing up to him.

Ethan dropped his lunch into Keren's hands. "Here you go." He raised an eyebrow when Keren rifled through it before looking back up at him with a slight frown. "What?"

"Does she not pack you mallow chips?"

"I pack my own lunches, Keren."

"And you don't pack them?"

"Too sweet for my tastes."

Keren pursed his lips but closed the lunch with a nod. "Thank you, Ethan."

"I'll make sure you get your lunch tomorrow, but try not to call me at school," Ethan cautioned as Keren stuffed the lunch into his own bag. "Not when you're in class."

"You sound like Mom," Keren pointed out as he set the bag back on his shoulders and tilted his head back. "What are you going to eat? Are you going to go back to school?"

Ethan hummed in thought. "No, I don't think so. I'm going to go home and get everything ready for dinner." Hands in his pockets, he headed away from his brother, but came to a stop at quiet footsteps in his shadows. "No, you can't come. Chalen will pick you up after school."

"Why do you get to leave school whenever you want?" Keren asked, gaze flat.

Ethan twisted around to face his little brother, and then poked his brow. "Because I'm older and get to make my own decisions — besides, I have to take care of my family; seeing as my little brother can't even remember his lunch and mom needs the help."

"That's not fair, I can make my own decisions," Keren mumbled.

"Tell me that when you can remember your lunch." Ethan reached forward to tap on both his temples and nudged him back towards the playground of innocence. "Go on."

Keren gave him a look of resentment before shuffling away with his hands tucked in his pockets. Ethan rolled his eyes and returned on his journey, keeping to the outskirts of Roxto, the Eteran city which glowed across the horizon, surrounded by forests, trees, and nature parks. Casinos lit up the center of the city, some of them Chalen and Father owned as a joint venture. In the back of his head, he could almost see the floating metropolis of Metro Six of Tersilia. Tall and interwoven like a fabric. Everywhere led everywhere, protected from the fall down to the planet by the strongest barriers known to the galaxy.

I wonder how good my memory is though... how old was I when Father took us to Eteran? Four? Younger? Ethan rubbed the back of his neck as cars rolled by on the road. I just remember a floating city, really... and lots of people. More people than here. He shivered when a cold wind blew down his shoulders, but he pressed onward into a small forested community. Prismkey in hand, he unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Empty.

Ethan listened, but no one spoke in the distance. He shrugged at the silence and placed his coat into the closet, which rolled back along the line to show some free hangars. He closed the closet with a tap on the panel. Heavy footsteps from the upper floor made him tilt his head upwards. He's home... maybe Mother is out with Chalen? He listened closer for any of Father's associates, but from the timing of the footsteps, Father was alone. He rested his hand against the closed closet, before heading through the living room to the stairway.

Ethan floated past his mother's and Keren's bedrooms, and hesitated outside the office door, then knocked. "Father?"

"You may come in, Ethanius," Father's low growl said from the other side. His hand dropped to the side, and he stepped forward when the door slid open. Father rounded around to his desk to take a seat. "Is there a reason as to why you're not at school?"

Ethan folded his arms and sat in the chair across from Father's when Father motioned for it with his hand. "I just didn't feel like going to the rest of my classes," he lied, but met Father's steely greens. "It's not like my grades are struggling." He folded his arms.

Father said nothing as he flicked through his datapad before setting it on his desk. "You came here for a reason, then?" Ethan clasped his hands together at the old ticking clock in the back of the room, over the window. He pursed his lips at each tick, each taunt. Father's eyes narrowed.

"I want to play a game of Chain Winch," Ethan said.

Tick.

Father blinked, and then asked, "For what?"

"Just to play," Ethan said.

It continued to tick.

"You know the rules, Ethanius. Rarely does anyone play this game with me for nothing," Father pointed out.

Ethan reached for the cards in the corner of Father's desk, watching every movement as he shuffled the deck. Every edge of the cards fluttered off his fingers. He studied the old picture frames within Father's office, most of them of the Associates he surrounded himself with. Some of them he never saw before, or some of them he had, and never saw again. He finished his shuffle of lies and deceit, and pushed Father's half to him. Father took it without a response, and shuffled them.

He zoned in on each flip of the card as Father prepared his start of the chain of information. Ethan twisted his own card, and readied for his response. Card down, Ethan placed it down, slipping it into the first weak link. "We were studying edevium theory in class today."

Father said nothing, and another card was added onto the chain.

"We own the Rilannan businesses, right?" Ethan pressed when Father added another card.

"You have an interest in working at one of them?" Father stopped his build of the chain to peer at him.

Ethan huffed. "Numbers aren't really my thing, but that's not where I'm going with this." He added his lucky card into the chain, and created a fold in the information. "They're in Mother's name."

"Yes."

"But you run the show."

Father eyed him.

Ethan folded his arms and waited for Father's next move with a tip of his head.

"We had to rebrand most of our workshops and edevium mining facilities when we moved most of our business into this solar system," Father explained.

Ethan narrowed his eyes. "Handy, if you're trying to hide something."

Father stopped, and the clock followed.

Ethan flipped over one of his cards. "Your associates." He nodded at the picture frames. "Some of them don't strike me as the type to handle numbers."

"You shouldn't let appearances deceive you," Father said in a careful tone, studying him. "I've worked with a lot of them for a long time."

Ethan folded his arms and refused to go along the dwindling chain. "Obviously. I've realised it's safer to assume there's always something someone has to hide — that's what you showed me." He tested his words, then said, "So... I know what you're hiding." Father continued the chain, but never took his gaze off him. Ethan straightened himself in his seat to match Father. "I know what the Malakai name means in the Underground syndicate."

Another tick, and another subtle response from Father as he withdrew his hands, and never denied it. "Why bring this up? Did someone tell you?"

Ethan scoffed. "I figured it out."

Father folded his hands and rested his chin on them. "Recently?"

Ethan hesitated at his question. "Some time ago. It's kind of hard to ignore when you're never really alone without Jozten — and Mother without Chalen. As well as the number of people who come in here to meet you."

"So, now what?" Father asked.

Ethan finished the chain with one last flipped card and got out of the seat. "Nothing, I just wanted to play." He headed for the door. "Thanks for the game, Father."

"You leave the table without really finishing it, you'll find yourself with a knife in your back," Father called him back, and when Ethan turned, he tugged out a hidden card and placed it on the table with a stoney grin. "You're much better than that, Ethan."

Ethan frowned down at the finished chain, trapped in the paper links and the word of a parental touch instead of the scorn of a monster. Hand on the door handle, he waited for it to unlock. "I just wanted some sort of conversation. We live in the same house and we barely talk anymore," he mumbled as he turned his back to Father. He stared at the wood. "Mother didn't know, did she?"

Father breathed in unseen webs of lies. "She knew long before you were born."

He gripped the door handle, but released his own frustration. "I always believed it was the other way around."

"You're free to believe that, Ethan." Father tapped something on his desk, and the lock shone green. "Your Mother should be home soon enough. You will have to explain to her why you aren't at school." Ethan nodded, but before he could leave the office behind, Father added, "If it bothers you that we don't talk as much as you'd like, I'll see that changed if you wish."

Ethan released the grip on the door handle, and twisted his head around. "Really?"

"You are my son. If you wish to talk, we'll talk."

Back to the stone cold silence and the ticking of time and a flutter of escaping the scorn, he repeated his own nod and left the room behind to await Mother's arrival, where her warmth dwindled with the clock.