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When Francis Roberts was growing up, the Academy and its Leagues fell into two categories in stories: the Rangers, who were good and brave and admirable, and everyone else, who decidedly were not. The Rangers were the exception in every story, but everywhere else the Dreads were clear - avoid the Leagues.
Francis idolised the Rangers from afar for years, favoured bedtime stories and wide eyed imaginings. He dreamt of meeting them, but his branch of the family rarely sailed that way so his quiet imaginings of single handedly holding off a kraken while Sarge dragged himself onto the deck and stared in awe at his seven year old saviour were, admittedly, highly unlikely.
That year he did fight a (small) kraken, but it wasn’t alone. He was barely in the fight, really, just crouched obediently somewhere sheltered and out of the way while the crew did their job. Heart in his mouth, Francis watched his family plant their feet on the swaying deck and look a monster fiercely in the maw, and shuddered in mixed horror and determination. This was who he wanted to be - a weapon raised, feet planted, a world made safer by the work of his own two hands.
The Dreads taught all of theirs to fight, because on a ship you either all headed into danger or none of you did. Francis washed dishes with his sisters and brother, chased cousins over the deck, and attended drills and classes every day like clockwork. The deck shifted under his feet with the swell of the waves and he planted his feet, shifted his balance, and breathed with it.
He was seven, watching breathless as his family fought in concert, he was eight and balancing a sword as the deck rolled beneath his feet, twelve and helping teach a young cousin how to fall -
He was thirteen, watching his mothers face go still as she read the letter telling them her brother and his crew had been found guilty of being vigilantes. He was thirteen, watching her crumple in and in and in, while standing still and stern, lips pressed thin. He was thirteen and looking around his grieving siblings, his cousins, his crew, and he curled his hands tight in his jacket as fury bubbled in the back of his throat.
That was the year Francis first read a copy of the First Leagues constitution. It had been a year of bitter, cold rage, and he picked it up because he wanted to see how you could get the Rangers from this system - stuffy, pompous, condemning anyone who didn’t study under their rules no matter how many lives they saved. When he was done, he wanted to sail up to the Bureau and wave it in front of them, force them to read it, because didn’t they see? Didn’t they understand what they were supposed to be? Didn’t they understand that they could be so much more?
Francis Uyeda walked through the Academy’s hated gates when he was eighteen, because there was something here worth saving from itself. His mother’s face had been stern and calm on the dockside, and when she kissed his forehead and wished him luck he could see her folding in and in on herself. One of the younger kids had been crying. One of his sisters had stubbornly refused to speak to him since he sent off the forms, and another had done the same once his acceptance had come back. His brother had made him promise to say hi to the Rangers.
He had lived most of his life on a ship, and now the ground lay still beneath his feet. He braced himself against it and stumbled when he adjusted his balance thoughtlessly for a shift that wasn’t coming. The ground was still, stable, and he felt off balance for weeks. He had lived all of his life with a large family and a larger crew, privacy a rare and sought after thing, noise and company a constant background. The Dreads were loud, boisterous, never ending chatter and argument and six conversations at once on a slow day. The Academy was full of people, true, but for weeks he felt off centre and still, the world quiet around him and the strangeness of having only one other set of lungs to listen to in years night waking him in bemused panic.
Francis had always been on the quieter side, and as he grew responsibility had made him quieter still. He measured words, considered and judged situations, because there was too much in the balance here to risk hasty words, hasty action. He was in this for the long haul, and he could not be discovered.
He sat through classes with peers caught up in their own glory and curled his fists under the desk. He wanted to scream at them, he wanted to drag out his mother’s best captain tone, his uncle’s disappointed scolding - what do you think this is all for? Don’t you see, don’t you understand - you are supposed to be so much more than this. We are supposed to be so much more.
Leaf hovered around the edges of his attention for a few weeks before he approached to calmly suggest the kid actually learn to take a fall. He went a whole quiet offer without offering his name - Francis had met so few new people over the years who hadn’t known who he was even if they hadn’t met him in person, and the Dreads were cautious about sharing their names with folk outside of the fleet. Leaf dragged Jack along with him, and they glowered at each other, two weathered heroes who had come to Rivertown to earn their overdue badges. Jack didn’t trust combat majors, jealousy and an earned wariness. Francis wasn’t inclined to like anyone who dragged a kid into fight after fight without bothering to teach them how to walk back out. Leaf sighed at them both and reminded them he could make his own choices, thank you very much.
After Red told Jack about his hypothetical background he stared at the ceiling for three hours, second guessing himself. How did he know Jack could be trusted - could he be trusted? - was he certain no one else had heard? - how would his mother’s face twist if he was found out, if he was put on trial, if they convicted him of being a vigilante - because he was, wasn’t he, when it came down to it. He might not be a legend in his own right, but he’d sailed with the Dreads, he’d helped go in search of dangers to take them out of innocent people’s way - would she stay standing this time, when she got that letter? When some trustworthy friend send word that her older son wouldn’t be coming back?
Jack was trustworthy. No one else heard. The letter was never penned. But he would wake in a sweat and breathe shallowly for weeks, panic crawling down his spine, and wonder. What if…?
The Leagues could be so much more, and here it was. Leaf was a healer who was slowly dragging it all into the light, the pettiness and the bullying, because what was the point in skulking away to sleep safe and letting these blows fall on someone else? Gloria was sharp and bright, her aim as precise as her essays, pretty, cheerful and ready to get her hands dirty. Clem was a standard, full of himself Combat spec until he piped up and made Red do a pleasantly surprised double take. And Jack Farris - Jack wanted to be so much more.
Jack and Francis formed a truce for the sake of a brave, reckless kid, and then a friendship when they both stepped back and really looked at each other. Red never asked what the jagged edges you could sometimes see in Jack were from - why sometimes, sat in the shadows with his back to a wall and his eyes on their small, fragile group he would crumple in and in on himself while his face stayed relaxed and cheerful. Red knew enough heroes to know you didn’t save everyone, knew enough to know - his mother looked like that, when Red’s brother sang a certain cheerful sea shanty, or Red used a particular turn of phrase, or she was basking in her family’s warmth but feeling a phantom space. You couldn’t save everyone, but you carried their ghosts on your heavy shoulders and wondered - what if…?
The stable loft club was where he felt balanced, steady on his feet on the unmoving ground. This was what he was supposed to do, who they were supposed to be. He channelled his uncles, aunts, older cousins and unrelated crew mates. (He didn’t channel his mother, because he thought it might be a bit terrifying for anyone who’d never met her.)
Francis had always been quiet, a little solemn and reserved, but Red was often silent, preoccupied, and focussed to the point of paralysis. There was so much to do, a lifetime’ work and then a lifetime’s more. This was his life, this was his work, and he had to make it mean something. He had a job to do, he had a hundred plans and swallowed down arguments, and he felt himself bursting at the seams with it all.
Over training sessions and late nights, Academy benches at breakfast and Sally-Anne’s lemonade, bits of himself he’d hidden away when he walked through the Academy gates started to shine again. He had forgotten - there was work to be done, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t laugh as well. He slipped out dry comments and Jack snickered, Leaf grinned, and Gloria smirked. For a moment he could have been crammed into one of the benches aboard their ship, surrounded by the warmth of his family.
He didn’t write home and they didn’t write to him. Francis Uyeda had official records, and on them were no living relatives. He’d had some anonymous help with his application, via a friend of a friend (…who had some friends who had a cousin, who had a friend who knew Sez, who had a friend on the inside). If he was found out - well, the Bureau had a price in the head of anyone in the Dreads, so he wasn’t going to let them find out. Red wasn’t going to lead the Bureau to his family for something so trifling as staying in touch. There were more important things, but he wrote out letters in his head when he couldn’t sleep, and tried not to dwell on imagined replies.
His sisters nagged him in phantom writing to do more staff drills, and gave him (unasked for) advice for the stable loft crew’s next session, which he generally acted on. In his head, his youngest cousin worshipped Laney, and his eldest sister fondly adopted Gloria on sight. His younger brother sent him a gleeful, teasing letter filled with nothing but ‘you liiiike him’ when he told them in his mind about his finally admitted crush on Leaf. Red rolled over that night and firmly told himself that was a lucky escape, really, but his heart twisted rebelliously.
He was nineteen, calling his friends to battle and trying not to hyperventilate because Sarge - the Rangers’ Sarge! - knew his name. He was nineteen, rallying and marshaling with a year’s training and a lifetime of his family. He was nineteen, watching bodies be lowered into the ground, watching faces in the crowd crumpling in and in, his own stern and still, thinking - if only they’d known more, if only I’d been there, what if I’d taught them more, what if..?
The next year felt like so much progress. They weren’t relegated to lofts and hidden corners, relying on Rupert’s perfect insider knowledge - Red thought he knew who the friend of a friend of a friend had been, these days - to keep from punishments, hunted out by those who should above all others be helping them. They had grown into something more: these little baby Leagues, teamwork and flexibility suddenly a necessity, were the roots of what he had always thought of when he daydreamed about the Rangers in his faraway bunk. They were learning, growing, showing their faces to the city who barely knew they were there except for their polished walls and sheltered lives. Red poured over reports with Leaf, Gloria, and occasionally Clem, and took their notes to Rhodes to be scolded and corrected, ready to take advice and training back to their groups.
Red wasn’t there when Heads got the news that his nephew wasn’t coming back from he mountains, but he insisted on being the one to carry it to Sez, Sally, and Bart. Thorne had called the news in, of course, through all due process - the letter Heads was reading and rereading, locked in his study, was a precise, clinical report. Thorne had called it in, but Sally-Anne had no phone that the Academy kids knew, and Laney was worn beyond Elsewhere travel. The letters they had scrawled would reach Rivertown weeks from now, full of their determination to get him back and their grief, but there had been an announcement at the Academy once Heads had finished reading the report and washed the tears from his face. Red sent a polite note with Clem to say that he would not be attending class that afternoon and would of course ensure he caught up for the next class, and made his way into the city.
The Bureau would inform Heads, Miz Eliza, and any relevant officials that Rupert Willington Jons Hammersfeld the Seventh was missing, believed dead, in the course of service. They wouldn’t inform the owner of a fish shop. They wouldn’t inform a man who worked for the city underground. They wouldn’t even know that there was a half-hag girl juggling on a street corner to not tell. Red pushed the cafe door open and thanked all the gods he knew that all three were there, and the tables otherwise empty, because he didn’t want to have to say this twice - he didn’t want to say it once but he choked it out because they had to know, they deserved to know, and that was more important than how little he wanted to do this.
Bart stared at his hands, resting on his precise, serviceable bowler. Sally-Anne’s breath caught and she reached blindly for Sez, and Sez - she was crumpling, in and in and in, and Red wasn’t sure how many more people he could bear to see break. Leaf bumped his shoulder in wordless support and fetched glasses of water, flipped the shop sign to 'closed’, and started on the dishes for the sake of doing something.
When the Bureau started trying to close down their fieldwork, Leaf raged. He couldn’t - wouldn’t - hold his tongue for the powers that be. It drove Red to distraction, and made him smile fondly when no one was looking. There were more important things - this was a long haul, a lifetime’s work - but Leaf was always in the moment. Leaf was blazing sunshine and fierce grins, taverns singing and dancing on tables, black eyes and spitfire shouting, and Red didn’t really understand why he thought Red was good company, of all people.
Red held his tongue and accepted that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction for a bit, but Leaf was chucked out on his ear and had to be sneaked in for guest appearances at their unofficial (if frankly poorly hidden) extracurricular training sessions. Leaf set up a police force with Bart, trying to bring order and security to Rivertown, and Red wrote essays and taught Terence Farris to throw an opponent twice his size across a ring just like Gloria. Gloria was busy teaching someone how to shoot and wishing, loudly, that Laney was there to have a contest with.
Rupert came home. In the end, that was what it was about - a city finally demanding its own rights, students demanding they be who they could be, not just what they had always been, the Bureau’s long grasp being questioned and defied - a boy coming home, and finding that it wasn’t going to lose him again at any cost.
Red wrote home, for the first time in years, and Laney took the letter to a likely port. He didn’t go with her, because if the Dreads came they had to come for the fight, not for him, because this wasn’t supposed to be about him. It was about what was right, what was owed, what they all were and what they could be. This was a call for aid, not a homesick son crying out for his family. The letter was almost formal, in its way - one of the Dread’s coded requests for aid, a warning that they’d be toe to toe with the Bureau. In the postscript he had cracked and scrawled - I miss you all so much.
They didn’t send a reply, just swarmed into Rivertown, noisy and boisterous, complaining about how the ground felt wrong, and Red disappeared into his mother’s arms, his sisters pounding him on the back, the warmth and cheer he hadn’t been letting himself miss. He danced around the edges of conversations, wry comments and dry humour slipped between the tangle of many voices at once. He had watched Leaf, for months and months - for years - dancing on tables and raising rabbles, and had drifted on the edges - Leaf was watching him now, across the room, smiling like sunshine and quiet, so quiet. Red disentangled himself from a cousin and grinned over at him, before turning to his mother.
“C'mon, come meet my crew.” His mother’s eyebrows shot up, but she threw an arm around his shoulder and let him lead her to the corner where Leaf was sitting, waiting for Weeds to drift in, Gloria to burst through the doors, Clem to bustle in with pages and pages of notes. Leaf was quiet, small - and he shouldn’t be. It was Red’s job to hover, calm and observing. Leaf should never look, just a little, like he wasn’t sure where he fit.
Rivertown rose up, and the Dreads rose with it. Red didn’t ask to be assigned to one of the groups with his siblings, his cousins, his old friends. He had his crew, and they’d been fighting together all year. He had trained them for this. They had each other’s backs, and Red hit the ground. Weeds dragged him up and Jill got under his other arm, hauling him to safety and begging him to live long enough to get there.
When he woke there was a heavy weight on the side of his bed. Leaf should never be quiet, uncertain, but here he was - red eyed and ashy pale, crumpling in on himself, gasping for words that slipped away from his tongue. Red blinked, slow and puzzled, and tried to find the words caught at the back of his own throat. Leaf should never look like he wasn’t sure he fit, here, like he wasn’t the first person Red would want to see.
The next time Red woke, his mother was there. She burst into tears and threw relieved arms around him, careful not to jostle. It hurt anyway, but he clung back. When she got the letter telling her a beloved brother was dead, in the aftermath of battles, at funerals, she had gone still, stern, but dignity was for in the wake of loss. It was steel spines and determination not to bow because there was something here worth facing. But Francis wasn’t dead, just injured, and this was about relief, about hope, and so she sobbed onto his shoulder.
(He was seven, curled behind a crate waiting seriously to be told it was okay to come out now, while the crew started to assess the kraken’s damage. He was seven, his mother finding him at last and burying her face in his mop of hair, shuddering as she realised he was okay, he was okay, and she could let herself feel how scared she had been when she hadn’t had to scold him out from underfoot in the aftermath)
The Dreads had answered the call for aid, and now some of them lay still and cold. Red gripped his own arms tight as people he’d played games with and learnt to wield a sword alongside were lowered into the ground. He hadn’t asked them to come for him, because they would have, of course they would have, and this had never been about him. He had asked them to come for Rivertown, for fairness and what the Academy could be, because if they were going to risk everything it should be because they had decided it was worth it, and they had come. They hadn’t come for him, he reminded himself, trying to drown out the voice in the back of his mind - if I hadn’t asked, if I hadn’t written, if I hadn’t added that postscript…?
They buried their fallen crew, and descended in a boisterous crowd on Sally-Anne’s to raise drinks and make increasingly embarrassing and inappropriate toasts, celebrating the lives that had been led. Red hobbled over to his usual table with Leaf’s help and his mother’s eagle-eyed supervision. Jack settled opposite, his back to the wall and one eye on the door, and grinned at him when Leaf challenged one of the Dreads to a dance contest.
“Just like old times, huh?” Red laughed, eyes on the was Leaf was laughing, fierce and open, head thrown back.
“Aww, you like him!” Jack snorted with laughter while Red rolled his eyes at his brother. “Francis has a cruussssh.” He opened his mouth to make a snarky reply, but Leaf caught his eye and grinned, and he forgot what he’d been going to say.
They buried Clem a few days later, once his grandmother had travelled into Rivertown for the funeral. She leant on Gloria’s plump shoulder, because Clem had written home every week and she’d been looking forward to meeting such a bright, brilliant young lady all year. They should have met her at graduation, pride filling her eyes rather than grief, but that hadn’t been their choice to make. Clem had been a combat major, brash and cocky, until he had slowed down and decided he didn’t have to be, actually, and turned out to be a decent fighter and excited academic, loyal and brave, and a patient teacher (though prone to going off in the kind of tangent that turned a wrestling class into a contest between pistols and throwing knives). He had been so much more than he’d set out to be when he first walked through those gates, forms trimmed in red.
Red’s mother collared him in his cosy warehouse corner, after, when Leaf had rushed off to help Bart and Gloria had disappeared to sit with Clem’s granny, holding her wiry hand tight and listening to the stories she had as though her life depended on it. Red was flicking through papers, planning schedules and classes for when he was improved enough to not risk the wrath of Rue.
“He was one of your crew.” She was serious, sad, and quiet. Red nodded, slowly, a lump in his throat. His family was still the Dreads, but they weren’t his crew anymore. He loved them - he trusted them and he missed them - but in a fight they weren’t the ones he would lean on anymore. They weren’t the ones he would turn to withought thought. They weren’t the people he trusted instinctively to have his back. His mother smiled, sad and proud, and smoothed his hair from his forehead.
“Come and visit us. Spend some time on the sea for a bit, let us all laugh until you get your sea legs back.” He looked at his hands, at the piles of papers and plans around him. She shook her head and tilted his chin to meet her gaze. “Come and visit us, once things are on track. I’m a captain too, kiddo, and believe me - you need to give yourself time as well. Your boy Leaf has already said he’ll hold the fort while you come enjoy some home cooking.” She smiled wryly. “Spoken like a boy whose never had your cousin Algie’s idea of cooking.” Red nodded, hesitantly. There was a lifetimes work here - but that was the point, wasn’t it? It was his lifetime, so he had to live it.
Weeks later, the deck shifted under his feet, and he stumbled, grumbled, and ignored his sisters laughing at him. Laney leaned on the railing, already looking faintly queasy.
“Last chance for an immediate ticket back?”
“Nah, you go make sure your rabble haven’t blown anything up. And if you can? Get that terrible couch out of my house.”
“Even I’m not that good, Red. See you in port in a couple of weeks.” She was gone in a glimmer of gold, and he braced himself against another ocean swell. The ground was moving and he was unsettled, off balance, but that would pass. An uncle was calling instructions to the younger crew members, running drills. A seagull was calling, high overhead. With Laney gone, he could almost have never have left home. He could have stayed here, one of the Dreads, the fierce protectors of the sea. It would have been a good life, but it wasn’t his.
He was twenty, standing before a mixed class of all majors, teaching them to set their feet, to hold their balance, and to roll with it when they fell. Later he would argue with Heads, a little nervously, about schedules and with Grey, vehemently, to get him out of the library for five minutes. The Academy was on shaky ground while they figured out how to keep the good and repair the rest, but he felt they were off to a good start. Tessa Farris grinned from the front row, while her cousin lurked at the back and thought longingly of the books he couldn’t read for the next hour because even sages should now how to duck. In the morning they would review reports of trouble in the city and agree which a few Academy students should lend a hand with, because there was no point teaching them to be heroes and then saying that the people on their doorstep weren’t worth defending.
(He was thirteen, reading the First League’s constitution for the first time and knowing they could be so much more)