Work Text:
Connor Roy was not interested in politics from a young age.
It’s summer, nineteen-eighty-something, and they’re in the villa in South Italy. Connor is half-watching his younger siblings in the pool, because that’s his job (it’s always going to be his job), and half-watching their father down the hillside, strolling along beside the vineyard, talking to the businessman.
Roman shouts, or whines, really, and Connor turns around to see Kendall splashing him and crowing loudly and if they’re too loud their father will look sharply up the slope and tell them, later, if it all goes sour, that they should be seen, not heard, and the woman who mothered the other three will glare and purse her lips and Connor thinks that will probably be all his fault.
“Guys, guys,” he says, getting off his lounger and kneeling by the pool, cream stone hard and gritty on his bare knees, “quiet down.” They’re all splashing now and he can’t quite tell who is allied to who, or if it’s more a free for all. (At one point, Shiv will choose whoever is winning or her current favourite of her brothers and she will turn the scales, make it an all out beat down on either Kendall or Roman, he needs to calm them before she does.) “Guys.” He can’t see their father now he’s kneeling by the pool, but he knows the sharp look will still come rocketing up the slope and pierce him somewhere he’s unarmoured. “Ken, stop it.”
He shuffles forwards on his knees, reaching out across the water to grab Roman’s shoulder and pull him back against the side of the pool, glaring over the six-year-old’s head at the other two who still splash. “Get off me,” Roman snarls, proper little wolf cub, like Romulus. “Get off.”
Shiv or Ken splashes one last time and it catches Connor full in the face but he just blinks the chlorine droplets off his eyelashes and glares at them. “Dad is doing something important, quiet down.” He looks down at Roman, at the nail scratches on his little, weak shoulders. “Tell Rome you’re sorry,” he says.
They descend immediately into argument, but quietly now they remember their father is just down the hill. “Why should we —” and “He started it —!” and “He’s a weakling.”
“I won’t take any of you out in the boat tomorrow,” he says, and means it. Roman is still under the curl of his arm, no longer protesting the hold, the sun is burning the back of his neck, Shiv and Ken are treading water and looking mutinous. “You know I won’t.” And they know Dad won’t take them either.
“We shouldn’t have to say sorry,” says Shiv.
“He’s only six,” Connor says, with a little bite. Roman wriggles a little like he’s thinking of protesting that. “Say sorry.”
“You’re not the boss of us,” says Ken, glowering the way Dad does. “
I’m
the eldest. I get to say what Shiv and Roman do.”
What am I? The nanny? he wants to say, but won’t. “ I’m the eldest,” he says, pulling his anger close to his chest. People who ‘go into histrionics’, people who have emotions when they’re not Siobhan or Roman or Kendall, get sent to the nut house, like Connor’s mother did. “If you don’t want to go out in the boat, just say.”
Kendall glares for a long moment. “The boat is stupid.” But then, “Sorry, Rome. I didn’t mean to scratch you.”
It takes Shiv a moment longer, her eyes on Connor, kneeling at the edge of the pool, then the arm he has around Roman, still bobbing in the water, pulled close against the edge. “Fine. Sorry.” It’s not really a good apology, Connor would even bet it was her who scratched him, but it’s as good as he’ll get from the kids.
“Alright. Let’s go inside.”
“No! I wanna stay in the pool,” says Roman, turning up his little almost-seven face to Connor, imploring. “Inside is boring.”
But then they all hear loud laughter from down by the vineyard, coiling up in the fresh countryside air, up in the blue sky and across the vibrant green grass, and Shiv and Ken move without another word to the pool edge and pull themselves up onto the hot stones, dripping water everywhere. It was not a happy laugh, and soon their father will snap for cigars and whiskey to have on the deck with the businessman. Connor shifts his hold on Rome and lifts him gently up and into his arms, even though he’s wet and clammy, holds him against his shirt and lets his wet little feet leave damp marks on his shorts.
Rome shifts until he’s got his arms around Connor’s neck and he kicks at the other two as they pad across the soft grass and into the blue shades of the house. Tonight there will be shouting and Connor knows what’s coming to Caroline, some day soon, and Connor will hold Roman close just like this so he doesn’t slip down the stairs to ask the cooks for snacks and come back with something worse than a scratch and snot and tears all over his face.
“I’ll ask Bianca to make us banana splits and we can eat them in the upstairs lounge,” says Connor, placing Roman’s wet feet on the cold tiles of the sunroom, “go and get dry and changed.”
Tomorrow Connor Roy will take all three of them out in the boat, just the same as he will take them camping and fishing and to tennis and badminton and to the airport to wave their mother goodbye when she leaves. There will be another man who could, a chauffeur or a nanny or their father, but it will be Connor. And yesterday and today and tomorrow and the day after that, he never thought at all about politics, he only thought about the kids. He will be there for birthdays and Christmases and military school and cries and for the anger and all the little ways he fucked them up, all the ways their dad did that he couldn’t fix. He will be there so much that Shiv and Ken and Rome will forget that he’s the eldest, they’ll forget he’s not… someone else.
Connor will try not to mind.
If Connor Roy ever has a biography, he will tell them he was interested in politics from a very young age. In all honesty, though, he never thought a jot about it. All Connor Roy cared about, from a young age, were his half-siblings. He will be the feeding hand when Logan Roy kicks the dogs to see if they will still come running back, he will be the forgotten Roy child, he won’t get his birthright as the eldest son. He almost won’t mind, love is a superpower, really, it’s something he doesn’t need in return, as long as he gets to pool it in his hands — thick and golden like honey — and let the kids drink from it, let them use those memories in press reports about their father, let them come to him when there’s nowhere else to turn, let them take from him.
Love is… not something Connor has ever grown on. He’s always been the one growing without it, trying to bear fruit for his siblings to gnaw on. It’s enough for Connor, if you ask him. If you ask him, he was only ever interested in politics from a young age. If you ask him, he doesn’t want kids, he’s had enough of those for a life time, he’ll laugh about it, but it’ll be true. And if you look close enough, you’ll still see their wet handprints on him, clutching tight, begging for a little more that he’ll always, always give.
If you look close enough, it’s always been Connor Roy — grey before his time, paying for love with money he doesn’t know how to earn — hoisting the other three out of the pool in Italy, out of their father’s splash zone, curling them up somewhere safer, as often as he can.