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“There is nothing I can do for you.”
It hits him like a ton of bricks, what? Nothing can be done? A hopeless case, surely not. He’s Troy Lougferd, right? That has to mean something. But the threat of his father is nothing to the threat itself. Those eyes that are reflected in his own are cold and uncaring, barely registering that the man in front of him is his son. His blood. All over what? A misunderstanding. He’ll change his mind, right?
“Dad, what? You can’t do this. Please. Please.” he bargains, gambling for his father’s sympathy
“I can do exactly what i want to, Tramilton. And what i want is for you to get out.”
“You cannot be doing this right now, really?
“Now.”
The word swings like a gavel, crushing any hope of empathy beneath its finality; and he breaks. The macho persona he defends with anything crumbles with the statement, leaving nothing but a boy.
“Please, dad! All this over a little fight? You know i can do better, let me do bett-”
The exclamation is cut sharply off by a hand to his cheek. Leaving an ugly smear across his face and his reputation, because who would dare hit a Lougferd? As it turns out, other Lougferds. With disdain, the man gazes at a silver ring on his index finger, stained with blood from where it clipped his son’s lip.
“You have had enough chances, boy. Get out! No son of mine will be a failure, so you are not my son.”
He had been eight that day. What man decides his son will amount to nothing before when he isn't even in high school? He cried, and his father told him to stop. But are you really a failure if you fail a spelling test, or are you just a child? There was nowhere for him to go, wherever would take him? So he did not leave. Instead, he spent his years slinking in halls that should be his own, gazing blankly as his father raises a better heir. His father was well aware he was still there, and did not ask him to get out again, letting him see how much better their family was without him in it.
When he was fifteen, he still did not leave, he haunted the estate as a ghost that still breathes, his young siblings are told to pretend he is not there, and they look through him. They are smart, creative, and athletic, and everything he is not.
He hates it.
He hates the way his father looks at him, and the way his siblings do not. The way his eyes flash with wickedness when they find him peeking around a corner. He hates that he must steal what is rightfully his to live, or he would starve in their own stores. He is homeless in his own house, and knows there is nothing to gain from leaving. All it would do is make him suffer more, the rats sharing his stolen morsels would become those who only see weakness in him. So he does not leave.
In the twelve years he spends wandering the estate, he could probably count the words he said on his fingers. Until his voice is forced.
The words are brought out of him because of his brother, who he’s watched grow from an infant, and is now ten. He is the one his father deems suitable enough to replace him, that smugness plastered across the man's face when he spots his cast aside son hovering as he disciplines the new.
“What am i going to do with you?” he says, venom trickling into his words. “We can’t have these failures, Arges, another flunked math test?” Arges, new. The very name itself is spit in Troy’s eye. It dawns on him that their father is confronting the boy about the same thing he came for this throat over.
“I don’t know, Father. I know it's not good enough, I can be better.”
“I can get rid of you any time I like, you know that? This isn’t good enough! I can do to you exactly what I did to Troy.”
“Troy?”
The genuine unknowing on the young boy’s face is like a punch to the gut. Of course he didn't tell them all my name. They would assume he was a servant, with no reason to suspect he was their brother, no one looked close enough to make the connection.
“The boy that we see around. His name is Troy, he is my son.”
“You mean we have an older brother? Why don’t we see him?”
“I told him to leave but he wouldn’t go. I told him to leave over exactly the tongue you’re giving me now.” He punctuates his sentence with the same preparation to swing and to strike.
It does not connect.
The boy who wouldn’t go has gotten rather rugged in his years.
His callused hands meet his fathers clean and polished one. Putting himself in front of Arges.
“I’m not fucking letting you do to him what you did to me. None of us deserve such a pompous asshole of a father as you.” he spits, voice hoarse and crackling from disuse,
“Go, kid. Go to the servants door” he whispers down to the boy, “Get the rest of them.”
Through tears the boy looks at his brother, nods, and takes off running.
Troy’s hands migrate up to his father’s throat, and pushes him to a wall into a painting, a family portrait that he is not featured in.
“We are going to leave, now. You are not to follow us, send anyone or clockworks after us, mention our names. You have no children.” he grits his teeth and presses harder. “I can let what you did to me go, but you have no right to hit them. You are a vile man, and a bully. Are we clear?”
The man can do nothing but nod, and does so. To his relief his son's hands are removed. Only to be replaced at his jaw. He hits solidly, a deafening crack echoing in the polished halls as the bone is snapped.
His father falls to the floor, the sound of his jaw breaking replaced with his disgraced son’s footsteps leading away. He does not call for help. He tells no one, for who would have respect for an aggressive man? He has no children, and is alone.
Troy is met with three young boys and two younger girls, all shivering and worried.
“We have to go soon, go and grab what you want to take, be back in fifteen minutes.”
They scurry off, Arges telling him that he said very loosely what has happened. What’s fifteen minutes to someone whos waited years?
Eventually they return, bundled in layers and layers, clutching their little bags of precious things. And their brother comforts them.
“I know where we’re gonna go.”
He leads them to the trash hole, and fights against their worried whines to get them in safely. With some struggle, they emerge in reclaim, Troy having seen people slink in and out of here, knows a place.
But on the way, crashes head first into an owl and a ratgirl.
“Sorry dudes! We’ll just be past you.”
“Wait!” the girl says, “You need somewhere? My uncles got room.”
And that is how six uplanders find themselves dozing to banjo music bungled up in a cottage, they decide they need a new name, and it feels for a moment that they’ll be okay.