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The fencing academy hall is quiet, except for the sounds clack, clack, clack of wooden swords meeting in quick succession.
Peter moves fast. Too fast for someone still so young. But he’s hungry. But not in a way children often are. In a way, Jimmy understands. A hunger for more. For better.
Jimmy parries Peter’s strike with ease, sidestepping as the boy lunges again.
“Too eager,” Jimmy scolds, knocking Peter’s sword aside. “Patience. If you move before you see an opening, you leave yourself wide open.”
Peter huffs, his brown eyes flashing. Her eyes.
Jimmy tightens his grip on his sword. He feels his stomach twisting.
It’s uncanny how much Peter looks like his mother. Jenny. That same sharp intensity in his gaze, the same stubborn set in his jaw. And yet, the fire inside him? That reckless energy? That’s not Jenny.
No.
That belongs to the man Jimmy cut open like a Christmas goose.
“Again,” he says, stepping back into position.
Peter doesn’t hesitate. He darts forward. Jimmy blocks, reflects and guides Peter’s strikes just off-centre so that he tires himself out.
The boy doesn’t realise what he’s doing. Not yet.
Peter’s quick, but his mind is still catching up with him.
Jimmy sometimes wonders if Peter’s father was the same at that age.
Though he wouldn’t know. By the time he met the man, he was grown, already standing across from Jimmy with a blade in his hand.
He remembers it too well. The way the bastard had smirked at him. Smug and self-righteous. Oblivious to what was coming. The way he had fought recklessly, without strategy, just raw strength. The way he had hesitated, just for a second.
And the way Jimmy had driven his blade deep and sharp, tearing through him like carving a roast.
The look in his eyes. Filled with shock. That slow, stumbling fall.
It was supposed to be the end of it.
Jenny was supposed to realise that she is his.
She was supposed to see him.
But instead, she cried. For him. For that man.
Even after he was gone from this sinful world, her heart still belonged to him.
Jimmy had gone searching for Jenny after that. Only to find out he was five years too late.
She was dead, and what she left behind was a boy in a workhouse, barely eight years old, with her brown doe eyes.
He decided to take Peter in and raise him as his own. It was a way for him to hold on to her and ease the guilt.
Jimmy forces himself back to reality.
Peter lunges again, sweat on his face, and Jimmy sidesteps easily, knocking the sword from his hands in one swift motion. It clatters against the floor.
Peter stares at it, panting.
“Better,” Jimmy says, nodding towards the fallen sword. “But you’re still leading with your heart instead of your head.”
Peter frowns. “I am using my head.”
“No.” Jimmy looks down at him, his voice low. “You’re fighting like someone who wants to prove something.”
Peter scowls. “Maybe I do.”
Jimmy tilts his head, watching him. He reflects briefly about what Peter would say if he knew the truth. If he knew the man who raised him as his own was the same man who took his father’s life before he was born.
That every time Jimmy looks at him, he sees Jenny.
That every time Peter fights, he sees him.
But Peter doesn’t know. And he won’t.
Not yet.
Only when the time is right.
Jimmy goes to pick up the sword from the floor and hands it back to Peter.
“Again?” Peter asks.
Jimmy smirks.
“Again.”