Archive of Our Own

Connor had long ago learned how to listen to children. Not in the distracted, indulgent way adults often did, nodding absently through half-heard stories, but with genuine patience, as though every winding thought and awkwardly formed sentence carried some hidden significance.

 It was one of the few things that came naturally to him. Perhaps because no one had ever really listened to him in quite the same way.

Kendall, especially, seemed to sense that.

He had been talking for several minutes already, perched cross-legged on the rug at Connor’s feet, his small hands moving as quickly as his mouth, leaping from one subject to another with the strange, seamless logic only children possessed. 

Something about his tutor’s arithmetic exercises had become, somewhere along the way, a complaint about his tie being too tight, which had somehow transformed into a detailed account of Roman trying to feed peas to the dog under the dining table. Connor had lost the thread several turns ago, but he remained attentive nonetheless, stretched comfortably into the armchair by the tall windows of his bedroom, his book resting open but forgotten in his lap.

Outside, rain tapped softly against the glass. Inside, Kendall filled the room with the steady hum of his voice.

“—and then Dad said I was taking too long, but I wasn’t, I was just reading everything properly, because what if one of the numbers mattered more than the others? You said details matter. Remember? You said that.”

Connor smiled faintly and lowered his eyes from the grey blur of the city beyond the window.

“I did say that.”

Kendall’s face brightened at once, as though the confirmation itself were a reward. “That’s what I told him. I said, ‘Connor says details matter.’”

The smile lingered, though something inside him shifted all the same.

Logan had not even needed to be named.

Their father existed in the house the way weather did—inescapable, oppressive, capable of changing every atmosphere simply by entering it. Even in his absence, there was a sense of him pressing against the walls. It lived in the way staff lowered their voices as they passed his study. In the way Roman flinched when footsteps sounded too sharply in the corridor. In the way Kendall unconsciously straightened his spine every time he mentioned him, as though preparing himself to be inspected.

Connor knew that feeling too well.

He knew, too, what it was to be looked at by Logan and feel himself measured only by what he lacked.

Being the eldest should have meant something. Sometimes, in public, Logan made certain it did. This is my oldest, he would say, a hand on Connor’s shoulder that felt less affectionate than possessive, his voice carrying that cool note of ownership he reserved for things he considered his. But Connor had learned young that being first did not mean being favoured.

It only meant he had been there long enough to watch himself become less important.

The younger children belonged wholly to Logan’s present life. Their mother was his wife, polished and socially impeccable. Their place in the family was unquestioned, fixed and secure. Connor, by contrast, came from a woman whose name was rarely spoken unless it was to diminish her. His mother existed in fragments now, reduced to passing remarks and cold dismissals.

She was unstable.
She was difficult.
She couldn’t handle things.

As though she had simply failed to keep up.

As though Connor did not still remember the sound of her voice.

As though he had not watched her vanish piece by piece.

And as though Logan had not, in the years after, begun nudging Connor ever so quietly toward the edges of his own family, where he could be tolerated rather than needed.

Kendall, though, had never seemed to notice that divide.

Or perhaps he noticed it and rejected it instinctively.

He still wandered into Connor’s room in the evenings without knocking. Still climbed onto his bed or curled into the armchair opposite him, talking endlessly about school or films or whatever thought happened to be pressing most urgently against the front of his mind. He still sought Connor out not because he had to, but because he wanted to. As did Roman.

Connor treasured that more than he could admit, even to himself.

“Connor?”

He blinked, drawn back.

Kendall had stopped talking, watching him carefully.

“You weren’t listening.”

There was no accusation in it, only disappointment.

Connor closed the book in his lap and set it carefully aside. “My apologies. Start again.”

Kendall huffed, though there was satisfaction in it too, the pleased certainty of having reclaimed his brother’s full attention. He adjusted himself on the carpet, knees knocking together.

“I asked,” he said more slowly this time, “if you think Dad likes me better when I tell him things.”

Connor went very still.

The question had been asked so simply that, for a moment, it barely seemed to register.

Kendall looked down at his hands as he spoke, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. “Sometimes when I tell him things, he listens more. He looks at me.”

The quietness of it struck Connor harder than it should have.

Not because it was surprising, Logan’s methods rarely were, but because Kendall was too young to understand what he was learning. Too young to realise that attention offered on those terms always came at a cost.

Connor leaned back slightly, studying him.

Kendall’s face was still soft with childhood, all rounded cheeks and earnest eyes, his hair beginning to fall untidily across his forehead. He looked worried in a way he was trying very hard to conceal, and Connor felt something old and protective tighten in his chest.

A child should not have to wonder how to earn his father’s affection.

But then, perhaps none of them had ever really been children in that sense.

“Ken,” he said quietly, his voice gentler now, “when someone tells you something in confidence, it means they’re trusting you with something important. Something private. Something that belongs to them.”

Kendall frowned, thinking.

“Even if Dad asks?”

The question hung between them.

Connor turned his gaze toward the rain again, watching the water gather and race down the glass in thin, uneven lines.

Especially then, he wanted to say.

Especially when he asks.

Because Logan would always ask.

He would press and prod and search until he found the tender places, and once he found them, he would turn them over in his hands like weapons. Vulnerability was something he despised in others because he recognised how dangerous it could be. He did not allow softness to survive untouched.

Connor knew that better than anyone.

There were things he had never said aloud. Not to Kendall. Not to anyone.

Not how frightened Logan could still make him feel, even now, when he was old enough to know better than to be afraid.

Not how often he thought of his mother, and how little of her voice he could still remember.

Not how deeply ashamed he felt for missing her.

Not how fiercely he felt responsible for these children who were only half his by blood, but somehow entirely his in every way that mattered.

He looked down at Kendall, who was watching him with complete and uncomplicated trust, and for reasons he could not quite explain, Connor felt something inside himself begin to loosen.

His thoughts had moved elsewhere, retreating into a place he rarely allowed himself to revisit, and beside him Kendall waited with an unusual stillness, sensing, perhaps, that something important was about to be entrusted to him. There was no impatience in it, only a quiet attentiveness, his small body folded cross-legged on the rug, his eyes fixed on Connor with that unguarded trust children offered so freely, before they learned to withhold it.

When Connor finally spoke, his voice had softened.

“When I was younger than you are now—before my mother was gone, before… everything changed. I used to wake in the middle of the night and wander through the house. I liked it better then, somehow. The silence. The way the rooms felt less like his when he was asleep. It was as though the whole place loosened, just for a few hours.”

Kendall said nothing, though Connor could feel him listening all the more closely.

“One night, I heard voices downstairs.”

He folded his hands together in his lap, his thumb running absently across one knuckle as the memory sharpened, not dulled by time so much as buried beneath it.

“My mother’s voice first. I remember that because she was louder than I had ever heard her. She was never loud. She cried, sometimes. She withdrew. She went quiet for days at a time. But she almost never raised her voice, and when she did, it frightened me more than anything.” His mouth curved faintly, though there was no real humour in it. “I should have gone back to bed. I knew that. But I stayed at the top of the stairs and listened.”

He could still remember the cold beneath his bare feet, the way his fingers curled around the banister as he crouched there in his nightclothes, the thin line of warm light spilling out from beneath the drawing room door.

“She was telling him that he was making me afraid.”

Kendall frowned, his expression tightening.

Connor kept his eyes fixed ahead, speaking more to the room than to his brother now, as though the memory itself required his full attention.

“She told him he could not keep speaking to me the way he did. That I was only a child. That I watched him too carefully, that I flinched when he entered a room, that I had started apologising for things I hadn’t done.” He swallowed. “She said he was teaching me to fear him.”

The room had grown very still.

“And Dad…”

Connor paused there, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly.

“He laughed.”

The word sat heavily between them.

It was not the memory of Logan’s anger that had stayed with him all these years, nor even the sharpness of his mother’s voice. It was that laugh. Calm, dismissive, almost amused.

“He told her fear was useful. That children should fear their fathers. That love was…” Connor hesitated, his eyes dropping at last to his hands. “Optional.”

Kendall shifted.

It was a small movement, barely more than a tightening of his shoulders, but Connor saw it nonetheless.

“Did he mean it?” Kendall asked, his voice quieter now.

Connor looked at him then, properly.

At the softness still clinging to his features, at the way his brow furrowed when he was worried, at how impossible it felt that someone so young should already be learning how conditional love could become.

“Yes,” Connor said gently. “He meant it.”

He wished he could lie.

He wished, suddenly and fiercely, that he could gather all of Logan’s sharpness and cruelty and place himself between it and his brother, shielding Kendall from truths Connor himself had learned far too young. But children always understood more than adults believed they did. 

They noticed the things left unsaid. They heard what slipped through doors and settled into the walls.

“My mother told him,” Connor continued, his voice quieter still, “that one day he would regret it. She told him that if he kept mistaking fear for loyalty, he would wake one day and realise none of us truly loved him.”

The words had sounded different in her voice. Desperate. Trembling. Like someone trying to save something already sinking.

“And what did he say?”

Connor exhaled slowly, the memory surfacing with painful clarity.

“He said that if fear kept us close, then it was enough.”

Kendall lowered his eyes.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

The rain continued softly outside. Somewhere further down the corridor, footsteps passed, muffled by carpet and distance. The house carried on around them, unaware of the quiet exchange unfolding inside Connor’s room.

Then Connor leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping.

“I’ve never told anyone that.”

Kendall looked up.

“Not anyone?”

Connor shook his head.

“It stays between us.”

Something shifted in Kendall’s expression then, something almost solemn, as though he understood that what was being offered was more than a story. It was trust. A piece of Connor himself, fragile and carefully hidden.

“A secret,” Kendall said.

Connor hesitated only briefly before nodding.

“Yes. A secret.”

Kendall straightened, almost visibly with the weight of it, and gave a small, serious nod. “I won’t tell.”

Connor believed him.

Or perhaps he simply wanted to.

He had just begun to say something else, something gentler, something that might ease the heaviness now lingering between them, when the bedroom door flew open so abruptly it struck the wall with a sharp crack.

“Ken! Come on, come on, you have to see—”

Roman rushed in all at once, every part of him moving too quickly, his hair in disarray, one sock half-fallen into his shoe, his face lit with such manic urgency that it was impossible not to look at him. He stopped only long enough to notice Connor before his attention snapped immediately back to Kendall.

“There’s a pigeon outside and I think it’s dead, but it also might not be dead, which is honestly worse.”

Kendall was already scrambling to his feet.

“What?”

“It’s missing an eye.”

“Roman!”

“I’m serious. It’s disgusting. Come look.”

He seized Kendall’s wrist and tugged him toward the window, already halfway through a breathless retelling of the discovery, his words tumbling over each other too fast to follow.

And then Caroline entered.

She moved far more quietly than Roman had, stepping into the room with the effortless poise she carried everywhere, baby Shiv resting peacefully in her arms. Shiv’s tiny face was tucked against her shoulder, sleeping through the chaos with the perfect indifference only infants possessed, her small hand curled against the silk of Caroline’s blouse.

Connor stood instinctively straighter.

He had never quite known what to do with Caroline.

She was not unkind to him. Not exactly. But she occupied a peculiar place in his life, one that required careful navigation. She was his siblings’ mother, not his own, and yet she had stepped into a role that touched the edges of his existence all the same, never fully claiming him, never entirely excluding him.

And sometimes, worst of all, she looked at him as though she understood more than she should.

Like now.

Roman and Kendall were laughing by the window, Roman dramatically narrating the pigeon’s apparent demise while Kendall pressed his hands against the glass, delighted.

Caroline’s attention, however, had settled on Connor.

Not the boys or Shiv.

Only him.

Her gaze moved over his face with quiet precision, lingering just long enough for discomfort to bloom in his chest.

It was not accusation… Not pity.

Something far more unnerving. Recognition.

As though she had entered too late to hear the conversation, and yet somehow knew exactly what had been spoken. As though she had heard enough of Logan, enough of this family, to understand what kind of truths Connor might choose to pass down.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then her eyes flickered briefly toward Kendall, toward the space on the rug where he had been sitting only moments before, and back to Connor.

A subtle movement. Barely anything.

And yet Connor understood it.

Be careful.

Or perhaps simply: I know.

His throat tightened. He looked away first.

Across the room, Roman had begun inventing an elaborate story about the pigeon rising from the dead and flying directly into Logan’s study to seek revenge, and Kendall’s laughter rang out bright and genuine, filling the room so completely that it seemed, for a moment, to push the shadows back.

Connor listened to it.

Watched Roman’s hands cutting through the air as he spoke, watched baby Shiv sleeping undisturbed in Caroline’s arms, watched the family gather in this strange, fleeting softness.

And quietly, somewhere deep inside himself, he wondered whether his mother had been right. Whether love could survive a house built on fear, or whether all of them were already learning how to call one by the other’s name.

By the time evening settled over the house and the family gathered for dinner, the strange weight of the afternoon had begun to soften at the edges, folding itself into the ordinary rituals of the day until Connor could almost convince himself that he had imagined the sharpness of it. The secret shared with Kendall, the quiet understanding in Caroline’s gaze, the old memory of his mother brought too vividly back into his mind—all of it seemed somehow less immediate beneath the warm glow of chandelier light and the low murmur of voices gathering around the dining table.

The room itself felt unusually calm.

Not peaceful, exactly—there was rarely true peace in a house occupied by Logan Roy—but something close enough to it that Connor allowed himself, cautiously, to settle into it.

Roman and Kendall had been bickering for nearly ten minutes over the last piece of treacle tart, their argument growing increasingly theatrical in the way only children’s disagreements could. Roman had declared, with all the solemnity of a lawyer making his final appeal, that Kendall had already eaten more than his fair share and therefore forfeited any rightful claim to what remained. Kendall, deeply affronted, had responded by accusing Roman of stealing peas from his plate earlier, a charge Roman denied with such immediate outrage that it all but confirmed his guilt.

“You can’t prove that.”

“You hid them in your napkin.”

“That’s circumstantial.”

“You don’t even know what that means.”

“I absolutely do.”

Connor had smiled despite himself, listening to them across the table as he adjusted Shiv more securely on his lap.

She had grown restless halfway through dinner, too old now to sleep peacefully through every meal but still young enough to be soothed by proximity, and after a brief fuss Caroline had passed her quietly into Connor’s arms without ceremony, as though it had been the most natural thing in the world. Shiv had settled there almost immediately, propped carefully against his chest, one impossibly small hand tangled in the front of his shirt while she stared solemnly at the silverware glittering beneath the candlelight.

Every so often she would let out a quiet, thoughtful sound, as if contributing something to the conversation only she could understand.

Connor found himself gently rocking her without thinking.

It soothed him as much as it soothed her.

Across from him, Caroline had noticed.

She sat with her usual effortless composure, one elbow resting lightly against the table, her wine untouched beside her plate. There was always something difficult to read about her, something reserved just beneath the polished surface, but tonight there was a softness to her expression when she looked at him.

“How is school?” she asked, her voice cutting gently through Roman’s latest protest.

Connor glanced up.

“Fine.”

Caroline lifted an eyebrow. “Fine.”

He smiled faintly.

“It’s going well.”

“That sounds marginally more convincing.”

He let out a quiet breath through his nose, shifting Shiv again as she reached determinedly toward the edge of the tablecloth.

“It’s dull, mostly. History and literature are tolerable. Mathematics less so.”

“And your teachers?”

He hesitated. “They think I don’t participate enough.”

Caroline’s mouth curved slightly. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps they’re right.”

That earned a brief laugh from him.

It was strange, speaking to her like this.

Not unpleasant, never quite unpleasant, but strange all the same. There were moments, fleeting and difficult to define, when Caroline seemed almost to extend something toward him. Not motherhood, not affection exactly, but an awareness. A kind of recognition that made him feel seen in ways he did not entirely know how to welcome.

As if she understood what it meant to survive proximity to Logan by learning when to speak and when to disappear.

“They’ll appreciate silence eventually,” she said, her gaze drifting briefly toward her husband at the far end of the table.

Connor followed it instinctively.

And there he was.

Quiet.

Predatory.

Logan had said very little throughout dinner, offering only the occasional sharp interruption when Roman’s voice rose too high or Kendall began speaking with his mouth full. He had scarcely touched his food. His attention, though not obvious enough to attract anyone else’s notice, had returned to Connor again and again.

Connor could feel it.

It had begun the moment they sat down.

A look held just a second too long. The faint, unreadable narrowing of Logan’s eyes each time Connor spoke.

It unsettled him in ways he did not want to examine too closely.

Perhaps it was nothing.

Perhaps Logan was simply tired.

Perhaps Connor’s own nerves, still frayed from the conversation with Kendall earlier, were making him sensitive to things that were not there.

And yet…  He could not quite shake the feeling that something had shifted.

That Logan knew something.

Not the secret itself, not what Connor had told Kendall, surely… but enough to make his skin tighten with unease.

He lowered his gaze back to Shiv, smoothing a hand gently over her back.

Everything was fine.

The evening was unfolding without incident. Roman and Kendall had moved from arguing over dessert to negotiating an absurd compromise involving splitting it unevenly. Caroline was asking Roman, with admirable patience, why exactly he believed the dog could understand French but not English. Shiv was warm and drowsy against Connor’s chest, beginning to drift toward sleep.

This was good. This was, perhaps, as close to normal as they ever came. He would not ruin it by imagining dangers where there were none.

Across the table, Kendall caught his eye.

Only for a moment, but it was enough.

There was something new in the look he gave Connor. Something quieter than before. A shared understanding. 

The secret.

Connor felt his chest tighten.

Kendall looked away first, returning to Roman’s ongoing complaints, but Connor could still feel the weight of it between them. A thread stretched carefully from one to the other.

With Logan still sitting in silence at the head of the table, his gaze occasionally drifting back toward him, Connor understood just how fragile that trust might be.

How easily things could fracture here. How quickly warmth could sour.

Still, he smiled when Roman demanded that he settle the dispute over the tart.

Still, he murmured nonsense to Shiv when she stirred and began to fuss.

Still, he answered Caroline when she asked whether he had been reading anything interesting lately.

He played his part.

He folded his unease neatly inward and buried it beneath practiced calm, because the room was warm, and his siblings were laughing, and for this one fleeting evening the house seemed to be holding itself together.

Connor had almost managed to convince himself that he had imagined the tension.

It was easier, after all, to believe that Logan’s attention meant nothing than to sit with the slow, creeping certainty that something had already gone wrong. The warmth of the room had helped. Roman’s endless chatter, Kendall’s earnest attempts to bargain for the larger half of the tart, the comforting weight of Shiv tucked against his chest—all of it had created a kind of fragile insulation, a temporary reprieve from the sharper edges of the day. Even Caroline, with her careful questions and unreadable gentleness, had allowed him to settle into something almost resembling ease.

He should have known better than to trust it.

Caroline had just asked him what he was reading—something inoffensive, something easy to answer—and Connor had begun to tell her, adjusting Shiv absently as she reached with clumsy fascination for the polished stem of a water glass.

“It’s a history of—”

“History.”

Connor looked up.

Logan had set his knife and fork neatly against his plate. His hands were folded in front of him now, broad and still, his eyes fixed not on Caroline, not on the children, but directly on Connor.

“A good subject,” Logan continued, his voice carrying that quiet, deliberate cadence Connor had learned to fear far more than shouting. “Useful, if you know what to take from it.”

The room had shifted. Connor could feel it before anyone else seemed to notice. Roman was still muttering to Kendall about unfair tart distribution, though more quietly now. Caroline had gone still. Shiv stirred in Connor’s lap.

Connor forced himself to nod. “Yes.”

Logan’s gaze did not move. “Lessons matter.”

Connor’s fingers tightened slightly against Shiv’s back. “They do.”

A pause.

Then, with terrible softness, Logan said, “Some more than others.”

Across the table, Kendall froze. It was subtle, barely more than a stiffening in his shoulders, but Connor saw it immediately.

And in that instant, everything inside him dropped.

No.

No, no.

He turned his head.

Kendall would not look at him. His eyes had fixed themselves stubbornly on his plate, his small hands folded tightly in his lap now, fingers twisting together beneath the table.

Connor felt suddenly cold.

Roman looked between them, confused.

“What?”

No one answered.

Logan leaned back slightly in his chair, his expression unreadable.

“I hear,” he said, as though discussing something mildly amusing, “that you’ve been telling stories.”

Connor’s throat tightened.

“Dad—”

“About family.”

Caroline shifted beside him, almost imperceptibly.

“Logan,” she said quietly, but Logan did not look at her.

He was still watching Connor. “About your mother.”

The words landed like a blow.

Roman blinked.

Kendall’s head lowered further.

And Connor.. Connor could feel his face burning.

“I was only—”

“You were only what?”

The question came gently, which only made it worse.

Connor opened his mouth, then closed it.

“Filling the boy’s head with sentimental nonsense?”

Roman looked immediately at Kendall.

“What did you do?”

Kendall whispered, “I didn’t mean—”

“Quiet.”

Logan did not raise his voice, and yet the single word silenced the room more effectively than shouting ever could.

Connor could hear Shiv beginning to fuss against him, small unsettled noises pressing into the tense silence.

“She asked,” Connor began, though even as he spoke he could hear how weak it sounded, how childish, “he asked me something, and I answered.”

Logan’s gaze hardened, though only by degrees.

“And what exactly did you think you were doing?”

Connor said nothing.

“Comforting him?”

The word itself sounded like an accusation.

“Filling his head with sentimental nonsense about fear and fathers and things he is far too young to understand?”

Roman frowned. His eyes moved from Connor to Kendall, then back again, and slowly, painfully, the pieces began to align.

“You told him,” he said quietly to Kendall.

Kendall looked stricken.

“I didn’t know he’d—”

“You didn’t know,” Logan interrupted, “because you’re a child.”

Then his attention returned to Connor.

“But you.”

Connor could barely breathe.

“You should know better.”

Shiv’s fussing had become crying now, her distress growing with every subtle shift in Connor’s posture, every involuntary tightening of his hands as he tried to soothe her.

“You think because you are older,” Logan continued, his voice still maddeningly calm, “that you have some special role here. That your little emotional indulgences somehow amount to wisdom. That burdening a child with your own grievances makes you noble.”

Connor felt the heat rising into his face.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“No?”

Logan tilted his head. “You thought it appropriate to speak to Kendall about your mother.”

The words struck with surgical precision and Connor flinched.

Across from him, Caroline shifted. “Logan.” A warning, and as always, he ignored it.

“To speak of her as though she were some authority on family.”

Connor’s throat tightened painfully.

“She was my mother.”

“And a deeply unstable woman.”

The room seemed to contract. Connor stopped hearing Roman. Stopped hearing Kendall’s shallow breathing. Stopped hearing even Shiv’s cries.

There was only that sentence. That familiar cruelty, delivered with such effortless certainty.

“You would do well,” Logan said, “to stop romanticising weakness.”

Connor looked down.

His hands were trembling now.

Shiv had begun to cry properly, frightened by the tension she could not understand, her tiny body twisting against his chest. He tried to rock her.

Tried to steady himself.

But his fingers would not stop shaking.

He could feel Roman staring.

Could feel Kendall’s guilt pressing across the table like something alive.

Could feel Caroline watching him with that unbearable, quiet awareness.

And beneath all of it, he could feel the humiliation spreading through him like heat—sharp, suffocating, impossible to conceal.

Without speaking, he pushed back his chair, the scrape against the floor was louder than it should have been.

Shiv startled at the sound, her crying worsening.

Connor stood too quickly, his vision already beginning to blur, and turned instinctively toward Caroline.

She rose at once.

Wordlessly, carefully, he transferred Shiv into her arms.

His hands lingered for only a moment, reluctant to let go, as though the simple weight of her had been the only thing keeping him tethered. Caroline looked at him. There was sympathy there.

Perhaps pity.

“Connor,” Kendall said softly, his voice trembling.

Connor did not look at him. He couldn’t.

If he did, he feared the tears already burning behind his eyes would spill over, and he would not give Logan that. He would not cry in front of him. Not here, not at this table, not with his siblings watching.

So he turned and walked from the room.

He could feel his face burning as he crossed the threshold, could feel the tears threatening now with every hurried step he took down the darkened corridor. Behind him, Shiv was still crying. Roman was asking what had happened, his voice confused and unsettled. Kendall was trying to explain, his words breaking apart before they fully formed.

Connor did not stay to hear the rest.

The hallway swallowed him whole, cool and dim and empty, the quiet pressing in around him as his breathing began to falter. He kept walking, faster now, his vision blurring despite every effort to steady it, one hand coming sharply to his face to wipe away the first tear before it could fall too far.

But another came.

And then another.

Not because Logan had humiliated him—though he had.

Not even because his mother’s memory had once again been dragged out and diminished before he could protect it.

But because Kendall had told.

Because Connor had allowed himself, for one reckless moment, to believe that something private could remain untouched in this house, that trust could survive here unbroken, and his little brother, without meaning to, had placed that trust directly into their father’s hands.

And somehow, impossibly, that was what hurt most.

So he walked on through the darkened halls, eyes stinging, chest aching, the sound of dinner continuing behind him as though nothing had changed, while inside him something quiet and tender had cracked cleanly down the middle.

Connor did not know where he was going until he was already there.

His feet carried him through the house on instinct alone, down corridors he could have walked blindfolded, past darkened sitting rooms and half-lit stairwells and portraits whose painted eyes seemed to follow him as he passed. The tears on his face had begun to cool now, leaving his skin tight and uncomfortable, though fresh ones still slipped free despite every attempt to stop them.

 He wiped them away impatiently, angrily, but they kept coming—humiliating, gathering at his lashes and sliding down before he could catch them.

He kept his breathing as even as he could.

One foot in front of the other.

Past the study.

Past the drawing room.

Past the nursery.

Anywhere but his bedroom, where the walls would feel too close and his own thoughts too loud.

It was only when he reached the small room near the back of the house, the one no one used for anything except the dog, that he finally stopped.

The door was half-open. He slipped inside and closed it softly behind him.

The room was dim, lit only by the weak spill of moonlight through the narrow window and the faint lamp someone had forgotten to turn off in the corner. It smelled faintly of dog fur and clean linen and something grounding Connor could not quite name, something earthy and uncomplicated that immediately made the tightness in his chest loosen, if only by a fraction.

The dog lifted its head the moment he entered.

A large, sleepy thing with warm brown eyes and soft ears, half-curled inside the pen Logan insisted upon keeping it in whenever guests were visiting or the household was too busy to deal with it properly. Connor had always hated the cage. Not because it was cruel, exactly, the dog was well-fed, well-walked, well cared for, but because something about it unsettled him, the quiet acceptance with which the animal curled itself behind those metal bars, as though confinement could become ordinary if endured long enough.

Tonight, it felt unbearable.

Connor crossed the room and sank immediately to the floor beside it.

The dog rose at once, padding over with the soft click of claws against the tray beneath the pen, pressing its nose eagerly between the bars. Connor let out a shaky breath and pushed his fingers through.

The dog began licking his hand instantly, warm and insistent, its head nudging against his knuckles with uncomplicated affection.

Connor closed his eyes.

For a moment, that was all he could bear.

The wet warmth of its tongue against his skin, the steady press of its head, the quiet sound of its breathing. Something living that wanted nothing from him except his presence.

Another tear slipped down his cheek. He didn’t bother wiping it away this time.

Instead, he bowed his head and let his forehead rest lightly against the cold metal bars, his hand still threaded through them while the dog rubbed itself gently against his wrist.

And there, finally hidden, the tears came more freely. Connor had learned long ago how to cry silently. How to keep his shoulders still, how to swallow every sound before it could escape, how to make grief look like exhaustion if anyone happened to walk in.

It was a skill Logan had taught him, though not intentionally.

There had been so many punishments over the years that they had begun to blur together, not in detail but in feeling. The same cold dread. The same tightening in his stomach whenever Logan called his name in that particular tone. The same desperate instinct to make himself smaller, quieter, less visible, as though shrinking might somehow spare him.

Sometimes it had been shouting.

Sometimes humiliation.

Sometimes something worse than either: disappointment delivered with perfect calm, as though Connor’s failures were not even surprising anymore.

He remembered being seven and spilling tea across one of Logan’s newspapers, his hands shaking so badly while trying to clean it that he had only made it worse. Logan had not struck him. He had simply stared until Connor began apologising, over and over, his voice breaking apart.

He remembered being nine and crying when his mother was taken away, only for Logan to grip his shoulder hard enough to bruise and tell him, in a voice low and sharp, that no Roy boy of his would make a spectacle of himself over weakness.

He remembered being eleven and trying, foolishly, to ask whether his mother would ever come home.

The look Logan had given him had been enough to silence him for years.

And now this.

Older, supposedly wiser.

Still humiliated all the same.

Connor tightened his hand against the bars as the dog licked his fingers patiently, oblivious to any of it.

“I trusted him,” Connor whispered, though his voice was so soft it barely seemed to exist.

The dog nudged his hand. He let out something between a laugh and a broken breath.

Kendall.

Sweet, earnest Kendall, with his wide eyes and his solemn promise.

I won’t tell.

Connor had believed him. Not because Kendall was incapable of betrayal, but because he had not thought him capable of understanding it.

That was the cruelest part.

Kendall had not told Logan to hurt him. He had told because Logan had asked. Because Logan knew exactly how to make children offer things they should protect.

Because Logan could make confession feel like loyalty.

And Kendall, still so young, had handed over Connor’s trust with both hands and probably thought he was doing the right thing.

Connor wanted to be angry.

Part of him was, a small, bitter, wounded part. But beneath it was something sadder.

The understanding that this was how it began. This was how Logan taught them.

How he pulled secrets apart and turned them into leverage.

How he made children suspicious of their own tenderness.

How he taught them that trust was something dangerous.

The dog had settled now, lying down with its head pressed against the bars near Connor’s hand, content simply to remain close. 

Connor stroked behind its ear with trembling fingers. “You don’t tell,” he murmured quietly.

The dog sighed.

No betrayal. No hidden motive. No complicated loyalties.

Only warmth. Only presence.

Connor closed his eyes again and let his head rest more fully against the pen, his cheek pressed to the cool metal, his tears drying slowly on his skin.

He wondered, not for the first time, what his mother had done when Logan made her cry. Whether she had hidden somewhere like this. Had she found some quiet room and folded herself into it until she could breathe again?  Had she felt this same terrible combination of humiliation and grief and aching loneliness, all sharpened by the knowledge that the person who had hurt her would never apologise?

The house beyond the door remained alive with distant sound—footsteps, muffled voices, the faint hum of a life continuing as though nothing had happened.

As though Connor had not walked out of dinner with his face burning and his trust cracked open inside him.

As though something inside him had not quietly broken.

The dog shifted closer.

Connor pressed his fingers deeper through the bars and let himself stay there on the floor, crying softly into the dark, because for now this small, hidden room and this gentle creature were the only things in the house that felt entirely safe.

Connor did not hear Roman enter at first.

The room was too quiet, his thoughts too loud, his attention narrowed to the steady rhythm of the dog’s breathing and the soothing, absent motion of his own hand moving behind its ears. He had begun to calm, if only in the shallow, exhausted way that comes after tears have spent themselves, when grief settles into something duller and more manageable. His face still felt warm, his eyes still stung, but his breathing had evened out. The worst of it had passed.

Or at least, he had thought it had.

It was only when he felt the faintest shift in the air behind him, the subtle disturbance of someone trying very hard to be quiet, that he lifted his head.

Soft footsteps.

Small ones.

Measured with exaggerated care.

Connor did not turn.

He already knew.

Roman had never been particularly good at sneaking, but he was committed to the performance of it, each padded step placed with painstaking deliberation, as though the effort itself might somehow render him invisible. Connor could picture him without looking: shoulders slightly hunched, mouth set in concentration, one sock likely still slipping halfway off his heel, his expression serious in the way it only became when something mattered more than he knew how to say.

The footsteps came closer.

Then stopped.

There was a pause.

A breath.

And then, without warning, Roman simply folded himself over Connor’s back.

Just the sudden, familiar weight of him draped clumsily across Connor’s shoulders, all thin limbs and warmth, his chest pressed to Connor’s spine and his arms thrown around his neck in something halfway between an embrace and an ambush.

Connor let out a startled breath.

Roman said nothing at first, he only held on.

His cheek pressed awkwardly between Connor’s shoulder blades, his grip tighter than it needed to be, his breathing warm through the fabric of Connor’s shirt.

It was simply so very Roman.

Connor closed his eyes.

One of Roman’s hands shifted, patting him once, uncertainly. Then again. As if he were comforting an injured animal he did not want to startle.

“I told Kendall he was stupid.”

Connor almost laughed, the sound that escaped him was too thin for that.

Roman, encouraged perhaps by the absence of rejection, continued. “Not because of the thing.”

A pause.

“Well. Maybe a little because of the thing. But mostly because he was crying, which was annoying, and I told him crying doesn’t help because now everyone’s upset and Shiv started crying too and now Mother’s angry.”

Connor reached back slowly, touching Roman’s wrist.

Roman tightened his hold.

“I dunno what happened,” he admitted into Connor’s back, his voice quieter now, stripped of its usual sharpness. “But I know you were sad.”

Something inside Connor softened. He tilted his head just enough to rest it lightly against Roman’s arm.

“That’s very observant.”

“I am observant!” Roman said it with immediate indignation.

“You’re not always.”

“I am when I want to be.”

Connor smiled, faint and weary.

The dog had lifted its head now, ears perked, tail giving slow, curious thumps against the floor of the pen as it watched the two of them.

Roman shifted again, readjusting himself until he was nearly lying across Connor entirely. “You left,” he murmured. “And I thought maybe you’d come here.”

Connor opened his eyes. “How?”

Roman shrugged, though the movement was awkward from his current position.

“Because you like the dog.”

Roman had simply followed the most obvious thread and found him at the end of it.

Connor felt his throat tighten. Carefully, he reached back and caught Roman beneath the arms.

“Come here.”

Roman allowed himself to be moved with surprising ease, though not without dramatic complaint.

“You’re squashing me.”

“You’re squashing me.”

“That’s different!”

Connor pulled him forward, lifting him from where he had draped himself over his back and settling him instead onto his lap, arranging him there with the instinctive familiarity of someone who had done this countless times before.

Roman fit easily.

Still all narrow shoulders and sharp knees and childish softness, his body warm and pliant as he curled sideways against Connor’s chest, one arm immediately wrapping itself around Connor’s middle as though anchoring himself there.

Connor adjusted his grip around him, one hand settling over Roman’s stomach. The other smoothing absently over his hair. It felt so natural it hurt.

Roman, entirely unconcerned by the significance of any of it, leaned forward at once and pressed his face toward the bars of the dog’s pen.

“Hello.”

The dog approached eagerly, licking at Roman’s nose. Roman recoiled with delighted disgust.

“Oh, disgusting. Again!”

He pressed closer and the dog licked him again.

Roman laughed, a bright, strange little sound. “I think he likes me better than Kendall.”

“That seems likely.”

“Kendall smells nervous.”

Connor let out a real laugh this time.

Roman beamed at the success of it, though he pretended not to notice. He continued talking as he always did, his thoughts spilling out in no particular order while his fingers threaded through the bars to scratch clumsily behind the dog’s ears.

“I think if I had a dog, I’d teach it to bite Dad.”

Connor sighed. “Roman.”

“Not badly.”

“That’s not better.”

“Just enough...”

The dog licked Roman’s hand enthusiastically.

“There. See! He agrees.”

Connor shook his head, his hand still moving gently through Roman’s hair.

Roman leaned back into him more fully now, his small body melting with the easy trust only children could manage, entirely certain that Connor would hold him.

And Connor did.

One arm wrapped securely around his waist, his hand spread broad and warm against his ribs, keeping him close without thinking, the way a father should hold a child who has come seeking comfort.

The thought struck him unexpectedly. And stayed.

Roman was still talking.

Something about a film he wanted to make.

A monster.

A spaceship.

A dog, apparently, now part of the plot.

At some point, his rambling had moved beyond the vague outline of a story and into something far more elaborate, his words gathering speed as they always did when he sensed he had an audience captive enough to indulge him. The monster had become the central figure now, though what kind of monster seemed to change every few sentences. At first it had been something enormous and reptilian, with sharp teeth and glowing eyes and an apparent appetite for businessmen, but by degrees it had acquired a tragic backstory, then a spaceship, and then, for reasons Roman seemed to consider entirely obvious, a dog.

“No, listen,” Roman insisted, twisting slightly in Connor’s lap so he could gesture properly, one hand still threaded through the bars of the pen while the dog licked lazily at his fingers. “It’s not just a dog. It’s the monster’s dog. They’re friends.”

Connor hummed softly, his hand continuing its slow path over Roman’s back.

“That sounds… unlikely.”

Roman gasped, scandalised. “It’s not unlikely!”

“It’s a little unlikely.”

“It’s emotional.”

Connor smiled despite himself, though he suspected Roman had not noticed. His attention had drifted, not away entirely, but enough that he was no longer following every sharp turn of the story. Roman’s voice had become something warm and steady, a current beneath his thoughts, soothing in its own strange way. He was listening, but only in fragments: monster, spaceship, dog, revenge, an explosion, something about Roman himself starring in the lead role.

“Hey.” Roman went still.

Connor blinked.

Roman twisted around sharply to look at him, his face pinched in immediate offence. “Hey!”

Connor lifted an eyebrow.

“What?”

“I’m right here!” The indignation in his voice was immediate and absolute.

Connor almost laughed. “I can see that.”

“No, you’re not listening.” Roman narrowed his eyes, studying him with exaggerated suspicion. “You’re doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

“The fake listening.”

Connor feigned innocence. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“You do!” Roman shifted again, planting one small hand flat against Connor’s chest as if to physically pin his attention in place.

“You’re nodding at the wrong parts.”

That, unfortunately, made Connor laugh. A real one this time, quiet but unmistakable.

Roman looked vindicated. “I knew it.”

“I was listening.”

“No.” Roman pointed accusingly. “What’s the monster called?”

Connor hesitated.

Roman’s eyes widened. “You don’t know.”

“I know.”

“What’s his name?”

Connor glanced at the dog and Roman made an outraged noise. “You’re guessing!”

The elder surrendered with a faint smile. “I may have lost the thread.”

Roman let out the kind of long, suffering sigh only children could produce when deeply burdened by the inadequacies of others. “You’re impossible.”

“I’m the impossible one?”

“Yes.”

Roman settled back against him with a dramatic huff, though not before elbowing Connor lightly in the ribs in punishment.

“Fine. I’ll start over.”

Connor groaned softly. “No, please.”

“Yes.”

“Roman.”

“You should’ve listened.”

And before Connor could protest further, Roman had already begun again, with renewed intensity.

“Okay. The monster’s name is Rupert.”

“Rupert.”

“Yes. Don’t interrupt.”

Connor bit back a smile.

“Rupert is misunderstood.”

“Of course he is.”

“He’s not evil.”

“Mm.”

“He just looks evil.”

Roman was gesturing wildly now, his hands carving shapes through the air, his entire body animated by the effort of telling it correctly this time. “Everyone thinks he’s going to destroy the city, but really he’s trying to find his dog.”

“The dog.”

“Yes.”

“The dog from the spaceship.”

Roman turned to stare at him. “You were listening.”

“Some of it.”

Roman looked suspicious, then pleased. “Yes. The dog escaped.”

“Onto Earth.”

“No, onto the spaceship.”

Connor blinked. “I thought they were already on the spaceship.”

“They were.”

Roman frowned and then waved the inconsistency away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Right.”

“The point is, Rupert loves his dog.”

Connor went quiet.

Roman didn’t seem to notice.

“He spends the whole film looking for him, and everyone’s trying to stop him because they think he’s dangerous, but he’s not. He’s just upset.”

His voice had softened slightly now, some of the theatricality draining from it as he pressed his cheek once more against the bars of the dog’s pen.

“The dog knows he’s good.”

Connor looked at him.

Roman was absently stroking the dog’s muzzle now, his small fingers moving carefully between the bars, his earlier agitation forgotten. “He keeps trying to tell everyone,” Roman murmured. “But they won’t listen.”

Something in Connor’s chest tightened. He didn’t know whether Roman understood what he was saying. He suspected he didn’t.

Children had a way of circling truths they could not yet name.

Connor’s hand moved slowly through his hair again. “And does Rupert find him?”

Roman looked up at once. “Of course.”

“How?”

Roman seemed offended by the question. “The dog hears him crying.”

Connor’s breath caught. “And then?”

Roman shrugged.

“He comes back.”

As if there could be no other ending. As if, naturally, love would always find its way home.

Connor smiled.

A small, private thing.

And for the first time that evening, the ache inside him eased—not gone, not even close, but gentled somehow by the warmth of Roman in his lap, by the careless certainty in his voice, by the simple fact that he had come looking.

Roman, sensing perhaps that he had his brother’s full attention again, brightened immediately.

“And then there’s an explosion.”

Connor laughed. “Of course there is.”

“A huge one.”

“Naturally.”

“And Dad gets eaten.”

Connor inhaled sharply. “Roman.”

“What?”

“You can’t put that in a film.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

Roman tilted his head. “Can I make him a villain, though?”

Connor looked at him.

At his bright eyes,  his untidy hair, the ease with which he had climbed into Connor’s arms and decided, without asking, that his sadness required company.

And something settled quietly inside him.

A space carved out not by Logan’s approval, nor by obligation, nor by blood alone, but by this—Roman pressed against him, demanding his attention, insisting he listen, refusing to let him disappear into himself.

Connor tightened his arm around him instinctively, drawing him a little closer.

Roman barely noticed, too busy explaining how the spaceship would crash into the ocean and how the dog would somehow pilot the rescue mission.

Connor listened this time. To every absurd detail, to every impossible turn.

And as Roman spoke, his small body warm and heavy in Connor’s lap, his face still pressed to the bars of the dog’s pen, Connor found himself thinking that perhaps this was enough.

Not the whole family. Not Logan. Not the impossible hope of ever being seen the way he wanted to be seen.

But this.

Roman’s trust. Kendall’s love, however clumsy. Shiv asleep in his arms earlier that evening.

The way they sought him out, the way they came back.

Perhaps he had no real place at the table. Perhaps he never would.

But here, in this dim little room, with his brother tangled against his chest and talking earnestly about monsters who were only misunderstood, Connor felt, if only for a fleeting moment, that he had managed to carve out a small corner of this family that belonged entirely to him.