When Malek was young, his father had forced him to walk through the poor districts. The general would grip his son's hand and pulled him down the cracked cobblestone roads. Malek had hated it and hated the memory even more. The people had looked at them with distrust, some pulling their children from his father’s path. The grimy roads and dirtier people were foreign to him despite them living in the same city. He knew his father had taken him there to teach him something, but he hadn’t known what it was. While he had never learned what his father wanted him to, he hadn’t left the encounter without learning a lesson or two. The hardest lesson to learn was that not everyone had servants to attend them, clean clothes, clean water, food, or houses. For the longest time, he had thought his father had shown him this to humble him. He had wondered if his father was warning him that this could be his reality. But he wasn’t so sure anymore.  

After every excursion, his father had asked, “What did that make you feel?” 

At first, Malek had replied, “I don’t know.”

He had been slapped, his father’s hand leaving a red mark behind. All his father had said was, “wrong.”

It became tradition. His father would walk with him, and he would ask the same question afterward. Malek answered it wrong every time. The stinging pain of the slaps dulled as he received more and more of them. 

One day, Malek had shouted, “What do you want me to say?”

“The right answer.”

He never found out what that was. He cycled through the breadth of human emotion, but none of it was correct. He tried indifference, happiness, shame, anger, frustration, sadness, and righteousness. A slap accompanied each of his tries. Then, his father had died, and there would be no way for him to find out. 

So, it puzzled him why he was walking down the dirty streets still. By now, the residents knew his face. However, that didn’t stop them from distrusting him. He never gave them a reason not to. He just observed them as they went along their daily chores, walking steady through the districts. He was surprised no one tried to hurt him. With his father gone, there was no silent threat to keep the dangers away. Perhaps they found him too high status of a target. Killing a noble with a position as high as his would guarantee them severe punishment. But he had seen men above him fall to the simple blade of a petty criminal before. He doubted he would receive an answer to his wondering. The people here weren’t a talkative bunch.

It was strange to stand at the boundary of the poor and the rich without his father. There was no terse voice asking him that damned question. He supposed that he would have to ask it himself. What did he feel? On his walk, he saw beggars pleading for crumbs, women and men working themselves to the bone, and children with hollow cheeks and exposed ribs. He also saw those same people laughing with each other and heard the squealing of the children as they played. Misery and happiness sequestered in the corners of the grand city of Stolital.

He could fix it. He had the money to fund programs to help them, to show them the glimpse of what Stolital could be. He had enough money to let everyone in those districts sleep comfortably for the rest of their lives. And before him, his father had the money to do that as well. But his father hadn’t done any of that. He had just led his son down the poorly maintained streets to gawk at the poverty infested parts of the city no one cared about.

The parts of the city Neve had lived in when she had scrounged enough money to rent out the most ramshackle apartment she could find. He had offered to pay for her, but she had refused. He supposed that living in that apartment had been her first taste of freedom. She hadn’t minded the rats that climbed through the walls, nor did she mind how the ceiling leaked when it rained. He had been disgusted, and she had laughed at his disgust because that was the kind of person she was. She was always laughing, even when it was inappropriate.

It didn’t feel appropriate for him to laugh at the people he saw. He was sure they would find it mocking, and he didn’t want them to see his laughter that way. He didn’t want to be seen as cruel. Although, it was undoubtedly cruel of him to stand there and watch their suffering. Sometimes, when there was nothing else to do, all you could do was laugh. Or cry, but he didn’t cry. Men of his status weren’t allowed to cry. A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. He remembered his father telling him it was improper to cry after his face had been reddened by his father’s hand.

His father never left bruises. It was also improper to beat children, but slapping didn’t count as beatings. Malek wondered why he loved his father. Neve had told him it was because he couldn’t hate him, like with her mother. He had settled with that explanation as he couldn’t find a wording that fit better. It wasn’t quite right, but it felt good to label his feelings with something.

His mother had watched everything passively. She wasn’t someone who cared about things like how her husband treated their child. She cared about raising him to be a man she could be proud of. So, she raised him to be like his father. Maybe that’s why she had looked disappointed when he came trotting home as if he hadn’t dropped off the face of Peyrn for months.

“Argus wouldn’t have let his duties go unattended,” she had said when he had darkened her doorstep.

He had smiled, “I’m not my father.”

“Try not to remind me.”

He had kept smiling because he didn’t know what else he could do. He smiled as he assumed his father’s lordly duties, even though he felt as though the walls of the Governor’s building were suffocating him. Even though he wanted to punch Governor Oguilar in his smirking face. Even though he felt that he was left all alone because Neve, Galen, Thuraya, and Vera went to find their greener pastures, and he was stuck in Stolital.

Just like the people he was watching. They were all stuck in a city with too many bad memories but no way to leave without forfeiting everything, spending every day wishing they were bigger than what they were.

He needed a fucking drink.