Quinlan had planned for the pain. He had planned for the hours, for the cauldron’s appetite, for the slow indignity of being emptied one drop at a time into Naomi’s warm copper, and on every one of those counts the plan was holding.

What he had not planned for was the family living in his chest.

The Bloodfather bond never slept. Every kill his women made whispered through it, every flare of their gifts pulsed against his sternum, and the current ran both ways. For six hours now, the strongest signature in the whole network had been quietly, steadily draining, and across half a continent, on skin he had marked with his own blood, crimson sigils were beginning to burn.

Blossom arrived first.

The shout hit the inside of his skull hard enough that both Elite healers paused mid-cast.

Quinlan chuckled.

Vex’s voice slid in underneath, low and sweet and completely wrong, the register she saved for moments when she was already holding her sword.

Ayame, crisp as a drawn blade.

Sera cut in.

As the rest of the gang made their opinions heard, Aurora winced.

"...Why are they both making those faces?" Gideon whispered, glancing between Aurora and Quinlan.

"Eyes on your reduction, dear," Naomi said.

Aurora set down her pen, pressed two fingers to her temple, and joined the channel with the audible patience of the family’s only scientist.

she continued.

Ayame repeated, then her tone lost its edge.

The samurai had a soft smile on her face, patting the mark on her belly tenderly.

<...> Quinlan remained silent where he sat.

It was no secret that his beloved samurai wanted him to bond with a person of his gender, instead of surrounding himself exclusively with women. She believed it wasn’t good for his mental health, or something like that.

She’d been begging him to find Ignis and go out for drinks with him, or whatever mundane guy stuff they wanted, but that never materialized. Perhaps later.

Quinlan didn’t really get why she was so hopeful he’d one day find a male friend, and he didn’t agree one bit. Surrounding himself with gorgeous babes was literal perfection, the best way for a man to lead his life. He didn’t miss having a perpetually grumbling, hairy creature in his life.

Yet here he was, doing this for Alexios, because he... respected that old fucker too much. If their situations were reversed, Quinlan would be disgusted to take that pill from another man. He would still do it, no doubt, but he wouldn’t like it one bit. That’s why he did what he did.

Ayame’s soft giggles sounded, far too happy for him for a reason Quinlan really didn’t understand.

But if she was happy...

...

The third batch died a little past midnight.

Naomi saw it first. The reduction had been holding a deep, steady crimson through the whole fold, and then between one stroke of her paddle and the next it simply gave up, the color collapsing out of it like dye poured into a river, leaving thin red water and six hours of work dead in the copper.

"No. No, no, NO." She threw the paddle down. "The same wall! Everything holds until the final fold, and then it just... leaves. Like it was never a substance at all!"

"Because it isn’t." Gideon was bent over the ruined batch, monocle nearly touching the surface. His voice had gone hollow and calm, the sound of his life’s assumptions failing in real time. "Essence-density readings straight through the collapse. It doesn’t degrade, it doesn’t scorch, it doesn’t separate. It’s not behaving like matter, it’s behaving like..."

"Like it’s waiting for something," Aurora finished quietly.

The workroom went still around that sentence.

Quinlan sat on his stool with his opened arm over the cauldron’s rim, and felt the truth of it before any of them finished saying it, a pull behind his sternum, faint and patient, in exactly the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He looked down into the fresh batch, at the blood he’d spent all night giving.

It was looking back.

Every drop of it, gallons of him spread across copper and glass and reduction flasks, was aimed at him the way a hound aims at a door. The hollow above his heart warmed in answer. Then the idea simply arrived.

His hands knew, suddenly and completely, what to do, the way they knew how to close around a saber. His blood had never been an ingredient. Outside his body it was still his, still family, still waiting on its patriarch, and no alchemist alive could give it the one thing it was waiting for.

An order.

"Oh," Quinlan said softly. "I’m an idiot."

Gideon adjusted his monocle. "In this house, we prefer to phrase it as ’the theory was incomplete.’ What have you thought of?"

Quinlan rose from the stool. Both Elite healers reached for him, and Aurora’s mouth was already opening around a protest, and he waved all three of them off with his good hand, crossing to the cauldron on legs that had earned the wobble in them.

"You’ve been trying to cook me like an herb." He spread his palm flat over the copper, and the surface of the batch rose toward it, a slow crimson swell, like a cat pushing up into a hand. "It won’t hold a form for you, because it isn’t yours to shape."

Naomi’s eyes widened, excitement overtaking her tired features. "You’re saying the final fold needs..."

"Me." He grinned, grey-lipped and delighted. "Well, maybe. I don’t know for sure."

"Your intuition is rarely mistaken," Aurora offered. "It’s like with smithing. You have zero clue about the technique of it, yet you somehow gain an insight into it." She pouted. "How unfair."

Quinlan merely chuckled, steadying himself against the bench edge. "Aurora, you can continue your utterly adorable pouts while we try this. The way you brew your primordial batches... same principle, except tonight the drop is conscious and charming."

"Modest, too," Aurora scoffed, but eyes were dancing and her pen was already moving. The plump alchemist was always having the time of her life when her lover was in the lab with her.

They rebuilt the brew from zero as the sky greyed toward morning.

Naomi drove the process, calling folds and temperatures in a voice that took no arguments. Gideon ran the stills with both hands and narrated essence readings under his breath, taking dictation from history.

Aurora sat closest to Quinlan, two fingers resting on his wrist, timing every addition to the beat of his heart. Quinlan stood over the cauldron through all of it, his will threaded down into his own blood, holding.

No spell name covered what he was doing, and no notification offered one. As the work taught him its shape, he understood it was more than any single power of his acting alone.

The Bloodfather class held the door open. It was what made his blood family instead of material, what gave his voice the standing to be obeyed, what named every drop in that cauldron his.

"Fold," Naomi called, without looking up from the copper. "Slow count."

"Holding," Quinlan answered through his teeth, and held.

But Bloodfather was a ledger of bonds, not a craftsman, and ledgers do not write.

The thing doing the writing, folding living essence toward a shape no recipe in the world had ever held, was the engine underneath everything else he was.

The Abyssal Genesis Physique, the same primordial appetite that had once caught a class and felt it lacking so it authored it anew, had recognized tonight’s work the moment his palm crossed the copper.

He bled, and the physique wrote, the same quiet authorship that had shaped his class and stitched the marks into his women. Tonight, for the first time, it was writing outside his body.

He simply spoke to the essence as he would speak to any of his own, and it obeyed the way family obeys, because it was asked by the right voice. Where Naomi folded, he held the fold. Where the heat should have collapsed it, he told it to endure, and it endured.

Endurance, it turned out, was the cheap half of the work.

Around him the workroom kept its own rhythm, a burner hissing steady under the copper, Naomi’s paddle knocking the rim on every turn, Gideon whispering numbers to his notebook.

As the reduction deepened, the essence began to drift under his grip.

Unlike the earlier batches it held together, obedient, and still it refused to set, turning slowly under his will like a thing waiting for the rest of its instructions. It knew whose it was now. That question had been settled the moment his will touched it. All it still waited for was the answer to the only question that matters to a gift.

Who is it for?

Quinlan exhaled, closed his eyes, and gave it Alexios.

Not the crown, nor the warrant, nor the convenient ally with a kingdom’s machinery bolted to his name. The class had no appetite for politics. So he held the man himself at the center of his mind: the old monster who had hunted him across a continent. The man who trusted his enemy with his daughter’s life. The king who worked himself to the bone for centuries straight, for a nation that did not deserve a fraction of his effort.

And with the target held, the Bloodfather class began taking his answers, one by one, weighing each of them like coin.

He accepted the word for what Alexios was to him: an ally he cared about, more than the asset and the investment he’d claimed to Aurora with a straight face.

The first male he actually cared about in his whole reincarnated lifetime.