Chapter Text
The Baron has never liked Raphael.
It took you longer to realize this than you’d like to admit, because to a child yet unconcerned with the way power flows through the world, the Baron's disdain towards your oldest brother had almost looked like favoritism. Frankly, for most of your life, you were convinced that you were the least favorite.
How else could you have explained why the Baron never dwelled on Raph's middling marks from your tutors, while you were berated for anything less than perfection? Why else was Raph allowed to continue playing outside while you were dragged along to sit in the corner of stuffy meetings between conniving old nobles? Why were you grilled relentlessly about the implications of each minor happening in the kingdom at the dinner table, while Raph was allowed to simply enjoy his meal?
For so long, you were sure that Raphael was everything the Baron ever wanted. The Baron always preached the gospel of strength and power, and Raph has grown into the mightiest warrior not just of your family, but of your generation. According to the Baron, strength always prevails.
But the Baron does not like Raphael, and so you conclude that the Baron is a liar.
Because beyond his strength and martial skill, Raph is honest, and kind, and good, like a fairytale hero leapt off the page. He is everything you are not. You have never been able to best Raphael in a fair fight.
But you have long since forgotten how to fight fair.
In your desperation to escape the Baron’s apparent ire, you turned from your brother's light and taught yourself how to wield shadows. You devoured information in a way not unlike Donatello, yet in a way that was entirely unlike him. While your twin carefully sifted out incontrovertible facts, you panned for rumors and hearsay. Like a dragon you hoarded secrets, figuring out how to hone each one to a razored edge, cutting yourself over and over again on others’ shameful truths. By haunting the Baron's dealings, you learned how to use each blade to deliver the most effective blow, and when to simply dangle it over someone's head like the Sword of Damocles.
Your barony is isolated, but it does still host guests from time to time, and those guests always bring their own children to test their fledgeling skills of statecraft.
And the oldest children—the heirs—are nothing like Raphael. They don’t pursue honor or the gratitude of the common people, except in shallow ways that are purely for show. They accompany their progenitors into the same suffocating meetings you have long become a fixture of, where everyone does their best to stab each other in the back with a smile. They are false, and calculating, and cruel.
In other words, they are just like you.
They are just like you, and you are just like them—always with a smile on your lips and a barb on your tongue and a sharpened secret held just out of sight. They are the heirs to the most powerful estates in the land, and Raphael—the heir of this estate—is nothing like them.
During a long lonely night staring in the mirror, while trying to replicate how one of your guests turned a mild smile into an insult and a threat all at once, you systematically recontextualize your childhood. Out of all of you, Raph spent the least time in the Baron’s looming presence. The Baron didn’t so much raise him as he simply set him loose upon the staff, and it is only by chance—or perhaps by your biggest brother’s shining, immutable nature—that Raphael grew up to be a gentleman and a hero, rather than the entitled monster it was his birthright to become.
Raph is kind, and honest, and good, and you are terrified by the way he believes everyone else to be the same. He is naive in ways that are downright dangerous for young men of your standing. The Baron has done nothing to disabuse him of his rosy worldview (not like he did to you) and you wish desperately that you didn’t know exactly why.
Because Raphael is not the Baron’s intended heir. You are.
Primogeniture is the law of the land, but the most important, most shameful truth you have spent your life learning is that for the powerful, laws are like locked gates standing in empty fields: easily circumvented, if you are willing to stray far enough from the straight and narrow.
Your horror mounts, because a little-known fact about you is that you’re not the second-born son; you’re the third. You emerged into this world after Donnie, by mere minutes that mean nothing to either of you and everything to the laws of succession.
However, while losing one heir is a pitiable tragedy, losing two would be downright suspicious, and the Baron would have a hell of a time making it plausible enough to avoid weakening their (surviving) family’s position.
So you seek out the succession records, trying and failing to convince yourself that the Baron must be planning some way to skip over both Raphael and Donatello’s inheritance without removing them from play entirely. Surprisingly, your withered faith in the Baron’s decency is proven half-right; Donatello has been neatly slipped down to third-in-line simply by swapping the timestamps on your birth certificates. It’s a masterful forgery. If you hadn’t wheedled the steward into showing you the original documents to settle an argument when you and Donnie were nine, you never would have known the difference.
So Raph is your only brother who’s in imminent danger of being pruned off the family tree. It’s not ideal, but it’s certainly more manageable.
You still need to know what battlefields you’ll be fighting this war on, and here your mastery of gossip serves you well. The most valuable rumors you ever collect are the ones about your family, because they show you where the targets are painted on your brother’s back.
People say that Raphael is reckless. They say that he would try to bring down wild boars with his bare hands simply for the thrill if the Baron let him.
This particular exaggeration has more truth to it than you would like, yet its pervasiveness in the flow of gossip leads you to inspect your brother’s armor and hunting spears. To your grim satisfaction, you find signs of wear and fatigue on equipment that you know for a fact was only commissioned last season. Signs that are easy to dismiss as a boisterous young man being too rough on his things, if not for the miniscule file marks and dusty tang of temporal magic.
It’s a simple matter to recruit your twin and little brother to your purpose. You tell them the truth (part of the truth, not the whole truth, never the whole truth), that “someone” does not want Raph to inherit the barony, and is taking measures to ensure that he won’t. Donnie imperiously demands that Raph needs to test his latest innovations in armor and weaponry, and there are always so many new designs that Raph never has time to use anything that came from the general armory. Any piece that Raph shows an interest in is quickly confiscated by Mikey “for embellishment”, and the masterpieces he illustrates onto them are so intricate that the charms of protection he adds are nearly invisible.
But people are also saying that while yes, Raphael is as big as an ox and twice as strong, his constitution falls far short of his stature. They say that you are always the one at the Baron’s side during matters of state because Raphael is almost constantly falling ill.
This fabrication is utter falsehood, through and through, but it lays a disturbing groundwork for masking potential poisonings.
The kitchen staff is deeply loyal to Raphael and his earnest, kind heart, but they won’t be able to protect him forever. Especially if the Baron deigns to get his own hands dirty.
So you’ll just have to kill the Baron first.