Prologue: My Kingdom for a Horse Race
Philip wakes up happy. Is it too much to hope for happiness to last 24 hours?
A/N:This is a hoary old chestnut of an AU experiment. Yet another one of those what-if, modern-day, corporate-raider AU, with no redeeming value whatsoever and not nearly as well-written as most other AU of this sort seen thus far. Pseudo-history, unbetaed written-under-influence mess. And yet, a guilty pleasure for me.
He wakes up to London's grey dawn, filtered hazily through diaphanous curtains he has always detested but kept anyway. His late mother favoured them, and even though she has left this accursed earth for more than a decade, he cannot bring himself to replace these and the lace monstrosities in the drawing room. If his business rivals ever found out about this one whimsical weakness... Well.
It doesn't bear thinking about. Not worth thinking about, even. Philip lets himself sink back into his pillows and negotiates a rare lazy Sunday for himself. How rare indeed, since he has no urge to leave what in other days would be a lonely over-large bed; since he has no urge to seek his many companions. No urge to do anything, really. He sighs and indulges in a long leisurely stretch as he listens to the rest of the house waking outside his door. Grey shifts to muted yellow as the sun climbs higher; a small gust slips through a small gap of a hastily shut window.
He cracks a smile and feels his sore facial muscles pull. He's been smiling too much, glad-handing too much yesterday, not that he minds really. Still, he feels like he has met half the world yesterday, each jostling for front position to congratulate him and try slip a business or three. The memory makes him smile a bit more, makes him forget about a small ache just behind his eyes. His horse won yesterday, capping an extremely successful year. First the Kentucky Derby, then Epsom and now another Stake at the Royal Ascot. Despite time zones, arduous travels and excellent competitors, his three-year old horse holds up well enough.
Speaking of three-year olds.
He easily picks a small voice from the early morning household buzz. Little Ari. Who drew him a passable likeness of his horse on their way back from the races. Who then extracted a breakfast "meeting" with him this Sunday in that timid way of his. Who went quiet afterwards and stopped talking for the rest of the day, alternating between staring and drawing instead.
Philip finds Ari on the breakfast table, his nurse nowhere to be found. Instead, he finds his old friend and advisor playing nanny to a docile child.
"Don't you have your own son to take care of?" Philip asks good-naturedly as he sits down on the table and accepts his breakfast tray from someone he is not familiar with. Possibly a new hand his butler has forgotten to inform him about, yet again. Although, she does look nice.
"If only Nick is half as agreeable as Little Ari," his friend replies, not bothering to look up, busying himself cutting fruits and placing them in Ari's plate. An "old guard", Perry Mannion has been with Philip since the very beginning, first working under his father, his two brothers, and now him. He is probably one of the few who has free reign in his home. His breakfast table at least.
"At least your son will be able to take over from you when you retire," Philip retorts absently, leafing through the Sunday paper with little interest.
"So quickly you want me gone, eh. Congratulations with Macedon, by the way."
"One of my best investments, that horse," Philip replies. More than women and money, he appreciates horses above all. "Takes the sting away from having to hand off Potidea Pharmaceuticals to the Consortium, that's for sure."
"No business on Sunday." Perry makes a small gesture with the child-knife in his hand to emphasise his words, only to have it stray too close to Ari, making the child flinch away. "Sorry, Ari."
The child just stares at him with rounded eyes before returning his attention to the small overturned elephant detail on his shirt, fork dangling uselessly in one chubby fist, food pitifully untouched.
"Your bananas are going brown." Philip reprimands, pushing the plate closer to his child, who ignores him in a way that makes Philip wonder whether his son has heard him. The child continues to be fixated with his elephant. Philip stares at the child a moment more and looks up to see Perry looking at him with clear eyes. "Don't say anything."
"Not saying anything," Perry shrugs. He has stopped trying to say anything. The boy is as the boy does. A bright toddler one day, then a high fever that takes everything away. Well, not everything, at least not according to the hordes of psychologists, psychiatrists, and people with more alphabets behind their names than he could count. Those people Philip brought in, those people who bandied the word "idiot" under their breaths and behind Philip's back. Some of them try to soften the blow by adding "savant" to the back of "idiot", but Perry thinks that it is of no consolation whatsoever.
The clock ticks. The boy begins to stack a fort out of banana. A rustle of newspaper with Perry nearly successful in restraining himself from asking for the crossword section. Silverware on fine bone china, the distant sounds of birds and murmurs of the masses.
He should have known. It's not as if he's just born yesterday. Quiet domesticity never lasts, not for people like him. One second he is basking on whatever praise the Sunday papers have for his horse, another second his mobile phone rings with ominous news.
Perry looks up from his crossword to a slew of curse-words, gives a worried glance at the child who gives no outward sign of being aware of anything other than fort-building. Philip catches his glance and stops swearing almost abruptly.
"What?"
"Tell me you don't know about any of this and I'll forgive you," Philip speaks harshly, stomping around the breakfast room with restrained anger.
"If it's not about Grabos Industries, then I don't know anything about it," Perry replies, gesturing for a housekeeper to take Ari away from crossfire, banana fort and all.
"Myrtle's just touched down in Heathrow." A smashed cup. "Fuck." A plate of breakfast remains joins broken cup and coffee spill. "Shit."
"I suppose it is too late to enter Macedon into the Durban Race?" Perry winces, his attempt at diffusing Philip's short fuse sounds lame even to him.
"Don't even start," Philip growls, eyeing the breakfast table for any other breakables. "Don't even fucking start."
"Are you sure? She's like... what... nine-months pregnant, isn't she? Surely she's not in any condition to travel all the way from New York." Perry inches closer slowly, trying to push crockery away from angry hands. He has no wish to be hit by a stray china if he can help it.
"You forget who you're talking about, obviously," Philip scoffs, slumping back into his seat, burying his face in his hands, sighing heavily. "Shit."
In the end, they only have less than ten minutes to clear away the evidence of Philip's anger ("like hell I'm going to let her see how she affects me."), to hide Ari as far away as possible ("who knows what she'll do to the poor kid, you know she hates him so much."), and to build up a somewhat unaffected facade.
And, just like any disaster—startling, somewhat devastating, despite all steps taken in the name of preparedness and prevention—Myrtle Argead née Karanid sweeps through the front door, majestically waddling down the foyer in perfectly tailored maternity gown and her mound of luggages trailing behind her. "Hello, Husband." A cool greeting and cold peck on unyielding lips. "Mr Mannion." A small condescending nod thrown Perry's way.
...tbc
NOTE:
[1] In 356BC, Philip II of Macedon is supposedly 26 years-old and Parmenion 44 years-old. For the sake of this story, Philip is probably in his late thirties, while Parmenion gets to keep his "original" age.
[2] Because I think it's bad enough for him to endure a name change. Perry Mannion is inspired by two fictional characters: Perry White from the Superman franchise and Peter Mannion from the TV series, The Thick of It. From Perry White, I borrow his high standards and toughness (he should be, really, working for several generations of Argeads); and from Peter Mannion, I'm borrowing his "old guard" sensibilities and maybe a soft-spot or two to even out the edges.
[3] Arrhidaeus gets his name changed too, shortened actually, because I think Arrhidaeus is just an extremely unwieldy name for the current age. Heckel notes his birth year as either 358 or 357, but I want to give him a bigger age gap with Alexander, so he's three years old in the start of this story.
[4] Olympias is Myrtle in this story, adopting more her second name than her third, more famous name.
[5] Modern Summer Olympics has dressage, eventing, and showjumping, but not horse-racing per se (as it did in ancient times). And I can't imagine any of Philip's horses participate in anything but flat-racing (and the occasional steeplechase). In this chapter, Macedon the 3-year-old thoroughbred won the Kentucky Derby in May, flew across the Atlantic, shook off jetlag to win first the Epsom Derby and then the Golden Jubilee Stakes at the Royal Ascot. Perry suggested Philip to participate in the Durban July Handicap to be held within the next fortnight in South Africa to get the hell away from Philip's Entirely and Wholly Pregnant Harpy Wife™.