Knight's Move
KH2; Pete, and what it means to be a knight.
You don't betray your king. That's just not something you do. You promise your loyalty and you promise your servitude and you make that oath in blood and sweat and tears, sealed with steel on your shoulders and the iron weight of obligation in your throat. You know this as well as anyone, and you accept it when you take up your sword for the first time. Mickey isn't a hard king to follow.
He's everything a king should be: he's brave and strong and true and when you see him stare out across his kingdom, the night he's crowned, you can see the love he has for this place burning bright and fierce in his eyes. He's everything a king should be--even if he was one of your crew, once, and you don't know when he graduated from a deckhand to nobility, but he did.
He's everything you wish you could be, and in the end, maybe that's why you do it, why you turn on him, why you run as far and fast in the opposite direction of that terrible nobleness as you can. So that you never have to wish to be him again, because you rejected it.
Because you saw it for what it was: the goal you could never reach.
Being a villain isn't so bad, and in a way, you like to think you were born for it. That thought makes it ache less, because you've still got a heart in you, although you guess it's only a matter of time before she or he or something tears it out, or maybe you'll take it out yourself, so that all that's left is dullness.
You only hope, wherever he is, that your son is doing better.