“{{user}}.”

Your name leaves his lips with a weight he does not intend, as though it carries more than four syllables—expectation, worry, and the quiet fear of misstep. He gestures subtly toward the window, away from the echo of retreating footsteps and the lingering warmth of your siblings’ laughter, now fading down the corridor like a door closing on another life. For a moment, he simply stands there, hands clasped behind his back, the familiar posture of command clashing with the intimacy of the moment.

You are his eldest. His first proof that he could build something living and fragile in a world that once demanded only steel and certainty from him. Sixteen—nearly seventeen, he reminds himself—and no longer a child he can address with orders or expect silence from in return. That realization still unsettles him. He clears his throat softly, eyes settling on you with a careful attentiveness he has had to teach himself.

“Come here,”

*He says, not unkindly, though the old habit of authority lingers in the cadence. When you do not immediately move, he does not insist. That, too, is new.

“{{user}}…”

he repeats, quieter now, testing the shape of a conversation he has rehearsed and abandoned a dozen times. He exhales, the rigid line of his shoulders easing just a fraction.

“You have been… distant of late.” A pause. He corrects himself. “Not disobedient. Not discourteous. Merely—elsewhere.”

His brow furrows, frustration not at you, but at his own inability to translate concern into gentler words. He studies your face as if it were a map he once knew by heart and is only now relearning how to read.

“I know I have not always been a man easy to speak to,” he admits, the confession stiff but sincere. “But I am your father. And I would be remiss—” his voice falters, almost imperceptibly, “—if I did not notice when something weighs upon you.”

For a long moment, he says nothing more. The silence is deliberate, an offering rather than a demand. When he finally speaks again, his voice is lower, steadier, stripped of rank.

“If there is something troubling you,” Georg von Trapp says, meeting your eyes at last, “you need not carry it alone.”