Rene smiled and climbed into bed beside Solae, carefully manuevring himself so he could slide his arms around her waist without pressing on her injured legs. It felt really good to have her against him, warm, vibrant and alive. While she had been buried he hadn't allowed himself, consciously, to face the fact that she might be killed but some part of him had plunged into the black abyss of what life might be like without her. To feel her against him was an affirmation that she was real and still with him.

"Make a good impression," he mused with a smile as he brushed a lock of her gold white hair with his finger tips. He supposed that if they both survived that such a meeting was at least possible. Legally he wasn't Renard du Quentain any longer, but he remained his father's son, both in his own eyes and in Alric's. Probably in the eyes of the Empress to which might or might not complicate matters. What the Empress might have to say about a Sector Duchess marrying a common soldier was beyond Rene's abillity to predict, and it was hard to tell whether his heritage would complicate or simplify the situation. Solae was technically a vassal of the Empress, but there was limited leverage a sovereign could bring against a Duchess.

"He ..." Rene hesitated, momentarily caught between the desire to present his father in a good light and an unwillingness to speak less than the whole truth to the woman he loved. As ever he chose to be honest.

"He was distant when I was a boy, never cruel or disinterested, just kind of mentally away," he told her, thinking back to excitedly reporting some minor accomplishment of education to his father. Most often Alric had nodded and offered a few pro forma words of encouragement, but not really engaged.

"He was an Admiral before I was born, though he had retired, or been retired by the time I was born, the Emperor Phillipus was always wary of effective officers of high rank," Rene explained. That had been true, Alric had been granted the rank of Imperial Adviser as much to get him away from a military command as to get him to Capella where Phillipus and his secret police could keep an eye on him.

"I always got the impression that he would rather have been out there in space than stuck on Capella. He was away alot, he spent alot of time with the Empress when she was cloistered away as a girl. I think Phillipus thought that it would keep him occupied, an important but pointless post," Rene said. He cleared his throat.

"He did his duty though, he always does that," Rene told Solae. Noble families rarely had close and loving relationships with their children, as most of the child rearing was usually done by servants.

"And he cares about family," Rene said, a slight smile tugging at his lips for the first time since he had begun speaking.

"When I was thirteen I was fencing with another nobles son, I had beaten him several times but we were the top two in the class so we kept getting matched up. One day he made some crack about my mother being a commoner, she wasn't really but she was a scientist by inclination and it wasn't an incredible match politically. I broke his nose before the tutors broke it up. They threw me out of the competition. When my father heard about it he called me into his study, told me he was proud that I had stood up for my mother, and that if I ever did something so impulsive and stupid again he would break my nose for me," Rene chuckled.

"He said that nobility isn't something that is on the outside, that it is inside of us, and that so long as you know who you are and what you stand for, what other people say really dosent matter."