Chapter 373: The Other Grandfather

"Truth of the matter is... I really am all that. Your mother's father and essentially just your grandfather."

The aged general was not too sly to admit. "I take it that that other grandfather of yours told you all about me."

"Not really. He's rather tight-lipped about you." Alexander could attest since he knew that Old Sullivan never really liked the other party.

"I'm not surprised." Old Man Pierce scoffed at that. "I've been quite straightforward about my distaste for him. How could he have much to say?"

Apparently, the dislike goes both ways.

"Of course, unlike him, I'm not tight-lipped since I'm vocal about it." The old general pointed out. "Anyone like him, who dealt in that deplorable industry, should be dishonorably discharged with a rain of bullets!"

Anyways, a bunch of old men whose quite abhorrent of one another. That's how Alexander would describe the situation with his grandfathers.

The other one seemed fiercely brash while the other is quite reserved with how they go about it.

If he thought back on things, Alexander noted Old Sullivan's quick and continued dissuasion of his jet piloting "dream".

Safety concerns and supposed high mortality rate aside, isn't it just because the old capitalist didn't want his grandson to associate much with stuff that connects to the old veteran?

It's petty grudges like these that build up and show how both of them don't really see eye to eye.

It's nothing original.

It's just in-laws being in-laws and not getting along well. A lot of age-old tales are pretty much re-using the cliched conflict that it is.

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Admittedly, because of that and so much more, Alexander wasn't too close to the maternal side of his family.

Even his mom wasn't too close with them, so how could he?

He could still distinctly remember her talking snippets about them though.

Obviously, there's Lionel Pierce. Then there's Carmen Pierce, Leon Pierce, Lancel Pierce... with mother Cynthia, and that was it.

As covered, the grandfather. Then respectively, the grandmother, and two uncles... with his mother as the youngest.

It goes way back just like any ancestral line, however, it ultimately huddled there.

With all of them passing away due to one reason after another... in a somewhat sequential turn of events.

Leon, the uncle, is a typical child born into a military family.

With a high-starred father in the ranks, it made sense to idolize and try to catch up to him.

However, typical of one such fellow, he lost his life during a military excursion. Details of the tragedy aren't that privy but there's not much to go on either.

The man was climbing up the ranks just as he'd hoped... but in the end, he's just another body in a coffin and just another name in the registry.

Shortly after that, Carmen, the grandmother, was struck by the grief of losing her firstborn.

Grief, depression, and so on ultimately consume what it wants to consume... especially when it doubles down.

Lancel, the second-born, had already taken the steps that his father and brother had taken.

Unfortunately, he wasn't able to reach the same heights as his father. He had the same path and final destination as his older brother.

Dead among many others in his cavalry.

With two Pierces down, the grieving mother followed her sons soon after.

It was only the young Cynthia and General Pierce from that point on.

However, that relationship ultimately soured with the hardened general blaming himself and getting consumed in whatever consumed his other half.

The young Cynthia was pushed away and then struck away from the Pierces entirely when she found love.

She could only start anew with a new family but misfortune finds a way. It just latched on.

Anyways, in an unfortunate accident, just like the Pierces before her, Cynthia Creed passed away.

This was the short Pierce history laid out and with all that had happened... there's really not much that Alexander could get to know, get familiar with, or talk about.

Much more so, when aside from a half-Pierce like him, the last of the Pierce happens to be the ill-fated patriarch.

Old Man Lionel Pierce.

A battle-hardened war veteran who must have quite the regaling military stories of his own. His stars and medals should point to that.

Still, it's more likely that his familiar story is the one that had the more poignant ups and down.

Making him into the emotionally hardened, weary, and stubborn hardliner that he would come to be.

From what little Alexander knew of the old man... he was someone who wasn't really interested in any sort of familial rekindling, contact or any correspondence of that sort.

It was as if he never existed and didn't want to cross paths with the very last of his kin.

Probably because he's kept busy with high-class military arrangements even with his supposed retirement.

Or maybe he stayed true to his disownment of his youngest daughter.

Or in the most poetically melodramatic of possibilities, Old Man Pierce just didn't want the curse that took away his family to also afflict his grandson.

Hence, he stayed away as far and as incognito as he could.

By the time Alexander turned 19, he was mailed a letter of attorney concerning a family member's will because, at that point, Old Man Pierce was already gone.

Leaving behind a spare bit of property, wealth, and memorabilia to be remembered by.

Alexander lived quite a life since then, so in a way, the curse that made the old general painfully outlive his wife, sons, and daughter was broken.

Superstition or not, he somewhat freed his grandson from all of it.

At the age of 75, he died alone. Suffering through recurring war wounds during the last year of it.

Although Alexander never appreciated Old Man Pierce as much as Old Sullivan, he's still quite the grandfather, isn't he?

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Of course, when it really got down to it, this current face-to-face interaction of theirs is most probably the longest or most considerable interaction that they had.

Both the old life and this re-life included.

Making this less of a touching reunion and more of an awkward meet-and-greet.

Especially with all that has just happened and the military lobbying that had to be done.

"You look like you're examining a ghost." Old Man Pierce noted. "Then again, from your eyes, it looked like you're reflecting a melancholic image of me."

"It's nothing." Alexander shifted away from that. "I just didn't expect that we'd ever get to meet or come across each other. I've seen how you didn't want anything to do with me during the funeral and guardianship, after all."

"So that's how you figured things out, huh?" Old Man Pierce understood.

He's the father, so how could he not have gone to his own daughter's funeral?

He's also the grandfather, so how could he not be present at his grandson's orphaned fate?

Although he hid himself well and just pushed stuff to Creed through most of it, this mourning young fellow back then must have kept quite the recollection of it.

"In all honesty, I've imposed on myself to never interfere with your life. For various reasons that you don't need to know." The aged general admitted and continued. "Circumstances just came up, so I had to break that rule of mine."

"These are strange times, especially with you... getting stranger as the times passed." Old Man Pierce stared with a bit of incredulity. "It's already quite concerning that you've closed yourself off but that's quite understandable, you've lost your parents. Our family's history with grief and loss just isn't that good."

"What's more concerningly confounding is the unusual shift that you took things to."

"Like drawing from picture books to comic books, you're mother would have been proud." The stoic man had a trace of fondness for that. "She loved art. I still remember the times she asked me to buy all the watercolors, brushes, canvas, and paint."

Of course, that incredulity and fondness quickly shifted to angered blame. "It's that Sullivan Creed that took things to a hateful turn."

"He's already exposed you to deplorable-ness by hiring those sleazy women to skimp on British nanny money, why did he have to capitalize on your work to shift that sleazy business to an acceptable one."

"If that's not enough, he just had to capitalize on your budding talent even more by directly throwing you into the world of business!"

"Why do you have to make toys when he could have bought them for you instead?"

"Then there's all those legal problems, with you dangled into all that trouble when he could have done it himself."

"Then there's funny pages of newspapers, cartoony stuff, music, and a whole bunch of whatnot. You're already being stretched thin that even you're schooling has to take a hit." The value of education just takes precedence for most elders, after all.

"He even had the gall to send me bragging letters that detail progressions as if there's nothing absurdly wrong with it!"

Admittedly, Alexander was partly to blame for most stuff that Old Sullivan was accused of... but the unnecessary bragging part was not one of them.

"Of course, there's the fact that he just had to hand you your father's computer that all led to this turn of events."

"Oh, just how much has this gaming stuff attracted? Quite a lot since there's too many sharks that are out to get a piece of you."

"It's all just turned into a mess that I had to pull a lot of strings to keep the others in bay!"

The more Old Man Pierce went on, the more ticked he was at the old capitalist.

"Fortunately, your next film project still needs advice regarding paramilitary rescue matters, so I straightforwardly signed myself up!"

"I'll make that old moneybag see some sense. How could he not when I'll punch it in his eyes?"

As the old general said so, his hands were already curled into a fist and Alexander was sure didn't want to be on the receiving end of those.

Although there's still a lot to handle due to the attention that the Chaos units have garnered... the eventual confrontation between his grandfathers seemed more pressing than all of that.