After March, the year continued to behave.
Not perfectly—this was still Oskar von Hohenzollern's life, and fate had a personal grudge against his sleep schedule—but compared to the previous years, 1908 moved forward with a strange, almost suspicious calm.
Weeks passed without anyone trying to assassinate him.
No fires. No explosions. No ministers storming into his office with maps and panic and the smell of politics. No sudden "history is collapsing, Your Highness" messages delivered at dawn.
For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, there were stretches—whole weeks, sometimes even months—where nothing catastrophic demanded his hands.
It didn't mean he stopped working.
Oskar never truly stopped.
He still approved projects, killed stupid ones before they had time to become expensive, signed papers that moved steel and money like blood, and occasionally produced a book that landed on Europe like a quiet hammer.
But most days were… ordinary.
Or as ordinary as life allowed for a man who had built half a country into an extension of his will.
He woke early.
Always early.
The sun would barely be up and already he was sitting upright in bed with that familiar look in his eyes: the look of someone who believed sleep was a negotiable luxury, not a biological requirement.
He kissed his women good morning—sometimes gently, sometimes hurriedly, depending on how many babies were already awake and planning a coup. Anna would usually be the first to stir, calm and warm, the kind of woman who could hold chaos in her arms without shaking. Tanya would wake later like a small storm, hair everywhere, eyes bright, already ready to argue with the world.
Some mornings he was greeted not by romance but by tiny hands gripping his thumb like a prison shackle.
"Papa," a voice would demand, as if the child had invented language solely for authority.
Oskar would sigh, defeated before the battle even began.
"Yes, my little tyrant," he'd whisper, and lift the child onto his chest as if accepting his fate.
Then came letters.
Piles of them.
Some important. Some urgent. Many ridiculous.
Praise, complaints, petitions, pleas, requests for funding, requests for jobs, requests for "one small meeting," requests for "one small loan," requests and letters of many kinds.
He answered what mattered.
He ignored what didn't.
He learned—slowly, reluctantly—that refusing people did not make him evil. It made him functional.
Later in the day he might meet a minister or an industrialist or a visiting foreign dignitary.
Or he might meet no one at all.
Those days were the best.
On those days he trained more than on other days.
Sometimes privately, in the palace gym with the guards and servants, and his family as well. The iron smelled clean there, the floor was polished, and the doors were watched by men who knew the difference between "privacy" and "let the press in to watch the prince sweat."
But increasingly, Oskar went to Pump World in Potsdam.
Not because he needed the noise.
Because Germany needed to see him in it.
Pump World was louder, thicker, alive in a way palaces never were. It smelled like chalk, sweat, leather straps, soap, and ambition. Men from factories trained beside clerks; soldiers beside students; women beside husbands; old men beside boys who hadn't yet learned humility.
And Oskar trained openly.
No ceremony. No velvet rope.
Just iron.
And he dragged Karl along with him, whether Karl protested or not.
It was important for the people to see their prince.
It was also important for them to see something even rarer:
The prince's right hand.
The little man who made the mad prince's visions real.
Karl, to his own quiet horror, had begun to change.
It happened the way irreversible things happened:
One workout at a time.
Oskar coached him mercilessly but fairly—correcting posture, mocking excuses, forcing him to finish sets he swore would kill him. And importantly, Oskar made him stop eating so many cookies daily.
Karl learned quickly that begging did not work.
"Your Highness," he would wheeze, face red, arms shaking under a bar, "I am going to die."
"No," Oskar would answer calmly. "There is no death if it doesn't bleed my little man. And dwarves don't fall so easily, so for blood and honour lift them weights my man."
People laughed.
Karl did not.
And slowly over the course of the year of 1908—undeniably—the softness retreated from Karl.
Strength appeared.
His shoulders broadened. His back thickened. His breath steadied. The "little manager" posture—the hunched, paperwork-burdened stance of a man hiding behind contracts—began to straighten into something harder.
Oskar even made him learn to fight.
Not fancy fencing for nobles.
Real fighting.
Grip breaks. Balance. Throws. How to hit without breaking your own hand. How to take a hit without collapsing.
On the upper floor of Pump World, where others trained around them like witnesses, Oskar drilled him over and over until Karl's movements stopped being frantic and started being controlled.
Once, after months of humiliation, Karl did the impossible.
He defeated his own bodyguard Gunther in a spar.
It wasn't pretty.
It wasn't elegant.
It was a small dwarf doing something very simple and very brutal: refusing to fall, and well giving a hard punch to the balls and the rest was history.
The room went silent for half a second.
Then cheers.
Heddy noticed the transformation most of all.
She noticed it in the way Karl started lifting things without straining.
In the way he carried their child with one arm while still arguing budgets with the other.
And one day—in a moment that started as a joke and ended as a promise—Karl curled her in his arms like she weighed nothing at all.
Heddy gasped.
Karl nearly dropped her in panic.
Oskar, watching, grinned like a monster.
"Good," he said. "Now you can carry your wife away when she tries to stop you from working."
Heddy slapped Oskar's chest as she struggled to reach much else.
Karl glared at him.
The gym laughed anyway.
Oskar spoke to the people too. Not like a prince addressing subjects, but like a man answering men and women who wanted to be better.
How to train. How to eat. How to stop drinking yourself into an early grave. How to breathe when the weight felt like it was trying to crush your ribs.
He taught without preaching.
He joked without cruelty.
He listened.
And when he spoke, people felt something rare:
A ruler who actually meant it.
Sometimes, Oskar and Karl went elsewhere.
To Waterworld—the sprawling new aquatic complexes that were part hygiene, part recreation, part instruction, and part national propaganda disguised as fun.
The air there smelled like clean water and soap rather than smoke and rot. Tiles gleamed. Pools steamed faintly in winter. Children shrieked and splashed like they had never seen a safe body of water in their lives.
Oskar swam there openly, wearing nylon swimwear so scandalously modern that half the women in the gallery suddenly forgot the existence of Christianity for several seconds.
The colors were Imperial—black, white, red—an eagle stitched across his crotch like a warning and a joke, strategically reinforcing his dignity and his future from the public's imagination.
He corrected strokes. Demonstrated diving. Showed Karl—and anyone watching—how to move through water without panic, without waste, without drowning.
It wasn't leisure.
It was education.
Clean water. Clean bodies. Fewer illnesses. Stronger lungs. Fewer men dying in rivers because no one had ever taught them that flailing was not swimming.
And Waterworld, like everything else, was part of a larger machine: better cities, better lives, better citizens. Pools built beside housing projects. Hygiene normalized. Disease dragged into retreat.
There were other places too.
New parks. New halls. New schools. New facilities that bore his imprint even when his name wasn't carved into stone.
Sometimes he visited quietly—no entourage, no speeches—just to check that they worked and that the people running them were not stealing everything that wasn't nailed down.
He even visited some of the new homes he'd built.
He stood in doorways and watched children playing in courtyards that weren't mud pits. He watched mothers hang laundry without coughing. He listened to old men complain about everything—because old men did that—and smiled anyway because their complaints were about trivial things now, not survival.
And most evenings, he was home.
Sometimes Karl's family was there too. Sometimes Bertha arrived with Alfried like a polite, aristocratic storm cloud. Sometimes Cecilie came with her child and her careful eyes, stepping softly into Oskar's gravity as if it were the only safe place left.
Sometimes they went to theater. Sometimes to a concert. Sometimes nowhere at all.
Sometimes Oskar simply lay in the palace gardens while children crawled over him like determined invaders, and the women watched and laughed and rushed to save him when he pretended to be crushed under the unbearable weight of a single toddler.
Life, for once, felt… good.
And that was the dangerous part.
Because peace always made him nervous.
By July, that peace carried a familiar tension—the feeling of a storm gathering behind a quiet sky.
Many of the women around him were heavily pregnant again. Their movements slower. Their tempers shorter. Their patience thinner. The palace felt full of waiting—waiting for births, waiting for announcements, waiting for something that could not be postponed much longer.
And more than anything, one date approached with the steady inevitability of a clock.
The twenty-seventh of July.
Oskar's twentieth birthday.
His coming-of-age.
He would have preferred to ignore it.
A quiet dinner. Family. Friends. No spectacle.
Unfortunately, princes were not permitted to prefer quiet.
By the evening of the twenty-sixth, the palace had already begun changing its skin. Corridors smelled of polish and fresh flowers. Servants moved faster. Footmen whispered about seating plans with the same intensity generals whispered about maps. Somewhere in a distant wing, musicians were rehearsing as if sound itself could be used to hold the empire together.
Oskar tried, once, to protest.
He was overruled by tradition and an army of women with clipboards.
He was on his way to becoming "official," and everyone could feel it.
That was when the Empress summoned him.
Not to a salon. Not to a receiving room full of waiting faces.
For once, she asked him to walk with her into the gardens.
It was late enough that the air had cooled, but not so late the ducks had abandoned hope. The pond lay still and black, reflecting lamps like a line of small moons. The ducks drifted near the shore like polite beggars, watching with the practiced patience of creatures who understood court routines better than most courtiers.
Auguste Viktoria sat on a bench with a paper bag of bread in her lap.
Oskar sat beside her—massive, careful, trying very hard not to look like a man who could bench-press the bench.
For a few minutes, she fed the ducks in silence, tearing bread into pieces as if the act itself was prayer.
Then she spoke, calmly.
"Oskar… tomorrow, in the eyes of the empire, you will be an adult."
Oskar resisted the urge to sigh, and failed only on the inside.
"Yes, Mother."
She tore another piece of bread, tossed it. A duck snapped it up with imperial entitlement.
"The ceremony is not only for you," she continued softly. "It is for Germany. It is for stability."
Her voice remained gentle.
Her meaning was not.
"There will be many noble ladies present," she said. "From good houses. Some German. Some foreign. Many of them… suitable."
Oskar kept his gaze on the pond.
"I know."
Auguste Viktoria's hands paused for half a heartbeat over the bread bag.
"And it is time," she said, "to think seriously about marriage."
There it was.
Not accusation. Not scolding.
A sentence spoken the way queens spoke of weather—because it was not optional, only delayed.
Oskar glanced sideways at her. Her face was calm, composed, maternal.
But her eyes were sharp.
She wasn't only speaking as a mother.
She was speaking as the Empress of a dynasty with a wounded heir, a broken household, and a court full of people who smelled blood in the water.
With Crown Prince Wilhelm confined and ruined, and Oskar—Acting Crown Prince—displaying ability far beyond what anyone had expected…
The truth had been forced on them all.
Oskar was becoming the future.
And Auguste Viktoria desperately wanted that future anchored to something traditional enough that the empire would accept it without flinching.
"You need a legitimate wife," she said quietly. "Not simply for propriety. For alliance. For blood. For the continuity of the house."
Oskar's mouth tightened.
"Mother," he said evenly, "I understand your concern. But I will make no promises."
She looked at him now, more directly.
"You will not even try?"
Oskar breathed out slowly through his nose.
"I will not be dragged," he said. "If someone truly important, powerful, and beautiful appears—someone I respect—then yes, I will consider it."
He paused, then added with honest bluntness:
"But do not hold too much hope."
The Empress's lips tightened, just slightly.
Oskar continued before she could speak again.
"And I still intend to marry Anna and Tanya."
Auguste Viktoria's hands stilled.
Oskar didn't soften the blow. He had learned that softness made women think there was room to negotiate.
"Together," he said. "If the Church allows it, then together. If I add another wife, then all three will be bound in the same way. Otherwise…" He shrugged faintly. "I won't marry at all."
Silence followed, thick enough to feel.
A duck quacked, offended by the pause in bread supply.
Auguste Viktoria resumed tearing pieces as if that gave her time to think.
Oskar understood the rules better than most men at court. A crown prince did not usually choose his marriage. Bloodlines chose for him. Alliances decided happiness. The person involved simply endured it and pretended to be grateful.
But power had shifted, and everyone knew it.
No one could truly force him now—not his father, not the court, not the empire itself—unless they were willing to tear apart what he had built.
And yet his mother's worry wasn't foolish.
A commoner could never be queen.
Not openly. Not cleanly. Not in a way the old world would accept without trying to break her.
Auguste Viktoria studied him for a long moment.
Then, unexpectedly, her expression softened.
"Oskar," she said at last, voice lower, more private, "I will be honest with you."
Oskar waited.
"You are the most outstanding son I have," she said.
The words were quiet, but they landed heavier than praise shouted in a hall. They carried grief in them too—because they implied what she did not say aloud about her eldest.
Oskar's throat tightened, but he didn't look away.
"And that," she continued, "is why I am afraid."
She tossed bread again. The ducks surged.
"I only hope," she said, "that for once… you find a girl you actually like… and that the world can approve of her."
Oskar nodded.
He didn't say anything, because he shared that hope—and because he knew how rare that alignment truly was.
A prince could have love.
A prince could have politics.
A prince almost never got both without paying for it in blood or scandal.
Auguste Viktoria's gaze drifted toward the palace windows, bright with light, alive with preparation.
"Tomorrow," she said quietly, "everyone will watch you."
Oskar looked out at the pond—at the small, hungry ducks, waiting for bread as if it were destiny—and felt the old, familiar pressure settle in his chest.
"Yes," he said softly.
"And I intend," he added, half to her and half to himself, "to disappoint at least half of them."
For the first time that evening, the Empress's mouth twitched.
Not quite a smile.
But something close.