Chapter 299. The Blueprint of Joy

The morning after the rain was a clear, sharp gift. Sunlight poured into the penthouse, gilding the dust motes and illuminating the closed album on the rug like a relic from another age. Anton stood at the kitchen counter, juicing oranges. The simple, rhythmic press and twist was a meditation. Sabatine was at the table, a large, blank sheet of artist’s paper unfurled before him, a cup of black coffee steaming at his elbow.

They hadn’t spoken of the album again. Its contents had been acknowledged, honoured, and gently shelved. Its weight had been replaced by a feeling of expansive, clean-slated lightness. The past was a foundational layer, solid and settled. Now, the space above it was empty, awaiting design.

Sabatine picked up a charcoal pencil, its tip hovering over the pristine white. He didn’t draw. He looked at Anton, a question in his eyes. It was a different question than any they’d asked before. How do we survive this? or what is the next threat? or even what should the Institute do next?

It was simpler, and infinitely more vast: What brings us joy?

Anton finished the last orange, poured the vibrant, pulpy juice into two glasses, and brought them over. He set one beside Sabatine’s coffee and sat across from him, the sun warming his back. He looked at the blank paper, then at Sabatine’s waiting face.

“Five years,” Anton said, the words not a limit, but a horizon. “No fear. No shadows. Just us.”

Sabatine’s mouth curved. He put the pencil down, reached across the table, and took Anton’s hand, their fingers lacing together over the paper. “Where do we want to be, on a random Tuesday, five years from now?”

The question was a key. It unlocked not a boardroom strategy, but a dreamscape.

Anton closed his eyes for a moment. He let the imposed structures of crisis and reaction fall away. What was left? A deep, humming core of contentment, and a world of white space.

“I want to be annoyed,” Anton began, opening his eyes, a smile playing on his lips. “Annoyed because the noise from the Academy’s common room is drifting up to our private quarters in the Highlands, and we can’t hear the peregrines on the cliff.”

Sabatine’s grin was instant, brilliant. He picked up the pencil with his free hand and in the top left corner of the paper, he made a quick, rough sketch: a simple, long building with a glass front, and above it, a squiggly line for sound waves. He wrote: Annoying, beautiful noise.

“I want,” Sabatine said, his voice warm, “to be arguing with you about soil pH levels. Because we’ll have planted that ridiculous vegetable garden behind the cottage on the island. And my tomatoes will be thriving, while your aristocratic herbs will be looking puny and offended.”

Anton laughed, the sound bright and free. Sabatine drew a small, lumpy rectangle in the lower right corner, with stick-figure plants. He labelled one cluster ‘Sabe’s Champions’ and the other ‘Anton’s Sad Sprigs’.

The paper ceased to be blank. It became a living map.

“I want the Foundation to be so robust, so ethically unassailable, that Leon and his team only need to consult us on legacy philosophy, not daily crises,” Anton said, his tone shifting to proud contemplation. “I want to write a book. Not a memoir. A treatise on ethical capital. The one I couldn’t have written before because I didn’t understand the ‘ethical’ part.”

Sabatine drew a small, stout book in the centre, with ‘ETHICS’ in block letters on the spine. Next to it, he sketched a stick figure with impressive hair (Leon) waving them away from a computer screen.

“I want,” Sabatine said, his gaze turning inward, “to teach a seminar at the Academy. Just one. Not on counter-surveillance. On… resilience. On how to carry a ghost without letting it steer.” His voice was soft, the vulnerability of the offering clear. “And I want there to be a kid in the back who gets it. Who needs to hear it.”

Anton squeezed his hand. Sabatine drew a lecture hall with stick figures, one at a podium, and one in the back row with a lightbulb over its head.

They went on like this for hours. The sun climbed, their coffee cooled, the orange juice was drunk. The paper is filled with a chaotic, joyful cartography of a shared future.

Year 1: The Academy’s first full cohort graduates. We throw a bonfire on the beach. Real fire, for celebration. A wobbly bonfire drawn.

Year 2: The Institute establishes its first fully autonomous satellite in Botswana, run by local graduates. We go for the opening.A rough outline of Africa with a star.

Year 3: We take three months. Not a weekend. Not a week. Three months. Sail the Greek islands. No sat-phone. (Rico will hate this.)A wobbly boat.

Year 4: That wing we designed for the Academy for families? We fill it. Not just with kids from the system. Our family.Here, Sabatine’s pencil hesitated. He didn’t draw. He just wrote the word, circled it three times. Family.

Year 5: We host a summit at the Institute. Not of world leaders. Of the people our tools have protected. We listen.

The plans were a mix of the global and the deeply, deliciously personal. There were professional milestones woven seamlessly with dreams of learning to sail, of adopting a disagreeable rescue dog, of building a library in the Highlands that smelled of peat smoke and old paper.

There was no ‘enemy’ to outmaneuver. No betrayal to anticipate. The only antagonists were poor soil quality and possibly a stubborn canine. The only challenges were those of growth, of scale, of the happy, chaotic management of abundance.

At one point, Anton leaned back, looking at the sprawling, joyful mess on the paper. “It’s not a five-year plan. It’s a… a blueprint of joy.”

Sabatine looked up, charcoal smudged on his cheek. “It’s a life, Anton. The one we earned. The one we get to live.” He put the pencil down, finally. “It’s terrifying.”

“Why?” Anton asked, though he felt it too—not the old, cold terror of threat, but the dizzying, wonderful terror of a sheer cliff of possibility.

“Because it’s so… quiet,” Sabatine said, his gaze sweeping their blueprint. “The drama is over. The epic is written. This is the next chapter. The one where we just… tend the garden. Build the library. Love the kids. It’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever considered.”

Anton understood perfectly. Fighting for your life had a brutal clarity. Building a life—a peaceful, flourishing, ordinary-extraordinary life—required a different, deeper courage. It required the faith to believe in calm mornings, in slow growth, in the simple, profound act of turning your face to the sun, unafraid.

He stood and came around the table. He pulled Sabatine to his feet and into his arms, holding him tightly, their hearts beating a synchronized rhythm of hope against hope.

“We’ll be terrible at quiet,” Anton murmured into his hair. “You’ll find a systemic injustice in the local council’s recycling policy and start a one-man crusade. I’ll get bored and try to revolutionise the sustainable scallop-farming industry.”

Sabatine laughed, the sound vibrating through them both. “And we’ll do it together. Our own, ridiculous, peaceful wars.”

They stood holding each other in the pool of sunlight, the blueprint of their future rustling gently on the table beside them. The shadows of Roland, Kaine, betrayal, blood, and fire were just that now—shadows, lengthening behind them as they walked steadfastly into the light.

Looking forward was no longer an act of scanning for threats. It was an act of shared imagination. It was choosing the colours for the walls of a room not yet built, knowing the other would love them too. It was the profound, exhilarating freedom of having survived the forge, and now holding the hammer and the chisel, ready to sculpt not a fortress, but a home.

The next five years stretched before them, not as a timeline to be endured, but as a landscape to be explored, hand in hand. There were no guarantees of ease. But there was a guarantee of each other. And from that fixed, unshakable point, every possibility—from global summits to tomato plants—radiated outwards, bright and endless and theirs.

The blueprint was drawn. The story of survival was complete. Now, the story of living—deeply, quietly, joyfully—was just beginning. And for the first time in both their lives, the future looked not like a battlefield, but like a blank page, waiting for the next, beautiful mark they would make upon it, together.

—--