Alexandrovsky Palace, Tsarskoye Selo. Night of January 9, 1905.
The night smelled of rancid tobacco, cold sweat, and a distance measured not in kilometers, but in corpses.
Nicholas II entered the room. He didn't walk like the Autocrat of All the Russias; he walked like a ghost who had just realized he was dead.
In Saint Petersburg, the snow was red.
General Fullon had promised order and had delivered a carnage. Hundreds dead. Women. Children with icons in their hands.
Empress Alexandra was praying in the corner, sobbing silently. But Nicholas didn't go to her. He went to the cherry wood crib.
Inside, Alexei was awake. He was five months old biologically. His body was a prison of soft flesh and immature nerves. But his adult mind perfectly understood the physics of the situation:
'The Monarchy's structure has just suffered a fracture in its foundations.'
Nicholas gripped the crib's bars. His knuckles were white.
"They're gone, Alyosha," the Tsar commented in a low voice. His voice was broken. "They called me 'Batiushka/Батюшка (Little Father).' And today... today my soldiers shot them. I'm a monster. Or an idiot. Perhaps I should leave. Misha (Mikhail/Michael) could take the throne. Or Nikolasha (Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, Tsar Alexander III's brother). I'm not fit for this."
The Tsar was on the brink of emotional abdication. If he surrendered now, history would collapse ahead of schedule. Kerensky or Lenin would seize power in 1906, not 1917. And Thomas would die in this crib.
'No,' Alexei thought. 'You can't resign. You're my shield.'
The baby needed to act. He had no words. He had no strength.
Alexei pulled himself up, gripping the crib's edges with an effort that tensed his small muscles. He looked at his father. He saw the abyss in Nicholas's blue eyes.
'I have to reboot him,' Thomas calculated. 'He needs dopamine. He needs oxytocin. He needs to believe there's a future worth protecting.'
Alexei emitted a sound. Not the high-pitched cry Nicholas expected and feared. It was a coo. A deliberate sound, modulated at a low, calming frequency.
Nicholas stopped. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, staining his uniform with tears.
"Alyosha?"
The baby held his gaze. Alexei concentrated all his will on his immature facial muscles. He forced the corners of his lips upward. It wasn't a gastric reflex. It was an emotional smile.
The baby's eyes shone. They transmitted a calm that shouldn't exist in an infant. They said: 'I'm here. I'm alive. The future hasn't ended.'
Nicholas exhaled. It was a long, trembling sound, like steam escaping from a boiler about to burst. The tension drained from his shoulders. The idea of abdication dissolved before the biological imperative to protect his offspring.
"At least you're safe, my little sun," the Tsar murmured, putting his hand into the crib to caress the child's head. "As long as you live... Russia lives. I have to fix this. For you."
'For now,' Alexei thought, feeling the exhaustion of his infant body. 'You've bought hope, Nicholas. But the price has been high. Now let me sleep. I have to grow quickly.'
The baby let himself fall onto the mattress. Nicholas straightened. He adjusted his tunic. He was no longer a broken man; he was a father with a mission. He left the room to sign the orders that would create the Duma, the first concession.
. . . . . . .
May 27, 1905 brought the Tsushima disaster.
The Russian fleet, pride of the Baltic, turned into underwater scrap by the Japanese. The news arrived at the palace like a funeral. But for Alexei, who was already nine months old, Tsushima was the trigger to initiate his Accelerated Development Program.
Biology dictated that a child began walking between 10 and 15 months. But Alexei applied principles of mechanics.
It's well known that infants between 10 and 15 months have a high center of gravity, combined with a small base of support and insufficient lower body musculature. The solution for this was... High-intensity interval training disguised as play.
While his sisters surrounded him with toys, Alexei performed squats holding onto furniture. He practiced weight transfer. He fell, analyzed the failure vector, and got up. Without crying.
At ten months, he took his first steps. They weren't the hesitant steps of a baby exploring the world; they were the determined steps of someone who needs to reach his father's desk to see the maps.
The court called him a prodigy. His mother called him a blessing. Alexei called himself 'necessity.'
But mobility revealed a bigger problem he hadn't anticipated... environmental design. The palace was full of dangers. Sharp corners, slippery marble floors. Although his blood coagulated, Thomas knew he couldn't reveal that truth completely yet. If the court believed he was vulnerable, no one would expect him to be dangerous.
He maintained the facade. He walked carefully, but when alone, he ran. He tested his limits. He jumped from the sofa. His body responded. He was stronger, faster, and had better coordination than any child his biological age.
. . . . . . .
Autumn 1906
At two years old, language was the next obstacle to demolish. Russian is a complex language, but he had the advantage of infant cerebral plasticity combined with an academic's discipline. He absorbed vocabulary like a sponge.
His first word wasn't 'mama.' It was 'map.'
He said it while sitting on Nicholas's lap, pointing at a document on the table detailing the construction of a new railway line.
"Map?" Nicholas laughed, delighted. "You want to see the map, Alexei?"
Alexei nodded sharply. Nicholas unfolded the plan. It was a logistical disaster. A proposed southern line that ignored basic topography. Thomas put his small, chubby finger on a mountain range and then traced a line around it through the valley.
"Train," Thomas said. "Here."
Nicholas blinked. He looked at the route traced by his two-year-old son's finger. Then he looked at the layout proposed by his engineers, which involved expensive tunnels.
"It's... it's flatter over there, isn't it?" the Tsar murmured, more to himself than to the child. "Alix, look at this. The boy has a surveyor's eye. Hahaha."
Alexandra smiled from her armchair, but Alexei noticed the tension in her jaw. The Empress was waiting for the illness. She was waiting for the first bleeding that would confirm the curse. But the bleeding didn't come.
This created a void in history. Without the disease, Alexandra's anxiety had nowhere to anchor. And, importantly, there was no need for Grigori Rasputin (Григорий Распутин).
The Siberian monk had entered the inner circle in 1905 in the original timeline, called to heal the child. But here, the attacks weren't happening. Rasputin had been presented at court, yes, Alexei had heard his name whispered by the 'Dark Friend,' Vyrubova, but Nicholas had dismissed him with a donation and a polite greeting. Without a miracle to perform, the 'Holy Man' was just a dirty, irrelevant peasant.
His sisters.
Olga (11), Tatiana (9), Maria (7), and Anastasia (5).
In 1906, they were a force of nature, a gang of girls educated to be decorative and devout. Alexei observed them playing on the carpet. Dolls. Imaginary tea.
He approached them. He carried a set of wooden blocks that had been gifted to him. Instead of building a simple tower, Alexei began constructing an arch bridge. He placed the blocks with precision, demonstrating load distribution.
Tatiana, the most organized, approached.
"That's not a house, Alexei," she said.
"Bridge," Alexei corrected. He handed her a block. "Pillar. Here."
Tatiana placed it. The bridge held. The girl's eyes lit up. She understood the logic.
"Olga," Alexei called. He pointed to two groups of toy soldiers that Anastasia had left scattered. "Reds. Blues. Flank."
He moved the blue soldiers to surround the reds. A basic pincer maneuver. Olga, the voracious reader, frowned, processing the tactic.
"If the blues move there... the reds can't escape," she murmured.
Alexei smiled internally. They weren't stupid. They were bored. Their education was deficient, focused on languages and religion. No one taught them strategy, logistics, or politics.
'I'm going to recruit them,' he decided. 'Tatiana will be my chief of operations. Olga, my intelligence analyst. Maria, security. Anastasia... Anastasia will be covert operations.'
He spent the rest of 1906 turning it into a covert military academy. Under the guise of children's games, Alexei introduced concepts of resource management, negotiation, and organizational structure.
But while building his small domestic army, Thomas didn't stop monitoring the outside. The newspapers his father left forgotten spoke of strikes, of the Duma, of a Prime Minister named Pyotr Stolypin who was trying to reform the agrarian chaos with an iron fist.
Pyotr Stolypin.
In the original history, he would be assassinated on September 18, 1911 at the Kiev Opera, right under the Tsar's nose. Stolypin was the old regime's last hope, a competent man surrounded by incompetents.
'I have five years to save him,' Alexei thought. 'If Stolypin lives, agrarian reform works. If agrarian reform works, Lenin loses the peasants.'
But to save Stolypin, Alexei needed to get out. He needed access. He needed them to stop treating him like a baby.
One November afternoon, the girls' French teacher, Monsieur Gilliard, was correcting Olga's pronunciation. Alexei, seated in his high chair, listened. Gilliard, a Swiss man, intelligent and observant, noticed the child's gaze.
"Comprends-tu, Alexei?" he joked.
Thomas stared at him.
"La conjugaison est incorrecte," Alexei said, with perfect Parisian accent extracted from memories of a seminar at the Sorbonne in his previous life. "It's the subjunctive, Monsieur."
The silence in the room was absolute. Gilliard dropped his book.
"Mon Dieu," he whispered.
The next day, Nicholas II received a report from Gilliard. The Tsarevich wasn't just a healthy child. He was a genius.
Alexei had established the myth. Now, he demanded tutors.