Yurndale University, the school Olivier taught at, was small, prestigious and located all but in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city wasn’t within walking distance, as it would be for practically every other institute of higher education in Baalphoria, instead requiring a moderately long bubble to reach anything even resembling civilization. It was so isolated that a slide line had only recently been installed, connecting it to the network that was continuously expanding over the country, occasionally reaching into the Free Colonies they had friendly, if forever tenuous, relationships with.
Stone buildings, most of which had existed since the school’s founding, 1037 years ago, were so far from the current style of Baalphorian architecture that those who stepped onto the property for the first time often remarked at how much it felt like stepping into the Free Colonies, as though any of them had ever actually seen the Free Colonies in more than outdated images. Ivy and moss stretched up the buildings, scattered through courtyards and parks, ancient trees reaching into the sky so far that students and staff had to crane their necks to see the tops, the entire campus at odds with the grey, sprawling school Olivier had attended in the capital when completing his law degree.
Having grown up in a mix of Roasalia’s activity and a constantly shifting landscape of wherever his parents’ current cases were, the calm of the campus wasn’t exactly where he had ever seen himself—odd, he knew. Olivier was perfectly aware that he screamed of someone who preferred calm quiet, but in reality, he was quiet enough inside, and a loudness outside was a simple balance to his own… he didn’t want to call it shyness, nor even claim he was an introvert.
Certainly, however, he had difficulties sharing who he was with the world. So many pressures had been placed on him since the moment he was born that becoming his own person had been difficult. The same went for each of his relatives, where it was expected they would all grow into their positions at the de la Rue law firm. It had been bad enough when he was young and brilliant. After his D-Level tests? When he was revealed as a non-dev and then forcibly outed by his own family?
Since then, the pressures weighing on him had just grown and grown, until he was graduating from compulsory schooling years early and going straight into university. What was the point in remaining in a class with only his cousins for friends, each of them struggling to connect with their classmates simply because
he
was their friend? What was the point in taking a gap decade when he had no one to spend it with?
No one liked spending time around him, save those few cousins who he could be himself with. Even now, his students might respect him—might clamber over themselves trying to get into his classes, knowing his days teaching were limited—but they didn’t like him.
He didn’t regret being here, though, even if his insistence that his law degree hadn’t been enough had upset his mother so much she’d cut him off until he agreed to take on the occasional case while he taught and worked on his sociology thesis. It wasn’t the life he had envisioned for himself, back when he was a child, still clinging to hope that he would find happiness. It wasn’t the life his mother demanded of him either, and at least he could glean a little happiness from their annoyance, even if loneliness ached through his body as he made his way through campus, heading for his least favourite class.
It was an entry-level class, designed for students who needed a broad, yet firm foundational understanding of the law. Business students, writers, and science students intent to go into innovative industries populated his class, and in the two years he’d been teaching at Yurndale, it had generally been his favourite, the myriad points of views and entry knowledge leaving room for more diverse discussions than classes composed entirely of law students.
Unfortunately, this class was also the one a certain silverstrain was auditing—and not even officially, not that his complaints to Dean Vickers had gotten her kicked out. Apparently, she was a family friend, and he was letting her attend classes because she may very well be ending up in prison for something that was entirely not her fault.
The fact that Olivier agreed with the fact that her ending up in prison was ridiculous—the result of antiquated laws that were sporadically applied—was beside the point. Dean Vickers, unfortunately, refused to believe the girl’s only intention was to disrupt his class, attempting to coerce him into taking her case because no one else would—and for good reason; this sort of case was more likely to solidify the law, rather than break it.
The brat had no interest in learning anything from her time in his classroom, even admitting as much, several weeks earlier, when she’d joked that he should take her case so she could go enjoy her last year of freedom, rather than be stuck in his classroom. In her defence, she had almost immediately realized it was the wrong things to say, but—
But why was he defending her!?
The girl was annoying—loud and brash, spouting her opinions throughout the classroom without a care who she offended! It was aggravating, and not because she was wrong.
Rather, it was aggravating because while some of Emilia’s ideas were wild—unrestrained and wandering, Olivier constantly required to talk her back to whatever point she’d been trying to make—she was also brilliant. Brilliant, vibrate, beautiful—her mind and body alike. Innocent and happy, despite the violence she had been forced into, attempting to save her and a friend’s lives.
Yes, despite his refusal to take her case, he had actually read the files she’d sent him—not that he hadn’t already known about the non-dev from The Penns who had killed a stalker with a traumatic black knot. Everyone was talking about it, and although in the news Emilia’s identity had been kept quiet due to her age—ironic that privacy laws protected her, as she wasn’t yet thirty, but other laws still expected her to be capable of fending off a killer without seriously injuring them due simply to her D-Level—in legal circles, more information had been shared about her, professional responsibility keeping them from revealing more about the girl to anyone else.
Emilia Starrberg, one of Secretary General Starrberg’s children, was just as much a princess as someone who had grown up a pampered, Penns Sub-30 could be expected to be. The way she walked and talked, the amount of confidence she had, the clothes she wore—everything about the girl screamed of someone who had never seen a day of hardship.
Honestly, Olivier was impressed she’d even managed to fight off the man trying to kill her and her friend, one Lux Archer, the actual object of the man’s stalking. There was nothing to suggest the girl
should
have been able to fend him off, not in the files he’d received anyways, which was only slightly more than the semi-publicly available information, accumulated from news about Secretary General Starrberg’s family by those who knew the girl’s identity, rather than a full description of who she was, of what she was capable of.
Probably, it was just that The Penns took training with skills quite seriously, according to Dean Vicker’s secretary, who had been recommended to the job by one of his sons several decades previous. While she was on their older side, and for some reason hadn’t returned to The Penns since she’d come to work at the university, she had been able to tell Olivier that the compulsory schools on the peninsula took training much more seriously than the schools her own children went to.
“Part of it is the risk of attacks from the sea,”
she had noted, when Olivier had first gone to complain to the dean about the girl invading his classroom.
“It’s not uncommon for creatures to pop out of the sea and try to take a bite out of someone. The other part is all the Hyrats, as well as the occasional Laprise or Baxter—at least, that’s what rumours suggest.”
The woman had gone on to explain that there were rumours that, before the schools had begun to supply students with official education in offensive skills, The Black Knot’s ruling families had taught their children themselves, starting their education early. Those children had then gone on to teach their friends—Olivier had been surprised to learn that even The Black Knot’s children could have
normal
friends, his heart aching that
they
could find people to accept them, despite their black knots, while he couldn’t.
Inevitably—or so the rumours said—a bunch of children being only somewhat educated in the safe use of offensive skills had caused problems. Hence, schools in The Penns had expanded Baalphoria’s standard skills classes—intended to teach students how to use common and basic skills, as well as teach them various laws pertaining to their use—to include offensive skills.
How useful those classes were, was the question… for Emilia’s actual lawyer. Not for him. Olivier was not taking the case. It didn’t matter to him what other details were in her full file—what other secrets were hidden in her past—nor did it matter how much training she actually had.
If she had only a bit of offensive training, how could she be expected to stop her friend’s stalker in a less violent way?
If she had a long history of using offensive skills, why hadn’t she been able to end the fight without killing the man?
Should any of that even matter, given her age?
Should any of that matter, given there was no extra leeway given to people the further they are from 10D, the point at which the law Emilia was being charged under came into effect; in the eyes of that ridiculous law, applicable only to those between 10D and non-devs, the lower a person’s D-Level, the more responsibility they had to stop a fight without violence, without death. To fail to stop a fight—even one they were only a witness to—could result in criminal charges.
In Emilia’s case, her self-defence was treated as manslaughter, and from what Olivier had heard, it had only been reduced from murder due to her father’s personal connections. For the government to have attempted to charge her with murder, simply for defending herself and Lux Archer from someone trying to kill them…
It was despicable, but despite his thoughts continuously being dragged back to the case and the girl they revolved around, it wasn’t Olivier’s problem. It was a lost cause, and even if he ached to take it—ached to see if he could win it and change the law to protect himself and every other low- and non-dev that it applied it, who so often had more responsibility placed onto them not just by their families but society as a whole—he couldn’t.
His mother was already pissed with him, and while he had been saving the pay from both his teaching position and the few cases he took to appease his mother, if he took Emilia’s case—if he risked the publicity of failing in his first big case…
Well, chances were his mother would cut him off again. He could do without the money—especially since with a father like Secretary General Starrberg, he was sure Emilia could afford to pay him well—he had always had problems standing up to his mother. As much as he might have wished for a different life, a softer upbringing with more choices and affection, he also loved law. While he certainly could start his own firm, the power of the de la Rue firm wasn’t anything to scoff at, and not only would it be just like his parents—his mother—to use that power to crush any firm he founded, but he needed that power.
There was so much cruelty in their world. The law being used to prosecute Emilia wasn’t the only one that was sporadically applied, more as a punishment for some other offence than the law aimed at. Laws targeted the poor while leaving the rich to grow richer, even if fortunately their culture tended to shame those who didn’t give enough back to the community. The government exploited workers and people without the resources to ask for help, the laws protecting so many were weak and broken through centuries of badly set precedents at the hands of lawyers who had tried to help but failed due to a lack of support.
Olivier wanted to change those laws, help those people the world didn’t see, through ignorance and turning their gaze aside both. Without his family’s firm behind him, he would be forced to spend years growing a new firm before he could change anything, and while he was sure a handful of his cousins would join him—abandon their own forced fate of joining the family’s firm to support him in the cause they had spent so many hours of their youth whispering about, lest their parents hear and tell them that while taking cases for altruistic reasons was commendable, they’d still need to take proper, soulless, paying cases as well—he didn’t want to condemn them to spending their first years of work struggling through cases without proper supports.
He knew all that. He had spent far too many hours rolling over the same thoughts in his head as he struggled to sleep these last few weeks, since that girl had shown up in his classroom in her revealing clothing and offered him sex in exchange for working on her case—a highly inappropriate offer than had still had his cock hardening in his pants, his mind continuously wandering to thoughts of that beautiful, infuriating woman laid out under him, over his knee, as he jerked himself off.
Yet, despite knowing that taking her case was setting himself up to fail—to more problems to his already ruinous life—Olivier couldn’t quite shake the thought that not taking her case was the mistake—that leaving her brightness to wither away in prison, because of an unfair law, would haunt him for the rest of his fucking life.
.
!
Arc 8 | Chapter 277: That Ache of Future Regret
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