“I dunno~ that Olivier guy definitely seemed interested in you~” Baylor teased as he and his brothers escorted Emilia through campus, attracting looks wherever they went. That wasn’t new—even in The Penns, where the sight of any clone wasn’t anything new, they still attracted attention—but Valor in particular was taking the attention worse than usual.
Out of the three of them—out of practically any living clone, save Cyan—Valor wanted a more normal life. It wasn’t like he was expecting that he’d ever get one, but both he and Taelor could tell he ached for something more normal.
Valor wanted friends outside of The Penns, where, admittedly, they’d mostly been vaguely friendly with Emilia’s friends because of her. If she hadn’t been around, it would have just been the three of them, the clones who were close in age as well, many of whom shifted in and out of Emilia’s friends group with more fluidity than they did.
Valor wanted to go to university, to have a gap decade—Valor just wanted to live a life that he wanted, rather than the one forced on them by their faces and black knots and family legacy.
Now, wandering through the winding courtyards and stone paths of Yurndale University, it was clear none of them were likely to achieve that here. Not together. Not with their own faces.
Baylor wished he could do something to help his little brother settle into their lives. He would even have continued attending school, if that would make Valor happy—he had never really been one for school, too unhappy being forced to sit still by anything other than Taelor’s oppressive energy and threats of punishment.
Being in a place like this, though… Baylor doubted it would actually make Valor happy. Maybe in a decade, when their friends—when Emilia—were done with their gap decades and deciding which school to go to, which path in life to take, they’d discuss it again. With Emilia there, joyful and beautiful, they could at least enjoy a bit more of a normal life, if only for the years it took until she got whatever fabulous job she finally settled on—most of them were betting something to do with coding or international relations—and left them to their fate in The Black Knot.
Of course, Baylor had already suggested this to his brothers, and while Taelor had seemed perfectly happy to plan to discuss the issue again in ten years, Valor had refused; he didn’t want to ruin Emilia’s own attempt at a normal life by tagging along, by leaving her beholden to their fate of being feared by nearly everyone they came across.
Nearly everyone.
“I liked him,” Baylor continued, thinking back to the way Olivier de la Rue had spoken to Grenner with respect and kindness, looking at him more with the wariness of someone who had never spent much time with a Hyrat clone, rather than the abject fear of someone who would never see them as anything more than the weapons most people assumed them to be. “Bonus points for his great taste in women.”
“He’s not interested,” Emilia snorted, which, what?
“Yes, he is,” Valor replied quietly from Emilia’s other side, each of them having linked an arm through hers as they walked, Taelor trailing in his habitual spot of just behind them, their perpetual protector and caretaker, always watching each of them, lest they need help or step out of line. Their youngest gave Emilia an assessing look. “Usually, you are excellent at seeing when someone wishes to fuck you. I wonder why you can’t tell that he wants to.”
“Probably because she wants to fuck him back,” Baylor laughed, breaking off into a grunt and more laughter when Emilia elbowed him.
“Emmie has always been quite terrible at telling when her interest is reciprocated,” Taelor added, amusement dancing in his eyes when the three of them glanced back.
“It took us a decade to get her into our bed, and I do not think we were particularly subtle about our interest,”
he added, signing the words because there were definitely a handful of students using less-than-legal skills to eavesdrop on them.
Taelor had a point, though, and when he gave it more than a single brain cell of thought, Baylor couldn’t help but see the similarities between themselves and Olivier. The lawyer was Emilia’s teacher—kinda, anyways—and highly annoyed object of her desire—mostly in regard to him taking her case—all of which meant he had to be professional with her. Yet, there had definitely been a moment there where Baylor had sworn the man was about to approach her, the want and desire clear in his eyes.
Unfortunately, he had already been making his way down to his childhood friend, and while he could have stopped, doing so would have left him standing between Emilia and the door—the door where the man’s nasty bodyguard had been. So, yeah, he could have stopped and let the lawyer shoot his shot, but chances were it would have been interrupted, and something told him the non-dev lawyer would never try again, were his advances cut off like that.
That mix of professional and wanting energy created an atmosphere that was similar to what had previously existed between the four of them. He and his brother were aware that what they were to one another was strange—perhaps not within the context of the other clones, who had a long history of finding comfort, if not outright love, with one another, but with anyone else. So, they’d kept the exact details of their relationship to themselves and hidden away their desire to have fun with Emilia, should she be willing, when in front of anyone who wasn’t her.
Emilia was acceptance and love, and when she did eventually learn exactly how close they were to one another, she really hadn’t cared—had instead told them they were perfect exactly the way they were, and in no world would she ever expect them to be
normal
.
Before that—for nearly a decade before that moment, only a few years ago now—they had hoped she would be accepting, if not interested, in them as a collective unit. So, they had been more open with one other and her when it was just them, something Emilia had directly cited as the reason she had had no idea even one of them would be interested in getting between her legs, let alone all three of them.
For a decade, they had been a mastery of contradictions that had left her just assuming they were weird and whatever want she occasionally saw in their eyes was in her imagination, and oh, fuck. Had
they
messed up her ability to spot mutual desire in someone?
Well, that sucked. Maybe one of them should go explain to her so-to-be lawyer—there was no way Emilia wasn’t breaking that man—that he was going to need to lay out his desire for her in simple terms?
As they reached the bubble stands, students talking in hushed words as they approached, many of them shuffling off because apparently even standing in the same space as them was too much, Baylor wondered if they actually should.
While the three of them might like sharing Emilia, they also knew that she needed something… more. As much as they loved her, their friend needed a partner who wouldn’t be risking their life practically every day—that was a big part of the reason they had never suggested anything more permanent between them. They hooked up often enough, Emilia spending many nights tucked between them, or occasionally within the arms of only one of them, but they could never quite be what she needed, and they were okay with that.
Could someone like Olivier be that for her? Certainly, the man had a good, if mean, vibe. Emilia liked mean, practically melting under Taelor’s hands any time he’d had enough of her being a brat. Plus, another non-dev? For a long time, a lot of them had imagined her and Andre getting together, but in the end, they had been better off as friends, and Andre… Baylor wasn’t sure Andre had a sexual bone in his body.
Emilia didn’t
need
a non-dev—and the Junkaiden non-dev she’d met had practically driven her insane with his own advances, back when they were teenagers—but there was something nice about the symmetry of it. One monster for another, although Baylor was positive Emilia was far more monstrous than the lawyer realized.
“Leave it alone,”
Taelor signed once they’d situated themselves into the bubble that would take them back to Roasalia.
While most students lived on campus, due to how far even the closer city of Kwenlee was, Emilia only snuck into Olivier’s classes twice a week, far enough apart that there was little reason for her not to continue bunking in the Hyrat dorms in the capital, although returning home, to the southern tip of The Penns, would be a bit much.
“You have no idea what I’m thinking,”
Baylor replied, knowing that while the minutes-older man might not be inside his head, he was always so aware of how both his and Valor’s minds worked to be able to guess at what they were thinking. It was both annoying—seriously, sometimes he would just like to have some thoughts all his own—and exactly the point of their being raised together.
Taelor levelled a look that promised consequences if he did or said anything to Emilia’s teacher. While normally Baylor would be quite enthusiastic about being punished by Taelor, something told him his brother felt strongly enough about this that, if he dared do anything, it wouldn’t be a fun punishment.
“Fine,”
he signed back, slouching into the plush seat of their luxury bubble—it was a long ride, and they could afford the expense, not to mention hopefully make use of the bed that could be deployed—as Emilia and Valor turned back from the window, where they’d been watching a sea of zirth flutter by, their dark, mesmerizing wings casting the relative peace of the hills surrounding Yurndale into a world of darkness.
It was a rare sight, to see so many of the creatures swarming, and there were myths all through the continent of the zirth being a bad omen—a sign that the end was nigh.
Nigh
as in something terrible would happen in the next decade or so, many record spawning years occurring years before any major war or formation of an aether scar. Considering war had been a common occurrence until the last few centuries of strained peace, that wasn’t anything impressive. The weakest of correlations, and certainly not causation, in Baylor’s opinion.
What was impressive were the inspiring stories that carried even over cultural divides, claiming that the zirth were also an omen of the hero, their place of appearance said to foretell that a hero, capable of stopping the predicted calamity was also nearby.
In Baylor’s opinion,
that
was much more interesting, and tons of stories from both within and without Baalphoria spoke of heroes and the zirth seas they had once witnessed, long before they knew they were a hero. Others told of heroes who had taken the sight as a sign they would do great things. Interestingly, in some stories anyone could fall prey to the call of heroism, should they witness a sea of zirth, while in others, only a true hero would ever take it to be something meant for them, many stories existing of children questioned about their opinions on the black storm that had overtaken their village, only to be snatched away by various factions to be killed or trained.
While he hadn’t generally enjoyed school, Baylor did enjoy reading, especially tales of heroes and legends that had been broken apart by Colonial Wars and word of mouth. If Valor’s wish in life were to live normally, even just a little bit, his own was to travel and hear more stories. The pyr of Nur’tha never wrote down the tales they etched into their energy, instead passing the knowledge along through generations of pyr and oral tradition. Foreigners recording the stories of their past was forbidden, but if he could visit…
If he could visit, would they allow him to sit and listen? Soak in the history so few outsiders ever had license to hear?
Baylor didn’t know, but he could hope.
Not that that hope were ever likely to come to any resolution. As much as every clone was given leave for rest and vacation, it was often difficult, given how long their assignments could run.
Eyes flicking back to Emilia, Baylor’s mind spun back to the long list of reasons she couldn’t be theirs, the fact that they would have to leave her alone for long stretches of time chief among them. Emilia deserved better than that, better than what little they could give her.
Each of them loved her, and because of that alone, they wouldn’t keep her, wouldn’t tie her to them, despite the itch that lingered under each of their skins, urging them to take her away and smother her in love and affection until she physically couldn’t take it anymore.
Taelor’s eyes met his when he finally looked back to his brother, their eyes filled with the same sad longing—the same heartbreaking understanding that if they could have something normal, it wouldn’t be a school life or even a gap year. It would simply be a normalcy so they could keep Emilia—make her happy and not risk dying in the field and leaving her heartbroken.
As though their death even before they started sleeping together wouldn’t have cracked her heart in half.
“Talie~” Emilia whined, suddenly sliding into the seat next to Taelor and pouting up at him. “I’m bored~”
Baylor almost laughed—they’d only been in the bubble for a few minutes—but he couldn’t, his cock already hardening with all the promise those few words had.
Oh yeah, this was gonna be a fun trip back into the capital.
.
!
Arc 8 | Chapter 280: The Omen of a Hero
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