Olivier was pacing in front of the airship when Emilia skidded around the corner. It wasn’t that she was late or anything—there was still a good hour to go before the ship took off—but she really hadn’t wanted to cause the man more distress because, according to both Halen and Lan’za, the man had been absolutely horrified when she went over the edge of the Huss’tra.
Who would have guessed that he hadn’t known there was a net around most of it—yes, most, but not all. There were a few aetherstreams in the sections on the riverside without nets, which would boot anyone who fell into them into the river and tear up any nets placed near them. Emilia had jumped into one of the aetherstreams when she was about twenty. Never. Again. She’d all but drowned, waking to Meerik’za giving her mouth-to-mouth while Grenner panicked about how he was going to tell her father she’d died in the fucking river.
Emilia still didn’t think he’d ever fessed up to what happened that night. As much as Grenner was her kinda-sorta bodyguard, he was also her friend—this often silent protector lingering in the background, just waiting to step in and protect her, and when he couldn’t? When he let her go off on her own? When she slipped away? When he thought his protection wasn’t necessary because she was going somewhere safe? Well, she knew all those times something bad had happened to her while he wasn’t around weighed on him enough that he covered for her.
Unless she were about to get seriously injured or about to start a war, he left her to her mayhem, neither of them ever telling on the other.
“Olivier!” she cheered, racing up to him with enough momentum that even pulling back, she still slammed into him, giggling. Strong arms met her, the man’s weight and height keeping them from toppling over—not that she would have complained about ending up on top of her soon-to-be lawyer. “Told you I’d make it back in time!”
The smile she aimed up at Olivier was met by a look she couldn’t quite decipher—some mixture of worry and annoyance and something else entirely. Fuck—she’d been hoping that railing into him would completely disperse his worry. Olivier didn’t need to be worried about her.
“You did,” he agreed, his fingers momentarily digging into her hips before he was letting his arms fall and guiding her inside with a gentle push to her lower back. “Lan’za is not with you?” he asked, glancing back the way she had come, his brow furrowing when he finally realized she hadn’t come from the south, but the north.
“I dropped her and Halen off back in the northern district. Lan’za had shit to give me—well, you, technically,” she explained, holding up a bag of sweets that Lan’za had given her with orders to immediately hand it over to Olivier. “These are for the class, unfortunately.”
Olivier accepted the bag of sweets, peeking inside as they were loaded into the elevator along with a number of other guests returning to the ship. As Seer’ik’tine had been the final destination for many of the guests, there weren’t too many returnees. Instead, plenty of new guests were lined up at the reception desk with their bags, and as Olivier evaluated Lan’za gift, Emilia tried to examine the new guests for signs of where they could be going.
Most of the guests seemed to be Dionese, but that wasn’t exactly surprising—the crew had already confirmed they’d be doing night landings throughout Dion. It was easy to assume they’d be landing
somewhere
in Dion for a day trip, the question was where. The other question was what other Free Colonies they could be visiting. According to the vague schedule Olivier had given them, they wouldn’t land in their final destination for another two days—as in, they had two days of travel; two days of presumably exploring other Free Colonies. It was perfectly possible both days would be in Dion—the Free Colony was huge and only ignorant people assumed western and eastern Dionese culture were anything alike—but something told Emilia that was unlikely.
From what she knew of airships and their flight patterns, this one was probably staying in the southern and central portion of the continent, and that didn’t leave a huge number of Free Colonies for them to visit. There were a few south of Dion, but they were sparse and generally a bit more standoffish to visitors—not that that meant they couldn’t land there! It would just be an entirely different vibe than Seer’ik’tine’s passing tolerance—at least until someone snapped—or Dion’s stern policy of throwing foreigners who irritated them into their prisons until they could be removed from the nation.
Emilia had been in those prisons. The ones they kept annoying foreigners inside weren’t too bad. Now the ones they stuck Dionese criminals in…
A soft brown hand appeared in front of Emilia as their elevator began to empty, only going up far enough to get them into the ship, before they’d have to switch to another elevator to take them… actually, where were they going? To their rooms? To eat? It had been a while since Emilia had last eaten…
“Thank you…” she sighed, popping the offered sweet bun into her mouth. Part of her had been tempted to lean down and bite it straight out of Olivier’s hand, but the man was feeding her, and she didn’t want to piss off the hand that fed her. “Is dinner soon?”
“It was supposed to be,” the man grumbled, hand once again pressing into the small of her back and guiding her along as she ate the sweet, jelly-filled bun he had given her.
“Supposed to?”
she absentmindedly signed, too used to signing when her mouth was full, especially after having eaten lunch with Halen.
Virtually everyone she ate with could sign, and in preparation for the trip, she and the triplets had attempted to stop signing at the table. They had been questionably successful, only occasionally lapsing into signs when they were discussing something particularly interesting… or just plain old bickering, her and Baylor having gotten into a heated discussion about the show they were both enjoying for very different reasons. The fact that it had taken nothing more than a short meal with Halen, the pair of them slipping between signs and spoken words as the mood suited, for that practice to be proven useless was a little sad, and yet expected.
Emilia loved signing; it had been her and her friends’ and siblings’ primary mode of communication for decades, and even if they often fell into using a combination of their hands and voices whenever Atticus and Simeon weren’t around, it was still an inherent part of all of them. It would probably be easier for her to never speak again than to never write words into the world with her hands.
“Sorry. Habit,” she told Olivier when she managed to swallow. “Supposed to?”
The man blinked at her, slow and steady, as he pulled them into another elevator—one she hadn’t even noticed they’d come to. Actually, when had he hit the call button?
“We had a reservation, but half the class went to go
decompress at the pool after such a harrowing day,
while the others are either resting or went off to eat on their own.”
“You seem rather done with them.”
“Yes.” It wasn’t quite a growl, but it was close enough to one that Emilia had to laugh.
“Does that mean we can keep the sweets for ourselves? Does your room have a fridge in it? We can just keep it all for ourselves and eat them together over the rest of the trip~”
Olivier definitely looked tempted, although he was probably too polite to admit he wanted to do such a thing. Instead, he just continued guiding her along, out of the elevator and towards their rooms.
“Do you want to try?” she asked, holding up the last bit of her bun to him. Some people didn’t like eating food that another person had had their mouth around—her brother was the sort who would turn away if he even saw other people sharing food, his stomach pulling in because just the idea of such a thing turned his stomach—and it wouldn’t have surprised Emilia to learn Olivier wasn’t the sort to tolerate such things, although… hadn’t he tried her food at the restaurant?
Still, Emilia was shocked when they stopped in front of their rooms’ outer door, and Olivier didn’t just accept the offering but leaned down and ate the food directly from her hand! His lips even suckled her jelly-sticky fingers for a moment before he popped off, chewing contemplatively as he pulled out his key and unlocked the door, ushering her into the small entryway.
“It is good,” he finally said, not even deigning to look at her exceptionally red face as he unlocked his room’s door and left her standing there, staring after his vanished form and into the abyss of the wooden door.
What the everlasting fuck had that been!?
Emilia was still staring at the door, wondering if she had imagined whatever that had been or if the man would complain if she barged in and returned the favour by sucking his fingers—or cock; either was fine with her—when her xphern buzzed. The poor thing had been sent over the edge along with her, and while it was fine—she’d long ago been gifted a heavy-duty model in a custom colour due to her history of absolutely destroying them with her antics—her bag had seen better days… not that it had looked particularly
great
in decades. It had been a gift when she and her siblings had left the orphanage, and she loved it. It came everywhere with her. It was all but in tatters.
Once, Yujao had sewn it up for her, his delicate stitching long frayed and barely recognizable as the lucky symbols they had once been. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could visit him again soon, and he would redo them for her. At the rate her bag was going, it would be losing shit before long—
The message to Lan’za, confirming she’d made it back to the ship and hadn’t tried to steal all the sweets for herself, swept off as Emilia began more frantically digging through her bag.
Fuck.
The fucking key. Where had it gone?
“Oh, come on,” she muttered to herself, digging and digging until she finally plopped down and dumped the entire thing out.
Seer’ik’tine money clattered over the floor, the book she’d been reading flopping on top of it—it was the last in the Grey Sander series she’d been reading, and that shit only existed on paper. Emergency knife. The willbrand hair-clip she kept tucked into the bottom, just in case someone took her necklace. A thousand hairbands because she was always loosing those. Lip chap, nail clipper, some emergency makeup.
WHERE WAS THE KEY!?
Seriously! It had been a large, heavy thing, and yet, it was gone! Just gone! Now, she was going to have to go to the steward’s office and beg for a replacement… assuming they had one?
Oh, fuck. What if this was one of those ships without spare keys? Or, they’d only have one for the guest and another for the cleaners? Actually, fuck all that. That key had had her room number on it—or, part of it, anyways—and since she had no idea
where
she’d lost it, didn’t that mean the entire lock would need to be replaced, lest someone find it and come break in?
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fu—
“What are you doing?”
Emilia
may
have squeaked, her head snapping up to meet the other non-dev’s eyes. He looked good like this, slightly more casual after changing his clothes and gazing down at her. Was he wearing sweats? If she rose up on her knees, could she just tug them down and—
“Did you lose your key?”
“Okay, it is really unfair that you can so easily guess what happened,” Emilia grumbled, deflating when Olivier squatted down next to her. “Sorry. I swear I put it in the inner pocket, but it’s not there.”
Olivier pushed through the chaos of her bag’s guts, picking up each of the hair elastics as he went and fingering the willbrand hair clip in a way that told her he could feel that it wasn’t a normal clip but had probably never handled a willbrand before—they weren’t particularly common outside of the military, law enforcement, and, well, her friend group, thanks to her own willbrandsmithing efforts.
“May I?” he asked, so polite as he motioned to her bag.
“Just be gentle. It’s important to me,” she sighed, sagging further against her door, her knees pulling into her chest as she just watched the man methodically search through her bag, his fingers eventually finding the hole the key must have fallen through. “Fuck. Sorry.” There really wasn’t an excuse for not noticing a hole that big.
The lawyer made a considering sound as he rose, extending a hand to haul her up. “It happens. We should go inform the ship, so they can change the lock and do whatever else they have to.” Turning away, he pushed his door further open and shooed all her stuff inside with a skill before setting the bag ever so gently inside. “My brother is terrible at leaving his things everywhere,” Olivier explained when Emilia raised a questioning eyebrow, his hand once again finding her back and pushing her along. “When he refuses to move his things from the floor, I move them for him.”
“Do you move them into his room?” she asked, already guessing that the answer was no.
A smirk tugged at Olivier’s lips as they stopped in front of the elevator, and he glanced at the map, determining where they had to go—two floors up, then another elevator down three, then a bridge to the admin area, apparently.
“No, definitely not into his room.”
Arc 9 | Chapter 321: the chaos of her bag’s guts
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