Olivier’s conversation with the clone—Byron Hyrat—was still rattling through his head when he finally found his way back to his room. Aside from another apology message from Emilia and one making sure he actually had his key before she went to sleep, Olivier hadn't heard anything from her—a blessing, given how little it would have taken for her to tempt him back to his room for a round between the sheets, his self-control a thread laying across a razor that even Byron’s words hadn’t been able to dull.
His temporary roommate’s soft breathing greeted him as he pushed his way inside the room, a skill already vibrating around him to keep the sound of the door, his steps, and the light of the entryway from disturbing her sleep. The ability Emilia had sent him earlier, so he could make sure the fall off the Huss’tra had done nothing more than bring a brilliant smile to her face, shifted over his eyes, so he wouldn’t need to turn on the room’s light.
It was an impressive skill, able to extend one's vision just over 10,000 kilometres with ease while also offering the ability to see through various obstacles, darkness included. It also interfaced so perfectly with the function he used to manage his brain’s intake of the world’s details, pulling everything it allowed him to see but not actually notice into a database for his Censor to analyze for anything important, that he couldn’t help but wonder: what were the chances they had been designed by the same person?
If Emilia had designed both this skill and his favourite function… Well, it would perhaps explain why Halen had been so obsessed with learning his reasons for
why
he had never updated the function, despite it having only been available for a few days before an updated version was released. What he’d told Emilia’s former classmates—that he saw no need to update it, as it worked perfectly fine for him and why mess with a good thing?—had been the truth, but not all of it.
A bigger part was simple attachment; the function was the first unofficial function he had ever installed, finding it after his cousin had spent hours lauding two increasingly famous hackers who had recently appeared
on the scene.
Axelle, for as much as he loved the girl, wasn’t the sort to become
excited
about anything—her twin Clovis either. Just like him, they had been raised under the severity of de la Rue
expectations
, and that had taken a toll on them just as much as any of their cousins. So, for Axelle to be practically glowing with praise for hackers that he increasingly suspected might very well be Halen and Emilia—hopefully his cousin hadn’t shared her frankly mortifying smut about the hackers with her new boss—he had been curious to learn more about them.
The function he now lived and breathed with, its code offering him small breaks from the unending chaos of the world, had immediately drawn his attention through its name: {Blissful Silence}. All he had wanted was a little silence, and given his cousin had spent so long talking about how one of the hackers she idolized released hacks for Dyads and other people who needed specific adaptations in order to function in the world without so much extra effort, his first thought had been that it would be a function to turn off his hearing.
The hacker also had a function for that, aimed at allowing people who experienced auditory overload to limit and redirect sound into visual cues, while also letting through sounds it deemed necessary—such as someone screaming their name because they were about to wander off a cliff, as stated in the description. {Blissful Silence}, however, was a mixture of that skill and a cataloguing function, further extending its abilities to lessen the strain of other senses as well. It allowed the user to tune out things they didn’t need to be paying attention to—and something told Olivier that Emilia may not have realized the door to the bathroom was slowly swinging open due to her own use of the skill, and why would she pay attention to the door that was supposed to be closed? It wasn’t like he was the sort to break into bathrooms where beautiful women were potentially naked.
{Blissful Silence} let him ignore everything unnecessary. It let him tune out his mother, the function altering him when he actually needed to respond, as it kept track of everything she said.
It wasn’t like the world was so overwhelming it would drive him to insanity to experience it in full force, the way some Dyads stated their own sensory overloads could, but it was safety and calm, and fuck if he would let anyone touch it until necessary.
Oddly, while his attachment to the function was certainly one of the biggest reasons he didn’t want it touched, there was something more: the fact that it felt like he
shouldn’t
change it. Yet another ridiculous feeling that he could call instinct, a finicky dislike of change, or some sign from the aether.
It was odd; for as much as he held on to this one bit of his Grey Sander heritage, Olivier had never been sure whether he actually believed in it or not. More, it was an amusing, connecting thing to go along with. Up until recently, all the things he had ever felt pushed to do by something somehow
external
from himself had been seemingly small.
Don’t update {Blissful Silence}.
Insist on teaching at Yurndale University.
Pretend to be sick in order to avoid the business conference his mother was trying to force him to attend for networking he didn’t need
—the same conference where Alaric Mhrina’s parents had died in a terrorist attack.
As much as that last one had saved his life, even it hadn’t felt important at the time. As much as he enjoyed teaching, he had been split between thinking the feeling that he
needed
to teach at that specific school was just a combination of some instinct within him and some push from the universe saying
do this one thing for yourself.
Now, Olivier wasn’t so sure it
was
for himself.
So many of the feelings he had chocked up to potentially coming from the universe, potentially coming from his own mind, were now tied to Emilia.
If she had designed the function he ran his entire life with, that was her he had wrapped around himself for comfort for over a decade.
If he had been teaching somewhere else, Dean Vickers wouldn’t have been in a position to let her continuously enter his classroom.
If he hadn’t sent Louis to the conference in his stead, maybe he would be dead. Alaric Mhrina would definitely be dead, Emilia’s friendship with the boy snuffed out before it could begin.
As he slipped into the bathroom, noting the way Emilia had seemingly tried to tidy it up but mostly failed, Olivier skimmed back over the conversation he had had with his cousin while wandering the ship with Emilia.
While in the back of his mind, Olivier had known what happened at the conference his older cousin had intended in his stead, he had never really thought to ask the specifics until he had heard Emilia talk about Halen Mhrina’s cousin. It wasn’t until he had messaged Louis, simply to tell the man that he was thinking of him and how close they had come to losing him a decade earlier, that he had bothered to ask exactly what had happened that day, only realizing as the older man related the details how even this urge from the aether had connected him back to Emilia.
Louis, who loved children and had stupidly agreed to marry a woman who wanted none, had seen a young boy wandering the conference centre alone. Had it been Olivier, on his way to a panel about international trade law and how Baalphoria’s reputation and influence had been changing, largely thanks to the Mhrinas, he would have just brought the boy to the nearest staff member. Let them deal with finding the boy’s parents or returning him where he was meant to be.
Not Louis. His sweet cousin had stayed with the boy and taken it upon himself to get Alaric back to the childcare centre he had somehow escaped from—after letting a staff member know, of course. It was only because of that—because his cousin had given in to the little boy’s request to walk through the outer gardens rather than through the centre itself, despite the additional time—that either had survived.
Had Olivier been there, he would have died. Alaric Mhrina would have been with a staff member—someone who likely would have insisted they take the shortest route back to the childcare centre—and would be dead as well.
Had the boy’s urge to leave the building been a gift from the aether as well? Given how the Mhrinas wore their heritage so freely, occasionally mentioning various beliefs they still held in interviews—although most of those views were much more innocuous to the Baalphorian public than some belief in a
will of the aether
—it wouldn’t surprise him if the little boy—whose name he had only heard for the first time that night, first from Emilia’s smiling mouth, then in Louis’ recollection of that day—had also been taught to follow his instincts.
Thank the stars his cousin was a softy who could never say no to children. While they were over a decade apart in age, Olivier couldn’t imagine his life without the older man—it was part of the reason he was so frustrated with the idiot for not just telling his parents he wanted to marry someone who wanted kids!
His cousin was made to be a father, his love for small humans practically vibrating out of him anytime he was allowed near them. Olivier had no doubt that if his sister wouldn’t kill him, Louis would spend all his time at her house, doting on his niblings.
“Idiot…” he muttered to himself as glared at Emilia’s skincare items—not because they were a mess, but because he had thrown his own skincare items back into his bag that morning. Perhaps Emilia was correct about the unpacking everything thing, even if he was sure her room must be a disaster of her things tossed this way and that, and maybe they should have checked her room for the key? As much as he had found a hole in her bag, allegedly in the pocket where she had stored her room key, it could easily be sitting on her room’s floor.
Surely the ship had a key to get in? They had seemed oddly resistant to letting them in, however, leading to the issue of Emilia sleeping only a few metres away in his clothes—unless she’d stripped. Emilia definitely seemed the sort to sleep naked, and he definitely shouldn’t be thinking about this.
Skincare. Getting his own skincare, despite the risk her might wake Emilia, and she’d end up looking at him with those big purple eyes, filled with sleep and want, and he would fold and fuck her. Using Emilia’s skincare and risking her asking about it tomorrow.
The latter option—definitely the latter option.
As he massaged moisturizer into his face, Olivier drafted a message to Halen, asking for his opinion on Byron’s assertions about Emilia’s case, his mind skimming back over his conversation with Byron.
“Everyone knew that Zachariah Lumos’ father would never allow him to be held accountable for his actions—that man’s high up in SecOps, you know?”
the man had told him as they both nursed drinks in the mostly empty bar—one of the many things they’d spoken about over several hours.
“The kid had already been harassing and stalking Lux Archer, and all his father did was have that traumatic black knot removed. There'd be a week or two where he’d be okay—back to the cheerful kid who existed before the black knot. Then, it would come back. Removed. A few weeks of it being okay, then back again, removed. Every time, it came back worse, and his father was still covering for him. Anyone else would have been put into long-term care—it was clear he was a danger to Lux Archer and anyone he deemed to be ‘getting in his way of being with her,’ and I don’t think Lux Archer ever wanted to be with him, even without the black knot.”
“That kid… I’m sure that even if he’d managed to kill Lux Archer that night and survived—he intended to kill her, then himself, you know?—his father would have still pulled all the strings to get him off. Another round of removing the black knot, then right back to it returning, all so he could obsess over someone else. And if he hadn’t managed to kill her? If Emmie had just stopped him and handed him over to SecOps?”
Silence had stretched between them, the answer to Byron’s question obvious: if the young man hadn’t been killed, nothing would have changed. His black knot would have returned eventually, and with it, the unbreakable obsession he had with Emilia’s friend. Around and around they would have gone, until one day, he would have killed Lux Archer. Maybe Emilia would have gotten her friend out of Baalphoria—she certainly had the connections to hide her away in Seer’ik’tine, at the very least—but if Zachariah Lumos were that unstable… would he have gone after everyone else?
Would every person connected with Lux Archer—every person important enough to be potentially used as leverage to make her return—have been at risk of his obsession snuffing out their life? Those were the sorts of stories most people told about black knots—the ones about the horror of being the object of their obsession; the ones that ended with the black knot in prison, their Censor disabled, or in fountains of blood when they ripped families and friends to pieces trying to get to the person unfortunate enough to be loved by them.
Emilia, who seemed to be both the object of obsession for many black knots—even Byron admitting that he would do anything for her—and loved them in return, would have known how the situation with Zachariah Lumos was going to end, especially if his father were refusing to do anything about it. Ironically, Olivier had heard rumblings that Emilia’s penchant for causing problems, both foreign and domestic, and perpetually escaping legal repercussion had been a factor in her actually being charged with murdering Zachariah Lumos—although it had since been reduced to manslaughter. Two children, allowed perhaps too much freedom and forgiveness by their parents, coming together until one was dead by the other’s hand.
Still, while Olivier imagined Emilia’s reputation was likely a part of why she had actually been charged, despite the ridiculousness of it, he wasn’t convinced there wasn’t the bigger reason: that Zachariah Lumos’ father was trying to protect his son from the consequences of his devolving mental state even in death, perhaps trying to prove
he
hadn’t made a mistake in protecting the boy at the cost of Lux Archer’s safety. He must have known his son was a danger, and yet…
And yet, even though Emilia’s potential reason for not attempting to stop Zachariah Lumos was understandable—something that so many people would accept as a good enough reason to not bother trying to stop him through anything other than death—Olivier didn’t know if it would make a difference.
The laws still said she should have stopped him, not killed him. Low- and non-devs were not the law, nor the arbiters of justice—not in Baalphoria, anyways. Yet, the justice system had failed her and her friends, and—
Olivier was just about to send his message to Halen—their first message since exchanging contact information, the younger man insistent that Olivier could contact him for
anything
—his mind spinning around the reality that Emilia had been forced to choose between killing someone and risking the consequences, and knowing he would return to kill Lux Archer if allowed to live—when a cracking sob broke through {Blissful Silence}, and he was already moving, pushing his way out of the bathroom to the bed and Emilia’s gasping breaths.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 335: Perhaps, These Were Not Choices For Myself After All
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