Sometimes, Emilia thought she and Halen were destined to be enemies, at least for a little while. The thing was, they had so seamlessly fallen into disliking each other; yet, looking back on their first meeting, something about how easily them came to be positioned against one another felt off. It was a perfect storm of incidents that led to them finding each other intolerable where they really should have been friends, so many of their interests and personality traits lining up in a way that should have worked, and yet seemed forbidden by the universe from doing so.
That morning had been bad. Emilia hadn’t slept well, her mind swirling with remembrances of her first home—of palms slapping over her face and hands moving over her in ways that had both made her uncomfortable but never actually pushed into something she would consider illegal.
Sometimes, it wasn’t so much the action itself, but the energy that surrounded a moment and the people involved that made whatever was happening uncomfortable. Emilia had looked it up once, the unfortunate precautions people who wanted to do terrible things to unwilling, too small bodies might do. Given how small she’d been, she suspected that those adults who still haunted her mind had wanted to do horrific things to her but had known it would leave injuries they couldn’t explain away. Probably, they’d just been waiting for her to get a little bigger before doing anything
more.
In the meantime, they’d been happy to try and force her young mind to accept their more innocent touches. She hadn’t accepted them. She got in trouble often enough anyways. What was a little more punishment for refusing an indecently innocent touch from someone who looked at her with covetous eyes when she already spent so much of her life being punished?
The night before she and Halen met, there had been a breaking story about an orphanage. Grotesque. Vile. Evil.
Emilia had gotten out of a place like that through sheer luck—through a self-imposed removal of herself from the eyes of the public and an accidental meeting with her father. The reminder of how terrible those places could be—the reminder that it truly took the most horrific of things for the government to step in because there were never enough homes or staff to manage the orphans of their nation.
Life in her first home might have been a decade removed from her mind, but it still took its toll at times, and Emilia had spent that night curled up in Malcolm’s bed, Andre and Rafe joining them at some point she couldn’t remember.
Once, she would have curled in with her siblings, but they had missed the newscast, Emilia having almost immediately limited what they could view on their Censors within days of their installation. Atticus and Indigo were just more fragile than she was, and the fact that she had spent the night tossing and turning and crying in Malcolm’s bed was proof that she wasn’t even that strong.
They didn’t need to be reminded of how terrible that place had been, nor of that fact that Emilia had been singled out by those adults because she was a troublemaker—no one believed a troublemaker—and because she was a silverstrain.
A slut.
A whore.
A temptress.
Who could blame someone for wanting a taste?
Who was to say she hadn’t invited those hands?
Who was to say it wasn’t her genetics making her think something untoward was happening?
Children like her were the ideal target, even above Indigo, who would always be a sweet, naive thing, or Atticus, who would always struggle to communicate.
Her siblings, of course, knew about the limits on their Censors—it wasn’t like Emilia had locked them out of certain content without discussing it with them or their parents beforehand. They were happier to be left in the dark, but she was sure that there were times when they could tell when something was wrong. It wasn’t always that some piece of news had brought her brain back to that horrible place, of course; sometimes it was just her mind summoning up horrors that her brother and sister would understand if she dared speak them aloud. Emilia wouldn’t tell them unless she had to. It was her job to protect them, and regardless, they weren’t the same tight threesome they had been at that home, a distance having expanded between them over the years of growing into teenagers—and now young adults—with vastly different interests and friend groups. Sometimes it was sad, to no longer be as close to these two people who were a part of her soul, but mostly, Emilia thought they were grateful that she had other friends to take care of her when her mind ran away from her.
They would help if she needed them to, of course. They were happy that she had other people to help because Indigo and Atticus were each a perpetual ball of issues themselves. That was okay—Emilia would give what she could to her siblings, letting her parents fill the role of caretaker that she had been forced into in their first home. They were parents to her as well, but sometimes, Emilia just needed someone warm and safe and deadly to hold her.
Malcolm would kill for her—had nearly killed creepy men for her before. Rafe hadn’t killed for her back when this happened, but she had suspected he would—now knew that he would. Then, there was Andre, someone she suspected would one day run The Black Knot, and who she knew would cut down anyone who dared touch his friends, even without a black knot crossing over his empathy into obsessive love.
So, she’d slept in their arms, these three boys who had been her first friends outside of that home and who would love her to the end of the world and back. Things had been okay that morning—they’d had some delicious treats delivered for breakfast, and Malcolm had done her hair for her before gently tugging her to school.
Things had been okay. Not great—she was too sleep-deprived for things to be great—but okay.
Things had been okay.
There had already been whispers when they got to school of a new kid—a rare transfer student. Then, Halen had been in her class, and he’d been cocky, yes, but overall, it hadn’t been anything so terrible that he would be exiled to the
other side
of their class—not forever, not so intensely, anyways.
Then, he’d said something bad about Malcolm. Malcolm, who was tired and grumpy from her tossing and turning all night. Malcolm, who was just being his normal, anti-social self. Malcolm, who loved her with so much intensity that if he could have hunted down every adult who had ever made her feel uncomfortable, he would have.
Halen’s words against Malcolm had been a line, cut through their classroom. Halen on one side. Emilia on the other. On went the next decade of their lives.
A decade later, while high and happy and waiting to be arrested so they’d have an alibi after trashing Coral’s old school, Halen had apologized for what he’d said that day.
“I don’t even know where that came from. I never thought that. It was like… I know it sounds crazy—like some pathetic attempt at an excuse—but it felt like something else put words in my mouth? Then, I was saying them, and there was no taking them back, only ever regretting saying them,”
he’d whispered into the heat of her neck—public intoxication alone hadn’t been working to get SecOps to come arrest them, so they’d moved on to working towards public indecency.
Halen had been so gentle with her, aware that she didn’t have sex while high or drunk and so careful to not make her feel trapped or unsafe at any point despite it never going further that some heated kisses and searching hands—they didn’t actually want to be charged, just picked up and given a talking to before their parents came to pick them up. Despite their long history of animosity and war, Emilia had, of course, trusted him—Halen wouldn’t hurt her, not on purpose. Yet, when he’d gotten hard, he’d pulled his hips away from her, and she’d had to pull him back, making sure he knew it was okay.
She trusted him—trusting Halen felt like something she was meant to do, yet there was constantly a road of issues that pushed near insurmountable problems between them. The odd thing was, with anyone else, they would never become such friendship-blocking problems. Only with Halen—only ever with Halen. With anyone else, that apology would have shifted them into friends. For her and Halen, it had only softened their relationship a little—and that
little
was doing a lot of work. For her and Halen, it had only been the day before that it had felt like something else could exist between them, unnamed as that thing might be.
Emilia was thinking about all this as she stared into beautiful golden eyes. Behind her, Emilia could feel Jerrial and Vern hiding behind a wall, the former’s energy primed to attack while Vern seemed to be trying to get him to run. That was okay. They didn’t know each other well, and Emilia wouldn’t hold Vern wanting to leave her behind against him, especially since she’d literally just walked into this beautiful, oddly familiar woman’s arms.
There were so many memories from Emilia’s early childhood that she remembered with pinpoint accuracy: those wandering hands; meeting the people who would become her father and mother for the first time; so many of those terrible, hateful words the adults who were supposed to care for her had said about her when she was too young to even begin to understand why they hated her for simply existing.
Slut.
Whore.
Silverstrain.
There were things she didn’t remember as well, the imprint of them lingering in her mind and yet not really there in anything more than whispers, entwined into her soul. So many of her hours had been spent in solitude as punishment for this or that—as punishment for not liking a hand on her shoulder, innocent and yet holding the energy that one day, it wouldn’t just be on her shoulder. Spending so much time alone, Emilia thought it normal that she would make herself an imaginary friend. They’d been close, she knew; yet, most of that imaginary friend she had created for herself had been lost to time, each strand of them dragged out of her until she knew something was missing, but also knew they’d meet again—at least, that’s what her imaginary friend had said that last time they had visited, during the punishment she hadn’t known would be the last, and yet, that imaginary friend somehow had. It was the only memory she really had of them, decades removed and blurry as it was. Soft golden eyes and a bright smile, their words odd and accented as they told her they’d meet again, no matter what.
This woman’s eyes reminded her of that imaginary friend, although she was sure they weren’t quite right. The colour was right, the shape and feel of them different.
It was ridiculous, she knew.
It was still a feeling she had, inescapable, as they continued to just watch each other.
It perhaps would have been easier to think that it was that odd similarity that led Emilia to think that maybe there was a reason they had met here—a reason she had zoned out and not microsparked off with Jerrial and Vern long before crashing into the woman because Jerrial had certainly been calling her back long enough that she should have been able to at least try to get them out of there. With so many whispers of the aether guiding people’s way having been uttered over the last day, Emilia was tempted to just think that the case: that the aether had guided her into this woman’s arms. Maybe that was part of it, if someone were inclined to believe in such things. Yet, something seemed wrong, her mind flowing through little moments that seemed just slightly
wrong
because if she were to assume the aether were pulling the strings here, she had to assume it was pulling them elsewhere.
Emilia had almost always been too friendly, too willing to make friends with everyone who crossed her path. More important than that, perhaps, was the fact that she held on to those friendships too strongly, letting toxicity slide because she loved having friends. Seriously, she’d heard the whispers of how people were glad she’d killed ‘ariah, everyone aware that if he was still alive she might have stayed his friend despite the danger he presented them.
That
was why she was thinking of her first disastrous meeting with Halen: it was weird that standing here, with someone who was allies with Fräthk, she was thinking about how maybe she and this golden eyed woman could be friends, when she had virtually never thought that she and Halen could be friends.
Not until the day before—not in any real, substantial way.
She and Halen were made to be enemies, and yet they weren’t. They were so alike, always pushing each other forward. Emilia couldn’t deny, however, that if they’d just been friends—if they hadn’t ended up in a prank war that had been cruel and near deadly at times—they might not have pushed each other so hard. Maybe they would have collaborated, but there was no way they would be the hackers and skill designers they were today without the animosity that had filled their late-teens and twenties. Now, as they tiptoed into friendship, Emilia knew they’d keep pushing each other because there was only so much they could do to soften the edges of their rivalry—a rivalry they’d both happily admitted they liked.
So, instead of standing there, thinking only that the aether had guided her into this woman’s arms, intent to make sure they met and became friends because of some stupid resemblance to an imaginary friend, Emilia was also left wondering about her and Halen—about what the chances were that the aether had made sure they wouldn’t be friends until their rivalry was set.
Emilia had no idea what she thought of the so-called will of the aether, but if it was a thing—if it did really exist and worry itself over the relationships and affairs of the humans living within it—it didn’t seem like a good thing that it may have wanted her and Halen to push each other into becoming the deadly, innovative hackers they were today.
No, if the aether wanted them—and all the friends who had benefited from their long war—to become the monsters they were, that definitely didn’t seem like a good thing at all.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 401: Someone I was meant to hate, if only for a blink of time
Comments