Clemence was… something. Emilia could think of a number of words to describe the teenager; most were not nice. Terrifying was probably top of the list—she still couldn’t shake the feeling that the younger girl wanted to dig her teeth into her flesh and make a meal of her, even if that particular strain of energy had left the building, the girl more vaguely threatening to anyone who got to close to them now.
Hopefully, that cannibalistic energy would stay outside, withering in the cold, because Emilia had not enjoyed being looked at like she was something to consume! Part of it was probably that she didn’t know this kid—after all, Baylor looked at her in a similar way. Where Clemence had this gleam of starvation in her eyes, however, drool threatening across her grin, the looks Baylor sometimes gave her were filled with bloodlust. He would kill her, if it wouldn’t—you know—
actually
kill her. If some way existed for Baylor to slice into her and her to remain living and not traumatized—Emilia thought not being traumatized by the experience was almost
more
important than her not actually succumbing to whatever injuries Baylor’s little brain wanted to inflict on her—Emilia could see them trying it out…
At the same time, she wasn’t sure she would be trying to design some sort of
temporary murder machine
for him? It might go well—scratch the itch to murder inside him
just
right and give him some relief from the urge he may never be able to scratch properly, even with his work for The Black Knot. On the other hand, it could go terribly and open the chasm of bloodlust within him into a drooling maw, urging him to swallow down all the lives he could.
…
…
Emilia needed to stop with the cannibalism imagery—it was making her stomach turn and urging her to just kill Clemence, lest she sink her teeth into the arm she’d looped her own through and now refused to relinquish. As much as the girl was scary, with all the energy of someone who would happily glue herself to Emilia’s side and never let her know another moment of peace, she was still a teenager. Teenagers were always a little deranged—well, Janie had never been deranged.
When Janie freaked out, there was a good reason for it. To hear Janie yell was to know that someone was about to be injured—potentially fatally injured. It all amounted to the fact that when Janie yelled, everyone listened, and Emilia wasn’t convinced the seemingly innocent girl hadn’t appointed herself as their group’s babysitter back when they’d still been children. Everyone was always yelling—screams of laughter and anger, giggles and sobs when the world was too happy, too heartbreaking. It was wonderful, but also the sort of atmosphere where the more important, life-saving screams might fall under the oppression of all other emotions and words. So, yeah, despite how Janie was always the quietest of their group—even more quiet than Rafe, the number of words she spoke falling far short than those Simeon let fall off from his hands—sometimes it seemed like an act of oppression upon herself—this giving up of her voice in order to make sure that at least a single member of their group would never go ignored when they spoke up.
None of the adults ignored Janie, either—if anything, even when she told them something in the most even of tones they all came running, and yeah, Emilia was increasingly talking herself into the idea that Janie might have purposefully pulled her personality into a specific shape to fit the form of their group. That wasn’t bad, exactly—stars knew Emilia herself pulled herself smaller, while BJ had morphed himself into the medical professional of their group, and so on. They were a family, fitting themselves together in ways that worked and didn’t, all at once. Being together as a unit was something ingrained in all of them, and in order to be that, they had to shave away parts of themselves, pick up the pieces and pass them to others, until they were a puzzle of slightly mismatched edges without corners—that was how Coral had managed to fit into their group, becoming this strange piece that connected their two sides of the class alongside Mikhail, and to a lesser extent Codeth. They were a puzzle without end, always happy to pick up new pieces as they went.
Jerrial could be a new piece, Emilia thought. Vern, with how quiet and surly he was… Emilia had no idea there. Maybe he would fit; maybe he would need to press into Jerrial, the way Polianna did to Coral—a piece that didn’t quite belong to their collective, but could fit fell enough with a single person to be dragged along.
Rayleen wasn’t allowed in their group—the woman gave her the creeps and when they parted ways, Emilia would be perfectly happy to never see her again.
Clemence was a teenager, and teenagers were weird and still coming into themself. So, Emilia didn’t want to outright say the girl needed to be dropped into the abyss with the hope they never met again, but yikes. At least when Emilia watched Cyan moon over Alaric, he was cute in his desperate love for the other boy—intent to make sure Alaric was happy in a way that Emilia thought would work out for them. Still, if Alaric rejected Cyan—insisted they could only ever be friends—Emilia knew the clone would accept it.
To Cyan, Alaric was his everything. If Alaric would never be happy with him as a partner, Emilia knew Cyan would accept it—he wouldn’t be happy about it, but he would accept it, and then spend the rest of his life as Alaric’s best friend, no matter how much it broke his heart.
Emilia had a feeling Clemence wouldn't be happy to accept that she had to leave Lüshan, let alone that she already had a bunch of boys she liked! Emilia didn’t even want to tell her she wasn’t super into girls! They weren’t a complete no—girls could be pretty, although the teenager was far too young for her—but she definitely preferred dicks.
Dicks were just… nice. They were smooth and silky, with a thousand different shapes and curves and sizes. Big dicks. Tiny dicks. Young dicks. Old dicks. All dicks were good dicks.
Vaginas were… something. Not having seen too many, she wasn’t too sure about them. Presumably they were all different? Certainly, a few of the boys she’d randomly hooked up with had made comments about her vagina to imply it was
different
from other ones they’d seen, but while she knew why hers was different, she couldn’t really imagine another vagina and had never bothered to look.
Should she look up some pictures? Compare what she saw to her own? Find some girls to spread their legs for her? Who would she even ask? Her friends? Maybe they’d show her—Emilia had little doubt most of the boys she knew would let her examine their penises, if she asked. So, why did she think the girls might not? Maybe it was just because she’d already seen most of the boys naked over the years, their bits dangling, unhidden, whereas girls were naturally more hidden?
“Why does your face look like that?”
Vern asked, startling Emilia out of her increasingly deranged musing on genitals.
“I was thinking about… things,”
she replied. Admittedly, she’d been about to blurt the content of her thoughts out to the man—his horror would have been amusing. There was a teenager there, however—one who might very well offer to show Emilia her goods and that would be bad and illegal and absolutely not—so she had pulled the words back in. Considering how much trouble she had controlling her mouth, Emilia was quite proud of herself!
“Things?”
Vern replied, bland as he stared at her, his eyes refusing to edge towards Clemence because they both now knew the reality of what—and who—the girl was.
After Clemence had looped her arm through Emilia’s and begun dragging her off, Jerrial had muttered something about checking a nearby room for something or other, dragging Vern with him. Even if his eyes hadn’t lingered a little too long on her own, Emilia would have let her Censor trail after them, intent to eavesdrop on the pair in hopes of either learning more about what Jerrial was looking for—eventually he had to tell them, right?—or about Clemence.
Clemence, as it turned out, was indeed a black knot. Jerrial had heard rumours that the sixteen-year-old had another irregular deviation as well—possibly something related to her tendency towards obsession—but there was nothing concrete to confirm such things. What he had whisper-hissed at Vern, the man’s heart rate rising with each word out of his friend’s mouth until Emilia had become vaguely concerned that he might pass out, had grown increasingly worse as he went.
Apparently, the reason Jerrial hadn’t bothered to tell Emilia about the girl was about what she’d suspected: the teenager was rarely in Falmíer; instead, she spent most of her time either travelling the continent or attending school in another Lüshanian city, learning how to be the Lüshanian equivalent of a medic.
Emilia… was trying not to think too hard about the reality that this girl wanted to become a medic. Some black knots did great in medicine! They could be cold, yes, but the lack of empathy for their patients actually worked for them, more often than not—something about not suffering emotional burnout and being able to leave their work at work. The last part seemed a little dubious to her—all the black knots she knew were workaholics, but maybe that was just the genetics of the Laprise-Baxter-Hyrat family talking—but the first had merit. So, it wasn’t like she was worried about Clemence becoming a medic due to her black knot. It was more… Emilia really didn’t want to think the girl was a cannibal, okay!? She just had those vibes and if Lüshan one day had a cannibal medic on the loose, she was simply going to blink into the abyss and try not to wonder if she should have warned someone about the girl, who had so far managed to keep her association with criminals from the government, as far as anyone could tell.
That was all assuming she could get rid of the kid, however. According to what Jerrial had told Vern—and her; he had definitely intended for her to be listening in—Clemence had a tendency to become obsessed with the
little bugs
Fräthk brought it. Not with all of them—if anything, she was apathetic to most, barely acknowledging their existence on the rare occasion she came around—but the ones she liked?
Well, for a while, she would be obsessed with them. Jerrial wasn’t sure how she managed it, but somehow or other, the teenager was excellent at getting her obsessions out of the city and taking them on her travels. Few of them ever returned, and even when they did, it generally didn’t take long for them to either mysterious disappear—presumably killed off by the girl—or to be sent off on missions where death was a near guarantee. The general assumption was that Clemence either grew tired of them—something that Emilia thought unlikely, given how difficult it was to shake off the love of a black knot—or they had offended her somehow. It was probably the latter: the little girl became obsessed with people so fast that she made up a story of them in her head; then, when they didn’t meet her expectations, her obsession shattered and she didn’t want to be reminded of her error, so she killed them.
“So basically,”
Vern had hissed back at his friend,
“Emilia immediately caught the attention of someone who is definitely going to be trying to kill her in the next hour?”
Was it rude of Vern to assume that she would shatter the girl’s obsession in only an hour? Definitely. Unfortunately, Emilia had similar concerns.
Were this any other situation, Emilia would be weighing her options—deciding if running away and hoping the girl would forget about her were the best option. Maybe she would have run. Still, there was a good chance that she would have been poking around, instead, trying to figure out what the girl’s fictional image of her was like, then slowly tried to correct it into something more like the real her.
Mostly, she just didn’t want to have to either kill the kid if she became a danger to their group. Even if Emilia managed to ditch the teenager and get the fuck out of Lüshan, Clemence knew she was Baalphorian and might very well track her down! Plus! Just because Emilia escaped didn’t mean the girl wouldn’t find a new obsession and continue her murderous ways, and how had this happened!? How had she been stuck with this problem child!?
There was a reason she’d decided to just kill ‘ariah, after all! Black knot obsession was no joke! It could be a decade from now, and she could suddenly find herself staring down this girl again, a willbrand pressed to her neck, Clemence having dozens more deaths under her because Emilia had left her behind to snuff out different lives.
It was all very terrible, and aside from random contemplations of
what
this girl might want from her—she’d been considering both the food and romantic angles, but it could just be friendship—Emilia was still cursing out the aether. Seriously!
Aether blessed
her ass. This was more like a curse, and no, she wouldn’t give up her stupid status as someone capable of dragging black knots to her because of this alone—she loved all her black knots, except this new one, and would not be relinquishing them in hopes of getting rid of this one, thanks. Still, fuck the universe for not only giving her a black knot stalker who maybe wanted to eat her, maybe wanted to fuck her, but also for giving her one who was related to the person they were trying to steal people from because there was that as well: Clemence was Fräthk’s daughter.
Great. Awesome. Just what they needed.
Arc 9 | Chapter 434: Emilia is NOT Food!
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