[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia didn’t think Halen was convinced by her claims that she was so totally strong. The dubious look on his face was entirely fake, of course—he knew well enough that she was physically stronger than virtually everyone, even without trying. While she might not spend time in the gym, lifting weights and working with machines that interfaced with Censors in ways that she could only ever think of as surface, every non-dev’s body was just made to be strong without effort—every low-dev’s as well, even those without Perfect Physical Levels close enough to perfect that it made little difference.

For her, Halen, and every other person graced with such obnoxious D-Levels—low-dev or Perfect Physical Levels—only people who actually put an active effort into hitting the gym and having an actually useful training regime could ever stand up to them in a test of physical strength—and that wasn’t even taking all the other little things that gave them an edge into account. The attention to detail, the coordination, the motivation, the ease at which so many of them learned and adapted; these were all things that anyone could have and train into themselves, and certainly, there had been people in their class who had needed to push a little harder to meet those of them at the peak, but they’d still succeeded in meeting—and even occasionally surpassing—them with that extra effort.

Then, of course, there had also been those who refused to try to meet them, content to stay behind and cheer them on, forced to give up because they couldn’t handle never being quite good enough to compete with them. The number of times Darrian had tried to encourage Leerin to at least try to keep up with them, his own efforts never quite enough to keep up even as he tried and tried. He never gave up—never let his inability to keep up get to him, as far as she could tell. Leerin was the complete opposite, every second she spent trying to keep up and not quite managing it, a blow to her person that was painful to watch.

Where Darrian had taken his association with the monsters of their friend group and used their personality and abilities to propel himself further than he likely would have gotten without such crazy friends, Leerin had let herself linger in the background. Leerin was smart, motivated in a generically Penns way where so many members of their friend group were motivated in the lazy, obsessive low-dev way.

Despite all the bits of being a low- and non-dev that Emilia knew set them apart, she had always viewed them as people whose abilities were only useful in three categories: within highly specialized industries—see Olivier, the lawyer, so many of The Ridge Rind’s researchers, and most hackers—during the currents of war—the Blood Rain General had long ago proven that non-devs dominated in war, only non-devs from other nations ever able to handle him in battle—and in driving those around them forward.

They were inspirational and destroying in equal measure. Their class had dragged Darrien, BJ, Lux and so many others along with them, inspiring them to always try to do better. They had also destroyed other friends, like Leerin, at least to some extent. Without them, Leerin may have been a bit more confident, but she had found it impossible to be confident in their shadows, and it sucked.

There was also little Emilia or any of the rest of them could do about it. While some of them certainly made themselves smaller at times—and Emilia wasn’t convinced Halen wasn’t as physically built as some of his terrible friends simply because he hadn’t gone to the gym with them, disinclined to ruin their spirit when barely any effort would be required for him to build the bulk so many boys in his friend group had worked so hard for—it wasn’t their job to push their personalities and interests and motivation smaller to make others feel better about themselves.

So many of them had tried to help those friends. Sometimes, they’d succeeded—Halen’s friend Coral working up the courage to ask Polianna out thanks to all his encouragement was proof of that, even if Emilia still thought Coral had shit taste—sometimes, they didn’t. There was only so much they could do, even if it hurt.

It also sucked that the entire situation had left so many of them feeling more comfortable with each other and other low-devs than anyone else. Around low-devs, they didn’t have to worry about shining too bright. Around Halen, Emilia didn’t have to worry about his reaction when she offered him a hand, unafraid to show her unassisted strength, even as she lifted the other arm and flexed. Her muscles didn’t move at all because just like her former classmate and every other low-dev, unless she trained for muscle size, she would never be big, only strong.

Halen, who had rearranged himself so he could reach her hand, pulled the hand that had been centimetres from brushing her fingers back, flexing his own arm dramatically, as though he weren’t afraid of losing his precarious grip on the small lips and grooves that covered the cold black stone of the Huss’tra and ending up back on the net. There was a little more movement in his own biceps, but it was still pretty minimal; just like her, Halen preferred activities that didn’t lead to much natural muscle growth. If either of them wanted to bulk out, they’d have to put a little more effort into it.

“You have almost as little muscle as me!” Emilia joked as he grinned up at her and finally grasped her hand, the pair of them using their combined physical strength, momentum and a minor skill to get him onto the ledge—Emilia wasn’t willing to risk them toppling over, given she was sure Olivier wouldn’t be able to calm down until she was safely back on the ship.

Leaning back against the Huss’tra, Halen gazed out at the sunset. She’d made the ledge a little small, and their thighs pressed together, their arms sticking together. Perpetually moving, Emilia’s leg bounced, constantly hitting Halen’s through a mixture of not giving a shit if she was annoying him and actively trying to get a reaction out of him. The most she got was his own foot occasionally shifting to temporarily capture her own.

“I once heard a girl saying she didn’t like too much muscle on men—well, boys, at the time,” he finally said in answer to her comment about his lack of bulk.

“Oh? A girl you liked?”

“It was a long time ago.” Thɪs chapter is updated by novel{f}ire.net

“So? Some people spend decades in love before moving on or finally getting with them.”

Halen leaned back a little further, shoulders cracking, while they continued staring off towards the bay, towards the ocean beyond. Further, and further still, lay another continent. There was a little trading with them, but that was about it. An unknown world, even more unknown than the southern Free Colonies, visible in their peripheral vision, the nations beyond them nothing by myths and horror stories.

It never failed to amaze her how disconnected their world was, so many mysteries no one could touch existing all around them. There were a few diasporas scattered through the Free Colonies, but they were so rare and maligned—outcasts in the societies that begrudgingly allowed them a home. Few people travelled, virtually no one risked exploring the continent, let alone the world as a whole, knowing the chances of having their life snuffed out for even pressing up against a foreign border were high.

They could do so much with the aether, with technology, and yet, they couldn’t have civilized conversations with their neighbours outside of the world of diplomatic friendships.

“I meant, it was a long time ago and neither of us are the people we were at the time. Whether I like or liked that girl, she doesn’t exist anywhere but in memories over a decade gone, nor does the boy who overheard her exist.”

“Except he does,” Emilia noted, pulling her foot back and hooking it behind Halen’s and forcing him to join her idle kicking. Surprisingly, he didn’t pull away. Surprisingly, she wasn’t particularly surprised he didn’t pull away. “You still don’t train for muscle, so the boy who heard her words and took them to mean he shouldn’t have big muscles still exists, at least a bit.”

“I… suppose,” Halen agreed with all the energy of someone who didn’t like that they had been talked into backtracking their opinion of themself. “I’m not really… attached to the idea of not gaining muscle. I just… I don’t know. It’s been a part of what I choose to do for so long, I’m not sure what I want anymore. I look at myself in the mirror and can’t imagine myself any other way. More… I got used to looking at myself, as my friends obsessed with gaining more and more muscle, and seeing someone that girl would prefer over one of them.”

“You convinced yourself you look better smaller? Or, more natural, I guess?”

Slowly, Halen nodded, almost as though he had never really evaluated his thoughts on the subject before. Maybe he hadn’t. So many beliefs came from mysterious places, only examined when someone asked about them and pointed out they were wrong or stupid or needed reevaluating.

Emilia could still remember her mother cooking a dish that had been passed down from her own long-dead mother. The grandmother Emilia had never met had come from a relatively poor family, marrying into the power and wealth of the Nemora family after meeting her husband in university. So many of Emilia’s grandmother’s habits, formed under the strain of years struggling to afford more than the essentials, had been impossible to shake, and in particular, she had generally refused to buy anything until absolutely necessary.

The pan Emilia’s maternal grandmother had used to make this particular dish had lasted a long time, passed on from her own mother when she left for university because it had been her favourite dish. Said pan was too small for the animal carcass the dish was made from. Cue great-grandma and grandma both cutting the sides of it off, stuffing the slices into the front of the pan.

This was not, in fact, how the dish was meant to be made. It had taken Emilia, Indigo and Atticus watching their new mother make the dish that first time—mostly, she’d been trying to bond with them while they’d been wondering how to tell her none of them ate meat—and asking what she was doing and why, for their mother to stop and think about it.

Why did the sides need to be cut off? Her own pan wasn’t so small that the animal wouldn’t fit without its sides being carved away, after all.

Their new father, intent to bond with them as well as begin teaching them all the things they had been missing out on at the orphanage, had grabbed one of the tablets they had no idea how to use and searched up the recipe to find an answer for them. Probably, he had been expecting to find an actual answer—something like so it will cook faster or perhaps to absorb more flavour into the inner meat.

There was no reason, other than that Emilia’s mother had grown up watching her mother persevere, even if it was no longer necessary, and find a way to cook the dish in a pan that was too small. Emilia’s mother had never stopped to ask if it was actually necessary, so she’d kept doing it long after she’d bought herself a properly sized pan.

All in all, Emilia’s mother had come out of that bonding experience more aware of the struggles her family experienced before marrying into wealth and with the awkward knowledge that none of her new children would ever eat any of the meat-heavy dishes her mother’s family had so often favoured—Indigo had burst into tears when confronted with a plate full of the dish, Atticus had refused to look at it, and Emilia had been forced to admit they didn’t eat meat, even back then, before any of them really understood the ethical implications or knew that fabricators were a thing—not that any of them ate that either.

“I…” Halen finally began to say, his mouth opening before pressing closed again, and sometimes, Emilia wondered if Halen knew himself at all.

There had been so many times in their years of knowing one another where she’d thought he was faking who he was—that the person under it all might actually be a good guy. Sometimes, she’d found herself wondering if he was just hiding who he was, or if it was really that he didn’t know who he was, instead latching on to the interests and desires and personalities of those around him and pretending they were his own.

Halen loved hacking, creating, learning, getting revenge. Everything else, she wasn’t sure about. Maybe he wasn’t sure either.

“I think you’ll look good, no matter what you do,” she finally said, tilting her head to examine him. “I mean, you’re hot this way. You’d be hot with a little more muscle as well.” Unbidden, her Censor overlaid the man with a little more bulk—not too much! Just a little bit.

Then, it became more and more and—

Laughing, Emilia sent him the image of what was most certainly too much muscle to Halen. “That’s gross, though! If you get to that point, I’ll have to stage an intervention and force you to stop working out.”

“That is…” Halen’s nose scrunched so hard, she had to laugh again. “Terrible. Tyrenn is about that bulky these days—”

“Ew.”

“Yeah… it’s a lot.”

“I am not staging an intervention for him. Hopefully being that jacked will keep the girls away. That boy has a truly awful personality.” Emilia shuddered.

Tyrenn was just… no. Maybe he’d grow up. Emilia wasn’t holding her breath, even if she hoped he’d find a better personality. Really, she always hoped for the best for everyone, even people she didn’t like. No matter who it was, she always found herself hoping they found a place where they could become a better person, where they could be happy with who they were. Tyrenn, like so many of the people who had been in Halen’s friend group—a number in her own as well—were neither.

Someone had once told her that was just a consequence of youth—that to be young was to be neither comfortable in your skin, nor to yet know your value or understand your place in the world. “The kindest thing you can do for those people,” they had said, “is to give them grace and forgiveness for their youthful ignorance and hatred. If they forever live in the shadow of their mistakes, how can they hope to grow? What is the point of becoming a better person if your errors forever give chase?”

So, if someday those terrible classmates showed up as better people, Emilia would try her best not to hold their stupidity against them. In the same way, it was easy to watch Halen and let what little animosity she still held for him melt into the setting sun—melt into the gold of his eyes, watching her so closely. They flicked to her lips, not for the first time that day. With so little space between them, it would have been easy to lean in and let them meet—and it was certainly the right atmosphere for it, romantic, even.

Emilia almost closed the difference—almost risked the fall that surrounded them—but something pulled her back. That tiny little instinct that tugged her at the most random of moments and always brought her to the best place.

A little voice telling her, “No, not yet.”

“Not yet, but eventually, through pain and suffering and a shifting in the aether itself—I promise.”

“I promise. Please, remember that, if nothing else.”