Arc 9 | Chapter 331: Endearingly Awkward
“So… how is this trip stacking up to the other ones you’ve taken your classes on?”
Silence stretched around Emilia’s question. It wasn’t the first question she’d asked Olivier since their departure from the crew managing the situation with Stewart. Thankfully, the boy hadn’t put up any fuss about being removed from the trip and had simply returned to his room to pack so he could be ready to move to another ship once they landed in what was almost certainly going to be Lüshan—not positively! But probably.
Unfortunately, as much as that situation had resolved itself nicely enough, Olivier had been strangely tense since witnessing Caoshun Huiya wrap his energy around her. Emilia… didn’t even know what had gone wrong! Sure, a lot of Baalphorians had this insane dislike for all core abilities, but she honestly hadn’t thought the lawyer the sort to be so obstinate in that belief! And, as they walked in strained silence back towards their rooms—not that Emilia could currently get into hers—Emilia still didn’t think that even was it; rather, there was some other reason Olivier hadn’t liked what happened with the Dionese man, and she had no idea what!
Even going back over the interaction… it wasn’t like she could pinpoint some moment where any of the ryohua had done anything to her? The most she could think was that maybe Olivier didn’t like that she was talking to people with irregular deviations unknown to him? But then, the same thing applied: Emilia really didn’t think he was the sort to make snap judgments about a person based on such things!
Sure, the man certainly could come to hasty conclusions despite barely knowing a person. He had almost immediately disliked her—probably—and thought her a little Penns princess, but she’d also blown into his classroom and—mostly jokingly—offered him sex in exchange for taking her case. At least she had done something to earn his ire. What in the world had Caoshun Huiya done!?
“Wait here,” Olivier said, pulling her towards a wall opposite a small convenience store located a deck down from their rooms by the hand he had grabbed and refused to let go of since they left Grenner to make sure Stewart actually returned to his room. The man glared down at her, aggravation radiating off him. “Emilia.”
Usually, Emilia loved hearing the man say her name so forcefully—so full of promise of consequence if she disobeyed him. While she never pushed him further when they were outside of his classroom, not wanting to find out how far his limits went when he couldn’t just forcibly eject her from the room, she usually had to fight with herself into submission. Usually, she wanted to push. In this case, she found her spine straightening, her eyes flicking to the floor as though she had actually done something wrong—she hadn’t!
Still, she gave him a quiet, “I’ll wait here, Olivier,” her teacher’s name coming out so soft the first syllables seemed to vanish into the aether.
Her not-quite teacher lingered there for a moment, and while she was still staring into the floor, Emilia could feel his eyes on her, his attention a heavy thing that was both terrifying and intoxicating. The hand around hers squeezed, just this side of painful, before he was dropping it and vanishing into the store and fuck if Emilia wasn’t going to wait in that exact position, no matter how long it took.
Normally, she was terrible at any sort of waiting without movement. Meditation drove her to the brink. Standing in lines was filled with her shifting her weight, playing games in her head, messaging people she’d been putting off contacting. Anything in school that had required her to sit quietly had been filled with so much movement, so much tapping of her feet and fingers, that most of her teachers had eventually allowed her to wrap a bubble of silence around herself, lest the other students straggle her.
Waiting there for Olivier, though? His presence gone and yet still lingering on her being, the warmth of his hand imprinted into her own cool flesh?
Waiting for Olivier was easy, even if she still let her mind wander a bit. Mostly, she checked in on the updates Halen had made to her annotations system, the man having immediately returned to Roasalia once they parted, jumping straight into updating it. It was… beautiful—a mix of her chaos and his attention to detail that somehow just came together so nicely.
Her former classmate had clearly taken inspiration from the last deranged section of her code and taken aspects of it to mix in with the chaos of the first parts. His own flair was there, slipped in beside her own style in his efforts to both tidy up the code and extend it to allow multiple users. He had also included a few more features because of course he had. The last section had been changed the most, Halen so perfectly replicating her chaos in the formerly perfect, deranged, code to make it match the rest.
Finicky perfectionist that he was, Emilia would have thought that, were he going to update and alter all her code anyways, Halen would instead make it all perfect. Instead, he’d drawn more chaos into that single part. It was less work to alter that small section, yes, but it was so un-Halen that Emilia didn’t know what to do with it. Part of her wanted to message the man—ask why he had altered it the way he had—a bigger part was terrified to hear his answer.
Not as terrified as she was of what was happening with Olivier, though.
Things between them had been going so well! How was it that something so stupid had messed everything up! It wasn’t fair, and if she hadn’t promised herself that she would be good and wait there for Olivier in the exact position he left her—insane, she knew—Emilia might have stomped her foot!
Their evening had been so enjoyable, just the two of them wandering the ship and chatting about anything that crossed their minds—although, Emilia had still been filling most of the conversation. Olivier had been listening, though! Listening and asking questions and it had all been so nice! She had wanted to give him a nice night out with a friend—who knew if he considered them friends, but Emilia was perfectly okay with having a temporarily one-sided friendship with him—and it had been going So. Fucking. Well.
Stewart had better hope his actions hadn’t fucked up their growing friendship. While she usually balked at the idea of abusing her friendship with the clones, if she had to ask whoever was assigned to get him back to Baalphoria to make him disappear en route…
“Emilia.”
Emilia’s eyes shot up to Olivier, finding him standing in front of her holding a bag from the store. Thankfully, there was less tension surrounding him now—less of a harsh line pressing through his mouth, his posture ever so slightly more relaxed—but he was still clearly upset.
“Thank you for waiting,” he said, not perfunctory words, but true appreciation—maybe even praise?
Fuck. Yeah. Emilia had already imagined that it would feel good being praised by him, and considering this praise was only the edge of a tone in his voice, she was going to be completely fucked if he ever figured out he could control her with a well-placed good girl or some shit like that.
Fuck. Taelor already led her and Baylor around by a leash of praise. Emilia didn’t need another man realizing how much validation just did things to her.
“Of course,” she replied, hesitating a beat before reaching out the hand he had been pulling her along by before.
There was a second where she didn’t think he would take it, his eyes boring into her skin so harshly she almost pulled back. Then, his warmth was wrapping around her own still-cool skin—and why was she so cold?
“Come along,” he said, his hand no longer so firm around hers that it would have required effort to remove herself. Now, he just held her as they walked. There was still silence, but it wasn’t quite as strained—still awkward! Just not as bad.
Still, the turn of Olivier’s key into their rooms’ outer door was loud between them, the second twist of it in his room’s door impossibly louder. There wasn’t an invitation inside, no question whether she wanted to come in. One moment they were outside, the door swinging open, the next, Olivier was tugging her towards the small couch that was slightly too big for the room.
“Sit.”
Emilia sat. Wasn’t she so well-behaved tonight?
The older man sat down beside her, setting his bag onto the table in front of the couch. If he had seated her at one end of the couch, himself at the other, room for another person between them, Emilia wasn’t going to say anything about it, nor was she going to cross the invisible lines he had created for them.
At least, she didn’t mean to cross those lines!
“Is that all for me?” she asked, leaning over to examine the things that tumbled out of the bag—or, that Olivier neatly removed from it and set onto the table because he wasn’t a heathen with no patience. Leaning over, she may have crossed the invisible line… and then some… and then a bit more until her knee was bumping into his.
Olivier, fortunately, didn’t seem to mind? Or, if he did, he didn’t pull away or bolt up from the couch or anything.
“All of your things are locked in the other room,” he noted, adding that he wasn’t sure exactly what sorts of things she would need, but his Censor had suggested the array of items he had gathered for her.
Emilia thought his Censor might have been messing with him—not because she wouldn’t use the stuff! More, it was just… a lot. Like, yeah, she loved face masks, but also, she could have managed with the toothbrush alone. The cleanser was appreciated. The deodorant… probably sensible. But the sheet masks, plural? All the various creams and serums? A bunch of stuff she didn’t even recognize but would definitely be figuring out and using? All appreciated, but what was the man’s Censor on? Had it assumed she was out of her room for a few weeks, and not just the night?
Speaking of the night…
“Is this your way of telling me you’re okay if I crash on your couch?” Emilia asked, trying not to grimace because the couch was actually really uncomfortable. All lumpy and hard in some spots, too soft and saggy in others. Emilia had slept in some pretty terrible places—middle of the Cyrenix Desert or the dungeons under Dion, anyone? How was this couch somehow threatening to be the worst?
Olivier shifted, not looking at her. Instead, all she got was a small nod. For a moment, their knees disconnected and Emilia was hit with the realization that maybe it wasn’t so much that he had seated them so far apart because he was uncomfortable being so close to her. For better or worse, while he wasn’t her teacher, he was responsible for her safety and comfort alike. Perhaps, he just hadn’t wanted to invite her to share his room for—sadly—non-sexual reasons while pressed so closely into her?
That was… sweet, even if his way of asking could use work in other departments. Seriously, who just drags their pseudo-student into their room, orders them to sit, then offers them a bag of items they bought on the advice of their Censor—and wouldn’t it have just been easier to bring her into the store so she could buy it all herself?—and just hopes the pseudo-student will come to the conclusion that they’re allowed to stay the night?
A very awkward man, that was who. It was, fortunately, rather endearing. Olivier, for all that he was refined and articulate in class and court alike, was so adorably awkward in normal social situations. It made Emilia want to poke, and maybe if he weren’t still clearly upset about something she might have.
As it was, she contained herself to slouching back into the couch and nudging Olivier with her shoulder, lingering there, skin to skin with him once more. “Thanks. I really appreciate you not leaving me to find somewhere else to sleep. I was kinda avoiding thinking about it too hard.”
Smiling up at the man, Emilia watched as he relaxed bit by bit more. Not completely, but enough that Emilia tugged her feet up under her and turned ever so slightly into him. It was probably inappropriate for their weird relationship, but Olivier neither pulled away, nor pulled her closer the way she wished he would.
Instead, they just sat there for several long, far less tense minutes of silence. Emilia just wanted to soak in the comfort—the skin to skin contact that she always craved. Did Olivier crave that as well? Probably—there was no way he wasn’t even more touch deprived than she perpetually felt, the result of caregivers at the orphanage never having enough love for the children in their care, if any at all. Inevitably, most of them had eventually formed friendships that involved snuggling, although there had always been a few kids who remained uncomfortable with physical connection, no matter how hard some of them tried to help them relax; now older, Emilia didn’t want to think of the implications of why those kids had disliked being touched so profoundly, even by other small bodies. Still, despite how much time she had spent pressed into the arms of another child in that terrible place, something about not being held in that first year of her life, only her learning to crawl and then walk allowing her to seek out other children to curl into…
Emilia doubted there would ever be enough touch to soothe the ache for contact within her. Instead, she would be content to soak up whatever she could get from her friends and family, and if she could give a little back to them in return? Well, there was a reason her siblings and Simeon were always her favourite people to curl up with, all of them pulling in affection like little vacuums.
Olivier felt a bit like that, his weight slowly shifting to press more firmly into her.
One day, maybe they would actually be able to snuggle properly. Not even anything sexual, just two people enjoying the comfort of another person against them. That would be nice.