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This was it, the moment Baylor had been waiting for since he had first begun imagining killing people for the simple enjoyment of it. This was the moment he would finally be allowed to kill someone.

He hadn’t even been able to speak yet, thoughts barely formed bursts of instinct in his little brain, the first time he had imagined killing someone. It hadn’t been Loren, but some other, nameless clone who had been assigned to babysit the three of them while their guardian dealt with some incident or another. Usually, clones stepped back from their duties while they raised a pod of clones. It was a vacation of sorts… if one considered raising a new brood of clones to be a vacation. Certainly, with his predilections and Emilia’s nonsense and the whole my pod is far closer than most are thing, Loren’s guardianship of them had never been a vacation.

That was beside the point, which was that regardless of how much guardian clones were meant to step away from their duties, it wasn’t that easy. Court cases popping up where they needed to testify was the most common reason they were pulled away from the children they were raising—despite the fact that, as clones, technically no one other than Emilia would ever be able to tell if a different clone showed up to testify, they tended to avoid that—although occasionally other things pulled them away. The source of thɪs content is NoveI★Fire.net

Baylor had no idea where Loren had gone that day, but the clone who had replaced him hadn’t been someone Baylor liked. It was nothing personal—Baylor liked few people. He loved his brothers and Emilia. Although he would never love them, he liked Loren and most of Emilia’s friends as well as anyone with a black knot could like people. Out of all his classmates, he probably liked Coral and Simeon the most, each of them different in their own way and accepting his darkness with ease. Still, he would leave most of his classmates to die if the risk to himself or one of the people he loved was too great, even if Emilia’s little heart would break. For Coral and Simeon, he would risk a little more for. Malcolm as well, not that his distant cousin was a classmate; rather, Malcolm was just another person who accepted him without question. He’d even been hurt before, stopping Baylor from actually killing someone. Despite the scars that slashed over Malcolm’s body from that whole ordeal, the older boy had never held it against him. So, if Malcolm needed saving, Baylor would try at least a little harder to save him.

This was also beside the point.

Back to their random babysitter clone of that day, there hadn’t been anything particular bad about him. Instead, he was just a random clone that Baylor didn’t know. Nothing to dislike—not until the clone had tried to take his brothers from him.

It hadn’t been anything so serious as the guy trying to kidnap them—a rare occurrence, but there had been a few pods who mysteriously vanished a few centuries ago who everyone presumed were taken by an older clone who vanished around the same time.

No, this was just nap time.

Baylor now knew that usually podmates had their own cribs and beds. For whatever reason, he and his brothers had shared one. Baylor assumed it was because of him—because he didn’t want to be separated from his brothers. When they were about six, Loren had tried to give them separate rooms. It was just part of growing up—learning to be independent, even if the three of them were meant to be able to emulate one another with barely a blink they would also need to function alone for long periods of time. Baylor hadn’t wanted to grow up, and the entire situation had been the catalyst that lead Taelor to acting more parent to him and Valor than older brother.

While he didn’t remember any specific thing that would have led Loren to leaving the three of them to sleep in each other's arms when they were so young, he could imagine—could feel the phantom grip of his tiny hands around his brothers as he screamed and flailed because they were his, and how dare anyone try to take them from him!?

So, yes, the moment that strange clone had attempted to put each of them into the individual cribs Loren still had but didn’t use, visions of ripping into the clone had filled his mind. Tiny as he was, he couldn’t do anything about it, but fuck if he hadn’t thought about it for months after.

What would the clone have looked like inside? His little brain had always been growing and absorbing, so he knew there were things inside people: blood, spit, vomit, shit, piss, and whatever they’d eaten that day.

It was gross, but he had always been so interested in how bodies worked. How did things go from being food and milk to being everything else? If he opened someone up, would he find the answers? Could he see whatever things existed inside a person—the thing that pounded in his chest, the things that expanded as he and his brothers sucked in air and food—and figure out how it all worked?

Now, of course, he knew how all those things worked. He’d even had a chance to see it all for himself, now that he was allowed to kill certain people—people who deserved it, people who needed to be killed, tortured, ripped into. Still, he had the urge to dig into people who didn’t really deserve to die.

It didn’t take a genius to realize when someone deserved to die and when they didn’t. Some people called for those people to just be imprisoned, and Baylor knew sometimes imprisonment was the best option.

Other times, it wasn’t. Sometimes, the threat someone posed to the world or the knowledge locked inside their head meant ripping them apart was the better option.

Baylor knew he was broken. It wasn’t a secret, and while some of the older clones wanted to put him down—erase the mistake that was his mind and existence—that wasn’t likely to happen, not at the moment, anyways. For the moment, he and his brothers would be shuffled into jobs where murder and torture were considered likely. All for him. All as a potential way to control the gnawing hunger within him that called for him to reach out and fucking kill Mikhail.

Baylor didn’t even think anyone would blame him. Certainly, a few of them would probably help him get rid of the body. They were already in the Free Colonies as well, so he could just not go back to Baalphoria. Fuck the consequences for killing his former classmate. Granted, when he’d imagined killing someone more for pleasure than necessity, it had been a bit more purposeful than the way he would just blow Mikhail up.

There would be plans. Special knives and skills. He had even contemplated asking Emilia to design him a few skills—for his work with The Black Knot, of course. He’d be killing for them, after all, and Emilia designed specialized skills for the organization all the time. Surely she’d be willing to create a few torture skills for him? A few that would let him sustain the lives of his victims more than some of the more horrific Black Knot skills already did, all so he could enjoy shifting through their innards a little longer?

Unfortunately, Baylor already knew that just like actually killing Mikhail for being an idiot with a big mouth wouldn’t be satisfying, neither did he think killing and torturing for The Black Knot would be satisfying. In the end, they just weren’t the deaths he was looking to press into existence. If anything, he was sure the knife- and fearplay he and Emilia sometimes partook in would continue to be more satisfying than any rage-induced or work murder he committed.

There was just something about cutting into someone who had really done nothing to deserve their fate that called to him. Fortunately, there was also something about cutting into a fear stricken and yet aroused Emilia that did things for his as well, the fact that he could easily slice into her and cut her life short like a fucking drug.

There was no world where he’d ever do that, of course! Never would he put Emilia in actual risk, and if he thought he might snap— No, he would never snap and do that to her. Someone else, perhaps; never her. Never any other silverstrain either, as what he’d told her before was true: if he ever killed a silverstrain, she’d have to be the first.

Ironically, that made silverstrains the only group who was safe from him, even if they were also his favourite type to fantasize about. Actually, as his favourite, it all added up to creating a bit of a problem! Ideally, a silverstrain would be his first; Emilia had to be his first silverstrain; therefore, he couldn’t kill anyone for fun!

Killing Mikhail would have messed with that, and killing him wouldn’t have been fun—not at fucking all. So, it was probably a good thing Coral had overheard the dumbass saying something rude about Valor. Then, she’d felt Baylor’s fury. It was a good thing Coral had good reflex and so many of Halen’s skills behind her—her speed and the skill’s accuracy when she’d knocked the idiot off the aetherstream was probably the only reason Baylor hadn’t killed Mikhail the moment his stupid words fully computed.

So what if Valor was quiet and almost always staring into space, even while they were travelling! That was just who he was, always so internal in his struggles that he faded in on himself. It was fine, and how dare Mikhail say anything about his brother, let alone something tinged with cruelty!

Valor didn’t care about his words—not exactly, anyways. Baylor’s baby brother couldn’t care about what people thought of him, yet he also wanted to live a more normal life at times. So, while he couldn’t care what people thought or said of him, such comments from someone they had known most of their life still lay over his soul as a reminder of why he couldn’t just be normal.

Valor was Valor, and even if he stitched another identity over his skin, he would still be the quiet, slightly odd boy he had always been. In other words, even if he weren’t so obviously a clone, he would still be off—he would still be something that wasn’t normal, and how dare Mikhail remind him of that fact when all three of them were currently struggling with the life of Black Knot agents that lay out before them.

If he were more comfortable with who he was, Valor would say no to that life.

If he weren’t constantly struggling to hold himself back from just saying fuck it and killing some random person who caught his attention, Baylor would say no to that life.

If it weren’t for his brothers being unable to say no to that life, Taelor would say no to it.

If things were easier, they would stay—be with Emilia, if she would have them. The four of them could be happy, he thought, even if he worried that one day he would slip up and kill someone. Not someone like Mikhail, who had been asking for it for decades with his constant inability to think before speaking—which yes, genetic condition and all; didn’t stop the guy from being annoying—nor someone like the criminals he would spend the rest of his life cutting apart, forcing answers out of them, before snuffing out their lives.

No—Baylor worried that one day he would kill someone completely undeserving, the way he had wanted to for most of his life. One little slip was all it would take for the logic and love the kept him from killing to shatter. There he would be, his eyes catching on some pretty little thing, their smile reminding him too much of the girl he loved. Just once—maybe that’s how he would think. Just once, then never again.

It wouldn’t be just once, and he couldn’t risk it—couldn’t risk Emilia no longer looking at him the way she did now, all because he had slipped.

So, he would go along with the life planned out for him, as much as he wished he could say fuck it. It was better to have Emilia as his friend—as their occasional bedmate—rather than risk their relationship crumbling. It was better to just take the deaths he was authorized to dole out, even if he knew they would never truly feed the hunger inside him.

Those things were better than the alternative, probably.

“Thanks,” he whispered to Coral as he came to stand beside her and Halen, the pair of them looking out over the expanse of forest that spread over the land that existed above Falmíer.

Coral leaned into him, bumping their shoulders together like they were friends—like her Dyadism wasn’t currently tormenting her with all the feeling of rage and frustration and murderous desire swirling within him. “Any time.”

Somehow, Baylor thought her telling the truth: if she knew he was about to snap, Coral would always try to stop him. That was sweet, if also potentially very stupid.