[Can’t Opt Out]

“So, you’re saying we have to go down?” the pretty silverstrain asked.

The look Clemence gave Emilia was withering—it was something only a teenager was capable of, or so she’d been told. This beautiful meeting of teenage sass and innocence, even if Clemence hadn’t been innocent since she was a small child, first stumbling into the den of monsters that was her family’s legacy.

All water under the bridge.

All stars in the sky.

All dead bodies, lying in a row.

“No…” Clemence said with the slow and careful pronunciation that had been drilled into her at school—people with head injuries or who were in shock needed their doctors and nurses to be patient with them, after all. “I am saying we have to go way, waaaaaaaaay down. They put the newest arrivals on the 47th floor, and from what you’ve said, I doubt anyone had any idea how powerful your teacher is, so, they would have put him down there, just to be safe.”

The pretty—although pretty seemed too mediocre for the beautiful, stunning, breathtaking girl—silverstrain’s eyes narrowed into slits of purple, little silver stars disappearing under her lids. “Mhm…” she replied with all the suspicion of someone who knew their question wasn’t so stupid to have deserved the tone—it didn’t. Clemence just liked poking and prodding at her newest conquests, was all. People could be so unpredictable, and it was good to find their lines and break points before she got too attached.

Of course, Clemence almost immediately found herself too attached—it was inevitable, her black knot tying her to anyone who attracted her attention. Usually, however, they weren’t more than a few years older than herself—not that Clemence had a problem with the other girl being a little older than her usual conquests, but she knew that could be a hang-up for some people!

A little over a year ago, a yanswt had published a book that became popular with all the students at her school, as well as a number of nearby ones—maybe more. Students her age generally had little freedom to meet up with their friends from before they chose a career path, unless their schools were geographically close or they managed to find time to meet up during the rare school break. So, Clemence wasn’t sure how far the belief had spread, but there had been this uptick in people thinking that the legal age gap for acceptable relationships—five years, if the person was still in school; fifteen, if they had graduated—were far too large. There had been petitions, even, seeking to force the government to change those age gap laws!

Clemence had managed to mostly stay out of all that—she wasn’t the sort of person anyone dared try to bully into signing anything—but the girl she’d been involved with, who was three years older, had suddenly been the subject of bullying. In the end, she had asked to be transferred to another school, telling Clemence that she hadn’t wanted to take further advantage of her.

It had been baffling—after all, as with most of her relationships, Clemence had pursued her! How was she the one being taken advantage of when she had been the one to slowly manoeuvre her way into the girl’s bed!?

This argument had not convinced her now-former upperclasswoman, who had simply claimed that she had been abused by her former, slightly older lovers—this abuse then apparently skewing her preceptive of what was acceptable and what was not—then vanished into the wind.

Clemence hadn’t even had the heart to kill the girl, as she tended to when her conquests left her. Whatever she could do to the girl would be nothing compared to whatever she was putting herself through, having beliefs like that. There was, of course, the chance that the girl had been forcing those words from her tongue without actually believing her—despite Clemence’s best efforts, the girl’s classmates had continued bullying her over their illicit relationship, which, according to them, definitely should have been illegal and grounds for expulsion and even prison time.

Fortunately, the publication had since been scrubbed from their schools, extensive censorship campaigns leading to the alleged destruction of every copy, although, she had no doubt a few had survived. Still, beliefs were challenging to snuff out, once they began to burn.

“Do you think there is a point ant which an age difference should make a relationship illegal, or where it becomes inherently abusive?” she asked, thinking it best to get this conversation out of the way before she could attach herself even more firmly to the Baalphorian girl. Having never been to the girl’s home nation, Clemence had no idea what sort of beliefs they had about such things, and it would be no good if the girl believed there to be permanent legal hookups to them being together.

Jerrial, who had been explaining the elevator situation to Emilia and his… friend? Was Vern Jerrial’s friend? Clemence didn’t know Jerrial well, but she had met him a few times in passing over the last few years. Usually, he was one of the friendlier and cheerier captives—someone able to find his smile, small as it tended to be, even within the misery of this place. Vern, as far as she knew, wasn’t some other escapee—which she had learned was precisely what Jerrial was: an escapee, come to help Emilia find her teacher and retrieve something of his own. Emilia had been the one to tell her this, and Clemence suspected that Jerrial hadn’t told the girl what, exactly, it was that he wanted to retrieve.

Such conversations would come later, but even after so little time together, Clemence knew that her Emilia would go with Jerrial, seeking to help him get what he wanted. She was just nice like that, Clemence knew.

Clemence would go with them as well, when the time came—there were things that she wanted as well, lost as she had long considered them to be. Maybe they would remain lost, but if not… Well, this would likely be the last chance she had to get them. There would be no coming back from this—from helping Emilia find her teacher, nor from helping this group through the building.

Of course, with Rayleen there, perhaps they would have easily found their way deeper? It was hard to say—the golden one wasn’t someone she had ever trusted, personally. Part of it was the whole thing where the woman had suggested that Clemence be disposed of. It wasn’t something she was supposed to find out about, but she had. No one had gone along with the golden one’s suggestion, but Clemence suspected that the woman’s words—the prophecy the woman had placed upon her head, stating that she would take part in their organization’s downfall—were the reason she had been all but abandoned since then, constantly being shuffled anywhere that wasn’t Falmíer.

People assumed she wasn’t often allowed within their organization’s strongholds because she was strange and had a tendency to claim whoever caught her fancy as hers, but that wasn’t it; instead, no one could bring themself to order her death, but neither could they stomach the reality that she may one day act to bring the organization to its knees—she would, and oh, how she was looking forward to it.

This, of course, brought up the Rayleen problem: the woman had pushed for her death when she was barely a child, and yet, here she was, helping to weaken the organization. Perhaps she didn’t think this would lead to the organization falling; perhaps she was just a bitch, perfectly willing to sacrifice a child and all the other people she had sent to her death since coming to work for the organization, and yet all too willing to betray it, the moment the chance arose.

For this reason, Clemence had situated herself between Emilia and the woman, not trusting Rayleen not to betray them any second, not trusting Emilia to be able to care for herself. The other girl had insisted that she was quite skilled; Clemence would believe it when she saw it.

“Uhm…” Emilia breathed out, all of them paused outside one of the two stairways that lead to the lower floors. “I mean, in general, Baalphorian law only has laws about age gaps for people under twenty-eight, which are meant to keep everyone safe and avoid accidental abuses of authority—not that such things don’t happen to people who are older! People just make slightly better decisions once their brains are more fully developed, so the laws account for that… in this, at least. Other things, not so much,” she replied, beginning to babble about Baalphorian privacy laws, and the oddity that they didn’t match up with the age of consent laws. “If a twenty-eight-year-old can decide to let the oldest person alive have sex with them, why are they not allowed control of their identity? Why can they make one decision that will affect their life, but not another!?”

Clearly, the girl’s annoyance was with more than just the mismatch of the laws—people didn’t get that animated without something else going on.

“Is that… common? For people to have sex with someone hundreds of years older than them?” Clemence asked, Emilia’s eyes shifted back to her, an adorable blush spreading over her cheeks.

“Uh… no, not really. I mean, there will always be attractive and charismatic people who are on the older side who tons of people will willingly have sex with, regardless of the age difference, but between regular Baalphorians? Not really.” Emilia laughed, admitting that she wasn’t among those regular people—unsurprising. Silverstrains were known for having few hang-ups when it came to sex, although…

“I thought you said there were age difference laws for people under twenty-eight?” Jerrial asked, apparently just as confused as Clemence was.

“I did, yes?” Emilia replied, tone just as confused as Jerrial's. “There are also close-in-age exceptions, which allow for a decade-wide age gap once the person turns eighteen—that was why I was able to have sex with a friend of mine when I was in my mid-twenties and him in his mid-thirties and why are you all looking at me like that?” The girl’s purple eyes flicked between Clemence, Jerrial, and Vern—Rayleen was ignoring them, instead working on slowly picking the lock to the stairwell, which was one of the more complicated locks in the building and could only be opened by a few people, Rayleen apparently not among them.

“We just…” Vern started, trailing off, his gaze skimming over Emilia, reassessing her.

Clemence did the same, trying to see someone who was in at least their late-twenties in the girl who she had assumed was in her late teens, maybe early twenties. It was a little hard to look at her, beautiful as she was, even with so much grime and sweat covering her. According to the short explanation she’d been given, Emilia had been forced to run through the tunnels several times—and had even had a personal run in with Gëon—so it was actually impressive that she only looked a little worse for the wear.

Everything about her, though… Clemence couldn’t see it—couldn’t see how this girl was supposedly closer to being a woman than a teenager, and fuck did that mess up her plans of conquest! Even if she left this place to go with Emilia—there was no way she would be safe staying in Lüshan after this—people could be so sticky about laws! Considering Emilia also wanted to return to her home, there was little chance Clemence would be allowed to pursue her until she was—what was the age Emilia had said? Twenty-eight?

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight.

Twenty-eight!?

That was so long! Over a decade! And yes, even as someone who had grown up around crime—removed from the organization as she often was, she was still a killer in her own right—Clemence also felt this strange urge to follow her own nation’s age difference laws and—

And what if Emilia was more than fifteen years older than her!? That would mean that if she couldn’t shake her own nation’s laws off her, then even when she finished her schooling, in far too many years for Clemence to even think about—although how she was going to finish her schooling when she had to get out of Lüshan, she had no idea—Emilia might still be someone her mind considered illegal!?

“Emilia?” she asked, voice a little empty as she peered up at the taller girl—at the taller woman. “How old are you?”

Pretty purple eyes blinked down at her, flashed up to the men, a frown pulling over her face. “Shit, sorry… I know I look younger than I am but… usually people aren’t this, uh… shocked, especially after they’ve spent time with me.” Gaze turning back to Clemence, something almost sad in her expression, she added, “I’ll be thirty soon—in a couple months.”

Thirty…

Thirty…

Well, almost thirty was at least less than fifteen years older than she was. Still, with how long schooling took…

That complicated things, a lot, and even Clemence wasn’t the sort of person who could demand someone wait decades for them—even the dozen years it would take for her to reach the Baalphorian age-of-consent was just… so far away.

Why couldn’t things be easy, even just once?