[Can’t Opt Out]

“Emilia was just asking if I knew the two of you had sex sometimes, was all.” Halen stared at his still unanswered reply to Codeth’s earlier message, wondering not for the first time why he had decided to ask if his friend would be interested in a threesome. It had been a stray thought that he had let wander towards his friend, knowing Codeth would be some mixture of baffled and horrified and amused by it.

They needed more lightheartedness at the moment, everything so heavy and impossibly dark.

Halen’s lips quirked as he stared out over the dark city, his response some attempt to find even the smallest bit of joy as he tried to breathe through his lingering panic. In the distance, Simeon was securing rope to the other side of his trek, and even from so far away, Halen could see the shake in his fingers—not from the strain of holding himself aloft as he anchored the rope to the cavern’s ceiling, but from the reality that once again, Emilia had shown up as dead to them.

It was too much.

The first time had been bad enough, but back then, when Valor had tumbled off the aetherstream in his shock, they hadn’t really known what to think of her supposed death. Olivier had been missing, yes, but they hadn’t known more than the barest of information about anything.

It still felt as though they knew nothing, and yet they knew so much, and Emilia had been cagey about where she was.

Somewhere beneath Fräthk’s holding cells.

Somewhere she didn’t want anyone else venturing.

Somewhere the was dangerous enough that she kept muting her relays—sometimes to emergency messages only, sometimes muting even those.

Emilia was far away, so in the case of an emergency, there wasn’t much she could do. Still, her muting every one of her relays had been a bad sign of what she was doing. Then, she’d died. Minutes later, she had been sending a message on her xphern, telling them she was okay but permanently offaether and Halen hated it.

Within his mind, he knew Emilia was alive—the local girl she’d given her xphern to was assuring them that she was still alive—but his Censor thought she was dead and logic didn’t mean anything to him, and he thought it didn’t mean much to half the other members of their group either.

Simeon, for as logical and cold as he could come off, loved Emilia with a fierceness that was almost intoxicating. The other boy was all hard angles and glares, and while Halen knew all his friends loved him, the relationship he had with Emilia was something different—something soft and so impossibly loving that just watching them together had his heart constantly squeezing. From what Halen had witnessed over the years, Simeon rarely let anyone touch him. Sometimes, he joined group hugs or allowed someone to help him with some part of his clothing, but it was rare.

It wasn’t rare for Emilia to hug Simeon, nor for Simeon to suddenly appear behind his friend and bury himself into the warmth of her. They were sweet, and while something between the two suggested that decades could go by without them seeing or speaking with one another, neither holding the absence against the other, Halen also thought that if one of them died, the other might shatter.

“Yeah, they’ve always been a bit like that?” Codeth replied when Halen babbled this into their relay, his messages about Simeon and Emilia coming in so fast they buried the conversation about threesomes—apparently, the not answering had been purposeful, or he’d accidentally started a new conversation just as his friend was available to message again? That was okay—if it was meant to happen, it would come up again. “Before we got our Censors, Emmie would go off for months with her dad, and when she came back… Well, she and Simeon would pick up like no time at all had passed, and maybe Miles helped them messages, but I doubt it was a lot. It was so different from the triplets, who would always freak—I mean, they still freak out when they’ve been separated for more than a few days. So much energy and excitement, and I know they were for sure messaging her the entire time they were apart through Loren and other clones? Other people would be more contained—although, I’m pretty sure Rafe always wanted to freak out when she returned.”

“He’s too contained to freak out,” Halen noted, sending a skill off to catch the rope Simeon was tossing their way so they could set up the pulley system to get everyone else across without them needing to actually climb the same terrible path Simeon had. “Even with Warren… Rafe was so contained in his rage? Like, I could feel it, but it wasn’t the chaotic rage of Levi or Baylor?” he added, wondering how Baylor actually would have behaved in that situation.

It was something he’d wondered about before, how the middle triplet, with his violent urges, would have handled tracking down the boy who hurt Emilia and snuffing out their life. While Baylor was so often uncontrolled, hyperactive—all smiles until, suddenly, he wasn’t—Halen thought people must generally be underestimating him. Regardless of the tight leash Taelor kept on his younger brother, attempting to control him, Halen thought people were insane to not assume Baylor must also have been controlling himself.

As easy as it would be to assume Baylor would have been an explosion of anger and hatred and violence—and certainly, based on what Codeth had relayed into their giant group relay, Baylor had exploded when Emilia’s information had gone dark. Halen wasn’t convinced it wasn’t at least part of his act in seeming the most deranged and unpredictable of the triplets. Would the clone crack if Emilia died and finally let his inner serial killer loose? Absolutely—it would be more surprising if he didn’t break down into a murder spree, but it would also be surprising if it were nothing but violent impulsiveness.

Having been on the receiving end of Baylor’s violence a few time, contained as that violence had been to pranks that were crueller than anyone else's, Halen knew how controlled the other boy could be. He could wait—had patience that rivalled even Valor or Simeon’s when needed. While he was often taken as being sloppy, the fact that he had managed to make that local girl, Westrial, look good after cutting away her hair showcased that he could be meticulous.

It wasn’t surprising to him that Baylor had two sides, yet he thought virtually everyone else would be surprised to learn Baylor could be more calculating and controlled than most of them.

Had Baylor been the one to take out Warren, Halen thought, their late classmate would still be alive, being slowly tortured and tugged back to life because in no world would Baylor ever let someone who had hurt Emilia escape punishment so easily.

It was nice, if also terrifying—Halen had hurt Emilia before but it had been more of a tangential hurt. If he hurt her in a more direct way? Broke her heart? Said something stupid to her yet again and turned her against him in another war of pranks and harsh words?

Well, Halen wasn’t convinced the only reason Rafe hadn’t suffered under Baylor’s claws was a mixture of the triplets being allowed to take his absence and breaking of Emilia’s heart as their chance to slip her into their bed. It was also pretty clear that Rafe was torturing himself… and Emilia did still consider him one of her closest friends, despite the strain of love constantly pulling between them.

Codeth sent back a hum of acknowledgement, along with several clips of Darrian working to calm down Baylor. They were cute, Baylor pouting and grumpy but turning into Darrian’s head scratches with ease, and really, while Janie having to deal with Leerin was unfortunate, Halen was glad that Darrian had ended up with the other group.

All of the triplets needed more friends—more true friends—if only so, if something bad happened to Emilia or each other, someone else might be capable of stopping their rampage.

Halen’s hand—the one he had injured earlier—twitched, a spark of pain echoing through his palm—and the fat of his palm hurting was better than muscles or tendons in his fingers—and a flicker of something flashed through his mind—a phantom image of Baylor sobbing into Taelor’s chest, begging his older brother to make it stop hurting while his brothers stared at one other in shock. Around them, something was wrong with the aether—it bubbled and burned, a cascade of pain rippling through it and why could he feel it?

Why could he see this moment?

“Did you know?” Taelor asked Valor, and Halen shouldn’t be able to see this—shouldn’t be able to see the question through their relays and why was that what his mind was focusing on when what was this?

Why could he see this?

The boys were a little older, their bodies in that strange place where most of the clones’ bodies stayed after they hit about thirty-five, which make it difficult to tell if they were still in their late thirties or several decades older. They were dirty, though—covered in blood and gore, their uniforms torn, their boots caked in mud.

Uniforms? Not something The Black Knot had, nor did they seem to belong to the Baalphorian military either. Not a war, then? Not a war they’d fought for Baalphoria? Wouldn’t surprise him—Emilia had so many connections throughout the Free Colonies, it would be easy to see so many of them being dragged into a war on some other nation’s behalf by her.

“No… I mean… I knew he was going off on his own a lot, obviously. I thought he was meeting with Emmie and didn’t know how to tell us—you know that man,” Valor replied, and even through these relays that hadn’t yet been—and Halen had no idea how he was aware of their future existence—Halen could feel the venom in the boy’s words, “won’t let her fuck anyone but him.” With a shrug—which seemed so silly when he and Taelor were chatting within their relays and not aloud—Valor added to their messages that he assumed Baylor thought they would judge him for helping Emilia cheat on that man.

The Taelor of this displaced place—memory, future—was quiet for a long moment before he asked Baylor if they thought they would judge him, but hadn’t they just realized that Baylor wasn’t helping Emilia cheat on… someone?

Someone who wasn’t him because Halen knew, down to his core, that he would never tie Emilia’s autonomy in that way—would never want her to. Emilia loved sex, and she especially loved the triplets, and in no world would he ever deny her their comfort and love and—

“Are you okay?”

Halen started, turning wide eyes on Doctor Vickers. The man’s own eyes were concerned, and yeah, that was fair, given not only were his vitals going wild in the stalking function, but he’d also been standing there, holding the rope Simeon had thrown him and doing nothing with it for several seconds—had it really only been several seconds? With someone else, those seconds of delay might have been nothing. Not with him—especially not with his vitals going haywire.

“Sorry,” he muttered, wiping at his face and trying to check in with himself.

Already, whatever the fuck that had been was fading from his mind, and while his Censor was trying to catch hold of the details of it, it felt like a lost cause—like trying to catch a dream before it fully settles into the mind. Bits and pieces were catalogued, but Halen knew it wouldn’t be more than the barest of things—the general feel of it.

A waking nightmare, so strange and displaced and had he fallen asleep? Certainly, he was tired—worn out more than usual; nothing he would allow to break him—but nothing in the recordings of his vitals suggested he’d fallen asleep. No, instead, it seemed like his body and mind had been freaking out for some other reason that his Censor couldn’t discern.

Thus began his several minutes of standing there, letting Doctor Vickers poke and prod at him, attempting to see if he could find something in his vitals or Censor that hinted at what had gone wrong. Leerin, in a typical fashion of being completely unhelpful, suggested that perhaps he had a brain tumour, which was now giving him hallucinations. Part way through her snide remarks, Janie had shut her up with a hand over the mouth, a silencing skill wrapping around her face. Leerin had glared while Janie had manhandled her to the pulley system, which Rafe had taken over setting up while Halen found himself victim to the impromptu medical exam.

So, while Halen was subjected to his examination, at the very least, he got to watch Janie and Rafe attach Leerin to the system while she struggled and then push her off the edge. Silencing skill still wrapped around Leerin’s head, none of them could hear her scream, but they all known she was shrieking as she sailed across the chasm of the city towards an unimpressed looking Simeon.

“I highly doubt you have a brain tumour,” his doctor said when it was just the two of them. “More likely, it is the stress, and while there were no signs in your Censor that you had drifted off for a moment, Censors aren’t exactly optimized to monitor for such things. Still, I will run more tests once we’re back in Baalphoria.”

“Alright,” Halen replied for a lack of anything else to say, unable to shake the lingering strangeness of that vision, which had felt so real; certainly, the heartbreak of seeing the older triplets speak of Emilia being with someone who wasn’t him—someone who would demand she be a person she had never wanted to be, her recent messages to him laying out that she would never want to be in a monogamous relationship—was a visceral monster inside him.

A nightmare, come to life.