[Can’t Opt Out]

“Go away,” Olivier signed with all the energy of someone who knew that, in no world, was the woman come to bother them going to go away. It was worth a try, at least. Maybe in another life, he would have people who worked for him who respected that, every so often, he didn’t want to work. Was he something of a workaholic? Yes—and admittedly, he had been far more of one during his youth.

First, there had been the loneliness and the familial obligation, law and studies one of the few places he could find peace and some semblance of happiness, his mother rarely demanding he be anything but himself in the courtroom. Of course, she increasingly tried to demand he tone it down, but these days; that just encouraged him to be even more himself—and therefore, someone his mother didn’t approve of.

Then, there had been Emilia’s case, and while her case had stretched longer and longer due to various circumstances—Emilia causing problems, mostly, even if he wouldn’t change a single thing she did over the course of her case—he had wanted to help her. Sometimes, Olivier thought that, were he to go back in time, he wouldn’t help her; instead, he would take her and Halen, Simeon and Coral and every person who wanted to come along for the ride, away to the Free Colonies.

Life would have been strange and different. In the end, Emilia had practically lived in the Free Colonies in the years between her case being won and the war, so really, would anything have changed, had they been fugitives from Baalphoria’s cruel and senseless laws? Maybe; maybe not. Maybe everything would have changed, the war lost because some moment of her true freedom had set her on the course to ending the war. Maybe the only thing that would have changed was that he wouldn’t regret wasting so much time—wouldn’t regret not burying himself between the bodies of the people he loved every day they both still drew breath.

Now, it was too late, and sometimes, Olivier buried himself in work for the same reason he had during those years of missing Emilia and Halen: grief. It tore through his body, sometimes—left him gasping for breath and sobbing into the arms of whoever would hold him.

Porsq or Xavier, quite often, neither deserving of his grief but understanding of it and never once voicing some distress that they were two of the people he felt safest with. Darrian, sometimes, as well, the other man’s fingers dragging through his hair as he shared stories of Emilia and Halen’s youth—of those years between when Olivier had been forced to leave them and the war as well, Darrian spending so much time with Emilia during those years that Olivier really wasn’t sure how she had seemingly never realized Darrian was practically in love with her.

“I’m just not the sort of person she would ever think to love back, maybe?” Darrian had once suggested, shrugging and taking another puff of some drug that Olivier wasn’t sure he’d ever been given the name of. As someone who rarely indulged, Olivier simply trusted his friends to procure drugs.

Darrian, over the years, had become one of his closest friends. As his friend, Olivier had smacked Darrian on the back of the head and told him he was stupid.

“Darrie,” he could remember saying through the haze of the high, Darrian’s eyes wide because the hitting and the use of Darrie were both rare from him, “you are an idiot. You are also one of the sweetest people I have ever met. If you told Emilia you wanted to be with her, she would blink twice, then smile and accept your love. I don’t even think it would take more than a few hours for her to figure out how to love you back.”

Olivier didn’t think that Darrian had believed him, but this had been a while ago—a few months after they’d first happened across each other in a sex club and become both friends and occasional partners, but only ever in group sex, both of them more tops than bottoms. Occasionally, Olivier bottomed for his more and more boyfriend-like friend-with-benefits, but in no world was he letting Darrian’s cock get anywhere near his ass—the guy was too fucking big and Olivier wasn’t a size queen, thank you.

Instead, they shared partners—never silverstrains, never anyone who looked even passingly like Halen—and in some ways, Olivier knew he had helped Darrian find himself—figure out what he liked in the bedroom. When the younger man had eventually admitted he liked people like Emilia and Levi and Baylor, Olivier hadn’t been surprised—Darrian always had dragged brats into their bed on nights they shared. Back at the beginning, when Darrian had been so unsure of himself and letting Olivier guide him, Olivier had still been surprised to realize how little confidence Darrian had in himself, as though he had never noticed how much his friends loved and valued him. After so many years… Olivier wondered if Darrian would take the chance to ask Emilia out, assuming she didn’t ditch the Zentari cousins when she woke up, or perhaps once they were out of the {(PVP Entrance Raid)}.

Somehow, Olivier didn’t think that likely. The way she had seemed yesterday, yes, she would have run had Olivier lingered too long. Even after the echo attack, before her knots had been at least partially sorted out, Olivier had felt almost as though she had wanted him to stay—to hold her a little longer.

Fuck how he had wanted to stay—wanted to hold her and never let go, pretend that they could turn back time and be happy. Yet, he had worried that just as Halen had claimed he and Emilia didn’t work without Olivier, the same would be true for him and Emilia: without Halen, they wouldn’t work.

So, despite how much he could have brushed aside going back to that horrific building and talking to SecOps, Olivier had left. Fear had driven him off—at least, that was part of it. The other part? Olivier knew Emilia, and thus, he knew that sometimes she needed to choose things for herself. The fact that only hours later Emilia had chosen to show up and tease him was proof enough of that reality, and really, if he were to give Darrian any advice, it would be to flirt with Emilia so relentlessly that she would crack her heart open for him.

Olivier really didn’t think it would take that much effort on Darrian’s part to make Emilia love him.

For a moment, a vision of him and Darrian peeling Emilia apart flashed through his mind, there and gone. It was too early for that. While he might be almost positive that Emilia was going to be sticking around, things could change. Better to not let his hopes for the future melt into a puddle of yet more grief and regrets.

“Olivier'burat~” Xavier whined, snuggling closer to him. “She’s not going away~”

“No,” their intruder said absently, her voice sweet and childlike despite the fact that the young woman was absolutely terrifying. “I have things to discuss.”

“But it’s late~” Xavier continued to whine, wiggling until he wasn’t snuggled into Olivier’s side but curled into his lap. It was nice, having this little child he loved so much safe in his arms. There would never be a single moment where Olivier wouldn’t happily let Xavier—or Porsq or a handful of other children related to him through both blood and unending love—curl into him.

“I cannot believe you are leaving our threesome to go snuggle a child,” a Halen who no longer existed anywhere but within Olivier’s memory laughed. Emilia had a similar memory, buried somewhere deep inside her, but doubtless, it had been as snuffed out as Halen’s life.

Within the memory, mirth shone in Halen’s eyes as he pulled Emilia closer, her own gaze locked onto Olivier, so much soft affection in them that he had never been able to fool himself. Even here, in this rare moment of him joining them, Emilia had urged him to go—Xavier, with his sobbing nightmares, needed his uncle’s warmth and safety more—and it had been so painfully clear she still loved him.

Emilia had still loved him enough to put his need to comfort a little boy they both loved ahead of her own desire to keep him close every second that she could.

Years had spread between him breaking things off with her and Halen and that moment, Olivier only ever finding himself in their bed when Emilia asked. Her asking had been a rare thing, not because he would say no because he never said no—how was he to refuse the girl he loved asking him to come to bed with her? Instead, it was because Emilia had become nervous and unsure around him—wary because she didn’t know what she had done to make him leave, as though she weren’t perfect and he didn’t miss her and Halen with every breath he took, even almost forty years later.

It would have been better if she had never asked him to join them; then, at least, he could have pretended that she no longer loved him—that his abandonment of her and Halen and all they had was a breaking point. In no world could Olivier ever claim to not know Emilia and Halen still loved him, despite how he had broken all of their hearts—and the fact that Emilia didn’t understand why he left them? The knowledge that she had cried night after night into Halen’s chest, asking the younger man why Olivier didn’t want them, Halen holding the painful reality of why Olivier had left inside him while assuring Emilia that she wasn’t crazy and the three of them had been happy?

It was horrible to know he was the source of so much pain, and yet, still, she loved him.

Olivier loved them both back so much that he had never been able to refuse even the smallest fraction of their love, despite knowing that every time he allowed them the comfort of all three of them being together, they would all suffer for it.

“You need to stop saying yes,” Halen had begged once, twice, a million times because Olivier could never stop himself from saying yes, the now-dead man’s forehead pressed to Olivier’s chest, his fingers destroying Olivier’s shirt where they had gnarled through the expensive fabric. So many times, Halen had asked Olivier to be the responsible one—to tell Emilia he couldn’t join them, didn’t want to join them. Halen, after all, was the one who had to deal with the fallout. So many times, Halen had held Emilia while she sobbed for him and inadvertently made Halen feel like he alone would never be enough for her, and Olivier wanted to think himself a good person.

Had he truly been a good person, Olivier would have avoided them. He wouldn’t have slipped away to Crishar or the Penns or Norvel to visit other people, only to find himself in Emilia and Halen’s bed yet again. He would have left them to their life, not perpetually reminded Emilia of how good the three of them were together, leaving her a shattered heart every time he left, every time she woke to find him already gone because leaving them had always been so hard and watching her fake a smile as she whispered goodbye and a thousand other well wishes was always too much when he had to leave.

Against him, Xavier pressed closer—one of the few people Olivier let fully see him trying to give his aching, cracking heart some glue to hold it together. Allowing Xavier to see the totality of him had been a jealousy thing, back when Xavier was young—after all, Porsq had always been allowed into his mind, not just by the then-preteen’s abilities but by Olivier’s trust in his as well. There had been a handful of them, telling Porsq that he never needed to feel as though he couldn’t always be probing at their minds.

Little Xavier had hated that Porsq had seen more of Olivier than he himself was allowed, so, Halen had made him a function for his pre-Censor tablet in order to display Olivier’s vitals. Later, Xavier had talked a number of other people into letting him have access to their vitals—Emilia, Halen, Levi, and Darrian had been the first, but so many more had followed, Xavier having access to most of their vitals by the time he had his Censor installed.

Only later had Olivier learned that Xavier had access to every aspect of their vitals, even those that had been removed for most of them after a few people had complained about being aware when Emilia and Baylor were having kinky sex. Olivier had been moderately horrified to learn that Xavier had always been able to see so much, even if he understood that due to the lives they had lived, all of the children and teens they had taken out of Falmíer understood far too much of the world’s cruelty.

“It normalizes that sex is okay,” Emilia had once said, tugging at the fabric of a blanket, laid out under her, protecting her and the children around her from the hot sand, although only a sleeping Xavier, Melodian, and Ivirium had been there at the time, the then-preteen curled around the bodies of the two silverstrain children, all of them growing up too fast. “For so many of them… sex has been a weapon, but it doesn’t need to be. So yeah, we could try to hide it from them—and it’s not like I’m saying we should bring them into the bedroom or anything! But, there is a power in normalizing the reality that sex is okay, and so are the kinks that come along with it. I think that’s better than pretending that the things that happened to them aren’t going to fuck with their minds, at least a little?”

In the distance, the children who were increasingly young adults and outright adults had laughed as they splashed in the waves, Alaric and Halen keeping the smallest from drowning while Cyan had vanished with Darrian and several of the young adults they had collectively ended up responsible for, returning with cookies and other snacks a while later.

Less than a year later, all of those children and young adults had been sequestered away as the war broke, many of them begging to come help, as though they weren’t still small souls in need of protection. Some of them had been kept out of the war far longer than Olivier thought reasonable; really, some of their parents and guardians still treated some of them as though they were babies, despite many being well over forty years old now.

Olivier understood why so many of the adults who loved the kids wanted to keep them innocent, as though most of them hadn’t been stripped of their innocence long ago.

Regardless, it was because of Xavier’s ability to see into Olivier’s own body and heart that the little boy had decided Emilia was ‘gusht material, Halen ‘burat. In the little boy’s mind, Olivier was in love with both of them, so obviously, they would be together. Then, when Olivier had broken things off, Xavier had held hm and told him it would be okay, then continued on referring to Emilia and Halen so closely—had pulled all of their relations into his sphere of pseudo-familial love as well.

The little boy had as much capacity to love as Emilia herself did. He was an endless well of affection, always so happy to snuggle with whoever needed some love, always smiling and laughing. When Myron and Harriet had first found their way into their family, he had been the first to greet them as cousins, declaring, “Even if Vanessa Van”—Louis’ terrible wife was never anything familiar to the children—“doesn’t consider you her kids, Louis’burat thinks of you as his, so you’re ours now!”

It had taken almost thirty years, but Louis was finally able to claim those two sweet children as his. If that wasn’t good enough, his bitch of a wife had finally been excised from the family. Wonderful—or, it almost was. Unfortunately, Vanessa was causing significant difficulties, fighting against her divorce as though it wouldn’t go through regardless of the fuss she made.

It was for that reason alone that Olivier forced his eyes open. His secretary—who was a lawyer in her own right, specializing in practically everything due to severe time-skew abuse, but had taken a more behind-the-scenes job in order to secure herself more freedom to do what she pleased.

Olivier didn’t generally ask questions about what it was she pleased to do—he wasn’t stupid and knew she was breaking the law, all in the name of justice, but it was better if he didn’t know the specifics. “Vanessa?” he asked, knowing that the answer would be that yes, Vanessa was causing yet more problems. It could be something to do with the Alver case—or some other case he was less involved in or some client causing some issue or another—but unless someone had died, he doubted it.

A problem with any other case could have waited. Problems with Vanessa, unfortunately, couldn’t.