[Can’t Opt Out]

There were moments that were burned into Emilia’s brain. This was one of them, and even through the phantom form she had been forced in, Emilia felt as though her entire soul were a shuddering, cracking thing—that was how visceral her memories of running for Xavier, not knowing if she would make it to him in time, were. There were other moments that were burned into her, of course, some layered over by trauma and love and a million little memory manipulations. Each was still a part of her.

Each time she’d fallen in love lived within her. Emilia thought even the moment she’d fallen for Halen was there as well, always lingering beneath the surface, but there nonetheless. It was something she could almost taste, and she knew this little version of her wasn’t quite there yet—wouldn’t be there for a while yet because she and Halen were always so complicated.

It would take more than some sexual tension, some relaxing of her hatred for him, for something to blossom on her side. Emilia didn’t know when she’d fallen, but she could imagine it—had seen photos, pulled from her memories on the occasions when she let herself remember, intent to get photos for the children in her life who had important people who were no longer alive.

For those little souls, Emilia would suffer remembering her life as it had really been, filled with so much pain and longing for all the boys she loved—and Emilia knew that during those times she missed everyone, yet, it was nothing compared to the absolute misery of missing Halen.

All those other boys were still alive, and maybe if she asked, they’d at least let her love them, even if they couldn’t love her back. Halen was gone, though, what they’d had—what promises they’d made to one another—burned away, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t remember it all, Emilia still knew: they had wasted so much time and it hurt.

What she wouldn’t do to go back and give Halen her everything—to force them to sit down and figure their shit out because they were complicated but there had been love enough there to shatter her when he died and that love should have been enough.

Why hadn’t it been enough?

Each of those worries and heartbreaking moments of the boys she loved leaving her behind lived within her, some clear, some a blur of simply knowing that there were sections of her life before the war with very little tampering because Halen hadn’t been there—hadn’t been some factor that needed more than the most basic of erasure. Where had Halen been? Why hadn’t he been there?

A blurry image of Darrian tucked between a collection of small bodies in Crishar floated through her mind. They’d been tucked under a tree near the lake, the summer heat beating down. Beside him sat a device that she logically knew Halen had given her, helping to keep all of them cool. In her memories, Darrian had brought it, Emilia teasing him about buying things from Hail—didn’t Darrian know she could make anything Halen could a million times better?

“I thought you were going back to Baalphoria?” this young version of her asked. The war had been two and a bit years off, their gap decade now into its second half and most of them having no better idea of what they wanted to do with themselves than when it had begun. Perhaps, that was partially the result of the chaotic lives they had lived during those years when they were supposed to be partying and learning about themselves. They had done that, and yet, they hadn’t.

They had gone back to Baalphoria and dealt with her legal case and suddenly being at least partially responsible for a handful of children and teenagers and twenty-something-year-olds. There had been a veritable war between them and the Ghrino family in the Grey Sands. There had been learning to deal with more and more politics on an international stage because they were always causing problems. There had been the attempted coup in the Inner Court and the ongoing civil war in Lüshan. There had been Simeon and Coral—and Bryce, but she only came into their lives later, during the class action lawsuit Olivier headed against the Dyad Containment Laws—and their suffering under the hands of their parents and the government. There had been so much testing of skills and functions, aimed at a million different things and if Emilia focused hard enough, she knew Halen had been there despite how much her natural—her artificial—inclination was to believe they had never seen one another in more than passing between graduating and coming across one another in basic training.

That was all a lie, and sometimes, Emilia thought the reason she was lost was because Halen was missing from her memories; yet, so many of her friends seemed lost as well. Neither Darrian nor Leerin had ever bothered going to university or finding a job after the war ended. Darrian visited the kids often, she knew. Emilia had no idea what Leerin did with her free time because Leerin had never liked the kids, although she knew her childhood friend tried to at least tolerate them, a few of the younger ones being friendly enough with her. Still, there was a reason why she’d been surprised Darrian had stayed with her so much of their eight years of freedom before the war ripped their lives apart.

Darrian had visited her often, during the spots of time she lived in Crishar—and she was almost positive that wasn’t the clones filling in Halen’s ghost with Darrian. Instead, it was Darrian being her friend—being a little in love with her as well, maybe. Had he known that, had he confessed, she would have latched onto him, lonely as she had been? Probably—probably, he hadn’t wanted to be nothing but a placeholder for her.

In no world would Emilia have ever done that to him. Someone like Elijah, nice enough but not her friend and not someone she could see herself with permanently, could be a fling—even she wouldn’t call him something as cruel as a placeholder.

Had Darrian confessed, though? Told her he wanted to be with her, support her, love her? Emilia knew exactly what she would have done, and fuck was he stupid!? In what world would she have turned down his love, and yes, she knew that her memories of those eight years were a mess of mixed up, sliced up, and outright-erased memories. Still, Emilia thought them accurate enough to judge how she would have reacted: by letting herself fall for this boy who had been her friend for so very long.

“I decided to stay,” the Darrian of her memory said, and Emilia had cried into his arms before this, just the day before, because why didn’t anyone ever stay with her? Was she so unloveable that Halen, Olivier, Rafe, the triplets—that no one—would ever choose to stay with her?

“Leerin is messaging me again,” she could remember saying, earlier that morning. It had become a tradition. Leerin didn’t like children, so never visited Crishar where sometimes the kids lived, sometimes they didn’t, even before the war began. A bunch of the teenagers and young adults they’d brought out of Lüshan and other places hadn’t wanted to have permanent Censor installed—and really, she didn’t think anyone outside of the brass had ever realized that their group had been designing temporary Censors long before the war began for those teenagers and the adults who had settled into Norvel and a handful of other nations. So, those teenagers and young adults had stuck to Crishar and Seer’ik’tine; so, a number of them had visited constantly, finding many of those they had stolen away from bad situations in that odd place of being too old to even want to be adopted yet in need of parental figures all the same.

A few of those then-young adults had only been a few biological years younger than her. Emilia had still become something between a mother-figure and friend to many; so, of course, she would spend her time with them, as had Darrian. Baylor had loved being with them, when the triplets weren’t off on a job—and Emilia knew Baylor had been suffering these last ten years simply because the kids were always telling her about him because miserable or not, her sweet Baylor still loved the kids.

Baylor was hurting, but she couldn’t let herself care, lest it tear her apart. Emilia still loved hearing about the times the kids made him smile, laugh—loved seeing pictures of him, fallen asleep in a pile of many-shaded arms or with his lips pressed to the tops of silver heads, young clones always tucked in close around the silverstrains they had attached their hearts to.

“I told Leerin I’m not coming back yet,” Darrian had told her later, after she’d come out to find him still in Crishar. Somewhere along the line, the three of them had fallen into a painful pattern. Darrian would come visit her and the kids; immediately, Leerin would start begging for him to come home. Emilia had never been quite sure what he told her—maybe he outright ignored his cousin—but eventually, usually after two or three weeks, Leerin would start harassing her to send Darrian home.

For a bit, Emilia would brush her friend off—tell her to come visit, the kids weren’t that bad. Leerin wouldn’t visit, but she would at least shut up for a while, until she started again. Only then would Emilia halfheartedly send Darrian back to Baalphoria—it wasn’t like she would be alone. Her other childhood friends visited, from time to time. Hurinren would come visit, sometimes—somehow, it had always been easier for her to trek across Crishar and Dion to see him and Yujao, but she and all the kids had always been welcome in the Inner Court. Zavriel had spent most of his time with her—Mikhail as well, the two of them having fallen into an easy friendship during their time together in Lüshan—while Lan’za, Meerik'za, and Jerrial had visited often and Meridian had spent as much time as he could get away with at the estate he had let her and kids takeover.

It hadn’t been the same as having Darrian there with her, sharing her bed because while the kids often snuck into her bed as well, there was something nice about having her childhood friend’s arms wrapped around her, holding her when the nights became too hard and never doing more than pressing kisses to her forehead and wiping away her tears.

So many moments with Darrian were burned into her core, but him telling her he was choosing her over his cousin, even if only for a short period of time… did he know how much that meant to her? To hear him actually say, “I’d rather be here, with you,” a small smile tilting at his mouth and eyes, and she had always thought it nothing but friendship in that smile, and she loved that Darrian had never made her feel like it wasn’t just friendship.

Never had he made her feel as though, were she to deny him romance and sex, he would leave. Never had he hinted he was open to more, and that just made her feel impossibly more loved and cared for.

Back then, she had needed a friend, and he had been that for her. Those last two years before the war, Darrian had rarely left her side—and really, Emilia was sure he knew she returned to Baalphoria far more often those last years, if only so Leerin wouldn’t have a full breakdown. Whenever she wanted to go back to Crishar, or occasionally to the Ridge Rind or Falmíer—even though the latter had been horrifically difficult to visit, Lüshan effectively locked down from the moment they escaped Falmíer, just hours from now, until the war began—Darrian would come with her, smiling and laughing and ignoring the demands from his cousin that he stay.

So much of those years lived inside her, and there was a reason why, had she and Darrian ever come across one another in the last decade, Emilia knew the chances that she would have run were negligible. Maybe she would have run; she didn’t think she would have.

Darrian, she thought, had lived inside her heart, placed upon a precipice of friendship and romantic love, for a long time. Somehow, she had just never noticed. Perhaps, through decades—millennia, eventually—of giving her a million moments that were burned into the core of who she was, Darrian had accidentally placed himself there; yet, neither of them had ever realized it.

In the same way, Emilia thought something of this moment playing out before her had cemented Xavier into her heart.

This moment had been one of the most pivotal moments of her life, pulled into her heart with perfect clarity because it had been impressive the amount of fear—by far the most overwhelming thing she had experienced until this moment—that had raced through her as she ran and microsparked through the sewers, shit and piss splattering over her legs and shorts and she’d left Olivier’s sweater tucked into her bag, intent to keep it safe. Looking at this younger version of herself… Emilia remembered how wrong she had felt since giving his sweater over to Clemence before entering Curtisal’s playground.

All she had wanted was to keep it safe; at the time, she hadn’t realized how much that sweater was acting as a barrier between herself and everything that was happening. With the chaos happening around her, she hadn’t ever pulled it back on. If she had known what would happen to it, she might have worn it as she moved, intent to absorb a little more of Olivier from it.

Even back then, Emilia thought herself already a little in love with the lawyer—and odd that, how easily love for Olivier seeped into her when it had been Halen who had always wanted her, Olivier who had always been brushing her aside.

Olivier didn’t love her back—that’s what she had believed until this dream.

Now, she wasn’t so sure, and the worst thing? The worst thing was that this entire dream should have been yet another thing to dig itself into her heart and soul and cast her future into a shadow of everything she learned here.

Emilia had no idea what she would remember—if anything, she somehow thought this would be like a virtual raid: at the end, she would be offered dozens of options of what she could take back to her world as a reward for her time here. A collection of options for things she needed to remember, no matter what, slotted into her mind, a collection more that were things that would be helpful to remember but had giant buts attached to them.

Olivier’s complicated feelings for her had one of those buts, and Emilia had a feeling that were she to be forced to choose, she might let herself forget how her understanding of their relationship might be impossibly flawed. Olivier was an adult and they had been in a complicated, impossible-to-describe relationship for decades. If he wanted something with her now that she was less afraid of facing the people from her past, the fucker could tell her himself.

Darrian, on the other hand? Emilia had no idea if he still wanted anything more than friendship with her. The fact that, once, he had held the possibility of loving her within him and yet never once made her feel as though he demanded her love? That Emilia wanted to remember—wanted to remember, even if it meant she’d have to figure out what the fuck to do about it.