[Can’t Opt Out]

It took far longer than Emilia thought reasonable for Samina to realize that she was getting messages on her xphern. Emilia’s floating body watched the messages roll in at the top of her friend’s xphern, and perhaps it was that Samina was distracted? She’d finally managed to get to the best ending of the route she’d been obsessing over, after all.

It had never ceased to amuse Emilia the sort of people her friend liked romantically. Unlike with Darrian, it hadn’t been a secret to her that Samina would have accepted a romantic relationship with her; once, Emilia had considered it, back when they were teens. There had been this moment, around the time her friend had hit puberty, her body plumping in all the places Emilia’s own never had, when she’d found herself wondering if it would work.

Ten thousand years later, Emilia still had no idea if it would work, and she didn’t regret not starting anything with Samina. With her black knot, her friend would have fallen hard and fast for her, and if things between them hadn’t worked out…

Well, there was a reason why she’d been so careful with Clemence, never wanting the girl to feel as though she were an experiment or something Emilia weren’t treating with the upmost care and caution. With Clemence, only grief and regret remained. With Samina, though?

Samina had found happiness with someone who was both nothing like Emilia and someone who was so much like her that, when the two of them were together, it were as though the world fell away. Perhaps it was a bit self-centred, but for a long time, Emilia had assumed that her friend had found someone who contained all the “good” parts of her personality, without so much of the chaos and hyperactivity. In some ways, that was true, but since seeing so much of her friend’s inner thoughts…

Honestly, Emilia wasn’t sure what to make of it—after all, Samina seemed a little less than enthusiastic about her endless babbling. Maybe, over the course of their lives, that enthusiasm had grown? Fuck knew Samina’s longtime girlfriend could babble with the best of them.

Another message came through, and finally, Samina noticed it. “What…” she muttered, perhaps unsure of what she was seeing—it wasn’t like the other girl had used a xphern much until this point, and combined with the stress and the fact that this place should have been effectively broken off from the xphern transmission network…

Yeah, no. Emilia couldn’t blame her friend for being a bit shocked when she opened the messaging program and found a collection of messages—all identical, but messages all the same—waiting for her. Even better? There was a signal on her side, weak but there, and at the very least, Samina had some calm within her—probably, she had more than Emilia had realized.

At least, she had once had more calm. All of them had changed over the millennia, Samina rising into a ball of pure chaos that made everyone—even herself, Levi, and Baylor—a little nervous.

Did she fall back into this calm person when alone? When with her girlfriend?

Emilia had no idea, and really, it was quite amazing that she and her girlfriend were still together—Yujao and Hurinren as well. A few more names came to mind, of people who had managed to make it work despite the strain of war and millennia on their minds and hearts. Mikhail had spent stretches of time apart from his late wife after the training system became the fully functioning monster it was after Alliance Ridge, yet, the two of them had always fallen back into one another, as adorable as they had been the first time Emilia had seen them together.

Other people had fallen apart—become harsh and spiteful as the war and grief tugged at them in different ways.

Losing children had always been the worst, Emilia knew. There had been a few people in their unit like that—people who were married with kids before entering their unit, one couple who met in their unit, married, had a kid. All of those people who had lost their children had refused to let them be taken to Crishar, Norvel, the Ridge Rind, or even the small island off the Penns, where one of the schoolmates had safely housed many of the Penns’ children for the majority of the war. One of those children born during the war had lived on the base, despite advice that they not.

“This is the safest place in the world,” she could remember that little girl’s mom saying as she pressed a kiss to her sleeping toddler’s forehead. Her husband had been with them, climbing the Strats, when Alliance Ridge exploded. His wife was supposed to be on base, keeping track of their child. She hadn’t been; instead, she’d left it to one of Emilia’s ex’s people to watch over the kid—the woman had been part of the regular military, while her husband had been recruited by Codeth from the unit he’d originally been put in, before Division 30 became something solid and essential to the war effort.

That woman had grown to hate her husband for daring to take some time to relax, as though she hadn’t also slipped out to head to Rosalia on the slidelines for some food. Her husband had just been broken—hadn’t known how to deal with his anger at everything and everyone because his wife was supposed to be watching their child, not her teammates. It might not have made a difference; maybe it would have.

Like many of them, he had never liked most of their regular military members, aside from his wife, and he never would have left their child to be watched by any one of them.

During the investigation and accounting of bodies and damage to their base, Emilia had found evidence of their child still in her crib. There was no evidence of any adults having come to try to find her—no evidence that those cowards who had screamed and run, trying to save themselves despite there being an active attack raging around them and the civilians and non-combatants in the base, had even thought to come protect the child, nor even give her a familiar face to see as she died.

Instead, Hyrenie had been there, smart thing that she’d been, her corpse splattered nearby because Emilia’s sweet, terrifying pet who shouldn’t have been at the base either, had protected that child from the monsters that had surged through Alliance Ridge before the explosion. Hyrenie had succeeded in her mission, too. At the cost of her life, Hyrenie had managed to protect that little child. Had Halen’s attempts to stop the explosion worked, Hyrenie’s sacrifice would have been enough.

When she was little, people had always been telling her that, one day, Hyrenie would prove herself the monstrous animal she was. “She will turn on you,” people said. “That creature will abandon you when you need her most.”

People ran. Her monster had stayed, not just in those last moments of her life, protecting a child whose parents had never let her get close to their little girl, but before that as well.

Hyrenie had so often wrapped herself around the kids—let them climb over her, roll with her, sleep with her when one of the broken children Emilia loved needed a monster to keep them safe. Her monster had kept those kids safe from human monsters and covetous eyes and wandering hands, had been the first to notice Westrial not coming up from the lake once, had killed criminals intent to grab Porsq and lost a limb because of it.

“Zavriel’buran!” she could remember Porsq screaming, his abilities echoing out through the world because he had needed Zavriel there immediately, and if that meant he had to force the man to him, so be it.

“I’m sorry,” that little boy, by then an awkward teenager who was far too small for his age, would later tell her and Zavriel, neither of them needing his apologies because they trusted him and loved him and knew he would never use his abilities on them with malice in his heart.

“Hyrenie’s awake,” she had said, her fingers brushing through the braids Bireth, on leave from the civil war in Lüshan due to an injury, had given Porsq a few days beforehand. The criminals had followed Bireth to Crishar, they thought, slipping through what little security had existed around the lake house in those days. Within hours, there had been more majenstra, more Black Knot agents, more ryohua, all there to protect her and the children and every powerful person who ever called the lake house home. “Do you want to see her? I bet she wants to know you’re okay?”

It was the first time anyone had truly been hurt trying to protect him. It wouldn’t be the last. Porsq was so powerful that only an idiot wouldn’t try to woo him to their side. The boy—now a man, of course—didn’t suffer so many attacks or offers to bring him in as a high-ranking member of this organization or that—legitimate and illegal, both—these days. Part of it was the war, she thought, this implication rising that Porsq was Division 30’s and once someone belonged to Division 30, that was it.

It wasn’t so simple—there were people who had been brought into the unit on a trial basis and simply not fit with them. At the same time, it was impossibly true.

Porsq was theirs, and no one could have him. More importantly, Porsq didn’t want anyone else. They were his family—people who had offered him love and comfort and never once flinched away from his abilities, even when they’d occasionally had to drag him away from angsty teenage use of them… not that she was one to judge, petty thing that she so often was.

That pettiness had sometimes been brutal, slicing into people when it perhaps was uncalled-for.

After their child died, her father had stayed with them, but his heart wasn’t there. When he died protecting a baby on the front barely a year later, no one had been surprised. They’d never found that child’s family, and like so many other kids they happened across over the years, Hayden had been sent off to live with all the kids they claimed as theirs. One of theirs had died protecting him—the last act of a grieving father. So, he was theirs now too.

The mother, grieving her child and friends, on the other hand, had effectively been kicked out of their unit after she had dared to blame her husband for their child’s death yet again. All of her friends’ died while leaving her child behind; yet, she never spared a single word of blame for them. Emilia’s pet—her friend—had died protecting her child, and the woman had needed to shut up.

The bitch had not, in fact, shut up. Words had slipped out of her, and then Darrian had been there, between the woman and Emilia, reaching out, dragging the woman away. Julian had been there too, tugging Emilia into another room and asking if she was okay—did she feel okay? It had been weird, confusing, and so unlike the Julian of her memories, until months later, Julian had knelt before her and confessed some of her and Halen’s relationship to her—only some; only enough that she would understand and not panic. She had, in fact, still panicked.

Emilia watched as Samina bit her lip, trying not to shift her weight too much, lest she lose the signal. It was a good thing she was down there—or, up there, perhaps, depending on one’s point of view—rather than the majority of their friends. So many of them would have moved, their bodies moving into a position of excitement faster than their brains could tell them to stay still. Off would the signal slip, along with any chance to get aid.

“Sometimes… I think many of us didn’t know each other as well as we thought we did,” Emilia noted, Samina giving no indication that she could feel her presence or hear her words. Unsurprising—Samina had always been happy to go along with her vibes-based decisions, but that was the chaos coming out, rather than some belief that Emilia could feel something within the aether. Really, Emilia was as shocked as her friend had been that Samina had been capable of feeling anything off with the cave system—it really was a testament to how strange and off the energy of this place was that even Samina could feel it.

Glancing around, Emilia tried to catalogue the cavern that Samina had found herself trapped it. It really was a mystery, how the exit had vanished. At the same time, it was rather annoying that in this form, she couldn’t feel anything particularly wrong with the place. Occasionally, while watching herself travel through the dungeons and the tunnels Jerrial had helped her reach, she’d been able to catch the smallest flavour of that something lurking down there. If she were being honest, Emilia wasn’t convinced the only reason she had been able to feel anything was because her younger self had been feeling it, either the remembrance that her body had, even if her brain didn’t, vibrating back through her, or simply the knowledge that something was there to be felt leaving her the ability to perceive it.

“Hello, is someone there?” Samina finally managed to type out on her xphern—really, Samina had no idea how to type on that thing and it had taken a few minutes just to get that number of words out. Almost immediately, another message came through: an automatic response telling Samina that someone was being alerted that the xphern message repeater had reached her. In some ways, Emilia was rather sad that she hadn’t been blessed with another trip to Dion. From what she’d heard, the rumai’se that Yujao had dragged into his sphere of influence had been taking “a little too long” to arrive and the Dionese man had—