Emilia had to confess—she had to, and it was terrible. Every little bit of her demanded that she look through the stalking data her function was currently feeding her about Olivier, just so she could monitor his vitals as she told him—or, ideally, as she didn't, instead talking her way around the confession laying bitter over her tongue.
Better to just get it over with—that was the sort of thing her father would tell her. With so much experience dealing with foreign dignitaries and diplomatic crisis, Miles Starrberg had to be good at both the political politeness of the job and the brutal honesty of it. It was a hard job, she knew, both from her decades of hearing stories about his missions and her occasional presence at more tense etings. There was a delicacy to dealing with anyone; people from other cultures especially.
There was a delicacy to dealing with people who were different, as well. Sion and her brother required a special sort of care, while black knots just wanted it straight—and in Emilia’s experience, it didn’t much matter the way you told a black knot sothing; chances were they would take it about the sa, as long as their mood was in its default position. If it wasn’t—if soone with the serial killer instincts of Baylor was already upset and had to be told sothing that might set him further off? Well, that was when a whole other sort of delicacy was required. In Baylor’s case, it usually involved Taelor and Valor being there, to make sure they could stop him if he really went off. Recently, it had also involved her. If Emilia were being honest with herself, it had involved her being there even before they had begun hooking up, Taelor or Valor requesting she co over and sit thigh to thigh with Baylor while they broke so sort of terrible news. Once they’d brought her into their happy, kinky little circle, she had been there, thighs pressed to either side of Baylor’s as she snuggled into his neck, giving him physical comfort—sothing plush to dig his fingers into—while news broke over his desire to see everyone he didn’t love burn and suffer.
Sotis, it was odd, loving soone who would happily beco a serial killer, if only the people he loved wouldn’t look at him different. While she’d never admit it to anyone, chances were that she wouldn’t look at him as anything other than the sweet, smiling boy he had been near every mont since they had t. Baylor was a serial killer, even if he’d never followed through with the plans that so often ford in his head. Emilia didn’t want him to follow through, but if he did…
If he did, she would still cut down anyone who dared try and take him out. Realistically, she’d just take him and run. Probably, his brothers would follow. Maybe, a few more of their friends as well. Surely, they could set up a little assassin or black ops group sowhere? Give Baylor so truly awful people to torture and kill?
Hopefully that would never happen. It was good to have a backup plan, just in case.
Olivier wasn’t a serial killer, and while he could have a bit of a temper… Really, Emilia had no idea what to expect of him once she spewed the truth of the matter at him. For the mont, he seed content to wait for her to speak, his hands firm around her, holding her still, lest she try to run away.
She wouldn’t run. It was too late; Olivier knew too much of the truth—a truth, her mind reminded her, that he had grasped far too quickly. Clearly, she and Halen hadn’t been nearly as careful with their words as they should have been. Granted, they’d collectively shared more of themselves with other people who had never put things together, so why should they have worried? Probably because most people weren’t Olivier.
Most people weren’t Olivier, so, perhaps, she shouldn’t bother worrying about what his reaction would be when she had no fra of reference for anyone like him. Soone kind and llow and petty, his temper usually only rising to et her, his biting words pressing against her skin, his cutting glares sliding into the wounds they left in her flesh until they were a sweet ache within her because Olivier was an, but he never really was—not to her, anyways.
“I put a stalking virus in that first release of {Blissful Silence},” she blurted out, a vomit of a story, rambling and half-incoherent spattering after it. Her loneliness and near desperation to find anyone who was anything like her in those first months after her D-Levels were tested. Her near instant regret for the stalking abilities of her function, followed by sleepless nights as she coded the stalking out and released a new version—a version which Olivier had never bothered to install.
“I promise,” she finished, her words finally forming back into sothing that could actually be followed without a thousand segues and corrections on her part, “I basically never looked at the data it shared with . I just, still have it? It still goes into a database. That’s why I asked Halen to talk to you about it, though. Just so you’d update it and I wouldn’t have to, you know, admit to how badly I fucked up. I an, it wasn’t technically illegal, but it definitely isn’t good and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Basically?”
Emilia blinked into the warm skin of Olivier’s shoulder. He hadn’t pushed her away, which was good, although the body under her had grown increasingly tense as she explained the situation. Rewinding her mory—which was rather difficult, given her Censor’s ability to record the conversation was still semi-compromised by {A Private Mont}—Emilia’s blanched. Being so honest, she had admitted to Olivier that she hadn’t entirely ignored the database. She had only basically never looked at it.
Fuck.
“Yeah…” she sighed, pushing herself further into the man because if he was going to push her off and never speak to her again, she was going to take what she could of him now. “When I was a teenager, sotis I’d peek. Lack of impulse control. I didn’t even really look for anything in particular? It was just…”
Fuck. How was she even supposed to explain this?
There had just been tis in her life where she had been so alone. Yes, she knew other non-devs, but Andre had been the only one nearby, and he had always just fit in so well. So had she, in many ways, but where Andre had never been afraid to be himself, she had always put so much pressure on herself not to be too much all the fucking ti. Everyone deserved to sparkle and shine, not just her. Andre sparkled, but it was different from her, and he had known that one day, he would beco part of The Black Knot—that he would take it over one day, most likely—and his sparkle would need to dim. Maybe not all the way—and Emilia hoped to all the stars and the aether that following the path laid out by his family wouldn’t completely burn out his spark—but it would need to fade and alter while working. So, Andre had taken his years of schooling as the freedom they were, never making himself smaller.
Emilia, on the other hand, knew that she had a lifeti to be a bright star that, if allowed, would fill the world until few others could be seen. So, she forced herself smaller at tis. It wasn’t hard, not really. Still, it had taken a toll, and when she’d seen Andre able to be himself so freely… she had just wanted to not feel alone in the pressing down of her personality, her strength, her everything.
“I just had a feeling you were like that too, I guess? Considering what your mother did to you? When she outed you, I an…” Emilia added to her explanation, Olivier a solid, still tense thing against her. “I guess I assud that you had these expectations put on you, whether by yourself or your family, and sotis, I just wanted a reminder that there was soone else out there, like . A non-dev who was just…”
She trailed off, unsure of how to explain it any better than that. It had been a long ti ago, was the thing. Trying to rember back to her complicated feelings at the ti was difficult, largely because it was all ford from the broken, flawed logic of a teenager! She was practically an adult now! Of course her thinking was different!
“How often?” Olivier asked.
“There’s like, two answers to that? Or, three, I guess?” Emilia told him, trying to decipher the sound of his voice for any sign of how he felt about what she was telling him. Unfortunately, the man was like a stone, his voice a monotone drawl over her soul. “I looked when we were at the restaurant? In the bathroom? You were just in there so long that I wanted to make sure you were okay! That was an outlier, though! I an, since actually eting you, there have been a bunch of monts where I’ve been tempted to look, but I’ve managed to resist… mostly. I looked a few other tis, but almost imdiately closed it! My impulse control! It’s bad. Seriously!”
“Alright, and before that?”
“The last few tis were like a decade ago, and those tis were, well… they were pretty much right after the thing I was having nightmares about. I wasn’t in a good place, and sotis, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d, uh… watch your vitals while you slept? Very boring, mostly.”
Adding the mostly was probably a mistake, honest as it was. Occasionally, Olivier had, er… woken up to take care of things. Those tis, Emilia had obviously closed the database down, although the fact that she had known what the other non-dev was doing, hundreds of kilotres away, had not been particularly good for her own libido, not that she had been able to even touch herself in those first weeks after her assault, before Rafe had softly taken her to bed.
Of course, Olivier was still paying too close attention to her words and latched right onto that mostly. Once again, Emilia worried he would push her off and bolt. Still, as her words and truth exploded into the world, he didn’t.
Was that good? Like, maybe he wasn’t mad? Or was it terrible? Like, was she going to be wandering off to find Grenner’s room in a few minutes?
Emilia had no idea, and all she could do when Olivier asked about the tis she had spied on him before that was tell him that she’d only looked at it occasionally during those first few months after he had installed it. Then, she’d stopped, not opening it again until she had struggled to sleep for those few long weeks.
“I think part of it was guilt,” Emilia admitted when he asked why she’d stopped looking. “There was also the fact that Halen had transferred to our school? He was so distracting— I an, we almost imdiately butted heads and ended up at war with one another. He also sort of… fit that sa sort of situation I was talking about? Soone who was making themself a bit different than how they actually wanted to be? I guess he just sort of filled that gap?” she asked, unsure if she was either making sense or if what she was saying was accurate because she’d actually never thought about it before.
Halen, in many ways, was like her. Their reasons for making themselves different from how their actual personalities were might not be the sa—Emilia wasn’t sure Halen would ever worry about outshining anyone, not if it was about sothing actually important to him, anyways—but the shifts they had made for their friends were certainly similar. Emilia… wasn’t sure what to do with that realization.
“Oh,” she added, before Olivier could add anything else to the conversation. “Since we’re being so open about odd feelings, there was also a mont where I felt like, ‘Hey, I don’t need to look at this database anymore?’ Or, maybe more like, ‘I don’t need to look at it for a while?’ Which is odd? Cause I’ve never felt like I needed to look at is again, and I’m not sure I ever felt like I needed to look at it before that mont? And this was also, like… almost five years after Halen distracted from looking, I think? Maybe a year after the not being in a good place and stalking you when I had insomnia? ”
Usually, Emilia was pretty good at understanding her own motivations for things. In this case, she apparently knew nothing. There was a good chance it was because she had spent nearly fifteen years trying her best to not think about the stupid ability to stalk Olivier, but it was still… odd to realize she understood so little of her motives at the ti, and really, looking further back… hadn’t there also been an odd feeling when she’d added the ability to stalk people into the function in the first place? So itching need that she hadn’t bothered looking too closely at, fearful of the deranged, desperate person she would find under her loneliness.
“When was that?” Olivier asked, his fingers tapping over her skin as she gave him a date. “I see.”
“You see?” she asked, wondering what in the world he could possibly see. It was, as far as she knew, just a random date. Nothing special had happened—not according to her Censor, anyways. Maybe it had so importance to him?
If it did, he said nothing of it. Instead, his fingers brushed down her spine, skin brushing skin because he had slipped his hand under her shirt long ago and never bothered removing it.
“It’s okay, Emilia,” he said, voice soft but strong. “I forgive you. So, you can forgive yourself, too. It’s okay. I am not mad, and what you did, it isn’t nearly as bad as you seem to think it is.”
Of all the things Emilia knew and didn’t know about her feelings when it ca to the stalking ability, Emilia had known this: what she had wanted, more than anything, was to be forgiven for what she’d done. It shouldn’t have been possible. How could anyone forgive her for such a violation of their privacy? Yet, here was Olivier, pulling her closer when they were all skin and bodies pressed together, clothing rudely interrupting the slide of all their skin against each other. Here was Olivier, telling her to forgive herself over her soft sobs that had co so easily at his words, tears dampening his shoulder as he just held her and repeated his words, over and over and over again.
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