Sion pressed his awareness into Halen, ignoring the way the other boy squird, his golden eyes flickering around Emilia’s willbrandsmithing workshop in what was certainly a mixture of interest and discomfort. It wasn’t difficult to see why he was uncomfortable with Sion digging through his mories of the day before, each slice of Halen’s mories from the hours he had spent in Seer’ik’tine tinged with so much love and adoration for Emilia that it was uncomfortable for Sion as well.
Emotions were… difficult, for Sion. It was perhaps part of why he fit so well with the black knots of their friend group. So of them liked him back—he and Rafe were almost friends, if not quite, while the triplets would never treat him with anything other than each of their personal brands of kindness. It was easy to connect with people who would never feel emotions the way the world thought they should; he didn’t feel those emotions quite properly either. It wasn’t the mixture of absence and obsession that drove black knots to be cold-hearted and yet brutal in their love all at once; rather, it was a confusion of why and how soone felt a particular emotion that filled Sion’s mind.
Once, those questions of why and how had plagued him, his parents demanding she speak, demanding she not be overwheld by emotions and sensations and just about everything else that filled the world to near bursting. Emilia had never been like that. Emilia had always been the sort of person willing to explain her emotions to him, willing to talk through his own emotions and those that fell his way.
Emilia wasn’t here right now to explain the love that Halen had for her—the way his eyes had so continuously flown to her as they spent the day together. Sion didn’t think Halen would appreciate him asking her, even if she weren’t currently cursing the world as she ran through the Falmíer underground.
“At least it isn’t the sewers…” she had ssaged earlier, letting him know that Halen would be by to pick up one of her more experintal willbrands on his way to grab a few things from her room. While willbrands often required training, she had also requested he pick one out for Olivier de la Rue. “Even if it turns out to be useless for whatever is happening today, he should have one. Maybe a few of his students, too? There are a few who are more… reasonable.” It had gone unsaid that Emilia was worried whether Olivier de la Rue was even alive—worried whether he would even be able to use whatever willbrand Sion picked out for him.
Still, he would find the most suitable willbrand for the lawyer, regardless of whether it ever left his hands for Olivier de la Rue’s. That was what Halen was helping with—why he was letting Sion shift through his interactions with the lawyer: so Sion could pick out a willbrand for him. It also likely why Emilia had asked Halen to pick up her things, rather than Sion: she had set him up to be used for his mories, not even telling the boy Sion would et him at her workshop.
“Are we almost done?” Halen choked out, his cheeks an even darker shade than usual for all the blood rushing through him. The man really was quite flustered, and it took a few seconds for him to haphazardly sign out his question, the blush worsening under the stress of accidentally speaking to Sion.
Sion took a photo of him, sending it off to Emilia. Her cackling response ca through a few seconds later—running through the underground, as slly as it was, vents leading up from the sewers, was tedious; mostly, she was spending the ti thinking about designing a better recon skill, most of the existing ones slow and requiring the user to stand still for an extended period of ti. “He looks so bullied!” she mused, and Sion had to agreed: with the man’s watery eyes and blushing cheeks, with the shake of his jaw and press of his lips, Halen had never looked quite so bullied.
Sion was rather proud of himself for being the one to cause the great Halen Mhrina to look so harassed.
“Yes, we are done,” Sion replied, turning to look through the shelves of willbrands he and Emilia had created over the years.
Most of the shelved items were Emilia’s creations, his own tucked away into drawers because even though he knew Emilia would never snoop into what he did in her studio without his permission, he had always felt odd about showing off what he designed to anyone, and the ones he was currently working on certainly weren’t the sort he had wanted to explain just yet. Of the willbrands that lay scattered over the shelves that he had created, most were practice pieces—his attempts to copy what Emilia or her willbrandsmithing master had designed. It was a good way to learn, and recently, he had been procuring old willbrands from thrift stores and estate sales and working on copying those.
Copying willbrands that he knew little to nothing about was much more difficult as he had no one to question on the techniques used, and had eventually co to suspect—and then know—that so of the willbrands had additional materials added during their creation to create more unique effects. When he had asked Master Shaw about whether adding anything extra to willbrands was possible—through Emilia, as he had never t the man himself—the willbrandsmith had said no, not for anything other than aesthetics. Yet, Sion had managed to create several willbrands with extra materials. Sion also suspected Emilia hadn’t quite believed her master either—although he also had a feeling it wasn’t that she thought the man was lying, more that she thought he just didn’t realize it was possible.
Still, regardless of his friend’s opinion on the matter, it was those willbrands he kept tucked away from her prying eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her—Sion would trust Emilia with his most important objects and secrets, always knowing she would keep them safe. It was simply that Emilia was brilliant—this star who was overwhelmingly talented in particularly everything her soul touched upon. If he told Emilia about his experints, it wouldn’t matter if he asked her to let him continue on without her help; she would let him do things his way, and he would figure out whether it was or wasn’t possible to use other materials to augnt willbrands. Then, he would tell her about it, and no matter how hard she tried, she would get this look in her eyes—a look at said she had never touched her fingers onto any experints with willbrands and other materials, yet her mind had floated there, and every secret he had gleaned she had already guessed at.
Maybe, after acting as ssenger between him and Master Shaw, she had already guessed at all those secrets. Maybe, during her travels with her father since, she had asked willbrandsmiths of other nations. Maybe, Emilia already knew everything about everything the universe over; maybe she didn’t. Sion didn’t want to give her any hints to get there before him.
It wasn’t that Emilia ant to do harm—if anything, he had seen her push down her interest in things her friends enjoyed often enough to know she was all too aware of how much her light could overshadow nearly everyone else. Still, despite her best efforts, Emilia was bright and vibrant and brilliant and Sion just wanted a tiny thing for himself, silly as it was.
Now, though, his silly secrets were about to fall from the sky because it would be stupid to not bring the strongest of his willbrands with him to Lüshan—not when Emilia was clearly trying to tell them sothing far worse than she was saying was going on with her request that Halen bring her that willbrand. It would be stupid not to give out those willbrands he had created and tested and imdiately thought this would suit so-and-so. If people died for his childish secrets, he would never forgive himself; there was a ti for silly secrets, a ti for the most life altering as well—now was not the ti for either.
“For you. For Coral,” he signed, holding out two willbrands to Halen. “I do not know if you will want to try them while we are in such a situation, but you should have them in case.” Silently, he turned back to the shelves, forwarding the testing and instructional information to Halen.
“Fucking shit,” Halen muttered, the words slipping off his fingers as well, despite Sion not looking his way, while a function translated the spoken words into text that floated gently over his mind.
Not for the first ti, Sion wondered if it would be prudent to have a function that translated signing he couldn’t see into text as well. While there had been the occasional ti over the last fifteen years where soone had signed at him while he wasn’t actually looking, it was rare and generally rather unimportant—the signing equivalent of soone speaking while another person was zoned out or listening to music through their Censor, as Baylor had once put it. Baylor was bad at not listening for both reasons, and there were tis when things needed to be repeated to him multiple tis.
In both cases, it was rarely anything so important it couldn’t be repeated, and Sion had never seen the Hyrat clone zone out while training—there were tis when zoning out could cause problems, even if the worst thing that could happen during the military-level training their class had partaken in was a few mild burns and their team losing the battle. In Sion’s case, the people around him usually defaulted to verbal communication when in such situations, which were rare outside of training, their prank war, or playing gas with each other. He didn’t mind—the point of the function that translated spoken words to text for him was so people wouldn’t need to worry as much about speaking rather than signing. That said, he could never fully articulate the love and kindness he felt from every person who continued to sign to him, even knowing they didn’t need to.
Still, as Halen’s few words had shown, there were always tis when overwhelm caused those who primarily signed to him to speak aloud. At the sa ti, he had signed when Sion wasn’t looking, only the shift of the aether slotting into {Blissful Silence} telling him about it. If he tried, he could read what Halen said through the function that catalogued the world around him; it wasn’t sothing convenient, however, and it would be far easier to have another function that could translate automatically for him—sothing he knew was possible, but Emilia had resisted programming, viewing their sign language as sothing that should stay out of Censors as much as possible. Sion agreed that he didn’t want their sign language going into the OIC’s bank of information even if it had long ago agreed to never officially catalogue or translate it—it was bad enough when adults they didn’t like managed to figure out parts of it, requiring those who used it to alter it so they could keep their secrets.
There had to be a middle ground, was the thing—so way for a function to only translate based on what the user knew; so way to keep its translations from actually being read by the OIC. Emilia would know, if he asked, but she couldn’t do anything where she was now, and Sion couldn’t shake the feeling that not being able to easily translate what was signed out of his sight—out of sight of anyone who knew the language—would be detrintal. Maybe not today, but… soon. It was an odd, niggling feeling that dragged him back to the feeling that had suffused him when he and Emilia had taken drugs from Mitine Dyn. It was a drag across his mind and soul—an urge that felt liable to pull his insides out if he ignored it.
Sion did not want to ignore it. Better to deal with Emilia’s annoyance that he had gone to Halen to create a function she had previously been resistant to bringing into existence than regret not asking when soone died because a hidden sign didn’t reach soone’s mind.
Ten minutes wasn’t long, but back when they had been teenagers with freshly installed Censors, it had barely taken Emilia the night to program the first prototype of the function that lessened the strain of the world on his senses. Days later, she had been popping out functions for all of them, perfect and flawed and always needing modifications and updates because she was always pushing what she and Censors could do with the human mind, with hardware limitations, with the aether itself.
That had been nearly a decade and a half ago, and both Halen and Emilia were monsters. Sion had seen them sit their butts down in the noisy Virtuosi Rigs of their school and pop up re minutes later—the skew of ti within the Virtuosi System aning it was more than a handful of minutes for their brains—with new functions and skills to fuck with one another. If he asked… would Halen try to create such a function for him—for all of them?
His forr classmate was just like Emilia, so yes, probably, he would.
“Halen?” Sion asked, his query falling off his hands as the other boy watched and waited, nearly vibrating with excitent because despite the ti crunch, he did want to do this.
Perhaps, in the end, Halen’s love for Emilia wasn’t so odd. They were the sa, and yet not. Soone so bright they risked burning the world, so bouncy they risked disappearing into the stars themselves. Soone with a gentle, unyielding light to push against the dark, only risking a burn across the world when nothing else worked, soone to be dragged along by another’s energy, overwheld and yet content to be pulled.
“Yes,” Sion thought, watching Halen hustle over to the Virtuosi Rig set into the corner of the room, where Emilia did both her willbrand designs and coding—the studio was reinforced, so testing skills was more suitable here than in her bedroom—“those two do suit each other, even if together alone, sothing would be… missing.”
Eyes falling back over the mories of Olivier de la Rue Halen had shown him, Sion went back to work picking out a willbrand—or maybe two?—that would suit the lawyer, at least temporarily.
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