[Can’t Opt Out]

The boy’s knock was soft across the door, tentative, as though perhaps she might refuse to let him in. Well, she hadn’t actually agreed to let him in, only watched him stride back across the grass. His loose white shirt and pale red pants had rustled in the breeze, his steps confident yet lazy and relaxed and reminding her so much of the boys she had grown up with, before he disappeared under her.

When she pulled open the door, he was already smiling, hair a messy ball of windswept curls.

⸂Hello,⸃ he said cheerily, the sound whispering over her core.

“Do not squirm,” she scolded herself, stepping aside to let him in, and closing the door behind him—this one didn’t have hydronic dampeners like the one’s at the inn.

This little bubble of the world was so different from the one—presumably—below that, for a moment, she questioned if she was really in the same world. Then she turned, eyes scanning over the red and, yeah, definitely the same world. Just a different style of it.

⸂You ate?⸃ he asked, leaning over and swiping a piece of something she had yet to try. He peeked under the patter she had re-covered with the cloche, smiling at her when he realized she hadn’t touched it. ⸂Not a fan?⸃

Emilia shook her head. “No, not a fan. And yes, I ate a bit…” Her words trailed off as his smile faltered. She could understand him, but that didn’t mean he could understand her. She swallowed, trying to figure out how to make the aether—how to make her core—speak to him. She focused, trying to will a yes through her mind and core and… Nope. If she could speak through the aether, she couldn’t do it as naturally as the hearing thing.

⸂Ah…⸃ He rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck, eyes scanning over the room. ⸂I can’t understand you, but, you can understand me, yes?⸃

She nodded.

⸂That’s a yes?⸃

She nodded again, then frowned. A bubble of amusement surrounded her as he realized the problem as well, the assumption that she hadn’t just nodded no twice.

⸂Yes,⸃ he said, all inflection of question gone from his voice.

She nodded.

⸂No,⸃ he continued.

She shook her head.

His head titled, assessing. ⸂No idea.⸃

She shrugged.

⸂Absolutely not.⸃

She glared ice at him, partially because that was what she would do to say “absolutely fucking not,” and partially because he was teasing her now.

Another laugh surrounded her as he rattled off a few more emotions and potential answers for her to emote. If was fun, but also revealed to be completely useless when he informed her that her chosen movements were pretty close to what he would expect from a local. She’d glared ice at him as he sat back in one of the chairs, smiling at her like she was the most amusing thing he’d come across in a long time. It wasn’t a mean smile, more one that reminded her of Rafe and his brother’s smiles, deprived of friends and attachment to the outside world until she had fallen—quite literally—into their life. The smile of someone who wasn’t used to being with people they hadn’t grown up with.

“I guess you’re not as nice as you look,” she muttered, falling onto the couch and grabbing more of the sweet, maybe-fruit.

He watched her movements, so contrary to his own graceful ones. She could be graceful—she’d been sent to boring ass classes specifically to learn to be the proper young lady she was supposed to be—but she wasn’t going to be forced to be that person within her own temporary room.

Instead, she flopped a leg lazily over her knee, giggling internally when a light blush pressed over his nose as he got an eyeful. She’d noticed, below, how covered nearly everyone was. Layers of protection from injury, she had guessed, but perhaps it was more than that. Even here, where the children had seemed freer, they were fully covered. The cuffs of the boy’s shirt were rolled up slightly, exposing the lower half of his forearms to her, but otherwise, he was covered from neck to toe in loose, flowing fabric.

Emilia tilted her head as she examined him. Was he a boy? She had assumed that before, based on looks alone, but her only frame of reference was her own world, where lifespans had been drawn longer and longer by knot therapy and genetic manipulation. He reminded her of how she had looked, just before the war. She’d been an adult who looked younger than she should have, the result of possessing ridiculously good D-Levels and the money to take care of herself.

She sighed, collapsing further into the sofa. They needed one of the girls—the Risen Guard trainees—to come join them, to cooperate and help her get answers. Getting answers was going to take forever if they were going to be playing a guessing game—not that the boy seemed inclined to talk to her. If anything, he seemed perfectly content to just watch her. It was a bit creepy, but mostly just so, so frustratingly intimate.

“Well, you can’t understand me, so you’re gonna have to do the talking,” Emilia said, levelling him with a look that she hoped conveyed her words. He blinked at her. She waved a hand through the air, a “Your turn.”

⸂My name is Key,⸃ the boy—man? Guy? Guy seemed generic enough. Wait, hadn’t he just given her his name? Why did she need a defining word? That seemed like a waste of time, although defining words were useful, even if they could be stupid and overly specific. Actually, he could very well not be a he, for all she knew. Hopefully he— they— Key would tell her, were that the case, and—

“Fuck,” she grumbled to herself, resisting glaring at the sweet fruit. She knew she shouldn’t have eaten all that sugar! Stupid platform, taking into account how sugar in the real world would make her spin and spin and lose control of her brain and—

⸂Do you have a name?⸃ he asked, interrupting her spiralling thoughts.

“Emilia,” Emilia tried, hoping that maybe a single word would catch across their language barrier.

The name that Key repeated back to her sounded virtually nothing like her name.

“Em?” she tried, nose wrinkling when he repeated, ⸂Ma?⸃ back to her. She signed, deflating further into the couch.

⸂No go, hm?⸃ he sighed, scratching idly at the back of his neck again. ⸂How about I try some sounds, and you can tell me if they are close to your name?⸃

Emilia shrugged, the movement she had said meant both “no idea” and “whatever.”

It couldn’t hurt, although she was certain this would be far easier when one of the girls who could understand her were around. Then again, Key’s probably sister hadn’t seemed impressed by anything that had happened the night before—which reminded her that Key hadn’t actually told her where she was or how long she’d been out for. This one way communication thing was a pain. Unfortunately, unlike the last time she’d had to communicate regularly with someone who couldn’t speak, she wasn’t a child, with a million, billion hours available for them to design their own, personal sign language. She could revert to that, to childhood hand-waving. She could try regular Baalphorian sign language, too, forced into them by tutors who insisted their self-designed signs would not suffice in the real world.

It hadn’t stopped them from only using their personal sign language to communicate with each other, even decades later—the last time they had seen each other.

Emilia’s heart gave a little squeeze, longing for home and family—the ones she had chosen—racing through her. It had been a long time since she had truly missed anyone and—

Key’s hand caught her own, scratching bloody lines in her arm again as Payton unknotted stars knew what—probably something having to do with longing. She hadn’t purposefully knotted away her ability to miss her family, but it had definitely deadened under all the knots, not dragging through her soul quite as deeply as it otherwise would have.

⸂Be careful,⸃ he scolded her, ignoring the glowering look she turned on him as he examined her arm, the red lines quickly sealing up. His eyes shifted to her nail, long and bloody, drops dripping through the air and back into her body.

⸂Dangerous,⸃ he teased, a hint of something almost admiring in his eyes as he let her wrist go. He shifted back, seating himself beside her, a comfortable distance between them. ⸂You don’t generally find things that sharp around here, but I think you already figured that out.⸃

She nodded, tucking her hands under her ass in an attempt to not scratch at her itching soul. Itching was better than aching. She’d had conscious, mass-knotting done before, in an emergency. Nebulae willing, never again. That shit had nearly killed her for how bloody—ha—painful it was.

⸂Something funny? Want to share?⸃ Key asked, smirking at his own, not so funny joke. Once again, he ignored the ice she glared at him. ⸂So, name.⸃

He rattled off various syllables, going through them as though this world’s alphabet was either completely different from her own, or he was purposefully randomizing the order. By the time he got to “Eh,” his voice somehow both precise and clipped, she almost missed it, her mind beginning to wander off in boredom.

She clapped her hands—which, when had she removed them from under her? She hadn’t clawed any more holes in herself, at the very least.

⸂Eh… plus something else?⸃ Key clarified, his nearly perpetual smile faltering for a moment, apparently having deemed “Eh” to be an unreasonable name.

She nodded, trying not to judge him too hard. She knew at least one Free Colony gave their newborns single syllable names, slowing adding on more as they grew and learned. She’d never met anyone from there, but she knew their baby names could conceivably be Eh. Her own baby name would have been Em, transitioning through Em, Emi, and Emili, before finally ending at Emilia, by which time she would have been an old lady.

“Oh, shit,” she thought, staring into space as Key began adding extra syllables to Eh. Echo. Evade. Escape. The fact that her own name hadn’t been discernible to him and yet, the options he offered to her followed the same pattern in both their languages was interesting, but not particularly helpful when she had jumped the gun. She’d gotten too excited that she’d managed to find part of her name, and now he was just assuming the first syllable of her name was Eh when it wasn’t! Fucking hell.

She sighed, wondering how far she could sink into the couch. Luckily, unlike her own wandering attention, his was focused solely on her, and he quickly gave up adding new syllables to Eh, backtracking into single syllables that included the sound.

Key’s lips twitched when he found “Em” and she bolted upright, waving her hands for him to stop. Getting to Em had been torture! They were not doing more and—

Her jaw dropped when he continued adding sounds to her name, begging with her eyes for him to stop. Em was fine! Most people called her Em! Em was great and perfect and—

She lunged towards him. She might not be able to cover his mouth to make him stop this nonsense—which he most certainly knew was nonsense, given the way his eyes were dancing with mischief and the names he was suggesting were increasingly absurd. Empirical would be a horrible name! She might not know how the names in this world were chosen, but Empirical was objectively horrible!

She slammed a hand into his chest, and then he was gone, laughter vibrating around her as she twisted, wondering where he had gone. He smiled at her from beside the window, light catching in his curls and turning it a brighter shade of red.

“So you do have some skills…” she muttered, glaring as she slowly approached him. Whatever that had been, it hadn’t just been fast, it had been undetectable—at least at her level. She really needed to figure out how to access the system, level herself up so she was less twitchy. Especially with her brain starting to ripple with the effects of ADHD—effects she hadn’t felt the full force of in half a decade.

She didn’t actually dislike her ADHD brain—more often than not, she actually loved it, missed the full force of it. It was obsessive and focused, when it wanted to be, anyways. It let her see the world in a way she generally enjoyed. It also made her a rather awful roommate and student. Messy and chaotic, caring only for the interesting things and getting wound up in them for days, until she was sleep-deprived and talking a million miles a minute, driving herself and Pria and everything she came across wild for how intense and restless she was and—

Key slipped through the world as she reached him, her focus sliding after him. The aether pricked, tiny and delicate. So different than a spark—different than anything she’d ever seen—and she bolted after him, making him move over and over again, analyzing every shift in the air, every hair out of place as he landed again, amused and happy to play her game, even if he couldn’t understand the excitement vibrating through her.

She tripped over a stool, landing gracelessly on the couch with an oof. A smile spread over her face as she took in the look of concerned surprise on Key’s face, easy-going smile wiped away by her clumsiness. She’d like to say the clumsiness was from lack of system access as well, dragging her up into regular person territory, but she’d always been clumsy while hyperfocused. She’d forget to eat, too. Lucky she had friends to order her food, a week of meals showing up at her door to keep her alive while she refused to leave or talk to anyone who didn’t have something she needed.

So, yeah, ADHD was great for some things, not great for others, and bored, mostly mellow focus had been what she had wanted out of university. Normalcy. Friendship. Fun.

Emilia had, for the most part, achieved those things, and as Key stared down at her in concern, his face slowly softening back into one of amusement as he hauled her to sitting, she wondered if this—this raid, this trip to Ship’o Stars and the man who waited there—might be the end of all that. She hoped not, but if it was, she was happy for the decade of normal she had managed to carve out for herself.

“Thank you~” she teased, even though she knew he couldn’t understand her. She’d have curtsied, if she wasn’t too lazy to stand.

Key smiled down at her, his own gentle laughter rippling through her, just as intimate and personal and overwhelming as before, and—

⸄What’s so funny?⸅

Emilia’s laughter broke as she looked towards the doorway, where Key’s friends had silently appeared.