[Can’t Opt Out]

“Em!”

A hand wrapped around her arm, and suddenly, she was spinning, finding herself engulfed in a pair of thin, pale arms. Blonde hair brushed over her face as someone far taller than her buried their nose in her neck.

“You’re okay…” the person said, and Emilia could almost recognize their voice—could almost find that missing resemblance, a decade and an entire world removed from this single, painful moment.

She couldn’t find it, and when the person finally pulled away, V was staring down at her, fear and anguish mixed through his features. Emilia smiled up at him, wiping a stray piece of hair behind his ear, her hand coming back flaked in mud.

“The mud hasn’t dried,” she noted absently, mind naturally latching onto some strange detail of reality, just as those notes from Rafe’s brother had told her to, so many decades ago. She rubbed the sticky substance between her fingers. It didn’t feel exactly like mud, but it certainly was. She’d crawled through enough mud in her life—first as a misbehaving child, later as a soldier and even once as a petty and ambitious university student—to know it was mud. Little pebbles rolled between her fingers, debris that seemed organic, despite the fact that she hadn’t seen a single thing growing within the labyrinth poked out of the brown substance. Thick and sticky, it reminded her of blood.

She really hoped V hadn’t been forced to drag himself through a tiny tunnel of blood—or if he had, hopefully he hadn’t actually realized the mud contained blood. She’d crawled through blood before, on the battlefield. More often than not, the worst of her nightmares came from those moments. Blood caking her as she crawled, trying to avoid monsters and hoping the blood she dragged herself through was that was allies and not the toxic blood of monsters.

Then, of course, she would feel sick for hoping it was dead humans she was scrambling through.

She wouldn’t wish those sorts of thoughts and nightmares on anyone—not unless they truly deserved them. While she was certainly the type of person to keep her options open—you never knew what kind of terrible people you were going to have the misfortune of meeting—she had never come across someone deserving of such terror—not even the men who had brought her stumbling into Olivier’s classroom or left Rafe sneaking into bed to comfort her through nightmares.

V blinked at her, fear giving way to incredulous concern. “Uh… no? Should it have?”

“Should it not have dried?” she returned, wondering if he knew something about how things dried in this world that she did not. “It’s been a while since you went crawling through dangerous caves… good thing that was just part of the game.”

Just part of the game.

This was just a game, and so was that world she had just destroyed. That wasn’t an actual world she had just accidentally destroyed in her panic, just like she had spent the last decade worrying she would. At the very least, this world seemed unaffected by whatever had happened in that other world, wherever it had been—and she wasn’t even convinced it hadn’t been a dream or hallucination.

Granted, the labyrinths seemed to be somewhat disconnected from the platform’s actual world, and the main part of the platform could be…

Emilia shook herself. There was no point in worrying about whether whatever had happened had affected the world outside the heartcore labyrinth until she could actually, you know, check.

The man’s lips twitched, and he looked about ready to roll his eyes at her. “Says the person who climbs in real life.”

Had she said that? Told him she climbed The Strats in the real world—or that she at least once had? She didn’t know. It felt like she’d met V forever ago, not mere hours. Maybe hours—who knew how long they had been unconscious for. They didn’t even know if V had also passed out after the blood storm.

Did you even count time spent unconscious as hours you had known one another, when it was cumulatively such a short period of time? You counted years of knowing someone, ignoring the sleep between in favour of ease. Did you do that for hours? Even a day or two? Emilia didn’t think so, but she’d been counting time strangely the entire raid, so why start counting more appropriately now.

“Are you okay?” he asked, hands gently checking her over, as though whatever had happened to her had broken her body and not her mind.

“What happened?” she mumbled, noting that her fingers at least weren’t broken in this life. She’d fought with busted limbs and fingers before. It had always sucked, and those times she’d had her Censor and skills to aid her—except during a few serious childhood scraps.

“You… you just kind of zoned out? It was like you were gone. I tried calling to you, but… but you were gone for a while.”

“It didn’t feel like a while.”

“No?”

“No,” Emilia said, shaking her head. Time hadn’t felt long, but she felt foggy, like she’d just woken from a long dream. “I was back in the war, but not the war. I don’t think I was there long. How long was I…”

“An hour? Two? It’s difficult to tell time down here, but it wasn’t just a few minutes or anything,” V sighed, still looking her over, as though her experience, wherever—whatever—that had been, would show across her skin.

Now, if the man could see inside her heart, that would be a different story. Then, he would be able to see the scars bleeding anew.

She smiled weakly at him, belatedly realizing they were actually sitting, when she wiggled and the ground rubbed over the bare sections of her legs. How out of it was she, to now even realize she was no longer standing? “I’m cold…” she absently noted, eyes shooting back to V when he immediately began to finger his shirt.

“I’d give you my clothes, but they are objectively disgusting.”

“I thought you were okay being gross?” Emilia laughed, feeling so very tired. She wanted to sleep—wanted to lean over and fall asleep next to her kind and concerned friend. She was afraid of what nightmares she would find within her mind, company or no.

V practically growled, not exactly at her, but more in frustration. A hand ran through his hair, sending mud splattering over them, and he cursed, rubbing the mud that had marred her away.

“V,” she called, catching his hands. “It’s fine. It’s just mud, and I’m not cold enough to need your gross shirt. If I were, I’d take it, but I’m not. I’ll warm up again once we’re moving.” Probably, but he didn’t need to know that. Move to warm up, move to shave away the shock.

The other visitor’s eyes didn’t meet hers, instead staying glued to their once more joined hands. He reminded her of a child, or a small, frightened animal, and she felt it again, that pull of nostalgia and knowing.

Too weak—she was too weak to even attempt to follow the thread of whom this man had once been to her. She hoped he wasn’t offended that she couldn’t place him, although, given that he had said he had drastically changed over the last decade, perhaps it was cathartic for someone to not be able to place him?

Emilia was sure that, were she not wearing skin so close to her own, she would be ecstatic for someone she had once known to not recognize her, and she had barely changed at all. She had changed, a bit, but most was the result of her knots. How much of that change would stick, once her knots were removed, was a question she was trying to avoid thinking about.

Actually, with so many of her core personality traits dampened by knots, she could very well be different enough that V looked at her in confused familiarity as well, assuming they had even been close enough for him to memorize her core traits. She was acting as though they had known each other well, but it could very well have been a passing familiarity.

“What did you do while I was out?” she asked, instead of giving in and asking him the thousand questions rattling through her. She leaned forward, and despite her misgiving about the state of V’s clothing, rested her forehead against his shoulder. Horrible. That world had been horrible, and dirt and smell aside, she needed more than someone holding her hands. She could get by without the comfort—she’d spent years dealing with traumatic nightmares by herself, after all, never confiding her secrets in anyone, not even her closest friends—but if V was willing to give her the comfort she craved…

The man tensed as she rested against him before all the tension leaked out of him, and he was sagging into her as well. “Nothing. Worried for you. Made sure the thing that took your friends didn’t take you too.”

“Mm, my hero,” she sighed, smiling as V huffed.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” she assured him, adding, “Plus, for all we know, the fact that you were watching me is what kept me safe.” She nodded into him, mumbling about various animals that hunted lone animals, versus those that hunted packs, picking off the weakest member, often when their pack left them behind.

“There used to be some animals, near where I grew up,” V told her, perfectly willing to indulge in her attempts to calm them down through random facts and anecdotes, “that sometimes took local children.”

“Ugh. Well, that’s terrible.”

V hummed, his thumb idly rubbing over her knuckles. “Locals tried to hunt them all to extinction at one point, but the government stepped in. Things got a bit… ugly.”

“What happened?” Emilia asked, leaning back to meet V’s eyes.

He smiled sadly, sucking in a long breath and gazing upwards. “A couple kids were killed by a particularly vicious pack. It was a few decades before I was born, but we were told horror stories about it during compulsory education. It was… quite messy, and the city—our parents and the local government—became colder, darker, more restrictive. There are rumours that the animals tried to kill more children, but failed, and that’s the reason our parents were more intense than even our grandparents: they saw their friends being hunted by the things. I have no idea if that’s true, though.”

“What happened to the animals after that?”

“The locals culled them,” V told her, looking vacantly away from her.

“Were their consequences—from the government, I mean?” Emilia asked. Usually, the Baalphorian government didn’t take well to smaller areas disregarding their laws, but this seemed like a situation where the government should have stepped in and relocated the animals or something.

“Nah,” V sighed, shoulder’s pressing back as his spine cracked. It would have been easier if he had dropped her hands. He didn’t. “The government fucked up, the locals took things into their own hands. There wasn’t much to be done, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about it outside of horror stories growing up.”

“In other words, it’s a secret history?”

V laughed. “Oh yeah. Even before The Flaming, it seemed to only really be known where I grew up. I went to a talk about ethically dealing with animal displacement following the war. A few similar cases were brought up, but no one mentioned this one. It wasn’t like the government was going to spread news of such a massive fuck-up, and I don’t think anyone really talked about it with outsiders? You’re the only one I’ve ever told.”

“Ah~” Emilia signed, trying to sound as innocent as possible when she asked, “And where did you grow up?”

V smiled innocently back at her. “Ah~” he echoed, eyes crinkling with too much amusement even as her own smile was already falling. “Now, why would I tell you that, Emilia? Don’t you know, people usually don’t share such personal information in raids like this?”

“Mm…” Emilia grumbled, scowling at him and cursing as his smile grew. “I’ve heard most people don’t even use their own names.”

“Or their own colouring,” V agreed, smiling growing even wider, his dimples etching distractingly across his cheeks.

“Who says my colouring is my real!?” she objected, pulling back to glare at the man more effectively. Granted, if they knew each other, he’d obviously know it was her own from that fact alone, but still! There could be someone going around pretending to be her, or something!

V’s eyes glittered with mischief and secrets. “Silverstrain can’t be faked, in the real world or in raids.”

Emilia’s glare and frown dropped, leaving her gaping up at the other visitor. “I…”

“Didn’t know that? I figured,” V said, leaning back and shrugging, the cute and happy man shifting into something teasing and a bit mean, and Emilia hated the way the shift affected her. “To be fair, I’m not sure most people do. I’ve seen people try to simulate silverstrain, though. It never looked quite right.”

“Do you know anyone with the silverstrain—in real life, I mean?” Emilia asked, hoping that perhaps V would mess up and reveal something important about whatever connection they had.

In was a long shot, however, and when V simply said he’d met a few people with it during the war, she was unsurprised. It was, however, a helpful bit of information, even if just slightly: V had known a few people. There were a few of them, during the war, but not more than a handful. Once, they’d all gotten together, just to complain about the assholes who judged them based solely on their irregular deviation. It had been great.

“Shall we?” the man asked, legs shifting until he was easily hauling them both up with a shocking amount of coordination and strength. “You good to try again?”

“Mhm!” Emilia cheered, still watching the man through narrowed eyes as he dragged them towards the doors.

It was a good thing she was watching him so closely, otherwise, when whatever had caused her mind to float away hit him as well, she wouldn’t have been prepared to catch his not unsubstantial weight as he toppled over.

“Shit!” she squeaked, trying to not splat onto the ground.

Emilia grunted as they hit the ground, V’s eyes staring vacantly up at her. “Creepy,” she sighed, grimacing as her fingers brushed over his eyelids to close them. “Well… fuck.”