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Arc F1.10 | Chapter 17: Staying and Going

“What do you mean you want us to stay up here?” Taelor asked, and despite how harsh and unbending their eldest brother could be, it was relatively rare that Valor ever heard him quite so serious. It happened, of course; usually, there was little happening in their lives that required such a stern tone.Levi had joked on one of the rare occasions that Taelor had been caught talking one of them down from doing something exceptionally stupid. In those cases, even before anyone had realized they were romantically involved, usually Taelor actually had been using his —that special tone of voice that promised if he or Baylor, and later Emilia as well, didn’t behave, they would suffer the consequences. It was moderately rare for Valor to find himself the victim of that voice, but it happened, Taelor’s punishments for him… creative—he wasn’t the one who thrived on being brought to heel, the way Baylor and Emilia did.

This voice wasn’t his older brother’s dom voice, however; instead, it was his voice. Whatever happened, there would be no punishments, no reprimands. All Valor could think was that, in the end, there would either be hugs or tears.

Baylor replied, and the strangeness of his brothers’ multilingual conversation was likely dragging more attention to them than if they’d just been having the conversation in Lüshanian.

Apparently, after Westrial had told Baylor that she wasn’t bothered by his various inclinations—although it remained unclear if she truly understood the full scope of them, Valor only getting the highlights from his middle brother—he had decided not to exclude her from any other conversations. On Taelor’s side, it seemed that he wanted to keep the exact details of their argument from the ears of their few Lüshanian members—Bireth and Curtisal, Westrial having been effectively accepted as now.

“Why?” Taelor asked—almost growled, really.

Nearby, Westrial’s gaze shifted between the two of them, a little furrow between her brows. Behind her, Darrian was cleaning blood off of everyone using a skill from Emilia. With how covered in blood they all were, different patterns of red worked over their clothes and skin, it was easy to tell the three of them apart. With how different their personalities were, especially as they continued to overexaggerate their differences, it seemed like the teenager could increasingly tell them apart regardless of physical differences. It would be interesting to see if that trend would stick, once they were clean and back in more circumstances. During their everyday life, clone pods were expected to both live as themselves and to practice altering and matching personalities. Emilia could tell them apart, and Valor knew that Malcolm could always tell which clone was Finn, Alaric which was Cyan, even when the latter two were trying their best to be nothing like themselves.

Would Westrial be able to pick Baylor out? Darrian as well?

Shifting on his feet, Baylor’s gaze shot towards the entrance to the holding cells, finally free of both Fräthk’s people and the security gate that had dropped in the last moments of their fight. As it had been created by Curtisal, the gate had been composed of a material similar to the cave system’s rock and was resistant to skills and core abilities. While Emilia’s own progress through the boy’s —a term both Curtisal and Emilia had used, seemingly independent of one another—had proven that {Hidey Hole} also worked on his creations, it didn’t work.

The difference between when it and several other skills worked and didn’t? Something within the structure .

Curtisal had noted when Darrian first tried to use {Hidey Hole} on the security gate that had popped up around the entirety of the visible portion of the holding cells and extended two levels underground, his attempt succeeding for a second before crashing out.

As the group travelling up from the dungeons had assured them that they weren’t in immediate need of assistance, they’d let Curtisal open the security gate, rather than brute force their way into the ground and into one of the lower levels, Valor listening to the boy’s idle chatter about how within his creations were an extra layer of defence against people who could affect anything his abilities touched—apparently, despite never meeting someone who could do such a thing, the boy had still decided to work a potential defence into his ability, based on the stories he heard.

Aside from this rare irregular deviations the young man had only ever heard about and Emilia’s {Hidey Hole}, Curtisal had never come across anything else capable of altering either his own creations or anything touched by the Lowdouran. Baylor, shifting through various chats on the xphern he’d ripped straight from Valor’s hands, had glanced up to say that a few other irregular deviations created similarly untouchable objects, but this was less well known, as they focused on smaller objects. The rumai’se largely crafted weapons, those weapons nigh indestructible, while glashial primarily created artwork. Baylor had muttered something about before turning back to the xphern, his fingers awkward as he messaged on it.

The fact that he was refusing to say who he was messaging and had microsparked away when Valor had tried to peek was concerning, and honestly, he wasn’t entirely convinced his middle brother’s attempts to convince Taelor that only he, Westrial, and Darrian should head down into the holding cells wasn’t simply a distraction—their older brother had also noticed the strange way Baylor was acting with the xphern.

If it was a distraction method, it had worked: Taelor was far more concerned with the insanity of their brother not only wanting to go down into the holding cells with only two other people, but the reality that those two people weren’t

Baylor started, shifting more and more uneasily, his eyes constantly flickering towards the entrance to the holding cells before momentarily unfocusing as though whatever was happening within his Censor were so distracting he couldn’t even hide that he was using it.

“And that’s why we should stick together,” Taelor said, Baylor already shaking his head.

A hand ran through Baylor’s hair, blood splattering off the curls. He was the only one of them still covered in blood because Darrian seemed to be leaving his new friend until last—himself and Westrial as well, as though Darrian had already accepted that Baylor’s plan was the one they were going with, and therefore, the three of them didn’t need to be cleaned up yet.

Baylor started again, stepping in close to their older brother, his blood-coated fingers brushing over Taelor’s cheeks,

“But Darrie and Westrial can?” Taelor asked, his own hands rising to cup Baylor’s.

Baylor breathed out, leaning forward until his and Taelor’s foreheads were pressed together. he added, shifting until his eyes were meeting Valor’s. One of those blood-soaked hands slipped free of their older brother’s grip, leaving steaks of red behind as Baylor reached towards him.

They were still attempting to play their roles, and for the most part, they were succeeding. While he had done support work from afar, Valor had wanted to do more during the fight. He couldn’t; if he had, anyone monitoring them would have known everything they were doing was a lie. So, his support had been limited—and really, he had spent most of his time looking through messages on the xphern and making sure no one was hit by the rare attacker who slipped through their defences.

It was during the former task that Valor had begun to suspect that Emilia wasn’t with her group anymore, the messages that were allegedly… not from her hands, but from her mouth, never quite matching up with what she’d actually say. Yes, she was speaking in Lüshanian, whatever she would say skewed by differences in words and thinking patterns that were wound through every language. Yes, Clemence—the person primarily responsible for relaying Emilia’s thoughts—could be altering everything Emilia said, just that tiny bit. The more Valor read of the messages, the less he believed Emilia was the one behind the majority of what was being said at all.

Emilia’s voice wasn’t quite right, but it was consistent, Valor would give the teenager that. Ever since Emilia’s group had found those people in the dungeons, every one of Clemence’s statements on Emilia’s behalf had been consistent in their tone, before that, though? Even back when Emilia had relied on the local girl to share her thoughts while in Curtisal’s , there had been something more in them.

At first, Valor hadn’t been entirely sure how none of them had noticed. On their side, he and Bireth had been primarily responsible for managing their xpherns, but they had been more focused on getting the chat with Fräthk’s group working, and then, with going through all the messages to figure out the situation. As a result, Halen had largely been left to transmit everything Emilia’s group was saying through to their relays. Every so often, Levi or Mikhail had contributed something, but for the most part, it had been Halen.

For a time, it had been easy to assume that Halen simply hadn’t noticed Emilia was no longer the one communicating with them. Then, during the battle, Valor had gone back through the main chat with Emilia’s group.

Half of the messages Halen had been relaying to them, supposedly from Emilia, were nowhere to be found, and while a small part of him had lurched and wondered if Halen had been making shit up the whole time, another lurch of his mind had landed him at the reality that Halen and Emilia must have been chatting one on one, which begged the question: if Emilia was capable of messaging Halen directly, why wasn’t she messaging anyone else directly?

was the most obvious answer. If Emilia started messaging any of them directly, she’d have to keep firmer track of what was happening with her original group—with the group they were going to rescue, largely because Emilia was supposed to be with them.

In other words, they were heading down to save people that yes, logically, he knew Emilia would want them to help. They were also setting themselves up to be disappointed.

Also, Halen had to know that Emilia wasn’t with her group, if he had become her primarily conduit for communicating with them—not that either of Halen or Emilia had bothered to tell them she wasn’t with them.

Once he had realized all of them, it hadn’t taken long to arrive at the reality that, for one thing, Emilia must have gone after the little boy who had been taken from Olivier. Since then, Valor had been mulling the issue over, unsure of whether to tell , even Halen, that he’d figure it out. The situation was messy, was the thing, and with Baylor insisting that he head down alone…

As Valor pressed into the circle of his brothers’ love, he wondered how likely it was that, upon learning Emilia wasn’t down there, Baylor would freak out. Even he was having trouble not bolting in the direction of Xavier’s little dot, which now that he was staring at it, he realized had finally moved, just a little bit.

Was that Emilia? Arrived to rescue that little boy and giving him room to move more than he’d been able to before? Did Halen know? Had Emilia told him everything that was happening? Was he up above them, worried for her and wondering how to tell them that she wasn’t with her group anymore and they were setting themselves up for disappointment but they still needed to go help those people because—

Against his back, the xphern in Baylor’s hand buzzed, and it felt like the first note in a tragedy.

Baylor whispered, and when he pulled back, unshed tears lingered across his lashes.

Valor asked, quiet in the desolate street, everything so silent and still now that the fighting was done.

Shifting, Baylor glanced down at the xphern, his jaw tightening as he blinked away the tears. he said, and Valor wasn’t sure he had ever heard his brother beg over something so serious—Taelor either, based on the way he seemed to deflate.

Within their older brother’s vitals, everything was wild—unmoored. Still, he nodded, clenched his jaw and tugged. Valor’s brain swam with the reality that Taelor had just microsparked the three of them into the holding cells, shifting them until they had a tiny bit of privacy before he was slamming Baylor into the wall. Their kiss was brutal—needy—Baylor’s eyes glazed over when Taelor pulled back.

Taelor signed, his hands shifting over Baylor in the most intimate of the various ways their sign language could be used to communicate—a message that brushed over skin and penetrated straight into the soul.

“Yeah… I will be,” Baylor breathed out, pressed back into Taelor for another kiss. In his hand, the xphern buzzed again, and from this angle, Valor could see the message:

“You’re being summoned,” Valor noted as Darrian and Westrial appeared beside them, Westrial’s dark cheeks darkening further as she took his brothers in.

Darrian asked, his own cheeks a little red, although it was unclear if it was from the position the three of them had been found in, Valor’s comment or his own.

Valor replied, smiling softly at Westrial when she said she wanted a , and for the first time, Valor could see what Baylor liked in the girl—he’d been too consumed with the xphern during most of their journey to notice the girl much.

Baylor said, pushing Taelor away to grab Darrian and Westrial’s wrists.

Then, they were gone, Baylor microsparking them to the stairwell while Curtisal slipped further into the building as well, his abilities vibrating out of him because the boy didn’t have to go with the trio in order to use his abilities to support them.

Across Valor’s vision, Halen finally responded to the message he had sent several minutes earlier, asking if anyone else had figured out Emilia was no longer with her group.

, several people knew.

[Halen:]

Valor stared at the message and the list of names for a long while, Taelor pressing into him and accepting the tight hug Valor inflicted on his older brother. It was interesting, he often thought, the way some people were able to see the whole of someone so easily, other people not so much.

Baylor, according to Halen’s accounting of who had figured out when, had figured it out immediately—the moment the little boy’s kidnapping had been confirmed. Codeth had also figured it out quickly, while Halen had never been given the opportunity, Emilia using him as her point person.

Taelor hadn’t figured it out—not unless he was keeping it a secret. As the older boy sniffled into his neck, Valor highly doubted he had figured it out.

In other words, when he found out Emilia wasn’t with the group—either when Baylor got to the group and didn’t lie or when their middle brother emerged from the holding cells with the group and Emilia was nowhere to be seen—there was a chance that Taelor was not going to take it well.

Valor thought, pulling Taelor closer and closer. For the moment, they had nothing but a calm in which to worry. It wouldn’t last, but they should take advantage of it while they could, especially considering Taelor might be pissed with him and Baylor, once he learned they had figured out Emilia wouldn’t be coming out of this place with them.