Arc 6 | Chapter 240: One Big Item Checked Off

“Hello, Emmie.” Malcolm didn’t look up when she sparked into his office, just continued playing with some sort of puzzle. He moved one piece, another. Twisting and turning each piece until all of the creatures—what even were those things?—were able to wiggle into their holes without running into one another.

Content to wait for him, Emilia plopped herself down in the plush chair across from him, taking in the office he had occupied for over three decades. Little had changed since the last time she’d sat there, in the last days of the war, curled up in this same chair with a cup of tea from Byshire. A few new pictures graced the walls, though, marking the lives that had been lost during the war—members of The Black Knot, as well as Division 30.

Malcolm hadn’t been an official member of their unit, but he’d been around often enough that he might as well have been. Her childhood friend had also been the one to push for members of The Black Knot to be allowed to join D30, when the government and higher ups had been concerned about their growing power and connection to The Black Knot, thanks to the presence of so many Penns residents who had grown up alongside its most powerful members, even training alongside them at times.

Due to that connection, Emilia had spent many hours sitting here, waiting for the man to think through this or that. Malcolm had been raised to sit near the head of the organization, and so far, he’d done a magnificent job of it. Still, sitting there, waiting for him to finish playing with a game of all things, was a new experience—the guy had only ever begrudgingly played with them when they were younger. Some of her friends had assumed his refusal to play with them was simply because of the age difference between himself and their group, which had included his younger brothers—and part of it definitely was that—but mostly, it was just that he was a serious dude! To see him playing now… it was an experience. A good one—Malcolm always had needed more soft joy and hobbies in his life—and as much as she had limited time, there was no way Emilia was going to demand he put the game down and pay attention to her.

Finally, his dark eyes looked up, the dim light of the room—Malcolm almost perpetually kept the blinds closed—turning the deep brown nearly black, casting his gentle brown skin an even deeper shade. It was a good image, for the people who ended up in this room: a terrifying monster of darkness, one who wouldn’t hesitate to kill when needed.

“Fuck, you look exhausted,” she commented, noting the dark circles lining his eyes, far more wrinkles pulling at the corners than the last time she’d seen him. “I think you need a better skincare routine,” she said, leaning in to press at his eyes and then a dry spot on his cheek.

It took a lot for low-devs to age prematurely. Clearly, the man hadn’t been taking care of himself, although whether that was from a lack of time or desire to do so—her friend had never really been one for caring much about his looks, unlike the youngest of his brothers.

“I will take that under advisement,” he lied. Well, apparently she was going to have to take things into her own hands. “I can’t say you look much more awake.”

“Well, I haven’t properly slept in the real world in…” Emilia trailed off, wondering when her last proper sleep even had been. Even the night before the pink tide arrived, she’d only caught a few hours of sleep in between visiting The Grint and waking for class. Before that… there had been an assignment due, and then she’d spent the night partying and…

Refocusing, she found Malcolm levelling her with a look she’d seen so many times when they’d been younger, and he’d found her passed out somewhere in his house, the nearby park, the beach. It was his

how old are you?

look. When they’d been younger, him the almost always serious and grumpy older brother figure to their entire friend group—much to his chagrin—she’d always thought it was a ridiculous look. What better time to skip sleep and enjoy the world than when you were young!? Now, inching into her 70s… maybe the look was warranted?

“There’s been stuff. School. The whole thing with the knotter.”

The man hummed as he looked back to his puzzle, the pieces repositioning themselves into a fresh configuration that he handed over to her. “I heard about that.”

“Obviously,” Emilia snorted, accepting the puzzle and trying to figure out how it worked—not to mention what the strange creatures on it were. “Where’d you get this?”

“Birthday present from Alex.”

Ah, that explained it; Alex always gave the strangest gifts. Nearly all of them seemed to both be one of a kind and mass-produced all at once. No matter how many decades went by, where they got the gifts was always a source of conversation, always accompanied by Alex avoiding answers, just like they did about nearly everything.

“Is the knotter why you decided to stop by for the first time in a decade?” Malcolm asked, a hint of accusation threaded through his voice. It was less accusation and anger than she deserved.

“No, Sammie’s taking care of that.”

“Something else, then?”

The puzzle vibrated gently, letting her know she had done something illegal, the pieces resetting themselves. “Yeah. I was in a raid—”

“The one where you got the tickets?”

“Yeah. It was… I know I don’t raid often, but there was some weird shit going on in it,” she said, explaining the situation with the heartcores and their mind manipulations. “It was… off-putting. I could feel it affecting my mind. I lucked out, and was in a knot therapy machine at the time, so the person who was managing all that had some records of my brain. There are definitely some… fluctuations that they didn’t think should be there.”

“But you feel fine now?” Malcolm asked, more than a hint of concern laced through his voice as he came to kneel in front of her and—

Attempts to smack his hands away failed, and suddenly, she was in the midst of her second physical of the day—not that Malcolm was a medic like Payton, but as far as non-medics went, he had more training than most. Given the mind manipulations would be, well, in her head, and he was assessing her whole body, it was easy to assume he also knew about her run in with the echo. He may also have just been concerned with her general wellbeing, though, and Emilia contented herself to actually reading the rules of his game while he assessed her, only switching her focus back to him when a cool hand came to rest behind her neck, probing into her Censor.

Emilia let her friend in, lips twitching when he realized her hack effectively locked him out. Realistically, even if he managed to get past the security protocols, he wouldn’t be able to understand what he saw unless she let him.

No one, at the moment, would be able to. Helix would be able to read some, since the new hack was both based on his own design and the programming language an extension of his, and he’d be able to figure out the rest relatively quickly, she was sure, but other than that…

Malcolm glowered up at her, knowing her well enough to know that if he glared long enough, she’d let him all the way in. She did, unafraid of what he would find inside her—part of her hack allowed specific memories to be further locked away, so she could let someone into her Censor without fearing that they’d accidentally stumble across anything that would lead them to hunt down certain people and torture them.

“This is allowing you to use your core?” he asked. Malcolm might not be as skilled with hacking as Rafe or the clones were, but his job demanded he know some, and it didn’t take more than a few minutes of searching through her mind, looking at memories from the raid as well as the last decade, for him to find a few of the more exciting moments from the last few hours.

“Cool, right?”

One brown eye squeezed open to meet her gaze. “You barely know that man.” The fact that Malcolm inherently trusted anyone Hetexia had vouched for barely deserved noting. The fact that he immediately didn’t trust Conrad was just as unsurprising. “You don’t even know his real name.”

“True… but when you know, you know. Am I right?”

Malcolm did not look convinced that she was right, and Emilia didn’t doubt he’d be sending people to look into Conrad’s mysterious identity. Something told her he wasn’t going to find anything—especially not with the revelation Conrad had been a member of that secretive military group.

Fuck did she wish Conrad or Sil would give her a proper name for the group! It was annoying thinking of it as simply the

secretive military group.

Annoying and repetitive.

“We have a few contacts—official, undercover, and begrudging—working for Hail. I’ll ask around about the raid, see if anything officially showed up weird—they keep logs of numerous things, even for private raids. See if anyone has heard about strange things occurring.” Rising with a sigh, Malcolm shifted until he was leaning against the edge of his desk. “Getting hero records will be harder, but doable. Time-consuming enough that if whatever happened in the raid is affecting people on this side, we’ll likely learn about it through some incident or another before we can get access.”

“Not just going to hack in?” she asked, part teasing and part genuinely curious. While she’d heard a bit about the ways laws were now favouring privacy over The Black Knot’s traditional ability to go where they wanted and do what they wanted without oversight, part of her hadn’t actually believed The Black Knot wouldn’t be working around those laws.

“No, the government has made it apparent that for anything regarding Hail, raids, and potential wrongdoings we have to do everything by the book.”

“Seriously? Is that why there have been a few serious incidents with raids traumatizing people and no one really being held accountable?”

“Yup. Usually, someone else tips us off about a raid going bad or being concerned with how another hero is acting. We have to balance getting to that person quickly and catching Hail doing something negligent.” Smile tight, Malcolm admitted that usually they leaned into getting to the person quickly, and the less than legal stuff they did often fucked up any charges they could bring against Hail.

It hadn’t always been that way, but there had been a number of laws passed during the war to allow companies and researchers the ability to innovate without risking a visit from The Black Knot. Despite the war being over, some of those laws had never been repealed, allowing Hail and other companies to continue their fucking around without much care for safety or other laws.

Unsurprisingly, laws had also been passed during the war to give The Black Knot more power to investigate this or that. Those laws had been repealed practically the moment the war ended, resulting in a strange situation where The Black Knot, who were traditionally able to act outside the law against practically anyone, could do little to legally control the actions of companies like Hail, researchers and high-ranking politicians, who had their own set of never repealed laws protecting them now.

That said, Division 30 had its own laws protecting them as well, and Emilia would be rather upset if they were repealed.

Needless to say, the entire situation was messy, but while Emilia had known about the general state of that mess, having been no contact with every member of The Black Knot, she’d kinda just assumed they had found ways to work around the laws when needed. Work around, as in, disappearing people to black sites and using {A Private Moment} and the Hyrat clones as needed.

Apparently not?

Malcolm snorted when she asked, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling, his hands digging into the wood of the desk. “Sometimes we do, but we have to pick our battles. If we keep disappearing people or manipulating too many minds, someone will notice, and there are a lot of people in the government who don’t like us at the moment.”

Not exactly surprising—unless they were personally acquainted with a black knot, most people didn’t trust them—and it wasn’t exactly like many of Baalphoria’s governments had been fans of the organization—not unless they were leaning into being dictatorial and using The Black Knot as their personal enforcers, anyways. The way her friend said it, though… Clearly, something else was going on. Something he wasn’t telling her, not that she deserved his trust.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” he said, reading her mind because despite a decade apart, he had still known her since she was a child. “It’s just complicated, and clearly, you have other things to deal with.”

Their eyes met again, his a near fathomless black.

“Later?” she asked, more hopeful than she would have liked to sound. This was, in the end, another small step back into her life, and at the moment, every step felt like a jump of faith. Her friends, no matter how long they had been in her life, could easily reject her and break her heart. Unfortunately, every person she reconnected with had the potential to break her, and she couldn’t forget that fact, nor the fact that she deserved to be broken for her abandonment of them.

“Later,” he promised, leaning down to press a kiss to her forehead. He lingered there as he told her that he was sending a few more members undercover, onto Ship’o Stars.

“Don’t trust me and Sammie to get it done?”

When he pulled back, Malcolm was once again the grumpy older brother figure, frowning down at her as a thousand past misdeeds passed between them. That was the problem with knowing people your entire life: they had a mile long list of all your errors in judgment and fuck-ups. Given how often she and Sammie had nearly died—or nearly killed someone else—or just generally caused chaos and mayhem….

Yeah, Emilia couldn’t even be offended that he thought they needed supervision. Plus, having more help around couldn’t hurt, especially if they’d be unassociated with their little group—people who would have the element of surprise when they inevitably needed help getting out of trouble.

“Thank you, Mallie,” she whispered, hesitating for a brief moment before surging out of her chair to wrap her arms around his neck.

Malcolm, for all that he was perhaps the most traditionally serious black knot of his generation of relatives, gave amazing hugs, at least when they were alone. Strong arms wrapped around her, pulling them closer, closer, until it felt like they could melt together. Her toes brushed the ground, her friend taking on the majority of her weight.

“I missed you, Emmie.”

Swallowing around her tears, Emilia told him she’d missed him, too. Despite her avoidance of her friends and family, she had always missed them, her mind so often drifting to the people she still loved and would die for, especially the ones who were public figures like Malcolm had become, much to his general annoyance.

“I should go,” she finally said, snickering when Malcolm put her down excruciatingly slow, perhaps afraid that the moment he released her it would take another decade for them to meet again. Emilia caught his hands before they left her hips, hesitating before asking him the question that she had asked him so often in the past and yet now felt odd, strained, obscene. “If I visit the clones soon—not until after the whole ship thing, obviously—do you want me to—”

“Yes.” So easy. Once, it had been hard for Malcolm to admit he wanted her to come to him after she spent time with the clones, or even just a random group of people interested in having a good time together. Now, he didn’t even need to hear the rest of the question.

“Pervert,” she muttered, laughing when he pressed another kiss to her forehead, muttering back that she was worse, and yeah, she definitely was.