Arc 9 | Chapter 342: Dropping into the Brutality

“Yes, I only know a few Grey Sander words,” Olivier confirmed, still wondering exactly how much to tell Emilia about his family’s history and the alleged reasons they had left the Grey Sands, before mentally backtracking, his mind rewinding to secrets that had been shared unfairly with him over the years.

Quiet and withdrawn as he was, during his youth he had often found himself being told secrets without actually knowing they were secrets until after they were told—burned into his brain and never to be forgotten. There was nothing worse than being a child with few friends to begin with, then suddenly also the keeper of one of their secrets, knowing it was something that

really

needed to be told. While his little brain had been good at finding ways around belated mentions that what he had been told couldn’t be repeated, his sharing of secrets with responsible adults—not his parents—had left his relationships with his already scarce friends strained.

He didn’t regret sharing some of those secrets—most of them had involved adults doing terrible things to his friends or his friends doing exceptionally stupid and potentially fatal things—the strain of holding a secret you would have preferred to have never heard wasn’t something he wished on anyone.

“What I tell you here isn’t meant to be spread,” he told Emilia, absently wondering when he had begun to draw shapes against her back. The soft fabric of his borrowed sweater still separated their skin, at least, but the temptation to slip his hand lower and either let it fondle her ass or slip up her back, only under the fabric, raked over his own skin, urging him to—

“Of course! I mean, with {A Private Moment} active, it’s not like I could spread it anyways,” Emilia wondered, laughing as she added that even if it hadn’t been active, she was sleepy and definitely too lazy to keep track of the fine details of their conversation at the moment anyways—if she had any questions in the morning, she’d just ask—or try. “And I mean, even if I was able to talk about it—Censor errors can sometimes break {A Private Moment}’s locks, even if it’s super rare—I wouldn’t tell anyone anything, promise! Or, well, I wouldn’t tell anyone without asking if it's okay first? Like, if I suddenly hear about some plan to blow up a famous lawyer family’s cache of records from the Grey Sands, I’ll definitely be messaging you asking if it’s okay that I let The Black Knot know about it— Although, then I’d maybe be violating Black Knot secrets, if the information came from them? Not that I’ll get in trouble for that. They’d definitely know I shared for a good reason, but—”

“The Black Knot tells you such things?” Olivier asked, interrupting her runaway thoughts because she was liable to ramble for a while unless cut off.

“Sometimes?” Emilia mused, her head bobbling in a way that was exceptionally ineffective at doing anything more than rubbing her cheek against his shoulder.

Having seen her bobble her head in thought numerous times throughout their acquaintance, Olivier understood the gesture well enough through touch alone. There was a chance he was slightly concerned that he could understand Emilia’s body language through touch alone so easily, but he was choosing not to think too hard about it.

“Same thing for you,” she continued, their still joined hands shaking as she extracted a promise from him that he also wouldn’t go spreading her nighttime secrets around if they somehow ended up unlocked. She didn’t have to try hard; Olivier had already more or less decided that if the silverstrain actually said anything concerning enough that he felt it should be reported to

someone

he would be letting Grenner—or perhaps Secretary General Miles Starrberg, if the Hyrat clone weren’t around—know, and then leaving it to him to deal with. “I think it’s a little obvious at this point that I do coding work for The Black Knot. I grew up next to the Laprises, you know? And have been friends with the triplets and Loren forever. I’ve also been through most of the training the kids went through in preparation for joining The Black Knot. So, all together, I get told a lot. I also, uh… have access to their system? Not all of it! And if I did anything questionable with the access I’d get kicked out, but…”

“But there is very little The Black Knot knows that is forbidden from you,” Olivier finished. That was… interesting, and terrifying. He also wasn’t sure what to do with that information—apparently it was so shocking, the part of his brain that processed information had gone offline. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on his mood in the morning—his Censor had made a note to remind him about it when he woke, even if {A Private Moment}’s specifications would leave him only able to message Emilia any questions he had about it.

“Yeah. There’s a little bit, but usually, I assume it's either something too close to me—like, there are no files about silverstrains open to me, and if they’ve ever tried to figure out who my birth family is, that’s also secret—or something really horrific.”

“Horrific?”

“Yeah, like abuse cases or allegations? Terrible purist things? Just things that might give me nightmares.” A humorous laugh brushed over Olivier’s skin as Emilia muttered that she already had enough things in her own life to have nightmares about and definitely didn’t need exact details and images of things she already knew happened inside her head. “Not that I don’t want to hear your story! Also, don’t take this the wrong way, but if your worst story is about abuse or purists, I definitely already know some pretty horrific ones. That shit is bad, but ultimately, it's also kinda…”

“Typical,” Olivier finished. It was terrible—cold-hearted, in some ways—but there were certain varieties of evil that were so common place that they seemed to lose some of their horror once a person had seen so much. “Yes, I agree. It doesn’t take long working with victims to become relatively accustomed to such things.”

“How do students and teachers deal with that?” Emilia asked because she was unable not to distract them from the topic yet again.

Would they even be able to sleep before morning came at this rate?

Still, Olivier was impossibly drawn to just follow the lead of her mind, and found himself reflecting on his own experiences as a student and teacher, as well as the stories he had heard from other lawyers. It all amounted to there being two main schools of thought. One said students should be introduced to the true horrors of the legal profession early in their careers so they could reassess if criminal law was the right place for them—there were always different specialties, even if there were often horrors in most specialties, just of different flavours. Employers who manipulated their employees or scammed customers. People who manoeuvred their way around taxes at the cost of the public good. Divorces turned into cruel battlefields of accusations—those Olivier had always had the most difficulty with, especially when children were involved.

There was just something about people who had once been so enamoured with one another falling apart so entirely that they would share the other’s secrets that scratched at his heart. While he had never been in love himself, he liked to imagine it something eternal—some switch that once flipped could never be turned off, no matter what the other person did. To see that that wasn’t the case—at least for some people—was rather disheartening, especially since it usually left him feeling as though perhaps his family's arranged marriages were actually the better option.

They weren’t.

The other common opinion was that students should slowly be introduced to the horrors they would experience in the profession. Olivier could see the appeal, but he also thought that slow drip of information was liable to waste many people’s time when students who had made it through an immediate immersion into the violence of their profession still quit the first time they were forced to listen to testimony of an assault victim, followed by their brutal questioning, and then the accused’s attempted to defend themself. Seeing pictures and video evidence of the worst crimes broke even more, and while there was definitely something to be said for gaining a tolerance before being exposed to some of the worst things humanity was unfortunately capable of, he doubted it made much of a difference in student retention rates to wait until their hearts had been broken by smaller things a thousand times over.

Emilia nodded against his skin as he explained the situation to her, eventually telling him that something similar happened with the clones. As not all of them were suited for certain jobs, they were often exposed to the jobs most likely to break them early in their careers. “Not really

break

them—breaking a clone is virtually impossible—but just… put them off the job? Or maybe make them a little lazy and grumpy about their job? The clones need to be happy! So when they don’t really like a job, they get given another one!”

“Why don’t they like certain jobs?” Olivier asked. While he didn’t mean to think of the clones as having the same personality—he’d seen well enough that all the clones Emilia knew had vastly different personalities—it was still so strange to think that the clones wouldn’t like certain aspects of the job they had literally been bred to do.

Humming, Emilia told him that one of the clones she had grown up with was a germaphobe. Apparently, he really hated having blood or any sort of grime on himself, even his own sweat. “He’s Mallie’s age, so about your age. When he started working for The Black Knot after graduating… well, one of the

older clones

”—the way Emilia said

older clones

made it clear she was not a fan of this clone, or perhaps an entire group of them—“got it in his head that even though

everyone

knew Finn wouldn’t do well out in the field, Finn had to follow the same path all clones followed. Working in the field… didn’t go well. You think you’re having a hard time reconciling that the clones are all very different from their collective public image? Now, try imagining a baby clone having a full on panic attack once they got back from their first assignment killing someone.”

Emilia’s foot scuffed over Olivier’s calf, angry on behalf of her… friend? Was this clone her friend?

“It’s lucky that Mallie is his friend. He wasn’t working for The Black Knot yet, and honestly, the clones operate a little apart from the main organization, but someone told him Finn had done that first job. Mallie went to go find him, and… Well, Finn had practically rubbed his skin raw trying to get himself clean, all while hyperventilating. The stupid older clones”—so it was multiple older clones Emilia had a problem with—“barely accepted that he wasn’t meant for field work, even then. I think one of them even suggested that if he couldn’t do field work he should be

put down,

” Emilia spit, and Olivier might not know the clones well, but he had to agree.

The idea of killing a clone just because they didn’t fit the ideal of a

perfect,

or perhaps

proper,

clone… No, that was terrible, and Olivier couldn’t fault Emilia for spitting at any mention of these

older clones.

“That might be a really severe example,” Emilia admitted, listing off a couple other reasons clones were assigned to less field work—Grenner, for example, didn’t particularly care for interrogating people or combat, but was still capable enough to be her

not-really bodyguard, babysitting-type person

, in Emilia’s words—“but I imagine you get the point. It’s part of why clones are put into the field so early, so they can be assessed and moved to jobs they’re more suited for, although most

can

do all jobs when they need to. That was a total digression, though. Sorry.”

Olivier shook his head. “There is no need to be sorry, as long as you do not blame me for your lack of sleep come morning.”

A laugh bubbled out of Emilia at that. “I think that would be a little hypocritical of me, although… Yeah, no. Hypocritical or not, that’s definitely something I would do— Jokingly, of course! I wouldn’t actually blame you for keeping me up all night when this is clearly a

me

thing.”

Amazingly, Emilia’s words weren’t followed by any lewd, teasing comments about ways in which he could keep her up all night that she definitely wouldn’t complain about. While those sorts of comments always edged into being inappropriate—although, Olivier was aware that if he pushed a

I do not consent to this sort of talk

into the girl’s Censor,

it

would make sure to reprimand her for violating his consent, although he doubted she would continue if he were so forceful; he had simply never felt the need to completely censor her like that—Olivier missed the unspoken words all the same.

Keeping her up all night in more sexually ways… that would be nice, but so was this, if in an entirely different way. This was Emilia, soft and pliant against him—although she was still attempting to crawl further on top of him with every shift of her weight—and just… herself, minus the sexual comments.

The problem, which tugged at his heart until he felt like he might be sick, was that he didn’t think Emilia was purposefully holding back. While part of him wanted to worry that, finally, something had turned the girl off from being interested in him sexually, he doubted that was the case. More likely, whatever nightmare had dragged at Emilia was the sort that had left her uninterested in sex—uninterested in touching into the realm of the trauma she had experienced within that nightmare world; perhaps within the real world as well.