Arc 9 | Chapter 422: Normalize Boys Telling Each Other They (Platonically) Love Each Other

Codeth heard it second, and oh, how he fucking hated it.

“Ya’ll are making me hear shit now,”

he signed, fingers twitching with an annoyance that Halen had somehow managed to vibrate into his translation function. It was impressive for how little time the guy had had to work on the function—and what kind of crazy ass setup did Emilia have in her willbrandsmithing... lab? Lab didn’t seem like the right word. Studio? That didn’t seem quite right either—too artsy when willbrandsmithing and coding were both part art, part science. Who knew—and knowing Emilia, the girl probably didn’t have any specific name for it

or

had some insane name for it, like

Chaos Hall

or some shit like that. Codeth would ask her, once they were onaether again.

The point was, most Virtuosi Rigs didn’t skew time enough that Halen could have been able to get his function working this well with the few real-world minutes he likely had within the system to code it. Halen was fast, but this seemed like too much for the few days he could have gotten out of even more of the newer rigs. Something else to ask about, once they weren’t in such a tense situation.

Why not ask now?

Well, for one thing, he really didn’t need to know if Halen was running on a brain that had spent too many days inside some Virtuosi Rig that Emilia, in all her wisdom and insanity, had added more power to—stars that girl and her need to add more power to everything her hands fell upon. Halen was already pushing himself hard, and the last thing Codeth or anyone else needed was to add to their growing list of concerns that his brain might spontaneously melt at any moment.

For another thing, he really didn’t know if Emilia—and Halen and Simeon and anyone else who stepped inside her

Chaos Hall

, which now that Codeth had thought of it was what he was going to continue thinking about her coding and willbranding space as—was breaking any laws with an overpowered Virtuosi Rig.

Technically

, there really weren’t any legal ramifications for breaking time skew limits—the threat of your mind breaking under the strain was considered punishment enough. Mostly, he just didn’t want to know anything about anything illegal when there was a good chance they were all going to end up with a clone digging through their mind if things went bad. Granted, there was

a lot

of illegal shit wandering through all their minds. It just didn’t seem prudent to add to the list.

The last reason he wasn’t going to ask was the simplest: he was pretty fucking sure he’d heard something!

Of course, most likely, he hadn’t. They were just all on edge. Everyone else seemed to be of the same opinion, a few small laughs escaping mouths, while the signs thrown his way held an edge of amusement and exasperation within them.

Still, it didn’t escape his notice that Sorvell looked back, his red hair fluttering in a phantom breeze that Samina had assured them wasn’t toxic, and both Halen and Valor—their current point people—had tested and confirmed it was fine.

Just air, filtering through the tunnels that made up the system, catching corners just right to make a breeze.

Codeth didn’t like it. Given the number of people who were subtly trying to cover their noses and move through the breeze as quickly as possible, he wasn’t the only one.

Still, Sorvell stood there, glaring back into the blackness. With {Starlit Eyes}, they could all make out bits and pieces of the world, but it was still something skewed and untrustworthy. Nothing within their sight was quite right—this world of flatness and colours that didn’t quite reach their eyes correctly. {Starlit Eyes} was a part real-world, part Censor-side augmentation of their vision. It was all very complicated and over most of their heads, but they all knew not to trust what they saw, {Blissful Silence} and a collection of other functions loaded up beside the skill to add and refine details of their environment.

They could never know too much—not in this threatening dark, with its millions of skittering legs and creatures that no one had seen enough to catalogue in official records of everything that grew and lived and shit and consumed and died the continent over.

“At the least, we’re going down pretty fast,”

Halen noted, poking his head over the edge of the cliff—which yes, Codeth knew there was some official term for it, but he climbed, he didn’t cave—that they’d come to.

A few of them needed to readjust their climbing gear, so they’d paused for a moment when Codeth had heard what sounded almost like a voice, disembodied and echoing down on them. Without even asking, his Censor had begun to run the sound through a function that would attempt to map its route—something Halen had designed for their class, as a way of attempting to track down the enemy team in their war games. It was highly effective, but Emilia had quickly created a skill that sent voices vibrating outward

wrong

, thus negating the function’s efficacy. Halen had then created a skill to fall over everyone on the field, magnifying every sound they made until everyone had to deafen their sense of sound—something they’d all struggled to handle—and on it went, and on it went.

Really, Codeth was more surprised that the pair had managed to go even a few months without one of them popping up to torture the other with a new prank. Emilia had been the last to be pranked, of course, the day they graduated, and she had her legal issues clogging up her mind. Still, she had always been the sort to deflect her issues into pranks and war and chaos. So, why hadn’t she done that this time?

“It could be the lawyer,”

Simeon suggested when Codeth sent a private relay to him, asking if he had any thoughts on it. Simeon had always been a vault of sorts, holding every secret given to him close unless he thought it needed to be spoken—given in answer to questions or just out of concern for someone’s safety. So, while the ECC Dyad sometimes didn’t quite understand human emotions well, he still often knew the bare-bones facts of things; hence, as the pair of them had been assigned to head down at the midpoint of their group’s descent off the cliff together, Codeth saw no reason

not

to ask.

Below them, Halen and Valor waited along with Rafe and several of their weaker group members… plus Darrian, who had decided to just carry his cousin down, rather than wait for her to put her climbing gear back on yet again. Above, Taelor and Baylor—as well as Samina and Levi, in a rare moment of the pair being allowed to stay together—guarded the remaining members of their team. Guarded against what, Codeth had no idea. The thing was, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that

something

was stalking them, even if his sound mapping function hadn’t come back with any proof he’d heard someone speaking. Sorvell or Simeon either, from what he could tell. It was part of why Sorvell was still up there; why he and Simeon had insisted on staying up for as long as was reasonable.

“You think she’s worried he won’t take her case?”

Codeth asked as they were lowered by ropes and a skill to suspend their weight, although Valor and Halen were attached to the other end of the rope, in case the skill failed.

Simeon’s hands rocked out a

not really, but not actually not really

—something more complicated than that, then.

“Emmie has been quite taken by him. I think even if he agreed to take her case, she would still be happy to let him take up her time,”

he added into the messages.

Codeth barely had time to feel sorry for Halen, to have had the girl he loved taken from him by someone like Olivier de la Rue, when more messages from Simeon lit up his Censor, implying that the other boy clearly thought all three of them would be good together—as in

together

together.

“Halen… isn’t gay—or bi,”

he felt compelled to add to the conversation, which at this point largely amounted to Simeon thinking that Emilia would be perfectly happy to put herself between both Olivier de la Rue and Halen.

“At least… I don’t think he is?”

A clip of Halen from the day before, telling Emilia that he wasn’t into men but would probably be down for a threesome with Olivier de la Rue, shifted out of Simeon and into him. Even Codeth could taste the… not quite lie in his friend’s words, but something not quite truthful either. Was he just saying that after seeing Emilia look at the lawyer some way, his heart bursting with the reality that if he wasn’t okay with sharing her, she might reject him? That couldn’t have been a surprise to his friend—they’d talked about it before, after all!

With Rafe, Emilia had been mostly content, but at the same time, she definitely hadn’t been. It had been her first real relationship, and if Codeth had to say what he thought was the problem, it was simply a lack of experience. Emilia and Rafe fit, and yet, they had needed something—someone—else between them. Maybe that was why they’d fallen apart, maybe not. Codeth was pretty sure another person would have helped, especially considering the sort of sex they’d been having the one time he’d accidentally stumbled across them

playing

in the woods.

It had been hot, if also a little traumatizing. All he’d wanted was some mushrooms to cook with! So, off he’d gone, traipsing through the forest, and then, boom! Kinky sex! Emilia and Rafe had been just as shocked as he was. Rafe had been cute, though, his hands flailing to cover Emilia up before she’d burst into laughter, muttering about how it definitely wasn’t anything Codeth hadn’t seen before. That was true—not only had a prank gone awry once, leaving Emilia to walk naked through a party, much to Halen’s horror, but the two of them had also had sex a few times. Not that sex required nudity—Codeth and Emilia had hooked up once while bored on a class trip, and it had only required their pants being pushed down. Certainly, when Emilia had asked if he wanted to join them, her eyes glittering with amused challenge, he had only needed to free himself and push into her mouth.

It had been good, but he was also pretty sure the experience had left him with an unexpected fetish—not to mention more than a little guilt. He’d definitely known Halen was in love with Emilia at that point, and while Halen had thought there no hope of getting between her and Rafe—Rafe, who had seemed quite into watching Codeth’s cock thrust in and out of the girl splayed out between them, if he were being honest—Codeth had figured his friend probably wouldn’t be too happy to know he’d had sex with Emilia.

Codeth had always been the sort to spew out his secrets—better out than in, the grandfather who raised him while his mother worked painfully long hours in the capital, was fond of saying. So, he’d told Halen, almost immediately. Halen hadn’t really cared—or if he had, it was simply in the way of wondering if

he

could happen across Emilia and Rage together and join as well.

“Emilia isn’t mine to be jealous over,”

he had stated with far too much maturity,

“and even if she was… I don’t… I wouldn’t be able to tell her not to enjoy herself with whoever she likes? I mean… if I had to imagine her, decades from now, settled down with a family… it wouldn’t be with just one partner?”

Another thing to ask Emilia, he supposed: when she had figured out that being with more than one person would suit her better—actually, she might not even yet realize it, in such hard terms. The triplets suited her, with their myriad personalities and what Codeth was sure must be vastly different sexual urges.

It would be funny if Halen had guessed she would always need to be surrounded by people who loved her, long before she herself realized as much. At the same time, Codeth worried about the consequences of that.

Halen loved Emilia so much it hurt—so much that he had been willing to push his mind and abilities and risk his life coming to find her, long before they had known the full scope of the situation that they probably still didn’t know the whole of.

Codeth just worried that his friend, who had been perfectly content to push his feelings aside because he thought Emilia would never like him back, might bend himself into something he wasn’t for her. He would do that, Codeth knew—shift himself into someone who would smile and let another person touch him, if only it let him be with Emilia as well.

He hoped this wasn’t that—hoped that somewhere in whatever Simeon had seen of Halen and Emilia and Olivier de la Rue, there was something else that seemed to imply Halen wouldn’t allow himself to be something that he wasn’t for them. Hopefully, if Halen allowed himself to be dragged into some polyamorous relationship with Emilia, it would be with an ease and acceptance not borne of desperation to be with her at any cost. With years between now and that conversation, where they’d discussed how Emilia would be better off with more than one partner, Codeth hoped his friend had worked through the reality of that inside his head—figured out where his lines lay and how to stick to them. Halen was smart; Codeth would just have to believe his friend knew what he was doing and how to keep himself safe.

Still, when his feet touched down, Codeth couldn’t stop himself from wrapping his arms around his friend, his nose burying into Halen’s neck as the other boy—man now, he supposed, even if in Codeth’s mind they were all still stupid children doing stupid, suicidal things. “I love you, and I’m here for you, no matter what,” he whispered, just breathing in the smell of his friend—all the sweat of movement and stress, the underlying scent of some cologne or another, and something that was just Halen, as familiar to his as the boy himself.

“I love you, too,” Halen whispered back, his fingers digging into Codeth’s hips, where he had caught him, before pulling higher until they were just a ball of warmth and love and hope because that was the main thing Codeth hoped for his friend: that this would all work out for him, and he’d get the girl and be completely happy with the ending and the people she surrounded them with.