Arc X.1 | Chapter 34: Interlude | Project Piketown Infiltration 34

The workshop glistened with hundreds of different minerals, both natural and synthetic. Some, Baylor knew from both his education and wandering through art galleries with Emilia and the kids, back before the war. Occasionally, he still let the kids drag him to such places—other more enjoyable places as well. Usually, he wasn’t very good company. That didn’t stop the kids from inviting him to a million different activities, each brightening when he managed to actually enjoy himself, each smile he graced them with, each genuine laugh, something he knew the kids cherished.

It wasn’t a secret to him that he had become an unhappy person over the last decade, the guiding light of his life gone. Most of the kids understood his pain—they always understood. They got to see Emilia whenever they wanted, but they still knew what being denied her would do to them. They were lucky; in no world would Emilia ever be the sort of person to deny the children who loved her anything. Not her presence or love or anything else.

What Baylor wouldn’t give to be a child again, able to curl into her warmth. Granted, where all the kids had learned to accept that she couldn’t stay with them forever—accepted that she needed to leave for… he didn’t know, self-care, maybe—Baylor definitely wouldn’t have been that accepting of what she needed.

No, Baylor would dig his teeth into the girl he loved and never let go, if she let him get close to her again.

This time, if Emilia wanted him to leave, she was going to need to shatter what they had—reduce his love to dust or kill him. There was no other option.

Beside him, Loxsh shifted, sending him a glance that Baylor wasn’t sure what to do with. It was something knowing, he supposed—knowing of what, was the question. Knowing of the thoughts rustling through his mind, so painful he felt he was liable to split apart? Knowing of the future that was laid out for him?

Would it be a painful future or one of happiness? Maybe he had no future, Emilia destined to snuff his life out because she didn’t want him anymore and that would be the only way to be rid of him.

Baylor could imagine it—this situation where he would fall to his knees and beg Emilia to slit his throat because he couldn’t live another breath without her and wouldn’t she please just end his pain?

“vy Starrberg isn’t going to kill you,” syn muttered, leaning close enough to nudge Baylor with their shoulder—apparently, for as up and down as his moods today had been, his former teammate wasn’t afraid he would snap and kill them.

Actually, was Loxsh his former teammate? Or were they still teammates?

“Still, I guess?” Loxsh said, reaching towards two of the minerals of the workshop and tugging the containers that held them towards themself. Delicate, deep-brown fingers popped the lids off, offering Baylor a better glimpse of them. “I mean, it’s not like I go echo hunting or anything, nor like I show up to the get-together some of you have more than once or twice a year, but… I might still be being paid?”

The syn’s head tilted as Baylor poked at the minerals and made a face. “No, then,” Loxsh laughed, pushing each container back into its home.

“No,” Baylor agreed, shifting his gaze upwards to the rows upon rows of containers.

Some were labelled, others were not. From what he could tell, the ones that weren’t labelled contained the synthetic minerals, some of which had names, others that were formed by the pozurn caste of Nur’tha, who had abilities similar to the Lowdouran, the glashial, the rumai’se, and Curtisal, who had an irregular deviation they’d never been able to find a name for. In other words, some of those containers held minerals that were virtually untouchable by skills and core abilities. Baylor could tell which contained such minerals, mostly because he couldn’t really feel them, his awareness of the room coming up blank whenever it touched on those minerals.

Despite having been around people with such abilities for almost forty, real-world years, they were the sorts of materials that were always a bit off-putting. Probably, that was why he was having such an issue with this project? That, and it felt like he was missing something. It were as though some little bit of information was missing from his brain, and if he just pulled that bandage Taelor was always placing over his memories off…

Not for the first time, a message came through from Hyr, telling him not to touch it. Interestingly, the syn didn’t seem to know what he was doing—Baylor had asked, horrified that Hyr might know he was in the middle of making them what was supposed to be a super-secret birthday gift, but had been assured that Hyr wasn’t spying on his general goings-on, but did know whenever he got close to pulling his memories free.

“Do you know what’s in my memories?” he had asked after Hyr told him off the second time, although he had received no answer. Part of him hadn’t wanted to know anyways—there was something easier about only his brothers knowing any of the details of those memories that were locked up inside him, he supposed. Sometimes, he wondered if other people knew as well, but he had no proof, only assumptions and vibes.

Julian might know, simply because he was the only one of them who had never let his memories be touched. Zavriel, who often knew far more than any of them but did occasionally mess with his own memory, might know. Every so often, Baylor caught both Darrian and Olivier looking at him some sort of way, and maybe it made sense that his best friend would know—Darrian knew so much about him, after all—but Olivier knowing was… weird. It wasn’t like the two of them had ever been close—really, Baylor thought the lawyer rather afraid of him, which was fair.

One moment, Emilia had been sitting, broken, at Olivier’s bedside; the next, she’d been so gone that even her stalking function had been turned off. As much as Olivier had remained in a coma for several more weeks, Baylor still blamed him for Emilia leaving.

Something had happened in that room, and even if it wasn't directly Olivier’s fault, Baylor was sure that whatever had happened was tied to him.

Besides, as much as Baylor hated himself and his brothers were leaving Emilia, Olivier had broken her heart as well. Hence, he was also on Baylor’s shit list. Much like he couldn’t kill himself or his brothers or Rafe because Emilia would—assuming nothing had changed—be heartbroken, Baylor couldn’t kill Olivier. That didn’t mean he didn’t regularly glare at the man while imagining vivisecting him. It would be slow and meticulous and Baylor would keep him alive so long and—

“Why is this so hard~” Baylor whined, tugging out more and more containers to look at whatever mineral was stored within them before rejecting them. The rejection was always immediate. Somehow, he knew exactly was he didn’t want to use for Hyr’s gift, yet had no clue what he did want to use.

So, soooo annoying.

Loxsh snickered, completely unafraid of him. That was fair. As much as he was in a weird mood, vacillating between being happier than he’d been in a long while and an absolutely shit mood, Baylor wasn’t going to actually kill anyone. Over the last decade, his temper might have become so volatile that he tended to make most of the people who had never been afraid of him… not necessarily afraid of him, but certainly more wary. The most he’d ever done was slam his willbrand through Anarch’s hand, after he’d caught her cheating at kyra. Given the offending hand wasn’t real, it hadn’t hurt her, only inconvenienced her and Curtisal as it had needed to be replaced.

“I remember Wyren talking about that,” Loxsh noted, swinging their bare leg over their prosthetic, lost during the final battle. The syn had always been a bit tight-lipped about how it had happened, which generally led Baylor to suspect they either didn’t remember—a lot of them were missing hunks of their memories from the last few months of the war, as they worked to figure out a plan using knowledge they were no longer allowed to have—or that they did remember and knew something they had to keep everyone else from knowing. If the syn did know… well, it would explain why they rarely came to get-togethers, and now that Baylor was thinking about it, every time he could think of where Loxsh had shown up they hadn’t been in Baalphoria?

Maybe the syn really did remember and was avoiding getting anywhere close to the OIC as a result? That would be… interesting?

Did that also mean he remembered whatever Baylor wasn’t allowed to know?

When he asked, the syn tilted their head, thinking, thinking. “Maybe?” they finally said, a frown tugging at their delicate lips—everything about the syn was delicate. Long limbs. A thin frame. Big eyes with long lashes that cast deep shadows over their cheeks. A near permanent pout. Despite still being tall, Loxsh was on the shorter side for a kyrfa'Nur'tha, resulting in them appearing almost like a doll when they stood next to other syn or members of the Gru.

“I… know some things that I do not believe you know… and I can guess which bit it is that your brother does not wish you to know?” the syn continued, their eyes flickering downward as Baylor continued their search through the room for the perfect materials.

“And do you think he’s right?” It was something Baylor wondered, sometimes. While he trusted Taelor—and Valor, although he was never sure how much his younger brother remembered of whatever memory had been hidden from him—there was a fine line to be found when messing with someone’s memories.

Baylor didn’t doubt that, did he not want his memories tampered with, there was no chance Taelor would be able to force him to accept the locks. Yet… yet, he always felt like he was missing so much—like some huge part of him had been carved away by those locks. The resulting emptiness was a horrifically painful thing, always tugging at him. There were times when he could mostly ignore it; there were other times when he couldn’t help himself, greedy hands reaching out to pull the missing pieces of his memories free until all he could remember was sobbing and cracking and Taelor’s voice gently reprimanding him.

“You know you shouldn’t touch it,” his brother would say, not to be cruel, but because his brother loved him and didn’t want him to be in pain—and the pain? That Baylor could remember, and were Emilia not alive and breathing, curled into Hyr’s arms, he might have thought her dead. Were Darrian and Westrial and the handful of children he had stuffed into his heart not easily reachable by relay or xphern message or a short spark, he might have thought one of them dead.

Only Khline and Huron were dead, and their deaths had hurt, but he remembered their deaths, little piece of him torn away by their loss, but they hadn’t torn him apart the way he knew the deaths of several of the people he loved would. No one else was dead, and for the life of him, Baylor couldn’t think of anyone else he might have loved? There was no one in his memories who had died or vanished from his life that had caused even the smallest flicker of grief. There was some ache for his friends when people they cared for died. Emilia and Darrian’s grief over Khline’s death had been more painful than his own grief, as had Ivirium’s over Huron’s, and certainly, he had felt something when Lux died, most of his friends falling apart, but Lux had been his friend in the sense that he would protect her, talk to her, but didn’t really like her.

Had Emilia and Darrian fallen out with her, Baylor wouldn’t have thought of her again. It had been that way with Janie: the only reasons Baylor had thought of her in the last forty years, since she had turned out to be a complete bitch in Falmíer, was because there had been a short moment of mourning when they found out she died during the war, then, he’d been reminded she existed by Simeon’s older daughter.

That said, Baylor wasn’t convinced most of his friends hadn’t brushed aside thoughts of Janie either—after all, it wasn’t like any of them had ever contacted Emilia to get pictures of their once-fake-friend for her daughter? Emilia would have memories of their compulsory school days for the kid, yet, no one had asked.

“Maybe it’s because it’s so far removed for all of you?” Loxsh suggested, all too happy to let Baylor babble about this or that as he moved—apparently, relaxing would make finding what he was looking for easier.

Baylor remained unconvinced on this fact simply because, while the syn hadn’t said as much, he had a feeling he was supposed to be letting the aether guide him to the right minerals. So far, there was very little guiding, and the only minerals he currently held was one that reminded him of the purple Emilia preferred for her willbrands—used to prefer, at least—shot through with bits of silver, and three green minerals, interwoven with purple and gold—these represented him and his brothers, obviously… not that he knew if he was supposed to be picking something to represent them. They had felt right, so he’d taken them. It still felt like he needed more.

“It has been literal millennia since you were friends with that girl, so perhaps, not even Simeon can be bothered to care? That much time and distance… I think it would be difficult to care, especially given how much the girl hurt many of you?”

His fingers skimming over the lips of the containers, waiting for the aether to pull him to a specific one, Baylor considered that. Simeon was, by far, the one who had the most contact with Janie’s daughter, and even that was more peripheral through his daughter’s friendship with Janie’s daughter’s adoptive sister. Simeon was also one of the people Janie had almost killed. As much as the kid had nothing to do with her mother’s cruelty, combined with it being so very long ago, many members of their friend group having to work through the reality that this girl they had thought their friend had never been any such thing…

Baylor’s eyes caught on the mineral he had pulled free. There was only one in the container, the mineral a deep black, and for a moment, he thought it was a bit like Darrian’s hair: so dark it seemed to eat all light. Then, he shifted and the mineral caught the light, a gold shimmer seeming to glow from within.

It was beautiful—heartbreaking, somehow.

The syn said nothing as Baylor plucked the mineral out, setting it alongside the other four in his hand. Immediately, his other hand reached for another container, another, another, each holding the perfect mineral within it, although he had no idea why they were perfect. Little bits of a few more reminded him of someone he knew. Others… others he couldn’t place, yet in some ways, it felt like he should be able to place the reminder they held.

Over and over, his eyes kept caching on that shimmering black mineral. He knew who it reminded him of. He hated that he knew and that it didn’t make sense—how could anything having to do with that boy ever make sense?

“That’s… quite a lot,” Loxsh noted when Baylor finally returned, over a dozen minerals clutched in his hand, three matching minerals for him and his brothers, the rest a collection of different minerals, all unique, and yet, perfect together.

“Is that bad?” he asked, frowning down at the pile and trying to imagine giving even a single one of them up. To say that his entire soul seemed to contract in a visceral squeeze of rage at the very idea of giving a single one up was an understatement.

Loxsh frowned down at the pile, and Baylor wished he was someone gifted with the ability to pluck thoughts from a mind without the use of a Censor. Something told him that Loxsh knew something that they weren’t saying about the gift they had suggested Baylor make for Hyr—the most the syn had told him was that the gift was something that would have great significance to Hyr and that it wasn’t something he could take back, once given.

A little ominous, but the moment Loxsh had suggested the gift to him—it was one of several suggestions—Baylor had known it was the gift he wanted to give his new friend.

Shaking their head, braids shifting around them in a cascade, the syn assured him it wasn’t bad. “Just… I don’t know—I really don’t. I know a bit about what this gift will signify to Hyr, but not enough to tell you exactly what they will see in it?”

Did Baylor mention the gift was turning out to be a bit ominous?