“Hey there, stinky little flower~” Emilia cooed as bright blue eyes fluttered open to peer up at her.
V frowned, lips tilting down and eyebrows pulling dramatically together. “Do I smell that bad?” he croaked up at her, the swallow that followed audible—they really needed to find something to eat or drink soon. V had, unfortunately, been forced to abandon his coat filled with supplies in the cave system, and Emilia had eaten all the treats he had left for her while she waited for her injuries to heal by the cavern lake.
“A bit,” Emilia said, fingers brushing through his hair.
She’d spent the majority of the time the man was out pulling bits of mud out of his waves. They were still dirty, coated in more grime than just the mud, but at least if he decided to shake himself like a dog—or in frustration—he wouldn’t splatter her with mysterious, undrying mud.
“It’s okay, though,” she assured him when his eyes clamped closed, mouth pinched in frustration. “I’ve mostly gotten used to. Seriously, though! I thought you were fine being a dirty boy! You don’t seem that fine to me!”
V’s frown deepened before he released a long, annoyed breath. “I don’t really care, but I also don’t usually have people around me who might care—or whose opinions I care about.”
“Ah~ I see, I see,” Emilia sighed, nodding sagely as she ignored the clench of her heart and continued working a knot out of V’s hair. Something was weird with it. She swore the moment she untangled all of it, working methodically from one side to another, more knots would appear. It was truly an impressive and terrible skill! It had kept her busy the last hour or two, however, while the other visitor presumably dealt with his own internal hell. “So… wanna talk about it?”
V’s throat bobbed with another painful swallow. “I was back in the war as well, but not in a battle or anything.”
“No?”
The man’s head shook slightly. “No. I was…”
His face screwed up, and for a moment, Emilia wondered if he was trying to find the right words to hide something from her. Then, she shook those thoughts off. Maybe that was it. More likely, he was just trying to find the words to explain whatever trauma had been swirled back up for him. Now was not the moment to be selfish and wonder if she was so important as to be in his memories.
“There was a moment, during the war, that I’ve regretted every day since,” V continued, eyes shifting under his lids, as though he were still seeing whatever nightmare had been chasing him, which perhaps he was, and Emilia rubbed at the corner of his eye.
“Yeah?” she asked, actually thinking that she managed to not sound overly enthusiastic about hearing it, which she certainly wasn’t! Yes, whatever V had seen could potentially lead her back to his identity, but that was the least of her concerns! She wasn’t heartless, thank you very much!
V’s mouth twitched, and when he opened his eyes…
“I said something I shouldn’t have, and refused someone’s kindness when I should have accepted. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized what a gift they had been offering me.”
“Can’t you try and find their kindness again?” Emilia asked. “In my experience, it isn’t until someone has burned a bridge a thousand times that it truly stays burned.”
The man smiled softly up at her. “I hope that’s true. I feel like I’ve been working to become someone they…” He shook himself, once again trying to find his words.
“Are proud of?” Emilia suggested, smiling when he glared up at her.
“No.”
“Hate?”
“No,” V deadpanned back at her, although she could see the amusement dancing in his eyes as they went back and forth, Emilia suggesting more and more ridiculous things he could hope whoever he had offended would think of him now.
“Want to baby?”
“Maybe.”
Emilia blinked down. V smiled innocently up at her.
“What? I like being babied. Is that a crime?”
“No…” Emilia said slowly. “I also like being babied.” Olivier, in particular, had always been great at babying her. There had even been a few times when…
Emilia’s thoughts shuddered back into the present. No, no, no! She did not need to be thinking about sex things with her shockingly kinky lawyer—because seriously, who would look at that man and think he was into anything other outside the box!? Yes, he looked like the type to be a bit mean in bed, but not the type to be into anything… extra.
And oh, was Olivier into so much more than regular, rough sex.
“Uhm… you want them to be attracted to you?” she tried. She really needed to get away from this train of thought. Just thinking about Olivier left her hot and bothered. She didn’t need her mind wandering away, thinking of specific, sexy moments with the man!
“Ah~” V sighed, something soft and distant entering his eyes. “I suppose it would be nice if they were attracted to me now.”
“Oh, did you have a thing for them?”
V’s laughter was like sunshine returning to the world, even if they were currently trapped in this terrible cave system, searching for Emilia’s missing friends, who she really hoped were okay! Between all the passing out, they’ve been separated for at least three or four hours, and considering how oddly time seemed to stretch and compress here, it could easily have been more.
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“I think everyone had a crush on them,” V laughed, eyes staring away blankly, like his vision were filling with memories decades old—wonderful memories, if the smile tugging at his lips were any indication. “They were just that sort of person? Kind and smart and beautiful, dragging everyone into their orbit. Even the people who hated them generally respected and admired them.”
Emilia was trying really, really hard to not assume the person V was talking about was her. It could have been Naomi! Naomi had been all those things too! Rebecca was kind—at least to the people she liked—and so incredibly beautiful it was unfair. And it didn’t even have to be a girl! V had already said he was open to either sex, after all. Olivier fit the bill as well, even if he hadn’t often shown his kind side to anyone, but he was certainly the most admirable of them. Halen… was so rarely kind, V probably wasn’t talking about him, but there had been other men in their unit who were. Even her ex had usually been kind, unless the person were an idiot.
Of course, if V were thinking he could potentially reconnect with the person, that took half those people out of the running, given they were, ya know, dead, and all.
“Stop that!” she mentally chastised herself. Seriously. She was going to drive herself crazy trying to figure out who this man was to her!
“Why didn’t you ever—”
“Make a move on them?” V asked, smile tilting sadly as he cut her off. “There was no way I could have. Back then… I was different. There was no way I could have asked them out. I thought about it, near the end of the war, but there was never a good time, and then we all floated apart.”
“We all?”
“My division. I know some units stayed together, but ours…” V shook his head, eyes fluttering shut as he mumbled about how they had all just seen too much on the front.
Emilia blinked at him. “So, you did serve on the front?”
V blinked at her, his attention snapping back to her from wherever—whenever—it had floated off to. “Did I not mention that?”
“No, just that you served.”
“Oops?” He smiled painfully at her, and the niggle that she had felt that he might have purposefully been hiding that part of his past from her slipped away, just like telling her had slipped away from him. “You… couldn’t tell?” he asked after a long moment of the two staring at each other.
“No, not really,” Emilia told him, one of her fingers dragging along the edge of his jaw and drawing a shiver out of him. “Nothing about you really screamed soldier to me… other than your general calm, I guess. I know a few people who have the calm from games, though?”
She smiled, telling V about how her boyfriend had complained to her a few times about friends who only had that cool in virtual games. “Sometimes, cool calm when you can’t die doesn’t translate into the real world at all! Even though you’re unlikely to get more than a minor injury in raids,” she laughed. Elijah had returned from a few raids over the last year, bitching about teammates he had met in VR games and thought would be reasonable people to team up with in real-world raids. Not so much. Still hadn’t stopped the man from defending raids as a good tool from keeping people prepped for war, much to her annoyance.
“You have a boyfriend?” the other visitor asked, eyes flickering shut, his jaw tensing slightly under Emilia’s fingers.
“Yeah~ but it’s nothing serious,” she sighed, leaning back against the wall she had dragged V’s body towards while he was unconscious, her own eyes flickering shut as well.
“Why date him then?”
Emilia shrugged, realizing V couldn’t see her and telling him she didn’t know why they were still dating. “It was fun, for a while. We actually started as enemies hate fucking each other,” she laughed, thinking back to that first time they had hooked up. Where she and Olivier had been all sexual tension before they had snapped and fucked against his apartment wall, she had never had much attraction to Elijah. He was objectively attractive, but personality wise…
She shrugged again. “I think it’s coming to an end. He kinda seems to want to… change our relationship—we’re open,” she added. “I think he wants to close things, but I’m not really into doing that.” Her fingers dragged through the man’s hair as she told him about how Elijah had gone to visit him family a few months previous and returned different—how they hadn’t really been hooking up with anyone else since then.
“I say that! But I hooked up with my ex-lawyer in the real-world today, or yesterday, I guess. Ugh, time is impossible to understand.” Her eyes opened, and when she looked down, she found V staring intently up at her. “What?”
He frowned slightly, looking conflicted, before he shook himself. “You shouldn’t date someone who makes you unhappy.”
“Who… who says I’m unhappy?” Emilia asked, startled by the statement—startled that something about her words or tone or whatever else had told V that Elijah wasn’t really making her happy anymore. Personally, she thought her words reflected more neutrality on the subject, keeping what mild unhappiness was beginning to bubble around her relationship out of her words and tone.
He smiled sadly up at her, head tilting into her hand, before he was pushing himself up. “We should go,” he said, rather than tell her what specific thing in her existence had told him she was unhappy with her relationship at the moment.
Honestly, if she popped out of this raid and told Elijah she’d hooked up with Olivier had he dumped her, she would probably feel a little relieved. It would mean freedom. It would mean not having to deal with whatever tension Elijah’s family had caused within their relationship—because as much as Elijah wasn’t bringing it up, eventually he’d have to, and she was sure it would be… aggravating and annoying, and they’d probably break up anyways. She’d thought the fun moments of their relationship were worth the current strain, but she was starting to question whether that were true, or just her wanting to spare herself from having to break up with him.
“You never said what specifically you were doing, in… wherever we ended up,” Emilia said as she let V haul her up, his hands warm and large around her own. “Not that you have to tell me.”
V laughed his sunshine laugh. “You first. You just said you were, shall we say, dreaming of the war.”
Emilia sighed, letting V drag her back towards the door that had trapped them each in nightmares of the past. “I was dreaming of lots of trauma, and then one of my skills going out of control.”
The other visitor’s hand tightened around hers. “I was dreaming of making things with the person worse—of permanently destroying everything I could ever have with them, even friendship.”
Emilia squeezed his hand back as they walked, V carefully peering through the doorway in case they were hit with another wave of nightmares. Nothing came, and they cautiously moved through to the next room.
“So… we both had nightmares of our worst fears and memories from the war? That’s a bit… odd.”
V hummed in agreement. “I’ve seen similar things in other raids, but usually, there’s some goal you have to reach? Something like… overcome your fears to escape or get a special item or bonus against the boss, or something.”
“V.”
“Emilia?” V frowned back at her.
“You did not just jinx us like that.”
“Like what?” V asked, although the shit eating grin on his face and the way he seamlessly pulled her out of the way when a blast of sticky mud came flying their way told Emilia that the bastard had totally expected to call down some sort of calamity upon them.
Stars help her, she had somehow found herself in a partnership with someone who enjoyed teasing the universe.