Admissions 1.5: Emile
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An instant after Emile resolved to beg Cylus to fuck him, but before he could disengage his mouth from Cylus' fingers to do so, the world opened around them.
They’d entered an ice-walled cavern, kilometers wide. The surface—of the ocean, he realized, giddy—was faintly lit by long, occasionally intersecting lines of glowing blue-green. The water and ice caught that illumination and threw it out and up, bathing the great space in low, lambent brilliance.
Except for the rapidly expanding square of darkness directly below them.
They both froze: still upside down, limbs entangled and clothing disarrayed, Cylie's scarf still draped around his neck. The elevator slowed quickly, but the field cushioned them, giving them ample time to adjust and avoid a head-first landing. They touched down softly as snowflakes; even once the field blinked out, his and Cylus' bodies rested lightly on each other.
The gravity. The City was kept at Earth-standard, but this was clearly not the City. Europa's native grav held them gently; Emile felt that if either of them kicked off, they might soar away together.
They'd landed in the center of a broad platform, standing above the surrounding waters. Red lights flickered to life around them, highlighting walkways and consoles.
Out in the soft-lit waters beyond, something stirred, sending out ripples without revealing itself.
Cylus' slender body tensed, fingers withdrawing from Emile's mouth. "What... is this place?"
Hearing a faint quaver beneath those words, Emile's arms tightened, holding the slighter man protectively. "Please, don't worry," he assured, though his own heart was racing at the unexpected scope of their surroundings. But nervousness was transmuting back into excitement as he understood where Val had led him, at least in broad terms. "Do you know much about the history of Europa?"
Cylus' tension eased fractionally. Emile let go, not wanting his new friend to feel trapped... any more than he might already, anyway. As they found their feet and smoothed their clothes, Cylus turned, surveying their surroundings. Emile wished the low red light didn't make it so hard to read his expression. "A little. This was the first place humanity searched for alien life, right?"
"Yes! For hundreds of years." Emile took a deep breath; this venture had been his idea, his suggestion, so it was his responsibility to lead. He stepped through the gap in the elevator rail. Walking slowly, reminding himself of his own intoxication, Emile adjusted his steps to the low gravity, just as he would in the vineyards outside his family's grav-controlled estate grounds. With just as much care, he swallowed the urge to infodump, doing his best to summarize. "Eventually, though, scientific consensus was reached. Europa had the chemical and geophysical prerequisites for life, but the spark hadn't caught. Some people argued we should leave, or maintain a modest long-term population to observe, in case a unique ecosystem might still emerge here. Others argued that even if something did arise, we'd never know it wasn't due to our contamination. And...”
“And then Terra nearly destroyed itself and needed somewhere to put all its fish,” Cylie interjected, bitterness edging his tone.
“Right. The oceans were hardest hit.” Emile’s emotions flared inside him, buoyed by wine. “So Windfall, which at the time was still establishing its Planetary Reclamation Program by ‘maximizing yields’ from terraformed worlds that ‘failed’—"
He spun back towards Cylus to gesture his use of air quotes, because even if Mother had tied their fortunes to Windfall through Uncle Adaire, Emile and Papa had always agreed that the very concept of a failed world made no sense—
What started as a dramatic turn continued into an involuntary spin as his feet left the walkway, angular momentum carrying him onward. Throwing out a hand to stop himself, Emile slapped something firm, bringing his rotation to an awkward halt.
Light flickered outward from where his palm had struck, dials and meters and a series of holographic displays flickering to life across one of the platform's consoles. Instinctively averse to triggering anything else, Emile pushed himself off the panel, only belatedly realizing that its angle had set his trajectory on a vector pointing further up than he'd intended—
—something warm and firm collided with his back, and for an instant Emile knew the shock of an unsuspecting bird being pounced from the air. Arms wrapped around him, cinching just below his breasts and clasping tight. His feet struck the walkway again as lithe thighs tensed beneath his ass, dissipating their momentum and stabilizing them both.
"Still," Cylus crooned into his ear, one hand tugging the ends of the scarf around his throat. "Breathe."
Still. Breathe. Feel. Remember. The words Cylus had poured into his ear as they fell, now softening his body into compliance.
Emile let the rise and fall of Cylus' firm chest guide his breath. His heart slowed, from the prey's instinctive drumbeat to the placid acceptance of... Whatever was asked of him next.
"It doesn't look like that kicked off anything immediately dangerous," Cylus observed, loosening his hold on Emile. "But... what do you think?”
Right, right, standing. Emile was an expert at standing. And explaining. He was proving it right now, finding his feet and turning to face Cylus again despite wanting nothing more than to throw himself back into the other boy's arms. But he needed to focus. Needed to make sure they were safe, and finish what he’d been talking about, and then—
Stop thinking about his mouth, and his hands, and his knives—
Emile wrestled his attention onto the console he'd collided with: data displays, screens and projections of graphs and charts and numerical readouts. Repeated among them in various forms were small, three-dimensional maps, and the rest appeared to be environmental readouts. The sight woke a strange and specific nostalgia in him, as Val must have known it would. She, too, had accompanied Papa on trips to the distributed terraforming stations studded across their homeworld, and these displays bore more than a passing resemblance to theirs.
“I think this is some kind of observation station. This all looks like monitoring and measurement...” His eyes jumped between displays. “Nothing indicating changes to airflow, or the local temp and chem balances...”
“It smells weird.” Tension threaded Cylie’s voice as he regarded the space around them uneasily. “And it feels like there’s irregularity in the airflow...”
Emile breathed deep, earlier excitement rekindling as he took in the scent of salt, underlaid by traces of unfamiliar life. “I think that’s... how oceans are. It smelled kind of like this on Terra, too.” Awe crept into his tone. “Except it’s so much more alive.”
Like the lake just outside the estate, almost. Even if it smelled nothing like lake-lilies, the air kissed his face the same way.
“Oh.” Cylus cleared his throat. “Well. Anyway, you were saying, about Windfall?”
Emile blinked away the memory of home. He was here, on a living ocean at last, and with someone he never would have met if he’d stayed. "So Windfall... Right, yeah. They got charged with relocating as much of Earth's ocean life to Europa as possible, with massive support from the entire Terran Consortium. Terra fired up the shipyards from the first Ark Fleet while Windfall bored the Ocean Gate, and descendants of the original research colonists collaborated on designing and upgrading the sub-marine infrastructure—that's when they started gene-modding, the ones who stayed, and became today's Europans...”
None of whom were here, as he’d assured Cylus earlier. And yet, someone must monitor all these... monitors. The notion of an unseen watcher, with vision perhaps quite different from his own, raised the hairs on his arms, and not in an entirely unpleasant way.
The stroke of a finger over his shoulder snapped him back into his body with a start. “The Europans, huh?” Cylie had moved close enough that Emile could make out a teasing edge in his smile, even in the dim light.
Emile blushed, hastening to reach his actual point. "Yes, ah, so, among the changes the Europans helped with, was the expansion and reconfiguration of the existing under-ice caves into a moon-wide network of sustainable, self-oxygenating environments, big enough for marine mammals to surface. And that! Is where we are now," he managed to finish as Cylie’s finger traced down his arm. Words slid on his tongue like warm butter. "I hope... That's... Okay."
The pressure of Cylus’ touch grew—no, Emile was slumping into him, body melting now that he’d finally finished his explanation. Before he could right himself, Cylie swept him into what Emile had always, romantically, thought of as a princess carry, slinging him through the low gravity with fluid ease.
Emile blinked up at him, heart in his throat. The red lights cast Cylus' eyes in gorgeously ominous crimson. "So what you're telling me, Emile, is that the place you brought me so I could show you my knives—" Cylie's voice did something much better than air quotes—"Is a secret ocean ice cave where Old Earth monsters go to breathe—to which you gained us entry via, at best, extralegal means?"
"...Yes? Not that they're monsters, really..."
"Well, then let's go." Cylus kicked off with shocking ease, carrying Emile through a graceful jump that landed them on what looked, as Emile took it in, like a viewing platform. It extended out over the water, its railing punctuated by the silhouettes of unfamiliar instruments.
Cylus tossed him in a low arc; Emile landed gently on his side, about three meters away. He looked down through dark metal grating to see water, ocean water, stirred by gentle waves.
A layer of mesh was strung under the platform, lit from beneath by one of the thick, glowing lines—a cable? covered in some kind of bioluminescent... algae?—running directly beneath them. Irregular patches of darkness mottled the luminous blue-green surface, which was fringed with mysterious shapes that danced with the shifting currents.
Further down, he could make out more lines, intersecting and branching. His mind reeled, suddenly realizing the scale of what he was looking at. This was another piece of the infrastructure he’d talked about earlier: the webwork that spanned Europa’s entire ocean, countless threads dwindling as they faded into fathomless depths—
A sharp series of snk-clicks drew his attention back up in an instant, eyes snapping to where Cylie had withdrawn his blades. They whirled, glass catching and refracting dim red and bioluminescent blue-green.
"Now," Cylie closed both blades with a heavy ch-chk, "I believe I said I'd show you how these work..."
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