I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 39: Adding To The Tally.

Aris Ashborne talked for a whole ten minutes before his first interruption.

Which was extremely rare, because Regulus was not someone who let people talk to him without him extracting every possible potential out of their words. It had become second nature to him by now, to never let someone talk without putting on adequate pressure.

For some reason, he was finding himself currently unable to do so.

It was not anything too serious, the situation simply happened, no one other than himself realizing that this was wrong, that this was not how anything was supposed to work when he was involved. Still, he found himself unable to speak, resorting to quietly absorbing the information given to him by the Ashborne.

It went surprisingly well.

The person, he still couldn’t figure out if it were a man or a woman, talked about everything that was important. The dungeon, it’s Aberrant classification. The timeline of events that could properly be constructed from the outside. Then the association’s involvement, carefully framed—what they knew, what they’d been told, what the current arrangement was. The medical situation, his arm, the specialist that was waiting for his consent, the options.

All delivered in the same direct tone as before, without apology or performance.

What Aris did not tell him, Regulus noted, was how he’d gotten him out.

Which was fine by him, because he really didn’t have the capacity to process more than this. It could wait.

When the Ashborne finally stopped, all Regulus could do was stare at the ceiling, a thousand different thoughts screaming in his mind for his attention.

The loudest one was, however;

"It’s been sixty years since then...?"

Which meant that he was the last remaining Aureate.

And every single person he ever knew was probably dead by now.

Aris quietly nodded, his movements slow with the patience of someone that had the whole day to spend talking. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

A light groan escaped his throat, raw and hoarse in its freedom.

"The association," Regulus asked, after a long moment of silence. "What do they want."

"For now, to keep you quiet until they decide what to do with you."

"And you agreed to that."

"We negotiated," The Halcyon said, from the window, with the tone of someone who had conducted the negotiation and found the outcome acceptable if not ideal.

"What did you get."

"Time," she said. "And discretion, for now."

Regulus processed this.

An Aureate, classified dead for years, reappearing in an Aberrant dungeon in Ilvane, extracted by apparently the last Ashborne. He understood, with the clarity of someone who had spent a significant portion of his life navigating the intersection of power and information, exactly what that combination of facts represented to every institution and faction currently operating in this city.

He understood, consequently, exactly how much danger the person sitting eighteen inches away from him was currently in because of it.

He looked at Aris.

"They’re going to use you," he said.

"They’re going to try," Aris said pleasantly.

"You don’t seem concerned."

"I’m moderately concerned."

"You don’t look moderately concerned."

"I rarely look what I am," Aris said, which was delivered so evenly that it took Regulus a second to understand it was the most honest thing anyone in the room had said so far.

He studied him.

The composed surface. The half-lidded eyes that were doing the assessment thing again, quiet and continuous, the kind of observation that didn’t announce itself. The cardigan, which he was choosing to stop thinking about because it was not useful information.

"Why?"

Aris tilted his head slightly, and his heart skipped a beat.

"Why what."

"Why go in." He hesitated, looking at his arm. At the flat space under the blanket. "You didn’t know who I was. You didn’t know what was in there. The gate was unstable." He looked back. "Why go in."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Silas, across the room, had gone completely still.

Aris looked at him with the expression he’d been wearing since Regulus opened his eyes. Steady, unhurried, returning nothing legible—and then said, simply;

"There was someone inside."

Regulus waited for the rest of it.

There was no rest of it.

He looked at him for a long moment, at the simplicity of the answer and the complete absence of anything performative in the delivery, no heroism being claimed, no significance being attached, just the fact of it stated as a fact.

’There was someone inside.’

So he went in.

Regulus had met a great many people in his life. Powerful ones, political ones, the kind who made decisions that moved the world and the kind who believed they did. He had developed, over years of careful observation, a functional taxonomy of the ways people presented themselves versus what they actually were.

He could not place Aris Ashborne in any of it.

That was going to bother him.

It was already starting to bother him.

"Regulus Au Nyx," he said, formally, because the situation apparently called for it and he had not actually introduced himself. "And thank you. For the extraction."

Aris nodded once, with the air of someone receiving information rather than a compliment.

"Rest," he said. "The specialist will be given the go, you’ll be put under for a little more. Everything else can wait."

He said it with the quiet finality of someone who had decided what was happening and considered the matter settled, which was an interesting quality in someone sitting in a chair in a overwhelmingly cute cardigan, and yet it landed exactly as intended.

Regulus looked at the ceiling.

His arm throbbed.

His joints ached.

His head was still conducting its own miserable business behind his eyes.

He was in an association medical wing in a city he hadn’t been in for years, missing a limb, surrounded by four strangers who had apparently spent the night arguing on his behalf with the association’s vice chairman while he was unconscious.

"Silas Carter," he said.

"Yeah," said Silas, from across the room.

"The tally."

"Yeah...?"

"What number am I."

A pause that contained a significant amount of delight being carefully managed.

"Current record holder," Silas said. "First words."

Regulus closed his eyes, a simple smile stretching on his exhausted face.

"Fantastic," he said.

From somewhere in the room, quiet enough that he might have imagined it, he heard what was almost certainly Aris Ashborne failing to suppress something that was almost certainly a laugh.

He filed this away.

The project, he thought, was going to be extremely interesting.