Guy leant on the cushioned back of the couch, his head overheating from the information that had just found its way from Slip’s lips and into his ears. He’d asked how he’d got the information in the first place, and even how he could know that it was true, and it checked out. As far as Guy could tell anyways.

“The Monarch’s daughter is here?” He asked, equal parts befuddled and worried. Slip grunted lazily, acting the nonchalant information broker.

“Not just the Monarch’s daughter either.” He said, a small smile playing on his lips, “She was actually the Monarch for a while too.”

“What?” Guy said, shaking his head with annoyance, “How’s that even supposed to work! Wasn’t he an info Linked? He built his empire on that shit.” Slip shrugged his shoulders, his face quirking into an almost sleazy grin.

“Hey, how would I know? Maybe she got some of her link from her pops.” Guy groaned.

Familial Linking. It’s what the ‘phenomena’ was called. Guy, for what he lacked in his combat ability, made up for in his theoretical understanding of Linked, at least to a decent degree. Familial Linking was something that the media loved to report on, showing brothers with similar links, or even complementing links, and writing it off as if their links themselves were significantly altered because of their blood relation.

However, it was bogus, mostly. Statistically it was a wash, even if there were outliers. Those outliers could be put down to other factors though, and usually only occurred between siblings who were extremely close in age and development.

For example, the Seven Brothers that live in New Zealand. They are the most prominent example of this theory of Familial Linking, but they also prove the counter as well. At the time of their Awakening, they were incredibly young, exceptionally so for an Awakening to occur. They are seven twins who had almost never left each other’s side throughout their entire life up until that point, and were subject to exactly the same stressors that eventually influenced their Awakening.

They were a perfect storm, and very few show as similar a likeness between their links as they do. And even then, they have commented that, while their links seem similar, they are quite different from each other in how they actually use them.

“Come on man!” Guy said in annoyance, the other man grinning, knowing that Guy hated having to constantly dispel the mystique around rumours like that, “We both know that Familial Linking is bogus.”

Guy slouched in the comfortable confines of his couch, letting the pleasant material sooth his oncoming headache, “So why are you even telling me this, man. Not like I can help you. Go tell Jeremy or something!”

Slip tilted his head to the side slightly, grinning in his regular goofy fashion.

“What’s a little bit of info between friends, hey?” Guy waved off the man, a little offended.

“What do you want?” Guy said, a little more forcefully this time. He didn’t mind Slip, the guy was even nice sometimes, but he wasn’t Guy’s friend, and never would be. Slip was a different breed, from a different part of the world. He was someone that constantly ran a cost benefit analysis in his head, and if the costs began to outweigh the benefits, he’d immediately cut ties.

Such was the path of succeeding in the world of gangs. There was no room for compassion.

“Fine.” Slip said, his face dulling down to a more neutral position, “Look, you might be the one that Jeremy has his eye on all the time, but really, he doesn’t give a flying fuck what you do. He doesn’t care what you’re up to, just if he can give himself any reason to punish you for it.”

Guy ground his molars together, pulling a surprising amount of definition out of his somewhat pudgy jawline. Guy had wondered how he was somehow maintaining the excess weight when it seemed so easy for the other trainees to lose massive amounts so easily, but he’d come to find that it was just another type of torture that Jeremy had decided to subject him to. By increasing the portion of the energy jelly that they had to consume to not starve their relatively newly Awakened bodies, Jeremy had managed to keep Guy consuming enough to maintain the pudge he’d come into the AASAU with.

“Your point?” Guy said, unamused by the man’s obvious observations.

“Well,” he said, drawing out the word slightly at the end, “he won’t exactly notice if you go and… introduce yourself.” Guy almost leapt out of the couch, immediately pacing around the room, waving his hands around as he spoke quickly.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He said loudly, almost yelling at the other man, “No way, no fucking way, are you getting me to do that shit. You’re seriously asking me to go and meet with an ex-druglord who ruler over an empire large enough that I knew about it in the upper districts? Are you insane?”

Slip grinned widely, holding up and hand and shaking it imperiously, “I wouldn’t say an empire, a small kingdom at best.”

“You think that changes anything?” He squawked, waving a hand dangerously close to Slip’s face, “If she ran that for even a day, then she probably ordered someone’s death, Larry! Do you remember how the Monarch and his little empire fell?”

The pudgy boy, while unassuming and quiet most of the time, was actually pretty imposing when he wanted to be. Maybe it was because Slip was quietly afraid of his link, with it having the possibility to make his own totally useless, or maybe it was the hair and the eyes.

Slip had only seen the man once in his time with Rightful Order, hanging around Jeremy and subtly earning himself more power, but seeing that man once had engrained the image of him in his mind. The curly brown hair and the bright blue eyes. Something that would lend the possessor a modicum of pleasantness, or even innocence. But to those that knew, who has seen him, they found themselves checking those that wore those features twice, just in case.

Slip knew that was the real reason that he kept slightly upping Guy’s energy intake. Just in case the pudgy boy in front of them earned himself the sharp, intense features that they feared lay beneath the layer of fat they preserved.

“Of course I do, idiot.” Slip snarled slightly, annoyed with his wandering thoughts, “We all fuckin’ know, ‘cause it was my, and their people that died. So shut your pie hole and listen!” The cutting words made Guy grimace, realising that he’d stepped on a landmine, though he couldn’t quite make himself feel all that apologetic.

“Honesty here, I can’t stand to be in the same room as her.” Slip shrugged, trying to bottle the small wave of emotions that arose as he thought about his extended limbs wrapping around her neck and suffocating her, “I’ll end up fuckin’ killing her, you understand?”

Guy sighed, running a hand through his tight curls, desperately trying to think of a way to deescalate this mess of a situation.

“Come on man, she wasn’t the one who–” Guy’s words were cut off with a bang, Slip’s hand coming down on the coffee table with all the force he could muster with the power his extended arm could afford him, breaking off part of the table’s side.

“I don’t give a flying fuck if it was her fault or not, Guy.” Slip breathed slowly for a moment, carefully controlling the pace of his breathing and therefore controlling his rage, “The point is, if I end up in a room with her, or even talking to her, I’ll kill her before the day is out. You understand?”

The words out of Slip’s mouth were so counter to his usual lackadaisical attitude that they would be jarring to anyone that only knew him tangentially. Guy, though, is likely the person who knew the ‘real’ Slip the most, however unpleasant it could be.

“Fine, fine. This is great and all,” Guy flicked his hand out with wry questioning, “but what the hell am I supposed to do with this, Larry?” Slip growled, hating that Guy was pushing his buttons by using his real name. Not even Jeremy used his real name, and Guy was the only one that used it instead of Slip.

“You’re gonna go and talk to her and get information from her. She promised me information when I had her bound, and I want to call in on it. And no,” he said quickly, already fending off the question he could see arising in Guy’s eyes, “I don’t give a shit what Jeremy thinks. He’s too preoccupied with his stupid grudge match to see that we should have been building ties this whole time.”

Guy waited for Slip to continue, specifically about why they should be building ties with the other team, exactly, but he didn’t seem forthcoming with that nugget of wisdom.

“Fuck, man.” Guy groaned, rubbing at his eyes furiously. “I’m the counter opposite of what you want here. I’m not good at this shit, I can’t do the whole interrogator negotiator thing.”

“And you don’t need to. You’re the one going exactly because you seem the most harmless.” Slip let the other man take in the statement before continuing, “I want you to figure out what they’re up to. I want to know what they want to do after this mess.” He waved a hand around to the building that surrounded them, a common enough feeling after having been in the place for a few months now, coming close to the end of their training. Guy knew that he’d be woefully undertrained in comparison to the rest of his team, and he was severely lacking in combat because of it, but he didn’t care.

In fact, the more useless he was, the more likely he was to survive the predicament. He didn’t want to do this. If he were caught out by Jeremy or, more terrifyingly, Terrence, he’d be physically tortured at the minimum. At the maximum?

Well, then word would be sent up the chain of command, and that was more terrifying than any physical torture that Jeremy or Terence could ever threaten him with.

“And if I don’t?” Guy asked, his eyes looking to the other man like pools of disappointment. Slip pulled one of the corners of his lips to the side, giving him an apologetic expression that Guy could barely be sure was genuine.

“Sorry mate. I’ll have to tell Jeremy about your Mum.”

Guy went cold inside his gut, letting the entirety of his abdomen freeze over until he felt nothing. He let all disappointment and any sadness wash away to revel a morosely stagnant expression, letting his eyes bore into the other man’s.

“Fine then.” He said coldly, letting the temperature of his gut leak up through his throat and out his mouth, “Get the fuck out of my room. If you want anything, you will call me. If you come into my room ever again, I swear to fucking God…”

He let the words trail off, staring the other man dead in his eyes. Guy was hardly the man to be able to make threats, lacking in any real confidence. But in this situation, he was motivated to do so with the cold that slowly spread outwards from his gut as he let the inevitable betrayal of any trust he’d built between him and the other man die.

Slip nodded slightly, not allowing Guy to pull a reaction out of him. He stood from his place in the large chair, striding out of the room without a single word, anything more being an unnecessary and, frankly, dangerous insult to the other Linked.

Slip closed the door behind him gently, and hearing the lock click a moment later from the other side, almost making him chuckle with just how fitting the action was for the situation.

As he walked down the corridor, down to his own room, he felt himself shifting uncomfortably within his own clothes, quickly becoming more and more uncomfortable with every step he took. As soon as he entered his own room, he started stripping out of his clothes in a bizarre curiosity for what was making him feel like he was being pricked with a dozen needles.

It was when he managed to get his shirt off that he realised what’d caused him the discomfort.

He was sweating. A cold sweat had made it through his skin, covering the surface of it in a slight glistening sheen, evidence of something that Slip hadn’t even realised himself. He gulped, finding that his throat was as dry as a desert, prompting him to reach for his fridge and pulling out a beer, even as early in the morning as it was.

He stripped himself down to his boxer shorts, popping the top of the beer bottle open easily after he looped a stretched finger underneath the cap and pulled, letting him slump down in his own chair and taking a deep swallow of the awful beer he’d liked since he was fourteen.

Though the familiar taste didn’t wash out the sour one already in his mouth as he stared at the blank television in front of him.

“Fucking hell.” He said to himself, almost a murmur as he downed more of the drink. “Maybe he really did inherit more from that fuckin’ psychopath than I thought.”

Slip didn’t quite want to admit it, though it was undeniable now. Guy’s eyes, he could have sworn that he saw real murder in them. Not the fake shit that so many kids tried to pull as an intimidation tactic. Guy didn’t need that; he didn’t even try to intimidate with it.

He didn’t want to admit that he might have just missed a train he’d wanted to be on. An unlikely, ramshackle carriage that looked unimpressive, but might very well end up going a whole lot further than he expected.

He could only hope that, if that train continued to go, their tracks might intersect once again.

Slip gulped down his bear heavily again, trying to erase the vision of two men overlapping within his mind, and just how terrifying the resemblance was. If only it were so easy to rid himself of such a mortifying thought.