They spent the better part of a long hour deciding on what they should share with the association officials, and what they should keep a secret.
When everything was confird upon, Virginia finally turned to Silas.
"Now for why i called you here."
"Finally." Silas let out a playful groan, eliciting a frown from Virginia.
"You’re going to testify against the associations claim." She said, unceremoniously. "You’ll be in charge of convincing them that this thing," She pointed to Aris, who was looking more drowsy by the mont. "Only survived because of sheer luck."
Aris blinked.
"Hey-"
"Done." Silas didn’t even let him protest.
Aris turned to look at him with the expression of soone who had been betrayed in a way they hadn’t seen coming and was taking a mont to process the specifics of it.
"You didn’t even let finish."
"You were going to object."
"I was going to ask questions first and then object."
"Sa outco." He had already turned back to Virginia with the easy energy of soone that had accepted the job and was waiting for the specific details.
"What’s the approach? Guy gets extrely lucky? The dungeon swallows itself in an attempt to kill the said lucky guy?"
"Sowhere along that line," Virginia said. "It’s easier to explain that way, and less questions about motivation if we chalk it up to coincidence. You’ll keep insisting that he survived because of a slip up in the first dungeon, and the sa should have been the case in the second because of what you saw."
"Lucky awakened, who also recently awakened as an S rank, who is also the last remaining Ashborne, survives a horrifying dungeon because the dungeon itself made a mistake."
Silas stared at Virginia.
"You’ll need to be convincing sohow."
"I’m always convincing."
"Weren’t you the sa guy that was raising a ruckus about your evaluation being wrong yesterday? And that too, looking straight at the face of the senior evaluator who have been doing this for longer than you’ve been alive."
Silas frowned, brows creasing in annoyance.
"He was wrong."
"That’s not the point."
"It was very much the point."
Virginia closed her eyes briefly, muttering a prayer through silent lips. She looked like she was selecting a response from several available options, discarding the ones that would escalate things.
Aris was still looking at Silas.
"I cleared an Aberrant dungeon, alone." he said, voice close to a whisper.
"Lucky," Silas said.
"I extracted an Aureate." Louder now.
"Very lucky."
"Silas."
"Listen." Silas turned to look at him fully. "The association does not need to know what you are, okay?. The association needs a story they can process and file and stop asking questions about. Lucky awakened gives them that."
A pause.
"You can be terrifying later. In private. I’ll even watch."
Aris stared at him.
A weird wave passed through the room, Amari looking impressed, Virginia a little... taken aback.
Sothing that was not quite a smile moved at the corner of Aris’s mouth and was aggressively suppressed before it finished.
"I find you deeply irritating," he said.
"I know," Silas said pleasantly. "Lucky awakened. Do we have a deal?."
Another pause.
"Fine," Aris said, in the tone of a man filing his objections sowhere they would remain on record even if ignored.
"Wonderful." Silas looked back at Virginia. "What else."
Amari raised her hand slightly from her corner.
"I’ll handle the anomaly docuntation, I have three months of observational data on the recent gate ergence pattern. If I present it correctly it gives the association a frawork that explains the Aberrant appearances without explaining—" she glanced at Aris— "the specifics of what they’re responding to."
"Good," Virginia said. "That covers the dungeon question."
"And Regulus?" Aris asked.
The na landed and everyone looked at the curtained bed for a mont, as they kept doing, the way you kept checking on sothing you weren’t sure what to do with yet.
"Regulus," Virginia said, "is the association’s problem and their miracle simultaneously. They’ll be too busy managing the implications of an Aureate reappearance to focus on the details of the extraction. As long as nobody asks how specifically a random awakened managed to carry him out."
"He was unconscious," Silas said. "Lucky awakened adrenaline. It happens."
"You’re very good at this," Amari observed.
"My father was a man with a secret identity," Silas said, shrugging. "I grew up understanding that the simplest explanation wins even when it shouldn’t." He paused, and sothing moved across his face briefly. "Especially when it shouldn’t."
The room absorbed that quietly.
Virginia looked at him for a mont with the expression she’d been wearing intermittently since the Ma’at’s Scale situation—the one that was revising sothing about him, slowly, piece by piece.
"Thank you," she said, voice softer now that everything was decided. "For agreeing to this."
Silas nodded.
"This guy went into a dungeon alone," he said simply. "Least I can do is make sure the paperwork doesn’t make it worse."
Aris, who had been listening to all of this with the drowsy stillness of soone running on the last of their available consciousness, made a small sound.
Everyone looked at him.
"I think that was an agreent." Silas noted.
His eyes were mostly closed.
"He’s falling asleep," Amari said, with the tone of soone docunting a natural phenonon.
"He hasn’t slept properly in two days," Lyra said from the doorway, which startled approximately three of the four people in the room.
She stepped in with the expression of a woman who had been managing impossible situations since before any of them had finished growing up and had simply stopped registering surprise as a useful response. "The eting has been pushed to nine. That’s..." she checked her watch. "...four hours."
She looked at the four of them. At the remaining takeout containers in the corner that was getting the ignore treatnt. At Silas’s jacket still on backwards from when he’d grabbed it in a hurry, which no one had the heart to tell him that it was backwards. At Amari’s notebook quietly being coddled in her lap. At Virginia, composed and sleepless and holding the whole thing together by sheer architecture of will.
Then at Aris, who was ninety percent asleep against the pillow with the expression of soone who had decided the world could manage itself for a few hours.
"Sleep," Lyra said, to the room in general. "All of you. Four hours. The eting will still be a disaster at nine, you might as well be rested for it."
Nobody argued.
Which was, Aris thought distantly, already falling under, the most extraordinary, and wonderful thing that had happened all night.
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