Cloverleaf Station: Chaper Fifteen, Part One

 Notes: Uh-oh, uncomfortable emotional revelations ahoy! Let's hope the ship doesn't sink!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Fifteen, Part One

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Chapter Fifteen Part One

 

Getting the Lizzie back turned into a protracted event, thanks to the time it took for Kieron to heal. She’d ended up wedged into a precarious position between two meteors, and instead of being able to go in and tow her out directly with Catalina, Elanus decided to create an entirely new AI-drive connection between his ships and force-upload the program to Lizzie. That way, Catalina could maneuver the other ship out on her own without either of them needing to be in the driver’s seat, so to speak.

“This is a big add,” Kieron commented after the third straight day of Elanus’s almost nonstop programming spree. Even with Catalina’s help, creating a custom program like this required a lot of work, not to mention testing—he ran thousands of simulations of different variables to increase the Lizzie’s chances of coming back in one piece. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I just spacewalked to her again? Kidding!” he added quickly when Elanus turned bloodshot, incredibly irritated eyes on him. “I’m just kidding.”

“I will tie you to the bed and sit on you, don’t fucking think I won’t,” Elanus warned him. “Spacewalk, blackest night, what the everloving fuck…” His insults and threats deteriorated into mumbles at that point. Kieron, realizing that the best thing he could do was stay out of the way, went back to his own simulations. The challenge of finding Zakari, for the first time since he set the goal, now seemed like a rather daunting prospect. Almost impossibly so.

Honestly, what were the chances that their old ship was still out there after three years, and not crushed between meteors or hit in just the right way to send it on a path straight into the quasar, or so pummeled by radiation that there was simply nothing left of it—of him—to bring back? None of those things were assured—the last two weren’t even likely—but Kieron still felt an unaccustomed sense of hopelessness as he looked at his data.

It was strange. Why should he feel this way? Things were good for him, better on a personal level than they’d ever been before. Elanus, for all that he was a jackass, was also fun, attentive, and an excellent lover. He was working his ass off to bring his other ship back to the station, but Kieron didn’t begrudge him that—he understood the impulse all too well. Yet he still spent every break with Kieron, dragging him into conversations with Catalina, telling them stories and soliciting information in return. It didn’t feel like an interrogation, like it had at first—now it just felt…like interest. Like Elanus wanted to know for the sake of getting to know Kieron better, rather than as a tool that he could use to lever Kieron into the position he wanted.

Kieron was happy for the first time in years. So why was he suddenly becoming so depressed about the singular goal that was keeping him here on Cloverleaf Station?

Maybe because you know you don’t deserve to be this happy. If you confirm it, if you find that you’ve really lost him for good and failed his family and done everything wrong, then you won’t be able to keep this. How could you? Failure deserves punishment, not reward.

Kieron closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, trying to exorcise his mother’s voice from his head. Failure, failure, nothing but a miserable failure. You don’t deserve to stay here. You don’t deserve to be a part of this. You’re the worst of me, I never wanted you, I would have taken you to the tundra and left you there the minute after you were born if it were up to me.

Mother was particularly strong today. He opened his eyes and sighed. Time for a session in the gym. Maybe a workout would help him drown out the sound of her voice.

It didn’t, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Kieron couldn’t run as far or as fast as he was used to, or lift as much weight, or swim as far. His usual two-hour workout had to be cut down to an hour and forty-three minutes, which was disgraceful. His body was back, it was healed, all the tests confirmed it. Maybe it was his mind that was the problem. Maybe so much joy was making him soft, unable to do his duty toward his best friend. Maybe it was time to start distancing himself from Elanus again.

After all, he was going to leave as soon as it was safe, go back to Gania and resume his position as one of their most elite inventors and corporate titans, while Kieron was going to be…here. Unless he found Zakari, which he wasn’t no closer to doing now than he had been at the beginning of the shut-down season. Why punish himself by getting used to pleasure, when it wasn’t going to last?

It was almost enough to convince him to resume the casual dismissiveness and cruelty he was so good at, except…then he’d have to be cruel to Catalina too. Ignore her, reject the pictures she created out of light and sound for him, spurn her childish attempts to communicate which were getting better all the time. He would have to take the trust she’d put in him and turn it on its head, which would make him no better than Deysan. He would have to break a piece of her, perhaps permanently. She might never trust a person outside of Elanus again.

Kieron couldn’t bear to do it. He just couldn’t. If the price of keeping himself as sharp as he knew he needed to be was damaging Catalina’s mind in the process, then he would have to resign himself to dullness. He wasn’t going to be that person, the one who made Catalina doubt herself, who stole her sense of self-worth and the comforting shield of love and affection she was wrapped in. If he did, he’d be no better than his own mother.

All you can do is your best. And if his best wasn’t good enough, Kieron would pay that price for the rest of his life, but he wouldn’t push his fear of failure onto Catalina. He just couldn’t.

He washed off and walked slowly back to the hangar where Elanus and Catalina were working. Or, well, Elanus was working—Catalina was humming songs with fifteen layers of harmony, each one accompanied by a hologram of a dancer spinning across a stage.

The dancers were dinosaurs in tutus. They were officially her favorite thing now.

“Keeeeeerooon!” She’d been working hard at upgrading her vocalizations. Elanus had explained over and over that it “isn’t necessary, we can read, you know, you can project right into our implants and we can just read it there and don’t look at me like that, Kieron will have his implant back in soon and you won’t have to use his tab, I know you think it’s clunky and—did you just sass me? Sassing your father? Have we skipped from five to fifteen all of a sudden?”

Needless to say, Catalina wasn’t willing to wait for Kieron to get his implant back to talk to him. She sounded like nothing he’d ever heard before, neither feminine nor masculine nor anything inbetween. Her voice was totally unique, just like her.

“Hi Catie,” he said, ignoring Elanus’s groan at his use of the nickname that Catalina was becoming fond of that Elanus loathed. “I liked that song, did you make it up on your own?”

“With Baaaaa—aaa—ack!”

“She used an ancient earth concerto by a composer named Bach as the basis for it,” Elanus translated. “I don’t know why she went so far back, there are hundreds of years’ worth of Ganian composers to pull from.”

“I liiiiike Baaaaaaa-aaack!”

“I do too, but you don’t see me limiting myself to music that didn’t even have the simplest synthesizers to help it along!” Elanus retorted.

Kieron sat down next to Catalina and watched the dinosaurs dance across their insubstantial stages, feeling…content. Still sad, still angry at himself for not doing more, but right now, in the company of two people he loved, he could handle those feelings without letting them sweep him away. It was nice, he—

Wait.

What?

He what?

He couldn’t. No. That was…love? Impossible. Kieron started to sweat, his mind carrying him down a dangerously emotional spiral as his heart began to race. Love them? How could he? He barely knew them! They were transitory, not going to stick around, little more than phantoms in the gray void of his existence! He couldn’t fall in love with them, that was the height of self-destructiveness. He might be pathetic by his mother’s standards, but he wasn’t that undisciplined…was he?

“Ha! Got it!”

Elanus’s self-congratulations broke through the painful monologue happening in Kieron’s head. “Lizzie has accepted the code!” he continued, looking done-in but satisfied as he stared at the screens he’d laid out in a semicircle around him. “It’s working, the connection is up, it’s time to bring her home. Catalina!” He turned to look at his child. “How do you feel about bringing Lizzie back now?”

“Lizzzzzzeeeeee,” Catalina hummed. “Miss herrrrrr.”

“Me too. Let’s go get her, huh?” Elanus turned to Kieron and winked. “Want to stick around and watch my baby being awesome?”

Kieron nodded helplessly, because of course he did. Elanus’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but he didn’t ask Kieron anything else, just patted the seat beside him. “Then let’s get this show going.”

Kieron sat down beside him, looked out over the code that was a tiny fraction of the complexity of Catalina’s brilliant mind, and fell a little deeper into the abyss of affection he felt for them.

Too deep, and he knew he’d never be able to climb out again.

Be careful. If you give too much, you’ll lose too much when they leave.

Kieron worried that he’d already given more than he could afford.