Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

 Notes: A little more interpersonal connection, and then we're BACK TO SPACE STUFF!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

***

Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

 

Pleasure and relief melted Kieron’s spine, and he sagged into Elanus’s arms, letting the taller man hold him up as he lost himself to the kiss. There was some sort of lesson here, probably, something pithy supporting the idea of doing good to have good done and so on, but Kieron couldn’t think right now. Even the simplest philosophy was beyond him. All that mattered was being with Elanus, taking what the other man was willing to give and giving it back as best he could. Affection. Comfort. Love.

Kisses that made every nerve tingle.

“Stop making my kid love you so much,” Elanus murmured as he kissed across Kieron’s neck. “Or no, wait, keep doing that, just don’t do it where I have to see it unless you want me to drag you off and fuck you in the middle of the hallway.”

“No fucking in the hallway,” Kieron said, slightly slurred but how could he be otherwise? He could barely think well enough to form words. “Un…sanitary.”

“Let’s go back to the bedroom, then.”

“Don’t you…shouldn’t we…”

“Catalina’s going to be busy for hours, we might as well relax.” Elanus nipped the edge of Kieron’s ear. “Unless you’d rather look at datasets instead of letting me suck your cock.”

“Bedroom. Now.”

Being a goal-oriented person had never been so much of a blessing. Neither of them were in the mood to tease, and it was the work of a moment to mute their implants except to priority messages from Catalina and focus on each other. Elanus, true to his word, pushed Kieron down onto his back as soon as he was naked. He touched him, stroking him to full hardness with a smirk on his face, then bent over and—

“Mmmfuck,” Kieron whispered, his hands coming down to Elanus’s hair so he could—not grip, just give him something to touch back. It felt better that way, more reciprocal even though this wasn’t a reciprocal act, it wasn’t, he knew that, he knew, but stars, how could it be possible to feel anything so incredible and not be expected to provide something in return?

Elanus pulled back just long enough to say, “You’ve giving me exactly what I want. Now shut up and let me have you.” It was embarrassing to be caught speaking his thoughts out loud, but Kieron was able to let it go. Elanus’s mouth was too warm and wet, his hand too tight to be anything but all-consuming. Kieron breathed, then moaned, and far too quickly he bit his lip as he began to come, pleasure so good it hurt.

As he fought to catch his breath, Elanus pulled up, already stripping off his shirt. “I need to—can I—”

“Anything.”

“Not smart.”

“You won’t hurt me.”

“I’m gonna try to take that the way I hope you mean it,” Elanus muttered, but whatever uncertainties he might have, they weren’t enough to keep him from taking himself in hand and jerking himself off hard and fast until he came, less than a minute later, across Kieron’s lax abdomen. “Fuck,” he said, staring down at Kieron with a bright gleam in his eyes. “You look…really good.”

“Messy?” Kieron suggested with a little smile. “You like messy and gross?”

“I like it when I’m the one who made you that way, yeah.” To his credit, Elanus cleaned Kieron up before getting the rest of his clothes off and snuggling up close to him under the blanket. It was cool in the room, but Elanus always seemed to run warm, and Kieron relaxed against him far too easily. They drifted for a while in calm, satisfied silence. It was perfect, blissful.

“Tell me something about you.”

Kieron tensed right back up.

“Anything at all,” Elanus clarified with a sigh. “I’m not talking about revealing your deepest, darkest secrets here. Just tell me something I don’t know. It can be as simple as your favorite color.”

“Mm.” Well…Kieron could do that much. “I like green.”

“Green. Okay, why?”

“Because I almost never saw it when I was growing up.” Oops, that was a little more personal than he’d been planning on getting, but in for a kilometer, in for a parsec. “Most of the plants on Hadrian’s Colony were orange or red. Lichens, clinging to rocks. Algae in the shallower pools. They were all red or orange or sometimes yellow. The landscape was very rocky, and sandy. It felt like everything was red somedays.” He still associated a sound with the color red, the dull ping of sand and pebbles being flung about by the relentless wind. “There were some green things in the hydroponics lab, but I was never allowed to go in there. There wasn’t even a window to look through, and by the time they were made into food, it was all powdered anyway. I didn’t see green until after I left the colony. On Trakta, actually.”

“With Zakari?” Elanus asked.

“Yeah. He was the first person around my age that I met after…everything.”

“Everything.” Elanus paused like he was weighing the word. “Mind if I ask you a few questions about that ‘everything’?”

Kieron didn’t reply. He didn’t like to talk about the colony—it almost always led to more curiosity, which was tiresome, or pity, which was offensive. But for some reason he didn’t want to shut Elanus up…not quite.

“How about I make some guesses instead?” Elanus cleared his throat, running a hand through Kieron’s hair as he got started. “Apart from the few ships that escaped with some young children, undoubtedly ferried there by worried parents, there were no efforts to leave. That leads me to think this was some sort of death cult, with an entire colony preferring to be killed rather than submit to oversight.”

Kieron bit his lip, holding back words he didn’t want to say, but which nevertheless wanted to come out.

“If your mother is who I think she is, and she really did get you onto a ship, it wasn’t because she loved you. It was because she didn’t think you were worthy of dying for the cause like the rest of them. She was the general’s daughter—she probably did her best to represent her father and his cause. Maybe you weren’t the son she’d wanted. Maybe you were too different, too—”

“Stop.” Hearing someone else say the words that Kieron couldn’t wasn’t any nicer than saying them himself. “Please. I can’t…”

“All right,” Elanus said, leaning in and kissing his cheek. “It’s all right. That was a long time ago. You’re here now, with me and Catalina. Nothing will hurt you.”

Staring up into the darkness, Kieron wished with all his aching heart that that were true.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seventeen, Part One

 Notes: Did I say we were back to plot? We're almost back to plot!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Seventeen, Part One

***

Chapter Seventeen, Part One

 

Three days of running revised location algorithms, all greatly refined thanks to the fleet of probes guided by Catalina, had left them with only one truly viable spot to check for the remnants of his and Zakari’s old ship in. It was within a reasonable amount of drift from his last known location, it allowed for all the impact variation the ship could have withstood without breaking apart, and it was relatively protected from the rest of the field. If Zakari wasn’t there, then he wasn’t anywhere.

The thought rested with odd quietude in Kieron’s mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the importance of such a discovery, or look forward to finding out his friend’s fate once and for all. It was more that…well, there was only so much anticipation and exertion he could take at any one time, and all of that personal bandwidth was being fully occupied right now by Catalina and Elanus. They’d kept him so busy, working on Lizzie and remembering to eat and sleep and watching light shows in the dark of Hangar Five that, well…resigned despair just didn’t get the chance to find purchase inside of him. Which, he knew, was surely much of the reason the pair of them had been so insistent on keeping him occupied, but he couldn’t find it in himself to resent it.

He knew better than to try, too. Otherwise he might end up cornered in his room again, having affection and guilt forced on him in equal measure.

“It’s going to be a tough spot to reach,” Elanus commented, tapping the point of his chin with one long finger. “Doable, but tough. Baby, you’ve been working on your new defensive laser array, right? How long until full implementation?”

“Tonight!”

“Pull the other one, you only started that project two days ago.”

“Tonight, Daddeee!” Catalina was insistent, the whine evident both over the implant and in the air of the hangar. Listening to her in two different frequencies had been a little overwhelming at first, but Kieron was quickly getting used to it.

“Since when have you been able to implement system-wide hardware changes in under a week?”

“Since noooooow.”

“She’s getting so big,” Kieron whispered just loud enough for Elanus to hear him.

“Shut up,” Elanus snapped, but there was no real heat to his voice. “She’s big when I say she’s big. Until then, she’s my baby.”

“Kids don’t work that way.”

“I’mma biiiig ship!” Catalina added, because of course she heard everything they said no matter how softly they said it. “Smart and faaaast!”

“I know you are, but—”

“Not a babeee!”

“You’ll always be my baby, and that’s final.”

Kieron headed off the useless argument before feelings could actually be hurt. That was something he knew how to do now—wild. “If you can get that upgrade done by tonight, then we can test it after some rest and head into the asteroid field at 0400. Does that sound good to you?”

“Mmm.” Suddenly Catalina sounded a little less sure of herself. “I don’t like it therrrre.”

Elanus didn’t say anything, just raised an eyebrow at Kieron. “I know,” Kieron said after a moment of wrestling with himself. “I don’t like it there either.”

“You doooo! You’re verrry brave. But it makes me scarrrred.”

Uh-oh, tread lightly. “It’s only natural that it makes you scared,” Kieron said gently. “You were brought here against your will and made to sit in the middle of that place for days. It must have been so exhausting for you to always been on the alert, especially with that awful guy calling the shots.”

“Heee’s down in the darrrk now, and I’mm with you and daddee, and I’m still scarrred.”

Down in the dark? It occurred to Kieron that he should probably be more interested in exactly where Deysan Mortiz had been held since he’d been taken into custody. Elanus had arranged everything—he’d had to, since Kieron had been more goo than person by the time he and Moritz had gotten back here. But he could focus on that later.

“I was scared too,” Kieron admitted. “It’s scary out there, extra scary when you have less control over your situation. But you’re going to have full control when we go out there next, Catie. I promise. I won’t make you do anything you’re uncomfortable with.” If he had to, he could finish fixing Lizzie in another seventy-two hours and take her out instead.

It would put the ship at the very limits of her capability to withstand radiation to go that far and back, but Kieron had no choice. The longer he waited, the longer the odds of finding anything left got.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Then you don’t have to,” Kieron said immediately. Elanus straightened, a look of alarm on his face. What? Had he thought Kieron was going to force Catalina to take him out there? “I’ll go in the Lizzie and—”

“I don’t want you to goooo.”

“I have to.”

“Baby, we talked about this,” Elanus said, gentle but firm. “You can’t tell other people what to do. Kieron said you don’t have to go, but he’s going. And I’m going to help him. No more argument about that.”

“But it’s not saaaafe!” Catalina wailed, and Kieron wished for the umpteenth time that he could hug her, just wrap her up in his arms and hold her tight.

“It’s as safe as we can make it, and—”

“It’s safest with meee, so I’m going toooo.”

Kieron and Elanus exchanged a confused glance. “I thought you said you didn’t want to,” Kieron said.

“I dooon’t!”

“Then—”

“But you’re going, and you’re safer with meee! So I’m going too! I want to be brave like you and Daddeeee!” She pushed the color orange through the implant—firmness, resolve, a little bit of fear but not enough for it to overwhelm her.

“Well then,” Elanus said, relaxing his spine a little. “I guess you are a big ship now, aren’t you?”

Catalina glowed with his praise. “Yesss!”

“And we’re going to make sure you’re a very safe ship too,” Kieron added. “So let’s make sure we have lots of time to test the laser array, okay?”

“Okay, Keeeeeron.” Catalina’s feed went dark as she refocused on her upgrades. Kieron sighed with relief and turned back to Elanus, only to find himself jerked out of his chair by the man, who was already marching them out of the hangar.

“What? What’s going on?” Had he fucked up? Was he about to get another lecture?

They only got as far as the hall before Elanus turned around, lifted Kieron onto his toes, and latched onto his mouth like it was his sole source of oxygen.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Sixteen, Part Two

 Notes: A little more emotional resolution before we dive back into plot! Enjoooooy :)

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Sixteen, Part Two

***

Chapter Sixteen, Part Two

 

The shouting stopped when Kieron began wincing every other word, but the strong hand holding onto his arm as it towed him back to his rooms had a grip so tight that Kieron didn’t think he could get out of it as he currently was. If he hadn’t been coming off of surgery? No problem; Elanus was strong, but he wasn’t a fighter. Right now, though…

Kieron relaxed into the hold and let Elanus lead the way, closing his eyes to spare his brain some pain. The medbot hadn’t been kidding about overstimulation; even with Catalina’s help, the elevated sensory input left him throbbing, almost as though his brain was being scraped out to make room for all of the new equipment. It was easier to ignore everything but Elanus’s hand, the brisk tug as they walked down the hallway, the smell of Catalina’s fabricator clinging to his clothes…

Kieron stopped when Elanus did, let the other man pull him into the darkened room that they’d been sharing for a while now, and lay him down on the bed.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Elanus said, thankfully with a low voice now. “The lengths you go to to avoid acting like a human being with human needs. You should have told me you wanted the implant back in. I could have made that surgery go so much smoother. We could have prepared your room, prepared you better for it. Now Catalina’s pouting because she can’t talk to you through your feed without giving you a fucking nosebleed and can’t see you in person yet either.”

“Sorry,” Kieron whispered. It was the best he could do.

“Don’t say sorry, just do better.” Elanus pulled the blanket up over Kieron’s body. “What set you off, anyway?”

Kieron was too tired to dissemble. “Made her upset.”

“Who, Catalina? Because of—is this because of what you said about Moritz?” The silence must have been answer enough, because he sighed in that way that Kieron knew meant he was also rolling his eyes. “It was a minor slip-up, not the end of the world. If I had to get mad at everyone who inadvertently reminded my baby of what that asshole did to her, I would be mad at myself every hour of every single day.” He paused long enough to lie down and stretch out next to Kieron, delicately weaving his long fingers into the hair on the top of his head.

Kieron winced in anticipation of those fingers accidentally floating over his implant, but they avoided the entire back of his head, instead scratching in slow, rhythmic circles over the safe spots on his head. In ten seconds, Kieron felt his shoulders and neck relax. In thirty, he actually felt his scalp relax, something he hadn’t even known was possible. The awful pain finally began to ease.

“Closeness doesn’t preclude hurt,” Elanus finally said, effortlessly picking up the conversation. “We always hurt the ones we care about. As long as it’s accidental, that’s just something to deal with and move on from. If it’s deliberate, well, there’s therapy for that. But I know you weren’t being deliberate, and I know you care about Catalina.”

Kieron didn’t speak—he couldn’t, he didn’t want to do anything to restart his headache—but he sighed more deeply, his own little effort at affirmation.

“Yeah. Exactly. Honestly, there’s only so much room for rage in me, and I can’t spare any of it for being angry at you anymore. I can hardly even spare any of it for being angry at myself, and if anyone deserves to be punished as an accessory to Catalina’s torture, it’s me. I trusted a monster, and he abused that trust. Catalina has forgiven me, if she was ever really mad at me to begin with, but I’ll never quite be able to forgive myself.” He shrugged. “Which is fine, as long as I don’t dwell on it and learn from what I did wrong. Now.

“Here’s the part I want you to really get through that fucking thick skull of yours, okay? Take it as a fact or on faith or whatever you have to do, but get this: Catalina loves you. She’s still a child, and she reacts like a child, but she loves you. She doesn’t want you to hurt yourself over idle words or feel bad because of her. You’re her hero. Enjoy that for as long as you can, because every other parent I’ve ever met has reliably informed me that this phase doesn’t last for long.”

Kieron huffed. He didn’t deserve to be anyone’s hero, but…he didn’t get to tell Catie how to feel, either.

“Yeah, so, communication is important in any relationship, but especially with a child. No running away and doing dangerous, painful surgery on yourself without backup whenever you two get into a tiff.” Elanus brushed some of Kieron’s hair back behind his ear. “You stay and talk it out. Or take some time apart, then talk it out before you have brain surgery. Got it?”

Kieron hummed.

“Good. Now, you’re going to be miserable for a while without more painkillers, so how about I go grab you some, and some water, and you sleep the worst of this off?”

“M’kay,” Kieron managed.

“Good. Don’t go anywhere.” Elanus got up before Kieron could pinch him for that—honestly, where was he going to go—and left the room. He came back before Kieron could fall asleep, injected him with a painkiller that made everything go floaty, then put a straw to his lips so he could suck up water that he hadn’t even realized he’d needed before it sated his growing thirst.

“Time to sleep.”

“Mmm.” Kieron barely had time to turn his face into Elanus’s side before he did just that.

Waking up felt like being wiped clean. The pain was gone, but Kieron’s mind was clear too, which meant he’d probably been asleep for a long time. Elanus’s side of the bed was empty, but Kieron could read the imprint of his body there in the curve of the blanket, and smell his scent on the sheet. There was a full glass of water waiting for him, and a note on his tab: Try it now.

Try it…ah, his implant. It had gone into hibernation mode when he fell asleep. Kieron reached out with his mind and, a little gingerly, activated it. The old station overlay came into focus in his vision, complete with its new update, Catalina’s little pink eye. Kieron opened his implant to the main channel, and—

“Keeeeron!”

“A little quieter, baby.”

“Sorry, Daddee. Hi Keeron!”

Kieron smiled. “Hi Catie.”

Pink bloomed in swirls around the eye icon. “Come baack,” she said, sounding both eager and plaintive. “I miss yooou.”

“I miss you too.” Kieron heaved himself into a sitting position, then onto his feet. He drained the water in the glass. “I’ll be there in a minute, after I clean up.”

“Good,” Elanus interjected. His voice was almost the same over the implant as it was in person. “Then we can start talking about the algorithms you’ve got running to find Zakari while you get to work on Lizzie. Don’t think you’re getting out of that. You broke her, you fix her.”

Technically it was an asteroid field that had broken her while Kieron was risking his life for Catalina, but this was one of those times he knew it was best not to get caught up in the details.