Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty, Part Two

 Notes: How do you get someone to do something they don't want to do? Make them think they're doing something they DO want to do. More details below!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty, Part Two

***

Chapter Twenty, Part Two

 

Oh. That was…quite the plan. Even as Kieron’s brain cringed from contemplating the absolute cruelty of it, he automatically took in Elanus’s body language—aggressive verging on attack—and adjusted his own into something non-provoking. He let his shoulders fall forward, ducked his chin down, lowered his eyes, and turned his body slightly away—all things that indicated he had no interest in confrontation. “It’s okay,” he said softly, some of the earliest lessons that had ever been beaten into him coming effortlessly to the fore. “It’s going to be okay. I’m not going to stop you from doing what you’ve got to do, I promise.”

“Really?” Elanus’s voice stayed angry, but at least he dropped his hands. “Then you’re going to let me get away with something that any Federation planet would throw me into prison over?”

“No.”

He scoffed. “Then you need to explain this to me, babe, because where I come from two plus two equals four. I’m not about to let Gania throw Deysan into a comfy prison house for the rest of his life or, even worse, let him out on good behavior in ten years because ‘he only stole a ship.’” Elanus’s face twisted with anger. “Even if they recognize Catalina as a living entity, the law hasn’t advanced enough yet to get the same sort of justice for mistreatment of an AI as it has for flesh and blood. It doesn’t matter that he took a toddler into danger and abused her for weeks and would have made her into a slave, all they’ll see is intellectual property violations and theft. It’s not enough. I won’t have it. I won’t.”

“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Kieron said.

“Oh no? Fine.” Elanus sat back on the edge of the table, leaning his weight on his hands. Like this, he and Kieron were almost the same height. “Then tell me what you’ve got in mind, and you should know in advance that if it doesn’t end in death, I don’t want to hear it and you can fuck right off.”

Kieron took a deep breath. “Catie is your child, isn’t she?”

Elanus rolled his eyes. “Have you not been listening? Has nothing I’ve been saying penetrated your—yes, she’s my child!”

“Then you need to set a good example for her.”

“I am. Self-defense is—”

“You’re not talking about self-defense,” Kieron interjected firmly. “You’re not talking about justice. You’re talking about torture.”

Elanus slapped the tabletop with one hand. “So what if I am? He tortured her!”

“And what are you teaching her, if you show her that the best justice is an eye for an eye?” Kieron shook his head. “I grew up with teachings like that, and all it did was take away all the love and trust and faith in each other that everyone on Hadrian’s colony once had and replace it with suspicion, anger, and ruthlessness.

“Catie is smart, so smart, but she’s still young. She’s relying on you to help her figure out her moral compass. Is that the direction you really want to push her in? To make it okay to justify any atrocity as long as someone else did something terrible first?”

Elanus, to his credit, didn’t immediately start speaking. He perched there, dark eyes fixed on Kieron’s face for a long time, before he finally said, “I can’t let him go. I just can’t.”

“You don’t have to,” Kieron assured him. “There’s another way.”

“There isn’t.” Elanus shook his head once, then again as he continued, “No, there isn’t! I’ve already been in touch with Ganian authorities and they’re adamant about taking him in alive and ensuring his welfare, and I’m going to have to give them video footage documenting his fucking ‘wellbeing’ in another week and I just…I’m not going to do it. If I have to lie to them and say he died in an accident, then so be it, because I won’t let him keep breathing after what he did to my baby.”

“I didn’t say he had to keep breathing.”

Elanus paused, his ire settling as his gaze turned questioning. “What? I thought you…you said…”

“I said I didn’t want you teaching your daughter that torture is a good answer to being wronged,” Kieron interjected, a little exasperated. He stepped forward, not quite close enough to touch, but far enough that Elanus could see how earnest he was. “I never said he gets to live. But you don’t have to be the one to kill him.”

“Oh, but…no.” Now Elanus was the one to reach out, grabbing Kieron’s hand and pulling him closer as Kieron stepped into the V of his legs. “No, I’m not going to ask you to do that. If it’s not all right for me to do it, then it isn’t okay for you to do it. I’m sure you’ve killed people before and I do think it’s sweet you would offer, which come to think of it is pretty sick of me, but I can’t let you do that.”

Kieron sighed. “I didn’t say I would be the one to kill him either.”

“Ohhhh…kay, you’ve lost me.”

Clearly. Kieron wasn’t used to being this many steps ahead when it came to Elanus, but he supposed a certain amount of fixation was to be expected. “You said you won’t let him go to prison. I agree.”

“And you said that we can’t kill him, so…”

“So.” Kieron let a smile appear on his lips. “We get him to kill himself.”

Elanus stared at his mouth for a moment, transfixed, before he shook his head again. “No, but—he wouldn’t. Won’t. He’s not the type to commit suicide, trust me. He can’t be shamed, the man is unshameable. Trust me, I would know. He’s not going to kill himself.”

“Not deliberately.”

“Oh? Ohhh…” Elanus let go of Kieron’s hands and gripped him around the middle, pulling him in closer. His handspan was almost wide enough to encompass Kieron’s entire waist. “You want to set him up to kill himself.”

“I want to give him the option to kill himself, yes.”

“And you think he’ll take it?”

Kieron nodded. “I think it’s going to look like such a good deal he has no reason not to take it. You said it yourself, he’s unshameable. He has no interest in paying for his crimes, no interest in spending any time in prison. He’s probably cast himself as the victim in his own mind right now. I think we can make it so that he thinks he’s getting the better of us and escapes, and then…well.” Kieron shrugged. “It’s still radiation season out there.”

“And he knows that,” Elanus added pensively. “So he probably wouldn’t try to fly out there.”

“He would if he thought he was in a ship that could take it.”

“Oh. Oh, baby.” Elanus tilted Kieron’s head up and kissed him passionately, bending him back so far that Kieron had to grab Elanus’s shoulders to stay upright. “Fuck, you’re such a clever thing,” he purred when they parted. “How do you want to do it?”

Kieron told him. Elanus laughed through most of it.

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty, Part One

 Notes: Time to revisit our old foe...or, kind of. Talk about him, at least. Let's see just how crazy Elanus can get!

(Also,in case anyone is wondering, some of these kiddo conversations come directly from the source in my home. For example, my child went to daycare today in rainbow sequined parachute pants, a neon My Little Pony shirt, and magenta sequined shoes. Yes, she picks her own outfits. It makes her very proud.)

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Twenty, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty, Part One

 

Kieron waited longer to do it than he thought he would. Longer than he should have, probably. He meant to do it right when he was finished talking to Xilinn, but then he got to the hangar and Elanus was rolling through a series of holograms so rapid-fire Kieron couldn’t even make most of them out, and with each one he got either a high-pitched “Yeeees!” or a low, rumbly “Noooo!”

There were a lot more “nooooo”s than the other way around, and he finally pushed the holograms away and said, “Honestly, if you’re going to be so picky why don’t you just design your new skin yourself?”

“Because I want youuu to dooo iiiit!”

“Well I want to do it too, but you’re not giving me much to work with, Catie!”

Kieron stifled a smirk as he heard Elanus refer to Catalina as “Catie.” He’d been adamantly against nicknaming her, claiming childhood trauma—“Do you have any idea what kids do with a name like mine? They don’t shorten it to ‘El,’ that’s for damn sure”—but he’d finally broken. Or maybe he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Either way, it made Kieron happy to hear. It was one small way he’d continue to have a presence in their lives even once they’d gone their separate ways.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Elanus asked, pulling up another hologram. This was a maze of swirling lights, sometimes blossoming into flower-like shapes, other times sinking into deep pools of solid color.

“It’s too briiiiight.”

“Since when do you not like bright? Since when do you not like to color yourself like a dozen rainbows got vomited all over a canvas?”

“Since foreeeever! I’m a biiiig girl nowww!”

“Too big for rainbows? Can you even get too big for rainbows?”

“Daddeee! Do a different ooone!”

“Fine, fine.” He swiped through some more imaged until he came up with something pebbly and fine-grained. “How about dinosaur skin? You could even have it in just one, regular, boring color if you want to.”

“Mageeeenta.”

Elanus made a startled sound. “You want me to fly around in a magenta ship? Do you want me to lose all the respect of my peers? Do you want them to laugh at me every time we land? Is that what you want?”

“Mageeenta, Daddee! And feathers!”

“Feath…why would I put feathers on a—how would we even do feathers on you? How is that supposed to work?”

“Dinosaurs did have feathers, you know,” Kieron offered from the doorway. Elanus spun around to look at him, his face momentarily brightening before he put a stern expression back on. Catalina burst into a song of greeting, finishing up with a trilling “eeeee” that tapered off into a register Kieron couldn’t even hear.

“Yes, of course I know dinosaurs had feathers, Doctor Obvious, everyone with the slightest knowledge of ancient Earth paleontology knows that dinosaurs had feathers. I’m just not sure how they’re supposed to be incorporated into a new skin for my ever-so-picky child here.”

“Maybe a different pattern along the thrusters and up at her nose,” Kieron suggested, walking over to Catalina and shaping the idea of it with his hands. “Something arcing back like this…in a complementary color to magenta, which—I have no clue what that would be, that’s entirely up to you.”

“Oh gee, thanks. I think—”

“I liiiike iit!” Catalina hummed gleefully. “Pretty feathers for my front and baaack! And top!”

“Why not just cover you in feathers while we’re at it?” Elanus asked with an exaggerated sigh. “Why not just make you look like a bird instead of a dinosaur?”

“Okaaaay. I’ll look for pretty biiiirds and piiick one!”

“Catie, I—” But her lights had already dimmed, a sign that she’d turned her attention to other things. It wasn’t that she couldn’t split her focus—her brain was designed to perform hundreds of complex functions at once. But, and Kieron knew she’d gotten this from her father, she tended to hone in intensely on one thing at a time when it came to external interactions. It made her a little broody, but Kieron appreciated her thoughtfulness.

“A bird.” Elanus looked at Kieron and raised one eyebrow. “She wants to look like a bird now. Probably a magenta one, given my luck. I’m going to be laughed out of conferences for showing up in a ship that looks like it should be flocking ahead of the storm.”

Kieron didn’t understand the idiom, but he let it pass. “Would you really?”

Elanus scoffed. “No, of course not. Are you kidding me? I could refuse every conference for the next ten years and people would still be begging me to attend on year eleven, asking for a closer look at my baby. When I say she’s advanced, that’s me doing my best to be modest.”

“And you don’t really do modest in the first place.”

“Not in the slightest.” Elanus paused. “So…how did the big reveal go?”

Kieron sighed. “There were tears. It was uncomfortable.”

“You’re doing a very good thing for your friend’s wife, of course there were tears.”

For more reasons than you know. But Kieron didn’t want to get into a conversation about fundamentalism on Thakta right now. He had something else to talk about. He cleared his throat. “I need to speak to you about something.”

Elanus’s hand froze over his projector. “Sounds serious,” he said, his voice casual but his posture already screaming discomfort.

“It is. This doesn’t have to be a bad conversation, though.”

“Why would it be bad?”

“Because I want to know what you’re planning on doing with Deysan Moritz.”

Elanus’s nostrils flared slightly, like he’d just smelled something off. “I already told you—I’m going to turn him over to the authorities on Gania as soon as—”

“No.” Kieron watched Elanus’s facile mouth flatten into a hard line. “Tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth.”

“It isn’t. Not the complete truth, at least. I haven’t looked down in the containment room where you’re keeping him,” Kieron said, feeling tired. He didn’t want to ruin the happy, comfortable thing they had together, but he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t figure out the truth. Cloverleaf Station, for now, was under his command despite his “boss” being there. “But I will if you don’t tell me what you’re doing to him.”

There was a long pause, and then— “Nothing. Yet. He’s in cryo for the moment.”

That made sense. The cryo containers in the storage areas were capable of holding everything from complex living beings to deadly viral strains if necessary. “And after the cryo?”

Elanus smiled. It wasn’t a beautiful smile. It certainly wasn’t a happy one. “After the cryo? Well, when he finally wakes up, I plan on having relocated his brain and spinal column into a rudimentary, bio-compatible bot. Probably one shaped like a box, that I can shove into a corner and sit on. I’ll give him rudimentary senses and particularly good vision, but I’ll take away all of his physical autonomy and then I’ll use him like the good for nothing piece of shit he is, so he can see how he likes being at someone else’s mercy.

“And when I’m done playing with his emotions and have done my level best to drive him insane, I’ll jettison his box into space and let him float in agony for as long as his batteries keep his brain alive. That’s my plan.” He spread his hands. “What are you going to do about it?”

Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Nineteen, Part Two

 Notes: Hey darlins! I'm back and almost able to focus on the screen, lol! Which means I can write more story for you, yaaaay. You might see some parallels in this chapter to events happening in real-time here in the states. Can't help it, I'm infuriated, but it shouldn't pull you out of the story. Enjoy!

Title: Cloverleaf Station: Chapter Nineteen, Part Two

***

Chapter Nineteen, Part Two

 

Kieron never knew what to do in the face of tears. Anger he could handle, panic and fear he could deal with; shouts and screams, no matter what provoked them, were simple. Remain calm. Look for redirects. Calm it down. Calm them down. Then deal with the consequences.

Dislike was better, indifference was ideal—let him be a disappointment, let him be not worth your time. The joke was always on the other person—Kieron wanted way less to do with them than he wanted them around. But tears, whether of sadness or joy…he was bad with those. So bad.

How did you comfort the widow of your dead best friend when you told her that you’d confirmed the identity of his corpse, after all? He’d expected her to be happy!

“Please,” Kieron said after the second straight minute of crying. “Xilinn, I…I don’t know what to do.”

“No,” she whimpered, wiping a hand across her eyes and trying to make herself sit up straight. “No, it’s—it’s all right. It’s not you, it’s not—this, not this, I promise, I—” She started to cry again, harder than before.

“Xilinn, please, it’s all right. I’ll get him back to you faster,” Kieron promised. He’d borrow the Lizzie if he had to—Elanus would probably let him, and he could get to Trakta and back before the mining season started again. “I can be there in less than two months. I can—”

“No, no.” Xilinn held up a hand. “Wait. Just wait.”

A clear order, a simple objective. Kieron waited, and watched Xilinn pull herself together by sheer force of will. When she finally looked at Kieron again, she was smiling so wide it had to hurt her face. “Kieron, you don’t know how important this is.”

“You’ll be able to inter him in the family crypt now,” he said, a little confused. “I know how important that is.”

“No, Kieron, you…there’s been an election here. The Fundamentalists have retaken control of Parliament.” A sob slipped out between her lips before she could stifle it. “They…they’ve rolled back almost all of the reforms of the past century. It’s not just Zakari whose soul would have been consigned to the void without his body’s return, it’s…his children, Kieron. Pol and Szusza.”

“I don’t understand,” Kieron confessed. “What does his absence have to do with the kids?”

The old rules state that you can only have full citizenship if both your parents are Traktan. Kieron, if you never found Zakari’s body and he was stricken from the family register, then the kids would lose their citizenship. They would become lower-class citizens in their own homes, they wouldn’t be eligible for state-sponsored assistance, they wouldn’t be able to attend our universities…they wouldn’t be welcome here until they were dead, to go back in the crypt with everyone else they weren’t allowed to live like.”

 Her eyes filled with tears again. “Laina and I—” Laina was one of Zakari’s other two former spouses “—would have to take them to another Federation planet for them to regain the standard of living they’ve grown up in, and Laina has two other children with Kriev, so I was planning to leave with them both. I was just about to buy tickets…”

“Holy shit.” Kieron had lived on Trakta for years, but given that he was a refugee, he’d expected to be treated worse than the people who were born there. He was an interloper, someone they had taken in with reluctance. But to refuse to care for the children born of their planet, children whose only crime was having a parent with an atypical sense of wanderlust…that was despicable. “I’m so sorry. I wish you had told me; you know I would have worked harder to find him.”

Xilinn laughed weakly. “How could you possibly have worked any harder than you already have been, Kieron? I was afraid you’d kill yourself if you tried to pick up the pace any more, and that’s the last thing I want. Besides.” She wiped her eyes again, her breathing more controlled now, her expression closer to its normal serenity. “You did it. You found him. I can’t believe you found him, it’s incredible. You’re incredible.”

“I didn’t do it alone.”

“Then the people who helped you are angels,” she said. “No matter why they did it—and I’m sure it was for your sake—they have my gratitude as well. And don’t rush over here,” she added. “The verification of the DNA you sent me, along with the updated incident report, should be enough to get me a stay of action for the children until you can get Zakari home. Just…” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Make sure you send him with someone you trust, all right? I don’t think I can take it if we have to go through this again.”

“I promise,” Kieron murmured. “Xilinn, I…”

“Can you call again once the children are home from school?”

“I…maybe tomorrow.” There was no way Kieron could take seeing Zak’s kids today, knowing they had come so close to losing their happy lives

“All right.” She smiled knowingly. “Perhaps tomorrow. Thank you so much for this, Kieron. Truly. You’ve saved us.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“No,” she said. “The least you could have done was nothing at all, and I wouldn’t have blamed you for it. Zak made his own decisions, and the consequences of those weren’t yours to bear. But you did bear them, for us. And your determination has changed the entire arc of his childrens’ future.” She was crying again now, but kept her smile. “We love you, and we miss you. So much. Come and see us when you can.”

“I will,” Kieron promised. “I…love you too.” He ended the call before Xilinn could say anything else, then  buried his face in his hands and just breathed, and breathed, and breathed.

So much disaster had been averted by the narrowest of margins… Kieron used to think he was one of the unluckiest people in the galaxy: his childhood living as a soldier, hatred and disgust from his mother, being pushed out of a death cult because he wasn’t good enough for death, living as a second-class citizen for years, breaking free only to lose Zakari…

But now he knew he was wrong. He was the luckiest man alive. He’d rescued Catalina, who was joy incarnate, survived near-mortal levels of radiation poisoning, turned an enemy into a lover with Elanus, and found—with a great deal of help—Zakari again. Enough of him to save his family’s future thanks to the unexpected regression of a supposedly advanced society.

If he knew how to pray, he would. Instead, all he did was breathe, slow and deep, until he felt more in control of himself. Then, he got up from his chair and went to see Elanus.

It was time to confront the final obstacle to the best future he could imagine.