Chelen City: Interlude 3: Kieron

 Notes: Time for a Kieron POV! Because he's got a lot to think about, and he's tired of being told to sit in the bleachers and watch the game.

Title: Chelen City: Interlude: Kieron

***

Interlude 3: Kieron

 

It was just as well that Kieron had done plenty of research into the most common manifestations of Elfshot Disease, given the ridiculous goddamn person he was living with. Once the acute damage was taken care of, once the girls were soothed and Kieron knew for sure that the house and all its systems were secure again, that knowledge was what allowed him to keep from having a minor breakdown by Elanus’s side in their bedroom.

One would think, for instance, that a stroke brought on by severe overexertion—a bleed in the brain, for fuck’s sake—would be a really, really bad thing. It turned out that it could actually be a lot worse, though. Brains, for all their complications, were actually pretty simple things for Regen to fix. There was no guarantee as to the continuity of memory, but maintaining basic functions while supporting structures to allow it to fix itself were completely common. A brain was way easier to fix than, say, a spleen. Some organs, it was just best to regrow.

So, a stroke followed by seizures—Kieron responded like any trained medic would, got Elanus immediate treatment, then put him in a tank to ensure he was completely fixed up before finally believing the scans and taking him out again. The treatment recommended a little more enforced sleep, so he was kept in an induced coma for another five hours, while Kieron just…

Didn’t freak out, no. Didn’t do anything to worry the girls. Just sat, and stared, and held Elanus’s hand, and wondered how often he would have to do this.

You can’t back out now. And he didn’t want to, but the way he felt watching blood pour out of Elanus’s nose, the blown capillaries in his sclera that made him look demented, the despair he felt during his collapse…that wasn’t something he wanted to experience again. Ever. This was three times now, which was three too many.

They needed to take Deysan’s information on Elfshot and turn it into a real cure. As far as Kieron was concerned, that was the top priority from here on out, next to protecting the girls.

“You okay?”

He didn’t whirl around to confront the man who’d invaded their privacy—it wasn’t like he hadn’t heard him coming down the hall. “Fine,” he said tersely to Ryu.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Neither do you.”

Ryu laughed. “That’s because I’m not. A day ago I was chilling with Catie when all of a sudden the house went dark and she started to scream. Scream. Have you ever heard her scream before?”

“Yes.” That was the first thing he ever heard from her—a scream as she was forced into the asteroid field by Deysan.

“It sucks.”

Kieron sighed. “It does.”

“And then you all came back, and the next thing I know Elanus is hit with a flareup. It’s just a…bad reminder, you know? That we haven’t figured any of this out yet, not my problem or his.”

Right, because what Ryu needed more than anything was to get a real cure so that the inorganic compounds supporting his new, Elfshot-resistant additions weren’t breaking down in his body any longer, while Elanus had the standard version that could be treated with Regen, but not cured. It just… “Why hasn’t this been cured before now?”

Ryu shrugged. “Too hard. They’ve tried everything, from intervention in the womb to genetic resequencing to total organ replacement without support from inorganics. It always fails.”

“No.” Kieron shook his head. “No, that’s not reasonable. That’s not…that’s not how the universe works these days.”

“It is, though.” Ryu’s voice was cautiously kind, like he was trying to talk Kieron down from some sort of ledge. Why does everyone think I’m about to jump? “Think about it—naturals just happen too.”

“Naturalism is a completely unpredictable flaw in the genome that occurs to one in ten million people spread across the entire Federation,” Kieron snapped. “Elfshot Disease is something that only happens to Ganians, and to a huge percentile of them, comparatively speaking. There are minds out there that are equal to the task—there have to be. I refuse to believe it can’t be cured.”

“Then why don’t you convince your boyfriend to take it on?” Ryu snapped right back. “He’s supposed to be a fucking genius—he is a fucking genius, I get that now, it’s no wonder he rose up out of the ranks of the regulars and into the oligarchs—so why doesn’t he work on Elfshot instead of making more super-sentient beings?”

That…was actually a good point, especially since Elanus had the disease himself. “Fixation?” he muttered. “Having to best his mentor at something? Your guess is as good as mine at this point.” Kieron pressed his palms against his eye sockets. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t make sense… “This whole fucking planet shouldn’t work. Everyone is always trying to take advantage of everyone else, there’s no clear sense of hierarchy…”

“That’s only in the upper classes,” Ryu said with a laugh. “Below a certain threshold, there are actual consequences for murderous behavior simply because society wouldn’t be able to function otherwise. That’s part of the grift, isn’t it? The elite get to act however they want, while the rest of us have to obey the rules. Although.” Now it was his turn to sigh. “Having tried both sides of things, I actually think it might be better in this case to be on the low end of things. I liked training as an assassin, but actually having to murder people, even when they’re expecting the attempt, is…not very fun.”

God, he wouldn’t have lasted a week in Hadrian’s Colony. He and Kieron shared a similar, debilitating internal softness that left them vulnerable to all the wrong things. Although…perhaps there was a way forward here. A shared goal that could give them purpose while making use of everyone’s time in the best way possible.

“I think we should find the assassin ourselves,” Kieron said. “You and me. Elanus is too close, he’s going to make himself vulnerable and end up paying for it. We need to go on the offense. You know how to get around here, and I’ve got the means to get us where we need to be.” Or he should, if his access to Elanus’s accounts actually meant anything.

“And what’s Elanus going to be doing?” Ryu huffed.

“Curing Elfshot Disease.”

Ryu blinked. “You make that sound so likely.”

“Oh, I’m sure he can do it if he puts his mind to it.” Or at the very least, he could come up with a way to save Ryu and improve the situation for the afflicted.

“And how are you going to get him to back off finding the assassin? Because he’s going to be even more focused on that than he was before now that someone went after Catie.”

Kieron smiled. “Leave that part to me. In fact, leave the next few days to me—I need you to do something else.”

“I don’t work for you,” Ryu muttered, tugging his sleeves down over his hands.

“True.”

There was a long pause, then Ryu said, “Fine, fucking fine, what is it?”

“I need you to help me play host, and possibly be ready to step in if a fight breaks out.”

Ryu frowned. “Host to who?”

“Some friends of mine.” It was time to start bringing Xilinn and Pol into the fold, before whoever the assassin was got it into their heads to go after them too. Kieron had brought them here to save them, not sacrifice them on the altar of someone’s argument with Elanus. They needed to move in, the sooner the better. “I’ll tell you more after I talk to Elanus.”

Which he would be. Thoroughly.

As soon as he was out of the coma. For now, Kieron just stroked the hair back from his lover’s forehead and sent a soothing feeling out to the girls. He felt better, having made a plan.

Now he just had to get Elanus to agree with it.

Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part Two

 Notes: Back today! Have some plot and angst and plotty angst for sticking with me ;)

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part Two

***

Chapter Twelve, Part Two

 

Elanus wasn’t capable of actually directing his own movements at this point. He had dived straight into his implant with every facet of his conscious mind, opening his connection to his daughter and his home with a reckless disregard for his own mental well-being. It wasn’t until the first tendril of the virus snapped his way that Elanus remembered to put up his personal firewalls, but it was a distant thought at best. This virus wasn’t targeting him. It was targeting Catie. His baby. His sweet oldest child, the person who had changed his entire life for the better, and seeing lines of living code curl and crush around her mind in an effort to winnow through it was enraging.

He felt his body move, felt hands holding him upright and a short but sturdy body hauling him into someplace colder than he’d just been, if the way his skin pebbled was any indication. Then they were on Lizzie, and ah, that was perfect, they could work together to—

But carefully. Carefully. He wouldn’t risk his other child, he couldn’t. “Mordecai Protocol,” he murmured as soon as they were on board.

“Yes, Elanus.” Lizzie retained just enough processing power to handle flying them home—the rest she gave into Elanus’s direction, along with full safety measures. Elanus had a moment of uncertainty as he began to direct Lizzie’s actions to help Catie—she was an incredibly advanced intelligence, after all. She might be able to do a better job than he could when it came to figuring out the best way to help her sister, and yet…

Catie was just as advanced, if not more so, and she’d been taken by surprise. Her efforts to protect herself had come too late, and now it was all she could do to hold her own. Elanus had experience fighting off direct viral attacks, both personal and professional. He would show them the way this time, and if—when—it happened again, his girls would be better prepared.

Both of them would. There was no other way forward.

“We need to block the trawlers, you see them?”

[Yes, but they’re matching her code upon impact. I might attack a part of Catie by mistake.]

“Look at the base numbers. Follow those in.”

[But they match.]

They were, in fact, very close to matching Catie’s own code perfectly, which was terribly concerning. And yet…there was something about them that was different. Like listening to a person with a very faint accent that you couldn’t quite place, or looking at a picture and being unable to decide if the color was blue or purple. “Look closer. Get as deep as you can and feel for distinctions. Check for timing issues, look how the code reloads, see the—”

[Ah! I see it now, Elanus.] With Lizzie reassured, she made much better time dismantling the tendrils doing their damndest to crawl inside Catie’s crumbling reinforcements. Elanus knew he wouldn’t be able to do any better, so he went deeper instead.

This was something he hadn’t done with Catie since she was a brand-new person, so new he hadn’t quite been sure she was a person yet. Once she had the capacity for speech, it felt intrusive to be present inside her thoughts as she put them together. In fact, he’d been on the verge of severing the bonding node that he’d accidentally created when making her entirely, both because it was her due as a maturing individual deserving of autonomy and because he didn’t need the temptation to go straight into her mind and tell her when he thought she was being unreasonable. But right now, he was glad to have it.

It felt uncomfortably like resetting his own brain, but one reboot later and Elanus was inside of Catie’s main program. It was light in here, beautifully light, but then the distant structure around them seemed to shudder, and with it the light turned gray. Catie had always communicated her feelings best through color, light, and sound. “It’s okay, baby,” he said, holding out his arms. “I’m here.”

[Daddy!] A warm cloud of pressure and light enveloped him, like an all-over hug. His daughter shivered in time with the assault, but he could tell his presence was giving her some much-needed support. [I don’t know how to make it stop.]

“I’ll help you,” he promised. “Let’s start by making you more comfortable, hmm?”

[How?]

“Let me see…”

Every mind was different, and so was every virus. Elanus had taught himself to use his implant to think in actionable code when he was just a child, and he’d practiced relentlessly as he aged up and became interested in moving into a higher class on Gania. He had to be the best, utterly and absolutely, and when it came to overwhelming Ganian code of any kind, well…he was the best. And this virus, for all its tenacity, was still fundamentally Ganian. If the saboteur had gotten another kind of mind to make it, things might have gone differently, but this…

Elanus strengthened Catie’s safeguards, pouring out strong, protective code that benefitted her while simultaneously attacking the virus. It flinched at the sharpness, the newness, and more and more of it began to fall prey to Lizzie’s dogged cleaning efforts. Once Catie stopped trembling, Elanus really went to work.

He ripped and wrenched at the virus, throttling it into nothingness and burning it to ash. He split his efforts into a thousand encoded knives, hunted it across the surface of his daughter’s mind and stabbed it to death. He enclosed the whole thing in a shield that would hide his efforts from the originator, if they were watching, so they wouldn’t learn any of his tricks as well, and he killed and killed and killed until the last remnant of the virus finally dissolved in a pathetic fizzle.

[Daddy…]

“Yeah, baby?” God, his head fucking hurt. Ow, it hurt so bad, but it was so worth it. But ow.

[I’m sorry I shouted at you.]

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen better.”

[I—Daddy!]

“Yeah…ba…”

[You’re bleeding!]

Huh? Was that what he was tasting? Elanus tried to raise a hand toward his face to figure it out, but he couldn’t quite remember how to connect to his hands again. His body…what did his body feel like? How far behind had he left it, and what was happening to it now? It had to be bad if the pain was affecting him this deep into his mindspace.

“Kieron! Kieron! Help!”

“I’ve got him,” a familiar voice said, and then there was a squeeze, pressure somewhere, a tilt that made his mindspace spin, and a round of cursing that made him want to smile…if he could only figure out how to make his mouth move.

“Oh my fucking god,” Kieron muttered, followed by the loud sound of him fumbling with something. “Don’t you dare do this to us. Don’t you dare.”

“Kieron…”

“Kee. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing I can’t fix.”

Then why do you sound so worried? Elanus wanted to ask, but a second later something cool washed over his mind, cool and soothing and it made him so sleepy…

A second after that, he was out.

No Story Post Today Because...

 Because school starts tomorrow and we didn't sleep all weekend and my mother has been ill and my car is dying and my kid needs attention and OH MY GOD DARLINS THERE'S BEEN SO MUCH LATELY! So much. I'm putting off story this week because I've needed the time for other things, but I promise I will get back to my usual schedule next week. You know why?

Because school starts tomorrow. TOMORROW. Tomoooorroooooow! My sweet baby will begin first grade, and I think we're all ready for that at this point. 

So, hey, I love you all and thank you for your patience. *mwah*

Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part One

 Notes: Diving right back into the intrigue!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part One

***

Chapter Twelve, Part One

 

Elanus blew out a breath. “All right. What do you know about the reason Deysan took off from Chelen City?”

Caria narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “Very little. He did contact me, asking me to assist in covering his exit, which I declined to do.”

That was surprising. “Why decline?”

“Because he refused to be honest with me.” She smiled thinly. “I value honesty extremely highly, as I’m sure you know. Whatever my boy was up to, if he couldn’t see fit to share it with me, then I couldn’t go out of my way to erase his tracks.”

“And that didn’t seem worthy of an alarm or two?” he pressed. “A moment of introspection, a chance for you to think, ‘Hey, if he’s not willing to talk to me about this, what else is he hiding from me?’”

“I’m old enough to know that everyone is entitled to a few secrets,” Caria said, then sighed. “It was only after you went haring off to catch him that I began to think something was really amiss. The two of you haven’t been on proper terms for years, and nothing I could do ever bridged the gap.”

She’d tried, early on. Gotten them together at parties, set up meetings through their secretaries, bought into contracts with riders that stated that the two of them had to work together in order for her to pay up fully. It had never worked. Each of them had been determined to avoid the other, Deysan because he couldn’t stand to realize he’d been overshadowed by his protégé, and Elanus because he realized his former mentor had used him for years. There was no chance of a reconciliation.

Definitely not after the theft. “He stole something from me,” Elanus said after a moment’s consideration.

“One of your AI ships.”

“My newest prototype, yes.”

“That must have hurt.” Oh, she had no idea. “But was it really a big enough blow that you had to chase him halfway across the galaxy and into an asteroid field? Surely you kept enough notes to be able to replicate your process!”

There’s no replicating Catie. Lizzie was a perfect example of that—a nearly identical operating system, and yet she’d turned out wildly different personality-wise. “Some of the components of this ship are literally irreplaceable,” Elanus replied. “And beyond that, I couldn’t trust that he would respect any sort of Federation law with regards to ownership of the technology. I’m sure I couldn’t, in fact, since he was headed for the Fringe with a deal in place that would make him a sick amount of money at my expense.”

“So he planned to sell your work to the highest bidder.” Caria spread her hands. “It’s not nice, and it’s certainly not the way a friend or mentor should treat someone they’re close to, but that’s business on Gania, Elanus. Corporate espionage is a time-honored tradition here. You could have interpreted this as a moment to be flattered that Deysan was going to such lengths to secure your brilliance, rather than condemning him for not treating you like the prince you want to be treated as.”

“It isn’t wrong for me to expect him to obey the law,” Elanus snapped.

“It is on Gania. If you want meek little law-abiders, make your ships on another planet.”

Well, if it was a question of dismissing the law to her, then Elanus could work with that. “You know, I understand that perspective,” he said, wishing he had a drink in his hand. It was always easier to dissemble when he had a glass in his hands. Where had Kieron gotten off to? “And I even agree with it. That’s why I decided to make it my personal goal to hunt him down and make him pay.”

Caria’s lofty expression flickered. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“No, it’s exactly what you meant,” he said. “If being stolen from is a compliment, than going after the thief in person is just returning the favor. Deysan stole something of incredible value to me. I wasn’t going to hire a few assassins to go after him when I could get so much more satisfaction out of doing the job myself.”

“You intended to kill him from the start, then?” Caria asked coldly.

“I wasn’t going to drag him back to Gania where he could be wrapped in your useless ‘laws’ and hidden behind so many doors that not even I could open them all.” There was no way. “He might have survived,” he said after a moment of dramatic consideration, “if he hadn’t chosen to hide in one of the most dangerous places in the universe. Seriously, he chose to put himself in the middle of an asteroid field next to a quasar in the hopes that I couldn’t figure out a way around the levels of radiation. He was in a ship of my making,” Elanus emphasized, “and he thought I couldn’t get around the puzzle he thought he’d solved.”

“But you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Caria frowned. “But you just said—”

“I know. But in all honesty? He chose a great place to hide,” Elanus confessed. “I couldn’t have gotten him alone.”

“Ah. This is where your lover comes in.”

Why deny it? She already knew about Kieron—everybody knew about him after Elanus lost all his sense of composure with Fritz. “He wasn’t my lover at the time, but yes. He figured out where Deysan was and how to get the ship back from him, at considerable risk to himself.”

“All that, before you even began sleeping with him? My my.” Caria fanned herself with one hand. “Whatever did you promise him for such an effort?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar,” she snapped. “Every action has its price. What was his?”

Wow. We are so deeply fucked up as a society. “I thought you wanted to know how he died,” Elanus deflected.

“I do.”

“He tried to escape.” Elanus smiled. “Freed himself from where he was being held, got back to what his ship, escaped into space.” He leaned forward slightly. “Only none of that’s quite right. In reality, we let him free himself, we allowed him to steal a ship that looked like mine but had none of its protections, and once he escaped into space…well, we didn’t have to do anything to him. The radiation took care of the rest.”

Her eyes were wet. “You let him die.”

“I let him kill himself, yeah.”

“You let him—”

Elanus hit the table between them, making Caria jump slightly. “He lost the game,” Elanus said, slow and deliberate. “The game that you encouraged him to play. The game he taught me to play. He did his best to screw me over, I retaliated, and he lost, Caria. That’s on him, not on me. It’s not on you, either,” he added with more generosity than he really felt. “He went hard. I just went harder.”

“Well,” she said after a moment. “I hope that brings you some comfort.”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“Good. And I suppose I should congratulate you on getting what you wanted. But—”

[DADDY!]

Elanus almost doubled over with the force of Catie’s scream. “What is it?” he barked, knowing he ought to be projecting his voice internally but unable to concentrate enough in the moment to do it. Catie didn’t reply. “Catie? Baby?” Still nothing—he could feel her panic, but he couldn’t break through the barrier that had come up between them.

Elanus escaped Caria’s bubble of silence and was immediately grabbed from behind. He spun, one hand raised—

“Come on,” Kieron said grimly. “We have to get home, now.”