Chelen City: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 Notes: Mkay, time to forward the plot! PLOT, DEAD AHEAD! SOUND THE ALAR--too late, we're hit!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

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Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 

“Daddeeeee…”

Her voice was soft, or as soft as Catie’s voice ever got. She liked to layer it with so many harmonics that half the time she sounded like her own Greater Ganian Choir, but this time there were only two or three echoes of the top notes of her speech. This was Catie at her gentlest. “Daddeee, wake up….wake uuuuup…” She sounded like she was more singing and less ordering, but there was a definite plaintiveness in there as well.

What had happened? Elanus took stock of himself, reviewed everything he could remember about what had last happened, and realized that he had a disconcerting blank spot in his memory. Shit. That almost always meant he’d had a stroke. Those tended to be harder on his memory centers than almost anywhere else.

“Baby?” he slurred, fighting to coordinate his mouth into working the way it was supposed to. His throat wasn’t dry, at least, and he wasn’t catheterized but also didn’t have to urinate, so he hadn’t been this way for long. Had it been bad enough for a Regen tank?

“Daddeee!” Catie’s voice rose in volume precipitously, and Elanus winced. “Oh sorry, sorry,” she said as soon as whatever camera she had on him saw it. “Sorry, Daddeee, I’ll be quiet.”

“Not too quiet, I hope.” Speaking of…where was he? His eyelids were for some reason harder to get moving than his lips, but eventually he opened them up to see that he was tucked into bed in his and Kieron’s room. There was no extra medical equipment around, no shots of Regen waiting on the table, nothing but the normal passive alerts that monitored his health currently on.

That was curious, but there were more pressing things at hand. “Are you okay, baby?”

“Yes, Daddeee.”

“Are you sure?” he pressed. “That was a nasty attack. I don’t even know how it got through the firewalls.” But he was damn well going to find out.

“I’m fiiine. I prooomise.”

“Good.” Something deep in his chest relaxed at hearing that from her own lips—so to speak. “That’s good.”

“I’m so sorry I was baaaad.”

“Oh, honey.” Elanus ran a tired hand over his face. “I know you were upset.”

“Yesss, but Kieron says that’s noooo excuse for being a ruuuude girl.”

Oof, alternating parenting styles coming to the fore. Okay, how did he do this without undermining his partner? “Well, he’s got a point. But you’re also entitled to your feelings. I wish I had taken the time to talk to you about all of this before it made you so angry.”

“I should have said I waaaas sad,” Catie replied. All of a sudden, a hundred different holographic images of T-Rexes in tutus, in every shade of pink, orange, and yellow imaginable, appeared in the air around him. The dress-wearing dinosaurs clasped their claws together and curtsied as one. “I’m sorry!” they all said in one voice.

Elanus blinked, then shut his eyes completely. It was just too bright for him to keep looking at, despite how cute it was. “It’s okay, baby, I forgive you.”

“Thank you!” The light behind his eyelids eased, and when he opened them again there was nothing in the room but the dim blue of the safety lighting.

“Where is Kieron?” Elanus asked, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He wanted to stand, but he also felt a little dizzy. He needed—ah. Electrolytes, right there. Nice. He drank deeply.

“He’s in the study with Ryuuuu.”

Huh. So he was in the house. Why hadn’t he come running when he realized Elanus was awake? It was what he would have done if their roles were reversed. For a moment, Elanus contemplated that he might have fucked things up worse than he thought, but…

Oh wait, no. This was Kieron being nice, giving him some time with Catie alone. Clearly Catie had been lying in wait for it, and he knew she needed the attention. “And Lizzie?” he asked, testing the waters.

“She was waiting with me, but then a call from Pol came in, so she took that instead.” Catie almost sounded okay with that. “Pol and Xilinn might come to live here.”

“Oh…” Well, that was a conversation he would be having with Kieron at the earliest possible moment. “I see. What else has been going on, baby? Tell me about what you’re working on.”

“I’m wooorking on algorithmic identification protocoools!” She jumped merrily into discussion of the methods she was trying to track down the virus that had attacked her. It was dry, meticulous stuff, the kind of thing Kieron would have had a hard time sitting through.

Elanus spent an hour working through practice problems and slinging advice back and forth before he finally got to the point where his stomach felt like it was going to eat itself. “I’ve got to go get some food, baby,” he said at last. “Lizzie is done with her call, right? Ask her to help you run the last three chains.”

“Okay, Daddeeeee!” There was a pause, and then, “I love you so much.”

Oof—heart, meet throat. “I love you too.”

His firstborn happily distracted, Elanus pressed to his feet and headed out of their room. He loved their bedroom, loved the sanctuary of it and the fact that is was a place that was just for him and Kieron, but that also meant they didn’t have a relay to the kitchen set up in there. The kitchen was closer than the study, so he’d stop and get some food, then go see what the hell Kieron and Ryu were up to.

And when did they start getting along anyway?

His miff was a little mollified when he saw one of his favorite meals waiting for him in the stasis unit. Pizza was one of the first things he and Kieron ever ate together without fighting at the same time, and Chelien pizza was the best in this entire galaxy and probably several others as well. The crisp layer on the bottom, followed by soft bread, then hot toppings, then a crackling lattice of weblike cheese on top of it all…delicious.

He ate three slices in short order, then shrugged and started in on a fourth. He was halfway done with it when Kieron came into the kitchen.

“I didn’t think you’d finish the whole thing on your own,” he said, his voice perfectly calm.

“You fool,” was all Elanus managed to reply.

“Yeah, I know.” Kieron didn’t speak again until Elanus was done with his fourth slice. He made that his last one, wiped off his hands and stepped forward.

“How’s Catie?” Kieron asked before Elanus could say anything.

“Fine. We’ve figured some things out, I think she’s feeling better.”

“Good.”

Elanus sighed. “Is there some reason you’re over there and I’m over here and we’re not all over each other yet?”

Kieron paused, then nodded. “Yeah. You’re going to be really angry at me in a second, so I wanted to get a good look at you while you’re happy.”

Elanus frowned. “Angry? Why?”

“Because you’ve been asleep for three days.”

“Thr…” That couldn’t be right. He didn’t feel like he’d been down that long. He activated his implant without a thought, looked at the date, and…shit. “Was I that bad off?”

“You were bad off,” Kieron said carefully.

Why was he prevaricating? “Bad enough to necessitate keeping me in a coma for three days?”

“Bad enough to keep you that way for two. The third day you could have been woken up, but I wasn’t in the house and I didn’t want you to regain consciousness  without me around to make sure it went okay.”

What the hell. “Where were you?” Elanus asked, feeling a sense of dread creeping over him.

“Infiltrating Caria Jayde’s house.”

What…the fucking…hell.