Hadrian's Colony: Elanus Interlude #1

 Notes: Because we needed to hear from him too!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Elanus Interlude #1

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Interlude: Elanus

 

Clean and quiet once more, his arms wrapped around a slumbering Kieron, Elanus lay in the darkness and ran through his plans. There were far fewer of them than he liked to have in reserve, and the ones he did have were way less precise than he wanted.

Too many unknown variables. He accessed every scrap of information about Hadrian’s Colony he could and reviewed it via his implant, but even though he knew the fate of almost every person who’d ever lived there, it still didn’t feel like enough.

Survivors limited to a group of six children, the oldest of them twelve, the youngest five. None of them, not even the little one, feels as though they deserve to be alive. Three of them are crying to return, two of them are catatonic, one of them is exhibiting signs of anger. That one was Kieron, Elanus knew. His fiancé would probably be mad that he was accessing records about his past, but on the other hand, it was publicly available knowledge. None of the children had been identified by name, and they’d been referenced in a lot of scientific papers over the years.

They’d been sent away from their parents, their people, the only lives they’d ever known. Saved, but none of them looked at it that way. It had taken decades of therapy for some of them to come around, and Elanus knew that Kieron was still iffy about his own sense of self-worth. That was strikingly obvious; they wouldn’t be here right now if Kieron understood just how precious and deserving he was. Not for the first time, Elanus wished he could inject some of his own self-confidence into Kieron’s brain. He had enough to spare.

Not that you haven’t made a shit ton of mistakes of late. Over-confidence, that was where he’d gone wrong. Not planning well enough, not covering all his bases, not understanding just how devastated Kieron had really been by rescuing Restaria Sanclare. He might be the one who’d cut former President Moreno’s head off, but it was Elanus’s carelessness that had driven him to that point. He’d underestimated Kieron’s resolve to protect him, and it had cost them both. Agreeing to come to Hadrian’s Colony had felt like a just penance at the time he’d agreed to it—Kieron had put up with Gania, almost been killed by it, and ultimately been driven into exile because of Elanus’s own mistakes, Elanus owed him a trip wherever he wanted to go. But this place…

First off, it was ugly. Even from a distance, it was a mottled mess of moldy grays, muddy browns, and gloppy greens near the tropical zone that was hardly appealing to the eyes. There were no large bodies of water on the surface; rather, a subterranean ocean seeped upward to create marshes and swamps and, in some places, rushing rivers that flowed into crevasses so deep that if your body washed in to one, it would never be found again. That was all bad enough, but couple that with swarms of biting insects in those same marshy zones that were large, aggressive, and resistant to known repellants, and General Hadrian had decided to locate his colony in a rocky desert instead of anywhere even remotely green.

There was water there, deep underground in wells they’d dug with old-fashioned machinery instead of modern-day laser drilling, barbaric, and they’d put up greenhouses for food production, but apart from that there were very few amenities to make it hospitable to mammalian, human life. Local reptiles—or their closest analogue, really, more like dinosaurs (Catie was having a mind-gasm over that)—thrived, and also had made quite a game of running raids on the colony while it existed, sometimes for plants but just as often for human prey.

The colonists had fought back with the simple-minded determination of the damned, and the situation had grown to be one step down from a civil war…and the reptiles, simplistic though their minds were, might have even won it. The general had restricted all use of firearms within the colony itself, saving the bullets for paying jobs, so the colonists’ best defenses had been a series of barricades, booby traps, and in some cases chemical warfare.

It had been chaos in its most elemental form, churning and pulsing beneath a thick layer of slavish devotion to the general himself and the faux-military formation he enforced on his people. The records from the Alliance senator who’d brought charges against the general and come with a naval force to put an end to the colony were harrowing.

“A thousand people are dead because of one madman’s insistence on playing God,” the senator recounted in his report to his peers on Olympus. “I would never have gone in force if I thought they would commit mass suicide. I would have…” He sounded tired, almost broken in the holo. “I don’t know what I would have done, but not that. So many lives were lost.”

So many lives were lost…but not Kieron’s. He’d survived, he’d built a life for himself, and now he was an irreplaceable part of Elanus’s life. There was no way Elanus was going to give that up, so he had to prepare himself carefully for what came next. If he was too opinionated, too judgmental, too pushy, Kieron would almost certainly start to distance himself. That was the last thing Elanus wanted.

Gentle. Calm. Observations, not opinions. Keep him talking. Keep the girls involved. Kieron was weak when it came to keeping their daughters happy; if they indicated that he needed to take a break or slow down, he’d be more likely to listen to them than Elanus. Stay close to him. Don’t let him go off alone. Being alone on this hellhole of a planet, where it seemed like he’d been the closest thing to alone anyway as a child, was a recipe for misery. Elanus needed to remind his fiancé of all the good things in his life now. This place was no more than a bump in the road, a piece of the past that no longer held any sway over him.

Tell him I love him. Tell him every day. Touch him when I can, hold him when he’ll let me.

At least they were heading to the creche first. It was a much smaller facility located on a plateau almost fifty miles from the main colony. It would be a good place to acclimate and come to terms with the environment, a good place to get a routine established. Kieron loved a good routine, and Elanus wasn’t going to object to having one here.

[Daddeee?]

[Yes, Catie?] he responded via his implant to her internal query.

[Weather patterns arrrrre undergoing a drrrramatic change. I believe the seasonal stormmmms are starting early this yearrrr. This will impact myyy ability to scan and mmmmonitor the surface.]

Elanus sighed. Fucking great. [Do your best, honey.]

[I will, Daddeee.] She paused for a moment. [Are we going to beeee okay?]

[We are if I have anything to do with it, baby.]

[Then we will. I know we will.]

Her faith in him was sweet. Elanus was going to do his best to be worthy of it, too.

Kieron shifted in his arms, his back tensing and shoulders bunching like he was caught in the grips of an unpleasant thought…or an unwelcome touch. Mine? Elanus began to pull back, but then Kieron made a sad noise in the back of his throat. Leaning in again set his lover back to rights, and Elanus tenderly kissed the back of Kieron’s head.

No matter what happened next, he was going to get them all through this. They’d do a whirlwind tour of Hadrian’s Colony, then leave this fucking place behind for good and go to a spa with a private beach for the rest of their exile.

Fine, maybe Kieron wouldn’t tolerate that for months on end, but still. Goals.

Elanus lay there in the dark a bit longer, his mind turning plans over relentlessly until, at last, he fell asleep.