Notes: One more moment of emotional reconciliation and closeness before we FUCK SHIT UP!
Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Six, Part Two
***
Chapter Six, Part Two
By the time their evening meal rolled around, Kieron was feeling better. Good enough to eat decently, not to fuss too much over Elanus, not to reach for Blobby and pull him close when the bot needed to charge against Catie’s hull for a while—radiant heat would do it, and she could specify where she was going to radiate heat so he would get the most out of it instead of soaking up what he could from the two humans.
Once the kids were “asleep”—power saving mode was practically the same thing—Kieron sat down next to Elanus on the mattress on the floor. “We should talk about what comes next.”
“Bullshit.”
Kieron frowned. “What?”
Elanus frowned right back, then upped the ante by pointing his finger. “We already know what comes next. You’re going to investigate the creche with Blobby for backup, sorry for that but he’s the best we’ve got right now, and then all of us are going to fly to the old capitol compound and look around there for a while. By then the worst of the storm interference should have passed, and if it hasn’t Lizzie will have plotted us a way out of it regardless, so we’ll get out of here. A week more, maybe two, and we’ll be done.”
“I…” Well, that was succinct. But not what Kieron had been getting at. “I don’t think we should go to the capitol,” he said instead.
Elanus nodded slowly. “I see…wait, no I don’t. Why shouldn’t we go there?”
“I don’t think it’s going to have anything to offer me.”
“Ah.” He nodded again. “You’re self-flagellating.”
Kieron scowled. “Fuck you.”
“I really wish you would, but I don’t think my leg could take it right now. And don’t change the subject. You don’t want to go there because you think it’s inconvenient now, not because you’re convinced you won’t get anything out of it.”
Kieron stopped himself from immediately snapping back at Elanus and let that statement settle inside of him for a moment. Then he said, “It really bothers me that you’re convinced you know me better than I know myself.”
Elanus’s confident expression fell a bit. “Kieron—”
“I don’t even think you’re wrong, exactly. It’s clear you know a lot about how I think and what I like and the way I would plan to do something even when we haven’t already discussed it.” It seemed to be a point of pride for Elanus, actually, that he knew his fiancĂ© so well. The fact that Kieron couldn’t reciprocate… “I can’t do that for you.”
Elanus shook his head. “You don’t need to do that for me.”
“I need to learn to do it,” Kieron replied. “And fast, because as things stand at the moment? I can’t let myself relax around you, because you get almost everything right, but the things you get wrong are driving me crazy.”
“What do you mean?”
Kieron sighed. How did he put this without coming off like a complete asshole? “I’m not happy that you’re in a position of doing things for me without any opportunity for me to reciprocate.”
“Relationships aren’t about reciprocation,” Elanus replied immediately. “I’m here because I want to be, not because I expect to get something specific out of you for the privilege.”
“I understand that intellectually, but…this is where you’re getting things wrong again.” Kieron pushed past Elanus’s immediate impulse to rebuke and said, “Think about when you first knew me. Or maybe a little after that, when we were friends but not really lovers, not together the way we were later. Would I let you do things for me like this? Would I let you sacrifice the health of you and your family just so I could eke out a little more knowledge?”
Now it was Elanus’s turn to be quiet for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t have, but it’s not the same. We’re not the same people that we were back then.”
“I am,” Kieron said, feeling a little helpless as he said it but needing it out there. “Or at least, I’m closer to that man than I am to the one who would let you handle all the bumpy parts of the crap we get into.”
“You never let me handle all the bumpy parts,” Elanus muttered, but it was clear he understood. “Okay, so you feel too dependent on us. No, worse than that—you feel like you’re actively hurting us and you can’t let yourself believe that we’re here because we love you, since you don’t feel the same way about us anymore.”
“I do love you,” Kieron said immediately, because he wasn’t going down that dark, pointless road again. “I love you, I feel that with everything in me. My heart knows it even if my head doesn’t, but I don’t trust that love the same way.”
“You don’t trust me,” Elanus said.
“It’s not just you. It’s us.” He needed that to be clear. “Until I learn to trust us, I need to be useful. I need to make things better for you and Catie, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that if all of the focus is solely on me and what you think I need. Sure, maybe I need some quality time with my childhood to make sense of my now, but what I really need is to take care of you two. And Blobby.”
Elanus stared at Kieron, looking a little lost and a little pained…make that a lot pained, judging by the way he was furrowing his brow. “You did great with Blobby today,” he said quietly.
“And then as soon as I got back here, neither of you needed me,” Kieron pointed out.
Elanus didn’t try to deny it, but he did deflect. “Catie needed you.”
“She didn’t.” Kieron closed his eyes and sighed. “She loves me so much, and I know she’s trying to give me the same level of care she’s used to getting, but I’m not giving her anything in return right now.”
“And you…need to.”
“Yeah.” Kieron wiped his face before tears edged out of the corners of his eyes. “And I know that’s fucked up, I do get that. I wish I could be more functional and more, more trusting, and I hope I get there, but the longer we stay here and things go wrong the worse I feel, because there’s nothing I can do to make anything better.”
Elanus touched his hand, and Kieron opened his eyes again as he turned his palm to thread their fingers together. “I know you don’t believe me yet,” Elanus said, “but you make my life better by being with me, even right now. My pain is easier to manage, Catie is happier, and to take it back to a broader scale Lizzie is positively transformed when she’s around you. You don’t have to be of some kind of particular use in order to be wanted, but.” He squeezed Kieron’s hand. “You just told me that saying things like this isn’t what you need right now, and I trust you. So. Tell me what you do need, and let’s do that.”
“I need something to do,” Kieron said immediately. “Something that’s helpful for more than just me.”
Elanus nodded. “Okay. We can come up with something, I’m sure of it.”
“And I want to leave as soon as possible. Maybe,” and this was hard to say, “maybe we can come back someday. I did come here with a purpose, but…we need to be better prepared.” That much, at least, was undeniable.
“Yeah. All right.” Elanus sounded caught somewhere between exhausted and resigned, and Kieron grabbed his evening dose of painkiller from the autodoc, then helped him lie down. “Do you think,” Elanus asked quietly as Kieron injected him just above the break in his leg, “that you’ll learn to trust me again?”
“I know I will,” Kieron told him as he set the syringe aside, then lay down next to him. “But let’s test it somewhere less potentially deadly, okay?”
“Deal.” Elanus turned bleary eyes in Kieron’s direction. The painkillers were potent. “Kiss me before I fall asleep?”
“Deal.” They shared a soft, tender kiss, and Kieron’s heartbeat felt steadier than it had all evening. The love was there.
The trust would follow, if he gave it time.