Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

 Notes: Having some FEELS this chapter. Oh Kieron, babe. We're gonna get you out of this...no guarantees it's not going to suck, though.

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

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Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

 

Photo by Ryan Stone

Carlisle scoffed. “You think I trust you enough to give you a weapon? After what you pulled?” She stood and began to pace again, which was fine with Kieron because it gave him the space he needed to trace the schematic and send it through to Blobby. He followed the lines as closely as he could, tapping out the identifications of everything as he traced over it so Blobby had the best possible overview Kieron could give him from where he was.

“What if you lose your mind again? What if you can’t stop yourself from being an idiot and lashing out?”

Kieron hummed as he wondered whether he was asking too much of Blobby. The bot was just a baby, after all, hardly even able to walk upright, and here he was asking the little lifeform to figure out how to infiltrate an entire base and help Kieron sneak himself and his reluctant…whatever she was to him out of it. It wasn’t very fair.

“Are you listening to me?”

With a flash of insight he really could have done without, Kieron suddenly drew an unwelcome parallel between himself and the General. As a child, Kieron—all of the kids—had been treated as soldiers almost from the moment they could bathe and feed themselves. They’d been expected to act like little adults and take orders like them too, and the pain of failure had been extreme. Kieron had never intended to be a parent, but here he was, in a position of authority over Blobby, asking him to risk valuable pieces of himself. He’d almost certainly lose some of them in the attempt to get them out, and if they failed, it wasn’t just Kieron who would lose his life. Blobby would be destroyed too.

“God damn it, I am talking to—”

“How did you bear it?” he asked quietly, making eye contact with Carlisle even as he tapped a final message through to Blobby. .. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._

Carlisle stopped for a moment. “Bear what?”

“What he did to us. What he made us do.” .. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._ “Everyone who had a child, who had to watch how we were treated. How did you bear it?” The pain of it was close to ripping his own heart out, and he hadn’t even made Blobby. Compounded by how worried he was about the rest of his family, and Kieron wondered how anybody stayed sane like this.

.. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._

“What else could we do?” Carlisle asked.

“You could have left.”

She sighed. “And gone where? It’s not like there were a host of planets out there ready to welcome in militant refugees with nothing to recommend them but scars and battle mania. We were dosed on so many drugs back then, things intended to make us fight-ready at any moment that really just made us unstable…it’s hard to explain, but it felt…normal.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t until the very end, when the drugs were running out, that I realized it really wasn’t normal. I hadn’t felt so much since I first had you, and it…well.” She gestured at him. “You’re alive because of it. What are you doing?”

“Just sending a little message.” All of a sudden a reply came back to him: ..  .-.. --- ...- .  -.-- --- ..-  - --- --- I love you too. He smiled at the tiny piece of Blobby he held, then slid it into his pocket.

“What is that thing?” she asked quietly. “What is it really?”

“It’s a piece of something important.”

“You look at it like it’s a piece of yourself.”

“Something like that,” he agreed.

Carlisle sighed again. “I suppose it’s my own fault you can’t tell me things.” She tilted her head a little. “You turned out a lot like your father. It wasn’t so obvious when you were a child, but now…”

It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Who was he?”

She shrugged. “A nobody. No one important at all, just a man I met in a station in the Fringe. He had tough, calloused hands, I remember that much. He could have been a miner or, stars, a janitor for all I know. I never asked, and he never asked me much either. I was only with him for a night.”

Well, that was… It wasn’t that Kieron had ever really wondered much about his father; he’d been too worried about the rest of his immediate family for that. But a part of him, a small part that he couldn’t quite deny no matter how much he wanted to, did think about the man sometimes. Had he known his mother was pregnant when they parted ways? Did he have other children? How would he have treated Kieron?

“He was handsome,” Carlise supplied. “But soft at heart. Not a soldier. I could never have brought him back here, my father would have ensured that he was killed almost as soon as he touched down.”

“Good thing you left him alone, then.” Kieron meant it, too. He just wished she’d left Kieron with the unknown man as well. Or…maybe he didn’t. It was true that he’d had a hard life, the sort of life he wouldn’t wish on anyone else, but it had led him to everything he had now. A family he’d never been able to imagine for himself, and a man who loved him so much he was willing to put up with Kieron’s wild flights of fancy and come here with him, of all places, just to make him feel better.

“Who are you thinking about when you smile like that?”

“My fiancé,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

None of your business, he wanted to say, but he also wanted to talk about him. “Elanus,” he offered like a peace treaty, and his mother accepted it with a nod. “He’s an inventor. He owns his own company.” About a hundred of them, actually. “He’s not a military man, but he’s a genius.”

“Hmm.” She nodded. “He sounds like a challenge.”

“He is.” Every day with Elanus was its own particular kind of challenge. Sometimes it was exhausting, but mostly it was exhilarating. At the very least, Kieron knew he would never be bored with the man. “I need to get back to him.”

“Well, if your robot is any good at its job, there’s a very slight chance that you will.” That was about as comforting as Carlisle seemed able to be. She put her hands on her hips and looked around. “I can’t give you access to any of our weapons, they’re DNA-coded to the user, but let’s see what we can take apart in here to give you something to work with, at least.” She scowled at the little kitchen space. “I’ve always hated that automatic kettle. It boils way too fast.”

“Sounds promising.” It was a start, at least.

And with Blobby on his side, a start was all Kieron really needed.