Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Elanus

 Notes: It's time we hear from our honey again, isn't it? He's been so down and out, it's time to rev him up ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Elanus

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Interlude: Elanus

 

It was morning when Elanus finally woke up. The sun could barely be seen through the storm clouds, yet the entire planet seemed brighter than when they’d landed. A quick self-assessment told him he had an IV in one arm delivering meds and fluids, a sleek splint on his leg, and a desperate need to piss.

“Catie,” he muttered, then paused to cough around the dryness in his throat.

“Daddeee! You’re awaaake!”

“Yeah.” He carefully detached the IV and pushed up into a sitting position, then looked longingly over at the water closet. If he scooted on his butt…yeah, he could— “How long have I been out?”

“Fifteen hours exactly, Daddeee.” Catie must have noticed the absolute shock on his face, because her tone became defensive. “You neeeeded it! You were getting really sick, I thought you were going to diiiiie! But I was low on power and it tooook a while to synthesize the medicine, and then even longer for the Regen, but your leg should be a lot better noooow.”

It did feel surprisingly good. Not painless, not whole, but far better than it had before. “How did you power up so quickly?” he asked as he finally reached the toilet.

Elanus listened to Catie’s run-down of the chain of events since he’d been under. He was proud of her, even though his heart hurt at the fact that she’d been forced to do so much on her own. She was his baby…but she wasn’t a baby anymore. “Good work,” he said after he sanitized his hands. He scooted back across the floor and hoisted himself up into the pilot’s seat. “So you’re charging well, but still missing a communications array and several of your landing components.”

“Yes, Daddeee.”

“Is your skin still capable of camouflage?”

“Yes, Daddeee.”

“Good.” He sipped at the bottle of water he’d retrieved from the storebox under the control console and thought for a long moment. Without a communications array, Catie wouldn’t be able to pick up transmissions—not from space and not on-planet. That was the first problem they needed to solve. “Do we have the necessary raw materials on board for you to synthesize a new array?”

“No, Daddeee.”

Ah, so it was going to be like that. “Try again, kiddo.”

“But we don’t!” Catie insisted. “Daddeeee, the only way I could make a new communicaaaations array is if I deconstruct the medbot, and we need the medbot! It saaaved your life! What if we take it apart and you geeet worse? What if we need it for Kiiiieron?”

“We need to be able to find Kieron first,” Elanus said, doing his best to keep his sense of frustration out of his voice. “And that’s going to be a lot harder to do if we can’t listen for any broadcasts on the surface. Flying around in this weather looking for some sign of him would be like trying to find a single line of bad code in a billion, and we don’t have the weaponry for a direct assault on any bases where he might have been taken.

“Synthesize another half-dozen injections of Regen and some moldable splints that we can use for a variety of injuries, then take the medbot apart. How long before you think the array will be useful?”

Catie’s lights dimmed for a moment as she did some intense calculations. “Four-point-two hours. And another three if youuuu want the materials for my laaaanding gear.”

Almost seven hours…but they needed to be able to take off and set down quickly and safely. “Do it,” Elanus said. “The second the new array is ready for installation, let me know. We’re prioritizing that.”

“Yes, Daddeee.” There was a moment of silence. “Do you think Kiiieron is okay?”

“Absolutely.”

The surety in his voice seemed to make his daughter feel better. “Thank you, Daddee!” She settled in to the fabrication process, and Elanus sat back and watched as the lights on the medbot began to flicker out, one by one. Catie would ask for help when she needed it, but thanks to her malleable morphology, she was actually quite good at moving her own parts around. That was going to be important when it came to installing the landing gear, since he still didn’t trust his leg to support his own body weight, much less stabilize one of Catie’s feet.

It was good he’d convinced her. Now he just needed to convince himself.

Elanus didn’t like being out of contact with Kieron. Elanus didn’t trust a separation. It wasn’t that he didn’t know Kieron was tough—fuck’s sake, the man had survived being blown into space, he’d survived fatal doses of radiation, he’d survived a childhood that would have damaged most people beyond repair. Kieron was a survivor, but Kieron…he wasn’t entirely himself right now. It was too easy to forget that his fiancé was suffering from memory loss, from fucking brain damage. Could he survive whatever those punks in the gunboat threw at him? Most likely. But what if…

What if he didn’t remember all the help at his disposal? What if he didn’t think he could rely on Elanus? What if he’d made a deal with the devil in order to protect them, or to save Blobby? What if Blobby had been damaged beyond repair and Kieron was blaming himself? What if he’d decided that Elanus and the girls were better off without him, or made himself into a decoy so that they could escape the planet with the same end result?

Elanus gave himself a solid fifteen minutes to fret over all the potential futures that might take Kieron from them. He let himself feel the pain he knew would come from losing the love of his life, let himself fester in the guilt he held for contributing to Kieron’s doubt, let himself wallow in the terror of this awful planet and the many ways it could break them all. He felt it, and when the emotion was too much to bear inside himself he let it out, crying silently as he covered his eyes with his hand.

Then, when his fifteen minutes were over, Elanus tucked all those thoughts to the back of his head. He pulled up hard facts and numbers, things that were concrete and could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and let them filter the fear out. It occurred to him as he did so that this was something he’d learned, through careful observation since Kieron had never admitted to compartmentalizing like this, from his beloved.

Saving me no matter where you are. And I’ll save you back. I swear it. He was going to do everything in his power to bring his family back together. It wasn’t in his DNA to give up, and Elanus would keep going until he couldn’t possibly go anymore.

And if, at the end of it, he didn’t have everything he wanted, well then.

His focus would change rather drastically.