Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Nineteen: Part One

 Notes: Let's talk...about VENGEANCE!!!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Nineteen, Part One

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Chapter Nineteen, Part One

 

 Photo by JR Korpa

“What? No.” Kieron reared back so he could look at Elanus in the eyes. “That’s not a good plan.”

“I beg to differ.”

Of course he did. Kieron should have known this was coming—Elanus didn’t believe in a proportionate response. The first person Kieron had ever known to cross him had ended up dying terribly in the middle of nowhere of radiation sickness, and that was far less dramatic than what Elanus had wanted to do to him. Elanus was incredibly logical in almost everything, except when it came to his loved ones.

Well, time to fight fire with ice and see if he could make a dent. “We’re not equipped to handle a group of nearly a hundred mercenaries who outclass us in terms of manpower, firepower, and general preparedness. We’d put ourselves at risk for no good reason.”

“You managed to deal with those negatives and triumph on your own, though,” Elanus pointed out.

“My escape was a fluke that was only possible because of my mother,” Kieron said evenly. Credit where credit was due, after all. She might have hurt him, but he couldn’t deny that she’d saved his life.

“You say that,” Elanus muttered. “But that’s not what your story sounded like to me.”

Kieron shook his head. “You don’t know enough about what happened to me yet to tell.”

“So tell me more, then.”

Kieron sighed. Just the thought of recounting it all made him feel tired, but he knew it was important to let Elanus know what they were up against. “Fine, but you stay through the whole thing and don’t interrupt me. Please.”

Elanus nodded slowly. “All right, but let’s do this with Catie too, so you don’t have to say it more than once.”

That was fair. “Okay.” Kieron moved to get up, but Elanus’s arms tightened around his waist for a moment. “You’re going to have to let me go,” Kieron pointed out gently. Elanus turned his face into Kieron’s neck, and Kieron’s will to argue vanished. “Babe.”

“Do you know how many times I’ve come close to losing you since we’ve met?” Elanus asked, his voice muffled. That sounded like a trick question to Kieron, but thankfully it was a rhetorical one as well. “Nine, and those are only the ones I know of, because I’m sure things have happened in the interim that you didn’t bother to share that could have ended with you dead.”

Okay, so he didn’t want to argue, but… “Nine seems high.”

“I’m actually downplaying some of the assassination attempts.”

“You yourself told me that those weren’t really meant to kill me.”

“I changed my mind.” Elanus’s grip tightened. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’ve been trying to adapt to the idea that I could lose you almost since I met you. I understand that there’s no point to trying to wrap you up and keep you safe; you wouldn’t let me. Even after you lost your memory—” he chuckled weakly “—and I count that as one of the near-misses, by the way, you were still so much yourself that you risked everything to kill Moreno.”

This was well-trod ground, and not worth the argument over it. Kieron stayed quiet, his arms around Elanus’s neck as he let his fiancé talk through what was bothering him.

“And it’s hard,” he went on. “It’s hard to know that I’ll never be able to control enough variables to keep you safe and healthy and with me. And you look at that and think ‘of course’ but for years, for years I had that level of control over my own life. Before I changed everything with Catie, before…and things are better now, I’m happier, but it’s still terrifying to lose that kind of control. But I’m working on it, because if I didn’t try to control myself I’d lose you anyway.”

Kieron wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t. He knew himself, and Elanus did too.

“But please consider,” Elanus went on carefully, his lips whispering the words against Kieron’s neck, “what you’re asking for when you’re asking me to not even consider retaliating. To me, that’s not solving a problem, it’s perpetuating one. If I let the problems that affected me lie, I’d have lost Catie because it would have been too much work to go after her. I wouldn’t have dared improve Lizzie’s programming to the same level, either, because it would mean too much chance for heartbreak. We’d never have met, and even if we had, I’d never have chased you into space not once, but twice.

“People who hurt the ones I love are the sort of problems I can’t let go of.” Elanus finally pulled back far enough to look at Kieron. “And if you tell me not to think about how I can keep them from hurting you, or Catie, or anyone else again in the future, I’ll inevitably disappoint you. It’s too hard, especially here, where there it’s literally the only thing there is for me to focus on. I don’t want to make you unhappy or angry with me, but—”

Kieron cut him off with a slow, sweet kiss. He didn’t want to admit that Elanus was right about this, and yet…how could he not? Relationships were about compromise, weren’t they? Kieron was always going to be a self-sacrificing, danger-courting idiot of the first degree despite his best intentions, and Elanus was always going to be a mastermind control freak who had to get the last word, and pretending otherwise was just going to damage their relationship.

Well, fuck that. And fuck this place, and his grandfather’s willing followers. “All right.”

Elanus raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“I’m not giving you a blanket ‘yes’ to doing anything you want in the name of revenge,” Kieron clarified, “but I’m not going to say we should just find a cave to hole up in until we can escape from this place either. I’ll hear out any ideas you have, I promise. And you have to promise to share them with me before doing any of them, okay?”

The next kiss they shared was sweet, but not slow. There was heat there, desire present in the insistent press of Elanus’s mouth to his, the slip of his tongue and the way he ran his hands up and down Kieron’s spine before settling on his ass and tugging him in, hard. Maybe they could—

“Daddeeee! Kieroooon! I’m boooored!”

Kieron sputtered into laughter, breaking the kiss as he laid his head down on Elanus’s shoulder. “She’s just like you.”

“My timing is so much better, are you kidding?” Elanus finally let go of Kieron’s waist, though. “Fine, let’s go alleviate our daughter’s boredom by sharing your harrowing tale of woe and coming up with some feel-good vengeance plots.”

“I do love our family bonding time,” Kieron agreed, still laughing. In the distance, he saw Bobby rolling their way. “Later,” he promised Elanus.

“But soon.”