Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Three, Part Two

 Notes: A little resolution, a little preparation, and we're slowly winding down this one, my darlins <3

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Three, Part Two

***

Chapter Twenty-Three, Part Two

 

“I want to talk with her.”

Elanus opened his eyes slowly, pulling his consciousness out of his implant matrix and letting all the algorithms he’d set into motion continue without his oversight as he focused on his fiancé. “Good morning to you too,” he said. “You want to talk to…who now?”

“Lizzie.”

Ah. Elanus pinched his thigh with his thumb and forefinger, a dirty little trick to get him fully back into his body in a hurry. Some people dissociated when they felt pain; Kieron was among them, with pain representing little more than a mental exercise for him. It was the opposite for Elanus. Pain disturbed him in a major way; he didn’t like it, and so whenever he felt it he wanted to get rid of it as fast as possible. A little pain got his blood pumping and his brain operating at top speed, which he felt like he was going to need for this conversation. “She doesn’t want to talk to you, though.”

Which had surprised the hell out of Elanus, but he wasn’t going to make his girl do anything she didn’t want to. As soon as Lizzie had found out Kieron couldn’t remember her, she’d shut herself off from him completely, shunning even the mention of his name or any of his updates. Not even Catie could force her way past the barricades Lizzie had erected around the mention of the man she loved as a father.

“I know,” Kieron said. “But I think she might need to.”

Elanus sighed. “You don’t know that. You don’t know her. She’s not some random person you met on the streets; you two have had adventures together that were formative for her, and she’d having to deal with the fact that those adventures only exist in her mind right now. You need to give her time.”

Kieron glared at him. “If you were serious about her mental health, you’d have found her a therapist.”

Elanus was stung. “She doesn’t want a therapist. What good have therapists done any of us lately, anyway? Look at what yours got away with.” Or her wife, whatever—same legal entity. Both of them were currently under house arrest, a palliative gesture by Moreno that would amount to nothing because Elanus was going to tear his throne down and burn it to ashes no matter what.

“Just because mine turned out shady doesn’t mean every therapist will. Besides. You refer to Lizzie as a girl. A child—someone with a juvenile mentality.”

Elanus didn’t like where this was going. “Yes…”

“Then she shouldn’t be making all her own health and wellness decisions anyway.” Kieron crossed his arms. “If I’d gotten my way when I was thirteen, I would probably have ended up killing myself before a year was out.” Elanus flinched. “I didn’t get my way; I had to undergo a metric ton of therapy in order to stay on Trakta, and I hated it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t help.”

“Look at you, remembering more and more about your life.” His past, specifically. Kieron remembered almost all of his shitty childhood, yay, and almost all of his years on Trakta at this point. Finding out Zak was dead had been traumatizing all over again, and he’d yet to remember anything specific about his relationship with Elanus or their daughters. All he seemed to understand was that when he thought about them, he loved them.

For Catie, that was enough. She dealt well in abstracts; Catie was ephemeral in taste, mood, and programming. She could accept that Kieron had both forgotten her and that he still loved her without any sort of dissonance, for which Elanus was fucking thankful.

Lizzie, on the other hand, was a creature of concrete ideas. She liked hard data, evidence, things to review and store away and reference. Feelings weren’t enough, in and of themselves; they needed to be supported by facts. And the facts, to her, were this: Kieron didn’t remember her or any of the things they’d done together. That rendered his love for her moot; he couldn’t truly love her because he didn’t know who she was.

Elanus had been arguing against her point ever since she made it, but…Kieron was right. Elanus hadn’t pushed very hard because, well…Lizzie seemed so adult. What even was her age, anyway? How could he even track her mental development with any sort of reliable metric, when there were only two beings like Lizzie in existence and one of them was content to remain, mentally, a young child? Lizzie didn’t want to talk about Kieron, she didn’t want to acknowledge he existed, but that just wasn’t healthy. She loved Kieron. She adored him; Elanus was pretty sure Kieron was his younger daughter’s favorite person. It wasn’t good for her to pretend like he was gone, or dead, or had never existed. All that would do was leave a hole in her sweet little heart, whatever form it took.

“She might not say anything,” Elanus pointed out.

“That’s fine. She doesn’t have to. She just needs to know that I’m there for her, and I’m going to make an effort whether she listens to me or not.”

“That sounds incredibly frustrating for you.”

Kieron shrugged. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever been through.”

“Given that the things you currently remember include your completely abysmal and abusive youth, I don’t think that’s an endorsement.”

Kieron, damn him, smiled at that. “You’re really sweet, you know that? Sometimes I’m not sure what you see in me, but then you talk to me like this and I know there’s got to be something special between us.”

Ow. Having a literal hole punched through his heart might hurt less. “I love you.”

“I know.” Kieron came over and kissed his forehead. “You tell me every time I see you. You make sure I don’t languish in the darkness alone.”

Oh, you asshole. “That’s what you think I’m doing with Lizzie, isn’t it.”

“I think you’re giving her every opportunity to talk to you, or Catie, or even Pol and Xilinn,” Kieron said. “I also thing they’re not the ones she has an issue with. It’s me. And Restaria, but xe’s gone.” Xe was gone as of yesterday, off to Olympus in one of their transport ships, and Elanus was fiercely glad to see the back of xir. “Let me do what I can to mend the bridge.”

Elanus sighed. “It’s not your fault, though. You didn’t mean to forget her. She knows that, she understands that—”

“She understands it intellectually, but that’s not the same as feeling it.” Kieron kissed him again. “If you really think it’s a bad idea, I won’t do it…yet. But I think it would do both of us some good, eventually.”

As long as Lizzie didn’t throw a tantrum as big as a minor moon, yes. “Do it, then,” Elanus said, looping his arms around Kieron’s waist and pulling him in close. Kieron hugged him immediately, and Elanus felt a headache he hadn’t even consciously registered begin to die down. God, Kieron’s hugs were a drug. “But don’t get upset when she doesn’t talk to you.”

“I won’t,” Kieron promised. “I can be patient with her.”

And hopefully Lizzie will be patient with the rest of us.

Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Three, Part One

 Notes: On we go!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Three, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty-Three, Part One

 

So. This was what it felt like to be totally unmoored, lost in the depths of space and wondering whether or not he was going to bump up against the right planet or not.

It was an unfair comparison, Elanus knew that. Kieron was right here, lying in their bed, asleep instead of unconscious for the first time in days. Neither of them was lost, not exactly, but…shit, how long had it been since Elanus had had to manage without Kieron? Over a year. More than a year of having him, sometimes having each other so intensely it was remarkable they didn’t hate each other in all honesty, a year of pain and injury and anguish and a love so intense that it seemed to spread to every corner of Elanus’s life.

And it could be so much worse, he had to remember that. It could be so much worse. He had Kieron alive. They were together. Kieron might not remember him perfectly, not yet, but regular Regen injections over the next few weeks would probably do a lot to help him. He would probably remember their past together, the life they’d been building. He had better remember the girls, because that was a pain that Elanus just didn’t know how to help. He couldn’t do it on his own; he couldn’t make them another father or find them a different version of the same thing. Kieron was Kieron, and he’d built special relationships with both of their daughters. They needed him, and he needed to remember that.

It's been one day. Less than a day. Five hours. And he’s more upset about this than you are, so stop wallowing and start figuring out the rest of your shit. First things first: finishing off Moreno.

It went without saying that Moreno couldn’t be president. Elanus had prepared for a hard sell to Caria, and it was hard, but not for the reasons that Elanus had thought it would be.

“Putting me into a position of authority over an entire planet is a farce!” she’d cried as she’d stalked about the room, a drink in one hand while the other gesticulated wildly. “Look at my track record for good decisions, hmm? I fostered an insanely brilliant mind in Deysan and then lost him to greed and envy. I turned my back on you when the two of you started sparring and you ended up being right about everything. I refused to believe there was a conspiracy going on in the highest levels of our government about the existence of Elfshot Disease, and even that turned out to be true! How can I be a good leader when I can’t even tell the difference between right and wrong?”

“You don’t have to do it for long,” Elanus pointed out. “Be the interim president, be there long enough to stabilize things and put an official stamp on the work that needs to happen. In a year, if you want to put forward a new name for office, you can and we can formalize an election. But that process needs to be cleaned out as well, or it’s going to be the same old political families rising up over and over again, and I think we’ve seen that they’re not prepared to change as needed.”

Given that Moreno was even now “investigating” the heinous attack on the Cabinet that had been captured on camera by Restaria and sent to Fritz, who’d just broadcasted it from his studio a few hours ago, it was safe to say that change came slowly. If Moreno had the slightest hint of self preservation, he’d be liquidating his assets and getting his ass off-planet as quickly as possible. Instead, he was entrenching. He was settling in to fight.

Fine. Elanus was more than ready for a fucking fight.

Already the polls were against Moreno, thanks to some careful social media sculpting led by none other than Catie. Lizzie, for her part, was slowly breaking in to the technological leviathan of a stronghold in which Moreno had shut himself away, capturing bits and pieces of his code and integrating them into a system-wide virus that she would trigger on Elanus’s order. His girls did flawless work, and soon Moreno would learn that, to his detriment.

Caria had come around, as Elanus had known she would, with the promise that she wouldn’t have to stay in the position for long. The only issue was making sure she was able to stay in it—technically, they were going to be breaking a number of treaties with the Alliance government they were a part of, and if this was interpreted through the lens of being a coup, things could get very bad very quickly. Even with the Central System armed forces in a shambled right now, they still had way more armaments at their disposal than Elanus could get his hands on or make in a hurry.

That was where Restaria was going to come in. Xe was going to be the emissary of Gania’s cause to the current president of the Alliance, none other than a man who’d been accused a time or two of instigating a coup himself—Sigurd Liang. Once in charge of the Academy on Olympus, now the admiral was in charge of holding the entire Alliance together. There had been several moments when Elanus was sure things were going to slip into utter chaos, yet Admiral Liang always seemed to be able to pull it back again.

The last thing a man like that needed was a distraction in the form of one of their outer allied planets enacting a coup. No, Restaria was going to go there, undone and unaccompanied except by an AI who would keep a close eye on xir, and xe was going to explain every fucking thing to Liang all on xir own. And then…well. They could keep xir or get rid of xir, what the fuck ever. Elanus didn’t care as long as Restaria never, ever came back to Gania.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That was painfully true in Restaria’s case.

“Elanus.”

He cleared his throat. “Go ahead, Lizzie.”

“I’ve got eighty percent of Moreno’s built-in systems linked and prepared to be locked on your signal. It will take another five hours to get to eighty-five percent, and another full day to approximate a hundred percent. His algorithms get much denser the closer to the center of his web I get.”

“Eighty percent should be adequate,” he said. “Begin the process, but only in the fringe of the system. I want Caria and Fritz to be there for the takedown. She needs to be seen as being in control.”

“So that you aren’t.”

“Exactly.” He paused. “And what about the other little project I had you look into?”

Lizzie hummed. “I verified the release of data didn’t come from the office of Delilah Farraday. It was from a personal implant modem belonging to Ghislaine Farraday.”

Her wife. Her loving, Ganian wife betrayed her trust and sold her patient out to Restaria. “Thank you.”

“What do you want to do about them, Elanus?”

“I’m still thinking about it,” he said, running one hand delicately through Kieron’s hair. His fiancé didn’t stir, too tired to wake. That was fine.

He could sleep for now. Elanus would take care of him. He’d be here for Kieron, no matter how long it took to set him to rights. As for the rest of it…

Well, all that would be settled much, much more quickly.

Chelen City: Interlude 7: Kieron

 Notes: And he's awake again! But not without some complications. Let's just read on and...not kill me.

Title: Chelen City: Interlude 7: Kieron

***

Interlude 7: Kieron

 

Kieron opened his eyes, blinked them against the too-bright light, and grimaced at the gritty feel of his lids scraping against his eyeballs.

“Consciousness achieved.”

Oh god, was that the autodoc announcement system? What the fuck, why was he in the autodoc?

“Initiating final scan.”

Final scan of…what? Why…where was everyone? He looked around the room blearily, but apart from a second regen tank that was still humming merrily along, there was no one else in here.

“Applying restoratives.”

Restorative wha—“Fuck,” he shouted as a mobile arm suddenly spritzed his eyes with moisturizer. Then he almost gagged as a straw was thrust in his direction fast enough to go not just into his mouth but close enough to his damn throat that he barely even tasted the water.

“Safety measures deactivated. Welcome back to perfect health, Kieron Carr.”

“Perfect health?” he spluttered. What had gone wrong with his fucking health? What was this? And why…why didn’t he remember anything?

He’d barely gotten past sitting up when a small, dark-haired woman ran into the room. She was wearing a full-length dress that had a silvery gleam, and black shoes on her feet even though they were indoors. Her anxious expression melted into a smile as she saw him. “Kieron, you’re awake!”

“I…” He knew her, he knew that he knew her, her name was… “Xilinn?”

“Yes!” She came over and extended her hands in a gesture of welcome, but didn’t touch him. Not surprising—it felt like half his skin had been regenerated. He was a patchwork of hypersensitive spots laid next to normal functioning ones, and even though he couldn’t see the difference between them, he could clearly feel it. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re awake. It’s been five days, we thought you would be back with us after three, but the damage went deeper than Elanus had anticipated. He—Kieron?” She frowned as she looked a little more closely at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Is Elanus my doctor?” Kieron asked cautiously.”

“No…” Xilinn said. “Kieron, where do you think you are?”

“I have no clue,” he said honestly. “When I saw you I thought Trakta, but I feel like—” The second he considered it, he knew he was wrong. “We’re not allowed there, though. Are we.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, we’re not. Lizzie?”

“Yes, Xilinn?”

Hang on, whose voice was that? The house AI? But it didn’t sound like the standard house AI. It wasn’t professional and dispassionate. This voice sounded…concerned. Plus, who named their house AI Lizzie?

“Has Elanus been alerted to Kieron’s status change?” Xilinn asked.

“Yes. He should be here in ten-point-two-five minutes.” There was a pause, and then, “Kee? Are you okay?”

Kee? Was that him? When had this person given him a pet name? How were they close enough for her to give him a pet name? No one outside of Zak did that.

And Zak…Zak was dead. Kieron wasn’t sure how he knew that, but it felt incontrovertible. Zak was dead, and Xilinn was here instead of with her other spouses, and Pol was—

“Where’s Pol?” he asked.

Her face brightened. “You remember Pol?”

“I do. And…” He was going to ask about [name], but he already knew that she wasn’t here. Wherever here was. “Where are we?” he asked with a very unsubtle pivot.

“In Chelen City,” Xilinn said. “On Gania.”

“Gania…” That was a planet he hadn’t thought about in a long time, if ever. Kieron knew of it, sure—he knew it was a planet founded by convicts, he knew it was populated by a very wealthy elite, he knew they had weight and money to throw around outside the Central System…but none of that explained why he was here. “Who do we know on Gania?”

Xilinn sighed. “Oh my. Kieron, what goes through your mind when I say the name Elanus Desfontaines?”

Kieron let the words wash over him. He sat with them, let them roll about in his head, finally let them settle, and…

“Nothing.”

“Fuck.”

Kieron knew he shouldn’t stare, but he’d never, in all the time he’d known her, heard Xilinn swear like that. “Xil!”

She pulled back and began pacing. “Oh fuck,” she repeated. “He was worried about this. You took so much damage to the [part], and he got you into Regen quickly but there’s only so much it can do when it comes to preserving memory as well as function. Fuck.” She stared at him determinedly. “Well. This is unacceptable.”

“What is?” he asked, completely lost.

“It’s just, it’s not—Lizzie,” she said, “you have to make sure Elanus knows about this, all right? Don’t let him rush in here blind, I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“I’ll inform him, Xilinn.”

“Get hurt why?” Kieron demanded. He was starting to shiver.

“Oh, Kieron.” Xilinn noticed his discomfort. “Hang on, let me get you fresh clothes. I’ll be right back.” She vanished, and Kieron took advantage of being along again to dry himself off with the towel that had been provided by the regen unit—weird, most of them didn’t bother—and wrack his brain over what the fuck he was doing on Gania some more.

It felt odd to be so unmoored in his own mind. Kieron didn’t know where he was supposed to be; he couldn’t think of where he’d just been or the last thing he remembered or what he was meant to do next. He remembered Xilinn quickly enough, and through her Pol and Zak, but trying to visualize Lizzie was giving him a headache.

Gania. Good grief, why had he come here? Whoever Elanus was, was he the reason Kieron had decided to come here, so far from everything he’d ever known? What purpose did he have in a city on a planet full of giants owned by hedonists and criminals? What the fuck was he doing here? Why the hell had he—

Kieron heard steps running in the hallway. He kept the towel across his groin so he wouldn’t scandalize Xilinn, then looked over at the door and—

A person skidded to a halt in the entrance. Not Xilinn—not Traktan. Ganian. A man, over seven feet tall, with close-cut brown hair shaved in skintight whorls from the tip of his chin over the top of his head. He was handsome, in a long, lanky kind of way, and when Kieron met those [color] eyes in the face that was trying so desperately hard to be stoic—

Fuck, what was this emotion? Why did it feel so overwhelming to look at this man? What was happening inside his chest, an ache so painful and sweet all at once? Why did he…why did he…

“I…love you,” Kieron said, sure of how he felt even though it was such a novel emotion—maybe because it was such a novel emotion. “I don’t—I don’t know—how do I—Elanus.” He reached out, knowing it was stupid and he’d probably be hurt, but then…

Elanus came to him and enfolded him in his arms, pressing his lips to the top of Kieron’s head. “Sweetheart,” he said, and Kieron hid his face in Elanus’s chest and tried to understand why he was crying.

He didn’t, but it didn’t seem to matter. Elanus held on anyway.