Page 38 of Cloverleaf Station

They always were, of course. You could change the outside all you liked, but the inside never changed. Whatever was at the heart of you, that was what you would go through life with. People could lie to everyone else about it, they could even lie to themselves, but in the end, the truth would always out.

Kieron was blunt and inelegant. He was suited to life on Cloverleaf Station, suited to an existence playing guardian to a rotating group of renegades who needed nothing more from him than a place to sleep, food to eat, and someone to keep them all from killing each other. He needed to remember that.

“Finished,” the medbot said, and Kieron blinked down at the blue lights glowing beneath him and wondered how it had been five minutes already. “Please wait another five minutes for the anesthetic to dissipate. Your painkiller has already been injected. You will need another injection in twelve hours.”

“Switch the implant on.”

“That is inadvisable so quickly after connection. Your central cortex has been under stimulated for the past—”

“Switch it on!” Kieron insisted. It was time to get back to business as usual—no more of Catalina’s voice echoing through the room, no more getting distracted by her light shows. Time to buckle down.

“Switching on implant.”

It started like static—a fuzzy feeling that traveled from the back of his neck to the space right behind his forehead. Even with a painkiller, Kieron felt like his brain was about to throb right out of his skull. He pressed one hand to his head in a futile attempt to soothe the ache, didn’t dare open his eyes and risk seeing nothing but blackness, and then—

“Keeron? Keeron!”

Catalina was there, smoothing out the edges of the static, covering the harshness of the new connection like a warm blanket in his mind. Kieron opened his eyes and saw the stats overlay come up like it used to, but in the lower right corner was a new icon—a glowing pink eye. Catalina.

“You have some fucking nerve.”

Ah, right … the procedure was over, so the door to the clinic was open now. Kieron turned and looked at Elenus, who seemed on the verge of bursting a blood vessel.

Join the club.

***

The shouting stopped when Kieron began wincing every other word, but the strong hand holding onto his arm as it towed him back to his rooms had a grip so tight that Kieron didn’t think he could get out of it as he currently was. If he hadn’t been coming off surgery? No problem; Elenus was strong, but he wasn’t a fighter. Right now, though …

Kieron relaxed into the hold and let Elenus lead the way, closing his eyes to spare his brain some pain. The medbot hadn’t been kidding about overstimulation; even with Catalina’s help, the elevated sensory input left him throbbing, almost as though his mind was being scraped out to make room for all the new equipment. It was easier to ignore everything but Elenus’s hand, the brisk tug as they walked down the hallway, the smell of Catalina’s fabricator clinging to his clothes …

Kieron stopped when Elenus did, let the other man pull him into the darkened room that they’d been sharing for a while now, and lie him down on the bed.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Elenus said, thankfully with a low voice now. “The lengths you go to in order to avoid acting like a human being with human needs. You should have told me you wanted the implant back in. I could have made that surgery go so much more smoothly. We could have prepared your room, prepared you better for it. Now Catalina’s pouting because she can’t talk to you through your feed without giving you a fucking nosebleed, and she can’t see you in person yet either.”

“Sorry,” Kieron whispered. It was the best he could do.

“Don’t say sorry, just do better.” Elenus pulled the blanket up over Kieron’s body. “What set you off, anyway?”

Kieron was too tired to dissemble. “Made her upset.”

“Who, Catalina? Because of—is this because of what you said about Moritz?” The silence must have been answer enough because he sighed in that way that Kieron knew meant he was also rolling his eyes. “It was a minor slipup, not the end of the world. If I had to get mad at everyone who inadvertently reminded my baby of what that asshole did to her, I would be mad at myself every hour of every single day.” He paused long enough to lie down and stretch out next to Kieron, delicately weaving his long fingers into the hair on the top of Kieron’s head.

Kieron winced in anticipation of those fingers accidentally floating over his implant, but they avoided the entire back of his head, instead scratching in slow, rhythmic circles over the safe spots on top. In ten seconds, Kieron felt his shoulders and neck relax. In thirty, he actually felt his scalp relax, something he hadn’t even known was possible. The awful pain finally began to ease.

“Closeness doesn’t preclude hurt,” Elenus finally said, effortlessly picking up the conversation. “We always hurt the ones we care about. As long as it’s accidental, that’s just something to deal with and move on from. If it’s deliberate, well, there’s therapy for that. But I know you weren’t being deliberate, and I know you care about Catalina.”

Kieron didn’t speak—he couldn’t, he didn’t want to do anything to restart his headache—but he sighed more deeply, his own little effort at affirmation.

“Yeah. Exactly. Honestly, there’s only so much room for rage in me, and I can’t spare any of it for being angry at you anymore. I can hardly even spare any of it for being angry at myself, and if anyone deserves to be punished as an accessory to Catalina’s torture, it’s me. I trusted a monster, and he abused that trust. Catalina has forgiven me—if she was ever really mad at me to begin with—but I’ll never quite be able to forgive myself.” He shrugged. “Which is fine as long as I don’t dwell on it, and that I learn from what I did wrong. Now.

“Here’s the part I want you to really get through that fucking thick skull of yours, okay? Take it as a fact or on faith or whatever you have to do, but get this: Catalina loves you. She’s still a child, and she reacts like a child, but she loves you. She doesn’t want you to hurt yourself over idle words or feel bad because of her. You’re her hero. Enjoy that for as long as you can because every other parent I’ve ever met has reliably informed me that this phase doesn’t last for long.”

Kieron huffed. He didn’t deserve to be anyone’s hero, but … he didn’t get to tell Catie how to feel either.

“Yeah, so, communication is important in any relationship but especially with a child. No running away and doing dangerous, painful surgery on yourself without backup whenever you two get into a tiff.” Elenus brushed some of Kieron’s hair back behind his ear. “You stay and talk it out. Or take some time apart, then talk it out before you have brain surgery. Got it?”

Kieron hummed.