R-16: Twilight, part 1 [complete!]
Probably going to be missing non-important italics too, because...I'm lazy today.
Aaaand here we go~!
Title: Twilight
Timeline: V
(By Shannon again)
Pairings: Reed/Aptsan, Damian/Quinn/Lucas, Lucas/ZackaryRurniel/Marquis
SUMMARY: (Warning: Time Skip!) After the Alliance's final defeat of R-16, Rurniel and Co. have been running for their lives. The Alliance has finally caught up with them, and Rurniel's in critical condition. Reed takes matters into his own hands and calls in his final debt, an old acquaintance named Quinn Helldirge-Johnson...
TWILIGHT
I
Reed slammed into the wall, breathing in sharply from the pain, green eyes immediately checking Aptsan.
He was still breathing hard, handling the controls of their tiny ship expertly, gritting his teeth and flicking through the pilot’s information screens at a rate Reed could barely even follow.
“He okay?” Aptsan shouted out over the din of alarms and the muted music that flooded everywhere Rurniel could possibly end up in.
“Still bleeding bad,” Reed reported, throwing himself into the chair opposite weapons control. “He’s out cold, possible concussion, and needs medical attention.” The hum of the console was strangely comforting in a life-or-death situation. “I didn’t want to stimulus him awake just to die.” He knew they were both trying not to notice how empty the bridge felt without Rurniel in his hook-up chair
Aptsan actually laughed. “Aww, Schnookums, ever the caring one.”
“Don’t call me Schnookums,” Reed said distantly, focusing on the analysis of the attacking behemoth of a ship. “Does the Alliance know-know, or just suspect it’s us?”
Another blast crashed into the ship.
“Oh, I’d say they know,” Aptsan grinned ferally.
“Good, then,” Reed said absently, and pressed the big red button.
“Masochist,” Aptsan muttered as the silent whorling of the chargers built up, checking his straps as Reed did the same.
“Brace for impact in ten,” Reed stated.
“Shit, I hate when we have to use this thing…”
“Five.”
Reed’s hands grabbed the handles all stations on The Phantom had, and didn’t even bother with the countdown anymore, the sound was that deafening. Instead he watched the gigantic red numbers counting down as they flickered and wavered in slow motion, from five, to three, and then to one.
For an endless moment, the ship went silent, all the power being sucked into the Atomo-Expansion Dissipater blast (affectionately dubbed “the planet-twister” by Aptsan) before the shriek of metal crushing against metal ripped out of the side of the ship.
The AED didn’t look very impressive- just a single beam of violet light that touched down on the massive Alliance Starglider’s hull, and then a thin ball of light that shot down and exploded half the thing’s side off in a burst of lovely blacker-than-black light with pools of the disconjoined atoms billowing together in clouds.
“You missed the bridge,” Aptsan said.
The jamming frequency from the Starglider cut off abruptly.
“I know.”
---
AD 6220.
With the defeat of the rebel forces known at R-16 at the Battle of Lecae, it seems as if the Alliance has truly won.
The dissolution of R-16 was swift, the established order and pseudo-government falling into small segments of guerilla forces. Some whole divisions stayed together, still considering themselves part of the age-old R-16. Others went off on their own, defeated and disheartened at the loss.
With the invasion of Zisoro in 6218, Alliance forces now occupied two of the four R-16 bases, and had destroyed a third. But it had not come without a cost.
General Rann Sul, the infamous man nicknamed the “Wolf of the Alliance”, had up and disappeared with his vice-generals Beatrix Talos and And Korialis, acclaimed Special Unit Wrey Cross disappearing less than a week later. The death tolls were absurd. Half the space fleet was either in drastic need of repairs or utterly destroyed.
And, quite possibly most importantly, there was still one Grand General of R-16 unaccounted for.
Most considered him killed in action- surely a Grand General wouldn’t up and leave when his base was under attack? Others said his Commanders, known for being helplessly devoted to the man, had knocked him out and shipped him away to safety. Even others said he’d betrayed the rebellion, now working immediately under the High Admiral of the Alliance himself.
But whatever the reason, the fact remained that Grand General Rurniel remained missing, and most likely highly dangerous.
The Alliance wanted him.
And they usually got what they wanted.
---
“Well, one down, three to go,” Aptsan grinned.
“We only had one AED blast left,” Reed stated.
Aptsan’s grin fell off abruptly. “But Rurniel-”
“He can instantly calculate and determine the needed energy into a trillionth of a watt,” Reed said, putting the screen back over the big red button. “All I can do is push the damn button.”
The next Alliance ship- this one a much smaller but much, much faster Nova – blipped onto the screen, hurrying forward from behind them.
“She’s fast enough,” Aptsan said, almost absentmindedly, his long, pointed ears twitching.
“Yes, she is,” Reed said, not even sure he believed his own words as he started calculating trajectories to nearby planets, knowing that even if they could outrace a Nova, there was no way in hell they could outgun it with their final AED blast gone.
Ignoring the jostling on the ship from the Nova’s shots, he scrolled through them, looking for somewhere safe, somewhere Alliance ships wouldn’t dare---
“Warp path 2.43.9766,” Reed shouted out, and Aptsan actually turned to gape at him.
“What the FUCK are you talking about?” he roared. “We are NOT taking Rurniel to a fucking ‘WILDLIFE PRESERVE’.” Even though his hands remained firmly on the controls, Reed could just hear the quotation marks. “And we both know what sort of wild lives they preserve on THAT one.”
“Just trust me for once,” Reed snapped back, green eyes glaring through his near-broken glasses. “2.43.9766. You can kill me later.”
“I’m holding you to that,” Aptsan growled, and punched the coordinates into the warp computer, which did the calculations SO much slower than Rurniel for the warp path.
Reed catapulted himself into the central chair – Rurniel’s – and poised his hands over the communications controls as the swirling pink-purple light shot out of the tip of the ship and tore the gate out of the ether.
With a half-assed prayer, Aptsan sent the ship careening through the gate.
---
“I really, really hate you sometimes,” Quinn Helldirge-Johnson sighed as he stepped back into his boxers, sending a glare towards the bed. “BOTH of you.”
“Now that’s just cold,” Damian Helldirge mock-gasped, a practiced look of betrayal surfacing on his features.
“Cruel,” Lucas Johnson agreed, burrowing deeper into the pillow with an unseen but very apparent grin. “And hot.”
Quinn pegged him with a sock. “BAD twin.”
"Evil twin," Damian corrected. “Sociopath, sadistic, incestuous twin.”
“And it gets you painfully hard,” Lucas stated, one blue eye opening just enough to send a devilish glance at the dark-haired man still in bed with him.
“Damn you and your no-non-Quinn-sex law,” Damian sighed dramatically. “Now you’ll never get to know.”
“Which is why I hate you both sometimes,” Quinn muttered, tugging his pants on and ignoring the blatant disappointment on the other two’s faces while he stepped into his well-worn boots. The white tank top went on after that, and then the suspenders were pulled up, and then the long black and red coat that came standard for any high-ranking person on Hemos.
“Shit, Quinn, that outfit just makes me want to undress you more,” Damian sighed.
“I just put all this work into getting into it,” Quinn frowned. “You are NOT tearing it off with your teeth.”
“But you usually love my teeth!”
“Ten minutes ‘till it’s your shift,” Lucas mumbled into the pillow. Neither of the other men seemed surprised that the other twin knew exactly what time it was, even if there wasn’t a clock anywhere near the bed in their custom cabin onboard The Loyalty. “J will have your head if you don’t relieve him on time.”
“And they’re both lovely, so I guess we better let him go.” Damian was, as ever, genuinely disappointed at the prospect.
“We’re on eight hour shifts,” Quinn reminded him for possibly literally the millionth time. “I’ll be back before Hemos-sunrise.”
“You’re not allowed to die,” Lucas’ muffled voice into the pillow was succinct, completely without humor.
“I know.”
“And you’re not allowed to get some other bastard to fall helplessly in love with you,” Damian said, smiling.
Quinn smiled back. “I know.”
And that’s when the page that sent Quinn Helldirge-Johnson running to his commander’s chair on the bridge blared through the all-ship speakers.
---
They were going to die, Aptsan decided, as he watched the young man (probably fifteen or sixteen at most) in the commander’s chair glare through the communications screen. But all this time spent under the command of someone over forty years younger than him had skewed his perspective of age, so that the Ndhaz judged by rank and power, not age and accent.
It had saved his neck before. He didn’t think it’d help much this time, though.
“And you think we’ll give you sanctuary for what reason, exactly?” A smooth voice with a jarringly courteous edge to it emerged from the young man’s smiling mouth.
“We’ve got a wounded kid- er, teenager onboard that needs immediate medical attention,” Aptsan stated, half watching the young captain’s reaction (which was little to nothing) and half watching the surrounding area for the pursuing Alliance ships.
“I’m sorry, but we have no medical staff on our ship,” the kid said apologetically, but not TOO apologetically. “However, I could give you the warp paths of many dedicated medical are-”
Reed finally pushed the button on his console, the one that turned their ship’s display from Aptsan’s seat to the whole of the bridge, and the boy shut up disturbingly fast.
“Get se…Quinn, please,” he stated. “I’ve got a favor to call in.”
“And who is calling on this Quinn?” the captain asked, voice dripping with barely-contained curiosity.
Reed paused for a minute. “Tyler.”
It was probably the first time Aptsan had ever heard him choose to use his first name with someone other than Rurniel and himself, and most certainly the first time he’d said it over a non-secure channel.
“Hold, please,” the young captain said, and the screen went blank, the sound of both sides muted.
“…you don’t get to fuck us over even more than we already are, you know.”
“I know,” Reed said, eyes distant behind his glasses.
Aptsan quirked an eyebrow up, trying to avoid the ever-hypocritical jealousy biting at his nerves. “And why the hell do you know someone who lives at a ‘wildlife reserve’, anyway? There something you’re not telling me?”
“Many things,” Reed stated. “And at the time he didn’t live here. He came to me.”
Aptsan found he had a death grip on his already-strangled controls. “And what the fuck does THAT mean exactly?” he gritted out.
Reed quirked an eyebrow up. “That I was nine and you don’t have anything to be jealous over other than how I can actually shoot and you can’t?”
He figured a glare and a sharp “fuck off” was enough of an answer to that little comment. This brought about one of their strangely intimate, amicable silences, where Reed smiled just enough to get Aptsan’s stupid heart fluttering and Aptsan knew he was probably leering the shit out of his fellow ex-Commander and that silent feeling of RIGHTNESS fell over them like a warm blanket.
“TYLER!” an unfamiliar voice shouted over the channel, and Reed’s face went utterly blank as he pressed the communications button.
He was blond. Taller than Aptsan, human, and looking at Reed like he was risen from the dead. Which, considering Reed’s track record, might not be far off from what the guy was thinking. Worst of all, he was downright DASHING, and looked like the super-friendly nice guy that charmed you into bed to tear your face off. No, those lips weren’t fooling him, the guy was obviously a native of Hemos with teeth like that.
Aptsan immediately hated him.
“Sensei,” Reed stated in that creepily quiet voice he got into when really pissed, really emotional (please NOT that one or else he’d screw the ship’s power capabilities and AED the blond bastard into oblivion), or really, really cautious or confused. Or if you were talking to the Ghost side of him, but that hadn’t happened since Zisoro fell (and again, if this blond blood-sucker did that to Reed, he’d be AED’d before he could even TRY to send Reed into battle).
“Tyler, get on the ground, NOW,” this Sensei Quinn bastard said, voice almost disgustingly concerned, like he was dealing with puppies or lost babies or something. “You’ve got three Alliance ships gating out after you.”
“Naah, really?!” Aptsan couldn’t help but call out. “Damn. Coulda sworn they were giant butterflies.”
Reed’s small smile was back, and Reed with it. “Joint quarters, please.” Aptsan grinned at the stunned blink that the stupid Sensei barely caught. “And we’ll need immediate medical attention.”
“Understood,” Quinn said in a way that was probably endearing to people not itching for his evil, vampiric neck to be snapped. “I’m looking forward to spending time with you and your, ah, friend when this is over.”
“I bet you are,” Aptsan muttered, and it looked like nobody heard him. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but who really cared? He had a slowly shutting-down ship to land on a planet that was half water, and the other half was either a canyon or a forest.
“…Tyler out,” Reed stated, and with a mutual nod and a final smile from Mr. Happy the channel was cut. “Aptsan, you and Rurniel are making up new identities immediately.”
“Kinda busy here…” Aptsan grit out, running computation after computation through the landing-nav, eyes whizzing past the numbers and trajectories and propulsion and inertial variants-
“Then I’ll make them for you.”
It was a shame Aptsan didn’t hear him over the roar of the craft entering Hemos’ atmosphere, or he would have managed to talk Reed out of ruining their lives for however long they were stuck on the vampiric planet.
---
Grand General Rurniel generally entered a room in a foul, impressive temper, glaring at everyone his disturbingly mismatched eyes could catch as he stormed through to whatever had pried him away from his work. He had an undeniable presence of both awe and apprehension on all who saw him.
When Grand General Rurniel lost Zisoro and went to being Alliance Renegade Rurniel, he lost none of that. In fact, if anything, it added an almost unbearable air of mystery, a darker fire in his eyes than before, and even more age, both biological and emotional. Although he was still growing, he was sixteen now, and it was a fact that the lost Wired child bathed in blood had grown up VERY well.
But, when Rurn Frisco, foster child of Tyler and Aptsan Frisco, was wheeled into the laboratory of one Dr. Zackary Pending, holder of nearly 80 PhDs and 15 MDs, he was just a bloody, pale mess whose mental stability was possibly in even more trouble than that of his slowly breaking body.
Dr. Zackary Pending had short dark brown hair with big, pretty brown eyes, one flecked with the ineffective silver points of early Wiring techniques, the other holding the multi-colored varnish of the modern Wired individual, although less obvious than most other circuit-bound people in the galaxy. There was barely any circuitry visible on his body, aside from at his fingers, and in sunglasses he could have easily passed for a natural.
He had expected no less, especially for how much he had paid to have it done.
His fingers brushed back long purple hair as the nurse scrambled for his instruments. The kid’s eyes were still open, face caught in an empty sense of horror, breathing fast and shallow. Zackary would have been worried about hyperventilation if the young man hadn’t been fully Wired, but since that kept most basic functions regulated he didn’t bother.
Instead, he jabbed the connecting cable into his eye and then the young man’s, and instantly regretted it.
electric cage of bitter knowledge crushed in around him angry and cold and YOU ARE NOT WELCOME
“It’s for your own good,” Zackary snapped out, attempting to force some sort of order on this chaotic world that was pressing on him to LEAVE – “Tyler and Aptsan sent me!”
The world went dark, and he was suddenly sprawled on cold tile in a dim room, fresh blood-stains splattered against the walls and floor, blood dripping down from the elevated metal grating that obviously served as an operating bed and trickling into the drain below.
…you sure don’t look like someone they’d send.
It was two voices at once, and Zackary looked at the operating table again to see two figures sitting on it. The first was a cold, dangerous adult with glowing silver eyes and long purple hair that now fell all the way to the blood-soaked tile below. The second was a child with prismatic, confused eyes and short purple hair, sitting in the adult’s lap like his life depended on it. In return, the adult was holding the child like a beloved teddy bear made of spun glass that he’d protect to the bitter end.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Zackary replied to the both of them, already working on why exactly this Rurn character would choose to have their most concrete mental plane be…THIS. “I’m a doctor. And Wired.”
Obviously. What do you want.
“To help you,” Zackary stated. “You’ve been injured, hurt very bad, and my team’s working on your body while I attempt to aid you mentally here.” The two tilted their heads at the same time, at the same angle, but to completely different effects. The adult was both warning and threat, the child curiosity and amusement.
How are you going to help?
Don’t you just want to suck our blood?
Who hurt us? Are the others okay?
Zackary stared at the two. They’d spoken differently, but…it was still the same voice, one too young for the adult and too old for the child.
“You barely have enough blood left to suck,” Zackary said, almost wry but trying VERY hard to not provoke the patient’s blatantly lethal wrath. “I don’t know who hurt you, or if the others are okay.” He paused, looking at the two again. “And I’m going to help by having you tell me what exactly freaked you out enough to split into a hurt-comfort splice.”
We’re always like this.
“We just don’t show it,” said a new voice, but also the old one, and in the corner stood the full representation of the patient, leaning against a bloodstain with a casual air that sent a shudder down Zackary’s spine. “So. You wanted me. You got me. Now get out of my head.”
But he still didn’t force Zackary out.
“Why this room?” Zackary asked instead. “Why would you choose to show me this? My own, ah, audience chamber is a private garden I had when I was a child-”
“I don’t think like you, kid,” the purple-haired teenager sighed. “I don’t NEED a solid stage for entertaining anyone stupid enough to try and jack into me.” He paused. “I improvised and went to the place I most often reexamine.”
“Oh,” Zackary said. For the first time in nearly two thousand years he had no clue what to do.
The representation sighed and stepped forward, and suddenly that blurry quality that was in every brain Zackary had ever jacked in to was just GONE and so was the room so that they stood in a small, simple room with no doors, no windows, just concrete all around and a metal table in the middle, two chairs facing each other. The representation himself was now dressed in a vivid red shirt and black pants, a white duster already hung on his chair, and Zackary could spot atrociously bright toe socks on his feet, accompanied by brown flip-flops.
“Before you try to fuck with my mind, let me tell you right now that I don’t trust you at all and I never will. But you were telling the truth about my boys, so your brain doesn’t get fried just yet.”
“Why thank you,” Zackary smiled, trying not to like the kid. But dammit, the kid was just ASKING to be a Djarvik with a line like that. “I’m going to be very, very direct about this then. Show me your first memory.”
And they were backing the bloody OR, except with the accompanying bodies and a terrified kid with purple hair and plugs sticking out of him soaked in blood.
“You done yet?” the kid asked coldly.
“Can you bring up mental pictures of the most important people to y--”
And there were two characters floating in the middle of a dark room, fully 3-D and with conspicuously blurry clothing, what with the clarity of everything else in the Wired kid’s mind.
“Would you be able to bring up a family member, too?”
It was slow, slower than anything else he’d seen the kid do, but eventually a very attractive man in his thirties with brown hair, silver eyes, and an arrogant smirk, dressed in an old English riding outfit, appeared.
Zackary raised an eyebrow at the representation.
“It was my birthday party,” he shrugged.
“Of course,” Zackary said innocently. “Now, show me yourself.”
And the figure that emerged was bleeding and caked with dried blood with empty eyes and his mouth gaping like he was about to scream-
Zackary jacked out with a snap, pulling the cable from his patient’s eye quickly and then working on his own, just in time to hear the shriek that came out of that mouth when the mind came back to fully connect with the battered body.
“Sedate him and finish up,” Zackary shouted over the screams, and the crew complied, a needle slotting between the kid’s wires and flowing into his blood with a thin hissing noise from the contraption.
Oddly disgusted with himself, Zackary pulled off his gloves with a vicious snap and threw them in the bin, storming out the door and ignoring the way that, even muffled, the kid’s agony got his stupid empathetic heart constricting.
It made him wonder if he was going to be the first Djarvik to go soft.
He prayed not. They’d kill him on principle alone.
---
Quinn Helldirge-Johnson, one of the commanding officers on the flagship The Loyalty and therefore one of the ten most powerful people in the Hemos government, found himself staring stupidly at a face he barely recognized.
“So,” he finally said. “How have you been, Tyler?”
The waiting room was empty aside from the four occupants – Tyler and his…friend, and Quinn, with Lucas lurking in the background like the obsessive sociopath he was.
“…adequate,” Tyler’s voice, so different from when he was a child assassin, said coolly. “I see you found your twin again.”
Quinn laughed easily at that, half at the memory of actually LOOKING for Lucas (the reverse of nearly three millennia) and also to let Lucas know that no, it wasn’t a threat, and he could keep his guns holstered thank you very much. “Right after I left Ikop, actually. He was waiting at the nearest space station.”
And the silence was back, which apparently sent Tyler’s Ndhaz companion into downplayed fidgeting and halfhearted, barely-caught threatening looks towards Quinn.
“Quinn Helldirge-Johnson, meet Aptsan Frisco,” Tyler stated, and every blonde in the room froze. “He’s my husband. Aptsan, Sensei; Sensei, Aptsan.”
Quinn blinked at the man. Tyler’s HUSBAND. He found himself smiling. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Aptsan. I trust you treat him well?”
“No, actually,” Aptsan said. “He sleeps on concrete and I whip him hourly.”
“Down, kitty,” Tyler muttered. “Play nice.”
“Oh, of COURSE, DARLING,” Aptsan cooed out, his grin almost…scary. “Please, forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven,” Tyler said, with more feeling in his voice than Quinn had ever heard on Ikop…well, at least, to anyone aside from Naoko.
And when someone down the hall began to scream, the two moved so fast it was as if they had never even been there.
---
“Start talking” was the first thing that assaulted Dr. Zackary Pending, followed by a knife at his throat and a gun to his temple.
Cold green eyes filtered through wire-rimmed glasses in front of him. Breath ghosted across his ear from behind.
He smiled dryly. “Mr. and Mr. Frisco, am I right?” Zackary sighed, and hoped it didn’t sound too happy. “Your foster child is going to be fine, as soon as he stops screaming.” He paused. “Possibly a bit jumpier than normal, and definitely weaker, what with all that lost blood, but he’ll be fine.”
“You sure?” the one in front of him asked coolly, a dark voice that could have sent an iceberg to shivering.
“Unsure, actually. Not that you know ancient pop culture, of course, so I’ll just stick to a generic ‘I’m a doctor, this is what I do, and this is what I think’ answer,” Zackary grinned.
“Zack, I don’t think you want to pick a fight with these guys,” an amused voice said, and Zackary could feel his teeth start to show at the sound.
“Tyler, Aptsan, please let him go,” Quinn said casually from down the hall.
The one in front – Tyler, was his guess – stepped away, and the gun disappeared. A second later, the knife and other person left too, leaving Zackary itching for a fight or blood or a good fuck and nobody right there to give it to him.
“I think dear Zackary and I have to attend to something,” that ever-amused, glorious voice that always, ALWAYS saved him called out, and Zackary’s eyes latched onto his savior’s light blue gaze.
Gods, if there was ever someone he was in love with, it was Lucas Evret Johnson. The man was sheer bottled lightning, and his timing was impeccable. “How the hell do you always manage to save me?”
“I check in every hour,” Lucas stated, smirking lightly as they walked down a hallway to leave the others to whatever normal non-Djarvik people did after a confrontation. “How’s the lust?”
“I can make it to Exam Room 4 without jumping you or the next passerby,” Zackary stated. Sure, the types of jumping would be completely different, but that wasn’t anything new. “It should be empty, too, unless there’s an explosion on base.”
“That’s convenient,” Lucas said simply, running a hand through his oh so shiny light blonde hair that was just begging to be scraped and pulled and fuck-
“-okay let’s try Exam Room 2,” Zackary said quickly, and shoved Lucas through the door to their left, grabbing the lapels of Lucas’ newest dark red leather shirt and crushing their mouths together, smashing Lucas into the wall. It never got old, even after a thousand years, when Lucas’ fingers curved just so around his neck, the other hand spread across his hip.
“You’re very attractive in your lab coat,” Lucas managed to state when Zackary began to try and eat his jaw line because FUCK he tasted good. “You should get blood lusted more often at work.”
“And you should give up your not-without-Quinn policy,” Zackary muttered. “It pisses everyone off to no end.”
“Why, Zack, dear,” Lucas grinned as he bit down HARD on Zackary’s earlobe, pressing the brunette closer to him. “I never marked you for the jealous type.”
“You certainly do like marking me in general though,” Zackary muttered, feeling the worst of the blood lusting dissipate. He probably still needed to go hunting, but that could wait until that Rurn Frisco kid wasn’t twenty minutes out of critical condition. With an easy, light laugh, his lips pulled away from Lucas’ lovely skin, feeling slightly proud of the sizeable hickey he’d managed to make in the short time they’d been groping in the exam room.
Now, they stood in what most people would call a hug. But, being Djarvik-line vampires, they saw it as “a sturdy upright non-sexual two-person structure which is oddly comfortable with someone you like”.
“Thanks,” Zackary said, a pleasantry neither of them really needed but he did anyway. He’d worked hard to develop a bedside manner, and the practice had infected most everything else in his life.
“Any time,” Lucas replied honestly as Zackary stepped back and rearranged his clothing. “Take extra care of that kid. Quinn likes his dad.” Lucas paused. “Well, one of them, at least.”
“I will,” Zackary said, and with another grin slipped back out the door and back towards the happy family most likely waiting for him.
And indeed they were, looking entirely nonchalant and unrepentant about the incident.
“Well then,” Zackary smiled, hoping his remaining blood lust wasn’t showing in his face. “I assume you’d like to visit?”
---
He could hear, and smell, and feel, and taste, but stared and examined the waves and the weave of darkness in front of him when he finally realized he’d been screaming from something he didn’t NEED to freak out over.
It only took another minute or two to realize why he was almost blind but really, really not.
“…who the FUCK put a blindfold on me?” Rurniel snapped, not giving a damn who the hell he was talking to.
“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t be awake yet-” a woman said over him, brushing some sticky wet hair away from his forehead. His hand snapped up and grabbed her wrist, ignoring the wrenching of the tubes plugged into his elbow.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” Rurniel hissed, sneering. “Something is coming off in the count to three- either the blindfold, or your hand. You pick.”
“B-b-but sir-”
“ONE.”
The cloth was wrenched off with a whimper, and he was nearly blinded from the burning white light directly above him.
He froze.
OPERATING ROOM good lighting comfortable bed but OPERATING ROOM no needles but there were tubes in him in an OPERATING ROOM but he was dressed for the most part even though he could feel the blood and the stitches around the blood but he was in an OPERATING ROOM no lab coats no drills no needles no jack in his eye no gas masks no saws no ready-to-implant circuitry but AN OPERATING ROOM
“Hey, hey, he’s awake,” a familiar voice laughed out, and Rurniel blinked. “How you feeling, si-uh, son?”
He tilted his head to the side to glare at Aptsan. “…SON?”
“We ARE your foster parents, Rurn. You do remember, right? Adopted son of the Friscos?” Reed’s easy voice said from his other side, smiling that no-good smile of his.
“I hate you both,” he stated, obviously getting the not-so-subtle message. “Tyler, you never get to pick anything. Ever again.”
“Except maybe curtains,” Aptsan amended.
“Shit, no, we’d have nothing but blue windows,” Rurniel groaned, trying to ignore how weak his voice sounded and the terrified nurse cowering in the corner. He sighed. “What happened?”
“The Alliance, as usual,” Aptsan shrugged. “They’re getting closer to our dear Tyler, I’m pretty sure.”
“But I still end up your son,” Rurniel sighed, letting his arm fall back to his side as Aptsan and Reed moved forward to flank the operating table. He tried very, very hard to not be exceedingly grateful to see both of them in front of him, unharmed, at the same time right then and failed miserably.
“Only ‘til you’re eighteen,” Aptsan winked, grinning.
“Or nineteen,” Reed stated, frowning just a bit at Aptsan.
“Or sixteen and a half,” Rurniel suggested.
“Denied, sir,” they both replied immediately.
And then Rurniel went into a fit of giggling, leaving Reed and Aptsan staring.
“It’s the drugs,” Rurniel managed to get through the giggling. “I don’t – ahaha- know what exactly they gave me but- hee hee- I’m not too happy with it.”
Aptsan stared. “He’s giggling, Tyler.”
“I’m afraid,” Reed agreed, equally fascinated.
“Shut up,” Rurniel managed through his laughter. “I’ll kill you both.”
And then, smiling and laughing, Rurniel passed out completely.
---
When they both were sure Rurniel was really, truly asleep and not doing that half-asleep thing where he could still wake up and throw things at them, Reed turned to Aptsan.
“…that was incredible,” he said, stunned.
Aptsan was grinning, nodding enthusiastically. “Hell yes! I’ve NEVER seen him like that before. It was almost like, I don’t know, like he was-”
“-happy-” Reed’s awed voice breathed out.
“-normal-” Aptsan raved.
“-human-”
“-a TEENAGER.”
And they stared back down at the sleeping super-genius Wired teenager.
“I want to see it again,” Reed said.
“Me TOO,” Aptsan said.
“What kind of kid did you adopt, Tyler?” Quinn’s amused voice called out from the corner, and two glares fixed on him.
“A spectacular one, what’s it to you?” Aptsan hissed out.
“Please don’t insult him, Sensei,” Reed said coolly. “I’d rather not be angry with you.”
Quinn looked downright sheepish. “I apologize, I wasn’t meaning to insult him. I was just amused by…well, you three, I guess.” He laughed awkwardly. “But, um, do you mind if I ask how long you three will be staying on Hemos? I mean, you can stay for as long as you like, honestly, but…well.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘well’?! I thought-” Aptsan snapped out, only to be interrupted by Reed’s smooth voice.
“Repairs on my ship, and then extended time for Rurn’s full recovery,” he said simply. He adjusted his glasses. “Recovery in every way.”
“Well then,” Quinn smiled. “I have an idea, then, if you’d let me try and help you with that recovery business.”
“…we’re listening,” Aptsan said.
Quinn grinned.
---
The next time Rurniel woke up, he was in a dark room in a big bed with Reed sleeping on one side of him and the hissing of a shower behind a lit door telling him where Aptsan was off to. There was an IV stuck into him, true, and he felt like a creampuff with all the bandages on him, but other than that the world seemed just fine, so he didn’t mind much when Reed scooted just that final bit closer to Rurniel so that they were using the same pillow, or that he was apparently not wearing socks or a shirt, or anything other than his boxers for that matter.
But how he hated the eighteen-years-old rule.
And YEAH, there was the pain, he didn’t know why it had waited to just smash into his nervous system but there it was, big and abrasive and making him wince, barely stifling a cry. It felt like he’d broken one of his ribs, maybe his right arm too, and there was a definite bit of stitching on both his right thigh and the right side of his chest. Just thinking about it made his stupid human body hurt that bit more, and this time he couldn’t hold in the pathetic whimper.
…but then Reed was there, head on the uninjured portion of his left shoulder, a hand caught loosely in Rurniel’s rather long purple hair (…he probably should get it cut, but never had the time to…) and that soft content smile he sometimes got when it was just the three of them. For some reason, the sight made the pain go just that bit easier.
The shower turned off, and a minute later a boxers-wearing Aptsan slid silently through the door, using much of his considerable stealth skills in the decent-sized bedroom before noticing Rurniel was awake.
“Good evening, sir,” Aptsan smiled at him, approaching the other side of the bed. “Want me to get him out of your hair?”
“…bad pun,” Rurniel’s weak voice rasped out, laced with pain. He frowned at the sound.
“I’m supposed to give you more pain medication through your IV,” Aptsan stated. God dammit, the man knew him too well. Not a way Rurniel could insist he could make it through the night without it and not make it somehow step on Aptsan’s work ethic and therefore pride.
But, Rurniel paused again, looking back over at the man sleeping almost cuddled on him. And then he looked back at Aptsan, doing his best to NOT ask, dammit.
Aptsan grinned. “Well, I can be a couple minutes late, I guess,” he sighed melodramatically, laying down on the other side of Rurniel. “Never said I’m against procrastination…”
Rurniel’s glare was enough to convey his annoyance at how OFTEN that tendency used to come up.
“Aww, come on, Rurniel,” Aptsan said, yawning just a bit. “It was usually you two’s fault anyway.”
“…was not…” Rurniel objected weakly, eyes drooping again, dammit.
“We’ll argue when you wake up more lucid, okay?”
“…bastard…”
“Night, sir,” Aptsan’s amused voice said kindly.
He might have felt the brush of lips on his forehead when his eyes closed, but that could have just been the meds kicking back in too.
---
“It’s probably bad that I want to stab him just so we can keep him medicated, huh?” Aptsan said at lunch the next morning.
They sat in their assigned room, which Quinn had given a king-sized bed without batting an eyelash at Tyler’s request. There was only one window, and it was in the bathroom and looked out at a lovely drab courtyard patrolled by security guards and ensigns in the Hemos military on a regular rotation. And there was no kitchen, either- only a small table with four chairs next to the tiny medication- and beverage-filled refrigerator. Sure, there was a cafeteria they’d been invited to use, but they wanted to keep an eye on their commander as much as possible.
“I want to too,” Reed admitted guiltily as he sipped some more tea. “But he’d kill us.”
“…not if we stabbed him good enough,” Aptsan grinned.
“Yes he would. Neither of us have the guts to actually mortally wound him,” Reed stated, smiling lightly over his cup. “And therefore he’d get better and kill us.”
“Damn you and your logic,” he sighed, but then brightened up. “But this plan of that sensei of yours-”
“His name is Quinn.”
“-that sensei of yours sounds PERFECT.” Aptsan smiled. “He’s going to be so grateful.”
“Yes he is,” Reed indulged. “Now eat your salad before I do.”
---
Four days later, when Rurniel was well enough to throw things and rant and glare doom at people again, he stared at his ex-Commanders.
“…you WHAT?” he hissed.
“Signed you up for school!” Aptsan grinned, obviously proud of himself.
“GHS-16,” Reed elucidated. “The gifted school here in Lsttabla. All boys, and you have to pass an entrance exam.”
“Well, you NORMALLY do, at least,” Aptsan smirked. “We took it for you, figuring you’d want to get in as soon as possible.”
“98%,” Reed said conspiratorially. “We missed a question on Hemos history.”
Rurniel stared at them.
“…again, YOU DID WHAT?”
Aptsan frowned. “…you ARE lucid right now, aren’t you? You’re only on some blood medication right now, aren’t you?”
“I AM,” Rurniel bit out. “BUT APPARENTLY YOU ARE NOT.”
“Pardon?” Reed asked politely.
Rurniel grinned at them, and it was the Scary Grin that tended to make everyone but his Commanders run away very, very fast. “I will give you forty minutes to report back with news and legal documentation that you have unenrolled me from this SCHOOL you speak of.”
His commanders blanched.
“Uh…that’s, uh, not possible,” Aptsan gulped.
“…EXCUSE me?” Rurniel hissed.
“You were given a full-ride scholarship for scoring the highest on the mid-year entrance exam,” Reed said carefully. “Taking the scholarship also was an agreement for you to attend for at least the remainder of the semester.”
Silence gnawed at the room like a hungry spider.
“Tell me if I’ve comprehended this accurately,” Rurniel stated, back ramrod straight in the bed. “You not only acted on my behalf by signing me up for classes in a high school, but also forced me to enter into a legally binding contract with TYLER’S STUPID NAME and I can’t get out of it for THREE MONTHS.”
“Yes, sir,” the two said guiltily.
With a roar of profanity, Rurniel punched through the mattress.
---
Part 2 is moving along quickly, so I'll have that up reasonably soon~ ♥
.
Aaaand here we go~!
Title: Twilight
Timeline: V
(By Shannon again)
Pairings: Reed/Aptsan, Damian/Quinn/Lucas, Lucas/Zackary
SUMMARY: (Warning: Time Skip!) After the Alliance's final defeat of R-16, Rurniel and Co. have been running for their lives. The Alliance has finally caught up with them, and Rurniel's in critical condition. Reed takes matters into his own hands and calls in his final debt, an old acquaintance named Quinn Helldirge-Johnson...
TWILIGHT
I
Reed slammed into the wall, breathing in sharply from the pain, green eyes immediately checking Aptsan.
He was still breathing hard, handling the controls of their tiny ship expertly, gritting his teeth and flicking through the pilot’s information screens at a rate Reed could barely even follow.
“He okay?” Aptsan shouted out over the din of alarms and the muted music that flooded everywhere Rurniel could possibly end up in.
“Still bleeding bad,” Reed reported, throwing himself into the chair opposite weapons control. “He’s out cold, possible concussion, and needs medical attention.” The hum of the console was strangely comforting in a life-or-death situation. “I didn’t want to stimulus him awake just to die.” He knew they were both trying not to notice how empty the bridge felt without Rurniel in his hook-up chair
Aptsan actually laughed. “Aww, Schnookums, ever the caring one.”
“Don’t call me Schnookums,” Reed said distantly, focusing on the analysis of the attacking behemoth of a ship. “Does the Alliance know-know, or just suspect it’s us?”
Another blast crashed into the ship.
“Oh, I’d say they know,” Aptsan grinned ferally.
“Good, then,” Reed said absently, and pressed the big red button.
“Masochist,” Aptsan muttered as the silent whorling of the chargers built up, checking his straps as Reed did the same.
“Brace for impact in ten,” Reed stated.
“Shit, I hate when we have to use this thing…”
“Five.”
Reed’s hands grabbed the handles all stations on The Phantom had, and didn’t even bother with the countdown anymore, the sound was that deafening. Instead he watched the gigantic red numbers counting down as they flickered and wavered in slow motion, from five, to three, and then to one.
For an endless moment, the ship went silent, all the power being sucked into the Atomo-Expansion Dissipater blast (affectionately dubbed “the planet-twister” by Aptsan) before the shriek of metal crushing against metal ripped out of the side of the ship.
The AED didn’t look very impressive- just a single beam of violet light that touched down on the massive Alliance Starglider’s hull, and then a thin ball of light that shot down and exploded half the thing’s side off in a burst of lovely blacker-than-black light with pools of the disconjoined atoms billowing together in clouds.
“You missed the bridge,” Aptsan said.
The jamming frequency from the Starglider cut off abruptly.
“I know.”
---
AD 6220.
With the defeat of the rebel forces known at R-16 at the Battle of Lecae, it seems as if the Alliance has truly won.
The dissolution of R-16 was swift, the established order and pseudo-government falling into small segments of guerilla forces. Some whole divisions stayed together, still considering themselves part of the age-old R-16. Others went off on their own, defeated and disheartened at the loss.
With the invasion of Zisoro in 6218, Alliance forces now occupied two of the four R-16 bases, and had destroyed a third. But it had not come without a cost.
General Rann Sul, the infamous man nicknamed the “Wolf of the Alliance”, had up and disappeared with his vice-generals Beatrix Talos and And Korialis, acclaimed Special Unit Wrey Cross disappearing less than a week later. The death tolls were absurd. Half the space fleet was either in drastic need of repairs or utterly destroyed.
And, quite possibly most importantly, there was still one Grand General of R-16 unaccounted for.
Most considered him killed in action- surely a Grand General wouldn’t up and leave when his base was under attack? Others said his Commanders, known for being helplessly devoted to the man, had knocked him out and shipped him away to safety. Even others said he’d betrayed the rebellion, now working immediately under the High Admiral of the Alliance himself.
But whatever the reason, the fact remained that Grand General Rurniel remained missing, and most likely highly dangerous.
The Alliance wanted him.
And they usually got what they wanted.
---
“Well, one down, three to go,” Aptsan grinned.
“We only had one AED blast left,” Reed stated.
Aptsan’s grin fell off abruptly. “But Rurniel-”
“He can instantly calculate and determine the needed energy into a trillionth of a watt,” Reed said, putting the screen back over the big red button. “All I can do is push the damn button.”
The next Alliance ship- this one a much smaller but much, much faster Nova – blipped onto the screen, hurrying forward from behind them.
“She’s fast enough,” Aptsan said, almost absentmindedly, his long, pointed ears twitching.
“Yes, she is,” Reed said, not even sure he believed his own words as he started calculating trajectories to nearby planets, knowing that even if they could outrace a Nova, there was no way in hell they could outgun it with their final AED blast gone.
Ignoring the jostling on the ship from the Nova’s shots, he scrolled through them, looking for somewhere safe, somewhere Alliance ships wouldn’t dare---
“Warp path 2.43.9766,” Reed shouted out, and Aptsan actually turned to gape at him.
“What the FUCK are you talking about?” he roared. “We are NOT taking Rurniel to a fucking ‘WILDLIFE PRESERVE’.” Even though his hands remained firmly on the controls, Reed could just hear the quotation marks. “And we both know what sort of wild lives they preserve on THAT one.”
“Just trust me for once,” Reed snapped back, green eyes glaring through his near-broken glasses. “2.43.9766. You can kill me later.”
“I’m holding you to that,” Aptsan growled, and punched the coordinates into the warp computer, which did the calculations SO much slower than Rurniel for the warp path.
Reed catapulted himself into the central chair – Rurniel’s – and poised his hands over the communications controls as the swirling pink-purple light shot out of the tip of the ship and tore the gate out of the ether.
With a half-assed prayer, Aptsan sent the ship careening through the gate.
---
“I really, really hate you sometimes,” Quinn Helldirge-Johnson sighed as he stepped back into his boxers, sending a glare towards the bed. “BOTH of you.”
“Now that’s just cold,” Damian Helldirge mock-gasped, a practiced look of betrayal surfacing on his features.
“Cruel,” Lucas Johnson agreed, burrowing deeper into the pillow with an unseen but very apparent grin. “And hot.”
Quinn pegged him with a sock. “BAD twin.”
"Evil twin," Damian corrected. “Sociopath, sadistic, incestuous twin.”
“And it gets you painfully hard,” Lucas stated, one blue eye opening just enough to send a devilish glance at the dark-haired man still in bed with him.
“Damn you and your no-non-Quinn-sex law,” Damian sighed dramatically. “Now you’ll never get to know.”
“Which is why I hate you both sometimes,” Quinn muttered, tugging his pants on and ignoring the blatant disappointment on the other two’s faces while he stepped into his well-worn boots. The white tank top went on after that, and then the suspenders were pulled up, and then the long black and red coat that came standard for any high-ranking person on Hemos.
“Shit, Quinn, that outfit just makes me want to undress you more,” Damian sighed.
“I just put all this work into getting into it,” Quinn frowned. “You are NOT tearing it off with your teeth.”
“But you usually love my teeth!”
“Ten minutes ‘till it’s your shift,” Lucas mumbled into the pillow. Neither of the other men seemed surprised that the other twin knew exactly what time it was, even if there wasn’t a clock anywhere near the bed in their custom cabin onboard The Loyalty. “J will have your head if you don’t relieve him on time.”
“And they’re both lovely, so I guess we better let him go.” Damian was, as ever, genuinely disappointed at the prospect.
“We’re on eight hour shifts,” Quinn reminded him for possibly literally the millionth time. “I’ll be back before Hemos-sunrise.”
“You’re not allowed to die,” Lucas’ muffled voice into the pillow was succinct, completely without humor.
“I know.”
“And you’re not allowed to get some other bastard to fall helplessly in love with you,” Damian said, smiling.
Quinn smiled back. “I know.”
And that’s when the page that sent Quinn Helldirge-Johnson running to his commander’s chair on the bridge blared through the all-ship speakers.
---
They were going to die, Aptsan decided, as he watched the young man (probably fifteen or sixteen at most) in the commander’s chair glare through the communications screen. But all this time spent under the command of someone over forty years younger than him had skewed his perspective of age, so that the Ndhaz judged by rank and power, not age and accent.
It had saved his neck before. He didn’t think it’d help much this time, though.
“And you think we’ll give you sanctuary for what reason, exactly?” A smooth voice with a jarringly courteous edge to it emerged from the young man’s smiling mouth.
“We’ve got a wounded kid- er, teenager onboard that needs immediate medical attention,” Aptsan stated, half watching the young captain’s reaction (which was little to nothing) and half watching the surrounding area for the pursuing Alliance ships.
“I’m sorry, but we have no medical staff on our ship,” the kid said apologetically, but not TOO apologetically. “However, I could give you the warp paths of many dedicated medical are-”
Reed finally pushed the button on his console, the one that turned their ship’s display from Aptsan’s seat to the whole of the bridge, and the boy shut up disturbingly fast.
“Get se…Quinn, please,” he stated. “I’ve got a favor to call in.”
“And who is calling on this Quinn?” the captain asked, voice dripping with barely-contained curiosity.
Reed paused for a minute. “Tyler.”
It was probably the first time Aptsan had ever heard him choose to use his first name with someone other than Rurniel and himself, and most certainly the first time he’d said it over a non-secure channel.
“Hold, please,” the young captain said, and the screen went blank, the sound of both sides muted.
“…you don’t get to fuck us over even more than we already are, you know.”
“I know,” Reed said, eyes distant behind his glasses.
Aptsan quirked an eyebrow up, trying to avoid the ever-hypocritical jealousy biting at his nerves. “And why the hell do you know someone who lives at a ‘wildlife reserve’, anyway? There something you’re not telling me?”
“Many things,” Reed stated. “And at the time he didn’t live here. He came to me.”
Aptsan found he had a death grip on his already-strangled controls. “And what the fuck does THAT mean exactly?” he gritted out.
Reed quirked an eyebrow up. “That I was nine and you don’t have anything to be jealous over other than how I can actually shoot and you can’t?”
He figured a glare and a sharp “fuck off” was enough of an answer to that little comment. This brought about one of their strangely intimate, amicable silences, where Reed smiled just enough to get Aptsan’s stupid heart fluttering and Aptsan knew he was probably leering the shit out of his fellow ex-Commander and that silent feeling of RIGHTNESS fell over them like a warm blanket.
“TYLER!” an unfamiliar voice shouted over the channel, and Reed’s face went utterly blank as he pressed the communications button.
He was blond. Taller than Aptsan, human, and looking at Reed like he was risen from the dead. Which, considering Reed’s track record, might not be far off from what the guy was thinking. Worst of all, he was downright DASHING, and looked like the super-friendly nice guy that charmed you into bed to tear your face off. No, those lips weren’t fooling him, the guy was obviously a native of Hemos with teeth like that.
Aptsan immediately hated him.
“Sensei,” Reed stated in that creepily quiet voice he got into when really pissed, really emotional (please NOT that one or else he’d screw the ship’s power capabilities and AED the blond bastard into oblivion), or really, really cautious or confused. Or if you were talking to the Ghost side of him, but that hadn’t happened since Zisoro fell (and again, if this blond blood-sucker did that to Reed, he’d be AED’d before he could even TRY to send Reed into battle).
“Tyler, get on the ground, NOW,” this Sensei Quinn bastard said, voice almost disgustingly concerned, like he was dealing with puppies or lost babies or something. “You’ve got three Alliance ships gating out after you.”
“Naah, really?!” Aptsan couldn’t help but call out. “Damn. Coulda sworn they were giant butterflies.”
Reed’s small smile was back, and Reed with it. “Joint quarters, please.” Aptsan grinned at the stunned blink that the stupid Sensei barely caught. “And we’ll need immediate medical attention.”
“Understood,” Quinn said in a way that was probably endearing to people not itching for his evil, vampiric neck to be snapped. “I’m looking forward to spending time with you and your, ah, friend when this is over.”
“I bet you are,” Aptsan muttered, and it looked like nobody heard him. He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but who really cared? He had a slowly shutting-down ship to land on a planet that was half water, and the other half was either a canyon or a forest.
“…Tyler out,” Reed stated, and with a mutual nod and a final smile from Mr. Happy the channel was cut. “Aptsan, you and Rurniel are making up new identities immediately.”
“Kinda busy here…” Aptsan grit out, running computation after computation through the landing-nav, eyes whizzing past the numbers and trajectories and propulsion and inertial variants-
“Then I’ll make them for you.”
It was a shame Aptsan didn’t hear him over the roar of the craft entering Hemos’ atmosphere, or he would have managed to talk Reed out of ruining their lives for however long they were stuck on the vampiric planet.
---
Grand General Rurniel generally entered a room in a foul, impressive temper, glaring at everyone his disturbingly mismatched eyes could catch as he stormed through to whatever had pried him away from his work. He had an undeniable presence of both awe and apprehension on all who saw him.
When Grand General Rurniel lost Zisoro and went to being Alliance Renegade Rurniel, he lost none of that. In fact, if anything, it added an almost unbearable air of mystery, a darker fire in his eyes than before, and even more age, both biological and emotional. Although he was still growing, he was sixteen now, and it was a fact that the lost Wired child bathed in blood had grown up VERY well.
But, when Rurn Frisco, foster child of Tyler and Aptsan Frisco, was wheeled into the laboratory of one Dr. Zackary Pending, holder of nearly 80 PhDs and 15 MDs, he was just a bloody, pale mess whose mental stability was possibly in even more trouble than that of his slowly breaking body.
Dr. Zackary Pending had short dark brown hair with big, pretty brown eyes, one flecked with the ineffective silver points of early Wiring techniques, the other holding the multi-colored varnish of the modern Wired individual, although less obvious than most other circuit-bound people in the galaxy. There was barely any circuitry visible on his body, aside from at his fingers, and in sunglasses he could have easily passed for a natural.
He had expected no less, especially for how much he had paid to have it done.
His fingers brushed back long purple hair as the nurse scrambled for his instruments. The kid’s eyes were still open, face caught in an empty sense of horror, breathing fast and shallow. Zackary would have been worried about hyperventilation if the young man hadn’t been fully Wired, but since that kept most basic functions regulated he didn’t bother.
Instead, he jabbed the connecting cable into his eye and then the young man’s, and instantly regretted it.
electric cage of bitter knowledge crushed in around him angry and cold and YOU ARE NOT WELCOME
“It’s for your own good,” Zackary snapped out, attempting to force some sort of order on this chaotic world that was pressing on him to LEAVE – “Tyler and Aptsan sent me!”
The world went dark, and he was suddenly sprawled on cold tile in a dim room, fresh blood-stains splattered against the walls and floor, blood dripping down from the elevated metal grating that obviously served as an operating bed and trickling into the drain below.
…you sure don’t look like someone they’d send.
It was two voices at once, and Zackary looked at the operating table again to see two figures sitting on it. The first was a cold, dangerous adult with glowing silver eyes and long purple hair that now fell all the way to the blood-soaked tile below. The second was a child with prismatic, confused eyes and short purple hair, sitting in the adult’s lap like his life depended on it. In return, the adult was holding the child like a beloved teddy bear made of spun glass that he’d protect to the bitter end.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Zackary replied to the both of them, already working on why exactly this Rurn character would choose to have their most concrete mental plane be…THIS. “I’m a doctor. And Wired.”
Obviously. What do you want.
“To help you,” Zackary stated. “You’ve been injured, hurt very bad, and my team’s working on your body while I attempt to aid you mentally here.” The two tilted their heads at the same time, at the same angle, but to completely different effects. The adult was both warning and threat, the child curiosity and amusement.
How are you going to help?
Don’t you just want to suck our blood?
Who hurt us? Are the others okay?
Zackary stared at the two. They’d spoken differently, but…it was still the same voice, one too young for the adult and too old for the child.
“You barely have enough blood left to suck,” Zackary said, almost wry but trying VERY hard to not provoke the patient’s blatantly lethal wrath. “I don’t know who hurt you, or if the others are okay.” He paused, looking at the two again. “And I’m going to help by having you tell me what exactly freaked you out enough to split into a hurt-comfort splice.”
We’re always like this.
“We just don’t show it,” said a new voice, but also the old one, and in the corner stood the full representation of the patient, leaning against a bloodstain with a casual air that sent a shudder down Zackary’s spine. “So. You wanted me. You got me. Now get out of my head.”
But he still didn’t force Zackary out.
“Why this room?” Zackary asked instead. “Why would you choose to show me this? My own, ah, audience chamber is a private garden I had when I was a child-”
“I don’t think like you, kid,” the purple-haired teenager sighed. “I don’t NEED a solid stage for entertaining anyone stupid enough to try and jack into me.” He paused. “I improvised and went to the place I most often reexamine.”
“Oh,” Zackary said. For the first time in nearly two thousand years he had no clue what to do.
The representation sighed and stepped forward, and suddenly that blurry quality that was in every brain Zackary had ever jacked in to was just GONE and so was the room so that they stood in a small, simple room with no doors, no windows, just concrete all around and a metal table in the middle, two chairs facing each other. The representation himself was now dressed in a vivid red shirt and black pants, a white duster already hung on his chair, and Zackary could spot atrociously bright toe socks on his feet, accompanied by brown flip-flops.
“Before you try to fuck with my mind, let me tell you right now that I don’t trust you at all and I never will. But you were telling the truth about my boys, so your brain doesn’t get fried just yet.”
“Why thank you,” Zackary smiled, trying not to like the kid. But dammit, the kid was just ASKING to be a Djarvik with a line like that. “I’m going to be very, very direct about this then. Show me your first memory.”
And they were backing the bloody OR, except with the accompanying bodies and a terrified kid with purple hair and plugs sticking out of him soaked in blood.
“You done yet?” the kid asked coldly.
“Can you bring up mental pictures of the most important people to y--”
And there were two characters floating in the middle of a dark room, fully 3-D and with conspicuously blurry clothing, what with the clarity of everything else in the Wired kid’s mind.
“Would you be able to bring up a family member, too?”
It was slow, slower than anything else he’d seen the kid do, but eventually a very attractive man in his thirties with brown hair, silver eyes, and an arrogant smirk, dressed in an old English riding outfit, appeared.
Zackary raised an eyebrow at the representation.
“It was my birthday party,” he shrugged.
“Of course,” Zackary said innocently. “Now, show me yourself.”
And the figure that emerged was bleeding and caked with dried blood with empty eyes and his mouth gaping like he was about to scream-
Zackary jacked out with a snap, pulling the cable from his patient’s eye quickly and then working on his own, just in time to hear the shriek that came out of that mouth when the mind came back to fully connect with the battered body.
“Sedate him and finish up,” Zackary shouted over the screams, and the crew complied, a needle slotting between the kid’s wires and flowing into his blood with a thin hissing noise from the contraption.
Oddly disgusted with himself, Zackary pulled off his gloves with a vicious snap and threw them in the bin, storming out the door and ignoring the way that, even muffled, the kid’s agony got his stupid empathetic heart constricting.
It made him wonder if he was going to be the first Djarvik to go soft.
He prayed not. They’d kill him on principle alone.
---
Quinn Helldirge-Johnson, one of the commanding officers on the flagship The Loyalty and therefore one of the ten most powerful people in the Hemos government, found himself staring stupidly at a face he barely recognized.
“So,” he finally said. “How have you been, Tyler?”
The waiting room was empty aside from the four occupants – Tyler and his…friend, and Quinn, with Lucas lurking in the background like the obsessive sociopath he was.
“…adequate,” Tyler’s voice, so different from when he was a child assassin, said coolly. “I see you found your twin again.”
Quinn laughed easily at that, half at the memory of actually LOOKING for Lucas (the reverse of nearly three millennia) and also to let Lucas know that no, it wasn’t a threat, and he could keep his guns holstered thank you very much. “Right after I left Ikop, actually. He was waiting at the nearest space station.”
And the silence was back, which apparently sent Tyler’s Ndhaz companion into downplayed fidgeting and halfhearted, barely-caught threatening looks towards Quinn.
“Quinn Helldirge-Johnson, meet Aptsan Frisco,” Tyler stated, and every blonde in the room froze. “He’s my husband. Aptsan, Sensei; Sensei, Aptsan.”
Quinn blinked at the man. Tyler’s HUSBAND. He found himself smiling. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Aptsan. I trust you treat him well?”
“No, actually,” Aptsan said. “He sleeps on concrete and I whip him hourly.”
“Down, kitty,” Tyler muttered. “Play nice.”
“Oh, of COURSE, DARLING,” Aptsan cooed out, his grin almost…scary. “Please, forgive me.”
“You’re forgiven,” Tyler said, with more feeling in his voice than Quinn had ever heard on Ikop…well, at least, to anyone aside from Naoko.
And when someone down the hall began to scream, the two moved so fast it was as if they had never even been there.
---
“Start talking” was the first thing that assaulted Dr. Zackary Pending, followed by a knife at his throat and a gun to his temple.
Cold green eyes filtered through wire-rimmed glasses in front of him. Breath ghosted across his ear from behind.
He smiled dryly. “Mr. and Mr. Frisco, am I right?” Zackary sighed, and hoped it didn’t sound too happy. “Your foster child is going to be fine, as soon as he stops screaming.” He paused. “Possibly a bit jumpier than normal, and definitely weaker, what with all that lost blood, but he’ll be fine.”
“You sure?” the one in front of him asked coolly, a dark voice that could have sent an iceberg to shivering.
“Unsure, actually. Not that you know ancient pop culture, of course, so I’ll just stick to a generic ‘I’m a doctor, this is what I do, and this is what I think’ answer,” Zackary grinned.
“Zack, I don’t think you want to pick a fight with these guys,” an amused voice said, and Zackary could feel his teeth start to show at the sound.
“Tyler, Aptsan, please let him go,” Quinn said casually from down the hall.
The one in front – Tyler, was his guess – stepped away, and the gun disappeared. A second later, the knife and other person left too, leaving Zackary itching for a fight or blood or a good fuck and nobody right there to give it to him.
“I think dear Zackary and I have to attend to something,” that ever-amused, glorious voice that always, ALWAYS saved him called out, and Zackary’s eyes latched onto his savior’s light blue gaze.
Gods, if there was ever someone he was in love with, it was Lucas Evret Johnson. The man was sheer bottled lightning, and his timing was impeccable. “How the hell do you always manage to save me?”
“I check in every hour,” Lucas stated, smirking lightly as they walked down a hallway to leave the others to whatever normal non-Djarvik people did after a confrontation. “How’s the lust?”
“I can make it to Exam Room 4 without jumping you or the next passerby,” Zackary stated. Sure, the types of jumping would be completely different, but that wasn’t anything new. “It should be empty, too, unless there’s an explosion on base.”
“That’s convenient,” Lucas said simply, running a hand through his oh so shiny light blonde hair that was just begging to be scraped and pulled and fuck-
“-okay let’s try Exam Room 2,” Zackary said quickly, and shoved Lucas through the door to their left, grabbing the lapels of Lucas’ newest dark red leather shirt and crushing their mouths together, smashing Lucas into the wall. It never got old, even after a thousand years, when Lucas’ fingers curved just so around his neck, the other hand spread across his hip.
“You’re very attractive in your lab coat,” Lucas managed to state when Zackary began to try and eat his jaw line because FUCK he tasted good. “You should get blood lusted more often at work.”
“And you should give up your not-without-Quinn policy,” Zackary muttered. “It pisses everyone off to no end.”
“Why, Zack, dear,” Lucas grinned as he bit down HARD on Zackary’s earlobe, pressing the brunette closer to him. “I never marked you for the jealous type.”
“You certainly do like marking me in general though,” Zackary muttered, feeling the worst of the blood lusting dissipate. He probably still needed to go hunting, but that could wait until that Rurn Frisco kid wasn’t twenty minutes out of critical condition. With an easy, light laugh, his lips pulled away from Lucas’ lovely skin, feeling slightly proud of the sizeable hickey he’d managed to make in the short time they’d been groping in the exam room.
Now, they stood in what most people would call a hug. But, being Djarvik-line vampires, they saw it as “a sturdy upright non-sexual two-person structure which is oddly comfortable with someone you like”.
“Thanks,” Zackary said, a pleasantry neither of them really needed but he did anyway. He’d worked hard to develop a bedside manner, and the practice had infected most everything else in his life.
“Any time,” Lucas replied honestly as Zackary stepped back and rearranged his clothing. “Take extra care of that kid. Quinn likes his dad.” Lucas paused. “Well, one of them, at least.”
“I will,” Zackary said, and with another grin slipped back out the door and back towards the happy family most likely waiting for him.
And indeed they were, looking entirely nonchalant and unrepentant about the incident.
“Well then,” Zackary smiled, hoping his remaining blood lust wasn’t showing in his face. “I assume you’d like to visit?”
---
He could hear, and smell, and feel, and taste, but stared and examined the waves and the weave of darkness in front of him when he finally realized he’d been screaming from something he didn’t NEED to freak out over.
It only took another minute or two to realize why he was almost blind but really, really not.
“…who the FUCK put a blindfold on me?” Rurniel snapped, not giving a damn who the hell he was talking to.
“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t be awake yet-” a woman said over him, brushing some sticky wet hair away from his forehead. His hand snapped up and grabbed her wrist, ignoring the wrenching of the tubes plugged into his elbow.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” Rurniel hissed, sneering. “Something is coming off in the count to three- either the blindfold, or your hand. You pick.”
“B-b-but sir-”
“ONE.”
The cloth was wrenched off with a whimper, and he was nearly blinded from the burning white light directly above him.
He froze.
OPERATING ROOM good lighting comfortable bed but OPERATING ROOM no needles but there were tubes in him in an OPERATING ROOM but he was dressed for the most part even though he could feel the blood and the stitches around the blood but he was in an OPERATING ROOM no lab coats no drills no needles no jack in his eye no gas masks no saws no ready-to-implant circuitry but AN OPERATING ROOM
“Hey, hey, he’s awake,” a familiar voice laughed out, and Rurniel blinked. “How you feeling, si-uh, son?”
He tilted his head to the side to glare at Aptsan. “…SON?”
“We ARE your foster parents, Rurn. You do remember, right? Adopted son of the Friscos?” Reed’s easy voice said from his other side, smiling that no-good smile of his.
“I hate you both,” he stated, obviously getting the not-so-subtle message. “Tyler, you never get to pick anything. Ever again.”
“Except maybe curtains,” Aptsan amended.
“Shit, no, we’d have nothing but blue windows,” Rurniel groaned, trying to ignore how weak his voice sounded and the terrified nurse cowering in the corner. He sighed. “What happened?”
“The Alliance, as usual,” Aptsan shrugged. “They’re getting closer to our dear Tyler, I’m pretty sure.”
“But I still end up your son,” Rurniel sighed, letting his arm fall back to his side as Aptsan and Reed moved forward to flank the operating table. He tried very, very hard to not be exceedingly grateful to see both of them in front of him, unharmed, at the same time right then and failed miserably.
“Only ‘til you’re eighteen,” Aptsan winked, grinning.
“Or nineteen,” Reed stated, frowning just a bit at Aptsan.
“Or sixteen and a half,” Rurniel suggested.
“Denied, sir,” they both replied immediately.
And then Rurniel went into a fit of giggling, leaving Reed and Aptsan staring.
“It’s the drugs,” Rurniel managed to get through the giggling. “I don’t – ahaha- know what exactly they gave me but- hee hee- I’m not too happy with it.”
Aptsan stared. “He’s giggling, Tyler.”
“I’m afraid,” Reed agreed, equally fascinated.
“Shut up,” Rurniel managed through his laughter. “I’ll kill you both.”
And then, smiling and laughing, Rurniel passed out completely.
---
When they both were sure Rurniel was really, truly asleep and not doing that half-asleep thing where he could still wake up and throw things at them, Reed turned to Aptsan.
“…that was incredible,” he said, stunned.
Aptsan was grinning, nodding enthusiastically. “Hell yes! I’ve NEVER seen him like that before. It was almost like, I don’t know, like he was-”
“-happy-” Reed’s awed voice breathed out.
“-normal-” Aptsan raved.
“-human-”
“-a TEENAGER.”
And they stared back down at the sleeping super-genius Wired teenager.
“I want to see it again,” Reed said.
“Me TOO,” Aptsan said.
“What kind of kid did you adopt, Tyler?” Quinn’s amused voice called out from the corner, and two glares fixed on him.
“A spectacular one, what’s it to you?” Aptsan hissed out.
“Please don’t insult him, Sensei,” Reed said coolly. “I’d rather not be angry with you.”
Quinn looked downright sheepish. “I apologize, I wasn’t meaning to insult him. I was just amused by…well, you three, I guess.” He laughed awkwardly. “But, um, do you mind if I ask how long you three will be staying on Hemos? I mean, you can stay for as long as you like, honestly, but…well.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘well’?! I thought-” Aptsan snapped out, only to be interrupted by Reed’s smooth voice.
“Repairs on my ship, and then extended time for Rurn’s full recovery,” he said simply. He adjusted his glasses. “Recovery in every way.”
“Well then,” Quinn smiled. “I have an idea, then, if you’d let me try and help you with that recovery business.”
“…we’re listening,” Aptsan said.
Quinn grinned.
---
The next time Rurniel woke up, he was in a dark room in a big bed with Reed sleeping on one side of him and the hissing of a shower behind a lit door telling him where Aptsan was off to. There was an IV stuck into him, true, and he felt like a creampuff with all the bandages on him, but other than that the world seemed just fine, so he didn’t mind much when Reed scooted just that final bit closer to Rurniel so that they were using the same pillow, or that he was apparently not wearing socks or a shirt, or anything other than his boxers for that matter.
But how he hated the eighteen-years-old rule.
And YEAH, there was the pain, he didn’t know why it had waited to just smash into his nervous system but there it was, big and abrasive and making him wince, barely stifling a cry. It felt like he’d broken one of his ribs, maybe his right arm too, and there was a definite bit of stitching on both his right thigh and the right side of his chest. Just thinking about it made his stupid human body hurt that bit more, and this time he couldn’t hold in the pathetic whimper.
…but then Reed was there, head on the uninjured portion of his left shoulder, a hand caught loosely in Rurniel’s rather long purple hair (…he probably should get it cut, but never had the time to…) and that soft content smile he sometimes got when it was just the three of them. For some reason, the sight made the pain go just that bit easier.
The shower turned off, and a minute later a boxers-wearing Aptsan slid silently through the door, using much of his considerable stealth skills in the decent-sized bedroom before noticing Rurniel was awake.
“Good evening, sir,” Aptsan smiled at him, approaching the other side of the bed. “Want me to get him out of your hair?”
“…bad pun,” Rurniel’s weak voice rasped out, laced with pain. He frowned at the sound.
“I’m supposed to give you more pain medication through your IV,” Aptsan stated. God dammit, the man knew him too well. Not a way Rurniel could insist he could make it through the night without it and not make it somehow step on Aptsan’s work ethic and therefore pride.
But, Rurniel paused again, looking back over at the man sleeping almost cuddled on him. And then he looked back at Aptsan, doing his best to NOT ask, dammit.
Aptsan grinned. “Well, I can be a couple minutes late, I guess,” he sighed melodramatically, laying down on the other side of Rurniel. “Never said I’m against procrastination…”
Rurniel’s glare was enough to convey his annoyance at how OFTEN that tendency used to come up.
“Aww, come on, Rurniel,” Aptsan said, yawning just a bit. “It was usually you two’s fault anyway.”
“…was not…” Rurniel objected weakly, eyes drooping again, dammit.
“We’ll argue when you wake up more lucid, okay?”
“…bastard…”
“Night, sir,” Aptsan’s amused voice said kindly.
He might have felt the brush of lips on his forehead when his eyes closed, but that could have just been the meds kicking back in too.
---
“It’s probably bad that I want to stab him just so we can keep him medicated, huh?” Aptsan said at lunch the next morning.
They sat in their assigned room, which Quinn had given a king-sized bed without batting an eyelash at Tyler’s request. There was only one window, and it was in the bathroom and looked out at a lovely drab courtyard patrolled by security guards and ensigns in the Hemos military on a regular rotation. And there was no kitchen, either- only a small table with four chairs next to the tiny medication- and beverage-filled refrigerator. Sure, there was a cafeteria they’d been invited to use, but they wanted to keep an eye on their commander as much as possible.
“I want to too,” Reed admitted guiltily as he sipped some more tea. “But he’d kill us.”
“…not if we stabbed him good enough,” Aptsan grinned.
“Yes he would. Neither of us have the guts to actually mortally wound him,” Reed stated, smiling lightly over his cup. “And therefore he’d get better and kill us.”
“Damn you and your logic,” he sighed, but then brightened up. “But this plan of that sensei of yours-”
“His name is Quinn.”
“-that sensei of yours sounds PERFECT.” Aptsan smiled. “He’s going to be so grateful.”
“Yes he is,” Reed indulged. “Now eat your salad before I do.”
---
Four days later, when Rurniel was well enough to throw things and rant and glare doom at people again, he stared at his ex-Commanders.
“…you WHAT?” he hissed.
“Signed you up for school!” Aptsan grinned, obviously proud of himself.
“GHS-16,” Reed elucidated. “The gifted school here in Lsttabla. All boys, and you have to pass an entrance exam.”
“Well, you NORMALLY do, at least,” Aptsan smirked. “We took it for you, figuring you’d want to get in as soon as possible.”
“98%,” Reed said conspiratorially. “We missed a question on Hemos history.”
Rurniel stared at them.
“…again, YOU DID WHAT?”
Aptsan frowned. “…you ARE lucid right now, aren’t you? You’re only on some blood medication right now, aren’t you?”
“I AM,” Rurniel bit out. “BUT APPARENTLY YOU ARE NOT.”
“Pardon?” Reed asked politely.
Rurniel grinned at them, and it was the Scary Grin that tended to make everyone but his Commanders run away very, very fast. “I will give you forty minutes to report back with news and legal documentation that you have unenrolled me from this SCHOOL you speak of.”
His commanders blanched.
“Uh…that’s, uh, not possible,” Aptsan gulped.
“…EXCUSE me?” Rurniel hissed.
“You were given a full-ride scholarship for scoring the highest on the mid-year entrance exam,” Reed said carefully. “Taking the scholarship also was an agreement for you to attend for at least the remainder of the semester.”
Silence gnawed at the room like a hungry spider.
“Tell me if I’ve comprehended this accurately,” Rurniel stated, back ramrod straight in the bed. “You not only acted on my behalf by signing me up for classes in a high school, but also forced me to enter into a legally binding contract with TYLER’S STUPID NAME and I can’t get out of it for THREE MONTHS.”
“Yes, sir,” the two said guiltily.
With a roar of profanity, Rurniel punched through the mattress.
---
Part 2 is moving along quickly, so I'll have that up reasonably soon~ ♥
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