Author's Note

What I imagine Fenris to look like, although he has much longer hair. (Photo may not be up to scale, since, y'know, he's like 6'4".) 

"Piper, put it down," Rose's voice spit out words on its own, not allowing the teenager to form her own thoughts.

Rose knew she was in trapped in a dream state, but it was a reality that felt too crisp and abnormally lifelike. It unsettled her skin as she stepped closer to Piper, not out of her own choice, who hid beneath a metal frame of a car, a relic from a time before the Republic of Elysium.

Piper's long, dark hair is stuffed inside of her helmet, but the bulletproof glass that acted as her mask had been pulled off, revealing her almond-shaped eyes, which were stuck on the thing she carried in her arms.

"Piper," Rose glanced around them, automatically knowing that, even in this strange state of reality, everything they were doing was against protocol. She found nothing but wasteland covered in red clay, a calm, crimson sky above painted with hints of pink, and the shells of wooden houses around them; although the last mission in this sector had been twenty years ago, the rot of burned-up lives curled up into her nostrils. "You have to put it down."

"Overrun the cameras, Rose," Piper's gaze still didn't stray. The sixteen year-old tucked her finger, which had once been covered by the maroon metal of the body-armor, into the bundle she carried. Suddenly, a sound, breathy and mocking joy, came from Piper's arms.

"Piper," Rose's voice came out rushed; she fumbled back out of surprise, the sound of the dry surface cracking beneath her scurrying feet.  "Protocol--" she tried to begin.

"Overrun the cameras," Piper repeated, giving her Elysian partner a deadly stare. "Or I'll break both of ours."

Rose swallowed before she clicked on the silver button fixed on her left forearm. At her touch, a holograph of both of their video feeds came up in blue. In their Elysian unit, Piper is the soldier; Rose is the intelligence. 

Rose kept Piper informed, and Piper kept Rose alive. But, by cutting the feeds, Rose would have nothing to give back to her Elysian. 

She gave another glance at the other soldier before she hacked into the system with a few strokes of her hand. The feed turned into nothing but a black hologram with a red, flashing 'ERROR' stamped across. A heavy lump settled in her throat knowing that there would be sizable reprimands for their actions.

"It's done," Rose turned her attention to Piper, worry evident at the bundle she still held. "We have five minutes at most before they notice, another ten for them to find someone with enough skill to override my program, and at minimum, three minutes if they find someone as good as me."

"Good thing no one is as good as you, Posie," Piper spoke. For the first time since she had picked up the thing, her voice wasn't frantic or harsh-- she wasn't pushing drill sergeant on Rose.

"We can't keep it, you know," Rose clicked off of the video feed and walked across the short distance between them, leaving footprints in the dry, red dirt. "We're not even suppose to touch things like that."

"Shh," Piper's bare finger presses into the thing's nose, the gesture making it release another strange sound that mocked happy. "Look at it, Pose," Piper moves her arm until Rose can see it, and what she sees is strange.

It's a baby. It's big, brown eyes are blinking up at her with carelessness, as if it had not known the country it had the misfortune of being born into. Hair as black as Piper's clung in shorts curls around its dark, round face. It gives them a gummy smile every other second.

"It's cute," Rose concedes, taking off of her own glove as means not to scare it. Her hand drifts around its face before she moves towards the blanket. It looks as if it had been a much more prominent color once upon a time, like the yellow it was now had been bleached from a vibrant emerald after an unfortunate life in the relentless sun. Something so new wrapped in something so old. It seems like it should be charming, but the thought settles unease in the pit of Rose's stomach. 

"What are we going to do with it when Colonel Ramsay reroots our connection?" Rose continues, but her hands drop to the baby's cheeks, touching the clear, perfect skin there.

"He's your father," Piper tells her. "Bend the rules."

"The only time he bends the rules is when he assigns harsher training than what is mandatory," Rose can hardly imagine Colonel Ramsay taking the baby and doing nothing but disposing it along with the rest of the Else. It didn't matter, a baby Else would grow into an adult Else, which is nothing more than a soldier.

"We have twenty minutes," Piper chews on her bottom lip until it becomes a rosy shade of red. "We find an Else-- spare them only to spare the baby."

"We allow not one Else to go free, but two?" Rose pulls back her mask so she has the freedom to rub her sweaty forehead. It was blistering where they were, even in the shade of the car. 

"It could be fun, Pose," her voice is laced with want. The same want that reminded Rose of how Piper had always been desperate for adventure, for something past their aluminum prisons tucked a lightyear above Earth.

Rose smiles; she drops her hand from the baby's cheek only to slip back on her glove. "Could be fun, if it wasn't treason."

"Fine," but Piper already knows she has won, that there isn't any way Rose will allow her Elysian out of her sight without their feed or trackers on. "You don't have to come with me then."

"Like I'm letting you go anywhere without me," Rose replies warmly, her hand reaching out to tuck the blanket beneath the child's chin as she looks up to Piper once again.

She's smiling, but the voice that's coming out of her mouth doesn't match up, too deep, too desperate. "Rose, wake up," she begs with a wide grin, a strange contrast that makes Rose's blood run cold. Piper tucks the baby closer to her chest and smiles again. "Posie, wake--"

The girl flew upwards, her grey eyes blown wide as she released a breath she didn't know she held. Fenris and Charles stare at her with expressions full of concern. Charles's eyes move towards the machine to her left, analyzing the medical charts that were going crazy with red lights.

"Piper-- Piper, she was," she heaves, trying to catch her breath. Rose studies the room she's in, it has no windows to the outside world, no furniture other than a couple of white armchairs, no decoration other than Charles's graphs. Not the red desert they were in. No baby. No Piper.

No Piper.

"My Elysian-- my Elysian, where, where--" she cuts herself off as she turns to Fenris, who stands against the wall as if there was no room for him here. His dark eyes are shiny. He won't look her in the eyes, and it drives her wild.

"Where is Piper?!" Rose screams, her breath coming in quick gasps. Her eyes become blurry, the edges of her vision suddenly framed with dark spots. Her skin feels too hot, as if flames had replaced the blood in her veins, and at the same time she feels as if she had been plunged into an ice shower. It was like she had one foot in the red desert, and the other in the cool room. "My-- my Elysian. My-- Root- I can't feel my Root!"

Her hand flies back to her neck, where she still felt no pulse from Piper. Her trembling hand went over the smooth patch of skin until she froze, beneath the tip of her fingertip, a bump raised out of her nape, hardly noticeable. It was some kind of scar tissue, unwelcome and frightening.

"Fenris," Charles spoke from where they stood. "Would you please leave the room?" His voice is clinical. 

"What--" he froze, casting a disbelieving stare at her, before he huffed loudly. "This was supposed to work."

"This was never supposed to happen, Fenris. Now, get out. You can wait and be the guard dog outside this door," Charles tells him, brows raising in a challenge. Fenris follows the order, clenching his jaw as he turns on his heels and gives Rose a once-over that dissects her to the bone.

Rose watches, her chest still heaving from where she sat on the bed, strapped to multiple IVs. She tried to allow her eyes to follow him down the curve of the hallway, but the stickers glued to her head and collarbone kept her from moving another inch. 

"We need to have a discussion," Charles's steals the words right out of her mouth. Charles grabs one of the seats tucked into the corner of the room and brings it right next to her bed. The doctor sits down with a wary sigh, their strange eyes mirroring a kind of tired that meant all hope was obsolete. 

"Where is Piper?" She demands, her voice not as harsh as it had to be. It unsettles her even more. 

"Can we speak candidly together?" Charles asks, face sincere. "We have no reason to lie to each other."

"Only if you tell me where Piper is," Rose agrees between gritting teeth.

"We can do that," the doctor nods as a tablet finds its way in Charles's hands. A log that no doubt has her medical history, and which soon will have her current medical state.

"So," Rose's fingers itch for the tablet, or anything at all that had a signal she could hack into with a few well-placed clicks on the keyboard. "Where is she?" 

"No," Charles shook their head, voice clear. "We begin with the easy questions, understand?"

"I refuse," she tells him, finding no way to concede with him. Without Piper, she felt off-balance, all wrong-- hopelessly alone. "My Elysi--" 

"Forcing information on your fragile psyche would not help either of us, Rose," Charles told her with a pointed expression in their strange eyes. 

She only remained in silence, mulling over the ultimatum as the doctor waited along with her. At the moment, she was realizing how few options she had. Answer a few questions and get Piper in return. Try to escape only to have the Else pin her back to the wall with too much ease and have another needle shoved into her throat, only to wind up in the same position she found herself in. 

After careful thought, she conceded with a nod of her head. 

Charles offered her a pleasant smile before continuing. "What is the last thing you remember before waking up this morning?"

She closes her eyes, and thinks about yesterday-- which felt so far away. "I was on the Elysium LoKi, today... today, we were suppose to get the new recruits," she doesn't open her eyes as she attempts to take herself back to the ship's cafeteria, where she had tried to distract Piper from her nervousness with the strawberries Rose had grown in the incubator on the ground level of the ship months before. 

"Elysian recruits?" Charles wondered, giving her raised eyebrows. 

"No, Elysians aren't recruited, they're paired at birth. These were soldiers," Rose rubs her temples, as if she can coax more memories out, thinking past the way Piper's eyes had lit up at the handful of soft, overly-ripe strawberries Rose had offered to her. "Elysium citizens that managed to have promising traits; combat skills, high IQs, weird little ticks that made them irreplaceable," Rose spoke, as she thought of Piper's hands wrapping her into an impossibly tight hug in thanks for the strawberries. 

Charles's fingers tapped frantically on the tablet's keyboard, recording everything that she said with the press of a few buttons. "What's your irreplaceable tick?" 

"My what-- my, oh," she shook her head, wiping away the fresh memory of her Elysian to concentrate on the words coming out of her mouth. "I'm good with artificial intelligence, and I trained well-enough in the LoKi fields with weapons and hand-to-hand combat that if I weren't Elysian, I would still have wound up in the military," she shrugs, because this isn't important. None of it is, not when Piper is out of her sights. 

"So," Charles smiles in encouragement as they record her answer. "What are they grooming you for?"

An alarm raises in the back of her mind. "This isn't relevant," she tells him between gritted teeth, forcing her words to be collected. She isn't ready to let them scrub her mind with torture and riddles to obtain useless information. 

"I can't answer your question if you can't answer mine," Charles's words are kind-- but how can she trust a person she had just met? "Rose, everything you're going to tell me, I want you to know it's likely I already know. The point of this is to see what you know." 

For a long moment she stares at him, trying to think of what Piper would say, before she continues again. "Captain of the ValHalla," her voice is scratchy as she replies.

"Captains are elected," the doctor grins at her honesty. 

"By the other captains," she speaks swiftly, knowing that the Else may not be well-versed in their government's functions. "Piper's mother, Mrs. Yaegar, is influential enough that I will eventually become captain," Rose doesn't add that Piper's mother is one of the most cold and ruthless people to ever grace the official halls in the Republic of Elysium. 

Charles's chews on their bottom lip before continuing, no doubt witnessing the hesitance in her voice for the mention of Mrs. Yaegar. "And what about Piper?"

"She's my Elysian," Rose's eyebrows raise at the Else's little knowledge of the Elysium's practices.  "She'd be second-in-command."

Charles's eyebrows raise. "Not first?"

"Elysians are made up of two units, Charles. You know this," Rose grows agitated, tired of this dead-end conversing. "I'm Intelligence, the only one qualified as captain."

"Interesting," Charles's hands move to log this into the tablet. The only sound were their breathing and the doctor's fingers tapping before Charles's begins again. "So, there's a shipment of soldiers, what is the relevance?"

"Piper and I are the youngest Elysian unit on board, they believe they will be less intimidated if they saw a couple of young faces," age wouldn't help the intimidation factor. Piper had always caused people to try to tuck themselves tighter and smaller away from her strong gaze; Rose's intelligence could stop anyone's trail of thought before they would babble in attempt to measure up to her mind.

"So, you were to chaperone?"

"No, no," she shakes her head, ignoring how the glued stickers stuck in her hair pull at her skin because of the minuscule movement. "We are assigned to them. They take a test, they're divided into one or the other. The Tyr and Vor," Rose explains. "This is the last mission we have before we are sent back to Earth to perform what we have been trained for."

"So, these recruits--" Charles finally glances up from the tablet to stare directly into her eyes with a kind of sincerity that frightened her. "Remember any of them?"

"Are you kidding? There are at least--" she closed her eyes, trying to think of any of the familiar faces after she had spent yesterday trying to coax them out of their shells. As Vor, the entire bundle of recruits had been spazzy at best, all young and nervous-- not at all ready to learn and conquer and rage on like Tyr. "I-- I can't remember any of them." Not a single one.

For a moment, Charles looked disappointed before speaking again. "What about the--"

She interrupted with a breathy voice. "No, I want to ask you questions now. I've answered them all, willingly. This is treason," a crime she would be worried about, if not for the fact that her country would find this ship and destroy every last form of life inside of it save for her and Piper.

"A promise is a promise," It was clear Charles wanted to ask her more, but luckily, they seemed to honor their word. 

"My Root," her hands go back to her neck, feeling the soft ridges of the scar-- which wasn't right. Yesterday, to her knowledge, the Root had still been there, safely tucked away into the meat of her neck. There should be aggravated, puffy skin where her fingers touched, trying to mend what it had just lost, not a fully healed scar. "Where is it?"

Charles's voice hardly missed a beat. "Gone."

"Why?" She dug her fingers harder into her skin, as if she could find the Root if only she looked hard enough. 

"The Root contains a tracking device," the doctor crosses their legs as they continue, "which I am sure you know about."

"No," she wanted to laugh, but she only allowed a tiny breath of a giggle escape her lips. "No, it doesn't," Rose forced herself to become serious once again, but it was hard, considering that she was strapped to a hospital bed in the middle of space with two Elses who had no idea just what they were attempting to prod from Rose. 

"What?" Charles paused, eyes going wide at her reply. 

"The Root is only used to keep track of our health, it transmits our Elysian's pulse, and kills us, painlessly, if we are caught and irretrievable from an enemy," she says the words like a well-versed script. It had been ingrained in her mind long before she fully understood exactly what a Root was-- but it wasn't bad. She looked over it herself, dissected the few that malfunctioned, even placed them into the newborn Elysians. 

Charles swallowed audibly at her words. "The weed in your neck gets to decide when you die?"

"No, my country does," she explains with an earnest voice. If the Else were so ill-informed, maybe that is why they have waged a war against the Republic of Elysium for the past century, simply misunderstandings of one another's cultures. "After they take consideration of the enemy, the Rooted, and the archive of information we possess." 

"This isn't good," Charles didn't look at Rose again, only feverishly tapping on the tablet as she waited for another question. The doctor paused, moving the tablet far away enough that they could look over it all at once, and didn't speak again. Charles seemed to be paralyzed in thought, a familiar state that Rose had found herself in almost daily.

"What?" She spoke after minutes of silence.

"Nothing," Charles whispered, as if whatever lay on the tablet's screen was the opposite of good news. "Nothing, go on. Ask me another question."

Rose didn't know what to ask-- so many questions were in her mind, and only one actually mattered. Where is Piper. But she held her tongue after realizing the question would likely take them all back to square one. The teenager folded her hands over one another, callouses she didn't remember ever having clung to her once soft palms. 

"Why did I wake up next to a stranger?" Because anything would have been better. A prison cell is more pragmatic; even more, a prison cell with her Elysian. 

Charles searched for words. "The nature of your relationship with Fenris is... complicated, as of now."

"The nature of my relationship," she repeated to herself in confusion. They didn't have a relationship. The only person she ever cared for, worried about, loved hopelessly is Piper. "What does that mean?" 

"I told you we would speak candidly, did I not?" The doctor told her, voice thoughtful. 

"You did," she agreed, clenching her hands tighter together, and at the movement, her IVs tugged uncomfortably. She didn't think about it, all she focused on was Charles's pink lips moving with words that didn't make any sense. 

"Rose," Charles's hand looked as if it wanted to stray towards her own, but the doctor thankfully kept it settled in their lap. "This morning, you woke up next to Fenris X, a man that you have been in love with since you were sixteen, on the Valhalla, a ship set to dock in the United Republic of Earth in ninety-six hours." 

Author's Note

Unhappy with this chapter. More Fenris next chapter. Eh. Hope y'all enjoyed!

Tell me what you liked, tell me what you didn't!!!

(BTW, if it's confusing to anyone, Charles doesn't conform to the girl or boy gender, so all of the their/they are strictly towards Charles.)