The civilian clothing is still uncomfortable, and as he kneels on the ground Mordin occasionally reaches up to his chest to adjust an armored drag handle that is no longer there. Only soft fabric greets his fingers, hardly protecting the fragile swell of skin on a worn and concave chest. He breathes deeply as he works. It is warm, even for Mannovai, and humidity fills his lungs with each inhale.
His hands dig carefully through wet soil, burying roots and herding fertilizer into small piles around a trunk no thicker than a broomstick. His muscles have begun to ache, but refreshingly so: a product of his own industry. The knees on his civilian pants are covered in mud with a compliment of water sprayed and slowly drying across the front of his shirt. Sunlight drenches the garden surrounding him and, standing up with a nod when he is done, Mordin inspects his handiwork. He smiles with deep satisfaction.
A Tuchankan raik dianthus. Native to dry habitats.
Mordin crosses his arms and narrows his eyes at the slender tree, silently willing it to grow in the coastal climate of Mannovai so far from its homeland. He has an excess of charts and soil injections if it attempts to argue with him: hormones and chemical mixtures, mostly nitrous oxide with a splash of acidic compost thrown in for the late flowering season. Everything has been measured and mixed himself. It is a very rare species of tree, moreso after the nuclear war that decimated the planet before Mordin's footsteps ever sank into its sand.
A fool's wish, perhaps, to plant such a thing. Staring up at it, Mordin wonders if perhaps he should have chosen a bush that the mulwiches would enjoy nesting in.
"Uncle," a voice says next to him.
Any thoughts of compost and twittering birds scatter away. "Professor Solus," he replies affectionately to the young man rising up from the ground to stand next to him, "how can I help?"
His nephew cleans his bare hands with a cloth and a smudge of soil graces the cooler hues of his forehead. He stares up at the tree and exhales, plainly overheated by digging holes all afternoon. "It feels strange to have you of all people call me that," he admits.
Mordin absently raises a hand to wave the concern away. "Nonsense," he replies with a tender voice. "Earned it."
Self consciously, the young man looks away and smiles. He tucks the cloth into a pocket and his eyes flicker back to the dianthus. "Why are we planting this?"
Mordin's gaze also shifts back to the tree. He smiles. "Always wanted to try horticulture," he explains. "Wanted to try lots of things, actually. Didn't have the time."
A satisfactory answer. With a nod between them, they turn away from it and begin an unhurried return toward the house. Mordin's nephew is polite enough not to ask why his uncle is living on Mannovai under a different name, nor why the older man's eyelids tremble with unspoken danger whenever questions of Tuchanka's cured injuries and the Union's resulting political stances come up in their conversations. It is better not to ask such questions of ghosts, unlikely as they are within salarian culture, and so the young man merely visits whenever he can and refrains from interrogating the apparition of his uncle.
He teases Mordin, however, without thorns, about the woman living in his house. "Are we ever going to talk about her?" he asks as they walk.
Mordin tosses him a roguish look, with the same reply he always has: "Merely a patient."
A solid dismissal, but Mordin's eyelids tremble with less danger, and more drama, and so his nephew continues to point out the unusual circumstance of the celebrity guest whenever he visits. Mordin pauses at a sullen patch of demael flowers losing their battle with the local fauna, whose petals he leans down over to pick through thoughtfully, and their conversation drifts to lighter, less complicated topics of quantitative genetic variances.
There is no reason to hurry, and so they do not.
However, Mordin reaches a hand back when he stands again. They walk together in the afternoon sunlight, and he worries the burn scar curdling the skin at the back of his neck with his fingers. Just one more scar, he thinks, on top of an excess of others. His hand drops away and his gait grows a bit quicker, his eyes lifting up to the modest house when they grow closer to where a small figure waits. He smiles when he sees her.
"How did it go?" Shepard calls out, sunglasses crowning her head.
"As expected!" Mordin calls back, jaunty at his own horticultural skill.
Shepard smiles and leans against the open doorway, tucked into shorts and a warmly threaded blouse that is far too large for her and too thick for the humidity surrounding them. She smiles and lifts her hand into a small wave. His nephew nods at her before he departs with a promise to see Mordin again the next day at the university.
"Finished with Sparatus?" Mordin asks Shepard when they are alone.
"If I get another conference call about petty political squabbles," she replies with a small sigh, "I'm going to violently disconnect our quantum comm line."
"Again?"
"Again."
Mordin chuckles softly and joins her in the doorway. They watch the new tree in the distance together, a spindling nothing composed precariously of hope and mauve bark, as it sways in the breeze. He can hear the surf in the distance, as always: a white-noise admonishment against planting what amounts to a type of foreign cactus. Inhaling stubbornly, Mordin decides that he will simply construct the tree with pure strength of will, bright and lovely like it was always meant to be. He is good at such things.
"Prefer it if I stopped calling during the day?" he asks.
Shepard glances at him with a confused expression that lifts into an easy smile. "No. I like it when you call," she says with a soft note of affection.
He smiles back, mildly bolstered by the comment. "Good. Would probably continue even if you didn't," he replies with a smirk and a sideglance.
She laughs, and her voice takes on a swift cadence that matches his own. "Prosthetic still synced properly, Shepard?" she says. "Need me to come home? Haven't dismantled anything? Space hamster still intact and," she inhales deeply, "eating properly for his size?"
He sniffs, entering the house. "Feed the creature far too much."
"He would probably disagree with you," she counters. Shepard lifts the miniature giant space hamster up when she reaches its cage in the living room, holding it with both hands. She flexes her fingers in soft fur and smiles when it hums at her. She continues to flex her fingers introspectively after she places it back into its cage.
Mordin blinks, watching her, surprised when he begins to smell ash. "Aware of the unlikelihood of the prosthetic failing, of course," he says, his gaze searching around for the source of it. "Work is immaculate! Perfect even. Threaded with several eezo cores. Eight neutrino auxiliary fail-safes!" He tilts his head and inhales deeply. Turning away, he glances back at Shepard with a frown about the smell in the house. "Still worry," he adds quietly.
Her gaze softens. "I'm fine."
"Affinity for destruction still concerning. House obviously in constant peril."
Sniff, sniff, sniff.
Shepard laughs, unconcerned. "Uh-huh."
Mordin continues to search, wondering if the partial retirement has finally driven him to insanity. Not an impossible scenario, to be fair. Retiring anywhere was a pipe dream spurred on mostly by stress, something he expected would drive him mad if it ever actually came to pass. The open air of salarian architecture was something he did not expect to be surrounded by ever again.
Shepard's eyes widen with recognition at his search. "I made a few loaves of bread," she tells him, following behind. "Sorry."
He raises a brow, and halts. "Oh?"
Shepard drags him into the kitchen, where several blackened hunks of alien wheat wait with glum candor on the table. He stares down at each of them, blinking, and then back to her very questioningly. The constant peril of the house washes over him with a wave of adrenaline, less of a jest than it was a few minutes ago. "Immolated them on purpose?" he asks.
She glances down at them and runs a hand through her hair, absently taking her sunglasses off when her fingers run into plastic. "I thought I would be better at cooking," she replies. "I've always wanted to try it."
Neutralized would be the kindest thing anyone could say about the bread, and so Mordin says nothing. He frowns down at the loaves, picking one up and pacing it restlessly between his hands, covering his fingers with ash. An unwelcome memory accompanies both the smell and the texture: digging grimly, surrounded by stars in the ever expanding distance of the void and an infinite number of silently crashing ships.
It had been breathlessly dark.
"Mordin," Shepard says quietly. She places a hand on his arm. "Stop it."
Mordin blinks, and pulls his hand away from the back of his neck. The bread has been set down, at some point he cannot remember, and he glances at her. "Apologies," he says quietly.
The smile she offers him is a flash of warmth, obviously meant to comfort him, and he is old enough to let it. Her hip knocks into the side of his thigh with a thump of affection and she slips an arm around his waist. "I'm sorry, too. I promise to be careful."
He smiles, returning the gesture around her waist, leaning over her with wide eyes and a wave of his free hand as he begins to tell her about the state of the dianthus. Mordin talks, for hours, at the university. At home he does much the same. He has hundreds of data pages dedicated to the keepers populating the Citadel, a lengthy treatise on the superiority of comic opera over tragic, and he recites his latest findings on local marine fauna to her whenever he can. An endless array of side projects greet him in his lab at the top of the stairs.
It is hard to imagine existing in a world that does not include his own participation, and so he does not.
The sunglasses dangle from her fingers as she listens. Shepard listens to Mordin speak of the tree, and then seashells, and then finally of coastal wind patterns, until the shadowed hues of evening wash over the house. Then she makes foreign food that tastes excessively of carbohydrates and a little too much shard wine. "I've figured it out," she tells him, with a laugh that still rings with a hint of military bravado throughout the room. She picks up the bread lovingly and holds it up. "I'm going to use these for target practice," she explains. "Wrex sent me my old widow and I want to be ready when he comes by again."
Mordin's eyes widen, and then he smiles.
Bright and lovely, he thinks.
Shepard aims at her loaves of bread with a glint of victory in her eyes, and Mordin injects plants with bacillus rannadrilgiensis as the insects native to Mannovai explore the imported flora all around them. He teaches theater three days a week, biology for two, and the other professors complain whenever his comm line is strangely disconnected.
The tree sways in the breeze outside; a wisp of possibility in a warm dusk.