A/N: My first fanfic!

Shepard halted and doubled back to the Citadel news kiosk. Garrus waited in place for a few seconds, then joined her at the kiosk.

"Listen to this," said Shepard. "The Consort may be leaving the Citadel! I wonder…?"

"Shepard?"

"I wonder if Septimus survived the Reaper attack?"

"What? Who?"

"Septimus Oraka. The old turian general who was moping around in Chora's Den because Sha'ira shot him down? Called Wrex ugly to his face?"

"Oh, him! That old fellow. Yeah. He was really starting to embarrass me. We told him to shape up, didn't we? 'Straighten up and act like a general.' I don't know. I may have heard that he did something heroic. Someone said he got the Consort and some of her acolytes off the Citadel at the last minute while holding off a band of geth. Something like that. The word in C-Sec was that she and some of her apprentices stayed to help coordinate the evacuation. But I didn't hear much about him. A lot of people disappeared."

"But I wonder if he survived."

"Why?"

"Well," Shepard mused, "He told me a story once."

"Story?"

"It was a few days after we talked to Septimus and the Consort about that silly spat of theirs. Remember? He wrote her a note of apology. I was passing time between appointments in a quiet sort of teahouse on the Presidium. I had left that trinket Sha'ira gave me on a chain around my neck all week."

"The key we used on Eletania?"

"The very one." Shepard ambled over to a bench with a good view of the Nebula and motioned for Garrus to take a seat. She tried to recall Septimus and his long story. Gazing out at the star-speckled vista before them, she wondered whether he had since become part of the luminous dust cloud that enveloped the ancient station.

"Well, Septimus was in there, and he just kept staring at me until I got up, went over, and asked to join him. He bought me a drink. I waited for him to start. He pointed to the trinket.

'Did she give that to you?'

'This? Yes.'

'Ah.' He sighed and propped an elbow on the table and stared mutely out over the terrace into the lakes surrounding the Conduit. I thought I should encourage him. I slipped the chain off over my head and put it on the table in front of him.

'So tell me, is there a story behind this thing?'

'Ah, yes, the story,' he rumbled slowly, as if he had grown tired of a lifetime of snapping crisp, terse commands. He was absent-mindedly swirling the chain around in circles on the tabletop with the neatly filed tip of a black talon.

'The story. Yes.

'I met her when I was around, say, twenty-five by your count. Started out with the military at fifteen with the rest of the youth my age. Some of us eventually went on to less combat-oriented posts for service after the mandatory training, but I stayed on as an orderly and moved up through the ranks. At the time, I was signifer for my company.

'It was pretty lawless back then. Even after all the centuries, there were still the occasional bands of marauding krogan, and of course, the batarian pirates, and they were much more brazen than they are today.

'Ah, we used to get things done! My company was building and defending a new colony at Apaxeros. We took some time to drive the pirates out of the area and landed at a nearby asari town called Sidra. That's where I met Sha'ira. While we were there, some pirates tried to raid and loot the city. See, the local Consort Chambers and its school were a particular target for the slavers. A lovely young asari who can sing and dance and recite oracles could be sold for a pretty sum. Still can. With lives that long, you could buy a couple slaves and pass them down to your great-grandchildren…'

Septimus stopped to take a gulp of his drink and order a dish of tupo millet cakes. 'Dexter and sinister omnicompatible provided you don't have bad allergies' he said. 'Just not as filling.' (You should try some if you get a chance, Garrus. They were pretty good.) Septimus waited for them to arrive, offered me as many as I wanted, and continued:

'The Matriarch who ran the place was a skilled biotic fighter, but those pirates were fast, and they had managed to commit various acts of sabotage. Poisoned some people, even. The city was very new; the defense systems were not completed. Huh. Typical. The pirates had created some spectacular distractions while a team of slavers got into the Chambers from the roof with the help of two gunships. The local contingent of asari commandos was tough enough to hold their own, but we were willing to help. Most of us had been resting in the spacious Chambers courtyard when it all happened. Some of our people went to help the Matriarch hold off the gunships. I planted our standard in the front lobby of the separate guest building while we sent out some men to round up the civilians and keep them away from the pirates. We ended up with some fifty staff and students and identified the ones who knew something about fighting.

'Sha'ira didn't. She very young then - much older than I was if you count years, but if she weren't asari she would have been just a little younger than me, I think. It takes them so long to grow up. At the time, she didn't know a thing about the martial arts. She saw me standing there with the standard' – Septimus straightened in his chair – 'and she came right up to me and asked my name. I told her.

'"Septimus Oraka, the proud and upright, honor awaits you," she said. I'll admit I was dumbfounded at first. I nodded at her and stood straighter and taller. She just kept smiling at me, and it made me nervous. She was wearing this.' He picked up the silvery trinket on its chain and let it cascade from hand to hand several times. Then he put it back down on the table.

'In the end, we drove off the pirates, and decimated them, of course. We stayed on an extra week to help put things in order, and I got to know Sha'ira.

'She was an indentured acolyte at the school. Indentured apprenticeships were common at the time, especially at more old-fashioned asari settlements. Her turian father was long dead, and her mother had been killed in a rare and unusual hovercar accident. The little trinket,' said Septimus, touching it lightly, 'was a memento of her mother. But as I was saying, she was already a student at the school, and so she agreed on a contract with them so she could continue her training and pay her own way by teaching the younger students. She was always so confident and capable, and did quite well for herself.

'Our company left, but we stayed in touch, and I would visit her when I had leave. The important thing, though, was that she came to love me. She used to say I was noble and handsome. I didn't usually have the kind of money you would have needed to buy her services, even though she was only an acolyte. Still, she gave me peace. She sang and played chess and bathed my wounds and rubbed my fingers when they were cold, and they were always cold after that time I was stranded on that awful frozen asteroid.' He crossed his arms and shuddered dramatically.

'But that's another story. One day, she took me aside. She said she wanted us to go away someday and move to some quiet, secluded colony. "Someplace warm," I suggested. "Someplace with water," she said. She could concentrate on her poetry, and I could cultivate my garden. But she still had many years under contract, and although my fifteen years of mandatory service were nearly complete, I was pledged to serve. "Honor awaits you," she had said. And to a turian – at least one from my colony – 'honor' might as well mean 'duty.' The region was still unstable, and there was work to be done. I had fallen into this military career, and if I was going to be a lifer, I intended to do a good job of it. In any case, we both needed to make enough money to buy that nice villa and retire.

'I suppose it might have been possible to take her as mate anyway, and I suppose I would have liked that, but her profession was governed by ancient traditions, and tradition dictated that active Consorts not marry. "You don't have to wait for me, and you don't have to retire for me," I said. "I know your work is important to you. You could enjoy many centuries as a prestigious Consort. And I could be, well, dead by the time you're ready to retire. Or you could even do something else for a living and be with someone who doesn't have to keep running off to make war." Of course I was not exactly indifferent about it all; I wanted her for myself, of course. It was just that I really was trying to do the right thing.

'But no, she didn't let me down easy! Sometimes I wish,' (he took a breath), 'I wish she had taken me up on that. That she had simply said, "Yeah, you're right," and that would have been the end of that. I would have been heartbroken, yes, but I would have understood that. I could have gotten over her and taken a mate from my own people and had children of my own kind. But no, she wanted me. My species mates for life, and I felt like she was the only one for me. I just couldn't imagine taking up with some string of substitutes, so I waited.

'Of course, once she became a full Consort, it would occasionally be part of her work to meld with clients. I didn't exactly agree with that. But it was tradition, and asari are perhaps simply, even biologically, different about these things, so I was ready to try to be tolerant.

'"It's all right," she had said. "If it's true that I've got centuries ahead of me, it wouldn't hurt if, when you retire, I spent your last few decades with you and then went back to my career – not to be crass, of course." As Consort she was always full of wisdom and poise, but Sha'ira herself could be as cold or tactless as anyone else when she was being herself. I loved her either way.

'That day, as I remember it, she promised me that she would come away with me someday to a quiet villa somewhere warm and be my mate, and she gave me this little Prothean trinket to keep as a token. She made me promise to come back for her – can you believe it, she was actually afraid I wouldn't, that dear fool! – she made me promise to come back and take her with me to that sunny villa when I was free to retire. I had no suitable trinkets to give, so I nicked my tongue with my ancestors' serrated knife, took her right hand, and with my other hand I took a little drop of blue blood and placed it in the center of her little blue palm. "I give you my word," I said. Sentimental of me, but I'm a sentimental old turian, and I keep my word. But she started it, you know.

'After that, I was often away for years at a time on some campaign or another. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I ended up a general. First thing I did with my better pay was to buy off the remainder of the contract of indentured service that bound Sha'ira to the Chambers on Sidra. She was free now. I handed the documents over to her and helped her get a nice place in a nice part of the Wards where she could live and set up shop. She was so happy; she always wanted to work on the Citadel. Within a few years she had moved her Chambers onto the Presidium. I was wonderfully proud of her.

'In the meantime, I was off working and fighting again. Honor, indeed! Bah. Honor doesn't keep you warm at night. You know, I once lost an eye and had to get a cybernetic implant. Half my head is probably synthetic by now. Oh, oh, I went down with a feisty little warship called the Machaira once, and I thought it was all over, but I got lucky and another ship picked me up. There I was, drifting in space, with the dismembered, frozen pieces of the crew swirling around me! Someone's guts hit me in the faceplate. There was a smudge. (I sure hate the cold of space. Don't you?) My legions,' he said proudly, 'have never been accused of war crimes. Still, I saw such things none the less. But when I was with Sha'ira, she always made me feel like she could see what I saw. It was as if she could transport herself into all my lonely memories and make it as if she had been there. Or rather, as if I had never been there. Ah, well, she's an asari; maybe she really could. Or maybe it was just her. I loved it the most when we talked about locations and plans for our villa.

'But we can trade war stories later, Commander. The point is, I'm finally able to retire! So the next chance I get to dock here at the Citadel, I go to see Sha'ira. I was going to tell her how I'd built us a lovely house with an orchard and a creek on a sunny planet not far from her home city. All she had to do was say the word and I would retire and we would be off.

'She rearranged most of her appointments that day to see me, except for that one elcor diplomat. Yeah, so it bothered me a little. Perhaps you'll think it was haughty of me to be offended, but she always used to make time for me, no matter what.'

'Wait. You betrayed a man's secrets just because he was ahead of you in line?'

'No! What do you take me for, a – ah, never mind. I wasn't really that upset. I was still happy and excited, you know. I figured slow-moving elcor diplomats would soon be the least of my worries.

'Finally, she let me in. I bounded into her room and swept her up in my arms and smoothed her lovely fringe. Then I set her down and composed myself. Wouldn't do to get carried away.' The old general's eyes lit up and his mandibles flared generously as he relived the moment. Even his crest seemed to stand away from his head with more energy. "Sha'ira," I said, "I've come to keep my word."

Then the general paused to down the final swig of his drink. With an exasperated sigh, his entire frame seemed to crumple inwards. He stared into the empty cup.

'Can you believe it? I mean, she said she couldn't go! I said that I understood; naturally it would take many days, weeks, months even, to wrap up operations here… . "It's not that," she said. "Something is coming. I've talked to many, many people and peered into dark corners of many minds – I believe this place will need me here for something important. And you, Oraka," she said solemnly (I am called Septimus, but she liked to be the only one to call me Oraka) "I sense that honor awaits you."'

Septimus pressed three talons into the table and leaned forward slowly.

'She probably tried to continue, but I think I waved some claws in her face. I was pacing around the room, and I remember feeling as if every scale on my body were beginning to peel painfully away from me as my limbs tightened. Inside, all I could feel was the piercing emptiness of a lifetime of wasted patience and vain restraint. I lost it.

"Honor!" I cried. "What do I care for honor! Honor can kiss my leathery backside! Perhaps I don't care for honor any more. You certainly don't! I've waited all my life for you, Sha'ira; I've spent the years of my youth alone, and all because I believed you when you swore to me! You, with your lazy thousand-year lifespan! You swindle me out of the few I had, and now – now, is twenty years out of a thousand too damn precious to waste on a promise to a friend in his old age?" I was in no mood to let her explain. That sensation of undisciplined emotion was perversely intoxicating. "Very well then! Stay, and keep your worthless promises for yourself." I clawed the Prothean trinket from my neck in a frenzy. I had never removed it, not for a second, all those years. I threw it at her feet and stalked out.

'I bumped into that elcor diplomat Xeltan as I was strutting out. I know it isn't his fault, but I just never liked that guy. And there he was, saying something loudly to Nelyna to the effect that Sha'ira always honored her promises or some such thing. "What a complete lie!" I thought. I seriously felt as if I needed to show them all how wrong they all were to trust her. And it occurred to me that two could play this game. I couldn't steal her time the way she stole mine (as I thought at the time), but I could certainly steal her reputation and accomplish in days what done to me over a lifetime. Perhaps she would learn to value time once she'd wasted enough of it, I thought. Also … it started to bother me like crazy that she was melding with all these creatures… we are, as I said, a naturally monogamous species, although I don't mean that as an excuse, though I was angry because of the lies … and after that I did some … dishonorable things … to add to the many things I wish I could forget, and the long and short of it is … that's how I ended up in Chora's Den.'"

"So that's what he was on about," said Garrus, leaning back and crossing his legs. "I'll stick to turian loves, please."

"Not attracted to humans, then?"

"Well, m-maybe, if-"

"So before I left, I offered to let old Septimus keep the Prothean trinket. He said I should hold onto it. If Sha'ira wanted me to have it, he said, maybe I was meant to have it. He seemed to think it might be a good thing to turn over a new leaf with her, anyway. He had to take off again in a few hours, but she had accepted his apology, he said. That was enough for now. They would talk when he got back."

Garrus hummed a two-toned hum in his syrinx. "But wasn't that was just a few weeks before the Reaper did its thing here? I hope they got to talk before this place got torn apart."

"I hope Septimus is alive," said Shepard. "If he is, perhaps the Consort has decided to keep her promise, after all. But of course, we've only heard his side of the story. A sentimental story, but he was a sentimental old turian."