A/N: I wrote this one-shot long ago when I was on a Mass Effect kick. It was an emotionally hard thing to write. The hanar/drell compact always fascinated and, admittedly, somewhat repulsed me, and the thought of young-child-Thane performing his first assassination haunted my thoughts. I had to get them out, but I debated ever posting this story. This story includes violent content (violence which is perpetrated by a child) and therefore may be upsetting to some readers.
First Kill
It's raining. It's not misty, or drizzling. It never is. It's a deluge. Huge, fat drops of water hammer everything in the world down, the soil, the vegetation, the people, even the buildings: they are squat and close to the ground, seemingly borne down by the constant onslaught. The biodomes glisten in the twilight, far-off and dreamlike, their myriad spires deceptively reminiscent of delicate shells, the spiraling sweep of their facades concealing chambers that closely resemble the nautili of Earth. The architecture is not wholly hanar; there are elements of both races buried in the deep recesses of these structures, nearly two centuries' worth of a melding of cultures.
But the boy has never seen Earth, and he has not yet lived long enough to appreciate or fully understand the joining that so inexorably changed the hanar and his own people. Indeed, he has barely ventured beyond his dome, a beautiful, sprawling enclosure of glittering metal and stone where he began his Compact as a very young child.
He shifts in discomfort. He has never before been entrenched in one place for so long. The early evening light is fading, and he shivers, for he is soaked to the bone. He gazes out over the dully gleaming rooftops of the long-since abandoned biodome. There are no shimmering mass effect fields here, nothing to protect the burnished metal surfaces from the elements. The smell of the rain is distinct and permeating. It is not the sharp, cloying snap-scent of ozone, as before a lightning storm, nor the loamy, slightly musty petrichor that necessitates the presence of terrestrial vegetation or fungi, but the clean, chalky tang of wetted limestone and calcium carbonate. The area is devoid of life; it was once an industrial processing area, but an accident resulted in the release of hazardous levels of radioactive chemicals, including unrecoverable eezo, forcing its abandonment. Here he waits, on one of the higher rooftops, crouched with his sniper rifle clutched to his chest.
The weapon would appear to be heavy and cumbersome, for it is large compared to his diminutive, scrawny 12-year-old's body, but he seems not to notice its weight. He is all limbs and knees and elbows, the edges of his fringe still soft and rounded, his eyes huge and bright. His scales yet retain the bluish sheen that fades with adolescence. He wears a lightweight jumpsuit of black microweave: material that can turn a knife or a low-caliber round but can do nothing to keep out the rain. It is sodden and clings to his skin. A wetsuit, he thinks glumly.
He is not nervous, not yet. He has been trained well, and the thing itself, the act, the danger, the performance, is not yet immediate, only proximate. He knows his brushes and paints and composition and lighting and canvas and the stroke, the technique, but apart they are nothing, only thoughts and instructions. They don't create a beautiful or cohesive piece. That's why he's here, now, his first joining of brush and canvas.
He knows very little about his mark, only that which is strictly necessary to complete the job: a general location and a general description of appearance.
He knows she's an asari, and that is enough, for an asari sticks out like a literal bright blue beacon in a hanar-drell dominated colony. Though he is young, he is not foolish: he knows that the job has been carefully selected, nothing too high-profile or difficult, to fit his training and experience. It is an almost laughably easy target. Still, there are requirements. There is a code, a ritual, a procedure, almost surgical, that he will follow all his life, starting tonight. Father Corvynelar has instilled in him a sense of the sacredness of the act: it must be quiet, it must not alert, it must be reverently executed. It must not cause undue suffering. Casualties must be minimized to the absolute, and an innocent must never be sacrificed, even for the sake of the completion of the job.
Father Corvynelar is his adopted hanar caretaker. The name is a religious honorific rather than a familial one. He is a priest of the Enkindlers and a religious scholar. He commands a high level of respect and a correspondingly high level of power on Kahje, and possesses a correspondingly high number of enemies. The boy knows not whether the asari is Father Corvy's enemy; he knows not her name, nor her position, nor anything about her but that she must die. The Enkindlers demand it. Father Corvy's voice is sharp and clear in his head, and he sees the ultraviolet pulses along his body that reinforce the conviction of his statement, sees the hanar as though he were standing in front of him right now, but in a different place. His fugues, the edeitic memory triggers to stimuli, have only recently begun as he has entered preadolescence. As a result, the events are still jarring and disorienting.
He returns to his present and scans the buildings again, eyes darting like frightened fish.
Movement at an entrance to one of the structures alerts him, and he curses inwardly, for they are not too far for a shot, but too far for his inexperienced comfort. He flits down from his perch, a wraith, and scales an adjoining structure, using the worn-down grooves as footholds. He silently and carefully approaches the edge, straining his eyes to see through the torrential rain the figures huddling in the shadows of the eaves several buildings down. He removes an attachment on his rifle, a handheld spotting scope, and holds it to his eye. His ocular implants grant him catlike night vision, and everything comes into sharp focus rather suddenly.
Three. One unmistakably an asari. One other possibly batarian; the last almost certainly drell. All armed. Will likely have to kill them all, though not likely that they are bodyguards, judging by their casual arrangement and the businesslike way in which they are speaking. Approximately 257 meters out; not even a remotely challenging shot. Wind negligible and irrelevant at this range. M-97 Viper fires .020x.039r mass-field projectiles at 240 rpm that travel at 870 meters per second each. 900 meter effective range, 1200 meter maximum range. He goes through the numbers in his head despite knowing it is unnecessary at this short range. He splays out, lining up the shots without a tripod, more out of a necessity for haste than his own pride. I could make this with my eyes closed, he thinks nonetheless with a small thrill. His heart rate has elevated, it is thrumming in his ears, racing in his throat. He breathes. Again, breathes. He shoulders the stock, cheek-locks, support hand moves far forward on forestock. Eyes down the scope's sights, zeroes, blue tentacles and dark eyes flash in the scope for a moment, only a moment, and he breathes in: at apex, squeezes the trigger, and the silencer thwips as the cartridge disgorges its contents, and there are three in quick succession, thwipthwipthwip and all three figures drop. The subsequent two are kills, easily, the bullets shearing through the flesh, bone, and brain matter in two perfect shots through the temple and between the eyes from the back, respectively, but the asari is not dead, he's got her through the neck, and it hasn't severed the spinal cord. She shifts and writhes on the ground, clutching her throat. He can't get a clear shot at her head or chest from this angle. He groans and shoulders his rifle with the strap: it automatically retracts and becomes compact enough not to hinder him. He leaps down from his vantage, racing across the slick, nearly submerged pavement. He can barely hear the rain over his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.
He approaches the bodies, blood blossoming from them in the puddles like spilled ink. He is cautious, wanting to be sure the asari hasn't gone for her weapon. He draws his rifle again. It unfolds with a mechanical whirr. He sees almost immediately that the last thing on her mind is retaliation or even defense: death is too close. She is shuddering violently, gurgling horribly, choking on blood as she struggles to breathe.
Her eyes are wide open, staring, unseeing, at the sky. He stands over her and raises the rifle to his shoulder, aiming. He realizes as he looks into the scope that he is shaking uncontrollably. The asari's eyes snap suddenly onto him, focusing, and she raises one blood-drenched hand and spreads her fingers, reaching for him. His mind races and he realizes, biotics, but she doesn't attack and he doesn't shoot. She gestures, minutely, piteously, and before he realizes he's done it he is crouching next to her, touching her forehead, gently wiping the rainwater out of her eyes. The eyes are growing dark, and round, now they're black as night, and as he grips her chin with the heel of one hand and the base of her skull with the other, energizes his eezo nodules with his amp, twists strongly and sharply he has suddenly entered a fugue and the memories with which he is bombarded are not his own. He watches her life flash before his eyes, but the images are vague and confusing and far too swift, and he can focus on only snatches at a time. The final few: a building in fading light; fields stretching away to a skyline of glittering structures in the distance that tower, light from the setting sun reflecting blindingly from their crystalline spires; a sudden deep blue reminiscent of Kahje's oceans in a storm, and it's become a face, beaming with warm, welcoming light, but the eyes are black, and they expand to fill every corner of his vision, consuming him, pulling him into darkness that is deep and quiet, warm and smothering.
He snaps back to himself with a gasp and lunges to his feet, backing away from the dead asari. His arms are coated to the elbow in her blood. Nausea overcomes him and he doubles over, heaving. He turns on his heel and runs, and gets several yards out before realizing that he has forgotten his rifle.
He returns, hurriedly, more terrified of the dead than he ever was of the living. He snatches up the rifle and turns to leave but suddenly he's yet again standing over the asari. He stares at her. Her eyes are closed, and her struggle has stopped so completely and suddenly that he is astonished at how peaceful she now looks. She's just a body, now, a husk. Her soul is gone. The rain is slowly carrying her lifeblood away, cleansing her skin and leaving it shining, immaculate.
Purpose and conviction rise in him suddenly and he bends over her, arranging her streaming hands over her chest reverently. The preciseness of the arrangement is childlike. He stands and folds his own hands, bowing his head. He murmurs a swift prayer, one that he learned from his parents, one they taught him before he could remember, but it comes to him suddenly, and it is the prayer that he will use, in some form, from that moment on.
"Kalahira, mistress of depths, I ask forgiveness. Kalahira, whose waves wear down stone and sand, wash the sins from this one and set her on the distant shore of the infinite spirit." He pauses. "Enkindlers light this one's path," he adds, as an afterthought, thinking of Father Corvy. He straightens, picks up his rifle, holsters it on his back, turns, leaves.
He winds his way home through the wet, shining streets leading to his biodome. He is ashamed of his failure to do right by his vows, and he knows that Father Corvy will be disappointed in him. But he feels strangely at peace as he thinks of the asari, her hands folded, her blue skin sliding in and out of sight in the water of Kalahira's sea as she drifts to her white shore. The rain has washed her blood from him, as well, and his hands are clean and glistening.