A/N: This is a story I wrote as a background for an OC in a Mass Effect RP. It doesn't contain any major ME characters, but is set in the universe. PM me if you're interested in joining the RP and I'll send you a link to our forums.
A Thousand Setting Suns.
Aoife is born into a plastic, sterile smelling world. She is soon more familiar with the sting of lab needles than her mother's warmth.
She lies in a room every night with white walls, white ceiling, white floor. Sometimes she feels like she is falling upwards.
Sometimes she wakes to find that in the night things have moved around her room. There are more needles, then, and everything in her room is nailed down.
She is given strange toys, and when she moves to play with them her hands are held down. Eventually she learns to move the objects with her not-hands, and is praised and smiled at.
There is no cruelty, but there is no love, either. Only interest. She has a sister, she knows. Scathach. She is able to play with her. The two of them each make a wall with their not-hands and each one tries to break it down in turn. The game is fun, but she always ends it with a pounding headache. On those days, the soft white bed is a relief.
As she gets older, and more responsible, she and her sister are allowed to walk through the floors of their world. They hold hands, for the human contact they only otherwise receive in impersonal physical examinations. They are two small brown-skinned, brown-haired mirror images. Everywhere they turn there are people watching them.
Scathach starts to misbehave as they get older. By the time they are six she is disobedient. She refuses to play with the toys and won't play the wall game anymore. Aoife is different. She is the older sister, and more responsible. Scathach is moved into her room, and for a while the games begin again. At night they try to tell each other stories, but they can never reach beyond the pale walls to a world they have never seen.
When they are eight, they are introduced to small blue children. They have never seen other children before, and wonder whether perhaps these girls are normal, and they are the strange ones. Now there are other blue adults around. Sometimes one will hold Aoife's head and the world will go strange and black tinted and strange emotions will flood these children what are we their brains are not biotics oh god
She hates those days.
She and one of the blue girls play a new type of game. Scathach tells her at night that she is playing one too with another girl. Now they make the wall around themselves and when the blue shining blows hit and break the wall, it hurts. She learns to make her wall stronger. Scathach learns new ways to break down the other girl's wall first. She wonders how they can be the same and not the same.
The first time she kills, she is ten. It is one of the blue women (asari, she knows they are called asari, but not their names. Maybe they don't have them). She is the one who used to hold her head. Her eyes stare at Aoife with an unfamiliar emotion and she speaks to her.
'Please'.
Aoife looks over at the woman with the needles. She knows that she is her mother, but doesn't know what it means. The woman nods. Aoife concentrates hard and warps the woman. She has never seen this happen before without the wall. The woman convulses, and flinches, but continues to twitch on the floor.
Aoife glances involuntarily at her mother again, and Scathach, who is watching. That same, unfamiliar emotion is in her eyes. Scathach doesn't want her to do it, she realises. But she is the older sister, and she must sometimes do what Scathach cannot.
This time, when she warps the asari, she convulses again and lies still. A trickle of bluish purple runs from the corner of her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes. Her eyes do not see Aoife. She pads over to the body, and pats her for a while. She shakes her a little harder. When the woman doesn't wake, Aoife turns to her mother, the seeds of incipient panic resting in her belly. Her mother is smiling. She opens out her arms, and for the first time ever Aoife is held.
She understands. She doesn't understand. She understands.
.
By the time she is thirteen, Aoife is the perfect biotic soldier for her mother. But she is also learning. The blue girls tell her stories about their lives outside the walls. They wear clothes that are not white and basic, and are allowed to paint on their faces with pretty patterns.
But most of all, they tell her about her mother. Aoife hears how her mother had never been satisfied with her own biotic abilities. How she married a strong adept simply for his genetic potential. How their older brother had been null, and had died for it. She doesn't understand all of this yet, but she will.
Mostly, she understands that her mother gathered scientists and eezo and worked hard until she and Scathach could be born. She wants them because they are what she couldn't be. They will make her strong.
For the first time in her life, Aoife realises that she is angry.
.
The anger doesn't go away. It fills her every breath. She begs one of the scientists to bring her things. When she starts to wear leather jackets, and chains, and dye her hair, her mother just smiles. Filled with the pounding anger, Aoife wants to do anything she can to share it with her mother, but nothing seems to work.
At the same time as Aoife is learning to rebel, Scathach is changing too. Like the planets dancing in the skies, they spin around each other, never touching, always apart. Scathach is the perfect soldier now, doing exactly what their mother wants. When Aoife pierces through her nose with a stolen earring and gets a severe infection, she wakes to find Scathach standing there, next to her mother, her eyes strangely blank.
The blows hurt, but more than the pain is the look on her sister's face. There is nothing there anymore for Aoife to recognise.
.
For a while, Aoife returns to the fold. She does what she is told. By the time she is 18 she is used to being pitted against other biotics. She wins. She always wins. Whilst Scathach has learnt to use different weapons, and uses her biotics to charge into her opponents, Aoife is a master of biotics, equal to most asari and better than some. Her mother ruffles her hair and calls her 'my little adept'. She no longer has to kill those she defeats. They join her mother, and Aoife is used to punish them if they won't. They call her Captain, and Aoife realises that her mother is achieving exactly what she wanted.
The anger comes back with a surprising force, and in her next match, against a boy about her age, Aoife deliberately loses to see what will happen. She is thrown against a wall, blood seeping from her nose and eyes as she is pinned up by a biotic barrier. She looks to her mother for her response, and sees a flash of anger in her eyes.
When she is released, Aoife walks from the room, and stands in the gardens to her home, breathing in the air. She feels she has won a victory. The feeling does not last.
She feels the smooth, cold barrel of the pistol against her head before she realises that the boy is there. He pushes her to the ground, and she realises what he is going to do. She doesn't cry at the strange pain, but her breath is released in choking, pained sobs. When he is done, he laughs and drops the pistol, redoing his belt again. She is numb. Turning her head, she looks up at the house, and her breath catches when she realises that her mother is watching.
The anger fills her, bursts from her fingers in a blaze of dark energy. Bypassing the gun, she grips the boy around the neck and strangles him to death with biotically enhanced strength. He takes a long time to die, and she enjoys it. She looks up again at her mother, a challenge in her eyes, and feels her stomach fill with cold bile as she sees her mother smile. This is what she wanted, for Aoife to feel that cold, burning anger, to understand the meaning of power.
She bends over and is sick, not caring if it hits the corpse of the boy. When she is finished, she stands up again, shakily wiping her mouth, and sees that her mother has gone. Moving quickly, she grabs the pistol from the floor, and climbs the wall surrounding the house, hands cut by the glass at the top, and slowing her descent with a burst of biotics. She doesn't stop running until she is coughing from the lack of air.
She is in a strange and unfamiliar place. Smashing the window to a nearby shop, she takes clothes, several credit chits, and runs. Eventually she reaches a hotel. She has been allowed out over the years, and knows what to do. She books a room in her name, and walks up the stairs to it. Using another burst of biotic energy she jumps from the first floor window, and runs to another, seedier motel she had spotted on her way. Here she shaves her head, showers, and puts on the new clothes she has found. She orders food, and almost inhales it, hungrier than she has ever been before. That evening she is on a transport ship heading away from Earth and towards the Citadel.
.
She is 18, of age, and when she reaches the Citadel she is let in with a minimum of fuss. She quickly finds that she has no transferable skills except killing people. She has learnt over the years to use a sniper rifle, and buys an M-97 Viper X with the last of her credits. She shakes when the young man introduces her to her first client, but after a few jobs she is used to the work. She earns a lot of money by using the skills her mother has taught her, and soon there is a need for that money.
.
Aoife gives birth in a small clinic. It is a painful, bloody experience, and she cries when her son Connlá is placed in her arms. She knows she cannot keep him. She hands him over for adoption, but Connlá's new parents are kind and forgiving, an elderly couple who could have no children of their own, and allow her to keep in contact with him.
When she walks away from her son for the first time, her feet shake, and all of the goodness seems to be gone from the world. Her anger, which has sustained her this long, seems to drain away. Catching herself, she stops from turning back, and walks resolutely on, climbing onto the transport to Illium.
.
In Illium she finds that her skills as an assassin are in constant demand. The only illegal thing on the whole colony is murder, and she learns how to blend in and stay unnoticed. The bulk of the money from her wetwork is transferred into a separate account and sent to Connlá's parents, and to fund organisations attempting to oppose her mother.
In order to live her everyday life, she sets up a small company advising on security from Eclipse mercenaries. She is unusual in Illium, a world which mostly accepts the presence of the mercenaries, but receives a steady stream of clients. And if the business is partly a front for her other job, then no one ever seems to notice.
It is in a bar on Illium that she meets Athanna. The asari girl approaches her, and hands her a couple of datapads listing the details of Aoife's activities. She explains that she is attempting to become an information broker, but that a volus has been suborning her contacts. If Aoife will deal with the volus Athanna says she will not expose her. The assignment is easy, and she and Athanna get drunk together at the same bar that evening. When Aoife wakes up in the asari's bed the next day, she is horrified, and runs. Athanna makes no secret of her attraction to the human, and tracks her down repeatedly. Eventually, the two become lovers.
Their relationship is tempestuous. Athanna is rapidly approaching her matron years and repeatedly begs Aoife to settle down with her and have children. During the course of one argument, the two fight, a fight which is abruptly stopped when one of Aoife's punches connects, and she sees bluish purple blood on her hands again. Flashbacks to her first kill hit her like blows, as she looks at her lover to see a trickle of blood at her mouth. She runs, until she finds herself drunk and on a transport to Omega, seducing a drell on the way to complete her descent.
.
Omega is not as bad as it seems. Aoife makes a few friends, although there is little assassination work to be done. She finds she enjoys mercenary work when her mother is not connected, and after some time her new friends convince her to contact Athanna. The asari is forgiving, and the two are shortly bonded.
Aoife is never so happy as when she sees her lover wearing the traditional Bangladeshi wedding sari and ornamentation. Athanna is fascinated by Aoife's father's culture, having found out who he was through her work. She insists on a traditional wedding rather than an asari-themed bondmate ceremony. Aoife buys her a dress anyway, and insists she wears it for the reception afterwards, so that she can keep it as is asari tradition.
The two intend to settle down quietly, but both need to work to live. Athanna is away on the Citadel when an unwelcome visitor knocks at their door.
.
Scathach stands at the door and cries, and Aoife knows that something is terribly wrong. When her sister finally manages to explain that their mother had found out about Connlá, Aoife feels as though a cold knife has sliced through her stomach.
Her son is dead.
Their mother, by this time as mad as Jona Sederis herself, had tracked him down, and when she found he had latent biotic ability, attempted to kidnap him to continue her line. His parents fought, but were killed. In the ensuing struggle, Connlá was hit by a stray shot and died instantly. He was ten years old.
Aoife feels the anger build up inside her until it bursts out. She pins her sister to the wall and screams at her, demanding to know why she didn't save her son. Scathach is limp, like a rag doll, and the tears run down her cheeks until Aoife thinks she must be made of water. Eventually she drops her sister, and falls to her knees. Through the pounding in her ears, and the sound of her world smashing into pieces, she can hear a strange noise, terrible, like a wounded animal. It is a pure noise of grief, and it takes some time to realise that it is coming from her. Her sister kneels down beside her and clings to her, holding her as they did when they were children, two halves finally meeting again, but at a terrible cost.
.
The war against the Reapers breaks out soon afterwards. Illium is hit by Reaper troops attempting to disrupt the chain of supplies to Thessia. Aoife and Athanna are already away, safe on the Citadel, but they can feel the war around them. When Aoife is contacted by Scathach, now working for the Alliance Military, both Athanna and Aoife are approved to join the elite N7 strike teams. They fight together well, but it is not until Scathach joins their strike team that Aoife truly understands what unity is. It is Aoife and Scathach, different but perfectly matched, orbiting each other like planetary bodies perfectly aligned.
They are part of the attack on Earth at the end of the war. The three are separated, Aoife helping to raise barriers whilst Scathach and Athanna provide biotic artillery support. The team of children Aoife is aiding is attacked by a Banshee warping her way into their centre. As the children scatter, Aoife steps up, biotics whirling around her body and a fierce grin on her face as she confronts the perfect biotic super-soldier.
.
Athanna runs through the ruins of London, searching frantically for her lost bondmate. The battle is finally, miraculously over, and a green glow can be seen through the asari's skin and eyes. She runs over paths that Aoife used to tread, past buildings she would have recognised. At last she finds her lover, crumpled against a familiar glass-topped wall. Scathach is already there, medigel in one hand, and a look of despair on her face.
Athanna reaches Aoife, and shakes her, gently at first, and then with panic as she sees the gaping wound in her side. The clouds are clearing, and the light of a thousand setting suns suddenly illuminates the wounded woman, as her eyelids flutter sleepily open, and she smiles at her crying bondmate. There is peace.