A/N - I've written a lot in many other places in my life, but this is my first on this website, so I'm excited :) This is an AU story set in the Mass Effect universe but not really in its timeline. It's set sort of in a time post-Reapers but without the Reapers (if that makes sense). The galaxy is unified but not because of the impending doom of total obliteration. All the wars and conflicts between species still happened, but they've been resolved by this point, by someone some time or another.
An HS story, but not how you'd typically think it'd be. This won't be the sterotypical 'everything goes right for the hero' story, my Shep won't get it that easy haha. You'll see pretty much all the characters from the games at some point scattered throughout the story, but maybe not how you would expect them to be in the game.
One other big note. Trying to convert all the ages of the different races into a working equivalent is really hard and I would say nearly impossible, but I'm going to try. For the asari and krogan, I am going to try and make their longevity as adaptable as possible. All the adult asari characters will be close to their ages in the games, however the ones who are teenagers will be the same age as the other races, but with 40 or so years tacked on. Their ages are seriously a pain in the butt, but I'm going to try and work with it (aka mention it as little as possible so as not to piss anyone off haha). This won't come up until much farther down the line anyway.
Sorry if that got long, just don't want anyone left confused or riding the struggle bus. If anyone has any other questions feel free to ask me to explain anything. Enjoy the ride, ladies and gents, and leave a review if you feel a hankarin' to, otherwise, hope you like Growing Pains! ;)
Chapter 1 - Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones
Hospitals had always freaked her out. She knew the uncomfortable feeling that the atmosphere created was common enough amongst a lot of people. The utilitarian white walls, gleaming stainless steel, and cloying scent of antiseptic in the air all combined to unsettle her. She hadn't spent all that much time in them, but the few times she had were ingrained into her memory. And not many people would say that they had pleasant experiences in hospitals.
Once when she was little, probably around 3 or 4, she had been goofing around in the back yard with their family dog, Koda. They were never really sure what kind of canine breed he had been since he was a stray when they had found him as a puppy, with no tags on him. The people at the vets office hadn't really known either, they just speculated and named out a few breeds he could have been. He grew into a huge animal, but he was infinitely patient with the little child that always crawled all over him. And that was one such crawling time. She had always wanted to crawl on his back and ride him around like a pony, despite the fact that her parents constantly told her not to.
At the time, her parents had been somewhere back in the house, trusting Koda to keep an eye out, and she took full advantage of the situation. She hooked her little arms around Koda's neck and hoisted one stubby leg as far as it could go to latch onto his back. Keeping a firm grip around his neck, she pulled her body up all the way onto his back. She sat there for a few moments almost in shock that she had finally climbed on his furry back. She was so delighted that she had finally gotten her wish that she released her hands from his neck scruff to clap triumphantly. But the motion disrupted the precarious balance that she had on his back and she felt herself slip off.
Instinctively, she shot her arms out to brace her body for the impact. As her body collided with the ground, her little left wrist took almost all of the force of the fall. She cried out painfully and cradled her arm to her body as she curled up on the grass crying. Along with being extremely patient, Koda was also incredibly in tune to the emotions of his human family. Licking her face quickly and whining, he loped to the back door of the house and scratched on the glass. He barked out a couple of deep bass howls to get the attention of the parents in the house.
Her parents had come out to find her on the ground holding a swollen wrist and tears streaming down her face. They knew Koda wouldn't have hurt her, so when they asked her what had happened, and had seen the slightly guilty look in her eyes, despite the tears falling out of them, they deduced what had occurred.
It ended up only being a slight fracture in a couple of her wrist bones instead of a full break, but she still had to sit in the hospital for hours while the bone regeneration casing was working. She remembered having to sit in the hospital for a long time because a hurt wrist wasn't high on the priority list in the ER. It had been cold and her wrist had been killing her. And when the nurses finally got to her, they apathetically poked, prodded, and scanned her wrist, not paying any heed to the whimpers of the little girl.
That had been her first, but certainly not last, experience with hospitals and the pain they represented. When she was 8, she and some of her friends from her street had been playing around on their hoverboards in front of their houses. She hadn't had hers as long as some of the other kids and, while she had gotten the hang of it, she hadn't completely mastered it.
She had seen her friend Matthias doing complicated tricks with his board and wanted to try some for herself. She watched him execute the tricks a few more times before she felt like she could replicate it herself. Gaining some speed, she hooked her foot under her board like she saw him do and attempted to jump up and flip the board completely around under her. But she hadn't been able to untangle her foot quickly enough and it twisted her feet up beneath her and sent her careening off the board.
The concussion she had gotten from that fall had been a doozy. One of the kids had seen her fall and ran and got her parents. Matthias quickly filled them in on what had happened as they loaded her into the skycar to take her to the hospital. She had fallen and smacked her head on the rough concrete curb of the street, giving her a deep gash on her cheek and road-burn all along her forehead.
Spilling blood bumped her up the list to a slightly higher priority level than her last visit to the hospital, but she still had to wait awhile. The pounding in her head was compounded by the bright fluorescent lights in the ER waiting room, and the rashes and cut on her face had burned from the cool air-conditioning.
When they sealed up her face with medi-gel stitches and thoroughly disinfected her burn with strong chemicals, she had to grit her teeth to keep from crying. And even when the stinging from her face wounds had calmed down after a few days, her concussion continued to give her terrible headaches for a few weeks.
Just a year and a half ago she had taken her next trip to the emergency room. She had grown up to love the outdoors, and any chance she got she participated in as many activities and outdoor sports as she could. In middle school she played in a lot of the common known Earth sports, but when she heard about the popular galactic sport of skyball, she became hooked. She always bugged her parents to let her watch the games on the extranet and familiarized herself with the rules and strategies of the game. She joined up and started playing on a local junior league, quickly becoming quite skilled at the game herself.
There were very tight regulations for the sport at any level below professional. Even then though, her parents had not been thrilled that she took such an interest in the game. Skyball could get very intense, and, while not life threatening (most of the time), skyball had a very high injury rate even for those who played in the professional leagues. While the hoverboards went nowhere near as high or fast as they did in the higher levels, the junior league games still allowed players to go upwards of ten feet off the ground.
The day she got hurt she had been in a huge tournament with her team, and they were about to be pitted against one of their rivals. She had been looking forward to the game all week and was ecstatic when her coach told her she was going to get to start. She chewed on her mouth guard nervously and fidgeted with all her pads while she waited for the official to blow the starting whistle.
The game had been intense right from the start. Both teams were very talented, and both teams desperately wanted to beat the other. And while there were no blatant fouls, the team members from both teams had been hitting and colliding with each other roughly for the whole game. She had been playing one of her best games to date, dipping and dodging players from the other team left and right. She even scored a few points herself.
At half time her team was barely beating the other team. And while their coach was encouraging them and telling them to keep up their hard work, she knew the coach from the other team was lighting a fire in the other players as well. It was hard to keep a lead after half time when the opposing team had time to rest and regroup.
Right from the whistle the other team came at them harder than ever. The foul calls reflected it for both teams. Her team was getting angry and riled up from being beaten on and they were starting to lose their temper. Earlier, she had juked one of the other teams players and caused them to collide with one of their own teammates. She could tell the other boy had been seriously pissed when she did that, and was just looking for an opportunity to get back at her.
And it arose when she had the ball and was headed to score. He came out of nowhere, roaring into her field of vision at neck breaking speed. She thought he was just going to completely slam into her so she had frantically leaned forward to try and dodge the brunt of the hit. What she didn't realize was that he wasn't planning on body slamming her, and her motion forward actually helped with what he had been about to do.
He swerved at the last possible second and clipped the back of her board. Hard. Her forward momentum completely threw off her balance and the sudden jerk of the board beneath her undid the footing she had on its surface. While she hadn't been ten feet off the ground, the eight foot drop that she took was still enough to hurt her how it did.
She felt herself go over the edge of the board and plummet to the ground below her. The twisting of the board also meant that she fell at an awkward angle: Instead of landing on her back, she fell on her shoulder. She felt a sickening crunch when her body crashed into the ground and the searing, burning pain that follows the severing of nerves along bone. She had even blacked out for a few seconds from the pain.
With her left side underneath her and the weight of her body pressing down on the broken bone, she was desperate to try and relieve some pain. She tried to roll onto her back to remove some of the pressure, and as she rolled she felt broken bones grind across each other. She was pretty sure at that point she spat out many colorful profanities that would have put a soldier to shame but she didn't really remember all that well. By then her coach and the medic had made it to her side, as well as some of her team mates. She remembered them all gasping and muttering and having sickened looks on their faces.
Stupidly, she had looked down, and she realized what was making them contort their faces so much. You could see the gleaming white tip of part of her collar bone poking up through her skin, its jagged edges having sliced right through thin muscle and skin. Her stomach heaved and she tried to turn her head enough to allow the vomit propelled up her esophagus to splash harmlessly to the side. The motion had sent another burn of pain radiating down her upper body.
The trip to the hospital that time had been a blur as her body had quickly gone into shock. The chills that broke out over her body, the sweat that had cooled on her uniform, and the cold air in the ER waiting room all combined to make her incredibly cold. A blanket had been draped over her to try and warm her up as she sat in the hover chair she had been put into upon arriving at the hospital.
Thankfully, even though it had hurt worse than all her other trips to the hospital combined, her condition that day put her almost at the top of the waiting list in the waiting room. Only those with life threatening injuries were seen before her.
They had to do surgery in order to slide her clavicle back inside her body and get it repositioned so it would heal correctly. Mercifully, the anesthetic rolled over her quickly and allowed her oblivion from the pain for a short while. She woke foggily later, her mouth feeling like it was full of cotton and a dull burning in her upper left torso.
She learned that they had put synthetic pins and screws into her collarbone to fuse the broken ends together. A conventional bone regenerating case wouldn't have worked because of the awkward area in the body that the bone was in. They would have had to somehow encase her entire upper body to knit it back together. So, they had to pull a bit of a 21st century medical move and pin her bones back together. They also gave her a sort of figure-eight brace that wrapped around her shoulders and back to keep her in perfect posture to allow the bones to knit back together correctly. Thankfully though, recovering from a broken collarbone took nowhere near as long as it had back then. What once had taken almost 3 months for some people, was reduced to just shy of a month in modern times.
However, since they had been nearing the end of their skyball season, she had thankfully only missed out on the last few weeks of it. When the doctors had been happy enough with the progress of her bone growing back together correctly, and in the right alignment, they did another quick surgery to remove the synthetic screws and pins. They shot some bone and muscle cell stimulants into the area and allowed the rest to heal back together naturally.
All in all, her visits to hospitals had not left her with fond memories. A hospital stood as a reminder of pain, sadness, and suffering. Sure, babies were born in hospitals - the joy of new life being brought into the world, but more often than not, people died in hospitals. When the word is spoken, thoughts of sickness and pain usually rush to the forefront of people's minds.
Some part of her knew that it was slightly unfair to dislike hospitals so much. True, a lot of pain happened there, but everyone who worked in them struggled tirelessly day and night to help relieve that pain as well. And for her, they had. She always came out of them much better than she had gone in, and she always came out knowing she was eventually going to be okay.
But not this time.
She sat yet again in another hospital waiting room, the memories of her time spent in places like these washing over her. But the pain associated with those times couldn't quite seem to touch her at that moment. The pain she was feeling now was nothing compared to what she had felt then. She wished she could feel all of those injuries at the same time instead of the shattering pain she was feeling now in her body.
She almost couldn't wrap her mind about what was happening. How is this fair? How can anyone be expected to bear this pain...
She sat yet again in another hospital waiting room, but this time, she wasn't the one about to be scanned or stitched up or operated on.
She sat yet again in another hospital waiting room because her mother was dying.