Chapter 1: The World
There were times, more often than not now that I put any thought to it, that she would look at me as though I were from another world. When her face would turn so vacant as I spoke to her, a bemused expression that no universal translator could fix and I would stop mid-sentence despite her protests, "Baby, please. I'm listening." Rolling from her side to knees atop the bed sheets and a look in her eye that said she believed what she was saying. And when I would go on, open that door just a crack and give her a quick peek into parts of me I kept from her, it would inevitably end in tears. Whether they were a reaction to the events I recounted, still unable to fully censor my own mouth of gruesome details that came out as jokes in different company or in response to a change she saw in me? I don't know. Only two things would stop the crying; my leaving the apartment or sex. And both were a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
That was on leave after my third tour, before Earth fell and when Shepard was still under house arrest for the events in the Bahak system. Before civilian and refugee became one the same and suburban malcontents would happily de-construct my career over what I hoped was going to be a quiet drink away from the apartment. I would come to tell people I was in geology - no follow up queries to that. The worst of them were the morbidly curious. How many did you kill? Come on man, you must. How many? Fuck, just tell me. You sick baby-killer! Disgust at themselves projected back onto me and back over to his buddies so that they could share in the hatred. Left alone with thoughts of death and killing, no sleep that night.
Each return to the World was more juxtaposing than the last and by that third term of leave I was a time bomb of irritability and anxiety. She would bear the brunt of me, the cold sweats and screams in the night. The thick coating of apathy that dripped off me in the waking hours and she learnt quickly not to ask me to make a decision on anything. Twenty minutes in a restaurant, staring at the menu and through it before she ordered for me. It's not that I couldn't make choices but that they were all so mundane in comparison to those out in the field, they didn't matter. I couldn't explain it to her, not without starting another argument. It all felt like a dream and I wanted to wake up back in the spartan squalor and immediacy of life at war.
There were stories of more than one guy who went back of their own accord as mercs. The Alliance wouldn't let them back into the fold without doing the minimum amount of away time in fear of their mental stability but from what I gather they were more than happy to hire them on a private basis. Nobody who went merc was ever followed up with a court martial, as long as your bullets were going the right way.
I was a Spacer, had been all my life, breathing nothing but artificial air for my first eighteen years. Hey you! Wanna see other worlds? Sign your name! Man was that recruitment officer a slick bastard, never seen a man adapt so fast to the needs and desires of others. Twisting and morphing them into a sudden impulse to join the Alliance military and better yet, make you believe you came up with the idea all by your lonesome. First time I set foot on soil I had a rifle in my hand and my first lung-full of an actual atmosphere had to be filtered through my helmet's respirator. I saw so many worlds in those first eighteen months, hide and seek with Batarian pirates and slavers, that even the urban sprawl of the Citadel made me feel cramped and confined in comparison. I had been promised adventure and exploration and I got it, more than any young boy looking out at the stars could have handled. New worlds and beautiful vistas, chewed up and turned brown soon after by our presence. Lush greens I would see from on high flash orange and red before nothing but the impenetrable black. We needed somewhere to land after all, swear I felt the warm ash through the soles of my boots.
Saw my first body that landing, gnarled and twisted just outside the blast radius, cinders on the stretched skin of the skull like a dusting of grey hair. Back exposed and blistered, clothes and skin made as one. A grunt kicked him over, Batarian, just as intelligence said there would be. I puked up almost before I had chance to take off my helmet (others hadn't bothered wearing their own, trees don't shoot back one told me but I would later learn that they loved the smell as I would come to), yellow-white chunks over the grey and black. "Fuckin' new guy. Tell those button-pushers to only do them medium rare next time. Kid doesn't like 'em so crispy." Like being back at school and promised myself I would never make jokes like that. Forgot all about that promise until I broke it. He was a year younger than me on paper but I wouldn't dare say it to his face, his eyes told me he'd seen more in the past year than I had seen in my whole life. Old men at nineteen. Experiences and situations forced at them so fast and hard that you could only wonder when it would release itself again. Every man a reservoir of rage that dams can only hold back for so long.
That was the first story I told her, first time I forced her to cry with tales of my job and the first time we fucked just so we didn't have to talk to each other. I spoke to the corpse once in a dream months later, the grunt kick him over and the four eyes blinked at me. He said he had a secret to tell me, woke up before he did. Always glad I woke up. And the waiter in the restaurant would ask how I wanted my steak. Medium rare. Came out the wrong end into the toilet, soon as we got home. How to tell someone you eventually got used to death? (Even though that first one would stay with me, like I breathed him in and he still swims around in my vital fluids.) That it came everyday like breakfast, bullets with your bacon. Only to get back to the World alive and wake up every day with soft pillows and a warm, semi-naked woman next to you instead of a rolled up shirt and heavy-set Scotsman.
"Ya know she disnae love you like I dae." he said once, mass effected lead hissing over our heads and waiting for a thunderbolt from the heavens (even Zeus didn't rest as on high as the Alliance destroyers). We both laughed, at the joke and the very real idea that it might be the last thought either of us shared. But behind the homoerotic varnish was a hardwood truth, who else could understand what I went through but the man who went through the same? David 'Howler' Young was with me near constantly on the last two of my three tours and beyond, when those great and terrible tentacles slipped tight around the throat of an entire galaxy. One look at him and you would make the assumption that his brains were in his neck, he would happily toy with people on this assumption and at the drop of a hat make his speech all but impenetrable. I got used to it.
His own marriage had fallen through, "Just glad there wasnae a bairn to get caught between us." Kids? Jesus, who could have brought a child into this? He rested his remaining hopes on my marriage and his advice was usually a list of things he considered having done wrong. He hung around our apartment for a spell of a few weeks one time and I swear she was ready to kill me for it, one soldier on a come down was bad enough and soon Howler learnt that I lied when I said it was okay for him to stay. I'd never seen him so meek and fearful as he was around her, "I cannae wait to get shot at again. But dinnae you dae somat stupid and lose her."
Second leave home was the best of the three and we had something close to what might be called a relationship but still far short of a marriage. I made a real effort and pushed it all down deep into my gut, all the death and shock and pain, away from her. Some things cannot be hidden and I would be woken from a post-coital slumber by the light fingertips on my back, knowing that she ran lines between the shrapnel scars and tried to imagine. I would feign sleep to try and cling to the borderline happiness of that spell back in the World.
But if I didn't care for what I found back away from the bullets and blood then the feelings were entirely mutual, if not fervently against me and my own career. For every veteran of the First Contact who would shake my hand and share a drink were three civvies ready to spit on the ground in front of me. Protests against the Alliance's continued 'harassments' of the Batarians were not uncommon on the Citadel and I would find myself gravitating toward them for an argument on more than one occasion. There were rumours (aren't they always) of supplies and funds making their way to Batarian hands from the same groups who would protest in the same safe, bloodless streets. Crazier still was the myth of humans fighting on their side. One grunt swore blind to me it was true, on his mother's non-existent grave no less, though stopped short of telling me where he heard it.
Later I would work on teams of mixed race, the Krogan and Turians would only laugh at these stories of protest and dissent. Ludicrous to imagine a people questioning the military action of their leaders with one Krogan putting it in a characteristically succinct manner, "Humans. Soft everywhere."
The grass is always greener they say and there were times when I longed for nothing more than to be back in the safety of the World. Just a shame it took near death situations to make me yearn for civilian life, for her. When I was hunkered down behind the remains of a concrete wall, rounds chapping at the other side like bleached bone knuckles. Knock knock. Don't answer. No bell tolls for thee and the angels only cry "Git some!" by your side until the weight of incoming forces their shields to give out and they're mortal once more, down with you in the dirt. Terror sent my mind to safer places, soft down on her forearms caught in streaming light or a stolen, stifled gasp in a shared shower. Physical memories (the kind you don't share with the rest to boost the ego), to be close to her is to be far from there.
Worse still to wrap yourself in those sacred thoughts and survive, having exposed them to such horror, such all-encompassing fear. So the next time she surprised me in the bathroom, it turned my stomach and the blood just wouldn't flow. How to explain it? Each world infected the other and faded them in my mind until neither could give me solace.
And when it all began, when that first giant squid came down from the heavens and not up from the deep, it all ended too. No civilians, no World and no more leave. Those who doubted Shepard as to even the existence of the reapers, would be intellectuals and armchair, backseat politicians, screamed foulplay at the incident with the relay. They argued that he had once again used his fabricated reapers, this time as an excuse for the wholesale destruction of a Batarian colony. Laughter ensued at the idea, knowing the Alliance scarcely needed an excuse for the mass murder of Batarians and there were far quieter ways than destroying a relay. Had to wonder what a reaper denier says to himself when that noise, pure dread and psy-ops distilled, came down from the clouds. What does an atheist say to the face of God? Was in a mission briefing half the galaxy away when I heard and we all shared quiet despair until one marine piped up, "Shit man, guess this is the World now. Can't wait to get back out there." We nodded to keep up appearances with each other.
On my first visit back to the Citadel after the whole galaxy when to shit there circulated a story amongst both refugees and soldiers. The race of those involved seemed to hold fast to that of whoever told it and the victim of the tale would usually fall upon the shoulders of a human, salarian or batarian. It concerned an altercation between a soldier and refugee at the 'shrine', that gruesome mosaic of photographs and holovids that inevitably splattered itself upon any surface near where the lost and scattered would gather. Faces of the dead, or as they preferred, missing, striking such carefree poses so as to appear morbidly cheery in their new, hopeless surroundings.
The way I heard it told from an Alliance corporal, a real jumpy kid who stared at any passing female in such a way that suggested that a career of killing had gotten in the way of what he considered a real conquest (lost in uniform before he was even old enough to screw). Who knows how many times it had been re-told and how many new details had been added or removed but the kernel was always still there amongst the frills.
"So there's this private and he's down there up to his ankles in refugee shit and piss, lookin' at that damn 'wall of the missing' or whatever the fuck. An' he says to his buddy, 'Dumb fucks, shoulda run faster' or something and that shoulda been that, ya know? I mean you an' me know what he meant."
Dumb fucks. Better than you than me. Don't mean nothing. Amen. Our own prayer, above and below religion, around the corpse in a huddle. One last helping hand into the shuttle, sitting next to us for one last free ride. Telling jokes, worried he's already had the last laugh on us.
"So this refugee decides that ain't cool, storms over in a fucking rage you know? 'What gives you the right?' an' 'Who do you think you are?' an' all that other self-righteous crap. I dunno maybe he's got his dead missus up there an' worried it's going in the guy's spank bank for later. Anyway, they argue a little an' it eventually boils down to the refugee, 'People are dying! My friends and family are dying! Do you understand what that's like?' Can you believe that shit?" he laughs a little and makes a face as though he wants me to ask what happened next, "Dude comes away with a broken nose an' two fewer teeth. C-Sec had to pull the private off the guy, word is one of the Turians bought him a drink an' the refugee goes and pulls a picture off the wall."
He waits with dead eyes but I don't laugh and he says, "No? Loses something in the telling I guess. Had to be there."