[re: the sound of your voice in the dark]

A/N: i still haven't finished the game but after the archon's flagship mission and doing the 3rd/4th parts of the ryder family secrets, i had no choice but to let sophie vent about some plot stuff.

mostly chronological, for now, since i'm writing as i play through. feel free to let me know what you think, or if there's any plot points you'd like me to cover (just pls keep in mind i'm not finished!)

mission: ryder family secrets, the fourth unlocked memory

also pls note i'm pulling stuff out of my ass for reyes' past bc all bioware gave us is """destroyed records""" with no helpful info


She didn't go see Scott like she'd planned, or Captain Dunn, or even Kandros.

When Sophie left SAM Node, she went straight to the Tempest, waving off Suvi's greeting and Liam's concern and shut herself in her quarters — lights off, windows closed, with only the soft glow of SAM's interface to light the room. She cried — a good, hard cry like she hadn't had in years — until her eyes hurt and her head pounded and her throat was raw.

It hadn't occurred to her until that morning that she hadn't ever properly mourned her mother's death. At the funeral, Sophie had been so furious, so angry with Alec that it consumed her; he'd always treated her mother like a puzzle — especially as the disease worsened — and watching him stare at the casket in disappointment, like his failure was more of a tragedy than her death, had been the last straw for them both. She'd only spoken to Alec in the Milky Way once, after that, and it had been about the Initiative.

But watching it all over again, seeing herself with red-rimmed eyes and tousled hair as she clung to Scott, hearing the exhaustion and grief in both of their voices — it was almost like losing her mother a second time. That hadn't even been the worst, though; Sophie had always suspected how Alec had felt, then, but actually experiencing it, feeling the wheels turning in his mind and listening to his insistence and excuses when all Ellen had wanted was a goodbye, had been enough to reignite the years of rage she'd harbored against him.

And what was she to do now? Talk about it? Drink about it? Continue to sit in silence and sulk over it? Any of those options required dealing with the issue — to varying degrees — and it was so much easier to just ignore it.

So that's what she tried to do.

Pushing herself to sit upright, legs crossed, Sophie leaned against the headboard of her bed and pulled a tear-soaked pillow into her lap. She squinted against the light of her omnitool as she keyed in a familiar frequency, and as she waited for the connection to stabilize it occurred to her that she must be quite a sight, in her sweats with the hood pulled up, with nothing but her orange glow of the omnitool for light.

"It's four in the morning, Ryder."

She couldn't make anything out on her omnitool's screen, and assumed Reyes was in just as dark of a room as she was. Sleeping, probably, rather than having a minor crisis. "Damn. And here I was hoping you'd have time to get really drunk and have lots of sex."

Sophie hadn't missed the way her voice had wavered, and apparently neither had Reyes; there was the muted sound of shuffling from the other end of the call, then a light clicked on and Sophie was treated to a view of Reyes, without a shirt and with his usually carefully-styled hair looking delightfully mussed and unruly. "I'm not normally one to turn down an offer like that, but…" He trailed off, yawning. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." She fidgeted with the sleeve of her hoodie, and her resolve crumpled even without any prompting from Reyes. With a sigh, she leaned over to the panel on her bedside table and flicked on the light. "It's stupid. I mean, I'd be over it before I even got to Kadara, anyway." Sophie had wanted to avoid the subject, and here she was prepared to talk through it with Reyes; she hadn't ever done anything like this with him, and found herself wondering at what point she would have to pin a label on their thing — it wasn't really a relationship; they weren't really a couple —if they continued this trend of being about more than booze and sex and distractions on a hostile planet.

But Reyes was still waiting for an answer, and Sophie had more pressing things on her mind.

"It's… Look, I'll give you the short version because I don't even know how to give you the long version," she began, hugging the pillow in her lap with her free hand. She bit at her lip as she thought, not sure where the hell to even start explaining her enhanced link with SAM. "My pathfinder implant is more… complex than the others. Courtesy of my father, who apparently thought he was immortal and no one would ever have to deal with his own fucking—" With a hard sigh, Sophie let her shoulders drop and shook her head. "Not the point. Anyway, I can… see, I guess, some of his memories. Experience them."

The hand that Reyes had been holding up, shielding his eyes from the light of his own omnitool, slowly moved so he could look at Sophie. Brow furrowing, he was quiet for a minute. "I'd like the long version of that, at some point. I think." He frowned.

"You'll have to get it from someone else, then, because I don't understand it. Anyway, I…" She trailed off, teeth pressing harder into her lower lip. There was a reason she usually went to Gil or Liam when something was bothering her; Liam was just so easy to talk to — and their talks always began with him handing her a beer — and Gil had a knack for knowing when they needed to talk and when they needed drinks and a game of poker. It would be easier, she reckoned, if she was there with Reyes, instead of just on a vidcall, but then again the drinks and sex excuse might have actually worked. "SAM showed me a memory this morning, and… it was the last time I saw my mother."

"Sophie…" Reyes pulled himself up so he was seated, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes. The crisp white sheets pooled at his waist, but Sophie was too distracted to properly appreciate the view; either way, she was more focused on the concern etched into his features, a rare display for someone normally so suave and charismatic — rarer still that it was directed at Sophie. "Tell me about her."

Not about it, not about the memory, not about the way her anger at Alec had overshadowed her grief at her mother's death.

No, Reyes wanted to know about her, about Ellen, about the woman whose loss Sophie could still feel years later and a galaxy away.

"She was… kind. Above everything, she was kind. She was a glass-half-full type, but she had this thing about fate and acceptance and letting some things just happen. She used to always say… to say that—" Sophie took a shallow breath, feeling that familiar lump in her throat — one she'd thought she'd worked past, thought she'd trained herself to ignore when she talked about her mother.

But it was back, and all of a sudden her room felt too small — the whole ship felt too small — and she was faced with the fact that Ellen Ryder had died over six hundred years ago and Sophie had fled the galaxy where her mother was, and all she wanted was to claw her way back through dark space to Brazil.

"The first time Alec forgot mine and Scott's birthday was when we turned seven," she said, trying to pull herself back to the present conversation. "Scott wasn't ever bothered by that stuff, not even then, but I just wanted us to be a family. I remember curling up in her lap and crying for forever." Clearing her throat in an attempt to hide the shakiness that was beginning to creep into her voice, Sophie watched as Reyes studied her over the vidcall, taking in every word she spoke.

It felt good to be so openly wanted, and while Sophie had relished his initial one-track-mind sort of interest in her physically, Reyes' recent earnest and eager desire to learn about her, about her life and her past, was something of a novelty for her. The relative openness they'd shared since Sloane's death was… nice, and Sophie had been trying her best to embrace it.

"I was fifteen when I learned that he forgot their anniversary most years, too," she continued. "I got right up in his face about it, yelling and saying all sorts of shit. Scott actually picked me up and carried me outside to calm down. I started buying her flowers every year — Mothers' Day, Valentines, her birthday, anything that Alec could forget about."

"That's a much simpler solution that I would've expected from you," Reyes commented, voice still rough with exhaustion but softened by admiration. "Then again — you are still single-handedly trying to patch up the galaxy's problems."

"Tell me about your mother," Sophie suggested suddenly, pulling her knees to her chest; she was beginning to get restless, the way she always did when the conversation turned too personal and too open, but this time she had no desire to change the subject or end the call. No secrets between us, Reyes had said, hadn't he, all those weeks ago in the aftermath of the Collective's takeover of Kadara. While Sophie had thought she wanted to leave the Milky Way behind — let everything from that other life fade away — with as much as she'd been thinking about her mother and São Paulo lately, she found herself with a fledgling interest in Reyes' life, too.

He gave his head a little shake and laughed, a low, quiet sound that pulled a smile from Sophie. "You would have liked her, I think. She was always doing something, always working or cleaning up after us kids. There were four of us, and we each had our own way of causing trouble."

She rested one cheek on her knees, a little surge of warmth spreading through her at the soft, distant gleam in Reyes' eyes; she hadn't expected nostalgia from a man like him. "Big family."

"It's easy to feel… lost," he admitted, looking away as his smile began to fade, "with three older siblings. Like everything's nearly run out by the time it makes it down to you."

"You miss them?"

"I left them long before I joined the Initiative. But… yes."

Their call fell into silence, and Sophie felt a pang of loneliness. She missed her mother, and she missed Scott, and in a way she missed Reyes — missed being close to him when all she wanted was to curl up beside him and sleep until her head stopped pounding and her chest stopped aching. "I'm gonna go see if Gil wants to grab something to drink before we have to leave the Nexus," she decided, already dreading her decision to end the call. "And… Reyes? I know you've got Kadara to run these days, but when Scott's up and walking again, I'd really like if you'd come visit."

The corners of Reyes' lips slowly curled up into a small smile, and when he spoke his voice was filled with a sincerity and honesty that Sophie was still getting used to. "Promise."