1: When I Collapse
A/N: Here's the (sort of) follow-up to A Broken Frame AND the rewrite of Can You Save Me because the original fucked up royal. Here, you'll find out what happened to Tali's sweetheart, Kal'Reegar…among other things.
ten years ago, Earth
"Look down, Tessa."
The little dark-haired girl obeyed, craning her neck to see the street below them. It was teeming with activity, much of it obscured by a large political campaign banner. A makeshift podium sat in the middle of the crowd. A man in a blue suit was talking into a microphone, and the people cheered.
"See all those people? Gathered around, taking off time to listen to one idiot blow crap out his arse. He's lying, of course. They all do that." The man on the roof shrugged. "It's the price of democracy. Tessa, look at me."
She looked up and met his eyes. Just eleven years old and already taking in his words like her lifeblood—but all children did that, didn't they? Children were sponges, they soaked up everything they saw and heard. Sam smiled to himself. It had been a long time since anyone had listened to him. Those had been the good old days, when his paycheck came from Uncle Sam (no relation). Now, he was on a pension, officially retired, and practically living with his former partner.
"It's everyone's duty to question authority," he said. "In an intelligent manner, of course. Learn this, Tessa, and learn it well. It is everyone's responsibility to know the facts. You can never take anything for face value. Ignorance and conformity—" he gestured to the crowd— "is how stupid people can stay in power to screw over those who don't know any better."
There was a long silence as the girl took this in, watching the crowd. Finally, she looked up at the man and spoke.
"Sam?"
"Yeah, Tess?"
"His pants aren't on fire."
three years ago, Earth
Tessa ascended the many-many-many flights of stairs, carrying the bag of groceries and humming quietly to herself. Today was a good day, she thought happily. She'd finally graduated from high school after four agonizing, awkward years. She'd been accepted to Princeton University in the United States. It was Shauna's birthday today, and Dad was home for the weekend. She'd gotten something special for her little sister—a bag of Japanese pastries, gilded in chocolate and filled with red bean paste—her favorite. She'd thrown in some red velvet cupcakes for good measure. Hell, Shauna wasn't the only one getting the love today, and Tessa had the money anyway. Dad was going to (finally) take some time off work and take them somewhere. Mom was making dinner. It was a good day. It felt like her four agonizing years of high school had all been leading up to this moment. For two parents who wouldn't even make time for her graduation, it was a hell of an improvement.
Tessa brushed her dark hair out of her face with one hand as she climbed the last of the steps, finally reaching her parents' landing. Almost immediately, the hairs stood up on the back of her head. Something was amiss.
The answer began to become clear when she saw the door. It had practically been kicked off its hinges, the deadbolt hanging, broken, by a single link on the door. Part of the threshold had been torn away. There was a large dent in the wood. Pushing it open cautiously, she stepped into the apartment with a growing sense of premonition.
The living room, the place that Mom kept neat with such a meticulous fancy, was a complete mess. There was broken glass strewn across the floor. There was a smear of blood on the floor, like someone'd slipped in it. Lying in a crumpled heap on the ground was a woman in her early fifties, glazed eyes open in an empty, eternal stare. Blood leaked from a ragged, circular wound in her neck. A whole section of it had been blown away and dried blood caked the woman's face but Tessa recognized it anyway. It was the face that crinkled up in a smile whenever she came home from school. It was the face that sternly ordered her to do the dishes whenever she was being sassy. It was the face that tucked her into bed every night until she'd insisted that she did not. And Tessa's eyes widened in horror; she dropped the bag and ran to the woman's side. Terror filled her heart.
"Mom!" she cried, even though she knew that there was no use. All the good feelings of the day were gone, and her chest was slowly turning into a ball of ice. A sob wracked her body and she turned her mother's head; the bullet had obviously penetrated at close range. The wound went down to the bone; she could see Lauren Knight's bloody vertebrae jutting out from the flesh. Bile rose in her throat and Tessa turned away, stumbling to her feet. She made it to the sink just in time and vomited, heaving until her stomach was empty. The sharp tang of blood in the air, the stench of death, and shock, just taking over everything else and cutting off all rational thought—it was too much. Tears streaming down her face, she rinsed her mouth with some tap water and got back up. She still wasn't quite sure what was going on, whether she was in some sort of nightmare or if this was just some sort of elaborate hoax. Many stories below her, Tessa heard sirens.
She returned to the living room and only then did she notice the other bodies. They were two men, dressed in the uniforms of civil servants. Each of them had two holes in their chest. Whoever they were, they must have had something to do with her mother's dead body on the floor. Looking down, Tessa saw scuff marks on the carpet. Along with a trail of broken glass and blood, they led to the shattered French door that overlooked the balcony. And before she saw for herself, she had a sick feeling that she knew.
Looking over the railing made Tessa almost throw up again. A rather grisly scene, surrounded by police cars, had been taped off with yellow crime scene tape. Two bodies lay in the middle, obviously having fallen to their deaths. They were locked in combat, even as rigor mortis was surely setting in. Blood splatter reached for a yard around their bodies. Even though she was ten stories up, Tessa thought she recognized the slim, fit shape of another person she knew well—or thought she knew. It was too far away to tell.
She backed away from the balcony, afraid of being seen, and wildly scanned the living room for the body missing from the carnage.
"Is anyone here?" she asked, her voice shaking. She said it louder. "Is anyone here?"
There was no response. Heart pounding with newfound terror, Tessa called out her sister's name.
"Shauna!" Tessa sprinted up the stairs, making a beeline towards her room. Heart pounding, she reached the door and threw it open. There she was, curled up in a little pathetic ball in a corner of her bedroom, alive—partly obscured by the giant teddy bear that Tessa'd won for her two years ago. Her hands had been clamped over her ears but she removed them now, looking up at her older sister in unbridled terror. But she was alive. It was small comfort in her present situation.
"What's going on?" she wailed. "What's that noise? Is it the police?"
"I don't know," cried Tessa, and she finally broke down. She picked up her little sister and hugged her, sobbing from sheer confusion and fear and terror.
"Where's Mommy and Daddy?" demanded Shauna, squirming in her grip. "Where are they? Where are those men? I want to see—"
"Shauna, no, no you don't—Shauna, wait!"
But it was too late. The girl wriggled from her grasp and ran downstairs. Tessa was very still for a moment, unsure of what to do.
Civilizations rose and fell in the pause that followed.
And then there was screaming, shrill cries of denial and grief and confusion. Tessa ran out of the room to see her sister kneeling in the middle of the room, screaming her lungs out, tears pouring down her face.
"What—" Shauna started blubbering, incoherent. Her mouth was open in a wail of dismay and it was all that Tessa could do to hold her and keep her from running to the balcony. Her little sister sobbed into her shoulder. Tessa stared at the opposite wall, looking at nothing and somehow still seeing her mother's body. The chilling grief was not gone, just somewhere else in her mind where she could not reach it. She felt numb all over. How could this happen? What was happening? Somehow her entire world had been turned upside down. All she could do was stare at the blood on the wall and pray to a God she never believed in that she was only dreaming.
When the police finally broke down their door, it took a very long time to get both girls to leave the crime scene and go with them to the precinct. They were rooted to the spot in grief, in fear, in shock. And anger. Tessa felt that the most.
The officer who cross-examined her was one Detective David Lang. He pushed a cup of water towards Tessa, who was sitting opposite him across a metal table. Her eyes were downcast, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. She was too tired to cry. She was just shocked out of her skull, unable to comprehend the facts before her nor the pictures set out on the desk. Crime scene photos. Her dead mother, her dead father, their dead assailants. It was surreal to her, alien. She could not understand. What…
"I know this must be very hard for you," Lang said gently. "I've got all the time in the world. Whenever you're ready…"
He left the words hanging to be interpreted as a kind gesture or as a threat. Tessa was confused. He was treating her like she was…like she had something to hide, perhaps. Was that it? Maybe she just didn't catch it from senses dulled with shock and grief, but the pinpricks of suspicion were hot on her skin.
"I've got nothing to hide," she mumbled.
"I'm not implying that you are," Lang replied.
"What do you want from me?"
"I want to know what happened."
"I was just going grocery shopping," she sniffled. "It's my sister's birthday today, and I was going to get her dessert…I didn't see the police cars. And then I got home…"
She didn't need to say anything else. He knew.
"Why didn't you see the police cars?" Lang asked.
"I come in through the back," she explained. "On my bike."
Lang nodded and wrote this down.
"Can you think of anyone who'd have wanted to hurt your parents?"
She shook her head. "No," she said. "My dad was a professor and my mom taught middle school. I don't see why anyone would ever…"
Lang nodded again and wrote this down, too. Finally, he looked back at his files.
"From what I can tell here, Shauna is adopted?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "The last of the papers were finished a couple of months ago."
"It says here that the papers were completed at the Gerard Foundation for Human Orphans," Lang continued, "But according to my records, no such place exists."
"That's impossible," Tessa said immediately. "I've been there. 551 Fifth Avenue, Los Angeles."
"So have we," Lang said grimly. "It's an old bodega that burned to the ground five years ago. Now it's just an empty building."
"Empty?" echoed Tessa. "No, it isn't. I can tell you the names of all the administrators there—Tracy Gerard, she was the administrator, Victor Epps handled our papers, Lucy Miles is the receptionist—"
"None of those people exist," Lang said firmly.
"That's impossible," she said again. "I don't understand."
"We were hoping you could shed some light on the situation."
Tessa shook her head desperately. "I can't," she said. "I don't know what's going on."
Lang let her out of the room after that. The precinct was swarming with officers and dispatch calls and media, so he took her to his office and let her cool her heels there. He was unexpectedly kind about the situation, offering her food from his fridge and asking her if there was anything he could get for her. Eventually, when Tessa decided to break her silence, she asked for a Coke and a sandwich. He got her both.
Lang left the room then, assuring her that he'd be back in an hour or so and that she was free to take whatever she wanted from the fridge. He closed the door behind him. Tess was too distracted to hear the key turn in its lock. She was alone.
Detective David Lang was a family man. He was fairly sure that this was the only thing keeping him sane through seven years of police work, but there was no way to be sure. Sure, Lori and Eddie and Judith had kept his head in reality, but he was feeling a little less familiar with sanity at the moment. The last roller coaster was over, but—and the atmosphere seemed to agree—he was in for another one. He walked back to the precinct, his mind abuzz. The afternoon had gone by much too quickly for his preference, and with a lot more blood than he'd expected. He wanted nothing more than to return home to his family and get some sleep, but it was pushing towards seven in the evening and, by the looks of things, he wasn't going home for a while. He sighed. He'd been hoping to catch a break after the O'Grady case. Now Chief Robertson wanted him in his office, and he didn't sound happy.
He felt sorry for the girl he'd interviewed, Tessa Knight, but he was also remarkably disturbed about her lack of emotion. It didn't seem normal. Maybe he'd talk to the shrink about it later, but frankly, if he'd been in her position, he would've probably gone crazy. Stony silence was one thing. A seeming lack of emotion was another.
He sighed and stepped over a writhing throng of journalists and cameramen, pushing past them to get to the Chief's office.
"Chief, you wanted to see me—oh."
The Chief looked up from his desk, and he sure as hell wasn't alone. There was a suit with him, a woman sporting a badge. A suit, he thought. No wonder he was pissed.
"Lang," Robertson acknowledged him. "Okay, so here's the breakdown; we don't have much time so I'm going to make it snappy. This is Agent Pearce from Alliance Intel. They've," he spat out his next words like they were a vile poison, "taken jurisdiction of the case. We answer to them until the killer is found."
Three years ago Lang might have made a scene and complained, but he was older and wiser now. He kept his tongue in check and simply nodded. "Understood, sir."
"We'd like to interview the daughters, if that's possible," Pearce announced. "They're not safe anymore. If it's okay with the chief, we'd like to take them into our custody."
"Now hold on one second—"
"Lang," Robertson warned him.
The detective backed off and sighed. "Sorry, sir," he said.
The Chief waved that off. "Agent," he said, addressing the woman in the suit. "May I have a private word with my detective?"
"Certainly," she said. "I'll wait outside."
The moment the door closed behind her, the words came tumbling like water out of Lang's mouth.
"What the hell is going on?" he demanded. "Why is Alliance Intel involved?"
"I don't know," muttered Robertson, "But I can guess." He stood up and handed him a file. "I talked with Abby. She tried to run the prints on the parents. Woman was fine, she was in the database from a misdemeanor and we were able to identify her...but she tried to run the man's fingerprints. They aren't archived, David. Or they are, but they're blocked by an Alliance Intel firewall. It's heavy stuff."
Lang frowned. "Well, that can't be good."
Robertson dropped his voice, looking nervously at the door. "I don't know what the hell is going on, David, but we have much more than a quadruple homicide on our hands. Be very careful about what you tell the Alliance. Leave nothing to chance, and for fuck's sake, watch your back."
"Understood, chief," Lang said. "Thank you."
"Good luck, David," Robertson said. "I just hope I'm worrying for nothing."
The detective left his office, shutting the door with a sharp snap. He sank down behind his desk, staring at the stack of datapads towering before him. He had had better days.
Chief Thomas Robertson had been chief of the Beijing Police Bureau since the end of the First Contact War. Before that, he'd been in the FBI with the former United States. This wasn't even the worst he'd had to handle. He'd been around when Shanxi had been hit by the turians and mass hysteria had threatened to overtake the people on Earth. He'd had to endure the strategic nightmare of penetrating North Korea and the bureaucratic nightmare that'd followed. What they'd found in the isolated north had taught Robertson a valuable lesson, that nothing should ever be taken for face value. Pearce had raised his suspicions the moment she'd walked through the door. All he could offer his detective was a warning.
He should've known, he should've been prepared and he knew that. It had seemed simple: two assailants dressed as civil servants attacked a family and managed to kill the parents, but not before they'd been killed as well. An open-and-shut case. It had seemed easy enough, and that was why he'd assigned David Lang to the case. It should've been a way for him to bounce back with an easy case. It should've been a lot of things. But then Agent Pearce walked through the door, and the entire thing changed. He'd handled worse; Murphy had given him much nastier things and he'd come out of them more or less in once piece.
The difference this time was that he was getting old, and the entire precinct knew that. He wasn't a young man anymore, he was ten years past retirement age, and he still hadn't quit. The job was getting harder on him every day, but he couldn't give up. The O'Grady case had effectively kept him out of retirement for at least another two years. Maybe it'd been seeing the strain the case had put on Lang himself, but perhaps it was also the fear, and the well-founded fear, that the Beijing precinct would fall apart without him. When Lang had picked up the O'Grady case, he'd been on the verge of retiring. He would have, too, if it weren't for the gravity of the situation. The man had revived a nightmare everyone believed to be put to rest twenty years earlier. He'd filled the morgue and the nightmares for every woman in the city for three years. And it wasn't just the chase that was terrifying. Sometimes Robertson wondered if the man had been worth catching at all. He'd played with Lang's mind like it was a board game, and he'd won. It didn't matter that O'Grady had ultimately been put to death. He'd won, and he'd gone to the chair knowing that he'd won. Robertson was an old man; he'd seen enough to be able to stand up to the strain. But Lang? He was still a young man, and his mind was still relatively pliable. Robertson was just afraid that his lack of foresight had cost Lang his mind. Quick minds were easily broken, and nobody knew this better than he.
A/N: I'm aware that this probably doesn't look very much like Mass Effect at the moment, but it will all pan out. Thanks for reading, and please leave a review! :D Don't expect lightning updates, this will definitely take a while and I'm more scatterbrained than... (insert witty metaphor here.) Anyhow, this is the start to my first (?) venture into OCs. Let me know if I screwed up my exposition in some way.