AN: HAH! Bet you didn't expect to see an AN up here, did you?! That's how we do things around here: unexpectedly. Anyways, just an FYI before we get into things.
"Italics in speech" = words not known/understood by Human/Quarians, depending on who says it. If Shep says something italicized, the Quarians don't know it and vice versa. Words spoken with emphasis will be marked with an underline.
Italics in narration = just italicized for emphasis.
I've tried to make this distinction easy to spot in the narration, but I figured I'd play it safe.
Binary
Shepard was quickly exhausting his options as the ensuing days dragged on. He wasn't entirely too familiar with this region, and so his limited abilities as a hunter and gatherer were further limited by his ignorance. His parents had done their best to inform and teach him along the road, but they'd done most of their business further West. This region of the country was a crisscrossing mess of rivers, wasted plains and forests and desolate mountains. However, there were things that were almost universal.
Over the course of three weeks Shepard was escorted through the wilderness by a trio of the aliens. (And he called them such with confidence, for that was what Shepard was growing increasingly certain that they were. He'd seen their flying brick sly straight up into the night sky until it was nothing more than a distant twinkle before vanishing. At that point he'd had to concede that there wasn't a whole lot else they could be.) Of the three, there was always the stoic Tala'Xen, who was obviously a leader for of some kind for the others. And considering that he was always openly armed, that would probably make him a leader of soldiers. Shepard had mentally filed him under "people to impress", and had always made sure to offer him the first pick of whatever he caught or harvested.
And, even though he wasn't exactly in his best element, he did manage to make a good showing of it.
Rats, or rather rodents, were always an easy meal. They were quite tasty, but it had to be cooked very thoroughly to alleviate the risk of some disease transmitting. Nobody wanted to have worms eating their way out of the small intestines, after all. The difficulty was in finding the twitchy little devils: they tended to be cowardly animals when not in a swarm. Squirrels in particular were difficult to get his hands on, and towards the end of his travails Shepard had a new appreciation the insult 'squirrelly bastard'. However, those too he managed to get a hold of by rigging up the classic box-trap. (Which involved bait, a box, a stick to hold up one half of the box and a long piece of string.) He'd spent a few very tense hours waiting for something to take the bait, but he's eventually been rewarded for his efforts.
Unfortunately, his catch had been dismissed out of hand by his captors. Shepard didn't blame them, but that didn't stop him from eating his quarry all the same. He'd taken particular pleasure in skewering the squirrel.
Lizards were better fare, though their position at the bottom reaches of the food chain understandably made them very leery of anything bigger than them. Shepard, in his weakened state, wasn't nearly quick enough to catch them by hand. For the longest time the only thing he'd been able to catch were tails, which wasn't about to impress anybody. However, since it had already proven effective on one animal, he'd tried out the box again.
But these too were likewise refused, which seemed like such a waste to Shepard. Lizards were delicious. Shepard ate those as well, as it would be a shame to waste all that meat.
Birds were next on the list of animals he could offer up in his place, which was a shame because he no idea how he was supposed to go about catching something that could take flight and didn't hesitate to do so at the first sign of danger. After spending hours upon hours with his now much beloved box and string waiting, he'd been forced to admit that maybe it wasn't the be-all and end-all of hunting.
And there were also the various roots and small vegetables to be found, though these were understandably much rarer. The earth and water had been poisoned, after all, and that which could survive in such harsh conditions were rarely something that could be safely eaten without further poisoning oneself with radiation. But some there was always something to be found for a young man looking for a meal so as not to become one.
By that time he was feeling well enough that he could travel further and faster. He braved the dangers associated with large bodies of water in order to pull up cattails, he dug up deceptively desiccated stalks to reach the healthy roots below, he scoured the countryside looking for whatever herbs could be found, he even managed to find a patch of wild rice that he hastily harvested before realizing that he had no idea how to separate the seeds. But he'd kept them all the same, on the basis that more was better than less.
All the same, he'd presented his varied bounty to the aliens with a hopeful grin. He'd been crushed when, once again, they wanted nothing to do with his bounty. But not too crushed to not make a savoury stew out of it.
Of course, food wasn't the only thing he picked up on his many excursions into the wasteland. As he was always escorted by his captors, he learned quite a few things from them as a matter of necessity. Simple words and phrases, mostly. Greetings. Names. Hardly enough for him to hold a conversation, but enough that he wasn't totally ignorant of what they were saying to him. Or about him, for that matter. And he, for his part, became fluent enough to tell them about the hazards of wasteland.
And there was a great many of dangers to tell them about.
He taught them that night was the worst time to be exposed, because that was when the radscorpions came out to hunt. It was likewise best to approach shaded areas with caution, because that was where they liked to rest until nightfall.
He taught them to stay away from large tunnels, as it was impossible to say for certain what lived there. What might be a shelter for rats could also be a den of wasteland wolves, which were like wild dogs but bigger, meaner and smarter. Wolves wouldn't have attacked him alone: no, they would have come all at once and ripped him apart in minutes.
He taught them how to make smokeless fires, and why they should never again even think about using the ancient tires that could be found on just about every old-world vehicle quietly rusting its way to oblivion. The smoke was visible from miles away, and the smell had a tendency to attract super-mutants. That had been very, very difficult to convey, as the name wasn't exactly something that came up in regular conversation. The best he'd eventually managed was telling them that they were a kind of man-eating giant. Which wasn't too far from the truth.
He taught them how to look for ant-holes, and how to find and avoid their scent-markers so that they wouldn't be followed when the ants invariably went out to search for food.
He taught them... well, he pretty much gave them a laundry list of things that could and would kill and eat them, and whatever advice he had to prevent that from happening. They might be threatening to eat him, but until they did their bumbling ignorance of the danger that surrounded them was just as much a danger to him as it was to them.
The aliens for their part were grateful for his advice, and took his word to heart. It was almost comical, the amount of credence they gave his lessons: he was almost tempted to feed them a line of lies just to see them do something ridiculous. But he fought back such impulses. Doing so would jeopardize their trust in him, and even if he weren't reliant on their good will that wasn't something he was prepared to risk. Some survival techniques needed to be taken seriously no matter how ridiculous the notion seemed. (Harvesting the poison glands of radscorpions in order to prepare a savoury stew, for example, always seemed like madness to those who didn't know how to prepare the meal.)
Still, it never failed to bring a small grin to his face to see a semi-circle of grown adults watch attentively as he showed them some new aspect of wasteland wisdom. (Life among the caravans, travelling through had imparted him with many of them.)
He couldn't have known that the Quarians ascribed much more importance to his words than he could have ever suspected. To him, he was simply telling them how to avoid getting killed. To them, he was teaching them how to adapt to the planet. He was teaching them how to turn it from a hostile wasteland into something that might, if one were generous with the term, be called a home.
All the same, he found himself liking his captors. Even with the unspoken threat at all times, he couldn't help but look forward to each excursion.
And it was because of this that, even after he had recovered to such a state that he felt confident in travelling once more, he didn't leave them in the night.
But that would soon be coming to a close, one way or another. He'd exhausted the resources of the wasteland, and now the only thing that might satisfy them were the Old World foods. He couldn't imagine why they would want it: there couldn't be much left of it at this point, and it wasn't even like it was the best food available. It couldn't be after two hundred years of laying neglected inside irradiated buildings.
He wasn't exactly eager to delve into the ruins of the old world, but that was what was left to him.
He just hoped that he wouldn't have to give the Qurians another lecture on the last and possibly most dangerous threat in the wasteland: other humans.
Because he really was warming up to them. He didn't want to give them yet another reason to kill and eat him.
Fallston had been a very small suburban community two hundred years ago, and had been built as a refuge of sorts from the hustle and bustle of the city that most of its residents commuted to every day for work. It had been built alongside the edge of a long plateau, the houses facing a long, sharp dropoff down into the farmlands below.
It had been an idyllic settlement, where those who could afford to live there had been able to forget the steady decline of the economy, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and the escalating threat of nuclear war. In better times, it had afforded its residence an unparalleled vista of an endless checkerboard of farmlands, at times a flowing sea of golds and greens.
Two hundred years later, the town now had a grand view of miles upon miles of a dusty, wasteland with only the wide trenches carved out by shallow rivers and the skeletal remains of farmhouses as a grim reminder of what had once been.
Shepard, who was ignorant of what the land had once looked like, thought that it was pretty enough in its own way. Certainly the way the sun reflected off the occasional patch of exposed glassed earth was something to see. And the way the gentle winds would cause drifts of dust to flow across the ground like water was strangely hypnotic. Or the distant glitter off of ancient snaking waterways.
Of course, he was only able to see it as such due to the simple fact that he wasn't down there himself. It was like fire: very nice to look at, but you wouldn't want to get too close.
"Does anybody live here?" Tala'Xen asked at his side, looking down empty street of Fallston. "Is that why you wanted to come here?"
Shepard felt a chill run down his spine at the question. Though small parts of it were lost in translation, he understood the general gist of it.
He tore his gaze away from the lowlands in order to answer the question.
"No," he answered in their tongue, struggling with the sound of even so small a word. "Not for many time. Dead. Leave. Gone."
"Then why are we here?"
"Food," Shepard said succinctly.
Tala'Xen looked over the ruined town, frowning behind his faceplate.
"Really?" he asked, doubtful at the prospect. "Here?"
"Yes," the Human assured confidently. "Old food. Ancient. From before."
'Before' had become the codeword for 'before the world went to hell', because the mere concept of the kind of Armageddon they'd been living through wasn't one that could be properly conveyed in only a few weeks. Such a thing had to be lived through.
The aliens were getting there, though. They'd seen enough wasteland to gain a small notion of what the rest of the world was like.
"Huh," Tala grunted in comprehension. "But why do you need it? Don't you have enough back at the camp."
"Is food," Shepard said, as if that explained everything. "For you. Not me."
"Heh, Kid, if you find anything we can eat here, I'll be surprised."
Shepard was certain that "kid" was some kind of nickname for him, and on that basis he found that he liked it. He'd have been less pleased with the moniker had he known what it meant, but he wasn't going to ask about it.
"I find," he said with absolute certainty. This was his last chance to find something for them. If he failed... well, he would have to leave, fleeing through the night once again hoping that he could outrun his own death. And even if he was better, he wasn't certain just how far or how fast he would be able to run. "Wait here. Watch. This place dangerous."
"Dangerous?" Tala repeated, sounding concerned.
"Others here, possible. They not..." Shepard explained. "Help. Share."
Tala'Xen thought bak to his own Pilgrimage days, when he too had spent long hours pouring through ancient ruins, abandoned asteroid belts or other places that people had long ago left behind, thinking the resources spent. Not everyone had been content to let him take what little he could.
"Yeah," the Quarian agreed, sounding bitter. "I get you."
He nodded to the nearest house, a modest home that had been painted cheery yellow in ages past. Centuries of wind, dust and sun had turned it an ugly, blotchy mix of brown and pale yellow where it hadn't been burned or simply blown away. The crumbling foundation was mercifully shrouded by long, wild weeds or creeper plants that had begun the process of climbing the woodwork.
Shepard took all this in, and then walked briskly over the home's overgrown lawn, careful to watch his step for anything lurking in the waist-high grass.
He then proceeded to plunder the house for whatever he could. Which, admittedly, wasn't much. There were a few bottles of nuka-cola to be found and a box of almost fossilized candies, but nothing else.
The next house, originally red with white trim but now a cracked and bleached pink, yielded only a box of Dandy Apples.
And in the next, half-collapsed but gamely trying to resist the inexorable pull of gravity and the wear of the elements, he found a single piece of desiccated, plastic-wrapped steak inside a rusting refrigerator.
And so it went, through house after house after house, hours upon hours until the sun was threatening to fall beneath the horizon and the first stars began appear in the sky. And only when he was absolutely certain that he had collected the last box of food, the last bottle of old-world liquor, the last piece of desperate hope that he had left did he present himself back to Tala and the rest of his soldiers.
He marched right on up to them with a hopeful grin and the fruits of his search held tightly in both his hands.
"Whoa there," Tala said, and gave a low whistle. "Think you have enough there?"
"Yes," Shepard answered and lifted his burden meaningfully. "Is food. You see any you like?"
"Sorry, kid," Tala said with a wry chuckle. "We don't eat that stuff. It's bad for us."
John Shepard, eleven years old and having had his last hope dashed, didn't know what to do. There was only one thing he knew the Quarians would eat, and it was him.
He let the boxed foodstuffs fall from his hands to the ground. He didn't want it: he would have to run soon enough and he didn't want to be burdened by their weight.
"Hey, don't be like that, kid," Tala'Xen said reassuringly. "It's not the end of the world."
No?
But- they needed food! Nothing he'd found was suitable for them! He was the only thing left!
But... if they did, what else would they eat?
What else...
Hold on.
They didn't want to eat him.
They wanted to eat humans. And they wanted him to lead them to others.
John Shepard, eleven years old and recently having recovered from a gunshot wound and a still walking with a small limp, knew exactly where to lead them.
AN: So. Third chapter in, and I think the next one is the last. Maybe something of an epilogue as well, but a short one. So... yeah. Look forward to that!