A/N:
Just to give you a heads-up...there's a POV shift for this chapter. But it WILL only be for this chapter, which marks the halfway(ish) point of the story. Tomorrow we'll be back to our favorite turian's take on the situation...
Chapter 12: Interlude: Rooftop DancesAdrienna could remember the first time she held the gun.
She knew something was up when her father picked her up from school. He didn't let her stay and play with Alex and John on the playground. He barely gave a nod to Mrs. Williams, who had greeted them both warmly. He scratched the scars on the side of his face as he called Adrienna over, his steady gaze fixed entirely on her. He barely spoke as they walked home quickly. He seemed to have forgotten how small she was. She remembered having to run to keep up with his long strides.
When they got home, he took her up to the roof. Adrienna remembered climbing the ladder on the side of the house ahead of him—the feel of his three talons along her back to steady her as she climbed. She remembered feeling a little annoyed at this. She was five now, after all, and didn't need his help for everything anymore. But, when she climbed over the edge and pulled herself up onto the roof, all her protests were forgotten.
She remembered that distinct moment of confusion: she didn't know what she was looking at. So she looked up at her father as he stood beside her. He was looking at with such expectation glowing in his eyes that she didn't want to admit to him that she had no idea why he had set up boxes and bottles on the far side of the roof. And it wasn't just their roof, she realized: he had set up rows of boxes all the way down the street, on the roofs of the neighbours: getting further and further away until Adrienna had to squint to see the smallest ones.
"Daddy…?" she asked him quietly, worried that her confusion had somehow let him down.
Instead, he smiled at her.
"Come over here," he said. She followed him as he strode over to the corner, to the workbench where he would sometimes stay for hours, fiddling at the tools and pieces of metal. "This is yours. Hold out your arms."
And she held her gun for the first time. She felt the weight not just through her arms, but all the way across her chest.
"It's heavy," she gasped.
"Well," he said, ruffling her hair and looking immensely pleased, "you'll just have to get stronger, won't you?"
Adrienna thought about this for a moment and decided that it made sense.
"I'm going to teach you how to use it," her father told her.
She frowned. She was pretty sure that none of the other kids at school knew how to shoot. It didn't seem very safe to Adrienna. Maybe he read this in her face, because he waved at how the boxes were arranged.
"Practise slugs," he said. "For when you miss."
Adrienna narrowed her eyes at him.
"I won't miss," she said.
He laughed.
"Yes. You will. You'll miss lots. And that's okay. This…" and he began to look worried. "…this is probably pretty unusual. I don't think you should talk about this too much to other people. Except for maybe Lynn—erm, Mrs. Williams. She knows because she helped me ask the other neighbours for permission to set up the boxes…they just think it's me up here, though. Lynn convinced them that rifle ranges on roofs is some kind of turian religious practise…" he chuckled. Then, he crouched down and stared right into Adrienna's eyes. "If you don't want to do this…I'll understand. But I think it will be a good thing to learn. And I think…I think it will help with the nightmares."
Adrienna fixed her father with a steely glance to match his own, trying to figure out how he could possibly have known about the nightmares. She hadn't told him because she had been afraid that telling him would make him sad. He always seemed so sad. She didn't want to make him sadder.
But now she thought that maybe she had been a little silly. Obviously, her father could fix everything. And now he was going to fix the nightmares.
"I'll try," she promised him.
Adrienna couldn't remember much more of that first lesson: only that she had been very bad. She didn't hit any of the bottles—not for a very long time. Her father never got angry at her, but on days where she didn't even get close, he would watch her anxiously and ask her if she wanted to wait a few years. She always said "no" : she wanted to keep going.
"Why?" he asked her, one time.
"Because…because the nightmares are different," Adrienna confessed. "Now…I…I always save you. Before the bad guys can get you. It's still scary. But it's…it's better."
And that had been been the last time he had asked her if she wanted to quit. After that, they both knew that it wasn't about actually hitting the bottles that tantilizingly stood guard on the crates: it was about how the gun felt less and less heavy in her arms, how good it felt to be able to hold it steadier when the kickback punched backwards, how she was getting faster and faster at reloading the heat sinks when they burnt out with that metallic smell and sharp hiss.
Adrienna could remember the first time she hit a bottle.
It wasn't one of the closer ones, but one on the house next door. She could remember how, for one breath, everything aligned perfectly: eye and mind and finger and gun. She could remember being startled by the sound of the bottle shattering, not sure what had happened, since she'd never actually heard the sound before—even though she had been practising for over a year at that point. It was the day her father gave the lecture: the day he explained what it really meant to be able to shoot.
"Dancing," she could remember him telling her, watching her intently, making sure that she really was listening. "You're not shooting a gun, Junior. You're dancing. It's an intricate dance done between the talon and the trigger. There's a rhythm to it. Here…"
He stepped over to the workbench and Adrienna couldn't help but laugh, because he had turned on music. It was silly, schmaltzy music—like the kind that she sometimes heard in old vids. And she knew it wasn't her father's music, because it was definitely human music.
Then, for the first time, he took the gun from her hands. She knew that he used it for his work, because once she'd snuck up onto the roof here when Mrs. Williams was looking after her. Adrienna and Alex had been playing hide-and-seek, and, when she'd crawled under the workbench, she had noticed that the rifle was gone. But she'd never actually seen him use it before.
And the silly old human music suddenly seemed less silly. Because, in time with the music, her father took the rifle and fired six times: an entire line of bottles disappeared in a shattering of glass. There was something beautiful in how easy he made it look, like he wasn't trying at all. Only his eyes gave him away: Adrienna could see how his gaze sharpened on each bottle, just before he pulled the trigger. She remembered feeling so very proud of her father in a way that she hadn't before. She'd always loved him, of course. But, suddenly, she understood that he was more than just her father: he was some kind of hero. And, in that moment, she wanted, more than anything else on Earth, to be just like him someday.
Adrienna could remember the first time the gun spoke back to her.
It had been their usual practise routine: they were up on the roof and Adrienna knew that she was getting better and better. She could (almost) always take out all the bottles in the first and second lines now. It was something she was very proud of, but her father seemed to think that she needed to be better. Adrienna was seven years old now. It had been over a year since she'd taken out that first line of bottles, over a year since she'd seen her father take the gun from her hands, and some of the glamor was starting to fade. She could remember starting to feel annoyed that her father wanted her to be better than this. Wasn't this good enough? She didn't have to be the best. The nightmares were gone, so why would she need to do this anymore?
Besides, she'd tried doing some extranet research on the gun, like they were learning to do in school for their history reports and stuff. It was weird that she couldn't really find anything that matched her rifle. It seemed almost like a Mantis…but it was different. She knew. And when she had looked up other Mantis rifles, models that were less common or customized, she'd found a newspaper report about how a prototype had been stolen years ago. And that the Devlon family were now all dead…except for a daughter that had gone missing…after her parents had been shot in the street…
Adrienna didn't really want to think or read about these things, so she had closed down her extranet terminal at school and refused to look up anything else. But she was beginning to think about how guns weren't really made only to shoot bottles. And she was beginning to wonder why her father would need to take the gun with him whenever he went to work.
So maybe she'd been a little angry when he told her that she could get the third line of bottles if she just tried harder. She wanted to tell him that she was trying. And that she wanted to know what he did at work. And where the Mantis had come from. And who she really was. But, instead, she had bit her tongue, channelling her anger through the green circuitry that extended down her arm and onto the tips of her fingers. She could remember feeling it spark as she touched the trigger on the gun…
…and the gun had spoken to her.
It wasn't like it was fully alive. It was more like it had suddenly become part of her, an extension of her arm. She wasn't pulling a trigger anymore—not really—but throwing that slug as far as she could. She fired again and again until that third line of bottles was down, but then, instead of reaching for a new heat sink, she felt her own skin prickle, the green circuitry burning brightly. And then she felt her skin almost…pull…the heat away from the weapon and send it steaming off from the circuitry as it lit up. It burned a little, but she knew, as the gun kept going through the fourth line and then the fifth, that this Mantis was telling her that it liked to dance.
But she still couldn't quite get anything past that fifth line. Her shots were too unfocused. So she had disconnected from the gun, only to find her father staring at her with the most ridiculous expression on his face: his bottom jaw had dropped, his mandibles were flared to the side. And she suddenly realized that, while her father wasn't easily surprised, the effect when it did happen was all kinds of magnificent.
Then, she remembered how he had swept over to her: staring at her, pulling at her arms, asking if she was okay with worry flooding the subtonals in his voice. She assured him that she felt fine, that she wasn't sure what had happened, exactly. Her father had snatched the gun out of her hands. As his talons probed the casing, he began cursing himself for not realizing sooner what the gun could do, muttering about how it must have been an experiment in using the human networking abilities to make weapons more efficient.
She had asked him if he wanted to try, but he had only shook his head. She knew that her father didn't like the idea of networking.
"Well," he said, when he was finally convinced that this was how the gun was supposed to function, "this has proven one thing: this really is your rifle."
Adrienna could remember going to bed that night feeling that she had discovered something special about herself, could remember how it felt like to do something that no one else could do.
And Adrienna could remember what had happened that afternoon.
"Dad!" she had hissed at him. "I'm trying!"
"Try better."
She stuck her tongue out at him, a weird human gesture that Adrienna knew her father found particularly revolting. Which was why she did it.
But, now, she secretly loved these lessons, bragging about them at school to Alex and any of the other kids that would listen. Now, she had graduated beyond bottles: her father had set up new targets that were vaguely person-shaped. She was getting to be very good. And she knew it. Of course, that may have been because there probably wasn't another nine-year old whose father had been teaching her to shoot a sniper rifle since she was five, but that was okay. It still felt good to be the best at something.
Well, almost the best.
Out of frustration, her father snatched the rifle out of her hands. He shot the target—right in the head—that she had missed several times now.
"Headshot," he said, quietly. "There. Now don't you dare tell me it can't be done."
She tried again. Missed.
"It's too far away! You got lucky," she complained.
He raised his brow plates at her, grabbed the rifle again, and hit the target square in the face again.
"Still a lucky shot," Adrienna said, but now she was starting to smile. "Do it again."
Her father obliged. Again and again. When he was finished, the target now had a face punched through it: two eyes, one nose, and one severely frowning mouth.
"Looks like you!" she said, laughing, and she could tell by the way that he sighed and shook his head that the shooting lesson was over for the day. She popped the last heat sink and took the rifle over to the workbench.
"Dad? Coming?"
But he had stopped, staring down off the edge of the roof and towards where the front door was. Suddenly, Adrienna jumped as someone knocked at the front door with such force that it reverberated throughout the entire structure.
"Someone's here," Adrienna said. "Probably Alex or something. Do you want me to get—?"
Her father motioned for her to be quiet, so she closed her mouth and tried to listen. The knocking came again. And again. And then someone was yelling something. A name? A name that she didn't recognize.
"Vakarian!"
Her father tensed. His mandibles flared wider than she'd ever see them do so before. Something was truly wrong.
"Vakarian!" the voice called again.
Then, faster than she could blink, her father was over at her side again. She remembered how he grabbed the rifle out of her hands.
"Listen. You need to hide."
"What?"
He grabbed her by the shoulders.
"Go into your room and hide under the bed. Don't come out. Do not come out, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Got it?"
She nodded.
"When everything is quiet, you need to come back out onto the roof and climb down the ladder on the side of house. Don't use the front door. Then…then go straight to Alex and John's house, okay? If I don't find you."
"What do you mean?" she asked, confused.
"Vakarian!"
He tensed again.
"You'll find me, right?" Adrienna said.
Her father looked back towards the edge of the roof, towards whatever was at the front door. Then, he looked back into her eyes.
"Junior. Go."
She pulled herself down the ladder, back into the house. She saw her father filling the rifle with real rounds. Then, he was swinging the sniper rifle into position: over the edge of the roof, aiming towards the front door. The knocking wasn't stopping. And neither was the yelling.
She ran and pulled herself under her bed, stuffing pillows around herself so that she wouldn't be seen with a cursory glance under the bed. She was breathing hard.
Adrienna curled up into a ball and tried to remember everything she knew about the gun: holding it for the first time, shooting that first bottle, the first time the gun spoke back to her…She thought about all these things. And she waited for the reassuring sound of her gun, dancing in her father's talons, to echo through the house.
But it never came.