Something in Sara starts screaming from the moment she wakes up in Andromeda.
Scott's cryo pod is damaged and Sara doesn't know how to live in a galaxy where Scott isn't.
When Sara was 10, she was a happy child. Bubbly and noisy, happy to chatter with anyone nearby who will listen. She sings off key and chases her twin with screams of delight, who in turn chases her. Their home is loud and joyful.
When she was 13, there was something wrong with her. A feeling, like something lodged in her throat, unmoving even when she coughed.
It was weeks before she told either parent. Until it became too painful for her to swallow.
A trip to the doctor, examinations, scans. A diagnosis.
Glottic carcinoma. Cancer of the vocal cords. Surgery, the only way to fix it.
The terror of realizing she'd never make a noise again. The doctors mystified at how a thirteen year old girl could get a cancer most often reserved for alcoholics and the immunocompromised.
She pleads with her mother, she doesn't want to be mute. In turn, Ellen begs Alec. Brings up clinical trials, experimental treatments, alternative therapies, radiation. Anything to change his mind.
But, Alec's face and voice are hard when he tells them no. He is N7, soldier, and by extension, so are his children.
Sara will carry this burden and that is the end of it.
After, when she wakes from the surgery, it is to pain more emotional than physical. She tries to scream with vocal cords that are no longer there, mouth bloodied by the strain. It takes two different nurses to restrain and sedate her.
After, Sara is silent. Her voice is the ghost that haunts their once happy home.
After, it is Scott who catches her, pulls her from the edge of a building. Scott, who holds her tight and cries tears she no longer could. Begging her not to leave him.
Later, Scott learns sign language and takes it upon himself to teach it to her too. He never leaves her side. Their mother joins in but Alec is too busy, locked inside an office filled with his own silent guilt.
Later, Sara discovers the beauty of music and doesn't go without it, too afraid of the silence that surrounds her. Along with music she finds peace in Art. A thousand shades of a thousand colors brighten her soul and she no longer cries herself to sleep at night.
She never really forgives Alec.
At fifteen she is better if only just. She finds a friend. The first other than Scott since no one at school speaks to the weird mute girl.
He's a boy. A Turian and the day they become friends she rushes home to tell her mother, signing with rapid fingers about him. Sara thinks he is beautiful.
Sara makes the mistake of drawing him on the dining room table where Alec sees. He speaks directly to her for the first time in two years. Anger coloring his voice.
"What is this? I can't believe this nonsense. Sara, you better knock this shit off. I didn't raise one of them. "
Them being, in Alec's words, the alien fuckers, the few exceptions to Alec's no swearing rule.
It wasn't the first time he'd said something similar. The first being when she was 11 and caught staring, wide eyed at the family two doors down, made up of a human, a quarian, and a small boy in a typical enviro-suit.
He's never been the religious type so he doesn't see the unions as sins against God. No. He sees them as sins against nature.
Sara always wondered that if it were really a sin against nature, then why did the little boy in the quarian exo-suit have five fingers.
Ellen tries to fix it. Tries to tell Alec that he's only a friend from school. Points out that she doesn't have many friends, the because of you , is never directly spoken but there all the same. Alec retreats again.
The damage is done. Sara no longer spends her lunch time with him.
When she is seventeen, Sara graduates from school a year early at the top of her class, technically Valedictorian but they give the title away to the runner up because how could she possibly give a speech to her graduating class?
Ellen tries to fight for her. To argue over translators. That it is wrong to give the glory to someone who didn't work half as hard as she did. She fails again.
Sara pretends very hard that she isn't bitter.
Scott squeezes her hand during the entire speech. He pretends he isn't as angry as she is about it.
The Alliance is a whole different ball game. There, there is no pretending. The other recruits actively despise her. Because she is silent. But she is also better than they are; than they ever will be.
Sara Ryder is smarter, faster, stronger with biotics that put almost all of them to shame.
They hate her. She doesn't care.
Likewise, they adore Scott. Scott, who can strip guns and put them back together in less than 5 minutes flat. He is charismatic and funny, sarcastic and witty in a way that both frustrates the commanding officers and makes them laugh.
He is her opposite in nearly every way.
Still. He doesn't leave her alone.
The only time they truly separate is after basic. She goes to outposts to be a peacekeeper, eventually discovering a love for unearthing prothean technology and deciphering the meaning behind them.
Scott, the fighter that he is, is assigned to the Arcturus relay, determined to protect civilians from slavers coming through from contested space.
When their mother gets sick. Sara breaks for the first time since she was thirteen. Her brother finds her curled up in a ball and joins her. He doesn't say anything because he knows nothing he can say will make it better. Ellen Ryder was the only one in the world who'd ever actually fought for Sara.
It is only when she sees how far Alec will go for Ellen that the bitterness returns. The clawing feeling burns from the inside out, suffocating her.
She hates herself for being resentful. Resentful because he'd never gone to such far lengths for her. Hates herself because it's her mother and of course they would do anything for her.
Once, Sara had simply justified it for him. Told herself that Alec just didn't have it in him to do that sort of thing for anyone. Clearly he could. Just not for Sara.
Alec burns himself through trying to save the only person he'd ever truly loved and Sara was helpless but to watch him.
Her career, the only thing she really had in life anymore other than Scott, turns to ashes because of it. So does Scott's.
Their mother dies and in a fit of fury, Sara signs something that Scott refuses to translate, horrified. Alec tries to demand it from him but it is SAM who answers. Flat and electronic, still not quite able to do the emotion thing.
"This is your burden to carry."
His face goes white and he walks away.
It is Scott, not Alec, who convinces her to go to Andromeda. He wants to go, wants a new start and a new life without the shadow of their father swallowing them whole.
Sara can't bear a life without him, her rock through life and so goes with them.
She wakes first as the oldest and Scotts cryo pod is damaged within minutes, him still inside it. The Doctor puts him in a coma and says it's the best hope for him, not sounding very hopeful.
Sara doesn't know how to live in a galaxy where Scott isn't.
Yet another thing that Alec has ruined.