A/N: A drabble takes place during the break between sections, though it would break up the flow too much to post it here. I'd be happy to link to it if anyone is curious!
SSV Payne, May 2164.
By nature, Hannah wasn't the nostalgic type. She had her pocketful of regrets, but no more; she had too much to get done to be carrying around a ruck full of what-ifs. If motherhood had taught her anything, it was the importance of forward motion.
"Mom?" Eliza peered into Hannah's room, slumping gracelessly against the doorframe. She still wore her school uniform, and Hannah realized with a pang that the hems of her pants needed to be let down again, for the second time in three months. "My homework's done. Are we going to eat soon?"
Hannah hauled a smile onto her face. "What? Those sandwiches after school weren't enough?"
"That was two hours ago," Eliza said, punctuating her words with a gusty sigh and a more pronounced slump. "I'm hungry again. Can we eat soon? Please?"
"Soon," Hannah promised. She nodded at her terminal. "I have to answer some emails first. Set the table, and I'll punch something up in a few minutes."
"Okay," said Eliza, sliding away from the doorframe and slipping down the hallway. Hannah listened to her footsteps fading away, her gaze falling to her hands.
No, not the nostalgic type, not by a long shot. Still, sometimes, she looked at her hands, and didn't see the calluses or the ropey veins under her skin, but blood, slick and black under the streetlights.
The alley. Three of us, five of them. Bad odds, especially since we were technically on their turf. Too many shots to count, no way to tell if mine did any damage. Everyone was screaming, and I was bending over someone. I don't even remember her name. But she was crying, and we both knew the medigel wasn't going to help. Then sirens, and lights, and when I held up my hands, they were covered with blood.
The blood was long gone; she couldn't even remember what it smelled like. Her hands were clean now, worn from hard use, but clean.
Clean as the smell of medigel in a dark alley, clean as the paint on a police skycar, clean as the stark black ink of her signature as she gave herself to the Alliance.
Not that she regretted it, not for a second. The Alliance had only asked that she put her skills to better use.
She shook her head and raked her fingers through her hair, where the black strands were just beginning to be shot through with white. Each new streak was a stark reminder of time's complete indifference to whether she wished things had gone differently - to if she wished she had stayed on Earth, and found a way to put down roots in real soil.
Hannah missed the smell of earth.
If the mood struck her, she could go down to the hydroponics labs and spend a spare half-hour wandering through the quiet, green-tinted space, running her fingers along the smooth leaves and resisting the urge to steal tomatoes or a handful of grapes, but underneath all the flowers and leaves, she would still smell tile and metal. What she wanted to smell was earth: dirty, stinking, warm earth, full of worms and rocks. She wanted to feel it under her fingernails, grimed into her knuckles, tracked down her face in streaks and mixed with her sweat.
This is not how I should be spending my free night, she thought. There are things to do. Emails to return. Dinner to cook. Vids to watch. A bathroom to clean.
None of the tasks, apparently, were enough to keep her from sitting down on the edge of her bed, staring at her hands. Her knuckles were clean, but thick with old scars; her fingernails, from necessity, were trimmed almost to the quick. She had good hands, strong hands, sensitive hands. Hands that could manipulate hair-thin wires without snapping them. Hands that could hold a gun without wavering. No matter what she used her hands for, they didn't waver. Hannah clenched them into fists, breathing hard through her nose as a wave of longing for earth, for Earth, moved through her, heavy as sea-water. God, she even missed that too, the smell of the sea carried on the wind, salt and sand, clean as glass.
The desire made no sense; she had left Earth, and earth, long behind her; she left the Sol System once she got her first assignment and never went back. On leave, she contented herself with the Citadel and its gardens and lakes, if she wanted a glimpse of something other than corridors and elevators. It had been enough for her for almost thirty years, and Eliza had never complained. Sharp-boned, bright-eyed Eliza, who laughed like a bird but grinned with too many teeth, and who was growing so fast there seemed to be another five inches of her at the breakfast table every morning. Eliza, who had spent her first two weeks on Earth and nothing since. She wouldn't even remember what the planet smelled like; she was a child of space, of starships, drive cores, and the silent, hulking mass relays.
She doesn't have to be, Hannah decided, relaxing her hands. She can choose what soil she wants, same as I did.
"Mom!" Eliza yelled. "I set the table! Should I order dinner?" A considering pause followed, then Eliza's voice came down the hallway again, more a wheedle than a yell. "It's pizza night and I know what toppings you like. Please?"
Hannah closed her eyes, a sting in her chest and her eye. "Sure," she called back, already constructing her question, knowing simplest was best. Sweetie, do you want to see Earth? "Extra cheese is fine, no extra-extra allowed."
"Aw," Eliza said, disappointed, but agreeable enough.
The Citadel, July 2164.
Hannah forgot the lofty beginnings for Eliza's trip to Earth within minutes of seeing her daughter step off the shuttle on the Citadel. All her questions — What did you like best? Did you see the Grand Canyon? Why are you so sunburned? — evaporated, boiled away by sheer hot embarrassment.
"You ran right into that little boy," she hissed, dragging Eliza away from the turian family. "God, Eliza, why didn't you look where you were going?" She cast a look over her shoulder, back at the family, just in time to realize the father wore the simple blue-and-black C-Sec uniform.
"I was looking!" Eliza spat, trying to squirm out of Hannah's grip. "He saw me coming! He could have moved!"
In spite of her flushed cheeks and the migraine beginning just behind her eyes, Hannah had to bite her tongue to hold down a laugh. I have to remember to tell Lamia about this, she thought. One more mark in the Vanguard column. Outwardly, she kept her face properly outraged, even as Eliza hissed and wriggled like an angry kitten, arms flailing.
"You were the one running when you shouldn't have been," Hannah told her, pulling them out of the thoroughfare and onto a bench. Eliza's hair had come loose from its braid, and Hannah brushed it out with her fingers before plaiting it again. "Really, sweetie, you need to be more careful."
"I know," Eliza said, in the tone she reserved for the moment when anger started to transform into guilt. "But he still could have moved." She twisted away from Hannah's hands, undoing the careful braid as she shrugged down in her seat. Her hair fell over her face, hiding what Hannah was sure was a truly memorable pout. "You didn't even ask how my trip was."
"It's on my to-do list," said Hannah, not surprised at all to find her own anger dulling, losing its heat. Two months without Eliza rattling around their quarters had aged Hannah by about twenty years. Her daughter was home. "After I decide whether or not to ground you for about fifteen years."
"Ten years," said Eliza. When Hannah tucked Eliza's hair behind her ear to peer at her face, Eliza gave her a sly little smirk. "He said I talked a lot. I deserve time off for that."
Hannah nodded, silently adding to her message to Lamia. "Do you? Well, we'll see about that. I think we'll start with some old-fashioned deprivation, though."
"Deprivation?" Eliza frowned up at her. "So like, no…"
"No dessert —"
"Mom!"
" — for a week. And you have to clean the bathroom when we get home."
Eliza looked stricken. "I just ran into him once!" she protested. "He got right back up!"
Hannah leveled a finger at Eliza's face. "Once was enough, my girl." She sighed, and let the rest of her anger flow out of her with her breath. When she slung an arm around Eliza's narrow shoulders and pulled her tight against her side, Eliza resisted long enough for a splinter to work its way into Hannah's chest before settling with her head on Hannah's shoulder. "Was it a good trip? Your messages sounded like you were having fun."
"It was cool," said Eliza. She plucked at the seam of Hannah's trousers with knobby fingers, a thin line of dirt under each fingernail. "It was quiet. Up here, even at night, you can still hear the engines and there's always people talking and walking around. But down there? When you get into the woods? It's just so quiet. You can hear stuff moving in the trees. It wasn't creepy!" she added, glancing up at Hannah, all urgency. "I wasn't scared. It was just different. And dirty."
"I can see that," said Hannah, laughing, lifting Eliza's hand and waving it in the air. "Sunny, too. You'll have a million new freckles once that sunburn fades."
"Yeah, I know," said Eliza, snuggling closer to Hannah. "We went to the beach, and it was smelly, like something died, and this one kid, Paul, found a jellyfish and threw it in another kid's face and she had to go to the hospital because it stung her." Eliza chewed the inside of her lip, then tilted her face up to Hannah's. "Do hanar sting?" she asked, eyebrows puckered together. "They look like jellyfish."
"They are not jellyfish, however, so saying that is an insult." And borderline racist, thought Hannah, happy to be able to head off this potential cross-species crisis before it went any farther. The image of the little turian boy being bowled over, squealing in pain when Eliza's elbow caught him in the carapace, would replay behind her closed lids for a long, long time. "I don't know if they sting, but I know they're very strong. Not elcor-strong, but plenty strong." She shifted, letting Eliza's weight fall against her side instead of her shoulder. "What else did you like? Did you see a sunrise?"
"Mom, I saw like, fifty. The counselors said the colors were so bright because of pollution and once the atmosphere got cleaned up they wouldn't look like that anymore. Same with sunsets. But the stars were nice. We had a contest about who could name the most constellations and I could name twenty but one girl knew them all. Her dads are cartographers though so it was kind of cheating for her to play. But I could run faster than her so that was okay. And there were three other kids with biotics there so we got a tent to ourselves and I got their extranet addresses and maybe next year we can have a tent together again."
"Next year?" Hannah kept her smile in place, relieved that no anti-biotic sentiment had crept into the trip, even as her stomach twisted. "You want to go back? To Earth?" To stay?
Eliza nodded. "Just for the summer, though. I don't think I want to live there, Mom. It's so dirty. I like ships and the Citadel better and you weren't —" She paused, hesitating over her words in a way Hannah had never seen, and it left a fresh knot in Hannah's gut. "You weren't there," Eliza finished, not looking at Hannah. "I know I sound like a baby but I missed — missed you a lot."
Oh, that kind of honesty was irresistible; too candid, too raw, and the way Eliza paused before giving it only sweetened the sting. Hannah closed her eyes and rested her cheek on Eliza's head, breathing in the smells of salt, sunlight, and rich, fresh earth. The smells would fade, all too soon. Until then, Hannah had a little Earth of her own, carried back through space in her daughter's skin, her daughter's hands.
