Warning for character death... double warning since it's not who you were expecting.
There is also a brief allusion to attempted sexual assault - nothing happens, just a mention.
14: Sleeping Dragons Lie
Hannah
Shanxi Borderlands
2157 CE
Hannah waited for the trucks to leave, then got to work.
She allowed one hour for Jane. Antibiotics, medi-gel, several brimming cupfulls of sweetened electrolyte solution, a hot bath and a change of clothes. After that, one hour to survey the rations. Enough food to tide two careful bodies along for several weeks. Albacus had left a considerate amount behind. He hadn't been subtle about it - the crates had been left outside the main storage facility as if in tribute. They might as well have had Hannah's name carved into their sides.
Whatever he thought of himself, Albacus was a good man. In Hannah's experience, good men were usually the first to die when things went south.
If only he'd stayed north. With her. She still remembered how to fight dirty.
Her chest felt heavy, and there was no time for weight.
After the essential tasks were done, a different sort of counting began. Hannah knew that it would take anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours for Albacus to return to Shanxi. Impossible to know if the turian General would wait that long to send his own team to make sure Hannah was dead, but she ranked it unlikely. In any scenario, she had hours at most. If Arterius' men left early and traveled by shuttle, a death squad could be arriving at any moment.
Let them try. This was her backyard, and she wasn't about to be caught unawares. Raids hadn't been common on Shanxi, but they hadn't been unheard of either. Small colonies were ripe targets for pirate gangs and anti-Alliance fringe groups. Sometimes, people on the ground could be assholes too. You could never be too careful - food and medicine weren't the only things she'd kept in bulk in her northern stockpile.
Enough combat gear for a twenty man squad. Alliance standard issue Aldrin, complete sets of heavy armor in mottled green to blend with the terrain. In both hue and hardness, the camouflage perfectly matched her eyes. She suited up.
She counted two dozen assault rifles. Basic stock equipment, but reliable. The same number of pistols. Half that for shotguns and submachines. Only two sniper setups, and she knew one of them had a tendency to jam.
Hannah determined her load by ammo compatibility first, then weight. No gun, no matter how fancy, could save her sorry ass if she ran out of bullets. Double that if she ran out of breath.
One pistol strapped to her lower back - good in a pinch, but short on shots. A hardy M-6 Lancer could drag her through the bulk of the fight. After a brief debate, she took the one good rifle. She'd never had the patience or steady hands for sniping, and the bastard was heavy, but getting off a few shots before the enemy closed might be her only chance out here. Worst case: she could always beat someone to death with it.
She hadn't seen the turians in close combat. Albacus had kept the violence to a minimum until Harper's team had thrown the shit into the fan. Hannah didn't need to think too deeply about her odds. She knew a turian could snap her in half if they got close.
After the guns, she saw about area of effect, anything to keep them at a distance. Trip mines, frag grenades, gas cans, a few spotty old farming drones that she programmed to fly heat sweeps, dropping proximity charges and incendiaries on anything that twitched and wasn't her. The drones wouldn't last long, but they'd be a distraction. Rip up the earth and run like hell.
The proximity alarm sounded. Thirty klicks out, and closing fast, ETA in thirty minutes. A shuttle, then. Arterius had suspected Albacus would betray him, and he hadn't even waited for confirmation. These troops had been sent well in advance. Give Hannah a few hours to think she was safe, then cut her down in her sleep.
Not likely.
Hannah had been an Alliance Marine for as long as there had been an Alliance. She wasn't about to quit now.
Jane was still groggy, had been sleeping in fits and starts ever since her first dose of antibiotics. A toddler half-mad with fever was an unknown that Hannah couldn't afford. The only way to keep Jane safe was to remove her from the equation entirely.
Hannah knew the spot, just the hidey-hole to slide her baby into, well below ground under a small power station in a field to the east. She could get there and back in ten minutes if she started carrying her now. It would keep her safe from the fight, but the thought made her sick.
She looked at the moving dot on the map, bright red with unquestionable danger. The turians were getting closer. She couldn't waste any more time.
She cursed and reached for the sedatives.
Hannah couldn't be sure of the dosage. Too little, and Jane would wake up a few minutes from now locked in an earth-packed crawlspace, screaming for her life. Too much, and she would never wake up at all. Hannah looked at the baffling ratios and weight tables on the side of the bottle and made her best guess.
She said a prayer, then she slid the needle into Jane's arm.
"Mommy's got your back, baby. When you wake up, this will all be over."
Jane
The smoke burned her eyes, she couldn't see through it. Couldn't hear through the heat of those screams, the singing choir in the ashes, the roaring of the flames. She choked on the sound of a dying world, and onto her shoulders the smoke descended.
The smothering guilt of her failure, the weight of his hand. Again, again.
He had to know that she could do better.
She could make it to him, if she just walked. Walked through the long dark, like he told her to. One step at a time. You can do better. Don't lose count.
Fifty-thousand years is too long, she cried.
I can't save them all, she screamed.
Not without you.
She couldn't keep up. It was too heavy. She had to go back.
Faster, she had to move faster. She could almost see the form of his face. Just one more step, it would be enough… She'd catch him, she'd stop him. She wouldn't get caught, she wouldn't lose count.
The cycle had to end.
The ache in her throat turned hoarse with blood, a scream that wasn't hers. Flooding her mouth until she was forced to babble around it, beg around it. A frothing mass, rabid and insane, until there was nothing but lightning in her heart.
Time and again, without warning. They all left eventually. Stolen far away. Into the sharp, devouring green of the trees, where they were never given back.
An endless cycle of hungry theft. Inevitably. Always. Again, again.
But it wasn't theft. Not really.
Not when the doors were left wide open for the thieves.
She woke up.
As her eyes adjusted to the blurry half-light, the door on the far end of the room opened. Wreathed in a sliver of light so piercing that it blinded her, a silhouette appeared.
Someone quietly said her name.
"Jane?"
The shadow peered at her, fatherly and familiar, and her heart leapt with hope. She forced down a deep choke of air and struggled to breathe.
"You called out," he said.
She sobered instantly. His voice was all wrong. It was Nihlus.
Nihlus was not her pari, he would never be her pari, his resemblance to her pari was circumstantial at best. She was on the Normandy, and her father had been dead for thirteen years. Her last night on Mindoir was little more than old nightmare conjured by the Protheans to get their message across. She wished they'd chosen something more subtle.
"The drugs aren't helping, are they?" Nihlus asked, putting a frustrated hand on the doorframe. "Have you slept at all?"
For a moment he simply stared at her tired, twitching face, trying to force an answer out of her. When none came, he stepped a few paces into the room and let the door seal behind him. He didn't do anything as transparently paternal as sit on the edge of her bed. Nonetheless he seemed reluctant to leave.
To fill the awkward pause, Nihlus moved to the desk beside her bunk and turned on the work lamp. That gave him a momentary excuse to hover nearby and glare down at her. Obviously concerned, and equally obvious in his inability to articulate it.
"Yes, I know I need to sleep more." She said. "No, it won't affect my performance."
With a sigh, she rustled beneath the sheets, pointed to the desk chair, and waited for him to take a seat and commence an inevitable lecture. Instead, he placed a quiet hand over hers.
He was wearing gloves and touched her only lightly, but the uncharacteristically intimate gesture startled her nonetheless. Her stomach twisted. Under the pretense of moving herself up the bed to come to a sitting position, she slid her wrist out of his grip.
His only warning was an eerie silence. Then he pushed her out of his way and invaded the bunk, rigidly arranging himself on top of the covers.
Through clenched molars, she growled, "What are you doing?"
"Trying to figure out what it is about this bunk that makes you lose your mind every time you get into it," he answered plainly.
He assumed a mockery of her posture: propping himself against the headboard with arms crossed, his feet jutting out in two uncompromising strike marks over the mattress.
"As I thought." He droned. "Inert. Just a bunk."
"What are you doing?" she repeated.
"If I'm crossing an old line, tell me right now. I'll leave you alone."
After a long pause, she was forced to admit, "You're not."
He sat next to her in forceful silence. As always, there seemed to be some point worth proving, and he was glaring at her all the while.
The proximity and gravity of his weight sinking into the mattress beside her was unsettling, and not only because it was unexpected. He was wearing an off-duty work suit in a surprising shade of near-black emerald, and he lacked all of his ordinary bulk. As he loomed beside her, she became suddenly aware of Nihlus: the torin, rather than the more readily dismissible Nihlus: the jerk from work.
Most disturbing and incongruous of all: he smelled too strongly of some kind of coppery, cinnamon air sanitizer. Sharp, metallic and difficult to ignore.
He jogged her from her confusion by grinding his elbow into the bare flesh of her arm. Breaking the long silence, he said:
"You're too uptight, Jane."
Her mouth fell open, but he didn't give her a chance to speak.
"You seem to think I'm the resident turian hard ass on this mission, but when was the last time you looked in a mirror? Die for the cause might as well be tattooed on your forehead. You eat like a nutritionist, speak like an Academy instructor, and instead of sleeping, you throw yourself at a Hierarchy Crucible. All of that discipline might be admirable, except..."
He moved his hand toward her knee. When she flinched, he raised his brow plates and turned up his palm.
"That. You'll make jokes and shake hands with anybody if it'll boost morale, but I've never seen you touch someone for your own enjoyment. That's not very turian of you."
Her jaw slackened even more, threatening to dislocate. Nihlus kept going.
"This attitude problem of yours is threatening the mission. You need to relax."
She finally found her voice.
"You're telling me to relax? You."
Nihlus clasped his hands in his lap, firm and scholarly.
"Yes. Me."
A pause stretched between them, long and full of uncomfortable implications.
"I'm no stranger to rigidity," he finally said. "It's how I choose to live my life. But discipline is a tool, and like any other tool, it can fail with reckless overuse. I maintain boundaries by choice. You? You're doing something far less deliberate, and after that stunt with T'Soni, I can see it's affecting your judgment."
"Maybe this hadn't occurred to you, but a lot has happened this week that might be affecting my judgement. Saren, the Spectres, the Normandy."
Garrus was a whole complicated subcategory of his own, which she silently added to the list.
"It's a lot. It's a helluva lot, actually. I'm not used to moving this fast. Am I not allowed a single goddamned moment to be overwhelmed? I'm fine. Nothing got melted, nobody died. I'm fine."
"Yes, that all sounded very reassuring."
"What the hell do you even know about relaxing, anyway? I practically had to force-feed you to Williams to break the ice."
"Just because you haven't been privy to my off duty hours doesn't mean I don't make good use of the time."
She was too startled by that line of thought to pursue it any further. Her arms tightened across her chest.
Nihlus watched her for a moment and shook his head. With an annoyed gust through the mandibles, he took off a glove and held out his palm, offering it for inspection.
She glared, squinted, and finally gave him a shrug of uninterested confusion. His talons looked very nice, and they were very long and natural. What about it.
He moved his bare hand to her shoulder, put a single finger on a spasming knot near her neck.
"This twitch has been annoying me since Eden Prime," he said. "Can I please kill it now? Yes or no?"
She had no idea which option would be more awkward: letting him do it or telling him to get out. She opted for the selfish version. Her shoulder hurt like hell.
She nodded to him with what she hoped was a remarkable lack of enthusiasm.
"I've picked up a few tricks from the Consort over the years," he explained, voice flat. "Nothing fancy, but I've gotten no complaints."
Was Nihlus Kryik trying to sweet talk her? In bed? The thought inspired a second of blind panic. Then his hand sank in, rough and militant. He was going to beat the tension out of her, just like everything else.
"The Consort, huh?" she said, relieved. "Never pictured you as the type,"
"The type for what?"
She didn't answer. He'd backed her into a corner with that one.
What indeed. She had no idea. Nihlus didn't seem the romantic type. Or the sexual type. Or even the friendly type. He was efficient and unsentimental. Calculating, on a bad day. Not the sort of turian to wander into the Citadel Consort Chambers for a night of overpriced lovemaking, frivolous entertainment, or anything else for that matter.
"Jane."
She grunted curiously back at him.
"What helps you relax? If you say nothing, so help me..."
His hand swept over her shoulder and gave an encouraging if forceful squeeze. Before she could stop it, her pulse thundered and her entire body flushed with unguarded memory.
Instantly, she was overwhelmed with the full-body sensation of Garrus Vakarian - inside her, around her, everywhere. His hands squeezing her shoulders. His body heavy over hers. His mouth. His tongue. His warmth, pulsing like a bright light inside her. His heart slowing. His eyes closing. The way she had felt tethered to him so tightly, so dangerously. Tempted to fall asleep in his arms and stay in the dark with him forever. Or at least for a while.
Nihlus' hand stilled near her shoulder, and she gulped.
With her gingery complexion it had always been impossible for her to hide any level of embarrassment. He must have seen the crimson glow that had crept up her neck and spread traitorously across her face. He'd probably felt her temperature rise beneath his palm. Her blood was boiling.
Breath hitching in her chest, she squeezed her eyes shut and hoped he'd ignore it. She should have kicked him out. A moment passed in silent tension, then he brushed the hair away from her neck with the tips of his fingers, and she took in a sharp breath of surprise.
Encouraged by her involuntary reaction, he circled the base of her skull with the pad of his thumb and shifted his body towards her.
In a very different tone, he said, "I see. Is that all?"
He leaned in just enough to press his thigh to hers. Shepard's eyes widened.
Oh. No.
"Jane… convictorix? That's easily done." He laughed quietly before continuing. "Given your record of favoring certain turian methodologies, I'm surprised you didn't initiate this earlier..."
His hand was far less military now. A stray finger wandered under the edge of her low-cut sleep shirt, skirting over the sensitive edge of her collar bone.
"I'm no expert on human sexuality, but…" He shrugged and cleared his throat. "For the good of the mission, I'll let you boss me around just this once."
She blustered, too shocked to reject him outright. Eyes bugging out of her skull, she stared at her feet and tried to form the words.
"I... didn't know you felt that way..." she squeaked, voice cracking with appalling underage nervousness.
"It's nothing to be embarrassed about. If you benefit from this kind of arrangement, I don't mind obliging for your health. Don't act as if you've never practiced at convictorix before-"
"No. I haven't."
He squinted and stopped moving his hand, blindsided by her reaction. With a quirk of his chin, all the seductive presence drained out of him as suddenly as if it had never been there at all.
"You haven't. Even at Cipritine Academy?"
"Especially at Cipritine Academy. See these?" She pointed to her crooked mouth, the off-center slant of her nose. "Only kisses those turians ever wanted to give me."
"Hmm," he mused, sounding disappointed, though hardly out of sexual frustration. She couldn't name the complicated expression that crossed his face as he backed away a few respectful inches. Whatever it was, it made her more uncomfortable than his offer of casual peer-to-peer recreational sex ever could have.
"Nihlus…" she attempted. "Even as a matter of health and wellness, you and me? Bad idea."
He didn't look off-put by her rejection. Far worse: his face tightened with friendly concern.
"Of course. If you really think that's best," he said, cool as ever. "I didn't realize what your preferences were... I didn't mean to offend you."
"That's not it." she slipped. Flaring with anger at the pathetic, defensive tone in her own voice, she shook her head and tried to focus. "It's none of your business what my preferences are. Has this been your ploy from day one - getting into bed with me?"
She scrambled out of the bunk.
"What? Of course not!"
Unfolding from the bed in one smooth, guiltless movement, he rose to meet her. For a moment, his hands hovered protectively near her shoulders, but when he saw that her flinch had returned more forcefully than ever, he seemed to think better of touching her again.
"Shepard, don't make this weird. You know damn well convictorix is nothing personal, nothing manipulative. It was hardly my first choice either. But you're slipping. This - descent - of yours at the first sign of emotional distress? I may have made a mistake nominating you for the Spectres."
She felt as though he'd just pushed her down an elevator shaft. She laughed disbelievingly.
"Get off my back, Kryik. You have no idea what those Prothean fragments have done to my brain."
"No. I don't. Because you refuse to vocalize it, even to yourself."
"I can do my job. I always have, sleepless or not. Sexless or not. For God's sake, my sexless sleeplessness is just about the only familiar thing in my life anymore, and you want to guilt trip me about it?"
"I'm not-" He stopped himself. "Shepard, don't be an idiot, at least not on purpose. This isn't about your lack of bed-related skills."
"Really. You just tried to seduce me as if it were some kind of - of - intervention."
Nihlus took a step back and rubbed the peak of a knuckle along one of his brow plates, looking fed up.
"I admit, comforting people isn't my area. Some of us choose to be alone. I keep to myself because it works. I've always been more at home that way. You're different. You have an ease with people, Shepard. Natural leadership skills. We need those skills to keep this crew at peak - this mission is only going to get crazier from here."
He stared at her.
"I bet it all on you, Shepard. Don't disappoint me now." As he said it, he reached into a pocket at his waist and pulled out a small, black trinket. Resembling a pendant without a chain, it was only as wide as a finger, and Nihlus smoothed his thumb curiously over the surface.
The tidy, ink-black lines of the little object instantly gave it away as another Prothean artifact, and Shepard stiffened.
"You said you didn't think I was the type to visit the Consort?" Nihlus asked, quietly.
She didn't answer. Instead, she watched as he continued tracing the little trinket with his thumb. Thoughtful, gentle, and unlike anything she'd seen from him before.
"There's no such thing as a type for the Consort. Sha'ira listens, she helps. Everybody can use a little companionship once in awhile. Even me." He quirked a brow plate, but didn't look up. "Before we left the Citadel, I made my customary pre-mission visit to see her. While I was there, Sha'ira gave me this. For you. She knew some of the residual effects the beacon might have, and she wanted to help…"
"You told the Consort about the beacon." Shepard interrupted, too startled to wait her turn.
"Yes, Shepard. And plenty more. She knew you'd never be seen receiving a gift from the Consort, even if she sent a personal invitation, so she passed it to me. I wasn't sure about handing this over to you at all, given how unforgiving all this Prothean garbage has been so far.
"But... that's not my call, is it? We've all got demons, and the Protheans have brought yours out with style." He held the trinket toward her in offering, centered in his palm. "Either embrace those demons... or give them a swift death."
"What is it?" Shepard asked, staring at the artifact, admittedly breathless.
"I asked T'Soni the same thing. Apparently it's a harmless data module. No psychic traces, no head games. As for what kind of data? Tax records, for all I know. Sha'ira seemed to think it might give you some small peace of mind."
Instinctively drawn to the small black shape, Shepard's fingers closed around it. She found it to be pleasantly free of whispering. It was still warm from Nihlus' pocket.
Before she could flee, his hand gently closed around hers; a slow, silent trap.
"T'Soni told me what you saw in that vision. About Mindoir, and your patrem. Knowing how it affected you, she said..."
"What?" Shepard snapped, angry that any conversation about the intensity of her memories might have been had behind her back, or at her expense. "What did she say?"
"You can't face this alone, Jane."
"Oh please. Says an asari scholar who knows nothing about me." She tried to wrench her hand away, but his grip tightened.
"No. Says the entire Prothean Empire, apparently."
Between their hands, the trinket sang into their skin, little more than the quiet flutter of a single leaf swirling down to meet the earth. Nihlus' eyes flashed at her: a blast of warm summer green. That glance of hard affection made him look so horrifyingly similar to her father that she could scarcely meet his gaze. Another rogue wire had just linked Nihlus to her pari, and she felt helpless to defuse the bomb without setting off a chain of reckless explosions.
Before allowing herself a single compromising squeak of acknowledgement, she took the still-warm trinket from his hand, picked up a set of clean workout clothes, and walked out.
Old and comforting, the trinket sang to her, its melody ringing in her ears like a forgotten lullaby.
Jane
Mindoir
2170 CE
Take this, he whispered. Remember what I told you.
She shook her head slowly, trying to refuse.
His gun had always been too heavy. Hefting it made her shoulder sore, her wrist ache. Her shots always ended up drifting down and left, popping kneecaps and shinbones when she was supposed to be lancing heads and hearts. Every time she missed, he made her start over from the top. His good hand would prod at the soft point between her shoulder blades, again, again. Until she was weak and shaking, shooting sparks from an empty heatsink.
You can do better. He would say. Do I have to? She would argue. Pay attention to your counts. He would instruct. How long do I have to keep trying? She would complain. Until your arms are too weak to hold the gun. He would insist.
She hadn't earned this yet. Taking this meant… it meant…
She stared at the weapon and opened her mouth to argue, but he shushed her with a strict wave of his arm.
Find Stephen - he should be with the others. Once you find him, do not separate for any reason. Start trickling survivors into the regional districts for evac to the far side. Walk through the underground train lines, use battery power only, or fumble in the dark until you are out of range. Tiptoe one step at time if you have to.
But-
No arguments. A raid on this scale means the Verge has unified - the batarians likely have a transport ship right above our heads. Something big. They will intercept any vehicle or transmission that tries to leave this spaceport. Send no comms, make no noise, and stay out of sight.
Her eyes were fixed on his ancient gun. Too big for her hands. Too heavy for her fingers. Not meant for her.
When she spoke, it sounded like begging. What about you?
The SOS has been received. SSV Hastings inbound, under command of Captain Kathryn Ballard. Tell the colonists, make sure they know her name. Tell them a rescue is imminent - hope remains. The militia men and I will draw enemy eyes away from your movements until Alliance reinforcements make contact.
No way - I'm not leaving you with those militia jerks! Just a bunch of old farmers and Blue Suns wannabes! Ripper's bottle-shooting gang! They don't stand a chance-
Quiet. This is up to us now, Jane. All of us. I trust you to get our people out. Do you understand what I need you do?
He wanted an answer, but she was too angry to speak. She was supposed to be an adult. Almost sixteen. Old enough to join the military on Palaven. Old enough to carry his gun.
She looked at her painted fingernails. Saw how small they were, curled around his priceless Armax. She imagined how stupid she must look: her flaking nail polish, the pale line in her dark hair where her roots had sloppily grown back. She felt more like a fool child than ever.
She wasn't ready to wear her father's colors. Even if he had said it made him proud. She knew, deep down, she was still too small and afraid. Too human.
Do you understand? he repeated, shaking her. If these slavers find you, do you know what they will do?
She nodded, shielding herself with fury. It was easier than being afraid.
Not so easily duped, he grabbed her wrist and triggered her omni-tool, linking their signals. When she refused to acknowledge, he put a rough hand on her face and forced her into eye contact.
Diume. Listen to me. This is no time for bravery and stubbornness. I want you out of here. As soon as I have an escape route, I will find you.
Looking into his steel-bright eyes, she forgot her next argument. Instead, she hiccuped and clutched his hand against her cheek. Allowed her shivering fingers and the embarrassment of wet salt on her cheeks do all the talking.
His grip tightened, his face softened, and he bent his forehead to hers, whispering. Her heart was pounding too loud, she couldn't hear a thing.
Behind him, an explosion. They were coming through the blast shield.
Without flinching, he pushed her up into the storage room vent and slammed the grate behind her.
Go. Go now!
Jane
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
The elevator door lifted, heavy and quiet as a curtain, revealing the towering hump of a lone krogan pacing through the cargo bay. High drama: a moonlit shark on an empty shore, lurking angrily from side to side. Might have been a startling sight, harrowing even, if Wrex hadn't stopped to poke the dainty pyramid of Shepard's training weights with one of his meaty fingers and whined,
"Limp-wristed turian playthings. No wonder she's got arms like twigs!"
She'd completely forgotten about Wrex.
Embarrassing, to let an entire ton of krogan biotic run amok through her ship. Not exactly her first choice, but she'd passed out cold in the comm room before arrangements could be made, before a deal could be struck. Whatever tense conversation he must have had with Nihlus in her stead had kept him aboard through their next stop. Beyond that, Shepard had no idea.
She and Wrex had fallen into desperate camaraderie on Akuze, but that chemistry had been built on gallons of ryncol, thresher maw acid, and blood. Now that Wrex knew who had raised her, now that he knew a turian noble had informed Shepard's workout routine and her worldview, the krogan mercenary's loyalties were anybody's guess.
She stayed in the elevator and hovered her hand over the recall command. She was too tired for this, completely unprepared for another round of conversation. Yet another clumsy set of polite evasions and quiet lies. All she'd hoped for was a five kilometer run, quiet and alone.
Wrex still owed her for Akuze. The idea of collecting debts put a bad taste in her mouth. This could wait until morning.
"I wouldn't mess around with that…"
The unexpected sound of Garrus Vakarian's voice leapt out the dark and latched onto the back of Shepard's neck with fierce teeth and refused to let go. Once she heard him, she couldn't move. Luckily, no one seemed to have noticed her.
The krogan turned from Shepard's Crucible and glowered at the far side side of the cargo bay, where the Mako was parked for repairs. She craned her neck to follow his gaze.
Ah. Jutting out from under the body of the tank were two lightly armored feet, crossed casually at the ankles. The top boot bobbed back and forth to the tinny strains of some some thumpa-thumpa track that could only be made out from a thousand-mile distance: club music squeezed through a small earpiece. Late night maintenance, an old turian standby.
Garrus' toes twitched warningly in the krogan's general direction. He rambled on, usual lack of restraint on full display. Shop talk.
"Just saying… Shepard's a bit territorial. Probably wouldn't like you fondling her stuff."
"Who's territorial?" Wrex huffed and puffed, then blew himself down onto the weight bench. "Snotty-nosed blue-blooded pyjak thinks he knows how to handle a woman's heavy machinery…"
She heard the crick-crick-crick of ratcheting beneath the Mako, then something came loose and clattered to the tiling. Garrus swore, fumbling.
Their conversation was veering too far off course for comfort. Shepard cut in just as the krogan made a greedy snatch at the Crucible's heaviest set of weights.
She barked roughly, "Your funeral, Wrex."
From under the Mako came a painful-sounding thwack of skull-on-metal and a trailing cough of surprise. Ignoring his head injury, Garrus wheeled out on his mechanic's creeper-turned-gurney. He was half-armored and covered in engine grease, naked below the elbows, and his bare hands were extra dirty. She tried not to stare.
It was the first time they had seen one another since Chakwas had carted Shepard out of the comm room. Seeing her alive and well for the first time in days, his face melted. It was an expression so tender and caressing that Shepard was forced to turn it aside like a blow.
Instead, she threw a few limp plastic pitchforks at Wrex. The krogan saw everything, and he looked less than impressed.
"You're not the boss 'a me, Shepard," he said with petty boredom, hefting a weight as if it were a q-tip. She sighed, feeling her exhaustion in every rib.
"The matter of your boss hasn't exactly been settled, has it?"
"You got an offer?"
"Do you even want an offer from me? You've spent the last few decades on the Shadow Broker's payroll. Next to him, I'm broke. Even more fun, I've got no spare room for loose cannons. This is a Council stealth frigate with two Spectres at the helm."
"Two turians at the helm, you mean. Plus, there's this extra baby turian that somebody left lying around under the tank."
Garrus' mandibles flew wide open in bamboozlement, but he wasn't fast enough to get in a returning volley before Shepard intervened.
"Oh boo hoo. Plenty of dirty politics to get in your way. Plenty of incentives to cut and run if the Shadow Broker outbids me for your contract." She stepped from the elevator and tried to look tall. Bulky. "Excuses. You already know, don't you? It's not about the money, or the Hierarchy share in this mission. Stick with me, and I can show you one hell of a fight."
"Pretty words, Shepard. Save them for your pretty turians. You don't have to convince me. I've got my own reason to go after Saren. That little asari wasn't just paying me with credits. She's got all kinds of useful information, valuable secrets."
"Care to elaborate?"
"Saren's up to something with the krogan. Weird science. I'm gonna make sure he stops. Our people are done being the galaxy's fall-back plan."
"Geth, krogan… who is he going to pervert next?" Shepard tried to make it into a joke, but the question was too real to fool anyone.
Stubbornly present, Garrus offered an answer by way of an uninvited punchline.
"A thousand credits says Saren has an army of undead elcor waiting in the wings."
Wrex put down the weights, sat up, and stared at Garrus for ten complete seconds before breaking with one solid HA. He pointed in disbelief.
"Alright, Shepard. Your baby turian's not so bad. Once he stops cryin', that is—"
"Wrex. Tell me straight. Are you with me or not?"
"Call me when you want to fight something big. I'll be there."
"Yeah. That's sweet. And when I call, you're going to follow my orders? You're going to follow Kryik's orders?"
The krogan rose from the weight bench, soaring to his full height and crossing the room to stare her down. She met his eyes, folded her arms, and waited. Their staring match was brief.
"Ahh, dammit."
He crushed her in a hug so deep that both of her feet left the floor. While he held her immobilized and struggling for breath, he spoke quietly in her ear:
"One condition. Settle up with your new boyfriend. I'm too old to deal with love-sick dextro babies. His constant woe-is-me stinkbombing is driving me insane."
"The hell does that mean?"
"Turian scent queues. Disgusting. Not to mention: whatever you two did to funk up that M-35, I can still smell it a mile away."
As he set her down and walked to the elevator, she flushed so hot and sudden that her vision swam. He waved at his entire face, unhappily. "Yeah. A mile away."
"Wrex, go find someone else to annoy."
"Here I am, best thing that ever happened to you, and this is the thanks I get? Who needs you anyway. I'll rebound. That Williams girl… wonder if I can get her to arm wrestle a krogan."
"Wrex…"
"Shepard."
He crammed himself into the cargo elevator and low-balled a heavy-lidded wink as he ascended.
Automatically, without stopping to acknowledge Garrus, she walked to the Crucible and tidied up after Wrex, putting everything back in its rightful place. Regardless of an old krogan's uncalled-for dating advice, she had no idea what she was supposed to do about Vakarian. Simply knowing that he was nearby, likely studying her every move, wondering, waiting… filled her with too many mixed impulses to sort. He was still a subordinate, and the mission was too high priority to compromise with sentiment. Nothing could change that.
She stepped up onto the treadmill and started to run. Going nowhere, staring into a wall, she ran for her life.
Moments later, before she'd had a chance to go breathless, he put a tentative hand on her wrist. The warmth of his palm startled her out of pace, and she threw her feet to the sidebars to keep from face-planting.
He wanted answers. Today, everybody did.
She stopped the treadmill and listened to his nervous breathing, but refused to turn around and face him.
"Yes?" she said.
His hand moved from her elbow. Slid across her lower back. She flinched involuntarily. His fingers lifted away in offended surprise.
"What Vakarian, more convictorix?"
"Convi... are you… are you kidding me?"
She funneled a solid blade of air through the nose, and said no more.
"That's what this is to you? That's what you think-"
Abruptly, he turned away and waved his fists through the air, but didn't hit anything except himself. One blow. An open-fisted slap against the chest-plate of his light off-duty armor. She heard the pitiful thud, along with the flapping sound of his hand shaking out in pain.
Ow-ow-ow, stupid-stupid-stupid.
He put a lightly bruised knuckle in his mouth and tried mending it with a sweep of warm tongue, then froze.
"No," he said. "That's crap. You can't just write me off every time we're in the same room and you feel funny. Red, we're alone. Middle of the night, magic camera loop in full force. Tell me-"
"Have you ever lost anyone?" she interrupted, as simple and flat as she could manage.
Instantly, the detective returned, anger carefully set aside. Garrus approached slowly, face peering up at her. His blue eyes were bright with restraint, alongside something far more dangerous. He looked too young, too clear, too much like a summer sky before a storm rolled in.
That much unchecked affection was terrifying. Deadly.
"Lost anyone?" he stammered. "Sure. C-Sec is a dangerous job."
His fingers curled around the handrail, millimeters from her own, never touching without permission. Still covered in a thin layer of grease from his work under the Mako, his ordinarily tidy hands were broken-in. Chapped and sore, in need of a good pumice rinse and a tissue massage.
She shook her head, trying to clear herself of the urge to close the gap.
"Not the line of duty. I meant losing someone… important. Right out from under you. A part of you is taken away without warning, without reason." She made a vivid sawing motion across her arm. "Gone forever."
Garrus didn't interrupt, though he obviously wanted to. He watched. Waited.
"During the meld with T'Soni... My father was all I could see. Every loss the Protheans suffered, it was him, over and over. The way he looked, the way I messed it all up… Whatever that memory shard originally contained, it translated everything through my experiences. My strongest emotions. My deepest failures."
Garrus didn't ask, though he obviously wanted to. He let her say it on her own.
"It's been over a decade. I was sure I'd put him behind me. I was so sure."
She clenched the rail next to his waiting hand until it creaked, holding on for all she was worth.
"Don't ask me to live it all over again."
David
SSV Hastings
2170 CE
Doctor Hale lifted the privacy screen on the med-bay window and peeked into the adjoining crew deck, then whispered to Anderson with a low rumble of anxiety.
"She's still out there."
Anderson followed the doctor's paranoid stare. The girl from Mindoir continued to haunt the Hastings med-bay, maintaining an uninterrupted vigil that was well into its fourth hour. Refusing to join the other civilians after Hale's assistant had treated her wounds, the girl had rigidly installed herself at the port side mess bench. Since then, she had done nothing but stare daggers through the privacy screen.
Hale was beginning to look as though feared being disemboweled, even with several locked doors and an armed Marine keeping the teenager at a distance.
Multiple crewmen had tried to funnel the girl towards the crowded cargo deck, where nearly one hundred surviving colonists were being housed and fed. No amount of muscle could budge her from her chosen spot - she refused to wander more than twenty paces. Anderson noted that she kept her posture combat-ready over an untouched bowl of oatmeal. He had to admire her resolve.
When Anderson's squad had found the girl, she had been half-naked and covered in her own blood, defending a mostly dead turian from a batarian hoard, literally single-handed. Anderson doubted he'd ever be able to shake his first image of her: forcibly stripped, battered half to hell with a broken wrist and one blood-blind eye.
The batarians had done that to her, and tried to do a whole lot more, from the sound of the doctor's report. She'd killed almost all of the raiders before they'd gotten the chance. Even now, with her left arm in a sling and half her face covered in gauze, she looked like a starving nocturnal predator, not a victim.
According to her own mission brief - a disturbing and professional sitrep at the scene of the attack - her name was Jane Shepard, and she had been living on Mindoir with the Jailor of Shanxi as her sole guardian for over ten years.
Anderson struggled to fathom the implications. One of the most notorious turian war criminals of the century was dying slowly but surely in the belly of the Hastings. Not only dying, but doing it heroically. Fatally injured defending human colonists from batarian slavers. Not, as most of the galaxy had suspected, a long-lost sacrifice to his own people's patriotic fury.
Albacus Regidonis was an unpopular name on both sides of First Contact, but Anderson didn't put much stock in either version. He'd seen the confusion in that fight first hand, and he knew truth was always more complicated than history preferred. Whatever his crimes, Regidonis had been presumed dead for a decade or more. So had his alleged human accomplice, an ex-Marine named Hannah Shepard. Anderson had assumed they'd both succumbed to the asp on Shanxi.
Far from it. The Jailor had been alive and well all these years, living out his days as an exile on an obscure farming colony in the Terminus. As for Shepard, Anderson couldn't guess. All that remained was a bone-white ghost of a girl: Hannah's only child, Jane.
Hale made a rude gesture through the screen, then spoke into a clenched fist.
"Commander, enough of this bullshit. I've got two dozen civilians in the cargo bay who need immediate attention. Half of those colonists have batarian brainwashing tech cooking their nerve centers. You can't seriously ask me to stay up here wasting medi-gel on him? We don't owe him a goddamn band-aid. What the hell is Ballard thinking?"
"The captain wants Regidonis kept alive for questioning. If you can manage it."
Hale stiffened in his chair, so Anderson elaborated.
"Don't start. Whatever you think you know about Shanxi? You don't know half. As for the survivors in the cargo bay, that entire colony would be listed on the batarian slave market right now if not for this turian. He dispatched the SOS, organized a militia out of nothing but farmhands, and led a three-day ground-side resistance that could have knocked our own crew back to basic. I don't care what scars you're still carrying from First Contact - that counts as heroism in my book. Patch him up."
"Even if I wanted to, we don't have the facilities. No bluepaks, no dextro grafts. What do you expect me to do? He's got a six-inch crater blown clean through his plates, a perforated lung... Jesus Christ, Anderson, half of his skeleton is in chunks. It's all I can do to keep him from leaking blue blood all over my floor. I can't triage a dextro, this rig isn't equipped."
Anderson didn't doubt the CMO lacked the onboard resources. He also suspected Hale would have let him bleed out even if he'd been working out of the best emergency suite on the Citadel.
Anderson glanced at the broken turian one more time, listened to the desperate wet struggle of his every breath. He didn't have long.
"What do you suggest?" Anderson asked.
"Sedatives, painkillers. All they'll do now is shut down his system, end it faster." The doctor paused, grinding his teeth. "Make it merciful."
Anderson took a steadying breath, and tried not to look too deeply into the boiling water stare of the girl in the next room.
"Make it merciful, then. Afterward, you can go down and deal with the colonists. I'll manage the girl."
Hale rose from his desk and looked down at Regidonis for a hard minute. Finally, he bit back whatever comment had risen in his throat, and grabbed a vial of opioid. With a nod to Anderson, he administered the final, fatal medicine into a port on the intravenous bag that hung limply from the monitoring station.
Anderson saw the girl from Mindoir unfold from the table. He watched her stalk forward to the med-bay door and demand entry. The Marine on guard moved to intervene, but Anderson ordered him to stand down. Something about Shepard's daughter filled him with respectful pause.
"You're going to let him die." she said tonelessly. Her voice was muffled by the inches of steel and glass between them. Hale still jumped a mile out of his shoes.
"He's going to die no matter what I do." The doctor threw it back in her face.
Hale steamed through the door to shake her down, raising his med-kit like a weapon.
"You're bent in the brain if you think I'm prioritizing a half dead cuttlebone over all of those trauma cases downstairs. What, this turian is your father now, just because your momma had a fetish? I feel for you, kid. Maybe once he's finally dead you can take a psych eval and get some real help."
She struck, just once. A distinctive sweeping leg move that Anderson remembered from his N4 tour on Palaven. The doc was on his back instantly, with the girl's foot wedged firmly into his windpipe.
"That's enough," Anderson said quietly. He stepped towards her and raised a pacifying palm until she let up the pressure on the doctor's throat. "Doc, go make yourself useful somewhere else."
"This is obscene, Anderson."
The doctor scrabbled to his feet and bolted, uninjured aside from the shame of being upended by a teenage girl with a broken arm.
"Let me see him."
The girl stepped forward and stared into Anderson with a fury so palpable that he could feel the hairs on the back of his head sizzling.
He moved aside and cautioned, "He doesn't have long."
The moment she finally saw Regidonis up close - stripped, shattered and covered with a blue-soaked sheet - her resolve shattered into pieces.
"Pari..."
Anderson's translator squitched in confusion. Dad.
Incredible.
A million absurd questions bubbled to the fore. Had Hannah Shepard and The Jailor of Shanxi been lovers during the entire First Contact War? Had they raised her child together? Had this militant beast of a girl grown up thinking a turian was her father? Or had she been kidnapped? Brainwashed?
Each different version had the potential to be paradigm altering, like discovering Charon all over again.
She stumbled, collapsing against the side of the turian's cot. The sudden impact rattled the nearby monitoring devices and intravenous fluids, and Anderson was startled from his curious stupor.
He refocused just in time to see which version of reality was the truth.
The girl raised her unbroken hand to cradle the Captain's face, and her thumb drifted along his facial plates, tracing his deep red family markings. Anderson saw that the chipped polish on the girl's blunt human nails made for a perfect match, and his breath caught.
The contents of his stomach reorganized with an acidic lurch, and he instantly knew himself to be the most perverse kind of voyeur. Whatever had happened in this girl's life, there was no longer any doubt in his mind. Her father was about to die in her arms.
Her tears fell, and she started to beg.
"Pari. I'm sorry. I should have listened to you. Please don't go away. Please. No, no, no, Pari don't leave me. I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
When the machines began to signal that the Captain's life had reached its end, Anderson turned his back. There was no escaping the sound of her answering cries.
It made no difference how long he lived. Anderson knew the formless keening of grief he heard in that room would follow him to his grave.
Original words and phrases:
- Convictorix: 'Intimate messmates' are common on turian military vessels and other organizations within Hierarchy command structure, where sexual intercourse between individuals of equal rank is considered salubrious rather than romantic.
Words and phrases courtesy of MizDirected's turian dictionary:
- Diume: My joy. A term of love specific to family.
- Torin/Torini (plural): Male turian of the age of majority (15)
- Patrem/Pari: Father/Dad