Content warning: allusions to violent crime and sexual assault, some emotional trauma, and a gory scene involving a broken arm.
15: Cataplexy
Garrus
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
In his time climbing up the rungs from mouthy beat cop to mouthy department lead of Kithoi Ward Special Investigations, Garrus had done more than his fair share of first response duty. It was punishment, at first, payback for all his backtalk and corner-cutting and sneaking behind so-and-so's back to rough up suspects. Then the higher-ups caught wind that Officer Vakarian had a knack for pulling solid evidence out of otherwise questionable survivor testimony. After that, first response became his specialty, and Garrus Vakarian was suddenly a detective.
He had hovered watchfully in alleyways next to barely cogent bodies, made note of fresh and flowing injuries, drawn up records of grievous assault, then called panicked families to break the news. He had slung blankets over shoulders, bandaged wounds before medics arrived, carried people too bruised and battered to walk themselves out of danger. He'd talked down suicides, he'd disarmed battering spouses. Over the long years, Garrus had even learned to recognize all the invisible ways that pain could leave scars that were never seen.
Calm and serene, staring past him with eyes far-off and unblinking, a victim would explain how their fingernails had been ripped off at the quick, or why blood was trailing from between their legs. Garrus would flinch, and they wouldn't. The sprawling territory between grief and denial was the ugliest and loneliest road to walk, and Garrus knew instinctively: Shepard was in that wasteland now.
When the Commander braced herself as if for another stab wound and begged, don't ask me to live it all over again, Garrus knew better than to listen to her.
Due process was always a mistake at the scene of a violent crime. Emotions ran too hot, the situation was too variable. Garrus had watched superiors and rookies alike fumbling with words, bungling depositions, triggering victims in the face of grief and terror. Wrangling fresh grief required practice and skill, or you could do more harm than good.
Generally, Garrus stuck to three loose guidelines of increasing complexity. Calling them a set of rules would have been dishonest - success depended on instinct, improvisation, and a tolerance for whiplash.
The initial phase of confrontation was easy: establish safety and trust. If Shepard was flighty in his company, it was because she still felt threatened by some imagined fiasco of sexual scandal, the compromise of her command. Garrus had hoped that reminding her of his camera loop would give her the needed sense of security, but her paranoia ran too deep for that now, and her eyes never strayed far from the Normandy's internal security feeds. Like anything weakened and cornered, she was seeing enemies everywhere.
"You don't have to tell me anything." Garrus finally coughed, breaking the long silence. It was a barely-functional offer at best and it tasted weird in his mouth. "If you do decide to talk, nothing you say will leave my confidence."
Short sentences, limited physical contact. Let her have her space, let her make the moves.
She shook her head and turned her body away. A bad sign - she wasn't going to admit she needed the assist. Alright, moving right along. Phase two.
Typically more complicated and mired in paperwork, his next task was to enable the victim's recovery in the absence of C-Sec personnel. Office numbers, data-pads full of coping strategies, scheduling medical exams. Signatures in triplicate on hospital admittance forms, that kind of thing. It was dull and impersonal, but a gentle gathering of loose ends was effective in the majority of cases.
He'd give it a go, but he didn't have high hopes.
"Okay." He sighed, holding up his palms in surrender. "Don't talk to me, it's not my place. But eat something. Sleep a little. And then talk to someone. Chakwas is the obvious place to start. Anderson, after that."
Her head snapped up.
"Anderson?" she grimaced, with a voice that seemed to accuse Garrus of treason.
"Yeah. Your old friend Tom Collins. Soldier of his rank and experience, he might have a few pointers. I don't know, Shepard. Who else do you call, when you're…"
Alone seemed like strong salt to rub in her wounds right now. He watched her shoulders tense, every muscle in her back clamping down to contain her trembling bones. Despite her fury, she stayed rooted to the spot, waiting for him to continue, as if hoping...
It was abundantly clear that Shepard didn't consider Garrus her lover or her friend. They were barely teammates - she wanted to be the Commander. Period. Convictorix, thrown in his face like an insult. Even that required a certain level of mutual attachment that Shepard was insistent on quashing.
But she had no one else aboard who could afford to pry.
Garrus recognized himself as expendable. Shepard could throw him off the ship for insubordination at any time, and Saren would never know the difference. Painful to admit his own insignificance on a mission that could define his career, and yet.
The logistics were insane - Prothean visions magnifying the death of a parent a thousand times over... That was well above his pay grade. And yet.
Garrus had made his career on guessing, and guessing well.
Breathing cautiously, he prepared the nuclear option. The fall-back plan his department always dumped on his shoulders because the cleanup was hell.
Allow the victim to release their emotions.
Albacus
PFS Tenefalx
2157 CE
Abandoned to the lonely hull protrusion that was the Tenefalx's brig, Captain Regidonis and General Williams sat side-by-side in silent but companionable injury. They had been thrown in together without food or water or medical supplies - it was difficult to say how long ago exactly. Half a day, a year. Two guards had been stationed at the single entrance to the bottom quarterdeck as an indulgent precaution, but everyone aboard knew that the chances of escape were slim. Even if Albacus and Williams miraculously managed to slip free of the security field without omni-tools or weapons, the Tenefalx had been re-manned with Arterius loyalists. There was nowhere to run except the dead vacuum of space.
Four decks above their heads, past the depleted cargo hold and the shuffled crew quarters and the overstocked armory, Desolas Arterius was prowling through the CIC. There, the General was likely planning an air strike that would annihilate the very last traces of Shanxi from the map. Below-decks in their cramped, communal prison cell, Albacus and Williams had little to do but wait for outside forces to determine their fates.
Down here, the engines were loud, the temperature was cold, and the grim atmosphere pressed down upon Albacus' head, heavier all the time. Every thought was muffled by the ever-increasing weight of blood-loss and failure, save for a single blooming ache in his chest. The lone regret that refused to die: he should have stayed with Hannah.
Without warning, the sound of tearing fabric echoed through the cramped compartment, and the sudden rrrrrip drove a hot spike of pain between Albacus' eyes. The Captain winced, letting his head fall back with a grunt. In one loud, violent motion, Williams had ripped one of his sleeves clean off at the shoulder. Industriously, he was dividing his disembodied sleeve into long strips of thick blue fabric, then gathering the improvised bandages into a neat and military pile. He repeated the procedure with the other sleeve.
One of the guards shifted and approached the containment area, knocking the muzzle of his gun into the flickering blue security field with a resentful fzzt.
"What are you doing in there, monkey?" he growled.
Williams kept tearing off strips and spoke to the guard in a dry, cracked voice without even glancing at him.
"I'm going to set this man's arm. I have no idea how to fix up a turian and I've got no supplies. You can bet it's going to be torture. That should appeal to you."
The guard hissed disdainfully but wandered slowly back to his post, apparently satisfied that the disgraced Regidonis was not going to enjoy whatever procedure the human meddler had in mind.
Albacus blinked away a rolling wave of nausea and tried to watch Williams at his work, but he had lost too much blood to see straight anymore. The pain in his left arm had settled into a kind of raw, pumping time-bomb. With every seething pulse, he knew his time was shortening. The wound might not kill him outright, but the life Albacus Regidonis had worked toward for decades was long over, blasted into dust.
Despite the seriousness of Albacus' injuries, the CMO had been ordered not to administer any aid. Hannabril was one of the few original Tenefalx crew that Arterius had kept aboard, likely because he was the best surgeon in the fleet. As long as the younger Arterius was recuperating from his own loss of limb, Desolas would not cut corners. Denying a dishonorable Captain the attention of his own chief medical officer for the very same wound? That simply added insult to injury, and was very much in Arterius' style.
Albacus had been allowed the last few doses of medicine stored in the onboard medical suite of his armor, but nothing more. Barely enough to close a wound, it was virtually useless now. If the blood loss didn't kill the Captain, Arterius seemed to hope an infection would do it soon enough. An execution without an executioner - a clean lie to tell the Primarch in lieu of a potentially compromising public trial.
Williams crawled across the floor to Albacus' side and ran an appraising hand along the Captain's left shin guard. He tested the ceramic with a gentle rap of his knuckle.
"How do I pop these plates off? I'll need both to make a splint."
Albacus blinked slowly, both startled and grateful. "Pneumatic locks. Either side."
Williams groped around on the Captain's calf and found the locks, releasing the armor with a hiss and a quiet plip of equalizing pressure. Once he had both shin guards in his hands, he turned them around in the dim cargo bay lights, squinting.
"Very nice, I have to say."
Perhaps Albacus would have laughed, if he thought it would do any good. Instead he breathed heavily and tried to stay conscious.
"I think I'll steal the rest for my trophy room," Williams joked, moving up Albacus' side and laying careful hands on the Captain's chest plate. "All the plating above the waist will have to come off. You know it's gonna hurt."
Albacus tried to use his right arm to assist in the removal of his armor, but Williams swatted him down until he nodded and relaxed into a pained slump, leaning against the corner where the floor met the hard built-in bunk on the wall.
"Brace yourself," the General warned, then began to peel off the armor one piece at a time, stripping the bark from a still-living tree.
Garrus
SSV Normandy
2183 CE
"Cut the crap, Jane."
Shepard's first name left Garrus' mouth like an ice cube thrown into an empty glass. A lone, sarcastic slow-clap, insubordinate and rude. She abruptly turned and stared a hole through a block of floor plating about six inches to his left, her pupils narrow and fierce.
Now she was awake.
"Stay in Commander mode as long as you want," he mocked. "I don't know how it'll help. Seems to me all Commander Shepard has been doing this whole mission is letting her guts get spilled against her will."
He watched her hand twitch toward the wound in her side. Shrugging, he opened his bare hands, showed some neck, and gave her the high ground.
"I'm not going to stand here and pretend to be your favorite person, but you've gotta let this out on somebody… Hell, Red, I'm used to being the personal punching bag of my boss. So, no great tragedy if you keep taking dirty swings at me."
Her eyebrows lowered and raised without rhythm, overwhelmed. At last, a deep frown. She looked fundamentally offended by the implication that she might abuse her rank just to bully him.
"Garrus…" she said, releasing her death grip on the treadmill and crossing her arms. "I don't want to make this a fight-"
"Does that actually work? Are you convinced? From where I'm standing, it looks like you conjure fights out of thin air whenever you can't find one big enough to feed your denial. Every night since you lost your pari, you've been fighting like hell to forget him, haven't you."
It wasn't a question. Her eyes narrowed, and he inched further toward the nerve.
"Yeah. I watched you squeeze out a single tear. Just one. T'Soni practically turned your brain inside out and filled you with an infinite loop of dying dads." He held up a finger, thrusting it into her face like a gun. "And you had one tear to cry about it."
She reeled back, disgusted, like he'd just thrown open his armor to show off a necklace of severed and bloody fringe-bones. Her legs tensed and she looked ready to bolt, so he spoke quickly.
"I don't know the first historical fact about your pari," he admitted. "I couldn't pick him out a lineup. But I've seen you in action. Walking around on Pillars of Integrity without ever giving yourself a moment to step down and recover... that's gotta bruise. Seeing all that, I can make some educated guesses about what kind of torin your pari was."
She didn't interrupt, but her eyes hardened dangerously, her lip curling with disdain.
"Enough with the Regidonis legacy, enough with all this crap stoicism… I know what I do when I'm a wreck. Which is often, by the way. I'm a nobody who grew up peeling root vegetables in my mari's sweaty restaurant. Now, there's a tarin who has the answer for everything. Whether it's the right answer or not? Well, who cares? You listen to your mother. When I don't know what to do, she's still the one I call."
Shepard's silence was chilling, and he worried he'd stepped neck-first into no-man's land. He went on anyway.
"We all get it, your dad's dead. I'm sorry, but you didn't just lose one parent before their time. You lost your mother too."
He hadn't needed to dig far, to find that out. Interviews, exposés, a million unflattering articles. Details were thin and explanations varied, but he knew two things. Hannah Shepard had been dead a long time, and her only surviving child never, ever brought up her name.
"I don't talk about that." Shepard warned, right on target. He opened his mouth to ask why, but she didn't give him the chance. "It's none of your goddamned business, Vakarian!"
Ouch. He dropped his eyes, twitched a mandible, and kept right at it.
"Sure. Still. When was the last time anybody bothered to ask about her without throwing a slur your way?"
She twitched.
"I.. I don't-"
"Yeah. I figured never. So here's the thing I'm curious about."
"This is insulting. I'm not here to satisfy your… curiosity."
Fed up at last, she turned and flew for the exit. He wasn't about to make the mistake of chasing her - he could land the final blow from a distance.
"Your parents. Do you think they truly loved one another?"
Her hand had almost reached the elevator call button when she stopped dead and shuddered through every muscle. He heard a gasp bubble out of her throat, it floated untethered from her mouth before she could stop it.
So that was a yes.
"How dare you?" she said, breath heavy and thick with rage.
Her words shivered through the room and slapped him across the face, but he forced himself to shrug it off. He sighed with feigned melodrama and ignored the guilty twist of his gut.
"Ahh… well. Must be jealousy. See, my parents hated each other - it was a relief when they finally called it off."
She turned to him, eyes burning through her unshed tears. "What the hell Vakarian? I'm supposed to cry about your childhood too now?"
"Oh no. This is a vindictive mind-game. I'm just toying with you, just like all of your classmates at Cipritine Academy. My brand of cruelty is a little different, of course - call it a nasty investigator's habit. I don't care about your feelings, I just need to know your every weakness. Blackmail, extortion, whatever."
Her eyes tracked him as he began to pace the room. His stride was quick and casual, and he waved both arms enthusiastically around his point, shaping it spontaneously out of nowhere.
"On one end of the spectrum, you've got two slices of ho-hum galactic average like my parents - who couldn't keep a marriage together despite every biological and cultural advantage. Their motives for sticking it out? A stab at normalcy, probably. Didn't work.
"Your parents, far away on the more poetic end of the universe, they forged some kind of impossible romantic bond. A bond so powerful and enchanted that you ended up the first Human Spectre, commanding a custom-built Alliance-Hierarchy love boat. Hannah Shepard and Albacus Regidonis did all that with Relay Three Fourteen exploding romantically around their heads."
He stopped and stared at her, scratching his neck condescendingly. "You know, I can't help but suspect that anyone capable of that level of cooperation would weep to see you shunning all your friends and allies. What do you think they'd say, if they could see you now? Commander Shepard. Angry and alone."
As soon as he said it, she quivered as if struck with a mallet. Her breath shook through a clenched jaw and she sucked back a loud nose-full of incriminating mucus, but she couldn't hide it anymore. He'd extracted the confession.
"You have no right-"
"So? Throw me out the damn airlock, Shepard!"
"I should! I SHOULD! Why are you doing this? You think I need you?"
He did think so, but that was a private opinion.
"Stop putting words in my mouth. I've got far too many words crowding around in there as it is." He sang it out as lightly as possible, dancing a little closer to her. "You need a few good laughs. A single night of uninterrupted sleep before you die. Maybe, just maybe, you could afford to shed a few private tears for the unbelievable paragons of peace and love that raised you." Another step closer. "My role? I'm just another sacrifice at the altar of Commander Shepard's heroic solitude."
"What?"
"It's alright. I know how this is going to end. Anybody who makes you experience a feeling gets thrown out the airlock. Honestly, being blasted out the Normandy's blowhole for making a woman's heart race seems like a pretty stylish way to go."
She closed her eyes and looked like she couldn't decide whether to collapse with grief or laugh in his face. In the end, she simply looked furious. Finally, she choked out another startled, "What?"
He moved closer still, with placating slowness, as if approaching a wild animal caught in a snare. She didn't stop him.
"As my last act of rebellion before I die... I'm going to hug you, Commander."
Her arms remained crossed over her chest, tight and defensive, but she didn't stop him when he closed for the kill. No, she didn't stop him at all.
He notched her face into his neck and wrapped both arms tightly around her head and shoulders. Sheltered there in warmth and darkness, cut off from the outside world at last, she laughed at him once, twice, and then fractured right down the middle. It was soundless at first, a grief so hard and deep and desperate that it was too big to vocalize. A sorrow felt rather than heard in the wild spams of her lungs, the salty blaze of her tears as they soaked his neck.
Soon, the real sadness arrived. Heaving, toneless wails, her whole body shaking under the weight of a loss she had repressed for so long that she'd forgotten how to feel it. He pressed her in tighter, muffling her sobs deep in his armored shoulders, gathering her face against his naked neck, devouring the pain whole on her behalf.
No one would ever have to know.
Some time later, her shoulders stopped shaking, the tears grew sticky and cold on his neck, and she slowly, slowly quieted.
"How you doing down there?" he asked, keeping his voice light. Teasing, impossibly, when all he wanted to do was tell her...
"Don't you dare say I'm uptight," she mumbled in a small, hoarse voice, killing that wandering thought before it could stray.
"Hmm. Yeah," he smiled into her hair. "What a suspiciously uptight thing to say."
She wiped her streaming face on the neck of his under-suit, being purposefully gross about it, and then whined, "I don't have to listen to your bullshit, Vakarian."
"So why are you still here, Shepard?"
She didn't answer.
"Thought so."
He kissed her. Chaste and firm, with his hands on either side of her face, simply breathing life back into her. She let him do it, just stood there and took the hit, until her arms finally loosened and circled his waist. He pulled away, nodding towards her Crucible.
"Forget this damn obstacle course you've constructed around yourself." He leaned forward and spoke against the skin of her temple, trying not to choke on the truth as he whispered privately into the small air between them. "Point me at the flaming hoops, Red. I'll learn to backflip. All I want from you right now, the only thing…"
She looked into him, red-eyed but present.
"...is to tell you this really great joke I know."
Albacus
PFS Tenefalx
2157 CE
"Stop me if you've heard this one before," Williams said in a friendly voice. "You turians have shaggy dogs?"
Albacus craned his neck and stared for a moment, unsure if the General was speaking in code or simply trying to distract him. There was a pile of torso plating on the floor now, and Williams moved to the armor on Albacus' right arm, tackling the easier limb first and opening the seals.
"I think not," Albacus said, finally.
"Oh good," Williams laughed, setting the armor on the floor. "Then you won't be like my grandbabies: ruining all the punchlines because they've heard 'em all." He punctuated that with heavy sigh of poorly hidden homesickness. "Alright, you don't have shaggy dog stories. How about Heaven? You got one of those?"
"Not precisely."
"But you know what it is? Heaven and Hell, life after death, an almighty creator?"
"Asari believe... something similar." Albacus flinched, hissing as a nerve in his shattered arm flared unexpectedly when Williams started to jostle the plates on his left side. Hit bit out the rest. "Drell, hanar. Several species. Religious."
"Not you though."
Albacus decided not to waste energy on an answer, his mouth was too dry, the pain too thick in his mouth. He jerked his head once to the side as Williams popped the first lock on his left shoulder pauldron.
No.
"Must get lonely," Williams said, softer now. "No prayer to lift you through a time like this... No chance of reunion after…"
The General inhaled sharply and wiped a creeping sentiment from his eye, then corrected, "Alright, Heaven is a go. Just making sure I'm not wasting a perfectly good joke, that's all."
They made a shared noise of mutual displeasure as the plates came off Albacus' ruined limb. The shock-white bones of his forearm were jutting through his bloodless skin, caked with clots of gore so blue and thick they were nearly black. As for the joint of his elbow, it was obliterated. Albacus could feel the shattered bone creeping up the back of his tricep, dragged by the still-attached ligament.
The Captain's arm would never be mended without surgery, and perhaps not even then. Williams' intervention was a stop-gap. In truth, it was medically meaningless, little more than a gesture of stubbornness and compassion.
"Alright," Williams said, taking a deep breath. "Here goes nothing."
In a low, easy voice, the General began his story.
"Two old friends are walking along a nice country road. Beautiful day out, the scenery's to die for. They're walking along, just enjoying the breeze and the sunshine and all the rest, when one of them stops cold and turns to the other, saying, 'Oh no, my friend, we must be dead!'"
Williams disassembled the chest plates of Albacus' armor, quickly stripping the medical suite of essentials: a scrap of coagulant, some sterilizing compound. Everything else had already been spent. From his own chest pocket, Williams secreted one final, precious addition: a packet of sterile wipes, unopened.
"The first man suddenly remembers that his best friend has been dead for years and years. Now, how could he be walking down the road with his best buddy, unless they were both dead men? So, that was that, they were dead as door nails, and they figured, well, we better keep walking and see where this road leads."
Williams scrubbed his hands as best he could with the sterilizing compound, then squeezed the remainder onto the strips of cloth he'd made from his own dirty, sweat-soaked sleeves.
"The road they're walking has a high stone wall on each side, so that they can't see the terrain, can't be sure where they're even going. After walking for a while, maybe days, maybe eternity… they come upon this beautiful gate set into the wall. The road leading up to this gate is paved with marble, and the archway itself is all pearly white and gilded. This massive, heavy golden gate opens up into a magnificent garden, right? Paradise, no doubt about it."
Williams lifted Albacus' good arm, moving it around and groping the bones to see how they were supposed to fit together - conducting the universe's shortest course in turian anatomy.
"They see a guard at the gate, wearing a full suit of golden armor. They call out, 'Excuse me, what is this place?' and the guard makes a big show of answering and says: 'Welcome to Heaven!'"
Satisfied with his study of a healthy turian arm, Williams eased one hand onto its broken partner, feeling for the damage. After a moment's appraisal and possible squeamishness, he opened the sterile wipes and began to clean the wound around the splintered bones. When Albacus flinched and suppressed a groan of misery, Williams started talking a little faster.
"After walking all this way, the men are pretty thirsty. The one who has only been dead for a little while has more energy, so he goes up and asks, 'Have you got a glass of water in Heaven?' The guard gives him the once over and hands over a jeweled cup brimming with water. But when the man tries give his friend the first sip, the guard stops him and says, 'Sorry, it's one or the other. We can't save both your souls."
The wound was as clean as it was going to get. One of Williams' hands pressed against Albacus' left shoulder. The other closed around the thin bones of his wrist.
"The newly dead man thinks about this ultimatum for a minute and then turns to his friend. He says, 'Look, buddy, you've been dead a lot longer than me. If you want to drink this water and go to Heaven, I won't stop you."
Albacus was surprised by the dense weight of the human's many fingers, and more surprised by their sureness. Williams pulsed his grip around Albacus' wrist: one, two, three. He was gathering his strength, preparing to set the arm. Albacus closed his eyes and listened to Williams' warm, comforting voice, gathering his own strength.
"Now his old friend, he claps the first man on the shoulder and says… 'Let's keep walkin'.'"
Williams pulled, sheathing the bones, cracking the entire limb back into alignment in a single excruciating jolt. The pain, now reawakened, was unimaginable. Albacus made a brief noise of terrified overexertion, followed by a low, delirious keen. Williams sucked in a sharp breath, apologizing, then continued his story.
"Another long while, maybe days, maybe eternity… and the road becomes an old dirt path. They come across another break in the wall. This time, it's nothing but a crumbling old gap, no gate in sight. Kinda run down, decrepit, and looks like there's a farm out in the distance with some people toiling in the fields.
Williams grabbed the last of the coagulant and injected a small dose into the oozing flesh wound, sealing it.
"Standing under a tree on the other side of the wall, there's someone reading a book. This time, the man who has been dead the longest approaches the stranger and asks, 'Excuse me, have you got some water for me and my friend here?' The stranger shrugs and says, 'Yeah, help yourselves to the pump down the hill.'"
Williams slid one of the Captain's re-purposed shin guards under Albacus' arm, bringing it flush against the jumble of flesh where an elbow had once lived. Carefully, he grabbed the other plate and gently braced it over the opposite side, making a splint that was barely long enough to hold the arm straight. Good enough.
"The two friends walk down the hill and find this pump. Now it takes some elbow grease to draw the water out of the well, and they've gotta take turns because it's so tiring, but once they get to it? Well damn, the water is cold and clean, and they drink their fill. Afterward, they head back up to thank the stranger."
Though he could barely think straight, Albacus allowed Williams to guide his one good hand for the final stretch. Albacus held down each bandage with one shaking finger while Williams tied a series of agonizing knots, securing the splint. It was almost over.
"The first man thanks the stranger and asks, 'What do you call this place?' and the stranger shrugs again and says, 'This is Heaven.'"
Job done, Williams sat back with a mighty sigh and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He settled against Albacus' bunk and sat right beside him, rubbing his face and collecting his thoughts.
"The second man says, 'Well that's confusing. The guard down the road claimed his place was Heaven too.'"
Albacus relaxed his arm into the improvised splint and gulped a lungful of cool, dark air. It was the least painful breath he had taken in hours. He met Williams' eyes and tried to communicate his gratitude, but the General simply waved one tired arm, brushing off the weight. Slowly, Williams leaned his head back and finished his story.
"So... the stranger under the tree looks up from his book and says, 'Believe me, this is Heaven. The place down the way with with the pearly gates? That's Hell.' These two friends are really confused now, so one of them asks what they're both thinking: 'Doesn't it make you mad, that Hell is over there calling itself Heaven when it's not?'"
Williams looked at the ceiling. He stared straight through it, ventured beyond it, and saw something far more wondrous than Albacus could imagine. Watching him, Albacus felt smaller, younger, and more fiercely cared for than he had in a long time.
"Calm as you please, the stranger under the tree smiles to himself and says, 'Oh no. We don't mind at all. In fact, they're doing us a service. They're screening out all the folks who would leave their friends behind."
A hand pats Albacus on the knee. An unconscious gesture, Albacus suspects - a carryover from some other life on a planet far from here. It is full of both comfort and sadness, the instinctual grope of a dying parent reaching for children he knows are far beyond his reach.
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:
- Torin/Torini (plural): Male turian of the age of majority (15)
- Tarin/Tarini (plural): Female turian of the age of majority (15)
- Patrem/Pari: Father/Dad
- Matrem/Mari: Mother/Mom
Well folks, we've surpassed the 100K mark! Unbelievable! That makes Red Streak the longest thing I've ever written... by a huge margin! I had no idea that this story would morph into such a crazy adventure when I started writing it a few short months ago. Thank you all so much for being here! Here's to another 100K! Eep!