I'm done with it. I'm done. I hate this chapter. I hate it with the burning passion of a thousand angry suns!
It might not seem like it, but I've been working on my fanfic nearly every day since I submitted chapter one. The problem is, I don't think I'll ever be able to get this chapter right. There's just something... off... about it. Not sure what and at this point I'm ready to move on. Hell, I've finished subsequent chapters in the time it's taken me to perfect this. I considered submitting them for the hell of it, but context is key.
I'd also like to give a shout-out to everyone who encouraged me with their comments on chapter one - especially November 412 here on Fanfiction and Gaia who gave an intensive review. I will be implementing your changes at some point in the near future, I promise!
Anyway. Here's chapter two. May it die a horrible, fiery death. I'm going to go wreak havoc with my turian infiltrator in MP now and pretend the enemies' faces are all June's. Yep.
The air around them is cold, yet oppressive. Her mind staggers through a bleak haze, trying to understand, trying to piece together what it is she's lost. They are silent. They know what she has lost. Their faces bear the same pain, the same helplessness.
Her once-captor takes a seat beside the door, his crisp shirt and tailored pants now stained with grass and dust. He cannot look her in the eye. Instead, his eyes focus on a silver band circling the third finger of his left hand. It is untarnished, unmarred, glinting in the light with all the hopeful promises of a life now gone. He slips the ring from his hand and studies it before his hollow eyes. A realization dawns over him and he is choked by a wounded cry. She cannot resent him more than he faults himself.
A solemn chant fills the cool air. Though she cannot understand the words, she can interpret their meaning. She looks to the old man hunched over the intricate carvings adorning his wooden cane. He is praying for those they've lost, those left behind - and for those burdened by salvation. His prayer falters. He is weary. His shoulders heave with each ragged breath as he rests his forehead upon his clasped hands.
"Daddy?" a small voice pleads. The woman holding the child can only shake her head. The child does not understand. She tugs at her mother's shirt insistently, her startled eyes searching for an explanation. The woman gently presses the child's head against her shoulder.
"Sleep now. It's over." The child's sobs fall away as her eyelids flutter beneath delicate curls. Though she resists, the sleepy comfort of her mother's embrace takes hold. The woman waits until the child's breath falls into rhythm before she lets the tears flow down her cheeks. She cradles the child in her arms, desperately trying to hold herself together. It is useless. Her face is contorted by her pain, her mouth forming silent, anguished cries.
Arms intertwined, the young couple tries to console each other. The woman clutches a locket hanging by a thin chain around her neck. She looks at June with vacant eyes. The man whispers something in her ear and the words form tears in the emptiness. Her head drops to her hands and she cries incoherently into her palms.
The man tightens his arm around her shoulders, but his eyes are somewhere distant. He sees smoke rising over distant buildings, dark visages blackening the sky. He hears the shrieks and cries of the abandoned. He is tortured by the same landscape that consumes June's mind.
She should have stayed.
The guilty dagger in her stomach twists hard, nauseating waves of pain cresting and falling upon her. They batter her weary body, relentlessly tearing at her wounds. She passes a shaky hand over her damp eyes, but all she can see is a burning Earth.
She retreats within herself, nursing the gaping wound in her conscience as she pulls together the pieces of her comprehension. She could not save her little brother.
His is among the tortured faces that haunt her behind closed eyes.
June awoke as a shudder passed through the metal floor beneath her feet. The twisted visions of a ruined Earth receded as she opened her swollen eyes. From beyond the partition dividing the cockpit from the cabin, June could hear the pilot running through docking procedures in what she recognized as the common galactic trade language. Though it had been years since her cursory classes at the Alliance Naval Academy, she was able to discern that they had landed on the Citadel.
Roused from their stupor, the occupants of the shuttle rubbed at the stains their tears had left, trying to regain their composure as the aftereffects of sleep wore away. June tested her heavy limbs. Her muscles protested against the movement, but she persisted and slowly the knots unraveled. Gingerly she lifted herself from the corner she had tucked herself into.
A throbbing pain roared through her skull, clouding her vision and muffling her ears. The hum of machinery intensified around her and pressed in through her pores. It aggravated the ache and June dug a white knuckle into her temple in an attempt to suppress it.
To her relief, it died away. She blinked her eyes to clear the fog and released her held breath.
"Stand by for gravitational and air pressure calibrations," the pilot cautioned over the intercom. From beneath her feet a hum surged, then fell silent. As the interior Earth-like air pressure adjusted to the thinner exterior pressure, June's ears popped and crackled. She'd barely overcome the dizziness before another surge told her the shuttle's artificial gravity unit had shut down.
Though June had run through simulations of common galactic gravitational forces in basic, the effects were no less disorienting. An eerie lightness washed over her body and she felt herself lifted. It was as though she stood in waist-deep water, but her weight was more absent than supported. In the lower gravity and thinner air pressure, her blood circulated more freely with each heavy heartbeat. A rush of blood to her head tipped her back against the metal hull and left her clinging to a support bar running the interior perimeter.
The last hum-whir of machinery dissipated. The air fell hot, stagnant, quiet - and yet charged with morose anticipation. Through the windowless metal hull a commotion rose up as a dull roar. A multitude of voices called out and responded; inbound starships echoed as they landed in the docking bay. Refugees, June realized. Like us.
A hopeful thought cultivated in her mind: there had been another shuttle on the ground. She envisioned the security guards retreating, her brother clinging to life as they carried him to safety. Were theirs among the roar of voices? June banished the cruel optimism as quickly as it had descended. No. Ben's gone.
June blinked back a fresh mist clouding her vision and out of her peripheral vision she could see the faces of the refugees turned to her expectantly. Though she averted her gaze, she could feel their eyes boring into her skin. They studied her closely, critical of the irritated flush prickling her cheeks, the beads of sweat clustering at her temples.
She understood their expectation. She was Alliance: a voice for humanity's interest, an instrument of their need. The oath she'd taken as an idealistic teenager had crafted her into that symbol. She remembered the scrawny, messy-haired youth in the recruitment office, enlistment papers clutched in sweaty palms against the nervous palpitations in her chest. It had been a salvation, a hopeful path from a disadvantaged life. She'd never imagined it would lead her here.
That memory seemed so distant. The broken woman clutching the guardrail as though it were the only thing keeping her grounded would not recognize herself in that bright-eyed youth. In a few short hours she had lost so much. In leaving Earth she had forfeited her home, her confidence, her security, and her brother.
Ben.Where June had found purpose in her Alliance uniform, Ben saw respect. She'd seen it dawn in his eyes the first time June came home on leave after basic. He had studied the crisp uniform with its bold insignia and imagined no longer having to walk with stooped shoulders to hide his lanky, too-tall form. Denial after denial had not deterred him. June could still see his smug face over the vid-com when he triumphantly announced his acceptance into the Alliance ranks.
The memory brought the traces of a bittersweet smile to her lips. You never did know when to back down, did you?
Neither did you, June. Runs in the family, or so you said.
June pushed herself away from the railing. Her oath still stood beside her; her purpose was no different. She sucked in a heavy breath.
"Everyone stay seated for now," she instructed the upturned faces. Again the ache reverberated through her skull, angrily tearing at her resolution. She stifled the bitter bile working its way up her throat until it settled in the pit of her stomach along with the maelstrom of fear and doubt that begged her to relinquish her responsibility. Clarity broke through and she found the will to gather her focus.
One careful step at a time, she crossed the distance to the airlock and retrieved the pistol she had discarded alongside Ben's pack. Her deft fingers disassembled the weapon and she laid the pieces in clear view of the door. She reached for the pack and glanced over the contents. All that lay at the bottom were a few holodisks and a folded scrap of paper.
June shouldered the pack as an omni-tool chimed from the cockpit. The pilot stepped through the partition, his eyes fixed on a message displayed in the holographic glow stretching over his forearm.
"They're requesting we release the airlock."
June trained her ears to the muffled commotion beyond the metal hull. She could distinguish a trio of voices approaching the shuttle from amid the din. The first two voices were baritone and undercut by a throaty echo, the language comprised of short, raspy syllables. Turian. The third voice hummed a melodic string, feminine and airy. Asari.
From the side of her omni-tool, June detached a small earpiece and fit it to her left ear. Her fingers tapped a command into the interface and the indicator light blinked as the translator activated. A soft, snowy static hummed low in her ear, but the voices were too muffled to be picked up.
"I'll talk to them," she advised the pilot. "Does anyone else have a translator?" As she expected, most everyone shook their heads. She'd pulled these people from the comfort of their homes. All they had were the clothes on their backs.
June waited for the guilty dagger to dig at her again, prepared for the torturous pain. But it was still. She was aware of its presence, but it did not tear at the edges of her wound any further.
"Translate for them," she instructed the pilot as her fingertips flew over the door controls. The door breathed a sigh and a flood of light and cold, bitter air rushed through the shuttle. June reflexively lifted a hand to shield the glaring light from her tender eyes. However, what chilled her more than the bitter air were the echoing cries that had been muffled by the shuttle's hull.
Where before the commotion had been a dull, indistinct roar, it now rose as a thunderous riot of voices desperately clawing over each other to be heard. June's translator worked to decipher the tangle of foreign human languages and she was fed fragments of their tearful pleas.
"Please, just look again," one voice begged. "Please."
"But she was right behind me!" another argued.
"Help him, please! He's not breathing!"
"I don't understand… I don't-"
"…why?"
June frantically fumbled with the dial on her earpiece until the hellish noise died down to a haunted whisper. She was not yet ready for the burden of their sorrow as well.
Her eyes acclimated to the bright illumination bathing the docking bay as an asari gestured to an armored turian guard standing behind her. She indicated the disassembled pistol and he stepped forward to retrieve it as another turian leveled his rifle at June's chest.
"Is anyone else armed?" The translator relayed the question with a near-imperceptible delay through June's earpiece, the velveteen asari voice replaced by that of an artificially generated human woman. To her left, the pilot asked the question aloud in English.
Though June shook her head, the turian that had retrieved the pistol lifted his omni-tool and passed it over the occupants of the shuttle.
"Arms cleared," he confirmed. The asari crossed her hands behind her back as a signal for the turians to stand down and tipped her head towards June. The overhead light reflected off of the geometric patterns of the vestigial scales tracing the asari's deep blue skin. Though her face was youthful, there was a quiet wisdom behind her violet eyes as she contemplated the human standing before her. June stared back unflinchingly, entranced by the contours of a face that seemed familiar and alien at the same time.
"I am Aurelia Nasina, Citadel Security refugee specialist," she offered with a polite smile as she gracefully leapt into the shuttle. "We regret that you have come to the Citadel under such dire circumstances, but we will do our best to accommodate you." In a very human, and very rehearsed, gesture, the asari held her hand out to June.
"Lieutenant June Shin, Systems Alliance Navy – Medical Services." She extended her hand to meet the asari's and a static shock sparked at her fingertips. Biotic, she reminded herself. I'd forgotten about that.
As Aurelia introduced herself to the pilot, June glanced sideways at the turian guards. Out of her peripheral vision she caught one of the officers lean close to his partner. He spoke low, but June discretely nudged the dial on her earpiece enough for the translator to pick up his words.
"Filthly little rodents deserve worse than this. I'm surprised she can still hold her head up after the batarians humiliated her people."
The speaking turian was advanced in age, judging by the ashen pallor of his carapace. Old scars distorted the green markings tracing his jaw and the plated bridge of his nose. Don't let it get to you. He's old and probably the turian equivalent of senile.
Despite her best reasoning, June could feel her temper flaring. An angry flush bloomed at her cheeks and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her tongue from inciting a diplomatic incident. The other turian, visibly far younger and lacking tribal markings, shot his partner a cold look.
Aurelia turned to address June and noted the anger in the human's face. She flicked her violet eyes in the direction of the guards, but did not outwardly acknowledge the insult.
"We will be escorting you to a temporary hold for registry and processing. From there you will be directed to the lower holds where a representative from the human embassy will assist with the immigration process."
As the pilot translated the asari's words, the young couple exchanged a worried look.
"Immigration process?" the woman asked in the June's direction.
"In order for refugees to maintain residence on the Citadel until conflict has passed on their home world, we require immigration paperwork be submitted," Aurelia responded directly to the pale-faced woman as though she were reading from a script.
"How long will that be?" the woman did not take her eyes from June.
"The immigration process normally takes less than a galactic-standard week, but current communication barriers with Earth may extend that to a month or more," Aurelia continued.
"No, I meant how long will it be until we can return to Earth?" A heavy silence fell over the shuttle in the wake of the woman's desperate, frustrated question.
"Gina," the man seated beside her placed a hand upon her shoulder, but she shrugged him away.
"Don't we have a right to know how long they plan to keep us here?" Her irritation broke through and she directed her anger at June. "I have family back there! What are they supposed to do?"
June could only shake her head, unable to produce either the answer the woman wanted to hear, or the likely truth.
"Typical Alliance," the woman cried bitterly as a fresh wave of tears filled her eyes. She slipped back into her sorrow and buried her face within her trembling hands.
They hadn't even left the confines of the shuttle and already June felt a the bitter tendrils of failure thrashing in her chest. An apology would do nothing. Instead June turned from the woman's sobs and disembarked the shuttle.
Aurelia stepped down behind her and touched a slender hand to June's elbow. With the gathered fabric at her elbow impeding another static discharge, June barely felt the touch. Unlike the asari's enthusiastic handshake, this touch was personal, sympathetic.
"Officer Nehrus," Aurelia addressed the elder turian in a hushed voice. "I believe Officer Valerius and I can handle this group from here. Why don't you assist with the more populated shuttles?"
As difficult as it was for June to read expression in the hard lines of a turian face, she could detect an unmistakable animosity boiling in the officer's eyes. He looked from Aurelia to the human woman standing at her side, but he did not challenge the tactful command. Wordlessly, he turned from the refugees filing out of the shuttle and stalked off in the direction of a fresh wave of starships.
"I must apologize for my colleague," Aurelia offered as soon as Nehrus was outside of earshot. "C-sec was not expecting so many refugees from the human systems. We're all a little on edge."
"Don't make excuses for that xenophobic old bastard," the younger turian named Valerius shot in the asari's direction. Aurelia silenced him with a sharp look and the officer turned his attention back to the elderly man he was assisting out of the shuttle.
June ignored the apology. He's right. It's not her place to apologize.
"Who told you this was a batarian attack?"
"The racial tension between batarians and humans is well known. After Shepard-"
"It wasn't the batarians. It was a Reaper attack."
Aurelia and Valerius exchanged a quick look as a hush fell over the group huddled around the shuttle. A few humans and C-sec personnel within earshot turned their attention to June.
"That's a bold claim." The translation of Aurelia's voice affected a skeptical tone.
"She's right." Everyone's eyes turned to the pilot as he spoke. "I know my starships. What we saw did not match a ship any known species manufactures."
"I saw the thing you shot," the businessman admitted in June's direction. "It looked more human than anything, but I doubt it could've even been called that."
A panicked murmur arose among those listening. This was the first wave of evacuees. Few had stayed on Earth long enough to have caught a meaningful glimpse of their aggressors.
"Officer Valerius, take them down," the asari instructed. "I'm going to take this to C-sec headquarters." With that, Aurelia disappeared into the crowd.