Once again, thanks to Elana.S for the beta!

Colorless

2171 – Sol System

From orbit, Earth looked almost perfect: a glistening orb with greens and browns for the continents, shimmering white at the poles, and a pure blue on the oceans. Face pressed against the shuttle window, Andie felt some of her nervousness disappear. Aside from how big the oceans were, Earth looked a little like Mindoir, like home. And, in a way, it was her home—her ancestral home since all humans came from Earth.

Her omni-tool lit up with an incoming call.

"Andie? Have you arrived at Earth yet?" Aunt Esther's voice came over the line. Andie's seat neighbor shifted in his seat, looking disgruntled at the noise. She fumbled in her pocket and inserted her wireless earpiece so that the call wouldn't broadcast to the whole shuttle.

"Yeah," Andie replied. "Just dropped out of FTL."

"Okay, good."

They went over the next few details of her journey, more as a comfort to Esther who, unexpectedly, proved to be something of a worrier. Andie would land in London, gather her bag, and look for the social worker from the hospital who would be taking her to the hospital in preparation for her surgery.

"It'll be fine," Andie said in as calm a voice she could muster. "I'll be fine." She looked over at her other neighbor, Merta, who flicked her mandibles in a reassuring smile and turned back to reading something on her datapad. "Merta will call you after the surgery."

"Okay." A pause on the other end. "I'll be praying for you, kid," her aunt said awkwardly. "I know I'm not as good at that kind of thing as your dad was, but I figure it can't hurt right?"

Andie swallowed. "Right."

Another pause. "Your parents would be so proud of you, Andie. I'm proud of you. I… I know it doesn't mean much, but I was on antidepressants for years just for being knocked around as a kid. You go through that… that slaver attack only last year and now you're making your dreams come true."

Andie hunched in her chair a little. "Don't… don't put me on some kind of pedestal," she said in a choked voice. "I'm not some kind of… mech. I… it still hurts if I let myself think about it," she admitted, "I just… I don't know. I had a lot of help. I had a good therapist and I had you and Uncle Andrew and Merta, and I wanted—want—to get better. This just seems one of the best paths to get there."

"You're a fighter, Andie. I know whatever you decide to do, you'll put more effort into it than anyone else."

#

Andie decided she preferred Earth from orbit. The spaceport was crowded with humans and aliens of all ages and shapes. A trio of volus—voluses? volii?—trundled past, arguing in wheezy voices about some business partner they were supposed to meet; a turian was watching the baggage claim turnstile, mandibles flexing nervously. Salarians chattering in their quick voices rushed past, an asari with a smug smile hurried by with a dozen shopping bags, and Andie even saw an elcor arguing in a slow voice with an spaceport official.

"Merta, look!" Andie said, eyes wide. A krogan—easily seven foot tall at the top of the hump—lumbered past, looking sour. She'd never seen a krogan in person, only on vids. He was easily more intimidating than she'd imagined: orange eyes, dark crest, and leathery, knobby skin that looked impervious to anything that might be thrown at it.

Merta looked and put her hand on Andie's shoulder, holding her back as the huge alien passed them. One of the krogan's slitted eyes found Merta, and the krogan sneered, bearing teeth.

"He's huge…" Andie breathed, wrinkling her nose. Krogans also had a distinct… scent.

"Her," Merta said. "That was a female."

"How can you tell?" Andie hadn't noticed any distinguishing physical characteristics.

"Generally, they're bigger." Merta dropped her hand from Andie's shoulder, gesturing her forward. "Krogan are best to stay clear of, Andie. Most of them are no better than mercenaries, and some are worse. Come on. We're supposed to meet the social worker around here somewhere."

The social worker—a short woman named Edith—was waiting past the security check.

"Well aren't you as cute as a button?" she gushed, when Andie had identified herself. "Just look at those freckles! I bet those are natural, are they? I know girls that have those added on. Friend of mine works at a beautician salon. Freckles are in this year! But only so many, you understand. Just a light dusting across the nose… and maybe one or two in other locations." The woman winked and giggled.

Merta's mandibles lowered a bit in annoyance, but the social worker didn't seem to notice.

"Now," Edith said in a businesslike tone, standing on her tiptoes to look over her shoulder. "Andie, you said that your aunt would be traveling with you… was she on a different flight?"

Merta's mandibles lowered even further. Andie bit her lip.

"Um, Ms. Edith—"

"Just Edith, dear!"

"Right. This is Merta… she is my aunt. By marriage."

For the first time since they'd met her, Edith seemed at a loss for words. Finally she managed a small, surprised, "Oh" and without another word, turned and led the way to baggage claim.

Andie flushed and hung back with Merta. It wasn't the first time she'd witnessed a bit of xenophobia against Merta. To be fair, she'd had to get over a bit of it herself when she first moved to Terra Nova to live with Merta and Uncle Andrew. After all, Mindoir was a human colony. Before the attack, she could count on one hand the number of times she'd met an alien face to face. But when other people found out that her uncle was married to a turian—a law that wasn't even legal on many Alliance planets—their awkward behavior was always an embarrassment.

Thankfully, Edith soon seemed to decide that filling the silence with talk was better than the alternative. Andie let the woman chatter away as they retrieved their luggage and got into a shuttle. It had started to hit her that her surgery was happening soon, and her stomach fluttered with nerves.

After the riot of sights and sounds and smells of the spaceport, the inside of the hospital seemed drab in comparison. At least it was warm. Winter in England had a damp chill that seemed to seep into Andie's bones, and she was glad for the blast of hot air that greeted her inside the doors. Merta, too, was glad to get in.

"Turians don't like cold and wet," she said, mandibles pulled tight to her face.

Edith took charge of Andie's luggage, letting her be whisked away by a bevy of nurses for a consultation with the surgeon. She hadn't been allowed to eat for a day because of the surgery and was starting to feel tired and grumpy. Luckily, the nurses seemed not to notice her growing sullenness and went about their tasks of preparing her for the surgery with brisk professionalism. As the only turian in a human hospital, Merta was eyed questioningly and with some suspicion, but since she was a relative by marriage, they couldn't outright forbid her from being with Andie during the proceedings.

There was one point, however, when something had to break through her shell of growing anxiety.

"We need to cut your hair in the back here," said one of the nurses. "The implant goes at the base of the skull, right at the hairline. It's where the implant will be inserted and also where, as a biotic, you will access the open port, which is also known as a headjack."

Andie hesitated only a moment. Her hair had been long ever since she was little. It was perhaps the last thing that bound her to her home and childhood… and she needed to move forward if she was to escape the despair that could so easily seduce her again.

"Cut it all off."

"There's no need to bother the top—"

"No, it would look stupid. Just cut it all off, and I'll let it grow back all the same length."

A few minutes later, Andie dared to look at herself in the mirror. They hadn't shaved her bald, like she'd expected, but it was a shorter style than she'd ever had, about as short as her brother Erik had kept his hair. The hair at the base of her skull had been buzzed close to the skin and then shaved with a razor, but that was unavoidable. She touched the scrap of bare skin, imagining the bit of metal that would soon be there. A headjack, they'd called it: an open port to her brain in which she would learn to plug a biotic amplifier, enabling her to control her biotic outbursts.

Soon, the final preparations were complete and she was laying on her stomach on a gurney in a thin hospital gown, goose bumps rising on her exposed arms and legs as scrub-clothed nurses wheeled her into the operating room. Merta, never one for sentiment, had simply patted her back and told her that she would see her when she woke up.

"Hi Andie," said the voice of her surgeon somewhere above her head. Though she could see for the most part out of a hole in the middle of the part of the gurney that cradled her head, all she could see at the moment was tiled floors and a trailing wire. Cool air blew across the back of her shaved neck and she shivered.

"Hi," she said in a voice that she hoped didn't quiver.

"Are you ready?"

"I think so, yeah."

"Alright then. We're going to start the drip, and I want you to count backwards from ten, okay? Let me hear you."

"Ten." The tile was white with specks of color in it, like granite, though she supposed it couldn't really be granite, not in an operation room. It was pretty though.

"Nine." Someone's foot edged into her field of vision, a smudge of brown against the rainbow of the tile.

"Eight." The colors started to blur and she blinked, wondering what was wrong with her eyes.

"S… seven." Her breathing sounded incredibly loud for some reason, as if she was drawing a hurricane into her lungs.

"Six…" The colors in the tile seemed to brighten and then bleed away, draining the little squares of life and then all went black.