It was easy to witness her father's memories when she took a step back. If Sara could view it as simple data, just a puzzle to unlock, she could coldly and rationally view them like a movie. It was a fairytale that barely even existed the six hundred years ago when it physically took place, much less now.
Dad was with Mom, again. On Earth, maybe just before Sara or Scott had made it planetside. Mom looked like herself. Brooding and quiet, maybe, but standing upright and not in pain.
"It's simple," Dad was saying, "we take SAM-"
"Who?"
"I named the AI: Simulated Adaptive Matrix." Sara had never heard her father so excited. There was a smugness there, it made the corners of her mouth twitch. "SAM. We use your research and interface SAM with an implant."
Mom was distracted. "Um. My work on biotic implants was yielding results, but this..? I don't know."
"What did the doctor say?"
"Alec..."
"What did he say?" The hard clip of her father's demand shook Sara from his perspective.
Mom lowered her gaze to the floor. "It's getting worse."
"There's your answer," he replied. "This will work. SAM will fix you."
"Alec, I'm not some war you have to win. You're not an N7 anymore." There was a hardness to Mom, a fierceness that Sara had never seen her use on her or her brother.
"That doesn't mean-"
Mom dashed right up to Dad and jabbed a finger directly into his chest. "They kicked you out of the Alliance for this."
Despite the attack, she was close enough for him to wrap his arms around her. "We're talking about your life."
"Alec. Did you ever consider that maybe it's my time to go? I'm human. We die. It happens."
It hurt. Was it Dad? Did the memory prove he was capable of feeling anything or was it just Sara's own emotions bleeding over?
"Ellen, please." Sara nearly pulled out and ended the memory early, but Scott's hand squeezing hers served as an anchor. "Losing you is not an option. The kids aren't going to lose their mother. God knows they've never had a father."
"Then give them one."
"They'd ask for a refund."
It was so like him, the stupid asshole. Mom knew exactly what she wanted- she explicitly spelled it out and instead of picking up the pieces and carrying on, Dad just deflected, his feelings a mutable haze. Sara tried to look away, but it wasn't her memory to command, so she settled for biting her lip until she flirted with the taste of blood.
"He's such a-!" she fumed as SAM node came back into view.
"Dad was a dick," Scott replied. "I know."
"But even from his own perspective?" Sara exclaimed. "I thought it would have to be a little more forgiving- maybe?"
"Come on." He nodded back to SAM. "Let's see this through."
"What did Mom ever see in him?"
Scott chuckled, "According to Dad, you do not want to know the answer to that question."
"Ugh," Sara groaned and gripped the dais. "Let's just get this over with."
Of course, as soon as SAM plunged onward, she regretted it. This was the kind of memory Sara had feared. Earth. Not the planet or the context or even the intent, but that she was there. She was there, Scott was there and they were going to see themselves through their father's eyes. Anxiety fluttered across her chest, causing her heart to skip.
"Finally, the Ryder clan in one room." It felt so stupid to admit her mother speaking warmly was triggering her fight or flight reflex. Mom smiled at the open door and everyone entering. "Feels like it's been years since we were together."
"Or more." Scott. Sara's brother snorted and acted casual, but there was a tightness to his shoulders. Through this lens, he looked round-cheeked and boyish, like he was too young to be wearing his Alliance-issued fatigues.
Mom didn't notice. "Well, I'll take whatever I can get. I've missed you two."
Two? Shit, there Sara was. Smaller than she actually was and hair in her natural deep brown, but it was her.
"How're you feeling, Mom?" There was no way her voice was really that high pitched.
"No," Mom said quickly. "We're not doing that." She grabbed Sara by her shoulders and spun the girl over to her brother so that she could address both children. "Only one rule for this visit: No talking about me. I'm fine. And when I'm not, the pills help. Deal?"
The twins shared a sheepish look. "Okay."
"Good." Mom clapped her hands and looked up at Dad. "Let's talk about something else. Alec?"
"Uh..."
All the warmth drained from her face. "Really?"
There was a previous conversation in her look. An argument. A ship ride from the Citadel to Earth with plenty of time for Dad to, if not learn how to interact with other human beings, then to look up basic ice breakers. He coughed. "Well, uh... you're both looking taller."
Scott regarded him as flatly as Mom had. "Yeah Dad, that does tend to happen."
"Right, right. I know." Dad was distracted and reaching. Had any of them noticed at the time, or were they too caught up in their own worlds? Sara could see herself looking at Mom as if to catch her in a perceived moment of weakness as her father spoke again. "So... I heard the Alliance has a new mako in the works."
"Yeah." Scott kept it terse and polite. "Word is, they can air drop this one from a ship."
"I know!" Sara bobbed away from Mom and beamed up at Scott. "They're saying we might get one on our next expedition."
"You still poking around the Attican Traverse?" Dad asked.
She nodded and turned her grin to their father. "It's amazing. We think we might have found a Prothean site! No artifacts yet, but we're still digging."
He sighed, easing into the conversation. "I remember the day they found the first ruins on Mars. Changed my life- we knew for sure aliens were real, we just had to go find them."
"Yes!" Finally, Scott warmed up. Dad shrunk slightly as an unseen coil of tension relaxed in his shoulders. "Everyday I wake up, I'm looking at a mass effect relay, and I keep thinking, what's on the other side?"
"Don't lose that," Dad told them. "The minute you stop wondering what's beyond the mountain, you die a little inside."
"No chance of that." Sara didn't really smile like that, did she? There was a weird, secondhand embarrassment churning within her to both hear her words recorded and repeated and to view her through her father's perception. She continued to bounce and grin like an exciteable puppy. "It's in our blood- you infected us."
As she cringed at the memory, it continued on with Scott being more social. "What was it like, Dad?" he asked. "When you went through that first relay?"
"Don't believe the stories- the Charon relay scared the shit out of us, Admiral Grissom included." Dad laughed. "Why don't we go have this dinner your mom's been slaving over all day and I'll tell you all about it?"
Macaroni and cheese. He knew. That smug little smirk gave it away. Dad knew Mom ordered the mac and cheese from Trudie's Diner and still he had the gall to berate Sara when she did the same after Mom passed. The more she learned about him, the less she understood.
Her hands were shaking and white-knuckled as they gripped the lectern in SAM node. "Let's take a break."
Scott's face fell. "Sara..."
"You know what happens next," Sara said. "We were there! Do you really want to watch Mom die again?"
"That can't be all that's in there-"
"It's all sentimental garbage!"
"That's not Dad!" Her brother ducked behind her and made himself a physical barrier between her and the door. "It's not. It's not him. There has to be something more. Play the next one."
She swiped her hair back and it flopped over her cheek the second she dropped her hand. "I just don't need to see her like that, you know?"
"She was my mom too," Scott ground out. "Play the memory."
Sara didn't need to see it. She had her own memory of that event. She didn't need to learn her father warmly regarded her as stoic when in reality she was too shell-shocked to appropriately react.
"I love you. Both of you." Mom was so warm. So calm and accepting. Why wasn't she bloated and red-faced and sobbing like Scott? Why was Sara just stupidly standing there and not saying anything? There was so much to hate about this memory, even Mom's voice ringing clear over Scott's blubbering. "Live your lives. Do great things. I see so much potential in you. And remember, fall in love at least once."
She looked over to Dad at that and he took her hand. He didn't tell her goodbye. He refused. Maybe Sara could try to find some solace in Dad actually saying, "I love you," to Mom as Sara led Scott out of the bedroom.
"You happy?" Sara asked her brother.
Scott met her glistening eyes with two of his own. "No. Keep going."
The only relief in rewitnessing Mom's death, was that the pain of anything that followed would be blunted in comparison. The next memory was not of Mom. It didn't feature her at all. It was just Dad, hunched over his work desk and staring at a viewscreen.
"Hello Alec." Sara didn't recognize the human woman, but as she spoke, her features shifted to turian, then krogan, then asari. It was clear that whoever the woman was, she wasn't any of the faces currently cycling before Sara's father. Perhaps, she wasn't even a woman.
"I'm too old for cloak and dagger." There was the dad Sara knew. "I got your message. I'm here. So who are you?"
"A benefactor. If you like."
"You have something to offer me?"
"A future."
He was getting annoyed. "That's vague."
"A future for your wife," the mystery person clarified. "You're out of money. Your contacts have dried up. You can't finish SAM."
"How do you know about-"
"I can help you," they said quickly. "Whatever you need."
"Start by telling me what you need," Dad demanded.
The image shifted from salarian back to human. "Your AI is more than a cure for your wife. It could also be the salvation for many others."
Cure! Sara felt herself scoffing. Too little, too late.
Dad didn't correct them. In fact, he seemed to be entertaining them on account of their knowledge of SAM and his finances. "I don't follow."
"Where we're going, we'll all need a different perspective to understand things." The ever changing face faded in favor of a new image. A lone swirling galaxy in the vast universe.
"Where's that?" Dad asked. "The... Andromeda galaxy?"
The face reappeared, this time a human male. It nodded. "I have a proposal for you... and Ellen can't stay in stasis forever. Are you interested?"
Stasis? Sara's hand went slack in Scott's as her blood ran cold.
Dad was as unperturbed and as Dad as ever. He cut the feed on the vidscreen and turned to the rudimentary SAM node beside his desk. "SAM, track down my kids. Tell them their old man needs to talk- it's urgent. And how's Ellen?"
That man- her father- cool as a cucumber as he perused the cryostasis stats of Ellen Ryder who was very much alive. Putting Mom on ice had suspended the progress of her disease. No cure, no hope and yet her vitals were as strong and as stable as anyone in cryostasis.
He was lucky he was already dead. Sara told herself he was lucky.
"Make sure her body's on the Hyperion," Dad said as casually as if he'd been declaring it would rain on Tuesday. "Don't use her real name. Say, 'Elizabeth Reilly.' I'll tell the kids when the time's right."
When the world returned to her, Sara was crying. Scott's eyes were red rimmed and his jaw tight with rage. She supposed it was only fair they got to swap roles this time around.
"That motherfucker," Scott finally found his voice. "What's next, Sara? What else does that prick have for us?"
"Nothing." Sara scrubbed at her eyes. "He encrypts his memories. He dies. I'd like to take a break from watching people I know die, Scott."
"Right." He slung an arm around her shoulders and yanked her into a hug. "Sorry. I shouldn't have pushed you."
"Yeah, well, Dad shouldn't have done any of this!" She hid her face in his shoulder until she felt like a person again. "I should be back on the Citadel, six hundred years ago, getting a pedicure and not dealing with any of this- what is wrong with our father?"
"Was," Scott corrected.
A laugh bubbled up. "That's true. Was."
"Feel better?" he asked.
"A little bit."
"Can we see her?" Scott's voice was soft. "See if she's still safe on the Hyperion."
"Yeah," Sara mumbled. "Sure."
For all the good it did.
As they wandered toward the heart of the Hyperion, Sara could hear the whispers. She knew it was because of Scott and not because of her red and puffy face. Scott was awake. Maybe her tears were ones of happiness. Since they were latched arm in arm, everyone seemed to be polite about whatever inquisitiveness they may have felt and settled for smiles and the occasional wave from afar.
The blocks of cryo pods reminded Sara of Ark Paarchero. There were clusters and rows of pods just missing, but she told herself that was a good thing. They didn't wake to kett interrogations and dissections like the salarians had. It meant those people had been roused to start their lives.
When she and Scott rounded the corner and headed deeper in, there was a dense block filled with untouched pods. Sleek, opaque containers emblazoned with the Initiative logo. In the top center, there was a tiny circular window to peer at the individual inside as if they were an oversized doll.
It was all showboating, of course. Cooled glass had a tendency to frost over.
Scott already had his omni tool out and was scanning the crew manifest. "Elizabeth Reilly" was low priority for thawing. Limited education and experience, but too old to be considered for manual labor and with no known family in Andromeda, Dad had gone all out to insure no one would go out of their way to wake her before he could secure her pod. Scott was running ahead without paying any heed to Sara now.
He skidded to a halt in front of an identical pod. "Oh my God... I don't even... How?"
Sara wandered up to him as he ran a hand over the outer shell of the pod. "Dad," she said. "Just being Dad."
"I want to shake his hand," Scott murmured. "And then punch him right in the face."
She just stood there and nodded numbly.
"Well?" he continued. "Can we get her out of there?"
"What?" Sara blinked. "No."
Scott sighed. "I figured."
"Six hundred years and still no cure," she scoffed softly.
"Well to be fair, we were all in stasis for those six hundred years," he replied.
"Oh shut up." She tugged at her hair and shuffled backwards. "I'm not the only one who can see how fucked this is, am I?"
"That's an odd way to say hopeful." Scott frowned at her.
"There wasn't a cure in Mom's lifetime," Sara said. "Nobody's done anything for six hundred years and even if anyone is awake to progress science, it's going to be for rudimentary survival not a cure for AEND."
That worrying crease in Scott's brow meant she was talking sense. "When you say it like that..."
"The Initiative is looking to improve crop yields, new fuel sources and to understand climate systems- they're not going to waste energy on something that affects one in ten thousand humans who were exposed to eezo for prolonged periods as adults!" Sara was ranting now. She knew it, Scott knew it, and they both knew she wasn't going to stop. "What the hell was Dad thinking? Even if we start today, what is the likelihood of a reliable treatment, much less cure, being available in the next few years-? Don't answer that, SAM! How old will we be when we can wake her up? Her age? Older? How long will Dad have been dead? Would there even be a fucking point to waking her up? I said don't answer that, SAM!"
"You've thought about this," Scott muttered.
"Yeah," she huffed. "I took all of five minutes to stop and think about how stupid it is. Maybe we should just wake her up."
"You don't mean that," he said.
"I mean yes, but no." Sara dragged a hand through her hair and wandered back up to their mother's pod so she could beat her head against it. "Mom was okay with dying. It'd be falling in line with her wishes, but. I don't want to watch her die again."
"So we just leave her," Scott realized. "Here."
She shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe we'll have to decide on a timeline that makes sense or-"
Her omni tool was going off. "Ryder?"
It was Cora. Scott nodded to her wrist. "Or we table it for now," he said.
"I am the Pathfinder," Sara said wearily.
"I won't do anything while you're gone," he replied. "Promise."
She raised her omni tool to her mouth. "We're ready, I take?"
"Yes," Cora said. "All set."
"Okay. I'm headed there now." Sara dropped her arm and yanked Scott in for a final hug.
"Try not to have too much fun without me," he drawled.
"Right," she snorted.
For someone like Scott, maybe the thought of battling kett and the Archon did sound like fun. Sara was tired almost dying and actually dying. As she made her way back to the Tempest and her crew, SAM kept recalling if not a memory exactly, then a frequent phrase her father would repeat. Some stupid N7 mantra: When your back's against the wall, if you can't run from it, use it.