Chapter Text
i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles
beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl /
part poltergeist /
sometimes / when the sidewalk / opens my knee / i think / please / please let me /
remember this
Franny Choi, Soft Science
Lana can still feel the bruises sometimes. Livid and dark. Purple in the right light. Like the asari who gave them to her.
`The Tempest heaves quietly, just the barest movement, the only sign in the otherwise still ship that Kallo is taking them up to FTL. Lana pulls her hair up, ties it off, fingers slipping unconsciously behind her left ear. A raised scar the size of her thumbprint, a warped burn. A special parting gift.
She’d tried to kill her. Which was, in Aria’s way, a compliment. A show of respect. On Omega, Patriarch’s fate was one worse than death. And Lana feels, sometimes, like a liminal thing. Not dead, not quite alive. The vast nothingness outside her window deepens the feeling. Clusters of darkness, of angry stars. We shouldn’t be here.
If she closes her eyes, she can feel the crackle of Aria’s biotics, can still hear her own screams echoing the walls of Afterlife. The FTL drives kick up, brief vertigo washing over her, then just as quickly receding. Lana kneads a sore spot at the base of her neck, thankful for the distraction. Sleep isn’t coming, no matter how exhausted she is, how worn down. They say she was in a coma for three days. They say her heart gave out twice. She thinks, maybe, her body is afraid. Afraid that if it lets its guard down for even a moment, death will overtake it again. Vertigo washes over Lana and this time it isn’t FTL kickback.
She feels a twitch in her brain and frowns. Lana can feel it watching, the robot they put in her head, wonders if her thoughts look like lines of code to it or if they have musculature; wonders if her thoughts are in a language it can understand or if, like a well-trained dog, it’s just mimicking what her father taught it. That twitch again. She can almost feel it wanting to correct her. She tries to keep her thoughts quiet. But they’re racing even if she can’t make out what they say. Her brain is shooting blanks. Pathfinder. She goes rigid at the sound. When it speaks out loud, the sound echoes a little in her head. It stopped speaking just to her, just inside her head, a day ago. Something about her heart rate, her blood pressure. It speaks out loud now, or not at all. Six hours of sleep is the advised minimum for a woman of your age. You are expected on the bridge in seven. She ignores it, wonders if maybe she can will it into silence with her own.
Fuck. What a fitting parting gift her father gave her. Her last, quietest refuge blown wide open. His hands kneading through her most private thoughts even beyond the grave. It’s more than that too. Those last moments when he’d cradled her head, his own oxygen pressed tightly to her face. An umbilical cord. His sacrifice another jab. A tenderness she’d never once seen in all her life. Where was this? Where was this when I needed it? Lana takes her hair down; she grabs her towel. The soft swish of recycled air washes over her as she heads out into the hall.
This always happens with mirrors. At least after she left Omega. A slippage. Where she doesn’t recognize herself at first. Where she expects to see something worse than she does. The miracles of modern medicine. Just a few scars, no bruises.
The crew showers are like a mirror, that cold metal reflecting her back to herself a hundred times over. Distorted and watery. Six hundred years asleep and it still feels like yesterday when all her ribs were broken, when she was frothing up blood in the cargo hold of that transport. Her fever spiking, veins burning up, ships going to pieces all around her. Her gasp echoes threefold in the empty room. These thoughts are still so intense. She leans heavily on her forearms, pressing her head to the metal, letting it cool her down. When she opens her eyes, she flinches. The steam rises up, obscuring everything, and she exhales, welcoming it.
Maybe this is how grief is going to be. Her brain seeking anything that isn’t her father. The dead man with the same eyes she sees every morning in the mirror. Those eyes that had watched her so intently on Illium. Assessing her after so many years apart. He had, apparently, been impressed with what he’d seen. She wouldn’t be here otherwise. Her father’s praise always came with a price. Sometimes the weight of his face makes it hard to breathe. The water shuts off. The room suddenly cavernously quiet. Just the drip, drip, drip of water from her hair. Lana takes a deep, long breath. The thing in her head twitches.
As she towels herself off, Lana tries to remember how old Aria was when she finally built up the courage to flee. More than a thousand. She’s almost sure. How long can asari even live? She wonders, as she examines herself clinically in the mirror, if Aria might be dead now. Finally. Lana tweezes a few stray hairs from her brow. Can a person like that that really die? There were times, standing beside her on the dais in Afterlife, when Lana was sure that Aria would live forever. Preserved by spite, by rage. Lana works a comb through the tangles in her dark hair and tries to figure out if the idea of the asari’s vengeful spirit scares her. Or if it’s scarier to think that the scion of Omega wouldn’t choose her to haunt. Death or obscurity. So many years under Aria’s thumb and she still doesn’t know which frightens her more. Or maybe that’s just something she got from her father.
Lana digs for her nail file in her toiletry bag, settles on the rim of the toilet once she finds it and starts to shape her nails. Cora gave her shit when they were bunking up back on the Traverse station before launch. Awful prissy for a military brat. The jab had barely registered. Lana would pour all her energy into her appearance if she had the time. It’s her first trick, her first line of defense. The most vulnerable and dangerous thing about her. She’d learned that long before she first landed on Omega. The thought makes her feel brutal and she slips with the file, pricking the skin around her thumb with its sharp edge. She feels the thing in her hear squirm, wonders suddenly if it can feel the pain. She rocks a little back, examining the blood trickling down her finger. Is it the same translated into lines of code or does the concept of pain gets lost in the algorithm, broken down into abstract pieces. Aria was like that. Good at breaking things down into pieces so small and unrecognizable that you could barely understand what was happening until it had already happened. Like a frog in a pot, boiled before it even tries to escape. Lana’s grandmother used to say shit like that. Back on Earth. Lana shakes her head, gets back to filing, quickly running over another tender spot, breaking one of her nails. They both wince.
Her first impulse is to apologize to it, like she would to a roommate, but she bites it back. She rips off the hangnail and tosses it into the trash, tries not to let the whirr of its disposal unnerve her. She’s never lived on a ship this small and all the little reminders of its ecosystem send her brain spinning until all she can think about is the bottomless drop beneath them, how up and down have no meaning this deep in space and with even the smallest shift the Tempest might lose its tenuous mooring, go spinning into nothing. The idea of a crash is less terrifying. At least impact is definitive. The smell of blood and fuel and burning wire. The thought of twisting slowly, endlessly through deep space ignites a quiet panic in her. She looks back up at herself in the mirror. She can feel the thing in her head twist. Worry, maybe, if machines can worry. She can feel her heart pounding, a cold numbness in the tips of her fingers. But her reflection is the same as always. Placid, just the slightest smile at one corner of her mouth. Aria didn’t teach her how to hide in plain sight, but she helped Lana refine it. “Fuck Aria.” Her voice echoes wetly in the room. She packs up her toiletries. She leaves.
Lana takes a long swig of water, stands again in front of the window. She doesn’t know any of the names of the stars and nebulas that stretch out in front of her. Though someone surely does. Not that anyone will ask them. They’d carved up and named this place back in the Milky Way long before Lana even knew it existed. The Nexus has become good at pretending that what they’re doing isn’t an invasion. Even if they haven’t found anything yet to invade. Even if they’re just limping along, grateful to sap up reserve power while thousands of human colonists sleep through it.
The faint glow of the scourge hums at her peripheries. She thought it was beautiful on that ride down to habitat 7. All glistening, glimmering rage. Like barbed wire, like the thorny stems of roses. We shouldn’t be here.
She’s got a picture of Scott on her bedside table. An honest to god film print that’s gone with her so many places it’s torn at the edges, white where the places she’s folded it have removed the film. Lana picks it up, runs her thumb along the glossy surface, thinned out by all the times she’s done just that.
It’s the two of them. At fifteen. Six months before she ran off and when she looks at it now, she can see the panic settled deep in her eyes, the tension in her jaw. But she’s still smiling. Scott too. But his is real. Bright and toothy, that little gap between his front two always so charming. They’re standing just outside the Presidium, leaning up against the railing, the fountain at their backs. Dressed in their school uniforms, they look like a strange mirror. They have the same round mouth, the same ski slope nose. Scott’s hair is a little ruddier, a little more like their father’s. Lana inherited her mother’s thick, inky locks. But they’ve got the same deep, blue eyes. Soulful, her mother used to say. Lana just thinks they look sullen.
Even the way they’re standing is like a mirror. Both of them with one foot tucked behind the other, their hands hanging onto the railing behind their backs. Scott’s about twice her size in the photo. Nearly a head and half taller and just as wide. He’s always been big, even when he was young before he started juicing at the behest of their father. She fits neatly in his shadow.
They’re glancing at each other in the photo, something unspoken passing between them. That thin line of energy always connecting them. A lump settles in Lana’s throat. She puts the photo down and looks back out at the scourge. It pulses, like it knows she’s watching.
There’s a framed photograph of her father too, though she can’t remember putting it there. Probably Cora did. A misguided attempt to comfort her, an assumption of shared hero worship. Because how could she, Alec Ryder’s only daughter, not adore him? Lana didn’t dare ask what Cora knew, what her father told her. He was a piece of shit, she’d wanted to hiss at Cora when the woman collapsed in the ship’s hydroponics only a few hours ago, so full of rage and grief that it had boiled over, cracked her normally ironclad composure. But Lana found herself balking in the face of her father’s betrayal of Cora. How awful that must have been. How fucking confusing. Just another bad thing in a whole ocean of bad, disorienting thing. And so, she’d just laid her hand on Cora’s back. I’m so sorry, she’d said, I’m so, so sorry.
Lana glances back down at the photograph. It's him in his dress blues, looking thoughtfully out of frame, the background a wash of stars. Lana isn't sure he has any candid photos. Not any that she’s seen anyway. His fellow soldiers must have taken some. The only time she’d ever seen her father even approach personable is when his fellow N7’s would come over to their apartment on the Citadel. But she and Scott would be rushed quickly to their rooms, only getting whatever snippets of conversation they could make out with their ears pressed to the crack in the door.
Some of his lovers probably took photos of him too though the idea fills her with revulsion. She remembers, just barely, the sound of another woman breathless around her father’s name, remembers pressing her hands to her ears, staring hard at the ceiling, remembers Scott turning his music up so loudly it slipped out of his headphones and into the room. Christ, her poor, long suffering mother. A titan in her own right brought so easily to her knees by him. So hopelessly, terribly in love that she’d let him limp her towards death, humoring his every painful, prolonged attempt to keep her alive when her body had already given out.
He was a man who loved to play god. The thing in her head twitches when she thinks that. She feels a tinge of pity for it. Sam. Such a harmless, friendly name. It didn’t ask for this either.
Lana looks back out her window. The particular strand of scourge they’ve been following is closer now. Light pulses down it, then fades away until the strand looks just like a smoldering ember. She wonders if it would be hot to the touch. Try and see, her father might say. Fearless or sadistic, she had never been sure. Would never be sure now.
Lana lets her towel slip to the ground, pads naked to the bed in the middle of the room. Never slept in. That’s some consolation, to not be sleeping in a dead man’s bed. She arranges her blankets around her like a little nest. Like walls, close but not touching her. She used to do this as a child when the Citadel would get too busy, when her head would get too busy. Surrounded and alone. Lana hears voices in the hall, coming out from the mess, disappearing down toward the armory. Surrounded and alone.
She’s said something to the crew before the ship launched. A sea of unfamiliar faces and she felt like a kid giving a presentation she hadn’t prepared for. She’d chirped, her voice almost unrecognizable, smiled in a way that made her cheeks hurt. She regurgitated everything she could remember about the Nexus, the Initiative. We’ll make a difference. We’ll bring hope. She’d had to be a lot of things on Omega but never cheery. It fit strangely on her shoulders. Lana hopes that her performance was convincing, that there is at least someone on this godforsaken ship that feels like whatever they’ve got to do, they’ll be able to. Lana only feels a steadily escalating dread.
There was a moment, before cryo, when a bolt of pure, painful panic shot through her. When she’d tried to imagine 600 years, the full scope of it. When she’d taken a breath and realized that it was one of the last she’d take in the Milky Way. Terror crashed over her and she’d nearly scrambled from the cryo pod. Fuck Aria, fuck running, fuck the whole goddamn Andromeda Initiative. But Scott had reached over, his hand quietly, firmly holding hers. I’ll go first, he’d said. Then with a wink, just like when we were born.
That panic washes over her again, laying alone here in a bed that was never supposed to be hers. And this time she really is alone. Scott’s out like a light. Practically dead. Her father probably would have preferred it the other way around. She might have preferred it the other way around too. In the Milky Way there were always places to run to. Always another city to go to, another self to slip into. She could always fall into the shadows, could always start over. Here it’s just the ship. And there’s nowhere to hide on the ship. Lana drums her fingers on her chest, trying to calm her stuttering heart.
She wonders, sucking in a ragged breath, if Scott is dreaming. Wonders what his dreams are like. He never had nightmares as a kid. She got all of his.
The knock on the door is so quiet she doesn’t hear it. But the thing in her head does and it tells her in that quiet, artificial voice that someone is there. It calls her pathfinder again. The word makes her bristle.
Lana gets up from the bed, wiping at her eyes. She’d fallen into a strange half-sleep. Enough to make her feel disoriented, but not enough to feel like rest.
She pulls on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and heads to the door to find Liam practically bouncing on his toes outside. Pretty, peppy Liam. Liam who’d been the first to greet her when they thawed her out. We met before cryo. Do you remember? She hadn’t. He’d forgiven her.
He’s all smiles and gesticulating as he talks. "Lana." Her name sounds soft in his mouth. He says it like he's never heard a name like that before. “A movie,” he says, “why don’t we watch a movie?”
She wavers at the door, but finds that she doesn’t have the words to refuse him and steps aside to let him in. She’s always had a weakness for naivete. And for liquor. He brings both. Sits down on her bed but doesn’t seem to realize that he’s done it, doesn’t seem to realize the implication of it. His smile is bright, eyes glittering. He doesn’t reach across to try and touch her when she sits down beside him and maybe it’s just another foreign thing that she’ll have to get used to. One of many.