"A sorcerer of Aramàn murdering some drunken crofter's wife and daughter? And of course, there were no bodies, no blood. Perhaps she just thought better of her lot in life than to spend it with you."
"No. No, she was happy. Fuck you. We were happy."
"Or maybe…maybe it was all just a dream. After all, a tracker like you should have been able to pick up some kind of trail."
Episode 29 hit like a truck and brother, I am roadkill.
(Spoilers for Campaign 4, Episode 29 below)
Ao3 link
“Papa, look! I’m a wolf!”
Kattigan looks up from the thread he’s carefully winding around the bolt he’s fletching to see Esmé lumbering around on the ground on all fours, her short dark hair in a riotous halo around her freckly, dirt-streaked face. He can’t help but grin at the sight, even though there’ll be hell to pay later from her mother when it’s time to clean their wild child up.
“Oh yeah? And what sound’s a wolf make, my little wolf cub?” He asks, which prompts Esmé to thrust her shoulders forward and raise her head up to the sky.
“Ummm, arf?” She barks out uncertainly, but with a gap-toothed, mischievous smile that he knows all too well by now.
“Silly pixie,” he laughs, setting the bolt aside to get down on all fours, he crawls toward her until they’re almost nose-to-nose. “A real wolf howls,” he growls in a low voice, “and eats up silly little pups who think they’re tough enough to be a wolf.”
With that, he throws back his head and howls. Esmé shrieks with laughter and does likewise, both of them howling up at the sky and into the echoing forest around them.
---
He finds a real wolf not two weeks later. A dead one, and the biggest damn wolf he's ever seen, her leg caught in a rusty jaw trap. The flies have just begun their feast and the carrion birds probably aren’t far behind.
“Damn poachers,” he mutters to himself, and sets his atlatl down to pry the trap open. There’s nothing he can do for the wolf, but he’ll be damned if he lets the poachers claim the pelt after claiming this creature’s life. A sudden movement under the wolf startles him, and he falls back ungracefully on his ass.
“Well fuck me,” he breathes as a small gray form wriggles out from under the dead wolf. The pup can’t be more than a month old and still has its milk teeth which it bares at him in a weak display of defiance.
“She’s your mum, then?” He reaches for the pup, but stops when its growls turn into a yelp of distress. Its leg is caught in the trap alongside its mother. Kattigan exhales slowly through his nose. Leaving it here is death, but the leg is mangled nastily so freeing it doesn’t carry much better odds. The pup wriggles out of his arms and goes back to lay beside its dead mother even group of crows start to circle overhead.
Damn thing is stubborn, though, he’ll give it that. And that’s something he can respect.
---
“Is he going to be okay, Papa?” Esmé asks tearfully when he brings the pup home, anxiously holding her roughly felted gray stuffed kitty, Ricky, in her tiny hands. In spite of its injuries, the pup is somehow still a wriggling, slippery ball of grey fur that’s almost escaped him several times in the long trek home.
“I don’t know, pixie. It’s been hurt bad,” he answers honestly.
“Bring him here, Kat.” Marienna already has her herbalism kit in one hand as she holds her other hand out to him. “Esmé, love, can you go out in the garden and gather some feverfew? That’s a good girl,” she says as their daughter scrambles out the door in her eagerness to be useful.
“Feverfew? Don't know that’d help the poor bugger. Paw’s gonna have to go, I wager.” Kattigan is already holding out the pup’s injured leg for her inspection and falling into old rhythms they’d established years ago when there’d been a lot more at stake than a single injured wolf pup.
“It’s not for the pup, it’s for Esmé. It's something for her to do instead of standing around and worrying. Even young children want to feel useful," she murmurs, holding the pup's paw so gently that, for the first time since he'd found it, it stops wriggling and simply surrenders to her tender ministrations.
“So that's how you tame a kid, then?” Kattigan follows her with a single gesture. She clears off the big wooden table in the kitchen to make room for her work.
“It's how I tamed you." She looks up from the pup at hime with a sly little smile.
“Tamed, huh?” He grins at her, playfully baring his teeth. She huffs in amusement then sets herself back to work cleaning and examining the poor pup. Her hair falls forward over her shoulder in a long curtain as she hunches down to get a better look. Kattigan wordlessly steps behind her and gathers her hair back to keep it out of her way.
“It's a work in progress.”
---
The pup sleeps fitfully in a pile of warm, clean rags in front of the fireplace. A clean bandage marks the stump of the paw they couldn't save, but the pup itself has a better chance of making it now.
(He, Marienna had informed him, not it.)
"He needs a name," Esmé declares, having returned with an armful of white and yellow feverfew flowers that now adorn the pup's head in a loose flower crown.
"Wolves aren't domestic types," Kattigan says gently as he helps her brush out her hair before bed.
"He needs a name," she simply repeats herself stubbornly.
Kattigan sighs, knowing a losing battle when he sees one, especially this close to bedtime. "Alright, then. What do you think we should name him?"
"Ummm." Esmé bites her lip, clearly caught off guard at getting her way so quickly. "Wolfie?"
"You're going to name a wolf 'Wolfie'?" He can't help that laugh that escapes. His daughter turns her scowl on him. "Alright, alright. We can name him Wolfie. Now, you have everything you need for bed?"
"Where's Ricky?" Esmé's eyes dart around the cottage looking for her favorite stuffie. It's a frantic few minutes before they find the grey kitty kicked under a cupboard in all the afternoon's excitement.
"All better now, lovey?" He asks, trying to shepherd her toward her bed.
"We can name him Wulferic," she says decisively, tucking the beloved stuffed cat next to the sleeping pup. It is not a suggestion so much as a statement of fact.
---
The fireflies dance under the light of a full moon, casting the meadow near their cottage in a soft silver glow. Cicada songs fill the crisp night air, punctuated by the shrieks of laughter and playful yips of Esmé and Wulferic as they chase after the fireflies. The loss of his front paw hasn't slowed him down one bit since he's been nurtured back to health. And despite his protestations that a wolf couldn't be a pet, the pup has formed an undeniably strong bond with the three of them, especially Esmé.
"Is it bad to eat that many fireflies? Should we step in?" Kattigan wonders aloud as a few more of the green lights disappear.
"Do you mean the pup, or your daughter?" Marienna asks. They're sitting on the ground with her back leaning against his chest watching the merry chaos unfold. He cards his fingers through her hair, drinking the clean, earthen smell of her.
"What do you mean, my daughter. Feral little pixie's all yours." He maneuvers a hand in under her arm and launches a sneak attack on the most ticklish spot on her ribs. She gasps, then laughs and grabs his hand and the next thing he knows the world is flipped upside down with him on his back and her looming over him.
"Hm, you might be right about that," she says with a smirk. Gods, but she's beautiful. Her hair catches the moonlight gleam and casts her features in soft shadow. He reaches up to run his thumb across the line of freckles that stretch across her cheeks and over her nose. She hums and leans into the touch, then murmurs in a low voice, "Let's get the little pups to bed, shall we?"
He can only grunt his enthusiastic agreement.
---
Wulferic is a natural tracker, of course. The pup can find trails that would baffle even Kattigan. But getting him on a track and keeping him on it prove to be two very different tasks.
They follow the trail of trampled ferns and broken branches in the understory. The hoof prints of the boar that trampled the cottage garden, broke open the goat pen, and terrorized the chickens are as clear as day in Kattigan's mind's eye. The tracks vanish when they arrive at a wide, stony brook.
"Which way'd he go, huh?" He crouches down to be at eye level with Wulferic. "You wager he went upstream or down?"
Wulferic sniffs the ground. His ears prick up and he looks up past Kattigan. Following his gaze, there's a line of fallow deer strolling casually across the brook not a hundred yards upstream. A picture appears in his mind of a haunch of roast venison as Wulferic happily wags his tail.
"Hmm, that does sound tasty. But if we play this right, we get roast boar tonight. Now, which way?" He holds out a piece of broken fence post for the wolf to sniff, and soon enough Wulferic is taking off downstream, on the scent once again.
"Good boy", he says, and tosses him a piece of dried meat from his pouch. Wulferic turns his head to catch it in his mouth midstride without missing a beat and continues leading the way. Behind them, the deer scatter frantically, and Kattigan gets a distinct sense of amusement from the wolf.
---
"Papa? Mama?"
Kattigan freezes in place at the sound of his daughter's voice in the middle of the night. Marienna does likewise, but with her back pushed up against a wall, her long legs wrapped around his waist, and her shift up over her hips it's considerably more difficult for her. He clears his throat before answering through the door.
"You're out past your bedtime, pixie. Something wrong?"
"I heard a noise. I got scared," she says plaintively. His eye flick to Marienna, whose cheeks take on an interesting shade of red. "Ricky and Wulferic say they got scared, too."
Kattigan muffles something between a groan and a laugh against his wife's shoulder, then eases her down so her feet are on the floor. He arranges his trousers and throws on a shirt. "I've got this," he whispers with a quick kiss.
"I'll be waiting for you." Marienna winks at him and gives him a playful shove toward the door. Out in the hallway, Wulferic, by Esmé's side as always, sniffs the air and tilts his head quizzically at Kattigan
In the end it takes a cup of warm milk, two lullabies, and her favorite bedtime story (the one about how the stars kissed her the night she was born, and that's why she's got freckles like her mother) to get her to settle back down.
But true to her promise, Marienna is waiting for him when he gets back to their room, ready to pick up right where they left off.
---
He's always known that men like him don't get to have happily ever afters like this. It's only a surprise that it lasts as long as it does.
A scream. A shadow. Two thuds that forever echoes in his nightmares. And they're gone. Like they never existed.
He tracks and tracks and tracks every clue he can find until his feet bleed through his tattered boots but he finds nothing but scorn and indifference. There can be no answers from a shadow, no justice extracted from a ghost that can't be found.
He breaks himself on the injustice of the world until there are only scarred and broken pieces left. There's solace in the constant haze of drunkenness which blurs the line between dream and memory, but even that just leaves him worse off.
Only Wulferic keeps him from losing himself entirely, anchoring him to the world of the living through sheer stubborn will. The wolf is living testament to the fact that his family wasn't a passing dream. But that brings him no closer to justice.
He doesn't mean to give up the hunt, but it's hard to keep looking for something, anything, when no one seems to give a damn. And why should they?
After all, he's just another dog with his leg caught in a trap, snarling his defiance while the carrion birds circle overhead.
Mass Effect
In which Anderson meets Shepard for the first time.
Follow-up to this story, and tangential to this one.
Only an N7 could make a formal recommendation to induct trainees to the Interplantary Combatives Training program.
That rule was established early on to keep the prestigious but difficult program lean. And, as one of the more prominent of the ICT’s alumni, Anderson was used to having favors called in to evaluate promising candidates.
Most potential candidates were more than happy to talk to him, eager to impress for that letter of recommendation that could earn them the respect of their peers. Most left disappointed, though. It took more than bravado in a scrap or two to make it into ICT, let alone all the way to N7, as he damn well knew. It took something else, something more, and most of the candidates he interviewed just didn’t have it.
Few, though, were as hard to read as the stone wall that was Lieutenant Shepard.
She stood across from him on the other side of his borrowed desk, tall and stiff with her shoulders locked up tight. Rough looking, as could be expected for someone who’d survived a meat grinder like Akuze. White bandages peeked out from under her uniform up the side of her neck, hiding the acid-ravaged skin beneath. Her left leg was locked in by a sturdy brace that seemed to be all that kept it attached to her body for all the attention she paid to it. The medical report he’d skimmed had been pretty clear on how close she’d come to losing it. But beneath the bandages, beneath the uniform was something that had caught General Ivanova’s notice. Something worth the time to come out to Arcturus to talk to her.
Fifty-one marines had landed on Akuze. Only one made it out. That alone was probably enough for Ivanova. Hell, it might even have been enough for him. But there was something more to it that he hadn't quite put his finger on.
“Your leg. I understand it was a result of friendly fire?” He asked, taking a shot at another target to see what he could hit, to see what was beneath the stone wall. None of his attempts so far had been successful. Neither the small talk nor the rundown of the incident on Akuze had gotten much out of her.
“Yes, sir,” she replied rotely. God, but she was young. Twenty-three years old, according to her file, but the eyes that looked past him, off to the side, anywhere but right at him looked so much older.
“Tell me how that happened.” He pressed his fingers together and sat back in his chair, listening to her give the same explanation he’d read in the formal report, the same story he’d heard in the inquiry board’s recordings with the exact same clinical tone of voice. Corporal Fern Kinley had panicked and fired her weapon wildly, hitting just about everything except the thresher maw and including three of her fellow marines. He held up his hand to stop her halfway through the recitation.
“Corporal Kinley was not field certified with assault rifles. How did she get her hands on one?” Again, knowing the answer but wanting to gauge her reaction. And again, met with the same detached indifference.
“Captain Nakamura was already dead. I made the call to open the weapon locker. I didn’t know Kinley wasn’t certified, sir. I take responsibility for what happened.”
Anderson held up his hand again. “I’m not here to assign blame, Lieutenant. The inquiry board already closed the matter, in any case, and concluded that Kinley shouldn’t have taken a weapon she wasn’t qualified for.”
“Then why am I here, sir?” She asked. Again, she kept looking past him and avoiding his eye. Like she expected some sort of punishment. Instinct whispered to him that it had little to do with Corporal Kinley, either. Not when the board had already ruled on the subject.
“Tell me about Sergeant Luo,” he said, changing the subject and keeping his tone casual but a sharp eye on her face. There might have been a small hesitation, maybe a little wince, but it was too subtle to really tease out.
“Luo and I were the only ones to make it out of the camp, but she was too injured to make it to the landing zone,” she said in that same flat affect.
“I’m sorry. I understand the two of you were close.” When her eyes flicked up in surprise, the first real reaction he'd gotten out of her, he added, “You were listed as her next of kin in her file.”
“She…we met at basic. I thought she was joking when she said…when she put me as her next of kin. She didn’t really have a family, though, so I guess….” Shepard trailed off, and there was just the slightest quaver in her voice, the smallest crack. So he pressed.
“The official report on Akuze states she was found halfway to the LZ. Looked like she’d been dragged most of the way there. God knows with her injuries she couldn’t have walked that far on her own,” he said.
"No, sir."
“The thresher maw might’ve killed her, but that wasn’t how she died.” It wasn't a question, but neither was it anything he’d read in any of the reports on Akuze.
“Sir,” was all Shepard said. And those eyes that had seemed so cold, so lifeless before now shone with all the truths she’d held back from the board. Her shoulders fell and for the first time she looked him in the eye.
A quiet understanding passed between them.
And there it was. The missing piece he’d been looking for.
“That was a hard choice you made, child,” he said softly. “I won’t tell you it was the wrong one. I wasn’t there." He pulled a datapad from the desk and slid it across to her. "But there’s a place in the Alliance for people who can make those kinds of hard choices.”
Shepard’s eyes now followed the datapad and narrowed at the red-and-black emblem displayed on it.
“What are you saying, sir?” She asked, her voice barely a whisper. The understanding they'd shared had drained the stiffness from her, and now it seemed like the leg brace was the only thing keeping her upright.
“Times like these make or break an officer, Shepard. What I’m offering you isn’t easy, but it might well make you. If, that is, you’re up to the challenge,” he said, getting up from his chair and straightening his uniform. “I understand you’re still on medical leave, Lieutenant. Rest up while you can, get that leg better. And when you’re fit for active duty again…come see me.”
He left her there, staring down at the datapad in silence, and wondered if he’d hear from her again.
That much is obvious to Shepard from the beginning. For all Lawson and Taylor talk up saving human colonies, it’s a hostage situation that she has little choice but to play her part in. The ship, the crew–Joker and Chakwas and Garrus and Tali–they’re the obvious carrot to keep her cooperative like the good warhorse she is. An organization capable of feeding fifty-one unsuspecting marines to a Thresher Maw doesn’t simply do nice things out of the goodness of its heart, after all.
The stick is far more subtle.
The picture on the desk is the first one. It’s meant to be seen, with the way it lights up whenever she draws near. The message behind it is equally easy to read. That there’s a picture of Kaidan on her desk, a picture that clearly hadn’t come from his service record or a public source, speaks volumes about Cerberus’ capacity for kompromat.
It takes her longer to notice the medals in the display case just next to the picture. Each one awarded after a particularly heroic moment in her career that was one more reason to lie awake at night and recount the names of those who only got those shiny pieces of ribbon and metal in a shadow box delivered to their next of kin. Her eyes are so used to skipping over them that she doesn’t notice the extra medal at first.
All the medals in the case are new, just printed copies of the ones that had long since burned up over Alchera. Except the one that isn’t. It’s old, the stained blue ribbon beginning to fade and fray while the silver veneer flakes off of the cheaper dull gray metal underneath. But the name stamped across the bottom under the embossed cross-hair shape is still perfectly legible.
M. Shepard.
She knows that medal like the back of her own hand, the places where the finish is worn off from her rubbing her thumb over it and the feel of those embossed letters under her finger. Knows the way it felt every time she’d tucked it into her armor for over a decade. Knows it like the memory of her own mother’s face on the day she’d given it to her on her sixteenth birthday.
It was Nana Peggy’s good luck charm. She won it in a longshot competition back in ‘35. She gave it to me, and now it’s your turn to have it.
Good luck charm, her ass.
It would be nice to think they’d tucked this memento into her cabin as a personal touch. It could even be Lawson’s official story, if she bothered to ask her.
It’s dark in her cabin when Shepard jolts awake in a cold sweat, wrenched out of her sleep by the blaring of an alarm klaxon, red lights blazing from the bulkheads. Her heart hammers loudly somewhere up near her throat and her breath comes in quick, short gasps as she breathes in the smoke and fire and suddenly she can’t breathe at all and–
Slowly her eyes adjust to the dark, allowing her to take in the details around her.
There’s no alarm klaxon. No acrid smells of electrical fires or explosions heaving her to and fro. No red warnings blink threateningly on her HUD. Air flows freely in and out of her lungs and Kaidan’s arms are loosely draped over her waist as he shifts sleepily beside her. The fish tank glimmers with a muted blue light, casting a soft glow across the cabin. And it is completely, utterly silent except for the subtle, dull thrum of the Normandy SR-2’s engines that permeate through the bulkheads.
She inhales deeply through her nose then slowly, deliberately expels the breath through her mouth.
So. That nightmare again.
After a few more deep breaths, she carefully disentangles herself from Kaidan’s arms and softly pads her way over to the bathroom. A few splashes of cool water on her face wash away the panicked rhythm of her heart. It takes a few more minutes and several more conscious breathing exercises before she can bring herself to return to her bed and try to squeeze more sleep in.
Kaidan has shifted to lay on his stomach by the time she gets back, splayed out across the bed in a state of total relaxation she hasn’t seen from him in...well, never, really. He’s always carried tension—in his shoulders, in his jaw, in that space between his eyebrows. It’s an artifact of that self-control he values so much. But now, in this moment, it’s gone, melted away somewhere in the depths of his slumber.
Warmth blooms up from deep within her.
She kneels down next to him on the bed, just watching the steady rise and fall of his shoulders as he sleeps, listening to his soft snores. He even drools a little on the pillow where his face pressed up against it. Just a little.
She leans down and traces a finger along his jaw. He doesn’t even stir. He’s really, truly, dead-to-the-world asleep. She moves her hand up his cheek, feeling the run of his stubble against her palm. He’s always been so clean-shaven before, always smelling faintly of aftershave, but now he just smells of soap and faintly of the oil used to lubricate armor joints, sharp and metallic.
His hair is soft, a sharp contrast to the prickly veneer of his stubble. He murmurs sleepily when she runs her hands through it. Then something small, a little glint of light, catches her eye, and her hand stills. Little silver flecks of hair near his temples gleam at her. She doesn’t remember that at all.
It hits her then. Really hits her.
It’s been a year for her, but more than three for him. He is older.
She knows, in an intellectual sense, that the universe had continued to turn without her. Her stint with Cerberus hadn’t afforded her much time to reflect on it, and she’d studiously avoided thinking about it during her period of house arrest. But now, to be confronted with real, physical evidence of it, written on Kaidan’s face….
It’s easy to think that the universe had simply stopped for two years while she’d been gone. It’s easy to think that time had stopped its normal flow to wait for her, Bethany Shepard, to catch up. It’s stupid and selfish, but easier to fill in the blank space in her timeline with the fiction that everyone around her hadn’t moved on. Easier to avoid thinking about what had happened.
But the universe hadn’t stopped for her, and the proof is written in those little gray hairs she runs between her fingers. It’s etched in the worry lines around his eyes that crease even in his sleepy, relaxed state.
Suddenly, he stirs, stretching his arms out over his head, and rolls back on to his front. The muscles of his chest ripple and stretch just under his skin.
He looks around the cabin, seeming to take in where he is...and who he was with. A warm smile spreads over his face when his eyes settle on her, and suddenly those crows-feet around his eyes are laugh lines, not worry marks.
“Hey, you,” he says. There’s a soft, dreamy quality to his voice. “Is it morning already?”
She shakes her head. Almost without thinking about it, her hand drifts to touch his cheek. He turns his face toward her hand and brings his own up to lace his fingers through hers. “Middle of the night. Still getting used to the Normandy’s clock?”
“Guess so.” He pulls her hand to his lips, where he lays a soft kiss on the center of her palm. The warmth of his lips sends a thrill down her spine. “What were you doing up?”
“Admiring the view,” she says, giving him a crooked half-smile.
“Mmm. This place has, uh, quite the view.” He chuckles. He’s not talking about the canopy, and they both know it.
“Flirt,” she says softly, eliciting another chuckle from him.
“Guilty as charged.” He stretches again, rolling his shoulders languorously.She lays her other hand on his shoulder, only for him to jerk away sharply. “Cold hand!”
“It’s freezing up here. You’re the nearest source of warmth,” she laughs. Still, she pulls her hands back and rubs them together to warm them up.
“Come here. Let me help you by reaching a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.” He pushes himself up into a sitting position and pulls her in close. So very, very close. Just inches away from her. Her knees graze the tops of his thighs. She drapes her arms around his shoulders, her hands meeting just behind his neck. She leans in, angling her face so her lips just brush his. His scruff lightly tickles her cheek, but then he pauses and pulls back an inch or two like he’s looking past her at something on her desk. “You know, I just realized something,” he murmurs, his voice buzzing in her ears.
“Hmm?” She feigns interest in whatever revelation just hit him while leaning in again, trying to capture his lips with hers. He shifts just enough that she catches his cheek instead, getting a mouthful of his stubble.
“It’s past midnight.”
“Yeah, and?” This time she takes no chances, putting one hand on each of his cheeks to hold him still. All thoughts of trying to get back to sleep have fully flown out of the bulkhead. There’ll be time for sleep when the war is done. But Kaidan, he just smiles and places his hands over her own and looks up at her.
“Happy birthday, Beth,” he says softly, before finally, finally pulling her in for a slow, deep kiss.
It’s some time before she gets back to sleep, but when she does it’s a deep, blissfully dreamless sleep as she’s held safe in Kaidan’s arms.
(Silly little story about my trash panda monk from a D&D game, whose recent brush with death inspired her to pursue a different path in her training.)
Rae is no stranger to the door to the Halls of the Ancestors. Too many times she's been here, stepping up to the door between the planes when the storm of the battle overwhelms her. Too many times she’s stood here feeling all too small before the dark, heavy door.
It's almost routine, by now, to feel the cool winds that beckon her from the other side and to hear the whispered voices carried on it. Sometimes it’s the deep, craggy voice of Master Tyrax, “Get back up and fight, hatchling. Those jackals aren’t going to punch themselves.”
Others whisper to her in a tongue she only remembers in dreams and lullabies, urging her to open the door to get to see her birth family once again.
Too many times she's reached out her hand to push the door open, the ancient wood of it oddly warm under her touch, only to turn away and rejoin the fight in the Living Lands, called back by the voices of her friends and the steady beat of her own heart.
This time when she finds herself at the door...this time is different. The voices call to her from the other side of the door, appealing to her to join them on the other side. There is peace, they say, a reprieve from the pain that wracks her unconscious body. A chance to rest and put her fists down for once.
“Leave the storm behind," whispers the sonorous voice of the one she'd called Grandfather Tairneanach, long since gone from this plane. He speaks to her in Giant, a thunderous tongue even in whispers that speaks closest to her heart. “Open the door and be at peace.”
The beat of her heart grows louder in her ears as everything else fades away. Louder...and slower.
A beat, and she's at the threshold of the door again.
Another beat, and she presses her hand against the door as she slumps to the ground.
A third beat, and the last breath is pushed from her lungs with a small, pained sigh.
Then nothing. Not even silence.
The door opens.
Light floods her vision. Lacking the strength to shield her eyes, she squeezes them shut against the sudden onslaught of radiance, but not before she catches a fleeting glance of bronze scales.
“The battle is still on, and you’re just lying here?” a deep voice growls.
"Master…Tyrax?" The sound pushes out of her in sheet astonishment. She forces one eye open to see the craggy face of a bronze Dragonborn in simple brown robes looming over her, a twinkle in his ancient eyes despite the stern tone.
“Get up, Rae. You’re not out of the fight yet.” He crouches down, holding out a clawed, scaly hand to her.
“I’m not strong enough,” she says in a voice as small as she feels, not feeling up to taking his hand.
“Strength has nothing to do with it, child.”
“Then why do I keep on ending up here?” The question bursts out of her before she can stop it. And suddenly she’s just so, so tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of losing. Tired of being small in a world of problems that are all so much bigger than her. It would be so, so easy to pass right through the door and leave it all behind…wouldn’t it?
“You think strength resides here?” A single clawed finger reaches out and pushes against her arm. “You lived too long among the giants, hatchling. Big brutes throwing their weight around. Impressive, I’ll grant you, but not strength.”
“My family is strong! So much stronger than me!” She bursts out, pushing herself up to her feet out of sheer indignation. Before she can even think, her fists are raised.
“It’s not a slight against those that raised you. But they aren’t strong like you could be, if only you knew it.”
“You’re not making sense, Master.” She lowers her fists. Not even death can stop him from talking in riddles, it seems.
“No? Think of it this way. You can be big and stomp all over those smaller than you. But that’s not being strong. Strength comes from within. It’s learning how to be yourself and to use the gifts you already have, not trying to be something you’re not. You are nimble. You are swift. You’ve something of the storm about you from your family, but you haven’t yet learned to bring it within yourself and truly use it.”
Rae frowns. The storm comes as naturally to her as breathing, and she’s used it plenty of times. But Master Tyrax wouldn’t be telling her this without reason. “I think….” She starts, then trails off and looks down at her hands. Small sparks of electricity gather in her palms, almost without her thinking about it. She presses her fingers down into her palm and the sparks travel up her arm toward her core where they mix and dance with the ki that resides there.
When she looks back up at Master Tyrax, he’s looking at her expectantly, just like he always used to.
“I can get stronger if I take what I have from my family and what I learned from you and put them together?” As she says it, it clicks into place, the piece she’s been missing. A sudden wave of energy flows restlessly within her, dragging her out of her stupor.
“You’re on your way to understanding, little one.” He beams at her proudly. “Never forget that you have a bit of the dragon in you, too. It’s why I agreed to train you in the first place.”
“I still haven’t beaten a dragon, though,” Rae says, unable to help the wistful sigh that escapes her. “I got really close once, but then a robot got it instead.”
Master Tyrax chuckles, a low and rough rumble from somewhere deep in his chest. “You’ll get your dragon one day, hatchling. But before then, I have one last thing for you.” He reaches out and gently presses a scaled palm against her forehead. A sudden pulse of energy flows through her, adding to the restless flow dancing through her before settling uneasily into her lungs. “I gift you the Breath of the Dragon.” He pauses, then adds, “Try not to set too many things on fire with it. Your guildmates won’t appreciate you bringing the place down around their heads.”
She grins up at him. “I’ll do my best. Thank you, Master.” On impulse, she throws her arms around him. She barely comes up to his waist, but he stoops down to return the hug.
“Be well, Rae. We’ll see each other again some day, but not for a long, long time.”
hiya everybody! I haven't been super active lately, for a few main reasons (especially for the last couple months) xD
First one being, I've been working on my new comic since July, which has taken a lot of my time and since I've been prioritizing that, I've not worked on new art that I could upload regularily.
But also, I am now 1/3 through the inking process! I'm hoping to be done with this by january!! (if life doesn't get in the way lol)
The second reason is, I had to get a job to pay the bills and I've had to get used to said job and trying to find a proper... work/work/life balance that let's me also work on art and my comic at a decent pace, while not leaving me completely dead. Still working on that one x'D
Third one is, a market I was on recently got hit by a pretty bad storm (as in "evacuate the pubblic" and "several of the tents, along with their stocks, ended up in the trees" level of bad) and although I wasn't hit as hard as other sellers, I did lose a significant amount of stock on top of having to replace some of my market gear. I'm glad it happened after I had just acquired the security of a paying job, but it still sucks a lot. (and insurances being what they are, I only got a laughable amount paid back... tho it's still better than nothing at all)
Sooooo... yeah. little life update I guess xD A mix of good and a bit less good. Updates and new art might remain a bit sparse, as I want to focus on the comic.
(cw: heavy themes including slavery, implied torture, and trauma)
Someone should check on the commander, Ashley had said to him after something had happened on the docks. Someone, meaning Kaidan, he’d understood. As for the something….
No one could tell him exactly what had happened, just that Shepard had told the crew to take the rest of the day as shore leave before disappearing into the bowels of the Citadel.
And somehow, he knew just where she’d be.
Chora’s Den was, as always, a headache waiting to happen. The too-loud music, the dull red lights, and the crush of people filtering around the dingy club had already settled in behind his eyes, causing a dull throb to form in his head by the time he found Shepard.
She was sitting at a corner table, staring straight past the asari dancer writhing on the platform in front of her. Two drinks, a pint glass and a shot glass, sat on her table, both completely full. Condensation gathered and dripped down the side of the pint glass, puddling on the table, suggesting it had been sitting there untouched for some time.
He approached cautiously, not sure how to even greet her like this, but she saved him the trouble.
“Williams sent you to check up on me?” She asked, before he even realized she’d seen him. She just continued staring straight ahead. He settled in next to an empty chair at her table.
“You had her pretty rattled. Figured I should just check to see you’re alright.” And he could see exactly what had Ashley so concerned. For all that Shepard was in the midst of a lively sea of people, she might as well have been alone on a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere. And Kaidan couldn’t shake the sense that something dark stirred restlessly just beneath that thin ice.
“You mean you drew the short straw.” She didn’t even look at him, just mechanically picked up the pint glass, brought it up to her lips, and set it back down without actually taking a sip.
“Something like that.” Kaidan hovered near the empty chair. Sitting felt too comfortable, too informal for whatever Shepard was wrestling with. The asari dancer looked over her shoulder at him, expectantly, and cleared her throat pointedly, prompting him to take the chair anyway. Shepard’s eyes flicked over to him, dull and uninterested in either the dancer or him. She brought up her omni-tool and sent a tip to the dancer, who nodded and continued her rhythmic undulations in an entirely business-like manner.
Shepard was silent for a long time. Kaidan simply waited. Waited for her to say something. To tell him to fuck off. To something.
Then, finally, she spoke.
“There was a girl on the docks. Talitha. Talitha Abbott.”
“Who was she?” Kaidan asked, quietly, gently. Her eyes flicked over to him again, this time seeming to actually notice him.
“What do you know about Mindoir?” She asked after another uncomfortably long silence.
“Mindoir? It’s one of the frontier colonies, out near the Terminus systems.” He racked his brain, trying to remember what he knew of it. “It got hit by a batarian raid pretty hard a while back, I think. Early 70’s?” There was something else, something that stood just outside his recollection. The dull ache in his head was making it hard to think.
“April 17, 2170,” she said, her voice completely devoid of inflection. “She was a survivor of the raid, if you can call it survival. Watched her parents die right in front of her eyes, along with everyone she ever knew or loved. They took her and kept her as a slave for thirteen years.”
Shepard remained entirely expressionless, but Kaidan couldn’t help wincing. Protecting frontier colonies from dangers like batarian slave raids was one of the core duties of the Alliance. He’d seen the aftermath of such raids before. It was never pretty.
And after thirteen years….
“How’d she get here on the Citadel?”
“Rescued. Then she escaped from her rescuers. She…dissociated. Couldn’t deal with what happened to her.” There was a catch in Shepard’s voice. A slight stumble, the tiniest hint of vulnerability. Kaidan started to reach for her, unthinkingly, but forced his hand back down to his side once he realized what he was doing.
“Shepard, what happened on the docks?” He asked quietly. The throbbing in the back of his head was growing. The longer he stayed in Chora’s Den the worse the ensuing migraine would be, he knew, but he had to stay. Had to know what had sent a hardened soldier like Shepard fleeing like this.
“She’s…sedated. Safe. But….” Shepard reached for the shot glass in front of her, her hand shaking ever so slightly, and quickly downed the amber liquid in it in one gulp. “Mindoir was my home, too.”
She set the shot glass upside down on the table, got up, and left, leaving Kaidan alone in stunned silence.
Short, angsty ficlet inspired by a prompt on the Kaidan subreddit
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The well stood in the middle of the apple orchard, ancient and immortal, built from river stones and a rough, patchy mortar that had been holding fast since long before his family ever set foot on the land. Equally ancient were the boards that covered the top of the well. Once, they’d probably been fresh and fragrant with that applewood smell that filled the orchard every spring. Now they were dark, covered in moss and ivy and ripe with the smell of decay that wafted up from the depths of the well.
There was a legend about the well in the orchard.
Or so his cousins told him, in tales whispered late at night around the orange glow of his oldest cousin’s omni-tool. A girl drowned there, cousin Lissa had told him in a conspiratorial tone, the kind that, at age eight, Kaidan understood to mean it wasn’t a tale for adult ears. Her parents boarded up the well after she died and she’s been there ever since. Don’t ever, ever, go in the orchard at night or she’ll drown you, too.
It had been a thrill to be deemed old enough to be a part of the Conspiracy of the Well. Less so when Lissa snuck out and called to him through his window in the middle of the night. Come out and plaaaaay, Kaidan. Come play in the well with me.
“Your cousins tell you the haunted well story, son?” his father asked him the next day, noticing his unnerved state. When he’d nodded, his father sighed. “I guess it’s an Alenko family tradition by now. My brothers and cousins did the same to me,” he said, which didn’t make Kaidan feel any better.
“There’s no dead girl in the well?” he’d asked. Adults like to be comforting, he knew, even if they had to lie to do it, and he was in no mood for comforting lies.
“Never was. Your uncles and I pried the boards off when we were kids to look down in there when we decided to find out for ourselves. Nothing but dirt and some rodents down there. Best we can tell it was boarded up when the well went dry.”
Nonetheless, Kaidan shivered with a deep, atavistic fear at the thought of opening up the well and looking down that dark, endless void held back by those boards.
But years later, at seventeen, Kaidan found himself sitting on the edge of the well, staring down that deep, dark abyss that echoed with the breeze whistling through the branches of the trees around him, so lost in thought he didn’t even hear the footsteps crunching through the leaves of the orchard.
“There you are, son,” his father said, shining a flashlight on him and startling him out of his reverie. “Your mother’s been looking for you. She said you missed dinner.”
Kaidan nodded slowly, never really taking his eyes off the well. “I just…needed to go somewhere to think.” The words echoed down the well and back up, temporarily drowning the tempest of his own thoughts.
“You took the boards off.” His father nodded at the pile of wood next to the well. Kaidan shrugged. He hadn’t really planned to. Hadn’t even planned to come here at all. But once he’d seen it, it just made sense. The wood was so soft he’d barely even scraped his hands prying it up.
“Guess I had to find out for myself,” he replied.
“It’s a bit dark out here,” his father observed. “Not much to see.”
Again, Kaidan shrugged. How could he explain that it wasn’t about seeing? That, on some level, he’d wanted his father’s assurances from long ago to be a comforting lie, to believe that there were some truths he could still find shelter from?
“Kaidan,” his father said gently, and this time he looked up to meet his eyes. “You take all the time you need, son. I’ll be here for you. You want to take a look down, I’ll shine the light down for you. You want to walk away, I’ll walk with you. I’ll tell your mother dinner can wait.”
Kaidan swallowed hard and slowly nodded. “Thanks, Dad. I…thanks.”
It was a long time before either of them spoke again, before Kaidan picked himself up and walked away from the well. But his father was there with him, every step of the way.
