Night Without Stars [Vakarian]
@all-around-turian-bad-boy
Alice was a liar. She had been a liar for as long as she could form thought in any coherent manner. She lied to herself, first, when she suggested that her parents would come back. She lied to everyone when she made up stories – where they were, who they were, when they would return – and even when she claimed the name ‘Shepard’. She couldn’t remember her last name, younger than three when her parents disappeared. In truth, she couldn’t claim that she had ever met them – one or both – as she had only the faintest recollection of a memory of a scent, and the color blue.
Alice had gone through much of her life without a last name, in fact. It wasn’t until she wandered into a library, not looking to learn but finding the desire to regardless, and they requested her last name for her library card. She was sure she had one, but she couldn’t remember – so she made a quick, subtle scan of her surroundings. Books everywhere, names of authors mostly too far to read.
She saw a sheep dancing along the cover of one of the children’s picture books towards a man with hair like hers holding a curved staff and scribbled down how she thought the word sounded. She had no formal education and only mildly more training; at nine, she could read but only barely and her handwriting would forever be atrocious.
The girl lied so much that she got better at it; she talked her way into school, briefly. She made excuses for her parents that didn’t exist, or if they did they didn’t matter. She had spent so many years devouring every book at the library; she knew plenty but didn’t know how to do a lot of the things that a formal education would have given to her. Her informal education of all things street gave her little patience for formulas or tests and so she disappeared three weeks after enrolling herself in the institute of learning she had chosen.
Alice was a smart girl, or more she was a clever girl. She may not have known the Pythagorean Theorem, how to spell ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, the chemical compound that made up water, or who led what revolution when. But she knew how to charm a snake, she knew how to talk around questions she didn’t want to answer, she knew how to shoot a pistol, and she knew how to pickpocket. She knew a few other things, but best not to put all of one’s cards on the table right away.
The thing she struggled the most with at first was the blue glow at the edge of her vision, which grew into a sort of humming in her head. One morning, when she was still very young, her vision shifted and all she could see were dots. Her eyes focused on the dots faded but were still there, though not really. Her mind was projecting what her body felt; nodes of Element Zero encasing reality around her. When Alice realized she was a biotic, she didn’t actually know that word or what it meant. She spent a goodly portion of her young life trying both to hide and control the pulsing in her nerves.
As an orphan discarded with the morning newspaper, Alice had no papers – no form of identification. She wasn’t sure if she had even been registered as a person at any point in her life. She found a guy that knew a guy that knew someone that could get her papers. She organized their payment and swung her feet over the concrete edge of a broken Earth building while she waited. She was just shy of sixteen then, but when the beanpole of a guy settled down beside her at their meeting spot and slid a manila envelope under her thigh, she wasn’t any more.
“Why’d you want to age up?” he asked, voice reminiscent of an old New Jersey accent.
“What’s it to you?” Alice’s face pinched in irritation. “I paid you, didn’t I?”
“Shit, kid. It’s just that most women want to be younger.”
“Gotta be eighteen to do anything on or off this stupid planet,” Alice grimaced, heel kicking back against the concrete and bouncing off again. “You sure this is legit, Sam? I can’t risk it.”
His eyes narrowed and he rubbed his forehead a little head cocked to the side. “You paid for the best. You keep your cool and tone down on the ‘stupid’, you’ll pull it off. Whatever it is you intend to pull off, that is.”
Alice jumped down, landing on the ground in a cloud of dust, and reached back for the envelope with one hand and waved with the other. It glowed blue, just briefly, and she smiled like a shark. “It had better.”
It worked. She thought it worked partially because she had studied other recruits for days, hanging around the military station to watch their movements, their actions, and their words. When she strutted into the office and offered herself as a recruit, the woman behind the counter barely batted an eye when she claimed she was eighteen.
Their willingness to take her may or may not have been relevant to the discovery of her biotic abilities; she knew she was special or something, but she didn’t know it was that big of a deal. She was terrified and angry when they told her about the implant. She hated the way she itched after they put it in. She felt chained and that feeling didn’t fade, even when she made it to the Citadel a year later.
It was difficult for Alice not to stare, wide-eyed at the aliens on the space station. She had been fighting the urge to gape out the porthole of the ship her entire trip to the Citadel. She took hurried glances at the stars around her whenever she was sure no one was looking.
When offered a few spare minutes to herself before reporting to the Alliance barracks, she stood slack-jawed at one of the many too-high windows in the Presidium. She was in a relaxed uniform, the black-blue pants on her lower half clearly Alliance and the gray t-shirt obscured slightly on the front by her dog tags and the back by her mass of bright red hair. She had enough time to gape at the stars before she scampered off to put on full uniform and be prepared for her first evening on the base.
“Look at me now,” she smirked to herself, lifting a freckled hand to push hair away and back. She was fortunate and happy to know that she could keep her hair, as long as it was kept up in a regulation hairdo while in uniform. She was disappointed, however, that she could not continue to paint her nails until she made a higher rank. In a year of training, development of her abilities, and adjusting to the L3 implant that itched at the base of her neck, Alice had made Private 1st class. It was still a far cry from her dream of Admiral, but she wasn’t upset. Yet. Without Sam’s help to fudge an education history, she would’ve started at a great disadvantage – her lack of formal schooling could have been her undoing but she had had a lucky break, with the years spent in a library and the type of testing they provided to discern one’s aptitude.
Alice let out a sigh and relaxed her shoulders, lifting her hands to set them on the metal railing in front of her. She leaned over, balancing almost all of her weight on it and almost pressing her face to the glass. Her body, short and thin from being at first underfed and then from the exercise of keeping up with those in her class, balanced precariously on long-fingered hands. She had heard a lot of things throughout her years and was surprised at how closely the barracks on Earth resembled the streets in the prejudice against curves. She had no business in uniform, she had heard; she would be better served on a pole with a figure like that. She convinced herself the men and women of that opinion were merely jealous. And she was too happy that it all worked out to care.
“Damn beautiful,” she grinned, speaking entirely to herself and not caring a fig if anyone overheard her.