Maybe giving Rea her space was for the best for now. While it was clear that she was in need of help, now was not the time.
He trudged off towards the armory, thoughts of his squad swirling around in his head. He had meant it when he said he wasn’t sure where home was now and for the first time he allowed himself to think about what would happen to himself after this was all done. Would he go to Rannoch? Surely there would be reprimands from Admiralty considering the choices he made before. Would they exile him? Maybe he would go to Thessia… though most everyone that he knew from his time there was dead. Still it felt more like home than the fleet had. Would Rea be with him after all of this? Of course she wouldn’t. She would have her own family and friends to return to and there would be no reason for her need Rothan. After all they had only just met. Still, why did he want to be with her after this so much?
When he at last reached the armory, he concentrated on the task at hand. Most of the stock was low now but it was clear that the Avenger rifle was not going to cut it anymore. He eventually settled on a Tempest SMG and a Phalanx pistol. Both weapons would free Rothan up to use his biotics more.
“Good choice.”
Rothan whipped around to the source of the voice: Rea. She smiled warmly at Rothan perhaps amused with his shock at her presence.
“I thought you—“
“I just stopped in to say hi,” Rea explained. “Besides, they said it would take an hour to get me my armor. Quite frankly we can’t wait that long. So I decided to jumpstart to process.”
“Well lets get you a fresh set of armor then,” Rothan said. “Unless you want to fight the Reapers in your pajamas.”
“No thank you,” Rea laughed.
Rea moved past him towards the arms officer. A minute later they were outfitting Rea in a fresh set of armor.
While he waited, Rothan remembered the scar running down Rea’s back. At first he had been worried that this was some sort of recent injury, perhaps even brought on by Rea’s recent experience in the underground, but it became clear that his was an old scar. Most people after they become wounded to that degree undergo a dermal regeneration procedure. It’s is a simple procedure and usually removes all trace of blemish. Some people, mercs or Krogan mostly, elect to leave their scars, bearing them as badges of pride. Yet Rea did not strike Rothan as the type of person who would keep scars for this reason.
Rea at last returned in a new set of armor. All the pads were free of scuffs, and it shined in the dim light. Clearly it had not seen a single battle.
“Better?” Rothan asked, eyeing her carefully as she finished clasping herself into her suit.
“Better.” She nodded. Again, Rothan knew that was not the complete truth and it pulled at his conscience. How long would he let this continue?
Rothan and Rea headed out of the armory. It would appear that they would be getting a lift by gunship to the rendezvous point. It would not be Rothan’s first choice. Gunships were highly visible, drew lots of attention, and therefore a lot of fire. But considering how time was of the essence now, he would not debate the decision.
A small collection of gunships were positioned in an area outside of the central area of the camp. It took them only a minute to get there.
“I guess this is it,” Rea said eyeing the gunship. A second later, the cockpit door opened, revealing a single Alliance pilot.
“You must be the two Lawson was talking about,” he said as he plopped out of the shuttle. “The name’s Rhys, Private Jacob Rhys.” He had to be young, perhaps even Rothan's age. He adjusted his blond hair slightly as he wiped sweat from his brow.
Rea and Rothan seemed a little taken aback by the designation. The looked to each other both questioning being flown into the hottest warzone on earth by this young soldier.
“Private?” Rea asked.
“You see anybody else jumping to fly you guys into the heart of no man’s land?” Rhys said.
Rothan hadn’t considered that. With Hammer already stretched thin, Rhys was probably the last person available with the requisite piloting skills.
“Sit yourselves down,” Rhys said as he drew his tool box out of the cockpit. “We’ll be airborne is a jiffy.”
Rothan and Rea turned to each other, but looking a little glib, but it wasn’t as if they did not know what they had to do. They took seats on some crates bordering the area while Rhys set to work on the gunship.
Rothan sighed. “Looks like were heading back out.”
“No, rest for the weary, right?” Rea said with a slight smile.
This time Rothan couldn’t just let it go. “You’re doing it again,” he said, levelly looking into Rea’s eyes.
She glanced away momentarily. “Doing what?”
“Hiding something,” he responded. “Rea…I know something’s wrong.”
“Rothan—“
“Please, let me finish,” he interrupted. “I want you to join your mind to mine again. There’s something I want you to see.”
Rothan knew what he was asking. He was asking Rea to share a part of herself with him. Ordinarily that was an intimate gesture, something reserved for close friends or even lovers, but it was clear to Rothan that he needed to do this.
Rea seemed a little confounded by Rothan’s words.
“Please… we don’t have much time.” Rothan said.
She shifted uncomfortably as she nodded and drew near to him. Her hands drifted to his arms, clasping them as she looked intently into his visor. Her eyelids fell closed. “Embrace eternity.” She whispered as she opened her eyes.
The sensation of their joining hit him like a shock at first, but Rothan quickly gained his composure. He remembered how Rea had selectively shown him some of her memories and he figured he could do the same. Carefully he began to recall the memories swirling all about him, and when the initial shock of the joining had ended, everything was dark.
Rea was standing with him in the darkness and he could tell she was a little apprehensive.
“What are we looking at?” Rea asked him.
A light penetrated the darkness, an omnitool at the source. Slowly everything else became clear. The tunnel walls. Rothan at the source of the beam. They were in the underground again.
“This is when I was on my way to you,” Rothan said to Rea as they watched himself in his memories.
A second later they saw him whip around to shine his light on A.Q.
“Easy! It’s me!” A.Q said.
Rea looked down, and Rothan could sense she was ruefully remembering the Misfit.“A.Q…”
Rothan and A.Q. argued in his memory for a minute, debating whether or not she could come with Rothan on his possibly suicidal mission. Then A.Q. moved onto her list, the very thing that convinced Rothan to let her join him.
“Lily. Carson. Matty. Jake. Salim. Fiona. Trev. Myrtle took them. All of them. You think for a second that I’m going to leave these tunnels with out doing something about that, you are sadly, ****ing mistaken.”
Then Rothan handed her the belt of grenades, the same grenades that she had used to end Myrtle’s life and her own.
A minute later, they were moving out toward the maintenance shaft that would carry them to Rea, to Myrtle, and ultimately A.Q.’s death.
Rothan turned to Rea as he watched himself leave. “I think… I think A.Q. wanted to die.”
“What do you mean?” Rea asked.
“I think once you’ve experience enough pain, and you see that same thing hurting the people love, you want it all just to end, no matter what the cost,” Rothan said. “I think that’s why she went with me.” He let his head fall to the ground. “If I had realized that sooner, maybe I could have helped her. Maybe I could have found a way to defeat Myrtle without her dying.”
“But you said you thought she wanted to die,” Rea said. “If she wanted do die so badly, could you have even stopped her? Would it have been right?”
“Of course it would have been right,” Rothan said, indignant. “There were people who depended on her. The Misfits. They loved her. What she did saved them, but it was also selfish. She deprived them of the greatest gift she could give to them. Herself.”
Rea didn't know what to say. “Rothan…”
“There’s more,” He said.
The scene before them shifted, dissintigrating into a sort of fog before coalescing once more. No longer were they in the dark tunnels of the underground bit in the enclosed bulkheads aboard the Ketsa.
Rea took her time to look around. The small space that they were in had been the room Rothan shared with his sister Chendra. Two cots were squeezed into the narrow room and a younger Rothan sat hunched on one of them, intently viewing a terminal screen.
“What’s this?” Rea asked as she watched the younger Rothan.
“What I did with my free time after my biotics manifested,” Rothan explained. “The admiralty was still divided on what to do with me, but it was clear that my place would no longer be onboard the Ketsa’s engineering deck. I didn’t have many friends, so I spent the majority of the time researching element zero. Trying to understand what had happened to me.”
“You mean how you got your biotics,” She said.
“Did you know that thirty seconds of exposure to a minor level of element zero is enough to kill you?” Rothan asked. “The event that I was exposed to lasted for five minutes.”
“I’d say you were very lucky then,” Rea said.
“Lets think about that for a second,” Rothan said as he looked at his younger self. “Not only did I get lucky by surviving the exposure, my mother survived as well. I was born without birth defects commonly associated with eezo exposure. Later in life there were no long term complications from my exposure, and I hit the one in a million jackpot of not only manifesting biotics, but useable biotics. The last Quarian who manifested biotics before me could hardly move a cup across a table, and that was with a biotic amp.”
The memory before them hazed over, rearranging itself into a new memory. They were still on the Ketsa but a different place, a different time. They were in a shuttle bay on the Ketsa. Before them, Rea and Rothan could see Rothan’s family saying their goodbyes to a younger Rothan, bound for Thessia.
Frola drew her son into an embrace. “Do well out there.”
Rothan didn’t know what to say to that. He simple managed a nod over his mother’s shoulder, their embrace ended.
There were few words to be said. Rothan’s family knew what was required of every quarian, but the pilgrimage was supposed to happen on different terms.
Rothan turned to Rea as his family continued saying their goodbyes. “I think they were disappointed. My dad had spent years tutoring me on the inner workings of ship engines. The hope was that during my pilgrimage I would bring back something of that nature.”
“But once your biotics manifested, that was no longer a possibility,” Rea said.
“Yes,” Rothan said. “This was bittersweet for everyone. I felt like I had somehow failed my parents. They weren’t sure if they should be happy for me or not.”
In the memory, Chendra stepped forward to embrace Rothan and he bent down to hug her. Despite a seven year age difference, they were always close. Now, Rothan was just glad that his family had been selected for a second child, as it was all too likely he would not be returning. Chendra cracked a joke, which ellicted a small giggle from Rothan, but that was it. Their embrace ended.
“At the time though,” Rothan told Rea, “I wanted it to be over. Everything that mattered to me had been taken from me. I could no longer return to the life I had. After I completed my training, I would join the Quarian military and serve there until I no longer could. It wasn’t fair. But my perspective changed…”
The memory faded to dust, swirling in the dark around them.
“In the fleet, everything we do must benefit the people,” Rothan said. “There are so few of us that we must fight for the survival of the whole. I didn’t realize that fully until I met Reiza and the others. Until I learned what it was like to depend on someone so completely and have them depend on you in return.”
Rea watched as the fog churned once more, turning a steely blue and settling once more. The ruined streets of London sat before them.
“Don’t shoot!” A voice called.
The memory finally settled, revealing Arkeer and Rea with their weapons trained on Rothan who held his arms in the air.
“When we first met,” Rea said.
Rothan nodded as he watched the exchange. Arkeer and Rea dropped their weapons as Rothan explained his situation.
“I was lost, alone, and scared,” Rothan said to Rea. “I didn’t know it yet, but everyone… my squad was gone. Then you came.” Rothan looked to Rea. Slowly she looked back. In their joined state she could feel every bit of emotion he was giving off. He was deeply troubled, she could tell, but there was more. Suddenly they were no longer playing attention to the memory playing out in front of them.
“You found me, helped me,” Rothan said. “I don’t know where I would be now if that hadn’t happened.”
The memory collapsed before them, three more springing up in its place, all of Rothan’s time with Rea, and they began to swirl around them.
“But it is more than that,” he explained. “You helped me in more ways than just that. I’ve come to depend on you in ways that I never expected.”
Rea was puzzled by it all, but the weight of emotion present here… she could feel it, the intensity of it. More memories arose, joining those already swirling around them in a cloud, as if all of Rothan was on display for Rea. At the rate they were moving, Rea could only glean feelings and emotions, gaining a sense of who Rothan was. It was almost overwhelming.
Though it hadn’t been his intention to recall this much, he could no longer control it. He could feel tears stinging his eyes and he wondered for moment if that was happening for real or within their joining. Either way, he tried to hold them back as he spoke, “When you depend on someone that much, you don’t just let them go. You do everything you can possibly do for them. That’s why I came for you.”
Even though he could feel Rea’s mind on his own, he couldn’t feel how she flet about any of this. It was as if there was some sort of wall preventing that, and its very existence was troubling to Rothan.
He moved forward toward her, taking her hand in his. “I don’t know what the future has in store for us, but I can’t let you clock out on me. I’m here for you. You can depend on me.”
Rea’s brow furrowed, a mixture of many emotions crossing her face. Relief. Hope. Sorrow. Anguish.
“I’m not letting go,” Rothan said. “We’re seeing this through together… because the thought of doing it any other way… is unbearable.
The memories swirled in a blur around them, coalescing and churning. Rothan’s tightened his grip on Rea’s hand. The memories whisked together, clashing in one focal point before them, issuing forth an eruption of light. Rothan and Rea both shield their eyes at first but then looked into the light.
Two figures stood in the light staring back: An Asari and a Quarian standing hand in hand. While it felt like examining the memories as they had before, this was different. It felt like something both of them had not experienced yet.
They light continued to grow and expand, soon overtaking Rothan and Rea, sending the world crashing around them.
In an instant, they were returned to the real world. They were still seated on the crates but their position had changed slightly. Rea’s hands were firmly in Rothan’s as they had been inside of the joining. The familiar sounds of distant battle and shuffling soldiers returned. Even Rhys working on the gunship.
Rothan looked to Rea as she looked to him. Tears were forming in her eyes as she stared back. She bit her lip as she looked as if he she didn’t know what to say, and now no longer joined, Rothan couldn’t glean the slightest hint of what she was thinking.
“Rothan…” she said at last.
“You’re the two they brought in about the missiles?” A voice called, interrupting.
Rothan and Rea’s hands immediately parted as they turned to see a woman approaching them. She wore a white jumpsuit, certainly not Alliance standard issue, but her poise and her all-business icy stare told Rothan that she had military training.
“Yes,” Rea said hesitantly.
“My name is Miranda Lawson,” she introduced.
“Rea Iallis,” Rea said with a brief wave. “This here is Rothan’Vells Nar Ketsa.”
Rothan looked down for a moment. Everything that had just happened was just so overwhelming. Still, the name Lawson… Where had he heard that name before? Meanwhile, Rea explained the situation as best she could. She told Miranda of how they came upon the fallen squad, Captain Grelk, and how they split up, though strategically avoiding the events of the underground.
“We could tell they were modified,” Rea explained. “But none of us were demolitions experts. We just knew that they were important and needed to get to a vantage point.”
Then Rothan chimed in. “They were still on their way to the rendezvous point when I left. I gave them a launch sequence for a mounted ML-77 model.”
“It won’t work,” Miranda said as she moved back to the gunship.
Rothan and Rea both got up to follow. He searched her face for any sign of a response to what he had just shown her. She gave him a hesitant look before looking back to the gunship.
Luckily Miranda and Rhys both did not seem to notice. Miranda pulled up her omnitool, calling up a display of the battlefield. The map showed the location of the reaper destroyer, Commander Shepard, as well as the locations of other missile squads. “If we’re going to bring down a Reaper with ground based artillery like those missiles, its going to required precise timing and targeting. More precise than any person can manage.” Miranda explained. “The rigs were modified with targeting transmitters. All the missiles were going to be targeted and fired through the Normandy’s targeting system.”
“Normandy?” Rea asked. “The SSV Normandy? Commander Shepard’s ship?”
“Right,” Miranda nodded. “A similar tactic was used when the Quarians brought down a reaper on Rannoch, only they were coordinating a orbital strike from the flotilla. We can’t be sure how much firepower it will take to bring the destroyer down. That’s why we need every missile operational.”
Rothan heard about the situation on Rannoch only briefly. His people had gone through with their plans to attack the Geth. But there were only rumors of Reaper involvement. Miranda seemed to be confirming those rumors and for a brief moment, Rothan’s heart began to race. The last time he had heard from his family was before the retaking of Rannoch.
But he quickly surpressed the anxiety. There were more pressing issues. Like the missiles. And Rea.
“I need you to take me to your rendezvous point,” Miranda said. “I can program the uplink, but we have to hurry. Last I heard about the commander’s progress, he had nearly reached the Thanix batteries.”
Rea gave a polite nod. “Then I guess we have no time to waste.”
“Indeed,” she said. “How long on the gunship Rhys?”
“Minutes away,” he called from the other side of the gunship.
Rothan looked to Rea once more. “No rest for the weary,” Rothan said lightly, using Rea’s own words.
“I have to grab some gear,” Miranda told them. “You two can go ahead.”
Rea nodded to Miranda as she headed off then looked back to Rothan. “Someday there will be.”
“What?”
“Rest for the weary.” She clarified. “And I hope that whenever that day comes, we’re together.”
Then Rea pulled herself into the gunship.
Modifié par Khambilo, 04 septembre 2013 - 03:05 .
Retour en haut
