#i feel like Sloane’s siphon powers could ‘cure’ it no ??

[shea-like-the-butter]

I ~railed~ Iron Flame in like 2days 🥲

[thedaselcor]

March 31, 2178

En Route

Sloane kept watch at the engine room threshold, ensuring Ryder wasn’t interrupted. It was odd, learning all the quiet parts of Ryder’s life—the things they kept folded beneath the surface. Even after Ryder’s big biotic reveal, they had never struck her as a particularly private person. Ryder lived so much more openly and loudly than Sloane had ever known a person could. Part of it was that they were always game to be as open about their relationship as Sloane was comfortable with, or to share their actual feelings with people, or relate at that quiet and genuine level that requires people to connect… But there were always more layers.

At first, she noticed in all the ways Ryder passed as not-biotic—all the microscopic movements and change of expression no one else ever really saw. Then, she’d seen it in Ryder’s control, in their measure. They’d always kept their shit together in unbearable ways, but when she’d learned that Ryder could get drunk, but intentionally killed the buzz by the same process they did anything biotic, and when she’d seen Ryder with their father, it had become something different.

She’d thought she had the whole picture, finally, when they’d cummed for her on Intai’sei, and when they’d let themself dream near her—when she’d seen who Ryder was when they weren’t in control. But now… she was seeing Ryder vulnerable, even fragile.

Ryder had attached a tube to the omni-gel converter in the engine room and siphoned it in a way that betrayed how frequent the practice must have been—how many times they’d managed their various implants and enhancements in secret from the world, probably without someone watching their back. Ryder slipped the tube in through the shunt on their hip, their face never betraying how much omni-gel must fucking hurt going in. They breathed out, only slightly unsteady.

“You never told me,” Sloane started, hoping to be a welcome distraction. “I know your sub-Q isn’t powering some anti-drunk software, and I assume you didn’t get it put in just as some sort of backup omni-tool supply reserve thing so…”

“Why do I have it?” Ryder finished the thought for her, nodding knowingly. “Well…” Ryder let their thoughts wander over the whole story, something they did when they needed to figure out how to make a long, complicated explanation into something short and simple. “Most people think of eezo exposure as an either-or situation, right? So they think ‘either the kid will be biotic, or we’re talking cancer and birth defects.’ Unfortunately, it can also be an and.”

Ryder paused for a long second, adjusting their stance and the tube uncomfortably. “Both my parents were exposed to eezo, extensively. The resulting gene mutations were enough to make me the kind of biotic I am, but they also caused all kinds of fucking trouble. By the time my biotics started to manifest, most of my body was trying to kill itself. They knew I had a cancer, but they couldn’t even identify what kind with what we knew knew at the time, so I lost the ability to walk, and hear, and talk, and— anyway, by the time my lungs were giving out my dad had found out about this special kind of quarian vi from before the geth and my mom had figured out the sub-q and…” Ryder trailed off.

Sloane tried to put the pieces together as Ryder meticulously pulled the tubing out of their shunt, but couldn’t quite get there. “I think I get why you’d need the the implant—like to run the prosthetics for your legs and whatever but… the VI?”

Ryder disconnected the tube from the converter and closed the cap on their shunt. “I still have cancer. As far as I know, this one can’t be cured. My mom was already looking into the VI they’re researching for biotic amps, but it’s a really basic VI. The quarian VI is compact, and adaptive in a way that nothing we have is—it adapts to keep fighting the cancer, and I get to keep breathing.”