#the front desk clerk doesn’t know medicine but she knows when the treatment isn’t working

[libraflyter]

In my backlog of ideas, there are the succubi/psychovores who literally have this as their origin story: once upon a time the priestesses at the temple hoarded all the food during a famine when one of their number, overcome with guilt, prayed to their goddess. They received the curse/blessing to no longer require food but to feed off the happiness of their flock: ensuring they would have to prioritize the wellbeing of their flock.

Like, some succubi go for the drain the target dry/hunt for the next one method because all species always have your true monsters but MOST have their territory where it’s all about community happiness (woe betide any who threaten their people). And yeah, the ones who feed on pain or despair instead of joy end up in medical professions or related fields. Again, shitty ones might prolong suffering but the rest know that if your patient gets control of their depression, there will always be someone else who is chock full and needs a new therapist.

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

[dearophelia]

for saviours (victoria, 10,700 words)

Victoria Ryder: selections from her pre-game life. (or, @moustache-conversationalist​ asked me to talk more about Victoria, and then this happened). Also on AO3.

Warning for a physically abusive relationship in #5 (aftermath of), and it’s referenced occasionally throughout the rest. No spoilers as long as you’ve made it to the Nexus.

[Here’s the corresponding playlist]

01:  Lift Her, Pull Her

now she was smart, she grew up with this complex that the people that surrounded her seemed to expect the world

thirteen.

Glaring at the group of boys in the backyard, Victoria slams her window shut. The fresh air would be nice, but she needs to focus, and twelve boys fresh off their tenth win in a row are not going to help with focusing. The window only muffles the noise, and she screams underneath her breath. She can’t tell them to shut up - she got in trouble the last time she told him to shut up.

(“Scott’s allowed to celebrate, Victoria,” Mom said gently, but firmly, as Dad sat silent at the table, reading his email. “Just shut your window, or listen with headphones.”

Three days later, she found a set of sound-cancelling headphones on her desk. A note on top of them - you can, and you will. There was manufacturer, no label, no serial number. She tried searching, and came up with nothing. But they blocked out all noise, even thirteen year-old boys.

At breakfast the next day, Dad winked conspiratorially at her before he left for his trip.)

Her ears need a break from headphones, so she sighs, resigning herself to having to listen to muffled Rowdy Boy noises all afternoon. She rests her head in her hands, staring at the textbook in front of her.

The test is next week. If she doesn’t pass, she doesn’t get into the Academy. If she doesn’t get into the Academy, she’s stuck going to normal high school, like Scott. If she’s stuck going to normal high school, then she’s stuck going to normal university, stuck going to medical school at 21 instead of 18, stuck waiting an extra four years for her life to start the way she wants.

But the human respiratory system stands in front of her. She knows the rest - all the math, the biology, the chemistry, the physics, even the history and literature she knows they’re going to ask just to make sure she’s “well-rounded” - but the respiratory system has been tripping her up for days. It’ll be four questions on the test, if that, but she refuses to fall into that trap. She can get four questions wrong on the physiology section and still pass, but that’s four questions she has to get right somewhere else.

Her classmates may play those kinds of mathematical games, but she doesn’t.

“You can do this,” she tells herself, straightening her shoulders. “You can, and you will.”

eighteen.

Her email beeps, pulling her attention away from krogan organ redundancies. She shakes her shoulders out - she wasn’t paying much attention to the words and diagrams in front of her anyway. She is very tired.

So tired she thinks she’s hallucinating when she sees who the email’s from. Dad. She got a birthday card from him - three weeks late - but otherwise hasn’t heard from him since she was home at Christmas.

Subject: Good luck

Victoria frowns, and wonders if Mom said something to him. She hadn’t quite melted down on their last vidcall, but she came close. She’s done with written exams, but she still has interviews and practicals to finish before any of the eight medical schools she applied to will consider her acceptance. Eight interviews, eight practicals, starting in two days, over in a week.

There’s a light, a distinct end point when she can get more than two hours of sleep at a time, reboot her circadian rhythm, and take a breath without also thinking about asari reproduction, krogan headplate mechanics, dextro drug protocol, or salarian digestive systems. The light is nine days out, but it’s there, and is the only thing keeping her from sitting in the middle of her room, amidst notes and textbooks and flashcards and mismatched socks, and completely and utterly giving up.

She opens the email.

You can, and you will.

- Dad

She scrolls down. A forwarded shipping notification for new guitar strings and a pack of new picks. “How did you know?” she asks, as if her computer has any answers. Her guitar’s sitting next to her bed, untouched for two weeks since she tuned a string too hard and it broke. She rubs her left forearm, where the string had snapped against her skin; medigel had sealed the cut, and a dermal regenerator sped up the process - it’s barely even a scar now.

She checks the package tracking details; it was delivered to her Academy mailbox yesterday. She stands up, pulls on pants, throws a sweatshirt over her tank top, and shoves her feet into sneakers. It’s a good excuse for a break, maybe she’ll get some food and coffee while she’s out.

The cool night air is refreshing against her skin; she’s been inside for three days straight studying, has hardly left her room except for the bathroom and to shower. Thunder rolls quietly in the distance, and she feels rain on the air.

The walk across campus to the student center and the mailboxes is a short one, but she consciously slows her pace, taking her time. A voice inside of her yells at her to hurry up, that she needs to study and practice, but another voice yells right back: ten minutes isn’t going to make a difference, and fresh air is good for her.

She puts in an order at the café next to the center - carbonara with triple spinach and tomato, add mushrooms, no prosciutto, and a large iced black coffee - and goes to check her mail while they’re making her food. Her mailbox is empty except for the small package, and she waves at the mail clerk - a woman from her dextro pharmacology course who looks about as stressed as Victoria feels.

The rain starts as she pays for her food and drink and heads back to her room. It’s only a slight drizzle, not even enough to worry about, and she doesn’t speed up her pace until her dorm is in sight and the rain picks up.

She pauses at the door, not sure she’s ready to face her room and krogan organ redundancies again. She takes a deep breath. “I can. And I will.”

twenty-three.

It’s silly, but she keeps every acceptance email she’s ever received. From the email welcoming her to the Paris Academy of Science at age thirteen, to the eight acceptances to medical schools (though she only starred the one from Aeghor), to her internship at Shenzhou, and her residency at Tereshkova, she’s kept all of them.

And now, she’s staring at the one she’s been chasing since she was sixteen.

Dr. Victoria Ryder,

It’s my pleasure to welcome you to my xeno-obstetric fellowship. The applicant pool was remarkable, and your clear, deep passion for your work, your thesis on genophage fertility treatments, and your colleagues’ wide respect for you as a person and as a doctor made you stand out from the rest.

Congratulations. I look forward to working with you in the next years. We begin on the first of August, at Galatana Orbital Hospital.

Enjoy your summer, and I will see you then.

Sincerely,

Dr. Lauren Walsh

Victoria’s read the email no fewer than ten times since it arrived an hour ago. She almost can’t believe it. Four thousand doctors applied for this fellowship. Three were accepted. And she’s one of them. She isn’t sure whether to cry or jump up and down for joy. She settles for reading it again. It’s my pleasure to welcome you.

“Doctor Ryder to OB, code two. Doctor Ryder to OB, code two.”

Good - her patient finally went into active labor. She finishes her coffee and stands up, sending a message to the charge nurse that she heard the page and is on her way. Cracking her neck, she heads for the elevator.

While she’s waiting, Victoria reads the email once more. Ten years. She’s wanted something like this for ten years - the chance to work with a galactically-renowned doctor at the leading edges of medicine. And she’s wanted this specific chance for seven years, since Doctor Walsh spoke at a symposium her sophomore year at the Academy.

And it’s here. It’s real. It’s happening.

The elevator doors open, and she waits for the team to exit and roll out their patient before she steps in. She presses the button for Labor & Delivery.

She taps forward on the email, and types in her father’s email address. They haven’t spoken in two years, not for any reason other than crazy schedules and focused priorities. But this - even if he’s bogged down in a cave somewhere, totally surrounded with only one clip left, he’ll want to know about this.

I can. And I did. - V

The doors open, she hits send and closes her email, and steps out onto her floor, tugging her white lab coat on as she heads for her patient.

02: Icarus

look out to the future, but it tells you nothing, so take another breath

“Time of death, 14:47,” Victoria calls quietly. The room is quiet for a moment, and the low, monotone beep of a flatline heart monitor sounds like a hull breach siren. She takes a breath, and then another before stripping off her gloves. “I’ll go tell her family,” she says.

Reyat stops her at the door. “I’ll tell them,” he says gently.

Victoria looks up at her intern and shakes her head, even though she wants nothing more than to pass this responsibility off - even to a salarian intern her patient’s family has never met before. Especially to a salarian intern her patient’s family has never seen before. “She was my patient,” she says, feeling so completely still that she’s off-balance. “Thanks, but I’ll do it.” She steps around him and out into the hall as the others start to unplug machines and clean up the woman - the body.

She’s lost patients before, had to deliver this news before. But she was there from the beginning with this one - Rebecca Peters, aged 52, with her husband Steven, trying for ten desperate years to conceive before they finally made it to her office. She’d helped them through fertility treatments, through failed IVF, through experimental gene therapy. Three years of intense, constant work, and eight months ago she had the privilege of telling Rebecca she was pregnant.

Now she has to tell her husband that his wife and his unborn son are dead.

“I quit,” she says, hours later, standing in the doorway to her mentor’s office. She’s taken a shower, but she still feels gross. Exhausted. Gritty.

“Doctor Ryder,” Walsh says, looking up from her computer.

“Doctor Walsh.”

“We are not having this conversation with you in the door. Come in, please.”

Victoria shakes her head. “No, I quit.” She takes a deep breath. “I…I cannot do that again.” Obstetrics and fertility are all she knows, all she’s ever trained for, but now - now all she knows is that she can’t go through today ever again. Can’t spend three years with someone, learning everything from her favorite color (blue) to her top choices in baby names (Michael, Adrian, Oscar) to the topic of her master’s thesis (commerce standards as they relate to and enforce batarian exclusion from a galactic society) only to have them die on her operating table.

Walsh leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. Her angular eyebrows furrow together in disapproval. “You’ve been on this track since you were fourteen. What are you gonna do instead?”

“Trauma,” she says. Get in, get out, turf the patient before you learn too much. Before you care too much.

An eyebrow quirks up, briefly. “You’ll have to redo your entire surgical rotation, unless you’re thinking of quitting on surgery, too.”

“I know. And no, I’m not quitting surgery.”

“Well,” Walsh says, “at least that’s something.”

The bitter disappointment of her mentor’s tone cuts deep, and Victoria winces. “I…”

Walsh interrupts her with a sharp shake of her head. “No. You had a bad day, Ryder. You lost a patient. It sucks, but you’re a doctor - it happens. Our specialty is longer term, and you need to learn the difference between being friends, and being friendly.”

“And I’m sure as shit not going to make that mistake again,” Victoria spits out. She feels tears starting to build again, and balls her hands into fists, pressing her fingernails into her palms.

“Walk out that door if you want,” Walsh says, “I’ll even write you a recommendation for Doctor K’Taara’s program. But you are not welcome back into mine. Understand? Walk out that door, we’re done.”

She’s wanted to be a doctor since she was six. A surgeon since she was seven, an obstetrician since she was eleven. She sailed through her pre-med high school, graduated fourth in her class at medical school, made it through her internship and residency years without a single locker room meltdown, got accepted as one of Walsh’s three fellows, and was the only one invited back for a second rotation.

And now she’s twenty-six, standing in Walsh’s door, half in, half out, ready to be all out. She looks up at the ceiling, as if it holds any answers at all.

“Yeah,” she says, exhaling slowly. She looks at Walsh. “I’m done.”

With a curt nod, Walsh dismisses her. “Clean out your locker by the end of the day. You’ll have your recommendation by Friday.”

A tight, painful knot forms in her throat, and Victoria tries to swallow it down. She’s either just made the biggest mistake, or the best decision, of her life. She won’t know until a month from now, when the trauma program starts up. Maybe she’ll go home, visit Mom, hide in the basement for a while.

Victoria nods and steps backward, out of the door and into the hall.

“Doctor Ryder,” Walsh calls just as Victoria’s about to turn the corner.

Slowly, Victoria walks back to her former mentor’s office.

Walsh is the one standing in the doorway now, hand extended for a parting handshake.

“You are an incredible doctor,” she says, clasping Victoria’s hand in a firm grip. “Own it. Be the best damn trauma surgeon in the galaxy. Be terrifying.”

03: Hejira

in the church they light the candles, and the wax rolls down like tears, there’s hope and the hopelessness, I’ve witnessed thirty years

She squints up at the bright sun in the cloudless blue sky. A light breeze blows through her hair, carrying with it the scent of honeysuckle and freshly-mown grass. Birds chirp and sing cheery greetings from the trees, bees buzz about the yellow and pink flowers, and crickets chirp in the grass, as if they aren’t aware that they’re supposed to be quiet. As if they didn’t get the order for respectful silence.

She closes her eyes. Amidst the rustle of leaves and singing of birds and buzzing of bees, she hears the low murmur of mourners conveying condolences. She should be over there with them, standing between Scott and Dad, shaking hands and accepting hugs from people whose names she doesn’t remember, who she hasn’t seen since childhood - if ever. But there’s a perk to being family of the dead, and it’s the phrase it’s too much, I can’t and being able to walk away.

Too many people, too many versions of I’m sorry, she was a wonderful woman, too many hugs and handshakes and reminders that her mother is actually dead.

Dead. Gone. In the ground, now. There’s even a bouquet of daisies thrown on top of the coffin amidst the traditional roses. Mom loved daisies, and everyone else seemed to forget that.

Victoria wraps her arms around herself, cold despite the black dress and early summer sun.

She’s on day six of three weeks of bereavement leave. Her boss - the very definition of good intentions, bad execution - insisted she take the full three weeks. She’s ready to go back now. Hell, she was ready to go back four days ago, except she didn’t want to miss the funeral. Someone had to stay to put daisies in Mom’s grave.

A hand settles on her shoulder. “You okay?”

Given that Mom died and you are obviously not okay, are you okay? is what he really means.

With a deep breath, she nods. “Yeah.”

As okay as I possibly can be, which isn’t that okay at all.

She turns and looks up at Scott, squeezing his hand when he lets it drop from her shoulder. “Do you think anyone would mind if I left? I’m getting a little,” she gives him a slight grimace, and jitters her free hand. Words don’t exist to describe what she’s feeling, only the overwhelming sense that if she stays in this cemetery any longer, she’s going to break down in a way she doesn’t want her own family - much less the strangers still gathered beside the grave - to see.

“Go,” he says, pulling her in for a hug. “I’ll see you at home.”

“Thanks,” she says, and returns the hug. He walks back to the grave, and she takes a deep breath and walks toward the road.

She kicks at a pebble and waves off the driver. It’s only a mile, she’ll walk home.

Home. A place she hasn’t been back to in a way that requires more than five pairs of underwear since she was eighteen. She didn’t even live in this house - they moved in when she was sixteen. Her room has always felt less like a room, and more of an afterthought: a rather uncomfortable pull-out couch in the basement, next to a ping pong table and some home brewing equipment of Scott’s that always smells like it never quite got clean. Mom at least made sure there were flowers on the table whenever she was home, and filled the shelves nearest the couch with books and mementos and little things she had in her old room. But there wasn’t even a dresser or a closet, or really any place to unpack her belongings, until she found a set of drawers behind an old LOKI mech missing an arm and dragged it out to sit beside the pool table. Not like she actually ever unpacked, not even this time.

Fifteen more days of this. Fifteen more days of Dad locking himself away in his lab. Fifteen more days of sleeping on a crappy couch and glaring at a shower with questionable water pressure and pretending she and Scott have a clue how to talk to each other. Fifteen more days of overwhelming and ceaseless reminders that your mother is dead.

She’s going to scream. Or lose her mind. Or punch someone. Possibly all three, and not necessarily in that order.

A block from the house, her work email chirps. She glances at it - her out of office message gives her an excuse to not respond, but she likes to keep up on her inbox. She lifts an eyebrow: it’s from Reyat, her intern at Galatana Orbital, and who she hasn’t seen or heard from since she left the station three years ago. From his email address, it looks like he’s at Jaëto Immunology now. Good for him.

Subject: Thought you might be interested

Well, now she is. She walks the rest of the way to the house and sits down on the front porch steps to read his email.

Ryder;

I’m sorry to hear about your mother. I lost my father several years ago, and unfortunately I can offer no words of wisdom or quick fixes: grief is something you just have to get through. You have the strength to weather it, I know you do.

I know you’re currently running Gagarin’s second trauma team - and I’ve heard great things about you - but in case a change of scenery will help you through the grief (I know it did for me), I thought to pass on an interesting opportunity.

Dr. Mordin Solus has been running a clinic in the Gozu District of Omega for the past two years. Communication in and out of Omega is fuzzy, but he seems to be in need of a new trauma specialist. I worked with him for six months after leaving Galatana, and he’s brilliant. He’s also a little crazy, but I’d focus less on that and more on the brilliant.

A human coworker of mine told me that food is something you bring to human funerals; there should be something called a “fruit basket” arriving shortly.

I wish you well,

Reyat

As if on cue, a delivery drone zips up the driveway to the porch. Victoria signs the touchpad and lifts the large - very large - fruit basket from its compartment. “Thanks,” she says; she always feels rude not thanking them, even though they’re robots. It beeps at her and flies away.

She carries the basket inside and sets it on the table amidst casseroles, cheese platters, cookies, cakes, and what she’s fairly certain is a fully-organic-never-even-heard-of-a-vat pot roast. She picks an apple out of the basket, washes it, and bites down. It’s the first time she’s smiled in six days. The apple is crisp, juicy, and just on the right side of tart. She wipes a dribble of juice off her chin and walks downstairs to the basement to change out of the black dress, black tights, and black shoes.

But she catches herself in the hall mirror. She looks almost as dead as her mother. Pale skin - she’d left her blush in her apartment on Gagarin, and hasn’t yet had the emotional energy to buy some, not even to place an extranet order - dark brown hair pulled up in a French braid, hollows under her eyes deep and dark enough to look like craters, black clothes…she looks like a ghost. And there are fifteen more days to go.

She sits down on the couch and unties her shoes with one hand, then bites down on the apple and holds it with her teeth while she shimmies out of her tights - her nail catches on them and drags a rip all the way down her thigh - and tugs her dress off over her head.

And then she starts to laugh. Because she’s standing in her parents’ basement, after her mother’s funeral, wearing only her bra and panties, eating an apple sent to her by a former intern, and she’s pretty sure it’s the first thing she’s eaten in a couple of days. She feels her body start to cry, feels the tightness in her throat and the sting at her eyes, feels her shoulders pull forward and an arm wrap around her waist - but she’s fresh out of tears. There are none left.

So she stands there, mostly naked, and finishes her apple in silence.

Maybe it’s the sudden rush of sugar, maybe it’s the total abyss of grief swallowing her up, maybe it’s the prospect of sleeping next to a ping pong table for the next fifteen nights. But she tosses her apple core into the matter recycler and books a ticket to Omega on her way to the shower.

Her transport from Indianapolis leaves in two hours, and it’ll take her five days. From Indianapolis to Armstrong Orbital Transit, and from Armstrong Orbital to the relay transit station off Io, from Io through the Charon Relay to Tereshkova, from Tereshkova to Shenzhou, and from Shenzhou finally to Omega.

She orders blush, pays the extra fifty credits to have it delivered in half an hour, and gets in the scalding hot shower to wash her mother’s funeral off of her.

“I love you,” she says to her mother’s empty office, dressed for travel and with her backpack slung over her shoulders and her duffle bag propped up next to her. She took four apples from the basket, and three of the chocolate chip cookies brought by a neighbor she never met. With a nod, she walks out onto the porch, and to the waiting skycab.

She’s on Shenzhou before she finally checks her messages, and finds twenty-three from Scott. She blinks at them, blinks at his words and desperation and where are you. But they all stay in focus, nothing goes blurry with tears.

(You are not fine, she tells herself. You’re numb.

I know. I’m gonna try being numb for a while.)

The gate agent calls for her transport to start boarding, and she stands to get in line. With a deep breath, she replies to Scott - I’m alive, headed to Omega - and removes her personal and work email inboxes from her omnitool. Scott’s twenty-three messages disappear, along with the rest of her life.

She smiles at the gate agent, displays her ticket - the agent raises her browplates at the lack of return date, but doesn’t say anything - and finds her seat.

04: Paris

if we go down, then we go down together, they’ll say you could do anything, they’ll say that I was clever

Victoria sighs as the elevator creaks its way up to her floor. She rolls her neck, trying to stretch out the knots that have formed in the last ten hours, with little success. Removing the bullet and setting the quarian’s arm had been fairly easy - repairing her environmental suit, on the other hand, was not. Good thing Mordin’s inventive, or all of Victoria’s efforts with the woman’s arm would’ve been for naught.

The elevator shakes and, for a moment, it feels like the cables are going to give out. But they hold, and the door slowly stutters open at her floor.

She checks the hall on either side of the elevator - empty - and yawns as she walks down the hall to her apartment. The palmprint scanner is old, twitchy, and needs three tries before it registers her as human, and another try before it figures out that it’s her. The retinal scanner, however, is brand new and works on the first try. She spent the last four nights in a tangle of wires, trying to override the palm scanner’s control of the door and reroute master control the retinal scanner, but she’s maxed out her knowledge of electricity. She’ll have to ask Mordin.

The door locks itself behind her, and she yawns again, dropping her bag beside a small pile of shoes just inside the entryway. “Ugh,” she groans. She needs a shower, food, and bed (preferably not in that order - she’d like to just fall face first into bed, but she really should shower and eat something first).

Two steps further, and she stops and stares her couch.

A very large, very blue, lizard is sitting in the exact middle of her couch, tail curled around itself.

She blinks at it. “What?”

It blinks at her.

She tilts her head.

It tilts its head.

She squeezes her eyes shut, waits a moment, and then opens them again.

Nope. The lizard is still there.

“Okay, not hallucinating.” She’s way too tired to process giant lizard in my apartment. “How did you…what…I don’t even know what to do about this. How did you even get in?” She scrubs a hand over her face.

The lizard blinks again.

“Thank you, that’s very helpful.” Victoria activates her omnitool and takes a picture of the lizard, running it through a reverse image search. If it isn’t going to eat her, poison her, or otherwise kill her in her sleep, she’s deeming the lizard a Morning Problem.

Her omnitool beeps: it’s a blue iguana, male. Herbivore. Not venomous. Good.

Victoria yawns. “You can stay the night. Don’t eat all my lettuce.”

***

When she wakes in the morning, she wakes with thoughts of breakfast, of focusing on her back and shoulders with her yoga, of maybe giving the smoothie place around the corner from the clinic a try.

But when she walks out of her bedroom, the lizard is still curled up on her couch.

“Oh, fuck,” she says, “I forgot about you.”

He shifts, settling his weight differently. Like he’s claimed the couch for himself. Like he’s moving in.

“Seriously?”

He blinks.

Victoria turns on her coffee maker. “Okay. You can stay until I figure out what exactly the hell it is I’m supposed to do when a giant lizard shows up uninvited.” His torso is bigger than her bicep; short of enlisting her biotics - and she’s never been too good at finesse - she doubts she can make him leave.

She sits down at the small kitchen table and sips at her coffee, staring at the lizard. “I dub thee Albert,” she says.

Albert flicks his tail and closes his eyes.

05: You Want It Darker

I struggled with some demons, they were middle class and tame; I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim

“What happened there?”

Aria’s voice catches Victoria off-guard almost as much as the question itself. Aria makes a point not to get involved with the patch-them-back-together side of her empire - Victoria can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen Aria actually on this level, in a room with someone bleeding - and she sure as hell doesn’t ask personal questions. But the black eye’s only a few hours fresh, and she hadn’t had time to even attempt concealer before she got the 911 to Afterlife. As bad as it looked when she caught herself in the mirror on the way out, Victoria bets it looks far worse now - even more so under the sickly green-white lights of the bathroom in Afterlife’s lowest level.

She considers lying - she can get a new apartment, dye her hair, change her access codes, bribe a batarian to loiter around the corner just as well as anyone - but it’s been two weeks. Two weeks since she had enough and told him to get the fuck out, two weeks since he’s been trying to prove the theory that adding bruises will make her change her mind. Two weeks of Mordin patching her up (of lying to him, of saying she’s found a boxing gym, of him clearly not believing her), two weeks of nearly every part of her body hurting.

Two weeks, after four months.

She’s been working for Aria long enough to know that Aria only asks questions like this once.

“Doral,” Victoria says, peeling off her latex gloves. She turns them inside out into a ball, elbows the biohazard recycler’s activation panel, and tosses them down a chute to be burned, compacted, and blown out into space. Upon examination of her shirt, she grasps the hem with both hands and pulls it over her head and tosses it down the chute after her gloves. Her pants probably deserve the same treatment, but she’s not about to take her shoes off to change out of them - this bathroom floor is the most questionable thing she’s ever seen in her life - and, besides, they’re black; not that bloodstained clothing would raise too many eyes on Omega.

“He do that, too?” Aria asks, looking pointedly at Victoria’s torso mottled with bruises.

“Yep,” she says, pulling a wrapped, sterile bar of soap out of her bag. She doesn’t look at herself in the cracked mirror as she turns on the faucet. The plumbing hisses and clanks, and then water burbles out. She sighs. The other bathroom on this level - the one that’s actually clean and has proper lighting and a decent sink - had an altercation of the evisceration-and-death variety earlier this evening, and a cleanup crew hasn’t made it there yet.

The lights flicker. Victoria sees something unpleasant scurry through the shadows into one of the stalls. She closes her eyes for a moment. She hates this bathroom.

“You should ditch him.”

“I tried.” She tests the water - it’s as hot as it’s going to get - and rips off the paper around the soap. She wore gloves and had Bray work her over with a scrubber omnitool, but she’s been elbow-deep in a krogan for the last eight hours trying to keep his secondary heart from exploding. A hot decontamination shower would be a better choice, though she doubts there’s one of those in all of Omega. “It’s having some trouble sticking.”

The hot water and soap sting the broken skin of her knuckles and she hisses. She’s been trying to return the favor as much as she can, but she can’t overrule physics: Doral is a foot and a half taller than her, has at least a hundred pounds on her, and was a hand-to-hand drill sergeant in the Hierarchy before joining up with the Blue Suns. She’s good in a fight, but not take-a-guy-three-times-her-size good. And he tends to crowd in and grab her wrists - she can’t even pull the mnemonic for a barrier trapped like that, much less a warp field. 

Aria’s silent for a while, watching Victoria clean up as best she can in a crappy bathroom after an eight-hour surgery in the basement of a club. “Want protection?” she says when Victoria finally turns off the water, and it’s with a tone that makes Victoria think it isn’t exactly a question.

The answer’s most definitely yes, but - “How much is that gonna cost me?”

“Nothing,” Aria tosses her a towel and her bag. “The last three doctors I’ve had on my payroll would’ve given Volak up for dead the minute they saw him.” She pauses, lets that sink in. “It’s in my best interests to keep you alive.”

Victoria dries her hands and forearms, and then pulls on the clean sweatshirt from her bag; her ribs ache with the motion. She shakes out her ponytail and pulls it right back up again, and then looks at Aria in the dim, flickering light. “You know,” she says evenly, “I’m not gonna complain if one of your guys gets a little rough and he ends up in a dumpster.”

Although its attempts certainly keep her busy, employed, and paid well enough to have a decent apartment, she doesn’t advocate murder. But she’s sporting bruised ribs - probably at least one broken - and her eye’s starting to throb, and this isn’t the worst he’s done. She won’t ask directly, but she’ll happily look the other way.

First do no harm has a pretty blurry line these days. A year ago, she’d be horrified by herself.

A year ago, her mother was alive. A year ago, she was working the day shift on Gagarin. A year ago, she would’ve called Volak the minute he hit her table. A year ago, she didn’t know how to shoot with one hand and field dress a bullet wound with the other.

A year ago, broken ribs weren’t quite so common.

The bulb overhead flickers again - once, twice, three times, and blows out.

Aria smiles, and in the shadows it even looks genuine. “I’ll pass that along.”

06: Comes And Goes (In Waves)

this one’s for the torn down, the experts at the fall; come on friends, get up now, you’re not alone at all

Victoria stirs her straw around her empty drink, clinking the ice against the glass. She pokes at the lime wedge, stabbing it into the ice cubes. Afterlife’s music pulses around her, its patrons weave and dance and stumble past her, and she’s bored. For the tenth time in the last twenty minutes, she checks the clock on her omnitool - no matter how she spins it, she’s been sitting here, waiting, for forty-five minutes.

She’s going to have words with Bray after this one.

The drell beside her vacates his seat, and it isn’t thirty seconds before a turian male takes his place.

Victoria stiffens. Jailen and Qorra followed her here - they follow her everywhere, she’s sure they rented a unit in her building - and no one’s stupid enough to try anything in Afterlife anyway, not even Doral. She’s safe, she knows this, but her head and heart aren’t agreeing much on logic these days.

Three deep breaths, she forces her shoulders to relax, and she gestures for the bartender to refill her club soda. She looks at the turian - the only way to really convince herself that he isn’t Doral is to look and prove it.

Crappy armor, and he sits awkwardly in it, like it’s new. Like he’s used to wearing something else, something better. He sits strangely too, like he’s trying to act natural - he’s failing pretty miserably at it. He turns to catch the attention of the bartender, and the lights illuminate his profile - strong, confident, with blue markings under his eyes.

Definitely not Doral.

He orders three shots of quadruple-filtered turian brandy, and throws them back in rapid succession.

Victoria bites on her straw and raises her eyebrows. “Bad day?”

He sighs, and knocks on the counter, ordering another three. “You could say that.” His flanged voice is strained, tight. He drinks one shot, but lets the other two sit, and doesn’t look at her.

She cracks her neck and checks the time again. Forty-nine minutes. This is ridiculous. She messages Bray - what the hell?

they’re blocked in an alley, had to send guys to help clear em out

She scoffs. If her patient has any blood left in him by the time he finally gets here, she’ll be amazed. She should’ve risked it and gone to meet the car.

The turian snorts. “Sounds like you’re not having a great day either.”

“I’m not four shots in,” she points out, though she’s rapidly considering the merits of catching up. “I think you’re still winning.”

He laughs, and it’s a strained, chaotic, unstable thing. “Fair enough.”

“I’m Victoria,” she says. She isn’t one to strike up conversations in bars, much less introduce herself to strangers, but it’s late, and she’s tired, and there’s a shotgun-ravaged batarian on his way that’ll keep her up for at least another four hours.

And he isn’t Doral. And for the first time in almost five months, she doesn’t feel quite so twitchy around a turian, even if this one does sound like he’s two seconds from leaping off a cliff.

“Garrus,” he says, finally looking at her.

She clinks her glass against one of his still-full shot glasses. “Nice to meet you.” She pushes her hair out of her face. Afterlife is hot, and she wishes she’d thought to take a hairband out of her medical bag before she parked it at the bar.

His mandibles tighten, and his sharp intake of breath is audible even through the music. “Looks like you had a really bad day a couple weeks ago.”

She winces. What she thought was a black eye was really an orbital fracture. Mordin knit the bone back together, but there’s nothing she can do for the bruising except wait. “Yeah,” she acknowledges. “But it’s over now.”

He stares at her, and his brow plates flatten.

And that’s when it hits her - he’s a cop. Not the corrupt ones that pretend to patrol Omega in exchange for credits in their pockets from one gang or another (or many), but the good kind. The kind she could’ve used when Doral started showing his love with his fists. The kind she maybe would’ve used, if he’d been around.

Garrus recovers quickly, affects a disinterested slouch again, and she respects his choice and doesn’t say anything.

“Good,” he says.

“You gonna get through your bad day?”

He sighs, and swallows one of his remaining shots. “Somehow,” he says.

“Ryder!” Bray calls.

She turns and looks over her shoulder.

“They’re five minutes out, get your ass downstairs.”

She throws him a sloppy salute and drains the rest of her drink.

“You work for Aria?” Garrus manages to sound disappointed and impressed at the same time.

“Mmm,” she says, bobbling her head in both a nod and a shake, “tangentially.” She slides off her stool.

He takes it at face value and finishes off the last shot without a word.

Victoria steps in beside him and rests her hand on his arm. “Whoever your bad day is? I bet they’d be happier if you didn’t destroy your liver.”

He blinks at her, and suddenly his discomfort and good cop vibe and six shots of brandy all slide away, replaced by a deep, relentless sadness in his eyes. It isn’t just a bad day - it’s a bad week, a bad month. He’s here to cope.

That, she can relate to.

She pats his arm and gives him a smile. “I gotta go save some lives. Have a good night, Garrus.”

07: Castle Down

and would you tear my castle down, stone by stone, and the wind run through my window, ‘til there is nothing left but a battered rose

Penny takes her hand and gently laces their fingers together. “This is nice,” she says, looking down at Victoria.

Victoria smiles up at her. “Yeah, it is.”

“That’s nice too,” she squeezes Victoria’s hand, “but I mean being able to walk without looking over your shoulder, or hurrying back to your apartment.”

Shrugging, Victoria checks around her. Nope - still no bodyguards. Aria called them back after Doral’s body was found mostly decomposed in a depressurized airlock last month. What was it Baylor called her the other day?

Switzerland.

She laughs, shaking her head.

“What?” Penny grins widely, looking at her. “What?”

Victoria pulls her laughter under her control again and takes a breath. “Apparently, I’m Switzerland.”

Penny raises an eyebrow. “You’re an Earth country that makes accurate watches?”

She looks at Penny, but Penny’s biting her lip, trying to hold back a grin. Victoria sticks her tongue out at her girlfriend and lightly swings their hands as they walk along the promenade back to their apartment (her apartment, Victoria hopes Penny will say yes to moving in with her, and then it will become their apartment). “I’m…the metaphor doesn’t work, actually.”

She’s not neutral. Far from it. Aria’s seen to that in the last few months, which has annoyed Victoria less than she thought it would. Maybe it has nothing to do with neutrality, and everything to do with Omega having enough common sense not to mess with its doctors.

“Because of the guy in the airlock.”

Victoria stops and turns. She’s wearing black skinny pants and a navy blue top, black eyeliner and dark lipstick, with knives sheathed into black boots she can run in. Penny, on the other hand, is in a fluttery pink dress and silver sandal heels, an outfit way better suited to the resorts of Virmire than even the better sections of Omega. Long copper hair curled into waves frames her gentle face, with soft, dewy makeup that hardly looks like makeup at all.

Penny’s a senior auditor with Irune Intergalactic Bank, on Omega for a long-term audit of the bank’s station accounts. Penny is an accountant who likes flowers and dancing and pancakes, whose entire repertoire of self defense moves is wrapped up in running very fast in the other direction and screaming, who is far too sweet and sunny for this dump of a station. Penny shouldn’t know about things like the guy in the airlock - she doesn’t know how Penny even does know about the guy in the airlock.

But if Victoria wants Penny - and she does - she needs to tell Penny about her life. More than just the clinic and the abusive ex.

She lifts up on her toes and kisses Penny. Her lips are soft and smooth, and taste of the citrus in her lip gloss. “Because of the guy in the airlock,” she says. “And a few other things I shouldn’t tell you out here.”

Penny pulls away, with an inquisitive eyebrow raised high.

“Do you want to come up?” Victoria asks.

“For those few other things you shouldn’t tell me out here?” Penny smirks.

Victoria returns the smirk. “Yes. But that’ll only take five minutes. The rest of the night’s up to you.”

“Hmmm,” Penny says. “I like the sound of that.” She takes Victoria’s hand again and leads her up the steps and into the elevator.

Victoria’s spent the last year hauling herself out of the dirt Doral ground her into, and Penny is nice. Penny is soft and sweet and caring - Penny is everything Doral wasn’t. Penny gives wonderful hugs. Penny is a delightfully normal person in a life that is rapidly becoming anything but.

The minute she steps out into the hall, Victoria knows something is wrong. She doesn’t see anything out of place, doesn’t hear anything out of place, but the hair on the back of her neck stands straight up. The shift out of Date Mode and into Defense Mode is instant and instinctive.

(Some day, she should examine that - how easily she unsheathed the knife from her right boot, how naturally she stepped in front of Penny, how quickly she pulled a barrier around both of them with only a twitch of her fingers.)

“Tori?” Penny asks, a scared waver in her voice.

“Stay close behind me,” she says. She thinks for a moment and pauses right outside her door. “Do you have any pepper spray in your purse?”

“Yeah,” Penny nods, withdrawing the can.

She runs an infrared scan with her omnitool - two shapes, in the living room. One human, one salarian. She frantically looks for Albert, and sighs in relief when she finds him sleeping in the bathtub. And then she rolls her eyes: he’s the same way with bugs, totally useless. “Don’t use that until I tell you, okay?”

“Just what were you going to tell me in those five minutes?”

She intends it to be teasing, but Victoria hears the undercurrent of concern - of fear - in her girlfriend’s voice. Before she triggers the retinal scan and they walk into whatever nonsense is waiting for them, she turns around to Penny.

“Short version? I work for Aria,” she says.

“Why do I get the feeling the long version involves you and several street fights?”

Victoria wonders whether Penny has any idea how close she is to the truth. “You don’t have to stick around for this,” she says.

“My alternative is to walk home alone, knowing my girlfriend is walking into an ambush. Besides,” she smiles, and it’s clear that she’s still scared, but there’s a tiny sparkle in her eyes, “I’m not missing you go ninja on some people.”

Victoria lifts up on her toes and gives Penny a quick kiss. She turns, pulls a tight annihilation field around both of them, and activates the retinal scanner. The door swings open. She adjusts her grip on the knife and steps inside, Penny right behind her.

Her annihilation field growls, and lifts the table lamp into the air. She targets the lamp, ready to throw it if necessary.

“Put it down, Ryder.” A voice calls from the dark.

Victoria frowns - she knows that accent. Scottish, with the hard, rough edge that comes from living on Omega too damn long. Yeah, she knows him. She’s patched him up in the clinic four times in the past six months. She lowers the knife, a little. “Monteague? What the fuck?”

He flips a light on and grins at her. He’s found a decent dentist since she last saw him - he’s no longer missing the teeth he lost in the fight that brought him to her two weeks ago. “Put the knife down, we’re not here to hurt you.”

“Who’s your friend?” She feels Penny wound up and on guard behind her, and takes her hand. A brief, hopefully reassuring, squeeze - it’s okay, I know this guy and he’s probably not going to kill either of us - and she lets go.

“Sensat. Needed him to get through your security.”

“It’s there for a reason, you asshole. What do you want?” Victoria sheathes the knife and dissolves her annihilation field. The lamp drops back onto the table, precariously close to the edge, but Penny catches it and gently sets it upright.

“One of our guys got hurt bad. Archangel said to grab you and get going.” Monteague stands, wincing a little as his hip straightens.

Victoria raises an eyebrow - she fixed that, and wonders if he decided to kick his way out of a fight anyway, just like she told him not to. Shaking her head, she lets the barrier fall. “Archangel know how to use a phone?” She crosses her arms. “Even Aria calls first.”

He shrugs. “It’s an emergency. You coming or does Sensat have to carry you over his shoulder?”

Though the salarian is scrawny - even for a salarian - she doesn’t doubt he could make good on the threat. But either way, the choices Monteague’s offered will end in her going with him. No matter what, she isn’t getting hugs - or anything else, for that matter - from Penny tonight.

Even if she could, she wouldn’t turn them away. Whatever and whoever it is, they need her help badly enough that they broke into her apartment to find her.

She turns to Penny. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to do this. But you’re welcome to stay. Sensat will fix whatever security he broke getting in here; you’ll be safe here.” She looks over her shoulder and glares at the salarian.

He dips his chin, nodding once.

“That’s okay,” Penny says, smiling as though it’s totally normal that her girlfriend got a house call from some local goons who need her medical expertise. “Albert and I can watch television.” She glances over Victoria’s shoulder at the two men waiting impatiently. “Are you going to be okay with them?” she asks quietly.

Victoria nods. Archangel’s done good work - his body count has hit her morgue, but they’re all people who have deserved it for years - and Monteague’s an ass, but he’s a good guy. “I’ll be fine.” She squeezes Penny’s hand. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“I’ll be here,” Penny promises.

08: Gesture

look at me like it’s a lesson, I know to take it all in

Her omnitool chirps mid-surgery with an email notification. She ignores it - the salarian open in front of her needs her attention more than whatever scam has found its way through her spam filter. She widens the forceps, and hisses at what she sees inside his chest. 

She’s no epidemiologist, but those growths are not normal. There have been rumors - low, but steadily growing stronger - of a bug running through the district. Something gnaws at her, something she overheard outside Afterlife. Vorcha aren’t exactly reliable sources of information, but she’d rather overreact.

“Everyone who’s not human, leave the room. Now.”

“Doctor Ryder?” Nivera asks.

“Out.” She looks up over her mask at the turian. And at the drell, Raetaq. And at the salarian, Zaan. And at the krogan, Bruna. “All of you. Now. Decon protocol level 5.”

She waits until the others have left the room before she looks across the body at Daniel. “This guy’s a goner,” she says. He came in as a stabbing victim, but it’s not the knife that’s going to kill him. Or rather, the knife sped up the process - if he even survives surgery, which is unlikely, his body won’t be strong enough to heal the wound and fight the infection in his lungs.

“Doctor?”

Victoria shakes her head. There are no good options here: patch the knife wound and save his life now only for him to probably die in days, or sacrifice his life now to gain valuable research into what looks like far more than just a nasty bug. It’s a shitty choice either way. “Prepare a sterile biohazard container. We’re taking samples, maybe Mordin can do something with this.”

***

It’s another six hours and three patients before she finally gets to check her email. She slumps into a chair in an empty room - almost empty, except for a dead drell on the table, covered by a sheet - finishes half of her protein shake in one go, and pulls up her email.

She doesn’t get much email these days. She started a new account when she got to Omega, and it’s somehow remained blissfully off mailing lists and scams. There are only five messages in her inbox - one from Mordin with preliminary results from the samples she took earlier (doesn’t look good), two from Bray confirming when and where they need her tonight, a sale flyer from Harrot, and…

One from Lauren Walsh. Subject: Job Offer.

Victoria frowns. Walsh has connections - the fact that she found Victoria’s new email address isn’t surprising, what is surprising is that she used it. She hasn’t heard a word from Walsh since she left her program six years ago, and truthfully never expected to, and certainly not via something with job offer in the subject.

Hesitantly, she opens it.

Dr. Ryder;

I’m putting a team together at Huerta Memorial. It’s an obstetric trauma team, focused solely on human biotic pregnancies. The first generation of human biotics is beginning to reach its childbearing boom, and we have - as I’m sure you can imagine - encountered complications. The Alliance has thrown full funding behind my proposal to create a research and treatment team to help prevent and treat these complications.

I know you are currently on Omega, doing what I’m sure is excellent, necessary work with Dr. Solus, but your talents would also be beneficial, and welcome, on my team. This is an open offer.

My condolences on the loss of your mother.

Regards,

Lauren Walsh 

She reads it again. And again. And a fourth time.

The Citadel’s nice. But so is Omega.

No, she thinks, it’s not. Omega is a shithole.

Omega is dirty and mean and broken, and she came here to run away - it was pure luck she stumbled into something resembling a life. It’s been three years, and maybe the grief has lifted, maybe it hasn’t, but she wants to live in a building with a working elevator. She wants a proper day-night cycle. She doesn’t want…whatever the hell it was that just scuttled across the operating room floor.

She wants a proper vegetable, one she didn’t have to coax into existence with a bank of secondhand grow lights she got from the weed and mushroom dealers across the hall. Maybe she wants an apple.

Another email pops up, from Mordin again. Schedule changes for next week.

No. She definitely wants an apple.

Victoria finishes her protein shake and sends the changes to update her calendar. She likes her work here, she does, even with whatever impending disaster is about to fall on their collective heads. But Walsh’s team - she could actually help. Make a real difference, not just triage gang fights and sickness. Go back to her roots; god knows, she’s actually missed it.

She should think about it. Talk to Mordin, see if he’s thinking the same thing she is about the illness, see if he wants her to stay. Vidcall Penny on Illium, see how she’s doing, find out what she thinks about her options. Get more details from Walsh, see exactly what they’d be doing, exactly where she fits into the team, maybe ask why Walsh wants her when she made it clear Victoria wasn’t welcome back.

She should take her time and think about it. The last time she didn’t take her time and think about it, she ended up here.  

She replies to the email.

I’ll be there in a couple of weeks.

10: Riders On The Storm

into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown

Victoria inhales sharply and stares at the dead plant behind Scott’s right shoulder. She deserves this, she absolutely deserves this - number two lesson she learned from Omega, own your bullshit (number one: always be armed) - but she’d rather be shoulder-deep in a pregnant vorcha than in Scott’s apartment with his dead plants and his bought-it-off-a-quarian-street-vendor crappy hotel room art on the walls and his broken coffee maker that beeps every forty-eight seconds, listening to him unleash three years of pent-up anger all directed straight at her throat.

But she deserves this. They’ve never been close, and she’s been leaving him behind her whole life, but this wasn’t just going to high school in Paris and leaving him to navigate blockheads, goons, and girls who broke his heart all by himself. This was abandonment.

She knows this. She’s known this for three years. She was just too numb to feel guilty about it.

He’s been throwing Omega in her face for ten minutes - god only knows how he found out about Doral, and somehow that’s her fault too - and she’s gearing up to shout right back at him (how dare you - he broke my fucking face) when Scott finally snaps.

“I needed my sister!” Scott yells.

Her words die on her lips.

She stands there, still tense, still primed to drag this thing from a one-sided screaming match into a spiteful contest over who had it worse when Mom died, in utter, stunned silence. Scott’s never needed anything from her in his life. Hell, if it weren’t for Mom getting sick, they’d probably still be doing hardly more than exchanging e-cards at Christmas and their birthday.

“You never said anything,” she says quietly. Not that she would’ve known what to do with it. But she could’ve tried. She could’ve thought about trying.

“How could I?” he spits out, green eyes glittering with grief now, not just anger. “You left for Omega straight from her fucking funeral. I thought you were just going home.” His voice breaks on home, and he turns away, running his fingers through his short hair. He walks a few steps over to the window, his hitched breath the only sound in the whole apartment.

The coffee maker beeps.

Victoria watches as his shoulders shake. She knows how to comfort an upset friend. She doesn’t know how to comfort her upset little brother. It occurs to her that she’s not been a very good sister, not for a long time, and Omega’s just the most recent item on a very, very lengthy list.

She bites her lip. Though she tries to hold them back, tears sting at her eyes. Omega was good for her, in the end, and she found solace there - a strange gritty calm amidst a maelstrom of chaos. But it wasn’t all good, far from it. There’s a lot in the beginning she wants to forget. She clenches her teeth hard enough that her jaw aches, and the tears fall anyway. She probably needed her brother, she just didn’t know it. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and wraps her arms around herself. “I’m so sorry, Scott.”

His apartment blurs as she lets herself cry. Hot tears stream down her cheeks and she hears her brother choke back a sob. She tries to hug herself tighter, but it doesn’t help.

It isn’t immediate - the coffee maker beeps six times before either of them make a move - but Scott turns back to her, and Victoria takes a step toward him, and slowly, slowly, they meet in the middle of the living room.

“Do that again, and I will kill you,” he says, burying his face in her hair. “I’m an N5 now, I know how to make it look like an accident.”

She laughs through her tears and holds him closer, not caring at all that she’s smudging mascara onto his shirt. “Yeah, well, I spent three years on Omega, I wouldn’t count me out.” She sniffles.

Scott smiles and kisses the top of her head.

She hasn’t been hugged in a while, and lets her arms settle around his waist. By the way that he’s holding onto her, she bets Scott hasn’t had a hug recently either; she hugs him a little tighter. 

They stand there, in the middle of his apartment with the dead plants and the bad art and the broken coffee maker, long after the lights outside have dimmed into their night cycle. Victoria rubs at her cheeks - gritty with tears, streaked with eyeliner - and her stomach growls.

He laughs and takes a step back. “Would you like me to make you food?”

Her mouth waters. Scott’s been a wizard in the kitchen since they were kids, and -

“Before you answer that, yes, I have the stuff for macaroni and cheese.”

The grin that breaks across her face almost hurts with how good it feels. “That would be amazing.”

10: Echo

we are golden stars above silver seas, we hear echoes from another galaxy

Scott sits in the crypod next to her, knees bent to his chest, eyes wide as he watches the organized chaos of the brightly-lit cryo facility.

“Scared?” she teases. She pulls the hairband off her wrist and tugs her hair up until a ponytail. 600 years should be enough time for the gene mod to take permanent hold, and she hopefully won’t have to do any maintenance on it in Andromeda. Bright orange hair permanently, here she comes.

He looks at her. “Did you read how this process works?”

“Yep.”

“And you’re not terrified?”

She shrugs. She’s never frozen herself before, but she’s put plenty of eggs and embryos into cryo, and even pulled them out. “Not really.”

Her omnitool beeps. She looks down, and smiles. A selfie of Penny, with Albert sitting on the couch behind her, his chin resting on her shoulder. We both love you. Good luck!

Tears spring to her eyes, and she tries to blink them back. She’ll miss them both, more than anything else. But Albert’s in good hands on Illium with Penny and her wife, and Penny’s in good hands with Albert and Malia.

I love you both, she writes back. Take care of yourselves.

Make good choices! :)

At that, she laughs, and wipes the tears from her cheeks. I’ll try. This is one last plea not to name your kid after me.

A picture of Malia’s rounded blue stomach. Victoria T’vellan. It has a good ring to it.

“Ryders,” Harry says as he taps a sequence onto the crypod across from them. “You’re up next. Time to put the toys away.”

Alright, it does. They’re telling me I have to hang up now, so: I love all three of you (and the fourth who isn’t there yet). Have wonderful lives. She checks the camera, makes sure she’s brushed all the tears away, and then sends Penny a picture of herself in the crypod, thumbs up. She powers down her omnitool.

“You’re sad about the lizard,” Scott teases.

She is. She’s sad about a lot of people, but she’s saddest about Albert; she tried, and even for a Pathfinder’s kid they weren’t going to allow her to freeze him alongside her. She swallows and looks over at Scott. “Like you didn’t bawl when you gave Rusty to David.”

He opens his mouth to argue, and then closes it. “Fair point. Here’s hoping Andromeda has suitable pets.”

Harry steps up in between them, and they fall silent. There’s a tight schedule. “You guys know the protocol?”

They nod and lie down. Harry presses a button first on hers, then on Scott’s. Thirty more seconds, and they’re past the point of no return.

Victoria turns and looks at Scott as the clear glass closes around her. “See you on the other side,” she smiles.

“See you on the other side,” he says.

She settles flat on her back, staring up at the bright white lights in the ceiling. Harry’s face comes into view, and she nods - she’s ready. He gives her a thumbs up, and she closes her eyes as a deep, frigid cold starts in her veins, spreading outward.

She has one last moment to think about Albert, about Penny, about Scott, about Mom in the ground outside Indianapolis and the daisies she planted beside the headstone, and then nothing.

Nothing for six hundred years, nothing until another galaxy, nothing until she wakes up with different stars outside. 

She blinks, and a smile slowly grows across her face despite the increasing chaos of the Hyperion’s medbay. “We made it.”