Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aya is beautiful, and every twist and turn in the local fauna, every divot in the buildings, every curve in the road seemed to have something of interest for her to study. She’s certain it’s the researcher in her- she knows how strange it must be to see an alien gape wide-eyed and open-mouthed over a structure Jaal had informed her was simply their average library (curling spires with plants that grew over them, bearing fruit), but she can’t help it. She’ll endure Vetra’s ribbing on her obvious infatuation with the planet if she must, but she didn’t want to board until she was sure she could be away from their gentle warm sun and the crisp breeze.

“You can see why we enjoy the planet so much.” Jaal speaks up from beside her and, when she turns, she notices that his gaze has remained on her for the majority of the mission. His face is open, mouth slightly parted and his head tilted to the side. It’s miraculous how similar their emotional expression was to human’s, and she’s pretty thankful for it. She’d worked alongside the other Citadel races (and an elcor who had been a slow but fantastic conversationalist) in the search for more Prothean ruins- she’d been able to pick up a few tells here and there amongst salarians and asari, even a few from a few peacekeeping turians.

But none were as expressive as the angara. It was equally heartening and terrifying to come across a race of people with little to no concept of personal space or emotion concealment.

Even now, there’s a blue tint crawling up Jaal’s neck, transparent on the thinner skin on his cheeks. She hadn’t been able to pick out when he was blushing (having no reference for what color his blood was, she’d fallen back on just expecting whatever), but now that she could, it was becoming obvious that he spent at least half of the time he was around her flushed and rambling.

The other half was spent on Aya and in combat, where he exuded an intrinsic type of confidence; he didn’t become someone else, persay, but he seemed to no longer fear missteps in communication. He was in his element, and she wished she could give him that peace of mind all the time.

But, baby steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day. All of those other sayings about patience being rewarding.

“Jaal, really...” She opens her mouth to say something about the scenery, about the people, anything, but all that comes out is a content sigh, her eyes briefly closing. He seems to understand, a smile gracing his face. He’s the type of person made for happiness- a smile suiting him better than anything else. Maryam changes gears. “Thank you for letting me come out here in my old gear- I love the Pathfinder suit, but it doesn’t have all the scanning capabilities I’d like.”

“You’re taking the time to learn about our culture and our planet to be a better ally to the angara.” He says it like it explains everything, and he’s still smiling.  “And with such a respectful method, how could I deny you?”

She reaches out instinctively to grasp his hands, to hold them and try to convey how much this really meant to her- that he was truly more than just her angaran emissary. But she refrains, instead reaching her hand down to push at his elbow to bring his arm forward. He nods, aware of her attempt at cultural sensitivity, and knocks the back of their arms together softly. “Really, though, Jaal- I mean it.” She’s looking into his eyes again, and she’s not sure when she’d looked away. While neither the cloud cover nor their shade moves, his pupils dilate past their previous slits. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime- I’m so glad I met you, and that you decided to come aboard.”

Jaal gives the little chuckle that usually means he’s has some sort of joke he won’t explain. “Truly, Ryder, the pleasure is all mine.”

They both turn back to survey the landscape again, listening to the dull rush of water, just a little ways away. She leans against the railing guarding the edge of the cliff’s face, feeling the distant spray of the water below. In the background, she can hear the low, warped sounds of angara chatting, too far for the translator to pick up words. If she focused, she could probably pick it out, but she’d been the topic of conversation as of late amongst the angara, and, really, it was far better to simply let them chat.

While she wants to simply enjoy herself, Maryam knows it can’t last. She straightens her back, wincing slightly when it pops. Beside her, Jaal’s eyes widen in horror, his voice carrying the same seriousness as if they were on the field, “Pathfinder, are you alright?” And he comes close enough for her to smell the perfume he’d had to ask for permission to bring on board. He reaches out, hesitant, his hands seeming to not know where to go. “Did you... break something? Are you injured?”

Somewhat alarmed, Maryam pulls back, blinking and rapidfire trying to figure out- “Oh, my back.” She blinks and, for once, is glad she has a background in biology. Peacekeeping for the ruins aside, she’d really enjoyed the research and being able to identify what actions were universal and what were decidedly human things. “No, I’m not hurt. Um, when I move too fast or lock my joints, there’s a bubble of, well, air in between the joints that is released, and makes that sound.” It was an incredibly condensed version of the explanation she’d given an overly interested turian, but it explained enough.

Jaal blinks, and his hovering stance relaxes- under the ridges of his head, barely visible in the broad daylight, she sees his bioluminescence shine brighter. “I am... relieved. Admittedly, humans seem to have more methods of accidental injury, which is worrisome. Your skin is very... thin, and you don’t seem to be very...” The sentence dies off, and he gives a sideways tilt of his head, back and forth, indecisive. “I’m not intending to offend. I don’t want it to come off that way.”

“No offense taken.” Maryam says, genuinely. “I know we look a lot softer than the other races, but I assure you it doesn’t care over into the battlefield. And, for as thin as our skin looks, it’s rather incredible how fast it can repair itself, as well as how its density helps for-” She stops herself, looking up at him with a drawn sigh. “I don’t want to bore you with the biology lesson, like last time. I don’t mean to show off.”

He regards her, blinking slowly. “Perhaps I misspoke, then.” A small frown forms at the edges of his lips, and he hunches slightly, meeting her eyes directly. “At the time, I thought you were touting your education- showing yourself as smarter, attempting to prove me inferior due to my interrupted formal learning.” His eyes dart away, and when he tucks his head this time, it seems to be out of shame. “Was the study part of your profession, before becoming the Pathfinder?”

Was she so transparent? “Yes, actually. I was the biology expert for a Prothean excavation effort. I had a bit of fighting experience under my belt, too, so I doubled as a peacekeeper on the colony.” The twist of nostalgia in her chest genuinely hurts. “Never a boring day, I can tell you that.”

From the look on his face, Jaal obviously wants to press on what a ‘Prothean’ is, but refrains for whatever reason. “I apologize, then- it’s something you are passionate about, not something you’re trying to... ah... ‘rub in my nose’?” He tests out, looking at her for approval.

“‘Rub my nose in’ or ‘rub in my face’, but you used it properly either way.” She nods, and he gives her a small smile.

“Thank you.” He continues. “I don’t mind listening about your biology- it’s rather fascinating, and you’re obviously informed on the subject. It’s easier than reading the distributed pamphlets. If I have any questions, I’ll be sure to come to you.” And there’s something in his eye- she’s seen him regarding her clear as day with respect, but there’s something more to it. A greater respect? The look is soft around the edges, friendly, his tone teasing at the end.

“I’ll answer to the best of my ability, then.” She says, matching his tone, smiling when he chuckles and turns back to the scenery. Deciding to get it over with, she cracks her knuckles in quick succession, seeing Jaal and a few passing angara shoot her brief, worried looks. “I’ll be heading back to the Tempest soon to analyze this data- feel free to call one of us whenever you’re ready to board again.” She taps the edges of her knuckles to his shoulder in an angaran move, followed by a serious nod, which he returns.

When she weaves through the Aya marketplace, she’s glad that she attracts less stares than she had the first time she’d walked through- Maryam wasn’t sure whether to chalk it up to them being desensitized to her presence or them pointedly ignoring her. The chatter isn’t about her, for the moment, but she hears the high voice of a child pronouncing human ‘huh-men’ and, when she turns, she finds a small angaran child gazing at her from a fair distance away. Trying for pleasant, she smiles, nodding in their direction.

She sticks to the edge of the street, by the railing, to make way for any others trying to pass through- she wasn’t due back by any time, and if anyone else had any pressing matters in the marketplace, far be it for her to keep them from it. She’s almost to where the railing ends when she hears the rapidfire sounds of feet hitting the ground in her general direction and, surprised, she turns to see the source.

The same child is running towards her, calling out ‘heh-man’ then ‘huh-man’, waving their hand palm facing outwards towards her (a gesture that’d caused more than a few diplomatic issues, since both Maryam and Liam often waved in this manner, and it was seen as highly disrespectful to present one’s palm to an angaran in acknowledgment). Maryam’s fairly certain they can’t lower their speed from how fast they were going and, considering their path, they were going to crash right into her. She squares her feet and, keeping her hands flat to her sides, prepares to be tackled by an angaran child.

They keep going, unyielding, but their trajectory was slightly off- instead of colliding with solid, strong Maryam Ryder, they are sent careening over the edge of the rail.

“Shit!” She says immediately, and, fourteen different thoughts at once (how did I not catch them followed by still have time), she jumps down after them, arms reaching out, hands grasping. She catches them by the back of a belt looped around their chest (takes a brief moment to thank Allah that she was larger and heavier and had fallen faster), pulling them into her. They’re letting out a scream, a loud, screeching sound that’s painful because it’s the sound of a child faced with certain death, hands grasping for a firm hold. With her free hand, she reaches to activate her jetpack- coming up empty. Shit shit shit- not in her Pathfinder gear- in her researcher gear, which meant-

She turns around, still clutching the child to her chest, and hits the release on the belt and, tensing herself and supporting the child’s neck, a rappelling line went out, anchoring itself high on the ledge of the sheer cliff. They stop falling abruptly, the give in the line making them drop slightly further before being snatched upwards, and she grits her teeth through it, feeling her stomach bottom out. They both pivot sharply towards the cliff, and she takes the full brunt of several sharp rocks to the frame of her body, the force of it sending them back out again. The next time she’s about to collide, she twists so the line has more give, and the hit isn’t so painful.

Now no longer faced with plummeting to her demise, she takes a deep breath and takes into consideration literally everything else happening around her. The shaking child on her chest- she wasn’t well-versed on the angaran concept of age, but the body build was similar to a six year old human, and they were shuddering and screeching and staring at her with shaken, terrified eyes with pupils dilated into slits. She takes another deep breath. There’s the faint sound of more angara rapidly approaching the rail, several alarmed calls of, “Pathfinder!”

“Hey,” She says, softly, feeling slightly more put together. They’re wriggling slightly, which would make pulling the line in more difficult and, while the entire maneuver had only taken a few seconds of unadulterated instinct, it had felt like years and wasn’t something she was willing to try again if they started to drop again. “Hey, mumu, everything’s alright, I have you- we’re safe.”

The wordless screeches die down, but the wriggling doesn’t stop- she feels a teardrop hit her face, and finds them crying, mouth moving soundlessly. “Are we gonna fall, Pathfinder?” They say, seemingly parroting what the adults above them are calling her, and it just makes her sad.

“No, we aren’t. I’m the Pathfinder, so that means I always know how to find a way out of messes-” She pauses. “What’s your name, mumu?”

The child blinks at her for a bit, seemingly somewhat relieved that there was an adult (no matter how foreign and alien) in charge, whose profession was keeping them safe. “Baako. Baako ada Oye. Is it...” They fumble, but she’s at least glad that Baako’s tears are drying, and they seem to be more secure in her one-armed embrace. “Is it rude to ask a human their name?”

“You have so many questions, Baako.” She says, in a teasing way, in the tone she’d used on her neighbor’s kids when she told them they were so smart. “It isn’t- my name is Maryam. Maryam Ryder.” She takes another deep breath, and they watch as their position on her torso rises and falls in accordance, either in shock or dazzled. “So, Baako- I’m gonna get us back up there, but I’m gonna need your help.”

They look at her with wide, trusting eyes, nodding very very quickly- it disturbs the line somewhat, and she mouths a soundless curse that she’s glad wouldn’t translate. “Understood.”

“I’m gonna need you to hold onto my neck, and keep very still, okay? The line-” She points at the line with her free hand to emphasize it. “The line is going to pull us up very fast and, once I tug it, I’ll grab onto you, but I’ll need you to hold onto me for that one second I won’t be.”

“Where is your ‘neck’?” They say, genuinely confused, and seemingly looking around her shoulders (which made her stomach drop again- it was a long way down). She pats at her neck a few times as a gesture, and their eyes brighten with new understanding. “Oh! Your neck is very thin, Pathfinder Ryder. Where are your nutrient deposits?” As she had, they take their small, somewhat sticky hands and touch their neck flaps.

“I don’t have any- but my neck is very supportive-” Too big a word, might not filter for the translator for a child. “My neck can hold your weight, so make sure to hold on tight.” Somewhat hesitantly, they lean down, wrapping their arms around her neck. Against the base of her neck, underneath her ponytail, she feels their fingers link together. At the very least, they hadn’t nigh choked her out as she’d briefly feared- she wouldn't have blamed them for clutching onto her tighter. “Okay- are you ready?”

Their bioluminescence flares, followed by a small, “Yes.”

Maryam tucks her her head over their’s and, calling out at the angaran heads peeked over to make sure she hadn’t dropped, “Move away from the edge!” Once she couldn’t see any of them, she just hoped they’d gotten a far enough space to keep from colliding with her inevitable canon ball, and hit the trigger on her rappelling belt again. It goes taught for a moment, taking in the slack she’d created, then starts rapidly taking in the line in increments, pulling the both of them up quickly enough to leave her ears ringing every time. Her heart is pounding in her ears and, frankly, the only comfort was that she knew it could hold two turians’ weight, so it should be able to take their combined weight.

On the last stretch, the ledge almost in her view, her grip tightens on Baako, and the extra pull of the line sends them a few feet in the air, parallel to the cliff. She throws her body weight to the right and, in an ungraceful crash to the ground (cradling Baako’s body tight to her chest and pulling her knees up to keep him from the same scrapes), rolls onto the edge of the Aya marketplace until she finally loses momentum. Once she comes down from the absolutely terrifying adrenaline high, tunnel vision in full effect, she feels them crying again, the bravado from earlier worn off in the face of their safety.

With no little amount of strength after getting tossed around like a ragdoll, Maryam pulls the both of them to a standing position and, after bracing herself, picks them up to hold them securely. It’s all instinct, something deep and maternal in her, but she shushes them, bouncing them slightly in her arms and humming. Eventually their sharp cries calm down until there’s silence and the material on her shoulder is still soaked, but not getting any wetter. “You okay?” She’s met with silence and, holding her breath, she pulls back slightly to peer at their face- finding their eyes closed, their shoulders relaxed. She doesn’t blame them for tuckering themselves out, and she continues bouncing them, humming, unsure if it’s for their comfort or her’s.

It seems like the entire angaran population of Aya is staring at her, wide eyed and mouths open. No one seems willing to speak first so, teeth rattling so hard that her voice shakes, “So, which one of you is-” She has to take a breath and close her eyes, trying to get her center of gravity back in order. “Which one of you is Baako’s parent?”

A female angara steps forward and, yes, she can immediately see the resemblance- they have the same flare to their crest, are the same light green color. “Mojisore ada Oye, Pathfinder. His true mother. He is my firstborn son.” Mojisore shares the same stunned look as the rest of the angara. “I... If he is bothering you, I can take him back...?” Her voice is hesitant and, while her hands are outward and grasping, the fingers are curled in like she’s prepared to pull them back.

Maryam angles her head again to check Baako’s face- he’d nuzzled into her neck, and was drooling slightly, making it hard to extract him from her. “It’s no problem, really.” Which seems to make Mojisore more nervous, so she tacks on, “It’s no problem to hold him, I mean- I don’t think he got injured in the fall or the ascension, but you should check over him, if only to be sure.” With that, she gently slides a hand under his chin, supporting his head and not disturbing him from sleep while she turned around, and passed him over to his true mother. It was a little difficult to maneuver him because there was no empty shoulder space to rest his head on her, but Mojisore acclimates and guides his head under her chin and resting on her nutrient deposits.

“Thank you so much, Pathfinder.” She says, softer, and there’s a small, hesitant smile on her face. “He has always loved the stars and, he’d just recently found out that you had seemingly come from them- I had thought he would simply run over to you, bombard you with questions. If I had known he would’ve been in any danger...” Her voice trails off, and she turns to face Baako, nuzzling his head. “Oh, may your luck build, Pathfinder.”

She’s not quite sure how to respond to that. “Thank you very much, Mojisore ada Oye.” Now, coming down from the adrenaline high, she feels the pulse of blood on the sides of her face, the faint swelling. There’s medical jargon that S.A.M. throws at her in the back of her mind, but she can’t focus enough to pick apart entire sentences- ‘contusions’, ‘concussion’, and ‘class two hemorrhage’ are all that comes through. She nods at her one more time and starts to duck back towards the Tempest, feeling the shredded bits of the side of her suit, a fairly large cut on her shoulder.

She’s stopped by two warm hands on her shoulder- the touch is glancing, but it’s enough to nearly knock her down. “Ryder, you’re injured.” Jaal’s voice is loud, alarmed, and there’s a murmur through the crowd. “Here, I can hold your weight while we get to the infirmary.” He loops an arm around her waist, fitting his fingers underneath her right rib- upon inhaling again, she realizes her left one might have a fracture in it.   

“Pathfinder, your blood is red?” A voice she recognizes as Jaal’s brother Baranjj rings out, loud and alarmed. “I thought it was residue from the cliffs!” And, all at once, there are more angara closer to her, in a blur of blue, purple, and green. Someone wipes at her shoulder with a cloth, another picks a leaf from her hair- Baranjj’s lighter blue is at her side, supporting the rest of her weight. He moves to wrap an arm around her back and hold onto her left side, but Maryam lets out a hiss of pain when his fingers flex, and he pulls back like he’d been burned. “Ah, human, I’m sorry- I didn’t realize-”

“They aren’t offended, Baranjj- she was wounded on that side, that’s why she slumps in that direction.” Jaal explains, quickly. “It would be best if I get her quickly to the Tempest- thank you all for your concern, genuinely. The Pathfinder will be back tomorrow to discuss further relations.” Which is a worrisome sentence that makes her wonder what relations she’d need to discuss, but in the next moment he’s lifted her up, supporting her at the knees, his arm around her back. She lets out an involuntary and very pathetic groan, pulling in on herself and leaving Jaal scrambling for a better hold on her.

“Sorry, sorry.” The action had winded her, and she takes the moment to try and regulate her breathing again. One she settles, much like when she’d been holding onto Baako, Jaal starts walking at a brisk but light pace. “You... You don’t have to worry so much, I just need to get stitched up. ‘S not that bad.”

“You’re bleeding profusely from your head- which is something I was under the impression you need to survive.” He quips back, but his voice is heavily laced with worry. He pauses for a moment and, without hesitating, pulls his rofjinn off, and proceeds to wrap it tightly around the top of her head. It’s warm and familiar, and reminds her of when she was younger, wanting to wear a hijab like her aunties and bothering them until they finally gave her a spare. “To staunch the bleeding.” He explains, but there’s hesitation- not knowing if that’s how her body works, most likely.

“I meant it, it’s fine- head wounds bleed a lot.” But her words slur a little. “You shouldn’t... Your rofjinn is important, I don’t want to stain it-”

“It is important to me, but it is still cloth- it can be washed. Keeping it clean isn’t worth ignoring your wounds.” She can hear the faint roar of the Tempest’s engines in the distance, but she fights to keep her eyes open despite the wash of comfort that falls over her. She’s staring up at him, looking at the hard set of his brow, the watery look in his eyes- genuine worry, fear. Maryam opens her mouth to remark on this, but a hard current passes through her, and she startles, tensing in his arms. He’s immediately apologetic, hushing at her. “My apologies, my apologies- it was instinct- angara heal each other with our currents, I should have controlled it better but I didn’t realize-”

“‘S fine. Didn’t hurt me.” She appeases him, reaching up with one aching, protesting arms to pat at his face- he lets out a strange, soft rumble, regarding her with more worry. “You did fine- thank you for carrying me.”

“Maryam,” Which is the first time he’s used her name like this, so soft and fragile and scared. His pace increases, jostling her cuts and making her flinch- he stares down at her, alarmed, holding her tighter to try to compensate. “You’re cool to the touch, and you seem to be losing pigment- what can I... What can I do? We’re almost to the ship, dearest Maryam, if you can hold on just a little longer.”

“When we get there,” She starts, then loses her train of thought. She shakes her head, her ponytail brushing against his arms. “When we get to the Tempest, just tell Lexi I need some fluids. ‘S not enough blood to need a transfusion.” Pause. “I don’t think. Since I’m still, able to stay awake.”

“Understood.” Then, as she feels the sudden press of released cool air from the ship as the bay was opened, hears the alarmed voices of several of the crew, the last dregs of her adrenal response fade away, and she drops her dead weight into Jaal’s arms, knowing that everything was out of her hands.

-

When Maryam wakes up, she hears the faint sound of Sahuna’s voice which, being slightly disoriented, was very alarming. With little to no grace, she jerks into an upright position, feeling the protest in her right arm- stitches up and down it. “Maryam!” Jaal’s voice calls out, loud and surprised. Quieter, he directs his voice to the call he’d taken with his mother, “Mother, I’ll call you back later. Stay strong and clear.”

He stands from the chair he was situated in at the foot of the room, and his smile is wide and relieved. “Woah there, Jaal,” She lets some casual tone into her voice, different from her usual stringent persona. After the day she’d had, she deserved it. “Far be it for me to interrupt you talking with your mother- did you tell Sahuna I said ‘hello’?”

He seems to fret somewhat, then. “You were unconscious, I don’t see how you’d be able to say much of anything.” She shrugs, and he deflates somewhat. “Ah. Another idiom.” There’s a long pause where he seems to think on it and, then, his gentle smile returns. “It meant that you wanted my mother to know you’re thinking of her, yes?”

“Yes.” She smiles back- he was getting so good and working over translation errors, it was heartening to see. “How is the family doing? Aya is beautiful, but Havarl is where they are- it’s nice.” Jaal’s smile gets larger, face flushing and the divots on the back of his head giving off a bright light.

The heart monitor she’d been attached to gives one long stream of accelerated heartlines, before fizzling out. She looks at it in shock, before pulling two fingers to her neck to check, just in case. “That... That would be why they sat me at the foot of the bed, I think.” Jaal says, not looking particularly shamed. “Now that you’re awake and well, however, I doubt there is reason to continue the monitoring. They explained the process to me while you were unconscious- the human body is certainly a tenacious thing.” He leans over to point at the bag of fluids, tracing the line to where it ran into her arm. “To be brought from so much blood loss with only a mixture of water and salt! It seemed so unlikely, I was-” Now he looks somewhat sheepish. “I was speaking with my mothers as to what they thought would be the proper course of action for blood loss- I had staunched the blood, but I wasn’t sure how to provide more to you.”

Maryam takes a moment to let all of that sink in. “That’s really kind of you, Jaal- I really appreciate the concern, and what lengths you went to make sure I would recover.” She smiles and reaches out with the hand without the IV in it, cradling his face. “Make sure to tell your mother’s I am grateful for their concern as well, but I’m fine. A little bruised, and I’ll have a few more scars, but nothing too detrimental.”

“Nonetheless, it was still worthy of concern.” Jaal starts, then stops, seeming to change the topic. “Aya is currently in shock right now- what you’ve done was an incredibly political move, and one that sways the opinion of the angara in your favor. While the child may have raced after you, and their falling of their own consequence, to have thrown yourself over the rail as well to save them...!” There’s pride in his voice and Maryam is glad she’s no longer connected to the heart monitor, because her heart rate spikes at recognizing adoration in his eyes. “It was heroic, selfless- the ada Oye family is discussing whether or not to propose you a position in the family as a Mother to Baako. They’re all-” He corrects himself. “We’re all in shock- for you to endanger your life without thought, to be put in such a state of harm, for the sake of a child that you have nothing to gain from? It’s... inspirational. Heartening.”

“He was just a kid.” Maryam says, reeling somewhat at the bombardment of all of that information at once. “Anyone would’ve done the same- I don’t see how it warrants honor or favor. It’s just... It was just the right thing to do.”

Jaal’s eyes sparkle and, just as she hears the rush of feet of a nurse coming to check on the state of the equipment (S.A.M. had probably reported that she was still among the living), he takes her hand and leans close. “Maryam Ryder, to protect our young as your young, is no small act. As far as Aya is concerned, you are an angara by honor.” His face becomes impossibly more vulnerable. “And, as word may spread to Havarl through my family, you are a hero.”

“A hero, huh?” She says, wondering if this was some long, drawn-out dream. If Jaal’s adoring, dilated eyes were all a dream. “I don’t need the title- it was just the right thing to do.”

Then Dr. Lexi P’Terro shows up, scanning the room and taking in the scene before her, Jaal’s bright bioelectricity in the air. “Well,” She says, somewhat amused. “I can see why the monitors went dead, at least.”

Chapter Text

There are discharge papers in her hand in half a day’s time, Maryam’s wounds slathered in medi-gel and her fractured rib cage miraculously set. “I’d like to run a few routine tests over the course of the week.” Lexi concludes, scanning over the last update of her vitals. “Your bones mended nearly overnight without prompting- if I’m being honest, I was hoping to keep you in the medbay a little longer. You have microfractures in your fingers that seem to have healed poorly, and I wanted to make sure they’re set correctly before sending you off.” She purses her lips and rearranges something on her omni-tool in front of her. “That will have to be postponed, but not forgotten.”

Maryam flexes her fingers, looking down at them with a mild apprehension. “Those should be older breaks- I needed my fingers stronger when I was working alongside turians and elcor.” It seems stupid, now, to recount the fact that she’d basically snapped her fingers for a competitive edge. “I, um. It was under human military supervision- striking things of coarser grit until you’re able to break concrete with your fingertips.” When Lexi raises one eyebrow ridge, she avoids her gaze immediately, knowing the following question. “If I hadn’t, I risked being sent off Mars and traded in for some random C-SEC with an itchy trigger finger.”

There’s another brief moment of uncomfortable eye contact before Lexi sighs, closing the form with a swipe of her fingers. “You don’t always have to have a logical justification for why you do something.” She drums her fingers alongside the tool, making hollow clicking sounds without any actual input. Her words come out practiced, careful. “What did you like doing on Mars?”

She reminds her of the counseling therapists after her mother passed to AEND, their planned kindness and plotted conversation routes. She shifts in the hospital scrubs, pulling herself into a more comfortable sitting position. “I liked the work, the people. I have my Master’s in biology so, where it was applicable, I could be called out from peacekeeping to provide input on some flora or biotechnology.”

“A passion we share.” Lexi says, agreeable. Her voice turns somewhat nervous. “I’m not the psychiatric side of this bay, but I’m always willing to listen if you need a... professional opinion on something.” She swallows, her voice picking up speed. “Your family history indicates an inclination towards depressive mental illnesses, which could only be exacerbated by possible trauma received in the field-”

Maryam holds up one hand. “Doctor, truly, I’m fine. Mentally more so than physically, lately, but nonetheless.” She pulls the hand back, flexing it, thinking about how her bones ache when she’s on Havarl, surrounded by the angara and always feeling like a thunderstorm was just on the horizon. “You don’t always have to have a logical justification for talking with me, you know. My offer of dinner still stands-” She pauses, closing her eyes. “Did that sound like I was hitting on you?”

“I, oh, er.” She clears her throat. “Somewhat, yes. I thought I made my stance on relationships incredibly clear when we first met.” There’s a slight purple tinge to Lexi’s skin that makes Maryam sigh, trying to forcefully course-correct this conversation to where she meant it to go.

“I meant it platonically- I come from a culture where saying things like that aren’t an exclusively romantic offer. I respect you as a professional and would love to hear about your work, niche as it may be.” She feels a smile tug at her lips, reaching her hand out, palm up. “So long as you wouldn’t mind a second opinion- I did minor in anatomy. All Citadel-schooling, too, so you know it was interspecies.”

Lexi seems to hesitate, before touching the tips of her fingers to the flat of Maryam’s palm nodding. “What I’ve said before still stands- as your doctor, I can’t afford to regard you in anything other than a functional, platonic relationship.” A similar matching smile tugs at her lips, though. “But it has been a while since I’ve been able to discuss krogan reproductive motility with anyone who has even the slightest idea what I’m talking about.”

That gets a terrible bark of laughter out of Maryam, who quickly covers her mouth. “Perhaps Kadara, then, if we’re going to discuss sex that doesn’t involve us for three hours in elevated vocabulary. It might be the only place that won’t tarnish our reputations.” She nods, then gestures at the IV still in her arm. “We can talk more on this when I’m not still hooked up to the fluids.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

-

There’s a flurry of activity at the terminal in her room- email after email from ama Daravs she hasn’t met and many more from the ada Oye family. Most were inquiring on her physical well-being (tiptoeing around outright asking about her health), with others commending her on her fast reflexes and selflessness. The most recent one is from Buqrir ama Darav, according to the tag line, and only read: Good job. Also, Sahuna provided the family and your anticipated new family (the ada Oyes, if you were unaware) with a means to contact you. Stars guide you, Buqrir ama Darav (Jaal’s elder uncle).

Which would explain her inbox clutter.

“SAM, can you sort these by word count? If there are any messages from any crew-members, prioritize those as well.” And, because she wasn’t raised to be rude. “Thank you.”

Of course, Pathfinder. Then, despite the limited functionality and connection to her email outside of some sort of mundane notification, the terminal re-sorts itself, with an email titled ‘Angaran Familial Relations’ from Jaal sorted to the very top. She pauses, somewhat concerned that it’s short enough to take priority over an email from Liam titled Movie Night: This Time it’s Personal, before shaking her head and opening it anyways.

Dearest Ryder,

Maryam pauses again, rereading the start of the email, convinced she’d misread ‘dear’. Was this really happening? The last time anyone had prefaced her name with ‘dearest’, she’d been the space equivalent of a motown singer in a shiny bar.

I would like to discuss your current situation with the ada Oyes. Seek me out whenever you’re not busy.

With love,

Jaal

It seemed like an easy enough place to start- with the angara she knew, instead of those she didn’t. Even after the weeks she’d spent with Jaal both on the squad and in the Tempest, even with her mouthful of questions that she’d paced out to not seem so invasive, she was never quite sure when she was overstepping her boundaries. And, if the emails were any such indication, she had a lot to catch up to if she was going to be a prospective alien family member to a kid she’d only just met yesterday.

That was. That was quite the concept, becoming someone’s secondary mother. It had been something she’d been vehemently against on Earth, on Mars- she’d had many lovers that had laughed at her birth control jokes, chuckling when she wrinkled her nose around her mother sending messages about potential grandchildren. The idea of being a mother was never an idea she’d entertained- she loved the roar of neighborhood children playing outside, hadn’t minded watching over them when their parents went away. But there was always the unspoken understanding that they weren’t her’s- they’d be gone when their parents came back and swooped them out of her arms.

And now, to be a mother.

Maryam sends a courtesy message in few words to Jaal about seeking him out, and for him to stay put lest they miss each other trying to find where the other one was.

He’s in the tech lab, disassembling his rifle for what she can only assume is the millionth time, with absolutely no exaggeration. It seems like a nervous habit, which she can’t fault him for- if she had any work simpler than her Pathfinder duties, she’d be throwing herself into that, too. She knocks her fist into the side of the door, not sure if it’s a universally understood gesture, then pulls back. “Afternoon, Jaal.” To be fair, she’s not quite sure what time it actually was in Galactic Standard, but it seemed to be the appropriate time.

Nonetheless, despite her multiple signals that she’d stepped into the room, he drops an Earth wrench, his head jerking up to look at her. He moves it quickly out of her line of sight, behind a toolbox to his right, then lets out a surprised, “Ryder.” He doesn’t blink in between sentences, something she’s learned to interpret as nervousness. “I didn’t think you’d be coming by so soon. I... I lament not preparing more for this conversation- I fear there may be many things I’ll leave unsaid, forcing you into a potentially explosive environment-”

“Deep breaths, Jaal.” And he takes her at her word, inhaling and exhaling slowly- he gazes at her appreciatively, as if her advice had helped. “If this isn’t a time-sensitive arrangement, I can always come back when you’ve collected your thoughts.” She shuffles slightly, adjusting her stance so she wasn’t straining the scabbing on her chest- the medigel could only do so much. “Your family just sent me a lot of emails- I can answer them while you think it over, no problem.”

Jaal’s nutrient deposits turn bright, bright blue, and the room gets somewhat lighter with his bioluminescence. “I’m sorry, perhaps that was a translation error- who is sending you emails?” He sets down the scope of his rifle that he’d been clutching in his fist, getting closer to Maryam, crossing his arms.

“Your family.” She repeats, tilting her head to the side. “Buqrir ama Darav mentioned that Sahuna distributed my email address to most of the ama Daravs and the ada Oyes in case they wanted to speak with me. Which, as it turns out, is what most of them wanted to do.” She gives a half-shrug, not too sure where his embarrassment stemmed from. “I assume most of them will be questions regarding the alliance or humanity, so I don’t have any problems answering them.”

“I- er-” Jaal fumbles for words visibly, still very blue. When he speaks again, his jaw is somewhat clenched, and he rolls it to try to relax it. “I worry that they’ll ask... invasive questions. Our concept of privacy and your concept of privacy are incredibly different from my experience, and I warn you that many of them may ask... intrusive questions.”

“Regarding...?” She prompts him.

“Your biology, most likely.” He makes a sound similar to clearing his throat. “Likely, your reproductive functions and many of them comparing you to angaran plant life.”

“Jaal, are you trying to tell me that these emails are thinly-veiled mating proposals?” Otherwise, she can’t see the purpose of asking what her womb did or whether or not her hair looked like a certain fern. “Or is it just angaran hospitality?”

“Some of them might be flirting with you, yes.” He says, and his blush seems to wane slightly, his fingers locking in front of him. “You should feel free, if you wish, to reject any of them. I’ve skimmed through some human customs, and I want to make a point that angara have no such resentment to those that reject romantic relationships.” His tone grows slightly more earnest. “You definitely do not have to fear for your life in a rejection, in any case.”

“And if I want to get to know one of them better?” She says, somewhat joking, but also to see if she could glean any more angaran dating tips from him. He was her emissary, certainly, but he was also kind and dependable and a good shot- even handsome, from her point of view. She’d dated a drell with similar coloring, skin like red sand and a mouth full of pretty words- it’d been a long time since she’d looked at someone as just their race in pursuing a romantic relationship.

Jaal seems to consider this for a moment, studying her face with his lips slightly pursed. “If you'd like to accept one of their proposals,” He starts, words carefully chosen, “Then I suppose it'd be just the same as any human relationship- built on care and mutual understanding.” He tips side-to-side- an action similar to her rocking on her heels.

“Good to know.” She tries to hide her smile at noting their similar movements, but it still comes out. Her chest burns a little- half the sting of wounds coming out from the medigel treatment and half of something a little more. She knows if she doesn't say it now, she may never get a better chance, “Jaal ama Darav, how would you feel about us ‘getting to know each other better’?”

There's a brief moment of silence, where he’s nigh unreadable, and she mentally scrambles to figure out if it's because she's offended or because he genuinely wasn't expecting her proposition. She remembers their stilted, halting conversation on his past lover Allia, her attempts at comfort.

“I know how that feels.” She’d said, hand over his in a movement she now knew to be condescending in angara culture (which explained why he’d squinted at her, scrutinizing). Her own fumbling confession, “I had a lover I lost, too- to a disease, but it's a similar ache. If you ever want to talk more about it-”

“I did just talk about it.” He’d said, moving his hand back so that their fingertips touched, no hand over the other. “In your situation, though- would you like to talk about it?”

And she’d laughed it off, vaguely uncomfortable in the face of her attempt at comfort being turned back on her. “I’ve lived and learned- it's not so fresh of a wound. I can live with it.”

He’d looked at her like she'd said something profound. “Isn't that all we can do?” Jaal’s voice soft, understanding. “Live with our wounds. But-” Hesitation. “But that does not mean we have to do so alone.”

She fears it might've still been a fresh wound for him. “I know you said you'd seen how violent human rejections can get, but it's not a thing I would d-”

“I would feel honored.” Jaal interrupts, a small smile on his face. He takes another deep breath, his voice taking on an amused tone. “Certainly I know not to be afraid of you by now- by now, I’m well aware of your character. Getting to know you...” His gaze seems far away for a moment- she realizes that these gaps in conversation were him gathering his thoughts. “You're a beautiful woman- kind, intelligent, steadfast. Fascinating. Knowing you better would be a great gift.”

Despite her best efforts, she feels some heat rise to her face. Her reliability and intelligence weren't commonly brought up, especially as a Pathfinder and someone who supposedly didn't have a plan. “Well,” She says, a little too quickly. “It would certainly be a shared gift- don't sell yourself short. I meant what I said about you doing great things- maybe I’ll be one of them.”

He chuckles, and she chuckles back, and they reach an impasse where there's nothing more to be said. “I’ll leave you to your work.” And he dismisses her with a nod.

When the doors autolock behind her and she's left on her own, power walking back to her room, the panic sets in. “‘Maybe I’ll be one of them’ ?” She echoes quietly, somewhat shrill. “Wallah, it’ll be a miracle if I didn't just scare him away.”

On the other side of the door, an automated Shelesh voice in Jaal’s auditory receptor notes an update to his translator. “View ‘human slang dictionary’.” He requests, eyeing the door. When it’s pulled up, he refines, “Alternate meanings of ‘doing’.”

The results pull up in front of his eye and, with a startled laugh that quickly rumbles and becomes genuine, Jaal ama Darav realizes he may be in too deep with this charming, kind hearted alien.

-

It’s a measly three hours he waits before Jaal sends her another message, just as brief as the first. He has to monitor himself, unsure of what sort of language to use with her- was it too early in what he tentatively thought of as a courtship to talk about their deeper feelings? Were certain terms of endearment attached to different, non-intuitive meanings? After revising his email no less than five times, he’d sent a simple:

Lovely Maryam,

I believe I’ve come to a solution. I’ll be in the tech room.

Jaal

And then, after a moment of overthinking, rapidfire sent off a follow-up:

Dearest Maryam,

Is addressing you by your first name culturally appropriate? Subsequently, is ‘dearest’ an appropriate term to refer to someone who you enjoy spending time with and flirting with? If I’ve made you uncomfortable, or misspoke and offended you, feel free to let me know.

With respect,

Jaal

He’s not too sure where she was on the ship, just that she was likely nowhere near this room, where he slept. He’d had one wild time trying to acclimate to their strange dense beds and their heavy blankets made for heat and not for keeping out insects. He’d kicked most of them off in his sleep the first night, leaving them in a dissatisfied pile on the floor before realizing that they were genuinely trying to accommodate him, and he’d folded them, using them to prop up his arms. His electric current was always stifled when he woke up, having to put all of his bodyweight on his one arm when he slept on his side.

While he considered his sleeping arrangements, his omnitool pinged.

Beloved Jaal,

He pauses for the moment, blinking and letting out a quick rumble of adoration- humans were incredibly reserved in their emotions, but maybe it didn’t translate to speaking over text? It certainly felt like a bold start.

I’m currently in a video conference with Director Tann (he’s reprimanding me as I type this)- I’ll be able to head over in approximately thirty minutes. Don’t worry about honorifics or endearments- calling me by my first name is fine, and, if we’re pursuing a relationship, whatever you call me is fine.

♡♡♡,

Maryam

Jaal stares at the strange, lumpy shapes she’d preceded her name with for a few moments, before shrugging it off as an untranslated word. He breathes a sigh of relief at his lack of offense (one less thing to worry about), and goes back to staring intermittently between ‘beloved Jaal’ and ‘pursuing a relationship’. She makes him feel like he’s young, like this is his first love and he’s the one making eyes behind the back of the governess during information rallies while she chuckles, indulging him.

True to her word, she knocks on his door almost exactly thirty minutes later, smile soft, hair bobbing behind her. A ‘ponytail’, he thinks to himself, wondering about the name for a few seconds. “Hello again.” Maryam says, starting to ‘wave’ at him, before quickly pulling her hand back down. “Sorry- it’s a habit.”

He nods, understanding. “Hello.” He pauses, considering his next words. “I’ve thought at length what would be the best approach to advise you in meeting the ada Oye family, but I fear that my advice can’t be all-inclusive of any situation you might encounter.” Now, the harder part. “If you would be willing, I’d like to take you to meet my own family, perhaps for a dinner, in order for you to gain this experience.”

Maryam pauses to blink a few times, and he frets, wondering about human adoption systems (did they even have familial adoptions?) and courtship processes (was it taboo to meet your partner’s family?). “I’d be willing.” She says, and she tilts her head side-to-side, a considering motion. “Would I be introduced as the Pathfinder, or as your lover, though?” ‘Lover’ is tentative on her tongue, and she seems to gauge his approval for her using it.

“Can you not be introduced in both capacities?” Jaal presses, wondering at the strange separation- were they not two facets of her same personality, no matter how recent the latter identity was?

“Well,” She starts, the word slow, in a way that usually preceded her explaining some complex cultural machination. The last time had been when she was explaining what a krogan ‘quad’ was, which had been a stilted and strange conversation on both ends. “I guess what I meant is that I don’t want them to regard me as picking favorites among the squad, or being less of a professional, if you introduce me as a lover.”

“Is that how it works with humans?” He asks, slowly, watching her face. Her mouth lifts up at a corner, revealing a sliver of her closely-placed teeth, so different from his spaced and square-shaped set. A grimace of displeasure.

“And turians, salarians, and asari. The krogan might rib you a little on it, but they won’t look at you any differently.” In that moment, not for the first time, Jaal wishes that she were angara, or that he were human, so that her seemingly blank face would make more sense to him. She shakes her head, seemingly coming back from wherever her thoughts had led her. “The idea is that you can’t be both a leader and be a lover- one of them has to take precedence, so if you make your relationship known, you’re assumed to be a lover first and a soldier second.”

“That sounds...” He squints and looks away, unable to hide his faint disgust. After a moment, he admits, “Terrible. If you were an elected leader, you should have their utmost faith that you can lead without favoritism or having a separate agenda exclusive to your personal life. You can expect no less respect from my family than what they already hold for you as a professional and what they know of you as a person.”

“A person?” She echoes, and he pauses, realizing that the translators would’ve filtered it simply as ‘angara’. She doesn’t follow up with what she’d thought in that moment, but he can only think of the implications- that she knew he considered her as angara as he was in a metaphorical sense, as worthy of respect. “I suppose some of them now know me better than others, considering the emails I’ve received. Your aunt Mide sent me a very disgruntled note about the pies Sahuna made, including the recipe and several demands for something ‘more palatable’, if I were to ever feed them.”

He feels a flush creep up his deposits and neck. “I’m very sorry for her-” But Maryam is chuckling and shaking her head. “Ah. I see this sort of behavior is universal, then?”

“Oh, I expected no different- my aunties would’ve said similar if I’d sent them a bad recipe.” It feels like some small secret moment, then, the two of them shaking their heads over strong-willed aunts. “I’m afraid of what Sahuna actually fed them, actually- salarians are known for ‘approximating’ human cuisine. Is it rude to bring food to a dinner, with angara?”

Her question prompts genuine thought- it would be rude for an angara to bring food to a non-communal dinner because it assumed that the host couldn’t cook well enough to satisfy them, but this would be a cultural exchange, and he feared the possibility of there being no food she could eat safely. “I believe in your case, it would be fine. What type of food would you bring?”

She answers his question with another, “When will I be meeting your family?”

The certainty in her voice (that she will be meeting his family) makes his heart stutter. “Would tomorrow be too soon? I fear putting it off, in the event of a kett attack or an issue within the Initiative.”

“No, the sooner the better, I suppose.” She nods, then, to herself. “I’ll bring a dessert- something simple you can eat with your hands.” Maryam demonstrates with her many-fingered hand, folding her four fingers to her thumb and bringing it to her mouth.

“Alright. I’ll seek you out around midday tomorrow, and then we can depart for Havarl if you have no other engagements.” He leaves it open-ended for her to contradict, but she shakes her head that her schedule was clear, so he nods, showing his understanding.

“See you then.” She seems to hesitate, leaning towards him slightly before drawing back. She reaches out for him, then, taking a gamble and pressing her lips (soft and full and colored like ripe fruit) to his left cheek, pausing, then kissing his right cheek. There’s a residual warmth there, which he dazedly notes is both from her lips and from the rising blood to his face. “That’s typically for greetings, but I thought it might be a nice note to end on.”

“Truly.” He feels somewhat winded, as if he’d just ran a long distance. “Do I return in kind...?”

“You would while I was still kissing you- you don’t have to actually touch the face, just make the gesture.” She tilts her head to the side, and she’s so pretty, so warm and strong and tempting. Her skin looked like an early sunrise, like light’s reflection on top of water- brown and gold and smooth. He wishes he could skip to a time where the angara and humans knew each other all too well, where their match wasn’t the first nor the last, and they’d had a long time to figure out what was and wasn’t appropriate. “But we’ll have plenty of time to practice.”

“Is that a promise?” He returns in an equally flirtatious tone, pleased and elated when her skin turns warmer, adopting a red undertone, and she smiles. With his attention drawn to her lips, Jaal notices they seem to get somewhat more vibrant. “Maryam, I am certain my family will adore you as I do. A woman of your strength, presence, and beauty could garner nothing less.”

She chuckles, which he’s relieved to be a universally understood sound. “If you flatter me any more, I may lose my humility- and then what would your family have to love?” She chuckles again to herself, shaking her head at some joke she likely wouldn’t explain to him. On her way out, she bumps her hip into his in a playful manner (if the human ‘wink’ was any indication) and, while he nearly falls right over because of how his weight was distributed, he tries to return it, only managing to barely make contact.

As soon as the door clicks behind her, he starts penning a message to his true mother, unable to contain his excitement nor the news of his new lover. Sahuna had gotten Maryam’s email address initially when he’d been accepted as part of the squad (which Maryam had accepted with grace, telling him that she had no intentions of hiding what happened in regards to his safety from his mother), so he knew they spoke, if infrequently.

Mother!

Maryam has accepted my advances, and I wish to introduce her to the family, as well as to you, physically. I believe this will be a good learning experience both for us as angara, and for her as a potential ada Oye Mother. She is as kind as ever, as patient as ever- she introduced me to a cultural greeting where one kisses the other on both sides of the face today. It is a relief to know that her’s is not a culture that wholly shuns physical touch, as I’ve worried so. To think, that we meet as lovers from two separate galaxies- I thank the Jarevaon Imasaf for creating her, for putting us on a path to meet. She says she will be bringing a dessert to share with us, and that Mother Mide had sent her an email regarding the ‘pie’ you had made- it may not have been a genuine human recipe! Hopefully, it will be something we can both eat and enjoy- I do not want to offend her over a dessert dish. We’ll be arriving around midday, so that I may introduce her to any family that can be present.

Stay clear,

Jaal

-

The following day, after the morning debrief, Maryam pulls him aside. “I would like your opinion on what I should wear to meet your family.” She says, entirely seriously, and he has to hold his laughter in. She sees through his quick cough. “Don’t laugh- their first impression involves what I’ll be wearing, and I don’t want them to think I’m uninvolved or culturally ignorant. I also need you to taste-test the baklava before I serve it to your entire family- it doesn’t have anything that I think could cause an allergic reaction, but I’d like to be sure.”

“You have a lot of worries for an event that’s supposed to alleviate most of them- recall that we’re doing this as an exercise for you meeting the ada Oyes.” Jaal says, reaching out a hand to pat at her shoulder as he’s seen her do to Liam. “You can be yourself around my family- if you do anything inappropriate, it’s a safe environment for us to correct your behavior without offense.”

She takes a deep breath, bringing to mind her advice from the day previous, which makes him smile. “Alright- you’re right. I would still like your opinion, though.” She turns around, gesturing him to follow with a tilt of her head.

“So be it.” He agrees, following her back to the Pathfinder’s quarters- the first time he’d set foot into them since the movie night. It’s a different experience with the lights on, seeing how wide and expansive the room is- covered in various discarded armors, scattered with weaponry. Were she anyone else, he might've feared an ambush or attack, but somehow this room seemed fitting. In a way, it was like his own set-up in the adjacent tech lab- few personal items, more defense possibilities.

When she goes to a smaller room full of clothes (he knew the angara concept of clothing storage was closer to something called an armoire or a chest, and that Liam and Maryam had lightly bantered on what human item was closest), she pulls out several different clothes in such a variety that he feels his eyebrow ridges raise without prompting. She throws them down onto her bed, then separates them out for better viewing. The topmost one is short and black, a one-piece item lacking a split for legs, implying free range of movement. “Is that a shirt?” He asks, innocuous enough. While Jaal knew how to sew and create necessary clothing items and the occasional ceremonial apparel, he was less than well-versed in actual fashion, which he was afraid showed. “You could pair that with some of your white pants for a full outfit.”

Maryam gave him a blank look, shaking her head. “It’s a dress- a full outfit. And I... don't think it's appropriate for going to meet your mother.” She holds it up to her body, and he sees that it comes up to her mid-thigh, the upper portion revealing most of her shoulders and chest. He feels his bioluminescence flare when he realizes how much skin would be showing, almost embarrassed for suggesting it as an outfit. She quickly files it back into the storage. “Perhaps this one?” She holds up a longer ‘dress’, covered in swirling patterns and heavy embroidery around the neck and down her chest. It’s a deep fuschia, with the thread being a reflective gold- it comes down to her feet.

“It’s beautiful,” He says with complete sincerity. Internally, he was taking notes on the patterns, thinking of possibly recreating them for a future gift. “Though I fear you may overdress- gold accents tend to signify someone of a high social standing, like with the Moshae. You may come off as arrogant.”

She shakes her head immediately to show that was the last thing she wanted. “So, no djellaba.” Maryam bites down on her bottom lip, light pressure, and it reminds him of how one would bite into a yielding fruit. She has to repeat her next sentence, as he misses it the first time. “What colors are more appropriate, then?”

Jaal truly wishes he’d acquired a formal education- color theory would've saved his stuttering tongue. “Er, well, non-metallic clothes are acceptable. Blue is more often used in a... romantic light. Pink, red, and green are more neutral, if you have anything in those colors.” She holds up another dress- it has a pattern in swirling shapes, but is a mix of red and green. “What is the pattern of?”

“Some of Earth’s flowers.” She responds quickly. He scrutinizes the pattern more carefully, identifying similarities between it and angara flora- wide leaves and reaching stems. “It’d be a good conversation starter, as well.”

“I like it- it’s very vibrant. We don't have many floral patterns- it's just not an emphasis.” He offers, at her raised eyebrow asking why they didn't have those types of patterns. “It’s casual enough for the situation, and, though it is fairly alien, it’s not offensive or self-important.” She holds it up to her body, and he likes the way the colors play off of her skin tone, the way her black hair and brown eyes seem to contrast and suit the reds and greens. “It would look lovely on you.”

Maryam nods once, then starts to peel off her armor. He clears his throat, remembering Liam say that humans of a perceived different gender don't change in front of one another and trying to be polite. She’s in her pants and her chest harness (brazeer, he mentally corrects to the word Liam had supplied at his inquiry in their cultural exchange) when she finally acknowledges him. “The showers are communal,” Her voice holds clear confusion. “It’s not as if you've never seen me naked before.”

“I see- it's a different situation, then.” So he makes no moves to avert his gaze, watching the muscles in her back flex and stretch to hit a release on her boots. Her lower half is considerably smoother than Liam’s, which he chalks up to their gender dimorphism.

“Although-” His gaze returns to her face, as her tone seems somewhat amused. “You probably should only look at me like that if we’re both naked. If I didn't know you better, I’d say you were treating me like a piece of meat.”

He puzzles over this, thinking of his mainly plant- and paste-based diet, then of corpses (meat?), before coming up short. “I don't understand your idiom, but I understand that my staring was rude. You’re very beautiful, and I was curious, but I should have refrained.” He fears his words may actually be selling her short- she is wide-hipped and broad-chested like the angaran women from old, pre-Invasion vids. Healthy and strong, but soft and fluid. There is old poetry he could recite that would describe it all better, and Jaal would repeat it all until his mouth dried out if she asked it of him.

Now, there was no softness, no health- angara rushing dinner tables for the first handfuls of food, the quicker sibling getting the bigger portion, their speed making them a better future or present soldier. He wonders if that is the analogy- the hunger he felt when he looked at her, wanting to rush to her, treating her like a well-placed meal.

But, he knows- Maryam Ryder is not someone to sate his hunger on between battles.

Maryam doesn't explain the idiom, stepping into the dress and pulling her arms through the sleeves. “I accept your apology. Now, if you wouldn't mind...?” Her arm somehow twists behind her back, gesturing faintly at a very small metal tab at the end of a gaping metal ‘V’ across her back.

He has to squint somewhat to see it. “I wouldn't, though my fingers are... somewhat ill-equipped to grasp it.” He pinches it between his thumb and pointer finger, wrapping his third finger underside of it for better grip. He starts to pull upwards, but the force just jerks Maryam backwards- she lets out a sound of surprise. “Sorry.” He places his free hand on her lower back to steady her, then tries again- the glide is smoother, though somewhat resistant when it hits a snag. Her ponytail is high enough that he doesn't have to worry about one more factor when he finally gets it to the top. Jaal smooths the fabric under his hands to get out any wrinkles he might've accidentally caused in his less than gentle handling, and she shivers underneath his palms. He swallows, ignoring his own resounding shiver and a slight spark of bioelectricity from his fingertips as he pulls away. “Finished. When you take it off, please check to make sure I didn't ruin the zipper.” There was a word for a similar but larger and less jagged clothing device, but he uses their word for it instead. “If I caused any damage, I will gladly repair it.”

She turns around, and they're so close that he can feel her breath ghost over his chin. Jaal was constantly impressed by her height in comparison to the rest of the team- she was taller than Cora by a head, and slightly taller than Liam. She could nearly look him in the eyes without tilting her head, but he had a few fingers of height over her. Maryam’s eyes flicker down to his lips, and he wonders if she intended to drag her tongue over her bottom lip, or if she truly was attempting to seduce him. Or perhaps, he followed the thought up with, she had been waiting for her greeting. Jaal tips his head down to plant his lips on her left cheek (stunned nearly to inaction by the softness of her skin- like the texture of a flower petal in its own right), then her right. He’s surprised that, even though he seemingly caught her off-guard, she still responds, making kissing sounds that he's fairly certain will replay in his dreams later.

When they pull apart, the moment surprisingly intimate for a greeting kiss, Jaal looks down at her and, somewhat winded, “Are you ready to leave?” Maryam touches her cheek lightly and shakes her head.

“Five more minutes- to touch up my makeup.” And he watches, somewhat in rapture, as she pulls up a camera function on her omnitool and, pulling out a tube from her side desk, makes her lips more red. There's a methodology to her application- he watches her quick and steady hand and she lines her upper eyelids with black, with a small straight line from the crease. Distantly, he thinks about how it’d make her eyes look distinctly more angara if they were blue. Nonetheless, when she pulls away, she looks sharper, more alert- and heartbreakingly beautiful. “How does it look?”

He's at a rare loss for words. “Beautiful. If I... If we were to kiss, would it ruin the tint on your lips?” He wonders what she would look like with blue tint, her lips twisted into the same wide smile.

“It would.” She confirms, sounding somewhat solemn. Maryam starts to move around him, sliding her feet into shoes that force an arch to her step (for what reason, he’d never know). In one hesitating move, she pulls a pin from a cup near her tints, pressing it into the center of her hair. With a craning look, he identifies it as a metal-wire flower, with small gemstones inlaid before she quickly turns to face him. She presses one hand to the center of his chest, and, under his bone protrusions, he can feel his heart beat faster as if to meet her touch. “Alright. Now let's go meet your family.”

Jaal wonders, truly, what he did for the stars to bless him with such a woman that looked like she was crafted in their image.

Chapter Text

It’s on the shuttle that Maryam realizes that she realizes she never had him try the baklava. The Havarl heat is slightly muggy, and it’s enough to start wearing down her straightened hair. The heat keeps the dessert warm in its container, though, so she has to compromise- all while trying to tuck the curled sides of her hair further into her ponytail. It’s a sparsely populated shuttle (she wonders if this was an ‘off day’ for angaran traffic), but those that are on look at the two of them with curious eyes. She has to remind herself that it’s not because she’s an outsider, but because she’s done something worthy, to them.

It’s different from when she was a novelty on the Citadel, the strange new alien thinking she could get an equal education beside the Citadel races. It’s different- everyone knows her by title, not race. ‘The Human Pathfinder’, not ‘the human’.

“Your brows are pulled together- what do you worry about, now?” Jaal sits thigh-to-thigh with her, a casual intimacy, although he was obviously trying not to be too obvious. She can understand that- no matter how accomplished she was, she was still not angara. With a slight pang, she can see her father’s look of surprise, then disappointment, when she’d brought around her quarian girlfriend. Interspecies relationships never were immediately accepted, she supposed. “The ride is certainly no rougher than Nomad.”

“It’s nothing- really, this is like a cab ride in Fes.” She says, as they veer a sharp left on the rails, and she collides with him gently, having braced herself. He pulls his arm up and around her, holding her upright as they round a sharper right she hadn’t seen. “Do you still want to try one of these?” She jams her thumb underneath the tab of the tupperware, popping it up and tilting her head at him. Considering, “Is it polite to eat in public?”

Jaal is already moving to pull off the top of the tupperware, with his free hand over her’s. He immediately stops when she followed up with a question, and pulls his hand back. “It is- unless it’s messy. Larger fruits like paripo is eaten privately, because it’s full of juice and will spill.”

“Oh.” She pauses, considering. “It’s the same for us- you may have to lean over it. It’s a flaky pastry, and may crumb.” Maryam opens the container, and she has to consciously close her mouth when she sees how he inhales deeply. He considers it, cut in triangles and two full, separated sheets. She’d asked him how many of his family would be there, and he’d given her a number in the thirties- sure, the baklava was now bite-sized, but she’d rather everyone get a chance to eat it than to have anyone scramble for it.

Faced with the reality of it, though, ‘bite-sized’ looked tiny in Jaal’s larger hand.  

He sniffs it again, looks at her, then pops it into his mouth. The thought suddenly occurs to her that his herbivore teeth might making it difficult to chew but, in two slow, considering bites, he’s able to swallow it. She didn’t realize her shoulders are practically up to her ears anticipating his opinion (thinking that if he finds it bland, she essentially has a box full of trash), but when she does, she immediately tries to drop them.

Jaal smiles, wide and closed-mouth, his pupils dilated somewhat and his eyes squinted. “It tastes,” he starts, haltingly. “Like tavum. Sweet, but... earthy. It’s a ‘pastry’?” At her nod (and her relieved sigh), his tongue darts out, taking the leftover honey off his bottom lip. “It is nothing like our paste. Comparing it to tavum might’ve been too quick of a judgement- it’s delicious.” She sees his jaw work, most likely trying to get the bits of mixed nuts out from between his teeth. He swallows again, tongue peeking out again, staring at her with such adoration she feels shy - struck straight to the heart, her heart warm and thrumming in her chest. He repeats, adoration and surprise in equal parts, “It’s delicious.”

Another sharp turn, and she takes no hesitation to lean against his arm, fingers wrapped around his bicep. “Two more stops to go.” Maryam says, gesturing at the electrical board with the shuttle’s stops displayed. The other angara dart their eyes away, and she wonders if it's because of the apparent intimacy in the gesture, or if she’s disgusted them. “I hope I didn’t accidentally make an intoxicant- it’s perfectly harmless to humans, I promise.”

Jaal laughs, loudly like always, and pulls her close to his side in more of a hug. “I believe you.” He shakes his head, chuckling, the last dregs of his laughter. He squints up at the display board, still smiling, and she wonders if she’s not alone in not wanting this private moment to end. He turns back towards her, tender and soft around the edges. “My family will love you for this.”

When the station stops, hard and fast, Jaal pivots harshly forward with the impact, and it’s enough for Maryam to be pushed straight to standing on her feet. He lets out one loud laugh, then shakes his head, rolling himself into standing. The rest of the angara on the shuttle take off at this station, and she hears their whispering- some jokes about ‘only Jaal would want to make first contact so quickly’, some ‘are humans built similarly?’. Jaal takes her hand, leading her to the previously occupied, cushioned seats for the rest of the trip.

Then they’re alone in the car, and she has to think about what was unsaid- that he loves her food. Loves her for it. She takes a breath to steady herself, then leans further into his arms. “Is this fine, for the rest of the trip?” Maryam asks, finding that his nutrient deposits are yielding enough to serve as a suitable rest while she’s curled onto him.

“Of course. I was simply being... conservative, due to the tentative nature of our peoples’ alliance.” He says, and his fingers flex on her arm. There’s a mischievous edge to his voice, then, as he continues, “You’re welcome to move as close as you please- I’m not ashamed of our relationship.”

She raises one eyebrow- she was practically on top of him already. With a quick thought of 'What am I so afraid of?’, she maneuvers herself sideways, sitting on his lap and turning her head to face him. Just one breath away, almost daring him, “I agree- while there’s nothing to be ashamed of, we do have to be... aware that our match isn’t an accepted one. Just yet.” Maryam has to appreciate that, even with his bioluminescence practically blinding her, his crest flushed bright blue, he still attentively listens to her words, nodding along.

“This is agreeable.” He follows up and, her dress fanned out over his knees, he wraps his arms around her waist, tucking his head over her crown. Maryam finds herself amused, distantly, because it's only while they're sitting down that their height difference is of any use. In her heels, she knows, she’s his exact height. Around her, Jaal shuffles, getting more comfortable with soft and slight rumbling sounds. “Perhaps we could let the shuttle go on its return circuit. A delay of ten or so minutes will not break my family.”

It’s the same teasing, mischievous tone, and it gets a laugh out of her- hitting his chest lightly, “I refuse to keep your family waiting so we can cuddle, Jaal. The ama Daravs will know me as nothing less than punctual.”

From her sideways position, she can still see him beam down at her. “No hesitation, as always. I warn you, darling one, that my family is... ‘cozy’, as you’d said of the crew.” She sees a bend on the tracks and pushes her body weight towards him, anchoring him as the shuttle felt like it was going to go sideways on a right turn. He makes an untranslatable sound of appreciation. “Again, you may have to deal with intrusive questions.”

To be fair, Jaal seemed far more concerned with what questions his family could ask than she was, or had been when she’d answered over fifty emails in the night. ‘Around thirty’ was nowhere near the sheer size of the ama Darav family, nor the number of emails she’d received requesting clarification on anything from how her feet worked to ‘the lowest moment in human history’. “Now who’s the one worrying? I’ll be fine.”

-

Jaal nearly instantly regrets his decision to arrive so late in the evening- while he’d joked about a few minutes more of contact and (upon retrospect) tame touches, arriving early by a half-hour would’ve given the both of them enough time to come up with a strategy in his room, as if they were going into battle. He knew he wasn’t wrong about his family- Maryam was lovely and lovable in equal measures, and he saw the delighted looks of his cousins when she’d stepped into the room. No, what he was concerned about was the sudden overwhelming attention placed solely on his dearest- she was a Pathfinder, certainly, but would she be comfortable with almost every one of his elders asking questions about her biology? He could practically feel the nervous static build up along his spine.

His eldest Mother, Auntie Mide, approaches fast and clear, one hand extended and curled, as Maryam had done when she’d first met him. Not the angaran greeting- the human one. ‘Shaking hands’. There’s a moment of tense pause, where he’s looking at Maryam and Maryam is looking at Mide’s hand and Mide is looking at Maryam expectantly.

Maryam pushes the back of her arm against Mide’s, coaxing her elbow to a bend, then curling her hand to a fist. The static in the room pulses, one quick wave of relief as the rest of the family watch the strange alien in their home instead opt for their greeting over her own peoples’. Then, for the first time, Maryam opens her mouth and, rolling r’s and clipped syllables, says, “Thank you for welcoming me into your home.” without the translator’s filter.

Jaal isn’t alone in his stunned silence- he feels somewhat guilty when he has to turn his head to look behind his aunt to make sure, yes, he wasn’t the only one that heard that. Auntie Mide’s mouth hangs open as it is, before she rapidly seems to try to regain her cordial manner once more. The smile on her face is small, though obviously controlled- he can feel his own smile on his face, the pride in his features. “Our home is open to you, by our word.” The customary return.

As a child, Jaal remembers scrambling to her knee to listen to the stories she’d had of the time before the kett- stories of her childhood. When the customary return was simply ‘our home is open to you’, and there was no need to specify that their consent was necessary.

“Come in, come in- Mide, you shouldn’t keep them half out of the door, for shame.” There’s an immediate transition in how they treat her, then- his second eldest Mother Yuula is reaching for Maryam’s shoulder’s, pulling her into an embrace. Maryam has to take the second to move her food container to prop it up on her hip, returning the hug with one arm, and Jaal sees her smile in relief. He chuckles- ‘relief’ was far from the emotion she’d feel once she realized that Yuula was a ‘force to be reckoned with’, and she used the hug to start pivoting Maryam towards the dining area.

He finds himself more impressed by her in the following moments than he ever had on the battlefield- the shoes that forced her feet into an arch obviously caused a balance issue, and Yuula was a hand shorter than her in them. Yet, somehow, Maryam maintained her balance, hunching over slightly and still keeping the baklava from falling out of her arms. Distantly, he can hear her start on about how she needn’t bring anything- were all humans so thin? She’d make sure she had a hearty meal in her by the end of the night.

With Maryam out of their direct line of sight, conversations roar up again, the room becoming boisterous and chatty once more.

His cousin Wanoula approaches him with wide eyes, her eyebrow ridges raised high on her forehead, her bioelectricity snapping in the air. “You adhi!” She says, though she makes sure her voice is quiet enough for Maryam not to hear- though, by Maryam’s tilt of the head only one room over, he’s starting to think there was no range where she couldn’t hear them. Wanoula looks a mixture of both betrayed and amused, and he waits for the conversation to take a terrible turn. “First alien that lands and you’re already smoothing her crest! I had resources on whether or not you’d at least flirt with her- but getting together? I’m all outta ash berries!”

Her sister, Aonmi, leans into the conversation and hits him with a firm closed fist to his chest protrusion. “You filled my fridge, Jaal! I knew, the second the human stepped off their ship and they looked like that character from the spec-fic movie you liked as a child-” Feeling his crest go very very blue at the idea that his human lover most likely could hear every word of this, Jaal reaches out his hands to beg her to stop but, Aonmi, bioelectricity discharged to let everyone know she had something to say, quoting the movie, “‘Oh, Jazoul, I may have crossed a sea of stars, but I am forever enamored by the ones in your eyes-’”

He’s horrified to hear his True Mother laugh as she enters the home behind them. “Reconnaissance ran later than usual,” Sahuna explained, propping her gun up and over her shoulders. “But what is this about ‘Star Destined’? Jaal, certainly you’re over the character Zafrina by now- you have much to do aboard the Tempest, where you’re surrounded by aliens that look like her.”

And, to make matters worse, she gathers some of his crest between her thumb and pointer, and jostles his head, like he were a child.

He whips his head (not breaking her grip) to see if Maryam had seen the display and, when he finds her back to him, thanks the stars, and tries to ignore the raucous laughter of his cousins and uncles over his embarrassment. “I love you all,” he says, when Sahuna finally lets go of him. “But you will never let me live down ‘Star Destined’, will you?”

“Oh, never, now!” His youngest Mother Laosilan, with an arm full of drinks to set the table, cuts in. “Now you’re Jazoul- with the strong and beautiful Zafrina whisking you away to the corners of the galaxy to fight the kett. Let us get our fun where we can!” He’s certain Maryam heard that, and he’s also sure that his bioluminescence is bright enough to signal the Tempest to land. On their way to the dinner table, several of his cousins and his uncles pause to quote the movie at him (he vividly recalls forcing them to watch the movie over and over with him, in this moment). And, worse, when he gets to the table (last to the table- skutt, he should’ve been faster), he finds all of the seats beside Maryam are occupied.

He takes his seat at the very far end of the table, both very satisfied that Maryam was integrated quickly into the family and a little miserable that he no longer held her full attention.

There's a brief moment of pause, where he wonders if they're trying to censor themselves around the human, before it interrupts into the same loud dinner as always- hands grasping for whatever food they can reach. He’s about to grab two cubes of paste, worrying Maryam would end up without food, but he sees Lathoul beside her, gently setting one down onto her food mat with a smile. She returns it, and it warms his heart to see the exchange.

Though seeing it meant he didn't get any paste. The only thing left is Maryam’s container on the center table, so he shrugs and pulls it closer to him, loading up on it. He hears her click her tongue (Lathoul bristles beside her, and he remembers how he, too, used to think that that was a sound of attack), but she just raises a finger at him. He has to focus to hear her, so far away, “That's too much sugar for you, Jaal- you'll give yourself a headache.”

“Oh, speaking of- what is this that you brought us?” Sahuna had taken her place on Maryam’s other side, one hand grasping her arm while the other loosely held onto her cube. She makes a somewhat impatient hand gesture for Jaal to push the ‘tupperware’ down the table, and she sets down her untouched cube to pick up a triangle of baklava, holding it up to her eyes in scrutiny. “Is this like the pie crust?”

“The only good thing about those ‘pies’.” He hears an auntie mutter, though he can’t figure out which one it was.

“No, no- pies are more of an American thing. I’m Moroccan- this is a ‘pastry’.” Maryam turns her palm up, then makes a stacking motion with her opposite hand. “It’s many layers of phyllo and nuts. It has other things in it, too- cinnamon, vanilla, lemon zest...”

Sahuna seems to brace herself, her smile somewhat exaggerated, before popping it in her mouth. The conversation around the table dies down, everyone watching her- meanwhile, Jaal ignores her advice and puts five of them in his mouth, making it about the size of the average paste meal. It bursts with a syrupy, warm flavor- he can make out the hints of a sharper spice (the cinnamon?), but his palate isn’t delicate enough to pick up the other things she had mentioned. He almost misses when his True Mother lets out a loud rumble of happiness, opening her mouth and pointing at it. “It’s good! It’s actually good! It tastes like-”

“Tavum.” Maryam supplies, grinning her sweet smile down at Jaal- he feels his deposits go warm, the spike in his heart rate. She looks so genuinely happy, so free at his dinner table- it’s a harsh contrast to the serious line of her mouth in the galley, her professional greetings and her quick work of eating. “I made Jaal taste-test it, though- I think you like the honey in it, but it’s not an intoxicant. It’s high in sugar, though, so-”

At the mention of ‘sugar’, there’s a flurry of angaran arms reaching into the container, some teeth-clicking and shouts of ‘unfair, you always get first bite’. And he sits back, with his leftover five pieces, as the rest of them settle back into their chairs, some of them without any baklava. Teviint, across from Maryam, is hesitant to speak but, over the intense rumbling and the loud crunching sounds around the table, she explains, “Sweet things are rare to find- we need to put our resources towards our health, not indulgences.” Though Maryam’s face is as open as he’s ever seen it, he watches as Teviint folds somewhat under her gaze.

Ah. He had practically forgotten that she had been one of the three of his family to go to the Roekarr’s side- he had forgiven them. And, when he looks closer (squinting and tilting his head), he sees that Maryam’s look is a measured response- her smile not as organic as before. Her eyes flit briefly between Lathoul, Baranjj, and Teviint- he’s surprised at how much she can convey in one single motion. Did you truly believe in Akksul? Do you still find me an enemy, even as I sit at your table, give you food, protect your brother?

Teviint is the only one without any on her plate (after haggling and promises of loaned tools and offers of gun-cleaning in order to taste the alien food dispersed it all fairly evenly) and, head tilted and considering, Maryam holds out the last bit of baklava from her own plate between two of her fingers. The world around them turns, the conversations continue on, the exchange lost in the discussion of kett formations, more arguments over whether or not the kett facility should’ve been destroyed as the Moshae had said. Maryam, her expression guarded, worried- he wants to tell her that he has so many more siblings, many who would respect their match and accept her- that one sibling being biased against her was only one out of the many that adored her.

But Teviint takes the food and, cautiously, takes a small bite out of the already small food. After one bite, she immediately finishes it off, surprising even herself, evidently. “It’s delicious.” She says it with surprise, almost with some sadness. “Pathfinder, you brought something good to this table.” Her bioluminescence dims, her shoulders folding in- seconds from weeping. Immediately, the cousins around her clap an arm around her in equal half embraces.

And Maryam smiles at her, open and soft and relieved again, and Teviint begins to cry, drawing more attention. He’s shocked at how quickly Maryam's emotions change, then- so quick to alarm, as she gets up from her chair, maneuvering around the table to where Teviint sat. There’s confusion, some quick sounds of alarm, and Maryam makes this strange hissing sound between her teeth as she pulls Teviint gently from their cousins Danai and Fadsizo, pulling her into an embrace. This only seems to make Teviint cry harder, as Maryam presses her into her chest, still making the hissing sound. She keeps making that sound, in fact, smoothing her hand down her back until she stops crying, down to hiccups of breath. “Now.” She pulls back, and he sees it- he had heard Maryam was born only a few hours before her brother, but he can see the elder sibling in her. “What are you crying about?”

“It is unfair.” She replies, nearly immediately. Her hands come up to hold onto Maryam’s arms, bracing her- she was not like Jaal, who would shy away from his feelings if it made him vulnerable. She was not like Mide, who mimicked Maryam out of cultural sensitivity. She was angaran and, when she felt an emotion, she made it known. “We get the kett, we get seventy solar cycles of suffering and enslavement and death. We get mandatory enlistment, children sleeping and eating separately for their own safety. We get shorter lifespans from wounds or stress or a stray kett bullet.” Her hand hits the table hard enough for Sahuna to flare in warning, standing up. “And then we get humans? We get you, who looks like a urtupe flower and smiles and means everything you say, with a sweet dish and a hand on my brother’s crest! Do you think this does not feel like a mockery? Like, the second we let ourselves believe everything to be clear, you won’t push us from the Forge?”

Mide stands, fast and on her feet, “Teviint , you will not act this way in my house- I do not know how the Roekarr let you act, but you will not bring this hatefulness to a guest that has done no harm to us.” And she’s about to pull Teviint’s hands off of her, her glow bright and furious and her lips firmly closed in disapproval.

“If I may speak.” Maryam interrupts, holding her hand over Teviint’s, meeting Mide’s eyes. Jaal wants to stand, almost to tell her that no, she doesn’t have to speak- the angara and the Jarevaon Imasaf natives were allied and it was the greatest disrespect to both Maryam as a guest and Mide as a host for Teviint to act this way.

But Mide narrows her eyes and tilts her head. Allowing her.

There are a few moments where she doesn’t say anything, where she opens her mouth and closes it, as if she wanted to say something, but- “I was going to say that, if I were untrustworthy, if I truly wished harm for the angaran people, Jaal would’ve put a bullet in my skull long ago. It isn’t that you don’t trust or love Jaal- you do, but you’re afraid he is too trusting. That... isn’t the point I want to make.” Her composed face, the drawn ‘eyebrows’ and her pursed lips, her military stature. “You look at me as an outsider and an invader- both of which are not false. Even if it was accidental, we did invade Aya, we did impose on your people by simply coming to this galaxy. I hold firm that we will never settle on Aya, Havarl, or Voeld- this is not something I will negotiate on. Wherever we inevitably settle, the kett pose a threat to our stability as a people and as an ally to the angara, and we stand as allies on that front.” She takes a breath. “That is what I say as the human Pathfinder.”

Maryam closes her eyes and, in her pause, five different voices chime in- “What more do you want, Teviint?”, “This was an issue long resolved.”, “She should not have to apologize for your rudeness.”, “Great, more politics at the table. Just what we needed.”, and Jaal opens his mouth, “And as Maryam Ryder?”

She opens her eyes and looks at him- it’s a moment of synchronicity, and she looks at him like she appreciates him, loves him. She looks at him like she wants to ruin the tint on her mouth just to kiss him. “As Maryam Ryder, I will tell you that I come from a colonized people. There was active resistance, but we crumbled in the face of stronger weaponry, of civilized means of subjugation. I come from a people that knows what it’s like to lose a history because you are facing impossible odds, that knows what it’s like to lose generations to what seems like hopeless fighting.” She blinks a few times, fast- there is no bioluminescence to alert him of her sadness, no falter in her posture, but he knows it like another sense. “I understand that it all feels too easy, but I am not here to do what has been done to my people before. Under my watch, I refuse to let it happen. If every Milky Way alien turns against the angara, tries to use them as a power play, as a means of resources, as things and not people, I will stand in between you.”

Maryam swallows, and there are a few silent tears that go down her face- no wailing, no moans of sadness. Jaal feels their collective horror at the silence in her pain, the way it’s pushed deep down and repressed until it spills out. The paints on her eyes remain untouched as she roughly wipes her tears off of her face with her open palms, then extends her arm, elbow bent, fist closed on her tears. “I approach you as an ally, because my people had none. I approach you as an ally, because I have grown up in the ruins of colonization.” She draws in a deep, shuddering breath that Jaal feels himself echoing. “I don’t need you to like me. I only need you to trust that I will never see a child go through what I have.”

Danai has his arms around Maryam, next, pulling her into a full embrace that Jaal sees her fully resist, her arm still out for Teviint to receive in acknowledgement. “Now, we are all crying.” He says, voice low and mournful- the only one close enough to have reached her so quickly. And, because he has a sharper tongue than the rest of them, he jokes, “Is that why you came into our home? Not to seed dissent, but to make us all cry?”

Maryam still does not reciprocate the embrace- she looks solely at Teviint, who has backed up, one halting footstep at a time. He wonders if she sees the angara in Maryam as he does, sees the exhaustion in her eyes but the endurance to them. He mourns for her, that she has had to live the life he has feared all of his life- after the long struggle, after the last bullet fired, if he would have to look the kett in the eyes as if they were his own people and they had not traumatized generations of his true people. To live the life of modifying sentiments to stay safe in one’s own home.

And he knows she sees it, when Teviint looks Maryam in the eyes and sees the possible, terrifying future for the angara, because she pulls away from her, shaking, and flees. Maryam’s gaze still follows her, tracking her not unlike a predator.

“I wouldn’t have had anyone cry, preferably.” Maryam says, and it’s a shaky joke, but she no longer seems upset- it seems like an effort to collect herself, with some shaking involved. There’s a slightly red tinge to her face that he guesses is flush from crying- he’s again taken aback by how quickly she feels she must reign in her emotions. “I assumed this would be more of a cultural exchange, and less of a group therapy session.”

“Therapy is nothing to be ashamed of.” His uncle Nesui offers and, while his cheeks are as tearstained as anyone else’s, her casual conversation lightens the mood and he sounds as steady as she. She returns cousin Danai’s embrace with a squeeze to both of his shoulders, then moves to retake her seat at the table, her knees shaking somewhat. “If you wished this to be a cultural exchange, then should we ask questions?”

“If you would like.” She offers, just as polite. She has to tuck her dress underneath her when she sits down, for some reason- he doesn’t see what was wrong with letting it fan out as it had on the shuttle. Sahuna, beside her, rubs her arm comfortingly, speaking to her in the hushed tones of a mother to a child. Maryam responds well, smiling and nodding and saying something that looks like she was affirming that she was fine, it was an ‘outburst’.

His uncle Zile, with absolutely no shame, asks, “When do humans die?” This gets a bark of shocked laughter out of Maryam, which prompts the question, “Why did you laugh?”

“No, no, it’s not like death is funny- just that you just-” She makes a fast gesture in the air. “Straight to the point- when do you die.” She shakes her head and seems to think. “Our average lifespan has us live until approximately one hundred and fifty standard solar rotations, but the oldest humans have been known to live up to is around two hundred.”

There’s a hum of surprise along the table. “Most of the population lives to seventy solar rotations- those of elevated status, who are better protected, are known to live to one hundred and fifty solar rotations.” Jaal tries to explain, but he is so far down the table, he wonders if she can hear him. The current of her conversation is shared between them, allowing him to hear the general answer of her voice, but she has no such means of carrying messages. Surprisingly, she does, and she leans into the table with her hands braced against it to be able to see him. “It isn’t out of mortality, but that we die in combat so often. Mide is the eldest living ama Darav, at seventy-five.” Maryam cuts her eyes at him, like she does when he’s accidentally been rude. “I don’t see the issue in discussing her age?”

“How are you able to hear him at the end of the table?” Sahuna asks, bewildered as she watches Maryam lean back.

“You’re all fairly loud, and he’s not that far away from me...? Can you not hear him?” She answers back, holding up one finger to Jaal to signal that she would answer him in a moment.

“Not well, no. I have to tune into his frequency to detect the gist of what he’s saying, but I cannot hear distinct words.” Maryam seems to blink a little in confusion, before something occurs to her and she points to her ears.

“I can’t pick up on those signals, so my ears are built to channel sound inward, so I can heard quieter sounds and with more accuracy.” And, while they were all looking at what Jaal had first described to them as ‘head handles’, they wiggle. Yuula squeals in delight, pointing at her as if they all hadn’t seen it. She hits the uncle beside her (one Jaal hasn’t seen in so long that, to be fair and honest, he doesn’t remember his name), and whispers, ‘Did you see that? Like an adhi pup!’ “Sorry, didn’t mean to take away from- Jaal, in most human cultures, it’s rude to mention a woman’s age. I wasn’t sure if it was the same here...?”

“No, definitely not.” Mide answers, shaking her head. He watches Maryam’s eyes flit over her more thoroughly- her covered nutrient deposits, the golden accents on her clothes, the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes. “Would it be rude to ask you about your age?”

Maryam pauses, considering, then scratches her neck. “No- I’m, um, twenty-three solar rotations by Earth’s standards. By Havarl’s standards...?” Her eyes go distant, her mouth moving without any words coming out- seemingly doing the math. “Approximately twenty-six...? That’s not exact math, though. It becomes rude to ask when a woman is visibly aged, because it’s assumed you will mock her for it.”

“Mock...?” Mide’s voice holds shock and the slightest of anger. “Age does not come with status, then? Why would they be mocked?”

“Is there a loss of wisdom? Do human women experience an amnesia as they age?” Yuula supplies, equally concerned. Maryam seems to deflate somewhat, and he can see their anger mimicked in her expression.

“There are some disorders where one does lose their memories as they age, but it’s rude because the standard of beauty for human women is ‘young’. Our worth tends to be tied to our appearance more than to our knowledge or our accomplishments.” She says this with a distant look, and it’s one of vague anger- he feels it. Understands it.

Briefly, he remembers her look of surprise when he had called her kind, complemented her intelligence and work ethic- he had thought it was modesty, appreciation. Now he suddenly worries that it may have been the first time someone had complimented her on her character and not on her looks.

“You are compassionate.” Fadsizo says, their chin lifted in earnest, giving her a small, tentative frown. “And very well-spoken. You do not deserve to be reduced to your appearance.” There’s a hum of agreement around the room, and it breaks off into several conversations about how repressed humans seem to be.

“Do you think,” Wanoula says to her sister, across from Jaal, soft and hesitant, “That she is this way because of those that colonized her people? Would the kett force us to stay silent but paint ourselves too look as if we’re fine, as she does when she’s hurting?”

“We cannot rule it out.” Aonmi responds, and her voice is full of pity. “It must be difficult, to have to hold everything in and have to perform as if you’re unaffected.”

“It’s funny that you think that way-” Maryam starts, and they both startle as if burned, obviously not expecting her to hear them, turning to face her. “Because humans are actually considered one of the most expressive alien species. Except for maybe the elcor, but only because they preface their sentence with what they’re feeling.”

“You are joking.” Nesui counters. “The others- the... aswar, the rock-faced ones, the krogan, the... thin ones. They are all worse than this?” He pauses. “I don’t intend to offend.”

“No offense taken.” Maryam responds, with a shrug. “The asari and the salarians are built on knowledge empires, and the turians have an altruistic society built on structure and order. Krogan live in isolated clans, though their society emphasizes anger as a show of power, so that’s the only acceptable emotion to show.”

“Good... Good to know.” Nesui nods, looking away and blinking rapidly, seemingly in disbelief. He pauses, then squints at her. “Are you angry? You’re... bristling.” True to his word, Maryam’s hair was steadily rising into the air, the little strands that weren’t pulled into the tight column.

“Bristling...?” She looks genuinely confused, until Nesui pats the crown of his head for her to mimic. She very gently touches the crown of her head, the strands swaying towards her fingers, then she laughs. “Oh, are you all nervous?”

There’s a murmur amongst the table that reaches a general consensus of yes, most of them had been nervous from the start, and were very worried as to how she took Teviint’s disrespect. “It isn’t as if we are trying to conceal it.” Mide says, dropping her shoulders as she had seen Maryam do to indicate nonchalance. “Though, how are you able to tell, and how does this relate?”

She shakes her head, still giving off a small laugh. “I’m not angry with any of you- least of all Teviint. But, when Jaal’s nervous, he gives off static, which my body picks up on.” Jaal feels himself flush- he had never noticed before and, while Maryam had told him before that she was a person with very little shame, he knew she wasn’t aware of how intimate the implication was. He can practically see Aonmi salivate to comment on this, and Sahuna tries to disguise her laughter into the palm of her hand. Maryam reaches behind her head, pulling out the metal-wire flower from her hair and, reaching a band in it that he’s never seen before, pulls it out, her hair getting drastically bigger. "My body picks up on your passive static, and my hair rises because they're all carrying a negative charge are repelled- I could get the same effect by dragging my feet on the carpet."

There are a few gasps, and Zile actually claps, as if she had done some great trick. Maryam’s look turns to one of great confusion, as she keeps combing her fingers through it, quick and fast, the small crackling sound of static from her fingers. Lathoul is wide-eyed beside her, and he reaches out, then has to shake his head and reconsider. “I’m sorry- could I...?”

Maryam’s hands stop, and she considers Lathoul for a long moment. Jaal takes in the sight of her- her hair is so long, like a moving river down her back. He can see the urtupe flower comparisons, now- her black hair looks like the long drooping petals, her brown skin like the center, and her lips like the pollen. “Somehow, I forget that we’re the only aliens you’ve met with hair.” She says, then tilts her head towards Lathoul, and it moves like a body of water- it’s silken, beautiful. Lathoul picks some of it up from the bottom, holding it in his hands like one would a fine thread. He combs his fingers through it, treating it as if it were thread.

“It’s so soft.” He reaches around her, taking the hair with him to show to Sahuna, who indulgently pats at it. He tries to move one down to Laosilan to the left of Sahuna, but her hair doesn’t reach, and she lets out a sharp hissing sound, unlike the one she made when she was comforting Teviint. Lathoul lets go of his grip immediately. “What did I do wrong?”

Maryam is rubbing the top of her head, her face in an obvious grimace. “You pulled- I can’t feel it at the ends, there, but I can feel it at the root. When you pulled, it hurt.” She blinks a few times. “It just stings- you didn’t hurt me substantially. And I know you weren’t intending to, so it’s fine.” She inhales and exhales, like she’s considering what to say, next. “If any of you want to touch my hair, please be gentle with it- it is still connected to me.”

And, surely, she hadn’t anticipated every angara at the table standing up to feel her hair. Laosilan is the first to make it, apologizing for Lathoul, and giving her a soft pat on her head, like she would an angara’s crest. Lathoul follows shortly, “I hadn’t meant to hurt you, Maryam- here, you can have my portion.” And, with extreme reluctance, he puts his last bit of baklava onto her mat. She laughs and gives it right back, surrounded by thirty crowding angara, reaching out to touch her hair.

When everyone has had their fill of feeling her strange, alien fur, they go back to their places and keep eating. Jaal watches Maryam touch her crown again and flinch, feeling some of the stickiness residue from her pastry, conveyed by someone’s messy fingers. He gets up and, as the last one to feel her hair, tries to part her hair back to how it originally was.

Maryam tilts her head back halfway through, looking up at him, and smiles, squinting at him as if he were the sun. In that moment, under her appreciative gaze, he feels as though he could be.

Chapter Text

The night starts to wind down and, honestly? Maryam was starting to feel her energy taper off, too.

There are goodbyes and introductions, which was one of the more surreal cultural experiences of the night. Her eyes still faintly ached from crying, and she hopes that her pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off a headache wasn’t considered a rude gesture. When the dinner had come to a relatively calm end (compared to the explosive middle, then the Petting the Human interlude), Lathoul was the one to pick up her mat, smiling, and going to put her’s to be washed with the rest of them. Like her own family reunions, everyone who had cleaned their place at the table lingered, chatting idly with one another. She takes the time to gather her hair back up into it’s ponytail and put the decoration back in it, listening in on the surrounding conversations.

She could hear her name mentioned more than once, and she’s a little humbled by the fact that, for once, she’s the girlfriend at the table, with no one to talk to.

The ones that remain that aren’t chatting, are in what Maryam assumes to be the kitchen. With finality, she gets up from her spot and maneuvers around the tightly-packed angara to help wash the mats- she would do the same with dishes and, as she’d seen Sahuna disappear into there, the very least she could do was chat Sahuna up.

The moment she steps foot into the room, Sahuna calls her name, a smile on her face. An immediate sense of relief drops over Maryam’s shoulders, and she sighs- it was hard to gauge what kind of impression she’d made on the rest of the family, but at least she’d stayed in Jaal’s True Mother’s graces. “Maryam, what are you doing back here?” Sahuna laughs, her arms covered up to the elbow in a bright green foam in what looked to be a giant sink, supposedly washing the mats. “Go back out, socialize! You’re the guest- we don’t need you doing any of the work.”

Finn (Jaal’s brother, she connects, remembering their hasty introduction after she’d been ushered into the kitchen by Yuula) lifts his arms out of the foam, some of it dropping to the ground, to shoo her away. “Really, now- we have this handled. It’s a drastically smaller workload than usual, anyways.” Beside him, his sister Koana snickers at the mess he made on the floor. “Well, it was.” And his leg reaches out, rubbing the foam into the hardwood floor until it disintegrates.

“I’ll be honest, Sahuna- I’m not sure I could handle another round of Zile’s questions.” She tilts her head, considering the workload- with the three of them, it was going considerably fast, but... “I know how to wash dishes, and it’ll be good to have something to do with my hands.” Sahuna squints at her, considering. “Besides, you had questions you didn’t want to ask in front of the table, right?”

Sahuna’s eyes immediately widen, before her face seems to crinkle into a smile. “I suppose I am ‘like an open book’.” The way she says it, it’s obviously something she’s intentionally quoting from a human source she’s read. She shuffles closer to Finn, forcing him and Koana down the line, gesturing with her head for Maryam to take the space beside her. Maryam moves in, taking one of the mats stacked on the counter and, realizing that there was no polite way to ask ‘how the hell are you washing these things’, simply dunks it into the foam as she’d seen Sahuna do. There’s a moment of very quick learning, as she watches her scrape her nailless hands up and down the mat, spreading the foam, which seemed to dissolve the paste off of it. “I’ve been doing much research into human culture, and, while I make no claims to being an expert, I realized that questions involving the body aren’t seen as polite. Am I wrong?”

“No, you’re right.” Maryam curls her hand, using the heel of her palm to more efficiently scrub the mat she was on. “But you aren’t human, and it’s natural to be curious. The rules are different here, so, unless it’s really invasive, I don’t mind answering.”

“Like when you’re supposed to die?” Koana teases from the end of the line, and, as morbid and seemingly out of angaran humor it seems, it still gets a chuckle from Finn.

“Like when I’m supposed to die.” Maryam agrees, setting the cleaned mat to the side and taking another. Koana holds up her empty hands, signaling for her to pass it down the line for her to clean, and she obliges. Using the heel of her hand, she realized, was a lot faster than the methodical scraping the rest of them were doing with their wide, third fingers. “So, what were they? I do remember you asking about my personal narrative, which isn’t something most humans keep, but I do have some photos of me growing up on my omnitool, if you’d like to see those...?”

“Oh, yes, I really would.” Sahuna nods rapidly, finishing off her mat and reaching for another. “After this, we can sit in the family room and look over them, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ve yet to see any human children, and I’m curious as to how they look.” She pauses, tilting her head to look at Maryam. “You never did respond to my questions about the human birth process.”

“Is that all?” She responds, just as nonchalant. She remembers the very quick panic she’d felt upon reading her questions, fearing that human birth would be repulsing or something to solidify how different they truly are from one another. After this, though... “Angara are warm-blooded and mammalian, no? And you give birth to live children?”

“It’s good that you have some questions of your own- I was worried that our conversations were beginning to get too one-sided.” Sahuna smiles again, turning back to her work. “I’m not what your definitions for ‘warm-blooded’ are, though ‘mammalian’ translates fairly well.” Her tongue works strangely over the latter word, giving the word too many syllables from the multiple m’s. “Yes, we give birth to many live children, and we are able to nourish our young. It’s a beautiful sight to see- the miracle of birth.” But she pauses, as if considering and reconsidering her words then, hesitantly, “Is... this different for humans?”

“No, actually.” Maryam lets that potentially terrifying conversation’s weight fall off of her shoulders. Now, at least, she could put her anatomy minor to good use. “I assume it’s a similar process, like with the asari- children are held in the womb, exit through a canal, and have to be cleaned off. I was afraid that if I just sent you videos, it might scare you. It’s often a... bloody process.”

“Is childbirth not seen as beautiful, in human culture?” She sounds as nervous as Mide had been when they’d discussed misogynistic societal norms, so Maryam shakes her head to assert that, no, it was the same in that respect as well. She lets out an audible sigh of relief. “Laosilan’s children are coming by later in the afternoon to be fed and cared for, and I was worried as to how you’d react to them. As Teviint so... aptly put it, our children are mostly kept separate, to keep them safe from kett attacks, so we can only see them while they’re under heavy guard, after the Resistance patrols.”

Maryam stares down at the clean mat in her hand, unsure as to when she’s scrubbed it so hard. It’s... appalling. It turns her stomach, moves her almost to throwing up, thinking of the life the angara have to live. If she never heard the word ‘kett’ again, it would be too soon- she can only see her grandmother telling her about occupations, about resistance, then the quiet. The century that folded afterwards of complacency, of using French language in the government, in public, in school- the fact that she could speak it better than her native Arabic. She was an old woman, repeating what had happened to her mother, to her father, and Maryam was a little girl, taking on the generations of suffering that her father wouldn’t listen to anymore.

The stories made her more of a fighter than anything her father had ever taught her. A man that changed his name from Iskandar to Alec just to seem less threatening to the Initiative knew nothing about sticking around when the odds were less than favorable. Explained his parenting style well enough.

“Do your claws not hurt?” Finn interrupts her thoughts, one foamy hand gesturing towards the violent scrubbing she was doing on a different, but almost just as clean, mat. She blinks, forced from her thoughts, and gives him a confused look. She has to drudge up some composure- she shouldn’t ruminate on her father for too long. It was a confusing and frustrating train of thought, and not an emotional journey for her to suddenly embark on doing the dishes. “The things on your fingers. Your claws.”

“Oh, my- my nails, no, they don’t hurt.” They actually do sting a little, and Koana and Sahuna are looking at her with worry. She tries to laugh it off. “Sorry, I was lost in thought- I was wondering why I hadn’t seen a single baby!”

And, though it was obvious that she’d unnerved them in her silence, Sahuna still tries to carry on with her humor. “Did you think we simply sprang from the ground, fully grown? A society of only adult angara?”

“Definitely not- I’ve met Baako ada Oye, who’s what? Six years old?” She sets her clean mat to the side, seeing that she’d made a rather substantial dent in the work load. She passes more down to Koana and Finn, trusting that Sahuna would get one if she wanted to. “But he is the only child I’ve seen in public, so I guess I couldn’t be too sure.”

“The ada Oyes are a merchant family- Mojisore was likely showing him how their family business worked.” Sahuna hums, though it takes Maryam a moment to notice that the sound isn’t coming from her mouth, but from the surrounding air- likely from her bioelectricity. “I’ll admit, I’m not interested in talking about the ada Oyes- I know little about them, and have little to share. Instead, I would like to talk about you and Jaal.”

“Finally - for all we’ve heard of Jaal adoring her, I thought he might implode at seeing he couldn’t sit next to her at the table.” Koana says, smacking a hand on the foam so that it sent a wave towards Maryam. “And he nearly did! We’ll have to keep him from the food storage tonight- all he ate were the sweets!”

“That isn’t to say that Jaal is not attentive.” Sahuna rushes in to say, turning to face Maryam- in her heels, Sahuna is slightly shorter than her, and she has to tilt her head up to seem sincere. “He is loyal, strong, kind. Writes lovely poetry, is good at sewing. One of my favorite children. The only reason he has remained single for so long is because he is somewhat oblivious to romantic advances- I hope he’s made his intentions clear to you-”

Maryam wipes off her hand and sets it on Sahuna’s shoulder. “You don’t need to sell me on how great Jaal is- I have plenty of firsthand experience. You almost sound like you’re trying to arrange a marriage for us.” At her sudden panicked look, Maryam realizes that, yeah, that might’ve been an arranged marriage attempt. She tries to stamp the panic down, herself. “Well, in any case, I’d prefer the both of us take it a little slow- marriage comes after a long period of commitment, for humans.”

“So you do have marriage!” Sahuna doesn’t seem the least bit deterred. “I’ve been watching human movies, and I watched one about the ‘dresses’- you wore one today, so I wasn’t too sure about the cultural context. What’s the pattern on it?”

Maryam feels herself blush a little- this was certainly the first time she’d been mistaken as a married woman. “No, no- this is, um, semi-formal. Definitely not a wedding dress- I used to wear this when I would sing, so it’s somewhat casual. It has flowers from Earth on it. I... I would not come to a family gathering in a wedding dress. That would be...” She doesn’t even have a word to describe it.

Finn seems to have only taken one word out of the entire rant. “You sing? What songs?”

She feels her flush intensify, and she has to force herself to make eye contact with him. “I, uh, worked as a singer in a Citadel bar for a while. It... It paid the bills. I liked doing it.” She leaves out the part where she had to leave because her father had his eyes on the galaxy next-door and needed her in military shape. She leaves out the part where she had to leave her girlfriend ‘for family reasons’.

She leaves out the bits that made it some of the happiest moments of her life.

Maryam expects him to press, to ask her to sing something for him to hear, or to challenge her with some musical fact. She knew angara had lyrical music, if only because she’d caught wind that Evfra loved karaoke, but Finn just nods, makes a noise of surprised acknowledgement, then continues cleaning. It's a relief.

“Is the pattern on your neck for decoration, as well? Like the pin in your hair?” It’s in genuine curiosity, but Maryam’s hand jerks to her neck, bringing the foam and mess with her. She usually covered it up with her scarf, wound tight around her neck to cover every inch of it and tucked under her jacket, but she hadn’t bothered, thinking that the only people that would see it would be the angara, who didn’t know the cultural connotation.

“Pass.” Maryam says, swallowing the knot of bile that’d risen in her throat. She’d rather rewind time thirty minutes, embarrass herself again by crying in front of the very people she was supposed to remain strong for, then have the pregnancy discussion one more time, than explain the burnt collar markings on her throat.

“Excuse me?” She responds, not unkindly. It takes Maryam one confused, somewhat offended minute to realize she wasn’t being rude, but was genuinely confused by her turn of phrase.

“I don’t want to answer that question- I’m ‘passing’ on answering the question. That one’s a little, um, more personal than the others.” There were years of therapy after the class trip to Mindoir- no one had thought the Batarian slavers would start smaller strikes, still trying to get something out of the colonist planet. Therapy told her she was too young to be responsible for getting hurt, that she shouldn’t be ashamed- should be proud to have been strong enough to have survived until she was rescued.

Everything after it had burned shame into her neck more than the imprint had, being marked as Batarian property, fit for a collar and cuffs, for life. Told her she had wasted her jida’s stories, hadn’t fought hard enough.

“Mother,” Jaal’s voice interrupts the impasse they’d reached, and he ducks into the kitchen, finding them all finished with cleaning the dishes. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but would you mind if...?” He tilts his head back slightly, which makes no sense to Maryam, who doesn’t know the layout of the house.

“Would I mind what?” He repeats the motion. “Oh. Oh. No, of course not- Maryam, kindness, you’ve done enough- go on with Jaal.” And, even if she had wanted to stay (which, to be fair, she wasn’t opposed to- one awkward question didn’t break a familial bond), Sahuna and Jaal make an effort to both push her away from the sink and pull her towards Jaal, respectively.

In his own home, Jaal is far more comfortable, and it’s such a relief to see. She knows he thinks that he looks perfectly at home on the Tempest, but she can see the stress in his shoulders, the closed-off way he walks. He always seemed to be performing in front of larger groups- around her or Liam, he was comfortable, terrible jokes and all. There never seemed to be a good time to tell him that he was their emissary- not a representative of the entire angara population. He was far too invested in keeping up appearances, even as she worked hard to get him more comfortable with the crew (the movie nights seemed to be wearing him down) and on the Tempest (redirecting more AC to the tech room where he slept, after hearing his very loud complaints about how muggy it got).

But in his own home, he’s loose and laughing at some terrible joke Finn had made about some angaran movie she hadn’t seen. In the same turn, he holds up a fist to imply there’d be some sort of retribution for it later- it all seemed all in good fun, and she was reminded of slugging Mehdi in the shoulder for embarrassing her in front of a date before. He uses the arm he has slung around her back to keep pulling her closer, until she’s finally out of the kitchen, sparing Sahuna and Koana one last glance (they had crowded together, talking excitedly about something).

It’s a short walk, and the doors to the next room simply open when the two of them step in front of it- she has the stupidest urge to scan it, wondering if it simply detected their footsteps, or if it recognized Jaal specifically. If it were the former, then she’d be... well, not too terribly surprised that angara didn’t believe in locked doors, but a little off guard. It would make sense in the scope of their wider cultural values of transparency and openness, but, in their current situation, it left a bad taste in her mouth- that their kindness would be taken advantage of.

As if she hadn’t noticed the hesitation in Mide’s voice on ‘by our word’.

“This is my room.” Jaal says, gesturing her inwards, his palm flat and warm on her back. Behind her, nearly catching her ponytail, the doors close quickly, a panel spinning. Jaal’s hand moves quickly to pull her hair out of the way, just in case, and seems just as startled as she was that it hadn’t been detected. “I intended for the door to close fast enough to give us privacy, but that might’ve been... too fast.” He admits, somewhat bashful, moving himself between her and the door.

“Well, I might’ve left your home with a new haircut, but it wouldn’t have been detrimental.” He hasn’t let go of his handful of her hair, fingers curling just slightly, as if he were trying to inconspicuously comb his fingers through it. She tilts her head back, knowing they were alone for the first time in a whirlwind of several hours and she had every right to enjoy a moment’s peace. He had opened his mouth to say something, but his jaw goes slack, and only her tilt of the head seems to signal him to close it again. She opts for a change in subject. “I think that went... relatively well. At the very least, I didn’t start a contact war.”

“At the very least...? No, you were perfect.” Jaal’s eyes dart over her shoulder at something and, when she starts to turn to look (was he trying to discreetly signal that someone else was in the room?), he quickly starts speaking again. “You earned the respect of the eldest Mother, you held your own against a barrage of questions, you helped my True Mother in the kitchen... You’ve probably better-liked in this house than I am, after all of this.” She holds her breath, parsing through the sentence for any trace of jealousy, but she finds none- just genuine happiness, maybe even pride. It’s nice to be able to look directly into his eyes like this- not having to tilt her head up and get a neck cramp because she wanted to be polite.

“I’m certainly glad I made an impression, at least.” She tries to think of the positive things they could associate with her: good cook, culturally sensitive, passionate. The negative ones? Too chatty, causing conflict with Teviint, emotionally repressed. She has to quantify the experience with it not being the worst-case scenario she had thought of- at least, at least, at the very least. “They’re important to you, so they’re important to me. I know you meant for this to be an exercise in angaran table manners, but I really did enjoy myself.”

“I... Good. I’m glad- I’ll admit, I was worried how you’d handle yourself in the face of such a big family.” His eyes dart again and, really, this time she turns around, even as his hand moves to her forearm to hold her back. Hackles up and biotics pulsing just under her skin, she sees... A schematics tablet on his bed. “Oh, now, who put this here?” He starts moving over to it and, suddenly, she has to hold back her laughter. It’s so obviously rehearsed, so obviously an attempt to put on a very specific air of aloofness, that she has to choke down a bark of laughter.

She still plays along. “Anything dangerous?” He lets go of her and moves towards his bed, picking it up and setting it on his lap. She sits thigh-to-thigh with him, as they had on the shuttle, unsure if sitting on his bed held a different kind of intimacy for him as it did for her. “These are schematics of...?”

“When I was younger, under the Moshae’s tutelage, my aunt Yuula stole a kett rifle for me. I took it apart, trying to learn something that would give us an advantage.” He traces his fingers over the imprints detailing the bits of the gun, every last screw and plate carved into it. She watches, nearly in rapture, at the sheer dedication of it all- it wasn’t uncommon for someone to take apart an enemy weapon to gain better insight, but it wasn’t a task for a child. “We didn’t gain any new insight, but I... enjoyed it. To take something apart, learn how it functions.” He’s rambling, and apparently going off-script, because he opens the schematics and inside is a-

“That’s a... kaerkyn?” She tests the word out on her tongue, not sure if it’s correct. In any case, it’s a skeleton of something long dead, reassembled to show how the bones worked together. She can feel the curiosity in her from her college years, rising like some long forgotten instinct, and she nearly touches it.

“Pet kaerkyn. Alfit.” Her eyes dart, somewhat alarmed, to gauge his emotions. He didn’t seem particularly moved, but... “You’ve seen how angaran life functions. There is little time for formal education. I took him apart to learn. It’s similar to... your work as a biologist, no?” He tilts the box closer to her for inspection and, despite the human instinct that immediately repelled her from wanting to touch anything skeletal, she is very curious.

“To a degree.” She agrees, still having to hold herself back somewhat. The bones were bleached, and it all seemed to be held together with a rudimentary glue- she could see it between the joints. The gap where there would’ve been flesh, the hollows of its bones... She’d assumed the kaerkyn had an exoskeleton only from what she's seen in the field, but this proved they had another structural level inside of them. Was it a redundant system, like the krogan had for several organ sets? Or did their exoskeleton not provide enough rigidity? She could look at this for hours. “I minored in anatomy, so this is... This is one of the most interesting things I’ve seen.” At his confused look, “Our higher educations are separated into ‘majors’ and ‘minors’- the major is our ‘major’ focus, and the ‘minor’ is less emphasized.”

“You are...” He seems to lose his words, then, simply gazing at her and bathing the room is a faint blue light. “I don’t show people these things. They’re... private, and no one is interested in information that isn’t readily useful. But, you... You’re so genuine in listening to me, so interested in what I have to say. You value my word so dearly that you’d go against the Moshae’s will to save the angara, on my thoughts alone. You care for my family, you respect my culture but offer your own perspectives. You...” Jaal closes the schematics, setting them aside. He breathes slowly, seeming to gather himself, before reaching up, cupping her face in one hand. “You make my heart sing, knowing you will always listen and respond in kind. I want us to be together, in a more official manner.”

She can feel the tears well up in her eyes at his confession- it was so genuine, so sweet and kind. It may have also been a little bit of relief- at the end of the night, after the conflict with Teviint, she wasn't too sure how interested he would be in her. She'd felt so overwhelmingly vulnerable at the table, with no resolution to the conflict, just her heart sinking closer and closer to the ground as Teviint refused to return her motion. She has to blink the tears away and, upon seeing dawning horror on Jaal’s face that he had made her cry, holds up one hand to stop him. “I’m crying,” she starts, still trying to hold it in, “Because I’m so happy. I want us to be together, too. You’re... You’re the greatest gift this galaxy could’ve given me.” And it’s nothing like his admission, but she hopes the sentiment is the same, that he knows it’s no illusion that she values his word, his presence, his perspectives.

He starts laughing, in both surprise and happiness, and she feels his arms wrap around her. “Yes!” He says, so loudly and so happily that she wonders if the rest of the family could hear him. She feels him nuzzle into the top of her head, his smile so obvious by the way it displaced her hair. She feels laughter bubble up in her, too, and she lets out a few wet chuckles, really glad she’d worn waterproof makeup in the event Havarl had decided to storm. He holds her for only a few seconds more, warm and strong and rumbling, before he pulls away, looking at her smiling face, his hands still around her waist. “I adore you.” And he’s leaning down and, there it is, there’s the kiss she’d been waiting for since she’d ‘wanted to get to know him better’.

Jaal’s kiss is soft, yielding- there’s little pressure to it, but it’s loving. Gentle enough for her to shiver at the minimal contact, her eyes closing. She parts her lips, just slightly, tongue peeking out as she wraps her arms over his shoulders, tasting the traces of honey on his lips. His loose grip on her tightens in surprise, and she feels the flicker of electricity from him to her- though she can’t pinpoint where it started and where it ended, it raises a chill up her arms. It takes a few more soft sounds of contact and Jaal’s sharp inhale when she holds his bottom lip between her’s in one heart-stopping moment for her to remember that they’re in his family’s home. She pulls away, using her thumbnail to scrape the smudged lipstick underneath her bottom lip, knowing that it’d stain and be obvious to anyone that was looking, but still trying to clean up, nevertheless.

And Jaal... Jaal was looking dazedly at her, his mouth tinted red and his pupils blown so wide that she could barely see his irises. He licks his lips, and she nearly tells him not to, that all he’d be getting is a waxy taste and, really, if she’d known they’d kiss, she would’ve worn cherry chapstick instead, but this looked nicer. There’s no revulsion in his expression, just stunned silence and, when he finally seems to come back down, he stands up abruptly, letting out a series of unintelligible sounds. “Agh, uh, um- let me show you... One more thing you might like. Lie down.” She raises an eyebrow at that but, trusting in him as she would in the field, slides down from the bed, pulling the decoration and the hairbow out of her hair so it wouldn’t hurt when she laid down.

He crosses the room at a hurried pace, hitting a panel on the wall. Above her, the ceiling explodes into a galaxies, nebulae, suns and stars. She audibly gasps, turning to look at Jaal, who was looking for her reaction, eyes hesitant and hopeful. “Jaal, this is gorgeous.” And she’s seen star maps before- she knows this is nowhere near accurate, but it’s close enough that she has to genuinely check to see that it isn’t accurate. “Did you...?”

“I made it, yes.” And he says it with a proud chuckle, watching her watch the stars above her head spin. “Long ago, and it’s more of a dream than a reality. It’s nowhere close to the charts we have now.” He crouches, then slowly lowers himself to the ground, looking at it as well. She wonders if he’s looking at all of the inconsistencies, able to pinpoint them now that he’d seen the stars in person. “But that doesn’t make it any less important. Now, it’s a reality. Just one more thing to take apart and... figure out.”

“But that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.” She echoes those same words he’d said to her, almost like a lifetime ago. Maryam reaches her hand out to him, hesitant and grasping, until his fingers connect and, giving her hand a squeeze, he laces their fingers together- a feat in its own right, as they wordlessly figure out how to manage her five fingers around his three.

“No,” He says, and she sees him turn to face her in her peripheral. “No, now I have someone to do it with.” He turns back to the stars, and there’s a long pause before, “This night couldn’t have gone better.”

“No, I don’t think it could’ve.” She agrees, thumb tracing the outside of his hand. A few more minutes pass in warm silence, before she realizes that the sun has long since set outside the window, and she doesn’t want to overstay her welcome. “Jaal, I just wanted to know- when would you like me to leave?”

“When I would like you to? Never, preferably. In a world without Pathfinding or kett, perhaps that would be a reasonable answer.” He lets out a humorless chuckle, but still turns to her. “I intended to extend the offer for you to stay the night. You’ve given me a place to sleep, and I’d like to return the favor, if only for the night.”

It’s a... surprisingly tempting offer. “SAM, do I have anything emergent for the next twelve hours on the table? Anything the Nexus can’t handle themselves?”

“For the next ten hours, both the Tempest crew and most of the Nexus will be unconscious during this period, leaving you free to do the same.” SAM responds and, yeah, that would actually make sense- they’d synched their clocks up with the main port on Aya, as it was the planet they visited the most for contact, and it held a similar time schedule with Havarl. And, considering the Tempest was docked on Havarl and had assumed the two were out on diplomacy...

“Well,” Maryam says, smiling at Jaal, “Looks like we have the night left for ourselves. Any big plans?”

Jaal, with the widest smile on his face, gets to his feet, holding out one hand to help her up as well. She takes it, pulling herself up, and returns his smile. He pivots the both of them so that they’re back towards the bed, and she’s holding in a laugh at how bold he’s being. She nearly gasps when he places his palms on her shoulders, with just enough weight to push her down onto the bed. “Why, Jaal-” She starts to tease him, but he holds up one finger- mimicking her.

Crouching down, he pulls a cot from beneath his bed, moving it so it was adjacent to the bed. “As a guest, you can sleep in my bed, and I’ll sleep here. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.”

And, really, Maryam has to laugh at herself for assuming they’d be doing anything other than having an intergalactic slumber party. Though, leave it to her to discover the only aliens that were strict on the ‘slumber’ bit. “Well, if you wouldn’t mind, I haven’t had a drop of water since we left the Tempest, and I’m pretty thirsty.”

Chapter Text

Maryam wakes up only a few hours after she’d fallen asleep- she wasn’t sure if it was the fact that Jaal’s bed was far too soft or because he snored like a train. It wasn’t like her girlfriends back in college didn’t make terrible, sleep-interrupting noises or that the bed she slept in on Mars was stiff, but maybe she’d gotten a little too soft, having her own room and bed. Tentatively, she sits up, noting that there are no springs underneath her to groan and wake the angara sleeping on the ground beside her.

Jaal had, thankfully, offered her a change of clothes to sleep in after she’d noted a drastic temperature drop when everyone had went their separate ways to sleep. “It’s harder for us to sleep when it’s too hot.” He’d explained, somewhat sheepishly, digging around in their communal armoire to find something of her size, constantly throwing despairing looks at her over his shoulder. “I... Our knees and chests don’t...”

She’d waved him off, taking an undersuit armor that he said belonged to his cousin Aonmi and, despite the fact that there was an extra bend for where their leg’s second hinge joint was, it fit... alright. Her chest was definitely a little restricted but not to the point where it was difficult to breathe, so she accepted it and had shushed Jaal until he stopped suggesting they go back to the Tempest to get ‘pyjacmas’ for her.

Maryam lets her foot touch the floor, the ankle of the undersuit too long and serving more as socks, cushioning her from the cold floor. It feels, she thinks, with a slight awe, like Ramadan in the Winter. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was back in her grandmother’s riad, her toes on the cold cement floors, tiptoeing to get the first handful of bread for suhoor, her brother snoring behind her. The nostalgia doesn’t sting in the cold early morning air, and she decides to stretch her legs a bit, maneuvering over Jaal’s prone body.

The door doesn’t open automatically like before, and she squints at the scanner to the left of the door, eyes bleary with sleep. She’s been studying shelesh since they made first contact, but she wasn’t well-versed enough to guess at a sixteen-digit passcode, and she was barely awake enough to try to hack it with her omnitool. She jammed the button that said ‘return’ and, to her surprise, the doors opened. That’s... one way to keep out intruders? The option they don’t expect?

Faintly, she hears soft warbling sounds, feet hitting the hard floor. Trying to let Jaal sleep (he definitely needed it, if his constant naps in the Nomad were any indication), she stepped out of the range of the door to let it close behind her. Feeling a little silly in what was literally an alien onesie she was walking around in, she heads in the direction of the warbling sounds, wondering if Sahuna was still awake and interested in the her personal narrative.

Maryam pulls up short, letting out a soft gasp. “Babies.” And, upon hearing her enter, Mother Laosilan and Sahuna both look up from where they were entertaining no less than eight angaran babies, just as surprised as she was. Remembering herself, she immediately apologizes, whispering, “Sorry, sorry- didn’t mean to be so loud.”

“What?” Sahuna says, at normal volume. A small pink baby hangs from her nutrient deposit, hands hooked around the front and back. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you at that volume- can you speak up?” Another one with blue eyes lighter than any she’d seen blinks up at Maryam, confused.

“I, um.” She starts, not sure what volume Sahuna could hear and what wouldn’t wake any sleeping angara in the adjacent rooms. “Sorry, I was quiet because I didn’t want to disturb anyone sleeping.”

Laosilan laughs, loud, cradling two children to her chest- breastfeeding, Maryam realizes. “Oh, as if any of them could hear you over Jaal’s snoring! The real reason Evfra put him on your team was so that Havarl could get a good night’s rest!” Maryam laughs, covering her mouth when it turns into a yawn. “Now, what is it? Do humans sleep less, or did Jaal simply keep you up?”

“We all thought you and Jaal would be intimate by this time of the night. The passions certainly seemed high enough.” Sahuna continues, still focused on the child clinging to her. “Oh, I do hope the two of you were compatible- it would be terrible if-”

“We didn’t have sex.” Maryam clarifies, very quickly, afraid of how that sentence was going to end. Sure, she wasn’t as tight lipped about what happened in her bedroom as, say, her brother, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hear her lover’s mother discuss worst-case scenarios for their interspecies rendezvous. She sits down next to the wide-eyed child, giving them what she hoped was a reassuring smile. In response, they grabbed their feet and did a full front-roll, bumping into her thigh. Not really thinking, she scoops them up, worrying over their neck and smoothing them out until, half-curled, they were cradled in her arms.

“Oh, she got you!” Sahuna laughs, and the child hanging off of her slowly starts to climb down. “Anwuli is so spoiled, she was trying to get your attention so you would play with her.” Despite what she’d said, Anwuli starts pawing at her chest, squinting and opening her mouth a few times. Sahuna takes pause, then, considering. “Oh.” She tilts her head from side to side. “She’s hungry and thinks you’re angaran. I’m not sure if you should be the one to feed her, though-” The word she uses translates poorly, but context clues point to ‘breast milk’. “It might not be healthy for her.”

“I’m, uh, not productive right now? That only happens after we’ve recently given birth.” Maryam responds, very gently removing the baby’s hand from her chest and holding it with her own. Checking to make sure she didn’t have any teeth to bite down with, she offers her pinky finger for the baby to suck on. Laosilan looks at her like she’d grown a second head when Anwuli stops fussing and settles in her arms. She tries to explain, “I used to watch over a lot of babies back on Earth- for human babies, it’s about the comfort, not the food.”

“And they stopped fussing even though there’s no milk? Incredible.” Laosilan observes, moving closer to Maryam and off of the cushion she’d been resting on, taking her two children with her. She nods, certain, “You’d be a good Mother. It’s not about having children- it’s about the instinct.”

Sahuna curves her hand and makes a holding gesture, nodding. “The way you hold Anwuli- supporting her crest, keeping her close to your- well, you don’t have nutrient deposits. It’s a good position to have her feel secure, especially if you needed to run with her in your arms.” She nods again then, moving to the side not occupied by Laosilan, “As we’re on the topic of children, would you happen to have any photos of yourself as a child? I do recall telling you that I wanted to see a human child.”

With the dozing baby in her arms, Maryam can already draw the parallels- big eyes, soft skin, uncoordinated. But, unlike human children, their neck seemed to be wholly supported by their nutrient deposits, which was why she could do an effortless roll. “Sure- when we left the Milky Way, we had to archive all of our social media and Cloud storage, so I have a bunch of photos on my omnitool.” Yawning again, she flicked her hand upwards over her left arm with the limited movement holding a baby allowed. Her omnitool had limited photo capabilities (the quality was mediocre, but it could hold so much data, so she’d used it like a thumb drive), but it was still something. Maybe if she had the time, she’d get a few converted to higher quality to send to her. She flips idly through the chronological sorting to as far back as she can go- a picture of her mother before AEND, before the times where she looked through her own daughter and asked where she was.

Maryam smiles softly. It seemed like an appropriate enough night for nostalgia. “This is my mother- Elaine Ryder. She was raised in France, but moved to Morocco to lessen the competition in her human-biotic research.” This sentence very obviously goes over her head. “France is the country that subjugated Morocco, where my father, my brother, and I are from. My mother’s family was from another country, but she was born in France.”

“Ah.” Sehuna says, squinting. “The names are unfamiliar, but the concept isn’t. Like children born on Aya, but their parents’ Voeld accents make them hard to understand.” She turns the image display to face her with her palms, peering at the image, then at Maryam. “You look like her, now. The same...” She trails off and, with a mother’s gentle touch, runs her smooth fingertips over Maryam’s right cheekbone, around her chin. Maryam has had a long time to cope with her mother’s passing, but she’d forgotten this kind of easy love. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be cared for, to have someone hold her chin and feel like they were holding her afloat. “You share her eyes.”

Maryam blinks fast enough that her tears don’t catch up to her. “You think so?” She skims to the next page- a photo her grandmother had taken with her father crowding her mother, reaching for Mehdi as her mother drooped, tired from labor. “There’s me and my brother, Mehdi. I’m on the left- I was born first.” She points at the (admittedly, very large) baby in her mother’s arms, and Sahuna lets out a surprised gasp.

Laosilan, on her other side, looks down at her own two children, now sleeping in her arms, then back at the photo. “Oh.” She says, very tenderly. “Oh, how beautiful.” There’s a long silence where the two angaran women simply scan over the photo, seeming to drink in the details. “Where are the rest of the children?”

“It was just my brother and me- humans give birth one at a time, so having the two of us was an exception.” While she explains, she sees Laosilan give a cursory look over the room- noting her children, where they were, what they were doing.

“Does it not get lonely?” She asks, adjusting her two children so they were no longer suckling, tucked into her clothes and close to her chest. “Your poor mother, with such a quiet home. Imagine having only enough children to hold in each hand.” As if disturbed by the thought, she gestures for Maryam to pass Anwuli to her, and shifts the two previous children onto her shoulders, clinging to her nutrient deposits and dozing.

“It’s a cultural difference.” Sahuna says, defensive over Maryam’s culture- she appreciates it. “Look at how big they are- this is just after birth, you can tell. Human babies are not small like angaran babies- they’re as big as an angaran three years into life. The mother must be so tired after birth, I cannot fault her for not wanting many more to care for.” Laosilan nods, sagely, as if this made perfect sense.

“It’s not like it was a quiet house, by any means.” Maryam interrupted, shifting the image to one of her and Mehdi as toddlers in her jida’s home, where her uncles and aunts and their children lived. “It was similar to how you live, if not a little bigger- all of my uncles and aunts stayed to take care of my grandmother-”

“Grand Mother!” Laosilan interrupts, with delight. “The highest Mother? Humans have such... concepts! Sahuna, which of us would be Grand Mother?”

Sahuna barks a laugh, startling a nearby child climbing onto her lap. “If it’s not Mide, we’ll have to hear her holler for as long as we live!” She scoops the child, bumping noses with them. Maryam moves quickly to a photo showing her whole family, her mother with her arms loose around her children’s shoulders, her father behind the camera. Aunts with their legs crossed at the knee, uncles with butter cookies between two fingers. Her grandmother, Zafira Ryadi, her father’s mother, sits in the middle of it all with a presence she has no words for. Sahuna’s idle chatter goes quiet, and she seems to look more closely at this photo than the others.

She’s about to move onto the next photo, one of her in high school and going through a bookish phase (double braids, fake glasses, and button-down blouses), when Sahuna speaks, “It’s been six-hundred years since you’ve seen them.” The sentence knocks the air out of her, but she continues, mournfully, as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her, “This must be so painful- I didn’t consider... I could not go a week without hearing if my family is alright, but you already know that they’ve... And you’ll never see them...” Her bioluminescence dims enough to alarm the children around them, who reach with grasping hands on her knees, patting and making nonsense syllables. She cries in round, contained sobs, her tears fast and compassionate. The mood catches, and Laosilan reaches around Maryam to comfort her, even though she, too, seems to be crying.

Maryam presses her pointer finger and her thumb to the corners of her eyes and blinks back the tears. “Of course I miss them.” She says, because it’s true - this is the reality of the situation, that she’ll never be able to see her Tata Fatima’s mischievous smile or eat her Ammu Hassan’s tagine. She misses them, but she knew she’d miss them, and she has no right to cry over it. This is what she had to do- this was the only option left to take. “But it’s... It’s not like...” Her voice sounds far too wet, so she clears her throat, gains some composure. “Several of them did, um, pass away before I left.” With a shaking finger, she points to her Aunt Nahida. Complications from a disease she’d picked up fighting in the First Contact War. Uncle Mohammed, heart problems. Cousin Hassan, beat to death. Aunt Nahema, PTSD-related self harm. Her own mother, AEND. She keeps pointing, she keeps listing causes of death.

She’s equally as startled as Laosilan and Sahuna when, after her finger indicates Mahajja Zafira had passed to old age, that there were only five remaining family members left: her father, two cousins, and her and Mehdi. “I never really...” Maryam trails off, sending some rapidfire thought to SAM about intergenerational trauma and to bring it up with Lexi. She swipes the tears from under her eyes quickly, blinking and trying to keep herself from falling apart. “I should... move on to lighter topics, I think.”

She’d known she was boxed into a corner when her father said they had to join the Initiative.

She hadn’t realized how little of a choice she’d really had.

“Would it be easier for you?” Sahuna says, and she reaches out to hold her, wrapping her arms around Maryam’s back and pulling her head into her right nutrient deposit. Mimicking her actions from earlier, she hears her make a terrible, unnatural shushing sound, rubbing her back. It hurts her ears a little, but she won’t mention that. “May you meet them as descendants, in a more peaceful world.” It rings familiar, as something she might’ve heard from the Angaran priestess, so she thanks her.

“Yeah, I’ll... I’ll skip to college, I think. That was a better time.” Skipping over the photos, she watches as her family gets smaller and smaller, her stomach dropping to the floor. God. God. Moving from Morocco to the Citadel for transitional learning before college. Finally, her mom smashing her cheeks together, leaning in for a goodbye kiss. The scenery becomes drastically different from the citrus tree in her grandmother’s house- the crisp lines of the Citadel’s first interspecies university, and she and Mehdi had scored high enough to qualify as token humans. “I had to be put in a separate dorm with Asari because of my biotics.” Which was why the next few photos were in a sea of blue, green, and purple- and, in the center, her, a quarian, and a turian. “Those were my girlfriends- Invicta on the left, Nalo on the right. We shared a dorm because we were the only biotic non-Asaris for a year then, uh, decided to date.”

“They’re cute!” Obviously, her family isn’t forgotten by Sahuna, but she puts on a very good front that she was distracted by this change in topic. “The one on the left, I know- she’s a turian- but I haven’t seen an alien like the one on the right or the mid-” She pauses, blinking, then leans closer. “Oh, that’s you! I didn’t recognize you with your head covered! You look so pretty!” It’s so genuine that Maryam blushes, scratching at her cheek.

“Yeah, um. I didn’t wear the hijab for a while after, uh-” The Batarian ship. She’d been singled out because her scarf had been a quick hold by the Batarian slavers. “I started wearing it again so Nalo, the quarian, didn’t feel so alone. There weren’t a lot of quarians at the university, so I started wearing it to show she wasn't alone. I mean- I mean, it’s very much so a part of my cultural identity, but I had bad memories associated with it. I still have it- you’ve probably seen me with it on- I just wear it around my neck.” She’d had a few, actually, but her white scarf was typically wound around her neck, hiding the burn scars on her neck.

“I wasn’t aware that humans practiced polyamory.” Laosilan starts, curious and gesturing between the three of them. “It’s not uncommon with angara, but the cultural educational videos we’ve been shown pair humans with other humans, and only in twos. And the other ones we’ve seen mark the... turians? The turians as ‘dextro’, which means you two couldn’t express close intimacy without a medical issue.”

Maryam can’t help the snort at the last part. “Dextro-levo issues are only a big problem for asari, quarians, and salarians- the idea that humans can’t kiss or ea-" She very quickly censors herself. “The idea that humans can’t kiss turians or quarians because we’d have an allergic reaction came from some bullshit science that got disproven a long time ago. We’re allergic to some Palaven-native foods, which might’ve caused the rumor, but I can personally attest to the fact that humans can kiss just about whoever they want.” She pauses. “So long as the other person wants to as well. And, if they’re quarian, that they’ve had the right amount of antibiotics.”

Only Allah knew how many times she’d had to go to the college medical center to get her natural flora catalogued to see how bad of a reaction Nalo would have if they bumped noses.

Sahuna chuckles a little, patting her on the back in a good-natured maternal way. “Humans are very emotive. You are a little reserved, but it’s amusing to see how determined you are over something as simple as kissing once you’re familiar with us.” She taps the photo with her free hand. “But this one has a screen over her face, and the other lacks lips- how would...? Ah, that’s rude, isn’t it.” She’d picked up on Maryam’s slight flinch, but she waves her off.

“Once Nalo got used to my, uh, germs? It was safe for her to take off the helmet, which was about two years in of close-living. And with Invicta, I did most of the work in the kissing department.” With a wicked grin, she pulls a video of the three of them, after a long week's work of studying for their shared interspecies microbiology test, sharing a bottle of dextro wine at night. It’d ended with her miraculously sober (the dextro-aligned fruit apparently didn’t ferment in a way that’d get her drunk), but both of her girlfriends absolutely wine drunk and trying to get her to dance with them.

The image is blurred, but Nalo has her arms hooked loosely under her’s, forcing her on her tiptoes, and Invicta is to her back, her flared mandibles getting caught in her loose hair. Through Nalo’s helmet, it’s very obvious that she’s smiling. They’re all so obviously in love. She remembers her father’s scowl, his contempt at her having not just one alien girlfriend but two alien girlfriends, one of which belonging to the selfsame aliens he’d just fought in the First Contact War.

Jida Zafira had been delighted though- she’d had some monologue about species ‘having to learn to share the galaxy’ in front of the two of them when she’d brought them down to Earth to meet her. When the two of them were alone, though, she was laughing, “Only you would find a Muslim alien and an alien made of rocks! As far as the apple falls, it still remembers its roots!” It was good.

It was good until Invicta was called to routine duty on Palaven. Until Nalo had to return to the Flotilla. Until her jida passed away so soon after her mother passed away that her father said she’d died of a broken heart. Until Maryam was holding onto her rushed-in-four-years Master’s degree in her hand and looking into the infinite vastness of space with absolutely no direction.

It hadn’t been hard and it wasn’t all bad- she was twenty-one and had had fun in college, had been in more than one club. The first ‘human-style chorus’ and theater had her name in more than a few different leads and solos, and it had been the only thing on her entire goddamn resume to land her a job. “After college, I was a singer at this Asari bar called ‘Violet Delights’- the pun doesn’t translate, I know. It was run by an Asari I’d met in one of my general education classes, and she wanted to run the Citadel’s first ‘Earth-styled bar’. It was good money, but more than that it was fun." She can’t help the excitement that creeps into her voice- there were few things she took pride in before she was Pathfinder (because as difficult as it got, as suffocating as the responsibility felt, she was good at it), but singing had been one of them.

Laosilan perks up- while Sahuna had remained ever-attentive as she went over her life story, she’d paused to pay attention to her children once more. She can’t blame her. “You sang?” She sounds as interested as Finn had been in the kitchen, and she wonders how close their relation was. “What songs? Do you have a record?”

“I don’t think our genres would translate- from what I’ve seen, Angaran music is mostly narrative, there aren't a lot of harmonies. I sang a lot of older music- French, Arabic, English... Edith Piaf was a big hit with the turian regulars. I think I have a video...” Maryam scrolls through until she gets to a video of her with her hair in tight waves in a long black dress. The owner, Suora, ran weekly themes, and that day had been Classical French Jazz, with the highest turian turnout of the year.

And one pink drell, Soro Hiul, his hands clasped in adoration, watching her with a smile.

Starting the video, she hears her voice croon out, slightly distorted by the means of playback, “ Des yeux qui font baisser les miens...” It’s spot-on, it’s perfect , it had taken her two weeks of practice to be able to imitate Edith Piaf’s vibrato on her r’s, and Soro had swung her around the dance floor after her shift had ended and the bar was closing for the night. “Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche...” Every off-duty C-SEC officer had clapped and whistled through their mandibles when it had rounded to a close. It was her favorite performance, which is why she’d asked Suora for a copy of the video.

But was it something Angara would enjoy?

Laosilan and Sahuna beside her had both gone very still, watching the video, and the children around them had hushed. It’d likely take Havarl’s translator a little into the song to start proper translation and feed it back to them, but they don’t seem to be paying too much attention to listening for meaning. Instead, when she finally hits the middle, “Il est entré dans mon cœur, une part de bonheur dont je connais la cause.” , Sahuna turns to her and, slowly, nods like Maryam should understand what she’s conveying. She goes to pause it to ask, but she’s stopped by the hand that’d previously been on her back.

It’s only when the song ends that they both turn to her and gesture vaguely. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Maryam says, truthfully. Then, with an edge of desperation, “Did you... Did you enjoy it?”

“Enjoy it?” Sahuna says with force. “All of that sound, it came out of your mouth? That wasn’t music, that was...” She makes a grand gesture. “Art? Was all of that the harmonies you were talking about? It was beautiful- you should show Jaal in the morning.”

Laosilan sputters out a laugh. “In the morning? Surely he wouldn’t mind being woken up for this- maybe my children could get a few minutes rest.” But she’s joking, even if her bioluminescence is bright enough to signal that, yes, she did enjoy the performance. “Were... Were all of your performances like this? I would love to see more.”

Maryam laughs at the suddenly shyness in her voice and, indulging her, pulls a video from the same week of her singing Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’. As both of the angaran women lean heavily on her, listening closely, she looks up to see the Havarl sun start to rise, tinging the room in a strange semi-purple hue from the shadows of the flora. Leaning onto Sahuna, she finds herself drifting off, closing her eyes, feeling one of Laosilan’s children clamber over her lap and towards their mother.

She wakes up with a jerk, suddenly, arms outstretched, catching the child just as they almost tumbled off of Laosilan’s head. Broken from whatever trance the music had put them in, Laosilan says, exasperated, “Stop! We’ve had enough falling to last a life cycle!”

Sahuna, with a surprised amusement, counters, “We shouldn't worry too much- Maryam seems built to catch Angaran children.”