Chapter Text
The breeze coming off Lake Superior stirred the long grass around Saskia’s bare feet, fingers drifting aimlessly along the feathered tops, as she wandered up and over the lip of the hill. She hummed absently to herself and breathed in the setting sun. Content. Calm.
Her jacket and boots had been left on the hood of her truck, the decrepit yellow pick-up that had been collecting dust in the garage of her family’s long-ago home. She’d half-expected to need to walk the few miles down the ambling dirt road to the lake. But the key she had left in the christmas cookie jar by the fridge was still there, and the old engine sputtered to life, the same glorious rumble and cough she’d come to love after working on it for nearly a year, back when she was still in recovery. It might just have been the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. It still was.
It had been almost five years since she had moved away, but she still felt like a teenager wandering slowly through the wildflowers and brush. When she’d had the energy, and her brother hadn’t forced her to stay in bed, she’d spent all her time out here. The old path was familiar, still threaded across the ground despite years and years of neglect, after so much time spent far, far away.
That golden light calling her to a home that never was, but might have been.
Saskia tucked a lock of wispy silver hair behind her ear as a gust blew off the lake, and frowned. She turned back to the road. No sign of another car, or maybe it was a motorcycle again, after Lukas had crashed the first. Idiot probably forgot what time we were supposed to meet.
Sighing, she came back to the field and the sunset and the storm-grey water, staring over the little cliff that overlooked Lake Superior. Orange butterfly-weed and pink prairie rose sprouted up amidst the endless, swaying yellow-green sedge and barley, but she kept her eyes peeled for blue.
Birds drifted overhead, calling out the passing of the day as the sun dipped below the horizon. The smell of fresh pine and pollen clung to the air, cut with the iron-tang of the lake. Wherever she went, however far she traveled, she could recall the smell, so branded to her consciousness was this place, bittersweet and just a bit cold.
She wondered if that would stay true when she left, but 2.5 million light-years was a long way to remember the smell of Lake Superior. Part of her didn’t want to remember. Wanted a fresh start under the light of a new sun. Or suns. Golden worlds in a golden galaxy—what would they taste like, smell like, look like? Would any of it be familiar?
There, she thought, a smile tugging at her lips. Myosotis scorpioides. Just where I left you.
Sprouting up from the bottom of a dead tree, pushing through rotted bark and tangled grass, were a few specks of faded blue.
She hesitated as she pulled some from the ground, wondering if she shouldn’t just take them all. It’s not like she would be coming back.
The flowers swayed, but she didn’t know if it was in longing or farewell. Maybe both.
She sighed, and rose. Something should stay behind when she was gone.
She left three flowers, a bundle of forget-me-nots in her hand, and turned back to the lake. Her chest constricted as she approached the edge of the cliff, the same fear clinging to her heart that she always felt when she came back—that what she sought might not be there. She knew her father visited every now and then, and he’d never mentioned the possibility of it being lost in a storm or a rockslide, but still…
A rounded tombstone stood in a soft red halo as the sun reflected off the lake.
Her feet slowed as she approached. The flowers bent slightly in her grip and she took a shaky breath. She ran her thumb across the polished granite.
“Hey, Mom.”
Her knees folded underneath her, and she sat, taking care not to crush the mass of flowers still grouped at the base of the tombstone since her last visit.
“I’m surprised you’ve still got so many of these,” she said, thumbing one of the petals and grinning. “Dad comes and replants these every year, right?”
Readying herself, she flexed her hand and let a little dark energy play around the stems. They shone brighter, dancing with blue light that hummed over her skin. She threaded them over the flowers in the ground, saturating the earth with a bit of her biotics. The stalks morphed into one another, forming one large plant that pulsed with light.
Her fingers shook as her temple throbbed, and the pain came, as she had known it would. She fought the urge to clench her hands, knowing it was just a trick of her mind.
It was always harder to use her biotics before getting a new implant. But she’d gone through so many at this point, she was used to it. One of the many gifts she’d been left with after that horrible accident five years ago. And since she never used her biotics for anything else, she could spare a bit of pain.
“I know,” Saskia murmured, “you think this is silly. But some of us actually like flowers.”
She leaned up to brush a bit of water residue from her mother's name, tracing the letters Ellen Lee Ryder.
“I meant to come back sooner, but the last year has been insane. Our handlers have been forcing us to do combat training. Most of the time I feel like a bruised peach.” She grimaced. “I am a terrible shot. Lukas is pretty good, though, so some of Dad’s genes passed on. He hasn’t quite figured out that stony silence, but he might mellow out in his old age. Don’t tell him I said that, though. It’s already hard enough for his head to remain balanced with all the extra weight of his ego.”
Falling back to the ground, she leaned back on her elbows, closing her eyes as the setting sun brushed against her pale skin.
“Your son, by the way,” she added, opening an eye to share a knowing look with the tombstone, “is late. I told him to show up at four. It is now five fifteen. I think.” Peering down at her omni-tool, she nodded. “Five fourteen.”
It made no sense, but she’d missed the real sun. She’d spent so much time on Helios Station the past eight months, all that artificial and filtered light had made her crave the real thing.
Especially since she was about to leave it for good. She didn’t know what kind of suns she’d find in Andromeda. It made an ironic kind of sense that she started to develop nostalgia for Earth now, after most of her life spent in indifference or desperate yearning to leave the confines of her then-prison.
“Obviously we have no idea what we’re going to see once we get there,” she continued, conversing idly with the air, as she always did when she came back, “but I have a feeling that I will be in the second wave of the Pathfinder team. Send in the nerds after Lukas and Dad clear any crazy wildlife out. I was actually looking at your research the other day. I still don’t understand how you managed to figure out the neural interface with the L2’s. We’re trying to retrofit a few just in case our L5’s don’t hold up through darkspace. It’s just the lack of any actual gravitational force out there that’s going to make it hard for those of us who rely on them, and people are worried. But you know all about the wonders of biotics in darkspace, obviously.”
She rambled for a while, saying whatever came to mind about finishing up her degree at Columbia and taking a few months to work on Eden Prime after the Geth attack, joining up with an Alliance peace-keeping force to unearth a new Prothean site on the edge of turian space. Everything she’d done since her last visit over a year ago. After a while, she lapsed into silence, breathing in the air and trying to recreate the shape of her mother’s face in her mind.
Even at the end, she’d been gorgeous. Brown hair streaked with a similar shade of faux silver, skin almost translucent, from the same disease that Saskia had managed to survive, though not without her own small casualties. Laugh lines gathered around her mouth, and warm, deep brown eyes that had retained their pigment even until the last. Eyes that Saskia no longer shared.
The roar of a motorcycle broke through her attempt to remember the exact color, cutting off with a growl as it parked behind her.
Saskia sat up and peered over her shoulder as a lanky figure hopped off the bike, dropping his helmet and shaking out his shaggy silver hair.
“You started without me?” he called in mocked outrage.
She sighed and turned back to the tombstone. “I understand you didn’t really have a choice in the matter, but couldn’t you have just left him in the med-bay or something, given him to a nice colonial family?”
Lukas sprawled onto the ground next to her, banging into her bare feet and nearly knocking her over.
“I want you both to know that I am late because of reasons that were beyond my control.” He tugged on her earlobe before pulling off his gloves, their own private greeting and reassurance.
She turned to grin at him. “You went out for drinks with Dan and Marlowe, right?”
Lukas shot her a suspicious look, letting her smooth back his hair where it stuck up in the front from his helmet. “You put a tracker on me?”
“Marlowe called me last night.”
Her brother’s face tightened in mock disapproval. “Seriously? Could you not seduce my childhood friends before we take our glorious departure from the galaxy?”
She blushed and shoved him away. “Jesus, I didn’t—” She broke off as he waggled his eyebrows. “You’re horrible.”
“Your daughter is still a spinster, Mom.” He grinned at the tombstone. “You’d be glad to know that I have fulfilled my brotherly duties well the past,” he paused to count on his fingers, “twenty-one years.”
Saskia frowned. “I am not a spinster.”
“You knit.”
“Sometimes. Lots of people knit.”
“Do those people also lock themselves into their apartments for two weeks to figure out how to program a machine to knit for them? You’re right. Not a spinster. A spinster master. An über spinster.”
“I spend my time the way I want, thank you. At least I didn’t almost get locked into a marriage contract with a Salarian banker on my first night back from Alliance training because I was bored.”
Lukas wrinkled his nose and stretched out on the ground. “You’re just jealous I’m in a position to almost get locked into a marriage contract with a Salarian banker.”
“I was not jealous when Dad had to bail you out of CSEC for trashing a Kodiak shuttle in your getaway.”
He just stuck out his tongue at her, and she almost smiled.
The past few months they’d been spending all of their time together, just like they used to, before she recovered and he left for Alliance training. Even if they were older and their interests had diverged, she was never more at peace than when he was at her side, making stupid jokes and generally being a pain in her ass. Looking after her in his own annoying, determined way.
While it had, at one time, been easy to spot the similarities between them, it was getting harder. Where Lukas’ skin was a flushed, freckled beige, hers was pale, practically translucent no matter how much sun she got. His eyes were a deep hazel-green, like their father, and hers were something closer to dark grey with a ring of silver around each iris. She was small, a bit too soft, though not as much as she used to be, thanks to the extensive Initiative training, where he was normal-sized and fit.
The only thing that matched now was their hair, and that was only because of Lukas’ stubborn determination to stick to a decision he’d made when he was sixteen.
“How was your lunch?” she asked, picking off a leaf from his shoulder and letting it drift into the wind over the lake.
Lukas shrugged, some of his good humor fading. “Fine, I guess. They both think I’m crazy. So, that’s fun.”
He had kept in contact with almost everyone he’d ever known his entire life, including the friends he’d made during their brief stay in Minnesota while Saskia was bedridden with the disease that had eventually killed their mother. She’d made the mistake once of checking the social feed on his extranet terminal, only to find that it scrolled so fast she couldn’t even read the names. He was giving up a lot to leave with the Andromeda Initiative, she knew that. It might be the chance of humanity’s lifetime, but for someone like him, it would be like closing the door on a crowded room of people that loved him.
Not so much for her. She might not be a spinster, exactly, but her list of people to say goodbye to had been rather small. And even then, the only one she would truly miss had died five years ago.
“You sure you don’t want to spend tonight with them?” she asked, knowing she wasn’t explosively entertaining company. If he wanted to leave the Milky Way with a bang, she wasn’t going to be shooting off fireworks.
He gave her a disparaging frown and nudged her foot with his boot. “Don’t be stupid. We’re staying at the house tonight and leaving first thing in the morning. Even I’m not so dumb as to get trashed with those assholes the night before we ship out.”
Saskia couldn’t help the small smile that spread across her lips. Her brother might be a ridiculous idiot, but he was her ridiculous idiot.
And she didn’t want to spend her last night on Earth with anyone else.
She winced as a spike of mild pain shot through her right temple, an after-echo of using her biotics for the flowers.
Lukas frowned and propped himself up. “Your amp still bothering you?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay. Harry said he was going to replace it as soon as he got the new ones.”
The Initiative was apparently sending state of the art biotic amps for everyone involved in the mission. It was the only reason he’d approved her at all. The new L5x amps were supposed to dampen biotics and make it easier for those with unstable abilities to function in high-stress environments. While her L4s had been enough for her day-to-day life, Harry had made sure the L5x would be ready for implementation before signing off on her. She might have recovered, but the shadow of the disease still hovered over her.
“It’s fine,” she insisted, jabbing her finger into Lukas’ bare strip of stomach where his flashy red motorcycle jacket had ridden up.
He hummed and pursed his lips, clearly not believing her. “You get the dye?”
She nodded, eyeing the dark roots on his scalp. “You sure you want to keep doing it?”
He’d been bleaching and dyeing his hair for nearly five years. Ever since she and her mother had begun to lose the pigment in their hair due to the disease they’d both contracted after an accident with unrefined element zero, Lukas had been dyeing his in solidarity. When their mother had died and Saskia had recovered, he’d kept up the practice—a silent nod to what she had gone through, to what they’d lost. Plus, as he so frequently liked to tell her, it would be too weird if her hair was a different color than his.
“Yeah, of course,” he said incredulously. “And thank you, wonderful, glorious, angelic sister of mine.”
“No, keep going,” she deadpanned when he finished. “You know how much I like it when you wax poetic. And I’ll help. Obviously.”
“Good, because I’m shit at it.”
She nodded in agreement. “You really are. It came out blue last time, right?”
“And I still have no idea why,” he said with a dramatic sigh, tucking his arm under hers as she lay down again.
They stared up at the darkening sky for a few minutes, both of them silent. Saskia watched the little puffs of cloud drift over them, trying to memorize their shapes. Would there be clouds in Andromeda?
Obviously, she thought with a frown, they were just moisture collected in the atmosphere. I’m going mad with sentimentality.
“We should have saved some of her,” Lukas muttered. “To take with us.”
“No,” she looked at him, “she wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”
He breathed out and closed his eyes. “I know. I just… I don’t want to think about her staying here alone.”
Saskia looked back up at the sky, knowing exactly what he meant. They’d scattered her ashes across the ground here, in the spot she’d taken to love in her last months.
Though, Saskia had always had a sneaking suspicion that her father had kept a little of their mother to release into space.
One foot on the ground and one in the stars, he used to say, staring at her mother with bright eyes and the beginnings of a smile. He was never more alive than when he'd stared at her, never more in love. Saskia didn't like to think that that was why she'd been so eager to join him in the Initiative, but that brightness had been there when he'd asked. Had called to that small part of her that had never really grown out of wanting to see it in his eyes.
“Yeah,” she said after a while. “You want some time alone?”
Lukas' hand closed around hers, pulling her closer. “Nope. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything—”
“Leave it, Saskia. Please.”
His small, tight voice was enough to tell her that it would be too much for him.
Lukas had always burned brighter than her, felt a little more acutely, more wildly. He was the one who cried at funerals and shouted at police officers and got drunk and ran off with Salarian bankers. He laughed a little louder and smiled a bit wider. The brilliant sunrise to her lingering light of dusk.
It had always been harder for him to lose their mother so young. And he had never learned to hide it like she had.
“Okay,” she said, reaching over with her free hand to tug gently at his earlobe. “Let me know when you want to leave.”
Lukas turned to her with a small, sad smile. Nudged her with his forehead. “We can stay until the sun sets.”
She nodded and turned back to the sky.
As it always did when she let herself think about tomorrow, really think about it, she buzzed with anticipation. They were finally leaving. After nearly a year of planning and testing and jumping over hurdles, they were about to set off for the edge of the galaxy. From the Titan Nebula, they would enter darkspace, and would not wake again for six hundred years. Thrown through space and time to God knew where, to a place where no one knew her name and everything would be different. Where she could start new. Be someone else.
She knew she should be afraid, what they were doing was ridiculous. But somewhere, deep down, she’d always wanted to fly, to fling herself as far as she could into the cosmos and see where she landed. Maybe it was the disease she’d so narrowly escaped when she was a teenager, the sense of death and stagnation that had always hovered around her, no matter how far she ran or how long it had been, that urged her on.
Maybe Andromeda would finally take that shroud away.
“You’re seriously excited for this?” Lukas asked, interrupting her thoughts.
Her mouth twitched. “Stop reading my mind.”
“I will not. Twin privileges.”
Saskia closed her eyes and breathed deep, letting the scent of her mother’s resting place fill her mind. Maybe she did want to remember it. For her mother, if not for her. “Yeah. I seriously am.”
“You’re so fucking weird. You won’t work up the courage to ask anyone out for a date the entire time you’re in college, but you want to jump into the next galaxy, no problem.”
She elbowed him in the ribs, but he only chuckled.
“I don’t know,” he murmured after a while. “I guess I am too. But this whole thing just seems… insane.”
“It is insane.”
“Right. But really insane.”
“Is this finally the day you decide you're responsible and level-headed?”
He let out a long-suffering sigh and sat up. “Yeah, no. You're right. It’s too late for second thoughts, I guess. Dad would just beam down and punt me into space if I tried to stay.”
Saskia knew he was joking, that he would have mentioned his reservations long before now if they were serious. But she couldn’t help but notice the hard set of his eyes, the tightness in the corner of his mouth that spelled fear, and anxiety.
“It’s okay to be scared, Lukas.”
He swallowed and nodded, leaning down and giving her a quick peck on the forehead. “I know. I’m just getting all introspective.” He rose to his feet and pulled her upright with a dramatic heave. “I’m probably just hungry.”
Lukas turned to their mother’s tombstone and splayed his palm against her name, eyes rimmed in moisture. “Love you, Mom. Always.”
“Always,” Saskia echoed, taking her brother’s hand and squeezing. “She knows.”
He nodded, returning her squeeze and taking a deep breath as he turned away.
Saskia stared for one more moment at the tombstone that marked the last place that held her mother, the last place that sang of the only home they’d ever really known, the home that had never really felt like home. Tomorrow marked the start of something wild and unknown. Her mother would know how important that was, and not begrudge her the urge to fly.
One foot in the stars, she thought with the hint of a smile, turning away to walk with her brother toward whatever Andromeda held for them.