[Citadel] In Confidence

The cleanroom facility is very professional-they've seen everything-but every quarian there looks at Raelon as if he's about to break something. They don't scan for weapons, but they do inform that being found anywhere but their assigned cleanroom will result in his being charged with felony assault. They also force him to watch a video about proper decontamination protocol. They seem to have a version for every race except quarian.

Des is simply allowed to go ahead.

Each room has a single airlock and decontamination chamber. When Raelon finally gets through, he's allowed into a facsimile of a very small apartment-except every surface is white or silver, and would easily wipe clean.

Des is sitting on the floor, leaning against the shelf like 'couch' and working on his suit. Even with it off, there are some tubes poking though his silver undershirt-he has a port installed in the crook of his elbow and another on his side, and he hasn't peeled off every pickup and sensor. His left arm is heavily bruised from the explosion-he's not using that hand much-but it isn't bleeding. The only sign of a cut on him is a very pale scar between his collarbones. His face isn't much of a surprise-his eyes might be a shade lighter than they appear than they appear under his mask, but they go through all the same expressions. His hair is new sight, though it's barely more than a layer of fuzz.

He sighed. “...This would have never happened three years ago.”

Raelon, for his part, while he wants to be with Des, recognizes that the information he's being given is important. If he and Des have a future beyond friendship, he needs to know this. Understand this. Treat this as life or death, because it is.

It's a daunting prospect. He holds his ground despite his crisis of confidence for two reasons: his attachment to Des and his suspicion that his time with Sundowners has inoculated him against panic in the face of life or death situations.

Finally, he's allowed in, and while he knew intellectually that a clean room was, for lack of a better word, sterile, the sheer emptiness and whiteness is daunting. Such a contrast to a clan hall, full of natural fibers and gathered objects and, admittedly, dirt.

He's a bit surprised by the rush of interest he feels at actually seeing Des out of the suit. That had always been his biggest reservation about their relationship--his desire to touch and be touched, without a suit in the way--and to actually see Des like this is a huge and thorougly inappropriate turn on. He can't help the feeling, but he can discipline himself to ignore it. Des' health is the priority here. He needs to keep his grabby little talons to himself.

....no harm in looking, though?

"Did I miss anything?" he asks. "Feel like they should give me a diploma after all that."

He tilts his head. "Three years ago?"

He blushed a little under Raelon's gaze, pulling his suit up into his lap and re-focusing on his work. "Now, I know in the sims I usually give myself hair, but it's impossible to maintain in a helmet."

Without quite making eye contact, Des gestured for Raelon to sit down beside him. "No, you didn't miss anything. My own decontamination and...this." He held up his arm, then turned it over. "Not a single puncture."

He'd had to give himself a hefty dose of anti-anxiety drugs.

Des shook out the piece he was working on, turning the seam inside out and back again. "...Before the Evening War. Quarians didn't fight each other."

Raelon is less shocked by the sight of Des' hair, how short it is next to the sims, than he is intrigued by how it might feel to touch it. Especially with the ability to satisfy that curiosity at hand--and still, somehow, miles away. Focusing himself - Spirits give him strength - he says quietly, "Doing my best to imagine that. My people have been on a war footing with other turians since the Unification Wars. And Omega still has places where anyone will attack anyone if they're desperate enough. But I see your point. A homeworld and a new hope means you're off survival footing. And that's when people's selfishness starts kicking in."

It occurs to him, too late, that Des might be as guilty of that as Kari. She attacked first - but why? Unless she was a psycho, she had to have her reasons.

"What did you have that she wanted badly enough to break that taboo?"

He turns around, a bit embarrassed. This room, however sterile, is still a living space - it has furniture, a fridge....yes. "I'm going to make you an ice pack for that arm."

"You trust your fellow Sundowners. Isn't that what this..." Des drew a quick circle around his face with two fingers, drawing them down over his lips. "Is all about?" He shrugged. "We were the Quarian people. Instantly recognizable to each other and everyone else."

"I took some painkillers, I'm really fine." He blushed a little harder, focusing on his suit. He could emote as strongly as he wanted and it would be all but invisible through his mask, and now it was all on display. He was glad for the drugs, the made this much easier. "My own work."

"I used to design weapons. To be used against the Geth." He extended his arm to Raelon when he came back. "I don't know if you suspected that. And...You saw what happened with your girl, when people have a weapon they tend to use it."

"You in theory trust your fellow Sundowners," Raelon says darkly. Perhaps someone who grew up on Solregit would buy into the belief that anyone with the red facepaint was a friend. Growing up on Omega disabused Raelon of that impression very early on. "Did I tell you about my former employer on Omega? She was more arms dealer and drug lord than Sundowner; she wore the facepaint because it suited her to play the noble revolutionary. I was fully aware that my association with her was a gamble that she would kill me later, or faster, than anything else on Omega."

His claws click in and out, in and out, of his talons.

"So unfortunately, this time the older man isn't the more cynical one." He favours Des with a grin now fully visible as he still has his hood around his neck.

"I don't care if you can't feel it, Des, you can't just expect drugs to mask the damage when a little bit of care would prevent it. Trust me, I know of which I speak." He bundles up some ice into a plastic sheet and ties it off in a knot; not pretty, probably leaky, but it will do. He drops it on Des' lap with an unspoken command to use it, or he will use it for him.

....Not that he would mind the excuse to be close, but, time and place, Shaman.

"Yes, I saw your posts about weapons design. And the subtext that you were less than proud of your work. I remember being very frightened that you were a pacifist and would be repelled by my warrior's faith." He gives Des another smile, somehow shy and roguish at the same time. "And then I resisted my urge to go picking through your files in search of answers. So I have no inside information, as it were, whether your unwanted guest wanted to take a weapon from you, or the plans to make more, or you yourself to return to designing. Nor do I know who sent her."

"Well, I did trust my fellow quarians, and I got hit with an overload." He tilted his head towards Raelon, managing to smile back. "Younger and wiser...and with excellent taste. The new camera. I wish I could pull off that kind of work."

"Ancestors!" Des jumps about a foot when the ice drops in his lap. After the better part of two decades in the suit, he is ridiculously tender-skinned. "That's cold!"

Still, he put it on his arm-though the sensation was so alien it left him squirming, even when he looked up at the ceiling. "I am completely distracted from any remaining pain."

After a moment he settled back down. "Liking the Geth doesn't make me a pacifist. If I was, I would have destroyed the research. If there's ever another war, I want my people to live. I just don't want them to start another war."

"I think they-they being some higher up in Special Projects-just want their data back. You can't force experts to work, and I'd be a security risk."

"Like that, do ya?" Raelon flirts with a grin. Yes, he's proud of that camera.

Des' reaction to the ice makes Raelon fiercely jealous. Of frozen dihydrogen monoxide. "You want to be completely distracted, you let me know and I'll show you completely distracted."

This response is new to him. Raelon is far, far too used to being passive, awkward, nervous, and submissive. Something about Des seems to bring out this daring, protective, wolfish side of him he didn't know he had. He thinks about how he drove over to Des' place and how defensive he had felt; in contrast, even when shooting that Cerberus operative during the attack on Denakot, he'd spent the entire encounter quivering in fear, trying not to piss himself, and throwing up violently. Right now, all he can think about is Des, and what he can do to guard him.

"You actually can force experts to work," he says guardedly, "and it's not nice." He thinks about his mother. Thinks about how he felt as he took orders he didn't want to follow in the hopes of prolonging her survival. How frightened he was when he told Quatra. How he was not sure whether to be happy or horrified when the threat was removed. Permanently. By Quatra and her people who might well be - were, he corrected - the greater threat. "But you got me now to help make sure that don't happen to you." He hesitates, not quite daring to ask if there was anyone else who might be taken hostage to force Des' hand. Sometime he will have to ask the quarian about living family members.

"So you think she was actually working for the Admiralty?"

"I am a man of consistent tastes. And this..." He held up his arm, fingers still squirming. "Feels strange."

He closed his eyes, listening to Raelon. Every time he tried to minimize the situation, Raelon smoothly defected it. "...I'm really underestimating how bad this could be, aren't I?"

He sighed, throwing one arm over his eyes. "Not the Admirality as a whole. Someone well under Xen?"

Raelon sits down and tries to think this through. Yes, it's possible he's overreacting...but...

"Look. I grew up on Omega; I fell in with a pack of minority revolutionaries. I plan for worst-case scenarios. If I'm overblowing this? Great. Excellent. If I'm not? Then we have a plan to deal with it."

He scratches the back of his neck with his claws; a giveaway that he's nervous. "Tell you what; you keep me from "starting a war" as you put it, and I'll make sure we're ready in case we have to finish one."

...Realization sweeps over him like a religious epiphany. He's not called the Sundowners to break Juhani out of jail. Maybe part of that is Juhani's own wish to stay the course, and maybe part of that is a suspicion that Juhani has some toxic habits that lead him into bad situations--habits Raelon can't break for Juhani, habits the human will have to break himself--but is any part of it related to his feelings for Des, feelings that, if it came down to it, would lead him to ask Vindi to help in his defense?

"Bear with me on this...as a holy man I have to ask...does Xen or her people have any right to this work of yours? Because if not...if it's yours, and you don't want them to have it...we can work with that. If you're honour bound to deliver it, though, that's where things get tricky."

A pause.

"Which, um, doesn't mean I won't help anyway."

"...I want to trust people. I want to trust the Geth, which sometimes takes a great deal of effort. I want to trust that this warmer reception I've been getting since the war is sincere." He let his arms drop with a laugh.

Des sighed. "...I produced it as a member of the fleet. I just...can't see any good in giving it to them. You must worry that one of your crew will start something they can't finish?"

Raelon watches Des and marvels a man of his age and experience can have such....such faith. It strikes Raelon as incredibly precious, like a fragile work of art. Impractical though it may be, he does not want to see it shatter.

"Start something they can't finish? Yeah. Yeah, I worry about that all the time." He thinks particularly of Vindi and Quatra. Or the whole tricky dynamic with Notras - will the rest of the clan understand why the General is keeping the secret he holds? Or, damn it, Trex, if she'd killed Des' unwanted visitor and been caught, the shockwaves could have destroyed the Denakot hall. "But I also trust them. Seems to me you've got more faith in the goodwill of others than in the folks you worked for...and I choose to believe you have your reasons. Because I did, when I left Quatra and threw in with Vindi. I knew that Quatra's way would just help the Reapers on their way to kill us all. So if you say they ain't to be trusted with it, then they ain't to be trusted."

He looks down, "And I guess I'm not innocent in the startin' things regard...I mean...the money for all this" he gestures to his cybernetics "...had to come from somewhere."

"...And sometimes it's foolish. Often, I'll admit it." It was not simple naivete. He had seen intestines, covered with pink frost, trailing behind their owners and the thousand other horrors of war in space. "But...'If you can believe for just one minute', right??"

He reached out for Raelon's hand, without quite looking. "It was money well spent."

"Are they giving you trouble?"

"They meaning the implants? No, not really. It was a matter of getting to the point where I knew that the nerves weren't going to get much better; installing monitoring equipment to take the place of pain receptors; and cutting the nerves that were only ever going to report pain, to no useful purpose." He's very nonchalant about the idea of rewiring his organic components, it seems.

"They meaning my former employer? Waiting game, I think. Quatra's rogue and sooner or later she may discover that all her bank accounts on Omega are empty."

His eyes darken. "I consider it my danger pay. She had me on her hit list already for joining up with Vindi."

"Elegant." Des smiles, reaching out and poking Raelon's arm. "A test."

"A fair portion of Omega was looted. Maybe she won't know it was you." He rolled his eyes. "I'm feeling terminally optimistic tonight, aren't I?"

"Who do you think put the security on her accounts? Admitting to shoddy work is a professional insult that I..." He sighs. "That I suppose I'll take, given its preference to the alternative. Do you know anyone you'd like framed for the theft?"

Being poked was something, he supposed, but... "Anyone could feel that. The real trick to it is the more subtle touches....like this...." He takes Des' wrist, if the quarian allows, and glides the other's hand gently over the weave-laced skin.

"I don't have any personal enemies on Omega...How about some loan sharks and 'salvage men' who ripped off pilgrimage kids?" He shrugged. "We're a very clanny people. There is an actual list we put them on."

He let Raelon take his hand, gently brushing over the Turian's weave. He alternated between the pads of his fingertips and the slight edge of his nails, to contrast in sensation. "...Optimism seems to be working out for me."

"Mail me that list." His grin is wolfish. "Clannish, yeah, but clannish and technologically advanced, which I'm a little jealous of. Sundowners like to pull that whole "if you burn down our village, we can just live off the land" business, which is spectacularly effective if you've got that kind of constitution, but I for one can't imagine considering electrical power as optional. So yeah, we got a list too, but it's more about knowing a guy who knows a guy who knows a story about someone who deserves a really, really bad day--and since I ain't on Omega any more, there's fewer "guys I know."

Meanwhile, he's dialling up the sensitivity on his dermal weave--Silver Future bless the designer--ooohhhh--okay, dial it back just a little, must't make a scene.

Not this soon in the evening, anyway.

"I think our settlers prioritize wireless networks higher than indoor water." Des laughed. "I cannot live off the land. There will be no camping. I hope you can live with the loss."

"If you're going to fiddle with that, give me access to the feed so I can...and I am not wearing my suit..." He looked momentarily lost for a moment, then leaned in to nibble on the weave. "No suit."

"I stink at camping. S'why I was always such a failure in a culture of...of..."

All of a sudden, Raelon has absolutely no interest in dwelling on his lack of success in meeting the Sundowner ideal. In fact, he might actually be somebody's ideal just the way he is.

"Hey," he says, his voice thick, "here's the control codes..."

He's sent them over before he realizes that giving someone else control of your nerve stims isn't just flirting - for a quarian, it's often the main act and here he is acting like a complete slut by the quarian definition, just tossing over his codes so quickly and so easily. Before he can try to justify himself or express restraint, Des is nipping at him and holy hells he likes that; that's the sort of thing he'd basically resigned himself to long, long months of craving before he'd ever get it, if he got it at all.

When he opens his mouth, a low throaty mewl is the only thing that comes out.