(Omega) With a bit of help from my friends

La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose

Nassa D'Veyra couldn't remember which furhead had taught her that particular saying, but for the life of her she couldn't think of a better way to describe herself. Or Omega, these days...

Take the outskirts of Katange arcology, for example. The last time she'd been this far out of Eclipse territory, this place had the best grill joint spirewards of Afterlife. But look at it now - 'Korwun Kraw's BBQ', with a menu that'd send a vegetarian running and a decor to match.

...in fact, the terrible balletcore mixtape playing over the speakers would probably send them heading for the hills before they even crossed the threshold.

---

D'Veyra was sat at the bar, skimming the menu with an unopened bottle of Gaflore in front of her. Maybe Daye wouldn't recognise her, at least not at first - she was still the same asari, same broad shoulders and genemodded musculature, but the differences were plain to see.

For one, her outfit looked like she'd rolled naked in a charity donation bin: a washed-out peasant blouse beneath a dark jacket that looked like someone had sown a few varren skins together, above a pair of hideously bright hippy pants that looked about three sizes too big. To top it off, the asari had painted her face with some turian-looking design, all thin red lines hugging the jaw and eyes.

But a closer observation would reveal that some things never changed. The two pistols, one on each hip, a solid-looking walking cane leaning against her barstool, the scar on her left cheek and that ever-present aura of violence.

D'Veyra's brow was furrowed. How in fucking hell do I tell him?

It actually took Daye a second to figure out which asari at the bar was D'Veyra. He'd been looking for her usual Eclipse casualwear, and the absence of that was sending warning bells down his spine. He was in his Suns fatigues (blue of course, with the corporate logo on the breast and shoulders), and he hadn't known either of them to wear civvies.

But there was no mistaking that scarred face or that grim air. Sometimes it was just like looking in a mirror, especially now that Daye had a few new souvenirs from Katamayla---the scar slashing across his cheek a reminder of just how close to death he'd come if it hadn't been for Rossi.

The second warning bell was that awful balletcore. Or maybe that was just him hating the godawful taste in music here.

"Sundown's Razor," he said to the bartender, settling in next to Nassa. Or who he hoped was Nassa, he still wasn't entirely sure. "Don't fuckin' tell me. It's a long-ass story?"

D'Veyra didn't even look up at first. "Make that two. And a salarian schoolgirl. An' whatever his second drink is, too."

Looked like someone had started early. The asari finally turned to look at her companion.

"Long doesn't even fucking cut it, but I'll tell it better with some booze in me." D'Veyra paused, scratching the paint on her jaw.

"Tides, mate, it's fuckin' good to see you."

"Makes two of us," said Daye before uncapping the bottle with his teeth. "Thought you might've fuckin' bit it after Elizabeth. Couldn't tell if it was your unit or the other company coming after us."

Not like it really mattered. The assault had been bad enough, and it hadn't even been an asari leading it. Daye had seen a tightly-wound salarian with a cybernetic arm barking orders to the various Eclipse officers before taking a precisely aimed headshot from Rossi's rifle, and even after his death the yellow tide had hardly slowed. And in the end neither of them had won--- 9 Commando had fought off the assault, but with so many casualties they were combat-ineffective, rotated off the planet on the next slowboat arrival.

Daye was content to drink in companionable silence for a bit with her, but eventually he had to ask. "So...fuckin' seriously, where have you been? The fuck are you doin' dressing like someone I'd deck after coming home from the DMZ?

No cheers, no salute, no pleasantries - D'Veyra was drinking from the bottle. The luminous pink cocktail first, then the Razor.

"Tides, that shit's foul. Ugh." The asari paused for a moment, shook her head and carried on.

"Fuck Elizabeth." Now this was new - another warning sign for Daye, perhaps - but when had Nassa 'the Ogre' D'Veyra ever sounded so tired? No quip about the fighting, no just-as-well-it-wasn't-my-girls, no nothing.

Hell, she didn't even acknowledge losing as many friends as she had. And she'd lost some damn good ones.

"It's not my unit, Daye," she finally said. "Not any more. They kicked me out.

"Fucking tides."

Daye put down the bottle mid-swig to just gawp at Nassa, shock plastered all over his brutish features. He'd been all set to give her an earful about how the Suns had fucked him over, but clearly things could be worse. Much worse.

--And even if they were, we'd fokken well hold 'em, eh?---

A swift shake of his head and the half-remembered, half-heard voice of Kobus Puren dissipated like a puff of smoke. Tshombesha hadn't been the DMZ, not nearly, but it had seen fit to keep a part of him there as well. And just like the DMZ, Daye wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to leave entirely.

And judging by how Nassa was acting, so far from her usual gregarious self, he was wondering if she was still back there in some way too.

He finally took another slug of the drink, pausing to issue a heartfelt, "Fuck."

D'Veyra snorted.

"Fuck pretty much sums it up. Second we got rotated off 'f Tshombesha-" she said, pronouncing the word with the mechanical ease of someone tasked with listening to dozens of rabble-rousing political speeches on the virtues of self-governance "-the second we were on-board, team of fucking garritroopers hauls me to the brig, brass's orders. I've been sat in some fucking prison since. Tides."

D'Veyra shifted on her stool, took another drink and spat on the floor.

"I mean, you kill one fucker an' suddenly it's all tides-damned court martials again.

"Fuck. 'Least you came out of it alright, hey?" No mention was made of the new scar. Business was business, after all, and right now the asari didn't know if she ought to cheer on her now-former comrades in arms.

Wait wait wait. Eclipse was now cashiering its own for murder? Eclipse?

Fuck, Omega becomes semi-respectable and the natural order of things was just flipped upside-down. Hell, not even flipped, it was doing fucking barrel rolls, from what Daye was hearing.

"Murder?" Daye shook his head, still not entirely believing this was happening. "You finally got what's-'er-name then? Ulunma?"

D'Veyra snorted into her drink.

"Yeah, I caught up with her. Nearly." There was a faraway look in her eyes, and not from the drink. "Tracked her down, called in a few favours to get myself passage to Earth, then... Tides."

This was the hard part. Not that either of them was squeamish, but D'Veyra knew a bit of Dayes history. Family, wife, kids, all that stuff. Same as Ulunma. And then something from an old war had come along and taken them from him. Just like Ulunma.

"I couldn't find her. So I found those she cared 'bout and I killed them. Hard."

The asari took a shot, eyes still on Earth.

"By the time we left for Tshombesha, Alliance figured out whodunit and put a bounty and a warrant out." Another snort. "And the Sisterhood figured it'd be easier to kick me out and chain me up than to lose all those shiny contracts in the Verge an' getting searched every time we tried to use a Relay. Tides."

Daye just looked into his drink, the world around him vanishing, the words of his friend all that he heard. Went after those she cared about...that had to be Ulunma's family. Family.

You didn't do that. You didn't fucking do that. Even now he could see the face of his youngest son, looking at him with that rictus of pain and horror as the crack of Daye's pistol echoed in the night. He'd never wanted to hurt Deven, never, but he hadn't been Deven that night, he'd been a sapper trying to overrun his line and---

--Daye squeezed his eyes shut, trying to center himself in the here and now. Time and place and faces were slippery enough when he was sober. It was positively difficult to keep himself centered while drunk. He set his drink down on the counter heavily, turning to regard D'Veyra with as neutral an expression as he could get, given the subject.

Fuck, maybe you could do that. After all, Ulunma had done her level best to get D'Veyra killed by deserting when her unit needed her the most...

You're thinking too goddam much about this.

So instead he just shook his head. "I fuckin' ran into her on Earth, you know. During Hammer. Wanted to do you a favor then, but we needed every gun we had, and by the time I could contact you 'bout where she was..."

If D'Veyra had missed maybe a couple of standard drinks, she might have picked up on her friends decidedly stony expression. But given that she'd been a) drinking heavily and b) living off nutripaste and water for the past five months, she let it slide with a smile.

"Wait, you saw her? Fuck me. It's a small galaxy, ain't it?" Tapping at the menu, the asari ordered them a plate each of the varren ribs (furheads can eat varren, right?) and carried on talking.

"Tides, I forgot you was there, like actually there. What was it like? Hammer, I mean?"

Somewhere beneath the slurred speech, an impartial observer would note that Nassa D'Veyra would not only kill a former friends family, but would fail to register it as being A Big Thing.

Daye was hardly impartial, not by any stretch of the imagination, but family was one of his triggers, and he sure as hell noticed. With a quiet grunt, he downed the rest of his Razor, trying to mentally sort out how exactly he felt about his friend's callousness.

"Hammer was like...think Katamayla, the flyin' columns, except scaled way the fuck up. I wasn't part of the main assault, me and a giant mashup of Big Three units were sent to liberate a Reaper processing camp. Got paired up with this ass of an asari." Daye shook his head. "Must've graduated from the Thessian school for bitches. Snooty as fuck, had a thing 'bout humans...just absolutely awful to work with."

With a snort, he shook his head at the memory of Melindra Vesh, waving for another drink. "Gotta say I missed ya and your own there. We were pinned down by Ravagers when the flash hit...after that...things got weird."

He took a look over to her, trying to gauge if she was in fit state to be asked about her time in the War. But she was somewhere else, and that somewhere else wasn't the War, that much was for certain. "Where were you at? Last I heard you were coordinating things on Omega, and then you went off the grid."

The terrible music blared on, complete with a head-banging batarian across the bar, and D'Veyra returned to the here-and-now.

Well, to the end of the Reaper War, but close enough.

"Tides. Can't say I ever saw one of those farms up close, but fuck, it's a good day when you get to burn something like that to the ground. Who'd Aria pair your ladies up with? Did you get her name?" She took the luxury of waving over the slab-created bartender for the inevitable refills (After all, ain't my money. Proceeds of crime and all that). Besides, there was the off-chance she knew who Dayes partner had been. Pretty small chance, given the size of the Sisterhood, but hey.

"Yeah. The War can get fucked. We barely got back to Illium for redeployment when the squid came down. Burned Nos Astra to the fucking ground.

"We were on the ground at the end. Managed to kill one of them, too."

The ribs arrived, but that was one of the problems of krogan cuisine - the chef had left the varren heads on.

Daye regarded the Varren's head impassively. After boiled sheep's head in the DMZ and what he'd seen on Katamayla, craniums absent the body did little to faze him these days."Joint command between my CO and some asari whose name I never caught. My direct opposite number was a Captain Melindra Vesh. Ex-Commando like you, I think. Lot more of an uptight cunt. Pretty sure her nose was having rounds fly up it was so high in the air."

To put it mildly. It had taken that joint op for him to appreciate just how lucky he'd been with D'Veyra and Jish on Katamayla. Shaking his head at the memory of Earth, Daye set to work cutting up his varren, starting with the head. "That's fucking impessive, I gotta say. The corporations got no sense of gratitude, these days. My men go through the grinder on Katamayla and they fucking eviscerate us afterwards. You do everything for 'em during the War and before, and they go after you for some extracurricular. Bastards." He punctuated his last with an emphatic stab of the varren head.

So maybe it was more what she wanted to hear than what he actually felt, but his irritation with the Suns was real enough.

"Vesh? Huh. Name sounds familiar... Hang on." It took a moment to cut through the alcohol, but the penny finally dropped. "Yeah, Melindra Vesh - Matron, about yay high, posh, bit of a Goddess-botherer? Huh. Small galaxy."

D'Veyra ignored her dinners head, going straight for the ribs like a woman possessed.

"Too fuckin' right. Piss on 'em." There was a pause, charcoal and possibly blood staining the asari's lips. "Wait, what've they done to you? Tides. Fuck the Suns." A beat. "And fuck Eclipse, too.

"...I can't believe I'm a fucking freelancer. Tides."

"Heh. Makes two of us." Daye shook his head, starting to shave the meat off the varren skull. It obviously wasn't going to be nearly as good as the ribs, but might as well save the best for last. "You still gonna go round calling yourself a Major? Or are you just gonna try and get strong-arm jobs workin' for crime lords and shit like that? Infantry units don't pop outta the ground much these days."

As for the Suns... "Someone high up had a lot riding on Tshombesha. A whole fucking lot. When the thing bogged down into a stalemate and 9 Commando was rotated offworld, I became the fall guy. Got a demotion to Major, and 9 Commando got reduced down to one-quarter of its former strength. Lost all my best officers and men, for the most part---Rossi and Puren bit it on Tshombesha, and Khor'shok and the rest got yanked away by other units when we came back home. Just me and Dunn left of the old guard."

D'Veyra, for her part, wasn't in the state of mind for 'thinking ahead', if you'll pardon the pun. No, for her, it was ribs all the way.

"Tides, no. I'm not Major of anything now, am I? Fuck. Nah, if'n I'm small time, I'll make no bones about it." There was a pause while another rib disappeared into the asari's bottomless stomach. "So yeah, guess it's pretty fucking small stuff, from now on. Tides. I'll miss the fuckin' tech, you know."

And the food, the medical, the people watching her back, the heavy ordinance, the pay...

"Fuck me." D'Veyra pulled apart another rib. "Tides, man, that's shite, that is. So what, you're building up a new Codo? Or are they gonna bump your command down to, what, a company?" She shook her head. "And what, all that loyalty you gave to what's his name, Del'Sareh? It's the same everywhere, ain't it?"

Another rib went the way of the first half-dozen as the asari raised her glass.

"Tides. To dead friends and new starts, or somethin'."

Daye silently raised his glass in salute to her toast, downing the booze with a quick slug. "We're still designated a Commando, but we're only at company strength now, yeah." There was a grim smile. "Looks like the both of us are pretty fuckin' small time now."

He didn't much feel like discussing Solem Del'Serah. The omnipresent turf war between the batarian and the obnoxious Vosque hadn't been decided one way or another yet, and Daye had a nasty suspicion Tshombesha hadn't helped Del'Serah's case. What he wouldn't give to know who the personnel pencilnecks were backing, these days...

"Yeah, to new starts. Not that my guys getting yanked away'll have much of that. Most of them are being sent to Corrections units. Fuckers like Kuril and those idiots on the Purgatory. If that's not a message from higher up, damned if I know what is."

In a way, D'Veyra was quietly pleased to note that the Suns' high-ups weren't any less forgiving than the Sisterhood. Far less psychotic, yes, but just as unfair.

"Tides, it's looking that bad? Fuck."

There was a pause.

"Daye, you're a mate. So even if you wind up standing guard over some slasher from Sticksville Twelve, I promise I won't call you a garritrooper." D'Veyra's smile wasn't exactly an oil painting. Barely a watercolour, really, with the way her scarred cheek twisted.

"Now, Centurion Dunn on the other hand - hah!"

She didn't want to ask him for help. She was a Commando, she was in the Sisterhood, for crying out loud. Nassa D'Veyra didn't ask anybody for help, least of all one of maybe four people in the galaxy who might actually give it.

Daye smirked at the thought of his hoary old Centurion standing post in some shitheap prison. "Thanks. I won't stop you if you want to have some fun with Dunn. He'd be happy as fuck to have an excuse to fight someone, I think."

One of his battle buddies a freelancer...there was a thought that was gonna take some getting used to. Fuck, where was she going to get good contracts from? Sure, there were brushfire wars all over the galaxy, but without Eclipse's logistics network or contacts... "So, uh, where's your next gig coming from? Any idea?"