[Nos Astra, Illium] A Moment of Quiet (closed)

"I shall remain silent on the subject," Daia promised. "Although having mentioned it, I should say there's no actual sex involved, just... well, authority, and I'll say no more." There was the shadow of a grin on her face, but she smoothed it out.

"Krogan ballet dancer," she giggled. "You know what, they'd actually be very good at it. Excellent reflexes and proprioception. I can only imagine how much convincing it would take, though. I just have to think of how much persuasion it took to get a few friends of mine to do one little chorus line in lingerie back on Omega..." She chuckled, then glanced back across at Sarah.

"I like your hair, by the way," she added. "Do you change it often?"

Sarah gave a nod and turned her head. With a deep breath, she began to explain; "Every couple of months. A few months last year, I shaved it down to a buzz, after that, I grew it as long as I could without coloring it, then I went back to platinum and just recently I dyed it black. I like changing it. Platinum's fine, but after a while, my roots begin to show. I'm a natural blonde."


She glanced over her shoulder. "I wonder if they have drinks.." She spoke quietly, resting her arm out on the edge of the pool. "Anyway, do you take casual acquaintances here often or am I just lucky?" She shot a grin in her host's direction. "I mean, I could live here, if I had any say in the matter."

"Intriguing," Daia murmured, studying Sarah's hair. She didn't recall hearing about a 'buzz' before, but she grasped the basic meaning from context. "I helped dye a woman's hair once - a friend of a friend who was visiting - but the whole process kind of mystified me. Doesn't quite come up in day to day life," she joked, running a hand over the contours of her smooth scalp.

"I come here now and then," she nodded. "Sometimes with friends. Clients not so much, it'd be improper to get up to any... well, carrying on, in a place like this; other places are more suitable for that sort of behaviour, if it's to be done in a communal venue. This, just to relax." She shrugged, with a rueful grin. "Sadly it's not much use to Ana, with the suits being watertight and all. But we have other ways, so no great loss."

She lifted her arm clear of the water, and produced an omni-tool interface - a simpler version than her usual, with her clothes and accessories stored away in the change room, leaving only the miniaturised 'tool in her anklet to drive it.

"Did you want to give that tea a try?" she offered. "It's really very good. Do you prefer a cup or a dish for tea, normally?"

Sarah shrugged. "Why not?"

The woman folded her arms and leaned back. "I just get so fucking irritated. I know I was a monster, but am I supposed to remain one? Can I redeem myself? I've donated to charity, I've turned witness, I've helped teach people how to use biotics, I've worked with charities.." She leaned forward, pressing her hands shakily into her face. "I can't escape the guilt. This baby's going to have the stigma of having me as a parent."

"I've known people who have done terrible things," Daia said softly, edging a little closer to Sarah so that her lowered voice carried well enough to be heard. "And, from time to time, I've encountered - briefly, thank the Goddess - terrible people. They're not the same thing."

She tapped a comment into her omni-tool, requesting two dishes of tea. It would be a few minutes before they arrived; elcor tea couldn't be rushed.

"I've tried to escape the guilt for years with no luck. It .." She pressed wet hands into her face once more, running them through her hair. "I'm sorry. Yes, tea sounds good. Tell me, you've met terrible people briefly? I can only imagine in your work you've met the wide range of characters.." She seemed to relax, her briefly stiffened posture sinking below the surface.

"How long have you been in your line of work? How do you like acting? Our family has quite the collection of cinema."

"Quite a few characters, yeah," Daia agreed, relaxing as well. She hoped to offer some more useful reassurance, maybe a different perspective, that would help Sarah, but right now she believed the best 'gift' she could give was some stress-free time. Little things could go a long way, she had often found. "Some I wouldn't necessarily want to be around at other times, but generally even the... well, the less reputable kinds of customer you find in places like Omega, for instance, they see the wisdom in behaving. 'Be good and you get to come back next time' can be a pretty persuasive argument, if you phrase it in the right way. Of course," she chuckled, "the krogan bouncers probably help. They say - we say, rather - diplomacy consists of a Maiden's lips with a Huntress's bite. I only really do the first bit by myself."

She glanced up as an elcor slowly made her way to the pool, with their tea carried in an under-slung tray. The woman patiently unloaded the two dishes, with barely a ripple in the surface of the warm tea within as they were set down.

"Piously: May this symbol of our welcome bring you peace in this house," she intoned.

"Many thanks," Daia replied. She lifted her bowl in one hand - the material looked ceramic, but was exceedingly light - and took a sip, closing her eyes.

"Mm. Arna Veldt," she noted, then gave Sarah a grin. "There's really not that much tea imported here from Dekuuna, you get to recognise the blends pretty soon."

She settled back into the water, with her dish balanced on her chest, and smiled.

"I do like acting quite a bit," she said. "If you can call it 'acting' - I like to think I manage, given the genre, but I don't kid myself that I'm in the running for a Silver Satellite award. It's fun, though. I've been a Justicar, a fighter pilot, a secret agent, the Consort, walked around inside a Migrant Fleet liveship, been through the Omega 4 relay... The magic of cinema can be pretty magical, at times," she chuckled. "I've only been doing this a few years - the first Citadel was a lucky break, nobody expected it would be as big as it was, so when the studio realised what a potential market it was sitting on top of, I was one of the performers they already had on speed-contact." She shrugged slightly, using a hand to keep her tea from tipping. "I'm not looking to give up my 'day job' for it, but as long as they keep tossing an occasional role my way, I'll keep giving my best."

She glanced across at Sarah, taking a sip of her tea.

"How'd this collection come about?" she asked. "Any particular focus for it? Earth cinema?"

"Earth and alien cinema." She took her own dish and took a long drink from it. "Mostly human cinema, from the 2150's on. I'm a big fan of the epic space operas that hinted at what space was like before the Turians blitzed us." She pursed her lips and gave a glance over. "Real life turned out to be far more fascinating." She spoke with a tired tone.

"Lots of new and exciting ways for humanity to make the same mistakes over and over again." She took another drink. "There's the works by Volke, who's action films I particularly like, and then there's the movies that Chris likes, which are usually art-house."

"Really?" Daia asked, looking curious. "I've got a fondness myself for pre-contact speculative fiction. I gravitated to the pre-relay 'golden age' in human works, 2025 through 2050 - Valkyrie and the like, you've probably heard of that one, at least. Some of the other films and series I've found look a bit... quaint, next to more recent Earth productions. But I like that, the innocence of it, the imagination."

She finished her tea and chuckled.

"Our pre-contact fiction is a little bit hilarious in hindsight, you know," she noted. "When I was at the academy I used to go trawling through the archives, finding all the old contemporary reviews that pre-contact films had gotten. Funny repeating theme, the point most often targeted as 'blatantly unrealistic' was the idea that we'd meet alien species who turned out to be compatible with us. 'Aliens will be alien,'" she went on, her voice adopting a mock-scholarly accent and sing-song tone, "'how could a being derived from an entirely foreign ecosystem and evolutionary environment conceivably be capable of receiving a meld?' And here I am," her voice returned to normal, "turian father, salarian grandfather, and so on."

"How could you ever meld?" She mimicked the same tone. "Humans, it's only humans and you guys. You guys- You have a turian father, a salarian great grandfather, but those could have been centuries apart. It's boggling how asari families work, I suppose you'd only meet your immediate parents, and never grandparents." She finished her tea, setting the dish on the ledge behind her. "Anyway.."

She hugged her knees to her chest. "Speaking of children, I'm having a son in september, as you already probably know. I was thinking of naming him after someone who helped save me, but I was also thinking of just.." She wrapped her arms around her calves. "I don't know. Never in my life did I want to have kids. It wasn't me, and Chris wanted them, and I figured we'd never get past the adoption services with my history."

"So I'm a mom. I'm sort of excited, and I'm going to do my best, but I'm also pretty freaked out about the whole thing." She shot a blue eye over at her companion. "What if I fuck up?"

"He left recordings, my grandfather," Daia said fondly, then she laughed lightly. "He had the Mannovai speech pattern - you know the one some salarians have: staccato," her accent changed again, "rapid-fire. Nothing superfluous, economy of expression paramount." She grinned at herself. "When I was young, listening to them, or seeing him through my grandmother's eyes - very young, before I'd really met any other salarians for myself - I thought that was how all salarians talked." She finished her tea with a contented sigh, and replaced the dish on the edge beside Sarah's. She gave her companion a compassionate look as the human gave voice to her worries.

"I don't think there's a parent-to-be in the galaxy who hasn't thought that," she said. "I know mine did. Literally that's what was going through my father's mind, when I was being born - 'Spirits save me, how in the twelve skies did I think I was ready for this?' Plus all the good emotions, of course, but if you can't be overwhelmed at a moment like that, when can you?" She chuckled softly. "My mother too - although right at that moment her mind was on more immediate matters, 'push' and 'breathe' and so on. That's first-hand observation though, they both shared those memories with me. Surreal experience," she mused, "watching yourself be born. But enlightening."

She put a friendly hand on Sarah's shoulder.

"It's okay to be unsure," she said. "Nobody raises a child by having all the answers up front. Just don't forget what you do have. Courage. Stubbornness. That'll probably drive your son a bit crazy," she grinned, "but I don't think he'll ever doubt that he's got you backing him up, when it counts."

"Stubborn sort of cuts it." She shot an eye-contact glance over, a wide grin on her face. "I've already got plans on what I'm going to do. 'Do everything my mom did wrong right, even if it kills me.' I want my son to have a better life than I did. I don't ever want to see him go through anything like what I did. The reapers are gone, Cerberus is gone and so is almost everything else."

She shifted in her seat and scooted over slightly. "Just between the two of us, I have no idea what I'm doing half the time." She chuckled softly. "You remember being born? I bet that was definitely surreal. Do you remember everything in your life? What were you doing three hundred days ago?"

"Who does?" Daia smiled back. "Take it from someone who's spent her life mucking about in people's heads, as well as their pants - everyone's just making it up as they go along."

She nodded when Sarah asked about her memories.

"Oh, yes - not from my point of view," she qualified, "but through melding later, I 'remember' the day through my father's memories, my mother's - the physician assisting her as well, she was our local healer when I was growing up, we were good friends. I have a lot of very early memories of myself, that way. It's actually a bit hazy when the memories, that far back, are actually ones I remember, rather than ones I was given later, when I was old enough to meld. But that doesn't bother me."

She thought a moment.

"Three hundred days... no idea," she concluded, with a casual shrug. "Sex, probably, but that's just a guess, playing the short odds. I remember... as much as anyone does about any given day, I suppose. The routines wash together, the significant moments shine through. Although it's four hundred years worth of any given days. There are meditative techniques we use to keep all our memories... sorted, I guess you'd day? They become pretty important for Matriarchs, naturally, and her acolytes assist. For young'uns like me - I should be well into my Matron phase," she interrupted herself, looking unrepentant, "but I still feel pretty Maidenish - it's just a... kind of internal filing system, and kind of subconscious. I remember what I need to at any given time, and all the finer details from centuries past, they're there - they sort of unfold, resolve into more detail, the more I concentrate on remembering."

"Must be nice, having memory like that. I'd try to remember my father and my brothers. I had a twin pair of brothers, both joined the Navy and one jumped over to join Cerberus with my mother. I lost them both." She took a deep breath. "My father .. I only have pictures. No clear memories. I can understand how things tend to blend together. Morning shower, coffee and breakfast, drive to work, work, come home, dinner and the five meals I squeeze in. That's my day."

Sarah stretched her arms. "..Anything you want to talk about?" She murmured, glancing over.

"It is nice," Daia mused. "And necessary, I suppose. For Matriarchs, certainly - kind of defeats the point of 'wisdom through experience' if you've forgotten most of the experience by that time anyway."

She returned Sarah's glance, with a slight smile.

"How long will you be staying in Nos Astra?" she asked. "Will you be back on the Citadel by baby time, or...?"

Sarah responded with a cold tone. "I'll be here as long as she tolerates my presence. With the way things have been going, I'm not sure. Things have been going rough lately and we've been at each other's throats. I may be going back to the Citadel sooner or later, or I'll just find my own place to stay here. It's like she's putting up walls and doesn't want me to go through them."

Her fists clenched. "Ten fucking years of being together and there's something going on and i'm out of the loop. I'm already having a fucking baby for us, but I guess I was a fucking idiot to think that was going to solve things."

"I'm sorry," Daia said quietly, wincing internally at how suddenly she'd sailed the conversation back into a minefield. These things happen, she reminded herself. Can't steer a perfect course every time, life isn't like that. 'Minefield' was an apt metaphor, she mused; Sarah's frustrated reply was rife with tangled emotions. "I know there's no... quick fix," she said. "I've been through stormy times like that, more or less."

She gave a little shrug, and the ghost of a smile, hoping Sarah wouldn't feel guilty for letting her upset show.

"I would like to do those calisthenics," she added. "If you both want to give it a shot. Nos Astra's a stressful city, a lot of the time, perhaps it'll ease the pressure just a bit."

Sarah took a deep breath, letting her frustrations out. She gave a brief nod and glanced over. "I guess I should be getting back soon. I'll get in touch with you or Taleeze." She reached behind her at the edge of the relaxation pool and shoved herself up to a sit, then up to a stand. "I'm interested, but I'm going to have to get her involved."

She gathered her robe and put it on, tying the band at her waist into a loose knot. "You know, I haven't felt that good in ages. I know I'm going to be back."

"Give me a call, any time," Daia offered, standing and donning her own robe. "Taleeze is offworld at the moment; she lives on Nevos, although she's becoming quite a frequent visitor here. She's on the Citadel currently though. But if we get ourselves going I'm sure she'll join in next time she's here."

She paused and took a parting look around the bath.

"You'll always be welcome," she smiled.

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