[Citadel, Spiza's Apartment] Bitter Irony

The apartment was silent when Spiza keyed open the door. The only sounds inside were a stale buzz of electricity and the quiet rush of air from the vents.

The room was messy, certainly. Spiza had taken advantage of sovereignty over his nephew to revive the various dying plants along the walls, but along with the reviving greenery came hundreds of cracked leaflets, stems and just plain dirt that littered the floors around the walls. They’d transformed the den into a makeshift bedroom as well, and of course the kid had made sure to mark his territory hard.

“…Rupo?”

The kid himself, however, was nowhere to be found. Spiza walked over to the kitchenette, looked around, and dropped a covered bottle onto the table. The cover itself slipped off; a label bearing the words “BLACK DIAMOND” stared at him invitingly, but he shook his head and moved back into the living room.

“…Rupo? You okay? C’mon, kid…I know you’re in here.”

Dammit, he couldn’t stand his sisters. He never liked them, and they made it all too clear the feeling was mutual, considering the hell they put him through for over ten years. But to even suggest for a second that Liu deserved this—

He shoved the thought out of his head as he checked the bathroom. Later, he thought. I’ll worry about that later.

His thoughts were distracted by something in the den – like a soft snuffling noise.

“…Rupo?”

Deep in the pit of him, something pulled at Rupo. A void had filled his chest over the past few hours, threatening to engulf him as he hid away in his uncle's coat closet. The youth sat with his knees drawn to his chest, one arm slung about them as his opposing hand wrapped about his left horn out of habit. Brown eyes gaped wide in the darkness, focused on some distant point across from him as he struggled to breathe.

In. Out. In. Out.

Two years ago, he'd believed that tragedy was something that happened to other people, not him. The coming and passing of the Reapers, however, had sucked that youthful optimism out of him; he could feel his childhood slipping away from him even now, strangled by the strangely sterile news that had hit him not twelve hours before.

Footsteps. A voice.

His gaze twitched to the side, honed in on the elongated shadow of his uncle in the doorway. Without bothering to respond, he let his head fall against the corner of the closet walls and stared dimly ahead once more, his body curled tightly away from the rest of the world.

Not in the bath. Or in the bedroom. Cabinets were too small, cleaning supplies were locked up tight, and he’d seen to it that the room panels were sealed. They were a security risk, after all, with his job…and more importantly, he didn’t care to chance a relapse.

Which left –

Spiza glanced at the closet, left slightly ajar as always, but he could have sworn he saw a pair of brown eyes just before they turned away from him. He stretched a hand as he instinctually moved to throw the door open – but after a split second of thought, he broke off and reconsidered.

No.

Using his momentum, he instead turned and slumped against the wall himself. Wrapping his arms around his knees, he stared at the opposite wall, looking for nothing in particular. For a long few seconds, he considered putting a hand inside the closet – a lifeline, if you liked, offering a way out of there, but he thought better of that, too. Would probably be a bad idea to pressure him, right?

Or was it a good idea?

He hadn’t a clue; he wasn’t equipped to deal with this – usually, he was the one that shut down, he was the one dealing with grief or horror or whatever the hell had washed over everyone else but clung to him. Just because he was a victim of it didn’t somehow make him an expert, right?

Right?

Minutes crept by unnoticed, the only sound from him being the slow rise and fall of his chest.

The two salarians were close, yet the wall that separated them felt like an ocean. Rupo hugged his knees a bit closer to his chest and let out a rattling sigh, only to snuffle uncontrollably a moment later. Out of some vain sense of hope, he shakily activated his omnitool and stared again at his message box.

Empty. No calls.

After what felt like an eternity, his voice - strained from either crying, vomiting, or both; it wasn't clear yet - piped up from behind the coats.

"Do you think they're okay?"

He should have been happy about this. It meant Rupo was trying to reach out to him, even it was in futile desperation.

Still. A week of searching, networking, and generally talking with what parts of the family wasn’t swamped with mutual loathing had turned up nothing. Whatever had happened at Nasurn’s reactor, it was being kept locked down tight – tight enough that when he put out feelers at the Embassy, he got cool glances and more than one person asking how his “therapy sessions” were going.

It was so nice to see his service to the universe reciprocated. Kicked around, bugged, usurped, threatened, and unable to even get a damn name for his nephew.

Or himself.

He felt sick.

A full minute passed before he answered.

“I…I don’t know.”

"I don't know."

His chest heaved as the words filled the air. Rupo's eyes squeezed shut, his shoulders shuddering. The war had already taken Liu's last clutch; to think that the rest of them were gone, gone or missing, needing help and unable to find it...

It was difficult to admit that the reactor could have swallowed them. The universe Rupo was born into had taught him that people disappeared all the time, sometimes as though they had never existed in the first place, but he could never have fathomed how it would feel to lose everyone all at once.

Choked breaths. A man could have processed it, but once more Rupo learned he was far from grown.

"I don't know what to do, I..." For the first time since Spiza's arrival, Rupo listened to the silence. They were both reeling. The youth scrubbed away tears with the back of his hand, then, in a shocking display of variance from his uncle, crawled out of the closet and curled up against the wall beside him. He didn't dare let any part of them touch, not yet, but instead buried his face in his palms. "I was a total shit to her before we said goodbye."

Days seemed to pass in silence as they sat there, absorbed in grief. Spiza, for his part, didn’t know what to say, and all his responses rung hollow before he had a chance to say them.

”No you weren’t. And even if you were, you couldn’t have known.”

"You don't really mean that."

Dumb as Rupo might have been (being a child), he wasn't completely ignorant. A pair of baleful brown eyes lingered on Spiza just long enough, then dropped away. It wasn't fair to be mean to his uncle. He'd suffered a loss, too.

With a frown that was far older than it had any right to be, Rupo reached into his pocket and pulled out a small baggie.

"Amanda gave this to me, she said it'd help," he said numbly, pulling out a long, tightly wrapped piece of paper with herbs inside. He plucked out a lighter with his other hand, then glanced to Spiza, his gaze inquiring. Would they share it?

“I do.”

Again with the being unable to talk. Thoughts fired incoherently in his head, conversations they’d have to have later, stories he’d tell Rupo later. A scene played out in his mind about how he’d talk about going to Illium a month from now, figuring out schooling and so forth.

But now? A hundred and one conversations and none of them offering advice about now.

He turned his head slightly and looked at Rupo holding out the bag. His expression was still stony, but his eyes narrowed slightly – not in anger (that was all spent at the moment) – but mild curiosity. He didn’t say anything, but the expression was clear: What is it?

No reply. Rupo didn't believe him; Spiza could say whatever he wanted, but the youth couldn't find it within himself to believe that his uncle actually meant what he'd said. The offer of comfort, bitter as it was, remained present nonetheless as Rupo flicked the lighter clumsily.

"The humans call it 'grass'," he said. "She told me, you know, when she has to move - which is a lot - she smokes this, and it helps. She said it'd make me forget for a little while."

The flame hit the end of the paper, lit it in a quiet ember. Rupo's hands were shaking, just like the rest of him. In the dim light of the bedroom, he was a frail figurine, small and hollow amidst the all-too-real backdrop of the galaxy.

Were this any other day, Spiza would probably have ripped the lighter out of Rupo’s hands and ground that weed under his foot. There probably would have been an argument. Maybe a nice hypocritical speech about substance abuse from him and the classic line “go to your room.”

Complete with awkward silence as they both realized that the den effectively was his room.

Not tonight, though. Tonight they’d both lost someone – and frankly, if it weren’t for the kid he’d already be smashed. So when Rupo held the lighter up to his face, Spiza’s own hand wrapped around it and held it there.

"Okay," an uncertain Rupo declared into the quiet of the den, "You're supposed to breathe it in and hold it, you know, like you would if you're gonna' dunk underwater. Yeah - like that. She said coughing's normal."

When his uncle had filled his lungs with artificial relief, Rupo pulled the blunt back and placed it between his lips in turn. For however much Amanda might have told him, the youth struggled to light the flame again, succeeding only when Spiza reached over and flicked it for him.

A deep suck of air, followed by a torrent of haggard coughs. Rupo struggled for breath, puffs of rancid smoke escaping his nostrils, and tried again a minute later.

This time, he held it in. His eyes watered from something other than the crushing pain in his chest.

It was like someone had rubbed sandpaper all across his lungs. Ash and fire slammed his larynx, and the entire world seemed to swim as he bent over coughing. Phlegm seemed to fail him, and he shook his head, watching the smoke drift in the air as he tried to clear his throat.

And humans liked doing this shit.

"Give it a minute. I'll um, I'll get some water..."

When Rupo returned, Spiza had ceased his coughing, but the sound of his breath held heavy in the air. The youth knelt down beside his uncle and offered him a glass of tap-water from the bathroom sink. Once Spiza had taken his fill, Rupo gulped down the remainder and sat back down beside him.

A few minutes passed, as did the blunt. Eventually, Rupo scooted closer to Spiza and leaned questioningly against him, hoping for some companionship as he waited for the drug to take its hold. It wouldn't be long, now.

Humans. Sucked.

Their companies sucked. Their cities sucked. Their people sucked. And now, as he was finding, their drugs sucked. According to a couple of schmucks back at Hahne-Kedar, this was supposed to be the best shit ever, that he’d spend all his time thinking about cruising around space-time or something, but all he could focus on was that conversation about how this was supposed to be the best shit ever, that he’d spend all his time thinking about cruising around space-time or something, and that he wasn’t spending his time cruising around space-tiem or something, and that he was instead trying not to burst into tears over his own sad-sack life and maybe Rupo’s and how this just was not at all like cruising around space-time and very much like something.

As he sat against the wall, next to his nephew, he slowly wrapped an arm around him and drew him in.

Despite the numerous warnings against the consumption of illegal substances, it was the marijuanna that broke down the barriers between the two salarians and allowed them to finally acknowledge one another as whole selves.

Rupo shuddered as his uncle wrapped an arm around him, then, without hesitation, buried his head in the older salarian's shoulder, his eyes squeezed shut tightly as his fingers buried themselves in Spiza's shirt. A quake ran through him, threatening to rupture the youth's delicate form as he choked back a sob. The blunt was held loosely in his quivering fingers.

It was no longer a time for words. The two sat together in the den, in the silence, and mourned.

Fin