#yaelfic

Shepard hauls herself into a Triton mech that’s seen better days (like yesterday, for starters, before she used it in a fistfight with about eighteen brutes) and announces that yes, obviously she’s dropping into the ocean to go hunt down a probe and an ancient alien that may or may not even be down there anymore, and James closes his eyes.

He was so close to having a working definition of Crazy Shit.

(By the look on Javik’s face, this is nuts even by Prothean standards. Which is not comforting.)

She assures him she’s going to be fine - of course she’s going to be fine, she’s always fine - and jumps off the platform with a splash.

He exhales, and thinks that Sam’s going to kill him if Shepard doesn’t come back up. Luckily he doesn’t have much time to dwell on that idea - Sam's a little scary when she wants to be, which is always when it comes to Shepard's safety - because not thirty seconds after Shepard’s comms go out, four flaming balls of Reapers drop from the sky.

Why not, right? 

Thank God Cortez knows how to a use a gun, because they’re sure in it now.

***

Shepard falls out of the mech and he sprints through the brutes and grenades to get to her. Dead, alive, or somewhere in between, it doesn’t matter. She’s in the direct path of a charging brute and Sam will really kill him if Shepard made the trip back to the surface only to get trampled.

She coughs as he hauls her up (alive, good; but doesn’t change the nutjob status of this mission) and trips as he drags her out of the way and throws her in the shuttle. He’ll catch hell for that later but right now -

Well, later might actually be right now because brutes fighting each other is a new level of crazy, but one that works in his favor for a change.

He’s not even halfway in the shuttle when Cortez starts takeoff, and he manages to get a few more shots in before they’re out of range and Cortez yells at him to shut the door already. A quick glance confirms that Shepard’s alive but still out cold, and he can’t do a damn thing about it because there’s an inbound Reaper and though Cortez is good, he’s not that good (no one is that good). Javik's busy working on Shepard and Cortez is busy flying the shuttle, and maybe this is a good time for him to get busy bringing up the turret.

For all the good a turret’s gonna do against a damn Reaper.

But the Reaper falls to the ocean like it just ran out of gas in the middle of the sky, and James didn’t think that the nuttiest part of today would happen after Shepard jumped a couple thousand feet into the sea and talked to aliens that live at the bottom of the ocean, but here he is.

Shepard coughs up what looks like a gallon and a half of seawater, and James resolves to modify his definition of Crazy Shit.

"Go," Yael says. Everything hurts, even seeing is excruciating, but she opens her eyes. Shoshana’s still kneeling before her, gun lying on the floor forgotten. "Sho," she coughs, "you have to finish this."

They shake their head. “No, come on.” Soldiers know when they’re done, when there’s no coming back, and Yael’s eyes, normally bright and piercing and focused, are dimming fast. 

The Butcher of Torfan. They hear about it on the news. The Butcher of Torfan is their sister, and she’s being held in Vancouver until the Alliance can figure out what to do with her. 

Once the shock wears off, Shoshana’s the least surprised of anyone. People look at the two of them and see identical copies: orphaned biotics with concrete-rough edges, not fit for polite company and medals and being paraded out for the cameras, but a perfect fit for the Alliance’s more questionable missions. The Shepard twins get it done.

But they aren’t copies. The cold mathematics of combat freezes Shoshana in their tracks. Give them a target and it’s gone, but give them an impossible choice and they’ll crumble. Yael’s always been the one to shut down, lock her emotions away, and make the call.

So Shoshana isn’t terribly surprised. Yael had a horrible decision to make and two minutes to make it in, and she made the right one.

"Please," Shoshana begs. Their strength is fading like the light in Yael’s eyes, but they dig down deep for their last scraps of energy and stand up, Yael’s arm around their shoulders. They nearly lose their balance again, supporting two people on one set of weak legs, but push through and remain standing.

The sudden movement jostles broken and ripped pieces inside of her, and Yael whimpers. Blood drips into her mouth and she focuses entirely on holding onto her twin. If she falls again, Shoshana falls, and she doesn’t think Shoshana could get up again. She knows she couldn’t.

The Hero of Elysium, the news is saying. Yael’s in a bar when she hears it. The Hero of Elysium is her twin, and the 24-hour networks are showing nonstop footage of the battle’s final moments: Shoshana holding up a biotic field they were never trained for, pushing back the straggling batarian forces.

In the aftermath, Shoshana tries to hide from the cameras, duck out of the bright lights to fade back into the shadows. Reporters call their evasiveness humility and grace, modesty in the face of true heroism.

But Yael knows better. It’s shame. Something happened on Elysium that Shoshana isn’t proud of, that they don’t want anyone to discover, that they think will tarnish the victory. 

Finding a way out, finding the key to change everything, has always been Shoshana’s specialty and they don’t even realize it. Where Yael sees two paths with body counts behind them, Shoshana sees a third option. Yael doesn’t ask, and Shoshana doesn’t tell. 

But everyone survived, because of Shoshana.

By the time they’re close to the glowing red conduit, Yael’s no longer awake. Her breath is faint, maybe not even there at all, maybe just wind on Shoshana’s burned skin. Shoshana’s own breath is coming shorter and shorter, the world beginning to spin.

They came into the world as a team and they’ll leave the world as a team, so Shoshana doesn’t stop to check Yael’s thready pulse or pause to try to wake her up. Yael carried them both this far, Shoshana’s portion is comparatively small. Three shots will do it.

Yael sends them off with their lists - after reminding Garrus that the Illusive Man is paying for all of this, and that the Illusive Man is a dick, and so he should in no way feel bad for buying the most expensive everything - and heads toward Alliance offices. Anderson said he’d forwarded her belongings there, care of Admiral Hackett. Thankfully, Hackett’s out and she doesn’t need to deal with that particular debrief.

The crate’s not much. She had most of her stuff with her on the Normandy, and Alchera was too cold to bother looking around to see if her favorite boots survived the atmospheric crash. Most everything is Alliance crap: medals and awards she didn’t feel like displaying (too many questions; besides, she still feels awkward being commended for her actions), uniform bits, and some gun mods. Amidst the pieces, she unearths the toy airplane she’s been carting around since she was a kid. She holds it up to the light: scuffed wings, broken propeller, wheels that never drove straight. She slides it carefully in her pocket.

There, in the very bottom underneath an N7 sweatshirt and a sketchbook full of terrible attempts at Sovereign, she finds her menorah. Her fingertips graze the metal, feel the wax collected from years of celebration, and she smiles. No way was she finding one out in the Terminus, and the menorah has been hers longer than she can remember ever owning anything. She stole it from Plum Street Temple the December she finally found a decent shelter, but paid it back in donations over the next ten years.

Her eyes light up as her fingers brush against a box. Candles. She sends up a prayer for this; she’d checked store inventories before docking, and no one on board had Chanukah candles, or even anything that could fake being Chanukah candles. She’d been close to asking Mordin for help.

She boxes everything up and has the crate sent to the Normandy's shuttle for transport. Her omnitool beeps at her, warning her of half an hour left before departure, and she decides to spend her time with the street vendors. If every race in the galaxy has managed to make something that tastes like Swedish meatballs of all things, she bets that at least one of them makes something that approximates a latke.

She gets lucky with the salarians, who look at her strangely as she orders six and nothing else (“they’re usually a side dish, soak up the sauce” to which she channels every ounce of guilt she can into a glare, and the two cooks hurriedly give her three more for free, “for your trouble.”), and then meets everyone back at the shuttle. Garrus hands her the promised amp and shotgun barrel, and everyone else is equally loaded down.

Thane presses up against her in the shuttle, under pretense of it being crowded and preferring to stand for the short ride. She knows better, and leans into him, enough so he notices, not enough that everyone else will. They’ve been orbiting around each other toward something since the Collector ship. A quick glance around tells her no one’s looking, so she lightly grasps his fingers. She feels the low chuckle in his chest and allows herself a smile.

"Come to my quarters tonight," she whispers when they finish unloading the shuttle. She checks her omnitool and converts the time. "Twenty-two hundred?" Close enough. A nod, and then he’s gone.

The chime rings exactly on time, and she lets him in. He notices the toy plane on her desk immediately; front and center, replacing the downturned photo; obviously an object of importance. “Siha,” the question is there in her name. He appreciates their time together, more than she will ever know, but the invitation sounded specific.

"Chanukah starts tonight," she says, gesturing toward the unlit menorah on the coffee table. "It’s the Jewish Festival of Lights," she explains at the slight confused tilt of his head, "where we celebrate the miracle of one night of oil lasting for eight." She knows he’ll ask about the historical context later, when he’s ready to understand it; they’ve discussed their religions at length, and she admires - if, to be perfectly honest with herself, a little terrified by - Thane’s strength and meditations on his own.

"Ah," he says, fascinated. "Drell have a similar miracle, with water." He steps closer to her, seeing the food and drink she’s set out, and committing the scripture engraved into the menorah to memory. "Need I do anything?"

"I was hoping you’d join me in lighting the first night’s candle." She finally finds the ancient lighter Joker lent her and flicks it to make sure it works. "Just…" she realizes she’s never done this with another person before, never wanted them to help more than with the prayer. "Cover my hand with yours, I’ll do everything else. EDI, dim lights to 30%."

"As you wish, Siha." He watches intently as the cabin dims and she lights the middle candle. He lightly settles his hand on hers. Warmth, strength, faith; he’s felt all these in her before, but never so near the surface.