#since i want them both as protagonists and will mix and match two walkthroughs probably

[arcanistvysoren]

finally knitted my scattered thoughts about ryders together into a neat one-shot while waiting for early access to finish downloading.

 • In 2176 the big news is: the Jon Grissom Academy finally opens its doors to young biotics—and the twins part ways for the first time as Jo leaves for a place her brother cannot follow—to hone gifts she hasn’t asked for.

(They’re twins. It’s unfair. It should be both, or neither, not this.) 

Other news coming in is still angry, reeling in the aftermath of the Skyllian Blitz. Their father keeps a stoic front, but his fists clench whenever he listens to it too much. There’s an uncomfortable stretch of emptiness in Jaime’s stomach, now that Jo is gone, that he can’t quite find the name for. But he sees the news, and the clenched fists, and fills the empty space by enlisting.

• Somewhere else in the galaxy Jien Garson takes a job on a project that will change the course of history and both of their lives.

• We stood together, staring into that bright blue light, not knowing where it was going to take us or if we’d even make it through alive. It was the hardest step I’ve ever taken…

Their father tells them all kinds of tales of his glorious mission. Or maybe just the one tale, but they listen to it with voracity and pride. They learn not to share it quickly enough: it turns out not everyone’s father is a famous war vet; not everyone’s family gets to live in the heart of the Council space; and people might viciously begrudge you your father’s high standing.

• One day Joana gets into a scuffle at school and sends a classmate flying into a wall with a sudden eruption of blacks and blues and purples and magic. Afterwards, the thing she is most afraid of is not that she has hurt someone, nor the principle, nor their father—(not even this sudden thing tearing her up, although heavens know she never really gets a handle on it)—but that her brother will hate her.

Years later, she will still reflect from time to time that it should have been him that got it. He doesn’t disagree: it would have made life a whole lot easier for her—but he doesn’t mind it either. He doesn’t need biotics to feel plugged directly into the infinite expanse of space.

• His fate is written in his bones long before Jien Garson claws the right for humanity to be included in the Initiative from the stringently crossed arms of other aliens. It has always been thrumming through his heart whenever he looked outside and saw the stars, and a new planet below, and the endless spinning void. And his ribs would expand with the almost-painful awareness that they are floating through the unfathomable. The most beautiful terrible thing.

There is a particular sort of victory in standing on the surface of a new planet and being able to pull your helmet off. Where the air here hasn’t been made with humans in mind, and yet here they are, existing, and the breeze brushes against his skin, leaving dust specks of an entirely alien ecosystem on his tongue.

It’s a longing, he finds, universal of all living things: they’re a space-faring civilization, this is it, the future, and they’ve made it. But they still long for more uncharted depths and new horizons, and still shiver at the sight of stars.

• “Stay safe out there,” Jaime tells her the day she leaves for Grissom. His tone is light, teasing: they don’t really believe in wars yet.

“I promise,” she says. It’s a new territory, this separation, but it’s not like it actually severs them.

(Him signing up for the Initiative however…)

• “It’s a little bit like you’re dying,” Robert tells him after Jaime explains the whole thing. They’ve been roommates for two years, and he sounds wary and at a loss.

“You’ll get onto that ship, and go to sleep, and wake up the next day, only it’ll be 600 years from now. In that time I’ll get married, and have kids, and die, and my kids will have kids, my blood will distill. I’ll be thinking about you for years, wondering if somewhere in the future you’re missing me, even though you’ll be still asleep on your Ark. And when you do wake up enough to remember me, I’ll be a footnote in a database of ancient military obituaries. Not that you’d know. If you ever get back here, you won’t recognize a thing.” He shakes his head with a frown, trying to wrap his head around it. “That Ark is like a coffin. As soon as you step on board, you’re gone.”

• Come find me, Andromeda says.

It doesn’t seem like dying to him.

• Space is not something that Jo Ryder chose, the way her brother has. Space has called for Jaime and enveloped him. She has to wrestle against it like an elastic band, trying to fit it around herself, uncooperative and resistant.

Jaime looks at the stars with a smile and anticipation. Dreams of things bigger than she even, and she worries where it might lead him. But at least he knows what he wants. She lacks, and envies him this surety.

• It was the hardest step I’ve ever taken. Their father continues to rehash the same story, in private and in public. Joana isn’t dazzled it with anymore.

“I don’t want our last name to be dictating who we are,” she tells Jaime matter-of-factly, and sounds tired.

In another life, where they have not surrendered to the life of the military, she might have been a programming engineer, or a quantum mechanic, or an astrophysicist. (Numbers light up for her the way stars sing for him.) She might have been a CEO, or a broker, and he might have been a researcher, an explorer, a scientist—and in that life neither of them would get to go on the Hyperion.

He wonders sometimes how those Jaime and Joana are doing. If they’re any happier; if they’re happy at all.

• She graduates third in her class and promptly runs away to learn piloting from aliens: it’s glorious, because no one cares she’s a Ryder. She’s a human, she’s a gnat—more breakable than a turian, less biotics than an asari, all hormones and fire in her blood, still a new thing, an unproven thing—she loves it.

She has soft skin, a vulnerable artery in her neck, messy hair the likes of which they haven’t seen, and to the aliens she’s a novelty.

She has a brusque tongue, inhospitable eyes, an unpalatable roughness, and to the humans she’s objectionable.

(No one ever takes her just for the whole of her.)

Watching over a team of scientists she finds herself fiercely missing her brother.

• “I decided to go Andromeda,” he tells her merrily. His smile fades when he notices her face. “You will come with me, won’t you?” he adds carefully.

And she has to shut her eyes, to not see him, or maybe to commit him to memory, the whole of him. Because he’s leaving. Going where she can’t, or maybe doesn’t want to try and follow after all. (When she opens her eyes again, they are bright.)

“We do everything together,” he insists helplessly. “Say you’ll come with me.”

She shakes her head, and doesn’t say it, cannot say it. Looks at him askance, terribly betrayed, and still pulls him into a wordless hug. Clings to him, and he to her, but it doesn’t help at all.

• Being a Ryder is a legacy. Not as much as being a Grissom, she supposes, but in the military circles their name carries weight: her father, the right hand man, stepping into the maw of the unknown, dashing and unafraid. Girls and boys in her class swooning over the photos of the alpha strike team that first stepped through the Charon relay to Arcturus. Girls and boys asking utterly inappropriate questions about her father.

That’s how she discovers the first thing different between her and Jaime: when she is just too mad, when it is bursting out of her, too full, too much, splitting out of her spine with a spike of something violent and unfathomable. And she cannot feel her body, and cannot understand its signals, and it’s awful from that very first second, and she never really learns to cope with it.

• In the wake of the Battle of the Citadel, Joana meets Commander Shepard, briefly. Spots her on the Presidium, sitting out of the way, half-concealed from the passers-by. She doesn’t want to bother her, but knows she’ll be kicking herself later if she doesn’t.

“Commander?” she gathers enough gusto to approach her. The women turns her head, unsurprised—the way people who are used to strangers approaching them are never surprised anymore. (Joana’s seen the look enough times on her father.) She lets out a nervous exhale and steps closer. “I just wanted to thank you. For all that you did. Saving our asses.”

Shepard smiles around a humorless chuckle, her eyes trailing down below, to the chasm in the Presidium’s floor, where you could see parts of the ravaged Tayseri Ward and the keepers skittering about.

“Doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment these days, does it?” she says. “We lost a lot of men.”

It’s been a few weeks. The news are still full of fire and death tolls, and the adults send children off to play while they huddle around monitors, listening to reports of more deaths and destruction that keep coming like ripples. It was one attack, and then it was over in a matter of hours, but they keep cleaning out debris, finding bodies—Flux has been unearthed last night; dance floor full of dead things; you can only hope it was quick—it is only now that the weight starts gravely settling in.

The Commander’s eyes look old on her face. She feels that weight acutely. So does Joana: so much that she cannot breathe. The memorial wall deep in the guts of the Citadel is full of names of her former shipmates, former classmates, and she feels her skin crawling because hers isn’t on it.

• She slammed the door on her entire relationship with her father when she left their Citadel apartment for good. It ceased to be a home that day, but it still felt like losing a pieace of herself when the geth armada tore through that part of the Citadel, making rubble out of her childhood. The home they could have had on Earth was lost the moment their father put his career first and sold it off, choosing to juggle his carious postings instead.

The closes thing she has to a home she loses because she’s on leave, but the ship she’s been assigned to isn’t, and the geth ships blow it to pieces. All that’s left of them is a wall of names mourned, and names unmourned, and names nobody will soon remember.

So she comes back to her father, still angry and rigid, and says she’ll go. Because there’s no more homes to lose. Because the shadows of the dead are standing on her shoulders, and the guilt is unbearable, and she can’t look up because of the choking shame and terror and so yes she’ll go.

• “I signed up for the Initiative yesterday,” she tells Jaime calmly over lunch. Nothing’s been formally approved yet, but it will be in no time if her father has anything to say about it.

Jamie is caught off guard only for a moment, before pulling her into a hug with a wide smile, both of them saying nothing. He doesn’t say he’s relieved, and she doesn’t say she’s sorry. That she almost abandoned him, or that he’s almost abandoned her, or both of them were nearly abandoned together.

He tells her of his posting at Arcturus instead, and that joke he heard the other day in the mess hall, and she laughs, that little snorting laugh she’s been embarrassed of since she was fifteen. And he smiles; and he’s glad; and he will get to hear it for the rest of his life.

• “I’m a soldier,” Robert tells him when it is the final good-bye, and Hyperion stands ready to depart. “So I don’t really get it. But I get that you’re not one. And maybe you’ll find whatever you’re looking for there. Whenever you do decide to wake up.”

“So, tomorrow then,” Jaime smiles crookedly, and hears his roommate’s laugh for the last time.

600 years later, tomorrow, he’ll think back to that moment when the realization will dawn on him that he might be in love. That it took him going to another galaxy for it to happen—amongst all the other brilliant things.

600 years later Joana will stop running from her demons, and fall onto an alien soil, and she’ll finally look her past in the eye and cry over it and finally bury it.

• Jaime lies on the floor of not-really-grass—only sort of grass, everything-here-is-different kind of grass. Maybe they will plant their own some day soon—but not tonight. Tonight, he lies on the surface of a no-name world and looks up into the sky where the Milky War streaks far across, a thin vague brush stroke.

They’ll have to build hubs to begin tracing where’s Sol, and Iera, and Widow, and Aralakh, heart wistfully looking back. Other stars are occupying his vision now. He doesn’t know the name of any constellation. He will stretch out his hand and draw lines through the stars, through the spinning solar systems. And he will make up the shapes for them himself.

• A good story ends with a homecoming.

#mine: fic #vg: mass effect #vg: andromeda #basically i want my m!ryder to be the starry-eyed dreamer consumed by space #the kind of person who would look at his life on earth and the entire milky way and say: #yeah this is not enough; i can part with this; i want to go further #and have the fem!ryder be the more grounded one; the kind who maybe didn’t want to go at all; #wanted other things; has always felt the shadow of her father and railed against it; #was prepared to be torn from her family and changes her mind at the last minute; #because battle of the citadel; because guilt and loss and running away; #(because DESTINY) #even though of course she doesn’t BELIEVE in destiny #her terror vs his longing; his running towards it vs her fleeing from things; all the dichotomies #[sigh] #i am prepared to get shafted by the canon of course #who knows how many things will completely contradict this #who knows how they will utilize the sibling that stays on the ship: definitely in a way that will undermine my story #since i want them both as protagonists and will mix and match two walkthroughs probably #but for now #i have expectations #i have feelings #i have only 30 fucking % of the trial downloaded #i want them to be each other’s home; each other’s foil and pillar and a reflection and a negative #and i have only spent like 3 months thinking about them and how they are so no room for disappointment there