Should've Seen the Water Rising

[beautifulspaceraptor]

Who: Shepard and Nihlus.
When: About a week after the Crash.
Where: On the outskirts of the encampment.
What: Finally dealing with some of that grief and some potential CR fixing.
Warnings: Talk of death and general sadness.


The headwrap doesn’t smell like Saren anymore and that helps. If only a little bit. Nihlus hadn’t taken it out of the compartment in the inside of his cowl after washing the blue off. Just the mental weight of it being there was enough: he didn’t want to see it.

Still didn’t, really.

Burning it with a bog standard fire wouldn’t really work. This was a textile popularly used by high level Asari biotics ranging from Commandos to Matriarchs and it was almost entirely non-combustible.

Instead, Nihlus is here, some ways away from the encampment, sitting on a rocky outcropping with his knees tucked against his chest. The dark, tattered piece of cloth floats suspended on his omni-tool’s rendering platform as he flash forges a disk of superheated ceramic underneath it.

He takes a slow breath. Then slowly raises his arm until disk and fabric meet with a low sizzle, pale smoke curling up into the air in thick, winding strands.

Comments

[beautifulspaceraptor]

"The mission was classified and Saren cut off most communication after the fact." Nihlus inhales slowly, rolling his head back, eyes closed. "Rumor has that he was he was in Terminus System, skirting around the Perseus Veil, just before reports of Geth sightings started to spike. Rumor has it that he was looking for something."

A brief silence, the Spectre gathering his memories and thoughts together, sorting out how to lay all the pieces out.

"I received a message a couple of days after netting those rumors. An encrypted video. It was just... him. Armless, bleeding out in his cockpit, staring at the feed. Didn't say a word."

He'd thought it was goodbye at the time.

It seemed so much more ominous now.

"Three months later, I find out he's alive. Picked him up for a mission on Omega, tracking down some Asari mob boss trying to shove a shipment of Eezo through from the Nemean Abyss to supply an anti-Council extremist cell. He had the Geth arm by then."

[squadgoals]

"Reaper arm." It's out of her mouth before she can stop it, almost defensive, and she falls silent again, eyes flickering down to Nihlus. Exhaling slowly, she stretches her arms behind her back, fingers linked, as she picks the line of thought back up.

"Thought the same thing when I first saw it. But the wiring, the--" She pauses, letting her arms fall back to her side, shaking her head. "It wasn't until I was with Cerberus, getting up close and personal with Reaper tech on the daily that I started being able to pick out the differences. It's Geth parts and baseline, but with something... more."

There's another handful of silence, before Shepard tugs another thread, pulling them together.

"But if Saren was ever closer to that Monolith than orbital strike distance, chances are his indoctrination started a long time before he met Sovereign — maybe even lead to it. Hell, it's starting to sound like he was marked as a potential player by the Reapers from day one."

God, when had that been? '57? More than fifteen years of sleeper agent to sow and plot some of the first seeds for Reaper re-entry. How much of Saren's activity, his attitude, methodology, had been Reaper-fueled?

"You've said before he was quieter after that. "

[beautifulspaceraptor]

Reaper arm.

Nihlus accepts the correction quietly, refusing to touch the nothingness where his own arm had been before. He remembers cold fingers on his shoulder from somewhere under the noise, the weight of it.

The real Saren had never used the arm for any kind of touch.

"He always withdrew after a severe injury," he murmurs. "I didn't think it... unusual. Arterius abhorred showing weakness. Even with Benezia and that woman had been there for his goddamn birth."

Another pause here. A bit longer.

"Anyways, the anniversary came and went and all I got was radio silence. On a whim I decided to swing by Palaven a few months after. Give the local law enforcement some excitement." A laugh here, soft and hollow as he idly runs his fingers over a nick in his shin plate. "I'd assumed Saren had already been there without me but there'd been no new offerings on the gravestone."

Not entirely unusual. There had been instances before where Saren had pushed back visiting his brother's graves a few months before. Long duration missions. But he hadn't be slated for any, not as far as Nihlus had known.

"On a whim, I started looking into the circumstances of Desolas' death and things got... pretty strange."

[squadgoals]

"Strange how?"

It was unusual, listening like this to Nihlus. Unlike his usual method of storytelling, usually involving brash accounts, exciting adventures, and bold claims, this was... raw. Real. No highlights or window dressings, just the details, as remembered, tired and well-worn.

Shifting her weight, she watches him unconsciously and consciously fidget, touch, and struggle as he speaks, drawing out the pain like a poison. Is this helping, or hurting?

[beautifulspaceraptor]

"The official story of Desolas' death was that he'd been affected by a biological contaminant created by a rogue team of humans. That's why Temple Palaven had to be destroyed. That's why Saren hated humanity so much. The incident occurred several weeks after the end of the First Contact War."

Saren never talked about it. Not once. Not beyond the visits to the grave.

"Every file I managed to track down, every piece of information I managed to get my hands on was... incomplete. The names I did manage to find belonged to dead or missing people. Soldiers, scientists, transport workers. It took months just to find one small scrap."

But he hadn't really been looking at the time, had he? It'd been a little side project, another one of Saren's many secrets to try and uncover so that he could figure out why the guy was such a cryptic fucking asshole.

"I thought it was the Hierarchy doing it at the time. A cover-up, like they did for the bomb on Tuchanka. I... was finally going to ask Saren about it. After Eden Prime."

Nihlus stares off into the distance, gaze lost in the gray horizon line.

"If you're right, then he'd have been under for twenty six years."

[squadgoals]

Turning her own line of sight towards the horizon, Shepard nods, slowly, considering.

"So Saren was one of our cycle's sleeper agents. In the end, he knew — he talked about making himself invaluable, so Sovereign would never need to destroy his mind completely — but I don't think he knew how much had already happened."

She hadn't. Anderson hadn't. Palavan might have, but as Nihlus aptly pointed out, those details tended only to come out when something was about to make them look bad. Once Saren was dead, there was absolutely no chance of it coming to light.

"Used to try and figure out where he'd met Sovereign in the first place. I figured it had to be something like the MSV Cornucopia, or... Aratoht. A chance encounter with a Reaper artifact that decides the victim's more useful alive than-- than as a husk."

It's a lame finish, but her mind is suddenly elsewhere, brow furrowed, briefly lost in irate contemplation. Where the hell had Desolas found it? That was something that might have helped war efforts along.

A crueler command would've held the Hierarchy's feet to the fire over hidden secrets after the bomb on Tuchanka incident — but Shepard wasn't, and the Primarch had suffered enough. At that point, bigger fish were already lining up to be fried...

"How'd they destroy it? Pretty sure our methods were a little different."

[beautifulspaceraptor]

"Orbital bombardment." There's a dry laugh here. "Right in the middle of of the spirits-damned capital."

He's not sure what kind of political magic nineteen year old Saren managed to pull in order to make it happen, but they sure could have used that sort of magic on their side.

Just how much did the Hierarchy know about the nature of the Monolith, though? Hierarchy doctrine tended to be heavy handed with military threats, but even they would have hesitated to just level the center of their biggest city. As Desolas' SiC, this bare-faced teenager faced down the Primarch- it would have HAD to have been the Primarch- and convinced them this was the best and only solution.

Just how much of the picture was Nihlus still missing?

"The public was paranoid enough about humanity at the time that the aftermath was cleaned up with minimum fuss, as far as I'd managed to find out."

Considering just how many people on the mission were dead or missing, he suspects anyone who tried to investigate probably suffered a similar fate.

[squadgoals]

As soon as he says "orbital bombardment", Shepard's head jerks to the side, studying his face. He was serious.

"I didn't realise..." And she can't finish, only shaking her head in disbelief. Someone beyond Saren must have known—or felt—the danger, even if they hadn't understood it wholly. But a strike on Palavan itself? "Someone must've known the bad PR was worth it."

Lowering herself into a crouch, she picks up a rock idly, turning it in her fingers as she speaks. "When I first met Wrex, he told me he'd met Saren before. That he'd been hired by him, to attack freighters. One day, they attacked a volus ship — Wrex didn't know why, since there didn't seem to be anything worth the raid on board. But Saren was insistent. And once they were on board, he just walked through the ship, up and down the corridors, ignoring everyone, looking for something."

Shepard pauses, considering the rock for a moment, before continuing. "Wrex had a bad feeling about it — couldn't figure out what, but something about Saren's attitude rubbed him the wrong way. He quit without waiting for the payout — and a week later, every other mercenary involved in the raid was found dead."

Settling down on to the ground beside Nihlus, she lets the rock roll off her hand, and looks sideways at her would-be mentor. "He was looking for something, that was always clear — but now I'm sure it was a Reaper artifact. It didn't make sense, not without the Monolith connection. And whatever it was? I'd put money on it that it's what led him to Sovereign."