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The Translation in Blood	By : Mayamahal Category: +M through R > Mass Effect Views: 19003 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Bioware or ANYTHING in the Mass Effect universe, including the characters therein. I make no money on this story.

Chapter List
- 7
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The Turian-
-and dammit, do I wish I knew his name-
-stayed a little distant the next day, making Hannah wonder more and more if she really didn't do something wrong.
That morning, worn and sore and still pretty tired, she hadn't bothered with braiding her hair. She finger-combed it free of tangles, having let it loose to dry while she slept, and simply bound it up into a long, free-flowing tail, too lazy to bother with it even though she knew she might pay for it later if they rolled into anything gross.
She'd slept naked in her thermal blanket and was sitting on top of it as she fiddled with her hair, smiling at the Turian as he roused on his own and rolled over in his own bed. When he spotted her, she said, "Good morning!" cheerfully. His usually reply was to nod and rumble a pleasant sounding series of syllables, but today he did neither.
Sitting up, he stared at her for almost five solid seconds, saying nothing, before standing up and donning his armor.
They broke down camp pretty quickly, the fastest she could recall so far, dressed and ready to go in less than a half hour. She tried to ease some of the tension she was feeling with a little humor, saying, "No dawdling today, hmm? You got a date waiting, bird?"
He snorted but otherwise remained silent, handing her her share of the load before hoisting his own on his back. He gestured for her to lead on, and, with a puzzled frown, she did.
There was no talking today. Mostly there was walking and looking and the Turian tapping busily at his glowing interface, keeping one eye on the path she picked out and one on whatever the hell it was he was doing. Several times, Hannah tried to trip him up and climb over a few large boulders, going out of her way to at least distract him away from his computer, but after he neatly stepping over the damned things without so much as an upward glance, she gave up.
Even when they paused in the middle of the day to eat and rest for a little bit, he still almost completely ignored her.
By the time they stopped for the night, Hannah was pretty concerned.
She tried to give him his space, busying herself with the mind-numbing, idle-consuming task of putting a few dozen braids into her hair. Such activities were a common late night luxury back in her youth, when her only worry was school and friends and what she was going to do when she grew up. She found comfort in it now, letting her mind wander and dwell on anything but him.
Mostly, she worried about her daughter, missing her, wanting to see her again. She was in good hands, her mother and father lived in the same city she did, but while it had been a good arrangement so far, the more Hannah traveled the stars, the more she wanted to bring her little girl with her. The ships were pretty spacious and many families traveled together on military ships, in particular the ones that were for exploration and not battle. The more she considered it, the more she liked it. She spent the next long moments contemplating a mental checklist of everything she'd need to do to have that arranged, succeeding in distracting herself from the awkward discomfort between her and her traveling companion.
When she'd tied off the last braid, the Turian broke his ... whatever it was... and plopped down next to her on the ground. It took her so off-guard she nearly jumped.
He gave her an amused glance, then gestured to her left arm, demonstrating that he wanted her to hold it out. She blinked at him but obeyed, simply relieved that he was talking to her again. Sort of.
He pulled her arm out of her jacket and swabbed her lower arm with some of that tangy, skin-tingling gel that had healed the same arm before, but this time only using it on the inside of her fore-arm. The skin there was unmarred and smooth, and she had about a second to wonder what he was planning before he pulled off his glove, gripped her firmly at the elbow with a low, warning growl, and cut sharply into her skin.
Her face contorted in pain and shock, staring at him with an expression of abject betrayal when he leaned close to her face and emitted a soft, soothing sound that can only be described as a purr. His eyes locked with hers, calm and gentle, so she shut her mouth and swallowed her protest.
She did whimper a quiet little, "Ow," but otherwise held still and silent.
The fact that she could see the approval on his face told her more about how well she was beginning to read him than anything else did, and she tried to focus on that while he butchered the square inch of flesh just below her wrist joint.
I can tell when he's irritated or worried, happy and pleased or laughing. I can read the lines of his body when he's tense or ready to pounce, or relaxed or tired... She tried to feel impressed with herself, but it deflated fairly quickly when she began to understand the depth of his advantage over her.
If what he was trying to show me on those vids were correct, he's been around people like me, humanoid faces and skulls and emotions, skeletal structures that are pretty much as sapien as mine... She crinkled her face at that realization. Well... damn. I must be an open book to this bastard.
She tried not to let herself wallow in this, but another thought occurred to her that perked her up a little.
Maybe that was why he was so quick to trust me... He could read me far better than I could him, and let's face it, I never would have relaxed around him if he hadn't around me...
Her train of thought was abruptly derailed when she felt the cold, hard surface of an object he was attempting to embed into her skin. Now she did complain, all but ready to yank her arm out of his grip when he felt her tense, looked her in the eye, and then jerked his chin towards the inside of his own left arm.
Panting a little with pain, she glanced down, and noticed a scar in the exact place on his arm that she was going to have on her's. She blinked at him, comprehension beginning to dawn. She considered him for a long moment, then gave a small, careful nod.
The next hour was fairly excrutiating, a mix of emotions and sensations that had Hannah fairly sweating by the time it was over. The hand he had on her to hold in place had queued up his interface, allowing him to see scans of her body that she didn't know he'd taken. -! She managed to glare at him a little for this invasion of privacy, but it was a handy bit of information to know; she could have guessed that the tech was capable of that, but it was fascinating to actually see what it could do.
She felt it when he connected the physical interface into her nervous system, a zip of electricity that made her fingers twitch, a tingle in every tendon that sizzled strangely between her knuckles. That was when she really understood what he'd given her, and oddly, felt a strange, small surge of disappointment amidst the jolt of excitement.
It's not a translator, then. Damn.
Holding the edges of her cut flesh together, he applied more of the medicinal gel to get the wound to clot and seal somewhat, before binding it up with a tight bandage. She lifted her arm, tried to flex her wrist but stopped when he rumbled a warning. She looked up at him and frowned, wondering how it worked and asking him so.
He put away his little collection of tools and washed his hands off with water from a canteen, drying them swiftly before sitting at her left hip, just behind her. She could feel his bent leg press against her lower back, unconsciously leaning into it as he reached around to lift her left arm with his right hand, lifting his own left arm parallel to hers.
He held up a finger-
-watch-
-turned his left arm so that the inside of it was facing upward, then reached out with his right hand to trace a brief symbol into the air just a centimeter or so above his flesh, right above the faint scar. On command, his personal computer interface manifested and lit up with an amber glow, complete with input board across his arm and the import/export interface resting in the palm of his hand.
Her eyes went wide and she squirmed in excitement.
"Show me!" she breathed.
He only had to demonstrate the activation twice before she got it, a flicker of movement above the inside of her arm that was so quick that it was almost impossible to see. With a strange, brief tingle, she giggled with glee when she uploaded her personal omni-tool for the first time.
They stayed up for hours adapting it to her liking, the Turian showing her how she didn't need it to speak her language or know her alphabet for it to work, how it was intuitive and easy to navigate. It had a storage system that completely blew away anything her species had, and an upload time that astounded her. He taught her how to access the recording program, video and audio, where they were usually stored and how to bring them up. He showed her how to access other omni-tools within the area, how to hack into someone else's interface and fiddle with settings, steal date, or, with the right program (that he didn't give her) cause pain.
"Wow," was all she could say when she absorbed all that.
He showed her how to do scans, showed her the difference between a discrete scan and a scan you didn't need to mask, demonstrating that the only difference was speed. She used that program to check out the terrain ahead of them, noting that tomorrow they would finally leave the lake and head into what appeared to be a canyon, albeit narrow, that had a steep incline that she hoped would get them to the surface.
She grinned at him when she figured out how to use that particular program. He showed her how to increase the range of the scan to its limits, showed her where things that were too distant but gave off particular signatures, like technology, energy, organic life-signs, certain minerals, heat, etc., could act as a compass and guide her to a closer proximity until her omni-tool could pick up specifics.
In the closest she'd heard him give to a throat-clearing sound, he explained to her through a series of gestures and one hilarious imitation of his accidental demise (and her usual bout of twenty-questions), that he was giving this to her in case something happened to him and she was out there on her own. She gaped at him; he was probably violating security protocols by the dozens just to ensure a measure of her safety.
Hannah found herself very touched, a swell of unexpected emotion bubbling up in her chest.
"This is so wonderful," she finally declared, turning her head to grin at him, her face radiating gratitude. "It's a fantastic gift you've given me, bird. Thank you."
And with that, she impulsively kissed the only part of him she could reach, in this case, one of his external jawbones.
That purr he'd emitted before resonated through him again, although with a lower pitch and a vibration she could feel from their close proximity. Beneath her lips, she felt his mandible flutter against her skin. With a blush that she was sure seared her hair, she yanked herself backward with a flurry of apologies.
"Oh- dammit, I'm sorry, I did it again-" she began, before his hand gripped the back of her hair, tangled in her braids, and pulled her back into him to brush the edges of his mouth across the soft, full shape of her lips.
A kiss from an alien was the last thing she expected when she woke up this morning.
It sent a shock of lightening down her spine, her eyes going wide in surprise as she all but gaped at him, her blush burning through her cheeks. When he drew back, she could see the color of his eyes, belying his avian features with a beautiful display of amber around the iris that faded into hazel, blue, and an outlining field of green. They were the kind of eyes you'd see back home in the face of a beloved stranger.
Again, she noticed how somethings transcended species; his pupils were dilated, his eyes glittering warmly in the white, glowing lines of his facial marks, like burning, green embers in a pale mask.
It took her breath away, and before she knew it, she was smiling.
He seemed pleased with her response but didn't press it further, letting her hair go and pulling back his hand, but not before the back of a talon gently stroked her cheek. He stood up and gave her one last amused set of syllables, before turning about and walking back to his gear, leaving Hannah in a state of bemused meditation.
She didn't join him for their usual swim that night, but it didn't seem to bother him. She sat on her blanket and alternately stared into space and fiddled with her new toy, though the latter was just to hide the fact that she really couldn't stop thinking... or looking at him. She'd glance at him now and again, wading through the water and periodically submerging. She wondered when she stopped thinking of him as alien and foreign instead of elegant and admirable. Her friendly affection notwithstanding, she never really considered ... caring for him. It had simply never occured to her. Was it even possible?
It didn't seem so unusual to him, and that in itself told her even more about his culture. Were cross-species relationships a common thing among his people? Or did they even have the inclination to care about such things? The history of her world spoke volumes about the fear differences amongst her own species could wield against each other, and it fed the hope in her heart that maybe there was a peaceful way out of this mess after all.
When he strode naked from the water, she abruptly found herself busy with her tool again, trying very, very hard not to blush. Yesterday, they'd frolicked in the lake practically naked together, uncaring about such things as modesty or clothes, and now ... now...
She turned off her interface while he dressed, too flustered to say anything as she all but pulled the blanket over her head. Her mind was so busy that night that she barely slept at all.
�@
- 7
- 8
- 9
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The Translation in Blood