Chapter Text
The new outpost on Eos was a series of shuttles landing, kicking up dust in anxious flurries. The man who was going to be mayor and Addison both informed her it would be named “Prodromos.” She shrugged. “Sounds Greek,” she told Bradley. To Addison, she said “Sounds poetic.” The woman had glared at her,looking torn about whether to scold her or not in the wake of their first victory. In the end, she huffed and stomped away to supervise the unloading of the most recent shuttle.
Person after excited person flooded out over the next few hours, nearly dropping their building materials to breathe the now-breathable air. Then, they wanted to shake her hand, get a look at her, see the person they swore they owed this chance to. Each time, she nodded, often not hearing half of what they were saying though she strained to, and reminded them it was the effort of her team and the Initiative at large. She wanted to pull her helmet back on, attempt anonymity and just drive. But the helmet was her father’s, “Ryder” etched into the side, with the unsaid knowledge that “Alec” belonged before it.
She needed her own damn helmet. First thing she was buying on the Nexus.
Still, she slammed it back on, felt it click into place and then pressurize. A couple moments of delay, and then she was breathing filtered air again.
The Basin was steep-walled closest to the establishing settlement, and opened up in the direction of the setting sun. There were layers upon layers of striations in the rock, colored a full palette of browns and reds up the walls, as if letting you choose one you fancied. Small, gnarly plants grew impossibly out of the cracks, not caring that everything seemed to declare that they shouldn’t be there. That was poetic.
When they were sixteen, she and Scott had gone to the Grand Canyon on Earth, having seen it in a vid as children and swearing to go as soon as possible. Alec had been partial to the cold thin air and pine smell of the Sierra Nevadas, so that was one of the only places they had visited on the homeworld throughout their childhood. While they loved it, they also wanted to see more, do more. At the Grand Canyon, they had rappelled down the side (most likely illegally, they hadn’t checked). Between insults, she had marveled at her brother about the hundreds of millions of years of history that these stones had written on them.
For all she knew, Eos hadn’t had billions of years. Maybe it was still a fledgling, but whatever beings built those vaults sped it through eons of evolution. Maybe they saw planets as their sandboxes; trash one and move on. But then...where were they? Did Heleus bore them? Or were they truly gone like the Protheans had been?
She walked over to the cliff-like walls, placed her hand on the uneven surface, a reddish ledge jutting out. Turning back to look at the settlement, she saw that no one was watching her. She rolled her shoulders. Exhaled.
“SAM,” she said. “Let’s go for a climb.”
Before the AI had time to respond, she triggered her jump jets, rocketing upwards. Letting out a whoop, she felt herself arc slightly as she lost momentum about ten feet up, the planet’s gravity seeming to pull on her stronger since the vaults were reset. As she started to fall again, stomach lurching, she grabbed a another ledge. It started crumbling beneath her gloves, but she pushed herself upwards as hard and fast as she could before activating the jump jets. Catapulting through the air, the cliff flew past her until she could see the plain above it. Attempting to stabilize herself with her biotics, she flew a few feet more horizontally, flipping awkwardly, before plummeting back down again and landing in the dust with a dull thump.
“Pathfinder, neither your sentinel nor your vanguard profiles are activated. Biotic usage is limited at this time.”
“Yeah, thanks, SAM.” Thanks Dad, she added to herself, For explaining your experiments.
There was a pause. She huffed and looked at her legs spread out comically, hands toying with the sand between them. And she laughed: at herself, at her father, at Andromeda, at the absurdity of everything that had happened.
After a moment, she stood up and brushed herself off. The sky submerged in deeper and deeper blues that bled into purple. Turning around, she sharply inhaled at the sun cradled in the dip at the other end of the basin. The last rays of light painted a picture that looked like the colors of spring rather than fire; Eos was not a desperate world anymore.
She walked to the edge of the cliffside and sat down, pushing her legs out from under her to dangle over the edge. Her heel hit the rocks a few times as her legs swung wide, knocking pebbles down beneath her.
“I almost forgot what the color pink looks like, SAM,” she remarked, staring out towards the horizon.
“There is no indication of damage to your memory. If this persists, I recommend you consult Doctor T'Perro.”
“You’re terrible.”
The sun sunk lower very slowly, biding its time. The activity at Prodromos did not stop or lag at any point, and she guessed they would work well into the night and the following day. No amount of fatigue would prevent them from seizing this chance. Already, the basic structure of one compound was rising up far below her.
She watched for a long time in complete silence, body groaning from the exertion of the past few days. Beneath her armor was a layer of sweat, some of it absorbed by the fabric, and she was sure was starting to smell. She was dimly aware of her hunger and a rising headache, but pushed it out of her focus.
After a while, she noticed a figure, greyish while juxtaposed against the sunset, walking towards her across the top of the basin. They waved. She started, but they motioned for her to keep sitting. As they came closer, the blue and white of the Initiative uniform was distinguishable, as well as the sturdy shoulders and broad chest of Liam.
She waved faintly, and he stopped beside her. “Mind if I join you, Pathfinder?” His voice rang loud and clear in her helmet -- their comms were still open.
“I don’t know. You might need to get your own cliffside to brood over, Kosta.”
He shrugged. “Don’t know if I’ll have time to before the sun sets, and that would ruin the whole look, wouldn’t it?”
She tapped the earth to her left side so she could hear him better without the comms. He sat down clumsily, legs and body larger than hers, and then he was rocking his own feet beside hers.
There was a moment of silence before she said abruptly, “I was born on the Citadel. Believe it or not, they had better things to do on the Presidium than program the fake sky to have a sunset. When I was stationed planetside in the Milky Way, I...never looked.”
“God, that’s a cliché,” Liam snorted. “No one ever looks. People have probably seen more sunsets in old vids than in real life. Me included. Maybe that’s the point.”
“The Initiative brings us back to a place where we either watch sunsets, or forget why we’re here.”
“You saying you almost forgot?”
“Nah,” she said. “And I can’t imagine I ever could.”
There was clicking noise beside her. She turned to see Liam take off his helmet and push back his headpiece, freeing his wiry hair. His face was shiny with sweat, and the now-gentle winds of Eos blew his hair slightly. He breathed deeply. “I almost forgot. Those twenty seconds you were dead, I thought, what do we do with three Ryders down?”
“You and Cora know what you’re doing. You’d have made it.”
He shrugged. “The good thing is though, we don’t have to find that out. ‘Cause you’ve proven you’re not going anywhere.”
She smiled. “Hell no.”
“Do you mind if I ask what it was like? When you...When the transfer happened?”
It was her turn to shrug. “A really bad headache.”
He looked at her expectantly for an elaboration, but she said no more.
“Anyway,” he said. “Sunsets in London weren’t spectacular, either. Not that I remember, anyway. But the days always felt longer in the summer, because the sun would always set so late.”
“I’ve never been to London,” she said. “Well. Guess I’ll never go now.”
He laughed slightly. “I keep having those little realizations over and over, too. I’ll never see the Tower Bridge again, never gonna walk through Regent's Park. All that touristy bullshit. But I miss all those little places, too.”
“I miss those second-hand shops on the wards of the Citadel. Never know where or who the owners got their junk from, but I knew better than to ask.” She sighed. “Nothing here really has sentimentality or a known history attached to it yet. We get to make that.” She looked back out towards the setting sun where the purple had overtaken most of the sky. Reaching up, she disconnected her helmet, hearing the hiss of it depressurize, and breathed in the air of a planet that was remaking itself.
Pushing back her head covering, her dark hair was limp, sweat-soaked, and clung to her scalp and neck. Running a hand through her hair, she felt the wind run cold against the back of her neck. “I’m gonna need about ten showers later,” she remarked. “But I think that can wait for making history. And memories.” They smiled gently at each other. He was much taller than her, so she leaned her head against his arm.
“You know, ‘Eos’ was the Greek god of the sunrise.” She yawned. “Lots of old poetry described her as having 'rosy fingers' as she let the sun out for each day. Or maybe she just announced it. It's fuzzy. But she was all the pinks of roses up in the sky, like those ones Cora is growing.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Didn’t know that. Or that you were into the classics so much.”
“Dad was a romantic, believe it or not. I just went a little further back. And let me tell you, you haven’t lived unless you’ve seen the Elcor production of the Iliad.”
She didn’t hear his laugh so much as feel it. “I saw Hamlet. The whole talking to the skull bit? Priceless.”
She giggled in response. “Wonder if the Nexus movie libraries have it.”
“Please, I’ve got it in my own personal library.”
She looked up at him, incredulous. “Really?”
He smiled, looking slightly bashful in the waning light. “I’ve got the whole Elcor Shakespeare collection.”
She practically shrieked with laughter. Leaning forward, she kissed him on the cheek, and continued laughing. He froze and looked down at his feet, grinning.
“Sorry I doubted you,” she said, still laughing. Then, she dropped her voice down an octave and spoke in a monotone: “Seriously: To be or not to be?”
“No, no, the adjective is completely different.” He nudged her playfully. “Contemplating death: To be or not to be? Vindictive: That is the question.”
She continued laughing, and nudged him back. They swayed. “Too much emotion for an Elcor.”
“Yeah, alright.”
She cleared her throat, and they fell into a slightly stiff silence. The light was now almost entirely gone, and everything was layers of shadows. Beneath them, lights were already shining up in the basin, harsh and yellowish. It just barely reached them, casting their faces in odd shadows. A couple minutes passed. She thought she heard Addison yelling about a late shipment. She closed her eyes.
“Hey, question, Pathfinder,” Liam said after a while.
“Hmm?”
“That goddess of the dawn, Eos, is it in her job description to bring the sunset, too?”
“Yeah - No. No.” She thought about it for a moment, trying to remember the old volumes she had read. “I think that’s what made her so unique, was that no other part of the day had a god or goddess or titan or what have you.”
“Huh.” A pause. She could practically hear him smile. “Guess we’ll have to name one. ‘Goddess of the Andromeda sunsets.’”
“Prodromos?” She suggested.
“I’m thinking...Ryder?”
She nudged him again, playfully pushing his face away from her. “Stop it. God, you’re full of shit.”
“It makes sense though, doesn’t it? Like sunrises are supposed to mean beginnings, not sunsets, and everything about Andromeda feels like it’s supposed to be an ending, and everything is just opposite of what we should expect. You’re not what anyone expects.”
“I half understood you, and I hope that’s a compliment.”
“It is,” he said confidently. “Nobody is expecting a shot at a beginning, ‘cause it’s so dark out, but you walk into the dark and bring one out anyway.”
“Well…” She started, and as his words sunk in more, she knew less and less of what to say. She looked down at the bustling settlement. “You’re lucky I’m not Addison. That sounds like goddamned poetry. ”
She leaned against him again, eyes starting to droop shut. She blinked furiously to stay awake. “Thanks,” she murmured.
He laughed again, warmly. “It’s a good life, Pathfinder.”
“That it is.”