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Vetra and dad were at it again. Not even the booming bass from their neighbor's music could drown out their venomous sub-harmonics as they filtered through the paper-thin walls.
Just another Tuesday night.
“What do you think you’re doing wearing that armor in here?!” Sid knew an accusatory talon was stabbing at the Blue Suns sigil on their father’s keel.
“Putting food on the table!” Her father shouted back.
Sid scooted closer to the vidscreen. Hierarchical Warriors was a good game to play on nights like this. The story kept her absorbed in the action no matter how many times she had played it. By now, Sid knew the game by heart and she was almost at the part when her favorite character would enter the scene. She romanced him every time she played.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, huh, Dad?!” It wasn’t often that Vetra raised her voice like that. Sidera squeezed the controller tightly in her three-fingered grip. “Is that the same lie you tell yourself when that garbage comes sniffing around your daughter?”
‘Oh no, V. Don’t bring me into this.’
“Sidera is doing just fine!” he snapped.
“Not when dear old dad comes home dressed like some… some thug!” Vetra was getting louder if it was possible. “Shake down any elderly people today?”
“Don’t you talk down to me like that. I am your father!”
“Then act like it!”
“You think I don’t know about the crowd you run with? Your little contacts?” A beat in which Sid could picture her sister’s loose mandibles, displaying her sharp teeth, passed. “Your crest must still be soft if you thought you could keep that from me!”
Sidera turned up the volume on the vid-screen.
Vetra and Dad didn’t always hate each other. There was a time when they were practically inseparable. It went downhill the evening Vetra ran into Sid’s bedroom in the middle of the night, a blanket in hand and anxious green eyes.
“Come on, Sid. We’re going for a ride with Dad,” she had told her, throwing the blanket over her cowl and wrapping her up tightly.
“Vetwa-!” But she was shushed by a well-placed talon against her maw.
“You have to be quiet, Sid. Can you do that?” Sidera adjusted the blanket to free her crest and then nodded. “Good. Now come on, get on my back. I know all the boards that squeak.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t bring us to this shithole of an asteroid!”
“Enough!” Sid flinched at the pure rage in her father’s sub-harmonics.
“Where are you going?” Vetra called in the wake of retreating boots.
The durasteel entryway cycled up and then back down without an answering reply. Vetra snarled her rage and stormed by Sid, never once looking at her huddled on the floor. She probably thought Sid was too involved with her game and wasn’t listening. Vetra never thought she paid attention to anything, but she noticed more than her sister realized.
She noticed that her older sister would quietly keen into her pillow on nights like these, after dad would storm off. She noticed that Vetra didn’t eat much when he was gone and she noticed every time she’d glance at the door when they heard footsteps outside the apartment, expecting them to be Dad’s. Sid would hear the disappointed thrum her sister made when it wasn’t. It became more apparent as days went on without Dad coming home again.
One night, Sid awoke to the sound of someone knocking on their door, but instead of answering it, Vetra hurried into their bedroom. Reminiscent of the night when they were both so much younger, but Vetra probably didn’t expect her to remember that either. Again, she came in with a blanket in hand like she was still a baby or something.
Sid was about to say as much but was cut off by the terror in her sister’s eyes. That was new. Vetra wasn’t afraid of anything. It made Sidera’s mandibles pin themselves to her jawline and her eyes pinch with worry.
As the courteous knocks devolved into insistent pounding, Vetra and Sid slipped quietly through their apartment- Sid cast a last, longing look at her Game Station- to the only window large enough to fit through. Vetra paused to stoop and place her hands on Sid’s shoulders, dwarfing them in size. “I need you to trust me, Sid. Can you do that?”
“Y-Yes?” Sid hated the way her subvocals warbled as she said it.
“I need you to lower your legs over the window, okay? And when I say ‘jump’ I want you to jump.”
Sid chirped her surprise and her mandibles pinched to her jaw. “Vetra, what-?”
“Just do it, Sid. Please.”
That’s how Sidera, at thirteen years of age, found herself suspended from the window of a dilapidated Omega apartment. She couldn’t stop the trembling warble from her second larynx if she tried. She could feel Vetra’s talons biting into the plates of her forearms.
“Ok, Sid.”
“Vetra, no,” Sid whimpered.
In the background, an explosion sounded followed by the dull thud of their durasteel door hitting the floor.
“Now, Sid!” A shove and Sidera felt herself falling. She might have screamed, but she wasn’t aware of if she had. She just watched Vetra’s face get smaller and smaller-
Her cowl impacted on cheap, felt lining of an old skycar seat in a cloud of dust. Pulling herself up, Sid glanced around the driver's seat to catch the eye- eyes of a female batarian. Her head was tilted back and both sets of eyes were scanning the air above.
“Better watch out, kid,” was the only warning Sid would receive before she found herself in a heap of plated limbs and heavy female turian.
“Go!” Vetra shouted, quite impressively considering that her face was currently pressed into a questionable stain on the floor of the car. Sid would have taken that moment to ask where, exactly, Vetra expected them to go, but she found herself bodily slammed to the floor instead, smothered under Vetra’s weight as bullets pinged off the skycar’s hull. ‘What the fuck was going on?’
Beneath her, the little skycar’s engines roared before they zipped off into the orange Omega glow.
They left the station after that night. Sid couldn’t say she was too upset about that, the asteroid was never a place that she truly considered ‘home.’ Though, she did lament the loss of her Game Station and her copy of Hierarchical Warriors.
Vetra and Sid traveled a lot now. They crashed on couches, seedy hotel rooms, and, when times were really hard, park benches. They never stayed in one place for long and Vetra always made a point to never wear out their welcome. ‘You never want to annoy someone that’s willing to grant you favors,’ she would tell her, as if imparting some granule of wisdom. Sid was never attached to Omega, but lugging around a duffle bag was tiring and she sometimes found herself missing a stationary lifestyle.
When Sid turned fifteen, she approached Vetra on the subject of joining the Hierarchy military. She could support them both, even regain citizenship on Palaven. Well, Sid could, but Vetra would still benefit from it. At least she wouldn’t have to disappear while meeting ‘contacts’ and ‘running favors’ for people.
They were on the floor of some dirty old apartment, all of the furniture was broken and there were dust mounds upon dust mounds around them. It had been home for a few days, and, while Vetra had been out, Sid had been trying to make it livable.
“Not happening, Sid.” Vetra said around a mouth-full of stale Blast-O's cereal . Sid could tell she was trying to hurry the process of getting it down so she could speak, but Sid was determined to beat her to it.
“Why not? I could support us if I did!” Vetra’s eyes narrowed, obviously annoyed at the comment, but Sid hadn’t meant for it to be offensive. “I just mean, we wouldn’t have to move around so much anymore, you know? I’m...” She couldn’t stop that stupid, defensive warble before it got away from her, but by then Vetra’s glare had softened into something resembling pity. Pity was not what Sidera wanted. “I’m tired of running! I’m tired of hiding and I’m tired of waiting for you to come home at night, wondering where you are!”
A pair of strong hands enveloped her shoulders and Vetra knelt down before her. Sid wasn’t even aware of when she’d gotten up and crossed the room to her.
“Hey, hey,” her sister soothed and try as Sid might to hold on to her anger- because Spirits her stupid sister needed to understand !- she felt it slip away in the wave of comforting sub-harmonics. “I know, Sid. I know. I get it.”
“No you don't!” she protested, her hands balling into fists at her sides. “You don’t get it! You’re gone all the time and one of these days you might not-” Cutting herself off, Sid stared hard at the floor, determined to not meet her sister’s pitying eyes.
After a moment, a talon-tipped finger hooked under Sid’s chin and her face was drawn up.
“Can I tell you something, Sid? You have to keep it a secret. No blabbing to anyone, you hear?”
“I’m not the blabbermouth,” Sid reminded her, remembering a time that seemed so far away now, when she accidentally broke dad’s gun and Vetra went and told on her. When Vetra said nothing in return, the severity of the topic weighed down on them both. “But yeah, I promise.”
“One of my contacts- a krogan, if you can believe it- is working on something big and she’s invited you and me to be a part of it.”
“Okaaay,” Sid replied cautiously. “What kind of project?”
Vetra smiled now, her eyes lighting up with an emotion Sid hadn’t seen in way too long. It took her a few moments to place it, but she thought it might actually be hope.
“What do you know about the Andromeda Galaxy?”