Chapter Text
When Noelle was ten, her cousin took her to see an R-rated movie. It was a horror flick about grave robbers and curses, and there was a scene in it where a guy’s face got ripped clean off. Watching it had made her feel cool and mature, and she only had a handful of nightmares.
She’s thinking about it now, more than two decades later, while she picks through the remains of a Salarian transport vessel. Salvage has always been a close relative of grave robbing, and she’s no stranger to dead bodies this far into the war, but this one just… feels different. Maybe because it’s a civilian ship, and a big one.
Back before the Reapers showed up to play extinction bingo with the Milky Way’s sentient lifeforms, Noelle spent most of her time stripping “secondhand” cruisers on Omega. Occasionally, one of her buddies would bring her along to dig the worthwhile tech out of the hull of some merchant ship that the gangs had raided.
Wartime salvage is worse, in pretty much every way. It’s never just the corpse of some idiot smuggler who pissed off the Blue Suns floating around in zero gravity anymore. It’s always half a platoon’s worth of barely of-age Turian recruits, or a medical supply drop going to people who have probably died without it, or, once, fucking husks.
Today’s flavor of horror is dozens upon dozens of frozen Salarian bodies, very few even in gear. Probably refugees. The back end of their ship is a decompressed hellhole, burned out and open to the void of space, but one section towards the front was sealed until she made her way in.
Some of the emergency systems are still working, even if life support isn’t. Gravity is impaired instead of absent, and the hazard lights are running. That’s a good sign for her salvage mission, which makes Noelle feel a little better about stepping over corpses to do her first sweep of the place. The old movie still lingers in her head, though, making her irrationally paranoid one of the bodies is going to reach out and grab her.
The first three rooms are promising, but it’s the fourth that catches her attention.
Her helmet’s HUD has a readout of the oxygen levels and the temperature, which she’s never figured out how to turn off. The little blinking light that tells her she can’t breathe in a dead, gutted spaceship is more annoying than helpful. When she forces open the sealed door on room number four, though, the lights change.
The red light shifts to orange, letting her know the oxygen is dangerously low instead of absent, and the temperature reading comes up. There’s some kind of backup life support in this room, and only this room, which seems to be full of nothing but machinery. There aren’t even any bodies in here.
“What the hell?” she mutters to herself.
She walks between the machines, which are all faintly humming, trying to place what they might be. The signs labeling the rooms are digital and not linked into the emergency grid, so she’s on her own. She recognizes the company logo as a medical conglomerate, which just makes it more confusing, as this isn’t the medbay.
After a couple of minutes, she decides to hell with it, and gets out her tools to pry one of them open.
The machine is an incubator. For a good ten seconds, that’s all she can process about what she’s looking at. There are eight eggs inside, in a circle around a primary heating unit.
One is empty.
Noelle has seen baby Salarians before. Not in person, granted, but the ones in the vids were never this small, and she’s sure they aren’t supposed to tremble like that. When the light of her headlamp brightens the inside of the incubator, the tiny infant manages to lift their head, blinking at her with dim, unfocused eyes. They have pale blue skin, and Noelle doesn’t know enough about Salarians to know if it’s supposed to be that pale.
She reaches out for them immediately, before remembering she’s wearing a suit. The urge to pick the little guy up is strong, but her hands are much colder than the heating unit. Maybe she can tuck them into the suit itself?
“Dammit,” she swears, undoing the locks on her gloves and half the ones on her chestplate. She picks up the tiny Salarian in hands now protected only by her undersuit, and fuck, she can feel them shivering like a cartoon kitten in the rain. They’re so small she could hold them one-handed.
She starts to tuck the baby into her chestplate, and they make the smallest, saddest squeak she’s ever heard. Noelle’s heart aches.
“Hang in there, little guy,” she sighs, and secures the hatchling inside her chestplate as best she can. They quiet once they’re back in the dark, and the shivering suddenly becomes comforting-- at least she knows they’re still breathing.
Noelle takes a deep breath and looks around the room. There are maybe two dozen other incubators, and she’s not leaving without checking every single one.
* * *
In the end, she finds four heartbeats-- three frail hatchlings, and one viable egg. The other two hatchlings were in the same incubator, clinging to each other for warmth the way the first one had been curled around the heating unit. They look similar enough that they must be siblings, both a dusty green, although one has a scattering of darker scales, almost like freckles.
There were a few others that made it out of the shell, but none of them had been so lucky.
The tech in the nursery is probably valuable, but she leaves it behind, taking just the egg and the babies. She can come back for it later.
Noelle immediately feels better once she’s back on her ship. It isn’t exactly a hospital, as it’s busy being a big empty box for her to shove salvage into, but at least it’s warm. The part of the ship that isn’t a glorified storage bin is a functional enough living space.
She’s undoing the chestplate the second the entry door is sealed, terrified that she’s going to pull it back and find the hatchlings no longer breathing. She’s relieved when all three little faces turn to her, even if their eyes are dull and unfocused.
“Okay. Warmth, then food. We’ve got this,” she tells them. One of them peeps at her, which she decides to take as a vote of confidence.
She pulls one of the blankets off her bunk and curls it into a makeshift nest on top of the engine, which runs hotter than it probably should. The egg goes into the middle, with the hatchlings tucked in beside it. The two she’d found in the same incubator cuddle up to each other immediately, while the third hatchling watches her intently.
“Hey, buddy. Any chance you know what the hell I can feed you?”
The hatchling peeps back at her.
“Not actually an answer, bud, but good effort.”
Keeping one eye on the bundle of blankets and babies, Noelle fishes through her stockpile of MREs. It’s all Alliance-issue for humans, so she isn’t going to get any hints there, and her extranet access is civilian grade, so she’s averaging a 7-hour wait time on data requests. She has quicker access to her buddies back on Omega, because the backchannels are less crowded even in wartime, but none of them would be any help.
“Sure do wish Laeran hadn’t gone and gotten himself arrested! Could’ve just messaged the idiot and asked what to feed you. Fuck, why do I only know one Salarian? I know like fourteen Krogan. How about freeze-dried meat, you guys up for some nasty chicken?”
The most attentive hatchling peeps again when she looks at them.
“Still not an answer, but I’m going to pretend it’s a ‘yes’. I think I’ve seen Laeran eat meat on a stick? Maybe? Not that babies usually eat the same thing as grown adults, but that’s my best bet right now.”
There’s a reconstitution process you’re supposed to follow here, but Noelle skips it, crumbling the dry chicken into a mug of warm water. The end result is an unappealing goo, but it smells vaguely like food, so it’ll have to do.
The babies seem to understand the smell too, because all three of them stare at her when she approaches with her mug.
“Bon appétit, kids,” Noelle says, offering a spoonful of chicken concoction to one of the hatchlings. It’s one of the two that had been sharing an incubator, the one with the spots. They take a big gulp of the chicken, then grab for the spoon to get more.
“Hey, hey, calm down there, Freckles. There’s plenty for everybody.”
Noelle has to gently untangle tiny hands from the spoon so she can feed the next hatchling. Even though these guys must be less than a week old, it’s a little alarming how much variation there is in their personalities. The freckled one keeps trying to steal the spoon to get more, their sibling keeps dozing off in between spoonfuls, and the blue one peeps at her when their turn comes around. Blue and Sleepy also have some understanding of their limits and stop accepting food after a few spoonfuls, while Freckles does not.
“Alright, buddy, I’m cutting you off. You’re already too drunk to drive,” Noelle says, doing her best impression of her favorite bartender. Freckles hiccups grumpily, but actually lets go of the spoon when she stares them down.
She takes the mug to the kitchenette in her living space, and finds all the hatchlings asleep when she gets back to them. For half a second, she’s afraid they’ve all dropped dead, but she checks and, no, they’re all breathing. Thank god.
She makes sure they’re all securely cuddled into the blankets, then heads over to the comms to put in her extranet requests. It’s going to take forever, so it’s best to put them all in now.
salarian infant care
That’s general enough, she’ll probably get a lot off of that.
incubating salarian eggs
God only knows when that egg is going to hatch. Keeping it on her ship’s engine is probably not the best incubation strategy.
common health problems for baby salarians
She doesn’t really know if that sleepy one really is just worn out or if there’s something wrong with them. Shouldn’t leave that one to chance.
salarian diet
Wait, is that going to work with what she actually has on-hand, or will it just tell her what they eat on their home world?
salarian diet human food salarians can eat
Okay, that’s better. What else?
Noelle hesitates for a moment, and then pulls up the form she’ll need to get a crew list for the ship she’s docked on. It’s leaving more of a trail than you’re supposed to in her line of work, but if these babies have families somewhere, well. She’ll take the risk for them.
* * *
While the hatchlings sleep, Noelle makes two more trips to the ship. It’s fairly routine work, which is a blessing, because she really isn’t paying attention. The wing that was left mostly intact doesn’t have any living quarters or the galley, so she doesn’t come away with any food, but the medbay is at the far end. She takes everything that looks vaguely like medicine, just in case she’ll need it for the kids.
When she comes back from the first trip, the hatchlings are still asleep. The second time, though, the blue one is awake and has even made it halfway out of the blankets. When they spot her, they make an even more valiant effort to get up.
“Oh, shit, Blue, no, you’ll fall!” Noelle protests, stopping halfway through taking her suit off to rush to the engine. She hadn’t planned for them being able to crawl right off the damn thing-- that might be a fatal fall.
She grabs Blue in time, though, and impulsively clutches them to her chest. The baby squeaks, and she recognizes the curious tone to it. How is a newborn this emotive?
“You scared me, don’t do that,” Noelle scolds, and Blue peeps back at her, something like an agreement, though there’s no way they know what she just said.
“Okay, message received, no more scavenging without a baby gate or something, shit. Hold on, let me take some of this off, you can come with me to check on those extranet requests.”
She places Blue back in with the other two, and this time they just watch while Noelle takes off the rest of her spacesuit. She leaves most of it on the floor next to the engine, but makes a little fence around the nest with the plating from her arms and shins. Once it looks like the other two won’t fall to their deaths, she picks Blue back up and cradles them against her chest.
“There. Safe and sound. Wanna see what the extranet says you’re having for dinner?”
Blue peeps agreeably.
“That’s very cute, you know. It still won’t make the answer ‘ice cream and cake’. Do Salarians eat cake?”
Blue peeps again.
“I’ve got to teach you some words, little guy. If you’re good, I’ll even teach you to swear, just like your auntie Noelle.”
In the better lighting of the living quarters, Noelle gives her young charge a proper looking-over. Blue’s eyes seem properly moist now, and they’re definitely more alert than they were on the ship. The skintone hasn’t changed, which hopefully just means it’s supposed to be that way.
“Guess chicken goop is good for you after all.”
She gets another peep in response. She ducks her head to give the little Salarian a kiss on the forehead before turning the computer on.
Half of her results are in, which makes her wince. She didn’t put any thought behind the order she requested them in. At least she requested infant care first.
Blue takes interest in the pictures that come up on the screen, but falls asleep pretty quickly while Noelle reads. She can tell by the wording that the information was written by an Asari, but that’s probably for the best, because a lot of this would have been taken as common sense and left out if it was Salarian-written.
For one thing, her babies are definitely all male, because only fertilized eggs become females and fertilized eggs aren’t incubated in groups. They’re also disturbingly skinny-- hatchlings are supposed to have ‘yolk fat’, which they don’t lose until they’re a few months old. It’s used to help them with the rapid growth of infancy, but Blue and friends probably burned through all of it on not starving to death.
“You’ve really had a rough time of it, huh, buddy?” Noelle murmurs, rubbing a little circle with her thumb along Blue’s back while he sleeps.
She’s thinking about ways she might be able to get higher calorie food to make up the difference when she gets to the section on imprinting.
So, apparently, Salarian clans maintain loyalty by having all the babies imprint on the matriarch. Because that’s a thing that happens. Imprinting on the first adult they see. Like ducklings.
She stares down at the dozing hatchling in her arms, who is apparently bonded to her for life now.
“Uh. Well then. Welcome to the McBride clan, little guy.”