Work Text:
You will know it when you hear it; it will not come again.
You might be scrubbing dishes, or admiring a flower, or reading a novel on your evening commute. You might be a child in a playground or a commander of an army, but you will know it just the same: a sound will dawn deep in your mind and shape itself into a melody that you have never heard before, but that is as much a part of you as the rhythm of your own breathing. The music will leap and twinkle and boom, and your heart will fill with joy—
“Distress beacon is ready for launch.”
—and your eyes will fill with tears because your soulmate’s last moment has arrived; as their soul leaves the universe, the complete melody of their existence is being bestowed onto you. Maybe you will dash over to them to spend these last seconds together. Maybe you will bow your head silently, never having met them. You will be desperate to hold on to this melody, which has only been heard by you, whose glory will almost inevitably fade in the confines of remembrance.
Unless you were a drell. Thane could, of course, recall every detail of Irikah’s melody: the tones that would spiral irrepressibly over a thrumming, blossoming backdrop. It occupied a spot in the amphitheater of his memory that he returned to more and more often, now that he was retired and nearing the end of his own life—a time at which his own melody would be tossed out into the unhearing void.
“The Normandy’s lost. Going down with the ship won’t change that.”
Retirement. That was a state that he struggled with. Things that had been minor details in the past now loomed large: housekeeping, eating, shopping.
He was in a crowded, dingy marketplace when it happened. He had been considering whether to risk the merchandise from a particularly questionable fruit stall, when suddenly none of it mattered because of what he alone could hear: distant horns, quiet but growing louder. The tones shifted lower and then back with a feeling of solemn inevitability.
“This can’t be,” he whispered, but it continued: the horns were joined by a tender humming and the slow striking of drums so deep that his bones themselves seemed to vibrate.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe….
He spun around, searching the faces of the strangers around him. Could this person—this soulmate—be in this market? Could they be on this planet? He was desperate to hold them and tell them he was there, even as he denied that they could exist.
The music passed, and Thane knew that this impossible being had gone from the world. He had lost the second chance that he never knew he had. He was kneeling on the ground without knowing how he had gotten there, his bag of food upended beside him. A few passers-by had gathered around—maybe guessing at what he had been through, maybe simply concerned—and helped him to his feet.
He could remember the music as vividly as he could remember Irikah’s, but he dared not visit it as often. He would only turn to it in moments of strange, shining aloneness that sometimes came to him in the middle of the night. It was on one such night, two years after the event, that he reached for that second melody—
And found that it was gone. He closed his eyes and focused, trying to recall how the sounds of the horns had layered over each other, but it was like trying to catch hold of air. There was nothing to remember.
He had, for the first time in his life, forgotten something.
Perhaps the entire thing had been a fluke of his aging mind.
Meeting a second soulmate would have been too good to be true. Perhaps having a second soulmate, but losing them before you met them, was too bad to be true. Thane gave a hollow laugh at his own backwards optimism. He rubbed his temples, trying to think of something—anything—to bury the newfound gap in his mind.
Shepard’s eyes flew open. She gasped. Breathing hurt. The light hurt. But she was alive—again.