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Kolyat had already gone home, but Thane remained in the patient’s lounge, gazing out the large windows at the manicured grounds below. Here in the lounge he could pretend that he wasn’t in a hospital waiting to die. It was always hard when Kolyat was gone. He was not one to face death idly from a hospital bed. His wish would be to die in battle, killed in the heat of the moment. It used to not matter what the battle would be, but now, he dreamed of spending his last moments struggling for a worthy cause. Her cause. After all, she was the one who had given him his life back. She was the one that had made these last gasps of existence worthwhile again.
But she had also given him his son back, and he knew that she would not want him to sacrifice that merely to satisfy his own desires. And so he remained in the hospital and spent as much time with Kolyat as he could. Surprisingly, he was mostly content. It was only these moments when he felt her absence that he had trouble finding peace.
There was not even the consolation of contact. Even before the Reapers hit Earth, he had received no messages in response to his own, and he could not even be sure the ones he sent had reached her at all. There had been no news of her beyond reports of her disgraced status and incarceration at Alliance hands. Now with the Reapers, he couldn’t even be sure she was alive. No, she was alive. His Siha would live to the end of this fight.
Thane looked up from his contemplation of the grounds below at the arrival of another patient in the lounge. His assassin’s instincts immediately and automatically calculated the threat from this new arrival. He was human and obviously in pretty bad shape. His face was severely bruised and he moved stiffly. His garments were those provided by the hospital, but as he came closer, Thane saw the marks from a biotic implant. He was probably military then. Most human biotics wound up in the Alliance. Military training would also explain his muscled physique and the ability to withstand pain that it would take for someone with his injuries to be moving around.
The man took a seat near Thane’s own and began his own contemplation of the presidium below.
“It looks so peaceful,” he murmured apparently to himself. There was a note of surprise in his voice. Thane wondered if this man had come from Earth. He imagined seeing peace would be unexpected to anyone after that. There was also something almost like disappointment in the statement, a soldier’s disappointment at being somewhere safe while his comrades fought on.
“It is a fragile peace,” Thane spoke softly back. “Bask in it now before the storm comes here as well.”
The man looked at him in surprise then shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain, but I have friends out there fighting while I’m here. I feel so useless. And then there’s not knowing whether or not sh-they’re okay out there.”
Thane caught the slip in his speech and felt sudden kinship with this stranger. “You will heal and fight another day. I, too, have someone out there, and if I know her, she’s fighting with everything she has, and I cannot be at her side. My condition would only slow her down.”
“I’m sorry.”
Thane smiled at him. “I still have my son who visits often. I do wish she could visit though, that I could at least have one more memory.”
“There’s a woman who... Well, I don’t know what we are, but I hope she visits too. There are things to say and... Maybe we’ll both get to have that last memory.” He smiled at Thane in understanding.