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“For the record,” Kolyat said, “this is the lamest family hangout ever.”
“What?” Thane blinked uncomprehendingly at him, the way he often did when Kolyat tried with great effort to impart standard social guidelines on him. Perhaps he had been less hopeless when he was younger, or else Kolyat marveled that his mother had ever thought Thane possible to domesticate. The man seemed flummoxed by the most basic standards of a life that didn’t include sleeping in a mob boss’ ceiling or sewing up bullet wounds with dental floss. “You needed to come, I needed to come…doesn’t this work out nicely?”
“We’re at a laundromat,” Kolyat said, in case the chintzy neon flamingos along one wall or the groovy new wave geometric art plastered on the front windows didn’t give it away. Or the row of clothing dryers which Kolyat was leaning back against. “Congratulations. You actually beat the time Uncle Qulax took me to see his tax lawyer on my birthday.”
The accusation did not have as much bite as Kolyat had imagined it in his head—that was the case annoyingly often these days—and Thane never bristled or took a defensive tone or ignored him. Instead, he always seemed to take everything Kolyat said with utmost seriousness, looking at him with this hangdog-seeking-forgiveness look, expecting—welcoming—Kolyat to heap more guilt or chastisement on him.
It took all the fun out of berating or guilt-tripping him.
“Did he do that?” When Kolyat did not elaborate, Thane prompted him, as usual taking note of the wrong thing.
“Yeah. Auntie had an emergency at work so she couldn’t pick me up from school,” he said, wondering as he said it why he was telling Thane such a pedantic story. It was barely interesting to him and he’d been there.
“I see.” It was hard to tell if Thane didn’t know what to say to him, or if he was just not a talkative person. Kolyat was beginning to suspect it was both.
It was terrible. Kolyat didn’t want to say things to him. But he had learned from the world’s most uncomfortable lunch outing that if he didn’t intervene, Thane might assume he preferred not to talk and they would spend hours in silence (a state which did not seem to unsettle Thane in the slightest—more proof of his oddness).
Kolyat exhaled loudly and a turian in the corner cast an annoyed glance at him, as though Kolyat were unconscionably harshing the mellow of the laundromat.
Blessed Arashu took pity on him and Thane interpreted the sigh as a request for filler conversation.
“How are your friends?” he asked. “Xeto and…Trevor?”
“Not recovered from finding out that I know Commander Shepard,” he answered, feeling his throat heat up. He wasn’t recovered from learning his connection to Shepard was closer than he had thought.
“Ah.” It was an audaciously mild response for a man who had until recently been content not to mention that he was dating Commander fucking Shepard. “Did Trevor ever get his autograph?”
“Hell no,” Kolyat said. “He’d have stapled it to my eyelids by now if he had. I thought he was going to pass out seeing her in person.”
The washing machine in front of them abruptly stopped and Thane frowned at it as his laundry came to a sloshing halt.
“You got to hit it,” Kolyat grunted. “Punch it.” Thane did not stop to question this advice; he got up and clocked the laundry machine, which shuddered back to life and carried on with its cycle.
“What about you?” Thane asked, turning back to Kolyat. “Are you seeing—” Kolyat let out a gurgling cry of disapproval, throwing his head back in order to smother the question before it was complete. Doubtless the turian on the folding chair was seething at this despoiling of the peace of the laundry sanctuary.
“You have got to stop asking me that,” Kolyat said. “And by the way, you have some real krogan balls asking me that when you were keeping your mouth shut about the Shepard thing.”
“It just didn’t seem relevant.”
“Uh-huh.” Kolyat rolled his eyes and shook his head, not dignifying this line of conversation with another repeat performance. Thane resumed his seat in the chair by the eco-plastic Ficus (a true exercise in modern performance art: plastic made out of plant material, formed to look like a fake plant), which Kolyat had permitted him to take without discussion. He had the irritating sense that Thane was soft balling the progression of his illness when he spoke of it to Kolyat.
Thane sat fidgeting quietly in the metal chair, making Kolyat grind his teeth to ward off a sense of obligation without saying a word. He looked up at the paneled ceiling. Around the upper perimeter of the room, there was a loop of silent advertisements playing. There was a crack in the ceiling panel just over Kolyat’s head.
“You know,” he said, already annoyed with himself for speaking, “you can’t just suck information out of people like a damn interrogation. It’s supposed to be a fucking exchange.” He hadn’t cursed, back in Anikah and Qulax’s house. They didn’t like it. At first, on the Citadel, he had wanted to seem less like a quaint, prudish drell from the Nowheresville, Kahje, and now it seemed to have become a permanent part of vocabulary. Ah, well. Bigger things to worry about; he'd reign it in if Auntie and Uncle came to visit.
“Pardon?”
Kolyat heaved himself off the dryers with a narrow-eyed look at Thane.
“You can’t just spend all day quizzing me about my life and my shit and never tell me anything back,” he said. “That’s bullshit. Why should I tell you anything if you won’t tell me things?”
Thane folded his hands in front of him and stared down at the pink-and-yellow tiled floor.
“I hadn’t considered that,” he said. “I suppose you’re right. I didn’t realize there was anything you wanted to know.”
At that, Kolyat could only cover his face with one hand. Didn’t consider there was anything you might want to know. Presently, Kolyat was forced to recall precisely how little Thane knew about parent-child relationships. Auntie had said he entered the Compact at six. Sometimes Kolyat repeated this fact to himself several times in a row when he felt like storming off in indignant outrage about some present failing of Thane’s.
“Let’s just. Start with something simple.” Kolyat exhaled again, folding his arms and resuming his lean back against the dryers. “Like, what the hell made you join up with Shepard, for one.”
“That’s…not simple,” Thane said slowly. “I believe I have answered this for you already, Kolyat.”
“Humor me,” Kolyat said. “You were skimpy on the details.”
“I suppose it was an act of atonement,” Thane said. “A way to…make up for…the rest of my life.”
“Is that really how you see it?”
“Giving my life for the greater good seemed the best way I could think. I believed in Shepard’s mission.”
“No, about your life,” Kolyat said. “That it’s…all some big mistake that needs to be made up for.” Thane lapsed into silence, and he had that thousand-yard stare that often preceded solipsism. However, he pulled himself back this time.
“I have made many mistakes, Kolyat,” he said, his voice so soft it was nearly a whisper.
“But is that all? Just a bunch of mistakes? A bunch of shit to clean up?”
“Not only,” Thane replied, delicate for all Kolyat’s coarseness (He was like that when he didn’t have cause to be otherwise—soft-spoken, polite, even-tempered. The little old human lady who lived near Kolyat positively adored Thane. It somehow made it only more unnerving that he had killed so many people, probably with that same serene expression.) He looked up, his brow ridge relaxed. “There was you.”
Goddamn.
He’d spent his whole life with Auntie and Uncle telling him his father loved him, it was just complicated. At some point, he’d simply decided they were full of it and trying to spare his feelings, because no father who left him like that could actually give a damn about him. The golden memories of his youth, when his father was home and played with him and sat reading on the corner seat of the couch in the afternoon faded into a hazy distance, and he embraced the cold reality that his father did not, in fact, love him.
He hated to think Auntie and Uncle might have been right.
“The cycle is almost finished,” he said, flushed about the throat, pointing to the washing machines.
“So it is.”
They went quiet, Kolyat rocking uneasily on his heels, looking over at the dusty strip of floor beneath the windows where the cleaning bot didn’t reach well. Jeez. He should’ve come done his laundry on his own time.
“If you would move things into the dryer,” Thane offered, rising to his feet, “I can go and find us something to eat.” Kolyat snorted, and Thane tilted his head slightly.
“Because between the two of us, you’re the one familiar with what’s edible around here,” he elaborated. Thane was pulling up his omnitool to send Kolyat the code for his credit account. Kolyat swatted impatiently at the air. “Stop. At least I have a job.” It wasn’t much of a job—he still thought sourly at times of what he had been offered for the hit on Talid—but it was something. It would be better when he wasn’t spending hours still on community service for C-Sec. Thane was coasting on what remained of his savings, and he had not planned on returning from Commander Shepard’s suicide mission. “I’ll get something.”
He straightened off the dryers, patted his pockets to make sure he hadn’t set anything down without remembering, and turned for the door. Thane took his seat again. Kolyat paused and considered asking if there was anything Thane didn’t eat, then decided if Thane didn’t like what he brought back he could go get his own laundry snack.
“I’ll wait here,” Thane said, as if that had been in question.
“Yeah. Sure.” Kolyat exhaled carefully as he exited the laundromat. As he headed for the street corner, he resisted the urge to turn back and make sure he could still see Thane sitting in front of the washers.
“Don’t be a baby,” he muttered to himself. “Where the hell would he even go?” Shaking his head, he settled in for a brisk walk to his favorite street vendor. Someone had to introduce Thane to what was decent eating in the Wards.