Work Text:
Maybe he should just smack him.
Doubtless that that was what Avitus was after, doubtless it was the reason for his determined clinginess in the first place even; he wasn’t usually affectionate to this extent, a fan of small touches and the press of a knee against another when at rest or one arm thrown over him whilst they slept. It suited them fine, maintained the distance between them that he had set and allowed them both to breathe as they puzzled through slotting together their wildly contrasting lives - sometimes he did miss the attention and affection that’d been offered up so readily before when he hadn’t wanted it, of course, but their relationship was a sharp and dangerous beast that required managing with unhelpfully nebulous concepts such as boundaries and accountability. This time around, they couldn’t let it maim either one of them - not when that involved harming so many other people.
Of course, any self-imposed distance had been forsaken as Avitus was apparently determined smother him to death instead. Or perhaps if the power did not come back when it was meant to with the dawn, they would simply wake melted into one miserable, overheating mass of plate and hide and old grudges. At least then he could suffer too.
“Please don’t.” He finally was forced to break when, under the guise of a stretch, Avitus wound up with his face shoved against his throat, the hot breath on his neck and clammy weight shifting more on top of him more than he thought he could possibly take.
“S’just a little bit warm.” He was finding this fun, wasn’t he? Evil, terrible, heat-loving varren that he was. Teeth scraped against his mandible and then the pest hummed in amusement. “You’re the stupid fucker who chose to settle on Kadara, Tiz, Could’a told you it was like this if you’d asked.”
But of course he hadn’t asked. He’d watched the hastily thrown-together videos outlining their options and, reliant upon Garrus and Sol’s decision, had just picked the option that they had - without any actual knowledge of where the places were or what to expect of them aside from a few panning shots of scenery and a brief summary of the species present on each.
Elaaden had been a desert where the sun never set, Voeld a hells cape of ice and tundra and therefore Kadara had been the sole viable option to their eyes, and so that was where they had gone. And maybe he hadn’t asked Avitus’ opinion on the place, but he also could have told him at any point that it boasted the shoddiest infrastructure of the three and, worse still, stank of sulphur.
Admittedly, the smell of sulphur rarely permeated inside the hastily-constructed settlement centre during the daytime hours, when the solar arrays could spare enough energy to run the centralised cooling system and provide for the other needs of the four thousand forcibly placed colonists, but at night, as they were reliant on batteries alone still, priorities had to be picked and… comfort for their bodies came behind maintaining food stores and keeping medical equipment online. It was only temporary, he reminded himself every night as the solitary, tiny window on his one-room apartment failed to provide even a hint of air movement. Only temporary and then… then they would work something else out. He had to trust the system would look after them in the end.
“I just don’t get how you’re not suffering just as much as I am.” He grunted, managing to peel his head off his sodden pillow, just to turn it and discover that the other side was not even appreciably cooler. “We are both experiencing the same temperature, are we not?”
Castis had just about managed to persuade himself that he could cope with the nighttime heatwaves for the greater good, just so long as the summer didn't last for much longer, and then Avitus had dropped by. On the one hand, his company was more than welcome and came with obvious benefits - which they’d both been all too content to indulge in - but then the power had been switched off for the night and the self-proclaimed problem had decided he all but needed to crawl inside his skin, as if they hadn’t already been sweating.
A snort, and then the troublemaker snuggled in all the tighter- spirits he was genuinely going to be the death of him; he was going to expire in the heat and it was going to be his fault. “Didn’t have a cooler growing up, Tiz. You think this is bad? Try a windowless box in a shitty old high-rise in Salum during the height of the summer. That was hell.” The moment’s silence that hung after that was as heavy as the air in the room, but for an entirely different reason; his childhood home had been hell for many more reasons than simply a lack of ventilation and cooling against Cipritine’s infamously murderous summer burn. Sweating a little, or even a lot, had been the least of his concerns during those times and… they pointedly didn’t discuss that.
“Salum burned away.” He added, whether to break the silence or provide comfort. “The first reapers to land did so on what was left around the Tratesk expansion. It went first, melted and blown apart in seconds.”
Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought Avitus relaxed just a little at hearing that the last remnants of his childhood had been glassed first. “First act of the invasion was to increase the real estate value of the whole damned place, huh?” Again, his breath was at his throat, nuzzling in and this time he did at least appreciate why he wanted comfort, for all that the additional warmth was unbearable. “Shame nobody filmed it, I’d have paid good money for that.”
“The rest of us were too busy trying to survive the slaughter.” Castis admitted softly. The topic wasn’t an easy one but at least Avitus had stilled and therefore was radiating considerably less heat. “It was only spring when they came. I remember thinking, spirits, at least it’s not yet summer, it will only get worse given that they cut the power supply for most systems and… that’s why I decided to go north, on foot."
“Which brought you and Sol back together.” Avitus surmised, perhaps recognising that they’d tripped headfirst into a difficult conversation in search of a distraction from the unbearable heat. “If it’d already been summer, you’d have gone east to the other coast, wouldn’t you? Straight to Oratil.”
Yes. Yes he suspected he would have. And most likely, he would have died there, starved to death with the other people in that outpost or overrun by the reaper’s thralls at some point or another. If he had even made it that far.
A different end, and one that was perhaps significantly less satisfactory; if not for the weather, he’d have never made it this far after all. Would have never found him again. Could never have been put in the miserable position of basting in a bed in an unpowered apartment on a backwater colony in a new galaxy.
All for the sake of avoiding the heat, he’d have died and not been here to suffer the heat now. Hilarious irony.
Avitus sighed heavily, as though the weight of the universe rested solely on his shoulders, and then rolled off him, grabbing his hand in passing to drag him out of bed behind him. “C’mon.”
“Where are we going?” He didn’t resist, always willing to be dragged along in the wake of his impulsiveness. If Avitus decided that they needed to do something on the fly, in the middle of the night, well, he’d long learned that it was probably going to be mildly fun or an entertaining thing to complain about for the next few days at the worst.
“You’ll see.” He answered all too cryptically, bending down to grab their clothes from where they’d wound up on the floor and tossing back his shirt and shorts to him. As if that were confidence inspiring, for it meant they’d be leaving the apartment, didn’t it?
He pulled on the offered clothing nevertheless, hating how it stuck to him and just made the suffocating heat that little bit more like a living hell, and then trailed after Avitus out of the door - which he’d had to shove open with one shoulder and a huffy little grunt as if this wasn’t his idea in the first place. He… tried not to consider that if the doors were difficult to operate manually that that would pose a significant security concern in an emergency; not everyone would necessarily be able to evacuate and come to think of it, did the alarms function with the power off?
But… there was little he could do aside from trust, both in the management of the settlement and in Avitus more directly and presently.
They padded barefoot down the mostly silent corridors that made up the accommodation block, the occasional sound of a muffled conversation from within one room or another, or someone’s omni-tool providing a distraction from the insomnia-inducing heat. Maybe he ought to feel a little worse for the aliens amongst them; they, as turians, were at least built to handle the heat rather well. Their time living on Rannoch had taught him all too well that humans in particular struggled with thermal regulation - what was a depressing annoyance to him could easily be physically dangerous to them. Then, out into the open-air walkway that led across towards the administration section and… it wasn’t any cooler outside than in, he realised with a twinge of annoyance, air just as tar-thick and unpleasant to breathe in. The next door opened automatically, and he knew before he’d even stepped through it that it would be blissfully cool on the other side.
Cooling wasted on empty administration offices whilst the residents suffered every night, was it?
Clearly too much of his resentment sounded out in his subvocals though, as Avitus glanced back at him apologetically once they were safely ensconced within. “It’s for the computer systems, they told me.” Well wasn’t that just brilliant. “I tried to argue that people were more valuable than tech but… hard to argue with the fact that if this shit overloads, you lose everything - including the adhi fences.”
That, admittedly, was a fair point with which he could not argue. The adhi fence, as they called it, was the barrier which encircled the entire camp and the surrounding land which had been planted up to provide some small amount of fresh food for them all. It did not, despite its name, have much to do with keeping out the planet’s answer to a varren but instead functioned as a boundary warning system to keep at bay the infinitely more dangerous large wildlife and sapient threats which they could not fully ignore; local dissidents, an unpleasant enemy faction at war with both the initiative and the locals and, worst of all in his opinion, self-styled raiders who saw no problems with throwing off the shackles of civilisation in favour of self-profiting barbarism. Calling the warning system a fence was the far more palatable option, naturally, than admitting its true nature.
“Compromising our safety would negate the value of being comfortable enough to sleep.” He grudgingly agreed, managing to edge under one of the air outlets - as chilly-cool as the room was in comparison with the rest of the settlement, the moving air was just blissful. Spirits if only he could sleep there- forget the lack of soft furnishings, he’d cope with curling up on the floor just to be cold at last.
Avitus hummed quiet relief that he’d accepted that, padding off across the room to fiddle with the lights which had flickered on bright-as-daylight. He ignored him in favour of just staying put until it felt as if he could finally begin to feel something aside from warmth and… as the lights dimmed, he spoke up once more. “Hey, SAM, talk us through what we’ve been working on.”
There was an artificial chirp broadcast through Avitus’ own omni-tool- he’d come to recognise the sounds made by the AI which shared his head when it wished to make its presence known well enough that it wasn’t a surprise, and then a holographic display brought itself up in the centre of the room.
A planet, small and cloaked in thick clouds aside from a few key points - through which grey land and turquoise oceans peeked - rotated in front of them.
“Formerly known as Habitat Seven.” The AI croaked, spinning the planet faster and zooming out for a moment to reveal its place as the second planet within a star system labelled Eriksson before focusing back in. “Renamed Ryder-I in honour of the first pathfinder lost to Heleus, this planet recently finished chemical terraforming to expedite the work of the vault network.”
He’d heard that that was the next step. For a lack of entirely suitable worlds that were safe to colonise freely, the initiative had had to take matters into their own hands and convert nearly-habitable into viable places. It was another thing to have that be laid out so plainly by Alec’s pet though- and to hear that the first of them was presumably named after him. And… it was where he had died, wasn’t it? Before he could get caught on that though, the AI zoomed in again, focusing on a satellite view of a patch of terrain, thin lines drawn over it to demarcate something he couldn’t quite parse, no matter how much he squinted at the hardlight.
Thankfully, it continued with an explanation. “The planned initial settlement for Ryder-I, set to take advantage of an extinct volcanic field for prime agricultural prospects. The first foundations were set down last week, naming the future colony Memorial.”
Castis wasn’t quite sure when the other had returned to his side, but an arm wrapped around his waist and he was pulled back so Avitus could hook his head over his shoulder. “Show him the spot.” He ordered his companion, and his excitement at getting to share something that he’d clearly been working hard on was unmistakeable. How long had he been working on this quietly?
The hologram dissipated and resolved into a set of static images. A digital construct of a modest box-build house set high on a cliff, plans for a physical road down from it that branched away, then an overview map which cited its location some way from the main settlement.
It… took him far too long to puzzle through just why he was showing him that and then- the question he longed to ask about it caught in his throat, caught because he couldn’t bring himself to voice it, just in case he was- “It’s gonna be a couple of years before it’s all ready, maybe one more summer on Kadara to get through.” Avitus said, sounding halfway to self conscious. Rambling, for certain, out of nerves. “And the planet’s a bit cold by our standards but I figure we can invest stock in warm coats and scarves. Sara’s said she’s gonna move there when she hangs up her guns because there’s room to raise Des and whatever siblings he ends up with next, then there’s plans to settle as many of the New Horizons lot as they can out there and so… if things haven’t imploded, if we haven’t imploded then, well- I’ve offered to take on the job of running security for Memorial. Plus I know of an open position for experienced law enforcement coming on the market.”
It sounded too good to be true, didn’t it? Castis swallowed down his doubts though, as best he could. He had to try, didn’t he? “I suppose it would make sense for internal and external security forces to ah, collaborate closely.” He took his little huff of amusement as the go-ahead to continue and plunged right in. “Are they aware what they’re getting themselves in for, putting a paranoid ex-terrorist in charge of security?"
Teeth latched onto the side of his mandible for a moment, lazy retaliation, and then Avitus dragged himself away. “About the same as they’ll get putting an anal-retentive law-book hugger in charge of maintaining peace.”
Mhm, that was only fair. “Spirits preserve the lot of them.”
Avitus spared him a glance back, expression close to fond for a moment, then beckoned for him to follow him back out into the insufferable heat once more. And here he'd only just gotten comfortable "Fuck spirits, they'll have us instead. Got a bit more faith in us, these days."
And that, he thought, would be worth any amount of sweat and suffering in the end.