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Love.
What a stupid little word love is.
It’s four letters, easy to spell even for a little kid, easy to say and so nebulous in meaning that he’s not actually sure it exists. The love people talk about in class and in everyone’s favourite books and holos is about as tangible as Trebia’s surface to him. Of course, people also talk about the love that mamas and papas have for one another and for their brood by extension.
If love’s the thing that happens between mom and dad in the middle of the night then Avitus thinks he’s quite happy never experiencing it firsthand.
Of course, it’s not always that way- he gets to grow bigger and stronger, despite everything that happens behind the door of that place. Bigger, stronger, smarter and meaner, right up until the day when he’s able to put all of those things together and walk away from it all for the last time. For good, now, not just to the shelter of transactional attention from someone he’s fully aware he should be terrified to approach. Hard to fear small predators when you grow up with a night demon on the other side of a grubby, battered door. People are involved along the way, but he’s under no illusion that the hands that restrain him under the guise of taking their dues for helping only ever saw a tool for their own ends. That’s alright though, because maybe he gets to use them a bit too.
And then, then everything goes a little bit sideways within the narrow view of the world he’s been offered so far.
The hands that guide his, teaching him to repair his kit, to hold his gun and to clean the belongings he can put his name to don’t have any ulterior motives; not yet at least. He’s a friend, he says, in a grave, over-serious way, and friends do things for each other because they want to see one another happy. There’s some element of transaction, sure, as he teaches the soft, pampered boy that’s only ever known love from every side to hit, scratch and bite in the name of self defence, but that’s because they’re lifting one another up for fairness, he’s told, and not because he happens to be useful. Maybe it’s the first time he gets more back from being used than has taken from him. Maybe that fact keeps him up at night sometimes.
Of course, old habits die hard and in the world he and his new friend are setting out into - marching in lockstep with not just the other two hopefuls who share their bunk room but an entire pack. They’re a pack still, only because they’re rough, primal and unfinished. The leaders assigned to transform that raw, savage group into soldiers ready for their legions know how the old system works, how to take and take without caring that their taking helps him hold his position near the top of their rabbles little hierarchy.
His friend says that’s a bad thing. He admits he didn’t know that until then.
So he teaches him how it’s meant to be - it’s an unintentional lesson once again in how transactional events can benefit both parties equally but after the fact, legs tangled and another’s hands tracing the blades of his crest and down his spinal plates, fingers finding more marks of use than there’s probably meant to be for a sixteen year old, he wonders if this isn’t perhaps a little bit closer to that stupid, impossible little word known as love.
Castis doesn’t love him, of course not, but he’s happy to stay a while at his side. He doesn’t let him engage in old patterns, sure, but he finds he’s a little more comfortable with the mutual use they engage in than he was with how things were before. Just a shame it’ll never be forever.
His new friend, now better known as his best friend, as the two he once snarled and spat at in their bunk soften and become casual friends, takes him home with him to see what love’s meant to look like. That’s not why he says he does it, but it’s an incidental that Avitus finds himself genuinely curious to explore alongside his friends generosity. It’s not perfect like he’d said- the mama and the papa explode at each other, talons bared and voices raised, but even in the midst of that, the fact that they remained so close to each other despite their hate is framed as being out of love for their son. Love so strong it can surpass hatred was something he ever thought he’d witness.
Of course, it’s because Castis has always known and touched that intangible spirit known as love that he’s able to find it of his own accord. Gentle hands and a sweet voice, Dorema Apsens is harder than his Tizzy but infinitely softer than Avitus himself- and watching the two of them perform that millennia-old dance known as courtship shows him that love can be found between people. For other people, of course, because he’s sure you have to know what love is first in order to produce it.
Dorema, Rems, she’s sweet with him too though. Maybe it’s just because she’s entwining her existence with his best friend, but she treats him like a friend too and so that’s what they become. Tizzy - though she calls him Cassie - seems at his very happiest when she’s there and so makes things permanent between them. They’re young, everyone titters, but you can be young and know what love is after all.
It’s then, celebrating the afterparty of a bonding ceremony which everyone thinks his best friends are rushing into, that Avitus wonders for the first time if he couldn’t be capable of love himself- if only the sort of love that’s determined to drive a wedge into the invisible seam between his very best friends. They deserve better than that though, and because he knows his place as their friend, he holds his tongue. Besides, barely two years later he’s given ample reason to stay quiet and another model of love to learn from as they welcome a chick into the cold, chaotic world.
She’s called Solana, Sol to everyone worthy of knowing her, because Rems thinks the name is beautiful like she is. Personally, he thinks the fluffy little thing needs some time to unfold before the word beautiful can come into it; that’s a sign of true love though, isn’t it? Besides, Castis approaches him, flush with the sort of joy that ticking off one of the boxes on the list he’d once told him he dreamed of completing, and includes him in their love for their chick.
“If something were to happen to the both of us,” he says, those blue eyes full of grave sincerity as always, “I would like it if you looked after her- if you would be her guardian.” If you would protect her from the loveless world she deserves better than to see he’s implying. What can he do but say yes? It’s an honour, even if it’s a concept that curdles in his gizzard- how could he bring anyone up in love when he’s not sure he’s able to provide it?
That’s why he spills his secrets, at long last and on an alien planet they could well not make it off of. Castis has to survive, he tells him, because his death will produce people like Avitus and nobody needs any more loveless bastards in this galaxy, for all that their sharp teeth and lack of inhibitions makes them the warrior archetype the hierarchy needs to combat the first whispering threat it has seen in a thousand years.
Castis is shocked, even if he thinks he should have seen it coming, and it’s not a promise to survive that he insists on making, but a promise to him- the last thing he wanted or needed. They’re far enough into being best friends that that’s the loyalty he’s somehow earned in return for his dedication to the role this very man taught him to perform. And it’s his turn to offer something in exchange, even if that’s providing a sharp set of teeth and a solid shoulder for his friend to cling to as the hierarchy spirits them all away from a war they’ll never call a war, eager for there to be no soldiers left to make it one despite the blood spilled and spirits freed. He transfers that solid shoulder over to Rems, for Castis’ sake, in the time that he spends under the knife, but then it’s to fulfil the job he was begged to take that he goes then. A grandparents love has time limits, apparently, and because a guardians do not, he goes to the quiet little house and allows a child who’s only known love in her life to crawl into his cowl to sleep.
The funny thing is that she never complains that he’s not her loving parents, just clings to his neck and babbles about what she did with grannma the day before and the funny cloud she saw and the asinine kids show she watched on the holo- all of it means nothing to an unloveable bastard better suited to war, but he’s confronted by the fact that at her tender age, Sol doesn’t know how to not love everyone who has the right to be around her.
Dorema is dragged away from her vigil and to work, so he takes up her place with Sol as company and comfort until she’s able to return- Castis is allowed visitors by that point, despite the fact that he’s a long way from waking up, and maybe it’s just because he’s the one holding their child, but Rems drags him into the room with her to watch over him. She sleeps against his side, too, in the uncomfortable chairs provided for their post, and spirits does that cause a debacle he only ever hears about a decade later. He’s tired too, mercifully, and sleeping is safer than contemplating the fact that he’s been included as his best friends loved ones for the purpose of this stay.
The rest of their war-pack didn’t make it off Shanxi, which is probably why Castis breaks mentally as he mends physically. He does all he can to be of use then too - mental wounds are as real and as dangerous for a man like him as a dirty bullet stuck in his chest. Avitus remembers the fallout from his parents hating one another all too well to forget that.
It’s why he doesn’t regret him leaving; he’ll be safe on the Citadel, even if it means distance from the things he knows and the people he loves; the ship Avitus gets dumped on next docks at the Citadel as often as Palaven, so he’s at least able to see him even if Rems is far too busy with work and their now brood of two to make the trip there. Besides, the new job has regular hours and allows him to return home for holidays, which solves every issue.
Their home is his home too, apparently. That’s what Rems tells him even several years later as she helps mend the physical wounds left by him getting too curious and forgetting for a moment that he’s unloveable. He’d been so stupid, ignored his every instinct about him and- again he spills a secret. Admits to her that he’d thought for a moment that he could be loved like Castis loves her, admits that he’s not sure if he’s jealous of her or if this is just how friends like them feel. Her hands falter but she doesn’t kick him out or snarl that he’s overstepped. Instead she guides him into a bed and allows him to cling to her whilst he cries out the last of what he used to keep him close. He’ll only remember his confession hazily once his blood is clean, and she knows that’s a mercy for his sake.
Castis breaks protocol and habit, comes home within the next day and he tries not to read anything in the fact that he comes up to assess his state before even stopping to hug his kids. His hands are gentle and presence comforting, even if the tone of voice he uses as he extracts the humiliating tale of what he did to separate Avitus from them, the ways in which he wove chains and trapped him in a chemical cage- thank spirits that the feral animal he is at heart panicked in that cage and chewed through the bars so it could run back to its old den.
Tizzy sleeps between him and Rems then, even if he sleeps on the sofa when he returns to work- it’s the three of them once more when he next comes home for the holidays though. And the kids, both of them soft with love just as their daddy was when he first met him, both look to him as part of the pack, part of their world that they can trust and call upon for attention. He’d long decided the universe was better off without more of his stock, but that doesn’t mean his heart doesn’t lurch with something painful when they come to him for help as readily as their own mother. He’d kill for them if he had to, he realises, betray all of the hierarchy and the order he’s been entrusted with, all for the sake of two innocent lives. Maybe he’s incapable of love but he can see what love should push him to do, so he’ll imitate it.
Of course, that not-love-loyalty that he has is why he accepts his fall. If the horrors on Dregir get loose, they’ll make their way to the Citadel and to Palaven- he can’t let the innocents fall prey to this disease, no matter what his superiors bark at him to do. Two more lives for his conscience in exchange for the salvation of two innocent children.
Bang-bang, bang-bang.
Make that a thousand lives on his conscience.
He’d have gladly died for it. Castis visited him to tell him he’s not salvageable after what he did, says he’s sorry but he has to think of Garrus and Sol. Avitus doesn’t have the heart to tell him he did it all for Garrus and Sol. What he does promise though is that he’ll commend him to the next life; traitors are usually excellent fodder for medical research and education as their souls and spirits left their bodies long before death, but Castis has argued for his right to try all the same. It’s not love, he knows, but duty and obligation after how much he’s done for them.
But it never happens and that promise sits empty as the cell he’s allowed to walk out of. Saren did that.
He didn’t think much of him at first glance, mind already determined to die, but within a few weeks of escaping Eldis, Avitus finds himself with a new god to worship - one that walks amongst the mere mortals and that, better yet, has a place for him at its feet. He’s so gentle with him, too, offering him a way out and a way to a purpose if he’s strong enough to keep walking; he doesn’t hesitate to put one foot in front of the other for his new god though. Leader, ruler, teacher and idol, Saren forms him into a more lethal thing than he was already and makes him conceive of an existence where he can do what’s necessary for the sake of every innocent soul.
In the dark and the quiet, his god is mortal though; they talk about both their pasts, the people who should have loved them, the pain of being torn from those who maybe, just maybe did. He thinks he could learn how to love him for the honesty in sharing his pain, truth be told.
Saren’s love is for another, more beautiful soul though. He sees the same devotion he found in Nihlus’ eyes from the very first time they’re introduced and it’s honestly a relief when the two of them work out how to transform what they have into love; they both deserve one another so much.
Besides, fate had a hilarious turn for him - throwing Castis back into his life as a battered wreck that he suspects he had a hand in ruining.
He’s spinning out of orbit, lost with no chance of recovering what he has, but Avitus is able to catch him. They move in together, not as friends but as that giddy thing he’s not sure he’s allows to touch - lovers.
Alright, no, it’s not love. Not like the love he had for Rems and that Saren and Nihlus share; their version is more about the trust that one another know the limitations of where pain and pleasure diverge and respect that hard line in the sand. They can bite and scratch, fuck and fight, hold and hinder, all for their own amusement, without ever being in real danger and that’s somehow comforting. Rems might understand from the look in her eyes when she saw the state of them, but the now-grown kids just see him as the wedge he once wondered if he’d be between his best friends and the new friends Castis has made might well remember the unloveable bastard demon he showed on an alien planet.
So be it.
He’s got his Tiz and the rest of the universe can go fucking jump, just so long as it leaves them unharmed. Maybe he can make it leave them alone- pre-emptively rip apart the shadows before they have a chance to send his Tiz on a spiral, kill anything that’d touch what he owns-
His friends die because he spent too long biting shadows that weren’t real.
Perhaps death is the only safety, he wonders, as the shadows claws drip with blood at their bedside and Castis slumbers on ignorant. Maybe if he just-
No.
He lets Castis run home, back to where he belongs and is actually loved by something that’s not toxic, that won’t kill him for daring to exist at its side, and the universe laughs that he’s got a lot to learn yet.
Macen’s hands are gentle. Not soft, no, he’s got calluses from his gun’s grip and what Avitus later learns is a loving childhood filled with gainful manual labour on his family’s farm, but they’re gentle all the same. He’s strong, too - for the first time in what’s become a very long time he thinks he’s in the hands of someone stronger than him. The thrill that sends up his spine isn’t fear this time around though, it’s excitement. He’s so careful with his strength that he never feels even the slightest prickle of fear about being manhandled by him, wrists held up whilst he whines or hips held down for his other favourite sort of fun. And it is fun.
Macen makes everything fun, and whether that’s his age or his outlook on life or the fact that he has always, always been so loved that there’s no reason for anything not to be fun to him, he’s not sure. But everything is a part of some greater adventure and learning experience to his gorgeous, sun-bright eyes and he finds it all to easy to bask in their hot gaze too because he lets him. And best of all, best out of any of this, he wants him- piece by piece, his secrets are teased out not because his tongue is too thick and hot in his mouth to retain them but because he’s asking and listening without even a hint of judgement, no matter how horrific they may be.
Damning them both to the hell that is Omega is the first time that Avitus realises that, shit, love might not be something he deserves but it’s something that he’s going to be freely offered all the same - and he dares to take the leap of admitting that what he feels back might just really be love too at long last. He gives in and throws away his last instinct for self-preservation to offer him his honesty and Macen smiles all the brighter for it. He loves him.
He loves him.
He loves him.
They sit in the dark and whisper about their next great adventure, because not only does this fabulous man love him, but he loves having him by his side through thick and thin, reliant only upon one another if it comes down to it; Castis might have given him a port in a storm, but Macen builds an unsinkable ship around the two of them that can withstand any storm. He calls it marriage. Avitus calls it salvation - then has to admit the depth of his loyalty and devotion to any goal he sets for the two of them trusting on his word alone. Somehow, instead of scaring him like it should any rational person, his oath is weighed heavily and met with a promise to never abuse the faith that has been placed in him for his own gain. There’s no explaining to him that whatever is Macen’s gain is his sole desire anyways.
They plot and plan, not just dreaming but conceiving of a world where the gentle thing he says he knows Avitus - Avi, his Avi, he calls him - will be able to become if he has the scope to put down roots. Maybe it’s a little bit (or in fact very) idealistic but it’s a dream as beautiful as the man who saw every part of the unloveable bastard he’s always been and said “I think I can love this all the same” and that’s why it captivates him heart and soul, why he looks at it and finds it all too easy to plan for a forever with him. That’s what love is, he realises at long last; not being some perfect ideal but being worthy in the eyes of another nonetheless.
And just like that, he’s dead.
It’d be nice if one day, just one day, fate and fortune could agree on what they wanted for him.
This time around, Avitus genuinely wonders why he bothers- not just to put himself out there continually but even to place one foot in front of the other still. What’s the damned point? He told Macen, fucking told him that he didn’t want to outlive him and yet fortune laughed in the face of what fate had provided him, took it away just as he’d started to believe that he might someday be worthy of a fraction of the care he’d already been shown.
It’s all too easy to slip into old bad habits - the very ones that his Mace had started the slow process of coaxing him out of relying upon - and worse still, he knows how badly he’s doing this time around but… fuck it all. Heleus is a rotten place that’d never been good enough for Macen anyhow; a drunk, violent ex-spectre is just about what it deserves to rein it into order.
Apparently that’s not good enough though.
This time around, the blue eyes that gravely watch him fight his way back from the event horizon of his own regret aren’t those of a turian, the too-numerous fingers that pry bottles out of his hands soft and gentle and the voice that begs him to hold on for someone else’s sake is alien-flat.
She’s not a god. Not an idol nor even his salvation made blood and bone, but she’s something to rally too nonetheless. This time around, the only living thing brave enough to weather the storm is just as twisted and as broken as him- or maybe he just makes her in his own image without realising what he’s doing before he has a chance to see how good she could’ve been. Doesn’t matter, in the end.
What’s funny is that, when he finally breathes deep enough to identify the fact that he looks to her as often as he ever looked to anyone else that’d stuck it out in his past, Avitus realises that the care he has for her isn’t what he’d first presumed it must be. Easily, he first wrote it off as being the same sort of defensive love that he’d maintained towards Castis’ kids but… Sara’s not a chick entrusted to his care before she even has a chance to open her eyes. No, she’s an adult in her own right one - though a young one he’ll concede - and she’s far from needing a warbeast to keep her safe from the dark. What she is, though, is in desperate need of someone to tell her they’re proud of her and to provide her with a shoulder to lean on in the darker moments.
She calls him dad eventually, not in the sense that she considers him physically anything like a progenitor but in the same way that he realises he considers her a daughter - parent and child for how they have made one another into something new simply by being connected. And… maybe it’s that love which could have never been romantic or sexual that he always needed to discover existed in order to truly heal.
Fortune tries to drag him away to find Macen, Saren, Nihlus and everyone else he ever adored, fate allows him the right to fight and it’s faith that saves him.
Nothing else matters. Not even the fact that fate throws the ruined wreck he was certain had died twice over back into his path and suggests that maybe he could be the one to fix someone else this time around.
He's not the one who needs to learn to love from Castis this pass around though.
“Dad?” Gentle, too-numerous alien fingers tug at his, uncaring about the proximity of soft skin to the cruelly sharp talons at the tips of them. He doesn’t need to open his eyes to know that there are concerned blue eyes on him - he can feel that from the way she’s twisted away from him. “Are you alright?”
She worries too much. Sometimes, the bitter urge to snap and try to spook her away so he can feel things in peace still surfaces but if there’s one thing he’d learned it’s that Sara Ryder fears damned near nothing about him, as foolish as that might be. “M’fine.” He mumbles instead, wondering just how long silent had been too long for her comfort.
“If you’re tired, we can watch this another time.” The vid’d already been paused, he realises belatedly, and it takes cracking his eyes open to check how long it’d been since he lost track of what was going on on screen. Granted, it was just a Blasto movie. Des was too young for them and both Vetra and Tizzy too damned smart to enjoy the paper-thin plots that served as an excuse to blow shit up but someone onboard New Horizons had brought the last one on an OSD and Sara’d managed to beg a copy for the two of them to rip to shreds together. Watching shit movies that involved either the hierarchy or spectres in some respect or another had become their thing, something to bond over as if they hadn’t had damned enough of those already. He’d grumbled that without an ounce of malice once and earned himself a well-deserved elbow to the keel for his efforts. Brat.
“M’fine.” He repeated, and whether she believed him or not, she let her head come to rest against his shoulder once more - allowing him to rest his chin on top of it. “Just got lost in my own thoughts.”
She snorted. ‘Didn’t know you thought things.”
Hah, regular comedian, that was his kid. “Funny, I try not to but… sometimes it happens.” Should he… well, she especially liked it when he let his guard down and was honest as to his thoughts and feelings. Like Macen in that respect, she wanted him to be the very best version of himself even when he wasn’t entirely persuaded that there was enough soul to him to be anything other than an unloveable bastard. This especially though, this attempt would please her. “It’s just… Y’know I love you, right?”
“Duh.” He could just feel her rolling her eyes but despite that, her arm tightened around him and Sara clung a little tighter. Didn’t need words to make it damned clear just what she wanted to say in return.
And I love you too.