Chapter Text
Imagine that you fled from a group that was hunting you down for having broken that group’s most sacred rule, because, on a truly cursed day, you discovered you were pregnant, and that very sacred rule forbade women from having children. So, you flee with your children, abandoning everything and trying to start over from scratch in an unfamiliar place, knowing no one, with no money, and with children by your side.
This was the harsh reality of Urdnot Morya. She was the mother of three very clever little krogan boys, the only ones from her litter of nearly 800 offspring who survived the genophage. The oldest was named Avestan and was almost 10 years old. The middle one was named Parcae and was 7 years old. Finally, the youngest was named Vedict and had the most advanced genophage, meaning he might not even reach his tenth birthday. He was only 3 years old. And to make matters worse for the little one, he was also born with a rare condition that caused a severe deformity in his auditory system. He couldn’t hear or speak, but his brain adapted, giving him a remarkable talent for writing. Vedict taught himself human sign language, a skill neither his mother nor his brothers knew, though Avestan had tried to learn a symbol or two.
The children were diagnosed on Omega by a salarian doctor, while Morya worked as a security guard at the Afterlife. In addition, they also had Alecto, a female varren cub they managed to rescue during their dramatic escape from Tuchanka, the krogan homeworld, after finding her injured beside her mother, who had been slaughtered for her meat. Some krogan tribes hunted male varren because their meat was juicier, but whoever slaughtered the varren mother must have been starving. Living on Tuchanka was like trying to survive five rites of passage, and sometimes, that was what many krogan went through over the course of their long lives.
Morya didn’t want that for her children, a life of misery and hostility on a devastated planet. So she fled Tuchanka and went to the Citadel to find a job, but as she had expected, people weren’t usually very kind to her kind, so she could only get jobs as a nightclub bouncer or even as a member of some mercenary group hired by some rich guy who wanted to take out target X. So she left and headed for Omega Station, but it was worse there than the Citadel, and the job offers were even worse.
Just when Morya thought her chances of securing a better life for herself and her children were gone, she overheard Aria T’Loak mentioning to some of her associates a paradise colony planet called Evetrovia, where they were hiring people to help paleontologists with the prothean ruins that covered more than half the planet. It was her last hope. She left everything behind on Omega, managed to buy a ticket for a space shuttle, and headed toward the planet.
And Evetrovia was everything they said it was, whether by word of mouth or in the advertisements he saw on billboards, both in the Citadel and on Omega. It was a vast planet, with many forest biomes and clear oceans, perfect for various species to begin colonization. It was very similar to Virmire, but with far more trees and oceans, and best of all, these oceans were freshwater, an extremely rare occurrence. Through the small window of the space shuttle, Morya and the children could see part of the prothean ruins hidden among the nature that covered them, like mystical cities concealed within the forests.
Morya was staying in a small studio apartment in the colony’s main city, Paper Gods, and had secured a job interview with the archaeological team monitoring the main ruin, which was part of the Paper Gods territory. And now she was inside a room, sitting on a tiny chair, with Alecto and her children sitting on the floor, waiting to be called in by the human evaluator who had a huge ass face.
“Come on, sit still, Parcae,” said Avestan, grabbing his brother by the arms and adjusting his pants, which had slipped down a bit after the boy had been wriggling around on the floor.
“I’m bored. I don’t want to sit here. I want to play in those ruins.”
“Mom! Parcae won’t listen to me.”
“Both of you, enough!” Morya warned, grabbing Avestan and Parcae by the arm and giving the boys a shake. “If I don’t pass this job interview, we’ll have to live on the streets, or at worst, go back to Tuchanka.”
Vedict made a gesture with his three little fingers and placed them on his head, but they couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“I think Vedict said Uncle Wrex’s name, but I’m not sure,” said Avestan, scratching part of his shell. “Mom, why don’t you ask him for help? He said he’d help us, that he had a ship and we could live on it.”
Wrex, the charming krogan mercenary from the Urdnot clan she met while she was still looking for a job on the Citadel. It was in the Zakera district, on the 26th floor. The two exchanged a few words; Wrex showed some distaste when Morya mentioned Tuchanka and said she’d done the right thing leaving the planet. And he ended up taking a liking to the boys, especially Avestan, and even said he’d like to be his father, a joke, of course. The boys’ father was likely killed by Morya’s former tribe. When she told her story, Wrex offered to help, saying he had a ship and that the commander, a human named Saki Shepard, would let them live there for as long as they needed. Morya, at the time, refused, but after so many problems, she was thinking of contacting Wrex to see if the offer still stood.
“If I don’t pass this interview, I promise I’ll contact Wrex.”
In reality, Morya was planning to contact him with or without the job offer. She had grown fond of the krogan, just as he had grown fond of her children, but she didn’t want to take advantage of his generosity. Wrex didn’t trust his own species at all; he said the krogan were beyond saving, and that their fate was to die out from genophage, since not even they themselves seemed interested in finding a cure. Morya couldn’t disagree or agree. She’d gone through difficult times on Tuchanka that she didn’t want to dwell on, especially after discovering she was pregnant.
Her clan had abandoned her and begun hunting her down. Since birth, she had belonged to it, a group composed solely of females. The clan’s main rule was: never form a relationship with a male and never bring their children into the world. Most of the women devoted themselves primarily to farming. Tuchanka had become a barren land after the civil wars, so any little corner that still had a patch of green suitable for farming and raising livestock was enough to feed the clan. But Morya committed the worst crime anyone in her clan could commit: she had a relationship with a man, a mercenary from the Nakmor clan who was merely passing through the clan’s lands, and became pregnant by him. Morya couldn’t remember his face, much less his name. She believed he had been killed by a thresher maw, an ambush set by the clan to punish her, since the man had wanted her to run away with him.
Morya left the clan, becoming an Urdnot, the clan that had taken her in during her escape and helped her leave Tuchanka safely with her children.
“Well… Urdnot Morya?”
Morya snapped out of her memories when the ass-faced human recruiter called her name. She walked over to her small table, sat down calmly, and kept staring at him the whole time, imagining and feeling sorry for the humans who would ever have to deal with him.
“So... you’ve worked at the Citadel and on Omega...” he scanned her resume on the datapad, with a certain lack of interest.
“Yes. At the Citadel I worked as a security guard, and at Omega the same thing, although they called me several times to be a mercenary.”
“I see. Have you ever done manual labor?”
“Some.”
“Like what, for example?”
“Well… on Tuchanka I’ve helped build huts and houses, and I’ve also helped cultivate crops, till the soil, that sort of thing…”
The recruiter gave Morya a cold look, as if he felt a certain disgust for her, but what bothered him more was the varren that was tied to the chair leg by a short leash and wouldn’t stop growling, and also the children, who were trying to calm her down.
“Who are they?”
“They’re... my children. And that’s Alecto, their pet.”
“Children? I thought krogan couldn’t have children...”
“We can have children; the difference is that some of them are stillborn. They were the only ones who survived from my litter” talking about her litter was still very painful; Morya had thought she’d be able to overcome genophage, that her babies would come into the world all perfect and healthy, but no. All the krogan were infected with genophage. Her chest tightened every time she thought that Vedict could be taken by the disease at any moment.
The recruiter placed the datapad on the table and folded her hands.
“Your resume is very good, but unfortunately, we can’t hire you.”
Morya widened her big yellow eyes.
“Why? If my resume meets your requirements...”
“Yes, but... these children... why aren’t they in school?”
“Have you ever seen any krogan schools around here?” The recruiter didn’t answer. “I get it. All right, I won’t take up any more of your time.”
Morya stood up, went over to her children, and asked them to untie Alecto. That was the first time anyone had discriminated against her because of her children. It had never happened before; she’d thought it was just an urban legend. Certain species, especially humans, were very prejudiced against women who had young children or were pregnant, especially if the mother was single. Morya thought this was a joke among the asari, since they usually raised their young alone because their partners died before their daughters even became maidens, but it wasn’t a joke; in fact, Morya remembered that the conversation she’d overheard among those asari was actually a complaint. Human males and krogan males were the same when it came to treating their females with dignity.
She had no choice left. She would have to contact Wrex and ask for help.
“Hey, Stuart, have you seen my excavation gear?”
“And why would I know where you put your stuff, Ryder?”
Morya looked back and saw a human woman with deep, dark brown skin and very short, straight dark hair talking to the surly-faced recruiter. Suddenly, their gazes met for a moment, the human’s violet eyes shining, but the krogan ended up lowering her head and leaving the room; after all, there was nothing left for her there.
Rayana Ryder was curious about that krogan, especially because of the little krogans by her side. It was rare to see krogan children around. She found her truly very interesting. The krogan had light brown armor and some dark purple markings that looked like tattoos. Her eyes were yellow, and she had some scars around her mouth. Her clothes strongly resembled those of shamans, unlike the krogan she’d met, who only wore armor. She’d been so distracted that she’d forgotten she’d only decided to speak with Stuart because of the electronic equipment essential for the excavations that she couldn’t find among her belongings.
“Who was that krogan?”
“Oh, just another single mom looking for a job, but this one managed to be even worse. Did you know the kids don’t go to school? Oh, please, this isn’t a daycare for alien children.”
Rayana knew that Stuart turned away many people who came to the prothean ruins excavations looking for work just because of their appearance or some trait he personally didn’t like, and this poor krogan had been one of his thousands of victims. Rayana was tired of complaining about him to the supervisor, but she… well, that was a story for another time.
As she ran down the building’s stairs in search of the krogan and the little krogan kids, Rayana found herself thinking about something her brother Scott had told her before she moved to Evetrovia: that she wasn’t actually interested in the Andromeda Initiative and had only joined because she hadn’t passed the test to become a crew member on the Normandy. Ray was indeed interested, it was her father’s life’s work, but the way things were going, she seriously doubted the project would get off the ground in less than five years. And to make matters worse, one of the arks had been stolen by a group of space pirates called the Zodiarts, and no one seemed interested in recovering it; after all, the stolen ark belonged to the quarians.
Until that was resolved, Ray intended to continue her work on prothean ruins, and those on Evetrovia were very interesting. She had never seen ruins so full of preserved relics, thanks to the planet’s more forested atmosphere, but as a result, these ruins were far more deteriorated due to the high concentration of oxygen, which accelerated the rusting process of the structures. Still, at least the artifacts found so far were unique and unlike anything ever seen; her team had already found ceramics, data discs, partially intact VIs, and what was catching the most attention: a gigantic statue of a prothean standing in the middle of the city, which was still being excavated. Ray was eager to find out what that statue was as soon as the excavation process was finished.
Ray found the krogan outside the building, on a sidewalk with her children, waiting for the light to turn green so they could cross, just like others standing beside her. Ray ran, pushing a few people aside, but managed to reach the krogan. Ray touched her, and she gave a sharp jolt; her strong, massive arms nearly hit Ray right in the face, and taking a punch or any blow from a krogan meant instant death.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The light turned green and pedestrians began crossing the street, but only Ray, Morya, and her children remained standing in the middle of the sidewalk.
“You’re the human who was with me in the interview room...”
“Yeah, that’s me. I’m Rayana Ryder, but everyone calls me Ray” she raised her hands in greeting, but Morya didn’t react; Ray ended up backing away. “Well, um… I heard part of your interview. Please don’t take anything Stuart says seriously. He’s a real jerk. I’ve already complained about him to the supervisor, but she doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.”
“It’s fine, I’m used to other species treating me badly. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to get going.”
“No—” Ray stepped in front of Morya. “I mean, please, stay. I want you to work with us at the ruins.”
“If you actually heard what that recruiter said, you’d know I wasn’t chosen.”
“I know, but… I’ll override him. I want you here tomorrow at seven, no late. And you can leave your kids at the ruins. You’re not the only single mom on our team. There’s an asari with a young daughter who was also snubbed by Stuart that I managed to bring onto our team, and her daughter has never gotten in our way.”
“Well, but my boys aren’t like that asari kid.”
Ray looked at the children. The oldest wouldn’t stop pushing and hitting his middle brother over his pants, and the little one, who was holding the leash of the varren, just watched. The little one looked at Ray and smiled, making a gesture with his little fingers.
He… spoke human sign language? But how did he learn that?
Ray knew sign language, of all human languages. It was mandatory training he’d undergone in the Alliance for people with hearing impairments. Although there were surgeries that corrected these impairments, such as internal devices or even reconstructions of the affected areas, these procedures were still expensive, and the Alliance couldn’t provide them to everyone.
The boy was using French in sign language, which he must have learned on the extranet or something like that. Unfortunately, there was still no universal sign language. Humans have over seven thousand native languages. Ray answered him, even though his French was terrible. She said her name and introduced herself. The boy replied, saying his name was Vedict.
“Do you… understand those gestures he’s making with his hands?” Morya asked, curious.
“It’s French sign language. I know a little. Does your son have a disability?”
“Yeah, he doesn’t speak or hear, but he learned these weird gestures from a datapad I gave them. I thought it was a game, not a way for him to try to communicate with us.”
“Mom, I told you that was communication, not a game,” said Avestan, after overhearing part of the conversation. “Hey, lady. Are you really going to give my mom the job?”
“Of course, kid. And you guys can go to the ruins if you want… as long as you don’t make a mess or touch anything.”
“Cool!” Avestan jumped up and his middle brother cheered; Vedict did nothing and just went back to petting the varren’s head; Ray suspected the boy might have some kind of neurodiversity as well.
“Thank you so much, human.”
“And you don’t need to go through Stuart. Come talk to me directly, you hear?”
Morya raised her hand to Ray.
“Urdnot Morya” Ray greeted her.
“Nice to meet you, Morya.”
***
Dear Wrex, I hope you’re doing well on your ship and that your captain is treating you well. I’m writing these words to update you on my current situation. I’m in Evetrovia; I got a job at the prothean ruins. I don’t know yet what my role will be, but I’m eager to find out. I know that working at these ruins pays well, which could be my salvation and that of my boys. If you ever come to Evetrovia, come visit me. Avestan can’t stop thinking about you.
Morya.