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At all beginnings, and all ends, this is what they keep in their bones: we are krogan.
Urdnot Bakara knows this better than most. Urdnot Bakara is shaman, truthkeeper, witness and historian for all the shame and loss and sorrow the krogan have endured. Their race has always had a long memory; now, more than any other age, there is much to remember.
Urdnot Bakara thinks of this often, even from the earliest days of her second birth, when she fought tooth and claw and nail from the black belly of a stone cave, when she broke again into the light with nothing, not even her own name. Only a little shard of crystal that was also a shard of a promise: the krogan are broken now, scattered over Tuchanka like so many varren, starving, snarling, circling around each other like the dying pack they are. But.
But they can be made whole again. Somewhere in them is the shard of spirit worn down by a generation of childlessness, of tomb after tomb after tomb made for their stillborn young. The krogan are weary, weary to death.
They are not dead yet.
—
It's harder to remember that in the holdings of Clan Weyrloc, where the cells are small and the tables hard and the salarian's needles and serums hold poison, and darkness, and pain.
Not suffering, though. No krogan woman who has held her dead children would call this suffering.
Still. It is hard, when the salarian named Maelon looks at the slow writhing of her sisters with impersonal, burning eyes. He does not know what this sacrifice means. They have so few females, fewer fertile—that they have chosen to come here, to one clan, that she who is shaman has led them here—it is a great sacrifice, a thing worthy of respect. He does not respect them. Only his own research and his own knowledge and his own guilt: salarian concerns.
She is krogan. She is shaman, and she will lead her people into the fight. Even if that fight is here in a small dirty room, against no enemy she can see.
But one salarian cannot undo the damage of a thousand years of his people's efforts, and her sisters die slowly, in agony, one by one by one.
—
A Tuchanka cell becomes a Sur'Kesh cell in one drug-dazed night. It is clean and steel and sterile, and as dispassionate, and Bakara—hates it. She doesn't hate many things. She hates the genophage, in the old tired way one hates the heat of Aralakh, or the dust-choked air of Urdnot skies; she hates the same salarian detachment that puts her sisters in sterile autopsies instead of the dignity of fire; she hates that even now, she hopes beyond all reason for their success all the same.
(It was easier when she was prisoner by choice. This is a truth she keeps to herself; her sisters suffer enough without bearing her frustrations. She is shaman, one who leads through truth, one who bears the weight.)
(She is krogan.)
But then the last of her sisters dies, insensible and in pain, and when Bakara watches her body taken away on a cold steel gurney to be placed with the dead something in her heart—gives way. What is shaman if she cannot protect her people? Who is krogan who watches her sisters die moaning and weak, without battle-glory, without strength? Even sacrifice like this deserves honor, but this death has nothing of honor in it.
She grieves.
Not like salarians, who die so often and so quickly there is nothing to them, yet sprawl endless catacombs for their brief lives, their silent tombs a thousand times more precious to them than the wailing charnel house they have made of krogan birthing grounds. She grieves, shouting their names, beating at the shimmering field that keeps her from them, tearing at her hood and veil because she is the one who should see to their death rites, not the salarians, not because she is shaman but because she has led them here to their deaths and she has let them die and she has done nothing to save them, nothing to save her people. She grieves—
The shields go down. Salarians in green and grey crowd around her, little things with high voices shouting at her and reaching for her restraints, as if they think they can keep a krogan from the blood of her heart. She beats them back with one stroke, easy as pyjaks, ready to kill them for their temerity and for their failure. (Her failure.)
Her other arm is free—she is holding a salarian. When did she catch him?
He still holds her restraints in one hand. Undone. He meets her eyes; then his hand opens to drop the three little strips of plasteel weave at her feet. The others swarm around her, their useless buzzing easily forgotten.
"Won't hurt you," he says. As if he could. "Can help, if permitted."
"How?" Her voice is unfamiliar to her own ears, low and thick with sorrow.
"Genophage. Krogan sterility research not destroyed. Future not hopeless for krogan." He smiles, an odd, quick thing. His feet dangle above the ground. "Or for you."
Why should she believe him? And yet—she crawled from a mountain's lightless hole once, on her knees, starving, dying, a small quick light in her hand her only guide. She was alone then, too.
The word comes out of her bones. "Please."
—
He is Mordin Solus, this salarian doctor, and he is—though she hates to think the word—different. He takes lead supervision on the research her body provides. Gone are the painful serums, the restraints; he gives her syrups instead, for the cough she has ignored for so long she has nearly forgotten it, and walks with her into the feeble Sur'Kesh sunlight when she has the strength, and he—speaks to her, constantly, as if silence might bring his own death. He speaks to her as a person. As krogan.
It has been a very long time since she felt the weight of sorrow lift, however briefly, from her heart. She knows he plays the fool for her benefit, that his dry humor is meant to take her mind from her pain, from her sisters lying side by side and silent.
She is not so weak as to be lonely. (To be shaman is to be alone.)
All the same, she certainly does not trust him. And then one evening, when the laboratory is empty and dark save them, and she can barely stand from the fatigue that keeps hold of her limbs, he tells her of his work on the genophage. It does not matter then, her exhaustion; though it takes every breath in her body she is up and on him, hand around his narrow salarian throat until his broken horn slams against the wall and the ceramic band across his chest digs into the meat of her forearm.
She could break him. She could snap him in half, like a dry twig from a tchoza tree. Proud little salarian, toying with her people's lives as much as any of the others of his kind, using her—
"You will find a way to undo it," she says instead, deep with danger and rumbling, a krogan threat.
"Will try," he says calmly, as if they stood equals instead. "Cannot guarantee success, but—" He drags in a sharp breath through his nose. "Will do all I can."
She drops him. He does not crumple to the floor like she half-expects; instead he catches himself and straightens, and he looks at her, and then—he briefly covers his eyes with his too-long fingers, a krogan mark of respect for a shaman so long out of use she has nearly forgotten it.
She stares and does not speak. Mordin Solus smiles again, though the edges of it are tighter than is his habit, and then he leaves her in her quiet cell and disappears into the dim green glow of the elevator.
She is not lonely. Her thoughts are too many for that.
—
It's a hard thing to wait for the doctor to send her cell climbing the delicate scaffolding of Sur'Kesh, harder still to watch Wrex and the human Shepard do all her fighting for her, as if she cannot fight herself. As if she has not been fighting all this time. Battle-rage is strong enough to heal many krogan ills, and even as weak as she is she could still hold a shotgun.
Worst is when the doctor and Wrex both extend their hands to her when she steps from the shielded cell. How dare they. How dare they, after her sisters have died before her eyes and her blood has been stolen and her children born dead in her arms. She is not weak, to need such coddling from them. She is not gentle. She is not soft.
She is shaman and she is krogan, stronger than all others, and she alone carries the survival of her race in her marrow, in the hollows beneath her hearts. None other.
There is no one else.
—
The Normandy is a strong ship, carrying a strong crew, and Shepard is a good human to command them. They speak together occasionally in the ship's medical bay, and she finds the commander an articulate example of the human species, intelligent enough that she has no qualms speaking of her own history. More importantly, Shepard intends to fight for the krogan, intends to cure the genophage in one fell swoop with the doctor's help. That is worth fighting for. That is what she keeps in her mind when the ship's night cycle finds her curled on her side, gasping for air through cramps that spear her gut through like hot iron; when her joints ache so badly she cannot stand; when Wrex comes solicitous and courting, as if her skin is not on fire, as if her eyes do not burn with every blink.
He doesn't understand. She knows he doesn't, and she doesn't hold it against him; Wrex is strong and old and set in his knowledge and krogan do not grow ill. When they die they die fast and blazing, good deaths, in battle, with honor.
Bakara is dying from the inside out, slow as rust. It is a battle only she can see, a private dignity no krogan can understand without waging. Her sisters bore it first; it is her honor now.
(Mordin sees it. Mordin sees every moment of it, all mapped out on his displays and his charts and his omnitool: her pain plotted onto the lines of a graph; her life reduced to a percentage; the weight of the krogan race made a series of little numbers in the corner of a screen.)
(Mordin is the only one to see her sweating.)
—
He gives her a new name, her third birth, for she who would be mother: Eve. She carries it like the weight of her second heart, kept near and held close, ignored until it is needed. She doesn't care what he calls her; she cares that he sleeps as little as she does, that his massive salarian eyes are always on one display or another, or on her, that she commands the whole of his attention at every moment. It is not a vain thing—shaman close themselves away from careless eyes, and krogan who posture die quickly. It is not that.
She carries the krogan in her blood. When he looks at her he looks at the whole of her people; when he heals her he heals her race. He is salarian, yes. He is also her only hope.
How curious, then, that she finds herself—liking him. Not only for what he does for her people, but for… for her. She is shaman and therefore nothing; she has no desires that are not for her sisters or for her world. But he brings her krogan food that, synthesized as it is, tastes of home; he says nothing when she coughs; he trusts her to judge her own strength when Wrex blusters with concern over what illness she cannot hide and demands in the same sentence that she be strong, as if he does not know that to wake each day in this spotless ship to more tests, more pills, more pain, is the hardest thing she has ever done.
Wrex can be nothing else. He is true krogan to his bones, a warrior of honor, fierce and proud and she would have him no other way. His children will be krogan the likes of which the galaxy has not seen since the Rachni Wars, since before the uplifting to the stars. She will bare her teeth often in the bearing of them, even if there is no one to see behind the veil; the battle-rage that burns in her blood is ferocious enough for a hundred krogan, a wildstorm made of a thousand years of barren mothers, barren sisters, of pyre after pyre of their children burnt to ash.
She is true krogan, too.
She drags in a breath, lets it out again. Wrex's children. Hers. If Mordin can give them to her.
She trusts him to try.
—
Mordin sings to her, sometimes. At first she lets him; later she requests it. Krogan have no songs like these, only deep stronghearted drumming things, sung at the dawn of battle and at the end of death. Those have their place and she honors them—and yet to watch his mobile face shape the rapid words, to listen to him rework songs she knows are asari or human or salarian to feature krogan instead, and krogan as something worthy of respect—
She enjoys that.
(Only once does she ask him why, on a dim night-cycle when there is no light in the medbay save two of his screens and the glowing indicators on her respirator, no sound but his tapping fingers and quiet humming that trails off the moment she speaks.
He looks at her when she says nothing else, his eyes so dark and wide they swallow the room, flecks of gold and green reflecting from her respirator in the very centers. For a long time he does not answer; it is long even for her, who might blink away his life, and then he sighs, and places his datapad on the table beside her, and folds his fingers together at his waist.
"Life worth preservation," he says quietly. There is an odd note to it, as if he means to convince himself as well. His eyes flicker; he shakes his head. "No. More than that. Scientific analysis led us to the genophage. Reasonable predictions, then; results dramatic, but effective. Logical conclusion at the time."
"Logical," she repeats, toneless above the soft humming of machinery. Logical, the demise of her race, her world…
"Then," he says sharply, one hand cutting the air between them. "Galaxy no longer as small as it was. Variables changed. Krogan changed. Weyrloc hospital demonstrated that with Maelon's research; dead krogan there incalculable loss. Krogan desperation exceeded parameters of original experiment. Endangered survival at alarming rate. Logic no longer sufficient; ethics of program different."
Her sisters. She would have been angry, once. "Nothing changed for my people."
"No." He shakes his head again, his eyes distant; then they focus on her all at once, precise as a pin. "Eve. Did not become doctor to cause harm. Purpose to alleviate pain, to improve fate of galaxy. Research supported program then; believed it necessary. Now, more necessary to undo it. Not only for galaxy."
"Why, then?"
He smiles, small and quick. His eyes reflect her respirator, green and gold, steady as the stars. "Because it is right.")
—
Tuchanka! Tuchanka the blasted, the barren, baking beneath the unblinking Eye of Aralakh, where dust chokes the air and nothing green grows but in the deep forgotten places, where no krogan have walked to kill it. Home, she thinks, her hearts racing, battle pumping through her veins like a scream.
It grows louder in her ears when they reach the Hollows, where the Reapers have spilled their blood at last, where the earth itself will rise up in war. It is easy to command the other krogan in this place, with the ghosts of generations beyond counting giving strength to her voice; they know her to be shaman, who bears the weight of history, and when she calls them to fight it is a balm to her weary soul to see the old respect catch fire in their eyes.
(The same look, she realizes, that the doctor has always given her. She is the krogan queen—)
She pushes it from her mind. Wrex stands with her, and Mordin, and Shepard—and the krogan will follow them all, and her with them, she who stands for her sisters, too. So many have died. Many more will die today, and more yet in the days to come. But they will be good deaths. Strong deaths, made stronger for the life that will come after.
The krogan roar, and she roars with them. Onward, to fight, to fight!
—
"Wrex," she says in warning. He laughs, a deep guffaw, and swerves the truck hard enough to the side to nearly throw Mordin from his seat. A massive explosion of dirt to their left marks Kalros's strike; Wrex swerves again, this time thrusting Mordin back against the wall, and Bakara frowns. "Wrex!"
"No trouble," Mordin says, gripping the rarely-used safety bars beside his head, his omnitool's glow slinging weird orange flickers over the truck's interior. "Prefer evasive action to comfortable demise."
The turn this time is enough to rattle her teeth. "It would be a quick death."
"Perhaps not. Thresher maws consume live game. Digestive system perfused with acids, venom; prey dissolved whole for maximum nutrient intake. Even considering tank, survival would be…" he draws in another sharp inhale. "Problematic."
"Grow a quad, salarian!" Wrex says from the front, a fierce glee in his voice.
The doctor's shout barely carries over the crunching of wheels and machinery and the ever-present roar of Kalros. "Anatomically improbable!" Then, with a quick flash of salarian teeth: "Metaphorically—up yours, krogan!"
Bakara grins, a wild thing beneath her veil. She knows what runs in Wrex's veins here; her blood is just as hot, her pulse thrumming with adrenaline, the world tinted sharper with krogan rage. But to see such a thing in Mordin—then again, she thinks as he smiles at her, his wide eyes bright and alive, his omnitool beeping a dozen different warnings about the maw, the truck's proximity to cliffs, to the Shroud where all things will end, even Bakara's own heartbeat…
Future not hopeless for krogan.
He has been different since the beginning. Perhaps she should not be so surprised.
—
The Shroud's explosion, when it comes, shakes the earth beneath her feet.
Then there is light, and then—silence.
—
She does not know how to grieve for a salarian. There is no body to return to Sur'Kesh; Tuchanka has taken all of him, merciless and demanding as Aralakh. He doomed her race, once—and saved it at the last, and in return Tuchanka gave him a good death, honorable, strong, a krogan's pyre in the sky, so brilliant that every corner of their world would see and know: this one is clan.
Tuchanka gave him the dignity of fire. She will give him the dignity of memory.
—
At all ends, and at all beginnings, this is what they keep in their bones: we are krogan.
Urdnot Bakara knows this, Bakara called Eve. She is krogan; she is shaman; she is—
She is mother now, a word too small for what she has become, a child in her arms born of her blood and her body and her heart and a thousand years of her people's suffering. The world has ended and begun again—and she has lived to see it, she and her sisters and her world, her home that now keeps hope in every word.
How long has it been? Long enough that she still bore a name, long enough that she kept her hope in a little shard of crystal, every edge dulled by the weight it carried. Long enough that her race remembered despair and sorrow best of all things. But now—
But now—
In the earliest hour of the morning, when she is alone, Urdnot Bakara carries her child from the room where it clawed its way to life. It is only a small thing—not weak, because no child born of Wrex could be weak and no child born of her could be weak—but it is small, and soft, and when she pulls the veil from its face it blinks into the harsh sunlight of Aralakh and gives a tiny, angry snarl. Good, she thinks fiercely. They have been grief-tame too long.
She bares her teeth. She bares her child to the world, to this first hour of a new day. A bright day.
"Mordin!" she says, and gives to the child its first truth, the burning knowledge she has kept for a thousand years, will keep for a thousand more. "You are krogan!"
Her child roars.