Love and War

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"I swear to even the Asari goddess that when I get out of here, that lizard Kandros will wish I was an exile for what I'm gonna do to him!" Quinn Talos raged as she was unceremoniously shoved into a holding cell on the operations deck. The dark haired woman paced for time, thinking it was would all be straightened out once Tann got wind of what Kandros had done. She should have known better. As far as she believed, human's still weren't exactly favourites of the other alien species. On earth Quinn had an excellent service record within the Alliance, just as most members of her family did, but she had wanted more. She wanted to explore, to see things no human ever had, which was why she signed up for a place on the Andromeda Initiative. The only problem was, she wasn't the pathfinder, and her superiors didn't believe in security personal leaving the Nexus. As well as she performed her job, the call sign 'Cutie', thanks to her unfortunate initials, meant she wasn't exactly taken seriously. Quinn was slumped on the floor with her back against the wall now, glaring at the Turian guard outside the forcefield. She had fought her hardest for the safety of everyone on the Nexus, and this was her reward; being called a traitor and about to be dumped on some godforsaken planet with the rest of the exile scum. All because Kandros feared losing what little power he had to her. The asshole can keep it, she thought bitterly.

Kandros was unable to keep from smiling when he saw the vid the pathfinder had managed to find for him. He remained as quiet as possible as he crept back into the bed. There the thrown slid his arm back around his lover and pulled her close. Perhaps things wouldn't be so bad. 

"Maybe it means you aren't really one of them?" Quinn suggested softly. "Do you remember anything before you came to Kadara?" She asked curiously.

The next morning Maggie made them a simple breakfast as she prepared for work with the clothes she'd stashed in Kandros' closet. Because he was still asleep she left the food on the counter with a note and went to operations without him. 

"I remember the Archon saying I was broken and to flush me out." Tyros admitted. "Why?"

Kandros was fuming when he woke to find Maggie had left without him. The security chief flew round his apartment tossing his uniform on before tearing out the door in the direction of the turbo lift. Once in operations a voice announced over the entire department that Maggie's presence was required in his office, a room a seldom used. 

Quinn shrugged slightly and shook her head. "Maybe nine of this is real and I'm still in cryo on the Hyperion." She told him with a chuckle.

Maggie appeared in Kandros' office,  looking the picture of innocence. She was carrying several files as she entered, pausing to set them on his desk. "You called?" She asked softly, glancing back at the door.

"Could be. Or your are dead and Kalihira has already set you on the path to your next life." Tyros said thoughtfully. He moved to the edge of a water front and looked down at it, frowning at the toxic water.

"Oh, so you do remember me?" Kandros asked from as his office door locked. "Maggie, you nearly died!" He told her sternly. "You shouldn't be back at work!"

Quinn silently picked up a small rock from where she was stood behind Tyros and tossed it into the water, laughing when it made her companion jump. "Maybe, or maybe I really do just have shitty luck."

"Tiran..Kandros...I'm fine. I feel great. I told you that last night. Why are you so worried about me?" Maggie asked trying to keep her tone low. She knew he didnt want anyone to hear them. 

"It's not so bad. We are together right?" Tyros snorted, frowning at the rock that was sinking into the deep water. "I must admit I worry about being alone."

"Have you eaten yet?" Kandros asked, and while it would seem somewhat off topic for Maggie, he had good reason.

"I don't." Quinn confessed, stood beside Tyros now, also watching the strange water. "If I'm alone... No one is hurting me." She breathed, surprised at how open she was around this alien.

"I had some nutrient paste I found in the fridge up here. Why?" Maggie asked, feeling like she was a bit broad sided by the whole thing. 

"I'm sorry I've been one of the ones to hurt you." Tyros confessed. He turned his head to look at her, his eyes watching her every move.

"Just nutrient paste? You didn't even have any coffee?" Kandros asked, hating that she had eaten the one thing that was universal to any species.

Quinn was still staring into the water, either not aware that she was being watched, or she didn't care. "Trust me when I say you haven't come close to hurting me." The young woman breathed as she subconsciously rubbed at her arm where there was a scar beneath the material that covered it.

"You told me last night not to." Maggie sighed, running her fingers through her hair. "Tiran...whats wrong? You're acting strange." 

"Who has hurt you?" Tyros asked her, turning to face her. "Why would they do such a thing?"

"Maggie, please sit down." Kandros breathed, getting his feet to gesture her into a chair on the other side of his desk. "You need to tell me something, have you been sick all your life? Is that why you needed Quinn's blood when you were ill the last time?"

Quinn didn't seem to want to answer at first, she barely knew this alien. But maybe that's what made him the best person to tell. "My family." She finally whispered at last, though now intentionally didn't look up at Tyros.

"You know I have. You figured it out even when I didn't want you to." Maggie admitted, hanging her head in shame. She wanted Kandros to think she was strong. She gone almost an entire year at hiding her disease from him. "The doctors told my parents that the only way to keep me alive was to manufacture a child with the perfect blood type...so they did. Quinn is perfect in every way. There is nothing wrong with her. And never will be." 

"Why would your family hurt you? I thought family was important to humans..." Tyros said gently, somehow knowing not to press her.

Kandros nodded his head, having simply wished to hear it from Maggie herself. "I'm so sorry." He breathed, realising he had most likely aggravated her condition by tossing Quinn off the Nexus. "But you don't have to worry any more, about needing her blood. You see..." He was struggling to find the words to tell Maggie what he had done. "How much do you know about the kett?"

"It is. I wasn't family to them." Quinn told Tyros with a little shrug. "Maggie was their daughter, I was just... I guess petri dish is the right analogy." She added with a snort. "I was made in a lab, engineered to be everything Maggie needed to keep her alive."

"Only what the pathfinder sends in her reports and what...happened to you." Maggie said, not sure she was going like where this was going. 

"How cruel." Tyros said softly. "I could...kill them for you...if you'd like?" He offered her a gentle smile, hoping to make her smile as well.

"They don't reproduce like you and I, or should i say our species, do." Kandros informed Maggie gently. "They take a body and mutate it, well, perhaps that isn't the right word, no they... They make it like them, but choosing which traits of the host they wish to keep." He added.

Quinn did manage a rather sad smile. "Don't think I haven't thought about doing it myself." She confessed, watching the rock she had tossed into the toxic water rise out again with the use of her biotics. "My father always wanted a son." She continued. "Don't get me wrong, he doted on on Maggie, she was his princess. But in order to keep her alive, their experiment needed to be of the same gender. I never had friends, went to school... Had a boyfriend, all the normal stuff. I was always in the lab, in case Maggie got sick."

Maggie began to squirm in her seat, her stomach churning. She didn't like where this was going at all. "And?"

"And how often was Maggie ill?" Tyros asked, pretty sure he already the answer.

"Our scientists have been researching this, they... Think they understand it, how to use gene therapy to make weaker genes stronger." Kandros continued, worried by the almost stern way Maggie was looking at him. "They used turian DNA to fix the faulty genes that were killing you. Maggie... You were dying, I couldn't let you go without trying!"

Again Quinn seemed afraid to answer. "Her sickness made her susceptible to other diseases, and at the same time resistant to the vaccines that kept other humans healthy. They would have to intentionally infect me, so my body would create its own antibodies, which they could then use to help Maggie." Quinn lifted the rock higher until it was eye level, when it suddenly crumbled into dust under the pressure she was exerting on it. "Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Maggie, none of this was her fault."

Maggie launched herself out of the chair and stumbled back toward the door. "I...i have to go before people start to talk..." She was out the door before he could say more. 

Tyros pulled her into his arms before she could protest, resting his chin on top of her head. "I'm so very sorry." He breathed. "No one should ever have forced themselves on you like that."

Kandros stared down at his desk, feeling the room was suddenly far too large without Maggie there with him. A part of him had prepared for this reaction, but it didn't mean it made it any easier, or less painful.

Though the feeling of being embraced this way was alien to Quinn, she didn't pull away. It did however explain why she kept people at arms length, even once she escaped her father, and why she hadn't exactly been devastated when Kandros threw her off the station. "Humans look weak to other species, but we're experts in causing suffering to our own kind." She breathed.

Maggie thrust herself into the rest of her day, refusing to answer calls from Kandros. When her day was over she left before the boss had even stepped from his office and made a beeline for her own apartment. 

"I've heard that. The Archon says it will destroy your kind completely. Will you let it destroy you?" Tyros asked her.

In Maggie's apartment there what passed for flowers here in the Andromeda galaxy. Kandros couldn't get roses until they had settled the golden worlds, and so he had asked angaran contacts what they sent their women. As it happens, they looked more like sorry dandelions.

"I don't have an answer to that." Quinn confessed quietly, her face still buried against Tyros's chest.
It was once again bad luck that someone had overheard their conversation when coming to inspect the crashed pod. Word would soon get back to the port that there was a human the kett would pay highly for.

Maggie locked her door and sat staring at the flowers the filled her apartment. She found herself wondering just how often Kandros had lied to her. He seemed to find it so easy.  

Tyros found himself tilting her chin up and pressing his lips to Quinn's. His entire body was alive with heat. He wanted to taste her. He needed her.

It had been hours since Maggie had finished for the day, and still Kandros had heard nothing from her. He was sat in Vortex, staring into a rather foul tasting drink. Things had gone to shit pretty damn fast.

A memory slammed into Quinn the moment she returned the heated kiss. She was on a planet, it was a hot jungle world where it rained almost constantly. There was the smell of burning debris, people were shouting for help. She saw a quarian visor lying abandoned on the ground, and then it was over. The young woman took a sudden step back, her lavender eyes staring up at Tyros for some kind of explanation for what she had just seen.

"Hello there..." an asari woman sat down next to him, her fingers dancing along his forearm. "I can't believe a handsome turian like you drinks in a place like this..."

Tyros stepped back as well, sure Quinn was disgusted with him. "Sorry." He whispered, hanging his head. "I had no right..."

Kandros looked at the fingers on his arm, then pulled it away to drink his glass to his lips. "Nowhere else to drink." He replied bluntly without looking at her.

Quinn was still trying to make sense of what had just happened. She could still feel the smoke choking her lungs as though she had actually been there. "You're from the milky way... aren't you?" She finally breathed.

Undeterred the asari's fingers went to his thigh. "Oh I can tell you somewhere else to drink." She purred. "We'll call it my place." 

"I don't know. I'm getting lots of strange memories... I don't see how...im a kett. As far as I know I always have been." Tyros confessed. "What would make you think any different?"

"Good luck with that." Kandros replied, removing her hand once more. "I'm not interested." He added, though his words were beginning to slur somewhat.

"When you kissed me, I... I saw something that wasn't one of my memories." Quinn replied, thinking she probably sounded crazy. "And I've heard you prey to Kalahira, that's a god of one of the milky way species." The more she said these things out loud the less Quinn was certain she was making sense. This man was undeniably kett, and yet... her gut was telling her he wasn't.

The next morning Maggie decided she needed to get more of her things. It was probably the worst mistake she'd ever made. She had no more than stepped inside his apartment when she began to find undrgarments that didn't belong to her. The horror came tearing into her as she entered the room and saw her lover beneath a long lean blue skinned body. 
Her stomach lurched. But to her credit she kept quiet as she shoved her things into a bag. 

"I was going to ask you about that..." Tyros confessed. "It was one of many things I was going to pester you with. Are you sure you didn't hit your head when we crashed?"

Kandros had drank to the point of almost blacking out. He had no memory of bringing the asari home with him, which meant her certainly had no memory of whatever wild night they had spent together. He had groaned somewhat when he thought he heard his door open, though moving right then was out of the question.

Quinn quickly realised that Tyros did indeed think she was crazy. "I'm not the one kissing people who are damn near strangers to me." she snapped rather defensively before stomping in the direction of the port.

Maggie shoved the last of her things in her bag, her chest on fire. She supposed she deserved this. After all, she was human and she had left him in his office. Her sister had been right all along.  
She would have made it out without incident if she hadn't tripped over kandros' suit and gone crashing to the floor.

Tyros sighed heavily but followed her, not sure what else to do. She was right. That didn't mean he had to like it. Or even tell her so.