Massive Disaster 4 - Interlude VI

Interlude 6

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

White was clinical.

White was sterile.

White was… fucking everywhere, man.

This color, this non-color; whatever semantic bullshit you wanted to use for it. Zedd knew he was spending too much time in his labs lately, way way too much, and he didn’t need Nina to tell him that to feel it.

Which said a lot on its own.

Either way, the feel of all this white was starting to crawl under his skin in ways that made him want to repaint every one of his goddamn sub-labs something different. Don’t even know what I was thinking in the first place.

White was pretty much the color of hospitals, of places where things went to die. Maybe blue… baby blue? Zedd frowned for a second only to shake his head a moment later, the image already popping up ugly in his head. No, this is a lab, not a fucking nursery.

With a sigh, he tilted his head, focusing back on the actual point of today. All that broke the quiet around him was the low rhythmic hum of the large white cylinder just in front of him; the MELD suspension tank in all white-framed metal (his design, his specs, meant to be soothing but right now it just felt like a countdown timer he couldn't stop) and the soft steady beep of the biometric monitor attached to the thing.

One beep per second. Sixty a minute. Three thousand six hundred an hour.

God, that noise is annoying. Like, he hadn’t programmed it in. Like, all of these weren’t his fucking choices. Calm down, calm down…

He knew exactly what had him on edge, overthinking his own long-settled choices, and basically driving himself up a figurative wall. It was the exact same thing that had him this way for the last few days.

Blue…

His Baby Blue, Kira Bethany Varnes, floated in front of him, unconscious in an oversized tube full of bright blue semi-translucent MELD. Her blonde hair drifted around her head, a peaceful halo as she bobbed in the perfect stillness of suspended animation. 

Zedd tried to fight the smile on his face, watching her like that.

Tried and failed.

Even knocked out, still got that little tough girl face, huh, Combat Barbie? Wires and microscopic nanite infusion tubes, about as thin as spider silk, trailed from the tube itself and right into her body, connected to so many different points in her skin. 

His machinery. 

His design. 

And above all else, his fault, if this went sideways and fucked her up.

Arms crossed over his chest, Zedd stood there and let out another sigh, reflection a dark sharp silhouette against the glowing blue of the liquid. He wasn't paying attention to the monitors, her biometrics not his priority right now. He had the kids for that; ADAM and ANGEL doing their job and doing them with the expert awareness and precision that he expected of NAVIs. 

No, Zedd was watching her. 

This has to work. He clicked his tongue, arms folding tighter. It'll work. The math is sound. But the math was always sound until it met biology and biology was a messy bitch that didn’t give a shit about your equations.

Adele stood beside him, his skinny little Quebecois doctor friend clutching a datapad in her hands instead of her usual NicStic. She was twitchier than normal, which was normal when she went this long without her little deathsticks.

Unfortunately for her, his sub-labs had a very strict No Smoking policy.

Good ol' Aye. The worrier. Somebody has to be.

Because he couldn’t afford to worry, he had to be the one that kept a calm head at all times. 

"All vitals are stable," Adele’s voice came out a low murmur, reading out biometrics that he didn’t need. She was here, handling this, for her own piece of mind more than anything else. The NAVIs could handle everything, honestly, but this… this was a bit too personal for that. "MELD is stable and w-we're ready to begin the primary sequence."

His eyes stayed firmly on Kira, jaw tight enough his teeth were probably grinding. She looks so small in there. Goddamn biotic hurricane bad soldier girl. He’d never thought of Kira as small, even after his own upgrade, but now…

"Zee?" Adele's voice was sharper this time, cutting through quick before he could shut down his own spiral. "You're sure the simulations hold? Infusing Asari genetic material into a human… a human biotic too… that sounds insane, you know that… right?”

Zedd blinked in her direction. “...I know.”

“It’s j… just I've read the data three times already. What we’re looking at for potential cascade failure… it’s not a statistical rounding error, Zee."

Not a rounding error, no, but so small it was… was effectively a non-issue.

Effectively.

"Forget the cascade… if we’re actually talking catastrophic rejection, we’re hitting less than one percent, Aye.” His own voice came out steady, reassuring even. Fucking liar. “Let’s not bullshit over bullshit right now." You're not reassured at all.

As much as he wanted to deny it, that less than one percent felt like a canyon wide enough to swallow planets. "Not a rounding error, yeah, but so low that Kay didn't even flinch at the risk when I briefed her. Blue will be fine." He believed in it, believed in her. "MELD does what it does, it buffers the shock, facilitates the integration. It's designed for exactly this kind of massive genetic rewrite."

"But… this isn’t the Guardians, Zee," she pushed back, knuckles white where she gripped the datapad. "This isn't the Guardians. Not like what you did to yourself, to Caleb. Augmenting is one thing, but Asari genetics is a fundamental rewrite of her DNA. She won’t be fully human anymore, the potential for rejection, fo-"

Zedd sighed out loud, Adele going silent as he scrubbed a hand over his face. 

He knew.

Of course he knew. 

He also knew how much this meant to Adele but he didn’t need her telling him what he already fucking knew. It was one thing with the others, soldiers who'd signed up knowing the meat grinder they were walking into, who understood the risks in their bones. 

But this was Kira. His first real friend out here in this fucked-up future where everything was familiar and alien at the same time. Adele's oldest friend too, which made this whole thing even more complicated.

This was... a lot.

Yeah.

No shit.

He turned away from the tank finally, full attention on Adele now, forcing a calm he absolutely did not feel into his shoulders. "She hit a wall, Aye. Alliance training pushed her to the absolute peak of what human biotics can do, and it's still not enough." 

Zedd’s eyes narrowed. "She knows it. That's why she asked for this."

Those same narrowed eyes darted to a nearby tray, a small piece of tech sitting there after ANGEL removed it in a simple procedure. The small intricate tech that was Kira's L3 biotic amplifier, surgically removed maybe an hour ago, was still slick with bio-gel and looking weirdly organic in ways that made his stomach twist. "What she had to deal with was a crutch. A leash. So we're gonna do Kay a favor and take the training wheels off the nuke."

Adele blinked at him. "...that analogy makes no sense."

"I'm not a words guy, Aye." He gave a sharp nod. "I'm a solutions guy. Now, start it up.”

Her fingers hesitated over the datapad, just a fraction of a second.

Zedd met her eyes, gaze firm where hers wasn’t.

Taking a breath, Adele shook her head and the only doctor in the room pressed the sequence into action. The machinery around the tank thrummed loud for a split second, a new substance flowing from the infusion tubes, shimmering pearlescent-blue fluid Kai Leng had obtained for them from a mature Asari whose life wouldn’t go to waste.

"Let's get this done, Kay," Zedd nodded slow at the tank like Blue could hear him.

Minutes passed and nothing went wrong, both him and Adele simply watching as time passed. 

Nearly a quarter of an hour went by, both their gazes barely shifting an inch.

Then…

The first spasm, violent and full-body, made his eyes snap open wide, Kira shuddering like someone had hit her with a lightning bolt; biometric displays shrieking red across every monitor.

Fuck.

"Rejection spike!" Adele's voice was sharp with panic, fingers flying across the datapad, trying to parse the chaotic data stream scrolling past too fast. "Neural activity! I-It’s… not a complete bio-feedback cascade but it's, it's close enough!"

"Hold the line," Zedd said, voice coming out low and commanding as he placed a hand on the cool glass of the tank, eyes locked on Kira's unconscious form, willing her through this with sheer proximity like that ever worked. Come on, Blue, you’re not gonna do this. You’re stronger than this. "Her body just needs to accept the change. Shock to the system. Give her another ten cc's of the stabilization compound."

"Wh-what?" Adele sputtered, voice cracking on the question. "That c-could k-"

"Don’t question me."

Sucking in a breath, Adele pressed the button.

With a hiss to match the young woman in the lab coat, the thick MELD-based stabilizing compound flooded into Kira’s body. What felt like a lifetime, maybe another fifteen minutes, maybe more; it all passed by as Zedd watched the process.

He never took his hand off the glass, palm print fogging and clearing with each breath he forgot he was taking. Adele's fingers never stopped moving either, scrolling through biometrics in a constant read-out, face lit blue-green by the datapad's glow.

Finally...

Silence. Red lines on the biometric readout slowed down, the frantic red lines long since leveled out and settling into a new pattern; stronger, more stable.

Zedd blinked hard, eyes dry from staring too long without closing them, mind feeling like it had just sprinted a marathon at full enhancement. He looked at the finished project floating there, at his girl suspended serene in the MELD, the faint shimmer of her biotic field visible now even without equipment.

Something else was different about her, though.

Something very obvious.

...of course.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

First thing she saw was her own face.

Wait…is that my face?

Well, it looked like her face.

Laying on her side, Kira Varnes stared right into a polished mirror set into the wall of the recovery room, the woman staring back at her just wrong in all the ways that came with knowing your own face. 

Close, yeah, it was damn close.

It could have been her, but off by half a degree from the girl who'd gone under. Softer in ways that she didn’t really recognize, smoother too. The faint tracery of scars from childhood spent brawling over scrap parts on Ryland, gone. Every single one. Everything about her skin looked newer, like it hadn't spent a good chunk of her childhood years getting scoured by recycled air and half-choked by industrial dust.

…so this is what Asari DNA does, huh? Zedd had been honest with her when she asked him for something to make her biotics more powerful, had told her that he ‘didn’t have experience with biotics’ and that giving her psionics would most likely ‘fry your little blonde space marine brain to nothing’. 

He liked calling her that. Space Marine. Ever since she got back from N7 training, one of his funny little nicknames. Kira never understood why but then she never understood all of Zedd’s little quirks; all those tiny little jokes that made him smirk.

Unfortunately, he’d been dead serious about the Asari DNA. It was the only way he could think of to boost her biotics that he could reliably pull off safely. Apparently, asking him to become an expert in biotics just to build her a more powerful amp was ‘asking too much’ but merging her DNA with an entire alien species was ‘super easy, barely an inconvenience’.

That was just how he was.

Sighing, Kira sat up in the recovery bed, surprised that she was so limber and alert right after what was probably the most invasive procedure anyone had ever been in. Weird. Frowning, she leaned forward and stared right at the mirror for a second time.

…are my eyes… glowing?

They were.

They were glowing.

Bioluminecent and bright blue, the soft light coming from them was visible even against the fluorescence of the room, the same color of her biotics more than the normal blue of before, it was like… like looking right into an eezo core. 

Kira took a breath, body shuddering as newly soft skin felt air ripple against it. …wow.

It wasn’t just the air.

No, her biotics…

Her biotics; God, she could feel them. 

Her whole body was alive with them, almost every inch of her body just…

…fuck me.

She knew what biotics felt like. At least, she was pretty sure she did and by the time she’d finished Adept training with the Alliance, Kira had thought herself damn near an expert but… fuck meeeeee.

Eezo nodes were in the brain. Everyone knew that; every single human biotic knew that. They were in the brain and they conducted dark energy through your nerves and into the rest of your body.

Apparently, asari didn’t hold to that simple fucking truth because Kira could feel that same energy and pull she had only ever known in her head in almost every single part of her goddamn body. 

Her brain, her spine, her arms, her legs, her heart… fuck, even her gut.

Why? Why her gut?

She didn’t know, but she also didn’t want it to ever stop.

This was woven in deeper, threaded through her head and her veins and the very fabric of everything she was. It felt like power. Not the raw bucking-bronco power of her old L3 amp that she'd learned to ride hard.

This was a deep calm ocean of it.

Overwhelming.

Exhilarating.

And a little fucking scary too.

The Alliance N7 biotic looked down at herself, at her hands; at the callouses that no longer existed and the perfectly smooth skin that looked nothing like what she’d known. Somehow even her hard-earned muscles had been scrubbed clean away; her whole body feeling lighter for it, smoother and more balanced in a way she couldn’t put into words. 

The young woman waved one hand in front of her face, digits moving almost interdependently of each other as she did so. Huh.

She blinked hard, trying to parse the changes, catalog them into useful data, and that's when she saw it.

Her hair.

Not the bright blonde she'd always had, the color that came standard-issue with her the day she was born.

"But I didn't... dye..." The words came out rough, throat dry as Ryland dust. She hadn't dyed it in months, not since the attack on Arkadia, not since everything went sideways and there'd been better things to worry about than maintaining roots.

But somehow it was blue now. 

A deep vibrant cobalt from root to tip, the exact shade of her own biotics when they flared. She raised a hand to touch it slow, hair silkier and more lively than hers had ever felt before. …this shit come with a spa day too?

Before she could ask anymore questions, the door to the recovery room hissed open. A familiar figure walked in with a smile on his face; tall, dark, and infuriatingly calm as always as he held a datapad in one hand.

Her own Mr. V.

Two words left her lips. Not the ones she expected, not the confused questions boiling in her gut about why exactly she looked like some sort of pinup bimbo now. Just the first thought that popped into her freshly shampooed and conditioned head.

"...my hair?"

Zedd blinked her way, looking a little…

Well, not guilty, exactly.

Zedd never did guilty. 

If he ever did something really fucked up like blow up the Batarian homeworld, he might be able to do guilty but until then, she doubted it.

No, this was something close. More like… sheepish. "Slight complication with the Asari DNA integration," he said, voice in that lazy drawl that made everything sound half-assed even when it wasn't. "Gene-markers for pigmentation cross-wired with the biotic recalibration, I guess. Once again, hair color is an unexpected side effect… that I don’t understand."

She stared at him.

Then down.

At the long strands going all the way down to her chest.

Bright fucking blue, the way she'd been dyeing it for years now. To stand out, to be more herself, to mark that she'd made it out of Ryland and earned a place somewhere better. And now it was permanent, coded into her DNA, part of the upgrade that was supposed to prove she belonged at this level.

…I don’t hate it.

"No," she finally managed, voice somehow smoother and softer than she remembered, just like the rest of her. "It's... it's okay. Guess I'm still Blue, right?"

Her man blinked, a small smile spreading across his own face to match hers. “Yeah, Barbie. Still Blue.”