Chapter Text
The bass didn't play so much as it did conquer, invading the space between each vertebra in Tarquin's spine, claiming territory with ruthless efficiency. He stood at the edge of Purgatory's main floor, drink untouched in his hand, watching bodies sway and collide in what some might call dancing but what his tactical mind couldn't help but compare to the chaos of a battlefield, albeit one where the combatants sought pleasure rather than survival. Purple light bathed everything in an artificial twilight, as if the club existed in some forgotten space between day and night, reality and fantasy, war and peace.
Nine levels of writhing bodies surrounded him, their movements synchronized not with each other but with the primal rhythm that dominated the air. Tarquin felt the sound deeper than he heard it: a second pulse beneath his plates that vibrated through his chest cavity. The architects of this space had designed it with precision, the acoustics calculated to ensure that thought itself became a refugee, driven out by sensation. A clever strategy, he had to admit. In wartime, thinking too much was its own kind of death sentence.
Strobing lights punctuated the haze—electric blue, shocking pink—each flash revealing a different tableau of desperate celebration. An asari dancer executed a perfect biotic-enhanced twirl above the central platform, her body seeming to bend physics and the minds of onlookers to its will. Beneath her, a human-batarian couple pressed against each other as if trying to occupy the same physical space, hands exploring with urgency. Near the bar, a krogan laughed with thunderous abandon, slapping the back of a salarian whose slender frame nearly buckled under the friendly assault.
The air itself seemed charged with something beyond the artificial fog that periodically pumped from hidden vents. It carried molecules of sweat and spirits-knew-what-else from half a dozen species, the sharp tang of spilled alcohol, the subtle pheromones released by bodies in various states of arousal. All of it combined into a singular scent that Tarquin could only define as the smell of desperation disguised as celebration.
What was it about impending annihilation that drove sentient beings toward these temples of temporary oblivion? Tarquin sipped his drink finally, the turian brandy burning a path down his throat with familiar intensity. The reapers had come, just as that human Spectre had warned years ago. He recalled the first vid call with his father: a crackling feed from Palaven to his ship in the Arrae System after months of back and forth with Fedorian’s office and its new Reaper Task Force, incredulity giving way to the blunt exchange of information.
Because how else could you respond? An emotional response was one no one could afford. Now they harvested worlds with mechanical precision while the galaxy's inhabitants took refuge in moments like these—moments where music obliterated thought and physical pleasure created the illusion that death remained a distant theoretical concept rather than an ever-advancing certainty.
Perhaps there was wisdom in it. The ancient turian tactician philosopher Taetrus had warned about the necessity of abandoning consciousness when consciousness itself became unbearable. "In the face of that which cannot be defeated through strategy or strength," he'd written, “One must seek victory in the willful suspension of individual cognizance. For personal recognition is the enemy of victory and fear a barrier to action. Only through battle-contemplation of the collective telos will the spirits guide the momentum of the well-conditioned mind toward meaningful sacrifice."
Die for the cause, Tarquin thought dryly, watching an elcor sway in the center of a raised platform with surprising grace despite its massive bulk. He wondered if these revelers had intuitively grasped what philosophers had spent lifetimes articulating. Something had pulled even himself to the club, after all.
Around him, the patrons of Purgatory engaged in the most elegant form of denial. A group of Alliance soldiers, their uniforms discarded for civilian attire that couldn't quite hide their military bearing, took shots of something luminescent and blue. Their laughter carried an edge that suggested they'd seen combat recently—perhaps on Earth itself during the initial invasion. Nearby, a turian drew appreciative glances as she danced with lethal precision, her movements carrying echoes of combat training repurposed for display rather than defense.
They all knew what waited beyond the Citadel's protective arms. They'd seen the reports, heard the whispers, perhaps witnessed firsthand the inexorable advance of the enemy. Yet here they were, finding whatever comfort they could in the press of strange bodies and the temporary amnesia provided by alcohol and rhythm.
There were worse places to wait for the inevitable, he reasoned. At least in Purgatory, if the reapers arrived today, they didn’t spend their final moments waiting for their fates to be decided upon by unseen forces. They might not even notice. Might not hear the deafening blare of Sovereign class warhorns or be blinded by the neon lasers that would mark the last collective exhale of their insatiable appetites—if not satisfied, then at least sedated.
Tarquin envied them in their ability to surrender to the moment. He'd tried—spirits knew he'd tried. Three drinks in and still his mind calculated angles, assessed threats, planned routes of egress should the impossible happen and the reapers breach the Citadel's defenses during his shore leave. The music that liberated others merely provided a soundtrack to his anxiety, each beat echoing his own heart, a sonic reminder of time passing, of responsibilities waiting, of expectations unmet.
The 9th Platoon would deploy to Tuchanka soon. His platoon, under his command. Supporting the new Primarch's desperate bid for krogan support on Menae.
His father's bid.
The thought sent a fresh wave of tension through Tarquin's shoulders. General Adrien Victus—no, Primarch Adrien Victus, now—had ascended to leadership through a chain of indiscriminate death that had claimed the previous Primarch and probably a dozen of his designated successors.
Tarquin didn’t even know how many people had to die for their circumstances to change this rapidly and this consequentially. Hierarchy command had a clear and strict line of succession, but Tarquin didn’t know it. He doubted his father did, either. He snorted into his glass at the mental image of his father wearing uncomfortable traditional robes at an inauguration service. If he were to ever have one. If they were to survive this. In the midst of catastrophe, formalities had been dispensed with. Fitting, really. An unconventional ascendancy for an unconventional leader.
In the midst of civilization’s twilight, his father had become the face and voice of their people.
And what had Tarquin become? A lieutenant whose commission reeked of nepotism to his fellow officers, regardless of his actual qualifications. A son who could never quite meet the standard set by his father's accomplishments. Or his grandfather’s. Or his great grandfather’s, for that matter. A turian who secretly wished he'd been allowed to pursue architecture rather than military service, who sometimes sketched building designs in his private quarters when he should have been reviewing tactical reports. Who pulled phrases from ancient writers when writing his own reports. Because he couldn’t intuit what the others could. Because he knew they were too busy understanding the world around them to recognize obscure treatises and call his bluff.
He drained his glass, the alcohol warming his blood without loosening the rigid control he maintained over his thoughts. Around him, the parade continued. The club's patrons surrendered to pleasure with enviable abandon. An asari maiden whispered something to her human companion that made the woman's pupils dilate visibly even from where Tarquin stood. A drell in the corner moved with hypnotic fluidity, his scales reflecting the pulsing lights like living jewels, amplified by the electric pulses of the hanar tendrils that were draped over his curves scandalously. Two turians enacted an elaborate courtship dance that had ancient roots in their shared colony world, though here it served as prelude to a much more immediate consummation than tradition would dictate.
Everyone connected. Everyone forgot. Everyone lived as though death weren't methodically working its way through the galaxy's populated systems.
Everyone except Tarquin.
And, he noticed with sudden interest, a solitary turian at the bar.
The stranger sat hunched over a glass of something violet and untouched, his posture a study in deliberate disconnection from the revelry surrounding him. His plates bore the green-grey coloration of one of the outer colonies, warm and weathered, though which one Tarquin couldn't immediately place. Unlike the other patrons whose eyes fluttered closed in temporary ecstasy or darted about seeking potential partners, this turian's gaze remained fixed on his drink as if he were measuring the liquid rings formed by each punch of bass, as if they contained some truth that eluded the rest of the galaxy.
Here was another soul who couldn't pretend. Another mind that refused to surrender to the chemical and sensory onslaught designed to obliterate thought.
Despite the pounding music and the press of bodies that had begun to make the club feel uncomfortably warm, Tarquin felt a curious sense of recognition. Not of the individual (he was certain they'd never met) but of the isolation that surrounded him like a force field, visible only to one who generated a similar field himself.
Without conscious decision, Tarquin found himself moving toward the bar. What would he say? What could he possibly say that would rise above the din in a place where conversation was a casualty of acoustics and cognizance the enemy of sanity? He supposed it didn't matter what he said. Something about the stranger's isolation amid the performative hedonism of the club pulled at him with unexpected force.
Perhaps it was merely the implicit acknowledgement that if the galaxy truly stood on the precipice of extinction, being unable to lose oneself in mindless pleasure was a lonely position to occupy. Perhaps it was simply the turian instinct for connection with one's own kind in a crowded territory. Or perhaps it was the sudden, irrational certainty that this stranger might be the only other person in Purgatory who understood what it meant to carry the weight of thought in a place designed to annihilate thinking.
Whatever the reason, Tarquin moved through the crowd with purpose now, his path taking him inexorably toward the sad-eyed turian at the bar whose solitude mirrored his own.
"You're not dancing," he shouted over the relentless assault of the music. The words emerged louder than he'd intended, almost accusatory in their volume. The seated turian looked up, his mandibles tightening slightly in what might have been surprise or annoyance. His eyes, a shade of muddy and dark-ringed green-grey uncommon among their species, assessed Tarquin with a wariness that suggested he'd grown accustomed to expecting the worst from unexpected conversations.
"Neither are you," the stranger replied, his rich baritone voice carrying despite the thundering bass. There was something in his subvocals that Tarquin couldn't quite place—a harmonic quality that hinted at an upbringing beyond the Hierarchy. He’d heard similar dialects on shore leave before: stints in the Traverse just trying to sate his curiosity for life beyond the Hierarchy mold, beyond the reach of his father’s reputation. The turian gestured vaguely at the writhing crowd. "Not much dancing happening at all, really. Just vertical mating rituals with clothes on."
The bluntness startled a laugh from Tarquin. "Can't argue with that assessment. Mind if I join you?" He indicated the empty stool beside the stranger, then held out his hand. "Lieutenant Tarquin Victus."
Something flickered across the other turian's features at the mention of his name—recognition, perhaps, though not of Tarquin himself. The Victus name carried weight, especially now. The stranger's mandibles, adorned with simple violet geometric markings, relaxed slightly as he nodded at the stool.
"Lantar Sidonis," he offered after a moment's hesitation, a hint of distrust behind his words that came off somehow as disarmingly charming. As if it—as if names—still mattered now, let alone whatever interpersonal issues would preclude making one’s identity known in the midst of a war with the unknown itself. Though perhaps that was wishful thinking on his part; he couldn't hide from his own name.
The stranger offered his own hand, and Tarquin took it, offering it a firm shake with a jerk of his wrist. A strange ritual he’d somehow adopted on shore leave when outside Hierarchy-controlled space—from the humans, if he recalled correctly. Strange, but not unwelcome. He didn’t know why he offered it to another turian, but he tried to commit to the act, to broadcast confidence lest embarrassment settle in. He gave the rough fingers a squeeze before releasing them.
It worked: curiosity grazed the subvocals of the response. "And no, I don't mind. Not like I'm saving it for anyone."
Tarquin signaled the volus bartender, ordering another round for both of them.
"Actually," he said, leaning closer to be heard over a particularly aggressive electronic crescendo, his new conversation partner leaning away slightly, as if on instinct, studying him from the corner of his eye. "There's a table open in that alcove. Might be easier to talk without shouting ourselves hoarse."
Lantar studied him for a moment longer, browplates lowered with a question. Again, Tarquin tried not to think too hard about the fact that he’d already shown his cards: coming over here, asking for an open seat, feigning convenience, and then immediately offering something different, more intimate. Then the turian shrugged with a casualness that felt practiced rather than natural. At least he wasn’t alone in that.
"Sure. Why not."
They navigated through the press of bodies, Tarquin leading the way toward a recessed booth where the club's architecture mercifully dampened some of the sonic assault. The lighting was dimmer here, the purple haze softer, creating an illusion of privacy that the open layout couldn't actually provide. Still, it was better than the bar—intimate without being claustrophobic.
As they settled into the curved seating, Tarquin found himself suddenly unsure of how to proceed. What had possessed him to approach this stranger? What did he hope to gain from the interaction? Beneath his uncertainty lurked an even more uncomfortable question: was he simply seeking distraction from his own thoughts, making him no different from the revelers he'd been silently judging? Could he afford that luxury?
"So," the turian—Lantar—said, breaking the awkward silence before it could fully form, "Lieutenant Victus. That's a name that's been in more than a few news vids lately." He took a measured sip of his drink. "Any relation to the new Primarch?"
Tarquin stiffened slightly before he could suppress the reaction. Of course that would be the first question. It would be for the rest of his life, he supposed.
"My father," he admitted, then added with a wry twist to his mandibles, "Though I earned the lieutenant part myself."
"Didn't suggest otherwise," Lantar replied with unexpected gentleness. Something in his tone made Tarquin believe him, which was rare enough these days to be noteworthy. "Must be strange, having your father suddenly become the voice of the entire Hierarchy."
"Strange doesn't begin to cover it." Tarquin found himself saying more than he'd intended, still shouting over the thrumming and repetitive beat. "One day he's General Victus, respected but controversial for his unorthodox tactics. The next, he's thrust into political leadership during the worst crisis our species has ever faced—or hell, any crisis any species has ever faced." He traced the edge of his glass with a talon.
“Should I offer my congratulations or my condolences?” He watched Lantar's fingers fidgeting around his drink, his keel swaying ever so slightly to the beat of the music. Tarquin wondered if it was resignation or nerves. He offered a timid flare of his mandibles, pushing past the ennui he’d exhibited at the bar.
"Both, maybe,” Tarquin returned the smile, easing through the jitters of talking with a new person. Let them come; they were a welcome distraction. “And everyone who looks at me is suddenly calculating how much of my position comes from merit versus nepotism. As if my father and I were both just brought into being, fully fledged, yesterday. The Hierarchy has a short memory sometimes.”
Lantar nodded, his expression thoughtful. "People love their simple narratives. Makes a chaotic universe feel more manageable." He gestured toward the dance floor with his glass. "Like them out there, pretending that if they just move fast enough, drink enough, fuck enough, they can outrun what's coming."
"And yet here we are, right alongside them," Tarquin observed. “And we’re not even pretending.”
"Maybe we're just bad at it." Lantar's mandibles flared in what might have been a smile, though it didn't reach his eyes. "Some turians can't follow the steps no matter how simple the dance."
Despite the cheesy words, the metaphor resonated with unexpected clarity. The earnest delivery made it fall all the harder on Tarquin’s ears. He often wondered whether all turians struggled to fall in line as much as he did. He did it, sure, he played the role—but it was never automatic. Did his men have to pretend to follow his orders without question, the way he pretended to know how to give them? Or was it simply mechanical, as easy as breathing?
Hiding behind a swig of his drink, he studied his companion more carefully, noting the subtle stress fractures in his plates that spoke of hard living, uneven healing, and a lack of medigel access during recovery. The way his colony markings were so faded they seemed deliberately obscured, as if he'd tried to distance himself from whatever heritage they represented. He wondered what this man’s experience was with falling in line. Or out of it. He certainly wasn’t part of the Hierarchy, Tarquin decided, but that didn’t mean he was free of the obligations of their kind—whether innate biology or self-imposed cultural expectation. Another thing he was unsure of.
He watched Lantar’s nostrils twitch. He wasn’t handsome—not exactly—but he wasn’t hard to look at, either. His features were intense, softened by the charm of being perpetually disarmed when he spoke. Cute, in the way all prey animals are cute. He was maybe a few years older than Tarquin himself. Nice waist, he caught himself observing. Nicer hands. He watched them idly tracing the rim of his glass with practiced indifference.
"Where are you from?" Tarquin asked, sensing this might be sensitive territory but curious nonetheless.
"Invictus,” Lantar took a longer drink before continuing. “Not that it matters much now."
His subharmonics carried a complex undertone of loss as his eyes trailed somewhere beyond Tarquin, more pointed than simple reverie. Following his gaze, Tarquin looked over his shoulder toward the club entrance. To an enclave where, upon their arrival to the club, one of his men had pointed out none other than Aria T’Loak, “Queen of Omega,” lounging with her legs crossed as if she were half a galaxy away flexing her tyrannical grasp over the Terminus Systems and not displaced by the same war that threatened them here.
"Omega?" Tarquin couldn't keep the surprise from his voice. He’d heard the outer cluster accent in the deep voice, but somehow hadn’t expected that the contemplative turian in front of him would be from the heart of no-man’s-land. Meeting Citadel defectors on Omega—sure. But a trajectory from Omega to the heart of Council space was, he assumed, much less common.
But, his thoughts took on his father’s raspy tones, echoing the brief call they’d shared after the impromptu ascendancy of the new Primarch, Unprecedented times…
Lantar grimaced. “The one and only.”
Tarquin studied Lantar’s face again: the scar-pocked plating, the perpetually lowered brow plates, the mandibles that never quite stopped wavering around his face. Here was someone too mired in the past to let the unknown of tomorrow burden him. In the face of the unrelenting demands of his own Tomorrow, that intrigued Tarquin. He leaned in closer across the round table, cradling his drink between his hands. “And how does a colony kid make his way to the heart of galactic government via Omega?”
“You mean how’d I get here from the ass end of the galaxy?” Lantar paused, pushing his drink away as if the thought of drinking it made him nauseous. “I made a mistake.”
His posture changed subtly, revealing the tension gathering beneath his carapace.
"Several, actually." He met Tarquin's eyes directly for the first time all night. "I got some people killed. Good people who trusted me. Then I ran."
The confession hung between them, raw and unexpected. Tarquin had anticipated deflection, not a direct acknowledgment of failure. He found himself respecting the honesty, even as he wondered at the specific circumstances.
"We've all made decisions we regret," Tarquin offered, thinking of his own missteps during training exercises, the simulated casualties that would become real ones soon enough on Tuchanka.
"Not like this." Sidonis shook his head. "I didn’t just fuck up. I betrayed everything I claimed to stand for. Got my entire team killed. Ten people… My friends. My—“ He stopped abruptly, mandibles tight against his face, still for the first time. "Someone I cared about nearly killed me for it. Tracked me down, hunted me for sport… Had me in his sights. Would have been justified for it, too."
Tarquin leaned back into his seat, feigning a relaxed posture. "Yet here you are."
"Here I am," Lantar spread his hands in a gesture of fatalistic acceptance.
“So why’d you do it?” He couldn’t help himself from saying it any more than he could help the lurch in his gut when Lantar barked out a self-flagellating laugh.
“Why’d I betray the man I loved and let all of our friends—our family—die?”
“Sure.”
“Call it an elaborate death wish,” Lantar swirled the colorful drink in front of him for a moment before answering, watched the tiny whirlpool forming at the center. “We were… I was mixed up in something I shouldn’t have been mixed up in. At first I thought I was doing it for Omega. And then I thought I was doing it for him.”
His words didn’t make sense, but the look on his face said everything.
“I think I was doing it for me,” his eyes wandered to the dance floor, watching but not seeing. “I was jealous, I was scared. I wanted so bad to get off that rock… and now here I am.”
“Victory at any cost, huh?”
“Talk about a house in a fucking Invictus jungle,” Lantar’s eyes flicked up to Tarquin’s, crest tilting in a brief display of resignation. “Did I mention I was born in one?”
Tarquin smiled at the self-deprecating joke before leaning back to regard the turian in front of him. His tongue darted out between his mouthplates, tracing their contours with careful precision. An old habit he’d picked up from Victus, Sr.: to broadcast contemplation, investment, professional responsibility. He’d always thought his father looked embarrassingly cool when he did it, and he’d enjoyed the way the display made him feel like he was being taken seriously. As a child, he’d run into his father’s office with a drawing he was working on, Adrien leaning back in his chair from what he was doing to squint earnestly at the lines on the page with a cluck of his tongue and a “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Tarquin didn’t know why he thought of that now, here, in the cradle of thumping bass and swaying bodies, a mass ritual of prayer for divine intervention.
Then again, he supposed, you don’t expect to get a moment for introspection at the precipice of the apocalypse, in limbo, stranded between past and future. And he had a feeling Lantar needed to feel heard, considered without judgement, with that same quiet contemplation.
He folded his forearms across the surface between them, pressing his keel against the edge of the table.
“So what did you come here for then, Lantar Sidonis?” he yelled over a crescendo in the club music. He kept his tone to the practiced and playful cadence of battlefield banter.
"Where else am I supposed to go?” he eyed Tarquin out of the corner of his eye. “Death didn't want me.”
“No dying for the cause for you,” Tarquin nudged him with an elbow that was too familiar for having shared exactly half a drink together. The dark amusement weighing Lantar’s features, however, urged him to continue. He had a feeling no one had given him the opportunity to tell his story, let alone to be met with good humor. “How fatalistic.”
“You’re telling me—turned myself in to C-Sec afterward, but they released me, too. ‘No jurisdiction over crimes committed on Omega.’" He made a sound that might have been a laugh in another context. "Can't even atone properly."
The music shifted to something with a slower, more insistent rhythm. Around them, the dancers adjusted their movements accordingly, bodies pressing closer together as the tempo demanded greater intimacy. Tarquin supposed for someone like Lantar, the reaper threat might itself feel like divine intervention. With his death twice deferred, he was waiting for someone to force his hand, to end it all.
“That why you’re so honest?” he pushed. “You looking for a confessional? Someone to get you on your knees?”
Something flashed in Sidonis’s eyes, his browplates twitching ever so slightly, his jaw wavering somewhere between a smile and a grimace as Tarquin met his gaze.
“Or are you still waiting for someone to take the shot?”
Lantar laid his hands against the table, the handsome, thick fingers twitching against the thrumming beat of the music. He didn’t break their eye contact. “Maybe both?”
Tarquin found himself leaning closer, ostensibly to hear better over the fresh assault of melody he hadn’t yet figured out how to filter out. He wondered at the unspoken circumstances of Lantar’s failures, at his need for martyrdom. He respected the commitment to the truth, his willingness to admit that he wasn’t cut out for something. To try something new. He wondered what character trait it was that this self-proclaimed loser had that he lacked. And as he opened himself up to the sad man in front of him, made himself available, ever the picture of turian service, he wondered: if Lantar was a failed martyr, what did that make him?
"What about you, Lieutenant?" Lantar interrupted his musings, his own posture mirroring Tarquin's, downing his drink and then closing the distance between them incrementally. "What’s got the Primarch's son navel-gazing on his shore leave? Besides the obvious galactic annihilation hanging over everyone's crest."
Tarquin considered deflecting, offering some sanitized version of his concerns. There was no shortage of excuses. Instead, he found himself matching Lantar's honesty with his own.
"I never wanted to be a soldier," he admitted. "I wanted to design buildings, not blow them up. But in the Victus family, the military isn't a choice—it's an expectation." He gestured vaguely at his uniform. "I'm competent enough, but, as my father would say, ‘Your heart's never been in it, Tarquin’... And now, he’s the Primarch. Every decision I make carries his reputation along with it. I don’t want to let him down."
"The weight of legacy," Lantar observed. "At least you have one—at least you know what you have to do."
"A mixed blessing." Tarquin sipped his drink, buying time, wishing he wasn’t staring at the bottom of the glass. "My father’s never been what you would call a conventional leader… I'm shipping out to Tuchanka soon. Leading the 9th Platoon on a mission that could determine whether we get krogan support for Palaven. If I succeed, everyone will say it's because I have my father’s luck. If I fail..." He left the sentence unfinished.
"If you fail, you'll have company in the ranks of plenty of good turians who couldn't measure up," Lantar said without mockery.
“Like yourself?” Tarquin prodded.
“I’m not a good turian.”
Tarquin’s mandibles flared out in a teasing display. He didn’t know why he continued to push. “And yet here you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do.”
Lantar’s head tilted slightly, meeting Tarquin’s gaze with a challenge, a twinkle gracing the sad eyes. They were sitting closer now than Tarquin had realized.
“Are you going to tell me what to do, Lieutenant?”
Tarquin closed the gap between them, a nervous talon just barely grazing a finger of the turian in front of him. “Have another drink with me.”
