Chapter One

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Grumbling mutinously about asari over-engineering as his omni-tool scanned underneath his beaten up 2178 Caldala air car, Michael Rivers wished he could just go out and pay for a proper goddamn mechanic and not have to jerry-rig the piece of shit car for the third time this year.

Money was tight at the moment, but he supposed much of the galaxy was feeling the pinch following the Reaper War. Still, perhaps it was time to give up on this lost cause, take out a loan and purchase a new vehicle. Holding a debt would probably be preferable to plummeting from the sky and crashing in a ball of flames.

Exhaling, Michael stretched his arms and checked the time. It was about time when his daughter got home from a long day at school. He would have to get dinner going for both of them, which was an affair in itself. He wasn't exactly the greatest cook in the world, but apparently he did it well enough to keep the two of them from starving.

Sure enough, behind him he heard the sound of little feet pattering on the concrete of the garage behind him. It was all the motivation the father needed to push himself from out under the vehicle and smile up at daughter standing over him. To get that smile from her when she came home, well, it was certainly a high point of his day.

Today was different. Her mandibles remained locked close together, and she just stood there looking at him. It didn't take a doctorate in xenopsychology to see that the Aliani Rivers, his eight year would turian daughter was hurting.

"Ali?" he spoke up to her as he brought himself onto his knees and remained there just about eye level with the little girl.

Aliani remained steadfast in her silence. Michael blinked and did not push the subject any further. He had developed a winning strategy with her recently, and all it involved was staying silent and locking eyes on her. He did not speak or blink. He just waited until his girl would crack under the pressure; her father had placed on her.

So the two of them remained locked, staring at each other; Michael hated watching his girl stand there, attempting to remain standing there without tear ducts to shed tear over what it was that was bothering her. He watched as Aliani's mandibles started to click softly as her large frame - average for a turian child, but a foot taller than any human eight year old - shook. His lips curled into a smile which she knew was an expression he gave only to one person in his life.

Before he realized it eighty odd pounds of pointy turian dropped down on top of him. It was sharp, it was painful, and he wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. He reached out and pulled her tight into his arms and listened as she sobbed into his shoulder.

"Daddy," she mumbled into his arm. "Daddy, I do not want to go to school anymore. Everyone is mean. Sara called me boneface and everyone else joined in and I don't like them!"

Running his fingers against the back of her head in a slow circular fashion as he did since she was much younger, Michael inwardly nodded. It was his hypothesis that this day would eventually come, living on Eden Prime like the pair of them were doing.

Following the sledgehammer strike on Palaven, the Reapers diverted hundreds of ships from the main force and scattered them into turian space in a concerted attempt to divide the Hierarchy's defense of Palaven by forcing the Hierarchy to protect the worlds which were supporting the defense of the home world.

It worked.

At the beginning of the Reaper strategic shift, the turians were too proud to admit that the diversionary raids and conquests were weakening their position. They remained steadfast, but anyone living in reality could see they were wavering. To make matters worse, even as they started to crumble and the war situation grew desire by the day, the turians still diverted men and material to the weaker client species, even to the other Council species. Yet still, they never asked for help, no matter how precarious their situation got.

It was not until the events of Eden Prime, New Esperance, and seeing what a single turian could do with a little bit of help from an alien that turian high command swallowed their pride and spoke up, asking their allies to support the defense of their colony worlds. A millennia of military stoicism was being broken for the good of everyone. It might have indeed been for the best, but it didn't hurt any less.

One the first official meeting was made by General Galius Kalanis, the Commander who was assigned to organize the defenses of the colonies. The General had expected nothing but token support from his allies in the Alliance, who had their own problems on their own worlds. Who could really blame him for feeling that way? The war was one where the life or death of your species was on the line. The General was a cold realist in the face of the Reaper war. Humans would naturally want to protect their own. It was what he would do.

Yet in the face of this reality, the Alliance had offered no excuses. Even exiled from Earth, they did not debate against each other over the subject. The human general was an hour and a half late to his meeting. He wasn't nearly as presentable or groomed as General Kalanis was. Unshaven, and rumpled, General Grigory Rokossovsky of the 14th Army Group showed up at the meeting. He was late because he had to go buy the two bottles of Vodka – a dextro and a levo each - in each of his hands and asked but one question on behalf of his superiors:

"Where do you need us?"

The sacrifice of the 194th Light Infantry Division on Eden Prime and the subsequent destruction of a Reaper Dreadnought was an event the Alliance Military was not about to forget easily. Blood and victory would be repaid with blood and victory.

With the promise of fresh troops who but needed turian logistics to move the humans groundside brining probable jubilation to General Kalanis; with that the two men got drunk and for a short while they both tried to forget the horrors the war was inflicting on their respective races. Details on what happened next were sketchy and rumours, but apparently the two men went down to an Izakaya on the Citadel Presidium and caused a ton of damage. But that was all just rumour and hearsay.

The turians were a hard race to read, they would never admit to anything voluntarily; but Michael liked to think that it was this moment that finally ended all the serious fear and suspicions between human and turian peoples. It only took the death of billions, the siege of the Palaven and the exile from Earth, but they now stood together: They were now siblings defiant in the face of a galactic extinction event.

All of this was important to him, because it was this that Michael and Aliani crossed paths.

In the twilight of the Reaper War, the 213th Mechanized Division was dropped onto the turian colony world of Heltarius to act as the spearhead against Reaper forces on the world with the rest of the 13th Army the Alliance sent. The local military units fought as bravely as they could in the face of an overwhelming Reaper ground force, but they were definitely in need of the human presence. Michael could still remember the cheering when his unit broke through the Reaper siege on the capital of Heltarius, Katara, and began the three week long battle to reassert turian control over the world.

It was during this time, his armour platoon was sent forward to secure the settlement of Araktis as a staging ground for the next stage of the offensive. When they got there it was a bloodbath. The turian populace had put up a hell of a fight, and the Reapers decided they were too much of a trouble to pacify, so they sowed total destruction on them. The township was razed to the ground. For every live turian they found, five were found dead.

As horrifying as it was, Michael could not help but feel some sort of reverence to what he was witnessing. The people refused to lie down. They pick up whatever weapons they could find, whispered their farewells to one another and fought until the bitter end. They had no illusions what complicity to the Reapers would bring and instead, they chose their own ends.

He and his squad were sent out to secure a farm. The armoured personnel carrier they road in was uncharacteristically bumpy. It took them getting out seeing what it was. They had found that they were driving over a road full of Reaper corpses. When they reached the farm itself they were greeted with the sight of fifty plus corpses of men, women and children. The bodies were still fresh, a few hours at the most. All of the turians lying dead, died with their rifles either tight in their talons, or nearby their bodies. Such was expected from a people who had a nearly universal draft for all able bodied citizens.

Just as Michael was about to call it in, he heard a strange sort of noise through the roaring and howling of the fire being carried by the wind. When he had gone to investigate, he found a young turian child. She was filthy and covered in soot. She remained weeping at their side clutching onto the body of her mother. As he found out from her medical records, she was only three years old at the time.

It took some effort a few simple words in the turian language he picked up over the month he spent in turian contested space to convince her to let go of her parents. He held onto her tightly in his own arm, singing lullabies of his own youth as he rocked the exhausted child into a state of sleep. As soon as she was relaxed and slumbering, he extricated himself out of her tight grip and lifted her up into his arms. He carried her back to the APC, ignoring the stars of his squad mates as he laid her down in his spot.

He returned back to the bodies of her parents with a trench shovel as well as a couple of body bags, and went to work digging them out a grave to share. He only paused long enough to gather their personal effects from off them. The Father was named Lainius, the Mother, Solaka and the child was Aliani Vetis. The omni-tool and identification tags would be small mementoes for the girl to cherish someday when she was old enough to understand what had happened; that they loved her so much that they sacrificed their lives to keep her safe.

The ride back behind the lines to Araktis was a mostly quiet. The girl woke up and starting crying as she presumably remembered what had unfolded. She was back in his arms, unperturbed by the fact that he was an alien. He held her in his arms the whole way back.

When he arrived back to the local government, he brought the girl to the local government officials sent to oversee turian civilian matters. He brought her before several turians in charge of child management, who decided it was best to ship her off world. As they went to take her, however, she just lost it. She started screaming as though the child support workers were Reapers coming to take her away. She wrapped her talons around his neck so tight that they drew blood. She did not let go until he told them to back off her.

So the decision was made on the spot by the three adults. The child was clearly traumatized and refused to leave the human. The turians were… surprisingly empathetic about the matter at hand. Quietly they went to his CO and asked if they could spare troops to act as sentries to protect the growing refugee camps. General Cheong agreed, and the next thing he knew, he had been assigned to the detail.

It was a quiet posting compared to half a year he spent in near constant combat, but it was welcomed. It was in this time he slowly found himself building on the connection he had with Aliani. He did his best to reach out to every turian agency he could get a hold of to get information on Aliani's extended family, but nothing turned up. They had shared a similar fate to her parents. After weeks of endless queries, he just stopped searching and focused on her alone.

He wanted to give her back everything she had lost. Family, happiness and as she slowly started opening up again, and as he did to, it made him remember things he had wanted to forget.

The family he had lost on Earth.

At the time, he did know for sure. News from Earth was sketchy at best. It took until the wars end and his return home to learn that just everyone he had loved had died in the opening hours of the Reaper invasion of Earth, and the rest of them died in the months of occupation that followed. His wife, Michelle, Tanya and Sarah, his eight and nine year old daughters, his parents, his siblings... everyone was just gone, and he was still here trying to live with their ghosts and bring this baby girl back out of the misery she endured caused by this war at the same time.

The only way he could manage was to forget their faces… to pretend that they were only figments of his imagination... dream people who never existed anywhere else but in his head. That worked sometimes, but nowhere near as much as he had hoped. In the end the only thing keeping him going was seeing to Aliani's improving wellbeing.

From there, it wasn't much of a stretch for him to approach the child services with the intention of adopting her.

Naturally this didn't go over well, at least not at first. It wasn't long before he found himself a turian adoption case lawyer and the support of all the caseworkers who were overseeing the interactions between Aliani's interactions with him. They testified at the hearings on his behalf without pause of hesitation. It was a gesture of trust and faith in him that astounded him to this day. The judge handling the adoption hearing decided to take his word the case worker's word on it. Provided he could prove he could provide a stable life for her. He did, and the paperwork was processed before he knew it.

So now Aliani had a father again, he had a daughter again and together in the shadow of overwhelming loss, the two of them quietly built a life together… just the two of them, only for the two of them. Sure, there were minor inconveniences caused by the differences in species, but they embraced their differences with open hearts.

…And yes, naturally it wasn't long before they had nicknames for each other. Aliani was Bird Daughter, and he was Ape Dad.

"Daddy?"

Aliani's small flangling voice broke his misty eyed reflection. He found her to be standing back up, her arms crossed over her chest. Michael looked up and smiled at her. She did not smile back. The name calling she was enduring must have really been a bother for her. Wiping a hand with a cleanish rag, he reached out and took his eight year old by her talon and smiled reassuringly up at her.

"Nothing that they say is worth a moment of your distress, of your agony baby girl," he rumbled back, his hand touching against the side of her face. "You just need to be braver than they are."

The remark must have caught his girl off guard. Aliani tilted her head, mandibles flaring open as she tried to see if her Dad was just making it up as he went along… which he was, but that was beside the point. That was just how parenting went, and that went double for when you were raising a daughter from a separate race altogether.

"How?" she demanded, only needing one word to express how much she doubted him right at that moment.

Michael finally stood up, and towered over his daughter. He would enjoy this for as long as it lasted. It would not be long until the growth spurt happened and Aliani would be the one having to look down on him. He reached out and pressed his fingers against the top of her fringe.

"By going back to school with your head held high," he said back. "It will only keep getting worse if you let them think they have power over you. Don't let them have power over you."

The answer Michael had for her was not the answer she had wanted to hear. Aliani pushed his hand off his head and pouted at him. It was clear that she wasn't having any of this. He couldn't blame her as he recalled being picked on by bullies over stupid shit he couldn't even remember.

"But what if you are wrong, Dad?!" she squawked in outrage. "What if they don't stop?"

She left her angry question to linger between the two of them. Offering her an expression of warm understanding, that he took her worries seriously, he bent over. Her mouth was hung open, so Michael reached out and touched a finger against her chin, closing her mouth for her.

"If that happens, if they keep at it, then might I remind of your talons?" he breathed to her. "You'll have my permission to use them, then."

In silence, his girl stared at him, searching for any sort of deception. She would find none. Sometimes kids just had to fight and spill the bad blood before it festered. Besides, Aliani was young still. Without factoring her sensitivity and reluctance to cause trouble, he doubted very much any real harm would come to the poor soul who ended up on the wrong side of the talons.

Well, at least that was what he hoped would be the case.

Shoving his concerns about the potential Pandora's Box he opened, he watched as he brought a smile back to Ali's face. Once again she threw herself at him and hugged him once again. As he lifted her up and suppressed the urge to grunt so that the reality of Ali getting older was kept far from his thoughts, he carried his girl out of the garage and back to the house.

Quietly, Michael hoped that this would never end.

…

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This spiritual successor to Eden will be four, maybe five parts. I have another unrelated femtur x human male story on the back burner. Set on Noveria. Anyways, thanks for reading.