He walked down to the memorial wall every day during his lunch break. On the Citadel it was easy to forget, even as the number of refugees on the docks grew, that the rest of the Galaxy was at war. The refugees were so carefully contained in temporary housing where the Citadel’s residents didn’t have to see them, but he didn’t want to look away.
Members of his species rarely lived more than thirty galactic standard years and he was already twenty. He was accustomed to death, just not this kind. The kind that took people screaming and bleeding from their worlds and left their loved ones clinging to the false hope of “missing” notices stuck to a wall. But he still didn’t want to look away.
There was a human woman always at the wall, her face in her hands, tears pouring over her fingers. It seemed like she never moved from that spot. On the fourth day he visited the wall, he brought her a container of soup from the modest food cart he ran in Zakera Ward. She looked up at him with eyes shining wet and thanked him. He finally understood what humans meant by “smiled sadly”.
On the fifth day he asked her who she lost. She turned to a vid lovingly placed on the wall’s ledge. Her husband, she said. Once again her face was in her hands, her back turned to him. He reached out and placed his own hand on her shoulder, feeling it shake under his palm. He would not look away.
