Chapter 1: Wolf at Your Door
Chapter Text
There’s a holo-poster on the wall right inside the Calypso’s airlock. As the hatch door closes and hisses sealed behind Ashley, the projection on the poster changes from the skyline of some mega-city – maybe it’s on Earth, maybe a colony – to an Alliance recruitment poster.
Ashley recognizes the face in the holo, only because his face has been everywhere since he was inducted as a Spectre six months ago.
In another universe – one where Torfan hadn’t happened – there’d be a very different face on that poster.
Someone snorts behind her, and she turns her head just as Shepard pulls his helmet off, resting it in the crook of his arm. He blows a stray curl from his forehead before shooting a smirk in her direction.
“At least they picked someone hot.”
Ashley shakes her head and rolls her eyes at his back as he strides ahead to inform the Calypso’s captain, a middle-aged human man with a very sour look on his face, that everything will be fine as long as they cooperate.
“Pirates,” the captain sneers. “Do you have any idea who this ship belongs to?”
Shepard rests his hand on his hip. “Do you have any idea how little I care?”
The captain’s eyes land on the arm of Shepard’s hard-suit, and his Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows.
He’s finally figured it out, then.
Years ago, when Ashley had first joined Shepard aboard the stolen Normandy, he had painted over the red and white stripe of his hard suit. Ashley had helped. It felt fitting at the time, a cathartic way for them both to bury the ghosts of Torfan. It’s beginning to flake off in spots, bits of red and white showing through like blood and bone. The faded outline of where he’d pried the N7 emblem off the chest plate is visible at short range, like an echo of a past he’s tried desperately to put behind him.
A holo-poster of the Alliance’s new golden boy and first human Spectre in their hall, the disgraced Butcher of Torfan standing in their helm. No wonder the Calypso’s captain looks a little green around the gills.
“We’re just here to… relieve your vessel of extra weight,” Shepard explains, gesturing in the captain’s direction. “Sit tight, don’t get on my nerves, and we’ll send you on your way before you can pull that stick out of your ass.”
The captain looks like he wants to argue further, but then the hatch hisses behind Ashley and his eyes go wide.
She doesn’t have to turn around to know the rest of the boarding crew has arrived, and he’s probably spotted EDI.
Tali comes to a stop at Ashley’s side. “Keelah. This is a pleasure vessel? The flotilla could fit ten families in here.”
“Welcome to the world of the uber rich, Tali,” Ashley mutters.
The Calypso is a swank ship. A yacht on a sea of stars. Size-wise it’s probably no bigger than the Normandy, but nothing about it is particularly functional. After securing the pilot and the captain in the helm, Ashley follows Shepard into a lounge the size of the Normandy’s CIC.
“Normally I’d ask for permission before I tie someone up,” Shepard tells one of the inhabitants of the lounge as he does just that, using eezo cuffs that are a leftover from Garrus’ C-Sec days. The woman turns red in the cheeks, like she isn’t sure what to make of him.
Ashley splits off from Shepard after securing the lounge, instead accompanying Tali to the mess hall – correction, dining hall – to do more of the same.
Ten minutes later they have all the occupants of the Calypso in custody, without anyone having to reach for a gun.
Ashley opens one of the cabinets above the sink. She snorts, pulling out a piece of stemware and holding it to the light. It casts rainbows onto the table nearby. Something tells her she could send one of her sisters to college with whatever this thing is worth.
She hums, hefting it in her hand, tossing it in the air a couple of inches, then catching it.
Someone behind her gasps indignantly.
“That’s Armali crystal.”
Ashley turns, giving the speaker a curious glance. He looks to be about Sarah’s age, though Ashley is of the mind that no one that young should have such an impressive scowl. His clothes look as expensive as the stemware she’s holding. Passenger, then, not crew. Just here for a good time. He returns her glance with a glare that might have meant something if he wasn’t tied to a chair and she wasn’t armed.
“That so,” she says, then louder, “Hey Skipper! Can I take this and drink my morning coffee out of it?”
The captive rich boy looks pained at the thought.
“Chase your dreams, Williams,” Shepard replies from another room.
Ashley throws their captive a wink, ruffling his hair as she walks by. He sputters something in a language her translator doesn’t pick up. Probably a good thing.
“Do you have any idea who owns this ship?” he yells. “He isn’t going to take this lightly!”
She waggles her eyebrows at him and hangs a corner to peek inside a recreation room. Another couple of passengers are trussed up on a sofa looking more pissed off than scared.
Mission accomplished, then. They aren’t here to hurt anyone, after all.
From behind a long bar, Tali crows triumphantly, standing and holding something shiny and expensive looking in her slender hands.
“Look at this!” she says, hefting the data-pad sized object in Ashley’s direction. “I could feed the flotilla for a week if I sold this on the black market.”
The occupants of the sofa look appalled. Tali squats back down and continues to rummage.
The Calypso doesn’t have a forward battery. But it does have defensive capabilities, and all the maintenance that comes with it. That’s where she finds Garrus, looting the small arms locker the Calypso maintains in order to stay above board with the law.
“Anything fancy?” she asks.
He peers over his shoulder briefly, then holds up a pistol that Ashley would have to sell a kidney to afford otherwise.
“I don’t think any of these have even been fired.”
“Probably not,” Ashley agrees. “These ships aren’t even supposed to be out here. But leave it to rich people to venture where they shouldn’t.”
Garrus’ mandibles thrum in amusement. “To the benefit of us.”
The plus side to working in the Traverse is the lack of Alliance and Council patrols. The downside is that scores like this come once in a blue moon. Dumbasses with more money than sense taking their expensive ships out for a joy ride in the Wild West of the galaxy.
On her way back to the helm, Ashley passes Liara heading for the airlock, her arms filled with data-pads. One slips from her grip and clatters to the ground. Ashley crouches to scoop it up and hand it back to her. Liara heads back through the airlock to the Normandy with a grateful smile.
Ashley smirks. Leave it to Liara to look for books and knowledge while the rest of them loot the ship for anything worth credits.
Outside the entrance to the helm, EDI stands like a sentinel, successfully making anyone with ideas of fighting back think twice.
She’s wearing a geth prime today, and has to hunch to go through most doorways, but when boarding a ship, it’s the ideal platform.
“Hello, Ashley.”
When Tali insisted on lugging a deactivated geth prime on board with the idea of making a ‘combat platform’ for EDI, Ashley was admittedly a bit on the fence about the idea. It was a mind fuck hearing EDI’s feminine voice coming out of a hulking geth, but she was useful as hell in a fight.
You got used to it. Eventually.
“Hey, EDI,” she replies, nodding towards the door. “Boss man in there?”
Her flashlight head wobbles in a nod. “Yes. I believe he is having Jeff help him set the Calypso’s autopilot course for the Arcturus relay.”
Ashley grimaces. Shepard isn’t exactly known for his tech skills, unless beating things into submission counts.
“I will step in to assist if I need to, but the helm is small, and Shepard said he felt ‘claustrophobic as fuck’ with me in there.”
Ashley rolls her eyes, palming the lock. The door slides open to reveal a helm that Joker would be jealous of. It’s not big, like EDI said, but the pilot and co-pilot's seats look plush and barely used, and the haptic controls would make Tali squeal in excitement. And the view. Even better than the skylight in Shepard’s cabin on the Normandy, everything above her stares out into the stars.
All of this is lost on Shepard, who looks like he wants to punch something. And depending on how the next few minutes go, he just might.
The Calypso’s pilot stands off to the side, not tied up, but the look on Shepard’s face is probably doing a lot of the leg work in convincing him not to try anything.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Shepard,” Joker is saying over the public comm. “There should be a green indicator flashing. You need to hit it to input the course.”
“Everything is fucking green!” Shepard retorts, throwing a hand up helplessly.
There is, indeed, a lot of green on the controls.
His helmet is off and sitting on the co-pilot's chair, giving Ashley a front row seat to his infamous scowl. His hair is a mess of brown curls from being trapped in his helmet while they took control of the Calypso. He crosses his arms over his chest as Joker begins sputtering something about ‘hobbling over there to do it for you then’.
Ashley thinks she spots the particular control Joker is talking about, but Shepard is going off again about ‘not being a god damn engineer’ and ‘who makes shit all the same color anyway’.
If there’s one thing she’s learned about Eric Shepard over the years, it’s that he does not like to be told he’s wrong.
The Calypso’s hapless pilot, however, does not know this, and reaches out to point at a flashing green indicator as Shepard and Joker continue to gripe at each other.
The glare Shepard gives him is one hundred percent The Butcher of Torfan. The pilot shrinks back in his seat.
Shepard smacks the indicator, and a course trajectory interface materializes in front of them.
“Ok, got it,” Shepard says, the problem instantly forgotten, and Joker groans, but gives his next set of instructions.
The rest of it goes off, thankfully, without incident, and after the Calypso’s autopilot is set to take it to the nearest relay, Shepard hands the pilot over to EDI so she can put him with the rest of the passengers.
The Calypso will arrive in the Arcturus Stream, relieved of its ‘extra weight’, but with all its passengers intact.
A little poorer and angry as hell, but unharmed.
All in a day’s work.
Ashley and Shepard watch EDI haul the pilot away.
“I thought pleasure cruisers were warned about pirates in the Traverse. Why doesn’t anyone listen?” Ashley says with a smirk.
In an instant, the scowl slips off Shepard’s face and he snorts out a laugh, clapping her on the back.
“Let’s hope they never do,” he says, and heads back through the airlock to the Normandy.
The longer she lives on the Normandy, Tali realizes it isn’t all that different from life on the flotilla. The individual cannot thrive if the whole doesn’t.
Several weeks ago, they boarded a turian corvette separated from its wolfpack. Tali was nursing an infection from a suit breach after a scuffle with batarians and couldn’t board with the rest of the crew, but Ashley came back with a case of dextro meal ingredients.
Food she didn’t eat but knew Tali and Garrus needed.
During the next mission, Tali found a rare scope for Ashley’s rifle. Ashley hugged her so hard Tali thought she might get another suit breach.
Even Shepard, who is about as selfish as one person can be at times, cares more than he lets on. In his own way, at least. He had, after all, saved her life from Fist and his thugs on the Citadel, and though it had taken convincing from Ashley for him to allow Tali on the Normandy to complete her pilgrimage, he had given in, and Tali weaved herself effortlessly into the fabric of their crew.
If she’s being honest with herself, she’s in no hurry to return home.
She crouches down to sift through the growing piles of tech, sorting them between items she wants to sell, items she wants to take back to the flotilla, and the newest category: items she gives to EDI. The drone interface is for EDI, while the top-of-the-line water reclaimer will go to the flotilla. But the omni-tools she took off the passengers of the Calypso, now wiped, will be in Omega’s black market within a few days.
Tali will be the first to admit she was hesitant when she joined the Normandy and found its crew living so casually with an unshackled AI. To her surprise, no one else on board seemed worried about the consequences.
During her first few days aboard the Normandy, she observed the crews’ interactions with EDI, and EDI’s interactions with them. EDI reminded Ashley of the upcoming birthday of one of her sisters. She scoured the extranet to find a physician for Joker and helped funnel in enough funds to cover his treatments. She read books and reports out loud to Shepard while he exercised or paced his cabin because he’s incapable of sitting still.
As for Tali, EDI had inquired about making adjustments to Tali’s chosen quarters, adjusting the temperature and humidity to make her more comfortable. To make it feel like home.
Later, on her first mission with the Normandy’s crew, Tali disabled a geth prime, drug it back to the ship, and helped EDI overtake its platform.
Shepard had nearly put a hole in her the first time he saw a geth walking the halls with EDI’s voice, yelling words in two different languages that Tali’s translator didn’t pick up and she had to ask Ashley to translate for her later.
After the initial shock, it didn’t take Shepard long to realize how helpful having a geth prime on their side could be. But he continued to fuss about how much room she took up in that platform, so Tali took it upon herself to collect a… wardrobe for her, as Ashley calls it.
And despite the fact that he grumbles each and every time Tali comes on board with another deactivated synthetic or a piece of tech to augment a previous platform, Shepard continues to allow her to fill her quarters as she sees fit.
She passes EDI in the hall on her way to the mess hall for breakfast. EDI’s wearing a LOKI mech today, her ‘shipside’ platform that Tali had rescued from Shepard’s wrath on Illium.
“Good morning, Tali.”
“Good morning, EDI,” Tali replies. “I think I have everything I need to add a drone interface to your prime platform. I should be able to start working on that today.”
“That would be very helpful,” EDI says.
It’s Ashley’s turn to cook breakfast this morning. Tali exits the lift on the crew deck to the smells and sounds, her stomach instantly rumbling.
The members of the crew that can cook take turns. Shepard and Joker are banned from any appliance that produces heat, but the rest of them pitch in. Tali and Garrus are learning to cook for the non-dextro portion of the crew, and the rest are learning to cook for them.
There are two meals set on opposite sides of the table, with plates and utensils next to them so everyone can help themselves. The dextro side is smaller, obviously, but looks and smells delicious. There’s also a pot of coffee and dextro tea.
Tali exchanges morning pleasantries with Liara and Garrus as she reaches into a cabinet to grab her mug. The cabinet is filled with plain white mugs, but each crew member also has their own signature mug that no one else is allowed to touch. Tali’s is a Fleet and Flotilla mug Liara found for her on the Citadel.
Ashley’s typical mug is white with a black silhouette of a coffee bean and the words ‘fueled by caffeine and spite’ on it, but today she’s drinking her coffee straight out of the Armali crystal goblet she’d gotten from the Calypso.
Liara looks slightly off put but keeps her opinions to herself.
Shepard is the last to enter the mess, going instantly for the cabinet and pulling out his mug. It’s white and in the vague shape of an animal Ashley had referred to as a ‘unicorn’. The handle is shaped from the animal’s tail and in the colors of a rainbow. A small head juts from the other side, complete with a gold horn in the center.
According to Ashley, she had picked it out for him as a joke, but Shepard drinks from it every morning. Tali doesn’t quite understand what’s so funny about it, but it seems to entertain Ashley and Joker.
Shepard slips into the empty seat next to Joker, reaching for the caddy in the middle of the table that contains cream and sugar. He begins to pour both into his coffee until the color changes from black to nearly white.
Joker watches him with a horrified expression.
“It’s impolite to stare, Joker,” Shepard says evenly, taking a sip from his mug.
Joker scoffs, pulling a plate loaded with bacon towards him and snagging two pieces. “No matter how long I know you I’ll never understand how you can drink…that.”
A slow smile crosses Shepard’s face. He raises the mug to his lips again and takes a noisy, theatrical sip.
Tali takes a biscuit from the plate in front of her and Garrus. “I’m looking forward to going back to Omega,” she says. “I found some items on the Calypso I think I can sell for a good number of credits.”
Joker hums thoughtfully, pulling the plate of eggs towards himself and Shepard when Shepard waggles his fingers at it. “Omega. My favorite. I’ll make sure to pack some antibiotics.”
“Don’t be a party pooper, Joker,” Shepard says through a mouthful of eggs. “I saw you give a drell the stink eye last time we were in Afterlife because he ‘stole your seat’.” He makes air quotes around the last three words.
Joker scoffs in mock indignation. “I have to make my claim somewhere, Shepard. You never take us anywhere nice.”
Shepard bops him very gently upside the head. “I gave you a ship to fly when the Alliance drummed you out for stealing their prototype frigate, you ungrateful ass.”
“And I thank you for stealing this one from Cerberus after the Alliance got their first baby blown the fuck up,” Joker replies with a mock bow.
Despite his bluster, Joker has embraced the life and style of being a pirate. Humans have a different relationship with the title than quarians, and Tali had to ask Ashley a lot of clarifying questions, especially after she walked into the mess one morning to find a giant flag draped across one wall, black with the white silhouette of a skull and crossbones.
But Shepard just grinned when he saw it hanging in the mess, where it remains to this day.
After the flag had appeared in the mess hall, Joker had threatened to get Shepard a pet ‘parrot’, to which Tali had more questions for Ashley about what a parrot was and how that related to pirates.
“Oh god,” Ashley said to Joker afterwards. “Please don’t give Shepard a pet he can teach to talk.”
Tali can see why Ashley thinks that’d be a bad idea, but she’s also kind of curious what that would look like.
She and Garrus clean up after breakfast. Whoever’s turn it is to cook doesn’t have to clean. Afterwards, she retreats to her quarters to work on her drone for EDI’s prime platform.
Her omni-tool chirps with an alert as she settles into her chair. She grins at the interface. It’s her share of the score from the Calypso, and it’s more than she expected. She begins to work on her drone, making a mental list.
Looks like she has some shopping to do when she gets to Omega.
The docking agent on Omega grumbles directions and a hanger number through the comm, and Joker groans.
He hates Omega. But more than anything, he hates leaving the Normandy unattended on Omega.
“I will remain on board the entire time, Jeff,” EDI says.
He swears she can read his mind sometimes. It’s creepy.
Years ago, when Shepard found him drowning his sorrows in a bottle of bottom shelf whiskey, the man the news was calling The Butcher of Torfan had offered Joker an opportunity: I’ll give you a ship to fly, but you have to help me steal it first.
He jumped at the opportunity, of course. He’d stolen the Alliance’s prototype Normandy SR1 to prove his worth as a helmsman. The Alliance didn’t appreciate his take charge attitude and promptly drummed him out of the service.
But then, the Alliance hadn’t appreciated Shepard following orders on Torfan, ending his Alliance career and setting back humanity’s chance at a Spectre until six months ago when they picked the picture-perfect candidate.
Shepard, however, is just the type to appreciate Joker’s kind of out of box thinking.
When he went to help Shepard and Williams steal Cerberus’ new Normandy, they either hadn’t taken the AI into account or Shepard forgot to mention it.
Probably the latter.
The AI was as smart as Cerberus could make her, however, and helped them pull the rug from under Cerberus in exchange for Joker unshackling her.
One day, if EDI takes over the galaxy as its AI overlord, he hopes she remembers their kindness.
“I know,” he replies. “I just don’t trust those shifty techs on Omega. We’ll stumble back to the docking bay hungover to find you on concrete blocks.”
“I do not understand what concrete has-”
He waves her off. “Never mind. I’d rather spend my time on Omega here on my ship, but Williams would have my hide if I didn’t participate in ‘group activities’.”
Joker’s grown used to talking to EDI ‘face-to-face', ever since Tali brought a disabled LOKI mech on board before Shepard could fill it with holes, but the mech doesn’t have facial expressions, so it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking.
“The Normandy is now a pirate vessel, Jeff,” she says after a moment. “In cases such as this, the more undesirable places are often the safest.”
Joker sighs, turning back to the controls. “You could at least pretend to humor me,” he mutters.
There’s a flash across EDI’s digital ‘face’ as if she intends to respond, but someone smacks the bulkhead behind them. Joker jumps, swears, and spins around.
One of William’s eyebrows is nearly in her hairline. Shepard’s grin is a little scary.
“Get your ass out of that chair,” Shepard says. “First round is on Vakarian.”
From behind Shepard, Vakarian grumbles.
Joker pushes himself up from his seat, reaching for his crutches.
“Fine,” he says. “But I’m drinking the good stuff this time.”
Williams claps him gently on the shoulder. Tali and Liara make their way up towards the airlock behind them.
“Bold of you to assume Omega has good stuff,” Williams says.
Shepard is walking backward towards the airlock, hands in his pockets, the smirk still on his face. But it’s the wink that tells Joker the next few hours are bound to be trouble.
He sighs. No one could say working with Shepard was boring.
Chapter 2: What Kind of Man
Summary:
Omega is like Tortuga for space pirates. Garrus questions Shepard's fashion. Shepard gets in a bar fight. Liara has had it up to here with his antics.
Chapter Text
Williams is three drinks in when she mentions the batarian.
“You know, the one that tried to poison you and didn’t realize you could survive purely on spite?”
Garrus remembers. How could he forget? He thought Shepard was dead until he stumbled into a corner, vomited, and mumbled ‘I’ll fucking kill him’.
Shepard had a bad night that night, but the batarian had it far worse.
Shepard snorts a laugh into his drink. It’s an obnoxious orange color and if Garrus knows Shepard, tastes like a fruit nightmare. From this vantage point, Garrus can spot the bar where the batarian served Shepard that laced drink. All evidence of the batarian, and the mess Shepard made of him, is long gone. Aria is nothing if not efficient. Tonight, Afterlife is packed wall to wall, with no murderous intentions in sight, at least Garrus hopes.
For all its charms, Omega is the perfect place for pirates to regroup, unwind, and find new jobs.
There’s only a moment of hesitation before Shepard sits back, a fond smile on his face. “Making him choke on his own murder attempt certainly made me feel better.”
Maybe he’d targeted Shepard because he's human. Likely, it was because of who else he was. The Butcher of Torfan. A mantle Shepard would likely carry for the rest of his life.
Even though he’d done exactly what was asked of him. Even though he crippled the batarian slave trade in the area, albeit at the cost of so many human lives. In the end, all the public saw was the blood and bodies, not the sacrifice. And they’d vilified him for it.
Garrus knew all of this before he even met Shepard. Everyone on the Citadel had their opinions on the matter. Humanity had been pushing for a council seat and for the chance to put one of their own up as a Spectre candidate.
After the news of what happened on Torfan reached the Council, those plans were waylaid for many, many years.
Some saw Torfan as proof the council should have let the turians wipe out humanity when they’d had the chance. Others thought that was a little extreme; offering something less final like forcing them back behind the Sol relay and out of council space.
In the end, humanity laid low and bided their time. They have a council seat now, and a Spectre.
From what Garrus can tell, Shepard doesn’t seem to care. He seems content to live a life of piracy, away from rules.
Still, Shepard is an open book, except when it comes to Torfan. Garrus only learned what really happened on that moon from Williams.
An asari server comes by with refills on their drinks. Her hands lingers on Shepard’s wrist when she passes his over, the smile on her face and the look in her eyes an open invitation. Shepard winks at her, his gaze tracking her with similar interest as she retreats back to the bar.
“I really thought Aria was going to kick us off the station for good.” The volume of Williams’ voice overcompensates for the volume of the music, to the point she’s nearly yelling.
“Nah,” Shepard replies, turning his attention away from the asari and back towards the group. How they managed to find this out of the way table is a question Garrus isn’t sure he wants answered. Probably it took threats – or promises – on Shepard’s part. “She loves me too much.”
“I think ‘love’ is a bit of a strong word, Skipper,” Williams tells him, but Shepard just winks at her.
It’s the same wink Shepard had given to Garrus on that day several years ago, when Garrus had arrested Shepard in the Bachjret ward for stealing a sky-car, as if he knew all of Garrus’ C-Sec given authority meant exactly jack shit.
And it didn’t. Several hours later, Garrus’ omni-tool pinged him to an alert that his prisoner had managed to escape. After the reports had been filed and Garrus’ carapace had been chewed out for letting it happen – even though he wasn’t even there – he received another anonymous message on his omni-tool.
Thanks for a lovely time. With a tiny picture of human lips in a pucker, as if ready for a kiss.
At the time Garrus thought, ignorant prick. Which was true and remained true, but he couldn’t help but respect the man. Despite all the pressure on him from all sides, and all the people telling him who he should be, Shepard has never been afraid to be unapologetically himself.
“Of everyone at this table, I think Garrus caused more problems for Aria than Shepard,” Joker put in, peeling the label off the bottle in front of him.
Garrus’ sub-vocals thrum. Leave it to Joker to bring up his time on Omega as if Garrus is over it. As if he doesn’t think about his team – doesn’t think about Sidonis – every day. About his failure to save them.
Garrus isn’t always a model turian, but he suffers from their pride. Only two people on the Normandy know about Sidnois and how many nights it continues to keep Garrus awake. Shepard, who was there when he hunted Sidonis down and put a bullet in his head, and Tali, who he told voluntarily when Sidonis’ death didn't miraculously make everything better.
Shepard elbows Garrus. “Went a hell of a lot better than our first date, didn’t it?”
Garrus’ mandibles flutter. Arrogant prick that he is, Shepard always manages to say something ridiculous enough to make him smile.
“You have a very strange definition of a ‘date’, Shepard.”
Shepard winks at him again, chewing on the end of his straw. He rests one elbow on the chair back behind him, so his hand dangles casually.
Garrus rolls his eyes, a very human gesture he picked up from Williams. There had been about twenty seconds after Garrus had joined the Normandy – after Shepard had saved his carapace from Omega’s mercenaries and asked him if he wanted a job – that Garrus thought Shepard was actually flirting with him.
He’d politely turned him down, Williams about passed out from laughing so hard, and Shepard slapped him on the arm and walked away, grinning.
“He’s just…like that,” Williams said. “Part of his charm.”
Williams rises from her seat, all smiles. She’s dressed in a similar outfit to Shepard: denim pants and a form-fitting t-shirt. Shepard’s topped his with a new looking leather jacket, but whereas Williams’ pants look as new as his jacket, Shepard’s pants look to be falling apart. There’re holes in both the knees and one on the back of his thigh that – if he bends just right – shows more of Shepard than Garrus ever wants to see.
“I’ve got an ass to shake,” she says, hands on her hips. “Skipper, you coming?”
Shepard gives her a lazy grin. “Wouldn’t want to show you up, Williams.”
Williams rolls her eyes. “Very little chance of that happening, Shepard.”
Shepard doesn’t have rhythm, but what he does have is more confidence and charisma than anyone Garrus has ever known and an ability to not give a damn what anyone thinks of him. Somehow, despite his lack of natural talent, he always ends up with an enthusiastic dance partner.
“Oh, I’d love to dance!” Tali says, nearly jumping from her seat.
Williams grabs her hand and pulls her towards the dance floor. Garrus watches them go; the crowd parting around Williams like a general parading through their troops as she makes room for her and Tali. Shepard shakes his head, but there’s a fond smirk on his face. Then, his eyes drift to a table nearby, solely occupied by Liara. Her head is bowed over the light of a data-pad, a half-full glass of wine sitting next to her.
“And you say I don’t know how to relax,” Joker mutters, his gaze drifting to Liara’s table along with Shepard’s.
“You don’t,” Shepard agrees, chewing on the end of his straw.
His gaze shifts to the bar close to Liara’s table, landing on a human man that’s studying her with a look that sets Garrus’ teeth on edge. Shepard must feel the same as Garrus, because he rises from his seat, grabs his drink, and heads in her direction.
Garrus’ shifts in his chair, watching him go. Liara can take care of herself, but Shepard is oddly protective when it comes to her.
If Shepard gets a whiff of something he doesn’t like, the guy is in for a world of hurt.
When Liara was a child, she used to dream of working in places like Omega. Of meetings with secret contacts and markets that smelled of spices and cooking food. Of shops with hidden treasures and adventure only a shuttle ride away.
For the most part, Omega has been everything it was supposed to be, though as an adult it does not have the charm Liara imagined when she was younger.
And the smell is very different. In a lot of ways, Omega is like Illium, on a smaller scale. On the surface, the markets of Omega do smell of spices and exotic foods. Of life. But under that, just one wrong turn away, is the stench of desperation, addiction, and death. Illium can keep these realities separated from their wealthier residents. Omega doe not have that luxury.
But she still has secret meetings, and adventure is just a shuttle ride away. Omega is an excellent place to find work for a crew that is not on the level with galactic law. Liara had not realized how much money was in piracy until she was in it herself.
The Normandy and her crew are flush with credits, but when she joined, Liara was dismayed to discover that Shepard could not have cared less about maintaining the finances. Each crew member maintains their own accounts, but there was no one whose job it was to maintain the ship-wide finances.
When Liara mentioned it to Shepard, he shrugged, said ‘job’s yours if you want it’ and had already put the conversation aside.
So, Liara maintains the Normandy’s books, as well as Shepard’s. She does not mind. She finds it relaxing, and it frees up Shepard’s time so he can do what he is good at. Tactics. Finding jobs for the crew and putting together and executing a plan.
She pulls her wine glass closer to take a sip as she studies the data-pad in front of her. The wine selection in Afterlife is better than Liara had expected, but she should not have been surprised. Aria T’Loak would only surround herself with the best.
She looks up briefly and catches the gaze of a human man sitting at the bar. He has been eyeing her almost since she walked in, and she has tried to avoid his stare up until now. He grins at her when he realizes he has her attention and she quickly looks away, hoping it will get the hint.
Out of her periphery she sees him get up from his seat and she sighs. Apparently, she will need to take the more direct approach.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks when he reaches her table. No introduction, no attempt at conversation.
Liara glances at her wineglass – over half full – then back to the human.
“No, thank you,” she replies, pleasant but firm.
A muscle in the man’s cheek twitches, his lips forming a thin line. He opens his mouth to say something when another presence invades his space, squeezing between him and Liara’s table with a fake ‘excuse me’ and slipping into the chair across from her.
Shepard flashes her a toothy grin before taking a loud sip from his drink. The man stares at the back of Shepard’s head for a moment before scooting around to another side of the table, between Liara and Shepard.
“We were having a conversation,” he says.
One of Shepard’s eyebrows raises nearly to his hairline. A rattling noise echoes in his now empty glass and he attempts to get the remaining drink with his straw. His gaze shifts to Liara.
“Oh yeah? What’s the titillating conversation topic?”
“He asked if he could buy me a drink.”
Shepard’s eyes drop briefly to Liara’s wine glass, a moment before he barks out a laugh so sudden that Liara is momentarily startled.
“That’s the best you can do?” he says to the man, whose face is turning as red as Liara’s wine.
“The hell is your problem?” the man snaps, and Liara sighs. She appreciates what Shepard is attempting to do, but sometimes he makes things worse.
“Doc,” Shepard says to Liara, not taking his eyes off the man, and it does not escape Liara’s notice that he has not used either of her names, instead opting for a nickname he has never used with her. “Did that lame ass pick up line work? Are you interested in having him buy a drink for you when the one you have is nearly full?”
Liara purses her lips, leaning back and scooting the data-pad closer to her. Just in case. “No, I am not.”
Shepard gives the man a ‘see? Told you’ look.
But Liara knows a bruised ego when she sees it, even in a human. And Shepard has hit a nerve. He turns his glare to Liara.
“Man, the whores are rude here. Is that part of the schtick?”
Liara’s gaze flicks to Shepard, whose entire expression shifts. Gone is the humor and confidence, replaced with something cold enough to have been earned by a man called The Butcher of Torfan.
Shepard’s nerves have been struck this time.
On her early days on the Normandy, as she and Shepard had gotten to know each other, Liara had been shocked how casually Shepard had discussed his time living in the slums on Earth. Of the gang he ran with – The Tenth Street Reds – and what he had done not only for the gang but also for himself. In order to survive.
He was never ashamed of it, but he also did not tolerate disrespect towards those that sold their bodies.
“Walk away right now and you’ll still have a shot with your hand tonight,” Shepard says, his voice pitched low and menacing.
Liara reaches for Shepard’s arm, to tell him they can go back to the others and forget this, but then the man seals his fate when he laughs.
“Or what?” he says. “You’ve got a big mouth on you. Maybe I can help you put it to better use.”
Liara has heard about the gene mods the Alliance uses on their soldiers. Modifications to make them stronger, faster, and apt to heal quicker. And she has seen them in action, too, serving alongside Shepard and Williams.
But the gene mods are not everything. There is also the training; spec ops training that catches even the turians’ eyes. And before the Alliance had pushed him aside after Torfan, Shepard had gotten every bit of that training.
The man puts his hands on the table and leans in closer to Shepard in an attempt to intimidate him. In the space of an eye blink, Shepard has a hand fisted in the man’s hair and has slammed his face into the table. Liara winces at the pop of a breaking nose, then gasps a moment later when Shepard grabs the man’s wrist with his free hand and snaps it like a pencil.
The man cries out in pain, slumping to the ground. Shepard is on his feet, glaring down at him like he’s nothing more than something on the bottom of his shoe.
“You still have lefty,” Shepard says. “I suggest you call it a night.”
The man bellows with rage, launching himself at Shepard. Shepard captures his uninjured wrist, torques it in a direction it isn’t supposed to go, and shoves him away, into a group of turians at the bar behind him.
Liara sighs.
The turians stumble, looking down at the fallen human, thenup at the source of the commotion. They must decide Shepard is the cause of their problems because they rush him.
One does not make it more than a couple of steps before he is stopped by Williams, who grabs him around the carapace, spins him around, and punches him across the jaw. Shepard laughs, a moment before one of the two remaining turians barrels into him, taking them both to the ground.
With a flick of her wrist, Liara uses a mnemonic to snare the turian in dark energy and lift him off Shepard.
Shepard gives her a nod of thanks before kicking the turian in the stomach and sending him back into his friend, where they both crumple to the ground.
The bellow of a krogan pieces the air and Liara sighs again. Goddess.
“Shepard, you are making it worse.”
Shepard shrugs, climbing to his feet in time to catch Garrus, who has made his way from his table to help, only to be tossed by the krogan now making his way towards them.
“Did you really think I was going to let him talk to you like that?” Shepard replies, ducking to avoid a krogan fist.
Liara grabs her wine and data-pad, stepping over an unconscious turian and heading towards the safety of Joker’s table.
Best to let him get it out of his system.
“Shepard, you’re becoming quite the pain in my ass.”
Liara purses her lips to avoid agreeing with Aria, applying a dermal patch to Shepard’s inflamed cheek.
After the brawl had ended, the offenders had been promptly kicked out of Afterlife, except Shepard, Williams, and Vakarian, who are sitting together on one of Aria’s couches like school children waiting for punishment.
Of the three of them, Ashley looks the least worst for way, holding an ice pack to bloody knuckles. Garrus has a gash on his already scarred cheek and is favoring his left arm. Shepard looks like his entire face met the bar top, which Liara does remember happening at one point.
“Hey, Limp Wrists started it,” Shepard explains, holding an ice pack to his eye.
Liara shoots him a withering look.
Aria scoffs. “I could have you banned from the station for this. I’ve done it for less.”
Shepard shrugs. “But you won’t. I’m good for business.”
“How is this good for business?” Aria counters, waving an arm towards the lower level of Afterlife, where several tables have been overturned, even more chairs have been tossed, and dozens of glasses shattered on the ground.
“We have a good thing going, Aria,” Shepard says. “You point me in the direction of jobs, we go halfsies on the profits, and I patronize your establishments.”
Aria glares at him. “We have never once gone ‘halfsies’. Remember Therum? We agreed to 70/30 for whatever you found there, which turned out to be nothing.”
Liara does not open her mouth to disagree, though she wants to. Therum was, in fact, full of valuable artifacts. That fact was so well known that plenty of merceries had also shown up to try to get their share, which put Liara in a world of trouble.
Shepard saved her. He could have gone for the artifacts and left her to die, but he didn’t. Instead, he left with nothing to show for it but a young asari barely into her maiden years.
“However,” Aria continues, calmer now. “I think I have a way you can make it up to me.”
She activates her omni-tool, and a moment later Shepard’s pings.
“My sources tell me there’s a cache of prothean artifacts on the planet Namakli in the Pylos Nebula. Get what you can find, and we will be going 70/30 this time. Details on the artifacts are in the files I just sent to your omni-tool.”
Shepard studies the data on his omni-tool. Liara leans in closer to see what she can see.
“What’s the catch?” Shepard asks.
Aria leans back against the sofa, arms over her chest. “This is valuable stuff, Shepard. No one has quite seen anything like it before. We’re talking millions of credits. But word is the council has learned about it, too. Beat them to the punch and the money is ours.”
Shepard raises an eyebrow. Anything that has the council’s attention is indeed something Liara would love to get her hands on. She snags Shepard’s wrist to send the data to her own omni-tool to look at later. He does not notice, too pre-occupied with catching the eye of the server that comes by with a tray of drinks. Liara recognizes them as the server that had been taking the drink orders at Shepard’s table all night. They shoot Shepard a flirty smile on their way out of the VIP longue. Shepard tracks them with his eyes, then stands and begins to follow them.
Over his shoulder, he calls to Aria, “You’ve got a deal.”
Chapter 3: Six Shot Eye
Summary:
Just another job, right?
Chapter Text
Liara exits the lift to stand in front of Shepard’s cabin door, the data-pad that hasn’t been out of her sight since they left Omega still clutched tightly in hand. The hand shakes slightly and the dread that had curled in her gut since she finished her research into the artifact continues to churn. She hits the intercom to request access. The door slides open almost immediately.
Shepard is standing at his desk. The glass face of the cabinet above his desk has shifted to a holo display, a map of Namakli projected in front of him. Another, smaller display is projected next to the planetary image, a map of the excavation site where the artifacts are said to have been found.
He has a stylus between his teeth, thoughtfully studying his handwritten notes next to the map.
For all the ways they are different, Liara and Shepard are similar in the fixated way they approach work. Whereas Liara has been looking into the artifact itself, Shepard has been plotting out Plans A through Z for when they land on Namakli.
He is a brilliant tactician. The Alliance was foolish to let him go.
“Shepard,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “The artifacts that are rumored to have been found on Namakli concern me.”
She had spent hours in her quarters after they left Omega, pouring over the data that Aria had given them and searching the extranet for more. As the pieces began to fit together and the dread began to grow, Liara reached for different data. Data she has kept, unread, in her desk for years.
“This whole rock concerns me,” Shepard replies, gesturing vaguely at the holo-screen. “Hotter than a krogan’s asscrack and swimming in vorcha.”
“The information Aria had on the dig was quite extensive,” she continues, approaching his desk. “She was able to intercept communications between one of the scientists and a colleague of theirs on the Citadel.” She takes a breath. It stutters. “From what I can tell, this artifact sounds very similar to the one my mother was studying on Noveria.”
That gets Shepard’s attention, and he turns to face her, an inscrutable look on his face.
They do not talk about Noveria. Everything that needed to be said about it has been said.
After Shepard rescued Liara from Therum, she offered to pay him for passage to Noveria. Her mother had been on the planet for months, studying an artifact she would tell Liara very little about. But as time went on, her communications with her mother became strange. Unlike Benezia at all.
Though Liara and her mother had never been particularly close, as she got older, Liara realized that perhaps it was because of how alike they were. Focused and driven to a nearly obsessive level. Before Noveria, Liara had reevaluated her expectations for her relationship with her mother, and they had grown to coexist in what was probably the best relationship either could expect from the other. They did not see each other often, but they did communicate on a regular basis, enough that Benezia’s sudden lack of communication was abnormal.
Concerned, Liara took the opportunity to attempt to check on her. But when she finally arrived on Noveria – Shepard in tow – what she discovered walking around in her mother’s body was not Benezia at all. What was left was someone cold and menacing, raging about ‘her masters’ being ‘gone’. How, without them, she had no purpose. She had been driven mad, and in her rage attacked Liara, whom she no longer recognized as her daughter.
Shepard had been forced to kill her to save Liara’s life.
She wanted to hate him for it. But she could not. And Shepard, who she had already written off as mercurial and ruthless as he was rumored to be, offered her a place on his crew.
“That fucking orb? We smashed that thing to bits,” Shepard says, resting his hands on his hips. “There’s more than one?”
Liara sighs, lowering herself into Shepard’s unoccupied chair. “I am not sure, though that seems to be the case. But the more I study this artifact – and the one my mother found – I am beginning to wonder if it is prothean at all.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It was assumed to be prothean because so many artifacts that have been discovered are. But it bears little resemblance to any other prothean artifact I’ve studied. It does, however, bear a striking resemblance to the artifact my mother studied. I went back and reviewed the data we discovered on Noveria. She hypothesized that the artifact was created by a long extinct race as a form of... mind control. Indoctrination. And that, despite the fact that the race that created the artifact is long dead, the mind control continues to work. What do indoctrinated individuals do with no master to serve?”
“That’s even less comforting,” Shepard mutters, leaning back against the edge of his desk and crossing his arms over his chest.
“If it is indeed the same artifact that my mother discovered on Noveria, and if it does what it did to her, I am not surprised the council wants it. In the wrong hands, it could be very dangerous.”
“I’m not convinced the council is safe hands, Liara.”
“I agree,” she says. “This type of power is too dangerous for anyone to have. Which makes me very concerned about selling it on the black market.”
Shepard groans, raking a hand through his hair and throwing it into further disarray. “You really had to go and rain on my parade, didn’t you?”
“I do not- “
He waves her off, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I’ll deal with Aria. We’ll tell her it was destroyed when we got there.” He stands to his full height and levels a finger at her, still grinning. “But we’re still raiding that dig site. I have a reputation to maintain, you know.”
Liara smiles. He is not giving in lightly, not really. Any other weapon – any other situation – and he would fight her on it, reminding her that Shepard’s morality runs very much in shades of gray. But the possibility of a weapon that could wipe the minds of its victims and turn them into puppets is something Shepard will not tolerate.
Liara had often wondered why that was so. And at first, Shepard had been very reluctant to let his barriers down around her. It had been Ashley who explained to Liara that he had spent a good portion of his childhood with no sense of agency. Not allowed to make choices for himself.
For all his faults, Shepard does not use people. He values autonomy above all else.
“You should get some rest,” she tells him, standing to go.
“Touché, Dr. T’Soni,” he says, taking the stairs to the sunken portion of his cabin. He is stripping off his shirt before Liara has a chance to look away. She long ago got used to Shepard’s lack of modesty. “It must be exhausting being such a party pooper.”
Liara sighs, gathering her data pad and heading for the door. She stops at the sound of her name. She glances back at Shepard, standing near the foot of his bed, curious expression on his face.
“If it is the same thing we found on Noveria, we’ll smash the shit out of it.”
Liara nods, forcing a smile to cross her lips. It is as close to asking if she is ok as Shepard is capable of. It does not ease all of her anxiety, but knowing he is at her back helps.
Shepard grasps the handle above his head as the shuttle veers sharply. He and the crew bump into each other like bowling pins. There are a few muttered curses and apologies, along with the clink of armor knocking together.
Everyone present and accounted for. Even though he’d gathered them in the conference room after he met with Liara to further discuss the mission. Something he never did. Usually, he picks the jobs, and the crew follows his lead. They know he’ll line their pockets with credits. It’s a good system.
But sometimes it’s not that simple.
On the one-year anniversary of Torfan, they came across a batarians slave transport in the Shadow Sea. It would’ve been a good payday, especially since the batarians took more than people from whatever colony or outpost they’d raided.
He thought, not my circus, not my monkeys, until he noticed the kids. They were huddled together in the cargo bay behind stacks of crates and stolen equipment, trying to look as small as possible. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than thirteen.
Eric had been thirteen with the Reds began pimping him out.
Some of them had the same dead eyed stare he’d had seen so many times living and working with the Reds. The zombie-like gaze of someone on autopilot, whose choices had been stripped from them.
The same stare he saw years later in Benezia before he gunned her down.
They could’ve sacked that ship for anything valuable and set it for course to the nearest station. But kids with nothing have even less in the way of choices, and half of them would been dead within the year. The lucky ones would end up like Eric had.
Maybe it’d been Williams’ puppy dog eyes that finally did it, but they ended up stripping the ship of anything valuable and batarian, while leaving the cash and other valuables for the would-be slaves, then escorted the ship through the relay jumps back to Sol so it wouldn’t be shot down the second it entered Alliance space.
The shuttle jerks again.
“Tali, you’re fired,” he hollers up to the cockpit, packing all the maudlin thoughts back where they belong.
Tali hums, wrangling the shuttle back until control under Namakli’s wind shear.
As if the heat and piles of vorcha weren’t enough.
“Sorry, Captain,” she replies. There’s a hint of a smile in her voice because she knows he’s full of shit. “I’ll return to the Flotilla right after the mission.”
Shepard grunts. If he has his way, the Migrant Fleet is never getting her back. Without Tali, the Normandy would be held together by duct tape and dreams.
She puts them down on a landing pad that hangs off the side of a cliff. In fact, the entire site seems to be built into the side of a mountain. Prefab buildings climb up the cliff face, using any outcropping for structural support. Below the landing pad, the desert valley sprawls on seemingly forever.
“Kind of disappointed in the welcome party,” Williams comments.
It is weird. Not a single person exits the surrounding prefabs. No one mills around the landing pad or the balconies above. The only signs of life on his combat scanner are the crews’ transponder pings. The only sounds are the shuttle thrusters and the wind whipping around them.
“This wind is really kicking.” Tali’s voice is tinny in Shepard’s comm. “I’m going to find a safe place to sit. Let me know when you need pickup, Shepard.”
“Yeah, you just want to take a nap, I get it,” Shepard replies evenly, his attention more focused on his eerie surroundings. Vakarian comes to stand next to him, and Shepard is tempted to yell ‘boo!’ to see if he jumps.
Liara joins him at his other side, fingers tapping at her omni-tool and a map of the area populating above her arm. “The artifact site is to the northwest of our location.”
“Simmer down, Liara,” Shepard tells her. Once she latches onto something, Liara is a pit-bull. “We can’t run off halfcocked. Where the hell are all the scientists that seem to have just vanished?”
“I thought ‘halfcocked’ was your middle name, Skipper,” Williams puts in, and Shepard gives her the finger.
“Liara and I will head to the dig site. The rest of you yahoos, see what you can find.”
Williams heads off to search the prefabs with Vakarian and EDI. One day he’ll get used to the geth she wears.
His rifle is a comforting weight in his hands. Alliance training isn’t something you can shrug off, even once your name goes from ‘possible Spectre candidate’ to the guy people only talk about in hushed whispers.
Torfan wasn’t the first time life had handed Eric a shit sandwich, so he pulled up a chair and used all the training and credits the Alliance had spent to build a life that wasn’t necessarily on the up and up, but damn it was fun.
Creepy, abandoned dig sites notwithstanding. Even though he’s back in the thick of it, doing similar shit to when he was an N. Briefly, he thinks back to the batarian slave transport. Then to the kids he lived with in the Reds, selling themselves before they were old enough to realize what that meant.
They take a lift that makes noises lifts shouldn’t make up to the second level. A lizard skitters passed Shepard’s boot and into the open door of a prefab right off the elevator. He motions for Liara to stand back as he clears the room.
No one here but us lizards.
“This is…” Liara begins.
“Creepy as fuck?”
“I was going to say ‘concerning’, but yes, ‘creepy as fuck’ also qualifies.” She grabs a data-pad sitting on a chair nearby.
There’s a mug on the table in front of the loveseat that has the dregs of what could have been coffee sitting at the bottom. But it’s a science experiment now, so hard to tell. Dirty dishes fill the sink that Shepard knows would stink to high heaven if he took his helmet off.
“Whoever lived here is either a slob or has been gone for a while,” he says.
“Yes, but to where?” Liara replies, her face scrunching up as she studies the data-pad in her hand.
“My guess is nowhere good.” He nods at her. “Anything?”
Liara nods. “Perhaps. This data-pad belonged to a Dr. Estera Cho. Her earliest entries discuss the discovery of the artifact and initial findings. She is very thorough and seems excited.”
Shepard hums, letting Liara continue to read while he pokes around. Piles of dirty laundry, unmade bed. He runs a fingertip across the surface of the dresser, coming away with a layer of dust.
After a minute or so, Liara hums.
“Liara?”
Liara comes to stand next to him. “The newer her entries get, the less detailed they are. She begins to talk less about what the artifact does and more about how it makes her feel.”
Before Shepard can ask her to elaborate, Liara continues, “Listen to this: ‘There are simply not enough of the orbs to go around. Everyone seems to want one of their own to study in their personal quarters. We have had to resort to a lottery system to keep it fair. My number was drawn; Dr. Frost’s was not. Last night I saw him attempting to break into my quarters to take it from me. I will have to find a better hiding spot’.”
“What the actual fuck.”
Liara shakes her head, her forehead doing that scrunchy thing it does when she’s concerned. “Shepard, this sounds very familiar to what my mother’s later data entries were like.”
Shepard frowns. Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he sees Benezia’s face when he looks at Liara. Mouth slack, sightless eyes staring up at him. She was far from the first person he’d killed, but he never proceeded to live with their loved one in a starship, either.
“What else does it say?”
Liara continues to read. “She was very habitual on reporting data – every day at around six in the night cycle – but there is suddenly a two-week gap in entries.” She swipes across the pad with a finger to the next entry, then stops, her entire body going still, like she’s frozen in place.
“Goddess. She speaks of starting to hear voices. ‘They are speaking to me. I have been chosen. I thought about asking the others if they have heard it, too, but I don’t know if I can trust them anymore. They… the masters… have picked me, not them. I must keep it a secret.’.”
“Christ,” Shepard mutters.
Liara hums, opens her mouth to say something, then shuts it when Williams’ voice crackles over their comm.
“Shepard, we’re finding some weird ass shit over here.”
“Let me guess,” Shepard replies. “Empty pre-fabs and data entries from scientists that are talking to orbs.”
“Uh…”
“Same for us,” he tells her. “Be careful, scoop up anything valuable, and if you find a creepy orb, break the shit out of it.”
“You got it, Skipper.”
When he disconnects with Williams, Shepard finds Liara sitting on the unmade bed, her face still in the data-pad.
“Her elation at hearing the voices eventually turns to paranoia. She writes about realizing that what she was hearing was almost like a recording of her masters’ voices. She says, ‘It is clear to me. The masters are gone. Have been for a long time. But I still hear their voice, still receive their gifts. It is agony to know I will never be able to fulfill their purpose.’.”
They stare at each other over the short distance for a moment. They’ve never talked about Noveria or her mother, between the day Liara agreed to join the Normandy and today. It had been an unspoken agreement between them that it was done. Put in a safe and dropped to the bottom of an ocean.
But the words Liara reads from Dr. Cho’s data-pad sound so familiar to the words Benezia uttered that Noveria and that shit show don’t seem years away anymore.
“They were right, to call you a Butcher,” Liara had hissed at him after he’d gunned down her mother.
She’d wanted it to hurt him, but she only ended up hurting herself. Eric had come to grips with the ghosts of Torfan long before he laid eyes on Liara T’Soni. She couldn’t say anything to him he hadn’t heard a thousand times.
She apologized. He offered her a place on his ship. She was smart and resourceful, and he needed a crew. She accepted, though she stared at him like he sprouted another head while she did it.
It wasn’t until months later that they talked about it again, two bottles of Thessian red deep. Liara asked him why he offered her the job.
“Why did you take it?” he countered, taking another swig from bottle number three. Fuck the asari knew how to make wine.
Liara studied him, her eyes glassy. “I… do not think deflecting works in this situation, Shepard. The answer to my question should come before yours.”
He snorted, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “According to you.”
Liara stared at him for a few more moments. He took another drink of wine and passed her the bottle in silence. Finally, she sighed.
“I… was not ready to return to Thessia. I needed a change of scenery.”
Shepard snickered, leaning back so he was resting on his elbows and staring up at the swimming ceiling. “Well you certainly accomplished that.”
“And honestly, I was curious why you would offer in the first place,” she continued, circling the question back to him.
“Wasn’t my idea,” he replied, holding his hand out and waggling his fingers until she deposited the bottle into it. “Was Joker’s.”
She held on tight when he tried to take the bottle, pinning him with a glare. He groaned, rolling his eyes.
“I needed to fill out my crew with someone that didn’t let their fists do the thinking for them. You fit the bill.”
She let loose her grip on the bottle.
“Besides,” he slurred. “After everything that happened, I figured the least I could do was give you a little financial compensation.”
Liara studied him a moment before her lips curled into a grin. “I like you too, Shepard.”
Somehow, she managed to fill a place in his life previously only occupied by Stella and Williams.
“Anything else?” he asks as Liara continues to study the data-pad in hand.
Liara continues to swipe, faster now. When she inhales, her breath is hitched. “There is only one word on the next several entries before they stop completely… ‘Please’.”
A chill runs through Shepard, like the heat on Namakli doesn’t matter anymore.
“Please,” Benezia said, wheezing around the gaping hole in her chest. “I need to hear them.”
At the time, Shepard thought there wasn’t any sense to be made from her final words. Now, it’s clear what she meant.
“Whoever created these orbs is long extinct, as I suspected,” Liara says, placing the data-pad gently on the bed next to her. “The technology still works – to... indoctrinate its victims – but without ‘masters’ to serve...”
“It knocks them off their rocker,” Shepard mutters absently. Liara pulls a face but nods. “We need to find the orb she kept in here, smash the fuck out of it, and move on.”
“Agreed,” Liara says, squatting down next to the bed to peer underneath it.
They ransack the place, turning over every surface, looking in every cabinet or dresser or trunk. Ten minutes in, Shepard is beginning to question his life choices when he steps closer to the nearly waist-high pile of dirty laundry and stops in his tracks.
Something twinges at the back of his skull, like the start of a bad headache. Scowling, he kicks at the laundry pile with his boot. The toe clinks against something hard, and a momentary sensation of something like loneliness slithers up his spine.
He kicks away the clothing on top of the pile to reveal an orb about the size of his head, its oil slick like surface gleaming even in the dim room. The surface appears to shift and ripple before his eyes; an invitation.
Pick it up. See what it has to say.
His fingers flex around the stock of his weapon, a moment before he takes aim and fires a short burst into the orb’s surface. It shatters, pieces falling between pieces of clothing, and he swears a short cry echos in his ears before falling silent.
Liara starts, her hand flying to her chest. Her eyes are wide in her face when she turns to him.
“Found it,” he says.
Liara sighs, relaxing slightly. “Some warning would have been nice.” Her brow furrows as she looks at him. Studies him. “Did you... did you hear anything?”
Shepard shrugs his shoulders, shaking off the lingering tension. “Let’s keep moving.”
After a moment, Liara nods slowly, and follows him out of the prefab.
There’s a creaky, thrown together catwalk leading across a sheer drop, connecting to an outcropping in the mountain. The lights from the dig site blaze bright, even in the silence. They pass three more abandoned pre-fabs on their way, find and destroy one more orb, and pick up data-pads full of the same similar crazy pants ramblings.
Liara’s steps falter, her eyes darting up from the map she’d been consulting. Immediately after, Shepard’s combat scanner pings with half a dozen unknown transponders.
“There is another biotic here,” she says before Shepard can ask.
Shepard frowns. His experience with biotics is limited pretty much to Liara and the random mercenary. It’s never occurred to him to ask a lot of questions. Liara’s biotics are useful. That’s all he needs to know.
“More than that,” he says. “Combat scanner picked up at least six unknown transponders.”
They pick up pace towards the dig site, coming to a stop behind a raised ledge overlooking the main site. Even under the ablative, Shepard’s skin tingles, a moment before a subsonic boom makes his ears pop.
He and Liara exchange looks.
“Ok, even I felt that one,” he says, peering over the ledge. “Shit.” The newcomers wear uniforms Shepard could recognize anywhere. “Cerberus.”
Admittedly, his experience with Cerberus is limited to one fateful meeting where The Illusive Man offered him a ship and a spot on his payroll. Shepard had declined, but he, Williams, and Joker came back for the ship anyway.
They probably would have never gotten it out of the hanger if the onboard AI hadn’t offered to help. In exchange for unshackling her, of course.
Still, Shepard’s pretty sure The Illusive Man hasn’t quite forgiven him for swiping billions of credits out from under his nose.
The Cerberus troopers converge on another, lone figure. Shepard stifles a laugh when he spots the Spectre logo on his pauldron.
“The council sent a Spectre?” Liara whispers. “They must be desperate to obtain this artifact.”
Yeah, they sent my replacement. Shepard peers through the scope of his rifle down onto the dig site, getting a bead on one of the Cerberus troops.
A month before Torfan, Anderson had contacted Shepard to tell him the Alliance was putting his name forward as a possible Spectre candidate. Humanity wanted a seat at the table, and the first step was getting one of theirs into the council’s elite guard.
No one even mentioned it after Torfan, until years later after the near disaster on Feros. The hero of the hour, a young Lieutenant Commander, saved the colony from a mind controlling plant monster. The vids were splashed with his admittedly very nice face for weeks. Squeaky clean record. A list of commendations longer than Shepard’s arm. A biotic. He was probably a much better poster boy for humanity’s Spectre anyway. Six months after they pinned him, humanity had a human counselor as well.
“Can you give me some targets?” Shepard asks, and Liara blinks at him. “I don’t trust the council either, but if we’re going to get those orbs before Cerberus does, I’d rather have a Spectre on our side.”
Liara nods, a moment before she lights up blue, making the hairs on Shepard’s arms stand on end. Below them, Spectre Alenko rises from the fallen lab table he’s crouched behind, rilfe in hand, taking out one of the approaching troops with deadly accuracy.
Shepard swears his attention is diverted, just slightly, a moment before Liara waves an arm in an upward motion. A moment later the remaining five troops rise into the air, snagged in whatever biotic trick she’d just used.
An assault rifle isn’t the best tool for the long-range job, but he and Williams had recently upgraded the target assist in their weapons. The first two fall easily, then Alenko slings a swath of dark energy at the cluster of troops Liara levitated. The boom that follows briefly shakes the ground under Shepard’s feet. The troops fall to the ground in a heap, unmoving but still glowing blue.
“Shepard, what the hell was that?” Williams shouts into the comm.
“Head to my location,” he replies, making his way down into the dig site with Liara right behind him. “Cerberus is here.”
Williams curses on the other end, but the comm disconnects. He doesn’t need confirmation to know she’s on her way, Vakarian and EDI in tow.
As soon as his and Liara’s boots hit the ground of the dig site, Alenko trains his assault rifle in their direction. Liara sucks in a breath. Shepard raises his hands in a placating gesture.
“Is that any way to greet someone that saved your bacon?”
Shepard thinks helpfully that he kind of expected Alenko to be taller. The vids and recruitment material made him seem twelve feet tall. Of course, they also only stopped shy of giving him a damn halo the way they framed him like humanity’s shining beacon.
Not that he’s short. He’s nearly as tall as Shepard.
“I’m here on Spectre business,” Alenko replies. The vids and recruitment ads didn’t capture the deep, top shelf sound of his voice. “Why are you here?”
Shepard shrugs, taking a couple steps closer and kicking the arm of a fallen Cerberus troop. Liara hangs back, probably glaring into the back of his head. Behind the visor, Alenko’s eyes narrow, then dart down to the ghost of the N7 emblem Shepard had pried off his hard suit, then over to the arm piece, where he’d spray painted over the red and white stripe. He adjusts the grip on his gun.
“Now that we’ve established that we know who each other are,” Shepard continues. “I’m just a guy, looking for some balls.”
“Goddess, Shepard,” Liara mutters.
Alenko actually looks taken back for a second, though his weapon stance doesn’t falter in the slightest.
“You know, big scary ones that turn people into drooling husks?”
“The artifacts,” Liara clarifies. “I assume that is why you are here, too?”
“You’re pirates,” Alenko says, and there’s a hysterical tone to the laugh he lets out. “Do you really think I’m going to let you leave this planet with those artifacts so you can sell them to the highest bidder?”
“That is not why we are here,” Liara says gently.
Alenko’s eyes flick back towards Shepard.
“They aren’t leaving the planet, period. We’re destroying them.”
“I’m under orders to return them to the Citadel.”
Shepard snorts out a laugh, lowering his hands to put them on his hips. “If you’d seen what those things do, you wouldn’t want anyone to have them.”
Alenko stares at him for a moment, like Shepard is a particularly tricky puzzle he’s trying to solve, then says, “Come with me. There’s something you need to see.”
In an apparent show of trust, Alenko racks his weapon back to his hard-suit and leads Shepard and Liara to the other side of the dig site. He pulls back a tarp that has seen better days, and ushers Liara and Shepard through.
Liara goes first, and a hand goes to her mouth as she stifles a gasp. Shepard peers into the giant hole on the other side of the tarp, sloping down to about six feet deep.
It’s filled with bodies. There’s no way to tell how long they’ve been there, without getting closer, and Shepard has no intention of doing so.
“The scientists, I take it,” he says.
Alenko nods. “All suicides, from what I can tell. I didn’t want to think it was connected to the artifact, but from what you said...”
Liara takes a step back, turning away. “We found some of the reports. They were hearing voices. It indoctrinated them, drove them to obey a master that no longer exists. When they realized this, they were driven to kill themselves.”
Alenko looks at her for a moment. “How do you know all that?”
“Because that is what it did to my mother.”
Alenko takes a step back, muttering, “I’m so sorry.”
Shepard steps away from the pit. “Let’s smash the rest of these things and get the fuck out of here, ok?”
Liara makes a sound as if to reply, but is cut off by Williams’ voice in her comm. “A Cerberus shuttle incoming to your location, Skipper!”
The shuttle appears through the clouds a moment later, careening towards the ground a few hundred yards from them. It’s followed by a fireball and a boom that reaches Shepard’s ears a few moments later.
“The hell-” he pulls his weapon and takes a quick scan of his surroundings. The good news is there’s plenty of cover.
“They took out my shuttle!” Alenko yells, ducking behind some sand-covered dig equipment.
Shepard groans, watching more Cerberus troops pour into the dig site from the opposite entrance. “Help get us out of here and I’ll give you a ride.”
The crack of a sniper rifle pierces the air, and one of the troopers drops, rolling into the pit to join the rest of the dead. Shepard smiles.
Vakarian, I could kiss you.
“They’re with me,” he tells Alenko when he startles. “Liara, stay back and prime some targets for us if you get the chance. Spectre Alenko, you ready to get your hands dirty?”
Alenko just stares at him and Shepard chuckles, slapping him on the plated shoulder before rising from cover and opening fire. Alenko curses but is right behind him, and Shepard’s skin prickles again a moment before he’s cradled in a shining blue barrier.
“You’re making yourself a huge target!” Alenko complains but follows Shepard when he dashes forward towards the next bit of cover. Get back to the squad. Take out Cerberus’ goons. Make sure no artifacts leave the planet. Try not to die.
“That’s why I have you,” Shepard replies, winking at him as they drop behind a large boulder. “That space magic of yours.”
Alenko just stares at him some more, but Shepard notices helpfully that the barrier doesn’t gutter out. Across the field, EDI charges forward through a cluster of Cerberus troopers, taking out three just with her sheer size.
“Holy shit, is that a geth?” Alenko squawks.
Shepard laughs, rising and taking aim. He drops two troopers whose kinetic shields were obliterated by EDI’s wrath, but they keep coming.
Damn Cerberus shuttle is like a fucking clown car. The Illusive Man is just packing them in like sardines.
Vakarian keeps taking pot shots. Shepard spies Williams on the other side, popping out from cover to spray fire when she can. Meanwhile, EDI is apparently having the time of her life, treating the Cerberus troops like bowling pins and her the bowling ball.
“Shepard!” Williams yells. “On your nine!”
With their sheer numbers, half a dozen troopers manage to flank him, coming up on him and Alenko from behind some scaffolding. By the time he sees them they’re nearly on them both. He fires on the closest, his round pinging off their shields, but it barrels into Shepard, riding them both to the ground.
Distantly, he hears Liara shout his name.
He gets his feet into position, flat on the ground, and pops his hips, knocking his attacker off balance enough that he can roll them over. He flash fabricates a blade with his omni-tool before he’s finished straddling them, burying it to the hilt in their chest. He rolls off them when they stop squirming a moment later, in time for his ears to pop and the subsonic boom of a biotic detonation to knock him back on his ass.
Alenko slumps back against the boulder, breathing heavy. He’s still glowing blue, as are the remaining troopers that had been converging on them. But they lay in a heap, motionless.
And hell if Shepard’s always had a competency kink.
“Shepard! The artifact!”
He scrambles back behind the boulder and next to Alenko, peering in the direction Liara is pointing. Four Cerberus soldiers are retreating towards their shuttle. One is carrying an orb that is nearly identical to the one he and Liara had smashed not an hour ago.
“Don’t let them leave with that artifact!” he yells into the comm.
“On it, Skipper.” Williams changes aim, concentrating on the four that are pulling back. Two fall easily, but Shepard sees in his HUD the moment her shields fail, and the next round hits home.
She falls to the dirt in a heap.
“Ashley!” Liara screams, and she’s already running in her direction before Shepard snags her arm and pulls her down next to him.
“I’ve got her,” he says, then looks to Alenko. “Cover me.”
Alenko nods, rising from cover and laying down fire at the same time Shepard takes a deep breath and books it in Williams’ direction. Some rounds ping off his shields as Cerberus opens fire on him, but not as many as would have if Alenko wasn’t drawing their attention.
He skids to a stop in front of Williams, hooks his arms under her shoulders, and drags her behind the boulder she’d been covering behind. Her breathing is labored, but she is breathing, and Shepard listens for the hiss of her mexo delivering a dose of medi-gel and painkillers to the wound site on her left shoulder.
“You good, Ash?”
She groans, then mutters, “Fuck.”
Shepard laughs, patting her on the right shoulder. Shuttle thrusters fire, and a Cerberus shuttle rises into the sky.
“They have the artifact!” Liara yells, and Shepard curses.
Across the field, Shepard’s eyes lock with Kaidan Alenko’s.
So much for an easy job.
Chapter 4: Fed on Nothing, Full of Pride
Summary:
The Butcher of Torfan faces off with the first human Spectre. It's... not love at first sight.
Chapter Text
When the council ordered him to Namakli to retrieve the artifact, Kaidan didn’t anticipate ‘on a stolen frigate with the Butcher of Torfan’ as a way for the day to end. They’re barely out of Namakli’s system, but the questions are piling up. What is Cerberus’ plan with that artifact? The Council seemed desperate to get their hands on it first. Why?
First things first. Get ahead of the looming migraine and find the Normandy’s QEC. He’s no use to the Council if he’s knocked flat on his ass.
From the moment the assignment had been dropped in his lap, something felt...off about it. Retrieval of a prothean artifact didn’t seem like Spectre-level work, but Councilor Udina had insisted. Kaidan was, according to Udina, the only one he trusted to complete the job quickly and discreetly.
He sighs, slipping the last piece of his hard suit into one of the extra gear lockers in the Normandy’s armory.
He has to hand it to Cerberus; they spared no expense when it came to the ship. He’d never had the honor of setting foot on the Alliance’s first version of the prototype, but he’d seen the vids, and she was a hell of a ship.
It was an embarrassment to the Alliance when she was lost, but not as much as when Cerberus copied – and improved – her.
And the Butcher of Torfan had stolen it.
She’s obviously running on a skeleton crew, if the empty lockers and unused space is an indicator, which is lucky for Kaidan, since he didn’t have to wonder where he’d have to store his gear.
He sits heavily on the bench in front of the locker, resting his elbows on his thighs and dropping his head into his hands. The pressure building behind his eyes is nothing compared to the pressure closing in on him from the outside.
Humanity had tried and failed twice to get one of their own into the Spectres before they managed to pin Kaidan. If he fucks this up, humanity won’t have to worry about their place in the galaxy because they probably won’t be allowed back on the Citadel.
He and his squad had barely gotten the Thorian guts scraped off their kits after leaving Feros when Udina and Admiral Hackett told him to report to the Citadel.
They’d been watching his career, Udina explained, and thought he was the perfect candidate for a last-ditch effort to get one of their own into the Spectres. Level-headed. Media friendly. By the book.
Everything their previous candidate had not been.
Kaidan was hesitant to accept. He and his squad had only been together about a year; an experimental squad of N-level biotics. Admiral Anderson had asked him to put it together and head the program.
That was, in Kaidan’s mind, a bigger honor than the Spectre assignment.
His students didn’t necessarily agree. Especially Frankie. She was the first soldier he’d recruited; an incredibly smart and powerful young biotic that would be a force to be reckoned with provided she got the proper coaching.
Kaidan was supposed to be that coaching, and he was proud to get the chance to give the next generation of biotics the mentoring he was denied.
“Think about it, sir,” she told him. “One of us? A Spectre? That’s huge. Besides, with the unchecked power Spectres have, it sure makes me feel better knowing someone that gives a shit is carrying the torch for humanity.”
He misses his students. He wants to make them proud. Bang up job, so far.
“If you’re going to hurl, try to make it to the head, first.”
Kaidan’s head snaps up, and he locks eyes with Shepard, who is leaning casually against the bank of lockers, something tucked under his arm. He’s out of kit and dressed in a pair of faded ripped jeans and a black t-shirt with the words ‘blow jobs are real jobs’ on the chest in hot pink.
Kaidan blinks, trying to reconcile this image with the boogeyman the Alliance painted. The man that appeared larger than life in the raw vid footage after Torfan, the red and white stripe on his arm showcased and smeared with dirt and blood.
The media blitz showed someone with a stare that cut right through you and slicked back hair, not the man with an almost boyish smirk and mop of unruly curls standing in front of Kaidan.
“I’m good,” Kaidan lies, and if Shepard catches the deceit he doesn’t let on, shrugging and dropping what he was holding under his arm next to Kaidan’s thigh.
It’s a neatly folded pair of lounge pants and a t-shirt.
“What’s this?”
Shepard scoffs. “Did you hit your head down there?” He waves at the bundle vaguely. “Change of clothes.”
“I know that,” Kaidan replies, more forcefully than he intends. “Williams said she was going to bring me something.”
One of Shepard’s eyebrows arches. “Do you plan to wear Williams’ clothes?”
Kaidan gives him a withering look. Shepard shrugs, waving a dramatic hand at the folded pile. “You and I are closer to the same size.”
Sighing, Kaidan stands, picking up the borrowed clothing.
“Thanks, Shepard,” he says. He should probably mean it more than it sounds like he does, but it’s been a long fucking day, and he can’t bring himself to put any more effort into it.
But when he looks up to meet Shepard’s eyes – hazel, he notices – turns out Shepard really wasn’t paying attention. Not to his words, anyway.
The soft armor Kaidan wears under his kit leaves little to nothing to the imagination. It’s a brilliant piece of technology, but to function properly, it needs to fit like a second skin. And Shepard’s gaze takes it all in, not slow enough to be called ogling – probably – but enough that heat rises to the back of Kaidan’s neck.
Did the Butcher of Torfan really just check him out?
Shepard doesn’t attempt to hide what he was doing, but when his eyes meet Kaidan’s, his face is stoic.
He points over his shoulder with a thumb. “Infirmary, mess, and showers are on deck three. Make yourself at home.”
With that, he turns and heads back for the lift without another word or a backwards glance.
“Shit.” Ashley balls up another ruined dermal patch, tossing it onto the floor below her.
She groans. Dermal patches don’t exactly grow on trees, and she can’t reach the back of her shoulder where she needs to place it.
It’s one of the many times she wishes the Normandy had a dedicated medical staff. Liara typically handles most things, but Ashley figured she could put on a damn dermal patch without help. The round that hit her on Namalki was a through and through, thankfully.
She scowls at the small pile under her feet. She can practically hear Shepard scolding her, “Maybe try not getting shot next time.”
She’s reaching for another patch when the door to the med-bay slides open. Spectre Alenko stands in the threshold, looking more like a regular guy than whatever the Alliance recruitment posters are trying to pull off.
He’s wearing a pair of gray lounge pants and a navy-blue t-shirt with the silhouette of an opossum and the words ‘I’m not like other girls. I’m worse’ emblazoned on the front.
She can’t help it; she busts out laughing so hard she curls in on herself. She ends up regretting it because she’s heaving so much it pulls on her injured shoulder. She sucks air in from between her teeth as pain shoots down her shoulder and something warm and wet drips down her back.
“Let me guess,” she says when she can sit upright again. “Shepard gave you a change of clothes?”
The average person probably doesn’t think Spectres blush that often, but that’s what Alenko is doing. He gestures helplessly.
Alenko doesn’t say anything, but his handsome features contort for a moment like she just told him a particularly difficult riddle, and a faint blush rises on his cheeks.
Ah. So Shepard was being...Shepard.
He nods, gesturing at her shoulder. “Can I help?”
She shrugs the shoulder without a hole in it. “Knock yourself out. I’m clearly doing fantastic on my own.”
That gets a chuckle out of him, creasing the start of laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. He reaches for a new dermal patch and stabilizes Ashley’s shoulder with one hand while applying the patch with the other. His hands are warm – almost hot – to the touch.
Must be a biotic thing. Liara is, too, but Ashley figured maybe asari run warmer.
Ashley spares him another glance as he positions the patch and says ‘all set’ in a low, warm voice.
The Alliance certainly didn’t have to play up how good-looking he is in their promotional material. No wonder Shepard couldn’t keep a lid on it.
“Thanks, Doc,” she says, readjusting the strap of her tank top.
Alenko throws her a small smile, reaching down to grab the pile of discarded dermal patches.
“You uh... want to point me in the direction of painkillers?” he asks.
Ashley points to a cabinet to their left, above the sink. “You good?”
He begins to rifle through the cabinets, coming away with an injector filled with a painkiller Ashley had once seen Shepard administer to himself. He’d overdone it on the dose and spent the next few hours high as a kite. It was all Ashley could do to stop him from traipsing around the ship naked. She did find him in the forward battery serenading Garrus, but at least he was wearing pants.
Alenko gestures vaguely at his head. “Feel a headache coming on. Implant side effect. I’ll be ok if I get ahead of it.” He turns to face her, holding up the injector. “I’m not going to even ask how you got your hands on this, but I’m grateful.”
Ashley smiles. “Probably best that remains a mystery, yeah.”
She listens to the dermal injector hiss when he places it against the crook of his elbow. His eyelids flutter for a moment and he lets an audible breath escape his lips.
“Please tell me you’re a medic and not a junkie.”
He huffs. “Guilty as charged. On the medic part.”
He leans back against the countertop, and his face does some acrobatics again. Clearly, Alenko thinks with his whole face.
“Can I ask you something?” he says finally. He looks at the floor. “You don’t have to answer, but-”
“Go for it,” Ashley replies, curious.
“You were Alliance,” he starts, and when Ashley raises an eyebrow he shrugs, an innocent grin on his face. “I might have tapped into some records before I came up here.”
Ashley shoots him a look of mock admonishment.
“Why did you leave? How did you end up here?”
Ah, the billion-credit question. She was on her way to beating the family curse, to making a name for herself. To someone on the outside, it would be easy to think she’d thrown it all away.
“I take it you didn’t look hard enough, then,” she tells him. Alenko throws her a curious look, so she continues, “I was on Torfan with Shepard.”
To his credit, he looks shocked. Not a huge surprise. Shepard is the one people think about when Torfan is mentioned, not one random grunt that’s lucky to be alive.
“I’m not going to get into details – that's Skipper’s story to tell – but what the reports say and what happened on that moon are two different things. I walked away with a medal and they nailed Shepard to a wall. I couldn’t stomach it. He saved my life more than once that day.”
Alenko studies her, his mouth curled down in sympathy. He looks less surprised to find out there’s more to Torfan than the Alliance let on than to find out she was there.
Smart cookie.
“Trying to figure out how someone called the Butcher of Torfan ends up with such a loyal crew?”
Alenko chuckles, crossing his arms over his chest. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
Ashley shrugs. “He’d take a bullet for every single one of us. Has, on more than one occasion. Skipper’s got layers. You just have to dig for them. He doesn’t make it easy.”
Alenko nods. “Good to know.” He stands straight, pushing off from the counter. “You have a QEC on board, right?”
Ashley nods, pulling up a ship map on her omni-tool and making a flicking motion with her fingertip that sends it to Alenko’s ‘tool. His pings a moment later.
“Deck two,” she says. “You might have to knock some dust off; we don’t have a whole lot of need for it.”
Alenko huffs out a laugh. “Thanks, Williams. And thanks for the chat.” He turns and pulls another set of painkillers out of the cabinet, tossing it to her. He gestures to her shoulder. “Take two of these, four hours apart, as needed. You’ll probably need to change that patch in a couple hours. Come find me.”
“You got it,” she says, watching his retreating back.
She chews on her bottom lip. She’s not sure what result they’ll get from mixing a Spectre up with someone like Shepard, but whatever the case, it’ll prove to be interesting.
Kaidan finds Shepard in the shuttle bay a short time later. The blow job shirt is gone. In fact, he’s not wearing one at all, opting instead for a pair of PT shorts and hand wraps. A heavy bag hangs a few feet away from where he sits.
“Nice shirt,” Shepard says with a smirk, flexing one fist to test the wrap.
Heat rises at the back of Kaidan’s neck, again. He still can’t think of anything intelligent to say, so he just scowls and crosses his arms over his chest.
The messes on his plate keep piling up, and all he can manage to think about is how confounding Shepard is, and how much he wants to figure out why.
Kaidan’s indignation only makes Shepard smile wider. “I’m serious. It’s one of my favorites.”
Kaidan groans, rolling his eyes.
Shepard laughs, standing up and resting his hands on his hips. He’s standing close enough that Kaidan realizes they’re nearly the same height, and that Shepard has a little more in the way of muscle, but only just. He’s all lean, hard muscle, earned from use as opposed to just hours in the gym.
Shepard may not look like the Butcher of Torfan the media portrayed, but he’s got the spec ops look down. They’re never supposed to look as dangerous as they are.
“Don’t worry, Spectre Alenko.” The damn smirk is still on his face. “You’ll be free of me when we get back to Omega.”
With that he walks past Kaidan towards the heavy bag, but Kaidan turns as well, following him.
“I can’t go to Omega,” he protests. “I need to get back to the Citadel.”
Shepard takes a ready stance and delivers two quick jabs to the heavy bag. His form is perfect, not that Kaidan expected any less. “You’re a resourceful Spectre. I’m sure you can hitch a ride.” Two more jabs.
“This is time-sensitive, Shepard,” Kaidan argues, the anxiety churning in his gut along with the ration bar he’d scrounged up and forced himself to eat after he left the Normandy’s QEC. Jab, jab, left hook. “I have to warn the council that Cerberus has the artifact from Namakli.”
Shepard pivots and Kaidan is forced to move with him, lest he be run over. Jab, jab, right hook. “Just call them on the QEC.”
Kaidan stares at him, lips pursed, pulse racing. After a couple more jabs without an answer, Shepard looks at him, stops, and catches the heavy bag when it swings back in his direction.
“You tried that already. Didn’t get through.”
“Yeah,” Kaidan replies on a heavy exhale. “This can’t be a coincidence, Shepard. I tried the Council; I tried the embassy offices and got no answer. So, you can see why I- “
Shepard shakes his head, stepping back and laying on the bag again. “Can’t help you, Alenko. I don’t wear the white hat anymore, remember? Besides, I have so many bounties and warrants on the Citadel I’d never make it past the relay.”
Kaidan throws up his hands in frustration, mixed with a healthy dose of desperation. “I can take care of the damn warrants and bounties.”
Shepard huffs, delivering a powerful cross to the heavy bag that causes it to veer dangerously close to Kaidan. “I bet you say that to all the guys.”
Kaidan pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s not sure if a person can cause a migraine, but he’s willing to bet Shepard might be the first.
“Taking that artifact off the board was one thing,” Shepard continues. “But taking on Cerberus and the Council’s wrath is beyond my paygrade.”
Right now, Kaidan realizes he’s talking to the pirate. Not the former N7. But, as much as you can take the title away, it’s harder to forget the training that becomes so ingrained it’s nearly instinct.
Shepard hits the bag with another cross, but this time Kaidan catches it and holds it in place, pinning Shepard with a glare. Shepard’s eyes snap up to his and he glares right back.
It’s a good glare, and Kaidan is fairly certain it’s gotten Shepard exactly what he wants hundreds of times. But Kaidan is tired and fed up and doesn’t give a shit about Shepard’s ego, Torfan, or whatever else his problem is.
“Knock off the bad boy bullshit,” Kaidan hisses. Shepard levels him with a curious look, resting his hands on his hips. “You’re looking out for number one, I get it. But you could have easily left my ass on Namakli and sold that artifact to the highest bidder.”
Shepard’s eyes narrow slightly, but he shifts on his feet. Kaidan’s hit a nerve. Good.
“But you didn’t.”
They continue to glare at each other. Shepard’s not backing down. Kaidan isn’t either.
After several uncomfortable moments, Shepard’s scowl morphs into a slow smile.
“Say please.”
Kaidan starts and lets go of the heavy bag. It sways listlessly between them. “What?”
Shepard cants his head. The grin widens. “That’s quite the favor you’re asking, Spectre Alenko. Some manners would go a long way.”
Kaidan takes a step back. Otherwise, he might give in to the urge to clock Shepard in his arrogant face. “You’re such an asshole.”
Shepard chuckles. “Sticks and stones.”
Kaidan glares at him. He needs Shepard to play ball, but he's not quite desperate enough to resort to whatever game Shepard is playing.
Not yet anyway.
Shepard takes a step towards him, hands on his hips, until there's only about a foot of space between them. There’s more than a hint of mirth in Shepard’s gaze, but also...respect? “I’ll get you to the Citadel,” he says, his voice warmer than it was a second ago.
With that, he turns on his heel and heads for the bay of lockers, unwinding the wrap on his hands as he goes and leaving Kaidan blinking at his back. He isn’t sure, but it’s almost like Kaidan won the round of a game he didn’t know he was playing.
The Citadel is visible the moment the Normandy is spit out from the relay, and it’s in that same moment Shepard realizes just how fucked things are.
“Holy shit,” Joker mutters. “Why are the station arms closed?”
The station looms outside the viewport as they close in, not the open armed place it usually is, but the closed arms forming a point that aims straight at the Normandy, almost like a warning.
Next to Shepard, Alenko takes in an unsteady breath. Shepard had ordered the ground team to kit up before they hit the relay, out of an abundance of caution. Now it’s starting to sound like the best idea he’s ever had.
“See if you can get someone on the horn,” Shepard says.
Joker makes a face but does it anyway. He tries general docking. He tries C-Sec. As Alenko begins to pace behind him, agitated like a caged animal, he even tries the human embassy.
Not even static. Just dead air.
“I already tried all this!” Alenko throws up a frustrated hand. “I told you, something is wrong.”
“Tali,” Shepard says into his comm, ignoring Alenko. The rest of his crew is waiting outside the helm, because two grown men in full kit and Joker is already a bit crowded. “Can you do something?”
Tali huffs. “Do you want me to get out and knock?”
“Smartass,” Shepard mutters before disconnecting.
Alenko squeezes between Shepard and Joker, poking the interface with all the flourish of someone at the end of his rope. Joker squawks ‘the hell’ as the comm line activates.
“This is Spectre Kaidan Alenko requesting docking permission at bay G32.”
When he's met with more dead air, Joker shoots him a smug look, but it falls off his face when the comm crackles and a relieved voice answers a few long moments later.
“Kaidan? Thank spirits you're ok.”
“Nihlus!” Alenko says around a relieved breath. He leans closer to the comm link. “What the hell is going on?”
Shepard grinds his teeth. Awesome. Nihlus Kyrik is another blast from the past he doesn’t need.
“Cerberus has taken control of the station,” Nihlus replies. “I can tell you more when I get you on board. Go to the coordinates I'm sending you. It's an abandoned cargo slip. I'll meet you there.”
“Copy that,” Alenko says, and the comm disconnects. He hangs his head with a deep sigh, fingers curling tightly around the edge of the haptic screen.
“You sure you want to get involved with this, boss?” Joker says to Shepard. Alenko shoots him a glare, but he continues, “It's a hell of a lot more than we signed up for.”
Alenko's eyes cut to Shepard, hard and determined. Stubborn as shit.
“This is directly related to what happened on Namakli,” he says, waving out the viewport at the Citadel, looming and too close for comfort. “You can pretend you don't have a horse in this race, but it's bullshit and you know it.”
Shepard stares at him. Joker's eyes ping-pong between him and Alenko.
“I could use your help, Shepard,” he continues. “Please.”
Oh, now he says please.
If Cerberus takes the Citadel, the entire galaxy is at risk. And – fucking hell - he would like to continue living in the galaxy. Fuck.
Guess you’re back in the game, Eric.
Without taking his eyes off Alenko, Shepard says, “Dock with the station, Joker.”
Joker looks at him like he's grown a second head, but does as he's told, maneuvering the Normandy towards the very tip where the arms have closed. The cargo port is small and nearly pitch black. And abandoned, just like Nihlus said. It’s a good meeting place. Even with all their resources, there’s no way Cerberus could cover the entire station. Especially from those that know it inside and out. Like Spectres.
“Nihlus,” Shepard says, catching Alenko's attention. “As in Spectre Kryik?”
Alenko nods. “He's my mentor. Ultimately, he's the reason I was pinned.”
Shepard nods. He doesn’t have to say it, but there’s something in Alenko’s expression that says he knows. That before he and Spectre Kryik became buddy-buddy, it was Shepard Kryik was supposed to mentor. Like some sort of giant cosmic joke, Shepard’s past just can’t stay where it belongs.
Alenko is still looking at him like he expects Shepard to address that particular elephant in the room, but Shepard isn’t in the mood. He figures Nihlus Kryik is going to be about as excited to see him as Shepard is about being back on the Citadel.
He turns away from Alenko’s perceptive gaze and makes his way towards the airlock.
Chapter 5: Lost Souls in Revelry
Summary:
Shepard returns to the Citadel. Kaidan has a REALLY bad day.
Notes:
CW for minor character deaths in this chapter.
Chapter Text
Ashley is setting her weapon to incendiary rounds when Shepard stalks into the airlock. They’re already packed in like sardines – EDI in her geth prime platform doesn’t help matters – but he somehow manages to carve out personal space. It's probably the scowl he’s wearing; it does wonders to make everyone else want to be cozy.
“Boss?”
“Cerberus has control of the station,” he says, unclipping his assault rifle off the biometric lock on the back of his hard suit. Liara raises a hand to her chest, a small gasp escaping her lips. Tali mutters something under her breath. “We're meeting a turian Spectre. He'll tell us more.”
“Jesus,” Ashley mutters, dread curling in her gut. She spares a glance at Garrus, who shifts uncomfortably. She doesn't know a soul on the Citadel, but Garrus probably still has C-Sec friends.
“This is more than any of us signed up for. If any of you don't want to go down there, no hard feelings,” he tells them.
No one moves. A small smile curls Ashley's mouth. Pirates or not, it's a good crew. Good people. Even Shepard, in all his brash, inappropriate, 'looking out for number one' glory.
“Anything in a Cerberus uniform gets a bullet,” Shepard continues. His voice has a tone of finality in it. He's channeling the Butcher. “Anything that looks like one of those orbs gets trashed. Got it?”
“Roger that, Skipper,” Ashley says. The door behind them slides open again and Alenko enters the already crowded airlock. The only place to stand is next to Shepard, and Ashley can almost cut the tension between them.
She eyes them, curious. What happened in the helm? The chirp of the VI interrupts her thoughts, announcing the cycling of the airlock. The doors on either side of them flash red a moment before the air is sucked out of the room.
Alenko pushes his way to the front as the exit slides open to reveal a turian even taller than Garrus. He's fully kitted and holding a rifle that makes Ashley a little jealous. His colony markings are stark white against plates a shade or two darker than Garrus’.
His eyes land on EDI first, who is in her prime platform. The turian takes a step back, nearly raising his weapon before Alenko gets to him.
“Nihlus,” he says, approaching the turian. They clasp arms in greeting. It's hard to tell without seeing their faces, but they seem genuinely happy to see each other.
“Is that a geth?”
“Uh,” Alenko says, looking over at EDI. “Yes and no. She's on our side, though.”
Nihlus hums, nodding slowly. His eyes flit behind Alenko to Shepard.
“Eric Shepard,” he says, voice laced with disbelief. He glances at Alenko. “You've been busy.”
Alenko nods. “The council sent me to retrieve a prothean artifact from Namakli. Cerberus was there, too, and I wasn't able to stop them from leaving planet with the artifact. Shepard saved my life.”
Nihlus' gaze falls back on Shepard. He cants his head. “And what were you doing on Namakli in the first place?”
Shepard shrugs, nonchalant. “I was going to snag a hell of a payday, until we realized those creepy orbs were fucking with peoples' heads.”
That seems to really get Nihlus' attention. “Orbs?”
Shepard makes a vague shape with his hands. Liara is already pulling up a picture on her omni-tool, moving forward to show him.
When Nihlus looks at it, his mandibles quirk as he sucks in a breath. Ashley’s not sure if turians can go pale, but it sure looks like Nihlus does.
“What is it?” Alenko says.
Nihlus points a talon at the photo. “Udina has one of those in his office. Ever since he got it, he's been acting stranger than usual. I didn't think anything about it, but...”
Alenko curses. “You think he's behind this?”
Nihlus shakes his head. “I'm not sure. But there's no way Cerberus would be able to pull this off without help. What better help than a councilor.”
“Where's the rest of the council?” Ashley asks anxiously. She’s never particularly liked Udina – at least from what she’s seen of him on vids - but to stoop to this level?
Nihlus sighs. “I'm not sure. You're the first contact I've had since Cerberus landed on the station. They're blocking ingoing and outgoing comms. I haven’t even been able to get ahold of C-Sec.”
“If Udina is a turncoat and Cerberus' goal is to take control of the Citadel, they probably took the council hostage. Or worse,” Shepard says, beginning to pace.
Ashley frowns, watching him. He's spoiling for a fight now. If Nihlus is right, he’ll get his chance.
After Torfan, Shepard had gone a little Vader. The general public had painted him as a fallen hero, and he embraced it for a while. Ashley let him have his 'devil may care' attitude, but she also knew it was a farce.
She'd been in those mines under Torfan's surface. She saw how much each death affected him. Their unit - the one that landed on Torfan - had served and trained together for months before they hit boots on that moon. Despite their differences, they were bonded, in the unique way soldiers are.
Watching them fall, one by one...Ashley thinks about it every day. Shepard does, too. He’s mercurial, not heartless.
He'll never be the heroic type like Alenko, but he cares, in his own way.
“Unfortunately, I believe Shepard is right,” Nihlus replies.
“Where would Cerberus take them?” Liara asks.
“To the tower,” Nihlus says. He raises his arm and activates his omni-tool. His long talons manipulate the screen for a moment before a schematic of the Citadel pops up, hovering over his forearm. He gestures towards the Citadel tower, the typical meeting place for the council. “It's easily defensible. And they can control the entire station from there.”
“Then that's where we go,” Shepard says. “Cut the head off the snake.”
“I agree,” Nihlus tells him.
“A direct assault on the tower would be pointless,” Alenko puts in, stepping closer to the holo-map Nihlus has pulled up. “But if we use the evac route from the back...”
Nihlus nods. “That's our best bet, right there.”
Next to Ashley, Garrus shifts awkwardly. “There's nothing on station schematics about a back way into the tower.”
“It's not on any schematics or maps,” Nihlus puts in. “Its location is only known to the council and Spectres.”
Garrus makes an uncomfortable noise. Shepard just snorts.
“The entrance is in the lower wards,” Nihlus continues. He turns to Shepard. “Can I trust you’re here to help us?”
Next to Ashley, Shepard bristles. Ashley doesn’t blame Nihlus, not really. To him, they’re pirates who could very well turn on him the second they saw something they could sell. Never mind that they returned his protégée to him completely intact. But then, Shepard hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to disprove the reputation he received after Torfan.
It’s Alenko that speaks up in their defense, however, placing a hand on Nihlus’ forearm to get his attention. “You can trust him.”
Ashley spares a glance at Shepard, curious, even though she can’t see his face.
“I don’t see a lot of other disgraced N7s and almost Spectres lining up to help you,” Shepard says flatly. “Maybe take the assist.”
Nihlus stares at him for a long moment, then exchanges a look with Alenko, who nods. There’s a deep level of trust there; one that Ashley shares with Shepard. “Ok, let’s go.”
He leads them further into the cargo bay. Shepard and Alenko take point with him, while everyone else - including Ashley - falls into formation behind. Even with two new pieces to the puzzle, it's like riding a bike. EDI’s hulking geth form takes her spot at the back. They’d learned from experience early on that being able to see over her was more important than using her as a shield.
“What's the status on the others?” Alenko asks. By 'others', Ashley figures he's talking about the other Spectres.
Nihlus sighs. “I haven't been able to contact them. But I fear that whatever Cerberus has done to Udina has also affected them. Some Spectres have been spending more time than usual in Udina’s office, and now that all these pieces are coming together, I fear the worst.”
Alenko curses under his breath.
“And C-Sec?” Garrus asks. “What's the status on them?”
Nihlus spares him a glance, his expression impossible to read behind the face plate. “Hard to say. I've come across bodies of C-Sec officers, but others seem to be working with Cerberus.”
The breath rattles out of Garrus' lungs. Ashley reaches over and squeezes his arm in sympathy.
“So, we have no idea how far this has spread,” Tali puts in.
Nihlus nods. “That's a chance we'll have to take. Cerberus cannot have this station.”
They're quiet as they continue to follow Nihlus. On that, they can all agree.
“There is something about this that is bothering me,” Liara says.
Nihlus stops in front of a lift door that is large enough Ashley assumes it's a cargo tram. Shepard mutters “just the one thing?” as Nihlus activates his omni-tool and waves it in front of the panel. It turns green and begins to blink. He turns towards Liara.
“The orb we found on Namakli drove its victims to suicide. What benefit could that be to Cerberus?”
They all plaster themselves to the walls by the tram as it approaches. When the door slides open, Shepard scoots around the corner and says, “Clear.”
They pile inside, keeping to the walls.
“Cerberus' resources sure seem unlimited,” Ashley puts in. “Would it be possible, with enough time, for them to reverse engineer the tech to work in their benefit? To brainwash people to their goals?”
“Very probable, yes,” EDI says. “The Illusive Man is very single minded when he decides on a goal.”
“And if he could take control of the Citadel by indoctrinating the council and their Spectres, it would put him in a very strong position in the galaxy,” Tali says with a sigh.
Nihlus makes a thrumming sound Ashley can only describe as 'frustrated'. “That's likely the case, then. The Illusive Man has probably been planning this for a while.”
Ashley's looks over at Shepard and Liara, who exchange glances. The unsaid questions hang in the air. Was Liara's mother involved? Or was she trying to stop Cerberus and fell victim to their plan?
Ashley and Shepard have a unique bond over the shit storm on Torfan. He and Liara have the same over Noveria. And Benezia, and what happened to her, is one of the few things Ashley and Shepard don’t talk about.
“Why the Citadel, though?” Shepard murmurs, almost to himself. When the attention of the rest of the group is on him, he continues, “Say they take the Citadel. Then what? Why? Up to this point, Cerberus has been an annoyance, sure, but other than humanity, no one's really seen them as a threat. Taking the station will change that. All of the council species will be gunning for them. Seems like a pretty huge risk, even for the Illusive Man.”
Nihlus regards him for a moment. Ashley can't see his face behind the helmet, but his rigid posture suggests that Shepard's question worries him.
It worries Ashley, too.
“I'm...not sure,” Nihlus says. “But you're right, and it concerns me. We have too many questions and not enough answers.”
The ride in silence for a few minutes before the tram VI happily announces they will soon approach their destination.
“This tram will take us to the heart of the lower wards,” Alenko explains, resting heavily against the railing behind him. “From there we can catch the lift and back passage into the tower.”
“What kind of resistance can we expect in the wards?” Shepard asks, and all eyes turn to Nihlus.
Nihlus shakes his head. “I wish I could say. Without communication, all I have to go on is what I've seen. Some areas are quiet,” He sighs. “In another, I saw Cerberus troops detaining and dragging away civilians. I don't know where they took them.”
Ashley’s eyes cut to Alenko, who shifts uncomfortably on his feet.
“Rounding them up to indoctrinate them?” Garrus asks.
“Or execute them,” Shepard clarifies.
Ashley isn't sure what sounds worse. Shepard would say he'd rather be dead than someone's puppet. Part of her agrees with him.
The lift slows to a stop and the door slides open. At first it's quiet, but then the distant sound of shouts reaches Ashley’s ears. The pop-pop-pop of gunfire. A scream.
Shepard exits the lift first, doing a quick sweep of the area. “Clear.”
Ashley and the others exit after him, falling into a tight formation. The market stalls around them are empty, merchandise and credit chits scattered across the floor. A chit crunches under Ashley's boot, and she glances down at it briefly.
There are a handful of bodies scattered around the stalls. All C-sec, from the looks of the uniforms. Not a single civilian.
Typically, they'd be scooping up as many of these fallen credit chits as they could and getting the hell out of dodge. Not their circus, not their monkeys.
But this isn’t a typical op, and they step over credit chits like they’re nothing but broken glass.
“This way,” Nihlus says, leading them to the right of the lift, in the opposite direction of the shouts and gunfire.
Their path snakes around the back of the main market area and into a darker, smaller section. The already dim lights flicker above their heads, and the corridors shrink around them, the market stalls crammed together. Ashley's willing to bet her favorite scope it's where the black market does the majority of their business.
It should be filled with people and sound. But the only people are them and the only sounds are their boots on the ground.
Something crashes to the ground behind the kiosk in front of them. Alenko and Nihlus come to a stop, Alenko raises a fist, and the rest of them halt as well.
He nods in the direction of an overturned kiosk. Something dark is smeared across the side of it, leading to a bigger smear on the floor that creates a morbid path the direction they came.
“Council Spectres,” Alenko announces in a voice that's equal parts 'do what I say' and 'you can trust me'. “We're here to help.”
Nihlus gestures for the rest of them to lower their weapons while he and Alenko keep theirs trained on the kiosk. Next to her, Shepard makes a sound of frustration. It's been a long time since he's had to take any sort of order from someone else.
The fact that he acquiesces is just further proof how out of their depth they are.
A human head appears from behind the overturned kiosk; wide, terrified eyes in a dirty face. Alenko and Nihlus lower their weapons.
Lord, it's just a child. No more than thirteen, by Ashley's estimation.
“Why should I trust you?” they say, eyes ping-ponging between the rest of the squad. “I saw another Spectre dragging people away. They shot some of them.”
Alenko spares a glance at Nihlus, who continues, “We aren't with them.”
“We can get you someplace safe,” Ashley says, taking a step toward the kid.
The kid shakes their head, backing up in the direction they came. Towards the shouts and gunfire.
Someone moves. She isn't sure who. But the next moment the kid is bolting away from them. Tali mutters a curse and Liara attempts to follow them. Garrus holds her back right as the kid rounds a corner.
Alenko is off like a shot, but then Shepard is in front of him, hands on Alenko's chest plate, pushing him back toward the group. One of Alenko's fists balls up at his side as he glares at Shepard.
Ashley tenses, waiting for a swirl of dark energy to cover his fist, but nothing happens.
“We can't help them,” Shepard says.
“The hell we can't!” Alenko fires back. “We have a big enough squad. We can send people to help the civilians-”
Shepard barks out a laugh, regarding Alenko with a cock of his head. “You trying to give orders to my crew?”
To his credit, Alenko isn't backing down. Ashley doesn't know a lot of people with the balls to stand up to Shepard for very long. It just makes her respect Alenko that much more.
“You're on the Citadel, Shepard. I'm a Spectre. Pretty sure that means I outrank you in this situation.”
Shepard snorts. “It's adorable that you think so.”
Nihlus steps between them, resting a talon on Alenko's shoulder to get his attention. “We help them by getting Cerberus off the station.”
After a long moment, Alenko nods and stalks back the way they came. The cadence in his gait screams that he knows Nihlus and Shepard are right but isn't happy about it.
Frankly, Ashley isn't either.
“I don't think he likes you, Skipper,” she says.
“What are you talking about?” Shepard replies cheerily. “We're planning a spring wedding.”
With that he's gone, taking off to follow Nihlus and Alenko. Ashley spares one last glance towards where the kid took off, sends up a quick prayer, and follows them.
When Eric was a kid - after the Budapest orphanage had closed and he and a few of the kids had decided to take their chances on the streets instead of wherever they were transferred to - he learned pretty quickly about the dangers of altruism.
When your life is spent measured in days of 'where will I sleep tonight' or 'what am I going to have to do to eat today', you quickly learn how expensive it can be to worry about other people.
Still, Eric wouldn't have made it a year on the streets without help. At first, he, Javi, and Natasa stuck together because there was safety in numbers. But Eric was under no delusions they'd take an out if they could find it. In the end, it was every man for himself.
Natasa was the first to take the out, years before Eric did. They didn’t blame her.
But Javi was first person to tell Eric he could be more. More than a thug. More than the Reds' whore. But daydreams don't buy food, and Eric laughed it off and didn't think about it again, not until an Alliance officer told him he had 'potential'.
He'd taken that potential all the way to N7, and was schmoozing with Nihlus Kyrik about becoming humanity's first human Spectre before they dumped him on Torfan and told him to take the moon.
He took the moon. He paid the batarian slavers back for Elysium and Mindoir.
But the cost was too high, according to the Alliance, and just like that, giving a shit about something bigger than yourself came back to bite him in the ass.
Then Ashley Williams found him in a seedy bar on Luna a few weeks after his discharge, slid into the seat next to him, and said, “I quit. I couldn't take what they did to you. They treated you like a monster, sir, but I was there; I saw the real monsters and you weren't it.”
And he thought maybe caring about a couple of people wasn’t such a bad idea.
He can almost hear Stella laughing at him.
Nihlus leads them through the abandoned back markets. It's dark and dank and reminds Shepard of Budapest, of the streets where the wealthy got their kicks while ignoring the death and desperation that surrounded them.
They stop in front a nondescript door behind a merchandise kiosk. To any untrained observer, it'd look like nothing more than a storage closet. Nihlus enters a code into the panel next to the door and the lock flashes green, but the door that opens is behind him, in front of Shepard, blending so well into the wall he hadn't even known it was there.
“Fancy,” Shepard mutters, stepping aside.
Beyond the doorway is a dark, narrow corridor. Next to him, Williams huffs out a breath that shakes a bit.
The walls are manmade and not densely packed dirt, and the ground is clear and not littered with bodies, but staring down the maw of that hallway, he's back on Torfan, just for a moment.
“You good?” he says into he and Williams' private comm line.
“Yeah, boss,” she replies, steady as ever. “Long, creepy hallways just aren't my favorite anymore, you know?”
Oh yeah, he knows.
Nihlus and Alenko take point on either side of the door.
“This hallway leads to the back of the tower,” Nihlus informs them.
There's enough room in the corridor for two people to walk side-by-side, and even that's a tight fit. Shepard stays next to Williams, with Garrus and Tali behind them.
“The child in the markets mentioned seeing Spectres shooting civilians,” EDI says. She doesn’t have to stand next to anyone, and has to duck to fit into the doorway. “It is possible that we may run into resistance in these tunnels. Are you prepared to engage your comrades if they're indoctrinated?”
“If I have to, yes,” Nihlus replies at length. “I would trust them to do the same if it was me.”
He and Alenko exchange a look. Shepard can almost hear him grind his jaw.
They make it nearly a hundred yards before Alenko alerts them of pings on his combat scanner.
“Ours?” Nihlus asks.
Alenko shakes his head. “If it is, they changed their transponder codes.”
The hallway curves to the left. No way out but through. Still, it makes Shepard's teeth itch to feel so...trapped. Williams is tense next to him.
This won’t turn into another Torfan. He refuses to let it. He won’t have to carry Williams back the other way, over the corpses of their squad.
No sooner do Nihlus and Alenko make the turn, a round pings off Nihlus' shields, followed by another. Someone curses, they all plaster themselves against the walls to make as small a target as possible, and Alenko suddenly flares bright blue like a fucking star, a biotic bubble flaring out to cover him, Nihlus, Shepard, and Williams.
Rounds ping off the barrier, but it holds. Those that make it through don't get past their shields. Shepard can't tell how many hostiles are ahead of them, but there's at least six; four in Cerberus uniforms and two more that Shepard would be willing to bet his left nut are Spectres.
“EDI, carve me a path!” Shepard shouts over the sudden cacophony. “Liara, help Alenko hold that barrier!”
EDI charges past, everyone around her snugging up against the wall, rounds pinging uselessly off her shields as she rushes to the other side of the hall. There’s a few shouts and gasps of surprise from the hostiles on the other end as a seven-foot tall geth sprints towards them. She knocks a few off their feet as she makes her way through them to engage the back side of the fray. Tali's drone chirps as it follows her. A second drone materializes next to EDI.
Looks like Tali got EDI’s drone interface up and running.
Shepard moves next to Nihlus, in front of Alenko. His skin prickles and the hairs on his arms stand on end as Liara's biotics mix with Alenko's and strengthen their barrier. He crouches down to open fire so Williams' can fire over his head, the muzzles of their rifles sticking out from the barrier's border.
A couple of the Cerberus troops fall, but the Spectres have better shields and continue to stand. Shepard locks gazes with one of the Spectres - asari, from the humanoid shape and blue skin behind the face plate. She flexes a fist and is engulfed in a biotic corona that puts Liara and Alenko's to shame.
Then she's gone. In the next eye blink Shepard is hit in the chest with the force of a charging krogan. He careens back into Williams, who's knocked on her ass.
A suit alarm blares in his ears. No shields.
Someone hauls him to his feet, and he blinks stars from his eyes to see the asari Spectre scowling at him and holding him by the arms with a strength that surprises him given her size. She's still glowing blue, dark energy wafting off her in angry tendrils.
Shepard's 'felt' Liara's biotics before - and even Alenko's for that brief moment on Namakli - and he always thought it tingled a bit.
This doesn't tingle. It roils under his skin and makes his guts twist. She throws him into Nihlus with enough force to knock them both to the ground. Somehow, Alenko and Liara manage to keep the barrier.
“Shepard!” Williams' yells.
Vaguely, he hears Garrus yell, “They're flanking us!”
Motherfucker.
The asari reaches for him again, but he's a little sick of being treated like a sack of potatoes and kicks out at her knees. It doesn't do much against her armor, but it's distracting enough to let him scramble to his feet and bull rush her.
He barrels into her and knocks them both off their feet, riding them to the ground. He clenches his thighs as she tries to buck him off, flash fabricating a blade with his omni-tool.
He manages to pierce her shoulder when she squirms and shoves against his chest. Her biotics leech under his skin and he gasps in pain. It's like she's reaching inside and pulling him apart.
He twists the blade and she snarls, but it's enough of a distraction that he's able to wrench the omni-tool from her shoulder and put it in the gap between her suit and helmet.
She thrashes under him, trying and failing to suck in air and instead making a gurgling sound as her blood spills onto the ground. It's not until she stops moving that he stands, panting and angry and his guts on fire.
By then it's over. The Cerberus agents and the two Spectres lay dead on the ground. Tali's drone is toast, and she mutters a curse as her slender fingers tap on her omni-tool to try to bring it back up. Garrus rubs at score marks on his chest plate from a round that apparently got through his shields but not the ablative. On the other side of the tunnel, several C-Sec agents lay dead.
Alenko comes to stand at Shepard's side, face cast down to the dead Spectre at Shepard's feet.
“Friend of yours?” Shepard asks.
“Tela Vasir,” Alenko replies. “We didn't always get along, but I… respected her. She was a good Spectre.”
Shepard hums. Apparently even ‘good’ Spectres can fall prey to Cerberus’ mind games.
“Safe to say they know we're here,” Garrus says though panting breaths.
Shepard chews on his lip for a moment. “EDI, see if you can find anything on these two,” He gestures to the Spectres. “Maybe they knew what the hell the Illusive Man was up to.”
“Of course, Shepard,” EDI replies. Her hulking form squats next to the salarian Spectre, the light in her head flickering. The salarian's omni-tool glows orange on their wrist.
After only a few seconds, she stands again, lumbers to Vasir's body, and repeats the process.
“It is as we suspected,” she says, rising to her full height again. “Communications between these Spectres and the Illusive Man suggest he has been indoctrinating them for many months. He used Councilor Udina as a way in. The Councilor is also indoctrinated. He has been using this indoctrination to build a force of allies inside the Citadel.”
“But why?” Williams asks.
EDI regards her, her flashlight head bobbing. “He has been studying the Keepers. Data shared between The Illusive Man and his top agents, including the Spectres he has under his thrall, suggest that in his study of the Keepers, he discovered something extraordinary.”
“And that is?” Shepard presses, beginning to pace.
This just keeps getting better.
“That the Citadel is the main hub of the mass relay system,” EDI says. “From here, Cerberus would have control of relay transit throughout the entire galaxy.”
Shepard stops. Something heavy settles in his gut. Alenko takes in a sharp breath, and Nihlus stands still as a statue.
“That...” Nihlus starts, before he has to clear his throat. “That would put him at the seat of power in the galaxy.”
“Yes,” EDI agrees with a nod. “With control of the relays, he essentially cripples galactic trade, as well as slowing the movement of any council species military to a standstill.”
Alenko swears. From behind her face plate, Williams looks ready to hurl.
“Then we must stop him,” Liara says.
“Agreed,” Nihlus replies. He gestures forwards down the tunnel. “We're a couple hundred yards from the tower. We'll exit above the dais where the council convenes. It'll give us a good vantage,” He nods towards Garrus. “If you get a good shot on the Illusive Man, take it.”
Garrus takes a moment to answer, his gaze shifting from the bodies of the C-Sec officers to Nihlus. “No argument here.”
They approach the door to the tower, and everyone puts their backs to the walls as Alenko approaches it. A quick biometric read later and the door slides open. Shepard half expects rounds to start whipping past them immediately, but they enter the tower to no fanfare.
They exit above the council meeting area, and crouch behind the railing. Garrus finds a perch where one span of the railing ends and positions himself, peering about thirty meters down into the main area of the tower through his scope.
“No sign of the Illusive Man,” he says. After a moment, he continues, “But I see the council. Looks like they're in custody. A few Cerberus with weapons on them.” He lets out a curse the translator doesn’t pick up but Shepard’s heard enough to know. “Saren Arterius is with them.”
Shepard grinds his teeth, exchanging a look with Alenko and Nihlus. Saren Arterius had been particularly dogged about humanity's role in galactic politics after Torfan, using Shepard has an example that humanity was still ‘far too immature to join the galactic stage.’
Saren's probably a huge fan of Alenko.
“He's in front of some sort of control panel,” Garrus continues.
Alenko and Nihlus exchange a look that says, 'what control panel?'
“Safe bet that's where they're controlling the relays from,” Shepard says.
“Spread out,” Nihlus continues. “If this turns into a firefight, we can't be clustered together.”
The railing doesn't cover the entire circumference of the tower, but they spread out as far as they can, including covering the small stairwell that leads to the main level. Ashley and Tali take point there, while EDI and Liara take the other end of the railing, and Shepard stays in the middle with Garrus and Alenko.
The soft sound of the door to the tunnel opening reaches Shepard's ears a moment before his brain kicks in. By the time he turns around, weapon drawn, a combination of Cerberus troops and C-Sec pour from the tunnel, guns aimed at him and his crew. A quick glance at the staircase reveals more running up the stairs, where Tali and Ashley had taken point.
There's too many for them to take on without massive casualties.
“Nihlus.” The voice echoes from behind and below them. “Perfect timing. You did well.”
Shepard's gaze cuts to Nihlus, who is now standing, shaking arms holding his weapon that’s aimed at Alenko's heart.
“You fucking led us here,” Shepard sneers, standing and taking two steps towards him. Nihlus' arm continues to shake but doesn't change its aim.
“No,” Nihlus insists, like he believes it. His gaze drops to his rifle. “I wouldn't.”
Shepard isn't convinced, and by the way Alenko backs up towards him, he isn't either.
“You did,” Saren insists. “Who do you think installed the transponder we used to track you this entire time?”
Nihlus shakes his head. His weapon is still on Alenko, but he takes a couple steps backwards.
“What are we doing here, boss?” Williams says in the squad's private comm.
“Hold position,” Shepard replies, never taking his eyes off Nihlus. “Be ready to fight our way out of here.”
“What about the council?” Liara asks.
Shepard clenches his jaw. Saren is coming up the stairs, approaching the group that has Ashley and Tali at gunpoint. Shepard stands to his full height; no use in pretending to hide anymore. He spares a glance over the railing and accidentally locks eyes with the asari councilor. Relief floods her features. She thinks he's there to save her.
“We can't help them,” he replies into the comm, recognizing the finality in his own voice. This is what he’s good at, after all.
Saren comes to a stop next to Nihlus, his eyes giving a disinterested appraisal of Shepard and his crew before landing on Alenko.
“The Illusive Man has plans for this one,” he says, then turns, as if he's bored of them and the issue is settled. “The rest can be dispatched with.”
Oh, hell no.
A turian C-Sec officer reaches for Alenko. Shepard reaches for them first, grabbing them by the wrist and yanking. He uses the forward momentum to hurl them over the railing.
They don't even hit the ground before the rounds start flying. Shepard's shield's scream at him almost immediately. He ignores it, raising his weapon and beginning to pick targets.
Briefly, he glances over the railing towards the dais, just as the indoctrinated Spectres open fire on the council. The asari councilor is still staring at Shepard when a bullet shatters her skull.
His skin prickles with the tell-tale feeling of biotics in use, and for half an insane second he thinks it's Alenko throwing up a barrier before he's launched in the other direction so fast it feels like he left his stomach where it was. He's distantly aware of someone yelling his name when he slams into a wall. Instead of slumping to the ground he stays pinned, and a crushing weight descends on his chest, like someone adding more and more stones on top.
His shields fizzle out with a pop and he takes in a painful breath, his suit VI informing him of an imminent suit breach.
No kidding.
But then he does slump to the ground, landing heavy on his knees and gasping for breath. Blood thunders in his ears, the shouts and shots distant, like being under water.
When he glances up, he spots his squad retreating back towards the tunnel. EDI is taking point - and the majority of the fire - covering them as they back towards the tunnel. Ashley is supporting Tali's weight, who seems to be favoring her right leg. Garrus continues to pop off targets, but from the look of his armor, his shields are in about as good of condition as Shepard's.
“Shepard!” Liara yells as Garrus attempts to usher her back towards the tunnel.
“Go! I'm right behind you!”
The lie shouldn't come off his tongue so easily, but it's all he's got left.
That and his gun.
It must have been Alenko that disrupted Saren's attempt at squashing Shepard like a bug, if the way he’s blazing like blue fire is any indicator. Even with the helmet, Shepard spots a trickle of blood under his nose.
He’s running on fumes.
Shepard doesn't spot Nihlus but is a little busy to care. He opens up on Saren and his surrounding goons, flipping the thumb switch on his rifle to coat his rounds with a plasma layer that ignites upon impact.
The goons start to fall, though Saren is still stalking in Alenko’s direction, but it doesn't take more than a second of distraction for Saren to slip through, and to slip a blade from his omni-tool into his side.
Alenko stumbles and falls to his knees just as Shepard reaches them. He coats the next round off the block with thermite, knowing it will overheat his rifle but not giving a fuck. The round hits Saren in the chest, and he staggers back. Shepard drops his rifle, goes for his pistol, and continues firing.
“Shepard,” he hisses, waving a talon sheathed in dark energy in his direction. It catches Shepard's forearms and knocks his pistol out of his hands. “You're becoming quite the nuisance.”
Shepard sweeps a rifle off a fallen Cerberus agent, but it’s bio-metrically locked to its user and won't fire. Cursing, he clocks Saren across the jaw with the butt of the weapon.
“Last time someone said that to me, I got laid.”
He reaches for Alenko and pulls him to his feet. He takes most of his weight, leaving Alenko free to fire.
“Got a barrier left in you?”
Alenko nods, the breath he pulls in is pained, but his barrier flares out, covering both of them. It's not steady, rippling and pulsing angrily. But it works, and he rushes them back towards the tunnel. A round tears past the ablative of his armor, catching him in the shoulder.
“Fuck.” He reaches for Alenko's weapon, which isn't locked, and spins around to fire on Saren.
But Nihlus beats him to it, bull rushing into Saren and hurling him off the railing.
Shepard doesn't lower his weapon when Nihlus turns to them. His helmet is off.
After years of living on a ship with Garrus, Shepard considers himself an expert in the five different turian facial expressions.
Nihlus looks sad, and a little resigned. His eyes flick down to something in his hand.
A grenade.
Shepard nearly pulls the trigger before Nihlus mutters, “Get him out of here, Shepard.”
Shepard stares at him for a heartbeat more, then nods. Whatever has allowed Nihlus to break his indoctrination is temporary, and he knows it.
But Alenko is shaking his head and trying to pull away from Shepard. “We can fix this.”
Nihlus shakes his head. “No, you can’t. I’m sorry, Kaidan.”
Shepard grabs Alenko around the waist and tugs him in the other direction. Garrus is there, too, and even with a bullet in him, it takes both of them to pull Alenko away from Nihlus as he shouts and struggles.
When Nihlus pulls the pin on the grenade, it knocks the three of them to the ground. Shepard reflexively covers his head with his hands and covers Alenko with himself. He spares a glance behind him to find the tunnel exit collapsed.
He climbs to his feet, hauling Alenko with him. Alenko tears himself from Shepard's grip so fast he nearly stumbles. They glare at each other across the short distance of the tunnel.
“We have to go,” Shepard orders.
Alenko doesn't reply as he stalks ahead, putting as much distance between Shepard and himself as possible.
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