Way to go Team Milkyway

What would I do without you?

“‘I was too busy killing them?’ Really?”

Shepard shrugs, quirk to his lip as he resumes walking, eyes on a kiosk run by a volus. “I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Oh yes, it precedes you. The beautiful Commander Shepard, was it?”

“I’m very pretty,” Shepard acknowledges, chin raised.

Behind them, William snickers. “The consort certainly thought so.”

“The consort gets paid to think so,” Kaidan mutters.

“Someone’s touchy.”

Shepard acknowledges the shopkeeper and peruses his selection of omni-tool upgrades. “He’s just upset no one called him beautiful.”

A sly look crosses Williams face that isn’t going to mean anything good for anyone. “Why don’t you do it?”

Called it.

“Only if he gives me his autograph,” Shepard replies. “But you know what? That gives me an idea.”

“That can’t be good,” Kaidan says, avoiding Williams’ gaze like the plague.

“You remember the server at Chora’s Den who comped your drinks?”

“The one who was dying for a drink, and it wasn’t water?” Williams chimes in. Shepard points at her in victory. Kaidan sighs heavily.

“Exactly,” Shepard goes on, ignoring him. “The beautiful Lieutenant Alenko is going to be the perfect distraction for me to plant that reporter’s bug in the traffic control tower.”

“Wait,” Kaidan says with a frown, trying to pull his brain off the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘Alenko’ coming out of Shepard’s mouth in the same sentence, even if it was sarcasm. “How…am I going to be a distraction?”

“Trust me. Come on.”

Shepard leads them into C-Sec with the kind of purposeful step that no one is going to get in the way of, and breezes into the control tower like he owns it. For a moment, he just scans the room, like he’s evaluating it for a report.

“Easy there, Skipper,” Williams murmurs. “You stand out when you look like that.”

He always stands out, Kaidan thinks, but manages to keep it to himself.

Shepard ignores her, gaze landing on a uniformed woman sneaking furtive glances over her shoulder in their direction. “Perfect,” he says under his breath, and puts a hand on Kaidan’s shoulder. “Quick, go over there and smile at her.”

“What?” Kaidan asks in confusion.

“Go…say something about her shoes.”

“Her shoes? What do I care about her shoes?”

“Shoes, shirt, whatever. I don’t care. Trust me, if you talk to her and stay in her line of sight, she will not notice me planting this bug.”

Williams nods sagely. “Skipper’s right. She is undressing you with her eyes as we speak.”

“For chrissakes,” Kaidan mutters. “So you want me to flirt with her, that’s what you want?”

“Yes,” Shepard says, fiendish look in his eye. “Williams? See that guy over there with the asshole face?”

“Oh yeah,” she replies. “Had my eye on him since we walked in.”

“Good. Go get belligerent. I need cover from all angles.”

“You going to bail me out if I get arrested?”

“Well, the Council never gave me a Spectre badge or anything, but I’m sure if I just tell them I’m above the law it’ll work.”

“This is a good plan,” Williams agrees.

“Wait,” Kaidan says, looking back and forth between them with an irritated scowl. “You’re sending me to flirt with someone, while Williams gets to pick a fight?”

“I’m playing to everyone’s strengths,” Shepard says.

“Great. Thanks.”

“I have faith in you, LT,” Williams says solemnly.

All right. Fine. If Shepard wants him to flirt, he’ll flirt. He approaches the woman with a tentative smile. “Excuse me, would you mind helping me? I’m not sure I’m in the right place.”

Her eyes widen a little, but she’s quick on the trigger to say yes. Kaidan’s smile deepens – it’s all about managing eye contact – and comes up with a quick story about trying to meet someone who gave him the location marker for the tower and told him it was a restaurant.

“Oh,” she says, sympathy in her eyes. “I, um. Think she mislead you. This is definitely not a café.”

“Such a shame,” Kaidan says, with just a hint of wistfulness in his voice. “She seemed so nice.”

A couple meters away, Williams’ voice gets a little heated. Out of the corner of Kaidan’s eye, Shepard maneuvers closer to a corner with a good vantage point of the room. His gaze, however, keeps flicking to Kaidan.      

“I, um, I know a good place in the Presidium?” the woman offers.

“Really?” Kaidan asks, sounding almost hopeful now, resisting the urge to check and see if Shepard is watching.

“My shift ends in about thirty minutes, if you want to wait….?”

“I—”

Before he can finish, Shepard swoops in with a patient but unarguable expression. “Excuse me. Sorry for butting in, but the Lieutenant is needed on an important mission.”

“Oh,” she says, crestfallen. “I could give you my number?”

But Shepard is already steering him away. “Williams,” he barks. “Move out!”

Williams, who looks ready to come to blows with her mark, gives him a winning smile and trots over to join them. “But I didn’t get to throw a punch.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Shepard says, double-timing it for the exit, casting the woman one last look over his shoulder. “Mission accomplished.”

“You sure?” Williams asks. The sly look is back.

“Yup.”

“All because of the Beautiful Lieutenant Alenko?”

Shepard shoots her a dark glance. Kaidan smirks, and raises his chin.  

“I’m not sure what to do with you, Garrus.”

Garrus looks up with a start from his pile of gear to find Shepard leaning casually against a row of lockers in the Normandy’s cargo bay. He’d been so engrossed in inventorying his arsenal for Williams he hadn’t even heard Shepard come out of engineering.  

“Sir?”

Shepard eyes him from crest to talons, as though he’s a requisitions manifest that doesn’t match inventory. Despite being reasonably sized for a human – in Garrus’ experience, anyway, which isn’t exactly extensive – Shepard barely comes up to his chin. And yet somehow Garrus feels a lot like a pyjack standing next to a varren that hasn’t decided just how hungry it is.

“Well, you’re part of my crew,” Shepard muses. “But you’re not Alliance. You don’t exactly fit in my watch rotation, or know anything about Alliance protocol. Technically, I don’t have any recognized authority over you at all. If you stole this ship from me and waltzed off to hand it to the Hierarchy, you’d probably get a medal.”

“Also probably start a war.”

Alenko snorts from his spot over by the weapons’ bench, where the pistol he’d been working on now lies completely disassembled.  

Shepard waves a dismissive hand. “That’s someone else’s problem.” But then he pauses, face scrunching up in ways that faces shouldn’t be able to scrunch. “You know, it probably would be my problem, actually.”

Human faces are distressingly expressive, and Garrus hasn’t been around enough of them to really grasp what it all means. “Uh, while I appreciate the…confidence in my ability to mutiny—”

This isn’t coming out right.

“—I don’t actually have any plans to steal your ship.”

“Good. Because while I may not have authority to give you orders, I’m pretty sure the Council did just give me the authority to put you out my airlock if you don’t follow them.”  

Garrus’ mandibles twitch in alarm. It’s a joke…right? Humans like to joke. Surely that’s a universal trait. “I’m very good at calibrating weapons.”

Shepard’s eyebrow raises.

Garrus’ own brow plates shift rather desperately. “You asked what to do with me.”

“Right.” His gaze shifts over to Alenko, who contentedly continues cleaning his pistol. “Any good with mass accelerator cannons?”

“Uh, sure?”

Shepard nods towards the infantry vehicle across the cargo bay. “Then familiarize yourself with the Mako over there. Pretty sure we’re gonna get a lot of use out of it.”

Alenko groans and rolls his eyes – that one Garrus gets – while muttering something about war crimes under his breath.

“Yes, sir,” Garrus says quickly.  

There’s that laser-sharp gaze again. It’s like looking a rail gun in the face. But then Shepard’s face breaks into a grin. “Glad to have you aboard, Garrus.”

“Thank you. Sir.” Should he salute? Was that…appropriate? He’s still thinking about it when Shepard calls out to another human stepping off the elevator by engineering, and jogs away.

Garrus blinks. At the weapons’ bench, Alenko shakes his head and chuckles, like he’d seen whatever just happened a thousand times.

“Can I ask…what that was about? That conversation felt like…”

“A test?”

Garrus’ mandibles flare. “Yes.”

Alenko’s smile has softer edges than Shepard’s. “He’s feeling you out.”

“…Feeling me…out?”

“It’s, ah, a figure of speech. He’s pretty good at reading people, but he likes to test out his impressions with a little verbal sparring.”

“I can’t tell if I passed.”

Alenko’s chuckle becomes a laugh. “That usually means you did. He doesn’t often misread people, but when he does, you’ll know.”

“Why? What happens?”

Alenko shrugs, with an affable smile. “Someone usually get shot.”

~

“Do we have a deal?”

A cold, perilous silence falls over the warehouse, where every one of Helena Blake’s mercs stand with the kind of staged relaxation that just so happens to put their hands right by their sidearms.

You trust her? Alenko had asked during their stomach-turning Mako drop, in which Garrus is certain that Shepard waited until death was imminent before engaging the vertical thrusters to avoid smashing against the freezing cold rocks of Amaranthine. Alenko had been right about the war crimes.

No, but I think she’s a lesser evil I can live with, Shepard had replied.

He’d been so adamant this was a friendly exchange that he’d walked brazenly into the center of her band of mercs, who hadn’t hesitated to close in around them. Garrus clocks twelve of them to Shepard’s squad of four, including a sentry on the upper level.  Alenko hangs close to Shepard’s left flank while Williams takes the right, leaving Garrus to bring up the rear.

Relax. We’re all friends, here.

Except as soon as Blake had started talking, Alenko’s stance had gotten a little more square, even though nothing about Shepard’s posture changed. When the silence hits, Alenko’s hand drifts marginally closer to his pistol.

“You know what?” Shepard asks thoughtfully. “On second thought, you can go fuck yourself.”

Before the ‘fuck’ is even out of his mouth, Alenko’ is in his hand and he’s knocking Shepard off his feet just in time to avoid the bullet coming from the sniper’s nest. Somehow, in the blur of running, shooting and cursing that ensues, Garrus and Alenko wind up crouched behind a shipping container while Williams lays down another round of cover fire and Shepard yanks the sniper out of the rafters with a skein of dark energy.

“So,” Garrus says, catching his breath. “I take it this was a misread?”

“Oh yeah.”

Alenko checks his heat sink before his corona engulfs him in a bloom of dark energy. He actually chuckles before he gets to his feet and re-enters the fray, like this is just another routine patrol through the Presidium.

It’s hauntingly beautiful to see up close, the wreckage of your old life neatly preserved under the snow and a blanket of stars. 

What had it felt like to die? 

To lose hold of the Normandy’s deck plates, be ejected so violently into the space between those stars?

You don’t remember. You don’t want to remember. But that doesn’t change the truth. 

This is where it ended, for you. The few steps between the bridge and the escape pod too great for you to cross. Joker had lived and you died, only to get yanked back from oblivion, stuffed into a reanimated corpse and told it was an upgrade. They even handed you a ship that’s a good enough copy of the old one you almost believed them.  

You have to wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier if Cerberus had given you a completely different ship, instead of trying to resurrect yet another thing that had already been destroyed. 

The Normandy, the real Normandy, is here.