#javik

I've been dipping in that hole a few years back. Just a general monster-fucker idea of it.

With Alice it becomes a bit complicated (though the scene where JAVIK begs to come with no-romance Shepard into the portal beam did quite the emotional damage to me). She'd started as shakarian shep, but cemented in shoker in later years. Dragging her into shavik feels a bit... promiscuous, and I am not a multiple-shep girlie.

Oh, I am team Javik! More importantly, team Hardened Javik.

He is the absolute gem of comic relief for Alice with all his deadpan comments, xenophobic rants (see: Alice's sense of humor) and constant confusion. The way he humbles Liara's infatuation with his civilization? Chef's kiss.

But outside of it, they share a special bond. Javik is the revenge of his people, he is a dutiful soldier, last of his kind. Alice is simply the only one of her kind, and she carries the prothean cipher inside her. At some point, when they stop bickering about her synthetic half, she shows him what Thorian gave her: the images of Prothean Empire in its prime. The remnants of his culture that were lost even to him.

And she gives him the memory shard. She gives him the proudest and the most painful memories back.

but javik not being "good" as people see it is why he's so interesting. he's from a different time with different rules, and that's the entire point! he's there so we can see how it was done before, and why this current cycle has a chance.

we wouldn't understand the importance of uniting very different and unique people if javik wasn't there to say that the prothean empire failed by forcing people under one people, one rule. and this epic failure happened despite the prothean believing themselves so superior to others!

we also get this lesson about idolizing previous civilizations and cultures as liara has to come to terms with the fact that the protheans aren't as wise and/or as benevolent as she wanted them to be. surely it's not that distant from irl where people tend to idolize empires from before, and learn almost nothing from history.

and it's not just on a larger scale that javik has a purpose in the story. he's also a character who believes there is no honor in war and who has lost everything. symbolically, he can be seen as a ghost, but also a great warning for shepard and their future.

Javik never doubted that she would appreciate the Prothean anatomy, fine-tuned by aeons of evolution long before her ancestors leapt into their first mating dance.

But sometimes, when flesh meets flesh, when the Cipher crashes their minds together like opposing magnets... There is something else. A row of lights, snapping into being, stark, electric, to illuminate a vast archive.

Every inch of her carries memories.

Her skin thinks back to being grafted by careful hands in pristine gloves, to being pieced together out of charred flakes on petri dishes. Her bones ache with echoes of whirring machines that modeled them in 3D, layed them out into a building-block puzzle, coated them in raw, quivering fat and muscle.

Her nerves run taut, interlacing with cybernetics, a living spiderweb that once began at a scientist's fingertips. And at the apex of it all, her brain strains, thinks, panics... Deep within, far beyond her easy smiles, her nonchalant bravery, her impossible compassion for all the miserable creatures in this cycle — she asks herself, again and again, if this is really her. If the fragments that were retrieved from the black void of space, to be used as tissue samples in Cerberus' experiments, are enough to... count as her. If that foolhardy young human, once torn apart into a brilliant sunburst over a remote planet, is still alive. If she is even meant to be alive.

Her answer is, of course, silence. Something Javik knows all too well. He, after all, is not quite meant to be alive either. His was the last-ever intact sleeping pod, sustained through millenia by drawing precious sustenance away from scientists, pioneers, great thinkers, avatars of Wisdom and Resilience... The likes of whom the little Asari would so feverishly daydream about. One by one, they were snuffed out, lost in that black void, leaving behind pure Vengeance.

Vengeance is nothing but sharp edges and scorching fire. Vengeance knows nothing of soft, quiet comfort. So it makes no sense, bears no meaning, when Javik presses his lips against the Commander's forehead. This is not an act of Vengeance. This is something she would have done — and has done, in fact, much to his scorn.

His excuse is that it calms her, and this spares him from cringing through telepathic turbulence.