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kauriart · 2 months ago

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Paragon, Renegade, Pilot Chapter 5

A NSFW Mass Effect fic | Joker/Kaidan/f!Shepard | Read it on AO3

Joker shouts himself hoarse within ten minutes of reaching the Citadel.

No one is particularly interested in listening to the pilot of a ship that has misplaced its Spectre. Especially when all his shouting boils down to: the ship with the giant ass is coming and everyone is going to die.

The tinny voice of the flight operator on the other end is annoyed — but not panicked — as they ping their way up the chain of command and Joker attempts to shout out dire warnings to the first, and second lieutenants, and then and the station captain who picks up the most recent comm request.

“You’re not Admiral Hackett,” Joker shouts, voice ragged. “I need to talk to the Admiral!”

“If escalation is appropriate we will—”

“It’s more than appropriate! I told you! There’s going to be an attack on the Citadel!”

“Lieutenant Moreau, as you’ve been told — repeatedly now — our sensors indicate no hostile activity, neither here, nor near any of the relays. Commander Shepard can use her Spectre-class access code to reach Admiral Hackett directly if—”

“She can’t. She’s a little busy trying to prevent a full-scale assault on the Citadel! If you can’t get me the Admiral, get me your commanding officer.”

Joker’s head throbs. He’s been slowly working his way up the chain of command on the Alliance side, while Pressly has been doing the same on the Galatic Council's side. Judging by Pressly’s pacing and wild gesturing on the video feed from the flight deck, he’s having no luck either.

Damnit, he did not leave Shepard and Kaidan (and Liara!) alone on Ilos for nothing.

“You know what, fuck it,” Joker mutters to himself. He takes a breath and then sends an unencrypted data package on Sovereign directly to the Alliance military through a broadband uplink. The information technically isn’t classified, but only because no one knew it existed in the first place. There might be a reckoning later, but Joker’s been in Shepard’s orbit too long, and the fuck-you-authority is starting to rub off on him.

“Lieutenant Moreau, you are attempting to share classified information across unsecured channels. That’s a—”

“I’m not attempting anything, goddamnit! Just look at the data I’m transmitting. That’s what’s coming for us.”

There’s total silence on the other side of the comm. Four solid minutes of nothing, and Joker seriously considers firing on the Citadel to force them into action.

And then; “Hackett here.”

Thank fuck.

“I have orders from Commander Shepard. She asked me to raise the alarm. Sovereign is coming for the Citadel. Now. It’s happening now. Uh, Sir, ” he adds with a belated huff.

Hackett is silent for exactly two beats. “Where is Shepard?”

“Ilos,” Joker says tersely. “Trying to stop this thing.”

This time, there isn’t so much as a pause for breath. “Deploy all Alliance military spacecraft within range to defend the Citadel. Hail Arcturus Station to send whatever they can in the way of air support. Divert non-military ships away from Citadel airspace. Lockdown the civilian populations. Inform the Council.”

Joker lets out a relieved breath, but the tension in his hands remains.

“Lieutenant Moreau,“ Hackett says. “You have command of the air defense.”

“Me? Sir…”

Hackett’s voice is grim. “You’re the only one who's seen Sovereign in combat.”

“Right. Ok. I have command, Sir.”

There’s a slight crackle on the comms as Joke’s feed is patched directly to nearly a dozen flight commands at once. The flight screen splits showing the status and position of all the ships under his command. Holy shit… It’s like half of the Alliance starfleet from Arcturus Station, and nearly every damn ship serving as Citadel defense; mostly Turian and Asari, but here and there the sleeker lines of Salarian cruisers.

Joker allows himself a full thirty seconds of quiet panic. Thirty seconds of where his chest tightens, and his breath is shallow, and he imagines that Shepard and Kaidan are bleeding out on Ilos, and he’s too busy presiding over the largest aerial defeat in Alliance history to save them.

And then he pulls himself the fuck together.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

“This is Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau of the SSV Normandy. There is a confirmed incoming attack on the Citadel by an entity called Sovereign.” He pulls up the holo of Sovereign and pings it through to the Alliance fleet. “Sovereign outclasses anything we’ve ever seen in terms of shielding and firepower. It’s not a ship. It’s a synthetic-organic hybrid. This thing can think and talk, and it’s a monumental prick.

“I don’t know what it wants. I just know that we have to stop it. Every station, every planet is counting on this fleet. On you.” Joker looks out across the stars, to Ilos— so far away it’s just a blurry fleck of light. But that’s where he’s left his heart.

“We are not alone. Commander Shepard is out there. We buy her the time she needs to bring this thing down. We save the Citadel. That’s it. That’s the mission.”

It’s not enough. A few terabytes of data and a battle plan that boils down to make sure we win.

They need more if they are going to survive.

Joker flexes his hands a few times. How does he explain what he knows in his bones to be true; how to handle the skies around Sovereign?

“I’m speaking directly to the Alliance and Citadel pilots, now. Sovereign is slow, but it doesn’t move like you’d expect because of its profile. We don’t yet know its weak points, so we’ll have to find them together. Sovereign has a Geth army at its back, so count on at least a squadron or two to show up. You cannot rely on your shielding, their weaponry is too advanced. Cut all non-critical power drains, and divert everything you’ve got to firepower and flight speed. And I mean every last drop. You’ll feel the change in the way the ship handles, so don’t overcompensate. No battle formations, nothing a machine can predict or calculate. Fly smart, but fly ugly. Trust your instincts. Watch the skies. We beat this thing together.

“Joker out.”

If this was a Blasto flick there’d be a dramatic swell of music, or a busty Asari kissing him goodbye, or a large-scale explosion, or… something. Not just silence and more silence. And it would be super cool if Sovereign just showed up already.

Joker flips the comm so he’s only talking to the Normandy crew. “Uh… that sounded pretty badass of me, right?”

A scatter of mostly sincere confirmations through the line, and one loud and distinctly amused Krogan laugh.

Joker patches into Wrex’s personal comm. “Eat my ass, Wrex.”

Another gleeful, raspy chuckle. “You know, Krogan tongues are like low-grit sandpaper.”

“Mmmn. Sounds so much better than waiting for Sovereign to not show up to his own surprise party.”

More silence. The waiting is awful. Joker buries his face in his hands.

“It was a pretty good speech, though.”

“Yeah I know,” Joker sighs. “Thanks, Wrex.”

The minutes drag on.

It hadn’t occurred to Joker that Shepard could have been wrong. Not even for an instant. Not until he’s assembled the whole goddamn Alliance navy and wasted his cool battle speech, and the seconds are counting down to when someone is going to remember that the entirety of the Normandy crew should be arrested, and their ship should be impounded, and—

“Incoming hostiles,” one of the Normandy flight crew says through the intercom. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a confirmed visual—primary hostile vessel, plus a full fleet in escort.”

“Thank fuck, ” Joker lets out a relieved breath, then a nervous chuckle. “You know what I mean.”

His eyes flick to the viewport as Sovereign breaches Citadel air-space, too close to the station to be anything but menacing. A moment later the Geth ships appear, black flecks against the sky, blinking out the stars around them. In a world without Shepard, there would be no opposition, just a handful of unprepared ships and C-Sec’s automated defenses. No alarms. No scramble orders. Sovereign and its Geth fleet would have carved through the heart of galactic command in minutes. Civilian casualties in the millions. Instead, Sovereign faces the entirety of the Alliance fifth fleet and the Citadel defense ships, forewarned and ready to fight.

“Surprise, asshole,” Joker grins, then shouts. “All ships engage!”

The alarms start –– an urgent, rippling claxon from the Citadel proper to the air defense as the skies dissolve into chaos.

The first wave strikes hard.

Geth fighters surge in tight formation, shields rippling, laser cannons locking onto key points of the aerial defense. Friendly ships scatter as the first volley of fire rips toward them. An explosion rocks the near side of an enormous Alliance cruiser, sending debris scattering into the void. Joker banks hard left, and feels the percussive blast of the explosion shudder against the Normandy. A Geth fighter streaks past the cockpit, just clipping the Normandy’s wing, but the shields hold—a flash of matte-black plating and a flare of blue.

Joker’s mind sharpens, cutting through the noise, focusing on what matters. His left-hand pilots the Normandy, while his right dances across a tactical holopad — a projection of the Citadel and its battlespace outlined before him, a mosaic of flashing alerts, ship movements, and distant explosions. He shifts the flow of battle, barking orders and pointing Allied ships to the dogfights they’re best suited for with a flick of his fingers.

The Geth are the immediate threat — they’re already tearing into the allied fleet, steadily eliminating the number of ships on the field –– but Sovereign is the primary target.

“Left quadrant, Sovereign’s going for the Citadel,” Jokers snaps through the fleet comms. “Keep it off her!”

The first Alliance salvos are ineffectual, skidding off the curve of Sovereign's hull. (Back?) The Reaper drifts closer and closer to the Citadel, implacable as a storm cloud. Ships from the Alliance fleet and Citadel defense attack Sovereign in waves, each as ineffective as the next. Some try for what might be its face, others aim for the spindly legs, but it makes little difference.

“Shields too strong,” Joker mutters to himself with a shake of his head. “We can’t break through.”

There’s a Geth trailing him trying to get a lock, so he picks up speed banking hard and then drops suddenly back. The Geth overshoots, streaking past the Normandy, but Joker is ready. He starts firing even before his targeting system locks on. The Geth ship explodes — close enough that the Normandy’s shields flare blue as he flies through the plume of fire and debris.

Then, a spatter of panic over the comms.

“Comms are down! The Citadel has gone black.”

“Lieutenant! The Citadel’s arms are closing!”

They are— the arms of the station are slowly enveloping Sovereign in its embrace. Once sealed, they’ll have no hope of getting to the Reaper. Not without destroying the entire ass end of the Citadel first.

“Motherfucker!” Joker punches the throttle towards the Citadel and dives headlong through a cluster of debris — a ruined Geth fighter slowly spinning end-over-end, trailing fuel and flame like blood.

Think, think, think.

How can they retake control of the Citadel like this? If the Citadel’s standard communication channels are down, the Alliance must still have a way to connect with its military officers. He refuses to believe that on a station of over 13 million, there are no QECs between Systems Alliance personnel in the Citadel and the outside world.

Sweat stings Joker’s eyes, but he needs his hands so he tries to blink it away. Christ, he’d give his left nut to have Shepard around right about now. She’d know what to do.

Then all at once a familiar crackle of static in his ear, distracting enough that Joker nearly flies straight into another Alliance ship, only managing to shift his course at the last second. It sounds… it sounds like someone remotely connecting to Normandy’s ground-flight comms.

But that’s not possible.

It’s not.

There are only three people in the world who have access to the other end of that comm channel, and they’re currently marooned a few trillion miles away.

A tiny ping of confirmation and the static resolves into a perfectly clear signal.

“Joker !”

He nearly jumps out of his flight chair. “ Shepard! What— How— Where are you?”

“I’m on the Citadel!”

He shakes his head speechless.

Joker can hear a faint spatter of excited cheering from the Normandy crew through the internal comm system that acts like a feedback loop through the ship. Through Shepard’s side, he can hear the clear sounds of a firefight — the bouncy ping of her assault rifle and a biotic slam, followed by a small explosion. Joker listens hard, waiting for the sound of Kaidan’s heavy pistol, and there… thudding in the background like a steady, measured heartbeat.

Safe. They’re both safe.

The burst of relief is so bright he’s almost sick with it. For the briefest moment, his hands shake.

“The conduit— it’s a conduit to the Citadel. There’s a miniature mass effect relay in the middle of the fucking presidium! We followed Saren through it."

Oh shit.

Joker’s eyes go wide. Saren and his Geth have had a back door to the Citadel all along.

“It’s a relay into dark space,” Shepard shouts to be heard over the gunfire. “The whole Citadel is a giant relay! The Reaper invasion starts today if we don’t kill Sovereign now.”

All Joker can think of is Eden Prime. An entire colony of almost four million souls was wiped away by a single Reaper. Nothing left but corpses and husks and one terrified Alliance Marine.

Ashley…

What kind of damage could a dozen Reapers do? A hundred?

“We can’t,” Joker shouts back. “Shepard. Sovereign has control of the Citadel. It's sealed up inside. And even if it wasn’t, its shields are too strong. We can’t even scratch it!”

Shepard swears. In the background, someone lands a tremendous biotic detonation — Kaidan or Liara or both of them are kicking ass.

A sound of frustration from Shepard and more gunfire. “Just be ready to take out Sovereign. I’ll handle the rest,” Shepard says.

“Affirmative, Commander,” Joker pings the Normandy crew. “Inform Hackett that Shepard’s on the Citadel. Garrus! Tali! Find me a weak point on that thing!”

He doesn’t even wait for confirmation before taking a strafing run against a cluster of Geth fighters harrying a Turian cruiser. They break off their attack, peeling away, and Joker manages to shoot off a section of one of their wings. The Geth fighter tumbles away, trailing smoke. Disabled but not destroyed.

The battlespace is getting harder to navigate. Broken ships litter the skies, and the defense has torn through enough of the Geth fleet that they’re losing formations and becoming difficult to track, and even more difficult to predict. Nearly sixty percent of all surviving allied spacecraft are reporting varying levels of damage. But, at least with Sovereign inaccessible, they can focus all their efforts on the remaining Geth forces.

The tide turns slowly in their favor. More Geth ships blink out than Alliance. And Joker throws everything he has into saving as many allied ships as he can and keeping the Normandy from harm.

And then, one of the flight crew shouts. “Comms are back! Sovereign's losing control of the Citadel!”

And Joker sees out the viewport, the arms of the Citadel slowly, slowly opening, revealing Sovereign, black and ominous, sunk in like a tick.

No sound from the outside world can pass through Normandy’s hull, but all at once Joker hears it, a menacing bwaaa that slices into his senses even as the skies light up in a flare of red from Sovereign's main canon. A Turian dreadnought caught in the beam disintegrates so quickly that Joker blinks and it’s just gone. All wreckage and crew burned up in an instant.

All at once Joker feels too small for the fight he needs to hold together. There’s no time for strategy. Just instinct.

“Eyes on Sovereign!” Joker roars to the fleet. “Drop kinetic barriers to a minimum, and push all excess power to speed. We have to stay the hell out of that beam!”

They try a run on Sovereign again. A barrage of cannon fire that lights up the darkness — fireworks against a stormcloud — enough to cripple the largest ship in the Geth fleet. But when the plasma cannons hit Sovereign, the energy diffuses instantly, no more effective than raindrops. Sovereign's shields barely even shimmer.

“Shit,” Joker swears under his breath. “C’mon Shepard… c’mon…”

Then he hears it. A mayday through the chaos swirling around the Citadel.

“What the fuck are they doing? ” He hisses, tracking the Citadel’s flagship through the mess of his flight screen.

“This is the Destiny Ascension. Requesting immediate support in evacuating the Council from Citadel airspace.”

"The… whole Council?” Joker blurts, horrified.

Shouts erupt across multiple channels all at once.

“Lieutenant, the Destiny Ascension is starting to break apart! They can’t take much more!”

“Shields are failing—”

“The Destiny Ascension—”

“Sovereign’s shields are down!”

“The Council. No shields remaining—!”

“We have a window to attack!”

In his heart, Joker knows he was not made for a decision like this. He knows it will make everything from here on out, harder. He knows it will damage relations with the council species. He knows Shepard will shoulder the blame.

And he knows he can’t take the risk.

Sovereign sits naked and exposed; he has no idea how long it might last.

“Stay the course! Sovereign is the priority,” he orders the fleet. “We take it down, or we lose everything!”

The comms light up with acknowledgments. Ships peel off, diving toward the exposed Reaper.

Most pilots don’t look outside their viewports. But Joker does. And so he watches ten thousand people die on his orders.

A volley of fire from a Geth destroyer hits the Destiny Ascension. The shields flare in one last, weak, death rattle. A piece of the Asari cruiser shatters, drifting off into space like broken glass. A plume of fire follows, red and blue, and then a tremendous internal explosion, bright orange cracks along the hull as the ship holds its shape for a moment before it doesn’t. It happens so fast. A series of explosions and the foundations of the ship fracture. One moment, an Asari dreadnought, wounded and tumbling through space, the next, just debris. Pieces of what was a spaceship, but isn’t anymore. A mere tangle of metal, shattered, twisted, glinting in the light of the Serpent Nebula’s sun.

Joker makes a broken sound, breathing hard. “Damnit…” Then he squares his shoulder and snaps into the comms. “Sync targeting arrays to me –– hit Sovereign now . ”

A barrage from a hundred plasma cannons arcs across the sky with one. singular. purpose.

Death.

“That’s for Sargent Ashley Williams you fuck face!” Joker shouts.

Unshielded, a portion of Sovereign’s carapace explodes in a flare of blue-green fire, and another shears off at an angle, sliding down to the citadel. Joker can hear the cheers through the comms and on Normandy’s bridge as the rest of Sovereign breaks apart moments later, falling almost gracefully to smash against one of the Citadel's arms. A plume of fire erupts, a tiny wound against the vastness of the station. The remaining Geth forces retreat almost instantly, vanishing into the blackness of space. Without Sovereign, they have no reason to stay.

Silence. Stillness.

The skies around the Citadel have become a graveyard — littered with shattered Geth ships, Alliance frigates torn in half, and the wreckage of the station’s own defense fleet. The surviving ships fly through the debris field, slow and deliberate. Their hulls scorched. Lights dimmed. Kinetic barriers running on backup reserves.

Victorious.

Sweat runs down the bridge of Joker’s nose.

Or maybe it’s just tears.

***

It’s quiet in the room — relatively speaking.

Outside, the rest of the medical ward is a flurry of motion, dozens of med-techs and doctors perform some sort of complicated ballet, weaving between hundreds of patients and bits of machinery; ordering tests, analyzing results, administering care with a brutal efficiency. Watching them feels akin to watching ships zoom around a starport — blurry with speed, but somehow managing to never crash into each other.

They’d given Shepard her own room, even as patients lined the halls and the floors of Huerta Memorial Hospital. Even as the wounded pile up, and those without life-threatening injuries aren’t even being let inside.

The whole of Huerta Memorial Hospital smells of smoke and that peculiar reek of melted plastic and metal. It nearly obscures the usually acerbic scent of medical spaces. Joker hates it. Hates everything about hospitals. Has spent too much of his life staring up at a hospital ceiling wishing he’d been born into someone else’s body.

But he just can’t leave Shepard’s side.

They’d pulled her out from under the pieces of Sovereign’s remains, Anderson had told him. And all Joker could think about was the fierce elation he’d felt when he’d watched the thing fall from its perch on the Citadel, not knowing Shepard and Kaidan were below. Not knowing he’d given Sovereign one final chance to destroy the people he loves.

It took an hour to dig Kaidan out of the wreckage.

It took another three to find Shepard.

The Normandy had docked at the end of the battle where the majority of the damaged ships had merely hung static in space, attending to what emergency repairs they could. But then, the Normandy didn’t have a scratch on her. Not many ships could say the same.

Out the window, one side of the presidium is still smoldering. The lake has a slick of oil and debris drifting across its surface, but they’ve managed to fish out all the bodies at least. Some of the trees have burned away, black smears marring the landscaping. Joker presses his hand against the window, blotting out the damage from Sovereign and the Geth. The other side of the presidium is almost pristine. Polished white paneling, gleaming floors, untouched by flame or debris. An Avina stands at the foot of a bridge, smiling.

Two halves of the same station. Two worlds. Before Sovereign. After Sovereign. His hand curls into a fist against the glass.

“Jo-Joker?”

He’s at Shepard's side in two heartbeats, knuckling tears from his eyes apologetically. “Hey.”

She blinks up at the brightness of the overhead lights, eyes unfocused and bloodshot. “Kaidan? Where—”

“He’s alright," Joker reassures her immediately. "He’s good. Took a couple of hard hits. Pretty wiped out too, bioticly speaking, but he’s fine. He’s okay. Liara too. Dr Chakwas had them brought back to the Normandy, but they couldn’t move you. You almost—” Joker swallows back the words. “You almost had me worried.”

Joker looks at all the equipment adorning the small space. She’s plugged into almost every device in the room, the heart monitor is still making soft little medical-sounding beeps in a steady, reassuring rhythm. When Joker first arrived at the hospital they wouldn’t let anyone near her room. It had taken two shouting matches and a call from Anderson to gain entry. Once inside, he’d stood at her bedside for over an hour, staring at the monitors, listening to her heartbeat and the sound of her breathing, heart overflowing with quiet gratitude.

“Don’t worry. I’m hard to kill,” Shepard says. Her voice is wrecked from two solid days of shouting over gunfire. His isn't much better.

“I know it. And now Saren knows it too. Bastard . Hope you did punch him for me before you killed him. ” Joker tries to summon a Commander at the end of his sentence, but he can’t quite manage.

“I—” Shepard hesitates, expression sobering. She looks unsettled.

Joker takes a step closer to her bed, uncertain.

“Saren killed himself, in the end," she says, voice quiet. "Shot himself to get out from under Sovereign's control.” A dry, humorless laugh. “It didn't make any difference though.”

And then she tells him about the final battle. How Saren’s corpse had sprung back to life, little more than a Turian-shaped husk. More than indoctrination. Like Sovereign had carved out his insides and rebuilt them with wires and tubing and the slosh of dark oil. Towards the end, it had rained black as they chipped away at the carapace that kept him — it — together. Part machine. Part monster.

“Maybe it wasn’t Saren at all. Maybe it was never Saren we were fighting. There was so little of him left. Just a husk in Turian skin.” She shudders, then makes a pained noise in the back of her throat, shifting restlessly on the narrow bed.

Joker frowns.

Shepard had come in with a lot of internal damage. They’d practically had her swimming in omni-gel, but it can only do so much. Joker knows more than anyone the limits of modern medicine. It can mend his broken bones but it can’t make them stronger. And Shepard is built so much from impossible things that he sometimes forgets she’s flesh and blood too.

“Saren was so sure… so sure they would spare him… He gave the Reapers Eden Prime, and Zhu’s Hope, and the scientists at Peak 15. Thousands dead so Saren could save himself,” Shepard shakes her head. “And it didn’t even work. What happened to Saren… that’s what the Reapers do to their allies.”

A flash of anger in Shepard’s emerald eyes. A bright and bitter hate that’s breathtaking in its depths. Joker knows it for what it is. She’s not mad at Saren. She’s mad at Sovereign for his disloyalty.

He sits on the bed beside her. He shouldn’t, but there isn’t a chair or any other surface available, and he’s not sure he can stand much longer. He feels a bit like they had to drag him out of the rubble too. Exhausted and battered from too much adrenaline and emotional whiplash. Plus he probably reeks. Can’t even count the times he’s sweated straight through his shirt in the last 24 hours.

Joker wipes tiredly at his face and feels the grit of dried sweat and tears, but his fingertips come away relatively clean. Half of the staff on this ward, and nearly all of the patients are coated in a fine, dark silt of ash and dust; including Shepard, though someone has made a halfhearted attempt to wipe the dust from her face.

She reaches for his hand and he lets her take it. It’s… smaller than he thought, and fits neatly in his own. It shouldn’t. Someone who shapes the world shouldn’t have hands this small. He looks down at their clasped hands for a long time in silence. Shepard’s nails are short and blunt and caked in dried blood. He can feel the calluses on her palms, and along the side of her trigger finger, earned from long days at the gun range and even longer days in the field.

Twenty-four hours ago he held Kaidan’s hand in the mess hall and felt the shiver of biotics across his skin. Now he’s holding Shepard’s in the hospital on the Citadel, a Reaper corpse just a few wards away. And between that moment and this one, a whole lifetime’s worth of fear, and adrenaline, and worry, and impossible odds they’d both beaten to make it back here.

“What a day,” Joker leans back with a little shake of his head. “I can’t believe it started with us hijacking the Normandy. I kinda expected that to be the highlight.”

"It was,” Shepard makes a breathless sound that’s too dry to be a chuckle. “The rest of it was pretty awful.”

“I dunno. I said fuck on an active comm to the entire Alliance fleet stationed on Arcturus.” He flashes a brief, wry grin. “Twice. I said fuck twice.”

“A true legend.” There's a twist of a smirk on her lips. “But that’s not what they’ll remember. You killed a Reaper today .”

“I killed the entire galactic Council today.”

In the silence, Joker can hear exactly what that does to Shepard’s heart rate. The bright-sounding beeps on the monitor falter and start hammering away. He hadn’t meant to say it like that, or maybe at all, but the words seemed to crawl up his throat to come tumbling out of his mouth.

“The Council. And the crew of the Destiny Ascension, all ten thousand of them.” He frowns down at her hand. “The Alliance lost almost half-a-fleet worth of ships, but that one… That one’s mine. I think I could have saved them. But I just…" he looks at Shepard, lost. "I didn't."

Shepard's expression is serious. “Out of everyone we lost today, I’ll mourn them the least. They knew, Joker. They knew. And they did nothing.”

A wave of anger swamps him, smothering the guilt.

What a waste. What an enormous waste.

Shepard has that look on her face, eyes narrowed and focused, playing out all the ways this might change the game. She’s already in the next battle. The next five. The next twenty.

Joker squeezes her hand, gently. “Hey. Don't do that. One step at a time. Just tell me what happens next.”

“The Alliance expands its official guidance on mako drops.”

He groans. “I’d almost forgotten. They are gonna be all sorts of mad at me today.”

“I doubt it. We would have lost the Citadel today without you.” Shepard says quietly.

“Without you, you mean.”

“Without us .”

Joker’s stupid heart skips about a hundred beats, and he stares at the way her hand curls so easily in his. “Okay… us .”

#my fic #mass effect #joker moreau #battle of the citadel #space is so hard to write for reals #if this was dragon age then the mages just wave their arms and do magic #here space ships fire stuff #is it lasers #is it plasma #who fucking knows

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