Shepard looked away from the small device that seemed to be the only true persona item in the drab room, asking its occupant "And you don't want to remember that?" The device in question - the Echo Shard - was a memory storage device from the prothean empire and the singular non-combat item that Javik kept.
He expected a cold-hearted, somewhat superioritist answer as was par for Javik. The response was ... surprising to say the least.
"Imagine if everyone you knew was dead; you could not remember their faces, or the the color of the sky above your home. The memories were gone. But so too was the pain."
As far as Shepard knew, Javik only had two settings: complete anger at the Reapers for killing, mutilating and harvesting his people to extinction and smugness towards the former "primitives" that now ruled the galaxy his people held with an iron fist. It sounded, at the risk of being called a speciesist, rather human to the commander.
And the picture described seemed blissful.
The sole prothean continued, turning to face his companion. "Would you want to remember them, Commander? Even if it meant watching them die again?"
I have that down pat, don't worry.
But it was a good question. To forget all that you had gone through, leave behind the burden of your people, everything they had lost, or to keep it alive but risk drowning in misery. Shepard had been living on one side of that pendulum for close to a decade and a half now.
He looked at Javik before glancing, almost longingly at the Echo Shard, wishing for something like it for humans. "We humans have a saying: let old ghosts rest."
A contented expression passed. "Then perhaps there is some wisdom in this cycle after all."
"I'll leave you be," Shepard said quietly.
He rubbed his reddish-brown hair in frustration after the door closed.
"Dammit," he cursed under his breath.
It was by no means Javik's fault. Conversations of that nature always stirred his darker memories. Memories that still woke him more nights than he could count.
"Sadly, there'll be no wisdom until we can follow our own advice."
He returned to the ship's lounge on the port side of the crew deck. Tali, his girlfriend for lack of a better term, had been trying to drink her own problems away and was three sheets to the wind.
"Shepaaaard. Knew you'd be back!" Her voice had a few slurs in it, not counting the extended pronunciation of his last name. "I keep hearing about how human men take advantage of drunk, hot women. Soooo ... is this where you, *hic* have your way with me?"
He predominately ignored the advance, booking instead for a supply he had hidden away in a compartment behind the bar.
"Sorry, Tali, not tonight." He pulled out a bottle of clear liquor, with a simple label on it that read "Mindoirian Dust". It was a type of gin his birthworld, Mindoir was famous for.
A self-proclaimed bootlegger had set up a distillery that was produced a gin so dry, so without flavor, that humans from all across the Alliance ventured to try it. The bottle before Shepard was one of the last true bottles of Mindoirian Dust in the galaxy, the planet's occupants having been killed off by the Reapers some days after the liberation of Rannoch. Shepard suspected it was a morale tactic the Reapers used, as well as a personal shot. Unfortunately, everyone he had known on that world was already dead.
Unstopping the bottle, he slammed a shot glass down and poured the gin. Raising the glass he toasted, more to himself than to Tali, "to Mindoir. May she rest in peace." He then threw the drink back, gasping as he took a breath afterwards.
The display was enough to shake Tali out of some of her drunkenness. "Shepard, are you okay?"
He took another before answering. "I just had a conversation with Javik. And I'm finding myself rather envious of him." A third shot. "And I'm remembering some old friends." He poured a fourth. "To Kevin Hobbs." This was quickly followed by three more, each to a specific individual. Kevin Hobbs, Louis Gill, Benny and Nicky Holland.
He finally stopped and explained in full. "They were my best friends. Ben and Nicole were siblings. Benny would hang around us like glue, reveling in the awesome people his big sister knew. Five years younger than us but you never knew it the way he carried on, always keeping up. One time we ended up skipping school for the day, chose to go out hiking in the forest. Not a whole lot to do on a farming world: study to go off-planet or farm. Those were our options. But us? We were gonna rule the place. By being the dumbest group of shitheads ever." He stopped the story to chuckle to himself, his eyes though she noted. They were pointed at her but they were looking somewhere else, the memory of the story he was telling. "We were out, miles beyond what was regarded as safe, past any trail heads when we came across this ravine. Musta been ... fifteen, twenty feet? Nothing but hard rocks to scrape yourself against and a long slide down into a rushing river to drown in if you slipped. Benny decides he's gonna be the first one of us to get over it. Without even looking for a narrower spot, he runs and leaps off. Nicky screamed bloody murder at the sight of it. We were all sure he was gonna die but were too shocked to do anything about it. Ben makes it across but is hanging on by his fingertips.
"Mind you, humans at age ... eleven. Not well built for that kind of stuff usually. He clambers his way up, feet kicking left and right looking for anything he can use to pull himself up. He finally makes it, turns to us, shirt and pants dirty and cut up and says "so whose following me?" He broke once more into laughter.
"Aside from the jump there really wasn't anything to do, so we just took turns going back and forth till we were bored of it. Paid for our little excursion with a week's detention. That first day ... We shoulda just skipped, gone out hiking again. But ..." his voice trailed off and he took another drink. This time, straight from the bottle.
"Well, we're doing our time, writing an essay on what we did wrong and how it'll hurt the community and blah blah blah. Everyone else is going home, studying for tests, practicing for the basketball match, or just enjoying a lay in the sun. There were, about one, maybe two hundred of us in the building when the air raid alarm starts screaming out. But this time ..."
"Shepard," Tali spoke for the first time since he started his story. She was still intoxicated and barely holding herself upright, but she was intact enough to know what kind of turn his story was about to take. "You don't hafta,"
"We start runnin' for the basement. Along with everyone else still in the school. Being out in the Verge, you learn to build safety shelters everywhere for when slavers came looking for a score. But this time ... the alarm was delayed somehow cause right after I hear it, I start hearing gunfire. The hallway we were in, it overlooked the courtyard where we'd all play sports. In it were kids lying dead or dying in pools of blood or being dragged away by the slavers. And batarians just calmly walking toward the building. Like it was a shopping trip for them. Fuckers. Probably saw it like that.
"Louis, he just froze when he saw it. Even when they started shooting at us he just couldn't move. Until a round sliced right through his throat and he fell to the ground. We all just stared at him, the same kind of shock like when Ben jumped the day before: he's going to die, isn't he? The weird thing is, he never once screamed in pain. He just ... laid there, gargling for a few seconds. The blood kept spurting out even after he stopped breathing.
"Nicky and Ben's parents were part of the marine unit on Mindoir so when this started happening she was the first to move. She snapped us out of our trance and got us moving again. Unfortunately, schools have a rather open design and not one for fending off pirates or killers. We ran into a couple of 'em as they were going from classroom to classroom. Nicky slammed right into one of them and fell on the floor. Kevin and I, I doubt we even had half a thought between us. We didn't plan on fighting him or anything, we turned our shoulders forward and slammed into them with everything we had.
"I grabbed for the pistol he had and pointed it at his head. I didn't know shit-all about alien biology. Dogs, crabs, ferrets, birds, humans, all have their organs in different places. But a head? If you break it the body stops and it's easy to identify. So I shot him. The round pierced one of his right eyes and he slumped back onto the ground. Kevin, though, didn't have the same luck. His batarian managed to get his gun back. He pointed it at Kevin before seeing me. We both fired, me at the batarian, the batarian at my friend.
"All Kevin could do was scream. The rounds echoed off each other and both of them fell down. Nicky grabbed the gun from me. Guess it was smart. I mean, I'd never even held an airsoft before then. The bones in my hands felt like they were made of broken glass at that point. She told me to tear my shirt up, use it to dress Kevin's wound.
"Needless to say, the others heard the gunfire and came looking. I had Kevin bandaged up and Nicky was firing off rounds as we kept running for the basement, hoping that they hadn't sealed it up yet. Then Nicky gets hit. She was shot in the leg and goes down screaming like Kevin did. He's bleeding all over me, she can't run any more. Then I-I ... I ... I do the one thing everyone expects of a kid in that situation. I panic. I wrestle the gun from her and run away to the nearest room I can find. I drop to the floor and stare at the door, waiting for anyone to come in. My hands were shaking. I was covered in blood, tears streaking down my face as I hear them shoot or drag everyone away.
"It was Ben and Nicky's mother who found me everything was over. I was the only one left alive in the whole school. I saw her and I start saying "I'm sorry" to her over and over again. She kept asking "where's Nicole? Where's Ben?" and after a while she stopped. Part of me always thought she realized what I did. The thing is, we'd been planning on skipping the next day. I got impatient and decided we should have gone the day before. If it weren't for me they would have lived. I killed them. Worse, I killed them twice.
The bottle he had been sporadically drinking from after his initial heavy foray was down to less than half a liter. Tali, meanwhile, for better or worse, had been fixated on the story he'd been telling her.
"Javik told me that he had forgotten the faces of everyone he knew in his cycle. Time just ... wore it all away. And I envy him."