Guilty All The Same - AcaigaWrites
"Everyone? You lost everyone - and damn near lost the ship, too?"
I know, please, I know, just shut up, don't you know how much this is hurting me, too? I failed, I fucking know I failed, now just stop.
"I know, all right?" Joker snaps, looking up at Miranda sharply. "I was there!"
Kelly Chambers. Karin Chakwas. Kenneth Donnelly and Gabriella Daniels. Rupert Gardner, Sarah Patel, Vadim Rolston. Jenny Goldstein and Thomas Hawthorne, Richard Hadley, Zach Matthews - they're gone. As good as dead, for all they know, and it's his fault -
Jacob's calm voice breaks through the tension in the air like a knife, and although Joker knows it's supposed to help, he feels even more uneasy. "It's not his fault, Miranda. None of us caught it."
In the recesses of his mind, Joker picks up on EDI's voice piping up, but he doesn't focus on it, he can't, because their faces are staring at him, fingers pointing, staring, accusing. He trembles, hopes that the remaining crew will pass it off as shock or as a result of the various stress fractures he has suffered. He can feel Ava Shepard there, her gaze soft and ever trusting, and he feels so unworthy, but damn it, if he isn't grateful.
He looks to her for her guidance, willing for her to speak when he feels like nothing he says can right this.Shepard looks at him with those familiar blue eyes, and he feels the ice-like numbness in his chest start to thaw. She folds her arms, comes to sit by him, and he forgets momentarily about the others in the room.
"I heard it was a rough ride," she says gently, and he hates that she's treating him like he's fragile and breakable when he knows that she should hate him for letting this happen, for letting the Collectors take away their family - "How are you holding up?"
His voice is bitter, and his tongue is thick in his mouth. "There's a lot of empty chairs in here."
Out of the corner of his eye he sees Shepard's hand lift, only to set down again, as if she was going to comfort him and decided against it. "
"We did everything we could, Jeff," EDI says. Something jolts in his stomach but not in the pleasant way; it isn't comfort from an AI that he's seeking.
"Yeah, thanks, Mom," he says quietly, and is even more grateful when Shepard's voice sounds again.
"Is the ship clean? We can't risk this happening again."
His back straightens. "EDI and I purged the systems. The Reaper IFF is online. We can go through the Omega 4 Relay whenever you want."
Miranda's voice cuts through him like a knife, and it takes every brittle bone in his body not to start hollering at her here and now. "And don't even get me started about unshackling a damned AI," she says viciously, and his stomach tenses in anger.
His next words are frustrated, angry - furious, even - and they don't taste like his own. "What am I going to do against Collectors, break my arm at them? EDI cleared the ship. She's alright."
It's almost sad, he thinks, that his only friends after this utter shitstorm of a day might be an AI and his commanding officer. A voice in his aching head tells him that it's not true, and that Shepard is so much more than just his commanding officer, than his superior.
Even as the others debate tactics and semantics, his eyes are on Ava Shepard and her certainty.
She finds him later at his usual post in the cockpit, where she usually comes immediately after a mission. If this was any other mission, he might have cracked a joke, mockingly sang a song, or made a teasing comment about this being a rather unusual haunt of hers. Today was no such day, though, and so he doesn't. Instead, he turns his chair around with a heavy heart, takes in the sight of her as she comes to stand before him.
It isn't often that Shepard looks tired, but she certainly does now. Her shoulder-length, chestnut hair is half-pulled-back into a ponytail, a habit of hers when she is working over a datapad and figuring out something challenging. He wonders what task she has undertaken; planning, most likely - planning a way to rectify what he'd manage to fuck up so badly.
"Commander," he says, and it's soft at first. "Sorry about the crew and... and you know what, no, I'm not sorry. What the hell were you doing, leaving us out here where collectors can work us over? Because you know what, I should... I should just go. Next port, just get the hell out of here." The words sting his throat in a subconscious reprimand for his outburst, and he instantly regrets the culmination of sadness and regret that sparks in his commander's lovely eyes.
"You don't mean that, Jeff," EDI says helpfully, and he groans.
"No, but it... it felt good. I'm sorry, Commander. Okay, I'm ready, I'm good. I'm ready to save the day."
Shepard steps closer, hands fiddling idly with the loops in her combat trousers. "I know how dangerous it was. If you need some time, let me know."
It feels so impersonal, and a part of him wonders - hopes, even - that she's speaking so robotically purely for the sake of regulations and the omnipresent AI. A part of him wants to brush it off, tease her for being 'touchy-feely', but truth be told, he needs the comfort. Tali has mentioned Shepard's soft side, the way she had consoled the Quarian at her father's demise, and he finds himself pining for the same.
Idiot. Missing your mom?
He shakes his head. "EDI? Do me a favour, go play elsewhere, all right? Give me some time with the Commander. Time where you aren't spying. Set flight to autopilot and slow drift. Go play Skyllian-five with Daniels and Donnelly or something."
"Understood. Logging you out, Jeff."
He taps several buttons on his console, closing the cockpit doors behind them. "Look, Commander, I'm sorry. Seriously. I didn't mean to shout like that. Tension, I guess. Guilt, too. Lots of that."
She comes forward and leans back against the cockpit counters, facing him. At some point before coming to see him she had changed into her hoodie, and something about it is endearing to him. In the light from his console he can see every freckle that dots her lightly tanned face, can see the way that the lighting gives her an air of youth that belies the years of trauma. "I'm not angry with you, Joker. And in part, you're right. I shouldn't have left you all so vulnerable."
"No," he says, shaking his head adamantly. "No, no, no. It's not your fault, Shepard. I was just emotional, and stupid and fucking dumb. Nothing for you to apologize about."
She looks down at him, eyebrows narrowed. "Joker. When are you going to accept that you did the best you could? Can you imagine what would've happened if you hadn't have been quick to follow EDI's instruction? You could've been lost too, and then where would we be? Where would I be?"
Her eyes have turned to molten lava in just mere seconds, and he finds himself incapable of looking away. "I... I don't..."
"One wrong step," she growls, "is all it would have taken for you to have broken a leg. You were so close to being taken too, damnit! Stop acting like you're the one at fault when you were so close to being the victim!"
Her eyes glisten, and his heart thuds against his chest almost painfully. "Ava, I -"
"So close, damnit," she says, and she's leaning over him, strong arms braced on either side of his pilot's chair. "They took the others. And they nearly took you, too. I'm not going to sit by and let it happen. I'll stop them, I will. But I can't sit here and hear you blame yourself, either."
She's so very close to him, radiating anguish and sorrow and pain, but also something else entirely. His head erupts into an all-out war, one side demanding that he flee, away from her before he makes her feel even worse, and the other side... the other side is completely in the dark on what it wants.
He reaches up a hand to her face, sweeps the chesnut hair away and tucks it behind her ear. "I'm not going anywhere. Ava, listen to me. I promise you. They won't catch us again. I know better, I'm going to heed EDI's warnings and actually take shit onboard when people tell me to -"
"And if it's out of your control?" Her voice drops to a whisper, half-panicked and saddened, half-angry and vengeful. "If they do something completely unexpected?"
"Then I'll go down fighting," he says back, resting his hand on her cheek. "I'm no shot, but maybe I will break my arm at them."
"This isn't a joke, goddamnit," she hisses, and something about that small comment irks him so very badly.
"You think I don't know that?" He almost shouts, but his hand stays on her cheek regardless, almost like a anchor. "This is the second time it's happened. Right now it's the crew I couldn't save, but before? Before, it was you I couldn't save, Ava. You died because I prized a ship above all else - I was willing to die with it, and because of that, you ended up dead. Do you even know what that fucking did to me?"
"Joker-"
"No," he shakes his head, shutting his eyes and wincing. "No, Ava. Let me have this. I spent a year of my life in total denial, wondering what the hell I was gunna do with my life. With the Normandy gone and then you too, what more is there? No ship compares, and there's sure as Hell no other commander I'd follow the way I follow you. I drank a lot. A helluva lot. I didn't want to believe it, but then that Cerberus woman appears with the news, and at first I think she's lying - nobody comes back from the dead. And yet, here you are."
His windpipe is tight, and his sentences felt alien to his own mouth. Ava stands over him, stunned, and just when he thinks she's going to pull away and leave him to his own thoughts, her lips are on his.
This isn't unexpected, not really. He's had these thoughts for a long time, read hers for a long time, so long that it feels like coming home at last. Heat pools in his abdomen, expanding upwards and downwards to fill him from the tips of his fingers to his toes. Her hands cup his face, mindful of his omnipresent cap, bringing him closer still as her mouth moves over his. His arms loop around her waist, pulling her down towards him, and he starts when she moves away for a moment.
"What's wrong?"
"Awkward angle," she says, thumb grazing his cheek. "I don't want to hurt your legs."
"I don't care," he says, and coaxes her to sit sideways over his thighs. "We need this way more than I need my legs to heal quickly."
He pulls her tight against him once more, kissing her firmly and running his hands delicately up her sides until she shivers. He delights in the small moan that emerges as she permits his entry to her lips, and in the way that they've diminished any remaining space between them. He kisses her lips, then her cheeks, along her jawline and below it, leaving several along the line of her neck.
It feels like a lifetime, a dream from which he never wants to wake, but he knows he has to. He rests his forehead against hers, knocking his SR2 cap off balance, but for the first time he couldn't care any less. Her thumb moves over his flushing lips, and a frown plays over her full lips.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so, so sorry Joker."
"Hey, now, let me have my moment."
"I'm sorry that you felt like that, and I want you to know, even if I'd never came back, I could never blame you. You mean way too much to me for that."
He's stunned into a silence that he never usually feels, so he responds in the only way he can. Joker brings his mouth back against hers, and she instantly responds.
"Either way," she says, speaking softly against his lips, "I'm back now. I'm here, and so are you. That's all that matters."
"Right. All that matters."