Author's Note: Pre-Virmire. A few little details here and there are borrowed- thanks for the inspiration.
Mass Effect and associated characters are property of Bioware.
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There are regs for a reason.
Battles are chaos. Eden Prime was pure proof of that; the second the intel goes to shit, you've got your guns and your squad to get you through. A gun jams, someone loaded the wrong ammo clips or didn't get the rails back on just right, Jenkins decides to take point and gets his face blown off by the geth… when everything's not in its right place, people die. Sometimes people die anyway, but there are enough variables without 7P fuckups a private shouldn't make in the mix.
When everyone follows the rules, the ship runs like the well-oiled, prototype-engined, one-of-a-kind machine she is. Everything falls into place. Things are where they ought to be. Each crew member has a routine.
When Shepard suits up for a mission, she knows her armor's in her locker. Weapons always in the same order- Shepard, then Williams, then Alenko and on down the line, racked and ready to go. Shore party circles up; straps tight, buckles buckled. Ash checks Kaidan, Kaidan checks her, she checks Ash. If Kaidan's hands linger a bit longer than they once did, she justifies it in her mind as thoroughness even if her visor hides a blush.
There are regs for a reason.
Even when there aren't rules to govern over them, life on the Normandy is routine. Every minute that Williams doesn't spend eating, sleeping, or watching vid-mails from her sisters back on Amaterasu is spent in the armory. Shepard's convinced by now that she could blindfold Ash and the woman could still strip, clean, and reassemble any weapon on the ship in five minutes or less. It's a calling, she supposes, in addition to a job, and if it didn't get done she'd have a misfiring weapon and probably a hole in her head by now.
(Shepard envies Ash's hair- pulled back neatly, nothing out of place. Her own hair got to regulation bun length once, when she was eighteen and just out of basic. When she went on her first shore leave and finally pulled out the hairpins, she realized she looked rather less like the sleek long-haired girls in the holovids and more like the spaniel dog she used to have back on Mindoir. The next day she chopped it off, the remainder barely long enough to pull back into the ponytail that she'd worn ever since.)
Wrex and Garrus eyeball each other from across the ship, swapping stories while Garrus works on the Mako; Wrex ran out of turian jokes somewhere between Feros and Noveria, so they'd had to find something else to talk about. Dr. T'Soni spends most of her time behind the medical bay, recuperating from one thing or another. Shepard's not quite sure how asari survive the mating process when even joining their minds seems to tire Liara so dramatically, not that she has any particular desire to find out. Tali's probably got her omni-tool out, tinkering with something. According to Engineer Adams, the 'Mandy runs nine percent more efficiently since Tali came on board and she's determined to work out that extra percentage point. Quarians like multiples of ten, for some reasons... there's a reason for the old joke, Shepard guesses.
Alenko lives by the monitors at the back of the mess. Shepard offered to get him a chair, once, since he stands back there so much, but he'd just shrugged- I like to stand, ma'am... old habit from Brain Camp, I guess. The lieutenant's a hard worker, anyway; when she makes her talking rounds after dinner, he always looks startled when she stops and it seems to take his brain an extra half-second to click from work to conversation. She notices, too, when she sits down in her quarters to read reports before she sleeps, that there are times when she can no longer hear the tapping of his fingers on the keys, when he takes a few steps away from the console toward her door. As always, she pauses in her reading, looks up expectantly, but he never opens the door. Mostly she wonders what he wants. Mostly, too, she knows.
There are regs for a reason.
The nightmares come, as they usually do since Feros, but Shepard knows that if she wakes up at 0200 she'll find Joker in the mess eating dinner and playing solitaire with a battered deck of cards. She grabs a mug of coffee (her mug's third from the left, always) and joins him to catch up on belowdecks gossip. He imitates Ash singing some centuries-old pop song as she works- it's a little falsetto but almost right, she'd bet- and she snorts coffee out her nose, like most nights. His crutches thump along the floor as he heads back to the sleeping pods.
In the morning they relay back to Citadel Station for a short stopover. She lets the rules slide on shore leave, this time; the word Virmire sits like a dead weight in her stomach and she's got a bad feeling about it, and the crew needs to relax anyway.
There's a row of empty glasses bearing little paper umbrellas on the table and a flower in Shepard's hair, courtesy of Jenna the waitress, by the time Ash and Kaidan coax her onto the dance floor. It's like armor check, in a way- the three of them in a little circle on the crowded floor, moving in time with each other against the crush of bodies- until a short-haired Marine whispers in Ash's ear and she turns to face him with a wink toward Shepard and a wicked grin. The pace of the music picks up and the crowd presses closer until she slips against the lip of the dance floor; she feels herself pitch backward and braces for the fall. Three umbrellas ago she would have righted herself, but now it's the floor for- Oh.
The momentum of Kaidan's hand on the small of her back lands her back on her feet a scant inch from the lieutenant and she blinks, and doesn't move for at least a few seconds longer than it takes her to regain her balance. His expression's textbook Alenko, all scrunched forehead and concern- then suddenly changes, for the first time Shepard can remember, to challenge her, to dare her to pull away first- and she doesn't. He picks up the rhythm of the song again with his arm still wound around her waist and gives her a grin that's the mirror image of Ashley's. Over his shoulder she sees Ash, pressed up close against her Marine, move one of her hands from around his neck to give her a thumbs-up.
There are regs for a reason.
She knows it.
They leave for Virmire in the morning.