Author's Notes: So school has been kicking my ass lately. I cranked this out whenever I could find a spare moment as a break from studying/my other story, not really intending to ever post it. When I finished it, though, I thought: hey, why the fuck not? ;)
I'm not really sure if this should be called romance, but apparently there's no such thing as a "so I don't go crazy during finals" genre. I don't own Mass Effect or any of its characters, blah blah blah.
The last thing Jack remembered clearly was the krogan coming at her.
It was her fault, really. How stupid do you have to be to miss a damn dinosaur until it's practically on top of you? She was worn out, distracted, tired of being shot at. She didn't even see him until he was close enough for her to count the scuff marks on his armor. From somewhere on the battlefield, one of her squadmates yelled a warning. Too late.
When he charged, he was like a freight train. He broke through her biotic barrier like it was aluminum foil, slammed her back against the rock wall behind her. In a fight between armor, rock, and squishy human - guess who wins.
She felt more than she heard the sickening crunch of her shattering ribs. She couldn't even cry out; the impact knocked every last bit of breath out of her and she slumped straight to the ground like a ton of bricks. She tried to scramble back up, tried to breathe, and her chest exploded with pain like a hundred hot knives stabbing her all at once. Jack clenched her teeth, clenched her eyes shut until the worst of it passed.
The first thing she saw when she opened them again was the business end of a shotgun pointed right at her face.
On the other side of it was the merc, his lips pulled back to reveal his rows of yellowing teeth and his reptilian eyes dilated from bloodlust. He was fucking grinning. Somehow the idea that he was standing over her, gloating, while she lay helpless was even more painful than the fact that she was about to get her face blown off. Shaking with the effort of just holding her head upright, she could do nothing but glare at him as his finger began to tighten on the trigger.
And then he was gone.
If the krogan had been a train, Shepard was a missile - little more than a black and red blur until he slammed into the side of Jack's would-be executioner. The latter let out an enraged bellow as both of them tumbled to the ground, and he swung a ham-sized fist to knock the man off. Jack tried to get up, to help, or at least to do something, but the act made her splintered ribs scream with agony in protest. This time she did cry out, falling right back down and panting into the dirt until the feeling relented again.
They rolled out of her sight and she couldn't bring herself to try to move again. So she waited, useless, focusing on her shallow, rattling breaths that each brought a burst of stars to blur her vision.
She heard a short scuffle on the ground, heard the discharge of a shotgun, and then heard nothing.
Just when she was starting to get nervous, though, there came a crunch of gravel as someone knelt beside her.
"Jack! Hey! Come on, Jack, talk to me."
She looked up into Shepard's wide and frightened eyes, barely comprehending. Then she looked past him, over at the hulking krogan on the ground behind him. Its face was little more than a pulpy mess, the wreckage still smoldering with embers from incendiary ammo.
"Fuck me sideways…" was what she meant to say, though it came out as little more than a groan and a gurgle as she choked on what she assumed to be her own blood. The warmth dribbling out the side of her mouth and the sharp, coppery taste that suddenly overwhelmed her tongue confirmed those suspicions.
Shit, she was gonna die.
Shepard was talking to her again, but she had to work so hard to understand him that she only managed to grasp every few words. Her head was swimming. All she wanted to do was close her eyes, just for a little while. She was so tired all of a sudden…
"…need you to…awake, just…to the shuttle…pick you up now, alright?"
Jack felt arms sliding gently beneath her, though no amount of caution could have saved her from the sharp twinges that punished her for every movement. She screamed when he finally lifted her, and felt an overwhelming urge to punch her heroic commander in the head. She would have, but the hurt wracking her body seemed to have caused a mutiny in her limbs, because her arms refused to listen to her brain's commands. She rested her head against Shepard's chest instead, her puffs of breath clouding on his armor. The blood on her cheek smeared, marring the glossy sheen of his chest plate, and in a moment of delusion, she wanted to apologize for it.
She must have blacked out for a minute, though, because the next thing she knew, she was lying across a row of seats in the Kodiak. She felt a pinch at her side, then this wonderful, cooling sensation that couldn't have been anything but medi-gel as the anesthetics began to take effect. It was a relief, but she knew it wasn't enough to fix the mess that her insides had no doubt become. It was like sticking an elcor in the ass with a thumbtack. She knew she was still fucked.
Shepard. Where was Shepard?
A momentary pang of fear overtook her when she couldn't see him right away. She saw vague blurs of turian, then salarian. Neither was focused on anything but her battered torso.
There. There he was. She tried to keep track of his face as it hovered over her, shifting in and out of focus as the internal bleeding continued to wreak havoc on her concentration. She tried to talk, barely getting out a croak before she coughed up another spatter of blood.
"Hey. Hey! I think she's trying to say something," she heard someone speak – couldn't tell who – but it was Shepard who leaned down toward her, trying to make out her words amidst the chaos as Mordin and Garrus tried to keep her alive long enough to get her to Dr. Chakwas . Jack lifted an arm, even though it felt like it was weighed down by blocks of lead, and grabbed a hold of the front collar of the man's armor. She dragged him down toward her, until her bloodied mouth was nearly touching his ear.
"If I die," she rasped, even as she felt consciousness slipping away from her again. "I'm haunting you, Shepard."
Jack knew she was still alive when she woke to a dull ache that throbbed all the way through her body, her first thoughts fogged up by what felt like a serious cocktail of painkillers. A harsh brightness assaulted her eyes when she tried to open them. She shifted to rub them, but winced when the movement jostled the IV needle that was stuck into her arm. Her sight adjusted slowly, until she could begin to distinguish shapes from the bright blur she started out with. An operating table, a whole row of beds, all empty. She was in the med bay. Interesting. She had a feeling that any other crew she had been a part of would have decided that she wasn't worth the effort and tossed her out the airlock.
She thought she was alone until she caught sight of what seemed to be the one dark blur in the room, a stark contrast to all of the sterile white around it. Upon closer inspection, the blur was a figure seated in an uncomfortable-looking chair near her bed. Its head had been resting in its hands, but it looked up at the rustling of the bed covers.
Shepard. Who else would it have been? He seemed tired, unshaven. She had never seen the man look so much like… well… just a normal man.
He smiled, looking relieved, when she turned her head toward him. He rubbed at his apparently stiff neck, and she wondered if he had been sleeping in that chair. "Good. You're awake."
"Mmm, sorta." Jack shook her head a bit in an attempt to clear it, carefully inching toward a more upright position with the pillows behind her propping her up. As the sheets covering her slipped down, she noticed that the only thing keeping her from flashing her bare chest was a wrapping of bandages wound around most of her upper body. Whatever. It was still more modest than her usual outfit. "How long have I been out?"
"Couple days," he answered after a brief hesitation, as if he lost track of the time himself. "How are you feeling?"
"Shredded." She imagined that if she weren't so stoned, she would have been practically begging him to throw her out the airlock. "Do I look as shitty as I feel?"
He shook his head. She noticed that his gaze never strayed from her face, even when she practically invited him to eye her up. "You look fine."
"Fine?" She raised her eyebrows. "Damn, Shep, turn down the charm. Am I blushing?"
"I mean, considering what happened to you, you look pretty good."
"Jesus. You suck at this." Grumbling, she turned to look straight up at the ceiling again, giving in to the urge to close her eyes for just a moment. "And you look like shit, too."
He laughed, an unexpected reaction to her grumpy sarcasm. "Wow. Can't crush or sedate that mouth of yours into submission, huh?"
She was all ready to be pissy for that. She jerked her head to scowl in his direction, but then a thought struck her and a sudden smirk tugged at the side of her lips instead as she remembered what he was talking about. "Did I threaten you?"
"Yep." He rose from the chair with a wry smile, coming closer to stand at the side of her bed. "It's a good thing you did, too. I was considering telling the Doc to save the medi-gel and just put you out of your misery, but I didn't want to have to deal with your ghostly ass popping out of dark closets for the rest of my life."
Her smirk grew. "Smart choice."
A silence settled over them then, broken only by the regular, high-pitched beeps ringing out from the heart monitor beside the bed. Curiously, Jack found her attention drawn toward Shepard's chest. Did the guy even have a heart anymore since Lawson had finished with him? The real, flesh and blood heart that he had been born with? If she pressed her ear to his ribcage, would she hear that familiar lub dub beating steadily inside of him? Or would he hum like an engine?
Fuck, what was wrong with her? Chakwas must have filled her IV up with some insanely badass drugs.
"Listen… I wanted to… I mean, I should probably…" She frowned, frustration etching itself into her features as she fumbled for words, but she stopped short when she looked up at him again, catching sight of his face. He looked like he was trying to suppress his smile, but was doing a pretty shitty job at it, if you asked her. His muscled arms crossed and his eyebrow arched expectantly, she could see the teasing spark in his eyes even through the eerie orange glow. The smug bastard.
Furrowing her brow, she stubbornly clammed up again. If he was going to be like that…
"Nevermind. Fuck off," she muttered, gingerly shifting back down into a supine position as a sign of dismissal. "Go kiss some Cerberus ass, or whatever the hell it is you do all day."
But he didn't leave, not right away. Instead, he laid a warm and calloused hand on her arm where it rested on top of the covers of the bed. She was startled at first, by how warm it was. She wondered for a second whether it was because of his cybernetics, like all of those little machines working to keep him alive were heating him up from the inside. Or maybe she was just cold, and hadn't realized it until she had felt something truly warm.
Jack gave him a questioning look, but he said nothing for a long time, only matched her eye contact with an indecipherable expression. He smiled when a few moments passed and she still hadn't looked away, brushing his thumb over her skin so faintly that she wasn't even sure whether it was a conscious action. Absently, she noticed that the beeps from the heart monitor were coming just a little faster than before.
"Get some rest," he finally ordered. "I want you up and breaking heads again ASAP."
She smirked halfheartedly. "Right. Gotta have us all in top form before we go die on the other side of the Omega 4."
"That's the idea," he grinned, either stupidly confident or actually looking forward to the chance to go down in a blaze of glory. He was batshit either way.
He gave her arm a light squeeze before releasing it and headed for the door. Jack followed him with her eyes for a second before she realized what she was doing, then tore them away from his retreating back with an exhaled breath that she hadn't known she had been holding in.
"And Jack?" He paused when he reached the doorway, and she rolled her head on the pillow to meet his gaze again. "You're welcome."