It was supposed to be a relatively painless mission – in and out. Shoot some mercenaries, "confiscate" some cargo, then pat each other on the back and be back on the Normandy in time for happy hour. It was nothing Garrus hadn't done a hundred times before, and with the number of missions in which he, Shepard, and Jack had been groundside together by that point, they could dispatch Eclipse like a well-oiled machine. But really, he wasn't all that surprised when their thoughtful planning started to fall apart. It was nothing against the Commander, of course. There was no one in the entire galaxy the turian respected more. He trusted Shepard with his life, and hell, he loved the human like he was family, but if he had learned anything from serving on the Normandy – both of them, in fact – it was to never take anything for granted. He had gone into too many routine jobs only to end up in a firefight for his life, and wasn't about to let his guard down any time soon.
That damned mission was going to serve as another good reminder of why he couldn't.
First of all, the planet itself seemed to be working against them. It was incredibly hot and consisted of nothing but sand and a scattering of boulders as far as the eye could see. The moment he had set foot on the surface, the heat washed over him like he had just stepped into a convection oven, and suddenly all that he wanted to do was retreat back into the conditioned air of the shuttle just so that he could breathe for a little while longer. By the time they had made contact with their targets, Garrus was beginning to seriously wonder whether it was possible for the contents of his head to roast within his own plating.
Though the pointing-and-shooting areas of his brain seemed to be doing just fine, he decided smugly as another man fell with a tungsten slug in the head and he ducked back behind cover. The Eclipse responded with a bout of gunfire in his direction, and he cursed under his breath as crumbling bits of boulder came raining down on his fringe. He was going to have to move again soon.
He had thought the massive rocks were beautiful when he had first seen them. They were composed of some kind of sedimentary mineral, all layers of vibrant oranges and yellows worn smooth by the wind. In combat, however, they were proving rather useless as sources of cover. The mineral, while certainly aesthetically pleasing, was much too soft to withstand bullets, forcing him and his companions to shift position every time enemy fire reduced their temporary protection to a chunky pile of powder. Needless to say, those beautiful boulders were quickly beginning to lose their charm.
A rather gleeful exclamation of "Fly, bitch!" revived his good spirits somewhat, and he looked to his right just in time to see Jack hit the deck, her body still lit with a blue-black corona as the strangled cry of a floating merc rose up over the gunfire. The sound was quickly followed by another few bursts from a rifle that landed in the already crumbling shelter that was the biotic's latest boulder, until she had no choice but to scramble across open ground in search of another. She pushed herself backward, kicking up sand in the urgent effort to avoid the trail of bullets that followed quickly behind her until she had retreated her way practically into Garrus' lap.
At the moment of their collision, she jumped and jerked her head to look up at him as if noticing for the first time that he was there, her chest heaving at the effort it took to move around so much in such an intense climate. Her exposed skin was glistening with sweat, and as a result, sand was stubbornly glued to her forearms where she was supporting herself against the ground. Once content that she was again in relative safety, she took a long, aggravated breath. "Wanna do me a favor?"
"Name it."
"Ugly asshole. Two o'clock."
Garrus tentatively raised his head and leveled his sniper rifle to his eye, following her directions to an armor-clad human who was busy popping out the heat sink in his gun. He was crouched behind a metal crate, but they were at enough of an angle from each other for the master marksman to make a clean shot. As he felt the satisfying kick of his weapon, the man dropped, leaving a spray of dark red against the side of the shuttle behind him as evidence that the round had hit its mark.
"What ugly asshole?" His mandibles twitched in amusement as he looked down again to meet the grin she offered in reply.
The biotic had warmed to him some over the months that they had been working together. He supposed that his skills with a rifle, and possibly his willingness to pull her ass out of the fire when the need arose, had earned her respect. Or at the very least, had earned a reprieve from the contempt she had shown for the entire crew when she was still fresh off of the prison ship Purgatory. In turn, he had acknowledged that the passionate spark in her was truly something to be admired. They had reached a delicate sort of truce, as it were.
And it was a good thing too, he thought as he watched her spring back to her feet, the blast of her biotic shockwave scattering three more hostiles like bowling pins. Not a battle went by in which he wasn't reminded how happy he was that she was on their side.
A flash of black and red in his peripheral vision assured him that the Commander was still alive and kicking on the other end of the battlefield; he had popped up briefly to correct matters when one of Jack's latest victims made the mistake of trying to get up.
"One less." The voice sounded tinny over the com-link, but otherwise held the same steady timbre that had guided him through countless battles before. No matter how desperate the situation, Shepard always managed to make everything seem effortless. The man sounded as if the showdown so far had barely made him work up a sweat – quite an impressive feat in the circumstances. He had never even acknowledged the sweltering heat since the drop in, despite being fully donned in his N7 armor, but then he had never been one to complain about things he couldn't control.
And the things that he could control – well, he controlled the hell out of them until they were nothing to complain about.
"Something isn't right here," the voice continued in his ear. "Why this much security for a cargo transfer?"
Garrus had been beginning to wonder the same thing as the fight dragged on. In fact, the whole operation was making him nervous. Their targets had come out of three different shuttles – two were clearly identified by black Eclipse insignias, but the third, larger transport vehicle was conspicuously void of distinguishing marks. Likewise, the targets themselves were a mixture of familiar yellow-clad troops and mystery combatants dressed out of uniform. Someone was going through trouble to hide the fact that they were dealing with mercenaries.
And, call him paranoid, but Garrus felt much more comfortable knowing who exactly he was stealing from.
He felled a LOKI mech, smiling briefly as he watched it shudder and spark in a twitching heap, and was lining up another shot when a flurry of movement at the edge of his scope captured his attention. He shifted his crosshairs to see what the dwindling resistance was up to and caught sight of a pair of hostiles high-tailing it out of one of the merc shuttles. He followed them to cover –quite a distance away from what had become the main battlefield, he noticed – then returned his sights to the doorway from which they appeared, just in time to see the reason for their sudden eagerness to give the vehicle a fair amount of space. His vision was dominated completely by white, blocky limbs.
The moment he realized what he was staring at, a fresh shot of adrenaline coursed through his system, quite effectively combating the fatigue that had been beginning to settle into his limbs. "Shepard, they've activated heavy mechs. Two of them."
"Son of a bitch," was the immediate reply, though by the low-pitched quality of his leader's voice, Garrus gathered that the outburst had not been meant for his ears. "Are you two as low on ammo as I am?"
The sniper glanced at Jack, her terse nod giving weight to his fears that the figurative tables were quickly beginning to turn on them. "I'm afraid so, Commander."
A grim silence settled over the channel. The sound of gunfire around them had all but disappeared, but the relentless mechanical whir of robotic limbs was slowly growing louder, the ticking of a time-bomb that would go off with a vengeance as soon as the lumbering hulks discovered their location. It was enough to drive a turian out of his head, but unyielding faith in his leader granted Garrus patience until new orders came, the inevitable moment when strategic battle planning gave way to the all too familiar blow-it-all-to-hell method.
"I think it's time to break out the Cain."
"Woah, hang on a minute," Jack spoke up, an unexpected occurrence as she was usually all for chaos and explosions. "Shepard, that thing is gonna take out everything in the area. If those crates blow, and it ends up that we came all the way down to this shit hole for nothing…" She trailed off with fists clenched at her sides, as if unable to think of a nasty enough threat with which to complete her sentence.
"Jack, I'm not gambling all of our lives for cargo," came the reply, seemingly untroubled by her unspoken promises of violence. "Let it go. We don't have time to argue about this."
Garrus could see the muscles in her jaw working beneath her skin as she ground her teeth together, getting the feeling that she wasn't talking to either of them when she spoke next. "No. We don't." She met his gaze then, only for a moment, but long enough to make him suspicious.
Rightly so, it turned out. Without another word, she ducked out from behind their shared boulder too quickly for him to even think about trying to stop her, leaving him momentarily stunned and quite literally in her dust. That was… definitely not part of the plan.
"Shepard!" He leaned out from cover to see the girl barreling straight for the two mechs. "Jack's gone. It looks like she's going to try to take them out herself."
There was a sigh of vexation, followed by another hissed curse tacked to the very end of it. "I'll take care of it. Be ready to fire on my signal."
"I'm on it, Commander," he assured, retiring his sniper rifle to the back of his hardsuit and replacing it with the relatively compact M-920 Cain. He didn't like to fire it, was a little on edge just holding it in his arms actually, and was grateful that circumstances didn't normally call for its use. Even after Mordin's assurances that "Nuke Launcher" was hardly an accurate nickname, he couldn't imagine that repeated exposure to anything that produced a mushroom cloud could be considered safe.
He returned his attention to Jack, who, funnily enough, was in danger of ending up in the mushroom cloud if Shepard didn't reach her soon. She was halfway to the mechs, nearly within the blast range. Where was he? Garrus scanned the terrain, but felt blind while deprived of his scope.
One of the deadly giants seemed to have noticed her. Yes, it definitely had. It was rotating its top half to face her, aiming its mass accelerator cannon straight at her advancing form, and then… she was gone. Jack disappeared from his view when Shepard came out of nowhere, having flanked her in the cover of the boulders and delivered a running tackle with enough force to send them both rolling across the ground. The mech's bullets landed harmlessly in empty ground where the pair had been only a split second before.
"Garrus, now!"
He pulled the trigger without hesitation, though didn't stick around to watch the devastating effects. Instead, he hit the ground and brought his hands protectively up to his head, having seen before how far debris could fly after a blast so large. First came the sound, the rumble that boomed in his ears and shuddered beneath his feet. The wind was close behind it, relatively mild at his distance though he could hear distant boulders cracking closer to the impact zone, and soon sand was raining down on top of him and grinding between the joints of his armor unpleasantly.
After that: silence. Though just when he thought it was safe to uncover his head, something plummeted from the sky and landed mere feet from him with a crunch on the slightly yielding ground.
"Defense systems off-off-offline," stuttered the amputated mech head, sparking once before its optics went dark for good.
And once again, Shepard's steadfast voice rang in his ears.
"All clear."
The ride back to the ship was… tense, to say the least.
Not one of them had spoken a word since walking away from the flaming wreckage and scorched ground that the Cain had left in its wake. There was nothing to salvage, nothing to show for their long and tiring battle aside from bruises and sunburn. Garrus was taking it in stride. Or trying his best to, anyway. The mission had been a dud, but so had plenty of others, and he was sure that they would make up the losses sooner or later.
Though sooner would be much preferable, he decided as he glanced over at Shepard and took note of the grim expression on the man's face. They were in the middle of some financial issues, though that was about the extent of what he knew, and had no real idea of how dire their situation was. Cerberus had pulled their funding - understandable, seeing as they had completely obliterated a sizable investment along with that Collector base - and since then, they hadn't exactly been rolling in credits. Garrus understood that the Commander was under a lot of stress after extensive repairs to the Normandy had eaten up almost all of their remaining money, and though stress was definitely not any kind of unfamiliar territory, he did his best to avoid giving his friend a hard time. The same could not be said for Jack.
She was lying on her back across an entire row of seats in the shuttle, one leg crossed over the other and fingers drumming restlessly on her bare stomach. Not once had her fixed glare wavered from the ceiling, but it was undeniably clear who the target of her nearly tangible animosity was. She seemed as though she was taking Shepard's rescue rather personally, as though pushing her out of the way of mechanical weaponry was synonymous with telling her to go wait in the Kodiak while the men took care of the heavy lifting.
It was going to end in a fight; that much was obvious. It was only a matter of time, and Garrus could only hope that he could at least get out of the shuttle before they were at each other's throats.
Shepard was the one to finally break through the heavy blanket of silence that had settled over them, apparently sensing the bomb that needed diffusing in the woman sprawled on the cushions across from him. He lifted his stare finally from the floor where it had been fixated for the better part of the ride so far, a weariness settling into his features in response to her apparent hostility.
His voice came out softly, though seemed stark as the only sound competing against the steady hum of the transport's engines. "Hey, Jack…"
"Don't 'hey, Jack' me, you patronizing dick."
He bowed his head and sighed, any hopes of calm negotiations immediately dashed. When his eyes rose again to her recumbent form, they were stern and full of authority behind his visor. "I made a judgment call. You don't have to like it, but you ignore my orders like that again and we're going to have problems."
She whipped her head toward him to finally aim her scowl in his direction. "I had it, Shepard." Swinging her legs off the seat, she sat up to face him directly, her reclining position apparently one too passive in which to defend herself. "You knowI could've handled those mechs. Fuck, you've seen me take out more than two before."
Garrus shifted his weight uncomfortably, scooting closer to the tinted window beside him in hopes that they might both forget he was there.
Yes, the Commander may have been an old pal of his and, yes, his relationship with Jack was as civil as it had ever been, but he still knew better than to try to break up one of their fights. The way they went at each other, one would think they'd been married for ten years as opposed to merely "shacked up" - as Jack referred to it – for a little over a month.
"Fresh out of cryo, you mean? When you weren't exhausted and dehydrated? Yeah, you handled them fine. But after that fight?" Shepard shook his head. "You're lucky you didn't fry your amp as it is."
"I know what I can handle." Her retort filtered out through clenched teeth. "We needed that score. You know that and you still pussied out."
His eyes narrowed, the only physical sign of his growing annoyance. "I was looking out for you!"
"I don't need your goddamn protection!"
If Garrus pressed himself any closer to that window, he was going to need one of the engineers in the hangar deck to help him peel himself off by the time they landed.
Inconspicuously, he checked the time on his omnitool so that he might count the seconds until they were back on the Normandy more accurately, willing the time to go faster as the skirmish beside him raged on.
"I fucking had it!"
Every head in the hangar turned to look as Jack came storming out of the Kodiak, her passionate anger echoing through the large open space and prompting more than a few nervous glances among the working crew. One more second in that enclosed space with that stubborn jackass, and one or the other of them was going to have to die. Vakarian seemed to sense it too, practically scrambling out of the shuttle like the whole thing was about to burst into flame. Shepard was the only one who didn't look ready to curl up into a ball and hide until she decided to calm down. Well… him and Grunt, who seemed totally unfazed at the prospect of an incoming shit storm. But Blockhead didn't count. He had wandered over when he sensed the possibility of violence and was shifting his gaze back and forth between Jack and his battlemaster like he was watching a tennis match.
Shepard took his good old time stepping down from the shuttle, unfastening his helmet and tugging it off his head as soon as his feet were on solid ground. Beads of sweat were still clinging to his forehead from the oppressive heat of the planet's surface, and he wiped at them with the back of his arm before finally acknowledging her again.
"So you've said." He sounded tired. Definitely still angry - his tone was laced with a cold authority, a little something to let her know he wasn't going to let her just stand there and scream expletives at him for hours like she wanted to - but mostly, he looked and sounded like he wanted nothing more than to head up to his cabin and pass the fuck out. She supposed that it should have made her happy, that he was that much closer to admitting he was a shit-eating control freak just so that he could get rid of her, but she only felt a surge of frustration at the fact that he probably wasn't even going to satisfy her by fighting back. "You know what, Jack? If you have a problem with following my orders, maybe you should just stay on the ship next time."
Jack bristled, though it was mostly at the fact that the krogan was now going so far as to chime in with a grunt of approval at Shepard's threat. All he cared about was having more chances to go groundside so he could stretch his legs and headbutt shit.
"I don't have to take this, Shepard. If you want me to keep following you into one death trap after another, maybe you should ease up a little on questioning my every single fucking move." She paused and sent a scowl over in Grunt's direction, waiting to see if he felt like interjecting any more unsolicited insight. He stayed silent, and in return, Jack swallowed the urge to see whether his weight was too much for her biotic throw to send clear across the room. "When are you going to trust that I know what I'm doing? I'm not a complete idiot - I can take care of myself."
His voice maddeningly calm, he answered without skipping a beat. "Can you?"
She felt the man's cool blue eyes sink to linger over her bare midriff, and knew immediately what they were focusing on. Spattered across her torso like small fireworks occasionally interrupting her tattoos, there were spots of scar tissue, still angry and red though they had been healing steadily since the incident in the Collector Base. Goosebumps sprang up immediately on her arms that had nothing to do with the temperature in the ship as she tried desperately to keep her mind from drifting back to the nightmare that put those scars where they were. Jack couldn't believe he had the balls to throw that in her face.
But if he had been trying to knock the fight out of her, he succeeded. She crossed her arms over her chest, though looked more like she was cradling a turning stomach than exuding any kind of defiance, and tried to ignore the feeling that her skin was trying to crawl away.
"Fuck you." She met his already softening glare with a look of total disgust, and was in the midst of turning to walk away when he seemed to realize how big of an asshole he was.
"Jack…" He sounded apologetic enough, but he had crossed a line. The only reply she offered was a one-finger salute over her shoulder on the way out.
Shepard let out a long sigh, running a gloved hand over his head and tossing his helmet back into the shuttle with just a little more force than was probably necessary. Garrus looked on with some concern as his friend fumed, though was all-in-all much more at ease now that the "happy couple" was soon to be separated by at least one floor of reinforced metal. It had been like this for weeks now, starting not too long after the entire crew unexpectedly survived what they had previously been calling a suicide mission. Maybe Jack thought she could get away with more once she and Shepard were together, or maybe Shepard was trying to rein her in and Jack was feeling smothered. Hell, maybe the both of them were drowning in an affair that they thought was only going to last twelve hours before they were dead; Garrus just knew what he saw. And what he saw was that the unlikely pair's relationship was more… explosive than usual, and it was all that everyone else could do to try to avoid the blast. "It's probably best to just let her cool off for a while. You know how hard it is to talk her down once you've set her off."
The turian's attention flickered momentarily to the deliberate stride of Grunt's departure – no doubt the war hound had only turned up to see whether the ever-escalating spats would finally come to blows – then shifted back to his leader as the man began the laborious task of removing his armor.
"It was a cheap shot, Garrus. She didn't deserve that." He sunk into silence after that, the flexible skin of his brow wrinkling into an expression of troubled thought. By the time he spoke again, he had already peeled the protective shell off of his body from the waist up, the black t-shirt underneath clinging to the sweat of his torso. Garrus noticed that even the dark fabric was dusted with sand from the brief periods of time in which Shepard had made the mistake of lifting the visor of his helmet, and he could only imagine how much of the abrasive dust he would find in his own suit when he finally got the time to settle down and get some much needed bathing done. "Maybe she's right. Maybe I've got her on too short of a leash."
"The leash is only there in the first place because you want to keep her safe." Not entirely true. Garrus was fairly certain that said leash came into existence when Jack was first recruited mostly to ensure the survival of the Cerberus crew, but that point could be forgotten for the sake of their discussion. "You care about her. She has to appreciate that."
Shepard, however, seemed skeptical. He slid a covert glance over to the door through which the biotic had disappeared, only grunting noncommittally in reply before getting to work on the bottom half of his armor.
Jack made it into the elevator before she let herself lose any of the self-assured composure she was so careful to maintain around the rest of the crew. In the span of time it took to cross the threshold into the small space, however, she fell almost immediately to pieces. Her breath shook and came in irregular gulps of air. She broke out in a cold sweat and fought a momentary vertigo when she could have sworn the ground had shifted beneath her feet. Reflexively, she reached her hand out to steady herself against the wall and willed herself not to puke. She didn't want to leave any evidence of her temporary lapse into weakness.
God, it pissed her off.
She knew she wasn't the only one who was still having nightmares about the Collectors. There were plenty of crew on board who got the shakes anytime anyone mentioned them - especially those poor bastards who had been just seconds away from being melted down into organic sludge before the rescue team had arrived. But as far as she knew, she was the only one having debilitating panic attacks in elevators. She was supposed to be the strong one, the badass biotic who even now made her shipmates nervous when she walked into the room. Instead, she was a sniveling little bitch who couldn't handle the thought of a few stupid bugs. Fuck, did she hate bugs.
Determined to pull herself together before somebody decided to call the elevator, she tried to focus on steadying her breathing. But past experience had told her that will alone wasn't enough to force down the furious butterflies inside of her. What had helped her before?
Gunning shit down was always therapeutic, but that buzz had already been killed thanks to Commander Hardass. Screwing said hardass hadn't seemed to hurt either, but that was hardly an option at the moment. Just the thought of him was enough to incite a gratifying flare of anger. It was his fault she was like this. If he hadn't brought it up-
She leaned back against the cool, metallic wall with a sigh and shoved any vengeful thoughts of him out of her mind completely. Shepard didn't know the extent of her trauma. And he wasn't ever going to either - not if he was just going to use it as ammunition to take her down a few pegs whenever he thought she was getting out of line. She led her head thud back against the smooth surface behind her, then did it again with more force when the first impact wasn't loud or painful enough to be satisfying.
"Jack, you appear to be agitated." The placid, emotionless voice of EDI filled the room, making her jump though she probably should have been used to the sudden appearances of the AI's disembodied voice by that time. "Should I call for Doctor Chakwas?"
Shit, was there no privacy anywhere on the goddamn ship? "Shut up, shut up, shut up..." She pressed the palms of her hands against her closed eyelids, repeating the words to herself like a mantra even after the ship had long gone silent again. Something about the darkness was soothing, and in the quiet that followed EDI's surprising compliance, Jack slowly began to breathe steady again.
The slowing pulse of her heartbeat in her ears had nearly disappeared completely by the time she heard the distinctive thudding footsteps of over two thousand pounds of lizard coming to stand beside her in the elevator.
She said nothing at first, didn't even move in hopes that Grunt might take the hint and leave her alone. Or better yet, that he was a figment of her paranoid imagination, and when she opened her eyes she would be, miraculously, still alone.
"I don't know what you're so upset about. At least you got to see something blow up today."
Fucking hell.
Jack let her hands drop from her eyes and rolled her head to aim a withering look in his direction. Usually it was enough to chase off any unwanted guests who wandered too close to her in the mess hall, but Grunt was, as usual, immune to her attempt at intimidation. He only regarded her passively, his slitted and weirdly blue eyes eventually shifting from her to the yet unlit buttons of the elevator. "Is there a reason we're not going anywhere?"
"Is there a reason everyone's panties are in a wad today?" She snapped back, jabbing her thumb violently into the button for the crew deck then crossing her arms defensively. "Jesus."
"You kidding? Shepard hasn't let me kill anything in weeks -"
"Rhetorical question, Grunt."
As irritable as she was that anyone had decided to stroll into the elevator at that moment, she supposed that she could count herself lucky that it had been him. The very last thing she wanted was sympathy, and you never had to worry about getting any of that from a krogan. He wasn't about to ask her if she was okay, or why her face appeared to be drained of all color. He would probably think it was hilarious that she was quaking in her boots over some phantom enemy they had already stomped into submission, and he would have told her to suck it up and deal with it.
As a matter of fact, that was exactly what she planned on doing.
The rest of the ride passed in silence, neither one of them being particularly chatty on the best of days, and when they arrived at their destination, Jack stepped out onto the deck without another word.
She headed first for the mess, hoping to smuggle out a few ration packs to avoid dining with the rest of the crew later, but the sight of Shepard and Garrus heading toward Lawson's office quickly killed her appetite. Promptly backpedaling to avoid catching their attention, she changed direction and tried to think of anywhere she could go to get some peace and quiet. Starboard observation, maybe? It was usually empty since they had dropped Samara off to continue her ruthless brand of justice in asari space. It would do. At least no one would know to look for her there.
Jack was nearly halfway to her newly-decided destination before she noticed the sound behind her, the steady thud, thud that made her grind her teeth and curse inwardly in disbelief when she realized what it was. Again?
She stopped and looked back over her shoulder at the persistent krogan, now stopped as well and watching her expectantly as if waiting to see whether she would make any more sharp turns. Grunt had started this shit months ago, after their trip to Tuchanka had made him officially Urdnot. No explanation, just started following her around the ship like a lost puppy. He never did it to anyone else - well, except Shepard when he happened to be in the midst of choosing who to take groundside with him. But she couldn't fathom what drew Grunt to her, of all people. She sure as hell hadn't encouraged him. Maybe it had something to do with her going on that big Rite of Passage field trip when they killed the thresher maw. Or maybe she was the only one who could hear about the more graphically violent of his battle imprints without turning green. Regardless, she hadn't figured out a way to get rid of him, so she resigned herself to having company for the time being.
Letting out an exasperated puff of air, she continued walking. As expected, the thud, thud, thud stayed close behind her.
"You ever heard of a cat?"
A momentary silence followed her question. No doubt Grunt was confused about her sudden willingness to start a conversation. Usually her reaction to his shadowing ranged from irate silence to flat-out yelling for Shepard to call off his pet. She didn't look back again, but she could imagine him checking over his shoulder to verify that she was, in fact, talking to him. The thought almost made her smile. Almost.
"No," finally came the rumbling reply.
"They're from Earth," she continued, as if there had been no pause. "Little, furry. Some humans keep them as pets. A guy I knew even brought one onto his ship to keep him company." She scoffed at the memory. "He probably saw it once every couple of weeks. You know what the little asshole did?" She didn't wait for a response. "Picked out the one engineer who hated cats and just refused to leave the guy alone. A whole ship full of people willing to give it attention, and it latches onto the one person who can't stand having it around."
Here she paused again, twisting at the waist in order to send a significant look back at him, one sleek eyebrow raised. Jack took him to be a little slow, so gave him plenty of time for the implied connection to sink in before adding, "Dumb cat, huh?"
Grunt shrugged. "Sounds like a useless animal. Your friend should've just eaten it."
Her face fell, and along with it went all hope of him grasping her point. Too subtle for him, apparently. Funny. She wasn't used to erring on the side of subtle.
"Wish I would've thought of that," she muttered dryly, closing the rest of the distance to the observation deck. She gave up on getting rid of him. She just didn't have the energy for it.
Whatever. Maybe the two of them could start a Shepard Sucks club or something.
Author's Notes: This is my first attempt at writing something of any considerable length, so here's hoping I can actually stick with it to the end. And also not butcher Jack's personality in the process. Amen.
Comments, suggestions, criticism, bribes, insults - all welcome.