THE NORMANDY

OMEGA NEBULA

PRE-OMEGA RELAY

Joker glanced up from the console when the small deck of well abused cards landed atop his arm rest, reaching out reflexively to keep them from tumbling into his lap. "You better hope you're wearing armor because I've got my braces and somebody is getting an ass kicking." Cards ready to be flung, he toggled the chair around, finding the hiss of hydraulics to perfectly accent his sudden irritation. Nobody bothered Joker at the helm. Nobody.

Nobody except for the Commander.

Shepard arched an eyebrow in challenge, her customary straight faced expression sliding into a smirk for a moment as he blew out a breath. "I'm armored Joker, but I don't see you kicking."

"Well Commander, I never hit a lady," Joker quipped, holding the deck out to her with a roll of his eyes.

Rather than take the cards back, Shepard stepped away and returned with a chair and a small tray she placed between them as she sat facing him. "Nobody calls me a lady." And it was true. So far as he knew, only those who had no idea who she was would dare to call her a lady and even that was slim. Her bearing was soldierly when it wasn't downright confrontational and scars decorated her face instead of makeup. The dark hair that been pulled into a knot before her "death" had been shaved down into a bristly fuzz that did nothing to soften features that nobody could really call pretty. Handsome perhaps. Certainly striking in a predatory kind of fashion. Still on the path of recovery from her release from Cerberus, her hair hadn't had the chance to grow out yet and her implant-affected scars had a mean glow to them that seemed to serve as a warning; much like the exotic coloration some species sported naturally. Even now, her features were firmly set though there was something distant in her laser-green eyes. Something thoughtful.

"I'll make sure it doesn't happen again, Commander." Still holding out the cards, he waved the deck impatiently. "I have to get back to-"

"Let EDI handle it." Again, that half smirk at his explosive exhale. "Let it handle it. You set our course already, you don't have to babysit it. So deal."

"Commander, with all due respect, I wouldn't let EDI handle my taxes so I'm not gonna sit here and deal with it because you have the sudden whim to gamble."

"Not 'deal with it' Joker, deal the damn cards. We're not gambling, we're just playing."

He waited another moment, hoping it was some sort of joke, but when she waved him impatiently onward he gave her a dramatic sigh and began shuffling them. "What are we playing? Not that it matters, without gambling it doesn't even have a point."

"Poker. Unless you aren't familiar with that game, Mr. Moreau."

Still shuffling, he scoffed laughingly. "Me. Not know poker. That's rich Commander, maybe they should start calling you 'Joker'." He flipped the cards out easily, settling the deck on the tray beside them. "Two person poker. No stakes. I bet we could make this a real game with some more players though. Not EDI, that thing probably cheats with all those cameras set around here."

"Keep talking, I'm gonna clean you out. Cripple or not."

"That's a low blow. Besides, I'm not afraid of ghosts." Tucking his cards, he peered at his hand and grimaced. Inwardly of course, there was no point in broadcasting his poor hand. Shepard was eying her cards with an unreadable look. Nothing to be done about it there; poker faced was her norm. Except for a few times during his career with her, the legendary Commander Shepard was rarely rattled. He could probably count the times he'd seen her shaken on his fingers. It seemed since coming back from the dead, she had been less solid in some areas and like a titanium wall in others. When they had dragged Garrus on board near death, the stricken look that had flashed across her face as the turian vanished into the medical bay had been a rare show of humanity. But then again, she'd always cared about her crew. Cared more about her friends.

But now she sat across from him, stone faced and eyes still distant with her fingers hovering over her cards.

"So what's this all about?" Joker waved his cards.

"It helps me think. Relax a little." Playing across the cards, she arranged and rearranged, discarded and drew.

"You? Relax? Now I've heard it all." Dumping his horrible cards only yielded slightly better odds, but his hand was still off. The card gods must have been laughing.

"It's been known to happen." A few exchanges later, the cards were down. Joker groaned and retrieved the deck, shuffling automatically. She took the next round, and the next after that, though his luck did seem to be improving. Several games later she was taking heavy losses. He was ahead.

"You're distracted. Now who's winning? The recently deceased is falling behind." Joker smirked, drawing a new hand as she shot him an unreadable look. Cupping her cards close she leaned back in the chair, boot tapping against the floor. She'd been doing it on and off through the games and even though he initially thought it a tell, he had disproved the theory after a few hands. If it was a tell, it didn't relate to the game.

Lowering her cards, she lifted her fingers to her temple and rubbed a moment before letting her hand fall back to her lap. "God this is all just one big game."

"Cards usually are Commander." It didn't take an intergalactic flight genius to realize she wasn't talking about cards anymore.

"This is how it goes, you know. Start out strong..." Pausing as she shifted forward, she discarded and drew, settling back into the chair with a sigh. "And then you get knocked down. Akuze. Eden Prime. Citadel. Virmire. Sovereign. And now, damned Cerberus." He could see where this was going.

Gauging her with the same swift expertise he handled the Normandy, he fixed his eyes on the Commander and folded his arms over his chest. It all fell into place and he could have shaken his head for not seeing it sooner. "Its funny who you meet on a mission, huh? Horizon was hard." She jerked as if she'd taken a blow, setting the cards face down with a sharp snap and looking at up him with an expression like he'd just slapped her across the face and kicked her puppy for good measure. And he'd be damned if it didn't surprise him. The reaction was sharp, the misery that flashed across her face like lightning as her shoulders came up with quick tension. "Damn, Commander."

"When did you turn into a damned armchair psychologist?" She snapped, retrieving her cards in an attempt to recover her usual composure though he could still see the surprise. It almost amazed him that she couldn't see it herself, as sharp as she usually was.

Everybody here was still new enough to the crew though, maybe they didn't see it like he did. Garrus might have seen it but the turian wasn't the type to go sticking his face into other people's business. Not when he was bogged down with his own issues. Doc Chakwas surely could, there was always some strange sort of female intuition around the matronly medic. "Well Shephard I'm an armchair kind of guy."

Setting her cards face down with a sigh, she looked up and scanned the helm of the ship, confirming that it was only Joker, EDI and her within earshot of the impromptu card game. Eyebrows drawing together at her seeming secrecy, Joker set his own cards down. "Commander?"

"Are we traitors?" And there it was. The weight that she had been trudging around with lately. Suddenly her distraction became clearer. Since Horizon she had been distant and moody, not as sharp on the draw or as quick to direct the crew as she always had been. Even though the Commander had been taciturn since her surprising return from the dead, she had been even more moody since the attempt to stop the Collectors on the colony planet.

Joker had been mildly surprised at how dismissive she had seemed about her run in with Kaidan, especially considering the two had gotten incredibly close over the course of tracking Saren. Not that either would have said, but he wasn't blind. He'd known Shepard almost as long as he had known Alenko, so there was no missing the way they'd started acting around one another. After they lost Shepard, Kaidan had come apart at the seams almost overnight and the rest of the crew had floundered. Hell, everything had changed. But now he was beginning to think that he didn't know her as well as he thought. If Horizon had been eating at her for so long he should have noticed. Should have anticipated it. Joker was observant even if he wasn't a 'people person' for crying out loud.

Breathing out a sigh, he reached up and twitched the brim of his cap then leaned back into his chair to meet her oddly uncertain eyes with a level stare. "Commander, let me lay the hard truth on you." Taking a moment to gather his thought, he turned to EDI's station. "None of this goes into any logs."

=It will be logged Mr. Moreau. Unless the logs pertain to security or crew safety though, they shall remain locked.=

"Yeah, they better." He grumbled, turning back to Shepard. "I know this sounds weird, but even though its impossible to forget that you were gone, sometimes its also hard to remember you weren't there. That you didn't see all the damned changes. We're not traitors Shepard. They let us down."

She shifted slightly into what he knew was her "listening" mode, body leaned forward and forearms braced against her thighs as she watched him, green eyes burning into his. That gaze was incredibly unsettling at times; the bio-synthetic implants they'd used to put her back together had given her eyes a none-too-subtle glow.

Shaking it off, he drew a breath and smirked. "I know Jacob filled you in a little already, about how things fell apart. Garrus must have told you too. He knew better than anybody after all. But here's the thing: nothing changed when Sovereign went down. The old council was wiped out, but the new council just kept sitting there on their asses. Anderson tried, but they started backsliding." Waving a hand irritably, he grit his teeth a moment. "They denied everything. Saren was just a rogue Spectre and Sovereign was just his damn ship and the geth were following him for the hell of it. By official reports, the Normandy had a malfunction and most the crew were lost to 'training accidents'."

Shepard's eyes narrowed somewhat. He nodded, smirk twisting into a scowl.

"Commander, they never even let the public know that you were dead. They didn't honor your memory, they used you as a figurehead for the Alliance and touted you as a perfect soldier even as they pulled your work apart and swept it all under the biggest damned rug you've ever seen. What we did went untold."

Even though Jacob had told her that to a degree, having Joker confirm it soured her stomach. "Oh, I'm not done yet. That just the tip of the iceberg Shepard." Turning to check the charts and flight instruments for a heartbeat, he let her have a moment to swallow it all. "And then there was your crew. Everybody that survived was shuffled around and told that they couldn't breath a word of what happened because it was classified now. It made all of us sick. Word got around anyway, there were a lot of dissenters and people left the Alliance because of the cover up. Even more signed up though because they used you for recruiting. They split us all apart, and the aliens went their own ways. Garrus left C-Sec even though they begged to have him back after what happened with Saren. Tali, Wrex, even Liara went their own ways. They promoted Alenko, probably to keep him quiet, and shuffled him off to one classified mission after another without even giving the guy a chance to come to grips with the way things were. Are." Drawing a breath in through his nose, he gave her a hard look. "They grounded me Shepard. The best damned pilot they have and they threw me away. So you're damned right I left."

For a long moment, she was quiet. Almost awkwardly so. Though her eyes will still fixed on him, there was a distance to them that said she didn't see him at all. Which was fine, it gave him a moment to push the anger and betrayal back down. "We didn't betray them Shepard. They betrayed us. Why else would we be here unless Cerberus had a plan? They believed every word of what the Alliance claimed were wild rumors and your overactive imagination. And they want it stopped in a way the Council doesn't."

"How could so much have changed in... in two years?" She still stumbled over the fluctuation of time, to Alex Shepard it was like the world had left her behind. To her, what only seemed like weeks had passed while everybody else hit faster-than-light and was waiting around some some curve she couldn't quite navigate yet. "Is the Alliance wrong now? And Cerberus is... what? Our savior?" Lip curling on the last word, her distaste at the thought was clear. Joker could understand. Shepard's parents had been soldiers, she'd grown up among them, become one and fought her hardest only to find the system dragged its ass. And now it had betrayed her and those she had fought for. Cerberus had been the enemy back then and they had cost her a lot in the past. Akuze had been their work. ExoGeni had been their front. She was right to be concerned, but they all were on one level or another.

"I still don't trust them. All that shit they pulled, all of those twisted experiments. But they're the ones saying the same things that we did. So we stick and we get this problem taken care of. Then who knows." Joker lifted his shoulders in a stiff shrug and pulled the bill of his hat down lower.

"Who knows." Shepard agreed listlessly and settled back into the chair to digest it all. It wasn't going down easy though.

Touching in on the real subject, Joker tipped his head back to meet her eyes beneath his cap."Look, Commander. Kaidan was an ass for saying what he did, but he could never give it up. Not like us. We saw what the Council and the Alliance were doing to us. He couldn't. To him, it was just the last thing he had left and he wouldn't leave it." There had been harsh words between them several times. Joker had been furious to be grounded, but Kaidan wouldn't or couldn't stand up for him, instead following the finger that Anderson pointed to the next target. Like some wind-up biotic running on steam rather than his own drive. "We never knew it until it was too late, but you held the crew together. Maybe you held more than just us together and when you died, it all went with you. I won't lie, I was shocked as hell to see you even though they warned me. Kaidan loved you, it was probably like a kick in the balls."

Shepard closed her eyes at that and if anything it seemed that her shoulders bowed under some new weight he didn't understand. He'd only talked to her about it all because he thought it would help, damnit. Gathering her feet beneath her, she stood and looked over her shoulder toward the galactic map and the elevator beyond it. "Thanks Joker. That's a bit better."

"If you say so, Commander."

"I understand things a little better now. I just need to think it all over." Gathering her deck, she jammed them into the formal looking uniform she'd taken to wearing around the ship. She seemed to chafe in it, but refused to wear the more casual uniforms with the Cerberus logo on them. "Give me time."

"I hate to break it to you Commander, but time is the one thing we've never had enough of and I don't think that's gonna change." Joker watched as she nodded, picking up the small table and chair and putting them back into the nearly hidden storage bin near the wall joints.

"Then we'll just have to make do with what we have." Surveying the helm for a moment, the Commander nodded faintly and skimmed her fingers over the fuzz that topped her skull.

"That's nothing new, now is it?"

Shepard remained silent with the eerie glow of her eyes on him for a long, considering moment that made him want to squirm. Not that he would. "No, I guess it really isn't. Thanks Joker." She half turned to leave before halting, eyes scanning the console before finding his. "For being here. For having my back." With no real way to answer that, he flipped a hand at her dismissively.

"Where else would I be?"

Again she hung back, this time stabbing a finger at EDI's glowing, blue orb. "EDI, keep those logs secured."

=Of course, Commander.=

"Get some rest Joker. Nothing's getting easier these days and I want you sharp."

He waited until she walked away before turning the chair back to the console, checking and rechecking the routes he'd input before she had interrupted him. Everything was still straight and proper but he hated leaving the console untended. "I'll rest when I die. Not that it seemed to do her any good."

AN: I've had this idea floating around inside my skull and since I started replaying some ME lately in an attempt to get myself geared and pumped for ME3 (Yes I know it's still months away, leave me be .) I decided this really needed to be finished. Hopefully slapping it up here where other people can mull over it will give me some much needed encouragement to finish it.