"Operative Lawson."
Miranda glanced up from her work as EDI's voice came over her office speakers, then frowned and looked back down - she knew full well that it was a foolish habit, but she'd still not managed to break it.
"What is it, EDI?"
"I believe you are needed in your capacity as executive officer."
"That's not a very helpful explanation," Miranda noted cooly, putting the finishing touches on another of her endless, pointless, unenlightening reports. Shepard was gone again, dragging Grunt and Kasumi through some exciting bullet-filled hellhole on some backwater planet, and Miranda was in charge - as usual.
"I apologize. My grasp of the situation is tentative at best, but it appears that Jack-"
Just the mention of the other biotic's name was enough to ruffle Miranda's feathers, and she scowled, slamming her hands down on the desk - fortunately she had enough sense of mind to avoid the keyboard.
"What has she done this time?"
"Nothing. She appears to be having some kind of...episode. I attempted to speak with her, but she expressed an extremely unequivocal distaste for my 'pity'." The mechanical voice, despite its supposed lack of emotive capability, sounded remarkably peevish at that moment. EDI disliked being told to butt out, regardless of how often the AI was told exactly that.
"What, she's upset? EDI, that's hardly something that I need, or want, to get involved with! Just let her cry it out...or whatever she does. I have work to do."
"Yes, Operative Lawson."
And the peace and quiet returned, allowing Miranda to finish her first report and start on another. It frustrated her immensely to be forced to prepare separate reports on every mission for the Illusive Man, for Shepard, and for her own personal files, but data kept the galaxy in motion and she had all of it. She liked that; being in control of so much information was intoxicating, and the responsibilities that came with it were certainly better than trying to keep Shepard's hodgepodge of aliens and criminals in line when the hero was too busy shooting things to drown them in charisma. The operative revelled in her power quietly as she put the finishing touches on the Illusive Man's report and sent it off, then leaned back in her chair with a sigh - she was finished, at least for the moment.
"Operative Lawson."
And there went that.
"What is it, EDI?"
"The situation has escalated, and intervention is highly advised."
Miranda groaned inwardly. The last thing she wanted, when she was finally done and still had a while to wait before the newest mission reports needed writing, was to deal with the insane criminal Shepard kept in the subdeck.
"Fine," she snapped, her feet hitting the floor with a loud clack of heels on metal as she got up, "I'm on my way down."
As the elevator opened onto the engineering deck, Miranda could already hear the commotion going on below, and she sighed. Perhaps she should have come when EDI first summoned her.
"No use dwelling on the past," she muttered before passing through the first doors into engineering. Daniels and Donnelly stood framed in the second set of doors, looking fearfully at the top of the stairs leading down.
"Ma'am!" Daniels, at least, had the sense to react to Miranda's presence...with something other than staring. She also had the sense to kick Donnelly in the shin when she noticed him ogling their acting commander.
"Get back to work," the operative ordered them wearily, "I'll attend to Jack."
"Ma'am," they both snapped this time, hustling back to their stations. Miranda sighed a second time, looking down the stairs for several long seconds before finally beginning to descend. Her steps echoed loudly against the metal walls, but the sounds were nearly drowned out by shouted curses and the horrible squealing of tearing metal. As it turned out, Jack was busily using her biotics to tear apart the metal table that had been installed for her, rending metal from it one small piece at a time. She'd already destroyed most of it, and Miranda had a sudden vision of her turning away from the scraps to start tearing into the walls. She definitely should have come at the first call.
"Fucking...desk! Stupid...fucking...table! Ugh! What is wrong with me!?" Jack was still screaming, nearly incoherent strings of curses as she flung the tortured remains of her table around the small space until eventually she'd rendered the table down to scraps no bigger than a fist. She paused then, breathing heavily, the blue glow around her body flickering and fading a bit.
"Are you quite finished?" Miranda asked drolly, a small smirk twisting her lips when the shaved head snapped around to look at her. Jack snarled at her, full lips pulled back from her teeth like a wild animal.
"What the fuck do you want, you fucking cheerleader? I'm kinda busy, in case you didn't notice!"
"Not only have I noticed, but half the ship has. Get ahold of yourself!" Miranda scowled right back, arms crossed and one hip cocked out as she stared down the volatile woman. Internally, she was busily evaluating the survivability of a fight in this enclosed space - it wasn't good. Without enough room to manuvuer, she would be thoroughly at the mercy of the more powerful biotic almost instantly.
"Oh shut the fuck up, would you? I'm not hurting any of your precious Shepard's precious crew, so why the fuck would you even care?" Jack turned away, stalking to the furthest reach of the space she'd claimed - it wasn't far, only a few steps, but she seemed to calm down the further she got from the white-clad woman. The harsh lighting flashed across her face as she turned back again, shining on the moistness of her painted lips, her luminous eyes, and the telltale tracks of tears down her cheeks. Miranda just scowled harder and refused to be swayed by evidence of a few tears. She doubted they were fake, as subtle deception - subtlety of any kind, really - was beyond the convict, but she'd be damned if she'd feel bad just because Jack had cried.
"Because if this keeps up, you'll be tearing sections out of the hull next! That concerns everyone on the ship, so I've come to tell you to cut it out before I have to force you to." It sounded weak even to Miranda, but she was suddenly having trouble stringing words together.
"Oh shut the fuck up," Jack replied, the anger suddenly draining from her voice as she plopped down on her thin cot, resting her back against the wall. "I wasn't gonna destroy the ship, I'm not that stupid. I just needed to fuck up that fucking table."
"I don't suppose you'd be overjoyed to tell me why you're destroying furniture today?" Dammit, dammit, dammit. She wasn't curious at all, didn't care about Jack's issues and didn't want to know, but somehow the question came tumbling out anyway.
"No." The answer was short and cold, and it made the Cerberus woman angry all over again - angry, and suddenly in the mood to push Jack's buttons.
"Well," she started, her voice more amused than she'd really intended it to be, "I'm guessing it has to do with the Teltin facility-"
She barely got the sentence out before Jack was lunging at her, fists glowing blue and expression twisted into a rictus of fury. Luckily, Miranda had had a pretty good idea of what her needling would result in, and was more than capable of holding off the other woman's initial, clumsy assault.
"Struck a nerve, did I?"
She started out feeling rather superior at having successfully provoked the other woman, but Jack's reaction burst her bubble quite effectively. The attacking biotic suddenly stepped back, hands dropping to her sides and biotics fading out before she returned to the cot and sat, back to the intruder. She pulled her knees to her chest, resting her elbows on them and staring straight ahead at the crossbeams.
"Whatever, Cerberus," she sighed, leaning sideways into the wall, "You wanna know? It's my birthday. Happy fucking birthday to Shepard's pet psycho. You fucking happy now? Just leave me alone."
Whatever nebulous ideas Miranda had had about the reason for Jack's sudden instability, this wasn't it.
"But it isn't-" She stopped, then, feeling weirdly guilty that she even knew the woman's real birthday - it was in the files, attached to the report of her having been taken from her family.
"I don't mean the day my mom popped me out, stupid! Ugh, fuck! I mean the first day I killed somebody! That's my real birthday, that's when Jack the fucking psycho killer bitch was born." She turned to look over her shoulder, scowling at Miranda where she stood, still framed by the stairwell opening.
"Why the fuck am I even telling you this? Fuck, it's that idiot Shepard, always convincing me to share my fucking feelings...now I'm even sharing with the Cerberus cheerleader bitch!"
Miranda was silent for a long moment, her brain in a whirl. She had no idea what to say or how to react - the Teltin facility and its experiments were a splinter group, its experiments and its results a mistake...but she'd been a mistake as well, once upon a time. And suddenly something occurred to her.
"I didn't mean to call you a mistake," she blurted out, barely holding back a blush as black-limned eyes stared blankly at her, "When we fought in my quarters. That was poor phrasing on my part. I meant that...that their experiments were a mistake. That they shouldn't have happened." She felt like an idiot, the little short sentences falling haphazardly out of her mouth.
"Tch, whatever," Jack muttered, turning away again.
They stayed like that for several minutes, Miranda unable to pull away and Jack unable to give anything further. When they finally broke, it was almost simultaneous - Miranda took a step forward, and Jack began to talk.
"It was a kid at the facility." Her voice was dull. "I didn't want to, but they zapped me until I did, and then the first time I hit him...fuck, it felt so fucking good. The narcotics. I didn't know what it was at the time, I just knew it felt so FUCKING good when I went after that little dude. He fought back, but...I crushed his head in. You'd think that would cause a big mess but no...none, really. He bled from his ears and nose, that's all. Kinda just looked asleep. And then they took me back to my cell and told me it was my birthday. They got me a fucking cake, can you believe that shit? A fucking cake."
Miranda didn't say anything, knowing full well that the other biotic wouldn't appreciate the vein of her thoughts. The more she learned of the experiments performed on Jack, the more she questioned not the morality of the people doing the experimentation, but their intelligence. Clearly results obtained from a single fight-conditioned and emotionally-tormented little girl weren't applicable to a wider population, and considering the time and expense that went into that conditioning and torment...well, the data were essentially worthless. She bit her lower lip. Conditioning and torment?
For a horrible, dizzy second, she imagined what would have happened to her sister if the girl had been left in their father's clutches, and she felt a little sick. Conditioning and torment...she could justify them abstractly, happening to someone else - particularly someone she hated as she did Jack - but when she tried to imagine her baby sister in that situation, it made her feel sick. Oriana hadn't chosen her life any more than Jack had, but at least Oriana had had someone looking out for her. The operative swallowed an uncharacteristic surge of guilt.
"I went to sleep, and I dreamed about it - but there were no narcotics in my sleep. I woke up, and I threw up for what seemed like forever. Then I hid under my desk and cried like a little bitch until morning. I woke up today doing the same thing...that's why I destroyed that stupid table. Good enough for you?"
Jack had never been looked after, had never been protected or taken care of. Perhaps it was time to change that.
Miranda strode forward, her steps confident but her heart racing, and sat just behind Jack on the cot, pulling the other woman around as she did so. Before the tattooed woman's biotics could do more than flicker, Miranda had wrapped one arm around her waist and cupped the back of that shaven head with the other. Aware but unbothered by Jack's makeup as it smeared across her shoulder, she held the other woman tightly.
"I'm sorry," she breathed into the bare ear, "I'm sorry."
And Jack wept.