Down with the ship
'Well, a captain always goes down with her ship.' Shepard supposed as she drifted into space, away from the burning wreckage of the Normandy, her home for these past months. The ship was torn asunder by the sickly yellow beam of the strange spaceship that had seen straight though their stealth systems. She watched, helpless as another explosion ripped through her ship, debris spewing into space, some of it buffeting her further from her ship.
'Atleast most of my crew escaped.' she told herself, but not all of them, she knew that. She'd seen corpses in the vacuum exposed CIC, her crew, dead. She looked at the escape pod she'd almost made it to, she knew Joker was in there, nursing a broken bone or five from being thrown into it.
A faint hissing hit her ears and she realised her air hose had been severed by some debris, she tried to reattach it and failed, but some quick thinking got it sealed with Omni-gel. 'Now I can die burning in the atmosphere instead.' her mind snarked.
'Oh shut up, if you hadn't gone for Joker you'd have been fine, you deserve this.' It was the oxygen deprivation, she knew that, her suit was limiting it's severely depleted reserves, keeping her alive, if not completely coherent, for as long as it could. She felt a spike of red-hot anger. Joker! If he'd just evacuated when he was supposed to she'd be in an escape pod, instead of dying in space. She wished she could rip him apart with her biotics. The anger dissipated quickly though, she'd chosen to save him, this was as much her own fault as his.
Wait, biotics. Was this the last, desperate act of her oxygen deprived mind, clinging onto any stupid, desperate hope for survival? Probably. But damned if she wasn't going to try whatever it took. That familiar tingling built up in her spine, from the base of her amp, spreading through every part of her body as the element zero nodes threaded throughout her nervous system sparked to life, it wasn't something she'd ever tried before, possibly not something that had ever been attempted before, she built up all that biotic energy, and then let it go in a massive biotic charge, directly towards Joker's escape pod.
She slammed into the pod at high speed, hand scrambling for grip as the impact altered the course of the podand almost knocked her away, one hand managed, desperately to grip onto a groove, and she mounted the pod with the magnets in her boots. There wasn't enough air, she couldn't get her breath back and her suit was showing failures from the impact.
"Joker." She wheezed out. "Joker can you hear me?" No, please don't let the suit's radio be dead! Not now, not after all this! "Joker.. Activate the… air shield, and open the door. Please hear me Joker." She leant her head against the pod, still no response, he couldn't hear her.. It was too late, there wasn't enough air, she was going to suffocate here, stuck to the outside of an escape pod, a metre from survival.
A pneumatic hiss, small air between door and shield venting. Vision blurry, Shepard saw the pod door opening a blurry figure moving, was that Joker? In one of the pod's emergency EVA suits? Gentle arms grabbed her, brought her inside the pod, the last thing she perceived before passing out was Joker's blurry face looking at her in concern, pulling off her helmet as the pod door resealed. "It's okay commander, you're safe."