A/N: And here comes chapter 2, and the regular updates shall commence along with it! Instead of complaining about how much free time I don't have, I'll just say that writing is somewhere below eating and above sleeping in my priorities, so if it takes me a while to update during this month it's not because I've forgotten! And now...

Chapter 2

Kal'Reegar shifts in his bunk.

The mattress is harder than usual. His shoulder blade presses uncomfortably against the surface and he turns again. This time the corner of something is digging into his ribs. What the hell?

He's also really, really warm. The fabric of his suit is chafing hot, almost irritatingly so. This has got to be the worst bunk he's ever slept in. With a grunt of annoyance, Kal cracks an eye open.

He instantly shuts it again, gritting his teeth as a white-hot spear of pain sears through his eye and into the back of his head where it lodges. His head feels as if it's threatening to split. After a few minutes of recovery he hazards another look, this time giving his eyes time to adjust before opening them all the way. Even then, he barely achieves a squint, and all the while someone is playing an impressive drum solo on the inside of his skull. Kal groans and props himself up on an elbow, shielding his eyes with a forearm.

Bright golden sunlight cascades in through a jagged hole in the window, spilling across his body like ghostly blankets. He looks around and sees that he's not in his bunk after all. The steel deck under him is covered with detritus, a piece of which he rolled over on earlier. Kal'Reegar blinks fuzzily and turns his head to regard the shattered glass above him. Thoughts swim through his head like confused fish. Someone... How did that get broken? Did I do that? Wait... No, that's not a window. It's...

Memory slams into him like a physical blow. Shit! Pirates! Where's—ah, fuck! We... I crashed the ship? Kal looks around again. The room is all too familiar now; it's the bridge of the humans' ship. Computer stations sizzle quietly. Something drips in the back of the room. Little bits of broken glass sparkle like a miniature star system scattered across the floor. Somewhere, bizarrely, a bird chirps. The sunlight is still too harsh for Kal to be able to see outside properly. He stands up carefully, but not carefully enough. His body wails in protest, ribs and side and legs and arms all complaining at once. Kal grimaces, limping a little as he moves to investigate the rest of the room. Gonna have some interesting bruises in the morning.

Everything breakable has been broken. A few things that were probably meant to be unbreakable have as well. The deck is buckled and bent, the walls are scorched, and the ceiling, not wanting to be left out, has acquired a large hole. Tubing hangs through the gap, letting off intermittent showers of sparks. Kal hears the drip again, and for lack of something better to do, he hobbles around the center console to have a look.

The other side of the cockpit has fared no better, with the addition of a wide streak of blood running from the ceiling, down one wall and into a pile of debris in the corner. The red liquid on the ceiling collects lazily into a drop. Kal watches it grow, until gravity wins out over surface tension and the droplet falls to the growing puddle on the deck.

Plink.

Kal steps around the puddle. The door frame on this side is crumpled, but the door is gone and there's still enough space left for a man to fit through. Should take stock. Find out who survived, and what survived. Might be a shuttle or something I can salvage. Kal stops suddenly, halfway through the doorway. He listens carefully, and soon he hears it again; a cough, from behind the pile of debris. Kal straightens up, instantly on guard. His guns are long gone, but he doesn't need them. He inches closer to the fallen metal, warily. "Hello?" he calls gruffly.

The voice coughs again, and then it says: "Shit!"

Kal steps closer, peering over a storage container. "Who's there?"

"The queen of England!"

Kal frowns. "The what?"

"You heard me. That you, Vin? You come up here to loot the bodies? Well I'm not dead just yet. Give me a couple more hours 'till I bleed out."

Kal can feel his temper slipping. "Don't fuck with me!" he yells at the unseen voice. "I'm having a bad fucking day, so don't push your luck! Now you've got one more chance to tell me who the hell you are, or I'm walking away."

"Fine, fine! Just don't leave me to bleed to death, okay?" The voice looses its jovial quality, becoming pained and weary. "The name's James. I'm one of the guys from Omega, came in on the last shuttle, remember? No, you prob'ly don't."

Must be one of the pirates. My accent's not so thick. He must think I'm one of his crew, thinks Kal. Aloud, he says, "Any more survivors?"

"How the hell should I know?" retorts James. "When we started to go down I tried to get out of the bridge. Everybody was running around, complete chaos. Then this container came out of fucking nowhere and, well, I'm trapped. Think it broke my leg, damn sure I heard it snap. I'm losing blood, and I'm out of medi-gel too. The pain's starting to come back. I won't be such good conversation in a few minutes." The voice trails off, then adds as an afterthought, "Oh yeah, that quarian bastard that got on here should be around somewhere, too, if he's still alive. You wanna watch your ass. He's a mean sonuvabitch, killed Franco with his own gun. Nasty shit. Hey, who are you, anyway? You're not Vin, I know that."

Kal smiles grimly. "I'm the quarian bastard. Now I'm gonna get you outa there, because I need all the help I can get, but if you try anything, anything at all, I'll break both your legs and leave you to die slowly. Got it?"

From behind the pile of debris James lets out a lengthy string of swearwords. Finally the profanities subside, and Kal hears him sigh heavily. "Shit. Well, it's a better deal then I'd probably get with the other guys, anyway. Alright quarian, get me out of here."

Kal wraps both arms around the storage container, and, ignoring the hiss of pain from James, heaves it off of the human. Kal looks down at the pirate, taking a moment to study his face. Strands of dark hair stick to the man's face, damp with sweat and pale from loss of blood. Brown eyes look up at Kal with a mixture of wry amusement and defeated acceptance. Kal places his age at somewhere between twenty-four and thirty, as best as he can tell with a human.

The man's lower leg is a mess. The cargo pants he's wearing are torn soaked with blood. In the midst of the red mess, Kal sees the white glint of bone. James's mouth presses into a tight line. "It's bad," he says.

Kal nods. "It's bad," he agrees. He kneels and, bringing up his omni-tool, triggers an application of medi-gel into the wound. The clear jelly works its way in, stopping the bleeding almost instantly. James sighs in relief, and he begins to shift the rest of the debris away from him. Kal rises, extending an arm to the pirate. "Can you stand?" he asks.

"Yeah, help me up." The human takes his hand and pulls himself up on his good leg. Gingerly, he tests his weight on his injured limb. The color drains from James's face, and he sits back down abruptly. "Ahh, nope. That would be a definite no," he says.

Kal blows out a breath of desperation. Carrying an injured human around isn't in his plan. Well, it wouldn't be if I had a plan, he thinks ruefully. Kal briefly contemplates just killing the man. It would save him a lot of trouble, and he's probably not going to be useful for anything anyway. Then Kal makes the mistake of looking into the man's eyes.

James looks back up at him, but his eyes aren't filled with anger or fear. Kal knows how to deal with those. Instead, all Kal sees is complete and utter acceptance shining back at him. The corner of James's mouth turns up a little, and his voice is full of the dark humor if his predicament. "Helluva situation, huh?" he says. "What are we gonna do?"

That acceptance, and the human's unthinking use of the word we, so willing to entrust his fate to Kal, sweeps away the hard anger inside him. Kal shakes his head in frustration. He can't kill the man, not after he's given himself up like this. Couldn't he have at least fought, or done something, thinks Kal. No. Had to make this complicated.

With a noncommittal grunt, Kal half drags, half helps the human to his feet. When he stumbles, Kal ducks his head under the pirate's arm, and, perhaps a little more roughly than necessarily, wraps his own arm around the man's other shoulder. They take a few hesitant steps, James hobbling alongside Kal, putting most of his weight on the quarian's shoulder.

"You gonna make it like this, human?" asks Kal. I just know this is going to come back to bite me in the ass later, he thinks.

"Yeah. I'll be alright for now. Out that door and down the hall is our way out. If the airlock is still unblocked, I can give you the codes to unlock it."

"What about the rest of your crew? We can't have been the only survivors."

James shakes his head. "The rest of the 'crew' is probably only about six people. I know there was one guy in the aft gun turret, one pilot, and maybe a few in the barracks that were still getting suited up. Oh, and Vin's gotta be here too. I can't imagine a crash killing him."

They negotiate the door and begin a sort of a lame three-legged race down the hallway. "Well," says Kal after some thought. "We don't have to worry about the gunner. We left the aft end of the ship floating in space somewhere. The pilot must have split when we started going down, I don't remember who was in the bridge when I came in."

The hallway ends, and the room beyond has only two exits. James points the airlock out to Kal.

Kal dumps James on the deck and sets off through the other door. The man yells protests after him, but Kal ignores him. Beyond the door are more empty hallways, branching off into rooms filled with smoldering tech and empty bunks. Every corridor is a dead end except one, a wider hall with signs pointing to a central hub. Kal rounds the corner to find instead a collapsed wall and fallen beams blocking the passage.

Satisfied that they're alone, he backtracks to where James sits awkwardly against one wall. As he steps into the chamber the man looks up from the floor, relief showing on his face. "Don't do that again," he says. "Just taking off like that. You had me worried."

Kal snorts. "Did you miss me? Let me tell you something, human. We are not a 'team'. What makes you think I won't just kill after you give me the airlock codes?"

James laughs nervously. "What, kill a helpless prisoner in cold blood? You're a soldier. You wouldn't do that."

Kal looks away, stalking over to the airlock controls. "You obviously don't know me very well, human."

"Besides," James continues, seeming to ignore Kal's last statement. "You need me. I know the crew. If we run into trouble, I can get us out. They'll listen to me. If it was just you, they'd shoot on sight."

"Whatever," says Kal. "Just give me the code."

James reads off the code to Kal, who enters it into the console with his omni-tool. The portal retracts, and Kal drags James into the airlock and enters the code again on the inside. The chamber hisses and sputters as broken systems try to close off the air vents, and then the outside door slides open.

Green. Everything is green, in a sense of the word Kal has never known before. Stringy plant fibers carpet the ground in every direction, and Kal remembers this is grass. A bird chirps a long, warbling call and Kal'Reegar looks up and he sees trees. Not just one or two like in a garden on the flotilla, but hundreds, thousands of them, swaying gently, their needles rustling in the wind. Sunlight shafts in between their trunks, splashing the forest floor with crimson and gold. Kal can feel the breeze caress his skin through his suit. He closes his eyes, senses overcome with foreign and amazing things. His foot sinks a little into the soft ground, the grass springing back up again as he takes another step. Everything around him is brand new, and somehow familiar at the same time. He knows he has never seen such a place before in his life, but it seems to fit into some kind of deeper memory. Could the homeworld have been like this?

A cough from behind him dispels Kal's revelry. He turns around, breathing a deep sigh. The air is fresh in his lungs, even through the suit's filters. "Yes?" he says irritably. His voice sounds strange in the vast openness.

"Well," says James. "I was thinking we could take a look around for the rest of the survivors. They've gotta be somewhere, and we don't want to get caught by surprise when night comes." He smiles wryly. "If you're finished sightseeing, that is."

Kal nods, forcing his focus back to the present. The trees still call him, beckoning with their shifting shadows and the sweet scent of their needles, but Kal ignores them. Time to work.

The ship is even more of a mess from the outside. From this side, all that's visible is a thick plume of sooty smoke and the occasional belch of flame from the amputated aft end. The nose has fared a little better: All along its length windows are smashed, plating is buckled, cracked and scorched, and the structure of the craft is crumpled from the impact point. As James and Kal hobble around the broken body of the ship he's killed, they see more and more felled trees, split and uprooted around the deep gouge the crashing ship had carved. As they near the nose, Kal can see a smoking tunnel cut through the trees in the wake of the dead ship. They reach the tip of the vessel, or how much of it that is visible. The nose is buried in a crater of upturned soil and rocks. It is crumpled beyond repair, and Kal sees the broken window through which the sun rudely awoke him.

James leans against Kal's shoulder, catching his breath. After a few moments' pause, he speaks. "Well, you sure made a hell of a mess, didn't you?"

Kal shoots a sidelong view at him. He's destroyed the man's ship, killed his crew mates, and robbed him of a prize quarian frigate to boot, but he doesn't seem fazed by it at all. If anything, it just seems to have made him obnoxiously amused. Kal grunts, settling for: "Your ship, human. You're welcome to clean it up if it's bothering you."

"No no," chuckles James. "I love what you've done with it. It was so boring before. So 'not on fire'."

Kal doesn't know what to say to that, so instead he looks around the crash site. The trees are thinner here, and one can see for a good distance in any direction. Kal catches sight of something and squints at it. "You see that?" he says.

"Huh?" James leans forward, shielding his eyes with his free arm. "Definitely someone over there. No- two people, I think."

Kal squints some more. He can almost make out two figures in the distance, moving around. "Damn," he swears. "Gotta be the pirates."

"What should we do?" asks James.

"I think botha you mothafucka's should put your hands on your heads," says a gravelly voice from behind them.