"Standing on the shore

Waiting for the ship in call

There's something in the way I move

That keeps them on their own

A star explodes a storm

A billion seasons born

A shock to the waves I know

Breaking far from shore"

- Empire of the Sun - "Standing on the Shore"

What was that? Joker asked himself as he stared at the wall's dull sheen across from his bunk, brow furrowed. 'You have nice eyes!' Seriously! He lay on his back, raging at himself, the snoring of crewmates, for once, only a secondary cause in keeping him awake. He wasn't used to blurting things out, and the fact that he'd done so irked him. Joker's relentless sarcasm was a product of his quick mind and ruthless mental censor rather than just raw wit, and he was proud of the fact that he pushed other people's buttons only as much as he felt they needed to be. This, however, was different, and the ornery pilot didn't like things that were different. He fiddled with a bar behind his head, idly thumbing the smooth surface of the brushed steel as he convinced himself that this wasn't a big deal. Shepard had far bigger fish to fry and probably wouldn't even remember that he'd said it. What the hell was that, though, that look? He'd only had a couple of beers, he had had enough presence of mind to know for certain that something was definitely there. He thought back, reliving the way her green eyes had ensnared him. It was as if a shell had fallen away, although whether it was her shell or his, he couldn't say. He thought he must have looked like quite an asshole when he'd slammed the can down on the table. Shit, it was only a few seconds or something, anyway, he thought as he tossed and turned, before finally settling down and pressing his back to the wall.

Joker blearily opened his eyes to find himself staring into the diagnostic panel of the sleek prototype Alliance vessel, the Normandy SR1. The despondent monotone of the general alarm screamed into the cockpit, and notices regarding pressurization loss, gravity, and descent vectors flashed under his hands. Like a machine, he dutifully ignored the screams of the crew, and focussed on avoiding the next attack that he instinctively knew was coming. For a brief second, he felt as if he had been here before as he slammed the release, unsheathing the escape pod hatches, initiating their drive cores. There was no time to look behind him as he maintained endless course corrections, screaming at the ship to hold itself together, to keep going. He could save them, he knew it as surely as he'd known he needed to breathe air to live.

She wasn't responding. He was feeling the Normandy die even under his fingers, but he knew all she needed to do was lift her nose another few degrees and the shielding could protect the wreck through re-entry and stabilise the angle for minimal impact. A small display showed nearly all the pods had streaked off into space, and the sensors bleeped obnoxiously that the enemy was bearing down. I know, I know! A hand appeared on the corner of his chair, and the feeling that he had been here before returned, sharply. As it did so, Joker suddenly became aware that the hand belonged to Shepard. Breathlessly, he turned to her, protesting. He could save the ship, he knew it. Knew it. His eyes burned into hers behind the clear steel of her visor, and suddenly the delusion fell away. He couldn't save the Normandy. He couldn't save these people. It was too late, and Shepard had come back for him. She had come back to save his ass. He understood. With Shepard's eyes still piercing through his own, he felt her grab his arm, and it seemed as if time had stopped around them. She thrust her weight under his, clearly running on pure adrenaline as she lifted him clear of the seat and staggered forward. It took him a second or two to realise that the sound had all gone. No alarms, no hum of the biotic field sealing the cockpit from the vacuum of space.

Joker startled as he realised that the only sound he could hear was his own hoarse breathing, loud in the breather mask. Silhouetted fragments of the ship that had been the focus of his life for so long were spinning before his eyes, and the pilot looked at them as if they were each lost pieces of his own body, even as Shepard laboured so hard to get them both to their escape.

They had made it to the open hatch of the cockpit's pod, and she had shoved him in first, firmly but also with restraint. He didn't know what knocked her off balance as she tried to climb in, he had figured she'd been right on his tail and was busy clipping together his seat's harness. The gargantuan beam of light that stabbed down between them sealed her route off and sent her spinning. Joker looked up to see Shepard floating in the air, mere feet from him. A sick choke caught in his throat as he wrested himself free from the harness, and reached out in vain, straining to get to the door. If he could get there in time, he could still pull her back.

"Shepard!" he screamed. The sound was long and loud in his ears although he knew no one could hear him.

. Then, it occurred to him. She was in free space now, only a metre or two away and she might as well already be dead. If he leapt out, now, to grab her, there was nothing beyond her to stabilise himself and push them back. The pod's door slammed shut even as he threw himself against it in a senseless, stupid, suicidal bid to try and bring her back. Her green eyes locked with his as she struggled against the uncaring, lazy spin of frictionless space. The austere expression with which he was familiar had given way to that of someone who knew they were about to die. Her had was extended towards him. The sight left him feeling punched in the gut and about to throw up. There was a feeling of suction as the pod fired from the chamber, and he found himself staring at Shepard's shape, spinning, receding horrifically fast down towards the planet. The only thing Joker could do was scream after her in a frenzy, his palms pressed helplessly against the window.

"I tried! I tried! I tried!"

Joker's eyes snapped open in the darkness, catching himself in the middle of making an anguished sound. His body was covered in an icy sweat. Screw sleeping. When he dreamed, it was the always the same one, and it was never any different. Every time, he never realised he was too late. Too late to save the ship, too late to rescue his rescuer. He clapped his hands to his face and sighed, rubbing his forehead. He became acutely aware of the feeling that he was being watched, and moved his little finger to look. Kelly Chambers was in the bunk across from him, her big, owlish eyes on him.

"What?" Joker rasped, keeping his voice low.

"Same dream again?" Chambers whispered across at him. She was too cheerful and concerned all the time, her voice too soothing, and Joker didn't like it. She seemed to love everybody too much, especially Shepard, and it made him uncomfortable that whenever she wasn't fawning over the commander, she was clucking over him.

"None of your business," was his uninspired retort, and he rolled over pointedly, his back to her.

"You should talk about it," she whispered. He should've known his response wasn't enough to shut her up.

"No," he insisted, too tired to find some quip he could throw at her. He assured himself that he could find one if he thought about it.

"Not to me," Chambers rolled her eyes, unseen by the pilot. "To her. To Shepard," she replied as she wrapped her blankets around herself tighter. She turned her back to him, too, knowing it would provoke some kind of sour response.

"What makes you think it has anything to do with Shepard?" Joker hissed, careful to keep the volume down. "Maybe I'm dreaming about my girlfriend or something," he had half rolled onto his back to direct the words at Chambers, trying to throw her off the trail and get her to stop asking questions. She merely snorted in response, and his teeth clenched in irritation. Yeah, yeah, come on, out with the bit about how I couldn't have a girlfriend because I'm a cripple and couldn't fuck her. Well, what do you know about it, he raged, his hand clasping his thigh just above one of the many implants their employer had given him, to strengthen the brittle bones in his legs.

"You talk in your sleep, Joker. I can hear you," Chambers said, softly.

He had no respose to this, and settled on grumbling curse-filled nonsense instead as he closed his eyes again, hoping this time he wouldn't dream. The image of Shepard as she had appeared in the cockpit of the failing ship was burned into his head, and the thought that even though she was alive today, it was no thanks to him, and that left him feeling bitter. The scene slowly replayed itself. Buttons, light, noise, Shepard grabbed his arm. Joker opened his eyes. There. Right there. That something he had seen in her, it was there, unmistakable, burning with an intensity that would have put the fires that raged around them to shame. It was there when she had fought through flames and nightmares to get to him, it was there when she had reached out towards him when she had fallen away from the pod, and it was there when she had set aside some time to delicately tell him that she gave a shit. Jeff, you're thinking way too hard about this, his mental censor tried to chastise before he got carried away, but he was already smirking quietly to himself.

The planet the derelict ship lay upon had been nothing but a nightmare, thinly wrapped in a coating of paradisian beauty. Like the colossal body of a beached whale, its bones jutted up to the sky, and stains that looked like faded blood surrounded its gaping wounds against a backdrop of flapping palm tree leaves. The heat of the place had been seductive, almost, and Shepard had looked on the beach with a longing that was quickly dismissed as the realities of the place had come to bear. The flora and fauna were incompatible with humans, over time causing marked mental degeneration, something that the crew of the fallen Hugo Gernsback had come to suffer. Taylor's father had played some kind of sick game with the crew over the years, hoarding the safe food stores for himself and the other male officers, and fashioning himself as some kind of god-king. The worst were the audio logs, explaining how the officers had repeatedly raped the female crewmembers after having lost so much cognition that they were incapable of refusal. The glassy look in their eyes had reminded Shepard of a dead sheep she had seen once on her grandfather's farm, and it disturbed her to the core. The game had continued until Taylor's father for some reason had denied even the other officers the safe foodstores, and had had them murdered or exiled, one by one. Feral groups of deluded people had prowled the island, and Shepard was relieved to be off it, white sand and sunshine be damned.

The Alliance had been notified and would be moving in. Matters were closed for the Hugo Gernsback, and Commander Shepard was done for the day. Cheerfully, she instructed Joker to not even give the Alliance their tail-lights. Working with Cerberus was not something she was proud of, but it had given her a new life, a new ship, and old friends. She did not need the Alliance pestering her about whatever they would inevitably pester her about, and she mulled this over as she dug her finger into a dent in her chestplate, passing through the airlock door. There had been relatively little gunfire this time, but the bastards had had mechs, and mechs were never fun to deal with. Grunt came through after her, smashing his fist to his palm.

"Good fight, Shepard!" Bellowed the krogan, his wide lizard mouth open in an enthusiastic grin. Grunt had gained his first scar, a vicious slash from a varren's teeth, and it never ceased to amuse her how the krogan was always checking on its progress. He did so now even as he walked, peering at his pebbly hide, marvelling at the way the skin was healing to leave a smooth, jagged line across his bicep. Shepard smiled and shook her head as she watched him and Garrus walk on.

She turned her head towards the cockpit and stood in the hall, a few metres away fom the back of the chair. It was something of a ritual for her to say 'hello' to the pilot every time he pulled her out of one scrape or another, but he had always greeted her first. There had been no greeting this time, and she raised her eyebrow. Joker was always quick to remind her of how great he was at pulling off the aeronautically impossible. A previously forgotten detail crossed her mind, and she smiled. Perhaps this was about the comment made the other night. Shepard had certainly been caught off guard by the sudden compliment, but had also found returning the sentiment curiously close to the tip of her tongue. Perhaps he thought she was angry with him?

"I assume everything is going well up here?" Shepard asked, her tone as non-threatening as possible. Stepping in, she relaxed as she heard the small whine of the chair turning around.

"Your armour looks like Grunt's been chewing on it," he said, eyeing the silver holes all over one side of her grass green chestplate. She smiled and looked down, seeing that the scratches and dents where the bullets had flattened and ricocheted off the metal did indeed look a little like tooth marks. "Not exactly a stabilising element, is he, Commander?" Joker added.

"This mission requires a little unpredictability, I think," she answered, looking back at the way the young krogan had gone just a moment before, before turning back to the helmsman, her arms folded. "Besides, you and I are not exactly stabilising elements ourselves, are we?"

"What do you mean?" Joker asked, distracted by a window that appeared on his display. Shepard dealt with a crick in her neck, rubbing the sore spot idly.

"The best pilot in the galaxy, whose favourite pastime it is to make impossibly close shuttle drops and destroy Reapers, and the first human Spectre, for whom Hell wasn't hot enough. Had to come back for more," she said with a shrug and a lopsided smile. "Sounds like a pair of entirely stable individuals to me!"

"Damn, Shepard. If you'd like, I can turn all mother hen instead. Reckon we can hide from the Collectors while they ransack the galaxy?" Joker asked as he brought up a navigational display. "So where to now, Commander?"

"Ilium," she said, and beamed at him. "We've another unstable individual to acquire. I'll talk to you later," she said, and left the cockpit, heading to the elevator.

"Commander, Miranda would like to speak with you," Kelly's voice caught the commander's attention. Shepard delicately cleared her throat to disguise the exasperation she felt.

"Did she say what it was regarding, Kelly?" Shepard's voice was all grace.

"No, she didn't say, Commander," Kelly's reply was entirely expected.

"Right. If you would tell her I'll be heading to her office now, please," she ordered, and stepped into the elevator.

"Aye aye, Commander," Chambers said, and the doors closed on the Combat deck.