Heuristics

Chapter 6

Other people's words began to trickle into Shepard's subconscious. She heard Javik's voice, but from far off, even while she watched the quickly fading forms of he and Aabim hop up onto the platform that his ship was resting on. She heard the sound of gunfire and then a shout, and all at once, the pain in her gut was back. She yelled out and curled around it, finding herself pressed against something cool and smooth but not in the right state of mind to consider what it was. When she opened her eyes, the muscles around them sore from how hard she'd been clenching them, she saw the familiar metal inside of the Normandy's transport shuttle. She could hear Cortez shouting to hurry up and felt the shuttle tremble and shake as Garrus hopped inside of it, still shooting out of the open bay door.

"Commander," a voice from above her said, and she looked up, pain wrinkling her forehead, to see Javik staring down at her. He had an unreadable expression on his face, and when the shuttle jerked violently from Cortez gunning it away from the Cerberus base, Javik held onto her to keep her from falling onto the floor. Slowly, whenever shoots of pain didn't cloud her thoughts, she discovered that she was lying in his lap, one of his stained hands still pressing tightly to her quickly healing wound. The coolness she'd felt had been the armor at his stomach. It felt good against her flushed face, so she pressed further into it, cringing. She felt like maybe she should try and sit up—it probably wasn't good for her teammates to see her debilitated like this—but she couldn't summon the strength to do so, and besides, it felt good to be in Javik's lap, where his legs made a soft pillow and his armor brought relief to her fevered skin.

Garrus rapped his knuckles hard on the door to the cockpit, signaling to Cortez that they were all (mostly) safe. He paced toward Javik afterwards, holding onto railings on the ceiling to keep from falling over. The shuttle never offered a smooth ride. "How's she holding up?" he asked, a hard edge to his voice that Shepard didn't recognize.

"She's warm," Javik said, pressing the tips of his fingers to Shepard's forehead. They were cool, like his armor, and she groaned in pleasure. "But her wound is healing."

Garrus cursed, throwing his head and looking away from the scene. "We should have paid more attention."

"It was a fool's mistake," Javik agreed, and Shepard felt his fingers slip from her forehead down to her cheek, possibly in an idle movement, before he pulled them away entirely. She silently mourned the loss of contact and turned fitfully in his lap. "But the commander is paying for it dearly. Next time she will be more alert."

"It wasn't just Shepard's fault!" Garrus barked, looking from Javik, his eyes hard and defiant, and then down to Shepard. When he saw that her eyes were open and she was watching him, every feature of his face softened, his the plates on his face falling away from their tense positions and his mandibles fluttering slightly. "Shepard," he said under his breath.

Javik's hand, the one that wasn't against her injury, went around her shoulder, pulling her closer to him. "She has been awake for some moments."

"Is she still in pain?" Garrus moved closer to the pair, his knees buckling slightly when the shuttle hit some brief turbulence.

Shepard began to speak, a bit tired of hearing others speaking for her, but her mouth was dry and her lips cracked. "Not as much as before," she croaked. She tried to roll onto her back, but she found the weapons still strapped to her back prevented her from doing this. She settled on just laying on her side, and she felt Javik stiffen when she shifted. No doubt he was uncomfortable. His bleeding, possibly poisoned human commander was lying in his lap. "I think I've been poisoned."

"You were," Javik affirmed, not looking at her, but out the shuttle window.

She swallowed a grunt of pain. "How do you know?"

"I can smell it."

Garrus gave her a strange look at this, but it didn't last very long. He shook his head, and though he appeared to be relatively calm, his mandibles were still twitching every so often. He was worried. Or bothered. Shepard had never been able to get turian facial expressions down. "You're indestructible, Shepard."

Shepard managed a weak laugh. Javik shot Garrus a murderous look, though it didn't seem to faze Garrus, who continued ribbing Shepard. After the light joking—which Shepard was thankful for, as every other moment she felt like every vein in her body was about to burst open—he started to explain what exactly had happened. After the Phantom had attacked Shepard and Shepard had shattered her attacker's kneecap, Javik had used his biotics from clear across the room to slam the operative away from her. "She was just red paste on the wall," Garrus explained, glancing surreptitiously to Javik. "I've never seen someone use their biotics with that much force before."

Javik said nothing, though Shepard felt his fingers twitch against her shoulder.

Garrus went on to say that while Javik tended to Shepard, he had gone to the center of the room, where the main control center was housed in a big column of glass. He'd shut off the comm buoy, which had encouraged every surviving Cerberus grunt to come chasing after them.

"And I passed out," Shepard finished for him, frowning.

Javik looked down at her. "No. I transferred memories."

From the look on Garrus's face, it was clear that he had not been privy to this information. "Why? Do you realize how dangerous that was?"

"I know full well the effects," Javik said back in an uncharacteristically calm voice. "The commander was going into shock. I transferred memories in order to preserve her."

"The pain was gone," Shepard said with a wispy voice. "I didn't feel anything."

"It's a common prothean practice for the injured," Javik clarified, giving Garrus one more another stern look, its severity at least mildly subduing the turian. The brief exchange between aliens played out as if a superior officer were berating some young buck soldier. Garrus wasn't wet behind the ears by any means, but it seemed that perhaps he knew Javik had been in the right this time and was grudgingly admitting it. "If we have time, we comfort the dying and wounded. We give them pleasing memories before they pass."

"Is this something you do for just anyone?" Garrus asked. "Seems like it'd be inefficient on the battlefield."

Shepard watched Javik hesitate for a moment. The ridges at his throat quivered slightly. "No," he said carefully, as if any word could at any moment be used against him. "It is typically a rite performed between family, close friends, or the joined."

"You mean mates?" Garrus's mandibles were flat against his face now. He was strangely still.

"Yes." He considered the turian before him slowly before turning his attention out the window again. The Normandy was slowly coming into view of the shuttle, set stark against a backdrop of the blackness, small dots of light blinking quietly behind it. The ship was a loud one when docked on a planet, but out in the vacuum of space, it existed in absolute silence. The only noise now was Shepard's still-labored breathing and the clanging noises from within the shuttle.

Shepard credited her next action to being feverish from the poison. After Javik's admittance of sharing something with her that he would normally only share with those closest in his life, she looked up at him and said Thank you, Javik, gently in Prothean.

She felt Javik start underneath her, saw him look down at her with wide eyes, and felt something in her chest tighten before pain overtook the feeling and she winced away from his gaze. The shuttle docked with several jostling movements that threatened to reopen Shepard's wounds, and when the shuttle door opened, Chakwas, Liara, and James were waiting outside with a stretcher.

Shepard spent the remainder of the day recovering in the med bay. Javik had helped her out of the shuttle and placed an arm around her as she hobbled to the stretcher. Chakwas had given her a "please-stop-almost-dying-Commander" look as she waved the omni-tool over her, letting her know in no uncertain terms that if she didn't have those cybernetics, she'd already be dead. Garrus was mostly used to this idea, but Javik had looked somewhat disturbed, his heavy brow furrowing and his lips pressing into thin lines. Liara had fretted over her a little bit but James had laughed, patting her gently on the hand and then returning to his corner of the shuttle bay.

Once in the med bay, Garrus had presented Chakwas with the Phantom's blade, crusted with Shepard's blood, so that it could be studied and an antidote extracted. This proved quick business, and honestly, it was rather fascinating watching Chakwas work. She'd carefully examined the sword under her microscope, her fingers furiously typing at a datapad. She seemed to be in an entirely different world altogether, and Shepard didn't dare disturb her—especially not after she'd been administered painkillers and a quick shot of something all-purpose that was supposed to stop the spread of poisons and venoms. She could feel her body rapidly cooling down, and with her pain dulled to a weak throb, she could finally think again.

She had so much to tell Liara—so much about how protheans handled interpersonal relationships, how prothean architecture looked, and how their home planet, or at least Javik's, looked. And also, as much as she hated the thought, she had a lot to talk about with Javik. She assumed he hadn't meant to transfer the memory of his conversation with Liara, and she was sure that his knowledge of her death rocked him. He must have thought she was some kind of walking undead or something. Or perhaps he thought she was an AI, perfectly cloning the old Commander Shepard. Hell, she'd had the same thoughts herself at times, wide awake at night in the quiet loneliness of her cabin.

She was about to resign herself to this idea—that Javik had been avoiding her because he thought she was some kind of crazy AI—before she remembered the look on his face when he'd been tending her wound while her blood pooled around her. That was unmistakable proof that her body wasn't mechanical (or at least not fully). He had looked so shocked, though at the time she had attributed it to him seeing his commanding officer in such bad shape. Whether he was pleasantly surprised by this revelation or even further confused by it, Shepard didn't know.

Before she could think more on it, the door to the med bay slid open, and none other than Javik walked through it, carrying something in his left hand. At his approach, Shepard sat up, but Javik lifted his free hand and said, "There is no need to rise, Commander."

She smiled, but she didn't lie back down. She'd been lying down all day, and it felt nice to get up and stretch. Chakwas glanced at her over her shoulder before going back to her work. "What kind of commander would I be if I addressed my soldiers lying down?"

"A poisoned one," Javik said in a flat voice, but at the unamused look on Shepard's face, he dropped the subject. "I came to return this." He held up what was in his hand: her pistol. It was covered in dried blood but otherwise no worse for wear.

Shepard laughed and accepted her "gift," raising an eyebrow at him. "You didn't even clean it? I like your style, Javik."

He blinked rapidly and then opened his mouth to speak, saying, "Prothean do not—I was not aware of that human custom, Commander," quickly. Shepard just laughed again and waved him off.

"I appreciate you salvaging it," she said, setting the pistol on her stomach, over the thick tan-colored bandages that wrapped comfortably around her. "I also appreciate what you did for me."

He glanced from her to Chakwas and back, and Shepard got the hint. Not the best place to discuss this. Her smile turned slightly devious, and she continued in Prothean, I meant what I said. Thank you. I might not have survived if not for what you did.

She saw his jaw twitch before he folded his arms and settled against the wall near her bed. Chakwas seemed to be trying her best to pretend like she didn't notice that the two were carrying on a conversation in a 50,000-years-dead language. You may still have lived, he insisted, looking away from her, but the shock would have rendered you incapacitated for much longer.

Shepard was still for a while, realizing that the conversation had taken a sharp downward turn, fiddling with the firearm Javik had returned to her. It was true that she didn't want to have any kind of meaningful discussion in front of Chakwas, but Javik seemed to be opening himself to her. He still had his arms crossed—which, though a human social cue, seemed to translate similarly into prothean culture—but he had not left and was entertaining her dialogue. She scanned his posture: his shoulders were tense, his face relaxed, and he had one leg straightened while the other was cocked against the wall. Her voice was soft when she spoke, the vibrations burning her parched throat: Did you think I was going to die?

She saw his eyes lower. He paused before responding, and when he did, his voice was so low and the vibrations so intense that she almost couldn't understand him. I didn't know. It sounded a lot like grief.

She reached a hand out to him and touched his elbow, which earned another jaw-twitch from him. He seemed to be clenching his teeth. You're a hell of a soldier, Javik, she said, and I'm happy I can trust you to be there for me.

This seemed to be just about all that Javik could bear, because he pulled himself from the wall with a look on his face that Shepard found impossible to decipher and told her, "Recover swiftly, Commander," before leaving the med bay in a huff. Chakwas reached over and took the pistol from Shepard's lap, giving her an amused look that clearly told her to try and get some sleep.

Chakwas delivered the antidote to her a bit later via one of the largest needles Shepard had ever seen. She then dimmed the lights in the med bay and instructed Shepard that the antidote would cause extreme drowsiness. She began to fluff the pillows of one of the beds, obviously planning on staying the night there in case Shepard reacted badly to the antidote or some other problem cropped up. Shepard was ready to argue against this—really, there was no reason for Chakwas to abandon her warm bed in the crew's quarters and babysit her—but she was asleep before she could form a sentence.

She dreamed of many things that night, but mostly of sand, a purple sky, and a warm breeze.