Wrex stands at the water's edge, his shotgun pressed into the chestplate of Victory's armor, rage and anguish written large and plain on his scarred face. "There is a chance for my people to be free here. A cure! There is a cure and you and those frogs want to destroy it! The first light of hope for my people in five hundred years, and you fucking pyjaks want to blow it up! Shepard, I respect you, but give me one goddamn reason why I shouldn't blow you in half right now and save my people. Tell me why we have to kill the krogan all over again!"
Her mind racing, her hand twitching towards the pistol at her side, the Commander makes a snap decision. She summons all of her anger at Saren, all of her seething mass of hatred and rage from the years on the streets of Earth, with no one to trust but herself, not even the Reds that call her family. She dredges up the feeling of being alone in the universe, trillions and trillions of people surrounding her but apart from her. She calls up every dark emotion and memory, and when there is no more room for anything else, she pushes forward, knocking the muzzle of the gun away from her with her left arm and slugging the warlord as hard as she can with the right.
"Stand down soldier. I am the only hope for anybody, let alone your fucking T-Rex kind. If you kill me now, Saren wins. If you kill me here and now, the geth win. The Reapers win." She grabs a hold on his collar and drags his face down to her level, her face inches away from his right eye. "And the krogan will lose. Forever."
Still inches away from him, every bit of darkness in her hovering just beneath the surface where the Urdnot warlord can see it, Vicky growls, "If you want to live another fucking second, tell me why I shouldn't move out of the way and tell every one of these Vorcha kissing bastards behind me to open fire and cut you to shreds. No one threatens me on my mission, Wrex. No one, not even you. I am your only hope of salvation."
For the first time in his memory, Wrex feels fear. Not fear of the Salarian troops all around, not fear of Gunnery Chief Williams, the woman pointing a gun at his head right now, and not fear of Saren or the Geth. Not even fear for his people. The krogan giant feels the only fear he can remember because of this little meatsack of a human. This tiny woman with so much strength, so much fire. He feels fear, not because this woman is the only thing standing between him and a quick death, but because she would be the first to pull the trigger, and she'd make sure he saw it coming. Because this little human is so much bigger, so much more than just a human.
Rumbling out a growl, he drops his gun to the ground. With a nod of his head, he steps back, pulling her arm to it's full extension. "Fine Shepard, I'll stick with you." After a moment's pause, he adds, "You'd make a good krogan."
"Smart choice big guy. Smart choice." Unwilling to let go of her anger just yet, she jerks him back and smashes her helmet into his face. In doing so, she makes both Wrex and Tali laugh after a moment of stunned silence. The Quarian pulls her close and rests her chin on Vicky's shoulder with a quip.
"You're starting to make a habit of headbutting krogan. Are you sure you weren't born to the wrong species?"
Whispering so that only Tali and Garrus can hear, though the Turian is just incidental, she replies with a grin, "Only could have been better if I'd been born a Quarian and met you sooner."
Then she reigns in all of her emotions, using the feather light touch of the girl at her side to focus. Making sure that Tali is still pressed to her body, she makes her way back to the rest of her team, making a note of the rifle that Williams still has trained on the krogan. "Put it down Chief. That's an order."
"But ma'am, he's krogan. They're unpredictable at the best of times, but now with a possible genophage cure-"
"I said put it down! You do not question my orders, do you hear me Williams?! If you ever do that again, I will beat you to within an inch of your life, and then I will fucking execute your insubordinate ass for mutiny!" With that, she wrenches the gun out of Ash's hands and throws it at her feet. "I like that dinosaur a lot more than you do, Williams. You can be sure of that. I sure as shit don't need a xenophobe onboard my ship when almost all of my team is made up of aliens. You were a convenient and useful soldier to have when I found you on Eden Prime, and Anderson talked me out of kicking your ass off my ship at the Citadel. He convinced me we needed you, just like he and the Council convinced me we need the asari. So either man up, or get back on the Normandy and wait for the all clear."
Victory forces Ash to look her in the eye and continues softly, "Prove that you and your family do not deserve the stigma of Shanxi. Live up to the image of the woman you've shown me when we talk in the armory. I know you see the others as a little bit of a liability, but you told me that you'd do as I ordered, so please Ash, let it go." After a moment of shame, Williams lifts her head and nods at the Commander. "Understood ma'am. I'm with you all the way."
"Good. Gather the team, looks like Kirrahe is ready to go over the plan."
As soon as Shepard and her crew are gathered, the salarian captain begins.
"This is a risky plan, and a risky mission. There aren't many of us left, but those of us that are here are trained soldiers, forged in the fires of combat. Shepard, I need you and a small infiltration team to distract and delay any enemy forces you can. Pick your two best people, make sure that you're ready. You will be team Shadow. I will take my men and split them into three teams. We will be Aegohr, Mannovai and Jaëto. Maybe that will remind my men what we're fighting for."
Looking at the gathered soldiers, he says, "Will will need to bring down the AA tower so that the Normandy can deliver a bomb to the heart of the facility. Our ship is destroyed, but the drive core can be and already has been converted into a heavy yield nuclear device. Once detonated, it will wipe this base from the face of Virmire forever. Commander, I will need a volunteer from your squad to help me lead the fire teams."
Without a thought, she throws Kaiden into the spot required by Kirrahe.
He scans them all again, and opens his mouth one final time. "You all know the mission, and what is at stake. I have come to trust each of you with my life - but I have also heard murmurs of discontent. I share your concerns. We are trained for espionage; we would be legends, but the records are sealed. Glory in battle is not our way. Think of our heroes; the Silent Step, who defeated a nation with a single shot. Or the Ever Alert, who kept armies at bay with hidden facts. These giants do not seem to give us solace here, but they are not all that we are. Before the network, there was the fleet. Before diplomacy, there were soldiers! Our influence stopped the rachni, but before that we held the line! Our influence stopped the krogan, but before that, we held the line! Our influence will stop Saren; in the battle today, we will hold the line!"
0000
0000
0000
Wrex and Tali stand behind her, outside the doors of the facility at last. "Well shit. Last choice to make, and I'm not sure I can make the same one I would have a year ago. The rest were easy, you know? 'Destroy this and help Kirrahe or leave it alone and change nothing.' This time though, it's shut down all security, making it easier for the STG troops, or set off an alarm at the other side of the facility, making it easier for us and probably getting them all killed."
Vicky looks at her comrades and says, "A year ago, I'd have thrown the alarm and sacrificed them for the sake of the mission. Now though..."
"Now the suitrat is changing you, making you a little softer. Sometimes anyway." Wrex growls with a smile. "I say shut it all down. Give them no warning!" He pounds his fists together, an eager look on his face and battle light in his eye.
Tali nods and voices her own opinion. "Shut it down, then surprise them from within. The geth can't communicate as well now, so they'll be confused and easy to kill, and any flesh soldiers will go running towards the sound of gunfire closest to them. That means that if we move quickly, we can take out most of the soldiers ourselves, keep the heat off of Alenko and the salarians."
Smirking, Vicky needles them both. "Look at you, agreeing for once. Sounds like good advice, I think I'll take it." She breaks the security system with her omnitool. "Stealth is on our side now, let's make the best of it."
0000
0000
0000
Captain's Quarters, SSV Normandy.
Captain's Log[personal; dictation of spoken log]: Fuck. Just... Fuck. Well that was one big disaster. Standard procedure until we hit the Salarian base camp. Seriously, nothing went wrong until that point. Even then, it looked like the only rough patch was gonna be Wrex getting pissed and almost shooting me. Got him talked down, by the way. You'd be proud of me Da-... Anderson. I did yell at Williams for continuing with her xenophobic bullshit, but she didn't even get hit this time.
Captain Kirrahe of the 3rd Infiltration Regiment STG came up with a plan, and we followed it. It even looked like it was gonna work. We shut down geth comms, positioning, satellite arrays, air support, everything. Even shut off the internal alarms so that they wouldn't know we were there. The cloned krogan were nothing compared to Wrex, and he even admitted that he'd rather kill them all himself than watch them become the future of the krogan race.
First sign of trouble was Dr. Rana Thanoptis, an asari scientist working on genetics in the lab. She's actually the one that engineered the DNA chains that allowed the krogan to be cloned. Thought she was clean, too, until she started screaming and holding her head. I didn't even ask, and she starts babbling on about indoctrination, says that it isn't Saren that's doing it, but somehow his ship. Out of pity for her, Tali and I turned our backs and Wrex blasted her onto the wall. It was a mercy.
Then we find another beacon. Thanks to Liara's mindlinks and the cypher we picked up on Feros, I was able to put together where we needed to go next. Then the shit hit the proverbial fan. The display went offline for a moment, and when it came back up, we were looking at Sovereign, Saren's ship. Except it's not a ship, it's a goddamn Reaper. Every single person who followed Saren that we've met was walking around under Reaper indoctrination, even Matriarch Benezia.
I somehow managed to piss it off, and Sovereign started a fast descent into the atmosphere to come kill me. Since we were running out of time, I sprinted like hell to get to the bomb site that Kirrahe had planned, right in the middle of the clone facility. I get there after having wasted everyone and everything that got in my way, and we start to set up. Then Alenko comms in and tells us that he and Kirrahe are pinned down on the AA tower. They got the gun shut down but couldn't get off the tower. I had no choice, I had to go save their asses.
I grabbed Tali and Wrex and we went charging off to do the hero thing. We get halfway there, and then Williams comms in and tells us that the geth have found them. Alenko tells us to go save her, she tells us to save Alenko and be quick about it. I argued with both of them for a few minutes, then told Ash that... [heavy sigh] God dammit... GOD FUCKING DAMMIT! [voice cracks] Daddy, I had to make a choice. I had to... And I chose Kirrahe. I told her that I had to leave her behind, and when Alenko started to protest she said, "It's ok LT. This is the right choice and you know it. She needs you more than she'll ever need me." [starts to cry softly] I had to leave her behind... This is the second fucking time that this goddamn fucking suicide mission for the Council has killed one of my squad.
I don't know if I can do this for much longer, Da-... Anderson. I mean, it's putting us all in so much danger, and we're all under so much stress. Used to be I'd love a job like this, but now? The fate of the entire galaxy depends on us.
Anyway, we get there and who decides to show his face? That turian bastard. Saren Arterius shows up looking like the posterchild for cybernetics and synthetic integration, and everything goes straight to hell. It had looked like there was some hope of salvaging something out of this, but then he showed up. Most of the rest of Kirrahe's men died, Wrex went down with a slug in his leg, Tali ended up with a suit rupture that she quickly patched, and I was dangled off the edge of the tower by my throat. I don't know how we did it, but somehow we made it out alive. I vaguely remember kicking him in the face and landing on the edge of the tower, safe. I think Wrex shot him too, and he got on his hover platform and sped away to be picked up by Sovereign.
We boarded the Normandy with whatever survivors were left, and then got the hell outta dodge. I watched from the windows in the shuttle bay as the bomb went off and wiped all trace of Ash out of existence. She went down fighting, I heard it. Anderson, I heard her die on comms. I heard her last moments, and... Daddy, I never treated her like a human being until today. And I had to listen to her die. [breaks down sobbing]
[End log]
0000
0000
0000
Vicky stands in the cockpit with Joker, but hardly registering the inane chatter that the pilot is constantly spouting off. She knows that he's probably cracking bad jokes, and talking about Chief Williams, and whatever else runs through his head, but she just doesn't care.
Somewhere in the endless hours of interminable silence from her, Joker must have paged Tali to come up because Vicky can feel the girl's arms around her. The weight of her head registers on her shoulder. The faint sound of the suit air scrubbers whirs in her ears. All the little things that she never appreciated before, all the things that never mattered to her. And now every moment, every bit of the most insignificant minutiae registers and burns itself into her memory.
They stand there in silence together, Joker still doing whatever it is that he does. After what seems like minutes but might have been hours, Tali gently pulls Vicky away from the forward windows and towards the crew quarters below the CIC. When the doors of the bridge close behind them, she registers that she's alone with Tali, even if only for a moment.
Slowly, life starts to come back to her, until she's crying again as the doors of her cabin close behind them. She cries on Tali's shoulder when the quarian sits them both down on the bed, and she doesn't stop crying until half an hour after she falls asleep from exhaustion.
0000
0000
0000
Tali runs her fingers through the sleeping Commander's hair, the little curls springing back to their places as soon as she lets go of them.
When she first met the Commander, she didn't understand how any woman could stand to cut their hair so short. It never occurred to her that long hair might get in the way for a woman like Shepard, or that she might simply like not having to bother with it. But the longer she was around this baffling woman, the more she came to like it, even admire it. If her hair was longer, there was no guarantee that it would still have those little curls, and Tali had come to adore those little curls.
As she watches the Commander sleep, she thinks over the mission that they completed almost sixteen hours ago. She thinks about watching Vicky react to everything around her. Rana Thanoptis, how she looked almost sad to see what had happened to the woman. The salarian teams that were held in captivity and indoctrinated, the shock on her face when she saw them. The frustration on her face when Alenko commed in to say that they needed extraction. The anger when Ash was cornered also and she realized she didn't have enough time to save them both. The look of her heart breaking when she made the choice she had to, knowing that one of her squad was going to die. The fear when faced with Saren.
Most of all, she keeps in her mind the image of Vicky keeping her face blank, her eyes leaking silent tears as she rests her head on the aft windows of the shuttle bay, the com in her hand. She thinks about how every single gunshot made Shepard, her Vicky, jump just the tiniest bit, hoping it was the last one, hoping that Ash would die quickly. How the screams and the taunts of the dying woman made them both shiver. And worst of all, she remembers the screams of agony as Ashley was torn apart by the geth just before the bomb went off and wiped them all out. The look on Vicky's face was one of shock, and the way she was shaking worried Tali. She didn't understand why until the Commander pitched forward onto her knees and vomited up everything in her stomach, though there wasn't much.
She had dragged Vicky to the infirmary still heaving and babbled everything out for Dr. Chakwas, who then gave her a minor sedative to calm her down and told her that Vicky most likely was in shock after hearing that happened. She gave the Commander something to settle her stomach, and something else to numb her a bit.
Shepard had waited just long enough to let the meds take effect, and then stumbled back to her cabin to make her report. It was hours before Tali saw her again, and then it was only because Joker had sent her a message down in engineering saying that "the Commander is doing that creepy silent reaper of the dead thing again."
How such a strong woman could fall apart so easily amazed her, but she knew in her heart why it had happened to Vicky now. She had stayed strong for so long, shutting everything and everyone out to keep them from hurting her, and then this mission came along. She was thrown into close confines with a larger squad than she'd had since Torfan for six months, and no matter how hard she tried to keep them all out, every single one of them got under her skin just a little.
Wrex became an admired equal, both for his actions in the field and for his mind in between missions. Garrus became her closest friend when she needed someone with whom she had no desire to sleep with. Alenko always answered her questions and gave her the tactical appraisals she was looking for. Liara, despite the reasons that Vicky distrusted her, became the one she'd go to for advice when it came to Tali, even though the asari had less experience than Vicky. Tali herself became her lover, and the one that she fell in love with. She couldn't imagine it happening any other way now, but at the time it amazed her that such a strong and dangerous person could be interested in her.
And Ashley, for all the things that she did to piss off Shepard, became the one she'd go to if she just wanted some... girl time. Some time to gossip, and talk about what was happening on the ship, and get a more emotional look at the events of the mission. And maybe, there at the very end, she became her friend. A friend that meant a lot more to Vicky than she thought, and whose death broke down the walls that she had built up for so long.
Here and now, she watches Vicky sleep because she's afraid that if she doesn't, she'll fall apart. After what seems an eternity, Tali lays down behind the woman that holds her heart, wraps her arms around her, and falls asleep with her to keep her company.
0000
A/N: Ok, so here we are. Fully caught up on what I've got written, and I only now realize that in seven pieces, I have written what amounts to a normal chapter in a fic on this site(16,000 words). ^^; So yay me?
This is going to make things a little more complicated, I can tell you that. I'll have to be sitting and writing for a lot longer, but I owe it to the few of you that are reading already to do that and do your patronage justice! I can't just be like "I'll bang a quick one out over lunch and be done with it" since this story needs to grow and evolve, and I should slow the pace down so it can do that. So, as promised in the foreword of chapter one, next installment is about Vicky's early life and where she was found.