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She looked like she'd been brawling. Her face was flushed with exertion, cheeks pink, eyes bright, and a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Her hair, damp with sweat around her forehead and neck, was in complete disarray. Her lower lip was split and swollen, barely oozing now though there was the unmistakable splotching effect from where she'd no doubt dabbed a fingertip against it and drawn her hand away to see blood on it. Her knuckles were scraped and cracked with little bits of skin peeling off, looking like they were stiffening uncomfortably with the swelling. She was wearing civvies - thankfully no sign of a Cerberus logo anywhere - but there was a tear in the fabric of her shirt, just below her collarbone. The skin below was unscathed but the clean lines of the cut were unmistakable: someone had pulled a knife on her. It was probably what had triggered the entire cleanup effort and impromptu lecture series. Shepard had never suffered disproportionate escalation particularly well.
It occurred to Alenko then that his memories - the ones he'd spent one year trying to forget and, having failed that, a second year trying to discredit - were actually spot on.
There really was a good chance that she was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen.
Lawson seemed significantly less impressed. Lucky her.
"What the hell are you doing, Shepard?" she snapped. "Bar fights? With no backup? Just what the hell did you think was going to happen?"
One of Shepard's eyesbrows arched incrementally and she gazed at Lawson mildly, arms still folded over her chest. She jerked a nod toward Lawson's face, to the giant egg on the side of her head and her swelling eye. "Who got you?" was all she asked.
Lawson hissed a sigh. "I'm serious, Shepard," she said. She started pacing back and forth in front of her. "This" - and she waved around to indicate the Dark Star Lounge in general - "is ridiculous. It's the middle of the night. It's a bar filled with... with... with drunk marines and... and belligerent turians. You have enough fights to fight that you don't need to go looking for more. You could have been killed. Killed, Shepard. Again. The Illusive Man isn't going to just up and decide to throw another four billion credits at you just because you decide to generate a second corpse for him to tinker with." She came to a stop and dropped her hands to her hips. "What were you thinking, Shepard? Honestly."
A muscle twitched in Shepard's jaw. Once. Twice.
There were a number of answers to that question, not the least of which was to blacken Lawson's other eye and stalk out before she could peel herself up off the ground. For a blissful, wonderful moment, Shepard considered doing exactly that. She just wasn't sure what it would accomplish besides a brief endorphin rush and a much longer-term breakdown in efficiency on her ship. She refrained. Compartmentalization.
She didn't rise to Lawson's bait, opting to counter with another question. "I take it he was just holding out for those stock options?" she asked, flicking her gaze from Lawson to Alenko and back again.
"I'm not here with her," Alenko said.
There was something in his voice she couldn't quite identify. She looked at him for a long, silent moment. He gazed back at her evenly with a quiet patience that surprised her. There had been a time once - weeks for her, years for him - when he wouldn't have been able to hold her gaze, that he would have apologized and looked away or clumsily attempted to change the subject. But here... His eyes were shuttered, dark and carefully neutral... and though she could feel the faint hum of his biotics, there was no surging charge-up that tickled her skin, no build-up that she could feel in her molars, not even a ripple that would suggest something less tranquil under the surface and that he'd merely managed to improve his poker face. No awkwardness, no discomfort, no hesitation. Just... patience. Evenness.
She had no idea what to make of it. She stared at him, arms folded over her chest, expression meticulously blank.
He suddenly took two steps forward and reached a hand out toward her. She reflexively took a single step backwards in response, throwing an arm up to block his hand if necessary, falling just slightly lower on loosened, readied knees, eyes glittering with silent warning. The defensive posture, instinctive though it was, was warning enough. He froze, a fleeting expression of surprise flashing over his features... then slowly brought his other hand up to join the first, fingertips pointed up and palms extended toward her in a gesture of peace. He waited.
After a long moment, she relaxed her stance. She lowered her arm, folding it once more over her chest.
Before she knew what he was doing or why, he took one more step closer, covering the distance she'd created, and slid a hand along her jaw and around her neck, his palm warm and dry and his fingertips barely grazing the skin. His thumb, scraping lightly over her jaw, came to a rest just barely on her earlobe; his fingertips splayed out at the nape of her neck, nestled in the sweat-dampened tendrils there; his palm fit gently, snugly, over the contours of her neck.
It was both achingly familiar and shockingly new. His hands were lightly callused, something that had surprised her but probably shouldn't have when he'd touched her cheek that first night and his thumb, roughened by constant maintenance on the Normandy and the Mako, had trailed with remarkable gentleness over her lower lip. The soft scrape of his skin over hers was painfully familiar and she wondered what he he'd been working on if not her Normandy. The heat from his body, too, was reassuring, comforting; he'd always burned hot - she wasn't sure if it was because he was a biotic or not, but at this point, she suspected so; the regulated air on the Normandy SR-2 always felt just slightly too warm for her now - and he was close enough to her now, without armor between them, for her to feel the warmth radiating from him. His scent, too, was impossibly familiar despite the obvious differences that should have struck her first: a hint of a soap that hadn't been available on the Normandy... the sharp, familiar smell of gun oil... no hint of the sweat he'd normally earned on the Normandy but with an unmistakable underlying something that she knew and couldn't forget.
But there was also a tingling... a sort of low-level vibration with a sorrowfully familiar pulse to it that was almost more a sound than a physical sensation on her skin, as if part of him were speaking - had always been speaking - and she'd only just learned how to consciously hear it. That was entirely new. Somehow familiar, nonetheless... but new. Shockingly so. She knew it was just his biotics, of course, and even though her brain couldn't box it into concepts she could understand, she'd seen him flare before, had felt him manipulate fields. There was probably some kind of... something... that biotics had. A different vibration, a different frequency, a different... something... that was unique to each individual.
Or maybe she found the hum of his palm against her skin so compelling out of nothing more than sheer ignorance. Touching her like that, after all, was something none of the other biotics on her ship would ever dare to do.
But in any case, he was right: if this was normal, there was no way he could ever have overlooked her being a biotic.
She stared at him, unmoving. He stared back... and for a moment, just a moment, she could have sworn she saw something flicker in his otherwise unreadable eyes.
"Ohhh," gasped Kasumi Goto reverently. She flipped hastily through her tattered romance novel to a particularly well-worn, dog-eared, much-loved series of pages. She scanned the page briefly... then looked back up at Shepard and Alenko... then back down at the book... and a delighted expression crossed her face. She sighed rapturously. "Just look!" She pointed to a particular passage and thrust the book at Vakarian.
He read the passage in question... looked up at Shepard and Alenko... then back down at the book. "Huh," he said, impressed. He turned the book over, surprisingly delicately given the talons on his fingers, and looked at the cover. He frowned. "The Commander would never wear a dress like that." His head cocked to the side, mandibles flexing slightly. "And I didn't even know human males could grow their hair that long."
"Alenko -" Lawson began dangerously.
Shepard started to raise her arm once again, to force his hand away from her with a brisk strike of her forearm, but Alenko held her fast. He slid his fingers perfunctorily around to the back of her head, moving with cool, clinical ease up from the hairline at the nape of her neck to the jack nestled in the thick hair above. She felt his fingers pull the hair aside to run over the exposed jack.
"You're not amped," he said.
She thought for a second that his hand lingered, that his fingertips strayed from the jack and to the warm flesh just below it... but his hand was gone before she could really tell. It dropped back down to his side. He took an abrupt step away from her, falling into a cool parade rest.
"Of course I'm not amped," she replied testily, an uncharacteristically and unmistakably sharp edge creeping into her voice. She took a deliberate step away from him, eyes darkening, jerking a nod toward first the bar, then the lights, then the table. "What part of this" - she waved her hand around the lounge - "says 'responsible biotic' to you, Kaidan? Is it the fancy new abstract art I made of the bar or just the fact that I managed to only destroy furniture instead of people? I can take out a gunship with nothing but a pistol and a smile but flash a fucking light in my eyes and I start spurting dark energy like a hemorrhaging recruit with his own knife stuck through his femoral. I'm not sure if you realize this, Kaidan, but currently, the single best hope for galactic civilization as we know it is that the fucking Reapers prefer soft lighting. I -"
She cut herself off abruptly and her expression slammed shut again. She took another deliberate step away, exhaling slowly. She recrossed her arms and gazed up at him, eyes unreadable once again. "I wouldn't give a raw recruit an M-920, Commander Alenko," she said with practiced, careful evenness, "because until someone beats the stupid out of him, the very best you can hope is that he kills only himself instead of his entire unit. So no." She lifted her chin just a notch, daring him to challenge her. "I'm not amped."
He looked at her for an uncomfortably long minute, his dark eyes carefully neutral.
She matched his gaze.
Alenko spoke without tearing his gaze from Shepard's. "Focused discharge with active multi-node support," he said to Lawson. "Looks like fully or close to fully mature intra-nodule synchronicity, even without coordination from an amp. New development or a gift from Cerberus?"
"New development," Lawson replied, joining him at his side. She, too, was perusing Shepard. "It was in the first round of functional requirements but was discontinued after we got R&D's LOEs. Had to narrow scope to stay on schedule." She looked faintly pleased. "Nice to see it showed up anyway though."
"Not sure 'nice' is the word I'd use since it's why she can punch through a bulkhead," Alenko said.
"She can punch through bulkheads because we gave her the ability to do so," Lawson corrected him matter-of-factly. "She's just doing it to ours rather than theirs because of a fluke. A convenient one, once we harness it. We had hard metrics for minimum required baseline and surge capabilities and all preliminary bioassessments prior to activation of higher brain functions came up green. She's significantly exceeded the latter and as I mentioned before, it's very likely she exceeds the former as well, possibly by an equally impressive margin. We'll need to baseline her to be sure."
"I don't see this part in here," Vakarian murmured to Goto, flipping ahead a few pages. "In fact, I... whoa." His mandibles stopped mid-flex and he peered more closely at the page. "So that's how that works. That's..." He blinked and flipped another few pages, scanning the contents. He blinked again. "Surprisingly unsanitary."
Alenko was still staring at Shepard. She was still staring right back at him. Both were completely expressionless.
"Any evidence of neural degradation?" he asked Lawson. "Neural instability? Developing conscious control of the nervous system in an adult will exacerbate any latent neuro-degenerative conditions."
"One of our original concerns when the biotics enhancement program was first proposed," Lawson agreed. "We had to recreate her synaptic pathways, including existing homosynaptic plasticity, as part of the primary reconstruction effort. Our primary requirement, after all, was that she be the same fundamental person she was. But her neurons are only a few weeks old. The underlying structures are all physiologically sound. Her neurons are much younger and more pliable than those of normal trainees. Biotics enhancement phase was approved only after a large number of assessments... one of which verified with forty-three percent certainty that actual, physiological neural age would help compensate for the established, adult synaptic patterns."
"That's roughly seventy million wasted credits for each of the other fifty seven if she ultimately can't look a geth in the flashlight face without surging," Alenko said.
"I'm sure you find that darkly humorous, Commander," said Lawson, "but given the Commander's history with the geth and the great likelihood that she will be unable to complete her objectives without facing them again, we did not. A full analysis of geth visual cues was one of the many aforementioned assessments. There's only a six percent chance that they would produce a visual disturbance capable of triggering an involuntary neural response and subsequent biotic surge. In any case, she can already flare on command. It's sloppy but she can do it. You saw it yourself." She shrugged slightly. "She has both a flexible nervous system and a lifetime - two now, actually - filled with muscle memory, rigorous training, and iron discipline. We gave her, in essence, the best of both worlds." She paused, giving Shepard a quick, cursory once-over. "She should be able to learn."
"What's your plan if she can't?"
"Forced chemical suppression of the biotic components," Lawson replied succinctly. "Hopefully with no lasting impact to the rest of her nervous system. There's a small chance there would be irreparable damage but the chance is small enough that it remains our primary exit strategy."
Alenko's eyes flew to Lawson.
She seemed unaware of why she'd earned his attention and just nodded back at him politely. "I'm very pleased to see you're taking an interest in the project, Commander. I knew you would. And given this discussion, it looks like your qualifications were in no way overstated. This is going to be an excellent and hopefully very productive partnership. I'll have the paperwork ready for you tomorrow morning. Once the NDA is signed, I'll have the project files released to you for review."
Alenko's eye twitched almost imperceptibly and he slowly turned back to look at Shepard, gaze hooded. "You have some friends, Shepard," he said.
She looked at him for a moment then said evenly, "Actually, no. I don't. Must've been too expensive to make it into the final functional requirements." She turned on a heel, saying over her shoulder, "Tomorrow morning, oh six hundred. We start training dirtside. I don't want to punch a hole in my ship. Kasumi, get that book away from Garrus before he gets ideas." She left.
