A/N: Some Shepard/Joker. Rated T. I've had the idea of Shepard getting a Normandy tattoo for a while and then did some art of that and then this happened.

Inscription

The armory is the inside of an eye. The iris is the faintly glowing, faintly humming engine core, and they are inside its nerves. It is looking away.

That's where she shows him, while Jacob is out still on the docks somewhere and the smog of Omega is still wafting its greasy rivulets of scent through the Normandy's halls. She trips the snap at the top of her uniform and shrugs the padded flightsuit stuff down to her hips before either of them have time to say anything. He draws in a breath and she turns away and shows him her shoulder. The aching, stinging surface of her shoulder. The air is cold against her skin left bare by the black shirt she wears underneath.

Then his breath changes. She could listen to no other sound for the rest of her life as long as she gets that hissing breath that started in surprise and ended in concern and awe and he's narrowing his eyes and tipping his head now, she knows it even though she's looking away. His lips are parted, slightly. He looks the most confused when he knows exactly what he's doing.

Joker trails warm fingers around the edges of the pain and she doesn't want to tell him to be careful, because if he knows anything he knows that. "This is…wow."

"I wanted her back with me," she says. "She's permanent now."

He's making tiny circles on the skin of her shoulder just below the little ink-painted Normandy ache.

(The hum of the ship is so comforting. Her and Tali; both of them couldn't sleep without it. The SR2 makes a deeper rumble.)

She says, "As long as this body is, anyway."

She's staring into the blue eye of the reactor core and waiting for it to blink.

He says, "She always comes back."

It's hard to tell what he says, sometimes; the words rustle together so. "What?"

"You came back. We all thought…but you came back."

She's about to lift her elbow back to scratch at the one spiderweb Lazarus scar that keeps persisting and shifting when he's suddenly right there and ruffling her hair just by being that close. He is, very quickly, pressing his lips against her shoulder and she is very quickly okay with that—

(The tattoo was from a grubby shop next to Aria's Afterlife, where the thin-eyed salarian artist knew the Normandy. He'd had veterans and citizens of the citadel tack it on their skin, although he had to look up a picture on the extranet to know all its shapes. The picture was from a news article Shepard had accessed shortly after she'd woken up. It was probably dangerous going to a man with a street-bought kit instead of a fancy derma-shop on Illium, but sometimes Shepard just didn't care about the body Cerberus had given her.) The needle ache was like a reflection against Joker's neck, echoing back, as he set his teeth against her shoulder.

The ship had brought them together and broken them and it was going to be with her forever, in her skin and in her sleep.

Later, he left the purpled skin around her new tattoo to run his palms across her cheeks and her forehead and she pressed her lips against his and opened the elevator door behind her and everyone's gone, shore leave, everything is so very quiet—

And she wondered, for just one moment as she ran her hands across his back and she felt him almost desperately spider his fingers against her and brush that mark, one fingertip-worth of thin pigment-pain, whether he was really in love with her or just the ship—