I don't own the Mass Effect.

Reclaimed Memories

The Huntress

Here we finally get the promised chapter from Nikita's point of view... it's going to tie into what happens in Einherjar, Chapters 3-7 through 3-10. It's not going to be a particularly happy kind of chapter, so be prepared in advance.

"Come on Nikita, up you get." A cheerful basso was accompanied by a broad hand grabbing my slender limb, gently hauling me up to my feet. "We Russians have to stick together."

I could only groan in reply, trying not to sag against Jaime's broad frame. He stank of sweat, entirely reducing the level of interest his well built body might have caused. From the lack of shameless flirting as my covered breasts rubbed against his side, I probably didn't smell much better. Or maybe we were both just too damned exhausted to play our usual game.

"Come on." He urged, gently pushing me back into motion. "Can't let that chatty Mongol bitch or that angsty Scottish asshole beat us, can we?"

"Yeah... right." My eyes managed to focus in time to see our competition, the other two members of our 'cabal' out ahead of us. Both looked to be as exhausted as we were, their white clothing run through with sweat, but were relentlessly pushing themselves onwards towards the distant finish line.

Groaning again, I pushed off as best I could, stumbling into a shuffling jog as I got moving again. Jaime quickly lumbered along in my wake, his black beard twitching as he panted. We were in the last leg of the day's training exercise, which had been even more brutal that usual in that we'd had to double the usual run-swim-run-shoot-run-spar-shoot-run pattern that our trainers had been running us through. Once we'd reached the usual finish line, we'd had to double back and repeat the entire goddamned process.

A glance behind us made me relax a little, the next team was still extremely far behind us, cementing our continuing position as the best of the cabals in the project.

The run to the end was little more than a tired, whimpering blur of motion as we ran through the long grass of Thessia, completing our circuit of the T'Ravt ancestral grounds. Despite Jaime's best efforts to get us moving faster, Ciarán and Enkhtuyaa had long since collapsed onto the ground before we arrived, a tastefully dressed Lady Mishi smothering a grin as we stumbled across the finish line to drop beside them.

"I see Team Five continues its tradition of excellence." The Matriarch's youngest daughter shook her blue head in bemusement, noting our time down on her omni-tool. "Your monopoly of the leave passes continues for yet another week."

I weakly pumped a fist into the air, which drew a breathy laugh from the head of our training.

"Bonus markers as well," She continued, "For all of you. Kerensky's refusal to leave an ally behind, Korolev's analyzation of what targets to take first, Enkhtuyaa's patient appraisal of the tides, and MacKinnon's... creative interpretation of the rules against sabotaging your competition."

I blinked at the last, then covered my eyes with a dirt covered hand as I groaned his name. "Ciarán..."

"Oh fuck off." The wiry Scotsman muttered back, his rapid breath not diminishing his accent in the slightest. "We bloody won, didn' we?"

I couldn't exactly argue with that, so I settled for trying to catch my breath and ignoring the stabbing pains running through my lungs. Our physical training was by far my least favorite part of this, especially since it was all callisthenics and endurance crap. I much preferred the investigative and analytical training courses that I was in, even though I wasn't with my team for those.

Not that I could make any sense of the engineering crap that Ciarán studied, or the medical texts that Enkhtuyaa read, nor keep up with the commando training that Jaime was receiving above and beyond our basic combat regimens. But then again, that was the entire point. Five teams of four specialists each, all of our skills intended to work in concert with one another to serve the Republic that had saved us from fates worse than death.

No... that wasn't right... was it? They'd-

Betrayed us!

I jerked at the sound of my own voice, blinking to find myself in another place, another time.

"I'm just saying." Jaime drawled, his heartbeat languid in my left ear, my head resting on his bare chest. "It took you long enough."

My skin flushed at the double entendre, "It did not!"

He laughed, a hand idly tugging the sheet a bit higher over our naked bodies. "I've been flirting with you for the last six months, I was wondering if you just weren't into men after I saw you ogling Tuya."

If anything, my flush worsened. "At least I don't constantly stare at the huntress who picked me up. I thought you were just trying to make her jealous."

"Zero?" Jaime snorted, "I like the girl, don't get me wrong, but she's not you. Although... if you're open to that kind of thing, a threesome might be-fuck!"

I pulled harder on his chest hair, just to make my irritation clearer. "No. No threesomes."

A snort that didn't come from either of us made my eyes widen, as Scottish drawl echoing in our team's room. "That's a goddamn relief, I don't have any brain bleach around."

"Ciarán." Jaime groaned, his own pale skin reddening as he looked over my shoulder. "Get out."

"Last time I checked, you weren't our leader." The voice retaliated bemusedly, footsteps echoing as he began to move about the room. "That would be the girl burying her face in your chest, and whose pale ass is sticking out of the sheets and leaking onto the floor."

Oh god. I hurriedly yanked the sheets over my rear, mortified beyond words. "Ciarán"

"Oh calm your bloody shit girl. I'm Xenthan, remember? I stopped caring about seeing people having sex by the time I was twelve. Bloody lowborn prostitutes not understanding that beds are better than alleys..."

Shockingly, that didn't make me feel any better. "Ciarán. Out! You can get your fucking book later!"

The sound of pages snapping together preceded his words, more footfalls moving towards the door. "Already got it, but fine, fine, I'm leaving. I'll tell Enkhtuyaa that we aren't welcome for a while if you want to go another-"

Jaime all but snarled, "Out you fucking dick!"

Quiet, mocking laughter was the only reply, the sound cutting off as the door slid open and then closed behind him.

"I hate him." I muttered. "I hate him so much. Why are we friends with him again? We should just shoot him in the next live-fire drill."

"As tempting as that is," Jaime sighed, "He's too useful to kill and he knows it. Plus Tuya would complain that we took her man-toy away. Still... he had a good idea."

Blinking, I pushed myself up a bit to better look at him. "What idea? Wait, no, I'm way too-"

My Jaime... he was once so...

One moment I was being rolled onto my back, feeling my legs spreading of their own accord... the next I was somewhere else, my mouth was moving without input from my mind, and panic thrummed in my chest as I realized I was merely an observer in my own body. "You're being paranoid, why would she lie to us?"

Ciarán snorted, pacing furiously across the showers. The tinny whine of his cobbled-together jammer making sure that no one could hear us, our team disguising our clandestine meeting under the cover of cleaning ourselves.

"Why wouldn't she?" He growled back, "We were all desperate, all in shite situations."

"Enkhtuyaa?"

His Mongolian lover sighed, her exotic, lanky body leaning against one of the stall doors. "I agree with him; We still don't know what happened to teams one and three. Yeah, they couldn't keep up and we knew they'd wash out... but why won't anyone tell us what happened to them? And if we're supposed to serve the Republics, how come we only ever work with House T'Ravt?"

I winced at the points, then glanced at my own partner. Jaime grimaced, his normally jovial features drawn as he rubbed a hand across his shaved head. "Shit... I don't know. T'Ravt is a hard old bitch, but she's treated us fair, and we're finally being let out on an actual mission in the Traverse next month."

I swallowed, "I hear a 'but' coming."

He nodded tiredly. "But they've got a point, love. Where's House Vasir? Or House B'Sho? Where are the Republic Intelligence agents who should be evaluating us? Fuck, where are the Spectre agents she said we might end up supporting?"

"And then there's... all of us." Tuya murmured, glancing almost worriedly at her lover. "I mean, we're mostly discreet, and I guess they'd give us some leeway about relationships since we're the best team... but why hasn't anyone said anything positive or negative about it? It's like they're ignoring it entirely."

My hands reached up to rub furiously at my face "All right, say I buy that she's not being honest with us, and that... whatever happened to the other teams worries me too... what do we do about it?"

"You're our leader." Ciarán reminded me, his wiry body slowing its pacing as he regarded me seriously, his body unconsciously stiffening into stiff Batarian mannerisms as his worry saw him default to old behavior. "What do you think we should do?"

I let out a long, tired breath. I'd been worried at least as long as the paranoid ex-slave, my investigative training letting me piece things together as quickly as he could. But I'd also been doing everything I could to keep up a brave face so that I could be the rock that my friends needed. As much as they tried to hide it, none of them were exactly pillars of stability... Tuya and Ciarán especially.

And we owed Matriarch T'Ravt so very much... she'd killed the men about to rape me, rescued Ciarán and Jaime from slavery, and healed a dying Enkhtuyaa. But.. dammit. Tuya's point on the sex had been one that I'd missed. Asari were open about relationships, sure, but they were also very chatty about said relationships and almost never shy about digging for details and seemed to adore teasing each other about flings.

So why hadn't any of them said anything about me and Jaime, or Ciarán and Tuya?

"We keep our ears open." I decided. "For the next three weeks. We don't ask stupid questions or act unusual. Jaime? I want you to chat up Zero about the mission, see if she knows where we're going and what the plan is. Say you just want to be prepared in advance."

He grunted. "She'll buy that, we're always trying to get a leg up on the other teams as it is."

"Right. Tuya? I want you to be your usual bantery self. Talk with the other teams a lot, see if any of them are acting... off." She nodded sharply at that, and I turned to Ciarán. "You and I are going to do some discreet poking around in the databases we're allowed into. We'll stick to the records of teams one and three, our excuse is that we're seeing what made them fail so we can avoid their mistakes."

We knew something was wrong... we tried to figure it out... we just didn't understand how fucked we were.

Memories rose, then faded, then rose again.

"They definitely didn't just leave." Ciarán muttered from behind his antique book, the battered red leather and faded golden tree marking it as Tolkien's opus. "Tuya says Alexia saw the huntresses guiding them out to the shuttle pads one at a time, very late night stuff."

I frowned, covering the expression with a drink of water. The pair of us were enjoying our 'leave pass' we'd earned from the last training run, taking advantage of being permitted to lounge in the Matriarch's beautiful gardens to speak privately. The fountain we were leaning against should block the listening devices that we were sure were around, so long as we spoke quietly and kept our mouths covered to avoid lip reading.

"She get any other details out of her?"

"Yeah. They were... staggering around a lot, each of them had a handler helping them move." He replied quietly. "Like they were drugged."

Teeth bit into my lip as I fought to avoid grimacing. "Making them forget the training?"

"If we're giving her the benefit of the doubt, which I'm not."

"Yeah..." Unpleasant emotion roiled around in my chest before being ruthlessly pushed aside. I couldn't afford emotion right now, I needed cold logic. "Your vote is that we try it, then?"

"Yes." The word was barely a mumble. "Tuya agrees."

Air slowly escaped my lungs. "So do I. I'll tell Jaime.'

I failed... we failed... why didn't we realize it sooner... Prepared for months instead of weeks... We were... I was their leader...I should have done more... I failed us all.

I groaned as consciousness slowly returned, feeling hands tiredly pulling me free form the wreck of the ship. Memories came back as Jaime pulled me to safety, our mission, our attempt at escape.

For a few glorious minutes, we'd thought we'd made it. We'd landed on Carastes three days ago, and started trekking through the planet's wilderness towards our target. Once we'd found them, we'd spent a few hours preparing for both our actual orders and our personal mission, making our move just after local midnight. We'd taken down the tiny pirate operation in fifteen minutes, the Batarians not expecting the commando attack, secured their pinnace, and then signaled for the extraction team. The moment the four House commandos had arrived, had lowered their guards... we'd hit them as hard and fast as we could. They hadn't expected it, hadn't had their barriers up, and had died stunned and confused we'd cut them down from behind.

Jaime, as our only pilot, had quickly gotten the pirate vessel airborne, using the Turian ship's guns to vaporize the shuttle the commandos had arrived in before likewise taking out the backup shuttle even as it tried to boost away. We'd gotten airborne and swung around to the north, heading for the planet's only city, our plan to ditch the obvious ship and lose ourselves in the crowd of pirates, slavers, and other criminals. From there we'd try and steal a new ship, and then make our way to the Alliance, to see if we could find someone there to protect us.

Then something had hit us, hard, and our engines had failed completely. Our eezo core had stayed online just long enough to prevent us from dying instantly when we hit the ground.

"What..." I coughed as my lover hauled my up into his broad arms, carrying me farther from the crash, following Tuya's slim form as she waved us into the trees. "What hit us?"

"Laser." Ciarán spoke from somewhere behind us, "From low orbit, I think. The cruiser wasn't supposed to be anywhere nearby..."

"They lied then." Jaime replied, his voice flat. "They didn't trust us as much as we thought they did."

Tuya grunted, glancing back, "Or something tipped them off. We're competing with Asari in spy-craft, keeping things hidden. It was always a long shot."

"Focus..." I coughed again, trying to get the smoke from my lungs. "Focus. We keep going north, away from the crash site. Tuya? You got your medical gear?"

"I do, soon as we find a good spot I'll need to-urk!" A blue flash slammed into her faster than my eyes could track, a huntress in black armor and leathers bearing her down to the ground with a sword at her throat.

Ciarán reacted on reflex, his pistol snapping up to shoot the Asari while his other brought his omni-tool to life with a gesture. Before he could use either the tool or his weapon, a second blur took him down, and a second later I found myself tumbling out of Jaime's grasp as more commandos announced their arrival with displays of biotic force, aimed weapons, and bared blades.

"Clever. Very clever, little monkeys." There was nothing warm or fun in Mishi T'Ravt's voice as she appeared above my prone body, a boot coming to rest on my throat. "If you had timed it a few minutes either way, you might have even made it."

"Do we dispose of them, mistress?"

"No." Our teacher shook her head once, her smile cruel. "Mother will want to speak with them herself. Bind them for the trip home... and give them a dose of compound three."

Pain. Pain. So much pain on the trip home. So many drugs... so many toxins... Mishi indulging her sadism. Beating us. Invading our minds, murmuring our dark secrets for everyone to hear.

I will kill that bitch if it's the last thing I do.

Everything was cold. I hugged my knees to my chest, staring at the white floor of my cell. I couldn't see the others, but I knew they were nearby, equally as trapped, equally as doomed.

"You acted earlier than I thought you would." Matriarch T'Ravt mused, making me glance up to see her beautiful features gliding past the tiny plastic window set into the blank door. She was dressed strangely, in Asari medical scrubs rather than in one of her usual elegant gowns. "I was going to remonstrate my daughter for taking so many of the House with on nothing more than suspicion, but instead I must reward her paranoia."

I didn't bother to respond to that, simply lowering my head to my knees again. Neither did the others... at least, I thought they didn't. The rooms were sound proofed, to keep us isolated, from talking with one another. Just like how the pure white walls, floor, and ceiling were intended to weaken our mental fortitude.

"I had intended to continue the charade for far longer, but the absence of my best team on such a simple mission will not be one I can easily explain away to the other teams. Perhaps I will allow them to thank you all for changing the schedule and cutting short the illusion of normality." She continued, her voice shifting to be heard from speakers somewhere in the cell. "Still, do take solace. I did not lie when I told you all that you had been chosen for something greater, for the chance to become more than the miserable little aliens that you were born as."

"Matriarch." A cool voice spoke, another Asari greeting her mistress. "We are prepared to begin the process on Subject Nine. Lord-Who-Shatters-Stars has consented to take their turn in preparing the chorus."

"Excellent." The Matriarch all but purred. A moment later the light above me flickered off, making me blink and glance up in time to see the entire right wall of my cell flicker to life with an image.

Jaime, nude, tied to an operating table with numerous Asari bustling purposefully around him. Incision marks were already prepared across his skull, and more than a dozen IV lines were connected to his arms and legs. His body was still, but his blue eyes were wide, and I could tell that he was uncertain, afraid.

"I will give credit where it is due, you were my best team, the ones with the greatest potential to truly become what I needed." The tall form of Cynthi T'Ravt appeared in the image, stepping over to caress Jaime's chest. "But we all must make sacrifices, and our initial tests seem to show that the more strain on a subject's mental faculties prior to the process yields better results."

Mishi T'Ravt drifted in on his other side, dressed in the same medical equipment as her mother, though she'd bothered with the full mask and had equipment around her eyes. "We're ready mother."

"Good." The elder Asari gracefully stepped backwards, giving her daughter and assistants room to work. "The process, dear humans, is not quite perfected. Insanity and death are more than likely, so I cannot waste those with the greatest potential. But you, dear Jaime... a common thug is not what I truly need, and so you will serve in another way. You will weaken the wills of your friends, and serve as the first example of my displeasure with your actions."

My limbs began to tremble, as I whimpered, wanting nothing more than to stop watching, but unable to tear my eyes away.

They began with a greybox implantation while he was still awake. Four commandos kept him restrained biotically as he tried to scream, tried to thrash, tried to do anything. I kept myself still for a few minutes, then screamed and tried to break the screen with my fists, my legs, my elbows, anything to stop seeing it. Hearing it.

I retched god knew how many times, then collapsed in a corner, covering my ears and screaming as well to try and drown out what they were doing to my lover. Another huntress arrived soon enough into that attempt, her biotics slamming me into a wall, locking me into stasis, forcing me to watch as they continued.

Once the first procedure was done, the various lesser Asari had cleared out, leaving only the Matriarch behind. She had drifted around Jaime's trapped body, then carelessly removed his gag. He lacked the breath to do anything other than pant and gasp, sobbing quietly in agony... and then her eyes had rolled to black, and she'd touched her fingers to his temples.

My love screamed. Screamed without reason, without air, without anything resembling restraint, and he kept screaming until nothing more than pained gurgles came out.

Things became blurry through the tears and sobs. I saw the Matriarch leave. Some kind of dark orb was inserted into the room from above, hovering above Jaime's broken, twitching body. It glittered with some kind of inner light, and his body abruptly ceased all motion as it flickered and glowed. It didn't even seem like he breathed until it was pulled back, his body collapsing limply on the stretcher.

Matriarch T'Ravt came in again, after that, once again melding with the broken man... though this time he didn't scream. He didn't even seem aware that it was happening.

He was just the first. Then she made us watch another. Then more... pain. Mishi, working on us. Laughing as she hurt us. As she... forced us to do things.

After... weeks.. months... time didn't have meaning, she didn't let us keep track... it was Ciarán who died next. She... she taunted Enkhtuyaa with it, with his role in her... game. He was... he was going to be made to lust after someone else. Some Asari. She... said consummating it would kill them both. That he would die in agony. We could hear Tuya screaming even through the walls... we wondered if they could hear us when Jaime had died.

Then it... it was our turn, on the table, with the orb. But she'd learned... to sedate her experiments. Breaking us first helped, but pushing us too far... she learned from what went wrong with Jaime, with the fact that he was insane from the start, that he remembered bits and pieces. Enough to hate her, enough to remember who Zero was. Enough to flee and plot against her.

Stupid old bitch... didn't realize we were already broken.

I was sedated. I don't remember what she did, not exactly.

"Liar."

No... no please, We don't remember more... don't make me remember more!

"Her exposure is at eighty percent of the human baseline sir, we aren't authorized to go farther without approval."

A grunt, somehow echoing. Everything was echoing. "You think she's telling the truth?"

"The machines say so. Still, there's a lot of missing parts... we should still force to at least ninety, maybe ninety-five percent and see what shakes loose." Percent of... darkness lies beyond, my truths were just fragile lies, salvation lay in destruction... no... no that wasn't... that wasn't right.

"I agree, I'll ask the boss. Get this thing back to its cell."

More grunting. Hands touching me. Bare skin on metal. On cold stone.

I came back to myself as I retched, vomiting into the hole in the ground that passed for my toilet. The cell wasn't like the Matriarch's, it was more primitive, plain metal walls and a simple force barrier to keep me trapped inside.

"Oh good, it's still alive." A voice drawled from beyond the glowing blue wall. "You still sane?"

When we get out, we're going to kill them. All of them.

Agreed. I spat the last bits of bile out of my mouth, then lifted my head up to glare at the two men beyond. Both wore white jumpsuits with black and gold trim, and the one who liked to taunt me sneered at my expression.

"Still sane enough to hate, I see. More promises that we're all going to die?"

Garrus will come. Aethyta will come. They'll massacre you all... and I will laugh as you scream.

I didn't realize that cynical Nikita had spoken that through my lips until the two men laughed, "That old whore. We crippled her before you got her out and you know it. Hell, we've got teams hunting her down right now... we know she's on planet, wounded, and has only that crazy Turian for help. It won't be long until she's back in her own cell."

"Maybe this time the Professor will let us indulge a bit." The other scientist muttered, his eyes flicking up and down my naked body with disdain. A petty cruelty, something to distract me, hurt me. Like the lack of a proper toilet, of the shit rations I was fed. Cerberus was trying, I would give them that, but they had a long way to go before they could match the Matriarch, much less Mishi.

Idiots, we've lived through worse than anything they can dream up.

"Not like I'd even want to touch this hairy Terminus bitch, at least with a blue you don't have to care about that."

"Christ Tim, always thinking with your dick. That blue would mindfuck you senseless if you touched her, that's why only mechs hauled her around." The two men kept bickering as they turned, vanishing out of a cell block that was empty but for me.

They'll come for us. They will. It's been a week, they'll have brought in help by now. We have to work out, as much as it hurts. We have to be ready.

"Yes." I murmured to myself, rising a hand to wipe at my face. I'd been bleeding from my eyes and nose again, though at least this time there wasn't anything from my ears or gums. I shook my head a little at the sight, then forced myself onto my back to start doing crunches. "We have to be ready."

First insights into just what happened to Nikita, Cieran, Jaime, and the other seventeen experiments. For those curious, yes, Enkhtuyaa is one of the 'twins' that have been referenced.

Please read and review, criticism is welcome, flames not so much, as usual. Reviews are my lifeblood as a writer.. every-time my email goes off with a review it makes me want to write more, so please take the time to leave one. Guests can leave them as well, and it only takes a minute, so please. Even if it's as simple as "I enjoyed it, please continue."

P a treon Zach_K2V

Thanks, Kat