Monster
Joker sat in the empty mess hall absently shuffling his deck of cards. It was a few hours after shift change, and now that the other players had left for rack-time, he was enjoying the rare moment of silence and solitude. The cards were somewhat of an anachronism, but he'd always preferred the tactility of them over the usual datapad-based games. It gave his hands something to do while his mind wandered.
He startled when Chief Williams abruptly rounded the bulkhead from the crew area. Normally he should have heard her coming, but evidently she wasn't wearing boots. Her hair was tied back hastily into a loosely-tied ponytail that left several strands astray, and the top of her fatigues had been neglected in place of a white undershirt. Despite the look of foul humor on her face, the whole effect was still enough to send his mind straying off in an entirely unexpected direction.
I've been in space for too long. "Good morning, sunshine," he drawled casually.
Ashley glanced at him with a sour look, then stumped over to the meal system interface and glared at it, finally stabbing a few buttons. Joker was fairly sure the machine produced her request faster than usual, if only to be freed from her stare. She scooped up the proffered mug and turned back toward the mess.
"Poker night with the boys?" she asked dryly, eyeing the cards as she came around the table.
Joker put on an innocent face. "Perish the thought... gambling's against regs."
Her raised eyebrow said exactly how much she believed that line. She dropped into a chair and planted her elbows on the table, mug raised to sip from its mysterious contents.
"Care for a hand?" Joker asked, putting down the deck of cards and smoothing the sides.
"What am I going to bet, my socks?" Ashley quipped. "Anyway, I probably have the world's lousiest poker face."
"I'm sure you have more of that coffee squirreled away somewhere..." he said speculatively.
Her eyes narrowed over the mug. "You're going to have to try harder than that to get your paws on my stash, flyboy."
"Fine, fine." Joker spread his hands. "So what are you doing up? I'm sure it wasn't to come subject yourself to my company."
"Monsters under the bed," Ashley said with a slight twist to her mouth. She set the mug down and reached out to slide a pair of cards off the top of the deck.
"Find a krogan under your pillow?" he inquired mildly.
"Now that's one hell of a bedbug..." she said distractedly as she set the two cards against each other in an inverted V.
"Just pull the covers over your head," Joker suggested. "Everyone knows monsters can't conquer the all-mighty blanket."
"Apparently these ones can," she muttered, taking another sip of her drink. She then picked up another set of cards and carefully set them up next to the first set, then placed a third flat over the a-frames. She had extremely steady hands, something Joker concluded must contribute to her dangerous reputation with a sniper rifle.
The pilot idly scratched his chin. Every ship was a unique creature, not just in the engineering and software that made it up, but also in the collection of humans who inhabited it. Over the years, Joker had always made a point of paying attention to all the elements and how they interacted, because it was all those things that made his ship function. It wasn't just how the drive field danced, it was also the push and pull of the chain of command, and beneath that the other, all-too-human elements; the things the military preferred to pretend didn't exist. It always struck him as somewhat absurd that despite the depth of modern psychological studies, Fleet Operations would still rather stick their collective fingers in their ears and sing than admit that their soldiers might get angry, scared, jealous, hurt or - god forbid - be attracted to one another.
There were always marines stationed on Alliance ships as well, and they were in many ways their own entity. Joker had always been fairly removed from the down-and-dirty business of operations on the ground; his head was always in space, intent on the numerous and engrossing subtleties of flying. He'd mingled, played cards with some of them, and listened to their stories that grew wilder for the telling, but it had always been easiest to stay on his side of the line. They ran the gamut, but there was always a percentage of muscle-bound meat-heads who didn't have time for the creaky-legged cripple.
These days, however, the lines blurred, especially now that a marine was his CO. One that actually came to talk to him, tolerated his sarcastic mouth with aplomb, and seemed to implicitly trust his skills. Or now that one was sitting in front of him, talking offhandedly about what he could only conjecture to be some kind of combat-stress induced nightmare. Four fading pink lines interspersed along her right arm traced the past invasions of shrapnel from the Cornucopia incident.
"I always thought aliens were pretty weird," she said absently as she collected more building materials. "I still do, but at least they have something going on, you know? Maybe... whatever a soul is for them. But I guess the real monsters are the ones that have nothing behind their eyes... if they even have eyes at all. Bad as we've seen it, all I gotta do is think about the people on Eden Prime who looked at a geth husk and recognized the person it used to be. Everything they were is gone but they're still walking around, and trying to tear your face off on top of it all."
"Hanar don't have eyes," he mused vaguely, "and I can't see them being very intimidating..." Oh that was a good one. Idiot.
"All I can think about when I see a jelly is whether or not they might taste good with rice and wasabi," Ashley said, quirking a smile as she set up another A-frame.
"This one asks that you please put the chopsticks away." Joker imitated a hanar's politely enunciated cadence.
"It was terrible, officer! Soy sauce everywhere!" Ashley said in an exaggerated, pleading tone.
She grinned as Joker chuckled. As she started on a second row of cards on top of the first, Joker shifted and accidentally bumped the table with his elbow. Ashley froze, hands poised with another a-frame hovering over the first row as she watched the tenuous stack stop vibrating. Her eyes flicked over to him with a slightly venomous glare, making Joker inch his chair back slightly and cram his hands in his pockets in contrition. Ashley went back to carefully placing the cards, tip of her tongue caught between her teeth in an expression of concentration.
"I always wanted to get the whole fifty-two up...," she said absently. "But one of my sisters always knocked it over, because that's the fun part."
"Not many people have an actual deck these days."
"The one I used was my dad's, but they were pretty worn out, and the ace of diamonds was bent so you could always tell which one it was." She paused, balanced a card on one corner and spun it under her finger. "I always wanted to try that trick where you throw the cards in the air, then plug the ace with a gun."
"Be nice to my cards," Joker said with mock concern.
Ashley playfully balanced the card on its edge, then let go and mimed shooting at it. "Blam," she muttered as the card overbalanced and flopped over, revealing the jack of hearts.
"Breaking hearts all over the galaxy... Poor Jack," Joker lamented.
"Oh yeah, that's me," she said sarcastically. "Breaking the geth's little plastic hearts, every one I see." She held her hands out in imitation of a rifle.
"You should try pressing the button on a main gun; nothing says love like a quarter-pound of iron moving at relativistic speeds..."
"Yeah yeah, yours is bigger. Congratulations," she smirked. "But mine has inferno rounds."
Joker raised an eyebrow. "Kinky."
"The penetrators are only for special occasions," she said with a mischievous grin.
He opened his mouth to retort, then closed it again. "Nope, I'm not touching that one," he said finally.
"The grandmaster of snark passes on the bait? I'm disappointed."
"Self-preservation, Chief," Joker demurred. "You can run faster than me, and I go all to pieces from anything worse than harsh language."
"Aw, well, don't worry, yours is still bigger." Ashley stood up and brought the mug back to the cleaning system. "Back to the front lines," she pronounced, then yawned and stretched expansively.
"But you didn't even make it halfway through the deck..." Joker said. "I promise I won't knock 'em over."
Ashley shot him a narrow grin. "Sure you wouldn't, at least not 'till I got into the forties. Nah, just letting the shields recharge. You think I'm gonna let some pissant monster win? Forget that. I'll go for the gold some other time. Nighty-night, I'll leave you the fun part." With one last sly smile, she turned and padded around the bulkhead back toward the crew quarters.
Joker reached out a finger toward one of the cards on the bottom row, then stopped a few inches short. He pulled his hand away and stuck it back in his pocket, slouching in his seat and staring moodily at the unfinished edifice.
Nah, she's just messing with me.