I wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to read this and leave such great reviews! You guys make my day. Also, I tend to play my Shepards as Paragons for the most part, so I really haven't seen what happens when you pick Renegade options for Horizon. I'm guessing that it doesn't turn out all sunshine and roses.

"Funny, the people you meet." He had meant for his comment to come out breezy, but Jeff couldn't unclench his jaw after watching the events unfold groundside.

"Yeah. Funny." Shepard's voice was hollow and Joker could see the fine way her hands shook as she held onto the gauntlets she had recently stripped. This went beyond normal exhaustion from battle to something that cut deeper.

"I take it that seeing Kaidan again went…"

"It was a surprise," she said, cutting him off, her voice harsh. "And it didn't go well."

"I'll say; he damned near put a gun in your face." Joker had been livid. When he first saw Kaidan through Shepard's rig, he'd been hopeful that they had just gained a friendly face to help fight the Collectors. Things went quickly downhill with Kaidan accusing Shepard of switching sides and working with known terrorists, not to mention yelling at her for not keeping in contact. Hello, she's been dead for two years! She didn't exactly call me to see how I was doing either. He'd always been friendly with the man, but at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to go on-planet and punch him in the face.

"I don't want to talk about it," she snapped, holding onto her gauntlet so tightly that Joker could hear the leather and metal begin to protest. And even though she just said that she didn't want to talk, Shepard leaned against one of the unused seats closer to the end of the bridge. "Was he right?" she whispered. "About me joining the bad guys?"

It's never been that black and white and you know it. Don't beat yourself up like this. He didn't say what he was thinking, but he did lean forward in his seat. "What do you think?" he asked instead.

She took a breath. "I don't know any more. At first, it was easy to see what the Alliance saw. Now, Cerberus looks to be the only people doing something instead of denying everything and standing around with their thumbs up their asses." She looked down at her boots. "Still, it hurts to have someone tell you point blank that what I'm doing is wrong. I trusted Kaidan with my life, Joker. I…"

"You expected him to do the same, didn't you?"

She looked up at him, her face a study in misery. "That too much to ask?"

"What would you have done if you had been in his place?"

"If he'd been brought back instead of me, if he'd been with Cerberus?" She thought for a moment. "I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. I would have gone with him, screw the consequences." As soon as she said it, she knew it rang true. Like she had told Joker, she had trusted Kaidan to watch her back. She would have extended that trust to find out what was going on. "Now I wonder if I really have changed." She'd been finding herself doing and saying things lately that she knew she wouldn't have done or said before. Her patience was shorter and she had a greater tolerance for toeing the line between right and wrong. She'd often caught herself wondering if this was the result of being brought back or if the only things that had kept her from acting this way before had been Alliance regulations.

Joker sat back and watched as Shepard seemed to be mulling things over. He knew her enough to know that she needed time to adjust to certain scenarios, and it seemed as if this was no different. He watched as Shepard gathered every doubt, every emotion that had recently shown on her face and locked them away.

He often wondered just how many of those hurts she could keep stored like that before her walls eventually broke down under the strain.

"There's something I want to know," she finally said. "When Cerberus contacted you, how did they get you to join? You said it was because they got you back in the sky, but that couldn't have been everything."

He looked everywhere except at her. "Hey, flying is a big deal to me."

"But it isn't a deal-maker. The Alliance would have put you back on active duty if you had waited long enough."

"You're right, it wasn't." The longer he stared at her steely mask of hard, piercing eyes and the set line of her mouth, the more he hated it. This isn't you, Jules. "You were the deal-maker. Miranda brought me down to the lab where they were working on you. As soon as I saw you, I told her yes without blinking an eye." He swallowed and plowed on. "I didn't care who had brought you back or what sort of strings got attached to me. I don't follow Cerberus; I follow you, Shepard. Always have, always will."

Something behind her mask broke loose. "Just like that?"

"Just like that." He was crap with words and he knew it, his tongue tangling around every single thought that was flying through his head. All those thoughts stilled when she walked over to him and knelt so she was at his level. He watched as she gently tilted his cap out of the way so she could see him eye to eye. For the briefest second, he thought - hoped - that she would kiss him, but all she did was stare at him for the longest time before nodding and moving away, her eyes looking less haunted than they had a moment ago.

He might be crap with words, but sometimes the things that were left unsaid were the ones that mattered the most.