Twenty-Six: Reflect
Everything seemed so much louder when another was sleeping. Every creak of Mara's hard bunk seemed certain to wake the softly snoring pilot beneath her. Even her breath was noisy.
Getting up wasn't going to happen. Irrational though it was, she couldn't wake Joker. Not today; not with her in this state. She was sure she had purple streaks under her eyes. Her throat felt raw and when she exhaled, she rasped. She was not the way she used to be.
She was not Mara, and she couldn't let Joker see this… other.
They called her Shepard or Commander—Joker called her Mara. It just felt foreign. Travis had called her Mara, back in… wherever she was, but it sounded right from him.
Where had she been, anyway? Heaven? A delusion? An intensely realistic dream? Wherever it was, it was better than here. She had her fiancé and her parents and her childhood friends all around her. Those closest to her from the Akuze unit had come to visit, wondering when she and Travis were planning the wedding.
There is no wedding; you're all dead.
Mara felt the back of her throat fill with a feeling she couldn't place. Was she going to throw up? Was it her anxiety? Or was it something new that the whole experience had brought upon her? She wasn't sure if she wanted to know the answer.
She wanted to stand up and move. When she swung her legs off the side, the bed groaned again in protest. The creaking subsided when her feet landed on the cold steel floor with an audible thwack. She winced as Joker stirred and the snoring stopped.
She held herself perfectly still and held her breath without realizing it. She was too considerate of his needs. She'd just been brought back to life—he'd had two years to sleep.
Looking around, she caught sight of a two-way mirror on the wall. Apparently, Cerberus didn't trust the former friends together at night. Had they been watching them the whole time?
Mara dared to move again and approached the mirror. She looked at herself and felt that clichéd feeling of unfamiliarity. Her eyes were red and puffy—purple streaks lining the bottoms as she'd expected. Her hair was longer and when she ran her fingers through it, it was just a big tangle of blonde strings. Her face was marbled with scars of all sizes, and she could have sworn they became angrier with her mood.
Who am I looking at?
Mara ignored her footsteps as she walked back toward Joker's bed. His arm had swung out of the bunk and his thin, fragile fingers were brushing the floor. She knelt down and gently settled his arm back beside his body.
Fingers still lingering on his, she couldn't bring herself to move. Before, she had been so worried of him waking. But now?
She shifted her hand so she was holding his and made herself whisper a new order.
"Wake up."
A.N.: I missed my regular upload date yesterday and for that I deeply apologize. This chapter needed an entire rewrite and I wasn't expecting that, and I was having so much fun yesterday that a solemn chapter like this was out of the question. I do not regret the fun, I will merely atone for my lateness by giving you what I think is one of my better chapters, compared to the more recent ones that I haven't loved. But who knows? Maybe you all won't like this one and these are just the musings of a writer who went to bed at four in the morning. Because of that last little factoid, please let me know if you see any mistakes. That goes for all of my chapters and all of my stories. I try to edit and proof-read everything I write, but it can be a challenge sometimes and I can't really beta-read myself. So please, whether it's grammar, spelling, or continuity, alert me to any errors in my work.