Author's Note: I apologize for not updating earlier, but between exams, project work, my beta going MIA (and having to find a temp), real life's just been a royal pain in the behind, and I've fallen way behind in my writing and updating. After much delay, though, I think things are back on track for weekly updates (I hope), and here's chapter 36. Hope you all enjoy, and thanks for your patience!

Chapter Thirty-Six

"Grayson." Shepard greets me tiredly as she fixes herself a drink. "You're up late."

"Couldn't sleep."

"Seems to be a common problem lately. Something on your mind?"

I shrug and play with my mug of cold coffee. That's actually too disgusting to drink now. "Aside from the fact that we almost got our asses handed to us by a giant space robot and its minion army of littler space killer robots?"

"Don't forget their brainwashed alien helper," she adds with a wry smile.

"Yeah, him, too. Especially him." I still wince when I think back to my stupidity in trying to take Saren on alone. Well, I think I'll file that amongst the stupidest things I ever did. Probably one for the top ten.

She leans over the table slightly. "How's the new lung?"

"Doing pretty well, according to the Doc. No issues, and it's about as integrated as it'll get. I'm practically good as new, ready to rush back where angels fear to tread. And me, too, by the way."

"I don't know about that," she tells me with a little smile. "Seems you did pretty well with that whole rushing thing on the Citadel, from what I hear."

"Joker needs to keep his mouth shut," I groan. I don't mind him bragging about how he had to save my ass with his brilliant flying. In fact, the first thing I did was buy him a drink. And then another. And another. I don't mind that at all. But then he got drunk. And somehow spilled to Shepard just why he had to bail out my ass.

"Still, that was some pretty nice work from what I hear. I still haven't heard your side of it." Shepard leans forward against a chair, mug in hand. "You probably stopped him from doing some major damage."

"Or I completely fucked things up and needlessly endangered people."

"I really don't think so."

I just cast a wry grin her way. "Oh, you have no idea."

"Then enlighten me." Shepard looks at me a little funny, and suddenly I feel uncomfortable. It's that intense stare of hers that makes you feel as if she knows something and is about to spring it on you. Something uncomfortable. "There's a lot of things that weren't in your report. Such as why the hell you thought it was a good idea to go into the middle of a warzone with a lung that might go kaputt at any time."

"Well...I had a little more faith in the doctors than that, but..."

"Cut the crap. What you did was irresponsible and dangerous." Shepard glances away for a second. "Do you have any concept of how close to dying you came when you took that round on the Normandy?"

"I've got a pretty good idea." That near-death experience with Q kind of gave it away.

"It doesn't seem like you did. That kind of recklessness is something I'd expect from-"

"From a total and utter idiot, I know." I pick at the ribbon that's attached to the medal still hanging from my uniform. Somehow, the damn thing just feels heavy and annoying.

Shepard recoils slightly at my self-deprecating tone. "Not exactly. I know that there's things you know, things you do. Most of which I assume have to do with your work for SpecOps, but I don't like my crew rushing into needlessly dangerous situations."

"You're telling me you wouldn't have done the same? The Citadel is under attack, geth are landing and slaughtering everything that moves, you're telling me you would've stayed put and gone into one of the shelters?"

"No. No, I wouldn't have." She lets out a sigh and takes a sip from her mug. "But you don't strike me as the kind of person who would deliberately throw themselves into danger. No offense."

"None taken." She's right, and we both know it. "Look, I fucked up. I get it. I know that. It won't happen again. I just...I got stupid and I thought I could help. I thought I had to help."

The redheaded woman shrugs, idly tugging at the shoulder of her N7 sweater. "Nothing wrong with that. But how the hell did it go from there to taking on a renegade spectre all by yourself?"

"I thought I could make a difference," I tell her wryly. "Guess I got caught up in the whole saving-the-galaxy schtick. For a moment, I actually deluded myself into thinking I could do some good on my own. Fat load of good that did me." I sigh and look down, and suddenly, I just feel angry. At Q, at myself, even at Shepard. Mostly at myself, though, because when it comes down to it, Q put me here, Shepard didn't come, but I made the choices that I did. I've irrevocably sent this universe spiralling down an unpredictable path, and now I'm dealing with the consequences.

And those consequences include having the deaths of tens of thousands of people sitting on your conscience like a metric shit-ton of bricks. Intellectually, logically, I know that most of them would've died from the original timeline. I know Q was trying to butter me up, but it doesn't really help. Deep down, I was hoping for some sort of utopian perfect outcome where Sovereign would be stopped before he could do any major damage. It never would've happened that way, I know, but that doesn't change the fact that somehow, I was still treating this a bit like a game on a subconscious level, with some kind of perfect run.

Sovereign may have been incidental to the deaths of sixty-some thousand people, but the choices I made led him there. I suddenly tear off the medal and fling it onto the table. "I fucked up. I failed. It's over, it's done with, all right? Let's just leave it at that."

Shepard looks at me strangely, almost sadly, then reaches across. Her hand pauses, hovering just shy of touching mine, then drops to the table. "Look, I didn't say that. I didn't mean it that way, all right? For what it's worth, you did good."

"No, I'm sorry, Commander," I clear my throat and look back up at her, getting myself back under control. "I apologize for my outburst, it won't happen again."

The Commander's fist slams into the table with enough force to rattle it - an impressive feat, I note absently, as the entire tabletop and base is solid. "Will you just shut the fuck up for a second and listen to me?" she hisses angrily. "Do I have your attention? Good. Now listen. Am I mad at you? Hell yeah, but not because I think you fucked up. If anything, what you did probably saved some lives, because we wouldn't have gotten those mass relays opened back up nearly as soon as you did. What I'm utterly pissed about is that you almost got yourself killed in the process. Who the fucking hells told you it was a good idea to go running off after a Reaper and his cohort by your fucking self, huh?"

"No one," I tell her with a shrug. "I just...didn't think."

"And that's the problem," Shepard sighs and deflates, her rage spent and she sinks back into her chair, playing with the medal on the table. "Look, I've been there. Let me tell you something about being a hero...don't. You think you can take on the world, and in a split second you make a critical decision, and it can end one of two ways. Either you fail and die, or you succeed and forever question yourself if there wasn't a better way, because you think you didn't do enough. And more importantly, you never think about the people you leave behind. About what your death would do to others." She shrugs and leans forward. "All I'm saying is...just be glad you survived this one, and next time, think before you run into something crazy. I hate losing crew and friends."

"Aye, Commander." I even mean it, because she's right.

"So, how exactly did you know where to find him?"

Oh, fuck. This is exactly what I left out of my report. How I knew where to find Saren. Come on, think. Think. "Would you believe I ran across him in a coffee shop?" Oh Divine, that sounded like a dumb line even to me.

"Not for a goddamn salarian second." Apparently I'm not the only one.

But perhaps this is the opening that I've been looking for. Or rather, the opening that's being shoved down my throat. Shepard's got that look, the one that says she's not going to let things go this time. The one that tells me I slipped up one too many times and she's not going to let me leave until I come clean.

Well...it sort of worked with Miranda. At least, to the point where I haven't been thrown into the loony bin yet, so maybe it's time to stop trying to be Xellos and just go with it. Subtlety was never my strong point, anyway. At the very least, I've got to think of a way to warn her about the Collectors.

I look down into my mug and take a sip, trying to buy me some time to figure out an answer. My train of thought, however, is derailed rather quickly as the taste of stale, cold coffee hits my tongue and causes me to splutter and cough it back up. When I'm done, Shepard is just looking at me with that amused grin of hers and shakes her head. I just shrug in return and get up and dump the vile contents of the mug down the disposal drain.

"You're right, I guess," I say, more to myself than to her. "Got someplace we won't be interrupted in?"

The redheaded spectre looks at me for a moment, almost with curious amusement, then gets up, grabbing a protein bar for herself. "If I didn't know you any better, I'd almost take that as a proposition."

"If it was, things would probably be a hell of a lot easier for me," I mutter, but she heard me anyway.

"I get that impression, yes," she chuckles. "Come on, I just bought Karin a bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy. This is probably the perfect opportunity to christen it."

"You sure she won't mind?" I swear, Shepard drinks more of Chakwas's liquor than the Doc. Which is pretty ironic, although I don't really think Chakwas minds. I'm pretty sure that the good Doc has a hidden stash of alcohol somewhere aboard this ship, just in case she ever runs out.

I also wouldn't put it past Shepard to know about it, heh.

"Has Karin ever turned down a drink?" Shepard chuckles and heads over to the med bay. "She's not on duty right now, so if we're quiet, we might even get away with it."

The quiet hiss of the doors is the only thing that announces Shepard's entry into the darkned med bay as the lights slowly come up. The Commander unerringly homes in on the doctor's desk, opening the drawer and silently hefting the bottle and a pair of shot glasses. Me? I'm just standing in the doorway, fidgeting like an idiot as I watch my commanding officer act like a little kid stealing cookies from a jar. She even has the same gleeful smile as said kid.

"Did you need anything, Commander?"

The voice of of nowhere causes both of us to jump as Doc Chakwas steps out of the shadows of her back office. The sheepish grin on the N7's face though causes me to laugh outright at the sheer hilarity of the situation. I mean, how many times do you ever see Commander-fucking-Jane-Shepard, kicker of intergalactic asses, bane of the Reapers - and mercs, and Cerberus, and other unsavory characters - looking like a kid caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar?

And Chakwas - no offense to her - looks like the perfect mother figure tapping her foot on the ground with a disapproving look. It's utterly ridiculous.

Neither Chakwas nor Shepard can hold their expressions for very long and a moment later, both the doctor's contralto and Shepard's mezzo-soprano join me in laughter. The good doctor catches herself first, followed by the Commander, and I'm sure to both women I'm probably looking like a lunatic, because I just can't stop laughing.

It's not even the sheer impossibility of the situation anymore, it's not even about the craziness that I'm about to commit. It just feels...good to laugh. It feels good to know I can still laugh at such inane things, despite all the shit that went down and is about to go down.

It's cathartic.

It takes a minute or two until I can finally stop myself, because every time I look at Shepard clutching the bottle, almost hugging it to herself, I start all over again. To the point where she gives me a mock glare.

"Are you quite done, Lieutenant?"

"Just about. Just...just about." I clear my throat and slap the most serious expression I can on my face to prevent me from giggling all over again.

"Well then," Chakwas asks, that mysterious, knowledgeable smile hovering on her lips, "what can I do for you tonight?"

"Well..." Shepard hums along in thought. "We were hoping to borrow this," she says, pointing at the bottle, "and this," she adds, gesturing around the room.

Chakwas sighs and smiles at her. "Really, Commander, you have an office for that."

"But it's so much more comfortable here," Shepard almost whines petulantly.

"Oh, very well then. I shall take my leave of you Commander. Lieutenant." Chakwas nods at me as she strolls past easily.

I look over at Shepard. "It's more comfortable?" I ask her, a little incredulously.

She just shrugs, grins at me and flops down into Chakwas's chair. "It is. Her chair's comfy. And," she adds with a conspiratorial grin, "she's got chocolate."

With that she reaches deeper into the drawer the brandy came from and withdraws a long bar of silver foil wrapped chocolate with almost reverent grace. Who knew...Jane Shepard, intergalactic badass, slayer of Reapers, chaser of renegades...and connoiseur of chocolates. It's almost enough to make be start laughing again, and I barely catch myself before I go off the deep end. Barely. With a lopsided grin that makes it way past my resistance I settle down into the chair across the desk and pour us both a glass as she unwraps the first chunk and breaks it off.

"Won't the Doc notice you've been into her chocolate?"

Shepard just shrugs and pops the piece into her mouth. "It's my ship," she notes with a grin. "Want one?"

"No, thanks. Not one for sweets."

"More for me, then." The Commander shrugs and nibbles on the candy for a little, a blissful grin on her lips. It's actually quite the peaceful setting we have here.

Too bad I'm about to destroy all that. Even though I'm not quite sure where to start. Which, as it turns out, is quite fine, because it's Shepard who starts the conversation.

"You married, Grayson?" With an absolute non-sequitur that has me blinking in confusion for a second until the words finally register.

"Pardon me?" I think I heard wrong. I must have heard wrong, because I swear I just heard her ask me...

"Are you married?" she repeats easily, breaking off another piece of chocolate.

Where the hell did that come from? "No. You read my file, you know that already."

The woman just shrugs and licks some of the molten chocolate off her fingers before downing a shot. "Just curious. Not even a girlfriend? No one special in your life?"

"No," I shake my head as I pick up my own tumbler and empty it in one long draft. If we're going completely off topic, I may as well get drunk so it'll make sense again. "Why do you ask?"

Shepard looks at me for a long moment, an unreadable, hooded expression in her eyes. "I've found that people who have something to come back to, something or someone to fight for...they tend to be the kind who are the first to throw themselves into impossible situations, and are the most likely to come out standing. Relatively speaking." She pauses, pours us another round, and then just idly tilts her glass against the light, watching it break across the liquid. "Quite paradoxically so, because one would expect that a person with something to lose would be more hesitant, more timid. More cautious."

"As opposed to a crazy maniac who rushes in stupidly into situations he doesn't know jack shit about?" I ask her, a little bitterly. I can't help it, it's still a little raw. Like most people, I don't like to be proven wrong. Even if I know I was being goddamn stupid.

"I didn't say that." Shepard sets the glass down and slides the chocolate bar over to me. "You should try some. It's really quite good."

With a shrug I take a piece from the little tray of foil she fabricated and bite into it, letting the bitter taste of high cocoa content chocolate wash over my tongue. It's bitter, tangy, with a slight aftertaste of berries that I'm sure the purists would hate on but is actually quite pleasant.

"You know," Shepard begins, "I guess in a way you could say I'm married to this ship. I didn't actually think I would be in command of a vessel at some point in my career, nor that it would be this soon. I'm a ground pounder. That's where I belong...on the front lines. So when they handed me this responsibility for a ship and crew I didn't know how to deal with it. Give me a ground combat squad, no problem. But a ship?"

"Looks like you did a pretty good job so far."

Shepard sips her drink a little more slowly this time. "Maybe. Maybe it's the fact that the bond between a commander and her soldiers on the ground is a little stronger than up here in space, because you have to trust your life in them every single day. Or maybe it's something else entirely...but the point is, I care about my crew. I get to know them. Even Pressly - he grows on you, I swear, even as grouchy as he is. It's something I fight for. The Alliance, the Council, they're all lofty, abstract goals, and don't get me wrong, they're perfectly good goals. But me? I need something here. Something concrete. So I fight for my crew. I fight for my friends. For my family." She drains her tumbler and looks at me over the rim of the crystal glass. "What do you fight for?"

"Freedom, justice, and the American way?" I chuckle at my half-drunken, utterly nonsensical answer and shrug. "In all honesty? Probably the same thing you do. Friends."

"Family?"

"None of that." Not in this universe, at least.

"Loved ones?"

"None of those, either."

She eyes me a little strangely for a moment, then shakes her head. "Too bad. It's really a powerful motivator."

"I dont' doubt that. Just...story of my life, I guess. I go about things alone. Always have."

"That's not a good mindset to have."

"I suppose not," I admit, and it's true. I know it is. But that's just the way life goes, isn't it?

Shepard seems to mull over this for a moment as she pours herself another drink. "I suppose it's understandable in your profession. You're a strange man, Patrick Grayson."

"You're telling me I'm weird? What about you, Miss I-charged-a-thresher-maw-in-a-Mako?" I snort in amusement, coughing and spluttering when some of the brandy goes down the wrong way.

"Who, me? I'm easy. I'm just a violent chick who likes getting into fights. You, on the other hand..."

"With a penchant for mass property damage," I mutter quietly. She hears me, though, and giggles, lifting her glass to me and clinking it to mine.

"Guilty as charged."

"You, though, are rather intriguing. You know, I talked to Admiral Kahoku. For a simple engineer, you seem to dabble in a lot of things. Infiltration, espionage, data analysis. For someone who was just recruited into a project for knowing too much about the situation, you seem to know an awful lot about everything that's going on."

"I like to be well informed?"

Shepard eyes me suspiciously for a moment before giggling. "I suppose. Do you play chess?"

She's just full of these random topic changes tonight, isn't she? I shrug, taking a moment to formulate my answer...because this isn't like Shepard at all. It's not the forceful, confident approach she always takes to everything. It's almost like...she's skirting around the topic, or she's distracted, or something. Come to think of it, she looks just as tired as I feel. With a wry grin, I tell her my deepest, darkest secret: "I do, but I'd rather not. The last time I played at a party after a friend's wedding, I lost."

"Nothing wrong with that."

"To a seven-year old kid."

"Oh." Her lips for a surprised O for a moment as she just blinks at me, before a broad smile breaks out and she tips her head back and laughs. "Seriously?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die. I didn't even last twenty turns."

"Oh, that's rich, that's...brilliant," she manages in between huffs of laughter.

I can't help but grin, myself, despite the fact that, well, it's a pretty embarassing thing to admit, but just like Miranda, Shepard just makes me feel at ease. Even under the threat of imminent and violent confrontation. With her or the Collectors, I don't know. "Go's more my speed," I tell her.

"And I heard from Joker you absolutely suck at cards-"

"That, too."

"You up for a game?"

"Of Go?"

"Chess," Shepard says, rummaging around the doctor's drawers, still giggling.

"Uh...no, thanks."

"Oh, come on."

I look at her, hair half undone from her usually neat bun and floating around her, the rumpled uniform that speaks of lack of sleep - or restless attempts at sleep, have your pick - and the telltale signs of mental exhaustion in the tightness around her eyes and realize that this is really as much for her benefit as for mine. "Sure. Go ahead and kick my ass, Commander."

Shepard pokes her head over the desk for a moment, waggling her eyebrows almost comically at me. "Jane. Just Jane. I'm tired of being Commander Shepard tonight."

It takes me a moment to realize exactly what she means by that. "You're off duty. Shouldn't you have left the Commander in her office? Preferably stuffed somewhere in the closet so she can't get out?"

"I'd like to, but it isn't that easy," comes the muffled reply.

"What about your friends?"

She finally emerges with the chess board in hand and sets it down on the table. Automatically, I start reaching for the black pieces, setting them up on my side.

"Have you looked around this ship?" she asks me, toying for a moment with her queen. "I have soldiers, subordinates. Sure, I'm friends with some, and I'm responsible for all. But even Karin refuses to call me by my first name. Hell, even Joker can't stop calling me Commander even when we're on shore leave."

"Give it time."

"I've known Karin for almost a decade. She'll never change, not that that's a bad thing. It's just...for them I'm this larger than life figure of authority. The first human spectre, the survivor of Akuze, an N7 above their ability to reach or touch. And that's good for a commanding officer. Especially on a ship." She grins a little weakly. "Good for morale. At least I won't have to worry about a mutiny anytime soon."

"But it gets tiring without friends. Without someone to talk to on a really personal level." I suddenly understand; as much as I'm isolated here in this universe, so is Shepard in her position. Especially if there's something personal to talk to, there's really no one for her to turn to. It's the same dilemma high ranking officers in my day face...and a lot of them end up doing something colossally stupid because it got to them.

Shepard nods and finally arranges her game pieces. "I usually talk to Karin, but...there's some things I can't even tell her. Things that would undermine their belief in me as their commanding officer."

I wait for her to make the first move, then idly let my mind wander as I move a pawn directly in front of hers. It's really ironic that this didn't come up in the games until way later, until Mass Effect 3, when the romance arc really started to take off, and yet I'm rather familiar with the situation. Still, I have to wonder...

"Why me?"

"The easy answer?" At my nod she continues, jumping one of her knights across the board. "You're not in my direct chain of command."

"No worries of mutiny with me?" I ask in jest.

Shepard chuckles as I take her pawn, only to have my bishop slain horribly by her knight. "I assume you'd give me the courtesy of warning me beforehand so I could prepare adequately."

"You know, I totally would."

As the battle on the chess board continues to rage, I get the distinct impression that Shepard's playing terribly on purpose, because some holes she left were so obvious even I could see them. Not that I'm complaining, because my mind isn't entirely on the game, anyway. It's just another sign she's distracted...or maybe it's the alcohol, because she's on her what, fifth? Sixth? Glass by now.

"The long answer is that you're the odd ball out," she says after a long silence, interrupted only by the clacking of the wood pieces on the board. "I understand you, but I don't understand why you're the way you are. There's things you do that scream you're a civilian thrown into this mess, just like you said. And then there's yet other things you do that tell me you know more about everything than you let on. Than you could possibly know, or should know. You're a walking contradiction."

"That's not the worst thing people have called me," I mutter quietly.

Shepard just grins at that. "The thing is...you have this...this disregard for authority in some cases. You're not intimidated by rank or authority, and I get the impression you couldn't care less about how many medals some general has pinned on his chest if you know what he's doing is wrong. Of course, it may end with you court-martialed, but hey, nobody's perfect."

"You mean, I tend to run my mouth," I counter wryly.

"Hey, I didn't say it was a bad thing." Shepard grins right back. "But it's more than that. It almost seems like you stand apart from everyone else, never really getting involved on a personal level. It's something you're doing deliberately, I think, whether you're aware of it or not."

"But that can't be it, right?" I ask her curiously. "I mean, hell, you want an insubordinate smartass, look at Moreau."

"Not in its entirety, no," Shepard admits as she moves her queen over, and suddenly I find myself on the defensive on the board. "I suppose I'm comfortable with you. Must be all those times we've been drinking together."

"You turned me into a raging alcoholic, all right. My liver thanks you," I chuckle inanely. Hey, I'm a little tipsy, myself, sue me.

"It's not something I can explain, really. You just happened to be there, I suppose."

"Gee, thanks for making me feel special."

Shepard grins at me, then takes my queen. "Checkmate."

I look down at the board at her announcement. Shit. I totally wasn't paying any attention to the game the last few minutes. Did I really play so badly there hardly isn't anything left of my figures? Dang. I raise my hands in mock surrender. "Well, I suppose it was inevitable. You got me, Jane."

We lapse back into comfortable silence, each lost in our own thoughts. It's strange to see Shepard like this, so utterly...not relaxed, but almost normal. Almost vulnerable, because she's letting her guard down and just sitting around like ordinary people. There's actually something I wanted to ask her but haven't...mostly because the answer, in the short term, didn't really matter and in the long term...

Well, let's just say I'd be prying open Pandora's Box with a freaking crow there's something about this situation that just compels me to ask, because it seems like it'll be the only chance I'll get at trying to get an answer and not screwing it up horribly. Or maybe it's the bloody alcohol.

"There's something I've been meaning to ask you."

"Hm?"

"Why?" I ask her, not really sure how to even phrase it. Why didn't you stick me in the brig? Why do you keep me around? Why are you content to play these games with me, instead of interrogating me like any other same commander?

"Why what?" she looks up a little sluggishly, trying to shake herself from her thoughts.

Running a hand over my face and through my hair, unfortunately doesn't help me find the answer to that question. "Why all this?" I finally ask her, just vaguely waving my hands around.

Shepard just looks confused. "Because...I like chocolate and brandy?" she asks, a little uncertain, causing me to chuckle.

That's not exactly what I had in mind, but the little bit of humor is actually making it easier for me to think. "No," I tell her. "Not this right here in particular, but everything. Sitting down with me for a drink. Playing along with me. Is this a game to you, Jane? Because every other sane commanding officer I know would have thrown me in the brig and interrogated me at some point in the last couple months, and yet you're content to sit down with me and...and eat chocolate and get drunk." It comes out a little harsher, a little louder than I intended it to, and even though a little part of me is yelling inside my head to shut up and stop digging my own grave, my own morbid curiousity is getting in the way.

"Why play along with me at all, Jane? I know you suspected. As the captain of this ship, hell as a goddamn spectre, you think anyone would've stopped you if you really wanted to find out what I knew?"

Shepard's uncharacteristically quiet and subdued at my sudden outburst, and I can't help but feel bad. I mean, she was relaxing and even having a good time, I think...and then I go and do something stupid and bring this up. I feel like smacking my head against the wall, because she didn't want to have anything to do with her command duties tonight and the first thing that I spout goes right back to that.

Me and my big mouth.

But it's too late to take back now.

And part of me actually doesn't want to. I'm tired of the cloak and dagger shit. I just can't keep this up. I know I have to, or bad shit happens, but a growing part of me just wants to scream and then go tell someone. It's not all that different from the way Shepard's feeling, really, which is why I guess I'm feeling her right now. I know it's cliche, and I know it's not exactly something you hear every day - I mean, really, what do I of all people have in common with the legendary Commander Jane Shepard? Not much.

Just, you know, the fact that both of us are isolated in our positions. She's the commanding officer of the Alliance's premier recon and covert assault frigate, the flagship for turian-human peace, the first human spectre, and a highly decorated operative, someone soldiers look up to. Me? I'm an interloper in this universe, and as much as I want to, I can't really talk to anyone about the stuff that bothers me. I can't bounce Q's cryptic answers off someone for feedback, I can't bitch and moan about how he pisses me off, or how absolutly alone and...and lost I feel sometimes in this universe.

To my surprise, though, Shepard just laughs, leaning back in her chair and shaking her head in mirth. "I was right, you are crazy," she chuckles. "No one else I know would have the gall to ask their commanding officer that and look a gift horse in the mouth." She's actually smiling at me now, albeit a little forced. "You're right, of course. I had considered doing that. Almost did."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because my gut told me to trust you." She chuckles mirthlessly. "It sounds so silly when you say it out loud, doesn't it?" Shepard looks at me with an almost baleful glare. "I wanted to mistrust you. I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever you were hiding. God knows, you gave me enough reason to. I swear, you let things slip so many times..."

"I know, I'm a terrible secret agent," I deadpan.

"But then you kept doing the unexpected," Shepard continues. "Every time I expected you to stab us in the back, every time I expected your hidden agenda to come out and leave us high and dry, you didn't. In fact, in most cases, you even went out of your way to warn us, or risk your life. It confuses the hell out of me. My brain tells me you're hiding something, something dangerous. It tells me not to trust you under any circumstances. It tells me to plan contingencies for the event that you do betray us, or something does go wrong. It tells me to make sure that I'm able to minimize any damage you could possibly cause and get you off my ship as soon as I can."

She pours herself a glass, empties it, then pours another one. Instead of drinking it, though, she slides it over to me. "You haven't had nearly enough to drink. Getting drunk by myself isn't any fun."

I pick up her glass and down the liquor in one gulp, letting the fire burn my throat and warm my insides. "I wouldn't exactly blame you if you did. So why are we sitting here now, like this? Why keep me around, hell, why even be this friendly with me?"

"Like I said, you kept surprising me. My brain might've told me one thing, but my heart..." she chuckles a little, taking a swig directly from the bottle, "it told me the exact opposite. Can't explain why. So I decided to give you a chance, and you haven't proven me wrong yet."

It's both reassuring and frightening to hear that...and it takes me back to a very similar conversation I had months ago, with a different woman who also decided to trust me. Now I know what Q meant when he said that I had invited something more dangerous than the Reaper invasion onto myself with this woman's trust. It feels infinitely reassuring and comforting to know that she is an ally, to know that she's just there.

It's also incredibly terrifying to think of what would happen if she ever became an enemy. Shepard as an enemy is scary enough. Shepard whose trust I broke is a much more terrifying enemy by far. I have no doubt that she'd hunt anyone who betrayed her down across the galaxy and probably into hell itself. It makes me dread her finding out that I'm working for Cerberus. It's inevitable, of course, because my entire presence here on this very ship is a house of cards that is getting progressively more complex with each passing day, and just more likely to come crashing to pieces around me.

I suppress a shiver at the thought. With any luck, that'll be far, far into the future, but I can't help but spare it a thought. "Let's hope it'll never come to that," I whisper hoarsely, partly from the alcohol burning its way down and partly because I know it's a lie.

"Amen to that." Shepard clinks her bottle against my glass, then tilts it to pour a refill. "Now what the hell were you thinking taking on Saren Arterius by yourself?" she asks, and it takes me a moment to connect the dots through my alcohol and exhaustion-addled brain to realize that she's come back to our original topic of conversation from the mess hall.

"Just...just figured he'd be up to no good. You know?"

"You're a terrible liar."

I open and close my mouth for a few seconds trying to get them to work and form a coherent excuse, but the alcohol isn't letting me. With a heavy sigh, I give up the fight and just slump down against the desk, staring across its surface at the woman on the other side who's looking right back at me, her chin propped up in the palm of her hand. "Protheans sabo-sabotaged the Citadel. Found that out from the VI we recovered the data from," I tell her, slurring quite a bit as a yawn sneaks its way past. "Figured he'd need to undo their sabotage...whatever the hell it was. Must've been something really important, if Sovereign is sending someone like him, so I hitched a ride on a geth dropship and found him in the Council chambers."

"That was an utterly stupid idea."

"The dropship?" I scrunch my eyebrows together tiredly. "I thought it was rather convenient."

"Going after Saren."

"Oh." I tilt my head and pillow it in my arms. "Yeah. I know."

"Why do it, then?"

"Figured if I could buy you some time, I had to. Sorry it wasn't enough. Just...thought that if I could stop him long enough, then the fleet could destroy Sovereign. Then he shut down the mass relays." I shrug and look up at her. "In the end, it turns out coming there was a mistake, after all. It was a trap."

"What do you mean?" she asks gently, curiously, almost...thoughtfully.

I straighten back up and lean back in my chair. "The protheans had coded in a block to prevent anyone who was indoctrinated from accessing the Citadel controls and sabotaged remote access. Saren couldn't have done jack shit to that console until I stupidly used it to open the mass relays. He was just playing with us, waiting for someone to come along to try and stop him and run right into his trap. And I walked into it headfirst like a bumbling fool."

"If you hadn't opened the relays, Sovereign would've destroyed the fleets, and the Citadel would've been overrun," Shepard counters quietly.

"He wouldn't have been able to try and open the relay by himself."

"You don't know that."

"If he could've, then why didn't he? Why bother sending Saren, why not a geth technician?"

"Because you were right. It was a trap, designed to place you in a no-win scenario. You did the best you could under the circumstances." Shepard's almost glaring angrily at me now, her voice no longer even and controlled, but rather a rollercoaster of pitch and volume, as uncontrolled as the firestorms she usually unleashes on the battlefield. "Don't you dare say that there was another way, that we didn't do the best we could. Don't. Even. Think. It."

"And if there was?" I ask her quietly.

"Then three thousand people died for nothing, and I refuse to accept that," Shepard snarls, hammering her fist down on the desk. "You hear me? I refuse to accept that."

And then it suddenly hits me what this is all about. The way she's looking like she hasn't slept at all, the exhaustion, the way she's been distracted all night, the sudden desire to get drunk, the mood swings, all of it. I was just too self-absorbed, too distracted by my own worries that the woman at the very core of all of my plans, the pivotal figure of the war I'm planning out, is falling apart with guilt. She may have been able to shrug things like this off in the game, but this is real life. Even the most hardened soldier won't be able to take something like the death of thousands of civilians lightly.

Especially when you're the one who gave the order.

"What I did made what you had to do necessary in the first place," I tell her gently. "So if anything, blame me for it. You did the best you could, given the circumstances. It was the right choice," I echo her words from just a minute earlier. I really don't want to be arguing with her about this, not after having gone through the same spiel with Q already earlier tonight.

The Commander...no, not really the Commander, because right now, the woman sitting across from me isn't Commander Shepard. She isn't in battle, isn't the guarded, self-assured persona she always assumes in front of her crew or in battle. Right now she's just Jane, trying to come to terms with what she did, and the consequences of it. Just like me.

With a wry, humorless grin at the irony of our mirrored situations, I take the bottle from her hand, pour us both a shot, and slide her glass over to her. "There wasn't any choice. I failed to stop him from accessing the Citadel's controls, so I guess this one is on both our heads."

"I had Vigil's overrides. If I'd been faster, if I maybe had just let him close the arms, hadn't gone for the power station but up to the Citadel Tower, instead..."

"Then the arms would've been closed and no one would've been able to get to him."

Shepard picks the glass up and looks at me a little strangely. "Patrick?"

"Yes?"

"This isn't going to be over just like this...is it?"

I'm not really sure what she's referring to, but..."No. No, it won't."

She sighs and raises her glass to mine. "You're not the only one who wishes there'd been another way, you know?"

"I know."

"Was there another way?"

You know, they say hindsight is always 20/20. That a better solution always presents itself after the fact. But in this case...it hasn't. And that, I suppose, is part of why this situation bothers me so much. It isn't that I tried and failed. It's that I tried, failed, and then found out there wasn't a better way. That the death of all those people, not just the ones on the Citadel or the Presidium, but those soldiers in the fleet, that this was the best possible outcome, that is something I'm finding hard to accept.

In some ways, it would've been easier if I'd screwed up, because then there'd be someone to blame for sixty-four thousand casualties. Most likely myself.

But when something like this happens...it just sucks, because people are dead, and there wasn't anything anyone could've done about it.

It really sucks.

"If there is, then I can't find one," I finally admit to her. "And as much as I hate to admit it, this was the best we could do. Like you said...sometimes, there just isn't a better way."

It stings when you have to admit that you set out trying to save the universe and the deaths of more than sixty thousand people was inevitable. Unchangeable. It even makes Q's argument that there were twenty thousand casualties less than in the original timeline sound hollow and morbid. It makes him sound like a total jackass, now that I think about it, so easily dismissing this many human lives as just numbers.

Hell, I can't even imagine twenty thousand people in one place.

This isn't a game, and there isn't a perfect run.

"Life sucks," Shepard sums it up for me.

"Amen to that."