Thirty-Seven: Nightmare
When Mara hit the ground, she saw stars.
Not in the cartoon sense – flickers and streaks of light cluttered her vision, and she faintly heard her own cry of pain. A pair of hands hoisted her up and she watched the world come back into focus.
That focus was immediately shattered by an ear-piercing scream the likes of which Mara had only heard from one creature: a thresher maw. Then she remembered exactly where she was, and she began to panic all over again.
When Grunt had urged her to hit the Keystone for the eighth time in a row, she punched it and glared at him. "Happy now?"
But it rang louder than it ever had before, and Tuchanka began to shake. Hard-packed dirt was spit up from the ground as the subterranean monster tunneled around Mara and her team. Garrus put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it; he could guess what was racing through her mind.
That same hand jerked her backwards when the thresher showed itself, but Mara's feet didn't follow. When the beast spat its venom, the only thing that saved her was the sheet of rusted metal… which then slammed squarely into her. She hit the stone floor, and everything became a blur.
As Garrus pulled her up, she tried to hasten the recovery of her senses. She crouched behind a low wall, barely able to avoid the thresher's venom, and forced herself to take deep breaths.
Deep breaths did very little when faced with an earthworm two stories tall.
"What do you want to do here?" Garrus shouted. "We can wait this out, if we have to!"
Mara's heart was in her throat. In a voice laced with panic, she yelled back, "We can't! I won't let this thing live any longer!"
Grunt reared his head and unleashed a battle cry that had already cowed many of their enemies. Just before Mara gave the command to stand and concentrate fire on the monster, she readied the laser she'd taken from a dead Collector on Horizon.
Garrus had taken a perch behind fallen sheets of metal, the barrel of his rifle poking out from above them. Grunt had borrowed Mara's assault rifle and was using it relentlessly, even going so far as to stand upon a toppled column and yell incoherent threats. Mara chose a position where she could easily duck behind a pillar, but she rarely needed to. With her laser boring into the thresher's eyes, its projectiles were wildly inaccurate.
Finally, Mara graduated from her impromptu exposure therapy. After a single, devastating scream, the thresher maw slumped over and crashed to the ground, and the stone trembled. The laser slipped from Mara's hands and her knees felt like they would buckle and slide out from under her, but she remained standing.
She released the battle's tension in a long, vocalized sigh, and pressed her lips briefly to her left ring finger. "There you go, Travis," she whispered. "That was for us."
A.N.: It's was nice to give Mara a moment of pure heroism like this! I'll keep this note short, but I do want to mention that I wrote a Christmas oneshot! For those who didn't see it already, it's called "Do You Wanna Build A Spaceship?" and it stars Mara and Joker in an evening of quiet gift-swapping. Give it a read if you like, and be sure to let me know what you thought if you do! I posted it last Saturday instead of my weekly upload here, so you'll probably find it easiest by visiting my profile page.
- Gairi