Alenko followed Justicar Samara silently, shoulders squared, arms by his side, chin notched high... and eyes involuntarily moving to watch Shepard leave the briefing room in the opposite direction.

The asari's amused-sounding voice registered in his ears, jostling him from any number of worst-case scenarios he was imagining as he and Shepard were separated. "She is safe, Commander," the justicar reassured him as she led them toward the lift. "No one here would harm her."

She had the decency not to point out that it would be quite silly for anyone associated with Lazarus to try and hurt Shepard before their plan was complete... not that there was necessarily a guarantee that the SR-2 was entirely devoid of spies, of course, but rather that they would not be so stupid as to tip their hands while aboard it. She was also kind enough not to point out that if for some reason Shepard was threatened, Alenko was hardly in any position to do anything about it... but that it was cute the young human male felt so protective.

Alenko, like pretty much any living human male having reached puberty by or after First Contact with the asari, had a certain generic kind of history with asari. He was pretty sure the first asari-based porn had hit the extranet about one, maybe two, hours after First Contact. Likewise, every human male had a sort of rite of passage that involved gratuitous amounts of parentally-unsupported media involving nubile young asari maidens for some inexplicable reason desperately desiring the touch of a human hand. Outside of that, the only asari he had ever dealt with at any personal level had been Dr. Liara T'Soni and, with the frankness that could only come from years of distance and shared agony, that particular relationship had been complicated rather immensely by the fact that they'd been competing for the affections of the same woman. They might not have really known it at the time, both being the general kind of socially-stunted idiots that they were, but they had been.

And Liara wasn't exactly the best gauge for asari. She was a maiden, first of all, far closer to Shepard or Alenko in terms of world experience than she was to a matron. She was also just a touch crazy. Alenko hadn't held this against her at the time considering Shepard's habit of accumulating friends that were all just a touch crazy... but still. Best case, his abilities to interact constructive with asari were based of of three things: 1) killing asari commando units; 2) talking with a young, touch-crazy asari the few times she took her nose out of a book and they found something to talk about that wasn't Shepard; and 3) extranet vids of questionable taste.

One of the problems with asari, Alenko had found, was that it was really hard to tell a maiden from a matron or, god forbid, a matriarch. There were some changes, certainly... but they really weren't all that helpful in general, not to his untrained eye anyway. He had a hard time accepting that the woman next to him - the one with the youthfully taut skin, the pert breasts, the athletic and toned body - was, oh, roughly thirty times his age.

Intellectually, he knew that this was one of the many things that humans, culturally, had had the hardest time accepting and integrating into their worldviews as they moved from simple galactic inhabitants to galactic actors. The turians had similar lifespans to humans, after all. The krogans were long-lived too but, well, with the exception of people associated with Commander Shepard, humans tended to rather dramatically shorten their own individual lifespans pretty quickly when around krogans. The asari... Well.

It was just hard to accept that the woman next to him had been born around the time Ghengis Khan had been busily setting up the Mongol Empire. That was all.

'All'.

"What are we doing?" Alenko asked the justicar. She was moving quickly through the ship, indicating both a familiarity he had only in passing - or perhaps more than passing, he supposed, but after the unexpectedly harsh flashbacks he'd had when first viewing the SR-2, he was inclined to discount as much of he could from his relationship with the SR-1 - as well as a quite concrete understanding of where they were going and why.

"Commander Shepard has asked me to provide additional training for you while this opportunity is available," the justicar replied.

He might peg her as a matron, maybe, by the deep resonance of her voice, he thought, or her careful but still seemingly effortless poise. The maidens he had dealt with had all been young... Liara, of course, had been near disastrously so, adding naivete and irksomely adorable innocence to a higher-pitched voice filled with emotional variances that the justicar's did not have. Samara was probably a matriarch though... if such distinctions even applied to justicars. Did they? He had no idea.

Wait, what -?

"What?" he asked intelligently. He shook his head. "For me? She asked you to...?"

"Provide you with additional training while this opportunity is available," Samara replied evenly. "She believes that you will benefit greatly from the experience. It is possible that she is correct, assuming you survive; human biotics exhibiting your level of discipline are rare indeed so I am willing to entertain the possibility, remote though it is. We will be sparring in the cargo bay. This way please, Commander."

He considered that for a moment, mostly because it was more palatable than considering the all-too-real possibility that Shepard had sent him to his death. Perhaps she simply did not know what justicars were capable of? She was so new to biotics, after all. It was probably all the same to her. Maybe she saw Justicar Samara controlling that perfect, brilliant white orb of raw energy and just assumed that all biotics could somehow do that, that Alenko himself did that at night in his sleeper pod for shits and giggles, that it wasn't proof positive that Samara was one of the, oh, few thousand people in the entire galaxy capable of such a feat.

Or maybe he was the one who was wrong. Maybe he was overly impressed with the legends. Maybe thinking of asari justicars using the legends as his foundation was no more accurate or helpful than contextualizing asari maidens using nothing more than the extranet media found in every newly pubescent human male's private data files.

Asari justicars were the stuff of legends, after all. Most asari, despite their thousand-year lifespans, never met one; they were probably as caught up in the legends as aliens were. He was pretty sure that simply having this vague conversation with Samara had put him in the less than one percent of humans, possibly even less than one percent of asari, who had ever interacted with a justicar outside of the great honor of getting killed by one. Maybe no one really knew what they were like. Maybe their powers had been overestimated, their discipline overblown, their Code fictionalized.

"The possibility that I will benefit or the possibility that I'll survive?" he asked her.

She glanced at him, her perfect, pale blue eyes somehow simultaneously endlessly patient and unerringly cool. "They are one and the same, Commander," she replied.

Yeah. Somehow, looking into those bottomless eyes, he was pretty sure all the legends were actually true.

She led him into the SR-2's cargo bay and somehow, despite the M-44 Hammerhead suspended overhead - holy shit, was it really a Hammerhead? He'd never gotten to drive one before, let alone work on one, and everything he'd heard was positive... better handling, better system responsiveness, at the cost of a little bit of extreme temperature resistance - Alenko found himself looking not at the incredible store of tech in the area but rather glancing up and over his shoulder toward the large windows overlooking the bay. He couldn't see through the glass from his current angle but somehow he knew Shepard was there, watching. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he supposed getting to see an asari justicar training someone was something few biotics, let alone biotics of Shepard's infancy, was a luxury not to be missed. On the other hand, if he was going to die, he'd kind of prefer it to be without an audience.

Maybe it wasn't Shepard at all, of course. Maybe it was the Corsair. Taylor. He'd been watching Alenko like a hawk since he'd arrived, albeit it with something more like professional alertness than Lawson's unmistakable sting.

"I find your approach to biotics refreshing, Commander Alenko," the justicar told him, coming to a stop in the center of the bay.

The bay had obviously been cleared out for their use... similar, he thought with a little pang, to how Shepard had done it on the SR-1 when she'd needed training space. He came to a stop opposite the asari but didn't clasp his hands behind his back as what his initial inclination; he was uncertain what the justicar had in store for him but he suspected he would need all the reaction time he could. His hands would stay at his sides. He had the feeling that was kind of like polishing a sword in preparation against a nuclear strike.

"Humans so often treat the abilities as a child treats his voice upon first learning he can produce sound," Samara said, voice pitched low, her words unhurried. "Loud. Brash. Without meaning. A mere mockery, no matter how well-intentioned, of the language of his parents." She regarded him. "You are still loud and brash, Commander, in some ways more egregiously than those with less skill and less discipline... but you, I believe, are at least aware of it and, perhaps more interestingly, seem to have come to the awareness on your own. Few humans have shared this epiphany. Very few. Many of my people even, despite their natural abilities, never share it either, comforted as they are in their parlor tricks. I believe this to be why you have made such a concerted effort to understand your abilities at an academic level, a technical level; you have recognized in some small way your limitations, perhaps even subconsciously, and have done what you can to try and address it. I find you interesting in this way - a luxury for one such as I, Commander, that I am not above noticing."

She raised a hand in front of her and a tiny white orb appeared suspended above it, expanding outward at a slow and perfectly controlled rate until it was six inches or so in diameter, its surface - if that's what it could be called and Alenko was pretty sure that was inaccurate - crackling with energy. She took a step toward him and he felt his skin start to itch in response to the orb. Hell, it wasn't his skin. It was the muscles below it. The bones. The eezo nodes.

"At this point," the justicar said as she slowly circled him, orb held a few inches from him, and his body itched, "you are no longer loud and brash as an innocent, ignorant child might be when compared to his parents. Now, you are loud and brash as a casual singer is when compared to a trained, classical tenor: unmistakable talent, skill enough to impress the lay people, but lacking the focus and training of a master. Able to produce pleasing sounds but ones which lack history, meaning, and context."

She came back around to his front, the orb dissipating from her hand, and regarded him for another long moment. It felt as if those pale, translucent eyes were peeling his skin back, layer by layer. "It is a pity you were given to the turians for training. It was a disservice."

He wasn't sure how to take that. He wasn't sure how to take any of it. His body itched. "It was," he said, "but I don't think I'd be who or what I am today without it."

The justicar nodded slightly. "Such wisdom in one so young. Your species is most intriguing, Commander."

"What would have been different had the Alliance gone to the asari instead of the turians for help with us?" Alenko asked.

Samara considered the question carefully. He got the impression that she considered all questions carefully. He didn't know if that was because she was a justicar, because she was nearly a thousand years old, or because she was Samara.

"Many things," she concluded. "In your specific case, which I believe to be your actual interest, you would either have killed earlier or not at all, depending on your constitution. I suspect the former and had that been the case, it would have been a duty required of you, not a reaction torn from you. Equally burdensome. A necessary lesson that I believe you have adequately learned since. Shall we begin, Commander?"

He almost said yes, had fully intended to do so, but what came out was, "Why is Shepard doing this?"

The justicar considered that question with the same deliberateness she had the previous. "I am unwilling to speak for Commander Shepard," she said finally. "It is not my place and, as with your biotics, while I would be able to string words together to convey technical understanding, it would lack history, meaning, and context. It is perhaps a question you should put to her, perhaps as you ask all the others."

And just like that, the facade melted away. He'd known deep down it was nothing but a glamour - a thin but powerful sheath cloaking reality, one that drew its power simply by showing something the viewer so desperately wanted to see but fading weakly away once it was recognized for what it was - but as with all good glamours, he'd liked it. But he looked around him... saw the Cerberus logos on the wall, the containers of heavy armaments that were banned by the Alliance for unnecessary cruelty, the tech that most Alliance frigates didn't yet get to carry because of budget constraints...

"I don't have any others," Alenko said. His voice had a slight edge to it.

Pale blue eyes watched the transformation with clinical interest. "I find that unlikely," was all she said before turning around to a small box on the ground near her.

He did not have time to think of a response or even to turn on a heel, announce that he was done, and get the hell off the damned ghost ship. The justicar silently handed him a long package, one wrapped in oiled cloth and secured with knotted string, and even before the familiar weight distribution registered, the faint smell of oil lingering on the cloth triggered the memory. He had thought he'd never hold one again.

He shook his head.

She nodded.

"The commander tells me you've achieved the third form. You will show me. I expect I will not have to kill you for your insolence."