"You ever see the Captain like that?" Vega asked Alenko, shaking his head slowly.

"Not like that," Alenko answered. Once Shepard started settling down, even more so he was out of the same room as she was, he could feel and gauge the force of personality by its absence. A mild headache lurked behind his eyes, and he suspected, from the squints and furrowed brows, he wasn't the only one feeling it.

On the one hand, he was glad she'd given the Admiral a piece of her mind. Goodness knew he wanted to throw the little twerp around like a rag doll—as far as he was concerned, Shepard was no more irrational than he was.

At this point, it was an officers' difference to sort out, though with the kind of crazy Gerrel seemed to be, knuckles were the only finality he'd understand.

"I thought I saw her pissed off when we were fighting the Collectors," Garrus mused, "she might have been killing them, but she wasn't angry like that. Kind of makes you feel better, though. Normally she'd have had that discussion in private."

Alenko nodded: that was true enough. When Shepard made corrections, she tended to do so without an audience. No one lost face, no one knew content. Outsiders just knew 'words had been had' between her and the object of ire.

He exhaled slowly, wondering if, maybe, being angry wasn't good for her right now. He had never seen her as freaked out—that was the only descriptor for it—as she had been once the gravity gave out. For that moment when she'd slipped through the airless, gravity-less space, during that moment before he reached out and grabbed her, he saw the silent scream building behind her eyes.

Anger could keep fear like that at bay, at least for a while.

-J-

"She can't afford for us to think she doesn't keep our interests at heart. Especially since she's asking us to fight and possibly die for a longshot cause," Liara declared softly. The flat silence that followed indicated that Shepard didn't need to prove she had their interests at heart. Everyone present knew she didn't find it easy to ask of them what she needed, and only bare, ugly necessity allowed her to do so.

It was why Gerrel's unilateral action had Shepard in such an uncharacteristic rage.

Solving a geth-quarian war the quarians were hell-bent on waging was beyond anything anyone had signed up for. By that same token, though, that was the very reason they wouldn't back out on her now. The quarians would be useful against the Reapers. The geth could be useful against the Reapers…if certain precautions were taken.

Liara mothballed the thought for later.

Liara also had the benefit of Shepard's drift; consequently, she also had a headache. Humans were usually 'noisy,' easy to perceive, but this was unlike anything she'd ever come across. Shepard's drift had scorched against her mind, a hot blast of white, a nose-stinging sharp smell that was not smoke, an angry scream. But in it was a streak of orange fear for people about whom she cared—not just in their professional capacity, but as people who were fixtures in Shepard's life. And as uncertain as Shepard's life was, had been since the day she transferred to the Normandy, she needed the familiar things.

-J-

"I could've shot the bastard," Garrus rumbled. "The man's unstable. Too reckless. Not a good leader for wartime." Reckless wasn't the word: the civilian ships were just asking to be carved up. They should never have been allowed this close to the fighting: armed or not, they were easy targets. Any military tactician would say so, and any military leader would have exploited it.

Damn if the geth hadn't caught onto that tactic.

"Reckless? Coming from you?" Liara asked with a weak chuckle.

Garrus snorted, resenting the comparison but knowing there was a time when it had not been such a stretch of the imagination. "I can be reckless, but I've never been that reckless." It was only after he finished speaking that Garrus realized he had just slapped down a particularly fragile joke.

"I know," Liara responded gently.

"…bu-ut it's nice to know there's someone crazier than me," Garrus finished hastily, trying to recover the joke and lighten the atmosphere.

Liara chuckled, patted his arm again, this time to signify that his missing of her initial joke hadn't caused difficulty. In a way, that he had missed it was mildly amusing.

-J-

"You ever see anything like that loco Admiral?" Vega snapped, resurrecting the subject after a few silent minutes, during which they all crowded into the elevator. He was so pissed off about that that he wasn't sure what to do to get around being pissed off. Pissed off and hot-headed, he wasn't any good to anyone; he needed to calm down, to think, to focus.

But damn that Admiral was…was…

"You still wishing you hadn't left Earth?" Alenko asked, mildly sympathetic.

Vega snorted, crossing his arms. "Yeah…but knowing I need to stay here kind of comes and goes. I mean," he continued hastily when Garrus, Liara, and Alenko turned their gazes on him, "I'm in it for what we're doing, but…" He shook his head, beginning to seethe again. "Come on, you gotta wish, at times like that you were being shot at by the real bad guys."

This gained rueful sympathy. Not, Vega thought quickly, that he'd been on the ropes. It was then that he realized what he took for blind solidarity behind Shepard's lead was not so: they had the same thoughts…they just didn't voice them.

"Yeah, I hear you," Alenko sighed. "Still, the sooner we get this under control, the closer we get to going home." And not, Vega understood, going home to rest, but going home to mop up the Reapers.

That was the part he looked forward to: taking the fight directly to those synthetic bastards and leaving some really bigass marks. "Damn straight."

-J-

Author's Note: Merry Christmas (or happy holiday) to all of you! Stay safe out there!