"Tell me more about this Uldren guy." Why couldn't her crew have normal problems? If it wasn't revenge or a puberty rite, it was bombs ending up in friends because of a combination of gangsters and homicidal past lives. "What exactly did he do to make people hate you that much?"
The panic attack has abated, but it still seems as though every word costs him physically. "To anger the Reefborn? He... butchered his own people. Tried to take over, and anyone that bowed to him, he killed. Then he... made the Scorn. Think zombies, but Eliksni. Had them trash and kill their way through the whole territory."
Chakwas chooses that moment to stride in, datapad in one hand and a mug that smelt like chamomile in the other. She deposits the hot mug on the bed next to Crow, giving Shepard a sharp look as she did so. I swear, I didn't do it! Crow had come to her with this, and if he'd anticipated having that kind of episode after spilling the beans, he had more guts than she thought, because not a lot of people would be okay with being seen like that, much less by a commanding officer.
Crow ducks his head, this time out of embarrassment, and mutters a thanks to the doctor, who pats him on the shoulder before wheeling about and leaving the med bay again. He takes the mug, but doesn't drink from it as he continues his story. "As for the Guardians, he killed the Hunter Vanguard. Permanently. Him and the Scorn."
"I haven't done as much reading on Guardian leadership as I should, what was the Hunter Vanguard's job again?" She inquires. He bites his lower lip, head ducked again, though this time in shame.
"Organizing other Hunters, mainly. Through them, his job was to keep an eye on the system; if something happened, Cayde-6 knew about it." The Awoken paused for a moment. "Vanguard leaders are also meant to train new Guardians of their respective class. Guess... guess that made me being born a Hunter that much more insulting."
"To Uldren, maybe." Shepard suggested, trying to bite back her anger. It wouldn't do for it to leak into her voice, and she couldn't afford for Crow to think she was mad at him again, not when he was opening up like this. While she was definitely having a talk with him later about trust, and the importance of not keeping unwanted explosive ordnance to oneself, she was more pissed off by the concept of random people inflicting violence on a member of her crew for no good reason(that she could see), even if the incidents had happened before his time on the Normandy. "It's not fair to punish you for his crimes. They should have known better, being Lightbearers themselves."
"How do you know? How can you be certain that none of me is him?" The Hunter challenged. "You barely know me, for all you know, I'm just as mad as he was, just as monstrous on the inside."
"I like to think I'm a good judge of character, Crow." She tells him slowly. "You've been here over a month, if you were planning to kill us all I'd have sniffed it out by now; and if not me, Joker or Thane would've."
"I could still be crazy." He pointed out dejectedly. "I'm two for two on emotional breakdowns at this point."
"I wouldn't expect anyone who's been through what you've been through to be totally okay." She reassures him, risking putting a hand on his shoulder. He tenses, but slowly relaxes as she goes on. "You're just as sane as the rest of us."
"By 'us', you do mean by 'normal people's standards, right?" He asks, looking at her sideways with a faint smirk. "Because if we're going with 'Normandy' standards, it would actually mean I am insane."
"You know, what's sad is you have a point." Shepard chuckles. "This ship can be a bit of a head case sometimes, but she's got a good crew, and you're a part of it. Maybe a little saner than some of us, if anything. We've all got things that keep us up at night. What do you say we take that bomb off your list?"
"I'd say 'good luck getting him to hold still for the scan'." Crow admitted. "He's... he's less okay with all this than I am. With being taken apart, I mean, the last time was Spider and he... wasn't gentle."
"Whatever you think will put Glint more at ease, just let me know." She encouraged. Poor little guy. She had diffused hostage bombs before, from explosive vests to nukes, but never a bomb inside somebody. This was going to be a whole new level of complicated, even without Glint's trauma hindering his cooperation.
"He doesn't want Mordin near this." The Awoken told her. "And I need to be with him for every step of this. Starting now. If he would come out. It's just a scan."
Crow then proceeded to go quiet, and for almost a minute his face did that thing it did whenever he was having a mental conversation with his Ghost. Eventually, though, Glint appeared, and tried at first to hide behind his Lightbearer.
"Sorry!" He squeaked. Crow nudged him into the open. "For not telling you."
"I think Crow's apologized enough for the both of you. Just hold still." She activated her omni-tool and set up for a deep scan. Glint tried to back away, but Crow held him still, a faint trail of Light visible between his fingers. The Ghost somewhat reminded her of some of those people who absolutely did not do hospitals or doctors. "Got it."
The Ghost was quick to vanish, and Crow sighed, running a hand through his hair. "I don't know anything about the bomb itself, I saw it happen but I..."
"Wasn't really watching?" She guessed, and he nodded. "Tell me about Spider. Who is he?"
"He fancies himself the Shore's only law. Given that the Reefborn are usually spread too thin to deal with the problems on the Shore, it's practically true." His grip tightens on the mug of tea, and she thinks she hears the ceramic creak in complacency. "Drugs, people, artifacts, any sort of contraband or shady enterprise you could name, he has a finger in the business, one way or the other. In your terms, he's a kingpin. Anything that can give him an edge, he takes. Including stray Lightbearers."
"Given how you were when we picked you up, I going to guess it would be safe to say he wasn't a very generous employer." Crow had been half starved when they first encountered him. Between that, his behavior around others, and the bomb, it didn't take her much to imagine just what Spider's treatment of him was like. It's also giving her insight to how it feels for Grunt to hold back a blood rage.
"No." He said with what seemed to be immense difficulty. "But he would argue otherwise."
It was in this moment that she recalled something he'd said at at the helm as they were leaving for the mission. "A Hunter's cloak is supposed to speak to his personality, a symbol of who he is."
The insignia on Crow's cloak left little to imagine, knowing what she did now. It was a symbol, all right; of forced servitude, speaking to who he was, a slave. Joker was right; that cloak had to go. Her eyes are drawn unwillingly to the small marks on his arms, thin, dark scars akin to burn marks.
"Do those have anything to do with it?" She can't help but ask, pointing lightly to one of the marks, even though she really doesn't want to actually know. He winces, and tugs the sleeve of his sweater down.
"Like I said, he dealt in every business, including anti-Light weaponry. Proving Glint couldn't heal me if I was cut was the best way of authentication." There's a multiversal barrier between me and Spider and he better hope it stays that way. She wants to hug the Awoken again, but she wrestles that urge back. She could only assume, from what she heard and his general dislike of contact, that those scars were only scratching the surface of what Spider had done, and for all she knew this conversation was bringing all kinds of Ghost-erased beatings to the forefront of his mind.
"I think we've talked about this enough for now." She felt exhausted just hearing about it, so he must be even more so. That, and she was dangerously close to losing her cool. The last thing she wanted to do at this point was let Crow mistake her anger for him as anger at him, and she had the distinct feeling that it would be easy for him to do so right now. "You should finish that up, get some rest. I'll talk to our brain trust about getting started on the bomb, you just try to focus on the transmat system for now."
"Yeah... yeah, okay." He nodded. His hands flares with sol Light briefly, and the tea started steaming again. She gave him a final pat on the shoulder before getting up and leaving him, typing out messages on her omni-tool as she went. Garrus, definitely. Tali. Joker, if only because it might make Glint more comfortable. She briefly considered Miranda or Kasumi, but half the challenge of this mission would be not spooking Glint too much, and the Lightborn duo weren't as close to the latter two as they were to the former three. They trusted Garrus, worked with Tali, and Joker... actually, she had no idea how Joker had become a go-to Crow expert, but she had a feeling Star Trek and junk food had something to do with it.
She sent messages for them to meet her in her quarters in ten minutes, and hit the button for her floor on the elevator. Once there, she took a moment to try and banish the hot tears trying to prick at her eyes.
What the actual fuck. They all knew his past was mess, the signs were there for all to see. But this? This was worse than what she had imagined. She remembers when they found out about the experiments preformed on Jack and those other kids. She had felt like this for the convict at the time, but Jack's nature made it very difficult, bordering on impossible, to feel any real sympathy for her and keep it. No matter how much you reminded yourself what she had been through, the knowledge that she dealt with that pain by inflicting more pain and violence on others quickly rose to the forefront of your mind. Jack took pity and spat on it, took kindness as one would an insult, and, by her own admittance, still wanted to 'kill everyone' she saw.
Crow was... Crow. Shy, kind, perpetually confused Crow, and that made it easier to be angry for him than it was for Jack. Easier to look at what was done to him and think, 'they did that to one of my crew' because he hadn't used that pain as an excuse for murder and violence, even though his past life apparently had a gift for both. To think, his very existence was the reason he'd been treated so.
On one hand, she could understand, because why should a bad person be given a second chance when there were others so much deserving? But Crow was the furthest from whatever Uldren had been, even by that brief description he'd given, and on that hand she understands fully the purpose of a second chance. She pauses with her hand running down her face.
Second chances were for doing better than the first time... not finishing unfinished business.
Crow wasn't making up for Uldren's crimes in this reality, or proving he wasn't that man; he was making his own legacy, defining himself. He was a good person, and now he had a means to exercise that nature. What if she was going about her own second chance the wrong way? She's been trying to put the pieces back together, but what if they were meant to be something new? She has Garrus back, she has Joker, Chakwas, Tali, and she'd named the new ship Normandy. They were still fighting Reapers, if only through agents of the malicious AI's.
What if she'd been so busy with old business that she had overlooked possibilities of something new? Plenty of thoughts had gone through her head over Alchera, things he'd never gotten the chance to do or explore. She'd thought she might be crossing something off that list someday once she and Kaiden had gotten serious, but if Horizon and that letter was anything to go by, that ship had sailed. Try as she might to get over it, two years for him had been only a day for her, and even though it hurts less after the months that had followed, she still regretted that that future was closed to her.
Still grieved it. But... maybe, just because Kaiden was probably gone from her life, didn't mean she had to close the book on that future. She could use a different piece, instead of trying to use the same one as before. She might have her friends mostly back and intact, but she couldn't help but feel lonely after getting used to being in love and having someone in love with her; the trust such a relationship forged.
The door opened and broke her out of her Crow-induced introspection on her love life.
"Any particular reason I'm needed the moment I about to get out of my braces for the night?" Joker yawned as he limped in wearing his nightclothes. It might be the first time she's ever seen him forget his hat, and the sight of his very non-regulation hair falling about his forehead instead of a hat takes her back a moment. "What's that look for?"
He kind of looked good without his ha- nope, Sierra, don't go there. She kicked her brain out of 'love life introspection mode' as fast as possible and turned quickly to the fridge under her desk to hide the blush the thought had summoned in case she couldn't banish it in time. She was suddenly very glad the lights were dim.
"Yeah, just wait until Tali and Garrus get here." she passed a can of beer back to him, and took one for herself, choosing to let that last question go unanswered. This was grim business, and she needed a cold one after all of it. "Might want to sit down and nurse that; you're going to need it."
Oops, I Shoker'd a little. I'm sure I can hide it with a rug or something. You know, I just now realized this series turned a year old back in August, boy does time fly. Reading over this for errors I wondered if I should change how Shepards thoughts suddenly progressed to her personal life, but it felt so organic, and really, that's kind of what happens when you find out somebody is having a rough time; it makes you think about how you're living your own life, and maybe even resolve to change how you're living it. That's just how human beings effect each other.
About Reviews: As thrilled as I am to see so many reviews for last chapter, these notes are already long enough because of my general chattiness, and replying to everyone individually would make half this chapter an authors note. So I'm going to try out a more collective response, if it feels too weird or janky, I'll probably pick five or so reviews at random to respond to next time this happens.
Reviews reply: I'm really glad everyone liked Crow taking the big leap and activating his loyalty mission, it was probably the most difficult process of writing I've had with this series because of its importance. You're right that Spider is definitely on the Normandy's naughty list, and he better hope that portal stays shut. To those wondering about timelines, this isn't the dark future timeline, it's just an alternative reality where the Wolf did NOT handle Crow's existence as calmly as canon, though one of you did hit the mark as far as stasis being somewhat of an influence in this. I've considered writing a one-shot multiple times to offer a glimpse into the now Crow-less D2 universe, but inspiration has yet to strike. I won't be doing any multiverse/multiple timeline things, and with the exception of Crow himself, mostof D2's influence will be staying on Eden Prime for the foreseeable future. Would I like to just yeet Mara in? Would I like to send them to a creepy asteroid full of Taken? Would I LOVE to make Quria drag some normal Vex through using it's Taken nature to do so? Yes to all of the above, but too many subplots can choke a story, and I don't want to overwhelm myself with the task of tieing all those threads off. The goal of this fic was always to be ME2 from Crow's perspective, with tweaks to the story that add some realism(like the fallout of Garrus' mission or Shepard's own head issues), and changes that his presence would cause(like delaying the IFF installation to finish the transmat project).
I hope that covered just about everyone! Again, I'm really happy at the response to last chapter, keep rolling it in and let me know what you think of Shepard's bit!
In other news I decided to post the prologue to a Horizon: Zero Dawn/Avengers crossover idea that's been invading my headspace on and off the past year or so, go check that out if you're interested and let me know what you think, it's such an obscure crossover nobody knows it exists and it was the first of it's kind on this site. I was also unable to resist posting the start of another HZD fic that's basically, like the current D2 season, a treasure hunt AU but with angst(though if I'm being honest my plans includefar more angst than SoP).
Fare Thee Well!