The first thing he remembered was the scientists in charge of this venture telling him that if one were to regain consciousness while frozen, however impossible such a situation might be, their only hope was to squeeze the emergency release, which you were meant to keep a grip on as you were going under. So, naturally, Javik's first instinct was to do just that. The pod screamed at him for it, lights flaring and flashing at all sides in a manner that blinded him even with his eyes frozen shut, but that was nothing compared to the pain of simply existing.

The very act of squeezing the release cost all he had to give, and though he could barely feel his hand at all to begin with, the agony of brittle skin and muscle cracking as he forced it to move caused enough pain for him to realize he was alive, he couldn't move, breath or scream, and all of this was one hundred percent wrong. He wasn't conscious long enough to ascertain why this was wrong, but he knew that it was.

When he comes to, the pod has at least ten different needles in his arms, and hasn't he done this before? He seems to remember attacking someone last time, tearing his arm away from the injections, he'd been sick for a while after. Best to not do that again, the pod had been designed to analyze the atmosphere that worked it's way into the bunker over the years and create immuno-boosters to help them adjust to the millennia of bacterial evolution that would have happened. His whole body shrieks with movement-induced wounds caused by cracks formed during his brief stint with lucidity.

He tries to relax, and let the pod do it's thing, trying not to panic because he's back where he never wanted to be again-

Back?

He jerks upright only to slam his forehead on the closed pod door, and now his head is throbbing in tandem with his hand.

"No... no, let me out!" He demands, searching fruitlessly for an opening with his good hand. "Let me out, now!"

The pod jerks, like it's sliding out of it's dock, and he tries to keep his breaths shallow to no avail. He can't move, he can't see, it's cold. It's every worst thing that's ever happened to him, and it's happening again as memories of the Normandy ablaze push their way to the forefront of his mind.

The doors crack open, barely an inch that he can feel, but when he works his hand between them, all he feels beyond is more metal. His heart is pounding like a brute against a blast door, and there isn't enough air in this cursed coffin. There are memories that don't make sense burned into his mind like brands, all clamoring for his attention as he brings up his bad hand and tries to use his biotics to help pry the doors open. There isn't enough room to move for biotics to make much difference, and the pain is causing them to misfire as his nerves try to prioritize telling his brain that he's injured while, at the same time, trying to fire in paths that activate the correct element zero nodes.

Javik has memories of cleaning broken glass off the deck in the Normandy's mess, honing his biotics in the hangar. Pressing forward against mortar fire on Tuchanka, cleaning his weapons across from the turian. His last memories should be of this place, of his time.

The doors give in, but he still finds more metal; the pod hadn't slid out like it was supposed to. "Victory, let me out! Let me out!"

The last thing he remembers is the smell of smoke, burning plastics, charred flesh, and iodine. He remembers his armor being scorched and ruined after being shot at by a Reaper and narrowly avoiding being crushed by a flying vehicle. There's a phantom pain along his jaw where someone had cleaned one of his burns with antiseptics recently. He remembers being led and shoved unceremoniously into a crash seat, remembers the restraints making his ribs scream as the ship pitched. He remembers "Brace, brace brace" from the pilot shouting over the intercom, and the brief scream of the crew as the Normandy starts ripping apart around them, as yellow light engulfed everything.

He kicks and claws at his prison, and suddenly realizes that his left foot strikes only air.

"Brace, brace, brace!"

He tries to find the edge with his hand, to no avail. He can't move enough. He tries to see how far he can bend his knee without metal stopping him, and it's not very far. But if he could get the pod even an inch...

"Brace, brace, brace!"

He tries to kick, with his biotics, but again, there's only so much power he can give while confined and in pain. The pod moves slightly, and he remembers telling the Commader that hope was for fools, but he feels hope now himself and he's never counted himself among the foolish.

"Brace, brace, brace!"

He can bend his knees enough to push the pod out further, and once he can bend them fully, he tries reaching with his hands again, and with some awkward bending, he's successful. Frantic and ecstatic in equal measure, he manages to fight the pain, and the rest of the pod slides out with a screeching similar to the Normandy's hull being ripped open by the Crucible.

"Brace, brace, brace!"

He's finally able to sit up, gasping for breath in the pitch black, and he scrambles to get out of the pod. He crumbles to the floor in and undignified heap, head spinning, and he fights the urge to vomit as he reaches blindly into the dark for some sort of indicator as to where he is. He only finds a wall, good only to brace himself against as he tries to calm himself. Rather stupidly, he tries to activate his omni-tool, desperate for some kind of light, only for nothing to happen. He feels his wrist, and it's bare of technology. Of course it is!

He clutches his throbbing head as he forces himself to control his breathing, wondering if this split between real and unreal might be synonymous with an actual split in his skull. He couldn't remember taking a blow to the head before going in his pod, but he couldn't remember the last certain time he'd taken a blow to the head, either; just waking up to a put-upon Dr. Chakwas, who had then proceeded to tear into him about wearing 'seatbelts', or some other such nonsense.

But that couldn't have been the last time he'd taken such a blow, because it can't have happened. He couldn't have woken from the pod a first time, fought a war, and died, only to wake up in the pod again. It just wasn't possible. But the pain radiating throughout his body, and the months of memories brimming in his mind tell him otherwise.

"Victory." He gasps. He tries to find his backup comms unit. "Javik to Normandy, Normandy..."

There was no comms unit, there was no Normandy. Apparently, there was no Victory, either. His body, quite through with all this nonsense, decides that it's long past time to faint and takes action accordingly.

He wakes up with his face in the dirt, his headache lessening in intensity, but his body still felt like it was on fire. He wants to curl up and die already, because this had to be what dying felt like. The Normandy was breaking apart, he was dying, and this was some near-death hallucination his brain had cooked up just to torture him before he went. Primitives believed that wicked sapients were punished when they died, and he was well aware he wasn't 'good' by most standards of the cycle, so it could be that as well.

Either way, this dirt tastes awfully authentic. The pain feels very real. The air is realistically foul for a place that's been shut off from the outside world for fifty thousand years, who knows what gases he's inhaling right know, or how many of his thoughts are being influenced by them.

He pushes himself to his knees. That's it! A rough laugh escapes him.

"I am not crazy!" He was just high on whatever natural gases were down here. He tries to stand, and promptly falls back down when he trips on a piece of debris. There was no Normandy, there were no primitives, he was not the last of his kind, and he hadn't lived for months in a new cycle. He had never left his pod in the first place, and the doctors and scientists who had all told him "No, you won't dream while in the ice", were big.

Fat.

Liars.

He looked around, trying to find any pinprick of light that might show him the way. If someone else were alive down here, their pod would be lit up. This was where all the command personnel had been assigned, if there was a light on, it would be here.

All he saw was pitch black. He was the last one left. So what was real? He woke up as the last in his... dream? Other life? And he had woken up as the last this time, as well. What do I know for certain? He knew his pod was still near. He knew his weapons were in his pod. His echo shard was in his pod. There should be a working light disk in his pod.

So he stood, trying to ignore the weakness in his legs brought on by the ice(he refused to think it was caused by something else), and manages to stumble back to his pod. He blinks when he sees light; it's meant to tell him he left the pod too early, the medical systems weren't done with him yet. I survived the first time. One of his legs nearly gives out, as if to oppose the admittedly unwise course of action he was considering.

Javik allows himself a grimace, and gets back in, trying to ignore the way his blood starts pounding through his veins. The needles go back in. His hand hurts. It's not as cold. The doors are open but he can feel the walls of the pod even though they aren't touching him. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine he's back in port cargo. Roomy port cargo. It may or may not have been real, there may or may not have been an AI watching him almost every hour of the day, but at least the Commander had given him his own space. A well-lit space.

He opens his eyes to complete darkness rather than the ceiling of port cargo. He turns his head, trying to find that small light that the medical system used to complain. It was out, but he could feel that it wasn't done working yet. He felt around the side compartment for his weapons, and once he got a grip on his rifle, he found it's light disk, detached it, and stuck it to his chest before turning it on.

He had to shut his eyes almost immediately, and he considers turning it off, but decides against it. The light is a relief as much as it makes the pounding in his head worse. When his eyes adjust, he still can't see the ceiling; it's too high up. But he can see the degradation of his bunker, the way dirt and rock has invaded where only metal should be. Sediment has created cascades of itself down walls and probably made a mess in other ways as well.

I am the last of my kind. The thought made him feel... raw, like a wound that refused to heal, but it wasn't surprising. There was no mountain of grief landing on top of him. Was it because he had already spent months processing this reality, or because his brain thought it had spent months processing this reality?

The last thing he remembered was the Normandy being destroyed.

The last thing he remembered was Victory telling him he would be the voice of the prothean people.

Which one was right? The only thing that aligned was that he was the sole survivor of what was, in hindsight, a doomed venture right out of the gate. A million dead, trapped in suffocating cold and darkness for the last moments of their lives, for what? If the Crucible was even real, he hadn't even seen the aftermath of it firing. If it had destroyed everything, Reapers included, he supposed that could count as a success, but he hadn't actually seen or heard of any Reaper casualties before the Normandy went down.

The pod makes a strangled buzzing sound to let him know it's safe to leave. He sits up slowly, trying to balance the need to get out with acknowledgement that his body still wasn't in peak condition. He spares a moment to inspect himself for burns from the run with Hammer Team. The only visible damage is cracks in the flesh of his hand from activating the release. He collects his weapons, hesitates when it comes to the shard, and in the end takes it with him anyway.

He isn't sure if there's a way out of the facility anymore. He resolved to try every entrance he could think of, and leave the north bulkhead as a last resort. If it had remained compromised all these years, it would be his best bet if all else failed.

All else did fail, and even as he made his way to the bulkhead, he can't shake the feeling that he's going to die down here. The light will go out, he'll suffocate, starve, or die of dehydration, all of these grisly ends coming in total darkness with not a soul around who will know he's passed. Some primitive would come across his remarkably fresh corpse during an archeological dig, and everything left of him will be displayed in some gaudy archeological museum until the Reapers burned it down.

The primitives might not exist. Or, maybe they did exist, but they were likely to be entirely different from what he had dreamt up. At least they hadn't been lingering outside his pod like last time; the likelihood of anyone taking him seriously after watching that was low, he would have had to kill someone just to make a point.

Access to the north bulkhead proved impossible, thanks to what appeared to be a landslide. He sat down, and took out his sidearm. The light was growing dimmer. Why had they built everything to last except their lighting? They saw well in the dark, but the total dark? There had to be at least a little bit of light. He shuts his eyes, listening to water echo through the tunnel. If any of it had been real, he should at least go back to his pod before he killed himself, leave some kind of message. English is still somewhere in his mind, and if things played out like they had last time, he knew that primitives would find his pod regardless of if he's In it. He could carve a message with his knife about the Catalyst being the Citadel, save someone some trouble.

Wait... water? He stands, looking for the source of the noise. If there was water, it had to be coming from somewhere. The chances of it coming from the surface were slim, but it was more than he'd had a moment ago. He searches every hole, every crack, until he finds a small pool hidden under mounds of dirt. He tears as much of it away as he can with his biotics, and it reveals what might be the start of some stagnant, underground river, with water trickling in from a tunnel that might be big enough for him to fit through.

He gets in the water and looks up. From what he can see, it's big enough to crawl up. He could get stuck and drown, but he's dead for sure if he doesn't try. If worst came to worst, he could try to force his way out biotically, if he had enough room. Which he probably wouldn't.

He braces his nerves and pulls himself upwards. Gritty mud scrapes his hands, and the tunnel smells even more foul than it looked. His heart starts pounding again, and he tries to swallow back the weakness. This was never a problem before, and he's faced fare worse things than confinement of this nature. Why was this a source of... panic, for lack of a harsher word? He was in control.

This mud tasted as authentic as the dirt had, so there went any possibility that this was the nightmare. He managed to drag himself up several meters(at least it felt that far), and he stopped briefly to catch his breath and fight off a rising sense of doom. Eventually he found the source of the leak, within a roomier-than-usual pocket of tunnel. The dirt was loose and wet around it, held together by smaller rocks and the roots of water plants he probably doesn't know the names of.

He could stick his hand through, widen the hole easily. But he doesn't know how thick the sediment is, or how wide he'll be able to tear it open. For all he knew, the hole was surrounded by pure, thick rock, and the dirt was only hiding it. He could manage to widen it enough to drown himself, but not enough to fit through. The current could keep him from escaping. It could lead to more, completely submerged tunnels, or into a body of water too deep for him to swim out of, even if he used biotics to give himself a head start.

It was still the only chance he had of getting out alive, no matter how slim the chance may be. I have seen worse odds. One out of a million to survive. Cybernetic reconstruction from brain death. Surviving a direct hit to the head from a precision kill rocket. Time trav-

Dreams were unreliable(even if they looked more like memories the longer he's awake). He should be wise enough not to rely on them.

So he braces himself, plants his feet where they find the most purchase, primes his biotics and forces himself to regulate his breathing in a way that will hopefully let him stay conscious longer. That new, foreign part of his mind decides to supply an unrelated piece of information about turians being unable to swim.

He makes the mistake of trying with his bad hand first, but thankfully his misfire doesn't do too much damage, and he has time to correct. He let's the water come slowly at first, so it doesn't come as a gut punch that knocks the wind out of him. Then he blasts it open, and everything becomes a chaotic blur of cloudy water. Violent currents lash small rocks across his face, and he forces himself to keep his eyes open as he feel for the perimeter of the hole. He finds the edges, grips them, pulls himself back, and launches himself forwards with biotics.

He manages to get a fare way forward, and through the pain, the chaos, he realizes that light is filtering in through the surface of the water. He can't tell if the roaring he hears is the current or his own blood as he strikes out for the light. He's lucky enough that the current of the drain he'd made doesn't pull him too hard, and the surface it closer than he'd anticipated. When he breaks the surface, he immediately discovers a new appreciation for oxygen, and that his eyes need to adjust. After so long in near-total darkness, the daylight is blinding.

He forces himself to look for shore, and finds it, too, is relatively close. Which is good, because between the body-wide pain and his armor he's not sure how long he could swim for. Maybe his incredibly horrific streak of bad luck is coming to an end.

He staggers onto land, and finds cover in the tree line as fast as he can so he can just sit down. When he finally does, he spares a moment to make sure the water hadn't affected his weapons, and he deactivates the light disk. He leans back against the rocks and dirt, giving in to his body's demands to stop moving, and taking in his surroundings. The species of tree he's surrounded by is vaguely familiar, as is what little of the landscape he could see. There were spires peaking from over the trees... human in design, not prothean, and there's no sign of archeological digging in the hills that, by his estimation, now conceal his facility.

Those human structures were familiar. He remembers seeing them scattered across the distance instead of prothean towers, remembers greeting the new cycle to the scent of blood and the sounds of distant gunfire, surrounded by strange creatures who, last he'd been told, used rocks and sticks for weapons. He shouldn't remember that. It never happened, if it had he wouldn't have just woken up underground and in total darkness.

His memories, dreams, whatever they were, whatever this was, it was like a river that had water trying to rush in both directions. Everything was mixing, unreal.

Or maybe all of this was what primitives called 'bullshit'. Perhaps the next time he slept he would wake up for real this time. He didn't have anything particularly urgent to see to, and he had found decent cover from all angles in this ditch. The sun was high, but he's been able to find rest in louder, brighter environments before, and after what his body has just been through, sleep comes trivially easy. His disjointed memories tell him that he'd spent most of his first few days on the Normandy sleeping heavily as his body tried to readjust after being frozen for so long.

He discounts this as he has a majority of things he sees in his own mind as he drifts off. Unfortunately, he does, in fact, sleep heavily enough that he only woke when the muzzle of a rifle poked him in the leftmost eye.

If he ever found a stranger sleeping on his turf, even one that was an unknown species, he might give them a kick in the shin as a meager courtesy, or maybe he would knock them out, tie them up, scour their mind for intention, or, when he was younger and had a foolish streak about him, wake them by dumping a bucket of waste over their heads. Then he would point his weapons at them and start making threats. There were really a variety of proper ways to go about it.

But this varren-brain pokes him in the eye.

He responds by first letting his attacker know exactly how he feels about their technique.

"Damn you, primitive heathens!" He punctuates this with a reflexive biotic kick that both sends his attacker sprawling in the dirt, and sets the nerves associated with the move on fire. It makes getting to his feet more painful, but soon he's backed up enough that the attacker can't get to him physically without him having time to fire first. Then they're both pointing weapons at each other, her still on the ground but hands steady despite how understandably shocked she looks, and him ready to pull the trigger at a moment's notice even as he racks his fake memories for a reason she seems familiar. The memories themselves feel less... chaotic than they had before, for some reason.

For a few moments they just sit there, each ready to kill the other. Her dark hair is tied tightly in Alliance regulation, like the Commander's often was, and even smeared with dirt, her white armor stands out almost painfully amidst her surroundings.

"You expect to kill anything wearing that?" He sneers. "A blind varren would see you coming."

"It works on sleeping assholes." She shoots back, and the sound of her voice brings a name to the forefront of his mind, a memory that truly wasn't his, but something distant of the Commander's. Ashley Williams; he thought he might have seen her name on that ridiculous wall of sentiment on the crew deck.

"I'm far from dead yet, human." He could kill her and leave. Even though his hand still felt like it had been mangled, and every muscle in his body burning, he felt slightly better than he had earlier. He didn't dare look for the sun to try to calculate how long he'd been sleeping. But what if this is not dream? If humans were real, and Ashley William's was real, why not other things? Hadn't she done something important before she died? What effect would killing her have?

It's not real! It couldn't be. It was literally impossible.

"My unit is closing in, so if you don't drop that weapon, you will be." Williams proclaimed boldly. He narrows his eyes. Even injured, he could probably take them, especially if they were all so brightly dressed. Even so... if this turned out to be real, he might regret it later. Not necessarily the loss of life; she'd poked him in the eye with a gun, and none too gently either. But something would turn up.

"You tried to gauge my eye out. If you relinquish your medigel, I will consider not returning the favor before throwing you into the lake." For lack of air locks, it would be the best he could do. The human has the audacity to roll her eyes at him, lowering her gun only slightly off mark as she reaches slowly into her pocket.

"Funny story about the lake; it's gone now." She informed him. She shows him the vial. He's never cared much for the medically inelegant goo, it's far behind what his own people had, but his hand was killing him at this point, and pain relief alone would be welcome, if only so that his biotics would be less likely to misfire.

"Lakes aren't in the habit of disappearing. Slide it over." She does so roughly. Maybe she's hoping it will break, just to be petty, but it doesn't.

"A big ass sinkhole cropped up and swallowed it just before noon. Wouldn't happen to know anything about that would you?" He pauses as he picks up the medigel, weapon still trained on her. What he means to say next was something along the lines of 'nothing at all' or 'none of your business', but his ice-addled brain only let's him get out one syllable.

"Oops." What did he just say? What was he, the turian?

"'Oops'?" The human's brow raises, and her weapon lowers. "You're admitting you had a hand in destroying a lake and all you can say is 'oops'? What the heck are you, anyway."

"Prothean." Why is he lowering his weapon? He raises it again; this primitive may lack basic survival instincts, but he does not.

"Right. And I'm a turian." Williams say dryly.

"I did not just dig out of my own grave to be poked and patronized by a primitive who lacks basic self-preservation instincts." He snaps, gesturing to her lowered gun.

"I'm trying to de-escalate the situation!" She jumps to her feet, temper flaring. "You're the one-"

A familiar boom rips through the air, the sound of a Reaper breaking atmosphere.

"Reaper!" He warns out of habit. Reflexively, he looks up, remembers there's only leaves to be seen here, and looks back just in time to fix his rifle on Williams again, who had made as if to move towards him. "I'm hardly what you need to worry about now. You have Reapers bearing down on you."

"Just what is that supposed to mean?" He is so tired of talking. So instead of responding, he gestures for her to follow and marches past her, up to the tree line, and he points at the grotesque omen of death descending in the distance. The sun is setting.

"That." So this was probably all some kind of... nonsense. There were Reapers here. He'd woken up during this cycles war again, clearly. Ashley Williams was some kind of deja vu, that was all. Nothing else had fallen in line with his not-memories.

"Whiskey... tango... foxtrot..." she breaths. She scrambles for her radio. "Donkey, we have an unknown hostile force landing near in or near the spaceport, possible relation to Bravo deaths."

"Unknown?" He wavered between unbelieving and irritated, even as his brain finally registers her reaction to his initial warning. "That is not an 'unknown', that is a Reaper. Did I assume incorrectly that you weren't raised in a cave?"

"Did I assume incorrectly you were the found one napping in the dirt?" She shot back at him, once again pointing her rifle at him. So we are doing this again? Sometimes it felt like these people were actively devolving in front of him. He brought his own weapon to bear. "I'm going to ask once; what are you, who are you, and what do you have to do with all this?"

"I already told you what I was. I am the one who was put in command of the facility below these hills, and the only thing I have done so far is drain your thrice-cursed lake." He sneered. "What else do you need from me, ape?"

"You expect me to believe a fifty thousand year old fossil crawled out of the dirt and conveniently knows how to speak english?" She snorted. "You're going to have to do better than that."

"My people possess a form of contact telepathy. It can give one a basic sense of another's language." He hasn't gotten close enough to Williams to read her, but he can recall a passing comment about her from one of the quarian's drunken sentiments. "I happened across a drunk hooligan on the shore, it is more than likely he drowned himself afterwards."

"So you conveniently read minds? Read mine, then." She challenged.

"I do not need to touch you to know you plan on trying to disarm me if I come within your reach, primitive." He wasn't nearly that gullible. "Do you have any more questions you wish to waste time with?"

"Were you born an asshole, or was it something that happened over time?" She scowled at him.

"Human, ask me something intelligent or I'll shoot you and go face the enemy by myself." His patience is a hairs width from snapping.

"What's your name?"

"Javik."

"What planet are you from?"

"You could never hope to pronounce the name of it."

"You know how to fight that thing?"

"I thought I made it obvious that I do." He's tiring of this woman very quickly. He can see why her dream self wound up dead.

"The only thing you've made obvious is your hostility." He resists the urge to roll his eyes. "How about we both lower our weapons, and you tell me more about that thing."

"It is the vanguard of your destruction, here to harvest your people and annihilate your culture as it did mine." He doesn't have time to play twenty questions with a figment of deja vu. "I am going to leave now, and fight it's forces. You are welcome to try to shoot me, in which case I will kill you, join me, or leave to die in whatever way pleases you most."

"Just like that, huh?" Williams snarks. Primitives. Javik turns and starts marching, though he keeps her in his peripheral in case she gets any ideas. He didn't know which memories were which, but he knew that where there were Reapers, there were things that needed killing. It was the only thing in this backwards reality that made sense, and he knew his duty. He was meant to wreck destruction on the Reapers, and even if this was just a fever dream, that's what he was going to do.

"Wait, you're actually going out there?" The female calls after him. "You're just dropping the 'vanguard of your destruction' bomb and walk towards the thing?"

"Why question if I'm doing something if you can clearly see that I'm doing it?" Again, it was like she was devolving.

"It was rhetorical, jackass!" She waves her weapon at him, but the motion is nonsensical and isn't remotely a threat. He walks faster, eager to leave the possible proof that his dreams weren't dreams behind, and is releived that she doesn't follow, even if he's annoyed at the lack of discipline it speaks to. In her place, I would have dragged the intruder back my superior; dead, if necessary.

When he thinks he's a good distance away, he starts doubling back, making false trails, and taking other steps to ensure he wouldn't be tracked. In one instance, he finally takes the time to peel back the mesh weave on his bad arm, and treats his hand with a modest amount of medigel before coating his forearm in the thinnest layer he can manage with the rest. Anything he spills will make this false trail more convincing, and he drops the empty vial on the ground to enforce the illusion.

He reseals the weave, and winces when it tightens automatically. Prothean armor was designed to be intuitive to the wearer's body, tightening around wounds in order to isolate them and stop bleeding, stiffening to steady broken bones, or to support injured limbs. His hand and arm feel better after the hot sting of the gel's antiseptic properties gives way to the numbing pain relief feature, but it suddenly occurred to him that he didn't have access to a medical omni-tool for when it came time to remove or replace the stuff.

Oh, well. His hand wasn't killing him anymore. He would give the primitives this; their medical tech wasn't prothean in efficiency, but it was very, very good at pain relief(sometimes too much so).

Hand treated, and with night falling, he doubled back again, before making his way towards the Reaper landing site for real. He hadn't heard any others enter the atmosphere, which he considered unusual, and he continued not to hear any for the entire night. He hears plenty of ships breaking the atmosphere, but nothing loud or large enough to be another Reaper, though the others do sound vaguely familiar. If he wasn't running off only a few hours sleep and his head wasn't a tangle of memories that didn't belong, he might even be able to place their origin with confidence.

It isn't a question that goes unanswered for long. Geth have flashlight heads; they aren't that hard to spot, but the patrol manages to catch him off-guard anyway simply by existing. The geth were real. The geth, which to his knowledge had been wiped from existence by their creators over Rannoch just a month prior, but no, that never happened. None of it happened. Yet, his own mind teases him, and he drowns the increasingly horrid conclusion that that part of his brain has been trying to force on him in simple action and violence.

The simple action of violently ripping the small geth squad apart.

It's almost unfair. He hadn't fought them much in the memory tangle, and he was devoid of both an omni-tool and the expertise of using one in combat professionally, but even synthetics were beholden to gravity. In some ways, computers are easier to smash than people are. He considers, for a moment, taking a geth omni-tool, but decides it's probably rife with spyware and probably rigged to explode or do something else unpleasant if a non-geth attempted to use it.

By the time the sun has risen enough to give a sufficient amount of light, the painkillers in the medigel are starting to wear off, his body is even more unhappy with him than before, and he thinks he might be coming down with something. The good-or worse-news was that the dream was becoming less entangled with the months leading up to his long sleep in the ice, and it's becoming harder to ignore.

The sound of gunfire in the distance offers him an opportunity to ignore it for just a little longer. He runs towards it, and the scents of smoke and death become more prominent until the sting of the former makes his eyes water. He changes direction, hoping to avoid being directly downwind of whatever fire was burning, and that's when he sees it.

A frigate, tearing up and away, silhouette both unfamiliar, yet familiar enough for him to recognize, from the memories of Commander Shepard and of others.

It's the Normandy.

Not the SSV Normandy SR2 he knew, but the original it was based on, intact and streaking away with the sun flashing cheekily along her hull, as if to taunt the enemies she was leaving behind. Javik watches her fly away, refusing to believe what he's seen. No. No, this cannot be!

More gunfire, closer this time, and he rushes towards it, mind filled with rival truths screaming at each other. This isn't real. It's impossible!

He finds Williams fighting geth, and he uses all the anger stemming from the impossibilities that have been thrown at him since he woke up to clear a path to her. Geth are crushed against old prothean structures, but he can't be bothered to try and recognize the area. He slides in next to William's, and she initially starts, looking torn between pointing her weapon at him like before, or shooting the fresh geth he attracted on the way in.

She settle for the latter. Truce, then; for now.

"Didn't I get rid of you?" She snarls, before reaching for her belt. "Frag out!"

"You did not; I excused myself." He counters, shooting down a drone that was trying to flank them as her grenade blew apart several geth and threw one other to the ground. More drones followed the one he killed, and from what he'd seen rushing in, there were more geth getting ready to replace the ones they were killing. "They will overwhelm us if we stay!"

"There's more cover west of this dig site!" She told him, breaking cover to spray a rocket drone; it's shielding sputtered, and Javik slammed it into the ground with it's own mass, his nervous system screaming at him to stop as he did so. "Wooded area just beyond it. I say we might be able to make it if we weed out that other drone."

They bring the drone down almost comically quickly, but it fires off a rocket at the last moment. Their cover holds, but he feels the heat from the blast and his ears are ringing. Williams pushes his shoulder to signal it's now or never, and they charge forward, more geth on their tail. They pass familiar structures with colonists impaled on them-Dragon's Teeth, though they've yet to be named that.

Pulse rounds slam into the dirt, and they barely make it to cover; Williams trips, but manages to think fast and shoot faster at the drones that try to put her down for good. He grabs her elbow and pulls her into cover with him as the geth that have followed them start pressing forwards. That's when he notices two people up the hill.

One of them bears the signature vermillion stripe of an N7.

It was real.

He barely snaps himself out of the realization long enough to finish the fight, and the whole time his blood is pounding in his ears. There are explosions, guns, and sputtering geth all around him, and the only thing he can hear is his own heartbeat, throbbing in his head like a bad song, leading a symphony aching muscles, a pounding headache, and his overtaxed nervous system.

Then, Commander Shepard is standing in front of him and Williams, demanding a sitrep from the latter before demanding he identify himself, his species, and intentions, and this was real.

They drift through his brain like static, the words he's been avoiding.

Time travel.

Javik had traveled through time. The Crucible had fired-

"Brace, brace, brace!"-

The Normandy had been destroyed-

"Brace, brace, brace!"-

And Javik had traveled through time, back to his pod-

"Brace, brace, brace!"-

And he was three.

Years.

Early.

"I... am Javik."

So, not really sure this will stay a one-shot, but I'm not sure I'll continue it, either. I'm really just playing with the concept, not ready to commit to it full time yet, and Javik can be an exhausting character to write sometimes, given his personality. I just just wanted to explore how he might react to this kind of situation, handwaving the possibility of him being able to wake up while iced, since this is already time travel and it can't get more ridiculous than that.

If I can make Shepard choose yellow, I can make the ice man wake up and mess with his head.

That being said, let me know what you all think of this, I might keep writing more on the sidelines of my current fic project and eventually post it. Because let's face it; Javik in ME1 would have caused absolute chaos, TimeTraveler!Javik would cause even more.

Fare Thee Well!