"I... am Javik." He almost chokes on his own name. Commander Shepard is standing in front of him, Alenko at her back, and he's three years early. She doesn't know him. "I am prothean, I once commanded the ruins your people are currently bleeding about."
"You expect me to buy that?" Her gray eyes narrow; there is no trust in them. They had not been close in his tangle of memories, the primitives were beneath him, but he had come to feel respect for her, and the Cipher had given her a subconscious understanding of his people that made it... easier to speak with her than the others. He wants to grab her, shake her, scream at her-REMEMBER ME!-force the memories of the life not lived into her mind.
But his own memories tell him that primitives don't react well to being grabbed or having memories shoved in their heads without warning, and having the latter happen to him yesterday is the the only thing that stays his hand. His own mind is still settling, he looks at her and for a few moments he thinks he's on the platform at the dig site and instead of answering her question, he opens his mouth and almost asks about the others despite knowing he's the last. He snaps his mouth shut before he can.
"He drained a lake with a sinkhole and his biotics are green, ma'am." Williams spoke up. "There's geth attacking and turning people into zombies by impaling them, and it all started with prothean crap. I buy it."
"You were pointing a gun at me yesterday." Javik pointed out, starting to wonder if she had some sort of neurological dissorder; how could she contemplate shooting him one morning and defend his story the next?
"You were a weirdo with a gun napping in a ditch." She countered, before looking back at Shepard. "An actual fucking prothean would be the most beleiveable thing I've seen all day."
"I can go into greater detail when we are..." he almost says 'back on the Normandy', but the Normandy is gone and it's not gone and by the memory of his ancestors, if they had trouble reconciling what he was, how would they react if he said he had lived their future and been sent back?
"Hey!" The Commander snapped her fingers to get his attention. "I need details now, you might have something to do with this."
"I would never betray organics to machines." He tells her, affronted.
"They're probably here for the beacon, this guy wasn't part of the dig." Williams informs.
"I came to lucidity a day ago, broke myself from my stasis pod and then the facility that housed it." Javik told the Commander, deciding to keep thing brief and leave out the time travel until he had a better grip on his own mind. A smart soldier didn't take risks when he could barely think straight, and primitives, he felt, would probably react negatively to such a revelation in this situation. "Then this barbarian assaulted me-"
"I confronted him-"
"While I was recovering, soon after which the Reaper descended on this colony." Eden Prime, Eden Prime, he tries to untangle the knot of memories, trying to find anything relevant, maybe something of Shepard's, maybe something he'd looked into in his own spare time. Beacon. Saren. 'Come to Illos'. Murder. He couldn't recall any details, but he knew of those things for certain. "You say your kind found a communications spire?"
"We were sent to retrieve it." The Commander confirms. "What do you mean by 'Reaper'?"
"It would seem to you a dreadnought, but it is sentient." How did they not know of the Reapers sooner, he always wondered. No matter how careful they were, their destruction of cycles past had left scars across the galaxy, obvious to those who looked for them. "They destroyed my people, and they are preparing to do the same to this cycle."
"You aren't making sense, what 'cycle'?" His patience, already at it's limit, snaps.
"We can stand here as your colony burns and the machines take what they please, or we can find the beacon so that I might see what information they think it has to risk revealing themselves for!" He remembers endless, needling questions from an asari with large eyes and an annoying voice. He knows what the final transmission on the beacon will be, if he wants to get off this rock, get his head right, and get back to the Normandy, he needs to get that message, fast.
Commander Shepard's eyes narrow again. No trust. They had yet to build the confidence in each other that bleeding on the same battlefields tended to build.
It... stings, actually.
It hits him then, exactly what it means; all they had been through, erased... gone. It never happened, not for her. He was a strange man out of time and possibly out of his mind to her, but to him she was a trusted comrade, even if it had been difficult following a primitive, especially at first, he trusted her, he had been in her head and fought at her back, and it was all gone. She had no recollection of him, he could tell as much from the moment he first saw her stride down the hill, and it would likely be true of the others as well if he ever ran into them.
"Williams, where's the beacon?" After a few moments, Shepard broke eye contact with him. He risked a glance at Alenko, who had spent the entire exchange with a rather quizzical look on his face.
"Dig site, just east." She points to the ruins they had retreated from only a short time ago. There were probably more geth there now, but now that they had four people, the synthetics would likely be no problem. What could be a problem was that he hadn't seen any sign of a communications spire when he was there. Maybe he had simply paid it no notice, being in a firefight with memories that shouldn't exist running rampant through his mind.
Sure enough, once they got there(wiping the floor with a unit of geth on the way), there was nothing.
"Where is it?" Shepard demanded. Javik's headache was getting worse, if possible.
"They must have moved it for transport this morning." Williams shrugged. "We could try the tramway."
"You primitives are idiots." Javik bit out. "Those spires are not meant to be moved, if it was damaged the messages within may have been corrupted."
"Well, excuse me princess; I had nothing to do with it!" the Chief snapped.
"Stop trying to bite each others heads off!" Shepard ordered. "We have bigger problems to deal with, so get your heads on straight and lets find this thing."
"Tram's this way." the Chief motioned to a path after taking a deep breath. They make their way up, and through a burning camp crawling with husks. He finds himself falling in on Alenko's left automatically, and the familiarity somehow brings a strange sort of relief. As they cut down husks, it's like he never left, like nothing is different, because even if they don't remember him, they still fight the same. He can still read the subtle cues of body language they both had, he still knows how to fight with them.
It feels so natural, it isn't until the fight is over that he realizes something has remained unchanged that probably shouldn't have.
Alenko.
He could practically smell the male human's hormones, and he kept looking at Shepard the same way he had in the other timeline; an idiotic expression of absolute infatuation. Shouldn't those feelings have stayed in the future? Unless... Dare he hope he wasn't the only one? Had Alenko time traveled as well? He 'accidentally' brushes shoulders with the biotic as they move towards a prefab that the Commander thought she heard people from, and quickly prods the human's mind for a specific, shared memory.
It causes a painful sort of feedback, and he finds nothing. But how would feelings from Major Alenko be present in the Lieutenant Alenko of this time? It made no sense. What about any of this makes sense? He wonders as Shepard wastes precious time interrogating two civilians.
Maybe later, if he found a subtle way to prolong contact with Alenko, he could comb through his mind more thoroughly. If his own mind decided not to split itself in two when he did so, that is. He could only guess that the feedback was a consequence of his own memories still being somewhat entangled, though they are oddly easier to sort now that he's back with familiar comrades.
"The tram should be just up ahead, maybe your turian can meet us there?" Well, familiar comrades plus one. Just the sound of her speaking manages to annoy him, and he only just manages to stop himself from snapping at her for pointing out the obvious.
Instead, Javik keeps pace with the others as they make their way to the tram line. A single gunshot rings through the air, and he almost freezes; one, lone gunshot against a backdrop of flames and relative silence? No geth weapons to answer or oppose it? That was... strange, to say the least, but he thinks nothing else of it, as they are met by more geth and husks as the reach the overlook.
At this point, it's all he can manage not to pass out. Using his biotics has become nearly unbearable, and it has finally occurred to him that in this timeline, he hasn't eaten since the day before he went in the pod(eating and drinking before going under had been heavily discouraged), and it's catching up to him. The last thing he ate was hardtack he split with Vega- no, it was some protein slop he hadn't asked the name of, back in his own cycle.
Between the pain, the exhaustion, and the migraine of his own memories, he just wishes he could die at this point. The only thing keeping him from asking one of the other for a canteen at the least(which he knew they would share willingly, given the softness of this cycle), was the likelihood that the Commander might stall the mission if she got even a wiff of his true state. One of her weaknesses was her squad, and even if she had only just met him this time around, it was a risk he didn't want to take.
Until he could figure out his own head, it was best if events played out as relatively similar to how they had previously. It was the path of least risk, it was the path of known outcomes, and he's had enough unknowns for today. If he wanted things to play out correctly, they had to get to that beacon as soon as possible... though it would probably be better if a primitive didn't activate it this time; the Commander had gotten lucky last time, but his own presence had already made changes, who knew if she would survive a second time? It was best not to risk this cycle's exemplar on a chance her mind wouldn't explode; whatever happened next, he needed Commander Shepard alive.
The fight is hard, but it doesn't last long; as he'd predicted, the four of them shred everything in their path. He can't help but notice that Williams has trouble 'keeping up with the program', so to speak. Then again, he knew Shepard and Alenko, he's been fighting beside them for the better part of several months- or has he?- and knew which cues to read. She was the new one here. Yet another thing he's quick to dismiss.
Once the area is clear, they locate several more civilians, who admit to criminal activities, and Shepard exercises her still-impressive skillset of acquiring quality gear by way of honeyed tongue. She then also proceeds to pilfer any crate that looked like it could be opened on the way to the platform. Javik tries not to roll his eyes; it typical Commander Shepard behavior, but it had yielded things of value in the past. The future. Whatever.
The platform has a corpse laying on it. A dead turian, shot in the back of the head. Javik crouches down, and tries to read the scene before him despite the feedback.
"It's Nihlus." Alenko sighs. "That's two we've lost down here, what's happening?"
"He knew his attacker." There was no clear picture, his own head is too much of a mess. "That much, I can read."
"Read?" The Commander inquires.
"Everything leaves an imprint. My people evolved with the ability to read such imprints." He explained. "It's also how how beacons work. We imprint a message on it, it 'remembers' the message, and transmits it."
"Sounds like a headache waiting to happen." The Chief comments, before her eyes snap to the crates nearby. "Movement!"
"Alliance Marines, come out and show your hands!" the Commander demands as the rest of them raise their weapons. A shifty-looking human male shuffles out from behind the cargo crates, hands raised palms-forward to the sky and visibly trembling.
"I'm human!" he cried, eyes wide. "Don't shoot!"
"Sneaking around like that could've got you shot." Shepard signals them to lower their weapons. The man regards Javik with frightened green eyes and backs up a step. He bares his teeth in a grimace, and the man blanches while Shepard shoots him one of those 'knock it off' dirty looks that he'd become familiar with. "He's with us. What were you doing back there? Hiding?"
"Y-yeah, from those creatures." the man shuddered. "My name's Powell. I saw what happened to your friend, it wasn't one of those things, it was another turian."
"What do you mean, 'another turian'? Tell me everything." the Commander demanded. 'Powell' wrung his hands nervously, eyes darting from side-to-side. If not for his current condition, Javik would have offered to take the events from the man's mind himself and save them the time.
"There was him, and the other one. He called him 'Saren', I think they knew each other? This Saren fellow didn't look like any turian I've ever seen, though." he rubbed the back of his neck. "Your buddy let his guard down, and then Saren shot him; right in the back! I'm just lucky he didn't see me behind the crates, or I'd be dead too."
And what a loss that would be. He was rapidly tiring of this interrogation, he was fairly certain they had heard enough of what they needed to, so he decided to move things along. "Where is the beacon?"
"B-beacon?" the human stuttered a bit having been addressed by the prothean. "They moved it to the other platform this morning, same way that Saren was probably headed; I saw him get on the tram after he shot that guy. I wish they'd never found that prothean thing, everything's gone to hell since it turned up! Everybody's dead, and if I hadn't been behind these crates, I'd be dead, too."
To Javik's consternation, they spend several more minutes talking to the man. Not only were they wasting time that Saren was no doubt using, he wanted to finish this before his strength flagged too much. All they got out of it in the end was more goods that Shepard blackmailed the man out of, and the knowledge that the only reason there was a witness to the turian's murder was because said witness was a slothful coward.
He's almost relieved when more geth show up on the tram.
It gets them back into action, and better yet, Powell is nowhere to be seen once the shooting stops. Thankfully, Shepard only gives the area a cursory sweep for him before pressing them onwards to the tram. There's an overabundance of cover on the line itself, and the battle is... what was that saying? The one involving some kind of human game Vega had mentioned once where one struck rodents about the head as they emerged from their underground tunnels? It was like that, but instead of rodents and hammers, it was with geth and guns.
It's annoying, and by the time they clear the platform, he has to actually exert effort to keep his hands from visibly trembling. From anger or overexertion, at this point he can't tell, because he both exhausted and incredibly furious at this point. He's been through worse, of course, but not in such unusual circumstances, and certainly not with his memories constantly trying to contradict themselves.
The Chief will make an impressive shot, and he's glance over expecting Vakarian. Shepard would shoot him a look, or a hand signal, and one half of his brain will tell him what it means and what she likely wanted him to do while the other half spins itself in confused circles trying to figure out what that look or signal was for and why was she making it at him. He keeps reaching for gear he doesn't have and shouldn't know how to use if he did, and he has a weird and sudden craving for a fruit he's never had and shouldn't even know the name of.
If he were to be completely honest with himself, Javik would say that what he desperately wanted more than anything right now was to trudge back into port cargo, fall asleep, and perhaps, never wake up. At least dead or in dreams he wouldn't have all this jamming his mind.
He knew for a fact he wouldn't have to deal with tram stations that were rigged to blow.
As in the first thing to greet them upon arrival was a bomb, probably with a yield high enough to turn this quadrant of the planet into a crater. Vakarian had once said that the perfect way to cover up a crime was with a catastrophe; in the chaos, evidence was nearly always destroyed or made 'circumstantial'. Unfortunately for Saren, Javik knew for a fact that Commander Shepard was trained to disarm nukes in timely fashion. While blindfolded.
Underwater. With nothing but a paper clip and a gum wrapper.
Or was he remembering someone or something else? It was entirely possible, with his current state of mind.
"This is shockingly simple in design." she even commented, after discovering the bomb was part of a system of explosives. It gave him an idea.
"Then we could split up." he suggested. "Your biotic has training enough with technology to do this, yes? If we split up, we can disarm them quicker."
"We barely know you, why should we trust you with one of us without backup?" Alenko prodded suspiciously. While inconvenient, he thinks he feel a tinge of... pride? At least one of his companions wasn't overly-trusting.
"If I was going to kill any of you, I would have done it by pushing you into enemy fire long ago." he points out. Alenko still eyes him mistrustfully, and Commander Shepard rolls her shoulders as she stands.
"It's a risky idea, but it has merit and we don't have time to waste. Javik is with me, you two will split off once we get up top." She ordered. Satisfied, Javik moved on with the rest of them as they made their way up and geth started to fire on them from above.
I did not survive this long to die climbing stairs! There was some cover along the first flight, but the second was just a ramp with bare railing along it. They managed to get up with one pair providing cover fire while the other ran for it, and once they were both on the top landing, they split off; Alenko and and the Chief went for the bridge nearest to them, while Shepard and himself ran between cover to get to the second bridge, taking shots at the geth across the way as they did so to help the others.
He decided not to use his biotics in this particular fight, because he had felt dizzy in the last one and is certain that him passing out would be a bigger liability than him not fighting to his full capabilities. Yet still, they managed to put the geth down easily enough, and found a bomb at the end of the bridge. Shepard disarmed it with a minute to spare, and Javik once again tried to check an omni-tool he didn't have for the position of the next one.
The Commander froze as she stood, and after a few moments relaxed. Noticing his expectant look, she nodded to him and tapped the side of her helmet.
"Comms, Alenko says they disarmed the last bomb." She explained. "We're in the clear."
They were soon reunited and continued towards what was unmistakably their missing beacon. There were a few husks and some more geth about, who soon found themselves full of holes and generally disassembled. Shepard led them in checking the whole of the surrounding area first, by which she really meant 'let's loot the place', and he decided to go along with it out of a strange fondness for her relentless resourcefulness.
Soon, though, it was thankfully time to pack the beacon up and view it's message. He pushes a too-curious Alenko back from getting a closer look at the device; it seems to be malfunctioning, and he's fairly certain that any non-prothean who approaches it won't have any fun if it senses them.
"It is damaged." he tells them. "I would not recommend any primitives handle it for now. I am no mechanic, but I may be able to stabilize it."
"Do what you have to." Shepard tells him. "I'm calling our ship down for pick-up."
"I will glean what I can from the message, and shut it down so you may move it." he really hopes that whoever had moved it before had shut it down before doing so themselves. He approaches the device with caution; even though he's a prothean, he a currently damaged one, and from what he remembered of Shepard's mind in the previous timeline, this message wasn't very stable. This was probably going to be... unpleasant, to say the least, but he'll likely handle it better than a primitive could.
He feels the field of influence wrap around him, search him, confirm who he is as he strides up to the console. He brings up the interface, and initializes the last received message.
Everything goes white with pain. The message screams through his mind like shrapnel from a bomb, disintegrating the thin membrane that had started to form between 'what was', 'what now', and 'what happened in the other life'. He's vaguely aware of his body giving out on him, and the words that slip from his mouth as his mind slips from coherence and consciousness.
"You idiot primitives broke it!"
So it appears the general consensus is that there should be more of this. I guess I'll just post whenever I feel I've reached a point that deserves to be a chapter break off. I just decided to save this one for N7 day. I'm glad people find it interesting, I hope that continues.
With that, feedback is always appreciated. I usually respond to reviews in these notes, but the chapter itself was sort of a response in itself.
Fare Thee Well!