Warning: This chapter contains spoilers for the Shadow Broker DLC. If you haven't played it, do so. Unless, you know, you don't care. In that case, you do you.
To Crow's surprise, nobody brings up Spider over the next few days except Shepard. He knows that Garrus, Tali, and Joker have been brought in on the task of figuring out, and eventually disarming and removing, the bomb, but none of them have pushed him to speak with him directly about it.
Joker, after his brief stint of silence, went back to normal after the incident with Legion. Or, normal-ish; he and Glint have been acting weird around each other. But for the most part, their dynamic has remained unchanged, and the pilot hasn't seemed mad at him at them at all for keeping the bomb a secret. Or Uldren.
Tali just stared at him more than usual. That was it.
Garrus vaguely bring it up, in a way. The former detective simply tells him the door to the main battery was always open if he wanted to talk about any of it. Crow supposed he'd seen all kinds of things in his old profession, and from what he'd heard of Omega, it was almost exactly like the Shore, if maybe even worse in some respects.
He does keep what Garrus said in mind, because now that he's had to tell Shepard about Uldren and Spider out of necessity, he finds that he doesn't feel the catharsis Glint always said he might get once he 'let it all out', so to speak. It needles at him like someone working a knife between armor plating.
He feels like everybody notices, but the thought of telling them, if anything, makes him more uncomfortable than before. He'd managed to keep Joker, he didn't want to scare the pilot off with the gory details. Tali still didn't like him very well.
Chambers, even as the ship councilor, was still off the table because she creeped him out. Whether this was genuine unsettlement or Joker rubbing off on him too much, he had yet to figure out.
So that left him with Garrus.
Except, Thane beats the turian to it. The drell's astute observational skills pried apart that something was eating at Crow within one sparing session. What started as a basic exercise in hand-to-hand ended up as about an hour of Crow telling Thane what he'd told Shepard. Even a few details he'd left out.
Somehow, it's easier telling Thane that it had been telling Shepard, which is odd because in some ways he admired the drell more than he did her. His calm demeanor, even when Crow was telling him of Spider's treatment of him. How, even when he was dying, he made time for other people, and the strange sort of wisdom the trained killer was capable of doling out when it was needed most.
"Garrus was right to offer an ear." he said when Crow told him of the turian's invitation. "You clearly have much you need to process; he will have encountered those in situations similar to yours, they they won't have been exactly the same. I advise you take him up on it; there is nothing wrong with needing help. If nothing else, he may be able to point your feet in the right direction."
"I just... it feels good to get it out there." the Hunter traced sol Light on the floor absent-mindedly. "I think that's really all I need right now."
"And when you need more- when you are up to more- speak to Garrus." the assassin reaffirmed, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Trust me, there is no-one more qualified ear on this ship than the one who has heard this all before."
"Not even Chambers?" he askes cheekily.
"Oh, she is qualified. But she clearly unsettles you; for that I blame our pilot." Thane does the drell equivalent of an eye roll. "Come, we mustn't break your stride."
His training with Thane is also the closest he thinks he'll ever find to Hunter style training. In a way, the drell assassin has become the closest thing he has to a Hunter mentor. Maybe that's what had made him easier to talk to?
He wished he could find that ease with others. His past feels like a rude stranger, loitering in the background of every conversation he has with others who know about it, like it's just waiting for a moment to butt in and make his budding relationships messy. He tried dispersing that feeling by asking them if there was anything they wanted to know, anything about him that bugged them in particular.
"No." Tali had said plainly and gotten back to work.
"Plenty, but let's save it until after we get your problem fixed." Shepard had told him.
"Depends." Garrus had shrugged. "I've done this before, you'd be here a while. I've been told I'm bad at stopping once I start asking questions. There's nothing in particular, but like I said before, my door's open is you need to talk. Is this that talk?"
"No." Crow had said. "I'm just trying to clear the air."
"There's not much to clear from where I'm sitting." the turian had said, pointing a stylus at him. "If you feel like there's something that needs fixing, it's not here."
When he went to Joker, the pilot did that thing he did when he was uncomfortable. Fidgeting with his hat, the odd little squirming.
"Look, Crow, buddy." he said. "I don't need any horrific details; your life sucked. That's just it, that's the truth of it. I'm not touching that can of worms, it's already following you around like a little dark raincloud."
"Raincloud?"
"Cartoon thingy, I'll show you later." the pilot shrugged. "But anyway, no, there's nothing I want to know. It'll just make me want to punch something more, and if it ain't this Spider guy's face, it won't be worth the hell Chakwas will raise when I come to her."
"You," Crow snorted, "would punch Spider for me?"
"I'm pretty sure everyone would punch Spider for you." he pointed out. "But yeah, I mean, unless orbital bombardment was an option. I love me the smell of vaporized arachnids in the morning."
"It would have to be. Spider is almost three times your height, when he's not sitting on his throne." It was... weirdly touching that Joker would punch anyone for him, even if it was a horrifically bad idea.
"He has a throne?" the bearded man makes a disgusted face. "Ugh. I told you to try to not make me want to punch stuff."
"Spider is a little... 'chubby', as well." Crow feels a familiar disobedient thrill as he speaks ill of his 'employer'. "You'd have some climbing to do to get to his face."
"Dude, ew." the pilot shuddered. "Wait, how 'chubby' we talking?"
"Morbidly obese for an Eliksni." the Hunter shrugged. "I've only seen him walk once, in all my time on the Shore. He's like a mountain of lard."
"Yeah, okay." Joker made a face and shuddered again. "I take back what I said. I will punch any of Spiders top lackey's, but I'm not soiling these hand on rolls of fat to reach the man himself."
They spend a good while after that making fun of Spider and his men as Crow describes them in more detail. Glint even stays conspicuously silent at the pilot's more lewd insults towards Arrha. Somehow, it's the easiest thing Crow has ever done, made easier by that thrill of disobedience. After that, it feels less like his past is lurking about. It feels like pressure released from an infected wound.
He thinks that maybe he can call Joker his friend out loud, but still refrains from doing so out of old fears that still needle at him in the dark. Working with team transmat became easier after their conversation(though it was more along the lines of a roasting session), and he was content, so he decided to leave things as they were from there. Even if the pilot and his Ghost continued to act a little odd.
At least with his mind a little more at ease in regards to his own personal situation, he could focus more on getting everybody to stop hazing Legion. Ken and Gabby kept sticking magnets to him when he passed them, and Tali seemed to run passive-aggressive sweeps of the ship's systems every time he so much as glanced in the direction of a terminal. Joker just kept doing the robot every time the geth spoke(while he was out of said geth's line of sight, or course), and while it was the least harmful thing the rest of the team was doing, it was incredibly distracting and made it difficult to keep a straight face.
At least by the end of the week he wasn't stalling or blurting out 'no data available' anymore. Poor Glint was still embarrassed by the incident.
Crow was also grateful that they had been docked at Illium for the past week as well, he suspects that things might have been worse if the team had been unable to get non freeze-dried food, and Tali was definitly in better spirits whenever she came back aboard; apparently, herself, Shepard, and Garrus had been paying visits to an old friend who lived in the city, some asari named Liara. Crow thinks he might like this 'Liara', considering she had somehow managed to get them a part that Crow didn't think they would be able to find.
"So Liara finds us this rare, be-all-end-all part, and the first thing we do is take it apart and mash it with things that shouldn't work well with it." Joker muses as he pry's apart an actuator. Crow rolls his eyes and tries to keep his hands from shaking as he worked.
Gabby had finally convinced him to try coffee, and although it was one of the less pleasant tastes he's experienced in life, it had been warm, and it had helped with the chill of prolonged sleeplessness. Now though... he felt weirdly invigorated. Restless. Electrified. Maybe he could try channeling arc? He felt like he could try channeling arc. It was all about movement, constant movement and flow, and he could never master that before but right now he thinks he could run laps on every deck of the ship and still have energy leftover-
Focus!
"Well, it's the closest thing we could find in this reality to the part we actually need." Crow tells him from the workbench where himself and Legion have laid out the pieces of the part in question. Glint is hovering over each of them, and slowly building a schematic of what the end product should look like. It had to be repairable and able to be replicated by the residents of this reality, so instead of just a copy-paste of what a normal transmat looked like, they had been building the system into something made wholly within the achievable parameters of Normandy's engineering team. If they couldn't build it and maintain it, nobody could, and trying to make it out of technology that they wouldn't be able to immediately grasp would be a recipe for disaster if it broke down.
"Just a bit of tweaking and it should be good to go." Glint added as Joker handed over his own prize. They work on it until their lunch shifts come and go, the whole team focused single-mindedly on the task at hand, despite having worked through most of the night before out of sheer excitement. They were so close, and Crow can't help but wonder if this was what the original inventors of transmat had felt like towards their own breakthrough; the power of instantaneous transport at their fingertips, but not quite in their hands yet.
Well, instantaneous transport within three hundred meters, at least. It would still be a game-changer, even if the ship had to swoop through the line of fire in order to drop them off, and their pilot being top-notch helped negate some of the risk involved when it came to such situations.
They were almost ready for a preliminary test(and he had gone through another cup of coffee) when Shepard strode into engineering. Glint and Tali had almost finished making the first few transponders that were meant to be installed in everybody's armor if this actually worked; transmat required a fresh scan of the subject in order to work so it didn't put them back together incorrectly, and given the varied biology of the Normandy's residents, it would take a while to calibrate them all correctly.
"Tali, The Illusive man came through on that intel Liara was wanting, Garrus and I are going to go drop in on her with it. Want to come, we might hit somewhere for lunch afterwards." the Commander asked. The quarian shook her head.
"Sorry, Shepard, we're really close." she yawned. "We could be testing it within the next half hour, even, no way am I missing it."
"You sound beat, have any of you even slept?" the Commander crossed her arms. Crow tried his very best to sit still for the first time that day; he was starting to think caffeine and having a Hunter's Light didn't mix well, considering he had spent the evening fighting off the urge to literally bounce off the walls.
"Pfft, yeah." Joker scoffed, leaning on a console nonchalantly.
"Lieutenant Moreau has consumed 500 milligrams of caffeine within the last 8.5 hours." Legion spouted off. "Engineer Donnely; 600, Engineer Daniels; 1200-"
"Bloody hell, Gabby!" Ken exclaimed. The woman in question only fixed her commander with a coffee-deluded stare.
"Snitch." Joker muttered under his breath as Shepard fixed the whole team with a look.
"Crow has only consumed 300 milligrams, and I have detected a total of two dozen uncontrolled spikes in paracausal energy from him as an apparent side effect." EDI added unhelpfully. Now he couldn't help but squirm under Shepard's scrutiny as she leveled her stare at him.
"You have half an hour, then I want all of you off this ship." she ordered.
"Boo!" Joker offered by way of protest.
"I don't think I've seen any of you outside this room for the past three days; you all smell like sweat and nachos, and Crow looks like he's going to explode any minute." Ken gave his pits an experimental sniff and recoiled, while Crow forced himself to stay still again in order to contradict his Commander's statement, and Joker looked around for the offending remnant of food that had given away they'd had nachos in engineering.
"You're leaving the ship, reminding yourself there's an outside world, and then you're going to clean up and sleep." the blond declared. "No if's, and's, or but's. That's an order."
Joker slouched in his chair as Shepard turned on her heel and left, only to quickly pause and do an about face. "Except Legion. Sorry, you would cause mass panic if you left the ship."
"Acknowledged." the geth returned to his task as the door closed behind Shepard. Ken flicked one of his 'secret' magnets at the geth.
"Why'd you bloody snitch on us?" he demanded, though Crow couldn't tell if he was actually being serious, given that he was now casting Gabby occasional concerned looks. Crow didn't know why. I feel great, so she must be feeling even greaterer. Greater. Better. Whatever.
"No data avail-" the geth froze and let out that awful screeching noise from before again. Everybody covered their ears, and Glint drooped guiltily. By the Light, I thought he was done doing this! Thankfully, this fit was brief, and as suddenly as it started, it stopped, Legion's eye flaps working rapidly for a moment before settling. "Error. No data available."
"Bet we can do it." Crow blurts out. His heart is beating too fast, and he feels like he's channeling arc energy. They could totally do it! "We could do it in half an hour."
"We have to be off the ship by then." Ken stuck his thumb in the direction of the door the Commander had exited through.
"Yeah, but you heard Tali; we could have it done in the next half hour anyway." the Hunter reasoned. "And technically, if we get it working, we could be on the ship up to the last second of our time limit."
"Crow, buddy, I like the way you think." Joker grinned widely and rubbed his hands together, looking like the epitome of someone who had heard a bad idea and desperately wanted in on it."
"You want to go straight to testing on people?" Tali exclaimed, hands on her hips and glaring at Crow. "That's a horrible idea!"
"Well... not straight to testing on people." he defended. "I was going to do a complex object first, maybe a datapad."
He waved the one in his hands about a bit to indicate it, and suddenly a brilliant idea bloomed in his coffee-addled mind. He grinned.
"In fact, just out of curiosity... where is Liara's office?"
"Thank you, Shepard." Liara said, something sparking in her eyes that made Shepard uneasy. She'd seen it last time she was here, too, and it made her nervous, because she'd seen it in Garrus as well. But Garrus hadn't hidden his rage, the whole world knew he despised Sidonis. Liara... it was more of a cold, hidden thing, and that made it feel even more dangerous.
"I'm going to my apartment to analyze this; you two can meet me there later if you like." the information broker- she still couldn't believe Liara was an information broker now- told them as she stood and brushed the folds out of her dress. Next to Shepard, Garrus shifted his weight.
"It'll be dinner in around two hours." he stated. "How about we pick you up and go out? Tali should be out of the engine room about now."
"I... suppose so." the asari sighed, hesitating. "I should have enough time to get a decent start on the drive. Thank you again for getting this."
"It's nothing. Least we could do for you finding that crazy component team transmat was looking for." Shepard shrugged, trying to hide how uneasy the young woman's apparent obsession was making her. She wondered if Garrus saw any of himself in her behavior, and she wondered if this situation will end similarly to the one with Sidonis; with a friendship in jeopardy.
"You still haven't explained what that means." Liara said as she collected her datapads. "I wish you would dispense with the mystery, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find my lack of ability to find further information on the subject unsettling and fascinating in equal measure. All I can concur at this point is that the lack of information points to the matter involving this 'Crow' you told me about."
"That's for us to know." Shepard said smugly; she was going to be honest, she wanted to knock the socks off everyone with this tech, and she was looking forward to it. "And you to find out."
At that moment, there was a clatter behind them. Shepard and Garrus both spun around, ready to draw the weapons they had concealed under their normal cloths, but the only thing they saw was a datapad in the middle of the floor. That wasn't there before. It was on, and when Shepard bent down to pick it up, she saw that the only thing on the screen was a single sentence.
'Look out the window.'
A chill ran down her spine.
"Window." she said, drawing her weapon. Frowning, Garrus did the same, and Liara pulled a gun from under her desk. Edging cautiously up to the window, Shepard scanned the area below, looking for- was that Crow?
The Awoken was in the dark jacket she'd gotten him on the Citadel, hood drawn up, and upon seeing them watching him, he raised his hands in a double thumbs-up. What in the world? She put away her weapon, and the others did the same. Liara craned her neck and narrowed her eyes, obviously trying to get a better look at the only Awoken who existed in their reality.
"That's him?" for that moment, Shepard sees the Liara she used to know, the excited archeologist.
"Yeah." Garrus says. "I'm surprised he's alone, I thought he didn't like public spaces."
"Oh, he hates them!" they all spin around at the sound of Joker's cheerful voice. "But this was way too good to pass up!"
"Joker?" none of them had heard him enter, and those braces of his tended to make him a loud walker. Not to mention, Liara's new assistant would have fussed about letting him in. "What do you mean? How did you get up here?"
"Hi, Liara, long time no see." the pilot says instead of answering. He limps over to the desk and takes a fistful of nuts out of the small bowl that sits on it. "These Thessian piriks or peanuts, I can never tell? You know what, it doesn't matter, I'm starving."
"Then go and eat like I told you too." Shepard tells him, brain still trying to catch up with what was happening. He shrugs.
"Nah, not yet; we gotta get Crow to a firing range or something, you were right about him getting ready to explode." he pops a nut into his mouth. "Anyway, I just wanted to say hi to Liara."
"It's good to see you too, Joker." the asari in question says, looking him up and down. "You look well. I take it Cerberus credits attributes to the lack of crutches?"
"You bet." he says around a mouthful of (possibly)peanuts. "If I have to work for a terrorist organization, you bet I'm squeezing them for every last cred; more for me, less for their weapons division."
"Is that why you tried to requisition and fifty-eight inch holo for the mess?" Garrus asked. The pilot waved a hand.
"We might die on this mission; I'm not dying before I have access to a decent holo for once in my life." He swallowed, and took another fistful of nuts. Liara reached over and scooted the bowl away from him. "Just one more for the road, I promise. Anyway, I also wanted you to know; we fucking cracked transmat!"
"I-in half an hour?" Shepard sputtered. Wait a minute, is that how... surely not?
"Yes we did!" Joker cried ecstatically. He hit a button on his omni-tool. "Beam me up, Glint!"
Liara let out a yelp of fright and clapped her hands to her mouth as the Normandy's pilot disappeared in a flurry of particles.
"Shit!" Garrus and Shepard both rushed to the window and looked down, where a number of flustered citizens were making room for an overexcited team transmat as they bounced about, shaking, grabbing, and congratulating one another as Joker appeared in front of them, stumbling a little on his landing but otherwise intact.
"They did it." is all Shepard can say. "Those sons of guns actually did it!"
Shepard: "Are you oka-"
Crow: "My heart rate is 1000bpm and my blood is Mountain Dew."
I did write a one-shot that takes place between this chapter and the next for N7 Day, and I also dropped a second chapter to 50,000 Ways it Could Get a Lot More Complicated, so if anyone wants to check those out, they're out there.
Jebest4781: Glad you think so!
edboy4926: Lol yeah, might have accidentally broken an entire race's worldview right there. Time will tell!
NotLeviathan: Whooo, boy yes.
JGThorncross: Yeah, nobody really thought about it. That's why it happened. Honestly, I feel like the OG trio(Shep, Garrus, Tali) can't be surprised by anything by the time the third game comes to a close.
Warderner: Who knows? **makes evil ploting face*
Knightwolf1875: Just a little bit. I don't want to overdo it.
Kofi Sotri: I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far! Hopefully I can keep that interest.
Fare Thee Well!