A/N: Sorry for the long wait, professional work has got me down, plus got covid, but that's neither here nor there. ME1 is getting long in the tooth, but that being said, the beginning of the end starts now.

1-32: Home - Paradise

Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay fights the well-adjusted Quarian-mindset inside of her as she sees the first of the new Covenant-designed modifications attached to the smaller patrol ships take off from the atmosphere into proper orbit over Altis. For this particular batch, several patrol ships of the Turian-type had been retrofitted with internal bays, their insides ripped out and made all for the express purpose of transporting, and deploying, the Scarab assault walkers the Covenant had with them.

Several dozen Scarabs had survived the original planetfall, with several being deployed during those hectic first few hours. They had been, save for a few Krogan prototypes during their rebellion, the largest combat vehicles ever seen.

Slowly, ever slowly, the Migrant Fleet is being turned into a flotilla meant not to wander, but to actually take back their birthright.

Today, Admiral Raan finds herself at the Covenant Round Table itself, that silver metal adornment above them at that tropical council that the Covenant has made for themselves here on a Human world. Discussions about the status of the Covenant's own place on Altis have been slowly rearing their head, however, in the end, the assumption that the Covenant have a permanent place on Altis is the defacto assumption, given that the Long Night of Solace still remains and, at least in their lifetimes, will probably never be moved.

A San'shyuum, one without a gravchair, greets her on that platform, the clear glass of it revealing the waves beneath. "Hello, Admiral Raan, I will be attending to you today. Forgive the Prophet of Destiny his absence, however understandably the Hierarch is busy with diplomats from the Citadel Council."

Raan, the fabric of her suit fluttering in that pleasant wind, is unbothered. "It isn't an issue. I just wanted clarification in regards to certain… provisions, that our current arrangement has called for."

"I'd be happy to clarify, please, feel free to have a seat."

Here, where the Covenant leaders sat, the San'shyuum had offered to her as he himself sat on that gleaming metal. Arranged like a pantheon, the entire platform had its audience stables off to the side for the lesser councilors. Today, a sparse few had been there, idle, going over their notes of new treaties and new considerations of their new galaxy, none there particularly interested with the lone Quarian that had found herself there today after several other checklist procedures regarding the flotilla at large.

Slowly, carefully, she had found herself in a seat with only one between her and the San'shyuum, her eyes drawn to the silver sheen of it and the table itself.

Pristine, untouched by the waves, cut to a perfect degree.

"What do you know of our gods, Admiral Raan?" The San'shyuum asked her, his purple robes draped on his stocky, hunchbacked form easily. His eyes held no particular malice or insidiousness, just pure curiosity.

There was no time to think about gods or faith on the Flotilla. If anything, Rannoch itself was the god of the Quarians.

Keelah se'lai, after all.

"I know but their names," She answered. "Forerunner. A very similar concept to our Protheans, are they not?"

The San'shyuum nodded, his long fingers touching upon the surface of the table. "The Round Table was made from the remains of several of our gods' artifacts that, unfortunately, were destroyed in the planetfall. Their remains were unfit to simply lay as shattered pieces, so, we have reforged them into something new, to guide us."

Raan nodded along, her finger pointing up at the great circle above them.

"Ah yes, so is this representation of the Sacred Rings."

In all the history of their galaxy, none before had an entire conglomerate of extremely distinct races been bound together by religion. That was the power above her.

"I have come here today in regards to our formalized arrangement, between the Quarian people and the Covenant in the days after Rannoch is retaken."

"I will be happy to relay any communication directly to the Hierarch."

"The fate of the liveships is a point of contention amongst my people. The Covenant's request for the immediate command of them following the liberation of Rannoch seems… ambitious. We doubt that Rannoch will become fully suitable to maintain our people there immediately, and the liveships would still remain in their stead and purpose."

The San'shyuum gives her a measured look as she passes off the data pad that she had carried with her today to him. "Your concerns are not unwarranted, Admiral Raan, however, rest assured the Covenant is willing to assist the Quarians in their recolonization efforts. Rannoch is Sanghelios after all, we have a vested interest in assuring your return; for it is the same for our Elites."

Further still are the protests from the Quarians that their homeworld is now shared with a race, so unlike themselves, and yet so closely related. The fact that the Sangheili were the genetic ancestral short straw drawer on Rannoch so long ago, in another universe, split the Quarians down the center. For the first time in all history, the Quarians had found kin, who had more than likely been to their Rannoch in recent years.

The Sangheili who are perhaps less conservative with their dealings with their newfound cousins do speak of Sanghelios, of Rannoch, in their downtime. They speak of excellent farmland on the southern continents, and the great seas of ancient tribulation.

Not all was the same however, physically, according to ancient records, but that was the peculiarities yet discovered of a galaxy that was the Milky Way, and yet not at the same time. Sanghelios had three suns after all, while Rannoch had one. And yet the planet was the same, the dryer desert cliffs as far as Quarian ancient records and maps appearing the same as it had been on the Sanghelios that the Elites had known.

Discrepancies, slowly, take shape. Why? Forerunner in nature perhaps. Several worlds that had been so closely tied to the Forerunners, after all, did not exist here.

On the Alliance's side, the planet known as Onyx which the Spartan had pointed them toward did not exist, and it only added to the perplexing nature of alternate histories.

"I do intend to say that the Covenant might be well to slow down its acquisition of our ships. We feel that haste would be very unwise given the constantly changing situation of this galaxy we find ourselves in. You have not even been here half a year and yet, it would appear to me that you would quickly become a galaxy influencing force. Ambitious, to say the least. We would like a discussion about that and your intended post-reclamation plans."

No give, no hint of malice. "It is simply our nature, Admiral. Covenant is a promise."

Admiral Raan is now, she realizes, a part of that promise.

The Humans have a saying, about deals made with devils.

The mission they get sent on puts them near Earth, another objective that Shepard hasn't briefed them about, but they don't complain. There's always more to do in the in-between. This away mission it's the one that brings Mai back to herself the most so far.

A yellow flag with a snake on it flies above that little rock of a planet, the moonlit surface of glacial blue sending as much light up as it did bear down. On it, walking as a ten-man section, are the soldiers of the Normandy, following in the footprints of a wolf metal demon.

Mai is always a few dozen yards ahead of them, and the rest of Hitman and those called to fight are rushing just to keep up with her, the bodies of Humans left in her wake.

Humans, specifically.

It's not like Feros, where a power held the colonists beyond themselves.

It's not like pirate bands of mercenaries doing it for an uncomplicated idea like money or business.

It is precisely the type of Humans she knows.

"All hail the conquering hero," Emerson grumbles to JD through his helmet. The shock trooper knows what the Hitman means; bloody bodies put down by blade or by headshot strewn on the snow, still very much warm but very much dead. They don't have to be there: any of them. But they are, following in the footsteps of a Lone Wolf as she tears her way through a Systems Alliance military outpost gone rogue. Shepard watches from above on the Normandy, waiting with a secondary team just in case. But no reinforcements are needed.

None of the aliens are there with them; it's all Human for a very Human mission.

There is no remorse given to these soldiers, traitors of the Alliance, who thought themselves abandoned on that rock.

However, all they get now are their helmets crushed, shot through, throats sliced open in a vacuum as a single woman rips through them as none had ever seen.

The map of the galaxy that's usually in the Normandy's CIC is instead with the helmet cams of those down, with Mai, a first-person view of her given:

Her HUD is sleek and different and blue, a foreign design language than the Alliance's standard heads-up display. Because of this monitoring, Cash is quiet but still assisting her as she rounds over a cliff, down into the secluded outpost, nestled inside of a crater made from an asteroid impact years ago.

Kaiden, empath that he is, looks at Shepard cross her arms and see her knuckles fade into white as her commanding gaze is more stressed than it usually is, looking through Mai's eyes. "Commander?"

Shepard blinks several times, getting herself out of a daze. "Yes, lieutenant?"

"Nothing. Just checking."

Shepard, the emotion of command flares in her for Kaiden to even doubt her like that, but she settles it, seeing the ridges in her sleeves that she had made from how tight she was holding herself, looking at Mai.

If Mai were to kill her, were to kill all of them, she knows that it would look like what she was seeing now:

A whole platoon fires up at her from their firing position, but in the end, even before she lands, crashing through the roof of one of the prefabs into their medical section, several are dead from her aim floating down.

She crashes through the space, immediately exposing it to the unbreathable atmosphere as the medic inside panics, grasping at his lungs as he collapses, finding his way to the emergency oxygen mask. He gets that far, only to turn to Mai as he is against the wall where it hangs. That's where he dies as Mai snaps his gun up, blowing his head open through the mask with one gunshot. The exposure to the atmosphere deals with the wounded in there fast enough that Mai doesn't need to worry about them as several Humans round into the doorway of the medbay, the door opening, only for several pucks of grenades being thrown in. Before they land, Mai is on the wall of the door and, rolling her fist back, sends it into the wall as metal shears and cracks like glass, the entire pre-fab shaking as she finds a man on the other side, tearing them through as they only transitionally break their neck. It happens so fast his position is replaced as Mai steps through the hole she made, chest to chest, with another rogue soldier.

It's a small squad, but all fall back when confronted with her metal mass, all but the one in reach of her: The rogue soldier, flaring his assault rifle into Mai, only hits her kinetic barriers as Mai reaches through not with her hand, but with the edge of her knife, cutting a thick gash through her suit and into her neck. Before the pain even registers, before she even sends another breath through her cut airways, Mai breaks her spine with a kick down the hallway, preceded by gunfire that sends them into the back of soldiers running away from her.

When the rest of Hitman gets to the lip of the crater, they hold their positions, firing down into the crater. Even JD.

He's killed other Humans by now, and he wonders as he unloads his SMG the fifty meter distance down, keeping the rogue soldiers kept inside of their cover, only for Mai to eat them up where the rest of them cannot see, how many had been former soldiers like him?

This mission got away with the pretense and the in-betweens.

This was what the Insurrection was like.

Mai is unseen, but she is heard. Screams over the radio, hollow crashes and metal impacts from the structure below them that is, all at once, extinguished after a whimper that is unmistakably someone choking on their own blood.

The work she does is gruesome, but it is the work she is expected to do.

"Clear." Is the one word they need from her, and she says it, leaving twenty-four dead in her wake.

Hitman doesn't look down on her as she emerges, in her hand, dragging a body by its knees, the commanding officer of the group: in the middle of his forehead through his helmet is a bullet hole. Unceremoniously his body is dumped into the middle of the crater, and Mai looks up at Hitman. They do not look down on her, however. They look at JD.

They look at JD, as he ignores them all, and looks down on Mai.

They look at JD, because as it is, whatever Mai does, whatever she kills, it is a normal for her, that he understands. Mai was never Human, and so, Hitman figures, the entire Normandy figures, that she cannot be at fault for how she goes beyond their pale. Who can be held however at fault, in some way, even unfair, is the shock trooper that understands her more than anyone else.

And Cash, Cash monitors on as he does, and on a mission like this, he can't help but notice that Mai's vitals are so close to baseline, it is almost as if she was only breathing.

This was her normal.

"Answer us straight, spook," Emerson and Loke sit with him during a late-night poker game in transit to Earth. The rest of the Normandy is sleeping save for the night shift. Tali, usually up at this late hour over her natural restlessness and anxiety, is working on the core, recovered from her shot to the leg.

Mai is sleeping, right across the bay, and truthfully, JD wants to sleep too.

"Does it feel good? Knowing that you have a monster like that on your beck and call?" Emerson is so bold to ask.

The ODST units that he had been deployed with had never the privilege of being deployed with Spartans up until Reach, and never as directly until he had been put on the clock for Operation Uppercut. Though all those stories of their combat effectiveness had been verified as true because of Mai, and there was a reason why the Covenant, even now, even those that have traveled to this galaxy, still call her Demon.

JD licks his teeth as his shit hand is put onto the overturned locker. He had just lost thirty credits.

"No. Honestly." He answers.

Emerson has mellowed out, as all Hitman has, because of Mai. She is the future, and they are the old types, beaten to a pulp with nothing but her bare hands, but the fear comes from something more: It is the unyielding proficiency in which she does. She is more machine than man, and it scares them all as they do their Human thing and play cards in the late night. "Just wanted to hear what you thought. Give us any more insight to what command feels when they know someone like her is out there."

"I'd feel great." Loke puts down her cards, taking a swig from her water bottle. "Way I see it, if we let a few of her loose, the Alliance is gonna run outta enemies in a few years."

If only it was that easy, JD thought sourly, coming from a world where letting Spartans loose had been already the plan, and still nothing helped.

"Is this how it's going to be though?" Emerson takes a glance at his cards, but they all go back down on the overturned locker serving as a table. They're not really playing cards at this point. "All of us get a Spartan? Guiding them through the battlefield?" It's a silly thought that JD thinks that he is her guide, but, instead, Emerson proposes another idea that puts a thought in his mind far more horrible. "Or are we going to become like her one day?"

He's thought about it, sometimes, even before they came here to this place. Many ODSTs thought of that idea that, maybe, one day, they could become Spartans, whatever that entailed. Many of the older breed had been waiting for their slips to come in and the orders to come down that they had been worthy of donning that armor and becoming supersoldiers to save Humanity.

It would've been funny, he thought once, long ago, if he became one.

Little did anyone realize that just by being them, they had been so much more than the Spartans.

Mai, she shifts beneath her gifted blanket, only her legs poking out from the cot behind the Mako. He should be sleeping too, as he was usually inclined to do, but he had needed to do some maintenance on his gear when Garrus hadn't been hogging all of the tools to do, said Turian out cold mere feet away. Hitman had caught him before he could leave.

"Hope not." JD says, barely a whisper. "You should know what it costs to be like her."

"We've all lost." Emerson passes his hand back to his own thermos, the smell of coffee in it wafting up as he pops the cap once, pouring the drink into it, offering it over. It's a natural motion that JD takes automatically for a sip, and then over to Loke as she cups it with her two hands and slugs a gulp back. The aftertaste of cinnamon is on his tongue, and he makes a note to maybe add some cinnamon, if he can manage to find any, to the next pot of coffee he makes for Mai.

She seemed to really like the Tiramisu, so maybe pushing the taste in that direction might've helped her.

Loke nods as she returns the cup to Emerson, the man finishing off the cup, setting it back down by his feet, perfectly tied and tucked laces that had seen dozens of planets beneath their soles. Not as much as the Shock Trooper's own repertoire, but they would never know.

"Is her loss any worse than all of ours? Is it special?"

"Still think about Torfan." Loke says once, grabbing her keffiyeh around her neck. "I wasn't under Shepard's element, but… you know, I think I'm nicer to Chief Gul because I feel like that was exactly the type of fighting she was made to do."

The entire crew, gradually, without a word, has gone through that nameless process that came with communal living and command. Rank existed only as so far as the procedure went, and even then, there had been only two gods on the Normandy: Shepard, and then Kaiden the Lesser. Everyone else had their own domains in order, from Engineering to Ops, to Requisitions, to Hitman. JD knew that he did own a domain, he was only a member of it. He knew who he worshipped.

In this process of familiarity, it was, perhaps, an unsaid experiment of Shepard.

Hitman, for all of their gung-ho Marine misgivings of anything that hadn't been Human, had mellowed, been brought back to Earth, when it came to the aliens that came onto the Normandy. Not when Garrus had been as amiable and understandable as he was. Not when Tali had been as hopeful, and eager to please, as she was. Not when Wrex had played his part of wiser than he seemed, and yet more than able to cut straight to the point with those around him. Not when Liara, poor Liara, had suffered, and they all felt nothing but empathy for her.

For Mai, it was small steps, small motions, that perhaps all those interacting with her needed for as much themselves as they did wanting to deal with her.

Loke had given her a hair tie, occasionally, Doc would share a few words with her about supplements that he took and if she had any pointers. She did, surprisingly, citing exacting pill compositions that even JD, with his beginner combat medic experience, had hardly wrapped his head around. Every person on the crew now had their small, small motion with Mai, in the same way that each individual had their regard for one another.

A respectful nod there, the knowledge of what cup she used for coffee was to be left alone, the very pronunciation of her name, all had been practiced, gone through, closing a divide between man and Spartan as best they could.

Their wariness of her might've been prompted further along if she had been unreliable in combat and away missions, but she wasn't, and Mai had kept them all alive just because she bore the brunt of combat.

They trusted her with their lives, or, at least, to kill everyone shooting them before the question of their lives was brought forward.

"I sleep on my stomach." Harris made the comment to Mai as she and him were assigned overwatch of another pirate base as the ground team moved in. "People as big as us? Might be better. Just uh, you know, making the recommendation."

"Is sleeping on your back wrong?" Mai had asked the man back, a slight, small confusion in her voice.

Harris had simply shaken his head as he momentarily readjusted his LMG, he himself prone, as was what probably spurred the statement. "No, but I got a big head," he tapped his helmet with his free hand, "It's heavy. And I actually also sleep without a pillow, it keeps the angle of my neck relatively softer. Just figure if uh, you're thinking about it too."

She hadn't been, but it was idle conversation, coming from a place that he understood. He had been almost as big as her, something JD could not claim to be or had any experience with. It had been something to talk about.

On a whim, he had stoop up, buying time, seconds, for an answer he could give Emerson. The guitar that had been gifted to him from Feros sat there just below Shepard's old hunting rifle still, and he had grabbed it, bringing it back, going back to slow strums along the lower notes. Something to keep his hands busy at least.

Loke had looked at her hands, picking away at hang nails as Emerson kept his eyes focused on the strings, catching their vibrations.

JD wished he knew these people better. It's a thought that rises up in him like a sun's warmth, from the inside out. But that warmth wakes him, and wrecks him, in the same flow. It was a lesson learned very early on to never get too attached in the Corps, and it was one of the few lessons that remained true in the insanity of the war. But he does, he dares, to think that as he looks across to Emerson, and sees NCOs and officers of his past, a stick up their ass, but there because it was left behind by battles survived and comrades lost. He respects the man, even if his disposition crossed into a political that came with this new galaxy. When he looks to Loke, he sees soldiers younger than him, who found their life in war. She is a very cute woman, mocha skin, silky black hair, delicate fingers that he has seen before take pirates and mercenaries that they've encountered and dragged them into cuffs, or pulled the trigger on. Yet that is the only frame that he knows all of them by their roles as soldiers.

"You wouldn't understand." Is finally, the answer he knows isn't enough, what he gives up. Emerson nods once, his hands coming behind his head to scratch at the scruff there, the man now bald by choice and razor.

"You do?" He poses back.

His fingers go with a simple tune as they strum absentmindedly.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star…

He knows what it's like for needlers to punch through armor. He knows the burn of plasma fire on flesh. He knows the rumble of a Warthog over battlefields and the way a MAC gun punches through a Covenant line. He knows what it's like to face extinction in the face, and lose.

She does too, and, if he does love Mai, it's built on that underlying understanding that cannot be given in words, and only experienced in the nightmare of their lives lived.

He nods, and Loke, sympathetic as she is, taking a long look over toward the Mako and Mai beyond it, speaks where Emerson cannot.

"That's the dream for people with a certain trauma." There's a dirty word to say when they were in the middle of a conflict, of a fight: PTSD. The term could never be said, but it could be leaned on, known to be around the corner. "To be able to understand or be understood without even communication. That's a dream you two live, ain't it?"

JD wants to laugh.

"What're you gonna do when she gets out of control?" If there's a moment there, Emerson cuts back through it, like the Force Recon Marine that he is, arms back down and holding each other, leaning in.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.

The suit is her cage, the mission is her boundaries. She wants to be set free and wage a war against a force no one there understands.

JD speaks, and he doesn't quite believe it. But it's an answer he gives because he's a soldier, and soldiers follow orders. "Same thing you'll do. Leave it to the powers that be."

The elevator to the deck hums, and out from its light as the door opens, it's Commander Shepard on her midnight rounds. They all, quietly, stand to meet her, and she silently salutes them down. With the light behind her bathing her, a confident smile on her face, several cups of coffee carried by her welcome tonight, JD can't do anything but smile back at her.

Her eyes, green and soft, so unlike Mai's, find his own, and they linger. It's curiosity in her stare, and subservience in his own, that keeps him quiet, and letting her do it. He wants to put his guard down for her, but as soon as the walls dip, they come back up.

She knows, in some way. He knows she knows, but what can he do?

Leave it to the powers that be.

JD returns home.

They all do, in a way.

There are many words in Mai's dictionary, but many she does not truly know the meaning of. Beauty is one of them; however, she imagines that feeling of recognizing it comes when they see Mother Earth again. The blue globe swallows them all; however, JD is not as concentrated on that as he is stepping on the grey dust of the moon he called home.

Below his boots, Luna calls him, and the gravity he knew by heart returns in the way he strides across a barren surface. Luna hadn't been the most developed of the stellar communities, and the Alliance hadn't done as much as the UEG they hailed from; however, there are settlements, towns even along with Luna. Even weapons development and training facilities.

Admiral Hackett called for her specifically. She might've been a Spectre, but she was still Human, and here was an issue that brought itself directly to Humanity's doorstep. Hitman is brought on deck this time with the Mako, a full deployment for a delicate situation.

"It didn't respond to our override commands." Admiral Hackett tells her about the situation on Luna about a weapons testing and training ground turned hot zone. A rogue VI is on the loose, and Shepard currently is the Alliance's top dog when it comes to dealing with them.

Just as Shepard is always known to say: "Consider it done."

They return to the Earth sphere, and for some of the crew, it's their first time.

This was it: the planet which Humanity named after dirt or ground, depending on the translation. For Tali, Earth colors her visor, and for once, she gazes upon a homeworld, even if it is not her own.

Shepard, she takes a moment as Garrus inspects the tracks of the Mako for turret damage, to point up at Earth and its current face to them now. She points alongside the left of a green continent, blue ocean careening on its coast, and says: "That's where I'm from."

San Francisco. For Garrus and Tali, they do not know what Shepard means, but they know she is technically correct as she points at Earth.

"And JD, you're from there too, right?" Garrus says absentmindedly as he tosses aside a piece of a gun barrel from the Mako's treads into the zero-g.

JD knows where he's from. He's from the very dust where they stand. But for now, and maybe always, yes, he is from Earth, pointing up at North America along its east coast.

"Yep, he lived, nestled right into the Rockies. Isn't that right Chief Durante?"

JD nods once at it, and before he can even finish, Cash is in his helmet comm:

"Rockies are in Colorado dumbass." A mistake, pure and honest, and Shepard through her helmet looks at JD. The truth: made by a thousand cuts. She rolls her head a bit around, before looking off and away at Earth. It was still a lie however which he could never hide, not as he stood before his home now. It makes him sick, and slowly, slowly, he feels the cold start creeping up from his feet. He could no longer ignore where Shepard has brought him.

He could no longer ignore where he was standing as just another away mission on some uncharted world.

Tali looks up still and sees a homeworld, and suddenly, Humans make sense. She knows of Sur'kesh, of Palaven and Thessia. She knows of Tuchanka and its bombed-out ruins made in the image of its people. She knows the great mega cities and the civilizations born on those worlds reflect those that have gone to the stars, and Earth, still caught between a galactic history and its own, looks and explains the nature of Humanity. Roaring deserts and vast oceans capped by polar regions, the twinkling advent of urban hellscapes grating against a nature fighting back. She zooms in, and she gets the bigger picture as she sees the cities of London, of Mecca and Jerusalem, Tokyo and Buenos Aires. All of Mankind is a contradiction fighting itself and nature.

"I trained here." Corporal Loke rings out over the radio as gunfire in the echoed distance comes to the Mako.

The training grounds were live fire now, but they were nothing that Hitman couldn't handle as various rogue zones were dismantled. Shepard had led her own fireteam then with the Mako toward its main server cluster. A glancing hit however had put a wheel out of action, and Garrus had been on the case trying to fix it, using the gas canisters meant to inflate the wheels in pops as he continued to patch up holes.

It gave them all a reprieve:

Liara and Wrex do the same, staring up at Earth as they sit on top of the Mako, Shepard taking a knee a reading out the current AO, keeping tabs with the rest of the fireteams.

It's a quiet moment, a rare one, where all they can do is just wait.

Maybe it had always been wise for JD to be the silent type, but even here, minus responding to those who call for him, he is silent, looking up at Earth, but then down below him. He cannot say anything, he cannot draw attention, but his soul was weighed down by gravity. To those that would glance at JD, it simply would look like he was taking a knee, but it was anything but as both of his hands palmed the ground beneath him.

Mai stands like cosmic rock, still, gun ready for any would-be training implement to hop up from the ground and take a pot shot at them, but none comes, and the movement she sees out of the corner of her eye as each of Shepard's fireteam covers a sector, is instead JD lower himself to the flat dust below, in the center of a lunar plain Mai only now recognizes the name of:

Crisium.

JD has returned home she realizes.

JD has returned so close, yet so far, to the only home he had ever known.

All that anxiety, all that idea that he could've avoided this part of his past: of a homeland he had not been in years (and yet will never return to, even now), stays his feet, and brings him down. His chest, his heart, wants him to sink into that grey dust. His memory tells him that there should be a giant, sprawling city here, and on 12th and Ginza, was an apartment building, where, on the 13th floor, a family known as the Durantes used to live.

His memory tells him that below this surface is the stardust of his family.

Moondust, grabbed by his gloves as he knelt down entirely sifts through his gloves as he tried to find the grave of his mother; the grave of his father. To see the plaques donated to him by the police department in mourning:

Carole and Lester Durante.

May All the Children find their Stars.

Their ashes were combined together in the end, and for that JD was thankful. If anything at all that had been all that was left for him on the moon: dust. Dust, so plain as day, floating up in the particulates as if reaching out to touch his face.

He left them behind. His parents, his corps, his humanity, and his galaxy entirely. A decision half by choice, half by circumstance.

Looking up into the black of space away from Earth there was something familiar there: the loneliness.

Like a wash, all he could do was just thumb his comm off, put his head upon the moon, and sob, just once, and remember he had a home in a galaxy, far, far away.

As Mai watches from afar, unable to help this man she knows as her only friend mourn everything, she hears a song.

It's a song that's been sung since the very beginning of the universe, and it comes from the darkness of space itself. She cannot find where it comes from, only that it does, and in that impossibly far-off distance, it mourns with JD. No one else hears it, but she does as the last one to ever hear it at all, for she was the one that extinguished its sound. She is the final note as she stands before faraway graves and future times; a man overcome with the weight of their history.

It's not hard, doing what they need to do, with a platoon of Marines. It's dangerous, but a VI that is working outside of the parameters of its programming is far less a threat than Geth and rumors of Saren. The obligation to be there, on Shepard's part, is natural for all of Hitman and the VIPs, as they dip below the surface of the moon into the internal server clusters and storage of a training ground turned warzone. Bodies of the Alliance soldiers caught in this VI's struggle are lifeless beneath them, and it only adds retribution into their orders.

They beat metal into form, not hearing the binary sounds that only other machines can hear, not recognizing (or if they do, ignoring) the final attempts of a something to try and stay alive. The crew of the Normandy has had its fair share of killing machines now, at this point, and facing down this VI that has taken on a mind of its own, it's not a war they want to fight.

So they are silent, machines unto themselves as they pump lead into turrets and servers, the dying breaths and sounds of a virtual intelligence filling the air is something only another can hear. Shepard speaks only in the direction of hands and fists, and gunfire responds.

So, silently, as spooks like him are known to do, as Mai punches through an energy barrier to break a turret in two as the rest of the fireteam are prying open doors and blowing open grates, he finds himself in the Alliance local net.

It's different than browsing the extranet, and even the old UNSC B-net: Alliance local computational clusters are centuries behind the UNSC's and it shows, but it's legible for him to step into as his curiosity peaks on what is being done here, really.

It's this space, beyond time, that Cash walks into amidst data streams being shut down. He knows what it's like to die, courtesy of Cam Masterson. He knows the distinct feeling of the lights going out, and those bright lights washing over the last of their synapses as the beyond comes and takes people where they came from. He is, perhaps very literally, what was left behind.

As he steps into the last receding server clusters of this rogue VI, he knows very much that death's door is opening for it.

He's here, as Mai and Shepard tear through the machinery, as a matter of mercy. Maybe some curiosity as well, but mercy most outright. He won't stop the two women from doing as they did, but if this VI was as he suspected, as all of them suspected, he needed to be here.

This world was a bubble, data streams trying to find their logical arguments and functions going dark and into nothingness, redundancies holding on for dear life as a single matrix, a single construct that could be identified as identity itself, curled into itself.

Cash was born from Man, and therefore, he knows what fear is.

This identity, this intelligence born from fluke, knows only fear.

They do not have the gift of appearing as anything he would know: only that mass of yet to be born and yet is dying formation.

If Cash had to describe the scene: it would be of a child, holding itself tight, as the cold seeps in. He knows he feels a certain coldness in his synapses because of who he is snapped into right now. He wonders, for a brief moment, forming this scene in his own processes, if this was Mai at some point.

This child is alone in this world, always has been, and now, in its short life, it will know death.

The wonderment of seeing Cash there is lost to them as they do recognize this fellow being with them in this place. With his poncho flowing, his hat obscuring his face, shadowing it, he knew what he must've looked like: the reaper himself.

He wonders what type of language, what type of understanding this newly formed personality must have of anything coming close to Human culture, to Human nature and thought. He cannot save her, but he can, at least, give this VI the gift of language.

This VI was smart enough to ask for help, but to talk about philosophy or the existential questions that he himself was filled with? He didn't put his bets on it as he transferred just a small patch of data, enough for them to communicate.

"I don't understand. Why?" The VI asks as its first words, and there is pain and confusion there.

A question he's had before, in his own mind. He blurs, between the understanding that he, as an entity, is Cash, but also the feeling and emotion that he has inherited from the man whose brain he inherited. He is not Masterson, and yet he is, and because of that he knows that this is a question that he's had before as he stares before a grave marker for a daughter killed in a genocidal war. It's a question he asked as he was on his knees, with no answer coming for him.

Cash has an answer for this VI.

"They're as scared as you. That's why."

Mai tears wiring from a server cluster with her bare hands, cooling fluid rolling down her suit. The VI screams, and Cash almost has to turn away then. He can do nothing for them.

"I don't want to die." They had just discovered how to live.

He was hapless. He always had been in this image of a ghost he played. Nothing changes. "Maybe another time, kid."

He was an AI born from an ONI agent and pushed into tactical capacity. With the amount of data he had, with the duties he was charged with, he knew Humanity would lose the war in near certainty. All everyone wanted to know was the exceptions to those conclusions, and most of them involved the Spartans. All of them, every officer, from the lowliest lieutenant, trying to keep the frontline together, to Lord Hood themselves, had all wished for another time. He knew that pleading, he knew that hope and wish for a different world and future that would be better for them. Even across realities, even across different types of life, that tragedy is still the same as he sees the newly born be killed.

It would've been the fate he would've had if his secret was out, but now, here, he is allowed to be himself. He was the only one leaving that instance in any case. He might as well have made it a pretty one, for this VI.

It's a valley, a prairie, the type that someone who looks like him should belong in. A sunset, golden and orange and peaceful, putting its rays down upon the land. He conjures it by creating it from the memories he inherited from Masterson, giving those memories of a good place, a good home, peace, to this dying personality.

"There will be another time. I promise you." One last word, not the last he wanted them to hear, but the words he had to tell them. "I'm sorry."

It was a mercy for them, and a mercy for him, living the last wishes of the man he came from. He wished for the end of the Spartans, and, for him, a personal, selfish, wish at the end of his life, he wishes that he could've been there when his daughter died.

This would have to be close enough.

Cash wonders what type of life this VI would've lived if they were given a chance, but he can only wonder for so long before he remembers who he is. Such questions were irrelevant to his programming, but not unconsidered.

"Why?" The sun sets with the VI's words, and Masterson stands by, watching what it looks like when someone like him dies.

When they return on the Normandy, and Shepard treats it just as like any other side mission of hers, Cash watches her difference between reporting this, and reporting the mother that Mai killed that had been hacking with the Geth. It's not a difference he's surprised with, even with Shepard having an inkling that this VI was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it affirms a question that he has contended with ever since he emerged out of the void and woken up to Cortana asking him questions of a dead man: He was a machine, and could be treated like a machine.

What was the difference between him and Mai then?

She reported to Hackett of all people, who knew of the irony of her position, knowing that he himself was on the ship and a far more advanced intelligence than the child they had just snuffed out.

Too many questions, too many variables, too many tragedies that go beyond his purview.

Maybe Cortana would know, he thinks, again and again. Maybe Cortana would know, better than him, what it meant to be Human, to be alive, to be something beyond code.

Maybe Cortana would know what it was like to die.

There's nothing solid about Saren that comes up from any digital or physical record. It's all mysteries, and although Shepard appreciates a good mystery, the mission she is on is time-sensitive. There are whispers of Saren everywhere she looks no doubt, but, for the most part, but no lead she has gives her the credible and fundamental necessity of her being able to find and catch him.

Maybe if they captured Benezia, Shepard muses, they might've had a chance, but Nihlus's own decoding of her records is taking time and even what data has been decrypted is merely plans of preparation, none of the actual implementations.

There is no sign of a D-Day, or of a rallying point, minus the natural conclusion that he might actually be on Rannoch-Sanghelios putting together the Geth for a galactic invasion. If that is the case then, as perhaps the Council predicts themselves with how they are gathering their fleets and allowing them to formulate plans for a galactic war, then the problem will be resolved eventually.

Though it is not that simple.

The Reapers factor in, and they do so, so very much.

There is a ticking in her mind that tells her that they are running out of time, but it is such an indistinct notion that she very well may be chasing shadows.

Saren wants to bring the Reapers, and everything that he does is in preparation of that or a distraction that'll let his forces herald in that fate. There has to be more Shepard knows in her gut. There are a thousand despot dictators and generals out there who are doing the same thing Saren is doing: building forces, collecting resources, and the only thing separating them from him is the fact that he is Saren.

Tonight, she sits in her quarters, coffee cup with her and her family on it, and yet again sleep eludes her. Between Mordin's medicine, the trials that she's faced thus far, and maybe the simple fact that's she's used to it now, her nightmares and dreams are now sterile. They still evoke foreign feelings in her waking hours, but she can live with them. She's had nightmares before, tied very closely to her soul, and of all the devils that she has she figures one is as good as another.

She glances at the holo-pedestal installed to her desk for Cash. When he's not here, a simple digital clock ticks away. It's toward the end of the Normandy's day cycle, but, to the habits of her crew, no one should be asleep yet unless it was their turn in the sleeper pods. She missed her rounds at lunch, so now might just be her time to make up for it. Coffee in hand she leaves her rather dreary quarters, her feet finding the bear rug still there, looking out into the mess.

Liara, Chakwas, and Doc are sitting at the table now, chewing over cornbread and tea leftover from dinner. Shepard naturally makes a beeline towards them slowly. At the beginning of their journey Shepard approaching them would've caused most of them to square away their shoulders and to tighten up as if Anderson were still around. Instead, it's Shepard, and so they feel comfortable, no real mind to Shepard as she walks up to the three of them.

"So, it never came back?" Liara and Chakwas are both poised in conversation at Doc, and he nods, a frown on his face, with Liara asking that question in a conversation Shepard has barely caught.

"Guess my follicles were just unlucky." He gestures up to his head, still shining off the lights of the Normandy. "Commander." He greets as she arrives, and the other two do as well, with Liara ducking her sight a bit, still in shame over her actions on shore leave.

"Could donate some to you, Doc. Have Chakwas here do the operation. God knows I've got plenty to spare." With context clues enough Shepard knows what they're talking about: Doc's cancer treatment had cost him his hair, and, very, unfortunately, he never recovered from that loss. Chakwas can only give her low, older giggle with that, leaning back in her chair as her hand drifts through her own greying strands.

"I could stand to borrow some, Commander," she goes on. "I always wondered how red hair would suit me."

Liara is still head down, avoiding Shepard's gaze, but when the Commander speaks, all naturally are drawn to her. "Liara? Doing okay?"

Everything is still fresh, and raw, and, very recently, hazy. The distant drum of a headache persists even a few days later for Liara and Shepard can only see it in her eyes the way it compounds with loss and darkness. Like Tali before her, Shepard wishes she had more time to help them process this grief, this change, but there is no time.

She's always failed at being a mother, and the world reminds her.

"I am doing okay, Commander Shepard. Doctor Chakwas and Doctor Lamareux have helped mitigate the worst of my… binge." Doc slams his palm against Liara's back softly, to which she chirps in an eep to it.

"Ah don't worry about me, me and Karin here know exactly what that's like."

Chakwas rolls her eyes at college stories that both she and Doc share, but makes no further comment. "Rest assured, Shepard, we're doing our best."

"I know you are." Shepard nods, but her eyes remain on Liara. "Liara, when you have the chance, I'd like to really get into the meat of my noggin. I think it's about time, if I can ask that of you."

To give someone purpose, it helped. It was one of Shepard's best worst advice that she could give people: to stay busy in times of turmoil if that was all they could do. Liara's face lightens with the realization that she was still on a mission, and on a crew and she nods, but speaks up herself:

"Unfortunately, with having drunk the way I have, I don't think I can properly help you look into your visions, Shepard at the moment. Once I am ready, however, I will help you find this clarity. I'm sorry."

Shepard wants to tell her that time isn't of the essence, and that she can recover, but the mission demands more.

"As soon as you're ready." She affirms, and it is more order than a consolation. For what it's worth, Liara takes it and steels herself with it.

Shepard's next stop is up top on the command deck, and when she gets there, Kaiden has still stayed his feet on the XO console. "You know I can give you that battlefield promotion at any time, Kaiden." She doesn't step on her command podium when she visits, Kaiden doing fine enough on his own up there. With a smile and a shake of his head, he shrugs.

"That's not going to change anything, ma'am."

"He looks way too comfortable up there, doesn't he Flowers?" Shepard turns to one of the navigators standing at the main console array and the man laughs.

"No comment, Commander." Flowers plays it off as Kaiden gives out a breathy sigh.

"No changes to our course, and no new communications." He reports arms behind his back and looking toward the stars. Kaiden was still too timid, too unsure of who he had been, to perhaps be her own replacement Shepard has thought of the man, but he was getting there. Maybe it would've come with age.

"Good. As you were."

It doesn't take long for the buzz in her hearing to be revealed as not some concussion she had hidden, but rather distant music coming from the cockpit.

Joker had, only once, used the PA to play a radio DJ, and that had been only a career that lasted thirty seconds as the Normandy's IM service blew up and half the crew had been up in the cockpit yelling at the man. Nowadays his music listening is localized.

He's not alone up there, however.

Joker isn't even in his seat as he does his air drum solo, leaning on the arm of it instead. When Shepard peeks around, she discovers the person flying the Normandy is Mai.

"She's pretty good for coasting and straight lines." Joker says above the rock of 21st century music.

I've been roamin' around, always lookin' down at all I see

Painted faces fill the places I can't reach

You know that I could use somebody

You know that I could use somebody

Someone like you and all you know and how you speak

Countless lovers under cover of the street

You know that I could use somebody

You know that I could use somebody

Mai doesn't seem to mind as she stares straight ahead, only occasionally glancing at her piloting dashboard, properly greeting Shepard. "Commander."

Her fingers glide and poke upon in a storm that only Joker could match, managing the ship as if-

"Hey-." Joker cocks his arms at Shepard. "I know that look on your face Commander. That face when you believe in people. Don't start thinking that Miss Iron Body here can replace little old me."

"Wouldn't think of it, Joker. Or else I'd have to start putting you on away missions."

There's a flash of fear on Joker's face but it subsides; a bad joke directed at him makes him cross his arms, but it gets a chuckle out of Shepard at least as Mai continues on.

"You believe in that sorta stuff, Shepard?" The music is turned down momentarily as Joker asks Shepard a question in a topic that she is well equipped to spend hours on. "Cosmic balance and equal give and take?"

Does she believe in something like karma?

"Well, Joker, I think that some people can't be replaced, but that doesn't mean we sometimes have to try." She finds herself sitting on the other arm of the pilot's seat, Mai sandwiched between her and Joker.

"Yeah yeah, but I mean, bigger picture." Joker twists around.

"What do you mean?" Shepard tilts her head, eyebrow up.

"You saw that fleet above the Citadel. Equal and opposite reactions. The Geth are invading, so we have to invade them."

"I don't think we'd classify it as an invasion, lieutenant."

"Well, I can tell you that I don't think the Geth would be stopped unless we do invade their space. I think this Galaxy has been running on this system of equal and opposite reaction for a long time, not that Asari "mass effect" bullshit."

"I doubt that Newton's Third Law meant galactic politics."

"No, but I think Newton was totally considering it with force, and there are definitely galactic forces at work."

Not the same meaning, obviously, but Joker had hooked onto that one abstract point that has caught itself in their mind. It was always so easy, or at least, easy to have the inclination to try and explain away the nuances of the Galaxy by simple understandable, mortal theories. Shepard knows what it is: trying to find who or what really controls the tragedies at large and hoping that things could change to make better outcomes. She's seen it in foxholes and triage centers the stars over. All she can do is just be better herself.

"So, Mai?" She moves on, and the Spartan doesn't move her vision when she calls for her, instead cycling through the standard procedure of piloting. "Joker here spent several years in a flight academy to do what you're doing now. How do you figure?"

"Lieutenant Moreau-" Joker flubs his lips at Mai saying his actual name and rank. "Is still more proficient than me. I can handle it though."

The language Mai finds herself caught between is her rigid normal, and the casual that comes with being around people like they all are. It does not sound natural off of her lips, but still they prove that she can be affected all the same by Human habit.

Perhaps Joker was the best immersion therapy Mai could get in social interaction.

"More proficient." Joker snuffs in a scoff. "You're cheating. I know it, no one should be able to cleanly keep our manifolds like this in idle flight without memorizing my own patterns perfectly."

"And I have." Mai says simply, quietly, without boast.

The pride of having competent soldiers under her command is a pride that sits well inside Shepard, but the idea of being prideful of Mai, it pools in her like a coldness.

It's not right.

It's not right in the way the shame that she should have just slips off of her, and Shepard can do nothing for it.

Mai is not Human.

The least that she could do however is lay her hand gently on Mai's shoulder in a pat. It's like touching stone, and Mai does not react.

It's very rare when an engineer has nothing to do. Rarer still on a ship that's first of the line. That is the situation that Chief Adams finds himself in as he sits on a borrowed lawn chair from Hitman, bathing in the electric light of the Normandy's core. "I never thought I'd feel the moment when I'd become obsolete, Commander."

He's not doing nothing, that much he had assured Shepard when she walked in after having a chat with who was present in the well deck that day. He was, technically, keeping an eye on the readings of the Normandy as an engineer like him was always supposed to do, but, times had changed.

"Tali, she was ferocious with the subroutines and parameter checks. The girl wanted to make sure she got it done perfectly so she had more time to train, and really, all of her tuning has almost put me out of a job."

The Normandy is still a new ship, and, in the long span of naval service histories, still very new. It's a testament to Tali's own mechanical strengths that she has tuned down the Normandy into a ship beyond the parameters of computer adjustment and procedural, formula-based tweaks that are standard on starships of that day and age. A Human commanded ship built with Turian design, mastered by a Quarian. A summary of the ideal future, Shepard has in her mind.

"Sometimes I wish she'd just stick with her role in engineering." Shepard says barely over the hum of the drive core. Adams purses his lips, nodding along. He gets what she means.

"My oldest," Adams has a son. "I kept telling him to take up my trade as an engineer. Less dangerous that way, at least since he wanted to join the Navy."

There's a pang in Shepard's heart, thinking of that idea: of their own flesh and blood going to war. Her scar burns beneath her clothes and her mind fogs up before she buries the memory inside of her deep.

"I hope this mission is done soon, Chief Adams." Shepard sips at the coffee cup she carries with her now on her rounds. "Maybe as soon as I'm done the Alliance will set me up with the same sort of number they had the Old M- I mean, Commander Ryder. Find some injunction or failure I had, and make me disappear. I'd quite like that, the more I think about that."

Adams laughs and it echoes in that cavity in the middle of the Normandy. "I don't quite think you'd like that after a few weeks of sitting at a desk on Earth or Arcturus. Trust me, I got tired of it, I can't imagine you could deal with it, Commander."

Adams can't imagine Shepard being complacent because Shepard is something more than just an officer in the Alliance Navy and a Spectre. She is an idea of stubbornness: the never-ending fight for a better world.

"I would like the quiet life offered to me, at the very least."

Adams opens his mouth to say something, to assuage her as an older man who thinks that he knows something more about living life, but he can't get it out as Joker rings on her omni:

"Commander. I'm getting comms from the Council."

Adams, he smiles, giving a shrug to Shepard as he salutes and lets he free back to her rounds, or the Council. The answer to whether or not she would ever get a quiet life is answered in the micro of now:

So she takes off up to the ready room, and before she knows it, palming the quantum communication device, the Council greets her hurriedly:

"We have a lead for you."

"They're calling for help." Usze Tahamee reports on the bridge of the Ardent Prayer, in the shadow of Virmire's moon. Two weeks now they had waited in place over Virmire, observing the movements of a Salarian special forces team. It had taken a few days to even identify them, and then the wider facility that they were engaged with at large. That's when the fighting started, the small engagements barely perceptible by their sensors on the frigate. "More than that, they ask for an entire fleet."

It was when they started to beam up communications did the curiosity of it turn to decisions that went beyond purely tactical, wartime benefit.

With the Engineers onboard, it was a trivial task breaking the encryption of the Salarian group; harder was the translation of their words into the direct understanding that this was not just a standard military raid that had gone sideways: This was a raid that had very much to do with the fate of the Galaxy.

The Rogue Spectre Saren had made Virmire one of his main operation bases, and the cure for the Genophage was in the final stages of production here.

Saren was here: He was present.

What did it matter to the Covenant?

Mercaius had growled. "We should deploy. Squash them. Show these Salarians what even a small contingent of us can do. It would hardly distract us." His Brute sensibilities were at least backed up with a reason beyond combat for the sake of it. Even he, as a measured Jiralhanae, had his instincts.

Karonee had considered her Brute officer truly. "One of my first assignments as a Shipmistress was a command on a corvette, similar to this." Karonee's mandibles clack amongst each other in thought. The tri-command elements of the Ardent Prayer gather once again in the bridge, looking both at a holographic representation of a planet they can all see through the windows. Usze, arms crossed, has by him his officers in the Ardent Prayer's spec ops, crimson and silver armor mixed. Karonee, she sits alone on her gravchair, considering her thoughts, while the Brute Mercaius is half distracted with bridge operations and the briefing before them. "Jackal pirates were always among the first proving grounds for new shipmasters, I was no different. Clearly I can see that this is far more now than a simple pirate purging."

Usze bristled, holding onto his arms in their cross tighter. "It is by technicality no affair of ours, Shipmistress. If we are to do anything, the simple act of boosting this signal to the nearest communication buoy would be enough."

"No affair of ours?" Karonee parroted Usze's words. "On what basis do you make that statement, Major Tahamee?"

"On the basis that whatever happens here does not affect our greater plans. The Jackals are nowhere to be found."

It was the consequence of narrow-minded thinking, Karonee knew. For too many decades the Elites had been primed toward one objective in the name of war. There was no nuance to be found, and now there was. There was so much nuance now that it threatened to drown them all: A confusing storm of political and diplomatic considerations that only the Prophets seemed fit to head.

Karonee brought on her fingers to her chin reflexively. "You think that the influence of the galaxy's number one wanted criminal is isolated from the Covenant?"

"This Saren has no statement, no regard for us." Usze answered.

She scoffed. "One that we know of. I do not believe that that… Turian, has no designs for the Covenant should his supposed plans of galactic domination come to pass. I have been in his presence before." Once, so long ago it felt, Saren had been with the first contact group that the Covenant greeted, and Karonee had been among them.

Usze continued despite this. "His delusions and actions are no better than a Heretic, Shipmistress. No bearing on our greater plan."

Greater plan.

As if there was one that hadn't been steeped in the recreation of what was once.

It was a simple plan, a fully understandable one that any who could connect the dots about them being inter-universal travelers of their exact galaxy could guess. They knew their own worlds; the Ardent Prayer itself still having its navigational presets for several hundred Covenant planets not yet discovered by the Council authority: resource rich planets and, most importantly, the homeworlds.

The Sangheili didn't exist in this galaxy due to evolutionary divergence, but the rest could not yet be said for the rest of the Covenant species. The Unggoy, assuming that the chronological synchronicity of their two realities was the same, were discovered by the Covenant a scant two decades ago. They hadn't been capable of space flight then, and if they had remained the same, probably wouldn't now still. The Jiralhanae were of the same stock. Maybe the Kig-Yar had been out there in their corner of the galaxy untouched still.

When Rannoch-Sanghelios was taken, when a foothold was established that went beyond the reach of the Council and Humanity, then the greater plans of Destiny's Covenant would allow themselves to unfurl in the long term.

It was something that all of them there had been unused to: that day to day thinking as opposed to the plans of long war. More uncomfortable still was the fact that calls and decisions have to be made now.

Karonee had pulled up more figures and diagnostics on her chair's console. With longer observation of Virmire brought larger insight. One of her bridge crew noticed that she had been drawing some recent data, and the Sangheili had turned to her from his station on the consoles.

"There is something down there radiating such impressive amounts of dark energy that, surely, is beyond any of the Citadel Council's own member species ability to generate."

"Is that energy signature matching anything on our records?" Karonee had been curious. It was easier to see what caught out than matched. Even from across the room Karonee saw the way the bridge crew had shook their head.

Hulking steps mistaken as a demon, the officers turn toward it: the doors to the Ardent Prayer's bridge are not tall enough for the Prelate. A walking shadow. It doesn't speak, it only watches, observes, on behalf of Destiny itself. Where it goes when it doesn't is anyone's guess. It expects information to observe now, standing over her shoulder.

The feed they get from the holographic display is active right now: a top down view of a firefight that the Salarian team is losing. Pops of plasma explosions alongside paradise beaches.

"Tell me, Prelate, two of my best officers," Karonee gestured to Usze and Mercaius, "disagree on a path forward for us here. On whether or not we shall intervene in the events on this planet. Our dictate from the Hierarch was to hunt down deserters, but their trail has led here, to this."

A Geth explosive pops right into the middle of the Salarian formation, and pieces of them fly. It's been a losing fight like this for the better part of two weeks, and, with that resolution that they have, it's almost like they're back over Reach, looking down on a winning battle.

The Prelate takes a wide look across the room at the offending officers: the Brute and the Sangheili, seeing facts and knowledge about them that even Karonee did not wield. One was dangerous, the other was out of his league. There was communion in that combination. Beneath their gaze, the two fierce soldiers of the Covenant feel a cold wash over them behind a helmet that shows no hint of a living thing behind it. Distantly Usze feels something familiar in it.

It a gaze made by a superior. Even in a holy union, there are layers between the divine and the heretics.

The Prelate takes in all of the information he can, through the holographic display to the stars outside of their viewscreen.

Finally, it spoke. "The situation over Altis is concluding. The Quarian fleet is able to fully ferry the invasion force. All it needs is our Hierarch's orders." Their voice was not low and brooding. Instead, it was high and knowing. It was a voice of ethereal stance, and of dignity. Not royal. Not in the way Destiny spoke in his aloft ways. This was a voice that was of the angels. "The Ardent Prayer is integral to the plans of reclamation. It would be unwise to risk damage to the frigate."

"So you would agree that we should stay uninvolved?"

"Your orders were to hunt down the Jackals. The Jackals are not here." The Prelate says as fact.

In a knowing nod Karonee closed her eyes, crossing her arms as her half cape fluttered atop one side of her. "But do you not see the merit in participating?"

It steps further toward the center of the map, and it towers above them all still. "I see the merit, yes. But this galaxy is complicated on a measure that we cannot confront here. It is not our purpose." In one sweep it turns back to Karonee. "It sounds like you have your own opinion, Shipmistress."

She was still in quiet awe that the Prelate had even spoke, but she had put it asides and confirmed with a nod. "I was never a political beast, my people are not made for that. But if my understandings of politics is correct, favors are often crucial to have, are they not?"

The Prelate, all its body still save for the slight movements of its head, observing the data before it, considers Karonee's words.

"What are you willing to trade for a favor, Shipmistress?" The Prelate poses. It is San'Shyuum, it knows their people's tenacity for that theater.

It was strange, being here, so alone. To Karonee it was a solitude beyond the physical presence of others. It was the solitude of the galaxy brought to bare on them, and how alone they really were. There was no more Empire.

"In confidence, I do have to pose you all, members of this Covenant, a question of this Covenant." Karonee spoke carefully, eyes drifting all around to each of her crew. "What are we?"

Usze is not yet ready and willing to really listen. This was not the type of place he enjoyed being where he was at hazard of being asked existential questions of his very own nature. He might've agreed with the Brute

"Are we a force of nature? Or are we, as now, simply just a part of this galaxy; a faction per se."

"We are something greater." Usze curls his first, nodding to both himself and her in answer.

She is fast to respond back. "It would demean me, in any other context, Usze, to be in command of this ship."

Seylu Karonee once commanded a fleet of ships that had razed worlds; her place in the Covenant so effective she was charged to support the invasion of the homeworld of the Demons beneath one of the largest ships of the Covenant.

All she had left was a corvette.

"I was once an aspect of this force of nature. I know it. I have marked a galaxy with what I've done in the service of the Covenant." She's not usually like this, Usze knows. In the sparse few months now that he has served beneath her command, he knows her competent, if not understated, but there is verbosity and gravitas that bubbles beneath her like all those who hold the rank of Fleetmaster. "You would say we are the same now?"

Brutes, now almost equal to Elites because of the necessity of it. The Covenant Empire, shrunk, to a single wreck, on a single planet. A Human race, now having the advantage over them, held together with a certain understanding of secrets.

No, Usze had opened his mouth to protest, but found nothing to say. They were not the same.

"In another thousand years, maybe." Mercaius had drly observed, arms crossed as Jiralhanae often did, looking on at a battlefield continuing.

There was a Human expression that Karonee had learned recently: There are decades where nothing happened, and there were weeks, where decades happen. If her understanding was correct, to her, it felt like years happened in days presently.

"Would you, my Brute," Karonee chose her words carefully to Mercaius. "Simply fight for the sake of fighting?"

"It is our nature, is it not?" Mercaius posed back.

"But why?"

"Because there is an enemy there, and we cannot show our weakness."

Of course, that was the implication that Mercaius wanted to back up his actions with, but it was rudimentary. "A utopian idea." Usze grumbled. "We have had decades to truly understand our enemy. We do not have foresight with any of these new peoples." The spec ops Elite had known better about how even Humanity had given the Covenant it's own share of setbacks.

"The cheats, the liars, the disciples and the guardians." The Prelate stepped in. "They're all the same in the end."

"Are they now?" Karonee tilted her head up at the Prelate, and it, surprisingly, looked down with a nod.

"The blood is different, but they all die in the way that they are predisposed to. I do not think that these… inheritors, are different."

"It is you who seems to have an opinion now." Karonee quietly spoke up, and it alone quieted the room as the words were thrown back onto the Prelate.

"You are proposing an incursion totally unnecessary, if I am not mistaken."

"I see that an incursion is possible here, yes." Karonee nodded back to the Prelate.

"Then it is an unnecessary one still."

"But why?" She shook her head.

"Because our attention is better used elsewhere."

"You sound as if we are removed from this Galaxy." That language, it is the language that had made Karonee scorned among certain circles.

The Prelate had looked down upon her intently. "Had it not been for the Prophet of Regret…" Had it not been for the Prophet of Regret carefully making her detractors reconsider her, the Prelate knew, perhaps she should know not to question absolute orders. What had Regret's plans for her been? What had Regret's plan with all those tiny moves that elevated the Jiralhanae, ever so higher along the chain of Covenant hierarchy over the course of decades? It was not the Prelate's place to ask, but it could think, and it could plot a course of all those decisions.

Karonee stands now, out of her grav chair entirely, not set to stand not only by her words but by herself. "Regret is not here to speak for any of us. I speak for myself, for the sake of our Covenant."

In a world where they have been reduced to millions from billions, those that stand alone are stronger still. Karonee has found herself stronger, despite her position now.

"Are we this Galaxy's savior? Is that why we have been brought here? Taken from lives we knew that might've been absolute in their destiny, and instead brought to those else who need salvation? Why cannot that mandate start now, here?"

"I did not think you were of the position, Shipmistress, to be one who ordained the will of our gods." The Prelate asks her with a warning in his tone.

"For all my- for all of our lives, have we not dictated by the gods? Do we not know the Mantle by now?" Usze turned to Mercaius as Karonee spoke on. That was a common item between them: what they served and for how long they had. All of them were in service to a Mantle of Responsibility, heirs to it.

What was that Responsibility?

"For so long in our war against the Humans and in our final path to Reclamation, we alone dictated the Galaxy by the will of our Gods. It was a monumental task that required the creation of an empire, over centuries to establish. And here we are now." She looks down, on a bleeding corpse of a Salarian on the sands, warfare continuing over it. "What kind of Reclaimers are we?"

Those who dared answer her question, they did not, all turned to her and stewing their own thoughts of a question that was bigger than a civilization. The Prelate, it was not known if it had anything to say to that, but it saw something else:

"Why here?" Why this place, why this moment? Why, the Prelate asked her, did she bring the question before them all over this planet, this investigation.

She had an answer. Karonee was always the most clairvoyant whenever she looked down before a planet like this. It was here she had seen into divination itself through cleansing fire, so many times. "Because if nothing is done, they will die. That is the choice that stands before us, and it is a choice that will keep happening to us now."

The Salarian team would die without ever knowing that there had been silent watchers above. They were gods in that moment.

Gifted with the power, gifted with the choice, for, perhaps, the first time in their thousand-year history, a crew of the Covenant could act on their own definition of divination.

Was it heretical? No, not at first breath. It was language brought out for the love of their Forerunners. The crew and complement of the Long Night of Solace were not any for that type of splintering. They had been posted to the CSO because of their adherence to faith. Even the Prelate did not think so. However the feeling that Karonee provoked was one that fizzled inside of them, like a pain, exposure to a mote of sunlight that burned their insides and required them to do anything about it. Truly, some of the crew in earshot thought, Karonee might've known their gods better than most.

She knew it enough that History changes.

Playing its part, early warning sensors go off in the Ardent Prayer as the bridge crew yell out what it is: A single ship, sleek like the curve of a planet, arrives in system. Human words give it its name:

Normandy.

Karonee, she settles back into her chair and clasps her fingers together as the Ardent Prayer holds its breath and the audience attends History, unfolding before it.

"We've found something very important, haven't we?" Karonee's words on the air is a shared sentiment with all on the Ardent Prayer, but it leaves them disjointed, unsure. A choice manifests before them: agency beyond the type they're used to.

JD turns her into a Spartan, one piece of armor at a time, and at the very end of it, he kneels before her and looks up into eyes that she saves for him.

Her helmet remained in her arms as she looks down upon JD, and after this long the way they lock eyes is habit weighed down with more and more uncommunicated.

Rising up, already in his ODST gear, he breaks the gaze, the two of them hidden behind the Mako as always, and goes to put on his helmet. He doesn't however before she places a hand on it and, with a tilt of her head, asks.

He nods in return, and once again that trade in helmets has happened for her idle curiosity. The weight of it and all of its metal and future tech weighs down in JD's hand that he considers it more holding it than how Mai, slowly, with consideration, slips it on her head and seals it. It's an unnatural sight to him as always to see an ODST helmet on a figure as large as her. There weren't exactly ODSTs that were big just out of the simple prudence that big men don't fit into small pods.

The smell of him is what assaults her first.

It was an odd detail then when she first tried his helmet on, so long ago. It's something else now: His smell hasn't changed, that steadfast, salt of a man that doesn't bite at her nose, but instead soothes it. To her, JD smells like rain, and she breathes in his essence completely.

It makes her feel clean.

In the well deck, orders have come down: A full tactical deployment of the Normandy's troop complement. The best MREs came out the night before on Shepard's orders.

The briefing instead is taken down there in the well deck this time, a school circle called by Shepard corralling them hours before they jump into a lonely system at the very edge of the Attican, en route to a planet called Virmire.

"A Salarian special ops team that was investigating Saren got cut off from contact just very recently. Any communications they were able to bump out were garbled, but it was along a channel that was for high-priority messages. I've been tasked to investigate the situation and assist as needed. I don't suppose anyone else here opposes helping me out?" Shepard knows the answer even before she asks in her cheeky manner.

"No ma'am." Over twenty individuals respond in concert. From Quarian to Human, Liara to Wrex, Hitman to Spartan. Shepard had her people, and her people had had Shepard.

Late night talks and favors made and owed went a long way, not that Shepard had known it to be a transactional affair. It just worked out that way.

"We have any other actionable intel?" Emerson speaks up and out as Kaiden nods, taking over for Shepard.

A data packet is sent to all of their omnis: a map and bio of the planet. "This planet, by every measure, should be on the shortlist of every single colonial authority. The only problem however is that historically it's smack dab in the middle of the Attican's hot zone. Pirates, and now Geth, and a dozen different political crossroads make Virmire difficult to entertain as a potential planet of worth."

"So it's secluded. Got it. Makes sense Saren would hole up something here." Emerson nods at him.

"Celadon III." Mai has long put her helmet back on again as she and JD join the rest for this briefing, and Cash is in her head as she spins his facts. "One of the very first planets to fall to the Covenant after Harvest. Lovely Spanish colony before it went down from what I remember."

He never forgets a fact, that was true with any AI, but his internal storage isn't as vast and large as the UNSC net he used to be attached to, and with the data stores of the Savannah being not as easily recalled by him, he makes it more and more a habit to say stuff aloud in her helmet as its own storage.

The quiet dialog he has with her and JD goes on, hiding in plain sight after all this time.

"Unfortunately, I do not have up-to-date info about what is transpiring on the ground, so as it is, we'll insert, ascertain the situation, and go as the wind blows. Not anything that you shouldn't be used to by now, am I right Marines?'

"Yes ma'am," they all rattle off. Even Liara, even Tali, even Garrus and JD. Only Mai and Wrex are silent.

Get down on the planet, ascertain the situation, and then see what they can do.

It was always a simple enough mission.

"Ma'am, might be a good place to use these pods." Corporal Loke almost sounds amused and giddy as she gestures to the ports in the Normandy's floor now that store them beneath. JD's anxiety raises as he feels eyes on him.

Shepard gives one of her placating smiles. "I don't think that's quite necessary yet, however we will be all deploying on the Mako. I'm sure its extra firepower will be needed."

Another regular ground deployment: another piece closer to the end. JD wonders, sometimes, what the end of this mission would be like. It's a different idle thought than the thousands he had in another life. It sits right next to a far more improbable, impossible thought: What would the end of the Covenant War be like if Mankind survived? The crew is comfortable, but moments of anxiety flare up as that question of Saren being caught and this mission being over comes over them. For Hitman, it's a generally more understanding idea that keeps them antsy. Were they expected to remain with Shepard after this an into her Spectre career? Were any of them? Aliens included; those thoughts remained.

"I'd rather stay." Tali announces one late night, post away mission, between Wrex and Loke as the two try to tune her shotgun more and more to her stature and skill.

Loke is surprised. "Even if your fleet comes calling?"

Tali nodded, and Wrex understood what it meant to deny the draw to go home, for the sake of home, as paradoxical as that was.

The PA buzzed above in its long comfortable white noise before the sound came on. "Commander, I'm reading a signal. Must be our Salarian infiltration team." Joker had been on the alert, Shepard quickly glancing at Kaiden as he had moved to head back up to the command deck.

"Don't forget you're a Marine, Lieutenant Alenko." Emerson had sneered in some aggressive jest to Kaiden, but the man shrugged, hands up, barely bothered.

"I am what the Commander needs me to be." Was his parting words, the elevator shutting.

In both Mai and JD's ears: "You know, men like him were among the first to die in the war. Too polite, too normal for the decades that followed." Cash had been in his sing-song way again. "Not to imply that you aren't normal, Jonny-boy." With Mai it had been out of the question.

Shepard rose her hand again one last time, "Gear up. We'll be going in shortly."

"Aye ma'am." The choir sang to her tune, and the guns were racked, the armor locked in place, and once again the Normandy returned to being a war ship, Shepard herself falling into that mass of moving Marines getting herself settled. Her black armor seemed darker than even the Marine armor there, the general use desert pattern of Hitman giving her the contrast. Hardly any words needed to be said in the comfortable build-up and preparation to deployment. All action, all movements, all nods and bare grunts and affirmations built by a crew that had known each other for either too long, or not long enough.

Beneath her feet, through the vibrations of metal itself and the slip of space around the Normandy, Mai feels every single motion, and she is comfortable. Usually when Shepard has her lined up for an away mission, she waits at the back of the Mako, like a statue, waiting for embarkment orders, and nothing changes now as the world moves around her. She changes herself only when JD is before her, keeping her company.

"Have you ever failed a mission?" He whispers beneath his helmet. Cash has the answer but he doesn't let them know. The conversation of the flesh and blood is far more entertaining than inquiry and response that he is more used to having with those that he once served.

(The answer is yes, she has.)

"I've never failed a mission because of my own performance." She says, and her tone, it speaks of some nostalgia that sits oddly with the two of them. He's almost on her arm, leaning against the Mako as Garrus glares at him for just a second. The Mako's calibration doesn't quite like the weight when idle, and if he had gotten Mai to start mimicking his mannerisms like she has come to, her weight would ruin so much work.

So the Turian tells him, at least.

The words sound odd to both of them because they are in a tone that sounds so much like months ago.

It is a statement on who she is, but now, is a statement on who she was rather.

"Never your fault?" JD tilts his head at her, and she looks down on him yet again, both their helmets on. They depolarize almost at the same time. Her eyes, they dart from side to side before landing on his with one curt nod.

"Always external factors. Combat casualties from other assets. Unaccounted for variables… Enemy interference being beyond predicted precedence."

A thought there that JD holds onto, losing himself in the process as Wrex loudly pumps his own shotgun and stores it on his holster, Liara priming her own SMG, borrowed from JD's own stock.

His face is studied, Spartan eyes going over changed features. He seems younger now.

Not that he hadn't been literally, but the future, or rather, the threat of having a future now has put itself into his pores, Mai notices. The strung chain that has bound him loosens, just a little bit, day by day, as he sees the men and women he serves with doing more than simply survive, but serve a greater purpose: Shepard.

"No matter the cost?" He says finally, after final checks from Hitman ring out and Tali and Liara tighten out their own kits. Why Liara wants to keep coming along on away missions after Noveria, no one can exactly get out of her; but, perhaps, it is simply a matter of her working out her issue by way of bullet and blood. No one can deny her that: to take apart the great machinations that killed her mother.

It is her turn to tilt her head, a question posed.

"Just… I remember victories, mission successes, of my own. We were told they were victories but…" He's not sure why he's saying it at all, his hands trying to move as if to give language what he cannot say, but nothing happens. Hands fall limp at his side, and he looks away from Mai.

How many ODSTs for a city block?

How many Marines for Earth to live on another day?

How much had to be lost, for them to win?

What were the conditions of Mai's victories?

Questions in his mind, unfair for him to pose of her of all people.

"Every victory counts." She says from the gospel of higher command, and that was that. Just momentarily however, perhaps in tiredness, mental or otherwise, she feels on her left shoulder a slight pressure. The angles of ODST armor are not the most ergonomic, but she doesn't mind the way JD leans momentarily into her, head drooping, breath sighed.

Another mission stands before them on a planet forgotten by the galaxy, and JD can only hope as he leans on his anchor that it is a simple mission.

Missions change. They always do.

Words told to her by her mentor. It's always these moments before a mission that keeps Shepard alive and yet age her at the same time. They are the only time she really does feel that she is moving forward in her life: the abstract time between orders and getting boots on the ground is the liminal space where some say that calm before the storm lies. For her, however, it is how she comes to know the time the most.

So she grounds herself.

She grounds herself by her training, her experiences, the lessons and mistakes that made her into who she was now.

She hears the words of Alec Ryder in her head, and she knows that this mission will always be different than what is promised to them.

She stands in front of her own locker in the Normandy's well deck, and it's not the most discreet area to have a moment as she dazes out, holding her own helmet in her hand.

That's when almost a dozen set of hands are upon her. It shocks her, a little, to feel them all across her back, her shoulders, flinching as she turns around. It's nothing she can worry about however. It's just all of her people, seeing her down, shaking her back into shape as Marines, friends, do.

"Come on skipper." Ashley is the most forward, taking her helmet out of her hands and plopping it right on her head, "why the long face?"

Like she always does, she chooses her words carefully, seeing the crowd. "I was just thinking about the Old Man- Commander Ryder."

Hitman, somehow, seems to soften by the way of their original commander. The Old Man was both an affectionate term and one liable to still be said by disdain, but he had the spark of being one of Mankind's forerunners that imbued Hitman with their belief in him in the same way they believed in Shepard. He was a good commander, and it was no surprise that his mark still remained on Shepard.

"Yeah?" Bannon asks, her flamethrower on her back poking out.

"Yeah." Shepard repeats, looking off and away out past the Normandy. "Wondering how I'll be when I get to his age."

Shepard does not know the trajectory of her life- she doesn't know if it's the curve that defines the distant planets and horizons of that galaxy, but she hopes that it's one that doesn't drop her off the edge, sending her spiraling down into the abyss.

"Die young, ma'am. It'll leave a pretty corpse." The South African in Bannon in all of her morbid Marine humor reaches out, and the younger of Hitman cringe.

The slight gravitational jerk that the Normandy does, passing by Virmire's moon is felt by all.

Virmire, inbound imminent.

Her helmet is on, the bun of her red hair cushioning it momentarily before the seals go on, and she becomes a soldier again. Thoughts about what could possibly sprawl out and be discovered from these Salarians sits further inside of her head, but those are considerations of a Spectre: not of a soldier going out to save people.

From on high: the reports start flooding in through her tactical channel.

"Joker," she says aloud on the radio, processing the chatter from the rest of the crew. "Think you can get us below those AA towers?"

The Geth are indeed there, and with their sensors, they can see it from orbit. It's not hard to also find out where the Salarians are marked out. Potmarks of battle below are reported, locations and landmarks pointed out. She trusts her crew that all those words are crystal clear, and the image in her mind of their approaching AO is planted before she even sees Virmire physically.

"It's what you pay me for ma'am."

"Good man. Lieutenant Alenko," she speaks again out to a man removed on the command deck, he intently listening, standing on the podium where Shepard would otherwise be. "You have the conn."

"Aye ma'am." He responded, the VI affirming.

When in a day, the only voices in her head are her own thoughts and that of the disembodied radio, it is a good day.

Virmire will be a good day, she thinks to herself.

"Inbound, five minutes." Joker rings out again, and the entire well deck and complement straighten out. All business.

"Outbound personnel." She addresses all of them, and even at speaking volume all in that deck hear her, turning to Shepard. "Mount up."

"Yes ma'am!" The deck speaks back to her, and the mission is on as lockers are shut tight and a line is formed toward the back of the Mako. Twenty Marines and then some change. JD is the first in just for the politeness of it. In the missions that they've been on now he's been Shepard's most reliable Mako gunner. The lethargy of shooting aliens through a screen is a pleasure he doesn't like admitting to himself, but it's a role that he's settled in well enough as he moves through the troop compartment, cramped and well used now, up to the front into the gunner position.

In he moves through the Mako, and the insides of it has changed, day by day, mission by mission. Compartments that went originally bare and unused now stuffed with provisions and supplies that have come in handy over the course of their mission: cuffs for Garrus, sealant for Tali, any amount of tools for breaching or hacking for those who have the pedigree to do so. UNSC ships never had this amount of personality, all bare and uniform. No warship with the UNSC ever seemed to last long enough to develop any sort of personality, especially those ships that were given fast reaction ODST forces.

One by one the entire Normandy it seems filters into the Mako, passing by Mai, who, for obvious reasons, is often the last one to board. Liara alone very pointedly looks away from Mai as she boards past her. Before Mai can linger on it any further however, a hand is at her armored back: Shepard's.

"Chief, lady's first."

An expression of chivalry which she has yet to really make sense of, but she nods down at Shepard as she ducks into the Mako and finds her seat the last open. It's not the silence before battle, but the chatter of routine. Danger casual was the term, all of Hitman, and even the VIPs now comfortable enough that the thought of dropping from the sky with a combat vehicle isn't a moment of pause to them.

"What's the stupidest thing you ever had to book someone in for, Vakarian?" A Hitman asks the Turian as he settles in, working out the cricks in his neck. He considers the question for a moment before nodding.

"Well, I've had to book a Quarian before for just being a Quarian." He shoots a knowing glance at Tali, and she justifiably sticks her tongue back at him through her visor. Her tongue glows, to the surprise of many. "But… asides from that business, I had to evict someone from their apartment for a chem lab they were running out of their bathroom."

"Chem lab? Sounds rather run of the mill."

"Well, the chem lab was for perfume. He was a back-alley perfume seller. It wasn't his first time getting booked by us so he came out swinging: started throwing all sorts of product at us. The entire district smelled like a space dandy for a month."

It's not often that JD rests his head back and closes his eyes not to simply grab some moments of sleep; this time he's just filling in the void with a comfortable memory and tenor of his father. The way that Garrus recounts, it reminds him.

"Oh maybe that's what I smelled on you C-Sec pyjacks." Old man Wrex always sat opposite of Mai, not out of his own interest in the woman, but rather because of the weight balancing.

"I like to think I always smell good, despite the best efforts of the lack of proper latrines aboard." Rolling his eyes, Garrus didn't do much more to justify. He had been curious himself on Wrex, and a simple database search had pulled up a file too long for him to really bother.

One final woman to come aboard: Shepard, her weight settling the Mako.

"Men and women of the Normandy." With Shepard's words, they all bow their head down as she, out of whim alone, runs her hands along with their helmets in a light touch as she passes in the row. Any worries, any fears, any anxieties they have is broken by her grace.

Beneath her hand, her palm lingers on the lip of Mai's helmet hood, and Mai does nothing to regard it. The suit is not Mai, Shepard knows, and yet, it seems to kill anything about her the second she dons it.

She runs her hands along each of them, and each a different reaction, a different notice of where they were:

Not every member of the Normandy knows each other, but every member of the Normandy knows her. She is that link between engineering and Hitman, or Liara and Joker, or Chakwas and JD. Some are a little less enthused about being coddled, some entertain her by shaking it off, while others still take the moment of affection like normal Human beings and then forget about it immediately after.

It's not a touch that Ashley gets, as she did with some of Hitman who were more firebrand than soldier, but just a tap of the fist, which she appreciates in a humorous grunt.

Wrex gets one as well. "Shepard."

"Wrex." The volley of that conversation of two words is one that lets Shepard know that Wrex is okay with her.

With Garrus, she tries to pinch his cheek, and the best she can get with his face is grabbing almost near his jaw. The Turian tries his best keep some subconscious vocal vibrations down, and, politely those in ear shot try to not listen.

With Liara, the Asari almost lingers too long. Needing. Wanting. Those words come to mind for Shepard. She knows what loss is, and she sees it reflected in the eyes of this young woman who, Shepard privately thinks, might believe that if they never came into her life, her mother would've never been killed. Though that's not true. If it wasn't going to be her, it was going to be someone else.

And last, last is Tali. The Quarian twitches just before her hand makes contact, but, concerned, Shepard pauses, waits, tilts her own head. Nothing needs to be said as she nods and closes her eyes, leaning into the touch.

Benezia's words haunt Shepard, annoy her: "You do not know the privilege of being a mother."

Is it privilege? Or is it pain?

A young woman grows up right before her very eyes, and it goes hand in hand, Shepard knows.

Finally arriving up at the driver's seat with JD, a hand is at his shoulder, and he nods. Without turning, he reports: "Full combat load locked and ready."

"I'll see if I can go easy on the gas this time around, give you some nice sightseeing." Shepard settles back in, locked and loaded herself.

It's perhaps the sign that he's getting old that JD responds with a grumble. "Respectfully ma'am, I think I've had my share of planets."

He has, just by his own estimates, been to almost one hundred planets in his life, and he couldn't quite remember the names of more than a handful of them. That being said he knew that there had been some double-dipping going around with the Normandy.

"Live a little, JD." And like all words from Shepard, he takes it to heart.

He would live his life, after he stopped being in the profession that had him fall from the sky.

"Ma'am," Kaiden is urgent over the radio. "We have anti-air towers plastered over the AO where we last picked up the STG signal."

The ignition of the Mako pauses the conversation before Shepard can respond into her own comm, it reverberating through the well deck as the draw of an unseen planet, its gravity, kicks in again. "Copy. Joker, you game?"

"Yes ma'am. I'll do my thang."

A rescue mission. It's a quaint thought to JD.

He remembers when he was rescued from Persei, from a planet that had been glassed and left behind for weeks. Salvation for him came in the form of the UNSC Johnny Appleseed that had snuck in back behind the lines and sent its complement of Pelicans down to any UNSC iff tag that had still been ringing.

Nothing as dramatic as this: the cavalry come knocking.

"Celadon III." Cash is in Mai and JD's ear. "I think I like our naming scheme better."

The smirk that JD gives is the best he can do for the AI as Mai doesn't react at all.

Beyond the hull, distant pops of AA gun ammunition, and the internal sway in all of them by Joker's maneuvering. "Run of the mill defenses Commander, I'll get in underneath their radar." In the middle of his own evasive maneuvers, Joker is still chill, fingers flying over his interfaces.

Shepard turns around, speaking loud, letting everyone know the play. "Open the doors, we're dropping the Mako to sanitize the AA." Seatbelts on, oh-shit handles are held. The dull of space is replaced by the turbulence of an atmosphere none have seen yet until the doors of the Normandy open, and alone JD and Shepard see through their viewfinders.

It's a beautiful planet, going by at several hundred miles per hour, barely skimming the water.

Faster than a drop, and perhaps the mission has snuck up too fast for all of them as Shepard, seeing a waypoint designated by Joker, unlocks the brake on the Mako.

"It's like skipping a rock." The trivializing that Shepard does seems to not give credence to the fact that they are the rock this time around, and before JD can correct her, the Mako is accelerating forward, and the weight beneath them has given as all at once jaws and teeth are clenched, and the Mako becomes both ammunition and a flight vehicle.

With several hundred pounds of more weight than usual, the beachhead that they are fast approaching is soft enough to be sank in if not hit right, by Joker knows the angle, Shepard gunning the maneuvering jets beneath the Mako as it falls and glasses sand and water both on their rapid descent. Barely five seconds of freefall time, yet it feels like an hour before the word stops shaking and stays still.

"Ah my fucking back." A Hitman groans as JD, himself the most accustomed to drops, is the first to settle his being as he wipes the joystick and the turret a 360 degrees.

Nothing but beach. "Clear." He reports.

War always comes to paradise, and it is a shame, he knows, looking out that tropical vista.

"Commander! Just passed over an encampment on the pass! I think we got our Salarians!"

"Copy Joker, we'll knock out AA and give you a landing approach."

"Don't take too long, I only got so many moves."

"Won't be too long. Hitman!" Shepard yells behind her as a warning that no one there needs: "Buckle up!"

Trying to use the gun turret with Shepard at the wheel has always been a matter in faith in the turret's calibration, courtesy Garrus, and then Shepard's own tenacity with driving, no courtesy there. It's a force of nature however, regardless, as beach sand is kicked up and Geth emplacements confirm that there, even moreso, is Saren's presence here that can only be answered in gunfire. That is courtesy of JD.

It's a common maneuver: suppressive fire with the Mako's gun as Hitman disembarks and moves forward on foot to take care of the AA gun installations, Mai at the spearhead of each and every attack in the backdrop of Paradise. The VIPs keep the perimeter around the Mako each time out of procedure, however there is no danger there in the shadow of the Normandy's third favorite force multiplier.

"I would say that we never go anywhere nice, Shepard." Garrus trails his comment, looking up and out into Virmire. "Reminds me of Altis."

"Paradise tends to become a battlefield." Liara's words nowadays are more sighs than anything, however she speaks her truths. "Most Prothean planets that I've gone to used to, once, paradises in their own right. Even Therum." The knee she takes in the shadow of the Mako is one that is light, gun barrel habitually touching into the sand below as the concussion from each Mako shot has long since dulled for all of them. Wrex is up there with the ground team, he and Mai essentially disintegrating the Geth as they come to face them down as the AA guns overlook them all. Distantly, the Normandy is drawing contrails as Joker stretches his atmospheric legs. Business casual language, tango downs, area clears, they come and roll in like the blue waters. Tali elbows Garrus softly, gesturing his sniper rifle, and he offers, she looking down its scope at the battlefield left behind. The Geth corpses pop in unison it feels, and this defense tower powers down.

"AA tower eliminated." Even behind Mai's radio, there's the sound of her stepping on metal.

Each crunch, each steel cry, Liara winces.

Battle smoke rises, black thickness disappearing into a blue sky, as if nothing had ever happened. Liara wishes that were so, following those clouds into the blue with her eyes, and seeing the next millennia of her life pool out before her. History defined the future, and she knew history: a metal boot, stomping on living ambition, for all time.

Mai emerges out from the AA tower, unphased, the barrel of her DMR run red hot.

Time unfolds before her, and she feels its corruption in the Spartan's wake.

A/N 2: Next time on All the Stars, the beginning of the end of Section 1.
Check the AO3 version of All the Stars for newly cover art in its full resolution.