Today seemed to be one of those days when nothing interesting would happen, which Joker was completely fine with, considering that his crew's definition of 'interesting' dangerously overlapped with the much less intriguing concepts of 'mortal danger' and 'metric shit ton of explosions'.

The Normandy was orbiting idly above the uninhabited Eletania while the Commander was planetside with Williams and the archeologist doing whatever she usually did when Hackett sent her on some errand. Which meant that there wasn't much for him to do besides getting on Pressly's nerves and monitoring Shepard's comms and suit readings.

A series of curses and muffled noises coming from Shepard's link snapped him away from the extranet article he was skimming through- a review of the latest Galaxy of Fantasy DLC – and made him switch to Liara's feed. Given the Asari's obvious (and hopeless) crush on Shepard, her cam would almost certainly point at the Commander.

What he saw on his holoscreen immediately made him reconsider his previous judgment on the day's uneventfulness: the Commander was currently climbing up a tree, hanging from a branch at least five meters above the ground.

"Uh, boss? Did a bird steal your wallet down there?" he asked on her comm channel. Her annoyed reply came between ragged breaths and sounds of snapping twigs.

"Pyjack, not a bird, and it wasn't my wallet."

Wait, she was messing with him, right? She must have sensed the confusion in his silence- she clarified her statement as if the reason for her climbing escapade was the most obvious thing ever.

"Hackett sent me to retrieve a data module, stupid pyjacks got to it and brought it back to their nest, so now I gotta climb up to it to get the damn thing back."

That makes so much sense now, he thought between fits of laughter.

"Right. Don't know what else I expected. I'm surprised you didn't try to get up there in the Mako, actually. That tree looks a lot less steep than a few mountains you've pushed that box on wheels up."

Shepard was now getting closer to the large, round heap of twigs and grass that he assumed to be the pyjacks' nest. She tested her bearing on a bulge protruding from the dark brown trunk and leaped to catch a branch above her head.

"Wait, wait, wait, stand still a sec, I gotta capture this on camera. This will be on the Alliance recruitment posters for the next ten years, inspiring the young and brave to enlist and teach those damn pyjacks to keep their tiny dirty paws off our memory cards."

I take it all back on today being boring. This is the best day ever.

"Keep it up Joker, and I'm going to order you to take your comedian ass down here and get the data module yourself."

"Uh, I don't think crutches are the best climbing equipment, Commander."

She snorted and leaped to a nearby branch, then dug her foot into the cavity between two forking limbs and pushed herself further up, her hands firmly gripping the bark.

"Yet another great reason for you to shut your mouth, Lieutenant."

By now, a small crowd had assembled behind Joker's seat, drawn by his enthusiastic giggling.

"What…?"

Without turning around, he raised a hand to shush Alenko, motioning for him to come closer and see for himself. A half concerned, half amused expression appeared on the biotic's face as soon as he, too, registered the surreal hilarity of the scene playing on the cockpit display.

Shepard's comms crackled to life once again.

"And don't you dare record the camera feed, or I swear I'll have you clean the toilets for the next three weeks."

Whoops, a bit too late for that. The whole thing was better than any vid he'd ever seen, no way he was going to only watch it once, but she didn't need to know that. Not yet, at least. Being on restroom-cleaning duty for a while seemed a fair trade for such amazing blackmail material.

"I'm hurt, Commander," he replied in his mock-offended voice, "you know I'd never do such a thing."

Shepard was now doing her best impression of a sloth, slowly crawling towards the nest while hanging upside down from the horizontal branch.

"Good to know." She inched along the short distance that separated her from her target, then pulled herself up to a squatting position and rummaged a hand inside the nest.

"Gotcha, you asshole!" she yelled in excitation, holding the data module like a trophy in her raised up fist.

"That's great and all, boss, but you need to get back to the ground now. I think the Normandy is a bit too heavy for me to land it on top of a treetop to pick you up."

She stared down at the 10 good meters separating her from the grass below and scrunched up her face in a mischievous smirk that promised she was going to do something that would land a normal human in a hospital and possibly get them arrested too.

"Oh, that's the easy part."

She grabbed the branch and swung down, then she let go, plummeting down towards the grassy surface at the base of the tree. Just as Joker had resigned himself to having to write his commanding officer's eulogy (a sentiment shared by the rest of the crew, judging by the looks plastered over his shipmate's faces), she caught herself on a lower branch, and let herself drop again to a limb closer to the ground. From there, she pulled herself to her feet and jumped the remaining two meters or so to the soft turf underneath.

His knees and ankles hurt in sympathy–a fall like that would have left him bed-bound for months on a lucky day–but she simply got to her feet as if nothing happened, cleaned her hands on her thighs, and signaled the ground team to go.

"Come on Joker, pick us up. I've had enough of those damn space monkeys for a while."

He was still smiling in disbelief as she walked out of the airlock a few minutes later and gave him a gentle pat on his shoulder before heading down to the cargo bay to get out of her armor and gear.

Fucking superhuman, that woman, he thought to himself, trying to blame the flush that was rapidly creeping up his cheeks on the temperature in the cockpit or on anything else than her unexpected touch.