Chapter Four – Insomnia
"Was killing the salvager really necessary?"
Jules was seated on a high bed in the med bay of Grunt's ship while an asari doctor – whose name Jules had briefly registered as Doctor T'Carra – shone a light into her eyes.
The medical check-up had been compulsory and Jules hadn't really been in the mood to argue.
After watching the Normandy's destruction, the whole crew had become very quiet and the plush, clean ship had taken on a somewhat sombre feel. None of the asari had seemed to have the nerve to say anything and so it was Grunt who had eventually broken the silence by ordering Ereba to set a course for the relay and then escorted Jules and Liara to the med bay.
Liara had been examined first – at Jules' insistence – and had then been led away by a few of the younger asari who had seemed thrilled at the prospect of speaking to her, though Jules had noticed that Liara's eyes held significantly less enthusiasm. But she had followed them all the same and Jules was left alone with the doctor.
While being instructed to 'look left' she had caught sight of one of the pristine windows that looked out onto the stars and had been grimly reminding herself of what clean glass looked like when the doctor had spoken.
"Better than letting him get his hands on my ship," she replied moodily.
"Really?" T'Carra sounded intrigued, "You'd rather see her destroyed than in someone else's possession? Look up."
"Obviously," Jules muttered as she raised her eyes and was confronted with an equally pristine, smooth metal ceiling.
Doesn't this ship have a single scuff mark? She mused irritably as she began to feel increasingly homesick.
"And what of the salvager?" the doctor continued to probe as she crouched down a little and peered closer into Jules' eyes, "Do you think he deserved to die?"
"He was an arrogant little shit who was perfectly willing to kill me and Liara just to get his hands on some scrap metal," she snapped, "do you really think the galaxy will mourn him?"
The doctor pulled back and clicked off the torch, leaving Jules to blink uncomfortably as she tried to get rid of the bright spots now dancing around her retina. The doctor didn't react to Jules' outburst as she instead calmly activated her omni-tool and performed several scans in silence.
From the patience and grace that she was displaying, Jules guessed she wasn't one of the younger asari. She was tall and the pale markings that framed her face were strangely geometric, reminding Jules slightly of the scars she had woken up with after Cerberus had rebuilt her.
Those scars had been healed centuries ago and as Jules reminisced, her thoughts drifted to Doctor Chakwas. The grey-haired doctor would never have let Jules get away with speaking to her like that, she had been one of the few people willing to put Jules in her place if she ever overstepped the mark and the memories made her smile slightly.
But this doctor was responding to her sulking by ignoring it, making her feel more like a petulant child than a respected hero. As the silence continued, Jules eventually grew to regret snapping at the woman and sighed heavily.
"What's with all the questions anyway? You're not a psychologist are you?"
That prompted a flicker of a smile on T'Carra's lips, likely because of the distain Jules had said it with, "Not by trade. But every element of the crew's health is important to me, raise your arm."
"Is the whole crew asari?"
"Apart from Grunt, yes. Now make a fist."
"What's he like, as a commander."
"Thoughtful, conscientious, very patient with his crew."
Jules raised her eyebrows in mild surprise, which obviously didn't escape the doctor's notice.
"You find that hard to believe?"
"No," she said quickly, "it's just… he used to fall out of hospital windows and set fire to C-Sec cars."
"And I used to dance on tables in Chora's Den," she smiled, "the war changed a lot of us. You can lower your arm now," she continued to frown at her omni-tool as Jules dropped her arm and eventually enough time passed that Jules knew she wasn't getting a simple all-clear.
"Don't keep me in suspense, Doc. Give me the bad news first."
Doctor T'Carra glanced up at her and hesitated before she spoke, "Commander… when was the last time you ate?"
"I'm not a commander," Jules told her bluntly, "and I ate this morning… or… yesterday morning," at some point the days had all started blurring together.
"Mhm, and when was the last time you had a meal that consisted of something other than dried rations?" Jules thought for a moment, opened her mouth to answer and found that she had none. Real food was hard to come by on the edge of the galaxy and it had been well out of her and Liara's price range for quite a while.
"You're malnourished," the doctor informed her, "dangerously. You also have muscle strain from poor sleeping conditions and your body was suffering from the cold. A few more weeks and you would have started to notice some serious health problems. Surely you must have known your lifestyle wasn't sustainable?"
Jules closed her eyes briefly but didn't reply, "What about Liara?"
"Her condition isn't quite as bad as yours, your implants put a huge strain on your metabolism meaning you need to eat more than she does but… well, she has numerous vitamin deficiencies and is in dire need of a decent meal. You both are."
Jules looked away quietly. She had known for months that their lifestyle wasn't exactly good for their health but she had ignored it, knowing that facing up to it would mean leaving the Normandy and trying to find a way back into society.
Liara had said nothing, content to wait patiently for Jules to come to her senses like a typical asari. Jules wondered if the modern day asari would have put up with life on the Normandy for quite as long as Liara had.
The truth was that no matter how much Jules thought about it, she just couldn't face the idea of returning to civilisation again. Crowds and cities and curious faces all wondering where she had been this past century. Questions and gossip and people forever wanting to air their opinions. The thought made her shudder.
Perhaps after all these years away she'd developed agoraphobia… or perhaps she was just a grumpy old woman alive long past her time, she mused with a smile.
Doctor T'Carra had gone quiet, still gazing at the scans on her omni-tool with a curious frown.
"Something else wrong?" Jules asked, making the asari look up.
"No, sorry Shepard. I was just looking at your implants. The technology is incredible, far beyond anything we have today."
"Cerberus were advanced even before the war," Jules agreed, she knew that two centuries of rebuilding had left little time or resources for innovation and technologically the galaxy was still behind what it had been before the war.
"They were certainly built to last," T'Carra muttered, "I doubt anything else this advanced managed to survive the Crucible."
The door to the med bay opened and Ereba entered. The pilot lingered for a moment in the doorway as the doctor turned to look at her, "Shouldn't you be flying the ship?" she asked casually but not accusingly.
"My shift just ended," Ereba said, "I… was wondering if I could talk to Shepard."
T'Carra nodded, "We're done here, you can take her to the mess hall, get some food inside her."
Jules hopped off the bed, swiftly taking the chance to get away and making a beeline for Ereba who – compared to the rest of the crew – was something of a friendly face, even if they hadn't spoken since before the war.
"C'mon," she muttered as she reached the girl and steered her back out through the door, "if you linger too long around doctors they always find more tests to run."
…
The first thing Jules noticed about the ship as Ereba led her through the gently winding corridors, was that there were hardly any straight lines. Everything on the ship was curved and smooth. The corridors snaked their way between rooms without harsh corners or junctions and even the walls and the ceiling were circular so that they formed more of a tunnel than a corridor.
At first glance the general aesthetics reminded her most of asari designs but not exclusively, the more she looked the more she saw human and salarian influences, showing how much of a confused, cultural muddle the galaxy had become after the war.
The lighting wasn't to Jules' taste. It was a blue-white glow that illuminated the corridors at a level that strained her eyes uncomfortably though it didn't seem to bother Ereba. Aesthetics aside, the ship had clearly been built for an asari crew.
"I can't believe it's really you, Commander," Ereba said as they walked, chuckling softly to herself.
"You can drop the commander," Jules told her, already sick of having to correct people, "it's just Jules these days. And I was just as surprised to find you flying a ship, you were a gift shop attendant the last time we met."
Jules remembered Ereba most from Illium where she had been soul-searching over her relationship with an uncommonly poetic krogan called Charr. Jules had helped the pair of them get together and remembered feeling pretty good about it at the time, until several months later when she had to deliver news of Charr's death to Ereba on the Citadel.
"There wasn't a lot of call for gift shops after the war," Ereba explained with a smile, "I had to find a new trade."
"Piloting was an interesting choice."
"Oh it wasn't the only thing I did. I've been a nurse, a scout, an engineer, a scavenger, whatever needed doing really."
Jules smiled and nodded. It was amazing the new skills people had learned after the war.
"What made you start working for Tevos?"
She paused for a moment, "Homesickness, I suppose."
"You miss Thessia," Jules understood, "you… realise the old Thessia is gone, don't you? Even if we repopulate it and rebuild the cities, it won't be the same."
Ereba gave her a small, hesitant smile but said nothing as she led Jules into a large mess area.
There were several tables, enough for perhaps fifty people to sit comfortably but the only one that was occupied was in the far corner where Jules saw Liara sitting with her arms folded and one leg slung over the other as a gaggle of young asari surrounded her.
They seemed to be bombarding her with multiple questions about everything from the reapers to Matriarch Benezia. Liara was deflecting most of them with one word answers and hard scowls but it was apparently doing nothing to dampen the maidens' enthusiasm and as Jules entered, Liara looked up and caught her eye with an expression that screamed: help me!
Behind her, large observation windows lined the wall, offering a breathtaking view of the stars they were travelling through.
"I'll get you something to eat, Commander," Ereba said and moved away before Jules could once again tell her that she wasn't a commander anymore. She could tell that was going to get boring quickly and sighed as she wandered over to join Liara and her group of fans.
"Girls," she muttered to the young asari as she came up behind them and as they turned to see her she was greeted with glittering eyes and wide smiles.
"Commander," one of them said and Jules gave herself credit for managing to clench her fists only briefly, "we were just asking Liara about how you two met."
"Were you indeed?" Jules held Liara's gaze meaningfully as she slipped into the seat beside her and saw a kind of pleading in her eyes, coupled with a good amount of annoyance – Liara was not fond of fan clubs.
"It was on Therum wasn't it?" another added eagerly, "They say you saved Liara from the geth, that you found her trapped and alone in some prothean ruins and dragged her out while an army of geth chased you!"
Jules blinked, she wondered just how many stories about them were being told across the new galaxy, and how many were anything approaching accurate.
"I'm not sure it was quite as heroic as that," Jules started, very aware of Liara who had her head down and was pinching the bridge of her nose as she tried to hide how uncomfortable she was, "and I wouldn't say Liara needed saving exactly, you should have seen her take down the krogan battlemaster who was stupid enough to get in our way."
Liara's head shot up now, her blue eyes glinting incredulously as she threw Jules a questioning frown.
"Really?" one of the asari asked with excitement.
"Oh yeah," Jules replied before Liara could stop her, "charged right into him, coupled it with a shockwave and sent him flying, I'd never seen anything like it."
"You must have been very young at the time, surely?" one of them said to Liara, who remained briefly lost for words before she stammered her answer.
"Erm, yes. I was one-hundred-and-six."
"And you managed to take down a krogan battlemaster?"
"Well…"
"He was as surprised as you," Jules cut in, nodding emphatically, "didn't know what had hit him, course he didn't have much time to worry about it – Liara finished him off before he knew which way was up."
"That's incredible."
"I…" Liara looked around at the eager – and now very impressed – faces but seemed not to have a response so after a moment she simply sighed helplessly and looked away.
"Listen," Jules spoke up, smiling gently at their interrogators, "it's been a bit of a rough day for us, perhaps we could carry this on another time?"
"Oh," the asari who spoke didn't hide her disappointment but she smiled anyway, "of course, sorry Commander. We'll just… get back to work then."
The group rose and left and once they were out of earshot Jules turned to see Liara glaring at her calmly, "As I recall," she began, "it was you who fought the krogan battlemaster, while I cowered in a corner."
"Shh," Jules smiled, "they don't need to know that. There's enough heroic stories about me out there already."
"I don't want to be a hero, Jules. I was always perfectly content working from the shadows," she stopped and sighed, "I have a feeling we're about to be flung back into the lime light."
Jules looked at her for a moment, "Are you alright? About the Normandy I mean."
She paused thoughtfully, "I think so. What have we honestly lost? Our memories weren't stored inside the Normandy's hull, we'll always carry them with us. It was… a shock, that's all."
"Yeah," Jules muttered, "I know," the Normandy had witnessed so much history in its time, seeing it reduced to debris in mere seconds had been hard for her brain to process.
"There is one thing troubling me though," Liara added, "if you knew the drive core was likely to overload… did you intend on killing us both?"
Jules shook her head softly, "I didn't really think the core would overload. Not until that scavenger showed up. I just figured that I'd at least make him chase the old girl. But then I saw the energy readings when it was powering up and… well… Tali's never wrong. It was better this way anyway, one last victory for the old girl."
Liara was silent, frowning down into her hands as she always did when she was deep in thought.
"Were you afraid I'd become suicidal as well as deranged?" Jules asked after a while and threw her a wry smile which Liara returned in kind.
"You're not deranged Jules, you're just… eccentric."
"Ha! You really think so?"
"Well I should know. I spend enough time inside your head after all," her smile made her eyes dazzle like sapphires as she met Jules' gaze, "you know, if that scavenger hadn't attacked us, we'd have powered up the FTL after Grunt's ship had disengaged from us and we might not have been able to stop the overload once it started. In a strange way, he might actually have saved our lives."
Jules grimaced slightly as she realised the truth of that, "The galaxy never stops finding ways to surprise us, does it?"
…
The food was better than expected. Jules had envisaged the kind of packed rations she remembered from Alliance ships but instead they were given chicken – that had been frozen for the journey – and vegetables that had apparently been grown on board.
It was all freshly cooked and a very far cry from the dismal stuff she and Liara had been surviving on these past decades. So much so that Jules actually found it a little hard to stomach the meal, her body was apparently too used to living on less.
It took them a while but eventually Jules and Liara finished eating and were shown to their cabins.
They were given separate rooms. After all, there was absolutely no reason for anyone on board to assume they wouldn't want separate rooms; their relationship had never been widely known about in the galaxy – even if it had been widely rumoured.
Jules lay on her back as she gazed around the cabin. It was small, with room only for the bed, a narrow set of drawers and a cramped bathroom area concealed behind a plastic screen. The bed was small too but the mattress was soft and the sheets were crisp and smelled of soap.
The shower had been stocked with a whole horde of hair products, likely by someone who knew nothing about having hair and had simply grabbed anything and everything they could find.
Therefore there was shampoo for dry hair, damaged hair and coloured hair, products to strengthen, thicken and add shine, conditioners of varying different qualities and scents and a whole boxful of combs and brushes, some of which she was pretty sure were meant for horses.
There was also, interestingly, three different hair dyes which made Jules wonder how the crew would react if she walked out the next morning as a blonde.
As much as she had been determined to play the part of the miserable old recluse being dragged back to civilisation against her will, she couldn't help but cheer up a little as she stood beneath a stream of hot water – real, clean water that hadn't already been recycled a-hundred-and-fifty times – and smiled at the thought of a very confused asari buying up an entire aisle of hair products.
As it happened, she washed her hair four times, revelling in each one as she felt months of dirt and grime flowing away. It had taken about half a bottle of conditioner before she had managed to get a comb through the tangled birds' nest that her hair had become and after well over an hour of work she had finally managed to get the knots out.
She had plaited it neatly in a braid that fell across her shoulder and now she lay staring at the clean, bare ceiling, letting her thoughts drift away with themselves. They were mainly centred around Liara.
She hadn't really expected that they would share a room, they had only slept in the same 'bed' on the Normandy to try and stave off the cold. Not that there hadn't been other benefits too…
Looking back, she couldn't actually remember when she and Liara had first become lovers, it hadn't been until after the war, she knew that much. Though in retrospect perhaps it had always been inevitable.
During their fight against the reapers she and Liara been friends. Good friends. Close friends. Maybe more than friends. Companions? Confidantes? Family? She wasn't sure she had a word to adequately describe it.
They had kept secrets that neither had ever shared with anyone else, found comfort in each other's silence more than conversation and generally understood each other on a level that seemed to go beyond anything Jules could describe.
She couldn't remember when romance had come into it, the affair had just sort of… happened. They had been living in draughty, prefab huts on Earth as they tried to rebuild London while simultaneously coordinating an entire planet-full of survivors and organising repairs to the mass relays. At nights they had just sort of, ended up together and by day not a word about it was ever said. They were both naturally private people and becoming intergalactic heroes had only made them more so.
When the last of the Normandy crew had died off and they were the only two left, Jules had suddenly become truly aware of the realities of a longer lifespan and it had terrified her. It hadn't been long after that when they had stolen the Normandy.
When it was just the two of them, they had quickly fallen into a comfortable way of life and they hadn't always woken up in the same bed, not until the power had started failing and the heating was turned down.
But if it had only been for the sake of practicality, why was she finding it so hard to sleep on her own?
She must have mulled the question over for an hour or more before she eventually gave up on the idea of sleep and kicked back the crisp, clean quilt, briefly marvelling at how there was no icy rush of air as she did.
She stepped out of the bed and headed for the door, she was wearing only a tank top and a pair of shorts – clean clothes that had been provided for her in the room – but the ship was pleasantly warm and she decided to revel in the luxury of being able to walk around half-dressed without freezing to death.
She stepped out into the corridor and looked both left and right. It curved off in both directions and there seemed to be no one about. Still unfamiliar with the layout of the ship, Jules picked a random direction and began to wander.
She didn't encounter anyone as she meandered through the winding corridors, squinting in the uncomfortable light levels that somehow seemed too bright and too dim at the same time. As she was passing an open doorway a noise drew her attention and she peered inside to find a small lounge area, not unlike the port observation room on the Normandy… which had actually become more of a box room in its later years…
There was a small bar in the corner and she saw Grunt sitting alone on one of the bar stools with a bottle in his hand as he gazed out at the stars through a small porthole window.
She smiled as she entered the room and when he turned and saw her his face split into a grin, "Shepard! I'm toasting the Normandy," he indicated to the bottle, "will you join me?"
"I don't drink so much these days," she said but one look at his expression made her relent, "oh alright, since it's a good cause."
"Hehe," Grunt chuckled, "to the Normandy!" he took a large swig of whatever the bottle was and then thrust it into her hand. She decided it was best not to pause and think about what the alcohol might be and instead took a mouthful.
Whatever it was it made her choke and her eyes watered as she sat but she didn't complain and Grunt didn't comment.
"She was a good ship, Shepard!" he declared, banging his fist on the table.
"The best," she agreed quietly.
"Then you had to go and blow her up!" the fact seemed to amuse him and he laughed heartily, though Jules suspected that had something to do with how much of the drink he'd consumed.
"At least she went out with a bang," Jules muttered.
"Taking down one last foe!" Grunt agreed, "There's worse ways to go, Shepard!" again he chuckled and took another drink but Jules saw a sadness in his pale eyes as he watched the stars racing by through the window.
"How long have you been out here looking for us?" she asked, she didn't want to talk about the Normandy.
"Eight months, give or take. You and Liara are hard to find, how do you cover your tracks so well?"
"We don't talk to anyone," she replied bluntly, and Grunt chuckled in understanding, "how did you find us in the end? Pot luck?"
"Nah, Tevos got a tipoff. Someone told her where you were and she sent us the coordinates."
Jules frowned and turned to look at him, "Who?"
He shrugged, "She said it was anonymous."
"Do you believe her?"
"No."
They fell quiet, enjoying the kind of comfortable silence only old friends can. As the time passed Jules took several more swigs from the bottle, each one becoming easier to swallow than the last.
"This ship have a name?" she eventually asked, gazing around at the polished metal surfaces.
"Armali," Grunt replied, groggily resting his head sideways on his arm to peer at her, "it's named after some place on Thessia."
"Yeah, I know it," Jules agreed. Or at least she had seen Armali through Liara's childhood memories. The area she had grown up in had been a quiet, idyllic sort of place; Jules wondered how well it had survived the war.
"This ship looks new."
"Mhm," he muttered, taking a sideways swig from the bottle without raising his head and promptly choking, "Tevos had four of them built," he spluttered as he sat upright and wiped away the drink he'd covered himself with, "flagships of her fleet!"
"Unarmed flagships?"
"We're not going to war, Shepard!" he exclaimed drunkenly, "This is a mission of peace, and hope, moving forward into… a new era of…" he waved his hand about as he searched for a suitable word, "prosperity."
Jules blinked at him for a moment, her face utterly blank. Then they both burst out laughing.
"Peace and hope?" Jules repeated with emphasis, choking slightly through her laughter, "Jesus Grunt, you must really love Egret."
"Sure," he shrugged, "but that's not the point. War isn't the way forward, Shepard, there are better ways to find victory than through petty disputes."
"Is this the same Grunt talking? War isn't the way forward?"
"The war taught me a lot," he allowed, "but peace has taught me more."
"Well, well," she chuckled, "you've grown up Grunt. Didn't think I'd see the day."
He shrugged again, "The krogan are changing, Shepard. We're finding new ways forward."
"Ways outside of Tuchanka?" Jules reached over and pulled the bottle out of his hand, taking another swig and coughing vigorously, "I'm still amazed Wrex let you leave. The most genetically perfect krogan alive and you decide to donate your DNA to the asari genepool," she laughed and swayed slightly on her stool as the drink started to kick in, "are there any little blue Grunts running around yet?" she asked innocently.
"Don't be stupid," he mumbled, "Egret's only ninety-seven, she's too young for all that. She wants to see the galaxy first. And not every krogan thinks I'm genetically perfect, some of the older ones still think that being tank-bred means I'm not a real krogan. Whatever that means."
"Bastards," Jules muttered, normally she might have come up with something more eloquent but the alcohol was starting to blur her coherence a little and she couldn't be bothered to try and think her way through the haze that was engulfing her.
"What about you, Shepard?" Grunt asked suddenly.
"What about me?"
"You and Liara. I remember the rumours after the war about you two."
Jules gazed at him for a moment, "Maybe that's all they were. Rumours."
"Yeah?" he challenged, the corners of his mouth curling into a grin, "Even after a hundred years alone together on the Normandy? You must have had a lot of time to kill," he began to chuckle knowingly.
Jules took a deep breath as she stared down through the neck of the bottle, squinting slightly only to find that it was now empty. As Grunt's words slowly registered with her brain she eventually turned to frown at him and decided to choose her next sentence carefully.
"Shut up Grunt."
She left the young krogan asleep at the bar, his loud snores filling the empty room, and sauntered back to her cabin, taking several wrong turns as she groggily tried to retrace her steps. At least she might find it easier to sleep now.
When she finally did reach the right room, she opened the door and found Liara waiting for her. The asari was also dressed for bed and was sitting on the mattress with her knees drawn up under her chin. When Jules appeared in the doorway she opened her mouth as though to explain but then faltered and just smiled softly instead.
"Yeah," Jules agreed as she stepped into the room, "I couldn't sleep either."
…
Doctor T'Carra sat alone in the med bay, nursing a glass of brandy in one hand as she studied the scans she had taken of Shepard with a thoughtful frown.
She didn't look up as the door opened and Adarna entered, nor did she speak when the asari glided over to the table and lingered in her eye-line.
"Well?" she said eventually, "Is it as good as we thought?"
T'Carra drained the drink and shook her head as she tossed the scans over for Adarna to see.
"No. It's better."
Thank you for all the continued feedback, I love reading all your theories and the like so keep them coming. We're off to Earth next where Tevos awaits...