A/N: Hey guys, firstly yes I know this has been forever and you'd probably all forgotten about it, pretty sure it's like been nearly a year since my last chapter. I got caught up in some shit and so I wrote a bit more of a personal project, 100,000 words takes some time. That finished now, I've decided I won't write anything else until this is finished, I hate leaving stuff undone forever and I hate getting into a story on here that doesn't give me some damn closure so I'm fully on this, got a lot of plans so as long as I strike a good balance between this and work, I expect to be making some good progress. I've already written a second chapter so expect that up in a few days after editing and lastly a huge thank you to any and all who kept the faith. It's been awesome to see messages and more follows no matter how long it's been so thank you

~Small Mistake

Jax leaned against the wall of the shower, focussing solely on his breathing as he let the water run over his back. The armour was tight, it offered exceptional protection but didn't offer much in letting his skin breathe, Jax had discovered a slick layer of sweat upon peeling it off. HIs eyes lingered over the bullet scars scattered over his chest and his expression darkened. He was lucky he had been found by so skilled a doctor, anyone else and he would've been surely dead. A drop of red tinged the water as it was swallowed greedily by the drain. Jax, his train of thought broken, frowned and touched his ear. He looked at his finger, seeing the tip similarly reddened. It seemed the shockwave explosion that dropped the tree on the YMIR mech he had created had down some damage below the surface.

"I'd get that checked if I were you" a voice behind him told him.

Jax turned around to see Jacob walking in, shirtless and a towel over his shoulder. He stepped out and grabbed his own towel, wrapping it around his waist to cover his nakedness. Jacob stepped out of his boots and stripped nonchalantly, his military discipline clearly overriding any instinct to be shy. "Showering now?" Jax asked confusedly. They had gotten back from their mission nearly an hour ago.

"Had to work out" Jacob told him, "clear my head."

"You okay?" Jax asked. "What happened down there… was pretty messed up."

"Yeah" Jacob sighed, facing the wall, "that's putting it lightly. I idolised my father growing up. I didn't really like him, hell I'm not sure whether I even loved him, but I always wanted to be just like him. Rising through the ranks, getting the new ships, going to the new places. Never changed, even after he went missing. The last time we talked was three years, four months and eighteen days before he went missing, just to put on a happy face for Mom. Then we find him and it turns out everything I thought about him was a lie."

Jax had the sense Jacob wasn't really talking to him anymore but still replied. "At least you had one, even if he cared in his own way, counts for more than you might think."

Jacob snorted, still looking at the wall. "Yeah, I guess you're right. For better or worse he made me into the man I am today. Nothing changes that, not even him."

Jax remembered back to his days on Omega. Garrus' team hadn't been perfect; they had lost men occasionally. The first time Jax had seen death was a turian who had been shot through the throat. He had thrashed around wildly, eyes full of fear as blood had pumped out of him and while the adrenaline of battle had been enough to keep Jax on task, after the shooting had subsided there was nothing to stop his tears from flowing. Sensat had been the one to comfort him, to hold him. It had been enough. Jax had never met his biological father and had long given up on ever finding him, but Sensat had been everything to him. Jax couldn't imagine ever putting a gun to his head. "It's good to own who you are" Jax said absentmindedly as he left back for the crew quarters. He redressed but grimaced as a splotch of red dripped onto his towel. Remembering Shepard studying him on the flight, Jax decided it would be best not to have any more issues against his name just yet. Swallowing his pride, Jax made his way down to the med bay. The door opened with a hiss and inside sat Doctor Chakwas.

"Ah Mister Weaver, come on in."

"Doc" Jax nodded.

"Do you require anything?" She asked.

Jax angled his head at her. "Bleeding from my ear. Anything you can do?"

Chakwas almost sprung out of her chair, Jax assumed she must have been glad to do something other than file reports. "Let's get a look at you" she said, cycling through the modes on her omnitool.

Jax stared at it with a small grin. "Have to say, your physicals are less invasive than I imagined they would've been."

"Much to my displeasure" Chakwas replied, "sometimes I feel like all this technology is overtaking the medical mind these days."

"So what keeps you from quitting?" Jax asked.

"No omnitool could ever force Joker to take his medication" she smiled, "and seeing my friends well is its own reward, even if a VI is the one telling me so."

"You don't think there's an inherent risk from making friends in a position like this?"

"As a doctor?" Chakwas asked.

"As an attendee of suicide missions" Jax clarified.

Chakwas' mouth opened slightly but she failed to give an immediate response. "I admit, the risk does seem obvious, just to make friends only to see them torn away, but I would give anything for those few moments of true friendship."

Jax was silent.

"And you have one in me at the very least" she told him, reading his thoughts. "And another in Shepard." Her omnitool blipped, indicating it had completed its scan. "Your eardrum received a mild perforation from a shockwave, perhaps the explosion you triggered partially dislodged your earplug, the bleeding is just the rupture draining out, nothing to be too worried about."

"Anything to be done?" Jax asked.

"This is one of the few cases technology doesn't have the edge over biology just yet" Chakwas told him, "your hearing is fine, the perforation will heal naturally on its own. I can give you some painkillers in the meantime and I might suggest wearing some form of more secure headwear if Shepard takes you out in the field in future."

"If?" Jax queried.

"I believe there's more to your psych reports Shepard wants to investigate further" Chakwas said absent-mindedly. "But you're finished with me."

"Cheers" Jax thanked her. "Also I have to ask, are you like the mum of this place?"

Chakwas actively burst out laughing at that. "Oh dear, maybe the others have their own views but I don't think so. Truth be told I've stayed so long aboard a vessel not for the lack of family, but for the want of one."

"What do you mean?" Jax asked.

Chakwas sighed as she discarded a datapad carelessly, sinking back into her chair. "I'm the last of my family" she explained. "It's not something I particularly fret too much about, the name extinguishing, there's not much of a legacy to be carried in it. However, I do think about it the more time passes, what will be remembered of not just me, but the family. Being the last of one's family at my age has a certain sense of finality to it."

"You feel the pressure to leave the name in a good light solely because you haven't carried it on" Jax said.

Chakwas nodded. "Feminism has come a long way in two hundred years, can you believe we weren't even allowed to vote once upon a time? However even now, I still feel like by sticking to doing this for so long, never walking away, never finding someone and settling down to carry it on, that I've somehow let them down."

"You feel comfortable making friends here, just being on the suicide mission because there's no bigger a statement to go out making."

Chakwas nodded. "It's my validation for the choices I've made. The others, out there and in the crew quarters, I hear them talking about their children or how they plan to spend their next furlough. There's a good chance we'll all be dead before we ever get to spend that time with those we love. Everything changes so rapidly in the military life, as a doctor it's often a constant swarm of injured bodies and all your job is meant to do is to patch them up so they can go get filled with more holes again. Joker is one of the only people who truly needs me for not just saving his life, but prolonging it for something more. I think I need that."

"Why are you telling me all this?" Jax asked.

"Because I remember a time where I wanted to leave the Alliance" Chakwas said, still in her chair. "To hang it all up, find something that was less engaging for the simple reason of not having to commit to the pain every time a name gets added to the memorial plate abroad an Alliance ship. You have that same look about you. You have a reason to be here, but that's not the same as having a reason to stay." Chakwas paused and then suddenly laughed at herself. "Listen to me babble on. Hell, maybe I am the mother of this place after all."

"Matriarchal figures have a tendency to exemplify disciplinary standards and are generally less likely to engage in excessive drinking to the point of unconsciousness" EDI noted.

"My yearly exception to formality" Chakwas explained to Jax's arched eyebrow. "Now consider yourself discharged."

"Thanks again Doc" Jax said, waving a mock salute. "For the help, and the chat. Am I ready for combat again?"

"Physically, yes" Dr Chakwas said, turning back to her computer. "Although it says you've been pulled from the mission roster pending a psychological re-evaluation."

"Again?" Jax asked exasperatedly. He remembered the way Shepherd had been looking at him. "What does Shepard have to doubt me with? I did brilliantly down there, even destroyed the YMIR mech."

"I'm sure you did" Chakwas said. "But this wasn't logged by Shepard. Yeoman Chambers requested the follow-up session."

"Kelly?" Jax asked confusedly. "What reason does she have against me?"

Chakwas shrugged. "I don't know but you'll need to see her if you want to get into any more planetside shenanigans again."

Jax sighed. Just my luck. "Well I guess I better go see the good shrink" he muttered, exiting the med bay.

"Now, I know what you're thinking" Garrus said, walking back and forth, his eye hard behind the visor. "I've seen a million like you before, sitting right where you are now and I'll tell you something else; I'll see a million more. But that's not relevant to you is it?" He pulled out his pistol and looked down the sight, checking its constant perfection. "No. Because in all the excitement, I'm not sure how bullets I've got left in thing and for you, I only need one to end this." He resisted the urge to check the thermal clip, aiming the pistol with deadly stillness. "And if there is one, just one left, then bits of you are going to be all over this floor. If not, well you get to be part of a wild night in a bar, thinking about how lucky you were to survive me. So that's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? Luck. So, with this gun trained on you right now, I have just one last question for you, punk." He cocked the gun. "Do you feel lucky?"

The bottle of purple plastic sat motionless at the end of the room.

Garrus pulled the trigger and the bottle exploded into pieces, the liquor within showering all over the floor.

"I guess that answers that question" Garrus muttered as the door hissed open behind him. "Shepard!" He exclaimed, quickly holstering the pistol. He gestured awkwardly to the bottles sitting on the end of the main battery. "I was just having a bit of target practice" he stammered.

Shepard couldn't smother her smile. "Sounds like that wasn't all you were practicing."

Garrus' head dropped, he couldn't bear the embarrassment of that smile. He didn't know if turians were biologically capable of blushing but he knew in this moment of embarrassment, seeing that woman with that smile, he would find out. "You uh, heard that huh?"

"Wish I could tell you I didn't" Shepard chuckled again. "No I don't, that was amazing. Since when did you watch Dirty Harry?"

"Well even calibrations can become tedious after a while" Garrus said. "A vid every now and then didn't seem like too bad a way to pass the time. Jax mentioned it to me, well I believe his words were 'you're like a turian Dirty Harry, Scorpio would've shit himself going up against you." He went down to the end and started picking up the larger pieces of the bottles. "I'll be honest, I only watched bits of it here and there and I have no idea why a human astrological sign would defecate itself in my presence but Dirty Harry had one really cool line, I wished I could've used it back in my C-Sec days."

"You and he certainly go back a while" Shepard noted. "How early on did he and Sensat join your team?"

"Not too early on" Garrus said, "The neighbourhood Sensat looked out for wasn't too far from where you had to clear out troops on the way to Mordin's clinic, Jax apparently lived on the other side of the region barrier, near Afterlife."

"Wasn't that slightly encroaching on Aria's territory?" Shepard asked.

Garrus shook his head. "All of Omega is Aria's territory, she just doesn't bother to police it. Anyone took a shot at her troops anywhere on the station and she'd destroy them and their entire outfit. We cut down squads of merc troops all over her territory, but never her men. It was a mutual understanding, we left her alone and she let us continue our crusade. People still knew Aria was in charge but we let them live without fear. Once Sensat and Jax joined on, we started to really hit our stride. We had Erash hacking any system ever designed, those two throwing grenades in the door and from there, we all contributed." His fists tightened.

"You seem stressed," Shepard noted, "more so than usual."

"I'm fine" Garrus replied, "just lacking an outlet to vent."

"How do turians usually vent?" Shepard asked.

"With violence mostly" Garrus told her, "turian military has tighter operational discipline than your Alliance but fewer personal restrictions. Our commanders run us tight and know we need let off steam. Turian ships have training rooms for exercise, training sims, even full combat sparring, whatever lets people work off stress."

"You mean turian ships have crewmen fighting each other before a mission?" Shepard asked incredibly.

"It's supervised of course" Garrus explained, "nobody's going to risk an injury before a mission and it's a good way to settle grudges amicably. I remember right before one mission; we were about to hit a batarian pirate squad; very risky. This recon scout and I had been at each other's throats, nerves mostly. She suggested we settle it in the ring."

Shepard allowed herself a small smile. She had seen Garrus' proficiency hand-to-hand, even amongst the hard-trained skill of turian combatants. "I assume you took her down gently?" She asked.

"Actually, she and I were the top ranked hand-to-hand specialists on the ship" Garrus elaborated, "I had reach but she had flexibility. It was brutal, after nine rounds, the judge called it a draw. There were a lot of unhappy betters in the training room. We ended up having a tiebreaker in her quarters." He stopped awkwardly.

"Did you win that?" Shepard inquired.

"Uh," Garrus seemed to stammer again. "I guess you could say that, I certainly didn't lose the fight, that much I know." He seemed to be on the verge of finding out whether turians blushed again.

"Well good" Shepard chuckled, standing up. "If you'd lost, I would've had to have hired her instead."

"Even if you didn't have me as a combatant, you'd have had me as an engineer" Garrus said, gesturing to the battery. "No one can calibrate like I can."

"Well good, because if we miss with a Thanix cannon, we are really fucking up someone's day."

"Not one mistake I'd like to own up to my commanding officer to" Garrus agreed. "What's the next mission?"

"I've got a backlog of favours still to clear out" Shepard explained. "Between you finding Sidonis and Jacob with his father, that's barely the tip of the iceberg. We may have a while to go before we're ready to tangle with the collectors again."

"We need to remove the distractions" Garrus agreed. "Well, I'll be here if you need me."

Shepard nodded and left, expecting a progress report from Miranda as to whether the operative overseeing the transfer of Oriana had made contact yet.

The elevator doors hissed open and Jax looked around. The orange holographic displays stretched all the way down to Joker's seat, the symphony of beeps and alerts filled the air. Kelly turned at the sound and her eyes shimmered with an emotion Jax couldn't quite name.

"Jax" she said with her soft voice, "need something? I believe Shepard is currently with Officer Lawson."

"I'm not here for Shepard," Jax told her, "I'm here for you."

"Me?" Kelly asked, "I'm not sure what for…"

"Did you tell Shepard I was unfit for combat?" Jax interrupted, cutting straight to the chase.

Kelly's expression faltered for a moment and there was an emotion Jax did recognise. Guilt.

"No, I only meant to help…" she attempted but Jax was having none of it.

"In case you haven't noticed" Jax told her, "I don't have a hell of a lot else going on for me right now. Doing this, helping Shepard and saving the entire galaxy, I have nothing beyond this besides blowing all of Omega to hell. So you want to do me a favour, how about staying the hell out of my business?"

"It's not that simple..." Kelly started.

"Then make it that simple" Jax told her. "I have no reason to trust you and you're making everything even less than that." He turned and strode angrily back to the elevator.

"Jax!" Kelly called, not caring if any of the crewman in the CIC heard her. "Don't walk away from me."

"Or what?" Jax challenged. "You going to give me another hole?"

Kelly remembered the bullet holes littering his back. "Stop acting like that!" She told him.

Jax reacted in surprise, the tone of her voice of her voice carried a lot more emotion than he had expected. "Like what?"

"Like those don't matter!" She said, bewildered by her own emotion. "They're the marks from the moment that changed your life, they mean everything!"

"You're wrong" Jax told her. "These aren't marks from the moment that changed my life, they're marks from the moment that ended it. Now put me back on the mission roster or organise a dropship to get me back to Omega, your choice."

"We're on our way to Illium" Kelly told him.

"Then you have until we leave to clear me" Jax replied. "Or I'll find a new ship." The door closed and he quickly punched a command to get away from Kelly, from having to face the answers her questions brought up. The door opened and Jax found himself on the engineering deck again. He quickly descended the stairs towards the sundeck, the red lighting never ceased to make him feel like he was descending to a realm much more sinister.

Jack was stretching her leg on the bench when he came in but swung it down and summoned her pistol to her in a flash of biotic energy. "What do you want?" She demanded, pointing it at him.

Jax froze from moment at the display of biotic power. On Omega, biotics were usually an indicator that you had been exposed to an overdose of eezo and was the first symptom of a horrible death via multiple tumours, systemic organ failure or as most people put it; good old cancer fucking somebody else's life up. Despite the pistol being trained on him however, Jax somehow felt reassured that she wouldn't shoot him. "Are you just going to stand there like an asshole or you going to say something?" She asked.

Jax stirred from his thoughts. "The flight plan is taking us to Illium" he told her.

"Yeah, so what?" She challenged.

"So I wondered what your plan was in terms of fucking shit up on a planet where red sand was legal" Jax elaborated.

Jack shrugged. "Red sand is just for idiot junkies going nowhere anyway. I prefer creeper, that's more my speed."

"You think you can find that?" Jax asked, "even on Illium?"

Jack shrugged. "I tend to elicit the illegal shit in most places, whether they're pretending to be civilised or not. They all turn out to be the same shitbirds living for the same sick thrills and willing to exploit the same people in order to keep their own lives rolling on with their own fucked up fetishes fulfilled."

"You sound like you're speaking from experience" Jax spoke softly.

"You don't know me" Jack said disinterestedly. "Why do you bother on trying? I think I proved pretty well I'm just a bitch."

"Maybe I want to know the person beyond the bitch" Jax answered evenly.

Jack sighed. "You're just a boy" she muttered. She detached the straps of what Jax called her top and displayed her bare breasts undaunted. "Is this what you really want?" She asked him. "To fuck? To get you off?" Her serpentine hand slid over the tattoos and artwork adorning her chest, down her stomach until it teased her waistline and slid beneath her cargo pants. Jack let out an audible sigh as she stroked herself in front of him in an exhibitionist fashion. Jax watched her with a disturbed fascination before shaking his head. "You're actually mental" he muttered to himself amusedly.

"What of it?" Jack asked, the silhouette of her hand still moving beneath the fabric of her pants. "You say mental, I know what I want and I'm unafraid to take it."

"Oh yeah" Jax replied with a bit of sarcasm permeating his tone, "because hiding in the basement with a fuckload of anger and bitterness absolutely screams that you have it all."

He half expected Jack to slap him with a wave of biotic energy but she slowly smiled, seemingly impressed by his gall. "Let's save the sex for later" she grinned, pulling back on her straps. "I feel like a different kind of fun."

"What kind exactly?" Jax asked.

Jack checked the alert that flashed over both their omnitools. "Shepard's taking Garrus and the cheerleader as her squad for going planetside; we've got some free time to fill."

Illium grew as a massive orb as the Normandy roared closer under Joker's expert touch. From space, the planet looked much more familiar to Jax; Nos Astra, the port they were headed for was just reaching sunset and the glitter of a million lights recognisable from orbit gave it the appearance of a space station. There were no wilds here. The ship shuddered slightly as the magnetic docking clamps fastened onto the Normandy and Shepard and her team soon disembarked. Jax got fastened in his demolition suit as Jack called him, it seems they weren't the only ones making good use of the time on shore leave. Kasumi, Mordin and Grunt were also disembarking with them, the disfigured scientist salarian took a few wide-eyed blinks at Jax, it was probably to be expected given it was their first meeting. Kasumi was completely unreadable and cloaked as soon as the doors open and Jax guessed that Grunt genuinely didn't care one way or the other as he strode out with massive steps, he was a walking tank.

"Come on kid" Jack told him as she led the way into Nos Astra, "let's find some real fun."