"Well this is a goddamn mess," the grizzled mercenary said, looking through Jessie's scope. The cross-hairs rested upon the head of a blue husk, alone in the wreckage of London. His finger caressed the hair-trigger of his beloved rifle. One bullet is all it would take to end its miserable life. The world paused with the space between his heartbeats…
…And resumed as he looked away from the scope with a snarl. Shooting the Reaper grunt would be satisfying, but it would be as good as ringing the dinner bell for any other abominations nearby.
He leaned back from the crumbling hole and rested his back against the opposite wall, willing the medi-gel to work faster and cease its incessant itching. After 50 years of field work he could handle a lot, but the urge to rip off his breastplate and scratch to his heart's content was overwhelming.
He opened up his omni-tool to take his mind off of the irritating wound, attempting to raise anyone nearby. He glowered at the micro-computer when he received static across all channels except one, which he opened.
"You finished moving that rubble yet?" The longer they stayed here, the higher the chances of the enemy finding them alone in the middle of this urban wasteland. They had to get moving soon and regroup with the others, plan their next move, and then find Shepard.
"Almost," the low grumble was accompanied by the clack of synthetic stone on stone. "Getting bored up there, old man?"
"You shut your goddamn lizard mouth and keep blocking off those stairwells. Just saw one of them husks slinking around a couple blocks away." He shifted to stop a particularly sharp stone rock from digging into the space between his armor plates. He gave up when moving only caused something else to jab him somewhere else.
"Did you shoot it?"
He'd known the big lug since the day he'd been, for lack of a better word, born, but the question still managed to blindside him. "What? Why the fuck would I shoot it, it would bring more of them knocking at our fucking missing door," he growled. Goddamn hospital without its doors. Not defensible at all. Even Anderson's apartment was easier to fight in. Fucking windows and toasters.
"Sounds like you're scared, old man."
Zaeed was floored by the audacity of the young punk. "Listen up you overgrown reptile, I'm not going to waste the energy beating my head against the goddamn brick wall known as your head, so get back to work, respect your elders with decades more experience than you and then get your scaly ass up here." He would love to attach a slab of varren meat to the brat, leave him in the middle of a Tuchankan desert and watch him fight off thresher maws through Jessie's scope if they both made it out of this alive.
"Better than being fleshy like you," he could hear the raspy chuckle before the sound of falling rocks overrode it. "On my way now."
Zaeed muttered a few choice words when the link was cut, hissing when the ragged wound in his side flared up. He grit his teeth while reaching into a pouch and pulling out another packet of medi-gel. While he smeared on another layer of goo, his mind planned and plotted their next move.
Communications had been spotty since Hammer had landed, but a total blackout didn't bode well. He had no intel, no knowledge of what was going on around him, nothing. All he knew was that the assault on the Beam had been thrown back. Hell, it was worse than that, their Hammer had been shattered against the Reaper's anvil. Where the fragments were right now, he had no clue; the scramble to escape Harbinger's approach had left all of them scattered across the surrounding area.
When their desperate charge had been halted, he had been beyond the open kill zone with a company of Blue Suns and portions of Aralakh. That had been a real treat. Whatever Zaeed had thought of his former mercenary organization, the underlings had at least been competent. They followed orders, shot with moderate accuracy, didn't waste ammo and showed basic tactical understanding. Until the damn Reaper showed up, then it turned into a shitshow.
The three kilometers of eldritch metal had landed with an earth-shattering roar, sending buildings toppling before the shock of the gods fall. Fury and fear was a bitter mixed drink he had tasted in that hour when the mercenary company had refused to advance, fearing for their own well-being. The almost-casual execution of one of the batarians in the group had galvanized them forward, eager for the possibility to survive the Reaper rather than certain death from the former-founder.
They hadn't gotten far when Hammer had been obliterated by the overwhelming power of an invincible reaper capital ship. Geth, human, asari, turian and krogan alike had fled the field with the voice of Hackett sounding the retreat for an already beaten charge.
With a sigh of relief, he threw away the empty gel packet, staring into the dark, ash-filled middle distance. The last he had heard of from that magnificent bastard was an evac by the Normandy, swooping above the battlefield to rescue someone important enough to risk the flagship of the united galaxy. If he had to guess it was the turian, Garrus something-or-other, Shepard's bed-mate and Zaeed's fellow defense enthusiast. He smirked at the thought of Scar-Face adding more ugly to that thing he called a face, wondering if the turian would ever rival the wounds that the former Blue Sun carried around.
After the brittle, ballsy pilot had rocketed away at Mach 2, it had been all Zaeed could do to keep the Reapers in the area from turning their retreat into a rout, trying to find a good position in the rubble while fighting off the husks that were swarming the area. They had been doing well, all the fuckery going on considered, when the wave of Cannibals had crashed into them.
Twisted bodies with weapons and circuitry welded into their flesh were mowed down by focused fire and continuous movement, but what the cannibals lacked in power and thinking they made up for in numbers. He had seen husks of all kinds flow into the area, like water filling an empty lake, cutting through the retreating Hammer and drowning them all beneath a tide of synthetic zombies. Their only saving grace was Aralakh Company, using krogan brute force to push back the onslaught and pave a path of bodies for those left alive.
Amongst all the chaos, he hadn't seen the lithe forms closing in around their rapidly separating formation. While they were all preoccupied with driving through the barriers of husks, bone-chilling screams had echoed throughout the city. From empty buildings and bombed-out streets, eerie blue carcasses had phased in and out of existence, leaping forward dozens of feet in the blink of an eye and wielding razor-sharp claws capable of piercing even tough krogan hides. Their slow gait was deceptive and before any of them knew it, dead or dying humans and aliens littered the ground wherever he had looked.
Jessie had burned in his hands as he coaxed more bullets out of her than her cooling mechanisms could handle. After the Blue Suns commander had been skewered next to him, he realized that this would be the time he didn't make it out alive.
As the blue devils had closed in, Jessie had given a bleat, clicking in his hands as her ammo block was reduced to nothing. He had thrown himself out of the way of a talon slash but not quick enough, the deadly appendages slipping through his armor and gouging into his side. Crimson fluid had splashed across the broken ground. His last inferno grenade had been in his hand, ready to go out in a blaze of glory rather than be turned into another monstrosity. He was saved from his own fatalism by a claymore and massive pair of three-fingered hands.
A blue-tentacled head had disappeared in a blue haze as hyper-sonic rounds splashed across the banshee at point-blank range. Then, like a ragdoll toted around by a seven-foot-tall child, the pup had lifted him over his hump and raged through the ring of foes.
He had no clue what direction Grunt had started lumbering; he only cared about shooting at the bastards with his spare pistol. If he actually hit anything he would have been amazed, he was bouncing all over the place. Eventually, when the enemies had fallen behind from sight and he couldn't handle the huge fucking scrape in his side, he rapped on Grunt's armor with his gauntlets, yelling at the krogan to put him down somewhere he could heal his wounds and fix Jessie.
Blue eyes had spotted a tall building still standing and decided that that would be the best location to defend, landing them in their current predicament.
Anger simmered under his scarred exterior; anger at the debilitating wound and the sheer meaninglessness of anything he could do. His mind could come up with no other words to describe what had happened. The whole galaxy was going to hell in a handbasket due to giant robot space squids, life as everyone knew it was going down in flames and their grand, last-ditch effort, all cards on the table, balls to the wall, final ooh-ra, ultimate end-all-fucking-last-gasp-to-end-all-fucks had been vaporized and spread across all of London.
He may have been seething with impotent rage, but the feeling of absolute goddamn helplessness was a strange bedfellow to his current mood. It was something he had not felt since the day Vido had left him half blind and half dead all those decades ago. The end of the world was upon them and here he was, hiding in an abandoned building to lick his wounds.
Heavy footfalls preceded Zaeed's rescuer through the open doorway, the krogan's dinosaur-like feet the first real sound he had heard in some time, besides the far-off patter of gunfire and the blossoms of explosions somewhere within the ruins of humanity. Clear blue eyes scanned the room before the tank-born trundled over to the sitting mercenary. The enormous krogan stared down at him with baleful eyes full of expectancy.
"We need to get back to the fight soon," Grunt said, glancing at the rents in the human's armor. "Heal up faster, our battlemaster needs us."
"I'm not sittin' around because I enjoy the scenery, if I-" Zaeed came full stop when he noticed the metal poking out from behind Grunt's hump. A hunk of metal that was almost limb-like.
"Grunt. What the hell is that," he said, gesturing with Jessie. Behind the krogan, flashes of light from above outlined the muddled forms of clouds.
"This is my gun." The big reptile just looked down at the mercenary and fingered his claymore, irritation restrained for the moment. The former Blue Suns founder grimaced at the tank-born's literalness.
"Not your goddamn weapon, the thing on your back." This time he pointed just beyond Grunt's shoulder to make sure he was piercing the dense skull of the pup.
"Oh that. That's a geth leg," he reached behind him and released the magnetic hold on the appendage, holding it reverently in his hands as if it were made of glass.
"Athame's tits, why the hell are you carrying around a geth leg?!"
"Shepard said it would improve my prowess in battle and bring me luck if I carried it around with me."
Zaeed stared at the leader of Aralakh Company, working his jaw back and forth while trying to come up with something to say.
"Have you been carrying that thing around the whole time or am I blind?" He had no witty remark to fire back with and continued with his line of questioning.
"No, I lost the foot the quarian made for me on the Normandy. I found this one under some rubble downstairs. Inside his scarred head, the cogs began to turn.
Quarian? What quarian does he… wait, Shepard's quarian? That little fire spark made him a geth foot for goddamn luck? The more he followed that thought, the more confused he became.
"Why would Tali make you a geth foot for luck and whatever else she said? And whose leg does that belong to? Please tell me she didn't take it from a living flashlight-head." Grunt ran a three-fingered hand over the metal piece in his arms before attaching it to its original place.
"Shepard said that humanity's warriors often wear small mammal feet to increase their strength and protect themselves from harm. I told him I wanted such a charm, to prove my prowess, but the ship didn't have any small mammals on board. The quarian said she would make me one out of pieces she had from battle on her home world." Right, Zaeed thought to himself, she did just get her planet back, didn't she? Hell of a time to do it. He chewed that over while parsing out what exactly Grunt had said. Talking with the tank-born sometimes required such an effort. The combination of knowledge implantation along with his alien nature made conversation taxing during certain topics, especially those foreign to the krogan as a whole; or anything not having to do with killing, how to look for ways to kill or who to kill. "Shepard also said that's why you carry so many scars, because you don't carry around a charm like it."
Zaeed almost didn't catch the last part but when he realized how devious the Lion of Elysium was, he knew that Shepard would get the ass-beating of his life when the two of them met next. It elicited a dark chuckle from his aged lungs.
"So the quarian just up and said she would make you a robo-foot for good luck?" The idea sounded so familiar it was beginning to bug him. He also had a sneaking suspicion Grunt wasn't telling him everything. "You asked and she offered out of the kindness of her heart?"
"No! She promised to make me one after I threatened the frail pilot for not taking me to the nearest planet with rabbits." The idea of Grunt stomping into the cockpit with the demand for a heading brought a small up-curve to Zaeed's mouth. If they survived, he would ask EDI for the video logs and replay Joker's heart attack moment over and over again.
Wait, rabbit? Oh. Oh-ho. Oh-ho-ho-ho. That's what this was all about? So the Hero of the Citadel had told Grunt about a rabbit's foot and he had wanted one for himself. Well that was a story to save for another time. Or to ridicule Shepard with, that idea was becoming more appealing by the moment.
"Goddamnit Shepard," Zaeed chuckled. His jolly mood evaporated when a scream of thunder ripped through the sky. Zaeed's eyes bulged out of their sockets as the prow of a ship exploded through the deep clouds over London, trailing fire behind it and as it plummeted to earth. The blaze it carried within its massive frame turned the sky into a glowing, hellish nightmare of fire and blood, the roar of a newly lit inferno bellowing out its pain to all. Zaeed stared at the ship plunging right toward them, mouth open as Grunt turned and looked up. The krogan whipped around, yanking the injured mercenary up by the arm and scrambling towards the open space where an outside wall used to be. Zaeed's side exploded in pain at the sudden jolt, pushing through the pain to escape the doomed warship towering in the atmosphere. He realized where Grunt was dragging him when he gave his one-word command.
"JUMP!"
"Goddamnit."
Author's Note:
For those who decided to take a second look, after the incomprehensible mess that the first chapter was, well you're crazy for giving this story a second chance.
BUT, I thank you for being crazy. This chapter is the segue between what we all played in the game and what happens outside the game along with setting up plot points I can use later.
Well. That and the humorous (I hope) dialogue possible between the two. Aliens and their misunderstood shenanigans.