AN: Hi, everyone! I'm going away on vacation, so the next chapter won't come out until the first week of September, probably. Have a nice summer, too!


Joker sometimes wondered: what was the point?

War was war, and Javik could tell everyone a lot about what it was like to live all your life in the times of war, never knowing the meaning of peace. But Joker didn't know if he was that kind of person. He joined the Alliance because he loved flying and wanted to prove himself in real, dangerous situations, not just in the commercial or private sector. Well, he'd hit the peak of his career the day Jo took over the Normandy SR1. He'd gotten that commendation thanks to his abilities and since then he'd indisputably proven that he was the best of the best out there.

He didn't want war. Never even really thought about the concept. Strategy, battle planning, deliberate movement of chess pieces on the board - that was not for him. He wanted to fly. That was what he did, of course, all the time now. Serving on the Normandy was a challenge every single day. Every planet Jo ordered them to was another deadly trap he had to work his way out of and he did it without fail. Flying was his world. Flying and Jo.

But Jo's world was being sucked into the war and for the first time since joining the Alliance all those years ago Joker was starting to really think about what the concepts of war and military meant. Technically his ship wasn't a part of any military force at the moment, but considering what was happening in the galaxy, it was a moot point. They were all in this war together.

Everyone in the galaxy took this 'together' in their own way. The military forces of every species were recruiting like crazy. At the same time pirates were shooting down supply ships and making money selling the goods back to the military, who had no choice. Survivors ran like cockroaches in all directions, having nothing, heading towards nothing, expecting nothing but slow, cold and miserable death. Politicians played their games more fiercely than ever before, forming five-minutes-alliances, breaking promises left and right. Scientists split in two sectors. The group that worked for the military thrived. Most civilian scientists lost their funding and jobs. And then there were the vultures. Those opportunists who made money on war. And there was a lot of money to be made.

Just the other day Vega gave Jo his report on the fuel network he was working on. She had given him the money Liara made for her, almost a million credits, and told him to use it if needed. His report showed her that from almost a million her investment became just over four millions in a few short months. Vega teased her about making money on war, all in good humour, but Jo hadn't gotten the joke. She ran out of the mess hall and Joker had a strong suspicion that she had thrown up in the bathroom. No one had ever spoken of that money again.

She was not the kind of person to exploit war for her own gain. Hell, she was the kind of person who didn't need any money in the first place, and yet it was falling into her lap. Joker was quite indifferent to the subject, since it wasn't his money. If there hadn't been a war, he would have teased her to death about being his sugar mama and buying him a racing ship as a reward for all his services. Now? He couldn't care less.

Looking at Javik gave Joker stomach cramps. He'd spent his entire life fighting the Reapers. This cycle was barely six months into this war. They were looking at long, desperate times ahead. It was the end of summer now, the victory on Rannoch many weeks in the past. Ever since they left the planet they kept zapping around the galaxy from one mission to another. Mostly finding some war bible someone lost, or saving a handful of civilians. It gained them allies, sure, but there was no palpable progress. The Reapers were still coming in force, dots on the galaxy map were disappearing, people were dying and there was no salvation in sight. What did those handfuls of civilians matter? Jo saved twenty of them, while twenty millions on Illium got decimated in one single orbital strike.

This wasn't a long war yet, and Joker was already losing his faith. He would have loved to say that his faith walked and talked somewhere in the CIC, giving orders and solving problems, but that would have been too romantic and idealistic. He hadn't lost his faith in Jo. He was just starting to admit that she was only human, like him, like Hacket, like everyone else. She had two hands and one head. She couldn't be everywhere at once. Her efforts had brought most of the galactic races together already, but a lot of those she tried to save were working directly against her. So...

What was the point?

The reality of war was that it was long, exhausting, pointless, and that flying was slowly losing its glamour under these circumstances. Flying didn't solve a thing. It was his passion and he was contributing, perhaps more than most other soldiers, but... what the fuck was the point?

Jo was also slowly losing her glow. Every morning he would see more and more clearly how she put on a mask when she went to the bathroom to fix her hair. When she stepped out, she became Commander Shepard. The image was strong and people responded to it. But every night he could also see how she took it off. And it was becoming more and more difficult every single night. Sometimes he would get worried after a while and go to the bathroom to check on her only to find her in the shower, eyes closed, face ashen, standing like a rigid statue. The running water made it impossible to tell if she was crying or not, but it didn't matter. Joker knew that if not on the outside, she was definitely crying on the inside. With every passing week it was taking her longer and longer to come back to him in the evening.

They were rarely joining the crew for poker nights anymore. If they ever did get some downtime, they spent it alone in their cabin, watching old vids. Joker was pretty sure Jo hadn't actually seen any of them, her mind always wandering, but at least in body she was always there, with him.

The crew tried to help. They honestly did. Garrus and Tali especially were taking on a shitload of work just to give Jo some peace. Vega almost never slept anymore, training his skin off (quite literally sometimes) to make her proud of him, and working on other projects in his nonexistent free time. Jo dutifully gave him his ICA assignments every day, but it was months into his training now and she never spoke about his reaching even the N1 status. Joker remembered with a chuckle how the guy had looked after his first endurance exercise. Back then it had been a voluntary torture. These days it was the life Vega was living, day after day skipping sleep and meals to get other stuff done.

Of course Joker wasn't any better off. He had his own projects he ran when he wasn't needed at the helm, but the crew knew that his time was not his own. Whenever Jo needed him he made himself available to her, all other things be damned.

He wondered often about this war. How did people manage it long term? History was full of long wars. A year or a dozen on Earth seemed nothing compared to four hundred years between the quarians and the geth. He supposed it would have been easier on all of them if Shepard was a Lieutenant Commander in charge of one ship in a fleet, obeying orders and fighting a small fight here and a little battle there when their superiors moved them like pieces on the chess board. Hell, even if she were the Admiral of the human fleet, it would have been easier.

As things stood right now, she was the saviour of the entire galaxy. Sometimes he thought about her offer from months ago. If he asked her to stop fighting, she would. Joker wished he could do that. He was asshole enough. But loving Johanna Shepard meant not only loving a woman. It meant loving a person and giving her due respect. If he asked her to hide from the fight, she would betray herself, become less than who she was deep inside, less than who she was meant to be. Joker knew he could never break her spirit like that.

Even if it meant letting the rest of the galaxy break her spirit by demanding too much.

"Take us to the Citadel, Joker," came his next order and he started pushing buttons. They hadn't been to the Citadel in what seemed like forever. Since the Cerberus coup. Since Thane died.


"Wait up, Lola!"

Jo heard Vega's call and stopped by the elevator at the docking bay.

"What's up?" She asked him when he stopped next to her.

"Mind if I tag along?"

"I don't mind, but why would you want to?"

"Oh, you know. You always disappear somewhere when we come here, off to do some mysterious stuff. I figure, since I'm training with you, I might get to know what it is that keeps you so busy."

Jo nodded and gestured him to join her in the elevator. In silence she led him to the Commons. When they stood at one of the balconies, she showed him her omnitool.

"See these nav points?" She pointed at the little screen. "That's people. This one is her," she indicated one nav point and a woman behind the counter at one of the shops. The young asari worked with the buyers professionally and efficiently. "Ereba. Once upon a time on Nos Astra I met her working in a store. Her boyfriend, a krogan named Charr, was stalking her, trying to convince her to take him back. He wanted children with her, but she wasn't sure that he was sure about it. So, he stood outside her shop and kept shouting poetry at her to convince her that he really loved her." Jo almost sobbed on a chuckle. "God, the poetry was awful. But I told her to get back together with him. So she did. And now," Jo pushed a button on her omnitool. "I have to go down there and break her heart." A krogan's voice started talking from her omnitool:

"O Blue Rose of Illium, if these humble words reach you, then I have joined my ancestors. My dream was to be by your side, a weed beside your beauty, twining together in the warm Tuchanka sun. But if my last days must be with krannt instead of kindness, still, I will remember the perfume of your scent and the soft touch of your petals. Let my broken bones build a wall around your garden, so you and the flower we planted together can grow safe and strong."

"Guess he improved his poetry, or maybe it's just me," she said, wiping the corner of her eye.

"It broke your heart," Vega concluded.

"And this lady," Jo pointed at another asari, standing alone and talking on her com. "I'm about to break her heart as well." There was a dying message Jo had collected while helping Samara and her daughters in their monastery. "And this man," she pointed at a turian sitting at one of the cafe tables. "And that woman, too. And that man." The last one would get his son's dog tags she'd found on Benning.

Vega was turning quite pale as the nav points on her omnitool started making sense to him.

"Still want to tag along?" Jo asked him.

"If you see that as a part of your job, then I can do it as well as you. In fact, do you want me to go talk to those people? You don't have to do everything, you know."

Jo thought about it.

"If you take the others, I'll just go talk to Ereba. After all, I played a role in her and Charr's fate."

They parted for a while and Jo couldn't help another tear when Ereba listened to the message. How much did Jo wish she could turn off all feelings and become a ruthless commander, but she couldn't. Her heart broke for all these people. When she met up with Vega again, the other nav points were gone from her screen and the young man looked shaken, but firm.

Together they made short work of notifying countless people about some artefact Jo had found for them which they desperately needed to fight the war. When the nav points on her omnitool reduced to a mere handful, it was down to favours and real missions.


James tagged along, observing Lola and taking notes. If he were to earn his N7 badge, he couldn't shy away from any responsibility she shouldered. Best way to learn from her was to attach himself to her and hope to keep up.

Keeping up wasn't always easy. She seemed to make decisions on the go and sometimes he couldn't make any rhyme or reason of them. She took a batarian terrorist off life support, but closed his dead eyes gently, almost tenderly. Bailey asked her to help him out with a couple of situations and she didn't ask for details. Apparently Commander Bailey got a carte blanche from Commander Shepard, no matter what he wanted. James wondered about that arrangement.

"It's not that I trust Bailey implicitly," she said with a shrug. "He's not entirely a good person. He's opportunistic and corrupt when it suits him, but he's always, always honest with me about it. What he asks of me is often illegal and he repays me by doing illegal stuff for me. But if he's ever going to stab me in the back, he'll give me a fair warning."

James was still thinking about that when more messages sent them chasing first after a volus diplomat, then after a hanar one, which gave James an opportunity to meet two more questionable people who enjoyed Lola's trust despite their tense relationship with the law.

James had seen both Zaeed Massani and Kasumi Goto in the mission logs EDI had shown him, but meeting them in person was something else. If the scarred, tattooed mercenary had been a cat, he would have started purring and rubbing himself against Lola. As it was, he gave her a little smack on the ass, grinned widely and asked if she and Joker were still going strong. The big affirmative made him an ever happier camper.

Kasumi sort of blew all James' fuses. She was a badass. Tantalising body, stealth and skill, sensual lips, sparkling eyes and a voice that sent hot shivers straight to his crotch - she was incredible. She was mind blowing. She was a dream.

But she was not Lola. A shame, really. His head spun from watching her 'die'. Lola sent Jondum Bau away only to reveal that Kasumi had faked her death. James tried his best to hide his breathless flurry by flirting. It was his natural reaction to a fascinating and beautiful female being. Yet deep inside he almost wished he could really mean it. Here was a girl of his dreams, strong, tough, gorgeous in every feature he could see, sensual, wild and independent, and she was not his commanding officer - why could he not like a woman like that? Why did he have to carry a torch for the one woman in the galaxy he couldn't have?

Then he noticed that Lola was giving him a strange look while he was flirting with Kasumi. After they concluded their business and Lola arranged to meet the young thief at the club that night to catch up a little, they headed to the Holding Area to check on the refugees.

"Do you flirt as you breathe?" She asked him coldly from the corner of her mouth.

"Why, Lola, you don't like it? It's just flirting."

"I've noticed that you flirt with everything that has boobs, Vega, before you even learn their names. Kasumi, Allers, Jack, Traynor, Campbell, Westmoreland, you even keep a whole fan club at the ship. And even Tali! Just so you know, that particular ship has sailed long ago and if you dare bring it off course, I will personally disembowel you before Garrus gets his chance."

"Tali and Garrus? I knew that! It's really just flirting, I never mean anything by it," James' head spun again with a number of possibilities why she was bringing it up now. Could it be that she cared?..

"Do they know that?" Her voice was pure ice.

"I..." For a moment he didn't know what to say. Flirting wasn't even like a sport to him, it was his natural reaction to a woman's proximity. It was like breathing. It gave him a sense of normalcy whenever a mission had gone wrong in the past, when his guts ached with loss and guilt, when he didn't know himself and the world around him was falling apart. Flirting with women was natural. He flirted with every one, even his fellow female soldiers, but it was always harmless. Lola should know. Why was she grilling him about it all of a sudden? Was she maybe just a little bit jealous?

"That is not a way for a commanding officer to act, Vega," she killed all his hopes before they took root. "There is no such thing as harmless flirting. Watch yourself in the future. Oh, for the love of..." She suddenly stopped, almost face to face with a blond guy in the middle of the Holding Area, who gestured wildly and sprouted bullshit about how Cerberus was good enough for everyone if it was good enough for Shepard to join. James' jaw slacked. Was this guy for real?

"James, meet the bane of my existence. Conrad Verner."

"Shepard!" The weird guy hopped over, too excited to meet her to walk with dignity. She put him straight about working for Cerberus, which sent the guy reeling about how he'd made another mistake. After some investigating it turned out that Cerberus had sabotaged medigel dispensers while he'd been distracting everyone. James was almost sorry for the fool who couldn't do anything right, it seemed. That was until he told Lola that he'd written his doctoral dissertation on dark energy integration and xenotechology. James' jaw slacked again and Lola's whole stance shifted.

"Really?" It sounded like she saw the guy for the very first time. Was probably true. James watched them talk until Verner got her some sort of an upgrade for the Project Crucible. Sadly, he saw a little bit of himself in Conrad Verner. The guy was obsessed with Shepard and took his hero worship to the next level. Was Lola just as annoyed with him as she was with Verner? He hoped it was not so, but the guy's face was too familiar to ignore. It was the face of a man who would do anything to impress his idol. James was just a little luckier because he ended up being useful to her in more ways than Verner. But deep down they were both nothing more than two pathetic, starry-eyed fools.

The awe on Verner's face when she approved of his having ran a shelter for war orphans was gut-wrenching for James. Was he as eager? As desperate?

There was a lot to think about for James and he was still at it when Lola dragged him back to the ship. A day with Shepard on the Citadel had sure been a wild, crazy adventure.

Their next mission was on Thessia and things started going FUBAR the moment Liara demanded to be on the ground team. James' guts clenched. The young asari might be good with her biotics, but she wore a jacket into the battle and used a pistol, for fuck's sake! Even if she were the strongest bioic in the galaxy - which she was not - her strength still wasn't in fighting. A brilliant mind did not mean a great warrior. James knew that Shepard took her just to placate her, but he wondered what the price would be for Liara's stubbornness. He swore that if her weakness cost them the mission, he would personally make sure she never tried to go planetside again, even if he had to break both of her legs to make sure of that.

Thessia looked bad. Mostly because James simply couldn't take asari seriously as fighters. No matter how good they were, they still relied too much on their biotics. Their armours were light, their weapons even lighter. He was not a sexist, hell, his all-time hero was a woman half his size. But compared to Shepard all asari looked like teenage girls. Liara was no exception.

Then one of the biggest bombs in their whole cycle's history dropped. Shepard announced that she could feel a Prothean beacon hidden in the temple and Liara started screaming that it couldn't be, that her people couldn't be hiding something so big. Shepard only rolled her eyes:

"That would explain how asari are so advanced," she shrugged Liara off. James couldn't help some righteous anger. The asari, always so superior to every other species, priding themselves on their knowledge and advancement - all that was based entirely on Prothean help? Granted, most of asari alive right now had no idea, they truly believed in their superiority, but this revelation made them all look like cheating and power-hungry hypocrites to James.

"The asari should have shared this knowledge," Shepard cut off Liara's protests that it wasn't true. "We might not have been in this mess if they had."

James wholeheartedly agreed. It seemed petty to wish to knock some of the ever arrogant asari off their high horse when their planet was being destroyed, but James was only a man, and besides, Shepard seemed to feel the same way he did.

The next bomb hit immediately after. A Prothean VI appeared and explained to them that certain patterns in the galaxy were being repeated time and time again, certain conflicts manifesting themselves in different ways in each cycle. Everyone's current assumption that the Reapers were the masters of this design seemed to be wrong. James remembered what the Reaper on Rannoch had said about bringing order to the organic chaos. Perhaps it had been right and none of them could truly comprehend the real magnitude of the Reapers' actions. Perhaps the Reapers weren't the cause of the sickness. They were merely a symptom.

Fucking hell. How could any of them operate on such grand scale? How could any of them even understand what was going on?

The things turned completely FUBAR when Kai Leng appeared. He even brought the hologram of an old buddy.

"I know the Reapers, Shepard," the Illusive Man's hologram said, sending shivers of dread through James. "I know how they think." This man truly believed to know the Reapers? To know how they thought? He was completely indoctrinated, a silly puppet not even knowing he was being jerked this way and that way for the Reapers' amusement. He would have been funny if he wasn't capable of causing so much damage.

That conversation quickly turned ugly. The Illusive Man was convinced that he was the big hero, while everyone else present save Leng knew he was nothing more than a pathetic toy. Shepard wasn't going to listen to him for long. Unfortunately, Leng didn't even try to fight her head-on, like a man. He used his goons and a gunship to keep Shepard, James and Liara behind cover. It was a coward's way out, but it had worked. James had been knocked out by a grenade, his vision fading out at the sight of a stone block falling from the ceiling and sending Shepard into the abyss.

When James came back to, it was over. Leng was gone with the Prothean data. Shepard was still alive, battered, bruised, having lost half of her weapons to the pit under the temple, and incredibly foul-mooded. Around them Thessia was also lost.


Jo didn't know what to say. Neither to her team, nor to Liara, nor to the asari Councillor. The revelation that the species so proud of their intellectual superiority to everyone else were nothing but cheaters still pained, and it pained more than the number Leng pulled. That one she could deal with. The asari hiding their secret in the face of galactic annihilation, when the information on their beacon could have prevented the entire conflict, was betrayal of the deepest kind. This seemed so much like the jungle law: everyone looked out solely for their own interests. Asari of all people should have evolved past such primitive notions. Jo had. She'd been raised on that very same law on the streets, and yet here she was, giving everything she had to save other people. Why couldn't others do the same? Why did they have to be such dastard and furtive b...

Jo stopped her own thoughts. This was neither the time nor place for name-calling. She broke the news to the Councillor, but she still preferred not to look at Liara when she re-entered the War Room.

"Shepard, I..." Liara sounded suspiciously like a little girl demanding a hug. "Nobody could predict that Cerberus would reach Thessia before us..."

"Pull yourself together," Jo didn't even try to hide the sharpness and disgust in her voice as she cut off Liara's whining. Had Liara not insisted on going planetside, had Jo taken Javik or Tali instead, the fight against Leng could have ended differently. Were she ready to admit her species' perfidious nature, Jo might have had an easier time being her friend, but Liara still didn't want to believe the facts, even after they literally hit her in the face.

Liara looked like Jo had slapped her in the face and a few other crew members shrunk back at Jo's harshness, but Jo couldn't make herself care. She was fuming. She needed to vent somewhere and it wasn't fair to Joker to always hit him with negativity. He deserved better than that.

Jo needed a distraction and thankfully her crew seemed eager to start another mission, to do something productive. The failure on Thessia hit them all quite hard.

Vega seemed to be fully on her side. Jo wasn't surprised. He'd been the one to pick up Liara's slack on the battlefield. He'd been the one to be hit by a grenade to shield Liara. He'd been the one who felt most helpless of them all. It was his job to cover Jo, and this time Liara's poor fighting skills got in his way. Right now he was as furious at the situation as Jo was.

"I'm sick of Cerberus beating us to the punch," Jo said and Vega agreed:

"Let's kick them in the balls for a change."

"I'm with James," Jo nodded. "Anyone know where they're hiding?"

The silence that followed shouldn't have been awkward. Jo noticed that EDI's mech and Traynor were exchanging looks.

"If you have something to report, Traynor, you fucking report it. Hesitation costs lives," she snapped. It was not good to be the Normandy crew today because Jo just knew she would lash out at all of them until she calmed down a little.

Traynor told her that she tracked Leng's shuttle to a system which housed nothing else but the Sanctuary, a supposed safe place for the refugees. Jo agreed that the blocked signal was worth checking out.

"If Specialist Traynor hadn't examined the data so astutely," EDI said with a new note to her voice. That note made Jo straighten up and listen closely. In fact, it grated against her nerves. "The interference would have been undetectable."

"Well, I'm glad that you've stopped drooling after my boyfriend, EDI," Jo snapped again, clearly reading between the lines. "But keep your newly found lesbian curiosity to your own and Traynor's free time. I don't care what you do with your pet, I just don't need it in the War Room. Everyone dismissed."

It was truly not a good day to be a member of the Normandy crew.

Jo went to the cockpit next. Joker had always been the only one who could handle her bitchiness, truly handle it. Maybe because he himself was a first class asshole, maybe because he knew her so well - Jo didn't know and didn't care. She needed to see him.

"So, Thessia, huh?" He greeted her from his chair. "Guess the asari are wishing they had fewer dancers and more commandos right about now."

Jo snorted.

"That's what Vega and I were thinking all the time down there," she confessed. "Might be a bit too soon for jokes, though."

"Yeah, see this?" He showed her a schematic of a planet with a moon. "Tiptree. Reapers moved in two weeks ago. So yes, I'm generally aware that there's war going on."

"Oh, god," Jo gasped. "Why didn't you tell me? We could have been there in a few days!"

"It's not something I can ask of you. You have much more important stuff to do, and besides, asari commandos have been deployed there to help with evacuation. I haven't had news yet, but I'm sure I'll hear from dad and Gunny soon."

"This is not the time to be a fucking martyr, Joker. This is your family. You should have told me, damn you."

"Everyone on this ship has family, Jo."

"Yes, but this is my family, too."

"You're under so much stress already, EDI says your readings are worse than during Akuze. Last time I had a briefing with Anderson, he told me to take care of you. Everyone is worried about you. I'm doing my best here, but it doesn't look like my best is enough anymore."

"Look, Jeff, nobody's taking a better care of me than you," Jo started but was interrupted by a ping from her omnitool. An external incoming message? Usually those went to her console. Hardly anyone got through straight to her omnitool. Jo frowned and opened the message marked "Evacuating Thessia".

She read the text and an icy shower of emotions washed over her. Her heartbeat sped up and she had to stand still for several moments before she found her voice again. Then she took a deep breath and exhaled, before looking up at Joker again. He looked at her with rising alarm.

"Joker, get yourself and the entire crew to the mess hall immediately," she ordered. "I mean it - every single person on the ship."

The regular conference room wasn't quite big enough to comfortably hold the whole crew, hence all the assemblies were held in the mess hall. Besides, what she had to talk to her people about was more of a private matter than an official one.

People looked confused, worried, tired and slightly annoyed. Most of them were already preparing for the next mission. Liara looked grey instead of blue. Jo waited until everyone settled.

"I have just received a message of fascinating content," she declared in complete silence. "I'm forwarding it to each of you now, so that you can all have a look."

"Evacuating Thessia. Good. You opened this message. This isn't actually asari military command. They're busy tending to what's left of their planet. So you survived our fight on Thessia. You're not as weak as I thought. But never forget that your best wasn't good enough to stop me. Now an entire planet is dying because you lacked the strength to win. The legend of Shepard needs to be re-written. I hope I'm there for the last chapter. It ends with your death. -KL"

After a few moments it took them to read it the humans exploded with colourful variations of 'Son of a bitch!', Garrus and Tali both grunted something Jo's translator didn't get, Liara roared and Javik spat.

"I'm gonna kill this pendejo!" Vega growled. "I'm gonna find him and rip out his spleen!"

"No, you won't," Jo said calmly with a smile. Everyone immediately fell silent. A calm smile was not the reaction they had expected, it was not the reaction they were having.

"Why are you so happy about this?" Joker shook his head in disbelief.

"My dear Normandy crew," Jo was smiling wider and wider. "Would you say I'm a confident person?"

There was a consensus that yes, she was a very confident person.

"Can you imagine me sending gloating messages to the enemies I've just defeated fair and square?"

Everyone shook their heads.

"Kai Leng is a formidable opponent for sure, he even used to be an N7, but when he sent this message, he forgot something. I'm an N7, too. I'm far better at it than he is, even. I have a psychology degree and right now it tells me a lot about the person who wrote this message."

"Oh, please share," Tali leaned forward with interest, much like most other people.

"The text is clearly written with the aim to intimidate, to rub in my failure, to make him look confident and to make me doubt myself. But its flaw is that firstly, a confident warrior doesn't need to gloat, especially if his victory had been as great as Leng describes, and secondly, he's trying too hard to convince me that I lost. What does that mean? It means that he's scared shitless of me, of us. We may have lost the beacon data to him, and it may have looked like a defeat which resulted in Thessia's loss, but something else happened there, something that only Leng knows about. Perhaps we hit him so hard that he started doubting his own abilities, I don't know, but clearly it was something that shook him deeply. Deep enough to despair, to sink so low as to send me a gloating message."

People looked at her and each other with confused frowns. They didn't dare believe her, but they knew that Jo wouldn't lie to them, not about something like that.

"First of all, Thessia's loss has nothing to do with our skirmish. It would have happened anyway, so none of us should feel guilty about that. Thessia isn't dying because of my lack of strength, so when Leng writes that, he's grasping at straws, trying to connect that little brawl with something much bigger, something clearly out of my control. He wants me to feel guilty about that because he knows I don't really have anything to feel guilty about. Secondly, he says that my best wasn't good enough to stop him. Well, perhaps this one time it wasn't. Wasn't my best, though. We all know that you're good at what you do, Liara, but you're useless to me in battle. Had it been Tali in your place, things would have looked very different. So I wasn't even at my best, but even that doesn't matter. I hung there over an abyss by the tips of my fingers when he went for the data. All he had to do to get rid of me forever was to go to the edge and shoot me. I couldn't have stopped him. He didn't. Instead he dashed for he data and skedaddled as soon as he was able. He ran instead of finishing the job. Why? Because he's so scared of me, of what I could do even when I'm helpless, that he didn't dare approach me."

Understanding and agreement started spreading over their faces. But Garrus, Joker, Tali and Vega got something else in their eyes, too. Dark determination to end this guy.

"That's why I gathered you all here and showed you this message. I've been in a foul mood since we returned to the ship and was just about to start wallowing in self-pity and guilt, when I received this. Best fucking news ever. Now I'm cured of all doubts, guilt or insecurity and so should you be. Kai Leng is fucking scared of me, he's trembling in his synthetic boots, I assure you. He tried his best to intimidate us, and for a moment it worked, but he was stupid enough to send this and it clued me in. He's not stronger than me, not superior in any way. Like the Illusive Asshole, he's nothing more than an indoctrinated puppet. I'm Commander Fucking Shepard, I'm better and stronger than him in every way, and the best part is: I still think for myself. Next time we meet, I won't be doubting myself or my team. This motherfucker is going down, I swear it to you, and he's going down hard."

The collective roar of approval was very close to a battle cry. Like her, the entire crew shook off their apathy, guilt and shock. They patted each other's backs and went back to work eagerly in full knowledge that they would win.