Hackett's intel sent Jo to Dr. Bryson's lab on the Citadel, only so that she could witness him being killed by his assistant. Something about the creepy way the assistant spoke reminded her of the colonists taken over by the Thorian all those years ago. Jo's gut told her that those short moments when the man lost control of himself and clearly became a vessel for an alien mind would give her more information than all the intel Dr. Bryson had gathered.
With EDI's help she looked at the messages between Bryson and Hackett. Bryson was looking for a creature he called the Leviathan of Dis, which supposedly had killed a Reaper.
"I believe the statement 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' may be relevant," EDI said, hacking her way through Bryson's data.
"You know what worries me?" Jo rubbed her forehead. "If this Leviathan could help us in this war, why didn't it help the Protheans? And if it did try and help them, they still died, so it's not that effective."
"Perhaps the Protheans never found it."
"If only the matter was just finding it. Why is it not fighting the Reapers already? It hides and clearly wants to be left alone, and it would kill and destroy any number of people to stay hidden. Why the hell would it help us?"
"You have persuaded uncooperative opponents before, Commander," EDI noted.
Jo was sceptical. Still, it was a lead worth following. Jo and EDI narrowed Garneau's location down to a system and Jo sighed deeply. It would take several days to get there even if they didn't make any other stops. The crew was itchy from the week they'd just spent in space with nothing to do, and now the mission was taking them on another long journey. They would need some serious shore leave very soon.
They did find the system and the mining facility on the asteroid. By that time Vega was seeing chess-dreams, Liara and Javik were on the verge of killing each other, Allers decided to take weapons training and Cortez double-waxed the Kodiak.
A man introduced himself as Dr. Garneau but at the first mention of Reapers he launched himself at the glass separating him from Jo and her team and spoke in a voice that sent very familiar shivers down Jo's spine. Reapers sounded just like that.
"Why do you pursue me? Leave the artefact. You will not take what is mine!"
Score. Direct contact with the Leviathan itself. Well, at least, unlike Bryson and Garneau, Jo had managed to annoy it enough to get it to speak to her directly. Questionable honour, but it was nonetheless a step towards communication.
"You killed a Reaper," she said. "I need your help!"
"You bring only death," the man declared right before he shattered the glass and ran.
"I bring only death?" Jo looked at her companions. "Is this creature for real? What death have I brought compared to the Reapers?!"
They caught up with the man just before he blew up himself and the artefact. It seemed to be the same kind of orb they'd found in Bryson's lab. A com buoy of sorts, projecting the Leviathan's mind, indoctrinating people, and there was one sitting right in the middle of the Citadel.
They flew back to the Citadel, only to find out they needed to hunt down Bryson's daughter, Ann. Jo clenched her jaws: getting to her location would take another week. Everyone sighed deeply, but they went.
The planet was overrun with Reaper forces, but Jo found Ann easily enough. On their way to the shuttle Garrus pointed out a mural on a cliff. Ann confirmed that the image represented the Leviathan and the humanoid natives under its power. Jo felt a shiver down to her bone marrow as she looked at the picture. This was not a Reaper. Sure, it generally looked like one, but it was not. The double colouring, the many curves and angles - Reapers were cut clean, their shape an economic principle of smooth lines, easy to depict. Whatever this creature in the mural was, a Reaper it was not.
By the time the Normandy returned to the Citadel again, everyone was climbing the walls. Tali started drinking, Garrus stopped all communications with the Primarch, Traynor started carrying her toothbrush everywhere with her for some reason, Liara and Karin took up singing together, while Ken and Gabby spread a permanent picnic blanket under the drive core and ignored Adams and EDI telling them that Engineering was not a park. Joker converted half the crew into frequent and enthusiastic porn watchers. Vega never complained once about anything. He took Jo's advice seriously: if it's torture, learn to love it. He busied himself reading books about physics, xenobiology and history.
In Bryson's lab again, Jo listened to Ann offering herself as a guinea pig for an experiment. She wanted to let the artefact take her over while EDI would track the signal to its point of origin. Jo wondered why nobody thought of this before: neither Ann's father, nor Garneau. They were probably too indoctrinated to think clearly.
Vega thought that what Ann was about to do was too dangerous. Jo thought to herself that people often died for less cause. Once the connection was established, he held on to the young woman, protesting again and again that they'd gathered enough information. EDI kept urging Jo on to maintain the connection. Ann's nose started bleeding and Jo had to assess the situation. Could she risk Ann's life in order to pinpoint the Leviathan's location? Vega seemed to think it wasn't worth it, but Jo knew: a blind search would take them weeks. In those weeks billions of people would die. Ann had volunteered and Jo would take advantage of that. After all, she wasn't demanding anything she wasn't willing to do herself.
Once EDI got the exact location, Vega shielded the artefact again. He was angry with Jo for Ann's condition, she could tell, even though he didn't say anything. He collected Ann into his arms and carried her off to the hospital. Jo looked after him and sighed. He cared about people a lot, which was a very good thing. What he lacked right now was the edge, the hardness, the willingness to do whatever it takes, even if it meant sacrificing people. She would give him some time to think about that before they would discuss it as a part of his training.
An hour later the Normandy was off again, embarking on another journey, the longest so far. Eleven days to get to the uncharted system far away from the nearest relay. By the time they arrived, everyone took up singing, chess got reinvented, the mess hall got decorated for Christmas - just because - and random possessions started disappearing and reappearing in odd places. People were getting more than the simple cabin fever, they were starting to go batshit crazy. Jo desperately needed this mission to end before someone decided to open the airlock for fun. She even started locking the cases with weapons and munitions with her personal seal, just to... avoid any temptation for the crew.
Turned out that the Leviathan signal came from under water. This made sense: everyone taken over by the creature mentioned darkness and cold. It took them a while, but eventually they powered up a mech and Jo spoke a quick prayer before she did one of the craziest things in her career: jumped into the ocean, with nothing between her and the water pressure but the thin glass of the mech's cabin. She hoped Vega appreciated what she was doing here. She wasn't only risking other people's lives, she was always offering to risk her own first.
She had a lot of time to rethink the wisdom of her actions as the mech plummeted to the bottom of the ocean. She'd never suffered claustrophobia, never even understood the concept, until the lamp on the mech's hull broke and complete darkness engulfed her. She was falling, surrounded by hostile emptiness, helpless and tiny against the void.
Brace for impact, brace for impact, she chanted to herself to chase away the sticky, cold fear. There was no way of knowing if the bottom of the ocean was ten meters away or ten thousand kilometres. She kept falling and falling until she lost all sense of time.
When the impact came, she still wasn't prepared. Three thousand meters. She'd lost communication with the surface a long time ago and could only hope that the mech's thrusters were strong enough to get her back up all the way. If not, she mused, Joker would just have to teach the Normandy how to swim and come and get her.
There was a light source down below. Whatever it was, instead of hope and relief it filled Jo with dread. Every instinct told her to get the fuck away from that light, but she made herself continue. Then everything trembled and big bubbles of air started rising from beneath the nearest cliff.
"Fuck," Jo sucked in a nervous breath. She knew deep in her gut: whatever was coming, she would be lucky to get away alive.
Jo had no idea how much time had passed when the mech finally broke the surface of the ocean and jumped onto the platform. She didn't care. The cabin opened and she stumbled out of it right under a brute's feet. Her body as well as her mind were too numb to register the danger. Garrus and Vega got her to safety and Cortez picked them up. The numbness in her body ebbed away a little by the time the team was in the shuttle, but Jo ignored the worried faces of her men and answered no questions. She just didn't feel like talking about it. Not now, not ever.
Joker was panicking. First of all - he looked around at his navigators. Had they seen the same thing he'd just seen on his screens? A Reaper entered the planet's orbit, headed straight for Jo's shuttle, and then died. Just... died. Fell into the ocean like a dead bug.
Something was wrong with Jo. She'd made it back to the surface all right, but ever since then Garrus, Vega and Cortez couldn't get a word out of her. She wasn't catatonic, at least he hoped she wasn't. Her nose was bleeding heavily, but she walked to a seat, sat down and folded her hands in her lap. Apart from that she seemed unresponsive. Joker didn't like that at all. What the hell had happened down there?
The shuttle entered the bay and Joker set the ship on course to the relay. They'd need eleven days to get back to the Citadel and he hoped Jo would be all right. There weren't that many working hospitals left in the galaxy. Once the ship was moving, he left EDI in charge and hurried to the cargo bay.
Karin was fussing over Jo, who sat on the shuttle's step. Her nose was still bleeding but she batted the doctor's hands away. Everyone looked a bit worried, but Jo ignored their concern. She got up and listlessly dragged herself toward the elevator.
"Emergency meeting in the Mess Hall," she said quietly. People around Joker exchanged worried looks. They followed her while Garrus sent a ship-wide message for every person on the ship to get their asses to the Mess Hall immediately.
Jo sat at the table, her face sad and tired. People gathered almost at once.
"I don't wanna talk about it," she said listlessly. "Not now, not ever. So I'm only gonna tell the story once." She closed her eyes. Joker was scared to even imagine what happened to her down there. She spoke, her eyes still closed: "I found the Leviathan. It is not a Reaper. It is what an asari is to a banshee, what a human is to a husk. It is... the original. Well, not a real original, but a descendant of the first species that had been harvested. The first Reaper, Harbinger, was created in their image, and each Reaper after that, until that humanoid one we destroyed on the Collector base."
Joker tried not to think about it. Thinking would blow his mind. He decided to let her finish before he'd contemplate the magnitude of what she was saying.
"That Leviathan, it's a cocky bastard, even more self-absorbed and self-important than you, Javik. It believes it's the apex of life in the galaxy. The Leviathan species, let's call them that, indoctrinated all the other, lesser species in the galaxy in their time and made them their slaves. They needed servants to tend to their needs. But then they noticed a pattern. The species would build machines that would destroy them. The Leviathans didn't like that, because 'tribute does not flow from a dead race'."
The last part she said in a dead, emotionless voice. He recognised a direct quote. A cold hand of fear started clawing its way up his spine. He could imagine what she would say next.
"Leviathans wanted to solve this problem, so they created an intelligence with the sole purpose to save life at any cost. Can you see what happened next?" Jo opened her eyes, looking at her crew.
"The Rise of the Machines," Joker whispered. He'd seen this vid before. Aliens among them obviously had no idea about this particular cultural reference, but even they got the general idea.
"Exactly. The intelligence found a solution. It did, indeed, preserve life at any cost. It harvested the Leviathans first and made Harbinger."
"Why would they create an AI when they'd observed other species get destroyed by synthetics time and time again?!" Tali exclaimed. Jo closed her eyes and quoted again:
"You cannot conceive of a galaxy that bends to your will. Every creature, every nation, every planet we discovered became our tools. We were above the concerns of lesser species. The intelligence was envisioned as simply another tool. There was no mistake. It still serves its purpose."
Everyone grew very quiet and the silence held for a very long time. People tried to digest the information and Joker could see now why Jo didn't feel like talking about it.
"But... why is this intelligence still... harvesting?" Tali asked again, her voice weak.
"What is the definition of insanity?" Jo asked and Karin provided the answer quickly:
"Repetition of the same action again and again and expectation of a different result."
"Yes. How does that apply to a machine?"
"It gets caught in a cyclic function and will repeat the same calculation indefinitely until something changes. The systems is rebooted externally, or the equation changes," Tali said firmer now. This was her domain.
"This intelligence is looking for a way to preserve life indefinitely. Evolution is its tool. It ordered the Reapers to build the relays to shorten the time between each cycle. The Leviathan thinks that the intelligence is looking for something, and until it finds it, the cycles will continue."
"Do you even realise how crazy that sounds?" Garrus protested. "For all we know, this intelligence has already found a solution: creation of the Reapers! Isn't it what the Reapers themselves believe? That our way of life is crazy chaos, but once we're harvested and melted into another Reaper, we become order, we become perfect? As far as a machine is concerned, it's the best way of preserving life!" He shouted. "And also, how exactly does this intelligence hope to find a solution, if it kills all of us before we can even try and find a solution? I mean, look at this harvest theory. It kills the organics right before we develop far enough to find such a solution for ourselves. It doesn't even give us a chance!"
"Are you asking me if I know how crazy it sounds?" Jo snapped back. "I know exactly how crazy this is, how moronic. There is no fucking logic behind any of this, no artificial intelligence in our cycle could arrive at this idiotic conclusion because it's too stupid to even consider. Our synthetics are way too smart for that. But they are not the problem. The problem is us. The organics. It's us that this intelligence wants. It's us that it harvests before we can change the equation. But our cycle is not like the others," she slumped in her chair, calming down a bit.
"How so?" Liara asked.
"We've been warned by the Protheans. We've stopped the first wave of the attack. We've had some time to prepare. Thanks to all this our cycle had the time to produce what no cycle has had before, apparently."
"Namely?"
"A conduit. A border point between past and present. A visionary of a different future. A voice for all the species, one that everyone hears in their hearts, not in their minds. A siren call. A bump on the road. A grain of sand in a well-oiled machine."
"In other words: you," Joker exhaled. Spikes of icy fear now prickled over all of his skin.
"Yes," Jo said and closed her eyes again. "The Reapers are hunting me, they perceive me as a threat. I am an anomaly. The Leviathan needed to know why. It grabbed me and decided to keep me with it, make me the servant of its needs. As far as it was concerned, the Reapers could harvest all the others."
Many shuddering exhales rippled the silence.
"So I did what I do best. I spoke to its heart, made it see my vision of the future. It let me go and promised its help fighting the Reapers."
"That's good... Right?" Liara piped in. Jo leaned back in her chair, eyes closed, and quoted again:
"It is clear why the Reapers perceive you as a threat. Your victories are more than a product of chance. We will fight, but not for you or any lesser race. We were the first, the apex race. We will survive. And the Reapers that trespass on this world will understand our power. They will become our slaves. Today they pay their tribute in blood."
The pause after this declaration lasted minutes. Eventually, though, Joker had to ask:
"Were they really the first?"
"I seriously doubt that. Evolution doesn't start with its apex. It doesn't have an apex. It is only our own arrogance - and the Leviathans' arrogance - that makes us think we're the apex. In reality all of us are nothing more but another experiment, a blip on the radar of the global evolution. Even this galaxy is nothing more than one Petri dish among others."
There was another silence, and it was again Joker who had to break it.
"Jo, talk to us. What are you thinking about? What really happened down there?"
"I don't wanna talk about it. But I have to, don't I?" She rubbed her hands down her face, miraculously leaving her mascara intact. "What happened down there is that I made a deal with the devil. I accepted a compromise I had no business accepting, but there is nobody in the galaxy who has that kind of authority. To save us all from the Reaper threat I made a deal with a creature that believes itself the apex of evolution, it believes us lesser races, it believes that we should be its slaves and tools. It knows that I'm an anomaly that could change the equation its intelligence is working with, it knows I could be the grain of sand that could stop the Reaper machinery, and yet it wanted to keep me as a slave for itself. It doesn't care that the Reapers would slaughter the rest of my cycle. It cares about nothing but itself. It believes that no living creature but a Leviathan is worthy of survival. It believes it owns the galaxy. The only reason it's hiding are the Reapers, and I just made it understand how nice things will be once the Reapers are gone. It won't have to hide anymore, if we win. It'll come out and claim its due. I found the creature and made sure that if we win against the Reapers, we'll have to jump from the frying pan into the fire, into another war."
As she spoke, people grew pale, some found chairs to sit in because their knees wouldn't hold them.
"And the worst part is: I didn't have a choice, did I?" Jo shuddered. "I had to get away from it somehow. I couldn't stay down there as its slave and condemn the galaxy to extinction. And I couldn't talk the Leviathan into killing itself, like I did Saren. Wouldn't have made a difference. It was not alone there. I saw at least three, and who knows, maybe there's a whole city full of them. So, I made a deal with the devil, and it'll come back to bite us all in the asses at the most inconvenient time possible. I made sure that if we survive the Reapers, we plunge into another war with the creatures Reapers were made after. One of them is bound to finish us off."
"Jo," Garrus took her hand and squeezed it tightly. "We'll just have to make sure that as few of those Leviathans as possible survive the conflict with the Reapers. Toss them to the barricades, so to speak. We'll find a way, we always do. Try not to think about that now."
"We should have left this one alone," Jo sighed. "Not all secrets are meant to be discovered."
"Shepard, it wasn't all in vain," Vega protested. "Now we know what those artefacts looks like and we can destroy them wherever we find one. We know what the creature is capable of and would recognise the signs of its influence. We have recordings of its signal through the artefact and can follow it. We also have the location of their home base as of this moment. If we have to go to war against them, at least we know where to start. We gathered valuable intel, so don't beat yourself up. You did what you had to. You weren't the one who decided to go after this legend. You were asked by Hackett to help a group that was already neck-deep in the problem. You also helped people along the way, freed them from indoctrination."
Jo shrugged listlessly:
"I don't wanna talk about it." She got up and slowly headed for the elevator. Joker went after her.
"Jo, are you unfit for duty?" He asked her very quietly. He couldn't question her in front of the crew, but he needed to know. She seemed deeply affected by the implications of her little tour to the bottom of the ocean and desperately required some rest. He needed to know what kind of rest that would be.
"I don't know," she said, leaning against the wall next to the elevator. "But have Garrus take over for the time being, anyway."
Joker wondered if the pressure wasn't getting too much. The things she had to deal with, the responsibility she had to accept - there was literally no other person in the galaxy who knew how she felt. She needed rest, they all did.
In the end it fell to him to debrief Anderson and Hackett on the mission. Both men took the report stoically. One problem at a time, they decided. And when Joker insisted that Jo needed rest, Anderson had an idea.
When Joker entered the loft a few minutes later, Jo was asleep. She slept through that day and night, woke up in the morning for breakfast and fell asleep again. On the one hand he was glad she had that kind of control over her sleeping abilities now, on the other hand it was scary. When he asked her not to escape the reality in sleep anymore she agreed. Instead she kept sitting on the couch for hours and watched the fish. Any minute now she would ask him the same question he'd asked her when she gave him the news of his family's deaths: what's the point? Die now or die later, who cares? And how the hell was he supposed to answer that?
Just because he had no other ideas, Joker dug up his minipad connected to the transmitter in her jaw. When she jumped into the ocean, the normal communication stopped working at a certain depth. This transmitter, however, had recorded everything. Even so, most of the time the conversation seemed one-sided. Joker supposed that the Leviathan had used its tricks to speak directly to her mind. One thing stood out, though, which Jo had failed to mention to the crew when she talked about what happened. The Leviathan said:
"The Reapers perceive you as a threat and I must understand why."
"I can tell you why," was Jo's almost arrogant reply. "Because I don't let the size of a problem intimidate me. I might look like a tiny insect next to a Reaper, but I don't stop fighting. I might look at millions of years of evolution and cycles and research of galactic proportions, but I don't stop fighting. I may look small and weak and insignificant, but hey, I got the Reapers' attention, and the Collectors', and yours. Reapers perceive me as a threat because I didn't throw the fight after just one look at them, unlike some other individuals. I'm a warrior at heart, so at least one of us is, here at the bottom of the ocean."
Joker bit down a grin. Mouthing up to a gigantic creature capable of killing a Reaper one on one? Calling it a coward? Teasing and needling it? That was his woman. She was a bigger asshole than he could ever be.
He sat her down in their cabin that night and played the recording to her. She looked uncomfortable and wouldn't meet his eyes.
"I know the pressure is crushing you," he said to her. "I know it's all getting to be too much. But what you said to that thing is true. Can't you just believe in your own words, even for a little while? Can't you draw some strength from your own wisdom?"
"I'm losing it," she said quietly.
"Your mind?"
"My fight."
A chill made Joker shiver. If she lost her mind, it was only half-bad. If she lost her fight, everything was lost.
"Is there... anything I can do?" He asked carefully.
"If it weren't for you, I'd have lost it a hell of a lot sooner. At this point... I don't know. This war... the parameters just keep changing and I'm not prepared for any of the eventualities."
"What are you thinking of exactly?"
"The Reapers, obviously. First we thought they just hated all organic life and obliterated it in periodic intervals. Then one of them tells me that their existence is beyond my comprehension and that they'd always been there and always will be. Then the next Reaper says that they harvest us to bring order in our existence, because the Reaper way of life is better than ours. And now a member of the species that the Reapers are formed after tells me that no, they didn't always exist, that was a shameless lie, they're in fact a rather recent development compared to the history of this galaxy. They're not even original, but in fact mass produced as simple tools to serve a purpose. See, the more I have to do with them, the more layers do I peel back and each one reveals something new that mostly contradicts previous layers. And the fuck of it all is that this time I found out the one thing that turns this whole war upside down: The Reapers aren't even individuals, they're all controlled by this mysterious AI that sill looks for an answer to a stupid question. Assuming, of course, that this layer of information is the actual truth. So, in order to win this war we can discard the Reapers themselves because they're irrelevant. We need to address this AI. How do we do that, where do we find it, how do we stop this vicious circle? I don't know. But the parameters have changed with this discovery. We don't need to prepare for a war with the Reapers, they're just a symptom. We need to find the source of the actual disease. The AI. And for that we don't need armies and soldiers. We need archaeologists, scientists, historians, analysts... I just hope that this AI has a main processor somewhere and isn't scattered all over the place..."
"Stop, stop," Joker grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. She was talking faster and faster without breathing, until her words became a panicked slur. "Breathe. Slowly."
"See how this new intel would kill the last of my buzz?" She had tears of despair in her eyes. "We're utterly unprepared and we have no time to start this all over again. I don't have the strength to start from the beginning. I don't have much left in me. I won't be able to do any of this for much longer."
"You don't have to," he said what they both knew but never actually spoke about before. "We have no time to look for this AI anymore. We're about to engage in a gigantic battle against the Reapers, whether they're a symptom or the disease, we have no choice. Hackett's agents have tracked Kai Leng to the Illusive Asshole's home base. He says that if he sends his fleet to attack Cerberus, the Reapers will take notice and the Crucible won't stay safe for long. The Crucible is finished, though, for all intents and purposes. Except for the Catalyst, whatever that is. Everyone is only waiting for your okay to launch the first wave of the attack. It could all be over in the matter of days for us."
"Mhm," Jo nodded grimly.
"Tools have this interesting quality to them, Jo: if you take them away, no master of no craft can do much. Even if we never find this AI, we can still render it helpless for a while if we destroy its tools. The only question that remains is: do we jump into battle right away or do we take a few days on the Citadel to unwind? Could be our last chance."
Jo sat back on the couch and rubbed her hands down her face. She was silent for a long time before she seemed to realise that he wanted an answer from her.
"We'll go to the Citadel first, of course. I'm just not sure I can actually unwind anymore."
"Anderson had a suggestion. He said that he owns an apartment on the Citadel, and he wants you to have it."
That got Jo's interest:
"He wants me to have it? What would I want with Anderson's apartment?"
"That's what he said. 'Take it off my hands', to quote him directly."
"If he hopes that I clean it after we're done unwinding, he can hold his breath until that happens. Now, Admiral Ahern's place on Intai'Sei meant something to me because I won it fair and square and because the man meant something to me. Anderson? After all the backstabs, theft, betrayal and duplicity he's shown me, I'll take my personal pleasure trashing the place before I send him pictures. I'll never 'take it off his hands'. Actually, the very fact that he's offering it to me makes me very suspicious."
"I'm sure you're exaggerating."
"Was I exaggerating when he stole the Normandy and took her for a joy ride to Omega? Or when he destroyed the whole ship's interior trying to make her his mobile command centre all the while he was making sure I would never return to her?"
"Okay, okay, I get it. Still, he's been your friend for a long time."
"That man is no friend of mine any longer. Next time I see him, I'll punch out his front teeth for trying to stab me in the back so many times."
Joker laughed at her sulky vehemence:
"Wouldn't it be bad for moral of his soldiers if you punch his teeth out?"
Jo snorted:
"They're not his soldiers, they're mine. Everyone in the galaxy is my soldier right now. I'm Commander Fucking Shepard. Check my references. They don't need Anderson when they have me."
"And do they? Have you, that is?"
Jo looked at him from underneath her beautifully arched blond eyebrows:
"You're a manipulative bastard, you know that? I may be losing my fight, but I haven't lost it yet, and you just made me feel it again. You gave me my battle anger and my determination back. You're an evil person, Joker. Is there something I can throw at you that you cannot fix?"
"Life will tell, oh my fearless leader. Life will tell."
She sputtered:
"Did you just call me your fearless leader? That's so lame!"
"What do you want me to call you?" He grinned, launched at her and grabbed her ankles. She was wearing small, easily removable shoes instead of her combat boots. He tossed them aside and started tickling her feet. She squealed and laughed loudly, like a girl.
"Goddess Divine!" She shouted between bursts of laughter. "I want you to call me Goddess Divine!"
"How about Girlie? Or Blondie? Twinkletoes? Freckles? Fairy Wings? Sugar Plum? Strawberry Shortcake?"
"How about I cut off your balls and wear them as a necklace?"
"You wouldn't," he exhaled sharply as they both fell on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, limbs entangled in a loving wrestling match, both laughing like mad.
"Don't be so sure!" She grabbed his hat and tossed it away.
"Have you ever done that before?" He teased her and received an enigmatic smile as a reply:
"My lips are sealed."
When they finally disentangled and went to bed that night, Joker thought that this couldn't go on for much longer. It seemed that lately their whole life was about heading for the abyss, only to be stopped one step away from it. Last time it was she who saved him. Today their roles got reversed. Each crisis they encountered rocked them harder and harder, making it almost impossible for one to get away from the abyss on their own. They needed each other, helped each other, but the darkness was coming in waves, each one closer than the last. Tonight Jo had allowed him to distract her from the doom and gloom so easily, she wanted to forget, desperately needed something else to focus on, thus she embraced the moment of carefree tumbling and laughing. He knew this distraction wouldn't work forever, or even longer than for one night. The nervous and spiritual breakdown was never far from anyone on the Normandy anymore. One way or the other, this situation would have to be resolved very soon.
