'The worst part,' James told the Asari volunteer, 'is that there's no cerveza.'

The Asari laughed. She didn't actually think it was the worst part—and she got the same post-war look in her eyes everybody was wearing these days, along with the black armbands. James knew what she was thinking—more like who she was thinking about. Somebody important, not ready yet to say their name out loud. Or maybe her mind was headed toward a home planet. Or maybe she was telling herself how great it was and how terrible it was that they just didn't know—all those people out there, all those systems, all those possibilities.

They could live in dumb hope forever if they wanted to, but dumb hope went with drinking like lime went with tequila. It always needed a little something to balance it out.

Piccadilly Circus Memorial Field Hospital was full, as always. James shifted the weight of his rations bag from one side to the other—it wasn't that heavy, and wasn't that the problem?—and didn't bother to shield his eyes, looking down over the rows of tents and the rows of cots.

He'd helped put some of those up.

He'd also helped tear some of the city down.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Post-war, people could block out the stuff that didn't help with rebuilding, at least for a while. Like the Asari volunteer—nurse or whatever she was, since whatever she used to be didn't count anymore—someone whose name James didn't know and didn't care to. She'd seen the dog tags he was still sporting, so she knew him about as well as anybody else did: soldier, big one, probably still clinging to the past, not ready to shake it off. Not ready to stop hanging around the field hospitals looking for survivors.

'Guess I've overstayed my welcome,' James added, not bothering to clear his throat. 'You'll tell me if somebody by that name does show up, all right?'

'Or let you know if I come across some cerveza,' the Asari replied.

That was a good one, James thought. He even chuckled, canned food tucked under one arm, making his way past Leicester Square—what was left of it—and toward the National Gallery Shelter, blown out shell of a building that at least gave some people a roof over their heads. Or half a roof.

It was still better than nothing.

And it was way better than no roof, especially when it rained, although at least the stuff coming down wasn't black anymore.

London. James had heard stories, enough to guess the weather wouldn't be his thing. Now he knew it wasn't. The food wasn't so hot, either, even if it did stand up to what they had back on the Normandy.

There it was—the old grit in his throat, something he could blame on how bad the air was directly over the city. Blow up enough mass relays and the atmosphere was bound to get dense; blow up enough everything else and you'd be coughing it up for days, weeks, even months. 'Now you've finally got an excuse for being short of breath—is that what you're trying to tell me, Vega?' Cortez asked, in those early days, when they still hadn't figured out if the stuff was going to kill them or not.

This time, James did clear his throat. It worked. Whatever was lodged in the back there shook free, right as he stepped clear of a couple of Turians trying to figure out how three fingers were supposed to get a decent grip on their hammers.

Garrus had been the same way. The guy knew it wasn't going to happen. Some people'd up and died because the life that came after just wasn't what they were meant to be living—only that kind of practicality wasn't the same as the stuff they had now, putting their heads down and eating whatever they could, sleeping whenever they could, breathing however they could.

Considering the quality of air was tighter than it was up in space before they had time to depressurize—or decontaminate—that was saying a lot.

James put the goods down on the table, a real fancy thing from a point in history so long before synthetics that it was almost funny to see it still in mostly one piece. There it stood, with a collection of salvaged tech, mostly garbage, and his rations spread out over the top, one scorch mark on a wobbly leg, but the rest of it intact. There was the old aquarium VI that didn't work anymore next to a busted up replica of the Normandy—the only two things that hadn't broken in the final crash.

As for the fish in the tank—obviously, they'd died.

And if they hadn't, somebody would've eaten them before too long.

James popped one of the tabs on his dinner, peeling the lid back. Sometimes he sniffed it first just to prove it didn't bother him and sometimes he didn't.

This was a 'didn't' kind of night.

'Damn,' he said.

'That good, huh?' Cortez asked. There he stood, not in the doorway like old times because there weren't any doorways; stations got marked off with separators, but it didn't do much for keeping out the snoring at night, temporary accommodations until things got stable again.

Then again, that covered everything.

'Even better,' James replied. 'Finger-licking good, Esteban. You here for another free meal?'

'What else?' Cortez stepped inside, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, wearing a look that was close to whatever the Asari volunteer had on earlier. Maybe it was just one of those days. Feeling too much led to thinking too much—and when you couldn't even buy a guy a drink to take his mind off things, they got these crazy ideas like rashes, like allergies, making it that much harder to breathe. They went into relief efforts as a grief counselor, of all the things, listening to everybody's sob stories they couldn't keep inside.

James rolled his shoulders out. The vertebrae at the back of his neck popped above the tattoo. 'A'right. Pick your poison.'

'Already have,' Cortez said.

He'd offered once—to hear James out, whatever he had to get off his chest. It's a lot for anybody to deal with, he'd said, turning serious, leaning forward with his hands together, thumb rubbing his knuckles and the thin skin spread between, like little valleys on unknown soil. His sleeves were rolled up then, too, and James could've asked…well, anything. Not the big questions, the ones nobody could answer, but the stuff like What's a pilot do when he can't fly, anyway? or What's a soldier do when the war's over, for that matter? That stuff sounded good in theory, looked better on paper, but it was harder to swallow than the ash and more dangerous than a live wire sparking loose in a ship's armory.

So he'd shrugged, leaning back. 'If wishes were fishes, Esteban…' he'd said.

'Yeah, yeah.' Cortez hadn't pulled away after, not for a while. 'You'd be shooting 'em right in the barrel; I know.'

James's dog-tags jingled. They were made to withstand all kinds of conditions, all temperatures—all kinds of heat—and that was how the relief effort had managed to identify so many of the survivors in the days after the synthetics were destroyed. It was how they managed to identify so many of the casualties, too, to put names on all the deaths.

Civilians were a different issue. Most of them had evacuated, or tried. Plenty hadn't. Now they were sharing the same shelters, most of the same jobs, night duties and the shell-shocked sitting on cots, a heavy cloud still hanging over the dark sky. That sort of thing.

James ate, dog-tags settled again. No matter how much time he had to 'adjust,' there was no way he'd get used to the shuffle of natural unrest. No VIs humming, no constant buzz from strip lighting, nothing—and into the void it left came the coughing, shifting, fabric on fabric, snoring, muted conversation, throats cleared, crying sometimes, quiet and muffled by an arm or a pillow or not even, the stuff that came out because it had to go somewhere. It couldn't stay inside. That was the real poison.

James wiped the sweat off the back of his neck, staring at the far wall and the hole in it, sheeted over by tarp, a piece too small to be useful anywhere else. He could hear Cortez tucking in, the pop of the tab accompanied by the same short sigh after the first bite.

That was one cool thing about Esteban. He listened to a lot of people and he was probably good at it, considering how they all looked at him after, but when it came to pretending everything smelled and tasted the way it used to, he never went in for it.

They both knew it wasn't prettier than it looked.

'That good, huh?' James asked.

'Even better,' Cortez replied.

'Yeah, well. You take another guy's food all the time, you don't get to complain about what's cooking.' James bit off a piece of jerky—looked and felt like rubber, tasted even worse—and spent the next minute just chewing. They were all just chewing, but jawing it up meant listening less to the sounds around him and less to his own thoughts and more to the creak of his joints. It was all locked up inside. And that was better than the alternative.

'Way I remember it, Mr. Vega, you used to be better at idle conversation.' Cortez wiped something from the corner of his mouth with his thumb, tendons in his forearm shifting. James wasn't looking. 'In fact, way I remember it, a guy couldn't hang out in Purgatory without hearing you losing at cards all the way out in Bay E28.'

'I didn't lose,' James said. 'I was just…keeping up morale. Some people do that different, Esteban.'

'Some people do it by taking their clothes off round after round?' Cortez asked. 'Hey, don't look at me. That'd keep up my morale. Should've dealt myself in. Wish I had.'

'I didn't lose,' James said again.

'You're right.' Cortez was leaning forward again, the way James had when he got his N7 ink. Now it was just a relic—like the aquarium VI on his road-cocoa table, or whatever it was Cortez'd called it. 'We didn't lose.'

James stared at that hole in the wall.

Actually, for a while after everything, when he'd been busted up helping pull some guys out of the wreckage—once all the ships in earth's orbit came crashing down, Normandy included—that old tattoo'd snagged him an infection, coming in hot like a fever. He sweated it out after a day, less, and the ink was still there like it'd never given him hell in the first place. But it wasn't easy to see in the mirror, especially when there weren't too many of those hanging around, most of them broken during all the fighting. Nothing but shards to go by now.

He knew it didn't mean the thing wasn't on him anymore. Just because he couldn't see it on the regular didn't mean it wasn't there.

Cortez, for example. He did his thing all day long and still turned up again at the end of it, just like bad credit. Out of sight and out of mind, but not always out of time or out of luck.

Sometimes out of sight wasn't even out of mind.

James needed a drink.

Contraband was going to end up a pretty big thing sooner or later—and always too soon. James had already knocked some local heads together over rumors of a black market starting up in the underground, London's old tunnels, what hadn't caved in.

No matter what they'd been through, people had to be smart. Too damn smart for their own good. Smart enough that other people were going to die because of it—how all the best plans worked, apparently.

'You know, I've seen a lot of guys tear themselves apart over not talking about stuff,' Cortez said. 'I was one of 'em.'

''Stuff,'' James repeated.

'Yeah, 'stuff,'' Cortez replied. 'You wanna make something out of it? You itching for that fight again?'

James looked up and they looked at each other, and there wasn't anything angry in Cortez's mouth like James expected, no challenge in his eyes. It was an honest question, which James'd always figured was one of those oxymorons—something that couldn't survive in the real world, much less whole damn galaxies of real worlds.

But for now, maybe forever, all they had was this one. It was like finding out a tee'd shrunk in the wash and now it was way too small, wrinkling and pulling at the seams, neck ripping when you tugged it on.

'Hey,' Cortez said. 'That wasn't a let's take this outside suggestion or anything. Just so you know.'

'I know,' James said. 'Shit, Esteban, I fucking know.'

It felt good to curse like that, stuff that would've flagged him with a demerit back when pendejada like demerits counted. If they ever counted.

James didn't say anything else. Cortez didn't either. And he left to tuck in for the night pretty soon after, not pressing his advantage, not pressing his luck, which was why he was the pilot and James was the soldier. Different skill-sets. Different instincts. Different personalities and different training. It was the natural stuff, the unnatural stuff, how James still hadn't learned that thing Shepard had, that thing Shepard was trying to teach him: how not to burn up from both ends all night long.

But James didn't know where there was room for raw muscle in finesse.

A weapon was only as good as whatever it was shooting at—as much as the hand doing all the shooting. Besides, he never could take advice from somebody who didn't live by the same rules he was laying down.

James kicked up his legs, knees bent, lying back on his cot. If he didn't tuck his knees in, his feet'd dangle over the edge. He'd put this bed together, along with a whole lot more. Unlike a Turian, he knew how to use a hammer to build stuff and tear it down again. 'Now, this has two ends,' he remembered explaining. 'One that looks like the front of your face and one that looks like the back of your head. Smash with the front, pull with the back. Shit, maybe you guys'd be better off just using your heads for the job. You don't scar easy, right? Tough Turian skin? You gonna unleash some kinda toxin to make me shut up now?'

The banter'd been nothing but one-sided. A few of them had scars, but not anything big enough, bad enough, to warrant the nickname.