Over the course of the next few weeks, Jade paid special attention to the ship talk. The consensus, it seemed, was that Javik, while being a marvel as the last surviving prothean, was also an unrepentant asshole. He'd apparently threatened to space half the crew at one point or another. They would sit around in the mess and compare stories over dinner, and they came to the conclusion that the other half of the crew just hadn't had the pleasure of interacting with him yet.
It was during one of these bitch sessions that Jade finally spoke up.
"So I offered to help him replace the panel," one of the crewmen told the assembled group. "And he snarled, literally snarled at me that he was perfectly capable of replacing it on his own and told me that I should leave unless I … How did he put it? Ah! Unless I 'had a burning desire to discover whether my species suffocated or froze to death first when exposed to the hard vacuum of space.' Can you imagine?"
"What were you doing in his living quarters to begin with," Jade asked quietly, taking a bite of her meal.
"What?" The crewman looked indignant. "I was doing a systems check when I noticed a fault indicating that one of the access panels in the port cargo area was loose. I went in to check it and secure it if necessary."
"EDI told you about this?" Jade looked up from her meal and fixed the young man with a hard look.
"No, it came up during a routine check." He was fidgeting a bit now. "I wanted to make sure it wasn't a sensor malfunction."
"But EDI, the unshackled AI who literally is the ship, didn't send you a notification that this 'loose panel' was affecting the ship's operation?"
The crewman sputtered something about Alliance regulations and the danger loose panels could cause in battle that Jade couldn't be arsed to pay attention to, so she cut him off mid explanation.
"That's fascinating, really. But what's even more interesting is the fact that there are no fewer than three loose panels in this room alone that, oddly enough considering the danger you were just outlining, have been loose since, at least, the day I first came onto this ship." Her eyes took on an even frostier gleam as she fixed the hapless boy with a glare that had, in the past, given even the most hard bitten militants pause. "It sounds to me like you, and all your friends here, have taken any and every opportunity you can find to invade the man's privacy and gawk at him like some wet-behind-the-ears farm boy on his first trip to the city. It's no wonder he's threatening to throw the lot of you out of the airlock. I'd have already knocked at least one of you out cold if you'd tried pulling any of that shit with me."
The entire group got very quiet as Jade spoke. Though her tone was light and conversational, not a single one of them missed the venom in her words.
"Now I wasn't raised on a ship, or a space station, or even in this century where it seems that personal space means fuckall, but I imagine privacy is still a concept that has some sort of meaning to you all. Am I wrong?"
She stared at them until they seemed to realize she was expecting an answer from them. As she received a belated chorus of "no's" and "no, ma'am's" from her cowed and guilty audience, Jade continued.
"Then maybe the lot of you slack-jawed idiots will remember that and take a moment before the next time you choose to barge into that man's private quarters to consider something. He has already seen how this war you're fighting so hard to win could end," Jade forced each one of her audience to meet her hard, grey, eyes. "He watched as his people fell to the Reapers, one by one, planet, by planet. And now, even though he doesn't know a single one of you from Adam, he's being forced to watch it all over again. Everything he did, everything he fought for was for nothing and each one of you is a reminder of that failure.
"So you think about what that would be like. And the next time you or one of your boneheaded friends decides they want to go 'check up on something' in the port cargo hold, you remember what I've said. Or, so help me, you won't have to worry about what he might do to you because I'm not going to leave enough of you to justify throwing it out the airlock. Are we clear?"
And as a body, Jade's little audience snapped to and gave her one of the sharpest salutes this side of basic training and a chorus of "yes, ma'am's" to go with it.
"Good, now git." She waved a dismissive hand at the lot of them. "You're spoiling my dinner."
"That was … impressive," said Liara as she took a seat across the table from Jade.
"Just figured Shepard didn't need one more thing to worry about when she's dealing with all the shit she's already got on her plate," Jade leaned back in her chair. "I'll probably have to take up prowling the engineering deck with my favorite scowl for a while to make it stick. But that poor bastard doesn't deserve to be gawked at by the entire crew."
Liara gave Jade a small smile at the image that conjured, then her face grew serious.
"How are you holding up," she asked.
Jade leaned her chair back as far as it would go and laced her fingers behind her head.
"Me?" she snorted. "Right as rain in April. Why wouldn't I be?"
"I saw how you reacted in Javik's cabin," Liara's tone was heavy, lending a weight and reality to the incident that made Jade's stomach squirm uncomfortably.
"Ah, it's nothing," Jade dismissed the statement with a wave. "Just took me back for a minute. Didn't expect it, that's all."
"To Beirut?"
The casual façade Jade had been trying so hard to maintain dropped abruptly at those two words.
"Where," she asked in a voice gone completely devoid of emotion. "Did you hear about that?"
"I'm the Shadow Broker," Liara seeped unphased by Jade's reaction to her little bombshell. "There's very little I don't have access to, and finding out about the operations of a human covert organization that existed over a century ago is comparatively quite simple."
"Fine," Jade's nod was curt. "You wanna talk about this, we'll talk. But not here."