Author's note: So I am cross posting this story from my account at Ao3. That means that the chapters will flow extremely quickly in the beginning until this one is caught up to the other one. After that I will slow it down to one update every two or three days.

February 2179, The Argo

The lieutenant was having a terrible morning. Chief Gunnery Officer Didius was ruining his life. Well that might have been a little melodramatic, but only a little. It's true that he should have gone through proper channels before changing the cannon's firing algorithms, but that would have taken forever and he had gotten that 0.075% increase in precision. That was enough to save lives. It was important, damn it all. Also his code was so damn elegant, a thing of beauty really. He wouldn't have been adverse to printing it out and hanging it up in his barracks. It was that gorgeous. So that made Didius' revenge that much more painful. Didius had written up the poor lieutenant and was requesting his transfer. Didius was still going to use the code, after running many very careful tests, because efficiency was what the turian military was all about. However they also had a very strict chain of command and even though the lieutenant technically outranked Didius, in this case he was the subordinate and going behind your superior's back was definitely frowned upon.

Maybe they'll pull me out of the military. Dad would love that. I wouldn't get citizenship and probably go live in the terminus systems.

The lieutenant briefly considered this fate and he came to the immediate conclusion that it might not be such a bad thing. Even though it would mean leaving his entire life, up till now, behind; he would finally be away from the clutches of his father.

He really wanted to punch the wall, it wouldn't help anything and he'd probably only accomplish breaking his hand, but the fantasy remained. Instead he stood there at attention, rigid and perfect, while silently contemplating all of the possibilities of the upcoming meeting with Captain Victus.

"Junior Lieutenant Vakarian, come in."

This time the lieutenant did punch a wall. Transferred and a permanent blemish on his record, his new station was sure to be lots of fun too. Vakarian was assigned to the ground vehicles. His entire job was to maintain the ship's Makos. Of all the worthless and insignificant postings, the only thing more trivial would be if the captain had assigned him to the mess. The lieutenant knew that his considerable skills were completely wasted with the spirits-be-damned vehicles. Of course, the worst part wasn't even his posting; he was pulled off any ground team for the next month. "If you can't learn to work as a unit and follow orders, then how am I supposed to trust other soldiers' lives to you?" Vakarian knew his Captain was right, he wasn't such a bad turian that he didn't understand. He stared at the small dent his fist at left in the wall and considering leaving another one.

"Just because you're having a bad day, doesn't mean you have to take it out on the ship." The voice was a soft purr and Vakarian would be a damned liar if he didn't admit that the owner wasn't one of the most attractive females he had seen.

"Cecilia" He didn't want to turn his face and look at her quite yet; as he was pretty sure she had started their old game. "Shouldn't you be in engineering?"

Cecilia Modius smirked behind his back and leaned her body so she wasn't touching him, but he would be able to feel her closeness. "Oh, they let me have a short day. I solved a particularly hairy problem within the exhaust manifolds and they told me that my solution was ingenious. There might even be a promotion in it for me." She breathed into his ear.

Oh yes, they were definitely playing the old game.

"How nice for you." Vakarian just barely bit back the growl that was threatening to rip itself from his throat.

"So, Garrus, how was your day? Wrestle any new algorithms lately?" She was starting to move her hands to hover around to his front, still taking the care to not so much as brush his uniform.

Garrus spun around, grabbed her wrists, and shoved her back. "I am not playing this stupid fucking game, Lia. Not right now!"

Cecilia pouted at this new turn of events.

"You and everyone on this spirits blessed boat know how my day went." His voice was quickly rising to near shouting levels and he had moved to pacing the small room. "Didius finally showed his colors as an acrocanth's cloaca and I'm stuck scrubbing out the damn Makos probably until my damned commission is through! The worst part, oh you're going love this bit, the damn fool is still going to use my damn code and probably take all of the credit. So," He stopped in front of the female and shoved his face in hers and growled. "You tell me. How was my day?"

Cecilia stood between a wall and a clearly irate turian and decided that this was not a good place to be. So she grabbed and lifted his arm, smoothly stepped underneath it, slammed her fist into the back of his sensitive waist, grabbed his shoulder and dropped the now off-balance turian to the ground. Cecilia then skipped out of the range of his arms.

"If you are quite done posturing and feeling sorry for yourself, you can get revenge for that little maneuver on the mat in fifteen minutes." She walked to the door and stopped to look at prone and growling male.

"For the record, the whole ship didn't know about what happened to you today. Sometimes 'how was your day' just means 'how was your day'. Not everything is about you, Garrus Vakarian."

June, 2169 - Mindoir

Charlie Nacht was going to have a great day. She knew it in her bones before she even opened her eyes. It was 0350, she wasn't sure when she had started thinking in military time, but she was positive that Ethan was to blame for it. She quietly slipped of bed careful not to disturb Grace, who had taken to spending nights in Charlie's bed. It was a little odd that she was never there when Charlie fell asleep, but she always showed up and brought along the dog, whose name according to Grace was Doggie and to everyone else it was Trace. Before Charlie started to get ready, she put her ID back in her wallet and stuck it on a shelf in her closet. That ritual complete she skipped off to the shower for her favorite ritual.

The past six months had been long and extremely exhausting, but they had also been rewarding and fantastic. She would start everyday with calisthenics, then spend the next few hours practicing at the shooting range, which was just a high mound of dirt facing the jungle. Charlie was incredibly proud at how well she was doing with that. She was very good with pistols, damn good with shotguns, and extremely poor with sniper rifles. Well that's not fair, she wasn't just poor with rifles she was truly abysmal. Usually she could hit the target or, at least, get close to it. Charlie had no idea what she was doing wrong. It should have just been a matter of getting the angles right, math essentially and she was very good at math. Just not this kind of math, her personal opinion was that it was too close to her least favorite subject; trigonometry.

So maybe firearms weren't quite for her, but she did know something that was. She positively excelled at hand-to-hand combat. She had skipped to the head of the class in that subject. Charlie really wished that Ethan would start giving out letter grades for the tri-weekly sessions where about fifty of the colonists would turn out to watch the security team spar. It was such a power trip to make someone tap out. She didn't win every bout, but every week she was putting out a better performance. If there was any official ranking she would have been about halfway up the column, which was pretty good considering she only had six months of training. That first day of training, Ethan was impressed that Charlie already knew how to fall. Learning how to fall without hurting yourself is an important, if not the most important, basic skill. She also already knew how to use someone's weight against them and, of course, she knew how to get someone on the ground. Charlie thanked all of the hard lessons she learned while playing rugby and was pleasantly surprised that she remembered most of it. Though she didn't know how to properly throw a punch or how to dodge or any of the fancy legwork Ethan had to show her; her previous training gave her a solid start.

With the exception of Charlie, the security team was all male; unsurprisingly they were mostly young men with cocky attitudes and too much testosterone. A few of them had protested Charlie's addition to the team, but she had just as much cockiness as the best of them. It also hadn't hurt that she had the height, reach, and fair amount of flexibility. She would jeer and mock them when she beat them and snark and slap them on the back when they beat her. It was really quite similar to her old rugby days, as long as she laughed at their jokes and drank their smuggled booze they were all good friends.

The smuggled booze was actually a sore point with her. Apparently she wasn't allowed to drink until she was eighteen here. She had told them she was sixteen, which was close enough to the truth, but had unfortunately also told them her birthday was March 10, which was true. This meant that Charlie still had nine months to go before she could "legally" drink alcohol. This didn't really stop her though, it just meant that she had to sneak off with the rest of the teenagers; not that much different from Earth. However, what was different was that kids she drank with were, well they were, kids. There was one boy in particular who just could not take a hint. Charlie had even threatened to kick his ass, but apparently that had appealed to him. Cody Soldner was a pain in her ass. Sure he was tall and good looking, but he just felt like a child to her. It was actually really disturbing whenever he would try and slip his arm around her. Charlie was used to grown up men and in her mind she was a grown up woman. It was actually a little concerning that the only men she would even consider being with were, at least ten years older than the body she currently possessed. Not that it really mattered though; she was not looking for a man to replace Justin.

All of that aside though; today was going to be a great day. She had finished her shower and was rechecking her already packed backpack. Today Ethan was taking her out in the Hoover. The Hoover was the name of the only shuttle the colonists had. It was beaten up and generally filthy, but to Charlie it was beautiful. Charlie first saw the Hoover during her second week on Mindoir. It was small, with only room enough for a pilot and two, maybe three, additional people. Ian Rodriguez was the sole engineer on Mindoir, so when he found Charlie poking around inside of it reverently stroking the control panel, he immediately demanded that Ethan let him borrow her a few nights a week as an assistant. Charlie was not a natural engineer, but she did throw herself whole-heartedly at the job. She was always trying to coax Ian into telling her more about technology, in general. But he could be surprisingly tight-lipped about some things. She had found out that faster-than-light travel existed, which wasn't exactly surprising at all, but that it wasn't warp field technology. That question had Ian laughing so hard he fell out of the shuttle. Charlie had not been amused.

Actually there was a lot that she felt people weren't telling her. She had to ask the questions in a round a bout way to start with, because she was supposed to know most of this stuff already. Apparently there had been some war somewhere, everyone only referred to it as "the war" which was unsurprisingly not very helpful, with some aggressors that were pretty much the equivalent of space Nazis. Charlie didn't really care much anyways; war apparently hadn't changed at all in 157 years. There were the good guys and the bad guys; and who was who only depended on what side you were on. As best as she could gather, these colonists came to Mindoir after getting fed up that their government decided to make friends with the aggressors. Charlie thought that was a little petty, though she would never say it; after all they were all human and wars end.

However these conversations were too few and far between for Charlie's taste. Most of the adults on Mindoir did not seem to trust her. The security team did, but they were only 20 people out of the couple hundred residents. Well the kids also liked her. After Charlie convinced Trent Newman to steal, er "borrow", his father's guitar; they decided that they liked her even more. She was not a natural musician, she couldn't write a song to save her life and her voice was a little too deep to pull off beautiful. However, Justin had been an excellent musician and had taught her well for the four years they were together. So she introduced the Mindoir youth to punk and her favorite rock from her childhood. Mostly it was Weezer, POTUSOA, Cake, and a little Green Day; however there were also some oldies thrown in there. Charlie wasn't so disillusioned that she thought she was revitalizing rock, but the kids seemed to like it and they brought her more sheet music that they found buried in old archives. If it wasn't for the really strange guitar, it was guitar-shaped but it had a built in amplifier and could be played as a bass, electric guitar, or acoustic guitar, Charlie would have felt like she was back like she was back on Earth.

At 0400, Charlie walked out in the living room to find Ethan, when she couldn't find him she decided that he must have left already, so she hustled out to the armory. She could see the light on inside the shack and walked in to find Ethan checking his rifle.

"Sorry I'm late. I must have just missed you." She offered him a smile and got a grunt as a response.

"Do you need me to grab anything while we're in here."

"Take this." Ethan handed her a pistol and her favorite shotgun. Then he started to deposit a large amount of ammo into a sack.

"What's going on? I thought you said this was just going to be a scouting mission and we probably weren't even getting out of the Hoover."

"Mission parameters have changed."

"The hell does that mean?"

Ethan turned and looked at Charlie for the first time that day. "Your boy's gone missing."

Charlie scrunched up her face and shook her head. "My boy? … Cody? What did that schlemiel do this time?"

"We're not sure, but he's definitely gone." Ethan gave Charlie a sympathetic look. "Jess is gone too."

"Well they probably went off, like a couple idiots, to drink and fuck in the jungle."

"Yeah that's what I'm thinking too. They say anything to you?"

Charlie shook her head.

"Alright well, it's you and me then. We're going to follow them and hopefully drag them back with no complications." Ethan stepped past Charlie who had finished attaching the pistol to her left leg and had her shotgun attached to her right. She already had her combat knife in a sheath strapped to the small of her back. Ethan looked down with a disapproving glare at the shotgun.

"Look I know you don't like it there, but it's perfect for quick draw purposes. And I would like to point out that shotguns aren't precision weapons, so the only time I'm going to need it is for quick draw purposes."

"Fine, but I want this rescue to end without us taking a single shot. Remember that. If we see something big and mean out there, we go around it."

"You got it, boss." Charlie gave what she thought was a dazzling smile, but was actually closer to an evil grin and she grabbed her machete off the wall.

The trek in the jungle was fairly routine by now. Ethan had started taking Charlie out on his patrol, her second month on Mindoir. They would walk out somewhere between a half a mile and a whole mile, Ethan changed it each time to keep from forming a trail, and circle the colony. Ethan taught Charlie how to watch for dangerous animals and make sure none of them claimed any territory too near to the colony. Most of the indigenous life on Mindoir preferred to be close to water and the colony was positioned on the high piece of land and was five miles from the closest water source, so most of the species they had to worry about were insects, snakes, and small lizards. However, occasionally something large would make its home nearby. There was the toornak, the boar thing Charlie had met the first day, the occasional rause, which looked like a 7 foot tall, scaled, and featherless ostrich. They would have been fine, if they weren't so aggressively territorial. The worst Charlie had witnessed were the raptors, oh they weren't called raptors, but after Charlie started calling them that the name stuck. She really hated them. They looked almost exactly the damn raptors from Jurassic Park, which was extremely unnerving the first time she saw them. The main difference was that the tallest of them were only 5 feet tall and they are scavengers. They were vicious though and hunted in packs of five to six members. The trick was to focus on one of them, mortally wound it, the rest of them would usually turn on their brethren, and it was easy to pick them off one at a time after that. God forbid they ever get intelligent.

The trail Cody and Jess left was easy enough to follow, as they picked their way the dense foliage. Ethan held up a closed fist and Charlie immediately stopped and waited for him to motion her closer.

"What do you see?"

Charlie crouched down to the floor and studied it for a minute before answering. "Two tracks, one male and one female. They appear to be heading north-north-east."

"Good. Where do you think their destination is?"

"Oy gevalt, they're heading for the Stevens." She spoke in a harsh whisper after a moment.

"I agree. This could turn ugly."

Ethan really didn't need to add the last sentence. The Stevens was an off-shoot of a massive river and was given that name after Roger Stevens was killed there during the first year of the colony. Since then the Stevens had been officially off limits and thus Charlie had never been there. They picked up the pace as they continued to follow the trail.

After about 20 minutes, Charlie stopped Ethan. "I think they were followed." Ethan followed where Charlotte was pointing.

Ethan grunted an affirmative. "Raptors."

Charlie would have been more pleased at her discovery, if it hadn't meant that there were raptors to deal with.

"Raptors won't go near the water though, they're not that dumb."

With that comment Ethan set off again, this time running as fast as it was safe to travel in the dense jungle. When Charlie could hear the running water, Ethan slowed down and gave her the sign for 'weapons out' and 'caution'. Drawing and unfolding her shotgun she followed Ethan's lead. Charlotte sighed with relief when she realized that the raptor tracks had veered off to the east and had apparently abandoned their quarry. Then she realized that they did that, because she and Ethan were heading towards something bigger and scarier.

Charlie could tell that there was a clearing up ahead, but couldn't quite see it through the brush. There were a quite a few tracks to be seen here and something large and low to the ground had recently moved through the brush, as a swath of plants were pushed down in a trail. There were also some disconcerting scratches on the trees that told the tale of something very tall. Ethan's hand signals told her to stay low and continue following the trail, he was going to go off to the east and get a better view. Ethan's back silently receded to the right of her and she was struck as being extremely jealous of his ability to move so quietly. Charlie hadn't quite mastered that talent yet.

When she neared the tree line she found Jess. Jess was lazily swinging in a hammock tied up between the trees with a few empty glass bottles littering the ground under it. The girl was, of course, fast asleep, as it was only about 0600. Charlie holstered her shotgun, stepped to the hammock, and placed one hand over Jess's mouth and raised the other hand's finger to her own lips. Jess woke up with a start and began to panic until she saw Charlie.

"Where's Cody?" Charlie whispered close to Jess' face.

Jess shrugged. Charlie let the girl go, but firmly motioned for her to stay put and be quiet. Thankfully the girl complied and Charlie scanned the beach for Cody. The term beach was rather generous for what Charlie was looking at, riverbank would have been more appropriate. The Stevens was rather wide, Charlie could see the other side, but she wasn't positive how far it was away a 100 feet maybe, quite possibly more. The water was rather slow moving and there was a bit of debris floating in it. There was also one long log floating alongside the bank. Charlie still couldn't see Cody so she crept a little further out, but still inside the brush. She gave the shoreline another sweeping glance and noticed that the log wasn't moving. It was in the same position and apparently defying the current. It didn't take her too long to realize that the "log" was definitely alive. She didn't know what it was, but it had to be, at least 15 feet long, based on what little of it was breaking the surface.

I couldn't have left the gators back in Florida?

Charlie was still focused on the creature that was keeping close the shore, when she heard a yell and Cody came crashing out of the jungle a little ways down the shore from the east. A few seconds later he was followed by four raptors. Two shots rang out and one the animals fell, but instead of turning on their brother the creatures were focused on the screaming prey. Cody was leading them right to her. When they got in range, Charlie pulled her pistol and aimed for the one closest to Cody. The first shot hit the raptors tail, the second went wide, but the last two hit the beast's head and throat.

Two more shots rang out and they were down to one raptor. The last one seemed to realize that Charlie was the real threat and leapt at her. She went down with the ball of hate and teeth clinging to her chest. It lunged at her throat and she raised her left arm to intercept its mouth. Her canvas jacket was absolutely useless against the teeth. As it sunk into her flesh, she felt the teeth connect with the bone. Charlie screamed, but not with fear as she did the first day on Mindoir. She screamed with fury, at the reptile who had the audacity to try and eat her. Her right hand reached for her shotgun on her leg, while she brought her left leg up to her chest. With a guttural yell kicked the creature up, raised her shotgun to its chest and pulled the trigger.

The raptor was quite dead as she removed her arm from its mouth and stood back up. Cody had stopped running and was now slowly walking backwards away from the trees, as if he was afraid of another attack. Jess was mercifully silent in the hammock, though her eyes were silently screaming. The adrenaline was starting subside as Charlie was suddenly well aware of exactly how much pain the bite had left her in. Her left arm was covered in blood; most of it was hers, though the blood covering the rest of her clothes was not.

A sudden movement and a scream snapped her attention back to the shore. The "log" creature had made its move and had Cody latched in its massive jaws. The creature was definitely not a gator, though its tactics appeared to be similar. The head was triangular, like a salamander, and was filled hundreds of razor-sharp teeth. The rest of its body was layered with close fitting dark grey plates.

Without much thought for her own life, Charlie tore off towards the creature. She dimly heard the two rifle shots, but her ears were filled with the gurgling screams tearing out of Cody's throat. Charlie thought she may have heard Ethan shout something from behind her, but she disregarded that thought. She had to save Cody. She wasn't going to watch him die. They were going to go home, she was going to call him a damn fool, and as penance he was going to corroborate her heroic rescue story. Cody wasn't supposed to die, that's not how his story ends.

Charlie reached the creature and realized that she didn't know where to shoot. So she jumped on its snout, put the shotgun flush with one of its eyes and pulled the trigger. Her only thought as she pulled was something akin to, "This is either really stupid or really smart."

It turned out be a little of both. The creature was definitely dead, so that was good, but the angle she was laying on its face meant that when it fell it threw her to the ground and landed Charlie squarely on her already injured arm. With a very anguished moan she pulled herself up and staggered to the creature. Ethan was running at her. Charlie was trying to get its mouth open, when Ethan got there and stopped her.

"Charlie. Stop." He grabbed her hands.

"What do you mean stop? I saved him. We have to … get him out of there."

"I'll get him out, but you need to go sit down. Keep an eye on Jess, okay?" Ethan was talking so low it was hard for Charlie to hear him over Cody's gurgling screams.

"I can help you! He's going to die if we don't stop arguing." Why was Ethan being such an idiot? If they didn't pull Cody out right now and start applying some medi-gel it was all over.

"I gave you an order soldier." The command in Ethan's voice had Charlie staggering back to the hammock before she realized what she was doing.

Charlie picked up her pistol out of the mud where it had fallen during her earlier fight with the raptor and slid it back into her holster. Cody's screams had changed now and she could have sworn that she could hear her own name echoing in the cries. The sound sent chills down her spine and almost made her turn back, but Ethan's orders kept her marching back to Jess. Jess was visibly shaking and crying softly. Charlie sat down heavily next to her in the hammock.

"How is he?"

Charlie gave a small shrug, "I don't know, but if we can still hear him screaming then, at least, we know he's still alive." Cody's screams were definitely getting louder and now she was sure she could make out her own name in between sickening gurgles.

"Charlie, I don't hear any screaming."

Ian and the Hoover came to pick them up shortly. When Ethan came over to collect the two girls, Jess was trying to put pressure on Charlie's arm that was still pumping blood and Charlie was just sitting there both unaware of Jess's efforts and her own violent shaking. She was still lost to the screams. Ethan tried to rouse the girl, but soon gave up and threw her over his shoulder and carried her to the shuttle. On the way back to the colony Charlie lost consciousness.

When she woke up she was in the hospital bed back at the Wallis' house. She thought her arm should hurt more, but it was just a dull ache. When she looked at the previously ruined left arm it was wrapped with gauze and there were three thick black circles connected with wires wrapped around the bandage.

"Good you're awake." Dr. Wallis noticed the device that had captured the attention of her patient. "That's a bone knitter. I'm not sure you've ever seen one of those in action before. It'll need to stay on another hour, at the least. So try not to move around."

Charlie slowly nodded her head.

After an unknown amount of time, Charlie asked. "How long was I asleep?"

"Most of the day, there was a nicked artery and you lost a fair amount of blood."

After a moment, Charlie whispered. "Is Cody alone?"

The doctor wasn't sure how to respond to this question. "Charlie, Cody's dead."

Charlie nodded her head. "But is he alone?"

"Yes, we're making preparations for a burial, but it probably won't be until tomorrow."

"Will you let me know when I can leave and can I have any candles?"

After Dr. Wallis removed the bone knitter and Charlie got redressed, she was led to the chilled supply closet in the back of the house. Debbie found some candles though she had no idea why Charlie wanted them. They were scented candles and had conflicting odors; Charlie pondered if this would be offensive to the dead, but realized that it didn't actually matter. As she arranged the candles around a spot on the floor, it dawned on Debbie what the girl was about to do.

"Honey, you can't stay here."

"A body must never be left alone it's disrespectful to person who once lived there." She whispered as she lit the candles.

Debbie was at a loss. She didn't know anything about Jewish customs, but, like everything with Charlie, if the girl said or did anything odd it was a fair bet to blame her religion. However, this was too far. What was the girl going to all night? What were the candles for?

The last question was answered by Charlie turning off the light and sitting down on the floor.

"I really don't understand."

"I'm going to be his shomerim. It's like I'm his guard until he's laid to rest. I can't really explain it. It is tradition and I really shouldn't be talking right now."

Debbie was truly at a loss, but she could tell that this was important to Charlie. So she left her alone. When Ethan came home that evening, she informed him of Charlie's silent watch over Cody. He also didn't understand, but like his wife he understood that everyone's mourning period was different. Ethan tried to bring Charlie some dinner, a blanket, and a coat. She politely declined the meal, stating that it mocked the dead, but took the rest.

Charlie spent the long night in the room. She didn't hear his screams, but she knew they weren't gone forever. She would hear them again when she closed her eyes. That thought kept Charlie wide awake. She was grateful too that the black plastic sheet hid Cody's body. Charlie did not want to see what the monster had done to him. She spent the night in silence, but in her head she mutely replayed the scene on the beach over and over counting every mistake she had made that morning. Every mistake was one, she promised Cody, that she would never make again.