The original members of the Normandy SR-1 sat together in the late evenings, their voices expanding through hallways and diffusing past cryogenic pods from where the latest iteration of the ship had encompassed them completely. The Normandy SR-2 was an unsettling issue, and they didn't often speak of it.
Mordin looked down at the small standard issue cup that didn't match his own in the lab. The black liquid still smelled quite appealing when he poured it at the counter. He paused, considering the quartet in the mess hall, and then slowly made his way over to them.
"I'm not kidding, Tali," Vakarian said at the long table, irritated thoroughly. "She's different. She would have understood before."
That evening, it was suddenly a disquieting thing to be different.
Shepard hadn't let Vakarian kill someone who betrayed him during the turian's short career of hastening himself into the cleansing incalescence of Omega. She had placed herself in front of a tired man who wanted to forget himself during a single violent moment and then silently challenged him to open fire through her body when she turned away to save him.
"Garrus," Tali'Zorah hushed him uneasily. "It's been a very long time."
His subharmonics were terse. "No, it hasn't. Not to her."
Jeff Moreau's mug landed on the table in the mess exactly as hard as he intended it to. "And this," he muttered after the sharp sound, "is why I never take you guys anywhere." He glanced to the woman sitting next to him. "Doc, help me out here."
Karin Chakwas shifted her composure, gracefully understated. "She's utterly the same beyond the cybernetic implants running through her body," she told them. "It's dropped her temperature a degree, but otherwise she's unchanged."
"See? Just little robot lights on our Commander Christmas tree."
Chakwas smiled at Mordin when he sat down with them. "What do you think, Mordin? She spends a lot of time with you."
Moreau snorted. "Yeah, hiding from the obsessed yeoman."
Mordin blinked when everyone paused to look at him, asking for precise answers and perhaps justifications for their concerns full of vague insecurities. He felt amazingly out of place, even more so than before, and the coffee rested unsampled on the table while he regarded their question in the creeping fluorescent light.
Where was she?
She was likely in her cabin, Mordin thought, but it wasn't his place to venture there and so he didn't.
In the silence Moreau grabbed onto Mordin's cup, sliding it away and leaving his own in its place full of hot water and a tea bag . The small tag hanging off the side read decaf in merry red letters, like a faint warning.
"Probably the same," Mordin said quietly, considering the new cup that was still ivory.
"How do you know?" Tali'Zorah tilted her head slightly.
"Don't, actually," he confessed, and then smiled at the quarian. "Understand the problem, endless possibilities and conclusions. Regardless, personally enjoy her now."
"That's an unscientific opinion." Moreau drank the coffee, hiding a smirk.
Jeff Moreau, now merely Joker, suddenly decided that he was Mordin Solus' friend. He didn't call the salarian an arrogant professor with tenure at Eff You University from the general safety of the cockpit after that, instead carefully venturing into the lab to see what he was up to before any boldly comical assessments were made.
Joker liked to stare at wide luminescent swathes of color growing in the petri dishes that rested on the lab counter and mutter "holy shit" like it was an effectively composed fecal mantra. One day, Mordin patiently explained each bacteria and fungal colony to him, describing the various deaths they could each incur.
"No touching," Mordin implored the pilot quite gravely.
"Shit, Mordin," Joker mumbled. "Remind me to never piss you off. What the hell does this green one over here do?"
"Asphyxiation through pathogenic bacteria," Mordin informed Shepard the next day while he described the pilot's reaction to his latest side project. "Not testing on us, of course. Didn't think I had to specify, but Joker got nervous."
"You teased him on purpose," Shepard chided him warmly.
Mordin smirked, full of dreams of mockery. Her eyelids moved salaciously while she listened to his stories, and he remembered that he still needed to castigate her for the silent hints toward sharply reproductive actions against his admittedly sturdy desk.
Unease settled into his body at the thought.
Aliens were single-minded creatures, from the casual liaisons of the turians to the violently amorous deviance of the krogans. During his ground missions on Tuchanka a turian ship named the Indomitable had assisted with distractions and its occupants were quite interested in Mordin and the rest of the STG team, inviting them over for an evening. He had declined, unmoved despite their appreciative compliments concerning his pigmentation.
Their interest had been purely physical, like most others, and so they left.
Perhaps he could tell Shepard about the problem gently, and then give her a small bollocking about something else to quickly lighten the mood. He coughed and decided to tell her soon, but still later. It was set aside in favor of describing his new side project where he would attempt to cure Joker's case of Vrolik's syndrome without causing expedient hepatocellular dysfunction.
Shepard remained, lingering like an indian summer whenever she smiled at him and hid from her upbeat yeoman.