~Jane~
Finding herself at Rio de Janeiro for N training for close to six months had Jane on edge. She was damn proud to find that she was referred into the program by a higher up, but she was also less than happy to be back on Earth after leaving eight years ago. Looking back on her shore leave and the unintentional friend she had made of a local Turian cop helped to calm her nerves enough to focus on her training.
Each day consisted of 20 hours of grueling combat training with little food or sleep in the dirtiest, most encumbering environment she could imagine. Every candidate was put into a small group with others who the evaluators believed complimented their skills and together they were to work as a squad through the obstacles.
During the four hours that Jane found herself trying to catch her breath and catch a bite to eat, she and the other candidates were allowed access to their Omni-Tools for a chance to check the extranet, send and receive messages from family, chat amongst themselves, or any other activity not related to training. It wasn't necessarily time off, but it was close enough to relax.
Using this time to follow up on the promise she made herself on the Citadel to try and open up and give herself a chance to develop friendships and attachments since Akuze. Jane approached the other two members of her squad, but a handful of jokes back and forth and a failed attempt from them to try and get her to tell stories of her personal live later she found herself back to square one.
She couldn't understand, it had felt so natural and genuine on the Citadel with Garrus, but when she tried the same here, where she could at least bond over their training together, she found everything to be too forced if it went past jokes and banter. Thinking that perhaps the ease she had found on the Citadel was just a fluke and one time only she sent Garrus a message during one of the breathers in her training. Nothing too big, just a simple "hey, what's up?"
Almost immediately he responds back, "Nothing. I'm at my lunch. Missing the Citadel already? It's only been a week." Reading his response, she got another message, "Or could it be that you've just missed me? I know it's hard to be away from such a charming person such as myself." At that she laughs quietly.
It wasn't a fluke then as she fell into familiarity that was natural between the two. "I don't know, I think I remember it was you who kept finding me after your supposed work hours." From then on Jane would message Garrus whenever she was allowed her four hour break from N training.
In the beginning, their conversations were simple. He'd tell her how things were on the Citadel and at his posting in C-Sec while she would relay whatever had happened during training. Eventually it had led to the two sharing stories from their previous postings in the military. Often times their stories would lead to each explaining a certain aspect of their culture that corresponded and gave certain context.
Soon, they were only talking about common cultural things that to each of them seemed obvious but when told to someone outside their race, it became much like telling another story, much like the instance in the restaurant.
The talks of their people and ways led to each telling stories of growing up. Garrus told of how he, like every other Turian, went into the military at fifteen. Jane spoke of her time in the Reds, an Earth gang that she joined at the age of ten to keep herself off the streets.
At first she was ashamed that she had felt so at ease that she let slip a darker part of her past. The last thing she wanted was to run Garrus off with the knowledge of what she did, the laws she broke, the less than reputable things she did, the people she crossed, but he didn't react at all how she expected.
Having matured faster than most girls her age, Jane had a body that looked older than she was with a little makeup to hide her young face. This led to her working as a pickpocket and runner of supplies until she was fourteen when the Reds then had her start preforming in the strip club they ran most of their jobs and business out of. She would also flirt with men that came in in order to trick them into following her somewhere where she or other members could ambush and rob them. She wasn't proud of what she did, but it was how she survived so she wasn't going to wish she hadn't done the things she did.
She had expected him to be angry, but what she hadn't anticipated was for him to be livid at the Reds for what she went through. He cursed that someone would treat a child to such abuse and what she never guessed to hear from him was an apology. He didn't pity her like the few others she had ever revealed her past to and for that she silently thanked him. Eventually, when he had sufficiently ranted about the injustice of forcing a child into such a situation she admitted that despite how it had all played out, she wouldn't want to have not gone through it.
Confused, he questioned her reasoning and Jane explained that the most traumatization she gained from what she went through was that she had a hard time making lasting relationships, both intimate and not. She remembers what it was like on the streets before joining the Reds. She also remembered the various other tasks that were handed to members and how the member's said safety wasn't guaranteed. All of that considered, she'd rather have had the job in the Reds that she was given. After some thought, he agreed.
One day, during their conversations, Garrus began to tell Jane of his family. He told her about his father, a as by-the-book Turian as they come that Garrus found himself always at odds with, his younger sister, who he would constantly find ways to get into trouble with as a kid, and his mother, the one person in the entire galaxy he found himself looking up to. As he wrote of them and his childhood home she could imagine the wonders of his childhood and she felt at a lost with nothing to quite compare it to.
As his stories painted a picture of what a childhood should look like she thought back to her own. Everyone, including the Alliance, believes she was an orphan with no known parents, but the truth is, she knows exactly who her mother was.
To say Jane was an accident that her mother didn't expect would be a severe understatement. Her mother was a prostitute and a drug addict. Her drug of choice was Blue Sand, a mixture of methamphetamine and Red Sand, a drug that simulated biotic abilities. Thinking back, her mother's use of Blue Sand while pregnant was probably the cause for Jane's eezo exposure.
Her father was one of her mother's clients, which one is anyone's clue, and at the time of her delivery her mother's handler had simply taken her to one of their clients that was a doctor during daylight hours. With the wonders of blackmail, the doctor delivered Jane without a being at a hospital and her mother took her home with the hopes that when she grew old enough she could continue the family business.
Her childhood consisted of living within a one bedroom apartment and being locked wither in the one room, which was luckily hers, or outside in the complex's hallway while her mother "entertained guests". Sometimes Jane would find a way to attend public school and was thankful for the meals provided due to the fact that there was no guarantee her mother didn't use her grocery money on her habit.
One day, when Jane was eight, she arrived from school to an open apartment and her mother lying on her sofa bed, unresponsive. She was naked, so Jane figured she had had a client over, and had a tie around her arm, a needle within reach. When Jane reached out and touched her skin, her mother was ice cold and her face stared blankly into the ceiling. Quietly Jane covered her mother's body, walked to the apartment next door, and dialed the emergency number.
When the authorities arrived, Jane was nowhere to be found. She still doesn't know why she left or why she didn't cry over her mother's death.
It wasn't until close to the end of her six months of training that Jane felt she needed to tell Garrus everything. Their conversations had turned to covering everything and anything that came to mind, from everyday occurrences to past memories, and she felt so natural and at ease. She couldn't quite explain why after vowing to tell no one of her mother she thought that now was the time and Garrus was the right person to lay the burden on.
He had laid his troubles of his childhood growing up with a father he felt treated him like a subordinate and not a son. A sister who was treated like she could do no wrong and was allowed certain liberties he felt he hadn't been given. Also, now that he was in C-Sec, of having to be under scrutiny by his father once again but this time at his work. He even told her about how in the military he was offered special training to join the Spectres, the elite forces of the Citadel Council themselves, but his father had gone behind his back and pulled some strings to get Garrus denied. Perhaps it was Garrus first offering his own demons that made Jane feel comfortable enough to broach the topic of her own.
She was on the last week of N training and all that was left was testing within a classroom setting and then the awarding of N-1 to all those who passed the six months when she broached the topic by asking if she could tell him something personal. It was only his light hearted response of "as humans say, 'lay it on me'" that helped her win her internal battle and tell him her darkest secret.
She thanked him afterwards for letting her lift the weight off her shoulders, to which he responded that anytime she needed someone to help carry her burdens he'd be there and that he was proud that she trusted him enough to have him be the first she ever told. He thanked her and assured that her secret would never be heard from his side. She never imagined he would thank her for her revealing the crap she lived through, she never expected anyone to want to thank her for that, but he did and once again, he didn't treat her with pity or any different than before she had laid her past out.
With their lives laid out before each other they found that their conversations didn't change despite the knowledge of what lay behind each of their internal walls. They still were able to joke, flirt shamelessly, brag, and retell old stories as if they had known each other years. It was an unusual feeling for Jane, but not one she found disturbing and in fact she couldn't have asked for anything better.