Crow and Glint spent the next few weeks building a sort of 'codex' of their own to kick Councilor Anderson's way, despite Commander Shepard's assurances that nobody in their right mind would mistake him as a threat to humanity if they met him. That he didn't have anything to prove. He continued anyway, because he wants to make it as clear as possible that he fought for humanity, even if this wasn't his humanity.
That, and he was tired of repeating himself. He was getting more comfortable talking with the crew and they with him, which meant he kept having to repeat answers he'd already given to others. They were all used to looking something up when they wanted to know about it, but didn't have that option with him, so they would come to him directly.
If they had access to all the answers they needed on their omnitool, he'd hoped to have less people ask him if his Awoken dreams could predict the next biotiball match(Gardner, and that was a 'no'), or if he could see through peoples clothes with truesight(Donnelly, also a 'no').
These weeks were also filled with near-constant drills, which intensified after Shepard and Samara had come back from a trip to Omega with the former worse for ware. He'd desperately wanted to ask if she was okay(mentally) when she came into med bay later that night with her fists bloody messes, because though Chakwas could have them fixed quickly between medicine and Shepard's cybernetics, they hadn't heard anything about injuries when she'd gotten back.
There were cuts throbbing across her skin but she couldn't feel the pain, just the edges rubbing against each other as she moved. The faint sting that wasn't quite pain of two parted sections of skin that used to be a whole striking one another like fault lines. She keeps her jacket on and marches straight to the elevator, trying to ignore Garrus, who had seen them off at the airlock and apparently had never left the CIC afterwards.
He hadn't been okay with being back at this station.
She keeps laser focus on the elevator but he's still a bright distraction in her peripheral despite his dark clothes.
When she gets to her quarters, the only sound is Fred running on his wheel. The sound echoes off the inside of her skull like it's lined with wool. It feels like shadows of suggestion are still crawling across her mind.
She shucks off her jacket. Throws it on the desk. Ignores Fred, who stops his running when she passes in front of his tank and starts to glass surf at one of the front corners. She steps numbly into the bathroom and stops in front of the mirror.
Foreign hands ghosting over her arms, she should be fighting it.
There's a cut on her cheek that has stopped oozing blood. She turns the water on, splashes it on the wound until it is clean. Fresh blood mixes with the water and the sink turns red. She reaches up, parts the edges of the wound, wipes the blood away from one edge and angles it with her fingers until she can see orange. Orange instead of flesh.
She lowers her hand shakily.
She should be fighting it but her will is no longer her own.
She screams and punches the mirror until it shatters, and keeps punching after it does.
He'd spent so long trying to decide if he should say anything, and what he should say if he did, that the news had reached Garrus, and the turian had come in and planted himself next to the Commander. Glint and Chakwas had quietly encouraged Crow to take a snack break after that. His Ghost had told him it felt like there was about to be a very private moment, and looking back, he agrees.
A silver lining to all the training meant he was learning more things, and he was starting to feel more... connected to his teammates. It wasn't like a Guardian fireteam, where everyone linked their Light together to bolster each other through darkness zones and battlefields. Where, he'd been told, many hands made the Light work as one.
But it was starting to feel less like a bunch of individual parts, and more like a single, flowing unit. He didn't feel like the odd one out anymore, at least in battle. Where he was found lacking, someone at his back could pick up the slack. Jacob seems unsettled by his Light, though, and Tali, though thawing, is still somewhat cool towards him, her body language neutral and the eyes behind her mask as untelling as always. Thane is still as chill as ever, and has even started helping him refine his hand-to-hand.
Thane was finally starting to see a pattern in Hunter martial style. That pattern was complete unpredictably, to the point of Crow seeming a neurotic mess if one didn't know it was intentional.
It did, however, employ heavy usage of knives, and that was something he could help with. Though unpredictability would make him harder to fight, Crow was still clearly inexperienced, and though Thane was slightly uncomfortable teaching someone his skills, in the end he could recognize that his own fighting style was the closest out of everyone's to Crow's. Hunter combat was all about swift movements and swifter kills, and drell assassin training had similar priorities.
He had never taken an apprentice, had never wanted to pass his skills in taking life to another, but the Awoken needed refinement, and there were no other Hunters who could teach him. He couldn't turn Crow into an assassin, and wouldn't if he could, but he could help hone his preexisting skills so that he might better survive the battles to come.
"So if you can heal yourself, how come Glint always does it?" Tali was asking as the three of them sat at the table with whetstones and blades. It turned out she knew a bit of knife-fighting herself, though as a weapon of last resort. Crow had cut his hand while sharpening a throwing dagger, and used his own Light to heal it rather than letting Glint see to it.
"I don't want to practice in the middle of a fight. I'm no expert. And um, it's rude to keep bleeding everywhere when your Ghost can stop it." He passes Light over the edge of the knife he's holding, and the metal shimmers ominously with sol energy in response. "It takes enough concentration that there's usually a bit of a mess before you can finish. With anything major, I mean."
"Then why practice it?" Tali inquired.
"In case it's too dangerous to let Glint out. Or... or a dark wound, but there's probably nothing here that can do that." The Awoken shifted uncomfortably and switched to another blade.
"Dark?" Thane had never heard such a term before but it sounded... unpleasant.
"Things a Ghost can't heal. Darkness used a certain way keeps a Ghost from healing. There's some Hive blades that can do it, Devourer Rounds, Weapons of Sorrow, but none of those are here." He adds that last part hastily, and seemingly with gratitude for this reality's lack of such objects. "The localized healing can help with them, though. Still leave nasty marks."
Like those on your arms? Thane wonders privately.
"Glint can't heal other people, but could you?" He decides to steer the subject away from the grim matter before he starts to think too much about what anything called a 'Weapon of Sorrow' could possibly do to a Lightbearer that was unhealable. "You're already working closely with Chakwas."
"I don't know, if I get something wrong on myself, Glint can fix it." He chews on his lip worriedly. "If I got something wrong on someone else... what if I duplicated a liver or something?"
"That can happen?"
He thinks his relationship with Tali might be improving, though, even if he can't tell by looking at her. Then again, he's still learning 'people' in general, how was he to know alien people.
He did know that working on the transmat system was helping. She would scowl at him frequently when they started, but at this point, between training and building, she was cool towards him most of the time, with occasional non-hostile interest in his 'oddities'. Shepard, had asked if there was anything from his reality they may be able to replicate to give the Normandy an advantage, and he had answered with 'transmat'.
He swore he'd seen her do a heel click in the hall on the way out. Long story short, she'd asked him, the engineering team, and Joker to try to figure it out, and so far it was going well. Odd, but well.
"'Beam them up'?" Crow's face does that thing it does when he's trying to figure out a new thing, and Joker, again, finds himself feeling sorry the Awoken's reality.
"Star Trek." Donnely states from under the consol. "You know, Scotty, Captain Kirk. Transporters, the Enterprise."
"Sorry, I don't follow." Donnely didn't seem to have figured out that clarifying something for Crow required 'dumb answers', or as he'd come to thing of them, 'guy from another universe answers'. If he asked about a movie reference or odd saying, you answered with 'movies reference' or 'just a saying'. Then you got into the details, if he asked.
Otherwise you just confused him, and would eventually lose him when he decided to dismiss himself instead of stick around not knowing what was going on. He was a little self-conscious like that.
"It's a TV show, we'll introduce you later." Joker spins his stylus nonchalantly between his fingers. "They got shows where's you're from?"
"I never went into the City long enough to see anything, but Glint's told me about a few." He hadn't really wanted much to do with Crow when he first came aboard; the bet he'd lost, thus resulting in him showing the newcomer around the ship not withstanding. It had been obvious Shepard would have him on the ground team, and the ground team was...
Well, the ship was beginning to feel like a traveling freak show. The only ones who weren't unsettling in some way were Tali and Jacob, and Jacob was unsettlingly nice. He didn't hate them, he just avoided them, because having the brittle bones guy in the same room as a homicidal biotic convict was a bad idea.
Turned out the only thing unsettling about Crow were the glaringly obvious signs that his situation had been in the shitter before the Normandy. He was actually okay company, once you gave him a gentle nudge into the open, and he'd even started to unbury a sense of humor, even if all the Guardian class rivalry jokes fell a little flat in this reality.
At least they were learning interesting things about Titan dietary habits.
"Like?" Gabby prompted, sitting on the floor with Tali as they poured over data.
"There's a lot of pre-Golden-Age police procedurals, I hear they're really popular with the Warlocks."
Odder still, because he thinks he's making friends.
With Joker.
And... Grunt, of all people. Or rather, Grunt is trying to be friends with him, he thinks. He doesn't know why; they're complete opposites, Crow and Glint weren't particularly fond of violence, and Grunt was prone to bloodlust at the drop of a hat. It makes things weird between them at best. At least the krogan was learning something; apparently Okeer had neglected his ability to read and write, and Glint was having none of that.
Grunt was... frightening on a good day. But he was really trying not to be, and seemed to have made it a personal goal to befriend Crow for some reason, so Glint did his best to clamp down on his nerves as he hovered over the young krogan's shoulder.
"Just sound it out, at first." He instructed. It was really quite unforgivable that Okeer hadn't programmed any imprints for knowing how to spell. "You're already decent at reading, doing this out loud will give you a better understanding of how it's all spelled."
"I'll sound like a fool." Grunt grumbled. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe sat innocently next to his empty food tray.
"There's nothing foolish about it." Glint soothed. "You're learning. Learning is one part catharsis, one part embarrassment, with triumphs mixed in between."
"You should have seen how many times I set myself on fire by accident learning how to control my Light." Crow comments from across the table. He's started eating with the rest of the crew, and Glint couldn't be happier with the progress he's made with trusting people in the last few weeks. If only he could conquer his own fears with such ease.
"Ever set anybody else on fire?" Joker asks wryly. Glint still doesn't quite know what to make of him. He uses(often inappropriate)humor as a delivery system for communication, sometimes harshly. But it's this same 'gift' with speech that he's used to draw Crow out of the med bay and engage him with the rest of the crew. For a sharp-tongued introvert, the pilot has a gift for handling people, even if he could go to the extreme in some cases(like with the Miranda incident).
"No, but there were some incidents with bushes." His Lightbearer said, before shoveling more potatoes in his mouth. Grunt made a frustrated noise and looked at the book.
"Go on." He encouraged. With a huff of irritation, the krogan opened it up to the first page.
Although it was weird watching his Ghost teach a krogan how to write and improving his reading, once Glint set his mind to something there was rarely a point to trying to stop him. And it wasn't the strangest thing to have happened in the last few weeks, not by a long shot; apparently, Gavin Archer had been apprehended by the Alliance within twenty-four hours of Miranda dropping him off wherever, and she definitly wasn't happy about it.
Crow, for his part, kept his mouth shut about the exchange at the pub, of course. He didn't know why Shepard and Joker had decided he could be trusted with the knowledge of their espionage campaign, maybe it was because the situation had left them no choice; pressed for time, with too much to do before Anderson was called away again. He didn't plan on putting their work at risk, and he certainly didn't want to be a subject of Miranda's wrath, so he kept his head down around her.
Aside from her, Massani, and Jack, he's starting to feel... safe, on the Normandy. Which, of course, meant something bad or unusual would happen soon and complicate things.
That something happened when he was finally dozing off for the night, roughly three weeks since Aite. The intercom startled him awake, and Glint let out a surprised squeak as he tumbled into his Lightbearer's lap.
"All ground team, report to the conference room, all ground team, report to the conference room; we have a Reaper-related situation that could quickly escalate." Shepard's voice commanded.
"Oh, dear." Glint clicked. Crow yawned and made his way out of the med bay, nearly walking into Garrus when he tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes. The turian opens his mouth to say something but winds up yawning instead.
"Sorry." Crow says, giving him space as they approach the elevator... which, of course, Thane is already standing in. He waits for them before sending it up, and Crow decides to practice his truesight. He breathed deeply of the void, and coaxed it to show him what the world was hiding. He looked around the elevator, and the corner behind him was illuminated by shadow. "Hi, Kasumi."
"You getting good!" the thief giggled, though she didn't reveal herself. "And purple is quite the striking eye color on you, you know."
"Thanks, I guess." She was still a bit hard to figure out, and he still wasn't sure how much he could trust her, being a thief and all, but she hadn't done anything too untowards that he knew of during his time here, and her friendliness was welcoming, most of the time.
The CIC was quieter than usual, maybe because that was the nature of the night shift people, or maybe because something Reaper-related had cropped up.
"Hi, Crow!" he's been getting better about involuntary invisibility since that particular ability had clicked, but Kelly startles him into the shadows regardless. "I was hoping you'd have a moment later-"
"Not the time, Chambers." Garrus admonishes, reaching uncertainly for thin air and managing to find the Hunter to give him a nudge. "Come on."
"Sorry." he mutters, willing himself back into the visible spectrum. Invisibility had served him well in avoiding Kelly, but she was getting more persistent lately.
"I don't blame you." Kasumi whispers from nearby. He allows himself a smirk, and the four of them make their way into the conference room, where most everybody had already assembled. Garrus moves up to take a place next to Shepard; they seemed to have repaired a lot of their relationship during whatever had happened in the med bay after Samara's mission.
Crow takes a seat just as Tali and Grunt walk in, and the later plops down in the seat next to him. "Get ready; we're gonna teach you how to pop some husk skulls, he he he."
"From what I hear, they're a lot like thrall, so it shouldn't be that much of a learning curve." he decides to respond diplomatically. He's found it's the best way to handle Grunt's bloodlust.
"Alright everybody, listen up." the Commander called for quite, and all eyes went to her. "Two days ago, Cerberus received a data burst from the facility that's been looking into the Reaper IFF we need; they found it, but the communication itself was erratic, context and vocabulary point to Indoctrination. An hour ago, contact was lost completely."
"We need to assume the the IFF isn't coming to us; so we're going to get it. There's no guarantee there was an evacuation, or that the team took the IFF with them if they did so. There's no guarantee the team is even sane, or if they left the IFF intact one the Indoctrination set in. For all we know, they were directed to destroy it, but we have to give it a shot." She brought up a hologram of a gas giant, and zoomed it to focus on a twisted mass in orbit. "This is our target. There are Cerberus structures giving us some range of mobility, but the rest of it is pure, dead Reaper. Given the risk of Indoctrination, I'll be taking in a small squad for this one rather than the whole team. These corridors will be tight, and there's no telling how the scientists will react to us. Anyone who goes in with me will be taking full brain scans for the next week to ensure nobody is infected, with two more to be given at random at a later date."
She looked across them all, eyes assessing. Grunt wiggled eagerly in his chair, and Crow put a hand on his shoulder to try to settle him.
"Thane and Crow, you're with me. Garrus, I want you waiting near the airlock with Grunt and Samara ready to go if things get too ugly." Crow sits up straighter with surprise; he's never actually fought beside Shepard before. "Alright, everybody go and prep."
He lets Glint switch his nightclothes for his armor.
"Showoff." Tali scoffs. Maybe, but he had to admit, he found some amusement in reminding them he could do this.
"When I say go and prep, I mean go an sleep." Shepard said fondly, rolling her eyes. "We're twenty hours out."
"Oh." he said. Glint gave him his other clothes back. "Okay."
Kasumi's quite 'It's so not fair' makes it worth it.
Better late than never, eh? I got distracted by Horizon. Not the car game, the one with the robot dinosaurs; Avad's got me in a chokehold and won't let go, so instead of writing this, I wound up writing an AU oneshot. If anyone ever wanted to see me write for Horizon: Zero Dawn, go an see it. It's the Helis fight novelization that you've secretly longed for since he was too easy to kill, even in Ultra Hard. The guy was portrayed as a human tank, he should have fought like one, too.
Jebest4781: Glad you're still enjoying it!
Ebuc: I point to any one thing that might make Tali/Crow possible. Maybe I just think it would be fluffy and I'm a sucker? Who knows. I believe that Light, being intuitive, could reflect what a Guardian is feeling when they channel. Between other Guardian, this could act as another layer of tactile language; if a Guardian punches another with a flaming fist out of anger, the message is carried across Light instead of just the action itself. A Guardian who's trying to comfort another with a hand on the shoulder might pulse their Light with the intent to provide comfort. To other Guardians, the effect of empathetic channeling wouldn't be as noticeable, but to a mortal, it's effect would be more significant, since they aren't used to interacting with the Light physically. I'm a fan of how the 3.0 changes have changed the way Guardians channel; it all makes more sense from a lore perspective, though I'll be using a mix of old and new abilities when it comes to this fic, mostly because the Shadestep animation effect from D1 was sick.
Knightwolf1875: And here you are, sir.
Ylnadiir: Huh. It's been so long since I looked at NLS that I actually forgot what it stood for.
JGThorncross: Glad you liked that chapter! Sadly, I just don't have the time or attention span for a collab fic. I'm a master procrastinator anyway, never did well with group projects, but I hope your fic goes well!
Guest(1): Yeah, the Alliance is understandably concerned about the unkillable godslayer running around as is, since he doesn't age, could wipe out armies if he wanted to(something most of us have done in about an hour of gameplay), and thus far has no allegiance aside from Shepard, who's currently running a Cerberus vessel; a murderous past life would definitly kick some kind of hornet nest.
Guest(2): I can see you feel strongly about this.
Okay, so at this point, this is early Season of the Chosen Crow; he's a little more confident, and he's gone and rented a sense of humor now that he gets more of the jokes he's surrounded by. Hopefully I can get the sassy streak up and running by the end of the fic, but since this version of him is still dealing with the Uldren revelation, the most I can hope to provide is occasional Hunter snark eventually.
Fare Thee Well!