Years of training are what stop Shepard from screaming when Crow gets blown to pieces, her body going into autopilot because when it happens, her mind temporarily forgets that it isn't permanent for him.
"Grunt, get back in formation!" She orders, but he's given himself over to the blood rage, and now they can't shoot anything that's coming at him without risking hitting him. Thankfully, no other abominations came out to play, and he handled the rest of his husks with the enthusiasm only a blood raging teenage krogan could muster.
She makes her way to the smoking pile of gore as soon as the room as clear, and by now she's managed to remember he's unkillable. Even if she hadn't, Glint appearing in a whirl of particles would have reminded her.
"It's okay!" He reassures them, shell parting and Light pulsing. "This is all perfectly normal!"
He's a mess, practically unrecognizable. Glint's Light seems to reach around the corpse briefly, then-
Crow jerks upright, and nearly headbutts her. She swears, starts backwards, and then has to take a moment to just... take him in. That uneven dark hair that they should really get fixed up, eyes that she swore used to be several shades paler in color, and now in the dark seemed to glow faintly. Whispy trails of Light drift across his skin, and his expressions is one of slight unease as he looks at them all.
"Hi?" He says, and it occured to her that standing over someone after a rez might be considered unsettling.
"You good?" She asks, almost not trusting her voice. He'd been dead and now he was fine. Knowing it was possible was one thing, and she'd seen the aftermath of a death no thanks to Jack, but seeing it happen? Part of her wanted to recoil, to get as far away from him as possible because her most primal instincts were screaming at the unnaturalness of him; her brain knew this was wrong on an instinctive level and it was urging her to get away.
Another part wonders: 'Is this what the others feel around me? Is this what it's like to be around someone who shouldn't be alive?'
The other part of her wanted to grab him and hug him, because he was alive.
"Yeah." He tells her awkwardly. "We going?"
"Yeah." She stood, and trying to keep her voice shake-free, turned to Grunt. "Grunt, we're having another talk about self control later."
He'd been gone, if he'd been anyone else this would have been a mission failure. No, not if he'd been anyone else. No, she couldn't afford to start seeing Crow as an acceptable casualty, especially when they were finally drilling it into him that his life and health mattered, Light or no.
"Check weapons and back in formation, Crow keep using that x-ray vision of yours. Chances are they'll be crawling out of every crack we see." She orders, and the Hunter nods, eyes flickering to a strange plum shade briefly as he glanced about.
"There's a few up ahead, I think, standing up here, not crawling beneath. I can't see further." He told her, and she tries not to think about how those eyes had been fused shut by burns less than a minute ago.
"Should have picked you up sooner." She commented, trying to sooth her nerves more than anything. "Could've used someone who could see through walls a while ago. Let's go."
They make it up the stairs in time to see two husks get picked off by what seemed to be long range precision fire. Thane isn't using his rifle at present.
"Sniper. Crow?" The Awoken glances about.
"Activity under the floor ahead and to the right, I think. Nothing too close anymore, though..." he grinned and gestured to the headless husks. "I guess they must have... lost their heads."
I need to stop letting him hang out with Joker so much.
"He he he." Grunt does his weird little chuckle when he seemingly gets the joke.
"Focus." She scolds, leading the way. They sidle up to the corridor where the husks had fallen.
"It would be faster if I checked out that sniper." Crow suggested. "If he gets me, you can just drag me back for Glint."
Shepard has to clench her jaw to stop herself from screaming 'hell no', because she's already seen him blown to pieces and doesn't want to see him with his head shot off. But he also has a point. He has a skillset, and she would be a fool not to use it, even if that skillset was the ability to die.
"Check." She orders through grit teeth. Crow moves forwards, Hawkmoon ready, and steps into the line of fire, eyes and gun both seeking his target. Yellow flashes with swirling plum between several blinks, and he tenses.
"No sign of the shooter, but contacts are swarming under the floor down there, looks like more husks and something else." He reports, stepping back into cover. "I'm going to refocus my Light, I'm more experienced with fire."
"Okay. Thane, set up. Grunt, on me." The drell took out his rifle, and Grunt moved up to her. She glanced at Crow, who still had a distant look about him. As she watched, he blinked, and to her for a moment there seemed to be fire in his eyes, and a spike in temperature about him. "Ready?"
The Hunter nods, and Shepard motions for Grunt to follow her. Like a shaken hornet nest, the husks start crawling out of the darkness beneath to meet them. Shepard and Grunt start mowing them down with gun and biotics, Thane picking the more distant ones off so that their numbers weren't overwhelming by the time they reached the N7 and Krogan. Hawkmoon barked judgmentally, the heavy caliber bullets- real bullets, not shavings of metal accelerated to stupid speeds- practically blasting and throwing husks to the ground harshly.
She'd had her doubts about such a weapon, but it was proving effective. What she still couldn't figure out was the strange noises it made, the way it seemed to glow, or the fact that when he'd offered to let her try it during target practice, it had felt both uncomfortably cold and warm in her hands, and when she fired it, it felt like the gun was... reprimanding her. She had decided not to tell Crow she though his weapon was sentient and didn't like being used by other people; he would probably think she was crazy.
Maybe she was crazy. She'd been dead, and she wasn't 'used to it', who knew what that did to a person's brain; especially a brain that had been exposed to a vacuum and subsequently melted by the heat of atmospheric reentry.
The husks keep coming; Shepard throws several of them with her biotics, Grunt whips out his shotgun as some of them start getting too close for comfort. A scion howls, and steps out of whatever woodworks it had been hiding in, along with so many husks, they clog the whole platform.
"Crow, do the thing!" Grunt yells with an air of irritation, like he didn't want Crow to 'do the thing' but could begrudgingly admit they needed him to. "Do the flaming knife thing!"
"Shepard?" the Hunter asks for confirmation, eyeing the swarm that's fast approaching.
"Do it, Grunt fall back." she and the Krogan promptly get out of the way, though her every instinct tells her to stay put and keep firing. Crow steps out of cover, Hawkmoon holstered, and the local temperature seems to spike. All at once, flame seems to erupts out of every pore of his body, curling, rising, swirling down his arms. He leaps, twists, hurls shaped fire at the coming hoard in a barrage of golden, superheated spikes, and they hit the husks hard, vaporizing some, before exploding and vaporizing more.
There is no smoke when the flames are clear, nor are there any hostiles, or remnants thereof other than misshaped metal where molten hot sol Light had superheated it. There was just Crow, shaking off residual Light like it was water. He turned to look at her, and there seemed to be traces of fire across his skin instead of the usual reflection-like light, but she blinked and he looked normal again. Once more, she had the sense that she was too close to something that didn't belong, but this time she didn't feel the need to run.
If anything, she felt strangely safe despite the place they were in.
"Looks clear." he announced, and they all came cautiously out of cover. "But I think we should deal with those before they wake up."
He points to the very back of the room, where it looks like some sort of altar has been set up, behind it a gruesome cluster of Dragons' Teeth, some of which were currently in use.
"Thane, take care of it." she orders, and the drell nods, before checking his weapon and approaching the setup. Shepard pokes around the room some, finding another research log that seems to put Crow off a bit.
"Reminds me of the Cryptoliths now than bone-whispers." he comments with a slight shudder.
"Let's keep moving." she gathers them up again once Thane had shot all the forming husks in the head, rendering them unusable, and they make their way through the next section of decon. Once they were through, they fanned out to check the area, all of them listening for the sound of husks scrabbling beneath them.
They don't listen hard enough.
"Shepard!" Thane warns, just as she hears it. She turns around just in time to see both of the surprisingly sneaky blighters heads explode. She whirls around to find who'd done it, but none of her squadmates had been in the right position for shots like that. Then, the flash of a familiar lightbulb head catches her attention from the catwalks above. A geth, with a hole blasted through it, looked her dead in the eye, lowered it's rifle, and the shock of it it so much that she forgets to point her own gun at the thing.
As if a geth standing down after covering her six wasn't weird enough, it then did something she thought was impossible.
It spoke.
"Shepard-Commander." it said in garbled male tone, almost as if in... acknowledgement. And then, her and, well, maybe all of them still frozen with disbelief, the geth walked away, and they let it. Or was it a him? Because what in the many stars had she just seen and heard?
"Isn't that impossible?" Glint broke the stunned silence. "Tali said that was impossible. And why did it help us?"
"I don't know." is all Shepard can give him, shaking her head.
"Well, since he knows you..." Grunt grumbled, "tell him I don't need his help!"
"It." Thane corrected, though he sounded perplexed as all of them did.
"Sounded like a boy geth to me." the Krogan shrugged. "Whatever."
They fight their way through another hoard to get to the miraculously intact IFF that the research team had managed to find and extract before they were indoctrinated. It's also been left conveniently close to the core they had to destroy.
The one that their geth... compatriot? Competitor? Whatever he was, seemed to be trying to mess with, while at the same time being swarmed by husks. They watch from behind a decon barrier as one husk get's the drop on him and smashes him hard against the ground. Well, there goes any chance of solving that mystery. She thinks dryly.
You couldn't talk to a dead man; dead robot in this case. Or rather, you could talk to him, but it was going to be a very one-sided conversation.
"Okay, since whatever our little tin friend was trying won't work, looks like we'll be doing this the hard way." she readied her weapon. "We're shooting that thing until it breaks."
"I could Golden Gun it into oblivion, if you like." Crow offered hopefully, and she had to resist rolling her eyes.
"Yes, Crow, I would like that very much." the Hunter beamed at this, and golden Light flickers across his right shoulder briefly, as if in anticipation. He was always almost too eager to please at times, but seeing such a look on his face made her feel a little less bad about relying on his powers so much during this op. Though she could choose to see it as putting him through his paces, seeing what he was really capable of, abilities like Crow's could easily turn into a crutch if she wasn't careful.
She had run ops without space magic backing her up her whole life, she couldn't afford to lose her edge by becoming complacent.
The barrier went down, and the husks quickly lost interest in the Gath as something new and fresh became available for killing. The four of them make quick work of them, but new husks are starting to crawl out of the darkness.
"Joker, get ready, we're sending you coordinates for pickup." she alerted Normandy's pilot.
"Aye, aye, ma'am. Coordinates received, just don't be too slow." He responded.
"We'll make The Flash look bad. Shepard out." She couldn't help but look at the geth on the floor. It was mostly intact; if geth could be knocked out, she'd say that was what happened. "Glint, what can you tell me about this thing? Is it really dead?"
Maybe this was a bad idea; curiosity killed the cat, after all, but she's been dead before so what's the danger in risking it again if Cerberus can just build her anew? Glint hovered down over the fallen synthetic, and scanned it, shell nodes twisting as he processed whatever information he was getting.
"Not dead, not really." he told her, swooping back to Crow. "I guess if you wanted to interrogate it, you could reactivate it."
"Grunt, get over here." She waved the krogan over, giving in to the demands of the Bad Idea Fairy that had tapped her on the shoulder. "I have a package for you."
"Commander, are you certain?" Thane questions, dark eyes searching, as if looking for signs that she was indoctrinated or had otherwise lost her marbles.
"No, but nobody ever learned anything without taking a risk." she told him. "This thing could talk; even knew my name. I think some answers are in order."
"Tali's gonna hate this." Grunt commented, shouldering the heavy metal body.
"Tali's going to have to live with it." Shepard grimaced. "She'll be helping with the interrogation. Crow, if you could do the honors."
"My pleasure." fire flashed around him again as she and Thane threw husks clear of their escape route, this time coalescing down his arm and into Hawkmoon, turning it into- as the name of the technique would suggest- a golden gun. He fired three times at the core, and the core did not like this one bit, so much so it promptly collapsed on itself, thus triggering Operation: Run Like Hell Is Behind You.
So they did. It was definitly getting a place on her top ten list of worst, most nerve-wracking things she's ever done on a op, right next to walking that exposed bridge in Dantius Towers with fifty mile per hour wind trying to know her and her team off of it. The best part was jumping to the airlock.
The real best part was closing the airlock, and finally bugging out, even though nobody really relaxed until the rattling and shaking stopped, with Normandy finally clear of the brown dwarf's gravity and storms.
"Well," Crow panted, still sitting against the wall, "that was fun."
"Yeah!" Grunt agreed enthusiastically, not picking up on the Awoken's sarcasm. He slammed his fist into his other hand. "Exploding husks, flaming guns, and a talking geth!"
"Talking geth?" Garrus asked, having overheard that last bit as the airlock opened. To answer him, she indicated said geth laying crumpled on the floor as she took her helmet off. The turian and the rest of his team all stared downwards. "Um... Shepard?"
"Tali, we have a new project." she said, grimacing.
"I can see that." the quarian commented warily. "Why?"
"He's a talker." she informed her. "And I want to know what he has to say."
The reason I'm late? So, I ran out of chapters, and decided to take a break. By break, I mean writers block, which was only cured by getting 8k words of Horizon Zero Dawn fanfic that wouldn't leave me alone out of my head, and finding the SEAL Team soundtrack Chernobyl of Fun and listening to it on a loop. The reason I didn't post on a wedsday?
It's the one-year anniversary of this fic, and I couldn't resist updating on the publish date just to cause a brief, trolling, heartbeat of confusion for those that find this fic. In other news, I've been taking a crack at the old Time Travel fic trope on the side, but with Javik instead of a character who's reasonable. Not really sure If I'll ever make it a real thing, but I posted the first chapter because I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. It can bee read as a conceptual one-shot, or I can actually choose to make it a thing, because I am still writing it, I'm just not sure I want to commit.
Jebest4781: hope it's as fun as you though it would be.
Ebuc: I more imagined him as coming in hot on Cerberus as they try to nab Javik's pod. Imagine thinking you're about to make off with a live prothean only for a flaming, axe-weilding Iron Lord to charge up from the depths of some random underground Hive portal that decided to open up again?
Knightwolf1875: Let's be real, the nature of Crow and Glint's existence and bond would totally give the geth their equivalent of an existential crisis.
JGThorncross: The comparison was to the whispery nature of both. The researcher trying to listen to the Reaper samples reminded Crow of people who try to listen to Ahamkara bones.
Guest: Glade it's binge worthy, and that you like the characterizations. It would be an interesting pairing, given that Crow is used to dying and it doesn't phase him, while this version of Shepard is struggling to reconcile what happened to her.
Bladethefox117: For the sake of this fic, I'm not really making heavy use of Hawmoon's video game mechanics. Instead, I'm focusing more on the surreal nature of the gun and it's uniquebond to Crow, and instead of just headshots and kills, it gets 'excited' by most forms of use, unless someone other than Crow is using it. A fully charged paracausal shot is, however, pretty much like a tank round as you seem fond of.
Kalacagim: I guess all it took was someone chucking him into Mass Effect, then, lol.
Mccoogsamuel: I've never played Half Life, so no idea what you're talking about. I have played Portal, though.
Fare Thee Well!