Crow sits in the skycar for about a minute until he finally decides to do something about the spam that's assaulting his omni-tool.
"Glint," he says, without taking his forehead off the wheel, "tell them we're all alive. And that Shepard is sending me back."
He really wanted to follow after them, Liara didn't seem like a very stable individual, but he couldn't stop shaking. He shouldn't have ignored Chakwas and Glint whenever they had told him to sleep over the past few days, but he had just been so excited about getting the transmat done, too invested in the distraction it offered from thoughts about a certain impending bomb removal. His body was equally displeased with him about forgetting to eat earlier, and his Light is furious with him for overworking it with complex tasks like localized healing, and following up with a Golden Gun.
He doesn't think he could help Shepard if he tried. He would probably just get in the way, as he was.
"Done." Glint chirped after a moment, before running a beam of Light over Crow's body. It helped, but only a little. "We're in transmat range, so I told them to just get themselves back. Let me know when you're feeling up to it, and we'll go."
He nodded mutely. Took another minute to breath. He just felt so tired. He forced himself to open his eyes and sit up; he could feel himself drifting off, and this was far from a safe place to sleep. He slowly got out of the skycar, feeling like if he moved to fast he might trigger a dizzy spell. It was funny; he used to get them all the time, during his days with Spider. Now, not so much; it was probably food-related. It was more unnerving to feel this way now than it had been back then.
Once he was standing firmly on the ground, certain he wasn't going to fall down, he gave Glint the go-ahead, and he found himself stumbling his landing in the mess hall a moment later. He was still getting used to transmat again. Goldstein was directly in front of him with a mug of coffee when he looked up. Crow was sorely tempted to take it for himself; maybe he wouldn't feel as tired if he had some more.
"Hello!" Glint greeted. Goldstein just continued to stare at them. His Ghost noticed him eyeing his crewmate's coffee. "Crow and I have discovered caffeine disagrees with him, so if you don't mind, could you please move so that we can make some tea?"
Goldstein nodded, jaw still agape, and Crow, working on autopilot, decided that tea sounded great. Gabby had seemed pretty shaken up by the carnage from the bombing, so he decided to make her some as well. Light blast it, I'll just make some for everybody. It always helped when Chakwas brought him some when he was having one of his off days, there was no reason it shouldn't work on the others.
In the end, he didn't drink much of his tea. Once he had set mugs of chamomile on the table for the others when they came in, he wound up sitting with his chin in one hand, watching steam rise from his cup and trying to figure out exactly what had just happened. He came to the conclusion that Tali's friend Liara had just forced him into a high-speed chase for a reason nobody had bothered to explain, Joker had wrecked a skycar on purpose after all his claims of having 'never wrecked a skycar and never will'(though in his defense, it had been more of a rough landing than a wreck), and he had overexerted his Light by healing victims of a bombing.
His mind cycled back to the woman that had thanked them, replaying her words over and over again. How he had felt when he heard them, like 'this mattered, I did this'. It had felt good, in a way he had never felt before. I should practice more. Until today he hadn't thought he could do anything like that, he hadn't been confident enough in his abilities to try, but if he could do what he did today after only practicing on the rare occasions he was injured himself... well, he was no Warlock, but maybe he could get good enough that it didn't take him forever to heal a wound, good enough to help the rest of the team if something went wrong in the field.
Yeah, that's a plan.
He must have dozed off, because next thing he knew, someone was sitting down heavily next to him. He started, reaching for one of his knives, but it was only Ken. Gabby sat down next to he fellow engineer and grabbed a mug of tea automatically. Joker was sitting himself down gingerly across from them.
"So, what happened?" He asked, thumbing the brim of his hat. It takes Crow a moment to process the question, and take his hand away from the knife on his belt.
"Uh... We chased an asari. I tried to get in a lane, Liara didn't like that, a truck blew up, she didn't like that either, and she really didn't like it when we were upside-down." Crow yawned. "And I think she might actually be crazy. She wanted me to ram the other lady into oncoming traffic."
"There's gotta be more than that." the pilot scoffed. Crow could tell by the way his face was pinched that he was in pain. He must have fracture something when he tried to run her over.
"Tali said my landing was okay that time." it was the only other thing he could think of. "You should go to Chakwas before she chases after you."
"I'm fine." Joker grit out.
"You're lying." Crow yawned, tapping his own mug and reheating it with his Light automatically, causing a twinge of discomfort. He still couldn't work up the effort to actually drink it. The pilot looked like he was about to let his famously sharp tongue loose, but Ken spoke up first.
"What the bloody hell was all that." the engineer blurted, staring blankly at the table. "Explosions follow the ground team, how did we wind up in that?"
"Dropping Tali off." Crow answered. The other man rolled his eyes.
"That was a rhetorical question." he pointed out. "I don't know about you guys, but we chose shipside careers so we wouldn't have to see people with their limbs bloody blown off."
"Like a ship's never been boarded before." Joker scoffed. "If you chicken out at the sight of a body, why'd you join the Alliance?"
Gabby let out a sob; the chitin that broke the ogre's back.
"Joker!" Glint hissed. This conversation was starting to go downhill.
"Sorry, ask that again." Ken pretended to try to dig something out of his right ear. "I couldn't hear you over the sound of bloody hypocrisy."
"And what's that supposed to mean?" the pilot challenged. This was was bad. He looked between the two of them, drowsy brain trying to figure out how it became a problem and how to stop it.
"You know what I mean." Crow opens his mouth, trying to figure out what to say to stop this, but he keeps drawing up blanks, and his heart is pounding just as hard as it had been during the chase.
"Say it." Joker spat. Please don't. He didn't know what to do, he didn't know how to stop this argument, he'd never really tried to stop something like this before. He didn't know what to say. He remembers worrying about how easily friendships seemed to fall apart between people, and he was playing witness to it happening in real time.
"Why'd you join the Alliance when you can't even-" Crow decides not to say anything. He slams a sol-covered fist on the table, the others rear back in their seats, and the tea flash-boils. He briefly sees spots in his vision. He thinks he might actually throw up. He stands, and things go dark for a second but he stays standing.
"This is a stupid argument." it's not the best case he could make. Considering he might be half-asleep at this point, though, he thinks it's pretty good.
"Guess it is, if you're some untouchable pyromaniac." Ken scoffs. The others seem too stunned to speak.
"You two were friends a few hours ago." He turns and makes his way to the med bay, his Light practically throbbing. Now it was trying to cross the threshold between discomfort and pain. "I'm going to sleep, I'm done."
He practically stumbles over to the first bed he sees, not even bothering to check if Chakwas was present, and he's asleep before he hits the cot. It's better than falling into the panic that's trying to well in his chest.
He strode through the halls of an Awoken temple, the crystalline interior scattering the sunlight as it flowed in through the windows. His quarry wasn't far, he was sure of it- there! A ripple in the air, a tug on his senses, on his Light. Crow followed it with haste, and dove into the portal that the Celebrant had ripped into the fabric of reality.
He steps out into the Normandy's mess hall. It's empty, save a single being. The Hawk of Light. It reguarded him almost mournfully, and looked upwards.
Crow followed its gaze and saw an open sky, felt the field all around him. The dark birds high in the air scattered dead leaves from their talons. One of them dives, quite suddenly, towards him, and it's body grows, morphs, fills the air with a mechanical roar as it's two, glowing red eyes morph into a singular one.
For all there's a Reaper descending on him, Crow feels strangely calm.
He wakes with a start. He's still face-down on one of the medical beds, and his neck is hurting after a whole night spent that way. Glint was resting just across from him, eye blinking slowly in his powered-down state. Wincing, he rolled over into a more comfortable position and tried to settle his heart rate, as well as his mind.
That was the first time he'd seen the Hawk since Eden Prime. The first time he'd dreamt of it since he'd been stuck here. He had figured that since all connections to his reality had been severed, there was no way for the Traveler to reach him. His dreams since coming here had all been actually normal, or Awoken normal. Maybe it was just a normal dream? It wasn't uncommon for aspects of Awoken dreams to leak into normal dreams without holding any water. Normal dreams had also turned into Awoken ones before.
Maybe the Hawk was leaking into his dreams as just another aspect of his life his mind had decided to use. That has to be it.
Still unsettled, he checks his omni-tool.
"By the Light!" He exclaimed. Glint shot up.
"What?" The Ghost inquired in a sleepy voice as the Awoken jumped to his feet and dashed for the door. "Crow!"
"We slept for twelve hours and Shepard called a meeting!" Hopefully, it would involve some answers about yesterday.
I feel like I was projecting in this chapter. I wrote most of it at three in the morning, but going back and looking at it, I think it actually helped me nail how exhausted Crow was. I did have to correct quite a few mistakes, though.
Jebest4781: Glad you liked it.
JGThorncross: A yes indeed. I don't think Reapers would be good at tithing, their harvests occur too far apart, and worms need constant feeding. It's also like a drug addiction; if they get a sudden influx of tithes for say, the few centuries it took to kill off the protheans, the worm gets used to that. Then, the Reapers sleep again, the worms start starving because their hosts are suddenly getting less than the new average. The more they feed, the more they need.
Edboy4926: Thanks!
Jctherebel: He's going to need some performance therapy before that, lol. And a lack of backseat drivers.
Ebuc: Bruh, tea and spaghetti. Obviously.
Knightwolf1875: Lol, gotta be honest don't know what that's from. But he's going to get into much more trouble than in canon, I can tell you that much.
Guest: If I ever truly abandon this series, I'll post an authors note explaining why, I won't do ya'll dirty like that. Unless I die or something. Same policy with hiatus'.
So last year I watched the og Top Gun and noticed it has the same intro as Mass Effect. I hear others are noticing, and I'm kind of hoping to see a few Top Gun/Mass Effect things pop up. No ideas myself, but still, I think it would be interesting.
Fare Thee Well!