Javik knelt on the floor by his cot in port cargo, the memory shard standing upright, innocently almost, on the metal before him. Except, the floor turned to patchy dirt a few feet in front of him, and the room opened up to reveal the back half of the mess hall. Vega was leaning on the wall, while Vakarian paced before the wall.

"I've got it!" The turian suddenly declared, whirling to face Javik. His scars have opened up like they were fresh, and his right mandible dangles precariously from his jaw, but he seems unconcerned about both that, and the cobalt blood soaking into his civilian attire. He points one talon at the prothean. "You time traveled!"

"I know." Javik responds softly, nursing his pounding head. He leans back against the cot, but it's disappeared and he nearly falls backwards into the abyss. Vakarian energetically darts about the wall, placing holos and connecting them with threads of light. "What are you doing?"

"You're kidding right?" Vega exclaims in exasperation. He notices that there is what seems to be a second mouth opening up across his neck, wide, red, and drooling bright carmine. "Buggy, it's your crime board."

"Yeah, remember?" Suddenly, the turian is in front of him, stooping to pick up the memory shard before offering him a hand. He accepts it, and the sniper pulls him to his feet. Blood wets his hand as his comrade tugs him to the board excitedly. "You're trying to find out who killed us all."

"It was the Reapers." Javik tells him, trying to pull away, but the turian grips his arm tightly enough that his talons pierce his armor weave. Besides that, he can no longer move. There is a large pool of red and blue swirling and mixing about their feet, and the reek of death suddenly holds the air in a grip just as tight as Vakarian's.

"Was it?" Shepard's voice asked from behind. He tries to turn but his body is locked in place. Vakarian regards him with cold eyes, and he feels Vega restrain him even though he already can't move.

"Was is?" The human directly behind him echoed accordingly, pulling Javik's knife out of it's sheath. The Normandy's alarms go off, red light flaring all around them.

"Was it?" Vakarian demands, blood bubbling out of the hole in the side of his throat as he growled, silvery-blue eyes rapid turning black as they did with all turian corpses. He felt his own knife glide across his throat. He tried to fight back, but he was still frozen, and Vakarian hurled him into the abyss with unnatural strength.

"Brace, brace, brace!"

It wasn't all black; he could see Illos' landscape at the bottom, and T'Soni looking up at him coldly. He tries to use his biotics to stop his fall to no avail, and he hits the ground as the world bursts into a blaze of yellow and tearing metal-

Javik is well-practiced at stifling and restraining himself when reacting out of a dream. He had to be, or he might launch people through the hull whenever he woke up; it was one of the reasons he had his own 'room' aboard the Normandy. So if he gasps as he wake, or flares his biotics out of reflex, both are cut short so fast they might well have never happened.

He is laying on a bed, a medical one if the feel of it is right, but he can also feel that his armor is still on. His bad hand and arm throb, every nerve in his body is still screaming, and his head feels like someone drove an omni-blade through his skull. He keeps his eyes shut and controls his breathing; he can sense others nearby, very nearby, like they were standing guard. The pain was still present, but it's duller than it had been, and his senses were sharper, with little to none of the feedback he'd been getting before(which had the unfortunate effect of making his headache worse).

He opened one eye, just a little, to assess his surroundings further, and found himself staring at the ceiling of a distinctly Alliance med bay. The whole area stank of apprehension and humans, and heard a familiar voice humming a tune a few meters away. Dr. Chakwas? If the old doctor was here, on this Alliance vessel, then...

He was on the Normandy. For some reason, relief floods through him, and he forces himself to fight it; he only knew a few people on this ship, and they didn't know him. He didn't know if he could trust even Shepard yet, and this wasn't his Normandy. Still, he takes a few moments to appreciate that, at the very least, he could finally let his abused body rest. Hopefully sort out his mind as well, while he was at it. With the way his head is still pounding, he would rather pretend to have never regained consciousness and steal some more sleep. If things went similarly to how they did last time, he would probably spend hours being questioned extensively, and the prospect is unappealing, particularly while in his current state.

Then the sharp hunger pains in his gut remind him he hasn't eaten in who knew how long, he needs to relieve himself, and it occurs to him that Chakwas hasn't treated him because nobody knows how to remove his armor. His options were to stay in bed and suffer, or get up and suffer. He hated both. Why couldn't he just sleep?

Figuring he'll have to deal with all this nonsense sooner or later, Javik opens his eyes and takes in the SR1's med bay properly. It's disorienting at first; the doctor's familiar presence created the thin illusion of being back on the SR2, an illusion that was easily shattered when he opened his eyes and actually payed attention to what surrounded him. The sight of the smaller, darker med bay is like reality slapping him in the face. He thought he had come to terms with all this being real, but this was...

He sits up slowly, wincing, examining his surroundings. There was no window into the crew deck, and everything seemed to have a simpler design to it. There is a door in back, but he knows from Shepard's memories that there is no AI Core beyond it. There are two Alliance soldiers standing guard near the entrance who instantly seem more alert the moment they notice he's moving. The only other thing of any real note is the woman who is still humming at her desk as she reads over a data pad.

Dr. Chakwas had been one of the few crew he respected, if only because it was always good to maintain a healthy respect for the one person on the ship who had the power to put you back together... or put their knowledge to use to kill you and everyone else on board. Though among humans there was an honor code that forbade them from doing the latter, so the chances of Chakwas doing that were low.

She glanced up from her data pad, double-took, and frowned, eyes narrowing with suspicion, a quiet sort of threat behind them.

Low, but never zero.

One of the Alliance guards spoke quietly into his earpiece, likely to inform his superiors that their guest was conscious. Javik, for his part, was waking up a bit more, and frowned as he took a moment to mentally examine the message from the beacon. He'd seen the full thing when he read Shepard in the... previous timeline, but what he's just seen is a garbled fragment that barely gets the point across. She did say it nearly killed her.

The state of the beacon compared with the aged state of the message would certainly do it, especially to a species the equipment wasn't built to interact with. She really had gotten lucky. He might have been fine, if not for the time travel 'side effects' he was suffering from. From this version of the warning, all he could discern was that there were survivors on Eros(Illos, this cycle called it, he had to remind himself), and any others left alive could find sanctuary there. Less clear was the warning left for the future cycle about the Reapers. And... he couldn't nail down a solid location for the planet in question.

He searched his own memories, trying to recall the Relay map present in the complete message, but he had dismissed the information as interesting but ultimately useless. A prothean could grasp complex information in moments, the skilled could absorb an entire lifetime with the brush of a finger, but if they deemed something unimportant, it was as easily forgotten as what one had for breakfast a month previous.

Like any species, their minds lost 'junk' information, though they had more control over what was dictated as such when it came to the memories of others. He had plucked what was useful out of Shepard's mind (such as English, and how to use an omni-tool), and let the rest fade. Some of it was more memorable than the rest, but ultimately most of it was easily banished from his mind.

Ancient messages that had no bearing on the fight at hand? He had considered it 'junk'. A last shout into the dark by people who had woken with company before walking to their deaths with the hope that their work could interrupt the cycle. If things had gone as planned, he would have received that message with a million others at his back, and receiving it would have been a victory; not only would the plan have worked, they would have had some of the greatest minds of the old Empire at their disposal.

He had banished it to the darkest corner of his mind, nearly shoved it into his shard in his eagerness to forget it. It used to stick around stubbornly, but now... he couldn't find it. He had successfully forgotten it.

The doctor seems to take his sudden scowl as a sign of hostility, her hand drifting beneath her desk, and the Alliance guards tensing.

Again, the chances of Karin Chakwas killing him were low, but never zero. He would probably be doing nothing but talk for the next few hours, he might as well start now.

"How long?" He asks. Chakwas blinks, studying him.

"Twenty hours." She tells him. The best way to get her away from her weapon was to appeal to her duty.

"I take it you have no idea what drugs to give me?" She looks surprised at that, and he quickly speaks up again. "This is obviously an infirmary, but I can tell I haven't been treated."

"Actually, I've got a fairly good idea of what might be safe for you by this point." Her dominant hand left the vicinity of her weapon to pull a data pad from the corner of her desk. "The problem is the armor."

That was odd... last time, it had taken her a few days of tests to figure out what was safe for him. Wordlessly, he unseals the weave on his bad arm and peels it back, ready to fight if he sensed anything off when she touched him. This wasn't his Normandy, if they weren't to be trusted this time around, he had to know, and as wary as he was about letting her treat him with possible ulterior motives, contact was the best way to uncover them.

"This is the worst of the damage." If he found nothing incriminating, he might ask for something to address his headache. He would certainly need to test whether using his biotics still caused pain. "My life pod malfunctioned, and activating the emergency release caused cracks in my arm at best. I found medigel and applied it soon after."

"You used medigel?" She crossed the room quickly, activating her omni-tool and taking his wrist firmly so she could examine him. "How did you know what it was? How to use it? Did you even consider the possibility of negative effects on your physiology?"

Javik tries to think of a good excuse. He tries to open his mouth and explain mnēmēmetry. But he's too taken aback by what he finds in her mind and finds himself speechless. She must mistake whatever expression that slips through to his face as an indication of a concussion, and runs him through several tests for severity. He decides to treat this as just another med bay visit, coming clean about most of his injuries... after all, that was all this was to her.

There were no ulterior motives, no dark secret as to how she figured things out quicker this time around. Her mind simply... thought it had done all this before. That was it. She didn't remember, like he did. It was like she was mentally three years older than she should be, subtle patterns of thought that were the exact same as the Chakwas of the SR2. As she examined and treated him, he examined her mind in depth to get a clearer picture of what exactly he was dealing with.

Humans had a word for false memories. 'Deja vu'; the feeling that one had already done a task or experienced the situation one was currently in. It seemed like Chakwas was operating on deja vu... no, it was more subtle than that. If she were experiencing constant deja vu, as a medical professional she would be worried, and the only worry he sensed in her was for him, her patient. It was more like an... intuition.

She was working on incredibly accurate intuition, giving her an edge. She still had to figure him out, but she was making faster progress because of this phenomenon. How was this possible? Why didn't she remember outright, like he did?

He would have to find a way to examine Leutentient Alenko further; there had been a discrepancy in his mental white noise earlier, but Javik hadn't been able to look closer because of the feedback. For now, all he could do was humor Chakwas as she examined him head to toe to ensure he wouldn't fall apart or rot from the inside out from unseen microscopic damage.

"Do you want to tear open your insides if you're wrong?" She challenged when he tried to assure her that the pod had done a very effective host of procedures during the thawing process to prevent such things. At least her mannerisms didn't differ from the future too much. If the situation is what he thinks it's shaping up to be, Chakwas might be the only familiar, unchanged thing in the galaxy.

Funny, how when he'd simply woken in a cycle to which he didn't belong, familiarity and lack thereof was something he tried not to think about. Now, he's been violently shunted into the past, and the things he had considered unfamiliar a few days ago, now counted as familiar, and he had been subconsciously seeking them since the moment he woke up. He's almost uncomfortable with Chakwas leaving after she's finished treating him, leaving him with the two strangers who had just watched their healer lecture him about his own recklessness("Biotic overdraw and you kept going? Has your common sense not thawed yet?") for over an hour.

He doesn't even have time to appreciate being (mostly) pain free now. The doctor had likely gone to get her Captain, and hopefully the Commander with him, and Javik has to figure out exactly what he's going to tell them. His first option is to tell them everything; the Reapers, the time travel, all of it. Everything he can remember about the future, and what little he knows about the events leading up to the war.

The obvious advantages of this approach? They could get started on the Crucible early. Maybe even finish it before Saren's attempted takeover. Could they use the Citadel as a trap, as the Reapers had for countless cycles before? Let Saren 'win', wait for the Reapers, then set the weapon off? Or even just rig the Widow relay to explode; if they were fast enough, they could wipe the bastards out, if not completely then enough so that the fleets of the galaxy could destroy the remainder by conventional means.

There would be some whining about the Citadel and its defenders, but compared to stopping the Reapers for good, they were a reasonable price.

The only flaw would be trying to stop the Commander from pursuing Saren through the Conduit. He remembered the Garrus Vakarian from his dream, gaze accusing, the image popping into his head as if to say 'guess who lives on that station, you idiot'. Perhaps they would like the plan better if a subtle evacuation was suggested?

Primitives were touchy about 'wasted lives'.

The cons? The information would lose a great deal of value after he gave it. Each major change would skew what was previously predictable into a new unknown. Say, if they were to attempt to blow the Widow relay and failed, it would mean the Reapers could continue this cycle as they normally would; lock down the network and harvest as they pleased. If he handed over the Crucible information and urged everyone to build it with all the haste they could muster, the Reaper vanguard could accelerate its plans and take the Citadel before they could finish the device.

Worst case scenario; he accelerated the timeline, doomed them, or both. Best case scenario; the war was significantly shorter, and they won.

His second option is to leave out the time travel, and do his best not to change things. The Crucible fired in the last timeline; who was he to mess with that? From his perspective, nothing really needed fixing. He merely need be present three years from now, do things as he had done last time, and things would turn out fine.

Aside from the Normandy being destroyed, with him on board. That was one thing he wouldn't mind avoiding.

The biggest problem with this one would be that it was probably impossible. He was here. A live prothean, a final product of his people's war with the Reapers, keeping quiet about it was unconscionable. He might not like this cycle, but holding back information that could give them an edge was something he just couldn't stomach doing, especially given that the asari were already doing a fine enough job doing just that on their own. His intel alone would change things drastically, both before and during the war. Keeping it to himself was treachery, and he would rather be indoctrinated than a willing traitor.

So, not changing anything wasn't really an option at all.

His third option was to keep the time travel to himself and do his best to guide things on purpose. This one was risky. The pros were vague, and the cons could be disastrous. And he would have to be incredibly careful not to get found out; it was all too easy imagine the primitives taking it badly if they found out he was 'playing god' with their future. He knew comparatively little about the years leading up to his original awakening, particularly the ones where Shepard had been indisposed, and that would be his biggest weakness.

He doubted that the Reapers waited in dark space for two years before that started their invasion the long way around, after the Battle of the Citadel. Ergo, if he could make it past that fight, Javik could count on over two years of breathing room to actually prepare the galaxy with. More than enough time to guide this cycle to the Crucible blueprints, maybe build more than one in case indoctrinated infiltrated the project. He could find a way to feasibly expose the cache on Thessia, or, failing that, claim that he had been told what the Catalyst was prior to entering stasis due to his rank, and kept it to himself go avoid the wrong people knowing.

The struggle would be keeping things on track, and actually heading off Saren before he gave the Reapers the Citadel. There was no version of events where the Reapers didn't accelerate their plans due to his presence. The only time he was guaranteed was the two year lull, and even then the Collectors would be starting their anomalous early harvest. But once the war started? If he did things right, it would be short. If the Crucible wasn't ready by then, he could just ride out what happened next with the benifite of being unable to get caught off guard.

Javik didn't have long to weigh his options. The door opened, and he shut his eyes as his headache started to rebound on him. He let out a deep breath...

And chose option three.

It was the best option given his limited time to consider things. It gave him more to work with. He could already count on wasting time explaining not only himself, but the Reapers as well, probably multiple times if primitives were at all predictable. Wasting more time explaining the time travel would give Saren a head start he couldn't afford. His knowledge would remain relevant for longer, depending on what he influenced.

Looking up, he steeled himself for the monotonous conversation that lay ahead of him, and was nearly caught off guard by Admiral Anderson's presence. Captain, now. He knew logically that the man would be here, but it's still... strange. He met the man only once, covered in dust and grime, weathered by months of war. Now he stands in the med bay of the first Normandy wearing a clean, pressed uniform. There are still grim lines on his face; the man was an old beast of war, long before the Reapers came. According to Shepard, he was the first 'N7'; products of a military training regimen that from his understanding started with getting stranded on an asteroid. Javik approved. As it was, he'd heard tell that pre-war, Anderson only acquiesced to leaving frontline combat because his knees were starting to go from all the heavy landings.

Clearly, bad knees were not enough to give the Reapers an advantage. Maintaining a foothold on a Reaper occupied home world, even for a few months, was no small feat, and it had given them a launching point.

"Chakwas says she'll give us half an hour to talk." The Captain tells him, folding his hands behind his back. Shepard hovers at parade rest by his left shoulder. "Boys, go take a break. Shepard and I can handle this."

The guards seem relieved to take their leave, and were likely overconfident that Javik would stand no chance against two N7's. Half an hour seemed gracious by Chakwas' standards, considering how long he had been out for. I have the feeling she will be most displeased with whomever pressed to interrogate me.

"Shepard?" At her Captain's prompting, the Commander activated her omni-tool. "I'm afraid we're obligated to record this. Will that be a problem?"

"That depends on what you ask." This recording could be easily accessible to indoctrinated spies. This meeting hadn't been recorded the first time around, specifically for that reason. "I have no trust in whoever may view this conversation."

"Do you trust us?" Anderson questioned.

"That remains to be seen." And so his deception began; he knew Anderson and Shepard were worthy of the truth, but they didn't know he knew. His people, with the ability to know each others mental state, had little use for the ability to lie, and attempts to do so were usually the early warning signs of indoctrination. There was no point in lying when everyone would know you were lying, and could scour your mind to find out what you were lying about if they so wished. Certainly, he thought he was good at telling people what they wanted to hear, but blatant deception?

He hadn't been good at lying when he first woke up. Now he had to rely on it. He is, for the first time, thankful that Shepard and the turian had sat him down and taught him to lie until he could fool a vitals monitoring suite.

"How can we earn that trust?" The Captain asked, eyes searching Javik's own, looking for minute reactions and tells even though the face before him is beyond alien. Javik, weighing his options, offers a handshake. The gesture is still alien to him, but it was good for getting a read on people; most primitives would shake a hand automatically, even if they weren't human, like the response was genetically ingrained in them. Captain Anderson, however, eyes his hand dubiously, clearly not fooled for a moment. "Shepard tells me you have... abilities. Hoping to get in my head?"

"If I sense I can trust you, I will show you how I got here." Javik offers. "And what I am unwilling to discuss in front of... that."

He almost says omni-tool. Would it be believable for him to know what an omni-tool was by now? Shepard looks displeased with this proposition, and ready to voice that displeasure loudly. She could get very loud when she thought one was doing something stupid ("Wear your damn seatbelt, Javik, or I swear I'll throw you through the windshield myself!"). "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"Permission denied, Commander." Anderson shoots her down before addressing Javik again. "Just know, Commander Shepard has full permission to deck you if you try anything funny."

"It would be disappointing if she didn't." Shepard as he knew her was nothing if not loyal. In acknowledgment of that, he fully prepared himself to get slugged in the face, because there was no way this wouldn't be disorienting for Anderson, and no way he didn't have a negative reaction to what he was about to see. Still eyeing him warily, the Captain shook his hand.

Javik had to be careful with what he showed. It was difficult to keep anything recent from leaking through, but he thinks he gets the point across; he shows the Reapers doing what they did best, several instances where he's had to deal with indoctrinated, one of his old superiors going through the old, worn-out speech about how their war had started and what victory would cost them. How he wound up in the pod and some... carefully selected moments of his escape from the underground compound.

It all happens in the space of a few heartbeats. When it's over, Captain Anderson jerks back swearing, and the only reason Javik doesn't get punched after all is that Shepard's commanding officer is between her and her target. And when he wasn't, he grabbed her elbow to halt her advance.

"Stand down." He ordered, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a headache- which, knowing how negatively most primitives' minds reacted to his intrusions, was probably exactly what he was doing. "All he did was show me things."

"Do you understand why I do not want to discuss them out loud while being recorded?" Javik inquired, hoping he'd gotten the message loud and clear about the indoctrinated.

"Commander, turn it off." The older human sighed.

"Sir?" She frowns, eyeing both of them askance.

"Just trust me." He insisted. Hesitantly, she switched off her omni-tool, and though Javik still has to worry about the official reports that will get passed around a pawed at by who knew how many people, he wouldn't have to worry about a recording with his voice on it floating around. A report was easier to redact than a recording, didn't have vocal inflections that people could analyze to try to figure out if he was lying about something, and he was willing to bet that restrictions for the report would be much tighter than that of a recording.

The chances of the wrong people reading it was still high, but the redactions would help, and the pool of risks was smaller.

"What exactly did I just see?" Anderson asked sharply. He was a shade paler than he was when he entered the room.

"The destruction of my people." he told him grimly. "And if what I saw on that planet was any indication, your cycle will soon face a similar fate."

I realised that I had most of this chapter finished an waiting in my drive, so I decided to wrap it up and give it to you guys for N7 day. Enjoy! I also started posting an overhauled version of To Trails End, so if anyone from the ME/Destiny is reading.

ryan20fun: An even fresher take would be finding Javik instead of the beacon, he could wreck so much havok. But I decided time traveler Javik was even better, so here we are.

NotLeviathan: I solemnly swear that they'll still find a way to make everything more difficult. I can't make it easy for Javik, that wouldn't be fun.

Fare Thee Well!