Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shepard and Kaidan are a gorgeous couple.

Like, propaganda poster gorgeous —  if you ignore the fact that she’s his commanding officer, and their entire semi-secret relationship is technically Alliance Unsanctioned™, which everyone does because hello. And that suits Joker just fine. Or not fine, fine, you know? But fine, alright? It’s fine. It’s expected. And he’d look ludicrous on either of their arms. Never been good at that whole looking aggressively chiseled while brooding at a vague middle-distance thing. And Joker is a realist. He’d mourned and buried his inability to look like a badass when he was about twelve.

(Joker has precisely two looks. Smug asshole and irritating goofball, and he likes to zip between the two lightning fast. You know, for funsies.)

But in the dead of night, when it’s just darkness and the soft sounds of a ship half asleep, and a hand — his own, duh — on his cock; he imagines. (Also for funsies.) Because apparently, his type is the Alliance’s best and brightest, and way way way out of his league. But Joker keeps his grip firm, wishing abstractly that he had callouses because he’s seen Kaidan’s big and blunt-fingered hands, and though he’s never been close enough to Shepard’s bare hands to tell, the Commander has never done anything soft in the whole of her life. And so, tug tug tug in the dark with a grip that’s a titch too hard and demanding to be comfortable, but it makes the bones of his hips feel like they’re made of warm syrup.

Maybe he ought to feel guilty about it; jerking off to his Commander and/or Staff Lieutenant — and let’s be honest, it’s mostly and — but Jokers had a life full of hopeless crushes and needing to look someone square in the eye and fly a ship less than five minutes after rubbing one out, and practice makes perfect, after all. So his hand doesn’t still or stutter, it surges up and down his length, like he owns it — well. Like they own it.

It takes all of not very fucking long. One hand braced against the panel of the shower stall, keeping him upright, the other standing in for Shepard’s mouth and Kaidan’s hands, which is why it’s all so quick and bright. Just a handful of strokes and he is gone.

Joker turns the shower on right after he pulls himself back together enough to manage the taps, weak-kneed, trembling, and breathing like he’d just run a mile. 

He never masturbates in Normandy’s cockpit. He does practically everything else in that chair and he’s not about to risk getting it sticky. Some things in this world are sacrosanct, and Normandy’s flight chair is one of them.

So he stands in the shower letting the water run down his neck and and his back and all the places he’d imagined being touched. He doesn’t get long to savor the post-orgasmic bliss. The water’s always hot — the whole ship’s practically one continuous loop of energy— but Alliance rationing being what it is, it’s on a timer, and if he lingers too long it’ll switch out to subsonic pulses of air that kinda vibrate the dirty right off of you. It’s the blue-balls of hygiene; deeply unsatisfying on every level, which is not how he likes to end a good wank.

(Or a not-so-good wank, which is rare, wanks being what they are.)

(Never pass up a good — or not-so-good — wank.)

So, confession time. Joker watches porn. Not like a lot, a lot. But just. Space is big and mostly empty, and the thrill of piloting still leaves ample free time, and he is a goddamn full-grown adult.

He's into your basic kinks. Threesomes. Anal. Asari in wet tshirts. But the extranet is big and weird and he's wandered into some stuff that he'd never have willingly searched for, like that drell-hanar porno with some really, really unnecessarily complex plot; 100% of all Elcor porn he’s seen; and that one-time he accidentally found Inspectreing the Booty, a porn parody about Commander Shepard steadily banging her way through the Normandy crew.

And that one was weird. Like super, terribly, irredeemably weird. But Joker’s curiosity can easily be described as morbid, so it’s not entirely his fault that several hours after finding the series he’s blown through every single episode.

Figuratively speaking.

Slightly more literally with the one that paired the Commander with her dark-haired, dark-eyed, burly, biotic Staff Lieutenant.

What there isn’t, is an episode where Shepard bangs her abrasive yet irresistibly charming pilot. Which is a little… yeah. You know. Even Wrex gets laid.

Somehow, even just in fantasy, the world knows Joker’s not meant to be with Shepard.

And that’s okay. It is.

Kaidan and Shepard have each other. Joker has the Normandy. And they have a goddamn galaxy to save.

***

Shepard starts visiting Normandy’s cockpit early on.

Not many commanding officers do that. They have the bridge for The Doing Of The Important Stuff, and that’s where he’s used to being summoned for any face-to-face conversations. 

The first time she’d done it he was pretty sure she’d only come to reassure herself that a pilot with Vrolick’s Syndrome wasn’t going to be a liability. He’d had that happen on nearly every ship he’d served — no matter that he'd had to take all the Alliance’s physical fitness assessments just to get his wings in the first place.

(He’d passed, but the Alliance had still ordered additional scans for him to ensure that he hadn’t broken anything from the stress of the tests. You know, just in case. And though no one’s actually said it out loud aside from that one flight instructor he got court-martialed; he’s well aware the Alliance doesn’t really want to employ a pilot with brittle bones. Even one who’d set every flight simulator record with every class of ship he’s licensed to fly — and a few he isn’t.)

But Shepard had just wanted to talk. And though the conversation had been somewhat impersonal and brief, Joker had sweated through his shirt because humanity’s first and only Spectre was intimidating up close, and way, way prettier than she had any right to be.

She’d kept coming back though, and their conversations had stretched. Meandered from professional, to casual, and then into personal territory.

She asks him about his time in flight school, and he tells her that the academy wouldn’t let him sit for certification on ships he hadn’t been formally trained to fly, so he broke into the simulator room and beat all the flight sim records on all available ship classes and models. Then he got stubborn and wouldn’t take the formal certifications, but the Alliance pretty much let him fly whatever he wanted after that anyway.

She asks him about his home base, and he tells her he always thinks of his ship as home, but that he’s got a tiny place on the Citadel because, although the Alliance wants their officers to be all-in all the time, they don’t want them to be so obvious about it.

She asks him if he’s got anyone waiting for him, and he lies through his teeth and says he’s got a girl in every port, and at least one desperately heartbroken Krogan out there somewhere. She laughs at that, the sound surprisingly light and bright and he is fuuuuucked. He is so fucked.

Stupid hopeless crush.

Some days she doesn’t ask him anything. She just settles into the copilot’s seat, folds her long legs up to her chin, and just talks. To him. Baffling.

Today she’s folded up like a pretzel, idly tapping through the Normandy’s feeds on a flight screen, which Joker kinda hates — he doesn’t go into her quarters and put his hands all over her guns after all — but not enough to shoo her away.

“You know,” Shepard says, “you’re the only one of my crew whose academy dissertation was classified by the Alliance. Even I didn’t have access to read it until they made me a Spectre.”

Joker chokes on a laugh. “You actually read those? I don’t even think my instructor read them. Did you read everyone's? Did Kaidan write about Canada? Or bacon? Or, wait, wait. Canadian bacon?” 

“No,” Shepard’s mouth does that weird thing like she’s trying not to smile. “He wrote about the biomechanical half-life of L2 biotic implants and why the Alliance shouldn’t upgrade them in active military personnel, as was the plan at the time.”

“O f course he did.”

“And you—"

“A Proposed Redesign of Sanitary Stations on Alliance F-Class Vessels Based on the Traditionally Varying Role of Toilet Paper in Council Species.” Joker tips the brim of his hat at her and flashes a quick grin. “Xenobiology, baby.”

Shepard blinks.

“Um,” Joker clears his throat quickly. “That’s—  xenobiology, baby Ma’am . Damn, that’s worse. Commander. Ma’am. Shepard. Sir.”

Shepard bites her lower lip.

Oh no, that’s hot.

“Uh…” He wipes sweaty palms against his jumpsuit, blundering on. “I mean the research got real interesting at one point. I even added some non-council species for extra credit. Did you know that Krogans—“

“Yeah. I read it. ” Shepard’s smile finally breaks through, and Joker legit stares because holy shit .

He can probably count on one hand the number of times Shepard has smiled — honest to God smiled, not just a smirk or that twisty grin that’s all sharp teeth and danger — and she is transformed.

And well… There’s nothing more terrifying than popping a boner in Shepard’s presence because she has a sixth sense about the world around her and Joker is just a thousand and twelve percent certain she knows.

(And speaking of percentages: it turns out if Shepard smiles there’s an eighty-seven percent chance he’s gonna get hard.)

(Give or take thirteen.)

And yep. There it goes.

Awesome.

Humanity’s first Spectre has dimples.

And Joker is completely screwed.

***

This is the part of the job Joker hates the most. 

Well, no.

He hates writing flight reports. Trying to reduce instinct and awesomeness into a neatly rational and easily defendable set of decisions is impossible at best. All the navy should need at the end of the day is crew safe, ship intact, and half the time he’s not even sure why he does the things he does.

He hates the way his dress blues always bunch up around his balls. He hates his dress blues, in general, but he hates them specifically where they are ball-adjacent. The constriction is always particularly nefarious whenever he has to stand around while some top brass does the sort of tiresome things that top brass always does— like passing out medals or giving great pilots crap for stealing a ship.

And he hates whenever some aeronautical engineering nerd slash twat suggests that navy pilots are a dying breed, and how the future of spaceflight is AI, and how [insert any installation request he’s ever made] is really a waste of valuable Alliance time and resources because he’ll be obsolete in a few years and something something something, Joker doesn’t listen to idiots.

So this is really the thing he hates fourth most.

He hates listening to the comms when Shepard and Kaidan are planetside getting shot up all to hell while he keeps his hands on Normandy’s flight controls ready to evac their asses back to safety –– but he hates the silence more.

(Fifth most? Whatever, he’s losing count.)

The team in the sky follows the team on the ground through a number of feeds: tiny blips and biometrics and bursts of data — but Joker has a direct, active comm link. But when the signal is blocked; or too scratchy to make out, even when Normandy’s computers run them through noise filters and decryption cycles; or when they’re just plain silent and there’s just dead air and tension and waiting and really unpleasant what ifs floating around inside his head. God, he hates that shit.

It’s strangely comforting when they’re actually fighting. The first spatter of gunfire always makes his heart leap, but over the months he’s learned to read the sounds of the firefight. All the Alliance soldiers carry the same base assault rifle, but Shepard’s got hers modded halfway to hell, and it has this pop to it, where every round sounds almost bouncy. Kaidan’s heavy pistol has this distinct thundering sound, kinda slow and measured and broad. Joker's even learned to identify the soft fizzy static of Kaidan’s biotics, which he tends not to use unless he needs to. But as long as they're shooting and flinging little blue fireballs, they're alive; and he can breathe a little.

But now, right now, Joker sits in the silence with a weight on his chest, hands gliding over the ship's controls restlessly, imagining all the terrible reasons it might be so damn quiet.

And it's quiet for so long.

Too long, maybe.

Too too long. Fuck, this is his second least favorite for sure.

So when Shepard’s voice finally comes through with a burst of static and gunfire, Joker’s relief is so profound he almost misses when she says.

“—us up. And make sure Chakwas is ready.”

“Dr Chakwas?” Shit. His hands are already flying over the controls. “Roger that, Commander. Bringing the Normandy in. Evac, three minutes five.”

Worry spikes through the relief, though Shepard’s voice was steady enough. Of course that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t lost a leg, or anywhere between one to three livers.

Wrex was with them today, so if he's down three, he’ll still have one to spare. The others, not so much.

Joker doesn’t like the atmosphere of this particular planet. It’s too slippery. The Normandy handles like it’s coated in oil. He’d rather a sluggish stick than one that slides around unpredictably, but he gets the Normandy down at speed and manages not to clip the side of the Cerberus research facility in the process.

The video feed switches to the hangar doors, letting in a cloud of smoke pierced with a scatter of laser fire as they open. He feels the tremble of rockets bouncing off the Normandy’s shields and resists the urge to belly-flop the ship directly on top of the Cerberus troops because how fucking dare.  

“Hurry it up Commander, they’re targeting the Normandy! There’s only so many rockets up the backside a lady should be required to take!”

He knows from the crackle of the comms switching to internal channels that they’re on a moment before the VI notification.

“Crew onboard .”

“Sweet,” Joker lifts away from the planet immediately, taking care to make sure Normandy’s burners are running extra hot, cuz fuck those guys. He hopes he melts every last one to the tarmac. 

As soon as they are out of the atmosphere and are moving into deeper space, Joker passes the Normandy off to one of the on-duty flight crew, barely waiting to be formally relieved. He dashes to the stairs — though it probably doesn’t look like dashing — and then has to force himself to take it slow. A tumble down the stairs would be the stupidest way to end his military career.

He meets the ground crew coming up from the cargo hold. The smell of a firefight hits him first. Smoke and that peculiar electric burn of spent thermal rounds are nearly eclipsed by the sharper reek of human blood and Krogan sweat.

Shepard and Kaidan are both wounded.

She’s walking easily enough, but she’s got an arm slung over Kaidan’s shoulders, and a long, vicious-looking scorch mark down her flank and across her back. As they pass, she smiles at Joker with such an easy, sharp grin that it should make him feel better about the whole thing, except that Kaidan shoots him a dark look over the top of Shepard’s head. Or at least he tries to. Joker can’t see any obvious wound but half of Kaidan’s face is awash with blood, the eye beneath, squeezed tightly shut. 

“Dodged a rocket,” Shepard explains. Her eyes are wild and a little bloodshot. Green irises eerily ringed with red.

Joker frowns. 

“Well, mostly,” Wrex says, coming up from behind them with Shepard’s helmet and assault rifle in hand. He chuckles, low and gravelly. “Didn’t dodge the explosive crate it hit, though.”

“Still counts,” Shepard mutters.

Joker frowns harder and follows them into the medbay where Dr Chakwas is waiting.

“Commander Shepard, that’s a nasty-looking burn.” Dr Chakwas pats one of the medical beds. “Hop up. Wrex, is any of that blood yours?”

“No,” Wrex snickers.

“Well done you. Now, if you’d be so good as to take the Commander’s guns away so they’re not cluttering up my medbay, thank you. Kaidan, sit down. I want to take a look at that eye.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eye,” Kaidan protests.

“Excellent. Then it’ll only take a moment.”

“But—”

“Sit. Jeff, get the Commander out of her armor.”

“Uh…” Joker hesitates, feeling oddly caught out. His shoulders hunch up around his ears.

Dr Chakwas makes an exasperated noise. “Shall I call Wrex back for assistance?”

“Not unless you want the Commander’s arms to fall off,” Joker mutters grumpily, already reaching to help.

Modern ceramic plate armor is designed to be easy enough to get into and a bit of a bitch to get out of, and Krogan’s aren’t well known for patience. The word gentle doesn’t even translate properly in their native tongue. Wrex’s idea of assistance is likely to amount to pull real hard.

Joker steps closer to Shepard. Even Spectre quality gear follows the same basic design as all Human-Asari models. Joker runs his hands across the seam at her wrist until he finds and unhooks the interlocking clasp on her gauntlet. There’s no bare skin to be found, Shepard is clad in sleek black under-armor shot through with sensors to support haptic feedback during combat. He works his way up both arms, as Dr Chakwas tends to Kaidan, hesitating only when he gets to the plating on her torso.

The front plates are nearly undamaged bar some surface-level scuffing that would likely buff right out. But the back section is melted in spots, bubbled and cracked from both the heat and sheer impact of the explosion.

Years of piloting have stripped the uncertainty from his hands. He’s as careful as can be, fingers slow and steady, but sure as he cracks her breastplate apart. This isn’t at all like any of the times Joker has fantasized about undressing Shepard. There’s more medi-gel involved, for one thing. And for another—

“You have very pretty eyes, Joker.”

Joker snorts, startled, and can’t quite brace himself for the nonsense his stomach does in response. “Look who's talking,” he mutters, ears flushing bright red.

“We’re both talking,” Shepard says, and there’s something in her voice that raises every hair on the back of his neck. She looks up at him but the green in her eyes is almost gone, swallowed by impossibly, unnaturally huge irises, and the whites of her eyes are red red.

“Uh, Doctor? Off the record? It sorta looks like the Commander is tripping balls right now.”

“Oh?” Dr Chakwas’ voice is even enough, but she looks alarmed rather than surprised.

“Um, yeah. Big Krogan ones, too. The whole quad at once.”

Kaidan tries to stand and join them, but Dr Chakwas shoots him a look of withering disappointment that has him retreating back to his corner. In another life, Karin Chakwas would have made an incredible Alliance Admiral. After all, she’s the only person with the balls to bully Commander Shepard. She only does it in the tiny dominion of her medbay, but still. That’s some Gold Star Commendation for Bravery-level shit right there.

“I can feel all of my fingertips,” Shepard says, seriously.

Joker grimaces. “Good for you. So,” he asks, turning to Dr Chakwas.

“The crate must have been near a cache of red sand,” Dr Chakwas takes a breath and shakes her head. “It may surprise you to learn that Alliance ships are not stocked with anything that might readily prevent a narcotic overdose. I can fabricate something in a few hours, of course, but…”

Joker feels something swoop in his gut, but he tries not to look too alarmed, for Kaidan’s sake. “That's too long,” he says quietly, finishing her thought.

“I don’t suppose the Alliance had anticipated the application of red sand via combat burn. I’ll have to author a medical paper — another one — on the extremely creative ways the Commander has tried to get herself killed,”  Dr Chakwas makes a thoughtful noise. “There’s no help for it I suppose. Joker, you wouldn’t mind a detour to an old friend of mine, would you?”

“Any friend of yours, Doc.”

“Friend may be a bit of an exaggeration. So might acquaintance. But I don’t think he’ll shoot at us very much. At least, not unless he knows Garrus is on board. Not a big fan of C-Sec.”

“Relatable,” Joker activates the comm on his omnitool. “Flight, this is Joker. Incoming primary coordinates from Dr Chakwas. Anticipate mild to moderate hostility. Somebody tell Garrus to go hide in steerage. Somebody else tell Navigator Pressly he’s got command of the Normandy.”

***

It turns out Dr Chakwas was right, there was a limited amount of gunfire involved in their terminus-adjacent supply run.

There was some yelling, a handful of threats, and one truly superb volley of insults that almost made Joker wish he’d been there to see the ground crew’s expressions in person.

Not for the first time, Joker wonders where Dr Chakwas picks up black market contacts in a life spent as a prim and proper Alliance medic.

Her shore leave must be wild.

Shepard survives her trip. Kaidan keeps his eye. And Garrus is removed from time-out.

And Joker has to write a stupid flight report about it all.

Chapter Text

Shepard isn’t the only one who visits Joker from time to time.

Kaidan gets headaches and can’t sleep. Needs to walk them off in the dark, but there are so few places on a ship that are actually dark. Alliance ships boast full crew rotation at all hours, so there’s always someone on deck and active, and the strips of fluorescent lighting piped into every crack only ever go off for maintenance. Joker’s cockpit is one of the few places on the ship with manually controlled lighting — bar the little blips and flares of the flight console —  and he thumbs the brightness as far down as it will go as soon as the door cracks open and he recognizes the Staff Lieutenant’s shuffling gait.

“Hey," Joker says quietly, and in response to Kaidan's wince, drops his voice down to a whisper. “Bad one?”

Kaidan makes a hitching one-shouldered shrug like he’s unwilling to move his head, and starts padding back and forth in the tiny space. He shuffles around, waiting for his meds to kick in, waiting to see if it’s just a bad headache, or if he’ll end up slumped in the corner with a full-blown migraine.

So Kaidan walks around in the dark and in the quiet and Joker sneaks glances at him every now and then under the guise of purely platonic concern, alright?

And maybe also because Kaidan is easily the best-looking person Joker’s ever seen in real life. Hands down.

(Dick up.)

(The platonic kind of dick, okay?)

Rumpled and warm from recently disturbed sleep, there’s something that’s intimate and vulnerable about Kaidan. He’s so far removed from the stalwart marine Lieutenant he usually is; all guns and biotics and stiff determination. And it sits warm in Joker’s belly that he’s one of the few people who gets to see this. One of the few people Kaidan is willing to be hurt in front of.

“Sorry to bug you again,” Kaidan says after a while, voice scratchy.

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” 

Kaidan glares, which is quite a feat, what with his brow already all scrunched up in discomfort. “You don’t have to say that every time, you know?”

“Well, you don’t have to apologize every time.”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s no bother,” Joker insists. “I like it. I like seeing you… um… suffer.” He turns his head back towards Normandy’s console, hoping to hide his wince. His ability to smooth talk — such as it is — seems to abandon him completely in Kaidan’s presence.

Kaidan chuckles, warm and mellow even though it's laced with pain. “Glad to know it’s not for nothing.” 

Joker risks a look over his shoulder, but Kaidan’s got his back turned, already pacing away down the length of the cockpit, and the worn, gray sleep pants he wears are half a size too small, so they're clingy along the curve of his muscular ass. “Uh… no. Nope. It’s not for nothing. Nope.”

(The dick is feeling slightly less platonic all of a sudden.)

He shifts in his flight chair trying to adjust himself discreetly. “You want quiet, or conversation?”

The shuffling pauses for a moment, then resumes. “Distract me, please.”

Joker makes a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat. “Do you know what I really hate?”

“Your dress blues,” Kaidan says without missing a beat.

“No. What? No. I mean, yes. But that’s cheating. Everybody hates their dress blues. But I’m not talking about the Alliance’s long-term war against the nuts of their own servicemen. There’s no time, and I don’t have the emotional strength, okay?”

Kaidan chuckles, the sound soft in the small space of the cockpit.

“I hate — yes, dress blues — but also that there haven’t been any meaningful advances in sock technology since nylon was invented.”

The sound of Kaidan's footsteps pausing. He makes a thoughtful sound, “Huh.”

“Yeah. And that happened in what, the 1900’s? Nylon and the heel turn? And that’s it. That was peak sock innovation. A billion years of military advances, and we’re still stuck with our great great great –– keep going, keep going –– grandfather’s socks.” Joker taps his fingers against the flight panel in emphasis.

“Socks aren’t… I mean, what else are they supposed to do with socks,” Kaidan asks.

“Lots. They could have adaptive insulation based on temperature or activity levels. Or like, self-massaging nano-tech. I mean, they don’t even leverage near-field communication to keep the pairs from separating, which seems like a miss,” Joker shrugs. “I dunno. I just think socks could be way cooler.”

“You want self-massaging socks?”

“I mean, I want self-massaging everything, but I’m a visionary at heart,” Joker shoots Kaidan a quick grin over his shoulder.

Kaidan’s already looking better. He’s still on the pale side, but the sharp crease between his brows isn’t quite as carved in as before. Joker’s learned that there’s about a ten-minute window to course-correct Kaidan’s migraines. Where they can mellow into a bad headache that keeps Kaidan functional, or get bad bad.

Joker’s no stranger to chronic pain, every bad break has left him with another weak point to learn to live around. His left knee is particularly messed up — he cracked his kneecap clean in two when he was a kid, learning the hard way that Vrolik’s Syndrome wasn’t something he could ignore just because he didn’t want it to be true. He still gets lighting strikes of pain through his knee if he puts weight on it wrong, that one break almost solely responsible for Joker’s lifelong limp. 

Kaidan’s headaches are different. Not as obviously debilitating as Vrolik’s Syndrome, but worse in a lot of ways. There’s a reason there are only three functioning biotics with L2 implants in the entire Alliance Navy.

Human biotics started popping up about twenty years before the First Contact war, and after, scientists were tripping themselves to develop biotic implants and put humanity on par with Turian or even Asari biotics. The first generation of implants, the L1s, were monstrous.

There was a big stink about it for a long long time but a ton of research data was intentionally purged so no one’s even sure how many biotics straight up died in the early attempts to control radical ezzo mutations in human populations. Hundreds, for sure. Some estimates are in the thousands with a failure rate of over 99%.

The L2 implants were so much better by comparison. Most of the kids getting them survived the procedure and got training to learn a measure of control over their biotics. But the amps themselves were way overpowered, and over time, the vast majority of L2s ended up frying their own nervous systems, to a host of side effects ranging from death to insanity, mental instability, and crippling pain — sometimes not even in that order.

Compared to other L2s, Kaidan is incredibly lucky, despite the fact that more than once, Joker has had to call for Chakwas when Kaidan succumbed to migraines so intense he nearly passed out from the pain. The doctor — and a very concerned Shepard — had to scrape him off the floor of the cockpit and haul him away. But most of the time, Kaidan lives his life as this functioning, biotic powerhouse, graded at almost Asari levels of kickass.

Kaidan is what the Alliance was hoping to get. Someone strong, and stable, and a soldier to his very core. The headaches are barely counted against him, and Kaidan has learned to be disciplined about his triggers.

After a few more minutes, Kaidan’s headache eases off, and he slides into the copilot chair, looking wrung out. He folds a hand over his eyes. “Socks. How do you come up with this stuff, Joker?”

“I dunno. Still waters run deep. I can be the best helmsman in the Systems Alliance and ponder the mysteries of the universe, you know.” Joker shakes his hands at Kaidan, even though Kaidan can see him. “Multi-tasking.”

Kaidan’s still got his hand slung over his eyes, but the smile he cracks beneath is easy and wide. “Mysteries of the universe feels like too much credit.”

“Sure. But socks are basically panties of the feet. What’s not to like about panties?”

Kaidan Alenko has a terrible sense of humor. Or a great one, depending on how you look at it. He never makes lewd jokes, but he nearly always laughs at them. He does so now, a short bark of laughter that he throttles back into a rueful grin. “Uh, yeah. I like panties.”

Fuck yeah, you do.

Joker’s cock gives a renewed twitch of interest at the word panties in Kaidan Alenko’s mouth.

Fuck, his platonic boner is never going to go away as long as Kaidan says panties with that kind of confident familiarity. It’s probably never going to go away, period. He'll die and his dick will still be hard for Kaidan.

“Er. How’s the headache?”

“Better,” Kaidan runs a thumb across the space between his brows, and Joker’s fingers itch with how much he wants to do the same.

“Good. Once you think you can stand the light, you should probably go and sleep the rest of it off.” 

“Yeah,” Kaidan says, not moving. “I probably should go.”

“Get some rest,” Joker taps on his flight screen. “We’re not due to reach the Citadel for a couple of hours. Probably enough time for a good nap.” 

Probably enough time for Joker to get to the showers and beat it real quick, imagining Kaidan jerking off into Shepard’s panties. He makes a sound of annoyance that he can’t manage to keep from being ravenously horny in Kaidan’s presence for more than ten minutes.

Kaidan pauses at the sound. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Shit, sorry,” Joker mumbles and scrubs a hand over his face. “Just… talk too much.” He flashes Kaidan a grin that he hopes isn’t too strained. “It’s your fault. You picked conversation. You should have known what you were getting yourself into.”

“I did. And I like talking to you, Joker.”

Oh.

Warmth blooms at the center of Joker’s chest.

His heartbeat feels too loud.

Super lame, blushing in front of Kaidan Alenko.

Joker snorts, and tugs down the brim of his cap, face embarrassingly hot. “Whatever. I know you’re just using me for my sweet sweet mood lighting.”

Kaidan chuckles, a warm broad sound that does little to quell the flip-flop of Joker’s heart.

“Next headache,” Joker says, to distract himself as much as anything. “I’ll tell you about the time the Alliance let me name one of their ships.” 

“Idiots.”

“Totally. I’m so glad you already know where this is going.”

As Kaidan carefully slides out of the copilot’s chair, he claps a hand on Joker’s shoulder, the touch gentle and fleeting. “Thanks, Joker.”

“Yeah,” Joker says, mouth gone dry at the touch. “Yeah.”

The door to the cockpit slides open with a soft pneumatic hiss.

“I outrank you,” Joker calls to Kaidan’s retreating back. 

“No you don’t,” Kaidan doesn’t look back, but Joker can hear the smile in his voice. 

***

A week later Joker arrives at Normandy's gym and stops dead in his tracks. Shepard and Kaidan are there too.

It’s the first time they’ve all been at the gym at the same time. Their schedules don’t usually align; Shepard is usually always at the gym, working off the crushing anxiety of whatever latest responsibility Hackett or Anderson or the Council have shoved on her shoulders, but Joker tends to do PT at odd hours, and Kaidan snatches time for workouts between migraines and missions.

Gym is overstating things. It’s not really a dedicated space, just a storage area with built-in hooks for resistance bands, and one of the storage crates is filled with a set of adjustable weights powered by tiny mass effect fields. A section of the floor converts into a pair of treadmills, which Shepard and Kaidan occupy, nearly sprinting in tandem. Joker wonders if it’s on purpose, if they’re trying to match each other’s pace and stride, or if they are naturally, unconsciously in sync. They’ve clearly been at it for a while, damp with sweat and that locked-in intensity that is such a turn-on for Joker, honestly.

It’s also a turn-on that Kaidan’s got his shirt off, and Shepard is just in a sports bra and skin-tight leggings, so the tiny space is just a sea of slick skin and abs, and Joker turns his back to avoid staring or popping the world’s most obvious boner.

(He’s wearing loose-fitting shorts so all he has to offer the general atmosphere is an abundance of hairy shins and knees.)

(And uncomfortably obvious boners.)

Joker’s got the kind of build easily described as average. Muscular enough, but tempered with a leanness that cuts through whatever definition he might have otherwise managed. Kaidan doesn’t have that problem at all. His abs toe the line between holy shit and goddamn on a daily basis. Shepard isn’t far behind in terms of pure definition, but her build is less bulky and leans towards a slinkiness that Joker has always associated with those large, predatory cats that went extinct back on Earth — quietly dangerous in every line of her body.

Joker drops his towel onto the bench but doesn't sit, glancing over his shoulder, wondering if he’s intruding on them. Shepard and Kaidan get so little time alone together as it is. Absolutely everyone knows they’re an item, and absolutely no one mentions it.

Ever.

Ever ever.

Not even behind their backs.

It’s like some weird Normandy code. A secret the entire crew is willing to keep for them, even as they struggle to maintain a professional front. Sometimes Joker wishes someone would say something, to make it all easier on them, but he’s not even certain it would help. Shepard is the commander, and Kaidan’s entire personality is built around following Alliance regs and the chain of command. None of that would change even if everything was out in the open.

“You working out, Joker, or you just gonna watch?” Shepard asks. She doesn’t even sound winded.

Joker manages not to blush, but it’s a close thing. “I dunno. Is watching an option?”

Kaidan’s rhythm on the treadmill falters a little, a half-stumble that he quickly corrects.

Shepard smirks, slowing her pace until she matches Kaidan again. “Get your ass in motion, Flight-Lieutenant.”

Joker huffs out a breath of laughter. “This is probably about as much in motion as my ass is gonna get, Commander.” He has to bite back the without help that almost slips free. Joker has the most uncontrollable instinct to flirt in Shepard’s presence, which is against regs, and also a super bad idea. Shepard is prone to flirt back.

“Insubordination,” Shepard mutters, the corner of her mouth kinked up into a little smile.

“I know,” Joker says, agreeably. “Take it up with Dr Chakwas. She gets mean when I overexert myself.” He starts stretching carefully as a warm-up. “Actually, she gets mean when I under-exert myself too. So she’s mostly just mean to me.”

Both Shepard and Kaidan grin at that. It’s common knowledge that Karin Chakwas is one of the few people Joker thinks of as family. Less common knowledge is that Joker never really under-exerts himself. He’s a complainer, sure. And he doesn’t seem like someone who pays the least bit of attention to the physical requirements for service. But Joker’s a realist and heart, and he knows he’s a thousand times more likely to get audited than anyone else in the Navy.

He’s memorized the official service requirements for Alliance helmsmen cover to cover; knows exactly how fast he has to be, how much he has to be able to deadlift, and how many points he needs per ten shots for a marksman's test. Whenever they make port at the Citadel he spends a chunk of his shoreleave at the gun range keeping his skills up to standard, just in case some Alliance dick biscuit wants to test him.

It’s so stupid. His job doesn’t really call for him to use a sidearm. His actual weapon, Normandy’s forward canon has a near-perfect hit rate and doesn’t need ten shots to get the job done.

So it’s stupid, but he’s not willing to risk his wings for falling short on push-ups.

(And the Alliance has dick biscuits a-plenty.)

Shepard steps off the treadmill and Kaidan is right behind her. They make a beeline for the weights and start doing reps. Kaidan works his arms and back, Shepard does legs, and Joker uses the lowest level resistance band and tries not to nut in his own pants, honestly.

They work out in a comfortable sort of silence. Shepard and Kaidan move around each other, catching each other’s eyes and smiling. It makes Joker smile too, and he forgets to stop watching them. 

His body warms with the exercise, and he lifts the hem of his shirt to wipe at his brow and catches both Kaidan and Shepard looking at him. 

“Uh. You want the bench?” Joker asks.

Kaidan hesitates, color high from the workout. “Sure.” He moves to the bench snagging a bar for chest presses and turning the dial nearly to the heaviest setting. He lays down and brings the bar into position.

“Need a spotter,” Shepard asks.

“Yeah, thanks.” Kaidan slides further up along the bench as Shepard steps forward into position, just over his head, ready to help catch the bar if the weights are too much for him. 

(Joker feels a little bad about how many times he’s imagined watching while Shepard sits on Kaidan’s face.)

(While Kaidan proves once more that he’ll eat anything that’s put in front of him, with gusto.)

Joker is so busy staring that it takes him a few minutes to realize that his omnitool is beeping, marking the end of his workout. He’s gone full creeper, apparently. He turns the alarm off but doesn’t move, feeling caught and awkward and… something. 

As Kaidan finishes his set, he places a hand on Shepard’s thigh. A touch so fleeting it’s almost casual. Shepard grins down at him, reaching, and brushes her fingertips across his brow. 

The breath seizes in Joker’s chest.

He looks away. It’s not a moment for him. It’s all theirs, and he feels strangely protective of that. Strangely protective of them.  

He slings his towel around his neck and leaves the gym without so much as a nod farewell. At the end of the hallway, he meets Ashley, coming up for a workout.

“Give them a minute,” he says, walking past.

No need to explain who he means. After all, there’s only one them on the ship that matters.

***

Three months ago Dr Chakwas changed the meds Joker takes for Volrick’s Syndrome. The new formulary helped remove a lot of the scratchy pain he’d feel in the mornings — like all his joints had rusted over and his hands would ache the first hour in the flight chair —  but it also made him dream vividly, with a depth and detail that almost rivaled reality.

The first few nights he woke up disoriented and off-kilter, uncertain if what he’d experienced was real or not. A week later he’d figured it out, but not before he’d panicked, thinking he’d made out with Shepard in front of the entire crew, and spent a whole day feeling disappointed and guilty and uncomfortably turned on.

Now he just lets himself enjoy it, because dreaming about getting laid is a pretty victimless crime, even if it involves coworkers.

Tonight, there’s a spill of red hair across Joker’s lap, the curve of a skull beneath his hand, and the feel of a mouth sliding relentlessly up and down his cock.

“Shepard,” Joker says, breathlessly. “Shepard… Shepard…” he says her name like a prayer, always. And she answers by taking him even deeper into her throat, slowing down as she reaches the very base of him until her name dissolves into a moan.

She holds there for a beat, throat full of him, and Joker can feel himself throb and twitch. If she keeps that up much longer, this is going to be a very short dream.

Shepard slides all the way off and smiles, just wide enough that her dimples show. “Like that?” Her voice is a little roughened.

“Mmh,” Joker nods, eyes falling closed as she sucks the tip of his cock back into her mouth, making words way way too hard to form. “Love… love it,” he manages. He thinks his voice sounds way more wrecked than hers does, which seems unfair. 

“Me too,” Kaidan husks into Joker’s ear. “I love it too.”

Joker weirdly doesn’t know if Kaidan’s been standing there the whole time, or if he just showed up. But he can’t be bothered to worry about such trivialities, not when Kaidan steps close and wraps his arms around him, drawing him close. The way Joker is pressed against him, shoulders to hips, makes it pretty obvious that Kaidan is turned on by whatever he’s seen.

Kaidan trails a hand up Joker’s flank and across his chest, thumbs rubbing teasing circles against his nipples. “Keep going,” he urges Shepard.

Shepard resumes sucking his cock, bobbing up and down from tip to root as Kaidan alternates between stroking Joker’s torso and rolling his nipples between his thumbs. Kaidan murmurs something against his neck, but Joker is too busy melting into a puddle of pure sensation to focus on words.

Shepard deepthroats him again, and Kaidan slides two fingers into Joker’s mouth, almost in perfect tandem. Joker’s a little shocked that the move doesn’t make him come on the spot. Instead, he moans brokenly around Kaidan’s fingers, hips twitching. He can feel Shepard swallow around all the precome he’s leaking.

When Kaidan pulls his fingers out, Joker’s breath rushes out of his lungs, shuddery and sharp. “Fuck, oh fuck.” His legs tremble.

“Easy,” Kaidan says, sliding a broad hand across Joker’s bare belly in a slow circle. “Don’t come too quickly. Make her work for it.”

“This?” Joker’s voice cracks a little. “This right now? Fuck. The opposite of help. Not if you don’t want me to come, like yesterday.”

A warm breath of a laugh against the back of his neck, followed by the touch of Kaidan’s lips. The fingers against his skin curl a little, nails intensifying the sensation. “Then maybe I should try helping,” he slides his hand down, down until it reaches Joker’s cock. Kaidan gives it one firm squeeze at the very base which kinda helps a little, but then he starts jacking him off slowly. Very very slowly.

The grip is too firm, the motions too slow. Joker’s balls feel achy, and over-full, and ready, but it’s not enough. Joker’s pending orgasm stalls, and then starts to creep forward in tiny, maddening increments, and Kaidan breaks the rhythm every time it seems like Joker is enjoying things too much. Which feels like every other second, but probably isn’t quite that often. He gasps, a near full-body shudder when Kaidan does it again, hand stilling for a moment before continuing that long, too-slow slide.

“Kaidan’s got a ruthless streak in him, doesn’t he?” Shepard doesn’t look mad about it, at all. If anything, she looks a little smug. Her hands run up and down Joker’s thighs.

“Look who's talking,” Joker makes a frustrated sound and thumps his head against Kaidan’s shoulder. His hips jerk forward in Kaidan’s grasp, and Shepard, still on her knees, whines a little. A small sound of need that Joker mimics unconsciously.

“Shepard is being so patient,” Kaidan gives Joker’s cock an especially firm tug. “She deserves a treat, don’t you think?”

Joker nods and makes what he hopes is an agreeable sound as Kaidan twists the hand wrapped around the head of Joker’s cock. Then he does it again.

“I want you to come in her mouth, Joker.”

Shepard leans forward and rests the head of his cock against her tongue, keeping her mouth open. She looks right at Joker, green eyes glinting, just waiting. Fuck. It’s so hot it quite literally makes his knees buckle out from under him, but Kaidan is there, making shushing noises and holding him upright.

“Oh, okay. Yeah. I can definitely do that,” Joker’s laugh is breathless and thready.

Kaidan picks up the pace, going from much too slow to milking Joker for all he’s worth. As if he wants nothing more than to wring the nut straight out of him. And it’s working. Joker goes from wanting to come to thinking he might die if he doesn’t.

 Joker starts spilling before he feels the orgasm hit, spend filling Shepard’s mouth, as she seals her lips around him, swallows hard, and keeps sucking. And then Joker doesn’t really know what happens next because the pleasure that lances through him is like a lightning strike, every nerve lit up and singing.

By the time he has the presence of mind to notice things again, he has both hands buried in Shepard’s hair, and she’s swirling her tongue around the tip of him, languid and slow. He hauls Shepard to her feet and kisses her. Feels the shape of her smile beneath his lip, tastes the musky salt of his own spend, and is nearly dizzy with how good it all is. Shepard wraps her arms around Joker’s neck, and Kaidan folds his around them both and–– 

Joker jerks awake with a shuttered gasp, blinking rapidly, still half-caught in the dream.

But he’s in his bunk, alone. The room is cold and empty, and he feels strangely abandoned. 

He can feel his own come, hot and slick in his pants, and bites back a frustrated sound. The increased frequency of wet dreams is one of the reasons he jerks off so much. He’s got the bones of an eighty-year-old, but the dick of a fifteen-year-old, apparently.

Old bones, young boners.

Ha.

Fucking ha.

His heart is still pounding, nerves over-sensitive. Bereft of a warmth and closeness he’s never felt in the waking world. 

Not real, he reminds himself firmly. Not real, not real, not real.

The feel of Shepard pulling him close, and Kaidan, behind, holding him steady. 

Not real.

The kisses on the back of his neck…

Not real.

It shouldn’t hurt, but it does.

He feels tears prick at his eyes and dashes them away before they can even fully form. So stupid. He doesn’t get to want this the way he does. He takes a minute to compose himself before risking looking around, but none of the other officers are abed. As commanding officer, only Shepard has her own dedicated cabin, where the rank-and-file crew rotates open bunks in a common sleep space. Shepard’s officers share a room but have their own dedicated bunks, which is a good thing since Joker can’t seem to stop nutting in his. 

He needs to clean up, change his shorts, at least, and probably his bedding. But if he gets up, he knows it’ll snap the last thread of the dream, and his lips still tingle from when he kissed Shepard. Joker closes his eyes, but he doesn’t sleep. He’s just not ready to face reality.

Not yet. 

Dreams are better.

In his dreams, his bones never break.

In his dreams, they always love him back.

***

Feros is bad, but Noveria is worse.

They’re on par for legendary monsters, dead civilians, and forcing Shepard’s hand towards ruthlessness — but Benezia’s death tips the scales in clear favor of Noveria. And Saren’s fuckery becomes personal for the Normandy crew in a way it wasn’t before. 

Joker learns that heartbroken Asari can turn temporarily grey, and he watches as Liara bleeds color and mourns the death of her mother. Benezia died herself, thanks to Shepard. Cold comfort now, but Joker knows it’ll matter to Liara one day. Some day.

But Noveria lights a fire in Shepard, fueled by dead scientists, dead colonists, and the ghost of a dead Turian spectre. And all the fuckery they’d had to deal with in every step they’d taken to get to Saren. Noveria was the spark, and now Shepard burns with an intensity that should terrify anyone willing to stand between Shepard and her quarry. It terrifies Joker sometimes. The way her gaze hardens and she aims her shots in a way that’s more cruel than efficient.

Shepard plus Wrex plus Garrus becomes a worryingly blood-thirsty combination.

Joker breathes a sigh of relief every time Kaidan goes on ground missions with her — she needs his stalwart, steadying presence more than ever. He’s not soft, but he’s uncompromising in his sense of right and wrong. Joker knows Kaidan blunts Shepard's sharpest of edges, he just has to trust that he’ll keep them that way.

Chapter Text

Ashley dies when they raze Saren’s base on Virmire down to metal and scorched earth.

And… Ashley dies when Shepard leaves her to die.

Nobody thinks of it that way, except for Shepard, but she locks herself in her quarters the whole night after it happens and won’t talk to Kaidan or Hackett or even Anderson. She sends a single transmission to Ashley’s family, unwilling to wait for the death notice to properly clear official channels. And then, nothing.

The whole crew is in a state of shock, and they’re heavy five Salarians who aren’t much better off. Joker has to keep reminding himself that Virmire was an overwhelming victory because judging by the state of the crew, you’d think it was anything but.

This time of day the mess is usually packed. It’s the noisiest place on the ship, full of mediocre food, low-stakes card games, shop talk, and gossip. Today there’s only Kaidan, freshly showered and shaved, hair combed into neat waves because the entire world could be ending but he’d never show up for duty less than regulation, no matter how wilted and raw he was on the inside.

“Hey,” Joker says. 

Kaidan grimaces.

“Yeah,” Joker sighs and slides awkwardly into one of the open seats at the large community table.

Kaidan has a huge plate in front of him. Extra rations for the extra calories it takes to power biotics. If he isn’t on a mission, you can usually find Kaidan maintaining his guns or his armor, or eating. Only he isn’t actually eating, just swirling a spoon through his otherwise untouched plate of food, looking miserable.

“You okay?”

“I’m alive,” Kaidan says after a moment, stabbing his spoon into his food. “I’m not sure I have the right to be unhappy right now.”

Kaidan doesn’t sound happy. He sounds miserable.

Joker clasps his hands together to keep himself from reaching for Kaidan. It’s the first time Joker’s talked to him alone since realizing that his crush is more than a crush. Since realizing he is well and truly fucked. He still dances around the shape of his feelings, even in his own mind. But looking at Kaidan now is a bit like the first time he got his hands on the flight controls of a ship and realized the way it made him feel was a forever kind of thing. 

“Yeah, you can be. Ash was your friend too,” Joker reminds him gently. 

“Maybe she shouldn’t have been.” Kaidan looks away, profile all sharp lines and misery. 

“Kaidan—”

“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. I just— Shepard’s at the breaking point.”

“I know,” Joker says. Feros. Noveria. Virmire. Three horrors in rapid succession, each one drawing them closer to Saren, each one painting the shape of a picture so much bigger than a single rogue Spectre who needs bringing to justice. 

“It’s going to get worse, Joker.” 

“I know,” Joker closes his eyes.

Kaidan is quiet for a long while. Then he pushes the tray of uneaten food away. “You have to talk to her, Joker. I can’t. Not…” His fists clench on the table, knuckles white and sharp, for a moment they flare blue. A little burst of biotic distress. “Not about this.”

Joker raises his brows, surprised. Kaidan never loses control of his biotics, not even small slips like this; a blue shimmer that doesn’t even make it up to his elbows. 

The Alliance is weird, they want biotic soldiers, but then never seem to know what to do with them after. For a while, they wouldn’t let human biotics serve on a ship, too afraid of their potential for destruction — the very trait they coveted. They used to treat them as little more than walking bombs. It’s better now, but the love-hate nature of the Alliance’s relationship with biotics endures; there’s still too much red tape and bigotry, too many crews with empty complaints, too little understanding of biotic mechanisms, and zero tolerance for slip-ups.

Kaidan makes a little sound of dismay, looking at the swirl of blue energy surrounding his hands. “Shepard needs to trust herself if we have any chance at this at all. But I don’t even know if she did the right thing.” Kaidan looks up, eyes dark and haunted. “She needs to hear—  And I can’t, and—” 

“Hey,” Joker interrupts softly. “Hey hey hey. There’s not a single person on this ship who doesn’t think the Commander made the only call she could.”

“Ash. How can it have been?” And Kaidan sounds so damn lost.

Ah, fuck it.

Joker slides a hand across the table and wraps it around one of Kaidan’s glowing fists. Kaidan startles at the touch — not many people try to feel-up activated biotics after all — but he doesn’t pull his hand away. Kaidan’s biotics feel warm and fizzy beneath Joker’s palm. They hold for a moment, then advance, rising up to envelop Joker’s entire hand.

It’s — Joker doesn’t know what it is, but it feels strangely intimate, to be caught in the flow of Kaidan’s biotic powers. Despite everything, his heart starts to pound like crazy. They sit just like that for a moment in silence, and then Kaidan’s biotics fizzle out, and Joker pulls back, fisting his hand against his knee.

“It was the right thing because Shepard loves you,” Joker says, voice whisper-low, cracking a small, lopsided smile as Kaidan’s expression shifts into startled alarm. “You're right, we need her for whatever happens next. But you can’t expect her to forgive herself if you don’t forgive yourself .”

Kaidan blows out a long, hard breath, thinking. Always thinking. His brow scrunches up. Joker knows he’d be pacing around if he wasn’t sitting. All his life, Joker has always thought with his hands, taping through flight screens, or fidgeting with them in his lap. Kaidan's more of a man of action, and always thinks with his feet.

“Shepard’s not the only one at a breaking point,” Joker says quietly, pushing Kaidan’s tray closer to him. “Look. I’ll talk to Shepard even though she’s probably gonna shoot me. But only if you take three big bites.” He taps the edge of Kaidan’s plate. “You need to eat, or you’ll give yourself a migraine.”

Kaidan looks down, surprised. His brow furrows, but he picks up his spoon and eats — three big bites and more. Tucking in with a fervor that speaks to how much the mission on Virmire took out of him physically.

Joker heads to the lift to be alarmingly insubordinate to his armed and angry Commander.

“Oh fuck. She’s totally gonna shoot me,” Joker mutters to himself as he punches in for the upper deck and straightens his cap, a weird mix of spiky emotions churning in his gut.

The Alliance chain of command is weird sometimes. Pressly’s the head of the flight crew, but Joker’s the head of the ship , and he can freely access any area of the Normandy — including the Commander’s quarters — unless the Commander has specifically requested him be kept out. He’s one of two people with default access to Shepard’s cabin.

The Commander’s quarters are on the topmost deck. They’re compact, wedged between an awkward bit of space beneath the coolant system and the shielding unit. All the doors on the ship are air-tight and double-hulled, so there’s no way to knock, but Joker still stands awkwardly in front of the sealed doors, convincing himself to go in unannounced.

It’s not against ship etiquette. Access is a binary thing. You have it, or you don’t, and if you have it, you’re allowed there. He’s just... never actually tried to see if he’s been barred from this space. He never even thought to try.

Visions of Shepard in her underwear dance around in his head. It’s not a lewd vision –– he’s plenty familiar with those –– just one that makes him panic now that he’s about to enter her cabin. He flexes his hand, open, then closed, then open again. “Stop stalling you idiot,” he mutters to himself and taps the door pad hesitantly, touch nearly too light to register.

Nearly.

Shepard’s doors slide open with a soft pneumatic hiss and a spill of soft, thumpy background music. Some Turian techno group, he thinks.

“Uh… Commander?” She probably heard the door open, but Joker still calls out hesitantly as he steps into the room. 

Shepard is on the couch, hunched over and staring at a holo of Saren’s head as it rotates slowly around. She’s still in her battle armor, ceramic plating scorched, and stained, and pockmarked where she took gunfire when her shields were down. Her helmet is off and lying suspiciously in the debris of broken shelving and shattered safety glass.

Joker carefully picks his way around the mess near the couch, not even bothering to brush away the scatter of safety glass before he sits. The pieces of glass look sharp, but aren’t, edges engineered to shatter at angles safe enough to run his thumb against. He plucks a piece off the table and rolls it across his fingers, thinking.

Virmire had been awful from start to finish. From the plan to split up Ash from the rest of the team; to the stand-off with Wrex; to the destruction of the partial cure for the genophage; to the revelation of Sovereign the Reaper and the reckoning to come. It was almost poetic when their forces had been overrun — nearly simultaneously, at opposite ends of the base, with an armed, homemade nuclear bomb between them.

And Shepard, caught halfway between two stranded crewmates. 

Joker takes a deep breath. “Ash wasn’t your—”

“Don’t,” she interrupts, voice shaking. “Finish. That. Fucking sentence.”

“Fault,” Joker says unflinchingly.

Shepard glares at him. And it’s a good glare. Focused and steady. Greater men have withered in the face of that glare. Smarter men. Men with better senses of self-preservation.

Oh yeah, he’s definitely getting shot.

Shepard breaks eye contact first with a muttered “Damnit, Joker, ” and snatches her helmet back up again looking like she’d love nothing more than to wreck the rest of her quarters.

Joker slides closer on the couch, gesturing to make it clear that he isn’t going anywhere.

Then he waits.

“It was different this time,” Shepard says after several long moments. “Different than with Jenkins, I mean. After… after he died, I played that firefight over in my head about a thousand times.”

Joker knows that death hadn’t been easy on her either. It was Normandy’s first death, the first crewman lost under her command. But Shepard had been distracted in the aftermath — infected by that Prothean beam, visions nearly driving her mad before her mind started to make sense of it all. There hadn’t been much time to mourn.

Shepard drags her fingers through the broken glass on the coffee table, sketching out a map she keeps in her mind; the assault path they’d taken on Eden Prime.

“If we’d been in an offensive formation around this turn; if Jenkins had been clocking the skyline, not the field; if I’d been two steps ahead of him or one step behind; if the husk that popped up had taken three shots or less to put down; if Jenkins had angled his body just eighteen degrees more to the left…” Shepard runs her hands through her hair, a flash of bitterness in her expression. “Nine times out of ten, he survives. “Ninety-nine out of a hundred, maybe..."

"Bad luck," Joker says, mouth twisting into something that resembles a smile, but isn't.

"Yeah. I can accept bad luck. I don’t like it, but I know that it happens.” Shepard turns back to Saren’s holo, staring as though it might hold the answers. “But Ashley…” She takes a slow, deep breath, steadying herself. “If it was her or Kaidan, there’s no world where she makes it out alive.”

Joker frowns and shakes his head. “Yeah, but. You didn’t know you were choosing between them. I was on the comm. I heard. Ashley said she could hold.”

“I knew she couldn’t.” Shepard’s voice is as sharp as a hammer-strike. “I knew it.”

“Kaidan had the bomb. You couldn’t––”

“It wasn’t about the bomb, Joker.” She raises her head slowly, expression bitter. “I didn’t— I didn’t even remember the bomb. I just chose Kaidan.”

It leaves Joker breathless, how easily and unapologetically she says it. Shepard pulls no punches, not ever. Not even the ones she aims at herself.

She takes a shaky breath. “I chose Kaiden because I love him. I put the whole mission in jeopardy because I love him. I risked the lives of everyone on this ship because I love him. I let Ashley die because I love him. That’s why the Alliance doesn’t want you falling in love with crewmates," her fist slams down on the impression of Eden Prime, scattering safety glass everywhere. "Because it’s stupid, and dangerous, and selfish, and there is nothing you can say to—”

“I’m in love with Kaidan,” Joker says quietly, even as his stomach does a series of complex flips as his brain catches up with his mouth because what the fuck. He’s never said it out loud before, never even let himself think it. It’s terrifying. He wants to claw the words out of the air and tell Shepard it was just a bad joke. But it’s true, and he doesn’t know how to lie to her face. Not now. Not about this.

Joker takes a deep breath and lets it out hard on a little, silent laugh. “So all those terrible things you are… I guess, you know, me too. We’re both stupid, and dangerous, and selfish, and Ash’s death still isn’t your fault.”

Shepard looks stunned.

It’s a little gratifying to see in a woman who’s always ten steps ahead of everything at all times. Joker can count on one finger the number of times he’s actually managed to surprise Shepard. At least he still has unpredictability in his favor.

Joker adjusts his cap with one hand. “I dunno, maybe the Alliance is right, but… I’m not sure you had much choice in the matter. I didn’t,” he laughs shakily under his breath. “Don’t. I don’t.”

Something in Shepard’s expression eases. She smiles. It's so slight most people would miss it. But Joker isn’t most people, and he knows Shepard’s face better than he cares to admit.

He clears his throat. “And you can check the flight logs if you want,” he says. “But uh… I think I was already taking the Normandy back to Kaidan when you gave the order.”

He’s getting shot and court-martialed.

Cool. 

“I was. I mean, I know I was. Even if you’d wanted the Normandy to turn around — to get Ashley instead. I mean, there might have been time, maybe. Maybe. But the ship wasn’t in position. I’m good, but I dunno.” Joker shoves his hands in his pockets trying to imagine it.

The Geth troops were already swarming, and the plan to rescue both Kaidan and Ashley was vanishing by the second. Geth troopers, shock troopers, and snipers, as well as husks and Krogran warriors already littered the ground. A thick carpet of troops that Shepard and her team had to cut through again and again to make progress through the base. Then there were the threats to the Normandy itself; AA guns, and rocket drones, and Geth destroyers who could juggle targets in the air and on the ground.

Geth are different from organic enemies. Quicker. Emotionless. Off-puttingly decisive. You can’t goad them into anything or rely on fear or miscommunication to make them scatter. They’re like a single enemy with many fists that can terrorize airships and ground soldiers alike. And something had shifted on the field that day, some signal Joker wasn’t privy to but understood all the same. They knew about the nuke Kaidan had planted, and they were coming in full force, and at speed.

At that point in the conflict, Joker was farther away from Ashley than he should have been, already drifting towards Kaidan despite Shepard’s orders. More distance, more time to get there. More enemies in the way to derail things. If Shepard had gone to Ashley instead there’s a chance he would have had to pick Shepard up en route, before they'd had a chance to sync up.

There’s a chance that both of them — Ashley and Kaidan — would have died. 

Joker grimaces.

Shepard looks down at her hands for a moment, then back up again. “Do you think Ash knew?”

“That I love Kaidan? Probably not. I mean, I didn’t even know until just before Virmire. Not really. Not entirely.” Joker grimaces because it seems so fucking obvious now. It was obvious forever ago. “That you love Kaidan? Oh yeah. Everyone knows.”

Shepard groans and covers her eyes. 

“Really?” Joker smiles, shaking his head ruefully. “C'mon, Shepard. No one can be in the same room with the two of you and not see it.” His smile turns sympathetic as Shepard hunches further into herself. “You guys try real hard to hide it though, I’ll give you that. You just…” he laughs, the sound more genuine this time. “You suck at it.”

Shepard glares at him through her fingers, less heat, more annoyance.

“Uh, you suck at it, Commander.” Joker corrects himself, grinning. “And Ash? I don’t… I don’t think she’d mind that you picked Kaidan solely out of love. She was a romantic at heart.” There’s a piece of glass caught in Shepard’s hair, a diamond glinting in a sea of red. He reaches for it, and plucks it out, unthinking. “Besides,” he says quietly. “Everything else aside. Kaidan is worth loving. Take it from someone who knows.” 

For a moment, there’s something in Shepard’s expression that’s completely… he doesn’t know what. He doesn’t know how to describe the look on her face.

“Joker…”

“Hey. Don’t worry about me. The Normandy’s the love of my life, Shepard.” Joker smiles, and it’s only a little forced. “I’m happy where I am.”

And it must be true, because he can’t lie to her, after all. 

Shepard takes a breath, mouth opening to say something else, but all at once they're bathed a harsh red light as the holo of Saren’s profile blinks out, switching feeds, and it’s just the strange elongated lines of his ship, Sovereign.

Joker’s always hated that ship. It never made any sort of aeronautic sense. The balance just looks off, and the drivecore placement is irrational, and the thing has legs and an ass, for fucks sake. What kind of a ship has an ass?

Well, now they know.

A sentient old-God hell-ship, that’s what.

A Reaper.

Joker and Shepard look at each other, whatever she was about to say is eclipsed by the enormity of what lies before them. They have to get the council to agree to prepare for a war with all-or-nothing stakes; an invasion of Reapers set to eliminate every advanced race in the galaxy.

And then they have to win that war.

“Shepard, I—”

The cabin doors slide open, and Kaidan steps in. He looks around in surprise, eyeing the destruction in the room, and makes a beeline for Shepard. 

“Kaidan,” she says.

“I’m here.”

It’s so simple. Those two little words are so quiet and reverent that Joker blinks, stunned. He’s never heard Kaidan use that tone of voice before.

“Your hands,” Kaidan breathes.

The side of Shepard’s hands are bruised and bloodied. Joker had assumed Shepard had used her helmet to smash the shelving.

She’d used her fists.

Shepard just shrugs a single shoulder, the motion ragged with exhaustion. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Let me see,” Kaidan holds out his hand, and Shepard slides hers into it. Simple. Neat. But Kaidan’s not looking at her hand, he’s looking at her.  

Shepard curls her hand around the tips of Kaidan’s fingers, just a little. A tiny signal of distress. 

Kaidan hesitates for a heartbeat, then tugs Shepard forward half a step, folding her into his arms. Fully armored, she must weigh a ton, but Kaidan is rock steady as she leans into him with a quiet sound. Their foreheads drift together, bright copper touching coal-black waves.

Joker turns away. Neither of them needs him anymore, not like they need each other. And he wants to be at Normandy’s helm when they reach Citadel space. But as he walks out of the cabin, he can hear the sound of Shepard beginning to cry, and Kaidan murmuring gentle reassurances, voice low and rough and loving.

The door slides shut behind him.

Joker leans against it hand pressed against the ache in his chest. Sense of longing expanding, taking up too much space inside him, making it hard to think and even harder to breathe. Besides it sits something that feels more like panic.

What the fuck was he thinking?

He told Shepard he loved Kaidan.

He told Shepard he loved Kaidan.

He could have thought of anything–– anything else to say.

He told Shepard he loved Kaidan, but he didn’t tell Shepard he loved her, too.

“Fuck,” Joker mutters. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Joker doesn’t know how long he stays pressed against the door of Shepard’s cabin, hurt and horrified. The pain is like a broken rib, jabbing into him with every breath, every heartbeat, but completely invisible, no matter how hard you look.

Just like he is.

Just like he’ll always be.

Chapter Text

Fucking Udina can suck a bag of dicks.

All the dicks.

Reaper dicks. Udina can suck Reaper dicks.

He grounded the Normandy. How fucking dare he.

Joker had felt it when they landed on the Citadel, the locking up of the flight controls even as the ship docked. He’d shouted to Shepard and tried to back out of port, but it was already too late. The Normandy had gone dark under his fingertips. A flash of panic, and then an agonizing wave of fury, and by the time Shepard had gotten to the cockpit, Joker was already pacing and bellowing, red-faced with indignation.

There’d been a terse exchange between Shepard and the communications officer who had explained what was happening –– Udina had grounded them on the Council’s orders; they have no interest in continued pursuit of ex-Spectre Saren Arterius.

Shepard disconnects the call with as much disdain as humanly possible. “I don’t like this. No one sets foot off this ship until I say so,” she snaps her fingers. “War room. Now.”

Joker is the last to arrive. Navigator Pressly looks grim, and Kaidan is pacing around the table while Shepard sits, hands carefully folded in front of her. She looks the kind of furious that usually ends in a very high body count .

Joker slides into the chair beside her.

“Udina and the Council won’t risk us going to the Terminus Systems,” Shepard says without preamble. “They’re no longer interested in Saren, or the conduit. They don’t want a war with the Geth.”

“It would be disastrous,” Pressly reminds her. He’s a good navigator. A good executive officer. But he’s an Alliance man down to his bones. Prone to defend the chain of command, not criticize.

Kaidan’s built from the same mold, though he’s more likely to follow the ethics of a thing than the written rules. Shepard too follows her own internal sense of right and wrong, but she’s less stringent in its application than either of the other officers. The rigidity of the line she won’t cross is highly dependent on how much you’ve pissed her off.

Joker has seen her plow straight through it at high speed and leave a swath of destruction in her wake.

“Yes,” Shepard rubs her eyes with her hands, she’s only gotten a few hours of real rest since Virmire. “But the Reapers will be worse. You know they will.”

Pressly frowns. He doesn’t enjoy disagreeing with his commanding officer. “We can’t verify half of what was learned on Virmire.”

“I can,” Shepard taps her head. “I’ve seen how bad it’ll get. I’ve been seeing it for months. I don’t want a war with the Geth. I want one with the Reapers.”

Joker has heard descriptions of Shepard’s visions. Dr Chakwas said the Prothean beacon Shepard touched had implanted them, but Joker had always thought of it as an infection. Something more insidious. More invasive. 

When it first happened they’d thought Shepard would die. She was in a coma, unresponsive, and having seizures. That was a bad couple of days. Kaidan had refused to leave her side until she woke up. And when she did she started describing a nightmarish blur of visuals, sounds, sensations, and emotions. Shepard called it a tangled memory someone put in her head — too fragmented to have any real meaning. Blasts of noise, silhouettes against a skyline, pain, hopelessness, rage, desperation.

Not a nightmare. A message.

Stop the Reapers or lose everything.

“What do you want to do, Commander?” Kaidan asks. He’s made a full turn around the table and sits on the other side of Shepard.

She presses her lips together in a thin line. “You do not want to know what I want to do.”

Joker snorts. He imagines it involves guns and morally-grey choices. 

“What are our options then?” Kaidan rephrases.

“Not many,” Shepard frowns. “We need a ship to take us to the Mu Relay. The Alliance is out. So is the Council. We could try STG, we saved Major Kirahee and a handful of his men, maybe they could get us out of the system at least, maybe to the Quarians, or someone else who might be willing to risk Terminus space. If not, our slim options get slimmer. Hijack a pirate vessel, hope they can’t figure out who's flying it. Hope that that matters to the Geth. Hope that it doesn’t trigger a conflict.”

“That’s the plan?” Joker gapes. “You want to drive a clunker through the Mu Relay and into Geth-controlled space? The council’s worried about triggering a war, and they won’t let us take the only ship with a stealth drive, the only ship that can make that run without—”

“I want the Normandy, Joker,” Shepard nearly snarls. “But we don’t have it, and we don’t have any time to waste. We need another plan.” 

Joker drums his fingers on the table, thinking. “So steal it.”

Navigator Pressly makes a shocked, scoffing noise. “Steal what? The Normandy?”

“I can do it. I’ve done it before,” Joker mutters. "It’s not as hard as it looks. It should be a lot harder, but it's not. They do get real mad at you though. Fair warning.”

Pressly’s face is undergoing an interesting set of color changes, oscillating between red and white. “Your plan is to steal the most advanced warship ever designed from the largest starport in the System’s Alliance?”

“Uh-huh,” Joker says.

Kaidan leans forward. He looks less freaked out than Navigator Pressly, but none of this can sit well with him either. “How?” 

Joker drums his fingers on the table again, a quick little beat that mimics some of the feeds he observes during takeoff. “Break into the embassy and hack Udina’s personal terminal. He’s the one who grounded us. He can unground us. You know, non-consensually.”

“Madness,” Navigator Pressly gapes. “Lunacy. We should try to convince Ambassador Udina to reverse his orders. The Council will—”

“No time,” Shepard interrupts. She stands and flips a comm switch on the wall. “Attention Normandy crew,” her voice is perfectly steady, caring across speakers, ship-wide. “We’re stealing our ship back and going off to start a war. We’ll be doing so in direct violation of council orders. Anyone who stays faces court martial and possibly execution. Anyone who disapproves of this course of action has five minutes to leave my ship, with my full blessing.” A pause. “You don’t have to martyr yourself for me.” She flips the comm off again.

The war room falls into silence.

“Well, it sounds way worse when you put it that way,” Joker mutters and settles more firmly in his chair. “But I’m not letting anybody kidnap my baby without me. They’ll mess up the settings on my chair.”

Shepard looks around, but no one in the war room moves an inch.

Navigator Pressly heaves a sigh and rubs at his temples with both hands. “And I was only three months shy of making pension. What a waste.”

“Joker,” Shepard says, the smile on her face going from soft to sharp in a heartbeat. “Let’s go steal your ship back.”

***

Twenty minutes later the Normandy takes off with the entirety of its crew intact. No one leaves, not even Navigator Pressly, though he looks a little sour and bewildered. Through it all he’s managed to maintain his belief that the Council has their best interests at heart, even if his ultimate loyalty is to Shepard.

(Joker’s managed to maintain his belief that the Council sucks.)

(It’s good neither he nor Pressly have let recent events change them.)

Joker flips Udina the bird as he pulls out of the Citadel. Cathartic, but not super effective through the Normandy’s hull and a few miles of spaceport. He activates the stealth drive as soon as he’s able, and despite the fact that there is no active sign of pursuit he doesn’t start to unwind until they’re able to jump to FTL.

Never gonna dock at the Citadel again.

Fool me twice, assholes.

He flies the Normandy further and further away from the nexus of council-controlled space. He has to manually plot the course to the Mu Relay, which is wild. No other relay has that requirement. He’s been pretty deep in the Terminus Systems before, but ships don’t usually fly into dark space on purpose. 

“Commander, we’re approaching the relay coordinates now,” Joker pings Shepard on her comm.

The cockpit slides open a few minutes later. Shepard –– already in full armor –– doesn’t slide into the copilot’s chair like she usually does, but stands at Joker’s shoulder, peering out the viewport as the shutters peel back. In FTL there’s nothing to see, just a blur of blue-black, stars churning by so quickly they don’t even register to the human eye. But now that Joker’s slowed to an approach speed they can see everything — the multi-colored swirl of far-off systems; gas pockets refracting light into rainbows; and stars scattered like a handful of glitter against the gloom of space.

They aren’t in visual range of the Mu Relay yet, but they will be in a minute.

Shepard leans closer to the viewport. “Let’s hope Benezia was right.”

Joker snorts, “Let’s hope she wasn’t.”

Thirty seconds later they see it through the viewport, a tiny speck growing into a colossal relay, larger even than the one in the Sol System. It has the same distinctive profile as all other relays, but it looks and feels dead. There’s no comm chatter from incoming and outgoing ships, no flares of light as the relay activates, pushing and pulling ships to new star systems. Stranger still, it’s floating at an odd angle, a remnant of when it was blown off-course centuries ago and lost.

“I’m gonna do a visual pass before we go through,” Joker takes the Normandy on a wide, sweeping loop, pinging engineering as he goes. “Tali, I want your eyes on that thing. Tell me if you see anything that’s gonna get us killed.”

He takes three passes around it, just to be sure. The Mu Relay looks like every other relay he’d flown through but four thousand years of non-functionality does not for a high level of confidence make. 

“It looks to be in surprisingly good condition,” Tali says over the intercom at the end of his final circle. “But sometimes the damage is not at surface level. The semiconductors are usually the first things to go, and if they’re shot we will likely burn up very quickly when the relay activates. We might not even realize it’s happening.”

“Uh... thanks, Tali.” Joker has a sudden vision of the Normandy exploding in little blue and red fireballs. “So like… fifty-fifty?”

A pause on the line.

“Sure.” It’s hard to tell through her voice modulator, but the tone of Tali’s voice does not ring with confidence.

Shepard chuckles, the sound more sinister than humorous. “I’ll take those odds.”

Of course, she would.

A little bubble of warmth fills his chest. Shepard is fearless. He doesn’t have the right to be anything less.

“Well, damn. Here goes nothing.” Joker straightens his cap and starts to line the ship up for launch position. “Commander, once we’re through the relay, we’re either already super-dead or we’re flying blind. I won’t know what to expect until we get there. Ilos might be––” Joker clears his throat. “Yeah, we won’t know. You gotta be ready to fight by the time we’re through the relay.”

“I’ll be ready in five,” she assures him. “I just need to grab my gun.”

“Punch Saren in the taint, if you can. From me. I mean, you can shoot him too if you like, but it just seems less classy.”

Shepard smiles, a genuine flash of amusement that gives him butterflies. At least if nothing else, he can make her smile.

“Joker…”

Shepard’s voice shifts abruptly. Soft. A little hesitant. Something about it makes him want to nope right out of there. It sounds like she is trying to find a way to say goodbye, or... something, and he’s having none of that.

“Whatever you are going to say, Shepard, don’t say it. Just— not now, alright?” 

She takes a breath, expression quietly displeased, but nods. Her hand slides against Joker’s shoulder, and then away again, whisper-soft.

Joker closes his eyes. 

The door to the cockpit slides open and he twists around in his chair so fast he feels a twinge in his back. “Tell me later, okay,” he asks urgently. “Tell me after.”

She stands in the doorway, the light spilling in from behind makes it so he can’t see her face, not even the glint of emerald eyes. “Sure thing.”

***

Just beyond the Mu Relay, Ilos looms.

In five minutes everything has gone to shit. Saren’s troops show up as a sea of red on his feed. A swath of enemies so thick he can’t see the edges of them. They could very well cover the entire planet.

(Maybe the Council had an itty-bitty-bit of a point about the Geth.)

“My God…” Navigator Pressly breathes.

“Yeah, I know, I know. I see it.” Joker triple-checks the stealth mode but knows it won’t do any good if any of the Geth so much as look up. "Fuck.”

“We need to get the Commander planetside as quickly as possible, Lieutenant. I’m spotting Geth Colossus out there. Colossi. Dozens at least.”

Something turns over in Joker’s stomach. A direct hit from a Colossus’ pulse canon will fry the circuitry on Normandy's adaptive shielding, leaving little pockmarks across the surface area of her shields. Little cracks that could open her up and leave her vulnerable to any Geth ground troops with assault rockets and advanced targeting systems.

Joker licks his lips. “Find me a spot, Pressly.”

“There’s nothing.”

“Find it,” Joker can hear one of the flight crew marking enemies in range with the firepower to directly threaten the Normandy. It’s a pretty long list already, and the troops will swarm once they’re spotted and the shooting starts. “Find anything.”

“There’s nothing,” Pressly insists. He’s too seasoned to out-right panic, but his voice is tight and brittle. “The terrain is entirely rubbish!”

Joker pulls up the feed of possible drop zones, scanning through it himself.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing— but…

Joker frowns, zooming in. Flat land. Limited boogies. But not enough clearance for a drop. He’d have to—

“Joker,” Shepard’s voice cuts through on the comm. She, Kaidan, and Liara are already loaded into the mako, but she must be looking at the same feed as him. “Remember what you said about mako drops? Ever get a chance to test your theory?”

“Uh…” The sound is flat and long and Joker hopes he conveys the proper level of what the fuck, Shepard because what. the. fuck. Shepard. 

“Joker,” her voice is the kind of deadly serious that would freeze most people on the spot. “You’ve got about twenty meters, max. How confident are you about your theory?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“How. confident,” she snaps.

“Fuck. Yes, alright! I can do this,” he nods even though she can’t see him. “I can do this, Commander.” 

He can’t see her expression, of course, but he can practically hear the shark-toothed sharpness of her grin. “Excellent.”

“Goddamnit, here we go,” he flicks his thumb along the flight controls, changing course for the new drop zone, and increasing the Normandy’s speed.

It’s counterintuitive, that’s why it’s controversial. A standard drop requires no less than a hundred meters of space. Mako’s have powerful shock- absorbers so they don’t rupture their passengers during a drop. High and slow, that’s what they all learned in flight school. Reduce the impact. Make the drop. 

Joker argued you could make a drop low and fast. Really low. Slide that fucker planetside like a pancake on a plate. No one would ever let him try it. The Alliance generally frowns on planetside approaches that reach speeds of hurtling.

But he was right.

And he knows he was right. 

Still, he’s not super thrilled to try it for the first time with both Shepard and Kaidan (and Liara) inside the mako he’s about to bodyslam into Ilos. But today’s all about balls out, apparently. 

He checks their course and increases the Normandy’s descent speed. Alarms start to blare, blinking orange and red, and the autopilot engages briefly before he overrides it, and throttles the stick even more. He can feel the vibrations in his flight seat pick up as Normand’s hull skips through the planet’s atmosphere. “Oh yeah. It’s gonna be a super fun Tuesday.” 

The Normandy’s flight support VI isn’t being super helpful. It keeps trying to get him to shift back to regulated drop speeds, so Joker juggles the calculations in his head. He can’t just not-squish Shepard and Kaidan and Liara. He’s got to not-squish them perfectly on target and avoid being seen by the Geth, or the whole thing is screwed.

A bead of sweat runs into his eye, stinging, but he doesn’t have a spare hand to wipe it away. “You’ve got about thirty seconds to back out of this, Shepard,” he shouts over the alarms.

“Just get us down, Joker!”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

Joker activates the hanger doors and feels the sudden shift of increased air friction all along the Normandy’s underside. He fights with the stick for a moment, fingertips dancing across the flight panel as he compensates for the fastest fucking approach he’s ever made.

For just a second the Normandy tips too far back and he gets a burst of wind up the open hatch. At this speed, it feels like something’s tried to yank them out of the sky, and he tips the ship forward, overcompensating. It shudders violently, and Joker’s forearms ache as he tries to wrestle the ship back into position.

“Joker! ”

“Fuck fuck fuck.”

There’s a horrifying moment when the Normandy skips off the ground like a pebble off a lake, shields protesting with a flare of blue, and he thinks for a moment that if the ship crashes and they all die, at least he’ll be spared from having to write what is sure to be a clusterfuck of a flight report.

A bead of sweat rolls into Joker’s eye and he blinks it away hastily. His hands fly across the flight panels as he gets control of the ship. “Get ready, Commander! Five seconds!

"Four!

"Three!

"Two!"

Joker punches the hangar bay doors open and feels the little hiccup in the Normandy's handling when the mako drops to Ilos. But there’s no time to watch the outcome. He peels away in a turn so sharp the shields light up from air pressure alone. There are a handful of tense moments as they head for the skies, streaking out of range from a pair of Geth destroyers that patrol adjacent to the landing zone.

Joker hates leaving atmo when Shepard and the strike team are planetside, but sometimes there’s no help for it.

As soon as he's out of range of the Geth, he boosts the comms signal as much as he’s able, but there’s too much interference to pick up anything useful. Just bursts of static fading into a crackling buzz. He tries not to imagine that Shepard and Kaidan are pancake-flat in a mako on Ilos, but he imagines it all the same.

“Please, please. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…”

Even through the noise filters, the static just sounds like static, and every once and a while the buzzing whine of feedback, and nothing more. And then—

“Jo— Joker— you copy?”

“Shepard!” Joker nearly bounces in his flight chair, triumphant. “Thank fuck! Are you all alright?”

“Listen. There’s something happening.” Her voice is too measured, too even, like she’s focused on something beyond the conversation, and trying not to speak too loud.

Joker’s relief evaporates in a moment. “Commander?”

“I don’t… I don’t know what it is.”

He starts to turn the Normandy around, to evac Shepard and the strike team out of there. “I’m coming to get you,” he says seriously. 

“No. Don’t, Joker. Sovereign is—"

There’s a burst of gunfire and the sound of biotic detonations; from Kaidan or Liara, he can’t say. It doesn’t go on long as firefights go, but every second of it is awful. He can hear Shepard’s assault rifle firing as fast as she can pull the trigger. She swears breathlessly, and there's a long pause where her gun is silent, either from overheating or something more sinister. Kaidan’s heavy pistol, thudding like a hammer strike. More fizzy biotic noises. And Shepard’s gun starts up again, then slowly falls silent.

“Joker?” 

“I’m here.”

Shepard’s breathing hard, sounds like she’s running. “Listen carefully. I need you to head back to the Citadel.”

To the…

"I—" Joker shakes his head sharply, the sting of sweat in his eyes. “Say that again, Commander, I think I just had a stroke.”

“The Citadel, Joker. Raise the alarm. Sovereign is headed there. I don’t… I don’t have all the pieces. But you need to get there and stop it. I have to find the conduit.”

Joker feels a cold spear of ice in his chest. “You want me to leave you behind?”

Stranded. 

In dark space.

Behind a relay history has forgotten. 

Surrounded by ten thousand Geth.

“No…” Joker breathes. “Nope. I–– I’m not doing this again. Not after Virmire.”

“You’re not abandoning us, Joker. You’re saving the Citadel.” 

Right now, right in this moment, Joker gives two shits about the Citadel. Let it burn. He’s not leaving Shepard and Kaidan (and Liara!) alone on Ilos. Fuck no.

“Joker…”

The way she says his name sounds too much like she did standing in the cockpit of the Normandy. And for one brief, terrible moment he wishes he could rewind and hear what she had wanted to say to him.

“Get to the Citadel,” she says. “That’s an order. Go!”

Joker closes his eyes. “Going, Commander."

His hands move over the flight controls, propelling the Normandy away from Ilos, even as it breaks his heart.

No one should be able to say that he has no respect for the chain of command. Not with how he carves out a piece of himself with each unit of airspace he puts between himself and Shepard. By the time he reaches the relay tears are rolling down his cheeks, and there’s nothing but gunfire in his ears.

It’s sacrilegious to wish the crew luck during a mission. But he kisses his fingertips and presses them silently to the flight screen as the relay folds space around them, making everything start to blur. “You got this,” he whispers raggedly to them both. To himself. “You got this.”

But there's only the static of a lost connection humming in his ears. 

Chapter Text

Joker shouts himself hoarse within ten minutes of reaching the Citadel.

No one is particularly interested in listening to the pilot of a ship that has misplaced its Spectre. Especially when all his shouting boils down to: the ship with the giant ass is coming and everyone is going to die.

The tinny voice of the flight operator on the other end is annoyed — but not panicked — as they ping their way up the chain of command and Joker attempts to shout out dire warnings to the first, and second lieutenants, and then and the station captain who picks up the most recent comm request.

“You’re not Admiral Hackett,” Joker shouts, voice ragged. “I need to talk to the Admiral!”

“If escalation is appropriate we will—”

“It’s more than appropriate! I told you! There’s going to be an attack on the Citadel!”

“Lieutenant Moreau, as you’ve been told — repeatedly now — our sensors indicate no hostile activity, neither here, nor near any of the relays. Commander Shepard can use her Spectre-class access code to reach Admiral Hackett directly if—”

“She can’t. She’s a little busy trying to prevent a full-scale assault on the Citadel! If you can’t get me the Admiral, get me your commanding officer.” 

Joker’s head throbs. He’s been slowly working his way up the chain of command on the Alliance side, while Pressly has been doing the same on the Galatic Council's side. Judging by Pressly’s pacing and wild gesturing on the video feed from the flight deck, he’s having no luck either.

Damnit, he did not leave Shepard and Kaidan (and Liara!) alone on Ilos for nothing.

“You know what, fuck it,” Joker mutters to himself. He takes a breath and then sends an unencrypted data package on Sovereign directly to the Alliance military through a broadband uplink. The information technically isn’t classified, but only because no one knew it existed in the first place. There might be a reckoning later, but Joker’s been in Shepard’s orbit too long, and the fuck-you-authority is starting to rub off on him.

“Lieutenant Moreau, you are attempting to share classified information across unsecured channels. That’s a—” 

“I’m not attempting anything, goddamnit! Just look at the data I’m transmitting. That’s what’s coming for us.”

There’s total silence on the other side of the comm. Four solid minutes of nothing, and Joker seriously considers firing on the Citadel to force them into action.

And then; “Hackett here.”

Thank fuck.

“I have orders from Commander Shepard. She asked me to raise the alarm. Sovereign is coming for the Citadel. Now. It’s happening now. Uh, Sir, ” he adds with a belated huff.

Hackett is silent for exactly two beats. “Where is Shepard?”

“Ilos,” Joker says tersely. “Trying to stop this thing.”

This time, there isn’t so much as a pause for breath. “Deploy all Alliance military spacecraft within range to defend the Citadel. Hail Arcturus Station to send whatever they can in the way of air support. Divert non-military ships away from Citadel airspace. Lockdown the civilian populations. Inform the Council.”

Joker lets out a relieved breath, but the tension in his hands remains.

“Lieutenant Moreau,“ Hackett says. “You have command of the air defense.”

“Me? Sir…” 

Hackett’s voice is grim. “You’re the only one who's seen Sovereign in combat.”

“Right. Ok. I have command, Sir.”

There’s a slight crackle on the comms as Joke’s feed is patched directly to nearly a dozen flight commands at once. The flight screen splits showing the status and position of all the ships under his command. Holy shit… It’s like half of the Alliance starfleet from Arcturus Station, and nearly every damn ship serving as Citadel defense; mostly Turian and Asari, but here and there the sleeker lines of Salarian cruisers.

Joker allows himself a full thirty seconds of quiet panic. Thirty seconds of where his chest tightens, and his breath is shallow, and he imagines that Shepard and Kaidan are bleeding out on Ilos, and he’s too busy presiding over the largest aerial defeat in Alliance history to save them. 

And then he pulls himself the fuck together.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out. 

“This is Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau of the SSV Normandy. There is a confirmed incoming attack on the Citadel by an entity called Sovereign.” He pulls up the holo of Sovereign and pings it through to the Alliance fleet. “Sovereign outclasses anything we’ve ever seen in terms of shielding and firepower. It’s not a ship. It’s a synthetic-organic hybrid. This thing can think and talk, and it’s a monumental prick. 

“I don’t know what it wants. I just know that we have to stop it. Every station, every planet is counting on this fleet. On you.” Joker looks out across the stars, to Ilos— so far away it’s just a blurry fleck of light. But that’s where he’s left his heart.

“We are not alone. Commander Shepard is out there. We buy her the time she needs to bring this thing down. We save the Citadel. That’s it. That’s the mission.”

It’s not enough. A few terabytes of data and a battle plan that boils down to make sure we win.

They need more if they are going to survive.

Joker flexes his hands a few times. How does he explain what he knows in his bones to be true; how to handle the skies around Sovereign?

“I’m speaking directly to the Alliance and Citadel pilots, now. Sovereign is slow, but it doesn’t move like you’d expect because of its profile. We don’t yet know its weak points, so we’ll have to find them together. Sovereign has a Geth army at its back, so count on at least a squadron or two to show up. You cannot rely on your shielding, their weaponry is too advanced. Cut all non-critical power drains, and divert everything you’ve got to firepower and flight speed. And I mean every last drop. You’ll feel the change in the way the ship handles, so don’t overcompensate. No battle formations, nothing a machine can predict or calculate. Fly smart, but fly ugly. Trust your instincts. Watch the skies. We beat this thing together.

“Joker out.”

If this was a Blasto flick there’d be a dramatic swell of music, or a busty Asari kissing him goodbye, or a large-scale explosion, or… something. Not just silence and more silence. And it would be super cool if Sovereign just showed up already.

Joker flips the comm so he’s only talking to the Normandy crew. “Uh… that sounded pretty badass of me, right?”

A scatter of mostly sincere confirmations through the line, and one loud and distinctly amused Krogan laugh.

Joker patches into Wrex’s personal comm. “Eat my ass, Wrex.”

Another gleeful, raspy chuckle. “You know, Krogan tongues are like low-grit sandpaper.”

“Mmmn. Sounds so much better than waiting for Sovereign to not show up to his own surprise party.”

More silence. The waiting is awful. Joker buries his face in his hands.

“It was a pretty good speech, though.”

“Yeah I know,” Joker sighs. “Thanks, Wrex.”

The minutes drag on.

It hadn’t occurred to Joker that Shepard could have been wrong. Not even for an instant. Not until he’s assembled the whole goddamn Alliance navy and wasted his cool battle speech, and the seconds are counting down to when someone is going to remember that the entirety of the Normandy crew should be arrested, and their ship should be impounded, and—

“Incoming hostiles,” one of the Normandy flight crew says through the intercom. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a confirmed visual—primary hostile vessel, plus a full fleet in escort.”

“Thank fuck, ” Joker lets out a relieved breath, then a nervous chuckle. “You know what I mean.”

His eyes flick to the viewport as Sovereign breaches Citadel air-space, too close to the station to be anything but menacing. A moment later the Geth ships appear, black flecks against the sky, blinking out the stars around them. In a world without Shepard, there would be no opposition, just a handful of unprepared ships and C-Sec’s automated defenses. No alarms. No scramble orders. Sovereign and its Geth fleet would have carved through the heart of galactic command in minutes. Civilian casualties in the millions. Instead, Sovereign faces the entirety of the Alliance fifth fleet and the Citadel defense ships, forewarned and ready to fight.

“Surprise, asshole,” Joker grins, then shouts. “All ships engage!”

The alarms start –– an urgent, rippling claxon from the Citadel proper to the air defense as the skies dissolve into chaos.

The first wave strikes hard. 

Geth fighters surge in tight formation, shields rippling, laser cannons locking onto key points of the aerial defense. Friendly ships scatter as the first volley of fire rips toward them. An explosion rocks the near side of an enormous Alliance cruiser, sending debris scattering into the void. Joker banks hard left, and feels the percussive blast of the explosion shudder against the Normandy. A Geth fighter streaks past the cockpit, just clipping the Normandy’s wing, but the shields hold—a flash of matte-black plating and a flare of blue.

Joker’s mind sharpens, cutting through the noise, focusing on what matters. His left-hand pilots the Normandy, while his right dances across a tactical holopad — a projection of the Citadel and its battlespace outlined before him, a mosaic of flashing alerts, ship movements, and distant explosions. He shifts the flow of battle, barking orders and pointing Allied ships to the dogfights they’re best suited for with a flick of his fingers.

The Geth are the immediate threat — they’re already tearing into the allied fleet, steadily eliminating the number of ships on the field –– but Sovereign is the primary target.

“Left quadrant, Sovereign’s going for the Citadel,” Jokers snaps through the fleet comms. “Keep it off her!”

The first Alliance salvos are ineffectual, skidding off the curve of Sovereign's hull. (Back?) The Reaper drifts closer and closer to the Citadel, implacable as a storm cloud. Ships from the Alliance fleet and Citadel defense attack Sovereign in waves, each as ineffective as the next. Some try for what might be its face, others aim for the spindly legs, but it makes little difference.

“Shields too strong,” Joker mutters to himself with a shake of his head. “We can’t break through.” 

There’s a Geth trailing him trying to get a lock, so he picks up speed banking hard and then drops suddenly back. The Geth overshoots, streaking past the Normandy, but Joker is ready. He starts firing even before his targeting system locks on. The Geth ship explodes — close enough that the Normandy’s shields flare blue as he flies through the plume of fire and debris.

Then, a spatter of panic over the comms.

“Comms are down! The Citadel has gone black.”

“Lieutenant! The Citadel’s arms are closing!”

They are— the arms of the station are slowly enveloping Sovereign in its embrace. Once sealed, they’ll have no hope of getting to the Reaper. Not without destroying the entire ass end of the Citadel first.

“Motherfucker!” Joker punches the throttle towards the Citadel and dives headlong through a cluster of debris — a ruined Geth fighter slowly spinning end-over-end, trailing fuel and flame like blood.

Think, think, think.

How can they retake control of the Citadel like this? If the Citadel’s standard communication channels are down, the Alliance must still have a way to connect with its military officers. He refuses to believe that on a station of over 13 million, there are no QECs between Systems Alliance personnel in the Citadel and the outside world. 

Sweat stings Joker’s eyes, but he needs his hands so he tries to blink it away. Christ, he’d give his left nut to have Shepard around right about now. She’d know what to do.

Then all at once a familiar crackle of static in his ear, distracting enough that Joker nearly flies straight into another Alliance ship, only managing to shift his course at the last second. It sounds… it sounds like someone remotely connecting to Normandy’s ground-flight comms. 

But that’s not possible.

It’s not.

There are only three people in the world who have access to the other end of that comm channel, and they’re currently marooned a few trillion miles away.

A tiny ping of confirmation and the static resolves into a perfectly clear signal.

“Joker !”

He nearly jumps out of his flight chair. “ Shepard! What— How— Where are you?”

“I’m on the Citadel!”

He shakes his head speechless.

Joker can hear a faint spatter of excited cheering from the Normandy crew through the internal comm system that acts like a feedback loop through the ship. Through Shepard’s side, he can hear the clear sounds of a firefight — the bouncy ping of her assault rifle and a biotic slam, followed by a small explosion. Joker listens hard, waiting for the sound of Kaidan’s heavy pistol, and there… thudding in the background like a steady, measured heartbeat. 

Safe. They’re both safe.

The burst of relief is so bright he’s almost sick with it. For the briefest moment, his hands shake.

“The conduit— it’s a conduit to the Citadel. There’s a miniature mass effect relay in the middle of the fucking presidium! We followed Saren through it."

Oh shit.

Joker’s eyes go wide. Saren and his Geth have had a back door to the Citadel all along.

“It’s a relay into dark space,” Shepard shouts to be heard over the gunfire. “The whole Citadel is a giant relay! The Reaper invasion starts today if we don’t kill Sovereign now.”

All Joker can think of is Eden Prime. An entire colony of almost four million souls was wiped away by a single Reaper. Nothing left but corpses and husks and one terrified Alliance Marine.

Ashley…

What kind of damage could a dozen Reapers do? A hundred?

“We can’t,” Joker shouts back. “Shepard. Sovereign has control of the Citadel. It's sealed up inside. And even if it wasn’t, its shields are too strong. We can’t even scratch it!”

Shepard swears. In the background, someone lands a tremendous biotic detonation — Kaidan or Liara or both of them are kicking ass.

A sound of frustration from Shepard and more gunfire. “Just be ready to take out Sovereign. I’ll handle the rest,” Shepard says.

“Affirmative, Commander,” Joker pings the Normandy crew. “Inform Hackett that Shepard’s on the Citadel. Garrus! Tali! Find me a weak point on that thing!”

He doesn’t even wait for confirmation before taking a strafing run against a cluster of Geth fighters harrying a Turian cruiser. They break off their attack, peeling away, and Joker manages to shoot off a section of one of their wings. The Geth fighter tumbles away, trailing smoke. Disabled but not destroyed.

The battlespace is getting harder to navigate. Broken ships litter the skies, and the defense has torn through enough of the Geth fleet that they’re losing formations and becoming difficult to track, and even more difficult to predict. Nearly sixty percent of all surviving allied spacecraft are reporting varying levels of damage. But, at least with Sovereign inaccessible, they can focus all their efforts on the remaining Geth forces. 

The tide turns slowly in their favor. More Geth ships blink out than Alliance. And Joker throws everything he has into saving as many allied ships as he can and keeping the Normandy from harm. 

And then, one of the flight crew shouts. “Comms are back! Sovereign's losing control of the Citadel!”

And Joker sees out the viewport, the arms of the Citadel slowly, slowly opening, revealing Sovereign, black and ominous, sunk in like a tick. 

No sound from the outside world can pass through Normandy’s hull, but all at once Joker hears it, a menacing bwaaa that slices into his senses even as the skies light up in a flare of red from Sovereign's main canon. A Turian dreadnought caught in the beam disintegrates so quickly that Joker blinks and it’s just gone. All wreckage and crew burned up in an instant.

All at once Joker feels too small for the fight he needs to hold together. There’s no time for strategy. Just instinct.

“Eyes on Sovereign!” Joker roars to the fleet. “Drop kinetic barriers to a minimum, and push all excess power to speed. We have to stay the hell out of that beam!”

They try a run on Sovereign again. A barrage of cannon fire that lights up the darkness — fireworks against a stormcloud — enough to cripple the largest ship in the Geth fleet. But when the plasma cannons hit Sovereign, the energy diffuses instantly, no more effective than raindrops. Sovereign's shields barely even shimmer.

“Shit,” Joker swears under his breath. “C’mon Shepard… c’mon…”

Then he hears it. A mayday through the chaos swirling around the Citadel.

“What the fuck are they doing? ” He hisses, tracking the Citadel’s flagship through the mess of his flight screen.

“This is the Destiny Ascension. Requesting immediate support in evacuating the Council from Citadel airspace.”

"The… whole Council?” Joker blurts, horrified.

Shouts erupt across multiple channels all at once.

“Lieutenant, the Destiny Ascension is starting to break apart! They can’t take much more!”

“Shields are failing—”

“The Destiny Ascension—”

“Sovereign’s shields are down!”

“The Council. No shields remaining—!”

“We have a window to attack!”

In his heart, Joker knows he was not made for a decision like this. He knows it will make everything from here on out, harder. He knows it will damage relations with the council species. He knows Shepard will shoulder the blame.

And he knows he can’t take the risk.

Sovereign sits naked and exposed; he has no idea how long it might last.

“Stay the course! Sovereign is the priority,” he orders the fleet. “We take it down, or we lose everything!”

The comms light up with acknowledgments. Ships peel off, diving toward the exposed Reaper.

Most pilots don’t look outside their viewports. But Joker does. And so he watches ten thousand people die on his orders.

A volley of fire from a Geth destroyer hits the Destiny Ascension. The shields flare in one last, weak, death rattle. A piece of the Asari cruiser shatters, drifting off into space like broken glass. A plume of fire follows, red and blue, and then a tremendous internal explosion, bright orange cracks along the hull as the ship holds its shape for a moment before it doesn’t. It happens so fast. A series of explosions and the foundations of the ship fracture. One moment, an Asari dreadnought, wounded and tumbling through space, the next, just debris. Pieces of what was a spaceship, but isn’t anymore. A mere tangle of metal, shattered, twisted, glinting in the light of the Serpent Nebula’s sun.

 Joker makes a broken sound, breathing hard. “Damnit…” Then he squares his shoulder and snaps into the comms. “Sync targeting arrays to me –– hit Sovereign now . ”

A barrage from a hundred plasma cannons arcs across the sky with one. singular. purpose.

Death.

“That’s for Sargent Ashley Williams you fuck face!” Joker shouts.

Unshielded, a portion of Sovereign’s carapace explodes in a flare of blue-green fire, and another shears off at an angle, sliding down to the citadel. Joker can hear the cheers through the comms and on Normandy’s bridge as the rest of Sovereign breaks apart moments later, falling almost gracefully to smash against one of the Citadel's arms. A plume of fire erupts, a tiny wound against the vastness of the station. The remaining Geth forces retreat almost instantly, vanishing into the blackness of space. Without Sovereign, they have no reason to stay.

Silence. Stillness.

The skies around the Citadel have become a graveyard — littered with shattered Geth ships, Alliance frigates torn in half, and the wreckage of the station’s own defense fleet. The surviving ships fly through the debris field, slow and deliberate. Their hulls scorched. Lights dimmed. Kinetic barriers running on backup reserves.

Victorious.

Sweat runs down the bridge of Joker’s nose.

Or maybe it’s just tears. 

***

It’s quiet in the room — relatively speaking.

Outside, the rest of the medical ward is a flurry of motion, dozens of med-techs and doctors perform some sort of complicated ballet, weaving between hundreds of patients and bits of machinery; ordering tests, analyzing results, administering care with a brutal efficiency. Watching them feels akin to watching ships zoom around a starport — blurry with speed, but somehow managing to never crash into each other.

They’d given Shepard her own room, even as patients lined the halls and the floors of Huerta Memorial Hospital. Even as the wounded pile up, and those without life-threatening injuries aren’t even being let inside.

The whole of Huerta Memorial Hospital smells of smoke and that peculiar reek of melted plastic and metal. It nearly obscures the usually acerbic scent of medical spaces. Joker hates it. Hates everything about hospitals. Has spent too much of his life staring up at a hospital ceiling wishing he’d been born into someone else’s body.

But he just can’t leave Shepard’s side.

They’d pulled her out from under the pieces of Sovereign’s remains, Anderson had told him. And all Joker could think about was the fierce elation he’d felt when he’d watched the thing fall from its perch on the Citadel, not knowing Shepard and Kaidan were below. Not knowing he’d given Sovereign one final chance to destroy the people he loves.

It took an hour to dig Kaidan out of the wreckage.

It took another three to find Shepard.

The Normandy had docked at the end of the battle where the majority of the damaged ships had merely hung static in space, attending to what emergency repairs they could. But then, the Normandy didn’t have a scratch on her. Not many ships could say the same.

Out the window, one side of the presidium is still smoldering. The lake has a slick of oil and debris drifting across its surface, but they’ve managed to fish out all the bodies at least. Some of the trees have burned away, black smears marring the landscaping. Joker presses his hand against the window, blotting out the damage from Sovereign and the Geth. The other side of the presidium is almost pristine. Polished white paneling, gleaming floors, untouched by flame or debris. An Avina stands at the foot of a bridge, smiling.  

Two halves of the same station. Two worlds. Before Sovereign. After Sovereign. His hand curls into a fist against the glass.

“Jo-Joker?”

He’s at Shepard's side in two heartbeats, knuckling tears from his eyes apologetically. “Hey.”

She blinks up at the brightness of the overhead lights, eyes unfocused and bloodshot. “Kaidan? Where—”

“He’s alright," Joker reassures her immediately. "He’s good. Took a couple of hard hits. Pretty wiped out too, bioticly speaking, but he’s fine. He’s okay. Liara too. Dr Chakwas had them brought back to the Normandy, but they couldn’t move you. You almost—” Joker swallows back the words. “You almost had me worried.”

Joker looks at all the equipment adorning the small space. She’s plugged into almost every device in the room, the heart monitor is still making soft little medical-sounding beeps in a steady, reassuring rhythm. When Joker first arrived at the hospital they wouldn’t let anyone near her room. It had taken two shouting matches and a call from Anderson to gain entry. Once inside, he’d stood at her bedside for over an hour, staring at the monitors, listening to her heartbeat and the sound of her breathing, heart overflowing with quiet gratitude.

“Don’t worry. I’m hard to kill,” Shepard says. Her voice is wrecked from two solid days of shouting over gunfire. His isn't much better.

“I know it. And now Saren knows it too. Bastard . Hope you did punch him for me before you killed him. ” Joker tries to summon a Commander at the end of his sentence, but he can’t quite manage. 

“I—” Shepard hesitates, expression sobering. She looks unsettled.

Joker takes a step closer to her bed, uncertain.

“Saren killed himself, in the end," she says, voice quiet. "Shot himself to get out from under Sovereign's control.” A dry, humorless laugh. “It didn't make any difference though.”

And then she tells him about the final battle. How Saren’s corpse had sprung back to life, little more than a Turian-shaped husk. More than indoctrination. Like Sovereign had carved out his insides and rebuilt them with wires and tubing and the slosh of dark oil. Towards the end, it had rained black as they chipped away at the carapace that kept him — it — together. Part machine. Part monster.

“Maybe it wasn’t Saren at all. Maybe it was never Saren we were fighting. There was so little of him left. Just a husk in Turian skin.” She shudders, then makes a pained noise in the back of her throat, shifting restlessly on the narrow bed.

Joker frowns.

Shepard had come in with a lot of internal damage. They’d practically had her swimming in omni-gel, but it can only do so much. Joker knows more than anyone the limits of modern medicine. It can mend his broken bones but it can’t make them stronger. And Shepard is built so much from impossible things that he sometimes forgets she’s flesh and blood too.

“Saren was so sure… so sure they would spare him… He gave the Reapers Eden Prime, and Zhu’s Hope, and the scientists at Peak 15. Thousands dead so Saren could save himself,” Shepard shakes her head. “And it didn’t even work. What happened to Saren… that’s what the Reapers do to their allies.”

A flash of anger in Shepard’s emerald eyes. A bright and bitter hate that’s breathtaking in its depths. Joker knows it for what it is. She’s not mad at Saren. She’s mad at Sovereign for his disloyalty.

He sits on the bed beside her. He shouldn’t, but there isn’t a chair or any other surface available, and he’s not sure he can stand much longer. He feels a bit like they had to drag him out of the rubble too. Exhausted and battered from too much adrenaline and emotional whiplash. Plus he probably reeks. Can’t even count the times he’s sweated straight through his shirt in the last 24 hours.

Joker wipes tiredly at his face and feels the grit of dried sweat and tears, but his fingertips come away relatively clean. Half of the staff on this ward, and nearly all of the patients are coated in a fine, dark silt of ash and dust; including Shepard, though someone has made a halfhearted attempt to wipe the dust from her face.

She reaches for his hand and he lets her take it. It’s… smaller than he thought, and fits neatly in his own. It shouldn’t. Someone who shapes the world shouldn’t have hands this small. He looks down at their clasped hands for a long time in silence. Shepard’s nails are short and blunt and caked in dried blood. He can feel the calluses on her palms, and along the side of her trigger finger, earned from long days at the gun range and even longer days in the field.

Twenty-four hours ago he held Kaidan’s hand in the mess hall and felt the shiver of biotics across his skin. Now he’s holding Shepard’s in the hospital on the Citadel, a Reaper corpse just a few wards away. And between that moment and this one, a whole lifetime’s worth of fear, and adrenaline, and worry, and impossible odds they’d both beaten to make it back here.

 “What a day,” Joker leans back with a little shake of his head. “I can’t believe it started with us hijacking the Normandy. I kinda expected that to be the highlight.”

"It was,” Shepard makes a breathless sound that’s too dry to be a chuckle. “The rest of it was pretty awful.”

“I dunno. I said fuck on an active comm to the entire Alliance fleet stationed on Arcturus.” He flashes a brief, wry grin. “Twice. I said fuck twice.”

“A true legend.” There's a twist of a smirk on her lips. “But that’s not what they’ll remember. You killed a Reaper today .”

“I killed the entire galactic Council today.”

In the silence, Joker can hear exactly what that does to Shepard’s heart rate. The bright-sounding beeps on the monitor falter and start hammering away. He hadn’t meant to say it like that, or maybe at all, but the words seemed to crawl up his throat to come tumbling out of his mouth.

“The Council. And the crew of the Destiny Ascension, all ten thousand of them.” He frowns down at her hand. “The Alliance lost almost half-a-fleet worth of ships, but that one… That one’s mine. I think I could have saved them. But I just…" he looks at Shepard, lost. "I didn't."

Shepard's expression is serious. “Out of everyone we lost today, I’ll mourn them the least. They knew, Joker. They knew. And they did nothing.”

A wave of anger swamps him, smothering the guilt.

What a waste. What an enormous waste.

Shepard has that look on her face, eyes narrowed and focused, playing out all the ways this might change the game. She’s already in the next battle. The next five. The next twenty.

Joker squeezes her hand, gently. “Hey. Don't do that. One step at a time. Just tell me what happens next.”

“The Alliance expands its official guidance on mako drops.”

He groans. “I’d almost forgotten. They are gonna be all sorts of mad at me today.”

“I doubt it. We would have lost the Citadel today without you.” Shepard says quietly.

“Without you, you mean.”

“Without us .”

Joker’s stupid heart skips about a hundred beats, and he stares at the way her hand curls so easily in his. “Okay… us .”

Chapter Text

Joker doesn’t remember Alchera.

Not much of it anyway. He’d broken his–– well, a lot. Little hairline breaks skittering up the bones of his legs like burns from a lightning strike, and a pelvis fracture that was a burst of agony so bright he thought he was dying when it happened.

But he remembers what came before. The sudden blare of the warning siren that made his guts drop down to his toes. Bellowing Shepard’s name into the comm even as he wrenched the ship into a wild and completely hopeless evasive maneuver. The heart-stopping impact that had shredded the Normandy’s shields. And the next, that had torn through her hull with a sound as horrifying as a Reaper’s scream. The wash of red that had lit up his console even as several feeds had fizzled into static. The upper third of Engineering was gone. Gravity on deck two was flickering in and out. Oxygen levels compromised. Hull integrity compromised. Radiation spiking. Fires all along the third deck. And the tiny, heart-stopping blips of two more incoming barrages.

The Normandy was lost.

And it had taken less than two minutes.

Escape pod five deployed. Escape pod four deployed.

A third impact straight to Normandy’s heart. The death rattle of splintering steel and the strange pop of electrical fires bursting into the vacuum of space. Screams. Audible above even the din of the Normandy’s alarms; someone was screaming.

Escape pod two deployed.

And Shepard, cursing, hair slick-stuck to her face through her visor. Pulling Joker bodily from his chair, clapping an emergency ventilator over his face, and dragging him toward the last viable escape pod.

He remembers fighting her. Digging in his heels because he couldn’t — couldn’t walk away while the Normandy burned. It was so awful, and wrong, and undignified an end.

But he’d never been a match for Shepard in strength or in stubbornness. So she'd dragged him through the wreck of the Normandy, hallways dark with smoke and blinking lights, and bodies floating through them in slow motion like some terrible dream.

He'd laughed, he remembers. Nerves spilling over in the worst possible way. Good thing he can fly, he’d have made a terrible marine.

And then they’d reached the escape pod. Shepard had punched the button on the hatch, and the doors slid open. Built for twenty, the rounded dome of space inside seemed unnecessarily large. She’d pitched him in without ceremony, and hung back while he strapped himself into the narrow semi-padded seat.

Three seconds. Four?

Her face was turned away, hair loose and unruly inside her helmet. Like flames trapped in a bottle.

In that moment she had never been more beautiful.

And then something on the Normandy had blown up behind her, shoving her roughly into the doorframe of the escape pod.

The emergency lighting died abruptly.

Still, enough fire to see by.

A brief, horrid moment when their eyes locked.

Shepard’s silhouette, frozen. Wreathed in smoke and red and blue flames.

I’m sorry.

He couldn’t hear her, but he could see her lips move, see her punch the hatch again.

Then the door slid shut between them.

The sound of the locks releasing was the sound of his own heart breaking. He could hear it above the din of his own screams. Above the roar of the boosters beneath the escape pod. Above the concussive blast of the last salvo, as what was left of the Normandy exploded.

Thirteen minutes.

He remembers thirteen of the worst minutes of his life. Alone in the escape pod as it hurtled towards Alchera. Screaming for Shepard so hard he’d nearly thrown up all over himself. The constant jostle of descent and the impact of the landing were only half-dampened by the internal shocks of the escape pod.

He’d passed out after about three minutes planetside.

That part was nice.

The rest of Alchera was wrapped in cotton wool. No one else who escaped had been injured, bar some superficial burns and abrasions. And all of the pods that had launched had reached the surface without incident, so Joker had Chakwas’ entire emergency stash of painkillers all to himself.

(Yay.)

He doesn’t remember what the days between the crash and the rescue were like –– when rations were sparse and hope, even sparser. He just remembers waking up in some Alliance hospital on the Citadel to the glare of harsh overhead lighting, and the sharp smell of chemical disinfectants in his nose, and an entire galaxy in mourning.

Shepard was on every screen and omni-tool in sight, in every whispered conversation. Her name rippled across the hospital ward, caught in an endless current of shock and speculation.

He wishes he had never left the Normandy. He wishes he had never thought to try and stay. 

In his dreams, he grabs Shepard, pulls her into the escape pod, and never lets go. In his nightmares… it ends differently, but not much worse than what actually happened. Shepard dies. Shepard always dies.

But none of it matters because when he wakes, Shepard is still dead.

***

All in all, Joker isn’t sure what hurts worse. The way Kaidan’s entire body is so heavy with grief that he rarely sits up straight anymore, or the way Kaidan looks at him. Not like a murderer. Not like the impetus of all this disaster. Not like the one who should abso-fucking-lutely have been left behind to die; to freeze or burn or get spat out into the silence of the stars.

Kaidan looks at Joker like he’s glad he’s still alive. And fuck him. Honestly. 

Of the myriad of things Joker’s ever wanted from Kaidan, forgiveness isn’t one of them.

He’d rather have rage. Hate. Abuse, even. But there isn’t a mean bone in Kaidan’s body, which is suddenly, irrationally, unfair. And for one bright moment he thinks if it had been reversed, Shepard would have yelled at him at least once for being so goddamn in love with a ship that he had to look around, had to say good-bye, had to waste those precious seconds like the fucking idiot he is. 

But the Normandy was made of mortal stuff. It was Shepard who was indestructible. Shepard who could walk through fire. Shepard who could badass her way out of any situation. Shepard who thought Joker’s life was worth more than the risk of taking two more steps to save them both.

So he’s angry at Kaidan because he can’t be angry at Shepard. 

And he’s even more angry at Kaidan because Kaidan doesn’t even have the decency to be angry back.

So in the wake of the attack on the Normandy, Joker had avoided him. He didn’t have to try very hard –– there were medical panels and PT, and a thousand debriefs, and then a thousand more when the brass realized he was the last person who had seen Commander Shepard alive, and he couldn’t explain why she hadn’t walked forward half a foot and then shut the escape pod hatch. 

He never told anyone about that last I’m sorry. It was too personal. The only moment he shared with Shepard that belonged to him alone, and he wasn’t about to give it to the Alliance for a panel of specialists and psychiatrists to pick apart. Fuck, no.

And so a month later all of the Normandy’s Alliance crew had been cleared for active duty, except Joker. Still under medical observation. Two words that meant he was grounded. Two words that really meant fuck you, you don’t deserve a ship.

And so the first time he sees Kaidan –– really sees him –– is the day of Shepard’s funeral. 

And Kaidan looks so...

He lists.

Like a ship with a fatal hull breach, leaking air and eezo in equal parts.

He hurts to look at, so Joker keeps his eyes on his own shoes for much of the ceremony.

There’s an Alliance chaplain of sorts, saying things that don’t make any sort of sense. Words like calm and rest could never apply to the Commander. Shepard was all passion and strength and mule-headed courage. She was light. She was chaos. 

She wasn’t…

(supposed to die)

…this.

The coffin upon the altar is open, but there is nothing inside. Or not nothing, but no Shepard; just a truly spectacular arrangement of white flowers. Some are recognizably from Earth. Others aren’t. A few glow, dappling the inside of the coffin with the light of tiny stars. 

It’s…

(wrong)

… pretty, he supposes. The way mortals mourn a God.

Lacking a body to bury they’d all been asked to leave a token. The Normandy had been Shepard’s home. The crew, her family. 

Garrus leaves a brand new Black Widow sniper rifle, modded to the hilt.

Dr Chakwas leaves an ice blue bottle of what looks to be very expensive brandy and a single crystal glass.

Wrex leaves a headbutt that splinters the outer shell of the coffin a little and sends the Alliance aide in charge of the ceremony into a full-blown panic, stalling the funeral for a good half-hour.

Kaidan…

Joker doesn’t see what Kaidan leaves.

When the time comes, he can’t bear to look.

But he hears Liara say “Oh, Kaidan,” in a voice so small and heartbroken that Joker’s eyes grow thick with tears and he can’t see what the rest of the crew leaves either. He keeps his head bent and his attention on the tiny drops that fall from his eyes onto the tips of his shoes. He floats safely for a little while in that liminal space between reality and grief, where everything is fuzzy and gray and empty.

Then someone –– Tali?–– rests a hand on his shoulder, urging him forward.

Oh.

It’s his turn.

Oh no.

Joker has no memories of Shepard that aren’t stamped across his heart. Nothing. They didn’t share anything tangible that he could hold onto. Just cockpit conversations and evacs and the rare blessing of her smile.

And once, an apology.

And now all he has to leave is a note. Just one word. A shakey, heartbeat of a scrawl crumpled in his fist.

Forgiven.

But he doesn’t want to forgive Shepard for dying. He doesn’t. And even if he did, he can’t grant absolution to an empty box. To a pile of things that weren’t even hers. His hand shakes. He keeps seeing it: tangled red hair, and fire, and Shepard’s lips moving on a pair of words he’d never heard her utter in her life.

I’m sorry.

He can’t move forward, and he can’t move back.

Who is he to withhold forgiveness? 

A fucking coward, that’s who.

He got her killed in the first place. And then she did the impossible — she died. Now neither of them deserves forgiveness.

He staggers back a step, and then another, breath all stopped up with a sob. And then he can’t see through the tears, can’t hear above the sound of himself losing a grip on his pathetic guilt, can’t think — and very much doesn't want to. But he feels his body moving, and the lancing strike of grief and panic as he turns and shoulders past his former shipmates.

Sounds blur. The lights of the citadel streak past like stars. But it isn’t until he’s back in his apartment that his brain processes the feel of a hand sliding against his own –– a broad sturdy touch, clammy with sweat and sorrow. Someone had tried to pull him back to himself.

Maybe it was Shepard’s ghost.

***

Time passing on the ground is nothing at all like time passing in space.

It’s lonelier for one thing. Everyone assumes space is lonely because it’s so damn big and so damn empty. But as if to compensate, the world of a ship is always so utterly full. There’s always noise and lights and screens dotted with information and alerts. The haptic feedback of it all; tiny thrums of vibration beneath his fingertips; the give and take of all the switches and buttons, not smooth, but stippled with tiny bumps and ridges so he can mark his place even in the pitch dark.

A ship breathes. The movements of her crew  — always wedged shoulder to shoulder even when they don’t actually touch — flow like a fully functioning circulatory system, like something alive. The steady rhythm of the Normandy always matching his own. Like the ship paced itself to his heartbeat. Like it would do that for him.

No other ship had felt quite like she did.

Here it’s just… silent. Hours and hours of nothing at all. Nothing to keep his hands busy, or his mind busy, or to soothe the sensation of being dragged through an endless hallway filled with smoke and fire and weightless bodies.

He’s given up the monotony of flipping through his datapad, blankly looking at random crap on the net. The Alliance is still blocking him from active-duty information (the pricks), and all anyone seems to be talking about is Shepard’s death — aggravating because his mind always fills in the little details that no one else knows.

Red and blue fire.

A tangle of sweat-soaked hair.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

“Fuck,” Joker scrubs a hand over eyes that sting with the memory of smoke. “Fuck, fuck.”

Still. Being inside his apartment is slightly better than being out of it. At least he can wallow without feeling judged. After a couple of weeks, he stops eating very much because it’s more bother than it’s worth. And he stops showering very much because, same.

And then he stops taking his meds. 

Not like, all of them. Just the ones that make him dream with perfect clarity. Because he doesn’t dream of Shepard or Kaidan anymore, or rather he does, but not in a sexy nut-in-your-pants kind of way. He dreams about how Shepard died. Sometimes he dreams of getting lost in an endless hallway filled with fire and death, sometimes it’s the escape pod and the look on Shepard’s face when she slammed the hatch shut between them. Sometimes it’s the aftermath, watching her run out of air, freeze to death, or just drift forever in the cold and dark and he wakes up, retching over the side of his bed because the absolute last thing he wants to experience in fucking high-definition is Shepard's slow and painful death.

So yeah, he doesn’t take those meds.

It doesn’t make the nightmares stop, because the nightmares never stop. But it makes them bearable. If he still watches Shepard die every other night at least it's through the foggy surrealness of normal dreams. Awful, but not soul-shattering.

So he trades emotional pain, for physical; the return of that rusty awfulness in his joints, and he spends an hour each morning aching and running his hands under hot water to make it stop. But it doesn't matter. What the fuck does he need good hands for if he isn’t flying a ship?

He doesn’t tell Dr Chakwas that his pain is worse, even when she asks point blank. Instead, he answers every one of her messages promptly and in as chipper a tone as he can manage in case the Alliance has finally decided it wants its most brilliant pilot back.

(They don’t.)

He knows Dr Chakwas is pushing for him to be released from medical observation, but since it really isn’t medical observation he doesn’t have much hope.

He flips his datapad on again, then off.

Then he flips it on again.

And he wonders if this is all that he'll have, for the rest of his life.

Chapter Text

Joker is drunk. And dead asleep.

Or, not asleep anymore.

The call comes in on his datapad, and he answers out of pure reflex, even though he’s off duty and it’s the absolute middle of the night. But because it’s the absolute middle of the night, and Joker is still drunk and very recently dead asleep, he doesn’t actually see who the call is from until he’s already approved the connection. 

Lt. K. Alenko.

Joker blinks at the name on his datapad, watching the little pulsing icon showing that the call is still active. He sits in awkward silence for a full thirty seconds trying to think of what to say before he settles on: “Hey.”

“Hey.” There’s pain threading through Kaidan’s voice. Not just grief, but pain, rough-edged and oddly reassuring in its familiarity.

“Headache?” Joker asks automatically, sitting up. Thankfully, his own brain doesn’t slosh around too much. He thinks the room spins a little, but it’s hard to tell in the dark.

Silence.

Joker can nearly hear Kaidan grinding his teeth.

“Yeah,” Kaidan concedes with a shaky breath. “I just thought… I wanted… I know we haven’t—” There’s a grunt of frustration, and Kaidan falls silent again, thinking a thousand thoughts a minute. It’s a wonder his head doesn’t explode.

And suddenly Joker wants things to be as they were between them. Wants that tiny sliver of normalcy back. Wants it so badly the bones of his ribs ache with it. “Just… Just say it, Kaidan.”

Silence.

“Kaidan…” 

Silence.

A long, long moment of silence. And then, “I’m sorry to bug you again.” Kaidan’s voice is soft and strangely formal.

“Bet you say that to all the girls.” Joker deadpans and then has to blink back the most embarrassing prickle of tears, because dammit he misses it all so much. Shepard. Kaidan. The tiny space of Normandy’s cockpit that was entirely his. Those few hours a week when Kaidan would come shuffling into his space. Shepard too, though her visits were more sporadic — sometimes coming to rant about the council, sometimes to consult over starcharts, sometimes with seemingly no agenda at all, but the desire to talk to him.

He ducks his head to hide his tears— rather more than a prickle, they slide down his cheeks — though he’s alone and there’s no one to see anyway.

They don’t talk much. Either the headache is leaning towards migraine and Kaidan’s in too much pain to speak, or maybe speaking itself is just too much. But Joker can hear him breathing on the other end of the call, wet and heavy and there.

So yeah. They are both crying alone in the dark. Or not alone, but just… separate. And it hurts, and it’s better. For once the loneliness of grief doesn’t threaten to swallow him whole. It just… hurts.

Joker falls asleep at some point to that heavy, sob-punctured quiet. To Kaidan’s sturdy presence lingering at the end of the line.

It’s the best sleep he’s had since Shepard died.

***

It’s about the fifth of these midnight calls when Kaidan finally asks Joker if he's still on the Citadel.

"Yeah," Joker says, surprised because he hadn't even thought to wonder where Kaidan might be, and longing hits him all at once like a broken rib. "Do you want to come over to my place tonight," he blurts before his brain can catch up with his mouth. Fuck. "I mean, um.. . Are you? Also. On the. On the Citadel?"

"I am," Kaidan sounds a little breathless. "And, yes."

"Okay,” Joker sends his address over with a few hasty taps of his datapad before he can talk himself out of it. It's not like a date or anything. It’s not like it’s anything anything. It's just–– 

"Be over in twenty," Kaidan says.

The line disconnects. 

“Oh shit.”

Joker sits with a funny, nervous sort of warmth in his belly for a full ten minutes before he actually thinks to look at the state of his apartment. Then he has a minor panic attack because depressed bachelor is one thing, and depressed bachelor who lives in an apartment carpeted with dirty underwear and should not be entrusted with an F-class Alliance warship, is another. So he scrambles frantically around the tiny apartment, trying to make it appear as if a well-adjusted adult lives there; shoving random detritus into the closet and wiping down all the newly exposed surfaces with an old towel.

He’s hastily donning a clean  — well, clean er — shirt when the doorbell rings.

"Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Alliance Marines,” the security system intones.

He’s a full three minutes early.

Overachiever.

"Fuck," Joker kicks the last armload of stuff under the bed, lurches towards the front door, and tugs it open.

 Kaidan blinks in surprise.

"Hi,” Joker says.

“Hi,” Kaidan says back.

They stare at each other blankly.

A minute passes.

It is awkward as fuck.

Was this supposed to be a good idea?

It isn’t a good idea.

"You look terrible," Joker blurts, filling the silence –– as usual –– with the sound of his own voice. And it’s a lie. Kaidan looks like he hasn't been sleeping, like, at all. But he's still Kaidan, so even unshaven and ill-groomed and in an old t-shirt with honest-to-God holes on the tops of the shoulders, he still looks fantastic.

"You, uh..." Kaidan points warily at Joker's bare head.

And, shit oh shit. Hat. Hat.

He keeps a row of them on pegs near the door and slaps the closest one on his head.

"Your hair…" Kaidan says.

"Yeah, I know, I know." Joker tugs his hat down self-consciously and hunches his shoulders as he turns and makes a beeline for the quarter-sized fridge in what passes for a kitchen. "You want anything? I have—” he yanks open the door. "A beer."

A beer.

One.

Singular.

Off-brand Asari beer.

And half of a stick of old butter.

And an unmarked container filled with leftovers that are probably on the brink of gaining sentience.

And an unnecessarily large bottle of lube.

And that's it.

Fuck.

(Well, clearly no fuck considering how much lube is still in the bottle.)

"Beer?" He croaks, feeling Kaidan come up behind him.

Kaidan agrees and Joker is more than happy to have something to do for the few minutes it takes to get the beer open and split it into two glasses. He's not a huge drinker himself —at least not usually— it messes with his meds, and whatever oblivion being drunk offers, it’s rarely worth Dr Chakwas' wrath.

He hands Kaidan a glass. The beer is more lilac than amber-gold, like the ones from Earth, but Kaidan doesn’t seem particularly bothered and takes a healthy sip. Joker does too which at once feels like a poor life choice.

The beer is old, and flat, and sad.

They are drinking sad beer together.

Sad, purple beer with little sparkles in it.

“Fuck,” Joker mutters, hoping the second sip will be better.

It isn’t.

Kaidan doesn’t comment, just keeps his gaze on Joker over the rim of the glass as he drinks. And then all at once his eyes crinkle up and he bursts into a sputtery sort of laugh.

The tension in the room evaporates in an instant.

Joker cracks a smile, something he was sure he’d forgotten how to do. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Pretty awful.”

“Damn.” Joker gathers the glasses and pours them down the sink. “Sorry.”

Kaidan smiles a little, strained but genuine. “I haven’t laughed in... uh…” His expression clouds and he rubs his hand through his hair. “Well, it’s been a bit. Thanks for letting me come over.”

“Yeah.” Joker mumbles and falls silent, wondering if he ought to offer Kaidan the stick of butter or just apologize for being instrumental in the death of his girlfriend.

Or maybe just offer condolences like a normal, grounded person.

Like, I’m sorry about Shepard. About Shepard being dead, not about me killing her. Not that I’m not sorry I killed her. I am. Sorry I killed her. You loved her. And I secretly loved her too . But just— My general, non-specific, yet no less heartfelt condolences.

Oh god. The conversation is terrible even in his own head. He can’t say any of that shit. Maybe he needs to go the butter route after all because it’s been a really long time since anyone has spoken and the silence is grating and awful and it’s starting to make his palms sweat.

For a moment Joker finds himself half-wishing that Kaidan would be struck with a spontaneous migraine because at least that’s familiar and — respectively — easier to deal with than actually socializing.

Kaidan makes a sudden sound, almost a laugh but it’s humorless and rather flat. “I might be better at this if I had a headache.”

“That’s –– no. Why would you want that? I wouldn’t want that. Only an asshole would. Not me.” Joker clears his throat. “Um… butter?” He gestures towards the fridge.

Kaidan smiles again, a little ruefully. “No. Thanks. I… I should probably go,” he starts to drift towards the door.

“I’ll make sure to have better beer next time. And maybe like, bread. For the butter.”

Kaidan halts, wide shoulders spanning the doorframe.

“Maybe I’ll just throw the butter out,” Joker says hurriedly.

“Ok,” Kaidan says. “Uh. Tomorrow then?”

Joker feels his expression slide off his face in pure shock. “Tomorrow? Here?” He blinks, “Um yeah. Yes. Alright, yeah.”

“It’s a…” Kaidan falters momentarily, and Joker’s heart does a full-blown somersault as his mind screams the word DATE at him in big sparkling letters. “Tomorrow,” Kaidan says softly, running a hand through his hair. “Thanks again for letting me come over, Joker. And uh...” His smile pulls a little wider as his eyes flit upwards. “Nice hat.”

Oh shit.

Joker grins and waves, but the instant the door shuts behind Kaidan, he lurches toward the bathroom mirror.

He’s wearing his dumbest hat. A dumb-as-absolute-fuck gag gift from some of his old flight school buddies after he received his first posting to his first ship. It’s an electric shade of purple with a giant, faded patch on the front for a place called Nessa’s, featuring a topless Asari balancing two mugs of beer on her comically large breasts, and the promise of the biggest jugs in the galaxy stitched in cursive along the bottom. 

Awesome.

Because you know what everyone always says about Kaidan Alenko? Big fan of the Asari titty bar.

Joker covers his eyes in despair.

***

The next morning Joker showers, and springs for some decent beer. At least he hopes it’s decent. It’s well-rated and beer-colored, and he can actually pronounce its name — which is the most important feature of any beer, in his opinion.

He buys some food too; enough of it so that if he gets stuck he can just start offering Kaidan stuff off the list, and that should probably get him through however long this visit is going to be.

And then he showers again because he’s all nervous and sweaty, and checks three times to make sure that he’s wearing a titty-less hat. (He is. This one’s a sober sort of grey with a small Carnifax logo done in holographic thread.) And when Kaidan finally gets there — early by four minutes this time — his eyes still flit to Joker’s hat, and his mouth pulls into a soft sort of smile that might qualify as a smirk if it were bigger.

That single smile from Kaidan already makes all the stress and hassle of everything worth it, even if it makes Joker’s heart pound out of his chest.

They sit on the floor of his apartment because Joker doesn’t really have furniture. And maybe it’s still awkward, and the conversation still drops now and then, but Kaidan doesn’t seem to mind.

And it’s… nice. Somehow.

The conversation stutters along until it’s easy again. They both are out of practice, but after a bit, they unwind and fall into old habits. The beer helps. And for a while, they might easily have been back in a time and place where everything makes sense again. Kaidan smiles. Joker laughs. They lose enough track of time that it gets dark, and the window — really just a holoscreen, and not an actual window at all — shifts slowly to the deep blues and purple greys of night.

***

Joker lives in two worlds now. The one filled with smoke and silent apologies and the sound of his own screams stretching on to forever; and the other one. The one where Kaidan is in his life, warm and worn-out, and just there.

They’ve learned what they can and can’t talk about. The Normandy is out. The Alliance is out. The Reapers are out. Galactic politics are out. Almost every single one of their shared experiences are out. So they talk about small things instead. Stupid things. Like the perfect spice level at the Zakera Ward ramen stand, or poker hands they didn’t win –– which for Kaidan seems to be every hand he’s ever played. 

Today it’s Kaidan’s unmitigated horror that Joker has never seen snow. “Never,” he gapes, “As in never ever?”

“I proudly self-identify as an indoor kind of guy. Weather is severely overrated.”

“But you’ve been planetside before, right?”

“I mean… not on purpose,” Joker wrinkles his nose. “My Dad took me to visit Earth a couple of times when I was young and my sister was super young. It wasn’t snowing, but it was raining. That was weird enough. Wet from the sky. Like a damn shower. Don’t think I’ll ever get used to weather that doesn’t even have the common decency to be predictable.”

“You’re mad at the rain because it wasn’t predictable enough for you,” Kaidan smiles.

“Nah. I mean, yeah. A little. I’m mostly mad because the wind blew my hat off. I can hold a decades-long grudge against the wind.”

Kaidan tips his head back and laughs, full-throated and unrestrained, the sound breaking through the clouds that have settled over Joker’s heart. It’s a disorienting sound. Unfamiliar and familiar all at once. A sound from a better time, from back when the world made sense, and Joker doesn’t think at all, he just tips forward and kisses Kaidan full on the lips.

It’s a small thing, as kisses go, only a few heartbeats long. Kaidan exhales a breath and all at once Joker comes to his damn senses and jerks back so fast there’s a jolt of pain in his ribs.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Shit.” Joker throws his hands up in a pantomime of startled surrender.

It’s too dark to see Kaidan’s expression, just the gleam of eyes gone perfectly round and wide.

Fuck. Fuck.

Joker gulps. “I didn’t— I’m so sorry. I—”

Longing evaporates into panic.

Shepard’s only been dead three months, and this is –– oh God, his friendship with Kaidan is the absolute last thing Joker has left to him that matters. And now he’s ruined it.

No more Kaidan. No more Shepard. No more Normandy. The Alliance barely wants to employ the guy that got Commander Shepard, first human Spectre and Savior of the Citadel killed, much less give him a ship to fly. He’s the common denominator here. He’s the reason it’s all in shambles. Panic twists into grief, and he backs away from the wreckage of his life, shaking.

But Kaidan reaches for him, gets his hands around each side of Joker’s face, and wordlessly pulls him back into another kiss.

What.

What?

It’s not a little kiss this time. It’s a big kiss.

Never in his life has Joker been kissed like this; all intensity and fast-devouring heat. No hesitancy. No gentle exploration. Just two people crashing together with the suddenness of a thunderclap.

Kaidan presses him down to the floor, tucking Joker beneath him, limbs braced to support the bulk of his body weight. A knee slots between Joker’s leg. This close he can feel Kaidan’s hard length between them, and his head spins as all the blood in his body makes an abrupt beeline to his dick.

Kaidan angles Joker’s head to deepen the kiss, tongue hot and tasting sharply bitter from the beer. And Joker makes a broken sound and loses himself entirely to the heat of Kaidan’s mouth, and the weight of Kaidan pressed against him.

It’s desperate. Inelegant. Sobs stopped up in chests. Broken noises. Teeth that clack together. Hips that grind together. And then Joker feels like he’s falling through the floor when Kaidan slips a hand beneath Joker’s shirt, fingertips drifting through the line of thicker hair between his navel and the waistband of his pants. His belly clenches, muscles drawing taunt. 

Joker pulls back a little, breathing hard. "Kaidan, wait wait. What is this,” Joker asks. “What are we doing?"

Kaidan brushes at the tears still on Joker’s cheeks with his thumbs. He bites his lower lip, briefly. “Coping,” he says raggedly.

“Okay,” Joker breathes shakily between kisses. “Okay. Okay. Yeah. I can do that.”

Kaidan’s fingers skim below the waistband of Joker’s pants, touch light, but not hesitant. "Please don't hate me tomorrow."

And Joker means to laugh at the impossibility of such a thing, but the sight of Kaidan working Joker’s pants open one-handed is just about the hottest thing Joker’s ever seen, and he legitimately forgets how breathing should work.

“Don’t hate me either,” Joker manages after a moment.

And Kaidan does laugh, a short burst of strained breath. “I won’t. I promise," he pulls one of Joker’s hands up to the bludge at the front of his own trousers.

Joker’s hands tremble as he starts to work open the fastenings on Kaidan’s pants — old-fashioned buttons, damnit, not the zero-g zipper that you can simply tug apart. It’s a matter of dexterity, and though Joker has no trouble with fine motor skills, the shape of Kaidan’s plumping cock beneath his fingers is super duper distractingly big-dick shaped.

He probably comes fountains.  

And Joker’s struck by the realization that he’s probably going to get the chance to find out. And that’s…. That’s…  Something. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to ponder what it is right now. Instead, he grabs a handful of Kaidan’s cock, which isn’t entirely what he meant to do. Something about buttons, right?

Kaidan pushes him back down to the floor and Joker’s about to blurt out an apology, but all Kaidan does is use the sudden space between them to peel off his own shirt, one-handed.

Joker glimpses a scatter of dark chest hair, and abs for fucking days before Kaidan grabs him by the front of his shirt and yanks him back up for a kiss, another one, all tongue and scorchingly hot. He slides both hands slowly up Joker’s torso, beneath his shirt, fingers splayed as if to maximize contact with bare skin. One hand pauses, thumb playing with Joker’s nipple, making him break out in a shudder of goosebumps. It feels shockingly good.

Then Kaidan grabs up a handful of Joker's shirt and works it off him. On instinct alone, Joker reaches up to make sure his hat stays on. Kaidan stares down at him intently, eyes dark and a little unreadable.

“Joker…” Kaidan says his name, just once, but Joker can’t tell what he means. It’s not a question or a plea. But there’s weight behind it, impossibly heavy. 

Then Kaidan is kissing Joker again in a way that overwhelms his senses. Desperate. Hungry. And there's something unfair about it all. Joker should get the chance to properly enjoy those kisses, to sink into them and just float for a while in the feeling of something he’s wanted for forever. But it’s like pushing a ship into FTL, the moment when you feel the momentum pick up, and you know it’s too fast, and you know you can’t stop it, but the blur of the stars is too damn intoxicating.

And then Kaidan has his hand around Joker’s bare cock. And—

For a moment the world stills. The space between each heartbeat stretches.

Oh fuck.

Fuck yes.

Kaidan pumps him twice. A pair of long, slow tugs, fingers calloused, grip too firm — fucking perfect — just the way Joker has always imagined it. He takes a huge, shuddery breath, fingers splayed helplessly into the carpet, immediately overwhelmed. A slick of precome drips from his cock, silvery against Kaidan’s fingers.

It has been an embarrassingly long time since someone else has touched Joker like this. 

And then Kaidan moves up to his knees, carefully straddling Joker’s hips, and works open the buttons on his own pants — the ones that Joker couldn’t function enough to manage. Kaidan pulls his own cock free, and Joker gets the impression of a broad and gorgeously flushed tip peeking out behind a roll of foreskin. Kaidan doesn’t jerk himself off, instead, he presses their cocks together, Kaidan’s on top, and Joker’s below. And Joker can tell from the feel of him that Kaidan’s definitely hung. He swears brokenly through his teeth as Kaidan starts to stroke them, a little stiltedly at first, alternating between one hand and two.

(There’s too much meat in the dick sandwich.)

He laughs at that, a tight, breathless chuckle of nerves and sensation. 

Then Kaidan finds a pace that suites them both, each tug, sharp with friction and heat. It's good. So fucking good. A fire builds in the bowl of Joker’s pelvis, spilling over with a lick of flame that rides up his inner thighs. Kaidan’s hand is against him. Kaidan’s cock is against him. Joker moans brokenly as strong fingers catch on tender skin. 

“Good?” Kaidan asks, voice all husk.

Joker nods. He doesn’t have any words left in him. It’s all too much.

He tries to keep his eyes open, desperate to preserve every detail in his mind. A bead of sweat rolling down the side of Kaidan’s neck. The way he bites his lips, just a little, the sharp edge of white teeth. The clench of his forearms as he jacks them both at once. The slippery head of Kaidan’s cock disappearing beneath his strong fingers. The hungry, focused look in Kaidan's eyes. The sounds Kaidan makes, breathless moans and tiny grunts of pleasure. And then tears grow thick in Joker’s eyes, blurring everything. He blinks them away, feels them roll into his ears as he remembers — he only gets to have this because Shepard is dead. 

But then Kaidan starts kissing him again. Slow and deep. Tenderness breaking through the riot of intensity and heat.

And then Joker is begging. Soft little pleas that fall from his lips because a part of his brain is just mush, utterly lost in that syrupy-sharp ache of needing to come so so badly. The other part of him knows with cold certainty that there’s a non-zero chance that Kaidan will return to his senses and realize he's doing all of this with Joker, and just stop.

Please don’t stop.

Please.

Please.

But Kaidan doesn’t stop. His hand tightens suddenly, grip too hard, too demanding, and Joker loses control completely and goes careening over that edge, coming so hard his vision goes white at the edges. He makes a gutted noise as his legs lock up, back drawing into an arch. He tries to thrust up into Kaidan’s hand, but he doesn’t have the coordination, hips jerking to the side as much as up and down. Then a messy flood of heat across his belly as he comes — all over himself, all over Kaidan’s hand.

And Kaidan still doesn't stop.

The next handful of strokes are all slickness and overstimulation. Kaidan's palm twists over the head of Joker’s cock in a way that pulls a little broken moan from him each time. One of his legs starts to shake.

It’s too much.

Then Kaidan makes a noise like someone has torn his heart out at the roots — a low, growly moan, and his head tips back, body stiffening, all grace gone to him. He lets go of Joker's cock and then he’s spilling, hand moving furiously against himself. Several pulses of white heat stripe across Joker’s chest and belly. Kaidan’s hand keeps moving for a long while before it stops. Long smooth strokes from base to tip, each ending with another dribble of come. He manages to stay upright for a moment before tipping over next to Joker on the floor, chest heaving.

They're both silent, working to catch their breaths.

After several moments Kaidan turns towards Joker and gathers him close, with a long, satisfied sigh. He curls up against Joker’s back, one hand drifting absently through the mess of come on Joker's belly. There's a lot; drying, and slightly tacky, and making that evolution from hot to gross, but neither of them makes a move to get up. Instead, Kaidan scuffs his lips between Joker’s bare shoulder blades. A tiny, scratchy kiss.

A painful bump of Joker's heart.

He wants to turn and kiss Kaidan properly, but it suddenly seems much too personal. And this moment between them, too fragile to bear the weight of Joker’s affection. So instead he catches Kaidan’s trailing hand, and holds it tight against himself, feels the steady beat of Kaidan’s heart at his back, and for once in his life, he can’t think of a single thing to say.

Not a damn thing.

Chapter Text

Joker doesn’t hate Kaidan in the morning.

He wakes up first. Sticky in places, and hollow-bellied with hunger. And Kaidan is pressed up along his side, still half-naked –– and equally sticky –– and no, Joker doesn’t hate him the least little bit.

But he sort of wishes he did. Because it’s probably worse than that. A terrible bruise beneath his ribs where his heart lies, because coping isn’t a basis for anything of real meaning, and Joker is problematically head-over-heels for this man and has no idea what he’ll do if this was a one-time thing. 

Or worse, a one-time thing Kaidan deeply regrets.

Joker's had enough morning afters to know how quickly two people can sour on each other.

Or how quickly someone can sour on him.

He’s a lot, and he knows it. More snipe and sarcasm than anything else, only good for piloting military spaceships — not that he does that anymore — and too physically frail to be anything but a nuisance in a relationship. He didn’t have much to offer before, but now it’s just meds, and physical therapy, and little red flags in his service file, and a stupid Citadel apartment filled with cheap beer, dumb hats, and no furniture. So he stares up at the ceiling, too stressed and unsure to actually enjoy this thing he’s wanted forever.

There’s guilt there too , a hard little nodule of it caught under his lungs. This doesn’t belong to him. It’s Shepard who should be asleep in Kaidan’s arms right now, not Joker.

Ten minutes later Kaidan's eyes flutter open and he wakes with a jaw-cracking yawn, half rolling away from Joker before he stops himself, and rolls back. Joker makes a superhuman attempt to ignore the fact that Kaidan's cock is flush against his hip and that he’s hard.

They both are.

(Oh, mornings. )

“Sleep okay?” Joker asks after a moment.

Kaidan runs his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I did.” His voice is low and scratchy with sleep and laced with a warmth Joker isn’t used to.

“Good. Um. Everything... else okay?” Joker asks quietly.

Kaidan looks at him for a long long time before answering. “This wasn’t—  I don’t hate you if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t hate you either.”

The corner of Kaidan’s mouth quirks up in a tiny, lopsided smile. “No? That’s good.”

They fall quiet for a while, just looking at each other. Kaidan’s expression is tired but intensely focused. Joker can almost see the wheels in his head turning away. A little frown appears between Kaidan’s brows and he rubs his thumb between them to ease his troubled expression, before realizing that his hand is probably still covered in dried come.

Most of him is covered in dried come, actually.

“Sorry,” Joker says, pulling back with a grimace. “Uh. Sorry. I think I need to shower.”

“Me too,” Kaidan says. That tiny, lopsided smile is back. “Want to shower together?”

Oh fuck.

Well. Morning wood has now become wood.

And it doesn’t help the state of Joker’s boner that Kaidan’s breathing has gone all husky, and the energy of the room has shifted sharply from mellow with sleep to that bright ozone-burn of arousal.

“Um, yeah…” Joker says, heart rate kicking up at an alarming rate. “My shower’s… um. Small. It’s small. And uh… back there.” He points a thumb back over his shoulder.

“Lead the way.”

“Okay.” Joker tries to smile, but it keeps collapsing with nervous energy.

There are a few awkward minutes as they disentangle themselves and get their pants back up enough so they can stand without tripping. And even so, Joker stumbles once or twice on the way to the bathroom, legs stiff the way they are in the mornings. Kaidan tucks a hand under his elbow to steady him. 

Joker rinses his hands in the shower as the water heats, casting glances behind him, half expecting Kaidan just to be gone. But he isn’t. He’s watching Joker — just watching. Eyes dark and a little bloodshot.

When the water warms Joker’s hands hover over the waistband of his own pants, hesitating. He exhales briefly, short and sharp.

Pants. Off. Don’t overthink it.

He shoves his pants down with one quick perfunctory motion and then has to step out of them in stilted, jerky movements. He can make a ten-ton spacecraft dance, but he can’t get out of his own pants with any semblance of grace. 

If Kaidan’s dissatisfied in any way, he doesn’t show it. His gaze sweeps down over Joker’s body, slow, and a little hard to read. Whatever it is, Joker is certain he’s not used to anyone looking at him like that. 

A beat of silence between them, filled by the patter of water against the shower tiles.

There’s none of that desperate, frenetic urgency of the night before. It’s different, somehow. 

Kaidan unbuttons his pants and slides them to the floor, kicking off each leg and stepping easily into the shower and beneath the spray. Water streams across his broad shoulders, pooling in the dip of his collarbone and sliding down a chest densely packed with the kind of muscle you just can’t build from the gym alone. Muscle from a man who can throw biotics with enough power to level a building.

Kaidan’s back arches in reflexive pleasure beneath the heated water, one hand braced against the tile, the other skimming through his hair, pushing wet curls out of his eyes. Joker lets his gaze roam slowly down the expanse of skin, faintly bronze and so heated the steam is curling off of him. The scatter of dark hair across Kaidan’s chest thickens abruptly below his navel, leading lower, where water sluices down the length of his––

God.

Joker’s breath catches in his throat.

Kaidan’s cock is exactly like the rest of him, (Canadian, ha!) bigger and better looking than is strictly necessary.

Like objectively, that’s a fantastic dick.

(The Reapers would probably spare humanity if they got a good look at Kaidan’s dick.)

Kaidan’s smile is a millimeter away from a smirk as he pulls Joker’s hand around him. 

It feels pretty awesome too , hard and silken in his palm. Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Alliance Marines, grade A cock.

Joker’s spank bank runneth over, truly .

He makes a strangled sound, grip tightening in reflex as water pours over his hand.

Kaidan smiles a little, eyes darting up to Joker’s hat. He raises those ludicrously full brows.

Fuck.

Joker tugs at the brim of his hat self-consciously. He knows how stupid it is. They’re both standing there in just their skin and Joker has Kaidain’s dick in his hand, and somehow this is the most embarrassing part of the entire morning.

Double fuck.

But Kaidan has already seen him without it. He pulls his hat off and chucks it towards the door, dick-free hand running across the stiff-short bristles of his hair. He keeps it a quarter inch long. Precisely beard-regulation length.

But where his beard is short and dark, the hair on his head is fucking piebald, spotted with large blotches of white hair on one side that had first started appearing when he turned seventeen. Poliosis was the clinical term for it. Dr Chakwas always said it was from the meds he took to manage his brittle bones, but he’s always felt it was just his crap genetics being crap.

Whatever the reason, Joker’s not a fan.

But Kaidan doesn’t comment on his hair, doesn’t even react. He just slings a hand around the back of his neck and pulls him carefully into the shower.

Joker gasps as the water hits him, hotter than expected. And then hotter still when Kaidan presses close, wet skin against wet skin, and kisses him — once on his jaw, another against the corner of his mouth, and the third, not really a kiss, just scuffing of his lips against Joker’s. Tender in a way that brings a prickle of tears to Joker’s eyes.

A gentle nip against his lower lip and Joker’s breath hitches. Kaidan deepens the kiss, tilting Joker’s chin up , kissing him carefully but thoroughly. Joker reaches for Kaidan’s shoulders, drawing him closer fingers splaying over warm skin, feeling muscle shift under his hands. Their cocks bump together. The angle shifts and Joker gets a mouthful of water. He swallows it away not wanting to break the kiss.

He’s gonna drown in the shower and he’s going to be delighted about it.

Kaidan pulls back a little, gasping. He reaches for the soap bottle and squirts a bit into his hand before running it up the center of Joker’s chest, trailing bubbles. “What do you want me to do to you?”

Fuuuuuck.

For all his fantasizing, Joker never really imagined what he might say in response to a question like that from Kaidan. It’s a disservice really , to Kaidan’s character, that his mind mostly skipped right over the logistics, and went straight to the steamy bits. But he knows what he wants.

“Everything. Fuck, everything.”

Kaidan grins and drips a generous amount of soap on the head of Joker's cock, slicking him up from tip to base in one quick twist of his palm. The sudden jolt of pleasure nearly short-circuits Joker’s entire nervous system. And Joker is going to die because big hands, and that’s a kink he can admit to. And it’s amazing. All of it. The rhythm Kaidan sets is insistent and so smooth and slippery from the soap, it’s just endless. Just a loop of sensation from the base of Joker’s cock to his tip and back down again.

Fucking amazing. 

Maybe a little too amazing.

“Kaidan.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs with that goddamned bedroom voice of his and keeps stroking.

Joker feels his balls tighten alarmingly. “ Wait wait Kaidan , I should tell you, nngh––”

“Yeah?” His voice is even huskier this time.

“I’m –– some of the meds… my meds.” Joker takes a breath and tries to retain enough brain function to keep speaking. “ God your hands. Um. Meds. Make me… I come—”

“Isn’t that the point,” Kaidan interrupts.

“ God, I hope so,” Joker makes a startled, strained sound. Half moan, half chuckle. His hips thrust up a little. “It’s just fast. Sometimes. Most times. Probably now.” Definitely now, he amends silently as little lightning bolts of pleasure start pinging through him, bright and sharp. “I come really fast. Just … you should know… just in case.”

Kaidan makes a pleased sound and presses an open-mouthed kiss against his neck that definitely doesn’t help matters. And he doesn't stop stroking him with those big fucking hands.

“Really really really fast,“ Joker amends, voice strained. He presses both hands against the tile of the shower stall, gasping, wishing he could last longer than thirty fucking seconds.

He thrusts up into Kaidan’s hand as his grip tightens, and Joker makes a slightly alarmed sound. There’s fast, and then there’s die-of-embarrassment-faster-than-light-fast. His hand drifts down to the base of his cock, digging in, trying to deny the inevitable , but Kaidan coaxes his hand away, insistent.

The feel of a soapy hand creeping over Joker’s hip and between his buttocks. Fingers swirl around his hole, before a single, thick digit slides inside. Joker’s breath shudders out of him. It’s a single finger, not too deep, more of a question than an intrusion. But the gentle stretch, the fullness of it makes every other sensation sharpen ruthlessly.

His nails bite into Kaidan’s skin. “Gonna... Kaidan… Gonna...Oh God— ”

Kaidan just doubles down, trying to milk it out of him. His finger presses deeper, thrusting in and out in tiny movements. “Trust me, Joker. I want you to come.”

Okay then.

Liquid heat spirals up through his core in a bolt of pleasure so bright his legs nearly buckle. He can feel Kaidan slide his finger deeper, feel himself clench down, helplessly. His breath falters, locking up in his chest. A blur of white stripes Kaidan’s thighs a moment before it’s washed away. Joker moans brokenly, tucking his face against Kaidan’s shoulder as he comes, toes curling into the slippery tiles.

Kaidan’s finger in his hole pumps a few times.

“You like that?” Kaidan husks.

He moans. It’s all fullness and heat and spikey over-sensitivity. “I love—” He shakes his head a little. Has to catch the I love you in his mouth, sink his teeth into it, and bite down hard, so it doesn’t slip free. “That. Yeah. I love that.”

“Perfect ,” Kaidan keeps stroking — long, slow pulls the full length of Joker’s cock that makes his stomach clench in jerks and spasms with each drag of his hand. His finger slides deep.

Never figured Kaidan would be quite so pushy in bed. But no complaints, fuck no.

“Turn around,” Kaidan says, voice tight with desire. 

Kaidan’s hands are gentle when they touch him, turn him, one sliding along Joker’s arm , the other at his hip. Joker braces both hands on the slick tiles of the shower stall.

The feel of Kaidan’s hard cock slotted against his buttocks is electrifying. It’s too close to things he’s fantasized about many, many times. And he feels breathless and achy in ways he can’t put into words as Kaidan runs his hands up and down Joker’s back. The steam wraps around them as Kaidan presses Joker forward, letting the wall support them both. 

But…

“Not… not today. Not here.” Kaidan murmurs, lips against the back of Joker’s neck. “I just want…”

And Joker doesn’t have the space to feel relieved, or disappointed. He just … feels. The thrust of Kaidan’s hips, seeking skin and sensation. All soaped up and slippery down the length of that gorgeous cock. A hand skims across Joker’s belly and across his chest.

It doesn’t take long, Kaidan rutting against him. The heavy breath in his ear starts to fray, and then falter. He feels Kaidan grunt, buck hard against him, and then go still. Feels a sudden pool of heat at the small of his back as Kaidan comes with a shattered groan. Feels the deadweight of Kaidan’s head against his shoulder, tipped forward like he’s just been headshot.

  Feels a stir of interest between his own legs.

Joker chuckles breathlessly.

Then he reaches his weekly allotment, and the water shifts abruptly to cold.

Kaidan gasps, swearing, and tries — not very successfully — to block the icy spray with his bulk.  

Joker laughs then , breathless and real , and pulls Kaidan closer as the cold water runs down between them, falling against heated skin. A balm after so much heat.

***

Kaidan makes them breakfast from an assortment of random things in Joker’s pantry, muttering darkly to himself about the lack of cutting boards and black pepper, and presses, but like French ones. He’s wearing an old green shirt of Joker’s and looks way, way better in it than Joker ever did. It’s criminal really , how effortlessly hot Kaidan can be. The shirt is a little small and a little thin, and the muscles of his shoulders and chest stand out.

Joker sits on a stool –– properly hatted –– watching Kaidan work, sipping hot coffee from a beer glass, and feeling something like that bubbly sensation of free fall you get sometimes from the g-forces of flight. He’s happy he realizes with a pang. What the fuck.

Kaidan slides a plate in front of him, and he gulps down a mouthful of coffee, burning his tongue.

They eat in an easy, companionable silence. Kaidan’s attention is fully devoted to working through the mountain of food on his plate and doesn’t notice the notification on his omnitool until it’s been pinging for a couple of minutes. 

He flicks through to the message. “Damn, I have to go,” Kaidan crams an entire piece of buttered toast into his mouth at an alarming speed. “They’re running drills today.”

Joker’s smile is probably closer to a grimace, but Kaidan doesn’t notice.

Drills are for active duty servicemen, not losers on forced medical leave. Joker hasn’t been allowed to be near a flight-sim or a gun range since he got back to the Citadel.

“I’m already late,” Kaidan says by way of apology , scrambling around to clean up the kitchen and find his boots where they’d been kicked to opposite ends of the living room.

He slings his jacket over one arm and rushes to the door, freezes at the threshold, and turns abruptly around . Kaidan hurries back to Joker and kisses him.

Joker exhales a surprised breath.

“Hey. I’ll be by later, okay,” Kaidan says.

“Yeah,” Joker’s smile is genuine this time, if a little rueful. “I’ll miss you.” He meant it teasingly but Kaidan leans in for a second kiss. This one lingers.

“It’s a date,” he says firmly and hurries out the door.

“Yeah… a date,” Joker says quietly to the empty apartment.

Chapter Text

The second time isn’t the last time, either.

Not even close.

In bed, Kaidan is all coiled intensity and unbelievably tactile. He almost never stops touching or kissing Joker, and like, absolutely no complaints. Zero complaints.

Kaidan finds bare skin, unerringly. Trails fingertips down the side of Joker’s neck or up his belly, the touch ticklish and arousing, even though he’s sure Kaidan doesn’t mean it to be. Sometimes the touches are pointed, and focused on turning Joker on, but other times they’re almost absentminded, as though Kaidan touches him because he likes it, and for no other reason.

Wild.

Most days, they take turns jerking each other off all over Joker’s apartment, and sometimes Kaidan gets extra handsy and presses slick fingers up inside Joker’s ass, thrusting with that careful, measured insistence until Joker comes so hard he sees stars.  

It never progresses beyond that. Since that time in the shower, Kaidan has never come so close to taking things further. Even once when he’d wrangled Joker out of his pants and maneuvered him down, chest to the bed and ass in the air, he’d only lain himself against Joker’s hips and thighs, rock-hard and panting. Then he’d slid off and made Joker come just like that, with his knees splayed, and his ass up, and that was still something even if it wasn't technically more.

And Joker wants more. He just doesn’t know how to ask for it.

So yeah. The coping is good. The coping is real good.

But it’s not like that every night.

Some nights, they can’t keep Shepard at bay, and Kaidan curls up in Joker’s arms, shaking with the force of his sobs. It’s ugly, the grief. Catches them unawares.

Some nights, Kaidan gets one of his headaches, and they spend their evening lying silently in the dark, in the narrow space of Joker’s bed. Kaidan lays his head across Joker’s chest, and Joker listens to the catch of Kaidan’s breath as it slowly, slowly steadies. His fingertips trace little random whorls across Kaidan’s temple until he falls asleep. And Joker curls himself around what they’ve shared, around the warm afterglow of Kaidan’s kisses, and Kaidan’s touch, and Kaidan, wrapped up, and sleeping in his arms.

It’s coping. Joker reminds himself firmly. It’s just coping. Kaidan just needs something to keep his mind off his misery.

But Joker is having a harder and harder time pretending this is just casual, meaningless sex. And when Kaidan is touching him, it’s nearly impossible not to spill his infatuation all over them both. He swallows a dozen I love yous so far back he can barely breathe, and the lie of it all grows sour on the back of his tongue. 

***

It’s bad news. He can tell at once from Dr Chakwas’ voice at the other end of the call. It’s too measured, too careful. 

“I’ve had a message from Alliance command,” she says. “They’re insisting on a full investigation into the events on Alchera. They want to be certain your escape pod was damaged prior to, or upon landing.” 

“Why would that matter?” Joker asks. He and Karin have kept up weekly calls since they returned to the Citadel and Joker was released from the hospital. Before Kaidan, she was the only person he ever got to speak to on a regular basis.

“You almost died. They want to determine if the injuries you sustained were avoidable, or…” Dr Chakwas trails off. Joker can imagine the tiny frown on her face perfectly. “Or, if you’ll be critically injured in any successful escape pod drop.”

Joker’s eyes narrow. “Tell them not to worry. I’m not getting into an escape pod ever again.”

“Jeff…”

“You know. Whatever, whatever. It’s just an excuse. It doesn’t matter. You know the Alliance doesn’t actually care about my ability to survive something like that again.”

“I agree,” Dr Chakwas says. “But pending the outcome of the investigation, they’ve upgraded the duration of your medical leave.”

Joker exhales through his nose. This isn’t the first time. The fuckers keep extending his leave. “How long this time?”

“I’ve already submitted a formal objection to dispute the—”

“How long?”

A pause on the line.

Joker feels a small spike of fear in his gut.

“Karin …”

“Indefinitely.”

Joker is glad it’s a call, so that Dr Chakwas doesn’t have to see the look on his face. “Indefinitely…Yeah. Okay.”

“They’ll continue to pay you your usual salary, Jeff. I insisted.”

“So they’re willing to pay me to do nothing, but they’re not willing to pay me to fly.” He tugs down on the brim of his cap in irritation. “Assholes. Well. Thanks for the update.”

“Jeff …”

“No, I mean it,” he says, voice softening. Since the moment they met, Karin Chakwas has had his back. “I know you’re pulling for me. I appreciate it. Really.”

Dr Chakwas is quiet for several beats before the conversation slides back into its usual shape. She asks him about his pain levels, and he lies, and she asks about his meds, and he lies even harder. She hesitates, but doesn’t press the matter, and he knows he’s not on his game today because lying to Dr Chakwas has become his new favorite hobby since Alchera, and he’s gotten pretty damn good at it.

When the call disconnects, Joker slides down to the floor next to his bed, feeling numb. Technically, nothing has changed for him. He wasn’t flying before. He isn’t flying now. The Alliance is mad at him for Shepard’s death, well, get in fucking line.

He doesn’t fall to pieces because his world is collapsing.

He doesn’t need to, because it’s already collapsed. 

***

That night, Kaidan asks to come over, and for a minute, Joker thinks of telling him not to. He’s been wallowing in self-pity all day and just knows he’s gonna be horrible company tonight. But it’s Kaidan, and Joker loves him, even if he’s secretly certain that one day he’s gonna walk away and break Joker’s heart.

So he says yes.

An hour later, the security system pings his arrival, and when Joker answers the door, he’s greeted by two bags overflowing with groceries. He scoots out of the way because he’s not about to save the burliest marine he’s ever known from whatever the hell is happening. 

“Tonight, I am making steak,” Kaidan announces happily and buffs a brief hello kiss onto Joker’s cheek in passing. “They were on sale, and you finally have a decent pan.”

“I’m confused,” Joker says.

“What? You said you like steak.”

“I do. I just don’t understand this. Delivery exists. Jesus, my arms hurt just looking at you.”

Kaidan just deposits the groceries on the counter and grins.

“That’s like two weeks of food,” Joker says, watching him unpack.

“It’ll be gone this weekend, trust me. The Alliance wanted to regrade my biotics today. All I want to do is eat my weight in mashed potatoes and get in your pants.”

It’s not enough. 

Once he had the stars. Now his world is a 600 square foot apartment with ugly carpet, no furniture, and one decent pan. And if he didn’t have Kaidan… He rubs a hand over the top of his hat. He needs to put his hands on a flight screen. All day, his hands have felt so empty.

“I want more,” Joker says quietly, surprising himself.

Kaidan pauses his rummaging to look up at Joker. For a split second, his typically measured gaze looks hungry. But then Joker blinks and it’s gone, replaced by the look he gets when he’s thinking hard. “More what?” he asks gently.

“Fuck.” Joker snags one of the potatoes in the act of rolling off the counter and tosses it back and forth between his hands a few times before setting it aside. “I dunno. I’m just being stupid today. It’s no big deal. Just… I’m fine, okay? Just forget about  it.”

Kaidan’s expression shifts into a true frown. “More what?”

More everything.

Joker shrugs one shoulder. “I love—” Don’t fucking say it. He sighs and closes his eyes for a moment, exhausted down to his very bones. “I love what we’re doing. It’s just… maybe it’s just today, or something. Fuck, I don’t know.” 

Kaidan reaches out and runs a hand up and down the center of Joker’s chest, looking worried. “What happened today?”

“Oh. Um… was hoping to get cleared today. Didn’t happen,” he says. Won’t ever happen, he doesn’t say, because he can’t bear to say those words out loud. “I mean, other than that, things are great. You’re great. This is great. It’s great.”

“Great…” The smile doesn’t quite reach Kaidan’s eyes. And then it does. “I think it’s great too,” he says very quietly and very seriously.

Despite himself, Joker feels a little flutter in his belly. Some little bubble of warmth amongst the nonsense he’s been feeling all day.

Kaidan runs his hand up and down Joker’s chest again. “The more that you want… it isn’t just flying, is it? It’s… us, too?”

“I can’t—I…” Joker drags a hand over the top of his hat and leaves it there, fingers digging into the curve of his skull. “It doesn’t seem right to complain about the best part of my life right now. You. Being with you.” He drops his hand and smiles at Kaidan. A real smile, even if it’s small and strained. “Mashed potatoes and pants-stuff sounds amazing. Seriously. I’m down. So down.” 

Kaidan’s eyes are serious. “It’s okay to want more from this,” he says. “From me.”

Joker does laugh then, a breathless, hopeless chuckle that’s a little wild around the edges because Kaidan has no fucking idea.

“So do you?” Kaidan takes a step closer. “Want more from me?”

No. fucking. idea.

The barest hesitation, and then Joker nods, keeping his head tipped down so the brim of his hat obscures his eyes. He exhales sharply through his nose, a swoopy feeling all in his gut, like too many g-forces all at once.

“Okay.” Kaidan breathes, and Joker risks a glance at him because it shouldn’t be that easy. Nothing has ever been that easy. “Okay,” Kaidan says again, voice certain, mouth kinked up into a soft smile. He sets his hands on Joker’s hips.

“It’s okay to not,” Joker blurts out. “Want more, I mean. From me. It’s okay if…” He looks back down at his feet. “If you––”

“Hey,” Kaidan cups Joker’s face, and raises it carefully for a kiss, brief but firm. “I’ve been trying to take it slow because I wasn’t sure what you wanted. It feels… This is all pretty new, and I want to get it right.”

Joker’s chest feels tight. “I… You’re getting everything right as far as I’m concerned.”

“Yeah?” A brief grin, bright as the sun, and Kaidan takes a step closer and wraps him up in an enormous hug. He’s solid against Joker and incredibly warm. Hot even, like he’s feverish. But it’s not that. Kaidan’s built up heat beneath his skin from all the biotics and needs to vent it out of his system.

Joker makes an inarticulate, but hopefully agreeable sound, and Kaidan chuckles and just holds him tighter. Minutes pass. And Joker lets out a long breath and feels some of that terrible uneasiness slowly, slowly, slowly settle.

“There we go,” Kaidan whispers huskily, not moving, not pulling back.

Joker closes his eyes. “Thank you,” he whispers.

“You don’t have to thank me.” Kaidan murmurs, dragging his mouth carefully against Joker’s neck, half kiss and half something that makes Joker’s knees unsteady. “Not for this. Not ever.” The muscles of Kaidan’s back bunch and shift as he runs a hand up and down Joker’s spine, tracing long loops across his shoulder blades. “God, you feel good like this.”

Nothing changes, but everything shifts. Joker digs his fingertips into the meat of Kaidan’s shoulders to anchor himself, feeling like he’s melting away in all that heat. He presses his hips more firmly against Kaidan, feeling squirmy and suddenly unsettled. Like all the tension he’d bled out is just racing back up the backs of his legs.

One of Kaidan’s hands slides firmly down Joker’s body and over the curve of his ass. It stays there, grip spanning an entire buttock.

Joker blows out an unsteady breath.

“Mmmm?” The noise Kaidan makes is deeply content and laced with heat. Joker can feel the curl of a smirk against his neck. His other hand drops down to Joker’s ass, pulling his hips closer. 

Joker’s breath catches a little, and then a lot as he feels how hard Kaidan is pressed against him. He raises his chin and kisses Kaidan, long and lingering, relishing the way Kaidan automatically deepens the kiss, mouth opening beneath his own. He’s kissed Kaidan like this about a hundred times now — enough to last a lifetime, and yet not enough at all. He makes a low, desperate sound in the back of his throat, and feels the way Kaidan’s hands tighten possessively on his ass in response.

It’s not the first time Joker’s noticed that Kaidan’s mood shifts whenever he leans too heavily on his biotics. Something about it burns away some of that measured restraint of his, and Kaidan gets this cocky swagger that Joker finds kinda irresistible, honestly.

“Hey, how about pants stuff first, and then mashed potatoes?” Joker breaks the kiss long enough to ask breathlessly.

Kaidan doesn’t bother answering; he just scoops Joker up, lifting him bodily off the floor, wrapping his legs around his hips, and carries him straight into the bedroom. And oh fuck.

Big fan of being manhandled by Kaidan, apparently. Who knew?

Kaidan deposits him on his back on the bed before peeling Joker out of his shirt, and then removing his own. It doesn’t matter how many times he’s seen Kaidan naked, or nearly so — his heart skips a beat every time. Joker reaches out and drags a hand across all that bronze skin and densely packed muscle. His thumb scuffs against one of Kaidan’s nipples, liking the way it draws taut as Kaidan arches against his touch, breath stuttering.

“No.” Kaidan grabs at Joker’s hand and pulls it away, planting a kiss against his palm to lessen any sting. He folds Joker’s arms carefully so Joker’s hands are behind his head, squeezing like he wants Joker to keep them there. “I want to touch you .”

Joker nods, eyes wide as Kaidan kisses his way down the inside of his arm, ticklish against his armpit. He drags his tongue across Joker’s chest and licks at his nipple before drawing the tight bud of it into his heated mouth. Joker jerks, and then moans as one of Kaidan’s hands returns to his wrists, crossed behind his head, and helps hold him steady. Kaidan sucks hard, moving from one nipple to the other, pinging little bursts of pleasure across Joker’s chest.

One of Kaidan’s hands moves between Joker’s legs, cupping his cock briefly beneath the thin fabric before working open the fastenings of his fly. Joker’s breath catches as he slips a hand inside. Kaidan’s palm feels incredibly, impossibly hot against sensitive skin, and Joker squirms a little, gasping, back arching off the bed. His cock springs out between them, bare and flushed and hard as steel.

Kaidan just tightens his grip.

And then, he drops down to his knees in front of Joker.

Is he?

No way, no way, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck––

“Let me?” Kaidan husks leaning closer.

Joker has no idea if it’s a question or not. But all he can manage is a single sound of need, breathy and raw and ragged with want, and Kaidan bends, and presses his lips against the very base of Joker’s cock. He looks up, eyes meeting Joker’s.

A strained burst of breath from Joker, raw and a little hysterical.

Kaidan Alenko’s mouth is on his cock.

Oh fuck.

Kaidan squeezes Joker’s trapped wrists, just once, before sliding both hands against Joker’s thighs, and begins to mouth his way carefully up Joker’s cock. The kisses are tiny, and teasing, and terribly arousing. Each time there’s that soft brush of that heated contact, a little, broken noise escapes Joker.

Pleasure hooks into his belly as Kaidan reaches the head of Joker’s cock. He scuffs his thumb over the tip and around the flared head, smearing the precome that’s already begun to leak out. Then Kaidan brings his slick and shiny thumb up to his mouth for a taste, skimming it deliberately across his tongue, which is hot hot hot, and seared into Joker’s brain for all of time.

And Joker has about two solid seconds to worry that Kaidan dislikes the taste of him before Kaidan leans forward and seals his lips around the tip of Joker’s cock, sucking firmly, tongue restless against the tiny slit. And oh fuck. Kaidan’s mouth is pure heat. Pure bliss. All the muscles in Joker’s belly go taut, and he makes a sharp-sounding groan.

It’s— a whole ‘nother level. Like this, Joker can’t even pretend they’re just helping each other masturbate away the grief and guilt. This. This is… Jesus fuck, this is heaven.

Just one more thing that Kaidan’s phenomenal at.

Kaidan takes more of Joker, sliding about halfway down, then up, then down again. He keeps a steady, sucking pressure as he bobs. His cock twitches in Kaidan’s mouth, and he dribbles a little more precome. He can already tell that it’s going to be the world’s shortest blowjob because there’s no way he can last. 

No fucking way.

Joker’s hands clench and unclench, wanting to tangle themselves in Kaidan’s hair. Wanting to thrust up into Kaidan’s mouth. Wanting. Just wanting. And then Kaidan takes more of Joker into his mouth, going slow, but deep, making an appreciative sort of noise that Joker can feel rumbling in his balls, as he slides all. the way. down.

Joker makes a wrecked sound, hips jerking, and grabs his own head to keep from reaching for Kaidan. The tips of his fingers ache.

Kaidan resumes bobbing, sliding down to the very base of Joker each time. All the way up, and all the way down, and—

“Kaidan. Kaidan, I’m gonna come,” Joker pants brokenly. “If you don’t want— You should… You should…”

Kaidan pulls off with a smirk. “It’s okay, I need the protein.” He says and swallows Joker’s cock down nearly to the base again.

“That’s—” fuck.

Joker spills and feels Kaidan swallow fully around his cock, before being swept away by an orgasm that’s like an undertow. It takes his legs out, drags him under, and he’s just helpless and shaking, unable to breathe or think, just feel; Kaidan, swallowing again, and again, and again, one hand clutched around the base of him to keep him steady, the other petting soothingly against his thigh.

It feels like fucking forever before that rush of sensation lets him free, and he gasps, dragging air into his lungs like a drowning man.

Kaidan just keeps going, maintaining that firm sucking pressure, still bobbing up and down, drawing out the pleasure of orgasm into something spiky with intensity. Joker moans, thrashing slightly as Kaidan holds his hips steady. It’s a straight-up signature move of Kaidan’s to keep going after he’s come, but it never gets any easier.

“Kaidan…” Joker’s hand flies to the back of Kaidan’s head, and then back up to his own again. He covers his face with his hands as that burn of pleasure sharpens into the unbearable intensity of over-stimulation. “K-Kaidan… God– –”

Kaidan takes one last long, torturous pull of his cock, sucking extra firmly before pulling off with a wet pop and a wide smile.

Joker gasps and shudders, going limp. That was all of 13 fucking seconds, and he’s completely wrecked. He doubts he could manage to stand, let alone walk. One of his legs is still shaking. 

“That… I was… Holy shit,” he gasps, breathing hard.

Kaidan rubs both of Joker’s thighs and grins. “Good?”

A laugh, so breathless it nearly fades away entirely. “Jesus, you have no idea.” Joker slings an arm over Kaidan’s neck and cranes up for a kiss. Kaidan makes a pleased sound, catching his jaw to kiss him back, deeper than before. Joker can taste himself in Kaidan’s mouth, all salt and a bitter earthiness. 

Kaidan stands, and Joker lifts a hand between his legs and finds Kaidan rock hard in his pants. He rubs down the length of Kaidan’s cock, tracing the shape of it.

“I think it’s my turn,” he says raggedly.

Kaidan watches, eyes dark and hungry, as Joker carefully works open the fastenings on his pants and pulls them down a bit. Kaidan’s cock springs out, almost smacking Joker square in the face. It looks huge from this angle, and so hard that the veins are standing out. It takes only the smallest tug for Kaidan’s foreskin to slide down, exposing the entire head of his cock. This close, Kaidan’s dick is a little intimidating. He chuckles breathlessly and loops his arms around Kaidan’s thighs, drawing him closer.

Kaidan lifts Joker’s chin gently. “You don’t… I don’t have any expectations,” Kaidan murmurs, voice all quiet husk.

“Yeah? Noted.” Joker breathes, thinking of all the times he’d imagined making Kaidan come with only his mouth. He parts his lips, and Kaidan slips a thumb inside, just a little, just enough to brush against Joker’s tongue.

Kaidan exhales hard, eyes fixed on Joker’s mouth.

Joker nips at him, teeth digging into the pad of his thumb, and Kaidan exhales harder, pressing his thumb a little deeper before pulling back.

Fuck.

Well, that boners gonna come back real quick.

Joker pulls Kaidan closer, until the tip of Kaidan’s cock brushes against his lips. He licks them reflexively, tasting salt, and something faint, and brightly ozone, almost… almost like lightning. Joker wonders if Kaidan’s biotics affect the flavor of his come, and licks at the tip for another taste before sucking the entire head into his mouth. 

Kaidan tips his head back, eyes half-closed in bliss, but he moans Joker’s name, and Joker’s eyes go wide because Kaidan isn’t imagining he’s being touched by someone else.

Joker’s grip tightens, possessive.

And Kaidan says his name again, breathy and soft, and his hips jerk a little, fucking himself into Joker’s mouth a little. A restless back and forth before he stills again.

“I want to see it in your mouth, Joker. Can I… Please?” Kaidan rests gentle fingers on the brim of Joker’s hat, waiting. When Joker nods, Kaidan doesn’t take it off, just spins his hat around, until the brim is facing backwards. “There. That’s so…” He traces the corners of Joker’s lips where they’re stretched around his cock.

Joker moans, mouth filling with the flavor of salt and lightning as Kaidan spills more precome. He pulls back so he can swallow without drooling, but keeps his lips pressed to the slick tip. Takes a full, clear breath before pressing himself back down, bobbing, taking a little more of Kaidan each time.

“How much can you fit?” Kaidan husks, his fingertips swirl on the top of Joker’s head, not pressing, but just there. 

Probably not all of it, he thinks. He’s out of practice for one thing. And for another, Kaidan is positively hung.

But goddamnit, he is going to try.

He takes a careful breath through his nose and slides down until Kaidan’s cock bumps against the back of his throat, gagging slightly at the sensation. He feels a thread of drool slide down his chin, but Kaidan whisks it away with his palm before cupping Joker’s jaw, holding him steady. Joker can feel all the coiled tension in Kaidan’s thighs, all that careful need. He makes a messy, broken sound, and Kaidan’s fingers tighten, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t press forward, just holds him in place, lightning on his tongue.

Joker covers the rest of what doesn’t easily fit with his hand, which feels like…a whole dicksworth of cock. He bobs a little, trying to swallow on the downstroke, trying to let Kaidan into his throat, but the angle is terrible, and he gags, and keeps gagging each time he tries.

(Maybe his hyper-realistic sex dreams weren’t so hyper-realistic after all. In his dreams, he always had no trouble deep throating Kaidan. He could just blow him for hours and swallow every drop, no problem.)

“Here… lean back,” Kaidan presses him down to the bed, hand moving over himself as he repositions Joker, and slides all the way out of his pants before clambering over him, keeping his weight carefully braced and off of Joker’s chest.

Joker pulls him closer until Kaidan’s directly above, and he can suck at Kaidan’s balls, feeling fragile skin against his lips and tongue. Kaidan jerks himself off as Joker laps at him, alternating between one ball and the other. He smells muskier here, but not unpleasantly. Something raw and real and deeply male. Joker takes a deep breath, ignoring the way his own cock twitches in response.

Then Kaidan shifts his hips. “Open,” he asks softly.

Joker opens his mouth and Kaidan guides his cock inside, tip slicker and saltier than before. He can tell at once that the angle is better, but like this, flat on his back, he can’t really bob or control anything; he just tries to breathe and swallow in rhythm as Kaidan slowly fucks into his mouth.

“I’m going to go a little deeper,” Kaidan says, hips flexing. He keeps the same, steady rhythm, but each thrust goes a bit deeper, right to the juncture of Joker’s throat, and then into it.

The angle is easier, but it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Kaidan’s cock is thick and long, and more than once it bottoms out past what Joker can take, and he gags messily. But Kaidan doesn’t seem to mind; he just backs up, breath unsteady. “Fuck that’s amazing…” Kaidan husks. “That’s perfect.” And Joker shivers, and wants Kaidan to go too deep again, if only for the way it wrecks his voice.

It gets easier after a while, he can better anticipate those deeper thrusts, and Joker starts to sink into the sensation of deepthroating Kaidan. He squirms a little on the bed, moaning around Kaidan’s cock.

“You’re hard,” Kaidan breathes, delighted.

Joker makes a sound that might have been a laugh if his mouth weren’t so full. There’s no way he wasn’t getting hard again, given everything.

“Touch yourself for me,” Kaidan says, voice rough.

He drops a hand to his cock. It’s fully hard, but over-sensitive, and slightly tacky. He tries a few experimental tugs, automatically settling into a pace that matches the thrust of Kaidan’s hips. He moans again because it’s all pretty fucking hot.

“Can you come again, do you think?” Kaidan asks.

And Joker makes a broken sound, part agreement, part dismay, because he totally can, and he knows it’s gonna feel amazing to come again, but also way too intense.

“Yeah,” Kaidan chuckles. “Try not to come until after I do.”

Joker does laugh at that, because he’s super duper bad at not coming, and then promptly gags, and then gags again as Kaidan picks up the pace. His own hand speeds up to match, the pleasure of it spiky and bright. And he realizes that if he keeps this up, he’ll have about thirty seconds before he blows his load.

His hand stills, gripping at the base of his cock, desperate.

“Not long now… Not long…” Kaidan mutters, still thrusting.

Distantly, Joker hears the sounds he’s making, overwhelmed and messy. He’s gagging more, losing coordination to the heat pooling in his gut, threatening to spill over and out of him. God, if he moves his hand even a little, he’s going to come.

And then Kaidan makes a deep, shattered sound, which officially becomes Joker’s favorite thing he’s ever heard. A thick flood of salt and Joker swallows, and keeps swallowing, even as Kaidan’s come spills down his chin.

When Kaidan pulls out, Joker takes a deep, strangled breath, hand still locked around his cock.

“Let go, Joker. Let go for me,” Kaidan pries his hand away and grips Joker’s cock, stroking firmly.

And then Kaidan is kissing him, deep and messy and tasting entirely of come, and Joker arches into his touch, overwrought. And the tension within him snaps with the suddenness of a thunderclap, and he’s coming hard, spilling over Kaidan’s fingers, the sensation sharp and hot fucking good.

Kaidan makes a pleased sound, and keeps going, and it’s instantly too much. Joker sobs into his mouth, arching away, and Kaidan squeezes tightly, one long, slow tug from base to tip that’s nothing but aching over-stimulation, wringing the last bit of come from him. And then, he lets go.

Joker collapses back onto the bed, gasping. Completely undone. He’s not sure how long they lie like that, side by side, basking in the afterglow of a pair of orgasms that have probably ruined him for life. Kaidan keeps kissing him, tenderly, slowly, interspersed between rubbing at his collarbones, his chest, and his belly, heedless of the mess.

“I need a shower,” Joker complains. “But if I move, I’ll die.”

The look on Kaidan’s face is too genuinely satisfied to be a smirk. “I’ll help you get cleaned up as soon as I get dinner started.”

“You super don’t have to. You can just lie here in a puddle, like me. We can do this for the rest of the night.”

“Can’t. My mashed potatoes are gonna blow your mind. Garlic. Whole grain mustard. Enough butter to drown in.”

“Yeah? Sounds amazing.” Joker cracks open an eye and closes it again. “But it’s gonna have to be pretty legendary to top that pants stuff. How confident are you in your potato game?”

Kaidan laughs and slides easily off the bed before bending to plant a single kiss against Joker’s sweaty brow. He reaches and spins Joker’s hat around until it’s back in its proper place. “Pretty damn confident.”

Chapter Text

"Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Alliance Marines,” the security system intones a moment before there’s a muffled knock on the door.

Joker glances at his datapad automatically, to make sure he hadn’t missed a ping from Kaidan. It’s–– he hadn’t expected to reach the stage of their relationship where they can show up on each other’s doorstep unannounced, because Kaidan is nothing if not straightforward. He'd set the boundaries, and this isn’t even a relationship; it’s just coping. And two people who cope together aren’t supposed to do this sort of thing.

Are they?

"Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Alliance Marines." The security system pings again even as Joker deactivates the lock, and the door slides open, letting in a spill of light and one very agitated marine.

“Hey—”

“I feel like I’m going crazy,” Kaidan grits out as he barrels into the apartment, eyes wild and bloodshot. “I keep— They put up a holo of Shepard right outside of my apartment. Big as the whole damn building. And it’s… it’s—” He turns into Joker’s arms, like he wants to collapse but doesn’t. He keeps his own weight braced away from Joker, though he rests his cheek against the crook of Joker’s neck.

And Joker isn’t surprised. The Alliance doesn’t waste anything that might be useful, not money or men or opportunities, and certainly not the memories of dead heroes.

And Shepard is the biggest goddamn dead hero in the galaxy.

But Kaidan is close to tears. He runs both hands through his hair. "I just… I have to hold onto her. The way… the way she is. Was. I don’t— It’s all slipping away.” He makes a terrible, wounded noise and begins to sob brokenly.

“Hey,” Joker says softly. “Hey, hey, come here.” He pulls Kaidan’s shaking frame against him, automatically tucking Kaidan’s head beneath his chin, and holds on.

“It’s wrong. She’s wrong. It’s not her,” Kaidan’s voice is muffled and threaded with anguish. “I don’t know where they got that picture, but it doesn’t even look like her. Her hair is short, and I’ve never seen her smile like that, and— And if I keep seeing her like that, I’m going to forget what she was really like and just remember Shepard the recruitment poster.” He says that last bit in a rush, voice thick.

Oh.

Oh, of course.

Joker pulls him into an even tighter embrace. “You know that’s not possible, right? You couldn’t forget Shepard even if you tried.” He makes soothing noises in the back of his throat and runs his hands across Kaidan’s shaking shoulders. “But she dedicated her life to the Alliance, top to bottom, you know? Savior of the Citadel. First human Spectre. She knew this…” Joker gestures vaguely to the recruitment poster lurking somewhere beyond the walls of the apartment, “was part of the gig.”

He runs his hands along Kaidan’s spine in long, smooth strokes. “I’m just surprised they managed to get her to hold still long enough to take a photo. Probably had a pistol trained on her or something. Probably like five pistols. And a Krogen warlord.”

Kaidan doesn’t laugh, but the wet snuffling sounds diminish for a moment.

“But that— that poster— that's how the world knows her, right? Badass. Heroic. I mean… they’re not wrong, just maybe… incomplete. The Shepard I knew was…” Joker shakes his head, grappling with the impossibility of mere descriptions. “Alarming. I mean, on every level. I’ve seen vids of her in action. Aggressive falls short. She was probably an absolute monster in a bar fight. She was a terror on the dance floor, for sure.” he smiles a little, despite himself.

The day they’d made Shepard a Spectre, she downloaded about a zillobyte of classified data, painted an N7 stripe on her new spectre-class armor, and went right back to kicking all the asses the Council could point her towards— and several they told her explicitly to stay away from. She shrugged off anxieties that would have pulverized lesser men, all with a quiet self-assurance large enough to have its own gravitational pull.

Joker wasn’t the only one who fell headfirst into it.

“But she was soft, in her own way,” Joker says haltingly. “Soft-hearted. Hard-edged about it, sure. But she wanted to scoop the whole world into her pocket and keep everyone safe, and when she couldn’t…” Joker shrugs, remembering Shepard’s all-consuming grief for Ashley and the wreck she’d made of her quarters. “She wouldn’t pull punches for anyone, not even herself. She just… did everything with her whole heart, all the time.”

His hands trail up and down Kaidan’s back, absently. “She’s got this… intensity she brings to everything she does that’s sort of brimful of chaos. Wild. Dazzling. Like the stars. That’s… Maybe that’s why,” he smiles, lips brushing Kaidan's shoulder. “She reminds me of the stars.”

A beat of silence, and Kaidan raises his head and just looks at Joker, brown eyes wet and serious.

“What?”

“You’re in love with Shepard,” Kaidan breathes.

Oh shit.

Kaidan shakes his head, pulling away. “I can’t… I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“Everyone was in love with Shepard,” Joker says, trying to force a smile, trying to shrug away the sudden swell of panic. “Garrus practically begged the Turian hierarchy to build a statue of her on Palaavan. And Wrex––”

“Joker.”

Double shit.

Joker looks at Kaidan helplessly. His hands clench and unclench uselessly at his sides. He should just say no. He should just deny it. “I…”

Damnit, it should not be this hard to lie.

The moment stretches out between them, raw and awful and silent.

Say something.

Say something.

“I am,” Joker breathes raggedly. And then he takes a half-step back because fuck, not that. Say anything but that.

But Kaidan’s just staring at him, eyes wide and… and something.

The first tear that falls down Joker’s cheek is a shock. Joker scrubs it away, but a second and third one follow. He turns away from Kaidan and jams his fists against his eyes, but more tears leak through. A flood of them, too many to count. He makes a tiny, broken sound. Several, in fact.

Kaidan reaches for him, but Joker moves away. He doesn’t have the right to break down like this, not over his own stupid feelings, not when Kaidan is the one who needs him. But Joker feels a wave of grief and guilt rise up, taking out his legs like a fast-moving current.

“I didn’t—” Joker chokes out. “I wasn’t going to— Nobody had to know!”

Shouting. Why is he shouting?

“She had you. She was happy. You were happy. Everything was fine. I didn’t need anything to change! I never wanted to ruin it! I never wanted––”

“You didn’t,” Kaidan says, frowning, “I know—”

“No! You don’t know. You have no idea.” Joker feels this random swell of anger rise up as Kaidan tries to touch his shoulder again. At himself. At Shepard. At Kaidan, too. Because it’s not fucking fair.

All his life, Joker has thought of himself as even-tempered. You have to be, when you're packing a literal warship. Anger was always a thing separate from himself. Irritation, sure. But anger? Rage? No. Not for him.

Now it swamps him, a bright, brittle thing that sits like a thermal core in his chest. He shoves Kaidan away, hard. Hard enough that he feels a twinge in his wrists. Stupid. But he barrels forward and shoves Kaidan again.

“Joker,” Kaidan takes a step back, eyes wide, hands up in a pantomime of surrender. “I’m not upset at you.”

“You should be.” Joker shakes his head, feeling sick. “You should hate me.”

“No,” Kaidan says, voice firm. “I could never—”

“I killed Shepard,” Joker hisses through his teeth before his breath falters completely away.

He’s said it to himself a thousand times, but he’s never said it out loud before. It’s worse out loud, though it changes nothing. Shepard is still dead, and it’s still Joker’s fault.

The look on Kaidan’s face is too awful to bear.

Joker covers his face with his hands for a moment, taking in long, unsteady drags of air. He wants to retreat –– pull the ship around hard and just disappear into the vastness of space –– but he has to face what he’s done. He has to. He lowers his hands. “Just tell me you hate me, already. Please. I-I just want to get it over with. I can send you your stuff… money maybe, for the groceries you bought. Maybe that new pan too. And then you never have to see me again, and—”

Kaidan’s hand presses over his mouth, briefly for a moment, and then again, more deliberately. He looks so upset. Joker hasn’t seen him this upset since the funeral. “Stop. Just stop, okay.”

Joker blinks, and tears spill from beneath his lashes. God, he’s such a coward. He can feel his legs shaking.

“Jesus, I can’t think this quickly. I have to—” Kaidan grabs Joker by the shirtfront and pulls him into his arms.

The air rushes out of Joker in little broken hiccups. He has to lock his arms at his sides to keep from hugging Kaidan back, but he can’t stop himself from leaning into Kaidan’s chest, because it feels like he’s trying to claw back together the pieces of a ship that has already splintered apart, and he doesn’t know how to survive that. Not again. Not without Kaidan.

“Just hold on, okay? I need to think,” Kaidan grits out.

“‘Kay,” Joker doesn’t know if he means figuratively or literally, but one arm raises and curls around Kaidan’s broad back for a moment. At least he means for it to be for a moment, but his fingers dig in, and he can’t manage to let go.

He’d imagined this moment unfolding so many times. He had expected Kaidan to throw things, or storm out dramatically, or at least yell at him for admitting he was instrumental in Shepard’s death. He never imagined that Kaidan would hug him.

A tiny, defeated, heartbroken sound escapes him, and he presses his face against Kaidan’s shoulder so another doesn’t slip free.'

“Damnit, Joker,” Kaidan’s breathing is fast and a little uneven. He sounds a bit like he’s panicking. “Okay, okay. You didn’t kill Shepard. Why would you say something like that? Why would you do that to yourself?”

“Because it’s true,” Joker mumbles into his shoulder. “If I weren’t being such a stupid fucking idiot, she’d still be alive today.”

“Stop. it.” Kaidan looks angry. Joker realizes abruptly how rarely Kaidan is honest to God angry. His eyes flare blue for an instant, which is not a thing human biotics are supposed to be able to do. However high the Alliance has rated his biotics, it probably isn’t high enough.

Kaidan skims fingertips across the base of his skull, where his implant is, and huffs. “I need to walk it off for a minute. I’m not— I need to think.”

Joker nods as Kaidan pulls back.

He doesn’t leave the apartment, or even the room; he just paces back and forth in the tiny space like he’s determined to wear a hole through the floor. Joker watches him pace and think and pace and think, like he’s trying to work his way out of a puzzle. In hindsight, mid-panic attack was probably the worst time to introduce two of Joker’s biggest secrets to the mix. But he hadn’t expected Kaidan to see through him so clearly.

He’d always intended to tell Kaidan that he was in love with Shepard. Eventually. Probably. Not that it mattered much. It was in the past, and Shepard was dead and…

And Joker killed her.

“Fuck,” Joker buries his face in his hands.

“The Collectors killed Shepard,” Kaidan hisses, pausing mid-stride. “You had nothing to do with it.”

“No,” Joker wipes at his eyes and looks at Kaidan, shoving his hands in his pockets so he doesn’t fidget. He wants to say the words that will wipe that anxious, heartbroken look off his face. But he can’t just absolve himself and keep pretending. “She died because I did… everything wrong that day. I didn’t see the Collectors coming. I didn’t evade their attack. I didn’t save the Normandy. I didn’t evacuate when I was supposed to. I didn’t… Kaidan, I fought her when she came to get me. I made it harder to get to the escape pod, and I wasted so much time that she––”

I’m sorry.

Red and blue fire.

The sound of the escape pod door sliding shut.

Shepard burned, or got spaced, or suffocated, or bled out. And he did that to her.

Joker takes a shaky breath. “I should have just made her—”

“You couldn’t have made Shepard do anything,” Kaidan interrupts, glaring. “I know that better than anyone.”

A single tear rolls down Joker’s cheek and drops to the floor.

“You don’t think I feel guilty about Shepard? I do. When Shepard ordered me to the escape pods to lead the evacuation, I knew… a part of me knew she wasn’t leaving the ship. But she ordered me off and I—” Kaidan slams his fist against the countertop, a frustrated bow that would have broken Joker’s hand if he’d tried something like that. “I follow her lead, Joker. You don’t— You can’t do anything else in combat. It’s more than training, it’s in my bones. But I still dream of throwing her over my shoulder and getting her the hell off that ship. Every night I—” Kaidan takes a ragged breath, voice faltering. He presses a shaking hand against his mouth. “Every night.”

Joker closes his eyes. Sometimes knowing a thing doesn’t help at all. He knew the Normandy was doomed from that first salvo. He knew it was hopeless even before he looked at the feeds; he could feel it — in his hands, in his heart.

It didn’t stop him from trying to save the ship.

“But… That day… on the Normandy…” Kaidan takes a deep breath, expression troubled. “What if I told you that I knew Shepard was heading for you?”

Joker blinks. “Then you should have stopped her. If it were me or her, it should have been her. Tell me you know that.”

Kaidan clenches his jaw. Won't meet Joker's eyes. “You’re not going to get me to agree with you on this,” he says quietly.

“It’s not— Look. After Alchera, Shepard would have gone on, and been this badass Spectre, and gotten the Alliance to stop pretending that the Reapers aren’t out there, and then she would have kicked their asses. And you and Shepard—” Joker takes a breath, and shakes his head helplessly. “Happily ever after.”

Kaidan stops pacing and leans against the countertop, and just stares at Joker. He looks exhausted. There’s a wet patch on his shoulder from where Joker cried all over him.

“But me?” Joker’s smile is bitter. “I haven’t done a goddamn thing since the Normandy blew up. Not one. useful. thing.”

“You kept me together,” Kaidan says quietly, seriously. He takes a step forward, reaching for Joker’s hand. “More than that. Joker, I... I’m in—”

“You’re missing the point!” Joker says, voice rising sharply. “I shouldn’t have needed to! Shepard is a fucking legend! I’m a pilot who can’t fly! So look me in the eye and tell me the world needed me more. That you needed me more!” He takes another step forward so he can glare at Kaidan point-blank. “So yeah, that little part of you that knew Shepard was coming for me? Fuck that part.”

“That’s it,” Kaidan mutters under his breath. “We’re done.”

The impact of those two little words hits like a bullet to the belly; full body shock and a flood of pain from a mortal wounding. But before he can say anything more, Kaidan scoops him up and slings him bodily over one shoulder, and turns towards the back of the apartment.

Joker makes a surprised sound, almost like a laugh, but it’s too manic at the edges. He doesn’t struggle even though his ass is in the air and his head is dangling down Kaidan’s back, because he doesn’t want to fall and break a hip. He crumples a handful of Kaidan’s shirt and holds on as Kaidan carries him into the bedroom.

Kaidan lays him down on the bed, hand cradled beneath Joker’s skull, before climbing on and pinning him down with his own body weight. He presses his face into the crook of Joker’s neck and takes a deep breath.

The position is so reminiscent of all the coping they’ve been doing that Joker’s dick starts to harden almost by sheer Pavlovian reflex.

Stupid dick.

A part of him wishes Kaidan would just start jerking him off and save them both from this train-wreck of a conversation, but he’s pretty sure that after today, Kaidan probably wants nothing to do with Joker and/or his Shepard-killing dick.

“F-fuck…” Joker fists up a handful of the bedding.

It’s not losing the sex, it’s losing Kaidan, and his dawning realization that Kaidan might feel some way about dealing with the loss of his girlfriend by coping with the guy who killed his girlfriend. Tears slide into his ears, and he feels wretched and lost and so damn sorry for himself it hurts to breathe. The very last thing he wants is to make things harder on Kaidan. Guilt swamps him, and he starts to cry in earnest.

Kaidan pulls back enough to cup Joker’s face in both hands. “You’re breaking my heart, you know,” he says, voice so low and rough it’s difficult to understand.

And Joker can’t see through the blur of tears, but he tries to nod. “I know, I did. It must have been… so fucking hard for you… When you opened that escape pod… and she wasn’t there,” he manages between sobs.

“You want to talk about Alchera? Now? Fuck,” Kaidan rubs at Joker’s tears with his thumbs. It’s completely futile. More spill over, unstoppable. “Yeah, it was bad. I got to your escape pod first, Joker. She— yeah. But you… You almost died in my arms. I almost lost you both that day.”

Kaidan wraps his arms around Joker and pulls him closer, shifting positions, rolling until Joker is half on top of him. His fingers dig into Joker’s shoulders a little. “When I think about everything that happened... I feel guilty and awful and… and really, really grateful too. I… It’s complicated.”

For Joker, Alchera has always been little more than flashes of overwhelming pain and the floaty sensation of too many painkillers. Anything else is just lost in grey static.

He knew it was touch-and-go from Dr Chakwas’ description of his injuries. She’d sat with him for days when he got back to Huerta Memorial on the Citadel. The recovery had been rough. They’d been stranded on Alchera for more than two weeks, and several of his breaks had required resetting. But even Dr Chakwas had been reluctant to talk about Alchera itself.

Joker’s nightmares were of the Normandy burning— fire, and smoke, and Shepard on the wrong side of a door. But he knew that Kaidan dreamed of the aftermath, of those weeks stranded on Alchera.

“I just feel angry,” Joker offers to the silence.

“I know.”

Joker exhales hard. He’s angry at Shepard for dying, and Dr Chakwas for not letting him die. He’s angry at Kaidan for not being angry back. He’s angry at Anderson and Hackett and the whole damn Alliance. He’s angry at Benezia, and Saren, and the Council he’d been forced to abandon.

And he’s so damn angry at himself that he could choke on it and die.

“I’m sorry,” Joker says quietly. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“I know.” Kaidan takes a breath and pulls Joker tighter against him. “But you were not to blame, Joker. Don't take that on, please. You didn’t cause her death. Shepard went to get you. Her protective instinct… that was one of the things I loved about her."

"Yeah?" Joker says, voice breaking, even though he manages a smile. "Me too."

"Yeah." Kaidan exhales, long and slow. "It feels… less lonely knowing there was someone else out there that loved her too.”

“I just wish… So badly…” Joker closes his eyes again, but it doesn’t stop the tears from sliding down his face.

“Me too,” Kaidan whispers, and presses his forehead against Joker’s. A tiny point of contact, simple and easy. “I wish too.”

And Joker moves his head down, and Kaidan moves his up, and they meet in the middle. The kiss is bittersweet, all salt and sorrow and softness. It’s a slow kiss. A tender rediscovery. And Joker doesn’t want to break out his last big secret, not tonight, but he thinks he's never loved Kaidan more than he does right now, right in this moment.

Kaidan cups his jaw and pulls him closer, deepening the kiss like he always does. Meeting Joker and pulling him along one step farther. His hand moves to Joker’s hip, fingers squeezing, digging in. He breaks off the kiss, panting. “We’re gonna have to talk about this more, you know? This wasn’t a one-conversation kind of thing.”

“No. No way,” Joker says with a breath of laughter. “I’m not talking to you ever again. It’s just gonna be non-stop blow jobs from here on out.”

Kaidan smiles, the first real, genuine smile of the night. And even exhausted and wrung out from grief and stubbornness, he’s still so damn handsome, he takes Joker's breath away.

Chapter Text

Nothing changes, but everything shifts.

They hold hands in the dark, talk about Shepard in stilted starts and stops, meandering at the edges of Joker’s guilt about her death, but never lingering. Kaidan staunchly refuses to assign Joker any blame in what happened in the skies above Alchera, and Joker doesn’t know what to do with that. At all.

For Joker, Shepard is dead, and he killed her. The guilt and grief have fused together in his mind, and he doesn’t even know how to look at just one part of it. But when Joker starts to spiral, Kaidan just holds him, and he forgets all the reasons he had for keeping everything bottled up in the first place.

There’s a gentleness between them, something soft and sweet that presses to the surface in a way it hadn’t before. That desperate, brutal need that rises up between them is blunted, shifting into tender explorations that last all through the night. Hands become mouths. Becomes the lightning-bright, bitter spill of Kaidan across his tongue. Becomes the muffled sound of delight Kaidan makes when Joker spills himself in turn.

Kaidan doesn’t leave Joker’s apartment—or put on clothes—for three whole days.

And it’s the best three days of Joker’s entire life.

Right now, Kaidan is in his kitchen, butt naked, rooting around in the cupboards for food, which requires much bending over while Joker, equally naked except for his hat, looks on as disrespectfully as possible and thinks that Kaidan Alenko probably has the world’s most gorgeous taint.

“We’re probably going to starve to death.” Kaidan sighs and stands back up. “I think we are down to crackers and this random sweet potato.”

“One day,” Joker says, grinning. “I am going to run my tongue down the crack of your ass.”

Kaidan raises his brows and chucks the sweet potato over his shoulder. “Food can wait. Back to bed.”

Joker makes an incredibly undignified noise that’s part laugh, part squawk as Kaidan sweeps him literally off his feet and barrels straight into the bedroom. Kaidan deposits Joker on the bed, on his back, and grabs him by the ankles, dragging him closer to the edge of the bed. He wrangles Joker into a pile-driver position, raising his legs up and over until he’s nearly curled into a ball with his ass in the air, and only his head and shoulders are against the bed. Kaidan scoots closer until he’s wedged tightly behind Joker, keeping his body braced, legs splayed, hips resting against Kaidan’s chest.

The position spreads Joker wide open, bringing his exposed hole nearly to Kaidan’s eye level. And Joker’s brain instantly dissolves into a puddle of mush. For half a minute, he stares up at his own hard cock dangling down in his face and can’t quite piece together what’s happening.

And then Kaidan licks Joker’s hole with one long stroke of his tongue. "Mmmh." The sound Kaidan makes is all delight and appreciative rumble.

Heat floods Joker’s face, and the breath bursts out of him in some embarrassingly needy sound, but Kaidan just grins and does it again.

Joker manages a breath of startled laughter. “What? Wait, wait. This was my idea!”

“Me first,” Kaidan says firmly, and licks him again.

The last time someone did this for him, Joker was practically a teenager. A few exploratory swipes of a tongue, and it was over. Kaidan Alenko appears to have a very different approach to ass-eating. Much like any task assigned to him, he’s thorough, competent, and focused on getting the job done.

And, as usual, he seems to thoroughly enjoy everything he eats.

His tongue circles Joker’s hole relentlessly, scuffing back and forth before jabbing teasingly at his rim. And it feels so fucking good that Joker wonders if it’s some sort of biotic trick. Maybe Kaidan is licking lightning and pure sensation directly into his hole because he’s never felt anything like this — an aching heat that keeps spiraling higher, and higher, and higher inside him.

He presses a hand over his own mouth, but can't quite hold back the noises he’s making. One of his legs starts to shake.

“Like that?” Kaidan asks, pausing to grin smugly like Joker’s dick isn’t right there and so hard it’s about to snap off. “You want to come, don’t you?”

“Yep,” Joker says, laughing weakly. “So bad.” Of course, if he comes like this, he’s just gonna nut in his own damn face. Which, given the situation, would be a great problem to have.

“Mmmn.” Kaidan makes a growly sound of appreciation and starts to eat him out in earnest, mouth in constant motion, kissing and sucking, all that steady building heat shot through with flashes of near-electric sharpness as Kaidan tries to spear him on his tongue.

Joker moans, tries to slip a hand between his spread thighs, but Kaidan grunts and grabs Joker’s cock himself, which is super awesome until he doesn’t jack him off. He just keeps that big, calloused hand around him perfectly. fucking. still.

Joker makes a series of noises wedged between frustration and despairing laughter. He can see the tip of his cock is between Kaidan’s fingers, slick with precome, and tries to fuck himself into Kaidan’s hand, which isn’t really possible given the position and his overall lack of leverage.

He’s not used to this at all. That heat and needy tension all coiled up inside him. Usually, if he gets at all close to feeling like this, he’s already coming—blowing his load the very instant he wants to, at the mere whisper of warmth. But now it’s like he’s been thrown into a fire and all he can do is struggle and squirm as the heat blazes through him, unquenched, while Kaidan cheerfully eats the absolute bejesus out of his ass.

"Nnnf," Joker moans as a slick of precome drips from his cock. Most of it catches on Kaidan’s fingers, but a few droplets fall against Joker’s cheekbones, hot and slick.

He struggles for a moment, and his cock shifts in Kaidan's grip, a little. An extra tiny layer of sensation. Arousal eclipses everything, hot and sharp and fuck, he’s not sure how much more of this he can take.

He makes a broken sound. “Wait, wait. Fuck… wait.”

Kaidan pauses, which is the absolute opposite of what he should be doing.

“No, don’t stop. It’s… good, Kaidan. So good, my God,” Joker pants. “It’s just…” He moans and shifts his hips, trying to coax Kaidan’s mouth back on him. “I don’t… I don’t think I can come from just this. I need… something. I need you. Kaidan, please...”

Kaidan makes a breathless sound. “I’m not used to hearing you beg.”

“Usually… usually I can come in like nine and a half seconds…” Joker pants. “Kinda miss that…”

“Yeah?” Kaidan swirls his thumb around Joker’s hole with a tantalizing pressure, but doesn’t press inside. “I didn’t realize it would be so hot, seeing you like this…” He leans forward a little, tongue returning to its primary post halfway up his ass.

Joker moans helplessly, tries to shift his hips, seeking more, seeking friction, seeking something. His hole feels hot and over-sensitive and plain empty. Kaidan hasn’t even put so much as the tip of a single finger up inside him since they started this, which is wild.

The past three days, while very tender, have also been intensely sexual. Each day, Kaidan has spent longer and longer fingering him, often not stopping even after Joker comes. Sometimes he keeps pumping his fingers in and out of Joker’s spasming hole until he can't take the over-stimulation. Sometimes he just keeps his fingers in place, still, but there, and Joker has to sit with that aching, relentless fullness.

And right now, Joker is so very not full.

He bites his lip. “Kaidan… please, please. I need you. Just — fuck.”

Kaidan licks his way across Joket’s taint and presses a sucking kiss directly against his hole before looking up, expression difficult to read. “I’m trying so hard not to just—” Both of Kaidan’s hands tighten reflexively, the one on his ass and the one on his cock, and Joker moans brokenly under his breath.

“Please. Please. Please, please, please, please.”

Kaidan’s hand pumps Joker cock, just once. One aching slide that has Joker fisting up the sheets, shaking and swearing breathlessly.

“You’re making it impossible not to just jump you,” Kaidan all but growls.

“Fuck,” Joker gasps. “Please jump me, yes. That. God, Kaidan, do that.”

Kaidan rears up to his knees so abruptly Joker nearly topples over. The move brings their hips in alignment, and the base of Kaidan’s hard cock rests against Joker’s hole, just fucking there. He looks up, meeting Joker’s eye.

Joker stills, breath catching.

“I want to be very clear what I mean by that,” Kaidan says, voice low and husky. “And what I want is to fuck you properly, Joker.” His hands hold Joker steady as he thrusts his hips in demonstration, cock sliding pointedly across Joker’s hole and up over his balls. “No fingers. No tongue. Just my cock, in you.”

“'Kay,” Joker manages.

Kaidan thrusts again, dragging the head of his cock back and forth over Joker’s opening. Then he stills with a groan and pulls them both down on the bed, so they’re lying flat together, tucked against each other's side. And Joker has a sharp moment of panic that Kaidan had changed his mind, before he takes hold of himself, maneuvering his cock between Joker’s legs, holding it there, all hardness and heat, even if he doesn’t press forward.

“I…” Kaidan frowns and tucks his forehead against Joker’s shoulder.

“Biotics… We don’t have a reputation for gentleness. I don’t. Not when I lose control.”

Ah.

In his fantasies, Kaidan just plowed him straight into the mattress for hours on end. Super hot, but maybe not super reflective of the reality of living with Vrolik’s Syndrome. And he knows Kaidan still has nightmares about the weeks trapped on Alchera, and Joker was in pieces, his hips quite literally cracked in half.

“I refuse to hurt you,” Kaidan whispers, running fingers up and down Joker’s spine. “I won’t. Doesn’t matter how much I want this — how long I’ve wanted this.”

Joker would bet a mountain of credits that he’s wanted it for longer. He’d started fantasizing about getting dicked down by Kaidan all of ten seconds after meeting him.

The Normandy had been dry-docked at the Citadel and awaiting her first wave of crew. Joker had read through the posting, but hadn’t recognized any incoming crew except for Karin Chakwas, whom he was convinced had just signed on to babysit him. Joker had been in his dedicated bunk in the senior officers' shared quarters when Kaidan Alenko had walked in, all broad shoulders and huge biceps, a duffel bag slung under his arm.

“Any of these free?” he’d asked, gesturing at the bunks.

“Take your pick,” Joker had said, panicking on the inside because he already had the hots for his Commanding Officer, and it seemed very uncool of the Alliance to staff the ship full of crew this insanely bangable.

“Great,” Kaidan had cracked a stupidly handsome smile and slung his bag on the bunk above Joker’s. “I’ll be on top.”

And then they’d shaken hands in introduction while Joker had a private, horny meltdown about it all.

Nothing has changed much from that day until this, except that right now they’re lying naked in bed together and the head of Kaidan’s cock is notched tightly against his ass.

And Joker is having a private, horny meltdown.

(Still.)

(Always.)

And Kaidan is having an existential meltdown that he might accidentally fuck Joker to death.

(Which, truth be told, would not be the worst way to go.)

“I’m not gonna break,” Joker says. “Or, I might, but I promise I’m not gonna be mad about it.”

“I refuse to hurt you,” Kaidan says again, butting his head into Joker’s shoulder.

Joker can hear the stubbornness in his voice start to settle into place, but his cock is still rock hard, and he hasn’t moved it away from between Joker’s asscheeks. So. Hope.

“Okay, okay. I don’t want to be hurt either,” he says, threading his fingers around the hand Kaidan has slung across his chest. “But I know how to live around this disease. I mean. You can’t take me ice skating, or anything, but we can have this. Together. Just—We can go slow, and I’ll tell you if anything hurts, and then... You can stop.”

Kaidan drags the head of his cock over Joker’s hole again. “We can go slow,” he mutters almost to himself and scuffs a series of kisses against Joker’s shoulder blade. “I can do slow.”

“Just not too slow, maybe. I still really, really, really wanna come,” Joker laughs weakly.

“Yeah?” He can feel Kaidan smile against his shoulder, feels him press a kiss to the side of Joker’s neck before he disentangles himself, and stands up. “Don’t move,” Kaidan says and dashes out of the bedroom, leaving Joker flat on the bed, cock pointing to the sky, and reappearing a minute later with the huge bottle of lube Joker keeps in his fridge.

He pours some into his hand and slicks up and down the full length of his cock, hissing a little at the chill. It’s a little mesmerizing watching Kaidan prepare himself. It makes a deep bloom of want unfurl in Joker that goes beyond the solid need to come. This is some ache that sits at his core, lingering beneath every breath, every heartbeat. A want so huge he can't put his arms around it, or even see the edges.

Kaidan drips more oil into his hand and sets the bottle on the nightstand before sitting at the edge of the bed and gesturing towards Joker. “Come here.”

Joker takes an unsteady breath as he slides off the bed and moves closer, straddling Kaidan’s lap so their cocks are pressed together.

“Ready?” Kaidan asks.

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Joker says.

Kaidan slips a hand beneath Joker’s hips, painting the cold lubricant over his hole with his fingers, before slipping first one, and then another inside, pumping gently. Joker moans at the stretch and hot-cold slide of it. It’s intense, and the promise of more — more length, more thickness — leaves him breathless. Kaidan cups Joker’s buttocks and raises him up, lifting until his ass hovers above Kaidan’s cock.

Joker gasps as Kaidan’s cock notches into place, perfectly on target. He feels almost dizzy.

This is it.

Kaidan kisses slowly up Joker’s neck, along his jaw, and across to his mouth. And Joker gasps again as he feels Kaidan lowering him slowly down. Resistance. Pressure. And then the head of Kaidan’s cock pops through his ring of muscle, almost all at once.

He's vaguely aware that his breathing is noisy and ragged.

“Easy,” Kaidan murmurs between kisses. “Easy, easy.” He lowers Joker slowly onto his cock, swallowing each and every one of the broken sounds he makes.

Kaidan's cock feels a lot bigger than it looks, and it looks plenty big. Joker tries to relax, tries not to tighten up or clench as he sinks down on it, but he isn’t used to the sensation of being stretched open and cored out millimeter by millimeter.

Then suddenly the head of Kaidan’s cock scuffs forcefully against Joker's prostate, and he shudders, crying out. The need to come coalesces into a single point of bright sensation, and the balance of too much/not enough leans sharply, abruptly leftwards.

“K-Kaidan!” He struggles for a moment and slips down faster, taking a few inches all at once.

Kaidan groans raggedly and grabs his ass to better control his descent. “Almost there,” he husks. “Almost there…”

Joker presses his forehead against Kaidan’s, breathing hard. They’ve passed the point of that relentless grinding into his prostate, and it’s—not easier, but less impossible.

“I’m almost… Almost all the way in…” Kaidan says, voice low.

Joker nods, so brimful he feels like he’s going to burst because there simply isn’t space inside him for more —physically or emotionally.

“There,” Kaidan breathes against his cheek.

The instant he’s fully seated, something unlocks in Joker, and that ball of heat and tension bursts out of him. The sensation is less like something building up inside him and more like falling from a high place—the liminal space of free-fall before abruptly shattering apart on impact. Joker makes a helpless sound, coming violently, back arching, ass clamping down hard. Feeling blown apart and anchored in place all at once.

“F-fuck, Joker…”

He collapses against Kaidan’s chest, arms shaking, legs shaking, mind scattered into pieces. He didn’t even register spilling across Kaidan’s belly and chest, but he can feel the slickness of his spend between them.

Kaidan holds him steady, hands rubbing up and down his spine, mouthing breathlessly at Joker’s collarbones like he’s the one who’s overwhelmed. Muttering broken things like hot, and tight, and so fucking good, and Joker nearly spirals apart again.

And then Kaidan starts to move, and Joker just shivers through the over-sensitivity, gasping, hanging on for dear life.

After several minutes, the aftermath of arousal thins, and Joker can feel everything he couldn't previously process. The thickness of Kaidan’s cock, driving deeper than his fingers had ever reached. The way Kaidan keeps his hips still, dragging Joker’s whole body up and down his length with the strength of his arms. The broken noises Kaidan makes between kisses—a tender counterpoint to the way his gut feels pretty churned up by it all.

“I’m gonna come in you soon,” Kaidan promises.

And Joker chuckles weakly, thinking that if he hadn’t just come, those words alone would have made him blow, for sure.

All at once, Kaidan stands and flips them, laying Joker carefully on the bed, managing to keep their hips together, and himself, inside. He takes a minute to reposition them, ensuring that Joker’s bent legs are supported before reaching over to the bottle of lube. He pulls halfway out and drips a generous amount of the still-cold lubricant directly onto his cock before pressing in again.

Kaidan runs a hand up and down Joker’s flank. “You have no idea how good you feel,” he groans quietly, and starts to move his hips, thrusting in and out in tiny motions.

Joker moans, back arching. The angle is different. It feels deeper, and there’s more pressure at the base of his balls from the way Kaidan grinds into him at the back of every thrust. He starts slow, but little by little, the pace of Kaidan’s hips picks up until he’s surging back and forth, cock sliding nearly all of the way out before driving in again. Joker fists up a handful of the bedsheets, breathing hard.

And then Kaidan slips a hand between them and takes hold of Joker’s cock, squeezing firmly. Joker's still floating in that post-orgasmic haze, cock only half hard, but Kaidan doesn’t seem to mind at all, just starts jacking him off with sleek, purposeful movements.

Joker’s skin is tacky with drying come, and the friction is over-bright for how recently he’s come. His hands fly to Kaidan’s hips, pushing back against them as Kaidan thrusts into him.

“I’ll be gentle, I’ll be gentle,” Kaidan pants brokenly, but it’s not his hips Joker’s worried about. Kaidan’s grip on his cock is like a vice, and all he can do is whine brokenly as Kaidan strokes him, a bolt of sensation just out of sync with the cock sliding in and out of his ass.

“Joker… God… the way you‘re clenching down on me…” Kaidan husks, scrubbing his thumb over the tip of Joker's cock before returning to that firm, base-to-tip slide of his hand. “I want… I want you to come before I do.”

Joker makes a noise wedged between a groan and helpless laughter. Kaidan almost never makes him come so close in succession. He arches, overstimulated as Kaidan’s hand pumps, and pumps, and doesn’t stop or even slow, hurrying him to the edge of a precipice he wasn’t ready for.

He moans Kaidan’s name over and over until the litany of it stoppers up in his throat as he comes again, harder and longer than before, spilling liquid heat into Kaidan’s hand. Sensation pings from his cock to his ass and back again, in rapid succession, like lightning strikes of pleasure so intense they’re nearly edged with pain. He’s never come this hard before, and wonders if it’s the biotics after all, and if Kaidan’s cock is lit up inside him, all day-glow blue and wreathed in biotic energy.

Then Kaidan makes a sound so guttural for a moment Joker worries he’s been gut-shot. He shudders, one hand braced against the bed to keep from collapsing, and thrusts home one final time. Joker can feel Kaidan’s cock pulsing inside him as he comes, the thick heat of it filling him up and spilling over. And everything, everything is messy and raw and over-bright.

The world stills.

Neither of them moves, save for breathing heavily. The front of Kaidan’s chest is slick with sweat, and a fall of dark waves spirals down across his brow. Joker wants so badly to reach up and brush his hair back into place with his fingertips, but he doesn’t want to disturb the moment. Wants to live in this heartbeat of time, forever.

Kaidan blinks. “Joker… are you… How…?” He frowns, shakes his head as if trying to clear it. He looks dazed and still heavy with that full-body repletion found at the end of a life-altering orgasm. He moves his hand away from Joker's cock.

Joker smiles and runs his hand over Kaidan’s hips. “Still not back yet, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither.

“Joker, that was…” Kaidan takes a breath and shakes his head again, this time like he can’t find the right words. He looks down at Joker like he wants to touch him, but neither of his hands are free to do so. “How are you feeling?”

“Like there’s a giant dick in my ass. So… pretty perfect. You?”

Kaidan chuckles. “Yeah. Perfect is a good word for it.”

A quiet happiness blooms in Joker’s chest. He reaches up with a smile. “Kiss me?”

Kaidan leans down, keeping his weight braced on his elbows, the shape of his smile against Joker’s lips. “Always.”

***

Joker knows that Kaidan has been putting off reporting to Alliance HQ. And even though Kaidan’s lack of an official posting allows him some additional flexibility, Joker also knows that the Alliance wants their officers visible to the rank-and-file; working out, running simulations, or at target practice—basically showing off the skills that got them promoted in the first place. So he’s not surprised when he finds Kaidan getting dressed the next morning.

“I have to,” Kaidan sighs, by way of explanation.

Joker grins. “I don’t mind. I’d just kinda forgotten how hot you look with clothes on.”

Kaidan smirks a little and leans in to kiss him goodbye. “I’ll make dinner tonight.”

“You make dinner every night.” He says and feels a perfect bubble of happiness rise up inside him. “I’ll get some groceries delivered. Yes, delivered. It’s not a crime,” he laughs and makes a shooing motion at Kaidan. “Besides, what if my arms snap off from the weight of all the Canadian stuff I’m going to buy you. What then? Canada will be so disappointed in you.”

Kaidan tries to shoot Joker a look of annoyed disapproval, but the smile ruins it, and he ends up just looking like a doofus.

A handsome doofus.

Alone in his apartment, Joker replays their night together over and over and over in his mind. Every kiss. Every caress. Every inch of that magnificent cock drilling into him.

Joker has seen porn—like, a lot of porn, my god, so damn much—even if his personal experiences are thin on the ground. He’s had a couple of truly awesome weekends, but this is already his longest and most serious whatever-the-hell it is. Certainly, the most sex filled. He knows Kaidan didn’t really fuck him that hard, even in the moments where it kinda felt like he did, he was restrained. It's just that Kaidan’s dick can be rightly classified as a heavy-class weapon.

Joker rolls over and presses his face into the pillow, overwhelmed and overheated by the mere memory. He likes the way his ass still feels cored out and sore in a way it never does in the mornings after Kaidan just fingers him.

“Goddamnit,” Joker swears breathlessly, unable to stop the way his face grows hot with embarrassment, and his dick gets hard, remembering. He rolls onto his back, breathing hard, refusing to jerk himself off because there’s probably a limit to how many orgasms a person can have in a 72-hour period before they straight up die, and that’s not what he wants Kaidan to come home to.

Instead, he showers, takes his meds, and trims his beard neatly down to regulation length. Then he flits restlessly around the apartment and thinks about visiting Dr Chakwas, but decides against it in favor of doing laundry because even though he and Kaidan haven’t been wearing many clothes, they’ve gone through all the bedding and every towel in the place, and maybe Kaidan doesn’t want to spend the day out and then come home to the smell of sweat and spunk.

(But if he does, Joker knows a way to quickly restore the apartment to its former glory.)

The groceries delivered in the afternoon include a small bouquet of tiny blue and purple wild flowers. They’re from a planet Joker’s never heard of in the Faia system. There's no discernible scent, but the fragile blossoms are gorgeous in the light of his holoscreen windows, even if he has to stick them in an empty beer bottle since he doesn't own a vase.

He tries not to think of them as thank-you-for-the-great-sex flowers, but they're not not that either.

The flowers are stupid and sentimental –– Joker is stupid and sentimental –– but he smiles whenever he sees them perched on the counter.

And he feels… peaceful. As though the smell of smoke is finally, finally, finally clearing from his head.

***

It’s bad news.

Joker can always tell when it’s fucking bad news.

Something about the line of Kaidan’s shoulders when he walks through the door that evening, and the slow, deliberate way he takes off his boots, has Joker bracing himself for the worst.

“What is it?” he asks.

Kaidan hesitates, and the worry in his gut spikes tenfold.

“Tell me,” he insists.

Kaidan frowns and takes a deep breath. “Joker… My reassignment has been processed. I’m shipping out in a week.”

Chapter Text

It’s bad news.

Joker can always tell when it’s fucking bad news.

Something about the line of Kaidan’s shoulders when he walks through the door that evening, and the slow, deliberate way he takes off his boots, has Joker bracing himself for the worst.

“What is it?” he asks.

Kaidan hesitates, and the worry in his gut spikes tenfold.

“Tell me,” he insists.

Kaidan frowns and takes a deep breath. “Joker… My reassignment has been processed. I’m shipping out in a week.”

For a moment, all Joker can hear is the shriek of the Normandy’s alarms, knowing all at once that the ship is doomed, and that he’ll still try to save her. The memory of that sound fades, but the locked-up feeling in his chest stays.

The smell of smoke lingers at the back of his nose.

(Again.)

(Still.)

“So soon?” Joker asks quietly, voice perfectly flat.

Kaidan looks at the floor. “I put it in so long ago, but I hadn’t heard… I just assumed…”

“Sure. Yeah,” Joker nods mechanically. “What… Um, what ship?”

“The SSV Trafalgar.”

Joker’s brows raise. He knows the specs of every ship in the Alliance fleet. He researched them all, trying to decide what he wanted to fly before he heard about the Normandy — more of a whisper than a ship.

(A half-built prototype, with the majority of her blueprints classified, and the Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy up to their eyeballs in arguments and red tape about how to even talk about her, and yet, Joker had known. Instantly. He’d sent request after request through formal channels before running down every Alliance Captain likely to get command of her. He got sanctioned with disciplinary action twice for talking about the Normandy before the rest of the Alliance was comfortable openly acknowledging the project. Then he’d stolen her straight out of her dock about two hours after Anderson was formally selected for her command because she was the ship he was born to fly.)

The Trafalgar is not at all like the Normandy. It’s a cruiser, not a frigate. Built for heavy weaponry, air-borne battles, and moving massive amounts of ground forces to deal with a variety of combat and non-combat situations. Joker’s only helmed a one a couple of times during flight school, and while his fellow pilots creamed themselves to fly the Alliance’s largest and most powerful model of starship, Joker was massively underwhelmed. The thing handled like an enormous kidney bean in space. All lag and blunt angles. And Joker had read dozens of flight logs of cruiser missions, and it’s just straight lines and pre-programmed flight paths. They use the pilots mainly for docking and relay positioning.

(Fucking yawn.)

But worst of all, cruisers are like tiny cities. Each individual strike squad is huge — two or three times as large as the Normandy’s entire crew — and whole teams exist just to man the comms during missions. Evac is done through a dozen shuttles, typically not enough for the entirety of the ground crew. Marines on the ground are routinely left behind when missions go sour, to ensure the cruiser’s retreat is covered.

No Commander of a cruiser would ever mourn the loss of a single soldier— how could they? They would have never spoken to the vast majority of the crew on their ship, never even known their names before they showed up on some KIA list.

A single marine can get swallowed in a place like that.

A single biotic marine graded at Asari levels can too easily become a pariah, soundly rejected by their squadmates.

On the Trafalgar, Kaidan would never be seen as anything close to what he was to the Normandy crew—capable and trustworthy, a man fit to be the right-hand of the Commanding Officer. He’d just be seen as a liability.

Or… disposable.

It is the absolute wrong place for Kaidan.

“I should only be gone two weeks,” Kaidan says, frowning. “Maybe three. It’s just standard crew rotation and training. Nothing serious.”

“No, it’s great,” Joker forces a smile. “I’m happy for you. A new ship. A new posting. That’s... that’s amazing! Yeah. I wouldn’t be here a second longer than I had to, if I were you.”

Kaidan frowns again.

Joker turns away and starts rummaging around in his fridge just to have something to do with his hands. He grabs a beer and splits it into two glasses, handing one to Kaidan. He clinks his glass against Kaidan's, the sound bright but hollow, and downs his half of the beer in three long swallows before noticing that Kaidan hasn’t moved an inch. He’s just watching him with his brows all scrunched up and that stupid, serious, thinking-too-hard look on his face.

Wordlessly, he snags Kaidan’s glass out of his hand and finishes the rest of the beer while Kaidan watches with a silent frown.

Joker turns and starts to wash both glasses in the sink, trying not to notice how his hands shake. It’s a good thing. It is. Kaidan needs to get on with his life and stop pretending that this is a sustainable solution.

But Joker’s been so focused on getting his wings back, he never imagined what might happen if the Alliance did clear him to fly. A new ship. A new posting.

And then what?

Joker braces himself on the sink and shakes his head helplessly.

Hope Kaidan is still interested in coping every couple of years when they manage to run into each other? Live on scraps until Kaidan falls in love again and Joker starts getting holiday cards featuring a couple of kids with their Dad’s biotics and crazy good looks and —

“Hey,” Kaidan wraps his arms around Joker from behind, one hand low on his belly, the other pressed against his pounding heart.

Joker stills, breath locking up the way it always does when Kaidan touches him like this, like he wants him. And Joker feels a part of himself melt even as he makes a noise that’s fraying all along the edges.

“I put in my reassignment as soon as we were rescued from Alercha. I walked off the landing dock and went straight to Alliance HQ.” Kaidan’s breath is warm against the back of Joker’s neck, voice low and ragged. “At that point… Well. Shepard was dead, and Dr Chakwas wasn’t even sure you were going to pull through.”

“Oh,” Joker says, voice strained. A part of him had wondered… assumed, maybe, he’d done it after they’d started together. It doesn’t change anything, not really, but it lessens the sting.

At least Kaidan hadn’t been trying to escape him.

“You have to understand, I… I was a mess, Joker. The entire time we were on Alchera, you kept trying to die on us. We had no supplies, and Dr Chakwas was a wreck, and I—” he takes an unsteady breath. “So when we got to the Citadel, I just— I—”

“You wanted a piece of your life back. You wanted to be a Marine again, if nothing else,” Joker says quietly, mouth kinking up into a humorless smile. “I get it,” he says sincerely. “Believe me, I do.”

“I didn’t know I was going to have this with you,” Kaidan whispers, voice full of broken things. “I didn’t know I was going to— ” He makes a frustrated sound and scuffs his lips against the back of Joker’s neck, a kiss by only the strictest definition. The rasp of his stubble scrapes a little. “You can’t even file for a joint posting unless you’re married.”

“Yeah, well, I keep telling you the Alliance is run by a bunch of assholes, but you never listen.”

Kaidan laughs. It’s small, not much more than a bubble of air, but it’s genuine.

And Joker folds his arms around himself and squeezes Kaidan's arms. It’s the closest he can get to hugging him back from this angle.

Don’t go.

Joker feels the plea in his heart falling over and over like rain. But he can’t ask that of Kaidan. Joker may be selfish and stupid and completely in love with the man, but he’s still an Alliance officer deep down, and he can’t blame Kaidan for wanting to go back to the war Shepard died fighting for. Even though the Alliance gives precisely two fucks about the Reapers.

(It’s probably less than two. A solid fuck-and-a-half at best.)

(As soon as the Sovereign-shaped hole in the Citadel was patched up, the Alliance and the rest of the Galactic Federation started denying the existence of other Reapers. They claimed Sovereign was a singular threat, defeated.)

Kaidan squeezes Joker back. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Me neither,” Joker sighs, and turns around in Kaidan’s arms until they’re facing each other again. “But this… it isn't really about me. And I don't want to make this harder on you,” he cups Kaidan’s face and kisses him squarely on the forehead. “It’s not… the end of the world,” he says, even though it feels like it.

“Yeah,” Kaidan sighs and just presses his forehead against Joker’s briefly. “I just wanted…” he trails off, grimacing.

“Hey,” Joker says. “I want you to feel good about this. Really. Even though your pilot is gonna suck compared to me, it’s not gonna make any difference because a toddler could pilot a cruiser. Just make sure your pilot isn’t Jim Ambrose. I went to flight school with that asshole, and if it’s him, you’re all screwed. He’ll fly straight into the first mass relay he sees, and not even on purpose. The guy’s a major fucktard.”

“Okay,” Kaidan chuckles before his expression turns serious. “You’ll be okay, won’t you?”

Joker leans in and kisses Kaidan softly, sweetly, and with his whole heart. “Only if you promise me one thing about this next week?”

“Anything,” Kaidan breathes.

The little bouquet of flowers is still sitting on the counter. A promise, unfulfilled.

“I want to have as much sex as is humanly possible.”

Kaidan’s expression softens and shifts into something wedged perfectly between a smile and a smirk. “I can do that,” he says, picks Joker up, and carries him straight to the bedroom.

***

Joker doesn’t see Kaidan much the following week. (Or the week after that, because the deployment keeps getting pushed back because cruisers are as inefficient as they are stupid.) As an Alliance officer, Kaidan has to oversee certain aspects of the deployment, and on a cruiser, everything is ten times slower and ten times more complicated than it should be.

In the time it takes for the Trafalgar to prepare to leave, the Normandy would have already flown to Artemis Tau, interrupted some Cerberus bullshit, put down a pair of Thresher Maws, picked up a mineral shipment, and still had time to sneak in a couple of bar fights back at Chora’s Den on the Citadel.

God, cruisers suck so much.

Kaidan has to muster at dawn and usually doesn’t get back until late, or very late, or ridiculously late. Most nights, he climbs into bed fully naked, pulls Joker against him, and falls promptly asleep.

Some nights he doesn’t fall straight to sleep. Some nights, he comes home smelling like biotics, and when he climbs into bed, he’s already hard, and Joker is treated to the kind of ride he only used to fantasize about. The kinds where they don’t even bother with speaking, Kaidan just rolls him on his front, and fucks his ass with a quiet determination, like he wants to make sure Joker can feel it the next day. (Which he always does.) And Kaidan doesn’t even pull out after he comes. Joker drifts off just like that, messy and full and wrapped up in Kaidan’s arms.

They are together nearly every morning. Mornings with Kaidan are full of sweet nothings whispered between kisses and gentle touches, and not at all like the focused urgency of their nights together. Some mornings, they make it all the way to the shower, but mostly Kaidan keeps Joker in bed, pins his hips down, and makes him come with his mouth.

(Usually more than once.)

(One time, more than twice.)

Kaidan always draws out the sex until the last possible moment, until he has to skip showering and is scrambling for his boots so he’s not late. And Joker watches him from the bed, grinning, quipping that it’s good that Kaidan's already had a hearty breakfast, and Kaidan grins back and blows him a kiss before he’s out the door. And then Joker gets to stay in bed and fall asleep for another hour like a good stay-at-home coping mechanism with fuck all else to do.

But with each day that passes, there’s a heaviness that starts to bloom beneath their touches. An aching melancholy undercutting the joy and closeness of their intimacy.

Each day Kaidan reports for duty is one day less that they have together.

And Joker doesn’t know what he’s going to do when there aren’t any days left.

***

The night before Kaidan ships out, Joker has a surprise bottle of champagne chilling in his tiny fridge. Real champagne from Earth. He doesn’t even know if Kaidan likes champagne, which is stupid because it cost him a solid paycheck-and-a-half, and it’s by far the most expensive thing in the whole damn apartment.

(If there was a fire, he’d grab the bottle and leave all the rest to burn.)

It was a romantically stupid, ill-informed idea. It doesn’t even make any sense. Kaidan going away is not something he wants to celebrate in the least.

Aside from the swooping emptiness at losing Kaidan, even temporarily, there’s the bitterness in the back of his throat. That Kaiden is going back to a world that looks and sounds and smells just the way the world ought to — and Joker isn’t. And probably will never be.

The Alliance will never let him fly. Not a shuttle. Or a transpo-barge. Not even a fuel tanker. He should quit the Navy. He’s sure they would accept some medical discharge bullshit, even if Dr Chakwas would never put her name to such a thing. He’d be free, and then he’d find someone, somewhere, who’d let him pilot.

And it’s tempting, it is. Especially on days like today. He could have the stars again, and that’s no small thing.

But Joker has had the best of the best. The greatest ship ever built. The best Commander to lead her. And the best—

"Staff Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, Alliance Marines."

Joker straightens instantly, a huge grin splitting his face despite everything. He slides open the door to his apartment. A startled: “Hey—” and Kaidan tumbles into his arms.

“Migraine,” Kaidan says tersely through clenched teeth.

Joker staggers under Kaidan’s weight, gets him a couple of steps into the living room, then gives it up as a bad job and just slides down to the floor with him. Then he kills all the lights in his apartment as quickly and quietly as he can.

“Shit. Kaidan, you didn’t have to come over.”

“Wanted to see you,” he mutters.

“So stupid,” Joker’s heart flips a little even as he’s privately certain he’s not worth this. He slides his leg under Kaidan’s head in lieu of a pillow — probably should have bought a couch instead of the champagne.

“Sorry to… to…” Kaidan presses his face into Joker’s knee, and the rest of the sentence dissolves into a strangled groan.

“Jesus.”

Kaidan is quiet for long, agonizing moments, fingers digging into Joker’s thigh. Then, “Sorry to—”

“Just shut up already,” Joker rubs the back of Kaidan’s neck, trying to distract him from the pain. He digs his thumbs in as hard as he dares — not very hard, truth be told, but Kaidan groans softly and writhes against the touch.

“Sorry to b-bug… Sorry—”

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” Joker says, voice exasperated, but fond. “There we said it. Now just be quiet for a bit, okay?” He slides his hand down the curve of Kaidan’s spine over and over again. He flings an arm out for his datapad, but it’s just out of reach, and he doesn’t want to disturb Kaidan just yet. He doesn’t really need it; he’s memorized Dr Chakwas’ care plans for managing Kaidan’s migraines, and he’s familiar with how they can unfold.

“T-took something,” Kaidan says. “Should kick in soon.”

“Yeah? Fucking better.”

“Feels like lightning in m-my skull.”

“Shhhh. Easy, easy,” Joker rubs below Kaidan’s ears where his jaw is tightly clenched. He mutters endearments and soothing nonsense, stroking rhythmically at Kaidan’s temples and jaw.

It’s a solid hour before the headache starts to loosen its grip and another two before the sharp crease between Kaidan’s brow eases and he manages to fall asleep. By then, Joker’s leg has lost all feeling, and the pins and needles are racing up his hips and back, but there’s no way he’s leaving Kaidan alone on the floor as he crawls off to bed.

(Plus, if he tried to carry him, his spine would probably snap from the weight of all that Canadian beef.)

Joker settles himself around the bulky marine passed out on his floor with a sigh. Big spoon to Kaidan’s little. His shoulders are so broad Joker can barely get his arms around him. He squeezes in as close as he can, breathing deeply.

Their time is running out.

Two weeks, or three, Joker reminds himself like a mantra. That’s all. That's it. That’s doable.

But Joker knows that without Kaidan, there’s just the black hole of Shepard’s loss, and a million empty regrets and what-ifs.

What if something happens?

What if this is really it?

What if he never sees Kaidan again?

Joker closes his eyes.

Fuck it.

If this is his last moment with Kaidan, he’s not going to waste it.

“I love you,” Joker breathes into the dark waves of his hair. “Shepard… I never told her. And then it was too late. So I thought I should say it out loud once. To you. Just… just to say it.”

Kaidan doesn’t reply. There’s just the quiet of the night and the easy rise and fall of his chest.

Joker wraps his arms around him with a sigh, and pretends this can last forever, that this is a perfect world with no death, and no deployment (and no Reapers), and everyone, even gorgeous biotic super-soldiers way way way out of your league, loves you back just because you want them to.

***

In the morning, Joker wakes in his own bed. His back is so stiff he can barely stand, and Kaidan is gone. He does three full turns around his apartment, just in case, but he’s no fool. Kaidan was due to report a full two hours ago.

There’s a message on his datapad, so the swooping emptiness of being abandoned by a lover doesn’t last for long. Joker’s eyes widen as he taps the icon.

It’s a video message. Kaidan, still in Joker's apartment, freshly showered, shaved, and dressed to report to Alliance HQ.

“Hey Joker,” he says. “Sorry for just leaving this morning. I know you didn’t get any sleep last night, and I just… I didn’t have the heart to wake you.”

A long pause where Kaidan turns his head towards something off-screen, and Joker is forcibly reminded how handsome he is. Profile all sharp lines and angles, even if his expression is soft and fond.

“Last night… I meant to tell you… I’d planned to tell you…” A one-shouldered shrug. “Well… you’re the only thing that’s been holding me together these last couple of months, and I… Well. Thank you seems crass, but anything else I should probably wait to say in person. But there are… things I want to say.” Kaidan flashes him an awkward smile, eyes cutting away almost shyly.

“I’ll… I’ll see you soon. Take care of yourself, for me.”

Then Kaidan leans forward and ends the recording.

Chapter Text

A week passes. Joker listens to the recording a hundred times.

A month, and it's probably a thousand.

Two months.

Three.

Four months of silence from Kaidan.

It wasn’t standard crew rotation and training, after all.

Joker knows about these types of deployments. The long dark hauls into deep space. The covert ops you didn’t know were covert ops until you ship out, and all off-ship comms are blocked. The two-month stints that turn into nineteen in the blink of an eye. The absolute, soul-crushing wall of silence that’s like gangrene to relationships. God, he’s sat in enough bars with enough marines, and every one of them had a story about the one who couldn’t wait for them.

And he and Kaidan had never decided if this thing they had was more than just coping. Never talked about it. Never once.

And now every day is harder.

His knee hurts. And his hips hurt. And his hands hurt. And he knows he ought to go see Dr Chakwas and get his meds tweaked. But he doesn’t because he can’t stand to see that little red flag on his medical records.

Grounded. Medical observation. Security clearance revoked.

Then plays Kaidan’s recording again, because there’s nothing left to Joker that matters as much as the soft, scratchy sound of Kaiden’s voice.

***

Joker marks the anniversary of Shepard’s death alone.

Liara had tried to arrange a small gathering in Shepard’s honor, but the Normandy crew –– those that survived –– were too scattered.

After Shepard’s funeral, Wrex had left for Tuchanka, Tali had returned to the Migrant Fleet, Garrus had stuck it out on the Citadel for a while, but now, he’s gone too. Most of the Alliance crew has taken up postings on new ships or stations, and some, like Kaidan, are unreachable. But Joker exchanges messages back and forth with the few he can reach. Pleasantries. Memories. Everyone expresses the same sentiment; they can’t believe it’s been a year since Shepard died.

Joker disagrees. He can’t believe it hasn’t been two hundred years since she died. It feels like a lifetime has passed. And nothing is as it was.

A year ago, Joker had woken up at the helm of the greatest starship in the Alliance fleet, surrounded by friends, madly in love with his Commander and her Staff Lieutenant, certain of his purpose and the path of his life.

And then everything had—literally—blown up.

(But one thing hasn’t changed. He’s still madly in love with Shepard and Kaidan.)

Joker takes the bottle of champagne he’d bought for Kaidan up to a secluded spot on the presidium. It’s near the rooftops and has a partial view of the starport. It’s also separate from all the nonsense and commemorative reports recounting the destruction of the Alliance’s prized frigate and the death of her Commander. It’s all speculation because the real story is solidly classified, and no one seems to know a single detail of what actually happened.

He remembers the strangest details of that day. Gardner had made a passable attempt at bagels, and Joker had held one in his mouth so he could ascend the stairs with a cup of coffee and still have a free hand for the railing. Garrus and Tali argued over which dextro-equivalent was closest in taste to strawberry jam, while Wrex provided wildly inaccurate descriptions. Shepard had come down to breakfast, hair still damp, plaiting the long red strands into a single braid over her shoulder, while three drops of water trailed down her neck. A normal morning on the Normandy.

If Joker had known that was going to be it, he would have appreciated it more.

He takes a long drink of champagne directly from the bottle, bubbles fizzy and overly cheerful on his tongue.

He misses Shepard. He’s missed her every day for an entire year, but right now it feels like an open wound. Some raw thing inside him that cuts so deep the bone is exposed, and he can barely breathe around the pain. He knows what it is to break into pieces, but he’d fall to the surface of Alchera a thousand times if it meant Shepard could be in the escape pod with him, just once. Just once.

Just…

He runs his palm over the top of his hat. Over and over and over and over, hoping the familiar tactile sensation will distract his hands and mind the way a flight screen once might have.

But it doesn’t help.

Not today.

He leaves the bottle of champagne on the bench, only half drunk.

He means to head back to his apartment, but when he gets there, he walks straight past it and doesn't stop. He walks from ward to ward along the Citadel. He walks until he can feel every old break in his bones, until sharp aches race up his legs and hips and span across his ribs and shoulders, and it hurts to even breathe.

Until he finds himself standing at Kaidan Alenko’s door.

He wipes the sweat from his forehead in the crook of his arm, winded and more than a little drunk. Kaidan had given him the address to his apartment weeks before he deployed, but they always just met at Joker’s place. He doesn’t— he knows Kaidan’s not there, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

A wave of dizziness hits him, and he reaches out to steady himself, fingers inadvertently brushing over the access pad. The door slides open, and Joker tumbles through with a startled cry, flailing out. He catches his fingertips on the door frame, barely saving himself from a fall.

“Holy shit,” he pants, heart pounding.

Two thoughts jangle around in his brain: that he really doesn’t want to have to call Dr Chakwas to scrape him off Kaidan Alenko’s apartment with a broken hip, and holy fucking shit, Kaidan gave him full access to his apartment.

Even Joker hadn’t done that.

He’d thought of it, sure. But it seemed too intimate a gesture, and a part of Joker was just scared that he’d chase Kaidan away if he ever left the smallest crack of what he really felt show.

And then Kaidan just does something like this, and doesn’t even tell Joker.

Ship’s rules. You belong in any space you can access.

So Joker belongs in Kaidan's apartment. Full stop.

Something inside Joker twists painfully. Maybe it’s the champagne, or the queasiness of a near-fall, or the fact that he misses Kaidan so goddamn much right now it hurts to breathe, but he steps inside the apartment so he doesn’t cry in full view of everyone.

Kaidan’s apartment is perfectly neat and clean, and the kind of put-together that makes Joker question his own life choices. Nothing in the apartment looks like it belongs to a career marine, except for a pair of standard-issue boots lined up neatly by the door. The space is small and comfortably furnished, with little touches of sentimentality all over the place. There’s the red cup on the counter stamped with a white maple leaf, the tiny stack of coffee-table books printed on real paper, a set of antique pots hanging from a rack in the kitchen.

Out of curiosity, he peeks inside the fridge, which, like the rest of the kitchen, is fully stocked, contents double wrapped for long-term storage.

“No lube.” Joker mutters to himself and shuts the fridge door. “Figures.”

Further in the apartment, Kaidan’s bedroom is as neat as the rest of the apartment, the dark bedding neatly made up, corners tucked under the mattress with military precision. Joker shakes his head, annoyed and fond all at once. Then he catches sight of Kaidan’s bedside table, and his legs collapse out from beneath him. He sits down hard on the bed, swamped by a wave of dizziness.

It’s a picture of Kaidan and Shepard. They’re smiling at each other, caught mid-moment under a pinkish spray of light. It was taken at the Flux not long after Shepard was made a Spectre. Joker remembers that night, drinking and dancing. For all that she moves like smoke over water on a battlefield, on a dance floor, Shepard is all stiffness and sharp angles and whatever the hell she always does with her shoulders.

That night, Shepard and Tali had danced for nearly an hour before pulling the crew onto the dance floor. They’d grabbed Garrus first and then the others, one by one. Wrex didn’t really dance, but he seemed to enjoy aggressively body-checking anyone who drifted too close to Joker.

Kaidan had been one of the last to join them on the dance floor. He’d been nursing a beer at the bar, pretending he wasn’t falling for Shepard. And she'd been busy dancing, pretending she wasn't falling right back. But then she’d grabbed his arm, sweaty and smiling, and they'd both stopped pretending when they'd smiled at each other.

Joker picks up the picture on the nightstand. He thinks it was taken right around that moment. A heartbeat of softness frozen in time. Ten minutes later, Shepard would be dancing on the bartop.

He grins, tracing the curve of Shepard’s face with his index finger. The sweep of dark lashes, the coil of bright red hair. He does the same with Kaidan, mapping the sharp edge of his jaw and the dark waves along his brow.

There’s a folded shirt on the table, too. Joker reaches for it. Dark green, the fabric old, and soft, and full of holes. It’s the shirt he’d lent Kaidan their first night together, back when he was certain Kaidan was going to panic and bolt. Joker hadn’t realized he’d kept the shirt.

A wave of loneliness swamps him. Joker hopes that Kaidan doesn’t realize what today is. He can’t bear the thought of Kaidan marking the first anniversary of Shepard’s death alone in the bowels of some giant fucking ship full of strangers.

Joker folds in on himself, exhausted. Too physically and emotionally wrung out to stay upright. He brings up his omnitool and taps on the recording from Kaidan, hearing that warm, scratchy voice he loves so much.

“Hey, Joker. Sorry for just leaving this morning.”

He pulls the picture of Kaidan and Shepard to his chest with one hand, and drags his old shirt up against his face with the other. It still smells like Kaidan, even beneath the sharpness of the laundry detergent he uses.

“I know you didn’t get any sleep last night, and I just… I didn’t have the heart to wake you. Last night… I meant to tell you… I’d planned to tell you…”

Joker closes his eyes, and a tear slides down his cheek. He lets the familiar cadence of the recording wash over him. The words lose their shape until the husky rise and fall of Kaidan’s voice is all that remains. As Joker drifts off to sleep, he barely registers the end of the recording or the way the evenness of Kaidan’s voice is broken by a tiny hitch.

“I’ll see you soon. Take care of yourself, for me.”

***

The months tiptoe by.

Nothing changes. Nothing shifts.

Joker never goes back to Kaidan’s apartment again.

He grows out his beard. Then he shaves it off again. He switches to a cheaper brand of beer. And then he switches back because it’s Kaidan’s favorite brand, and it reminds Joker of his kisses. And then he drops his medications one by one.

It’s not even a conscious decision, not really. He skips a few doses from simple absentmindedness, and when he tries to go back to his usual schedule, they make him so nauseous he spends a couple of weeks trying to weed out the pill he can no longer tolerate, but it feels like every combination makes him feel wretched. So he just... stops.

He knows he should go see Dr Chakwas and have her review and reset his meds… but he can’t. And with each month that passes, his meds matter less and less to him, even if some days it’s hard to get out of bed, and that scratchy pain in his hands never seems to leave.

He grows out his beard again.

And then he shaves it off.

***

There are rumors that Shepard is alive.

It’s not the first time he’s heard that Shepard survived. For a while, every redhead with a gun was trying to pawn themselves off as the Commander once word got around that the Alliance never found her body.

The first time he heard that Shepard had lived, he spent nearly a year's worth of credits to book passage to some backwater system, only to find some half-assed phony impersonator and definitive proof that he's still head over heels in love with Shepard.

He’s a connoisseur of Shepard rumors now. There’s the one where she’s been recruited into Turian high command; the one where she’s working as a stripper in the terminus systems; the one where she’s in a Krogan prison; the one where she’s pregnant with the Asari councilor's love-child; the one where she’s being held hostage by Batarian slavers; the one where she was being held hostage by Batarian slavers, then broke out, killed half of them, and took over command.

There are even worse whisperings. Nightmare stuff. Stuff about what oxygen deprivation does to the brain, or what rapid decompression does to the body. Once, Joker had to listen to a detailed explanation of what it might be like to suffer an arterial bleed while free-floating in space, and how the force of your own blood leaving your body would actually propel you backward. As it turns out, there are a helluva lotta ways to experience truly awful things in space.

There are your conspiracy theorists, with their endless, infinitely detailed explanations, and unshakable certainty that Shepard was in league with Saren, or indoctrinated by him. They can go on for hours about how Shepard had orchestrated the whole attack on the Citadel for the chance to take out the entirety of the Council and place a human in the highest seat of galactic power. That one just hurts like a gut punch. Joker would be lying if he said that none of his nightmares of endless screams and weightless bodies were of the Destiny Ascension.

Every now and then, you get your assholes. Mostly young, plastered marines in dive bars with the world’s most punchable faces, explaining how it’s a good thing that Commander Shepard is dead. They’re usually surrounded by squad mates trying desperately to get them to shut-the-fuck-up. On more than one occasion, Joker’s gotten into shouting matches because he doesn’t seem to have any self-control anymore. But at least guys like that help him find the teeniest-tiniest silver lining to it all: the bitter thought that the Reapers can't come fast enough.

So he doesn’t pay any attention to the latest crop of rumors.

But then, someone sends him a set of coordinates and a lock of red hair.

And in one instant, Joker feels what’s left of the tiny shelter he’d rebuilt around his heart crumble away.

He tries Ryncol for the first time that night and ends up puking into the Presidium Lake. He spends the rest of the night on the floor of his apartment with his head in his hands and just aches for them. For Shepard. For Kaidan.

He stays in his apartment for six days. Six awful days where he’s frozen between hope and grief and a cluster fuck of what-ifs.

(And bouts of every one of his internal organs turning inside out from the Ryncol.)

(Super do not recommend.)

The next morning, Joker leaves his apartment at dawn, unable to sleep, unable to go a minute longer without answers, heading to the one person left in his life.

In the almost 19 months since the Normandy blew up, Dr Chakwas has never returned to a naval posting; instead, working on an Alliance R&D lab on the Shalta ward, focused on xenobiology. One or twice, Joker’s tried to convince her to head back to the skies, but she always waved him away, flatly unwilling to engage in that topic at all.

He has a visitor’s pass that Dr Chakwas has arranged for him, so when he reaches the lab, he lets himself inside, belatedly remembering that even though they’ve kept up their weekly calls, he hasn’t seen Dr Chakwas in person in almost five months.

She’s alone in the lab at her desk near the back, dressed in a white coat, neat, chin-length grey hair framing her face as she works.

“Hey,” Joker says, smiling a little despite everything.

“Jeff?” Dr Chakwas rises, looking more alarmed than surprised. “Are you alright? What are you doing here? Are you in pain? Did you break anything?” She lowers her voice, but just barely. “Did you kill anyone?”

The rapid-fire questions are as familiar as they are annoying. Joker hunches his shoulders. “No, I didn’t kill anyone, Karin. Is that what you think of me? I’m just— I’m fine.”

She looks very unconvinced. “You look absolutely terrible. Sit down.”

“Uh, thanks?” Joker glares a bit, but he sits because it is so not worth arguing with Dr Karin Chakwas. About anything. She looks affable and even-tempered, but she’s utterly fearless and more stubborn than Wrex, which is fucking saying something. “I’m fine. I just… haven’t really been sleeping.”

“And?”

“And I haven’t eaten much today.”

“And?”

“And I drank Ryncol.”

Dr Chakwas doesn’t say anything in response, but based on her expression, Joker is a thousand percent sure she’s killed someone. Or is about to.

“A little,” Joker adds hurriedly. “I threw it up. Repeatedly. Whatever. That’s––it’s not even why I’m here!”

She doesn’t ask, she just presses her mouth into a thin line and waits.

He stuffs his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing against the lock of hair for the ten thousandth time. It can’t be Shepard’s. It has to be Shepard’s.

Joker takes a breath. “Can you get something tested for me?”

“Of course,” she says at once.

“Off the record? I mean it, Karin. Off off. No one can know you even tested it.”

Dr Chakwas is silent for a while, a frown on her face. “I’m perfectly capable of discretion when the situation calls for it.”

“You still have access to your data from the Normandy? All of it? The genetic sequencing from the crew?”

Her eyebrows raise nearly as high as they can go, but she nods once.

“Okay,” Joker exhales. He digs a hand into his pocket, but can’t make himself draw out the lock of probably-not-Shepard’s hair right away. He feels foolishly protective of it, as though what he carries in his pocket — what’s been tormenting him for days — is the tinder that will ignite a fire far beyond his ability to control.

Stupid, stupid. The simplest answer is that it’s a prank.

He takes a breath and folds the lock of red hair carefully into Dr Chakwas’ palm. It’s like a tiny handful of fire.

Dr Chakwas looks at him sharply, all softness gone from her face. “Jeffreson Marcus Moreau, what on earth is going on?”

“I don’t know.” Joker buries his face in his hands. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t even think straight anymore. Just––tell me it isn’t her so I can go get some sleep.”

She stares at the lock of hair for a moment, glaring, as though she could unlock all its secrets by force of will alone. Then she rises and disappears into the back of her lab without another word.

Joker paces around her office until he can’t do that anymore. Then he sits in the corner, perched on the world’s most uncomfortable stool and chugging cups of stale coffee from tiny paper cups because he has to have something to do while he waits, or he’s going to explode.

His stomach is churning, sharply unpleasant. He knows the combo of anxiety and Ryncol is messing with him. Anxiety, Ryncol, and poor medication adherence. What a trifecta.

The door to the back of the lab slides open. One look at Dr Chakwas’ face and Joker knows.

It’s hers.

The lock of hair belongs to Shepard.

Joker makes a sound he doesn’t recognize, something between relief and dismay, a tangled, broken sort of sound.

And then, embarrassingly, he bursts into tears.

Dr Chakwas reaches for his hand. “Wherever it is you’re going Jeff,” she says in a tone that brooks no disagreement. “I’m going too.”

Chapter Text

It had taken time for Dr Chakwas to file for a leave of absence from her post and make travel arrangements on a multi-stop passenger shuttle for the pair of them, while Joker sat around being little-to-no help. The shock of confirming the lock of hair was Shepard’s had thrown Joker into weeks-long numbness that dissipated the moment he set foot on the shuttle.

(Going fuck knows where, to meet fuck knows who, to do fuck knows what.)

The shift from numb to anxious panic had been instantaneous. Like some insect suddenly bereft of shelter, exposed to the harsh light and scrabbling for that lost sense of security.

He’d been doing fine, hadn’t he? After Kaidan, but before the lock of hair? Not great, but he’d been getting by. And now…

Now he’s fucking not.

Joker's mind is an absolute wreck.

No matter what he does, it just cycles through a series of questions, over and over, fist curled protectively over the lock of Shepard’s hair in his pocket. Who would do this? How did they get it? Why did they send it to him? What do they want? What does it mean? Relentless questions, rattling through him with enough force to break ribs, echoing in the quiet between every heartbeat. Just over and over and over and over again.

And it breaks him a little bit more each time he circles the loop because at the end of it is the worst question of all. What if.

What if Shepard––

Fuck. He won’t even allow himself to complete that sentence, because the implication of it alone is too much to bear. He can't. He fucking can't. But it's a single speck of glitter against the vast black maw of reality. It sticks to him. Irritating and brilliant and fucking impossible to dislodge.

So instead, he paces in the tiny line of space between the bunks in steerage, biting his nails until they bleed, and Dr Chakwas has to sit him down in front of the other passengers and wrap each of the tips of his fingers in gauze so he can’t gnaw them down to the bone.

So then he just paces relentlessly and wishes he could bite his nails.

Karin Chakwas is too smart for her own good. The first morning of their journey together, it takes her about thirty seconds of watching him hobble around to figure out he’s off his meds. She doesn’t say anything, just gives him one of those hard, flat looks of hers that makes her seem ancient and all-knowing all at once, and he almost blurts out everything right then. Everything that happened the day the Normandy was attacked, and everything that happened afterwards. How his grief at Shepard's death was so huge that he thought he would die from it, until he kissed Kaidan Alenko and found a new path forward––and the best sex of his life.

Yeah. He’s definitely not gonna tell Dr Chakwas about the sex.

He’s gonna jump out of an airlock before that ever happens.

And all any of it makes him want to do is wrangle the shuttle pilot out of the flight chair, take the ship, and push every last drop of speed out of her to get them there faster.

(He thinks he could shave a solid six hours off the trip, more if somebody spent half an hour calibrating the drive-core. He can feel the way the pilot is constantly fighting the stick instead of riding out the momentum of their maneuvers. And the drive-core feels out of wack, he can tell from the tiny vibrations and the sound of it, like Turian subvocals, all rumble and just a tiny bit out of sync.)

As luck would have it, they’re the shuttle's last stop—a shitty spaceport in the middle of the Voyager Cluster. Though spaceport is a very generous word for what appears to be two clunkers and a docking bay super-glued together, surrounded by noticeable debris, and venting plumes of greenish smoke into the atmosphere.

Joker grits his teeth as their pilot executes the shoddiest landing Joker’s ever personally experienced. The instant they land, he grabs Dr Chakwas’ hand and makes a beeline for the shuttle doors. “If it turns out they want to harvest our livers and sell them on the black market, just run away and save yourself,” he mutters out of the side of his mouth.

“Not a chance,” Dr Chakwas says crisply and tucks herself closer to Joker’s side.

“Are you––”

The doors of the Shuttle’s docking bay slide open, and in steps two Cerberus assault troopers in full kit.

“Oh fuck,” Joker tenses, but there’s nowhere to run. “Cerberus. You gotta be kidding me.”

In that moment, it’s hard not to imagine how Shepard would have handled a similar situation––the only question being whether she would have killed the Cerberus grunts in ten seconds, or twelve? Joker is not quite as adept at murder in close quarters, so he shoves his hands in his pockets and glares real hard.

“Follow us,” one of them says. The voice modulator built into Cerberus’ standard-issue helmet makes them all sound like the same deep-voiced asshole.

Joker glares harder and glances at Dr Chakwas, who shakes her head imperceptibly, eyes hard, which he interprets as her don’t be an idiot look.

He blows out a breath and follows without comment.

The spaceport’s docking bay is cramped and smelly, absolutely living up to expectations. The new shuttle that the Assault Troopers lead them to, does not. It far exceeds them. The new shuttle is nothing like the one they took to get here. It’s a top-of-the-line E-class shuttle with sleek black and white plating that must be such a bitch to keep clean. The viewports gleam with a gunmetal shimmer, and while Joker can’t see what the inside looks like, it's probably not a clunker.

The shuttle doors slide open, and the lead Trooper peels off, motioning them inside with his rifle.

“Hey, you. Are you going to tell us where we’re going?” Joker asks.

A pause.

“No.”

“Lovely,” Joker says between his teeth and steps inside.

***

No one says a word the entire ride.

Joker just stares out the nearest viewport, trying to track their movements through space, but without any planets to help orient him, it’s like trying to keep track of a single needle in a giant pile of needles; everything looks the same after a while. They’re likely still in the Voyager Cluster; they haven’t been flying long enough to be anywhere else, but besides that, Joker can’t tell.

And he can't fucking keep still.

He taps the Normandy’s docking code restlessly against his knees, unable to stop himself. He’s handled Shepard’s lock of hair so much over the past few weeks that it’s all knots and split ends. He slips his hand in his pocket just to check that it’s still there, and then moves his hands back to his knees. Tap tap tapping to keep his hands occupied.

Dr Chakwas looks nearly as tense as he feels, and he tries to catch her eye more than once, but she stares resolutely out of her own viewport and doesn't move. After several hours, she makes a soft sound of exclamation, and Joker rushes over.

Floating in the darkness is a space station shaped like a warship, all threat and aggressive angles. Joker takes a deep breath through his nose. This was all such a fucking bad idea.

Dr Chakwas pats his knee briefly, lips curling into a grim smile even though she won’t meet his eyes. He cuts his gaze towards the Assault Troopers standing against the walls. They're inscrutable in their helmets, with those visors you can't even see into, but he knows they're being watched. So he stays silent, knuckles white against the seat, watching the station loom larger and larger, until the pilot docks with the kind of easy competency Joker doesn’t really enjoy in a terrorist organization.

(How come Cerberus couldn't have had the piece of shit pilot?)

The shuttle doors open with a hiss, and the two Assault Troopers flank the door as a woman walks in. She’s tall, with rather intensely hourglass proportions, movements slinky and graceful. She’s… well, stunning is the only word to describe her. Blue eyes. Inky black hair. Unlike the Assault Troopers, she isn’t obviously armed, but everything about her is unnerving. Motions, too precise. Gaze, too intelligent.

“Lieutenant Moreau. Dr Chakwas.” Even her voice is smoothly alluring. “I trust your trip was agreeable.”

Joker snorts and jerks his head at the pair of Assault Troopers. “Yeah. Friendly bunch. Bet they’re great at parties.”

The corner of her mouth flickers upwards so briefly Joker might have imagined it. “My name is Miranda. I’m the Commanding Officer in charge of this facility. I’m sure you have questions.”

“One or two,” Joker says tightly.

“Of course,” Miranda smiles, but the curl of her lip is not particularly friendly. “Dr Chakwas, these men will escort you to your quarters. I’m certain you’ll find everything to your liking. I’ll need to borrow Lieutenant Moreau for an hour or so, but don’t worry, I promise to return him to you without incident.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Dr Cakwas says seriously. She shoots Joker one last inscrutable look and then turns to follow the Assault Troopers.

Joker hesitates a moment before following wordlessly behind Miranda. She has to slow her pace to meet his because he refuses to walk any faster than he can without limping.

He doesn’t get much chance to see the facility, just a glimpse of a large open-air atrium that reminds him of the presidium — clean and full of self-importance — before she turns sharply down a corridor that leads them into a more internal part of the facility.

“Just so you know,” Joker says darkly, “I’ve spent the better part of a year wrecking my liver.”

Miranda scoffs. “I have no interest in your liver, Lieutenant.”

Joker ignores the subtle and sinister emphasis on the word your. “Well, now I’m kinda offended.”

“You shouldn’t be. Not many people have the chance to meet the Illusive Man.”

“The what man?”

“Illusive.”

“Wow. His parents name him that?”

“A certain degree of confidentiality is important in our line of work.”

Joker makes an amused sound. “Yeah, but as a moniker it’s a little too on target, isn’t it? I mean, given everything you all did to get us here.”

She raises a single black brow at him. “Pot, Kettle, don’t you think, Joker?”

“Ouch.”

She touches her hand against an unmarked portion of the wall, and a hidden door slides open. “In there,” Miranda says, with a tip of her head.

Joker peers over her shoulder. The room is dark and empty.

She motions again with her head. “Don’t keep the Illusive Man waiting. He can answer your questions about Commander Shepard.”

Well, fuck.

Joker steps inside.

The empty room around him activates. It’s completely wrapped in holoscreens; the floor, the ceiling, everything. Not the typical kind, these are cutting-edge and adaptive. They probably cost several dozen fortunes. Faint lines of energy flare in waves of blue before the entire thing resolves into a sleek, seamless platform, the dark silhouette of an unarmored man in a chair, and a breathtaking view of space, full of nebulae and golden flares of light.

There’s no wavering, or transparency, or lines of static like you get with other holoscreens. The display is crisp and so realistic that Joker might as well be in the room with this so-called Illusive Man.

“Lieutenant Moreau,” the figure says, not standing, not turning around, just gesturing a little with a cigar. “A pleasure. I’ve been waiting for some time to meet you.”

Joker rolls his eyes. He’d been prepared to meet some ultra-rich asshole with the world's most over-inflated ego. So, you know, expectations met. “Okay. Hey, or whatever. I know you brought me here to talk about Commander Shepard. So let’s just forget about everything else and do that.”

A brief, humorless chuckle. “My mistake. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate the meaningless pleasantries. But we can get right down to things if you prefer.” He takes a long drag on his cigar and blows out a lungful of smoke. It looks like a puff of black in silhouette, but it smells real enough. Almost as if the cigar and the man smoking it were actually in the room. “Tell me, what does the Alliance teach its pilots about no-win scenarios?”

“This— Really?" Joker makes a noise that’s half laugh, half scoff. “You want to talk Alliance training policy? Now?”

“Humor me.” Another puff of cigar smoke. “This is one of the few points that the Alliance and I agree upon.”

This time, the sound is pure annoyance. “Avoid them,” Joker says crisply.

“And if you can’t?”

Joker glares. It’s ineffective since he’s glaring at the back of the Illusive Man’s holographic head, but he does it anyway.

“Come now. Your aptitude scores have led me to believe that you’re quite smart.”

He grinds his teeth. “Prevent them.”

The Illusive Man holds his cigar between his teeth as he claps slowly, more smug than sarcastic. He pushes himself to standing, back still to Joker, and takes a long drag on his cigar, smoke billowing around him in soft black clouds.

Joker appreciates the overabundance of dramatic flair, really. The galactic council could take a few notes, or at least up their holo-projection game. But the lock of red hair is burning a hole through Joker’s entire fucking world, the same as it has since the moment he got it. He slips a hand into his pocket, thumbs brushing against the scarlet strands. “What the hell does any of this have to do with Shepard?”

“The why of it all is so much easier to accept than the what.” The Illusive Man turns, stepping into the light. Average height. Average build. Expensive-looking jacket. Handsome, but not too handsome. The eyes are a bit of a shock. Pupils catch the light with an almost silvery, pearlescent sheen, but the glowing, ice-blue flare of his cybernetic irises is vivid and entirely unsettling. “The Reaper invasion is the biggest no-win scenario that humanity has ever faced,” he flicks absently at his cigar. “We’ve no hope in the fight to come without Commander Shepard.”

And it’s true. But Joker has been too much of a mess to bother with freaking out about the Reapers. His existential crisis is still firmly fixed on having to remember to take his medication, or do laundry, or just exist in a world without Shepard. He hasn’t had the capacity to lose his shit about weathering a world-ending conflict without her.

Buuuut he can have that freak-out now instead, with the Illusive Man for company.

Sweet.

So glad he made the trip for this.

Joker grinds his teeth together. “Well, then I guess we’re all pretty fucked, thanks for the reminder.”

And they are. The Reapers have been orchestrating mass-extinction cycles for an unfathomable amount of time. They have a stunning track record of destruction, and aren’t super likely to have initiated this cycle when they had any chance of losing.

Still, that wouldn’t have stopped Shepard.

Joker swallows a sharp knot of panic and despair. “So, you wanna hug it out, or something?”

A shark-like grin wreathed in smoke. “Not exactly. I’d prefer it if you’d agree to join Cerberus as a pilot for one of our most important and highly-funded initiatives.”

“You want to recruit me? The world is ending, remember? And even if it wasn’t…” Joker laughs, the sound a little wild. “No. No way.”

“Do it for Commander Shepard,” The Illusive Man says, the shadow of a smirk on his face.

“She hated Cerberus,” Joker says. “She’d hate me for even talking to you guys.”

“Have faith,” the Illusive Man flicks at his cigar, the gesture so casual, it’s almost lazy. “She might be… open to changing her mind.”

Joker stills. He can’t even identify all the emotions that statement lets loose. It’s just a clusterfuck of feelings cantering around inside him. He grabs hold of his anger, which is the only emotion that makes any sense. “I’m not sure if you’ve heard the news,” he says, voice flinty. “But Commander Shepard blew up over the skies of Alchera.”

“She did.” The Illusive Man brushes casually at Joker’s shoulders as if he were physically in the same space and could affect the wrinkles on his uniform. “Lovely woman. Not as tall as I’d imagined,” the cybernetics in his eyes shine brightly. “But then, some people just have a presence, don’t they?”

Every single hair on the back of Joker’s neck stands on end. “You… You found her.”

“I did,” he holds the cigar between his teeth for a moment. “And then I created the Lazarus Project. To… even the odds as it were.”

Anger shifts into rage, and Joker folds his hands into fists, heart pounding. If the Illusive Man was actually in the room, Joker would probably take a swing at him, no matter what it would do to his hands. “So, what? Got an army of Shepard clones? Is that what this is about?”

“Don’t insult me,” The Illusive Man says calmly. “Do I seem like a man who settles for a facsimile when I can have the original masterpiece?” He wanders away, gesturing with his cigar. “Shepard was just the appetizer. Special Operative Lawson here will show you the main course. I expect great things from you, Lieutenant.”

A door slides open in the holoscreened sky, and Miranda steps inside the room. The projection deactivates in phases, the image of the Illusive Man collapsing around her, leaving only uneasiness and the scent of cigar smoke.

What the fuck.

She gestures. “Follow me, Lieutenant.”

He does. She leads him back through the facility. It looks high-security and high-tech and faintly medical. His naval training kicks in, and he tries to map the floor plan as they walk, but the place is huge and he loses track of all the turns and corridors and the rows and rows of lab space and manufacturing equipment. He tries to keep a count of personnel, to gauge the size and shape of the operation, but his mind is racing, and it’s just a blur of soldiers and scientists and lab technicians in full kit.

Whatever the fuck is going on here seems to be a big operation.

“So. The Lazarus Project.” He can only tell that Miranda’s stride falters, just a little, by the sound of her boots on the polished floors.

“The Illusive Man must think quite highly of you. Not many people know the name of that initiative. Fewer know of its objective.”

“I’m not sure I’m one of those people. Some constructive criticism for Cerberus: that dude was not exactly a clear communicator. I recommend leadership training.”

Miranda falls silent for a full three minutes before responding. “Lazarus of Bethany was a figure in the Christian bible who was said to have died in 30 A.D.”

“Random, but okay,” Joker snorts.

“He remained dead for four days prior to his resurrection, and then went on to live another thirty years,” she says evenly. “It’s been quite a bit more than four days this time around, but then, Shepard may require longer than thirty years, don’t you agree?”

The floor opens up and swallows Joker whole. “Excuse me?” He can hear himself say in a voice too easy and measured to be his own.

“As of two months ago, Commander Jane Shepard became the first person in modern history to survive death.”

“Bullshit,” Joker’s voice is low, and fast losing its evenness. “Bull. Shit.”

“Her heart is beating on its own, and she’s had consistent brain activity over the past several weeks. There’s been some challenges in replicating full neurological function, but then we had to rebuild her almost entirely from the sternum down. Her left arm was well, five and a half inches below the shoulder. She isn't yet conscious, but we're preparing to wake her in a few weeks, once her numbers are where we want them to be.”

Miranda’s words have blasted Joker so far out of his own body that he can’t tell if he’s still walking behind her or if he even has legs anymore. This is what it must have been like to be the first person who wandered blindly into a mass relay— space folded all around, and suddenly they exist somewhere else entirely, with no words to describe what just happened.

“I don’t believe you,” he mutters under his breath at first, and then louder, ringing through the air. “I don’t believe you!”

Miranda raises a single dark brow. “Turn around, Lieutenant.”

Joker turns, and his heart stops.

The ship is at the far end of the hangar, obscured by scaffolding, and smoke, and the bustle of an active spaceport. He can only see part of her, a smudge of a silhouette through the smoke, but he knows, he just fucking knows.

It's the Normandy.

Holy shit.

He makes several heart-wrenching noises before he manages to pull himself together enough to pretend to be someone who doesn’t fall to pieces over the partial silhouette of a ship. And it is pretense, all of it. Because he continues to fall to pieces, only he’s more subtle about it.

“You see, Lieutenant,” Miranda says, voice calm and quiet. “It’s just as you were told. We are in the business of bringing dead things back to life.”