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You want to scream at her—“Slow the fuck down!”— and holding back the shout floods your mouth with sour adrenaline spit. But then again, you’re used to turning your voice box into a rough-hewn casket for DOA commands, remembering them always after, endless novenas silently recited while you stare out shuttle doors wishing that something had gone differently.
Firstly, there is no point in yelling at Jack; it rarely gets anywhere and never goes well. Even your hardest Commander tone —the one you spool up like a back up genny or a just-in-case electrocannon when you’re too tired for it to come unforced or stuff gets too murky to barrel through— it’s hit or miss with her anyway, even at your best. She is always running ahead, plodding forward, biotics and boots singing a loud-quiet-loud round with the dirty concrete, and you just want her to stop. But you treat her like a tied-and-staked varren— no matter how scary, you can’t ever bark first, it would just be an excuse for her to turn and bite.
Back in engineering, she’s worn a polished chrome track around the floor by pacing. Even when she’s perched like a falcon or sitting crunched on the bed, she looks at you with rolling ferine eyes, a zoo animal devoid of understanding and pretty pissed off, wondering why you’d come into her enclosure. Jack’s face, the familiar arch of her eyebrows and creases at her mouth’s corners and the hand that becomes as much a part of it each time it rakes carelessly on her shaved head, it spits and hisses before either of you get a word off. You’ve started to think of her as a klixen in the ship’s belly, baring her teeth for show and gnawing at the Normandy’s bones when nobody’s around to jump.
She doesn’t look all that wild now —less cagey or caged— as you study her face. Her eyelids are heavy and fixed, her movements economical and steady. There’s a tension deep in her tissue, slowly rippling up and radiating self-control like you’d never thought you’d see: she’s hunting. And she’s moving too damn fast.
So you let her take point, figuring Jack knows the way and there’s no bucking her into formation anyhow, but you lead by dragging your heels, pausing at way marks to question and analyze the features of this garden ruin. It smells like old bodies and cloying jasmine and you struggle to keep your stomach
—there’s sooty sludge on the walls, like in vids of old Earth when they figured out how to split the atom and scorch each other into stone; you want to touch it, run your fingers along, through it. Veracity in the viscera. You want to touch the history, the hate and discontent, her fear catalyzed into violent breaking waves that bled out of these walls and into the world where you found her and—
you’ve given her a place in your mission, in your ship: just enough bare ground and blank walls to let her decorate with her own barbed wire. Which is the same as building her another cage. You’re sorry, so, so sorry. Thane would get it, in that assassin’s cold current running through his monastic core. He would understand the bottomless remorse of rebreaking bones you tried to set clean, if he hadn’t left you alone to navigate this bloody labyrinth when he retreated stoically inward, immediately after stepping inside it. This is a dirty place, and he’s proved too clean-minded after all.
“I never understood anything that happened here,” Jack says, voice unnervingly flat. She’s here-now and here-then and quaking between the two, so you watch her, vibrating, too, your vision a blurry paralax or like you’ve got the DTs. Every second you watch, thinking observation will suss out which busted girl she actually is, the old or the recent. Like there’s a difference, like it doesn’t switch in her every step. Being here—rummaging through detritus of not just Jack's personal smothered life, you know now, but sprawling through all those short corpses long forgotten and then rotted— it doesn’t feel like enough for either of you.
And it didn’t from the start. Plant explosives in the center of the past? The request was so shockingly mundane, unimaginative, it seemed too stupid to refuse. It won’t work: her explosions never really burn up all the fuel and always leave room for little aftershocks, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground, in these walls. They have to come down. You know that at least, now that you’re here and feeling those children’s captivity like phantom cramps in your arms and shoulders. Like it’s pushing against you, and you strain, flexing muscles and your own blue fire, to shove back. The forces bearing down (not equal and hardly opposite), pushing, sliding you through room after room at a confounding clip.
Thane trails silently behind, all the while Jack’s cavalierly recounting her big atrocity, the one that kept her running in circles tight and dark as the tattoos on her neck, and never stopping to explain any of it beyond the fact of it that central prey response
—escape, escape, run and live and look back only when you’re years free and still nettled under different chains—
that you feel too when you watch her too long, like you're itchy and hamstrung. Through every room, mirrors and instruments and watching her skip like a stone on the surface of it: the detonator hanging off her belt looks so damn redundant. It never occured to either of you that she is the bomb, all exposed plastique and wires with no snips in sight. But you notice it only when you finally do touch by accident, rifle held in the crook of your arm and free hand tracing channels of death-sweat dried into the synthetic fabric, roads tracing along the arm of each white chair centered in each operating theater that led only oone place. They jut out like dry brittle bones.
Jack starts walking again, numb and calm and free—hunting—and you follow, but you’re feeling the drumbeat of a newborn headache and Thane is a leathery-scaly ghost beside you and you just can’t parse what’s happened here, what’s still happening in her.
You also can’t begrudge the Blood Pack, even as you put them down: they’re just rooting for salvage in a damp and filthy mausoleum, just like her. Like you both.
Only one hundred feet away, Aresh, though. Aresh: “What do we do with another you?” you ask Jack and her granite gun-arm and shivering trigger finger. You make it a joke, so it’s not a desperate searching plea, but Thane looks at you and you’re flayed alive.
What you do with her: is bite back the doubt that maybe there’s silent metal mercy enough in this cell, and you and Jack can mete it out. He’s so broken, this ungrown boy from the discard pile, so jagged and begging for meaning; you can see it breaking her up and all you can think of is mercy. You came here to erase this fucking place from the map, but it’s gotten so much more complicated than that. The best thing might be to burn all three, Teltin and its two endlessly pacing refugees. Their frightened eyes are compasses always pointing back.
But what you do with her, together in a sotto vocce collaboration, is let him scurry from the blast. It’s the first order she’s ever followed, really; not because it suits her, but because all other things being fucked up but equal, she listened. The relief on both their faces, open like childrens’, flips your stomach again and again.
And in her cell, the entirety of the little girl she was and what she was soldered together to become: it’s you that paces around her—desk to bed to blood to bed to desk— hearing pounding and shouting and rattles of a club dragged along heavy iron bars, as she stands stock-still in the middle, eyes restless but everything else easing to a stop.