Fic: Big Damn Hero
Title: Big Damn Hero
Author: infelixsoror
Summary: Joker's used to Shepard saving everyone in sight. That's just what she does. He's not so used to being the one saved.
Fandom: Mass Effect
Characters/pairings: Joker, Shepard
Rating: Teen
Word count: 1500
Warnings: Character death, some swearing, spoilers for both games and shameless reinterpretation of canon.
Author's Notes: Written for The Girl Saves Boy Ficathon.
xxx
Now, just so we're clear about this, I’m the best damn pilot in the Alliance Fleet. Anyone who says different is a lying bastard. Hell, I might even be the best damn pilot in the whole damn galaxy. Not like I’ve met them all to compare, you know. But not everyone appreciates just how hard it is to pull off a Crazy Ivan, or how damn good you have to be to send a ship hurtling away across space and keep the drift under a couple of thousand k’s. Add to that the fact that I can’t fire a rifle without breaking my collar bone and, well, it’s doesn’t make me a very good soldier. Doesn’t make me the sort of soldier that other soldiers want on their teams.
Okay, so maybe the fact that I can’t tell an idiot he’s a genius even when he’s my commanding officer has something to do with it. But that just adds to the fact that I shouldn’t be a soldier. Shouldn’t be anywhere near the obsessively-ordered world of the military. But I’m the best there is at what I do and the Alliance likes having the best at its beck and call, even if that means giving the best one crap assignment after another in the deluded hope that he’ll learn to stop running his mouth. I was this close to quitting. The private sector wouldn’t have the best ships, but I wasn’t getting to play with the best ships with the military, either. Truth be told, the Alliance was probably just as close to discharging me as I was to quitting, because their plan of wearing away my mojo with shit assignments was just as shit as the assignments.
So then they sent me to Shepard.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What on earth would the Saviour of the Citadel, the first Human Spectre, want with an ornery bastard with a talent for flying? But this was a good four years before any of that stuff went down. Back then, she was just a broken N7 operative without a team and she needed someone to cart her ass around and pull her boots out of the fire. And, just like me, she was damn close to quitting.
Honestly, part of me thinks that the Alliance wanted us to get each other killed. But, you know, Shepard was a damn good operative, good enough to work solo and train the next generation of affable killers, so maybe they wanted her alive. Maybe they sent me to her in the hopes that she’d get me killed and save herself. That backfired. Boy, did that backfire.
See, most folk don’t remember that Shepard was a soldier long before she was a hero. She had this unit. The 95th Infiltration Unit. Good guys, from what I heard. They were all dead or gone by the time I turned up, never got around to asking why, but I’ve never thought it was Shepard’s fault. No one else does, either. Except for Shepard. I don’t know whether it was because of that stuff on Akuze, or if she was always like that, but Shep’s not big on leaving her people behind. In the four years I’ve served with her, I’ve only ever seen her leave one person behind and it nearly killed her to do it. So, yeah, assigning me to her team wasn’t a particularly efficient way to get me dead.
Especially as glorified chauffeurs don’t spend a lot of time on the front lines; I haven’t been in the kind of situation that could really get me killed all that often, even if Shepard wasn’t so keen on keeping yours truly alive. But she kept me safe from the brass, safe from the people she spent her time trying to kill, even got me a commendation or two along the way. It wasn’t a bad way to spend four years. And then I started hearing rumours, a ship built by humans and turians, the best of both in one gorgeous package with a drive core to kill for. It was going to be the best ship ever to grace an Alliance dock.
And it was going to be completely fucking wasted.
Come on, a ship like that, in the hands of an average Alliance flyboy? It would be a disgrace, a travesty, a complete fucking atrocity. As I told Shepard, repeatedly. Not that she was really listening, I think, but when the Powers That Be decided to stand the 95th Infiltration Squad down permanently, Shep became the XO of my baby and I... I got exactly what I wanted. Well, I got a new CO, but Anderson wasn’t so bad. He let Shepard deal with me, mostly, which was the way it had worked damn well for years and the way that it continued to work even better on the Normandy. Anderson wasn’t around for that long, anyway, undone by politics and the Council’s best brand of bullshit.
Shep became the first human Spectre while we were on the Normandy. I wasn’t there myself, but I saw in through the feeds. She became the first human Spectre, the CO of the Normandy, and more importantly, my CO once again. And, boy, did we have wacky adventures. Zombie-plant people, they were fun. And there was that time we committed mutiny together. I don’t care what the Alliance likes to tell people, they definitely did not give us permission to take the Normandy to Ilos and save the galaxy. It was mutiny and I’m proud of it.
And then I told her that I could do the impossible, drop the Mako in a spot a fifth of what it should be, and she believed me. She’d trusted me with her life before, plenty of times, all the time. She’d never trusted me with the safety of the galaxy before. And, needless to say, I pulled it off. Wasn’t about to let my Commander down.
Thing is, most Alliance soldiers get moved around a lot. It’s just the way the military works, you know? Way of the world. N7s are different. There aren’t all that many of them, from what I’ve heard. And they tend to find a niche, find their spot, and stay there, with folk who can work with them and get the best possible result, or the largest explosion. Shepard always did favour the latter. Now, I’m no N7. Glorified mascot at most. But apparently working for the N7s for long enough kinda makes you one of them. Not a brother-in-arms, but maybe a cousin or something. And somewhere along the line, I got it into my thick skull that I was enough of a N7 to get to stay with my people. With my commander.
God, I’ve been following her orders so long, I don’t think I remember how to follow anyone else’s.
And, no matter what that asshole in Internal Affairs kept insinuating, I did follow her orders. Not all the time, not always to the letter. But I followed her orders in every way that counted and she knew that. I was her man, I followed her damn orders. All except for her last one. The order to evacuate. I loved that ship too damn much. Not as much as I...
I didn’t follow that order. So she had to come get me.
She had to come get me and only one of us made it off the Normandy. It’s not rocket science. It’s actually pretty damn simple. She died saving me. She survived terrorists, slavers, geth, rogue Spectres, hell, even a millenia-old sentient robot of death. And a stupid flyboy with delusions of grandeur managed to take her down.
This wasn’t how I imagined going down in history. Shepard’s going to be immortal, the kind of symbol she never wanted to be. She was an infiltrator at heart, always, and they don’t like being noticed. But, well, the Saviour of the Citadel, first human Spectre, yeah, the Earth historians are going to have a field day with her. And I’ll be in that story, a little footnote about the insignificant fool that she died to save, look at how noble she was, what a hero. It’ll wipe out all of the times that we worked together, all the ops we pulled, all the times we saved each other, all the times I didn’t let her down. And it’ll be the right way to remember us both.
She was noble. And a hero. And I’m a fool.
I always knew that Shepard would die to save me. Fucking insult to her memory to suggest anything different. Hell, she even told me once, straight up, that if I died on an op, she would already be dead. And I believed her, I did, heart and soul. I just didn’t expect it to actually happen. Shepard was unstoppable. I wasn’t going to die on a op because she was never going to be already dead. Simple as that. Stupid as that.
Doesn’t matter. I’m here, she’s not and it’s my own damn fault. She died to save me and now there’s no one left to save the Galaxy. What the hell. Not like there’s anything left worth saving anyway.
Here’s to you, Shepard. I’ll see you again soon enough.
Fucking hero.