Commander Shepard (evertheheroine) wrote in welcomethreads, @ 2013-08-29 21:14:00 |
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Almost anything could have come out of the portal, and Jane Shepard wouldn't have even batted an eye. Geth? No problem. Reapers? Slightly more of a problem, but she could have found a way. Her squadmates and girlfriend showing up as human? Barely even a blip on the radar. Even a horde of angry Protheans, bent on the enslavement of this tiny town, would have been something she could have handled, but those weren't the things that came out of that portal. What had come out? It was nothing Jane had braced herself for at all. She'd had visions of that moment, of watching Jack collapse inside the Collector base, while she was holding the line for Jane to make her escape. She remembered the utter horror she felt, in that moment, to lose her friend, when they were finally in the home stretch. It was the kind of thing that still woke her up at night, shivering and panicked, completely frightened and leaning on Liara for support. Jane never talked about those nightmares either, not yet anyway. She could talk about what it was like when she died, or how seeing Earth, and that tiny boy, destroyed haunted her dreams. She was more than willing to share those dreams with her partner, but the ones about Jack? Those were the ones that generally ones where Jane didn't say anything. They were the ones that left her crumpled up in a ball in her shower or sent her out for midnight runs. They were the dreams that hurt the most, the ones that made her angry. Jane tugged her dog-tags over her head from the bedside table. Normally she might have worn the uniform, like she had when she'd gone to meet Garrus and Tali, but it felt..stale..to do so with Jack. She instead opted for the simple fatigue tank-top, slacks, and boots, before she moved to the door without a word to anyone who might have been in the apartment. Her final moments with Jack were all she could think about. It turned her stomach upside down, it almost made her feel dizzy, and Jane even opted to take the elevator out of the towers to give herself some time to just breathe and keep herself collected. Jack's death hadn't been like Kaiden's, or Mordin's, or Kasumi's even. They were people who chose to make the sacrifices that needed to be made to see the day done. They weren't bad calls on Jane's part, or orders she'd given that had ended badly. She could have lived with that. She could have told herself she did the best she could do. Jack's death hadn't been any of those things. It had been something that just shouldn't have happened. Besides...Jack's life had been hard enough, and Jane had fought hard to see something better for the woman. To see it so instantly shattered had privately crushed her Commander. Now, Jack was here, in Storybrooke. She didn't know what had happened either, which was about the only part of it that made sense and, as Jane shoved out the doors of the towers, her mind was rapidly trying to decide what to say to her. How could she really begin to explain everything that had happened, that Jack had died? Could she? Should she? As Commander Jane Shepard broke into an almost desperate sprint for the clock tower, she decided it didn't matter. What mattered was being there for Jack -- well, that and making sure the woman didn't level half of Storybrooke in her, understandably confused state. She spotted the bald silhouette almost instantly, and she felt her heart crash somewhere down around her knees. It was one thing to talk with her through the PDA, it was another thing to see her there, in the flesh. Jane gave herself a moment to breathe before she finished the job up to the clock tower, and plainly into Jack's field of view. Jane didn't say anything. Jane couldn't find a single word to say, as she stared at the woman for a long moment, before she finally offered up a single, almost whispered, collection of consonants and a vowel. "Hey." |