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“Joker, listen--”
In that breath time crawled. Keening hysteria—he swallowed it down. Desperation, rage –these too, clawing at the back of his throat, clamouring in his heart. Sucking air in through his nose, he forced his brain catalogue mundane details around him.
Quiet, eerie quiet. EDI alarmingly silent above and all around them.
Ceiling.
The window, and Earth beyond it. He felt his mandibles flex as he forced another deep breath.
Hands. Traynor's: wrung together in prayer, perhaps in hope or for the lost. His: settled on Joker's brittle shoulder. The pilot's: stilled just so, hovering inches from the orange control panel.
And guilt. Palpable just there on Joker's shadowed face, and words unsaid, again, not again, and he knew in that instant just what Joker's unchecked loyalty would cost the Normandy.
Now was not the time to be a bad Turian. Not with so much at stake. This is why he stood on the deck of an Alliance vessel, and not amongst the charred remnants of London, chasing at the heels of a ghost. Not for the sake of a insignificant wound, painful and not quite festering yet but no worse than those he had fought through dozens of groundside missions before, no-- but to make the hard decisions in her place. He could do this. She needed him to do this. His gaze slipped rebelliously to the window again, to the blue planet below. He willed himself to look away, but could not quite squeeze his eyes shut.
He gave himself a second to indulge the phantom could-have-beens queued in his mind; countless nights together missed because every minute of their time was borrowed, never theirs to keep. Then a second to mourn impossible ever-afters; crab claws in the sand and bottles of wine. Hands. Tiny hands. Three-fingered or five, it wouldn't have mattered. He had never longed for normal until it was already too late and all his selfish dreams went to die with Shepard now, unsung on a hero's pyre. He burned to be at her side, to pull her from the rubble or to fall into the same grave. This, at least, he wanted, and he deserved.
Bitter as gall, and the heaviest of mantles to take up.
He swallowed it down. Every good spirit on the Normandy depended on him, just as she had willed. His intractable heart railed with mutiny. How dare she force this on him, how dare she? But how could he turn his back on this, the only request she had ever made of him. He couldn't. He wouldn't. His days of following were gone forever now, in their place the crushing weight of leadership.
“--we have to go.”
He tore his gaze away from Earth and, for her, made himself promise not to look back.