There were times Shepard loved the responsibility of captaining a ship. The contentment as everyone worked together to accomplish their mission, watching as her crew came together like a well oiled machine. The pride at the knowledge that everyone looked to her for guidance and leadership.

This wasn’t like those times. Shepard was currently in the middle of organising and verifying all the resupply reports from the crew to make sure that the Normandy was ready for a quick departure from Omega. They might’ve crippled the leadership of the three major merc bands on the station but she wasn’t about to hang around for a retaliatory attack from an ambitious underling or to be used as an unwitting pawn by Aria again.

That the self-proclaimed queen of Omega had used her team as a way to weaken the gangs had burned Shepard. Not because she was upset that the Asari had profited from her mission. That was admittedly good tactical judgement. It was that Aria had hidden that goal and forced her team into a massive trap that could’ve been planned around and might not have gotten Garrus hurt!

Shepard dealt with enough cloak-and-dagger crap in her normal life now that she wasn’t exactly thrilled to deal with more.

The paperwork wasn’t doing much to help her mood or temper either. It normally would’ve been handled by Miranda as her XO, but despite the incredible healing ability Revan showed Garrus had still been in critical condition and was rushed into the medbay for surgery the second they got back to the Normandy. As one of their resident bio-experts, Miranda had been acting as an assistant to Chakwas, something that meant Shepard was stuck with doing the forms she would normally handle. But as long as Garrus pulled through she would do twice the work with a damned smile on her face.

Of course since her friend’s survival wasn’t intrinsically linked to her completion of various paperwork she stopped reading over the form she had picked up the second Jacob walked through the Comm Room door to deliver his hourly update on Garrus’s condition.

“Anything new?”

“Nothing you want to hear, Commander.” Jacob replied. He had come by several times to keep her up to date on what was going on. The surgery ended hours ago and Garrus was expected to live -It was the only reason Shepard had been convinced to focus on other tasks- but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to keep checking on him.

“The docs have done everything they could with the surgery and some cybernetics, but he took a bad hit. Best we can tell, he’ll have full functionality but we have no way to know when he’ll be back on his…”

Jacob paused as the door beeped open to reveal a battered Garrus on the other side, still in his armour that had shattered around the collar and his face a raw mess of tissue where it wasn’t covered by a trauma patch.

“Shepard.” The turian greeted casually.

“Heh, tough sonnova bitch.” Jacob huffed disbelievingly. “Didn’t think he’d be up yet.”

Garrus walked into the room with an energy Shepard wasn’t sure someone just out of medical should have. But the sight of her friend up and alive dissipated an unseen weight from her shoulders and she couldn’t resist a smile forming.

“Nobody would give me a mirror.” Garrus said, gesturing at his face. “How bad is it?”

“Hell Garrus, you were always ugly.” Shepard teased. “Slap some face paint on there and no one will be able to tell the difference.”

Garrus chuckled before wincing. “Auch ow, don’t make me laugh, my face is barely holding together as it is! Besides, some women find facial scars attractive. Mind you, most of those women are Krogan…”

“Looking to give Wrex a bit of competition then?” Shepard idly acknowledged Jacob salute and walk out of the room.

“Hilarious.” Garrus said dryly. “Frankly, I’m more worried about you. Cerberus, Shepard! You remember the kind of sick experiments they were doing?”

Shepard smiled wryly at her friend’s worried tone. It’s not like she could forget some of those, no matter how much she might want to.

“I know, but what are my options? The Council is denouncing anything to do with the Reapers and won’t lift a finger to investigate out here, and the Alliance can’t be seen trying to pick a fight even if it is to protect human colonies. I need Cerberus for their resources if I want any hope of getting to the bottom of this.”

She went on to explain the Collectors and their suspicions about them working for the Reapers. She also briefed him on the other new members to the team, how they had picked up Revan and Mordin and things like that.

“Spirits Shepard, you certainly managed to find yourself in a mess.” Garrus said when she was finished.

“Still want to hang around?” Shepard asked, hiding her insecurities behind a smirk.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She had to physically stop herself from falling over in relief. “But I think I want to meet this Revan. Should probably thank her for saving my life.”

“Ah.”

Shepard hadn’t actually seen Revan since they made it back to the Normandy. The Sith had lagged behind the rest of the team’s frantic rush to get Garrus to the medbay and had apparently decided to simply return to her claimed room. Now that she wasn’t constantly on edge waiting for news about her friend, Shepard realised she should also thank the one who ensured he lived long enough to get help.

“Well we can do that together then.”

They both moved for the elevator, Garrus filling her in on some of what he had been up to the past two years. It was nice, but Shepard was also once again reminded that she was a woman out of time. Garrus seemed a bit more jaded than when she last saw him, and he suddenly had an air of command that he just lacked before.

That wasn’t to say Garrus had ever been bad at what he did. Just that for as long as Shepard had known him, Garrus was a bit of a loner. He worked with a team just fine, but he would happily run off on his own to get a mission done or work on the outskirts of the team. Hearing him talk about setting up squad training exercises and planning ops reminded her of, well, herself after she had gone through officer training.

Still, it was just another reminder that two years had passed her by and the universe had moved on.

Shepard pushed those thoughts from her head and refocused on the present. They were just outside the cargo bay Revan had claimed for herself.

She pinged the door to let Revan know they were stopping by and waited for the door to open. Stepping through, they were both greeted with the sight of the elven woman in full armor, datapad in hand, and surrounded by small mechanical pieces floating around her. Revan turned just enough so the black visor stood out from the cloak she wore as she greeted them.

“Shepard. Archangel.”

“Revan. Whatcha doing?”

“Inventorying everything you pulled from my ship. There’s quite a bit for what was supposed to be a factory prototype.”

“Any idea why? Or find anything interesting?”

“I have a guess. And I found the engineering notes for military grade hyperdrives, which backs that guess up quite a bit. Not that it makes me feel any better about it.”

“What’s a hyperdrive?” Garrus asked.

Shepard guessed it was Revan’s version of an FTL drive. It made sense that without the Reapers guiding her galaxy, Revan’s home would have to rely on some other way of achieving lightspeed. And they didn’t even use Eezo! She wondered how they had overcome that limitation if the Mass Relays weren’t a thing. A mass driver not able to take advantage of the ME fields the Relays produced would have to be even more enormous! The scale of the things must be impressive.

Although considering a malfunction between whatever Relay equivalent they had and the drive that had been on Revan’s ship had launched Revan a galaxy away, maybe they weren’t that impressive.

“A translight engine ships in my galaxy use to get to wherever they need to go. Practically any mid-sized ship up will have one or two.” Revan said, flipping between screens as she inspected a part on her hand.

“Mid-sized? Something like the Normandy?”

“No, maybe a third that size. Though there are cases where ships the size of the Kodiak can get clearance for one.”

“Traffic control must be a nightmare.”

Revan just hummed distractedly.

Garrus apparently had been reading Shepard’s mind because the next thing he asked was how they got from system to system if they didn’t have anything like the Eezo or the Relays.

Both of them had stood a little straighter when Revan just said a hyperdrive could easily reach another system in reasonable time.

“So what? A few weeks to get to the next system?” Garrus asked optimistically. Even the most advanced FTL drives in council space needed more time than that but it wouldn’t hurt to guess upwards given everything Revan had shown previously.

“No of course not.” Oh well, Shepard guessed just because Revan could walk through some of the best trained mercs in the business, it didn’t mean that their technology was on the same level. “In a few weeks you could cross the galaxy a couple times with a civilian drive.”

…

““WHAT?!””

-o-

Revan glanced up at the pair at their shout of surprise.

They were a welcome distraction. While inventorying everything that had been sent with her was important, it was also boring as hell. So messing with her hosts by slightly exaggerating some capabilities would be fun. Besides, she wasn’t exactly lying. You would just need to be part of the 0.1% that could afford a civilian model that fast.

“Is something wrong?” She asked innocently.

“How fast are your military ships if the civilians are that fast?” Shepard practically demanded to know.

“They tend to be a bit slower actually, but considering the size difference between a Harrower class and a civilian shuttle. Well, that's not much of a surprise at all.”

“... and how big are those?”

“Somewhere around 800 meters.”

Her two visitors let out a little sigh of relief that Revan hadn’t said they were all the size of the Destiny Ascension or something like that. Of course from what she had read about the dreadnought, Revan wasn’t going to tell them a Harrower could go head-to-head with the pride of the Asari fleet and walk away more often than not.

“So what brings you by?” She prodded instead.

“Ah, well I just wanted to say thanks for the save on Omega.” Garrus said with a start.

“Same here,” Shepard chimed in. “you have no idea how much keeping this idiot alive meant to me. If you need anything just ask.”

Revan actually did have an idea how much it meant to the human, having felt the surge of despair when the Turian was injured.

“Well if you want to pay me back, perhaps stop sending Lawson around trying to get samples of my stuff. I already gave her a datapad worth of it, she should finish going over that before asking for more.”

She smiled as Shepard stilled at the realisation Revan had been giving things to Miranda and by extension Cerberus. No doubt the Commander was worrying about what Revan had provided to the humanocentric terrorist organization but she needn’t have bothered.

Revan had neither the time or desire to translate whatever the Cerberus agent was after, so when Miranda had offered to pay for some earlier schematics she had found, -incidentally revealing Revan was under surveillance in the process- Revan had given her a datapad containing the plans for a single seated fighter. The wireframes for one, at any rate. The technical details were replaced with a rather bland adaptation of a holodrama Revan kept on hand, translated into Shyriiwook.

She wasn’t exactly in the habit of providing tools to her enemies after all.

Shepard quickly excused herself to track down her XO, leaving Revan and Garrus behind in her rush.

“Did you really give Cerberus all the information needed to build a new fighter?” the turian asked. “I don’t know if you haven’t heard about them, but Cerberus gets into some really messed up stuff.”

“I’ve heard about them, yes. But I’m in a foreign galaxy with few resources to call on. Trading a single datapad I have no use for, for a significant amount of credits is the obvious solution.”

“Seems to be the common attitude around here.”

Revan just shrugged. Only two types of people tended to work with terrorists. True believers or people who wanted to use the organization’s power. Shepard hadn’t exactly struck Revan as a true believer either.

The Sith Lord finished logging the final component on her datapad and returned all the loose ones to the crate with a flex of her will.

“Did you want some help with that?”

Revan tilted her head at Garrus.

“Do you know what any of these are or how to read my language?”

“Well…no.”

“Then no.”

-o-

Shepard did her best to not burst into the science bay where Mordin and Miranda were setting up the some tests for the samples they had found on Freedom’s Progress.

“Shepard! Good to see you. Need something?” Mordin greeted her, rising from where he was fiddling with the insides of some of the equipment. A small bit of tech in his hand.

“Nope, just swinging by to see how you’re settling in. Any issues with the lab?”

“No, quite satisfactory.” the Salarian replied. “Found a few surveillance bugs.” he held the bit of tech in his hand up demonstratively. “Destroyed most of them. Might need to return this one to Miranda. Expensive. Still, nothing unexpected.”

“Right. Thank you for the consideration, Professor Solus.” Miranda retrieved the bug with a faint blush on her face. Shepard figured being caught spying would be embarrassing to anyone.

“So Miranda…I heard you managed to buy a fighter blueprint off of Revan. I didn’t realise Cerberus would be interested in more alien tech.”

“Cerberus is all about advancing humanity. If we can learn from other races and integrate it into our own technology, we will do so. So the Illusive Man has set a standing order to purchase as much technology from Revan as she is willing. Although we haven’t exactly learned much off of what she gave us so far.” the Cerberus Agent said with a slight frown.

She was much less enthused about getting access to the level of technology Revan kept describing that left most of their own accomplishments in the dust than Shepard would’ve figured.

“You...don’t sound excited about it. Shouldn’t this be on the same level as finding a Prothean artifact? Maybe bigger because we can actually ask questions about the tech?”

Miranda shook her head. “If it was for weapons, maybe. But for fighters they need to be designed to fit in a carrier or another larger ship to be any use. We might get something from the subsystems, but we need to crack the language first.”

Shepard blinked.

Revan didn’t even translate the schematic before giving it to Cerberus? And they still bought it?

Sensing the question Miranda shrugged. “It’s not a huge loss on our end. We have a very good team of researchers. If they can’t crack the language then we release it to the extranet. Not the whole thing mind you, but enough to decode the rest if we get lucky. If all that fails we simply pay Revan more for the translation. It gives us plenty of time to look into a manufacturing plant if we really want something.” She explained, leaving Shepard at a loss.

She had been expecting to have to somehow manage new and dangerous information being hoarded by the wrong people. Instead she walked into a game of cryptography.

“Oh. Well, um, I picked out the next specialist we should head after.” Shepard said, regaining her mental balance. “As soon as the last of the resupply is strapped down we’re heading to Korlus.”

“Aye, Commander.”