chapter 14

It had been all of thirty minutes before a debriefing was held in the com room aboard the Normandy as it was on its way to return to the Citadel for some well-deserved R&R and resupply, along with dropping some Geth samples off at some Alliance base, hitting up a couple planets for mineral scans and exploration.

Both John and Jane were still reeling from the effects of the Cipher as everyone took their seats and waited before the debriefing kicked out.

"Sounds like we missed a good fight," Wrex grumbled, looking cross about something before he leveled a look at John, "I want in on the next mission."

"Done," Jane answered as everyone who hadn't been part of the initial ground team were still recovering from various states of shocks as helmet vid feed was playing up on the wall to fill in the blanks, "now we have one more topic to cover before we dismiss."

Jason immediately began to sweat after the sideways look he received from Jane as Jackson perked up, crossing his arms and looking indifferent.

"It's time you've told everyone about your pasts," Jane sternly reprimanded them as Dr. Chakwas stepped into the room as well, standing off to the side, "and don't skimp on the details either."

Everyone traded an uncomfortable look after Jason remained perfectly still without so much as blinking before Jackson coughed to break the awkward silence before he stood up and sighed.

"As most of you in this room know," Jackson glanced over at those who obviously didn't, "we're not regular humans."

"Nothing new whelp," Wrex grunted in agitation.

"Right, well, I guess the good doctor can shed some light on the subject because most of it goes over my head." A faint beckoning for the good doctor in question to step forward as the lights dimmed.

It took fourteen minutes for everything to be laid bare, the extensive list of genetic upgrades, irregularities not found in humans, projected abilities and their limits, the fact that neither one of them was natural in any way shape or form and the final kicker that left everyone stunned, was that both of them had been created.

Artificial. Unnatural. Abnormal. Different.

"Spirits," Garrus was the first one to recover enough to close his mouth after the slide show of medical reports, scans, and existing documentation. Dr. Chakwas had provided for everyone, "that is a bit much to take in."

"Take your time," Jackson had a cheeky grin plastered across his face, "we understand perfectly."

Wrex made a sound of approval (?) before he nodded his head, "You'll do."

"Seriously?" Ashley asked as she leaned forward, "You got nothing to say?"

"Why should I?" His eyes seem to be searching deep for something, "I won't treat them any differently because of their pasts, which they had no control over."

Mental note, put extra effort into the special project for Wrex.

The giant reptile cast a glance around the room, "Will the rest of you treat them as aberrations or as our comrades?"

Startling history made on this day, the first time a human male ever hugged a male Krogan and lived to tell the tale.

Jason kept a tight rein on his emotions as he spent the entire watching the reactions of everyone in the room, keeping a particular eye on Tali as did, but he was discreet about it before Garrus was the next to join the bandwagon.

"I see no difference in them," his mandibles twitched in the equivalent of a Turain smile, "in fact, it explains a few things."

Liara simply fixed them with a smile, "Fascinating, I look forward to working with you both."

Jason felt downright anxious about what he was about to hear next as everyone turned to look at Tali, who was squirming nervously with everyone staring at her before she cleared her throat.

"I have no problem working with Jason or Juggernaut, er I mean Jackson," her head wildly whipped back and forth between them as Jackson waved it off with a laugh while Jason gave her a small smile, "they've done so much for use already."

Jackson clapped his hands before throwing his arms wide, "Group hug anyone?"

"….."

"Eh, never mind," Jackson took a seat before looking at Jason, "Your turn, little brother."

"Yes, now tell us how you are capable of biotic proficiency above that of most humans without the need of an amp," Jane gushed as Jason found himself leaning back in his chair as the fabled Commander Jane Shepard was straddling his lap examining his head, everyone present simply tear dropped comically.

The seething death glare coming from John was enough to remind him that he could be getting a lap dance from Jane and he wouldn't enjoy it one bit on the fact that John would murder him in such a way that would make the fate the Reapers held over their heads pale in comparison before he gently pushed Jane off him and stood up, the number of impatient faces looking at him was more than enough to make him nervous as he started pacing.

"Short version, I was injected with enough nodes to make me glow like a light bulb for a couple months after waking up," a grimace at the thought was enough to stay in character, "I have so much dark energy stored in my body, the best comparison I could think of is the same energy of a ten megaton nuclear warhead in retrospect."

Ignoring the stunned "HHHHHHUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHH?" From the collective audience, Jackson munching on a bowl of popcorn, he pulled from some magical hammer space as he forged on ahead, sticking to the original plan.

"Most of what happened to me is something I will not be talking about," a pointed look in the direction of one particular commander that had the good grace to look inconspicuous, "but I will inform you that my dampener is keeping my biotics at an acceptable level.

"He means below supernova levels," Jackson mumbled around a mouthful of popcorn, "trust me, that is something you do not want to see."

"Moving on, I would greatly appreciate it if you didn't go around advertising the fact that I have something other than a highly modified amp in the back of my skull," Jason let out a sigh and tried not to fidget, "any questions?"

Jane was the first to shoot one off, "How are you still alive?"

Jason smirked, "Hell, if I know Commander, maybe the gods hate me."

"Then they must love me," Jackson piped up as he muffled a belch, "because I am oh so magnificent."

"See what I mean?" Jason grumbled as a couple chuckles slipped out, "They cursed me with that."

"Any idea who the people that did this to you were?" John asked with such conviction that Jason had to remind himself that they didn't know, seriously messing up timeline aside as he kept his neutral expression in place for now.

"No real proof and I'm confident that I brought that place down for good," Jackson nodded darkly once everyone realized that he hadn't been joking, leaving a few very nervous people sitting around the room, "I doubt they'll come up again, ghosts of the past."

"Hopefully, they stay that way," John shrugged, "ghosts sometimes come back to haunt you when you think they are forgotten."

If only you knew Shepard.

Jason smiled, ignoring the flinching he received as he chuckled, "Well, if we ever run into them again, we'll make sure they stay dead."

"Damn straight." Jackson nodded.

XXX

From there, the debriefing was concluded, and everyone took the news rather well, the ground team heading for the showers and such to get cleaned up before getting some sleep.

It took an hour and a half of scrubbing with two gallons of the most potent antibacterial general purpose cleaning agent that killed anything it touched to get his armor and equipment cleaned off before he even thought about sticking it inside his locker, well that and he already had a laundry list of things to do as well.

It felt good telling everyone about their 'past' of sorts, granted there wouldn't be a person alive to believe them if they started claiming to be from another dimension and this current reality was actually a video game, but it was better than telling them nothing. Even though they were technically lying, Jason figured that if they couldn't tell the actual truth because of all the tampering Glyph had done to them, then the cover story was the next best thing because they were not working for some renowned terrorist organization or a secretive information broker half the galaxy knew about either.

That and there hadn't been a single thing Jason had ever agreed with Cerberus on in all three installments, except for Project Lazarus, but that was it, so pretending to be agents of Cerberus had quickly been rejected from the start.

Anyway, now that he had showered, eaten enough of what passed as food on this ship to replenish his low energy levels and drank an entire pot of coffee, he was now set to get to work on several things, but first he had to find his partner in crime.

Tali was already hard at work by the time he arrived at his workbench and stowed the rest of gear inside his locker, having to pry the oversized rifle away from Jackson ("Please give it back to me!") in order to run some scans over it to add it all to an extensive collection of Geth research Jason fully intended to hand over to Tali when the time was right. Not that she would ever be at a loss when it came to Geth information, but the fact that John had clearly stated that the parts taken from the dropship and a few random weapons that were still functional were getting handed over to the Alliance.

He had been rather adamant about mentioning that it take more than a week before the items he had outlined would be handed over, making hints about gathering any available data and schematics that they could for their own research, walking away with two very happy people, well an overenthusiastic engineer all but vibrating with joy and an entity from another dimension that already knew everything there was to know.

"Isn't this exciting?" Tali droned on as her fingers were practically flying over the haptic interface of her omni-tool, "We can learn so much about the Geth, flight patterns, capabilities and even discover where they have been and how they've been moving around."

Yep, totally Pilgrimage worthy gift right here, Jason shrugged as he handed her the plasma torch and got to work on tearing apart the early model Widow in order to have a scanned schematic file on hand in case anyone wanted to know how he managed to build one completely from scratch, that and photographic memory helped out a lot.

"Some of the strings of data were mildly corrupted," Tali continued on as Jason handed over the occasional tool or took some various part she had removed to set farther up on the workbench, "nothing important enough to worry about now, but I think I can extract all of the navigational charts and plot the ship's flight path since it left the Outer Veil."

"If we can pinpoint the primary routes taken by them, we can cut them off for good," Jason nodded as Tali was full on serious mode after she synched the Normandy's computer for the extra power they were going to need in order to successfully siphon somewhere around sixty-two terabytes of data in the next fifty seconds before the internal firewall programs deleted the rest of it, "that and learn roughly how many Geth units are outside the Veil."

It took another fifteen minutes of preparing the last minute adjustments and tweaks to everything before Tali imitated the download, chirping softly at each terabyte that was data mined as the other end of the bar showed how much data had been corrupted.

"Fifty-four terabytes," Tali murmured softly as she patted the terminal sitting next to his workbench affectionately, "we did it!"

What happened next surprised him a little bit as she launched herself at him and wrapped her arms around him, squealing with joy as she did, Jason didn't have the heart to remind her that Wrex was standing less than six feet away trying to sleep. In fact he reciprocated the bear hug, granted he wasn't trying to squeeze the air out of her lings, but he wasn't jumping up and down either before he realized that they were still holding onto each other rather tightly.

Tali seemed to notice it as well, "I'm sorry, it just came over me."

Jason merely gave her a gentle squeeze before letting her slip out of his grasp, "It's alright, and it'll take us a week to sift through all that data, though."

"Yes there is that chore onto top of everything else," she sounded tired as she made triple sure multiple backup copies were saved to both the Normandy network and to five external data modules before she encrypted everything to keep it away from prying eyes for now, "I should get started on analyzing it."

"No," she looked up to see him shaking his head, "you need to get some sleep before you fall over again and I end carrying you back upstairs to the sleeper pods, you can tackle it once you get some sleep."

She did that finger wrestling thing again, "I am not tired, and I will be running preliminary decryption cycles through that data."

Jason simply looked at her for a couple of seconds without saying a word before he reached over and gently grasped her shoulder, "What's wrong, Tali?"

"What? Nothing is wrong. How could anything be wrong?" Jason arched an eyebrow at her accelerated rate of speech and the way her fingers were nothing more than blurs before she let out a sigh, "Keelah, how did you know?"

Score one, Jason nodded for her to continue.

"I haven't been sleeping well," Tali said while she slumped onto her stool rather dejectedly, "it is too quiet on this ship."

"Felt the same way for a while after I got out of that place," even from the vague way he saying it, he knew that Tali understood he was talking about something from his past, "wasn't until I found something to distract me from the silence, music helps."

"I tried, doesn't work," Tali sounded downright miserable, "and the last thing I need is to make mistakes because I was tired, it could cost us so much if I mess up."

Jason slipped behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders, startling her as she sat upright, "What are you doing?"

"Relax," Jason assured softly as he began a simple massage technique by rolling his thumbs deep into the tense muscles located on the top of her shoulders, "it'll help."

"I don't understand…oh yes, right there." Tali purred as Jason slowly worked his way across her shoulders.

Quarians had upper body muscles and nerve points similar to humans and Asari, but another thing about Quarians was that they had much larger nerve clusters, in a sense making it that much easier for someone to give them a massage.

It took him less than three minutes to have her slumped onto the workbench, boneless and nothing more than putty in his hands as he worked his way down her upper back and stopped at the small of her back. Her suit was thick, but he gently probed his way around the seals and applied just the right amount of pressure into her spinal column (Quarians had much larger gaps between each vertebrate that was filled with a dense muscle) in all the right places before he patted her shoulder.

"Feel better?" Jason knew that if anyone had been listening or watching them, they would've thought he was pulling the moves on her, he quickly made a mental note to disable the video and audio feed to the cockpit now that he thought about it.

A pair of silvery orbs looked up at him as Tali sluggishly lifted her head and stretched her arms over her head, the sounds of kinks getting worked out as her content his ears

"Very much," she did that cute head bob again as she straightened up in her seat, "thank you for that."

"Don't mention it."

Tali all but jumped to her feet, "I feel wonderful. What did you do?"

Leave it to a Quarian to not know what a massage was as he schooled himself to not laugh at her expense, which would be rude.

"Just a massage," a glance at the look she was giving him, meant he should elaborate some more, "manipulating nerve clusters and muscles in a manner to release tension and stress without hurting them."

Uh oh, he could see faint traces of a blush appearing under her visor as she quickly looked down, fingers whirling a thousand rpms as she stammered, "Oh? It was wonderful, perfect even, but I don't know how to give you in return if you want one."

"Tali, it's alright," it was cute when she started to babble, but he didn't want her thinking too deep into it as he laid a hand over her twirling fingers gently, "you don't have to pay me back for that."

Instead of reassuring her, it seemed to have the opposite effect as she was busy looking down at her hands, Jason had no idea what was going through her head, but damned if her blush wasn't all but visible to him before she nodded quickly and walked towards the elevator quickly.

"I'll get to work after I get some sleep," Tali blurted out as she tapped the console button several times, "seeing as how you don't sleep up there, you'll be down here right?"

"Oh course Tali," Jason nodded, "Pleasant dreams."

Tali did that cute squirming thing again before she punched the console command a couple more times before the doors started closing, "Bosh'tet elevator, so damn slow."

XXX

"Hey Tali," Jackson called out after he spotted her leaving the elevator from his seat at the mess table, "Going to bed?"

Tali nodded as she waved at the others seated around the table, John, Garrus, and Ashley were still up.

"How did the download go?" At her confused look, Jackson lifted his arm to show his omni-tool, "Jason informed me that you two were not to be disturbed because you two were downloading all the info off those hard drives, not to mention boy wonder was tearing apart my rifle."

"Oh, yes we were," Tali said as she walked over to the food dispenser and grabbed a sterilized tube of dextro, "it was enlightening."

"Uh huh," Jackson narrowed his eyes and waited for her to sit down before dropping the bomb, "did you two christen the workbench while you were at it?"

Tali dropped her food in shock as she wildly waved her hands around.

"Hegavemeasimplemassagetherewasnothingwrongitwedidn'tdoanythingIswear!" Jackson laughed as Tali spilled the beans while Ashley shook her head and slapped his arm, which served to get his attention.

"Oh come on, that was funny!" Jackson laughed as he patted Tali on the head again, "You got to learn to lighten up Tali."

"I am sorry," her posture just screamed I am ashamed, "I did not know if he shared something only humans do with others."

John chuckled as Garrus seemed to be clueless before Ashley sighed, "A massage isn't considered too crazy, a simple method of comforting one another and providing some stress relief."

Tali's head shot up as she was practically strangling her food canister, "Stress relief?"

"Not that kind of stress relief," Jackson said as he face palmed before standing up and walking over to Ashley, "it's just a way to relax tension and sooth sore muscles, here let me show you."

Ashley soon became the unwilling participant by receiving a quick massage from Jackson as the others looked on, while he continued to narrate for Tali's benefit.

"Others species, most notably the Asari, have found that massage therapy treatments are ideal for helping someone relax, relieve tension and deal with stress without requiring something so physical," Jackson rattled off as he let his hands get to work, "it can be given to either male or female subjects by either a male or female therapist, it isn't some strange human thing."

Ashley chose that moment to let out a soft moan after his fingers found a rather tight knot as he expertly kneaded it for about a minute before he stepped back towards his seat, donning a pair of sunglasses from nowhere as he sat back down, "And that is how it is done."

"So it wasn't…" Tali trailed off before Jackson shook his head as she let out a sigh, "That is good."

"You bet it is," Ashley said as she slowly stretched, "Beats trying to do it yourself."

Garrus chose this moment to chime in with his two cents, "So it is always better if you have a willing partner to give it to you?"

Tali choked back a sound as Jackson went right on, "Sure, kind of hard to get any satisfaction if you do it yourself."

"I'll say," Ashley said as she took a hit off the cigarette she pulled from somewhere, looking very pleased with herself, "want me to return the favor big guy?"

"You…reciprocate?" Tali squeaked as John shook his head and stood up, getting everyone's attention.

"Guess I'll turn it," he stopped before giving Tali a slow look, "are you alright Tali, you seem awfully quiet."

"Oh, I'm fine, just tired is all," Tali sighed as she watched him walk away, "Oh, Keelah."

"See you guys tomorrow," Jackson said as he walked off with Ashley towards the elevator.

That left her in the company of the only other dextro on the ship as Tali brought up her omni-tool and keyed in a search program.

"What are you doing?" Garrus asked after about a minute.

"Looking up massage practices," Tali said as she finally started eating, "I think I need to understand a few things."

Garrus wisely decided to avoid that topic, a smile slipping across his face before he headed toward the nearest sleeper pod.

Someone should really tell the poor girl when everyone was joking, but it was entertaining, to say the least.