Chapter Text
If Miranda remembers correctly—and she always remembers correctly—Jack once threatened to smear the walls of the Normandy with her brains, sell her teeth on Omega and break every single one of her fingers in a new and exciting way. And Miranda had promised—and Miranda always keeps her promises—to have it out with her proper, like a woman should, when this business with those nasty bug-eyed aliens was all settled and she could safely pour all her energy into bouncing Jack’s head off the door of her cabin.
She’d planned for it, too. Even set a date and bought a bottle of celebratory wine (because really, she wouldn’t lose to that) right before they took off for that relay that was going to lead them to who-knows-where, but.
But.
Few things had gone off without a hitch during this whole mission, and when she catches Jack looking sidelong at her a few times (five times, actually, but it’s not like she’s counting) while they’re still cleaning debris out of the CIC, Miranda decides that maybe, maybe, this would be a good time to practice letting bygones be bygones. Or however that goes, if it truly goes at all.
She’s ruminating on the particulars of that bit of silliness when Jack snaps at her from where Miranda is standing by the elevator, much like an angry varren, hackles raised and all.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” She half-yells, half-hisses, because apparently when Miranda was thinking of how best to utterly ignore the situation, she was doing it while fixated on the tattoos and the sprinkling of scars decorating Jack’s torso, and wow, those things really do cover a lot of ground. Impressive, really. Even more impressive (and highly troubling) that she hadn’t realized she was doing it.
Jack stalks toward her, and before it can escalate to the point that Shepard must again intervene so insufferably, she punches the elevator button and snarls, “Not much,” because really, who does this woman—this child—think she is?
It’s entirely the wrong thing to say, and she knows it. If she didn’t, the obscenities and the fists being hurled at the door would have told her as much, and part of Miranda—a bigger part than she’d like to admit—wishes she hadn’t done it.
She retreats to her room, because there’s much to be done, and she stays there even when everyone else goes out for drinks or shopping or murdering or whatever it is people do on Omega. The Normandy is huge, and she has a lot of mouths to feed and no feasible way to do it now that they’ve been cut off from Cerberus. Jack, she knows, will curl up in her little hole down in engineering and do nothing while Miranda stays up all night talking to bureaucrats on Illium, to people on the Citadel she never, ever wanted to speak to again, to people from all corners of the galaxy who owe her favors just so they can get through another few days, and the thought of it would be nausea-inducing if Miranda hadn’t already begun calculating every bit of this the moment Shepard set that timer in the Collector base. It feels like half a lifetime ago.
Pretty soon, Shepard will probably burst into her cabin, interrupt her work to tell her she needs to apologize to Jack, and then they’ll have this awkward, barely civil stalemate again, like a ceasefire where neither side ever actually stops pointing guns or hurling cheap insults at the other. She can feel the headache coming on already, because she doesn’t want this again and she doesn’t want to deal with Shepard right now either, but most of all, Miranda isn’t sure she’s the same woman she was six months ago. In fact, she’s sure of it—because she’s always sure—and she thinks that she should maybe take the initiative and go talk to Jack this time, like an adult, and when did she start caring about so much about hurt feelings, anyway? She’s not sure whether to blame Shepard for this or so much time away from the core of Cerberus, but either way, now’s not the time.
Now’s not the time, but that’s never stopped Shepard. Today is no exception.
“You need to talk to her. Actually talk, not just act superior and condescending.”
She is very good at being superior and condescending. She takes pride in it. “And if she behaves like a child and starts screaming the moment she sees me?”
“Then that’s your problem. No fighting, though. You’re both better than this.” And, damn it, she can’t stand it when Shepard acts like a long-suffering mother hen who’s disappointed in her chicks.
Miranda makes her calls and sends out far more messages than she’d like, even threatens a few agents out in the Traverse, but she also spends a lot of time that evening thinking of those scars on Jack’s belly, of the things they’d seen on Pragia, of how maybe, possibly, she might have been wrong all along.
She mostly keeps to her cabin for the next few days, burning bridges and whispering veiled threats over her omni-tool, not even bothering to take some shore leave when they dock at Illium to let any Cerberus loyalists go their own ways. She is, to the shock of some of the crew, not one of them, and it almost (almost) warms her heart to find that no one else is, either.
But Miranda has work to do, and cannot be deterred by the drunken escapades of crewmates and the worried wonderings of where their next paycheck is going to come from, because it’s her job to quell those fears and line their pockets with money for terrible liquor and Omega strippers. So, she takes her meals in her room and does not mention the stares she draws from Vakarian and Tali’Zorah. (Shepard, for her part, never doubted her, and she takes a small amount of pride in knowing this. More than she probably should, but then, that seems to be par for the course these days.)
It’s about midnight, or at least she thinks it’s about midnight, when she finishes feeding some backchannel information to an Alliance informant (how she loathes it) and decides that after the fourth day straight of missing dinner and staring at a computer screen all evening, she could really, really do with a drink.
For a while, it’s just her, a bottle of white Zinfandel and the dark kitchen, the soft hum of the ship providing some nice background noise while she plans out her schedule for tomorrow. Miranda likes planning, because if you plan, if you have a schedule, if you map out your life and don’t let the cows get in your way, you have certainty; and if you have certainty, you have power. The former, she loves; the latter, she’s grown into like some women grow into their silk and diamonds.
Miranda also likes wine. She’s never cared for the piss that so fascinates most of the rest of the crew, who go to Omega and Dark Star and drink until it makes them stupid or maudlin or—worse—both, like adolescent boys with a bottle of vodka in their parents’ garage. She tries to keep a few bottles tucked away for herself in the kitchen and her cabin, mostly human-made, some asari and salarian. One, a crisp rosé champagne, she’s been saving for a while now; for what, she’s not sure, because if destroying the Collector base and telling the Illusive Man where he can shove it and just how hard doesn’t qualify, she isn’t sure what does. But.
She’s about to pour herself another glass and head back to her cabin to stare out the window when she hears the soft hiss of the elevator door. At first, she assumes it’s Mordin heading to the med bay, but the obnoxious thud of those heavy boots could be only one of two people. And it’s not Massani.
Jack looks at her with the sneer Miranda assumes she practices in the bathroom mirror every morning, and before she can curse herself for not immediately retreating to her room with her bottle, Jack is leaning on the table, trapping her there and showing her teeth.
“Where are your friends, cheerleader?” Miranda’s fingers twitch. “Drinking alone like a pussy. Drinking wine, like a pussy.”
“Charming, aren’t you?”
“You fucking bitch.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been hiding in there for a week now,” Jack says, and she’s smiling but her face is all twisted, wrong, and her voice is like poison in Miranda’s ear. “Scared of me, bitch?”
“And I suppose you think I ought to be,” she spits, and Miranda isn’t scared, she isn’t scared of anything and how dare she, when Miranda has been the one making sure they still have fuel to burn, food to eat, that they haven’t all been arrested or executed or vaporized or whatever by the Alliance or Cerberus or both yet, and what has Jack even done?
“Keep your damn voice down.” Jack glares and stops mid-curse. “If I have to suffer through you and Shepard again, this whole ship will pay for it.”
“Fuck you.” Jack keeps hissing like a viper—a quiet viper, now—and Miranda just sits and seethes, because this could all have gone so well if she’d just stayed in her cabin for the evening.
Jack doesn’t go, though, either out of spite or anger or something else Miranda doesn’t care to comprehend, and for her part, she is mostly silent. When Miranda moves again, Jack bares her teeth and leans away from the table, shows her back, and Miranda finds herself staring again. Jack is all wiry muscle and ink and for some reason Miranda is finding it increasingly difficult to stop mentally tracing them and wondering where all those scars came from, who gave them to her and why and who they have to kill to make sure no child ever has to go through that again. She doesn’t say it, because she doesn’t say a lot of things, but Miranda regrets, and that’s not a feeling she’s ever liked.
After a while, Jack stretches a bit—and if she didn’t know better she’d swear Jack knows she’s watching—and whips her head around because Jack likes to look you in the eye when she’s shouting insults or threatening to rip you apart. “You’re such a fucking bitch. You know that?” It’s quieter than she’d expected, and then her back is to Miranda again and she can see the thin patterns of crisscrossed scars beneath the ink. One of them curls angrily around her hip. “Because I can’t fucking stand—”
“A bitch, yes, I am,” Miranda snaps, and that’s it. Fighting in the kitchen in the middle of the night won’t do, but she doesn’t have a plan and she needs to do something with her fingers to keep from throwing Jack across the room, and she can feel the air practically bend and break around Jack’s clenched fists, just waiting for a chance. So she gets up and pushes past Jack, slams another wine glass on the table (she’s sure she’s cracked the stem), and with great prejudice, she pours two glasses of white Zinfandel. And then, before she can change her mind, she grits her teeth and shoves it out.
“I apologize,” she says, sharp, like ripping off an old bandage that’s going to come up with a lot of blood. “For the other day.”
And Jack looks at her like she’s started talking in tongues. Her eyes narrow, just slightly, and she does not unclench her fists. It’s fine; neither of them is used to apologies and likely never will be, and knowing Jack, she expects an ulterior motive here, a ploy to get something out of her or hurt her, and that, Miranda understands very well. She cannot even remember the last time she admitted fault. She’s far more used to her quiet system of debt, of acknowledging that she owes someone something or that she has the upper hand the next time she needs a favor. The intricacies of such a thing would probably be lost on Jack, though, so here she goes, taking the direct, diplomatic approach. Shepard would be so bloody proud.
“You expect me to drink that shit?”
“Drink it. Don’t. I don’t care.” Miranda takes another sip, lets the wine linger on her tongue and decides it’s gotten warm and slightly sour. She makes a show of not looking at Jack, who seems to be making a show of not looking at her, too.
“Fuck you.”
“Articulate as ever.”
But Jack does eventually sit down across from her, makes a face and gulps down several mouthfuls of wine like it’s fucking Omega pisswater, and Miranda wants to tell her, no, that’s not how you do it, but she doesn’t. Instead, they sit in the quiet, listening to the hum of the Normandy, glancing furtively at each other every so often, and, well, Miranda didn’t plan this out at all.
“I’m so tired,” Jack says after what feels like ages, a little quieter than usual, and it might be the wine, but Miranda nods. Miranda looks at her and says, “I know.” Because she does. God, but she does.
Between drinks, Jack looks right at her, hard, and says, “No, you don’t. You really, really don’t,” and Miranda’s eyes linger a little too long at her collar bone, the tiny scar at the hollow of her throat. (She really, really didn’t plan this.)
And then it’s quiet again. Miranda opens another bottle, and Jack drinks too fast and she drinks too slow, but eventually they finish it, too. They sit in the kitchen for hours. They say almost nothing.
“We can’t keep this up. You know we can’t. We’re going to have to do something eventually.”
Jacob is pacing in the Communications Room, worry creasing his brow. They’re going after a squad of Blue Suns who have hijacked a ship in the Hades Nexus cluster, the eighth or ninth such odd job they’ve taken this month. Jacob has mixed feelings about it, as he does about so very many things. Miranda has no such reservations; they’re getting paid, which takes care of one problem, and they’re helping rid the galaxy of a particularly revolting scourge in the process. It’s almost like charity work.
“We should go to the Alliance.” He is stony-faced and obstinate, always, but in this, he is malleable enough. He meets Miranda’s eyes and then looks away.
It’s always been a little awkward with Jacob, will always be a little awkward, but Miranda appreciates his honesty, the quiet, soothing ripples he makes when he walks into a room. Jacob has large, calloused hands and a deep voice, he knows a thousand ways to kill a man and he is always sure that things will work out in the end for better or worse; and, even if Jacob doesn’t know who the hell he is or what he wants, there’s no one else she would rather have on board. But if he just didn’t have to be so damn reasonable.
“You know we can’t do that,” she says. “Not yet.”
“Not yet,” he repeats, his face a blank slate.
They can’t, and they won’t, because it’s not even an option at the moment (and for her, at least, it never will be). The second they go to the Alliance, they’ll all be grounded, chained, collared, and maybe there will be a trial while the higher-ups try to decide if these “Reapers” are really a threat, and maybe it will even be over before they blow Earth to pieces, but it’s not a risk Miranda is willing to take right now. Or, they can take it if they like, but she’ll be long gone by the time they run back to those fools expecting anything short of incompetence and galactic embarrassment.
Fortunately, Shepard agrees. They still need information, resources, still need to do what they can, and, and—oh, maybe this is Jacob and Shepard and their damned bleeding hearts oozing all over her, but she would not see this crew come to harm in any way. Not the cook, not the engineers, not the smart-assed pilot.
Not Jack.
Beside her, Shepard taps her temple with her index finger and sighs. “Got anything else for us, Miranda?”
She does. “Five more lined up for the next two weeks.” All of them pirates and some especially nasty mercenaries. Like they’re exterminators.
“I don’t know what we would do without you,” Shepard says, and Miranda knows she means it. She always does.
She takes the elevator down to the crew deck with Shepard and Jack walks past them, no doubt slinking off back to engineering after grabbing something to eat. Neither of them glare or spit venom for a change; Jack gives her a stiff nod, and Miranda does the same, and then she can just feel Shepard looking from her to Jack and back again. And so, she makes sure to lock her door because she’s not at all in the mood for the inevitable interrogation about that. Not yet.
Oriana Lawson is the most beautiful thing in the galaxy. Which might seem an odd thing to say about your sister who is also technically your identical twin, but it’s not as if they’re the same person. Not even a little.
For one, Oriana has the most amazing smile, all teeth and unabashed joy, and Miranda’s never had that, not even when she was a small child. Instead, she’s got more of a smirk that ranges from smug and self-satisfied to irritated and you-clever-bastard-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that, and she’s sure her eyes were never so bright. Oriana talks faster, makes excited gestures with her hands and has this full, happy laugh that makes something warm and utterly blissful well up in Miranda’s chest, makes her remember the few times she held Ori before she was placed with her family, and sometimes, when she flashes that smile and talks about baking cookies with her mother or plays her violin, it’s all Miranda can do to keep from weeping.
Everyone, she thinks, should have a sister. Everyone.
But she forgets, sometimes, that Oriana is just as smart, just as clever, just as willful and intuitive as she is, and when it comes out, she’s not always sure how to react. Like right now, when Ori mentions Cerberus and the Normandy and hints in a rather unsubtle way that she knows Miranda is sort of, kind of on the run, and part of Miranda wants to tell her that everything will work out soon enough (because Miranda may not have a plan yet but she will), and another part wants to reach through the damned screen and hug her because she is her sister and she is truly the most marvelous thing in this galaxy.
“You could come stay with me, you know,” Oriana says, leaning close to the screen, and now she looks a little worried and that will not do.
The offer makes Miranda’s throat feel tight, and were it under different circumstances, she thinks she might even do it. She could take off for a week or two, share her sister’s bedroom, get to know her adoptive family. Have dinner with them, take Oriana shopping, go to her recitals, help with her homework, braid each other’s hair before bed and tell secrets in the dark. Because that is what sisters do, and even though Miranda isn’t sure she would be any good at it, even though she might feel like she was just pretending to be someone else the whole time, Miranda wants.
“I can’t, Ori,” she says, and it actually hurts, a little. “I would, but I can’t.”
Somehow, the topic keeps turning back to the Normandy and its strange, colorful crew, and Miranda actually makes Oriana laugh a few times with some heavily edited stories about Kasumi and that salarian Spectre who’d been after her for years, and then some more about Mordin’s many, many quirks, but when her sister asks about Jack by name, Miranda blinks a few times and tries not to look as shocked as she feels.
“The other biotic,” Ori tells her, like she’s suddenly forgotten the foul-mouthed woman she was scheduled to beat to a pulp weeks ago. “The one with all the tattoos who was there with you and Shepard. What’s she like?”
Of course. Nos Astra. Shepard had insisted they bring Jack along with them and Miranda had quietly protested, because this wasn’t some shitty planet they could shoot up and forget about, this was Oriana, this was hers, this was the biggest part of her self she had ever given anyone, and Jack would stomp all over that and defile the pieces.
But she hadn’t. Jack was mostly quiet when she wasn’t raining down biotic fury, and now that she thinks on it, Miranda was grateful. Jack had helped save her sister and she’d thanked Shepard, but she’d never said a word to Jack. And Jack had never said a word to her about Pragia, either.
“She’s—she’s difficult,” Miranda says, and Oriana asks if she has any tattoos.
They talk a while longer, decide to talk again the day after next like they always do, and at Oriana’s insistence, she promises she will call her if she needs anything at all (she will not), and they also plan to meet up on Nos Astra soon, if only for an afternoon (she will, she will).
“Sleep tight, Miranda.” Oriana blows her a kiss, and what Miranda would give, just to kiss her baby sister goodnight. Just once.
“Sweet dreams, Ori,” she smiles, and when she turns out the light, she tries not to think of Jack and Jack’s tattoos and the scars across her belly and the damned stink of Pragia and how maybe she owes her something else.
The next day finds her standing at the exit of a not-so-abandoned warehouse on some forsaken planet overrun with Blood Pack trash, her only instructions being, “Kill anyone who tries to get through.”
It’s simple enough. It’s quiet enough, too, because Shepard decided Jack should stay with her, and rather than go straight for each other’s throats the way they used to do, it’s become a bit awkward, and Miranda has never known what to do with awkward. Jack stares straight ahead, bounces on the balls of her feet every so often, and Miranda almost wishes a krogan would charge them just to give her something to do.
It doesn’t happen, though. It doesn’t look like anything is going to happen, and Miranda is just about to open her mouth to attempt something civil that she will probably immediately regret, but Jack beats her to it.
“This sucks,” she says, and yeah, that’s about right.
“It’s money. Buys us a little more time.”
Jack snorts. “For what? If she thinks I’m gonna hand my ass over to the Alliance, she’s got another thing coming.”
Miranda glances at her. Jack’s cheekbones are high, almost gold in the muted sunlight that’s leaking through the cracks of the roof. She doesn’t notice any scars above the neck and she realizes suddenly, because it is a fact like the dust on her shoes and the gun in her hand, that Jack is beautiful. Almost violently so.
“What will you do?” She is genuinely curious. She once heard Jack talking about being a pirate, how Shepard could live like a queen if she wanted, and she wonders if this is what Jack has in mind. She would be good at it, Miranda thinks, if she hasn’t gone too soft under Shepard’s watch, and who among them hasn’t at least sprouted a conscience or nurtured the seeds of doubt in these past months?
Jack looks at her, sidelong like she sometimes does, eyes wandering up and down like she’s sizing her up, and what is that all about? She’s probably a good five years older than Jack, at least, and yet she feels her face heat just slightly when Jack’s eyes linger at her hips.
“I haven’t gotten that far,” Jack says, lower than usual, and then she’s staring straight ahead again.
She isn’t sure what to make of that, because it feels like Jack just threw her something, exposed a small piece of herself and gave it to Miranda to look over and do with it what she will. Miranda has five hundred different things to say in situations like this, things she uses to get what she needs and extract what she’s been ordered, but these things are tricky when they’re real, and she has never had a plan for that. Why would she?
So she just says, “Neither have I,” because, well, she hasn’t, and then their eyes meet, very briefly. And that’s the end of that, because about eight seconds later, Shepard emerges with Tali and Mordin, who are looking rather pleased with themselves (or, Shepard and Mordin are).
“No action down here, I take it?” She grins, and Miranda can tell she’s not yet come down from that battle high she gets from emptying her SMG into a crowd of mercenary assholes just begging for it. Then they’re back on the shuttle, making some calls, collecting their money, and she doesn’t have time to think about the way Jack watches her when she thinks Miranda isn’t looking, or the how she wishes Shepard had taken just a little longer to clear out those men.
Two nights later, Jack stays for dinner. Actually sits down and has dinner with the rest of the crew like a normal, well-adjusted person might. Miranda wouldn’t be there herself, but Shepard had noticed her absence most evenings and insisted she stay, and, well, who’s going to resist when Shepard asks?
Jack takes a seat with Samara, and damn it, that’s where she was going to sit, and it’s probably not a good idea to just plop down next to Jack even if she kind of thinks she wants to talk to her. Then again, Samara is there and Samara is like a steady stream of water that courses straight to your center. She doesn’t judge, won’t mention it if she sits next to Jack even though she knows their history like the rest of the crew, won’t make pithy comments she’s had planned out for months like certain other people around here do. She will simply let it be. Miranda thinks Samara could probably tame lions if she just sat and had a nice talk with them.
So, she sits.
“Miranda,” Samara says, and she’d never say it, but Miranda is pretty sure she could listen to Samara speak all day. “It is good to see you. Shepard tells me you have been very busy.”
“That, I have,” she admits. Beside her, Jack stabs at her chicken, and already she wonders if this was a mistake, but. “Everything’s been fine, I hope?”
“I have been well.” Even the way she eats is graceful. “Eventually, I think I will return to Thessia, but for now, I will stay where I am needed.”
Miranda is happy about that, really. She’s quite fond of Samara, loves her stories and her centuries-old wisdom, and she will be genuinely sorry to see her leave. But, people come and go. It is a fact, hard as iron, a lesson she has learned over and over. She is reminded of Niket, and sinks her knife into her chicken.
“Do you know where you will go, after all this?” She’s asking Miranda, and, well, she still hasn’t given this much more thought. In fact, she has been making a large and obvious point of avoiding it, talking with Oriana, planning their next raid on some slavers, cashing in on favors long overdue.
“I… don’t know,” she says, and it’s a quiet thing, honest, because you can be nothing but honest with Samara. She weeds out lies and uncertainties like pruning a vine. “For once, I don’t know.” Suddenly, she feels tired again, if she ever actually stopped.
She hums thoughtfully at that, spears a piece of lettuce. “It will come to you,” she says, and when she smiles like that, Miranda can almost believe her.
She can feel Jack doing that thing she does next to her from the corner of her eye, that sidelong glance again, except this time she’s leaning on her fist and staring right at her. So, not sidelong. Ogling, more like. Miranda suddenly wishes she were as regal an eater as Samara.
“And what about you, Jack? Do you know what you want?”
Miranda doesn’t look. She doesn’t. (But she wants to.)
“Hell if I know,” she mumbles. Miranda watches her reach for her glass, and she’s pretty sure her arms are more ink than skin. It’s strangely mesmerizing, and of course Jack catches her looking. She is slowly learning (and learning a little too late) that Jack seems to be acutely aware of when someone is looking at her.
“Like what you see, princess?” She drawls, and she’s doing this on purpose. Like it’s a great big joke, or something. Miranda just swallows and averts her eyes.
“Perhaps if I liked women with more tattoos than a batarian slaver and mouths like a tar pit,” she snaps, and Jack snorts and takes a long drink. There’s not much venom in her words, not like there used to be, and Jack looks out at her over the rim of her glass, looks her over just like she had the other day and then meets her eyes in something suspiciously resembling a challenge. Or maybe that’s just in Miranda’s head. Maybe Jack has decided to slowly drive her mad now that they’ve got this unspoken agreement to not kill each other on sight. (She doesn’t think so.)
She leaves right after she’s finished, just a few minutes later, and Miranda can’t help but watch her go, clunky boots, long-legged gait and all those tattoos, and she is again certain that Jack knows. She isn’t sure what to make of this. She still hasn’t said a word about Illium, or Pragia, or a few other things she can’t figure out how to put to words just yet, and she has no idea what to do with this, this, this thing that just happened. Whatever it is.
“I do believe there is something different about these tomatoes,” Samara says. She looks like she’s considering something, and Miranda is entirely sure it’s not the tomatoes.
It’s three in the morning and she can’t sleep, and when she can’t sleep, Miranda thinks of all sorts of unsavory things. Like the Alliance catching up with them, or her father figuring out where she’s hidden Oriana, or Cerberus agents ambushing them when they land on some cold rock in the middle of nowhere. She thinks of what she’s going to do when Shepard decides it’s time, and with the kind of existential horror she thought reserved for teenage nihilists, she realizes that for the first time in a very long time, she does not know where she is going or what she’ll do, and she may have little control over it in the end.
She is so very, very tired. But, No, you don’t, Jack had said. And. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she can’t understand what that’s like, to have to cut and run at a moment’s notice, to be a prisoner in ways Miranda has never truly known, and to just be so hideously, achingly tired of it all.
She sits up and looks through her schedule for tomorrow. Mercenaries in the morning and a short stop on Illium, no doubt to see Dr. T’Soni again. She’ll have to make some more calls, and she’s got a visit with Lanteia in the evening. A busy day, and all she can think is how she’d like to spend half of it in bed with a cup of tea and maybe someone to talk to. She can’t call Oriana, because she would never burden her sister with things like this, and Shepard has more than enough to deal with right now and likely always will. Samara would listen, because Samara always listens, but that doesn’t feel right, either.
She’s always gotten by on her own, because she is all she needs. She learned from a young age to swallow her problems until they digested and she was done with it, but.
But.
She still envied other girls their mothers and friends when she was growing up, knowing it was something she would never truly have. On the rare occasion that she made a friend or found someone who would listen, who made her feel normal, she always knew separation was inevitable. Her father didn’t want her associating with people because then she might get ideas, and ideas that weren’t his weren’t welcome. And then, they simply became one less thing in her life, and that was that.
Learn to live with it. Do not attach yourself to anything. Expect only of yourself. Do not hope for someone to understand you, to save you, to need you. Know yourself, know what you want, tattoo it onto your mind like prayer and let it be your solace.
It was part of the reason she was so desperate to free Oriana from his death grip. She didn’t want her sister to turn out like her.
She spoke to Jacob about this, once, and he had listened like he always had, but he didn’t understand, not really, and she always felt a little strange talking about these things with him. Jacob never budged. Things moved Jacob, sure, but he would never show it. And, in truth, Miranda has always been more comfortable in the company of other women, which she blames partly on her father and partly on many of the other men she’s known. Men always want something from her, they’re always so willing to try and take it whether she’s offered it or not, and Miranda is rarely willing to give of herself lest she spend every last cent of what she’s worked for all these years.
That’s probably true of many women, though. Shepard and Samara, definitely. And Jack. Jack, too.
She still hasn’t spoken to Jack, not about anything at all, and she supposes she could seek her out, just casually stumble into engineering—as if she has ever done that before—and start talking, but that feels all wrong, as if she would be trampling on something that wasn’t hers, and how she would hate that if it were her. There’s also no guarantee that Jack would listen long enough to hear it, or even that she wants to; Jack is a tight bundle of violence and fork-tongued spite, less so than she used to be around Miranda, but it’s still unwise to assume anything.
But. They’ve shared a bottle of wine. They’ve had dinner without killing each other. They’ve even exchanged a handful of sentences and some strange glances and if Jack were a man (or maybe any other woman), Miranda would know exactly what they meant and she might even do something about it.
She turns over in bed. This is unfamiliar territory and she really doesn’t like unfamiliar territory, not on top of everything else that’s going on, but with all these things that seem to keep getting stuck in her throat in the middle of the night, this one has become the most persistent. And nothing good ever comes from letting these things fester.
Better to rip it off. Like a bandage. Again.
So, Miranda starts to plan.
Two days later and she’s waiting for Shepard again, on a hazy planet full of vorcha that she really does not like. This time, it’s her and Samara and Jacob, and Jack standing a little farther away than she should. Four biotics—four!—and is this truly necessary?
She decides not to question it when a particularly large and ill-tempered group of krogan comes at them with shotguns. Then, it’s all screaming and bones cracking and blue waves of energy, and it’s over before it even started, really. Miranda makes quick work of a few vorcha shrieking profanities, and Jack takes the last krogan down herself, throwing out her arms, and Miranda watches the way she twists at the waist, the flash of glorious color when she closes her fists and pulls. And Jack knows she’s looking, because Miranda has figured this much out and it is now part of a somewhat delicate plan that may or may not work.
A plan. To speak to Jack. Maybe she went mad long ago.
“Lot of them, huh?” Jacob is reloading his gun and looking over his shoulder. “Hope Shepard’s got plenty of clips.”
She’s about to say that Shepard doesn’t need thermal clips because the whole damn universe just seems to bend to her will when she catches Jack looking. Really, really looking, not sneering or doing that furtive sidelong kind-of-sort-of looking thing. It’s unguarded and thoughtful, guileless, as calm as she’s ever seen the woman, and Miranda doesn’t remember the last time someone looked at her like that. Like they were trying to figure something out, or they thought she had some sort of answer for life or the universe or—worse—themselves—that they’d find if they just stared long enough. Maybe Shepard.
She’s not sure how to feel about that.
They keep watch for any stragglers, and Jack takes a stroll through the carnage every so often, probably just to watch them bleed, until Shepard comes back and tells them they can finally, blessedly get off this planet. On the way out, Samara falls into step beside her, an endless ocean of agelessness.
“You work well together,” she says, and Miranda probably shouldn’t be so taken aback, because Samara sees everything, even the things people would rather she not (especially the things people would rather she not), but Miranda is just a little stunned. She doesn’t know what to say, and she doesn’t have to, because Samara’s words flow together like tides. “I believe it is a good thing for you both.”
“Are we still talking about work?” She cocks her head, and Samara’s face is still that serene mask of grace and tranquility but for the smallest twitch of lips that she washes away as quickly as it comes.
“You should tread lightly,” and her voice is so, so soft, “but that does not mean you should fear to tread at all.”
“Did the ancient justicars say that?” Because it sounds like something they would say.
“No,” Samara admits, and now she is certainly smiling. “I said that. And I’ve had a thousand years to learn it, in case you have forgotten.”
Miranda chews that over with dinner, during which Jack is conspicuously absent, and tweaks her plans.
It’s midnight, again, and she is in the kitchen, again, and she’s waiting—not eagerly—for the hiss of the elevator door. Because Miranda is fairly certain that something is about to happen, is so certain, in fact, that she has set out two wine glasses and hasn’t even uncorked the bottle of cabernet sitting on the table. Jack will make her late-night rounds on the crew deck, and Miranda will invite her to have a drink. And they will talk, and it may be awkward or it may not be, and she will say the things that need to be said. And she will listen. And maybe they will even do this again.
She has it planned out, this time.
She doesn’t have to wait for much longer for the elevator door to hiss open, and she hears the clunky boots she’s come to recognize by the particular timbre of the thick heel scuffing the floor, and then there’s Jack, standing in the half-light of the kitchen, blinking, and not looking nearly as surprised as Miranda thinks she ought.
In fact, she smirks.
“Waiting on me, princess?” She grabs the bottle and searches the label, probably looking for the alcohol content. Typical. “You’ll have to work a little harder than that if you want to get me out of my clothes.”
Miranda bristles. But it’s not a bad sort of bristle, not really. “Pretend it’s batarian brandy,” she offers, and Jack sits down across from her, no poking or prodding necessary.
“Then maybe we’d get somewhere.”
She can’t really argue with that, other than to say batarian liquor tastes like three-day-old dishwater with an exceedingly unpleasant aftertaste of matchsticks, but. This is progress. And this is Jack, and this is her, and this can all be undone with a wayward look or the wrong choice of adjectives, and Miranda is nothing if not restrained. Most of the time.
For a while, they just drink. And they aren’t so much furtively glancing anymore as they are brazenly looking, and it’s quiet but it’s a good sort of quiet, and Miranda is truly reluctant to break it.
“I…” She begins, and this worked out in her head a few hours ago, really. She takes another drink. Bandages, ripping, tearing. Yes. “I never thanked you for helping me back on Illium. With my sister.” Jack doesn’t say anything, just stares and drinks, so she soldiers on. “I—I could not have done it without you. And I appreciate it, truly. More than I can say.” There. One down.
Jack blinks, and her gaze shifts to something off to Miranda’s side before snapping right back up again. “No problem,” she sneers, and has she already finished her glass? How has she already finished her glass?
“Damn it, if you’re going to drink my wine, do it properly,” Miranda says, without bite. She pours Jack another—smaller—glass. “Small sips, so you actually taste it. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”
She tells Jack how to taste the different notes, explains how to let it linger on your tongue and inhale just so, which makes Jack wrinkle her nose and snort and this wasn’t part of the plan at all, but Miranda doesn’t care. By the third glass, she thinks she’s even making progress.
“Cherries,” Jack says, finally, and if Miranda didn’t know better she’d say she was positively triumphant. “Cherries and fucking… berries.”
“Currants,” and now it’s Miranda’s turn to smirk, and when did she start keeping track of who got to do what? “They’re blackcurrants.”
“What the hell are those,” she doesn’t-ask, and Miranda feels warm and slightly drunk and, and—well, happy. She feels happy. She is sharing an exquisite bottle of wine with someone who has never heard of cabernet sauvignon or blackcurrants before, who helped keep her sister safe and doesn’t take what she doesn’t offer and pulls off a shaved head better than any man or woman she’s ever known. This, too, is unfamiliar territory, but not the unpleasant sort. This is good, easy. This is something she could get used to. This is something, she thinks, she might want to get used to.
“You talk to her?” Jack asks after Miranda tops off her glass again. “Your sister.”
This is something she has shared with no one but Shepard, and even then, only in passing. Oriana is hers, something wholly good and warm and precious, and she is not sure it’s something she’s comfortable speaking of just yet. Miranda would kill without hesitation for Oriana, and has. She would fight a horde of krogan with her bare hands and storm Cerberus’ headquarters all on her own just to keep her sister safe and happy. It is a delicate thing she nurtures like a bullet to her gun, and anyone who tries to take it from her will meet a very swift and unpleasant end.
But, Jack. Jack is here and she is listening and she might be slightly drunk but this is something they shared. This is something between them.
“I do,” she says, a little tentative. “She’s—amazing,” Miranda concedes, and stops herself from rambling further. Jack probably doesn’t care. “I never thought I would know her.”
Jack takes a long, hard drink, probably just because she knows it irritates Miranda. “Good. That’s good.”
Well.
“Jack,” she starts again, and it is probably the wine, or—rather, it is simply the wine making things a little easier. Probably. “I’m… I’m not good at,” she swallows, because this is her, this is Miranda Lawson, the person, the woman, the thing she seals off behind layers of brick and mortar because how could she ever trust anyone else with this? You could never truly know another person. You can only ever trust yourself. Do not attach yourself to anything. Do not hope for someone to understand you, to save you, to need you.
There is a chance, perhaps a bigger one than she thinks, that Jack will throw this back in her face and tell her to fuck off or explain very loudly just what a bitch she is or whatever manner of profanity she’s favoring tonight, and if that’s the case, it’s a good thing she’s got more wine. A very good thing.
“I’m not used to being wrong.” And there it is. Another bandage, another piece of skin. “And I have been wrong.” About Shepard, about Cerberus, about the geth perched in the AI core, about you.
Jack doesn’t look vindictive, or even particularly surprised. She takes another drink, meets Miranda’s eyes, and there’s this look that Miranda has never seen on her before, not sympathetic or apologetic, but understanding, really, truly understanding, like she knows just what has come to pass between them and she’s been waiting on it for a while now. She looks as tired as Miranda feels, and maybe even a little smug.
“I know,” Jack says. And, a bit quieter, “So have I. A little.” And that, really, is all of it.