Chapter Ten: Shattered Glass

Jack slammed the door to her quarters. With all the destruction the Reapers had rained down, survivors were stuck living in buildings of older construction. Sometimes there was no working electricity. Other times, like now, there were no power doors at all. For one raised in a high-tech Cerberus facility only to later skip from one spaceship or station to the next, Jack found the heavy wooden antique doors of Buckingham Palace entirely inadequate.

It was still a barrier between herself and everyone else, however; and that was precisely what she wanted.

Her room was massive even though she had wandered down and down and along twisting corridors to find it. The old servants quarters that used to hold a dozen beds had been converted into storage and then an office and apparently back to storage in the past 200 years or so. The metal plating of the walls had been covered in wainscotting whose white paint had long ago grown dingy. In her anger, Jack slammed her fist into the floor, a shockwave of biotic energy charging forward. The opposite wall, despite its age and wear, absorbed it harmlessly.

Jack screamed until the echo rang louder than her own voice. When destruction was no longer therapeutic, there were only so many options left.

"Louder, Small One. I don't think Harbinger can hear you."

Jack's attention snapped over to the door. She hadn't heard it open. There, silhouetted in the emergency lighting of the hallway, was Grunt. The doorway that was huge by human standards barely accommodated his girth, but he entered easily all the same.

"Fuck off," the woman replied. Normally, her tone would have been hard, forceful, snappish. But for as much as she wanted to be alone, the krogan's presence was comforting enough that all she could manage was to sound tired.

And she suddenly felt so very, very tired.

The krogan didn't move from the doorway. Rather, he leaned against it, tapping the varnished wooden surface as though he found it a curious thing. To him, it probably was. Born and raised in a tank, given new life upon the metal workings of the Normandy, Grunt had probably never even seen something made of wood let alone know where it came from. Further, even if he did know, there was the definite reality that his warrior brain was acknowledging the superior qualities of metal armored plating in comparison to centuries-old oak.

"You know Tali didn't mean what I know you think she meant, right?"

Jack sighed and raked a hand through the crest of hair she had allowed to grow back. "Look, I really don't want to talk about this."

"They just need a small sample of your-"

"I will not be someone's fucking experiment!" The woman blinked and found herself standing face to face with the krogan. She couldn't remember standing up or dashing over. She definitely didn't remember triggering her biotics, but they were flaring nonetheless. Blue light completely consumed her right fist, a fist she had stopped only a few inches away from Grunt's scowling left eye. "Not again. And Shepard deserves better than being one, too."

"Shepard's the one that told them to do this."

"In what? One of those screwed up dreams? Geth don't fucking dream."

"And mechs don't scream in pain, either, but you and I know better, don't we?"

Jack's expression remained hard, and her dark eyes didn't even blink as she let her biotics extinguish. Her hand dropped back to her side.

"You and I both know what it's like to spend our lives in a tank, to be poked and prodded and fed all the wrong information." He lowered his face so that his snout was a hair's breadth from her nose. "This isn't that."

"No. This time, it'll be Shepard in the tank."

"Do you think she would let Tali do this without knowing what she was getting into? She survived Cerberus same as you. The difference is that she didn't let it own her."

The woman wasn't about to let that one slide, no matter how much of a friend Grunt was. She took a few steps away as if to to back to her bed, then spun back in a beat. With a shriek of rage, she flung blasts of biotic energy at the krogan still standing in the doorway. As if he'd been expecting it, he took a step back and closed the door to use as a barrier. The power meant to reave his armor into uselessness was absorbed by the wood, rendering it totally harmless. He knew. These doors and paneling weren't a curiosity to him. He knew.

Further enraged, Jack kept up her barrage. Her screams were unintelligible and fierce, but even she couldn't keep it up forever. As she tired, her yelling broke into sobbing. She collapsed to the ground when she couldn't pretend anymore. She wasn't the badass bitch she wanted the galaxy to believe she was. She was just some little girl, some frightened little girl snatched away from her mother's arms at birth, taken and hidden and tortured until there was nothing left.

But Shepard had thought there was something. She had kept saying it over and over and over all those times she'd make her way down to the dark underbelly of engineering, that cave of pipes and plating and machinery where Jack had hidden herself on the Normandy. She hid not because she hated people. She hid because she didn't want to see all the things she could have been if given the chance at a normal life.

Shepard had gone and given her that chance anyway...no matter how much Jack knew she didn't deserve it.

She felt herself be hauled up by the collar of her jacket, sleeves digging into her underarms. She didn't have the strength or will to get her legs under her and found that, in this instance, she preferred to let herself be dragged across the floor and plopped onto a mattress that creaked with old springs. Grunt stood in front of her, then, arms crossed in front of him and his head tilted to the side in expectation. A human might have coddled. An asari would have comforted. A salarian would have preached the logistical errors of such an outburst of emotion.

Grunt just waited.

Jack pressed her palms to her face, gruffly wiping away the remaining signs that she'd been crying. Had it been anyone else in the room, she would have been embarrassed to the point of raging again.

Tired...so very tired.

"Just a small sample...Tali promised."

Grunt nodded. "Just a flake of skin and a drop of blood. You're the only human biotic we've got."

"And then what?"

"Then we wait." The krogan held out his hand to help Jack get to her feet. "And we give Shepard something we never had while trapped under glass: support."