Ummm … yeah. The muse goes rogue again. Those of you who aren't familiar with my Moments In Time series probably won't give a damn about this, and those of you who are would probably prefer me to be working on the main story, which hopefully I can do now that I've tossed this particular plot bunny a carrot to gnaw on instead of my brain.

Definitely AU, not exactly a crossover. As usual, more discussion at the end for those that are interested.

The Shadow Broker went down. Hard.

Talia didn't give a shit. She kept unloading round after round from the M-22 Eviscerator into the twitching hulk of the yahg, advancing step by step until she was at point blank range, ignoring the growing warmth in her hands as she pushed the limits of the heat sinks. The bastard had already eaten enough ordinance to bring down a cruiser, but that wasn't the only reason she kept firing, wasn't the only reason for the red haze of rage that touched the vision in her right eye, the pounding of her pulse in her temples or the strong urge to look up the native planet of a species she'd never heard of until fifteen minutes ago and nuke it to a glowing cinder.

This particular bucket of fugly had tried to sell her best friend's corpse to the Collectors – and evidently by extension to the Reapers, had tried to murder said best friend's girl, brought them to this fucking backwater of a planet on a clusterfuck of a mission that had her hanging ass off this POS ship over the mother of all thunderstorms, sniping mechs and mercs while dodging stray lightning bolts. She was bruised to hell and back, had a split in her forehead that had gummed up the lashes on her right eye, and the distant thrum of pain beneath the flood of adrenaline announced that she'd busted a few ribs getting slammed around in the final fight. Taken together, it was more than enough reason to want the fucker to get back up so that she could take him down again.

And it was the only reason, damn it.

A hand fell on her arm, squeezing lightly. "T.C., ease up." Erin. The only one who ever called her that. "He's dead, chica. Ease up." Her voice was as calm as ever, cutting through the haze like a hot knife through butter.

"Not dead enough," Talia snarled, but she let off of the trigger, head turning to search every nook, cranny and shadow of the room, ignoring the sparks of pain as minute contractions of the periorbital muscles shifted the visual display from thermal to infrared, cycling back and forth, seeking anyone else in need of killing. The Alliance had offered her a cosmetic cybernetic implant that would have been indistinguishable from her other eye, but the eyepatch facade had allowed the use of a far more extensive array. It was pushing the limits; they'd warned her about that, warned her about the pain, but when she'd given the go-ahead anyway, they'd done it, and it had been more than worth it. In addition to the thermal/IR scanning, her left 'eye' now had 20x magnification optics with range-finding capabilities and the ability to calculate wind speed and direction, elevation and atmospheric density, all of it linked by transponder to her Black Widow, allowing her to nail a batarian between his eyes at two-plus klicks. Plus, the eyepatch looked badass.

Besides, compared to the fucking batarians popping the original model out of the socket with the equivalent of a rusty spoon, the present sensations barely qualified as discomfort.

"All clear," she reported at last, shifting back to standard optics and turning to Commander Erin Shepard: best friend, fellow badass, so-called 'Butcher of Torfan', erstwhile Savior of the Citadel and modern-day Lazarus. She tipped her head toward the dead yahg. "Mission accomplished?"

Green eyes searched her face, but Talia kept her own expression passive, and Shepard finally gave in. "Looks that way," she agreed, one shoulder tipping up in a slight shrug. She knew Talia well enough not to push.

A sudden cacophony of noise shattered the eerie silence that had fallen over the chamber with the cessation of gunfire, explosions and colliding bodies: the massive communications console returning to life after the power flux that Liara's biotic endgame had caused. Better than a score of voices from operatives all over the galaxy clamored together, all of them asking a variant of the same question:

What the fuck is going on?

Liara T'soni, shy archaeologist turned badass information broker, had been standing, staring at the Shadow Broker in disbelief. This was her mission, her idea. Shep had dealt herself in because she loved the asari; Talia had dealt herself in because Erin was one of her two best friends, and because she owed the asari. Liara was the reason that one of her two best friends was not a charred corpse in the hands of the Collectors, which meant that Talia was down with whatever she needed done.

She lifted her head now, blue eyes taking in the flashing lights and glowing monitors of the console for a long minute before moving to stand in front of it. They had just taken down the most powerful information broker in the galaxy, so a bit of gloating to his lackeys definitely seemed in order, but when she activated the microphone, her first words were not "Just pwned your boss. Have a nice day!".

"This is the Shadow Broker." Her own voice in the room was almost lost beneath the voice from the speakers, the distortion algorithms making it sound just like it had when the yahg had been the one doing the broadcasting.

What the fuck was going on?

"Shep?" Talia glanced warily from Liara to Erin, hoping for some enlightenment, but the Spectre looked as stunned as she felt. The asari had changed over the previous two years – fuck, they all had, but while the increase in the badassery quotient had worried Shepard, Talia had generally approved; the girl was a biotic powerhouse … might as well have an attitude to match, right? If her stated reasons for this mission had been a lie, however, if she'd just used Erin to topple a rival and claim an empire … well, gratitude only went so far, and Talia let her finger return to the trigger of the shotgun, the pressure just shy of firing. If it turned into a twofer day on Shadow Brokers, so be it.

"Wait." The one word was enough to put her on standby, watching as Shepard approached Liara. The asari might be an unknown quantity, but Talia had followed Erin Shepard on a dozen different tours of hell, including the hunt for Saren, and trusting her was not even a question that needed to be asked. Liara kept talking, explaining away the down time as the result of a systems upgrade, setting up deadlines for status reports. Becoming the goddamn Shadow Broker.

Fuck, Shep, I hope you know what you're doing. Not that having the Shadow Broker on their side would be a bad thing, as long as she was on their side, but -

The sound of footsteps in the hall they'd come in through had Talia at the door just as it slid open. She saw the pistol first and reacted fast, letting the shotgun go, her right hand shooting out to catch the thin wrist, fingers digging into tendon and nerve to make the hand holding the pistol release it. The cybernetics that made up most of her left arm included an integrated omni-tool, and a flick of that wrist forged a silicon-carbide blade: razor sharp and white hot. Before she could drive the blade into the chest of her target, however, her focus shifted from the empty hand up the arm, and Lieutenant Commander Talia Cousland, Systems Alliance N7 marine, found herself staring into the wild blue eyes of the redhead that was the purported reason for this clusterfuck of a mission in the first place.

Shit.

So, a few weeks back, I was trying to help a friend bust down a writer's block and came up with the idea of an ME/DA crossover. The friend found another way to break the block, but the idea wouldn't go away.

It's not a crossover in the true sense of the word. It has no direct connection to Moments In Time, no Thedas, no Grey Wardens. But after – shit, I've forgotten how many years of writing for those characters, I've got a solid enough grip on them that exploring how the personalities might evolve and interact given a very different set of backgrounds and circumstances intrigued me.

I gave some thought to plugging more the DA NPC's into the place of their ME counterparts: Wynne for Chakwas or Samara, Zev for Thane, Morrigan for Miranda (that one was the most tempting) & so on, but I'm quite fond of the ME cast, so in the end, Talia, Leliana & Alistair are all that made the jump, & Leliana is the only one who is replacing an NPC from the game.

Thought about replacing Shepard with Talia or Alistair, but decided that I liked the idea of a perspective from the sidelines. Between Shep, Talia & Al, all three origin/service histories will be covered.

Again, these characters are not the same ones that are in MIT; my goal is to make them distinct in this universe, but still recognizable at the core of each personality. Only time will tell if I succeed. I opted to start in medias res, in the middle of ME2, because I really don't want another epic length story to keep up with. Not sure how long this one will wind up being or an update schedule, because as soon as I get this plot bunny to stop humping my leg, I'm headed back to MIT & the other stories in that 'verse.