I had this up for three months on my AO3 account before remembering to put it up here, ooops. Anyway, Citadel DLC was really great, wasn't it? No reason.

Several things happened very fast.

The outlaws all turned to look at Reyes, who stopped dead in his tracks. In a split second, Ryder funneled the energy from her barrier into a biotic charge, surging through the outlaws towards Reyes; she used her momentum to grab him and haul him bodily behind a stack of crates. A spray of bullets punched a trail into the floor behind them.

Reyes grunted as Ryder shoved him against their cover, attempting to flatten them both against it to avoid the ricochet.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed.

"Isn't it obvious? I'm saving your life!" The corner of his mouth quirked up in a rakish smile, but he was breathing hard; his chest heaved against hers, and a loose curl had dropped against his forehead. Had he… been running?

A retort died on the tip of her tongue as more bullets pinged against the sides of their cover, this time from a slightly different angle. Dammit, the outlaws were trying to flank them. Their cover was about to turn into a dead end.

"Here," Reyes said, a touch more urgently, shoving a pistol at her. She took it without question.

"I had the situation under control!" She took advantage of split-second pause in the fight, leaned out, and shot at one of the outlaws – the human – and heard the familiar crack of shields fizzing out in return as she beat a hasty retreat back into cover.

"Well, shall I just leave you to it, then?" Reyes leaned out to shoot from the other side of the stack of crates; there was a flanging cry from the turian Outcast.

"This way!" Without waiting for a reply, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her from one stack of crates to another. A slightly better position; closer to the edge of the shipping yard, harder to flank. They ducked behind cover just in time as a blast from the krogan's shotgun that would have torn through Ryder's barrier and filled them both full of shrapnel instead impacted mostly against the top half of the crate they were now crouched behind. It left deep gouges in the metal. She crouched lower, turning her face away from the threat of flying shards of metal.

"SAM!" she shouted, though there was no real need. "Can you get through their jammer?"

"I am attempting to." She still wasn't used to how incongruously calm SAM always sounded. "Their equipment is surprisingly sophisticated. I will need some time to disable it and contact the Tempest."

"Not great for time right now!" she replied, leaning out of cover to fire again and nearly getting a faceful of concussive shot for her trouble. Her biotic barrier wobbled briefly before she reinforced it.

"There should be a maintenance tunnel leading from this dock," Reyes said, voice as low as possible over the gunfire, appearing to have got the gist of her conversation with SAM. "This part of Kadara is a warren, if we get in there we can lose them." He jerked his head up and to the side. "Up on—"

"That balcony? Saw it earlier," Ryder replied, a touch breathlessly. Unfortunately, the route to the stairs up would take them directly across a wide aisle meant for moving cargo. Scratch that, then. She gathered biotic power and sent it rocketing towards the krogan in a series of jagged explosions. He sailed through the air in a surprisingly graceful arc and landed in a pile of cargo with an ear-splitting crash.

"Can you get us up there with your biotics?" Ryder almost jumped – Reyes had put his mouth right next to her ear to be heard over the noise. Apparently he'd concluded the stairs were a no-go as well.

"Up there, sure. Up there and not shot is going to be harder." She could handle the weight of two people, but not fast enough to avoid concentrated gunfire, and she wasn't keep on gambling her life on her ability to hold a barrier for that long. She was no slouch when it came to her biotics, but she wasn't Cora.

"Then we make sure they can't shoot at us." All traces of humor were gone from Reyes' voice now, and when she glanced over, his gaze was focused and sharp.

"Take them out before they call for backup – got it." Not for the first time, she wished the port authorities weren't so strict about the no-guns rule. She really could have used her shotgun right about now.

Peeking over the mangled top of the crate, she fired on the human again. One, two – the outlaw's shields went down again – and the third shot hit near her clavicle. She dropped, and didn't get back up.

"One down," she said, privately just a little bit pleased she'd gotten the first kill. She shifted her sights over to the other two thugs just in time to see Reyes blow out the turian's knee, and follow up with several shots to his gut.

"Make that two," he said, sounding far too smug.

That just left the krogan – who at this very moment was stalking towards them, pounding their cover full of shotgun rounds and paying only nominal attention to cover. Hopefully this one didn't have the full complement of redundant organs; she didn't think they had the ammo to deal with that.

Under concentrated fire from two sources, the krogan's shields broke fast; he dropped his head, and Ryder had the sudden feeling of being sighted by a bull. A well-armored bull, with a shotgun and grenades.

"Shit!"

She grabbed Reyes', arm, pulling him away in the nick of time as the krogan let out a bellow and charged. He crumpled the metal crates they'd been crouched behind like so much rice paper with the force of his relentless charge, as Ryder and Reyes backpedalled, trying to put a safe distance between them. She fired shot after shot at the krogan's face. Most of them ricocheted harmlessly off his plate, but a few found their mark. The krogan didn't even seem to notice, fully consumed by bloodlust by now.

He was going to pin them down at this rate.

"Reyes, cover me!" she shouted, drawing on her biotics again. Blue light warped the world around her briefly – and then she launched herself at the krogan in a charge of her own. It was like charging a particularly stubborn boulder: the krogan rocked back on his heels and snarled, but didn't fall. Not deterred, Ryder raised her pistol and unloaded most of her clip point-blank into his face; the krogan roared in rage and pain, and swung a blind fist at her.

If the punch had connected – if she had been a millisecond slower, if she'd tried to put in one last shot –without her shields and armor, the force of it would have crushed her skull like an egg, biotic barrier or no. She felt the air ripple as she threw herself backwards, boosting her speed with more biotics. Reyes' covering fire stopped the krogan from following her immediately, giving her the space she needed to get away as they dashed behind a large shipping container. She glanced upward; the balcony was almost in reach, but cover was starting to get scarce this close to the edge of the platform. If they could get behind those barrels, they'd be close enough that she could probably boost them straight up—

Out of the corner of her eye, Ryder saw something sail through the air towards them.

"Grenade!" she yelled, before the object landed at their feet, and she realized her mistake.

Krogan were, by and large, not known for their sense of subtlety and proportion – and this particular krogan was no exception. He hadn't thrown a grenade. He'd thrown his entire belt of grenades.

Time slowed as the world shrunk to the size of a pinhole. She didn't think. Gathering so much biotic energy in a split second it made her bones creak, she grabbed Reyes by the waist and slammed a barrier between them and the grenades while simultaneously speeding them both backwards, away from the grenades, with a wave of energy.

It was almost enough.

The blast burst through her hastily-erected barrier and, combined with her jump, threw them further than she'd intended. She watched in horror as the edge of the platform disappeared from under them – and then they were falling into the yawning void below.