Mass Effect 3
Rating: M (language)
Implied development of a pairing... can you guess it? ;)
Jaine Shepard 'verse (Renegade!)
Prompt: "Falling Slowly", from the me_challenge community at Live Journal, Insanity Round (though I finished this too late to post on the community, but at least I can post it here!)
Summary: Shepard takes a leap, and those who care about her most are there to catch her...

Falling Slowly

She squeezed the trigger steadily as she ran, painting the Reaper with a laser so that the Normandy could find its target. She'd shot many a weapon while running before… but not for such a prolonged period of time. Not in such a confined space. Not without backup or cover. Not with a massive sentient machine bent on destruction staring her right in the goddamned face.

She'd done some pretty damn crazy shit in her life, but never anything like this.

One lone woman against a Reaper. She ground her teeth and stared right into its hot red eye, her hardsuit's warning system chiming as the searing heat from its energy beam cut through the rock behind her as easily as if it were butter.

She kept running. Kept squeezing that trigger.

Come on come on come on come on….

She was exhausted. Stumbled on something. Messed up the shot and swore virulently as she had to start all over again. But then she reached the outcropping that walled off the small plateau she stood on and had nowhere else to go.

The blast of the beam roared in her head, drowning the blaring alarms of her hardsuit. Her HUD exploded in a brilliant display of flashing red icons and warning lights. There was only one thing left to do.

She jumped.

The fall took forever. Time slowed. Every detail became excruciatingly clear to super-heightened senses: the purplish sheen of the Reaper's massive leg as she plummeted past it, the way the energy beam sent up a plume of vaporized rock above it like a whale's blowhole as she twisted around in mid-air, still squeezing that trigger, still painting her target. The way Rannoch's sky looked strangely orange. She couldn't remember if it had looked that way before or not. The sheer face of the plateau she had just leapt off of – it would be a hard rock to free-climb, that's for sure. The way the ground seemed much further away than she had anticipated…

A bright beam of light suddenly lanced from the clouds, blasting the Reaper for a third time, and the machine jerked and shuddered, pink explosions ripping through its metal hide and tearing it apart. She thought she heard some sort of shouting through her helmet, and then an abrupt vertigo gripped her and her body jerked upwards just briefly before finally slamming with great force into the ground she had been expecting some time ago.

Her vision flashed white, her HUD flickering. All breath left her and her mouth opened instinctively, but her lungs refused to expand.

Dim noises reached her; voices and running footsteps. Someone slid to a halt next to her and dropped to their knees, and then Vega's face eclipsed her view of the sky.

"La madre que te parió!" he hissed. "You are one perra loca, Commander!"

She gasped, finally regaining control of her diaphragm. "I… told you all… to get the hell out," she growled, trying to push herself into a sitting position.

Vega helped pull her up and she sat for a moment, letting her head hang as she recovered her air and took stock of the ache in her head and ribs and tailbone.

"Yeah," he grunted. "And if we hadn't come back around, Alenko wouldn't have been in range to give you a pull right before you splattered on the rock. And instead of a perra loca you'd be a perra muerta."

Shepard raised a hand to her head, frowning. She glanced sideways at Vega and noticed Alenko standing behind him, gripping his rifle a little too tightly, his face ashen. Alenko had changed all right… once upon a time he would have never disobeyed a direct order. "Well congratulations," she drawled, her voice hoarse, "you've both just earned yourselves extra PT." She moved to stand up; Vega jumped to his feet and offered her a hand.

She stared at him for a second, then accepted the help.

"And you," she said as he lifted her easily from the ground. "You also get to clean up the Kodiak inside and out. With a toothbrush. For calling me a bitch."

He held her hand in his vice-like grip for just a second too long, fixing her with that maddening, lopsided grin. "Just calling 'em like I see 'em, Commander."

Her eyes narrowed and she pulled her hand away, spinning on her heel and trying to hide the pain that shocked through her body as she stalked back toward the waiting shuttle hovering some distance away.

Damn that Vega.