Aftermath
Joker and EDI are together the moment the Reaper war ends.
(AKA, I finished the game and if I suffer, so do you all 🥲)
Three clusters. They had traveled three clusters away, almost overdriven the core trying to stay clear of the blast from the Crucible. Joker was pretty sure they had made it, but he was double-checking the ship’s readings for the fifth time, because… well, because if they had abandoned Shepard at the Citadel, then he better not have scratched the paint on the Normandy, too. Leaving your C.O. behind twice in three years and losing the race with the weird red beam? Too much bad stuff to put down in one report.
By his side as always, EDI processed her own share of signals. There were pros to having a girlfriend who didn’t need sleep. Unfortunately, she had also gotten really good at picking up his stress cues. “Don’t worry, Jeff. Based on empirical evidence, Shepard’s survival rate resembles that of a tardigrade.”
He barely listened, trying to figure out what that last wave had been. He’d never seen anything like it. Somehow it had passed through them right during their FTL jump, and now some of the nav systems were starting to act funny. Some kind of energy matching Prothean code?
In that familiar, self-complacent tone of hers, she added her signature clarification. “That was a…”
She trailed off, and Joker scoffed under his breath. “A joke, yes, I get it. Got anything better?”
A long moment went by in silence. Busy as his mind was, it took him some time to consider she may actually be looking up a better joke on the extranet. This was a little slow for her standards. Still focused on the strange readings popping on his screen, he muttered, “Hey. Sorry. It was good, actually. I just— I hope whatever she did worked.”
Maybe he had finally managed to offend her. She gave him the silent treatment, and so he caved in and looked away from the numbers to take a glance at her. She sat on her copilot seat, motionless, platinum eyes looking away like she could not hear him.
“Oh, come on, EDI. I said I was sorry.”
He leaned over the armrest to seek her gaze. Determined to break her little act, he waved a hand in front of her face like some annoying kid at camp.
That was when he noticed. Her omni-visor was gone. Without its orange glow, the rest of her looked eerily artificial, like something was missing. Something that made her her, and not a machine.
A series of alarms appeared on Joker’s screen then. They rung repetitively, high-pitched and difficult to ignore. Critical system alert, the words read in his peripheral vision. When his heart fell to his stomach, it was not because of them, although somehow he knew exactly what the screen would say next.
The body next to him lay perfectly still. Joker Moreau went numb at his very core.
“…EDI?”
