Shepard flicks the credit chit on the table. It spins on its bottom-most corner for a moment, before it starts to fall. His finger twitches, a rush of air and blue surrounds the chit, now caught in suspension. Shepard moves his index finger slowly, turning the chit nonchalantly.
There was no purpose, no necessity behind the motion, and Shepard liked that. To do something without need, simply on a whim. He had almost forgotten the taste of freedom, like the electric hum at the back of his throat.
The chit slows as Shepard manipulates the space around it again, but his eyes are elsewhere this time. Steaming mugs of coffee and cocoa and strange concoctions for Garrus litter the table, but Shepard's interest drifts through the haze to find the words being passed across the way. He keeps his hand turning lightly, and the index finger of his free hand taps the metal surface of the table. A rhythmic drumming persists, to mimic the way Shepard sees his friends speak.
It helps him.
Well, it used to. Shepard had adapted to life without sound, ever since the eezo exposure nailed him with his biotics. The drawbacks? Some slightly fried sensorineural nerves. Project Lazarus had brought him back, good as... well. Good as new. Hearing included. Still, it's hard to leave behind old habits, and Shepard is reluctant to part with such sentimentality.
Liara is speaking in rapid time somewhere to the right of Shepard, and he vaguely places Javik nearby the stream of data coming from Liara, if his uninterested grunts and murmurs were anything to go by. Honestly, Javik seemed mostly disgruntled by the fact he was sharing a table with primitives than by anything Liara was telling him. Tali is sprawled across two chairs next to the prothean, legs curled up on one while she sits on the other. For such a tiny thing, she could take up space when she wanted to. Shepard hides a smile as he moves past her, finding Ashley sitting straight across from him. Shepard pieces together snippets of conversation between the two, and his interest is piqued when he figures that Tali is asking about Ash's family. Makes sense. Tali only really ever had her father and Raan. It was certainly a... different perspective.
His thoughts derail when he notices Ash gives him a subtle glance over her datapad, and he smiles quickly, ears burning. Perhaps he needed to get out of the habit of listening. Truth be told, he'd be lucky if his job ever let him.
"--so, I told that C-Sec officer where he could shove his 'mutually beneficial' tax credit scheme--" Garrus' rant suddenly pitches in volume down the table, with air quotations to boot. Sparing a glance to see the other half of Garrus' conversation, Shepard finds Steve's best effort at maintaining interest in a heavily one-sided tax debate. Shepard snorts, diverting his gaze back across the table to James, sat next to Garrus. The lieutenant shoots Shepard a withering look. Shepard only grins and leaves him to his fate, slap-bang in the middle of Garrus' storytelling trajectory.
"--spatial mapping of pre-planned flight vectors--"
It's not too difficult to recognize the static voice over the comm. EDI, it turned out, was particularly good at... debating. Perhaps that's why Shepard finds Joker taking a rare break from the bridge to join the crew, sitting at the end of the table with a mug firmly in hand. A tiny, useless shield from the barrage of statistically accurate data EDI pulls from nothing. Shepard smirks. Arguing. EDI was very good at arguing.
Nobody pays heed to the spinning credit chit on the table at all, and Shepard feels an inward sense of tranquility. He would keep spinning his own little world, and nobody would notice. He would scream, shout, cry bloody murder, and nobody would hear. He would let himself be human, and nobody would blame him at all.
Like a wave on a barren shore, Shepard lets the thought consume him for a while.
Calloused hands curl into fists on the table, the chit stops spinning and falls to the metal surface with a dull clink, but still, it turns no heads. Shepard fidgets in his seat, trying to shift the static in the air around him as his hands slowly stop tingling, the blue sensation fading.
It had been a long while since any of them got the chance to simply sit down and talk. Not about the war, not about their newly-formed alliances, not about their rapidly dwindling hope of making it out alive. Just... talk. About the shitty food rations, or space coffee that isn't coffee, hell, even taking digs at somebody's shitty playlist choices. Anything at all. Anything that meant they didn't have to listen.
Listening was hard, at the best of times. Harder still when it meant finding a meaning for other people, as well as your own. A leader made a living out of a skill like that, and Shepard knew it.
Trying to listen to one man in the middle of a war? Shepard knows how to take orders.
Trying to listen to thousands of people, every one of them with something to lose in that war? Shepard doesn't know where to begin.
Sometimes, Shepard simply doesn't listen at all. He spins his own little world, and it keeps on going because it must. It keeps on going, because the minute he stops is the minute it goes silent.
And up here, in space? Up here, between the stars? Up here, in the black where light can't reach? Silence is your faithful, unwanted companion to an inevitable end.
