Despite my own internal turmoil surrounding the thought, I did watch Rix for a while after that, just to see if what I feared was true or not. If it was, I wanted to find a way to shut it down as quickly as possible. As the days went on my fears seemed less and less grounded, as things immediately went right back to the way they had been before my entire mental state had turned to ash. If there was an interest there, he was hiding it very well, to say the least. If only I could have said the same about Rick's interest – the man had taken to watching me like a hawk.

I finally ended up having a mini-blow up at him for being stuck up my ass, and he argued with me that I had scared the shit out of him – he thought the issues with my brain tumor might be popping back up. I had to stop myself from snapping at him that there never was any brain tumor, instead just showing him my own scans and the ones that Glitch did, proving that things were fine. He eventually backed off, but it still felt like he was hovering.

That sense of hovering is what prompted me to take the next job he offered me, even though it was going to be a projected six weeks away from Omega, with a crew of nine other people. I didn't like the idea of being away from the ship and not working on it for that long, but I knew the pay would be exceptional and he wouldn't be docking any of it. If it went well, the pay would buy a large chunk of the remaining materials I needed – meaning I could get off this rock that much fucking faster.

Reluctantly I locked things down tight, ensuring that I wouldn't be missing anything or have any molded over food when I got back, set the ship to low-power mode and talked Glitch into putting himself into a hibernation state, unless someone tried to fuck with the ship. He wanted to follow me while I was away, but I was afraid we'd be going far enough that our comms would stretch the system too far. He finally agreed, and I nodded goodbye as I locked the door behind me. Bag of kit in hand, I made my way down to the other end of the dock, where I would be meeting the rest of the crew at the shuttle that would carry us off-rock.

While I recognized all of the faces but two, Rix was the only one I had any kind of daily interactions with. Wordlessly I followed the rest of the crew onto the shuttle, silently staring out the window as we prepped and left. It was strange to me, the way I felt when we left Omega's space. I found that I hadn't wanted to leave, and I knew I'd be happy to get back. I knew it was because of the ship, however. After everything else that had happened last time, it couldn't be anything else.

The irony was that I had pretty much ignored Omega this time around, since Mordin and Garrus had never had a chance to come here, and Cerberus hadn't invaded because they were all dead. Seemed like life was more than making me make up for that now. As my mind continued to mull over the similarities and parallels, one more struck me. Last time, he had almost died while trying to tank a rocket with his face. This time, he had died, to a suicide bomb. What if... what if that was what was supposed to happen all along?

As much as the thought haunted me – what if I had been to him what Cerberus had been to me, yanking him back from the precipice of death even as they had forced me to claw my way out of the grave? Either way the thought still pissed me off, but if she had told me that he wouldn't last a year then would I have still made the same choice? I didn't know, honestly. It didn't change the fact that she should have fucking let me die in that explosion, like she had told me I could if I was just too tired to continue anymore. Why would changing the timeline take that option away? I'd never get it.

The more I thought about it over the next couple weeks, the less I could decide which option would have been worse for him: nearly dying then being saved only to go through the entire bullshit Reaper war and watching all that loss, or being drug through the six month rollercoaster that was this timeline's version of it and skip all the loss, but die six months later. If I had to pick, I would have chosen the first one. At least this time he hadn't been forced to settle for me, no matter how I felt about him.

With that thought I plonked my wrench down on the table with a frustrated sigh, only to hear someone clear their throat nearby, a lot closer than I would have thought. I turned my head a bit to see Rix staring at me, his mandibles flapping in question. I just shook my head and started to look away, when one hell of a chill went down my spine, causing a massive shiver I couldn't repress. I frowned, and a few seconds later his mandibles flared hard, just before the door slammed open and what felt like a million soldiers poured through. There was a lot of yelling and shouting, and most of us immediately hit the floor on our knees, while the two newest men put up a fight. I felt a sharp pain at the base of my skull, then the world went black.

When I came to, I was chained to a seat, and I could hear multiple other chains rattling around me as the transport swayed. Someone's leg kept brushing mine – judging by the odd angles of the leg, it was likely Rix. I didn't want to open my eyes, but eventually I had to. All of the group was bound to their seats with chains, while the two new assholes who'd fought back were also gagged. Just by looking around I could tell it was an Alliance shuttle, which meant Alliance soldiers, and Alliance protocol. Fuck me running.

The way I seated I could see out the window of the shuttle, and the view did nothing to lift my mood. While I had heard of the space station they had created to be a prison, I had never come across it. With a sudden wave of clarity, I understood the awful feeling I had gotten both times I was on Purgatory. Granted, Purgatory itself was bad enough. This, though, was so much worse. An involuntary spurt of fear spiked through me before I could stop it, and suddenly the elbow next to me glued itself to mine. As much as I hated myself for it, I took every ounce of comfort from that touch that I could.

The closer we got to that station, the harder the panic tried to claw its way out of my throat, and I had to actively work on silent breathing techniques to keep myself calm. All the shit I had faced down in my life, and while the fear of failure had often been ever-present, it was nothing like what I was feeling right now. I could stare a Reaper dead in the eye, and feel almost nothing compared to this. It wasn't the being locked into a space station part, or the regimented days, or being around other criminals that was bothering me. It was having all control taken away from me, and having no agency of my own. Being stuck at someone else's mercy, being punished for something I didn't do – that was what bothered me the most.

No matter what the outcome was when we landed, I knew I fucked if they didn't immediately let us go. It wasn't like Purgatory where I had TIM and the rest of the Normandy crew behind me, or Garrus and Mordin beside me. I had no good omnitool, I had no weapons or armor, and I had no one to stand at my back if I put up a fight. I had nothing, and no one. And I couldn't even start a fight without outing myself and my abilities. I swallowed down my tears as we landed, but the fear wouldn't drown. Rix's shoulder pressed into mine as we landed, and he whispered in my ear "It's going to be okay, we'll figure it out."

I swallowed hard again, and looked at him briefly. So nice that he could be optimistic, but I knew better. I knew my life, and I knew my luck. I knew that we all had just gotten dragged into someone else's bullshit, and I knew we were all fucked, because I was fucked. Despite my brain spiraling, I was completely numb by the time we made it to the room where they read the charges and ordered us locked up while they did their investigation. As I was stripped down, kitted out with prison gear, and led to my tiny closet of a cell, that numbness became a sort of icy calm.

Everything I had been working for was now completely screwed. The ship, Glitch, getting away to be by myself – it was all completely derailed, or way off track at the very least. What if I ended up spending the rest of my life in here? To be saved from death, brought back for what – to serve a life sentence for war crimes I couldn't be convicted for, since I had died? Hadn't I avoided all of those, this time around? As I stared at the ceiling, I guessed that it didn't really matter, in the end – I was still stuck here.

Over the next few weeks, I found out just how true that statement was. I was definitely stuck in here – we all were – and absolutely nothing I did or said mattered. There was indeed proof that the two newest members of our crew had done the shit they were being hauled in for, but none of the rest of us had anything to do with that crap. I had easy, definitive proof for myself and Rix, because we were side by side most of the time on jobs. I didn't have the same hard proof for the others, but they worked on the docks as well, all they had to do was check security cams and see that they weren't anywhere involved.

No matter what proof I gave them, time stamps or omnitool data or dates or parts delivery receipts for the ship, the woman in charge, Della, just sat there, smug, smiling at me with a look of predatory pity. Something about her seemed off, compared to her underlings who seemed to genuinely care, at least a little bit when their attitudes were stacked side by side, but she was the one in charge and there was nothing they could do, or so it seemed. Rick did call me once while this was going on – he had tried to get us all out with the proof he had on his end. However, the bitch wasn't having it, for some reason, and would only let him get one, maybe two people at the most.

He offered me the chance to get out, and told me to pick one other person to come with me. My mind immediately went to the Turian, but I couldn't leave the rest of them behind and I told him so. He just chuckled ruefully, and told me that's one of the reasons why he had picked me to be one of his adopted family. I didn't hear from him again after that, and I felt even more alone than ever.

Three months after that shuttle touched down, we were all finally wrangled into one room, with Della sitting at her little elevated table, looking at all of us with a sense of satisfaction that made me want to be sick. The two assholes who'd caused the trouble got life in prison, in a harder facility than the one we were in now. The rest of us – well, they couldn't prove that we were there with them, but they also couldn't prove that we hadn't been involved in some way prior, even just verbally, so we all got five years to think about what we did.

She did grudgingly amend that while we were expected to do work while we were in prison, there were options for us – we could do the normal tasks, and work off our normal sentence, and go about our ways once it was over. Or, we could take on other work – harder, crappier, sometimes more dangerous, which would give us the opportunity to work off more of our sentences. There was a hierarchy to those jobs – the more you proved yourself, the better jobs you could pick, the more time you worked off extra.

As I watched the delight and greed flit behind her eyes, I knew exactly what was going on here, and I felt that icy calm settle over me again, layered with a nice, cold fury. I had thoroughly enjoyed shooting Kuril between the eyes for his bullshit, and that was just for trying to fuck me over. This bitch was wrongly imprisoning people so she could exploit and profit off their labor. If this bitch ever stepped sideways and I had a weapon on me, I'd happily show her the error of her ways. I think she might have seen a little bit of that in my eyes, because I saw her straighten up just a bit, before she sent us on our way.