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The first time Jack sees the varren, he’s muzzled and chained and lunging at everything that walks by his cage. She stands, staring at him for several long moments until a salarian walks through the door behind her.
“Excuse me,” he says in that officious manner Jack’s come to associate with the entire species, “This area is not open to visitors. Adoptable animals are back through this door, in the front half of the shelter.”
He pushes open the door, which is clearly marked ‘employees only’, not that Jack particularly cared when she walked through it a few minutes before. She doesn’t care now, either, as he’s gesturing her back towards the front, towards the undamaged, palatable, ‘adoptable’ animals. Jack’s having none of it. She can see the fierce blue glow that lights the red body up, can see it flickering and dying and flaring back into life, and her own biotics want to light up in sympathy.
“What’s wrong with him?” she demands, “Why’s he chained up like that?”
The salarian flinches back from Jack’s direct gaze and then shrugs uneasily, glancing past her towards the cage. The animal strains towards him, growling viciously behind the muzzle, and he takes a startled step backwards, stepping slightly behind Jack as if she’s going to protect him.
“He has some…behavioural problems, as you can see. He’s biotic, and that tends to make varren…irritable. We suspect he was also abused before being brought to the shelter. He is not a candidate for adoption and will likely require euthanization.”
“I want him.” There is no hesitation in her – she can see his pain, she knows it like it’s her own, and she’s going to save him like she saved herself – better than she saved herself.
“As I said,” the salarian replies, beginning to sound annoyed, “He is not available. His behavioural issues alone make him unsuitable for adoption, and combined with biotic ability he is nearly uncontrollable.”
“And I said,” Jack snaps, turning around and lifting him off the ground with her biotics so she can snap every word into his quivering little face, “I want him. Now make it happen.”
The adoption fee is exorbitant – lawyer’s fees for the hastily-drafted waivers, hazard pay for the veterinarian needed to sterilize the varren in accordance with shelter policy, a little extra for the muzzle and chains and drugs that everyone insists are necessary to keep the varren from killing her on the spot…and a tip to the ‘traumatized’ shelter worker.
“Well, that appears to be everything then,” the lawyer informs her, tapping away officiously at the datapad in his hand. “You understand that you are accepting full responsibility, fiscal and otherwise, should your new…acquisition prove dangerous to you or others?”
Jack growls at him. It’s been six hours, and her patience has been running dangerously low for the last four. “Yes,” she hisses, “Now can I take him home?”
“Just one last thing,” the lawyer gives her another slimy smile, and the biotic nearly comes over the table at him, “What will you call him?”
She thinks for a minute, but it’s really not a difficult decision. She’ll name him after what made him – and her – what they are.
“Eezo.”
- - - - - - - - - -
Reactions vary.
Her students are thrilled and immediately declare Eezo their new unit mascot, even though he tries to bite most of them and succeeds in sending two flying with his biotics. Jack lets him – she’s got to keep the kids on their toes somehow, after all.
Miranda is distinctly less pleased when, the next time she shows up unannounced at her lover’s apartment, she is greeted by a huge, hissing red varren instead of a naked woman. Were her barriers not up as a matter of habit, he would have knocked her right back out into the hallway with the lunge he makes.
Jack just laughs as her new pet attempts to assault her girlfriend.
“Eezo,” she calls him off after two more lunges, and he reluctantly obeys, having learned rather quickly who the boss is in the apartment after about the third time Jack suspended him in midair for trying to attack her. The woman would have been amused at how easy it was to gain his obedience, if not his trust, but she was too busy being angry at the people who abused him and the shelter that wanted to put him down.
“Why,” Miranda begins with a dangerous tone in her voice, “Is there a giant varren in your apartment?”
“Meet Eezo,” Jack answers easily, not one to be cowed even by her lover’s most intimidating tones of voice. “I picked him up at a shelter.” She squats to run her hand soothingly along the silky scales that cover his back and sides, knowingly avoiding the scars that still seem to trigger him to violence when touched. She knows the feeling.
“You what?” Miranda’s voice rises in shock, and despite everything Jack’s belly stirs at the rich, full sound of the familiar voice that she hasn’t heard for nearly two months. It’s not a good time, she knows, but there is very little about Miranda that doesn’t ignite her lust, especially after such a long separation. “Why would you do that?” demands the former operative, not yet aware of Jack’s rather prurient thoughts. “Do you even have time to take care of it?”
“I’ve got time for lots of things,” Jack purrs in response, licking her lips and deliberately looking her lover up and down. Blue eyes widen.
“Really? I’m trying to talk about your questionable decision-making skills, and you want to…what, jump into bed?” She sounds incredulous, but the tattooed woman can tell by her swiftly dilating pupils that she’s open to the idea. Jack just raises her eyebrows. “Fine,” Miranda hisses, reaching for the clasp on her suit, “But only because I don’t have much time right now. I swear if you let it watch I’m never sleeping with you again.”
- - - - - - - - - -
“No. No! Jack, if you leave that thing with me you are going to come home to a crater. I am not kidding.”
The ‘thing’ in question is Eezo, of course, sprawled lengthwise across Jack’s entire couch and snorting in his sleep.
“It’s not like I can take him to a combat zone,” protests the ex-con, but Miranda is not giving in. Jack knows that stance – hands on hips, one foot out to the side, jaw set. Arguing with Miranda right now is rather like getting into a fistfight with a brick wall, but she’s taken on worse odds before.
“Besides,” she adds, “He likes you!”
“No,” repeats the former operative. “You are not leaving your out-of-control and – need I remind you – biotic pet varren with me! Whether or not it likes me is immaterial.” In fact it was probably a strike against the animal, considering that his ‘like’ manifested largely in following her around, constantly begging for food and attention. It only helped somewhat that he seemed to have figured out that although Jack was in charge of him, Miranda was in charge of Jack.
Jack scowls, crossing her arms over her chest and cocking one hip out defiantly.
“First of all, he’s not just a pet – he’s the mascot for me and my kids. Second, he’s gotten a lot better and you fucking know it. He just needed some TLC, it’s not like it’s his fault that he’s biotic or that those assholes abused him! Just give him a chance, you’ll learn to love him too.”
Miranda wavers – it really isn’t Eezo’s fault – and then firms. She has no idea how to look after a huge biotic varren, and the fact that she finds herself competing with him for Jack’s attention more and more often only puts him further in her bad lists.
“Yes, well it is his fault that he – it – delivered a half-eaten animal of some kind to into my luggage in the middle of the night!”
“This again? I told you, he was being friendly!”
“Yes, this again. Where did it even find a mammal to partially consume on the Citadel? That was probably someone’s pet, and he put it in my underthings!”
“What do you care?” Jack asks sullenly, reaching over the back of the couch to scratch the varren gently behind his head ridges. “Since you seem to think pets are a waste of time anyway.”
“I care because of the ‘in my underthings’ part!”
“But didn’t we have fun waiting for them to wash and dry?” Jack favours her lover with a lascivious look, and Miranda huffs at her.
“Dammit Jack, sex doesn’t solve everything.”
But then Jack licks her lips; those full, soft, delicious lips…Miranda unzips her suit. She really is helpless to resist the younger woman and those whiskey-coloured bedroom eyes of hers.
Later, lying in bed – they made it there eventually – Miranda heaves a long-suffering sigh.
“Fine, but if you’re gone longer than three weeks I’m feeding it to a krogan.”
“Deal.”
- - - - - - - - - -
When Jack goes to Earth, she takes Eezo along because Miranda is already there, somewhere. The Crucible is done; there is no more work for her there, and she has always been the type to take the initiative. Nobody knows where she’s heading or what she’s doing, and ‘the front lines somewhere’ is the closest thing to a last known location.
Jack delivers her kids safely to someplace that she wouldn’t call safe but that isn’t the front lines, at least. She yells at them, pushes them around, threatens to post Rodriguez’s diary on the extranet if she doesn’t keep her fucking barriers up, and cries a little when she leaves them behind to hunt down her absent lover. She tries to leave Eezo too, but he catches up within the hour and she figures she’s stuck with him.
It’s just as well, since he’s the one who finds Miranda, under assault by a brute and rapidly losing ground. Jack reaches out with all her strength, seeing the fear on Miranda’s face and already knowing that she’s never going to make it into shotgun range before that thing snatches her lover’s head right off her shoulders. Luckily, four legs are faster than two.
Eezo hits it from behind just as Miranda goes down with a cry. He runs right up the creature’s protruding spine, latching onto its exposed neck and biting down viciously, dog-like. He hangs on tight, massive teeth crunching vertebrae. The brute spins, nearly flinging Eezo off right onto Miranda, but the varren holds on long enough for Jack to make it. Screaming - because goddammit she didn’t finally find Miranda again just to lose her! - Jack works her shotgun like a woman possessed, pumping shot after shot into the Reaper spawn until it lies still in a putrid pile of blood and electronics.
She spins away from the corpse, her front splattered liberally with its insides, and kicks aside a discarded heat sink with a hiss.
“Miranda,” she calls, terrified, and then, “Eezo!” She saw her lover go down, knows where she is at least, but she has no idea what might have become of her loyal pet after she went berserk with the shotgun. Her stomach plummets when it occurs to her that she very well might have killed him by accident, and she very nearly drops to the ground with relief when she hears Miranda’s voice call out to her.
“We’re over here,” says the former operative from where she sits in the cover of a fallen concrete slab, arms around Eezo’s neck as the varren stands over her, scanning the horizon for further danger. Jack steps around the obstruction trying to check up on them without making it too obvious. They both appear unharmed at a glance, and the ex-con takes what feels like her first full breath since she spotted that thing hulking over her girlfriend.
“Good boy,” Miranda murmurs to the varren, leaning into the scaly form and running her hands along his back and sides, heedless of the grime that accumulates on her hands and clothes. “Good boy, good boy.”
Jack collapses beside them with a groan, reaching out to scratch Eezo’s head. Her little family, filthy and tired but whole.
“I told you you’d learn to love him.”
“Oh shut up.”