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Shepard had been afraid—terrified, even—as she gasped at her rapidly diminishing oxygen supply, never sure which would be the last breath until . . .
Once the shuddering, strangling panic had subsided, death wasn’t so bad really. Dark. Warm. Indifferent. Shepard could’ve stayed there forever. And she’d expected to.
Or maybe that wasn’t really death. After all, how could anyone have expectations when they were dead? Maybe she just didn’t remember being dead because there was nothing to remember. Maybe the darkness, the warmth, the indifference had been the coma—her resurrection. Lazarus Project, as Cerberus called it. But no matter how many biblical allusions they used, nothing could soften the harsh, jagged light that came with waking up.
From the cold, hard slab of Lazarus Station—could they not at least have found something, anything, to make her comfortable? even just a blanket to swaddle her back to life?—to the “skylight” of stars and vacuum that taunted her every time she tried to close her eyes for a moment of rest, her new “life” felt like she was walking on eggshells. Not that she had to step lightly or avoid confrontation, but that no matter how tender and careful her steps, destruction was inevitable. Shards of broken relationships and two years of time lost cut into her like glass, and no medi-gel pack, no tourniquet, no pressure in the galaxy could stop that bleeding.
You’d think Shepard would be angry, resentful even. But she wasn’t. She was too empty for anger—for any emotion, really. Or was it too full? Gasping for something, drowning on nothing. Fitting, for the living dead. A walking contradiction.
Not that she had much luxury to reconcile those contradictions. From the moment she woke, she’d been reaching for a gun—arming herself, shielding herself, following a voice that only gave orders. That voice didn’t ask if she was all right. It didn’t care if she felt disoriented, going from death into battle instead of the other way around.
She hadn’t been awake—alive—more than a few hours, and she was already being debriefed on what was wanted—demanded, ordered—from her. And of course she would do it. What else was she going to do? Go back to bed?
#
The sniper didn’t seem to mind Shepard and her team. He almost seemed to be expecting them. He held up a finger to quiet them, just for a moment while he took aim.
He took the shot.
His quarry went down.
His shoulders relaxed.
He took a step away from his perch, removing his helmet as he went.
The harsh glare gentled just enough, and Shepard didn’t have to squint so much at the light of life.
“Garrus!”
#
“It’s just Garrus to you.”
“I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”
For the first time since she woke up, Shepard felt like punching someone, and this merc was in awfully convenient punching distance. Instead, she reached for his chest plate and pulled him forward until he was less than an inch from her face.
“Evac. Now.” She surprised even herself with the hard edge in her words, given how tightly her jaw was clenched.
She pushed Massani backward and went back to trying to staunch the blood flowing from the side of Garrus’s face that had caught the rocket—they’d joked about him being bad at ducking, but that didn’t seem so funny anymore. The ghostly taste of copper filled her own mouth, and Shepard felt the sick rise in her throat. No. Not like this. No more drowning.
Garrus wasn’t going to die gasping for breath too.
#
“Frankly, I’m more worried about you.”
It was strange, looking into a reflection that Shepard didn’t recognize. That wasn’t entirely true. She did recognize the posture and the silhouette and the color of her eyes and the curve of her mouth. But everything else was . . . different, but only just barely. A different color, a different shape even. If her body was a room, she was certain someone had come in while she was gone and replaced all the furniture with exact copies, uncanny lookalikes, pale imitations of the original.
She wasn’t sure how long the tap in her private bathroom sink had run, but she turned it off and reached for a face cloth that was much softer than it had any business being.
She understood what Joker had meant about the civilian sector designing for comfort. She really did. But this softness. This comfort. It didn’t make sense to Shepard. These towels were for someone else. Somewhen else.
She let the scalding water of the shower burn her skin red and tender before she turned it off. As the water dripped from her, she could feel the droplets following new paths, new patterns along her skin, and she grabbed a towel to stop the newness, to keep the water from finding her glowing cracks and fissures.
Tearing the sheets from the down-stuffed mattress, she spread them on the floor and curled up on her side, turned away from the stars’ constant mocking.
The hard, cold, unyielding metal soon bled through the thin fabric, and somehow, that was comforting.
#
Shepard lingered too long, she knew. The slick, rotting walls surrounded her, and she knew, she knew she was walking into a trap. But the tableau of the abandoned, crumpled body surrounded by silent monitors arrested her.
A Collector. A Prothean. Dead. Deserted on some cold, flat table with no one coming for them. A fragile carcass that would crumble under a single touch. An insignificant used-to-be-a-person. Taken, twisted, scraped out, strung up to make them easier to control.
Shepard shook her head, pressing the heel of her palm to her temple. She was fine. She just wanted to get out of there, fast. Whatever horrors stood between her and Normandy, it wasn’t enough to stop her.
#
Sweat ran down Shepard’s spine in a steady stream as she took another lap around the cargo bay. She’d stopped counting somewhere around fifty, and that had been a while ago. Even so, she wasn’t even close to tired yet. Frustrated, she slowed to a walk and punched the call button for the elevator to go back to her cabin.
She was spending too much time alone. The commanding officer should be visible, accessible. But what—who—was she really making herself available to? The ship was crawling with Cerberus. The crew seemed nice enough, genuine even. But they’d all been offered something in exchange for their service—a safer galaxy for their children, a chance for vengeance, a wrong righted—and Shepard had a feeling not one of them had fully examined that promissory note.
Even Joker had been bought, and all it took was a softer chair and a new Normandy—in theory, a replica of the original, but bigger, fiercer, rewired and refit with new toys and heavier firepower.
The elevator doors opened and Shepard stalked into her cabin, tearing at her sweat-dampened clothes and flinching when her fingers brushed along the embroidered Cerberus insignia.
Hadn’t she been bought too? No one seemed to want to give her details on exactly how she—her body—ended up in Cerberus’s possession, but one thing was clear: Cerberus had invested substantial resources into her—stronger, more resilient, enhanced—and they expected a return on that investment.
Half of her wanted to burn everything—her bed, her clothes, the whole blasphemous SR-2—and walk back to the Alliance naked as the day she was born. But the other half still had the image of all those empty cells, their insides smeared in a viscous blackness that Shepard tried not to think too hard about.
She could keep her pyrotechnic inclinations in check long enough to make sure the Collectors didn’t take even one more colonist. And she had a feeling the Illusive Man already knew that. He held her promissory note the same as anyone else aboard Normandy, and sooner or later he was going to call it in. He’d call all of them in eventually.
#
“It’s so much easier to see the world in black and white. Gray . . . I don’t know what to do with gray.”
Shepard turned against the hard, cold metal of the floor beside the bed and threw an arm over her eyes to block out the sight above her. If it was any comfort to Garrus, he wasn’t the only one losing sleep over Sidonis anymore.
Why hadn’t she stepped out of the way? She’d left behind an entire wing of innocent factory workers to burn so Zaeed could get his precious revenge. She’d destroyed priceless art and sprinted across one of the worst kill boxes of her life, dodging between crates as Kasumi did her little acrobatics show to bring down those damn shields. Shepard had even seen Miranda take aim against an unarmed Niket, put him in her sights, say goodbye, and pull the trigger . . . and she’d done nothing.
But she’d stood firm between Sidonis and Garrus’s crosshairs. She’d warned Sidonis. She’d talked Garrus down. Why? Sidonis was a coward—worse even. Ten good people were dead because of him, and Garrus had nearly been counted among them.
Shepard sat up and threw her pillow, blindly, letting the back of her head hit hard against the metal floor and ignoring the sharp pain. She heard a hollow clink, a glassy crash, and a dull thud, but she didn’t look up to see what she’d destroyed—the heels of her palms were pressed too firmly into her eyes to see anything at all.
“EDI,” she breathed, sure it was too quiet for even the ship to hear her.
“Commander Shepard.” The blue sphere appeared across the room, up the stairs, near the door. As far away from Shepard as anyone could get here. “What can I do for you?”
Shepard took a deep breath and let it out slowly. That was a much more complicated question than perhaps even EDI appreciated. What could anyone do for her? Now? With Cerberus’s claws dug so deep into her she no longer knew where the Illusive Man’s will stopped and her own decisions began?
“How’s, um,” she said and stopped, clearing her throat, ignoring the hot, unspilled tears burning behind her eyes. “How’s the crew?”
“The crew is in excellent health,” EDI responded. “Four swing shift officers are awake to monitor the ship. Jack is currently pacing her crawl space, and Thane has woken up to begin a scheduled prayer. Officer Vakarian has set up a makeshift shooting range in Cargo Bay and is—”
“Thank you,” Shepard said, leveraging herself up from the floor. “That’s all I need.”
Shepard dressed quickly in loose clothes (new, since they’d stopped at the Citadel, with no honeycomb embroidery scratching at her still-sensitive skin) and headed for the elevator, pulling on her shoes on the ride down to Cargo Bay. As the doors slid open again, she pulled her hair back in a tight ponytail. From across the room, Garrus lay so still Shepard wondered for a moment if he was even breathing. When he pulled the trigger, she could feel the reverberation of the concussive shot in her chest.
“Shepard,” Garrus said as he stood without looking at her. “Sorry if I was making too much noise. I didn’t think—”
“Couldn’t sleep either,” Shepard interrupted. “How about I take you up on that sparring session. Up for it?”
Garrus half-turned toward her, his good mandible dipping in consideration. Finally, he nodded. “It’s your boat.”
Shepard pulled the mats onto the floor and smoothed them out. “It’s an invitation, not an order. You don’t have to take it. Get some sleep if you want. I can do something else.”
She kept her back to him as she set up the mats, but she could feel him looking from her to the elevator, her neck tingling in anticipation of his choice. Her heart pounded against her chest, and she wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted him to do. If he went for the elevator, she’d take the reproach and give him the space he needed. If he stayed, she’d take the punishment—Cerberus had made sure she could, after all.
She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath, waiting for him to decide, until the blood pounded in her temple. She exhaled and took a deep breath as silently as she could manage.
Something hissed and clicked behind her—his rifle breaking down and compressing—and the heavy fall of his footsteps were the only thing to warn her before he entered her periphery, closer than she expected. A warm hand on her shoulder almost made her jump. She turned toward him and saw him looking at her with an unreadable expression, even for a turian.
“How about a drink instead,” he said, his voice softer than she’d expected. “I think we could both use one.”
Shepard huffed a laugh and felt her muscles relax a fraction. “Kasumi’s asleep,” she said. “At least, I think she is. I can never tell with her.”
Garrus flicked his mandible in a wry grin. “I’ve got something in the battery. Come on.”
His voice still had a hard edge to his voice, but there was something yielding in it too. She hadn’t expected a third option. She’d prepared for reproach or punishment. Those made sense. A drink? She had no idea what to expect from a drink.
In the Main Battery, Shepard lingered by the entrance as Garrus disappeared down the narrow bay where he kept his cot. When he reappeared, ducking between the safety bars, he kept his eyes on the bottle of dark purple liquid he now held in one hand, with two plastic cups in the other.
“I had a different reason for this when I first got it,” he said, unscrewing the top and pouring out a couple fingers in each cup. “Got it dual chirality thinking we’d be toasting . . . well, something else.”
Shepard took the cup he held out to her but couldn’t look him in the eyes. It didn’t take a mind reader to know what his original intention had been. Sidonis. He’d expected to toast killing Sidonis and avenging his team.
She glanced up for a brief moment to see Garrus looking at her steadily. “I’m—”
“Don’t,” Garrus stopped her. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”
He set down the bottle and took a perch on the crates across the room from her. He raised the cup, as if to drink, without looking away from Shepard, but stopped. She kept her eyes on the metal floor in front of her and sipped at the sickeningly saccharine alcohol. It took all of her self-control not to spit it out as soon as it touched her tongue.
“Why’d you do it, Shepard?” Garrus asked at length. “Why’d you stand in the way?”
Whatever enhancements Cerberus had woven into her bones and her muscles and even her nerves, it wasn’t enough to keep her from wanting to crawl in a hole and disappear.
She sighed and set the cup of undrinkable alcohol aside. “I get it, Garrus. If I’d been in your place, I would’ve wanted blood too. But I couldn’t . . .” She stopped and bit her lip, choosing her words deliberately. “If you’d killed Sidonis, the Illusive Man would’ve owned you. Like he owns everyone else around here.” Like he owns me. “I couldn’t just stand there and let that happen.”
Another pregnant pause stretched between them, and Shepard was sure any moment the floor would open up and swallow her whole. She could handle the debt she owed, no matter how unwillingly she’d come by it. But the thought of the Illusive Man using Garrus’s anger and grief to manipulate him into similar shackles ate at her. The possibility that Garrus might leave her crew also ate at her, but she could at least rest easy knowing he had that option—that freedom.
“I could’ve taken that shot, you know,” Garrus said at last, warming the chill spreading throughout the room. “After you told him to go and he started to walk away. His guard was down, you had your back turned to him. I had time and a clear line of sight. It would’ve been easy.”
Shepard looked up to see Garrus staring at her intently. But she didn’t see any anger in his eyes, and something inside her loosened. “Why didn’t you?”
Garrus dipped his mandible in confusion at her, like the answer should be obvious. “I trust your judgment, Shepard.” He huffed a laugh that had no mirth in it. “Spirits, it was tempting, though.”
Shepard felt a relieved smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. That was probably the first one since she woke up. Picking up the cup again, she swirled its contents and considered whether it would be rude to leave it unfinished.
A choking sound caught her attention, and Shepard glanced up to see Garrus coughing and looking at the cup like it had insulted him. “Crap, that’s . . . really awful.”
Shepard grinned and chuckled. The tension that had crackled between them since that silent ride back from the Citadel felt like it was finally dissipating. She set her cup down and stood again.
“You made a deal,” she said. “Cerberus said they’d get you Sidonis if you’d work with us. Consider it a breach of contract if you want, but you don’t have to stick around if you don’t want to.”
His mandible flared in surprise. “I do want to, Shepard.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “I’m not here for the Illusive Man. I’m here for you. I’ll need some time to let go of Sidonis, but . . . I’ve got your six, Shepard. I go where you go. That hasn’t changed.”
Shepard’s throat closed tightly enough to hurt. Until Garrus had said he would, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted him to stay. Needed him to stay.
She nodded, afraid her voice might betray her if she spoke too much. “Glad to hear it. I’ll let you get some rest.”
She turned toward the door to leave, but Garrus stood and reach for her, the warmth of his loose grasp around her wrist making her shiver. “He doesn’t own you, Shepard. You don’t owe the Illusive Man anything.”
Shepard looked up to meet Garrus’s gaze and felt her heart pound in a way she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She was beginning to suspect she did owe the Illusive Man, but not for the Lazarus Project or the SR-2 or the chance to defend colonists from the encroaching Collectors. Moving just enough, she clasped Garrus’s hand with her own and squeezed.
She swallowed and nodded again. “Thanks, Garrus.” She looked back at her abandoned drink and grinned. “Call me when you’ve got some better stuff around here.”
#
“I want something to go right. Just once.”
For the first time since spinning wildly above Alchera, her oxygen spilling rapidly into the vacuum surrounding her, Shepard breathed easy. She lay stretched on her back and watching the stars glittering above her bed as she ran her fingers idly over the bumps and creases in the dog tag she’d soon surrender.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Garrus mumbled beside her, still half-turned into the pillows surrounding him.
Shepard grinned. “Look who’s talking.”
Garrus opened one eye to look at her. “It’s the right thing to do,” he assured her, again, and sighed. “I don’t like it, but it’s the only option. After what you saw in the Bahak System, the Alliance has to listen to you.”
Shepard’s smile disappeared. Bahak. So many dead and nothing she could do to stop it. “Yeah. I know.”
She had to admit—stealing the Normandy from the Illusive Man had felt damn good. With the Collectors destroyed, along with their base and that Reaper atrocity, Shepard considered her business with Cerberus concluded. If there was a new Shepard and a new Normandy, it seemed only fitting she should lead a new mutiny. Throwing off the Illusive Man’s chains, reclaiming her agency and autonomy, had been far easier than she’d expected, too. The look on his face—open mouthed, gaping like a fish, confused and betrayed—brought a smile to her face every time she thought of it.
But the thrill of victory had been short lived, Dr. Kenson had seen to that. Shepard had shut the door on the Reapers, but only barely. And three hundred thousand batarians had been caught in the crossfire. There would be consequences, and if humanity stood a chance against the Reapers, Shepard would have to step up to face those consequences, and soon. It was a mantle she would have to wear alone.
Turning on her side, she settled under the warm covers, against the soft bed, until she was eye to eye with Garrus. She ran her fingertips gingerly against the still-tender scars along his newly uncovered mandible. If she looked closely, she could catch the soft blue glint of the nanoweave pulling the tissue together to heal. It was silly and sentimental, but Shepard couldn’t help thinking that those little constellations brought out the blue in his eyes too. She traced the faint lines along his neck and shoulder, down to his chest, where she felt the soft rhythm of his heartbeat.
His hand came up to meet hers, keeping her palm pressed to his breast. “I’d stay,” he said quietly. “If you asked me, I’d go back to the Alliance with you. Let them decide what to do with us. I go where you go.”
Shepard sighed. She could taste the words, just three little syllables. Come with me. It'd be so easy to say. “Not this time,” she said, her voice almost low enough to be a whisper.
Garrus leaned forward until his forehead rested against Shepard’s, a low hum emanating from his chest at the touch. “I’ll find you,” he said.
Shepard closed her eyes and nodded. So much hung in the balance. There was no telling when the Reapers would arrive. They’d been shouting the warning into the void so long, and no one had taken them seriously—she could only hope they would start listening, and soon. The dominoes would have to line up just right if they wanted to stand even the hope of a chance. So many variables, so many unknowns.
But they would find each other again. She could feel it in her heartbeat and taste it on his breath. They would always find each other. Life, as crazy as it had been, was funny like that.