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He notices her scars first. They’re the kind that don’t show up so well in a vid: thin, red, glowing faintly. They crisscross her cheek, darting beneath the fall of her hair. She sweeps it back behind her ear, defiant, as though the scars mean nothing to her, as though she’s proud to display them.
He salutes. “Commander.”
Her eyes narrow. The hard glint of them raises goosebumps on the back of his neck.
"Just Shepard," she corrects him, folding her arms over her chest. "I’m sure they told you that."
They did. He doesn’t know her, but he feels a dull rage on her behalf—that the Alliance could allow this to be done to her, savior of the galaxy (three times), human spectre (first).
"Lieutenant James Vega," he says, extending a hand instead of answering.
She eyes the offering and doesn’t move. “Awfully polite for a guard dog.”
He bristles a little at the insult and pulls his hand back. She smiles—a small, joyless thing—and nods to the door.
"Well?" she invites. "Back to your post."
"It was an honor to meet you," he mutters, already retreating.
Her laugh follows him out: cold, angry, confined. The door closes behind him. He’s visited by the impression that this pointless metal box contains a deity that has allowed herself to be caged, and when her moment arrives, she’ll casually step over his corpse on her way out.
He’s not sure whether he’s terrified or turned on. Maybe both.
He doesn’t always stand guard outside her door. There are other places to be: the security room with its infinite cameras, watching all the points she could exploit; the window, which she has now broken twice; the bathroom, where she takes her sweet time in the shower.
He’s also watching for anyone else to break in, because some people want her head these days, but he’s the last line of defense. No one’s made it past the front door yet.
Admiring her from afar was easier than watching her pace her cramped quarters. Occasionally she strips down to her sports bra and does pushups until she collapses. Sometimes she falls asleep right there on the floor, head pillowed on her arms. Sometimes she jumps imaginary rope for hours. She shadowboxes, she kicks the shit out of her furniture, she breaks the window again but doesn’t try to leave.
It’s like keeping a lid on a hurricane.
After a month of Shepard’s incarceration, Anderson joins Vega in the security room. “How’s she doing?” he asks.
"What does it look like?" Vega mutters back. "It’s not like she’s talkin’ to me.”
Currently, she’s doing situps. Vega has counted three hundred and eighty-nine so far. Sweat gleams at her temples. Her lips are pressed tight. If she’s counting, she’s doing it in her head. He fully expects that she isn’t. He also fully expects that she’ll fall asleep mid-situp.
"I replaced the last window with something a little more durable," he adds, still watching her progress. "Expensive, but I don’t think she’ll break it again."
She doesn’t break it again. She goes for the mirror in the bathroom instead.
After two months, she starts spending a lot of time hunched over her only datapad. It’s a useless little thing—there are an awful lot of restrictions on what she can and can’t access—but she tinkers with it for hours.
He watches, because it’s his job, but also because he’s fascinated. The Shepard Show, streaming live, twenty-four hours a day. He never expected her to be so angry, somehow. Sure, he’d heard something about her punching out a reporter once, but he’d also heard they’d deserved it.
And yeah, she killed a few hundred thousand batarians, but he sat in the courtroom for that trial. A few hundred thousand batarians or the whole galaxy; what else could she have done? What kind of options were those?
He sees her lips move for the first time in months and realizes what’s happened. Shit. She’s broken through the restrictions on the datapad. She’stalking to someone. About what, he has no idea, but now he’ll have to take the damn thing away from her.
He wishes she would be more cooperative, but at the same time, he doesn’t. She wouldn’t be Shepard if she cooperated.
She looks up when he walks in, totally unsurprised. “Busted,” she says. The corner of her mouth twitches, like she’s fighting a smile. “Say hello to my keeper, Kasumi.”
"Hello,” the hooded figure purrs. He can’t see her eyes, but he gets the impression that she’s checking him out.
"Give it," he orders, hand outstretched.
She tosses it at him. Kasumi laughs, and by the time he catches the datapad, the screen is dark.
"You shouldn’t risk it," he tells her.
"Risk what?" she demands. "My ship? My rank? My reputation?” She laughs—sounds more like a scoff, really, low and fierce—and falls back on her bed, closing her eyes.
She couldn’t have said dismissed any louder without shouting it, and it’s an easy order to obey.
He tries a little harder to engage her, after that. He’s sort of bored, too. The Shepard Show is fascinating, but in a really morbid way. He wants to stop watching it.
He’s on guard duty at 0200, and she’s been pacing for a full hour. He pulls up a checkerboard on his omnitool. “Hey,” he says. She’s on the other side of a foot-thick metal wall, but there’s a speaker that lets her hear him. The pacing stops. “Want to play a game?”
They took her omnitool, of course, but she doesn’t need it. She plays by memory, giving him space numbers to move her pieces to, and she still kicks his ass.
When she finally leaves—and she does leave, because when the reapers come knocking, you don’t just leave Shepard in the brig—she gives the handshake she denied him six months prior. The corner of her mouth pulls into the tiniest of smirks. The hard glint in her eyes isn’t a wall, but a challenge.
"It’s been a pleasure, Vega," she says. The world is ending, but her voice is full of promise.
"For you, maybe. Cleaning up after your temper tantrums isn’t a dream job."
It’s a good-natured barb, but her eyes still narrow. “I was just warming up.”
No need, he thinks, watching her walk away. All these months, she’s been a blur of movement, but he sees now that she was a bird beating herself against glass walls, directionless. Now she walks with purpose in her step, and passersby edge around her before they can be crushed.
He’d like to see her kill a reaper. Maybe he’ll get lucky.