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The night before the Normandy flew into its second suicide mission in as many years, Commander Shepard called Traynor up to her quarters for probably the last time.
They played chess - Traynor won, again, because it would take more than the end of the world to convince her to go easy on her Commander, who was also her girlfriend, who also bore the weight of the galaxy upon her shoulders and whom, Traynor was personally convinced, needed to have her ass kicked at something on a regular basis just to keep her ego in check.
To remind her that normal people didn’t win all the time.
It wasn’t like it was hard. Shepard played like Traynor, reading over the mission reports after each surface excursion before sending them off to High Command, imagined she fought - neglecting her other pieces, using her queen aggressively as an extension of herself. Once it was taken her defence more or less fell apart, and her king was ripe for the capture. After her third loss she sulked, too, something dreadful, and switched the games board off at the power source.
Traynor said, teasingly, “I wasn’t done with that, you know.”
Shepard stood, stretching; one arm across her chest, palm pressed against the flesh of her upper arm. The servos in her elbow joint audibly whirred. Shepard said, “I’m sure I can find something else to keep you occupied, Specialist.”
They took to the bed, then, with its lumpy sheets all stuck together with velcro to stop them sliding around when the Normandy docked - those precious few seconds when things swayed and everybody wore their seatbelts and were reminded, with the inertial dampeners disengaged, of the true shape of things - and when Shepard bent down to kiss her the red lights behind her eyes never once wavered. Traynor in answer spread her fingers over Shepard’s spine, feeling the uniform ridges of metal pins lurking beneath the skin there, the synthetic symmetry just a hair’s breadth too imperfect to fool.
Sometimes when she woke in the night Shepard would be lying there on the other pillow, asleep with the red light shining through her eyelids. Sometimes she thought of the Reaper she had seen on Rannoch on her video feed, magnified to a dark shadow with one merciless red eye. Sometimes she did not. Occasionally she touched Shepard - on the arm, or the shoulder, or what should have been the soft pouch of her belly - just to feel the humming of the cybernetics woven into her very muscle fibre, the way Shepard’s skin didn’t quite dimple as it should under the press of her fingertips.
The war stripped things from all of them, but none more so than Shepard. Joker made jokes of it, Chakwas fretted, Edi conversed, and Garrus clicked his mandibles and talked about war like mathematics, and Shepard ploughed on through like the servo in her elbow. Like she didn’t remember how to stop, how to breathe, how to lose.
Shepard’s emails were full of desperate pleas from civilians who thought she was something more than human, who wrote to her like something divine - come and save me, save my family, protect my friends, Shepard keep us safe - more and more of them each day, despite Traynor’s firewalls. Traynor wiped her own browser history each day of page after page of dry, academic articles about the upkeep and maintenance of high-tech combat implants, complete with diagrams of human bodies laid out, exposed, machinery winding through skeletal systems and pouring through rib cages; things Traynor had always before admired, until…
Well. Until.
Shepard bought Traynor a new toothbrush and Traynor found her a Cerberus base; Shepard kept a chessboard in her quarters and Traynor hijacked her shower loudly, lewdly, making it obvious what she was doing, and beat her at chess so thoroughly Shepard usually wound up sulking. Shepard shared her body, what little of it remained after the Collectors, after Cerberus - after her own desperate drive for perfection, discarding flesh and bone and muscle for machinery that performed the same function but better; a wartime necessity.
Traynor shared her past before the war, her parents’ colony hopes and dreams, her crush on EDI, her anxieties and neurosis and all her little imperfections - everything, it seemed, but her fears.
Those she kept.