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It's six days after the end of the reaper war - The War, they'll call it, in the years to come, capital letters not so much implied as enforced - when Admiral Hackett comes to his hospital bed.
Shepard doesn't know exactly where he is. London, somewhere, in a makeshift alliance field hospital, plastic sheeting and brown camo-paint walls and nurses in fatigues; an intensive care unit, maybe, or even a trauma wing like the whole hospital isn't a trauma wing, the whole planet, a billion survivors left breathing, blinking terrified eyes in the light of a new dawn.
"Shepard," says Hackett - not 'Commander', not Commander ever again after the crisp clean letter arrived during one of his many surgeries, waiting for him on the night table when he came back to himself, corners tight little right angles and the Alliance stamp on the envelope all shiny and formal like that could make the words honorable discharge sting any less. "Glad to see you up and awake."
He's breathing. Many aren't. Shepard blinks at him slowly from his hospital bed with his one working eye, the other a shattered lump of melted steel and lifeless cybernetics, and waits for him to go on. Where's the Normandy, he wants to ask. Where is my crew, where are my friends, why did you let me go, but he doesn't, partly because he hasn't had the biomechanical surgeon in yet to assess the mess that is his Cerberus-granted jawbone but also because he knows, he knows that no matter what what will come out will be nothing other than what do you need me to do.
Same old, same old.
Hackett says, "We've got a situation developing here in London and we're hoping you can clear things up."
We've got a situation on Luna, on Virmire, on Eden prime; we've always got a situation brewing and Shepard, we're gonna need you to pitch on in.
Shepard blinks at him to continue. The machine breathing for him whirs in and out. Hackett takes off his hat, explains: the Krogan and the Salarians just aren't playing ball and, with the entire Alliance diplomatic corps dead, well - Shepard, you're our only hope. Help us. Help the galaxy yet again.
Once upon a time Shepard was nothing more than a feral orphan, standing outside an Alliance recruiting station looking up at a poster of Jon Grissam and thinking, this is what it is to have meaning. Once upon a time Shepard was the last line in the sand at Elysium, blooded but not beaten, amp glowing red-hot and Batarian corpses piled at his feet, and he never once wavered. Once he stared dead into that boy-who-wasn't's face and saw the broken, glitching VI hiding right behind it, stuck in a loop and too stupid to pull itself out.
Fifty thousand years. So many fifty thousands of years. A tangle of them like a ball of yarn in the minotaur's den, a skein stretching back further than maybe even Liara knows - all to get them here, to this point, this hospital bed and these busted limbs and Hackett, asking for more, more, more.
He can't nod. Can't talk. Can't write. So he blinks yes in Morse code, and Hackett does him the courtesy of not even pretending to look surprised, because you can take away the Commander but no matter what - no matter how much of him you smash up, carve off, burn away, destroy - he's still Shepard.
He's still Shepard. And he's still breathing.
Same old, same old.