Chapter Text
Their house had been battleship gray, and that was about all Shepard remembered of it. The words weren’t even hers—she’d been too young to know what a battleship was. They’d been her mother’s. She remembered the way the corner of her mouth turned down when she said it. While her younger self might not have had the words to articulate it, she knew now as an adult how disappointment and regret could sour an expression—an embrace.
She’d never even had a chance to call that house a home. She had no memories of which floorboards creaked or which faucets leaked no matter how often they were tightened. She couldn’t even remember if they’d kept pictures on the walls.
Once, when she’d been rifling through an alley dumpster to find something to eat or to insulate her against the cutting Montreal winter, whichever came first, before the sun set, she’d come across an honest-to-goodness magazine—one with those slippery pages that smelled like sawdust and something else sharp. It’d been one of those magazines with pictures of pretty houses and advice on how to redecorate your sitting room this season and what kinds of food were must-haves for the holiday. All concepts beyond her ability to fathom.
There was one layout showing a house in a snowy forest. Stones set close together at the base to keep out the cold, and cords of dark wood linked together to build strong walls for the thick ivy to crawl up. Inside was more wood and a stone fireplace, where flames glowed warm and happy, blankets that looked soft as anything, strewn lazily across a sofa. She’d had to touch the page with her near frozen fingertips just to make sure it was a picture and not real life.
It baffled her that not a single person was anywhere to be seen. Did these homes just exist? Waiting for someone to live in them? To be warm and happy?
Though she shredded her improvised insulation to line her thin, worn-out clothes then continued her search for something to either sleep under or eat, she tore out that single page, careful not to rip the picture, then folded it and put it in her back pocket. It was something to think about.
That picture stayed with her for years. She tucked it into a rusted coffee can with other trinkets she kept under a loose floorboard in the Reds’ crash house. Worn, with white marks where it had been folded more times than she could count, it stuck with her either in her footlocker at Basic or hidden beneath her underarmor through her N7 training. On Elysium, she’d worried she’d get blood on it, and she did but only a little bit and only on the part where there was text, leaving the pictures themselves untouched.
It was there.
When Ashely stayed behind to make sure the bomb went off.
When Sovereign reanimated Saren’s dead carcass in a last-ditch effort to stop her.
When the Normandy listed above Alchera and her oxygen rapidly, unceasingly abandoned her.
It wasn’t there anymore when she awoke on Lazarus Station, but she didn’t realize that for at least a couple of hours.