Chapter Text
The first time David Anderson meets Shepard, he’s a cocky kid fresh out of N7, up to his neck in people politely begging him to serve on their ships.
It’s kind of going to his head.
Captain Shepard is one of the most decorated officers in the Alliance Navy, but half of the other ones have shown up to offer him positions and so running into her in the N7 dorms doesn’t feel particularly special. The only thing that’s really different at first is that she - well, stands out.
Most Alliance officers are practically dressed and neatly put together, serious and stern. Shepard’s dyed her hair a red so bright it practically glows against the severe gray of the walls. And she’s - well, angular. Her face is sharp and triangular, with narrow eyes and protruding cheekbones and thin lips. He wouldn’t call the effect pretty (especially since she’s nearly two decades older than him), but it’s certainly striking. Hard to look away from.
He gets the impression she’s put some work into keeping it that way.
But lunch started fifteen minutes ago, and Anderson’s dealt with what feels like hundreds of job offers today. He’s not in a patient mood, not even for heroes. He folds his arms across his chest, and asks, with the bare minimum of politeness,
“With all due respect, ma’am, can you just get to the pitch?”
“The pitch?” Shepard raises her eyebrows at him.
“You know. Why I should work on your ship. What kind of exciting promotion opportunities you’ve got in store for me.” Anderson thinks longingly of the meatballs they’re serving in the cafeteria.
Shepard smiles at him, knife-edged and certain.
———
In 2165, Commander Carolina Shepard was sent on a mission to the Terminus Systems, accompanied by Saren Arterius, who was informally evaluating her for Spectre candidacy.
She had been widowed barely two weeks prior, a fact that she’d spent a significant number of favors keeping from the press. It was a good decision in hindsight, because her rejection from the Spectres quickly escalated into a vicious scandal.
No conclusion was released about why the mission went as badly as it did and no formal punishment was ever given. This was officially due to lack of evidence - Shepard’s testimony contradicted Saren’s in several places. Under ordinary circumstances, the Council would have unilaterally believed their agent’s version of events. But witnesses brought in to corroborate almost universally agreed with Shepard’s version of the story. This would have been damning except for one thing: no one but Saren and Shepard survived the burning of the refinery.
Anyone who saw the events that lead up to that fateful explosion (and the death of Kahlee Sanders) took their story to the grave.
The investigation was further muddied by politics - specifically, Saren’s politics. Shepard drew attention to his public activism against human expansion, and all but accused the Council of deliberately sabotaging humanity’s play for a Spectre. Saren, in turn, outright said she was crying xenophobia in order to hide her own incompetence.
Lines were drawn. Between Saren and Shepard’s vicious arguments any time they were in a room together, the members of non-Council races who remembered similar almost-sabotage of their own Spectre candidates, and Saren’s impeccable record and consequent staunch supporters within the Citadel embassies, everyone with enough clearance to know about the case had an opinion and every opinion was tenaciously held. After the case was closed, many joked that it had been settled not because there was nothing else to find, but because they wanted the embassies to be habitable again.
In the end, the compromise was simple. Humanity received a few trade concessions, but their bid for a human Spectre was closed. If they were to try again, it would have to be with a different candidate.
———
A few years, a couple more legal threats from Saren, at least one instance of retaliation which proved that said turian had no sense of humor, and Shepard was heading into work on Christmas day. The human embassy wasn’t entirely deserted, but paid time off was paid time off, whether or not you had to lie about religious obligations to get it.
Shepard doesn’t have anyone to spend the leave with (the psychologists say that isolating yourself from friends and family is not a healthy way to cope with being a widow, but military psych is all bullshit) and even if she did she’d rather take the time off in February for the new year. So she’s here, delivering end of year reports to the embassy for lack of any other work.
Kahoku’s in a meeting at the Citadel Tower - less because he wants to work and more because he’s too honest to claim that he’s Christian, if she knows him. He’s offered to join her for lunch, so she’s taken a cab over. She might catch the last couple minutes of his meeting, depending on her luck. He’s been on a kick about networking lately, it’d make his day to introduce her to some of his politician friends.
But.
Halfway up one of the tower staircases, she catches sight of Saren. She might have picked a fight - it’d have been more entertaining than the politicians - but he looks terrible. Now, Shepard’s been in the military since she was eighteen. She fought in the First Contact War, she spent nearly six years after that in black ops; her scruples about kicking a turian when he’s down are about as substantial as the Consort’s underwear.
But.
Saren doesn’t look like he’s having a bad day in the civilian sense, where you break up with your girlfriend or get yelled at your boss. He looks the flavor of bad that comes from spending too long looking down the barrel of a gun. There’s scorch marks on his armor, dried bloodstains in green and purple on his gloves. He’s doing the thousand yard stare up the staircase, and his shoulders are slumped out of perfect turian parade rest for the first time since she’s met him.
The problem is, this is a familiar look. Shepard did her time in black ops, she knows deeply and intimately how it feels to come home after a too long mission, after too many missions back to back, and know that you’ll report, sleep, and get sent out again. She knows the slow, sandpaper damage it does to kill and kill again, with nothing in between.
She’d just never thought that it’d happen to Saren.
Shepard hesitates. Argues with herself. Loses. And finally, pulls out her omni-tool.
CS: kakohu
CS: *kahoku
CS: u in w/counicl
BK: Yes
BK: Why?
CS: hw long can u drag meeting out
BK: … Why?
CS: will owe u favor
CS: + bring lunch
BK: I can give you thirty minutes.
BK: An hour if you bring me takeout from the Asari place on Zakera 26.
CS: done
The conversation takes just long enough for her to snag a cup of shitty dextro coffee from the nearest breakroom. It’s not long enough for her to come up with a tactically sound way to approach Saren, but she’s got the twin advantages of surprise and caffeine which should give her enough of an edge to come out unstabbed.
She makes a thoroughly unprofessional racket going up the stairs, and cuts off Saren’s smartass comment by depositing the coffee in one of his hands. And while he’s visibly still trying to process that, she hooks her arm through his unoccupied elbow (lightly, but positioned for a smooth transition into a throw - no sense taking chances) and starts dragging him up the stairs.
It takes him a full thirty seconds to get a sentence out of the spluttering. Shepard would love to attribute that to the sheer cunning of her plan, but it probably has more to do with exhaustion.
“Is this poisoned?” Is what Saren finally comes up with. She resists the urge to tsk at him, it’s a weak accusation.
“I wouldn’t poison you in the middle of the Council tower,” Shepard replies, steering him through the closest door and into one of the human diplomatic floors. “Too many witnesses.”
Saren’s still eying the coffee like it might bite him, so she adds, “It’s even dextro - don’t know how you drink that shit, it smells like paint thinner.”
He brings it up to his face, clearly sniffing it for something. She resists the urge to roll her eyes, and instead lets go of his arm for a second to unlock one of the breakrooms. She pushes him toward one of the couches and steps back, watches with a (quickly-repressed) pang as he practically crumples onto it, his other hand coming up to cup the coffee like it’s some kind of lifeline.
“The council’s running late,” she says briskly, and then rolls her eyes at his expression. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’re obviously delivering a mission report. Anyways, you’ve got about fifty minutes and it’s a human holiday, no one’s coming in here.” She gestures at the couch. “Nap.”
“So you can stab me when I fall asleep?” Saren snaps, tone acidic. “No, thank you.”
It’s like pulling goddamn teeth. “Then lie down and shut your eyes,” she retorts. “You look like shit.”
“I don’t even have proof that the Council is delayed.” Indignation makes him sit up straighter, look more like himself. Shepard shoves her relief to the back of her mind and rolls her eyes. She brings up the message history on her omni-tool, and shoves it in his face.
“See?” Shepard says, with exaggerated patience. “Not lying. And if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get that takeout.”
She turns on her heel and stalks out of the room.
That’s the end of it, she thinks. They’ll both pretend this never happened and she can go back to hating him without any uncomfortable empathy getting in the way.
———
That’s not the end of it.
Of course it’s not the end of it - why would that be the end of it? If there is any sort of cosmic force influencing the fate of the galaxy, it doesn’t like Shepard enough for that to be the end of anything.
The next time Shepard runs across Saren on the Citadel, he’s a couple badly timed movements away from bleeding out.
Her first reaction, on seeing him leaning up against a shady corner when she makes her way down the wards to the only halfway authentic Chinese restaurant on the Citadel, is not compassion or even pity. Instead, the part of her mind that hardened during the First Contact War runs a threat assessment. He’s favoring his left side, heavily, a hand pressed over his side. It’s too dark to make out the blood, but she knows the half-hunched posture of someone with a major injury. She’s studied enough turian anatomy to guess that he’s nicked one of several arteries in the vulnerable junction between turian hips and their vaguely conical chest area, one of the least armored areas on a turian body.
Turian blood clots faster than human blood, if only because they have less of it by volume, but Saren has clearly lost enough to weaken him. A solid kick, a little bit of bladework, and she could take him out. Easy.
Then, Saren looks up at her, his pale eyes gleaming in the half-light of the wards and Shepard’s brain kicks into gear.
Killing him wouldn’t be wise - she might get away with it, but there’d be no benefit to the Alliance. Besides, she tries not to be the type of person who kills people over personal grievances.
There was, of course, no real benefit to helping him either. No one would know, if she left him to bleed out in this alley.
But she’s done her fair share of time pressing on gunshot wounds in dark alleys, and her fair share of watching people hurry past while pretending not to see.
She’d like to think that Saren wouldn’t be dragging himself home to an empty apartment to apply medigel to himself, to sew the wound shut with shaky hands and no one to apply anaesthetic. That the council is better, somehow, than the people who run special operations in the Alliance.
But she can see, in the bloody desperation in Saren’s eyes, in the viciously prideful set of his shoulders, that he doesn’t have anyone to help keep him alive.
Shepard shuts her eyes, hisses out a sigh through her clenched teeth and steps forward.
“Come on,” she says, holding out a hand to show him she’s unarmed. “My apartment’s only a ward or two up from here.”
-
He doesn’t want to go with her - of course he doesn’t, but he isn’t stupid enough to turn away free help. Perhaps he has some kind of deadman switch, set up so that someone would know where he died and implicate her.
Perhaps he doesn’t have enough fight in him to resist an offer of help.
Either way, Shepard half-carries him through two ward elevators and up a flight of stairs to dump him onto her ratty old couch. She makes a cursory extranet search to make sure that human medigel will work on him. As turns out it won’t - but the medical monofilament she had stashed in the bathroom for stitches would do to sew him up.
And so she found herself walking into the turian grocery down the street, in the wee hours of the artificial morning, to buy dextro medigel and turian painkillers. It was not something she’d ever pictured herself doing, but the bleary-eyed turian cashier didn’t so much as blink when she set them down, and after a moment’s deliberation, added a couple of dextro ration bars to the pile.
“Those are the worst flavor,” the turian told her, her voice bored. “If you’re buying those for your boyfriend, he’s going to hate you.”
Shepard can’t help a wry, half-humorous exhale at that.
“Good,” she says, grabbing another one and adding it to the checkout pile. “He owes me for this.”
-
Saren is dozing when Shepard makes her way back into the apartment, his head hanging down, the back of his carapace wedged between two couch cushions. The bandage hooked awkwardly around his hip is beginning to show spots of cobalt blue. Shepard drops her haul on the table to wake him, since she was reasonably sure that shaking him was likely to result in someone getting stabbed. Or bitten, or headbutted - not, of course, that she had ever injured someone trying to wake her up before.
The way he startled was funny, at least, as was the glare he shot in her direction.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” Shepard says, with as much obnoxious cheer as she can muster. “I brought gifts.”
Saren doesn’t deign to respond to that with more than an expressive glance, but he does snatch the medigel out of her hands when she picks it out of the pile. That seems to be mostly an excuse to scrutinize the ingredients, which makes Shepard roll her eyes.
“Honestly,” she says, letting herself sound as put upon as she feels, “if I wanted to kill you, I would have left you in the street.”
“I imagine there are other uses for me,” Saren hisses, giving her a narrow eyed look. The medigel, apparently passing muster, comes out of the pack while he divests himself of the bandage with brutal efficiency. Shepard doesn’t bother offering to help, instead taking inventory of the ugly stitches crawling like translucent caterpillars up his side. He’s probably dehydrated.
“You’d better not need blood,” she warns him. “I’ve got no idea where to get that without sending you to a hospital.”
Saren gives her another look, diverting his attention from applying the medigel. “What do you want?”
Shepard sighs. She thought that he’d save this conversation at least until he’d gotten another bandage on.
“I don’t want anything,” she informs him, leaning on the back of another chair.
“Do you honestly think I am idiotic enough to believe that?” Saren snaps at her. “What do you want? You cannot imagine that gratitude will be enough to get me to betray the council.”
“Nothing.” Shepard enunciates every syllable of the word with mechanical precision. “I’m not idiotic enough to expect any favors from you.”
Saren flares his mandibles, exposing his razor-sharp turian teeth in a gesture of aggression that most would deem uncivilized. Shepard rolls her eyes at him.
“There’s a human morality tale called the farmer and the viper. It’s about an agriculturalist who saves a snake from a trap and gets bitten when he tries to release it. When he asks the snake why it bit him, it tells him that it is its nature to bite, gratitude or no. It’s not in your nature to help humans, Saren, and I’m not enough of a fool to think gratitude could change it. If I learned nothing else from the refinery...”
Saren actually contrives to look surprised. Shepard sucks air through her teeth, forcing herself back to calm with an effort of will. She’s put enough effort into keeping him alive that it’d be a waste to kill him now.
She shouldn’t have reminded herself of all of the reasons that she wants to.
“Then why am I here?” Saren asks, the words like knives on her abraded patience.
“I don’t know,” Shepard says, unable to keep the edge of bitterness out of her voice. “Maybe it just makes me feel better about myself.”
She turns on her heel, and stalks back into the bedroom of her tiny apartment.
The next time she leaves it, he’s gone. So are the ration bars and the medigel. The painkillers, the bandages, and the monofilament are tucked neatly back into the medical kit.
The parody of courtesy makes it worse, somehow.
———
Anderson’s first few weeks aboard the SSV Tokyo are, in a word, boring. They are mostly filled with paperwork, introductions, and dry runs of all the duties he’s going to be responsible for going forward. And once that’s done, there’s not much to do aside from watch the stars pass as they hop from system to system on their patrol route.
He spends most of that time wishing that the action would start already. This, inactivity, wasn’t what the Alliance went to the trouble of training him for. He doesn’t say that out loud, but he guesses that Shepard reads it on him anyways, judging by the paper-thin sympathy and the transparently hidden amusement.
Of course, when the action finally does start, he immediately wishes that everything was still boring. It’s batarian pirates, because it’s almost always batarian pirates. The Alliance doesn’t maintain a heavy presence in the Terminus Systems for nothing.
He gets the feeling that this wouldn’t be a problem normally. The Tokyo has enough firepower to outgun the batarian ships twice over, and they would be able to tear through them in a few volleys if they needed to. But the batarians have human prisoners (because they always have human prisoners) so Shepard wants to do a strike mission on the holding facility to liberate them before the shooting starts, in case they try to use them as hostages.
A small team, a vital mission - it’s an ideal opportunity for Shepard and Anderson to put their N7 training to good use. Anderson can’t say he wasn’t excited.
Then (because, he learns later, apparently Shepard’s luck is just like that) it turns out that the holding facility was actually a super-secret testing facility for the kind of batarian science that Anderson dearly hopes is against council regulations, and the whole thing is guarded by a literal army of the best commandos the batarian military has to offer and-
Well, long story short, six hours after they break atmosphere Jenkins is dead and Anderson is in a dirty cell with both hands applying pressure to Shepard’s stomach, hoping that he remembered the medi-gel triage procedures correctly. And that he had enough to actually staunch the blood. And that he hadn't accidentally applied it to someplace that wasn’t actually bleeding, because it had been a long time since the first aid classes and there's too much blood to see anything on her torso.
He would have asked Shepard, he would have loved to be able to ask Shepard, but she passed out shortly after taking a bladed punch to the gut and has shown no sign of waking up since. The other prisoners (the ones that are alive, anyways) are huddled at the opposite corner of the cell, looking at them with wide-eyed despair.
The Tokyo has probably noticed that they’re overdue by now. Probably they’ve scanned the facility in more depth and called for backup, and probably in a day or so the Alliance will mount a rescue mission.
All they have to do, Anderson tells himself, is stay alive that long. Even that much isn’t looking like a sure bet.
Some time after that - it feels like hours - the shooting starts.
For the first second or so, Anderson assumes that it’s the Alliance rescue mission. But then he remembers that they are a day, at the least, from any kind of Alliance backup and no matter how long it feels like they’ve been in that cell there’s no way it’s been that long. And there’s no one left on the Tokyo who could mount this kind of rescue.
So, if it’s not the Alliance, what is it? Batarian infighting? Pirates turning on their government or the government turning on an experiment gone politically inconvenient?
Either way, it probably won’t end well for them. Anderson counts the seconds and thinks back to hand to hand combat training. It’s going to be one against many - how can he even the odds? Can he get someone else to keep Shepard from bleeding out while he does?
Anderson eyes the other prisoners, gone wide-eyed and confused at the conflict, and privately doesn’t rate his chances.
When, finally, someone comes through the door, it’s not what he’s expecting. Towering over them, especially with Anderson kneeling by Shepard’s side, is the meanest looking turian he’s ever seen in his life. His pale, scarred carapace is splashed with blood - batarian or human, Anderson can’t tell. His mandibles are long, narrowing to razor points well behind his head. His eyes are a watery, pale blue, and he’s looking at the assorted humans in the cell with the worst sort of derision, like he’s looking at something nasty stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
His eyes linger on Shepard for a moment longer than they should. Anderson hunches a little further over her, and shoots the turian a glare of his own.
“The council was not informed of Alliance operations in this sector,” the turian intones, “Your shortsighted raid on this base has disrupted my intelligence gathering mission in this sector. The council will hear about this.”
As though it’s an afterthought, he shoots a look over his shoulder at one of the human prisoners anxiously trailing after him. “Get a stretcher for the woman.”
-
Saren (someone eventually tells Anderson his name) acts as though he wants to storm out as dramatically as he walked in. But he stays to organize the evacuation of the prisoners. Anderson has to yell at him to get him to release them to Alliance custody, and he has a headache by the end of it.
But the shuttles get loaded, Anderson gets whatever evidence he can drag out of Saren’s clawed fingers, and they get ready to return to the Tokyo. Saren is heading out on the shuttle he flew in on, off to report to the council or go and storm some other base of operations, Anderson doesn’t really care which.
And that would be that, but for one last piece of weirdness on the way out. Anderson organizes the former prisoners - he has to, Saren refused to even try - which means he has to leave Shepard alone on the ship. There was enough medi-gel to stop her bleeding, so he can’t really justify sitting at her bedside when there are other people who need his attention more.
But they’re on the first shuttle to the Tokyo together - they have to be, Anderson is the XO and he needs to be overseeing things from the bridge - so he heads back to the shuttle as soon as he can. Might as well keep an eye on Shepard if he can.
Standing over her sleeping form like some kind of ominous statue, is Saren. The turian’s head is bent, just slightly, so that he can see her face. As Anderson watches, too surprised to move, the turian lifts a clawed hand and sets his fingers, very gently, on her cheek.
That’s enough to get Anderson to start moving, but Saren moves before Anderson can chase him off, before he can really see him, turning on his black-cloaked heel and disappearing into the lengthening twilight shadows.
-
Anderson resolves to tell her about it once she wakes up. He has no idea what that was about, but he’s absolutely not going to keep quiet about it.
But first, he needs to deliver his report. When he gets to the turian, Shepard, dressed in a hospital gown and only upright because she’s propped up by stiff medbay pillows, sighs.
“Saren,” she says, ruefully. “I should have guessed. We’ll probably need to visit the Citadel to make sure the right story gets told.”
“Wait,” Anderson says, “you know him?”
“Yes?” Shepard asks, tilting her head a fraction of an inch. “Why is that- he didn’t mention he knew me.”
She looks a little bit put out, but not particularly surprised.
“He did not,” Anderson confirms. Shepard rolls her eyes. “He also, uh, touched you?”
“He what.”
“Um, on the face,” Anderson gestures. Shepard’s expression changes from tempered rage to an expression which - well, Anderson isn’t really sure what it means, but he’s very sure that it isn’t disgust. Or confusion. Which is extraordinarily weird.
“Uh,” Anderson says, not sure how to phrase any of the many, many questions he wants to ask.
“You want to know how we know each other.” Shepard shuts her eyes as she says it, in a long exhausted blink.
“Yes,” Anderson confirms. “And why you two are...”
He’s not sure there’s a tactful way to finish that sentence. ‘What’s going on between the two of you’ makes it sound like there’s some sort of drawn out emotional affair. Anderson really hopes that’s not it.
Shepard tilts her head back, obviously thinking. After a long, long moment, she speaks. “You know how sometimes,” she says, meditatively, “you meet someone who is so similar to you that you just kind of want to...”
She trails off and waves the hand that doesn’t have an iv in it around vaguely.
“You know, rip their eyes out of their skull so that they’ll stop fucking looking at you.” She glances at Anderson’s expression and sighs. “No? Just me then?”
Anderson doesn’t trust himself not to say what he’s thinking in response to that, so he just nods.
Shepard sighs again, sounding put upon. “I was in the running to become humanity’s first spectre,” she says, abruptly. “He knocked me out of it. I had an- oh, what do they call it? An evaluation mission. With him. It went badly, there was a scandal, we would have cheerfully hated each other for the rest of forever, except-”
Shepard shakes her head. “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that nowadays.”
Anderson waits for her to go on, but she doesn’t. Her expression is set in the stubborn way it sometimes gets. He guesses that’s all the information he’s getting out of her today.
Shepard gestures for him to go on with his report, and he does, but he makes a mental note to look up the human spectre thing later. He’s sure that’s not all there is to the story.
———
Well, Shepard supposes she can’t blame Anderson for being curious about her “relationship” with Saren. She would have zeroed in on it too, as an advantage or something likely to cause mission complications. She is, unfortunately, not quite sure whether it will be an asset or a liability in the long run.
She’d figured after the first two times she’d helped him that they would settle into a pattern where she would help him if he needed it and the two of them would politely pretend they’d never met whenever he didn’t.
Saren, unfortunately, had not complied with her plans.
The first time he’d demonstrated that was on the Citadel, in nearly the same place he’d almost bled out in. The human grocery by her apartment went out, so she’s been forced to carry her plastic bags of cold noodles and kai lan up three wards and across half the neighborhood, what feels like ten times the normal amount of walking it takes to get groceries.
Which means, of course, that she’s about ten times more likely to get ambushed by some street thugs that think they’re tough.
Shepard had known it was a risk, choosing to live in the lower wards. She could probably afford a place higher up, but all the rich people on the Presidium give her hives and it’s not as though she can’t deal with street thugs. She could beat them up with one hand tied behind her back. Unfortunately, her groceries won’t fare nearly so well and her employment at the embassy certainly won’t survive an assault charge. Especially not one against turians, which seem to comprise the better part of this group.
Shepard ignores the leader of the thugs, demanding her attention, her fear, and her wallet in no particular order, and contemplates what to do. She’s tempted to just kill them - but then, murder is worse than assault and she can’t really claim it was self-defense.
The wisest thing to do, most likely, is just to run. She can probably make it up onto the rooftops if she drops her grocery bags, none of them look fit enough to follow her.
But then she loses her dinner and also her pride. Shepard, fundamentally, doesn’t want to give anything to this class of thug, and she is very bad at controlling her impulses.
The lead thug, noticing that she’s not paying any particular attention to him, gets into her personal space in an unprofessional effort to intimidate her.
Shepard lets the arm holding her grocery bags drop lower, so the bags trail on the street. She’s going to grab him first, dislocate the shoulder probably, and then move for the others. She waits for him to take a step closer, but he doesn’t.
He stops, cold, his jaw hanging open, looking at something behind her.
Or rather, she guesses, someone.
“Leave,” Saren’s voice comes, from above her right shoulder. His tone is frigid, violence practically condensing off the words and dripping into the air. The thugs scatter, dashing off into the shadows like frightened pyjacks.
Shepard takes a step forward, getting herself some distance from him, and then turns on her heel to give him a look.
“What was that for?” she asks.
Saren eyes her, coldly. “I saved you,” he noted. “You might say thank you.”
Shepard rolls her eyes. “You saved my groceries. Thank you, for keeping my broccoli from getting smushed. Why did you bother?”
Saren looks at her. Disdain drips from his expression.
“We’re not friends,” she warns him, “and I didn’t need your help.”
Saren scoffs. “You weren’t stopping them.”
“It would have been inconvenient,” Shepard says, folding her arms over her chest, the plastic of the grocery bag crinkling against her hip.
“There you go then,” Saren gestures at her. “I saved you the inconvenience.”
“Why?” Shepard demands.
Saren, who was already in the process of sweeping off to whatever ominous things he usually does with his day, shoots her a look over his shoulder.
“I’m not a viper,” he says, cryptically, and then vanishes into the shadows of the wards, his steps clicking against the metal flooring.
Shepard stares after him, her brow crinkling in confusion.
“What the fuck,” she manages, after a minute or so.
———
The next time Anderson sees Saren, nobody’s bleeding out.
Shepard warned him that there are no guarantees on that front, but given that they are on the fanciest cruise ship Anderson has ever seen (and that’s saying something, his mom loved space cruises when he was younger) with the promise of good food and soft beds for a full week at the least, he’s feeling optimistic.
This is an infiltration mission, apparently Shepard’s specialty when she was back in N-school, and she’s practically giddy about getting to put on one of her many, many false identities. They’re trying to get close to a turian merc leader notorious for taking hit missions on human colonies. Hopefully close enough to get some data on who’s hiring her and why. Anderson isn’t sure that she’ll even be willing to talk to them, given her probable xenophobia, but apparently Hackett thought that their “combined charm” would be enough to complete the mission.
Anderson is mostly sure Hackett isn’t expecting one of them to seduce her.
Mostly.
Shepard doesn’t seem worried about it, at least.
The first curveball comes early. They’re barely through the door when Anderson hears a vaguely familiar turian voice, talking in strident tones. He looks toward it, and does a double-take. That is Saren Arterius, extremely famous turian spectre, arguing with the concierge. It doesn’t look like anyone’s recognized him - but this is a cruise in the Terminus Systems, intended for incredibly rich pirates. A spectre is not going to be welcome, and even if they let him in, his presence is going to put everyone on high alert.
Apparently, Shepard’s thinking that too. One second Anderson is gaping at the turian, trying to figure out how they’re going to salvage this, the next she’s dragging him through the crowd, her heels clicking menacingly against the expensive tile.
“Mendax!” she chirps, waving at Arterius. “Is that you, honey? Did you forget I was carrying the tickets?”
She releases Anderson and steps closer to Saren, hooking her hand through his elbow like she’s done it a million times before and shooting a high-wattage grin at the concierge.
Saren stands stock-still, stiff and unresponsive in her grip. Anderson hopes that he’ll develop enough sense to play along in the next ten seconds or so, but it’s not looking likely.
Help comes from an unexpected corner. Just past Saren’s other shoulder, another turian, with a brown carapace and white markings and startling green eyes speaks up.
“Hi mom.” He says, sheepishly, looking directly at Shepard. “I told dad that he should wait on you, but you know how he gets. I think he was trying to surprise you.”
“Aww, honey,” Shepard coos. With the hand that’s not glomming onto Saren, she reaches into her purse and grabs her datapad - complete with virtual tickets - and hands it to Anderson. The message is clear - add the turians and make sure the names match. “That’s sweet of you, but you know you can just leave these things to me. And how are you, Nihlus? I know you and David haven’t seen each other since you went off to do your mandatory service.”
That’s Anderson’s cue. He steps forward, sliding Shepard’s datapad back into her purse, and offers a hand to Nihlus. When the turian takes it, he pulls him in close for a friendly slap on the back.
“It’s good to see you, man,” he says, pitching his voice a little bit lower than normal, “how’s the military treating you? Got a hot turian babe to kick your ass yet?”
Nihlus rolls his eyes. “I’ve told you a billion times, David, turian military service doesn’t work like it does in the vids.”
“I live in hope,” Anderson says, grinning at him.
Shepard looks away from them and back to the concierge. “I’m Valentina Arterius,” she says, offering a hand to shake. “Let’s get this sorted out, I’m sure you’re having a busy day.
-
Five minutes later, when they’re out of the crowded lobby and the bug-sweeper program on Shepard’s datapad has reported them clear of surveillance, at least for the moment, Nihlus turns towards Saren.
“Arterius,” he says, gently chiding, “you should have told me you were expecting back-up.”
Saren doesn’t say anything.
“Oh, he wasn’t,” Shepard says, with wicked cheer. “But if they’d kicked you guys off the ship, everyone would have been on high alert. Terrible for infiltration.”
Nihlus turns to look at her, his mandibles slack with surprise.
“So you two - know each other?”
“Of course,” Shepard says, beatifically. “I’m his best friend.”
“Shepard,” Saren grinds out, “stop lying to my trainee.”
Shepard cackles. Nihlus, apparently giving up on getting a straight answer out of either of them, turns to look at Anderson. Anderson gives him an expressive shrug and mouths ‘I’ve got no idea’.
Since Shepard is too busy laughing, even now, her arm still hooked through Saren’s for some reason, Anderson decides that it’s up to him to make introductions.
“I’m David Anderson,” he says to Nihlus. “Alliance Navy. She’s Captain Shepard of the SSV Tokyo. I know who Arterius is, but-?”
“Nihlus Kryik,” the turian says, with a grave nod. “Spectre in training.”
“Nice to meet you,” Anderson says.
“Likewise.” Nihlus politely inclines his head. “Shepard, may I ask how you know me? I don’t recall us meeting.”
“You’re Saren’s favorite trainee,” Shepard says, in the pitch of cheerful that means she’s lying. “He talks about you all the time.”
Nihlus perks up. “Really?”
“No,” Shepard says, “I hacked his datapad.”
Seeing the way Nihlus droops, she adds: “Oh, don’t make that face. He really does like you, if the glowing reports he’s given to the Council are any indication.”
Nihlus gives her a suspicious look, but Saren takes that moment to speak up.
“I am standing right here, Shepard,” he says.
“And not denying it!” Shepard points out.
Saren makes a haughty noise. Nihlus, perhaps noticing that he’s still not contradicting her, perks up again.
Shepard pulls them to a halt outside room 1126. “Alright kids,” she says, with a sickly-sweet edge of Valentina Arterius to her voice, “here’s where we’re staying.”
“Nihlus,” Saren says, “I will ask you to gather intelligence on our situation. Return here by eight, there is a ball,” his voice is thick with distaste, “at nine.”
“Anderson,” Shepard says, cheerfully, “same deal. There’s a pool party on deck three you might want to check out.” She throws him a key to the room.
Within the next ten seconds, the two of them have disappeared inside the room, leaving Anderson and Nihlus standing together in the hallway.
“So,” Nihlus says, “do you think they’re actually, you know, involved?”
-
“I’m telling you,” Anderson says, “she wants to like, maim him.”
“And I’m just saying,” Nihlus counters, like he has done every time Anderson made a reasonable argument, “that’s the longest I’ve ever seen him touch any living thing that he wasn’t trying to kill.”
“Maybe it’s just that he thinks she’s attractive or something,” Anderson tries. The mental images make him wince.
“Dude,” Nihlus says, “last mission, there was this asari pirate. Hottest person you’ve ever seen. She was trying to put the moves on Saren, get him to not arrest her or something. She tried to stroke his arm and the literal microsecond she put her hand on him he punched her in the face. Broke her nose, right there in front of her whole crew. We had to fight our way out.”
Anderson groaned. “Yours too? There was this Alliance bigwig that like, put his hand on Shepard’s back, and she just grabbed him and literally threw him six feet over the conference table. The only reason he didn’t press charges was she could have made a case for sexual harassment if he did.”
“Spirits,” Nihlus shook his head. “She was touching Saren, you know.”
Anderson shook his head. “She doesn’t mind touching people. Just hates being touched. I wonder if there’s like, some kind of psychological condition that goes with being that good at hand to hand combat. Once you reach a certain level you just,” he gestures, “punch anyone that puts their hands on you.”
“I hope not,” Nihlus sniffs.
Anderson shoots him a look, and he elaborates.
“I’m going to be able to beat Saren someday,” he informs Anderson. “And I swear on the spirits of my ancestors I’m still going to be able to get laid when I do.”
Anderson snorts a laugh at the unexpected vulgarity. “I’ll drink to that,” he says.
-
And drink to it they do. The pool on deck three is enormous and crowded with attractive, scantily clad people of every possible combination of species and gender.
Neither of them have a swimsuit, so they sit at the open bar and sip the stupid, expensive beer. There’s no way to get to know each other, not without blowing their cover in front of the bartender, so instead they make meaningless small talk about the latest big asari action film. Anderson watches the crowd for his target as they do, trying to pick a single turian face out of the crowd of dozens of them.
At least, until someone steps in front of his face.
She’s asari, standing with another asari that looks so similar to her that they might as well be twins. She’s wearing the skintight black suit that an untrained human might mistake for something other than armor.
“Hi,” she says, smiling a bright, seductive smile. “You boys looking for some fun?”
Anderson flicks a glance towards Nihlus. The turian is looking dead ahead, but there’s a tension to his shoulders. He’s probably getting the same feeling, that this is going to turn out to be an ambush. But there’s no way to refuse them without looking even more suspicious, so Anderson finishes his beer and gives them a smile he hopes doesn’t come off as insincere.
“Sure,” he says. “Coming, Nihlus?”
-
There are times when Anderson wonders if Shepard is ever smug about her ability to know, somehow, every time they’re about to get ambushed by pirates. Surely there must be a warm, fuzzy feeling every time she tells them to look sharp about fifteen seconds before an entire squad of salarian pirates drops from the ceiling like a pack of heavily armed tarantulas.
But every time he does it, he’s usually too busy trying not to die to celebrate. Like now.
Anderson ducks under a biotic projectile, and wishes, bitterly, that his clothes had been bulky enough to hide an assault rifle. As it is, he can only snap off a couple of shots from his light pistol in between ducking around a table. The asari assasins don’t seem to be armed, so cover’s going to be useless.
He caught one of them in the shoulder, and she’s ducking backwards as Nihlus presses her, throwing a punch that she dodges easily. Anderson takes her moment of distraction to line up a shot, and it goes off, blowing the asari’s skull to pieces right between two of her crests. He pays for the second’s pause, as the other asari flips him into the air with a biotic projectile.
It’s Nihlus’ turn to take advantage of the distraction. As Anderson spins ineffectually, he pulls a wicked looking turian knife out of a holster on the inside of his jacket and chucks it at the asari. It embeds itself in her shoulder, and he ducks forward to throw a punch, driving it deeper.
He dodges a biotically enhanced punch, and then pulls out another knife, which he jams straight through her windpipe.
Anderson drops from midair, landing hard on his back with an ‘oof’. He’s going to feel that in the morning.
“You’re a good shot,” Nihlus says, stepping over to offer him a hand.
“Thanks,” Anderson says, getting to his feet with a wince. He’s definitely got bruises all up his back. “You throw a good punch.”
“I’m a spectre candidate,” Nihlus dismisses him, letting Anderson gather his feet. “It’s expected of me.”
Anderson snorts at him. “I made N7 - if I couldn’t hit a shot, Shepard would have never taken me on.”
“I didn’t expect you to be able to keep up,” Nihlus says, with the blunt turian honesty that Anderson usually respects. At the moment, though, he’s not so fond of it. “Saren said-”
“Saren’s wrong,” Anderson says, flatly. He’s pried enough information out of Shepard to guess what Saren would say about the human military.
Nihlus frowns at him. Anderson doesn’t give him a chance to respond.
“Come on,” he says, “we’ve got to report back. Shepard will want to know that someone’s gunning for us.”
Anderson glances around the room and sighs.
“Though she’ll probably want us to clean up first.”
“Hide the bodies?” Nihlus glances around the room dubiously.
“There’ll be an incinerator,” Anderson says, grimly. There’s always an incinerator on these kinds of ships. Actually, he’s pretty sure that Shepard has started marking them on the map for him.
-
After a truly hellish amount of playing lookout, they wind up having to cross half the ship to get back to their room. The staff’s deliberate lack of curiosity about the purple bloodstains on their clothes is - well, Anderson can’t approve of it, but he supposes it makes their job easier. Thinking about the kind of indifference it would take to clean this kind of ship depresses him.
Nihlus has been pretty quiet, shooting Anderson looks like he’s worried he’s offended him. Anderson isn’t interested in explaining that he hasn’t, not just yet. If Nihlus hasn’t noticed the wonderful world of alien power dynamics yet, Anderson’s going to need more than one beer to enlighten him. He’s perfectly set to just barge into their room and start his report, but Nihlus catches him on the shoulder before he can make it to the door.
Anderson shoots him a look, but Nihlus holds a hand up for him to wait.
Now that he’s paying attention, he can hear it too, raised voices inside the door.
“-’s an auditory hallucination, Arterius.” Shepard is saying. “How long have-?”
“That’s none of your concern,” Saren hisses, his voice sharp and defensive. “It won’t affect the mission.”
Shepard’s voice drops, too low for Anderson to make out her next words.
Saren’s response, by contrast, is strident. “No,” he snaps. “You cannot possibly expect me to take you up on that. I am not weak enough to need-”
“It’s not about-” Shepard starts, and then cuts herself off with obvious frustration. “Fine, whatever. Have you been sleeping?”
“That is not relevant to this conversation,” Saren says, haughtily. “Why you would think-”
“It might help, Arterius,” Shepard says, her tone the coaxing one she likes to use on civilians when they’re about to get hysterical. “And you can’t tell me that’s not going to affect the mission.”
Saren snarls at her, but even Anderson can tell his heart’s not in it.
“It won’t help,” he says, after a moment. “You don’t need to condescend to me, Shepard.”
“I don’t think you’re weak, Saren,” she sighs. “If you want a nap- I’ll keep watch.”
There’s silence on the other side of the door.
“It won’t help,” Saren repeats. He sounds exhausted. “But I will try.”
There’s a shuffling noise on the other side of the door.
Anderson and Nihlus trade wide-eyed glances. Before they can figure out whether or not to go in, the door opens, and Shepard steps out.
She’s pinching the bridge of her nose, her shoulders slumped slightly. At least, until she catches sight of them and straightens, holding a finger up and taking a deep breath. Her omni-tool flares to life around her wrist and she gestures with it. Anderson guesses she’s activating her noise-cancellation program.
“How much of that did you hear?” she asks, crisply.
“Auditory hallucinations?” Nihlus says, incredulously. “But he seems-”
“Saren is good enough that they don’t interfere,” Shepard says, firmly. “Not much, anyways. As far as I can tell, they’ve been happening for months now. Why are you two back?”
“Assassins,” Anderson says, succinctly.
Shepard sighs. “There for us or the turians, you think?”
“No idea,” Anderson says, honestly.
“Shouldn’t we do something about him?” Nihlus says, sounding concerned. “Surely there’s someone we can report this to.”
Shepard shakes her head. “I’m not convinced there is. Even if there were, he wouldn’t thank you for it.”
“The Council-” Nihlus begins.
“Won’t want to know,” Shepard says, firmly. “More importantly, they won’t help him. There’s no health services for Spectres that I can tell. Once you join them, your health is your own responsibility.”
She sounds grim. Nihlus seems to interpret her tone as a criticism.
“You say that as though the Alliance is better,” he says, stiffly.
“The Alliance black ops division has health services,” Shepard says, flatly. “But- it doesn’t mean humanity is better. For the most part, that makes us worse.”
Anderson shoots her a skeptical look. Nihlus seems to agree.
“That doesn’t make sense,” the turian argues.
“They’re more in the habit of causing problems than curing them.” She shoots Anderson a look. “Remind me to warn you about Cerberus sometime.”
Anderson salutes her. She’s made it very clear that the only way he’s joining black ops is over her dead, rotting corpse. He’s not really looking forward to another horrible war story.
“I had hoped that the Council would be better,” Shepard says, and she sounds tired. “They’ve had centuries to- well, it doesn’t really matter. Nihlus - the best thing you can do is trust him. Get him to trust you, too. Enough that you can confirm if something is real or not.”
“But-” Nihlus glances at her. “Shouldn’t he at least take a break? It doesn’t seem wise for him to just- keep going.”
“It’s not. But he’s not willing to stop,” she says. “Even if he were- vacation time only seems to make it worse.”
Shepard shakes her head. “He won’t thank me for saying that much. We’ll need to get back to the mission soon. You’ve taken care of the bodies?”
She directs that to Anderson.
“Yes, ma’am,” he tells her.
“Good,” she says. “Much as I hate to do it, we’ll need to wake Saren up. We need to work together for this.”
She turns on her heel and starts back into the room. Nihlus looks after her. There’s something a little bit lost in his expression, as though he’s not sure what to do.
Anderson can’t blame him. Shepard has always seemed untouchable, invincible. If he’d heard this about her-
“Come on,” he says, bumping Nihlus’ shoulder with his own. “It’ll be alright.”
And together, they get moving.
———
Shepard remembers:
It’s artificial night on her corner of the Citadel. She’s sitting on the roof of her apartment building, having picked her way past the maintenance locks. She’s got a bottle of cheap booze in one hand, and she’s stretching the other out in front of her. Her feet are dangling over the edge. She’s fifty stories up and one bottle in, she can’t look down or the alcohol and the vertigo will combine to make her throw up.
That’s fine, there’s enough to look at in the skycars and the skylines of other, more distant wards. She can’t see the Citadel tower from here, but she can pretend. She’s drunk enough that she’s not above aimlessly flipping off the skyline.
Behind her, the door clicks open.
Shepard rolls her eyes.
“Go away, Arterius,” she says. “I’m not in the mood to deal with you today. Bleed out somewhere else.”
“I’m not bleeding out,” says Saren, sounding vaguely affronted.
That is worrying information. Saren, generally speaking, cannot be trusted to know how much blood qualifies as ‘bleeding out’. Shepard shoots him a glance over her shoulder.
He is not, in fact, bleeding out. All four of his limbs are attached. He’s dressed in casual clothing - or what passes for casual in Saren’s wardrobe. She suspects that the sleek black ensemble that he’s wearing costs more than an ordinary Alliance grunt would make in a year.
He’s ridiculously overdressed for her concrete and rust rooftop, and even more when compared to her. She is sensibly dressed for midnight drinking in an oversized t-shirt, a pair of short shorts, and a single flip-flop. She’s pretty sure that she kicked the other one off at some point, losing it to the crowded skyway below her.
“Well, if you’re not bleeding out, what are you here for?”
“The woman at the convenience store,” Saren says, “was rather convinced that you were going to try and drink yourself to death.”
And she had told Saren, because Shepard had convinced her that they were dating, because the sour face he had made at it was funny. She should have known it would come back to bite her. Oh well, the thought of how he must have reacted to the assumption that he’d care about her death is amusing enough to make up for the regrets.
“I’m not,” Shepard says, turning her attention back to the skyline and taking another sip out of her bottle. “Go away, Arterius.”
“I’m reasonably certain that drinking near twenty-meter drops counts as suicidal behavior.”
Shepard rolls her eyes, though he’s got no way of seeing it.
“I’m not going to fall,” she says, and to prove it she gets up, bracing herself on the ledge as she puts her feet underneath her and stands, balancing perfectly on the narrow lip of the building’s edge.
She turns to face Saren, wobbling a little with the motion, and blinks, confused, as he twitches forward. Like he actually thinks she’s going to fall. Like he wants to catch her if she does.
“Oh shit,” she says, “you’re actually concerned.”
Shepard hops off the ledge and takes an unsteady step towards him, taking another swig of alcohol to try and make all her confusing emotions about that go away.
“Is this some kind of guilt thing?” she wonders aloud, reaching out to try and grab Saren’s chin so she can get a better look at his expression.
He bats her hand away. “Hardly,” he says, and when she pouts at him, he makes a frustrated noise. “You have dodged every question I have ever asked you about why you care whether I live or die. Why would you expect me not to do the same?”
“It IS a guilt thing,” Shepard crows, her voice bright with malice.
“It very much is not,” Saren says, glaring at her.
“It’s a thing where you think you owe me, right?” Shepard grins at him. “Same difference. Well, a word of advice, Arterius: you’re not going to be able to pay me back like this.”
“No?” Saren is watching her with an inscrutable expression, but there’s something faintly defensive about him.
“Nope,” Shepard says, popping the p. “I’m out of that line of work. You know. The one where you nearly die every mission. Nowadays if I get hurt, I can just go to the hospital. Medical assistance is just much more valuable to you than it is to me.”
“Then I take it you have come up with some way for me to ‘pay you back’?” Saren’s voice goes tense and derisive on the last words.
Shepard cackles at him. “No need to sound so constipated! You’ll like this one, I promise.”
She leans forward and hooks her fingers in his collar. “I want you to kill me.”
Saren’s hand, which had come up to try and pry her off him, freezes around her wrist.
“Not, like, right now,” Shepard assures him. “In like, four years or so, or whenever I start to think that my bank account is more important than the lives of the people under my command. I would rather you did it before I get anyone killed, but it’s hard to tell when someone starts slipping. But after the first time I send someone to die and it’s not worth it, I want you to snap my neck.”
Saren stares at her. His hand doesn’t relax, his cold fingers digging into the bones beneath her hand.
“Shepard,” he says, his voice almost hesitant. “Why are you drinking?”
“Why does anyone drink?” Shepard raises the bottle in her other hand. “Weddings, funerals, anniversaries, promotions - they’re trying to make me a captain. On the track to a position in the admiralty, I’m told.”
“You- don’t want the position.” Saren is looking at her like she’s nuts.
“I don’t trust myself with the position,” Shepard corrects him.
Saren is still looking at her like he doesn’t get it.
“‘But why?’” Shepard says, pitching her voice lower in an awful imitation of Saren. “‘Why wouldn’t you trust yourself with the lives of thousands of thousands of people? Who doesn’t have enough of a god complex to do that?’ - it takes a special sort of person to make choices on that scale, and I am not it.”
“If you know the decision is bad, you can avoid it,” Saren says, with exaggerated patience. “And with that sort of power you can shape the destiny of humanity on the galactic level. You could-”
Shepard’s revolted expression must be obvious, enough so that it stops Saren mid-rant.
“That’s the other reason I’m drinking, you know,” she says. She’s not sure why it’s so important that he understands, but in the moment the need to make him see is all-consuming. “It’s an anniversary. Eight years ago, my husband died. He died because the best man he ever knew, his favorite uncle, decided that his life was less important than some data on some ancient asteroid that might have given humanity an advantage in galactic politics.”
“Then take the power,” Saren says, “and use it to make the galaxy better. Make it so that no one dies like he did.”
Shepard shakes her head. “If someone who is fundamentally good can’t handle that kind of power, how could I?”
She yanks on Saren’s collar. He resists it, standing stable and still. So she closes the distance on her own, standing on her toes to get close to his face.
“Promise me, Arterius, that you’ll kill me when I go too far. Promise me that, and I’ll forgive every debt between us.”
Saren, like the dick that he is, tries to pull her hand off his collar. When she doesn’t budge, he shoots her a condescending look.
“You’ve never claimed that there were debts between us,” he says, coldly. “You’ve proclaimed, time and again, that there was nothing you wanted from me. Why should I do this, when there’s nothing I get in return?”
He’s making the face that means he’s picking a fight. He expects her to get defensive, angry, try to argue this.
It means he’s off balance when she laughs at him.
“Here’s what I’ll give you,” she says. “An offer you can’t refuse. I’ve been where you are, Saren. Just too old for the higher ups to know what to do with you, young things circling you like sharks. Your position isn’t safe, and you’ve got too many enemies to expect the Council to save you when things inevitably go wrong.”
Shepard drops the bottle in her other hand, letting it shatter on the unforgiving concrete and metal of the roof. She hooks her now-free limb around one of the taller pipes. A brace, for what she’s about to do.
“Sooner or later, Arterius, you’re going to fall from grace,” she punctuates the words with a smile, and a vicious kick to the back of his legs, knocking his feet out from under him. Saren lets out a turian curse as he falls. Shepard doesn’t let go of his collar.
He doesn’t hit the ground. She’s holding him up, the disgustingly expensive fabric of his shirt strong enough to support his weight, her body braced between the solid metal of the pipe and the heaviness of Saren in her hand. Shepard isn’t above feeling a little mean satisfaction at being able to look down on him for once.
“And when you do,” she says, almost softly, “I’ll catch you.”
She lets her face break into a shit-eating grin, smug as she can make it.
“Do we have a deal?”