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2171 - Arcturus Station
She’s slouched into a plastic bench seat in the space port when he disembarks, swathed in an overlarge black jacket with a trio of white-red-white stripes down the sleeve. His brow pinches as he strides forward, but the admonition building on his tongue fizzles away when her eyes turn up from the datapad in her hand and she smiles, unfolding her gangly legs and rising.
Her cheek is pressed against his collar as he folds her into his chest, breathing a “Gwynne bach” into her crown of auburn hair. Her answering “hi, Daddy” is muffled against his shoulder.
He loosens his hold and looks at her, frowning as he takes in her hairstyle: a short, blunt angled bob, sleek and framing her face. “You cut your hair,” is the second thing he says to her after her name. She rolls her eyes.
“It was getting heavy.”
“So you cut it off ?”
She nudges him with her elbow and swings away, tucking her arm into his and pulling him toward the food court.
“Oh no,” he says firmly. “I didn’t spend three months on a frigate to eat fast food. We’re finding a restaurant with vegetables.” Again, she rolls her eyes, but allows him to lead her out of the port district to hail a taxi. He glances sidelong at her, fingering the strap of the duffle digging into his shoulder. “Maybe the apartment first?” he suggests, and she nods, her hands twisting into the sleeves of his N7 jacket. His brow arches. “You’re not supposed to be wearing that,” he says.
“Then maybe you should hide it better,” she says loftily, not taking her eyes off the railing of the shuttle pad. He huffs a laugh.
“This a clout thing at school?”
Her brow drops into a furrow. “Maybe I missed you,” she says, a little snap to her tone. Rhys has the decency to swallow, his smirk softening into a frown. She glances up, then looks away, her expression halfway between a wince and a scowl. Rhys wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her into him again, resting his cheek on her crown.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I missed you too.”
“It’s fine.” Her voice is curt, but she softens against him, her thin arm snaking across his back.
---
---
They play catch-up at the restaurant. Hannah’s back on assignment as well on a cruiser, and he’s just missed her, but David had been in port for a few weeks and has been checking on Gwynne for them. Academically, she’s taken an interest in VI programming and meteorology, and has abandoned tennis for swimming. There’s a club for navy brats, she explains, and they race each other. She’s the second fastest swimmer, but she can tread water and hold her breath the longest. It’s why she cut her hair. She hates caps, but the length and density of her hair has been slowing her down.
Hannah wants Gwynne to go to New York and see her grandfather. Rhys swallows his surprise. “She say why?” he asks between bites of garlic bread, cautious in his curiosity.
“No. I don’t think he’s sick or anything, she just wants me to spend some time planetside.”
“Well that’s fair,” he says. “You hardly get to go.” Her eyes go flat and she looks out the window they’re seated against. “What.”
“He’s gonna drag me to temple,” she says dully.
“Hey, if it’s Cardiff with your grandmother, it’ll be Mass.” That receives a grimace. “So, you know. Pick your poison.”
“You want me to go to Cardiff?” she asks carefully, glancing up through her lashes. He shrugs.
“Do you want to go to Cardiff?”
“I mean, if I’m already on Earth,” she mutters, spearing a crouton hard enough to shatter it. She huffs.
“Already on Earth,” he echoes sarcastically, “as if New York and Wales are a train ride away.” She smirks. “I’ll see what she’s up to. You know she’d love to see you.” She allows a small smile and a nod, then chases a crouton onto her fork intact before popping it into her mouth. He watches her as if trying to piece together what he’d missed since the last time he saw her--how she’s changed, how she’s the same. The hair is the obvious one, and her complexion has evened out again. He wonders if another summer on Earth will be enough to bring those Shepard freckles back out. She carries herself differently, too--a little straighter, he thinks, more confidently. Must be the swimming.
After the server has cleared away their lunch and Gwynne has suckered him into splitting a mint chip shake, Rhys clears his throat in a way that foreshadows an important conversation. Gwynne’s idle tapping on the tabletop stills.
“Have you given any thought to where you might go for school?” he asks carefully, suddenly wishing he had waited for the shake to arrive, because it would at least afford him something to do with his hands. Gwynne looks similarly at a loss and she reaches for her soda.
“I was actually thinking about enlisting,” she says, equally carefully, watching him once more through her lashes. Rhys frowns.
“You’ve got the grades to go anywhere you want,” he says.
“And get stuck in one place for four years?” she scoffs. “After spending no more than six months in one place? The thought gives me hives.” Rhys sighs.
I didn’t want this for you, he wants to say, and he realizes with sudden clarity why Hannah wants to send her to New York. They must have had this conversation before she shipped off; it must be why Gwynne was so hesitant to report her mother’s decision. He doesn’t want her to have a marine’s life, hardly seeing her family and never knowing when might be the last time in port. But she’s a crack shot and whip smart. He knows she’d do well anywhere she went.
“You don’t think you have to follow some family legacy thing, do you?” Generations of Shepards were military, and it was forced on him and his brothers. They were indoctrinated from an early age with war stories. His grandfather used to insist that his great-great-something-grandfather stormed the beaches of Normandy himself. He’s only stayed because of the benefits Gwynne’s set to receive; that, and he doesn’t feel like he’s useful for much of anything else. Lap dog of the military, a batarian had told him once--spat in his face. Nothing more than a meat shield for a loaded gun. Gwynne… she’s bright. Disciplined. He doesn’t want to turn her over to the machine.
“No, but my teachers talk like it’s sort of an inevitability.”
He grimaces. “Of course they do.” She inhales, fills her cheeks like a pufferfish, then exhales a steady stream of air. Their server appears with a green milkshake in a fluted glass and the extra in a tall tin cup--relics of the mid-twentieth, but it’s an oft-agreed-upon sentiment: whatever isn’t broken shouldn’t be fixed. Humanity has a funny way of hanging onto antiquity. They both thank her with smiles and turned chins, though their eyes don’t stray from the other; twin pairs in different faces, a tempestuous, steel-cut blue, but Gwynne’s set in her mother’s shrewd, almost feline tilt. She’d inherited his own mother’s sleek russet hair and the Shepard skin, a warm sort of pale with a tendency to freckle, but everything else about her is Hannah, from the long limbs she’s yet to grow into, to the straight slope of her nose and carefully pursed lips as she judges his reaction.
“It’s not my decision to make,” he says eventually after scooting the shake to her and taking the tin for himself. She swipes a finger through the small mountain of whipped cream and turns her gaze to it with an intensity as if she intends to divine the deep secrets of the universe from within.
“But you wouldn’t make it for yourself,” she says shrewdly. He presses his lips into a fine line and nods.
“Knowing what I know now, yes.”
“But you went all the way through N-school. You could’ve stopped.”
“That was before we had you,” he says patiently.
“You all said I was an accident.” Her voice is petulant.
“A surprise,” he corrects firmly, scooping some shake into his mouth. “A welcome one. We got a chance to slow down.” He eyes her carefully. “Why do you want to enlist? Really.”
Her eyes flicker back up to his before dropping down to the shake. She sucks a long sip through the straw and swallows it down, then licks her lips. “Do you ever just… look at something and get homesick? Some place you’ve never really been.” He ponders, then shakes his head. Hannah and her grandmother’s shakshouka recipe is home. Gwynne’s clumsy Welsh and glitchy experiments is home. She frowns slightly. “I do. I look at the Arcturus relay and I want to know where the other ones go. I stare out at deep space and I feel… I feel like my destiny is out there.”
“There are other ways--”
“Slower ways.”
“ Safer ways --”
“Boring ways--”
Rhys huffs and drops his face into his hand, scrubs his jaw and hangs his hand off the back of his neck. “Okay. I mean, again, I can’t stop you, but okay, I get it. I’m on your side.”
Her face breaks into a smile and his heart stutters. As if he’d ever been anything than wrapped around finger from the moment she came into this galaxy, wailing and red-faced.
2174 - SSV Agincourt
He’s leaned against the bulkhead in the cargo hold where her squad, in transit back to Arcturus, has sequestered themselves, scuffed and bruised but on the whole in one piece, mucking out weapons and maintaining armor. She herself is cross-legged on the floor, leaning against a crate, her sniper rifle in pieces around her, the bottom end of a tube of omni-gel dangling from between her teeth. Her hair is pulled back into a bun that rests on the crown of her head. From his distance, he can’t make out the conversation, but something causes her to roll her eyes and sneer around the tube between her teeth. She drops it into her hand before tossing it across the circle to a sandy-haired man, who barely catches it before it has the chance to smack into his face. A young marine facing Rhys looks up and catches his eye, and he noticeably straightens, rising to attention. Rhys huffs, but steps forward to address the unit they’d picked up. They fall into line and snap off sharp salutes in unison. He purposely avoids Gwynne’s gaze at the end of the line.
“As you were,” he says breezily. He watches the unit almost as a hive mind take in his rank, then his designation, then his nameplate; and nearly every head swivels to Gwynne. She huffs and rocks back onto one foot, hip cocked.
Her head snaps back to her unit. “What.”
The blond with her omni-gel still in his left hand points. “Is that--”
Rhys coughs around a laugh and says, “if I had known it was my daughter’s distress signal we were responding to, I’d have let the next frigate in the system pick you up.”
They blink in stunned silence, but Gwynne snorts. He gives her a wink, then addresses the group. “You all settling in okay?” he asks, clasping his hands behind his back. They look amongst themselves before nodding.
“Is our C.O. okay?” a woman asks hesitantly, stepping up to speak for the group. Rhys finds himself nodding.
“Hell of a concussion, but he’ll pull through,” he says. The group deflates with relief, and Rhys turns curious eyes to Gwynne and cocks his head toward the stairwell. She frowns and follows, wiping grease off her hands and throwing a rag at one of her squadmates. Once they’re a safe enough distance away, he turns toward her and asks, “Small team. What was your assignment?”
Gwynne shifts between her feet and licks her lips. “That’s--”
“Classified?” he cocks a brow, and she grimaces as she nods. “Mm. That’s what your C.O. said.”
Her eyes get curious. “What were you doing in this system?”
“Classified.” He says it with a wink, and is rewarded with another eye roll. “Whatever it was, glad you made it out.” Her lips curl into a small smile and she nods.
“Yeah. Hey… How old were you when you were invited to ICT?”
Rhys pauses, searches her face, then exhales hard through his nose.
“You were invited, weren’t you.”
Her lips disappear into a thin line and she rocks onto her toes. “I, ah. Accepted.” His eyes shutter closed and he props his hands on his hips. Gwynne is seventeen again, telling him she’s enlisting whether he likes it or not.
“When do you go to the villa?” The tone in his voice causes her to shrink slightly, and a pang of guilt lances through him. He does his best to quell his irritation. I never wanted this for you.
“Few weeks.” He searches her face to fill in the gaps the last year has left. There’s a scar across her eyebrow now, a nick along her jaw. Her complexion is smooth, space pale, but she’s his Gwynne, stubborn and stoic as ever.
He holds his hand out. “Earn it.” It’s what his old mentor told him. And then, “who recommended you?”
“Anderson, actually.” She takes his hand in a firm grip, but instead of shaking it, he pulls her into a hug. Over her shoulder, he meets eyes with one of her squad, who quickly ducks his head. Gwynne hesitates, but her hands press into the back of his ribs and she sinks momentarily into that protective paternal shroud.
“He’s rarely wrong,” Rhys says of Anderson, then pulls back and smiles. “I’m proud of you.”
She smiles.
2177 - SSV Einstein
“Shepard speaking.”
“Hey Dad.”
His shoulders drop. “Gwynne bach,” he murmurs, arms swinging out to prop himself up on the railing over the comm console. “Where you headed?”
“Ah, Akuze?” She sounds confused. “Colony went dark, we’re checking it out.” There’s a pause on the line. “Then it’s back to the villa.” Her voice is excited, and he finds himself grinning down at the terminal.
“You’re not done yet?” he teases, and hears her scoff.
“This is N6,” she explains almost giddily, and there’s relief in her voice, but he tenses. They keep them in the dark about N6 training until they’re on the shuttle, geared up and nav disabled, hurtling toward their own personal hell in the form of an asteroid. He’s not about to break the code among the few who bear the stripe by telling her now, despite every inch of him wanting to. He schools his tone and clears his throat.
“Then I’ll see you at Arcturus for graduation, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Good plan.” He swallows. “So, Akuze?”
“That’s all I can really say,” she says with uncertainty. He can imagine her hands twisted into themselves, a singularity of knuckles pressed against her solar plexus. She hates not knowing. She’s going to hate N6.
“Ah, you’ll be fine. Infiltrator extraordinaire, right?” She laughs, but it’s distracted and halfhearted. “Your mom’s ashore, by the way.”
“Yeah, I buzzed her.”
“Good.”
“Just wanted to say hey. Miss you, love you.”
“Miss you, love you,” he echoes, as he has since she could talk. “Buzz again when you’re aweigh, when you can.”
“Aye aye,” she says, and the crackle of the comm goes silent. He scrubs his face and heaves a weary sigh before forfeiting the comm room.
---
---
“Shepard speaking.”
It was flagged as an emergency, and it was designated from Arcturus belonging to his wife’s tag ID. His voice is tight and his stomach is a ball of lead.
“It’s Gwynne.” Hannah’s voice is pinched, her voice far away. “Her…” there’s a hitch in her breath, “her entire unit was wiped.”
His knees buckle. The railing around the comm room keeps him upright. “Everyone?”
The silence that stretches between them echoes louder than any engine he’s heard.
“Everyone but her.” His legs are a little easier to stand on after that, and his lungs burn for the breath he’d been denying suddenly filling his chest. “They’re taking her to Vancouver, I’ve booked a shuttle--"
“I’m putting in for leave.”
“She’s going to go ballistic if we’re both there--”
“Hannah, I don’t--” his breath is ragged. “She’s supposed to go back to Rio for the last round. She can’t…”
“She’s going to tell you that’s for DMHS to decide.” Hannah’s voice is also calming slightly.
“What happened? ”
---
---
“Thresher maws,” Hannah echoes dimly, eyes unfocused with horror. She turns them to Rhys, who sits grim-faced across from his wife and daughter in his own seat.
Gwynne slides her hand out of Hannah’s. “That’s what I said.” Her tone suggests that she’s been met with the same reaction everywhere she’s gone. He searches her face, her eyes dark and hollow and staring through the blanket over her lap. Her arm is in a sling, and one of her legs is on a sterile pad, skin graft still angry from its latest treatment. He was told that the maw’s acid splash had eaten into her hardsuit and burned the webbing and fiberglass to her shin. Medics on her cruiser had nearly ripped the skin clean off trying to undress her, so they vacuum-isolated it until she could get groundside to a burn team. By the time she got to Arcturus it was infected, and by Vancouver she was delirious on meds and wheeled straight into surgery. She’d been in recovery three days before Rhys could manage to get to her. Hannah had flown with her from Arcturus.
“Honey, what--” Hannah glances at Rhys, then puts a hand on Gwynne’s shoulder. She flinches, and Rhys frowns. Hannah’s hand hovers in the air before she tucks it into her lap. “How did you get out?”
Gwynne’s eyes flutter shut. “Colony went dark. We went in for recon. There was… nobody there, and we couldn’t find shit on where anyone went. No struggle, no evidence. We set up camp outside the habs to regroup and start with fresh light, but something felt weird so I requested to run the perimeter.” She licks her lips and opens her eyes, lifting them straight to Rhys. “Have you ever seen one?”
Hannah answers a faint no, but Rhys nods. “Feels like an earthquake, if you’re close enough.”
She nods. “We camped right over a nest. It was three little ones, probably juvenile.” Her eyes skate to her leg, where she regards it with a distant detachment that suggests that it hasn’t quite caught up with her. Her tone suggests the same. He wonders when the break will come. “I ran back. I was on the other side of the habs, poking around the comm logs on my omni-tool. All I had was my sidearm, like it would’ve made a difference.” Hannah’s hand flexes like she wants to touch Gwynne again, but she keeps it in her lap, digs the heel of her palm into her thigh. Gwynne inhales. “I cloaked and ran into the camp to activate the beacon. Then I ran to the LZ.”
She looks up at Rhys, then swivels to look at her mother. “That’s how I got out. I ran.”
“You were smart,” he says.
“I was a coward.”
“You’re alive,” Hannah breathes, eyes glassy.
“Yeah.” The single syllable suggests she'd rather not be, and Rhys's heart drops.
2180 - Cardiff, Wales
She hasn’t worn her blues since she earned her N7 designation. She hasn’t actually worn proper field dress since shortly after that, and that degree of separation made it seem sometimes like she wasn’t part of the Alliance at all. She liked that about her job. It wasn’t the Alliance her parents joined.
But here in this ancient cathedral, with banners and bunting and flowers dripping off every surface and a sea of Alliance blue worn by cousins and comrades and superior officers, she is violently reminded that she is Alliance, through and through, and it was the Alliance that got her father killed.
Oblivious to that dark intrusion that’s snagged on every corner of her skull, Hannah Shepard sits at her side and grips her hand in a vice. She’s stoic in any other way, but Gwynne knows by the white grip that she’s seconds from falling apart. She swallows the acid in her throat and skates a thumb across her mother’s wrist.
She hazards a glance at her, studying the slope of her nose and straight brow she’d inherited, her obsidian eyes deep and hollow and unfocused, mouth a thin line. The natural curl of her hair has been smoothed into submission into a regulation bun at the nape of her neck, and Gwynne’s noticed for the first time the graying streaks at her temples. Her skin, olive toned but space pale, is waxy and sallow. Gwynne returns her attention to the pulpit with vague distaste.
He hadn’t felt any sort of connection to the church he was raised in, and Hannah grew up Jewish. Gwynne connected more with her mother’s heritage, and so she sits here as an interloper, in a house that was not built to admit her, grieving her father in a way she was never taught. It feels incomplete.
She and Hannah take the following week to grieve their own way, sitting shiva in the small apartment overlooking the channel that Rhys had kept. They cover the mirrors, turn over the photos, prepare the first meal together, and sit.
It is here that Anderson comes to visit, standing awkwardly in the door, peering over Gwynne’s shoulder into the living room where Hannah sits on the floor.
“It’s the ritual of it,” Gwynne says as an explanation, following his gaze. “It grounds her. Us.”
He looks as drawn as the rest of them. He and Rhys had been close, and he was the one who told Hannah what happened.
Sudden, violent, unexplained.
The records were sealed tighter than Gwynne was comfortable trying to break through.
“I’m glad you were able to get leave,” he says, voice low. He is one of very few people privy to her assignment details.
“I’m going back out when the week is up,” she responds, and his answering look is stricken. Too soon, he probably thinks, but she sighs. “Shiva lasts seven days,” she hisses, dragging him to the kitchen. She turns the tap on. “It’s been three. I’m going insane.”
“Shepard,” he sighs, and she grimaces. Is she the one now meant to bear that mantle? Now that the senior has passed, has the mononymous designation defaulted to her? Three weeks ago he was calling her Gwynne. Maybe it was a way to distance himself from the family. She supposes it doesn’t matter.
“No, Captain,” she says. “As much as I need the ritual, I need routine. I need to work. ” He purses his lips, but he (of all people) understands.
“Where?”
“Illium.” He grimaces. There’s no official Alliance presence in the Terminus, sure. But she’s only one person. And it’s not going on any official record.
“Be careful, Lieutenant.”
“Aye aye.”
2185 - Normandy SR-2
She’s staring out the skylight carved out of the bulkhead of her ship, upside down on her bed and picking at a thread in her comforter.
“Didn’t see you out there,” she says to the glass, blinking at her own reflection. If she squints a certain way, she can pretend they’re his eyes, blinking over a mountain of whipped cream between them. “Turns out nothing happens when you die. Everyone was wrong.”
Or is it as simple as falling asleep and waking up to a new life, as she had? After the bullet between his eyes, had Rhys woken up in the body of a screaming babe, wailing his first breaths? Would he be human again, or knowing what they know, is he asari? Turian? Or by some perverted trick of fate, is she the only one meant for that? Two years of death reduced to an overlong nap?
“ETA to Omega is three days, Commander.” Joker’s voice fills the cabin and she frowns at the designation. Can’t command very well if you’re dead, she thinks, but her attempts to reach Anderson or Hackett were bricked. She’d have to find a way to the Citadel to see someone. She has half a mind to correct him--just Shepard.
She wants to march herself to Arcturus instead of Omega. Every inch of her is screaming to turn herself over, but what would that amount to?
Rhys’s voice echoes in her head: the job comes first. Turning up two years after being declared K.I.A. is counterproductive to that, and Freedom’s Progress is a grim prognosis indeed. Omega first, then the Citadel.
He’d hate this. She hates this. She misses him so violently right now that her stomach is folding in on itself, and she allows her body to follow, curling around a pillow and allowing herself to react for the first time since she’d rolled off the table and back into combat on fawn legs.
She is six years old tucked into a dark corner of a space station.
She is fifteen in the Bristol Channel kicking toward the surface where a wave had sucked her down.
She is twenty-three and sprinting for her life, breaths snagging on sobs and burning feet pounding into the rippling topsoil of Akuze.
She is twenty-six in a cruiser’s comm room listening to her mother break down thousands of lightyears away from her.
She is twenty-nine, drifting over Alchera, watching her ship disintegrate with the last gasp of breath burning in her lungs, blinking between amber honey and husky laughter, and steel-cut blue and mint chip milkshakes.
Finally, Gwynne weeps.