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Rosemary doesn’t know much about turian biology. There’s never been a need, nor an interest. She likes to live through ancient legends whispered through the wisps of her cigarette smoke— a fancy way of saying she likes history much better, and she never went to school. Besides: she’s a soldier, not a woman of science. And when you’re a soldier, the only thing you need to know is how to fight. Point and shoot. It’s the same for every race.
You learn how they fight, though. Once you’ve fought enough. Krogans like charging headfirst into battle, literally. Salarians use stealth, asari are fond of their biotics. Turians, being militaristic, are very strategic, and most don’t work alone. There are exceptions, obviously— Nihlus comes to mind— but that is generally what is expected.
So Saren is a surprise.
Well, actually, no. Saren was a surprise. Now he’s a constant: a constant force of chaos, a constant swinging pendulum. You’re not sure what he’ll do next but you are sure it’s going to be ugly no matter how perfect the lighting is and how much focus you put on its good side.
Virmire. Far from a routine mission, but there was a plan. Was. They were supposed to all get out alive, for starters. She just sentenced Kaidan to death and forced him to make an empty promise that he would make it out alive— bloody an broken, but alive, which is better than the corpse he is going to be. Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it.
Can’t think about it because there is Saren— unpredictable, swaying Saren— right in front of her and it should be so easy to point and shoot (just like every fight, just like every race) to make him fall from mechanical grace and short-circuit in the shallow water below. But “should” is different from “is” and she feels the familiar flames of anger and in her gut, propelling her forward like a catapult, a haze of biotic blue haloing her clenched fist.
Rosemary doesn’t know much about turian biology but she does know that when you see claws like hawks’s talons preparing to swing down upon you, you’ve fucked up. She doesn’t know much about biology and neither does she the amount of times her impulsiveness has screwed her over. She’s lost count. Her eyes go wide for the last time in plural and the next thing she knows everything on the left side of her face is black and in intense, searing pain.
She doesn’t scream so much as she hisses in loud, erratic bursts, the hands—claws— around her throat, bloody claws, making this very difficult. It’s hard to concentrate when there is so much pain going on at once, so Rosemary puts herself on autopilot.
Her clenched fist finds its target at last, albeit late and sans biotics. She falls, none too gracefully, and scrambles for her gun before stumbling to Ash, praying he doesn’t take goodbye shots at her. He doesn’t.
One arm hauls Ash over her shoulder and the other desperately clings to her bloodied socket, as if covering will stop the bleeding.
"Shepard, your eye—,"
"I’m fine," she spits, steps heavy in the direction of the Normandy. "Just… head wound. They bleed a lot, y’know?"
She makes it onto the ship without fainting. She considers it a victory.
"Shepard," Chakwas begins, after she’s been bandaged, and Rosemary is already preparing herself for a medical lecture. She’s already sat through "my god, what happened down there" and the "next time, think before you act" speeches already. The latter of which Rosemary has heard several times from several people, all of whom know that it’s not going to make a bit of difference. Including Rosemary.
"We should get you to the Citadel as quickly as possible and find you a good ophthalmologist so you can get fitted for a prosthetic—,"
"No!" Chakwas nearly flinches at the forcefulness of Shepard’s interruption. Rosemary hops off the bed to pace, a necessity for someone as active a talker as her.
"No time. Saren is our number one priority. We gotta get him first.”
"With no depth perception, you’re not getting anything at all," Chakwas countered, folding her arms like the stern mother Rosemary never had. "Modern technology allows for us to connect prosthetic eyes to the optic nerve, even create an artificial one if the organic on is destroyed, so—,"
"And lemme guess: I’ll need at least weeks to recover." Rosemary mirrors Chakwas, although she looks much more like a defiant teenager than a mother. "Weeks we don’t have. The depth thing ain’t a problem: they make visors for that, now. Modern shit, right? ‘Sides, imagine how badass I’ll look with an eyepatch.”
Rosemary grins. Chakwas doesn’t.
"Really. All due respect, Chakwas, sounds cool as hell, but we ain’t got time. My eye can wait. My eye will wait.”
Rosemary feared her intense, resolute glare would be less effective now that she only has one eye to do it with, but to her relief, that seems to not be the case. Chakwas sighs, somewhat in resignation, but mostly in frustration, knowing that there was no arguing. Another victory.
"Try to avoid battle for at least a little bit, will you?” Chakwas says in her this-is-actually-an-order-I’m-just-being-nice tone of voice. “Allow it some time to heal. And keep it clean.”
"Can do, Doc," Rosemary replies in her I’m-going-to-try-but-no-promises tone of voice.
She swivels on her heel, strutting best she can out of the med bay. “Can do.”
Rosemary never did end up getting that prosthetic. Even after Saren was killed, she would always cite time as her reason for never doing so; there are more important things to do. My job comes first. The Normandy comes first. The Alliance comes first. So on and so on— but Chakwas, Joker, and everyone else who had known the Commander for more than five minutes knew the truth: she liked it. It was a part of herself that she had accepted the moment Saren’s vicious claw came down upon her, even if she didn’t know it at the time. She liked it. It gave her a story.
Then, she died. Not even spectacularly, the way heroes are meant to go out. She was spaced, dying on a technical failure of her respiration system, gasping and choking and flailing in the great vacuum of space before her heart stopped trying to keep a doomed woman alive. Not a hero’s death. Not a hero’s death at all.
She remains dead for a long time. In the future, when she reawakens and is no longer doomed so her heart keeps thumping, she’ll try to remember these two long years and will find herself unable to. There’s not even an empty, black void to fill in the blanks. It’s as if she simply woke up after falling asleep. There is nothing.
Which is why, when she wakes in the Cerberus facility, she’s shocked.
Not because she’s awake, but because she thinks she must still be dead. She swears it, in fact. Up and down and cross her heart over her father’s grave, she swears, because that is the only possible explanation for light to be flooding the left half of her vision.
It’s not until the voice of the woman over the intercom telling her to do what she does best registers in Rosemary’s mind does she realize that she is very, very much alive. She feels sparks of anger begin to burn in her blood, but she douses them because there are slightly more pressing issues at the moment. She’ll reignite them later.
And she does. Not when she meets the woman behind the voice at the exit (Miranda; pretty name for a prettier face, one she doesn’t want to trust but has no other choice right now) or The Illusive Man (she has the balls, sure, but she’s not fucking stupid; he probably wouldn’t even give her a straight answer). Not even when she reunites with Joker (“what happened to being a cyclops?” my god, rosemary missed that grin, but instead of grinning in reply she snorts bitterly; “ask cerberus,” she replies, lighting up).
No, she waits until everyone is fine and dandy and settled on the new Normandy before storming into Miranda’s office like the category four hurricanes that wreaked havoc on the islands in her youth. She crashes her hands on the desk like the violent sea on the shore and Miranda hardly even flinches, she just looks up. Like she was expecting this. It makes Rosemary even more furious.
"Why did you give me an eye?" Her tone is so vitriolic that, if it could be liquefied, it would dissolve iron is seconds. Miranda is unperturbed.
"The Illusive Man wanted you at your best, Shepard. He wanted you whole." Her voice is far more telling than her face; she’s irritated, defensive. If Rosemary didn’t know better, she’d say she was angry. "So we made you whole."
She grits her teeth and thanks any potential higher power that she has at least moderate impulse control. “Damnit, Lawson, I didn’t want to get another eye! I was fine with just one!”
"Well," Miranda says curtly, "most people would be glad to get half of their vision back, so forgive us for expecting the same of you.”
Rosemary leans in close, almost uncomfortably close, glaring and milking every ounce of anger out of both eyes as she can because she’s not sure how much longer she’ll get to use that word, both.
"You of all people should know I ain’t most people.”
She pushes herself off the desk in an almost violent manner, leaving Miranda to the whirring of her computer and of the Normandy’s engine.
Her eye is heavy. Of course it is; it’s not organic, and organic eyes are mostly water. Kind of jelly-ish. It’s hard to create something like that artificially and have it hold a shape and enable her to see, so Cerberus did what they could.They didn’t do badly, by any means, but that’s not the point.
The point is her eye is heavy and it’s agonizing. Not so heavy to cause her to lose her balance or to tip her head oddly, but it’s noticeable enough to be a constant nuisance. Like having an itch under your skin, so you can’t scratch it. It’s weird. it’s unnatural. It’s not hers. She wants it gone.
Rosemary stares at herself closely in her bathroom mirror, so close her nose almost touches the glass, fingers stretching her eyelid so she can get a nice, good look at her cybernetic eyeball. From a distance, it looks fine, but up close it’s painfully obvious that this was not the eye she was born with. It’s too… plastic. Too artificial. She keeps expecting to hear tiny clicks as she moves it, like she’s some sort of robot. It’s disgusting.
They did an excellent job matching her eye color, though. Light green. Just like your mother, her father would say. She never knew her.
Rosemary takes the pocketknife she keeps in her bedside drawer— the closest thing to a family heirloom she has— and flicks it open. Then closes it. Opens, closes. Opens, closes. Opens.
Won’t this hurt? her voice of reason wonders.
No more than it did the first time. her emotions replies, and she plunges the knife into her socket.
Reason was right. Holy fuck, it hurts. It hurts like she just stuck her hand in a pot of boiling water. It hurts like her head did when she saw the prothean vision, exploding from all sides. It hurts like her heart when she had to kill Kaidan, like her lungs burning, starving for oxygen, right before she died. But the pain didn’t stop her from getting the job done the first time, so why should it now? At least now, she has control. She maneuvers the knife all around her eye, disconnecting it, making sure there will be little issue when she rests the flat edge of the knife against the edge of her socket for leverage, and lift, lift, lift—
Something snaps and she gasps a shriek, but she’s so close, so close, she grins like a maniac and the blood stains her teeth. Her free hand fingers around the protruding eyeball, and she pulls— and out it comes, bloody and gross, with veins and silicone. She laughs in victory, before she notices the blood on her hand… and on her face.
It’s everywhere. In her hair, on her uniform, arm, the bathroom counter. And it keeps coming.
Fuck.
She’s never wanted an elevator to move so quickly in her life, or for her crew members to completely ignore her as she runs blood-covered through the crew deck, covering her eye with one hand and screaming Chakwas! Chakwas!
The doctor gasps in what seems like horror but could also be intense disappointment. “Shepard, what the hell did you do?”
"I…," What a silly question. She knows what she did. "My eye felt weird."
The expression that adorned Doctor Chakwas’ face immediately following that statement could only be described as “holy fucking shit, you’re a dumbass”. “So you decided the best course of action would be to cut it out?”
Rosemary shrugs. “Yeah?”
"Shepard, you could have killed yourself!”
"Wouldn’t be the first time."
Chakwas sighs, exasperated, as she does many times in the process of treating Rosemary’s self-inflicted wound. At one point, she expresses her disbelief in Shepard actually going through with this, to which Rosemary replies that neither can she. At another, she asks where the eye is. (“why, you have a collection?” "no, i want to dispose of it properly.”).
After she’s all fixed up and Rosemary leaves with Chakwas’ parting words of please don’t make this a habit, she makes her way up to the bridge.
The first time Joker had seen her bandaged like this, his comment was, “You look kind of badass.”
This time?
"With all due respect, Commander," he says, after turning to face her for a fraction of a second. He doesn’t have to ask. Once he saw the bandages, he knew. "You’re a fucking idiot."
Rosemary takes a long, contemplative drag on her electronic cigarette. “Yeah.”