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The night they first docked at the Citadel after leaving Earth, Shepard came back to the Normandy quietly and without fanfare. She’d shed her usual N7 jacket for a plain grey sweatshirt and jeans, and had tucked her messy ponytail up under a baseball cap— not that she needed to. Shepard after a few months of house arrest was still a redhead, but she was miles from the neatly clipped bob they showed her with in all the promo photos.
Slung over one shoulder, she carried a cheap nylon backpack that clanked and clinked quietly whenever she took a step. Nobody stopped to ask her what was in it. Not as she wound her way through the Lower Wards. Not when she squeezed into an elevator that was already over capacity. Not when she got off a floor too early and slipped into a maintenance shaft to come aboard the Normandy the back way.
The Saviour of the Citadel, the would-be saviour of the Milky Way, was entirely unremarkable— and unremarked on. Right until she ducked into the shuttle bay and was faced with one James Vega, alone in the hangar at two in the morning.
“The hell are you doing here?” she asked.
“The hell are you doing here?” he said back. “We haven’t seen you all day. Liara was ready to start pulling fire alarms.”
Shepard shook her head and went over to her armour locker. “I was running some errands.”
Vega raised an eyebrow. “Dressed like that, Lola? Doesn’t that hoodie belong to Joker? This looks more like deep cover than shopping trip to me.”
“Call it what you like,” said Shepard shortly. The locker buzzed, and an Incorrect Passcode alert flashed on the screen. She swore and tried again. “I’ll ask again, Lieutenant,” she said as the locker swung open: “What are you doing down here?”
James looked down at his feet. “I was, uh. I was working out. It helps.”
Shepard knelt and started pulling out gear: regulation helmet, gauntlets, breastplate. “Good. I need you at your best.”
“I wasn’t talking about fitness,” he said slowly.
Shepard rubbed her thumb over a stained bit of fibreglass on one of her vambraces, trying to work the grime off. “Neither was I.”
Her armour was black, the best polished composite the galaxy had to offer: power joints, ablative shielding, you name it. It was elite stuff, and the crimson N7 stripe down the arm proved it. Rookies would crack jokes, sometimes— what’s the difference between a foot soldier and an N7? Fifty thousand creds and a nice coat of paint! Shepard had thought those jokes were disrespectful even before she was Special Forces. They’d ticked her off all the way from boot camp to Akuze. They didn’t bother her anymore.
“As long as you’re here,” said Shepard without looking up, “can you grab me some 200-grit and masking tape?”
“The fuck you doing, Lola? Planning on redecorating your quarters?”
Shepard reached wordlessly into her backpack and pulled out a couple of cheap rattle cans, the sort of spray paint that had been illegal on airplanes for the past two hundred years. She set them down on the metal floor of the shuttle bay and went back to rummaging through her locker.
Vega eyed the cans. Green and blue. Not a nice, minty green, but not a fluorescent one either. Almost forest green. And the blue— well, Vega was a Marine, not a poet. He wasn’t going to call it turquoise, or sky blue, or sea-green, or whatever the fuck else colour it might have been. There was a can of blue paint, and a can of green paint. That was all.
He went over to Cortez’s workbench and dug out some sandpaper and tape.
“You know we’ve got proper armour tinting gear on board, right?” he asked as he passed it over to her. “You want green armour, hell, you want hot pink armour—”
“Just give me the goddamn tape.”
“What, no pink armour? Come on, it’d suit you—”
“Cut the jokes, Lieutenant. Cut that joke in-fucking-particular.”
James shut up.
Shepard tore off a scrap of the sandpaper and started roughing up the finish on her breastplate. It was funny, almost, how quickly the shine came off. This armour had seen Shepard through the sorts of battles they made films about, a dozen times over, but with the shields powered down the polish came off like so much finger paint. Apparently it was harder to build something resiliently beautiful than something resiliently bulletproof.
“I know we have tinting equipment,” she said, putting down the breastplate and starting on her helmet. “This isn’t a fashion statement.”
Slowly, James eased himself down to the ground, sitting cross-legged on the cold steel. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I know.”
Shepard picked up the blue can and shook it, sending the little ball inside clattering noisily against the walls. “Do you?”
“Yeah,” James said. “I do.”
She gave the can another couple of good shakes before uncapping it and going to start on the breastplate. Before she could move, though, Vega reached out and put a gentle hand on her arm.
“Pass your vambraces,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment before setting the can down and handing over the armoured sleeves. Vega took a sheet of the sandpaper and started filing off the polish while she went back to spraying down the breastplate.
“You should probably be wearing a mask,” he said mildly. “I hear that shit’ll give you cancer.”
“Vega, if I live long enough to die of cancer I’ll throw a goddamn party for Death the day he darkens my door.” She set down the can and picked up the tape to start masking off the helmet visor. “Our lives are one big occupational hazard. What’s a couple whiffs of poison here and there?”
“You won’t be saying that when you’re ninety-five and hooked up to a ventilator round the clock.”
“I won’t be ninety-five and hooked up to a ventilator round the clock. We both know that. Come on, Vega, you’re not guarding a flight risk on house arrest anymore. I’m your CO. No more comforting lies.”
“Is that an order, ma’am?”
“If I tell you it’s an order, are you gonna make that some weird sexual innuendo?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me that,” Shepard muttered. “No ma’am, no pink armour cracks. No fuckin’ poetry, for that matter.”
“Yes, m— uh, Commander.”
“What the hell would she have made of this?” said Shepard to her helmet. “The fuck kind of God would put the galaxy through this? So much for faith.” Shepard tore off another strip of tape to finish covering the visor and picked up the can again, giving it a good couple of shakes. “So much for faith,” she repeated to herself.
Vega put down the vambraces and started sanding the polish off of Shepard’s shin guards while she sprayed the rest of the helmet. Overspray stained the floor green. Cortez probably wouldn’t be happy about that.
“You leave anyone behind?” asked James before he could think better of it.
“Anderson,” said Shepard shortly.
“Aside from him.”
“No, Vega, I didn’t. Other than Anderson, there’s not a single goddamn person left on that planet who I care about. All it ever was to me was cruel. Concrete and pollution and despair.” She dropped the helmet onto the ground with a clang. “If you ask me, I say let it fucking burn.”
James didn’t ask the obvious question.
Shepard picked up the helmet again. “But it’s not up to me.”
“Plenty of soldiers defect,” Vega said.
“Yeah, well, I’m not doing this for the Alliance, Vega. I’m not doing this for the Council. I’m doing this for you, and for Liara, and for Kaidan, and—” Her voice broke. “I’m doing this because I don’t want it to be up to me anymore. I’ll stop the Reapers. Civilization can keep its galaxy. Once I do that, the rest’s on you.”
“You say that like you don’t expect to be around for it.”
“I don’t,” Shepard said. “I won’t be. And you know what? You probably won’t be either. Kaidan’s going to wind up in another coma, Miranda’ll get taken out by a Cerberus sniper, Garrus will get vaporized along with the rest of Palaven, and you’ll have my back in a stupid fight I shouldn’t have picked and take a bullet that was meant for me— and it won’t matter because I’ll get crushed by a brute thirty seconds later. Maybe Liara will make it. Maybe Joker will make it. Maybe I’ll be wrong and all of you will. We’re going to win, Vega. I always win. But a lot of people are going to die in the process, and I refuse to let a list that long go down in history without my name on it too.”
“Permission to speak freely, Commander?”
“Yeah.”
James cleared his throat. “With all due respect, you know your dying won’t save anyone else, right?”
Her gaze flicked up to meet his. “What makes you think that’s the point, lieutenant?”
He handed her the sanded shin guards. “Because I don’t think you’re as selfish as you think you are.”
She rolled her eyes and started masking off stripes on the shin guards. “Sure.”
“If you were, you’d already have stuck a gun in your mouth,” James said.
Shepard’s hands stilled on the tape.
“It’s not like you haven’t had a chance. You’re the jewel of the Alliance. You’ve got access to all the pistols you want. You have master key privileges to the med bay and the drug cabinets. We’re on the Citadel, there’s no shortage of places you could throw yourself from. You’re very good at killing, Shepard, and if this was just about dying you’d have turned that skill on yourself a long time ago.”
“Not with you on my ass, I couldn’t.”
“The apartment you were in had six knives in the kitchen chopping block,” said James. “The windows were bulletproof, but the balcony railing was only four feet high. There were skipping ropes in with the weights and two blister packs of Gravol in the bathroom. But here we are, because you still had some shit to do, right?”
“And when we stop the Reapers, I won’t have shit to do anymore,” she said.
“Do you seriously think that all you have to offer the world is your skill with a gun?”
“Yes,” she snapped. “And I’m goddamn right. I’m not nice, or clever, or creative. I haven’t got a degree, I haven’t got work history aside from murder. There’s nobody in the galaxy who deserves to be stuck with me. When we stop the Reapers, that’s it, Vega. That’s the moment I stop being useful, and that’s the moment I stop being worth anything.”
“You think Liara’s going to agree with that?”
“That’s a low fucking blow, Lieutenant,” said Shepard tightly. She moved to her knees and uncapped one of the paint cans, laid down coats of blue across the fiberglass in neat, even strokes. Her hands didn’t shake. Shepard’s hands never shook.
“Put the can down,” said James eventually.
Shepard kept going.
“Put it down,” said James, with something almost venomous in his voice, and Shepard didn’t put the can down but she took her finger off the nozzle and looked at him.
James pulled his legs under him and threw a punch.
It was a big, slow haymaker, the sort of thing even the dumbest civilian could duck in their sleep. Shepard dropped the can with a clatter and dodged back out of James’ reach, hands flying up instinctively as she leapt to her feet, ready to block. He came back with what would have been a quick jab to the gut, but Shepard’s smaller frame gave her an easy angle to knock the strike aside and land a punch of her own to Vega’s side. He grunted, staggered, stepped back.
“The fuck was that!?” Shepard shouted. The sound echoed off the walls.
Vega brought his fists back up and turned to the side to make himself a smaller target. Textbook boxing stance. Shepard swore and feinted left before landing a good whack to Vega’s temple, just hard enough to get him a little dazed. The force had made him bite his tongue: a little bit of red tinted his lips when he licked them. His counterattack was clumsy, but his strength was enough to push through Shepard’s efforts to parry and knock the wind out of her with a fist to the stomach. She gagged, wheezed, played it up for a second longer than she needed to— straight into a low kick to the kneecaps.
Vega had been expecting the trick and danced back before the hit could land. “That the best you got?”
“You’re goading me,” snapped Shepard.
“It’s working,” said James.
Shepard feinted left. Vega fell for it and left himself open for a brutal knee to the kidneys: she heard the air leave his lungs in a huff, and took advantage of the moment to shove him off balance and send him sprawling on the floor.
“See?” said Shepard bitterly. “I’m really, really good at hurting people.”
James rolled over and groaned.
“Go to bed, Lieutenant,” Shepard said. The anger bled out of her expression, leaving her looking pale and exhausted. “You need rest.”
“When are you going to bed?”
“I sleep three hours a night. I pack it in at 0300 so I can eat breakfast with the crew. Good for morale.”
“Bullshit you sleep three hours a night.”
Shepard picked the spray can back up and gave it a fresh shake. “I do. Miranda could have wired it up so I didn’t need sleep at all, but she said there were too many studies about soldiers going insane from sleep deprivation for her to chance it.”
James pushed himself up on his elbows. “Sleep deprivation, huh?”
“Yeah,” Shepard said. “Go to bed.”
“I can’t sleep,” said James, honestly. “If I close my eyes, all I see is Earth.”
“Join the club,” Shepard muttered. “You’re telling me big, buff James Vega is too much of a pussy to take a nap?”
“I’m telling you big, buff James Vega is man enough to admit he’s a little fucked up after abandoning his homeworld, yeah.”
Paint hissed from the nozzle. “Go cry to Kaidan.”
“Kaidan doubled up his headache meds. He’d probably sleep through the ship depressurizing.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” said Shepard quietly.
“You’re full of fuckin’ contradictions, you know that, Lola?”
Shepard capped the can and set it down. “Yeah. I know.”
“Must be exhausting.” James picked up the vambraces he’d been sanding and tossed them to Shepard, one at a time. She barely looked before she caught them.
He watched her dust off the last bits of top coat and start painting again. “You know,” he said, “you can have a happy ending. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself to win. If you want to die, fine. But don’t pretend it’s in service to the war.”
“Go to bed, James.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
Beat.
“I ain’t coming to your funeral if you die pulling some martyr shit, you know? Don’t make me stand up and give some boo-hoo hero speech. You gotta get old and then kick it doing something fun. Get your face sat on too hard or something. I’ll call you a galactic hero for that.”
Shepard’s lips quirked at the corner.
“Come on, Lola,” he said. “You said yourself there’s still shit worth fighting for. You know there’s still shit worth fighting for, or you wouldn’t be here. No more crap. I’m getting through this war and I’m getting through a good few decades after it, and you’re coming with me.”
“Are you asking me to elope, lieutenant?”
He snorted. “Not a chance. Maybe I could take Liara in a fistfight, but she could line up a dozen snipers to shoot me and counter-snipers to shoot them and then shoot each other while I was making morning coffee.”
“She wouldn’t, though,” Shepard said with a crooked grin. “And that’s what counts.”
“I want to be godfather to a horde of tiny blue babies,” said James. “That’s why you gotta see the war through, actually.”
“Garrus called godfather three years ago,” said Shepard.
“Then you gotta have more than one. I said horde.”
“Joker called the second. Kaidan called third.”
“I don’t think this is how godparents are supposed to be assigned. Can I be godmother?”
Shepard smirked. “Yeah, sure. I live through this war, and you and Garrus can be godmother and godfather to my and Liara’s hypothetical firstborn. Now will you go to bed?”
James reached out a hand, hesitantly, to touch Shepard’s shoulder. He half-expected her to move away, to knock his arm aside, but instead she just looked up at him with a weary sort of smile.
Screw it, he thought, and pulled her into a hug.
Shepard wasn’t tall, but she was built like a gymnast, all strength and dense muscle. It was sort of like hugging a statue, if James was being honest. She might as well have been made out of marble for the way she froze up in his arms. Realizing he’d made a mistake, James was about to let go and apologize, but then Shepard dug her fingers into his shirt like she was holding on for dear life and he tightened his grip instead.
He felt, more than heard, her sob into his chest. It was the sort of full-body sob that made your knees go weak and your throat ache and your whole chest collapse in on itself, tbe sort of deep, painful, animalistic sound that a lucky person made once in a lifetime, if that. James stood there, and he held Commander Shepard in his arms like his bulk could shield her from the weight of the universe, and he thought to himself maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I never made N7 after all.
They didn’t talk about it tomorrow.