Chapter Text
It was five days after the death of Mordin Solus and Shepard was taking her first vacation in God only knew how long.
She didn’t count shore leave. Shore leave was still work. While the crew might spend theirs in bars and tourist attractions, Shepard had built a routine of spending her leave catching up on sleep, the news, ship repairs, and requisition deliveries.
This time, Ashley had the last few covered. No—had insisted she cover them, and with emphasis. Shepard would have been relieved to have someone trustworthy taking charge of one small corner of her growing map of problems and neverending checklists if she weren’t so discomforted at being politely bullied off her own ship.
“Who’s been acting XO since we left Earth?” Ashley asked, skimming a datapad with her finger.
“Traynor and I have split duties.”
“Meaning you’ve insisted on doing nearly all of it and she double-checks your work.”
Shepard grunted. No record would be able to prove that had been an acknowledgment.
“No wonder you look terrible.” Ash looked up and pointed at her own eye, pulling the lower lid down. “These are going to go permanently dark if you don’t get some rest.”
“It’s not rest I need,” Shepard said, but didn’t elaborate. “All right. Fine. Go forth and conquer.”
“But not literally, ma’am.” Ashley’s eyes were already back on the screen, trailing through the list of requisitions, personnel, and equipment updates. She tallied something at the bottom. “Two days should be enough.”
“Roger. Talk soon.”
Ash gave her a two-finger salute without looking up, and Shepard had thus departed her ship for her first vacation in… at least five years. Seven? Six months under both arrest and interrogation—time that she had mostly spent stress-exercising and failing at gathering intel—certainly didn’t count as relaxation, no matter what Anderson thought. And she wasn’t sure whether to count a two-year medical coma as time off. Her mind had been off duty on that operating table, but her body had been working overtime, either by nature or by force; and it all caught up eventually.
She had died tired. She had woken up tired. Some days she was convinced she’d been born tired.
And before that had been Saren, and before that her stint as Anderson’s XO, where this administrative record-keeping had been part of the job. Under Cerberus, she had double-checked Miranda’s work, first out of distrust, then later out of habit and mutual respect for thoroughness; on the SR-1, she had done the same for Pressly out of overeagerness and nerves after Anderson had assigned her the command.
The last shore leave she could remember truly enjoying had been before Akuze.
Shepard stopped in the airlock and cracked her neck as it whirred, cool blue light passing overhead. EDI’s smooth voice informed her XO Williams had the deck. She stepped out into the bright docking bay and headed down the terminal, dodging Alliance personnel and ignoring a small group of reporters waving her down from behind the safety partition.
It’d certainly be fair to say she’d been feeling worn down for years. Enough of the new staff had noticed her flagging—which had been a damn mortifying thing to realize as the commander of a team fresh out of dry dock—some even possessing the balls to make what they must have thought were helpful recommendations on sleep medication and yoga routines. Always tentatively given, as if uncertain whether the famous Commander Shepard really had the bite of modern legend, or whether she would use it against her own crew if they spread word of how she was losing her edge. Even if it was obvious to any species with eyes that she was looking more like a zombie wandering the halls of her ship these days than anything remotely human.
Shepard was well aware that she’d been looking unwell since the Normandy left Vancouver just over a month ago, but given the circumstances, she didn’t think anyone had much right to nag her over it. Working short-staffed over six weeks had pushed everyone to exhaustion. EDI pulled a lot of the technical weight, but she couldn’t mimic a unique, organic voice signature, written language, or the physical labor needed by engineering and maintenance. It wasn’t uncommon for Shepard to find Adams working three shifts in a row, and she had been much the same, filling in the role of her own XO whenever Traynor’s clearance or experience was lacking, which was unfortunately often.
Nobody complained; nobody groused. It was grueling work, but at least she no longer had to put up with grumbling. No more would she have to listen to Rollins and Oppenheim bitch about her workers’ rights abuses in forcing their palettes to suffer the plastic taste of MREs, as if her warship were a fucking restaurant; gone were the days when Chambers had whined about sore feet after standing for two hours at her terminal before Shepard’s responding look had inspired her to shut her mouth so quickly that her jaw audibly clicked.
This was the job in wartime. The worst had come to pass, and they were here to meet it head-on, and keep meeting it head-on, again and again, until the Reapers learned what it was like to fear something for the first time in their obscenely long existence. She bit her tongue when minor requisition requests were misfiled; when tensions got high; when Joker got snippier than usual as his bones ached in shifting temperatures; when they had to reserve fuel on discovery that a station had collapsed; when all of her senior officers were so buried in paperwork that they missed mandatory debriefs that she still prepared for weekly, God only knew why.
Down a flight of steps and across the entry hall, Shepard scanned her digital ID at the C-Sec window and logged her Carnifex. The distracted asari barely looked up as she skipped the scanner.
The Tuchanka Treaty had been enough for Hackett to deliver to what remained of the Alliance Parliament: evidence that Shepard was proving her worth as a political force, capitalizing on her clout, and gaining powerful allies for humanity in their hour of need. Surely this warranted a full complement of staff onboard the Normandy SR-2, the symbol of human-alien cooperation and most elite stealth ship known to civilized species, which was operating 24/7 during the largest total war the galaxy had on modern record.
The response from a shell-shocked, overwhelmed, scrambling Parliament had been to decree that Shepard’s success in procuring assistance from two major allied races within six weeks meant that she was operating at peak efficiency and needed no further help, because funds were tight, and it was a war, and she would just have to make it work.
In response to that announcement in her inbox, Shepard had spent ninety minutes on the line with Hackett making it clear in no uncertain terms that their success in this treaty had been a joint effort due in large part to the success of former allies and goodwill, not the operational efficiency of her own struggling crew. She had made her case in facts; she had compared her wearied recent successes to the efficiency of previous tours in ’83 and ’85 with full complements; she presented Chakwas’s dire concerns about the crew’s deteriorating mental health from overwork; she had been level-headed and clear-spoken but unwavering and, if she liked to compliment herself, had made a pretty damn good case for why she deserved to be fully reinstated.
Hackett had listened quietly to the entirety of her performance, then sent a saved copy of her speech to Parliament in rebuttal. Approval to assign an executive officer, marine lieutenant, mess sergeant, two new engineers, three copilots, a second medic, and an assistant for Traynor came within fifteen hours.
She was certain she had been successful because no sane person in the galaxy wanted to listen to Commander Shepard rant about something else for two minutes, much less two hours. Hell, she was lucky Hackett was still taking her calls in between forwarding her Cerberus cleanup assignments that were always sending her to the ass-end of civilized space. Absolutely no one had the time to listen to anybody else anymore, and she was aware of her uncomplimentary reputation for shaking trees until she got what she wanted. (She cursed whoever had conjoined the phrase “varren with a bone”; it was her least favorite phrase to overhear at the Citadel Tower.) It was much easier to just give the first human Spectre what she wanted so the Normandy’s wheels continued turning; so the undead, unbreakable Shepard war machine stayed happy.
It was not the way she preferred to succeed. But she would take the win.
And now they had Ashley Williams on board, a veteran to the team, if not quite to the ship itself. A new cook was being assigned, so Lieutenants Vega and Richards no longer had to pull double duty. Someone somewhere had found Daniels and Donnelly amidst the chaos that were currently the Alliance databases, and Shepard had signed off on their transfer this morning. She was no longer treated with eyerolls and skepticism at the Citadel Tower, and the charmingly annoying nickname “Conspiracy Commander” had completely disappeared from the headlines. She was alive; she was fighting; she was in her element. They had earned a win on Tuchanka, and this shore leave was going to celebrate it. Some things—small things, but things that mattered, things that would make a difference—were slowly, impossibly, starting to come together.
Others were ripping apart at the seams.
So it was five days after Mordin Solus didn’t come down from the Shroud, three days after Thane Krios took a sword to his stomach, and only two hours after Garrus Vakarian had turned in his notice for transfer off the Normandy that Shepard left the Normandy docking bay, removed herself from the work, and took her first real break from what, practically speaking, was also the first of her new life.
Shepard checked into an apartment on the far end of the Presidium at a station of temporary residences reserved for Spectres and other high-profile officials. Deciding against the pricier suites overlooking the lake, she picked a room over a skycar bypass with a more industrial view of the distant Citadel arms. When she pressed her hand to the cold glass, she could feel faint rattles as each car went by.
She pulled up her omnitool monitor and worked through a truncated to-do list. Countersigned and finalized Hackett’s approval for Ashley’s transfer. Sent over recommended edits to the Alliance’s upcoming press statement on nominees for the interim Council. Didn’t touch the message that appeared in her inbox from G. Vakarian, formalizing what they had talked about earlier this afternoon. Turned off her email.
She knew what it said. She’d already approved the damn thing.
Not in so many words, exactly. When Garrus had come to her cabin with his notice, after taking a moment longer than she’d have liked to process the news, she had only nodded in answer. Which was about as intimate as her personal interactions got these days.
She hadn’t signed it in person. He’d waited an uncomfortably long moment before realizing that she wouldn’t, at least, not in his presence while he hovered over her desk—and then he’d excused himself and left, hearing the dismissal in her silence.
Even for her, that had been—cold. He left, and she’d nearly called him back, redone the conversation, but another try wouldn’t have been any better. This was who she was; this was the best she could offer. No wonder he wanted to leave.
Shepard slept for nine hours—excessive, for her—and woke in the middle of the night cycle starving. She showered and left the building, wandering along the skycar bridge. At this time of night, a spot with an overpass view, however ugly and urban, would be filled with couples and teenagers looking for privacy or trouble. Now, a month into the galactic war and only days after a political coup, most of the queues outside the vendor stalls were patronized by families, the displaced, and the homeless.
Shepard waited twenty minutes for a spot at a stall and another ten for an overworked salarian cook to serve her a bowl of watery noodles. She tipped him extra and, feeling bad for his brightly advertised but unpopular dish, bought two roasted pumpkin shells stuffed with avocado and tofu, a chef’s original. She gave one to a kid sitting on the railing, kicking his feet over the bridge with no shoes, and chewed her way through the second with a tiny biodegradable fork. It was all right in a way most alien experiments with human food rarely were, so long as she didn’t think about it too much.
She found a creaky bench and parked her feet on the railing. Smothered the urge to open her email to ensure nothing or nobody had caught fire since she’d left the Normandy the previous afternoon. Yawned so widely and so long she wondered if her jaw might crack.
A ping chimed; the red notification light blinked to 1. Betraying herself, Shepard opened her personal comm to find a note from Victus.
Signed and sent. Moving forward with terms relating to the krogan clans while waiting for Alliance countersignatures. If any disagreements arise, you know how to reach me.
Somewhere off in Alliance space, Alliance lawyers were receiving their own notifications. The agreement would be checked in triplicate before Hackett would catch wind of it. But she still pulled up one of her private files: what she privately called her cheap politician’s bullet list. She wouldn’t normally allow herself to be so premature, but it was one in the morning, and she needed a victory.
Tr. Hierarchy- Sl. Union
- As. Republic
- Migrant Fleet
- Kr. Freeholds
Urdnot- Nakmor
- Hailot
- Thanx
- Talyth
- Khel
Further down the list were more names and factions broken into categories, in descending order of likelihood. Aria T’loak was, surprisingly, near the top.
She and Victus had spent five hours in the Normandy’s War Room hashing out the details of their alliance after Tuchanka, and then double that time metaphorically pulling out hair as they rewrote everything in legalese, which they ultimately sent to their teams for review. Wrex had sat in the corner talking logistics with Bakara on video, grunting his approval or objection whenever he felt necessary. Out of thoroughness, respect, or some brief lapse in judgment, after she had wrapped up one particularly complicated clause on contractor rights with Victus, she had asked Wrex if he would also need a copy of their agreement for record purposes. In retrospect, knowing the krogan, she had deserved all the mockery he had flung her way since.
As she left the room: “Don’t go yet, Commander, we need your signature and date before the rest of us can leave the room, too.” As he passed her leaving the abandoned mess from a midnight dinner: “Hey Shep, I took some chocolate from the canteen without asking. How many demerits is that?” A ping on her tool as she charted their course back to Clan Urdnot’s base on Tuchanka: Shepard, I gotta take a leak. Can I have a hall pass?
But that was Wrex, and how he showed affection.
As for the other thing, with Garrus. It might just be how he showed…
Respect, she supposed. Though her gut said deference, however insulting that felt to everything they were, everything they’d become. Everything they were to each other. Or maybe just what she’d thought they were.
“Christ, Shep, that looks disgusting.”
Shepard tilted her head back, though she already recognized the voice: Jack, upside-down, one pierced brow raised in judgment at the mushy lump of avocado and pumpkin in her lap.
“Don’t knock it till you try it,” Shepard said, though the only reason she hadn’t thrown the rest in the trash was because the nearest garbage bin was too far down the bridge.
Jack swung onto the bench head, one boot on the seat and the other dangling off the side, and gestured for Shepard to hand “Amoli Satma’s Earth Fruit Fusion” over, though it contained neither fruit nor anything grown on Earth. With an abnormally high metabolism even for a biotic, Jack was nearly always hungry. Shepard, thinking of Ashley handling requisitions in Bay D24, took a moment to be thankful the SR-2 didn’t have to accommodate her diet on an Alliance budget.
“Fruit and veggies don’t do shit for us. You need meat,” Jack said while devouring the rest of her food. She dug with a grimy thumbnail to collect some of the pulp from inside of the rind. “No wonder you’re a shit biotic.”
“Probably.”
She licked her fingers clean, crumpled the packaging, and tossed it down the bridge; a blue wave carried it twenty meters to their left, where it thunked solidly inside a trash bin. It chimed and a distant robotic voice thanked her for not littering.
“What are you doing here?” Shepard asked.
“Stopping my fucking stupid kids from getting arrested.” Jack paused to dig a nail between her teeth, picking at something. “You know that marines can be written up just for smoking a joint? Even on shore leave?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you do. You could’ve goddamn told me.”
“I didn’t know you enlisted until a week and a half ago.”
“This is why I don’t fuck with the blues. There’s always a twist, another rule I gotta follow. I never thought fucking Cerberus would give me more freedom than the goddamn Navy.”
She elected not to tell Jack that she was already on a very long leash with the Alliance, all things considered. She understood Jack better than she liked to admit: Jack’s anger needed a regular outlet, which she’d had with Cerberus but was now expected to tamp down while wearing the uniform. Metaphorically, at least. Shepard had a feeling any well-meaning idiot who insisted Jack wear the Alliance blues would be biotically flung so hard there would be a permanent indentation in whatever unlucky bulkhead happened to be in the way.
“What’re you doing down here? Nothing but refugee camps further down this way.”
“I,” Shepard exhaled, “am on vacation.”
Jack stared at her, and then gestured to the view around them—to the concrete jungle of the Citadel’s undercity and its roaring bypass—with a sarcastic brow.
“My omnitool is off,” she explained, knowing this was pointless; her defense sounded pathetic even to her. “I have an away message.”
Jack looked incredulous. “Shepard,” she said slowly, “go down to the wards and snort some red sand. Hanging around the Citadel doing jackshit is not a fucking vacation.”
“It’s as close as anyone will get until the Reapers are dead.”
“You can get high while you do nothing. You’ll enjoy it more.”
“I’m fifteen years sober, Jack. Not looking to break that streak.” She surprised herself by saying so. That was the thing about Jack, why she had to be careful around her; Jack was someone who spoke to those old, ingrained parts of her younger self—the teenager who would become Shepard—without even trying. If she didn’t keep herself in line, if she toed her own boundaries, she risked getting too personal, sharing history without her own permission by indulging in unwanted, dormant urges buried years ago.
“That’s right. I keep forgetting you were a runner on Earth.”
She sighed. She had not been a runner, but that was better than the truth. “Among other things.”
“Do they use gang kids as cannon fodder? I hear stories about the shit that goes down on Earth. Entire armies made of child soldiers. Biotic wrestling with no limits, so you got guys slamming each other into the ceilings and stuff. I heard a fast food joint in California was serving human meat. They can’t all be true.”
“Probably not. But the stories should give you some idea.”
“Hey, speaking of a break, we should try out that Armax arena place. I caught a promotional coupon. First five matches are free.” Jack rose and lifted her hands above her head, stretching in a way that showed off her midriff tattoos. “C’mon, you’ll like it. No, I’m serious, let’s go blow off steam.”
“Jack, my entire life is blowing off steam. Sometimes I need to do nothing. If you want to shoot with someone, call Garrus. He should be around there somewhere.” She waved a vague hand toward the far cluster of lights, at the refugee camps behind them.
“Vakarian is no fun on shore leave. He sucks the fun out of shore leave. I told him to come to the Biotic Wrestling Championship with me, and all he wants to do is haggle with mods merchants, read the news, and eat the same stupid street food he ate when he was living here.”
Shepard, who privately thought that that was a fantastic use of one’s shore leave, kept silent. If she was not so determined to avoid the man, she would likely be spending her time off doing exactly the same, preferably in his company. Which she was not thinking about.
“Turians are weird, man. He hunkers down in the battery and works on his days off.” But then of course Jack said it, and Shepard was unprepared for the way all the air left her lungs when she heard the words: “You two are perfect for each other.”
On any other night, she’d roll with it. Keep the conversation moving away from dangerous waters. Now all she could think about was how many people could have noticed, might be thinking along the same lines, might have seen what slipped through the cracks, might be wondering if she and her gunnery officer were...
She found her voice. Only a few seconds had passed. She was fine; Jack hadn’t noticed anything. “I didn’t know you kept on top of his activities.”
“We used to play poker in the lounge… Us, Massani, Goto, sometimes the krogan. Garrus was easiest to win money from.” Jack looked oddly pensive, staring out over the streaking lights of passing cars. A freighter rumbled underneath, drowning out other sounds for a few long seconds. After the noise died, Jack sighed. And then, quietly: “Don’t ask me back on that ship, Shepard.”
She looked up at Jack, who didn’t meet her eyes, but opened her arms wide and gestured at the overpass, muscles tensing in her hands. Blue flares rippled over her arms.
“We destroyed an entire species. No casualties on our side. For a short time, we were the most dangerous team in the universe. A fucking lightning strike. You can’t recreate art.”
The thought of this warfare, this immense mass violence—hearing the destruction of the Collectors reframed as a genocide—all of it considered art pulled her stomach into a knot. The Collectors hadn’t been a decisive victory. Not once on the Illusive Man’s ship, with his intel, with his crew, had she ever taken their win for granted, not with his eyes in the ceiling and his money funding everything from their two-million-credit cannon in the gunnery to the five-credit coffee in the mess. And yet—they had done it against those incredible odds, and then taken the ship and everybody with it right from Cerberus’s grasping hands. And, in doing so, solidified her image in the crew’s mind as the superhuman leader, achiever of the impossible.
She would not argue with Jack, who had aligned her vision of the world in a way that allowed her to make sense of what was done to her, the experiences she had lived. Jack, who had been awoken from cryosleep, dragged aboard her abuser’s ship, given an outlet for her violence and an enemy to point her middle finger at. Art? Maybe so, to someone who had been manipulated into believing violence was her natural state in the universe. Shepard wouldn’t allow herself to argue with Jack’s perception of the world any more than she would allow someone to question hers.
But the Collectors had been foot soldiers. The real enemy had reared its ugly, multifaceted, overwhelming head. That was then; this was now.
Her mouth was dry. She swallowed. Recreate art? Recreate a miracle, more like. “‘Can’t’ isn’t an option. I’m gonna have to.”
“You aren’t getting me.” Jack dug into her jacket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “A biotic sledgehammer isn’t gonna do you any good.”
“The Reapers aren’t an enemy worthy enough to get you on the front lines, flinging husks into the stratosphere?”
Jack stuck a cigarette in her mouth and flicked open a lighter, lighting the end with a practiced move. “They absolutely fucking are. But you’re playing politics now. You’re not looking for allies for a strike team, you’re looking at nation leaders to build an army. It’s a different game. You can’t throw me into that.” A stream of smoke breezed past her lips.
Shepard mulled over that, considering her previous team with a new perspective. Kasumi, Miranda—excluding Thane, they had each turned down her invitation to rejoin the Normandy for reasons she hadn’t quite understood. She could offer protection, resources, transportation, but it hadn’t been enough. They all had different priorities, possibly motivated by a distrust for the Alliance, or, understandably for those who’d never been marines, simply combat exhaustion.
She needed bodies, needed people at her back. Her old crew saw a woman who had dragged twelve strangers into hell, now back and asking them to do it again.
But this wasn’t another call for people to join a suicide mission. This was a game of chess as the universe blazed on, rings of fire catching system by system, alighting others as they grew. Under Hackett’s maddeningly vague orders—Win this thing for us, no matter the cost—she was desperate for a team, desperate for anyone. But of those few she could even reach with comms in disarray, even fewer would sign on to fight another war.
She couldn’t afford to rely on old friends to reach out first. And she couldn’t afford to lose the ones she had.
Shepard rose and dusted off her pants. She wasn’t sure if she had come to any decisions, but she felt clear-headed, strangely, considering it was nearly two in the morning and she was running on about a hundred calories consumed within the past twenty-four hours.
“You need help finding your students?” she asked.
“Nah, I sent their skinny asses back to the dorms. I just came out here for a smoke.” Jack gestured. “You want one?”
She did want one. Desperately wanted one—when was the last time she had indulged?
Before she knew what it was like to suffocate; before she woke up on that operating table heaving for breath with clean, artificial lungs.
“I’ll pass,” she said, and turned back the way she had come. “Take care, Jack.”
“Yeah,” was Jack’s reply, which was her way of saying, You too.