Chapter Text
Lieutenant Vega stuck his head around the door just as the Vancouver sun was starting to slide towards the horizon, and said with undisguised curiosity "You have a call from your mom."
Byron Shepard looked up from his datapad and said "Can I take it in here?"
Vega shook his head. "Nuh uh. Sorry."
Instead the lieutenant walked him down the corridor to the detention centre's comms booth. The transmission had stilled while it was on hold, to save on data; Vega reactivated it as they walked in, and the blue-tinted figure on the projection plate reanimated.
"Captain," Shepard said, and saluted.
"Knock it off, By," Hannah Shepard said affectionately. She was in uniform, bleary-eyed, with a cup of coffee in one hand and her engineer's drone floating behind her. She wasn't holding a cigarette, not on duty, but looked as if she wanted to be. "Happy birthday, kiddo. How's it going?"
Byron looked around the room, with its bare walls and DETENTION CENTER stencilled on the door, and shrugged. "I've had worse. And I kinda missed the last two, so I'll take it."
"Yeah." Captain Shepard took a sip of coffee and stared distractedly off to one side. "Those were not good days. I tried to do our normal thing for the first one. Went badly." Another sip of coffee. "Tried not doing anything the second time. That was worse."
*
They didn't talk often, but every year since he'd joined up and transferred off his mother's ship, they'd done the same thing. She called him on his birthday. He called her eight months later on hers. She'd wire him a copy of the trashiest erotic novel she could lay hands on. He'd send her conspiracy theories or bad asari love poetry. (The year he'd transferred to the Normandy, he'd enlisted his stepmother Jean to record a dramatic reading of some of the choice bits of Turquoise Like My Soul. She'd retaliated by "accidentally" copying in Joker on the delivery of Prisoner of Palaven.) They'd have a drink, separately, later in the day or beforehand or whenever they came off shift.
The time zones changed, the routing protocols and the ship names changed, but some things stayed the same.
He'd called her on her last birthday, briefly. They'd both been distracted. The Normandy had been on Illium; the Orizaba had been on patrol duty out in the colonies. He'd sent her a book claiming that humans were a superblack asari genetic experiment gone wrong (Garrus had recommended it, having apparently been involved in putting the author in jail), and had been rewarded by a message from Jean saying it was genuinely awful and 10/10 for effort. He'd raised a glass of something purple and headache-inducing to her in the bar later and thought no more of it, or of the birthdays he'd missed.
*
"I'm sorry, Mom. I had no idea."
"Not your fault. You were dead." His mother set down the coffee cup and folded her arms. "Can't imagine it was fun for you, either."
"I don't remember a damn thing," Byron said. "Might as well have been two days. Two hours, even. Felt like all the other times I've woken up in hospital."
All the times beforehand, at least.
(Since then, since coming back, every time he woke up to the familiar clinical smell, the first thought - sharp and cold like breathing vacuum - had been How long? He'd lost two days in Kenson's facility, and the absence ached like an old wound.)
"Lucky for you," the Captain said tiredly, to which he didn't have an answer.
"How are things on the Orizaba?" he said instead.
"Still in the sky," she said. "Can't ask for more than that. Jean says hi." She rubbed her forehead. "I'd tell you where we are, but -"
"They suspended my security clearance," Byron finished. "Yeah, I know."
"You know mine isn't high enough to get told what the hell it was you did?" Hannah Shepard demanded. "I got a message from Admiral Hackett saying you were in jail pending court-martial. What for? Classified. How long for? Classified. Does this have something to do with Cerberus? No comment. What about these rumours from the batarian border? No comment. Just crazy stories. And now this new posting …" She shook her head. "I'm hoping you knew what you were doing, By. I'd like to be right."
"They won't court-martial me," Byron said. "It's political. I'll be fine -"
"Commander -" Vega began, warningly.
"- as long as they're doing something to prepare before the Reapers turn up," Byron finished, ignoring the lieutenant and watching his mother's face.
"There we go," Vega said, not quite quietly enough.
"I heard you the first time, kid," the Captain said. "And all the others. I believe you, but only because you're a lousy liar. Thousands wouldn't."
Byron folded his own arms. "Great. Maybe try convincing the Defence Committee."
"You think I'm not trying?" She sighed. "Look, By. Just because nothing's happening to you right now doesn't mean nothing's happening." She glanced to one side, at something out of range of the projector, and said "I have to get on shift. Enjoy your birthday present."
The transmission cut.
The console went ping. Vega checked and said "She's sent a data packet. Looks like … a book … uh ..."
"Family joke," Byron said dryly.
"Right. Sure." Vega closed down the display. "Your mom has a weird sense of humour, that's all I'm saying."
Byron shrugged. "No disagreement there."
"You know some poor bastard is going to have to read that?" Vega said. "Everything that comes in here gets screened."
"Well, I hope they enjoy it," Byron said, and headed back to his room.
*
The data packet, duly screened, was dropped off on a datapad several hours later by an extremely embarrassed-looking ensign, who handed it over without making eye contact and practically ran away afterwards.
There were in fact two files: the first was a card with a cartoon hamster on the front, and a note saying
They encourage people to study up in jail, don't they? I hear art improves the mind.
I never know what to say in birthday cards.
Chin up, kid.
Love, H.
The second file proved to be, not the expected dubious novel, but an art book - the kind that in physical form would have been a glossy, large-format coffee-table production, almost an artwork in its own right - published with the imprimatur of the University of Cipritine, on Palaven, and entitled Armoured in Skin: 2000 Years of the Male Nude in Art.
Byron Shepard sighed, and smiled, and put it on the nailed-down desk - next to his picture of Garrus - for later.
An hour or so after that, when the sun had set properly and dinner arrived on its plastic tray, he cracked the top off the can of Alliance-standard off-brand cola and went to stand by the window.
The sky over the city was never wholly dark; now, still in the early evening, it was almost brown. The moving glints of satellites and orbital habitats passed above and below the steady gleam of Venus.
At seven years old, sitting in the observation port of the SSV Narragansett as she lay in orbit around one of the colonies - Shanxi, maybe - with his mother pointing out important stars, he'd asked her "Which way to Earth from here?"
She'd got her drone to project a brightened starfield over the wide window, picking out the things too small or dim to make out with the naked eye, and then throwing a blue destination marker over the distant spark of the mass relay.
She pointed over his shoulder, and said "That way. Wherever you are, the relays will take you home."
Thirty-two and in jail, Shepard leaned on the window-sill looking at the anonymous gap between two clouds where his omni-tool told him the relay lay, and raised a drink to Earth's gateway to the stars.