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The first thing she thought when she woke up was that her right leg was missing. She reached down for it only to find that her hand wouldn’t move, and when she tried to open her eyes, they wouldn’t respond either.
I’m dead.
But the soft whirr of machinery near her head wasn’t the familiar low thrum of Normandy Vitu, and there was a distinct lack of saltwater or kaiju blue in her nose.
“We have brainwave activity,” someone said nearby. “Get the doctor.”
“The captain asked to be alerted as soon as there was a change,” someone else answered.
“Doctor first.”
***
She was aware she was dreaming even as she heard the VI relaying statistics, heard the strain in the Normandy’s engines when the second wave hit them.
“We’re going down!”
Even in the dream she couldn’t tell who said it, herself or Anderson, but she felt the burn in her right leg as a piece of the Normandy’s hull sheared through it, felt the fire in her lungs with an inrush of sea water.
This time when she opened her eyes it worked, and she squinted at the dim white light glowing from the edges of a hospital room, soft backlighting from the lamps and bed itself. Looking down her body sent vertigo rocketing through her, but the shapes under the blanket suggested she still had both legs. Biotic? she wondered, but then there was a shift beside her, and she forgot about her leg.
Anderson. Her throat was not as cooperative as her eyes, but she got enough of it out that he sat up, leaned forward, angry red scars not inhibiting the brightness of his smile.
“Shepard,” he said, gripping her hand. She tried to squeeze back and managed a twitch. “Welcome back.”
***
It was a full six weeks before she stormed out of the hospital against medical advice, still bothered by ghost pain in her right leg – fully organic, fully her own original limb, but still sparking with the memory of feeling Anderson’s leg blown off in the drift.
She bought a motorcycle on the way home, huddled into the leather of the Normandy jacket that Anderson had brought to the hospital with her clothes and other personal items from her locker, and opened the throttle all the way. She would have gotten a ticket if the officer hadn’t recognized her.
“Shepard,” he said, sounding surprised and awed all at once as he waved off her ID. “Didn’t know you were out of the hospital yet. My wife and I damn near cried when we heard you woke up.”
She grunted in acknowledgement as she tucked her license back in her wallet.
“Just glad you and Anderson gave that bastard Thresher as good as you got,” he said, tipping his cap to her. “Better, since he’s still dead. You have a nice day, ma’am.”
Her apartment was dark when she walked in, empty of everything that had made her rusty metal bunk feel like home. She didn’t turn on the lights, grabbed a beer out of the fridge – no goddamn telling how old it was, but it wasn’t like it would go bad – and knocked the cap off against the countertop.
Los Angeles was as familiar as ever out her window, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of being backed into a blind corner at not being able to see the coastline, and she twitched every time she heard a helicopter.
The next day, she got on her motorcycle and drove inland, headed for the desert, leaving behind the medical report that had told her she’d been clinically dead when they hauled her out of the ruined Normandy and in a medically induced coma for months afterward – the report that said she’d lost about a year of her life, all told – and her discharge papers from the jaeger program. Unfit for duty, honorably discharged.
Anderson had told her he’d received something similar, his entire right side too busted up to pilot one of the machines anymore, even though she could barely detect the limp when he walked.
There weren’t any kaiju in the desert.
***
The dusty bell over the door clattered when someone pushed it open with enough force that Simza knew it wasn’t one of the regulars. The look on the bartender’s face and the way he reached under the counter for his shotgun told her the rest of what she needed to know, and she tilted back her shot glass, unconcerned with the burn of the whiskey on the way down.
“Told the last ones I wasn’t going back,” she said without turning around. “Guess y’all want your own custom dental work.”
“My dental work is just fine, thank you.” Anderson sounded on the verge of laughter, and she turned so fast the barstool wobbled.
“The hell are you doing here?” she demanded, beaming, gesturing to the barstool beside her. “Hud, get my friend here a drink, on me.”
“No drinks for me,” Anderson said, tugging down on the hem of his dress coat to straighten it, shiny gold medals on his chest catching the dusty, dim light. “I’m here on business.”
“Ah, hell.” She picked up the glass Hud had set down for Anderson and took a swig out of it. “Don’t tell me you’re just another asshole here to try to drag me back to the coast. That damn wall ain’t gonna do any good, and I’m not gonna be around when they bust it down.”
“It’s already busted down, Shepard. That’s why I’m here.” Anderson leaned against the bar, watching her drink his beer. “There was a breach in Sydney this morning. They’ve authorized an emergency recommission of the jaeger program.”
“Good for them,” she muttered into the glass. “Don’t see what that has to do with me.”
“We need you to come back to pilot the Normandy.” He paused, watching the stubborn set of her jaw, and added quietly, “I need you to come back.”
“Oh fuck me, Anderson,” she groaned, setting down the half-empty glass. “Don’t pull that shit on me. You know damn well they won’t let me back in one of those rust buckets, even if I wanted to.”
“They don’t have much choice.” He took his cap off, set it on the bar with a little sigh. “We’ve lost almost all our pilots in the last six months. They’re desperate.”
She drained the rest of the beer and dashed the foam off her upper lip with the back of her wrist, frowning down at the scuffed bar. “I guess they must be,” she said gruffly, “if they’re asking a ghost to come back.” She looked up at him sideways. “What about copilot? How’s your leg?”
Anderson chuckled darkly, shaking his head. “I’d love to get back in one of those things with you, but I just can’t move like I used to. I’ll be in the control room, cheering you on.”
“Guess that’ll have to do.” She slapped a handful of cash down on the bar and slung her leg over the barstool and shook everything out as she stood up. “Let’s see what’s out there.”
***
“No.”
“Shepard –”
“Fuck no. I am not getting back in that machine with some – punkass kid who hasn’t even graduated high school, I don’t care whose son he is.”
She slammed her locker shut hard enough the cheap aluminum latch bent and bounced it back to her, and then slammed it shut again hard enough that it stayed.
“Give him a chance. Do the combat drill. Get in the simulator.”
She rolled her eyes to the side to give Anderson an exasperated look, but he was having none of it. “How old were you when you got in the Normandy with me, Shepard?”
“Older than this asshole,” she muttered, but it was a token argument, and she was glad the kid couldn’t hear her sounding like a petulant child being reprimanded. “Look, it’s gonna be a cluster,” she said.
And it was.
Alarm klaxons blared when they both came rocketing out of alignment, fighting for control of the drift.
“I had it!” he shouts as he’s ripping the helmet off, and she shoves him before she’s fully out of the harness.
“I fucking told you to let me do it!” she snarls, in his face, not budging at all when he shoves back. “Look, I don’t give a fuck who your mom was –”
“Don’t you fucking say shit about my mom!”
Later, Anderson will say that they don’t know who threw the first punch, but she’ll always say it was her, and Angelo will always say it was him. They came at each other in perfect sync, nothing held back, knuckles bruising and swelling, and when they hit the floor and rolled, she heard Joker and Kaidan yelling to get them apart, heard Anderson shouting “No! Leave ‘em alone.”
He’d always known her best, in the end.
After the fight, Angelo missing a tooth, Simza with an eye so swollen she couldn’t see out of it, they did it again. The next day, they climbed into the simulator, and this time the drift was flawless.
“Neural handshake at a hundred percent,” Joker said in awe, and they both grinned, feral and buzzing with the thrill of the drift.
And just in time. The paint was still drying on the rebuilt and rechristened Normandy Omega when the alarm went up: Category Three, surfacing fast, codename Sovereign.