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Echoes in the Static
The office was aggressively neutral. Beige walls, a slightly worn but comfortable-looking synth-leather chair opposite an equally beige desk, and a window overlooking a non-descript Alliance administrative complex courtyard. Benedict Shepard sat stiffly, hands clasped tight in his lap, tracing the seam on his trousers with a thumb. He’d changed out of his R&D lab coat into something less official, but still felt trapped under a microscope.
Across the desk, Dr. Aris Thorne offered a calm, patient smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Human, female, mid-fifties maybe, with sensible grey hair pulled back and the standard-issue Alliance datapad resting beside her elbow. Mandatory referral. That’s why he was here. Not because he wanted to be, but because punching lockers – even empty lockers – after snapping at Dr. Chen wasn't considered acceptable workplace decorum. Especially not when your surname automatically tripled the scrutiny.
“So, Mr. Shepard,” Dr. Thorne began, her voice modulated, calm. Professional. “Your file mentions an incident… an outburst. Would you like to start there?”
Benedict shifted, the synth-leather groaning softly. “I assume you’ve read the report.” His voice was low, clipped.
“I have the official summary,” she clarified gently. “But summaries rarely capture the… context. Or the feeling. What happened, from your perspective?”
He sighed, letting his head tip back against the chair for a moment, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles. Each tiny perforation felt like an eye staring back. “Fine. We had a successful simulation run. Big one. A potential pathway to significantly reducing mass effect field reliance for localized FTL jumps. Huge implications for breaking free from… well, from the old tech infrastructure. Reaper tech, ultimately.” He paused, swallowed. “It was my team’s work, my algorithms finally cracking a major barrier.”
“That sounds like a significant achievement,” Dr. Thorne prompted.
“It was ,” Benedict said, sitting forward again, the frustration starting to bubble. “We were celebrating, reviewing the data, and Chen… Dr. Chen… he made a joke.” He clenched his jaw. “Something about ‘Like father, like son, tearing down old galactic paradigms.’ Meant it as a compliment, I guess. Thought he was being clever.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
Benedict let out a short, harsh breath that wasn't quite a laugh. “How did it make me feel?” He looked directly at her, the defensiveness cracking slightly. “It made me feel like three years of intense work, countless dead ends, sleepless nights, my entire contribution… was just an footnote. An echo. Like the only reason it mattered, the only frame of reference anyone has for anything I do, is him .”
He gestured vaguely, encompassingly. “Commander John Shepard. Hero of the Citadel. Slayer of Reapers. Savior of the Galaxy. The man whose face is practically etched onto the collective consciousness.” He tapped his own chest. “My father. Whom I never met.”
Dr. Thorne remained silent, letting the weight of his words settle in the quiet room. Her stillness was unnerving, yet somehow less judgmental than the usual reactions he got.
“It wasn’t just Chen,” Benedict continued, the dam starting to break now that the first crack had appeared. “It’s always like this. It’s been like this my entire life. Twenty-five years of it.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, thick like the vids showed his father’s had been. “Do you know what it’s like? People hear the name ‘Shepard,’ and they get this… look. Reverence. Awe. Then they see me .”
He met her gaze again, a flicker of bitterness in his green eyes – another inherited trait. “And the disappointment is almost immediate. Oh, you’re in R&D? Not N7? Not leading suicide missions against rogue synthetics?” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Or worse, they get excited. ‘Wow, you look just like him!’ Yeah, thanks. Thanks for reminding me that the most notable thing about my appearance is that I resemble a ghost.”
“It sounds incredibly isolating,” Dr. Thorne offered softly.
“Isolating doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Benedict scoffed, though the fight was draining out of him, replaced by a weariness that went bone-deep. “It’s… it’s like living in static. There’s this constant background hum of expectation, of comparison. When I was a kid, it was teachers saying, ‘Your father would be so proud.’ Okay, maybe. Or maybe he’d wonder why his son prefers calculus to calibrating thermal clips.”
He looked down at his hands again. “Then I got older, and the resemblance became more obvious. People started approaching me. Not because they cared about my work on alternate energy sources or FTL theory, but because they wanted Shepard stories. They wanted gossip. They wanted an ‘in.’ ‘Hey, Ben, think you could introduce me to Admiral T’Soni?’ Or, ‘Is it true Archangel Vakarian really shot a merc’s head clean off from two klicks away just for spilling his drink?’”
His voice took on a mocking edge. “‘You must hang out with them all the time, right? The legends? Your dad’s crew?’”
“Are they… part of your life?” she asked carefully.
A different emotion surfaced now, softer, warmer. “Yeah,” Benedict nodded. “Yeah, they are. Tali… Aunt Tali, she’s… she’s the best. And Garrus. Uncle Garrus.” He managed a faint smile. “They’re family. The real kind. They knew him, obviously. They loved him. But they don’t… they don’t lay his ghost on me. They yell at me when I’m being an idiot, they cheer when I actually succeed at something as me , they tell me stories about him sometimes, but not like… not like he’s a benchmark I’m failing to meet. They just tell me about their friend. They tell me he would’ve loved me. That’s… that helps.”
He sighed again, the smile fading. “But they can’t be there every second. They can’t deflect every stupid comment, every hopeful idiot trying to get close to the legend by proxy.”
The room was quiet again, save for the distant hum of the building’s climate control.
“And your mother?” Dr. Thorne inquired. “Miranda Lawson. That carries its own weight, I imagine. Especially working within scientific circles.”
Benedict’s expression tightened. “Mom…” He paused, searching for the right words. “She’s brilliant. Fierce. She tried… she tries … so hard to shield me from it. Moved us around when I was younger, used different names sometimes until the resemblance became too much. She poured everything into raising me, giving me opportunities she never had. Genetics, freedom… all that.”
He looked away towards the window, though his gaze was distant. “I love her more than anything. But… sometimes I look at her, and it’s just… sad. She’s done incredible work herself, rebuilt networks, helped stabilize planetary comms grids after the war… but she never… she never remarried. Never really let anyone else in, not truly.” He hesitated. “I know she had… companions. Over the years. But nothing stuck. It’s like… like she’s living in his shadow too. This perfect, idealized memory of the man she loved, frozen in time at the moment he saved everyone.” He frowned slightly. “Her and Aunt Liara… they work together a lot. Maybe…” He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, she deserved her own life, not just… Keeper of the Flame. And I feel guilty sometimes, like maybe if I wasn't a constant, walking reminder…”
He trailed off, picking at the seam on his trousers again.
“It’s a heavy burden,” Dr. Thorne said, her voice gentle but firm. “Carrying the weight of your father’s legacy, your mother’s grief, and the expectations of the galaxy, all while trying to forge your own identity.”
“Identity…” Benedict repeated the word quietly. “Yeah. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Sometimes I’m working on my designs, pushing the boundaries, trying to find solutions that are mine, truly mine… and then I catch my reflection in a console screen. Dark hair, green eyes, that stupid jawline… and I just think…” His voice cracked slightly, the raw hurt finally surfacing unfiltered. “Am I just chasing a ghost? Is that all I am? An echo? Why the hell did I have to look so much like him?”
He finally looked up, meeting Dr. Thorne’s gaze. The practiced confidence was gone, the veneer of detached sarcasm stripped away. In its place was just a young man, lost and overwhelmed, asking a question nobody could truly answer.
“Why couldn’t I just be… me?”
The question hung in the sterile air of the office, heavy and unanswered. Benedict held Dr. Thorne’s gaze, the rawness still evident on his face. The silence stretched, but unlike the awkward silences before, this one felt… different. Less like waiting, more like acknowledging.
Finally, Dr. Thorne leaned forward slightly, her expression softening with genuine empathy, losing some of its professional reserve without sacrificing its steadiness.
“Because ‘just being you’ is complicated, Benedict,” she said, her voice losing its slightly formal edge, becoming warmer. “Especially when ‘you’ are inexorably tied to one of the most significant figures in galactic history. It’s not fair. It’s not simple. And everything you’ve described – the frustration, the feeling of being invisible while simultaneously being under intense scrutiny, the isolation, the weight of expectation – it’s all completely understandable.”
She paused, letting him absorb that validation. It wasn’t pity, he noted distantly, it was understanding. A rare commodity.
“The incident with Dr. Chen,” she continued, gently guiding the conversation back, “it wasn’t just about his clumsy comment, was it? It sounds like it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The culmination of years of feeling like your own accomplishments, your own identity, are constantly being filtered through the lens of your father’s.”
Benedict gave a slight, jerky nod. Saying it aloud felt both relieving and exhausting. “Yeah. It just… snapped something. Like, even this? My biggest professional success yet? Even this isn’t mine? It’s just… more Shepard stuff?”
“And that feeling is incredibly diminishing,” Dr. Thorne acknowledged. “It undermines your sense of self-worth and agency. The fact that you resemble him physically adds another layer, making it impossible to escape, even visually.”
She picked up her datapad but didn’t activate it, just held it lightly. “Benedict, you’ve been navigating an extraordinary amount of pressure, largely alone, for your entire life. You mentioned your mother’s efforts to shield you, and the support from Tali and Garrus – that ‘found family’ structure is vital. But the core issue, this feeling of living in an echo, of wrestling with a legacy you never asked for… that’s something internal that needs addressing.”
“So, what?” Benedict asked, a hint of the old defensiveness returning. “You have a pill for ‘Excessive Hero Father Syndrome’?”
Dr. Thorne offered a small, sympathetic smile. “No. There’s no pill, no easy fix. Therapy isn’t about finding a magic switch to turn off these feelings or erase your father’s shadow. He’s part of your history, part of the galaxy’s history. That won’t change.”
She met his eyes firmly. “What we can do, here, is create a space where you can safely unpack all of this. Where you can differentiate between the expectations others place on you – because of the name, the face – and who you actually are, what you actually value.”
She leaned back slightly, adopting a more forward-looking tone. “We can work on developing strategies for navigating those comparisons when they inevitably arise. Ways to respond, internally and externally, that reinforce your sense of self instead of letting those comments erode it. We can explore your achievements, like your R&D work – which sounds genuinely groundbreaking, by the way – for their own merit, completely divorced from your lineage.”
“Explore how?” Benedict asked, skeptical but listening intently now.
“By talking,” she said simply. “By examining these patterns. By challenging the assumptions – both yours and others'. By understanding how these external pressures have shaped your internal landscape. We can talk about your relationship with your mother, the complexities there, the shared but different ways you both exist in relation to your father’s memory. We can talk about what the support from Tali and Garrus means, and how to lean on that constructively.”
She gave him a direct look. “It’s a process, Benedict. It won’t be quick, and some days will be harder than others. Today was a significant first step – just acknowledging the depth of this feeling, articulating it. That takes courage.”
For the first time, Benedict felt a flicker, not quite of hope, but of possibility. Maybe the static couldn't be silenced entirely, but maybe… maybe he could learn to find his own signal within it.
“Okay,” he said quietly, the single word carrying more weight than anything else he’d said that hour. “Okay. Where do we start?”
Dr. Thorne gave a small nod, a hint of a genuine smile touching her eyes this time. “We start by scheduling our next session.”
The automatic doors hissed shut behind Benedict, muffling the sterile quiet of the administrative block and returning him to the ambient sounds of the Alliance complex – the distant hum of shuttles, the chatter of personnel passing by, the rustle of wind through the carefully landscaped gardens. He’d booked the follow-up appointment, his hand surprisingly steady as he tapped the confirmation on his omni-tool.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and started walking towards the transit hub, his gaze fixed on the synthetic flagstones beneath his feet. The conversation with Dr. Thorne replayed in his mind – not as a jumble of anger and frustration this time, but as distinct threads. Validation. Strategy. Process. It wasn’t a solution, not yet, maybe never entirely, but it was… something. A recognition, at least. A space to breathe.
The late afternoon sun warmed the side of his face, a welcome physical sensation after the emotional chill of the office. He tipped his head slightly, letting the light soak in, feeling the tight knot in his shoulders ease just a fraction. He focused on the simple feeling, the warmth, the quiet crunch of his boots on the path. Maybe… maybe it wasn't about escaping the shadow, but learning to stand within it without being completely obscured.
Then, the warmth vanished. A vast coolness fell over him, sudden and complete. The sunlight was abruptly blocked, plunging him into an artificial twilight.
Benedict stopped walking. He didn’t need to look up immediately; he knew what cast that shadow. He’d felt its metaphorical weight his entire life; here, it was literal.
He let out a slow breath, a faint smirk – wry, resigned, perhaps a touch defiant – playing on his lips. Tilting his head back, he looked up.
And up.
Looming over the central plaza, the nexus connecting all the Alliance HQ buildings, stood the monument. One hundred meters of gleaming alloy and reinforced polymer, sculpted into the likeness of Commander John Shepard. Clad in N7 armor, rifle held loosely at his side, his gaze fixed eternally on the horizon, towards the space he’d fought and died to protect. A symbol of sacrifice, heroism, and unwavering resolve, casting a long, undeniable shadow across the grounds. Across him .
Benedict stood there for a long moment, dwarfed by the effigy, the silent, unyielding presence of the man he resembled, the father he never knew. The static was still there, the weight hadn’t magically lifted after one hour of talking. But something, however small, had shifted within him.
Meeting the statue’s impassive metal gaze, Benedict spoke, his voice quiet but clear in the sudden stillness beneath the towering figure.
“Hello, dad.”