Chapter Text
“No, the house is definitely not haunted, why do you ask?”
Neither of them had asked. The real estate agent laughs musically. “And I know it looks like a bit of a fixer-upper, but I promise you it’s in great shape on the inside.”
“Really,” says Shepard dubiously.
“Totally! Let’s go in and take a look.”
The agent marches up to the front door. Shepard follows more slowly, eyeing the house. It’s a cool, soothing shade of green, two stories, with a pointed roof. Fixer-upper? After a lifetime on shipboard or in Alliance housing, Shepard hardly knows what a solidly built house is supposed to look like.
With two windows overlooking the front door, it does look just a little bit like a face, though, doesn’t it?
“It looks solid enough to me,” Garrus says quietly from behind her. “The agent sure seems eager to get it off her hands, though.”
Shepard shrugs, heading up to the doorstep where the real estate agent is waiting with a smile. “Let’s see what the inside is like.”
Inside, it’s clean, quiet, sparsely furnished. Haunted? No; rather, anything personal seems to have been stripped away and replaced with stock art or tasteful sprays of artificial flowers in narrow glass vases.
“This is probably more space than we need,” Garrus says to the agent. “We’re really just looking for a quiet retreat for a few months.”
“Of course, I understand completely,” the agent says. “There are certainly other properties you could take a look at. But this is really a special house, I thought of it as soon as you called.”
Because you wanted to get rid of it? Shepard wonders, but she wanders into the kitchen anyway, leaving the two of them behind in the living room. It’s a spacious, oblong kitchen. Plenty of room for two people to prepare two different meals. Not that Shepard knows how to cook. Smooth gray stone countertops, white cabinets. Shepard moves to look out the kitchen window, placed over the sink.
Outside, she can see a small shed painted the same color as the house off to the right, and a stand of trees that degenerates into shattered tree stumps at the nearest edge. Beyond the trees are mist-covered hills; it’s too cloudy today to get a clear view. Standing there at the sink, Shepard has a sudden, powerful vision of a Reaper poised outside on its grasping black legs, its killing red beam lancing across the view, scorching and destroying those trees. Now, years after the war, those scars have faded.
She smells tea and cookies. For a moment, Shepard imagines that if she turns around, she’ll see… someone. A middle-aged woman, her mind tells her, in a comfortable cardigan, nose buried in a book as she sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea cooling by her side. Shepard finds she doesn’t want to turn around, caught up in the calmness of that image.
Someone had a life here, before the Reapers came; maybe a peaceful, quiet, comfortable life.
She turns around anyway, hearing voices approach from the other room.
Of course, there’s no one sitting at the table. The tempting aroma fades away as soon as Shepard moves.
“These are all high-end appliances,” the agent tells her brightly from the doorway.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Shepard says, glancing at Garrus.
He smiles at her. “I hear there are two guest rooms, if we want them.”
“Well, we could have people over,” Shepard says with a shrug, and follows them toward the stairs, looking around as she goes.
“See, what did I tell you? Everything’s in good shape,” the agent says.
And definitely not haunted, Shepard adds to herself, sarcastically.
Still. Shepard feels nothing but peace and quiet from this house. If there’s a ghost here, she wouldn’t mind seeing what its life was like.