Chapter Text
The kids don't care if you're alright, honey.
Pills don't help, but it sure is funny.
Paragon
Jane Shepard woke up to the sound of her space hamster running on his wheel in her tiny studio apartment near the Alliance HQ in Vancouver. She looked up at her calendar on the wall and sighed heavily. She’d been under house arrest for three months after serving harder time in an Alliance prison under interrogation. Throughout the entire ordeal so far, she’d been totally alone. None of her friends from the Normandy had written a word to her. No vid messages. Not even a fucking card on her goddamned birthday.
Thirty-two. Technically thirty, depending on how anyone wanted to count being dead for two years. She was thirty-two, she’d learned about the Reapers a little over three years ago, and thwarted every plan the giant mechanical space squids had to eradicate life in the galaxy, all so she could try to buy enough time for various interstellar governments to fucking listen to her.
Shepard rolled onto her side and hid her eyes from the early morning sunlight. She hated waking up alone. The bed in this cell of an apartment was tiny, there was no way she could fit anyone else in here with her let alone an alien boyfriend at least a foot taller than herself. She still fought back tears every time she opened her eyes after being somewhere else in her dreams. Sometimes they were tears of sorrow, and sometimes they were tears of relief because she’d been having a nightmare.
Shepard buried her face in the dark kinetic weaving of a bullet resistant shirt that she slept with every night. The sleeves were wrapped around her in the pale imitation of a lover’s embrace. She inhaled deeply knowing that the warm, metallic scent of Turian had long since faded from the fabric.
She wondered what everyone was doing these days. Had Tali been put on the Admiralty Board? How were Legion and the rest of the Geth doing? Was Liara okay being the Shadow Broker? How had Thane’s illness progressed, did Kepral’s Syndrome finally catch up with him? Shepard hoped he’d been able to spend more time with his son and make up with Kolyat. Did Grunt ever pass his Rite of Honor and was she a grandmother yet? How was Wrex doing with a contender for toughest hump on Tuchanka? What were Jacob and Miranda up to now that they’d quit Cerberus? Did Samara make it to visit her daughters? Did Zaeed finally retire? What was Mordin doing? Was he back at his clinic on Omega or had he picked up Maelon’s research and tried to finish the genophage cure? How was Jack liking teaching at Grissom Academy? Were she and Nia still together? How was Kasumi? How were Joker, Dr. Chakwas, Kelly? Did Ash ever come out to her family about the whole bisexual and alien girlfriend thing? Did Garrus make up with his dad, or get the Turian military to listen to him?
She hoped he had more success in that department than she did. She also hoped he still thought about her at least half as much as she thought of him. The last thing he’d said to her before she waltzed her happy ass out of her ship to a waiting pair of handcuffs was that he’d never stop loving her. It would have been nice to believe, but beautiful lies were the hardest to break free from.
But… he wasn’t lying. Garrus doesn’t lie. Not to me.
Shepard pulled Garrus’s shirt more tightly around her. She tried to remember what it felt like when he held her and found that her mind couldn’t call anything forth. Even her dreams were faint memories of talons and teeth and a long, pointed tongue.
Shepard’s house arrest could have been bearable if she could have at least fucking talked to any of her friends. After a blur of interrogations using borderline illegal methods overseen by Alliance brass that didn’t give half a shit that she used to be Commander Jane Goddamn Shepard, after solitary confinement where she nearly lost her mind, the house arrest was the worst part. She was nominally free, but constantly watched by guards, handlers, and anything else the Alliance thought they needed to keep her in a very small area of the city in which she grew up.
Shepard rolled over and glanced at the vid screen on the wall across from her bed. She’d fallen asleep binging old cartoons. It was something, at least. Not her music, but something to keep her mind from coming up with extraneous thoughts to prevent her from sleeping. She supposed she could get up, get herself presentable.
—
Shepard stepped out of the shower and toweled herself dry. She pulled on a pair of black uniform pants and boots, trying to avoid looking at the fractal scars snaking down her arms and one leg. The tight elastic band of a sports bra snapped into place under her breasts. She contemplated the blue shirt laying over the footboard of her bed and made a different selection instead. She tied the sleeves of Garrus’s old shirt around her neck and zipped up her N7 jacket overtop of it. The Alliance had kept her personal possessions for her while she was in prison, but Shepard had insisted on being allowed to take this shirt with her.
“If you want to take this from me, it’ll be from my cold, dead fingers. You really wanna fuck with Commander Goddamn Shepard?”
“Prison regulations state–”
“Fuck your regulations. How are you going to stop me?” She glared out from under her bangs, eyes burning with cold fire.
The guard took half a step back, stammering an apology.
“That’s what I thought.”
That hadn’t been the last time someone tried to fuck with her. Three months at a blacksite under interrogation, and when she wasn’t there she was in solitary, and when she wasn’t there she did have limited contact with the other prisoners. Shepard had mostly kept to herself during those times. It wasn’t out of fear. She just didn’t want to get involved with prison politics.
“Yo, Red!”
Shepard rolled her eyes but didn’t look up from her table in the corner of the mess hall. Harsh fluorescent lights cast stark shadows on the concrete walls and aluminum furniture. She’d learned early on not to sit with her back to the room.
“Hey!” The voice was louder now. If Shepard deigned to peek through her bangs, she’d find its owner. “I’m talking to you, Red.”
Red. That was what they all called her. She wouldn’t give her name, and the prison guards didn’t either. The fact that Commander Shepard was in this fucking hole was the tightest secret in all of Alliance space. Quietly disappeared after being stripped of her rank, her ship, her accomplishments, and dishonorably discharged after saving the goddamn galaxy three fucking times.
“We’re not supposed to talk to one another,” Shepard said quietly. Normally if she just engaged gray rock protocol and made herself uninteresting, they all left her alone.
“You think these assholes are gonna protect you?” the other prisoner sneered right next to her ear. Shepard crushed the impulse to strike and potentially kill them. “I got a question for you. Why’re you so special they let you keep this?”
Shepard felt a tug on the shirt sleeves tied around her neck. She closed her hand over the knot that hung in front of her chest. She realized she was shaking with the effort of staying still. She’d been on her best behavior so far, done what she could to prove that she wasn’t supposed to be in a place like this. She was Commander Goddamn Shepard. She wasn’t a mass murderer or a terrorist.
Except that she was. Shepard glared out from under her bangs. “Because nobody is going to take it from me, least of all some scum of the earth fuckbitch I could break over my knee.”
“Think you’re a badass, Red?” Another tug on the sleeves.
Shepard arched an eyebrow. “Think? I know. My body count is orders of magnitude higher than yours. Now back the fuck up. We’re not supposed to be talking to each other.”
“Where’d you get this?” Two more tugs. Shepard could feel dozens of pairs of eyes on her, waiting to see if “Red” would finally do something.
Shepard inhaled deeply through her nose. “If I tell you, will you leave me the hell alone?”
“Depends on the answer.”
“I fucked a Turian. Multiple times. Had him calling me a goddess in bed. Satisfied?”
Footsteps stomped away from her as guards finally got off their asses to intervene. Shepard kept her eyes on the table and slumped over with a sullen expression. She hadn’t started the altercation, but she sure as hell was going to pay for it. She wrapped one arm around her waist.
Shepard raked a brush through her wet hair while she thought. The water made little pitter-patter noises as droplets hit the hard tile floors of her studio. She tried pushing her bangs back out of her eyes, but they just fell forward again. She couldn’t do a damn thing with her hair without Kasumi, it seemed. Shepard pulled back what she could into a ponytail at the base of her neck. The rest hung over scars that had steadily looked worse the longer she’d been on Earth. Shepard tried to smile at herself in the mirror and couldn’t get the deep canyon dug into her cheek to disappear completely. The expression looked fake, hollow. She wasn’t happy. How could she be? Commander Shepard learned a long time ago that she was nothing without her squad, without her friends.
How many had she lost now? Annie, Helena, and the rest of her old gang that used to run in the slums of this very city. She’d bounced around between a few groups at the Alliance naval academy, then been plucked out of the milieu of students by her figure-skating coach, Roxanne “Goose” Jett. Her proving ground for the Alliance N7 program had been the Skyllian Blitz, and Goose’s intuition about little Sheep had been proven right. Shepard had earned her place on McDonald’s squad with Goose and the others. She’d found herself another little family. Then they got eaten by a Thresher Maw on Akuze and she was the only one left. Her performance had been enough to catch the eye of the Council and made her the first Human Spectre. Her induction into that had set her on the path to discover the Reapers, meet her best friends, and fall in love with a fuckmothering Turian of all people. Now they were all gone too. She was alone. Again.
Tali at least had taught Shepard enough about makeup to do a little something about the dark circles under her eyes. Shepard lightly dusted purples and grays on her top lid and drew straight, sharp lines along her lashes. She brushed a gunmetal powder on the outer corners of her bottom lashline. It wasn’t much, but it’d do.
Shepard nibbled on a strawberry poptart, not her favorite, but the chocolate ones were in short supply for whatever godforsaken reason. She looked up from the tiny table in her kitchen out the window and saw a little boy playing with a toy spaceship on his family’s balcony. He was a cute kid, maybe around Theia’s age. Shepard wondered what the little Asari was doing right now. She looked up into a blue sky dotted with clouds. What were any of the people she’d met on her missions doing right now? Shiala, the Asari she’d rescued from the Thorian on Feros; Char the Krogan and his girlfriend; Maelon, Mordin’s wayward student, or David, Mordin’s protege from the clinic on Omega; the Rachni Queen. There were others whose faces she could remember but whose names escaped her for the time being. Too many other errant thoughts fought for her attention.
She checked her omni-tool for any messages knowing she wouldn’t find them. She hadn’t even been allowed to log in to her fucking terminal to play an online video game since getting out of prison. She hoped Tali had found the time to keep up with feeding Shepard’s virtual pets.
Someone knocked on her door. Shepard tossed the last piece of poptart into her mouth and answered. A young man, maybe a few years younger than herself, with warm brown skin and more muscles than she knew what to think about, greeted her with a salute. Tattoos curved around each side of his neck, stopping just below his hairline. He kept his black hair cropped short and kind of spiked up on top. “Commander.”
“James, you’re not supposed to call me that.” Shepard said to James Vega, a lieutenant in the Alliance marine corps. He’d been one of her babysitters since she’d been grounded and confined to this apartment block.
“I’m not supposed to salute you either,” James said. He couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking down to Shepard’s legs. “I don’t suppose you had any plans today.”
Shepard looked back over her shoulder to where a pair of ice skates hung off a peg on her wall. “Nothing that can’t wait.” Skating was the one leisure activity she could still enjoy. She’d gotten a lot of her old rhythm back in the last few months, and even re-learned plenty of tricks Goose had taught her that were technically illegal in competition, but impressive as fuck and got her rounds of applause from some of the younger kids at the rink. If the Alliance never let her leave Earth again, she could settle down and teach figure skating, maybe.
“We gotta go, the defense committee wants to see you,” James said.
Shepard snorted. “The fuck do they want with me?”
“If you ask me, I think they stopped deciding to be a bunch of pendejos and are taking you seriously. But they wouldn’t tell me why they want you. Just that they need to see you. Now.”
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Shepard sighed. She followed James through the crowded hallway. People gave the burly marine a wide berth, but some of them shoulder-checked Shepard on accident. Sometimes she wished she were six feet tall and built like a brick house instead of five-eight and more lithe than stocky. She could still throw a punch to knock anyone on their ass, regardless of species or size. She could still headbutt a fucking Krogan into submission. People still made the mistake of underestimating Jane Shepard, though.
“Admiral,” James said, coming to a stop in front of an older man with brown skin, short gray hair, and a wide nose and mouth. The man wore the blue and gold uniform of a navy Admiral. James saluted.
“Anderson,” Shepard said, snapping to a salute out of habit. After her trial, the Council had opted to replace the then-Captain Anderson with Ambassador Udina as Humanity’s representative in the galaxy. A military man didn’t inspire a lot of trust in the Batarians, who’d all but demanded Shepard’s hide tanned and prepared for display as a throw rug. The Turian councilor, Sparatus, had objected, but the Asari and Salarian representatives overruled him. Aside from Humans, Turians had the newest seat and it had taken them thousands of years to achieve that. Humanity discovered it wasn’t alone in the galaxy barely thirty years ago.
“You look good, Shepard,” Anderson said.
“I’ll say…” James muttered, seemingly believing he’d kept the thought to himself. Shepard fought the urge to roll her eyes. She’d never told him she was seeing someone, partly because she wasn’t even entirely sure if she still was. She still loved Garrus though, and that was enough reason for her to not even look at anyone else.
“Maybe a little soft around the edges?” Anderson jabbed Shepard in the gut, but his hand met hardened steel the likes of which could make a Turian swoon. He shook out his wrist.
“I don’t go soft, Admiral,” Shepard said.
“How’re you holding up since you were relieved of duty?” Anderson asked, leading them towards the hall where the defense committee would be waiting.
Shepard exhaled loudly. “I fucking hate it. Hot food and soft beds are okay, but…”
“You feel like you’re stuck down here unable to do anything,” Anderson said grimly. His jaw had a harder set to it since he was relieved of his Council position.
More people rushed down the hall, flitting around like hummingbirds on the edge of a panic attack. “What’s going on?” Shepard asked. “Why’s everyone in such a hurry?”
“Admiral Hackett is mobilizing the fleets,” Anderson said. James peeled off to join up with another group. Anderson continued, “I guess word’s made it to the Alliance command. Something’s coming our way. Something big.”
“The Reapers.” Shepard said it as a statement of fact. Her shoulders drooped and the light behind her eyes died a little.
“We don’t know. Not for certain.” Anderson paused on the stairs and looked back down at her. Despite his words, Shepard knew the gears in his mind turned the same as hers. They knew what was coming, and now disgraced Commander Shepard was being pulled out of the closet to save their fucking asses.
“What the hell else could it be, Anderson?” Shepard demanded.
“If I knew that…” he trailed off.
“You know we’re not fucking ready,” Shepard said. “Not by a long shot.”
“Shepard, have I ever told you that I’m exceedingly glad you’re not my daughter?” Anderson said. “You may want to tone down the mouth in front of the committee.”
“Fuck the defense committee,” Shepard grumbled as they ascended the stairs once more. “Unless we’re planning to talk the Reapers to death, the committee is a waste of time.”
I’ve technically done that before.
A brief memory of the time she’d talked an indoctrinated Spectre into suicide popped into her head.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Anderson said. “But they’re just scared. None of them have seen what you’ve seen.”
If they had, they wouldn’t have cut me off from my goddamned therapist.
Anderson kept talking. “You’ve faced down a Reaper. Hell, you spoke to one, then blew the damn thing up!”
“What was that about language, Admiral?” Shepard teased.
“Shepard, you’ve seen how they harvest us, what they plan to do to us.” The stairs gave way to a long hallway filled with more Alliance soldiers, sailors, and airmen. “You know more about this enemy than anyone.”
“Is that why they grounded me and took away my goddamned ship?” Shepard snapped, rounding on Anderson to block his path. She glared up at him.
“You know that’s not true,” Anderson said, trying to placate her. “When you blew up the Batarian relay, hundreds of thousands of Batarians died!”
“You do not have to fucking remind me, Admiral,” Shepard spat. She felt tears try to escape and ruin the effort she’d put into her appearance. Her fist struck her thigh, right on top of the number 304,942 permanently etched into her skin in black ink. “Not a night goes by that I don’t hear those people screaming. If there had been any other way–”
“I know, Shepard,” Anderson reassured her. “It was either that or let the Reapers walk through the back door. The committee knows too, and if it wasn’t for that you’d have been court-martialed and left to rot in the brig.”
Shepard chuckled darkly. “Anderson, I’ve been in my little comfy cell for three months. Where the hell did you think I was for the first three after the trial?”
He looked taken aback.
Shepard snorted. “Never changed my story, no matter what they did to me. You know, I thought confessions under duress weren’t admissible?”
“Shepard,” Anderson began, but she cut him off.
“Let’s get this over with. I’m a soldier, not a fucking politician. We do this my way, cussing and all.” She started walking towards the end of the hall.
Anderson caught up to her. “I don’t need you to be either, just do whatever the hell it takes to help us stop the Reapers.”
The door opened and an officer quickly greeted them before directing Shepard and Admiral Anderson to the right, towards the courtroom the defense committee was using for their meeting space. James was there, and he wished her luck with a firm handshake before Shepard turned to follow Anderson and stopped in her tracks.
“Ash?” Shepard breathed.
“Lieutenant Commander,” Anderson greeted the dark-haired woman. She’d gone back to keeping her hair in a smart bun, more in line with Alliance regulations than the long braid she’d adopted while acting as the Alliance liaison on Shepard’s run against the Collectors. Ashley Williams wore a set of blue armor, an upgrade from her old kit.
“Shepard!” Ashley’s face lit up. Shepard took long, quick strides forward and crushed the small brunette in a hug. “They finally let you out of the hole, huh?”
“Shut the fuck up, Ash,” Shepard said. “What have you… where… Were you here this whole fucking time!?”
Ashley shook her head. “Not exactly. Liara and I have been following a few leads for Admiral Hackett. We actually lost her base to a Cerberus attack.” Ashley smiled nervously. “Same assassin fuck who tried to nail us on the Reaper. Li and Feron crashed the ship into a Cerberus cruiser. It was fucking awesome!”
Shepard laughed, then suddenly stopped. “Wait. Lieutenant Commander?” She squinted at Ashley. “You’re growing up, chief. Guess I have to call you LC now.”
“How’d it go in there, Lieutenant Commander?” Anderson asked.
“Hard to tell, I’m just waiting for orders now,” Ash said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you, Shep. These bastards were keeping you under lock and key, though. None of us were allowed to talk to you. Me, Dr. Chakwas, Joker, nevermind anyone not affiliated with the Alliance. Trust me. We tried.”
Shepard bit the back of her tongue to keep from freaking out on Anderson right there in the middle of the hallway. It wasn’t that nobody cared to try and contact her. They literally couldn’t.
Fuck. What if Garrus tried to contact me and thinks I’m mad at him! Dammit…
“Admiral,” an officer stepped up to catch Anderson’s attention.
“Come on,” Anderson said. He followed the officer without looking back to see if Shepard was coming. She hurried after him and cast a glance back at Ash who was giving her a little wave and smile of encouragement.