Lillian Shepard (ME3 Headcanon Archive)

     He sat back in his seat, carefully put his feet up on top of his locked helm station, and sighed. “Yeah, okay, so, the… uh, the thing you’re going to need to know about Major Shepard, first off, is that she’s the hardest hardass in the universe. You know who her mom is?”

    “Yeah, I read her file. Captain Hannah Shepard of the SSV Orizaba.”

    “Right, so you can guess how much time mom had for parenting. She let the gene-ups and holoschools do all the work, really. I mean, not that it didn’t turn out kind of amazing, but, uh. She doesn’t… make friends easy, you know? Like, everything fits into this moral…” Joker gestured. “…superstructure, this whole black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me, better-or-worse kind of thing. She chooses the right thing to do, and then she just does it. Drags everybody with her. You know? That whole marine thing, ‘Lead, Follow, or Stand Aside.’”

    Sam made a face for a moment. “Sounds like I picked the wrong ship to be rescued on.”   

Joker shook his head.  “Now, don’t get me wrong, you have to be like that to do the things she’s done, right? You can’t really let yourself second-guess, or you go back and second-guess everything else.”

“She sounds practically inhuman to work for though.”

“Well… I mean, she just expects people to perform at their best, right? Not even to make it look easy, just… she’s got a lot riding on her. She’s an N7, she’s a Spectre, she’s kind of the— well, I mean, she was being marketed as the ideal Alliance soldier. That’s kind of a lot to carry around. Plus she thinks she has to work double-time since she was off the radar for so long.”

    “You said she’s gene-modded?” Sam asked.

    “Yeah, like you wouldn’t believe. She got signed up for every solidified gene-wipe there is, and all of them took. Every single one. You know how usually you get some but not others, and hey, now you don’t catch colds, or you’ll never get arthritis or maybe you get lucky and you get both, but there’s like eighteen others that just don’t work? Well, Major Shepard got pretty much every single one as a blue-mark.”

    Sam stared, waiting. Joker was looking at her as though expecting her to recoil in surprise. After a moment, she raised her eyebrows, prompting him to explain.

    “A blue-mark is where you’re top-percentile. Full mod-acceptance. So basically, Lillian is smarter, her muscles work better, her bones are tougher, her eyesight’s sharper, she’s probably never going to get cancer, she doesn’t ever get sick, she only needs like… five hours’ sleep every night, it’s…” Joker shook his head. “it’s nuts. It’s crazy.”

    “Wait, so, basically, she’s the best example of humanity? Like a ‘perfect human’?”

    Joker pursed his lips and made a yes-no gesture with his hand. “Eh, kind of. It’s not like there’s a perfect human, right? It’s more like… she’s the best possible combination of all the genes that went into her. Like, if you don’t have the genes for heterochromic eyeballs, gene-modding isn’t gonna give them to you. But, yeah. Way better than just random combinations of passed-on traits. It’s like she’s her perfect self.”

    Sam sat back, thinking for a moment. “It’s hard to imagine the perfect human being a five-foot-three redhead, so that’s good,” she said wryly.

    Joker snickered to himself. “‘Aren’t you a little—” he began.

    “‘—short for a stormtrooper?’” They both finished together.

Both broke out laughing for a moment.

“Wait, wait, okay, hold on,” Joker said, waving her off. “Hold on, no, you don’t get to laugh at that joke unless you’ve actually watched that stuff, Traynor.”

“What?” Sam asked. “Watched Star Wars? I’ve seen all six of them, thank you very much!” she huffed.

“Yeah, but did you watch them in the right order?”

Traynor narrowed her eyes a little. “Starting with a New Hope, then The Empire Strikes Back, then—”

“No, no, no, see, that’s what I mean. Phantom Menace comes first—”

“Absolutely not!” Sam declared, raising her voice to cut him off. “The New Hope Trilogy was published first, and then they went back and wrote the Imperial Dawn Trilogy afterward! You can’t just say that Imperial Dawn came first, just because it’s first in the timeline! You have to watch them in the order they were published so you can appreciate the differences in storytelling style!”

Joker scoffed. “What, so that’s what you do?”

Sam folded her arms. “And what if I do happen to like cheesy classic sci-fi two-dees?”

Joker blinked. “Wait, what?” he asked, looking over at her again.

“Two-dees. Star Wars was first published as a 2D movie, Joker. You can’t poss—” she stopped, then gasped, eyes wide. “No! You’re kidding! You’ve never watched them in flat, have you? You haven’t!”

“Hey, it’s a long list of crappy rubber-suit movies, a guy’s only got so much time!” Joker said defensively.

Sam laughed. “And here you are pretending to bar the way from the philistines! I bet you haven’t even watched Indiana Jones!”

Joker slunk in his seat a little. “I’ve seen some of it—”

“The highlight reel from sixteen years ago where they cut the whole thing together and made as though it was one movie?” she challenged.

Joker held out his hands in front of him. “It was a good flick! You cut out all the chaff with the Nazis and—”

“That was the best part, Joker! Augh, you’re kidding me. We’re going to have to start all over with you, aren’t we?” Sam asked, sitting up in her chair and waking up her dim orange display.

“Wait, what?” Joker asked again. He was saying that a lot tonight. He hadn’t had a chance to really get into full nerd-mode with someone in years.

“Here,” Sam said. She held up her forearm and synced her omnitool to the cockpit stations’ displays. “How long are we auto-cruising?”

Joker glanced briefly to his screen. “Four hours on this hop, then a discharge and another three hour cruise to the mass relay. Why?”

“That’s enough time to binge-watch the whole trilogy. I’m off duty in twenty six minutes. You’re gonna be here?”

Joker gestured at his leg braces, neatly folded to the side of his chair. “Unless I gotta pee.”

The shockwave pushed away the low clouds and began to kick up a massive tsunami as it rapidly expanded. The sea rose up almost vertical, obscuring the remnants of the Everest and gathering momentum, throwing boats and flimsy dockside buildings up onto city streets.

Lillian slowly brought her hand to the radio trigger at her collar, but her mouth was dry and she was at a loss for words. She watched buildings, vehicles, and people be picked up and hurled, broken apart or crushed by the expanding bow-wave of air. Her eye’s digital rangefinder told her the oncoming devastation was three miles away.

Two miles. She leaned against the guardrail and realized hopelessly that she was thirteen stories up.

One mile. She caught her breath at last and shouted at the top of her lungs.

“AllianceforcesbracebraceBRACE—”

The wave rolled over her like an avalanche. It was eerily silent, so impossibly loud that it was beyond hearing, a smash of un-noise. The metal catwalk crumpled underneath her, the guardrail hit her in the chest and then folded and broke around her like wet paper. Her back hit the exterior of the building and she heard her armor creak as the crushing pressure tried to smash her flat.

Gravity took over a second later and her stomach lurched as the world dropped out from underneath her. She scrabbled for handholds, but the metal of the walkway was clanging away down the side of the building.

Lillian instinctively pulled her arms in to keep from twisting them, and she let herself fall, tumbling and bouncing down the slope of the wall. On the second roll, the shockwave’s differential pressure blew out every window, surrounding her in a blizzard of glittering razors that scraped and pinged off of her suit. Noise started to return, a sound like someone slowly turning up the volume on a televised earthquake.

The angled architecture she was falling down abruptly ended and she reached out for something, anything to grab hold of. A blown-out crater in the exterior of the building was wide enough for her hands to grasp, but her body was at the wrong angle and her momentum broke her grip. Part of her watched with a clinical eye as her last chance floated out of reach, and for an instant she relived slapping the button to seal Joker’s lifeboat just before the first Normandy was cut in half at the neck.

A nine story freefall spread out beneath her and seemed to take forever. It felt like she had a long time to consider everything that had led up to this moment. The city burned as it flipped above and below her, end over end. Her helmet’s radio played a staticky melee of conflicting voices. She relished the weightlessness of the long death-drop, blood rushing around her ears and making her giddy. All of her aches loosened up a little, the bruises of the day’s labor not seeming quite as bad as they had a moment before. She deliriously closed her eyes and exhaled.

Reality smashed into her and she blacked out for good.