#*shepard bday 2014

small musings on all my Shepards

Winter has blanketed Serrice in a permanent snow and cold, but still she’s outside, looking upward. The night’s clear and the city lights are dim, residents sensibly asleep. Snow begins to fall and she closes her eyes, holds her arms out, and twirls in the sparkling starlight.

Her first set of finals start tomorrow. She’s stressed and exhausted and thoroughly convinced she’s going to fail (three hours of sleep and breakfast will change her mind to confidence). None of that exists out here. Right now, right here, it’s just her and the stars.

Her stars.

She knows all of Thessia’s constellations, can draw them from memory and name each star, nebula, and cluster in each bright point of light. But that’s school and studying and she left all of that behind in her room. They’re simply stars. Beautiful, bright, constant, powerful stars. She witnessed a star go nova last week, and found herself crying for the death of such an ancient being.

Wind blows snow through her hair, grown out from military regulations. She has six years to go before her hair needs to meet regs again. Returning to the Alliance seems like an eternity away, though she knows it’ll come sooner than she thinks. Liara sticks her head out of their window and yells at her to come back inside: it’s freezing and she’s not wearing a coat and the pizza’s here.

After Thessia, when Liara’s cried herself out and curled up in a fitful sleep, she activates the galaxy map and sits beneath its lights, leaning back on her hands. Her stars are covered in red, stars she couldn’t save. She turns off the reaper markers, but they’re burned on her eyes, their locations memorized.

Mindoir burned. The SR1 burned. Earth and Thessia are burning. Everything she’s ever considered home has burned. Her friends’ homes are burning. She stands up, the holographic map surrounding her.

small musings on all of my Shepards

She can’t do this, can’t breathe, doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to be anywhere (calm down please oh god take a deep breath), she can’t, actually physically cannot move, she’s crying and dizzy and finally she does the only thing she can think of. She activates her tactical cloak and runs.

This is not the first time.

Her mother finds her hours later, sitting red-eyed and sniffly with her knees pulled to her chest as she stares at the hypnotic lights of the drive core. But today, instead of pulling her up and giving her a quick hug and then taking her home, her mom sits next to her, wraps an arm around her shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of her head.

They talk about it that night over dinner, as much as she can, which isn’t much. She bites down on her back teeth, forcing herself to tell her mom everything and not run away. She knows enough to know that she hates the way things are. She talks to the ship’s doctor the next day, and meets with an Alliance psychiatrist when they’re on Arcturus a month later. She hasn’t been back in school, but her grades have risen since the CMO sent a note to her teacher; she’s allowed to review the recorded lectures instead of going to class, and takes all tests at home, supervised. She likes school again.

Her mother is not at all surprised when she chooses to the infiltrator specialization.

small musings on all of my Shepards

She starts to read, in rehab. She always had the skill, never bothered to use it beforehand. But now, she’s found herself with an extraordinary amount of spare time on her hands, and hell if she’s going to pick up knitting. Anderson’s been called back to duty, so it’ll be a while before she has a console again.

So she reads. Most of it’s dull as untoasted bread (she’d maim a guard for an extranet connection so she could get something written in this century), but it’s something to do and by the time Anderson comes by with the promised console, she’s decided that Dickens and Twain are awful and made the excellent decision to devour a decent chunk of the library’s African American Literature section (still nothing from this century; she’s put a complaint into the suggestion box).

Group therapy’s been talking for weeks about finding replacements for drugs, something to fill the time you used to devote to getting high. In her case, that’s a hell of a lot of time to fill.

Books and the gaming console help, but she’s fidgety and the Bluewire she swiped from the hospital gift shop can’t handle anything more than a basic door override, so she can’t even work on her programs and hacks. Arts and crafts is bullshit, no one needs that many things made out of popsicle sticks; her artistic talents are anyway limited to cooking heroin. And biotics are strictly prohibited for reasons beyond her comprehension.

She learns to do nothing. She’s meant to be learning skills and hobbies to fill the time, but she’s headed for the Alliance the day she turns 18 - papers are drawn up and everything - and nothing seems like a better way to fill the in-between months than learning combustion engine repair. There’s an art to sitting still and quiet, and she perfects it, because she might as well be good at something.

small musings on all of my Shepards

Mindoir left her smoldering, but Alchera set her on fire. Better, faster, stronger.

A gold blaze through the battlefield, she aims and shoots and barely a nanosecond passes before the brute’s head explodes and its body lumbers over itself, falling to a thudding stop. She’s so far ahead of Vakarian she’d have to turn her implants off until the end of the war to give him a fighting chance.

A cannibal howls in her face and she roars back before punching its eye and smashing her Black Widow into its skull with a satisfyingly sickening crunch. Vega lays down cover fire and Vakarian has her in his scope and she rushes forward to catch the last marauder off guard. This is her signature on the bloody and charred field in front of them, artwork of her own design.

She grabs its fringe, tightens her fingers and snarls at its struggle – she has cybernetics in her veins, too. But she’s angrier. She wins. As the banshee’s shriek scratches down her spine, she yanks, rips the marauder’s fringe completely off. It drops and collapses pathetically at her feet, dead. Reaper blood drips from her fingers.

The banshee’s nearly on top of her, but she rolls out of the way into cover and aims. She grins. Laughs.

small musings on all of my Shepards

They don’t know which one is older, only that one of them must be older because that is how things work, so they alternate years.

Yael’s the oldest the year they run through the streets of Tel Aviv after breaking out of yet another foster home they hated, laughing and glowing blue. Sho charges into a trashcan and Yael lifts it up, lets it soar a few feet before setting it down again. They end up in a temple that night and for many nights afterward, the rabbis and cantors long ceased asking questions about the stray children that sleep within the holy walls.

Rabbi Daniel decides that the payment for sleeping under the temple’s roof is education. Yael’s more eager than Sho, soaks up every word and prayer and story. Her Hebrew becomes better than her English.

(They can both curse up a storm in Yiddish)

Sho’s the oldest when buying a binder that fits and Yael shaves their head for them.

Sho’s still the oldest when Yael ends up in jail and Sho bails her out with money neither of them have.

(They join the Reds together)

Sho gets into an argument with the Reds leader, throws a shockwave so hard he flies ten feet into the air and lands flat on his back. He’s the first person they’ve killed.

Yael’s the oldest as she grabs their hand and the twins run as hard as they can, leaving everything behind.

They stay in a shabby temple on the other side of the city for a few nights, coming up with a plan. The Alliance recruitment office next door has free coffee and occasionally bagels, and they take informational pamphlets each time they take food or coffee, just to be polite. Their plan isn’t forming at all, but the pamphlets look promising. They’re both strong biotics, and there’s even a special pamphlet just for them.

They join the Alliance together, go through boot camp and basic together, even have their first assignment together. They’re split up after that for years, seeing each other only when shore leave schedules match up in time and place. They make do with the extranet and video chat on High Holy Days.

It’s only after Torfan and Elysium that they’re working side-by-side again. They’ve stopped worrying about who’s older, and instead worry about staying alive.

They’re the only two in their class to make it to the end of their N7 training.