#dane shepard

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“Cybernetics kept him alive, I don’t know how-” “Don't move him, his arm is-” “No choice, get ready for evac, we’ve got to get him to-” “The hospital’s still there. Sort of. They’ve got equipment to stablise him if you- is he awake?” “He’s awake,” Shepard grumbles out, whisper soft and tired. “‘N can hear what you’re sayin’.” “You’ve lost a lot of blood, you need to stay still.” Which is just as well, considering he wasn’t planning on going anywhere. They’re moving, hands on him and boots thudding against the remnants of the pathways. He looks up, stares at the commander’s jawline and wonders why he can only see her if he tilts his head to the left, blocks out the- Christ. He’s lost an eye. Figures it would take that to get him to panic. They won’t let him back into the military like this, not with impaired vision and without the Alliance he has nothing left, nothing to- nothing for- nothing, nothing, NOTHING- “Calm down, Shepard!” He laughs, a twisted noise grinding its way from a shattered throat and goes back to being a dead man. ---

Back of a shuttle. He knows the smell, the odd mix of sweat, ozone and fuel that pings off the taste of metal on the back of his tongue. Getting his eyes (eye) open is difficult but he does it anyway, blinks at the lights and does his best to keep himself from screaming. Painkillers. He needs some. They gave him some. “How does he keep waking up?” “Cybernetics, fight or flight, I don’t fucking know. How the hell does he do any of the things he’s done?” “Can still hear you,” he tries to say, but the oxygen mask makes it hard to talk. He groans instead, spine aching and his left arm is a fucking pain, these painkillers aren’t really helping but when he tilts his head to look there’s nothing there from just above the elbow. Cauterized, sizzled skin. He bets his leg looks about the same. Explains the eye. Dead man walking and he breathes in, breathes out, closes his eyes. Half a dozen reasons to let himself sleep but he can’t and he waits instead, rides the waves of pain from an arm that doesn’t exist anymore and tries not to think about the fluid he can feel in his left eye.

Survival, he thinks, has nothing to do with being the baddest motherfucker out there and everything to do with the bullshit other people feed you with.

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Medically induced coma, they call it. He sleeps for two months. They took him off the drugs three weeks ago but when he cracks open his eye he gets a slight static feedback before the new eye they gave him crackles into focus. Not perfect, not yet. Whirring and twisting and apparently they’ve fixed more than his face. “I can’t say yours is the face I wanted to wake up to, Sir.” Anderson laughs at him. It’s a relieved sort of sound, gravelly and rough and Dane wonders if that’s what his father might have sounded like if he’d lived and squashes that train of thought before it can get any further. He breathes in instead, chest no longer aching any more than usual. He’s never lived a day without pain, if seems, and when he sits up he feels the pressure on both arms. New arm. It stops working right the second he concentrates on it so he just doesn’t, hauling himself up the bed with a hiss. “Good to see you’re alive, Shepard.” Ah. Back into military zone. Or maybe he’s so used to calling him Shepard he doesn’t remember his first name. “My crew?” Steve, he thinks, stomach twisted up somewhere near his throat. Kaidan and James had gotten out, limping aboard the Normandy but he hadn’t heard anything of them after that. And Steve’s shuttle had gone down, smoke and fire and a name caught on the tip of his tongue- The heart monitor sped up just as Anderson opened his mouth. He’s got his hat off indoors. It makes him look older, somehow. “They’re okay. All of them survived.” All? But- “Edi?” “She’s fine.” So the little bastard on the Citadel had lied to him. Why the fuck would it have targeted all synthetics? Reapers could select their own code as well as broadcast it. Edi wasn’t entirely reaper tech anymore, neither were the Geth; they’d taken the code and repurposed it, redesigned it. Improved on it. If the ships were still flying his cybernetics were still going and apparently, Edi was fine. Clearing his throat, he rubs a hand over his face and winces when he catches on new scars. The entire left side of his face is a mess. Fuck. “Where are they?” Clearing his throat, Anderson stretches his legs out. Dane sees the cane from the corner of his eye, wincing internally. That explains what Anderson’s doing here, anyway. “They stuck around for a few weeks to get their bearings. Check on you. They got back to Earth two weeks after we found you. They’re helping with the rebuilding efforts, some on their respective worlds and some here, on Earth.” It makes sense that they’d go and make themselves useful. There’s no time to rest on laurels, not with the galaxy in a mess like this. He’d have liked- No. Not fair, thinking like that. “And you, sir?” “I’m here for my bi-weekly rehab, Commander.” He picks up the cane at that, a brown wood and steel contraption that probably has something hidden in it. The steel reflects the lights from overhead, dull and flickering once in a while. It’s a wonder he has a bed, that they’d put so much effort into saving him. Sure there are more important cases than his own. He’s done his job. They don’t need to worry about him anymore. “Make sure to grab it by the middle if you swing it, Anderson. It’s never going to stand up to a wide swing, it’ll split right down the middle.” His mouth twisting into a wry smile, the older man leans back in his chair. “I’ll keep that in mind.” It’s tiring, being up. Not game to check the rest of his injuries, especially not with close to two months of bed rest, Dane swallows and tilts his head back. The room’s clean, tidy and far too neat. Maybe he’s not alive at all. He falls asleep like that, missing Anderson leaving with a three step gait, cane bearing up a leg that’ll never move the same again.

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