A Promise of Love and Death
The bulkhead opened with a hiss. A bottle and two glasses in his hands, Shepard stepped into Miranda's room. Compared to officers' quarters he knew from Alliance warships, this one deserved to be called "luxurious" – the front part of the large room was furnished like an office, the rear part as a bedroom. They could be separated by a kinetic barrier, opaque or transparent as preferred, but Miranda's was always open, revealing an always perfectly tidied-up sleeping place.
Miranda was standing at her window – too large to be called a porthole – staring out into space. The loose casual Cerberus outfit she was wearing couldn't hide the tension in her posture, making Shepard almost stumble over his words.
"You left the victory celebration early," he said. "I thought…maybe something less noisy would suit you better. I brought some wine."
She turned her head and looked at him, then the bottle he was carrying. Her mouth curled into something like a smile, then changed back into the unreadable, neutral expression of her "Cerberus agent" face.
"I've been thinking," she said.
"That sounds ominous", he replied as he put down the bottle and the glasses on her desk. "This was supposed to be a celebration. Can't the problems wait until tomorrow?"
"Not this one." She turned and walked over to him, stopping at the other side of the desk. Her eyes wandered over his body head to toes. She sighed.
"I'm drawn to you like on a rubber band."
"Yes," he acknowledged, hoping that his tone said clearly enough it was the same for him.
"If I don't resist, I'll be drawn into your arms and won't ever want to get away."
Not knowing where this was going, he thought for a few seconds about how to reply. The painful knot in his stomach didn't help, and he had to swallow a lump in his throat before he could continue.
"Is there….a reason to resist?" he asked carefully. Some intuition older than the history of human civilization told him to stay on his side of the desk.
"That's what I've been thinking about," she replied. She walked around the desk, stopping in front of him. Still her body said 'Don't touch me'. She lifted a hand as if to touch his chest, then let it drop again.
"Do you really like this….loss of control; this dependency?" she asked.
"Right now it's painful," he admitted. "But it's worth it. You are worth it!" he continued more forcefully.
"Is it?" she answered with a desperate laugh. "It's like an addiction. I. Do. Not. Like. Addictions!" It was almost a shout; the most passionate statement he had ever heard of her.
"I was the head of Lazarus project," she continued, pacing forth and back between Shepard and the window as she spoke. "Do you know what that means? After Wilson's death I may know more about the human body than anyone else in the known galaxy. Whatever I feel, I know how it comes about. Without even trying hard, I can visualize the current moving along the nerves, the chemical messengers affecting different areas of my brain and my body. And now I'm supposed to succumb to this…this chemical survival program no matter the cost? It's insulting."
She stopped in front of him.
"But there's no hiding from it. I want it. I want….this." She grabbed his head with both hands and kissed him violently, then stepped back before he had a chance to respond.
"And more…" she continued more softly. "You say it's worth it. But tell me…" she said, keeping his gaze focused on him with a stare from her blue-grey eyes.
"…is it worth the whole fucking future of humanity?"
Shepard frowned, not quite sure of what to make of this. How could their love endanger humanity? But he trusted Miranda enough to assume she had a point. And this outburst was much easier to take than the unbearable tension of before.
"Go on," he said.
Reverting to her usual graceful stride, she went over to the window and looked out again, as if the human colonies were visible to her in some mysterious way. "I say it's not," she continued.
"And with or without Cerberus, I'm ultimately committed to humanity's continued survival and advancement. So are you I believe. Right now it is not assured. So, I want a promise from you; and you'd better make me believe it. "
He walked over to where she was standing. His mind had finally caught up with her reasoning, so he suspected what was coming. Again she turned. For a few moments they faced each other silently in front of the window before she delivered her ultimatum:
"Promise me you won't sacrifice the mission for me!"
No surprise there, Shepard thought. Trust Miranda to open that can of worms right at the start. Fortunately he had thought about it, and knew his own answer. But there was something he had to know first.
"And…if I can't promise that? If I say humanity can go fuck itself, if I say I don't care about it all if it means losing you?"
"Then I will go," she answered firmly. "And…you will not see me again."
Her eyes never shifted in their focus on his' as she said this. She would do it, he could see it plainly. It might break her heart, but she would do it. He could only hope that what he was going to say would be enough. He sat down on the edge of the desk. Staring into the black star-sprinkled space outside the window, and with a feeling like he was balancing on a needle, he let his mind wander into the past, to a mission that regularly appeared in his nightmares.
Three fusion torches blazing away at empty space, changing the course of a small asteroid. Images of the destruction that would follow. Cities smashed by mile-high waves, volcanoes erupting. A small vehicle floating down to a rocky grey surface. The clock counting down for the end of a world.
"Perhaps you've heard of the attack on Terra Nova," he began. "It was in the news, a Batarian terrorist attack barely prevented. Not in the news was the fact I was there. I prevented it."
Seeing the surprise in her face, he continued.
"Yes, I know Cerberus intelligence is good. But the Spectre archives are well-protected. " Damned tears, he thought as he noticed his eyes watering. "Some people died there. That was in the news, too; and in the archives."
A face floating in the darkness. A harmonious, straight-nosed face, frightened, but determined, talking in an unintelligible stream of words that had once had some meaning. At some time, when this was not a dream.
"There was a woman. Kate Bowman." He took a deep breath to keep his voice from breaking. "She helped us; an engineer, a civilian, who'd been captured by the attackers. She'd gained access to a vidcom terminal and gave us vital intelligence, without her we might have failed. She didn't even break when her colleague was killed for failing to answer the Batarians' questions; so courageous in the face of death. I almost fell in love. Heck, in a way I did love her, even though I never met her face to face." He stopped, his mind lost in memories.
Another face. A Batarian. Words were exchanged. Memories of meaningful diplomacy. Then images of a slave camp. Memories, and another's memories within. A thin-boned girl in his arms, and her story. A blaze of hate and a shot in the darkness.
"What happened?" Miranda asked after almost a minute.
"We tried to reach the Batarian leader – Balak – in time to save the colony. I extracted the code for his base from his second-in-command before I killed him. But when we entered the base, Balak had set up a hostage situation with a timed explosion. It was: kill or capture him, and the hostages die. Kate Bowman was among them."
Yet another face. Confident. Then incredulous as a pistol was drawn. A shot going off with a sound like rolling thunder. The first woman's face again, charred to an unrecognizable husk, staring up at him out of empty, evaporated eyes.
"I couldn't let Balak go. It wasn't in me. I would have hated myself for my whole life if I had let him go. So we attacked, and while we fought the explosion went off, killing Kate and some others. I'd planned to send Balak to the alliance after capturing him, due process and all. But after I'd checked on Kate, I put out his eyes with her charred omni-tool before I killed him. Don't ask how. The outcome made me develop a thousand tactical plans for similar situations. I don't know if any of them ever helped anyone. Perhaps you can imagine how I felt after that. To this day I have nightmares about it. But nightmares or not, if I were in the same situation tomorrow, and faced the same unavoidable decision, I know I'd do exactly the same thing again."
And the last scene. A small memorial stone on a mound of stones, somewhere on a rock floating through the limitless void. Unknown by all but three, a star in the darkness. Lost. Like her.
"So this is why, if you ask me whether I could leave you to die if necessary, I can answer: yes, I could."
He turned away from the window, facing her again.
"But would I? Since it's you who's asking, and since I know how you feel about this, you have my promise….."
He got up from the desk while talking, confronting her just as she had a few minutes before, fixing her eyes with his stare.
"….to leave you to your death should the future of humanity require it." It was painful to say; but necessary, and the truth. It was his truth. But what followed was also his truth. "But for nothing less than that. And only," he finished at last, "if you give me the same promise."
The tension had drained out of her as he spoke, and her face had acquired a bemused expression. Shifting her head and looking up at him, her mouth curled into an enigmatic smile as if of its own volition.
"You have blood on your lips," she said, stepping closer to him. "It's my fault". Then she took his head in her hands, more gently this time, and kissed him, rectifying the situation.
After some time, they broke off. "I could say you're the important one, not me. The Illusive Man would say it. A few days ago I would have," she said, shaking her head in disbelief at her own change of mind.
"But I'm curious about what we can do together." Seeing his raised eyebrow, she smirked and added with mock formality "Including but not limited to the obvious."
"So you have my promise, too. Although I can't come up with a speech like yours to make you believe it. I hope you believe me without one."
He looked at her; then nodded, any remaining words lost in a long sigh of relief as a load the weight of an asteroid dropped off his mind.
Miranda chuckled. "But this must be the strangest declaration of love two people have ever given one another."
She went over to her desk, took something out and tossed it in his direction.
"You forgot the corkscrew."