The last time she'd stood on the front porch of this house, she'd been sixteen. Sixteen with long, unbound hair, tan skin made darker from the long, warm days of summer, and dirty bare feet. She'd been wearing a white sundress, she remembered, a yellow sash around her waist, a flower tucked behind one ear. The smell of baking bread had wafted out the window, making her stomach grumble, and she remembered promising herself that she would steal a slice when her mother wasn't looking.
Those were the days before she was Commander Shepard, back when she had been a barefoot hoyden who was full of smiles, a likeable child that family and neighbors alike had called Ree, the nickname her brothers had saddled her with upon her birth. There had been four of them, all older, all as handsome as their father and as stubborn as their mother. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: their names a testament to their mother's unshakeable faith.
Her name was more unconventional. Somehow, her father had persuaded her mother to name her after his very favorite gun: Vera. The fact that she'd learned how to work the full-bore auto lock with a customized trigger, double cartridge, and thorough gauge by the time she was seven had been a source of great pride for her father. He used to brag about it to the neighbors while her mother had rolled her eyes and attempted to interest Vera Shepard in pretty dresses and dolls. Vera had adamantly refused both, to her mother's great exasperation. She had insisted on wearing overalls and playing with her brother's guns, running around the farm barefoot and climbing trees when she was supposed to be helping her mother make and can the fruit preserves.
At fourteen, she'd begun to develop an interest in boys, and had promptly decided to look pretty. To her mother's great delight, she'd begun wearing the lovely sundresses that hung untouched in her closet. To her mother's great chagrin, she'd been caught in the barn with one of the neighbor boys' hands up one of those lovely dresses a short year later.
Shepard smiled at the memory, remembering how her mother had chased the boy off their property with a frying pan, while her father had ordered Vera to her room. Less than a month later, she'd snuck the boy back into barn, and that time he had gotten a great deal more than his hand up her skirt. Shepard glanced over to the left, where the red walls of the barn she'd gotten into so much trouble in as a teenager still stood and felt a wave of memories and melancholy wash over her.
She'd been so certain of everything then, so sure of herself and her place in the world; an oddity for a teenage girl, to be certain, but then Shepard had never once been conventional. Standing here, in front of the small, slightly lopsided two story home that had been the center of the galaxy in her childhood, she felt more uncertain than she ever had in her life. She'd saved the galaxy twice, and what did she have to show for it? The council had denounced her, Cerberus was after her, and Kaidan…
Shepard winced at the thought of him and firmly put him out of her mind, refocusing on the memories of her childhood. Her father had built this tiny wooden home when she had been ten; he and her brothers had harvested the wood from the forests of Midnoir themselves to cut down on the cost. Before that, they had lived in town in a sad little two room pre-fab home which her mother had hated. The woman had told her children stories about the farmhouse that she had grown up in on Earth, a home with real wooden floors and stairs and an old fashioned fireplace. Shepard's stern, stoic mother had cried when her father had led her through the home that he and her brothers had built.
Shepard took a deep breath, her hands clammy, feeling more like a sixteen year old child then the thirty-one year old woman that she had grown into. And then, she knocked on the door. Several moments passed in silence, Shepard's heart lodged in her throat, and then there was a shuffling behind the door before it opened with a familiar groan of the hinges. A middle aged woman stood before her, a woman as old as her mother would have been, had she survived the raid. She took one look at Sheppard before her eyes opened wide and she pushed the door open fully, the wariness so common in the gazes of the older generations of Midnoir being replaced by a warm smile.
"Come in, Commander Shepard," the woman exclaimed, her hands fluttering about her unkempt appearance, smoothing her dress and patting at her hair. Shepard supposed she should not have been surprised to be recognized; after all, Midnoir had won the right to utilize her likeness after her "death." But still, it was disconcerting to be known by a woman that she didn't know, to be issued into her mother's house by a stranger that was her mother's age.
"Would you like some tea?" the woman asked, and Shepard swallowed hard and shook her head as she surveyed the small foyer. The floors were still the unstained wood of her childhood, scratched and worn after twenty years of use. The cheery yellow walls had seen a new coat of paint, but were the same color that she remembered helping her mother to choose from the store. A coat rack made of antique wood from Earth stood in the place of the one that her father had crafted from old metal scraps, and in place of the gun rack that used to house the family's rifles was a framed photograph of Shepard and her family standing in front of the house the summer before the raid.
Her mother stood firm, her jaw square, her braid falling over her shoulder and nearly to her waist, her eyes warm and her smile soft in spite of the strong set of her shoulders. Her father's arm was around her mother's waist, his bright blue eyes twinkling with mirth as they always had, the dimples in his tanned cheeks pronounced as he grinned. Two of her brothers stood to one side of her father, Matthew with his dark curls and Cheshire grin, John with his hands shoved in his pockets and the shy, awkward smile of a boy of seventeen. To the other side of her mother stood the other two boys: Luke with his big hand resting on the hilt of his new handgun, his chest puffed out with pride, and Mark, who looked so much like their father that their mother had occasionally confused their names. And there in the middle stood young Ree, the girl that Shepard used to be. She was barefoot in the photo, her arms around John and Luke, her parent's hands resting on her shoulders. She had been the youngest, the most mischievous, and in the photo her blue eyes were unguarded and sparkling, her grin as wide as her father's, her body at that awkward, gangly stage typical of fifteen year olds.
Shepard swallowed hard and tore her gaze from the picture, realizing that the new owner of this home had hung it without knowing any of the people in it, had set it to adorn the wall so that her guests would know that this had been the home of the infamous Commander Shepard when she had been little more than a backwards farm girl. Shepard suddenly felt violated that something so private was hanging in a stranger's home, the very home that had used to belong to her.
The woman must have seen her unease, for she wrung her hands together and her eyes darted to the side. "I'm going to step outside to the garden; feel free to look around," she said, and Shepard nodded her thanks. The woman scurried away with a backward glance over her shoulder, furiously tapping at her omni tool. Shepard suddenly had the unsettling sensation that the whole of Midnoir would know of her visit within the hour.
With a shake of her head, Shepard set the thought out of her mind, instead walking forwards and stepping up the stairs. The third stair creaked as it took her weight, and Shepard smiled when she remembered how often her mother had nagged at her father to fix it. Once upstairs, she glanced into the tiny room that her four brothers had shared, remembered the mess of clothes on the floor, the perpetually tangled sheets on the bunk beds that had nearly filled the small space. It was made up as an office now, bookshelves lining one wall, a pre-fab desk and personal computer pressed against the other.
Shepard stepped out of the room and entered the one beside it, a space so small it was closer to the size of her bathroom about the Normandy SR-2 than a decent bedroom. But it was where she had spent countless hours as a child. Her bed had been pushed up against the back wall, just below the window that had been just large enough for her to shimmy out of late at night after her parents were asleep. When her parents had caught her rolling in the hay with Jimmy Gordon when she was sixteen, she had been locked in this room for days. They'd even figured out that she was sneaking out after the second night and had put a bar across her window to ensure she stayed there. Out of spite, she had opened her window as far as the bar would allow, picked up her loudest gun, and had shot rounds into the field beyond when she knew her parents had fallen asleep. After the fourth night of her imprisonment, they had found the hiding places of all of her guns and removed them from her possession.
She'd put them through hell, Shepard realized now with a pang of regret. She'd been a little brat back then, fiercely independent, desperate to live her own life. Never had she thought, back in those days, what it would be like to live without a family. To be entirely alone in the galaxy. She wished that she could go back, that she could have just one more day with her family, that she could have appreciated them when they were living as much as she did now that they were dead.
Shepard swallowed and left the small room behind her, walking down stairs to make her way through the pocket sized living room. There had been a couch here and two chairs, all of which had been replaced by newer, more modern furniture. The fire place that dominated the wall was the same, but the picture frames on the mantle bore the images of strangers.
There were ghosts in every room of this house; she remembered laughing with her brothers on the couch while watching the holovision, remembered her father chuckling when she had stubbornly refused to stop her futile attempts to start a fire with sodden wood. As she passed into the kitchen she could almost smell her mother's fresh baked bread, hear her brothers arguing over who got to eat the leftovers at dinner time. Usually, while they had been fighting over who got to have seconds, she had snuck a spoonful of them onto her own plate while egging them on to keep them distracted from her actions. Her brothers had never caught on, but her father's bright eyes had always twinkled with amusement whenever he had caught her.
Later on, she had heard her mother's screaming coming from this room. She'd been out with Jimmy the morning of the raid; he had pushed her up against a tree deep enough into the woods that they wouldn't be found, and she'd lifted the skirt of her white sundress in an act so forbidden it had sent a thrill down her spine. Afterwards, she'd taken the dusty path home, grinning like a fool, absently wondering what her mother would do to her this time as she toyed with the flower that Jimmy had placed behind her ear when he'd kissed her goodbye. She remembered thinking that her mother would come around, that one day soon Jimmy was going to ask permission to marry her; he'd told her as much, had whispered it into her ear as he'd pressed himself inside of her.
And then, her happy thoughts were interrupted by the gunfire, and the screams. She didn't remember much after that, just disjointed, hazy moments that seemed more like a nightmare than a memory. She remembered seeing flames as she'd raced home, remembered seeing a man wearing her father's overalls and holding her father's favorite gun lying dead in the front yard, unrecognizable due to the mangled remains of what had once been his head. Another body was draped over the steps leading to the front porch; she'd tripped over it as she had raced to get to her mother, and she remembered the flash of horror when she'd recognized that the corpse belonged to Matthew.
She remembered thinking, "If I can get to Mama, everything will be alright. Mama will make everything alright," and racing through the house, her dirty bare feet slapping against the wood floor and drawing her closer and closer to the screams coming from the kitchen. And then she was there, and her mother was on the floor, and a Batarian turned to face her, a gun lifted in his hand. Her mother started to cry then, and then a shot rang out and there was silence, and then there was a scream so painful that Shepard had wanted to cover her ears, but that just made it worse.
When the Batarian slapped her across the face, she realized that she was the one who had been screaming, and when he forced her against the wall and pushed up the hem of her dress, she remembered thinking how different it felt from when Jimmy had touched her just minutes before. And then he pushed himself inside of her and that was different too, the organ bigger, the skin thicker and coarser, tearing her deep inside as he plunged in and out of her body, his hot, rank breath in her ear, his strange hands closed around her neck, keeping her from moving, barely allowing her to breathe as she choked out sobs. She had attempted to use her newly discovered biotics, she remembered, which had caused him to slam her head hard enough against the wall that she had almost lost consciousness, before stabbing something into her skull that was painful enough to cause her to finally, mercifully, black out.
The next thing she remembered, she was in an Alliance refugee hospital, half of her head shaved, with almost no memory of what had happened in the weeks after the raid. Occasionally, in her nightmares, she caught brief glimpses of what it had been like: to be utterly docile, incapable of saying no, forced to do things that still caused her to wake up sweating and screaming.
Shepard shuddered and pointedly looked away from the wall, away from the corner by the kitchen table that her mother had cowered in before she had been so callously shot. She'd come here, on the fifteenth anniversary of the raid to remember her family as they had been in happier days, not to remember the horrors of her last cohesive memories in what had been such a warm and happy home.
And yet she couldn't help but to think of the raid, of the months and years that had passed after it. Couldn't help but to compare the open fields and thick forests of Midnoir to the gray landscape of Vancouver where skyscrapers replaced towering trees; the warmth and charm of the little home her father had built to the sterile apartment on the 102nd floor in which her foster mother had lived. Here, she had been surrounded by family; parents, brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and so many cousins. The closest she had come to having a family since the raid was her crew aboard the Normandy; the years in foster care, Basic, and her early training she had largely spent alone.
Shepard gently pressed her fingertips against the wall of what once had been her home, before pressing her forehead against its smooth surface. This was a dwelling place of ghosts, a house of memories. It was no longer her home. With a deep sigh, Shepard stepped back from the wall, and walked to the front door without a word to the new owner of the place that held so many happy memories. On her way out the door, she paused by the photograph, stared into the eyes of all the people long gone.
And finally, she looked into the face of Ree, a deep ache filling her chest. This part of her no longer existed; a thousand somethings had come along and had changed that happy, mischievous little girl, had put a hardness in her eyes and walls around her heart. Sometimes, she wasn't entirely sure which she missed more: her brothers or the girl that she had used to be.
She closed her eyes and opened them again, memorizing every line in her mind's eye. Goodbye, her heart whispered, as she stepped out the door, and left her mother's house and stepped into the cool embrace of the Normandy.