Background: Takes place after Mass Effect 2, including "Lair of the Shadow Broker" and other DLC. Shepard considers her past and what she's lost in the course of leading the battle against the Reapers. Female Shepard, Earthborn, War Hero, Paragon.
Catherine Shepard placed the last of the dogtags gently into the crate as she sat down at her terminal, typing out a brief message to Admiral Hackett and Councilor Anderson about what she'd found on Alchera and her recommendation for the memorial. "EDI," she said, as the familiar blue glow appeared towards the corner of her vision. "I'd like to send this message through an encrypted channel to Alliance Command. Once they confirm, we'll make arrangements for delivery."
"Understood, Shepard," replied the AI. "Do you have any further instructions?"
"No, I'm fine for now. Thanks."
"Logging you out." EDI's display disappeared as Shepard leaned back in her chair, her gaze falling on her own Alliance tags. She'd assumed them to be lost - along with so many other relics of her former life - when the first Normandy was destroyed, only to find that Liara had, somehow, recovered them.
Liara T'Soni, Shadow Broker, she thought, her mind drifting back to that first comm room debrief after they had rescued Liara on Therum and allowing herself a slight, wry smile at how ridiculous the notion would have seemed to anyone in the room at the time. Despite Liara's initial mistaken perception of romantic interest on Shepard's part, the two had eventually become friends and confidants. More than anyone else on the ship, Liara was someone Shepard could rely upon for a viewpoint unfiltered by the cynicism and world-weariness that their situation seemed to bring out in many of the crew. Even after humanity's newfound influence in the galaxy began to develop in ways from which Shepard increasingly recoiled, Liara had believed in Shepard's leadership and in, as she herself put it, "what humans would call 'our better angels,'" right up until that day when the Collectors tore the Normandy to pieces.
The next time Shepard saw Liara, she was threatening to flay someone alive with her mind.
It wasn't that she couldn't rationalize, intellectually, what Liara had been through. She had no practical difficulty trusting Liara or any of the information that her operation had provided thus far, and the last time they'd spoken was largely free of the tension that had otherwise been there ever since Shepard's return. And yet, her friend had changed in real and possibly irrevocable ways. She didn't know if she'd ever truly see the "old Liara" again, or if she even had any right to expect such a thing - it was, after all, for the purpose of bringing Shepard back that Liara had first waded into darker waters. And while she herself had never been involved in anything more than petty thievery and a few fistfights with rival gang members, she had known both victims and perpetrators of worse in her youth, including some who had been driven to that point more by desperation than anything else.
The media loved to play up Shepard's story as one of a dead-end street thug who turned her life around by joining the Alliance and saving Elysium in an act of pure bravado. Shepard had always found her popular image exaggerated on both counts. Her life as a teenager had been defined primarily by poverty, not by violence, and her brushes with crime were limited to stealing what she and her friends needed to survive and occasionally defending themselves from the more aggressive gangs. There were a few times when one of the Reds had been involved in some bloodier incidents, but none of them really had anything to do with Shepard or her closest friends.
Nor did she accept the notion that joining the Alliance marked the emergence of some completely different person. At the mandatory debrief after the Skyllian Blitz, the psych officer had suggested that Shepard never really left Tenth Street behind. While she found this a bit of an oversimplification as well, the man had a point. What had really kept her ticking during the assault on Elysium, more so than her training or her sense of duty, was remembering what it felt like to be one of what Thane would have called drala'fa – the ignored, the weak and the marginalized left to fend for themselves. She couldn't and wouldn't be the one to let the colonists be taken away to a life of brutal slavery and exploitation, and if she died in the process, well, the Alliance had given her four more good years than most of her friends back home had ever gotten.
She got up from the terminal, stretching her arms as she walked over to the couch and sat down, momentarily distracted by the Prothean relic from Kopis; as usual, it emitted a slight whirring sound, levitating into the air in reaction to Shepard's presence. The psych officer from nine years ago had encouraged her to draw strength from her past. She wondered what the man would say about the fact that messages from a 50,000-year-old alien civilization were now her other "anchor" in life.
Because as much as she might wish otherwise, she didn't, and couldn't, ground herself in her relationships with other people, at least not any more. Of her closest friends on the Normandy, two had died on the Collector Base. Kasumi Goto, the quirky thief and infiltration expert, was perhaps the one member of the crew whom Shepard was not sure had ever truly come to grips with the fact that they might be embarking on a suicide mission. But, despite her profession, Kasumi was one person whom Shepard could rely upon to be entirely straightforward and honest with her, and if she did truly grasp the weight of their situation, she certainly never let it affect her sense of humor or her performance on the mission. It was fair to say that, without Kasumi's efforts in the ventilation shaft, they might never have reached the base's core. She wondered if Kasumi had sensed, even for a millisecond, her impending death before that lone Collector bullet tore through her skull, and hoped that if so, she'd found some peace in that moment.
The other, Garrus Vakarian, had also been killed part of the way through their assault. When they had discovered kidnapped members of the Normandy crew still alive on the base, Shepard had been forced to make another tough choice: risk one of her specialists to escort them back to the ship, or send them on their own and hope for the best. She'd chosen the former, and still would if she had it to do over again. It gave her some small comfort to know that Garrus would have accepted the assignment without hesitation even had he known the fate that awaited him – to be gunned down by the Collectors while providing cover for the rest of the crew – and that he'd have considered it an honorable death.
As for Tali, she honestly wasn't sure if she could count the young engineer as a friend any more – not after the fiasco on board the Rayya and the subsequent chaos among the Quarian fleet. Shepard believed now as strongly as she ever did that Rael'Zorah had to be exposed for what he'd done, and that the Quarian leadership needed to make peace with the Geth. But she couldn't help but wonder whether there might have been another way to handle the situation, one that would have been less personally painful for Tali and less politically explosive for the Quarians in general. In any case, the outcome hadn't been what she'd hoped: while many of the Quarians were ready to reconcile with the Geth, a significant faction seemed to support Rael's actions and were as hell-bent as ever upon war. Though she didn't ever share this with Tali, Shepard was well aware that memories of Tenth Street, of how she and several of her friends suffered "accidental" exposure to Element Zero that just happened to be convenient for corporate experimentation, were fresh in her mind when she had made the decision to expose Rael.
The strange thing was that, every once in a while, the tension with Tali seemed to disappear, and she could almost believe they were back on the original Normandy, chatting in the engineering section.
"Actually, he was selling one of you," said Captain Bailey.
"Me?" asked a bemused Shepard.
"Yeah. When you erased a file, it would say, 'I delete data like you on the way to real errors.'"
"That's pretty extreme, Shepard," Tali chuckled.
"Laugh it up, Tali," Shepard retorted, briefly slipping into the banter that had once been routine for them.
Several months after the trial on the Rayya, however, those moments were still never more than just that. Shepard could tell that Tali was as dedicated to their fight against the Reapers as ever, but she wasn't comfortable around Shepard personally and sometimes seemed distracted and less able to make instinctive use of her skills. In fact, under normal circumstances, Shepard probably would have sent Tali into the ventilation shaft on board the Collector Base. But she had sensed Tali's focus weakening, and so she'd assigned her to Miranda's fire team instead.
As for her old Alliance ties, there was simply too much distance, too much of an obligation for Shepard to appear the harbor within the tempest, for her to rely upon them in that way. Joker was quite possibly the best pilot in the galaxy – not to mention a reliable cut-up who could probably go on a comedy tour with EDI in his retirement if they managed to survive this war – but he looked to her for strength and stability, not the other way around. Even Chakwas, who had seen about all an Alliance doctor could ever see, had confessed that she envisioned Shepard as their "immoveable center." And those were the Alliance-trained soldiers who *were* still behind her every step of the way. Anderson, while he trusted her personally, couldn't afford to take her into his complete confidence, given her use of Cerberus's resources to fight the Collectors. And although Shepard had never particularly liked Ashley Williams and had seriously considered court-martialing her for killing Wrex on Virmire, her rebuke on Horizon had still stung – she could imagine similar words of outrage and distrust coming from many a Normandy SR-1 crew member, including some of those whose remains she'd discovered just a few hours ago.
She noticed the relic returning to its place on the table as the whirring sound faded. You and I still have business together, don't we? she found herself thinking, as if the Protheans themselves were sitting in front of her. Yet another thing she'd always kept from her crew, lest they doubt her mental stability, was the odd sense of connection to the Protheans that she'd felt ever since Shiala had given her the cipher on Feros. She could never quite explain it, but she felt something more towards them than simple fascination or even the chance to redeem their legacy somehow. It was as if – she realized how ridiculous this might sound – some part of them was still alive through her, and she had little doubt that more of their secrets were still out there and might well be the key to defeating the Reapers.
Not for the first time, she considered that perhaps her need to isolate herself was the price of completing this strange journey with the Protheans and leading the charge against the Reapers. If there was one thing she could be certain of when it came to her crew, it was that they did trust her to make the right decisions when it came to the looming conflict. She'd had concerns for a while about some of them, such as Jack, whose anger and capacity for violence often seemed ready to boil over, or Grunt, who had initially greeted her by throwing her against a wall and threatening to kill her, but she would readily put her life in their hands again when the Reapers made their next move. Even Miranda, the Cerberus loyalist who had been furious when Shepard reprimanded her for her attitude towards Jack, eventually confided that she believed Shepard was right to destroy the Collector Base.
This crew had followed her through hell and back, and she had no doubt they would do it again when the time came.
And yet she'd never felt quite so alone.