Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect. That pleasure belongs to the esteemable Bioware and such.
AN: This is a newly edited, slightly longer repost of my original first chapter. I hope it explains a few things better.
Shepard stares at the smooth, unblemished skin of her arm.
It isn't right.
She'd once had a scar there. From Torfan. A Batarian had shot at her arm as she used her omni-tool to summon her droid. She remembers digging the bullet out, cutting into the flesh of her forearm to remove the shard of white-hot metal. The scar wouldn't have be half as bad if she had just left it alone.
At the time, it had seemed like a good idea.
At the time, sending your entire unit to die had seemed like a good idea. Most of Torfan is just a blur now. Screams and pain and panic. Then cold clarity, that one moment when she decided to kill them all. She was told later that some of the Batarians had surrendered. She hadn't noticed.
"The Butcher of Torfan."
It isn't right, that the last solid reminder is gone. As if it had never been. As if she had never suffered through it. Erasing the pain she'd felt.
Shepard pulls out the boot knife she always carried—now. And slices into the new skin.
This way. That way. Ripping. Haphazard. The blood flows down her arm, makes the hilt of the knife slippery. At first it burns, fire licking down the path her knife carves. The edge of a scream bubbles up in her throat, but she swallows it down. It had to hurt. The pain means she was human. Doesn't it?
But the pain dulls, dies. What had started with frenzied, almost raging, motions becomes slow and methodical slices as she tries to picture the details of her original wound in her mind.
Just a bit more. She stops and looks at it. It looks almost…right. She drops the bloodstained knife, the sharp ting of metal against metal ringing in the hollow, empty place inside her.
Looking down at the mass of oozing red and torn edges, Commander Shepard is the closest to calm she had been since rising from that cold slab of metal and picking up her gun to fight. It isn't perfect. It isn't the same. But it is better.