An Ode to a Madman
He united us through hate.
How he did it seems almost simple now, but at the time it had seemed complex and crazy.
Shepherd was madman and a renegade, with a face that was falling apart just to hammer in the evil look of his face. He always had those piercing red eyes from the exposed cybernetics that made you think he was capable of anything simply because he was him and nothing more. He didn't need any charms or ruggedly handsome good looks like all the princes and knights in shining armor from the fairy tales because he had muscles that were as tough as steel and the dead-eye accuracy that not even the best asari commandos could even hope to compete with. We had all seen both what he was willing to do and just what lengths he was willing to go for the mission by the time it was done: from something as simply as head butting a krogan...to straight-up killing a Thresher Maw, or even more; he went in to the core of the galaxy and came back afterwards!
When everybody first met him: nobody knew what to think of him outside of Joker and Chawkwas, then later Tali and Garrus. It seemed that he was always trying to keep a professional wall between himself and all the crew with only a few people being allowed past that wall to see the angered but passionate man who the commander really was. He didn't even seem like the hero that everybody talked about, with his attitude many people thought that he would probably get them all killed when he went in to a rage, and made a stupid tactical call as a result. What we didn't know was that was exactly why he had succeeded before. Many of our personalities didn't seem like they would have fit before the mission was over: Jacob and Thane, Miranda and Jack, and even Tali and Legion near the end. Every single one of them was at odds with each other, unable to find any common ground. They were frothing over with anger to the point that in two of those cases physical violence nearly occurred.
That's how he led.
He wasn't the charming and ever hopeful "fight together or we die alone" type by any means.
Instead he was a completely different type of man: "Be angry at each other, but wait till the Collectors are DEAD!" sort of leader.
He made us all come together despite our differences, in some cases under the promise that we would be able to go at it with each other without any problems like the Collectors 'interrupting' afterwards. Because of that every single member of our crew was able to set aside their differences. Because of that anger that he made everybody store up, all of it saved and aimed at one point, he didn't need to inspire them any further when it came time to hit the Collectors. Even with the majority of the crew captured he had no visually apparent problem, no falter in his step as he strode in to the briefing room in that armor in all it's various shades of dark orange camouflage. Even if his speech could be considered inspiring, to the crew aboard the ship it had amounted to something akin to: "Okay, now get angry."
They did to.
Shepherd and his crew stormed in to the Collector base with fury unmatched even by that of a woman scorned. A krogan (tank-bred or otherwise, a krogan in spirit), a turian mechanic, an asari Justicar, a drell assassin, two Cerberus operatives, an escaped convict, a Geth unit, a Turian vigilante, a Salarian scientist, and even the Earth-born war hero himself. These were the most unlikely group of people to ever work together but it seemed that Shepherd's way of command had worked. There was always that niggling fear that despite his seemingly stubborn and thick-headed denial that this was probably a suicide mission, nobody was going to make it out of that base alive whether the Collectors were stopped or not. That was wrong. True to his word every single man, woman, and synthetic platform made it out of that base alive. To add some whip-cream to that bad ass pie, despite everybody's belief that he would risk leaving that technology in the base for a crack-pot group like Cerberus...even that judgment of the Commander was wrong.
It seems in the end that even a madman has some sort of moral standards.
Looking back on it now, I wish that I could have been in the briefing room to hear the frustration in the Illusive Man's voice.
Anyways diary, I already sent a message to Shepherd. I recently managed to procure one of asari dancer costumes from a 'special' store on Omega: I already sent the Commander a message about it, my little thank you for that night we had shared together after he had escaped the supposedly derelict Collector ship. Not to mention a thanks for saving me before I was turned in to a glob of DNA to make a reaper, but I digress.
~ Yeoman Kelly Chambers; (former) Cerberus Psychological Department.