The Kodiak's doors lifted to the only slightly brighter lights of the SSV Einstein's shuttle bay, and a team of anxiously awaiting uniformed soldiers and medical staff. Far more than would normally greet a recon team, but these were not normal circumstances by any means. A murmur of confusion echoed softly in the bay, when four soldiers emerged-with no civilians.
A moon-faced woman in immaculate Alliance dress blues greeted the hulking fellow at the lead, who promptly saluted. "Commander Alvarez," she said, and peeked around the soldiers, somewhat incredulous to see just the one person inside the Kodiak. "...just the one? We were expecting more, from the reports."
"Captain Butler," Alvarez saluted, and stood at attention. "She's the only one we found outside the camps, ma'am. The clinic was bombed out pretty bad, it's a miracle we even found her. Everything else..."
"My God. It must have been a massacre."
"It wasn't pretty, ma'am." Alvarez's eyes looked haunted, and Butler wisely decided not to press the issue. She climbed in through the shuttle doors, to take stock of that one lonely survivor.
A disheveled girl huddled on the floor of the vessel in silent stillness, her brown eyes vacant and devoid of light, her expression distant and her body listless. She may have been breathing, but it seemed there was little life within. Her mahogany brown feet were bare, delicate cherry-lacquered toenails smudged with dirt. Dried blood and grime marred what must have been a pretty white and violet party dress, once. Now it was torn, frayed at the hem. Long braids fell about her in a mess; if they'd been pinned up at one point, they weren't anymore, and just sort of hung about her lifelessly. Butler's heart fell. Civilians were bad enough but...she looked so young, so vulnerable. Like one of Butler's own teen girls waiting back on Eden Prime.
"Hey there," the captain greeted the girl, kneeling down beside her with an outstretched hand holding an energy bar. "It's not a lot, but it'll hold you over 'til we get you cleaned up."
The girl remained silent, staring into nothingness.
Butler's heart was in her throat, but she put on her best can-do, reassuring smile. The way she would with her own daughter. "I know you're scared, and you've been through a hell of a lot. But I want you to know you're safe here. You're safe. The Alliance is going to take care of you, and you don't have to be afraid anymore."
If there were any indication the girl understood her, Butler didn't see any. The captain was hardly a medical expert, but she knew shell shock when she saw it. They needed to get her to the med bay, and let Dr. Singh take a look. She gestured, and one of the crew passed her a large blanket. "My name's Johanna-Captain Johanna Butler. This is the SSV Einstein, an Alliance vessel. We came to help, because we got your distress signal. We're here to help you. But you need to trust me."
The girl's eyes darted sharply, fixing themselves upon Alvarez, and Butler appeared confused.
"She seems to trust Dan most," a second soldier said, shrugging. "She wouldn't let anyone else touch her." Butler nodded, and handed the giant blanket to the commander.
"S'okay, mija," Alvarez said, smiling at the stricken girl. "C'mere. Just like in the clinic, alright? One step at a time."
After a long, agonizing moment, the girl slowly began crawling toward him. When she came within reach, the commander gently lifted her into his massive arms, enveloping her in the blanket. "It's alright, mija. I ain't leaving you."
"Have we got a positive ID match on her, Peters? Any next of kin, emergency contacts...?" Butler asked the other soldier, as she watched Alvarez carry her off.
Peters handed the Captain a small datapad, and nodded. "All we could manage was a prelim ID scan. We couldn't get any more details, we didn't want to risk detection on the enemy's sensors."
Name: Shepard, Imani Salma Fakhri
Gender: Female
Age: Sixteen
Ethnicity: North American of African/Middle Eastern ancestry
Occupation: Sophomore, Mindoir Agricultural and Technical High School
Christ, Butler thought. Just a baby, not much older than her own Tina. Her jaw clenched, and she shook her head in barely contained disgust. "...dammit. She's just a kid."
"I know, ma'am." Peters' tone was respectful, but short. The captain was clearly not the only one disturbed.
"How long's she been...like that?"
"Since we found her, ma'am. The good news is, she doesn't seem to have any serious injuries, just minor scrapes and bruises. Nothing we couldn't fix with medi-gel, and it looks like she was treating herself before we got there. It's the psych stuff that's got me worried. Best we can tell, she was down in the cellar of that clinic alone for days. Everyone else was dead or in the camps, probably waiting for transport to some godforsaken hellhole in the Terminus."
"Damn those batarians," Butler hissed quietly through clenched teeth. "Damn every last one of them to hell."
"With permission, ma'am, I'd like to go back down there and help with that," Peters said, stiffening. "There were a lot of people in those camps." Butler clasped his shoulder.
"Don't worry, Lieutenant. Those batarians are going to wish they never set foot on Mindoir." Butler's hardened expression turned curious then, for just a moment. "What was that in her hand, do you know?"
"A tube of lipstick, if you can believe that. She refuses to let it go."
Imani Shepard was exhausted, and felt the weight of that exhaustion as soon as she peeled her armor off. Only half of it was physical, in all honesty, despite the brutal nature of the fighting on Horizon against the Collectors-but the mental exhaustion wasn't something she was entirely ready to deal with. That would mean having to deal with what Kaidan had said, and there was just too much at stake for her to be distracted by such things. The Illusive Man had passed along two more dossiers, and she needed to plot her next move, once she got Tali on board. So, Commander Shepard was going to do what she did best, which was get coffee and get the hell back to work.
Of course, as soon as she'd poured said coffee into her trusty N7 mug, the door to the main battery opened and Garrus came walking down the hall. During their time on the old Normandy, Imani had grown rather accustomed to late nights in the mess with the turian. It was like clockwork, familiar and comforting no matter how grim the circumstance: dim lights, coffee, and wandering conversation, talking shop for hours. In the bizarre situation she found herself in now, that familiarity was even more comforting than it was previously. Garrus' presence was something steady she could rely on, and he always seemed to be around, these days-something she was admittedly grateful for, especially considering what had transpired just a few hours earlier on Horizon. Some of the Cerberus crew had taken to calling him her big, blue shadow-out of earshot, of course. None of them was really eager to pick a fight with the infamous Archangel, after all.
"Shepard. You're up late," the turian said, striding toward her.
"So're you."
"Just like old times."
Imani smiled at him. "You're gonna wear that record out, Vakarian."
"I beg your pardon?" The brief flicker of confusion that always crossed Garrus' eyes at her use of an unfamiliar human idiom was something that never ceased to amuse Imani. It's not as if she did it on ipurpose/i, or anything. But she had to admit that when he was confused, it was kind of, well...adorable.
"Never mind. What're you doing up so late?"
Garrus approached the counter and went for the bin with the dextro supplies. "You know, the usual. I was working on some calibrations, decided there wasn't much more tweaking I could do, and came to get coffee. And then I ran into you, as usual."
Imani couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Well, it is kind of my ship."
"I'd heard. How's that working out for you, by the way?"
"Pretty good. They even pay me in money."
"A step up from your old Spectre days, I see," Garrus laughed, mixing himself a cup of instant. The smell was unbelievably strong, and that was saying something considering Imani grew up with the scent of Turkish coffee wafting about her home. Turians liked their coffee strong, with little accoutrement. She'd thought it was sort of fitting.
"Shepard, can I ask you something?"
"What's on your mind, Garrus?" Imani sat, resting the datapad in front of her.
"You know, in all the time I've known you, you've never really struck me as a vain sort of woman," the turian mused aloud, sitting across from her at the table. "But I was just thinking about it, and I don't think I've ever seen you without your face painted."
"I've never seen you without your face painted either," Imani pointed out with a sly grin.
Garrus' nose crinkled somewhat indignantly, and it made her silently laugh. "That's different, you know that's a cultural thing for turians."
"Well." Imani leaned back in her chair, mug in hand. "It's kind of a cultural thing for humans too, though it's much less important to us. We all have different reasons for wearing makeup, some of us like to wear it to look attractive for others, some wear it just because we like how we look with it. Why'd you want to know?"
"I was just wondering why you did that, because you're the only human woman I've seen with her face painted even with a combat helmet on. And just about all the human women I've seen in vids change their face paint, but you always wear the exact same color on your mouth."
Garrus was frighteningly observant sometimes, true enough, it was the old C-Sec investigator in him, but Imani thought that was a rather odd thing to take note of. She raised a questioning eyebrow at him. "Any particular reason you've been staring at my mouth, Garrus?"
He cleared his throat with a nervous cough. "...it's, uh...there?"
If Imani hadn't known him so well, it might have been harder for her to notice that Garrus was flustered. After all, he couldn't blush. But there was something in the way his eyes darted from hers, the way his mandibles twitched ever so slightly-and the way he immediately downed about half his cup's contents that spoke volumes. It was amusing, really. A little baffling, but amusing. And kind of adorable.
There was that word again, "adorable". It wasn't a word one generally applied to turians, but there it was sneaking into Shepard's mind again when she looked at Garrus. She found herself smiling at him again, but the smile faded when she realized she probably couldn't dodge the question much longer. Imani took a few sips from her own mug, then spoke after a long moment of awkward silence. "My mother never did anything without putting makeup on. Even if she didn't plan on leaving the house. She always said she was 'bringing some glamour to the arse end of the galaxy.' It didn't matter if she was knee-deep in a muddy vegetable patch, or holding high ritual for Mother Aset, she always looked like a supermodel. Mom was always like that."
Garrus' expression turned sympathetic, then. "She sounds like she was a remarkable woman."
"She was. And I guess I wear it because it's a way to stay connected to her, even though she's gone." Imani reached into her pocket, and pulled out what had come to be her lucky charm: a small, severely warped and dented tube, covered in scuff marks. It was a miracle that it had even survived the Collector attack; she didn't think she'd ever see it again, but there it was, somehow jammed into her old helmet in the wreckage on Alchera. She was starting to think it was indestructible, like her. Imani passed it across the table to Garrus. In all the intervening years, she'd never allowed anyone else to see it, much less touch it, but this seemed right somehow.
"What's that?" he asked, examining it curiously.
"Before the Collector attack? An empty tube of Star Radiance lipstick. The color was called Plum Passion," she replied. "It was in my purse the night the batarians came. I'd borrowed it for the school dance, from my mom-it wasn't empty then, obviously, and it was her favorite color. It's the only thing I have left of her, and I've been carrying it around ever since."
Garrus nodded, and gingerly handed it back to her with a strange kind of reverence. "I think I understand why your mouth's always the same color, now."
Imani took one last glance at the battered tube before returning it to its customary place in her pocket. When she was younger, and the tragedy still a fresh wound upon her heart, wearing that lipstick was almost a funerary gesture of mourning. But over the years, something changed-with time, distance, perhaps. It became something more than that: a statement of proud remembrance. Not sadness and regret for a past that could never be changed, but strength and resilience. For Imani, wearing that lipstick had become a sign that being a child of Mindoir wasn't something to garner empty platitudes of pity but something to take strength in. She was a survivor. Mindoir had ceased to become tears for Imani, it had become her battle cry on Elysium during the blitz.
All in a deep, rich shade of plum upon her lips.
What's more, for once Imani didn't feel as though she needed to keep these thoughts to herself. Sitting there with Garrus, she didn't feel self-conscious, or as though she were engaging in pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing. There had always been something about the turian that made her feel like she could relax a little of the invincible façade she always kept around her crew. But Garrus had been a survivor too, in his own way.
"You never really get over something like Mindoir, Garrus," Imani said, revealing thoughts she'd never shared before. "You move on from it, sure. There's an old human cliche about time healing wounds, and it does to some degree. I learned to accept what happened, what I lost, a long time ago. It made me what I am in a lot of ways, and I'm stronger for it. But I still can't throw that damned tube away, sixteen years after the color ran out, even after the Collectors almost destroyed it."
Garrus reached across the table then, and patted her hand with his own. It was an immensely comforting gesture to Imani, the warm, velvety softness of his glove again her skin. She drank from her mug again, hoping that he wouldn't notice the red flush creeping into her deep brown complexion.
For his part, he didn't seem to notice. "I've got twelve names scratched into this thing, Shepard," Garrus said, taking his hand away to gesture toward his visor. "I get it."
"I had a feeling you would," Imani said with a smile. She glanced back at her datapad, her heart a bit heavy again. As much as she enjoyed Garrus' company, duty called.
"Listen, Shepard, I know it's getting pretty late," he said, almost as soon as the thoughts came to mind. Rising to his feet, he cocked his head to the side, one of those dozens of little quintessentially Garrus gestures that Imani had sorely missed, far more than she'd realized. "Thanks for the coffee. And the conversation. I appreciate you sharing those things with me. Sorry if I stirred up any unpleasant memories."
"Not a problem, Garrus. We're friends, aren't we?" Imani smiled again. "Get some sleep though, Joker's last ETA on Illium was a few hours, and I want you with me when I'm chasing down these leads."
"Always a pleasure, Commander."
It was another day, and another new recruit aboard the Normandy SR-2. Samara, the asari justicar who was the latest addition to the Commander's motley team of specialists, was settling in on one of the observation decks, and Imani felt relieved that the mission went off without incident. So relieved, in fact, that she was determined to spoil herself and actually go to bed at a ireasonable/i hour. She had plenty reason to, anyway: Liara promised to meet with her first thing in the morning with information regarding the drell assassin who was next and last on her list from The Illusive Man. The team was really coming together, and Imani was pleased. The Collectors wouldn't know what hit them. With a bit of a satisfied bounce in her step, she got on the elevator and headed up to her quarters.
A surprise was waiting for her inside her cabin, however, beside her private terminal: a small, dainty powder blue shopping bag. Imani blinked. That certainly wasn't there before. Her curiosity piqued, she peeked inside, and pulled out a note.
Got a little help from Liara back on Illium, she thought you'd get a kick out of what they changed the name to. And hell, we are traveling the ass end of the galaxy; the Normandy could always use a little more glamour. -G.
With an incredulous grin, Imani looked inside the bag again. There was a small tube of lipstick inside, with the same familiar speckled star graphics along the sleek metal case. It was good old Star Radiance. And the color?
Shepard's Passion.