Shepard didn't move. Her body ached in that bone deep way that told her something had gone very, very wrong. It wasn't screaming with pain, but she was familiar enough with her own body to know that would change if she tried to get up.
She risked cracking an eye open. Thick dust filled the air and made her eyes water. She could just make out the earth rising around her, in a big circle.
A crater?
Oh, right. She'd killed the Reapers.
That statement bounced around her mind for some time, ringing in her ears and driving out all other thoughts.
She killed the Reapers. She did it. It was done. They were dead.
The Crucible must have dumped her here. Earth? It was the closest planet. Then again, given the sheer amount of Element Zero packed into the Crucible when it connected to the Citadel, the galaxy's largest relay, she could be absolutely anywhere.
She'd killed the Reapers though.
She closed her eyes. Something in her core that had been standing at attention for years finally relaxed. Surey she'd earned the right to lie around for a bit? She snorted, tears leaking from her eyes. Various parts of her body were sending her omens of catastrophic damage, but she didn't give a hoot. She'd done her part.
Silhouettes, hazy through the dust and moisture in her eyes, appeared at the lip of the crater.
They looked about human height. Alliance?
Men and woman in matching black suits, the sort she'd seen in old movies, emerged from the dust.
"Where did she come from?" one asked, looking straight up.
Definitely not Alliance.
They surrounded her, and she wished she'd bothered to try and get up. She tried to raise an arm, then groaned and let it fall again.
The man closest to her yelped and leapt back.
Half a dozen guns suddenly pointed at her.
"How are you still alive?" a tall man with a deep scar on one cheek asked quietly, frowning.
If she could, she would have shrugged.
They put a bag over her head and took her somewhere that smelt of a hospital.
Why the bag? They hadn't bothered to disable her Omni-tool, spinning her around a couple of times was hardly going to make her lost. They hadn't even tried to take out her biotic amp.
The bag yanked away suddenly. A narrow face peered at her from a distance of a couple of inches away.
"Awake?" the man asked, intelligent eyes examining her from over tiny round glasses.
And they were examining her. It reminded her of the way Miranda used to critically eye her back in the early days, examining her handiwork, as it were. Checking that Shepard hadn't damaged the body billions of dollars had gone into creating.
She scowled at him.
"Well? What do you have to say for yourself?" he said, standing up straight and therefore further away from her face. He wore a white lab coat over a shirt and tie.
She was lying down on a gurney. She lifted her head enough to see the thick leather straps holding her down. This probably wasn't a hospital. Images of various shady corporate labs across the galaxy drifted through her mind. She let her head fall back onto the cold metal with a thunk.
"Come on, alien, don't keep us in suspense," he said, studying her with a barely suppressed smile.
She rolled her eyes.
The man ran a bevy of tests on her. She could see him just at the periphery of her vision, looking at her blood samples through a microscope. Occasionally he muttered questions to himself and gave her suspicious side-eyed looks. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't seem to be finding it.
In the meantime, she could feel her implants repairing themselves. Being tied down had probably worked in her favour—she couldn't jostle around and disturb whatever equipment Cerberus had filled her up with.
She looked at the scientist again. He wouldn't be able to get anything dangerous from her implants, both Mordin and Miranda had verified that she didn't have any active Reaper tech in her. She was going to have to put a stop to this all the same. Eventually.
Grudgingly, she wriggled her wrist against the restraint, seeing how much it would stretch. Her armour and gun were gone, but she was still in her under armour body glove. The comfortable weight of her Omni-tool pressed against her forearm. She mentally prodded at her biotic nodes running down her spine. They were surprisingly active—it seemed her biotics had gone large untouched by the crucible's blast.
The man stood and loomed over her again, interrupting her sulking.
"Time to test a theory," he muttered, pressing a button under a desk.
A number of guards entered the room, all carrying rifles on their backs and long knives at their sides. Their faces they hid behind full face helmets. Two of them unlocked the gurney's wheels and pushed her out through a door previously out of her range of vision.
She noted the exits.
They entered an empty white room. The guards undid her restraints, unceremoniously dumped her on the ground, and then left with the gurney.
The door clicked locked behind them. She winced and rode out the wave of pain at being jostled. Already it hurt a lot less than it had only hours before. Damn Cerberus and their billions of dollars.
She looked around the room. The walls were padded, did they think she might try and hurt herself? She poked at the padding, but it wasn't soft at all.
Oh. Sound dampening tiles.
"Tell me, Specimen J-2, can you feel anything?" The scientist's voice crackled through a tinny speaker on the roof.
She slowly looked up.
"I know you can understand me. A nod or a shake of the head, or a cry of pain where appropriate, will suffice," he said. "Now. Do you feel something new?"
She narrowed her eyes, waiting. Nothing happened for nearly thirty minutes. She sat with her back to the wall and the door in front of her.
The speaker crackled back to life occasionally to check on her, but she refused to co-operate. She didn't know what they were expecting from her even if she had been prepared to work with them.
Whatever he was expecting her to 'feel' just wasn't happening.
"Nothing to report, specimen?" he asked, his voice sharper.
She raised an eyebrow at where she thought the camera was and shook her head belligerently. She wondered how they imagined they'd be getting the cuffs back on her now that they had let her loose.
"What about now?" the scientist asked nastily.
She heard a small cry of pain in the background and her head jerked up.
"Hm. Interesting."
"What are you doing?" she asked, trying to quell her alarm.
"Can't you tell?"
What kind of crackpot experimentation was this? She frowned and cautiously stood up.
"I can feel something," she lied, hoping her gamble wouldn't backfire. "It's… distant. I don't know what it is. What are you doing?"
A whimper of pain was quieter this time, but it sounded worse. Wet, somehow.
"How about that?" he asked, fascination in his voice
She swallowed through her dry throat and shook her head. "No. nothing. It's too distant, whatever it is."
"Hm. Distance. Fine."
She held her breath, wondering how this would play out. If she heard that soft cry of pain again so help her she was going to start ploughing through walls.
Instead, the door unlocked.
Guards filtered into the room, more of them this time. A few took up station along the wall in front of her, while others flanked the scientist. At least she assumed it was him, given the flashes of white visible between uniforms.
The guards parted. The scientist nudged someone a couple of steps towards her.
A kid with a bloody nose.
A damn kid.
Her eyes jumped up to the scientist. He was watching her with fascinated eyes, eagerly waiting for her response. He looked so damn excited.
She swallowed. She held out her hands to the kid and didn't have to fake the trembling in them. She was beyond furious. He was so pale, like he had never seen the sun. Even his hair was pearly white. He couldn't be older than eight.
He observed her curiously, hopefully. His eyes, impossibly green, flickered between her face and outstretched arms.
She could see the scientist holding his breath.
The boy took a tentative step towards her, cautiously eying all the people watching him.
He took another step. He looked up at her with such hope in his eyes. She didn't know what he was expecting, but she was going to do one better.
She pulled him behind her and threw a biotic blast at the guards.
Half of them went through the wall. She pulled the rifle off of the closest guard, and punched him in the face when he groaned. Most of them had been laid flat by the blast and wouldn't be getting up ever again. The scientist had been thrown backwards straight at the metal door frame. She stared at the broken corpse. It was a better end than he deserved.
She looked back to the kid. He hadn't moved. He was staring at the wreckage with serious eyes.
An alarm sounded.
"Are you… are you rescuing me?" he asked.
"Yes. I am," she turned around and crouched down. "Can you climb up on my back?"
"I can run," he said.
She shook her head. "That'll give them another target. And if we get separated in here, I don't know how I'll find you again."
The sound of dozens of booted feet thundering down the corridors.
The boy nodded, satisfied, and scrambled up onto her back.
"Go left," he said. She ran.
"ESCAPED SPECIMEN. ESCAPED SPECIMEN," blared the alarm.
They rounded a corner and ran right into a group of guards. Shepard threw a biotic wave and took cover, bringing up the rifle.
"Um, try not to look?" she said.
He didn't say anything.
The alarms kept screaming through the speakers, and he kept directing her through the halls.
"ESCAPED SPECIMEN. ESCAPED SPECIMEN."
His grip on her neck grew choking.
"What's your name?" she asked. She loosened his grip and patted his hand in what she hoped was a friendly manner.
"Sephiroth."
"That's a nice name," she replied. Wasn't that a Jewish thing?
"Who are you?" he asked quietly.
"I'm Shepard." She glanced back. Those bright green eyes were studying her intently. She smiled. "Nice to meet you."
"There's someone coming."
She slowed and crouched by a wall. She risked a glance around it. Three guards stood at an intersection, monitoring every direction.
"Hey!" They fired at her.
She swore and put them in a biotic stasis. The sound of more boots pounding the floor thundered around the corner. She threw a biotic wave, and started firing.
"Let me down," Sephiroth asked. She ducked back into cover and crouched down for him.
"Just stay behind me—no, no, come back!"
The second he touched the ground, he darted out from cover towards the fallen guards.
She swore and lurched forward to give covering fire. He took a long knife from one of the bodies.
"Sephiroth!" Shepard yelled, between firing in bursts. "Get down!"
He ran towards the second group of guards, who were slowly making their way down the corridor crouching behind metal shields.
She ran after him and threw a biotic shield. She wasn't good at shields.
Without a sound and quick as a bullet, he leapt over the line of guards.
She stopped running.
He cut the guards down.
The last of them fell, shield and rifle clattering to the ground. Sephiroth stood in the middle of the bodies, his blue hospital gown blood splattered.
He looked back at Shepard. They stared at each other for a moment.
"Alright, get back up," she said, turning and crouching again.
They came to a stuttering halt at a bank of elevators. She'd already looted a key card, and Sephiroth told her the passcode. She was astounded that they hadn't closed down the elevators, or at least stopped them from accessing this level.
The door slid shut on the red flashing lights, screaming alarms, and machine gun toting guards.
A pleasant tune played. Someone else's blood dripped onto red plush carpet. Mirrors lined the walls.
She let him down.
"Why didn't you try to escape before?" she asked. "You knew the all the passwords."
His brow wrinkled up. "I wasn't allowed to. Hojo said so."
She nodded slowly. "Okay, okay. Well, seeing as Hojo isn't in charge anymore,"
He smiled fiercely, his eyes a little glassy.
"I say that if anyone ever tries to take you back to a place like that, you have my full permission to escape." She crouched down in front of him. "But I'm not going to let anyone hurt you like that ever again. Okay? They have to go through me now."
He nodded like a bobble head and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He blinked rapidly, and his lower lip wobbled.
"Oh, kid," she said and opened her arms.
He crashed into her. She held him tightly, resting her head on his and rubbing his back.
"Never again," she swore. "Never again."
He nodded and sniffled against her.
She looked up to the floor number. They were approaching the ground floor, and hopefully the way out. She patted him on the back and stood.
"Are we going to fight our way out of Shinra?" he asked.
"That depends on what they've got waiting for us. There are no alarms in the elevator, and they're still in use. I think that means this isn't a building-wide crackdown. It was limited to that level." She hoped.
She held her breath, took his hand, and stood tall. Her biotics hummed just out of sight, ready to be thrown up in a shield in an instant.
An elevator was just about the worst possible place to be defend—no cover, and they'd have to run headlong into oncoming fire before they could find any.
Sephiroth didn't look worried. It was a strange comfort. He might be accustomed to violence, but he wasn't so used to it yet that it he was anticipating all the ways they could be violently gunned down. Small mercies.
"I've never been outside before," he said.
She let out a slow breath. This 'Shinra' was very lucky she was trying to tone the violence down in front of her charge.
The doors opened with a polite 'ding', and she tensed, biotic blue edging in around her vision.
A large, brightly lit foyer appeared in front of them, filled with people who didn't so much as glance their way. A group of men in suits stood in front of the elevator, looking impatient. She felt every splatter of blood on the two of them.
Shepard lifted her chin, squeezed Sephiroth's hand, and marched.
They walked out the front door.
The next day found them in a dingy motel under the plate. 'Midgar' was a hideous labyrinth of a city, with magnificent wealthy sectors on top of a metal platform and sprawling slums on the sunless ground below.
Shepard had set up her emergency beacon through her Omni-tool and set it broadcasting her location to the heavens. No response came immediately, so she needed to prepare to go without help for the indefinite future.
Sephiroth was just as startled as her at how easily they escaped the Shinra tower. She suspected that wouldn't be the end of it, though. Those men and women in suits who had found her in that crater would undoubtedly be sent out to retrieve them. She was an alien in a society where that was clearly still a really big deal.
And Sephiroth? She had no idea what was going on there, but she guessed it was something like Pragia. She had scanned him for injuries as soon as they were out of sight of the tower. The results said he was uninjured and… roughly human.
"What are we going to do now?" Sephiroth asked, making an absolute mess of a bowl of fried rice. It was nice to see him doing normal kid stuff, like spilling food on the carpet and eating with his mouth open. Apparently he'd never had rice before.
"I'm not sure yet," she sighed. "We should leave the city. We're right under Shinra's power centre here, and hiding in the slums will only work for so long." They'd already dyed their hair, Sephiroth looked odd under the long black locks, but he was still too memorable. Something about him drew the eye; different hair certainly wouldn't fool trained professionals.
Midgar was expensive too. She'd gotten money from some muggers who picked their target poorly, but the bulk of that had gone into getting the room. Maybe beyond Midgar things would be cheaper? She needed to provide for two, and Sephiroth couldn't afford to be skipping meals.
She blinked, and her thoughts ground to a halt. She'd been planning for the two of them, but he might have people out there looking for him. He might have a home to go back to.
"Do you know have any family, Sephiroth?"
"My mother's name is Jenova," he said without hesitation.
"Okay, do you know where she lives?"
He looked at her for a long minute before his eyes skittered off to the side. "She died."
"Oh." She scratched the back of her head. "Do you know where you're from? Midgar?"
"I was always in the labs," he said, his shoulders drooping. "Hojo said I was born there."
"Alright. Never mind," she said. She put a hand on his shoulder because he looked upset. He looked at the hand and squirmed. She let go.
A part of her that didn't get to be in charge of decision making very often said she should look after him herself. It was the same part of her that liked to ramp the Mako off of cliffs, that woke up Grunt from his tank and handed him a shotgun. That part of her saw a scared little kid who was more comfortable with knives than hugs and said he was one of hers.
"What do you want to do?" she asked him quietly. She didn't know anything about kids. She should be finding him somewhere safe to recover and enjoy the rest of his childhood. It was madness to consider anything else.
He stared hard at the ground. "I want to stay with you," he whispered.
"Okay," she let out a slow breath. "Okay."
He stayed with her.
A/N: Thanks for reading, this is part three of a Sephiroth/Shepard prompt challenge. I am still looking for more prompts, let me know if you have any ideas!