"Shit." The woman said, sweat drenched and panting. "I made a promise."
"Oh," Said the man, hand pausing where they rested on orange holographic type keys. "Right."
"He saved my life." The woman said.
"But our first child honey? Wouldn't he understand?"
"He's dead Mark. It's not like I can ask him."
"Shit." Mark said, his wife nodded once, twice, a third time.
Her eyes drifted over the sterile white of the room, "We have to do it."
Mark Shepard closed his eyes even as his fingers moved, damning his child, his new baby girl, forever.
The Girl would be named Shep Shepard.
As a child she would be teased. 'Didn't your parents care enough to give you two names?'
'You're just not smart enough to remember more than one.' '
As a teen she was immune. "I know who I am." She would tell the would be bullies, "Can you say the same for yourself?"
As a woman it hardly mattered. Her first name had become Commander, the other forgotten. Shepard was as much as a job title as it was a surname, and she smiled condescendingly at any who tried to call her Shep. Like they knew her, like they deserved to shorten the last of her names, or were important enough to use her first.
At the end she bore both proudly, yet silently. The last for her father and the first for the man who died saving a child named Angie Harper, back in the early days of the First Contact War.
