Hero's Don't Cry
By: ThatBlondeGirl
Disclaimer: Mass Effect belongs to Bioware. I just get to play with them.
When she got right down to it, amidst all the mire, superficial images and overlaid personalities she was still a little girl holding her stuffed bunny. Its ears frayed and coming apart at the seams and its feet dull because when she was little she had dragged it across the floor.
The poor thing had been missing an eye, and the stitching of its nose had been coming loose. Her mother had sew arms and legs and ears so many times. The threads hadn't match the once downy fur. The multicolored strands weaved across the joints. One leg was shorter than the other, having had a run in with the neighbors dog.
She had balled her eyes out when she had found the slobbered upon bunny, its foot a few yards away. Sitting by her mother, she had watched as it been made as good as new. It was not until she was older that she had realized the unevenness.
One paw had been without its stuffing, a hole having been worn into the 'thumb'. She had chewed it off, as children were wont to do, her father had told her once. As far as she knew, that bit of damage had been there forever. She had no memory of chewing on her bunny's thumb, she, of course, had no memory of being given the bunny, either.
It's faded little sweater had borne the marks of the fires the raiders on Mindoir had set. During basic the fluffy white tail had fallen off in a footlocker. She had left it, with no time to sew it back on. She had herself to keep together, after all. It had been shoved in the bottom of duffle's, and equipment lockers (it took her forever to get the stale smell of used locker out). She fancied that her bunny had been one of the most well-travelled stuffed animals in the galaxy.
Her tears had been soaked into its dulled stuffed body. She had tugged at the ears and thrown its small body across rooms in frustration and anger. The hole in the thumb had been re-sized as she had tugged at its frayed edges in hesitation. Secrets had been whispered into its soft belly as she clutched it to her. Her fears, uncertainties, wants, misgivings, hopes - all had been laid bare for deaf, nonjudgmental ears.
Kaidan had laughed at her when he had caught her sitting on the bed writing up her reports on Ilos with the bunny seated in her lap. She had thrown it at his head in mock anger, and then explained, trusting him to understand. He had. And she fell even further for him. Especially when he jokingly demanded that it not take up too much bed space. She pushed him off the edge and told him the bunny had priority unless he was naked.
She missed that damned bunny about now. It had been made into nothing more than ash when the SR-1 was torn to shreds. It had died with her. Too bad Cerberus couldn't resurrect stuffed animals.
As she walked to the shuttle, the metal handcuffs chaffed against her wrists. She had jokingly told the soldiers in her escort that she preferred gold. They had given her a stilted laugh, too awed and uncertain to do much else.
Joker and Chakwas were a few paces behind her. They weren't cuffed. They weren't on trial. The Alliance saw fit to question them and she suspected Hackett was going to sweep their involvement under the rug. After all, the court-martial of Commander Shepard was bigger news than any regular hearing. The massive media coverage regarding her was suspiciously lacking in its mention of her crew.
Pausing beside the transport as her escort loaded duffels and boxes of seized hard drives and data pads, she looked back at the Normandy, the design a stark contrast to Mars' red-orange landscape. Technician crews in Alliance paraphernalia were already swarming it.
Joker had baulked, loudly, when he had gotten news that his baby was going to be picked over by 'Alliance hack jobs'. EDI has assured him that Alliance technicians and mechanics were adequately trained. Shepard had shrugged and told him that it was out of her hands. Jack told her to go pirating. Miranda had given the convict a dower look and continued to rattle off a list of need-to-knows.
Shepard had made the decision to drop the crew off at Omega and let them scatter. Rolling into port with a ship full of thieves, convicts and general malcontents was just a bit too audacious, even for her. It was bad enough they weren't being allowed to dock at Arcturus, the Alliance brass labeling the ship as a threat had routed them to Mars. She suspected it had more to do with keeping the ship grounded and within Alliance confines than any actual threat. That and the press was eating it up.
At that's what it was really about, wasn't it? She mused as she ducked into the transport. The great Commander Shepard, humanities first Spectre, Hero of the Citadel and inspiration for all aspiring marines, was being dragged back to Earth in irons. Her ship had been seized, her weapons confiscated. She had been effectively neutered, armed with nothing but her charm and reputation. If only Ash could see her now. The Alliance was damned good at putting on a show. She just hoped the Batarian Hegemony was eating it up as much as the media circuit.
She took a deep breath as the transport engines rumbled to life. Chakwas and Joker were being brought in separately; the soldiers she was left with created a thick tension in the air. She could really use that bunny about now.
She knew the plan, Hackett had informed her of the expected course of action. After the transport ride, they would catch a shuttle to Arcturus at which point she would be released to the care of Admiral Hackett. Then there would be two months of psych evals, personal statements, physical exams and a litany of other tests she couldn't care less about. The seized hard drives and data pads would be mined for a believable defense, and character witness would be brought forth.
It was a rush job, Hackett assured her, impending Reaper invasion and all. There was a big fat 'I told you so' waiting at the end of that series of events, she could taste it. If she lived that long.
She briefly entertained thoughts of banging her head against the transport window, but thought better of it. The Mars outpost was outfitted with two kinds of soldiers, those near retirement and those too green to put into the actual field. The latter had been assigned as her escort and she imagined they wouldn't take so well to a 'hero' beating herself up on the window. She'd probably start muttering if she allowed herself that bit of leeway, anyway. Although an insanity plea would probably fix much of her immediate issues.
To bad she had a moral compass, and an intact survival instinct. Even though the rumors said that her Reaper babble had been from an unstable mind, if she actually used it in court the Citadel Council, procurers of her Spectre status and keepers of her ability to gallivant across Citadel space with a VIP pass, would run so far away she'd be lucky if a mass effect drive could catch up.
Politicians had a bad habit of not trusting crazies so there was no way a crazy woman could save the galaxy. At least not a self-proclaimed crazy woman. Shepard supposed it did take some kind of brain defect to go up against a sentient race of older-than-dirt machines. She pondered it for a moment and the decided she was going to just stick with a health dose of survival instinct as her reasoning. She didn't need to start analyzing her mental capacities right now. People who made more money than she could do that.
The transport settled and a larger shuttle awaited to make the trip to Arcturus. They made the transfer and as Shepard took a seat she wondered if the handcuffs were really still needed. What did they expect her to do? Bull rush the five men sent to escort her, and somehow manage to break through the bulletproof door protecting the pilot and make her escape? From the look on her escorts faces, it seemed so. The half fearful, half-awed look was getting old. This was not how she was going to sit for the four hours it took from Mars to Earth.
Glancing at the men around her, not much older than boys, she decided that if she couldn't worry the edges of bunny ears she'd worry the edges of cards.
"Anyone got some cards?"
Someone always had cards, so she held onto them in a white-knuckled grip as she played Skyllian Five and traded casual stories. When they figured out she wasn't going to blow things up at random, they started to pry. Did she really blow up a relay? Yes. Had she rushed, headfirst, into the Omega 3 relay? Yes. Did she really steal the original Normandy from Citadel control? Yes. Were you really dead? To which she shrugged. And the more outlandish follow-up, are you a zombie? That one had incited a round of laughter, which only increased when she quipped that without her coffee she was a homicidal zombie.
When the shuttle finally docked at Arcturus the mood became somber again. The brief respite slipped through Shepards' fingers too fast for her to grasp. That's why she had loved her bunny, she could hold that for as long as she needed. She was handed her dress blues and released from her irons as she changed. They were immediately returned to her wrists as she stepped from the room. Her white hat was held by one of the men.
As she stood in the decontamination chamber, the clamor of a crowd echoed. She needed to put on her Commander pants now, she supposed. Taking a breath she replaced the armor that had rattled loose. She needed to be better at holding that together, these next few month. Hero's (or unrepentant killers, as one loquacious reporter had called her) didn't cry.
She had learned after the Skyllian Blitz how to walk through a crowded room. It had taken her a while to get use to it, and to this day crowds in enclosed areas still made her twitch with mild anxiety, made worse by her lack of a weapon.
The room continued to decompress and the convoy gathered in front of her and turned to face her, backs to the door.
"Commander," The ranking officer stepped forward and saluted. The rest followed suit. "We think your righteous. And you need to kick some bureaucratic ass."
She smiled and nodded and attempted a returning salute, the irons chaffing against her hands. They returned to their positions surrounding her and when the doors opened, Commander Shepard marched through the room as flashes went off in front of her eyes. She didn't stop until they had reached the conference room where the transfer would take place.
Hackett nodded to her as her cuffs were removed and then dismissed her escort after the return of her hat. As she stood at attention in a room full of high-ranking important so-and-so's she was read her crimes and signed two trees worth of paperwork; her fingers itched to pull at raggedy threads.
As the room emptied Hackett escorted her to her quarters, explaining that they were sparse but their stay on Arcturus was only for a week or so. Since she had willingly come in the brass had been willing to allow her some leeway in her lodgings but she was still considered a flight risk. Apparently her prison break on Purgatory had reached official ears.
Shepard nodded and spoke at the appropriate moments. Her hands were starting to shake, so she kept them clasped behind her back as they walked. It was odd to be so unarmored and alone for so long. She had spent roughly a year armed with a crew at her back, nearly constantly. This was foreign.
They stopped at a nondescript door, Hackett handed her a folder of papers and wished her a good evening before leaving her in the hall. Keying in the code into her omnitool, the door opened with a whoosh. She stepped into the gray utilitarian room and relaxed her body against the door after it closed, dropping the folder to the floor sending papers and a datapad scattering.
Closing her eyes, Shepard focused on her breathing. She wasn't alone, she had people behind her. They believed in her, they trusted her, they were relying on her. She could get through this. Her breathing shuddered as she sunk to the floor.
A large crunch startled her out of her thoughts. Sitting up, she pulled a blue gift bag that had gone unnoticed in her turmoil, half crushed, from behind her. White tissue paper covered the internal contents but for a simple envelope with her name written on top.
Scrunching her nose in confusion she pulled the paper to her. Efficiently she opened it and removed the folded paper from inside. Her eyes scanned the slanted writing on the Alliance stationary.
I figured you could use this right about now. You're not in this alone.
-Kaidan
Clutching the paper in her hand she ripped the tissue paper from the bag and gasped. Pulling out the toy from the bag she had to work to get her breathing under control. The thumb was missing, as was the eye and it was quite tailless. The jacket had faded a little more, but the scorch marks were still there. The feet were still dirtied, too. An ear looked a little loose, and would probably need stitching soon enough but the multicolored threads still held.
Taking a breath, she sobbed. It was her bunny! She buried her face in what was once the soft fur of its belly. She sobbed again, catching a whiff of a familiar cologne, it smelled like him. And on the floor of the cold room, Shepard cried, curled around her stuffed bunny.
AN: Inspired by Easter, my own wonderful childhood blanket the functioned similarly, and a recently surfaced pic of Kaidan with a bunny on the KAAS ('cause I lurk there, hard). And my wonderful Shepard wouldn't shut up, so instead of sleep, I wrote this.
Forgive some of the choppy transitions, this honestly started as just a drabble about Shepard and her bunny and decided to turn into an me3-ish one-shot. That I'm relatively happy with...I'm unsure of the tone conveyed, but I'm sure everyone can agree that Shepard probably needs a good cry (+5 for Kaidan cologne!)
I may write up Kaidan finding her with the bunny, that paragraph was added later and I really liked it. He totally snuck in and demanded Shep get her bunny, cause originally she was just going to have to go without...not sure when he had time to grab it but meh, that's what creative license is for (I also claim this for military anything!) ;)
R&R
~TBG