Commander Shepard was minding her own goddamn business just standing around behind Joker's chair without him knowing, doing nothing of great importance except breathing, when a voice quite forcefully squirmed into her right ear so suddenly she had horrible war flashbacks and wept invisible tears.

"Commander, aren't you supposed to be ge—"

Using her super-lightning-fast-rocket reflexes she ripped one of her shoes off and shot it into the face of the voice's source: Kaiden Alenko. His face became so engulfed by the sound-barrier-breaking shoe that he had to go to the Medic Bay for a while. This allowed peace to return so Shepard went back to staring intensely at the space just above Joker's head.

Hours/days later, Shepard was still in the same position but no-one questioned her about it because she looked very scary when she was bothered during one of her "moments", as they liked to call them (i.e. standing around for hours just doing nothing, not even eating, staring ahead at nothing with one eye slightly closed and the other pointed kind of off-center). Joker was very oblivious to her almost eternal presence mere centimeters behind him since his chair could not swivel. This pleased the commander greatly because it allowed her to stand in complete silence just beyond his peripheral vision without him (or anyone, really) telling her to "go and talk to this person" or "go explode this" or "go away I need to eat why are you here?"

Sometime around space-noon Kaiden finally had the courage to go back to the cockpit but Shepard heard his feet scuff the space-dust behind her so she readied another shoe.

"NO! PLEASE, COMMANDER! THE STITCHES—"

Joker had to pee sometime after Kaiden's comatose body was discovered in the MAKO's glove compartment so Shepard had to retreat back to the space map and pretend that she was studying the cosmos (while still keeping her uncoordinated eyes on Joker at all times). As she watched Joker wobble his way across the deck in audible agony a dark blurry mass appeared on her left and began to say something about the Reaper threat. She didn't pay much attention to them and just mumbled "yeah" and "uh-huh" whenever she heard a pause in their speech. Joker was nearly reaching the end of his painful mission to the elevator and Shepard had to fight to keep herself from running over to his empty chair and marking it as her own. The blur beside her still hadn't gone away and she was getting very sulky.

Finally, Joker's spindly and twitchy toes disappeared behind the wall leading to the elevator and Shepard, completely ignoring the blur's existence by this point, cartwheeled off the ramp and flew towards the cockpit, images of her fingers digging into the leather filling her eyes with such joy but then Kaiden—who really should have learned his lesson and never go back to the cockpit ever again after the first two incidents—was moved 0.0000003 decimeters to the right by space turbulence and his right hand's pinky finger was shattered by Shepard's projectile nose, causing her to veer off-course and crash into ship's dashboard.

The auto-pilot turned off and, without Joker's knowledge of flight there to control the ship, they plummeted down and down and down (or up and up and up since there's no true direction in space) and hit a supermassive asteroid which then spun off into deep-space where it collided with Saren and Sovereign's faces simultaneously.


Thus, the Reaper threat was pacified, and Commander Shepard was made a space-hero. Kaiden Alenko's pinky soon healed, but the scars on his heart and mind never did. Joker returned from his bathroom break and found his chair covered in illegible writing—the one and only love letter Shepard had ever written in her life. To this day, she still stands unnoticed behind his chair, not even knowing or caring that she had saved the entire universe from destruction. But, as long as Kaiden's ridiculous hair is always 100,000 meters away from her, she is happy.