Chapter One

I could taste the blood.

It seeped between fingers, trickling down out my mouth and through my skin. I tried to keep it in, but my life force simply didn't want to listen. Rivulets of red tracked rivers down my body, a light shimmering within it as it fled me. My head arched back, I leaned against something, more blood escaped. I was drowning in it.

My hand clutching my side did nothing to stay the red tide, no amount of begging or pleading would make it return to within me where it belonged. The darkness that enveloped the world around me slowly began to turn deep crimson red, pooling out from the ocean around me and becoming the sky. Pain ebbed away, numbness not even the right word to describe the emptiness that filled where that searing sensation had just been. Not only the pain left, but every other sensation, every other feeling was fleeing my body in my blood, refusing to give an explanation.

I don't know how I got the wound, if I had been shot, stabbed, poisoned or whatever else could have done this. Soon, there was no more blood to spill out to become another drop in the ocean or a cloud in the sky, black stained red. But somehow, I was still alive. Forcing my head down to look at my body, I was met with an image that if I could still feel anything, would have horrified me. But instead, I stared with apathy at the metal that was my body, red streaks down it as the last of the human part of me washed away. Nothing but a cold machine beneath it all.

Then the whispers started.

"Fuck!"

I jolted upright screaming, my head just barely skimming under the cabin ceiling. My heart felt like it was beating a thousand light-years a second, pounding in my head. My sheets were soaked with sweat, two very obvious twists from where my fingers were currently grasping for something to anchor me to. Something to tell me I was in reality, and no longer in another horrid dream.

My head pounded in time with my breathing, pain springing up my body every second more. When I finally leveled up, sweat coldly dripping down my forehead, a pair of green eyes were watching me. Concern swirled though alien orbs that I had seen for months, waiting in the same place, filled with the same care.

"Another dream?" Marco asked tenderly, standing at the side of my bed. In the tight spaced sleeping quarters, I occupied the top bunk and Marco the bottom. There was hardly enough room for the furniture and ourselves at the same time, and we rarely slept at the same time anymore anyways, it was simply too dangerous. At any moment we could be found out here in space, at any moment Cerberus could find us. It filled every second with terror, and lately it seemed it was getting into my dreams.

I nodded my head, cradling my forehead with my hands as I slumped my shoulder forward. "They're getting worse." My voice cracked, the fear I would still feel for hours at a time after those dreams slipping into my words. My hands were shaking even as I tried to still them against my face, eyes closed, I couldn't look at them. I couldn't be reminded how weak I'd become.

"We're almost there, we can pick up some medicine and see if it helps you sleep." Replied Marco, a hand slowly falling on my back. Before I could stop it, my whole body tensed at the contact and he gently pulled it back.

"Sorry." I muttered, shame flooding my body and making tears well in my eyes.

Marco stepped back from the bunk, each step echoing in the tiny compartment. "It's not your fault Athena." He glumly replied, sub-harmonics low, without looking up at him I could picture some 'hurt puppy' expression pulled across his scaly face. "It's their's."

But that was where he was wrong. Cerberus might have implanted that chip that influenced what I felt emotionally and physically, acting like some step down fro ma control chip, but I still had to break it's hold on me. For a month or two after we'd first gone on the run, it seemed I was in the clear, that I had control over myself and that they didn't. But these past few weeks it's returned full-force, and that was where I took fault. Every idle touch, every slip of a hand, every unexpected contact and my body tensed like I felt threatened.

It was crazy though, the only person in the entire universe I never should feel in danger with was the turian with the human name, my absolute best friend. But I did, and some days I couldn't even bring myself to look at him after it happened, shame just building up on more shame. I had hoped the constant close proximity of being stuck on a starship together would bring might help change it, and for a good while it had, but now it was like someone was stabbing me with a needle. Forcing something vile inside me.

We used to play games to pass the time, cards we'd bought on some gas giant's orbital station, or these really weird turian games he'd have to explain to me every time we played. But now those were falling apart, like a single petal from a wilting flower until the whole thing comes tumbling down. No matter how hard I tried to get past it, I felt absolutely powerless to stop it, as if months of progress had been lost in a single moment and I couldn't know why.

"Do you want something to eat? It's about breakfast time now anyways." Marco offered kindly, refusing to let me mope any longer. I pulled my head out of my hands long enough to flash him a grateful look, and then nodded my head. "We have those weird fruit type bar things, freeze-dried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the glorious and delicious nutrient paste." I laughed at the way he said it, something he was rather good at was making me smile. The sad part though was that he didn't have to even check our stocks to inform me of my selection, he just knew, and they were that low.

"Sandwich please." I replied, tucking my legs against my chest and wrapping my arms around my knees, eyes staring forward at a small bulkhead in the wall. With a nod of his head that I just barely caught, Marco left the bedroom compartment of the ship, the door closing behind him automatically. The aching in my head had subsided entirely by now, but a dull pulse as I still tried to honestly calm down came every now and then. My bed looked more like it had just been messily disturbed as I woke up, but it was still damp, reminding me physically of the nightmare.

And the voices, they had stayed on.

We had been on the run from Cerberus around a year now, and since about three months ago my usual bad dreams had steadily declined into something far more sinister and haunting. Shadows and voices, a chill up my back as if I was being watched, they were always there. Once I was in a forest with people like forms of darkness that shimmered and watched me as I bumbled about lost and confused. They spoke from all around, a singular voice with each cold but familiar one filling it. Sometimes there were faces too.

I had seen Doctor Keller so many times, I had his face memorized. His light skin and greased back grey hair, kind blue eyes and a comforting laugh, I couldn't get him out of my mind. But when I saw him there in the forest or in the black room, he wasn't kind, he was sad and broken. If I tried to approach him, tell him in the end I had gotten free and it was worth it all, dark clawed hands came out of the ground and grabbed my feet. It angered me that I couldn't speak to him, but that anger always turned into fear as I would be sucked into the ground or he'd turn and look at me with glowing blue eyes.

The smell of food roused me from my thoughts. "Goddess." The asari term slipped out before I could stop it, hands reaching out on their own accord to snatch up the meager sandwich, my stomach was growling like a varren. I started gobbling down the food, getting half way through the first half before I could rein in some semblance of control over myself. "Thanks." My words were sticky. I probably looked like a child.

Mandibles pulled back in a smile I could never not love. "We're about a half day from Anhur, so you might want to get your disguise ready." The ever present serious mood took a firm hold, destroying the laughter. My head nodded without my consent and I far more slowly finished the food he'd brought to me, Marco taking the plate back to the bathroom to clean it.

He was down by the time I'd climbed down from the bunk, and I landed on the cold metal floor barefoot. "Alright Magnus Jortik, I'll go put my face on." I replied, using his current cover-name.

"Gertrude Verbanski." He replied back playfully. I managed a laugh as I started towards the bathroom, moving around a smiling Marco. It had taken some time, but after a while Marco and I had managed to turn our scenario just slightly into something less scary then it really was. Exciting as well as terrifying. A new name, a new face, a new life almost when we traveled somewhere. We'd arrive as one pair of people, and leave as another. I'd honestly lost track of all the names and personas we'd used, but he never seemed to. I figured he kept a list so we never used the same ones twice.

Playing a different person was fun and dangerous, but when we got back on the ship we both knew exactly who we really were. He was a turian with a kind heart from a lawless station, and I was the ex-Cerberus experiment who once had amnesia and worked for Aria T'Loak. Oh an also a Shepard, not that I honestly could see what was so special about it.

Just a big Alliance family, lots of service and lots of heroes sure. Isabella and Connor Shepard, my parents, both had served for over twenty years. Aunt Hannah and Uncle John just as well, and now my cousin was the famous Commander Shepard. Me? I was just trying to be forgotten as I should be.

The mirror gave me a perfect view of my face, one last time before I altered it once more to keep myself alive and free. Curly black hair frown out to my shoulders, dark brown eyes and tan, freckled skin. For some reason I always kept the arch in my eyebrows, I guess they'd grown on me in the end. A pair of scissors and a bottle of dye awaited me on the lip of the sink. Time for a change.

I took the scissor sin hand and looked at the tight black ringlets falling from my head. It always took me a moment to make the first snip, but I always managed it in the end. I had to manage it. A few minutes later and my hair was clung tightly to my skull, barely an inch off my head. I picked up the bottle of hair dye, strawberry blonde, and got to work.

By the time I was walking out with my new hairdo, green contacts and make-up also obscuring my real looks, Marco had put on new face paint. Unlike his intricate white markings, it was symmetrical group of red triangles along his mandible and flat nose, golden contacts displayed over his changed to green eyes. "You look nice." He smiled warmly upon my return.

A blush burned across my face before I could stop it. "Thanks, so do you."

"Got something for you." He said, walking over with a datapad, blue screen scrolling already with data. "From Aria too." Why did he sound a little less then excited?

My heart started racing with excitement, and I quickly took the little machine in hand before I scurried into the cockpit, virtually throwing myself into one of the black seats. I skimmed the technical jargon about when I had received the message, yadda yadda yadda, and got to the words sent to me by the woman I still desperately loved.

He took it.

I blinked, looking over those three words that were utterly confusing in truth. Who was he? What could he have taken? Aria was the type to keep a lot of things secret, and they were guarded well. If she wanted it, there was little that could be done to take it from her. And of course the thing had to be something I knew about, so for her that really only left two viable options.

Afterlife.

Omega.

My fingers flew over the keys, typing in the question that had my heart racing. There were plenty of people who would want to take one of if not both from her, but the he was someone I had to knew right? Jorvan? Did Jorvan stupidly take something from Aria T'Loak? No, it didn't seem like something he would do, especially considering she was the sole reason he was able to fly again and that was probably the most important thing to that turian pilot.

No, it was something else, I just had to figure it out. Suddenly it clicked.

TIM? Omega?

I sent the email without a moment to waste. In order to keep Cerberus from tracing messages we sent between each other, I had had to come up with a rather long process. Aside from all the coding I had to do in order to essentially firewall the datapad, it was linked to only one person in the entire galaxy to send and receive messages to and from, there was a considerable lag as it traveled, I'd wired it around any major hubs that the data I still had showed thicker Cerberus activity in the area. Depending on where she was, it could be hours to days before she got any word back, and just as long on top of that for me to hear from the beautiful asari pirate.

I should have been more concerned about her, about her being dead or captured, but this was Aria T'Fucking-Loak, Queen of Omega and one of the most powerful sentient in the Terminus Systems. The thought was absurd. I mean of course I worried, but this wasn't quite the galaxy was about to implode worry, more of if she was making off alright now. Seemingly, she was well enough to have sent the message at least, so I took some comfort in that.

But then again if it had been Cerberus that had defeated her...

I but the datapad down, the little machine resting in my lap, staring out at the stars that passed by us in the view port. She's gonna be alright. I forced the words in my mind over and over again, making them fact the best I could. I couldn't be afraid for her, because then I'd screw up and get Marco and I killed or worse. I couldn't be afraid.

Marco came up and sat down in the pilot's seat, flicking little switches and pressing buttons without saying a word. He wasn't the best pilot starting out, but after a year the turian had totally gotten it down. Myself, well I was our 'it's a complete fucking emergency' pilot for good reason, I'd nearly crashed us three times in our practice bits, and we weren't even trying to land. The mechanics of flying a spaceship were still beyond me.

"Do you ever miss them?" I asked, mind settling on our adventures on Omega from nearly a year ago. We hadn't landed there once since we'd departed, the closest we had ever gotten was the fuel depot, and I planned on keeping it that way. Returning to Omega was too dangerous, a litany of reasons to avoid the station always coming up to the front of my mind.

"Who?" He sounded distracted, which he honestly was so it didn't bother me.

"Eli, I mean Sorlin, Jorvan and Runin?" I clarified, though really he should have known who I meant immediately. They were the only 'them' I could ever mean.

He scratched a chin plate, a habit I doubted he would ever break, and leaned back slightly in the chair as he debated. "A bit yeah."

"Ever wonder what happened to them?"

His eyes darted to me for a split second, narrowed as if it were that hard to wonder or he didn't really want to talk about it. "Well, last I heard Sorlin got into that clan Urdnot on Tuchanka."

A smile grew on my face at the news. "Really? That's awesome!"

I earned an agreeing nod of my best friend's head. "Yeah, he sent me a message last week that came in while you were... sleeping." He added, carefully picking the word. Sleeping didn't exactly accurately describe it anymore. Resting and hoping I didn't get caught in a nightmare sounded far more accurate. I was surprised he didn't come and tell me immediately though, after all any news we got on our friends always made me happy, and it would be a lie to say I hadn't been the most uplifted person as of late. "From the sounds of the message he had joined a while ago but didn't send anything our way, or it didn't make it through to us."

"Well what did it say then?" I urged.

Marco shrugged. "Most of it was him boasting about kills he's made, or how his clan leader Urdnot Wrex is uniting the krogan people pretty effectively." He sounded surprisingly uninterested.

The name sounded rather familiar however, like I had read it or seen it somewhere. And if he was uniting the krogan then he had to be important too. "Wait, didn't Urdnot Wrex work with my cousin?" I asked. On one of the asari world's we'd landed on there had been whole stores filled with books and other merchandise on the Great Commander Shepard and her exploits in her quest to defeat Saren. There had been so many different things about her, those she'd traveled with, and what they'd done. As a joke Marco had bought me a movie about it too, and the actress didn't look a single bit like my cousin.

I still had one book that detailed everything that had been opened to the public, and it certainly had sounded like my cousin. Interestingly enough, anything that talked about our family lineage never even mentioned I existed, only one by some volus said that her aunt and uncle had tried to have a child. I really blamed Cerberus for that one.

"Yeah, he was that krogan that they say was hired to kill Saren." Marco confirmed. "You know I hear she's no longer working with Cerberus." He sounded like he was still weighing his words, like something specific could make me crumple or shatter like glass. I wasn't some fragile piece of work anymore.

"So I've heard." I said flatly, turning to look back out the view port. Stars flying by was a beautiful but lonely sight. About three months ago, the same time my dreams had gotten worse, Jane had blown up an entire solar system by crashing an asteroid into a mass relay. Scary thought though was how we'd actually just been in that system, but once we heard about how batarians had captured humans they called terrorists, we'd hightailed it out of there. I couldn't see how anyone didn't see her still working with Cerberus though, blowing up an entire alien system sounded like the kind of twisted shit Cerberus would do. "She's also supposedly in jail back on Earth."

I could very easily recall Marco and I getting some supplies when every vidscreen in the store cut to a new channel, plastering my cousins face and what she'd done across it while a turian and asari anchor discussed it. I had dropped the space rations I had been about to add to my cart and started crying right in front of a bunch of asari strangers. Marco had to carry me out, take me to the ship and help me calm down before he went back hours later to finish purchasing the supplies we desperately needed.

He had held me closely and gently for so long, trying to comfort me as the bit of hope of finding and having a family crumpled around me. Memories of the girl who'd stolen cookies with me at her birthday party had run through my mind, comparing themselves with this woman who had caused so much death to others. There was just no way that kind person who stood up for others would just kill billions of innocents, I refused to believe it then and refuse to believe it now. Whoever that Commander Shepard was, they were not my cousin. My cousin was dead.

She just had to be.

I had seen whoever was pretending to be her once, on Omega and not realized it. I once would wonder what could have happened if I had recognized her and spoken with her, what might have transpired. Would we have recognized each other? Call each other's name, run across that one street that separated us and embrace? If I had only known who she was, who she was to me back then, how much now would be different? I would never know, because I refused now to believe it was really her now and then. It simply couldn't be because she was dead. Jane never would have willingly worked with people like Cerberus, it was against her nature. It was either her clone, or if they really did bring her back to life then they had something in her head controlling her like they'd wanted to do to me, or some super highly skilled impostor. Besides, she hadn't seen me since I was three, and I sure as hell didn't look like that little kid then.

Of course I would never let anyone in on my disbelief. For some reason, I couldn't see it going over well, especially with Marco who I slowly had learned virtually idolized the woman. Anytime we heard about the Great Commander Shepard, he hung on every word. She was perhaps his absolute hero, though I couldn't exactly see why. What had she done for the turians?

"Athena..."

"What?" I snapped back to reality as my name was called, looking away from the view port to he chocolate scaled turian.

"We're about to land, strap up." Marco instructed, pulling his safety straps across his chest and clicking them into place. I gave a nod of my head, straightened up and clipped the harness into place. The ship hull started to rattle slightly as we entered the planet's atmosphere. We were just getting supplies, a quick in and out was all it was going to be. Hopefully, things at last went along according to plans.

Knowing our luck, that wasn't going to happen. "Let's do this." I smirked.

AN: And they're back! Athena and Marco's adventure has continued, this time we're going across the galaxy instead of just sticking around Omega. It's been a bit since we've seen them, but hopefully everybody will enjoy this story and what's to come. Thanks for reading, don't forget to review!