Scenes from the Life of Phil Shepard
Family
There was a hand on his chest, was the first fact that impinged itself on his awareness as Shepard awoke. By its blade it rested gently there, its little finger loosely curled and half-buried in the bed of wiry black hairs it had found. The skin of the hand was blue, darkening to a pale violet beneath the fingernails. Shepard had to breathed deeply to arrest a sob that bade fair to break loose when it came to him that he could remember trimming those very nails to their utilitarian position, with their edges behind the pads of the fingertips, where they would pose no danger to white gloves donned at the behest of a librarian about to bring a treasured codex out for consultation, nor scratch a Prothean artefact when examining it in a museum, or — and Shepard could remember exulting in the experience — the first time this very hand and its fellow had liberated such a find from fifty millennia of imprisonment in the soil of an uncharted world.
The implications weighed on him. Delightfully, to be sure, as delightfully as Liara's meagre weight leaned against the left side of his body as they lay there, her head pillowed on his shoulder, but they weighed on him nonetheless. Her weight was too meagre, was the next thought that bubbled to the surface of his mind: he could remember absorbing herself in surveying a dig-site, staking out the exact spot where the next trench would go, then turning back to the last one, abandoning heavy equipment in favour of shifting the soil using her biotics, then by hand, then brushing or blowing the dirt away as she reached the right stratum; finally, Shepard remembered noticing that the local star had passed overhead too many times for one who still had not eaten or slept, even taking into account the short day-cycle.
Liara stirred, detaching herself from Shepard's site and moving her head to her own pillow. Shepard looked up at the ceiling a beat longer, fighting free of the toils of a new and beguiling past, then turned onto his side to face an infinitely more beguiling present and future.
God, you're beautiful. Shepard's body arched as for a crazy moment Liara's eyes seemed wide and blue enough for him to dive bodily into. A smile quirked her lips as she considered the mental image, though he'd done nothing more to communicate it than lean forward slightly. His voice when he finally spoke was a lost-little-boy whisper of wonder:
"We don't have to say anything, do we?"
She smiled indulgently. "No, we don't, but it is customary to. It will help us remember which of us is which."
No smirk, no sarcastic lilt in her voice: Shepard remembered a sex-ed. class Liara had taken and realised before she had finished speaking that she was serious. He gulped.
"I…" he began, and this time Liara really did smirk as his realisation that he couldn't think of anything to say was written plainly on his features. She came to his rescue.
"You made it easy," she whispered. "I wanted this so much… so soon. I came so close to… to offering… you know" — He nodded. — "…that I scared myself. But you waited… and then when we joined, that first time…" Her voice became little more than a breath, shaped into hints at speech sounds by her lips as he watched them, enthralled. "…it was like coming home."
Shepard still couldn't quite believe that, but the part of their joint consciousness that had been Liara had patiently spent hours the night before insisting that, however many dark places there might be in his memory, he still had her trust and her love, and — there was the real sticking point — he still deserved them. No need to rehash that little debate again.
"I love you." He said simply.
She smiled. He felt like his heart would stop. "I love you too." He was sure it would. She grinned at the look in his face, snaked both arms around him and pulled him in for a kiss. Turned out he survived. He put his own arms around her and felt her cheek rub against the line of his jaw as she luxuriated in the feeling of enveloped — he knew she loved the sheer width of his shoulders — he shivered as she made a spine-tingling purring noise and her warm breath tickled his ear.
"We need to go. We're probably already late." He rubbed his cheek against hers.
She tightened her arms around him. "Yes, we should." They kissed some more.
They cuddled a little longer, then with infinite reluctance Liara broke the embrace and got out of bed. Like a sparking, intermittent electrical contact, Shepard felt his always-sluggish sexual response flicker to something approaching life as he watched her disappear into the bathroom in all her naked glory. The feeling was gone as soon as it had come, and he stretched for a bit, then rolled lazily out of bed, grinning to himself — and not for the first time — over the fact that he had at last found someone who didn't expect anything more from him. As he sorted through their clothes and listened to her making a brisk toilette, an implication occurred to him.
"You look so… human, or maybe humans look asari… you know what I mean. It can't be a coincidence, can it?"
"Actually," she called out over the sound of the running tap, "we're all hideous tentacle monsters, using our insidious mind powers to seduce honest colony kids."
"Ah," he returned her deadpan tone as they passed one another in the doorway of the bathroom, "that would account for it." He dropped a kiss on her nose, and went for his own wash and brush-up.
"Actually actually," she called out to him as she got dressed, "I've often wondered: given the morphological similarities between humans and asari, quarians and turians, fauna generally on life-bearing worlds throughout the galaxy… After what happened to you on Eletania, we know the Protheans watched us. Maybe they did more than watch."
"Mmm." Shepard acknowledged the theory through a mouthful of toothpaste. He couldn't think of an intelligent contribution to make, so he simply finished washing up and went to get dressed, enjoying the comfortable silence.
"Uh, hi." Shepard looked up from under bashfully lowered brows and spoke the words sheepishly, making him, did he but know it, adorable in the eyes of the woman he spoke to. Liara stood to one side on the threshold of the woman's home and appraised her: she was one of the tallest human women Liara had ever seen, overtopping her and Shepard (who were much of a height) by about half a head. She was lean, had warm brown eyes to Shepard's blue, and her black hair was liberally threaded with grey. The one feature she really had in common with her nephew was their skin tone: so pale it was almost pearlescent.
"Hi yourself," she finally said when it became clear that Shepard was momentarily tongue-tied. When he failed to return that serve she spoke more to fill the silence: "You know, you look a lot like a fellow I saw on the news — Commander Shepard, his name was. I remember, 'cause it had me thinking: my sister, now, she married a fellow named Shepard, and I did hear that they had a son who'd be about the age of this Commander fellow, but of course I wouldn't know anything about that now."
By the time she'd finished, Shepard was grinning boyishly, and had found his voice. "How are you doing, Aunt Kathie?"
"How am I doing, he asks. Well, now, since it's been a little while, you'd better come in and sit down while I catch you up on the news." Shepard and Liara stepped over the threshold, and Aunt Kathie called out "Liam! You'll never guess who's here!"
From rather closer at hand than the volume of his wife's call would have suggested, a wry baritone made itself heard, announcing William's presence before he turned the corner and presented himself to view; "With you prattling on at the top of your lungs and not letting him get a word in edgewise, I think I could take a shrewd guess. How are you, there, lad?"
Shepard nodded to his uncle. William was shorter than his wife, but still had an inch or two's advantage over his visitors, and that not counting his vivid shock of red hair. "Uncle Will," he acknowledged the salutation, and looked briefly at Liara before continuing with the formalities: "Liara, this is my mother's sister Kathleen, and her husband William Keogh. Aunt Kathie, Uncle Will, this is Liara T'Soni."
"Lovely to meet you, my dear!" Aunt Kathie launched herself arms-first at an only mildly startled Liara, enfolding her in a capacious embrace and planting kisses on both her cheeks. "I think we've seen you on the news vids as well, haven't we, Liam?" Without waiting for her husband to reply, she made a sudden thoughtful expression, and went on: "Now, I do recall reading that some a… that some people from, erm, elsewhere can't take human food or drink… Are you…?" Liara barely managed to start shaking her head before Aunt Kathie resumed her sunny expression and went on. "Ah, that's grand! We can all have a nice cup of tea! Come on through!"
Shepard and Liara exchanged a wry look, recalling everything he'd tried to share with her to prepare her for the Aunt Kathie Experience, then looked up and were forced to grin sheepishly as they realised that Uncle Will shared it.
As Aunt Kathie filled and set the kettle boiling, thought for a moment and went rooting through the cupboards for the good china, she kept up a running flood of questions that would not wait for an answer, and sundry other commentary: "And how long will you be staying? Do you need Liam to make you up the guest room? I warn you, you'll never be forgiven if you take yourself off again without seeing your cousin Maire: sixteen she is — as well you should know! — and after me for the same thing you were at that age, wanting to go off to England of all places and train for a soldier. Honestly, sometimes I wish I'd never told her Commander Shepard was her cousin Phil: maybe she'd wait and finish school first, but she wants to go be just like you. I don't know…"
Shepard took advantage of the necessary pause as Aunt Kathie peered into the teapot, winced and went to rinse it out. "Speaking of," he introduced his theme loosely, "I think I owe you an apology, don't I?"
"Sure, and what for, child?" Aunt Kathie asked without looking 'round.
"For the fact that you haven't seen me in over twelve years," Shepard
said quietly. "For what I said when you did."
For a long moment Aunt Kathie was silent, pinching tea leaves out of the tin and dropping them into the pot with jerky neglectful movements. She drew a breath sharply in through her nose, as audibly swallowed, and turned to face her nephew, her eyes only faintly moist.
"It was only true what you said; it is a stranger I was to you… and you had something you felt you had to do."
Shepard smiled gently: "It may have been true, but it wasn't kind. I'm sorry, Aunt Kathie."
For a moment, it wasn't clear if she was about to weep, smile, grimace, hug him or box him on the ear. Finally it turned out to be none of the above: she snorted and smiled lopsidedly at him.
"Sure, and I thought you'd be back inside of a month or two anyway. You were skinny as a rake back then, and your big blue eyes the size of soup plates." She looked him in the eye and spoke simply: "When you stuck with it, I was proud of you."
All present took refuge for a moment in the low-key ritual of tea-drinking, perched on stools or otherwise leaning on the breakfast bar. Shepard paid particular attention to Liara's face as she brought the cup to her lips: they could both remember him drinking tea and not entirely hating it, but how it would strike Liara's taste buds was a question neither of their memories could answer. She had, of course, been raised to a matriarch's exacting standards as regarded the social proprieties, so Shepard received no clues: her face was impassive. He kept looking at it anyway, as it was fast becoming one of his favourite hobbies. He let his lips spread into a goofy grin, drank in the sight of her for a beat longer, then took a sip of his own tea. His eyes met Aunt Kathie's, and the smile in hers made it clear she had missed none of the by-play. He grinned at her, as good as admitting that he'd brought someone home to meet his family. Wordlessly, she took it happily on board, and changed the subject.
"You've picked the right time to come, anyway: Donal and Shivvy are both home for Christmas. They'll be home in a bit… and thinking about it, you'll see Declan as well if you wait a couple of hours. We're babysitting the little one so he and Sarah can have a 'date night', if you ever did." She pronounced the phrase as though it were from a foreign language she'd only taken a year of in school, then cocked her head on one side and made a suggestion uncertainly: "Would you ever let me call your cousins? Since you've come while they're all on the plane, it'd be a shame if you missed any of them."
Uncle Will had leaned forward, his mouth half open to try and save his nephew from being swamped with relatives, or indeed to point out that Shepard and Liara might be staying long enough to catch up with his cousins one at a time, but he was forestalled. Shepard raised a hand, and Liam was impressed to find himself abandoning all thought of speaking. My nephew the space captain…
"Go ahead, Aunt Kathie. That's what we came for."
"Will you two put your eyes back in your heads?" Aunt Kathie's tone was no more than mock-scandalised, and the laughter of their brothers and sister was good-natured, but Siobhan and Maire went roughly the colour of beetroot anyway. The family sat in a cramped circle in the living room, eyes generally turned towards Shepard and Liara on one of the two-person settees, but the two youngest girls had appropriated the couch opposite, the better to pursue their self-appointed roles as the respective shadows of the variously exotic visitors. Maire was staring at her cousin with the hero-worshipping attitude Aunt Kathie had warned him about, but Siobhan, it seemed, had eyes only for Liara. Shepard smiled fondly as he saw a sympathetic tinge of violet suffuse her cheekbones as she watched Siobhan look away in minor mortification.
Aunt Kathie gently twisted the motherly knife: "Pay her no mind, dear. We don't see many asari here."
"No?" Liara enquired with mild surprise. "So far from the Alliance, I'd have thought your trading partners…" She tailed off as the Keoghs exchanged looks. They silently elected Patrick to explain in what he liked to think was an authoritative tone:
"Watson is an old colony," he told her. "After first contact, we made a few painful mistakes before we knew what's what out here in the Terminus, so we still rely on our trade links with the colonies nearer home. There are some newer colonies on the nearer side of the Traverse that rely on our trade, so the Navy," he nodded to his cousin, who smiled gently, "keeps our lines secure." He grinned as a thought occurred to him, and exaggerated his accent: "Besides, there's a lot of Irish here, so we have to secure our corned beef and cabbage supplies, so we do!"
Siobhan, at least, was quick to notice that the eye-rolling chuckle that was Liara's contribution to the general merriment was the exact mirror of Shepard's, she had clearly needed no explanations to understand Patrick's deliberate invocation of stereotypes. Siobhan reflected on what she'd learned about the asari in school, and her eyes grew even wider.
Aunt Kathie, for her part, had thrown her head back and fairly screeched "Go on with you! Corned beef and cabbage, he says!" As the general merriment died down, a tangential thought occurred to her: "Did you bring your uniform, child?"
Shepard let his brows knit together quizzically: "Erm, no… I mean…" he paused and glanced at Liara as something occurred to him: "we both brought armour, but…" he paused as he realised it shouldn't have occurred to him in the first place; "…it's not even Alliance issue, so…"
"You brought armour?" Aunt Kathie expostulated, briefly sidetracked.
Shepard nodded sheepishly. "This is the Terminus…" he raised a hand in Patrick's direction. "I know you've been here long enough that Watson itself is pretty safe, but can you imagine how embarrassing it would be if something went down and the first human Spectre didn't have the equipment to get involved?"
Uncle Will, at least, smiled a wry appreciation of the mental image, but Aunt Kathie was back on her theme, and unlikely to be shifted: "If your mother was here she'd want to see her baby boy in his uniform, I'm sure. And so do I!"
Shepard and Liara exchanged a glance: "Everyone's here," he pointed out to her. "I think that's our cue." He turned back to Aunt Kathie: "You'll get the chance," he told her as he and Liara produced a stack of five substantial envelopes each from an inner pocket and began to pass them out.
"Sure, and what's this, child?" Aunt Kathie asked as she read the hand-calligraphed "Mr. and Mrs. William and Kathleen Keogh" on the heavy cream-coloured paper, but she had a suspicion, which was confirmed as she slipped the unsealed envelope open and read: "You are cordially invited: Dr. Liara T'Soni and Lt. Cmdr. Philip Shepard request the pleasure of your company…" Aunt Kathie threw her head back and screeched again.
When her eyes tracked back down, she beheld Shepard and Liara with one arm around each other's waists, so candidly affianced that she wondered that she hadn't suspected before. her eyes shone as she looked from side to side, and read over the shoulders of her sons: "Mr. and Mrs. William and Erica Keogh," "Father Aidan Keogh"; her nephew had remembered every one of his cousins' marriages, ordinations and life events with perfect accuracy, she was sure. "Oh, child… oh, child…" she kept repeating, overcome.
The revelation naturally divided the room into groups: Aunt Kathie, Roisin, Maire and Siobhan descended on Liara to bewilder her with bride-to-be cooing, the menfolk recoiled, and Shepard took advantage of the confusion to excuse himself in the direction of the washroom. When he came out, he found Uncle Will waiting for him.
"Congratulations, lad. She seems like a lovely girl."
Shepard grinned and let his eyes do the lighting-up thing as he contemplated the future waiting for him at the end of his aunt and uncle's downstairs hallway. "You have no idea."
Liam smiled and shook his head, but then the clouds drew together across his expression: "I wanted to catch you alone," he told his nephew, pausing to gather his words. "I just… thank you, for the loan I mean, and for helping out with tuition and all… I feel bad… I mean, practically the only time you ever hear from us is when…"
"Well, that's my fault, isn't it?" Shepard grinned as he interrupted his uncle's pause, drawing a quizzical look. "If I'd come visit more often…"
Liam grinned back, and turned, half passing his nephew and placing a hand on his shoulder by way of escort back to the gathering. Or so Shepard thought: in fact, as soon became clear, Uncle Will was leading him to another room. "You'll have a word alone with Maire?" he asked, and Shepard nodded gladly as he realised that the room was one of the smaller bedrooms, no doubt the one Maire and Siobhan had shared, and still did when Siobhan was home from college.
Maire stood and looked shyly up at her cousin as Uncle will boosted him over the threshold with an affectionate pat on the shoulder. He was forcibly reminded of Aunt Kathie's remarks vis-à-vis eyes, soup plates, and the size comparability thereof: Maire looked slight at first glance, standing at about 5′4″, but a closer look revealed that she was more sturdily built than a look focusing solely on her pale, delicate features might suggest. Shepard had enough of the same genes to know first-hand that her pale skin didn't necessarily mean she was an exclusively indoor sort — people related to her mother or his in general simply did. Not. Tan. But still, he thought, his blue eyes looking into hers, she was… very young.
He grinned at her and held his arms out. "Hi, coz." She grinned back as they hugged.
"So, Aunt Kathie tells me you're thinking about signing up with the Alliance?"
"I want to finish high school at AFC just like you did!"
Shepard gave her a searching look, as he tried to figure out how far "like you did meant "because you did." "Well, you could do worse," he finally said mildly. "How are your grades?"
"Straight A's," she told him with an embarrassed grin. He smiled back.
"Then maybe you should think about going to Welbeck. I don't want to run my old school down, but the teaching's definitely more geared to high achievers than at AFC. And it would put you in a great position to apply to the Academy, if that's what you want to do."
Shepard resisted the urge to sigh as Maire's eyes narrowed in suspicion: "How come you didn't do that?" She asked.
"'Cause I wasn't as smart as my big sister," he told her mildly, and grinned as she started. He explained:
"Your cousin Jen was army mad from the age of… I don't know," he abruptly realised, "say about ten? She started drilling with the colonial militia on her eighteenth birthday, and she was headed to the Academy, except, well… the raid happened." Maire shifted uncomfortably as her cousin visibly made an effort not to remember the Mindoir raid. He went on:
"Look, my advice, for what it's worth? Take your time." He grinned as a thought occurred to him: "I was nearly seventeen when I joined up, so you can still do that and be just like me!" Maire rolled her eyes. "When you come to the Citadel I'll introduce you to some friends of mine: some are Navy, some are Marines… I probably know people who joined the service in every possible way, so you can ask them all about it and work out what's best for you, OK?"
"OK." Maire couldn't help returning her cousin's broad charming smile as they went to reinforce Liara in her defence against the remorseless welcome she was receiving to the family.