A/N: Recently replayed the Mass Effect series, and I wanted to write something elaborating on how I see my newest version of Shepard. Consider it a character study mixed with a fic.
Takes place in Mass Effect 2, shortly after getting the Normandy SR-2.
Trigger Warning: Mentioned suicide, mentioned depression, mentioned abuse, mentioned underage prostitution.
Her skin doesn't fit.
Shepard flexes her fingers again. She curls it into a fist, clenches hard, watches as knuckles and bones and veins press against spotless skin. For an instant, scars crisscross against her hand. Then she blinks, and, no, her knuckles are completely clean, untouched, perfect.
It's an odd feeling, being haunted by the phantom memories of your own body. Everything feels wrong, just slightly off. Shepard spent most of her first few days tripping over her own feet. She's lost count of the number of times she's reached for a bottle of water and then knocked it over when her too-long fingers hit plastic earlier than her hand remembers. Doors are too low as well. The SR-2 is larger than the original Normandy, but Shepard is larger than her original body too. Before, she was short. A diet of nutrient paste and scrounged garbage doesn't exactly encourage growth in a teen street rat. By the time she enlisted, puberty was long over, and even a strict diet combined with Alliance gene therapy hadn't added a single inch to her 5'2".
It hadn't mattered. It had never mattered. She'd proven to all of them that even some gang trash could be as good as any of them. Better, even. Some kids were third-generation Alliance brats, but their better birth didn't make them run faster or hit harder or shoot straighter. Most of those kids hadn't made it into N7 training. Those that did were gone by first week of N1. As it turned out, having all your teeth improved your photogenic smiles and not much else.
Grimacing at the memory, Shepard lifts her upper lip to expose her gum, checking both sides as her reflection bares its fangs at her. Thirty-two chunks of enamel wink back at her, perfectly straight soldiers. Shepard cautiously touches at a molar, as if the touch will cause it to remember that it doesn't belong in her mouth. Last time she saw that tooth, it was on the floor of some dirty backstreet in Vancouver after a cop punched her in the face. That job had been a mess, she reflects, letting her lip drop. The Reds were useless on a good day, suicidally incompetent on a bad one. Trying to take territory from the Twofingers had been an idiot move.
Still, it had been a lesson. Every scar, every bruise, every missing tooth, they were lessons, even if that lesson was nothing more complicated than 'Duck, idiot.' Shepard traces fingers (long fingers, fine fingers, unfamiliar fingers) over her skin, her touch ghosting across a body built too big.
Finger burns, don't touch overheating weapons with bare hands. Fingertips clean as freshly fallen snow.
Shoulder scars, don't jump through glass without armour. Smooth skin instead of puckered flesh.
Dented skull, headbutting batarians is a stupid idea. Whole bone that curves uninterrupted as she draws her palm across her head.
Wrist scars, don't ever give up again. Pure, perfect veins stand proudly in front of her eyes. As if they'd never had a dinner knife stolen from the cafeteria dragged across them in a fit of mad anguish and hopeless grief.
And just like that, eyes are brimming with tears, fury and despair wells up in a tidal wave so hard that she is like to choke, and Shepard's just Jane again, an angry, desperate kid who was in deep with the wrong kids, lying in a back alley trying to keep her blood from gushing out of her side. She doesn't even remember what the fight was about, just that she was so enraged she dropped her heel of week-old bread and the next thing she knew there was a shiv scraping against her ribs and someone was shouting about cops and jail time for murder and then there was nothing but deserted silence.
She doesn't remember anything about the cop who eventually found her there, hands sticky with blood, a gasping fourteen-year-old brat with short, greasy red hair and so much blazing rage that she burnt everyone who came near her. All she remembers was sirens, beeping machines, distant shouting, muffled orders, and bright lights shining in her face.
Afterwards, she managed a fortnight at the orphanage, and then a month in juvie, and the dinner knife incident. Then, it was a week back in hospital, and then back to juvie for two months interspersed with a rotating stream of counsellors and broken noses, before Jane finally had enough and scaled the chain link fence during a blackout.
She never did find the bastard who'd gutted her. Back then, she wanted to rip his bloody head off. Now, though… now the memory just makes her feel tired, a deep, thrumming void inside. But not as empty as the months that followed her escape, wandering the streets, no gang, no allies, no friends, no family. Fighting for every scrap she could fish out of the dumpsters, trying to avoid the roving gangs with their bats and pipes, protecting their turf. She did what she had to do to survive, trading favours and punches and her body, whatever it took, even as every exchange scraped away another layer of her soul and peeled away her confidence, her self-worth, her light in the dark.
Until one day, when the beatings were too many, when the running was too tiring, when the touches were too much, when her soul lay in tatters around bloody feet and bloodier legs, she had the dumbest, stupidest, most reckless, most suicidal, most gloriously fortunate decision to try and steal a gun from an Alliance officer on shore leave.
Gun control had gotten tougher since the Alliance formed. The bigger gangs, the cartels, the Mafioso, they had guns, sure, the real things, death-spitting barrels of red-hot light. But the street gangs, the roving bands of the lost and the unwanted, they had to make do with pipes and bats and firearms so old they still used gunpowder and actual bullets. More than enough to deal with the turf wars and unaffiliated stragglers, sure, but nothing when compared to the firepower and shields of the Alliance.
So Jane, stupid Jane, idiot Jane, lucky Jane, decided to try and steal the handgun off of a marine who was catching a bus late at night, on his way back from a night of drinks and friends and laughter and all that Jane had never known. Alliance marines had, like, seven guns, everyone said so, they were worse than cops. At least cops just had tasers and sticks, they didn't have weapons which spat instant laser death. So, the marine looked tired and drowsy, he was probably drunk and dozing off, and he had so many guns he wouldn't notice if she just took one, right?
Jane yelped and nearly wet herself when the sleeping marine lashed out, quick as a whip, his hand enveloping her entire lower arm in a giant meaty grasp.
"You shouldn't try steal from a drunk man," thrummed the deepest baritone Jane had ever heard. "When your judgement's impaired, it's hard to not grip too hard. You don't want broken fingers, and I'm not in the mood to break anything. So how about we both pretend this never happened, and you go on your way?"
A smarter rat would have counted her lucky stars and bolted, before the marine came to his senses and gave her a beating as well, as a warning to the other thieves. A cautionary rat would have dashed out the window, before the driver spotted the stowaway. A more perceptive rat would have realised that the marine had more or less admitted that he might kill her, and not even on purpose.
But Jane was tired of being smart, of being safe, of being clever. She didn't have any friends to warn with bruises and breaks. She didn't have the energy to pop the window and hit the ground safely. She wasn't even sure if she wanted to even live anymore. She was hungry, and fatigued, and half-mad, and so fucking tired.
So instead of ducking her head and scurrying like the vermin she was, Jane lifted her chin, looked the marine right in the eye, and spoke with the calm clarity of the very confident or the very crazy.
"You're drunk right now. From the smell of you, I'd say you had too many drinks. I'd say you're trying to avoid a fight. You don't look so tough, sleeping at the bottom of your bottle. I could take you."
Blue eyes flickered, sharpening with a startling focus. The marine gazed at Jane, into her, through her, steel gaze excavating her history from beneath the brim of an Alliance cap.
"How old are you, kid?" he rumbled.
"Fifteen, sixteen," Jane thought. Damn, how old was she? She couldn't remember. She lifted her chin and jutted it out in that authoritative way she saw the cops do. "Seventeen," she said. It always paid to say you were older than you were, she'd found. People were less likely to cheat you, more likely to take you seriously, more likely to hire you.
"Seventeen," the marine repeated. It was like he was rolling the word over in his hands, dissatisfied with the blemishes he found. The look he gave her called her a liar. "I'd say you're even younger. Hard to tell with all the grime and those eyes. Street kids always did grow up faster than everyone else.
"But let's say you're seventeen, even if I'd peg you closer to fifteen. You're still pretty young, even if you're old for the streets. You make it to that age, you should be looking forward, looking for jobs. So tell me, kid, what makes you so eager to die?"
"I'm not," Jane snapped, mouth working faster than her brain. Not realising that nothing speaks false more truly than denial. "I'm going to live. I'm going to outlive everyone. And all I need is the gun. Hand it over, old man, or I'll show you how eager death can be."
He huffed, unimpressed. It actually looked like he'd burped, some of the alcohol making its way back up.
"Tough talk doesn't make a tough person, kid."
"I'll show you tough. Give me the gun!"
Jane tried to grab his pistol from its holster. She might as well have tried plucking the stars from the sky. The marine's grip didn't even flinch. Her wrist chafed against the hard callouses of his palm.
"So you're seventeen, huh." And the way he said the question, like it was a lie so obvious that talking about it was a waste of time, it made Jane feel childish and stupid and completely out of her depth. "It's a shame you aren't older. Then maybe we'd see if there's someone beneath all that anger and bravado. You wouldn't be the first bully we made into a soldier."
"What are you talking about?" Jane said, angrily trying to work her wrist free of the marine's huge fist.
The man let go of her wrist so suddenly that Jane fell out of her seat, suddenly tugging on air. She landed on her butt, but quickly scrambled back on all fours to create some space between her and the marine.
The man didn't even look at her, coolly ignoring her wary anger. Instead, he pulled a chip out of his pocket, a tiny disposable datapad that Jane recognised from her stints as a delivery boy down by the docks. He quickly keyed in a few lines into the chip, then tossed it to her feet. She glared at it before transferring her gaze up to the marine still in his bus seat.
"Take it," he said.
Jane didn't move.
The marine sighed. "If you ever get tired of living on the streets, if you ever want to turn your back on this hellhole of a planet, if you ever want to get out, if you ever want to say 'Enough', go to that address in three days' time. I'll be outside. I'll wait from sunrise to sunset. If you want to take your life back, if you want to hold your future in your hands, then meet me there."
The bus slowed to a stop, and the marine slung his bag across his broad shoulders.
"This is my stop. Here." He took a few credits out of his pocket and put them on his seat. "For when you get off. Don't want the driver chasing you outta here."
"Where are you going?" Jane demanded, clambering to her feet.
"This is my stop. For reference, remember this place. It's the closest terminal to the address on the chip. Hopefully, I'll see you again. If not, well…" the marine shrugged. "I can't force you to do anything you don't want to."
"Don't be stupid," Jane scoffed before she could stop herself. "People always make other people do what they want them to, whether or not they want to do it. That's what power is."
The marine gave her the strangest look. It was sadness, mixed with pity, and a dash of intrigue.
"Tell me about it in three days. Maybe then I'll believe you."
And just like that, the marine was off the bus, gone, leaving Jane with some cash, a data chip, and seventy-two hours to make a choice.