Author's Note

This is a story about trauma. Alcohol abuse, child abuse, sexual violence, and torture will be discussed before the end of this piece. If that's not your thing that's cool but I'm just letting you know now.

The primary romance in this piece is fShep/Garrus, but I'm planning to include Jack/Zaeed and Kasumi/Miranda as well, and possibly others if I get around to it. Things will probably get naughty at some point. There's also past fShep/Liara, but that's not a major part of the narrative.

This is my current ongoing project; updates will be slow, but they will happen. I'm always looking for beta readers, if you're interested, and I'd be happy to reciprocate.

Thanks for reading.

Chapter 1: Lazarus

Death is an old friend by now. So is pain. They've spent a lot of time together lately. But consciousness is an enemy she hasn't faced in a long, long time. Shepard paddles weakly, limbs numb and leaden in the icy water, a fly in crystal-clear amber that burns infinite and black. And then... something. A star, maybe. A moon? She isn't sure. But the light comes from somewhere, pale gray and growing steadily brighter. Shepard looks up and sees ripples. She is rising to the surface.

"Dammit, Wilson, she's waking up!"

"But that's not supposed to happen yet." The doctor stood at Miranda's elbow, fluttering.

"Shut up. Sedate her!" He was usually smarter than this, she thought. Maybe he was just rotten under pressure. Pathetic, really. On the table, Shepard stirred. Shit.

"It's not working!" Wilson's voice had a hysterical edge to it.

"Increase the goddamned dose then!" Miranda turned back to her project. The Commander was still weak and bloody, her face and torso a maze of staples, tape, and open wounds after the latest round of implant replacements. She was as bad a patient dead as alive, Miranda thought. Constantly rejecting her implants and synthetic organs, reacting badly to drugs, refusing to assimilate nutrients, and now metabolizing her sedatives too quickly and waking up, of all things. People had used to talk about Shepard as some unkillable legend, a mythic figure destroying the geth in a single stroke. For an immortal colossus, she certainly displayed a remarkable will to die. Her eyes flickered open.

"Brain activity's off the charts! Heart rate rising! Shit, she's gonna stroke – "

"Put her under!" Miranda snarled, then bent over the supine Shepard, who wheezed and struggled, managing to lift an arm off the table and catching at Miranda's collar. Well, at least they knew the neural grafts to her hand were working. The Commander's eyes were wild with pain and fear, and her mouth twisted as she struggled to speak through the drugs pinning her to the operating table.

"Shepard, don't try to move. Lie still. Try to stay calm," Miranda instructed, pressing her patient's trembling arms down by her sides. Shepard fought her, but she didn't have the strength to offer any real resistance. Her eyelids fluttered; her chest heaved.

"Got it. Respiration dropping. Heart rate returning to normal..." Wilson sounded shaken. Miranda watched Shepard's eyes roll up in her head as she slipped back into unconsciousness. Only when she was certain the Commander was completely under did she step back.

"All right, Wilson. I don't know what the fuck you did, or how, but I'm going to find out. And in the meantime you had better make sure it never happens again." The Chief of Medical quailed under Miranda's glare.

"Yes ma'am."

"It's like you're trying to kill her."

"No ma'am. Her metabolism – the biotics, and the liver – "

"Spare me your excuses. Get Chang in here to monitor her. I want you looking through the logs to find your mistake." Wilson flinched. "Now , Doctor!" He fled. Miranda crossed her arms, fury humming under her skin. Lazarus was so close. Wilson's fuckup – well, it had nearly cost them the project, but they had had consciousness, contact. They'd have Shepard up and working before the end of the year if some other idiot on the team didn't kill her by accident first. Miranda's job at this point was making sure that didn't happen. They needed the Commander too badly and had come too far to let her slip through their fingers now. You're our only hope, Shepard, she thought. And you're damn well going to deliver, if I have to personally drag you every step of the way.

Someone was yelling at her. It was loud, too loud; it hurt. She reached out to pull the pillow over her head and found only cold metal under her palm. This wasn't her bed. What... where... She thrashed. Her cheek stung where it pressed against the slab she lay on.

"Shepard, get up! You have to get up." No, she thought. She was dead. It was done. She clung to the knowledge of her nonexistence, trickling down to her without proof or context. They couldn't make her, she was dead, it was someone else's turn now.

"This facility is under attack! Shepard!" They weren't going to stop shouting. Fucking hell. She forced her eyes open.

She was alone in a small med bay – no, a lab. White tiled floor, machined ceramic walls and ceiling. No windows. The lock holo on the door glowed red. It looked like a prefab, or a space station. Dimly, she wondered if this was hell. Her head ached; her face burned as she blinked and squinted. Slowly, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. She was sore, and fine lines of pain traced their way down her body as she moved.

"What the fuck," Shepard rasped.

"Good, you're up. The facility is under attack by mechs. There's armor and a pistol in the locker behind you – suit up, Commander. They're coming!"

"Where the hell am I?" Shepard demanded. But the comm was dead; the strange woman did not respond. "Fuck!" She staggered to her feet. The fuzziness in her head was clearing rapidly, which wasn't doing much for the sharp pains that wormed their way under her skin. "Fucking hell." She turned, leaning on the low metal table that had served as her bed. Sure enough, there was a locker on the rear wall. She headed for it, supporting herself on the slab until her knees steadied under her.

The locker opened with a hiss at her touch. The armor inside was black, patterned in white and gold, with a gray and gold undersuit folded up inside the helmet. A pistol and holster hung from a hook in the back. More immediately interesting were the water packs wedged into one corner. Shepard ripped one open with her teeth and guzzled its contents greedily, ignoring the wetness that dribbled down her face and onto her chest. The second pack slaked her thirst. She dropped the empty wrappers on the ground and looked down at herself, reaching for the undersuit.

She wore only a hospital gown. There were angry red lines running down her thighs and calves, wrapping around her ankles; one started between her toes and continued up past her knee, disappearing under the skirt of the gown. Shepard froze. Those wounds weren't hers. She ripped frantically at the ties on the gown, heedless of her stinging skin as she tore the garment off. Standing naked on the cold tile, Shepard choked. The scars wrapped around her, neck to toes – a long, irregular mark swept down her shoulder to curl around one wrist; red lines sliced through several of her fingers at the second knuckle; her torso was a labyrinth painted in jagged red. Fingers pressed against her face revealed more cuts, crazing her cheeks and forehead with who knew what unholy patterns. Following the marks up and out, Shepard discovered that, to add insult to injury, her head had been shaved.

"What the fuck – what the fuck – " She snatched at the memories that flickered tantalizingly in the corner of her eye. The Normandy. Recon mission, Alchera, lost ship – lost ship. The dreadnought attack. The void. Her people. Joker, Liara. Oh god, Liara. Shepard braced herself against the locker, breathing in huge, panicked gasps. She had been spaced – spaced! How was it possible that she was still alive? She could remember spinning in the dark, dizzy and disoriented as the vacuum sucked all the O 2 from her suit. She had died. She had died. Had Liara made it off the ship? Had Joker survived? Was Kaidan still alive? Garrus? Wrex? Her crew? How could she even be here – and where was she now? And who – who was holding her?

Shepard ground her teeth, the sound cutting through the clamor in her head. Standing around naked in a cold lab and surrendering to panic would get her nowhere. She was alive, apparently anyway, unless this really was hell, in which case none of her questions mattered. What had that woman said? The facility was under attack? Shit. She had better do as she was told then, and suit up. Shepard picked up the undersuit and shook it out.

Black and gold embroidery on the right breast. A logo... She could remember pain. Drugged pain, weak, heavy, crushing her down onto – it had been in this room, she realized. A dark-haired woman with a smug face and cold eyes snapping orders at someone standing at the bank of machines at the foot of the table. Shepard, don't try to move, lie still, try to stay calm. Someone – the woman – pinning her down. Then darkness again. Shepard clenched her jaw and yanked the undersuit on, one leg at a time. She didn't recognize this horned hexagon bullshit. No matter: just another thing to find out as soon as possible.

The armor had a red N stripe down the right arm. It was also stamped with the hexagonal logo. Bizarre – the Ns were an Alliance program. But the equipment was N7 issue, for all the logo matched no Alliance or merc heraldry she'd ever seen. Shepard powered up the hardsuit, relaxing a little as the onboard medical VI hummed to life and the kinetic barrier fizzed to full power around her. The pistol was empty, no clips even, but... Shepard clenched a fist and felt a reassuring surge of biotic energy down her arm. Scars or no, she still had her superpowers. She threw off the mass effect field, meaning to knock a crate across the lab. The heavy-duty biohazard canister atomized in the resulting blast.

Shepard staggered back against the wall, eyes huge, heart pounding. But I don't have that kind of power, she thought wildly. She ripped off her helmet and yanked her amp out of its port. This was... it was... it wasn't her amp. It too bore the strange hexagonal device.

"What the fuck did they do to me," she grated.

"Shepard! What are you doing? You can't stay there! You'll be overrun by mechs any minute. You have to get moving!"

"Who the fuck are you? What the fuck – "

"There's no time, Commander. You have to get out of there, now!"

"Fuck off!"

"I am not letting you die now, Shepard. Get out of there. Run!" Shepard stood, amp clenched in one fist, helmet in the other, as the door hissed open. It revealed an empty hallway – more white ceramic, metal railings. Still no windows. Underground base? Asteroid facility? The sound of gunfire yanked her focus back to her immediate situation. The air smelled of ozone and cooked meat. That bitch on the comms was right – this was a bad place to be. Cursing silently, Shepard shoved the amp back into her port and yanked on her helmet, the HUD winking to life under her visor as it connected with the rest of her hardsuit. Default interface, missing data she wanted; if she was going to be stuck with this armor, she'd need to reconfigure it. But there was no time to worry about that now. Once again, Shepard found herself following the stranger's orders. This time, she ran.

The mechs were goddamn everywhere. They weren't too smart, but there were a hell of a lot of them. And they had the superior position – again. She leaned out of cover just long enough to knock another LOKI unit off its feet. Hahne-Kedar crap, she thought, blowing its head off as it struggled to rise. They were new models, but between the logo and her HUD she had all the information she needed. But there were three more behind it; only one even stumbled when the downed mech blew. For the hundredth time since leaving the lab, she wished for an omni-tool. She'd never been the dab hand with tech disruption that Garrus and Kaidan were, nor had she any ambitions of approaching Tali's skills, which bordered on magic powers as far as she was concerned, but even overheating the mechs' weapons for a moment would have been a blessing. A handgun was not the ideal weapon for taking out kinetic barriers.

The LOKI units arrayed themselves around the stairs, fortifying their position. Shepard picked her shots, muttering curses into her helmet. A barrier down here – she gestured, flinging a warp field from her fingertips with a grunt. The mech's torso shattered on impact, its limbs tumbling to the ground with a clatter. She dropped back into cover, panting a little. She couldn't understand this new level of biotic power – her body shouldn't have been able to sustain it, no matter what they'd done with her amp. But she'd been cutting swathes through the facility's security system for the better part of an hour now and she hadn't even worked up an appetite. It frightened her as much as the scars.

Rounds whined off her shields, forcing her attention back to the moment. Getting distracted during a firefight, Shepard – that's great, just fucking great, she thought. Pull yourself together, Commander. Shepard forced the terrible snarl of questions into the back of her mind. The mechs were closing on her position. Fuck. She was out of time.

Shepard jerked one shoulder, her barrier snapping into place around her, better than a hug with enemies bearing down on you. She rose and began to fire, taking out one shield, then the other. Bullets slammed though her shield and vaporized against her barrier, but the mechs were close enough that she felt the impacts on her chest and hip. Shepard ignored the blows, using her biotics to knock one LOKI unit back to the stairs before taking the shooting arm off its mate with a single shot. At least she still had her aim. She lobbed another mass effect field, slamming the downed mech into the railing. One more shot and both units were on the floor, smoking. Shepard made for the stairs.

The door opened as she was reaching for the lock holo. Shepard was still bringing up her gun when the FENRIS unit slammed into her chest. The dog must have weighed 35 kilos at least, with god knew how much power in its spring besides. She went down hard, the mech slicing through her shields with a blast of electricity. Oh no you fucking don't, she thought, clenching her fists, and blasted it with her biotics. Shepard just wanted the damn thing off her, and she succeeded admirably. The mass effect field she released flung the unit down the hall and kept right on going, ripping through the cluster of LOKI units on its heels. She didn't have time to gape. Rolling to her knees, Shepard took out the dog's power cells and slid into cover, leaning around the doorway to shoot at the bipedal mechs as they regrouped and made their way toward her.

She wondered if she could reproduce the shockwave. Fighting for one's life was hardly the time to experiment; on the other hand, it seemed like nothing she did with a mass effect field could fail today. She threw the dark energy at them, skipping it on the floor like a rock over water. Kinetic barriers already weakened, the mechs scattered like bowling pins. Shepard leaned out of cover, dispatching one of the machines, then another; the last one standing fired at her, moving steadily forward. A bullet slammed into her shoulder, sending her staggering back. Shepard cursed, switching her gun to her bad hand and blasting the LOKI with a warp field. She could feel blood pooling in her hardsuit.

"Getting fucking cocky," she snarled. Her HUD blinked alerts at her: suit penetration, no medi-gel available – as if she needed reminding. "This shit better stop bleeding fast." She flexed her hand experimentally, then her arm. Her shoulder was out of commission, but it was just a flesh wound. Damned inconvenient though. There was a gouge in the pauldron where the bullet had grazed it before penetrating the undersuit, making a black slash through her red N stripe. "Figures." She clamped her left hand over the wound, holding her pistol ready by her hip, and kept going.

"Where's that bitch?" she muttered. The comms had been silent for awhile, her self-proclaimed ally cut off midsentence by a rattle of gunfire. Shepard didn't care about the strange woman's welfare, but she would like to get the hell out of this – whatever it was – before she died of starvation. A person couldn't live off roast mech.

The whine and clatter of bullets grew steadily louder as she approached the end of the hall. Maybe there was an actual human on the other side of that door, she thought. Her chatty friend? Shepard hoped so. She wanted answers. She slapped the lock holo open and stepped into cover.

The door opened with a hiss and for a moment, her heart leapt. A broad-shouldered man with dark, close-cropped hair crouched behind the railing of the walkway ahead, coolly picking off his unseen attackers. When his pistol grew hot in his hand he ejected the clip and rose from cover, biotic charge glittering at his fingertips. Shepard drew breath to cry out before she saw his profile. The shout stuck in her throat. It wasn't Kaidan – no, of course not. The Lieutenant was a little leaner, and much lighter-skinned. No omni-tool flashed at this man's wrist. It had been a fool's hope that she'd meet some of her team here, of course. Wherever 'here' was. She refused to wonder if her people were still alive. There were mechs to kill.

Shepard ducked behind the balustrade and sidled toward her fellow human, the thick plateglass protecting her from the LOKI units' shots. She shouldered her barrier into place and checked her pistol – empty. She loaded her last clip with a grimace.

"Hey!" she yelled.

"Who – Shepard?" The surprise in the man's face took her aback. "I thought you were still a work in progress! How did you get here?"

"Someone woke me over the fucking comms, got me down here."

"Miranda?"

"Who the fuck's Miranda?" Comprehension dawned in his eyes.

"What do you know?"

"Nothing! Where the fuck are we?"

"This is Lazarus Station. Research facility."

"We're in space?"

"Yeah."

"And who the hell are you people?"

"Look, I'd love to play twenty questions, but we've got mechs climbing out our ass. Let's deal with this, okay? Then I'll tell you whatever you want to know." Shepard stared at him hard, but his dark eyes met hers squarely.

"Fine," she snarled. He nodded.

It was a quick fight. The mechs were easy to pick off from cover, crowded stupidly on a balcony and firing at the plateglass that protected the humans. Shepard was impressed with the stranger's biotics, especially his trick of catching enemies in an energy field and pulling them out into the air, then dropping them two stories onto hard tile, and made a mental note to figure it out when she had time. The hexagonal logo on his collar was less promising. But once the last mech was dispatched, he gave her a nod.

"So. You have questions, Commander," he said. "Let's sit. Anyway, shoot." He settled himself on the floor, leaning back against the glass of the railing and digging in the pocket of his uniform, coming up with water packs and an energy bar. Shepard accepted the water with a nod, levering herself into a sitting position – slightly more challenging in a hardsuit than in his light armor.

"Who are you?" she asked, ripping her water open and taking a swig.

"Right. I guess I didn't introduce myself. Jacob Taylor." He offered a hand, which Shepard grudgingly shook. "XO of this station. I'm just a soldier, though. Served five years in the Alliance Marine Corps. Most of my job is handling security here." Jacob opened the energy bar and offered her half. She accepted it and ate, not particularly hungry but knowing she might be later.

"Who the fuck runs this station?" She gestured to the logo on his uniform.

"Can't tell you that, Commander."

"Like hell you can't."

"Sorry." She considered hitting him, but discarded the idea immediately. She wanted to get off this station alive, if possible, and Jacob would help her with that a hell of a lot more than the mechs.

"Fine. Look. What the fuck is going on? What did you people do to me? How did I get here?" He sighed.

"Shit. All right. I'll give you the quick version. Your ship was attacked off Alchera. The Normandy was destroyed, and you were killed – dead as dead can be when they brought you in here. Our scientists spent the next two years bringing you back to life. That's what this station's all about, really: Project Lazarus. You, Commander." Shepard stared at him blankly. Was he fucking with her? No, he looked serious, even... sorry. It – she couldn't digest it all. She latched onto the first question that floated through her mind.

"The ship was destroyed? What about my crew?"

"Most of them survived. A few servicemen from the lower decks didn't make it out, but all the officers and your alien specialists got out okay." A hand unclenched around her heart. Liara was alive.

"And this Project Lazarus. What the hell was that?"

"A special initiative to get you back, Commander. I'm no scientist, but it was pretty serious. Huge budget, cutting-edge technology."

"Like what?"

"Implants, cybernetics, you name it. I heard talk about neural grafts and synthetic organs and fuck if I know what else, a lot of long words I can't spell." He shrugged uncomfortably. Implants, she thought, restraining herself from touching her face with an effort. Synthetic organs. That explained the scars, or some of them.

"You keep saying it was to bring me back. There weren't any other... subjects?"

"Nope. Just you."

"And my injuries..." Jacob met her eyes squarely.

"It was bad. The first time I saw you, you were nothing but meat and tubes." She flinched – she couldn't help it. Meat and tubes. His words painted an ugly picture. "I'm sorry. You've spent most of the last two years on an operating table, dead. Then in a coma. Then sedated. You got blown out of an exploding spaceship, Commander. The trauma... Anywhere else, they'd have put you in the ground." Her mind skittered over this information, unwilling to absorb it. She crumpled up her empty water pack and threw it over the railing, watching it arc perfectly down through the glass until it was lost to view.

"Who's this Miranda?" she said at last.

"Miranda Lawson. She's the CO. My boss. She ran the Lazarus Project. I'm betting Miranda's the one who woke you up and got you moving – did you see a video feed?" Shepard shook her head.

"It was a woman on the comms, though. Didn't recognize her accent."

"That's probably her. Australian."

"Bitchy?" Jacob laughed a little.

"Yeah. What did she tell you to do?"

"Get the fuck up, get moving, head for the shuttles. She got cut off – didn't sound good."

"It'll take more than a few mechs to drop Miranda. She was right though, we should head for the shuttle bay. We gotta get the hell off this station."

"No argument here. What's going on, anyway? This attack?"

"I have no idea. One minute I was settling down for a little rack time, and the next, every goddamn mech in this place starts shooting. At us. I've been on the move ever since. Lot of dead bodies." He shook his head. "It had to be an inside job. Nobody could have hacked our security systems like this unless they already had clearance."

"What the hell would anyone attack this place for?" Jacob raised his eyebrows.

"To get to you, Shepard."

"Why me? I'm just a soldier."

"You. Cmdr. Shepard. Just a soldier." She shrugged.

"The Alliance must have carried on without me, right?"

"Well, they sure as hell declared you KIA."

"That's what I'm saying. What the fuck did you people want to... want me for, anyway? This is insane!" Her voice had a brittle edge to it. Shepard clamped down on her panic before she started screaming.

"I'm really not the one to ask, Commander," Jacob said. "Look, we gotta get moving. We'll have more mechs inbound any minute now. Place is crawling with them."

"Ain't that the goddamn truth." He rose, offering her a hand.

"Let's roll," he said.

The Chief Medical Officer reminded Shepard of nothing so much as an oversized, balding rodent. He muttered over the shuttle bay doors, fiddling with his omni-tool. Shepard watched in silence, arms folded; Jacob stood beside her, coolly professional, one hand on his gun. Dr. Wilson's omni-tool pinged cheerfully.

"There, that should do it. Now we - " The door opened with a hiss midway through his bypass script.

"Miranda!" Wilson yelped, leaping back in shock from the dark-haired woman who stood in the doorway. Shepard's mind went still with recognition at her cold eyes and smug mouth. "But you were – "

Crack. Shepard raised her eyebrows as the squirrelly little doctor crumpled to the floor, a bullet in his throat.

"Dead?" Lawson asked his corpse.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jacob cried.

"My job," she said flatly. "Wilson betrayed us all."

"How the hell do you know that?" Lawson trained her glare on him.

"Who do you think trapped me in D wing behind an army of mechs?" Jacob shut up. "Shepard, you're all right. Good. Let's get to the shuttle."

"Not so fucking fast." Shepard folded her arms. "I want answers, and I want them now."

"You want to stand here and bicker while mechs pile up on top of us?" Lawson snapped. Shepard cocked an ear. The shuttle bay was quiet; so was the hall behind them.

"Yeah," she said evenly. Lawson's eyes narrowed.

"Fine." Shepard allowed herself the smallest of smirks. It was her turn now.

"Who the hell are you people, and who do you work for?"

"That's not – " Lawson began.

"Cerberus," Jacob said. Shepard's gut clenched. She shouldered up her barrier, reaching for her gun. Lawson charged a fist with biotic power, but Jacob held up his hands. "I see you've heard of them, Commander." Shepard kept her gun on Lawson, but one eye on him.

"You could say that," she said coldly. "Ever hear of Akuze?" Lawson's face went a little stiller. Jacob looked blank.

"No."

"Well, your CO here has. You wanna tell him about the op, Miranda, or should I?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't waste my time. Your little club killed my entire unit there a few years back. Another of your science projects, just like me," Shepard spat. Jacob's eyes widened.

"Listen, Shepard, I don't know anything about that, I swear. If this was back when you were in the Marines, I was working for the Alliance at the time. Please Commander, we've got to get out of here," he said.

"This is a waste of breath. The longer we stay here, the longer the mechs have to find us. It's time to get on the shuttle, Shepard." Lawson did not lower her gun.

"Yeah? Why should I go anywhere with you?"

"Because I have the access codes to the last operable shuttle on this station. Go ahead and kill me if you want to stay here and starve, assuming the mechs don't get you first."

"Shepard, Miranda, please." Jacob came forward slowly, working his way in between them, one hand on the muzzle of each of their pistols. For a moment Shepard thought Lawson might hit him, but her face relaxed as he pushed the barrel of the Commander's gun towards the ceiling. "Let's just go, okay?" The two women glared at each other over his shoulder, slowly holstering their sidearms. Jacob held his hands up for a moment, meeting both their eyes in turn.

"Come on," Lawson said, turning on her heel. Shepard matched her pace as she strode into the shuttle bay, chewing on the inside of her cheek. This was going to be an interesting trip.