June 8, 2186 CE: London
Three Weeks Post Reaper War
The midnight air is still. People are still afraid to leave their homes, but Shepard has to get to the banshee corpse.
She'd spotted it that afternoon when Cortez had taken her to the temporary Alliance hospital in central London for her daily check-up, its grotesque open mouth gaping at her from across the street outside of the shuttle.
They spent nights in the shuttle now, Shepard curled up in the co-pilot's chair and Cortez in the back. The Alliance had offered her an apartment, but she no longer cared to sleep anywhere with windows or mirrors. Unlike Admiral Hackett, who still calls her at least twice a day to figure out what he can do to get her into the apartment - and, in his words, "Get her head back on straight" - Cortez simply accepted her reasons and agreed to let her use the shuttle as a temporary home.
"Whatever will make you feel safe, Commander," he told her, looking directly into her eyes uncomfortably. She knew why: her hair was singed off, her scalp laced with metal stitching, so he couldn't look up, and her right leg was mostly gone, so he couldn't look down.
Cortez is a heavy sleeper, which had made it easy to take his rifle from the Kodiak's weapons locker and slip out the hatch. She has to make sure it's dead. She looks down at her right thigh, knowing that under the pant leg the offending limb is just scarred, concave remain with some kind of mechanized metal beam threaded through where her bone should have been. It might have been better if they'd just chopped it off rather than to leave her looking like...like a human-geth hybrid of some kind.
Shepard-Commander, why did you kill us?
She can see the banshee as she gets closer to the road. The ones that were killed after turning were incinerated by their own biotics when they died; this one was either killed before it had turned completely or it was still alive. Ignoring the pain that laces through her legs, she climbs through a blackened crater and makes her way across the remains of the road to the banshee, lifting the gun in that old familiar motion that comes to her nearly as easily as breathing.
And she shoots.
Her first and second shots hit it right between the eyes, but it's still staring at her and she can't stop because if it weren't for this creature she wouldn't be carrying this guilt, this well-deserved but unbearable guilt that burns her like acid. She took her first life when she was nineteen. Thirteen years later she's taken a half million.
Behind her, she hears running footsteps, but she keeps firing: she can't bring herself to fire for the Normandy, gone for going on three weeks now with no communications, but instead she fires one for Anderson, one for Legion, one for Mordin, one for Williams, one for her own deadened soul.
Roughly, a hand wraps around hers, releasing her finger from the trigger before pulling the gun away, and she sees Cortez hold it at a distance as he pulls Shepard against his chest with his free hand. There's a click as he empties the heat sink before dropping the gun, but Shepard doesn't have the energy to feel angry at being treated like a child. She barely even has the strength to hold onto Cortez, but the steady thrum of his heart against her ear is comforting in its regularity.
"Shepard, it's dead." Cortez murmurs. "You won."
"I don't feel like I won." Her voice is raspy from disuse. She feels Cortez's arms tighten strongly around her - surprise, maybe, that she's finally speaking again. When they were aboard the Normandy, he had always been stoic and professional, except for that afternoon when when he'd spoken of Robert and their last conversation.
Shepard can for the first time truly grasp the words in that recording. Don't let me be an anchor. Only now she hangs around Cortez's neck as the one weighing him down, and she's dying, alright, just a lot slower than Robert had been.
She imagines that her heart will just stop one night, probably soon. People who do the things that she's done don't get to just keep breathing when they've taken that right from so many others - three hundred thousand batarians, countless geth, a half dozen friends. The weight has to crush her eventually, she reasons. Their blood will never been clean from her hands and her mind will never be free from their whispers.
"It's like you told me." Cortez tells her in a harsh whisper against her ear. "We have to survive, remember? Like the SSV London."
Shepard looks at the corpse again, taking in its long, crooked fingers, reaching permanently for the sky. There are no clues as to what this banshee might have been before it became so deformed, and even though it's utterly irrational she sees the vibrant commando Lieutenant Kurin, riddled with bullets - Shepard's bullets, fired from her shuttle pilot's rifle in the dead of night.
August 7, 2186 CE: SSV Normandy, London Docks
Eleven Weeks Post Reaper War
Doctor Karin Chakwas has rarely hesitated to file a report. She's always been a consummate professional, and takes pride in that. Never a report late, never a complaint from any of her patients. And she's seen many throughout the years. But Shepard's report has been sitting on her desk aboard the Normandy for a week now.
The commander's only thirty-two, and to file that report will effectively put an end to her military career.
It's accurate, of course. Shepard sustained enough damage to her right leg that it will likely never work properly again, and even with the mechanized device inserted into her thigh she still won't be able to nearly match her earlier pace. Couple that with the damage to her cybernetics and her biotic implant, and, well. No one can predict with a hundred percent accuracy what would happen if Shepard stepped onto a battlefield again, but Chakwas can see that the soldier's damaged body simply wouldn't hold up. Her heart could give out, or her implant could flare, or…
It doesn't matter. The report has to be filed, and that's that.
Chakwas had insisted to the newly appointed Admiral Coats that she was uncomfortable passing judgement on something like this, but was told that Shepard would see no other doctor after what was being described as "an incident" involving a dead Reaper asari. Apparently the commander had fired a full heat sink into the corpse before being led away from the scene by Lieutenant Cortez, and for two weeks afterward she didn't speak a word until the Normandy had arrived, safe and sound, back in London's docks; even then she had simply asked to see Major Alenko.
The major was the one who suggested seeing Dr. Chakwas when all else failed. It was a bittersweet reunion, hard for the doctor to swallow that the frail woman being led into the temporary medical center was the same woman who had herself once led the Normandy so fearlessly. Throughout the meeting, Shepard refused to relinquish her vice grip on Major Alenko's arm, and Chakwas had needed to physically pull the commander's hand off when it was time to sedate her to safely check over her cybernetics.
"How are you holding up?" She asked the major, then, as they both watched Shepard sink artificially into what seemed to be her first moment of peace in a long time. She still thought of him as the idealistic lieutenant with the migraines, tossing Corporal Jenkins around with biotics in the cargo bay, but to see him standing there older and wiser in so many ways made her throat tighten with sentimentality.
"It's tough." He replied simply, folding his arms across his chest. "I don't know what to do for her, Doctor."
"I think you're already doing it, Major. She's a fighter, always has been. She'll fight this, too."
Over the next few weeks, her prediction came true: Shepard began to show signs of steady improvement, even bringing a bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy to one of her physical therapy sessions and showing her old spirit in small ways - a smile here or a wry comment there.
But Shepard would likely never be the same and, as time wore on, Chakwas became to realize that she wouldn't truly recover physically, either. The damage was simply too great, the delay in treatment too long. If it weren't for an anonymous tip to the Alliance brass detailing her location, Shepard may never have been found.
Her eyes flick over the datapad, detailing a lifetime of achievements in just a under a decade, from the Skyllian Blitz to the defeat of the Reapers.
She presses send.