I've been a lurker for a long time, and I've absorbed a lot from the wonderful writers on this site. Which means, please let me know if I've inadvertently stepped on any toes. Thanks! Also, the chronology might be a bit off; I've tweaked it as felt reasonable. Rated for a sprinkling of naughty words.
Commander Shepard, Superstar
It almost seems funny, sometimes. It's something for sure, the ways people reveal themselves. Some slowly, peeling open like a roast on the fire; some at first glance, determined that true honesty requires full and instant disclosure. And some keep their own counsel, never really giving an inch even at the moment of apparent surrender.
Back when I was barely seventeen, learning the officer crap (that followed the glowing blue freak crap, that followed the grunt crap) just past Basic, they told me that any leader is only as good as the weakest link in his team. And that puts a "leader" like me, who seems to be constantly rebuilding what they comically call their "team" from the assorted detritus of the galaxy, right into what Chief Fuller would have called "a real crock of shit".
It's strange, and possibly grounds for a psyche evaluation, to think that I considered the last time I was sure my ship and I were the only barrier between the known galaxy and the void as the best year of my life, but here I was doing it near constantly. Perhaps it was just the pressure we were all under then, but I had had a crew in general, and a ground team in particular, that I could and did trust with my life. With all life, in truth.
And then, suddenly, a new but not new ship, and a crew comprised of spies and criminals in equal measure. My fine new stable of specialists came together slowly, and that was a relief, as most of us had to stretch our ideas of what made an acceptable coworker more than once. For myself, there were a few familiar faces: Joker, who'd pulled my boots from the fire a couple times but gotten me killed only the once; and Dr. Chakwas, who was good for a loving bit of nostalgia now and then.
But what else? The main body of my new staff members were marchers for Cerberus, and that fine organization might have rebuilt me into some sort of zombie super soldier to unleash in humankind's defense, but I didn't have a lot of confidence that they'd done it out of charity. The Yeoman, my "assistant"? I guess I should have been grateful that they were so open about monitoring my correspondence. They gave me an efficient XO and a capable armory man, both handy with biotics and rifles alike, but Miranda and Jacob were more my company minders than my subordinates. I could not show my back to either one, never mind a moment of weakness.
That was the set as it came to me, and from there it was out into the melee to recruit. Zaeed and Kasumi were easy to get aboard, if a bit harder to win over. The Illusive Man's money did the hiring for me, but that handy shortcut only won me a pair of mercenaries, no different than any others. Deadly, skilled, as professional as I could ever want, but truly loyal only to themselves and the current highest bidder. I would have to look elsewhere whenever possible.
Dr. Solus, the dead brilliant Salarian, could kill as quickly as he could think and proved surprisingly likeable. Unfortunately, he also proved to have an extremely flexible set of morals, and a dedication to the greater good that included full support for genocide when it was deemed necessary. Perhaps ironic that he should end up sharing berth with Grunt, a genetically perfect Krogan almost as artificial as I had become. Once I'd helped him find acceptance with the Urdnot clan, Grunt took me as his warlord, no small vow amongst his people. Respect that position though he might, Grunt was young and hotheaded, too green by far to be trusted in extremis.
Jack, my raging overpowered biotic, was oddly enough my greatest hope at first. Her anger, her bitterness, and her obvious inner strength made me think that she could my new Williams – an Amazon and sister-in-arms, and her hatred of Cerberus only sweetened the pot. Jack broke my heart, again and again, but there was no fixing her; she was too far gone to ever trust anyone, and so no one, in turn, could ever trust her.
Nor could I rely too heavily on my two most outwardly honorable teammates. Thane may have ultimately become a warrior monk once the shadow of his own mortality began to loom over him, but he had still spent the bulk of his professional life as a prolific assassin who considered himself blameless for the hundreds of lives he took. And Samara, polite and cultured, dedicated to the ideals of justice and balance, owed allegiance to her arcane code as an Asari Justicar before all else. Who was to say that her judgment of a given situation's morality would not differ from my own? Or, more importantly, from what the mission demanded? She'd vowed to bow to my orders, but I wasn't particularly interested in surviving the mission only to find my second death in a flash of blue.
The last member to join our motley crew, picked up nearly upon the horizon line, was Legion. I will always be grateful that I met him; he opened my eyes to the complexity of the Geth. We in the Alliance, and indeed the population of all Citadel space, had underestimated and misunderstood their people for centuries. They are artificial, and yet as changeable and opinionated as any organic. And because of that very miracle of an evolved created intelligence, Legion's loyalties had to be considered as suspect as those of any other being.
But I have gotten ahead of myself; what of my old crew, those who swam in my mind immediately when I opened my eyes again, thinking that only days had passed since the attack on the first Normandy? Ashley, of course, was still dead, just one in a string of good people that I had let down. Wrex greeted me as an old comrade in arms, a mark of great respect coming from a Krogan. However, his new responsibilities on Tuchanka could not be abandoned. While he wished me well, he could not fill out my crew. Liara was surprisingly cold when I first saw her again, but I have since learned more about her two years of suffering. As I was the indirect cause of much of it, I haven't the heart to blame her for wanting to keep some distance between us. Also, it is because of her that I am alive again, and most days I manage to thank and not damn her for that. And Kaidan, my... he was not available.
I would see Tali early on, and it was a cordial if not entirely satisfying meeting. She would eventually join me on the new Normandy, and I will always love and respect her. But after I saved her from a judgment of treason by her own people while also managing to preserve the good name of her father, our relationship changed. Despite the hard-won maturity that she had gained from two years of difficult and dangerous work on the outskirts of the galaxy, she began to remind me of the Liara of our first mission together. She looked at me with something like hero worship, and all I could see as I stared back was the inevitability of it all draining away when I ultimately let her down.
And that left me with Garrus. He had changed less than it seemed while I lay on Cerberus' unnatural alter; he became only more of what he had been when I first met him in the Council fore-chambers. He and I were always and still the same. We sought justice for those who could not win it for themselves, and we were both willing, ready, and even eager to die in the fight for it. We were intensely driven, would be bound by no rules save our own, and we put our own comfort and safety last almost as often as those whose tools we were did.
Garrus was with me when the Illusive Man sent us to Horizon; he was there when my universe collapsed into a single point of raw pain. Tali was not yet a member of the crew, nor would she have gone planet-side with the two of us – the mission was too physical for myself and a pair of tech specialists. Jack rounded out our ground team, and the three of us cut an impressive swath across the hoard of Collectors. And then, there he was, the last of my prodigals. Kaidan, whom I had let in as I had no other; Kaidan who could thus end me as no other. And then, there he went, angry and bitter and disappointed in me.
I could not say that my life to that point had been simple or pleasant. When I was six, my parents uprooted our family and moved us to a godforsaken colony called Mindoir out in the traverse; compared to Earth, the place was a dangerous backwater with little to do but toil endlessly. That was obvious even to a child. When I was twelve, a boy with dark messy hair made some crack about my developing chest that made me want to slap him so badly that I did – from across the room, with a blur of blue light. The only adult biotic in the entire colony was a mining engineer named Yusef, and he taught me some basic control to keep me from hurting myself. He could not, however, help me with want I really wanted, which was to stop being a freak that the other kids were afraid of.
When I was sixteen, all that ceased to matter when Batarian slavers descended on the mass of us, turning my world to blood and ash. They jammed a slave jack into my brother Arthur's brain stem, and then he was no longer my brother. My father – always a kind word, often stubbly, smelled like coffee and engine grease – was beaten to the ground with a shovel and eaten, still alive, by varren. My mother. The things they did to my mother.
The Alliance soldiers that saved me and the few other survivors took us to Earth. Most of us were newly minted orphans, and it was hoped that we had distant relations who might take us in somewhere. Always quick on my feet, I slipped away the moment my boots touched ground and spent a week wandering the city. When I was sure that no one would remember my face, I doubled back and enlisted in the marines. The moment that the skeptical recruiter realized he had a raw and untrained but completely healthy biotic in front of him is, coincidentally, the same moment that he suddenly stopped being so concerned about my inability to prove that I was eighteen.
When I was twenty-two, every single goddamn soldier under my command was slaughtered by a thresher maw, a nightmare beast none of us had ever even seen. By the time backup arrived, I had managed to finish the work of my fallen crew, and the rescue squad entered a charnel house of dead marines, rended maw flesh, and a raving, blood covered lieutenant who actually fired at them in her delirium. They gave me a promotion, a raft of medals, and a wide berth after that.
When I was twenty-nine, I left a fine and honorable soldier, only months under my command, on the ground in an edenic paradise with an improvised nuclear device. Its terrible light flared, and it scattered her atoms amongst the white sand beaches and abundant, fragrant tropical flowers.
When I was just two weeks shy of thirty years old, I drifted helplessly away from the convulsing husk of my ship, slowly suffocating, as she and twenty souls shuddered and died.
And so how, after all of that, was it possible that this – watching Kaidan walk away with his back held stiff and his lip curled in self-righteous disgust – was the worst moment of my life, the most empty that I had ever felt, the closest that I had ever come to simply giving in to the rising tide of blackness that was gushing through my chest.
I made it back to the ship. If Jack had wanted to know what all of that was about, either she was smart enough to realize or Garrus made it apparent that no answers would be forthcoming. I made it through the required post-mission debrief, and even forced a bit of small talk with Joker and Chambers. I think I even managed to keep the agony out of my voice. I made it to my quarters, I hit the glowing button to empty my grand, useless fish tank of its newest crop of brilliantly-colored corpses, and I closed down EDI's console.
And I broke and I cracked and I tasted ashes on my tongue, and I wished to god that the damnable holo of Kaidan fucking Alenko on my desk was an old fashioned photograph in a glass frame, so that when it hit the far wall above the bed that it would have shattered as I did.
And he did not come to cradle and comfort me, to wipe away my hot tears and keep me from breaking my wrist on the bulkhead throwing stupid punches like a teenager. He was and is selfless enough that he would have done so if it had been what I needed, but it was not. I had to reconstruct myself by myself, straighten my own back and put each of my scattered pieces back on as though I were strapping on my armor, as though there was the slightest chance that I would ever be functional again.
He did not come to me, but let me go to him. And sometimes we would talk, and sometimes he would claim that calibrations waited for no Turian. When it became clear that my chosen method of crawling back to life would be to fix any personal problems the crew could throw at me, he was generous enough to allow me to help him as well. And I returned the favor the only way that I could think of; when he wanted to take revenge rather than seek justice, I did not stop him. I did not lecture him as I had done in the past, and I did not try to shape his actions or outlook as his commanding officer. I aided him in his bloody retribution, and then we never spoke of it again.
He became what I needed. When the Illusive Man knew too many details of my private conversations, he rigged me a device to check my quarters for bugs whenever I had been away from the ship. When I was injured on an away mission, he pushed Jacob aside and revealed that he had become a capable field medic. When I had been forced to separate another pair of my specialists, bickering like children, he would spar with me until I had sweated away my frustration.
And when the final test loomed, when we were streaking through the sky towards the Omega 4 relay ablaze with the desperate glow of all mankind's hopes, when were hours away from what would almost certainly be our final sacrifice, he finally relented and came to me. And he entered my quarters without knocking, and he was anxious in a way that I had never seen. He doubted himself, and by extension he doubted me, but I could not be angry with him. When had any such thing ever been other than a disaster for either of us? And so, a simple thing for people who felt as we did – I took his hand in mine, and I willed him to be calm.
And he stilled then, and he slowly bent his neck to rest his forehead against my own. His movement was so gradual, I think to mask the considerable height difference, and I had time to think that he was one of the only people on board with a decent shot at killing me with his bare hands. He stared into my eyes for a long moment, and I into his. He looked at me, and I looked at him. He looked into me, and I into him, and we saw, and we understood. And it was enough.