The Smaller Picture
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Shepard's concerns used to be on the scale of worlds. The scale is much smaller now, and yet in some ways the stakes feel higher. Shepard/Garrus, adoption.
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Disclaimer: This author in no way profits from the writing of this story. All characters, dialogue, or other referenced material from the Mass Effect trilogy belongs to Bioware.
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A/N: I wrote this story in the middle of the night five years ago when I couldn't sleep... and then in the morning I couldn't find it on my computer. For years I thought I dreamed writing this, until today when I found it in a folder full of Mass Effect art and screenshots. I couldn't help myself and had to post it right away! I hope you will enjoy it.
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There is an old human movie about a happy home for used and broken toys. For people, there is no such thing. Shunted off to the side are billions of wounded, orphaned, and scarred. The facility is run-down and under-staffed, like everything after this war. It wears many hats—orphanage, hospital, mental health facility. Though it is for children, it is not a place for a child.
Astana is six and dreams each night of the twisted creatures that dragged her mother away. She hears the sound of a reaper and screams. Her sky-blue skin is marred with the scratches she gives herself as she fights off invisible attackers in the night.
Kanpur is four, and his missing plates and cracked bones tell his story. They hadn't expected the boy under the debris to live, and yet he defied all their expectations. But the boy who lived will never be a boy who runs and plays like other children. His legs will never be the same.
Corta is three, and one of precious few batarian children left in this war-torn galaxy. For a year, fire burned on her Homeworld, sucking acrid smoke into her growing lungs. She does not remember a time without hospitals, without gasping sounds and breathing machines.
Julie and Janie have lived less than a year, and yet find their lives threatened daily from an accident before their birth. The eezo exposure killed the mother but not the infants, leaving them alone in a galaxy with precious few resources to spare on two sickly children.
The room is full of such children, and it's this pleasant chaos that greets Shepard and Garrus as they enter.
A harried nurse rushes past to begin Corta's scheduled breathing treatment. Astana whispers to herself in a corner. Kanpur runs to meet the visitors and stumbles, beginning to cry as he falls to the floor. Garrus scoops the boy up, speaking quietly in words Shepard cannot hear. The child brightens. Garrus mirrors the boy's expression, mandibles flaring into a smile.
Shepard, lifting a pair of infants into her arms, meets his eyes across the room.
As they discuss their options with the center's director, their amorphous tropical home grows and changes. On the day they move in, Garrus hurries to stay on schedule with Corta's breathing treatments and Shepard holds Kanpur's hand as he carefully navigates the beach. They are awakened in the night more than once—by hunger, pain, and nightmares. They don't grudge any of it.
Their choice, Shepard knows. Their life.
As Shepard lifts Astana into her lap, rocking, soothing, and wiping away tears, the small picture has never loomed so large.
After years of seeing the galaxy in planets and numbers, in ten billion die so that twenty can live, it is a strange but welcome change to think in people and names, in family and friends. In Astana and Corta and Janie and Julie and Kanpur.
She'd worried, at first, that retirement might be too quiet. She worried that she couldn't be content without a challenge, without battle, without living among the stars. She'd worried that she could never be satisfied again with anything smaller than saving the galaxy.
She was wrong.
As she tucks her six-year-old back into bed, not for the last time this night, she is content with the way things are. She makes a tour of the children's rooms, laying a kiss upon each tiny brow. She is welcomed back to bed by a half-sleeping turian, his heavy arm falling across her as she snuggles up to his plated chest. It rises and falls with the rhythm of his breathing, and Shepard thinks of the five children sleeping elsewhere in the house, their cadenced breathing too quiet for her to hear.
She doesn't worry anymore. She knows, deep in her bones, this is enough.
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