Athena Shepard couldn't sleep. The faces wouldn't let her.
The last few weeks had been eventful. The Collectors were defeated, their base destroyed, and the Human Reaper lay dead, the supposed suicide mission completed with minimal casualties, all "non-essential" personnel. Liara was now the new Shadow Broker and finally seemed a little more herself. It was nice to see her friend free from the lust for revenge that had haunted her when they had reunited, and a friend in such high places would prove to be invaluable.
But neither the thought of Reaper retaliation nor the new position of her Dr. T'soni were the things keeping Commander Shepard up. She was thinking of a mission during the time she was tracking Saren and his faction of Heretic Geth, as Legion called them.
The Terra Nova Incident occurred a little over two years ago, though to her it was less, when a group of Battarian terrorists did what Battarian terrorists were want to do and almost used a mining asteroid to kill millions on the planet it orbited.
Commander Shepard had made choices, and she wasn't sure they were the right ones, but she could live with that. Athena Shepard was many things -compassionate, idealistic, decisive- but naive was not one of them. Ever since she had lost everything she knew at Mindoir she had developed a view of optimistic pragmatism. The past could never be changed and choices made were final, but everything could serve as a lesson for later. If the tragedies that had befallen her in her sixteenth year hadn't befallen her she wouldn't be the hero she needed to be at Elysium -(Her memory of the blitz was a blur of violence and exhaustion save for a few moments that stood out, some she held on to and some she tried not to think about too much)- She would not be the person that saved the Citadel from Sovereign. She was an excellent soldier and she was damn proud of it.
No, it was not the choices she made that kept her awake some nights, but why she made them. When the right hand man of the leader, whose name was Balak, had approached her in an attempt to save his own skin she had felt nothing but contempt for the Battarian. He had insisted that he thought it was going to be "A simple slaving run" (she almost shot him then and there) and that things had spiralled out of control. She tried to threaten him to leave peacefully, no way in Hell was she going to ask the bastard nicely, but while she had the oratory skills required she lacked the practice that some of the mavericks and renegades in the Alliance possessed. The situation escalated into violence but she felt no remorse when a biotic blast from Liara snapped his neck and her team killed the rest. That was just the beginning.
The event she meticulously analyzed over and over again was the confrontation with Balak himself. After shooting their way through his henchmen, the terrorist issued an ultimatum. His freedom for the lives of three innocent civilians, one of whom had helped Commander Shepard mere hours before. Lieutenant Commander Athena Shepard chose to sacrifice three lives to take down Balak. She murdered his bodyguards and immobilized him. He tried to talk some Nietzchian bullshit about how he "did what he had to do" and that "she was the real terrorist", but she merely replied with a few warning shots in non-essential areas and waited for Alliance Navy to pick the son of a bitch up. And she had enjoyed doing it.
That was what got her thinking. Had she chosen to capture Balak over those three lives because she wanted revenge for Mindoir and the lives Battarians like him had destroyed, not because he was a big enough threat to justify the cost?
Balak was placed in one of the worst prisons in Alliance space. When she had promised that guard that it would hurt Balak to breath she had meant it. She wondered if he was tortured. Sometimes, Athena caught herself hoping he was.
She had never even seen the faces of the dead in person, but she made sure to study pictures so she could remember every freckle and aberrant eyelash. If they had died for her own petty revenge, then by God she was going to remember their faces.
And she did. She remembered the faces, and the faces remembered her in her nightmares.
Kaidan had told her not to beat herself up about it. Heh, Kaidan. Another regret, though not one that kept her up at night. She had loved him, part of her still did, but things changed. "Never thought I'd find love in the arms of a Turian" she had said to Liara after they took down the former Shadow Broker together.
It was at this moment that there was a knocking on the cabin door.
"You're still up" said the soothing voice of Garrus Valkarian. It was a statement, not a question.
Shepard let her friend and lover in and they sat on her bed.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked. His voice was filled with concern for the Commander. Garrus had lost so much and it showed in everything he did.
"Terra Nova". Garrus had been with her on that mission, he knew firsthand what had happened, and she had shared her feelings on the subject with him.
"Again". Garrus looked at her with love and understanding. "Listen," he began "I know more about revenge than most people ever should. You helped me make my peace with Sidonis and many of the other things in my past. I should have done something to help you back then, but you remember how brash I was in those days".
Athena looked quizzically at the brash hothead next to her, her sorrow and doubt ever so briefly pushed aside, and asked playfully "What do you mean 'those days'?"
They shared a laugh before Garrus began again. "What I'm trying to say is that it's ok. I'm not sure if you did what you did for the right reasons, and I know you're even less sure, but you're the most amazing person I've ever met, and I doubt the woman I love would do something like that".
Athena opened her mouth to speak but Garrus cut her off. "However, even if you did do it for the wrong reasons, that's still ok. Damn it, you deserve to make the wrong choices sometimes. Even then you stopped a dangerous criminal from committing more crimes, and now you have an experience to keep you from acting on impulses of revenge at the cost of others. I know I'm a filthy hypocrite for saying this, but you've taught me this much. Honour the memory of the dead and move on".
Lieutenant Commander Athena Shepard's mouth was agape. Garrus was cutting pretty close to her own philosophy and had just helped her more in one night than most ever could. It was things like this that made her love him so.
She pulled the Turian close and hugged him with all her considerable might. She didn't even notice she was crying until she felt the warm tears on her hands and broke into a full sob as Garrus comforted her.
For the rest of the night the couple sat on that bed and held each other close knowing that the past was behind them and that the future was worth fighting for.