A/N: So last night I was hit with the desire to write a one shot today... My friend (and one of my favourite writers) Snow White Queen suggested Shepard/Victus, so here we are!
I very loosely based this on the song Grapevine Fires by Death Cab for Cutie.
I will gladly take any requests/recommendations for pairings or prompts for one-shots.
Adrien Victus was a man who was burdened with the fate of his entire people.
Commander Shepard was a woman who was determined to ensure his success.
Victus was, without a doubt, a highly compelling man. He conveyed an infallible commitment to his men and his people, and he expressed both the wary confidence and deep concerns necessary for success in a situation as hopeless as the Reaper war.
But that was not what drew Shepard to him. It was the lingering sadness in his eyes; it was the doubt etched deep into his plates; it was the exhaustion and hopelessness in his slumped shoulders.
Since the moment she had left Earth, she had felt the same weight, and he was the first person she had encountered who carried the same burdens.
She wanted nothing more than to erase his concerns and replace them with one of the only weapons that organics still had in this losing war: hope.
So when the Primarch asked her to secure an alliance with the krogans, there was no hesitation before she said yes. When he asked her to rescue the turian team crashed onto Tuchanka - lead by his son, no less - she accepted the mission without thought. After the reveal of the planted bomb, she was on the Kodiak ready to part before he could finish briefing her.
Each time she left the ship, she would catch his amber eyes following her; he watched her with a longing to fight by her side, wielding his gun and not his words. She understood that staying on the ship completing the paperwork was not his place. Fighting on the ground, surrounded by loyal men, was where he wanted to be; but his people needed him to lead them, and thus in front of his terminal he would remain.
Although Shepard's analysis of the Primarch was surprisingly accurate, her belief that his longing was only for the battlefield was not.
Of course he wished to feel a gun in his hands again, but he also longed to understand, and perhaps obtain, the confidence of the woman who was hell bent on saving the galaxy.
Like him, her life was dedicated to her people. Like him, her passion was for the madness of the field, for the pursuit and destruction of the enemy. Like him, she was a soldier through and through, strong in both will and spirit. However, unlike him, she believed that they would win this war.
Each night was restless, filled with nightmares of his planet burning and his people rising again as Reaper abominations to fight their fellow turians. Each day was filled with reports that his nightmares were real, and his fruitless attempts to delay the inevitable: the systematic destruction of his entire race.
The day when his beloved only son joined the Spirits, Shepard was the one who kept him whole.
It was very late - or very early, depending on your perspective - and Victus was planted at his terminal in the Normandy's War Room. Although staggering statistics and desperate reports flashed past his eyes, he absorbed none of it, his mind only on the sacrifice of his son. He had nothing now, nothing but his people, and if matters continued in this way he would soon lose them.
A bleary-eyed Shepard staggered into the War Room, a mug of steaming liquid held firmly in her palm (although he assumed it was the 'coffee' beverage humans held in such high regard, it was simply warm milk, an old remedy for sleeplessness Shepard had learned long ago). Her free hand brushed over her cropped hair; growing tired of feeling the long locks sticking to her head in battle, she abandoned long hair years ago. The disturbance of her entry caused Victus's eyes to flick up from his terminal; were it anyone else he would have let out a derisive snort and returned to his work, but his eyes followed her across the room instead. Her long legs and arms moved with the loping grace of a gazelle as she neared his position. By human standards her skin was very dark: her mother had been from India and her father from Africa, providing her with a pleasant olive-toned hue and dark eyes that never betrayed her secrets.
"Can't sleep either?" He had always found her voice to be pleasant and relaxing, almost hypnotizing if he allowed her to launch into a lengthy recollection of a tale of battle.
"Too many nightmares," he confessed.
"Nightmares are something we're all a little too familiar with these days." He nodded in agreement.
"I'm genuinely sorry about Tarquin," she continued.
His mandibles flickered and his brow plates faintly moved downwards, but he chose to not reveal the depths of the pain of his loss. The farce of strength was necessary for politicians. "I'm proud of his accomplishments, his sacrifice for the good of an entire people that isn't his own. Any turian father would be."
She surveyed him with those eyes, and her gaze was so intense his plates tingled. "You can admit your grief. We've all lost people we love in this war."
Slowly, Victus closed his eyes and exhaled, his breath ragged. He closed his terminal, gripped the table, and hung his head low. "I never dreamed I'd bury my son. I dreamed that I would go out in a blaze of glory in the battlefield, and he would inspire his soldiers with tales of my bravery and victory; but now I will either be the downfall of my people, or I will succeed and wither into old age behind a desk."
She was surveying him again, absorbing each of his features into memory. "Those behind desks are the unsung heroes of the war."
"Those in the battlefield give their lives so that those behind the desks may live to dole out supplies and delegate refugees for another day."
"Come with me." She had used a tone so commanding that he had no choice but to obey. He dragged his weary feet out of the War Room, into the elevator, and down into the mess. "Sit." He took a seat at one of the tables as her hands flashed around the kitchen with blinding speed: starting the kettle, chopping the leaves, steeping the hot liquid and adding the choice amounts of sugar and milk. She rested the tea before him and took a seat across from him.
"May I tell you a story?"
Although he wanted to let out an ecstatic 'yes!' at the thought of her hypnotic tones lulling him into another world, he collected himself and simply nodded.
"Have you read my service history?"
"As much as anyone else. You're an orphan, spending your childhood on Earth's streets, enlisting when you were eighteen. Until you became the saviour of the Citadel, your pinnacle moment was surviving the destruction of your unit at the hands of a Thresher Maw on Akuze."
"A woman has to go through a lot to survive the unforgiving metropolis streets of Delhi," she began. "I won't bore you with the details, but my parents were… tangled in less-than-desirable business. My father was a drug mule from Africa to India, and my mother was a distributor. They had one night of fiery passion in which I was conceived, and then my father was back to Africa. She never even learned his name. She continued her work until her contractions began, and knowing that I would do nothing but hinder her budding success in the Red Sand industry, she sent me to a small orphanage (run by the Tenth Street Reds; she either knew it and denied it, or she was oblivious) to hopelessly begin my life. But I survived, and the Reds recruited me when I was fourteen; oddly enough, I enjoyed it. I was suddenly forced to grow up very quickly, faced with drugs, sex, and murder. When I was freshly seventeen, I found out that I was pregnant.
"I refused to take the same route as my mother - I would not abandon my child. Although the father refused to get himself involved at all, I accepted my fate as a single mother: I found a legitimate position as a night shift server in a small diner and raised enough money to get myself a bachelor apartment as well as all the necessary supplies to prepare for an infant. Directly on the due date, I went into labour.
"The birth went as expected, but when the baby was born… no breath, no heartbeat, nothing. Stillborn. The doctors had no explanation. It was going to be a girl, and I would have named her Avery. Avery Jean Shepard." She attempted to swallow but only a pained choking noise came out.
"It's amazing that you can convince yourself that you're the strongest person in the galaxy until you have to accept the death of your child, your creation, your blood and your life. I was willing to throw away everything I knew so that I could cherish this being, this little girl. She would have been my everything. But now that she was gone, nothing else mattered, and that was why I wanted to enlist. I knew that I could be the most fearless soldier in the Alliance, because I had already lost everything.
"But since the day that I became Commander of the Normandy, I learned that there is always something to live for, always something to have hope for. Just because I don't have a family, doesn't mean that those billions of civilians don't have families that I can reunite them with. I may no longer have a family, I may no longer have my baby girl, I may not have a partner to love, but I'm surrounded by the best damn crew that a person could know." She reached her hand to cup his face in her long, slender fingers; he closed his eyes and leaned into her gentle touch, allowing her warmth to wash over his entire body. "That is enough for me to have hope for, enough for me to fight for."
Swallowing his fears, he kneeled in front of her, wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and rested his forehead against hers. For a moment, their spirits were joined and they released their pain: her regret, her insecurities, her crippling fear of failure; his loss, his loneliness, his hopelessness. The world outside of the two of them no longer existed, and they were joined into one.
She whispered, "You're never alone."
He replied, "Nor are you."
Duty called, as it always does. Victus was given an atrociously oversized office on the Citadel to conduct his affairs, and Shepard travelled to Rannoch, Thessia, Horizon, and Cronos Station before the final assault on Earth.
When a crew member walked into Shepard's quarters and inquired about her framed photo of Adrien Victus, she would say: "He reminds me why we fight."
When a politician walked into Victus's office and inquired about his framed photo of Commander Shepard, he would say: "She gives me hope."