Shepard woke up with a lot of questions, terrifying a nurse refilling his IV who had done nothing to deserve this.

Over the course of the next few hours, in between doses of sedatives, he managed to harangue his caretakers into giving him a loose understanding of the world outside the red haze of his head, though it took a bit of sorting through the bits and pieces they gave him:

1. The Reapers were all dead

2. Tali was alive, and had in fact visited him earlier that day

3. Yes, they were going to get her

4. He had been in a coma for a few months, and would have to stay in the hospital for quite some time to recover properly

5. Everything was going to be okay

6. The Reapers were still dead

7. Please, sir, try not to exert yourself

That was a while ago. Things had gotten marginally more sensible since then. He'd been moved to a nicer room in the hospital, the sort with fake plants that still look dead, and with treatment and therapy he was getting physically well enough to want to bang his head against the wall from boredom, which the doctors said was an improvement.

He at least had plenty of people to talk to. Tali visited every day, and stayed every night she managed to hide from the nurse staff. Practically all of his former squadmates had visited him to express varying degrees of astonishment that he was still alive. And then of course there was a constant stream of various alliance officials, the vast majority of whom he suspected were just making up excuses to visit him so they could puff out their chests and say they had.

But today, there was Admiral Hackett, standing in front of his hospital bed and, still unusually, in the flesh. This was an event.

The Alliance Navy's officer training academy liked to talk about its holy triumvirate of "intelligence, sobriety, and reliability", but the difference between hearing that ideal and actually meeting Admiral Hackett was the difference between seeing a picture of the ocean and drowning in it. In all the years Shepard had worked with him he had only seen Hackett either calmly professional or mildly cynical, with not even rumors of a third emotion. Shepard's relationship with him was based mainly on a series of concise and sensible instructions all ending in "Hackett out." There was a theory, common among Alliance recruits, that there was no such thing as an "Admiral Hackett", just a very thinly disguised AI.

So the sight of Hackett, one hand occasionally pinching the bridge of his nose, staring intently at a point slightly to the right of Shepard's head, was slightly unnerving. The man actually seemed uncomfortable. It was like watching a mountain squirm.

"Commander," he said. "This is a conversation that we should have had a long time ago. I've tried to keep you out of a lot of mess- the Alliance's mess- thinking I could fix it myself. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case." He paused. "Things have gotten... stupid."

"What exactly is wrong, Admiral?" Shepard asked, trying to meet Hackett's stare unsuccessfully.

Hackett didn't seem to know where to start. Before he could, the door slid open, and in walked Tali, accompanied by a volus Shepard didn't recognize. A motorized thing that looked like a large briefcase on wheels trundled along behind the volus of its own accord.

"Shepard," Tali said, walking up to his bedside and giving his hand a squeeze. "This volus followed me here; he says he has business with you."

"Yes, he's-" Hackett began, but was cut off.

"Hello. It's nice to finally meet you, Commander Shepard," the volus said. "My name is Jerro Gan. I'm your lawyer."

"What?" said Shepard, who by now was feeling somewhat alarmed. He looked at Tali, who seemed just as surprised as him, and back to Hackett, who didn't. "Am I being accused of something?"

"No. That would be a lot simpler," Hackett said. He glared at the volus. "And I thought I ordered you to wait in the lobby until you were called."

"You requested. I didn't listen to that request," Jerro said, waving a stubby arm dismissively. "I think it's important that my client have representation present."

"Why does he need a lawyer?" Tali said, sounding both confused and indignant. She glanced down at Shepard. "When did you get a lawyer?"

"Let me explain," Admiral Hackett said, returning to his current default posture of hand on nose, eyes focused in the middle distance. "Commander, you were extremely heavily injured and in a coma for a little over four months. You were recovering and the outlook by the doctors seemed to be generally positive once we were past the first post, but it was obvious to most of us that, if you were ever going to return to active duty, it wouldn't be anytime soon."

"I still haven't-" Shepard began, but this time Hackett cut him off.

"I'm not here to bang the recruiting drum, Commander. If you decide you want an honorable discharge you'll get it no questions asked, along with an Admiral's pension. God knows you've earned it," he said. "But we figured you were going to spend a long time in recovery either way, even once you get out of this hospital. And right now the Alliance doesn't really need commando raids or deep-space espionage. We need support. Contracts, trade deals, donations, bodies, just generally enough people working together so that we don't collapse in on ourselves right after winning the war. And you happen to be the most famous human in the galaxy. So we figured, once you were allowed out of the hospital, that we would ask you for a little show of support. Interviews, speeches, talk shows, that sort of thing. Just going around telling your story and asking people to support the Alliance."

Shepard started to relax. "Well if that's all, then I suppose I would be happy to help."

Hackett sighed. "Yes, we knew you would be happy to help, Shepard. That's where it all began to go wrong."

"You see, some of my staff decided that you'd obviously say yes, and figured we should plan ahead. Pre-arrange interviews, put diplomatic visits on a floating schedule, put a few soldiers on standby for your escort." Hackett paused, and shifted uncomfortably. "They also figured it would be best if you came back from your injuries... looking well. So they wanted to let the doctors give you some non-invasive but not necessarily life-saving treatments, mainly to keep down scarring."

"And I want to point out that my client did not consent to these procedures," Jerro said.

"Hey, we're not complaining," Tali said. She squeezed his hand again, and Shepard recalled an occasion where she had drunkenly explained her fondness for his skin for almost twenty minutes. There had been a lot of words that didn't translate properly.

"Even so," the lawyer said, but his heart didn't sound in it. He was leaning over his motorized briefcase fiddling with some sort of latch, and seemed like he was only arguing the point out of deep-seated reflex.

After a second, he grunted approvingly, and the briefcase unfolded upwards into a miniature desk, complete with computer terminal, at just the right height for a standing volus. "Alright then," he said, flicking a switch on the terminal, "Get on with it."

Hackett shook his head. "My first mistake was letting them go ahead with the project. My second mistake was not supervising them. My third, and most significant, was giving them all the time they needed."

"Did they not get it done?" Tali said.

"No, they found the opposite problem," Hackett said looking at Tali. Somehow it seemed that he found it easier to look her in the eye than Shepard. "They planned the Commander a full diplomatic calendar, all the details worked out. That took them the better part of a day. Then..."

He sighed. "All right. This will be a lot easier to understand if you just show them," he said. He looked Shepard in the eye properly for the first time. "I hope you can understand," he said.

The volus inhaled sharply, and opened a small drawer on his desk. He pulled a small can out, slowly walked up to Shepard's bedside, and solemnly pressed it into his hand.

Shepard looked at the label:

N7 COLA

Commander Shepard's Favorite!

"After I'm done saving the galaxy, there's nothing more refreshing than a cold drink."

After Tali managed to stop laughing, Hackett continued with his explanation.

"By the time I caught up with them, those idiots had given the rights to your image to no less than three dozen different companies for branding purposes," he said. "They had somehow managed to get it into their heads that the point of the project was to increase awareness of you by any means possible, and given the amount of time they had on their hands they found some extremely creative ways."

"So there are billboards with my face on them all over the galaxy?" Shepard asked, bewildered. Tali snorted, but remained standing this time.

"No. Not yet, at least," Hackett said. "Eventually I looked back in, and when I did I had everybody involved transferred to rubble-clearing duty on Mars. But by that point it was all out of control, and that's when your lawyer got in contact with me."

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask about that," Shepard said, looking at the volus standing innocently behind his rolling desk. "Who are you? You weren't there when I was court-martialed. "

"Not a defense advocate," Jerro said. He fiddled with his computer, and a holographic display shone above it for the benefit of the feeble non-lawyers on the other side of the desk. He began flicking through a series of documents with important-looking seals on them, the sort that the professionally educated hang on their walls to prove their credentials in full certainty that nobody's ever going to read them.

"Jerro Gan, Doctor of Law, Lenos University," he said, pausing at one document that was apparently supposed to prove this. "Independent practice, specialty in copyright and intellectual property."

He took a deep breath. "About three years ago, I was contacted by a human agent, affiliated with an obvious shell corporation, who had an interesting proposal regarding you, Commander Shepard. You were believed dead and any sensible court would call you a public figure, so under common Council copyright law any interested party would assume that they could make use of your image in whatever way they pleased. But, though means they chose not to reveal, this shell corporation had obtained security rights to your image- which they wanted to exercise through me. They set up a well-funded trust to automatically pay me twice my normal fee for dealing with cases involving your name and image."

He stared up at Shepard owlishly. "Generally speaking, they wanted me to sue the hell out of anything depicting you in a negative light."

"Cerberus," Shepard said automatically. It made sense. Half the reason that Cerberus had sunk billions of credits into rebuilding him was his fame; it made sense to budget for public relations.

"I see that you can put two and two together just as well as I could, Commander Shepard," Jerro said. "But it was all legal and not terribly unethical from my end, so I took the offer. Credits are credits."

"Why would Cerberus hire a volus lawyer?" Tali asked.

"I gather that most human cultures consider lawyers evil by default," Jerro said, with what passed for a shrug in a species with no shoulders. "Apparently they don't distinguish between human evil and alien evil. And I happen to be very good at my job."

Jerro started flicking through more pictures for Shepard's apparent benefit again. "I spent around two years under the nominal supervision of the shell corporation, keeping my feelers out. Most of what I found was just cheap merchandise. There was a line of novelty shirts saying 'First Human Spectre- Dead in Half a Year'"- an image of a stall in a shop came up, and Shepard noted the unflattering caricature of him with half his face missing- "which was popular with certain Turian and Krogan demographics. I don't know why; they couldn't even fit a Krogan. Then there was the fake N7 armor"- another image of another stall, this one with a rather more flattering caricature of himself winking and giving a thumbs up- "No guilt whatsoever about taking that one down; a lot of people could have gotten hurt. You get the general picture."

Jerro shut off the hologram. "Most of the owners folded after a cease and desist, the rest after some aggressive posturing towards a lawsuit. I doubt the argument would have held up in court, but it never had to get that far. The only one that got past me was a vid by Eridani."

"Citadel. I think I saw that one," Shepard said. In fact Tali had sat him down and made him watch it with her, and had spent the entire time complaining about the unrealistic depictions of the Normandy's systems. "That one wasn't exactly unflattering though. Just bad."

"I get paid either way," the lawyer said with another roly-poly shrug. "After that, of course, you were discovered to still be alive fighting collectors and my contract defaulted from the shell company to you. They didn't seem terribly surprised. So I've kept on, but it's mostly been quiet. There was an incident a year ago where multiple stores on the Citadel were found using the same obviously faked endorsement from you-"

"Yeah, about that-"

"-But up until now nothing has actually required your attention," Jerro finished. "Didn't help that you spent most of that time undercover, under house arrest, or unconscious. Then one day I got fifty blips on my radar all at once, and I realized that this is the big one."

Hackett smiled. He seemed to be relaxing a bit more now that the deadly truth had been revealed. "You don't know what it's like to get a video call from an irate volus," he said. "He didn't even have his pressure suit on. I just saw a blob of flesh yelling about copyright infringement."

"Those contracts were all illegal," Jerro said reproachfully. He pulled up another document, and for once Shepard understood it: this was the standard enlistment form for the Alliance navy, which he himself had signed all those years ago. "The Alliance has the right to use of Shepard's likeness for clearly-defined recruitment advertisements only. I couldn't sit by with my 'only unflattering depictions' rule and let that happen."

"So none of this stuff is going to market, then?" Shepard said, holding up the can of cola. He noted that the ingredients list included "raw courage". Against himself, he found himself chuckling at that. This really wasn't that big of a deal.

Hackett suddenly seemed gloomy again. "If I had my way, yes," he said. "But we're still recovering. And it would look really, really bad if we suddenly bailed on three dozen different contracts, no matter how illegal."

"So what are we going to do?" Shepard asked.

"I've talked to a lot of representatives, and the path forward seems pretty clear," Jerro said. "Under the circumstances, most of them are willing to re-negotiate. You review the contracts. Any you think are truly offensive we can nix, the rest we re-do except legally. The only downside is that there's a lot of reading involved."

"How much reading?" Shepard said.

Hackett paused, and silently walked out of the room. He immediately walked back in, carrying a footlocker. He dropped it on the foot of Shepard's bed; tilting him forward slightly.

"Let's get to work!" Jerro said cheerfully.

Suddenly Shepard didn't find the situation nearly as funny.