I'll seek you out,
Filet you alive
One more word and you won't survive
And I'm not scared of your stolen power
I see right through you any hour

I won't soothe your pain
I won't ease your strain
You'll be waiting in vain
I got nothing for you to gain

~Eyes on Fire by Blue Foundation~

So, you wanna know all about Commander Shepard, Butcher of Torfan, first human Spectre, savior of the Citadel, and the bitch who thought taking down Sovereign was more important than saving a bunch of whiny-assed council members? I'll tell you right now that my shit ain't pretty. You'll either love me or hate me when all this is done - there's no grey area in between.

First off, I don't take shit - I dish it out. You fuck with me, I'll hit twice as hard and leave your head spinnin' in circles next to your fucking prone body. Secondly, you screw with my crew, starin' at the end of my gun is the least of your worries. I'll do shit to you that'll make you wish I'd killed you the moment I saw your face. Am I a tough bitch? Hell yeah! Psychotic? More'n likely. I get shit done, though, and that's all that matters.

How did I end up this way? Easy. You take a happy girl from Mindoir, who spent her summers with her family at their cabin in Minnesota hunting and fishing, and have her watch them and her friends either taken or slaughtered by a bunch of Batarian bastards. Mind you, that naïve little shit was also only 14 years old when the raid happened. That puts a rage into a person, a hatred, that can last lifetimes.

People like to say that an Alliance frigate found and rescued me. That's complete and utter bullshit. More like propaganda the assholes spewed out to make themselves look good, especially since they didn't get their hands on me until I was 19. I didn't join 'em out of a sense of duty or responsibility to the human race either. I was forced into joining and just bided my time within their ranks. To them they thought I was a happy little soldier who aced her special forces training - well until I pretty much sacrificed my team to take out as many of those four eyed bastards as I could when we landed on Torfan. Do I feel bad about sending a bunch of pansies off to their deaths? Fuck no!

Long story short - Eclipse mercs found me on Mindoir, not the Alliance. I earned my uniform before they even pulled me off the planet. One of 'em handed me a pistol and I shot the asshole who was gunnin' for me and the other mercs, shouting that they'd got here first and I was their prize. Hell no. I ain't no prize for some two-bit slave trader and never will be. An idiot turian on Purgatory learned that later on, but that's another story. They were impressed at how steady my hand was when I fired off that shot and the lack of emotion from a child who had just killed their first sentient being. Why the hell should I freak out over killing one of them when I saw them murder my parents right in front of my eyes?

My training began in earnest then. They found my hidden biotic talents and honed them into razor sharp skills. Hell, the Alliance doesn't even know about them - so in their files I was classified as a non-biotic with mass weapons knowledge. Then again, thanks to yet another betrayal, they thought I was a Blue Suns merc and they ain't well known for their biotic abilities. If they'd've known I was Eclipse, I'm sure poking and prodding would have ensued.

Basically, I'm a soldier with the talents of a Vanguard and an Infiltrator. Toss me any weapon and I can wield it with an uncanny precision. Piss me off and get too close and I'll body slam your ass, if I don't knock you and your friends over like fucking bowling pins first. Gotta love them shockwaves. Then again, that's also if you can find me - I can hide in plain sight, standing right in front of you, and you wouldn't even know it before the bullet hit you between your eyes. I can fry your ass too and damn the sounds of someone screaming as their flesh bubbles and cracks is ambrosia to my ears.

Yeah, I'm fucked in the head. I like it that way.

I was with the Eclipse for five years until an assignment I was on went wrong. My mark had no idea who I was or which band I belonged to - hell he had no idea I was even a merc. He tried to get me to join his happy little band of assholes and when I said no, he made me pay. Got a hold of the authorities, pinning me for a Blue Sun's job that went bad, and I was told I could either be jailed or join the Alliance. I chose the Alliance cuz I knew I'd have a chance at blowing away more Batarian assholes and they didn't disappoint.

I settled down a bit after Torfan. Got a good chunk of that rage outta my system, though it never truly goes away. Shit, I'm sure they even think, knowing my past, that I cleaned out that one solar system on purpose - never mind the fact that if I hadn't sent that damned asteroid into the mass relay, the Reapers would be on our asses right now. Hundreds of thousands of dead Batarians was just the icing on the cake, so to speak.

So yeah, there I was, hailed as the Butcher of Torfan when I get this call in telling me I've been chosen to be the XO of this new prototype frigate, the SSV Normandy SR1, under the leadership of Captain Anderson. I actually kind of liked the man. He and Hackett were a couple of the few who didn't take shit from me, but then again they didn't give me shit either. That was an interesting assignment, I shit you not. Most of the crew tiptoed around me like they expected me to blow someone's head off for looking at me wrong. Hey, I'm cracked, but I ain't that bad.

Shit started getting weird after that. Saren kills the turian responsible to watch me and see if I'm Spectre material. Thanks to this sweet little quarian, Tali'Zorah, we prove that the Spectre has gone rogue and I basically take his place in the ranks. Not only that but I'm given the task of chasing his ass all over the damned universe and keeping him from finding this thing called a Conduit. Great. Babysitting duty for a rogue turian and his geth pets was not exactly what I had signed up for when I said I'd help the Council out.

Before we left the Citadel I had already amassed a strange group of companions to help me chase this jackass around. Truth be told, I liked the aliens a bit better than I did the human crew. Well, there was one that really shocked the hell outta me - Kaidan Alenko. Before I knew it, he had found some way to gently push past all my barriers and actually mean something to me. I swore to myself after the shit that happened on Mindoir, and then again with the ass who sold me out to the authorities, that no one would ever mean that much to me again. Kaidan proved me wrong. He took my scarred and battered heart and healed it. He soothed the savage beast inside me, if you wanna get all romantic 'n shit. I needed him and that's why I kept him around, saving him on Virmire. Even now, with all the crap that's happened, I don't regret my decision. All the pain and destruction in my past has made me into the crazy, fucked up bitch I am today, and that's what's gonna save the damned galaxy from the Reapers.

So, Sovereign's dead, the Council is dead, and we're out scouring the edges of the Terminus for pockets of geth and to figure out what the hell is causing ships to disappear. We're attacked, the Normandy is destroyed, but at least I got Joker out in time before I got spaced. See, he ended up like a brother to me. He didn't mind my prickly-assed attitude. He doesn't know the whole story - nobody does. Well, scratch that, one person does and he's the one half hangin' out of my bed right now, snorin' like nobody's fuckin' business. Nah, I ain't tellin' you who it is either. You'll find out in good time. That time just ain't now. Still, I did my job. I made sure as many people got out alive as possible, especially Joker, before I died. Ain't that the shit - I actually did something selfless for once - and it wasn't enough for karma not to bite me on the ass.

I tell you what, though. I was glad to die. All that anger, all that frustration, the pain, the hurt, all of it, gone. Just gone. I finally felt peace for the first time since I was 14. Even loving Kaidan as I did, and being loved in return, wasn't enough to fix everything completely. It helped for a while though.

Then Cerberus brought me back. I struggled against it, no doubt about it. Dumb shits had to sedate me, though, the one time I almost succeeded in waking up enough to try and overload my system so I could have that peace again. Of course, the next time I wake up, I'm fully functional and got too much of a need for self preservation to let the fucking mechs take me out. That and curiosity were enough for me to bust ass through that facility, taking down as many of those robotic bastards as possible.

Was I pissed that it was Cerberus who resurrected me? Not really. I didn't get as huge a bug up my ass about the organization as the others had. Shit, you live the life I had before I went into the service and Cerberus looks like just another merc organization, just better funded. Doesn't mean that I felt any loyalty to them though. So what if they spent billions of fucking credits to resurrect me? You can't buy me. I'll just stick with you as long as we have the same goals - the moment those change, bye bye birdie. I made sure the Illusive Man knew that. This wasn't the Alliance where I was forced to serve, this was something different and I'll be damned if he thought I'd just be led along like a puppy on a leash. Luckily, he got it. Even so, I didn't like the organization and I hated having Jacob and Miranda following me around like I needed a goddamned chaperone.

Freedom's Progress hit home for me. The difference being that there was no slaughter here that could be noticed like what happened on Mindoir - instead everyone was just gone. Seeing Tali again was the only bright spot of the whole ordeal, enough to shake me out of my need to check every fucking shadowy corner for a hidden Batarian. Joker and the SR2 were other little treats for me. I don't get sentimental often, but damn, seeing my bro again and, while it wasn't the same damned ship, the Normandy, was enough to get me a bit damp in the eyes. Unfortunately I think I broke a couple of his ribs when I hugged him, but luckily he didn't seem to mind.

We're back to flying the stars again - headed to Omega to pick up the first of many new recruits. Now that I know who the enemy is, these Collector bastards, they'd better watch their backs. I don't play nice with slavers.