Warnings for suicidal ideation here, kiddos. Shepard is really not in a good place.
Shepard stands at the window, pressing the muzzle of a Locust SMG against the bottom of her jaw and staring pensively up at the stars. Her shoulder blades are popped out and close together, like they can fuse together to protect her from the back.
"Nora?" Garrus says, moving quietly like he would towards a frightened animal. He's afraid that if he startles her she'll pull the trigger by accident. She doesn't react much to the sound of his voice, but she relaxes a fraction.
"Garrus," Shepard says on a sigh. "Sorry. It's just that kind of night."
She doesn't move the gun, though.
"You're..." he trails off, clears his throat. "You're thinking about this again?"
"I didn't ever really stop thinking about it," she says with a frown at him. That's good, though, Garrus can work with annoyed Shepard much better than he can suicidal Shepard.
"Do you remember when you found me on Omega?"
"Yeah, of course. You looked like you were a week away from launching yourself into orbit."
"Yeah," he says. "That's kind of what you look like now, Shepard. Come on. Put it down. You've seen how things can change."
"I'm frankly not sure what's the best course of action here," Shepard muses. "On the one hand, if I don't put it down, and I go through with this, then the nightmares will stop and no one will comm me at three am to ask why I didn't try harder on Thessia. I really fucking hate reporters, you know that? But on the other hand, if I do, and I let you hide it or something, then the sex tonight is going to be great and in the morning I can give Henry his meds and laugh at the face he makes. So this could really go either way. Give me a minute here."
"Take all the time you need," Garrus suggests. "I've heard humans can live well into their hundreds now."
"You heard right."
Shepard stares out the window for a few moments longer. Garrus is glad that Jas and Henry are asleep. This is a side of Shepard he hopes their children will never encounter, the cracked-up burnt-down savior of the galaxy that would rather die than have another nightmare. She sets the gun down on the counter and goes to Garrus, where she presses her forehead tightly to his mandible and inhales so sharply it's almost a shout.
"I'm sorry, Garrus," she says. "I don't want to worry you. But sometimes the only way I can cope with wanting to die is to almost make it happen."
"I understand, Shepard."
"I'm Commander fucking Shepard," she says. "I can learn to leave this stuff behind. It's just taking a long fucking time and it's frustrating."
"Come here," he says and then no one does much talking after that. Shepard screams herself awake for the third time in as many nights, and while it shouldn't be a surprise after the last eight years, it's as much a shock as ever. She doesn't scream when the nightmare's over, because it's only involuntary, and Shepard holds her emotions rigidly close like she's allergic to them and the only protection is to lock them in. She rolls against Garrus, still asleep and in a strange hunched position to keep his spurs off the sheets, and listens to Henry's wheezy breathing through the baby monitor.
Seven years since her second death; ten years since the first. Billions of dead and billions of dollars between them. Shepard's third life is shaping up differently than both before, but it seems it'll be no less difficult. She doesn't want to fight anymore. She doesn't want dreams that end in a bang and a flash or silent cold. She had thought for a while after Jas was born that things were improving; she had thought the same thing after Henry, but then he'd been in ICU for nineteen months and she slid right back down into the sticky awfulness. It's like being back in the braces, grunting and straining to stay upright.
She had intended for things to change after she left Marta and Hero, after Kaidan's talk. She had tried for some time, and things did change. Even now she doesn't go for runs longer than Jas can keep up for. She's been thinking about re-enlisting, even, but not in this condition.
"The safety was on," she murmurs to Garrus' back.
"I know," he whispers back. She rolls over to give him a little space, plays with her biotics. Sleep never comes easy. She pulls marbles off the floor up into a tight orbit, lowering them one by one into a spiral and moving them faster. She rams one into another, curving it off at the last second to arc backwards. This is one of the only things that don't make her think of wartime; biotics are clean and natural as breathing, one of the few constants from her childhood. She misses the navy.
"I think I'm going to re-enlist," she whispers. Garrus shifts but doesn't answer. He must have fallen back asleep. She says to him anyway, "Not for a while. But soon. That's who I am, I'm a soldier."
She turns over, dropping the marbles with a quiet clatter on the thin carpeting, and settles herself against Garrus. She has to pull up one leg and fold the other to avoid his spurs, and his carapace cants her torso back at an awkward angle, but she's gotten used to sleeping like this. Jas appears like magic before morning. She mostly stays in her own bed now, but a five year old is old enough to know that screaming means stay away. Jas, of course, is a Shepard and a Vakarian, which is why she goes to the screaming.
"Mama," she says, brilliantly cheerful and obnoxiously loud. Shepard groans. Garrus groans loader. Jas groans even louder than either of them, almost covering the sound of Henry's warbling.
"Jas," Shepard says without taking her face from the pillow.
"Yeah?"
"Is that the baby?"
"Yeah!"
"F-" Shepard cuts herself off, sits up, reaches for Henry just as he starts crying. "Fr...ick," she says. Henry, in Jas' lap at the foot of the bed, is nearly the length of his sister's torso, held up at the waist to compensate for his poor balance. He can even run when he can stay upright, but there's a tumor affecting his motor skills and the doctors won't do the surgery until he's recovered from the last.
"Poor baby," she says, getting out of bed to lift him and Jas at the same time. Garrus watches fondly, far more awake than Shepard, but makes no move to help.
"Thanks for the help, dad," Shepard says, settling Henry on her hip and lightening the strain of Jas' weight on the other side with a gentle pull. "It's much appreciated."
"I figure you could use the activity," he says with a laugh.
"By self," Henry demands, no longer crying. Shepard sets him on the bed. He stands, wobbling. Shepard feels a sting of sympathy, struggling not to take his arms and keep him upright.
"Come on, kid," she says. "Do you want to see EDI today or what?"
"EDI," Henry demands again. He's a lot like Jas that way. A lot like his mother.
"Then you'll have to let me and Daddy get you around for now, alright?"
Henry shrieks, but he doesn't kick when he's lifted, so they both count it a victory. Garrus moves the toddler to his crest, where a turian baby of similar age would still fit inside. Henry curls his fingers round the edge and licks Garrus' face. Garrus grunts in disgust. He's never really gotten over human spit; turians don't have saliva, some avian ancestor's holdover. Shepard snickers.
"Come on," she says. "Time to get Brat and Squint cleaned up."
"Don't call Daddy names," Jas scolds.
"I'm talking about you, kid."
Jas likes baths. Henry doesn't. Shepard wonders when her life narrowed down this much, like going from a full 180 view to looking down a scope. She used to care about things like the fate of species and extinction events. Now she just wants her kid to stop screaming every time his feet touch something mildly cooler than his skin.
"Henry, goddamn it," Shepard says at last. Jas is shivering on the toilet in a towel, hair sticking up straight vertical. Her skinny legs are pockmarked with bruises from careening into the counters. Henry, smaller and squatter, howls when Shepard warms the water. He howls when she cools the water. He howls when the back of his head is dunked, smoothing down the patchy hair that makes him look like an old man. It's the same color as Shepard's and Jas'; he's the lucky one, though. He got the same blue eyes as Garrus. It's kind of eerie, when Garrus plucks him from the sink and they both stare at Shepard mournfully.
"Don't torture the kid," he says. "If he wants to stink, let him stink."
"Stinky," Henry agrees. "No bath."
"You're almost two. You're practically a grown man, Henry."
Henry mumbles several things to himself as he's wrapped in a towel. Shepard understands a little of it; there's a word from a turian nursery rhyme, there's car and mama and EDI, there's a few things he must have overheard in the last vid from Liara. Most of it is nonsense. Jas is a nonstop chatterbox today while she's dressing. On goes the sweater, out comes a paragraph about the chickens across the street.
"Excited, huh?" Shepard asks as she's wrestling Henry's foot into a sock. He chirps. The doorbell rings. Garrus makes his way to the door with Jas sprinting alongside, invites in Joker and EDI. Shepard follows a few minutes later, holding the wriggling Henry like a football. Joker is on the couch, angled a little towards EDI and also a little around her, like he's ready to throw himself down to protect her from an explosion. EDI isn't in Eva's body anymore, which has long since been broken down for scrap, months before the black box in the Faraday cage was completely unlocked. She has a similar body now, but a little more EDI. She's still got the sexbot look, but her face is more mobile, even more convincing than the old one had been, and she's wearing slacks and a big ugly sweater. She's got another in her lap, which she is quite successfully enticing Jas to wear.
Shepard gives her a look, one eyebrow raised. EDI nods to the shrieking toddler under her arm. Well. Turnabout is fair play. Conversation bounces around the room like a volleyball game-from EDI's quest to gain rightful citizenship despite the Council ban on artificial intelligence to Shepard's first therapy appointment to the funny looking splint on Joker's upper thigh to Henry's last boot cast to Garrus' next visit to Palaven. Shepard moves to the kitchen to feed Jas, closely followed by EDI, who moves quite differently than she did. Her footsteps sound much less tentative. It throws Shepard off.
"So," Shepard says, eyeing the sweater. The stitches are all identical size and shape, almost like they're machine produced. "You have a knitting algorithm now?"
"Yes, of course," EDI says, sounding pleased as she passes a juice box to Jas, now wearing a similar miniature sweater. "I do not sleep. I have quite a lot of time to fill, especially now that Jeff is indisposed."
"Is that what they're calling it now?" Shepard muses. "So he can't-"
She looks down at Jas, bright eyed and sucking on the straw, listening avidly. Shepard decides she doesn't want to know badly enough that she'd ask in front of a small child.
"Will you make me one?" she asks instead. EDI beams. What does she pull out of her handbag in the other room but another sweater? Several cosmetics that look like they'll just slide off her dermis, a three year old bottle of untouched perfume, and a half-eaten candy bar, which EDI hands to Jas and which Shepard snatches away the moment Jas moves it to her mouth. EDI has no way of telling when food's gone off.
Shepard puts the sweater on in delight.
"I'm trying to teach the kids that being alive isn't scary," Shepard says when EDI asks her about finally starting therapy. "They can't feel safe enough to play if ma is always scared witless."
"That's quite reasonable of you," she says. "And very responsible. I am glad to see you living again, Shepard."
"I could say the same to you, you know. You were touch and go for a long time. I don't think I'll ever understand why you were affected, but the geth weren't." Shepard frowns, watching Jas bolt onto a chair and swing her legs, still listening with enormous eyes.
"The geth network is stored within an adaptation of a Faraday cage, which is not very different than what I did, but it protects their individual consciousness to the point that they were affected but at a far lesser degree," EDI says blithely. "I do not think you would be interested in the details of how it works."
"You would be right."
"You see?" EDI says with a smug little grin. "I am learning about conversational preferences. Jeff, for example, does not like to discuss what it was like before I came back. I have curbed my curiosity in response to this."
EDI waits patiently. Shepard sighs and puts her chin in one hand, resting the elbow on her other arm.
"It was scary, EDI. No one really understood the coding in your black box. We didn't know if you'd be you, or if you'd even wake up. We got pretty lucky, as I understand."
"Would you like to the know the odds of the exact occurrence?"
"Not particularly. It worked out."
"Ah. I see. Adjusting parameters. Is this an example of 'what will be, will be'?"
"Yeah, I guess you could say that. Hey, now we're almost even," Shepard says, sparing a slantwise look at Jas. "Now you're one for two."
"One for two on-" EDI pauses, mouthing words. "Ah. Yes. I see. Now all I need to do is save the universe and do it again."
"You really did that already," Shepard says in amusement. She doesn't go into detail, because EDI was there and Jas is in the room. She doesn't want the kids to know more than they have to, right now.
"I am glad that you are around, Shepard," EDI says. "I am glad that you are still here."
Shepard doesn't ask what she means. They both know, and so do Garrus and Joker. Shepard goes back into the living room with EDI, Jas hot on their heels, though she peels off at the last minute to scoop up Henry and cuddle him while looking to see if anyone is paying attention to her show. When no one is, she immediately sets him back on the floor.
Shepard slumps against Garrus, watching EDI and Joker fondly. Joker's sclerae are blue still, something that alarmed Shepard on their first meeting but now is simply a marker that not all things change. His beard is thicker, almost longer than regulations allow. Shepard can close her eyes and it nearly feels like nothing has changed at all. This is one of the good changes, though. EDI is back, after all. She'd woken up a few times, once as the chess piece on the Normandy and screeched static, and once, briefly, in the chassis she's in now. That time had lasted long enough to alert Joker and then set him grieving again. Now, at least, Shepard doesn't feel guilty and Joker isn't bitter.
EDI wants to be seen as a person, by the law, since her crewmates have long seen her as such. Council law still forbids artificial intelligences, but EDI is self-actualized and no one is advocating wiping out the geth. Shepard supposes they all proved their worth in the war and immediately afterward. EDI has a lawyer now, a terrifying woman by name of Jhadav.
"Nice place here, Commander," Joker says while he's carefully contorting himself and his splint around EDI on the couch. "Probably big enough to fit a whole bunch of orphans in here."
Shepard shrugs, sighing theatrically.
"You know, Joker, I did try and start an orphanage, but the Council wouldn't give me a permit."
"Yeah, and why's that?"
"Something about a propensity to use the small as bait," Shepard pauses, meeting Joker's eyes. Neither of them makes a facial expression. Shepard begins to laugh. "Alright, I'm sorry, that was brutal."
"I would think it would be because of your destructive tendencies and poor decision making skills," Joker says. "Y'know, like letting the ship get hijacked while you rescued a hamster."
"Yorick and the hamster are both very dear to me," Shepard protests. Joker looks to Garrus.
"Please don't tell me the husk somehow survived too."
Garrus sighs deeply. Joker groans.
"Does it still scream all the time?"
"Yeah. And it's always watching," Garrus says. "All the goddamn time."
"Oh, man, that's rough."
"You're telling me."
"Yeah, well, I'm the one with the-" Joker stops cold at Shepard's dirty look. "-The sprained...thigh."
"Like spaghetti," Jas offers primly from the carpet. "Put it in the sprainer."
"Yeah," Joker says with a slightly wheezy laugh. "I definitely put it in the sprainer."
Shepard's leaking killing intent. Joker shuts his mouth.
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