Title: Child of the Cosmos
Author: Lucky Gun
Description: A mother is often faceless beside her child's accomplishments, hidden in history and time. Not always are they still, though. Five times Hannah Shepard had to shield her eyes to look at the bright, shining star that was her daughter. Paragon FemShep, Pre ME1 to Post ME3 Survival
A/N: Yet another prompt from Rocket Rochelle, one I was wonderfully pleased to write. Quick and dirty – work and class don't leave much time for anything else. But still, something delightful to write. I take some liberties, as usual, and change (including the timing) or expand a bit of a few things. I pull from my others ME stories, very clearly Enough, which is a post ME3 survival fix. Pulls from DLCs throughout, so if you don't know them it might throw you. Poems used were found online in Google Images. I claim no ownership of these words.
For a star to be born,
there is one thing that
must happen: a gaseous
nebula must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This is not your
destruction.
This is your birth.
The comm screen in front of her didn't flicker, but still, she was having difficulty reading it. It could have been the brightness of the lights in front of her or the dimness of the room behind her, but she couldn't focus much. The words were nonsensical, and she squinted as she read them again.
Shepard, Hero of Skyllian Blitz, In Hospital on Elysium – Status Pending
No, the message hadn't changed.
Hannah Shepard groaned under her breath and rubbed her eyes tiredly. She exhaled slowly through her teeth and tried to fight down the rising nausea in her gut. They'd barely given a thought for Elysium before the raid, and now that it was over, well, a battle cry it had become. The entirety of the Fifth Fleet was toasting her daughter – her daughter! – and it wasn't even known if she was going to survive.
The chime of a door behind her should have startled her into motion, but she didn't budge. Granted, she was over her time in the comm room, and FTL bursts weren't free. But still, she'd earned this. If by nothing other than proxy, she had earned this moment.
So she tapped a few buttons and straightened, hoping her hair wasn't too mussed, and put a strained smile on her lips as a holographic image of her own face stared back at her.
"Hey, baby, it's mom," she started quietly, and ignored the sting of tears at the corners of her eyes. It took a few seconds for her to speak again, and the tightness in the back of her throat made it hard to breathe.
"They told me they'd give this to you when you woke up. I tried to get there but...well, they say your PNOK is currently your squad leader. I don't blame you, honestly, but regs are regs, and they won't give me leave to come see you. Blood isn't as thick as gun oil in the service; isn't that what your father always says? You know how proud he is of what you did there..."
She trailed off, uncertain what to say next, and stared at the far corner of the room. There was some anger inside, but mostly it was just cool, collected denial. So she squared her shoulders and forced her eyes back to the hidden camera lens, forcing her jaw to stop trembling.
"The brass is already talking about giving you a Star of Terra, so do me a favor and make sure you put me as your plus one. I'm still young enough to gatecrash a party, so just try me, young lady. I will be there at your ceremony, because you will wake up, and you will not die."
There it was, in all its unfathomable horror, and she said it again, just for good measure.
"You will not die."
A flash of the image she'd seen was burned in her head, and fear screamed above it all – there was blood everywhere, armor burned and scuffed, a frozen hand clutching an assault rifle like a lifeline, and a spiderweb of cracks covered the helmet visor. A nurse working the recovery of the scene was an old family friend and had sent the snapshot to Hannah – she'd viewed it and deleted it immediately. The N7 on the top of the chestpiece and the telltale black and white digitized camo pattern over the rest of it were like a signature. It was her daughter on the ground being worked by a crew of six, Batarian corpses all around.
Her daughter, her biotic skybird, still and silent like she'd never been as a rambunctious, obnoxious child, her little star, was growing into a nova before her eyes. The waves of her growing influence were obvious in the halls of the ship her mother staffed and, damn them, even in the aliens in the station where they were docked. It was to be expected, she reasoned distantly. Here was proof, living and breathing (living and breathing, my child – breathe; live!), that humanity would take up the mantle of protection for all in the galaxy. Details were still filtering through, but one thing was perfectly clear: Shepard had rallied the defenseless Elysium, and when the colony's perimeter had been breached, she had single-handedly held the line. Human colony or no, alien presence was high there, and there was already talk of further steps towards a Council seat for humanity.
Moon dust to stardust to a supernova blooming, her daughter was a catalyst of change.
And dammit, she would live.
"Message me when you wake up," Hannah finally said, a mix of an order and a plea in her voice, and she nodded once at the camera, smile a little watery but showing teeth.
"You have to tell me all about your shore leave."
The screen flickered for real this time before dimming to darkness, a little blue light shining a confirmation of data transmission, and she watched it numbly. It blinked in time with her own heartbeat, a beat she prayed – prayed, hoped, begged the sky – her daughter's was keeping.
The light died as the console went into hibernation, and Hannah ducked her head, pressed her palms against her face, and cried.
She was a shooting star,
Her smile so bright and rare,
That by the time that you had blinked,
There was no sign it had been there.
It was not with a little frustration that Hannah stormed towards the FTL comm room of the Kilimanjaro. She had twelve hours worth of reports to finish within the next half shift, and her captain would have her ass if she was late. Still, the look on her yeoman's face when he gave her the message had triggered a little bit of curiosity. It wasn't often the young ensign had the balls to go eye to eye with her, and she was wondering what had given him that little bit of spine.
So she walked up to the panel, tapped the blinking button, and looked up at the interface in front of her as she answered, "Shepard speak - "
Then she blinked, and took a step back. The woman staring back at her reminded her a lot of herself, only twenty years younger.
"Oh, hi," she said carefully, glancing at the uptight admin assistant in the corner. The older woman was frowning hard under a set of antique glasses, and Hannah looked back at her daughter. "I don't have time for a personal call right now; I'm on duty."
The brief twitch of lips on the other side of the connection made her guess the words before they even came through the speakers. "I know what that's like," the Commander answered honestly, and Hannah tried not to read too much into the exhaustion she could hear in the tones.
What came next was sad and heartbreaking, though there was some closure in knowing where her old friend was. Hannah forced herself to focus on that, not the darkness under her daughter's eyes or the slouch in her stance that told of a weariness she couldn't hide. The conversation was closing fast, and, without a look at the old crone in the corner, the XO stepped forward and lowered her voice.
"I have to go, but take care of yourself. You're...you're making us proud."
Shepard stood straighter at that, a little bit of a real grin on her face, and there was half a lifetime in that smile. Hannah stared, forgetting herself for a moment, news reports and net stories filtering through her mind. She thought of the face of this woman before her, her only child, and the headlines she'd seen beside it across the galaxy for six months.
Commander Shepard, Spectre Status Recognized
Shepard of the Blitz Walks Out of Interview
Shepard and the Council: Is She Humanity's Best Representation?
Aliens Aboard SSV Normandy; Shepard Defends Crew Assignments
Asari Archaeologist – Is This Really Commander Shepard's Secret Weapon?
Remember Shanxi: Soldier Aboard Normandy Fighting Family's Legacy
Quarian Child: Technical Savant or Embedded Spy?
Vakarian Clan Disowns Former C-Sec Officer, Shepard Unilaterally Offers Asylum
Dangerous 'L2' Biotic Operating On Normandy, Inquiry Pending
Shepard Goes Too Far! Bloodthirsty Krogan Aboard Top Alliance Warship
Virmire: Normandy Confirmed At Fault, Shepard Eulogizes Fallen Comrade
Fraternizing: Should Spectres Have To Follow Alliance Protocol In Bed?
Questionable Judgment: Shepard Spares Deadly Batarian Terrorist to Save Five
Anderson Defends Protege, Shepard Has No Comment
A flash of rage that bordered on insanity bubbled up from Hannah's gut, and she shook her head as she ignored the other woman in the room.
"Listen to me, sweetheart. You don't take any shit from anyone, do you understand? You go straight as your heart tells you and listen to your instincts. Trust yourself, trust your crew, and maintenance your weapon religiously. Don't let anyone tell you how the hell you're supposed to shine, skybird. You burn like the supernova you are."
Her voice was firm – the universal mom voice – and her daughter's stance straightened a bit. The smile didn't come back, but there was a spark in her eyes that hadn't been there before.
"You haven't called me 'skybird' since I was an ensign, mom. You'll ruin my reputation." Shepard's words were light, but there was an undeniable warmth to them, and some more weight seemed to slip from her shoulders.
Undaunted, Hannah pointed one pale finger at the holograph before her and shook it hard.
"Worry about your character, child, not your reputation. Your character is who you are, and your reputation is who people think you are. Don't make me beat that lesson into you again." She paused, then continued, "Listen, you're spread thin and dealing with everyone's problems, including your own. Take your crew – your friends, honey – and grab a sanity check. Ahern told me about what happened at Pinnacle; take some downtime at your new place before you burn out. And turn off the damn galactic newsfeed for a few hours at least."
The wry look the Spectre tossed at her came with a cocked hip and a hand tight to her hip.
"Is that an order, XO Shepard?" she asked casually, and Hannah smiled like her daughter couldn't find the energy to. "Friendly request, Commander."
It took a few moments, but her daughter finally nodded slightly. "Yes, ma'am. Be safe, mom."
The signal faded before Hannah could respond, and she stared at the metal wall in front of her for a moment while struggling to put her emotions back in a box. If her hands tightened into fists, she ignored them.
"My boy speaks highly of her, you know."
It was the old admin in the corner, her steely eyes peering hard at Shepard. Blinking rapidly, Hannah couldn't form a question fast enough, and the older woman looked back down at her paperwork.
"Yes ma'am. My Charles thinks she hung the moon."
With that, Sergeant Pressly went quietly back to her work, and Hannah smiled at the top of her white hair for a moment before heading back to her own reports.
The sky is so tragically beautiful
A graveyard of stars
The headlines that had dogged her daughter as harshly as the Spectre dogged the Geth were dramatically different after Alchera. Words that were once dark and critical became aglow with praise. Questionable calls the Commander had made became 'daring decisions of a noble internal strength', and there was no more mention of the Normandy's diverse crew.
The Alliance had lost twenty one soldiers in that tragedy, and Hannah had watched the military funerals with a sort of strange lethargy from the dais. There was no body in the center coffin under the flag, and when eight N7s had lifted it to their shoulders, she thought they may have staggered in their overcompensation. It weighed too little, she knew. It was missing a hundred and forty pounds of heart and courage, not to mention fifteen pounds of rifle. They had wanted to place it in her coffin – the Commander had never been seen without it – but Hannah had declined and requested her daughter's armory be moved to Intai'sei and the homestead sealed.
That's where she was now, sitting quietly on the couch in the living room of the main building, ten cases of her daughter's personal effects sitting in various stages of disarray. Hannah had been there for a few days, bereavement leave allowing her the rare luxury of turning off her omni-tool, and already she had fielded visits from several of her daughter's crew.
One, a half-crippled pilot looking far too guilty for her heart to take, had come in and cracked a few jokes before sitting dead silent for five hours in the hallway. He'd taken a memento when she offered, her daughter's antique paperback copy of Moby Dick looking reverent in his bruised hands, and he had given her a small smile. "Saren was her whale, you know. She got the bastard and didn't go down with him. She once…she was asking me about my condition one time, and I sorta snapped at her, and she just apologized and said, 'Ignorance is the parent of fear.' It took me three weeks to find out where that was from. That phrase just seemed to define her, you know? She refused to be ruled by fear. She refused to let fear change her. She was the same person from day one. And it was an honor to be her pilot."
Two others came at once, a Quarian and Asari, and they engaged in small talk while they mindlessly helped Hannah sort out some of the freight that had come in. There was an ease in their movements that spoke of the knowledge of loss, and it made sense; frailty in one, extreme longevity in the other, the two women had likely seen many comrades come and go. They both spoke freely of Shepard, giving her mother snapshots of a time she had never known with her daughter and never would know again. There was laughter, and there were tears. Hannah had watched the empty coffin slip beyond the gravity well of the neutron star Nox, the plasmic burial ground of the military, but for those a few hours, she felt like her daughter was with her. The tech took an old omni-tool interface while the archaeologist held a strange, simple metal orb close to her chest as they left silently.
Possibly the most surprising visitor she had was a massive Krogan, quieter than she thought was attainable in his species, and he stayed for only a few moments. He moved around the room with a heavy step, stopping here and there, breathing deeply and evenly. He grunted some sort of affirmation when he came to a computer at the edge of the room, and he tapped the top of the screen with a strange gleam in his eyes. His claw found some sort of disk taped to the back of the monitor marked with the word 'Wrex', and he guffawed softly. "Damn, Shepard. Dead and gone and still keeping promises. Clan Urdnot thanks you." He left with only a nod to her, and she didn't even have time to rise from the couch before he took his leave.
Another was Turian, tall and stoic. He had spoken only a few words while he was there, and simply stood and watched the sunset from start to finish. He held one of her daughter's sniper rifles as he did so, his claws resting comfortably on the grip, and when darkness fell and he went to replace it in the weapons cache, Hannah had stopped him with a light touch on his arm. There was an almost tangible respect in the avian eyes that refused to meet hers, and she smiled gently before sending him on his way.
The less said about her final visitor, the better. The man was as quiet as the Turian and more broken than the pilot, carrying a sort of anger and sadness that matched the pain festering in Hannah's heart. An old adage echoed through her – grief is the price we pay for love – and it warmed and burned her equally. She had said nothing as he wandered through the apartment aimlessly, his fingers glowing blue when they alighted on surfaces, and she watched his eyes close against pain that tightened the muscles in his jaw. Then he crawled onto the thin bed, curled into a ball, and passed out. Hannah had watched over him as he slept, covering him with a blanket and humming under her breath as she worked through a dogeared book she'd found in her daughter's belongings. When the man had awoken twelve hours later and went to leave, he took nothing more than his memories of her daughter and a hug from the Spectre's mother.
So Hannah finally found herself utterly alone in the vastness of that homestead, surrounded by the physical reminders of the life she'd birthed and loved and missed and lost. She felt little comfort in the cool air outside or the quiet tones strumming from the music system embedded in the walls of the building. She found a stranger in some of the things she studied, a person who had grown up so far away from her mother's watchful eyes. But still, she saw her little girl's fingerprints in everything.
There was a picture of Shepard in a lush jungle setting, squadmates all around, an N5 glaring out from her collar, and the rifle in her hand had a little smiley face on the barrel in neon green marker. There were a handful of handwritten notes, relatively innocuous, really, except for the doodles here and there in the margins; one looked like a Krogan headbutting a Salarian with a strangely satisfied grin on his face. There was a piece of scrap metal that looked like it had gone ten rounds with a nuke and lost, and the word 'REAPER' was etched into it over and over again in her daughter's handwriting. There was a handful of OSDs that were heavily encrypted, every single one of them marked with words that made no sense to Hannah: Cipher, Thorian, Friend From Noveria, Vigil, Chorban's Data.
There was a second handful that were all labeled CERBERUS in a heavy hand with dark ink.
Deep in one of the crates was a collection of small boxes, some stamped with the Alliance logo, some of them with the hallmarks of the Turian, Asari, and even Salarian governments. In the middle of the pile was one particular case, simple and clean, and Hannah pulled it out slowly. It wasn't the first time she'd seen it, but it was the first time she'd held it. With a shaking hand, Hannah opened the mahogany grained lid and the dying light of the setting sun caught the Star of Terra nestled within. It gleamed beautifully in the thinning rays, the white and blue medal shining brightly against the rich black velvet lining. The sapphire stones sparkled, reminding her so much of her daughter's biotics when they flared around her in happiness and sadness.
"Oh, my little skybird," she whispered as her fingers caressed the flawless gems, and the ache in her heart intensified.
Emotions she couldn't name and could barely survive found their way out through her tears, each one splashing on the medal she clutched to her chest, and for a long time, she would wonder if she had died with her daughter.
Though my soul may set in darkness,
It will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly
To be fearful of the night.
There were very few things that scared Hannah anymore.
There were so many things that should terrify her, absolutely. Reapers invading, untested alliances being put to the utmost challenge in their infancy, increasingly unknowable technology being pressed into service without even the slightest bit of testing – it was incredible and daunting and so, so terrible, she should have been horrified.
But she knew a superhero's middle name, and that gave her a sort of peace she didn't know if she deserved.
So it was with a lighter step than maybe was appropriate that she headed to the bridge of her ship. Had she the inclination, she maybe would have felt a little guilty of it, but she reasoned it might help morale, and the mild pulse of censure disappeared.
"You have new messages at your terminal, Captain Shepard," her yeoman announced the moment she crossed the threshold.
Nodding once, she headed to the computer system nestled snugly in the corner next to the navigation systems, pulling up her inbox with a deft hand. There were a half dozen communications awaiting review, but one of them had a blue FTL emblem next to it, and she raised an eyebrow at the title of it.
The Emergency Induction Port That Broke The Camel's Back
There was more than a little confusion on Hannah's face as she turned slightly and said to her XO, "I think I need to take this in my quarters. Take the conn, will you?"
She didn't wait for an acknowledgment before immediately stepping towards her room right off the bridge. It only took her a few moments to load up the message on her private terminal, and she frowned at the video emblem for a second before finally clicking it.
Instantly, the wall in front of her lit up with the image of her daughter leaning towards the camera. Her hair was longer than usual and tangled, her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, and her pupils were blown out. Still, there was a bit of a laugh in her words as she grinned at the camera.
"Mom! Damn, you're a hard one to get a hold of. I tried you, like, four or five times, then said screw it and decided to leave you a message."
Hannah frowned and leaned back in her chair, a small smirk finally working its way across her face. She knew the reasons for her daughter to imbibe were numerous, and she herself wasn't a stranger to the odd drunken calls and comms. Still, it had been awhile since she'd seen her little one like this, and it was more than a little humorous.
"We're at the Citadel and the Normandy is in for some repairs; she's been through the ringer the last few months and needed some refitting. Anderson gave me his apartment here and me and my crew have been living it up on the Silversun Strip the last few days. Well, until last night, anyway."
There was a sudden deflation in Shepard's stance, and Hannah unconsciously leaned forward, instantly concerned. Her daughter sighed and rubbed at her eyes for a moment before she looked back up and said, "There was an...an incident, mom, and it's all classified and bullshit, as usual. But there was...there was this girl. And she reminded me of me. But not – not me, not really. I can't explain it. But she threatened my ship and my people and I tried..."
Any emotion coming softly over the speakers was mute and numb, and Hannah breathed slowly as she swallowed back the pain she could practically taste in the Spectre's voice.
"I tried to save her. I did, and she just let go. And that? That I could almost understand. Circumstances what they were, she never would have seen the light of day ever again. I mean, I told her to choose to live, and she asked me for what, and I couldn't give her a good answer. Because really, how wrong was she?"
Shepard shook her head and leaned back, and Hannah glanced over her critically. She was thinner than she appeared in the news feeds, and paler, but her body hummed with energy even over the video link.
"We've got the Reapers crawling over every system; hell, I can't even drop a radio probe without alerting every monster for the next three clusters. We've got the Quarians and the Geth playing house on Rannoch and that still makes me feel like I need to keep a pistol on my belt. We've got Rachni working as techs – freaking techs! – on the Crucible. The entirety of the galaxy is something completely different than it was just five years ago. Hell, I'd take the Blitz everyday for the rest of my life over what's going on right now."
The younger woman crossed her arms and glared at something off-camera for a few moments, giving Hannah a look at a new scar on her cheek and a bruise on her neck. The black fatigues she wore were rumpled and dirty, grease and something burgundy barely visible. Hannah sighed heavily and tried to beat back the worry that was abruptly engulfing her.
Shepard looked back up at the screen and gave a small smile, something very hollow and dark, and she added softly, "I'm pretty sure I know how this is all going to end, mom. I've gotten lucky so far, damn lucky, and I've got a feeling it's going to run out soon. But that's okay. It really is. My priority is my crew. Then Earth. Then everything else." Here, she snorted, unamused, and she leveled a look straight at her mother. "Yeah, in that order. How screwed up is that? But I guess…it's easier to save a dozen than a billion, a billion than a trillion. Easier to hold in my head."
She looked down and muttered something under her breath to herself before looking back up, sheepish this time. "Anyway, I'm gonna send this before I sober up. There was a point here, I promise. I want to make sure that no matter what happens, you'll know, you'll believe, that I've done everything I can so far, and I'm going to keep doing everything I can. I won't give up, not until my last breath. My real last one, I mean."
The Spectre leaned forward to disconnect the message, then paused and finished, "You always say I make you and dad proud. That means a lot to me, mom. That means...everything." The image shut off a moment later, leaving Hannah in a dim, dark set of quarters that suddenly felt so much larger and more empty than it ever had.
And the fear that hadn't yet touched her was suddenly knocking on her door.
Moon dust in your lungs
Stars in your eyes
You are a child of the cosmos
A ruler of the skies
Chaos.
She'd heard the word, used it often, and had lived through battles that had bordered on insanity. But this...this was pure, true chaos. This was something that the military always tried to train them for but never had a clue how it actually went. Preparation was logical and clean. Chaos was emotional and toxic.
And the three weeks after Earth was something that could never be put into words.
Three weeks. Three weeks of orders from faceless men and women thrust into positions of power by death and loss. Three weeks of trying to determine just what exactly had happened in the Crucible and Citadel that had scrambled the fleet so badly. Three weeks of elation followed by fear and then uncertainty as ships reported in, the lists of the dead and missing began to clog the intranet, and families screamed for answers. There were over two thousand neutron stars in the Milky Way. All were reserved as military plasmic burial sites.
There was a queue at every single one.
For her part, Hannah had followed her given tasks to the letter. The Orizaba had been instrumental in rescue procedures around Earth. Though purposed as a dreadnought with extensive combat capabilities, the Orizaba had been integrated with a signal detection system based off the Reaper IFF discovered for the travel through the Omega 4 relay. So her operators had little trouble finding emergency beacons throughout the multitude of wreckage, signals coming through clearly even with all the magnetic and mass effect distortions in the area.
Three weeks of searching through hunks of charred metal and stoically facing down the corpses of both man and alien and machine, and Hannah still had no word of her daughter.
Her operators weren't blind to her worry, and they were loyal to their captain. They searched for transponders, wreckage signature, hull pieces – anything that could prove the fate of the famous Commander Shepard's ship and crew.
Three weeks of nothing.
It was a frenzied sort of normal now, something they all had fallen into and eventually found their balance in. Everything was almost predictable now. Oh, it was chaos still, absolutely, but it was becoming their new standard.
"Captain, we have a message coming in from Admiral Hackett," her yeoman abruptly said at her elbow. She startled out of her mindless musings, a soldier's daydream of calm, and nodded once to him. Her hair was in her eyes and any decorum in her uniform had been lost; she couldn't remember the last time she had showered.
"Admiral Hackett, Captain Shepard," she answered tiredly, and she was used enough to these calls that she didn't even feel a flicker of hope in her gut anymore.
"Captain, your presence is requested in lunar orbit. With the Orizaba still on rescue maneuvers, you'll have to take a Kodiak. When can you be ready?"
The disembodied voice sounded as tired as she felt, and she didn't even try to hide her own exhaustion as she replied, "Yes sir. I can be underway within thirty minutes, sir. May I inquire as to the nature of my recall?"
There were two seconds of silence that were unusual for the other man before he responded carefully, "Consider it classified, at least for the moment, Captain. You'll understand when you get there. Coordinates being relayed. Hackett out."
So twenty five minutes later, hair damp and a uniform resembling something close to clean clinging to her, Hannah stared out the front window of the small transport shuttle with an urgency and concern she felt to the marrow. She was piloting herself – she wasn't terribly gifted at it, but there was no atmosphere and landing and takeoff routines were done through autopilot. Plus, her best pilots were needed in the rescue tugs. Teeth worrying her lip, Hannah aimed for the waypoint glowing on her screen and wondered.
An hour later, her guts twisted inside her like a snake as she took in the heavily scarred frigate locked in lunar orbit. It was pocked and sooty, some edges of metal raised and warped. The paint job had been scorched over and again by weapons fire, but its call sign was still legible.
Normandy
Docking was a blur, automatic and voiceless, and Hannah refused to acknowledge that her hands were shaking as she carefully pulled her hair back into a loose bun. When she stood from the pilot's seat, she stumbled, and she ran trembling fingers over her lips. Memories of Elysium and Alchera came back like a whirlwind, and she shook her head hard. With a snap of her heels, she walked determinedly towards the door, and stepped out into the landing bay of her daughter's command.
There were two people waiting for her, neither whom she recognized, but she nodded to them anyway.
"Captain Hannah Shepard, reporting as ordered," she introduced herself without preamble, and the bulky Marine glanced at the female synthetic beside him before shifting into a salute. "Lieutenant James Vega, ma'am. This is Edi. She's, ah, not enlisted."
Still, the synthetic stepped forward on her own, and she extended a cool metal hand. "I am an unshackled AI bent on the destruction of mankind."
Blinking, Hannah stared at the hand in front of her and then glanced up at the eyes that were closer to human than she would've thought possible.
"That was a joke."
Vega muttered something under his breath and then raised an apologetic gaze to his superior. "Sorry, Captain. She's still figuring out humor and when it is and really honestly isn't appropriate."
Edi frowned slightly and there was more emotion in her voice than Hannah was really prepared for. "My apologies, Captain Shepard. Jeff always uses humor to distract. I am still learning this skill."
Hannah waved it away, unconcerned. If the brass was comfortable with the situation, she figured she didn't have much right to fuss.'
"Lieutenant, Edi, a pleasure. Now, pardon my bluntness, but I haven't slept in thirty six hours. Anyone mind telling me what I'm doing here?"
There was an old human phrase, bite the bullet, and it seemed like the fastest way to get to the bottom of things. Her mind recreated Nox, and she wondered halfway if it would be as beautiful a ceremony or if it would be garish in its scope. She thought about the Star of Terra she'd cried over and if there'd be a twin to it. She thought about the homestead on Intai'sei and reminded herself to change the linens before any crew stopped by.
"Oh, sorry, Captain. I thought the admiral would have told you. The Commander requested your presence almost as soon as she woke up. She's waiting for you in the starboard lounge. She wanted to come down here and greet you herself but Alenko pulled rank he doesn't have and forced her to sit down for a bit. She still tires pretty easily."
Hannah froze, and she knew the man wasn't lying to her. The grin that split his face was real and raw, as visceral as the chaos they had all been living through. So she nodded, a simple jerk of her head, and she followed the two up an elevator from the bowels of the ship to the third deck. Everything in her was technicolor, everything outside was static, and she didn't realize there was a hand on the small of her back. Edi was watching her carefully, sensors plotting vitals, but the calmness in the synthetic made it very easy to believe that maybe, just maybe, this was real.
The doors to the lounge slid open before she was really ready, but there was no preparing for this. Her child back from the dead once again, but this time...everything was different.
Hannah glanced around the room and realized that she was nowhere close to alone with her daughter. There were seats throughout but they were all taken, faces she recognized from that dark time on Intai'sei raising to her presence with peace and joy. The hand at her back steered her carefully, and she let her feet bring her to the front of the couch that faced the moon outside.
The other human Spectre was there, a tired smile on his face but he still nodded to her respectfully. The Turian was at the other end of the couch, slumped a little low but waking up from a doze to give her a welcoming flutter of his mandibles.
In between them was her daughter.
Shepard was laying on her side, clad in sweatpants and an old tee shirt. Her head was pillowed on Alenko's thigh, her legs thrown over the sniper's lap, and her short hair was cut jaggedly and didn't hide her face. Or the scars, the bright pink flesh of healing wounds. Or the slight part in her lips as she breathed deep in sleep, the shadows that had marred her face for the last five years gone.
It was with a silent gasp that Hannah fell to her knees and ducked her head. Without looking, she let her hand come to her daughter's shoulder, and she ignored the medigel plaster underneath the fabric and just soaked up the warmth of her living, breathing daughter. There were tears obscuring her vision, but something edged into her hearing.
"Hey, momma. I missed you."
It was a voice she hadn't heard in person for a decade. And when strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, she sobbed. It had been ten years since she'd held her child. Shepard still smelled like gun oil and eezo, as she always would, but beneath it all, Hannah could remember the faint dusting of baby powder.
"Oh, my little skybird. My child," she whispered into the embrace, and there was a slight shake of muscle as her daughter chuckled lightly.
"What did I tell you about my reputation, mom?"
Leaning back, Hannah smiled through her own tears at the woman in her arms, uncaring as to the awkwardness of the embrace or their audience.
"What did I tell you about your character, daughter?"
There was a sheepish grin on the younger Shepard's face, and she dutifully responded, "It's who I am?"
There was pride and happiness and not a little awe on her face as Hannah leaned forward and pressed her forehead against her little one's.
"It's who you are, darling. This is who you are."
I'll see you on the other side of the stars.