A/N- If you started reading this before this chapter was put up, go back and check the bottom of chapter one for two more segments I added on. I uploaded it right before running off to work and didn't realize I hadn't ended it at the right point until I was putting C2 up. That's all for now.
Shepard was still out when the shuttle landed at the Alliance base a few hours later. Top secrecy- the brass and those who would be responsible for her direct care were the only ones who had been told she was even alive. No word off the base until they knew her condition better.
Which was why every blasted non-essential personnel was lined up outside the building to salute the Commander of the Normandy when she was brought in. Some secrets were just too damn good to keep apparently.
A general on convalescence gladly gave up his private quarters for her and the staff settled their patient in, meticulously checking her vitals and every possible variable and fluctuation they could find. There were a few raised eyebrows but no one said anything about the krogan that parked himself on the far wall. The Commander's habit of acquiring aliens on her crew was well known, and xenophobes as a rule had become rarer since a joint alien/human effort had saved all remaining life on Earth. Anyway they were too damn busy coming up with a treatment and recovery plan to bother. The fact that this particular alien was identifiable to members of the staff as the clan chief who had fought by Shepard during the first Battle of the Citadel didn't hurt either.
They kept her under with constant surveillance for a few more days until they were satisfied it was safe to wake her. When they did it was done... cautiously, very aware of what had happened the last time. The staff in the room held their breath as she stirred.
Every time, she woke up expecting to find him on his side next to her, sleeping or just watching with that soft affection in his eyes. But he wasn't, and every morning twisted the knife a little deeper.
There had been intermittent times Garrus would slip up to her cabin after they'd totaled the Collector base- not just for sex but enjoying each other's company in a manner more private than they were willing to show the crew yet. They would sleep next to each other, her enjoying the warmth that seemed to radiate from his skin as he smoothed his talons through her hair. She would read over briefings and do her paperwork sitting on his lap in her underwear, while he would nuzzle his face in her throat and say things to make her laugh when she was griping about the smell of his morning cup of kava. They'd discuss plans of action for a Normandy finally free from Cerberus control as she sat on the bed in a towel, brushing out her hair from the shower. It was comfortable.
He'd only left her when his mother was at the end of her dying, but before they could pick him up again the Alliance had grounded her, and the reapers... After Menae he had permanently moved up to her cabin, fuck disrupting the crew. She hadn't woken up without him there since until now.
The last month had been killing her. Not knowing what was happening to her ship and her people- she knew every one of their faces and names. A number of the missing ships had been found intact, limping or destroyed thanks to the efforts of the Geth- in a galaxy of shattered infrastructure the speed-of-light communications between Geth platforms was a godsend and the only way anyone knew what was going on outside their particular systems. They told her Hackett was alive and damn proud of her, large parts of the varying fleets had survived and they were making their slow way back to their homeworlds through the less damaged but much slower secondary relays. Wherever there were Geth on a planet they could communicate and coordinate. Sending things anywhere would be time-consuming and tedious, but it was something. There just hadn't been a word on the Normandy.
Waking up in the bloody ruin of London she'd had direction, a goal- it had powered her long past the resources of her body on strength of will and pure spite against her enemies. Now the only enemy she had was herself. It wasn't a pleasant prospect.
That stunt she'd pulled back at the civilian hospital was biting her in the ass with a vengeance now. They'd been working nicely to correct everything that had gone so fuckawful wrong with her physically when she mucked it all up by running long past her limits on half mended bones and tearing muscles she barely knew she had. Those three hours could end up costing three months of her life in additional physical therapy, the doctors had informed her.
Her focus sharpened like a laser on what she could still do- there was so much beyond her control it was all she had to keep herself distracted. She hated feeling useless, and without a mission or a war to fight it was hard to keep that sense from crawling up her bones. Shepard threw herself so hard into her physical therapy the staff had to shout at her to slow down or she'd just make it worse again- the doctors were just doing their jobs but the longer the reports (she was getting updates on Galactic status at the same speed the military was, one of the perks of her name) came back nothing, nothing, nothing the more stir crazy it made her. They couldn't understand the desperate undercurrent in her brain that insisted that if she was healthy she could charge into space on her own and find them better than the rest of the damn galaxy that was already hunting for her ship.
Wrex was the one that had to talk her down when she got too frantic and wouldn't listen to the staff, her grumpy grumbly voice of reason. He'd disappear for a few hours most days but always seemed to know when to come back, prying a datapad from her fingers before she could smash it into the frame of her hospital bed in frustration or making a dry comment to wake her up from the fog that was telling her a few hundred pushups would be a great idea right now.
And they would talk: about old times on the SR1, about the shit they'd gotten up to in their earlier lives- giving him considerably more stories to tell but she didn't mind, she'd always enjoyed his stories- about the current state of the recovery effort with bets about what species would do something stupid first. About anything but what had happened the last few months and the Normandy SR2, and one crew member in particular.
Talking about the Genophage always cheered her up no matter how black her mood was. They'd lost people in the effort- Mordin had been a friend, and she hadn't known Tarquin Victus very long but he had been a good man in over his head- but there was just something satisfying about the honor in a good death that took the edge off. Thanks in large part to their sacrifices the first generation of young krogans in centuries was just starting to be born, and the more she heard about them the more she wanted to run around with as many of the little buggers as she could. When she said so Wrex teased her that he wasn't letting her visit until she was strong enough not to embarrass him.
Somewhere in her head she was aware that he'd become the substitute for the psychologist she'd thrown bodily out the door the second day she was awake, as crazy as it sounded when she looked at the scarred up old krogan lounging in the chair across from her while he checked over his rifles. Shepard just smiled wryly at the though and settled back into her physical therapy routine, happy to be one of two old soldiers swapping war stories. Mornings still hurt but she was adapting to the rest- hell, if she didn't get better she wouldn't get to meet Urdnot Mordin and Urdnot Shepard the Younger. It was enough of a goal to hold in her hands and run for, and for everything else there was still time.
Less than a week later her borrowed omnitool blinked with a message that a glance told her had come from outside the facility. Alarms went off immediately in her head- no one else was suppose to know she was even alive, let alone the address to contact her at. It claimed to be from Kasumi and when she flicked it open it read like her former colleague, succinctly stating "Glad you're alive Shep, but the guy I got your address from spilled the beans to someone else before I could stop him and the hoards are probably descending on you as we speak. Have fun!"
Shepard swore loudly enough to startle a pair of pigeons off the ledge outside her window.
True to Kasumi's insight the first camera cars showed up an hour later. What seems like every other camera in the country and countless individuals seemed to follow as the day wore on. This being Earth it was vastly human, but she spotted Asari tendrils and Quarian suits, Salarian horns and Turian fringes, even one lone Hanar standing tall and pink above the crowd holding up an illegible sign. Blood red eyes just watched in amusement as she snapped her curtains shut and sank wide-eyed into her bed.
In the civilian hospital she would have been swamped by now, but the soldiers had drawn around her with the protective wrath of a Drell mother and there wasn't a single intrusion into the building that wasn't thrown out on its ass inside two minutes. The crowd's only interruption of her routine was the view from her window changing from English countryside to tank barricades and the seething masses of organics.
Shepard had been crouched poking up the curtain a bit and peering furtively out the window with a handheld mirror when a soldier in the doorway startled her by speaking up and she jumped two feet to bash her head on the sill. Quarian curses (some of the many things Tali had taught her included colorful expletives) spewed from her mouth as she clutched her head, which just made Wrex roared with laughter, and then the soldier jumped about a foot at that. The two humans stared in vague embarrassment at each other for a few seconds before Shepard came back to her feet, composing herself at ungodly speed and gesturing for him to go on.
"Commander Shepard." he saluted, "The situation with the building is fully under control and under no circumstance will you be bothered unless you wish so. To that end the brass wanted a list of individuals who should be granted access to you, 'mam."
Easy answer. "I don't have any family to speak of, so just anyone who has served on the Normandy SR-1 or SR-2. The Alliance has all of their identifying information in their databanks already."
"Including the Cerberus personnel?"
Some of the people he was talking about were lost on her ship right now, some had been killed by Cerberus on the Citadel for just trying to live better lives, some had had heavy parts in the construction of the Crucible for fuck's sake. Anger would have been an easy reaction but she pushed it down- he was just doing his job. "Anyone who was still on the ship when the Alliance grounded her was loyal to me, not Cerberus. Let them through like anyone else."
"Yes ma'am." He saluted again and ducked out.
"Well," she said after a pause, glancing back to her friend with a wry rise to her features, "So much for all my peace and quiet."
"Peace and quiet was never your style Shepard."
"True, but neither is that." and she gestured almost helplessly at the window and what was beyond the curtain. "I'm just a soldier, not some politician who likes being worshipped. Frankly it makes me nervous. I think some of them were starting to camp out."
"Side effect of saving the galaxy twice. The galaxy comes looking for you."
The amusement in his voice was obvious, and she kneaded her fingers into her forehead and groaned. "Well the galaxy can wait until I get a shower. Yell if we're invaded."
"Will do, Shepard."
In the end the building hadn't been breached and she had time to clean up, eat and start stretching out her joints before someone from staff came to her door to inform her a Steve Cortez was here to see her. The assent was out of her mouth before she had fully registered who it was (part of her brain still insisted he was on the SR-2) so she was a bit shocked when her shuttle pilot came through the door and embraced her. He broke it quickly and stood back at a formal respectable distance- but when she looked at his face she could see a touch of tears there. Here she was, so worried about her crew, completely forgetting that a number of them were still planetside- were within a few hours distance, and she hadn't bothered to try to contact any of them because of her selfishness for personal time. Shit.
"Sorry Commander, I shouldn't have been- subordinates should be more professional and you're still injured-"
"Steve I'm sorry I've been such an asshole, I should have called-"
It was all very heartfelt, but as they had started talking at the same time they couldn't make out a word of it and they had to stop and start over one at a time. Shepard sat back heavily on the bed and listened. Apparently he'd only just heard- he'd been shoulder-deep in a project fixing something for the government in London and too distracted to listen to the news until his shift had ended. If he'd known earlier, he probably would have been one of those people camped out outside.
"You're not going to break me with a hug Steve. You have a right to be upset, blowing everyone who was still here off was a godawful idea. Shit, you should be a lot more upset with me than you are, you're too damn good natured for your own good.."
"Frankly Commander, I'm just glad you're still alive after that mess with the Crucible and the Normandy disappearing.. I didn't think any of you were coming back."
Fuck, she thought she'd gotten better about this, one mention shouldn't feel like a shotgun blast in her chest. It was just three months, ships were still trickling in, the Normandy still had supplies for twice this. Time to start living up to her rank again instead of the way she had been acting- a confident smile pushed onto her face and she made her tightened posture relax. "Give us a little more credit than that. We're hard to kill."
It worked, he eased up some. Talking was more comfortable after that, and anything that made the knife twist deeper in her gut got filed away to be dealt with later. He even convinced her to turn the television on for the first time and see some of the news footage which was... surreal. Her face was staring at her from every channel: a fresh faced teenager in her first Alliance uniform, wild-eyed and splattered with yellow blood on Torfan, glowing and triumphant in the broken ruins of the Citadel with Wrex and Garrus flanking her- shit the way he'd looked at her when she rose from the wreckage- why hadn't she realized she wasn't alone what she felt back then, had she just been that bad at reading turians? It was as clear as anything on his face. The Cerberus years were a gap that ended with her new face drawn with feather light red scar tissue on her cheeks illuminated sharply by paparazzi flashbulbs at the Normandy's grounding. It ended with the few frantic images crews had managed to capture of her during the Reaper war. Her life, laid out in photographs.
Mixed in were people. Anyone they could find with a connection to her- not her squad that had left her team and were still on Earth, they were either too busy to be found, psychotically antisocial or both at the same time. Instead there were soldiers she had encouraged in London, civilians who has met her in passing, people she had saved, people who felt saved by her despite never meeting her. An asari had tears spilling down her eyes as she explained how the Commander had saved her bondmate in C-sec when Cerberus invaded the Citadel. A human runaway said she'd inspired him to join the Alliance and if he hadn't been shipped out to basic the day he had he'd have been in a city that was leveled by the reapers. Mothers clutched their children, siblings held each other, a Salarian saluted her, an aged human soldier who had been at a battle she had lead thanked her. The two humans in the hospital room watched in silence at the outpouring.
"You're going to have to talk to them sooner than later, Commander."
"I know." They were quiet for another moment. She muted the TV and sighed. "Thanks for talking to me Steve. You can come back any time."
"I'll try to, but there's work they need me for in the city- with the amount of damage everything took you wouldn't believe how much they need someone who can work on vehicles right now. Make sure to invite me if we get a reunion with the crew."
When her mind automatically corrected him, but her mouth was suddenly dry so she just took his offered hand to shake it and nodded. Since her krogan bodyguard had slipped out twenty minutes earlier (not a fan of television or the weeping-fest going on onscreen) she found herself alone in her room, watching the silent screen for a time. The reporter's eyes were hollowed from stress despite her best smile- she'd been through a lot. And she was someone Shepard knew to be fair.
Orange light flickered up from her omnitool as she brought up the communicator and connected to someone in staff.
"I want you to contact Emily Wong for me. Tell her that if she can follow my stipulations I'm willing to do an interview."
