Drawing in that first breath of sterile air was sheer agony. His body was not used to operating under its own power, and the many needles threaded through his skin and the bleeping machines nearby were testament to this. When he forced his eyes open all he could see was bright, white light, leading him to believe that he had not yet awoken and this was just another trick of his consciousness.
No such luck.
Shepard craned his neck, groaning in the process as his bones and joints seemed to quite literally creak, and observed that he was in a hospital, dressed in a hospital gown and wearing on his arm a plastic wristband reducing him to a numerical designation and a few scant details.
#1138
Shepard, William
At least they got the name right.
He tried to sit up but felt not merely pain at the end of every impulse but atrophy, an unwillingness to comply with the most basic of commands. His arms were like lead, his torso an immovable object, but it was a terrifying thing to feel so alive and yet so trapped within himself. As his shoulder lifted off the bed he began to groan, the sound low in his throat, croaky, scratchy, utterly unpleasant. It was a foolish thing to do but he was not used to feeling so helpless. He lurched again, attempting to lift his other arm, only to severely underestimate his own strength and end up tumbling out of bed.
There on the floor of London's finest hospital lay humanity's prodigal son, sprawled out and clutching desperately at his chest, his laboured breathing turning almost immediately into something of a wheezing sound. He began to set challenges for himself, challenges his body could not possibly rise to in its current state.
Stand. Walk. Get out of here before they throw you in the morgue.
Death's door was behind him but he had not travelled far. His nightmare was ongoing. His trust was a trigger waiting to be pulled. Whatever world he had awoken into did not have the answers he was looking for.
Finally he heard footsteps, voices too but he had no strength left to pick them apart. After a moment he felt two distinct pairs of hands, on his arms and on his legs, together lifting him back onto the bed and briefly holding him in place as if he were going to spring to life again and make a mess of their floor. Instead he merely groaned, or at least what would have sounded like a groan if he had the strength to articulate it, and then a face appeared, hovering just above him, a middle-aged, balding man with red hair, a round face and a deeply concerned expression.
"Where am I?" he finally forced out, his every syllable merely a gasp stolen from his lungs.
"Royal London Hospital," the doctor replied distractedly, shining a torch into each of Shepard's eyes before reaching into his lab coat.
"D-don't let me fall asleep," Shepard urged as if it were a perfectly rational request. "Please."
The doctor ignored him and readied the needle. "I'm going to give you a strong sedative," he supplied, locating a vein on Shepard's arm. "You'll thank me later."
Shepard made to struggle but found he had more to contend with than pain and atrophy. Two reasonably large orderlies held him in place while the needle pierced his skin and it wasn't the sedative he felt flowing through his veins but cold dread, personifying this nightmarish scene. The light was fading, the well-defined shapes within the room were blurring together, and he wanted this to stay, this room and these faces, because it was the nightmare he knew.
He feared what awaited him in the dark – he feared that this time it would not let go.
OOO
Shepard stirred again two days later, his body still weak and his mind chaotic, but there was at least a renewed sense of clarity. Perhaps it was the passage of time. He was quick to move and test his muscles but again was met with resistance that did not come from within. He peered down at his arms, and then his legs, only to realise he had been strapped to the bed with restraints. He was ready to scream.
"Just a precaution, Mr. Shepard," said a mild voice, and Shepard lifted his gaze to see the redheaded doctor once more looming over him. "For your own safety, of course. You took quite a tumble before. We didn't want that happening again."
Though it ached to do so, Shepard clenched his fists and felt his jaw grow tight. "Undo them," he demanded, forgetting himself and his surroundings for just a moment and feeling like a soldier again.
"In due time," the doctor replied, pulling a small torch from his lab coat pocket. "I just need to administer a few tests." The reassurance did not have the desired effect, a fact not lost on the doctor who saw fire in the eyes of a man trained to kill. "Or," he added quickly, pocketing the torch and retrieving a key, "we could remove them now. That's fine too."
The doctor undid the restraints and forced a smile, difficult to do whilst swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat.
Shepard barely looked at him, choosing instead to grasp his wrists, and then his ankles, his brief period in chains feeling like a lifetime. Then he breathed and though it was still painful and the very air tasted unpleasant, it was getting just that little bit easier.
"So, doc," he asked coldly, his voice still hoarse. The doctor-patient relationship was off to a rocky start. "What am I in here for?"
"Well, Mr. Shepard–"
"Just Shepard is fine," he corrected, rather sharply.
"Well, Shepard," the doctor amended, feeling in no position to argue, "you were in a coma."
"No shit," Shepard snapped, still rubbing at his joints in an attempt to breathe some life back into them. "Why?"
The doctor did his best to hide his surprise and tried to call upon his bedside manner. "Numerous reasons. For starters, your body was in a state of shock. The damage was… considerable. Do you–" he paused, considering the question and whether it was wise to pose it to a man in this condition. Finally he decided Shepard could take it. "Do you remember what happened? Do you remember anything? They found you in the streets under enough rubble to crush the life out of most men. No one expected you to live," he added, speaking frankly. "It's a miracle that you did."
Shepard shook his head. "I'll start counting my lucky stars when I can walk again," he remarked dryly. "The last thing I remember I was on the citadel. And then… shapes and sounds but nothing concrete."
"There was a rumour," the doctor began tentatively, his arms crossing over his chest. "I don't believe it. I'm not sure it's even possible, but then… not much about you is, Shepard." The doctor averted his gaze, feeling utterly foolish for repeating what he considered nonsense, and yet in the months Shepard had spent in a coma he could think of not a single more reasonable explanation for his miraculous survival and accelerated recovery. "They say you fell from the sky… from the stars. They say you impacted Earth like meteorite and blew a hole in the ground."
Shepard stayed silent for a long time, trying to reconcile such madness with his own patchy recollections. Finally he lifted his head and asked, "What else did they say?"
The doctor did not lose the tentative edge to his tone but this time he met Shepard's gaze. "Two things. One, they claim they saw you take your first, shaky breath beneath the rubble – recorded it, in fact – which given their version of events makes no sense. And the second thing is just as ludicrous but I suppose…" he paused again, shaking his head, as if trying to physically force five years of medical school and ten years of experience out of his thoughts. It was that kind of anecdote. "I suppose it comes closest to making sense. They say you were surrounded by a sort of… blue aura, emanating from within. I don't know much about biotics, Shepard, but I hope I'm not alone in thinking that that's utterly insane."
Shepard slowly nodded. "Oh, it's insane. Absolutely." He hesitated, eyes drifting towards some unremarkable spot over the doctor's shoulder. "But once you've come back from the dead, doc, you learn to take insane in your stride." It was at this point he lifted a hand, his arm still heavy but the strain was overwhelmed by his curiosity, and traced his fingers over the small, familiar scar along his spine where many years ago they had installed his biotic implant. There was another surprise awaiting him, however, as he felt his hair tickling the back of his hand – hair that he could not recall being nearly so long. It was almost amusing that such a thing finally prompted him to ask what perhaps should have been his first question.
"How long have I been here?"
"Almost two months," the doctor quickly replied, relieved to be providing an answer that had some grounding in reality.
Shepard again nodded. There was another question he wished to ask, a question that was more important than any other, and yet he had stayed his tongue for a very simple reason. If Tali was alive, and on Earth, then she would be there by his side, there so he had a familiar face to wake up to. The lack of any such welcome party spoke volumes. And so he kept his question vague.
"And the Normandy? My ship," he clarified, although there was really no need. The names Shepard and Normandy were synonymous.
"I'm afraid I can't answer that," the doctor replied in earnest. "The Normandy is one of many ships from which there's been no contact. I'm sorry."
It had been the faintest glimmer of hope, barely worth clinging to, but to have it snuffed out in so resounding a way was difficult to swallow. His face fell into his open hands and he felt the scratch of stubble; felt his unwashed, sickly skin; felt his hair pass through his fingertips until it ended at the tops of his shoulders. He let out a quiet sigh and bowed his head.
"I'll leave you in peace," the doctor said, dismissing himself and deciding the tests could wait until later.
Shepard offered no acknowledgement.
It was strange to drift away as one man and wake up as another. The Normandy, his ship, was gone; the crew, his friends, were gone; the alliance, his allies, clearly had better things to do.
Tali'Zorah vas Normandy. Gone.
Shepard turned his gaze on the plastic wristband hanging from his arm, perhaps hoping it would provide some grounding.
#1138
Shepard, William
It took a great deal out of him but he lifted himself from the mattress and headed towards the window, leaning his weight against any reasonably sturdy he came across. It was at this point he realised not simply how weak he had become but how very thin. It was entirely logical, of course, but as he caught sight of his reflection in the pane of glass it was no less frightening. Much of his muscle mass was gone and coupled with his impressive height he looked merely gangly and on the verge of toppling over.
The left side of his face was covered in bruises and several little scratches. The right, however, was wrapped in gauze, and he shuddered to think what lay beneath it. His green eyes looked cloudy and bloodshot. His sharp facial features remained much the same; they had at least put him back together again in the right order. His dark blond hair hung over his face and it elicited memories he thought buried, recollections of his days living on the streets and associating with various gangs. Long before the alliance. Long before the war and the reapers. He looked closer and he almost smiled.
It was not who he expected to see but it was, at least, a familiar face.
Eventually he looked beyond his reflection and out onto the city. London was in ruins, paths of destruction extending in every direction, but even from his high vantage point he could see the beginnings of the restoration efforts. The human race was built to endure, it was truly one of their most admirable characteristics, but no matter how bright the future looked the present was bleak. The stones with which they built their future were stained with the blood of those who had sacrificed everything.
Perhaps it was only fitting that he call this place home.
The lost man in the lost city.
OOO
The doctor returned later that day and administered a series of tests that grew increasingly more intrusive. Shepard sat there and endured the poking and prodding, feeling numb and lifeless, like a piece of meat at the dinner table, picked at and then left to fester. His body ached but his mind refused to sleep. Too much time had been lost already. It sounded crazy, perhaps, for he was still gravely injured, but he wanted to escape, to walk on his own two feet and down a path of his own choosing, no matter the pain it would bring.
He was lying on his side, his arms tucked in close – he found that this position placed the least amount of stress on his spine. Every once in a while he would peer out of the window. There wasn't much he could see from his fifteenth floor vantage point, for a great many of London's skyscrapers were now little more than dust, but it grounded him and promised that there was something to go back to.
Shepard stayed like this for hours, fighting off the monotony by merely thinking. It felt like he had spent the last three years acting, taking up arms for others, throwing himself head first into life and death situations because it was the right thing to do. Rarely did people stop and point out that he was behaving like a fool. They were much too preoccupied, offering with one hand their immense gratitude and, with the other, preparing another favour to ask of him. His hero complex had turned him into a slave.
"Hey, Shepard," a familiar voice suddenly interrupted his thoughts, "nice dress."
Jack. Unmistakably so. He lifted his head and saw her leaning against the frame of the door and dressed, as always, like the proverbial space punk – tight pants, leather jacket, tattoos and scars covering almost every inch of her skin. Shepard never would have expected the psychotic biotic to be his first visitor.
"I really mean it," she continued, moving into the room and standing at the end of his bed. "With legs like those you could get any man on Earth."
"I don't know what I've missed more, Jack," he responded finally, groaning as he lifted himself into a sitting position, "your sense of humour or your winning smile."
Jack wrapped her hands around his bedpost as she rolled her eyes. "Nice one, Shep," she deadpanned. "So, hey, where's the cheerleader? Or the asari priestess? How can they expect you to recover without at least four or five women fawning over you at all times?"
Shepard lifted his brow and gave her a pointed look. "I thought that's what you were here for."
This time she was genuinely amused. "Oh, but I know better," she replied, laughing gently, "I'm not your type, right? Too many fingers, for starters," she added, lifting her hand and wiggling four fingers and a thumb in his face.
"Funny," he said mildly, "perhaps it was your sense of humour."
"Cheer up," she said dismissively, reaching for the datapad at the end of his bed, "it can't be that bad." As she read over the information her face contorted into a strange grimace. "Fuck – is this legit?" she asked, finally meeting his gaze. "Maybe it is that bad."
Shepard eyed her sceptically. "What are you talking about?"
"William?" she repeated amusedly. "Your name is William? I always figured it'd be something boring, like John or James, but William? I bet you studied art history in a previous life."
"Laugh it up, Jennifer," he replied pointedly, "I'll make sure to consult you before I name my first born."
Her expression darkened for a moment at mention of her real name but she quickly shook it off. "I was going to ask if you wanted to hit the town, seems like you're the only half interesting person left on Earth, but reading your chart," she added, eyes sweeping over the datapad once more as she winced dramatically. "I'm not too sure how you're alive let alone conscious." She began jabbing at the datapad screen in an attempt to get more information out of the device. "And they call me the biotic freak."
"What do you mean?" he asked, trying to remain calm and composed but unable to mask his own urgency. "What does it say?"
"Says you fried your implants," she replied distractedly, her brows knitting together in confusion as she read on. "I wish I was making this stuff up, Shepard," she added pre-emptively, giving him a knowing look over the top of the datapad. "This is insane. It says your implants are operational, somehow, but the output levels are fluctuating dangerously. If these readings are correct–" Suddenly the colour drained from her face.
"What?" he snapped irritably. "What is it?"
"Let's just say I better stop making jokes at your expense. According to this, your biotics could level an entire city. Jesus Christ, Shepard, did you know about this?"
Shepard fell silent, once more reaching for the back of his neck and trailing a finger along his scar. He had assumed the awkward silence he shared with his doctor was down to the whole unnatural resurrection thing. The fact that he was apparently a ticking time bomb had, strangely enough, never crossed his mind.
"No," he replied simply.
Jack was never one to live with uncomfortable silences and so she quickly changed the subject. "So, hey, the whole hero thing? It finally paid off. You should have been here that first night. Everyone was cheering your name. Hell, if you've ever dreamed of your own candlelight vigil you only need to look outside. They're practically queuing up just to worship you." She began to laugh. "At the start they were just praying for you. Get better, get on your feet, save us from the next galactic shitstorm – you know, the usual stuff. But I shit you not, they've started praying to you, like you're some kind of God. Isn't that insane?"
The good news kept coming.
"That's not funny, Jack."
Jack pursed her lips and huffed. "Jesus, Shepard, I'm tryin' here. And you ain't makin' it easy. Hey, take a look at this," she offered, lifting the datapad but making no effort to hand it over. "Visitor log. This oughta be good for a laugh."
"I appreciate what you're trying to do," he said quietly, his tone suggesting otherwise.
"Okay, we've got Urdnot Wrex, Urdnot Grunt," she began, reading the datapad with an ear-to-ear grin. "Couple of visits each. I guess they forgot to bring flowers. Jacob Taylor with a plus one – no idea how that Cerberus dweeb survived an apocalyptic showdown. Then we have the asari priestess with three visits!" she exclaimed, laughing uncontrollably. "One look at her rack would have brought most men out of a coma."
Shepard head fell into his hands as he tried to silently admonish Jack but he couldn't help his own laughter spilling over.
"Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me!" she said suddenly and Shepard looked up in time to see the woman's almost deranged grin. "This is too perfect. Our favourite cheerleader – seven visits!" Again, Jack fell about in fits of uncontrollable laughter while Shepard merely looked on, shaking his head but wearing a genuine smile. "We all knew she had a crush on you but that's veering into stalker territory. I bet she couldn't resist the sight of you in that dress–"
"Gown," Shepard corrected her.
"That's not much better," she replied, flashing what he was forced to concede was an infectious grin.
His relationship with Jack was a strange one. Though she was a hostile, paranoid creature that was determined to screw everyone in the galaxy over before they had a chance to do likewise to her, she had nonetheless become a close friend. They would drink together into the early hours of the morning after everyone else had gone to bed, either comparing scars or, if Shepard was drunk enough, comparing kills, a subject that Jack took great delight in. There was nothing romantic about the encounters, but it was a friendship that came naturally and with nary an awkward moment between them.
They also both happened to dislike Miranda Lawson, although perhaps in Jack's case dislike was too gentle a word and, in Shepard's, too harsh. Jack loathed the woman, everything she stood for, the lies she maintained in the face of indisputable evidence, the sickening self-absorption around which she lived her life. Shepard, on the other hand, merely took great pleasure in getting under her skin, his pranks ranging from sending phantom communications to her quarters in the middle of the night to digitally distorting her bedroom mirror and leading her to believe she had gained twenty pounds over the course of a weekend.
Shepard also enlisted help in these childish but quite brilliant endeavours. Jack, Garrus and Joker were only too happy to lend a hand, and though Tali took a little coaxing, once her mischievous side revealed itself she could not be stopped. He remembered every soul, living and dead, who had served aboard both the Normandy and its successor, but none more so than those he thought of as his truest and most trusted friends. There weren't many of them across the galaxy, and their numbers were dwarfed by the rogues' gallery he had accumulated along the way, but he felt empowered by these bonds of friendship.
Again they fell into silence although this time it was easier on both of them. Eventually Shepard looked up and offered a gentle smile. "Thanks, Jack. I appreciate it."
"Hey, what are friends for, right?" she asked, shrugging. "I mean, what kind of person would I be if I let the cheerleader sink her claws into you? You've always had my back, Shepard, even when most sane people would have flushed me out of an airlock. I wanted you to know that I have yours."
"There's a lot of blanks that still need filling in," he pointed out, eyeing her.
"Yeah, yeah," she said dismissively as she pushed herself off the bed. "But for now this is all getting a little too sentimental. See you around, Shepard," she called out over her shoulder, "don't go levelling any cities without me."
OOO
Over the next few days Shepard got fewer hours sleep than he had visitors. The krogans, Urdnot Wrex and Urdnot Grunt, came with tales of his march on the conduit, an act of daring worthy of the warrior race. And yet, much to his amusement, still no flowers. Later Jacob Taylor arrived with his pregnant wife, Brynn Cole, in tow, reminding Shepard that he still owed him that drink. Jacob's enthusiasm and sense of camaraderie was perhaps lost on him but for the sake of appearances he maintained the charade.
Next to visit him was the asari justicar Samara, and it was her sobering and almost depressing demeanour that he most appreciated because it felt real. She told no tales and offered no reassurances. She merely pointed that for all their sacrifices the galaxy was in disarray and that, on a more personal level, a great many of them were so very alone. As she said this she looked Shepard right in the eye, her expression articulating what she refused to say aloud.
Sorry.
The final visit was equally dismal but for entirely different reasons. A mere thirty seconds into his conversation with Miranda Lawson concerning his recovery and she had already started harping on about her perfect genes and her wretched father and all the other nonsense he had heard a thousand times before. He had foolishly thought that a near cataclysmic event might help her gain a little perspective, but whilst the world around her changed and tried to rebuild, she remained stagnant and self-obsessed. Her displeasure with him was evident as she practically stormed out of the room but she left Shepard with a renewed appreciation for the sound of silence.
His recovery was slow, to say the least. The doctors continued to perform tests on a daily basis, perhaps still struggling to believe that he lived despite being gravely injured. Then there was the physical therapy, a demeaning process in which simply taking a few feeble steps earned rampant applause. His legs were fine, they said, and he concurred, but still they insisted on taking it slowly and working the atrophy out of his system at a healthy rate.
Their pleas for patience were not well received, either. He was going stir-crazy sitting in that room, starring at the same four walls and being practically strapped into bed each night. His resistance made them back off a little and he had no doubt he was thoroughly disliked by the majority of the hospital staff, most of whom were just doing their job. But as he sat there being force-fed medicine and baby food with round the clock updates on his glacial rate of recovery, all he could think about was his ship and the people he loved.
It was at the end of that first week when he received his first visit from Alliance brass. The pomp and circumstance was to be expected, he even felt for a moment as if he were in the middle of a royal visit, but what caught Shepard by surprise was that the procession was led by Admiral Hackett. He acknowledged the man with a small smile and, when saluted, he offered in return a lazy salute of his own.
"Shepard," Hackett greeted warmly, grasping Shepard's hand and giving it a firm shake. "Damn, it's good to see you." His enthusiasm and relief evident, the Admiral gave the younger man a pat on the back and a squeeze of the shoulder. "How are you feeling?"
Shepard winced but held his smile. "Little sore, sir," he replied, laughing quietly, "but nothing I won't live through."
"That's what I like to hear!" Hackett's voice practically boomed and it occurred to Shepard how different the Admiral seemed in a post-war environment. The transformation was remarkable. All those vid-calls, all those messages – their communications throughout the war had been utterly bleak, like pre-emptive eulogies for the dying people of the galaxy. To live through such dark days and live to tell the tale, one could understand why Hackett seemed reborn.
"So are you going to tell me what's going on?" asked Shepard suddenly, his tone quite serious. "I can't help feeling like anyone with access to the extranet knows more than I do."
Hackett nodded. "Of course, Shepard," he said, taking on a quite business like tone. "I'm sorry we couldn't come sooner, but what with the recovery efforts, galactic politics still weighing us down like a lead brick – I mean, we've got quarians and turians we need to feed, asari women reciting poety in the street, krogans picking fights because they're bored and have run out of war stories Don't get me wrong, to see the whole galaxy united like this is incredible. Never thought it'd happen in my lifetime. It's just a lot to deal with when it's all happening in your own backyard."
"It's fine, admiral," Shepard assured him, "it's not like I've been waiting by the phone."
"Oh, but you should have been there, Shepard," said Hackett, sucking in a big breath of air as his voice took an almost whimsical quality – not something Shepard ever expected to hear from the admiral. "You should have seen it. That first night was something out of a dream. There was so much pain and loss – these great, big Reaper husks still smouldered in the skies – but there was hope like you couldn't imagine. Everyone came together and they filled the streets, waiting until morning so they could take in that first light and witness the impossible – a new day. No one thought it was coming. We were this damn close to oblivion," he added, pinching his thumb and index finger together. "But you never gave up. You refused to let the Reapers win."
"I wish I could have seen it," Shepard said quietly the moment the admiral finished speaking, and, remarkably, none of the bitterness in his heart was reflected in his tone. "It sounds incredible. What about the recovery efforts?" he quickly added, not wishing to dwell on the lost months of his life.
"Slow," Hackett replied in earnest, nodding his head. "But we'll take hope where we find it. While there are millions of people stranded in the Sol system, they're all eager to help rebuild – a favour we fully intend to repay when the mass relays are back online."
"I–" Shepard didn't know what to say. His mind re-visited a place he had hoped to keep at an arm's length a little longer. The Citadel, the Star Child, the choice he knew would never stop haunting him. But he was sick of the act. He didn't feign shock at mention of the Mass Relays, though of course he knew exactly what happened to them. "You can fix them?" he asked suddenly.
"Well, it's not like changing a light bulb," Hackett replied amusedly, quickly chalking Shepard's hesitation up to post-traumatic stress. "But yes. From what I've been told, almost everything learned working on the Crucible can be applied to the mass relays. Whether we could go out and build our own is another story, but repairing them is entirely in the realm of possibility."
"How long?" asked Shepard, taking in the news of a galaxy slowly bringing itself back to life with a sort of numb appreciation. That was to say, he admired their ability to brush themselves off and get back on their feet, but it all felt so far away and incompressible from his impossibly small little corner of the galaxy – a place where the only noticeable change was that the walls seemed to be rapidly closing in.
"Depends who you ask." Hackett smiled. "Optimistic estimates say the Charon Relay could be up and running in a matter of months. Some say closer to a year, maybe even two. Several ships have volunteered to scout ahead to nearby systems to commence work on known relays. The call of home is a strong one, Shepard. You should know that. You just saved yours from extinction."
Home. It was a funny concept. When he thought of home Earth rarely came to mind. Rather, he pictured his ship, his friends and, above all else, the woman he loved – the woman willing to depart her newly reclaimed homeworld to be by his side. Home was not a place but an idea. An idea that could not be realised without her.
"As for Earth," Hackett continued, taking the silence as his cue, "she's slowly rebuilding. We have volunteers running shelters, rescue crews clearing rubble and every hospital on the planet at capacity. The Alliance is working towards building a future, both on a galactic-front and at home. A future we very much hope for you to be a big part of."
Shepard nodded numbly.
"You okay, son?" asked Hackett, taking a step closer to Shepard's bedside. "You look a little pale."
"It's just… a lot to take in."
Hackett, prepared to take a leap of faith for a man he had the utmost respect in, placed his hand upon Shepard's shoulder. "Don't think we've forgotten about the Normandy. It wasn't amongst the wreckage – not a single nut or bolt. That means it's still out there. And if your helmsman is as good as everyone says he is then either we'll find them or they'll find us."
"Thanks," Shepard offered weakly, trying to force a smile but his expression just looked strained.
"I–" Hackett began, squeezing Shepard's shoulder. "I'll leave you be. You need your rest, after all. Godspeed, Shepard. And…" He smiled sadly. "Thank you." The admiral turned on his heel and made to leave, signalling the soldiers at the door who, unbeknownst to Shepard, had been staring at him the whole time.
Shepard waited for silence and when it found him he closed his eyes, pushed his hands through his hair and took a deep breath. It was news – good news – and he ought to have been jumping for joy, or whatever equivalent his current condition allowed. But the bad news was noticeable in its absence, though Shepard hadn't the heart either to ask Hackett for the death toll or to hear it.
No war could be won without casualties. Shepard had learnt this early in his military career – on Elysium, in fact, the first time he was fit to be called a hero. That was not all they called him, however. The one that stuck, the one that he came to loathe as he was visited nightly by the faces of the dead, was, coincidentally, the one the Alliance embraced, sprinkling it liberally through every press release following the war.
The Lion of Elysium.
How many dead soldiers did it take to build a legacy?
His gaze drifted across the room and through the window he observed crumbling skyscrapers and a smoke filled horizon. It said more than Hackett ever could, and it answered that most pressing question.
Billions.
