**
Eight
**
They sat in the Normandy's mess, two cups of coffee long since gone cold sitting between them. Late in the 'night' shift, there wasn't anyone walking around, but they kept their voices low out of deference to the risk of anyone walking by and overhearing them.
"Can I ask you a personal question?"
Shepard's mouth quirked into a smile. "Kaidan," she murmured, "Considering how much of yourself, your past, you've revealed to me, it would probably be very churlish of me to say no."
He gave her a lopsided smile, one that made the muscles in her abdomen clench; the one that made her tuck her legs under her chair a little bit further to hide any shifting motions she might have made. "That wouldn't be very gentlemanly of me, would it?"
"So ask." She turned the mug in front of her between her hands, just to give them something to do.
He leaned back briefly, studying her. Nerves fluttered vaguely in her stomach, but she held her tongue, waiting. Finally, he said, "Why does no one, not even that gang scum that tried to corner you on the Citadel, call you by your first name?"
She let out a breath she hadn't even realised she'd been holding, more nervous about what he could have asked her than she'd realised. "That's all?" she said, teasingly, though she dropped her eyes to the stagnant liquid in her mug, not quite able to look at him while she spoke. "You're not going to ask me about my childhood, or what it was like to be one woman against Thresher Maws out to eat me for breakfast?"
He leaned forward, and touched one finger to the back of her hand briefly to get her attention. She felt the afterimage of the touch even though it was brief and hardly anything to write to a Court Martial board about. He was still smiling, gently. "If you want to tell me, I'll listen, but I know as well as anyone that you shouldn't have to talk about those things if you don't want to."
Guilt twisted at her for a moment. "I didn't mean to make you-"
He stopped her with a raised hand. "I said 'if you don't want to' didn't I? I wanted to."
"Alright," she said, "But why no one uses my first name is hardly on the same order of things. It seems a bit one-sided, this personal stuff."
"I'm curious," Kaidan admitted.
She laughed slightly and shrugged. "It really isn't very interesting. The sign-up form has two spaces for a name. First and last. I made it up. I was always just 'Shepard' before that."
She'd thought it was a fairly simple answer, but his forehead creased in slight confusion. "I… I guess I don't get it," he said, "You… don't have a first name?"
"According to my file I do," she said, waving her hand in the air vaguely, as if to indicate the information in the ether. "But if I've got a birth certificate anywhere, it's probably not the same one. I was always Shepard, growing up. Don't know if that was my parent's surname, but it was what I got called. I didn't need more than that, until I found myself in the waiting area of an Alliance recruiting station, staring at the 'first name' bit of the form and wondering what to put."
"So how'd you come up with it?"
"Well…" She hesitated, wondering whether telling him would destroy her big-bad-scary-spectre image, but the way he had his head propped on his hand, grinning, told her that it might be a bit too late. "One of the other girls there to sign up had this fashion magazine. I asked if I could borrow it and, uh…" She took a deep breath and plunged on. "I flipped through until I found a picture of a model I liked and used her name."
Kaidan's brow furrowed. "So your name…"
"… is really some model's name." She grinned and shook her head, "Not that I ever use it for anything other than my login. She was blonde and way too thin. But I thought it would have looked weird on the form. It didn't occur to me that I could have explained and they probably would have just let me leave it blank, or just used a default name as filler."
She leaned forward and lowered her voice, "Anyway. I think 'Commander' works just fine as a first name, right?"
"Bit awkward to call out in a fit of passion, isn't it?" She half expected him to back down after uttering such a blatantly flirtatious statement, but he stared back at her, unblinkingly, and, underneath the table, she locked her ankles together.
"I suppose so…" she said, half-whispering, "I think just 'Shepard' works for that."
Kaidan tilted his head slowly and smiled. "I'll bear that in mind."
**
