~ Finding The Heart ~

Moon Over Rat Pack

Disclaimer: The characters in this story are the intellectual property of Bioware, not mine.

WARNING: Rated for MA for future chapters. 16yrs+ readers only please. Foul language, adult concepts.

Author note: I've purposefully tried not to describe Shepard too much, after all, fans of Mass Effect will each have their own versions of Shepard, so I leave those parts up to your imagination.

REFERENCE: The name 'Jomo' I took from looking up a wikipedia entry for the first president of the Republic of Kenya. A man with force of character, a talented diplomat and person of ample capabilities from what I could tell, all of which traits the character I have named after him shares so I thought I'd use that name for him, even if my character's personality is quite different in other ways.


Upon arrival Joker gently set the shuttle down with not even a bump, purposefully showing off just how gracefully skilled he really could be when he wasn't having to try to dodge projectiles, laser blasts or flying debris. He treated his passengers like they were Hanar coralcrystal ornaments missing their packaging. "Be sure to call me when you are ready to leave, m'lady." He yelled in a faux-posh accent, having of course safely locked the pilot's compartment beforehand. Shepard nonetheless thought of an adequate response to his teasing: she thumped the blacked out window between them hard enough for it to rock the Kodiak and there was silence after that.

Her mind then drifted to the next task at hand. This dress was not made for moving around in... She carefully watched her step as she hunched down to make it under the shuttle's doorframe, trying not to let it drag on the floor. Well that's not entirely true... it actually allows for flawless movement if required – I have to give it credit for that – but that's really only going to apply once I'm in a situation where I no longer care about keeping it clean... Puzzling about how she might make the step down without a splash from the wet pavement she paused, holding her dress out of the way in preparation.

She was gingerly about to make the step down when a hand appeared in front of her. She looked up. Handsomely serious, Zaeed only raised an eyebrow as he made the offer. Shepard, disgruntled, reluctantly took it. Placing her hand in his, she allowed herself to be helped down gently onto the slick and shiny pavement. She stepped out into a grey world smelling of wet concrete and brick – unfamiliar smells to a non-Earther. A light, colourless drizzle was falling all around, making the pavements and rooftops sparkle in the dim evening light. Zaeed laughed and exclaimed as if with experience:

"Typical goddamn English weather..." Then, grinning upwards at the sky, he raised a brow with a sideways glance at Shepard. "It's supposed to be bloody summer!" Another laugh.

"Uh-huh." Shepard smiled back disbelievingly, but it was warm enough for the time of day for her to know he could be telling the truth. Mindoir's climate was supposed to be similar to that of Earth's and she had lived in the temperate zone, and that's where London was situated on Earth's latitude and seasonal precession. She knew that much, at least - she'd had to write it out in lines for homework once because she kept forgetting, instead thinking it was the capital of an island nation just off the coast of a larger landmass that had a country called 'Australia' on it. For some reason her brain liked the sound 'Aust', so she always remembered 'Australia', always remembered 'Austria', but often got the two mixed up and therefore where everything was on Earth. Let's hope if I'm ever back here I don't have to try to navigate anywhere else but London!

Zaeed offered his arm for her to hold as he had done before on the Normandy and she obliged. He quickly led her towards the odd-looking venue that was to be the setting of this occasion; their 'first date'. Couples queued up outside, waiting to get in at the steps. Shepard was about to stop at the rear of the queue but a tap on her hand told her she needed to keep moving as Zaeed led her straight through the crowd like he owned the place, sparing only a nod for the security on the way. That was odd...

Entering the club they were met by the coarse sound of a peculiar kind of music. A brass trumpet was playing amid a lazy beat, easy piano and double bass improvisations. Jazz! Or at least that's what she thought it might be. No I'm sure it is... It was a decidedly human style of music and uniquely so, according to her old music lessons as a small child. Clearly this was no ordinary club – she'd never known of a place that played this kind of music. Shepard was a child of the electronic beats and the synthesised sounds of modern multiracial dance music, complete with alien rhythms, melodies and instruments, mixed in with human ones. More and more out of her depth, she was. This dress, this place, this music? I felt less awkward walking into an Asari strip club for the first time...

Walking inside, they passed along a wide corridor with toilets and a cloakroom on one side, a bar with comfortable leather-backed (real leather?!) chairs overlooking the street on the other. At the end of the corridor was a flight of stairs that they then descended. The steps fanned out at the bottom and revealed a surprisingly large establishment. There were dozens of tables set with candles and patrons who were being served their orders, edging onto a very large open space where a few couples danced slowly in antiquated poses and styles.

On the other side of the dance floor from the tables was a large stage with an almost equally large group of musicians, all dressed smartly with clothes that Shepard had only ever before seen in textbooks and photos of the old Earth. It's a real band too?! That was a bit of a shock. VI mixers were so easy and so cheap to find these days that it was pretty rare to find anyone able and willing to host ( let alone pay for) real musicians to give live performances, except at opera houses, theatres and grand concert halls.

She was amazed she remembered the names for all of the instruments she saw on show here. There were saxophones, trumpets, trombones, even some string instruments and a double bass... and I'll be damned: a real baby grand piano! In fact all were authentic instruments – not a single one electric or synthesised. That was the most surprising thing. Non-digital instruments are rugged, difficult things that constantly needed tuning, repairing, fuss and love... Or so an old friend had once told her, as she remembered with a pang of sorrow:

Oh God... Hiro...

Hiro who'd once (unsuccessfully) tried to teach her how to play the piano, for whom music was the very air he breathed and accompanied his every thought (asleep or awake), from whom Shepard had been adorably inseparable... from as early an age as she could recall. It was in his family's home that she had last heard sounds like these – Hiro had been an astounding musician even by the age of eight, proving adept at playing any musical instrument he picked up. He had been destined for greatness, sell-out debuts, great concert halls, fame and fortune...

Until the slavers came.

Even though both Hiro and Shepard survived, nothing between them would ever be the same again after that. Shepard's parents were killed. Hiro's parents... were taken. In the immediate aftermath, sixteen and raw from loss but of differing kinds, the two of them had initially clung to each other and their friendship. Classmates were missing, teachers too – entire families were gone or dead – and as fate would have it: nobody who Hiro or Shepard were ever close to remained. For a time they were tearfully grateful just to have each other, but even that changed... in the end.

As time drew on, Shepard came out of the experience the stronger. Hiro... did not.

Nightmares of his parents, being alive but suffering, worked day by day to consume him. His mind imagined the events that he had not himself witnessed... Hiro hadn't been at home when it happened. All that day he'd been in town being tutored and attending rehearsals for some large concert he was to take part in later that month... that never happened. He never forgave himself for not being there, although what he imagined he'd have been able to do had he been there was anyone's guess – Hiro was a kind and gentle soul, who could never have been violent. Perhaps... Shepard thought glumly, he would rather he had been taken with them... Fool.

Shepard frowned, painfully, remembering how he'd turned his genius away from music in the aftermath, frantically searching for information about what people taken by slavers endured at the hands of their captors and beyond. Day and night he crippled himself with his own imagination, turning to sleeping pills to try to control his sleep and stay the nightmares, and stims to continue his futile and exhaustive obsession with knowing what his parents may yet be enduring. He began to believe that he was tied to them... in this way:

"You don't see them! You don't see them! Everyone has forgotten about The Taken but they're still out there! I see them every time I close my eyes! I see the hollowness in their eyes..."

It was... in the end... the way Hiro chose to keep his parents close to him. If he wasn't hyper, he was unconscious, and that was they way of things for a while. He grew hateful of the Alliance – after all they hadn't saved his parents. He seemed gradually to forget entirely that Alliance forces had at least saved him and rescued his best friend just in the nick of time. Shepard, relegated to the role of observer by that point, watched and received his outbursts in incrementally increasing rage, because to her: The Alliance were her heroes. They had saved her. Saved her when she had got nothing left with which to fight off capture, just as the fear of what her future might become, began to take hold of her – her strength was failing, she was starving...

Shepard had been hunted. She knew what it was to be hunted.

Her parents dead; the band of slavers who'd killed them decided to set out after her. They saw this signs of a teen living at home, her parent's protective instincts - maybe the half eaten bowl of cereal next to the homework she'd been in the middle of. They must have imagined that hunting her down would be an easy task (they were wrong) but either way having been forced to focus completely on her own survival for days on end, Shepard herself had nightmares in the aftermath - albeit of a different kind.

She'd often slept under the bed. She endured extreme panic attacks that for at least a month afterward that had her climbing into closets at the slightest sound emerging from silence and she couldn't remember how she'd got there, or even what it was that triggered that response. She had difficulty building or maintaining emotional attachments to others, too. She would get stuck for varying periods of time in that single-minded purpose of 'looking out for yourself' – Hiro being the only exception and in her eyes an extended part of her 'self'.

However: Hiro's rants about the Alliance, which Shepard often took as personal attacks, prompted her to enhance the drive for personal survival she'd developed running from the slavers far beyond the physical and deeply into the mental. Even now she remembered always what it was to be alone, and have to fend for herself alone, and sometimes imagined that life would be simpler that way. It was a constant battle not to drift into that mindset. Even going to counselling at the time was just another part of her developing obsession for doing what needed to be done - whatever needed to be done... to survive.

Counselling did help in the end, though not by ending that obsession. Counselling simply helped her her learn to turn it outward. That, coupled with Anderson's influence, encouraged Shepard to shift her priorities and identification of 'self' from preserving just her own immediate and personal survival, to preserving her long-term survival by promoting the survival and and well-being of others, until eventually that became a goal in its own right. Resonating with something deeper in her core than the slavers could ever have touched, she had found her honour and a reason to match her survival instincts to her actions, and she had found peace.

But that was only after Hiro's death.

She had been loyal to him beyond all reason: watching what the cycle of drugs was doing to him, the shaking mess he was turning into, unable to function without his next fix, all the while refusing any form of support from anyone... He was the last remaining thing she cared about in the entire universe before she joined the Alliance. That plus her own problems nearly broke her in the two years she had tried to pull her life – and his – back together after the slavers had gone. Of course: nothing could go back to how it was.

Hiro chose his addiction over their friendship – that was how she saw it in the end – and so it was that Shepard had walked away, hollow and abused, to join the Alliance. Hiro... then having finally, successfully, pushed Shepard away... preceived that the last living soul he had ever cared about, as he saw it, had betrayed him. He turned to other things in the absence of her being his emotional punch bag. Until one day Shepard returned to Mindoir, having been informed (as last remaining 'next of kin') that he had committed suicide.

The sound of applause jolted Shepard's mind back into here and now.

She was quick to replace the look of sorrow and dread of memory she wore on her face with one of attention to her surroundings - although the fear lingered. It was the memory of Hiro that had made her abhor Zaeed's addiction, and made her truly anxious with fear he might yet return to it. She wondered if she'd truly ever trust him in that regard. She wondered if she'd ever feel that safe with anyone.

Zaeed had missed the expresssions that had flashed over her face in that momentary time warp her mind had just undergone. He continued to lead, having reached for her hand to guide her through the bystanders and diners. She stared at the back of him with a pained smile, for old insecurities die hard: she just couldn't help but think about how much she never wanted to get close to someone and then be forced to give them up - like she had Hiro - ever again. Not like that.

She looked at Zaeed and in a split second ten years sped out in front of her, ending with Zaeed as he had been when she had found him in the Starboard Cargo Area that day: falling apart with a bottle in his hand. Then his fingers tightened around her hand, bringing her out of that awful fantasy. She reminded herself then that Zaeed was nothing like Hiro. They were radically different. He wasn't shy. He wasn't an anxious person. He was... in his own humorously pessimistic way, quite an optimist.

When given a possible reason not to sink into despair and self-pity, he'd jumped at the opportunity.

Shepard just hadn't quite joined the dots yet about the flipside of that: that she had been that 'opportunity'... Why, or what else that might mean... Because that was her blindside. She was blinded by the normality of being herself, which everyone else recognised as remarkable beyond compare. She was also blinded to the very personal stakes that people could - and did - attach to her, because she had a conscious recognition of her own unusualness, and often mistook them for the influence of her fame and reputation.

She felt unshakably different, every day of her life. She was always in this way, alone - humbly grateful for any kindness she received, but she never allowed herself to need it.

And the truth is, I might be lucky to have one year with him, let alone ten... So maybe I should take what little pleasure I can find, wherever and whenever I find it, from here on in. Leave the worrying for bigger and more important things.

"Ah. Here we go." Zaeed's voice above the murmur of the crowd once again snapped her back to reality. A waiter was eagerly making his way to meet them, and Zaeed raised a hand to greet the man as he approached. The man bowed with courteous enthusiasm as he met them and exclaimed:

"Mr Massani! A pleasure to see you!" A handshake and a hug with a pat on the back followed, then to Shepard: "Madam; I am honoured to meet you." Another bow, this time in her direction; "I hope you enjoy your first visit to Moon Over Rat Pack tonight." Then to Zaeed again: "Your table is ready, please follow me." He led them around the edge of the wooden dance floor (it was actually real wood) while most of the band members seemed to have joined the crowd, taking a breather for the moment. A few remained onstage, playing a simpler tune to occupy anyone still listening. Some sat quietly on stage around and behind those performing, barely visible outside of the spotlight. Others, easily identifiable by their band uniforms, milled about between the two bar areas that hemmed the room either side.

Mind now on her surroundings, Shepard became acutely aware of eyes falling upon her as they walked, tracking them from around the room. She was used to drawing attention, but amongst the larger majority (mostly the males) there was a kind of stare that she was broadly unfamiliar with: jaw-gaping sexual attraction. It made her feel immensely uncomfortable. It's this damned dress... I didn't wear it for you, you know! She scowled at each one of them dissapprovingly - the men and women gawping that way - and was gratified when her commanding authority was re-instated and they quickly looked elsewhere.

She smiled with deep sadistic satisfaction that when turning away, many of them found themselves being scowled at even more scornfully... by the man or woman sitting opposite them. She lowered her eyelids and smugly thought to them: Have a great evening with your partners. There were yet still more stares though, that she could not identify any obvious reason behind. She suspected that some may have recognised her face and were marvelling in wonder at whether or not she might somehow be the Commander Shepard... Nevertheless she saw in some of those staring faces no recognition of her at all, which was odd.

Reaching their table, the waiter pulled a chair out and offered the seat to Shepard. She thanked him, genuinely; the dress was making all sorts of mundane things like even just 'sitting down' seem tricky. The waiter pulled out the other chair for Zaeed after tucking her in, but Zaeed did not take it. Instead he muttered 'thanks' to the waiter and glanced in Shepard's direction.

"Want a drink?" - He asked with an upwards nod.

"Umn..." Shepard paused to consider. What she really wanted was something extremely alcoholic – a pauper's sedative for her nerves – but remembering present company and recent events, she swiftly rejected the idea. "...I'd like some orange juice please."

"You sure? Makes no difference to me." He shrugged – a mildly cocky statement for a just-started-recovering alcoholic.

"No, no. Orange juice is fine. Thank you." Shepard nodded to the waiter, who quickly turned to Zaeed. She'd already elected to face this event (however it transpired) sober for future mental deconstruction in the aftermath. Besides... it was against her principles to flaunt the having and enjoying of something that someone else might want but shouldn't or couldn't have.

"And you Mr Massani? What will you be having tonight? We've got some of the finest whiskeys stored just for you. 2140 was a very good year. I secured a whole case – perfectly aged and kept in uninterrupted stasis ever since." Shepard tried not to allow her eyes to widen to the point they might fall out of their sockets when she heard that and did the math.

Goddess! Stasis?! For that long?! The ideal age of whiskies is what – twelve years depending on what they're aged in? It must have been put in stasis barely after the technology was reverse-engineered from the Prothean ruins on Mars! How rare must that stuff be?! How much does it cost?! Wait... I don't want to know...

"Thank you Jomo but I think I'll have some Colombian coffee if it's all the same to you." Zaeed slapped a hand on the waiter's arm, "But hey - don't worry about bringing mine over. I'll get it from the bar. It'll Give me a chance to say 'hi' to the boys n' girls anyway. It's been too long."

"That it has, Mr Massani, that it has." Jomo smiled, nodding enthusiastically. "OK I will bring madam her orange juice and I will bring you tonight's menu, but of course you know you can have anything you want." He gestured with broad, dark-skinned hands, flashing the pale of their undersides as he did so and bowing to Shepard before he departed.

"Old friend, Jomo is." Zaeed smiled as Jomo got out of earshot. "Good man. You wouldn't think it by the way he dresses and talks to customers like the rest of the staff, but he actually owns and runs this place – has done for many years. Runs it well, too. Nasty shock to anyone who thinks they can push the ordinary staff around or be rude to them." Zaeed winked, "Anyway if you'll excuse me I'll just go say 'hello' to a few folks then I'll be right back, alright?"

Shepard nodded, mildly curious as to how it was that Zaeed had come to be so welcome here. She watched as he removed his hat, placing it on the table. He took off his long, black neru jacket and folded it over the back of the chair. Once more Shepard was forced to notice how incredibly handsome his outfit was – pants trim to his waist, waistcoat trim all the way from there to up his ribcage. Watching him move through the crowd, she noted how he nodded at a few of the people seated and standing around. So... A lot of the stares she'd thought directed at her, might actually have been directed more specifically at her being with him. He wasn't just welcome here, he was well-known. Approaching the bar, she noted how people moved out of his way.

Actually it was nice to be not quite the centre of attention, for once. She watched Zaeed lazily at a distance as he spoke at the bar. He leaned forward to shake hands with a few of the staff. Oh damn... Shepard propped an elbow onto the table, rested her chin on her hand and blatantly stared; infatuated with the way his pants outlined a sprinter's backside. Damn he looks good... It was a constant shock to her how physically attractive she found this man to be, a man who was nine years her elder. Since when did I find him so alluring..? The sound of his laughter rang clear above the crowd and shook her from her dream-stare with a jump. He turned, having picked up his coffee and was headed back from the bar. She cleared her throat and pretended to be preoccupied with her napkin.

Looking up as he drew closer, she noted he had a huge grin on his face. "Old friends are the best friends." He stated cheerfully, "You know they wanted to know how much I was paying for such a beautiful woman to be here with me tonight – they don't believe me that you're here because you want to be." He chuckled and shook his head as he placed the small china cup and saucer down onto the table.

Shepard shook her head and blushed a little, blushed again when she realised he might actually have done that on previous occasions – paid for company. Then, refusing to be embarrassed, she turned to the bar where she could see several of them were presently watching, she waved and blew them a kiss. "Do they know who I am?" Shepard asked Zaeed, smiling back at them as they fell all about poking each other and laughing.

Pulling out his chair Zaeed paused, "Yes and no..." then sat down. "I told them who you were. They said I was pulling their leg but that you were a cracking good look-alike."

"Riiight." Shepard shook her head.

"Commander Shepard would never wear a dress like yours, they told me, and in any case she died two years ago." Zaeed adjusted the placement of his chair.

"Huh." Was about all Shepard could muster to that. It was still a sore point, knowing she was actually properly dead, remembering dying, but remembering nothing of it prior to what she could only assume were dazed awakenings on a doctor's operating table. Might be that was Zaeed's way of pointing out he was lacking information about that part of her history (it wasn't exactly common knowledge), might be he was just that insensitive, might be he was testing to see if it bothered her... With Zaeed it was hard to know for sure what his angle was when he said something. Regardless she put on a brave face, half-expecting a direct question about it to follow. Instead, however, he moved on:

"They'll probably spend the rest of the night trying to work out how I could possibly be telling the truth and second guessing themselves." He chuckled, paused and looked up. "Jomo knows, but he's one of the few folks in this galaxy I trust to keep that to himself. We go back a long ways – me n' him. He saved my life. He's the one that found me after Vido thought he'd killed me. Got me to a hospital in the nick of time and stayed with me the whole time 'til I was better."

Zaeed twitched his head in Jomo's direction. "He was a measly sales rep for some mildly dodgy firm or other at the time, just happened to take a turn down the wrong – or right, depending on how you look at it – alleyway that evening. He's an honest man, just there weren't many honest jobs in that place. He always used to say he always wanted to run a club like this – it was his dream. We had more than a few things in common when it came to taste – music, decor, fashions... So once I'd managed to stash away enough cash from bounty hunting, I bought this place and gave it to him." Zaeed smiled and sipped his coffee.

"Hm." Shepard was a little surprised: "He doesn't seem to be the type of person who'd want something he hadn't earned with his own two hands."

"You hit the nail on the head with that – at first he refused to take it." Zaeed set the cup down, gesturing with a raised finger whilst turning the cup around on its saucer. "Had to give him a bloody printout of my financial transactions before he'd believe I could afford it. After that? Ten days of arguing why I wanted to give it to him and how he hadn't earned it. I told him he bloody well had earned it – he saved my life and I had a debt to pay, and I pay my debts. In the end he accepted on the condition that he always had to keep a table for me, not change a goddamn thing about the place I didn't agree with firsthand, and that he put his should-have-been-an-accountant skills to managing my funds so I didn't make any other stupid financial decisions, so long as we're both alive."

"Considering how much you seem to be a lone wolf, I must say I'm a bit surprised to find you've got so many friends." Shepard curled her hand under her chin.

Zaeed sighed and pulled a sour face. "They're good men and women here. I know good folk when I find them and I keep tabs on them. Aren't too many. But if you think I trust them... Or wouldn't kill them..." Zaeed's face took on a darker expression, "I told you before: put a gun to someone's head and chances are they'll tell you whatever it is you want to know. Nobody could pay me enough to kill these people but if I thought they were going to get into a situation – one where what they knew could affect my survival and someone might put a gun to their head to find it out – I'd kill 'em in a heartbeat before it happened."

He stared at Shepard with solemn conviction: "I'd do it quick and I'd do it clean, but I wouldn't wait for them to shame themselves if I knew I couldn't get them out in one piece. That's the way I work Shepard." Taking a deep breath, he broke his stare to tend instead to the nursing of his coffee as if it were a stiff shot of some sorts, brow furrowed. "Had to do that to someone once, wasn't fun. Nowadays I keep friends like these at a distance – I won't tell 'em anything that might get 'em killed..." He looked up again, deadly serious: "...at my hands."

"I can appreciate that." Shepard nodded and paused, " I think you have major trust issues..."

"Hah!" Zaeed scoffed.

A smile spread across Shepard's face: "...But I can see where you are coming from. Of course you know I have to ask: where do I fit into that equation?"

Zaeed sucked air and thought about it. "Honestly? I don't know." He shrugged and pulled a face. "You've got..." He paused as if trying to find the right words, "There's something about you. People trust you. It's an instant thing. Noticed it the first time I met you and you'd got Cerberus Bitch and Lapdog in tow, them letting you call all the shots despite her being used to being top dog. Hell I know about that twisted Ice Queen – she's a wily one yet even she trusts you."

The crowd erupted with applause around them; the easy blues melody that had been playing in the background of this conversation had come to an end. Waiting for the noise to die down, Zaeed looked at Shepard. He seemed to scrutinise her for a moment, before continuing. "Remember how I said only two kinds of people don't crack under pressure?"

Shepard strained to recall the statement – it was from one of the many stories he'd told her. "The trained killer and the psychopath?" She proposed.

"Right. Well... I think I might need to edit that. Could be there's a third: the martyr. Personally I could see you falling into that category." He smiled and winked. Flattery indeed, thought Shepard, in the most bizarre ways...

Jomo arrived with Shepard's drink, carefully sliding it in front of her. She nodded acknowledgement and thanked him, but noting how the two of them had been deep in conversation, he placed the menus on the edge of the table and was then gone without a word.

"Martyr?" Shepard stared into her drink and smiled darkly – smiled at how nothing was ever simple, how he was technically more right than he might ever get to know, smiled... at how her job had become her life, and of course then she remembered Alenko, and didn't feel like a martyr at all.

Virmire was a place and time carved into her as deeply as her last year on Mindoir, and thoughts about it and what happened there always left her feeling bitter. "I am best known for my heroics, but martyrs don't usually order other people to die for them – usually the defining point of a martyr is that they themselves die for their cause, inspiring others then to follow." She shook her head. "That's not me I'm afraid." Zaeed raised an eyebrow inviting her to explain, because he'd lived the two years following her supposed death, and witnessed otherwise.

She sighed. "When I was fighting Saren I had to choose which of my two closest comrades was going to die for my cause. One was a man who probably could have been my lover down the line were it not for Alliance regs. I kinda wanted him to be and I think he wanted me too. Both were friends." Shepard picked up the drink and swilled it around the glass. "One happened to be with a Salarian Special Task Group, the other – my would-be lover – was the last man standing at a bomb set to blow the place sky-high. Both were in mortal danger." She lifted her glass of orange juice and stared into it.

Zaeed sipped at his coffee again and then speaking from the decorative rim of the china cup that held it, he asked: "Your choice?"

"I chose to save the one with STG. I chose her because I knew from the moment I spoke to Sovereign for the first time, the moment I started to wrap my head around the true scope of the Reaper threat for the first time, I knew I was going to need to safeguard as many forces as possible for the time ahead. Having potential allies in the STG in future I believed to be more important than anything else I wanted." She sighed again, "I figure you should know that before this..." She gestured, limply waving a hand at table level, "...goes anywhere – and before you start throwing words like 'martyr' in my direction."

For a moment she wondered if the night might be over following that brutal honesty, but Zaeed simply stared at her with a little smile as if he'd found a new level of respect for her. "I understand." He nodded, took a gulp of his coffee, and then apparently satisfied with that as an ending to the conversation; changed the subject. "So... Tell me something about the great Commander Shepard that I haven't already heard in the vids."

Shepard laughed, a little shocked by the man's nerve. "Well... Umn..." She started, "Really I have no idea what they put about me in the vids and what they don't." She shrugged.

Zaeed only stared under half-lidded eyes: "Fine." He gave a small shrug. "From the beginning then."

"The beginning?" Shepard took a deep breath and tried to gather her thoughts. "Well... I uh... grew up on a colony - Mindoir. Lost my parents when I was sixteen – slavers. Alliance came to our rescue. I enlisted as soon as I could. They were the closest thing I had left to family by that point, I guess." Apart from Hiro, who I walked away from because he chose his addiction over me, like I fear you could one day if something pushed you hard enough... She omitted mention of Hiro and instead just sighed: "Actually... It kinda seems like me and slavers share some sort of weird, entwined destiny." She set her glass down with raised brows and stared at the table as she thought about it.

"A few years later I found myself fighting off a Batarian raid on a Elysium – slavers again. I was told that was actually one of the reasons for my being chosen as a SpecTRe." Shepard shrugged as she continued: "Anyway, while on the chase for Saren as a SpecTRe a few years later, there was this girl who'd been taken by the same slavers that attacked Mindoir and killed my family – in the same attack no less. Somehow she escaped the slavers or someone had rescued her – I forget the details – and somebody brought her to the Citadel."

"They called me off the Presidium to go talk to her when she started threatening to kill herself. Maybe they knew my history and hoped I'd be able to make a connection with her." Shepard chucked, "That or maybe they called me because for some bizarre reason when she got away from whoever was looking after her, she'd somehow fled onto the private docking bay where the Normandy was parked, making it my personal business."

Shepard took a gulp of orange juice: "I managed to talk her down and they took her away. I think she's in care now. I got a letter from her a few months ago."

She shrugged, and felt suddenly hideous inside and out. Like she was snugly wrapped around by some putrid dark monster that forever made her memories haunting ones. Darkness clung to Shepard like Omega's stench clung to clothes. Memories of traumas past weighed her down at every turn, and she suspected even ordinary people noticed the cloud above her head even when she was being cheerful and outgoing. People instinctively knew she'd seen things – bad things - and the fact of her having survived those things and still be functioning, terrified them. Staring into the bright golden orange of her juice, she tried to paint over the memories with that colour.

"To sum it up: me and slavers go back a long way. I even crossed paths a second time with the one that led that raid I fought off on Elysium. The dumbass laid a trap for me in the hopes of revenge. ...It didn't work out too well for him."

Zaeed was quiet for a while, watching her. She hadn't caught the anger in his expression as she'd talked; her eyes too focused on the drink in her hands. She didn't catch the soreness in it either, and she didn't see how under the table he now clenched his fist, hard.

"Slavers huh? Dirty bunch." He exhaled, loudly. "Met a few. Slippery as you like and mean as hell. Not people you ever want to know and let live."

"Yeah." Shepard lifted her drink and took another eye-wateringly large gulp of the juice, mentally washing away her memories with the colour as she swallowed. It was smooth as milk but had a real sharpness to it. She smiled and shook her head.

"Hey I'd forgotten what freshly-squeezed orange juice actually tastes like. It's one of the things I've always missed - racing around the galaxy as I have been. I uh... never really got over being spoilt as a child – years growing up and living on a farm, eating fresh food... It sets standards that food most anywhere else just can't meet let alone beat." She shrugged: "So usually 'eating' is just something I do out of conscience." - and laughed.

"Huh. You should try the coffee. It's almost to die for." Zaeed took a mouthful of the now lukewarm liquid and grinned with a sparkle in his eye. That was a reference to our earlier conversation wasn't it? The one about martyrs. Shepard was starting to realise that when he actually used that brain of his, it was sharp as a knife and twice as deadly. Throw someone off balance then come at them sideways. It was his sense of humour coming through again.

"So." Shepard raised her eyes to his, expressionless except for a raised brow. "What's next?"

"Dinner!" Zaeed exclaimed gleefully, adding: "Food that might pass even the high standards of a farmer's daughter, too." He winked with a toothy grin, and passed her a menu.

"Hah!" Shepard scoffed but didn't rise to the bait: "Hey anything better than Alliance rations and I'll be happy."