Postcards from the Edge of the Galaxy

by Eleneri

Part of the Rose Shepard series: A place for all my Mass Effect trilogy drabbles, none of which are in any particular order. As always, Bioware owns all; no infringement intended. It's their own fault they write such darn good characters that I'm compelled to write about them. Very likely, there will be romance of some sort in there somewhere, because well... I'm writing it.

10. Slipping

Omega Station

Outside Afterlife

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Shepard hates Omega.

She hates the sour air, the despair in the streets, how any act that can be considered even vaguely decent is looked on with as much distrust and wonder as if it were a lump of platinum sitting in the middle of the corridor.

She's not sure, but she might hate Aria T'loak. The asari's blunt brutality is like a barrier curtain. She wants nothing. She needs nothing. Neither carefully-chosen words nor, Shepard suspects, a carefully aimed bullet will puncture the shields Aria's got around herself. Worse, she cares for nothing.

She reminds Shepard too much of herself, of what she had been before David Anderson took raw recruit R. Shepard and browbeat, cajoled, and railroaded her into something close to her present form.

That's what Shepard hates most about Omega. It's familiar. She backslides almost without a thought, moving like a soldier, armed like a walking arsenal, but thinking like the street thug she used to be. It's all too easy to pull a gun and intimidate someone, all too easy to threaten to break someone's legs. It's the language they all speak. No one thinks it odd - they just mark her as higher on the food chain and comply. After finding Garrus, after almost losing him, it gets so incredibly hard to not harden, not let that ice get so far down into her that her heart solidifies and she isn't Shepard anymore.

Shepard wraps herself in the memory of warm whiskey-colored eyes and a slow, quirky smile, and it makes the ice go away. Still, she's glad when the has both Mordin and Garrus on the Normandy, and the Collector-manufactured plague is cured, and Aria is becoming an ally with glacial slowness, but what really matters is that she can order the Normandy off Omega, and she can stop slipping.

And then the message from Hackett comes. He wants her to investigate the original Normandy's crash site on Alchera.

Shepard turns from her terminal, with only the slightest hesitation, but she knows Kelly Chambers has probably seen it, and is filing it away to report to the Illusive Man. She sends the nav points to Alchera up to Flight, and has Joker plot a course. She goes to gear up without a word to anyone.

She can feel herself slipping again.