X.
"Shepard and her crew…"
Shepard turned the plastic box around, her thumbs leaving little white networks of cracks where they pressured the corners.
The label on the back of the box read SSV Normandy SRI. The first ship of the Normandy class, she was built as a joint venture between human and turian corporations. Her stealth systems and boosted, experimental drive core make her one of the most advanced frigates in space today. Commander Shepard and her crew lived and served on this vessel during and after the Battle of the Citadel.
Shepard couldn't take her eyes off the model ship, off the wingspan barely the length of her palm. She stood next to Mordin in the Citadel shopping district, the civilians around her ignoring her and the microcosm she felt like she held in her hands. "I can't believe they made this."
Mordin's voice sounded clearly over the background babble. "I find it easy to believe, even predictable. Marketing keeps the population's opinion of the military leaning toward the positive. Also, the attack is something many citizens lived through. Shared milieu, increased likelihood of purchase. Note the books."
"I've got one of the books." She raised her arm to show him the plastic bag looped around her wrist. "I know about milieus." She smirked. "It's just weird…someday they'll be reading about me like I'm reading about Anderson, in dry, life-leeching prose." Shepard's story, on the shelf right next to Anderson's and Grissom's and World War II.
Mordin said, "Memory engenders comfort."
Shepard slid her credit chip into the automated teller and bought the model.
Tali returned from the next kiosk with a bag of her own, walking jauntily. Shepard remembered the first time she had come to the Citadel and been awed by the bustling crowds. "What have you got?" the quarian asked cheerfully.
"Model ship." Shepard showed her.
Tali took it in both of her three-fingered hands. "Model Normandy." She sounded happy. "I always wanted one. My father collects model ships, made them when he couldn't find any that matched the ships we saw in the flotilla."
"Really? You can have it, if you want..."
"No, commander," Tali said. The title sounded more like a nickname coming from her. "You keep it."
Shepard smiled. "It'll look good next to the Blasto poster and the pulpy novels."
She liked to think of Tali's father sitting at a faded metal desk putting models together, sealing wings from one ship onto the hull of another with paste and tape, showing his daughter what he'd made. They'd be patchwork wings, but hold together with all the love of a parent who wanted a planet for his child.
"…lived and served…"
She sat on her bed and unwrapped the ship, cracking through the plastic with scissors. She'd watched ships a lot when she was young-big, silent, alien warbirds taking off and docking with whatever base her family was stationed on at the time. At the age of ten she could list more names for machines than for living things. Divots, drives, cowlings, grease and space-ice formed her vocabulary. For a long time after she'd had to lean the meanings of words they used on Earth: veldt, tundra, savannah, rainforest. Every culture had its own language, and spacers were a culture of their own as much as Eskimos were, with a thousand words for machines.
She'd learned the basic notion of ships from her father. Mass drives and engine kick could be understood without any math, but starships weren't like combustion engines; you had to know more than what dials to watch to fly safely. She'd learned first aid from her father too, how to stitch and set without medigel to seal the wounds. She'd been thinking of him during the last stage of Elysium, the siege. She'd stopped thinking quick, though, about how he'd caught something fast and deadly from a patient and died on Jump Zero.
Space was in her blood, was in her parents' blood when they chose to see the galaxy from two different sections of an Alliance warship. Hannah Shepard had extended both the open palm of peace and the closed fist of war during her posting on the SSV Einstein, and Kendra's great-great-something had been the second human in history to break out of Earth's atmosphere. Some old Earth poets had said that space wasn't meant to have people living in it. The Shepards weren't having any of that.
It was right, then, that Kendra lived on the Normandy now and didn't have a planet or a station to call her real home. It was right that she'd died breathing space in and it didn't kill her. It was right that she was in love with a pilot.
"…served on this vessel…"
Miranda never said "thankless" flat out, but Shepard heard it behind her words. My company raised and paid billions to let you live and breathe and eat. You still hate us. And they call me cold.
When Shepard went to see how Miranda was doing she found her sitting at the table in the bedroom behind her office, barely visible behind the tech on her desk.
Shepard paused in the place she usually stood here, a few feet in front of the desk. It was marked out in mental tape as the 'Miranda safety zone.' "Can I come in?"
"What do you need, commander?" Miranda still sounded cold, but she looked up, propping her fork on the half-filled plate in front of her.
Shepard took that as permission to move around the desk so that she could hear better. She felt like an intruder, but glancing into the bedroom saw that it was as clean and empty as a hotel room before the occupants arrived. No secrets here, and no humanity either, just sheets tucked tight under the bed corners. "Just wanted to talk. We're having lunch," She pointed casually over her shoulder at the mess. "If you want to join us."
Miranda raised an eyebrow. "You're gesturing with a model ship."
"Oh. I know."
Awkward silence.
"Look, you paid for this ship. Like you said. I want you to enjoy it."
Miranda's eyes hardened while the rest of her expression remained passive; it gave an unsettling appearance of her being in strict control of herself. "You can't change whether or not I enjoy the company of soldiers and convicts…and one salarian who might almost understand what my work for Lazarus means. I have nothing to talk to them about."
Them? You, she means. She's the snobby kid at the empty table. "You're lonely."
"That's not relevant to the mission."
"Neither is shopping, but you've got to do it sometimes or you just go crazy."
"I appreciate that you're in a good mood, commander, but please don't expect me to catch it."
"Sorry." Shepard shrugged her shoulders. Miranda was hard work of the sort she didn't feel like tackling today. "I'll leave you to your empty room, then."
"…after the battle…"
The forward corridor was still and cool as a cavern, computer stations sprouting in their grottoes. Most of the servicemen were in the mess now, leaving an unbroken fairy-ring of orange to mark Shepard's path. She tried to sneak up on Joker, but he had the home field advantage.
He reached up and back, trying to touch her face from an angle so awkward it looked futile. She crossed her arms over the back of his chair and leaned in to get a better look at his grin, the shopping bag pulling at her left wrist. "How's the old Citadel doing?" he asked, brushing at her chin. "Need saving yet?"
"Not from anything major. How're things up here?"
"Just got better, commander."
"I missed you, flyboy… Hey, were you born in space?"
"Well, I mean, I wasn't born floating, but…"
The pilot's seat was propped up today instead of reclined like usual. He'd been working on something, windows filled with vector maps open on the screen. It was easy as thought for her to orbit him, to fold her legs underneath her and rest with her arms on his knee. The shopping bag slithered from her grasp. His eyes widened and his mouth went slack with surprise until he leaned forward to tuck a hand against her jaw and under her ear, locks of her hair parting between his fingers as he proved she was real. His expression turned to something so sweet that it seemed to relax through her, leaving her blanketed with the comfort of just trusting her weight to him. Chiming and humming sounds continued through the bridge as they always did, but they didn't matter.
"Eh, what did you ask again?"
"Where you were born," she mumbled.
"Arcturus Station, most trafficked rock in the universe. It's in my records. If this is an official military interrogation, I'd love to see something more casual…"
"This is casual." She trapped his hand under hers and tipped his palm to her cheek, feeling the warmth softening her scars. "I was born on a station too. Visited Arcturus with the SSV Heinlein when I was thirteen. "
"I was a very different person back then."
"So was I. Maybe we met."
"We never would've known," he said after a moment. Maybe he was thinking the same thing she was, something she didn't want to say: that she'd been a lanky teenager who ran everywhere, no matter what safety regs said, and he was nearly housebound. Probably still ignored safety regs though. She rested her chin against the cloth of his uniform, rubbed against it like a cat claiming him. Now he'd danced and she'd been dead for two years.
He started playing with her hair again, loosening the strands. She closed her eyes, changed the subject. "Hmm. You should've come to lunch with us."
"Aw, there's all those people being…peopley. I like it up here where it's quiet."
She took his hand quick and stood up, pulling him with her. "But Tali and Mordin and I showed everybody all the stuff we got shopping--it was very domestic."
"Next time," he said. "Promise." He kissed her, lingering as she slipped her arms under his and snugged close enough to rub at the taunt muscles of his shoulders.
"I've got a present for you," she said after a moment. He watched as she bent and took the model Normandy out of the bag, holding it as gently as glass. He stroked its wings like she had, turned it around to look at the name on its curved, creaturely sides.
"Wow. This…this means a lot." He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her forehead. With the ship in one hand he moved toward the end of the console, looking for a place to set it. "We'll give her a place of honor."
"Never forgotten." Left beside the chair, she leaned against the console, reverie of the past and the future nipping at the present. Her braced fingers touched the hologram, and it flickered. "Sorry!"
The screens retained their former state, but EDI piped up. "Please do not disturb the projections."
Shepard smirked. Joker did too, hesitating over the console before hitting a key she hoped was the mute. She watched his hands as he placed the model ship on a low strut.
"They had a Destiny Ascension too," she said, "I think I'll get it later. There's a case up in the loft that would be perfect to display them."
"Aw, you're gonna take her away from me, make her all pretty? My girl can take it down here."
"You could still see her." Shepard caught up to him and captured his hand, gently laced her fingers through his.
He turned to face her again, quiet. "Is that an invitation?"
She couldn't say anything, didn't need to-she traced the edge of his jaw to his hairline, remembering the smell of his skin.
He moved closer, hesitating to kiss her cheek, her nose. But he had that look, that sour this just got complicated sadness. "Maybe."
"What…Joker, hey…"
He kept one hand loose in hers but moved around to sit down again, to glance at EDI and the screens. The other hand rubbed at his face in exasperation or fatigue, or…
What did I do?
"Don't worry about me. Just tired. Sorry, commander. Just…give me a bit."
"What…what's the problem? If there's anything I can do-"
"Nah. I'm fine."
It's me, isn't it? It's Vrolik's or Garrus or Cerberus or--She remembered that in her childhood, questions could be answered. "How does this work?" "Why are they fighting?" "Why are you crying?" Adults would give simple answers. "Momma's sad." "Daddy's had a long day at the clinic." "Well, a lot of krogans were having babies, and the turians saw that there would be too many krogans for all of those babies to be able to eat. So they made it so not all the krogans could have babies anymore." Why weren't questions easy now? What couldn't be distilled into speech fit for a child?
Shepard picked up the model ship, looked back at her pilot. "Okay. I'll keep her for when you visit."
"That's…that's good, commander."
She lingered, watching him not look at her. There was nothing she could do. It was the feeling of hull breach, of seals popped in her spacesuit and fingers just too small to hold the gap-- nothing she could have done.