Chapter 21: Human Behavior
He shuddered in her arms. Freezing cold, his body wreckage in a cobalt fountain. The plates that made him, the facets and angles of his geometry, his entire being - slipping through her fingers like water. It was impossible to hold all his pieces together. Collapsed, trembling, and clinging to him – she tried with every fiber of her grit to keep his plates still against the tide ripping him apart, pouring from the hole where his face once was.
"Don't you die on me! Don't you dare die on me now – not now, not now!"
But he rasped and he turned, freezing fingers still coiled around the edge of his weapon until the moment his dying heart changed flux, and they fell limp as his central circuitry rerouted to keep his draining blood flowing through his core, to no avail.
"Thane! Thane! Christ, get over here and help me!"
To no avail.
Tears fell on him like rain, the only thing he could feel, but yet they slipped away so surely, all the world breaking until its sound became a roar – the collective ringing of everything he had ever heard, thundering through the air, so great and powerful he feared falling into it forever to never hear again. But hands held him from the chasm screaming beneath, small hands around his face, a whisper he could barely hear against the screaming bellows of the shattering world, the distended ring of reality being torn apart, molecule by molecule, atom by atom.
"Please, please stay with me, stay with me…"
Memory by memory. Ash by ash.
Blurs and tracing movement, so thick the scent of blood and something burning. He drifted in a sea of moving color slowly on the waves of the terrible roar, barely afloat. But in his shattering sky from the he thought he saw someone looking back, as if through rippling water, as he drifted, far beneath swiftly rising waves.
The water was cold, but if felt beautiful in its sharpness. Numbing, ice – a pleasant shock as every sense released at first in protest and then, so softly, evaporated. He calmly watched the light above slipping through the ripples, further, farther, until all that remained was a silver memory; pale moonlight from the sky filtering though the waves which washed high over his head.
As he sank like snow into the knew he couldn't swim, and it didn't matter anymore.
It felt nice, actually.
Peaceful. Drifting.
The light high above the gathering dark, farther and farther.
Gently, slipping down.
Without warning, hands.
Wrapping, grasping.
Arms and a grip like steel, from fingers so thin and many.
Warmth in the cold.
He looked, though he could scarcely see, he felt rather than saw something approaching him in the abyss.
In the deepest sea, in the place furthest from the sun, something was burning blinding white. Swirls of luminescence of a form he could barely understand – a nebula, a birthing star made of divine fractals too complex to understand and to beautiful to describe. It surrounded him, too massive to see in its fullness, only catching it in pieces, its edges so fiercely bright. A nova – searing feeling back into his mind while deafening the endless waves of water as he fell encircled by infinite rings of light.
So bright, so lucid – it burned his eyes, he could barely see – so fiercely radiant and huge, tearing through the sea roared a hidden force, crashing from the sky. He felt it enveloping him in its fiery wings, drawing him into its blazing core.
So foreign - this alien in the deep, and so massive it was that he was powerless to it, to its starlike aura, to its thousand wings so far greater than he could perceive. But in its unknown sphere with its form so strange, he felt, with certainty something familiar reaching to lift his head hung low.
Fingers beneath his jaw, and palms sliding on his face – if he could see, if he could only see in the blinding light, drawing closer, so close to something at the edge of memory, brimming on the cusp of the corporal so far away – but even in the water, even in the dark - the touch, a touch remembered.
And through the burning palms that lay upon his face, lips.
Something opening his mouth.
Breath.
Pouring in like a fountain.
Arms, around him.
So many arms, and hands.
Ringing, in his ears.
Rushing, towards the surface.
Breaking through the waves.
Crashing up.
Up.
Floating, as if through a beam.
Roaring, silent.
Into a vessel of blinding light.
Taken.
Stars ripping past as he broke across an endless sky, shifting black to white, red to blue.
Unusual in their features.
Strange faces not from his world.
What was he lying on…metal…something hard, his body pushed back by many hands.
A ceiling now, its lights above drifting and between them, faces hidden in silhouette.
Voices in incomprehensible tongues.
So much metal everywhere.
Instruments.
Gleaming things he did not recognize.
But the touch upon his hand.
He gripped it.
The only thing real.
Three fingers, in five.
A warm release.
A gentle push.
And sleep.
For seven days, she guarded him.
Mordin had given up on fighting with her, no small task, but even salarians had their limits. She could stay, he said, but only if she kept quiet and out of his way while he worked, manically, on his patient. Although she had not known him long, she could read from his frenzied nature, so absorbed in the here and now, that this was an exceedingly rare gesture of empathy for him, though she suspected Chakwas had much to do with it, as the operating theatre was technically hers. And so, the commander obliged the sinewy doctor, and she watched over the broken turian day and night, unwilling to move even a fraction as he slept without a sound, laying still and pale.
It was by the third evening that she had given up on her duties. Her data pad was her only portal to the outside vessel, which she had no interest in perusing even for a moment, untouched near the door.
Let Miranda play captain for a while. It's her ship anyway, she thought bitterly, to no one.
By the fourth morning, she had shut off her ever buzzing omnitool; Thane, the only one with enough sense to leave her alone. She knew her young, insightful yeoman meant well, but no amount of kindness or food from Gardner sent in from the mess, laying largely untouched in the trash, was going to going to convince her to leave the turian's side.
Not again.
It was the middle of the night on the seventh day. Exhausted, starved, and drained of tears, she merely sat, uneasily in her chair, staring at him. She had observed the bandages migrating across his face, as the machines stitched him slowly back together; cell to cell, axon to dendrite, myocyte to plated dermis.
She watched him lying there, mourning. Long after the lights shut off each night cycle and her only company became the low glowing dark and the gentle murmur of equipment, she remained by his side.
She sat leaned into her knees in her chair across from where he lay, wondering how he could look so familiar and so wrong. Still washed from his surgeries his darkened face was bare of paint, the trauma having completely changed his complexion, and the soft rings around his eyes to black. It was so strange to see him unadorned from the lines so carefully drawn, on the small part exposed from the scaffold still weaving his many pieces into one. The sterile light upon him pained her; he looked fragile, the glow on his plates a sickened gleam, as if he was made of glass so thin it could break at the slightest whisper. And so she said nothing. Breathng in silence, her head in her hands, just watching, as he slept.
The possibility that he would never move again, very real in her mind.
His chest rising and falling, so fractured.
Tears surged again.
But she couldn't look away.
Too long, had she hid that glance, too afraid to see.
To feel.
And look where it had gotten her.
The tears welled in her eyes, water from a riverbed long dry, but she blotted them back, wiping them from her tired face amidst a searing migraine. Her eyes were swollen beyond recognition, and they closed as she bowed her head, her hands in her lifeless hair as she felt the pain wrack through her in burning waves.
Guilt rolling through her, waves of endless depth.
From the back of the room, too pitied to watch anymore, stepped Karin Chakwas, setting down her codex. She had lived longer than the woman she witnessed weeping soundless on the chair, and in her career she had seen much suffering. As a doctor, she had long since learned to compartmentalize. In her decades of practice, she had mastered a calm over her emotions that allowed her to operate cleanly even in abject chaos.
But never in all her years did it get easy to watch the living waste away.
The silver-haired surgeon approached the bent woman in the chair with soft steps, and with her eyes mourning for her in empathy, she placed a hand between her shoulder blades, and stroked.
Her hand was warm, and heartfelt.
Shepard glanced up at her through her hands, silver eyes greeting blue, and they looked into each other.
It was usually Shepard comforting victims.
"Dear...He's going to recover." said Chakwas quietly to her with a face lined with sadness and concern.
Shepard bowed her head, her lank hair falling in her face, and she pushed it back; her gaze falling to the mathematical patterns of the tiles lining the floor.
"…I know…but…you have to understand…he's never, really, going to…be…"
She trailed eyes met again, Shepard's dark.
"Trust me. I know."
The doctor, her heart heavy, nodded; knowing her commander's words to be true. As a trauma surgeon, she knew better than to ask most veterans about the things that they had seen, if they weren't ready to talk about them. She knew from age that many of them weren't.
She had never asked about Akuze. But from what she had heard from a few friends that had cleaned up the aftermath – for no one but her had survived with any treatable injury, she couldn't even begin to imagine what her commander had survived, and what she must have done to do so. That alone, had kept her silent in the time she had known her from asking about the nightmare that had started her career.
She crossed the room, retrieving a glass from a cabinet near the door, and filled it with ice and cold water from the cooler. It wasn't much, but she knew Shepard's complete inability and utter lack of concern for her own well being in the pursuit of protecting others was borderline masochistic, and that her guilt could be self-destructive. She remembered how, after Kaidan's death, her commander had simply disappeared for days, sending orders and coordinates through her terminal in absolute isolation, not showing her face for even for mealtimes.
And she remembered with great clarity, the explosive argument just a few weeks after, right before the battle that nearly destroyed the Citadel. How bitterly she and the turian had fought, over what – no one knew. It pained her, after silently watching them grow so close together during the first and final flight of the now doomed Normandy SR1. The doctor poignantly recalled pleasant times of the two coming into the clinic laughing after lighter missions, trading stories and trying to one-up each other with the severity of their flesh wounds, teasing about missed shots and the associated stereotypical hindrances of the others alien anatomy. She, the now august woman who had spent so much of her life alone on her journeys, had found it so vicariously sweet to see them together in the quiet mess in the long hours after everyone else had gone off. On more than one occasion, she had noticed them lingering in each others company even after their inseparable friends the asari and the quarian had decided to call it a night after the day's troubles had subsided.
The doctor remembered one late evening in particular as she had gone down for a midnight cup of tea, her mug eagerly empty after a tiring day spent suturing the bitter krogan back together. She stopped in her paces; the lights of the mess down and dim, and she laid eyes on them seated side by side, staring out the window together in complete quiet, watching the universe float calmly past as a table full of deconstructed firearms lay abandoned behind them. In her memory, she could still see their silhouettes beside each other, so different in the soft dark, seated closer together than she suspected they would dare if they knew they were not alone. She recalled, quite clearly, slipping back out of the room without making a single sound.
Wondering, if they knew they were in love.
She handed her the water, and had to give her a stern look in order for her to even take it, but after a moment she did, submitting to her thirst. She watched the younger woman drink, noting her lips chapped from dehydration, and the doctor exhaled in dismay.
"You're no good to anyone ill, Commander. You really need to leave, and sleep."
But Shepard shook her head, and said quietly, not tearing her eyes away from Garrus for even a moment, "No."
Chakwas turned her head, looking at the unconscious turian, and considered, her brows tense. She turned again to the woman seated tear stained in the chair, brought to her knees by the weight of guilt, unable to even stand.
"Shepard."
Grey eyes through red hair. The doctor looked away, deeply into the wall, past the machines, past the room and the stars themselves. Shepard looked at her, and watched the older woman's pensive expression with laser like focus. She did not look back at her.
"When I was your age…younger, actually, I decided to leave England…Earth…Forever…I…well...I never much cared for it. I believe once, I told you that I found life planet-side terribly boring…but..."
Their eyes met, young in old.
"That was only half a truth."
A chill ran over Shepard.
"When you get to be my age, when you live long enough, see enough war, enough battles, and every branch and root of human nature, my dear…it is so easy to lose hope."
She stared harder at the wall, her eyes piercing through their lines.
"To become…bitter. And to never…ever want to return home."
Shepard sat back in her chair, not daring to blink for even a moment, breathing as her heart pounded in her chest. It was as if she was speaking from her own future.
"And…I never did. I left everything, I left it all behind, to entertain a desire. To travel, forever. To never go home, back to moldering old Europe, still clinging to its bloodlines and history. Back to the same tired faces, the same decaying ideas…the same prejudices…"
She met her eye, coldly, in the dark.
"They say we live in great times. In the 'future', the farscape. But my dear…"
She turned her silvered head back to the being lying broken on the bed, and closed her eyes, seeing her past in perfect clarity.
"Human nature, hasn't changed."
Shepard's dry lips parted, so slightly, as she breathed, for what felt like the first time in years.
Someone, finally, had confirmed what she had felt her whole life. And she listened, every pore of her mind open, as Karin Chawkwas spoke the first real words she had heard since she had awoken naked on a Cerberus operating table.
"Every day a new horizon, every year as different and unpredictable as the last. I have had the luxury of having been…well, everywhere. I've seen the spires of Illium, the snow drifts on Noveria. I've glimpsed in my youth the borealis on the moons of Palaven, and with you, the star-arms closed upon the Citadel. I've seen everything…and yet, not enough."
Her eyes fell, images of a past still clinging to her sifting before her eyes.
"You didn't live through the First Contact War…I did. Why, we still feel the ripples now. I still remember the fear we lived in, fed by the media and our politicians. I still remember the hatred in the streets, and the bigotry, the nationalism, and the racism. After all our people have been through, after all we should have learned from our history, how despicably narrow minded we were…and are."
Shepard's eyes, glazed over, nodded with her.
"Yes. My return to the Citadel…was less than pleasant."
Chakwas's face became as hard as stone, as she looked at the turian once again.
"Yes." she said with an abiding ice Shepard had never heard in her voice before, "Fascism is quite the rage these days."
Their eyes met, resounding in mutual understanding, and she continued, with light washing through her cold tones.
"Shepard I don't work for Cerberus. I work for you."
Shepard nodded slowly, her intense gaze unbroken, and whispered, "As you've said."
The doctor's eyes gleamed as she bore into her, resolve and belief blistering through.
"My child. I believe you were meant for great things. And so do many, many other people. I know very little about you, but from what I have seen… I would follow you anywhere…And so would he."
Shepard looked, resounding in feeling, as Chakwas tilted her head, her eyes which had seen so much, now seeing straight through her.
"There's so much violence in the world. And I know you were born from it, and into it. But there's a place, in your heart, of no violence…and no bigotry."
Shepard gasped in quiet as her heart seared, awakening.
"The eye of the storm. Where nothing can touch, no fear, and no darkness. And my dear…it is only a secret to you."
Pounding. Her heart, falling out of her chest.
"Don't you see, how we all flock to you? How we all reach out, and follow, wherever you guide us? There is something in you…something that we need. That we all need, and that only you have, and in spite of what you may believe about yourself…it is good…and selfless. Look around you. Just look. All of this, a gamble, for you. The most powerful figures in the Universe know your name, and fear it. I watched Dr. Solus rip out three dozen security nodules from this room alone. Certain players would not take such precautions, if there wasn't something to be careful of."
Shepard eyes gleamed as she looked down at her clothes, to the logos even present there.
"I was there, at your funeral. I saw the people gathered. Dalatrasses and matriarchs, princes, primarchs, presidents...the vanity. The lies."
She shook her silvered head, holding a finger to her temple.
"But the true sight to behold, were the real people. The sick, and the impoverished. Soldiers. Nurses. Secretaries. Quarians on pilgrimage. Young krogans, barely in their first rut. Turians and asari, hanar whispering prayers, volus collecting charity in your name. Every race. Every class, drawn to you. Hundreds of little girls, in particular. All looking up. All looking up to your face on the screen, with wide eyes, in wonder. In belief."
Shepard's head met her hands again, staring down at the floor, but she continued. She had to.
"They played your last interview. If you could only see the way they looked at you. Shepard…you are so much more to us, than you know."
But she snapped, unleashing months of pent up rage that had been gathering from the moment she awoke against her will as nude and weak as a babe in the ruins of a research station governed by the most questionable human interest agency in the galaxy. From the moment she met the Milky Way's most elusive man and knew she was doomed to live in his pocket, to when she boarded the painful ghost of her lost ship, to when she looked at her face for the first time in the mirror and watched the cybernetics glowing just beneath her skin, she questioned for the first time in her life how much of her own body was truly real.
"It's propaganda. It's goddamn propaganda. They're using me Karin, under the guise of good deeds. The Illusive Man, Udina, the media - even the goddamned Alliance. Those motherfuckers. I heard the stories, the engineers told me in detail. All of them -liars. Profiteers. They betrayed me – they wouldn't even tell the truth after I gave my life for them – the geth? The goddamned geth? Thousands died for that battle - Kaiden- civilians- Nihlus - to slay that thing – and what did they do? What was the first thing they did? Lied, to everyone – because what really happened didn't fit in nicely with their narrow little view of what is politically appropriate! And then, and then used my fucking image for goddamned recruiting vids!?…Where the hell is the honor? This...this isn't what I signed up for when I was a recruit."
Her eyes, rimmed in hateful tears, met the doctors, and she spoke in a pierced whisper,
"Let me tell you a secret."
They narrowed, and said the words she had always thought, but never in thirty-two years let touch her lips.
"I…hate our kind."
Those cold grey lenses burning yet further, unyielding.
"I really do."
Silence rang in the quiet room. Chakwas crossed her arms, and thought.
"No." She said softly, after a long moment. "You don't."
Shepard laughed bitterly, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Oh, yes. I do. I have my whole life, since I was old enough to see it. And I've seen enough now to know exactly how I feel."
But the doctor continued, her voice firm and low.
"A while back, I heard something on the telly. An interview."
Shepard still looked bitterly at the ground.
"An interview of a remarkable young woman. Who spoke quite fondly of turians in particular."
Shepard glared at Chakwas, daring her to continue, but the elder woman was completely unafraid, and spoke on confidently, with raised eyebrows.
"And it struck me, that all the things this woman respected of them and their culture..."
Karin paused, staring Shepard down.
"...Were perhaps the things she felt were so sorely missing from our own."
She slipped her eyes away, avoiding Shepard's fiery gaze, to calmly look at her fingernails.
"As I recall, this impeccably strong young lady also mentioned something about the easiest thing in the universe being to live in fear and hate of what one does not understand."
She looked at her, directly in the eye.
"You don't hate people. You simply do not understand the actions of the small and greedy because you cannot relate to selfishness and narcissism of that magnitude. You, Shepard, are cut from a different cloth."
"Karin, you have no idea. You have no idea how selfish I can –"
But she cut her off, continuing.
"I realized this, after reading your obituary, and after speaking at great lengths to an old friend, who knew you from your first and rather interesting day, as he tells it, as a recruit…I never knew you were an orphan."
Her eyes met the younger woman's with profound empathy, and she spoke with great conviction.
"I cannot imagine the things you been through. Family is one of those…curious things...which we tend to take for granted."
Her words punctured Shepard's anger, and it deflated, her shoulders sinking, as she listened to the doctor speak.
"I never before realized, but I recently wrapped my head around it. You treat us all like family."
The truth made Shepard's heart sink deep into her chest.
"All those little gestures you did while you were commander of our first Normandy. Wrex's armor, books for Ashley, favors for Garrus, Liara and Tali, eggs for the crew, special treatments for Kaidan's headaches paid for out of your own pocket, and a dozen others. You sought our approval. You…cared…deeply, of what we all thought of you. We were just strangers to you, but you cared."
Shepard sank back in her chair, hiding her face behind her hand. Chakwas shook her head in quiet amazement.
"And I always wondered why, why you, our commander, N-bloody-seven; who never even had to - or needed to seek our favor or approval for anything on this ship – would come down to eat with us, to talk to us, and to get to know us personally. I have never had that sort relationship on any craft before in my life. And it wasn't just lip service – Shepard, you actually listened. I couldn't believe it. And even, as you say you hate humans so much, my dear, you are even doing this even now. The brandy you brought me, spices for Gardner, the couplings for your young friends below decks." She still shook her head, smiling. "That doesn't look like hate to me. If it was, you wouldn't give a damn about all those missing colonists whom you've never even met, but there you are every night, hunched over in the CIC, trying to get to the bottom of it."
Shepard, oddly, was so embarrassed she was laughing. Chawkas shifted her weight, and laughed a bit as well. And Shepard thought she could hear, if she wasn't completely insane, the Englishwoman's accent slipping into something far less proper; looser, almost grittier, and definitely more colloquial.
"I think you're a bit bipolar, actually. It's damn comedic, considering that lovely speech you gave on black and white thinking. It's like, on one hand you are this paragon of altruism, and on the other, my dear, you can be quite the mad renegade. Child," she laughed, "Have you ever considered that you are terribly unhappy not for the reason you may believe, but because you're in sixes and sevens about who you even are?"
Shepard, exhausted, was still laughing. "Chakwas…You know…'Shepard' isn't even my real name."
"Oh stop, of course it is. It may not be the one your parents left you, but what does it matter? It is now. Look at him," she said, nodding her head to Garrus, "So who is he really? Garrus, or Archangel? I think you know. You realize, of course, that you two are exactly same?"
Shepard pushed her hair back, and looked in dreamy disbelief at Chakwas, smirking, saying only, "No."
"So, I never saw it before, but I think enough time alone with my brandy has caused some of these old neurons to function properly. You," she said with clear eyes, gesturing casually at her,
"Say you hate humans. He," she tilted her head to Garrus, "…is eh, not exactly the model turian. And he knows it. And you know it. And we all know it. Shepard. You're both bloody misfits."
Shepard snorted, trying not to laugh so much as to wake Garrus.
"Please, I'm such a poster child they actually used me for posters. No royalties for my charities, I might add."
"Oh sure, you like to pretend you're just 'Plain Jane Shepard', girl next door from Earth. Right. Oh, nothing special here, oh don't mind me, just decided to wake up one day and fly the bloody Mako through an alien transport beam, straight into the Citadel, to talk a madman into doing the right thing and stepping down with a bullet, eh, just in time for tea with Cthulu himself. Please. What utter horseshit."
Shepard blinked, not quite believing what she was hearing.
"You honestly think, if there wasn't something absolutely remarkable about you - that every damned crime syndicate in the Universe would be out there fishing for your corpse as trophy? That Joker, and I shouldn't even be telling you this, gave up bloody flying after your death from his survivor's guilt – and he jumped – jumped – and for him that's no small feat - bless him, at the chance to serve under you again when the call came to us that Cerberus had you, and that you were still alive?"
She turned her head to the sleeping turian, who looked almost peaceful in spite of his injuries.
"You think it was a coincidence, that he lost his mind after you were gone? Here's a secret, my girl. 'Course he did. We all did. Because like a wise space-commander once said, there's no damned honor anymore. And everybody who can't be bought knows it. And that's why I left Europe – and that's why I'll never set foot upon a colony, and that's why I'll brave even Cerberus's unadulterated bullshit just to serve Commander Shepard another day."
Chakwas crossed the room and picked up Shepard's codex, turned around, and placed it in her hand; giving her a direct look that she did not break, as she spoke directly from her heart.
"So, I'm frankly tired of standing here, watching a strong woman cry over things better left in the past. Thus, me to you, old woman to young – trust your damn self, mind the gap, and carry on. Shepard, he's turian, and from how I've heard you speak, you know turians. You know damned well that you can't take responsibility for his decisions – that he wouldn't let you. You know that he will own them, no matter how bad they were. And I know, that the person in that bed would follow you to hell if you asked, and that there isn't a silly row or injury in the galaxy that's going to come between two people who were given a second chance to storm the skies together again."
And she tossed her head proudly back, checked her watch, took her codex, and strode to the door, but then turned back at the last minute, and eyed Shepard sharply.
"Oh, and one more thing. Don't let anybody condescend you for liking aliens. If the bloody men can fancy asari without anybody losing their damn hat – and they're not even technically female – then fuck all and cheers."
And she stormed out of the clinic, with Shepard staring with her mouth slightly open, wishing she had learned to talk to her sooner.
Author's Note:
If you ever get close to a human
and human behaviour
be ready to get confused
there's definitely no logic
to human behaviour
but yet so irresistible
there is no map
to human behaviour
they're terribly moody
then all of a sudden turn happy
but, oh, to get involved in the exchange
of human emotions is ever so satisfying
there's no map and
a compass
wouldn't help at all
human behaviour
- Human Behavior, Bjork