Shepard sat at a workstation after her shift, silent and focused. The general aura she cast indicated clearly she did not want anyone to talk to her, did not want anyone to look at her, did not want anything except to be left completely and totally alone. Like she already was. Her eyes burned as she worked steadily, almost obsessively, her pale face rendered ghastly by the light of the screen.

For once, Fitzpatrick the cat was not lying beneath her chair sleeping or waiting for her to finish her work and pay him some attention.

Shepard's mouth thinned, trying to stop her eyes from stinging. It wound up a pointless exercise.

Valen, the rescued turian child, behaved beautifully for the human crew, right up until the time the turian delegates met with the Captain to take the child into custody. Valen and Fitz began to panic: Valen at losing the cat, the cat at being separated from the child.

Shepard knew Fitz belonged to a turian originally. She never expected him to want to leave the Midway…leaveher. Her own words to Arbor as she stood, watching Fitz and Valen scream, echoed loudly in her head, amplified and reverberating in the vast emptiness she sought to fill with preparatory study.

Let him take the cat! Then she fled, unable to stand the noise, or the wail inside her at losing Fitz. A sense of hopeless abandonment swelled over her, enveloping her until her eyes slid out of focus, no longer interpreting the squiggles on the interface as writing. Vital information.

The cat was not only a reminder of a dead best friend; he eased the gaping hole in her soul left by too many deaths of too many people close to her. A cat could not replace people, but it could ease the void of loss.

Eight standard hours ago, Fitz had left in Valen's arms, eyeing everyone warningly. As she watched over the security channel, her eyes blurred with tears, which she immediately rubbed away with the palm of her hand.

She repeated the gesture now. She was a marine, dammit! If she didn't start acting like one, she could count on people coming over to chew her out about being tough. Or worse, try to 'make her feel better'. The brutal correction for her own failings did nothing to ease the tears, but stubbornness kept them within the confines of her eyes.

So stupid, she snarled to herself, keying down several lines of text, poking the interface harder than she needed to, getting so worked up over a cat. A cat for crying out loud. She wished she had not thought the word 'crying'; it made her eyes sting worse.

She could get another cat, though she doubted it would be accorded mascot status as Fitz had. No, she couldn't get another cat. Why bother when she wasn't in port for more than a few weeks in a year? It wouldn't be fair to the cat, she'd have to find someone to look after it while she couldn't…she might as well buy it for someone else.

Her throat tightened as she stopped paying attention to the interface again, absently chewing on her tongue. The trouble caused by letting the cat go to someone else—someone who genuinely needed the creature's comfort—made Shepard seriously doubt her career choice. Not that she could change paths now, the Alliance was what she knew, all she knew. But her apparent lack of fortitude and toughness made her doubt, and the empty echoing hollow where Fitz had once purred in her soul lent extra strength to dark depressing thoughts.

The analytical functions of her brain seemed frozen in the aftermath of losing the one creature she really connected with. She worked with the rest of the crew, worked well with some of them…but she could not bring herself to call them friends. They were business partners, acquaintances at best, not friends. Not like O'Conner. Not like Fitz. Not like any of her dead friends on Mindoir.

Shepard slouched further in her chair, letting the armrests take her elbows, flaying her thumbs as she did so. So much death. So much loss. Part of her wondered if she shouldn't go through the medical system to see if they could do anything about this, but the practical part of her operating in the background demanded an answer for: what can they do about it?

Any of the popularly prescribed drugs for managing psychological conditions would bounce her out of the N-program faster than she could blink. She'd passed the initial physical which meant consideration for entry only, but if they got one hint, one scrap of evidence there was something wrong with her that would make her unable to function they'd bounce her out of the program. Ns were expensive, after all. No one wanted them to turn out defective.

No, she couldn't take that—especially not today, on top of everything else.

Nevertheless, as Shepard bullied her brain into retaining the information she read on the bright interface, she could not stop the feeling of abandonment sinking into her skin like soft rain into dry ground. This was not the empty loss of someone near her killed. This was the feeling of being abandoned. As hard as she tried, she could not think of it any other way, despite what the logical or compassionate parts of her argued.

She needed the cat.

She also needed, she thought savagely, to advance, which meant abandoning the pity party in hopes of getting some real work done.

The harsh words pulled her to task, but did nothing about the burning in her eyes.

No, she had had enough. Enough loss…so she would not leave herself open to it, ever again. Friends she might have, but never a best friend, a sister-in-arms. Comrades she might have, but no man could hope for more than that.

It was an empty life. A life empty, but for service.