A/N: It has certainly been a while. I've been busy, but I have more free time now. Expect more regular updates. Hope you enjoy!

He picked up the teacup. Its handle was warm from the boiling liquid that had been poured inside. The rising heat carried the scent of mint and tea leaves. He took a deep breath, inhaling the warm smell and letting it fill his lungs. He slowly brought the rim of the cup to his mouth and took a small sip, careful not to burn himself. The taste was unlike anything he had had before. It wasn't synthetic bullshit flavoring; he'd seen the man put actual leaves in, turning the clear, boiling water into a brownish murkiness.

"You must be wondering why I said I knew you," Marcus began. After the ending of their last conversation, he thought he would make some tea and calm the nerves.

"You weren't the first Marcus I've met. Well, I guess maybe you are, since you said you knew me." The name Marcus haunted Shepard. "I knew another one."

"And, where is he?"

Shepard snorted. "Dead. I killed him."

Marcus repositioned himself in his chair, a little unnerved by the revelation. But he forced a small smile on his face. "Then I endeavor not to end up like him."

Shepard looked at the poor, old man. Was this the life he was condemned too, being surrounded by people who were constantly afraid of him? He gulped before speaking. "I…I'm sorry. You should know that I ended to inflict no harm on you. I promise."

Marcus faintly smiled back at Shepard, filling him with warm, alien feelings. "I was left for dead in the ruins of my house. My family had been taken from me and killed in front of my eyes, and I was powerless to fight back."

As John watched Marcus tell his story, he thought he could see him visibly age ten years and shrink further into his seat in shame. It saddened Shepard that this man had to suffer, to see so much taken from him; mostly because it reminded Shepard of himself: unable to stop the horrors that had happened to that which he cared for. And at this point in Shepard's life, he'd already learned to care for nothing.

"And then, just as fast as the slavers had arrived and rounded everyone up, they left. And I was all alone." Shepard held his cup of tea with both hands, warming his fingers as he tried to comfort himself. "I was barely able to stand up and watch this place burn to the ground. Fires were spread far into the distance. There was blood. Blood everywhere."

Shepard's set down his cup of tea and balled his fists. He was angry. "Did you cry?" Shepard asked.

"No, not yet. Sometimes it can take a while for the feelings to hit you. It hadn't shown on the outside, but inside, I was… broken. I had lost everything and everyone I cared for. I wondered why they hadn't taken me, killed me, enslaved me, instead of my family. I trudged through this place, walking aimlessly, without purpose. I can still remember the heat of the flames, the sting of ash in my eyes, the smell of death."

Shepard watched as the man's eyes turned glassy and lost focus as he relived his memories. "Eventually, I collapsed from exhaustion."

The room, except for the sound of the crackling fireplace, was silent for a long time. Shepard waited patiently for Marcus to continue, but as the minutes dragged by, his curiosity and impulsiveness won out. "So what happened, did the alliance find you or…?" he left the question hanging in the air.

"They hadn't arrived yet. It wouldn't have mattered anyway; the damage was done. No, I woke up again in the morning. It was quiet, so quiet. The fires had long ago burned away, the pirates had left. It was just me and nothingness. I… I wandered around for a long time, aimlessly, searching for something, but I wasn't sure what. Maybe anything. Eventually, I reached the wreckage of a downed ship."

"What kind?" Shepard asked, the soldier in him wanting to identify the ship.

Marcus shrugged his shoulders. "It was Batarian, no question about that. Maybe a fighter, by its size, but I couldn't tell you." He cleared his throat. "As I approached the ship, I noticed charred and splintered pieces of wood everywhere. It had crashed on a house, and I suddenly realized it was your parent's house. Barely half of it remained, the other half having been destroyed by that ship. So, I walked towards it."

Shepard picked up his tea. It was getting colder now, the liquid no longer blistering hot. He took a fuller sip this time and savored the flavor as it passed over his tongue. Without as much heat, he could taste all the rich flavor of the tea leaves. He would have enjoyed it more if he weren't having such a depressing conversation.

"I could see an armored body lying face down on the ground, a couple of meters away from the aircraft. He lay in a pool of his own blood, dead. But I wasn't happy with it. I took the gun holstered at his hip and shot him again." Marcus snorted. "I don't know what I was expecting, the body to cry out in pain or something, but the pilot had already been dead for a long time. The sound of the gun was eerie in a place so quiet, so devoid of life. I listened to it echo away into the distance and eventually fade into nothing."

"And then I heard a scream. A single wail coming from the wreckage of the house. I thought I must have been imagining things in my delirium. Nonetheless, I approached the building. Maybe, against all odds, someone had survived. And I… I was right. I found you, buried under a mess of wooden beams. It was a miracle you hadn't been killed. But, when I finally reached you…" Marcus paused, gulping in disgust at the memory, "you were holding an arm. A severed arm. I tried to pry you from the limb, but your arms just wouldn't let go. When I looked closer at it, I realized something: it was your mother's."

Shepard closed his eyes for a second. Everything Marcus had said seemed so familiar to him. Except he couldn't remember it. It felt like a weird scene of grim and morbid déjà vu. "How… how could you tell?"

"Your mother's wedding ring was still on her finger. I was your father's best man; I'd know that ring anywhere. It was nothing overly fancy, just a small diamond on a gold band. But it was your mother's. So I now knew why you would not let go of that arm. I took the ring off her finger and put it in my pocket. It would be something I would keep to remember them by."

"Then I tried to make you let go of that cold, stiff limb you couldn't stop hugging. You were understandably stubborn, but eventually, you let go. I carried you out of the house in my arms. Your eyes were… wild. You didn't even blink, just stared straight at me. I would have expected you to cry and scream, but you didn't."

"Why?"

Marcus shook his head. "I don't know. But it was concerning. Babies always cry, and you weren't, despite your injuries. You had burns and cuts all over. I thought maybe it was because of all that had happened. Or maybe you'd already cried. But in that moment, I knew I couldn't let you die. You were the last living memory of your parents. You survived what so many others didn't. After having let so much slip through my fingers already, I wasn't about to let you go to."

John just stared blankly at the wall. He wasn't sure what to feel. Angry, sad, grateful? But most of all, he was shocked. Shocked that someone had cared so much for him, because he felt like nobody ever had.

"I cared for you as best I could, but there was very little I could do, other than shield you from the cold or find you a sip of water. But as the hours dragged by, I knew you were dying, either from starvation or from your injuries. And there was nothing I could do to save you. You were cold, so cold, and I thought that you'd already died and that I was holding a dead body."

"Yet, just when I was about to give up hope, I heard the roar of engines. For sure, I thought that this was it, that we would die now, that the pirates had returned. Armored soldiers started dropping from the sky, armed to the teeth. They found us, hiding in the wreckage of a barn. Just when I thought we would have died, one of them took off their helmet. It was a human, and I never thought I'd be so happy to see a random person. They took you away, and…"

Marcus never finished his sentence. "And what?"

"I never saw you again, John. Days later, when I was finally able to ask someone who knew about you, they said that they had already taken you to Earth, that it would be safer there for you."

And so, Marcus' story was finished. The two men sat in silence for a long time. Shepard's mind was elsewhere, processing all the things that he had just heard. After god knows how long, Shepard spoke up, stating two, simple words: "Thank you."

Alenko and Williams sat on a log, basically doing nothing. It was getting late in the afternoon, almost sunset. Shepard had yet to return. To be quite honest, Alenko wasn't sure he would ever return. But two days still remained.

"So, what's it like running around with the commander? Any different than being stationed on a planet?" Alenko asked.

"Well, it's certainly been a crazy, busy couple of weeks, I will tell you that. But, for the most part, I wouldn't rather be anywhere else. We're hunting down some of the worst of the worst. What could be more honorable than bringing them to justice? And I think the alliance picked the right person for the job."

Alenko started to crack his knuckles, one-by-one, an old habit he'd developed ever since he was a kid. "For which job? Justice or hunting?"

Ashley sighed and picked up a twig. She started writing letters in the soft soil. "Fair enough. But it needs to be done. Sometimes, the best person for the job is the worst person. Too many lives are at stake. You saw what Saren did to Eden Prime. If we can stop that from happening again, then maybe the collateral damage is worth it."

Kaiden looked over to see what Ashley was drawing on the ground. A farmer, it read. "What you writing?" he asked.

She dropped the twig in her hand. "Oh, nothing."

Kaiden poked her in the arm. "Liar."

"Fine. It's a poem I read a long time ago. It reminds me of all of this." She started typing on her omnitool, searching up the full text of the poem. She patiently waited for the page to load, internally cursing the slow signal on this backwater planet. "Here," she finally said as she held out her omnitool so Kaiden could see.

He began to read the poem out loud.

"A farmer comes home one day to find that everything that gives meaning to his life is gone."

"Crops are burned, animals slaughtered, bodies and broken pieces of his life strewn about."

"Everything that he loved taken from him - his children."

"One can only imagine the pit of despair, the hours of Job-like lamentations, the burden of existence."

"He makes a promise to himself in those dark hours. A life's work erupts from his knotted mind."

"Years go by. His suffering becomes complicated."

"One day he stops - the farmer who is no longer a farmer - sees the wreckage he's left in his wake."

"It is now he who burns, he who slaughters, and he knows in his heart he must pay."

Kaiden was never good at poetry, but he slowly put all the pieces together in his mind. Who the farmer was, the life's work, the suffering, the wreckage. It all fits so perfectly. Except for the last part. He wasn't sure that Shepard cared about the way he treated people or the things he had done. "Where's it from? Also, you should show that to him."

Ashley shut off her omnitool, suddenly very self-conscious. "Old TV show. And no, never. Don't you dare tell him I showed you that. I don't think he would be happy."

Kaiden stood up, staring into the distance. He looked at the sky, a light orange that gradually faded into purple. It was almost like a painting. It was beautiful. "Don't worry, your secret is safe with me," he laughed. He paused, collecting his thoughts before continuing. "You know what really scares me about him? However rash and brutal and evil all the rumors about him are, that was under alliance regulations. I fear the things he might do in the future, without the threat of any rules at all. And if the last weeks have been any indication, we all might end up dead sooner or later."

Ashley snapped the twig in her hands in half before getting up too. "It's a price I'm willing to pay to find Saren. He killed… everybody. Friends, families, even kids. I can't remember being anymore afraid and scared than that day. And I prayed to God for help. I guess my prayers were answered. I…we couldn't save everybody, but at least some people survived. If Shepard wasn't there, everybody would have died.

Kaiden took a deep breath before turning to face her. "But you didn't make a deal with God, you made it with the devil, that's the problem. Shepard didn't care about saving the colony. He did it because he enjoys killing. At the start of the mission, when we lost a private, I've never seen a commanding officer care so little. Even tried to stop me from helping the dying kid. That is the kind of man we are serving. And maybe that's okay now, when he's hunting down Saren. But then what do you do when he becomes the new rogue spectre, and you have to hunt him down? I'm scared that they gave somebody like him that much power."

Ashley stayed silent. She wasn't really sure what to say, mostly because she kinda agreed with everything Kaiden had said.

Marcus was rummaging through the bottom drawer of his dresser. He kept everything of true value to him here. Eventually, he found what he was looking for: the wedding ring, which had gone untouched for years, maybe even decades. And an old photo, its edges frayed and charred from a fire long, long ago. He slowly stood back up, his back in immense pain from having been bent over at his age. He slowly hobbled his way back to the living room and took a seat. He placed the two items in the center of the table. "Here, you should have these. They belong to you," he said softly.

Shepard first picked up the ring, delicately lifting it off the table with two fingers. The band was made of gold and had a small, medium-sized diamond. Even in the dim light, it sparkled and shined. It must have cost a fortune. Shepard never understood why people would waste so much money on something like this. To him, the fact that you had to throw around money to get a person to care about you only reinforced his pessimistic view of human nature. Yet, to him, the ring still had infinite value, not because of what it was made of but because of who it had belonged to. He gently placed the ring on the table and picked up the second item: a photo. Its edges were burned off unevenly, but enough of it remained that he could see the subject of the photo. A man and a woman stood smiling, hugging each other. "Are these…"

"Yes. Yes. They. Are," Marcus stated, enunciating each word.

These were his parents, there was no doubt about it. He could see the very features that he carried from each of them: the eyes, the face, the hair, and so on. He reached to touch his own face, almost as if he was touching his father's. They looked happy, so happy.

The irony hurt. They looked so much like him; no shit, because they were his parents. But they were completely different people. What he saw in the photo was two people who enjoyed life and each other's company; the smiles on their faces and the look in their eyes… these were good people. But Shepard, what the fuck was he? All he could see was the face he would wake up to every morning: sickly-colored bloodshot eyes, laced with hatred and disgust at the world around him and himself. No, these could never be his real parents. Sure, maybe they were biologically his parents, but they hadn't been the ones to raise him, criminals had. He knew that if they had lived, he would be a completely different person. Feeling that he didn't deserve to look at the photo any longer, he placed it face down on the table, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Marcus.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Shepard replied simply.

Marcus leaned forward in his chair. "I've only known you a short while, and even I can tell when you're lying."

Shepard started to nervously tap his fingers on the table. "It's just I… I don't deserve that photo."

"Why?" Marcus asked, confused. "These are your parents. I'd rather no one else have it."

Shepard sighed loudly before responding: "I'm not their son. That kid died a long time ago."

"Nonsense. You can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to me."

"I'm a bad person, Marcus. I'm a soldier who travels the stars, killing people. If they'd known the depths I have gone to, the things I've done… they'd never call me their son. They help and care for people. Not like me, I break them."

But Marcus refused to listen. "No, you're still a good person" he insisted, "and you're still their son."

"Good?" Shepard laughed painfully, "I lost that part of myself a long time ago. I'm not sure if I can find it again." He paused, before continuing, his voice almost a whisper. "I'm not sure it matters anymore. You wouldn't understand. Taking a life…you…you lose apart of yourself, something you can't get back. It changes you."

"I refuse to believe that crappy excuse," Marcus replied sternly, "every day, you make a choice. You have that choice, no matter what you tell yourself, and I don't care what you tell yourself. I suggest you use it and use it wisely. For there will come a day when you die, and in that moment, no matter how little you care about life, everything you've ever done, every regret or mistake, every missed hope and failed aspiration, will stare you straight in the face and make your last seconds of life a nightmare." Marcus wagged an accusatory finger in Shepard's direction. "So I suggest you stop making excuses and start being the person you want to be. Maybe your parents are dead, but they'd tell you exactly what I said. If you do give a damn, I suggest you heed this advice. If not, you have nobody to blame but yourself."

Shepard's eyes stared at Marcus, scanning his face. So old, yet such conviction remained. "I have everybody to blame. The world treats me like shit, and I'm supposed to help it! That's not how this works. They deserve to suffer just as much as I have."

Marcus violently shook his head, a little ashamed of what he was hearing. Maybe Shepard was right, he wasn't their son. "You're full of shit, you know that? One second, you say you're not good enough of a person. The next, you question the value of being good at all."

Shepard's eyebrows popped up, stunned. "That's not what I…"

"Now, I have a theory. You enjoy taking the path of most resistance, making life difficult for yourself. Why?" Marcus folded his hands in his lap, now confident in his argument.

Shepard laughed heartlessly, but he was anything but amused. "You don't know what you're talking about. And I don't know why you care so much. Just let me be. This is my life."

Marcus sat there, looking straight into Shepard's eyes. For a couple of seconds, he didn't say anything, but he held Shepard's undivided attention, nonetheless. Eventually, he spoke. "Maybe you're used to having people give up on you. But, unfortunately for you, I'm not that kind of person."