Chapter 1: Changes

September 9, 2184 CE

Lazarus Research Station, Deep Space

Of all things it was the hands that bothered him. They were just so... different. Those hands, strong, scarred, and calloused, that gripped the back of his pilot's couch, that hauled him to the escape pod, that launched the pod even as they were sucked into the void—they were indelibly imprinted in his mind. The hands before him now were smooth and unmarked. Devoid of history, of connection.

Empty.

Jeff "Joker" Moreau, currently (and probably permanently) unassigned pilot extraordinaire, stood observing a massive tank with endless wires and monitors trailing in every direction. The tank was filled with pale blue fluid which cycled constantly, bubbling with added oxygen. Inside floated a naked woman whose privacy was guarded only by strips of opaque fabric. Commander Shepard, paragon of humanity, Savior of the Citadel, cast off of the Council, and ultimately another life cut short, unable to fulfill her purpose.

Don't think of her that way, Jeff. This bitterness business is starting to get to you.

A sudden movement in the tank drew Joker's eye. Did she just…

Her hand twitched again. Joker opened his mouth and turned—

"Just testing the nervous impulses while we rehydrate her, Jeffrey. Nothing to worry about."

The voice's owner, his guide and unofficial guard dog, stood back in the shadows cast by the bright medical monitors at her workstation.

"Don't call me that." He tried to cover up his irritation with humor. "To you, it's Grand Admiral, or Joker if you must. Ah, the life of a hero."

She waited in silence, refusing to take the bait.

Joker sighed. "Alright, Cerberus. I didn't think I'd ever see the day, but you've got a deal. Bring her back and I'm in."

February 2, 2185 CE

Serpent Nebula / Widow System / Citadel Station

Time went slowly for Joker as days slowly turned to weeks, then months. Aside from his brief visit to the secret Cerberus space station (after they'd carefully ensured he couldn't figure out where they'd gone) he'd had no contact with anyone remotely resembling a Cerberus agent. He'd spent his time on the Citadel, the center of the galactic community and home of the multi-species Council which governed most of known space. All of this came as quite a surprise to humanity a generation back, and they were still in the process of playing catch-up.

At times like this, leaning against a bridge railing and looking out over one of the lakes of the prestigious Presidium deck of the Citadel, feeling the artificially generated breeze play across his face, it seemed like it might never have happened; that seeing Shepard, Cerberus, all of it was just another nightmare. But the credits kept coming in regularly. In turns it gave him a fevered sense of wild hope, only in the next moment to have the fact that he'd more or less signed up with a terrorist organization slam back into his mind. Who'd have imagined he'd end up here?

The breeze kept blowing, churning his slow thoughts.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been standing there when the man approached him. Joker's measure of time was based on how many times he had to sit on a bench to rest his legs, and it hadn't quite adjusted to adjusted since the new (terrorist funded!) cybernetics had gone into his legs. The man, as painfully nondescript as one could be, set alarm bells ringing. Nobody looked that normal.

Defense mechanisms built over years kicked into high gear, spewing passive-aggressive irony in all directions. "Sorry, no autographs today buddy."

"No doubt," snorted the man in amusement. "You leave in twelve hours on the Gryphon, a shuttle at docking station ninety-four." With that he turned and nonchalantly walked away.

Joker turned back to look over the lake. Despite everything, the little ember of hope he'd been trying to quash for months had burst into a flame. Don't do this to yourself. Dead is dead. There's no coming back. Even if she did, imagine how much harder a zombie Shepard would push you. Probably make you do a suicide run or something, as if taking on rogue Council secret agents and insane AI's bent on galactic extermination wasn't bad enough. Don't go, it's obviously a lie.

Even as he thought it, he knew he'd be at docking station ninety-four, bag packed, and an hour early to boot. Shepard was the only one who could get him to be punctual. He shook his head with a sigh and wandered off towards his apartment to start getting packed.

February 6, 2185 CE

Deep Space, Lazarus Research Station

The lights turned back on.

Burning pain flared all over her body as lines of liquid fire traced along her legs, chest, back, and face. Even her brain felt like it was choking on flames and smoke. Her first, instinctive reaction was to curl up, an instinct she only half managed to suppress, and instead clutched at the worst pain in her left side. A voice echoed somewhere beyond comprehension, strong and persistent. Alarms blared shrill cries and she could feel the vibrations of explosions rippling through her, every movement an agony.

"Shepard... armor in the... der attack..." She started making sense of the voice, though it felt like her ears were cranking the volume up and down haphazardly.

And that meant she was probably still alive.

How am I not dead? What's going on? Where… where am I?

Her mind struggled with a massive overload of stimulus and conflicting shreds of memory. She died. She knew it, remembered her last moments aboard the SSV Normandy and her crazed flight into the outer atmosphere of some unimportant, backwater planet. The Alliance had arrived too late to save her. And yet...

While her mind worked, gears grinding back into motion, her body slipped into the autopilot spawned of many, many hours of training. If there was one thing she knew, it was combat. She shut down the pain, compartmentalized it away, and dragged herself up to a sitting position. Familiar armor was neatly laid out in the bedside locker, and she forced her aching body into it.

The armor fit her perfectly, every millimeter adjusted exactly to each quirk in her body, a process that normally took weeks. She shuddered at the thought of unknown hands measuring, adjusting.

Whoever had made the armor had taken the time to emblazon the red-and-white N7 stripe down the right arm, identifying her experience level within the elite special forces of the human Systems Alliance. There was even a heavy pistol, an M-3 Predator by the markings along the short barrel. It looked like a standard-issue heavy pistol; the small mass-effect-generating core of element zero was there, ready to temporarily diminish the mass of tiny grains of metal sheared off the ammo block and accelerate them to hypervelocities, with a thermal clip to absorb the resulting heat.

She moved onward, stepping out of the room and into a hallway with the industrial-clean feeling of hospitals everywhere. A door guard lay slumped over her desk, a smoking whole in her chest, across from the crumpled remains of another human. They'd killed each other, but both wore the same white uniforms with black accents bearing an emblem that was vaguely familiar. Traitors? A civil war?

She turned right down the next corridor past medical displays and expensive-looking equipment, her only option as the base went into lockdown and heavy airlocks dropped down, sealing off passageways. Corridors and bullet-proof glass funneled her in a straight path that seemed far too predetermined for her liking. She crept silently through laboratories and past research stations, pristine in white and steel. Nearby she could hear the clanking of mechs, even the deep, rumbling buzz of a heavy mech's machine gun, and distant screams. Not something to face with only a pistol she'd never fired, much less after… whatever happened to her.

Her luck ran out as she rounded another corner and three light mechs stood guard, blocking the path. Backwards led nowhere; the only way was through. A quick heave and a stainless-steel desk became a temporary barricade, scattering papers, pens, and knickknacks across the floor. The desk shuddered under the mechs' combined fire and they started circling around. No time to waste.

Keeping low, Shepard peeked out the left side of her cover, lined up the M-3 on the nearest mech, and opened fire. The pistol thudded just as she remembered, its heavy recoil reverberating up her aching arms. She studied the mech while her shots chipped away at its armor, making it struggle to maintain its balance. They were bipedal and humanoid with thin limbs that made them look ungainly and top-heavy. The mech's head was dominated by a single red sighting lens set dead center, which spun as it refocused on Shepard. Her rounds finally punctured its armor, blowing through the painted-on registration number and sending the killing machine tumbling to the ground.

Return fire focused on her from the other two mechs, clanging off the desk and sizzling against the kinetic barrier system, colloquially known as shields, built into her armor. She shoved the desk with her shoulder, rotating it to the left, and ducked back down. The move bought her a few seconds during which the faint hum and reassuring tingle of her barriers returned.

Let's see if this still works.

Shepard reached deep inside herself to a small mental irregularity, a spark of power and awareness of mass and gravity. Humanity had never experienced anything like it until contact with the Citadel and its intergalactic community. Aliens left and right seemed to naturally reach out and manipulate reality in ways human science could hardly describe, much less emulate. Then the first accidental spill of imported Element Zero happened. Overnight, humans started to exhibit uncontrolled "biotic" behavior, which the Systems Alliance military was quick to take advantage of. Despite many failures and bouts of outright insanity, they had finally come up with a stable system of implanted amplifiers for these biotic soldiers. Shepard once had one, but she hadn't even thought to check...

A blue corona of power flickered faintly on her skin as she mentally condensed and focused the power into a mass-effect generating pull. With a grimace of effort, she stepped out from behind the remains of the desk and pulled on the closest mech. The power slipped away as quickly as it had come, leaving her even more drained than before, but the mech only stumbled, barely knocked off balance. The pull that had once lifted a mech helpless into the air only tripped one! Irrational anger burst into life, the consummation of all the pain, confusion, and fear she felt. Disregarding the danger, caution, and even self-preservation, she strode straight out to the staggered mech. The third mech's sand-sized projectiles clanked and hissed off her shields and armor as she put the Predator to the closer Mech's head and pulled the trigger.

Just as it gave its last spluttering spark her defenses gave out, leaving her helpless. She was about to die, again, from a cheap, mass-produced mech. It was just too much.

Then something happened that had never happened before. Shepard lost control.

She'd been angry, full of passion, enraged even, but never, not even as civilians were slaughtered around her, had she ever given over control to the anger. It was not something soldiers did if they wanted to stay alive.

With a snarl of primal ferocity, she aimed all her anger, hatred, all of herself at that last mech which stood calmly aiming to take the kill shot, hopelessly out of reach. She pulled on her biotics harder than she ever had before, but instead of throwing it out of herself at the mech, she threw herself into the biotic storm which crackled across her skin with wild, self-destructive abandon.

The result was something she had never seen, or even heard of. The biotic corona gathered around her launched her at the mech. The impact was enormous, biotics rippling like lightning as they instantly transferred all her momentum into the light mech, launching it backwards into the white walls and shattering it into spluttering, dying remnants.

Shepard staggered, equilibrium thrown off by the abrupt deceleration. Her shoulder hit the wall and she slid to the floor as circuits and shattered metal rained down around her. Nausea tore through her stomach and she heaved, choking on vomit of pale white goo.

What am I? What happened to me?

Only the distant sounds of combat answered.

Without an active threat her adrenaline sputtered out and she couldn't get up again. Lying there, not moving, just doing nothing was gloriously peaceful. And it was okay, okay, okay, because nobody was counting on her. She was dead. Nobody would die if she didn't move. She didn't think she'd ever stand again.

Her eyes closed.

Her head drooped.