Author's note: With thanks to IllusiveSoul for assisting me with the description of the tuxedo/gown and for beta-reading and for being awesome. :D

"I should've asked you to take me shopping with you sooner," Miranda remarked as she and Shepard entered a brightly lit store full of formal wear, all of it carefully arranged in such a manner that it somehow didn't make the space feel or look as cluttered as it actually was.
"Why?" Shepard frowned, and Miranda gave a pointed look at the clerks hastily making their way over to the duo.

"Because whenever you enter an establishment, you're immediately flagged as a VIP in the internal memo, and everyone hurries to cater to your every need," she said, and now that Shepard thought about it, that had indeed happened at the three stores they'd visited before arriving here, only Shepard hadn't considered it was because of her.

"That's a thing that stores do?" she asked, and Miranda laughed.

"I think it's adorable you think they treat every customer this well," she commented as the clerks began offering their various services from assisting with picking things out to serving champagne and light refreshments, perhaps a bite sized piece of cream cake or a salty snack of some kind.

"This is silly," Shepard commented, beginning to feel rather uncomfortable with all the attention. She didn't usually shop in establishments like this, typically she ordered her clothes through the Extranet, but a wedding gown wasn't something she could order without trying it on.

She wished she'd had a camera ready to capture the look on Miranda's face when she'd told her that she would be the one wearing a dress while Samantha would be the one in her dress uniform. She supposed she could understand why people would assume she'd be the one insisting on wearing her dress blues; she knew she hardly came across as a delicate, feminine flower.

While being guided toward the section with the wedding gowns, they walked past something that immediately caught both Miranda and Shepard's eye, and they paused simultaneously, exchanging a look.

"That's it," they said in unison and rushed over to the outfit they'd spotted, leaving the sales clerk behind, and wondering what happened.

A tuxedo composed the top half of the outfit, the jacket a deep shade of navy blue, the smooth rounded lapel trimmed with matching gray satin. The dress shirt underneath was white, the vest over it a same shade, its edges trimmed with more of the navy blue hue that the jacket and bowtie were made of.

At the height of the waist, the tuxedo gave way to a large, flowing gown. The fabric was long enough to effortlessly cascade around the wearer and drag behind them, but not long and wide enough to become inconvenient despite spreading in a large circle and giving the wearer an imposing figure, assured to catch eyes wherever the wearer went.

"Well, that was over quicker than I thought it would be," Shepard commented as they were exiting the establishment after having spent some time trying the tuxedo/gown on and discussing making minor alterations with the staff to ensure the fit would be perfect.
"I had reserved the entire day for this, so we're nicely ahead of schedule. We could take a lunch break and then tackle the wedding cake."

"Not literally, I hope," Shepard smirked, and Miranda rolled her eyes at the bad joke. "I honestly don't think I'm qualified to make any decisions about the food, let alone the cake; growing up, I spent years literally eating from restaurant dumpsters, so you can't expect much from me as far as having a sophisticated palate goes."

"The mental image of a child-version of you dumpster diving is heartbreaking but extremely difficult to imagine because I've only known you as the savior of the galaxy," Miranda said as they walked in the cooling Autumn noon air.

"Funnily enough it seems that most people have conveniently forgotten where I come from because it's not good PR for Earth if the poster girl of humanity has a history like mine," Shepard shrugged one shoulder. Not that she'd ever tried to hide any part of her past, the things she'd done or why she'd done them; the Alliance, however, had rather effectively tried to dampen the stories once Shepard had become a household name.

They made their way to a nearby restaurant and ordered lunch, Miranda going over a long list of things she'd already gotten done, and another list of things that still needed to be done as they waited for the food to arrive. Frankly, Shepard didn't really have any opinions about anything regarding the wedding and was happy to let Samantha and Miranda handle it all (well, except maybe use her veto-right if for some reason either one suggested anything incredibly gaudy). That said, there were times when she felt rather useless, because she didn't know what she could do to help. She expected she should've offered some input, but she genuinely had none.

While the wedding was important, it wasn't the point of it all. A big celebration to make her union to Samantha official was all well and good, and of course there were the legal aspects of it all as far as inheritance and ownership of property went, but what really mattered about it all was the promise, not the party or the property. The promise of spending the rest of their lives together, sharing their everyday life, raising their daughter together.

As far as Shepard was concerned, they could've had the legal aspect of it all sorted at a courthouse and then have a small party with a few close friends rather than a whole wedding, but then again, she'd only do this once, so why not go all out for it.

"If you actually do want or need my help or my input, just ask me, but otherwise, I have full confidence in you and Samantha, and I am more than happy to just stay out of your way and let you handle everything," Shepard said, and Miranda raised an eyebrow.
"You mean I get to be in charge of everything with minimal interference? I will try to somehow manage," she grinned.

"Thank you, you're so generous," Shepard chuckled. "But seriously, thank you. I know wedding planning is a bit...below your paygrade, so I do truly appreciate everything you're doing."
"Believe it or not, it's my pleasure, it's fun planning for something nice for a change," Miranda assured.

Their food arrived and Shepard eagerly dug into her meal of garlic noodles; all this conversation about catering had made her rather hungry. Miranda took a bite out of her grilled steak bruschetta, and frowned a little as she chewed.

"What's wrong? Is the food bad?" Shepard asked upon noticing the look on her friend's face.
"No," Miranda shook her head, "I just realized there's one very important thing we'd completely forgotten to consider."

"And what's that?"
"The wedding dance," Miranda said, and Shepard froze in the middle of taking a drink from her mineral water.

"Oh, shit. Oh, fuck," she cursed. "How am I supposed to—hell, I would've needed a year to practice before—oh, crap!"
"Calm down! We're ahead of schedule, so, after lunch, we'll find an instructor, sign you up for some lessons, and get started, there's still time," Miranda said.

"Right after lunch? Is that a good idea?"
"Probably not, but we both know you will need all the time we can afford," Miranda smirked, and Shepard had to agree.

She had no illusions about her dancing abilities. Normally, it didn't matter, and whenever she danced, she didn't care about looking stupid because the point of dancing wasn't to look cool, it was to dance because you were enjoying the music.

But a wedding dance was different, formal, important. She couldn't afford to step on Samantha's toes or trip over her own feet, or shuffle awkwardly. Plus, she would need to be able to dance while wearing the gown. This was going to be a problem.

"You said you wanted to implant some kind of a control chip into my brain when you were bringing me back from the dead, can't you just get a chip that would make me a great dancer and put that in my brain?"
"Honestly? If such a chip existed, I would do it in a heartbeat because it would still be easier than teaching you to dance."

After an excruciatingly long afternoon trying to learn the basics of a simple waltz and being repeatedly figuratively slapped on the wrists for mistakes like trying to look at her feet while dancing, Shepard finally arrived home. She'd been willing to leave and volunteer for diaper duty a couple of hours ago rather than keep practicing, but Miranda wasn't wrong when she said Shepard needed all the time they had.

The instructor Miranda had found was the definition of a hardass, and Shepard predicted that the strict woman would have what it would take to get Shepard to finally learn to dance at least for one song. Shepard also predicted it would take more tears, sweat and blood to accomplish that than it had taken for her to accomplish anything before, and that was saying something.

"Samantha?" she called out but there was no response. Shepard figured she was probably asleep, having managed to adjust to the baby's sleeping rhythm quite well, napping while the child was napping. Shepard didn't call out for her again, worried she might wake her if she was indeed asleep, and instead, she went to the kitchen.

After retrieving a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, Shepard took a long drink from it as she made her way to the living room. The bottle fell from her hand when she entered the room and saw the stranger sitting on her couch, holding her daughter.

"Who the hell are you?" Shepard demanded. The man turned to look at her instead of focusing on the baby in his arms (the baby still happily patting his cheeks with her little hands), and Shepard frowned because he did look a little familiar, but she had no idea why because at the same time, she felt certain she had never seen him before in her life.

His hair had been shaven to a stubble, he had thick dark eyebrows and blue eyes, a scar extending from his hairline higher up his head. He also had noticeable scarring around his neck, the lines dotted with small white circles left behind from stitches. He looked rather ragged and on the edge, visibly jittery, and Shepard recognized the symptoms all too easily; he had crashed from his high and was now moving on to withdrawal.

"You don't recognize your own brother?" he asked, and Shepard frowned.

"Cain?"
"In the flesh," he said.

No, that was impossible. How could he be alive? And furthermore, if he was alive and had been this entire time, why hadn't Shepard ever heard of him until now?

"You can't be, Cain is dead, if he ever even existed in the first place," Shepard insisted, taking slow steps toward him. Whoever this guy was, he was obviously unhinged and Shepard needed to get her baby away from him.

"As if coming back from the dead is even a trick to the descendants of Lilith Shepard, you should know," Cain smirked. "Now, stop right there. Wouldn't want to risk an accident...like with her mother," he continued, holding the baby up a little higher to emphasize his point, and Shepard stopped.

"What did you do?" she whispered hoarsely.

"Don't worry, I didn't do bad things to her before I shot her. Mama raised a gentleman," Cain said and reached his left arm behind his back, still cradling the baby with the right one. He pulled out a pistol from where he'd kept it tucked under his belt and he held it up, giving Shepard a pointed look.

Shepard recognized the pistol all too well. It was Lilith's ancient Colt M1911.

"Where is she?"

"In the shower," Cain shrugged, and Shepard clenched her teeth, fighting the urge to just run over there and check, maybe there was something she could still do, maybe he was lying about actually shooting Samantha, anything was possible, Shepard would need to go look to be sure, but she couldn't, not now, she had to get the baby away from him. All these thoughts were running through Shepard's head, colliding and crashing into each other, rendering her incapable of making a decision, and for the first time in her life, she genuinely felt herself freeze in panic.

She'd had brief moments of hesitation before on the battlefield, but never anything like this. It was different when the life you were potentially risking was your own or that of a soldier's who'd known what he was in for when he'd enlisted. Taking risks and making decisions was easier then. But now the life in danger was her child's, and Shepard couldn't move because she was too terrified of that being a fatal mistake.

"How did you even find me? What do you want?" she asked instead.
"Your fans love to stalk you and among all the chatter and hype about your upcoming nuptials, they made your location pretty much public knowledge. I've been watching you for weeks. As for what do I want, well...I'm not entirely certain. I just know I can't let you have this beautiful life while you've ruined mine."

"How have I done that? I didn't even know you were alive!" Shepard snapped, and Cain stood up abruptly, jerking the gun in Shepard's direction.

"You killed my mother!" he yelled, pressing the muzzle of the pistol against Shepard's forehead and pushing hard. His finger, however, remained resting on the trigger guard. Shepard contemplated on trying to snatch the gun away from him, but decided not to, it was too risky while he was still holding the baby.

"You took everything from me!" he continued furiously, his skin glistening with sweat, his eyes watering as silent tears began to swell and slide down his face. "So, I'm going to take everything from you."
"Don't!"

"Why not?" he shrugged one shoulder.
"It doesn't have to be like this. We're both more than Lilith and Andromeda, we can do better, we are better. Yes, she's gone but...you're not alone, you've got me. You're my brother, we can still be a family," Shepard said, and Cain smiled through tears, then laughed a little.

"How stupid do you think I am?" he asked. "Besides...why would I want to live in a world without my mother? She actually cared about me enough to bring me back," he continued, tilting his head to the side a little to give Shepard a better view of his scars.

Whatever had been done to him had involved a lot of surgery to somehow fix the broken neck Andromeda had given him. It had obviously worked, but looking at the amount of scarring, Shepard guessed it had been a slow and painful process. Maybe painful enough to drive one mad.

Shepard could relate, she'd been there herself, and had admittedly felt like she would go insane too from the amount of pain and repeated invasive surgical procedures she'd had to endure since being rescued after once again plummeting to her death from space. Funnily enough, she didn't clearly remember what dying actually felt like. She figured it was her mind's way of shielding her from snapping because if she could remember how horrible it had really been, she'd probably go insane.

Or maybe Cain was insane just because he was insane. What little Shepard recalled of her childhood with Lilith had been a constant struggle to gain the approval and love of a callous mother-figure who would never love her back. Then again, Shepard had not been the favorite, Cain had, perhaps Lilith had treated him with all the care a loving mother would treat their child.

But why can't I remember him? If he was alive the whole time, it doesn't make sense that I haven't seen him before, Shepard tried to recall.

Had there been a sickly kid among the gang, someone who had gotten Lilith's full attention? Maybe? She had a faint recollection of feeling jealous over something like that, but she'd never known it was her actual brother. She supposed it wasn't surprising she couldn't remember or hadn't been told the truth about him; she hadn't been told the truth about Lilith being her biological parent either.

"She was my everything, and you murdered her!"

"She didn't leave me a choice," Shepard said.
"Just like you didn't leave me one," Cain said, turning the pistol toward the baby (who was by now crying at the sudden loud voices that had startled her).

"No!" Shepard lunged toward Cain. Everything was moving in slow motion and Shepard felt like she was trying to wade through thick syrup, her movements excruciatingly slow as she tried to hurry to stop Cain when he placed his finger on the trigger and a loud gunshot boomed through the room. Shepard felt warm liquid splatter across her face, her skin pelted with something hard among the warm stickiness. Ignoring it for now, she grabbed the baby and pressed the child against her chest protectively, only then turning to look up at Cain.

The entire upper half of his head was gone, ripped away by the projectile that had entered through the back of his head. His mouth hung open limply, fragmented bone, brain tissue and blood dripping from what was left of his head, and slowly, his body went limp and he fell to the floor.

Behind him stood Samantha, still holding Shepard's heavy pistol in her shaking hand. She was nude, her hair wet from the shower and from blood, a lot of it caked to her scalp, a generous stream of it continuing to flow from the head wound, trickling along her neck and over her shoulder to her chest and abdomen. She lowered the pistol, her grip loosening until the weapon fell from her hand, and she slumped against the wall, slowly sliding down to sit on the floor.

Shepard hurried to her, kneeling beside her as she called for help.

"It's gonna be all right, I'm right here, you're going to be fine," Shepard kept repeating, as she held on to Samantha's hand tightly, cradling the baby in her other arm as she waited for the paramedics to arrive.
"I want you to name her what we discussed," Samantha said.

"Don't talk like that, you're not going anywhere, you will get to name her yourself."
"Shepard..."

"Don't."

"But there are things that I need you to hear and promise me you will do. I want you to move on, all right? You don't handle being alone anywhere near as well as you like to think you do," Samantha insisted, and Shepard scoffed. The last thing she wanted to think about was "moving on", there would be nothing to move on from, everything would be fine, this was stupid.

"Don't talk, just...hang on, okay? Just hang on. You've got a lot to live for, you're not allowed to die now, not after everything we've been through to get here, do you hear me?"

"I love you, Maxima."
"I love you too, and you're going to be fine, just hold on," Shepard said, letting out a breath of relief when she heard the sirens approach, and a few moments later the paramedics entered the living room, followed by a police officer.

"What the hell happened here?" he frowned as he looked around, and Shepard admitted this must have been quite the scene; there was a body missing half of his head, a naked woman with a head wound, and Shepard holding a screaming baby. Still, this was hardly the time to ask questions.

"Help her!" Shepard yelled, and the police officer gently pulled her aside so that the medics could do their jobs.

"Huh...interesting," the woman kneeling beside Samantha said as she carefully palpitated her head.

"Ow! Don't bloody touch it, it hurts!" Samantha yelled.
"I know it hurts, but I don't think the bullet actually pierced your skull," the medic said, still feeling around Samantha's head.

"What?" Shepard exclaimed, relieved.

"We will obviously make sure, but from what I can see and feel, the bullet is lodged between your scalp and your skull, the scalp has a lot of tiny blood vessels so there is a lot of blood which makes this look a lot worse than it really is," the medic explained. "You are very lucky!"

"Lilith's gun. It's a relic, it didn't have the firepower to do any worse damage," Shepard laughed through tears when she realized what had happened.

Without further delay, the medics took Samantha with them to the hospital to have her head properly examined, the bullet removed and the wound patched up. Shepard would've wanted to go with her, but someone needed to look after the baby and give a statement about what happened.

When Shepard looked at the baby, she noticed a smudge of drying red blood on her cheek. She couldn't say if it was Cain's blood or Samantha's, but it didn't matter, she had to get it off. She went to the bathroom, intending to get a towel and wipe it off, but she stopped in her tracks when she saw the state of the room.

There was a splatter of blood sprayed on the wall in the shower, a small pool of it on the floor where Shepard presumed Samantha's head had rested at while she'd been incapacitated. Copious drying smears of blood spread on the floor, a trail leading out of the bathroom and into the master bedroom where the trail turned into a pattern of droplets and bloody footprints and handprints from where Samantha had stood up and gone to the weapon locker from where she'd taken the heavy pistol she'd used.

That was too damn close, how could this happen? I almost lost them. I almost lost them! Shepard screamed internally as she stared at the carnage and it finally sunk in that all this blood was Samantha's.

"Hey, uh, you probably shouldn't go in there before the techs go over the scene," the police officer said, placing a hand on Shepard's forearm and lightly urging her to turn, and she nodded numbly as she followed him into the kitchen.

"I...uh, sorry, what was your name?" Shepard frowned, feeling groggy and dazed as her brain worked to catch up with everything that had happened. She'd reacted to the situation, handled it out of muscle memory and instinct, almost completely without thinking, but now that she was actively thinking about it, everything felt awful.

"You can call me Andres," the officer said.

"Excuse me, Andres, thank you, could you...take the baby, I don't...feel too good and I'm afraid I'll drop her," Shepard managed through shallow breaths. The officer took the baby into his arms and Shepard sat down on the floor, her entire body trembling uncontrollably.

The thought "I almost lost them" kept looping in her mind over and over, and suddenly she couldn't breathe. For a fragmented moment, she felt like she was falling from the sky, swallowing air uselessly as she tried to breathe in oxygen that didn't exist, and she was suffocating, her skin felt like it was burning and itching, but the itch was somehow deeper than skin and no amount of scratching at it made it go away. Her entire body cramped as it struggled to breathe, a sharp pain spiking through her abdomen and chest, spreading over to her back.

"Hey...it's okay. Everything's okay, I know what you're experiencing now feels very real to you, but I assure you, it isn't. You're safe, all right? You're safe, everything is fine," Andres's voice came through.

"Focus on your breathing. Come on, just take a big inhale with me, through the nose, just in...and out through your mouth...in...and out," he kept repeating, and Shepard sucked in a breath, managing to slowly bring it under control and settle into a calm rhythm.

The panic attack slowly faded away, and she went from shaking to shivering and finally just feeling a bit jittery.

"Sorry," Shepard muttered and wiped her face, only now realizing she'd apparently broken down in tears without even noticing.

"Why are you apologizing? I'd be worried if you didn't have that kind of a reaction to everything that happened here," Andres said. He then turned his attention to the baby who (thankfully) seemed completely oblivious to what was going on and was instead focused on the shiny badge attached to the officer's uniform. He turned to look at the child when he felt a tug on his shirt.

"Are you trying to steal my badge? That's illegal," he smiled at the baby as the child kept running her fingers over the embossed surface of the badge, utterly fascinated by its texture.

"Then...thank you."
"It's all right," Andres assured.

"I can take her now," Shepard then said.
"It's okay, give yourself a minute, we're fine," he smiled, and Shepard nodded, having to admit she wasn't quite as confident in her ability to hold the baby without dropping her as she wanted to be.

"I suppose I should tell you what happened here."
"When you're ready," Andres said, and Shepard nodded again, exhaling deeply.

This was going to be a long night.