When Shepard woke again, a different, quieter medic appeared to take her vitals. She ate a little food, bland military rations. Her mother didn't appear at once, so she wondered if she had imagined the whole scene of the day before. Maybe it was an effect of whatever head injury she'd had, or the meds. She lay in her drab bed and stared at the dingy ceiling and wondered if she'd lost it this time. She wondered if she could possibly obtain an omni-tool or a book or, hell, anything to pass the time. Instead, she dozed fitfully.

But a few hours later her mother came back, ushered in by one of the staff, and sat down by Shepard's bedside. "How are you today?"

"I'm... fine, Mama. Where were you?" Her voice sounded weak in her ears, querulous. She frowned, fidgeting with the edge of the blanket.

"I can't be here all the time. I'm working with the quartermaster. There's a lot to do, you know." Mama set down her bag and rummaged inside. Shepard squinted as a ball of green yarn and needles emerged from Mama's bag. Knitting. Mama had knitting? She didn't remember Mama knitting before. She tried to focus as her mother kept talking about her work, something about the logistics of feeding and housing so many people, refugees and wounded...

"You never used to work," she found herself blurting out.

Mama's knitting needles stopped. She stared at Shepard with narrowed eyes and then snorted. "You left home a long time ago, Valenka. Even your baby brother left home five years ago. You think I've just been sitting around dusting the furniture?"

Val flinched, embarrassed. She did remember her mother as fully occupied with her four children, the youngest born when Val was nine. "We wanted a big family and the space to raise them in," Dad had always said, and Mama had usually responded with that snort as she looked around at their tiny colony prefab house. "We could do with a little more space, if you ask me," she'd say, and then usually one of the boys would start demanding his own room.

"No, of course not," Val said hastily now.

The brisk movement of the knitting needles resumed. "You know I've been in colony administration for years. Honestly, don't you even read your messages?"

"Of course I do." Val picked at the edge of the sheets, looking away from her mother. "Sorry. I just... it's easier to remember when we were small."

"Hmf." Mama sniffed. "Well. I suppose Ivan was still young when you left home. But yes, Valenka, your mother is a real professional."

"I never meant you weren't—"

"And this place could use it. Humans, turians, salarians, asari, krogan — do you have any idea how much krogan eat?" She shook her head. "At least the quarians are mostly staying in their ships. Good people, they help us a lot."

Shepard kept quiet and let her mother talk. Mama was positively animated as she explained the complicated business of managing supply chains on a planet suddenly full of injured people of more than half a dozen different species. The quarians were pushing their liveships to their maximum agricultural output, apparently, and everyone was having to coordinate shipping goods around the Exodus cluster at sublight speeds. It sounded very complicated, the sort of logistics that gave commanders fits, that would have had Shepard herself tearing her hair out. Shepard stared at this stranger who seemed to be her mother and wondered, for the first time, what it had cost her mother to stay home with four rambunctious children in a tiny house while her husband worked out in the labs and fields every day. Dad's work as an agronomist had been vital to developing crops that would adapt to Mindoir's soil and ecosystem. Val didn't remember her mother ever complaining about her father not being home enough.

"Mama?" she said before she thought, interrupting her mother's stream of conversation.

"What is it?"

"Did you miss working, when we were little?"

Mama frowned at her knitting. Val watched the pucker in her forehead, her eyebrows drawing together. It was a familiar expression, too familiar to be something she hadn't seen in years, wasn't it? "Sometimes," she answered after a moment.

"Then why didn't you?" There must have been professional child care even on their colony, right?

"I didn't have children so someone else could raise them." Mama's frown deepened. She sighed and began to unravel her knitting. "Easy, they said. Something to keep your hands busy. Pff."

Val frowned herself. "You're — did you just learn to knit?"

"Have you ever seen me knit before?" Val shifted uncomfortably, but Mama kept talking without seeming to notice. "As if I ever had a minute to sit down, with all four of you. No, no, a lady at the office showed me. Before you woke up. Something to do to keep your mind off things, she said." Her hands were so steady and her eyes so focused on the yarn in her hands that Val barely caught the tiny waver in her voice.

Guilt made her shoulders hunch. "I'm... sorry, Mama."

"What for? For doing your duty?" Her mother's voice was harsher now. "For fighting those... Reaper monsters? No. You did the right thing. I know you didn't have much choice about joining, with the biotics, but you have served well."

"I..." She swallowed, jarred by the sudden wrongness. She hadn't discovered her biotics until the slavers attacked. She'd only had her basic biotics training after age sixteen, along with her foster care and her grief therapy. If the batarians had never attacked Mindoir — what then? She'd gone to the Alliance Academy so she could return to the colonies and protect them. Hadn't she? Or had she been... conscripted, somehow? She couldn't summon up any memory of it, or any other memory of finding out her abilities. Her fingers closed, crumpling the blanket. What did the Alliance do with biotics who didn't volunteer? "Well. I'm here and awake now."

Mama sniffed. "Of course you are. You're made of strong stuff. I always knew that."

Shepard blinked, caught off guard. She couldn't recall Mama ever saying anything like that before. If she thought back, she remembered a lot of scolding, a lot of Behave yourself, young lady and You'd be so pretty if you just did something with your hair and Why must you run so wild with the boys and Take care of your brothers. She and her mother had never been that close, had been at odds more than otherwise. There were too many younger brothers to get much time for mother-daughter bonding, and the things Val had liked, like running in the woods and fields around the colony, weren't her mother's sort of thing, anyway. Things had been especially bad when she was a teenager, and she couldn't remember any more what they'd fought about, just a haze of shouting at each other before she either grabbed her running shoes and went out, or went into her little bedroom and slammed the door.

But if — since — her mother was here, they must have... they must have gotten over that at some point, right? They'd had sixteen years of adulthood to work things out. Half a lifetime. And — she couldn't have been home all that time, if she'd been on active duty, but they must have talked. Right? Of course they had, Mama had even mentioned messages. She must have visited. Sometime.

Her missing memories taunted her, a giant gap of connection or reconciliation that she had no access to. Except they weren't missing, were they, not really? Her memory was just full of something else: her foster family, her military career, her crew, her friends. Shepard was used to going it alone, used to taking care of herself. She had responsibilities to others, sure, but they were bonds of duty and camaraderie and professionalism— and later, friendship. If none of that was true, then who was she? What was she like? Did she send messages to her parents after every mission? Did she keep tabs on her brothers? They would all be grown now, living their own lives, and Shepard couldn't imagine herself doing any of that. But was she a dutiful daughter, in the end, a good sister? Or a terrible correspondent? She didn't know, and the lack frustrated her, made her cast about for something she couldn't quite see, perpetually lingering in her blind spot, shifting further out of reach whenever she turned her head.

Something of her confused reflections must have shown on her face, because Mama said, "What?"

Shepard shook her head quickly. "It's nothing."

"Tsh." Mama looked at her severely. "You're a poor liar. You always have been. Do you think your mother can't see right through you?"

Shepard's lips twitched, in spite of herself. She'd kept her share of secrets, and she'd learned how to bluff, but Mama was right: she'd never been good at the bald-faced lie. She had to prepare for one, gear up for it like it was a mission. No, she told the truth, most days, no matter how hard it came back to bite her in the ass. Except—

—except that wasn't her, who'd told the truth about the Reapers for the last few years, was it? It was that other Shepard. The famous one.

She rubbed her forehead. She didn't understand any of this. If she was hallucinating, it was an extremely detailed hallucination. If it was some kind of scheme or ploy, it was a frighteningly realistic one.

And Mama was still waiting for a response, lips pursed and eyebrows raised in a familiar expression. Since she was a bad liar, Val gave her a little of the truth: "I just didn't remember you saying anything like that about me before."

Mama huffed out a little puff of air. "Why say it? It was clear enough. All those bruises and skinned knees. Running wild with the boys." She shook her head, and she was smiling. Smiling. A fond, indulgent little smile. She hadn't smiled about any of it back then.

Maybe this wasn't really her mother after all. Shepard's fingers curled into the blanket. "But... you were always scolding me for that..." she protested.

"How else was I going to make a young lady of you? You got into fistfights, devotchka. How many times did you come home with a black eye, eh? Or skinned knuckles?"

"Not that many!" It had happened a few times, sure, but not more than three or so. Had it? She ducked her head, trying to remember.

"No, because you gave more than you got." Mama shook her head again. "Do you know how many times the other parents called me? Hmph. I told them, if their boys couldn't hold their own, that was no fault of mine. Or yours. Pff." She frowned at her knitting.

Shepard had no idea what to say. It was as if the pieces of her childhood were rearranging themselves in front of her eyes, or as if someone had whisked back a curtain to reveal the levers and gears at work. Maybe she couldn't trust even her more distant memories? "You never said anything like that," she said faintly.

"What, should I have encouraged you? No. Especially not after you hit your teacher."

"That was an accident," Shepard said, sure her cheeks were burning, and hoping the facts lined up right. She had hit Mr. Salazar, but only because he was wading into a fight she was having with the Macmillan twins, and that had only been because they were picking on Misha, and he'd only been five or six at the time, and Mama had told her to look after her brothers...

Mama clicked her tongue. "I know it was. But it looked bad, you understand? Hitting a teacher and fighting with those younger boys, even if there were two of them. Such a mess. We had to do a lot of talking with your principal."

"Oh," she said faintly. The stories matched up, and she supposed that was good. Still, her perspective felt turned on its head. Maybe it was just the fact of hearing how her mother saw things, or looking back on the events as an adult. She'd been twelve or so, fired up with a ferocious drive to protect her little brothers, and she'd charged in without thinking through the consequences, determined to teach the Macmillan bullies a lesson. She supposed they were all lucky her biotics hadn't flared up yet, or she might have done more serious damage.

"I always knew the boys were safe with you, though."

"Oh." Val stared down at her hands in her lap and relaxed her death grip on the blankets.

"You're a good big sister. Always good at taking care of the boys."

"Thanks," Val said hesitantly.

Mama chuckled. "Look at me, getting all sentimental. Let's have enough of that, eh?"

"Mama," she said, and then stopped herself. Her whole life, she'd never known how she got the eezo exposure that had made her a biotic.

But she could ask, now, if she could get past the hesitation clogging her throat.

"What?" Mama said.

There was a knock on the door, and an aide appeared with two trays.

"Here's dinner," Mama said with some satisfaction. "What was it you were going to say?"

Shepard reached out and accepted the tray. Did she need to know? "Nothing."

#

When Shepard was finally allowed to get out of bed and start physical therapy, the routine quickly became familiar from previous injuries, which was to say it was gruelling, painful, tedious, and irritating. Her injuries, plus three weeks' unconsciousness, had taken their toll, leaving her weak and fragile and wobbly. She set herself to the therapist's prescribed exercises with dogged determination. It quickly became a routine: breakfast, work on her legs, lunch, work on her arms and shoulders, dinner, collapse into bed. She could tell she was making progress, which meant it must be happening quickly. "You're doing very well," said Lara, one of the therapists, watching her walk and scribbling notes. "It's unusual." She frowned at her records, tapped something on the pad, and then her face cleared. "Oh, you're in the cybernetic enhancement group. I've only seen that once or twice before. That explains a lot."

"Right," said Shepard, wishing she could actually run on the treadmill. She would get there—she could almost feel the cybernetics starting to kick into gear, rebuilding damaged bone and muscle—but for the moment, walking had her sweating enough. Then her brain caught up with what Lara had said. "What?"

"Cybernetic enhancement group?" Lara said. "The Alliance was running a thing with volunteers before the war started, cybernetic physical enhancements on top of the usual genemods. It's right here in your file." She waved the datapad, as if Shepard could read it from her position on the treadmill.

"It is?" Shepard said, and when Lara looked puzzled, she hastily laughed and added, "Good, it didn't used to come up right in the file."

Lara shook her head, making another note. "Gotta love Alliance record-keeping, huh?"

Shepard forced another laugh. Her heart was pounding more than the level of exertion really called for. She itched to grab that file and look it over for herself, maybe find out more about whatever cybernetic enhancement group she was supposed to have been a part of. She was used to thinking of her cybernetics as unique, designed by Miranda's team on the Lazarus Project, legacy of that and the series of questionably legal tech shops on Illium and elsewhere that they'd visited in the days of the Collector mission. Back then, any edge had seemed worth it, and Dr. Chakwas had approved the installations.

Maybe they weren't as unusual as she'd thought. Maybe the Alliance had been using similar technology all along. But she couldn't remember signing up for any such program.

Or could she? She could imagine, at least, the array of forms and disclosures and waivers that she would have had to sign; she could almost visualize them, bland bureaucratic language and the Alliance seal at the top.

Shepard shook her head and grimly set back to her exercises.

She couldn't shake the restlessness afterward, though. The cybernetics under her skin seemed to be revving her up, filling her with energy. She was pleased with her progress, at least. The better her therapy went, the sooner she could get out of this hospital, back on her feet and back to full strength.

But why? What did she have to work toward, to get back to? Mother, father, brothers? Maybe. They must have their own lives. She couldn't imagine living at home with any of them now, and if she had friends now, she didn't know who or where they were.

She had friends, she thought rebelliously. The best friends anyone could ask for. Friends who had been there for her in the face of everything, who had stood by her side through the worst things she could imagine.

She had not one clue where any of them was now. Or, even worse, whether they would recognize her if she found them. That thought made her breath come short and her eyes damp; she had to lock it away, focusing on the mindless rhythm of her exercises instead.

She slept badly, in spite of all the exertion. She dreamed that her skin was blackened and burnt, the flesh of her arm seared away and her tendons tightening into a claw; she dreamed of a hole in her abdomen, and the hot slickness of blood spilling from her body. She woke up from dreams like that gasping, and had to scramble out from under her covers and pull up her clothes to look at herself and verify that her skin was pale and whole and healing.

Still, she would look at her face in the mirror, and imagine that there should have been a scar on her cheek, a crescent standing out under her eye. She couldn't shake the feeling that this other Shepard, this John Shepard, carried the scars that should have been hers.

Maybe he'd taken her friends, too. If he had her place — or if she'd somehow imagined herself in his —

No. That, too, didn't bear thinking about.

Her subconscious seized it, though. Now her dreams returned to the forest, or the Citadel, or London, and her ears were full of whispering voices that she wished she couldn't make out. She would find herself running toward the sound of Tali crying, but Shepard couldn't reach her in time. She dreamed of Garrus walking away from her, and woke up unable to remember what they'd argued about.

Usually the dreams slipped away on waking, leaving her only with a clinging dread that she could never quite shake off, no matter how much she tried to empty her mind and focus on anything else. She had no omni-tool to distract herself with, and her mother's conversation wasn't enough.

Mama stopped by daily, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for a couple of hours. She always brought her knitting. Whatever she was working on grew, day by day, a shapeless mass of green yarn. She talked, determinedly, about her work at the quartermaster's office or whatever scraps of news she'd picked up. She mentioned names that blended together in Shepard's head, until she couldn't recall which ones were Mama's current coworkers and which ones were neighbors from back home.

"You haven't talked much about the war," Mama said one day, head bent over her project.

Shepard flinched. She hadn't been sure what she could say without creating confusion. "You haven't asked," she said defensively, and regretted her tone immediately.

Mama didn't seen to notice. "They said you might not want to."

"They?"

"The doctors." Mama frowned. "Or no. Maybe it was someone else. But everyone says London was bad. Lot of casualties. You might not remember, they said, and that might be for the best."

"Oh." Who, she wanted to ask. Mama often talked about they who'd told her something, and if Shepard asked who they were, Mama would say, "Oh, you know," in a vague sort of way, meaning the brass, or the harried civilian authorities, or what passed for the news media these days, maybe. Shepard wasn't sure.

"I will listen, if you like." Mama made a stiff shrug. "Or I'm sure a psychologist will come by, if you wish." She glanced up again. "Do you remember?"

"Yes," Shepard muttered. She remembered. She and Garrus had joked about walking into hell, but London was the closest she'd come to it. Dark, chilly, and damp, the city had stunk of ash and decay. Hordes of husks, with their screams and their groans and the stampeding of their feet, seemingly endless hordes of them, leaving nothing to do but fire, and fire some more, punctuated by the hiss of a spent heat sink and the surge of biotics. The worst night of her life, bar none. She remembered that the noise of the Reaper ground cannons had been so loud that the ground had shaken and aiming was nearly impossible; she remembered the bitter certainty that this was it, their best and only chance, the dire knowledge that the squads on the ground and the fleets in the sky were there because of her, because she'd pulled every string and called in every favor she could muster, and solved the most protracted of conflicts just to get everyone there, to that nightmare that threatened to go on until every last one of them dropped. At least they would go down fighting, which was better than a lot of the Reapers' victims could say.

And she had done it, had gotten herself through that night with Garrus and Tali at her back. Just like always, like it had been since nearly the beginning of the whole struggle. They had run out of quips in the end, even Garrus. They'd saved their breath for fighting. By then the two of them knew where she was going to be next, and she knew how they'd position themselves, how she could best deflect attention and guard their flanks; they didn't need to speak any more, all differences left aside in the familiarity and chemistry they shared. So there had been nothing left but raw honesty when the two of them were too wounded to go on. She'd called for evac because there was nothing else she could do, not for them, and there had been nothing else to say but what they'd said to each other in the end, in the hellscape the Reapers had made for them.

If that was all a delusion, that priceless camaraderie in the midst of that nightmare —

Her vision hazed, blinded by tears. She tried to blink them away, and drew a breath to settle herself, but it turned into a sob before she knew it, a creaky little sound. She clenched the blanket in her hands, and a few drops fell from her eyes, hot on the back of her hand.

She'd almost forgotten there was another person in the room, until her mother's arms swept around her, thin and firm. Mama was saying, "Shh, shh, you're all right," and murmuring in Russian. For once it was easy to let herself go, to let her head rest against her mother's shoulder and cry while her mother smoothed her hair and soothed her.

Far, far easier to do that than to explain what she'd lost, even if it was only the construction of her own mind, something that had never really existed.