Shepard and Garrus ran into Vega as soon as they got to the bar. Shepard wasn't even surprised to find the big lieutenant leaning on a stool. She was surprised to see him light up with a broad grin and wave at them both. "Hey, Scars! Blondie! Glad you could make it!"
As soon as she heard the nickname, her face contorted into something that was probably a snarl. "Blondie?"
"Sure, 'cause..." James waved a hand vaguely in the direction of her hair.
"He likes nicknames," Garrus supplied. "Can't be bothered to remember people's real names."
Val rolled her eyes. Her face felt permanently crimped into a scowl. "But you have to be able to do better than Blondie."
"What? Don't it suit you?" James grinned at her.
She'd never understood his original nickname for her, but now she felt oddly desolate. She was supposed to be Lola, damn it, and she couldn't very well demand that he call her that. She settled for a blunt: "No. It doesn't."
"I'd have to agree." Garrus signaled the woman behind the bar, who passed him a bottle. Evidently the two men were regulars here. Val ordered a beer while the two of them kept wrangling.
"What do you know about it?" James demanded. "You're hearing everything we say through a translator."
Garrus shrugged, cracking open his bottle. "You really think I've worked with humans for years and not picked up anything of your language? What you said was obviously a diminutive, and she's not."
Val blinked at that. She wouldn't have thought he had that strong an impression of her. When glanced at him sidelong, though, he returned a flaring grin. She couldn't help but smile back.
James snapped his fingers and pointed at her. "Marilyn."
Her smile dropped and she rolled her eyes. "Now you're just picking famous dead blonde women. No."
"I'll figure somethin' out." He tapped his head. "I always figure them out."
"What, you think 'Scars' is so brilliant?" She accepted her drink from the bartender.
Leading the way to a booth at the back, Garrus snorted. James looked injured. "I call 'em like I see 'em."
"I don't mind, Jimmy," Garrus drawled, glancing over his shoulder.
"What do you call Shepard?" Val asked, curious. She couldn't imagine James applying a feminine nickname to John Shepard.
The two men looked at each other. "Loco," James said, looking a little sheepish.
She laughed.
It was an odd evening. Almost comfortable, and yet not quite. The place was, to tell the truth, a dive: some sort of shed or warehouse originally, maybe, that had been repurposed when someone dragged in an assortment of mismatched chairs and tables, including one tall enough and long enough to serve as a bar. Shepard didn't want to know where the proprietors got the weird variety of liquor they provided. The woman behind the bar, with a tight face and bright red lipstick, served drinks competently, but didn't invite much conversation.
Garrus had picked the booth. Shepard noticed that he'd chosen a seat where he could see the whole room, and had an especially good view of the door. He leaned back in the booth, one ankle crossed over his knee, all relaxed swagger, but he drank slowly, and his eyes didn't seem to miss much as they traveled around the room. James leaned on the table, shoulders hunched, roaring with laughter. He was putting away a lot more, but Shepard knew the lieutenant had a substantial capacity.
She took a moment, while the men were bantering with each other, to send a message to the address Garrus had given her.
To: Jacob Taylor
I'm Lt. Cmdr. Val Shepard, with the Alliance, currently on Terra Nova. I'm looking for my brother, Alex. Garrus Vakarian told me you might know where to find him. Let me know if you can; I'd like to make sure he's safe.
Shepard sent it off while James was laughing about some joke she hadn't caught. Communications were jammed up enough that there was no telling when it would go out, but she'd sent it to the queue. Hopefully she'd hear within a few days. She powered down the omni-tool and put her attention back to the conversation.
The rhythm of talk between James and Garrus was easy to fall into. Familiar, like a sport: jokes and sarcasm and anecdotes batted back and forth between them with an ease and comfort that Shepard couldn't help but find inviting.
Except that the stories they told might start in familiar places, only to veer off in directions she didn't expect.
"So we were checking out this mine," Garrus would say, "and it turned out that it was full to the brim with husks."
"Naturally," James said with a chuckle.
Shepard remembered that mine. It had been some of the ugliest close-quarters fighting she'd seen in a career full of ugly close-quarters fighting. They'd gone down and down and down into the mine, the air close and dank; she'd started snapping husks' necks with her hands to conserve thermal clips. She tried to remember who'd been with her and Garrus. Jack, Shepard thought. The younger woman had gone to pure biotics and had been drenched in sweat, a snarl on her face, by the time they reached the bottom of the mine to set their charges.
Garrus's version of the story was different, an adventure involving Zaeed and an explosive that John Shepard had rigged out of a defective tactical cloak. Val laughed appreciatively, while trying not to squirm in her seat. Her own contributions to the story-swapping had to come from earlier parts of her career, and she could only hope they didn't overlap too closely with anything John Shepard had ever said.
"You must have seen some action in Hammer, though, right?" James said as the evening wound down.
Val stiffened. Memories of that dark night, the stench of a city full of dead, and the screams of the husks and banshees, flickered through her mind. Everything she remembered about that night had Garrus at her side. Her eyes shot across the table to him. He lounged in his seat, regarding her with interest, and she had to control herself carefully so she didn't flinch. She couldn't leave him out while talking about that night. She didn't know how. She looked at her empty bottle instead. "Yeah, I'm not so sure that's a story I'm ready to tell."
"Mm. I hear that." James drained what was left of his glass.
"I think we've all been there," Garrus said, in a slow, meditative way.
"I should go," Shepard said abruptly. The air felt too warm, suddenly. Stifling, too many voices chattering at other tables. James snorted as she pushed her chair back, and Garrus blinked up at her.
"Do all humans do that?" he asked.
Shepard's cheeks grew warm. "Sorry. Long day."
Garrus nodded, and she turned to go with only the briefest return nod.
"See you around, Goldilocks," James called after her.
"Again with the hair," she grumbled. "Come up with something better, Lieutenant."
He laughed behind her as she made her way to the door.
Outside, it was just growing dark. The cool air felt like a balm against her face, warmed from the afternoon's jog and a few hours spent in the bar. Shepard stretched out her legs and took the walk back at an amble. The bar was outside the Alliance camp, but not even a kilometer away, an easy enough walk. Probably just enough distance to let the Alliance turn a blind eye. Shepard hadn't even drunk enough to be buzzed, really. Her biotic metabolism always burned through alcohol quickly. She passed a couple of people headed the opposite direction, and wondered how rowdy the place got later at night. The gate guard gave her ID a cursory glance before waving her on her way, and she exchanged nods with a couple of people without recognizing anyone. Still, no one seemed to recognize her, either.
In her gray room, Shepard changed into her one set of coarse, bland pajamas and went to sleep. She woke from muddled dreams about London and found her omni-tool's message indicator blinking.
None of the messages were from Jacob. There was a terse one asking her to report to a Major Coats at Alliance command, a schedule for outpatient physical therapy from the medical team, and three from her mother.
The hospital says you got discharged. Give me a call.
I stopped by your quarters but you're not there. Where are you?
Don't disappear on me. Call me.
She scrubbed at her eyes and hastily tapped out a message. No way she wanted to call this early, with her mother possibly already in a tizzy.
Sorry, Mama — didn't get your messages until this morning. Tool must be a little unreliable. I'm fine, all checked out, getting squared away with Alliance command today.
The water turned cold two minutes into her four-minute shower.
Shepard learned quickly that the camp worked on routine, and she was a piece of grit in the gears. She showed up at the mess hall only to be informed that her card cleared her to eat breakfast between 0700 and 0800 hours, not after 0800; on learning she was newly released from the hospital, she was grudgingly allowed to eat breakfast off-schedule, and had to prove she was a biotic to get authorized for the full biotic's ration. She ignored the guarded or exasperated looks she got from the people in line behind her and dutifully ate her reconstituted eggs and toast at a corner of one of the long tables without speaking to anyone.
Lacking anything better to do, she checked in at HQ, where a harried attache stared at her blankly for several seconds before her face lit up. "Oh, Lieutenant Commander Shepard! I'm so glad you're here."
"I'm just glad to be out of the hospital," Shepard said with a smile.
"I can imagine," the aide said. "Listen, the Major doesn't need to see you yet, since you're not cleared for combat, but I do have the biotics schedule for you."
"Come again?" Val asked.
"Oh, no. Didn't anyone tell you?" The attache blinked at her. "You're supposed to be supervising the biotics facility."
Val stared. "I am?"
The aide sighed and rubbed her eyes. She had impressive dark circles under her eyes. "Yeah. Someone has to supervise training sessions and keep track of equipment, do evaluations, make sure no one's experiencing side effects from combat or other medical issues, and you're the most senior biotic we have on site."
"I am," Val repeated numbly.
The aide looked at her as though she were a little slow. "Of course. Weren't you with the Biotics Company? You've got qualifications nobody else does. I mean, I suppose they have biotics over at the turian camp, but... someone really should have gone over this with you. Let me just see if I can find the records..."
"I'll wait."
The aide nodded and bent over her console, muttering to herself, probably about other people's incompetence. Shepard stepped back and took a couple of deep breaths. Right. She'd been Kaidan's second-in-command in the 1st Special Operations Biotics Company. There weren't that many biotics older than she was, especially not without significant impairments from the old L2 implants. Of course they thought she was the most experienced human biotic available.
She'd never done that kind of training, though. Her own training had been patchy and mostly improvised, and more to the point, was all years ago. As a biotic in regular combat, Shepard had learned by doing. She knew a lot of practical tricks, but very little theory. She'd also never been good at the kind of finesse and control that people like Kaidan or Miranda had. Throw things across the room? Fine. Throw herself across the room? Sure. Those things she could do. Keep up a barrier or a singularity? Nope. She'd always been shit at those. Half of what she'd learned, she'd gotten from asari or Wrex. How the hell was she supposed to train a bunch of assorted Alliance humans?
"Here." Shepard's attention snapped back to the aide, who held out a datapad. "Here's the local complement of biotics and their records. We have a mix of ranks and experience, but all their data should be in there."
"What kinds of implants do they have?" Shepard asked warily, taking the datapad.
The aide shrugged. "It's all in the file. There's a schedule for the facility, too, and the keycode. It's kept locked when not in use. You can authorize private practice at your discretion, but please don't abuse the privilege."
"Okay," Shepard said, eyebrows rising.
The aide nodded and bent back to her work. Shepard hesitated for a moment, and then decided that she'd been dismissed.
At least she had something to do now. She left HQ clutching her datapad. She took a hasty glance at the schedule. There weren't any actual classes scheduled until the next day. Maybe they'd been postponing them until they had a supervisor they considered qualified? That much was a relief, at least. It gave her some time to go over the records she'd just been handed and make some kind of plan.
The biotics training facility was nothing more than a single-room prefab set up near the rest of the exercise facilities. Shepard really didn't see the need for a separate lock. It was one large room, so at least there was some space to maneuver, with one mirrored wall and an assortment of battered props, most of them made of heavy foam that wouldn't do much damage if they got out of control.
Shepard extended her arm and swept the props to the side of the room with a twist of her fist. They tumbled in eddies of dark energy. Force, not finesse: Shepard's calling card. Her lips pulled back in a taut smile. It felt good, like flexing a muscle too long unused. She spent five minutes just knocking around the props, bouncing them from one corner of the room to the next. Fast and hard, mostly, though she tried levitating and holding a few just for variety. It didn't take long for sweat to break out on her forehead and the back of her neck as she strained to keep them in the air.
Blowing out a breath, Shepard let them fall. She had no idea how Kaidan made that look so easy. Or Miranda. Miranda made everything look easy. Miranda pulled off singularities without a hair or speck of makeup out of place. But there were a few things Shepard could do that Miranda couldn't. Sighing, Shepard rolled her shoulders, shook out her arms, and planted herself at one corner of the room. Time for the moment of truth.
She didn't have a mnemonic for this, ordinarily. Charging came to her like a reflex. This time, she visualized the channel carrying her across the room toward the pile of foam props in the opposite corner, closed her eyes, and clenched her fist—
—and went.
Here, and then there. The wash of energy shot her across the room in an eyeblink, raising the fine hairs on her arms and setting her nerves alight. Shepard stumbled on the landing, jarred by the sudden dislocation, but even a bad landing didn't stop euphoria from washing through her nervous system. Yes. She'd done it, she still had it. Her old instincts worked like they were supposed to, and even her barrier was shimmering around her, hazing her vision with blue. In one smooth movement, Shepard gathered that leftover power into her fist and raised her arm, poised to explode.
No. She couldn't safely set off a nova in here, not with the mirror lining one wall.
Instead, Shepard had to let the dark energy dissipate, letting it run crackling out of her hand. Her arm tingled when it was gone, and dust still swirled around her.
Refusing to let that caution bring her down, Shepard charged a few more times just to prove to herself that it wasn't a fluke. She ended by throwing her head back in the middle of the room and laughing. This. Something that worked the way it was supposed to. The rest — well, the rest she could figure out later.
She locked up the facility as she went out, only to find Mama coming down the lane toward her. For a short woman, she looked like nothing so much as an oncoming storm, and barked out, "Where have you been?"
"Out," Val replied, as if she were a teenager again, and flinched at her mother's expression. "Sorry, Mama, I was just getting settled in, and this is my new assignment, so..."
"I know. I just talked to that girl in the office, since you didn't call," Mama said, folding her arms. "Are you too busy to have lunch with your mother?"
"Of course not," Val said, simultaneously annoyed and guilty. She was ravenous, actually; a couple of hours of biotics practice would do that. And at least she had something to talk about over lunch: she told Mama she'd gone for a run the evening before, and how she was supposed to be supervising and training the other biotics. "It's, um, it's been a while since I did that stuff," she added.
"Huh," Mama said.
Val looked at her curiously, hoping she'd go on. Mama shrugged. "Well, you've never been very patient, have you?"
Val bit her lip, hearing her insecurities mirrored. She shrugged in her turn. "I'll just have to do the best I can."
"Of course you will," Mama said. "Your father would be so proud, you know."
"Yeah?" Val looked up from her tray.
"Of course. He was so thrilled when you got your commission, but you know how he was. Always thinking ahead. He would have been so proud to see you teaching."
Val's smile froze. "Was? I thought you said Dad was fine?" Hadn't Mama said? Coordinating relief, or something?
Her mother stared at her. Apprehension shivered down Shepard's spine. She'd said something wrong. Maybe this was the crack that would take everything down, but why now? What would happen next? Her heart pounded, and she felt keenly aware of the number of people surrounding them, eating rations as if nothing had happened.
"Maybe you should see the medics," Mama said, frowning. "You know your father died five years ago. That transport accident?"
"Oh." Val realized she had a death grip on her fork and unlocked her fingers. "I'm so sorry, Mama. I don't know what I was thinking."
Mama sniffed and returned to eating.
Shepard swallowed and did the same. No one appeared to tap her on the shoulder. No one did anything out of the ordinary at all. Maybe she'd misremembered. Maybe everything was muddled, worse than she'd thought.
After that, she practically fled back to the biotics facility for some blessed privacy and spent the afternoon going over the biotics' files. It was something she could sink her mind into, and she might as well be prepared for the training sessions that would come.
The camp's routine was so scheduled and regimented, it was easy to get sucked into it. Meals, her own workouts, the training sessions she was supposed to lead, lights out, they all fell into place like pieces of a puzzle. The biotics Shepard was supposed to supervise included a couple of veteran L2s and L3s in her own age range, but most of them were younger, some of them recruits still in their teens. For the first few classes, Shepard filled the time by putting them through their paces, finding out what each of them could do; then she set them into pairs and trios to work with each other, teaming the vets with the greener ones. It wasn't so different, in the end, from managing a ship's crew or a combat team. They didn't need her to demonstrate everything, to her relief; she could always call upon one of the more experienced biotics for a demo.
On most days, Val ate lunch or dinner with Mama, who reminded her twice more to tell the medics about her memory lapse, before apparently putting it aside. Some of Shepard's biotics trainees started joining her for meals, too, when they were on the same schedule. Some of them were even there when Mama presented her with her finished knitting project, a lumpy green sweater that hung loose on her frame. It looked ridiculous, Val thought, but she couldn't very well refuse it. Besides, the barracks got chilly at night, and the misshapen thing was surprisingly warm. Val found herself running her fingers over the rough wool when she had trouble sleeping.
She kept up her workouts religiously, and took to long runs over the countryside. Sometimes, in the evenings, her runs took her back to the ramshackle bar. She usually found Vega there, and sometimes joined him for drinks, rejecting his latest weak attempt to give her a nickname. Garrus wasn't at the bar as often, but he'd join her and Vega when he came in. It was comfortable, orderly, filling up her time with routine, filling her mind and heart with responsibilities. All of it lulled her into almost overlooking the uncomfortable moments — when she absent-mindedly bumped her shoulder against Garrus's, laughing, and he looked at her with polite puzzlement, or when she saw Reapers striding vast and oblivious across the landscape while she was running.
Val dreamed, on those nights, that she rested her head on Garrus' lap while he combed his fingers through her hair, or that her crew called to her, or that she stood shaking with a gun in her hand while a child talked to her in a voice like Harbinger's. She woke from those dreams with a jolt, her mouth dry and her eyes stinging, furious with herself for coming so close to forgetting that something was wrong, that she and her memories didn't fit.
Yet in the morning, the routine started all over again, keeping her too occupied to think much about how any of this was possible.
After ten days of this routine, Shepard had her medical check-up. Not with Dr. Menendez, but with a busy medic whose name she didn't catch, who hooked her up to machines and took some readings and scribbled on his pad while muttering to himself. Afterward, Shepard stared at the datapad form he'd pushed into her hand.
Cleared for active duty.
Author's note: There may not be an update next week due to travel, but if not, there should be on the week after! Thanks for reading!