Muffled noises in the darkness. His first thought was just what it was that he was hearing; his second was surprise at the fact that he was. He hadn't been just a moment ago.

John – he did remember who he was this time around, and he also remembered that he had woken up at least once before – noticed that he was lying in a bed somewhere. However, he could not open his eyes or move a muscle.

Is this another dream?

A robotic voice cut through his sleepy thoughts. "Subject roused successfully. Should regain full consciousness and motor functions momentarily."

He opened his eyes just to start blinking profusely. Some idiot had directed a lamp directly at his face.

Someone spoke to him. "Shepard, wake up. This facility is under attack , your life is in danger."

That got him wide awake. Groaning, he sat up and covered his eyes with his right hand. Through the slits of his eyelids and fingers, he could see that next to the bed, there stood a mech with several arms, one of which featuring the lamp still blinding him.

"Get that light out of my face."

The thing was apparently programmed well enough to understand the order, because it complied immediately. John swung his legs over the edge of the bed and after some swaying managed to keep standing. The floor was cool beneath his naked feet; he wore nothing but a hospital gown and, thankfully, undies. He took a step and then some more ; they were shaky at first, as if he had been lying asleep for far too long. But every step was steadier then the former.

Good.

"Shepard, you can walk, good. There isn't time to explain. You need to suit up and arm yourself."

He looked up at the speaker in the corner of the room that was broadcasting the voice. "Who are you? Can you hear me? You sound familiar, have we met?"

"I said there's no ti – my name is Miranda Lawson. I saved your life on Vostralska and again here. I'll explain it all later. But now you need to get out of your room and rush down the corridor. The equipment for you is in the third room on the left side, I opened the door. Now move, there are mechs closing in on your position! I'll determine the safest route and then radio you again."

He simply nodded and got going; what Lawson had told him would have to suffice for now. He also remembered her face now. AIS agent, he remembered. That was what Pressly had told him after Vostralska. It didn't matter now, he'd deal with it later. Now to survive.

The door sliding open in front of him, John could immediately hear the gunfire echo through the corridor. Those mechs couldn't be far off. He stuck his head out, quickly checking for threats; but the hallway was empty. So he took off running to the door Miranda had mentioned. It was indeed open. John jumped in and stood in front of a wall stacked to the brim with a wide variety of guns. The center of the room was taken up by a table – on which, armor parts were laid out in an orderly fashion – just as if the person meant to wear them might come around any minute.

Which was exactly the case, he supposed. It only took two seconds to check that it was a complete set; he didn't recognize the manufacturer, but it was of unmistakably high quality, a notion reinforced all the more when the fabric of the undersuit touched his skin. It matched his underwear, and he could feel them interfacing with each other from the movement of tiny machines embedded inside. A complete three layer concept; another hallmark of top of the line body armor. There was little time to appreciate it however; instead, he hurried to put on the actual armor as fast as was possible on his own. He was pleasantly surprised when it turned out quite manageable.

It took him a couple of minutes interspaced with short bouts of listening, trying to determine how much time he might have left. The gunshots had definitely come closer, and so he didn't take the time to appreciate the red and white strep on his armors right arm, or the N7 logo on his chestplate.

When he was finally done, he quickly turned towards the guns only to find that he hadn't seen any of these models before. Not knowing which was which really, he just grabbed the heavy pistol from Kassa Fabrications as well as the next best assault rifle and shotgun. Holding the rifle in his hands, he quickly unfolded it and gave it a lookover. There was a button the function of which wasn't immediately obvious to him.

Naturally, he pushed it.

The gun ejected what looked like a magazine of some kind, and now John noticed that there was a box full of the things standing in the corner. He looked down on the pouches assorted on his chestplate.

So that's what they're for.

He had already been wondering who on earth would carry that many grenades.

But why magazines? These are mass effect weapons, so why...are these some kind of heat sinks?

He figured that it didn't truly matter as long as it worked. But whatever this place was, they obviously had access to the shiniest new toys.

Turning to leave, John stopped at the last moment. Tucked into the corner out of view when entering , on another table, lay a scabbard – he had almost missed it. Quickly stepping over, John couldn't stop a grim smile from forming on his lips. Whoever had selected all this for him obviously knew his fighting style and preferences well.

Whoever. Where was he? What had happened? How much time had passed? Why was he in a nondescript facility, under the care of some AIS agent? What about his crew?

Not the time, he reminded himself. It wasn't easy, but the situation necessitated to postpone all these questions for later. The by now uncomfortably close gunshots certainly helped, though.

Lawson must've gotten into trouble. I should've heard from her by now.

There was no point in trying to look for her; John was as lost in this place as a newborn in a forest. In fact he just now realized that he didn't even know if this was a building or a space station. He cursed and got on with it, hurrying down the corridor in the direction of the room he'd woken up in, passing it seconds later. Without direction, "away from the gunfire" was probably his best option.

That idea turned out wrong, when he peeked around the corner. The first thing he saw where the dead bodies, the second was the group of mechs coming through a hallway on the other end of the large room he was looking into. They were humanoid with actual hands instead of simple fixed cannons, and they reacted quite fast for their kind. After the half second he'd been distracted by the corpses all three of them already had their guns in his general direction.

Only two of them got to fire though, the other one had the mechanical innards blown out of it's head before it managed. The other ones didn't last much longer. Satisfied, John noticed that his shields had been barely even weakened by the couple of projectiles that had hit them and that even straight out of a bed, his reflexes were sharp as ever. Perhaps sharper, even – he had eliminated all three mechs with one clean headshot each, all within one second from noticing them. If his memory didn't trick him, he hadn't ever managed that kind of feat in actual combat before, only on the range.

The mechs were easy targets, he supposed; slow and clumsy. Last thing he'd heard about bipedal mechs, they hadn't been quite refined yet. It appeared he had heard correctly.

Good thing I went with the pistol, he mused as he continued forward. Strange heatsink mechanicsm notwithstanding, this thing packed a punch just as he'd expected from a Kassa model.

The following minutes went by uneventful; occasionally he could hear gunfire and screams somewhere, but it seemed sporadic and unorganized. Eventually, he decided to try and find a console that might tell him where he was and how to get away from here. Shortly after, he'd found an open office with the desktop still running; there were no bodies to be seen, so he figured the person who worked here might have managed to get to safety.

Or perhaps they had just died somewhere else, like so many others he had come across on the way.

Thank god, he thought when he found that the workstation hadn't been logged out – the poor sod had definitely had bigger worries at that moment – and so he bent over, supporting himself on the tabletop with his left and browsing the console with his right, the pistol resting next to it.

Okay...what month is this...

The desktop had a clock in the bottom right as usual; it was just past 7 am. Hacked their security mechs at dawn. Clever. Inside job? Alright, this should take me to the calendar...

John stopped for a second before, with no small amount of trepidation, double tapping the clock. As expected, the calendar opened up. His eyes snapped up to see the month. Upon seeing it, he failed to suppress a groan.

November. I've been out for over a mo -

That was the moment at which John noticed the tiny "2185" in the top right. He stared at it in disbelief for a couple of seconds before the realization of what it meant fully hit him. Despite the situation, he had to sit down for a moment, the ground suddenly swaying beneath his feet as if he'd been on a boat in the middle of a storm. A hundred thoughts barreled down on his mind; what had happened, where was his team, and had anybody done a single thing about the Reapers in the last two years?

As John's thoughts wandered aimlessly, his gaze trailed down his body. Two years in bed...I should be nothing but skin and bones. How the fuck am I in this kind of shape!?

The sound of footsteps snapped him out of it. In the blink of an eye, he was up and the weapon was back in his firm grasp. There was something off, though.

Those aren't a mech's steps, he realized. Lowering the gun slightly, he briefly checked the left and then stepped out onto the corridor,turning to the right, towards the other person. Some ten meters in front of him stood a small, scrawny man with a bald head who looked to be somewhere in his forties.

"D-don't shoot, Shepard! Please!"

John lowered the gun a bit. "You know me?"

The guy grinned nervously. "In a way I do. Quite intimately, actually. I'm the guy who's been putting you back together over the two...damn, how do I even put this..."

"Two years, I already noticed." , John helped him out as he took his left off the pistol and let it drop to his side, relaxing his body. "Who are you then?"

"Name's Wilson. Dr. Wilson."

"Alright, Doc. How do we get out of here?"

"With a shuttle. This is actually a space station."

John raised an eyebrow. "A rehab facility on a space station? Does this place have a name? And where is it even!?"

The man shrugged apologetically. "I honestly don't know. They only brought me in for the project, they don't tell me much."

This kept getting better. "They? Who runs this place, exactly? The AIS?"

"Kind of...listen, I can't talk about it, okay? They made me sign NDAs and whatnot. All I can tell you that this is Lazarus station, where we conceptualized and realized the Lazarus project. Which would be...you." He cleared his throat and shuffled uncomfortably. Apparently he expected a strong reaction to this.

All John felt was confusion as to what the doctor was getting at. "Lazarus? Like, the dead guy in the bible? I'd figured there would be a reason I was out for two years, but that bad?"

Wilson drew in breath to answer, but before he could do so John cut him off with a held up hand. They both stood still for a couple of seconds, and soon enough John could clearly make out the noises that had set him off. "Mechs.", he whispered. "Not far off. A couple of 'em, by the sound of it." He looked around the corridor for another intersection. "I suggest we talk later. Right now you better tell me where those shuttles are and then we try to get there in one piece."

Wilson gulped audibly. "Agreed."

Clattering filled the hall as the last of the mechs dropped to the ground, two holes in it's chest. In the somewhat more open space, Shepard had changed to his rifle and been pleased to find that it was of the same top notch quality than the pistol.

He paused and looked around, making sure that none of the mechs had unexpectedly developed some finesse and were lying in wait somewhere, but saw nothing. Satisfied, he stood up from his crouched position behind a large crate and gestured Wilson, who had been waiting in the back, to do the same. "That was the last of them, at least for now. Come on, let's get out of here before we get bogged down again." The doctor nodded and walked past him towards the large door at the other end of this hall, behind which he had said was the shuttle bay.

"You think you'd have a chance to access communications from that console? This Lawson could still be alive somewhere."

Wilson shook his head without looking up from his work. "I'm a doctor, not some IT tech. And Miranda was in the D wing, the mech were all over that sector. There's no way she survived that." He slouched a little and when he spoke again, he did so very quietly. "Or anyone else." He shook himself. "Alright, that's it. Let's go."

He pushed a few buttons on the holographic display and stepped in front of the door, which slid open a couple seconds later – revealing none other than Miranda Lawson, gun in hand and a decidedly displeased look on her face. Wilson recoiled as if someone had physically shoved him.

"M-miranda! But I thought you were - "

He didn't get to finish the sentence before his brains were blown out of his skull. Completely flabbergasted, John did not even raise his weapon, he just stared at the corpse in disbelief, and then up to the woman who had done the deed. There was a man standing a bit behind her, he realized now; not much smaller than Shepard himself and notably more muscular. The entire way he carried himself screamed military. Right now, he was palming his face. "Jesus Christ, Miranda..."

It snapped John out of his surprise and while he did still not point it at anyone, his grip on the gun tightened. "That's putting it damn mildly!"

She shrugged. "He's the traitor. I broke into his private messages and found it all. He was given instructions on how to open a backdoor in our security system, and that is how they hacked the mechs."

"And you didn't think to question him!?"

"For what? I already know who he did it for. All that was left was to deal with him. The project almost failed at the last moment, and almost my entire staff is dead. I don't take kindly to traitors who get my people killed. I think you understand that."

John took a step back and looked at the corpse with new eyes. The doctor had seemed harmless to him. But he had trusted that Wells bastard as well, and now Ashley was dead. And this woman had saved his life twice now. He looked back at her and nodded.

"Alright."

He collapsed the assault rifle and stored it on the magnetic rail on his back. She nodded back, satisfied, and half turned to leave. "Let's go, then. The combat has done extensive damage to the station and it won't stay intact much longer."

"Shouldn't we look for survivors first?"

"Already done, the entire staff had PDAs at them at all times. Everyone who made it is back in the shuttle bay waiting for us. Now come on."

Thought of everything.

"No."

Lawson had already completed her turn, so now he got to witness her hair flowing wildly as she whirled around – not losing composure however. She merely gave him a profoundly skeptic look.

"No? Did I not just lay out the situation to you very clearly? I am leaving, and I'm taking both shuttles. So I suggest you get on board."

"I'm not going anywhere until I know what's going on here and who you people actually are."

Her features grew hard. This was someone used to conflict – not that Shepard had had any other impression of her.

"This is not an Alliance facility. Not even AIS. I'm not some moron. The Alliance would not just shoot people on the spot, and they definitely don't have a secret high security hospital for comatose soldiers hidden away somewhere!"

"You will be informed shortly."

"Forget it."

"I have my orders, Shepard, and I intend to carry them out."

John was about to take a step closer and reaffirm his point, but the guy that had stood behind Miranda stepped in first, hands held high and a conciliatory tone in his voice. "Miranda, I told you this wouldn't work. We can't ask the Commander to trust us if we're not playing with open cards. Did you really think this would work out?"

"Jacob..."

So that was his name. John took a quick closer look at the dark skinned man; his first impression of a military man had definitely correct, the entire posture betrayed it, the short hair and beard fitting the bill.

"We're not getting around this, Miranda. Do you want to tell the Illusive Man that you couldn't get Shepard to board the shuttle!?"

'The Illusive Man'? This is getting better and better.

"Who?"

Lawson pinched the bridge of her nose with an exasperated sigh as Jacob turned to Shepard. "That's our boss. Listen, Shepard, you're right. This isn't an alliance facility. When I tell you the next thing, please keep in mind that Miranda and I saved your life on that jungle planet and spent the last two years of our lives bringing you back. So." He put his hands on his hips and looked down; John found himself more confused – and worried – by the second.

"Spit it out already!"

"The Lazarus project was...this entire facility is... it's a Cerberus cell."

About a second later John was holding the man up against the wall by his collar, having pushed him back and slammed into the bulkhead with a strength that surprised him just as much as, judging by his wide eyes, Jacob; in the other hand was the Kassa pistol. Right now it was pointed straight up in the air, but John had a strong urge to change that.

"Give me one reason not to kill you right now."

Intuitively, he had kept Lawson in the corner of his left eye, and so he saw her moving immediately; not a threat, however. She took a close, cautious step forward. Her words were anything but slow and cautious, though.

"Shepard, put him down! He wasn't even with Cerberus when those things happened!"

The barrel of his handgun remained in place, but so did his iron grip around Jacob's suit.

"Talk, I'll hear you out. Guess I owe you that much."

"Good. So first of all, Jacob here only joined Cerberus because he couldn't stay with the Alliance after he helped me to get you and your Quarian friend out of that disaster on Vostralska. But more importantly, the Cerberus cells you destroyed were all acting on their own accord. I'm sure you heard they were a former alliance black ops group? Well, that was true. They split off from the alliance and we welcomed them in – until we realized how far they had gone off the deep end. We had nothing to do with Kahoku's murder, nor any of the other things you uncovered."

He scoffed. "Convenient. All your dirty dishes actually don't belong to you, huh?"

She held his gaze. "I'm sure you'd take umbrage with quite a lot that we've done and are doing, but nothing of the sort that should make you want to behave unreasonably."

He grimaced angrily, but eventually put down the gun and let Jacob go. To his credit, the man had recovered from his initial shock swiftly and was looking pretty calm again already. John took a moment to really muster him; he wasn't sure how far he could trust his gut anymore, but maybe he could see what Lawson had told him about Jacob to be true. Military type, probably with the corsairs, the stint on Vostralska made no sense otherwise. Bent the rules a little and had ended up in a place he knew little about, John mused. It made sense alright. Perhaps he could believe that.

I'll have to talk to the guy alone.

For now, Jacob quickly rearranged his suit and cleared his throat. " I hope this is cleared up then. They don't tell me much Shepard, but I'm sure you've got your reasons. No hard feelings, as far as I'm concerned."

The man was likable, he had to give him that. Still.

"Fine.", he snapped and tromped past them. "Let's get the hell out of here then. Where are we going? To your Illusive Man? I don't suppose you guys are gonna make a stop at Arcturus or the Citadel for me."

Lawson had caught up to him on the left. "Not immediately, no. But if you want to go there, you can. You're not a prisoner, Shepard. We didn't go through all this hassle to bring you back just to fight you. All you have to do is speak with the Illusive Man. He has invested considerable resources into you, and he wants to make you an offer."

What, do these people think I'll join them or something? Have they lost their minds!? But there was something else bugging him considerably more. "'Bring me back'. Jacob said the same. Wilson said he spent the last two years putting me back together." He tried to catch eye contact with Lawson. "Just what the hell happened to me? What about my team, my crew? What about the Normandy?" The memory of that unknown vessel showing up on their scanners flashed through his mind, leaving him with a terrible foreboding. Lawson briefly looked away and actually seemed to be somewhat concerned.

"Shepard...what is the last thing you remember?"

"The Amada system, reconnaissance mission for the council. Turned out to be an ambush. Some unknown vessel, dreadnought sized. I remember that I was wondering if this was some new type of Geth ship..." He shook his head. "And that's it."

She blew up her cheeks a little. "That's...much better than I feared, actually. There'll be time to explain in detail later, but the gist of it is that the Normandy was completely destroyed. They mostly made it out alive, but your pilot got stuck. Moreau."

"Don't worry, Joker isn't the kind of guy you forget." It was hard to speak. They probably noticed. "Casualties?"

"Your first officer, Pressly. Two junior officers from the CIC and three servicemen from the lower decks, I forgot the names. Your non – alliance crew all made it out alive."

Tali!

Between the shock of hearing about Pressly and the relief, John had no words for a while. Garrus...Liara. The realization set in that for all these people he had been gone for two years, no matter how much he remembered talking to them just hours ago. It didn't help in the slightest. The ground beneath his feet suddenly seemed to take on a life on it's own, and it took all of his willpower to not stop and ask these Cerberus people for a moment to sit down. Finally, he trusted his voice enough to ask: "What was that you said about Joker?"

Lawson startled as if she'd been in deep thought. "As I said, he got stuck. It was his console, it caved in. You decided to get him out yourself. That's how it happened. You...were spaced."

John looked at her confused. "I don't understand this. When you get spaced, you either come back fine or not at all. What did you spend two years on?"

She slowed down and gave him the most genuine look he'd seen from her so far; for a second, her professional exterior gave way a little. "Believe me, Shepard. It's better when we talk about this in private where we can sit down. I'll explain it in the shuttle."

He nodded, not the least bit reassured. The rest of the short way passed in silence; less than half a minute later, the three of them passed a door into a largely unharmed hangar holding two shuttles with nondescript gray paintjobs. In front of one of them, a good dozen or so people in the white, black and orange uniforms he had seen on the corpses all over the station were for the most part huddled on the ground, only two of them standing guard with Avenger rifles in hand. Upon their entrance, the group stirred and looked over to them wide eyed, some of them hushing among themselves. He was pretty sure that he made out his name more than once.

Lawson stopped and turned to Jacob. "We're taking the Kodiak. I'll go and quickly wrap things up with Donyeng, you go and ready up the shuttle."

Jacob nodded and entered the shuttle, Miranda walking over to the Cerberus personnel. The vessel they had been waiting next to was a larger one; looking at it closely, it appeared to be a modified Vespers model. John watched for a moment as Lawson started chatting with her underlings, than turned to follow.

Inside, Jacob was was already performing basic pre-flight checks, probably leaving the final steps to Miranda herself. John actually couldn't fly one of these things, he realized. N – school had only taught very rudimentary piloting skills to be used in an emergency, and the Kodiak had been brand new when he...disappeared. He hadn't really had time to have someone introduce him to it.

Alright, now's the time.

"So, Jacob. Do you come with a last name?"

The other man briefly interrupted his work to look up. "Uh, Taylor."

"How long did you serve?"

"With the Alliance? Seven years, officially. Three years with the corsairs after that."

"Corsairs. That's a rough life."

Taylor chuckled. "Tell me about it. But I kinda liked it. It was less bullshit than with the Alliance proper, you know? There was still enough of their pencil pushers around to drive me mad, but it was at least bearable."

"Not a fan of rules?"

"When they keep me from doing my job? No. The amount of times we didn't take someone out who we could've just because the higher ups were worried it might be traced back to the Alliance would boggle your mind if I told you, believe me."

John just nodded. In a way, Taylor reminded him of Garrus when he had first met him. Garrus didn't throw in with a fucking terrorist group, though.

"And how did you end up working for Miranda?"

Jacob had finished his work by now and took a seat in the passenger space. "Well...when I was with the Corsairs, intel wasn't always the greatest at first. But a couple month in, it started to get better. We landed some big hits on the Terminus gangs. We mostly tangled with the Batarians, obviously. Anyway, I noticed that we were being given these little tidbits of information here and there. I thought some AIS agent had taken a liking to us. Turns out, it wasn't an AIS agent. Miranda covertly supplied us with that intel so we could take care of things the Alliance wouldn't have known about in time and that Cerberus didn't have the resources to deal with. Eventually, there was a job she deemed important enough to be there in person for,and we met. A couple stints later, I learned who she really was. She wanted to recruit me. I refused. We kept working together...even stopped a terror attack on the Citadel once. Batarians, of course. They didn't bring that in the news, did they. The council and C-Sec getting their bacon saved by a 'terrorist group'."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. He believed the story, and he wasn't getting the impression of a fanatic from him, but if Taylor really believed Cerberus was some sort of misunderstood special forces group, he was an idiot.

"Anyway, over time I thought more about actually leaving the Alliance for Cerberus, but...i wasn't sure. I knew Miranda and that was it. But then that...thing with the Blue Suns happened, and I didn't have much of a choice anymore."

"And do you trust Cerberus now?"

Taylor shrugged. "Trust is a big word. I trust that they' wouldn't be stupid enough to ask me to do something I think is really wrong, and I know Miranda has her heart in the right place. That's gotta be enough."

"Miranda has a heart?"

Jacob snorted and grinned. "She's a good person once you get to know her, believe me."

A moment later the aforementioned entered the Kodiak, giving them a look that made clear she had definitely heard the end of that exchange. "Well, gentlemen. The others have their orders and are set up for their journey. Let's get on with ours." She sat down in the pilot's seat.

John leaned back in the seat. "And where are we going?"

"Another Cerberus station. I will not tell you where it's located. The important part is, with this vessel it's going to take us over a day to reach the next mass relay, and then another two days to reach our target. So I suggest you come out of that hardsuit and make yourself comfortable."

Next to him, Jacob swore under his breath; Shepard felt much the same. The prospect of spending the next three days in this passenger compartment with a terrorist officer and her clueless follower was less than enticing. But what use was moaning, and so he simply took Miranda's advice and started peeling himself out of the armor's outer layer with some eagerly offered help from Taylor. After all, one thing was true: Cerberus, for some reason, had invested a lot of resources into saving his life. He was reasonably sure that he had no reason to worry about getting stabbed in the back by them, for now at least.

As Miranda let the engines roar and steered the Kodiak out of the shuttle bay and then brought it on course out of the system, John steeled himself for the conversation he was about to have with her. Based on what he'd been told so far, it wouldn't be pleasant. At least this undersuit was really damn comfortable as far as undersuits went. He'd be wearing it for three days straight after all. Some minutes later, the shuttle shuddered and the psychedelic lights of FTL flight filled the frontal viewport. With some trepidation he sighed, got up, walked over, and dropped into the copilot seat.

"So." , he said. "Give it to me straight. What exactly happened to me and what did project Lazarus do?"

"You died."

Surprisingly, this didn't faze him at all. He had expected something drastic.

"What, did I go into cardiac arrest and you did some advanced CPR on me?"

She sighed. "No. You didn't just have no circulation, you were dead by any measure. When you tried to rescue Lieutenant Moreau, you were hit by an explosion before you could make it into the escape pod. Your last act was to trigger the pod's emergency shutdown. When we...found your body, most of your bones were broken, you were penetrated by shrapnel in a dozen different places and you had been deep frozen."

As well as he had taken her initial statement, the calmly laid out details Miranda shared now hit him like a punch in the gut. For a long time, he just stared out at the lights and said nothing; he couldn't have said how he felt. When he came to a bit some minutes later, John came to the conclusion that he wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel right now.

"If that's true...how the hell am I here?"

"Wilson.", she answered. "He published a revolutionary paper on cell – preserving thawing techniques in '82. We got him on board, him and an entire team of top of the line medical professionals. Together with them, I...figured out a way. We spent an entire year just experimenting before we ever touched you."

Again, John took a long time to form a reply; on one hand he was thankful, on the other afraid. "But...I am me, right?"

She turned to look him in the eye. "Yes, Shepard. You are not a clone, you are the original Commander John Shepard, born on Mindoir in '56. It was...incredible work, to be frank. Nothing like it has ever been done before. You are the first human being to come back from the dead, Commander. Perhaps the only being ever. Congratulations, I'd say."

Guess she doesn't go to church, he thought to himself, feeling somewhat detached from it all; this was so insane that somehow he had trouble believing it, even though everything, from the tone of her voice to the little snippets of information he had seen on the station and the fact that it had been two years told him it was true. He blew up his cheeks and slowly exhaled.

"Do I even want to know what exactly you did?"

Miranda was focusing on the instruments again. "Probably not. I'll make sure to send you a dossier with a, uhm, list of...changes. Due to the severity of the damage, we had to make some adjustments. Do you really want to know more?"

"Just spit it out already."

"Well, most of your organs are cloned tissue. That's actually great, people pay a fortune for that."

"Yay..."

"We cloned a lot of skin too, obviously, but that's just standard procedure. Then there's your skeleton...what can I say, there's not a whole lot of bones left in your body that we didn't reinforce with titanium. Modern medicine goes a long way, but getting you back into fighting shape after the damage your frame suffered...it wouldn't have been possible without augmentations. We only used the most modern techniques, mind you, it's not like you have screws everywhere..."

John shook his head in astonishment. "How does it even keep together then?"

"It's...fused. I'm sorry Shepard, but that's all a part of you now, nobody could remove it anymore without taking out the whole bone." She had to have noticed the expression of mild shock on his face, because she continued: "I know it's a lot, but...there really wasn't another way. Bones from cloned tissue simply aren't a thing yet, at least not or any type of real strain."

He nodded. "I'm not...questioning you. I'd just like to know what...changed, I suppose. It's my body after all, I ought to be somewhat informed. No?"

"I suppose .Well, there is actually more..."

"Jesus Christ..."

"We had to replace the large muscles oft your left arm and leg with cloned tissue anyway, because those took the brunt of the damage from the explosion. But cloned muscle needs to be attached cybernetically no matter what, so we...I...made a call. I'm sure you'll see it my way in time..."

"You didn't."

"I did. I created bio-engineered muscle for you, and since you can hardly be , well, enhanced on one side and normal on the other, we did the same for your right arm and leg. And then we obviously had to give a lot of your torso the same treatment, it just wouldn't work together properly otherwise..."

He wasn't sure how he felt before; right now, he knew exactly. He was getting angry. "You turned me into some...some...cyborg!?" He slapped the armrest. "Did your doctors tell you a fucking thing about consent!?"

She remained perfectly calm. "They did. We discussed it extensively. But in the end, as I just told you, we were going to have to augment you to some capacity no matter what. So we chose to do it in a way that would be beneficial to you in the fights to come." Her eyes narrowed briefly. "We know what's coming. You'll need every advantage you can get, Shepard. You know it's true."

He wanted to yell at her, but despite all he had to admit that she had a point.

"Try to see it this way, " , she said in an almost apologetic tone, " you're in the shape of your life. Bloody hell, you're in the best shape humanity's ever seen. Didn't it surprise you what you did to Jacob back there?"

"It did."

"Shepard, you're one of the strongest humans to ever lived, and probably the thoughest too. You could probably throw hands with a young Krogan."

John's anger deflated like a popped balloon. He just didn't know anymore. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he almost dreaded the answer when he once again asked: "So...anything else?"

He really hoped that she'd finally say no.

"Well, nothing else exactly, but just so you're not surprised when you see it...you weigh in at one hundred and ten kilograms now."

"That's it? Anything else I should know?"

"That's it."

John let his head drop on the backrest and closed his eyes, feeling utterly drained. "Fucking hell."

AN:

So, this one took forever. What happened? Well, one thing is that it is a good bit longer than the chapters I usually do these days because I felt like a couple things simply had to be in the first chapter of this new part. As of the actual writing, at first I had a mild block because the first half of this is just kind of a rehash of what happens in the games, and as you might remember I hate writing that. And then when I finally got past that and picked up my momentum, my Windows decided to hang itself and I couldn't write for two days. And then it was friday, and I'm not exactly writing on a friday night ;P

But eventually, here it is. i hope you enjoy it.

Regarding the direction of the story, we will contunue the "Au novelization" route for some more chapters and then return to the "behind the scene + occasional slightly AU versions of events from the game" format of the first twenty something chapters for a while. There'll still be an overarching thread in the background that will eventually come to it's conclusion, though, don't worry.