four.
Someone is always watching, and all she wants is a drink.
It takes a long time—a long time, long enough to lose any semblance of this being a spur-of-the-moment thing, long enough for this to be a wholly premeditated act, long enough for any sense of unease about who she is or what this makes her to disappear beneath her conviction that she is going to do this, no matter how stupid this might be. But it takes a long time to make this happen, not because she doesn't want to, but because someone is always watching and she refuses to believe that she can't find a place away from that.
Funny, because she'd grown up either being watched (security cams are everywhere on a space station, after all) or being surrounded by people who'd deliberately chosen to be as far away from the cameras as they could get. Her entire adult life has certainly been supervised, even those black ops undercover never-written-down missions she has to claim don't exist, because there's always somebody, a teammate or a civilian or even just the VI in her hardsuit monitoring her heart rate. And of course all the above-ground places are covered with cameras and advertisements with face-recognition software more detailed than her own brain can manage, and the DNA security scans, and—
well, it's not something she can just escape, and honestly it's mostly harmless, even when it's not.
But these days she's a prisoner in her mind, on her own ship, and even her damn bed is watched by a vigilant AI spy and when she looks over her shoulder, down the deep dark tunnel of frantic suffocation and helpless heartbeats too loud in her ears, she thinks at least in the black she was alone.
Someone's always watching the airlock, too.
And the usual voices in her head can't really stand her either, but she'd rather have that than the silence, Catie hating her all over again to the point where she doesn't even recognize her sister (though hey, that goes both ways apparently), doesn't know what she'd say or do if she could see her now. And so she falls back on her last words, I had a life and they made me live yours instead and now you've managed to ruin that too, echoing in the empty chambers where her voice used to be. And there's no way to reply, to say that it's not her fault, that she didn't want to die and she's not sure she wants to be back. Not if it means being back like this, with the twin weights of her sister's hatred and her own guilt squeezing the air from her lungs, not when that's not even the worst part of it and yet she has to bear all of it like the crushing load of a dead Reaper on her back.
It's being trapped in a hardsuit and waiting for someone to crack it open and fracture a rib or two in the process, break her sternum just to get the blood pumping again—
and on Horizon he does, he does, but he won't come with her and she knows he won't and she doesn't know why she tortures herself with asking—
and she needs to grieve, dammit, she remembers that from all the mental health classes and briefings and counseling sessions, even if she refuses to let go, even if she can't just stay dead.
(This is not how the mental health classes and briefings and counseling sessions suggest she ought to grieve. This is, in fact, the complete opposite, but she really doesn't care. She wants to hide, and she desperately needs a drink.)
The Citadel's too centralized, too close to Alliance space; Illium's even worse with the watching, since everything has a price; and she's not sure she could stand Aria's careless smirk from Afterlife's lounge. But in the end, Omega's her best bet, short of someone opening a bar on the other side of the Omega 4 relay—and hey, maybe that's a retirement plan worth considering, especially if they can't find their way back—and if Aria decides to be pissed that she picked a hole-in-the-wall instead of Afterlife, well, she'll probably end up laughing too hard instead.
Shepard really, really doesn't care.
It's a krogan joint, which suits her just fine, and she brings Grunt so that if anyone decides to question her presence she can pull the krantt card. This is technically disrespectful, according to her cultural sensitivity briefings, but it'll give Grunt the chance to knock the heads of his fellow krogans and that always makes him happy. She's ditched her hardsuit and bought the first crappy clubbing outfit she found off the ship, and if Miranda was telling the truth about not putting a chip in her head she just might be invisible to Cerberus for the first time in months. Unless, of course, EDI has a direct line to her cybernetics, which is possible, but she's pretty sure she can see lead shielding through the holes in the wall and maybe that'll be enough.
Jack is here, too. She didn't exactly invite her but the younger woman has a nose for trouble and free drinks—and even if this all turns up on her tab, she can blame Jack and disclaim ever being there and if anyone decides to disagree she'll punch them.
She's maybe been spending too much time with Grunt.
The cybernetics make getting drunk difficult, her hyped-up metabolism laughing away the first five shots, fist-bumping the next three, but by about the tenth she's feeling it, strung out on the end of a kite. She could've just done ryncol from the start, but she wants this to linger.
"Hey," says the krogan next to her at the bar, "human."
"Yeah?" she says, holding her eleventh shot and trying to decide if she'll still be conscious after it. She's floating in a pool of apathy and it feels pretty damn good.
"You're Commander Shepard?"
"Just Shepard," she says, and then she laughs because hell, she'd be up for Major by now, shit, who wants to be a major anyway, all desk work, should've gone enlisted if she wanted to hit things, doesn't matter now, does it?
"You killed—"
"You wanna dance?" she asks, setting her drink down, swinging to face him. Her joints are loose and now there's adrenaline mixing with the alcohol and she feels on fire, fantastic, alive—
"Uh," Jack says from the other side of her, in a tone that indicates that she really doesn't care, "maybe not the best idea."
"For him or for me? 'Cause it's sweet of you, but I can take him."
The krogan slams his drink down; Grunt stomps the ground and Shepard waves him off, backing away from the bar as the bartender grumbles. Stance wide, stable (ha she can feel herself swaying), fingers flexing, thumb on the outside, and the krogan charges and she slips out of the way, stumbles against a table, pushes off it and jumps on his back.
A bad idea, as he rears back and slams her into another table-speaking of broken ribs—but she's too drunk to care about pain and she scrabbles her fingers into the ridges of his plates, hauling herself up as he tries to shake her off until she's sitting on his neck and can wrap her legs around it. How many windpipes do krogan even have? He grunts as she squeezes and suddenly he swings his head and she digs her fingers under the edge of his plates and holds on as tight as she can, tightening her legs because maybe she can shut down at least one of his—
And then he's grabbing her ankles and before she can really process what to do he's pulled her over his head, ow, and the room is a blur as he swings her around and throws her into the wall. Ten shots start making their way up from her stomach as stars swirl over her head and maybe she's dying again—the room is still spinning, wavy and wrong, but her eyes pick out what appears to be a very angry krogan putting his head down and if she's not dying again she's about to be and this isn't really how she'd wanted to go and that's about all she can manage to think, which is a relief, and she starts to laugh.
And then she keeps laughing and she can't figure out why, she's supposed to be dead, and then her skin thrums with someone else's biotics and her biotics flare in response and hit a wall, an implacable stasis field, and she blinks again and there's Jack, hands casually raised in front of her, Shepard in one field, the krogan in the other.
"Well," Jack drawls, and through the stasis field Shepard can't make out her face, "this has been fun and all, but I think it's time for us to go. Grunt? Close out the commander's tab."
Grunt say something in reply, and then Jack is moving, hands still out, and when she reaches Shepard she kicks her to get her moving and she really is going to throw up because she's inside a stasis field rolling across the floor and she keeps laughing and she'll choke on her own vomit at this rate and her head aches and laughing hurts like maybe more than one rib is fractured in there. The field traps her laughter around her ears and she doesn't know how far out the door they get before Jack drops the field and the outside world rushes in upon her and it smells.
She's on her hands and knees and puking up her guts—and she's never been this drunk before, so, mission accomplished, and she starts to laugh again and her throat burns and more comes up, and she can feel Jack's biotic field buzzing at her back and when she finally stops puking long enough to flop over she finds herself leaning against a wall and looking up at the deepest scowl she's ever seen on Jack's face.
She grins.
"That," Jack says, "and this is coming from me, and the irony is making me a bit sick, but that," she jabs a finger in the presumable direction they came from, "was fucking stupid."
"Yeah?" Shepard says, and at the edges of her happy drunk stupor she feels shame and responsibility and guilt, as well as a physical pain she doesn't really want to contemplate, and she clings to her laughter instead. "No shit."
"I don't know what kind of fucking moron you have to be to pick a fight with a krogan on his own turf," Jack says. "You never struck me as the suicidal type."
"I'm not," Shepard says, breathless, her throat raw, trying to filter out the words she doesn't want to hear. "Just drunk."
"Yeah," Jack says, still looking down at her, arms crossed. "Didn't strike me as that type, either."
"I'm not," she says again, and it occurs to her that she's sitting next to her own vomit in what appears to be a trash heap and she pushes up with her hands—and her arms don't appear broken, that's good—and makes it to her knees before gravity pulls her sideways. She pushes back, biotics flaring without her doing much more than making a fist, and she's heading for the low-hanging ceiling before Jack yanks her back to the ground and she lands, hard, and the fact that Jack might actually be mad at her about this is—hilarious. Or at least it must be, because she's laughing again, and this time it really is starting to hurt but she ducks the responsibility because it's funny.
"So, what, you're finally cracking?" Jack asks. "Commander Shepard, off the rails?"
"Just tonight," she says, though she's pretty sure it's technically noon, Normandy time, but Omega is always dark. "Just—" and something catches on something somewhere in her chest and she wheezes instead of finishing her sentence. Not that she knew what she was going to say, and now that she's not pounding back drinks her enhanced metabolism is catching up to the alcohol and everything hurts, skin heart blood head lungs ow.
She's never been one of those Marines who finds exhilaration in injury, one of those N7s who feels like it makes her sharper, more alive. She can fight through the pain, ignore the distraction, shoot a batarian square between the eyes while cinching her own tourniquet, but it's only ever made her feel bad. She doesn't want to feel bad.
"Time to find another bar," she announces from the ground.
"No," Jack says, "time to find some medi-gel and patch you up before you go back to your bunk to sleep it off. You think," she says, as a protest blubbers across Shepard's lips, "the cheerleader won't blame me for this? Hell no, I'm not taking the fall for you."
"Then why'd you come?" Shepard says, vaguely aware that she is sulking, but at least she can ignore the voices in her head when the ones in her bones are so insistent.
Jack doesn't answer, and whether they go to a bar or—no, not Chakwas, she couldn't handle the disapp—no, everything hurts, focus on that—she needs to be standing up, and so she goes about it. She makes it to one knee, wobbles, gets a foot under her and then another but then the first foot forgets what it's supposed to be doing (ha) and she flails her arms to keep her balance—
and then Jack unfolds, grabbing her arm and yanking it across her shoulders, and then she starts dragging her down the corridor. Shepard's feet take an alarmingly long time to catch up with the motion, and she's not sure her arm hasn't been dislocated, but she's so surprised she can't handle feeling anything else.
"You," Jack says, though maybe she's not talking to her, "fucking suck, you know that? Of course you're not perfect, nobody is. And you're an idiot because you care, but at least you've been consistent about it. Everybody wants something but you never want something until now? And what do you want, to get yourself killed? And if you don't, then what the fuck are you even doing here?"
"Good question," Shepard comments. She hangs her head so she can keep an eye on her feet, which are more or less walking alongside Jack, though the walking is jerky and making her nauseous again and Jack's voice is loud and her head hurts.
"Shut up," Jack orders, and Shepard obeys. When was the last time she had a direct order to obey? Or disobey, and it's been two and a half years according to everyone else but it still doesn't feel like it and she still forgets, no matter how hard she tries to remind herself, left right left right come on feet, she thinks, come on.
Jack is still talking. "...fucking hero, but you're wound too tight, you know that? I mean, Jesus, I could've told you that picking a drunk fight with a krogan won't solve your problems. You're too fucking extreme. Can't even be selfish like a normal person, no, you have to go and try to die—"
"Would be very selfish," she observes, still watching her feet. "Have to save the galaxy."
"Too. Fucking. Extreme." Jack stops and Shepard's feet keep going and next thing she knows Jack unslings her arm and pushes her into the wall, pinning her with her forearm. Her tattoos swim across Shepard's vision, her teeth bright and white in the shadows. "What the fuck is this all about?"
"You care?"
"Fuck you." She pushes off Shepard and takes a step back, still glaring at her. She's not entirely sure she can stay upright—definitely a fractured rib, though it doesn't feel like anything's been punctured, and sobriety's tendrils are worming their way into her brain and she doesn't—want—
"No thanks," she says, but the drunken joviality has deserted her and the words echo hollowly off the walls.
"Stop trying to be a little shit," Jack says. "You can't pull it off. Answer the damn question."
"Why?" Shepard says. "You don't care. Nobody cares."
There's something fierce in Jack's expression, not caring, because she's pretty sure the other woman doesn't know what that means, but her head hurts and so she closes her eyes and braces herself against the wall so she won't fall and counts her aches.
"You're fucking lonely?" Jack says.
"Just because I don't," she squeezes her eyes shut, feels the tension in her jaw, wants to laugh but can't manage it without despairing and shit, she doesn't want to be sober, "want to kill other people on sight like you—"
"That's just because you're too weak," Jack says. "You care and look where it's gotten you. At least I don't go around trying to die."
"You wouldn't know how to." She's kind of proud of Jack as she says it. The other woman's a survivor despite all of Cerberus's best efforts, not because of it. Kind of proud, and suddenly a little jealous.
"Neither do you."
"I might," Shepard says, "if you hadn't saved my life."
Ha.
"Trust me," Jack says, "you haven't even touched the surface of suicidal."
"Trust me," Shepard says, opening her eyes, and then she stops because really that's all she wants. It's what makes her a good commander. The kind that people enjoy serving under. What are you afraid of?
She misses him. She misses him, and it's a hurt deeper than the ache in her bones and the suffocation of always-lonely-never-alone, worse than facing the black because it's death by inches and seeing him had been hell and back again but at least she'd been—alive.
Jack is still scowling at her, and there must be something on her face because she says abruptly, "This doesn't have anything to do with that asshole on Horizon, does it?"
"He's not an asshole," she says, which is not what she means to say, so she follows up with that: "No."
"For fuck's sake," Jack says, crossing her arms again, head tilted, and Shepard tilts hers to match. "Do I have to give you the 'he's just a guy' speech? Shit, what are you, twelve?"
Shepard keeps tilting her head and the world tilts with it—everything hurts, and it'd be easier just to fall over. But Jack doesn't let her, catching her as she slides halfway down the wall and shoving her back upright, shaking her shoulders. Her head flops and that hurts, too, and makes everything muddled. "Not twelve," she says, because words are starting to feel expensive. "Or an asshole."
"See? This is what I mean," Jack says, giving her another shake like she'd like to let go but knows Shepard won't stay upright if she does. "Look at you. You care, and where does it get you? Drunk and alone and half-dead because you almost took a krogan to the face. All it does is fucking hurt. Even the great Commander Shepard can't escape it. So why do people bother?"
She's suddenly tired, staring at Jack for a moment like she's looking in a mirror, like the other woman's right, like all this pain could've been avoided—like she's had a choice in any of it, but—she chose to love him, didn't she? Could've escaped that one if she really tried, maybe, but she never did and she'll never know for sure and it'd be easy to blame her past self for the oversight but—she'd choose it again. Choose him again. Chooses him now, chooses all of them now, and will tomorrow when she's waking up with a hangover to rival her most legendary escapades, and will the next day when she's still alone, and again and again and—
it hurts—
but something occurs to her, and she tilts her head again and looks at Jack. Jack, who is still standing there, holding her up against the wall, looking like she's won, and in the face of her annoyed confidence—no, disappointment—she says, "Not alone."
Jack's eyes narrow. "What?"
"Drunk," Shepard says, starting to nod and immediately regretting it, "yes. Half-dead, maybe. Not alone."
"So?"
"Not. Alone." She reaches up and tries to poke her in the chest, ends up hitting her shoulder. "You're here."
Everything's a little too blurry to catch Jack's expression before she shuts down completely, before she pushes Shepard against the wall and lets go and turns away, but she can feel the flare of her biotics and she grins. And then it registers that Jack is walking away and she stumbles after her, reaching out and landing a heavy hand on Jack's shoulder.
Jack shrugs it off, angry, and Shepard keeps grinning because she knows this anger and it's—
"You stayed."
"Fuck off."
"You ca—"
"Fuck off," Jack says. "What did I say about trying to be a little shit?"
"Sucks, doesn't it?" This time she slings her arm over Jack's shoulders, mostly because she's falling again.
"Keep this up and I won't take you to the Normandy."
"Yes," she says, and before she can add the ma'am Jack actually snarls, and she starts to laugh.
"Shut up," Jack says, which only makes her laugh harder and it hurts, laughing, it hurts and leaves her breathless and bruised and bleeding and alive, heart pounding and nerves thrumming and hope drumming like a cadence before dawn, when everything's about to be made new.