A/N: Three short drabbles at three different times in Shepard's life with an overarching theme this time.
Her mother's skin was covered in scars. It used to be a game for her, when she was small. She would trace the faint white-and-pink lines that criscrossed the woman's body in the quiet hours they were allowed, following them with her fingers, as though she was tracing her way through a maze. She loved her mother for her jagged skin. Each scar held a story that, with enough pleading, she could ply from her mother's mouth. This one was from a training exercise gone wrong in her early military career, here was an old burn that calloused over from an overheated rifle, there was a bullet wound from a raid that never healed properly. Those three on her knee, she would admit with a twist to her smile, was from when she first started shaving her legs and could not properly control the razor.
She never minded the injuries she suffered when she was a girl running pell-mell through the stations or ships where she lived. Every time she would scrape her arm or cut her leg, she would look up at her mother with shining eyes, asking if it would scar. Of course, her mother and father both disapproved of her zeal, and before bed she explained to her that scars to take pride in were not something gained from reckless behavior, and the wounds that birthed the marred skin on her mother's body were not something she ever sought out. They were stories of the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned from them. "You'll earn your own in time, honey," she told her daughter, "but don't go looking for trouble just so you have a story to tell, okay?"
When she returned home after the disaster on Akuze, after the medal was pinned to her dress blues, and after she woke up terrified and sobbed into her mother's arms, they traced scars again, and her mother followed the new lines across her eyebrow and jagging down her chin. The ones she earned through mistakes, and the ones, her mother thought, that would teach her much more than a successful mission ever could. And some distant part of her that she regarded with creeping horror took pride in the marks on her daughter's face.
She wasn't surprised that her mother knew she was lying to her. Shepard had been very careful with the details she had slipped to the older woman (she was alive, she was on an important mission pertaining to the disappearances in the human colonies, she had gone through the Omega 4 Relay), but somehow Hannah Shepard had always been able to see through any deception her daughter tried to pass by her. When they got a quiet moment alone, her mother's stern joy at seeing her child again gave way to the cold anger that terrified her subordinates. If she was honest with herself, Shepard would admit she had been expecting it.
No, what surprised her was when Hannah revealed her daughter's tell. "There," she said, accusation lacing her tone, and turned Shepard's wrist to reveal the soft pink skin that had once been a scar from her early training in the service. "Here," and she pointed to a lightly freckled place on her forearm that had been a long scratch that had scarred after she picked too much at the scab. "These," she said, quieter now, and traced the lines that had once been her trophies from Akuze.
And Shepard swallowed, suddenly and horribly aware that her stories were gone.