Edited on 17 MAY 2015.
All the love for my beta Sindrandi.
The only thing we have to fear,
is fear itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Smoke was in the air and the smell made her nostrils tingle.
What the hell is that?
Tar. Burning. Ash. Meat and crunching of bones. She gasped and her eyes flew open. Black. Gone. Forever burning. She clutched at her abdomen as bile rose up into her mouth.
Burning, burning, BURNING.
She spun and tried to run but her feet would not budge.
A mirror stood before her, though she did not recognize the woman staring back at her. Her skin was paper white and cracked like age-old cement. Dark, crusted blood outlined her features, making her look bug-eyed and sickly. Her eyes were bloodshot and her lips almost nonexistent, showing long lines of ivory teeth. She had no hair, her whole face gangly and deformed.
Then she opened her mouth.
"You were nothing but meat and bone, Shepard."
Terror rose in her belly. The face began to warp and crumble and shiver as it kept repeating the words over and over in a singsong mantra.
"Meat and bone. Meat and bone. Meat and bone."
No, this can't be happening!
When she looked back all that was left of the horrid face were chattering teeth drenched in bile and a pair of rolling eyeballs on the ground.
It was decomposing.
She took a quick step back to escape, but the eyes snapped back to pierce her own.
"Where are you going, Red? You sleep when you're DEAD!"
"NO!"
Vivian Shepard bolted upright in her bed. Her shivering shook the beads of cold sweat from her brow onto the sheets leaving tiny imprints.
Frantically, she searched the room.
No mirror, no teeth, no blood, no bones…
"Just a dream," she whispered to herself, tempted to begin a mantra of her own, "It was just a dream."
Slowly, she wiped her face and staggered to her feet. Shepard took a deep breath as she made her way over to the bathroom and stood before the mirror.
Blinking quickly, she gingerly touched her face, outlining the angry, red scars on her cheekbones and chin from Cerberus piecing her together.
"Everything looks about right."
'Yeah, about as right as a dead woman can get,' a little, annoying voice in the back of her head mocked.
She groaned and smacked her hand against the sink basin with frustration.
It had been a month since the attack on the Cerberus base housing the Lazarus Project, or more accurately, the Shepard Project. It had been a whole month since those sons of bitches brought her back to life. She still hadn't been able to wrap her mind around it, and even if she did, she was pretty certain she was never really going to be alright with it.
Why couldn't they just let me die?
Her shoulders slumped as she sighed. She knew exactly why; the Collectors. Humanity was in peril and no one else would do anything about it. Nobody except Cerberus gave an immediate shit, but most importantly, the Collectors brought the imminent threat of the Reapers hanging on their tail ends.
While she wished nothing more than to be done with it, there was nothing for it.
It rested in her hands to stop them, and, she planned to get the job done. Because, if she wouldn't, nobody goddamn would. And, that was about the gist of it.
Being brought back to life just for these assholes to kill me again? Like hell, I am.
Her determination brought her thoughts to her team; the one she was tasked to assemble. So far, they were eight strong, but they were either Cerberus, or strangers.
Her first additions, Miranda and Jacob, both have the title of Cerberus Operative under their belts and report directly to the Illusive Man, the head honcho of Cerberus and the guy that keeps getting labeled as her boss.
Last I checked, he works for me and needs me to get this done. He gets me Intel. He gets me resources. He finds me people. But, no, no. Go ahead and keep saying he's my boss, I work for Cerberus, and I'm a traitor to the Alliance.
Vivian smashed her palms into her eyes as she slumped down into the desk chair she hadn't even realized she had wandered over to.
After Horizon and seeing her old lieutenant, Kaidan, again, she was harder on herself than usual. She was uncharacteristically cynical, which would probably explain the wide berth her crew had been giving her lately.
Yeah, I suppose it couldn't hurt to lose the attitude…
It just pissed her off. How dare he accuse her of betraying the Alliance and what he stands for, what they both stand for, just because she is working with Cerberus? She was trying to help her people, how could he not see that? Why it was so hard for him to put his emotions aside and see the facts, she did not know, but she wasn't going to let his whining and insults stop her.
At least she had Garrus. A little sliver of normalcy in her topsy-turvy world. He always had a talent for helping her see the big picture. The incident with Kaidan had been no different.
Begrudgingly, she opened up the most recent data file the Illusive Man had forwarded to her containing the names and locations of the newest potential additions to the team.
The Justicar, the Assassin, Tali, and the Warden.
Miranda, Jacob, Garrus, Mordin, Zaeed, Kasumi, Jack, Grunt, were already safely stowed away in the Normandy, and these four will make her team a nice, even twelve.
"It's going to be good to have Tali back, definitely," she mumbled to herself letting a small smile slide on to her features. She had always thought of Tali to be a close friend. Kind, strong willed and opinionated. Oh, and she has a shotgun. Can't forget the shotgun.
Chuckling, she closed the file and leaned back in her chair to stretch.
All right. Everything is in order. Haestrom, Illium, and then back to Omega.
She started to rock the chair back and forth with the toe of her foot as a small contented smile spread on her face but she nearly knocked the chair and herself clear backwards as a realization came zooming into her head.
"Wait, what?" she quickly reached for her terminal again and pulled up the file of dossiers again.
The Warden was definitely a new addition. She hadn't seen it the first time she had pulled up the list. Why was the Illusive Man pointing her back to Omega? Obviously, he knew that they had been there not too long ago and could have knocked out two birds, in this case three, with one stone. But, as of now, the Normandy was docked on Tuchanka refueling after assisting Grunt with his Rite of Passage and finding Mordin's student.
Why the change of direction?
She opened the inquiry for The Warden and read the details of the dossier.
Codename: The Warden. Real name unknown.
Location: Omega
Close relations with port leader, Aria T'Loak. Well known among station's population.
Unknown species. Unknown age. Unknown origin.
Subject has agreed to take on Collector mission gratis.
"What the hell," Shepard mumbled as she read the very short list over and over. "If they're close to Aria then why does her name not ring a bell?"
She rifled through her brain to find anything useful from her time on the station but with no success.
Well. If she is well known to Omega's people, then I know just the person to ask…
With that, she popped up from her seat and headed to the elevator to take her down to the crew deck. Once inside, her brows tightened into a crease once she pushed the button for the third floor.
Garrus Vakarian was the first recruit that she picked up from Omega. Only she hadn't realized Archangel and Garrus Vakarian were one and the same. Though, if she were honest with herself, she would admit that the dossier inquiry did give off a definite Vakarian vibe. She just chalked it up to the fact that she missed him and her old team.
And, boy, what a shock it was when it actually did turn out to be Garrus. Shepard, Miranda and Jacob found him, malnourished and sleep deprived, in his makeshift sniper's perch barely keeping upright, up to his eyeballs in angry mercs, stims, and grief.
Honestly, she couldn't blame or judge him in the slightest. It was quite possibly the worst situation a soldier could find themselves in. Garrus had stationed himself on Omega and decided to go the vigilante route. Along the way, he picked up the quite the team from what Shepard understood; 12 men strong including Garrus. They seemed like a good team, from what little Garrus had said. They were really starting to make a difference; before they had all been killed, of course.
Now they were all dead, because of a traitor named Sidonis.
Sidonis had lured Garrus away from his team so that they were caught unawares as the combined merc groups ambushed them.
Every time Garrus spoke of the traitor, Vivian could feel the hate rolling off him in waves. He had trusted this Sidonis with his life, and more importantly, his team's life and he threw it all to the wind to save his own skin. Pure, unadulterated treachery, the blackest of crimes.
A shiver ran up her spine at the thought of something similar happening to her team. She admitted to herself that she could barely imagine the pain that poisoned Garrus's mind from losing his entire team. She imagined if it were to happen to her, she would waste away, fade into unending guilt of not being able to save them.
She shook her head to chase the thoughts away.
Vivian looked up and realized that she was standing in front of the main battery's doors. She hadn't known that she had carried herself there already.
Get your head back in the game, Red. This is ridiculous, zoning out like this.
She took in a deep breath then, slowly letting the air out of her lungs as a sigh before pressing the console lock and the door slid open.
Garrus had his back to her as she took a few steps over the threshold. She cleared her throat, making her presence known. Garrus immediately swung his body around to look at her.
"Oh, hey, Commander. Can I help you with something?"