"Yeah, right," Julie says. "No way uncle Garrus loses, grandma. He could go blind and still take down a krogan from a kilometer away."
"With a rubber band gun," Jensen says.
"Firing backwards over his shoulder and aiming via mirror, I bet," Miranda adds dryly. Everyone laughs at that. "Come on, weepy, don't you have any stories that you're not making up?"
Jack contemplates this for several moments, long enough for Jensen and Cerise to get up and argue over who gets to use the restroom first. But she waits for her grandchildren to return before nodding. "I suppose I could tell about how Fari's dad and I got together."
Having spent the last few minutes refilling drinks, Kaidan sits down, snuggling against Miranda. "Sure, let's hear it. How did you convince the deadliest mercenary in the world to shack up with you, anyway?"
"Well," Jack muses, "it all started with some Cerberus remnants shooting at me."
It's been a year now, Jack thinks, staring at a holo advertisement. Mindoir isn't the colony she'd expected. Shepard never talked about it much, but he understood the pain she went through. He'd suffered enough on his own when the batarians attacked. It is a surprisingly resilient place, rebuilt for the second time after the Reapers. Scars can still be seen, if you know where to look, but everyone tries to ignore them, and focus instead on the day Shepard fired the Crucible. The day the Reapers stopped fighting, fixed the relays, and vanished back into the black depths.
Bending over, she looks down into the stroller. Jason is five months old now, and for once sleeping peacefully as she walks through the small shopping district. Teaching biotics isn't the job she could see herself doing a year ago, when they were fighting through London, her Alliance students dying around her. But a year ago, she still had Shepard. Now all she had was his son. She tried to tell herself it was enough, when she lay alone in bed at night.
Something catches her eye through one of the windows, and she steps a little closer, one hand on the handle of the stroller. Her eyes widen as she sees the man running towards her, battered yellow armor and assault rifle aimed in her direction. Her combat skills are a little rusty - giving birth and eleven months of peace will do that to you - but she pulls a barrier around her and throws herself in front of the stroller.
The window shatters as he leaps through it, and gunfire flies on the air. "Jack, get out of here! There's a car out back!" Zaeed shouts. Jessie, lovingly restored to immaculate condition by Tali and Garrus, comes up to his shoulder. A three-round burst slams into her back, only her biotics stopping the bullets from piercing her skin.
Yanking the stroller around, she looks over her shoulder as she fights through the panicking crowd at the door. Three men, bearing armor with Cerberus logos, are running across the street. Jessie fires, a steady stream of bullets turning one of them into mincemeat. Two men follow. One drops behind a car, evading Zaeed's fire for the moment. The other grabs a hostage.
Snarling, Jack looses a shockwave, the biotic energy enough to make the car jump twenty centimeters in the air. The man behind it flies much further than that, bouncing off the restaurant almost as high as the roof before crashing to the street. Hostage-taker gawks a moment too long, and a five-round burst perforates his head.
Jason is screaming, as Jack yanks the last of her assailants into the air, holding him steady for Zaeed to finish the job. Crowds of colonists are screaming too, but they don't matter to her. With the danger eliminated, she kneels in front of the stroller, staring in surprised wonder. One bullet hit the stroller, punching easily through the fabric and leaving a tiny, bleeding line across the tip of his nose. Aside from this, her son - Shepard's son - is unharmed.
Zaeed steps inside, Jessie still out and ready. "I don't know if there are any more," he warns her. "They're after Shepard's goddamn kid. Your kid."
The buckles of the stroller come apart easily under her fingers, and she presses Jason close to her shoulder. "How'd you find out?"
"Liara sent me some intel. I was here to goddamn retire, actually. Nobody else was closer than two jumps away." His left hand presses against the small of her back, guiding her through the employee area in the back of the clothing store. Jessie is held up in his right, muzzle forward, his line of fire sweeping over frightened shoppers and store clerks with careless abandon. "There were five of them. One died taking out your goddamn Secret Service escort."
"I had an escort?" she asks. A year of peace has made her woefully out of practice. Love made her out of practice too, she thinks, and hates herself for even thinking that Shepard could be to blame for this.
"Not anymore," he says. They stop at the door, letting him sweep the back street before hustling her over to a recycling truck. "Inside, quick."
She's buckling the safety harness on when the last Cerberus goon makes his appearance, opening fire with a submachine gun. Zaeed just smirks, flattening him with the truck, hardly a bump before they're to safety. Two miles down the road, they stop outside the spaceport. "Zaeed?" she asks.
"What?"
"Stay with me. There might be more of them."
They stare at each other for several long moments before he nods. A ship is just landing, a quarian design, and he leads the way. Two geth step off, waving them on board, and the door closes on that brief stage of her life.
"Now that is how I goddamn remember it," Zaeed says from the doorway.
Yolanda reaches up, running her finger over the small, horizontal scar on the tip of Jason's nose. "I think it gives him character," she says, kissing the scar as her two children make barfing sounds.
Jack rises from the chair, going to give Massani a hug, and a long kiss, thoroughly embarrassing her children and grandchildren. "Now that everyone is here, it's time for the feast, right?"
Gathering together around the table, they dig into the meal prepared in honor of the family and friend known as Commander Shepard, Savior of the Galaxy.
Author's Note: That's a wrap, folks. I might have misunderstood the point of the contest, having never done one of these before, but I think it turned into a decent story.