Author's Note:

I apologize for how it took for this part to come out. This one was...well, it was hard. It was very hard. I got bogged down in the middle, and swore I'd toss it all and start all over. Much love to a dear friend who talked me out of that, and then helpfully beta'd for me. For the record, the story's gone and turned itself into a five parter (this is actually only half of what the second part was originally going to be!), but I expect the other parts to be easier to write.

Yes, after reflection, I've raised the rating to be on the safe side.

Disclaimer: Bioware owns it all. Even if they don't want the bits I made up.

Dead Man's Switch

Part Two: Survivor's Guilt

Meg Shepard had been sixteen the first time she heard an explosion.

It had been a school bus. Or a sort of school bus; the Mindoir colony lacked the funds or the population to import specialist vehicles, so in reality it was an heavy farm van, of the sort every colonist family possessed, converted to carry seats behind, to ferry the children of the more remote colonists – the Shepards, the Fletchers and others – to the little school in the tiny town that formed the backbone of colony. It was only just barely a school. In truth was there wasn't even a teacher. It was just the one place where there was an uplink reliable enough for Mindoir's children to be tutored via extranet.

Someday, they promised, when Mindoir was more established, there would be a monorail, running from the city centre out to the remotest fields. "Or a hoverbus," Jade always said when the subject came up. "I want a hoverbus, like back on Earth." Jade always dreamt of Earth. Her prize possession was a digital screen that cycled between the shiniest and most exciting images of the home planet, bright and garish against the prefab metal walls of the colonial house.

Unlike her best friend, Meg had simple dreams. She liked the scent of Mindoririan earth, tangy in the morning sun, and the purple grass, and the lows of the sheep her family raised. She was in no hurry to rush away.

There was no school bus now, van, hover or otherwise. It was a pile of charred scraps; metal and plastic and bits of bodies. Oil and blood seeped into the ground, into the purple, purple grass.

Jade had also always been possessed of a great calm, the sort that looked at tempests and was never shaken, or however that quote went. The poem had been in Lit Module 12.3, and Meg couldn't remember what in the world the poem was about, but she did remember that line reminding her of Jade. Jade took everything in stride, from an unexpected quiz, to spilling coffee on her best dress, to an entirely unexpected dead cow in their yard, But this left her shaking, white to the lips, hands trembling. "Meg…" she whispered.

Jade had been her best friend as long as she could remember. Their family's farms abutted, their father were drinking buddies, and the two girls were almost of age, although Jade, the more sophisticated and composed of the pair, was actually ten months younger. When they were six, they had made mud pies together. When they were twelve, they had sworn eternal friendship and worn matching halves of a cheap silver heart necklace. At sixteen, as they were now, they giggled over boys together and made starry-eyed plans for seeing the galaxy beyond Mindoir. They never even considered that they might not leave together. To each other, they were simply a fact of life. Where Jade went, there Meg was, and where Meg was, there Jade went. Anything else was unthinkable.

Not that their relationship was entirely trouble free. They did have a regular fight every other month, which occasioned a lot of yelling, and then tearful apologies, often involving the consumption of vast amounts of ice cream. Meg was a faster swimmer and a better shot, but Jade did better in school. And, as they grew older, Meg could not help but think Jade was prettier than her. Jade had a look that was exotic in this day and age; with skin fairer than typical and which she took care to keep snowy white. Her eyes were green, with an impish slant to them, and her hair deep black, which she kept blunt-cut, the ends curling up about her jaw. Meg was just brown of hair and eye, with medium skin that still managed to be somewhat freckled, and tall and skinny besides, a hopeless tomboy. It didn't help she possessed a tremendous crush on Jade's older brother Richard, who had left Mindoir to go to med school.

The afternoon had been like any other. The school bus had dropped them at the end of the long, rather crooked lane (centuries of civilization and people still couldn't build straight country lanes), and they had started down it, carrying their school bags, laden with datapads and the remains of their lunch.

They had been halfway down the lane when they heard the explosion, a shattering sound in the still air, and come running back, to the stench of smoke and blood. There had been gunshots, Meg remembered vaguely. Only they hadn't realized then they were gunshots. She figured it out later, when they were staring at a sight none of them had the experience to comprehend.

"Oh, god, Meg," whispered Jade. "I think that's…Driver Sam's arm. Without the rest of him."

Meg looked. She didn't want to look, and wished she hadn't. She would never be able to erase that sight from her mind; the hand still gripping the steering wheel, both steering wheel and arm terminating in nothing. Kyle, her little brother, began to cry. He was half Meg's age, and she knew now he'd been an 'oops.' As Ms. Marks in SexEd Module 11.5 told them, even current birth control was only 99.9995% effective. The remaining .0005% still occurred. Apparently their mother had coped with the unexpected child by deciding her daughter made the perfect babysitter. Meg rather resented this.

"Quiet," Meg told Kyle without any pretence at gentleness.

"Why quiet?" asked Jade.

Couldn't she hear it? The fall of feet over the hillside, the muttering in an alien tongue…

"Because they're coming back," Meg said.

*

Sometimes Shepard stopped thinking.

Sometimes she stopped thinking and just let her body take over, the reflexes and strength honed by exercise and gene therapy, and her instincts, whatever it was in her guts and the cores of her bones that drove her to do what she had to do.

In these moments, her consciousness came in flashes, like a throbbing strobe light of impressions, as if the full horror of it was too much for her brain to process smoothly, and instead it had to black out between flashes. The twitch of the young man's hand, his sad thin figure exploding, the flash, the sound, the security guard dissolving into a crimson spray beside him…

And as it came, in flash after flash, she was already reacting, off her feet, springing onto the heavily pregnant woman beside her, and pulling her to the ground behind a wall, decorative, but convenient, low but high enough.

Silence, then. The stink of ashes and blood and offal and gunpowder--her old friends. Sirens begin to clamour, shrill and loud piercing the air. And Shepard lay still, as close to this stranger as she had once lain with Jade and Kyle in a little hollow while the first batarians she had ever seen came past, praying they would not see them, their heartbeats all beating so quickly in such unison they all melded into one. Few things united people so well as fear.

Reality resumed its usual steady flow, and Shepard rolled off the woman, reaching down to her ankle holster, fingers closing about the grip of her pistol. It was steady and familiar within her hands. She always felt better with a gun in hand—with the knowledge she could fight back. "Stay down," she warned the other, cautiously shifting to a crouch and peeking over the wall.

The scene beyond was desolate, scarlet splattered over stone. Shepard forced herself not to think about what those shapes lying there were. Scanning debris and trying to pick out shapes, of bones and organs and body parts could drive you mad. She only sought the figure of a gunman or another bomber, or anyone else who might present a threat. The streets beyond, leading into town, were now devoid of people. The sirens kept sounding a mourning wail.

There was no immediate life, hostile or otherwise. She waited, pistol half propped on the wall, but finally arose cautiously, ducking to what cover she could find, before offering her free hand to the woman. "I think it's safe. At the moment."

The other was a woman of her age, with long mousy hair, and a long, thoughtful face. "Was that--?" she asked, heaving herself up with a great effort

"Yes," said Shepard concisely.

"You're bleeding," she said.

Only now that it was mentioned was Shepard now aware of it, a thin burning line along her cheek, and a dampness of blood. "It's nothing."

"I'm a doctor," the other declared brusquely, reaching over to take hold of Shepard's chin, a move that made her bristle. The woman peered at her face clinically before letting her fingers drop. "It's not nothing. However, it's very minor, and it'll wait. You all right otherwise?"

"I'm fine," Shepard replied stubbornly. She was the soldier here. Damned if she'd allow herself to be hurt while civilians were blreeding.

The sirens refused to stop. A tremulous keening, possibly human, broke through them, and Shepard looked over to see something stir in the ruins, the two pale frightened faces of the teenage girls. "Dr. Newcastle?" called out one. "Doctor? It's Chelly. She's hurt."

"Come here," Shepard said, and the two girls obeyed, the taller one leaning on the smaller, her right arm a bloody mess. They moved awkwardly.

They had been lucky, Shepard thought dispassionately. They had been half-shielded by a small rise in the ground, and just far enough out of the blast radius to have a chance. Everyone else, who had been clustered by the street corner waiting for their rides…

It was too late for them.

She tried to take in the lay of the land while the doctor looked over the girl's arm. The spaceport proper was some distance away, across a garden and a network of parking space, and it was nearly all exposed ground. The town was no closer, but provided the opportunity of walls and bins and other pieces of cover. The soldier in her—and she was mostly soldier—liked those odds better.

The uninjured of the two girls was staring about her, expression blank. She wore her hair in a long braid, a style that stirred a few memories for Shepard; memories she quickly quashed. "Everyone just…" She did not finish her sentence.

"Don't look," Shepard. "If you look, you'll wish you hadn't. And you can never unlook." She knew this well. Whatever innocence she had once possessed had been lost in the charred remains of a school bus.

"But," said the girl. That seemed to be all the words she had left. She fell silent.

The shock was still raw for Shepard. Too close to a day thirteen years before. "We need to get you inside," she said, trying to snap herself back to business.. "Until we know what's going on."

"And I need to get her to the hospital," the doctor said brusquely, wrapping the injured girl's arm with a strip torn from her own tunic. "If she's to have any hope at all."

"Hospital?" There was a hospital now? In her time the colonists took care of most injuries and illnesses themselves; with medigel and a diagnosis program, much was possible. There was a military doc at the garrison for more involved issues.

"On Second Street, past the the corp store," said the uninjured girl, a little impatiently. "Haven't you been here before?"

"When I was here, there only was one street," replied Shepard. "And the last time I saw it, it was burning."

That shut the girls up, but the doctor looked up, eyes narrowed in thought. She had green eyes, a pale and undecided shade of green, and she seemed perfectly unconcerned about the blood spotting her hands. "You must be Meg Shepard."

"Yes," said Shepard flatly. Something twigged at the back of her mind—how odd she would use her first name instead her rank? From half the vids and reports, one would barely know Shepard had a first name.

She pushed that thought away. There were more important things to worry about. "We'll go, but we'll be careful. Suicide bombers are tricky to predict. Sometimes they're just a random loony. Sometimes they're a group of random loonies. Sometimes they're the precursor to something less random."

She raised her pistol, and ushered them slowly down the street. She had a mission, and an immediate objective—get the civilians to safety.

Her head was so much clearer when she had a job to do.

*

Kyle kept saying he wanted to go home. Well, so did Meg. Except there was no home to go to, not any more.

There was nowhere to go. That was part of the problem.

They had snuck down the back lanes and fetched her father's shotgun from the tool shed. Meg carried it now, awkwardly, the weapon bouncing against her shoulder. She had shot birds with it before. She wasn't sure she could shoot a person. Even an alien.

Were aliens people? It was a question she didn't want to ponder at the moment.

She had shielded Kyle's eyes as they darted across the farmyard, from the sights she wished she could forget. The blood trickling down their stairs. That was much as she could comprehend; the horror that that sticky scarlet trickle promised. Everything else was beyond her; the sight of her parents' bodies too much to absorb. It was like a bad dream, but waking was slow in coming.

They had tried to go to the garrison, but had seen black smoke rising from over a hill, and so went no further. They had been wandering for five hours now, and it was dark, and growing darker.

"Forty eight hours," she told Jade as they rested, tense and listening to every noise on the wind, like rabbits grazing. "It takes forty eight hours for the Alliance to get troops here. We've waited five already. Forty three more, and the fleet will be here." She didn't know where she'd gotten the forty eight from, or even if it was correct, but the sheer solidarity of the number made her feel better.

"Forty three hours is forever," said Jade. "And was anyone left to tell the fleet?"

They wandered. Their feet ached. Meg tripped on her long skirt. She was a tomboy, always a tomboy, but today she had worn a long floral skirt to school, like the skirts her mother, who called herself an 'hippie' (such an old-fashioned word!) wore, as she floated about the house and hummed to herself, dreamy-eyed. Meg had felt pretty, for all of six hours. Now she felt absurd.

She had told her mother just yesterday that she was a grown up now. She had never felt more like a child.

And her mother was dead. Nothing left of her at all save a pile of limbs spread at awkward angles, and a glossy scarlet pool.

It happened near dawn, in flashes of consciousness, her strobe-light sense of action. They had surprised three batarians, heavily armoured and stinking of blood. Without thinking, Meg raised her father's shotgun and shot one, point-blank in the chest. Its arms flailed, and it fell over, making choking gurgling noises—

Meg barely had time to absorb the thought of killing something—someone, before she was snatched rudely by the hair. Her hair was long, a long, long braid that hung nearly to her hips. Her mother loved—had loved—her hair. Her mother, humming her songs, used to brush it to a gloss before school, until Meg told her she was too old for that.

The ground seemed to sink away as she was hauled off her feet. She scrabbled frantically for solid ground, to right herself, for anything solid. Her legs were hopelessly tangled in her skirt, and the pressure on her hair brought tears to her eyes, and the world around here seemed to darken.

Another flash of consciousness, and then Jade was there, screaming abuse, throwing rocks, a little whirlwind of fury in dark hair and pale skin. The grip on Meg's braid loosened, and she fell forward, onto her knees. "Run!" screamed her friend, voice high with fear, and Meg only choked on her objection. "Run, you stupid girl!"

Meg snatched at her brother's hand, and ran for all she was worth, ran until her heart pounded in her chest and her breath came heavy, holding onto her brother's hand as if it were her only link with sanity. He was crying again, but the wind carried his sobs away.

When she could finally think again, she was far away, her feet bloodied and her skirt torn. And alone.

There was no Jade. No Kyle. No shotgun, either. She stared at her hand, perplexed, the feel of her brother's small, clammy hand so clear in her head she tried to will it back into existence.

Her best friend had been captured for her sake. And she had let go of her brother's hand—her brother, the last thing her mother had entrusted her with.

And she was lost in oh so many ways.

She climbed a tree, and pressed herself against the branch, heart throbbing against the wood, and hid, like the coward she was.

A day later, an Alliance patrol found her when she fell out of the tree on top of them.

So that was the story of Meg Shepard and Mindoir. There was no hero there. Only a scared child.

*

The town was in ruins.

If there was anything left of the Mindoir Shepard had known, it was no longer here. Cars, bins, bits of building and bodies were tossed over the street with careless abandoned. Windows and doors were shut tight, barred against the unknown.

But there seemed to be nothing attacking them, so on she went. Somehow, miraculously, in this dusty, bloody hell torn apart nine ways from Sunday, there were survivors. Walking wounded, who joined her little cavalcade, leading onward.

They had gone a block before they found the first relief effort, a single garrison soldier, who was trying to patch the wounded with too little medigel, and rest them in a vehicle. He recognized her, even through the dust and her shades. "Commander," he said, and the joy in his voice was so real it scared her. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

She only paused for a moment, accepting a brief swallow of water, counting the survivors on way to the hospital, and promising to do what she could to help. He didn't know much more than she did, only there had been 'several' bombs.

Several. That sounded bad.

And onward she went, leading the survivors, like a weary pied piper. It was already more people than she had managed to save the first time.

*

When she enlisted in the Alliance—because helping people was the best way she could think of to atone—she hacked off all the hair her mother had loved. She did herself, with a pair of old-fashioned scissors—there were all sorts of fancy gadgets for hairdressing they hawked in the infovids, but when you got right done to it, they never really had invented anything that got the job done better than scissors—snipping off her braid, and when she looked at herself in the mirror, hair cut to her jawline, the thought crossed her mind that was the way Jade had always worn it.

She never talked to anyone about the reality of Mindoir. Oh, she had half-blurted it out to the Alliance officers who had rescued her, but she was so tired and shattered then she never did figure out what she actually said. n Alliance therapist tried to tease it out of her once, many years later, after Akuze, but she stared at the ceiling and talked about birds. She wasn't quite sure why she chose birds, but they seemed a very harmless subject indeed.

When she met Richard again, Jade's brother and her longtime crush, she told him she was sorry about Jade. He told her it wasn't her fault.

She never did believe them.

They were together for two years, her and Richard, united by a shared pain. In the end, he left her. She wasn't dealing as well as he was. He couldn't deal with that. Or she couldn't. Sometimes she wasn't sure.

Once, Captain Anderson, who she had first met in the confused blur of things after Mindoir, while the Alliance were shepherding her all over the place, and then recognized her again when she was in uniform, had squeezed her shoulder in a fatherly way and said "Don't dwell on your failures. Live for those you cannot save." It was good advice, or at least she thought so.

It didn't make it go away.

After Virmire, after Ashley, she had poured Kaidan a glass of contraband whiskey and said, "I know something about survivor's guilt," but that was as far as she got. She was afraid. Too afraid of getting too close to him. Because it was against regs. And because she always lost anything she loved, so it was safer not to love at all.

She was keeping a list in her head, despite herself. The list of all those she couldn't save. Her family. Jade. Her unit on Akuze. Ashley.

That wasn't healthy, she was sure. But, goddamnit, she was perfectly functional.

Wasn't she?

*

The hospital was small. Small as in 'narrow;' it did boast a third floor, which was something that distinguished it from the other buildings about it. Two vehicles were drawn up outside, unloading wounded with almost tangible urgency.

The pregnant doctor, who was now pale and clutching her belly—dear god, let her not be going into labour, prayed Shepard—suddenly brightened. Or looked just a little less weary. "Richard!" she called out, and ran—well, waddled forward—to greet a man emerging, who wrapped his arms around her, despite being half-blood himself to the elbow.

"Sue," he said, kissing her, "I was so worried…" And when the man in question raised his head again, Shepard realized with a sudden flop of her belly that Dr. Newcastle's apparent spouse was Richard Fletcher, her old boyfriend.

This day kept getting better.

"Meg," he said finally, his gaze resting on her. ".I—I heard you were coming."

Unlike his sister, Richard was a rare natural blond, hair the colour of old gold. He had the same pointed jawline as Jade, though, and the same eyes as well, dark green and slightly slanted, although their vivid hue seemed less shocking against his fair colouring. "Richard," said Shepard. At least that explained why the other doctor had used her first name. It seemed strange to hear it. Her given names were actually the primly old-fashioned Margaret Anne, but she had been Meg to everyone since she was a baby. Until she had lost everyone. "It's been a long time. I didn't know you were here."

"I came back," he said. "This is Sue, my wife—but I assume you've already met—"

"No time to catch up, I need to know what's going on." Shepard purposely hurried through the conversation. "Are your comms up? I need to speak with whoever's in charge here."

"Yes, of course—just inside, in the lunch room. We're in touch with Commander Singh at the garrison." He moved on to examine the new arrivals, back to business with a quickness that felt Shepard somewhere between relieved and insulted.

His wife hung back for a moment, resting a hand against the wall. She looked at Shepard, her jaw set firmly, a trace of hostility in her gaze. Or perhaps it was just firmness. Shepard wouldn't have called it hostility two minutes ago, when she didn't realize she was her husband's ex.

"Thank you for helping us," Dr. Newcastle said. "I—well." She shrugged. "I like to think I'd have had the good sense to get down when the bomb went off even if you hadn't been there. But you were, and I'll never know, will I? So I have to thank you."

"No need to thank me," replied Shepard. "I save people. It's what I do."