The world was blurry as she awoke, and instead of detail all Shepard could make out were fuzzy shapes, brushes of color like an old oil painting. There was a brightness but she wasn't sure how much she could trust her senses. How long had she been out? Where was she? What had happened to her? Immediately, she thought of that clouded field of vision she'd seen through over a year before in some Cerberus lab, the distorted voices of Miranda and a man she'd briefly known as Wilson talking and yelling, arguing over her early consciousness. But there were no voices here, none that she could hear as a loud ringing grew duller and softer in her ears.

Her body felt heavy, and as she tested her tired and worn muscles, she was unable to decide if her limbs were just beyond use, or she was restrained. Shepard's mouth felt dry as a desert, lips chapped, but at least she was breathing on her own, a relief, however paltry it was. She tried to call out, even if she knew better than to make noise in unknown circumstances, but it only launched her into a small cough. The flesh of her cheeks, her neck, her chest, felt tight as it pulled under the strain.

She blinked, attempting to wash away the haze in which she was buried under. There was a light overhead she could make out now, so bright her eyes burned under the fluorescence, and Shepard lifted her right hand instinctively to shield them, but there was another tugging, this time from the back of her hand, an IV line being pulled, most likely. It didn't hurt, not really, and that coupled with the distinct lack of all the other painful sensations in her body told her that she was heavily medicated. She was thankful for it, for the sweet relief it offered, but at the same time fearful of the implications. Cerberus, she thought of again. Maybe this was Cerberus all over again.

A panic rose in her chest, and this time it wasn't just because of how vulnerable she felt, but because she couldn't recall any of the recent past. How long had she been here? The last thing she remembered was the Citadel, London, Earth in all its devastation. Was she even the same woman that was before? Was she a third, a fourth, a fifth? She needed to be sure, needed to find a scar, a mark, anything that made her who she'd known herself to be in her last real memory. A kind of chill ran straight through her to her very core, and it left Shepard in a scrambling frenzy, limply dragging her hand up, limb shaking as she tried to hold it steady before her eyes. That scar on her hand, the one that had belonged the original Shepard, it was still absent. Her heart broke and tears came. Somehow, she'd hoped, that just maybe it might all have been a horrible dream, and like happened in all the stories of childhood, the hero would get what she earned in the end; she would be made whole. She wouldn't, as it turned out.

Shepard fought to lift her left arm, she had the remains of a wound there she'd earned on the Collector base, but no matter how hard she tried, it stayed unmoving. It was almost as if the connection between brain and muscle was severed, and the implication of what that might have meant left soft cries of distress coming from the back of her throat. She turned her head to the side as much as she could to look for any sign of where she was, but the left side of her face and neck restricted her movement—for what reasons, she never wanted to know. Her one working hand grasped blindly at her bed sheet, looking for a handle usually on the side of hospital beds, but there was nothing to find purchase on.

She was struggling to sit up, her body screaming in utter and complete exhaustion, when a hand touched touched her shoulder, gently pushing her back down. Her eyes immediately found the stranger, and for half a delirious second, Shepard thought it was Miranda, once again come to build her from the ground up. She had the same dark hair even if it was pulled back, but her face was different, worn in and older, maybe fifty, fifty-five years old.

"Easy," the woman said. There was nothing unique or striking about her for Shepard to work off of, even if her heart wasn't otherwise pounding in genuine fear. No name tag, no emblem of the Alliance or Cerberus. About the only thing she could be sure of was that she was human. "You're okay," she reassured.

Despite the calm the woman offered, Shepard's hysteria remained present, even more so at the weakness she felt. How bad off could she be that she couldn't even sit up on her own? She tried to inch herself discreetly to the other side of the bed, but her legs didn't want to work, the rest of her too tired to compensate. In all directions, her eyes searched around the room but found nothing from her vantage point, just a metal tray and the woman watching her, arm wrapped and suspended in a makeshift sling crafted of torn and tied cloth. There was no knife, no medical instrument to make a weapon of for herself, not that Shepard believed she could even wield it, but fight or flight was taking hold, and she was in no shape to begin the retreat.

"Do you know where you are?"

Shepard just blinked, both unwilling to respond and afraid to find out if she even had a voice left anymore at all.

The woman pursed her lips, visibly contemplating her next move. In the end, she brushed her hand over her own chest, treating Shepard as though she was a child. "Emma," she said, indicating herself. "I'm in the next cot over, your medic told me to keep an eye on you," she explained and sighed, shaking her head. "A-are you in pain?"

No, the pain was still at bay, and thank every Goddess and Spirit for that.

Emma tried for a third time. "Can you tell me who you are?"

The woman didn't seem like a threat and every instinct in her body telling her that the stranger meant her no harm, but Shepard remained just as tense. She coughed again, trying to swallow and moisten her mouth, though it was just as dry as it had been when she'd awoken.

"Re—" she rasped, face crinkling in frustration, and attempted again. "Reapers?"

Emma's face wore a distinctive relief, the kind that went beyond thankful her charge was apparently not brain dead, but also found a kind of peace that had been missing for a long while. Shepard knew the answer before the woman responded.

"Dead," she said, a soft smile forming.

Shepard, despite how much it went against every ounce of training she'd endured, shut her eyes and relaxed into the bed. She let those tears out that had formed before but not fallen, chest heaving with the comforting solace of a job done, a mission completed, and some semblance of life restored for those that were left.

Her guard down, Shepard stayed like that until there was once again the gentle nudge to her shoulder.

"I'm going to get someone, alright?"

"Please," Shepard responded, and reached out before the woman could leave, grasping at her shirt, fingers tangled in the fabric. She met the woman's eyes.

"What year is it?"

"Year?" Emma blinked, a glance given between Shepard and the hand that joined them. "2186. You haven't been out that long. It's only been a couple days."

There was no guarantee. It could all be a lie, a trick by Cerberus or the Reapers or anyone else. Maybe somewhere in the galaxy there were even more of her bodies stored, simply needing a data dump of her brain's synapses and pathways, but for the time being, Shepard chose to believe that the body she had taken to London was the one she still wore.

Her hand released its tight grasp on the stranger's shirt, eventually going limp and dangling off the edge of her bedside. Weary, Shepard fought the urge to sleep to get her last words out. "I…will you be here when I wake up?" She didn't know the woman's story, why she was there, or how she'd been tasked to be her keeper, but in the minutes she'd known her, she'd grown bonded, like a young animal imprinting on the parental figure it followed about in its early days.

Though her eyes were wide, bewildered even, Emma nodded. She took Shepard's hand from where it hung and lifted it back onto the side of the cot, tucking it beside Shepard while her eyelids fell shut.

"I'll be here."

The second time she woke, it wasn't to the comforting cloud of pain relief, but rather the exact opposite. She wasn't even fully awake, eyes still closed, when she let out her first yell as a direct reaction to the agonizing fire spreading from her left lower arm and up towards her shoulder. Of course, it did mean her limb was still attached, so there was that.

"Stay still," someone chastised, and the pain crept further.

"Please," she implored the man's figure as she opened her eyes, "I can't—" her breathing was short and quick, not taking enough oxygen as she strived to breathe through the pain. "Fuck, fuck—Jesus Christ! Stop, I can't—"

"You were much better when you were unconscious," the man groused, continuing on his work, and though Shepard could see, she was only barely able to make him out through the thick tears in her eyes brought on by the excruciating hurt.

She'd felt extreme pain before, or at least she'd thought she had. There'd been bullet wounds and broken bones, bruises and migraines. Then there'd been that whole dying thing, the distress of suffocation she could still recall from the memories gifted to her, but nothing, not anything she'd ever felt before, compared to this. She felt like she was being flayed alive.

The woman who had previously identified herself as Emma pressed a cold hand to Shepard's cheek, trying to direct her attention away from what the other was doing. "He's just changing the bandages," she said, attempting to put her at ease, sympathy in her gaze.

Shepard wept openly. Before, there'd always been something for the pain. Kaidan with a medpack, Chakwas with some miracle pill. It was like every ounce of pain she'd ever been relieved of in her life before had come back to her all at once, direct and focused on her left side.

"Your burns are pretty severe," the medic said, cleaning the flesh where it was raw and open and then applying a cream before fitting the sleeve of a bandage around her arm. "Infection's the big worry for someone like you. Gets into your blood and then you've got sepsis and coming back from that with what little we've got right now… it's damn near a death sentence." He sighed loudly and ripped open a new package, beginning the process all over again at Shepard's neck and lower cheek, this time with greater care. "Normally you'd be in a burn center, you'd have doctors for this kind of thing, a couple plastic surgeons trying to minimize scarring and tissue damage, already fast-tracking your own skin cultures in some lab."

She could feel when the packing at her throat was removed, cool air both soothing and stinging her skin, and she tried to stifle the cries, the shake of her body. It only made things worse.

"But you've got me," he announced. "RN from a red sand rehab clinic. And right now we've got antibiotics, some ointment, and gauze. That's a good day as far as things have been lately, but it means fuck all for you. So we're going to keep you clean and hope your body can make do on top of everything else you've got, and if you walk away with use of your arm—I'll consider it a fucking Godsend. Hey," he attached the bandage, lining the edges with tape from her cheekbone on down, "you're all done for today. Congratulations."

"Work on your bedside manner," she cracked even through heavy breaths. The pain was receding, now just a dull roar rather than a sharp shriek, which made it manageable for the time being.

"When someone starts paying me, I will," he grunted, and after the crinkling of used packaging was discarded, he pulled up a data pad, its screen cracked but still functioning. "You lucid enough to hear the rest of the damage?"

Shepard gasped, "there's more?"

"You've got no idea. Burns on 18% of your body, confined to the left side. Fractured fibula," he tapped the edge of the data pad to the hard casting on her lower left leg concealed beneath the blanket. "Dislocated shoulder—we popped that right back in for you, no charge. Concussion," the medic nodded to her, "not to mention the hematomas, contusions, abrasions, and one heck of a nasty cut across your head." He stopped, then added, "sorry about the hair, by the way. Hope you weren't attached to it."

Shepard felt at her face, starting from her forehead and moving upwards towards her scalp. The right side was business as usual, matted and knotted hair ever present, if grease and blood laden, but the left side was an entirely different story. It had been overzealously shaved in large sweeps, another bandage following down towards behind her ear.

"…When they dragged you in here," he was shaking his head dismissively, the kind of expression one used to denote someone on death's door—she'd seen it on a few doctor's faces on the Citadel when they'd brought Kaidan in, "no one thought you were going to make it through the night, especially not your—"

"—Henry, she can deal with the rest later." Emma finally cut in, a deliberate glance in his direction. The nurse raised a shrugged shoulder and set his focus back on Shepard.

"We're running low on the painkillers you're allowed to have. As bad as you are right now, there are some people worse that we're just keeping comfortable, so you'll have to deal with it." Henry said nothing else, gathering up his bare bones carryall of supplies before moving on, leaving the data pad behind. Shepard moved to grasp it in her functioning hand, but Emma had it first, setting it aside and out of reach. Her brows knitted together at the woman's behavior, but Shepard let it go. It hurt too much to protest, anyway.

"Hungry?"

Shepard shook her head. She didn't know what had been sustaining her the last few days, if they'd been pumping her with liquid nutrition or what, but her stomach wasn't interested as it was.

"Well that's too bad," the woman replied and fished under Shepard's cot. She returned with a can of something, by the label it was a protein shake, the kind the military usually passed out to its soldiers for breakfast to fill their bottomless stomachs a little more. Emma cracked the top open and added the straw, normal sized and thus seeming far too gigantic for the small can, and brought it to Shepard's mouth. She didn't have the heart to resist, not at the woman's watchful insistence.

While Shepard drank, Emma talked. First about a few other patients and then about the reason why she was there—her own broken arm had brought her to the tiny field hospital, and waiting for transport north had kept her on as a volunteer in the meantime. They were in a tent, or a series of them really, two hundred or so patients with two doctors for all of them, a couple of nurses who were just as valuable these days. Henry, she reassured, was one of the best.

She finished, and Emma, untrusting, shook the can to test for any remains. It reminded Shepard of her mother when she was a child and prone to avoiding finishing her milk, her vegetables. Already, her stomach felt unsettled at the sudden invasion of nourishment.

"The fleet?" Shepard asked, trying to steer the conversation in a certain direction. "How much is left?"

Emma helplessly shrugged her shoulders as she disposed of the can, but kept the straw on the side table, likely to sanitize and reuse later. Supplies were tight, after all. "I only know what I've heard. Relays went dark," Shepard's eyes widened, "but they're working on repairing. Anything that was in the system is stranded here right now, but I heard a lot of ships were called off at the last minute and fled. So God knows where they are."

She attempted to follow along with the woman's sparse information. Sword—Hackett was going to send them to a meeting point once the crucible was activated. If there'd been enough time, they would have left. The Normandy included. Shepard tried to lift her left arm, going for her omni-tool, but the pain stopped her. Fuck, she could only imagine the damage done to her implant if her arm barely resembled a slab of raw meat right now.

"Is there a… a terminal somewhere I can use?"

"You're not getting out of that bed anytime soon," Emma chastised. Yes, Shepard thought, she definitely sounded like her mother. "And they're few and far between these days. Got a couple in the camp. But if you've got people you need to try to contact… they probably don't have access either."

Her head hurt. Her everything hurt. But that didn't distract her enough from the fact that Emma was right, even if she could get a message out, the people she wanted to reach wouldn't be able to get it because of distance or because of death. No, she wouldn't consider death, not after she'd forced Garrus and James back onto the Normandy, the rest of the crew already inside. She could still see the look they gave her when she insisted she finish on her own, the way Garrus had reached out to her until she'd backed away and began running. If she could have taken him with her, she would've, but the state he was in at the time… Shepard exhaled heavily into the stale air of the military tent.

"I can try to get some information for you, though," Emma ventured again, and watched Shepard with a curious expression.

"There's a ship, the Normandy, had a cousin who was a crewman on it," she lied. "Only family I have left."

"I'll see what I can find. But was there anyone else?" She tried again, prompting and pushing Shepard. "A boyfriend? A husband? Someone like that?"

It felt like the inquisition, but Shepard just shook her head against the pillow and kept things simple. "No, not anymore."

The woman had those sad eyes, depressed at the corners, almost pitying, and it reminded her of that final look Liara had given her at the Alliance's temporary base of operations. There was something else there, but like before, Shepard didn't want to know. Anything else would just be too much.

"I don't mean to be—but, do you think I can be alone for a little while? I just… need to think."

"Sure," Emma said, then forced a smile, seemingly coming alive all at once. "Of course. I'll be back later to check in on you." She backed away to leave, tucking the data pad under her arm to take with her.

"Thank you," Shepard added quickly, "for looking out for me. I… just, thank you."

A tip of her head was Emma's acknowledgement, and then as promised, she left Shepard to her thoughts.

The following afternoon, Shepard passed a rather pitiful milestone: being able to sit up again, albeit with some assistance. Her posture left much to be desired, hunched forward, her good arm cradling the mangled, bandaged flesh of the other. Beside her stood Emma, carefully running the sole pair of clippers the makeshift hospital owned over Shepard's scalp, doing her best to evenly match the short prickled hair on the other half of her head as best as she could do with only one arm.

"Not my best work," she said, and Shepard cast her a sidelong glance, catching the tip of the woman's tongue between her teeth as she eyed Shepard's scalp. "But you've got the head for it. Always wanted to cut mine off when I was younger, never brave enough," she said lightly, smiling as she brushed her hand over it, dusting away any more of the clipped bits of hair. Emma gathered the towel laid out to collect what hair it could, and set the electric shaver aside. She handed Shepard a small metal bowl with shallow sides and a flattened bottom, the kind of thing usually reserved for collecting medical instruments, soiled bandages, maybe even someone's sick.

Shepard flipped the container over to catch the mirror image of herself. It wasn't perfect, in fact with the scratches and dullness of the well worn metal, it hardly looked like her at all. It was more than that, though, and Shepard quickly realized the reason she didn't recognize the woman looking back at her was because she truly didn't resemble herself these days. It was one thing to feel the damage with her fingers, finding the tenderness of a bruise, but it was another to see just how discolored her skin was where blood pooled beneath, how deep her scrapes went, and even the generous amounts of bandaging.

She didn't hesitate, nodded her head to the bowl for Emma to take and hold, and then Shepard began peeling back the gauze fastened to her face, desperate to get her eyes on the extent of the damage there. The nurse—her nurse—Henry had been surprised by how far she'd healed through the worst of the damage already, but Shepard had said nothing at the time. There wasn't an easy way to explain the kind of skin weaves she had without raising questions. Regardless, she wasn't ready for the sight, what with the cruel joke that had been Henry and Emma touting her skin's healing abilities. If this was good, how had it looked when they'd first seen her? Emma touched her right upper arm in a comforting gesture, but it also served the dual purpose to remind Shepard not to idle. She closed the dressing again, hiding away the red and angry, weeping flesh.

At her hairline was another long bandage, and though Shepard didn't know what it looked like, just that there were stitches and medi-gel coating the wound, it reminded her instantly of the body of the first Shepard they'd found in Chronos station. Her head had been cracked open and resealed, though for sinister purposes rather than a wound obtained in battle. With the whole of her hair gone now, Shepard thought she resembled the likes of Jack more than herself, save for the lack of the distinctive tattoos, or plush, bright red lips. What would any of her old friends have thought if they saw her? Scars came with the job description in their line of work, and when Shepard blinked, she thought of Kaidan apologetically dragging his lips over her newly healed wounds just as he'd done to the other ones she'd earned in his absence, learning the feel of the new her.

Emma cleared her throat. "You alright, dear?"

Shepard winced, covered the half of her unburned face with her hand as the answer.

"The wounds will heal," the woman calmly reassured.

Inclining her head back towards where Emma stood above her, Shepard asked quietly, "have you heard anything? The ship I asked about?"

Emma nodded at the reminder, and struggled with sifting through the pocket of her trousers. A size or two too big, if Shepard could guess by the way the belt was tightened at her waist. That wasn't unusual from what she'd seen of the other patients and volunteers that passed by. Emma retrieved a small scrap of paper, the ink smudged and nearly illegible.

"Put word out to a few soldiers," she supplied, turning the paper round until the letters were correctly positioned. "SSV Normandy—"

Shepard could already hear the words in her head. Destroyed during final assault. Collision with another vessel. Whereabouts unknown. Ship found, no life signs, crew presumed dead. But Emma continued on with that nervous tick in her throat, stopping to clear her voice every few words.

"Stranded in Horse Head Nebula, location classified. Comm—Communication?" She questioned the abbreviation, looking to Shepard for guidance before. "Via QEC—I'm not sure what that is. Beginning repairs. No reported casualties."

Garrus had needed medical help, she told herself. Had she not called for the Normandy to evac them, he wouldn't have stood a chance down on that battlefield, even laying in cover, waiting for someone to come along. He'd needed Chakwas and she'd made the call to save him. But if she'd put him on that ship with all the rest only to die an hour later—her thoughts had been so loud that Shepard had nearly missed Emma's proud delivery of the gathered news. Shepard's head shot up.

"They're okay?" She questioned in disbelief.

Emma laid her hand over Shepard's on the bed. "As far as we know, your cousin is okay."

Shepard was regretful for the lie, especially to do so to a woman who had only offered help without asking for anything in return, but the feeling of genuine relief outweighed all the rest. They were alright. The Alliance, the Turian hierarchy, maybe even the Flotilla, would be looking for them. She didn't know what it meant for when they returned, not with how things had been left between her and those that new the truth, but Shepard imagined there'd be one hell of an Alliance-led interrogation and debriefing when she notified them of where she was, and then at the end, a lot of drinking. A lot of laughing. Maybe just enough to make the rest of the horrible truths not matter so much for a small time.

She felt her cheeks pulling into a lopsided smile, the left side of her face fighting too much movement, but she grinned through the throbbing discomfort anyway.

A boy, a young teenager that had to grow up far too fast in this war, came by with a weighted box under one arm. To the beds across from her own, he doled out the identical rations delivered twice daily. It wasn't much, but it was enough to get by, and furthermore, it was simply all they were going to get. Each patient gratefully accepted the vitamin and protein shake canister alongside the prepackaged MRE, and Shepard would have been lying if she said her stomach wasn't already growing hungry from the unsatisfying ration bar and high-caloric sludge she'd drunk down earlier that morning. The boy handed off a can and pouch to Emma, and then with a glance to the number marking the foot of Shepard's cot, handed her a pouch and not one, but two servings of the drink, and kept on moving.

Shepard eyed the gifts bestowed to her, taking the second can in her hand and holding it out to the boy as he delivered the pair of goods to the next bed. "You gave me an extra," she said.

Emma hushed her immediately, tried to swat her hand down. "You need it," she argued, "your burns won't heal if you aren't eating."

Persistent, she spoke again. "I don't need special treatment." Shepard dodged the woman trying to interfere, extending it back in the boy's direction.

He shrugged a shoulder and spoke with casual insistence before moving on. "It's for the baby."

Shepard, for the first time since she'd woken up, actually barked out laughter. "You've got the wrong bed, kid. Now come take it to someone who really needs it."

The boy impatiently groaned. "Bed 32, they told me. You see that?" His head jerked back to the end of her cot. "You're bed 32. Now let me finish what I've got to do so I can get out of here and eat my own dinner."

She didn't fight after that, just let the boy go on his way as she lowered her arm to the cot, both out of exhaustion and her willingness to give in. She watched the teen continue to work methodically, down the rest of the rows and then out through the flaps of the tent and into the one adjacent. Shepard whipped her head back around to Emma, trying again to laugh, though this time it was forced. "Some other woman's going to be needing this," she said, and offered the can to the more mobile woman. "Make sure she gets it."

Emma said nothing, just watched Shepard carefully and though she reached for the drink like she was to take it, she merely folded Shepard's grip back around it and pushed it towards her. "I'll make sure to tell someone," she hesitated, "but you should drink it since you have it."

Shepard pushed it back at Emma's hand, grinding her teeth together. "No. No, I really shouldn't. I don't need it, I heal fast and I'm not—"

The other woman swallowed, throat bobbing, and ducked her head to avoid Shepard's accusing eyes. Shepard went absolutely still, the breath sucked from her lungs for half an instant before she was compensating, nearly hyperventilating at the implication the other woman's avoidance held. "No," she repeated in consternation, voice growing louder with each syllable. "No."

"Take it easy," Emma said, palms up in a show of surrender and compliance. "We'll get it sorted out." A few nearby patients lifted their heads at the disturbance, the sudden raise of volume in the otherwise usually quiet atmosphere.

Shepard felt hot all over, like the chills had just faded away in a particularly bad bout of the flu and left her body to feel the few degrees above normal. Her pulse, well, she could hear it in her ears, felt it jumping and twitching in her limbs, sweat at her brow and the creases of her joints, wherever skin met skin. No. There was nothing logical about it, nothing that made sense. Beyond the biology of it, the fertility suppressants both she and Kaidan should have been on… the reality of such a situation made her stomach roll. Had there been anything in it, she was certain she would have heaved the contents over the dirt floor, her legs, the blanket. Instead, the nausea just swept in and settled at home in her throat and gut. She threw the can to the floor, and it was a testament to how little strength she had that it didn't open, didn't even end up dented.

"No. Not me. Not now. Not fucking ever," she maintained, as though the firmer she spoke, the truer it would become. Maybe that was another gift Cerberus had instilled her with: the ability to make things real if she believed them enough. They had almost, after all, when they'd convinced her she had been the real deal, the Commander Shepard.

In the middle of the altercation—if it could have even been called that, Shepard was in no position to be engaging in fisticuffs with anyone, even a middle-aged civilian woman—Henry cut in through the tent's doorway, alerted by the commotion.

"Everything okay…?" He questioned, keeping his distance, body language screaming that he was wary of getting involved at all. Though nurse and caregiver he was, peacekeeper was not in the job description.

"It's fine—"

"No it's not," Shepard hissed, and turned towards the only medical professional that had visited since she'd woken. "I need you to tell me, I need you to tell me I'm not pregnant."

There was that look again—the one she had seen between Henry and Emma the day before, the one that said so much without saying anything at all. She hadn't known the code then, hadn't been aware of the topic at hand, but now she felt like a fool when it stared her in the face.

"And what? You both were just going to not tell me until—until—" Her hand balled into a fist full of the bed sheet, fingers going white at the pressure. "Until I gave birth? What was the god damn plan?"

"Until you had been conscious for more than three days," Emma tried to justify.

"Well you're all wrong. Do the test again."

"You think we're even set up for something like that?" Henry motioned around him wildly. "Because we've got so much staff and equipment lying around—for Christ's sake, the world has changed."

"Do it," she said through a clenched jaw, "again."

"Look," he sighed in exasperation and moved around her bed, quickly sifting through the small amount of supplies, belongings. On Emma's nearby cot, he found the cracked data pad he sought, scrolling through the partially malfunctioning screen to draw up the records belonging to the particular patient in bed 32. "Managed to get you a scan when they brought you in. Showed some internal bruising, your broken leg. Also showed us that while you were concussed, you weren't in danger of an aneurism, rupturing something. And it showed," he tilted the screen towards her, swiping at the glass until it zoomed in on the vaguely humanistic form. "Pregnant. Somewhere in the first trimester. Don't know more than that since we weren't looking for it and we definitely don't have the tech to find out, not here."

It could have been anyone else, she told herself as a comfort. Technology had come a long way even since she was just a child, but her face wasn't attached to the scan, no discerning outer marks. Of course, there was the fractured bone in her leg, the other injuries that matched, but still she refused to acknowledge it. No. They were wrong.

"These things…" Henry started, sensing her aversion to the matter entirely, "they can run their course sometimes, yeah? So if this isn't… it's early, the shape you're in… it may not last, anyway."

It was a hollow solution. She didn't want to be pregnant so she should hope that it eliminated itself? Shepard wanted it to never have existed to begin with, and the potential that maybe sometime in the next days or week it would bleed out of her and for that she should be happy to endure that pain, wasn't sufficient. To be honest, no answer but the one that she couldn't have, would ever have been enough. It wasn't good enough, and from her crew and friends, she had never accepted the bare minimum. But these weren't her people, this wasn't her show to run.

If her legs would have behaved properly, she'd have been on her feet and out the door, not that her plan would have gone much further than that. A panic built in her lungs and throat, the same way it had when she'd had to make the mag-boot walk to the Geth ship, reliving—what she'd thought at the time—was her death before her eyes. The voice of her friends in her ear had been the only thing that had pushed her through that, kept her moving forward, kept her from screaming out and checking the back of her O2 line when that walkway had torn apart. But here she was, alone even with the others around. Completely, utterly, and to herself.

Lightheadedness crept into her skull, and Shepard shook her head without control or finesse. "Listen… I—I can't. No way. I shouldn't even be able—" Kaidan, she thought, and had to close her eyes for fear of giving even more away than she already had. There was no question as to who the father was—although the horrific idea that Cerberus had somehow done something or that the Catalyst and Reapers may have done more to her than piss her off and rip her to shreds while she was up in the Citadel, did cross her mind.

Maybe two weeks ago she would have quietly, and privately, let herself think of the possibility of life post-war, post-Reapers, post-every-fucking-thing, and that life may have included children, but the reality that she wasn't who she'd thought she was had made a rather gigantic kink in the plan. She and Kaidan, they'd never talked about family or settling down, though every so often he'd mentioned his parents and Vancouver, his open ended sentences always finishing with that he'd like to take her there. Someday. Eventually. But that was then, when she had been Shepard, and this was now, when they both knew she was not.

Someone splayed their hand across her back and Shepard lifted her head, wanting to see a familiar face to help her whether through the storm. Garrus. That was who she wanted to see right now, offering his support even if maybe she wasn't sure she deserved it.

"I'm sorry," Emma said, and though Shepard knew she didn't mean it for not being who she wanted to see, she accepted the double meaning. "I know it wasn't my place to get in the way, but I thought it would be better if you could get your bearings first."

Shepard shrugged her touch away. "Please don't."

The older woman withdrew but didn't go far, instead pulling the privacy curtain shut to shield them from voyeuristic eyes and came to sit next to Shepard. Sometime while Shepard had been withdrawn, Henry had made his leave.

"Is that why you're here?" Shepard asked, watching Emma in her periphery. "Because I'm pregnant? Is that the reason you've been helping me?"

Though the relative stranger had been nothing but kind—barring the deception—and genial despite all the other circumstances, when Emma exhaled a heavy breath and allowed her shoulders to slump, her body relaxing as though a string pulling her tight and wound had been cut, it was the first time Shepard felt she was really seeing the woman. She was worn around the edges, and not just from her own physical injuries, but from the months she and the rest of those who had survived on Earth must've had to live through. Every hour of that horrible war was shown on her face.

"I'm here because…" a hand scrubbed over her face, "because a lot of people are here, injured, sick, some more severe than even you. But you—you looked like you'd been through hell and back. I don't know your story, what happened to you, I don't even know your name, but when I thought about the possibility that you wouldn't wake up, and if you did, you'd be alone after some of the things you must've seen… I thought it was worth my time for a few days. I've got my own daughters and I know they're safe—we were lucky. I'd hope someone would look out for them if they were in your place."

That was all she needed right now. A new layer of guilt, this time from a stranger who had come out of the blue to give support where it may have been needed. Shepard didn't know what she would have done had she woken up alone—torn her IV out and tried to walk out of there, probably, done more damage to an already broken body and hurt someone in the process, if not just herself.

"You've got time to think about what you want to do," said Emma after a moment of quiet. "Keep it or don't, though I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to find someone who can take care of it—safely," she amended. "Things are going to get better. Maybe not for awhile, but it'll change. If you do want to keep it, there will be people to help. You don't have to do it on your own."

There hadn't been enough time to even consider what she'd planned to do. Yesterday she'd thought the worst of the Normandy and her crew. There hadn't been a reason to identify herself as Shepard; it would have only earned her a place in custody with the Alliance, perhaps a warm meal, and the incessant reminder of who they all thought she was. Today, while she didn't know if they were well, she knew they were alive. And in that instant after hearing the good news, Shepard had something to reach for, a return to the only friends and family she had left. She would endure another six months of lock-up as they questioned her on what had happened in the Citadel if it meant coming out the end of it with even just one of her friends waiting. But the ball had dropped of course, just as it always did.

"Katherine," Shepard provided the name before she even thought about it. A couple decades earlier, it had belonged to her grandmother, not to her. "My name is Katherine."

Emma raised her non-casted hand, and though it was awkward, Shepard took it and gave a weak, lingering shake.