Awakening to pain had been a double shock since she hadn't expected to wake up at all. The last thing she remembered was taking another step. Because her entire world had funneled down to taking another step. Just one more. Every cell, every thought focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
The doctors told her she would, with time, be able to move her shoulder with almost as much mobility as she had before but it had been a close call. Years later it would still be weaker than the other one, needing special exercises to keep it limber. But she'd been lucky. A few days more and there wouldn't have been enough muscle left to rebuild and the bones would have been completely eaten away. She could still feel a phantom of that sick, swollen, rotting sensation in her shoulder even through the antibiotics they were pumping through her.
She stared at the wall across from her bed blankly, unwilling to sleep even though she was so drugged up she could barely keep her eyes open.
If they had compared her at that moment to a picture of her at thirteen right after she'd been picked up from the ruins of Mindoir, they would have found the expression and demeanor eerily similar.
She couldn't close her eyes without seeing Jacobson caught mid laugh as the monster smashed out of the ground directly beneath him. They'd had a mere moment to stare, stunned, at the sinuous beast rising above them before everything went to hell. Later she'd learned there had only been three Maws but they had seemed to be everywhere at once, in that moment there had seemed to be thousands of them.
Barrimore, who had just been joking about how frighteningly easy his fiancee was finding it to plan their wedding without him there, screaming, his gun firing compulsively as he was dragged beneath the ground. Commander Lyle fruitlessly shouting orders, trying to bring some measure of order to the chaos, his shouts cut off within minutes. Toombs...she hadn't particularly liked Toombs. He was a hotshot, a showoff. She had never been sure what exactly he'd been so determined to prove...or to who. But now he'd never get the chance, the terror on his face as he was dragged down would haunt her for the rest of her life. She'd seen one of the creatures rear back and threw herself sideways on pure instinct. Thick fluid had liberally splattered against a soldier named Meeril that she hadn't known very well. His startled cry veered up into a shriek of agony that reached a higher and higher pitch as the venom ate his flesh away until it turned into a liquid rattle, his throat dissolving. By that time, she hadn't been paying much attention to what was going on around her. She didn't scream like Meeril did but she fully understood why he had. She'd only taken the very edge of the shot of acid that had taken him down but already the pain was incredible. She'd stumbled blindly, half expecting with every step to feel jaws closing around her and dragging her down, running in a blind panic long after the screams had faded into the distance...
Shepard slammed back into awareness, sitting up in bed with her fist pressed to her mouth. Her teeth scraped against her knuckles as she bit down to muffle the scream that choked her. She couldn't scream, couldn't...she had to keep it quiet, inside her. A weakness she couldn't let show. Not here. Not to the crew.
She couldn't breathe.
The small, cold part of her mind rationalized even as her body shook, bent over, the sheets a tangle around her legs, dark energy dancing over her skin. At least she could think. It wasn't one of those rare times she was shot into a state of mind between sleeping and waking, caught up in memories, trapped by her own half awake mind.
Oh, she'd heard the diagnoses over the years. Night terrors, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, You're A Fucking Loon, Shepard. Oh, and this little number right here...anxiety attack. Any number of things you picked up when you couldn't remember one bad memory without dragging up half a dozen others. Add on visions from a long lost race and just try getting a good night's sleep ever again.
She forced herself to breathe in. It was like a hundred needles stabbing into her lungs. She held the breath, letting her hand drop from her mouth, both of them twisting into the sheets beneath her. She tried to hold it longer and couldn't as another bout of shaking took over her, making the air escape her lungs in a whoosh.
She gritted her teeth, closing her eyes tight, making herself breathe in again. Hold it. Let it out.
Her heart was pounding, her body ached, her hands clenched and unclenched in the sheets as she forced herself to breathe in and out slowly, over and over.
Oh, it would be wonderful if Saren won because the Spectre hunting him dropped dead from a bad dream.
Nope. Fuck you, Saren.
Her breath rushed out of her again, this time more of a snort of indignation. She'd be damned first.
Slowly, slowly, her heartbeat returned to normal and her breathing evened out, calm descending on her mind, energy fading back down so she wasn't lit up like a Christmas tree.
"Shit." Shepard raked a hand through her damp hair and scowled into the darkness before swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. She dressed in the dark and moved toward the main deck. There would be no more sleep for her tonight.
There was only a skeleton crew of people at the moment, which suited her fine. Just the act of passing through the second deck on her way to the comm room soothed her, she was startled to find. The sheer familiarity of the Normandy and her crew provided her with a sort of stabilizing element. It was amazing how much you could pick up about a crew even when they weren't there, she thought as she passed through the mess hall. There was a rich scent in the air that only came from real chocolate, which meant Tanaka had snuck a midnight snack out of his hidden stash at some point. Addison Chase was on duty and taking a quick break, because Shepard could hear her talking over a link in the tones she only took when speaking to her fiancee. There was an old holographic GamePad sitting in the middle of the table. Someone had challenged Howard to a chess match, maybe. There was an off chance someone might actually beat him some day, but it hadn't happened yet.
Her crew, her squad...all part of what was home for her.
A dangerous concept for someone with a life like hers. People came and went...and died. In the wake of the nightmare, she felt a surge of fear, wondering how many of the names on the crew roster would end up names written on her memory. Like Jacobson, and Jenkins, and Toombs...
She tore her thoughts away from that.
It was lucky for her she had plenty of things that needed her attention. Running endless amounts of information through her mind meant she didn't have to think.
Shepard had always had a knack for computers. She was pretty even handed on both using those skills lawfully and very, very unlawfully. She might not have been able to understand a word when Tali was talking about engines but when it came to hacking and programming, she could follow what the quarian was doing. She figured with Tali's ingenious little search invention, she had some time to study a few things outside of their search for Saren. There was little they could do until there was a direct spotting of either some major geth activity or Saren and his followers themselves. Which she was looking for almost on an hourly basis. She hated waiting.
Shepard watched Herman's VI interface dance around as the program sorted through the data she was running through it. A lot of people asked her where she'd gotten the avatar's likeness from and she usually gave a handful of names in answer because it was the truth. The figure, its outfits, voice and music were, in fact, an amalgamation of several different rock musicians, both male and female, from the past, even all the way back to the 1980's. She'd scanned in different features from pictures and sketched out a figure blending a them together, programmed the avatar from the sketch, then repeated the process with sound patterns for voice and guitar.
Joker had laughingly told her several opportunists had tried to make copies of Herman to sell but no one could get it quite right.
Of course, her Herman had features designed only by her and only for her. His programs were painstakingly designed and updated because he was both her main offense and defense when it came to the technological side of her world.
Case in point: the problem with having an Alliance built ship was that while you were on it, it was rather hard to hack Alliance databases.
Just a little. All she wanted was to get a bit more information on exactly how what Baker had been up to the past few months. The timing between Baker's accosting Ashley, the snap inspection from the Rear Admiral, Udina's sudden silence and the focus on erasing any mention of the Reapers all combined to make her a bit nervous.
Her talk with Kaidan didn't help matters. Poor guy. As a biotic herself she knew how weird people could get around them. But imagine being driven to the point other biotics- who should have known better -were actually afraid of you. It was sad, because Kaidan was probably the most responsible human biotic she'd ever met. She and Kaidan didn't exactly see eye to eye on a number of things but he was solid and she respected his opinion. He was also a great deal more politically savvy than she was, so taking his words into account couldn't hurt.
She rose, pacing back and forth across the comm room.
Sometimes it felt like she had a hook in every limb, each one trying to pull her in an opposite direction.
Whine, whine, whine, Shepard.
Herman leapt up and let out a slamming riff on his guitar, staying in a sharp, bent over pose. He was silent, indicating he hadn't found anything. She tapped her fingers on her arm, debating whether or not to try and go another level deeper, which ran the risk of being detected and traced even with all her modifications. Shepard turned Herman off and stared across the room, frowning.
Benjamin Creed.
Where did you find that name, Baker?
Garrus stepped off the elevator onto the main deck, walking idly. Walking helped clear his head and put his thoughts in order. He'd been thinking a lot since they'd encountered that poor bastard, Toombs. About Cerberus. And Saleon.
Of all people on the ship, it was Garrus, strangely enough, that knew the most about Cerberus. It was actually rare to uncover something regarding them. Crazy and anti-alien though it might be, Cerberus was well funded and very well organized. A major blow against them had never been done. Since both the Council and the Alliance had declared it a terrorist organization, any members identified within Citadel Space were to be arrested immediately. This was especially true for C-sec, since any Cerberus agents on the Citadel itself were either infiltrators in a high position or at the very least a key part of their plans.
Garrus himself had only tangled with Cerberus once in his C-sec career, and that had been on the fringes of it: an assassination plot his unit had helped uncover. But his father had come across them several times since they had been outed as terrorists and had been happy to relay the details to his son. Like Liara, Garrus had a hard time wrapping his head around the thinking of an organization that claimed to want to work for humanity, and then do everything they could to make humans look bad to the rest of the galaxy. People who protested the admission of a human into the Spectres often used Cerberus as an example, though the idea of Shepard being part of the organization was laughable. Shepard despised Cerberus; she'd made that clear when they'd come across a couple of their outposts and had seen the kinds of experiments they were doing both with people and with rachni (which, along with the geth, made a whopping two species thought long gone involved in this whole mess).
The comm room was alight. Garrus peered in and wasn't at all surprised to see Shepard there. She had detached one of the chairs and drawn it up to one of the main consoles, sprawled in it with a pad of synthetic paper balanced on her knee, sketching idly as she thought and monitored whatever it was on the console. Apparently he wasn't the only one having trouble sleeping. She looked tired, her clothing wrinkled and her hair a pale cloud around her head.
Feeling a bit awkward, like he'd walked in on something he shouldn't have seen, he started to step back out, but Shepard glanced up at that moment. "Garrus?"
"Commander." He stepped into the room, moving toward her slowly.
"Can't sleep?"
"It's still hard to shift from Citadel time to ship time," he admitted.
He came up beside her and blinked down at the sketch pad in her lap. She hastily tried to flip it over but it was too late. Garrus just looked at her for a moment, mandibles drawn tight against his mouth. It was quite rare to see her flustered. "I don't think Ambassador Udina would want that used as an official picture, Commander."
Shepard closed the pad. "Nonsense, he looks lovely."
"Is that the Consort's dress?"
"Well, I figured he'd need to be in something fashionable and who better to trust with fashion?" she said primly.
Garrus chuckled and sat down in one of the other chairs. There was another of those awkward pauses until Shepard broke it, clearly trying to change the subject: "What were you and Wrex arguing about earlier?"
He straightened up. "We weren't arguing."
"I saw you."
Garrus sighed. "The krogan kept asking me who would win in a fight, me or you."
"Oh, so it was your turn for that one. What did you answer?"
"I told him he was being impertinent, of course," he said, a bit indignant. "You're a Spectre with a distinguished record. Besides, there's no reason I'd ever get in a fight with you."
"That's very true." Shepard nodded, setting the pad beside her chair and unfolding her legs, sitting up to study the console. After a moment she added: "But if we did, I'd win."
The turian narrowed his eyes. "Because you'd use biotics. That's cheating." One of these days he was going to figure out what it was about this woman that made it so very easy for her to provoke him into saying something he never would have to any other superior.
Shepard just grinned, looking more like her usual self than she had in days. Now it was Garrus's turn to hurriedly change the subject. "What are you working on, Commander?"
"Eh, trying to find out a couple things about our friend Major Baker. Not having much success, though, I'm not much of an inves..." she trailed off, looking at him suddenly, "tigator...but you are..."
When Shepard had first started to track Garrus down, she'd spoken briefly to his boss, Executor Pallin. At the time, she hadn't known what she'd done to earn his disapproval when she hadn't even met him, but considering the amount of trouble she (inadvertently of course) ended up causing, she had assumed he probably had a legitimate reason. Later on, Garrus had told her Pallin didn't approve of Specters, calling him so by-the-book he might as well have written it.
She could see why the two had clashed. Pallin had outright stated he thought Garrus needed to have more consideration for the rules, but had admitted he was a very good investigator.
Watching the turian now, Shepard decided Pallin hadn't given him nearly enough credit. Garrus wasn't a good investigator; he was a brilliant one. It took him less than an hour to piece together a basic picture of how Baker had gotten information on Benjamin Creed.
"I can't believe he sent men into the Terminus Systems, is he stupid?" she muttered, pacing around the room.
"From the look of this, he hired someone. He definitely didn't send Alliance soldiers in, which would have been really stupid. He probably got the information from the Shadow Broker or one of his agents."
"You think?"
"He covered his tracks, there's nothing overt, but I doubt anyone but the best could have tracked him down, which means the Shadow Broker." Garrus hesitated. "Creed is good at hiding. Even the Shadow Broker couldn't find all of his aliases."
"He has to be," Shepard stopped pacing, her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes narrowed at the console. She realized how defensive her posture had become and forced herself to relax.
"I imagine he's more cautious after that slave ring got broken," Garrus said, an odd note in his voice. "Those two men on Earth that you killed were some of the top leaders of it?"
"I killed more than two of them."
"But you didn't kill him."
Shepard turned her head, sensing they were finally getting to the core of whatever had been bothering Garrus. As much as she hated bringing up that part of her past, it was almost a relief. Like lancing a boil. "I know a question inside a statement when I hear it, Vakarian." Her voice was quiet.
Garrus looked away. For all his passion and hotheadedness, Garrus was a turian born and bred. It was one thing to butt heads with his superior over something he felt passionate about, but this was something different. This was a question aimed at someone he considered a superior that went beyond impertinence, nothing else could explain why he had been dancing around it for so long. She puzzled over it for a long moment as the silence stretched out, ticking off possibilities in her mind.
It hit her like a shot. She leaned back, her gray eyes locked on his. "Garrus, you aren't suspicious of me because I killed off those slavers."
"I'm not suspicious, Commander," he denied a little too quickly.
"Yes, you are. It's the same kind of suspicion I would be having in your position. Wondering if the person I was following into battle had been involved with a slaving ring that sold children for sex."
Garrus shifted, looking very uncomfortable now. Bingo.
Shepard moved back to her seat and settled into it, collecting her thoughts. Garrus watched her. "Your last name was Creed before you changed it," he said finally.
Shepard's lips twisted into a bitter smile. "He's my father."
Several things that Garrus had been wondering about clicked fully into place and he nodded. "You were young then. Right after Mindoir would have been...very hard for you...and he seems like the type to take advantage of that..."
It touched something in her that even if he believed the worst, he couldn't quite believe the absolute worst. That she was as cold as her father. A monster. Not even Kaidan, the only other one to directly question her about her crimes, had cut so close to the bone. It brought out a need to be honest with him. "He found me not long after Mindoir was destroyed, took me away, trained me, got this installed," she touched the back of her neck on the edge of her implant, "found someone to help train me in biotics too. I would have done anything he told me to and I never questioned him. Not until the very end." She took a deep breath. "But, you have my word, Garrus, for what it's worth, that I did not willingly or knowingly participate in that goddamned travesty." Apparently her word meant something to him, because he relaxed a great deal. "And I never thought he was capable of it either. When I found out about it, that he was backing it, that was the thing that made me break away. To use that same training he'd put into me to break it down, to get justice for the children lost and hurt and maybe rectify whatever damage to them I might have helped cause, even if it was unknowingly."
"And yet you stopped Toombs." Garrus sat down in the chair across from her, leaning forward slightly, his gaze intense.
She flinched and looked away. "I thought he might have a better chance of getting off if he could offer the Alliance something against Cerberus. Because someone would have caught up with him eventually. With his testimony and the doctor's..." She shrugged. "In this case, the doctor wasn't any use if he was dead. I thought...maybe Toombs could still be saved...maybe lives could be saved if what they knew could stop some of Cerberus's plans."
"You don't think he had the right to kill that scientist for what he had done? Torturing him? Experimenting on him? You did the same thing."
"Yes, so I know what carrying that kind of hatred and anger in you does to you. You let it rule you, eventually it's all you have left. I didn't want that to happen to Toombs. I thought...incorrectly I guess...that the Alliance could help him rise above that, give him a chance to fix his life." She paused for a long moment, gathering her thoughts. "When the Alliance recruited me, it was exactly the kind of discipline I needed. I learned I needed to step back and look at each situation objectively, the consequences of them, before I acted. Because...in the end, it wasn't that blind slaughter of the people I held responsible for the slaving ring that broke it. It was a group of people putting pressure on it until it finally broke. Objectively. Because it was the right thing to do, not out of vengeance. Same thing with Toombs: killing that scientist might make him feel better in that moment, but maybe knowing the information he used could help bring a blow to Cerberus would have helped him more in the long run." She leaned back again, waving a hand. "Sorry, I don't know if any of that rambling makes any damn sense."
"It does. Some of it, at least. I just...I don't know why you stick to so many rules when you don't have to."
"Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. Depends on the situation." She could tell that was something he probably couldn't understand. And she'd lost the ability to think in pure black and white the way he did. You don't have blood on your hands or lists of names in your head, Garrus. I hope you never do. But one day, some kind of situation would turn his world upside down and force him to look at things in a way he never had before. The same way it had for her, and Kaidan, and Wrex, and nearly anyone she knew with that kind of light that lifted them above the usual crowd. Garrus had that, she realized with a jolt. He would make one hell of a Spectre. "Most times, they protect people. That's what they're for."
"Protect?" Garrus narrowed his eyes slightly, leaning forward again. "It isn't just Cerberus doing sick experiments on people."
Shepard raised her eyebrows.
Saleon. That was a name that was forever a black mark in Garrus's mind.
The vast difference between image and reality was one Garrus had received a lesson on early in his career. C-sec wasn't what it was made out to be on the vids and neither was the Citadel. So many viewed it as a great symbol of peace and galactic security, the center of civilization. They didn't want to think of it as a place with the same kind of crime you'd find anywhere else. They certainly didn't want to think of it as a galaxy wide smuggling hub rivaled only by Omega, its dark mirror image out in the Terminus Systems.
Organ trafficking wasn't as profitable as the more popular ones, like guns and drugs, but the occasions they had cropped up were memorable.
"I remember this one elcor diplomat we caught my first year on the job," he explained to Shepard. "He was hacking people up and selling their organs. Had the station in a bit of a panic."
"And they say Udina shreds diplomacy."
Garrus rolled his eyes at her, one of those rare gestures that was almost universally shared among species. At least the ones with eyes.
But one case had been unique even among the unique cases. Their first real lead had come when DNA samples led them to victims that were still alive and in possession of all their organs. The one thing that connected them all was a salarian geneticist by the name of Dr. Saleon. However, nothing in his lab suggested he'd been cloning. There had been no salarian hearts, or turian livers, or krogan testicles...
Shepard, who had retrieved a bottle of water for both of them, choked mid swallow at that last one. She coughed for a moment, finally managing to speak in a strangled voice: "Dare I ask why you thought he'd be cloning krogan testicles?"
It might have been petty, but he found a bit of enjoyment in having caught their unflappable commander off guard not once but twice in one night. "Some krogan believe testicle transplants increase their virility. Counteract the effects of the genophage. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop them from buying. They'll pay up to 10,000 credits each. That's 40,000 for a full set. Somebody's making a killing out there."
"Is it bad that I find that both funny and heartbreaking at the same time?"
Garrus shrugged, looking away. "None of his employees would talk, but during an interview, one of them started to bleed profusely and freaked out when I ordered a medical exam." It hadn't taken long to realize why. There were incisions all over his body, some of them fresh. "They weren't just employees, they were test tubes. Walking, living test tubes."
Shepard had recovered and was listening with appalled fascination. "You mean he was growing organs inside them?"
"Exactly. He cloned their organs right in their own bodies. Then he harvested them and sold them off."
"I can't imagine how fucking dangerous that is. There's no way he could have pulled that off without killing off at least a few of them."
"Most of the victims were poor," Garrus explained. "He'd pay them a small percentage of the sales, but only if the organs were good." His hands tightened on the arms of the chair. "Sometimes the organ wouldn't grow properly...so he'd just leave it in them."
"Christ..."
Garrus nodded. "Most of them were a mess, but only on the inside- hidden so nobody could see it." He was getting around the point of his story, keeping his eyes on Shepard's. "We never caught him."
She frowned and he pressed on. "He ran for it when we closed in on him. Blew his lab, grabbed some of his employees and headed for the nearest space dock. By the time I found out, his ship was already leaving. He threatened to kill his hostages if we tried to stop him. I ordered Citadel defenses to shoot him down, but C-sec headquarters countermanded my order. They were worried about the hostages. Worried about civilian casualties if the ship was destroyed so close to the Citadel."
Shepard was grasping his point, at least on some level. "Which is procedure."
"I told them the hostages were dead anyway. He'd just use them to make more organs. But they wouldn't listen." He couldn't stop the edge of frustration leaking into his voice. "All they had to do was disable that ship. Stop him from running. Maybe the hostages die, maybe they don't. But at least we stop the bastard responsible for it all."
"I see."
Garrus leaned back. "I just...wish I'd caught him. That's all."
"And following the rules let him get away." At his nod, she cocked her head, studying him thoughtfully. As if seeing him clearly for the first time. "For the sake of argument, though, as hard as it is to watch someone get away, is it any easier to find out you locked someone up...or killed them...and they were innocent?"
Now it was his turn to look at her, startled, then thoughtful, not quite sure how to answer that question.
Shepard shrugged, figuring it was enough to make him think on it a little. "If I had an all wise and knowing answer that would make it easy, I'd give it to you, Garrus. The only thing I know from experience is that nothing is perfect. No system and no person. It's a matter of finding a balance between the two, I suppose. You can't save everyone, you just do the best you can from situation to situation." She folded her hands in her lap, studying him. Not for the first time, Garrus got the strange sensation she was looking through him; having Shepard's full attention on you was slightly unnerving. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. "I told you I didn't really have a goal in life. That isn't necessarily true. I don't think its possible to change the universe for the better, but before I die, I'd at least liked to have saved more lives than I've taken."
Garrus nodded slowly. He wasn't sure he agreed with her about changing the universe for the better. Maybe it was simply no one had tried hard enough. Yet. But her words had struck a chord in him. It made him think there wasn't so much of a difference between what he believed and what she believed after all.
Author's note: Aaaand there's the second half (and half and half, yea). And the part that was giving me trouble. Getting Arian to talk seriously about herself is like pulling teeth.