An unstable biotic began to roam the lower levels of the Normandy SR-2, screaming obscenities like thunderclaps into the atmosphere and scorching electricity onto metal whenever her fingers brushed against the walls.
Shepard had closed her eyes each time a scream ripped through her body, and after a while the sound of it was suffocated by its own repetition.
Where was she?
"Both fucked in the ass by Cerberus," Jack finally decided when the intensity faded. The two women had something in common and they worked together entirely from that intersection.
A warden had imprisoned Jack, claiming he sold criminals to batarians despite the absence of evidence that he had ever done so. He mostly locked them inside glass boxes and watched them, or wrapped their bodies into misted shackles. He had even assumed to keep Commander Shepard, and then his prison was unceremoniously blown away in a charging flash that only proved how far out of his depth he had actually been.
Mordin worked at his desk in the tech lab, pondering the mistakes of the warden's notion until Shepard came to see him. Then he spoke of tissue samples and the momentum in his voice faded into something vaguely less harried when he realized that the space between them was quiet and just wide enough to accommodate his musings.
"I'm going to go eat lunch," she informed him during a pause. "Do you want to come with me?"
Mordin settled back into his typing and thoughts. "No."
She picked up the cup that sat by her terminal and wiped at the counter with a tissue. "Well, do you want me to bring you some food?"
He glanced up. "Yes, actually."
Later she returned carrying two boxes in front of her. She set them down on the floor, and then rooted around his cabinets. Mordin would have castigated her for it, but no one on the ship had ever brought him something to eat before. The crew seemed to think that salarians ate like birds despite their high metabolisms. He usually forgot about it himself, wrapped up in research.
Commander Shepard had appeared cold when they met, her body drenched in an accretion of ice that she didn't often shake away. As the ship became populated she began to warm ever so faintly, and the kindled core of her center would occasionally reveal itself in a downburst of dulcet connection that couldn't be sustained or controlled. It was usually a smile, like in this moment, or a laugh.
Shepard's cheeks were round whenever it happened.
"How many calories do you need to eat?" she asked, making a space beneath a counter.
"Approximately forty five hundred and three," Mordin answered. He paused from his research and crouched next to her. "Being older," he admitted, "perhaps not so many."
She nodded, opening the boxes and revealing their contents to him. One contained dozens of ration bars and the other was full of bottled water, topped with a cup that matched her own. She tucked them both underneath the counter for him.
From that day forward, Shepard kept one of his cabinets filled with edibles instead of tissue samples.
Mess Sergeant Gardner complained about the appropriated rations and Mordin would have voiced his own complaints, considering it was relatively tasteless human fare that he was now eating, but he enjoyed that she brought it to him and so he said nothing. Instead, he absentmindedly stared at the stars through the window in the lab and considered seeker swarms while he ate a chocolate bar that she had slipped into the box for him. When it was finished he gathered up a few more of the strangely textured sweets, wrapping them carefully and then setting them aside to be shipped to his nephew.
A modest gift from the Normandy SR-2, Mordin thought and would not write in his letter to the younger man. He smiled, enjoying the thought of his nephew's bright pigments that curled into a small picture. Very few things in his life had been kept pristine against the continued necessity of his work and the sprawling shade it draped over everything.
Professor Mordin Solus decided to tell Commander Shepard about the modified genophage he had wrought upon Tuchanka the next day, willfully casting a shadow across her face.
It had been the right thing to do.
He inhaled, believing it a little more when he said the words out loud.