A krogan had threatened to kill her in a standoff, but then decided not to. It was simply because she was so irresistibly eloquent; like the most ardent of peris in a charming ancient stage play.
"Like a cheap action vid from Jaëto," Kirrahe had insisted, vaguely drunk on shore leave.
Mordin became familiar with the Special Tasks tale, although he wouldn't make the connection to Commander Shepard until much later. Kirrahe had contacted him not long after it allegedly happened, proclaiming classified details about a mission where his team met a Citadel Spectre with eyelids so boldly salacious that they could halt a tempestuous male krogan in his tracks.
Mordin had shaken his head, because he didn't watch cheap action vids.
Previously the Commander of the STG Veshok-16, Kirrahe insisted on calling Mordin whenever he was inebriated. The man was often being promoted, his career a harshly flawless atonement that uplifted him through ranks that clouded his earlier insecurities and inexperience. "You held the line," the decorated salarian would eventually mutter roughly during their conversations, and the caricature of his inspiring statement hid a terse and regretful accusation about the both of them.
"Military bravado," Mordin would inevitably reply, because Kirrahe's mistakes in the field had forced him to do something else.
They usually found a reason to close the holo-call, after that.
The story curling through the grapevine turned out to be correct, however, and the furious red krogan of Special Tasks Group legend was truly an outlier, guilelessly captivated by Commander Shepard's charm when he met her again. Very few of the people she had known before her death were genuinely satisfied by her new presence with no tasks or accusations in hand to burden her with. She passed through them like a gauntlet, each one bearing against and threatening to tear pieces from the legend of her steady constancy like flowers being lifted from Ophelia in a discordant display of Shakespeare's human stage play.
"It's really you," the scarred red krogan still roared when she arrived on Tuchanka, his voice a cleansing avalanche across its surface. He rushed towards her diminutive figure. "Should have known the void couldn't hold you!"
Shepard didn't believe him when he picked her up. "Say it to me again, Wrex."
"It's really you, Shepard," he vowed with a decisive rumble that settled over her.
Wrex Urdnot uplifted her into the dry warmth of the atmosphere, because he was a friend who needed nothing from her except her authenticity and he had assured her of it in one sweeping instant.
"Wrex!"
"Shepard!"
Her laugh was sincere and unrestrained as it was caught completely with heat, pouring forth from the smile of a woman who had once been Jane Shepard and now suddenly still was. She placed her palm affectionately onto Wrex's crest while he roared affirmations to her and then one of her calves curled toward her thigh, exactly like a cheap action vid from Jaëto.
Or Iolanthe, Mordin thought with a smile. It had been a Gilbert & Sullivan opera.
The scene still filled Mordin with a certain wavering sense of inconstancy that was difficult to compartmentalize, and so the muscles in his back were strictly tensed until her boots landed onto the stone with an intact thud. He reached out to place a hand on her shoulder and she stepped back when another krogan pushed in front of her. Mordin led her away from the less respectable creature, pulling against her position gently until ample space settled between her and the suddenly arguing pair of clan leaders.
Uvenk's crest was green, like blood, and he shouted passionately at Wrex.
A female krogan drenched in the same colors had once tumbled insults toward Mordin in much the same way. Then she had cut slow and luxurious vulgarities into the left side of his face, pressing him into the ground. He had responded by reaching into the dust, his hand grasping patiently at nothing with a grim persistence, and then he thrust an errant pitchfork into her face.
Jirin and Chorel were already dead, misplaced into a verdant pool spread by their Commander's inexperience.
Mordin kept his eyes open whenever the memory conjured itself. He had killed seven female krogans, including an unarmed member who attempted to radio for help. She had ripped against him before she died and irrevocably imprinted his face forever with her violent perseverance.
They had been a group of Weyrloc scouts, guarding agrarian fields that raged darkly hot against the contrast of the salarian STG team's intentions and chilling shifting parameters.
They had all been, and were no more.
"Are you alright?" Shepard asked where the population of Tuchanka no longer accosted him. There was a smile on her face, coaxing him back to the present where her cheeks flushed warmer than before and subdued the freckles there, because that was something that Commander Jane Shepard had once done and she was now allowed to do so again. Her fingers curled around the hand that still rested on her shoulder, concern beginning to cross over her face while they looked at one another.
She lifted her other hand and pressed it to his forehead in an affirmation that mimicked the krogan outlier.
"Of course," Mordin told her when she asked him again, because he knew precisely where he was at all times: he was on Tuchanka.
He closed his eyes while she touched his scarred forehead, wishing they had both found themselves somewhere else and knowing that it couldn't have happened any other way. It had to be him, or the modification of the genophage would have failed.
Other people made mistakes.