The human woman, Jane Shepard, had been born on a colony called Mindoir located in the Attican Traverse. When an Alliance patrol found her there, her friends and family slaughtered or corrupted by cranial implants, she immediately joined their cause as a soldier.
They outfitted her with an Ln5 implant, and transformed her into a vanguard.
She moved on to become the Hero of the Citadel, and was later relinquished and marked deceased over a planet named Alchera by a galactic council who, troubled into denial by the enormities they had been preserved from, had decided to summarily send her away.
"Yes, the reapers," Councilor Sparatus of Palaven spat out before she left, his fingers twitching near his cowl in a condescending attempt to mimic human body language for her benefit. "Let us know if you find them out there with Saren's remaining geth."
Councilors Tevos and Valern had assumed stiff postures with still fingers, their lips pressed into silence.
Sparatus would attempt the motion once again, years later, when he met an apparition that was avidly tired of his bullshit and quaintly told him so when she spoke to him again. A human supremacist group had summoned Commander Jane Shepard back to life, and now she would fight to save colonies similar to her own from being harvested at the edges of the galaxy. She had fostered no true allegiance to the group called Cerberus, but she cared about the colonists and so she would take advantage of any resources she could find.
The Council uneasily returned her abdicated titles and once again dismissed her from their sight.
It was a somewhat unsettling existence, and so Shepard would often close her eyes with the intention of briefly counting small lights in the darkness before once again returning calmly to the present. The expected finality of the aggrandized starscape was impenetrable and fathomless compared to the infinitely smaller disturbances that presented themselves each time she opened her eyes.
"It keeps me grounded," she explained to Mordin when he incredulously questioned her about blinking in such a way. An arc projector rested in her hands and she loaded it, chilling under the heatsink. "Are you ready, Grunt?"
The tank krogan responded by firing his assault rifle into the skies of Tuchanka. It was unprecedented for a krogan to have an alien krantt, and yet Shepard had been gifted the title twice; once to the Patriarch of Omega, and now to Grunt.
The latest disturbance rushed toward them on the large platform they stood upon.
"Seven hundred yards and closing," Mordin announced, daunted by the excess of shattered cultural assurances surrounding him when he fell into position next to her. "Chance of survival approximately sixty seven percent."
The thresher maw erupted steeply into the atmosphere of the planet and then crashed into the platform. It would either secure a krogan rite of passage for Grunt or mercilessly drag Shepard back into the carnage of her history to punish her for having the audacity to think she could have ever escaped it. Its body temperature was an endothermic thirty seven degrees Celsius and it contained five thousand and five pints of blood, protected by a carapace that was almost three meters thick.
It had murdered her entire N7 team, on a planet called Akuze.
"Are you trying to make me feel better or worse?" Shepard yelled to Mordin in the rising chaos.
Grunt bellowed, exhilarated.
"Better!" Mordin yelled back to her. "Still bad at it!"
She grinned in the rush, and he felt his latest attempt was a modest success. The arc projector rebuked the thresher maw in a long flash of ivory light and Grunt would stay on Tuchanka late into that evening, enjoying his new brotherhood with the Urdnot clan.
"No roughhousing," Shepard told Grunt with a wink that held no true intention. There was a smile on her face before she left him and it disappeared in the shuttle as Lieutenant Patel piloted the small craft back to the Normandy SR-2. She picked up a data pad that rested near her in the back, momentarily reading through it to distract herself from the exhaustion of her own adrenaline, and then passed it to Mordin with a shake of her head. "Breeding requests from Grunt's new buddies."
Mordin stared at the data pad littered with drunken contract attempts toward her and narrowed his eyes while he sat down next to her. "Subset of krogan deviants enjoy flexibility," he muttered while he read curiously through each of her private messages. He lingered on a few particularly unintelligible requests originating from the cold storms of Noveria. "Who is Lorik Qui'in?"
"A turian who wants me to upset his fruit cart," she said quietly.
His fingers hesitated on the data pad. "Fruit cart?"
"A one night stand, Mordin. I'm not interested." Shepard sighed and took the data pad back. "I get propositioned a lot because people like the idea of me."
Mordin nodded, because Massani had pointed out the issue and so now he noticed the constant flirtations. "Turians enjoy trim waists, attractive pigmentation," he recalled. "Red human hair also quite rare. Popular dyes usually contain ammonia combined with oxidizing agents, combined with alkaline compounds. Genetically unusual to have proper recessive allele pairing."
"My hair isn't fake," she insisted.
"Exactly. Considered attractive." He gave her a conspiratorial side glance. "Problematic for both of us. Very awkward."
Shepard considered the warm colors on his face and smiled again. "We're both cute redheads," she decided after a moment. She pressed her shoulder into his affectionately and then faded. She dozed, her brows furrowing occasionally, surrounded by contracts and propositions that she would refuse while requests weighed with heavier precedence were attended to.
Mordin glanced down at her uneasily, contemplating reasons to move to the other side of the shuttle bench, and then he did nothing because they were both cute redheads and he enjoyed the jest of the sudden mutual title between them. He hesitated, and then reached over to brush stray strands of hair away from her eyes while she slept.
The hair bled, humanly, into his small picture when he did so.