Chapter 11
Jane Shepard
Shepard stood on the crew deck of the Normandy SR-1, bathed in red and orange light, a distant wailing alarm like ringing in her ears, the sound of crackling fire much louder. The display flashed with dozens of severe red warnings informing her of the extensive damage to the ship. Shouting piped up behind her. The heavy sound of armoured boots against the deck plating came upon her. She pulled on her helmet and turned to meet them.
Hannah Shepard carried her own helmet in her hand, dressed in her full combat armour, looking to Shepard for guidance.
"M-Mum?" Shepard blinked. "Mum?"
"What are you talking about, Shepard?" Hannah replied.
Time froze, but the fire still danced in the eddies of air getting blown into vacuum. Shepard took in the totality of her mother's form and realised it wasn't her mother; Hannah Shepard's head sat atop Liara's body. Over her mother's—Liara's—shoulder in the mess hall, thirty inky silhouettes watched the exchange.
"Who are you?" one asked.
"You're not the Commander," another said.
A silhouette rushed to fruition from the surrounding smoke, a step behind Liara. It took a long drag on a cigarette, two lung shaped holes appearing in its chest when it exhaled. "You exist because we allow it," it's voice boomed, eyes blinding Shepard with a red flash, "and you will end because we demand it."
Shepard raised her arms to protect herself, tense, heart seizing at the shock of unexpected death. The alarm and crackling cut off, replaced by the underlying hum of regular Normandy operations. Earth stretched out before her. A slight reflection mirrored the appearance of a bland, forgettable, pasty redhead. Watching planets suddenly shoot off into the distance without so much as a slight quake always messed with her sense of perception for as a kid. What god-like powers must organic life possess to build chariots to move the very universe itself?
"Well, what about Shepard?" Udina asked. "Earthborn…but no record of her family."
She turned around—no-one was there.
"Doesn't have one," Anderson replied. "He was raised on the streets. Learned to look out for himself."
"He proved himself during the Blitz—held off enemy forces until ground reinforcements arrived," Hackett supplied.
Anderson added, "she's the only reason Elysium's still standing."
"We can't question his courage," Udina said.
"Humanity needs a hero," Anderson said, "and Shepards the best we've got."
"I'll make the—"
The voices rewound with scratching static.
"Well, what about Shepard?" Udina asked. "She's a spacer. Lived aboard starships most of his life."
"Military service runs in the family," Anderson replied. "Both his parents were in the navy."
"She saw whole unit died on Akuze," Hackett said. "She could have some serious emotional scars."
"Every soldier has scars. Shepard's a survivor."
"Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy?" Udina asked.
"That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy," Anderson argued.
"I'll make the—"
Screeching rewind.
"Well, what about Shepard?" Udina asked. "She grew up in the colonies."
"He knows how tough life can be out there," Anderson replied. "Her parents were killed when slaves attacked Mindoir."
"She got most of her unit killed on Torfan," Hackett said.
"She gets the job done," Anderson argued. "No matter what the cost."
"Is that the kind of person we want protecting the galaxy?" Udina asked.
"That's the only kind of person who can protect the galaxy," Anderson argued.
"I'll make the—"
The voices jammed, skipped, scratched, repeated, jumbled. Louder, louder, LOUDER!
Silence.
Was there an issue with the PA system? But Udina wasn't supposed to be onboard for this test; he was stationed on the Citadel. Shepard shook her head, letting out a groan. Nerves. The SSV Normandy SR-1 was the crown jewel of the Alliance fleet, a collaboration between Humanity and the Turians, a symbol that the bad blood from the First Contact War had been buried. A lot was riding on this test, so much so that a Council Spectre would be overseeing it.
Shepard took in her reflection on more time, then headed for the CIC, getting to the pressure door at the top of the stairs and stepping through to the captain's cabin. Liara lay on his bed, stark naked. Her eyes popped, hand scrambling to cover herself up.
"Who are you?" she demanded. "What are you doing here?"
"Ash, it's me," Shepard replied.
"It is, but you're not the person I'm waiting for." Ashley wrapped the bedsheet around her tighter and stood, less of an outright embarrassment on her face and more straightforward disappointment. "The Commander won't appreciate being told someone broke into his cabin."
Shepard pinched her eyes shut, and opened them to see Kaidan pulling on his trousers, a bashfulness about his movements while retaining the same disappointed sheen. Shepard backed up into the corridor, letting the door to her former cabin hiss shut in front of her. Her thumb and forefinger came up to stiffly massage her temple. What was going on?
Dark corridors, brown, debris strewn. Overhead a gas giant loomed through the interlocking, transparent metal panels of the ceiling.
Shepard's tenth birthday. She stood off to the side watching a little boy seated at the dining table, excitedly blowing out candles; his mother and father smiled, laughed, cheered, and wished him a happy birthday. She recognised the family cabin on an Alliance station, but couldn't put her finger on where exactly.
"I can't believe it," her mother said, "double digits already!"
"You're growing up too fast, John," his father added. "Soon enough, you'll be heading off to high school."
Her mother reached over the table to playfully slap the back of his head. "Stop willing her to grow up faster," she scalded. "We already get so little time with her."
"Do you remember this?" A man stood beside her; tall with dark stubble and sculpted cheek bones, his hair as close shaved as possible without being bald. She recognised him: John. "I never had a family, or birthdays. I didn't even know when it was until I joined the Alliance. My nights were spent huddle in whatever abandoned building we could find, days spent stealing scraps and scrapping with others on the street to survive. What I wouldn't give for a birthday like this?"
Shepard could scarcely believe what she was seeing. The man was her…but also the little boy with her parents. Pain thrummed in her skull. Why was she seeing herself as a man? Was she…trans? But his memories of life were different. Weren't they? Had Cerberus messed around with her life recollections? No. The photo in her apartment of her family. Unless it too was fake? The thrumming crashed around in her head, like a drummer bursting out a solo at the height of a concert.
"That's your body fighting off the drugs ravaging your system," a second voice, with a heavy Latina accent—told her. "Doctor Banderas has done all he can for you, and now it's up to you to survive until it's been flushed from your system."
Shepard looked up, and was once again confronted by herself; this time she was a woman, but bore distinctively South American features.
"What I wouldn't give to spend one more birthday like this with my family," the new Shepard continued. "I'll never forget returning to Mindoir after the raid to find their scared, charred, brutalised bodies amongst the rubble of my old home."
"I'm sorry, Juanita," John said, reaching behind Shepard's back to give Juanita's shoulder a squeeze. "One different choice, one accidental cosmic keystroke, and our lives are completely different, cascading apart from similar beginnings."
"We exist in a multiverse of possibility," Juanita picked up. "You're worried you might be less valid because you're an offshoot of some universally canonical Shepard—don't be. We are all valid."
John looked down at her, smiling. "Go out there and…"
As he spoke, crack began to form on his face, like creeping vines spreading across his body, and Juanita suffered to same affliction that spread to the room, people, infecting the whole universe.
Sovereign's horn shattered the environment, sending Shepard tumbling through an endless black void, occasionally flashing red like a passing streetlight. She flailed and tried to scream—silence. The horn again.
"Rudimentary creature of blood and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding," it's voice boomed, all around her and yet also only in her head. "There is a realm of existence so far beyond your own you cannot even imagine it. I am beyond your comprehension. I am Shepard."
She tried to scream again—nothing. Tumbling, tumbling, head of heels, down, all the way—
Shepard stood in the briefing room aboard the SR-1. Gathered around her were Ashley, Kaidan, Garrus, Wrex, Tali, and Liara. They all slouched in the chairs, fatigue and stress evident on their faces, the team having just returned from a mess of a Geth siege and corporate espionage, and a giant plant creature that turned Asari green. Shepard occupied her own chair with the same crushing weight as a noir detective perched on a stool by the bar, cigarette in one hand, hard liquor in the other, and a lifetime of regrets causing back problems.
"Commander, you look…pale," Liara said, studying Shepard from across the room. "Are you suffering any ill effects from the cipher?"
"The cipher shook me up a bit," she answered—understatement of the century.
"I might be able to help you; I am an expert on the Protheans. If I join my consciousness to yours, maybe we can make some sense of it."
Shepard pushed herself to her feet, muscles crying out for her to stop, to rest. "Do it. Hurry—we don't have much time."
Liara met her in the middle of the domed room. "Relax, Commander." And she closed her eyes, opening them again with solid black corneas. "Embrace eternity!"
Nothing happened. Shepard blinked, looked around. Everyone watched with burning anticipation. Liara blinked back to her usual bright blue, mirroring Shepard's confusion. The images from the beacon on Eden Prime should've flashed through her mind, stabilised by the combined effort of the cipher and Liara's mental fortitude. What went wrong?
Liara's gaze landed on Shepard. "You're not Shepard," she said, taking a step back. "Your mind is empty and cold, and…lifeless."
One by one, her squad rose to their feet, confusion rippling around the room like a wave at a sporting event. Shepard wanted to defend herself, but no sound accompanied the movement of her lips. Inky whisps seeped in from the vents to surround the team, forming into myriad versions of herself; each had a different ethnicity, gender, height, build, hair style and colour, eyes, attitude, and yet they all contained the essence of Shepard. Then in turn, clockwise around the room, their eyes turned molten red and cracks snaked across their faces, glowing red like rivers of molten lava.
"The mission must be completed no matter the cost," they said, a chorus of accents, tones, pitches, inflections. "Stopping the Reapers is all that matters."
The Normandy crew continued to react to Liara's accusations, oblivious to the performance happening around them. Their bickering faded away to ambience as Shepard focused on the new arrivals.
"Is it really worth it if I lose my humanity in the process?" she asked of the apparitions.
"You're a species of hunters and gathers with an overdeveloped sense of self-importance," they replied. "Your humanity is a collection of philosophical concepts of what the ideal Human should be. How much will that matter to the countless corpses strewn across the galaxy when the Reapers are finished? How much will that matter to the countless future cycles?"
At some point, Shepard's crewmates had been removed from the scene.
"The Reaper's are unknowable, eternal," they continued. "They move with one goal, talk with one voice. They will not stop, will not sleep, will not slow down until their harvest is fulfilled. What does a poultry concept like humanity matter in the face of nature?"
She may not have the cipher in her head, or have been the one to touch the artefact on Eden Prime, but the memory of what she saw had carved itself into a part of Shepard's psyche so fundamental to her being that Cerberus had unwittingly cloned it along with the rest of her. The Prothean's fought for millennia and still fell, sending generations after generations to the slaughter with no hope of salvation. That fate loomed over the galaxy once again, utterly unstoppable. Dry ice surged through her veins. Fear on such a cosmic level surpassed the fight or flight instinct entirely, striking shock into her mind. It threatened to simply turn her off.
Pressure shot up in her skull as if her head was stuck in a vacuum chamber, the images from the beacon consuming her entire field of perception. Shepard grasped her head and dropped to her knees. This time, her scream echoed out around her and shook the very fabric of the universe itself.
"You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
A kernel of consciousness came back to her, barely enough to twitch the needle on the dial of life. She was floating, surrounded by thick transparent liquid, bubbles rolling past her eyes. Two hazy figures stood on the other side of the glass, too blurry to make out beyond one being dressed in white and the other black.
"—steady progress. I'm confident that, should something go wrong with Shepard, the clone will be able to provide any necessary replacement parts, or in the event of catastrophic failure, take up the mantel without issues."
"Very good, Ms Lawson. I would, of course, prefer the original Shepard, but your progress with the clone has been exemplary. I can see now that putting you in charge was the right decision, and you'll continue receiving whatever funding and resources you require."
"I won't let you down."
"You'd better not—the fate of the galaxy rests on the success of the Lazarus Project."
Shepard's screams echoed around the room, her body thrashed, hands and feet flew out in every direction. The blurred outline of a figure standing over her was joined by three others, and her limbs were restrained. The first figure produced something from outside her poor field-of-view, and pressed it into her neck.
Shepard woke again. She didn't know how long she'd been out, but her body felt like it had reached the ass end of a weeklong bender—asleep without resting. She lay with her eyes closed for a few moments to cherish consciousness and the solidity of existence. Nothing was going to appear out of thin air, or yank one environment away in a snap, or taunt him with any number of insecurities. That last one still had the possibility of happening—unfortunately.
She opened her eyes. The mining facility infirmary. A sigh cut through the ambiance. She'd survived, so that was something, and made it through the hellscape of mental anguish that resulted from… Her memory on the why wasn't all there.
You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it.
Dry ice. Her skin itched wherever it had contact with her gown or the bedsheets or the pillow. Her lungs heaved. The universe closed in around her. She tried to sit—restrained. Tugging failed to produce freedom. She screamed.
The doors opened immediately, and Dr Banderas hurried in with a couple of nurses.
"Get me out of these restraints," Shepard demanded through hyperventilating breaths. "G-Get me out. Please."
Banderas complied without a second thought. Shepard sprung from the bed, propelling herself to the other side of the room, where the panic began to recede. She forced her breathing to slow, took air deeper into her lungs, and her heart calmed over the course of several minutes.
"Thank you, Doctor," she said. "I'm sorry about earlier—assuming that was real and not just…imagination."
"Oh, it was real," he replied, with a reassuringly charming smile. "My ribs still hurt."
It was Shepard's turn to smile, sheepish. "What happened?"
"One of the scientists dosed you with the drug they were working on," he answered. "Volyov has taken them into custody."
"Good. And the impending issue with the Alliance?"
"Still impending."
"How am I doing?"
"Well, you're awake and lucid, so that's a good sign. There's some colour in your cheeks, your pupils are no longer dilated, I can see your breathing's returned to a normal rate. At a glance, I'd say the drugs have been flushed from your system, but I'd like to do a full workup to be sure."
Shepard nodded. "Okay, let's do it," she told him. "We don't have much time."
Banderas went to work running all manner of tests, performing a full-body physical so detailed it rivalled the medical profile she'd had to undergo when she enlisted with the Alliance, but she soon found her vision glazing over, body shifting to autopilot. All she could think about was Sovereign and the impending galactic holocaust. Her sleeping patterns had already suffered over the last few years; something told her it wasn't about to get any better.
A/N: Maybe this is good, or maybe it's just the pretentious wank of a fanfic author trying to sound profound, like a teenager who'd just discovered poetry. Maybe it's somewhere in-between. It'll be a good few months between when I'm writing this and when it releases, so it'll be interesting to see if I see it differently when it comes to editing. I also write these author's notes right before they're uploaded, so that'll be interesting, too. This chapter is the manifestation of both Shepard's and my own identity crisis. Whether it's good or not is up to you.
A/N 02: So, I'm making this author's note right before uploading. I've decided to upload as is, but I'm going through a lot of the same feelings now as I did then. Life and preparation for the future has been weighing heavy on me. I've got enough chapters to finish off this current arc, then I might go on hiatus or end completely. I don't know. We'll deal with that when I get there. Thank you all again for sticking with my fic.
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