Work Text:
Although Shepard was definitely feeling the pressure of time—and how little of it they had—she also had a dozen errands to run on the Citadel that couldn’t be put off any longer. Reluctantly, she gave the order to quit the Traverse and head back to the Serpent Nebula. Still running schedules in her head in an effort to maximize efficiency and minimize time wasted, the last thing she expected was a cranky Rear Admiral for a greeting party. She’d heard of Mikhailovich, of course, but hadn’t ever met the man, and by the time he’d challenged every ounce of diplomacy she possessed, she hoped very much never to have the occasion again. She wondered, just for a moment, if she could’ve used her Spectre status to get away with punching him. Tempting.
She was still trying to put the altercation behind her when the elevator doors opened, admitting her to C-Sec Academy. Almost at the same moment, her comms pinged with an incoming message. Expecting Joker, or perhaps Captain Anderson, she was surprised to find, instead, a heavily-accented and unfamiliar voice begging her for help. He said the word Mindoir, and she exhaled with the force of a punch to the gut. A very unexpected punch. Below the belt. And of course she turned around immediately, heading back up the way she’d come. Liara and Garrus exchanged looks; Shepard pretended not to notice. Her foot tapped an uneven pattern against the elevator floor as it took a damned eternity to travel what should have been a short distance. To add insult to injury, the news announcer’s voice droned on about ExoGeni’s success on Feros. She closed her hands into angry fists at her sides.
Thirteen years felt like a mere thirteen hours as soon as she turned the corner and saw the terrified girl pushed up against her insufficiently protective cover of crates. Thirteen minutes, perhaps. Hadn’t it just been yesterday, and not half a lifetime ago? Shepard’s breath caught. This young woman must’ve been a child; she hardly looked older now than Shepard had been then.
As the girl spoke, Shepard, too, remembered smoke and the scent of burning meat. Remembered the blood, the fire, the bubbling yellow paint, her father’s lifeless body, her nails ripping from their beds as she climbed the rough bark of the tree that saved her life. Difficult as it was, Shepard pushed those memories aside, focusing instead on Talitha’s terror, Talitha’s too-high too-childish voice, Talitha’s inability to use pronouns in the first person. Shepard held out a quelling hand when Liara made a startled, unhappy noise behind her. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know the asari’s eyes were wide and likely filling even now with tears.
With Liara kitted out in her borrowed military gear, it was easy to forget she was a very young asari who’d spent most of her life cloistered with books and dig-sites and artifacts. No burning meat. No monsters of Mindoirian magnitude. Being able to use biotics didn’t make a soldier, and the deaths and atrocities Liara was used to were tens of thousands of years old. This is no place for civilians, Shepard thought without ire. Only grief. And regret. Liara couldn’t go back now. None of them could.
Talitha’s eyes filled with tears, too, and she waved the gun erratically, slipping back and forth between times, between memories. Shepard swallowed hard and tried for a reassuring smile as she took another step forward. Like a skittish animal—oh, God, don’t think that, don’t think that—Talitha’s eyes rolled, too wide, and her body twitched and trembled, already seeking impossible flight. Or fight, Shepard reminded herself, not discounting the gun. Even if she’s only fighting her own demons. An exorcism with a gun is awfully final.
Finally, finally, Shepard managed to step close enough to hand over the sedatives. It was a risk, she knew, to leave the final decision in Talitha’s shaking hands, but one worth the taking. The girl hesitated only a moment before swallowing the pills, turning something almost like a smile in Shepard’s direction and asking with heartbreaking innocence, “Will she have bad dreams?”
The question caught Shepard entirely off-guard, and it took a great deal of effort to let none of it show on her face. Yes, she thought. For the rest of your life. She didn’t say it. Instead, she lied—a kind lie, but a lie nonetheless—as she enfolded Talitha in her arms. So small. So fragile. If anyone deserved a white lie, it was the broken, battered child trapped in this woman’s gaunt and tormented body.
She was still thinking about Talitha and about bad dreams—she’d have some of her own the next time she tried to rest, she had no doubt, no doubt at all—as the elevator door opened again, this time to drop her square in front of a pushy reporter with more gall than sense. For the third time in an hour, Shepard stepped hard on her own feelings and slammed her most imperturbable mask in place. She knew reporters. She’d been dealing with reporters since she was sixteen years old—will she have bad dreams?—and, later, the intensity of the media attention after the Blitz had forced her into a role she neither wanted nor enjoyed, but damn if it hadn’t trained her to keep her temper when pushed.
So Shepard let al-Jilani ask her needling little questions, ignored the goading, and kept her replies positive and professional, without once betraying anything classified. Just like the Blitz had taught her to do. Still, by the time the bright camera lights finally flickered and died, Shepard was a hair from losing what very, very little of her patience remained. Her fingers twisted hard together behind her back. She turned on her heel, ignoring al-Jilani’s faintly derisive thanks, and marched herself into the elevator up to the docking area again.
“Commander?” Garrus asked, pitching his voice low. The single word asked about eighty questions, and she wasn’t up for answering any of them. Not today. Not now. Not with Mikhailovich’s the Council got their paws, claws, tentacles, whatever on our ship and Talitha’s will she have bad dreams? and al-Jilani’s don’t worry, we’ll find out all ringing in her head.
“I changed my mind,” Shepard muttered, as the door closed. “I think I’m granting shore leave after all. Two days. We all need the break.”
Liara and Garrus exchanged looks again; she pretended to ignore this one, too.
#
Alcohol was good. Alcohol was nice. Alcohol was fabulous. And two days’ leave meant she could get absolutely blitzed here, in this shitty off-the-beaten-track hole of a bar, check herself into an equally shitty hotel for the night, and still be her usual perfectly-professional, perfectly-in-control, perfectly-Commander self again by the time the Normandy left port.
Will she have bad dreams?
Shepard scowled into the bottom of her empty glass. Not with enough alcohol in her system she won’t. She debated whether it would be more efficient to get up and head to the bar herself, or to wait for the waitress to swing by again. On the one hand, crowd. On the other, waiting. She sighed. If only all her decisions were merely as difficult as this one. The fate of the galaxy was hardly resting on whether it would take five minutes to get another drink, or ten.
“That can’t have been easy for you, Commander.”
She looked up. Garrus stood beside her secluded booth—he really must’ve been some detective if he’d managed to track her here—but made no move to sit until she waved him into the seat opposite.
“Which part?” she asked. She meant it to sound a little pert, maybe, but instead the words emerged drawn and startlingly honest. Because she was looking right at him, she saw the alien twitch of his features. It was an ongoing project, trying to figure out what the various shift of plates and flicks of mandibles and angles of head-tilt meant, but his face still spoke a language she was a novice at. She thought this expression was concern. Maybe even full-on worry. Her own lips twisted wryly. “How much do you know?”
To his credit, he didn’t pretend not to understand her meaning. “I did, uh, a thorough background check.”
She snorted. “And then some, says the pause? Good. I like initiative. And I like not being followed blind. So you know about Mindoir and you know all the Alliance-approved propaganda about my role in the Skyllian Blitz?”
Garrus nodded slowly. Shepard leaned forward on her forearms, meeting his unblinking gaze with one of her own. “What do you think about that?”
“Uh. About… what, exactly, ma’am?”
She furrowed her brow in mild disappointment. “Don’t go timid on me now, Vakarian. You did the digging. Tell me what you found.”
He folded his hands carefully; she wondered if it was to keep them from fidgeting. He had a tendency to twitch that she’d noticed on more than one occasion. “It’s… implausible. A single person might hold a building or an outpost, but not a whole colony. Especially one as big as Elysium. It, forgive me, Commander, reads like fiction.”
Satisfied, she settled back again, folding her hands across her belly. “It does, doesn’t it? I’m glad you noticed. Not my fiction, I’d like to add. I’ll tell you the whole story someday.”
“I’d like that, Commander.”
“But not today. Today, all you need to know is that I don’t like reporters,” Shepard said, holding up a finger to mark each complaint. “And I don’t like xenophobic assholes, no matter how many gold bars on their shoulders. And I really fucking hate batarian slavers.”
He looked a little disturbed, as if afraid the next raised finger was going to stand for and I don’t like nosy turians, either. She tried to smile again, and mostly failed. “You're right, it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all. In fact, today was a bitch, Vakarian. Can I get you a drink?”
“If you insist, Commander.”
She lifted skeptical brows. “I’ll buy you two if you make it an even Shepard.” She wiggled her fingers, taking in the table and the bar and her civilian attire. He was in armor. She was beginning to think he only wore armor. Maybe it was a turian thing. “Otherwise I’m going to feel dangerously close to being on duty, and if I’m on duty, I’m going to have to stop drinking. And, Garrus? I have no intention of stopping drinking. Not for hours. Hell, maybe not until tomorrow morning.”
His chuckle coaxed a more genuine smile from her. She turned her gesture into a wave for the waitress. The asari’s gaze slipped back and forth between them, but before Shepard could get annoyed about it, Garrus ordered something turian and a refill of whatever she was having and the asari slipped away again without saying anything.
“So how did you find me, anyway?” Shepard asked, pushing her empty glass away with a fingertip.
This head tilt was one she sometimes thought of as nervous. Uneasy? To allay any fears he might have, she added, “I’m not pissed about it. Just surprised. I thought I did a good job of covering my tracks. My professional pride is a bit wounded.”
He glanced toward the asari waitress as though desperate for his beverage, obviously stalling.
“C’mon, Vakarian. Spill. It was some damned fine tracking.”
“It really wasn’t.”
“I just said—”
His mandibles flicked. Not irritated, she thought. Irritated was different. She'd seen irritated before. Shamefaced? Amused? She needed an expression translator to go with the language one. He said, “My apartment’s around the corner. Thought I’d stop in, make sure the place hadn’t been ransacked in my absence, maybe pick up a few things I left behind. It was… quiet. You know, after the Normandy. So I came here.”
Her laugh, sudden and bright, took her so by surprise that she clapped a hand over her mouth to stop it almost before it had begun. The smile stayed firmly in place though, and she shook her head. The asari, delivering their drinks, gave her another inscrutable look. “So you’re saying of all the gin joints in all the, uh, Wards, I chose yours?”
“I… don’t know what a gin joint is exactly, but…” He lifted his glass, tipping it toward her in a silent salute. “But if you mean a bar, then yeah. They actually serve good dextro liquor here. Though the decor leaves something to be desired.” His smile—and she was pretty sure it was a smile—fluttered and died, replaced a by the anxious head-tilt again. “Didn’t know if you’d want to be disturbed, though. Almost turned around and walked out again. I… like you said, it was a bitch of a day.”
“Is that why the waitress looked at us so strangely? Does she know you?”
Garrus shook his head. “She knows I usually drink alone, when I drink at all.”
“Well,” Shepard said slowly into the slightly-awkward silence that followed, “I’m glad you didn’t. For what it’s worth.”
“Didn’t, Comm—Shepard?”
She smiled until she felt the corners of her eyes crinkle. “Glad you didn’t turn around and walk out again. And I guess… I guess I’m glad neither of us is drinking alone. After this bitch of a day.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he agreed, clinking the edge of his glass against hers. “Definitely.”
Maybe, she thought, just maybe the dreams wouldn’t be so bad after all.