Chapter Text
Lifting her head from her chest, her eyes burning in fatigue, Jane dragged her gaze to the clock glowing on the far wall across the soft prison of her bed, the numbers cutting through the dark. With thighs and calves that remained unfinished and numb, she sat on the edge of the bed Cerberus had given her. Alone and grey in an unnamed room, in an unnamed base. Later, she would know it was called the Minute Man station.
0327 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard time.
She stared at the numerals. Her brain, still new existence, dehydrated, exhausted, processed with the neural enhancements that stitched her consciousness together. She suppressed a sigh, pulling on her mask of stoicism by an automatic muscle memory, disappearing behind it. She already had shown too much emotion. She knew she was being watched. Discreetly, she ran her fingers for the thousandth time down her bare leg, trying to feel. To understand what had happened. She hung her head, her fingers strumming over her thigh.
Nothing. I feel nothing.
She looked back up. A blink of disquietude flickered across her eyes, still her unusual shade of mercury-silver. Though it felt like seconds, minutes had passed.
0353 UCT 2185.
How...how did the time change so fast? What year is it? What day is it?
She blinked. Monday became Tuesday. She looked up. It was Thursday. Fearfully, she gripped the sheet beneath her fingers, as if holding on to reality itself. It seemed, since she had been taken from Lazarus base to her location, that there was something was wrong with time.
Something was wrong with her.
Her skin was unfamiliar. Foriegn. She gazed at it, stretched out before her in a plane of perfect poreless vellum. The starlight from the small window to her side illuminated her bare legs, her top wrapped in hospital gowns, a pallid, freckle-less beam that felt as if plucked from someone else’s body. Erased of the traces of particle bullets. The scars of N7 training, paid for nearly with her life. Virmire. Illos. The Citadel. Countless battles, erased, as if none of it had happened. The callouses at her knees and elbows from ducking, scraping, crawling - gone. Thighs and hands smooth of the divots where her shields and armor had been pierced. Shoulders wiped clean of the traces of battles narrowly won; memories of mortality burned into her body like the cigarette burns of her youth.
Jane Shepard, said a girl once in tears, in a different time. In a different life. Like something given to an unnamed corpse.
She shut her eyes, forcing her younger self out, putting her back behind the door in her mind that contained her. Yet as always, she did not go willingly. Dark eyes flickered behind her younger self’s shoulder as she shoved her once more into the room in her mind she kept her in. Sparkling like onyx. Seeing straight through her. She shook her head, turning away, once more, from the memory of those eyes that never left her in her mind. Yet, against her will, like all that had happened since she had awakened, a voice returned to her; a memory of a memory.
This one’s heart is pure, but beset on all sides by wickedness, the evil of low souls, and misery. Protect this one, so that she may find kindness in this life where cruelty has failed her.
She felt herself reach, on instinct, for the paragon at her breast; her eyes already drifting to the window and the endless gleams of black. Yet, it was gone. She had given it away.
Remember? Remember? You traded it. You left it. It’s over.
She stopped herself, hating herself, gripping one hand in the other as she stared into the dark.
He tried to warn you...how did he know?
She fell into a sleep so exhausted, so light her eyes remained open, staring at the numbers. Before her a memory rippled. Cold, reflective, yet warbled; like a stone dropping into water.
1632 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard Time.
“Three!” The doctor shouted, tears in his eyes as his hand went immediately to touch her hair. Jacob pulled instinctively away, his eyes narrowing at the sweat on Wilson’s face, though he could not place why. She felt Jacob’s shoulder beneath her hips, the muscle of his trapezius coiled like stone as he pulled away from the man approaching them, that they had arrived to save. She needed to take only one look at his eyes to even though her malaise tried once more to flair her biotics; defensively, reflexively; something was wrong with the way he looked at her. Yet, her biotics failed. Only the smallest, weakest glimmer of her former power remained; the faintest candle of what she had before. She demanded in confusion,
“Don’t touch me - who is Three?!”
A door opens behind the man before them, shaking and sweating and still strangely reaching for her. Beyond it, fire, and the last shuttle, and an ice-skinned woman wreathed in flame. The man turned. Shepard watched a narrow black finger pull the trigger.
Wilson’s skull at such close distance his grey matter and fragments of bone exploded across the gleaming silver-pearl floor like wet gelatin confetti.
Through a numbness that dulled her senses like ballistic gel, she heard someone screaming, and with it, something hot and wet on her face. Wilson’s brain splattered across the linoleum in a red slag she could hear slipping under the treads of Jacob's boots even as he tried to avoid it, carrying her limply forward. What little of her body she could feel was even less than before. Her gun draped listlessly in her hand, hardly there. The acrid assault of burning plastic and the fiery, fatty singe of burned human flesh clung to her lungs. Thick. Terrible. Jacob shouting, his voice reverberating through his skin and into her. The ice woman's face contorted as she shouted back, beautiful and terrible as a polar bear. They tore into the open wing-doors of the shuttle, the two Cerberus operatives arguing, shouting. It was then she understood that the screams she heard were her own.
“She’s not right! I was supposed to bring her back as she was! Why is she bloody shouting!?”
“She died, Miranda! You know anyone that died and came back!? Dr. Wilson - what the hell did you do!?
“My job!”
Her mind slipped on Wilson’s blood as Jacob loaded her onto the shuttle, falling further into the past.
1521 UCT, 2183. Galactic Standard Time.
The helmet cracks, as cold and clear as ice against a glass. The far white plane of Alchera, dead and smooth and white as her body, invading in a silent howl every inch of space. Liara’s eyes in terror against the other side of the escape shuttle. The oxygen running thin, pouring out of her armor in pale whispers into the black folds of space. The last thought of her mind as it died the voice that said,
Suffocation is no way to die.
He looks back at her, only a silhouette across the rain. His words disappearing in the air pale whisper lost against the black as the planet hurtled towards her, her oxygen slipping away. Her lungs burning as they failed.
Pieces of ship floating in the black. Floating in tides of emptiness. She had been in the Alliance navy nearly her whole life, yet only then, in her last moments as her thoughts and memories were erased by the string of her life cut short, was space just another kind of sea. Nothing but black, where gravity was gone against the dark, as lightless as sand in the evening.
Down and down and down, towards the arc of that planet looming forward in death as she tried to swim against the weightless. A lack of tether. Hands reaching for nothing against a void that did not give purchase. The loss that did not give back to the loss felt in her heart as she drifted away to nothing. Dismantled by separation, undone of memories, of form, connection. The gravity that held her together, faces and voices that made her real, the bonds and binds and burns that made her alive.
She reached for it. But he was gone. They all were.
1004 UCT 2183, Galactic Standard Time.
She had felt it then. Her body. Her heart.
The touch of light against her flesh, rising and falling in shared breath as she moved against Garrus. His visor lay discarded on the bedside table, beside a glass of wine forgotten. Ribbons of black silk and diamond stars lay strewn across the floor, the gala dress forgotten. Their hips locked together, her body melted in his. Her corset and laces lay torn apart and discarded beside them, gleaming atop the silver-cobalt of his abandoned mantle. Her black garters were still on, her gun gleaming at her thigh as she rode him.
The feeling of his face against hers, his fingers raking down her back, his breath in hers as they moved as one, pressed so hard together the ceramic-like plates of his brow nearly cut her, but she didn’t care. There was nothing but his breath, his fingers and long claws slipped upward through her hair, pulling her body harder against his across the curve of their bed, her heart so filled with fire it burned to be alive. She felt him tensing, clutching at her harder as she brought him to ecstasy.
Shepard collapsed against him as he shuddered beneath her, his silvery flesh burning and strange and perfect, his long angled body so much longer than hers. Panting, she stroked at his face in affection. Her heart panged as she watched his beautiful eyes falling shut as he nuzzled his face into her hand. She smiled, her brow creased from exertion, falling downward to tuck herself into Garrus, fitting like a puzzle piece, whispering as she stroked at his chest, his neck,
“I love you...I love you…”
She pulled her face back from Garrus, stroking her fingers down his hard cheekbones, her hair destroyed, sifting in red tendrils over him. He looked up at her breathlessly, the corrugations in his nose softly flaring, fiery hot to the touch as she lay straddled over him, clan paint pressed into her cheeks, her lips.
“...Are we...,” he breathed, his velvet voice cracking softly as he came down from the halcyon calm of orgasm. She arced down to brow-kiss him as she slipped her fingers to the sensitive flesh behind the blades of his fringe, drawing her Vakarian-blue nails in soft circles across his skin, the soft glow of his eyes closing as she made him purr in happiness.
“‘Are we’ what, Gare?” She asked, settling into his chest, trying to negotiate across the curve of his hooded carapace that occasionally gently annoyed her when she wanted to be even closer to him. Garrus dreamily pulled her down from his lap, turning, spooning her body into the warm crook of his waist, pressing his face into her half fallen apart updo, nuzzling his face into her neck. She closed her eyes, feeling the gentle scratch of his mouth against her ear, his breath whispering inside her, his thighs pressing against the back of hers. He traced her ribs, her breasts, her navel, their hands weaving together against her pelvis.
“ How are we going to do this, when you’re my mentor ?” Garrus continued, his translator catching up, his voice deepening as it did when he was so happy with her he felt he could break, making her face light with joy as she settled against him, peaceful and satisfied with her heart racing in endorphins. Jane smiled even wider, seeing beautiful fantasies of their future play across her eyelids. Shepard held her eyes shut in her smile, holding his three long fingers tighter in hers.
“You mean, when you’re a Spectre?...Whenever we want,” Shepard whispered, dragging his hand down her garter on her thigh, slipping Garrus’s fingertips down her gun, feeling him harden again as she guided him slowly down the metal against on her flesh; his breath catching in pleasure, high with his blood burning on her words,
“However we want…” Garrus rasped a sharp sigh against her ear, pulling her close as she continued silkily, taking his hand to lower lips, wanting more,
“ Remember?” she said, her breath hitching, voice catching as he entered her again, his claws drifting down her,
“Fuck the law.”
She blinked. The numbers changed. The faces. So many unfamiliar faces, and none she knew from before. She lay in the dark, lifting herself in terror, a cold sweat pouring off her. Was he a dream? Was he a memory? Had she been a Commander once? Fallen in love with a turian? Made it off of Omega, run away only to run away again, and again, again? Garrus’s eyes, soft and pressed into her hand, looking up at her. She blinked. They filmed over, unnatural blue and lightless as spiders' eggs, his face becoming Saren’s.
She snapped up, grasping at her arms, staring at the glowing numbers of the twenty-four hour clock across the room. She started to cry, hoping the dark would hide her tears. She flipped, hoping to see Garrus, but she was alone; terrified, somewhere she didn’t recognize.
No….no….where are you...please...where are you?
Was it her cabin? Their apartment? No. Wrong. Everything was wrong. A holding cell. A Cerberus holding cell. She tore her eyes back to the clock; the confounded, cursed clock. The numbers raced by, forwards and back, her memories slipping by in flashes of confusion punctuated by terror.
Shepard counted backwards, trying to focus her mind through the filmy miasma of exhaustion encasing her mind, sheathed over the sharper edges of her brain from left-over narcotics. She knew she was being drugged, yet she did not know how. She had refused their food, their water. Refusing to speak. She had not made it easy on them; even unable to walk, she had managed to be a disruption. But she could not remember how.
Her flesh felt disconnected from her somehow, the only feeling in her a dull nausea that felt like a burning tequila hangover. Her mouth watered with a sickly feeling, her body shivering; all of her slowly wretched in an indistinct, teetering pain. She pushed it down, searching her mind for a memory, of something beautiful - something real, something that had happened. Death. So much death. The faces of the crew, bodies still, piled up in a jumble of limbs as she ran past them with Joker on her shoulders, just the way Jacob had carried her.
No. No, don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Run. RUN.
Door after door, down the long black hall - there, light; the doors, push them open!
Sunlight so bright she couldn’t see, blinding her; his voice filling her ears, her body. Garrus’s fingers in hers, their shadows, one long, one short, splayed across the range as he teased her for the thousandth time on her piss poor long range marksmanship,
Do you really have to brag so much?
When it comes to beating you at something? I’ll brag until the day I die.
1345 UCT 2183, Galactic Standard Time.
“Where is Garrus Vakarian! What did you do to him!” she screamed, throwing the uniform they had offered her at Miranda, striking her in the chest as her beautiful face contorted in rage. Shepard wept, destroyed with disbelief and terror at all they were telling her, trying and failing to stand, forgetting that the cybernetics linking her nerve endings to the musculature in her legs was still not synchronized. She swore at her wheelchair so hard she nearly tipped it over; all the words in her ear about life and death and the years somehow slept through as the unfamiliar body she was trapped in grew around her consciousness like a weed,
No, her panicked mind was bellowing as it panicked. She saw Garrus sitting across from her, easily leaned into an armor upgrade with glass of his liquor beside him, looking back at her as she read a book on zen gardening peacefully from their bed,
This cannot be real. This cannot be real.
“I told you, we cannot find him! We - no one in my organization laid a bloody finger on your-,” Miranda sputtered over the words in almost hatred, “-Spiky lover!” bellowing back at Shepard in wrath while Jacob held his head in his hands,
“Bullshit! I don’t fucking believe you, you goddamned terrorists!”
“He disappeared! Here, look, THIS! '' The Cerberus woman spat bitterly, her carefully plans unraveling before her eyes, swiping through a data pad to pull up a cracked C-Sec police report. She practically threw it at the woman before her, the sad excuse for the stoic, collected commander she had been expecting shivering weak and unhinged before her. Never in her life did she resent her superior for not allowing her the control chip. Jane wheeled over and snatched the data pad in her fingers, blinking in immediate shock. The operating system was different. The search keys in the wrong place from what she remembered, her fingers not knowing where to go.
No, no this can’t be. Oh, no. Oh, God.
And then, in horror, her eyes flashed red with the footage of flames pouring out of a window.
No.
Their window. The wide, floor to ceiling square that held the arms of the Citadel inside it like a picture frame at the only slice of home that ever felt real at 2201 Traiectum St., Unit 1304.
NO!
“Where is he!? You can bring me back from the dead, but you can’t find one turian!?”
“...He’s gone. I looked... I looked myself, Shepard.”
But she couldn’t hear her. All she could see were the flames on the screen with her tears, feeling the last stars in her sky go shuddering out.
1848 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard Time.
The clock ticked by, Jacob slowly turning to Miranda for an answer that wasn’t there. She only shook her head bitterly as she stared across the distance at Shepard, all of her plans destroyed along her expectations. Yet Shepard barely saw them. Her chest tightened as her eyes stared down in cold unfamiliarity at the uncannily smooth limbs before her. There was no mistaking the extra inches in her length. She touched her knee. Smooth and pale and dead as the snow swept across Alchera.
“What do you remember, commander?” asked Jacob carefully, the drone of the shuttle as it raced away almost a comfort. His voice was warm, like tea. Measured. She still wore his shirt, an unworn flight suit laid across her lap, her legs still bare. Shepard stared her grey eyes into his bark-brown. There was softness there. Humanity. Her eyes flicked down to the silvery hexagonal brand gleaming on the flight suit, and now somehow, on her own chest. An ice trickle of double slithered from the back of her throat into her gut as she swallowed. She wanted to believe it. She didn’t.
“What is this, some good cop, bad cop shit?”
Jacob tensed his jaw, beginning as he would for the next several weeks to lose patience with her.
“Start by telling us what you remember,” interjected Miranda. Shepard flicked her eyes to her and stared hard into her. It was like looking at a glacier.
“No,” she replied sharply. Miranda’s eyebrows raised.
“We don’t have time for games. We brought you back for a mission, and that is-”
“I don’t give a shit.”
The room seemed to grow ten degrees colder. Shepard kept her gaze, razorlike and hostile, set in Miranda’s.
“Cerberus is a criminal organization. As an officer of the Systems Alliance-”
“You were declared killed in action, our legal team has said you aren’t bound to -”
“ BULLSHIT!” she snapped back so harshly tears welled in her eyes, turning the thin skin around them a tender, viscous pink. Miranda slowly began to shake her head, the realization dawning on her that none of this was going to go to plan.
“Colonists are disappearing by the tens of thousand. You were shot down by Collectors-”
“-I don’t believe you,” Shepard interrupted back quietly, shaking her head. A tear shook loose from her eye from the force of denial it took to disbelieve her own memories of her death. She wept silently as she stared back at Miranda, their eyes locked together.
“Show me proof.”
“I have reams of data-”
“No. No. No vids. No reports. Nothing that can be faked... I want to see physical evidence. And until I do, I’m not saying anything more.”
Miranda stared at her hard, her lips moving for a few moments as she formulated words,
“You don’t care that thousands of colonists are missing?”
Shepard stared right back at her, not answering.
“I said we’re done.”
0418 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard time.
The same room. Seconds. Minutes slipping by like teflon. Seconds somehow bleeding into hours. Days turned by dark alchemy overnight into weeks.
She had been moved to a laboratory, hastily pulled together in the weeks she had been held on the base. She sat alone, suppressing shivers at the cold medical equipment around her, waiting in her hospital gowns, wrapped three layers thick. She still refused to wear one of their uniforms.
Jane turned her eyes upward, staring at the black eye of the camera in the corner of the room in complete motionlessness. As she had been taught in her years of N7 training, Jane pushed her fear down, shoving it into a backroom of her mind behind the doors in the spindly, damp halls of her memory. Yet she found as her eyes shifted to her hands in her lap, something had changed since she had woken up against her will, surrounded by unfamiliar faces with her old life buried over two lost years in the past. It was getting harder and harder to keep the doors closed.
Her fingers were the same shape, the vasculature of her wrists and the lines tracing her palms identical to what she knew, but where were the callouses on the second pad of her trigger finger? Her thumb from gripping a pencil wrong her whole life? The crooked knuckles from where the vanguard’s right hand had been broken more times than she could count? All erased. All gone and smoothed over, poreless and delicate. Weak.
Prey.
I’m trapped.
A door creaked open in her mind as if was pulled by a ghost. Behind it, a deep, lightless fear, twined in the blood-dark roots of Omega.
Unconsciously, she turned her head to the small window to her left, staring into the starfield surrounding her like an uncertain sea. As if a scab torn off a wound, the red wastes of Omega bled across her mind, and with it, the acrid, caustic scent of tainted, acid rain.
I’m trapped and I’m never going home.
Jane slammed her eyes shut on instinct as if to turn the memories off like a faucet. A drip at first, then a fall of rain. Then a storm. And in the torrent, the voice in the dark, from across the tides of memory. Soft, strange, and comforting; untouched by time. A salve that had healed a once open wound.
Beautiful girl, why do you cry?
She lifted her head from her tears, lost and terrified, pouring down into the rushing water below; lost in the downpour, trying and failing at seeing his face. The shadow stood before her, so close she could feel his body heat, pointed nails in soft black gloves, tracing down her palm as she shivered, her gaze landing in eyes burning in the dark like coals.
You are surrounded on all sides by danger, yet I fear you cannot see it. Just as before, dear memory, if I have taken notice of you, so have others. I fear for you.
She watched his letter burn in the flames.
Lurching, a rush of hot, lurid acid wretched up from her stomach into her mouth. Automatically she shivered forward with her hand at her lips, panicking, yet forcing herself to swallow it painfully. She tried, as she turned her head away from the lens she knew was viewing her to stare for the hundredth time at her foreign, smooth legs. She blinked down at them, pushing back her vomit. Her terror. They were utterly, completely hairless. All of her was.
These are not my legs.
This is not my body.
Feeling a sense of control for the first time she had awoken, she stared at the pen in her hand, taken from the desk in the corner. A standard ballpoint stylus. Metal body, emblazoned with a frosted white Cerberus hexagon. The sharpest thing she could find.
Carefully, she uncapped it feeling a quiet, poignant calm, and touching the tip to just below the top of her knee. Carefully, she traced a thin black line down her thigh, seven inches long. She didn’t feel a thing.
As she set to work pushing it into her flesh, blood filling the crater she tore into herself like tears, she set her mind into the past.
“...it was bad,” Jacob had said, only hours before. She had stared off into space, still confined to her wheelchair, staring at the clock.
1152 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard time.
“When I first saw you...you were nothing but meat and tubes. Anywhere else, they would have put you in coffin,” Jacob said, shaking his head. As she opened her leg with her fingers, she stared at two things. One, the glowing red mesh in the center of her body. Two, the realization that had made her cut herself open.
“Am I,” she had stuttered, staring at him with her blood as still as ice water,
“...what am I?”
He looked at her hard, then turned away. He did not know what to say, cursing Miranda for withdrawing behind her duties. Jacob closed his eyes heavily. He was a soldier, not a psychologist, or a doctor. He hoped wherever Wilson was, he was burning.
“How is this possible?...Am I a...”
Shepard couldn’t even say the word, her mind threatening to break. Garrus, gone. The Normandy, gone. Her ties to the Alliance? Destroyed. And there in Jacob’s face, the last thing she needed to see, was a flicker of fear. Of not knowing, flickering in a shade of doubt across the hardened brow of a soldier; the most disconcerting thing imaginable,
“I’m pretty sure you aren’t a clone.”
“...You’re ‘pretty sure’?!”
“Listen, I wasn’t on the medical team, Miranda would know better than I. But she...and Wilson... and our scientists and the best tech money could buy spent years putting you back together.”
Shepard ran her fingernails down her thigh, trying to feel.
Nothing. I feel nothing.
“Project Lazarus had only one subject...you. The whole point…” he swept his hand across his hair, rationalizing, starting off then forcing himself down into self assurance, then back at her as she quietly dissociated in front of him, his words entering her ears yet gliding over her brain,
“...was to bring you back. Just you. But you completely. Exactly as you were-”
“I’m fucking six inches taller. I can’t walk, Jacob. Where the fuck is my body hair?! Did the Illusive Man take that too!?”
“-Like I said,” he snapped, “You weren’t finished. We’re bringing someone in for that. An expert, though…” Jacob sighed in frustration as she bored her grey eyes up to him from the wheelchair, his eyes landing on her malfunctioning, incomplete lower half,
“He’s a genius. An expert geneticist, doctor, scientist... and a former STG guy.”
But she couldn’t hear him. She opened her eyes. Blood bathed her, spilling onto the floor, rushing from the gash at her thigh. She wrenched it open, staring into the mesh of red glow that lay within her.
1411 UCT 2185, Galactic Standard time.
Suddenly, her head seared and breath caught in her throat as her vision blurred. She wavered, then corrected herself, hiding her weakness for the camera staring down at her. Today, she was strapped down to her bed. She could not remember why. Her mind felt strange, slow, and heavy. She felt herself falling back to sleep.
To her right, she heard the thick steel door unlock and open, a rush of fresh oxygen entering the laboratory. Fighting to keep conscious, she felt two figures approach her. One familiar, cold, black and white female, Miranda, and one stranger. She felt eyes on her body, and over her chest as she lay fixed to her bed, came the grey wash a tall, thin silhouette. Backlit by light too bright to look into as Miranda flicked on a lamp above, she rolled her eyes to see another figure; not the stranger on Omega, but a different alien. A horned head, one shorter than the other.
She felt him scanning her, hearing the servos whirring in his omnitool. The salarian pressed his tongue in dissatisfaction against his teeth. Then, suddenly, fingers on her arm, on her pulse.
A strange flash coursed through her as she felt his fingers touch her skin. Imagery flooded her so powerfully she saw it before her eyes in flashes, like a flip book.
The wrenching humidity and heat of an alien planet that smelled like moss and fern. Foreign cream-pale lilies in a tiered water garden vibrating with eight-winged dragonflies; a place of learning. The sound of footsteps, her eyes scanning a syllabus. Students. Questions. Colleagues. She was walking, hurriedly checking her omnitool, but the arm wasn’t hers, then suddenly a concert hall; singing - vibrations spilling out of her in beautiful peals, but it was not her voice.
Song poured out of her to fill an empty auditorium, surrounded by friends, other salarians, singing in a-capela. A joke, laughter, notes of music bleeding into memories of screens and data. The smooth feeling of granite, sandstone, and shell as she ran her fingers over a collection of alien stones behind a glass display, pulled open in secret by a colleague. Insights of analysis gleamed like brightly colored fish swimming in glittering streams of data, flashing like comets in a mind of dazzling, burning intelligence - but it wasn’t hers, no. Vibrating through her skin, as if on a shared wavelength of complimentary sound, the touch of a mind so efficient it rang through her so sharply it made hers feel dull in comparison. A neurotic buzzing energy, and at its core, a hidden, tender kindness.
Suddenly, her eyes burned blinding white. He flashed a small light in her eyes, she felt her lips begin to move, but the voice was not hers.
“Heart rate significantly depressed... Eyes not tracking movement. Pupils dilated. Subject under influence of heavy narcotics...Awake - but only barely, ” he muttered, viciously, quietly angry.
Miranda’s expression curdled as she pulled her expression from Shepard, laying still as pond water on the table. Her eyes weakly watched the salarian as he leaned over her, placing his fingers gently across her temples, her jaws, checking her facial muscles for symmetry and signs of stroke.
“Can hear me?”
Jane gave a weak nod. It took her entire strength to push back against the drugs.
“Dr. Solus. Here to help. Lift eyelids, against my fingers. Fight me. Give good try.”
He gently laid his fingertips over her eyelids, closing them. Mordin felt the frailest resistance beneath his fingers, yet his fingertips remained unmoved. His wrath welled in an inferno in his gut. They knew enough to bring the woman who has saved the Citadel back from the dead, but not enough to know how to handle the realities of what they had done to her without drugging her so severely she couldn’t speak. As he suspected, ethics were not even secondary to their aims. They did not exist at all. The woman who had killed a reaper was now so weak she couldn’t battle his fingertips.
He seethed, pulling his fingers away, before setting them to a frenzy at his omnitool as Miranda interjected,
“I gave her a sedative-”
“-Putting it mildly,” he interrupted coldly, without looking at her. Miranda sharply eyed him, souring in hidden embarrassment. Emotions were not her strong suit. Neither was the sheer outpouring of terror, fear, confusion and disorientation that had poured out of their third attempt since the untimely truncation of the project.
“Not my first choice , but she has been nothing but a disaster since she awoke... She attacked me earlier, when I found her in here, covered in her blood. Or tried to... I didn’t know how she would react to you.”
Mordin balked, breaking away from her as his mind whirred hotly, wheeling over a vitals unit to begin physical diagnostics, its wheels squeaking against the linoleum. Miranda ignored his open displeasure, watching the alien closely. Shepard lay on the table, falling back to unconsciousness. Perhaps, thought Miranda a little guiltily, she had been a touch heavy handed with the sedatives lately.
“Look at her thigh. There. She found a pen. Gashed herself open.”
Mordin’s sharp, almond shaped eyes darted down to a seven inch long cut on her thigh, recently sutured and actively undergoing medi-gel based cellular reconstruction. He stared at it in disgust, turning to Miranda,
“Psych profile outlined remissive post-traumatic stress disorder. At most tendency towards maladaptive compartmentalization, possible romantic codependencies - never self harm. What happened here? ”
Miranda kept her voice extremely level, though her eyes narrowed into slits, staring into him as the words left her tongue.
“She had her fingers four centimeters deep in her thigh. She was in the process of peeling herself open by the time we got through the door,” Miranda snapped, her arms crossed at her chest, boring her eyes into the back of Mordin’s shorter horn, wondering how he had lost it.
“Something is wrong. Extremely wrong.”
She hadn’t slept in weeks, worn down by the impossibility of keeping their third attempt at Shepard viable. Miranda stared down at her while she slept, wondering darkly if she would need to be decommissioned and salvaged for parts, like the others. Miranda stared down at her work. Two years and over four billion credits on the verge of being wasted.
“You have two weeks, or we’re scrapping it and reorienting our approach from the ground up. She’s not stable,” Miranda rationalized so smoothly she didn’t even register the brutality of what she had said as Mordin pushed his anger down, gently leaning over Shepard, observing her.
After a moment, he turned his eyes to her, pausing bitterly as the words formed on his tongue like venom,
“Sentient being on table,” he snapped so viciously it shocked her out of her tallying of Shepard’s performance measures for project success. Lawson stared at the salarian as if had been slapped. A fierceness shone behind his eyes as he glared at her from across Shepard’s unconscious body. Dr. Solus was spindly and shorter than her by an inch, yet he radiated a badger like, wiry power. He pointed to the woman on the table, glaring at her with his eyes fixed in Miranda’s,
“Miracle of biology and tech. Progress clearly luck on your part.”
His voice was so quick and acidic she stood stunned. Miranda had never seen a salarian so incensed with anger. The scientist continued, looking down at the unconscious human while shaking his head intensely,
“Drugged and restrained like lesser life form. For convenience,” he remarked bitterly,
“Think this is appropriate response to birth trauma? Death trauma? ”
“What were we supposed to do?” Miranda snapped right back, “Our previous doctor blew up the bloody research station and tried to make off with her body to God knows where! She’s weeks away from completion-”
“Excuses,” Mordin hissed, his hands and body whirring to motion, to work, moving around to the other side of the table, sucking air against his teeth as he rifled through protocols to sync his omni-tool, shaking his head with a curled lip as he proceeded to upbraid her in a voice he had not used since he personally expelled a group of his graduate students caught using performance enhancing stimulants,
“As I thought, fluke. Amateurs toying with creation - never good. Future advice? Do not attempt experimentation on species capable of calculus. Hubris observed thus far? Incredible.”
“She was in a bloody box when I got her - I spent two years growing her and her failed iterations from nothing but muck!”
Mordin raised his brows, absolutely disgusted, knowing precisely where to cut her down,
“Able to process tissue cultures. Undergraduate level skill. Supposed to impress me?”
But as he turned back to his patient, his sharp eyes caught the lens of the camera glaring down at them from the upper corner of the room. Mordin stared at it, then raised his finger, jabbing it sharply in its direction,
“That. Out.”
Miranda raised her beautifully arched eyebrows in abject disbelief.
“Excuse me?”
But Mordin persisted in white hot impatience, staring straight at Lawson as he descended his finger to point now at her chest,
“You. Out of depth.”
Miranda’s jaw dropped. She stared.
“What did you say to me?”
He turned his finger back, pointing to himself.
“Me, here to clean up mess. Your mess. Short sentences, for comprehension. Understand?”
She stared at him, feeling as if her soul had left her body. Miranda had absolutely no response to that.
“My laboratory, my clinic, my rules,” Mordin continued, circling around Shepard as Miranda boiled in her skin,
“ Will report hourly to your private terminal,” he added, waiving her off sharply as she stared, not believing what she was hearing. Before she could formulate a response, he jabbed his finger back to the camera, leaning over to examine the sutures she had pierced together herself, as her medical staff lay now in the grave. He shook his head in disdain. Sloppy. All textbook experience. No practice.
“Go. Take observation equipment with you, or will be destroyed. Doctor patient confidentiality sacred.”
Miranda could only smirk in bitterness, almost seeing The Illusive Man’s expression in response.
“My boss will not have that.”
Mordin looked back at her and slowly cocked his head. He had not blinked once since he had began to speak.
“Did I stutter? You,”
He pointed towards the door.
“Relieved. Go.”
Miranda, burning with resentment, embarrassment, and the not so quiet fear that she was not ‘meeting expectations’ turned on her heel. She swept out of the room rancorous in indignation, leaving the camera right where it was.
Where once had only been the vague, anonymous lines of clean white medical equipment, Jane Shepard awoke to a room that felt, inexplicably, like more of a den than a laboratory.
She rolled heavily over, scrunching into herself, free of her restraints. For the first time, she realized through a pleasant, rested drowsiness that she was warm. A soft, weighted blanket had been placed over her; a quite out of place rose pink confection with happy earthen sunflowers splayed across in a cheery alternating pattern. For the first time she could remember, she felt incredibly, serenely comfortable. She nestled into herself, feeling strangely safe. Jane just listened, letting her consciousness drift back to her body as she slowly sensed her surroundings.
The clear, crisp brasses of jazz music played softly from a small wireless speaker in the corner, sitting atop several small attache cases of what looked to be personal effects, equipment, and boxes of fresh medical supplies and other oddities brought in by courier. She heard a gentle clinking of glassware and movement, and among those pleasant sounds, a quick alien voice softly narrating idle streams of consciousness in Sur’keshi.
Like the fingers of a lover, the scent of something familiar and seductive teased at her, making her salivate before she even opened her eyes.
Coffee.
She pushed her eyes open, peeking out from the blanket, watching a figure come into focus. It was a salarian, she realized, as her mind felt sharp for the first time since Miranda had executed Wilson. She had thought he was a dream. Shepard watched him, tall and spindly and dressed in clean white splashed with crimson to match his unusual, burnished complexion. His face darted from expression to expression as he stared into the beautiful drink brewing in his glassware. He was hunched convex over a laboratory bench, having constructed an ersatz vacuum brewer out of a 1000 ml beaker, an omni-powered Bunsen burner, glass tubing, a ring stand, and 1000 ml florence flask.
“You’re real,” she said hazily, thinking out loud as she watched him work, staring into the deep black brew before him with pristine focus. At that he smiled toothily, descending a pH meter into sample of the blessed solution he had created, replying lightly, jokingly,
“Patient awake. Favorable. But questioning nature of reality first thing in morning? Can get messy.”
Jane watched in subdued amazement as he, with the perfectly still hands of a surgeon, siphoned off enough of the coffee from the flask to fill two simple white mugs. Only then did he turn his gaze to her. The salarian’s eyes were perfectly black like almonds made of jet, wide set in their sockets, quick moving and radiantly clever. He smiled, ducking his head down as he set one aside for himself a this lab bench. Warmth radiated from him. She felt something tense in her heart lessen.
“But yes, am real. Well. As far can be observed by existing methodologies.”
He waived off the rest of his thought, “Semantics,” he added, approaching with cup in hand. Staring at the coffee like a shark to blood, she tried to lift herself, but was still too weak. He observed, and extended a hand to her, three fingered like a turian. Jane looked at it. She felt a pang of shame. She was so weak she could barely move.
“...Am I real…? I don’t feel it. I can barely move. Or think.”
“ ‘Am I real,’ ” Mordin repeated, thoughtfully considering the implications of her statement. He cocked his head slightly to the side as he surveyed her,
“Simple question. Complex answer. First? Coffee.”
She mournfully looked at his hand, and pushing down her pride took it, rising to sit up. Carefully, he hovered the cup near her hands, still holding it,
“Touch. Ceramic good heat insulator, but still unsure of your sensitivity. Need more tests. Too hot ?”
She gingerly wrapped her fingers around the base of the cup, feeling it. Somehow, she could not remember eating; or much past waking from the table and entering the room she was currently in.
“No.”
“Drink slow. pH 5.8. Beverage acidic. Stomach is new. May be upset, ” he added, carefully transferring the weight of the cup into her hands as if handling an egg. She raised the cup to her lips as he observed, watching keenly for her motor skills and coordination,
“Enjoyable hot beverage from your world. Quickly gaining popularity on Sur'kesh and colonies. Only small quantities needed for increased mental stimulation when coupled with our metabolisms. Causes jitters however. Sometimes pleasurable. Mostly not.”
He flicked his eyes over her bed-head of knotted hair as she sipped quickly, eyes closed and savoring her first drink of something pleasurable since she had been brought back screaming into the world.
“Heard you were fan.”
She only nodded, continuing to drink faster than the heat would allow her. Grey circles of exhaustion and dehydration had formed beneath her barely three week old eyes. His task, ostensibly, was to determine if they had been successful in bringing the genuine Commander Shepard back from the grave. He watched her carefully, keeping his deep skepticism of Cerberus’s plan to himself, tucked down into his personal agenda. With her eyelids closed, she tipped the remainder of the coffee into her mouth.
“Ah - ah, no, No. ” Mordin chided, stopping her before she inhaled the entire thing, “Slow. Slow.”
She looked at him indignantly but obliged, pausing for a moment as he forced the cup sternly away from her mouth with one finger, looking at her sharply. Before she could find herself fighting further, she suddenly felt lead-heavy and overwhelmed with exhaustion. Suddenly, in a spark of anxiety, she glanced fearfully at the time. 0753. Morning, but which morning? She no longer knew the day. A wave of nausea as anxiety bred with the acid of the beverage hit her stomach. Shepard turned a pallid grey, looking back up to Mordin, who replied dryly,
“Warned you.”
Defeatedly she asked him,
“Can I lay back down?”
“Yes.”
Gently, Mordin took the cup from her fingers, and she laid back uneasily against the pillow, her thoughts and memories of her captivity slowly flickering back to her. He continued to work, circling her. She tried to force the shame at her helplessness out of her mind, focusing on he soft sounds of medical equipment and instruments whirring in neutral white noise. Jane felt Mordin fluttering around as if he were a hummingbird, performing scans and diagnostics as unobtrusively as possible, yet quick as lightning. She lay still as he flitted from limb to limb, pushing down her shame. Strangely, she felt she could trust him, though she could not place from where.
“My boyfriend says I drink too much of that. Coffee...He’s always bitching about hydration.”
Mordin flicked his eyes to her face, smiling a touch internally, then back to his omni-tool, divining volumes from her gut bacteria. They were, of course, still nowhere near as florid as they should have been.
“He’s right.”
Shepard sighed, looking heavily at the cheery, out of place sunflower pattern on the blanket. Its weight sank onto her like an embrace. Jane’s eyes slipped carefully down the pink satin edge. It looked gently worn. It had the light scent of a foreign, wetland flower that she could not place. Quietly she realized that it was his.
“You are not Cerberus.”
“Correct.”
“...Then why are you here?’
Mordin dipped his head one way, then the other, keeping his motives, like a true salarian, close to his quickly beating heart.
“Was told interesting story. Cerberus reportedly played God... Given hubris...propensity for flagitious ambition? Not surprising. Yet, was surprising they succeeded. Had to see it myself...Fully expected some sort of reality-vid ‘gotcha’ but no. You are, irrefutably, alive.”
Her heart sank. He looked at her darkly, sensing her question.
“Is it true...that I was dead?”
Mordin nodded, watching her.
“Medically correct. Yes.”
He flicked his eyes down to her thigh, hidden beneath his blanket.
“Want to tell me what happened there?” he pivoted, taking a soft but serious tone, indicating towards her right leg. She took a deep breath, moving the blanket to the side. A long, jagged scar now graced her once perfectly smooth thigh. Somehow, it felt like an act of revenge. She turned her head to the side, avoiding his gaze.
“I cut it open.”
Mordin set his gaze in hers. Hard.
“Why.”
“I had to know.”
“Know what? Be specific. ”
Shepard turned her head away and didn’t answer. After a long time, she said,
“If I was still human.”
The salarian exhaled. It is as he thought, and Cerberus, naturally, did not, in all their planning think to consider.
“Yes,” Mordin replied firmly, stopping his frenzy of movements to look at her quite sternly in the eye. Eventually, she turned to face him.
“Why did they bring me back?”
“Not certain. Have suspicions, but not certain.”
A long moment passed between them. Her eyes fell.
“They told me the Normandy was attacked by Collectors,” She shook her head, her unbrushed hair tangling against the pillow as her eyes stared far off out of the window, lost in the sea of infinite stars.
“I don’t know what to believe.”
He narrowed his eyes, watching her closely as he synced data between the equipment around her and his highly specialized omni-tool.
“Regardless, no future self-vivisections,” he said sternly, then almost comically, “ Lack qualifications.”
Shepard stared ahead, seeing into her memory.
“When I cut myself, I wasn’t human inside...There was this glowing meshwork...Am I a machine? An android?”
“Android,” Mordin repeated, seeming to roll the word over in his brain as he nodded his head from side to side,
“From your Latin root androides . Know definition?’
“No.”
“Meaning, ‘resembling a man.’ Term implies full tech interior, simulacrum of organic exterior.”
He came around to her left side, lifting his gaze sharply from his omnitool to look at her in the eyes,
“But you? Not so. Human on outside, human on inside. More accurate term? Augmented organic lifeform,” he said, twirling his finger around as if to trace a circle around the outline of her body, “Yet not first of your kind. Millions more exist like you. Though admittedly, to lesser degree of sophistication.”
“I don’t understand.”
“For instance, previously had L3 biotic implants, yes? Neural link for translator? Biofeedback implants in fingertips for omni-device integration?”
Mordin looked at her quizzically, seeing that she was not quite understanding, and in a flash of french with a rocky but solid accent he added,
“Comme çi, comme ça."
It was that that somehow made her smile her first smile since she had been born. He had said the phrase literally (Like this, like that), but it was the thought that counted. Shepard’s smile faded, turning her head to the window once more. She stared at her reflection in the black mirror of the glass against the infinity of space.
“...I feel like Frankenstein.”
“Frankensteins’ monster, ” Mordin sharply corrected, smirking a little,
“Herr Frankenstein was, of course, the doctor.”
Shepard turned her eyes towards him, suppressing a little smirk, deadpanning,
“I knew that... so how bad is it? How much of me is augmented?”
“‘Bad’ matter of perception...think of this way... Looking at your muscle weave, if we can get your cybernetics functioning and integrated in with the remainder of your nervous system and musculoskeletal network - calculate your body can take, oh , about a fifty percent reduction in direct melee impact damage.”
She stared at him, her eyes growing wide as the wheels of her mind began to change direction. She liked the sound of that.
“What?”
“Yes. As vanguard class combat specialist, thought you would find that interesting.”
“ Oh I find that very interesting Mordin... What else?”
“Have complete organ systems, scaffolded from your original tissue. Brain. Lungs. Liver. Heart. Skin. Rebuilt stomach, esophagus - oh, and no worries about chiralities any longer. Should be able to metabolize any type of protein. For survival situations, of course.” he added delicately, knowing full well about her proclivities for turians. She kept her face very still. He continued,
“Also contain synthetic materials and biomechanical elements. Bioengineered blood. Exotic non-newtonian properties in rheology...Contains synthetic hemoglobin with oxygen transfer efficiency in triplicate,” he nodded his head in a strange, almost approving way,
“Likely will not suffocate again, yet space is cruel mistress. Should make swimming interesting.”
He set himself back to work, continuing,
“Bones also heavily augmented. Contains weave of element zero enriched titanium framework integrated with natural osteoclasts, osteoblasts, et cetera.”
“...I have metal bones?”
“Not purely. Sophisticated alloy laced with bone tissue network. Similar biomaterial structures integrated with skeletal muscle tissue... Should offer significant improvement to material properties. Torque. Tensile strength. Shear force…” he smiled a little crookedly, tapping away at his equipment as she watched him closely,
“Shepard hard to kill before. Now, even harder.”
Jane felt a wave of chills pass over her skin. Slowly, she raised her hands up from her lap to stare into them, seeing them in a different light than before. Solemnly, she turned her wrists, looking into her palms. Her eyes fell on the twin arcs, perfectly parallel, that soared over the mound where her thumb met her hand. Someone, a drunk private during some terrible shore leave party once in her early years, had stared at it incredulously, slurring something about her having two life lines. She had laughed it off. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“...am I synthetic?”
Mordin exhaled, clicking his tongue against his teeth as he thought,
“Yes and no. Somewhat philosophical question. Extremely unique case - N of one. Partially, yet in limited, technical sense of the term. Cybernetics and implants fill in the gaps, keep your systems synthesized, running. But you are, by volume, mostly organic - with organic tissue scaffolded, not cloned. Grown, so to speak, from your original tissue. So, synthetic not wholly correct term. Android definitely not correct term. Perhaps-”
He stared off into space, thinking.
“Transhuman.”
She closed her eyes, her very soul sinking down into the floor, feeling him continue to bustle around her.
“...Is it true the Alliance determined I was killed in action?”
“Also correct. Saw your memorial myself. Intergalactically synchronized,” The salarian laughed a little, traveling in his memory. He had watched it from his laboratory, gathered around his graduate students.
“Give quite an interview. Funny, when not under duress. Possessing sense of humor is good - promotes endorphins. Prolongs lifespan - ah,” he added quickly, sensing his faux pas, “ Natural lifespan. ”
“God,” she cringed looking over at him in horror at the realization that they had televised her interview across the galaxy. The implications horrified her.
“...Which one? They showed that? ”
Mordin burst into a sharp stab of laughter as he worked,
“Your conversation with Ms. Emily Wong...You were attempting to minimize your involvement in the Battle of The Citadel. Tried to appear humble. Wise long term strategy.”
She shot her eyes open at him at that. His face cracked into a toothy smile, continuing to scan her.
“Joking.”
“Uh huh.”
“Have just one question though. Very serious.”
“Go for it.”
“True that Blasto attempted to court you?”
His question was so out of left field, so perfectly timed in his comic delivery, that she completely burst into laughter. Of all the things that had happened in the assault of horror that her rebirth had been, that details flooding back of the famous hanar’s incredibly unhinged, negging exmails from her previous life broke her completely open with mirth.
“Yes. Relentlessly. He is horrible. Complete asshole, or whatever they have.”
“Anal pore,” Mordin clarified. She frowned.
“Ew , oh - I’m sorry, no offense.”
Mordin smirked, his hands working briskly,
“None taken, have cloaca. Quite sophisticated compared to anal pore.”
She stared at him, laughing darkly. Shepard shook her head, continuing as she watched him with razorlike focus hidden behind her smiles,
“I thought hanar were supposed to be polite? I swear to God, I am going to shave this off some day,” she said, rolling her eyes and indicating towards her long red hair. She shook her head, mocking him,
“This one would like to wrap his limbs in your red tendrils. Have lover in every port. Could offer tentacle in every orifice. Fucking, ugh. ” She visibly cringed, shaking the disgust off herself.
“I used to read them outloud to Garrus. The boyfriend,” she clarified. Mordin nodded placidly as he worked. He knew.
“God we laughed so hard... But what is it with my hair? On Earth, yes it’s rare, but you get relentlessly mocked,” she shook her head, her mind going to Joker. Her heart seared in her chest, wondering where he was. If he was safe.
“Any sufficiently rare anatomic structure rife for fetishization,” Mordin remarked, continuing to smirk a touch.
“Find sexual proclivities of other species fascinating. Aesexual, personally.”
Shepard smiled coyly at that, reaching up to feel through the tangles of her hair. She ran her fingers through it, thinking. Calculating.
“That must be freeing.”
“It is. Quarians have hair - obfuscated under envio-suit. Quarians also considered very attractive. Probable source of interspecies fascination with hair. Also, rare coloring. Have rare coloring myself. Complexion considered desirable among turians. Occasionally awkward. ”
Shepard listened, looking out the window, combing through the knots in her hair with her fingers as she thought, absently beginning to twist the long rope of her hair, much longer than before, into a braid. Tali’s mask drifted in front of her eyes and with it, a terrible aching in her heart. She sighed quietly, feeling heavy again. Slowly she asked,
“ So what are they paying you Dr. Solus?”
“Equivalent of the IGDP of a reasonably sized colony. Favorable. Academic research always needs funding. Grant proposals…”he sucked his teeth, sighing, “Miranda very persistent. Made offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Shepard stared out the small window into the black, thinking quickly.
“I imagine, as former STG, you have some nefarious hidden agenda. I don’t blame you, by the way.”
He tilted his head, surveying her,
“Have personal project. Won’t comment further.”
“I understand,” she said quietly, nodding.
“I also understand you removed the camera from this room.”
He stopped what he was doing, looking at her. She did not look back. Softly, she continued in very different tone of voice.
“I assume if the Salarian Union sent you as counterintelligence you wouldn’t tell me.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Ten years ago, assumption correct. Today, work alone.”
“I’m not with Cerberus. And I don’t intend to be.”
“As said, work alone.”
A long silence rang between them. He watched her watch the stars, laying in silence. In the reflection of the small pane of reinforced glass, pale reflections of their silhouettes were captured as if in a frame of time.
“They tell me colonists are disappearing. That it was the Collectors that attacked my ship. Me.”
“From estimation, true.”
She nodded, saying quietly,
“You want their tech.”
Mordin raised a brow at her. He had read she was intelligent. Deceptive. Highly calculating. It was quite one thing to read it in a report, and another to see it play out before him. He said nothing, observing her sharply.
“And I assume so does Cerberus. I don’t need to be a geneticist to know Collector technology is advanced enough to interest them. And you.”
Mordin carefully returned to his work at his omnitool, yet was listening.
“Help me help you, Mordin,” she said quietly after a silence. Silkily. In a shrewd, authoritative tone that distinctly reminded him of someone he used to know quite well. Omega, thought Mordin quietly as he observed her, was an interesting place. What it did not consume, it evolved.
“I asked for evidence,” she continued, staring into the stars ahead.
“And I can keep asking. I’m sure if Lazarus is ultimately deemed successful,” Jane said delicately, “There will be ample opportunity to study whatever evidence we find. Tissue samples, salvage, who knows?” She said mysteriously, keeping her eyes forward,
“I have been told the plan is to form a team. If we are to be given some mission to pursue,” she shrugged a little, “I’m sure there would be many benefits to having a geneticist of your caliber with us. With me.”
Shepard looked back at him, her strange silvery retinas landing presciently in his. Mordin gave her a curious, long look. Finally, he spoke.
“Told you was aesexual... So attempt to seduce me with data?” he remarked pointedly. She said nothing, though looked a touch pleased with herself, looking at him darkly in return. She gave a small, subtle smile.
He had heard a rumor she was impeccably good at Optimium for her species. Now, he believed it.
Mordin exhaled something between a laugh and almost a breath of approval, gesturing his fingers, alternating between her and him,
“Reveal of personal information calculated? Ingratiating scheme?”
Shepard continued to smile craftily, eyeing him.
“Well, is it working?”
Mordin tilted his head the other direction, evaluating her,
Clever. Clever, clever, clever.
“Depends. Will need ‘evidence’ first.”
Shepard watched him closely, darting her gaze to one of his eyes to the other.
“There’s been an accident on Freedom’s Progress. They want me to go investigate it, naturally. I don’t really want to, to be honest,” Jane said dryly, narrowing her eyes at him. The salarian stared back with a poker face, yet inside, his internal clockwork was firing.
“I want them to bring me something to prove this isn’t all bullshit.”
She smiled again in that devilish way that was distinctly familiar. He watched her carefully.
Omega breeds survivors.
“How about Collector tissue? Think that will slake my curiosity? Doctor? ”
Mordin Solus stared back at her, still for once. Salarians, and Special Task Group espionage in particular, retired or not, rarely said all that was on their quick-thinking minds. He snapped closed his omnitool, crossing one arm over the other as he surveyed the woman before him, calculating as quickly as his genius could take him. He stood thinking, weighing her words, all he knew about her, and every regret of his life against the voice of his heart.
After a long moment, he turned his eyes to the clock across the room, and spoke,
“Zero nine thirty-seven. Galactic standard time.”
Mordin’s almond eyes met Shepard’s slate as a moment passed heavily between them. He raised his hand from beside her, his three fingers hovering in mid air. She looked up at him, meeting his gaze.
“Perhaps start of beautiful friendship.”
Jane smiled slowly as she took Mordin’s hand. They shook, looking cautiously at each other as the tides of their fate slowly changed; their lifelines braiding together in the current turn of the Wheel of Life.
“Well,” said Shepard tilting her head as she watched him watch her,
“Only one way to find out.”