Chapter Text
Miranda knew when they wheeled that charred, broken body into the operating room that this assignment was going to take everything she had. She doesn’t know what she expected, but it certainly wasn’t this big slab of unmoving meat barely managing not to rot.
Doesn’t matter. She’s been given an objective and the resources necessary. She’s not going to fail. Even if Wilson is doing his damnedest to make it so. If he must be present during the project, Miranda really wishes he’d just stand in the corner and pretend he’s a wall (wouldn’t be a stretch, considering he’s about as medically useful as one). If she has to correct that man’s numbers one more time, Shepard won’t be the only corpse in the room.
Despite Wilson’s uselessness, the Lazarus Project is maintaining good progress. Miranda wants to say she’s upset that she’s spent two years of her life reviving the same woman who’s destroyed some of Cerberus’ best labs, but she’s actually enjoyed the challenge. There’s a new obstacle almost every day, and she’s most satisfied when the commander would stay stable for over 48 hours - then she flat-lines and it’s back to the drawing board. And Miranda went back to the drawing board a lot - sometimes the cybernetic implants would reject the host, or the body’s blood flow would be unsteady, or it turns out Wilson used a sedative that Shepard is allergic to and they have to scramble to keep her heart beating.
There was always something new to learn or fix; like the fact that Shepard's eyes, now finally restored, though not quite functional yet, were donated and given to her in an operation when she was eleven. Her biotic amp, an L3 implant, was completely fried and had to be removed before being carefully replaced with an L5x - Miranda doubts that the Illusive Man will thank her if she leaves his favorite war hero without all of her skills intact.
Miranda doesn’t remember the last time she slept for more than three hours. Must be two years now. She works all day and only rests when her body absolutely needs to, which is much less often than people might think, thanks to her genetic tailoring. Even when she does take a break, her time is taken up by looking into Commander Shepard in every capacity - service records, medical records, even clips of interviews on the extranet. Those, in particular, are quite extensive. The woman was on practically every talk show in existence after the Skyllian Blitz - Miranda remembers catching other Cerberus soldiers watching them on their breaks. She hadn’t given them much thought until now, as she watches vid after vid in her darkened office, eyelids heavy but not feeling up to sleeping just yet.
“Now, Commander,” the host says from her seat across Shepard, her blue skin shimmering under the studio lights. “This might not be the first time someone’s asked you this, but the public absolutely needs to know. Are you seeing anyone?”
Shepard grins, looking prim and striking and absolutely nothing like the somewhat human-resembling cadaver Miranda had left on the operating table only an hour ago. Perfect white teeth flash brightly against dark brown skin as she leans forward, blue eyes glittering charmingly when she looks up at the host from underneath long eyelashes.
“That depends. Are you single?” Miranda pulls her earphones out to escape the audience’s shrieking, something she's been doing a lot lately seeing as no matter what show she's on, Shepard can't seem to resist riling the public up. She watches the Asari host giggle mutely while the commander turns her gaze to the studio audience, giving them a wink that only makes the screaming worse, threatening to ruin her earphones with their sheer volume.
This is probably the twentieth interview Miranda has watched in the past three days, not counting the countless number she’s already seen since the Lazarus Project began. She’d wanted to know more about the woman she’s putting all her time and effort to revive, the woman the Illusive Man spent billions of credits on the technology to make it so. After viewing all these talk show segments and watching her smile and flirt and charm her way through all of them, Miranda is absolutely sure of one thing.
Commander Shepard is an idiot.