Chapter Text
“Too many. Lost shields. Sorry, Shepard. Tell them… I held the line…”
Shepard stood in the corner of the hospital room, her arms crossed as she stared at a sleeping Mordin. His wrists looked terrible from the restraints. If she hadn’t gotten through to him…
Shepard had seen Mordin die. She had in vain used one of her medi-gels to try and heal his wound, stayed with him as he had taken his last breath.
Her omni-tool’s scans had confirmed it. Afterwards she used the Collector base’s reactor to send out a radiation pulse to kill all the Collectors and leave the base itself intact. The damage his body would have sustained from that…
Which was why she found Mordin ambushing them at the Mars Archives wearing Cerberus armor and pointing a gun at Shepard’s face so unexpected.
“Mordin?”
He hadn’t answered her. She searched his face for any sign that he remembered her, but there was none. It was like she was meeting him again for the first time— but even then, the salarian now standing before her seemed so different from the one she had met on Omega.
It didn’t matter. He was still her friend.
Mordin coldly told her that The Illusive Man had tasked him with “removing her from the equation.” It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know what he meant by that, especially considering he still had his gun pointed at her. He had barely finished his sentence when she knocked the gun away and shouted for Liara, Kaiden, and Vega to help take him down without killing him.
The furious death glare Mordin wore as Shepard brought down the butt of her pistol against his forehead to knock him out somehow rattled her more than when he actually pointed a gun at her.
Shepard stared at his face for a moment afterwards. Stared at the faint, glowing scars. Her hand had moved to touch one of them. They were exactly like the ones engrained on her own face. Only one thing could have brought him back to life and left those scars.
The Lazarus Project. The question burning in her mind at this realization was Why? Why Mordin? Why bring him back, and why send him to kill her? Maybe she would be able to get something out of Mordin. Some kind of information. Even if she couldn’t, she wasn’t going to just leave him here. She wouldn’t let him fall back into Cerberus’ hands. Not again.
She sent Vega back to the ship with him, with orders to restrain Mordin to a bed in the medical bay and inject him with anesthesia to keep him unconscious. And then Vega could come back with the shuttle to cut Cerberus off if they attempt to escape with the Prothean data.
Everyone protested at first— understandably. She couldn’t blame them. But Shepard had shut it down. She had already lost her friend once, she wasn’t about to again.
And now here they were. At the Huerta Memorial Hospital. Kaiden was being treated for his own injuries in another room. His were far more severe, so Shepard had to wait even longer before she could see him.
“Cannot fail! Break out of here, track you down— kill you!”
When he woke up, Mordin had thrashed violently against his restraints. He wouldn’t listen to anyone, not to Dr. Chakwas, and not to Shepard.
Until Shepard sang—
“I am the very model of a scientist salarian, I’ve studied species turian, asari, and batarian. I’m quite good at genetics (as a subset of biology) because I am an expert (which I know is a tautology). My xenoscience studies range from urban to agrarian, I am the very model of a scientist salarian.”
Mordin had frozen at that. And then he slowly turned to look at her, his already usually very wide eyes now the size of dinner plates. His body started to tremble. He was neither the near unflappable scientist Shepard once knew, nor the assassin sent by Cerberus to kill her. He was just a man now, scared and confused.
Shepard could also feel the eyes of Dr. Chakwas on her, but she ignored that and chose instead to meet Mordin’s gaze.
“Gilbert and Sullivan,” she had said. “You told me about that. You sang that exact song to me in the Normandy’s research lab. We’re friends, Mordin. Good friends. Remember?”
“Yes… no? Never met you before Mars Archives. But…”
Mordin’s eyes shut tightly and he threw himself back against the medical bed with a cry of frustration.
Shepard approached the bed. Dr. Chakwas moved forward to stop her— Shepard lifted a hand as if to silently say she knew what she was doing. And she did.
She stood less than a foot away from the medical bed now. She looked down at Mordin, and he looked back up at her.
“How much of your life do you remember, Mordin?”
He was silent for a long moment. And then he looked away, and stared up at the ceiling.
“First memory waking up in Cerberus lab. Nothing before that.”
Shepard hung her head. His entire life, gone? Perhaps more accurately suppressed— her singing seemed to bring something back. There was no way this could have been caused by the radiation pulse she hit the Collector base with. And considering Cerberus had sent him to kill her…
“Cerberus must have tampered with your memories.”
Mordin was completely quiet after that. He didn’t answer when Shepard spoke to him, asked him questions. Dr. Chakwas then stepped in and suggested that Shepard leave him be.
“He needs to rest anyway,” the doctor had said.
After that, Shepard stood aside and observed. She watched as Chakwas treated and bandaged Mordin’s now injured wrists without him fighting her.
And now, an hour later, Mordin was fast asleep. Shepard watched the slow but steady rise and fall of his chest.
The Illusive Man already had one bullet with his name on it. And now he had a second.