Someone’s talking. About? Her. She is Commander Shepard. Must be her. Who’s speaking?
There’s a tight feeling in her chest. Something is forcing it up. Out. Breathing? Is this me breathing? Halfway, at least; something is doing the rest of the work for her. She sucks in air as much as she can, tries to open her eyes. There is only an empty blackness. Bandaged, maybe.
There’s a noise. Spinning metal. Fast. Cooling fan? Too loud. Angle grinder. No, higher.
Saw slips fully formed into her head. But what is it cutting?
Another half-breath and heat begins to prickle down her at the same time the voice orders "you can remove that."
"I don’t even know what that is." Another voice. The prickling becomes stinging.
"I think it’s a leg –"
Oh.
 Me.
Shepard screams.
--
There is no sound on one side of her head and the rest is dull and muted and she can’t count the voices above her but it must be more than six; all voices ignoring her cries and the wretched begging she’s been reduced to – please, stop; please please pl –
‘Extreme mental fortitude and endurance’, her profile said. Been that way since starting the ICT program. Changed little since. The psych guys must have had their theory wrong; a few minutes and she can’t keep her mouth shut, can’t grit her teeth and bear it like a soldier and they’re still cutting pieces away as she struggles against them, strains her back against the table beneath her and why aren't they answering her and why can't she see and -
 Wait.
Still cutting.
The saw hasn’t stopped. They haven’t spoken. But…she’s writhing - twisting, swearing at the bodies she can feel around her. If –
Comprehension floods her veins with ice.
She relaxes, sags back against the blood-slick steel beneath her.
Only she doesn't.
She’s not fighting them. They haven’t spoken because she hasn’t moved, hasn’t screamed or begged or cried aloud or gasped for air. Stop, she says quietly, almost a whisper, but this time the voice is not aloud but in her head, as the ones before were. As they all were.
She tries to turn her head, but the low voice beside her ear doesn't move.
 Wiggle your big toe.
Nothing. She thinks.
 Do I have a big toe left?
She feels nothing but heat below her hips. She can still feel her chest moving up and down with her breaths, but the steady, even rise and fall is so much at odds with the frantic struggle in her head that she knows she has no hand in the matter.
A second word picks itself up and shakes the dust from its shoulders. Paralysis.
 Please. Stop.
The heat is a burn and the smell of cauterised flesh fills her head with fog. Before she loses consciousness she idly wonders if the blackness really is due to her eyes being closed -
Or if her eyelids are open, but there are just no eyes to see out of them.
--
Shepard is breaking. Bird bones snapped and crushed; a quick twist and the cartilage in her remaining knee comes loose. There are hands at her shoulder, sinking fingers into tissue too mangled to make out in the scans, seeking out any bones that might be salvageable. She feels it, all of it, but numbly, vaguely; with the distance of someone who’s no longer sure what sensation is real or imagined.
Sometimes her mind focuses on a voice; a conversation that stirs her awake, and with the awareness comes agony that slams into the length of her body and sends white hot splinters of pain to the sockets where her eyes used to be. And those nights, like every night, she tries to speak. Stop. I can hear you. I’m awake. This hurts m– STOP!
And like every other night, they don’t hear her.
She's unaware how many days have passed before she struggles from the stuttering sleep cycle that holds her tight - wake, hurt, faint; repeat ad nauseam - and when her wakefulness stretches into hours she begins to wish she was unconscious again.
The blackness that greets her never changes. She starts to imagine she sees colours in the void; an omni-tool flashing orange on her arm, the blue light of Garrus' visor in the corner of her eye, acrid brown-black smoke choking the hull of the Normandy. The emptiness feels oppressive, as if she might find herself stuck, trapped, overwhelmed by acknowledging it. Easier to focus on the constant ache and the sudden sharp slashes and wrenching twists that come without warning; on what she can hear rather than see (black, always black, don't think about it, it won't last) and as the days slip by she begins to separate the voices around her.
The woman is in charge of the operation. She is there every day at first; she moves in and out of Shepard’s room (door behind and to the left; it catches briefly each time it slides shut) and oversees the treatment. Her assistant hardly ever leaves. Watson? Wilson? Every time the woman comes in he has new problems to whinge about. "The skeleton is more compromised than we thought. I can’t fill veins that keep collapsing. The coffee tastes like goat piss."
The rebuild isn’t going as they had planned.
Rebuilding. A custom-built, made to order Spectre. For what? I’m not going to be your tool, she sneers at Watson/Wilson. He doesn’t answer.
--
Shepard is upside down. She thinks. She’s fairly sure she can feel pressure against her face and the cold droop of fluid lines above her head. Watson/Wilson and one of the officers are layering something onto her back. It feels like a dozen fingers have sunk beneath her skin, buried to the knuckles in her back, and are scratching back and forth against her nerves. She would be choking on her gasps, her spine twisted and shuddering with the pain if her body was able to move. In the absence of a physical release it turns inwards, settles its grip around her mind and squeezes until she feels close to passing out. Again.
The clawing stops as Lawson’s voice comes over the comm, cutting through the news report Shepard’s been listening to - something about an Alliance operation in the Apien Crest. Relevant news is becoming few and far between. She misses the flurry of reports about her crew from the other month, and mentions of the attack on the Normandy have almost stopped altogether.
Lawson sounds frustrated. "How much more time do you need, Wilson? We should be stress testing the organs next week."
"Fat fucking chance at this rate. Left kidney’s gone again."
"Take one from the spare. It’s not using them."
"Righto – oh for fuck’s sake."
"What’s happened now?"
"The flesh keeps falling off."
Shepard could laugh.
Well, she couldn’t, but she would. How many terrible zombie vids had she watched during her detention on Earth? And now she was the undead herself, complete with absconding flesh and the inability to form words.
How long has it been like this? Six weeks? Must be more. She should remember the dates from the radio.
The days are blurring together, seeming endlessly long but for the regular clink of a teaspoon against Wilson’s cup of coffee. He used to have one in the morning, which gave her a mark to keep her time by, but he’d recently started drinking another in the afternoon and it’s left her unable to figure out whether it’s day or night. Shouldn’t the medics state the date and time out loud before procedures?
Maybe that’s autopsies.
It seems to be taking a long time.
--
She hates the woman. Hates her for the days she decides the elbows are out of alignment, wrenches the bones from their sockets and relocates them, only to be dissatisfied and do it again; hates her for the gasping rush of fluid that’s pushed through her body and swells her veins to bursting. The sound of Lawson’s voice grows from annoying to maddening; every time Shepard catches the scent of her perfume as she leans over the table she strives to pull herself up and drive a fist into her gut. If she had fingernails she’d rake them down the woman’s face.
This isn't a life! She spits at Lawson. This is worse than death.
Kill me. Kill me, you selfish bitch.
--
It’s worse when they give her eyes.
She’s heard them deliberating for a few weeks, confirming what she suspected, that the blackness she’s so familiar with is due not to lack of sight but to lack of the required parts to see with. She doesn’t know what happened to them. Burst? Eaten by scavengers? Removed when she arrived here? Though…when did she arrive here? She’s losing count of whether it’s weeks or months.
When Lawson settles on a date Shepard is almost giddy with anticipation. Sight is the rope out of the darkness. It’s knowledge. Advantage. If she can see, she can gather more information than the scraps filtering through to her by sound. What do they look like? Human? Is there a uniform, a crest or a badge she can identify them by? Scan the tech, the room. Is this a station or a ship? Look for windows. Bulkheads.
Look at your body.
See what’s left of it. The work they’ve done. Try to find what’s causing the cold burn in the lower abdomen. Estimate recovery times.
More than that, though. Sight would be a connection. She doesn’t want to admit it; she wants to swallow the words before they come into her head. She hates these people - hates Wilson and Lawson and the younger man that fills needles and drops instrument trays on the floor and the guy that fixes the monitors - and she hates herself for thinking it, but she’s lonely. If she could speak she would laugh at the clumsy kid, ask Lawson about the weather outside and that Jacob guy she’s mentioned.
You hate them, remember.
She can’t speak; even if her vocal cords are intact there’s still a machine sustaining her breathing. But she could look at them. Make eye contact. Share an understanding. Look at the shapes and colours in her room, see all the things she can occupy herself with that aren’t sounds. Gain an advantage. Anything but the cloistering darkness she has now.
The instant change slams into her with a shudder; a strike across the face or a fist into her gut that leaves her reeling, and she’s desperate for vision; anxious to see now that the possibility is in front of her. The darkness is overwhelming, the hiss and beeps of the machines are too loud, there’s a metallic whirring in her chest that fills her mouth and her ears and it’s going to be too much; she can’t stay in the months of darkness or her mind will break like the rest of her -
She shoves her fists around the words in her head. Swallows the thoughts. There’s a sick burning in the back of her throat. Not sure if it’s bile or blood or engine oil. Good to focus on.
Maybe - this wouldn’t be so bad. They’re rebuilding her. It’s better than being dead in the vacuum somewhere.
Right?
Right.
Fuck what their plans for her are. Let them rebuild. When they’re done, she’ll find a way off whatever planet, ship or station she’s on. Find who survived from her crew. Find Anderson.
It’s not going to take much longer. In a week she’ll have eyes, and sight. A few more weeks for the rest of the structural parts, maybe. Still need to sort movement. Should prioritise that when they see she’s conscious.
Not much longer.
Less than a week.
So it’s a surprise when she wakes, days earlier than expected, to a stinging whiteness instead of the black. There are fingers on her eyelids, and when they move away the white stays. Can't blink then; no nerve connection to the muscles in your eyelids? Not important; she has light. It's not the dark anymore. Her heart vaults into her mouth and she strains to focus on the voices above her. For a moment she’s sure they’ll be discussing her cognition; surely now they must know; must be able to see some flicker of awareness or life in these new eyes.
But they’re not.
"Brain function?" Lawson’s voice is above her.
"Normal. No activity above base rhythms. Brain stem is repairing, but slowly. Could possibly sustain a heartbeat on its own."
That’s not right. There’s lots of activity, you simpering idiot. Put a gun in my hand and I’ll sustain a bullet through your forehead. It sounds embarrassingly lame, even to her, but there's no bemused glance from Liara and no Garrus chuckling in her earpiece.
Tomorrow. She holds the word tightly, forcing optimism while the increasing odds of reality slowly squeeze their claws around her heart. Course I’ll look glazed and unfocused when I can’t see anything. It’s still light. It’s not the blackness. I’m fine. Give it a day to settle down and when my sight adjusts I’ll look her in the eyes and she’ll know. She’ll - just know.
But the tomorrow Shepard wants doesn’t come. Instead, it is a tomorrow where she sees for the first time the dark fall of hair that brushes her cheek as Miranda bends over her. She sees the glare of the overhead lamps, one corner of a computer interface processing diagnostics, an almost-full bag of clear liquid running tubes to somewhere below her head.
But her view is a fixed screen; when Lawson stands and steps to the left Shepard’s eyes cannot follow her.
Stuck! The bitter voice in her head crows. Paralysed like the rest of you!
And when Lawson leans over her again there is no spark of recognition in her eyes.
The taste of an escape, the hope Shepard has built up over the last few weeks dies as she stares, unmoving, at the sleeve of leather she is unable to look away from.
Another day, maybe, I still need time - I’m fine, I'm out of the darkness now, I can see -
But just as she is sure this day can’t get any worse, when the chance she’s been desperately clinging to is pulled from her newly-built fingers, when the coming weeks loom grey and hopeless over her once more and she is sure her eggshell heart will break if it’s not for the rods holding it together –
Miranda’s hand passes over her face, and closes her eyes.
--
She is Commander Shepard. She thinks.
Maybe she’s not. This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be happening. Commander Shepard shouldn’t be lying here. She lies in her bed on her ship, traveling the galaxy, emptying her gun into any merc grunt that gets - she’s a hero. The hero wins.
She doesn’t lie on a table with veins full of battery acid instead of blood, surrounded by strangers who didn’t think to anaesthetise a patient they assumed was unconscious.
No. Not strangers. Not anymore. The total of the people she knows now. The only ones who know she’s alive. Commander Shepard stopped living for her friends some time ago - she’s a finished story for them; a chapter in their book to be closed, passed over. They continue with their lives, and she's just not a part of them anymore. Her own life has stopped. She is a person who was. And if she’s dead to everyone who matters, who is the person that remains?
Not the hero. The hero is dead. She can’t be this. The hero doesn’t become a broken body, a broken mind left in a corner of the galaxy, gradually being forgotten by everyone including herself.
She couldn’t be Commander Shepard. That was someone else, or someone she thought she was.
Or - maybe she had been Commander Shepard, but it matters fuck all now. She is the waste of a galaxy, the old weapon collected from scrap and rendered piecemeal.
It feels like she’s been here a long time, and if Watson/Wilson still listened to his radio she would learn it’s been over a year. Over a year of her bones being rebroken and reset or replaced with composite steel. A year of being sewn and stitched and welded together. A year since they stopped looking for her. A year with no touch that hasn’t hurt, with no voice that’s spoken to her instead of about her.
Touch me. Talk to me.
But Miranda didn’t kill her when she asked, and she doesn’t listen to her now either.
She is not Commander Shepard. She is this table, this room; she is the pile of meat and tubes that sits in its corner of the galaxy and waits to die.
I always wondered if one of the reasons Varania betrayed Fenris…or Leto…was that she felt like he had abandoned her, even if that wasn’t fair. Nothing changed for her when she was free, but her brother was gone. This was an experiment in drawing sad elves, basically
(You can probably tell I was inspired by this other Dragon Age comic, which is far more beautiful! Go look)
Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want to hug a hanar? They just look so squishy and cute - before you factor in the paralyzing sting, of course. Even still, hugging one would totally be worth it.
I got this commissioned from the lovely choco-minto and it’s even more adorable than I first thought it’d be! Gawd, she is amazing.
kaledo-art
gummygunk
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germansingergirl
