Fire and Metal
Shepard's been spending a lot of time in Mordin's lab as of late. EDI put it to an analytical metric, informing Joker and Garrus that approximately thirty-one percent of her waking activity was spent in there. Considering she's consistently been up for thirty eight hours at a time, interspersed by periods of rest that haven't yet exceeded two hours, it's long periods of time. The doctor had joked that the Commander had obviously taken a sexual interest in him, which he unfortunately could not reciprocate given his disdain for alcohol and mood music. Grunt and Zaeed had found that hilarious, and even Jacob had cracked a rare smile.
Garrus, however, is not so amused, in no small part due to the fact that he knows that Mordin's been continuously operating on her, with Miranda's assistance. He knows this because the latter of the two scientists told him, when questioned. Though, the exact wording she'd used had been “improved upon”.
“I laid the foundational work,” she tells him tiredly in the wake of a particularly long surgical procedure, the third in a week, “But Dr. Solus seems to have grasped the idea behind the Lazarus Project in ways that most of my staff couldn't fathom. Honestly, it's a shame we couldn't have brought him on from the project's inception.”
“Shepard's alive,” the Turian growls in reply, “The project is done with.”
“On the contrary, the project was never finished. Cerberus never meant to just revivify Shepard; we meant to make her invincible. Now if there's nothing else?”
“ 'Nothing else'? There's plenty else! You and Mordin need to stop cutting her up like she's a damn science fair display!”
Despite Garrus standing a foot taller than her, fanged and scarred, Miranda is unfazed by his aggression. It only takes a gentle twitch of her fingers to send him careening out of her quarters, buoyed up by a multitude of mass effect fields. The door locks behind him, before the speakers crackle to life.
“If you have objections, Officer Vakarian,” her filtered voice informs him, “Then you are more than welcome to take them up with the Illusive Man, or better yet: Shepard herself. She's undergoing them all voluntarily.”
To be fair, basic operational implants are standard issue for most military organizations throughout the Milky Way. Garrus himself has a neural mod for AR visuals, tagging enemy combatants or directing him to the next objective. But Shepard? At this point, the Turian suspects she's more metal than meat. Bone reinforcements, a synthetic muscle weave, epidermal medi-gel dispeners, the list of augmentations goes on. She can see in the dark, glow in the dark, the scarring from the Lazarus project shining a luminous orange. On Tuchanka the irradiated atmosphere burns his tongue and throat, Grunt gagging as he sets foot on his homeworld, but Shepard doesn't even sniff, as toxicity filters lining her lungs kick into high gear.
They clash with Eclipse mercenaries on Illium, trying to rescue Miranda's sister. At one point, Mordin and Kasumi are pinned down behind cover. The plan is simple: Garrus and Zaeed will lay down covering fire and Shepard will flank the emplacement. The first part of the plan goes well, and one of the mercs drops when the Commander's shotgun puts a hole through him. The other one is from Palaven, though, and familiar with Turian bait-and-switch ops. He goes for his sidearm and fires off two rounds. The first takes down Shepard's shields, the second one hits her in the cheek and her head snaps back.
There's a long, terrible, strangely quiet moment where Garrus is trying to wrap his head around the fact that it's over, they failed, Shepard is dead again, before she pulls herself upright, eyes burning red, blood waterfalling over bared teeth from the gash in her cheek, and grabs her enemy's hand in her own. There's a sickening crack, and as much as Garrus wants to think that it's the pistol that's falling in twisted pieces to the ground, the other Turian's screams inform him otherwise. He stops when the Commander's fist impacts his helmet, crushing his visor. And his skull. Despite being covered in gore, her wound's stopped bleeding by the time the rest of the squad can meet her, cheeks flush with the effulgence of working medi-gel. A few of them, Garrus included, think they should withdraw, considering Shepard just took a bullet in the head. But Miranda pushes past, uncharacteristic worry coloring her face, and Mordin resolves to check the microfibers once they're back aboard the Normandy.
Joker thinks it's cool. Garrus just thinks of Saren, the plating on his face cracked and threaded with alien lights. Tali is concerned, and with good reason. By the time she joins the mission, glitches have begun to present themselves.
In a firefight with the Blue Suns, one of their Combat Engineers deploys an EMP. EDI falls to silence Garrus's HUD winks out of existence, the comms going with it. But Shepard locks up, drops to the ground, eyes unfocused, jaw slack, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Garrus is the first one to reach her, alarm's sounding in his head as it becomes clear she's not breathing. A moment later his AR feed reboots, and Shepard sucks in a great lungful of air. That one she actually needs a moment to recover from. Only a moment, though, in spite of what Garrus says. She insists she's fine, and offers a hand to get him upright. They are still in combat, after all. The Turian has trouble remembering that; he's still caught on that split second between his HUD restarting and her breathing again, when her biometric feed reported that her heart had stopped.
Later, EDI connects to Sehpard's augmentations' systems to run a diagnostic, reporting the Commander is, from a strictly medical standpoint, fine. The shit-eating grin she gives her long-time Turian comrade is palpable in the air. But then EDI disconnects and Shepard goes fully blind, until they hook the pair of them back up again.
A new surgery is scheduled to correct the problem, Tali to consult on the code language that was used to write the software for Shepard's prostheses, and finally enough is enough.
Not for Garrus, mind you; he's never once been able to convince Shepard of anything, least of all that she's pushing herself too hard. But Thane has a softer touch.
“It's like when your computer has a bug!” she insists, as the Drell bars the way into Mordin's lab, “You don't toss it in the trash, you fix the problem!”
“But that's where you are failing yourself,” he replies, “You aren't fixing the problem, you're postponing it with more and more extensive augmentations. Siha, you must let yourself heal.”
“Thane. There is no time for me to lay around taking antibiotics. I need to be- EDI. EDI, SHUT UP!”
She hears EDI through the comms, even when the AI isn't broadcasting.
“Siha… Shepard,” Thane insists, “You are pushing yourself beyond what your species is capable of.”
“Isn't that the point of scientific discovery?” sniffs Miranda.
“This doesn't concern you!” snaps Garrus.
“And it does you, Vakarian? Limits are excuses that fearful people invent. Shepard is beyond that kind of thinking.”
“This isn't a fitness goal, Lawson,” cuts in Tali, “You're talking about increasingly invasive surgeries to replace failing tissue with synthetic material!”
“Tali,” groans Shepard, “you're supposed to be on my side here.”
“I'm only here to make sure none of the software has a chance of shorting out your brain. I'm not going to pretend this is a good idea.”
“Two weeks ago, I took a bullet to the head and walked away with a scrape! How is that a bad thing?”
“Because it's what the Reapers are doing, Shepard. Remember Saren?”
“I. Am not. Saren. You all need to stop comparing me to that psychopath. I'm trying to save lives!”
“There are worse fates than death, Elaine,” Thane continues, “I worry for you. You don't sleep. You barely eat. Shepard, no matter how hard you push yourself, you are only human-”
“I'M NOT ALLOWED TO BE 'ONLY HUMAN'!”
Is it the increased capacity of her lungs or just her own fervor that allows for such volume. Garrus doesn't know enough about the sciences behind her augmentations to say for certain. But Shepard's roar is enough to shake the bulkhead. Silence falls in the wake of her fury, broken only by her panting.
“Every time I try to put up my feet,” she seethes, “Or catch my breath, there's an alarm that starts blaring, somewhere. The entire galaxy is catching fire, and you all want me to pretend it isn't happening. I don't get to do that! I'm 'Commander Shepard, best hope for the galaxy, lookie here, it's my favorite store on the Citadel, aren't I great?'. I was dead! It was your turn to pick up the slack and look after space, and look how that turned out! The council buried its head in the sand, Anderson spends more time bitching about this shit than actually trying to clean it up, and half the outposts in the Terminus Systems got abducted while you were out pretending to be heroes! Hell, even Cerberus doesn't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have sent an army on this wild goose chase, instead of sinking a fleet's worth of credits into bringing me back! SHUT THE FUCK UP, LAWSON, DO NOT TRY AND ARGUE WITH ME. Every single one of you would be quaking in their boots, holed up on Omega, or Illium, or wherever you please, if I wasn't here. You all had two years to fix this dumpster fire of a galaxy, and you fucked that up. So don't pretend I'm not the only reason anything gets done around here; I am not going to stop, certainly not so all of you can feel better about yourselves.”
Shepard plants a fist in the wall at the height of this tirade, cracking the panel, her knuckles already knitting shut when she pulls away. Her eyes are collapsing stars, too bright to look directly into, and every one of her crew members averts their eyes, anger and shame and hurt so thick in the air that it carries a scent. And for a moment, Shepard softens. The glow in her eyes, her scars, fade and she watches them with remorse. But it's only a moment.
“If there's nothing else,” she growls, “Then get back to your posts. Boots on the ground in four hours.”
“Shepard, this repair is going to take at least six-” Miranda begins.
“Four. Hours.”
The door locks behind them, and Garrus's stomach sinks as imagines Mordin wheeling out a cart laden with scalpels. He looks at Thane, tries for words, but neither of them can manage anything. Instead, he suits up, and goes to wait out the remaining three and a half hours down in the shuttle. He thinks of a lot of things. His father, never once approving of his insistence that rules and regulations were the only thing standing in the way of true justice. His own band of misfits, dead on the ground of their hideout, in lawless Omega. But mostly, he thinks about Shepard. He thinks about watching her become a shooting star, in the atmosphere of a planet he can't remember the name of. He remembers watching her die, and wonders if she really came back.
Then he touches his scars, thinking about Omega again. He thinks about needing to be rescued. He thinks about bleeding out in the second story of a slumhouse, and how it was Shepard, full of fire and metal that came to his rescue. And he wonders.
Oh, how he wonders.
