College Science Fiction Piece (Mass Effect)

Science Fiction Piece

 

It was adjusting his equipment that got to Shepard.

It sounded so stupid, even to himself. He had faced things that by all logic should have impacted him more. He’d woken up in the midst of an attack to learn that he’d been dead for two years. He’d met old friends and comrades, and seen the way the years impacted them. He’d even received an email from his mom, making clear that they needed to talk if he suddenly wasn’t, in fact, dead.

Yet, it was his stupid guns that made it set in.

He’d been using standard stuff since waking up. Too rushed to make real changes for optimization. If he’d felt faster, stronger…it had just melded into the chaos of battle where instinct reigned.

Now though…Now, he’d had the chance to just sit down and do the menial work that followed battle. The changes to that routine suddenly stuck out.

He had to make numerous modifications to his trusty Mattock. He’d upped the power to get the satisfying recoil he’d grown used to over years, only for the ammo block and heat management to become unwieldy. He had to do further modifications to increase those. By the end, the gun was a third heavier, bulkier, and had the recoil to shatter a normal human’s shoulder with a single shot.

That it felt perfect to him hit him somewhere deep. Shivers started running through my entire body. The ugly realization that what felt normal and what should be normal was clearly diverging for him.

People often got cybernetic arms to be able to wield a gun like this, and yet he was now casually capable of using such a weapon without a single sign that he wasn’t a stock human wielding standard gene mods. Suddenly, his very arm felt foreign. His fingers started twitching uncontrollably, as if it the very thought of its foreignness removed my control. The idea crept into his head that it might suddenly move to start choking him, even if he knew that was a stupid thought. He still couldn’t help trying and hold it stiff so that it exhibited no movement.

Feeling nauseous, he stood up from the worktable and moved across the ship till he entered Doctor Chakwas’ office. She was asleep, but he didn’t care. He moved and used his CO privilege to pull up his own records from her systems. These records contained the X-rays, CAT scans, and all the other scans he’d forced her to do as soon as they had set off. To see what had been done to bring him back to life.

His brain was remarkably unmarked, clearly a desire to avoid using obvious augmentations there, but the rest of his body was not spared. Bone reinforcements marked his entire skeleton, each bone pieced back together and reinforced till he was able to handle several times the impact as normal humans. Bones weaves that made everyone else that wasn’t a krogan feel weak and fragile. Terminally damaged organs replaced by cloned ones. Even his scars, obtained from over fifteen years of military service throughout the galaxy, had been replaced by new skin.

He could only stand there, feeling violent spasms run through his body as he fought off rising panic, trying to pick out what parts of him were still him and what parts just weren’t.

Even as Shepard struggled with his own feelings towards his revival, he was forced to see those very emotions reflected by his friends and comrades around him.

City of Discovery, planet of Horizon, date of 2185 CE

“You think you can just show up after two years and expect everything to be fine?” Ashley asked in disbelief, almost shaking from feelings seeking an outlet.

“I hoped so,” Shepard replied, forcing his body language to stay cool to hide his inner thoughts.

That nothing was fine. No one knew that more than he did. Even if they weren’t standing in the battlefield that had been made of the Horizon colony, a third of the colony’s population lost to the Collectors, too many ugly thoughts and feelings burdened his shoulders.

“Well, it’s not,” Ashley said, shaking her head. She started pacing, feeling so much like a panther on the edge of pouncing that Grunt and Miranda shifted behind him as if in anticipation of an attack. “Two years, skipper. Two years I think you’re dead. Not even a letter. Now you show up working with Cerberus? What else can I think except that you’ve lost your damned mind?!”

“I was dead, Ashley,” he replied back, trying to hide his growing tiredness that had nothing to do with the fatigue that followed battles. “Letters weren’t an option for me, and Cerberus is the one who revived me. All they wanted from me was to fight the Collectors.”

“That’s bullshit Shepard,” Ashley snarled, now genuinely angry. “We saw how Cerberus operated. They’re just using you. As for you dying? If that’s true, how isn’t that worse?!”

Shepard didn’t bother speaking up by this point. Ashley wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t thought himself. He also remembered that Ashley was the only one of his old squad to be truly religious.

“I don’t know what they did to you, skipp…Shepard,” Ashley said, only stopping to stop using her old nickname for him in favor of his name. “But it’s all too much. If I don’t know you aren’t some clone, that they don’t have some control chip in your head, that you aren’t really Commander Shepard…I’m sorry, Shepard. I can’t trust you.”

He then watched solemnly as Ashley walked away, not following her or responding to her words.

In truth, despite how harsh they were, he was a bit happy with Ashley’s words. They showed that at least some people were wondering the same things he had been. It had actually been in question.

Garrus practically shrugged when they met, accepted his words, and then joined as if the past two years didn’t change anything. Wrex just remarked that it must have hurt like hell to be spaced, and then took Shepard’s survival as a natural thing not worth questioning. Tali was disbelieving at first, but in the end just trusted him.

Even when he couldn’t trust himself.

To find someone who didn’t just take his revival from the dead as just a thing…it honestly felt good.

 City of Nos Astra, planet of Ilium, date of 2185 CE

“You gave them my body?” Shepard couldn’t help asking, shock at the news having left him breathless even as indignation forced him to straighten to his full height.

“Yes,” Liara breathed out, still not looking at him. Such odd behavior from Liara, even with two years having clearly changed the young asari archeologist greatly, had been what had prompted him to force answers out from her in the first place. “I was tracking down your body for burial, and then to stop the Collectors from taking it for whatever reason they wanted it as well. Cerberus helped, and they said they could bring you back. I…the galaxy needed you, Shepard. There’s no one else who has done or can do what you can. If we are to beat the Reapers, the galaxy needed you. So, yes. I gave them your body.”

Did you ever think you didn’t have the right to do that?

The question on the tip of his tongue went unspoken, but still seemed to sound throughout the room. He just knew that Liara was thinking the same thing. Her continued refusal to answer the unspoken question was all the answer he needed.

So, he turned around to exit Liara’s office. He only stopped halfway through the door. Pausing, he finally managed to work out, “Is that all the justification you are going to give?”

Not even Shepard knew when he’d ever return to talk to Liara again, and both knew it.

“I…” Liara started, hesitating. “I’m sorry, Shepard. I can provide all the justifications I rationalized to myself, but the reality was…I couldn’t let you go.”

Somehow, even as he walked from the office, that answer did ease the pressure weighing down upon Shepard a slight bit.

He was mad at Liara. There was no doubt about that. Just as he was mad at Ashley too.

Like Ashley though, he was also a bit relieved. Some might be relieved that they were so valued that there were practical reasons why one would be willing to spend billions of credits to revive a single soldier, but not Shepard. To be so essential that he couldn’t be allowed to die till he completed his work…It was terrifying. The belief by those around him that everything depended upon him.

Even if it was the small, petty feeling of a lover refusing to accept that he was gone…at least it was a human emotion guiding it.

Even if Liara was an asari instead of human.

Zakera Ward, Citadel Space Station, 2185 CE

Shepard only peeked around the corner, spying his mother seated at a table, before pulling back to hide himself from view.

He felt silly. He was a famous war hero. A soldier. Spectre.

He was not some kid hiding from his mother.

Still, he hid. Not too much of a surprise since they had never gotten along too well. The divorce between his parents, losing the rest of their family from the slaver raid on Mindoir while she was halfway across the galaxy, her continued focus on the military, etc. It had all led to a strained relationship. One where they sent obligatory messages to each other when protocol compelled them to like a promotion. It was never hatred between them, just a certain indifference from them walking paths that rarely intersected. Despite both being in the Systems Alliance Military, she was Navy and he was Marines. She was a shipboard officer, and he was Special Forces.

Even without his having lost two years, it was almost a decade since the two had gone beyond messages to arrange a face-to-face meetup when they didn’t need to.  Any personal meetings were more coincidence. When their postings or travel coincided to put them near each other, and it was expected for them to use the opportunity.

With the entire ‘dead for two years’ affair now between them, Shepard could only imagine how much more awkward this meeting would be.

Deciding not to hesitate any longer, Shepard forced himself around the corner to start approaching his mother. He was decently close before she noticed. Her cool blue eyes fixed on him when she didn’t, their intensity making him almost miss a step.

Stopping before her, he nodded before speaking bluntly, “Good to see you, mother.”

She was then hugging him. It was such a surprise he wasn’t able to dodge or try moving away. He also froze when he realized what was happening.

They hadn’t hugged in…a long time.

“I’m so glad to see you here, son.”

Smiling a bit awkwardly and returning the hug barely, he told her, “Sorry about not seeing each other earlier. I was dead for two years, and it’s been…complicated since.”

“I don’t care,” she quickly responded, surprising him. Her arms only tightened as she continued, “I’m just truly…truly glad to see you again. Everything else. It’s not important right now.”

It shocked Shepard how much that relaxed him. Enough so that he tightened his arms, hugging his mom fully for the first time in years. He then whispered, “I’m glad to see you too.”

Everything wasn’t fine.

It was stupid to think it would be. It still oftentimes felt like Shepard’s body wasn’t truly his anymore. He still worried over it all. Still had nightmares of the last moments he had before dying. Felt violated when imagining the two years people put him back together into a living being. Still felt resentment over others making such a lifechanging choice for him.

He could at least decide though that he was glad that he got the chance to have moments like these again.

Maybe that was enough.