Mass Effect Befores and Afters

**Befores and Afters**  
_Some things change. Some things don't._

**I. Mako**

Her drone just barely fits under the Mako.

She wouldn't need it, normally, but her hands are full with the torque wrench, she's got a bolt between her teeth and her headlamp keeps threatening to fall off. The light from the drone offsets the shadows from the maintenance trench just enough, and when she mutters around the bolt it chirps cheerfully in response, its tinny voice reading off the next set of pre-programmed instructions.

_USING A MALLET BREAK THE CONTROL ARM FREE OF THE SPINDLE_

_Mallet_. Shepard rests the wrench on her stomach, feeling around her for the appropriate tool without result. _Which is still on the workbench. Damn it._ She bends her knee to kick the edge of the hoverboard with one booted heel, sending it scooting out from beneath the Mako- and squarely into Kaidan's ankles, knocking him back a step before its momentum dies.

"I thought I heard you muttering under there." He crouches down beside her. "Isn't it supposed to be impossible to break a Mako?"

"Whmph-" She spits the bolt at him; it clinks off his belt buckle and lands on the floor beside his foot. "Whoever said that wasn't trying hard enough. I think we cracked an axle on that last slide down the mountain."

Kaidan picks up the bolt, twirls it between his fingers. "That would explain the loud noise and the wheel wobble. I knew that terrain was impassable."

"We passed it just fine."

"Until you broke the Mako." He sets the bolt on her stomach, next to the wrench. "At least the system's clear of geth. Maybe they'll even give us a real mission soon, instead of mopping up stragglers in the Terminus."

"Yeah, well. The medals were pretty shiny." Her scar twitches, pulls her right eye closed into the semblance of a wink.

Kaidan snorts. "And that and a dead Reaper'll buy you a cup of coffee. Did you need something?"

She gestures awkwardly toward the workbench. "I forgot the mallet- I haven't fixed an axle since Basic. Wires and lasers are more my thing, y'know? But the mechanic's on shore leave until tomorrow morning, so-" her drone peeks out from the repair bay, chiming impatiently, "-I figured I'd take a stab at it."

"A stab?"

"Metaphorical stab. With hammering." Lifting and setting the wrench beside her on the hoverboard, Shepard powers down the gravity control and starts to sits up even as he pushes her back down, one hand on her chest. "Hey, now- watch those hands, Alenko."

He grins and waves her off. "I'll get it for you. Mallet, right?"

"Yup. Should be on the… right. I think."

"So it is." He rises and his footsteps move away for a moment, then pause. "On one condition." Something scrapes along the bench surface; his footsteps come back, closer, and she turns her head to look at him as Kaidan waves the mallet in front of her, crouched down to whisper in her ear.

She rolls her eyes at him. "On what condition?"

"Promise you won't steal the blankets again." His voice is barely audible, even so close. (They were always careful, in those days- regulations and all- but caution turned every moment into an opportunity, like how the elevator just happened to get stuck for about a minute whenever they were in it together.) "You have seriously cold feet, Shepard."

"I promise."

Kaidan nods solemnly, reverses his grip and hands it to her, handle-first. "Have fun."

"Will do." She kicks the hoverboard back into gear and slides back under the Mako as her drone reactivates with a happy-sounding hum.

_USING A MALLET BREAK THE CONTROL ARM FREE OF THE SPINDLE_

"Yeah, yeah."

After a moment, the drone's synthetic voice is lost beneath a flurry of hammer blows.

***

_Shepard didn't expect to find much left on Alchera, honestly. Her ship- Joker's baby, but in her heart it was hers- sits in a dozen pieces on the surface, scattered armor pieces and dog tags like deformed metal flowers on red dirt but then she comes down a hill and there's the Mako, resting on a rocky outcropping like she just drove up and left it there yesterday._

_Never mind that it's been two years._

_Never mind that it must have fallen out of the sky, landed there when the _Normandy_ broke up during re-entry (though she was mostly broken up already, long before she hit the atmosphere)._

_Never mind that the rear axle she replaced so carefully is still intact when she peers beneath the vehicle, complete with the scratch on the right-hand side where the torque wrench slipped out of her hand._

_Maybe it really is impossible to break a Mako._

_She scales the rocks and kicks at the door until it opens, reaches inside and pulls the dangling fuzzy dice off the viewport; they fit neatly into an empty ammo pouch, and when she returns to the SR-2 she drapes them over the corner of the frame that holds his picture._

***

**II. Armor**

"But now we've got reports about you and Cerberus."

She denies it, of course. She's working with Cerberus, not for Cerberus, the change in preposition making all the difference in the world, but the words seem interchangeable to everyone but her.

The armor doesn't help. The style's the same that she always favored, with plenty of pouches and pockets for spare wires and ammo and odds and ends. Her shotgun sits comfortably at the small of her back; her sniper rifle, an upgraded version of the gun she's used since her trips to the firing range with Mom, rests along her spine in its scabbard. She looks the same- except for the orange blazon on her shoulder like a traitor's brand.

In the end, Kaidan walks away, and Shepard doesn't fault him for it.

When she gets back to the ship she dismantles one of the pop-up turrets and uses the laser to blast the painted logos off her armor. She's finished with the body armor and halfway done with the helmet by the time Miranda stalks into the armory.

"Shepard, what the hell do you think you're doing?" Her speech's particularly clipped today, the consonants sharpened to knifepoints.

"Making some adjustments to my gear." Shepard finishes with the laser and makes a few passes with a buffing pad before picking up enamel and paintbrush. "Orange isn't my color."

Miranda scowls, picking up her breastplate in one hand and one spaulder in the other. "This is Cerberus property, not some off-the-rack Alliance garbage. It's not yours to deface."

She finishes the white stripe down the armguard, looks up and snorts. "Oh, really?"

"We've discussed this, Shepard. You've already made non-standard adjustments to your weapons, the drones-"

"-and half the crew are aliens and it pisses you off, Miranda. I get it." The stripe's still too damp to tape over; she'll have to do the red later. "But I'm pretty sure we've established this is a non-standard mission."

Arms folded across her chest, Miranda stands in the doorway. "Field research suggests that this armor pattern is optimal across nearly every combat condition. You may lose the element of surprise."

She pushes a few buttons on her omni-tool and her drone flickers to life, hovering just at eye level in front of the other woman's face.

"If people see me coming, lady, it'll be because I want them to." Shepard smiles over the static buzz of the drone's energy field. "So if I want to paint my armor bright fucking pink with lime green polka dots, I will."

Miranda narrows her eyes.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some work to do." She turns her back to the door and doesn't look up until she hears it close.

***

_She always liked the way Kaidan looked in blue- the color did something remarkable against his hair- but she has to admit his new armor is pretty spectacular. Maybe it's the pockets._

_You can never have enough pockets._

_The first time she fights beside him when he wears it, they end up pinned between two buildings with a turret on their rear and an Atlas shooting rockets up their noses. Shepard hates Atlases- can't get close enough to shotgun them, sniping takes forever, so she's stuck plinking away at the damn thing from behind a crate between carefully timed Overloads._

_"Low on ammo here," she shouts across to him, sending her drone behind them toward the turret._

_He throws a clip across; she reloads the rifle and aims across the crate, finally getting a clear line of sight to the mech's pilot through the shattered bubble. Her shot catches the Cerberus soldier just between the eyes, and as he slumps out of the cockpit the mech powers down. Behind them, the turret explodes in a shower of sparks. _

_"Clear?" Kaidan checks their tail. _

_She crawls out of cover, looks right and left around the empty Atlas. "Clear."_

_The turret's dead, a few parts still useable- she tucks those into her belt pouch- but its thermal clips don't work with rifles. Shepard looks back to Kaidan with a shrug. "This rifle's an ammo hog. Can you spare any more?"_

_"Eh, I've got plenty." He opens one of the front pockets. "The ammo pouches on this thing have ammo pouches. I feel like a munitions factory."_

_Shepard resolves at that moment to get a suit of it for herself._

_It would figure, of course, that the Ajax was a Cerberus design, stripped in bits and pieces off a couple dead engineers after a raid and retrofitted to Alliance spec. (Of course it was for engineers- practical, elegant design with plenty of gear space, easily adapted to different loadouts, better-than-standard performance enhancement. Only an engineer could create such a thing.) She can't help but tease Kaidan about it, if only a little._

_"So I guess not everything Cerberus worked on is so bad, hm?" She brushes off the engraving on the chestpiece- SHEPARD, in big block letters, unmistakeable as anyone's but hers._

_"I guess not," Kaidan says, inspecting his own suit with its matching engraving; he looks her up and down, and grins. "I can think of a few good things they've done."_

_"This armor is pretty great." She doesn't notice he's still looking until she turns around._

_"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, it is."_

**III. Rest**

It's a travel day, which means mission planning.

There aren't many travel days, now, with the Reapers in almost every system, but this outpost's at the furthest edge of the cluster and they decide to play it safe. If the Reapers follow them, there won't be enough time for a full evacuation before they lose the whole thing- or the planet it's on.

Like Bekenstein.

Shepard closes her eyes and flops back onto the bed. "I need a nap."

"You need a vacation." Kaidan snatches the datapad from beneath her just before she rolls over onto her stomach. "A long vacation."

"Hmph." She turns her head to the side, keeps her eyes closed. "Didn't they tell you in Spectre training? We don't get vacations. We just keep working until our bodies give out, then get replaced with new models. Like machines."

His hands slide under the white cotton of her shirt, fingers working at the knots that run like parallel ropes along her spine. "You're not a machine, Shepard. You get to be tired once in a while." He digs into a particularly stubborn spot; she winces, then relaxes. "Besides, we've done as much planning as we can."

"I keep telling myself that, but it's never enough." She rests her head on her folded arms.

Kaidan lets it go for a while, brushing her hair away to get at her neck, pulling up the elastic cuffs at her ankles to work along the backs of her legs. "It has to be."

"What if it isn't?"

He stops, then, and when she turns to look at him he lifts her hand in his, presses his lips against the tattoo on her little finger. "It will be. Get some sleep, okay? EDI can let you know when we're getting close."

"I don't want to sleep."

"I thought you said-"

Shepard sighs. "I did. I lied. I want to forget, I guess- when I sleep, I remember." She rolls onto her back again, looking up at the passing stars through the skylight.

"Can I help you forget, then?" Kaidan, still sitting cross-legged on the bed, looks down at her.

"Not if it involves tequila like last time. I was hung over all day." Her nose wrinkles at the memory. (She's had to stay away from it ever since; she'd always thought he was a whiskey drinker, anyway.)

He chuckles, and bends down to kiss her stomach, just at the gap where the hem of her shirt pulls away from her waistband. "I can probably think of other ways."

"Mm?" She smiles.

"Mm." He gets the drawstring between his teeth and pulls.

***

_Communication lines were spotty after the war ended, and it took some time to repair enough of the damage to get the Normandy airborne again. He knew she wasn't gone, though. The others called it wishful thinking, made a plaque with her name to put up on the memorial wall, but he wouldn't do it. Not yet._

_When he gets the message he's already back on Earth, helping clean up the wreckage that used to be Vancouver, but half an hour later he's on the first transport to London._

_"They found her." Liara meets him outside the hospital- she'd been the first to know, as she was so often. Her voice cracks. "She's in rough shape, but she's alive. I've spoken with Miranda, and she's coming to help, but-"_

_"That bad?" He swallows. He'd seen the records._

_"No, no. Alive. Awake, now. Shepard's a hard woman to kill."_

_"Let me see her."_

_She's terribly pale and wrapped nearly head to toe in bandages and clean white sheets, but when he comes through the door she smiles. "Hey, you."_

_"Hey." There aren't words for this, for the moments between 'I thought you were dead' and 'don't ever do that again' and 'I love you,' so he settles for the first thing that comes out. "You did it."_

_She laughs like it hurts her, but she nudges his hand where it rests on the bedrail. "Just doing my job."_


End file.

Mass Effect, Drama, Romance