Arran Shepard shuddered in the wake of the dream. That boy. That boy had followed her into the stars, was haunting her. A blur of dead, so many little boys and their mothers, their brothers and sisters. All of them dishonored and left for the maggots who seemed to be the only other winners on the field – save the Reapers. The Reapers didn’t even have the decency to make use of what they killed, to feed. There was no meaning but annihilation. Arran needed to make sense of the terror that had become the very boundaries of her life. So maybe her unconscious fixated on a child, on what could have been if she’d never been ordered on that fateful shakedown cruise to Eden Prime, and twisted him, left him to the fire. It made a shitty kind of sense.
Her thoughts had turned so dark lately. She could manufacture faith, produce raw belief for any of her crew when they needed it. She had made herself into a walking Shroud, spouting cures for anyone who shared her air. Recirculating and recirculating those particles of hope, trying to get everyone to breathe it in.
But laying in her otherwise empty bed by the placid glow of her empty aquarium, in the wake of the dream of the burning boy, in the goddamned quiet that bore down on her like a Reaper’s eye beam…she thought of hope and choked.
Arran had never thought specifically about having children. Her mother had managed both a military career and the care of a solitary, studious girl who didn’t mind the lurch and churn of life aboard starships. For herself, she’d never felt that was her purpose, not when not when she clawed and scraped and survived by inches to do the good she’d been trained to do. After Akuze, all of that always felt like enough. It was enough. Her focus was on the moment she was in, the people she was with. She’d never thought about giving way to “seceding generations,” about what necessarily would follow. Or, if she didn’t get this shit exactly right, wouldn’t. Not even after her ship exploded and spaced her to oblivion, and Oblivion gifted her right back to the Illusive Man, did her perspective shift.
Now there was this boy who kept burning in her brain. Maybe it was just a metaphor for her fear, with weight of the universe on her shoulders, something had to give. That’s what Kaidan would tell her. She was just trying to process. It was normal. She didn’t have to attach a value to it.
She needed Kaidan back. She needed the one person she could waver in front of. This man who came from where they used to plant trees and watch them bear fruit. She needed his hands on her. ”It’s just a dream, Shepard.” He’d say, if she stirred in his arms. ”You’re on the Normandy. We’re en route to the next mission. Gimme the all clear sign.” And she’d respond, sometimes after a long pause, to that whispery concern, “All clear.” Her body’d soften. She could let sleep in, knowing he was there.
He hated her now, though. Or infinitely worse, he was disappointed in her. And she wanted Kaidan to be wrong about Cerberus, briefly tried to hate him for being self-righteous about it, but he wasn’t. She’d had her integrity messed with, her head was rebuilt as much as the rest of her internal organs, the implants and screws and biochemical intricacies that gave her leave to laugh off death. Arran had believed with no doubt that she was on the right side of the line simply because that’s the side that woke her up. It was fine to use the Illusive Man as a dance partner. Couldn’t be all bad. Turns out a monomaniacal humanist with a war chest the size of the Milky Way could have his own fire on the brain.
Arran shook her shock of red hair, rolled her shoulders, and threw off the covers. She stood up and started getting dressed. She’d slept for two hours and there were reports she could read. This war was N7 training all over again, forcing her to survive on less and less. She didn’t need hope. She remembered the jack boot pressed into her temples, the instructor screaming: “You are all you have. You are all you need. Get up.”
Centered. Squared. Do it. In a simple zen exercise, Arran put it all away. Idly, she reached for the datapad and made herself a note to buy some fish.
