ME fic: Genesis (Part Two)

[infelixsoror]

Title: Genesis
Author(s): infelixsoror
Artist: alishatorn (tumblr)
Disclaimer: Mass Effect belongs to people who are most definitely not me.
Word Count: 13,500
Characters/Pairings: Hackett, Shepard
Warnings: Violence, death, references to sexual violence, torture, drug use and forced prostitution.
Spoilers: ME1 only (references to Shepard’s Earthborn profile)
Summary: When Hackett is sent to earth in search of missing marines, his only hope is a young streetrat called Shepard, who’s just desperate enough to make a deal with the devil she doesn’t know.
Author’s Notes: Written for the 2012 Mass Effect Bigbang. Many thanks to Alishatorn, both for the gorgeous art and for organising this whole thing.





xxx
An hour later, with Kes safely tucked away in the securely-locked clinic, Shepard was hoping that she might finally be able to focus on some of the many, many other problems.

Finding the Reds wasn’t a problem. These days, all you had to do was throw a stone anywhere outside of enforcer turf and you’d hit a Red. And then, of course, you’d have to be ready to run. The Reds didn’t take kindly to folk throwing stones at them. Hell, even finding the right Reds was a walk in the park for a girl who’d spent years learning everything she could about every last one of them. The more turf Jojo took for himself, the more people he forced into red, the more contacts Shepard had.

But finding proof, well, that was a new one. Most of the people Shepard dealt with just wanted answers, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question of if they should keep waiting for their loved ones to walk through the door safe and sound, and she’d spent long enough answering questions for people in Riverside to just accept what she told them.

Shepard was hoping that finding proof worked the same sort of way as finding answers, just a matter of going to the right people and having the right conversations. With the right conversations, maybe she could finally pin down where the Reds’ guns were stored, check to see what kind of specs they had. That might be enough, especially if Hackett was smart enough to prove that the dead engineer would have been in the right position to sell those kinds of secrets.

But the confession... That would take a very particular conversation with a very specific man.

One problem at a time. Guns first, dealing with the devil later. The Reds owned - well, ‘owned’ might be a too-legitimate term for their claim - plenty of buildings, some of them devoted to spice-dealings, full of the addled and the addicts all clustered around the designated dealer, others to Jojo’s girls and boys who, despite the name, were available to anyone who had the credits. There were the buildings reserved for semi-private business meetings, a handful of others used for those meetings which were always going to be finished with a round of gunfire. Presumably, there were buildings somewhere where the Reds could sleep and live, as Shepard had never seen anyone with a red armband sleeping rough or hunkering down in the Undercity for longer than it took to turn someone’s home over.

(There were even rumours, whispered behind hands and closed doors and only to the people trusted above all others, of building filled with missing Unregs, people who hadn’t pissed Jojo off enough to die outright, who wouldn’t be missed even by the other forgotten people, waiting for the next time the slavers rolled into town. Shepard tried not to think about those rumours too much, certainly never repeated them to anyone, if only because she knew deep down that there was no way Jojo wasn’t involved in the one truly unforgiveable crime of Riverside.)

But she had no damn idea where they stored their guns. Spice, yes, dead bodies, yes, but she'd never found a Reds' armoury, not once in all the time she'd had to turn over every stone in Riverside, no matter how bloody.

Well, she reasoned, trying to talk herself into a plan before she managed to talk herself out of it, there must be guns where there were Reds. The barracks, they'd need defending. Maybe not as much now as when there'd been more than thirty gangs in Riverside, all fighting to the death over every little thing, but surely those places wouldn't be defenceless. Particularly if she went for one of the more established bases, not one of the ones out on the edges, where'd the Reds had been the Sons or the Jokers just weeks before. And if the guns were that new, that rare, that powerful, then Jojo wouldn't want to share them, not yet, not even with his own people.

Jojo's place. Well, he had at least three of them, not to mention every other inch of Riverside that he considered his, but Shepard knew which was his favourite. The original clubhouse of the Tenth Streets Reds, built back when Riverside still had streets named and labelled like they were a real society; it was Jojo's favourite, Shepard suspected, because that was really where he rise to power had begun on that day, all those years ago, when he had walked into the leader's room with a knife in his hands and a glint in his eye and come back out bloody and smiling.

Shepard managed to get within eyeshot of the place before she had to duck down behind an overflowing dumpsters, press her back against the wall and let herself shake. Fear was like any other poison; no matter how high your tolerance, there was only so much the human body could hold before something had to give.

“Come on, Shep,” she whispered to herself, knocking her head gently back against the wall. “It’s just another job.”

She gave herself another few minutes, just waiting for her own breathing to even out and settled down. She'd broken into more than enough buildings to know that the beginning was everything. Fuck up the first few minutes of any job and that was it. Game over, no second tries.

Breaking into a Red building was fairly high-up on the list of crazy shit Shepard had done, far up enough that it probably didn't even feature on anyone else's list. That, in itself, might just give her the edge she needed. The enforcers were similarly convinced that they were untouchable and she'd taken more stuff from them than she could comfortably carry. And the enforcers had cameras, something the Reds would never waste their time with.

Of course, it was going to take more than avoiding non-existent security cameras for Shepard to pull this off. Getting caught stealing from the Reds, that was an automatic death sentence. Getting caught stealing their new and improved guns, well, that would be a little worse than a death sentence.

Shepard stood up and used the dumpster to get her up onto the nearest roof. Even in Riverside, where folk went above and below the streets far more than they just walked along them, people just didn't look up. She looped around Jojo's place a few times, eyeing up the walls, judging distances. It was an old building, one of the ones built back when Riverside still had an economy. Easier to climb those things than the smooth metallic walls of the enforcers' or the clinic.

She counted four Reds up on the roofs, all presumably playing sentry. Three of them were doing their jobs well, but the fourth... If she got herself into the right position, hanging down from the edge, just out of sight, she could probably yank him over into thin air before he had time to wake up properly. The fall would be enough for keep him out of commission for a good long while, if it didn't kill him outright. Neither ending was particularly desirable; a living soul with multiple broken bones and a working set of lungs could raise all sorts of ruckus, and a dead Red would attract a hell of a lot of attention.

Shepard found a nice wide windowsill on the right side and settled in to wait, crouched low and feet settled just right. It was good weather for it, at least, not raining hard enough to hurt like the last time she'd done this sort of cat burglar crap, and she could smell the crap the lacklustre sentry was smoking. It was the same shit that was plaguing the Undercity, made people slow and stupid, easy pickings for the stronger and the sober. It also tended to knock people on their asses if they smoked too much of it and the sentry had the slightly-shaky hands of someone not used to moderation.

The poor bastard finally slumped over and started snoring just as Shepard's knees started to ache. She hopped up onto the roof gratefully and dashed for the opposite side. The leap from there to the open window into Jojo's place was slightly longer than she would really have liked, but she made it, more or less, hands snatching at the sill just before she fell out of reach. She hung there a moment, catching her breath, then hauled herself through the window and into the building.

There was a door, just to the right of the window, and she paused outside for just long enough to check there was no sound coming from inside before passing through it. A quick sweep to make sure it was deserted, and then she ducked behind the door itself, swung her bag down off her shoulders. There was no way she'd be able to wander around inside Jojo's place without someone spotting her, so the best she could do was to try and make sure they didn't realise it was her they were seeing.

Thank God for the dress codes of the gangs.

She pulled her bandana out of the bag, tied it over her nose and mouth. Her jacket was tucked away in favour of the non-descript faded black hoodie she kept for these sorts of moments; with the hood up to hide her hair and the bandana to hide her face, this might just work. Especially once she’d tied a strip of red around her arm, feeling her stomach roll unpleasantly when she tightened it firmly.

It was just a disguise, she reminded herself as she tightened the cloth. Didn’t mean anything other than that the Reds were too damn certain of their position to bother checking who was wearing their colour.

Still, might be a good idea to keep her distance from anyone and everyone.

Shepard edged back out into the corridor, then remembered that the whole point of the disguise was to make it look like she belonged, and Reds didn’t edge around anywhere, let alone their own bases. She stepped away from the wall, but kept her hands in her pockets and her head ducked down low, and started searching. Worked her way with a careful sort of casualness through the whole building, heading up to the roof and all the way down to the basement, ducking in and out of rooms and round corners to avoid brushing past anyone. So long as she made every turn like she’d been planning it all along, no one ever seemed to notice.

She was in the basement, well, the first level of basement, when she realised precisely where Jojo would be keeping something as valuable as the first military-grade weapons in all of Riverside. His room, the one that he’d dragged plenty of unwilling people to over the years, the one that Shepard had seen the inside of far more times that she was ever going to be okay with. But she’d stopped promising herself never again years ago and she knew Jojo wasn’t here. She knew the difference between Reds-getting-stuff-down and Reds-keeping-busy-to-keep-away-from-their-boss. So there was no real reason not to walk down the next flight of stairs and through the heavy door that was never locked when no one was inside. No real reason at all.

The room hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d been there. Same scummy bed, same stuff on the walls that she didn’t want to look up. But the last time she’d been here, Jojo had had some sort of rare merchandise stashed away in here, that new spice that she hated so much. He’d shown it off to her, chatting about his work and his plans like she was interested, like she had some sort of right to know.

She found the crate tucked away in one of the corners, unlocked and full to the brim. Must have been twenty, thirty pistols in there, all of them showing clear signs of tampering ‘round the power cells and cooling mechanisms. At least Jojo didn’t seem to be that fussy about how his guns were stored; they’d notice the missing piece as soon as they bothered to count them again, assuming that there was anyone in the Reds who still knew how to count, but a quick glance at the crate wouldn’t look any different.

The pistol went into her bag, wrapped up and buried deep. And then she got the fuck out of that building as quick as she could without actually running.

xxx
She was so busy keeping her head down on her way out of central Red territory that she didn’t see Jojo until it was too late to hide. The only real option was to bit her tongue until the nausea died down and slap a smile on her face, all the while thanking whatever god might exist that she taken the red off her arm the second she was out of that building.

“Shepard, it’s been too long since I last saw that pretty little face,” Jojo said, stepping right into her personal space. “You been avoiding me, sweetheart?”

“Now, why would I do a thing like that?” She kept smiling, hoped to hell it looked genuine enough to pass. “Just been keeping busy. Lot of money to be made out there at the moment.”

“When are you going to stop wasting your time with all that finder crap? You should come work for me, you know. Lot more money to be made with a little red on your sleeve.”

“Oh, you know me, Jojo. Don’t like being tied down.” She knew the pistol was deactivated, she’d checked it twice before hiding it away, so there was no way it was actually producing the kind of heat that she could suddenly feel at the small of her back.

“You seemed to like it well enough last time,” Jojo replied, stroking one hand down the side of her face. “This independent woman thing is all well and good, but sooner or later you’re going to need to start thinking about your future. Things are going to start changing around here. Changing fast. I know what you think about me. Pathetic king of a pathetic kingdom.”

“That’s not what I-”

“It’s okay. I know this place isn’t exactly worth running. That’s why I’m thinking of moving on. Just like you are. We should go together. Take the Reds out into the world.”

“Your boys aren’t ready for that, Jojo. Ruling Riverside is one thing, and you do it very well, but taking on the outside is... You’d need an army, man. Bigger bribes, better guns. I just don’t see it going the way you want.”

Jojo’s fingers tightened on her face. “Things don’t go any other way for me, Shepard.” But then he smiled, fingers loosening back into something that would, from anyone else, be called a caress. “Time for you to go, I think.”

“Yeah,” Shepard agreed, risking a step backwards. “Yeah, I should-”

“Just don’t stay away too long this time,” he called after her as she scurried away. “I get real lonely when you’re gone.”

xxx
Shepard barely made it out of Red territory before she started shaking. Of course, being out of Red territory didn’t mean safety or security, and so she had to find a conveniently deserted corner in which to huddle down and shake until the she could stuff the sound of Jojo’s voice back in the darkest corners of her mind.

It was a trick she’d used before, one that usually worked well enough to get herself back under control. It wasn’t good enough to fool Doc, it certainly wasn’t good enough to fool Kes, not when that girl was smart enough to add Shepard scared and recent trip to Red Central and get the correct answer of Jojo. When the shaking had stopped, Shepard straightened back up and started walking. Not towards the clinic, she couldn’t take the risk that the Reds were still watching; best to drive any potential spies to distraction with a nice tour of Riverside before heading back to hand the stolen gun over to the Doc.

She still had to get the confession, of course. She should have planned that a little better, really. She certainly shouldn’t have waltzed in Jojo’s home without a better idea of what she’d do when she inevitably ran into the bastard, but there’d be other chances. Shepard was so caught up in how to engineer a more relevant conversation with Jojo that it took her far longer than it should have done to notice what was so wrong in Riverside.

Because, the thing was, crowds in Riverside were never silent. They gathered around brawls and shouted for their favourites, cursed the losers; they pushed each other out of the way or into place, always swearing at those who pushed them. Years ago, you might have heard laughter here and there, when so many were gathered together, maybe even the odd song or snatches of music. Shepard couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard music in Riverside, other than that Kes hummed softly under her breath. Sometimes, sometimes the crowds weren’t crowds at all, they were mobs, surging in every direction, screaming in rage or in fear, or just plan screaming.

But this mass of people, moving quickly and silently and all very certainly away from something, it wasn’t a crowd. It wasn’t a mob. Shepard had seen it before, plenty of times, always when the Reds had decided to make an example of someone, when everyone else decided that they didn’t want to stick around to become the next example. Kes had a word for these things, called them exodus.

The right thing to do with exoduses was to blend in, move along with all the other people and get as far away as you could before the Reds decided that a larger example was required. Shepard knew that, knew it better than her own name, and she’d joined plenty of these terrible exoduses over the years. But she also knew Riverside. She knew, with an icy certainty deep in the pit of her stomach, where the people were hurrying away from.

People may have noticed when she started shoving her way through, going against the seemingly endless tide of people, but no one tried to stop her. They all had much larger concerns than one stupid kid intent on hurrying towards danger instead of away from it. The stream of people had slowed to a faint trickle by the time Shepard could smell smoke in the air, and by the time she could see the source, there really wasn’t any doubt about just who had caught Jojo’s attention this time. Anger and guilt, but no doubt. As if there had ever been any doubt.

Shepard could still vaguely remember the first time she’d heard that an ex-soldier had come to Riverside, offering cheap medicare; she’d figured the rumour was about as accurate as the one about being able to gain full citizenship by sleeping with the right three officials. But the soldier really had come to Riverside and he really had come to offer medicare, as Shepard had discovered a few years back when she’d broken both her legs trying to evade the enforcers. And everyone had known that the clinic was off-limits, untouchable even to the gangs that ruled Riverside. Even to the Reds.

Until now, Shepard supposed.

The clinic’s door was just gone, the shutter half-torn off and oddly mangled. The building itself wasn’t the source of the smoke; it looked as though the Reds had dragged out most of the furniture that hadn’t been nailed down and set it on fire. Hell, they’d even dragged out some of the stuff that had been nailed down, Shepard thought that she could see the charred remains of one of the examination tables.

She really didn’t want to go into the clinic itself. She didn’t want to know what she only suspected.

But she’d seen Jojo’s work before, after the fact and in person and even in the nightmares which had only really started once she’d let Kes into her life. And she’d seen what he did to those who weren’t really the target, the ones who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or, God forbid, the ones who actively tried to get in the way, and there was no way that the Doc would have ever willingly got out of Jojo’s way.

There was a Red standing just inside what remained of the door. Shepard would never quite remember what happened to him - what she did to him - but it probably had something to do with the knife that had made its way from her boot to her hand. And then there was blood on the knife, blood on her hand and sleeve, and so much more blood on the floor of the clinic. Those bright smears led Shepard’s eye towards the office, to the sprawling body of another Red slumped there against the wall. Judging by the visible hole in her stomach and the pretty impressive blood pool around her legs, she’d bled out. A slow death, the sort of death that should never have happened at all in Doc’s clinic.

Shepard stepped carefully over the woman’s legs into the office. It didn’t seem to have fared any better than the main room; there was marginally less blood on the floor, but the desk had been overturned, pinning someone to the floor.

The figure under the desk wasn’t Kes. The clothes were too expensive, the boots too big. It was Doc, and he wasn’t moving. He’d once shown her how to tell if someone was alive or dead, all things to do with pulses and breaths and heart-rates, but she’d barely been listening at the time and she certainly couldn’t remember it now. She settled for shoving the desk off him, then went to the well-hidden panel in the corner. The Reds hadn’t touched it, unsurprisingly; even Shepard had first found out about it in the good old days when she’d been deeply paranoid of the good doctor and had been spending days at a time spying on him to make sure that he wasn’t dealing in slaves or experimenting on the Unregs, and Jojo had never considered the Doc worthy of that sort of attention. Getting the panel open was a little more complicated; the code had been changed since those days, but the wiring was as crap as ever; you’d almost think the man hadn’t spent most of the last few years surrounded by  thieves and undesirables.

Shepard had, fortunately, been paying attention on the day when the Doc had talked her through his emergency contact system. It helped, admittedly, that the system only really had one function and, therefore, one button. She smacked it with a fist and stared blankly at the screen until it lit up. No picture, just a white dot in the centre, no way to tell who was listening at the other end of the broadcast. Maybe Doc’s partner, the strange man who was as detached as Doc was connected. Maybe Gibson, even though Shepard had never seen the two of them together, never heard one mention the other.

“Jojo hit the clinic,” she said finally, uncertain if the words would be understood, if whoever was listening would even care. “Doc needs help.”

And then, because there was no sign of Kes anywhere in the ruins of Doc’s carefully-created sanctuary, Shepard walked out of the office, out of the clinic, and started on the way back to Red territory.

She knew exactly where Kes would be. She’d be exactly where Shepard had always sworn she was never going to end up; it didn’t even matter that she’d never made that promise outside of her own mind because Jojo would just know how much it would destroy her.

The streets were mostly deserted; the few people she saw scuttled out of sight the moment they realised she was there. Riverside could always tell when the dead were walking. Even the Reds out and about would only let themselves stare once she was past them and therefore unable to look at them in return. Shepard walked into Jojo’s place through the front door, as if she owned it instead of being owned by it, and wasn’t that surprised when the guards just let her pass.

The corridors inside were packed with more Reds - enough that Shepard suddenly realised just how empty this place had been before, just how much Jojo had played her - but they all cleared out of her way the moment she got close. Like Jojo's intense focus on her was something you could catch. The crowd thinned out the deeper she went into the base until, when she walked down the last awful staircase, there was only one in sight. Finney, loitering outside Jojo's room like some sort of idiot kid runner.

He wouldn't meet her eye as she walked past, another hint at just how terribly wrong this had all gone. Finney had known Kes, after all, and Jojo was always attentive to his people's interests and relationships. He probably hadn't been made to watch, though. With something like this, Jojo would rank his own pleasure and privacy over the chance to make a point to someone as insignificant as Finney.

Kes was on the bed, sprawled across the middle. There was blood on her face and smeared across her limbs and torso, more of it on the sheets. Her hair was matted and tangled, torn out of its braids, and her eyes were open. She would have been staring at Shepard, if the dead had been capable of staring at anything.

Shepard didn't shut her eyes. She kept looking, taking it all in until every little detail of what she had let happen was burnt into her memory, and only when that was finished did she cross the room to what was left of Kes. Using her sleeve, she wiped the blood from Kes' face, tucked her hair back behind her ears, then pulled the sheet up to cover up everything else that had been done to her. There were things on her mind, things that maybe she should have said long before, but it was too late now and so she stayed silent.

"He's on the roof," Finney said, still standing outside the door. "You probably shouldn't keep him waiting."

"When he killed Jacknife," Shepard replied, ignoring his comment. "Was that because of Jacknife or because of you?"

Finney sighed. "It was because of me."

"And then he tied red around your arm and let you live and you just went along with it. You signed on with his murderer just like that. Shit like that is why everyone thinks that we're not worth saving, hell, it's why they're right."

She'd never figured out if it had been common knowledge, the whole thing with Jacknife being more than just a Son, with him being Finney's actual son, but she was pretty damn certain that she was probably the first person to throw it in Finney's face. Well, the first apart from Jojo, but he didn't really count as a person.

Shepard took one last look at Kes, kissed her cold forehead, and walked out of the room again. Finney was still silent, looking paler than when she'd entered, and she was halfway up the stairs before he spoke again, sounding more broken than she'd ever heard before.

"Do you really think I don't regret it?"

"Doesn't much matter what I think," she called back, not taking her eyes off the steps in front of her.

She'd left the gun at the clinic, she realised. The gun, her knife, anything that she might have been able to fight with. Pity, really; she'd never quite wrapped her head around the whole 'irony' thing, but she was fairly certain that shooting Jojo with one of his own guns would have counted. Not that she really thought that a gun would change what was about to happen; she could have all the guns in Riverside and she'd still really only have two options in front of her. End up like Finney, or end up like Kes.

Shepard would take the second option a thousand times over, no doubt about that.

Finally, she was at the bottom of the last staircase. She paused, for just a moment, and let herself think about Kes. Not about the girl who first come to Riverside, or the one who’d taken Shepard into her life, the one who laughed more than anyone else Shepard had ever met, or the one who’d woken up from nightmares more often than she didn’t. Instead, Shepard thought about the Kes lying on Jojo’s bed.

This wasn’t about who Kes was. This was about what had been done to her.

Shepard hadn’t really had a plan for what to when she was actually facing Jojo, not when all she had was the intense desire not to submit and not a damned idea about what that actually meant. She hadn’t really thought about what Jojo might do, what she might do in return. And she certainly hadn't expected this confrontation to start with a thrown knife.

Shepard had only dimly registered the pain in her thigh when the leg gave out from under her. She twisted as she fell, just barely managing to avoid landing on the knife and, with that accomplished, she could focus on the blinding pain.

“Oh, my little Shepard,” Jojo said softly, coming close enough to stroke her hair out of her eyes. “It shouldn’t have happened like this. You should have come to me long before any of this was necessary. But if I have to cripple you to keep you, I will.”

His other hand was suddenly on her thigh, digging in just below the blade, and she screamed. She lashed out with her good leg, but her shitty boots didn’t even do that much damage on the days when she had enough strength to kick properly.

“You see, that’s why it has to be you.” Jojo’s fingers loosened on her thigh and Shepard could breathe again. “You fight. Even when you shouldn’t, you fight. My boys are going to need that. I’m going to need that when I lead them out into the world that should be ours. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To get out of this cage that all the real people like to keep us in. Even your little friend could see that and she wasn’t that smart, was she? I mean, she really thought you’d come back here in time. I don’t usually like it when my girls shout someone else’s name, but I didn’t mind it this time,” Jojo continued, almost thoughtfully. “It was almost like you were there, really.”

Shepard’s fragile self-control shattered and she spat in his face. He backhanded her, almost casually; one of his rings caught in her eyebrow piercing and he yanked his hand free without a moment’s hesitation. The small silver ring hit the roof with a faint clink as blood started pouring down into Shepard’s eye.

Jojo turned away, looking out across the badly-lit dump that he’d always been so intent on ruling. He was still talking, going on and on about his grand plans, voice rising unsteadily, but Shepard tuned out and turned all of her attention to the knife sticking out of her. Decent sized blade, if the way it was practically against her bone was anything to go by, but the handle was a little smaller that Shepard liked. And it was - or had been meant to be - decorative, which usually meant shitty grip even before it was splattered with slippery blood.

But it was all she had, and it was a hell of a lot more than she'd been expecting.

She wrapped one hand around around the knife, braced the other on her thigh, pressed up against the blade, and started to pull. The first slight movement of the blade made her head spin, leg throbbing in time to the rolling of her stomach, but she gritted her teeth against the pain and sick feeling of metal against flesh and kept going.

The knife came out, millimetre by agonising millimetre. Shepard kept it firmly in her hand as she struggled to her feet, certain that if she let it go she wouldn't be getting it back. Standing was interesting; there was more blood running down her leg now, without the knife to hold it in, and this was probably why the Doc always hesitated before taking things out of people. Too late to worry about that, not when her body was very clearly only going to tolerate her insane need to move for so long before putting her back down hard.

Shepard limped forward one tiny step, biting through her lip to stop from screaming, and then took a slightly larger step, then another. The roof wasn't that big. Hardly any distance at all. The knife was still in her hand, right where she needed it to be, and she watched Jojo, still edging her way towards him, waiting for the moment he moved.

When it came, when she spotted the little shifts in cloth and muscle that meant Jojo was about to turn, Shepard threw the knife. It was half a second too soon, or maybe half a second too late, and slightly wide, but it carved a decent gash across the damn red tattoo on Jojo's arm.

The surprise made Jojo take a half-step back and that was all Shepard needed. She threw herself forward, leg screaming in agony and she screamed along with it, catching Jojo around the waist and letting momentum take over.

If she'd been in a little less pain, been a little less broken or a little less angry, maybe Shepard would have been able to stop herself from following Jojo over the edge. As it was, she didn't really care.

xxx
Iowa Central City,
Six Months Later,

Hackett knocked on the door for eight minutes straight before it finally slid open, revealing one deeply unimpressed looking Gibson.

“You stopped answering my messages,” Hackett said when she just glared at him. “Figured I’d drop by and make sure your personal communicator was working properly.”

“I stopped answering your messages because there was nothing more to say and your obsessive tendencies are a lot less cute when they’re not saving my life. Look, Steven, the Riverside deal is done,” Gibson said, her voice softening just slightly. “The Alliance knows what happened to your people; Jojo’s been posthumously convicted of all of it. Hell, even the Taskforce is back on, and with the Reds floundering around without their little psycho dictator, it might actually do some good this time around.”

“But you’re still taking early retirement.”

“Well, it takes a little of the joy out of helping the lost and downtrodden, knowing that the people above you only care because they’re scared of that shit spreading out into the real world. But you’ve never been that interested in my career or lack thereof, so how about we leap to the real matter on your mind.”

“I want to see Shepard.”

“There we go,” Gibson said, crossing her arms as she leant against the doorframe. “The kid’s fine.”

“How the hell is she fine?”

“It might have something to do with all that medical care she’s now entitled to with her fancy new citizenship papers. Certainly did wonders for the few remaining fragments of her shin bones. The rest of it, well, I’d imagine that unhappy endings are a lot easier to deal with when you’ve never expected anything different.  And before you even think of saying anything at all along the lines of, ‘it was my fault’, let me point out that you had essentially no role in this last depressing chapter of Shepard’s life.”

“I sent her after Jojo.”

“For the love of all that is holy, stop making this about you. Jojo was obsessed with Shepard for years. Why do you think she started working with me in the first place?”

“I just want to see her. You’re right about all of this starting long before I showed up, I know that, but it got worse after I arrived. I need to try and make it end better that it started.”

xxx

The noodle bar by the shuttles was actually pretty good; Hackett had been there once or twice, normally when a little drunker than regulations were strictly happy with. He hadn’t realised that it was low-key enough to hire an actual person to wash the dishes, but maybe Gibson had persuaded them. He waited across the street, trying to think of the appropriate way to start a conversation with a kid who he’d sent absentmindedly into her own personal circle of hell.

He was still considering when he spotted Shepard walking out of the restaurant. She looked... different. The clothes were cleaner, admittedly, and a little newer, and she looked slightly less like she was two days away from starvation. Following her through the streets was probably a little creepy, but Hackett had made his peace with that. He was a little surprised, however, when she stopped outside a recruitment station, but then he saw the way she was staring at the stock image of the Alliance unit.

“Come on, you,” he said, dropping a hand onto her shoulder. “I think we need to talk.”

She shrugged his hand off immediately and glared at him, but she didn’t argue and she walked with him willingly down the street, even if she did somehow always managed to keep at least a foot of space between them at all times. There was a park somewhere down this street; Hackett had visited it before, and the little stall selling drinks and the weirdest assortment of snacks Hackett had ever seen was still there, open for business. He brought them each a cup of coffee and shoved one of the overly-sweet asari dumpling things into Shepard’s hands.

They sat on a bench together, still with that good foot of space between them, and drank their coffee. Hackett realised right around the time that Shepard started trying to shred the reusable mug that the kid wasn’t about to start this conversation.

“So, the Alliance?”

Shepard shrugged. “It’s the easiest way to get offworld. The only other people who’ll take on someone like me are the mercs and mercs are just gangs with better weapons.”

“And we all know how well you respond to gangs with better weapons.” The joke fell flat; it probably didn’t help that Hackett didn’t even know if he was joking. “But that’s all you want? To get offworld?”

She nodded, but it was slow, hesitant.

“What were you planning to do?” Hackett asked gently. “You and Kes, you must have had plans for when you got full citizenship.”

“We were going to start running. Not sure if Kes was really ever planning to stop once we’d started.” Shepard finally seemed to accept that the coffee cup wasn’t destructible and put it down on the bench. “Apart from Kes, everyone good I’ve ever met came from the Alliance. And I know that doesn’t really say much about the Alliance, not really, but... They’d give me something to do. It might even be something worth doing. And I need something worth doing right now.” Shepard stood up from the bench and stuffed her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. “After all, it would be a shame not to something more than wash dishes with my shiny new citizenship.”

“It won’t be easy, kid. It’s not easy for anyone, but I imagine that it would even harder for you.”

“Can’t be any worse than Riverside.” Shepard shrugged and started to walk away, but she only made it a few steps before stopping again. “You know, you should look me up in a few years, Hackett. Maybe the next time we work together, it’ll go a bit more smoothly.”

“You’ve already enlisted.”

“Two days ago,” Shepard called back. “But thanks for the talk anyway!”

Hackett leant back against the bench, shut his eyes against the glare of the sun, and did his very best not to laugh like lunatic.