Chapter Text
It's so cold…
She used to love this. Space had been her secret solace. The void was vast, ancient, tender in its indifference. On the Normandy, the stars stretched beyond the viewport like a promise. She’d linger there, beside Joker, stargazing. Him and space, the only constants in her life that never judged, never tried to fix her.
The cold seeps through the breaches in her armor, slides over her skin like it knows the way. It claws up her veins, nesting in her ribs, settles deep. She forces her limbs to move. Fingers twitch, too slow. The gloves are stiff. Mag boots are offline. There is no up or down, just the drift in the void.
And now the void bares its teeth.
It is no longer a sanctuary; it is a predator. The stars do not shine—they stare, a million frozen eyes that follow her spin, unblinking and hungry. Silence presses against her helmet until she can hear nothing but her pulse. The friend she trusted has turned—its stillness is no longer kind, its quiet is no longer gentle.
Then comes the vibration, subtle, persistent. There’s no sound in the vacuum, but she feels it anyway: the oxygen line is gone.
She tries to breathe steady, falling back on the drills. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Conserve oxygen. Control panic. Her lips shape the rhythm, but her lungs betray her. Each inhale stabs, each exhale flees too fast. Breath feeds panic, panic devours oxygen, and training buckles under the weight of fear.
Her mind blanks. She reaches for something—anything—to stop the spin. Her hands grasp at emptiness. Instinct screams to use her biotics. She does, and flares of power burn through her with each pulse, dragging on nothing, only draining her faster, until her nose is bleeding. The thick copper taste envelops her lips. The space doesn’t care. Her strength evaporates, leaving her weaker, colder, smaller. The truth carves deep: she isn’t going to make it.
But Joker will.
Joker’s in the pod. Safe. The thought loops, the only warmth left in her body. She clings to it even as the void eats everything else. Normandy is gone, half her crew dead, nothing solid left to reach for, but he will make it.
Her vision narrows. Stars streak, smearing into pale scratches across the dark. Her limbs drift, light and foreign. Her chest no longer rises the way it should. The void pulls at her, cradling her like a tide, whispering her name. One last exhale and she lets go.
She doesn’t see Alchera below, not clearly, but something inside her understands: she is already falling. She is already broken. When the planet rises to meet her, it will tear her open—bones shattered, organs bursting, everything scattered in steam and fire.
It’s so cold.
The thought survives the emptiness, follows her into the dark. She wakes with it inside her, coiled tight, breathing through her lungs before she does. The cold moves first, it’s under her skin, inside her chest, threading through muscle and bone until she can’t tell where it ends and she begins.
Light floods in. White, surgical, merciless. Shapes loom at the edges, blurred, sliding away before she can fix them. She gasps. The air is wrong, it’s too sharp, too sterile, the burning sting of recycled oxygen and antiseptic, that clings to the tongue. Her lungs convulse against it.
Beeping machines pound at her ears, harsh and insistent, syncing too perfectly with her frantic pulse.
“It’s too early. She isn’t ready.” A woman’s voice. Not soothing. Just observing.
Her body jerks, spasms without direction. She tries to rise, but her limbs are not there. Pain floods her, raw and unrelenting, as if nerves were stripped and reattached wrong. Every muscle throbs. Panic bursts through her chest, like a hollow tide. Machines scream in rhythm with her pulse, alarms climbing higher.
“I know, I know!” A man’s voice now, strained, stumbling. He rushes past her vision—white coat, hands fluttering—then out again. “Had to drug her twice, she’s resisting.”
Her skin burns, every nerve raw. Each ragged breath tears her apart. Then darkness blurs everything. Her heart stutters. Vision tunnels. She wants to scream, to claw free, but nothing answers, as she drifts back into the void.
“We almost lost her.”
The words stick, bitter as pain. Almost. As if she hadn’t already been gone.
The same sharp female voice drags her back. She registers commands before they start meaning something.
“Wake up, Shepard. There is no time.”
She snaps her eyes open. A different room, softer light. She’s lying naked on a synthetic cot, her body aching in ways she doesn’t understand. Joints throb like she’s a doll put together wrong. The cold is still inside her. It has followed her here.
“You’re in a Cerberus facility,” the bodiless voice continues. “It’s compromised. There’s armor and a weapon in the locker. Move.”
She staggers to the locker and pulls on the suit. Cerberus armor, ill-fitting, the fabric scrapes her skin raw, shield generators whining weakly. The gun is standard issue, heavy, reliable. Something solid to wrap her hand around.
The moment she steps out into the corridor, the mechs pour in. Cold faceless screenplates, guns already warming. Shepard wants to raise the gun, but her body has already chosen—forward, crush the line, break them before they can pin her down.
The air tears around her, biotics detonating without thought. She’s flung like a missile across the floor, slamming into the mechs with bone-rattling force. The impact isn’t hers alone; power surges outward, a violent shockwave that scatters them like wreckage, steel bursting apart in a rain of sparks.
She lands hard, arms crossed up to cover her face, the impact threatens to fold her, but the charge holds her upright. It steadies her as much as it breaks her.
And it feels wrong.
The power isn’t obeying. It doesn’t wait for focus—it takes her. It moves faster than thought, instinct deeper than a soldier’s drills. She wasn’t trained for this, biotics used to be an effort, not a force. But in that heartbeat, as it floods her veins and flows under her skin, part of her doesn’t want to resist.
Smoke curls from the wreckage, black against the sterile light. The pistol trembles in her palm. She tightens her hold until the grip bites. Breath saws through her throat. Survive first. Figure it out later.
The cold curls in agreement.
She finds him in the next hall and nearly shoots on sight. A man in Cerberus colors, the logo stamped across his chest like a warning—enough reason. She raises the gun, ready to tear the mark out of him.
Jacob Taylor, he calls himself. The words that follow hit harder than the gunfire. She was dead. Not wounded, not lost. Dead. Nothing but meat and tubes dragged onto a table while Cerberus—fucking Cerberus—poured credits and years into rebuilding her.
Two years? Her mind rejects it, shoves the thought away like deception. This isn’t possible. Must be a sick Cerberus psy-op. She remembers drift, silence, the hiss of her oxygen line. She remembers the cold pressing into her chest, then light tearing her awake. Seconds. Not years.
But he keeps talking, steady, insistent, fellow soldier trying to ground her to reality. And all her body answers with is the same command it carried since Alchera: survive.
Her instinct howls for violence, to silence him, to burn the insignia off his chest. But he throws an unspoken plea for truce. She grants it. Not because she wants to—no, she would gladly rip the man apart and go on—but because some buried part of her knows she has to. Survival demands it.
Together they find her—the woman from the edge of death, the voice accompanied by machines and pain. Miranda Lawson. Shepard doesn’t need thorough introductions. She knows her already, knows the calm weight of her tone: We almost lost her.
The memory collides with the present as Miranda raises her pistol and drops the panicking scientist mid-sentence. Cold. Efficient. Shepard recognizes the rhythm, the grace under violence.
Miranda doesn’t waste words. Escape first. Answers later. Shepard has no room left for argument; survival instinct still claws at her throat, demanding she falls in step. All she has to do is follow.
And the shuttle leads her straight into another facility, another chamber, another voice. The Illusive Man. His words are the same, smooth and sharp as a blade pressed to her throat: dead for two years, returned by Cerberus, no crew in sight. His augmented eyes watch her like the hungry stars, calculating what’s left of her. She doesn’t know what to make of him. Every instinct screams: lies.
She listens anyway.
Colonies gone. Humans. The Alliance is buried in bureaucracy, too slow or unwilling to act. Shepard is the obvious solution—the woman who bled and killed for the humanity, who bent the whole Galaxy’s course with her bare hands. Of course, Cerberus wants her. Wants her enough to drag her from the grave. His promise: one mission on Freedom’s Progress, and she can walk away.
She won’t. They both know it.
There is no control chip. No kill-switch, Miranda admits it with annoyance. But the implants are unfinished. Buzz on the edge of her nerves, that makes her too sharp, like an overclocked machine. Miranda calls it temporary, promises it’d “settle” in a familiar environment. Shepard parses that easily: war will fix her. She tests herself with battle stimulants and adrenalin sharpens her, glues the pieces together. She is ready.
The next test comes fast. No time to breathe, no time to think. They put her on a shuttle, drop her on an empty colony where doors hang open and silence clings to every wall.
Mechs stalk the streets. The fight returns like breath, but the body that moves is more than she remembers. It’s stronger, faster, biotics overflow her with unfamiliar strength. Battle stims ignite the veins, and the rhythm of recoil, charge, impact feels intoxicating. The skin doesn’t fit, but it doesn’t matter, because in the fire of combat she rebuilds herself.
Then a voice breaks through the thrill. Her name, cracked through a filter. Tali is here. For a breath, it pulls her off balance.
“Shepard?”
One word with impossible weight of two years. She almost answers. Almost. But the Quarians rings her in, rising their rifles, suspicion thick in the air. It’s not a reunion. It’s an interrogation. She doesn’t blame them. If she was in their place, she wouldn’t trust the woman dragging the dead body in the Cerberus colors either. She doesn’t fight it. Doesn’t explain. Just listens. Tali knows she’s alive, and that is all she can offer now.
Veetor is the mission’s end. Broken, frantic, his voice wild from what he’s seen. He clings to his Collectors story like it’s the only thing left keeping him together. He’s not stable, but might be useful. Tali asks for him in exchange for the data, her voice carrying more weight than the weapons ever did. Shepard looks away. She feels the pull to yield, to listen, but the reflex wins.
“He stays with us.” It’s not cruelty, not armor—just the echo of a soldier who survived too long by making the hard decisions. The look Tali gives her is hidden by the mask, but Shepard feels it. The distance splitting between them. Shepard hears herself say, “I’ll send him back, I promise.” But words feel hollow.
The shuttle ride back is quiet. Another colony gone, no survivors saved, only scraps of intel and a broken boy in their hands. She focuses on that. On the course already set—to save human colonies from Collectors with Cerberus.
Then it stops. The sprint, the gunfire. Adrenaline drains and leaves her bare, scattering the pieces. Two years gone, and the world already healed over her absence. Cerberus brought her back—the ones she hunted, now the only ones who want her. There’s no one to go back to.
It sinks in, the simple fact of it—she’s alone, out of time, breathing borrowed air. The Illusive Man sits before her in his private theater of smoke and stars, already planning her next steps. He speaks of strategy, necessity, inevitability. She hears it but cannot feel the ground beneath her. Her breath shakes. For a moment, she wants to disappear back into the silence, to stop existing where she no longer belongs.
And then his words cut through. “And I believe you need a pilot. I just got the man for you.”
She turns before the echo fades.
He is there. Joker. His thin frame, green eyes, awkward stance, clutching to his cap like it’s the only thing that keeps him standing. Deep circles under his eyes. Looking at her with the same spark, as if the years never happened. “Pretty damn good pilot. And this time—see—no crutches.”
Her vision swims, then sharpens. For the first time since Alchera, the void, the sterile Cerberus walls, the world feels solid. He’s here. He made it. The fact that she died doesn’t matter anymore; nothing does, except that she isn't alone here.
Her throat tightens. The name slips out raw, unguarded.
“Joker…”