Identity (a Mass Effect fanfiction)

Soldier

Quietly Shepard slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb the outflung tattooed limbs of his lover. He crossed the room to his desk and turned on his terminal, clicking onto his email as he sank naked into the chair.

He reread the email from Admiral Hackett with annoyance that didn't quite overcome the heaviness of his heart; then he read the email from Anderson with less annoyance and more of a sense of a duty he had not carried out.

Undecided, he read them again. And again. Until a voice came from the bed, and he looked past the glare of the monitor to glimpse her sitting up amidst the tangle of the sheets. "At it again? I told you to delete those things."

"I can't just delete an email from the commander of the Fifth Fleet. Or from Anderson. I owe him."

"You don't owe any of them shit. What did they do for you? Left you for dead, that's what."

"I don't owe Cerberus anything anymore, either. I did what the Illusive Man wanted—I took out the Collectors."

"Yeah, but you destroyed their base, too, and pissed him off." Jack got up and crossed the room, the light from the fish tank playing across her tattoos. "In my book, that makes you free, not some Alliance stooge."

"I'm not a stooge."

"You are if you let them bully you into running back to Earth so they can play patty-cake with the batarians."

"I destroyed a planet, Jack! A whole batarian colony!"

"To keep the Reapers from coming through. In the end, it's a win."

"The batarians don't feel that way." He leaned back in the chair and looked up at her. "If it keeps the batarians from going to war with the Alliance, what's a couple months sitting in a tribunal on Earth? I like Earth. I grew up there."

"Earth smirth," Jack said, her face twisting. She had never been there, he knew—at least, if she had, she didn't remember it—and liked to make a big show of not feeling any kind of connection to anything or anyone. "Who cares?"

Shepard thought of Doug and Rachel, still living in Oklahoma. "I do. I still have ... friends there." He had never told Jack much about his past. Enough to let her know that he was like her, an orphan, with nowhere to go back to, but not about what Rachel had done for him, or Doug. He heard from them only sporadically, anyway. They were busy—Doug was remarried and had a small cattle ranch, and Rachel taught school. Shepard wondered if she was married, or thinking about it.

"Yeah? So go see them."

"Why don't you come with me?" They had talked about this before, briefly, but it had been forgotten since the Collector base. At least, it hadn't come up again.

Jack glanced at him, startled. "You're serious? You want to take me to Earth? To meet your ... friends?"

"Yeah." He reached for her hand, tugging her down into his lap.

Never liking to feel captured, Jack squirmed away from him, back toward the fish tank, watching the schools of fish flowing through the water. "You don't mean that."

"Of course I do."

She glanced at him over her shoulder. "Just to visit your friends? Then we leave?"

"Well ..." He looked over at his terminal, Anderson's email still up on the screen. "I'd probably be noticed in transit, and I'd likely have to go to Vancouver and—"

"I fucking knew it." Jack whirled around, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him. "Damn it, Shepard, why do you have to be such a goody-goody all the time? You really are the king of the fucking Boy Scouts, aren't you?"