Chapter Text
When Mordin said that he might retire to the beach, collect seashells, Shepard had pointed out, “You'd go crazy inside an hour,” and the same could be said about her, actually. She hadn't lasted long in Alliance custody before she baited Vega into a card game.
So when she finds herself sitting on dry sand dune instead of the Citadel's sleek, gore-splattered floor, a sun-weathered rock on her back in place of cold stair steps, the wind in the too empty space beside her, all to the view of blue ocean waves where Earth and a trillion souls had been burning, she gets up to her feet (as she always does, as she always will) and walks head-on into the impossible as usual.
* * *
She stumbles upon Mordin Solus first. “Shepard!” the scientist salarian greets her, with his confident little nod and large observant eyes caught in a quick upward blink. “Happy to be visited.” He closes his eyes, inhales deep and sharp, and looks her over once more. “Didn't expect to see you soon, though.”
“Well,” Shepard says, “if we’re where I think we are, technically I was here first.” Hell, maybe I’d never left.
Mordin sniffs. It's his typical all-knowing, derisive, haughty idiosyncrasy, and she misses him so much she could break his old bones in a hug. “Studied many cultures, many religions. Never knew you pre-suicide mission; still conclude you the real, living Shepard. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”
That does it. She laughs, a little manic, more than a little broken, but she breathes through it without coughing up blood or poking more holes in her lungs with her broken ribs or spilling her entrails out of the wound in her stomach. Beneath the phantom pains, she feels tired all of a sudden. She goes to sit with the grace of a soldier who hasn't slept in well over a week, an arm holding her middle in pretense of soothing laughter-ache while she relives limping through a long corridor piled to the ceiling with corpses fresh and rotting, the floor slick with blood red and blue and violet and green all mixed together into pools black sticky as tar. In her other hand she clenches a fistful of sand, coarse grains digging into skin still ghostly raw with abrasions and burns and lacerations, this hand of hers that'd held the gun that shot Anderson under the Illusive Man’s control.
Everything feels real enough and not quite so at once, with the sand and the wind and the warmth, without the urgency to hit and shoot and fight—tear the madman's indoctrinated face apart with her bare hands because the Reapers didn't care for pain and he was the next best thing—real enough, because what is, really, in the past three years of her life?
The sky here is as blue as the ocean, Earth-blue (and even when it'd been burning, when its freckles of man-made lights had sputtered out, Earth was a beacon of life-blue and -green against the darkness of space). She dares a glance straight at the sun, a golden yellow softened by brush-strokes clouds, its glare bleaching memories of bleak, gray London that'd been more mass grave than metropolis. Blinks back the sting in her eyes, smells the salt in the air, hears the chirrups and croaks of seaside birds, and feels wetness on her lashes even though the tides are too far and low, the wind too light of a breeze. Beside her, humming some quick, cheery beat, Mordin searches the beach for seashells to study.
“Gotta be a bit more specific,” Shepard rasps. “That's a long list of things.” She lets the sand grains slip between her fingers, stares at skin and wrinkles that aren't hers. “I didn't always make the right call.”
Mordin sniffs again. “I made a mistake,” the good doctor tells her. It takes her a second to single out the anomaly in the grammatically-appropriate statement. “Modifying the genophage. But. Still the right choice at the time. No Eve yet, no Urdnot Wrex.”
She looks over at him. Hunched over, shifting methodically through sand as if excavating treasures, his lean and nimble form appears just a tad smaller. “You know, Bakara is pregnant already. Wrex said she insisted on naming their first kid after you.”
“Hmph. Krogan culture criticality endangered. Names of prominent krogan figures more fitting, motivating, uniting. (Though many traditionalists, extremely violent and xenophobic. Hmm. Problematic.) Would suggest ‘Shiagur.’ Or ‘Kalros’—unconventional but novel. Of course, ‘Shepard’ would also be excellent.”
“You're kidding.”
“Not at all. Honorary krogan. Grunt's battlemaster, prefer krogan-made shotguns. Normandy crew agreed: must at least be half-krogan.”
“I swear, you headbutt a krogan once…”
“Ah, and courtship with Garrus! 'Loyal, reasonably intelligent. Bit aggressive. Aware krogan women find scars attractive.' Hypothesis supported.”
“Hey.”
Mordin smiles. On his narrow alien face, it stretches from one end to the other, as wide as the worst of his visible scars. “Appreciate the news, Shepard. Understandably hard to find such luxury here.”
A cool breeze saunters by. From behind locks of hair free to flow along the currents, without sweat or dried blood or blown-out husks innards sticking the strands together, Shepard watches as he uncovers a beautiful assortment of seashells. He gathers each one with gentle care, like handling cultural artifacts instead of mere specimens, all the while keeping up a soliloquized commentary filled with more than clinical scientific jargons. She doesn't know if seashells differ from planet to planet or as constant as oceans, but the familiar sight hits like home.
“May I?” she asks, reaching out a hand for one. At Mordin's slightly off-guard blink and far more curious noise of assent, she takes hold of a pinkish-cream conch shell marked with imperfect red-brown rings, thin on their paths around like paint scraped down canvas and flared at the grooved edges like river mouths, all swirling into a pool of solid color at the point end. It's a reassuring weight in her palm, its texture both rough and smooth like the calloused hands kindly holding hers in some far-off memory. She looks aside and finds a well-worn knife lying on the sand, because whatever this place is, it is kinder than the galaxy where millions are brutalized daily and all civilizations razed every fifty thousand years.
Her craft is amateur, crude, and the ghosts of her ancestors would surely turn in their graves should they bear witness, yet Mordin is sincerely fascinated. Shepard smiles to herself, amused and fond. For all he is a brilliant professor, the tainted work he'd done with the genophage, art and culture never fail to move him so passionately no matter the species, whether in captivated intrigue or righteous anger.
(She wonders if he'd known of the City of the Ancients on Tuchanka, if the STG had ever beheld it. If it would've even made any difference at all.)
When she has finished, she blows air into the instrument experimentally, the resulting bellow too unrefined to name it so yet. She works on it still, a precision task far more challenging to her than modding guns yet strangely as calming, recalling to her best her grandmother's expert hands and her mother's clumsy ones. On a daring impulse, she adds brave estimates of a tone hole and nearly stabs herself laughing at the squeaks and raspberries it coughs up; it turns out Mordin can and is eager to help with that. (“Helplessly tone deaf despite extensive cybernetics. Innate or learned, in humans? Or bio-synthetic fusions didn't carry over. Hmm. Need more samples.”) Still, they butcher two more seashells before they concur one acceptable.
"Yes, of course, of course!” Mordin nods eagerly, holding up the instrument and rotating it every which way. “Seashells plenty, interior already hollow, intuitive anatomy—where to place the mouth and blow.” Shepard snorts out a surprised laugh. Mordin smiles, nods definitively. “Excellent candidates for instruments.”
“I don't remember what we used to do with it,” Shepard says. She sits forward, hugging her knees to her chest. “Humans were luckier than the drell, but by the time we started to colonize other planets, my home country's islands had sunk well beneath the rising ocean. My mother never even set foot on them.” She wriggles her toes, digs into and feels the sun-warmed grains of sand between each one. She tucks her chin on her folded arms. “How can you miss something you never know?”
Mordin hums. “You make it worth it.”
Ah.
What is a legacy?
She looks at the instrument in Mordin’s hands and thinks of her grandmother and mother and tales of sunken islands told through bedtime stories and wistful longing. She thinks of Bakara, finally watching her children draw breath. She thinks of the krogan telling their children and grandchildren the tales of Mordin Solus, scientist salarian.
It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.
There'd been too much at stake and too little time during the war for Mordin to fawn over even Javik. Shepard will mourn never having seen him marvel at the geth's Consensus; at EDI unshackled, learning, changing; at the rachni's rise from the ashes; that he'll never hold a baby krogan in his arms and sing them battle lullabies.
But there will be baby krogan.
There will be mothers and fathers spared the pain of stillbirths.
And now, they have time.