On Any Other Day

[earthborn]

Who| Shepard And Her Adoring Fans
What| The Customer Complaints Desk Is [OPEN]
Where| A lovely little park outside a lovely little café on a quiet day when the sun is shining, just after a certain network post
When| The morning after Shepard's Exposé goes live.
Warnings/Notes| Talk of murder, genocide, cussing, and political discourse. God help us all.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, she's got a rail-thin barrista with a shock of violet-pink hair, and he keeps bringing her coffee from all the way across the street. On any other day, she'd call it perfect— he keeps sarcastically saluting her and she keeps sarcastically thanking him as 'private', and the coffee is damn good in addition to cheap and hand-delivered. On any other day.

But despite the shining weather and the convenient caffeine-drip, she's not set up here with the empty chair beside her own for the sake of simple joys.

Come at me, bro.

Comments

[aintyourdad]

"Really? Military badass like you?" Not that Joel was one to judge - he was fully aware most people around here had no idea what to make of him and Ellie. Not that he owed anyone any kind of explanation for it.

Still, he was curious what sort of kid a woman like this found herself with.

[earthborn]

"Yeah, almost as weird as some asshole hanging around with a girl he's definitely not related to," Because honestly, Joel, you walked yourself right into that one, "He's a good kid, it's just that they grow up so damn fast. They, uh...he actually just got his first command a few months before I got here. Krogan army doesn't screw around when they think you can handle it, and they don't give a shit how old you are."

Joel would probably like Grunt, once he got over the 'first time meeting a Krogan' part. Grunt was sharp, thoughtful, but most of all direct, just like Shepard. Hell, just like most Krogan. Shepard got the feeling that it was a quality Joel appreciated about as much as she did.

"Come to think of it, he'd probably get along pretty well with Ellie."

[aintyourdad]

"They grow up fast when they need to," Joel says with an almost sad tone of voice - thinking of Ellie, and the way she was before Colorado, and the way she is now. She's fine most of the time these days, but still more subdued than she ever was when they first met.

"They probably would. Then again, Ellie gets along with most folks who don't patronize and aren't tryin' to kill her." His eyes slid over to her with something akin to irony, or even a hint of amusement.

[earthborn]

"Hah," she caught the wry glance and rolled her eyes on cue, "I don't think Grunt has ever once patronized... anyone."

He might threaten them with a painful death in a variety of fast or slow options, but he only ever seemed to stumble on sarcasm or verbal cruelty by accident. Good cursing vocabulary, of course, but by now it would've been a miracle if he hadn't. Wonder what Okeer would have made of his 'perfect soldier' now?

"There was a joke going around that I collect deadly killers like some people collect trading cards," She snorted and sat back comfortably to show how little it bothered her, "It's kinda hard for me to take it seriously when I remember him playing pretend with plastic sharks."

[aintyourdad]

"It's a weird feeling," Joel admitted with a nod. "Ellie's a kid - she likes ice cream, and comic books. She made me play laser tag at the Crowning."

He glanced up at the sky, at the clouds drifting overhead, thinking back to a cold, cold winter. "I couldn't tell you how many people she's killed. Not just infected - people. I got hurt real bad, a while back. She kept me alive, for weeks. I'm not even sure how she did it."

[earthborn]

"I don't know, kinda reminds me of when I was a kid," If not for the quiet of the day, the sound of a living city muffled by the foliage, she might easily have gone unheard. It wasn't sadness; hard to be truly sad about being on the winning side when the losers invariably ended up dead in a gutter or homeless ward.

It felt strange, comparing pasts with someone less than half your age, "You do what you have to, to get by. I was only a little older than her the first time I killed. She's an impressive person."

Not a kid, just this once, but a person. Shepard shook off the contemplative mood and scrubbed a hand across her face. There was no help for it.

"Tell me about it, Joel. The infected, the whole lot? Help me put some context to it."

[aintyourdad]

"She's the strongest person I know," Joel said firmly. He believed every word of that, too. She was stronger than him, for sure.

He didn't like talking about it - with anyone here. No one here could possibly understand, and he didn't owe anyone an explanation. But somehow Shepard - well, he knew she wasn't going to judge, or offer useless pity, or try to explain how her world was just like that. It made it easier.

"It's a disease," he said with a shrug. "Cordyceps brain infection. It's a fungus, actually. About, oh, twenty years ago - 2013 - it got into our crops, somehow, then jumped to people. It grows in your brain. You lose your mind within a few days, start attackin' anyone in sight. It killed off most of the population in a few years, I guess. Last time anyone was around to count, I heard it was somethin' like 60% dead or infected. That was years ago, it's probably more'n that now. Governments collapsed, society fell apart. Some of the cities got quarantined, they've been run by military units, but even those're collapsing, far as I've seen. I doubt there's more than a handful left."

[earthborn]

She listened and thought of the Quarians, fleeing their home world, population whittled down until they fought a constant war between their desperation for population grown and genetic diversity, and the desperate scramble for resources. Thought about London, Cairo, Vancouver, brunt black under Reaper lasers, the few civilian populations still left as isolated pockets. Thought about the masses converted into Reaper sludge and Husk ground-troops. Liara's horror when she realized, finally, truly swallowed the bitter pill that the monsters they were fighting weren't just targets to be dehumanized and eliminated.

They were once people.

"Martial Law. It's not an easy way to do things, but it's smart" she said, with a recognition devoid of value, "That's hard to come back from. It's possible; hope's not dead so long as there are still a couple hundred healthy adults. Not that I recommend it."

The Quarian bottleneck research again. But it felt a lot more immediate when you weren't talking about some poorly visualized group of aliens. Human extinction was a fact of life for more than just Joel's world, after all.

"So where do you and Ellie enter into it?"

[aintyourdad]

"It ain't smart when most people hate it," Joel said with a shrug. "When it means people fightin' for control of the few places free of infection - we're not comin' back from it."

He said that with a flatness to his voice. "There's no cure. Even if - doesn't matter. There's almost nothin' left to save." Almost no one worth saving, he didn't quite say.

"I was a smuggler. I got hired to smuggle Ellie. Then, I don't know, shit happened. And I made a promise. To keep her safe, to get her - where she needed to go. That's all. I'm nobody, she's nobody. Just survivors."

[earthborn]

"Bullshit, you love that kid," She's not asking; it's the plain truth.

Some part of her was thinking about population density and infection vectors and all the hundreds of little things that led up to successful and satisfactory refugee management.

Sounded to her, judging by what Joel had said, that whoever was running things in his hometown was more shitting on the cats than herding them. No one spoke that calmly about the death of his species unless he really believed it was unsalvageable.

"Maybe. Maybe not. But it's a pretty big planet. I'm willing to bet you haven't seen the whole of it," Shepard is not the kind of person willing to accept failure as an option, even in abstention, "Kind of a moot point, anyways. At least, for now."

Something to remember, when she got home. Gonna be a lot of apocalypse to go around.

[aintyourdad]

"I didn't say I don't, I'm just tellin' you how we met," he pointed out with a shrug.

"We've spent the past ten months or so, hoofin' it cross-country. We started in Boston, we were in Salt Lake City when we - " He waved his hand at their surroundings.

"Boston was collapsing when we left, hadn't even seen another QZ still operational. You got your pockets of people, little groups livin' however they can, in the old QZs or in other places. My brother's got a pretty decent set-up in Wyoming. Crops, livestock. Long as they can keep the infected out, and hunters, and... well, everything, they might be okay."

[earthborn]

"I've seen longer shots end up fine."

Never give in, never surrender, never let them see the fear you carry. Ever.

"...Sorry," He might not see the fear, but Joel can probably see the sheepishness just fine, "I've been told that I'm a little stubborn. Thanks for talking about it with me."

[aintyourdad]

Joel's lips twitched a little - not really a smile, but maybe the beginnings of one. "Twenty years is a long time to keep goin', I think I'm pretty stubborn, too.

"I honestly never thought much about it, though - humanity, I mean. Livin' day to day was plenty to handle. I guess it's just... bein' here, I get time to think. Seein' this place, the way people are. How many people there are."

[earthborn]

"Not too many," She lifts her head to look around, considering the idle population, andnot for the first time that day, "I've...had the opportunity to think about 'humanity' a lot. It was kinda my job."

Had it really been a year? No, more than. It felt like a lot longer, and at the same time, almost no time at all. Nothing had happened.

"These people have no idea how bad it can get," She wasn't going to go for one, Shepard still had more self control than that, but the desire for a pleasant distance from this reality rose up in her and, for just a moment, seized control of her voice, "I need a drink."

[aintyourdad]

"Way more'n I've seen in one place in a long, long time," he pointed out with a shrug. "I get jumpy."

He scanned some of the people milling around - the weird hair, the absurd clothes, the tittering laughter. Oblivious.

"I know what you mean. But that must be some job you had - that an official title where you're from, 'Protector of Humanity'?"

[earthborn]

"Don't even joke about that. Some Elcor still call me the 'Saviour of the Citadel,' right to my face. I was just about ready to start shooting people after a certain point."

You run one rescue fleet past Dekuuna and they never let you forget it. Shoulda just let the wrinkly bastards burn; she doesn't mean that, not really, except for on days when she has to hear about it.

"Commander is just fine. My job was..." she opened her mouth to continue, then shut it, grimacing, "...glorified gopher with a warship, is what it feels like. Everyone keeps acting like I'm the big damn hero who's gonna save them all from the other side of this war. Meanwhile, the human population is... getting kinda thin. I was in London just before I showed up here; there wasn't a lot of it left standing. Why they think I have the answers to all that, I'll never know."

[aintyourdad]

"Guess some people just get picked, whether they like it or not," Joel said thoughtfully. He thought about Ellie, and how she seemed to have taken the responsibility of the whole world onto her shoulders, and how much he resented that sometimes.

She shouldn't have to do that, no matter how special she was.

"I don't like titles, anyway. You got a first name?" In Joel's world, first names were the only ones that mattered, except, well. To the military in the Zone.

[earthborn]

"It's Jane," Not often she feels comfortable using it, but it comes out easily, "Most people just call me Shepard, though."

Not to put too fine a point on it, Joel, but she is military.

[aintyourdad]

"Is that your polite way of sayin' you'll rip my balls off if I try usin' your first name?" Joel asked with another twitch of his lips. He is not military, after all. Calling someone by their last name is a weird concept for him.

[earthborn]

She smirked, "Only one way to find out."

Which was a no, of course. He could call her Jane if she wanted, but no one had ever regularly called her that. She'd been Red, Skip, or Shy for a long time and had only become Jane when putting off replacing the "Doe" on her official paperwork with something more believable.

She wasn't sure if she'd remember to react quickly in an emergency— which was quite likely to turn up, given the circumstances.

"Of course, if I did, the cops would probably cuff me."

[aintyourdad]

"Wouldn't be the first ball-buster I've pissed off," he said easily enough, thinking of Tess. He should probably get back to her, as difficult as it is.

"And I get the feeling you wouldn't let a pair of handcuffs stop you from doin' whatever the hell you wanted."

[earthborn]

The retort died on her lips. She hadn't yet been cuffed in the Capitol, and only rarely before, since her youth. But that hadn't been as true, after Aratoht.

"You might be surprised," the smirk had gone with her good mood, "Not everything in that vid was a lie. People don't take that level of damage lying down."

The Alliance might have been who she turned herself over to, but she'd been in Alliance prisons before. They didn't come with the charming Batarianesque amenities she'd had before they'd transferred her to the house arrest in Vancouver. They had rules.

[aintyourdad]

"No, I s'pose that's pretty universal. Destroy what somebody loves and they'll get pissed at you," Joel said with a shrug. "No matter how good the reason. Kill a man, and everyone who loves him is gonna be your enemy."

[earthborn]

She blinked once, as if trying to shutter the memories back by physical effort. Still no time to fall apart, Shepard. You'll deal with it later. If you live long enough.

She could have purged the boil; Joel would have been receptive, she was sure. Or maybe he wasn't as unjudgemental as he seemed. Regardless, she said nothing, only breathed quietly for a moment, deliberate and slow.

"I had a good reason. But it doesn't matter, now."

[aintyourdad]

"I figure, whatever we did, whatever we were, before we got here - doesn't really matter now," Joel admitted with a nod. "Some of the people here - they like to kill. To cause pain, just because they can. I don't think you're one of 'em, so I'm not too worried."