Commander Jane Shepard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
earthborn) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thecapitol2014-04-22 11:16 am
earthborn) wrote in thecapitol2014-04-22 11:16 am
On Any Other Day
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.
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.
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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?"
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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."
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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.
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"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."
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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."
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"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."
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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."
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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'?"
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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."
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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.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, Joel, but she is military.
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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."
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"And I get the feeling you wouldn't let a pair of handcuffs stop you from doin' whatever the hell you wanted."
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"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.
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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."
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She still didn't. What did their lives matter to her, really? Nothing.
"Why in the hell is everybody in this place so damn optimistic?"
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He stopped himself, waved a hand vaguely. "I've just seen enough people like that - the ones who're sick, the ones who live just to cause pain. I'm not sayin' I think you're a saint."
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There were embers in her eyes when a gust of wind blew over and the shadow thrown by the tree momentarily bathed her face in a more muted light. It was over almost immediately, but after a moment, she still looked away.
"Can I buy you a coffee, Joel?" she was grasping for a topic change and the barista was coming back around, again, "Unless there's somewhere else you wanted to be."
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He thought about Tess, and Ellie, back in the Tribute Center. Part of him wanted to spend every moment he could with Tess, and another part of him wanted to keep his distance. After a moment, he nodded. "Coffee sounds good. I take mine black."