Chapter Text
It’s been fifteen months since her body was recovered from the rubble of Ground Zero.
Fifteen months of grueling reconstruction of her bones and muscles and the Cerberus-built parts of her that were one of the few reasons she survived at all. Gratefulness is embedded into her skin from the time when her mother was still alive – the stubborn ease of Anna Shepard’s graciousness often left Leigh speechless. Shepard herself can’t for the life of her feel grateful for Cerberus without feeling a jab of guilt-ridden anger boil at the bottom of her stomach, like a wound that keeps pestering her again and again. Guilt is as easy for her as gratefulness was for her mother. But then again that guilt is something she’s befriended over the time she’s had to spend more or less bed-bound.
That comes with being awake, she supposes. The first eight months she spent mostly asleep, in a drug-induced coma that was supposed to help with her healing. Considering the pain she’s had every day since then, she has to think being asleep was a blessing. Sleep like that didn’t have any dreams. There was just blackness and sometimes colors that resembled the shields she used to see from the windows of the Normandy. A mess of blues and violets dancing against a sheet of black, like she’d be watching cold-hued northern lights dance behind her eyelids. Of course the memory of this after she awoke felt distant, like her brain had been turned off for too long – and sometimes she felt like the whole thing was just her imagination trying to fill in the months of nothing in her head. Even with the months spent unconscious, poked, prodded, and on the verge of existing, her body still resembles the mess it was before Project Lazarus was started, but for better or worse she’s been awake. More or less, at least.
The few times she’s braved to look into a mirror have been disorienting. It’s like she’s getting used to a rebuilt version of herself, even if little has changed. She thought the biggest shock should’ve come after Cerberus and their reconstruction of her, but this post-Reaper-war Shepard is worse.
She's not what she was. Her body is not what it was. The strong lines of muscles have withered away and left behind what she can only call a ghost of herself. It’s hard to think back on a time when she was a worthy opponent to creatures thrice her size, when getting out of bed and doing her mandatory walks around the hospital is too much of work. Despite the physical therapy and the new plates on her legs to aid the bones the remnants of the Catalyst cracked, there’s still a sway in her step that wasn’t there before. She tries to hide it most of the time, with that pride of hers clinging so tight to her skin that whatever the ache and cost of her resilience is, she can’t let that vulnerability show.
It's not a limp (even if her doctor has called it that more than once), but whatever it is, it's an all-too visible reminder of what has happened to her. It’s enough that she’s bound to a bed, unable to help with anything aside from giving intel on how the destruction of Reapers came to be, but to visibly be even more frail than she lets on? Not a chance. And as if she needed matters to be made worse, the subject of Reapers has been chewed dry a long time ago. Everyone knows what happened and what was left behind, which leaves her little to no role in the world that's come after the war.
She’s scarred, which in itself is nothing new, but the frames of those scars are unfamiliar. An ugly pallor clings to her naturally brown skin and the soft curls she usually keeps short have grown to her shoulders. The lines of her muscles aren’t as sharp as they used to be, thanks to the lack of virtually any kind of movement aside from hobbling to meet the daily walking requirements her nurses push on her, let alone her rigorous training routine. Yet again one thing of the past that feels like it was in another life entirely.
All in all the word she’d describe herself now is soft, and as hard as she tries to convince herself it doesn’t matter (she’s alive, shouldn't that be good enough?), it definitely does. In features that don’t feel like her Shepard finds a resemblance to her mother, another face so long gone she doesn’t know if her memory is failing her on that, too.
Or maybe it’s trying to find a silver lining amongst the rubble.