Chapter Text
“It was Shepard again."
The Illusive Man took a drag on his cigarette. He could feel the vibration of Kai Leng pacing back and forth behind his chair. “Of course, it was.”
“That base should have been able to hold out against her,” said Leng. “Pathetic.”
“They underestimated her,” said the Illusive Man, scrolling through the images on his screen. Images of Shepard pointing a pistol at a Cerberus operative, followed by the operative lying on the ground. Other footage showed Garrus Vakarian in a sniper nest, with the Prothean throwing a grenade from behind a crate.
“If I had been there—” started Leng.
“—you would have underestimated her, too,” said the Illusive Man.
"Maybe we'd still have the base if you'd just killed Shepard while she was still in your grasp."
“I allowed Shepard to leave by mutual agreement after her successful attack on the Collector base,” said the Illusive Man. "She served her function."
It was a lie. He had tried to recall the Normandy for months afterward to no avail.
“If she had faced me one-on-one on the Citadel—” said Leng.
“I have a new assignment for you,” said the Illusive Man, feeling a headache begin to spread behind his eyes.
Kai Leng left after his briefing, and the Illusive Man sighed. The loss of the base was more severe than he let on. Though he would never say it out loud, he had underestimated Shepard as well. It seemed to be an unbreakable habit. Every time he assumed she was outgunned, outclassed, and out-funded, she pulled off a victory that left his best agents humiliated.
He should have been able to push past the frustration and stay focused on the Reapers. And yet.
The Illusive Man set his cigarette in the ash tray and switched to brandy. The ice clinked in the glass as he raised it to his lips. He clicked on an encrypted file, pressing his thumb to the biometric reader on his chair arm to open it.
Images of Shepard spread across the screen.
Shepard as a sulky teenager with cold sores on her lip and a gang tattoo on her neck.
Shepard in basic training with long, black hair pinned up. Shepard after Akuze with a shaved head and dark circles under her eyes.
Shepard being sworn-in as the first human Spectre. Shepard's charred corpse on an operating table.
Shepard in a Cerberus uniform reading a datapad in the starboard lounge of the Normandy SR-2.
He wasn’t sure why he was fascinated by her. Maybe it was just her manner, that unflinching fearlessness that drew people to her like a magnet.
Or maybe it was because he had wanted her by his side.
Their alliance should have worked. Shepard had proven time and again that she put human lives first. She had sacrificed the Council. She had done what needed to be done.
He had invested so much in her. Idealistically, he had envisioned a future with Shepard as his right arm. She was meant to be his sword, the one who would carve out a glorious future for humanity.
Instead, she had made a fool out of him and stolen his ship.
It still scalded him to remember it. Every time he received a new report of Shepard thwarting Cerberus, he found himself angry to the point of seeing red. Why couldn’t she see what he was doing? Why couldn’t she see how much stronger they would be if they worked together?
How had she gotten the better of him so easily?
He could feel his blood pressure climbing. Pain crackled behind his eyes, making his cybernetics ache inside his skull. He sipped his brandy, trying to relax. His doctors had warned him that his health was becoming increasingly precarious. He couldn’t afford to overtax himself with so much at stake.
He needed to relax.
He flicked through the images until he found a folder near the back. When the Lazarus Project had begun, Cerberus had assembled an archive of every vid, image, and record of Shepard’s life. Some of them were public, but the majority were from private logs, secure channels, and sealed Alliance records.
Others were bought from information brokers. A few from the Shadow Broker himself.
The Illusive Man opened the unnamed folder. Inside were three vids. He clicked the first one.
It was a vid taken by a drone. Shepard walked along a sunlit promenade in a seaside shopping district. She was wearing a ballcap to cover her face, as was the man behind her.
The two of them entered an apartment complex. The drone, obviously cloaked, began to circle the building until it found a window. Inside, Shepard and her male companion took off their hats.
The man was Kaidan Alenko.
The vid was dated not long after the battle of the Citadel. The planet, Uravia, was a pleasure colony in asari space. Shepard had rented an apartment there for shore leave and brought along her staff lieutenant.
Transport records indicated that the two of them had been trying to be stealthy. They mostly succeeded, but small details gave them away. Security screens at customs. Tailored advertising at a restaurant. An automatic chit upload on a toll road.
The next few minutes showed the two wandering around the apartment, Shepard giving Alenko the tour. They drank a beer on the balcony.
Then, as inevitably as an asteroid falling into orbit, Shepard leaned forward and kissed him.
The drone followed them from window to window as they shed clothes. Shepard ran up the stairs laughing, Alenko on her heels. They found their way to the bedroom.
The Illusive Man scrolled forward a few minutes to a highlighted portion of the vid. It was shot from above through a skylight. Shepard was naked in Alenko’s lap, arms around his neck, her eyes closed and her mouth open in soundless rapture.
The Illusive Man replayed the brief scene over and over on automatic repeat. He never tired of the moment. It was Shepard as she never expected him to see her: vulnerable.
There were other positions, but none of them electrified him like that moment. Shepard, her face wide open, body shaking, helpless.
The vid had belonged to a private detective hired by the Williams family to investigate their daughter’s death. There had been rampant speculation, both within the Alliance and on the extranet, that Commander Shepard had not been as impartial as she claimed to be about who she chose to die on Virmire. There were rumors that a tribunal might be held, but the Alliance decided against it. Shepard was a Spectre, the hero of the Citadel, and the savior of humanity. If she wanted to indulge in a little fraternization with one of her subordinates, could anyone really judge her?
The Williams family might have made a case with the vid, but the Shadow Broker had intervened and purchased it for an exorbitant rate. What he had planned to do with it, no one knew, but it had cost the Lazarus Project a pretty penny down the road.
The Illusive Man closed the vid and opened the second one. It was a composite vid. The first half was dated the solar day before the suicide mission on the Collective base. The quality was not as high, and it was shot through night vision. The footage came from a hidden camera in Shepard’s quarters, the only one the Commander had never managed to find.
It was embedded in a piece of bulkhead over the bed. Below, in the dark, Shepard lay with her legs spread, Thane Krios between them.
Her affair with the drell had been unexpected but in keeping with her psychological profile. The Commander entered and exited relationships abruptly. Her unstable childhood had left her with a strong fight or flight instinct, a hair-trigger temper, and deep insecurities. She had severed ties with Alenko and gone after Krios aggressively. The drell, no doubt projecting his dead wife onto her, had fallen in love.
He fast-forwarded to the second half. Following the Collector Base, the lovers had spent a few nights on Illium while the Normandy underwent repairs. It was meant to be one last vacation before Shepard turned herself into the Alliance. Ser Krios, ever the gentlemen, had taken her to the opera.
A camera recording the performance had swept over the audience at an opportune moment: revealing, in the dark of a private booth, a man and a woman kissing.
By zooming in and cleaning up the quality, as many had done on the extranet, it was clear that the woman’s legs were spread, her dress around her hips, panties around one ankle, with the man’s fused fingers plunged to the knuckle inside her.
Shepard’s face and Krios’s face had been covered by each other’s as they kissed in the dark. The two had used assumed names and falsified identities, so while there was a brief meme about the fucking couple at the Nos Astra opera, neither their reputations suffered for it.
It had been a Cerberus operative who informed the Illusive Man that the mole on the woman’s labia matched one on Commander Shepard’s, and given her presence in the city at the time, it had not been hard to identify her.
He sipped the brandy, his throat dry, and opened the last vid.
It was not explicit. It showed Shepard and Alenko at a restaurant on the Presidium. The time stamp put it at three weeks after the Cerberus attack on the Citadel. Thane Krios’s remains would have long been vaporized in a Zakera ward crematorium.
The two of them were smiling, their fingers intertwined. They were happy together, as if nothing had happened. As if Thane Krios had merely been a distraction for Shepard to use and throw away.
“Whore,” said the Illusive Man.
He could feel rage swallowing him again, the quickening of his pulse souring to something jagged and yellow. Tossing back the glass to finish off the melted ice, he slammed the glass back down and finished off his cigarette.
He couldn’t keep doing this. It was becoming an obsession. He wondered if the Reaper cybernetics he’d recently had implanted were impairing his mind. After all, the Reapers were fascinated with Shepard, too.
He needed an alternative solution.
He opened a comm. “Lila,” he said.
“Yes, sir?” said the engineer on the other end.
“I have a job for you,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“This is a Level Five project, strictly off the books. Confidentiality is of the utmost import.”
“Yes sir,” she said. “What is it?”
He typed the words and sent the message.
There was a long, long pause on the other end.
“Of course, sir,” she said.
“See that it gets done,” said the Illusive Man.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“And Lila?”
She waited.
“I meant what I said. Tell no one." He closed the comm.