Shepard holds a funeral for her clone.
The paperwork is almost harder than the ceremony. Turns out it’s tricky to register the death of someone whose birth - creation? Decanting-from-vat? - was never recorded to begin with. Then there’s some kind of question about whether the clone needs to be retroactively registered as a Council space citizen to have her death put on the official record, and if so, whether she counts as a member of the Systems Alliance or as an ‘undocumented alien’. Which is pretty fucking ironic, considering how utterly she’d have loathed having the word alien attached to her.
And once Shepard’s ground her teeth through a dozen calls and bludgeoned through the first layer of formwork - a death certificate still needs a name.
‘I have to put something,’ she says. She’s aware that her voice is ragged, and that Kaidan is watching her as he brews her fourth coffee of the evening with concern heavy on his face. She must look barely alive, up near midnight in a kitchen that was Anderson’s and still feels nothing like hers, hair falling forward, eyes shadowed grey. Datapads and empty mugs strewn around her. Fine. She’s felt barely alive ever since she woke up in a Cerberus lab.
‘You could choose one for her,’ Kaidan says gently. A lot of people speak to her gently, these days.
‘She’d hate that. A name makes you individual. She didn’t want to be an individual; she wanted to be me.’
The cofee machine whirrs softly, sounding louder than it is in the open space of the apartment. It still doesn’t feel right, all this space for one person. Someone could drown in this much space.
‘She didn’t want to be you, though. Not really.’ Kaidan pours out the coffee, his eyes only leaving her face for a moment. ‘What she wanted was to be the symbol. The face on the vids.’
He carries the mug over and sets it down beside her hand. Shepard grips it tight. The unfinished form blinks up at her from the datapad screen, and she looks away.
‘I’m not asking this because I don’t support you doing it, or to judge you for it, or anything,’ Kaidan says, after a moment. ‘I just want to understand. Can you tell me why this is so important to you? I mean - I get that you were trying to save her, and she... she let go. But...’
He hesitates, and in his silence Shepard hears, she tried to kill you. She tried to take you away from me, and everyone who cares about you, for a second time - because she was jealous.
Shepard sips her coffee. It hasn’t had time to cool down, and her lips smart. She ignores it. She thinks.
‘What you said about... being the symbol,’ she says at last. ‘I get why she wanted it, or thought she did. I understand feeling that Commander Shepard is someone bigger than you are.’
Kaidan breathes out slowly, and takes a seat beside her.
‘I get feeling that you’re so small, so nothing, next to everyone’s idea of what Commander Shepard is. And when I fall short -’ She sees him prepare to protest, and cuts across him. ‘I do, I do all the time - I feel like it’d be easier if I were the symbol. Not...’ She waves a hand, indicating all the sleep-starved mess of her. ‘This. I don’t even know when what would Shepard do and what will I do stopped feeling like the same question.’
She lets her hand fall back onto the table. Kaidan takes it and holds it tight.
‘And I think of her, the clone, waking up in some Cerberus med bay. Confused. And Brooks - Brooks was there, feeding her things to believe, manipulating her, turning her into the symbol she wanted. And I get it.’ Shepard bites her burned lip. ‘Because I woke up in a Cerberus lab. And I was scared. And they used me, and I let them.’
What she does not add is, and sometimes I don’t feel any more real than her. I don’t have any way to prove that I’m the woman who died in the wreckage of her broken ship. They wiped away that woman’s scars. There could be all kinds of tech in my head, feeding me a lie, telling me I’m real.
She swallows. Her throat feels raw. ‘And now the clone’s dead, and no one cares. We’re planning a fucking party. If I don’t push for a funeral, she’ll just go unregistered and undocumented and everyone will keep joking about how crazy this whole mess has been, how I fell through a fish tank and a mad clone tried to steal my life, and it’d be like she never existed at all. I don’t have to fill in these forms. I could take the easy road and let her be a ghost. But I can’t do that, Kaidan. I can’t.’
He looks at her, his eyes steady and patient and full of worry. Then he slips an arm over her shoulder and pulls her in, and Shepard leans into him, needing the surety of his touch, his warmth. Anything that tells her she’s something more than a force piloting a set of N7 armour.
Kaidan presses a slow kiss to the top of her head. He holds her until she stops feeling ready to howl. Then he sits with her and helps her fill in the forms, helps her choose a name for the clone, one that fits. When morning comes, he calls C-Sec and stays on the line until they agree to release the body to the Normandy, into the custody of the only person who could be considered the dead woman’s relative.
He doesn’t ask Shepard any more questions as to why she needs this done.
In the end, they bury her in space, as Shepard would a crewmate. And no one has stories to tell of what she meant to them. They have nothing to say about the achievements of her angry little life. But they wear their dress blues, and speak softly, and they turn the lights down low.
Shepard doesn’t know if this is what her clone would have wanted. Maybe she never learned to want anything for herself at all. It doesn’t matter. A funeral doesn’t help her clone; it helps her.
They lift the casket into the airlock. EDI opens the outer door. And the casket leaps away into space in a blur of silver-grey, like the body within is hungry for the stars.
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