Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Food! Food food food food FOOOOOOD!” a little girl squealed, sprinting down the hallway.

Garrus blinked. Did that really just happen? And since when did Shepard have a kid?

He'd heard scuttlebutt around the ship of the Reapers turning human recently. As in, just over an hour ago. There was a lot he could lead himself to believe, especially after adventuring with Shepard, but that was over the line.

So where the hell did she get a kid? And she was definitely Shepard's kid, she looked like a tiny clone of the Commander. He wasn't aware of any Asari ever coming out without being blue all over, and Liara hadn't shown any signs of carrying a youngli-

“Hey Garrus,” the woman of his current thoughts greeted him. She sounded amused.

“Shepard,” he greeted her in return, turning to look at his commanding officer. “When did you get a kid?”

Her lips twitched, a little smirk taking over. “Just recently. She flew in.”

Garrus stared at her.

No way he'd heard that correctly.

“What?” the Turian eloquently asked.

Shepard nodded, pointing over her shoulder to the elevator she'd come from. “Met her in the cargo bay. She opened it up so she could fly in, pretty sure.”

Garrus… blinked.

“Flew in.”

“Yep.”

“From outside?” he asked for clarification.

“Uh huh.”

“She's way too young to pilot a shuttle,” Garrus protested. “Even if she is your kid.”

Shepard abruptly chuckled, shaking her head.

“What, she didn't fly it? Who'd she come with, then?”

Shepard stepped forward, placed a hand on his shoulder, and grinned.

He knew that grin. It promised either teasing, or pain for their enemies.

Or both.

Usually both.

“Nobody flew her in, Garrus, shuttle or otherwise. She flew into our open cargo bay. From outside the ship. On her own.”

Garrus looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.

“Shepard, we are in space.”

“Yup.”

“You're telling me a little girl who looks like you flew into our cargo bay from hard vacuum.”

“That's right.”

“...Alive.”

“Collie seems pretty alive to me, but then I'm not a philosopher,” she mused, shrugging.

He was silent for several more seconds, wondering just how far his commander had jumped off the nest's edge.

“Shepard, are you high?!” he finally exclaimed, his disbelief bursting from his mouth.

“I wish," she muttered. She retracted her hand with a light pat to his shoulder and clasped them behind her back. “But no. This is our new reality. Collie, the little girl who looks like my kid, is or was the Reaper we beat on the Collector Base.”

Garrus, if he had eyebrows, believed that they would have hit escape velocity.

He continued to stare at her.

Shepard pursed her lips and grimaced. “You don't believe me," she deduced.

"No kidding,” Garrus shot back.

She shrugged again and began to walk toward the mess hall again. "It's the truth," she insisted.

"Uh huh," Garrus deadpanned. "Did she have anything to do with the phantom Thresher Maw in the cargo bay?"

Shepard smirked at him. "She's hungry," she informed him with a shrug that was far too innocent for him to believe on her face in particular.

A somewhat distant squeal of "FOOD!" and what sounded like screams of horror emanated from the mess hall.

"Hungry," Garrus repeated. He looked between Shepard's still unworried, unhurried walk and the doors to the mess hall down the hall.

"Very hungry."

"...Riiight," he drawled.

Liara could not believe her eyes.

A young mirror of her lover sat on the other side of her table, a stuffed caricature of a Reaper on her back, mouth wide open as she practically shoveled food into a gaping maw which despite looking very similar to a human mouth could not possibly be due to the fact it was successfully intaking more matter than a fission thruster.

At the rate the girl was draining their kitchen via mortified cooks ferrying dish after dish to her only for her to systematically demolish the contents, the Normandy would be out of food in minutes.

Which was saying something, because it was supposedly fully stocked, and that stock could support a crew of hundreds for almost a year.

"...Collie, you said your name is?" Liara tried. She pointedly placed her fork down on her own plate and managed to close her mouth.

"Mmhm!" the girl nodded rapidly, not even slowing down to speak. Even though her mouth was full and her cheeks resembled those of an animal from Earth Shepard showed her known as a squirrel transporting its acorns, she was apparently able to make herself entirely clear.

Yet another impossibility to add to the list of what she'd already said or done, and that list included consuming several dozen times her mass and volume in sustenance.

"...Shepard's… Reaper… daughter," Liara continued, doing her best to emulate the nonplussed look her mother had always sent her way when she was young.

"Yep!" She scarfed down a steak, whole, and licked her lips. "But I know you're doing it with her so, you can be my mom too! Blue moms are cool!"

Liara's eyes bugged out, and she was grateful she wasn't eating or drinking anything. Despite her shock at the blatant phrasing, younglings were usually smarter than they looked, so she wasn't that surprised that the girl knew it.

...And on further reflection, even if Collie believed herself to be a Reaper incorrectly, because obviously she wasn't, that blatant phrasing was all Shepard.

Then the second part of her words hit Liara while the girl was shoving an entire foot length sandwich down her throat, and her heart melted.

The doors to the mess hall swished open, but Liara was… distracted.

"Uh… umm," she found herself stammering. She knew she was bright blue then, and she fiddled with her plate. "I… I'd like that, Collie. After Shepard tells me why she never told me about you."

Collie merely pointed over her shoulder instead of replying so she could keep eating.

"I didn't know, Liara," Shepard claimed. She swung her leg over the bench and sat next to Collie, curiously eyeing the stack of dishes on the edge of the table. "Is there still any food on my ship or have you eaten it all?"

Collie just shrugged and kept shoveling.

Shepard sighed. She raised her hands to palm her face and added a groan when she saw the cooks bringing out more food. "Hackett better give us enough funds to feed you if you're going to keep eating this much."



Liara, meanwhile, stared at her Commander, her lover, and if this Collie was to have her way (which, honestly, she was cute enough to extort out of them both) her soon to be wife, like she’d grown a second head. “What do you mean… keep, eating?” she asked, mortified. Her eyes tracked over to the still growing near city of plates that hadn’t yet been taken away.

Shepard shrugged. “It’s my first time dealing with ships that can walk and talk and need to eat-”

A feminine scoff of annoyance echoed out of the ceiling of the mess hall, EDI chiming in on that particular falsehood.

The Commander sat there for a few moments, stunned, then sighed and shook her head. “Okay, sorry, my second time dealing with ships that can walk, talk, and eat… and boy does that just sum up what we get into all the time,” she deadpanned. Shepard stuck her thumb out at the still shoveling little girl next to her and grimaced. “However, EDI eats very little. Collie, apparently, is starved, or something.” She turned to address Collie and raised her eyebrow. “You know you said you were hungry and like, a little bit of why, but could you expand on that? I want to have some kind of explanation when I march to my death to ask Hackett for more provisions.”

In between bites Collie complied, rambling what felt like a kilometer a second. “My mass drive core isn’t formed yet because I wasn’t supposed to be space capable for like, months, then you blew me up and whatever the heck it is that brought me back like this didn’t give me a very big core so I’m kinda rapidly converting this food into a core that’s big enough to sustain my reaction systems which is like, bigger than the Normandy by several times, so I need a lot. As for how exactly this food is being turned into Element Zero in my stomach that doesn’t actually exist, I have no clue but it’s yummy!”

Shepard blinked several times at the ‘explanation’. “EDI, please tell me you got all that?”

“I’ve recorded it, Commander. I’m still working on believing.”

“That makes two of us.”

Liara continued to feel her own jaw drop at the ludicrous nature of their current conversation. A sudden thought occurred to her and she lowered her head to the table in an attempt at being discreet. “Shepard,” she hissed, instantly gaining her lover’s attention, “you didn’t tell me your people trained kids to be N7! That’s horrible!”

Shepard and Collie looked at her like she was the insane one for a few moments. The latter even halted her eating long enough for the terrified mess hands to dash in and out, taking away the towers of plates and bowls.

Then Collie’s eyes widened, and she burst out giggling.

Shepard just sighed and shook her head, a long-suffering smile of commiseration on her lips that Liara was well familiar with appearing whenever things stopped making sense. A tingle of dread fell down her spine as the next words came from the target of her incredulity’s mouth.

“She’s not an N7, Liara. She’s a ship. A Reaper, actually. The one we kinda blew up on the Collector Base.”

Shepard sat there and waited for Liara to process that, knowing damn well that she sounded like she was full of it.

Liara only had one thing she could utter. “...Jane, are you on drugs?”

Garrus chimed in from across the cafeteria. “THAT’S WHAT I SAID!”