A/N: I own nothing except the laptop I wrote this story on.

I was twenty-six when my life changed forever. When I was thirty-one, my sister was killed.

Perhaps I should back up.

We were born to a pair of space-faring Alliance commanders, each of them stationed on their own ship. Hannah was mom, and Daniel was Dad. They didn't see each other as often as they liked; but they made the time that they had count. Shore leave, joint operations between their respective postings, convieniently synchronized sick days…they became something of a running joke amongst their colleagues in space. "Some people juggle work around their lives. Only the Shepards do it the other way around." They used to say things like that. Never bothered either mom or dad: they were the ones in love, and the rest of the Alliance could stick it as far as they were concerned. They were in love, and that was all that mattered.

As a result, I guess Sis and I picked up a similar mindset: as long as you made the time you had together count, then that was what mattered. She and I rotated between the ships growing up; sometimes I was with dad, and sometimes she was. Sometimes I was with mom, and then sometimes she was. Though as we got older, we gravitated. I tended to be with dad more often, and she tended to be with mom. Fair enough, I suppose. And no one really complained. I sure didn't. And neither did Sis.

I knew she was gonna be the one that the big-wigs would grow to love. She glided through her classes, and took to space life like a duck takes to water. She aced her exams; I grinded through them by sheer effort and luck. She got every recommendation in the world; I weighed my options and decided that the life of a commissioned officer just wasn't in the books. And yet she never made me feel like I'd "failed" because I hadn't hit her level. Of course, I always kicked her ass in the marksmanship tests, so I at least had that.

You could just see how much she loved the life of an officer. She was the smart one, after all. Dad and I joked that she took after the smart half of the family; it was best to keep the doofuses off to the side. In the meantime, I took a posting in the shock troopers. Just a regular grunt, and an NCO at best. I'd never have the same arc that Sis did, but that was ok.

Leading a ship isn't just about making the correct battle decisions: it's about juggling the politics and everything else involved. That's messy stuff. I prefer staying in the muck with my buddies, in a foxhole somewhere in a hellish planet where the flora might be just as dangerous as the inhabitants, cupping our hands over a lighter in order to sneak a smoke without giving away a position. There's a certain rush from that life that filing paperwork never really manages to satiate. Let Sis take care of that itch her own way; I'll deal with my own itches my own way.

I contented myself to a life of living on the edge, as the blue-collar to my sister's white collar. I could even see what my likely career arc would be: a career in the infantry, with a few promotions based on merit, and then towards the end I might get a graveyard promotion on my retirement because of my last name. I might get married; I might get divorced. Being a grunt is a hard life, after all. But I had my family, and that was good enough for me.

And then it all got taken away.

Turns out that, while all the other alien species in Council Space were suspicious about us squishy humans, only the Batarians had the balls or the craziness to do something about it. They ripped right through the Skyllian Verge, blasting through the lightly-defended posts and colonies like a hot knife through butter. They only took prisoners when convenient, and dealt with the rest how you expected them to. Racism is a hell of a motivator for creative killing, regardless of who's the perpetrator and who's the victim.

Well, in the middle of their preemptive strike, those four-eyed bastards went and made the two biggest mistakes of their lives.

The first was trying to take Elysium.

You know how that one went. And yet, still, I got a lot of mileage out of asking Sis what it was like to save an entire colony single-handedly with only a few civvie guns (that got overrun or injured or killed quickly)…in her pajamas. You think I'm joking, but the Alliance bean counter had to look through the glossary of military terms to find a more "dignified" description of what Sis was wearing. He settled for "non-combat fatigues." That's got to be the most professional description for red flannel pajama and a panda bear t-shirt that I've ever seen in my life.

I sometimes wonder what the last thoughts of anyone she gunned down that day were, as they realized they were getting sent to their maker by a girl who looked like she'd been woken from a slumber party. That was a pretty funny mistake.

The second one wasn't so funny.

A little over a year after Elysium, a human outpost surrendered to the invading Batarians, with a gentleman's agreement between the commanding officer of the invading force and the garrison that no fire would be made on the retreating civvies, who were loaded into a single ship and to leave to spread the word of the attack. Relatively straightforward, I suppose. The combatants stay to fight to the end, and the civilians leave like they're supposed to.

Except as soon as the ship was in space, the Batarians opened fire. One ship up against a small fleet of cruisers, not even bothering to keep their shields up? You do the math. When it was brought to the attention of Council space, the Batarian Hegemony swore that they thought it was an enemy ship that was planning a suicidal attack, despite the fact that it was going in the opposite direction and the only guns it had were ones the passengers could've made with their fingers.

Also, the captain of that doomed ship? Daniel Shepard, husband of then-XO of the SSV Einstein Hannah Shepard, and father of two. Dad died doing what he did best: looking after people, and always believing in the angels of our better nature. Of course, pretty words don't mean a whole lot when the guy who taught you how to throw a baseball gets vaporized in the dead of space.

Nobody bought the Batarian story, least of all the Alliance. It got so bad that even the Turian Hierarchy privately contacted Alliance brass about helping organize a counter-attack, just to remind the Batarians what happens you commit what amounts to state-sponsored terrorism against another species. Considering the relatively frosty public relationship between Turians and humans at the time, none of this was "official." A few Turians, maybe even a few SPECTREs, provided some intelligence and weapons suggestions, as well as locations that would be worth striking for maximum psychological impact. Say what you will about Turians and their tendency to have a stick rammed up their backside, but they know how to fight. They schooled us in the First Contact war, after all. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I was part of the major unit to be deployed at the location: a mining colony on a moon called Torfan. Nothing really nice about that place, but it was part of the Hegemony and it was considered just important enough to the Batarians that attacking it would scare the hell out of them. Not for the number of casualties, necessarily, but for the fact that there were a lot of dirty secrets buried in those mines that I imagine the top Batarian brass would prefer the rest of the galaxy not find. After providing as much intel and support as they could while still maintaining plausible deniability, the Turians pointed us in the general direction of Torfan and stepped back to watch the fireworks.

Mom and Sis weren't too happy that I'd been assigned as part of the strike team, and were even more annoyed that I was at the unit that'd be spearheading the operation. I was the second in command to the leader, a Major Benjamin Kyle. Nice guy, but definitely not the right person to lead this kind of op. He was the sort who got promoted because he was great at toeing the line and filing paperwork, but his fieldwork tests were just average at best. And true enough; at the first sight of how stiff the Batarian resistance was, he clammed up. Official reports list it as a nervous breakdown on the battlefield, but anyone who was there would put it a little differently. Perhaps a lot less politely.

Of course, with him out of commission, that left you know who to pick up the pieces.

I shouldn't have been thinking of him, but all I could think of when I announced myself as the interim leader of the raid was the fact that those four-eyed freaks had taken my father from me. And I intended to make them all howl.

Someone had to get their hands dirty, after all.

When it was all over, there was barely enough space on the ground to cover the bodies from both sides. Alliance brass dithered over whether to award me a medal for taking command when my CO faltered, or to give me a court martial for the actions I'd taken once I'd gotten it in order to drive out the enemy and let the Batarians know they'd messed with the wrong species. With the wrong man. With the wrong Shepard.

In the end, they did nothing. Can't blame them; that'd be a helluva awkward precedent to set. They settled for letting me quietly discharge from the armed services, and I just packed up and left. Told Mom it was something about finding myself, or some garbage like that. Didn't listen to her pleas that I see a shrink; maybe she was right, but it's too late now. I guess. I figured it'd be better to just disappear.

Well, I might've avoided the court martial, but I didn't avoid the court of public opinion. The last major extranet vid I read before leaving was on the news of the Torfan attack, and the nice little moniker they bestowed upon me.

The Butcher of Torfan.

In a way, I guess it makes sense in the end. There's always gotta be two sides to everything. There's light and there's dark. And, all things considered, it's probably for the best.

Jane got to be the Hero.

I got to be the Villain.

I can live with that.

I was twenty-six when I boarded that shuttle to who-knows-where-just-not-here, with barely a goodbye. Five years later I found out that she was dead.

It should've been me.

Goddamn it, it should have been me.

I settled, if you can call it that, in the worst part of the Terminus Systems. The blight of the galaxy. Omega. As far away from the Citadel and its bullshit shine and gleam as I can get. I'd been there about a year or two before I heard the news. When I heard, I decided that if the angel of my better nature was dead then I really had nothing left to live for. Jane shouldn't be gone. I should. And it gnawed and gnawed at me until I couldn't take it anymore. So I did what I always did when I saw a problem: I faced it head-on.

So, one night, about two years after I heard that the hero of the Eden Prime Geth War was dead, I sat down at the table of my little hole in the wall apartment and made myself a deal. The last bottle of liquor in my possession was sitting there on the table. Either I finished it off or it finished me.

And that, on that rotten and miserable and hellish night, is where my story begins…

A/N: Hope you enjoy. For your reading enjoyment, the voice of Shepard's sibling (name not yet revealed) is that of Kiefer Sutherland's performance as Venom Snake from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Imagine that tired, weary voice, and you have our main character.