He wears the armor she died in.

There is a level of intimacy in that she doesn't even understand herself, only that when she looks at the cracks and that gaping hole and the blinking lights and the way he watches her, head slightly cocked while the plates flare and flatten over his—his eye, damn it, the confusion radiating from him—even though she knows he'd tell her that as a machine he doesn't feel and so cannot experience emotions and thus cannot be confused—she knows better. She watches him in battle, the way he responds to her orders and covers Garrus without having to be told, the way he fits them like no one has since Wrex—Garrus meets her eyes across the rubble strewn battlefield between them and he's grinning that turian grin, all teeth, and her own heart swells in response, still high on adrenaline, gun smoke smeared on her cheek and blood and dust all over her armor. He shakes his head at her.

Shepard, you're crazy.

She is. She knows. It's a special kind of crazy, all impulse and hot emotion and gut instinct.

She claps Legion on the shoulder, and the way his plates twitch says I don't understand you and she smiles at him, showing her teeth like Garrus, a fighter's smile. "Welcome to the team, Legion."

There's something about him, something about the way he falls in step with Garrus, something about the feel of them together at her back. She straightens her shoulders a little more, puts a little more swagger in her step.

Together, they are invincible.

He doesn't understand her. She defies his logic, disproves every equation meant to fit her into the world, every attempt at detailing the lines and patterns that define Shepard, Commander, Jane. She is chaos, unpredictable. A whirlwind hurricane. He has followed her across the stars for this, for the way she looks at him over her shoulder and she doesn't say anything at all but he knows exactly what she wants from him. Later he will tell himself that he deciphered her body language, the tilt of her brows and the lines around her mouth, the glint in her eyes and her fingers tight on her shotgun. Later, alone in the silence of the AI core, he will struggle for the answers to questions that have yet to fully form, and his fingers reach up to touch the edges of the hole in his chest, the armor that was hers—he remembers the snow swirling around him and the cold, dead metal at his feet—and—and—

No data available.

Almost the truth. Almost a lie.

Because how can a machine explain the—the not-feeling he'd experienced when he'd looked down at her dead armor, at his feet in the swirling snow on that silent world? Loss. Grief.

No data available.

She is so tired of goddamned quarians and their goddamned war and punching that son of a bitch in the gut felt right in a deeply satisfying way, her fist in his stomach, the elegance of simple violence and simple anger and the pure, white rage that boiled to a fever pitch inside her when Daro Xen said What an interesting specimen this is, shall we cut it open and—

And it took a level of self-control that Shepard hadn't known herself capable of, to reply to that bitch with words instead of with the purity of anger, instead of her fist in the bitch's face, a level of anger that disconnected her from herself, that left her looking down on Xen from almost outside her own body because her body was boiling, she was on fucking fire and if Xen hadn't backed down Shepard would've had a whole new war on her hands.

Legion is my friend.

She was sick of them calling him it, sick of patronizing quarian superiority and she knew that her own feelings about Legion weren't exactly what one might call logical but when were feelings ever logical? She trusted him and it was right.

Legion himself didn't understand it. Shepard didn't understand it, but she didn't need to. He was her friend. He was family. She'd die for him just like any of the rest of them.

The first night he was on the ship, sometime in the dark hours of the graveyard shift when she was waiting in the mess hall for Garrus's shift to end so she didn't have to lay in that bed by herself, staring up at the stars and dwelling on all the numbers she wasn't supposed to think about, the MIA and KIA and the colonies that had gone dark, all the silent worlds—but they weren't silent, not really, there were red skies beneath which monsters walked, there were streets where the blood ran deep enough to drown in and there were screams.

She knew. She dreamed it far too often, and lived it in every silent waking hour.

So she was waiting for Garrus, sitting alone at the table with her feet propped up in the adjoining chair and a data pad in hand when Legion approached her.

It was a testament to her weariness that she hadn't heard the elevator, or his approach, or seen his light shining in the dark. He seemed—hesitant, unsure, standing at the far side of the table and watching her.

"Hey," she said, and set down the data pad. "Have a seat."

He hesitated again, and she knew he was thinking about telling her that he didn't need to sit, that being synthetic meant he didn't require physical rest. But he sat.

"What's on your mind, Legion?"

She watched him process this, the colloquialism, the casual human approach to communication where the words themselves didn't really convey the meaning of the question.

"Shepard-Commander…this…we have been thinking of the exchange between yourself and Creator Daro Xen."

Shepard took a sip of her tea and set the mug back down. "What about it?"

She watched him with half-open eyes, through the steam rising from her tea. His light flickered and the plates above his eye flattened completely. It was like he didn't even know himself what he wanted to ask, didn't know how to define and grasp what was bothering him.

Hello, my friend. It is good to have you here. I have missed you.

She smiled, a slow curve of her mouth. It would only confuse him more.

"Your defense of our physical platform—"

She snorted. "You mean when I almost took the bitch's head off because she wanted to dissect you?"

She wondered if he knew how expressive he was with those eye plates.

"We…we have…a question for you."

She looked at him. Waited.

"Why do you trust us?"

She stood up and walked around the table until she stood over him. He watched her, turning his head to track her movements. She sat beside him and leaned over and took his hand. He offered no resistance.

She grinned at him, and his eye plates shot up.

"You're not going to like the answer, Legion. It's a very human answer. Do you want it anyway?"

A pause. He considered. Building consensus.

"What is the answer?"

On Rannoch, in the dust and the sweat and the dry air, with the stench of the dead Reaper—nothing smelled quite like a Reaper, oil and blood and rotting and metal—with the heat baking her skin and the setting sun blinding bright in her eyes—here, once again, she has lost everything.

The tears mix with the sweat on her face, slipping through the smoke and grime on her skin, burning her eyes. Somewhere inside of her something is screaming. Her hands are curled into fists so tight that she can feel her armor creaking in protest and her chest hitches but she can't seem to breathe.

You weren't supposed to die on me, NONE OF YOU were EVER supposed to die—

But once upon a time, she'd died too, she'd left them and his very body bore testament to that, the broken armor he'd picked up on that frozen world because no fucking data available, and now she would never hear him tell her what she already knew in her heart.

She knelt in the dust beside him and her hand smeared red blood over black metal.

This armor. She'd died inside this metal shell. Broken ribs and lungs that had strained and gasped and her blood smeared over her visor, a red haze between her and the stars, her heart thundering in her ears but that time there had been nothing to fight and no one beside her, just her own piercing pain and the burning in her throat because there wasn't any air at all to breathe, just her own blood and the silence of dying alone, that most intimate of life's experiences.

She had died in it and he'd lived in it and even now she doesn't know what she thinks or feels about that, what it means to her that this geth, this being that should have been her enemy had sought her across the stars and when he'd found this hulk of metal, the only thing remaining of Shepard-Commander, whatever he had felt or what had compelled him to graft her own broken remains to himself, to use what was left of her to heal the breach in him so that he could go on living.

She carves his name into the wall, and the crew doesn't say a word about it.

This is her own private ritual, her own memorial of shame and regret and pain. The wall is a monument to her failure and to their victory. She will never forget. It is for them that she fights. For these names, for the lost, that she pushes herself so hard against the impossible shadows that loom over her.

Putting his name on the wall is her way of lighting a candle against that darkness.

And if her armor looks a little different these days, if the blue is one shade closer to black and the scars and scratches don't match up the way they used too, if there are too many dents and pieces that aren't quite aligned…

Sometimes it doesn't matter, what might live on beyond death, what might linger in the souls of other beings touched by the single life. Sometimes loss is just loss.

Sometimes the heart doesn't have a reason, my friend.