Rated for graphic use “damn,” because Renegade Shepherd has a potty-mouth

Family

Amy Wong had asked her once what she thought about her crew. Shepherd had given it some thought, then told her that she thought of them as family. It was exactly the sort of sappy drivel that audiences loved, but it also happened to be true. The details weren’t important. Amy didn’t need to know that her last “family” had been a pack of thugs and pickpockets that still hit her up for money or jobs on occasion, just as she didn’t need to know the details behind Dr. Saleon’s death, or that Liara had taken to wearing her mother’s headdress.

The old family, the new, what did it matter? If she closed her eyes and listened, why, they sounded the same, and she would toss them aside just as easily when the time came.

Trust

She trust Garrus, as much as she trusted anyone who hadn’t sat beneath Luna and breathed in deeply of the smog-choked air, wishing so hard that she thought she would die, wishing that they had stopped at Luna.

Water

Back on Eden Prime, she’d told Ashley that she was a failure. Ashley had looked like she was going to cry.

Rules

Even Garrus didn't complain when Doctor Chakwas turned that temper on him. He may have been a rebel, but even he followed the number one tenet of space travel: don’t piss off the doctor.

Biotics

Kaidan may have been the next step in evolution, but he wasn’t psychic. A psychic would have known better, would have put her on trial instead of showered her with kisses, gave her the last necklace she’d ever wear instead of a ring. A psychic would have known that, after he’d told her of his days in brain camp, she’d hunted down every descendant of that teacher, one by one.

She didn’t hold back when she hit with the ruler.

Armor

Wrex never spoke to her about his grandfather’s armor again, not after she’d sold it to pay for repairs on the Mass Drive. There were too many words freezing in the air between them, and she wouldn’t have listened anyway.

Binary

Tali had promised to give the data to the flotilla’s scientists once her pilgrimage was complete, but she hadn’t been able to resist trying to decipher just one more line of text.

She woke up the whole ship when she started to scream in ones and zeroes.

ROYGBIV

Doctor Chakwas had started to explain it to her, something about predatory raptors’ diets in comparison to that of fruit-eating mammals, who needed to be able to discern fruit in the trees and so on and so forth, all of which was obviously very fascinating to somebody with a degree in doctor-y stuff, but very much less so to everybody else in the galaxy, but Shepherd wasn’t listening. “You’re colorblind?”

Garrus's jaw plated flared irritably. “We learn to recognize Red very quickly.” And that, she supposed, settled the matter.

Job description

Shepherd was pretty sure that officers Smith and Matthews did more than salute every time she used the stairs, but damned if had the slighted clue.