Chapter Text
“Domo arigato! — ¡Gracias! — ¡Merci! —”
“English!” Vanaheim barked at the machine for what felt like the hundredth time, trying to contain the growing annoyance in his voice. He wondered why he’d gotten the VI for so cheap, and now he’d figured out why. The thing barely functioned properly in the first place. Getting it hooked into the low-power, crumbling and disabled frigate he’d been living out of for the past few months was one of the more excruciating tasks he’d been put through in his lifetime.
Finally, though, the thing started talking to him in a language he could understand more than a few words of.
“Thank you for setting me up! I’m Commander Shepard, and I think we’re gonna get along just fine!”
It didn’t even sound like them.
At the very least, the overpaid, probably overworked designers of the thing had gotten the likeness properly. But that wasn’t much to say, was it? Everyone and everything that had access to a communication device had seen Shepard before. Plastered all over the galaxy as an Alliance hero, resurfaced after two long years of being a corpse, followed around by a ragtag group that had stopped an attack on the Citadel a couple years ago. All of it was too over the top. If he was told that Shepard was a conspiracy to make the Alliance stronger, he’d have supported the idea.
At least, he’d have wanted to.
A thousand voices chimed in to silence his own personal thoughts. There was a vote being held - there was always a vote being held - to determine whether or not Shepard could be a myth. Predictably, most of them disagreed with the notion. “Too much evidence,” seemed to be a common throughline. Tired of the voting, tired of the VI, tired of the day, Vanaheim set to leave the atmosphere, gathering his things as he paced the ship. It wasn’t much longer he could make this crashed frigate last - someone was bound to come looking for it soon, and he’d be on his own again. At least he had the almighty Shepard by his side, didn’t he?
“I’m noticing the surrounding area seems to be too… … … COLD,” the replica began, “You should consider getting a blanket!”
Great.
Of course it was cold. The only thing stopping Vanaheim from freezing to death on the unprotected planet’s surface was the remnants of the ship’s internal heating systems, still trying to warm the crew - whom he’d found the rank-smelling bodies of only a few days prior.
It wouldn’t be long before he was the next to die in the ship if he stayed. When he’d checked outside on a spacewalk a few days prior, he saw Cerberus ships gathering in the atmosphere - no doubt gaining strength now that Shepard had stopped focusing on taking them down for whatever reason. Almost every planet he’d gone to in search of some kind of peace was eventually raided by Cerberus forces looking for resources. It never had much to do with the fact they’d planted a robot in his body.
Yes, as his stretched skin and taut limbs cascaded across the half-dead ship’s crew quarters, broken pieces of glass scattered across the ship reflected Vanaheim’s true form. Not simply a lone survivor on the run from nothing in particular, no, an escaped victim of the prime torturers in the galaxy. About a quarter of his head looked so far from the humanity Cerberus preached to protect, emanating a faint blue glow reminiscent of the Geth that had swarmed the galaxy a couple years ago. One of his eyes, and most of his jaw had been preserved as human, but the damage was clear for all to see, with half his upper lip seeming torn off completely to make room for the horrific synthetic components grafted into his head. His right arm, as well as most of his torso, were mostly synthetic as well - but those were easier to explain and lie away.
It wasn’t as if he could simply tell people why he looked like a Geth. He knew very well what the people of the galaxy thought about machines, from the press reports of the Geth during the attempted destruction of the Citadel, to being driven out of small colonies for daring to look like one of them.
Cerberus never seemed to care that one of their experiments had escaped, though. Every time they touched down on a planet he was on, all he heard was chatter over the comms about Element Zero and Palladium, and if he could stay out of sight they’d just leave without taking note that he was even there in the first place. Still, a crashed freighter would be too much to ignore on a dead planet like this one. They’d go looking, and Vanaheim had to imagine he wasn’t still alive out of the kindness of Cerberus’ heart.
Once all of his belongings were packed into the worn-down silicone boxes he’d been carrying around for years, he set to putting on the remnants of a space suit he’d picked up from yet another salvaged ship, a few months ago. That was all he lived off of now. Salvage. Sure, with a helmet and some decent clothes on, he could go out into the world and get a job, maybe as a bouncer or a mercenary. He didn’t quite want a life like that, though. Sure, scrapping parts to survive off of broken metal wasn’t what he wanted, either, but if he already had a thousand voices chiming in on every decision he made, what good would the scraping of active machinery and the cacophony of civilization do him? He would be content when he was safe and alone, and these trips to and from other planets were just buffers in between him and his final goal of personal peace. “Nirvana,” he heard from the back of his mind as he thought to himself.
They weren’t helping.
The suit he’s scavenged off a crashed pirate ship didn’t even fit him. His human parts were by no means skinny, Cerberus had been training him to be a super-soldier, after all, but he could’ve sworn it was made to fit an upright elcor, the way it tried to droop off of him when it wasn’t properly locked in. The helmet was human-adjacent, at the very least, so he wore it whenever he was forced to be out in public. Explaining something about personal safety and security was much easier than the flashlight beaming out of his head.
The Geth parts used to replace a portion of his skull actually seemed to shine much brighter than the ones he’d seen on vid channels, so it was his safest option to put black tape inside the helmet to stop half his face from blinding anybody he talked to from within the visor. It blocked a giant chunk of his vision, but after learning a lesson about the hospitality humans showed to machines the hard way, Vanaheim decided that option was better for everyone.
Combined with brushing what portion of his hair he had left - a ragged droop of blonde that made him seem like a punk band singer - out of the way, putting his gear on was almost more of a chore for the cyborg than leaving the planet in the first place. Still, he managed, lugging box after box onto what could barely be described as a shuttle before throwing himself in with a loud, metallic clank and manually forcing the doors shut.
The vehicle was tiny. It was an old cargo vessel used to transport luxury goods back in the day, crashed when a bunch of pirates shot it down just as it exited the atmosphere of a mining world a few years ago. They’d obviously stripped all the loot off of it, but they’d left it in decent-enough shape to where someone with access to an entire data hub’s worth of mechanical knowledge could piece it back together bit-by-bit until it was fit to fly again. Before that, Vanaheim usually just stowed away on giant freighters - not dissimilar to the one he had been living in - to get somewhere new, so not having to worry about other people around him was a genuine comfort he cherished throughout his journeys across planets and moons.
Shuttle thrusters came to life with a familiar, egregious hum, one that Vanaheim had an easier and easier time tuning out now that he’d been living with it for a few years. Every so often a sputter would come to life and jolt him back into a paranoid state, and the data would roll in from the Geth hivemind - what could go wrong, his odds of surviving, and a few more things that made Cerberus seem like a nice bunch of folks.
He set course for “anywhere off-world” and drifted to the back of the shuttle in his usual hunched walk of isolation, curling into a ball on the uncomfortable surface of the floor. There wasn’t a bed on the vehicle used for transporting jewelry, of course, but it was okay. He’d slept on worse before. He considered himself luckier than most Cerberus guinea pigs - he actually made it out. That helped him sleep, at least as much as the constantly-active robotic side of his mind would allow. Drifting off was difficult with a constant, barely-decipherable stream of data pouring into his thoughts, but he’d learned to live with it, just as he’d learned to live with being half-synthetic in a galaxy that hated synthetics. Naturally.
…
…
“Odds of flesh surviving; 73.549 percent, rapidly decreasing.”
The robotic material replacing most of his organs was actually undulating, trying to warn him about something he couldn’t see yet. Panicking as he woke, Vanaheim ran to see if he could make anything out from the tiny window at the front of the shuttle, but all he saw was the wide shape of the Omega spaceport, one he’d taken glances at hundreds of times before, but that didn’t warrant any real concern. He was a bit too close for his liking, but he would just take control and-
KRAK-OOOM!
The sound of something crashing into the back of the shuttle rocked through the vessel and straight down into Vanaheim’s core. Being as replaced by Geth parts as he was, he didn’t need to breathe in the vast expanse of space, but the instant-freezing cold would be a problem for him. He thought about trying to steer into Omega’s docking bays - an option he didn’t quite enjoy the thought of - but thankfully, he wouldn’t have to think for much longer, because the shuttle had been hit so hard that he was being launched towards the spaceport at an increasingly alarming speed.
All he could really hope for now was that he wasn’t flattened by a wall when he was launched through the window of the vessel and out into the spaceport. Vanaheim returned his helmet to his head and stared out at the approaching hub, praying his armor was buckled on tightly enough he wouldn’t be ripped to shreds on impact.
“Odds of flesh surviving; 41.081 percent, rapidly decreasing.”