Like the kid she never got to be

"I…" Shepard paused, glancing down at her diaper. Her mind racing back to rain-soaked streets and perpetually damp clothes. "I didn't have much of a childhood, growing up. NYC was… rough, not a good place to grow up, especially when you're an orphan."

"How did you manage?" Samara asked. Her blue fingers clasping gently around Shepard's hands. Shepard had always been cagey about her past, she never brought it up, and Samara didn't pry. She could understand, after all a Justicar was supposed to leave their past behind.

"I fell in with a gang, the Tenth Street Reds. We looked for each other, looked out for ourselves. It kept me fed, but it wasn't what you'd call, nurturing." She stared at her lap, squeezing her thighs together, pushing against the mass of plastic and cloth and polymer between her legs. Rustle. Crinkle. Rustle. Crinkle.

"I was always… fascinated, I guess, by diapers," she went on. "Wondered what it'd be like to try one on, wear one around. I think I thought it'd remind me of being a kid again, of… having a family that'd take care of me."

"Does it?" Samara asked gently.

Samara had seen Shepard in many forms. Her hard edges and her magnetic aura, her certainty in herself, and her certainty in others. The woman's whose cocky-confidence and iron-will who managed to melt her way to even her icy heart.

She hadn't seen this. Shepard with her head hung, shoulders hunched, face shrouded by her unnaturally red hair. She didn't meet Samara's eye. She didn't look like the hero of the Reaper War but… a quiet, timid girl, who needed her mother.

Samara freed one arm, wrapping it around Shepard's back, the other to drawing a biotic field. Shepard's diaper crinkled as her body hovered midair in a haze of blue and black for just a moment before she landed on Samara's lap with a plastic thwomp.

That made Shepard giggle, a short high-pitched thing, as Samara cradled her. Her head nestling into the space between her breasts as Samara ran her hand through Shepard hair, smiling. She hadn't felt like this in… centuries, but the memory still lingered, love, happiness, pride, and joy tinged with sadness of what was to come. She had been a mother once, a lifetime ago.

Maybe she could be one again.