#c-sec security so fucking confused though. on the one hand they're pretty sure shepard doesn't have kids

[flatstarcarcosa]

oh god i went to say something dragging norman!shep about harry but just had the thought of like

harry does in fact, end up making it safely off earth with an evac after the reapers hit but his grandparents/emily’s parents don’t, and because of comms being fucked there’s like three whole weeks where norman just doesn’t know anything and like.

yeah, sure, he got married young and became a dad young and had a wonderful plan with his wife and then. she died, and it threw everything askew and the thought of being a single dad when he knew he couldn’t evenly divide his time between his career and his child scared the hell out of him, so when his in-laws offered to take care of harry while he was enlisted he took it.

and then kept taking it, and using their goodwill to avoid the entire issue of you have a son that at best, sees you maybe twice a goddamn year and one day this will come back to be an issue for you but the two of them don’t have the animosity that their namesakes do, it doesn’t come from a place of mutual dislike and trauma. after all, by the time me3 rolls around harry is like MAYBE freshly 10 y/o.

and sure, people may think norman’s indifferent, at best, towards harry on account of him never bringing it up and the few people that find out about it also finding out at the same time about the whole ‘we never got married via official channels, i took emily’s name, and basically just didn’t offer anything up because we both knew if the alliance knew i had a new pregnant wife i’d get passed over on certain assignments because of the family thing’ and that, to them, is more bonkers than some of the other shit they’ve seen him do.

liara in particular has to go fucking SIT DOWN about it, because like??? hello??? she’s the shadowbroker. she dated this man. she’s the SHADOWBROKER and she didn’t know he’d been MARRIED with a CHILD??

norman’s assurance that it’s surprisingly easy to alter your own records before joining the alliance does nothing for her btw. but anyway.

it bites him in the ass finally when he has to ask hackett for a favor for keeping ears out on any news that may surface about harry. it stings less when hackett tells him anderson already told him about it, on account of anderson being the one to have brought harry to visit norman while he was locked down on earth.

he also asks bailey, a quick aside before going to see udina, because it’s not until the normandy docks at the citadel and he sees a news blurb about earth does it finally dawn on him. it wasn’t even intentionally putting harry out of his mind, it was just a matter of everything happening so fucking fast that he never got a chance to think of it at all.

and then it’s three weeks of just dead air. silence.

no one knows anything.

and then one day the normandy docks at the citadel for supplies, to eke out a couple small hours of carelessness amid the chaos. and the elevator AI informs him he’s needed at the civilian housing loading dock because apparently harry had just landed the day before and has been causing an absolute ruckus the whole time and while everyone understand he wants his dad, he really needs to understand that commander shepard does not have kids, child, i think you may need to see several doctors.

and norman knows immediately it’s not a case of mistaken identity and can’t help but release all of the tension with a loud laugh.

“yeah, that’s him, all right.”