#god I now have the worst HCs for shep's parents lmao

[baejax-the-great]

The Egg Method

Mass Effect 1, Kaidan and Shepard gen fic. Read on AO3

Mentions of food, Mindoir, and biotics.

~

“How did you train your biotics, if you don’t mind me asking? Did the colony hire someone or…?”

As much as Shepard hated talking about Mindoir, it was a fair question, given everything Kaidan had told her about BAaT. And anyway, these memories weren’t bad ones for once. Shepard shook her head. “Nah, it was eggs.”

“Uh… what? …Ma’am?” he added someone belatedly.

“I trained my biotics using eggs.”

Her parents really hadn’t known what to do with her when the biotics showed up, but she was not the only colony kid creating mass effect fields in their bedroom and causing structural damage to their prefabs. It was her dad who came up with the “egg method” of training before the Alliance had pulled her out of the rubble and jammed an amp in her head.

Kaidan was still staring at her with one furry eyebrow raised in complete incomprehension.

“Here, do we have any eggs in the fridge?” she asked, “Get ‘em out.”

Kaidain approached the fridge slowly, like he still wasn’t certain if she was being literal or not and set a full carton of eggs on the counter as delicately as if they were little grenades. The eggs exploding all over the kitchen wasn’t the most outlandish fear; she was out of practice with this after all.

“Okay. Pick some number of them and toss them in the air.”

“Ma’am?” If Kaidan’s eyebrow could raise further up his forehead, it would have. Shepard also didn’t miss that she’d caught the attention of a number of people on duty who now paused in their tracks, datapads hanging limply in their hands, and if she screwed this up she’d have the attention of every single member of the crew along with a sticky mess on the floor. Kaidan bobbed his head back and forth as he considered tossing eggs on a spaceship, and Shepard called out, “Do I have to make that an order, lieutenant?”

With a wince he tossed four in the air, and Shepard caught each of them in their own little mass effect field. For one split second she was certain she’d cracked the shell on the leftmost one, gravity and mass fluctuating in her fingers as she adjusted her control over them. She was not mopping the deck today or wasting precious non-frozen food on a stunt.

“Eggs and open space,” she said once she was sure of her grip on them. She tossed an egg out of a field and caught it in a new one. “That is what we had the most of on Mindoir.” She tossed another, then another, and she heard Chakwas start laughing behind her as the eggs hit a juggling pattern. “Throw more in if you like, Lieutenant. This is hardly a challenge.”

Kaidan’s mouth had dropped open, but he tossed a fifth egg in. With a sixth, she had two simultaneous juggling circles. Toss, catch, toss, catch, mass effect fields flickering in and out of existence and not a single egg cracking. An old rhythm that was just like riding a bicycle on a tightrope that was on fire. She was panting with exertion by the time he got the ninth in there, though she still enjoyed the gasp from her crew as she flicked an egg high over everyone’s heads and caught it neatly just next to Quezado’s ear. With twelve eggs, her skin was crackling with blue energy even as the eggs stayed pristine in their fragile shells. Twelve perfectly controlled fields, flicking in an out of existence in perfect coordination and timing.

Had this been Mindoir, her father would have rewarded her with French toast for this performance.

Twelve was enough, though, and the collar of her shirt was soaked with sweat. She brought the fields together to hover just in front of Kaidan, and with her nod, he plucked them out of the air and placed them back in their carton while Chakwas and Liara clapped politely. The rest of the crew looked confused, having never seen a biotic display out of Shepard before, but as their commander rolled her shoulders, a couple others joined in the weak applause.

“If the whole soldier thing hadn’t worked out, I figured I’d have a solid chance in a circus somewhere,” Shepard announced, accepting the performance was a bizarre misstep and deciding she didn’t really care. Yeah, the crew was uncomfortable with someone who could tear the ship apart with her mind—or two someones, as everyone knew Kaidan could, too—and reminding them of that fact probably wouldn’t win her any friends, but her father had been right all those years ago—if she could hold an egg in a mass effect field without cracking it, she wouldn’t bring the house down with every temper tantrum. Or nightmare.

He would have enjoyed today’s show.  

Once everyone had cleared out, Kaidan muttered, “You did all of this back then without an amp?” He shook his head in disbelief as he closed up the carton and turned back to the fridge.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, lieutenant,” Shepard objected, one hand in the air. “Where do you think you’re going with those?”

He turned back to her and followed her pointed stare to the frying pan on the drying rack. Instead of putting the eggs away, he pulled out milk and some cheese. “A display like that would work up an appetite,” he conceded.

“Damn right. And I’ve gone through all the trouble of prescrambling those eggs for you.”

Kaidan laughed as he cracked the first egg and found that the yolk had broken and mixed entirely with the whites. Shepard shrugged. Not even she was perfect at biotically juggling eggs.

“Uh, omelet then?” he offered.

“Perfect.”