Shepard had woken up that morning in a holding cell, woozy, bruised, and combative. He'd had to check the clock to be certain what day it was. Three days ago, when it became clear that maintaining order with the force at its current size wasn't anything like possible, he'd made a judgment call.

If chaos was inevitable, he could at least make it work for him. His previous venture into the hospital had been informative. This time, with back-up, and with the level of crazy on the island at a new high, he'd been positive he'd make it further if he kept his head down.

That much had worked. It had taken hours for his omnitool to hack the locked door in the second sub-basement of the hospital, well past all publicly visible security cordons, but it had revealed another subterranean level. Getting there had taken only minimal violence and mayhem.

He'd been in the process of exploring when there was a distant rumble -- if he'd been on a ship he would have said it had just taken a hit -- and suddenly there were airlock doors sealing off the corridor. Before he had a chance to get out, someone vented the oxygen from the cordon. His suit reservoirs had long ago stopped working without a competent maintenance tech to supply new parts. He'd blacked out, fighting, head full of bad memories...

When he woke... He'd been less reflective that morning when he realized where he was. Now, frog-marched by glowering officers through the corridors, he'd been given plenty of time to think.

Yeah, he'd been in this office before, or its spiritual precursors, more than once in his career. Hell, he'd been there again just before he showed up on the island.

"If you're taking a statement, I'll try to keep it brief. If this is an interrogation, you should have asked me about a lawyer -- but I would have waived my Mirandas anyway. Does that count as co-operative?"

"Not anything further," he said, somewhat testily. "The moment's passed. Worst you have to worry about from me is speaking my mind."

He didn't like anything about this. It reminded him too much of being interrogated by Kaidan after he'd come back from the dead. Beifong was an officer he liked, someone he respected. And he knew very wel;l he'd put her in a position where she had no choice but to do this.

Shepard, too, shifted position; taking up a parade rest stance after a moment of rubbing circulation back into his wrists. Even then, he manages to slouch just a little, to look comfortable, and instead of staring straight ahead he turns just slightly to look her in the eye.

"I built something with this department," he said, crisply, the bitterness behind his voice just as evident as the conviction. "I had a Hell of a team. We survived everything this island could throw at us, and it didn't matter how they chipped away at us. Garrus. Shirogane. Jenny. Even if I couldn't replace them I could find the next best thing. We had a squad that could and did take on anything. One of the finest I'd ever seen."

He paused.

"Who's left now?" There was a snap to his voice as he asked the question. "How the Hell can anyone enforce order with what we've got left? Everything I put together, the island took away. I compensated where I could and it took away more.

The civilians aren't much better than the government. When this last shitstorm went down, maybe twenty percent of the island followed the curfew. Even if it had been fifty, we would have narrowed the field enough that we could do something. As it was... with six cops per shift, anything we did was just pissing into the wind. Didn't mean a damned thing."

Deep breath. Gritted teeth. Nostrils flared, spoiling for a fight until he took another breath, calmed himself back down.

"So I did the best I could. Lehnsherr's goon squad hitting the hospital was an obvious feint. I know guerrilla tactics. He hit security there, broke it pretty good, then withdrew, leaving the hornets all stirred up around the nest. I went in; I collected a statement... and then I kept moving. I figured anything I could find about our arrival point might tell us something about an exit."

He shrugged.

"Then I got caught."

"With technology a few centuries ahead of what the island admits to having, nobody had to let me do anything."

There was a note of pride in his voice at that. It faded into his frown.

"I didn't get as far as I'd like. I didn't find anything definitive. And if you think I was looking for an exit for personal gain, then you don't know me very well."

"If all I produced was an officer corps that runs around like a chicken with its head cut off when I vanish, I'd say I failed as a leader a Hell of a lot earlier than this." His voice is nearly a drill-sergeant bark.

"And don't fool yourself. Any crime, any battle, any fight in human history boils down to "because they pissed me off" in the end. We only apologize for it when we're the ones who lose the fight." He glowered, gritted his teeth, and took a step back and a deep breath.

"Which two?"