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Shepard has never slept well, not even when she was a kid. She was always the last to fall asleep and the first to wake. At some point in her teenage years she settled into getting just four hours of sleep every night and that was years before the dreams started.
She first started having them after Akuze. Every night for months she would find herself in a grey forest, with the screams of her dying teammates echoing through the dark. She would see their shadows and silhouettes, she would run after them, but it did nothing. When she woke up they would be just as dead. It took a few months before she stopped having them every night and a years before she stopped having them every week. When she started serving on the Normandy she only had them every other month.
Until Virmire. The moment Kaidan’s comm cuts out Shepard knows she will find herself in the forest tonight. She also knows she wont find her way out of it for months. She wakes up crying that night.
-
The dreams used to be about others. Shepard would relive the deaths of her friends and squad mates over and over again. Now she relives her own.
It still starts the same, she finds herself in the forest and she starts walking. The silhouettes have started to fade over time, Kaidan is the only one that’s fresh, staring at her as she nears. Moments before Shepard reaches him she gets yanked into the air. The breath escaped her lungs and she doesn’t get it back.
She wakes up gasping, clawing at the sheets of her new unfamiliar bed. The space window over her bed does nothing to help. In her panic her hands go to her throat and in the morning she finds bright red scratch marks on her neck.
Shepard sleeps even less after that.
-
She hasn’t made her way out of the forest in months. Mordin has joined the choir. Then Thane. Then Legion. Every night she runs after the child and every night she sees him burn. She doesn’t wake up gasping any more, it’s full on kicking and screaming now.
Shepard keeps apologizing to Garrus for it and he keeps telling her not to worry. Often times he ends up soothing her back to sleep and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him that it wont help, that she’ll just find herself in the forest again.
She just wants it all to be over.
-
Warm sunlight filters in through the curtains of their home. Shepard and Garrus bought the little beach house one year after London and have been living there ever since. She loves it.
Shepard wakes up yawning and finds the bed empty. She groans rolling over, blinking into the sunlight, yawning again. This time Garrus hears her in the other room. “Morning”
“Mornin’”, she replies. “How long did I sleep?”
Garrus appears in the door frame. “About eight hours?”
“Wow”, she scrunches up her face, suppressing another yawn. “That’s long.”
He walks over and presses a quick kiss to her forehead. “It is. For you at least. I’m impressed.”
“I didn’t dream. First time in years I didn’t…”, she shakes her head “I wasn’t there.” The dreams became even worse after London. EDI and Anderson joined the choir. Thousands of Geth shadows stood around. In the worst of them she died again, crushed by the rubble of the Citdel.
“Is that...that’s good right?”
“Yeah”, she smiles at him. “It’s getting better.”
Shepard doesn’t know if she’ll ever be fine, but she can hope for getting a little bit better every day.