Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows

where you accompany me in your dreams

and tell me the hour of light.”

― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

Somewhere at the very beginning of love, he turns towards her and smiles.

She no longer remembers why, only that he does. 

A lot of things follow.

*  *  *

Somewhere at the very beginning of the long preparation for the groundbreaking first run with SSV Normandy, Kaidan watches his commanding officer walk through a long technical tour of the vessel, keeping the same composed facial expression for nearly two hours - yeah, he clocks her. That might not tell him much about what sort of person she is, this living legend of a woman, but it does tell him that her self-control is roughly the size of a solar system.

Quickly he also learns that she’s a biotic - an L3 despite her age, which he assumes is a benefit of a N7 education and/or a mom in the military - that she carries a Stinger and, according to the sim statistics from their brief stay at Arcturus, is a better shot than most of her subordinates, Kaidan excluded. She's served with some people whose names are familiar and many who are total strangers to him. The brass seems to unanimously like her. Her mom is the XO of Kilimanjaro. The last two things may or may not be related.

Those are the bare minimum of facts that he gathers around himself, the way he does. To prepare, to analyse, to assess.

They don’t, however, prepare him in the least for Eden Prime.


--


Afterwards, her memory goes something like this:

Jenkins, dead within minutes after stepping out of the shuttle and she curses silently in her armor - hadn’t she just told him to be careful, no heroics - while Alenko kneels by the body. The smoke and bitterness of this burning earth fill the air between them as they move on.

Death, living dead and refugees, one-sided war with no victory marches. 

Geth, fucking geth everywhere and when their numbers finally dwindle, she has her mind invaded by alien tech and she screams without making any kind of sound until Alenko holds her and Williams roughly shake her back to herself again.

“Hang on, Commander,” they say, the intensity of their words increasing the more she drifts off. “Don’t give up on us, ma’am.”

All of it is just strange. The galaxy bleeds out before her eyes and Alenko holds her hand.

She feels their presence like faint gasps before she goes out cold, dreaming of a destruction that knows no bounds, that has no name.


--

Even the Captain looks worried, Kaidan notes.

That’s not a good sign.

Then his commander finally comes to and reassures him with a soft loop-sided grin that slams down between his ribs. 

That’s not a good sign either, for entirely different reasons. 

*  *  *

It’s definitely something for someone in her position to suddenly play the underdog.

It does certain things to your crew, to your leadership, when you’re stating the obvious and get frowns and air-quotes back, when you’re bestowed with prestigious titles and some half-hearted pomp and then, around the next corner someone suggests you’re mildly delusional and in need of a reality check. 

Shepard decides to work with it, spins her eclectic crew tightly around bold moves and disconnected Council calls while going out of her way to perfect every stray Alliance order she picks up over comm link. A keen eye for diplomacy, the media says after she’s ambushed into an interview, a credit to your uniform, Hackett offers and she eats it up as the galaxy rages at her heels.

It’s the same old story, really. Only titles shift.

Since Torfan, when she became a case study and a badass warmonger and got five extra attachments to her psychological profile and couldn’t fall asleep without self-medicating with alcohol for five months, she’s been untouchable in every sense of the word even though at least one of those senses just reads hopelessly lonely.

Untouchable means nobody in the Fleet gives her crap about just about anything; it means Hackett personally calls her with specific missions a N7 rookie could only dream about and then, in turn, protects her through assorted trials where other commanders would get oceans of red tape and protests; it means she stands apart, stands by herself. Not even her damn mother mothers her anymore.

“You okay, Commander?” Alenko asks her anyway because he doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the galaxy has decided.


--


"It’s your move." Kaidan nods towards the screen, to their ongoing game of omnitool chess that he's more or less destined to win because she’s not committed enough but that’s not really the point. 

He'd suggested it after Feros, when Shepard had been pacing the floor, very clearly stuck in a cycle she couldn’t break out of and even Chakwas had given him a look. 

So, chess it is.

His CO leans forward, elbows on her knees and then that ever-distracted look on her face momentarily passes, dissolving into something else. Something that always, without fail, burns in his chest. 

--

Torfan rewrites her.

Only in pieces and minor details that nobody else sees, of course. A tilt to the way she’s glued together, a change in the compartment of her brain that holds innocence, holds hope. There’s an exhaustion in being a tale, regardless of its moral, it moves beneath her skin, sings between blood and bone. 

In the aftermath of storming through Torfan and crashing into extensive psych evaluations she earns herself a personal visit from Admiral Hackett.

She's told she looks dead on her feet, he looks as commanding as ever and places a hand on her shoulder before he leaves. I know it might not feel like it, but you got the job done. Don’t forget that.

She doesn’t, even if she wants to.

Nobody forgets.

Torfan rewrites her, placing ciphers around the vital parts.

When Major Kyle resurfaces and calls her the Butcher of Torfan, something in her finally shatters.

He never ordered her to wipe out everything that moved, didn't give the word to shoot surrendering slavers or risk a whole squad going after stragglers. 

And he didn’t stop her.

She made a choice and it broke her in ways she had no idea existed but she made it and perhaps she will have to make it again. 

Looking into the major’s eyes again she sees the way they’re entwined, sees the rough edges of shame that hasn’t found its way out. Sees the differences, the touch-points, the erratic patterns of coincidence. Shepard thinks of mom, how she'd hug her those first devastating days afterwards - touch her hair, her arm, her face, hold her together with the stubbornness of family. 

Torfan rewrites her, perhaps it rewrites them all, the way the relays had, or the First Contact War. It had altered their romantic space opera into a dark fairy tale, reminding them all that the galaxy that once gave them the stars is vast and full of nightmares.

"Well, I don’t scare easily, ma'am," Alenko says as he quietly decodes her one inch at the time. 

--

He hasn’t talked about Jump Zero in years, had no plans to ever do it again actually but already on their fifth day together, weeks before the shakedown cruise, before Eden Prime, he offers Shepard a rambling story about some random tutor there, something outdated and archaic being taught. It’s because she's a biotic, he tells himself. She'd be interested. 

And she is. She asks a hundred questions about the tutors, the kind of training, the demographics of the kids sent there, sounding like a proper Alliance officer taking notes; she says that she wasn’t discovered until she was thirteen and that her mother refused to send her away to experimental education. 

Kaidan nods and thinks about his father's silence, his mother's anxious preparations and administrations every time he had visited and was returning again, as if she needed to clean out the house, needed to perform a hundred little rites to send him over to the others. Thinks about their brave, stoic faces when he comes home for the last time, Vyrnnus dead and his hands full of blood no matter what those responsible try to tell themselves. 

He thinks his parents have loved him, through it all, he thinks they have no idea what to do with him. Perhaps all grown up children feel the same way; he has half a mind to ask Shepard but doesn't.

Instead he talks about other things: politics, his parts of Earth, the fact that he once wanted to be a surgeon or a pilot but the migraines put an end to pretty much anything demanding that sort of precision. He talks about stupid movies and science, about the worst planets he's ever visited. 

He tells her about Rahna. 

And she nods and hums and listens, asks even more questions as time passes, until a whole transit’s gone to waste for her as he's been talking. 

"You're easy to talk to," he says once, meaning that he’s sorry for stealing her away from duty. It earns him a fleeting smile.

It takes him a while to understand that he isn’t taking her time, that she’s giving it, and she doesn’t do it the same way with the others and Kaidan swears to work twice as hard to make up for it before he allows himself to just simply enjoy her. 

*  *  *

If anyone would ask for numbers, Kaidan has been with seven women and two guys, in total. He doesn’t have a type, doesn’t think the human brain with its intricate web of receptors and hormones really work that way. His certainly doesn’t, it operates slowly where feelings are concerned - at freaking glacial pace according to pretty much anyone he ever went to training with and a lot of people who’s tried to seduce him during shore leave. Attraction, for him, takes a while, proper infatuation takes forever and a lot of it goes on in his own head, plenty of space required.

Besides, he concludes over would-be suicide runs and countless groundside tasks in the Mako with her always present, always there , Commander Shepard is actually very far from the type Kaidan doesn’t have.

By the time they reach Noveria, he has fallen irrevocably in love with her. 

--

Shepard has been with a good chunk of men - roughly hundred by her last count, most of them several years ago now - and made out with enough women to know for sure she’s mostly heterosexual. Beyond that she doesn’t have very specific preferences, has always gone with the flow, seized the moment, found things to work with in the specific context. She appreciates spontaneity, a little cockiness, someone who will give her a good time and cheerfully walk away.

Monolithic, by-the-book lieutenants probably wouldn’t qualify, if she ever did figure out a supposed ideal. It takes too long, demands too much and she’s typically only passing through.

Yet here they are, confined to each other with their hearts uncomfortably on their sleeves among regulations and calibrations and she would have laughed, if they weren't constantly thrown in harm’s way.

Then he makes her laugh anyway, despite it all, drags up exhausted giggles from the depths of Eletania where they spend the better part of a day fighting geth and feeling up monkeys in search for a missing data module and Kaidan dryly dictates a report for Hackett while they're invading the local wildlife's personal space.

It’s off the record, it falls between the clearly defined lines and Shepard can’t stop looking at him in the shuttle back to Normandy.


--


Later, when she's gone and his world is full of her, this is what he remembers the most from how it all started:

How quiet they can be together, how absolutely still in a galaxy exploding with noise. He who can’t usually stand it, she who’s drawn to it, circling the rowdy surroundings like a moth circles light. Shepard who isn’t silent unless she’s plotting something, Shepard who chats when she’s happy and when she’s bored, even more when she worries. That same Shepard who sits beside him for so many stolen, wordless moments that he loses count before they’re even halfway through their mission. There are days when he can see her sink into it, tilt her head back and drift off.

"Thanks for letting me borrow your silence," she says sometimes, smiles, and slips out again.


--

Later, in the solitude of the cloned vessel that carries all the cutting-edge tech and none of Normandy's soul, Shepard remembers how Kaidan filled out the empty spaces, the breaths between words, the stretches between actions. In her ship, in her doubts, in her.

He’s a quiet guy, easy to miss.

He’s a treasure in an uncharted world.

*  *  *

They’re careful with their bodies, the way they’re taught to be, especially as it becomes clear their hearts are running a different course. Sitting several feet apart, standing firm, applying every reg they both know even in their sleep and at least somewhat sometimes truly believe in. They’re in total agreement about said regs and perfectly synchronized in their communication regarding them.

It’s only on the verge of exhaustion or desperation that Shepard considers throwing herself at a raging thresher maw or a stray bullet just to make sure he lives or rearrange her tactics for the tenth time but factor in LT Alenko’s odds at survival this time around. She catches herself doing it, sure, but she does it all the same.

It’s only in the middle of the night shift where the ship is quiet and restless minds cannot sleep that she drags herself over to where he is, datapads ready as a shield and excuse as he looks up at her with that gaze, the one that pulls her in. 

They’re careful with their bodies, but on the way from Virmire, Kaidan’s hand reaches for hers and she holds it, wordlessly, until her fingers are numb and her eyes full of tears.

“She died because of me… because of us,” he says and she can’t argue against that.


--


Ash dies and for the first time - briefly but passionately - he wants to get away from the Normandy. I always leave a way out and he almost lets his mind go there, but duty calls him back and Shepard stands firm, seemingly better constructed to endure grief and regret. He wants to ask her about it, wants to ask her about Torfan, too, but the task is so daunting and she’s cagey about her past.

After their disastrous debriefing and yet another bracing call to the Council, she comes to see him. There’s a stubborn jut to her jaw, a layer of guilt over her words.

“For the record, lieutenant, you outrank Williams. You’re also the best human biotic I’ve served with.”

He wishes she’d call him Kaidan, now more than ever.

“Commander - Shepard - you don’t have to-”

“Your record is spotless. I trust your judgement and I value your opinion greatly. Your grasp of politics and diplomacy is an asset to our team and you keep an open mind.” 

Kaidan lowers his gaze, blinks, when he looks up at her again the hard, professional expression has softened, the sharpness of the blame she places on herself dissolved into sadness. He wants to wrap his arms around her, offer the solid physical comfort they can’t afford.

“It was you or her,” she says. “I had to make a choice. What would you have done?”

There’s a bag full of Gunnery Chief William’s stuff that stands outside the medbay, awaiting further transportation. He knows, because he’s been staring at it since it appeared. A human life, no larger in the end than what fits into a bag. 

“The same,” he admits and the stars flutter around them.

“I'm aware we’re on thin ice here.” She rubs a spot at the back of her neck, glancing up at him with eyes that hold the sun and all the stars. “But this, this wasn’t our fault.”

“Yeah.” He sighs. “I know.”

*  *  *

At the Citadel, Anderson puts his entire reputation on the line for her and she doesn’t have time to hesitate.

“No pressure, right?” Kaidan looks at her sideways.

It’s mutiny and it’s wild and it's the only thing they can do and when she sees that reflected in his eyes, something burns down to the ground inside her. They’d follow you anywhere, Anderson says and it’s a heavy truth to carry.

“You’d stop me, right?” she asks, when they walk back to the ship, overly casual like two teenagers after having shoplifted, self-conscious about every detail of their postures. “If I get in way over my head in this mess?”

If this is somehow Torfan, again.

“Shepard-”

“I need to know this.” When she says it she realizes it’s true, feels the sharp urgency rise in her. 

“I would,” he says, after a pause. “Of course I would."

The love she feels for him then more than covers a little mutiny, it could fuel a whole revolution.  

--


War shapes their love at every turn.

War shapes everything it touches, cuts it down to sharp definitions.

That first time in her room, shivering with adrenaline and anticipation on their way to Ilos, they’re not blowing off some steam, they’re not fucking, they’re not even having sex. That’s never what it is. Though the expression makes him cringe a little, despite the fact that he wouldn’t speak the words, they’re making love from the moment Kaidan steps into her quarters and closes the door behind him, the second he smooths out his doubts and kisses her through her own hesitation that she masks, badly, behind pick-up lines. I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of you serving under me, lieutenant and he thinks oh come on, but it’s Shepard; when he loosens her tight hairdo a cloud of brown curls fall across her face and he melts, when her hands roam over his back, her breath nothing but a hungry moan, he kisses her with an intensity that drowns out everything else.

I always leave a way out he says but in this, oh he knows as his hands tangle in her hair and her body presses him up against the wall, in this there’s nothing leading anywhere but here, an endless cycle ending in Shepard’s arms.

An endless cycle, he thinks, tracing the line of her jaw with his thumb.

That’s what she is.

In it, he can see it, a perception of a life with her: waking up curved around her body, the squares of light splayed across her back as he opens the blinds; her belongings cluttering up their shared spaces (even in his imagination it bothers him vaguely); the rhythm of her, lively and loud; the scent of that light, citrusy perfume she uses on the odd occasion when they’re not merely washing out grit and death; the way she often backs up to look him in the eyes, like it’s important, like he’s important.

In it, her skin is damp and warm and full of marks and signs, his hands are unearthing everything there is to know about her body; her mouth that travels close to his ear spins tales of what they still have left to do to each other and he laughs or reddens, pulling her over him again.

“You keep a list, Commander?” he asks, breathless like a teenager.

There are thin lines around the corners of her eyes when she grins, broadly. “You don’t?”

He should have, he realizes later (not late enough) in an evac shuttle over Alchera. He should have, because that would at least have been something .

*  *  *

They go to Ilos even though it’s impossible and speak to Protheans even though they’ve been extinct for an eternity and it’s a good thing Liara comes with them because the scope of history, the massiveness of their experiences is lost on Shepard as she scramble together enough info to keep going, race towards the finish line.

“Oh, Shepard,” Liara says, several times that day.

Oh, Shepard.

When they run through the vast graveyard where an entire civilization died.

When they crash into the Citadel, breaths caught in their throats and guns drawn and geth breaching through all failed defenses.

When they stand there, the only Alliance ground team at the Citadel, now suddenly weighing the fate of the Council in their hands, Shepard blinks and has Torfan on her mind, in her blood. But this is not Torfan and Hackett isn’t Major Kyle as he commands the Arcturus fleet to go in and save the Destiny Ascension and Shepard knows she must believe that.

“The admiral would stop you, too,” Kaidan says, quietly, as the sky screams with approaching ships. “If you made a terrible decision.”

What he really says, perhaps what he’s been saying all along, is we’re in this together and that sentiment rings in her as she confronts Saren again, even as his indoctrination floods all that once must have been good and fair in his soul which, frankly, she has no idea about but she knows he’s not this.

They’re not this.

Later, in the ruins, she wakes up next to the charred, twisted corpse of the turian and it takes a few seconds to establish in her blurry, fragmented mind that he’s the one who died.

--

Kaidan thinks she’s dead for almost a day, waiting with Liara underneath a chunk of metal that smells of ozone and fire.

That she isn’t is such a relief it aches in him for the two days they spend in hospital beds and all that time doing little except thinking about her makes it almost impossible to speak when they see each other again at the makeshift party in the makeshift buildings that is now the seat of power for the galaxy. It’s not a party party, it’s a memorial as much it’s anything else and it’s crawling with proud and heartbroken Alliance brass which is entirely too much this shortly after what they just went through. Thankfully, Shepard finds him in between a watery drink and a slowly increasing headache.

“Hey,” she says, in her regular voice though she wears her dress blues. It does things to him, seeing her in those now that he's seen her in absolutely nothing, and her list springs to mind.

“Hey,” he replies, a smile breaking through.

It’s so clear to him then. All of it, everything, is leading back to her.

Her hand in his, briefly and out of sigh, as she drags him to a secluded spot. The aftermath of war slows their bodies down but his heart races and Shepard hands him a chocolate donut - found them at the medbay, talk about spoils of war - and leans the back of her head against his shoulder. His body instinctively tenses but his arm comes around her, evening it all out. He can feel her grin.

Of all the things he imagined doing with her after the geth was defeated - are they? - this never made the list but somehow it’s the only thing that fits. They have this undisturbed, undiluted moment and they spend it eating their donuts slowly while listening to music from the 20th on Shepard’s omni - mom collects it, she says, turning up the volume, she claims they’re the best tunes to pilot a ship to. She licks her fingers clean from the leftover butter while he closes his eyes and smiles into the song that drowns them.

We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder, we belong to the sound of the words we’ve both fallen under.

*  *  *

They argue that day, their last. 

Nothing big, just the same old stress-induced spats about pointless details (not pointless, not details ) and the now familiar approach to their not-quite-Alliance ship and their not-quite-Alliance run. He claims they need to figure it out long-term, she says Kaidan, right now we're fighting geth and it's the wrong thing to say and the wrong thing to do, can hear it in his voice as he calls her Commander, stressing each syllable of the word.

"I'll talk to Alliance command once we're done here," she says eventually, by way of apologizing and Kaidan nods, a softness to his expression again.

Then, their time is up. 

All of it, all of their stolen seconds and hours and months have expired and war finds them once more.

Shepard sees the beam half a second  before it hits the ship, but it doesn’t matter. 

In this, nothing matters.

Tali tells her something over the comm, Joker sends out their maydays, Garrus ushers a dozen servicemen to the escape pods and Liara tends to the wounded for a second, long enough to see it’s no use.

Shepard can’t remember, afterwards, what she was doing. When her crew prepared the evac, saving what could be saved, what did she do? It’s second nature to step out of a crisis, try to document it to yourself so you can pass the deets on to the Alliance, it’s what she’s been trained to do but she doesn’t know.

All she remembers later is that Kaidan comes to find her as the ship falls apart around them and the sky opens up, weightless and cracking. Leave, she tells him, thinking she can’t bear the weight of his death, that it’s different from everything else, that it will destroy her the way Torfan never could. 

“I gave you an order!” she shouts at him over the debris, over the end of the world as it once was and never will be again.

He looks at her like he wants to ask if this - this - is the moment to start pulling rank on him, but instead he nods, and his voice is softened by the burning ship, the roaring skies when he replies.

“Aye, aye.”

 

--

They’re waiting by the escape pods groundside, one by one, as they arrive and crawl out. 

They’re counting: living bodies, missing ones, lethal wounds and medigel. 

Kaidan’s counting time. It's been too long already, shuttle after shuttle have dropped. He knows the numbers. Only one pod left unaccounted for. 

When it arrives and Joker gets out, alone, his face a twisted mask of shock and regret, Kaidan sinks down on the dirty ground that feels like a battlefield, only it isn’t and there’s no one there to pull him back to his feet again so he sits there, falls there, and he doesn't think he'll ever stop. 

--

Right above her head or almost, just a light-year or two to the left, there’s a dead star. She’s sure of it, can sense its hollow presence in her chest now that she’s dying, too.

As a military brat, raised in between relays and systems with stardust and black matter in her veins, she would talk to the stars about everything. They were the substitute pets she absolutely not no way in hell had been allowed to keep on a spaceship. 

Oh, mom. Don’t cry. I did my best, like you taught me. 

Mom is a warm space in her, tinged only with the guilt of making her live through the hell of outliving her own child. 

Kaidan is worse. He's a black hole, a wrecking pain.

She closes her eyes one last time, remembers the constellations and how they never were the same anywhere, remembers her joy at finding them shifting, changing, raging against the dying of their own light.

Don’t give up, she tells them, tells him. The fight is yours now. I’m so sorry.

War shapes their love at every turn but it’s the stars that will hold them together.

Chapter Text

There are flowers everywhere for her funeral and Kaidan doesn't know what to do with himself, where to stand, what to say, how to occupy his hands. If it hadn’t been her , he thinks, pressing an icy palm over the buttons of his jacket. It didn’t have to be her.

There are flowers everywhere and his throat is dry.

Hannah Shepard stands by her daughter’s empty coffin at the service nobody wants to hold for a woman who is rumored to have fled into deep space, rumored to be kidnapped by terrorists, rumored to be a terrorist, to be alive. The last rumor is a tightness in Kaidan’s chest, but he knows it’s not true, knows she wouldn’t be alive now, several months later, not without a life sign thrown in his general direction. She wouldn’t. She’s sloppy sometimes (a lot), careless with things other people take for granted because she’s been a figurehead and a hero longer than she’s been an ordinary person and it changes you, but she’s not cruel, she cares. 

Someone tells him in the weeks before the service that she’s read this great vintage piece on the Westerlund News archive about how FTL discovery created a surge of disappearances, people just needing to get away from it all, you know, do you think...?

No, he had said, firmly. She wouldn’t do that.

Maybe, someone else says, I mean maybe she just got overwhelmed. I heard she went AWOL for months after Torfan.

I reckon the batarians have it in for her. Given the history there -

No. 

There’s so much he doesn’t know but he knows this: Alexandra Shepard died.

She went down with the Normandy, she got everyone out and did everything right and the universe doesn’t care about that, it's not going to miraculously bring her back.

So here they are, and Kaidan stands by her mother, listens to Anderson and Hackett and some senior officer he recognizes vaguely from the Alliance extranet who has, it turns out, trained with Shepard and considers her a dear friend .

“Never heard of her,” Hannah mutters. “all those years and the only people Alex ever told me about were Tali'zorah and you. And that she befriended a krogan clan leader.”

You. The room spins. 

He can’t look anyone in the eye all evening because he doesn’t mourn a commander, he’s been way beyond that since Eden Prime; his reg-breaking grief sits in his chest like a shadow creature, bloated and out of proportion and he pushes it back, holds it down, but it keeps growing like the sickness it is.

"I'm sorry, Alenko," Anderson says and Kaidan suddenly knows that he knows , recognizes it in the cadence of his voice. It hardly matters now, of course. Nothing does. 

"I'm sorry," Joker says, too, subdued and pale. "She saved my life."

Kaidan looks at the brass and the marines, the crew that got out, looks down at the floor and thinks you should have died instead, thinks if you hadn’t refused to abandon ship, thinks if I hadn’t left her until the whole building moves beneath him and he has to leave.

--

He gets his shore-leave extended twice, no further explanation and he can’t bring himself to ask. His mother calls him every day, her voice steady and far-away and he tries to remember how it feels to hug her. You're too thin, she says, won’t you come home for a while? He lies to her, says he has to work.

Before he knows it, it becomes true and he’s back in his uniform, holding it together because that's what he does, that’s what Shepard would have done and he stops drinking whiskey, starts a new cardio regime at the gym and picks up Liara's meditation advice as an attempt at soothing the angry flares of migraine he's had ever since the crash. If it’s his fault that she’s dead at least he needs to make the most of the life he doesn’t deserve. 

You look good, Alenko people say because what the hell are they supposed to say?


--

He arranges himself around work, duty, principles. He’s never letting the Alliance forget the reapers and argues with anyone who wants to focus their resources elsewhere, shamelessly exploiting his name and its close association with Commander Shepard. This, at least, he figures the Alliance owes him for tearing Shepard away from them. He gets promoted, he tutors a group of biotic operatives in the off-hours and he calls his mom like the good son he often forgets to be. 

After a year, he attends a party at an old friend's place and the friend just so happens to have invited someone - single actually - who's a handsome engineer with a friendly voice and a good sense of humor. Kaidan shakes his hand and tries not to sink into the black void of despair that opens up at the thought of dating, of moving on, of replacing. It doesn't help. There's music and noise and he thinks about the Citadel, about old 20th rock ballads and leaves before the food arrives, blames work and something vague about being needed elsewhere. It's a lie, everybody with half a brain knows it’s a lie, but it lets him escape. 

Two days later he leaves for the Iera system.

A year and a half, and the colonists on Horizon hate him so much it’s actually refreshing. It shakes up his world a little and he feels closer to Shepard, somehow, being in constant opposition. Her facial expression after those calls to the Council, the angry shape of her pacing the lower deck or punching at training equipment. Fucking air-quotes, she’d hiss and biotic-kick one of the dummies to the other side of the room. Kaidan even manages to smile at the memory, even if it stings in the hollows of his chest.

Two years and they’re making progress if you squint and maybe that’s what they ought to do. It’s easier waking up, going to bed, conversing with hostile humans all the livelong day because he does it with a purpose and he does it the way he does everything else: thoroughly, methodically and with the belief that it matters. Somehow. 

Two years and he curses his stupidly monogamous heart as he walks out on a perfectly lovely woman because the moment was lost to him the second he remembered Shepard. A mouth that isn’t her mouth, a laugh that is too gentle, too submissive, a pair of eyes that doesn’t burn with the fire that creates the world. 

When he finally meets her again, that’s what he wants to tell her - you’re haunting me, I love you, you’re everywhere - but Horizon is a grey mass of bitterness and frustration and she’s alive after all and suddenly nothing follows any kind of logic.

* * *

She’s rebuilt and ancient, a myth of a woman chasing Collectors and ghosts and running into her own shadows. All of them hurt because the passage of time has betrayed her, sliced her open.

Two years, they tell her, dragging her out on the other side of death and she wants to ask them what right they had, with whose fucking authority they turned her into Lazarus but that sort of thing doesn’t carry any weight here, this is lawless land.

Two years and she was someone else then; she is the same now.  

She remembers joking with Tali on the Normandy just the other day, remembers pulling casual pranks on Garrus; fruitlessly trying to beat Joker’s high score on every omni-tool-compatible game ever released; she remembers other things than polite distance and mistrust; she remembers being in love, the fluttery, uncomfortable fear of losing it and the flood of warmth in Kaidan’s presence.

Remembers mutiny and how it had felt, the thrill and panic and the physical aspects of it, the breathless, senseless desire. They had chosen it, chosen each other - such a simple choice for once - in the midst of their race against extinction and she wonders now, in this sterile new ship, how one ever forgets that sort of thing. 

--

She rushes to the Citadel, to pull at the old strings that are still randomly attached but slipping fast and Anderson has a look in his eyes when she talks about Cerberus.

"I can’t tell you anything else, Shepard, you know that," he says and looks away, out at the sprawling city around them. It never felt like home but now it feels like it’s part of a different galaxy altogether, one in which she was never born.

“There’s something else you should know,” the Illusive Man says, in passing, habitually vague as though he truly believes he is a neutral part, that they can work together . 

Months after Horizon, Shepard still dreams about putting a knife in his spine. 

--

For hours, down on Horizon, she thinks he’s been abducted. The ground is full of terror and the heat unrelenting and she looks over her shoulder at the frozen human bodies, notices the crouched, cowering fear in their expressions and feels sick. Beside her Zaeed swears quietly.

Come on, Kaidan, she thinks. Be alive.

The fact that he is alive and breathing is a soft thud behind her breastbone and she’s still reeling from it when he hugs her. He hugs her and for a second everything stills, the endless turmoil, all the threads that tangle and pull come to rest there in his arms.

He smells of soil and coffee and grass, groundside smells; he told her once he misses Earth, specific places, specific sights and she’s never forgotten, ties those details to her image of him. Is he satisfied here? Who does he talk to when the ungratefulness of the colonists gets to him? Does he spar with someone and does he hold back? Where does he go to find rest? There are so many things she wants to ask, to say.

In the end, she asks nothing that demands an answer and says nothing worth remembering and he doesn't understand the spaces between the words in this new life of hers, she can tell from the way his gaze falls, the shade of anger in his tone. 

So much have passed between them, so much have changed and this is, apparently, what remains. 

The Normany, burning.

The sound of his voice, the parting words when she was last alive. Aye, aye.

The shape of him, walking away from her.

* * *

Before, when she was dead, he saw her everywhere.

The world forgot quickly but he didn’t, he had seen her in every crowd, during every extranet search, in every face around every corner.

Not much has changed, now that she’s back.

He sees her on the news, on the extranet, in a stray search. She doesn’t look the same, her eyes are duller, her voice is deeper, the sun isn’t raging in her bones and her scars are gone, all of them vanished; for some reason his hands shake when he thinks about how he’ll never trace that thick marking across her face that she once told him a Batarian gave her and she kept out of spite; he never asked out of spite for what and now he never will because that map of her past is buried. 

Looks the same to me, someone says but they’re wrong.

Then she’s on the Westerlund News and lectures the reporter about human lives lost against Sovereign and Kaidan can’t stop watching it, can’t unsee the glint in her eyes and that slight tremble in her voice whenever she’s upset far beyond momentum and protocol. 

Shenyang. Emden. Jakarta. Cairo. Seoul. Cape Town. Warsaw. Madrid. And yes, I remember them all. 

He almost calls her then, her signature burning on his screen before he turns it off and goes back to work. 

* * *

After Horizon, everything stays inside her, piling up.

All the calls, every letter, even the simplest vid chats with her mom. No personal communication goes out, almost nothing comes in either and she’s relieved and despairing in equal amounts about that. 

She’s Lazarus; she’s a trap for everyone she cares about.

After the worst kinds of missions when her brain can’t shut down and her back feels like it’s going to break just from holding her upright, Zaeed pours stiff drinks for her in the cargo bay; during long transit hours Thane tells her stories, delving into metaphysical theories about bodies and souls and doesn’t seem to mind that she’s dozing off; other days Garrus consults her about new tech or weapons, or calls her down to the crew’s quarters for some version of poker with Tali and Kasumi and Chakwas. We change the rules each time, Shepard, keeps you on your toes. 

She nods, she smiles, she doesn’t let herself get attached.

She’s Lazarus; she’s a trap.

--


Escape is the only artform she’s ever mastered, space-born military brat that she is. 

Don’t stand still, occupy yourself only with the image others offer you, never go beyond surface details, get to your feet and keep going, follow the noise, the chatter, the unconquerable life.

Kaidan had given her a place to stop, a moment’s respite.

She should have known it was only temporary.


--

"Admiral Hackett wanted me to give you these," Liara says eons later and billions of missions away and hands over the old Alliance dog tags, holding them out for her like pieces of a past that still aches, the edges raw and unhealed. "He hopes you are doing well."

Shepard nods, looks away; her throat is thick with held-back emotion.

When she’s alone again she sits by her desk, balancing the little metal piece in her palm, the metal cool against her skin as she closes her hand around her own name, the letters barely there as she runs her thumb over them. 

* * *

The grief eventually withers inside him, a slow gradual shift taking place that year when he follows every piece of news on Cerberus, on Collectors and Reapers and Shepard and sleeps entirely too little for months in a row.

She blows up the Collector base, he catches the gist of it on the news and he thinks of course she did like he still knows that. (He does.) He hears she loses people (again) and he thinks about Torfan, thinks about all those unasked questions he thought he would have the time to ask. About enduring, about moving on, about shedding the weight of the galaxy. Thinks about the Butcher of Torfan, how she hates the nickname and closes around it like a feral animal, protecting not only herself but those lost. (She remembers every name; she once told him during a long patrol on a distant moon.)

Then there’s the turmoil in the Bahak system and a whole damn relay being shattered and Kaidan witnesses hearings both in person and via comm link like the rest of the gossip-hungry brass and she’s back with them, at least partly, at least part of her. What parts she left for Cerberus he does not know, cannot bear to think about. There’s a new scar on her lower lip, a heavy streak of sorrow in her eyes and whenever he sees her in front of the admirals she reminds him of her mother at the funeral.

“She’s fucking lost it, this time,” someone at the station says to someone else.

“Didn’t she do that a long time ago, I mean really ? And with her Cerberus connections, too.”

“Yeah, not even Hackett can get her through this one, I bet.”

“I read the report,” Kaidan says. “It held up.”

The truth, should someone force it out of him, is that he read it five times and went over every detail of it, looking for reasons for his doubts, looking for a place to leave them behind. He feels like an idiot , a fool scrambling for his lost faith somewhere in a cathedral of stone and prayers and it’s crumbling, the whole place is coming down around him but so are the Reapers and this is no time for mistrust.

Then he sits through all these meetings and sessions and watches Anderson place himself on the line for her, watches the blunt, soft-spoken force that is Admiral Steven Hackett grind the critics to dust, hears them both call Shepard a hero, a remarkable leader, saying her judgement is impeccable and her reasoning solid and he doesn’t disagree with that, of course he doesn’t, it’s just - 

You’d stop me, right? Her voice in his memory, the incredible softness of her fear, the intimacy of it. He’d promised her then, promised himself, that he would always do just that. Even if everything else ends between them, even if it’s the one last thing that remains he will honor her humanity and her trust in him.

I’d stop you, he answers her again now, in his head, as she stands before him in her uniform once more, like the past three years have all been a terrible dream. I would.

Earth is under siege, the Arcturus fleet is decimated and he sits in a shuttle headed for Mars, by Shepard’s side and there’s nothing to do but to lock himself to his own oaths and faithless hope as they travel through the stars.

Chapter Text

Earth is dying.

Of course, Earth has been dying for a very long time at this point so they should be used to it, but of course they’re not. In the end, it turns out you can’t really prepare for your own extinction.

And yet, in this shuttle they travel from it like it’s possible to outrun it, wrap it up in lightyears and fleet formations, wash away death from their armor. The beams from the Reapers live behind their closed eyelids, the sight of Vancouver in pieces is branded into every word they speak.

“How long do you think we have?” Kaidan doesn’t look at her; her hands are resting in her lap, bare and bruised and oily from rummaging through the broken city they left. His family lives here, she wishes she didn’t know that, wishes it wasn’t true. Her hands twitch. They want to reach out, want to touch him for comfort the way they have habitually done ever since Feros when lines had been properly crossed for the first time and she no longer cared. He had squeezed her fingers between his own then, she had pressed her palm against his arm, dipped her forehead briefly towards his shoulder. Skin on skin, the simplest consolation.

Now they’re far apart.

“Not enough,” she says, turning slightly towards him. “But that hasn’t stopped us before.”

“No,” he agrees and he sounds so tired she wants to cry. “It hasn’t.”

*

 
Mars is crawling with Cerberus, like dark echoes all over the surface. 

For a while (too long, by all accounts, he knows that) looks for a pattern, a logical flaw. He thinks it can’t be a coincidence, that her presence by his side here again is too good to be true, too convenient and he can’t hide it. There’s something going on, something beyond Reapers and seeing Cerberus presence here rattles his brain, summoning every single piece of worry from the past two years. Long after he stopped fearing she had genuinely switched sides he had kept himself awake calculating the possibilities of her being controlled, being on a leash, functioning as an unstable weapon in the Illusive Man's hands. It’s not that he doubts her , it’s more that he counts on people to want to take advantage of the first human Spectre, warp her into something else.  

But Shepard doesn’t take kindly to being protected and his doubt hurts her, oh, he sees it in her face, the way her mouth purses, hears it in the tone of her voice. And although that knowledge is horrible - that she’s hurt, that he’s hurt her - he can’t stop himself, still feels that this is what he promised her, what he’s always been to her.

“Please trust me,” she says.

“I do,” Kaidan answers but he hears the word come out hollow and meek.

Liara gives him pointed glances, and later she will forward so much intel and reports about what Cerberus and Shepard did and didn’t do that he'll never run out of reading during his hospital stay even if he only reads a fraction of them. But they’re still on Mars and she glances at him across the rooms. 

"She’s back," she says, nodding at Shepard who's bent over a console, trying to download data. "How does that feel?"

“I don’t know,” he answers because it’s the truth. How does anything feel at this point?

Then the numbness from leaving home subsides. In small pieces at first, then through greater shifts mounting up to a landslide. 

Fighting at her side again loosens something in his chest. Thaws emotions he has worked hard at burying, shatters those defenses he put up when he understood she wasn’t coming back and then had to be fortified by a thousand when she did turn up, behind enemy lines.

And now she’s here. She’s here.

She’s still a downright brilliant battlefield strategist with a mediocre aim and her biotics are crackling, shivering attacks with lots of force and less finesse. He’s still putting up barriers around them both, shielding her against enemy fire and taking hits meant for her as her attacks trickle down, her biotics fading. She acts quickly - jumps into harm’s way for him, for Liara, for just about anything - and Kaidan wants to protect her, do right by her, impress her. (He's not proud of the last bit, but at least he owns it.)

Fighting at her side again brings back a shadow of then , and he’s leaving himself wide-open to it, against all better judgement. There’s no way around it.

Shepard’s a different woman - harder, sadder, older - but she’s also the same.

“Hey,” she says, under her breath. “Your gun is freaking cooler than mine. New?”

“Hey, you were always stubborn,” she says. Her tone is warm even if he just compared her to a Cerberus husk, even if she hated him for doing it, even if he hated himself for doing it.

She doesn’t really hold grudges, though, never did. Her mind rushes forward and her heart is big; he used to think she was arrogant because of it but she just really forgets quickly, moves on in a way he absolutely cannot. Remembering it makes him miss her even more.

So Kaidan smiles, because hell, this is Shepard , doubts or not.

“Me ?” he asks because really.

“Uh-huh.”

A soft thud inside him. An echo.

“You outrank me now, major,” she says under her breath as they take a tram and dodge bullets and there’s a hitch inside his chest at the title, the way it lives in her mouth, becomes a glint in her eyes. Hell , he’s missed their battlefield flirting like the starving man he is. That simple, clever way she always had of pushing him out of his cages and comfort zones, the glittering promise in her eyes, the ridiculous things she'd say to make him smile.

For a moment, with her gaze locked into his, everything is very simple.

He doesn’t remember much after that, and when he wakes up he’s in a hospital bed and the inside of his head feels like sandpaper and grit.

*


War, she thinks. War. It’s all that she is now. 

Kaidan almost dies on her watch, because of her involuntary ties and her inability to pretend he’s just another marine. He’s never been, and the Illusive Man has known this all the time, seen straight through her; she can’t stop him.

Palaven burns to ashes, she can’t stop it.

Cerberus is raging through the galaxy to destroy everything she works for, she can’t stop it. 

Humanity is losing colony after colony, she can’t stop it.


*

War, he thinks. All of it is made of war.

And in his own private bubble, pieces are falling into place at long last. A reward after the past two years, a recognition he’s been told he deserved on more than one occasion.

It’s jarring and it’s complicated and he can’t share it with Shepard, not during her visits that serve as brief breaks from the battlefields, doesn’t want to steal what little downtime she has, clog it up with his own drama.

She’s out there, fighting, brokering peace from the rubble of ancient conflicts and he runs on a treadmill in the safety of a hospital, sits with Udina trying not to be sidelined by bureaucracy and internal affairs and it’s not the same .

---

“She was the most solitary creature on that Cerberus ship,” Chakwas tells him and there’s a twist underneath his breastbone at her words, a fresh injury the doctors forgot about. “Never got used to seeing her like that. But you know Shepard. She carries on."

"Yeah," he says, suppressing the images of her, alone, the memories of Horizon, her detached comments and composed face. With nowhere left to run, she turns inwards. Some officers take to yelling, others to drastic changes of course, a handful fall into doubt and despair. Shepard goes quiet. He had seen it after Virmire when they grounded the Normandy, again on the Citadel that crumbled under their weight. I can get a salute from anyone on the ship, Kaidan. Sometimes I need a shoulder. 

--


“Cerberus has no honor,” Thane says to him in the patients’ lounge. “They don’t operate with mercy or fairness. Our mission to take down the Collectors had both, however. Shepard made all the difference.”

“Yeah.” Kaidan looks out at the Citadel traffic, strings of light and speed going round and round. “She does that.”

"I have no obligations left in my short time," the drell continues. "So I will watch over her, the best I can, like she watched over us."

And Kaidan nods, says I appreciate it, thinks that his thoughts are grounded in this, at least, firmly planted in a trust that has always been there even if it has taken various forms, slipped out of reach. 

It's Shepard. 

Everything else can be sorted out eventually. 



--

“Thank you for the offer, sir,” he tells Admiral Hackett after a series of events that make a loud, thundering noise at the back of his mind but seems to have left no impact on the world around him. “But I think I would rather serve on the Normandy.”

If she’ll have me there, he doesn’t add, doesn’t care to think about. 

“Alright.” Hackett nods. “I trust it you will have no issues taking orders from Shepard again.”

It’s not exactly a question, but Kaidan answers it anyway. Feels like he owes it, like he could never say it enough.

“None whatsoever.” 

*

It says something about the state of the galaxy - or perhaps about them - that having an armed standoff isn’t something that fundamentally shakes them up. 

An armed standoff with someone you love, Kaidan corrects her and she touches his arm, catches his gaze, wonders if there’s any collateral damage there, if she can bear it. 

But he smiles, a quick, introverted sort of smile and the stars fall back into their positions above them.

War sets the course for them, shapes the maps of their lives but love, Shepard thinks as she counts all the ways stardust reflects in Kaidan’s face, his smile, the way his hands sprawl over her back in her memory, maybe love is what defines them in the end.

There’s no one like you, she thinks. Soon, when they have time, she hopes that she will tell him that. They have lost years, they’re different people, they need time to catch up and catch their breath but some day, she will let him know.

"Welcome home," she says now, in the meantime, as the doors push open and the ship pulls them both in.