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Thane couldn't wait to get back to their apartment on the Citadel. It was yet another new beginning for him, but this one was joyful. The Reaper war was over and Shepard had survived. She was alive! He had never doubted that she would be victorious, but both history and mythology were replete with stories where heroes did not survive their battles.
He hired a car to take him to the Presidium level where he now lived with Shepard. It was only the second time he had visited the apartment since Shepard had been released from the London hospital. He knew every detail of the trip and the apartment, but it did not yet have the comforting familiarity associated with home with multiple overlapping memories of arriving and spending many days in the same place.
He had missed so much in the last days of the Reaper war. As his disease progressed after the Collector mission, the knowledge that he could no longer aid his siha in her battle weighed heavily on him. When Liara had arranged for him to be moved to the top of the transplant list on Kahje, he accepted without second thoughts. He no longer wished to die. Much to his dismay, however, he had been confined to Kahje during the last push to take Earth back.
"I love you, Thane. I promise, I'll come back." Determination burns in her eyes brighter than a fever. Behind her, I glimpse Garrus and Liara checking weapons against a backdrop of a ruined city. "But first, we're gonna kill some Reapers," she adds with a feral grin.
He grimaced when he spotted a cinema marquis featuring her attack on the Reapers. It had been hard enough fending off the reporters before the Reapers showed up. He was certain they had doubled their efforts to get an interview with the Savior of the Citadel and the Hero of the Reaper War in the run-up to the movie premiere.
"She punched a reporter this morning." Kolyat's expression is caught somewhere between admiration and guilt. "I didn't realize he was camped outside the door, and I wasn't fast enough to stop her when the prick started asking her personal questions."
Sometimes my conscience stirs when I think about using my son to keep watch over my lover while I was on Kahje. But he offered. He resides on the Citadel now, a citizen of the galaxy, and Shepard offered to let him stay in her apartment. "This place is too big and lonely for just me, Thane." It is spacious enough to house most of the crew of the Normandy, and according to Kolyat, many of them do stay over frequently.
His doctors had been reluctant to let him leave the planet, but he was adamant. He had lost enough time with Shepard. No more. She needed him, and he had sworn that he would protect and support her, no matter what, until the end of his days.
In the Presidium proper, he took the stairs two at a time, delighting in the smooth feel of air moving in and out of his new lungs. The surgery scar on his chest still ached on occasion, but this past trip to Kahje had confirmed that the lung transplant was still functioning properly. There were yet more trips to Kahje in his future to monitor the efficacy of the transplant, but for the moment, he ignored the necessity of leaving her alone again. Today was for celebrating his recovery.
The Reapers are dead, and all of Kahje is celebrating. No one knows how it happened. The pulse of energy from the mass relay disrupted communication for days. I cannot join the celebrations. There is no news from Earth, no word on Shepard. Finally, a week later - contact.
Garrus looks like he's been through hell. I suppose he has. Guilt rises up that I was not at Shepard's side, sharing in the danger and aiding my friends. His expression fills me with dread. Before it can build too high, he delivers good news. "She's alive." That is the only good news he has. "She's bad off, Thane. If you can get to Earth...well...you should."
I check out against the doctor's advice. I will not stay away any longer.
Even now, just a few short months after the end of the war, there is still a joyous feeling in the crowds. The Citadel was finally back in the Widow system and the worst of the damage had been repaired. There were more keepers about than he had ever seen before, and they worked non-stop to repair buildings and support systems. As he walked down the broad avenue leading to their apartment, he dodged yet another keeper coming out of a clinic. The memory of his reunion with Shepard rose up, as intense as when he reached her hospital room in London.
She's alive! Thank you, Arashu, for your grace and blessing on this penitent sinner. Oh, thank the gods, you're alive, Shepard.
Red hair spills across a flat white pillow, highlighting the unnatural paleness of her skin. Her face is thinner, the lines sharper, and even unconscious she looks to be in pain. She should be joyful. The Reapers are destroyed. She saved us all!
The machines surround her with wires and tubes, beeping and humming softly. Her body is battered and nearly destroyed. Her left arm is gone, crushed beyond saving. I take her remaining hand in mine. It is lax and unresponsive. Wake, I silently beg her even as I prepare to sit vigil for however long it takes. For now, this must be enough. She lives. I live. We are together, and this is all I have dared pray for.
He rounded the corner and saw their apartment. A smile pulled at the corner of his lips. It was a gift from Admiral Anderson to her in the closing days of the Reaper war. It was only his second time here since Shepard had been released from the London hospital, but it was his home because she was here.
"Your friend honors you with this place."
"I know. Swanky. Can't believe they're still letting me live here now that the war's over."
"You're a hero, siha. To the entire galaxy. This is part of how they choose to reward you. Enjoy it."
She looks down over the living space and sadness fades her blue eyes to grey, but then she pushes it away and forces a smile to her lips. She thinks I won't notice, but I do. She catches my hand and pulls me toward the bedroom. "Maybe, but right now I'd rather enjoy you. Those new lungs of yours up for it?"
I laugh, purposefully letting the sound be more than I truly feel right now. I'm better at pretending than she is, but I silently promise both of us that I will turn her smile genuine. "I already feel ten years younger. Perhaps you should worry about keeping up with me."
Another flash of sadness and I curse my poorly chosen words. Her recovery has been difficult. I sweep her into a kiss and pour all of my love and longing for her. We've been apart too long. We've both touched death and returned.
We don't make love that night. It takes time to become reacquainted with each other. Our time together in the London hospital was limited by my requirement to return to Kahje. I've never told her the reason my subsequent stay on Kahje was so long and I missed her release from the hospital was because of the infection I got in London or how close my donated lungs came to failing because of it.
She is shy around me as never before, and it takes a long time to convince her that I consider her new scars to be part of her beauty. It takes even longer before she can be persuaded to take off her shirt and show me her cybernetic arm. From a distance, it looks normal. It is only up close that one can feel the different skin texture or see the slight fumbling as she tries to make her artificial fingers do as she wills.
It bothers her more than she will admit, this change to her body. But physical damage is easily repaired these days. In time, she will use her new hand as easily as she did her original one. It is the injuries to the mind that are far more damaging. For her and for us.
The biometric scanner hummed before admitting him to his new home. Kolyat had sent him a note that he was heading out to stay with some friends. Kolyat's note also mentioned that he'd told Grunt to make himself scarce. The young krogan had appointed himself in charge of his battlemaster's security, and no one stopped him.
In truth, there was no one better. Thane had been restricted to Kahje most of the time, and Kolyat had his own career to manage. Garrus and Vega had stayed as long as they could, but eventually both had been called back to service by their governments. Grunt, however, had told Wrex he could shove his quad up his ass if he tried to tell him to come back to Tuchanka. Wrex had laughed and told him to protect his battlemaster, and that was that. It didn't take long for the hordes of reporters to figure out that they weren't going to get past the bad-tempered and heavily armored krogan performing guard duty.
Today though, it would just be the two of them. Thane dropped his travel case by the entrance and looked around. The space was neat, as always. Shepard's spacer upbringing had instilled in her an almost fanatical devotion to minimalism and tidiness. Evidence of Kolyat's and Grunt's residence was mostly confined to their rooms, although he spotted a couple of comic books next to Grunt's huge chair. Instrumental music provided a soothing background noise, and his nose twitched as he took in the smell of fruit and sweets in the air. Shepard was baking. It was her new hobby, something to occupy a portion of the overwhelming amount of free time she was now faced with.
A new noise reached his ears, barely audible over the music, but it was enough to send him racing down the hallway in a near panic. "Siha!" He stopped short at the entrance to the kitchen, unnerved at the sight of Shepard slumped on the floor, surrounded by glass shards and globs of dark, sweet-smelling jam splattered all over the floor and crying her heart out.
Stepping carefully around the glass, he knelt next to her and wrapped his arms around her. "Shhh. Everything is alright."
"No, it's not!" she denied angrily as she turned her head from him and dashed her organic hand across her eyes to brush away the tears. "I dropped the damn jar and look at it!"
He tried comforting her again, even though it rarely worked when she fell into one of these moods. The events of the Reaper War had taken a harsh toll on the woman in his arms, damaging her in ways that he couldn't quite understand and wished with all his heart that he could fix. Her doctors had told him that only time would help. Time and his love and support. He would willingly give her all of those.
"It is easily cleaned up, siha," he said as he hugged her tightly.
To Thane's puzzlement, that only made her cry harder. "No, it's broken and gone forever."
"Then we'll get some more," he tried.
Evidently that was the worst thing he could have said because she fell against him as huge, rasping sobs wracked her body. She looked and sounded like someone who had lost everything in the world, and Thane was very sure this was no longer about the jam. "It's...all...gone..." she wailed between gasping breaths. "Forever!"
A panicked scream wakes me from an unusually deep sleep. It is our first night together on the Citadel. My trip from Kahje was long and difficult, made more so by the constant breathing exercises I am required to do as well as the lingering ache of another surgery and the lethargy of the numerous medications. I chastise myself for sleeping so deeply that I missed the early signs of her nightmares even as I acknowledge that my body is still weak.
She screams again and claws at something out of her nightmare. I catch her hands, but that only increases her agitation. "Wake up, Shepard!"
The door opens as Grunt looks in. He's only checking to make sure it's another nightmare and that intruders haven't somehow slipped past him. I nod to him, and he leaves. I learn the next day that this is a common occurrence. Kolyat tells me he is glad I'm here so that I can take over comforting Shepard from her nightmares. He has a good heart, but Shepard can be difficult to face at times.
I learn that the worst nightmares linger in her mind the next day, sometimes for several days. She yells or cries over things that she would have ignored during our time on the Normandy. She turns away from my arms some nights and curls into herself. Traumatic stress, her doctors say and recommend counseling. She goes, but it seems to have no effect.
All Thane could do was wrap his arms around her and wait out the storm. Anything he said would be taken the wrong way at the moment. It took a long time, far too long in his opinion, for her to cry herself out. Still holding on to her, he stretched to grab a kitchen towel and wordlessly handed it to her. She immediately grabbed it and buried her face in it, as if he hadn't already seen it splotchy and red. "Talk to me, siha," he urged. He'd been trying since London to get her to open up to him about what had happened, but she had always refused.
He held her closely and crooned low and deep in his chest, a sound and vibration that he knew from experience usually calmed her down. Today was not one of those days. "It's this stupid hand," she muttered through the towel even as her artificial hand flexed in response to her anger. "I should have been more careful. I forgot how clumsy this hand is, and it just slipped out. My dad sent that jam to me because he knew it was my favorite. It reminded me of the summers I spent with him. But now he's gone and so are the cherry orchards, and I just destroyed the last thing my dad ever gave me!" The words dissolved into a high pitched miserable keening as she hunched over in his lap, and another round of sobs shook her body.
His heart ached for her, especially since he considered himself extremely fortunate. Both Shepard and Kolyat had survived, as well as most of the Normandy crew who had become his friends over the last two years. "I wish I had the right words to take away your pain," he sighed, more to himself than to her as he rubbed small circles against her back. Her symptoms reminded him of some of his peers who returned from assignments gone wrong. Traumatic memories were an occupational hazard for those given to the Compact, and the drell had a long history for treating them. Unfortunately, his own training was as an assassin, not a memory healer.
She was exhausted, and the tears didn't last as long this time. He urged her to lean back against his shoulder, but she refused. She was staring at the floor, and when he followed her gaze, he saw a large splatter of dark red jam that reminded him of congealed human blood. Apparently, he wasn't alone in that.
"I see them every time I go to sleep," she said in a ragged monotone. She spoke slowly, each word spaced out as if wrung unwillingly from some dark depth. He nudged her ear with his nose, silently willing her to continue. "Bodies. Hundreds of them. Torn apart and tossed into piles. The smell, oh god, the smell." She swallowed reflexively at the memory. "It was a charnel house, sticky globs of blood and rotting flesh everywhere. They didn't even process those bodies. Why not? Were they killing for sport? Killed too many to process, so just toss them out like rotting meat?" In the background, Thane could still hear the light instrumental music, a morbidly incongruous counterpoint to the scene she was describing. All he could do was tighten his arms around her, although he feared he would interfere with her breathing if he held her any closer.
Her next words lurched out as if she'd been holding them back for months. "I shot Anderson." She started to tremble in his arms. "I never told anyone. They never found his body. I'm not...sometimes...I'm not even sure he was really there," she whispered. "Black tendrils crawling through my mind. The Illusive Man was there, talking, talking, talking! They squeezed my mind, and I squeezed the trigger. I killed him. I killed Anderson. But not if he wasn't there. I don't know anymore. I don't know what happened."
Now that she had started talking, the words poured out of her, and as she talked, the shaking got worse and worse until Thane held her not for comfort but to keep her from collapsing. "There was a kid - he died when I escaped Earth. I saw him in my nightmares. Every night. I chased him, and he burned and I burned with him. Then he was standing in front of me on the Citadel, but he was a ghost. Except he said he was the Reapers, and this was all part of their plan. He wanted me to join with them. Syntheses. Organics merging with synthetics. End the war. He said it was destiny. I saw a vision of it - people merging with Reaper tech against their will, dead husks coming back to life..."
Abruptly she lurched forward and threw up on the floor. Thane held her hair back and rubbed her back when she was done. She tried her best to wipe her mouth with the dish towel, but her hand was still shaking. "I think...I think they were trying to indoctrinate me. Anderson said...he told the Illusive Man that he was indoctrinated, but I wonder...what if he was talking to me? What if he wasn't there, and it was just the sane part of my mind trying to fight off indoctrination? Saren came back to himself at the end. So did the Illusive Man. Right before they each blew their brains out."
For the first time, she twisted to look at him and grabbed onto his jacket. "Thane, what if I'm indoctrinated? What if I wake up and realize I have to kill myself?" The look on her face was pure agony mixed with terror.
A similar dread closed a cold hand around Thane's heart, but he refused to let it grow. "That will never happen, siha," he growled, unable to completely suppress his emotions. "You are not indoctrinated. We would have seen evidence of it by now if that were true." He swore he would never leave Shepard alone again, but the knowledge that he still had to travel to Kahje to complete his medical treatment weighed heavily on him. He pushed that thought away for now to focus on the woman in his arms. "Listen to me, Shepard. You are not indoctrinated. You are reliving your memories in different ways. It is frightening and painful, but it doesn't mean you are indoctrinated and it doesn't mean you are doomed to relive them forever."
She shook her head, and when she looked at him, the pain on her face nearly broke his heart. "Nothing works, Thane. I've tried medicine and sleeping pills and alcohol. The nightmares keep coming. And then I see something like...that," she said with an aborted gesture toward the jam splattered on the floor, "and it brings it all back. I'm just so tired of it all."
A rare impulse grabbed him and for once he didn't stop to think it through. "Come away with me, siha."
She glanced at him with a faintly puzzled look on her face. "What? Where?"
"Kahje."
"Why?"
"It would be good for you. The hanar think you blessed by the Enkindlers but are far too polite to bother you with constant requests for attention, unlike the reporters here. Drell are intimately familiar with the trauma of unwanted memories returning to haunt them. I believe they would be help you more than the doctors you are seeing now. And it would get you away from the Citadel. Merely being in this place triggers the memories you are trying to suppress."
She started to shake her head. "No, I don't want you to spend more time there than you have to. Your lungs..."
"I was careless when I was younger," he admitted to her. "I will not make such mistakes again. Come away with me," he pleaded softly. "It is where you belong. Arashu has chosen you as her siha. The hanar adore you, and the drell will respect and understand what is troubling you."
She pressed her trembling lips together as she gazed unseeing at the high-end furnishings of her luxury apartment. He could only guess at the thoughts going through her mind. He knew from Garrus and others that this place held many memories for his lover, both good and bad. "I don't want to be a burden," she murmured. "That's all I've been since..." She lifted her cybernetic hand a few inches and waved it aimlessly around.
"You are not a burden. You are a hero, but the war is over and heroes deserve a chance to rest. Come with me," he asked again. "It is my home, and I would have it be yours as well."
"I don't...I'm not..."
"Shhh. You do not need to decide now. Think on it. Let's get you upstairs for now." She didn't protest when he helped her to her feet and up into their bedroom. His first objective was to wash away the splattered jam that had triggered her meltdown. Once she was safely ensconced in the shower, he returned to the kitchen to clean the mess.
He was finished before she was out of the shower. When she finally stepped out, he wrapped her in a towel and steered her toward the immense bed. Her unresisting acquiescence bothered him, another sign of her newly variable moods and the unseen damage from the war. He stripped his own clothing off and slid underneath the sheets next to her. She held tightly to him and it was many long minutes before she relaxed into slumber.
It didn't last. It was a rare night that a nightmare didn't take her. Thane woke when her hand smacked him in the chest. He grabbed her arms to still her and shook her carefully while calling her name. "Wake up, Shepard." He was braced for tears or angry words, but neither came. In the dimness, his eyes dilated to take full advantage of what light there was and he frowned when he realized she was staring blankly at the ceiling. "Shepard? Siha?"
"You were serious?"
He wasn't sure exactly what she was referring to, but it didn't change his answer. "Always."
"Alright."
"Alright?"
"I'll go."
The thought of taking Shepard away from the Citadel lifted a weight he hadn't even realized he carried. "When?"
"Now."
He didn't question her further. Instead he grabbed his omnitool from the bedside table. Five minutes later, they had tickets. While he was doing that, she had dressed and was waiting for him. He did raise one eyebrow in question. Even after so long apart and so much that had happened to each of them, she could still read him. "I don't want to bring anything with me. I want a new start."
He nodded his understanding. "Grunt?"
"I've got you now. He can stop playing nursemaid."
"He never considered his duty less than the highest honor, siha."
"I know. But it felt wrong to me." She paused before asking, "Kolyat?"
"He's a grown man now. His choices are his own. I will notify him of our plans."
She took his hand as they left the bedroom and walked through the darkened apartment. He closed the door behind them, and Shepard never bothered to look back. He took her hand again as they headed for the docking ring. This would hardly be the first time his life had been turned upside down in an instant, but this was one of the few times he was glad for it. A fresh start for both of them. A chance to build something new without war and death hanging over their heads.
He smiled and squeezed her hand. When she looked back at him, she was smiling.