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There are two men in a lab when Shepard walks in and two men being carried away when he walks out. One on a stretcher and one in a body bag.
'Should've known, right?' he says to Kaidan afterwards. 'Can't set foot in a lab without someone being indoctrinated. Or whatever that was.'
Kaidan's sat on the couch in Shepard's quarters, watching him scratch his jaw and scroll through the data copied from Bryson's lab – filter data, search results, profiles on the Mahavid T-GES Mineral Works facility. Shepard's shoulders look tense, but no more so than usual, and they bump against Kaidan's the same as always when Shepard comes over to join him.
'There's a lot of that going around,' Kaidan says.
'Yeah, you'd almost think there was a Reaper invasion on or something.' Shepard frowns at the datapad in his hand. 'You know what goes together even better than labs and indoctrination? Mining camps and indoctrination.'
'It might not be so bad.' Kaidan nudges Shepard's ankle with the toe of his boot. 'Maybe we show up and Garneau's there waiting for us with this Reaper-killer all wrapped up in a pretty pink bow, and we can blow through to Earth and save the galaxy in time to grab a couple of beers in front of the sunset. You never know.'
Shepard chuckles. 'I have to tell you, Kaidan, nothing good has ever happened to me in a mining camp. Ever. It's always husks and creepy eezo experiments as far as the eye can see. Although Therum wasn't bad in the end. Apart from the geth.'
'Therum was an archaeological dig site, not a mining camp.'
'It was a mining camp first. That counts.'
Kaidan shrugs. It's a small point, sure, but you have to fight the small points in the middle of a war like this because the big ones are just too goddamn big.
'All right,' he allows. 'Liara was one of your better finds, I'll give you that.'
'Liara? I was talking about that mining laser. Wish we could have taken that with us. That was pretty good.'
Kaidan snorts. There's a dull throb of tension building behind his eyes. Not an implant headache, just one of the ones he gets sometimes from Shepard being Shepard at the end of a long day of mind-controlling artefacts and paramedics.
Shepard catches his wince, always looking closer than Kaidan expects, and rubs the back of his neck, thumb skirting round the implant jack.
'Cheer up,' he says, 'it could be worse. Last time I answered a priority mail from Hackett, I ended up in Bahak.'
Somehow that doesn't make the headache go away.
*
Kaidan says 'you were right' before Shepard gets round to 'I told you so'.
'Eezo and husks,' he admits, 'you had it pegged.'
'And yet, it's always worse than I expect.'
Yeah, none of them had gone in expecting that. That's the funny thing about the Reaper war: whenever you think you've finally hit rock bottom, there's always a new low. Always a new brand of nightmare fuel to keep you up at night, and this one hits closer to home than Kaidan's comfortable with.
It's those hollow-eyed miners and the time that passed them by, easy as breathing, ten years gone between one breath and the next. It's them and the people on the other end, the families whose children, partners, parents just disappeared. Vanished into Leviathan's grasp for ten years without a word, dead in every sense but the biological one and with no bodies to send back for a casket.
How do you come back from something like that? That's what Kaidan wants to know. How do you pick up ten years of unravelled threads and come back to the kid that's maybe never even seen your face, maybe forgotten that he ever did, or the family home that's been sold, the mother who died of cancer three years ago. Hell, these people don't even know that there's a war on and that maybe everyone they ever knew is gone already. That kind of fear, how do you deal with that, when you wake up and suddenly everything's unknown?
Looking at Shepard taking off his helmet and his gloves, getting out of his armour – looking at the cracks in his skin where Cerberus didn't put him back all the way, the faint scars on his jaw and the backs of his hands – it's a horror Kaidan thinks he can almost imagine, like those two years that they lost already, a horror Shepard lived through; or rather, didn't.
Carpe diem. Live in the moment. That's what you have to think about.
The moment between when Shepard's hand brushes Kaidan's stowing his chestplate and when he steps past; between the rise of his chest and the fall that turns it into a sigh, a private showing, breath warm by Kaidan's cheek before he turns back to ask Liara something about fresh leads and the lab on the Citadel. The kind of fleeting warmth that could keep a guy running long past empty if it had to.
Kaidan's wasted a long time with regulations and regrets and being half-hearted about the things that matter, and it's not going to be his downfall the second time around.
He's going to take this where he can, his whole life in the moment before the elevator door slides shut and the shuttle bay becomes just another space without Shepard in it.
*
They show up at the Namakli dig site too late to rescue anyone but Ann, and too late to do anything but tell her that her father's dead.
They're really on a roll with this mission; the velocity is all downhill.
Shepard saves his mirthless chuckle over that for later when it's just the two of them, him and Kaidan on the floor of the starboard observation deck, their backs against the couch and their knees bumping as they watch no particular constellations pass. The stars are sharp even through all those layers of fused silica.
Structural weakness, Shepard's fond of saying about it, and he always smiles when he does like it means something else to him. He doesn't say it now. Doesn't say anything else, either. It's not that there's nothing to say, but that there's no good place to start. The ground gets treacherous out here with nothing but that wide transparent plate between you and your end. It's not hard to think that safety's just a trick of the light.
Or that's what Kaidan reckons, anyway. Maybe mortality's just too much on his mind.
He's thinking of his own dad. MIA, two months with no word. The conclusion isn't hard to draw, except that it is. It feels disloyal of him to be so sure about it, but he's not fooling himself about the odds. It is what it is, and the feeling's long since settled in behind his sternum, so familiar a weight that he mostly doesn't notice it at all unless he breathes too deeply, slows down too much. He's not going to be able to outrun the facts when they come in and they might drop him yet, but at least, for now, there's still some track to go.
Ann Bryson didn't have that chance to brace before the facts caught up with her, caught her straight between the eyes.
'Poor kid,' Kaidan says, though she isn't one. There's something about putting parents to rest that makes you feel small; burying her father, she'll always be a child.
'Can't save them all, hard as we try,' Shepard says, and even though they've all learned that the hard way – through Earth, through Thessia, through a host of tough choices and lose-lose scenarios where victory looks a hell of a lot like defeat but with better press – even after all that, it still comes out of Sheppard's mouth like something said by rote but not really believed.
Like he's still a green recruit in there somewhere, staring at the stars and thinking that the whole galaxy is there at his fingertips: every lost life a moment that he could have been better, could have been faster, could have given something more if only he knew how.
Carpe diem? Well, that cuts both ways.
'But we do try,' Kaidan says, 'and that's the important part. That's... Well. One day, this is going to be over.'
And then what you've done will really matter, because chances are that's all you're going to have left, and that's how you're going to have to live with yourself, one step at a time. It's something they don't talk about, don't even think about, really, because the luxury of future plans is not nearly a given. But when the time comes, and whoever it comes for, that's how they're going to have to cope with the empty places round the table and the ones who didn't make it.
There are going to be a lot of broken families out there.
'You have to believe that,' Kaidan says. 'Whoever'll still be around to see it, one day, this is going to be over.'
Shepard shifts over beside him, puts his hand on Kaidan's where it rests on his thigh. 'I'm sorry,' Shepard says, though there's no one he should be apologising to, least of all Kaidan.
Kaidan turns his hand over. There's a kind of comfort in the scarred knuckles of a soldier against the inside of his knee.
'Yeah,' he says, 'me too.'
*
'There's no way this is going to go down easy, is there?'
Shepard's at the weapons bench in the shuttle bay with his hands on his Vindicator and his eyes on some narrow spot between his fingers. There's a smile on his face that isn't much of one, a half-cocked grimace that says it figures and let's do this and I'm tired at the corners, if you know where to look.
'Probably not,' Kaidan says.
Shepard snorts as he hefts the rifle and clips it to his back. 'Yeah, that's what I thought. Wouldn't want our grand finale to be an anticlimax anyway. That'd be a shame.'
'A real shame. I'd probably cry.'
'Can't have that, Major. Bad for morale.'
'Then for the sake of morale,' Kaidan says, 'I respectfully suggest that we get out there and kick some Reaper ass. Got a lot riding on this one, and not just how sorry I look when I've been crying.'
Garrus leans out of the shuttle, mandibles flexing, always a sure shot when you need it most.
'It's true, Shepard. You should have seen him at the card table last night. Fifth hand and only his socks left to bet.'
'Yeah?' Shepard says. 'Think I'd be crying too.'
'Vega has that effect on people. Children especially, so I hear.'
'Hey,' comes the call from the across the bay, 'you got something to say to me, Scars?'
A team effort. Kaidan, well, he goes back and forth over whether he's a team player or not and this'll always be more Shepard's team than his, but he appreciates it all the same.
You need a friend or two, people you trust with your life and everyone else's, even if you're not always much of a talker. Even if you're less of a talker than you used to be. Someone to take the heat off, take some of the sting, lay down enough covering fire that Kaidan can step in and stand a little closer by Shepard's side, helmet under one arm – both of them holding their armour but not quite wearing it all the way.
'It'll be tough,' Kaidan says, 'but we can take it. We didn't come this far to roll over now.'
It's just about enough. Sometimes a guy needs a shoulder to cry on, but sometimes he needs one that's going to shoulder the full weight of the burden right alongside him and not pretend it's lighter than it is. Maybe Kaidan provides the latter too often when he should go for the former, but he and Shepard are old hands at this now. They know what they are and what they're not and even though Shepard might wish that things were a little different in his heart of hearts under all that titanium alloy and heavy muscle weave, Kaidan knows how to bear up under those chips on his shoulders, straighten them out.
'I've got your back, Shepard.'
'I know. Just try not to get distracted back there.'
Kaidan raises his eyebrows just before he settles the helmet over his head, locks down the visor.
'I won't if you won't.'
Shepard grins.
*
It doesn't go down easy; Shepard never would. Not in a fight and not when it counted, not in bed either, so why would he here? The seas are heaving black all the way to the horizon and the sky is raining down on them, not just water but worse things too, husks and marauders and banshees.
The mech goes down with one hell of a splash, battered by the black swell and the hissing salt foam. Shepard's voice is calm as he marks off the depth, down and down and down, but it's about the only thing that is. Cortez wears his fear on his face, shoulders twitching against the recoil of his pistol. Garrus looks like he's wound tight enough to pop every joint of his plating under the armor. Kaidan too. He's feverish from the heat of his biotics, swallowing iron and salt at the back of his throat. He could blame his unsteady feet on the pitch and yaw of the deck, but he's a better man than that.
When Shepard gets back, he thinks – and it's a matter of when, not a matter of if – when Shepard gets back, but that's as far as the thought goes, no plan, just a when sitting firm at the forefront of his mind.
When Shepard's done slipping away into the deep like the miners' ten years slipping by, like two, like a short future getting shorter with every cubic foot.
It's easy to say he'll focus on the moments they do have rather than the ones they might never get, but it's harder out here where the list of things Kaidan can't afford to think about is longer than a krogan's grudge – the wrinkles in the t-shirt Shepard was wearing over breakfast; the clothes he wasn't wearing last night; the way the mech's comm line shut out ten minutes ago and that Reaper in orbit is closing in fast.
He shouts at Garrus to watch the left flank as he hurls a pair of husks into the water to clear the right. He sets his shoulder to the stub of bulkhead that's giving him cover and squints through the rainwater smeared across his visor. He could go half deaf in this storm from the bark of rifle fire and ricochet, and the screech of crumpling metal under a brute's claws, but all that's a whisper compared to the leagues and leagues of silence where it counts.
They need to buy more time.
Kaidan thinks, it's not like Shepard to be so quiet.
*
The chill coming off Shepard's armor is enough to make Kaidan freeze. Even the deck of the shuttle's not warm from the thrusters, soaking in the deep-sea ice and putting out no heat to help the effort along.
Shepard's colder than a slab and looks like he belongs on one. He's bleeding from his mouth and his nose, shadows under his eyes like he's never slept in his life, and Kaidan can't get him to wake up.
But he does.
In his own time, same way he does everything – faster and harder than anyone else, and when he's up, he's up, making for his feet as though he can shake it all off with the blood spat out on the deck.
'A headache,' he says, like that's it, like it's just one of those times that Kaidan's implant has put him in the medbay and nothing less routine. 'Always wanted to try deep sea fishing. Probably works better with a rod.'
Maybe it is routine for Shepard now, or getting to be that way: one more time that he's looked death in the annoyed, exasperated face and been told to piss off. Maybe hell's already too full of bad jokes.
'Never do that again,' Kaidan says.
Shepard's head hangs low, hands braced on his knees. He's paper-white and he looks translucent and thin under his armor, skin sitting too close to the bone and the metal that shores it up. Kaidan would offer him a hand, a shoulder, a leg up if he'd take it, but there's more metal in Shepard than Cerberus put there; more mettle, the kind of alloy in his spine that knows how to cave under too much pressure but only in an abstract way, muscle memory that's never been used. It carries his head up, puts a grin on his face that tires Kaidan out just from looking at it.
'I won't if you won't,' Shepard says.
It doesn't make much sense and it's definitely not the reassurance Kaidan was looking for – the reassurance he knows better than to expect from a guy as honest as Shepard – but he cracks a smile anyway, and if it's just that, a crack, with no glimmer of the wiring underneath, then Shepard's in no condition to call him on it.
*
The view from the observation deck window is black like the Despoina ocean was, but a damn sight calmer. That's an illusion. There are Reapers out there too, just as messy and much more bloody. The harvest. You'd never know it from the way it looks all still and distant with Shepard's reflection stamped over it.
Kaidan closes his eyes against the cool pane, still warmer than the skin of Shepard's face had been when they laid him down in the shuttle.
'You scared the hell out of me.'
'It was pretty scary,' Shepard admits. It's not admission enough; it's not as personal as Kaidan's feeling right now.
Kaidan shakes his head.
There's no cracking Shepard. What he's seen, what he's said. The things he won't say. Kaidan can't know what it was like for Shepard under all those atmospheres of pressure, down so deep it would have swallowed him up worse than space and they'd never have known where he went. Kaidan hasn't gone, willing and alone, into a darkness that deep, he's never known any mind but his own, never touched anything that old. He's thankful for it, but he's sorry for it too.
As for Shepard, 'the adventurous type' doesn't cut it. He isn't standard issue. No standard operating procedure in the galaxy applies, and 'handle with care' would be an insult to them both.
'You're crazy,' Kaidan says, 'you know that, right?'
'It's what they tell me.'
'Yeah, well. I guess that's part of what I love about you.' He doesn't even trip over the word.
He's not going to pretend he didn't know what he was signing on for, even if they're still working out the terms. It's just one of those things. It's who Shepard is. He's always going to be the guy out there in front taking on the tough spots and the lost causes that no one else has the wilful perversity to touch.
But Kaidan's got a choice here too. He can be the guy always waiting on the shoreline with dry toes and sick at heart, or he can be the guy up to his neck in saltwater, soaked through and shivering because he refuses to get left behind.
Shepard slides into Kaidan's periphery, leaning up against the window. His eyes are blue the way the ocean wasn't, and if his skin still looks clammy and pale then that, like safety, might be a trick of the light.
'Is it too soon for an off-colour joke about mouth-to-mouth?' he says.
Kaidan takes a deep breath, lets it out on a smile and screw the cost.
Structural weaknesses aren't all about glass.
*
Kaidan offers his shoulder that night, and more besides. Shepard curls into it with a sigh between the sheets, curls into him, the flush of his throat no trick, his hands on Kaidan's hip, the back of his neck, tight press of their bellies, foreheads, thighs.
'What happened down there?' Kaidan asks, running his fingers down the shell of Shepard's ear. His voice is a low murmur, a lower depth charge that he feels in the muscles of Shepard's stomach, quivering.
It's a question of more than the details in the report Shepard prepped for Hackett. It's a question of less, about the smaller things that aren't, that have no place in the scrubbed-up official version of events but put that forced, end-of-days expression on Shepard's face and shut him up for an hour afterwards.
'It was dark,' Shepard says, 'and it was cold.' His voice is much smaller than the span of his shoulders in Kaidan's arms, rougher than his hands; something not easily given.
He turns his face into the crook of Kaidan's neck, nose under his jaw, and breathes into the cradle of his collarbone. He sighs again, an exhalation of relief as Kaidan chases the tension from the knotted muscle of Shepard's back with his thumbs. This close, Kaidan feels his eyes shut.
'I've had too many people in my head.'
Shepard gets round to it in his own time, same way he does everything. Faster, because if he were any less quick the facts might come in before he could prove them wrong, and harder, because he takes Kaidan down every time, straight to the mat without even trying.
The dark of Shepard's cabin isn't really that dark. The aquarium light and the shapes the bubbles throw on the walls don't make Kaidan think of the sea, nor does the pressurised air of the Normandy: monitored, filtered, measured, not even felt. It's never quite quiet up here even with the music off, always subject to the low-frequency hum of the drive core that's lived in the ship a lot longer than Kaidan has and feels that way too, the sound of system integrity deep in the hull, not quite home but close enough, like two years of time turned back: the assumption that everything's running smoothly.
You never can trust assumptions. Can't assume trust, either.
But honesty, that's something in the length of time between two heartbeats, a moment, in Shepard finally winding down, not saying it, but showing it anyway. It's about handling the pressure, two bodies in a closed system trying to hold out against the entropy. It's about Shepard, voice not more than a shot in the dark, a flare way down below sea level, saying, 'You're warm, Kaidan, you're so warm,' and Kaidan, daring to think about the morning.