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When the sun is nearly blinding
May you by it see everything
As it was meant to be
A wonder extraordinary
Made to wander free and fearlessly
Unto all eternity
Because death has lost already
- The Arcadian Wild, “A Benediction”
——
The candle flickers alone on the table.
He knows that this is against regulations. Alliance Naval Code 1493.4B, Kaidan thinks. Open flames are a safety hazard onboard all Alliance craft and are restricted to engineering purposes only with supervision. He knows the book back-to-front, committed the whole thing to memory before basic ended. He knows he shouldn’t be doing this.
He just can’t bring himself to care.
It’s only been a few days since Virmire, but it feels like a lifetime since the last time he saw her. The cocky smirk on her face as she rushed off to report to Kirrahe and his squad, as if she’d won a prize and he’d lost. The click as she secured her helmet in place, now seeming all too ominous in its finality. Her lazy wave as he boarded the Normandy to secure the bomb, her fingers curling slightly as she disappeared from sight.
He wonders what Ashley would think about him using her candle like this. If she had been saving it for a special reason, or maybe had been a memento from her civilian days. He wonders if it had had any particular significance, why it had even been in her locker in the first place. He wishes he could ask her.
But he can’t.
Kaidan stares into the candle’s flame, turning those last moments over and over and over in his mind for the hundredth time in the last two days. Setting the timer on the bomb. Making peace with his imminent death. His stomach dropping as Ashley radios, “Screw that! We can handle ourselves. Go back and get Alenko.” Falling to the geth as they swarm the dropsite. Feeling his heart beat quicker when Shepard picks him up. Realizing that Shepard is saving him.
His eyes flick up to the door of the CO’s quarters on the far side of the mess, then quickly back down. The guilt at that last is almost as strong as the grief. He stares deep into the candle, searching for something. Answers. Absolution, maybe.
Nothing comes.
The candle gutters for a moment, the slight hiss of the medbay door changing the air pressure in the mess. Soft footsteps approach, stopping a few meters away.
“Lieutenant.”
He scrubs his eyes before turning and acknowledging the asari with a nod. “Dr. T’Soni. You’re up late.”
She gives him a half smile. He’s still not familiar with asari physiology, but he suspects he knows what the slight discoloration around her eyes means. “I am finding it difficult to sleep.” The smile fades as she glances at the candle. “I do not wish to disturb you, though.”
Kaidan shakes his head and gestures to a chair. “Not at all. I couldn’t sleep either.”
Liara has a seat, and they sit in a soft silence for a while.
“It’s hers,” he murmurs into the stillness after a time. Liara doesn’t say anything, just looks his way. “The candle. It’s Ashley’s. I found it this morning when I was packing up her locker to send her stuff home. It was…” He trails off.
“You took it?”
He shifts in his seat. “It wasn’t on the manifest. Everything we bring onboard is supposed to be declared and written down. Alliance Naval Code 3120.32D, part 5.1.40b,” he recites from memory, “The division officer maintains a permanent file of itemized, descriptive inventory sheets for any personally owned tools, materials or equipment authorized to be brought on board.”
“Impressive,” Liara says with a slight curl to her lips.
Kaidan half-bows in his chair. “I do have a reputation to uphold.”
She gives him a sidelong glance. “Ashley told me once that you sleep with your regulation book under your pillow.”
“Those books are softer than our pillows,” he replies, the ghost of a smile pulling around his lips at the memory of a well-worn argument. “I just can’t believe she actually had contraband in her locker all this time.”
“Really?” Liara smiles softly. “Because that’s entirely in keeping with what I know about her.”
Kaidan chuckles. It feels good to laugh a little, but the sound dies quickly, swallowed by the darkness in the empty room. After a moment, in a small voice, he says, “I miss her.”
“I do, too.” She pauses, then tilts her head. “Then why burn her contraband, instead of keeping it?”
He sighs again, carding a hand through his hair. “It’s silly, really. I…” He stops, not sure how to explain.
“I apologize, Lieutenant, I did not mean to—“
“It’s the longest night,” he says abruptly. “Tonight. Back home, I mean.” Liara gives him an encouraging nod that seems only slightly baffled. “It’s a tradition of sorts. Religious, kind of, but not really, I guess.” He falls silent, unsure how to continue.
Liara gazes thoughtfully at him. “Tell me about it.”
He looks back at the candle, the tips of his ears feeling hot. The words come, unbidden. “My family aren’t religious, not like Ashley’s,” he begins. “Just not something my parents ever really cared about. Except once a year. There was this little chapel down the road from our cabin in the Canadian interior. We’d go to the cabin for school break every winter. December in the interior is…beautiful. High drifts of soft snow, evergreen trees dusted with the stuff. And at night, the stars mix with the aurora the create this sight that just…takes your breath away. Magical, to a kid.”
His head thrums with the memory. “Anyway, this chapel we’d go to was always decorated for Christmas. An, uh, old Earth holiday. Weirdly, we never went for Christmas Eve service, or any other service. But Mom always insisted we go to the one held for the longest night.
“The chapel always started out dark, and quiet. Never a lot of people, maybe because it was rural, maybe because it was sort of depressing. The choir would sing quiet songs, and the pastor would say a few words, but he’d always end with some verse that says, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. And then…”
He closes his eyes briefly, the sense memory intimately overwhelming. “People would start getting up, one by one, and lighting the candles around the walls. In memory of loved ones. In hopes for others. I just liked the act of lighting them when I was a kid, watching the fire, you know? And little by little, the whole chapel would just be…filled with light. Blazing, reflecting off the stained-glass, warming up the whole space. It was incredible. Always made my mom cry,” he chuckles, scrubbing at his face again. “And the pastor would send us out with the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.”
Liara sits with that for a long moment, staring into the candle. Kaidan doesn’t say anything more.
After a while, she says softly, “It is a beautiful ritual.”
Kaidan ducks his head.
“Would it surprise you to learn that the asari have a similar ritual?”
He raises an eyebrow. “It would.”
She gives him a small smile. “The siarists tell a story gleaned from one of the older religions about the goddess Athame. The ritual involves the lighting first of one flame, then dozens, and finally hundreds as an echo of the goddess’ words in the story.”
“What did she say?” he asks.
She pauses for a moment, collecting herself. Then, in a soft voice, she says, “Once, when the world was new and the asari were still young, there was a time when the days grew shorter and the nights grew longer, until there was nothing but night.
“Then, the goddess Athame descended from the heavens. She brought with her all the tools for civilization: knowledge, wisdom, empathy, courage. But strangely, she did not bring with her the light.
“The people asked her, ‘Athame, goddess of all that is—why have you gifted us with so much, and yet not given us the light?’
“And Athame answered, ‘My children, I have done better than return to you the light. I have gifted you the tools to beat back the darkness. For the light comes and goes, but the darkness is everpresent. So grow, my children, and learn what you must so that you might one day push back the darkness and herald light’s return.’”
Liara falls silent. After a moment, Kaidan says in a voice thick with emotion, “That, um. That certainly…resonates.”
Liara gives a soft chuckle. “Early in my studies, I encountered a Prothean story tablet—fragments really, so much had been lost to the Reapers. But the tablet fragments together told a tale quite similar to the one the asari tell about Athame.”
“How is that possible?” Kaidan says, furrowing his brow.
Liara shrugs. “I asked something similar of the Matriarch advising me, Dr. P’Ropp. She said, every culture across species recognizes that darkness is inescapable. We do not know if the light is coming back when the night falls. We hope for it, we might even pray for it, but we do not know. We cannot. All we can do is wait.”
She sighs heavily. “And so…we wait for the light.”
His eyes flick up to Shepard’s door again, and then back down.
“You should go to him,” Liara says quietly.
Kaidan is instantly tense, his eyes going wide as he looks over to meet her gaze.
“I am sure he would appreciate the comfort, too. And the company.” The smile she gives him makes his heart beat quicker again. Another rush of guilt follows.
Kaidan shakes his head, blowing out a shuddering breath. The candle gutters. “Not…um, not from me.”
“Kaidan—“
“I’m the reason she died.”
He cuts her off quietly, but his words echo in the nearly-empty mess like a shout.
“I forced the choice. I forced him to choose. I armed the bomb, I set the timer. I— I forced him.” He takes a breath, trying to keep his voice steady. “He thinks her death is her fault, because of course he does. That’s who he is. He doesn’t fail, but she—“ His breath hitches. “She died. He thinks it was his fault, but it’s not. It’s mine. It’s mine.” His voice breaks, any words that might’ve come next dying in his throttled throat.
“Ashley’s death is not your fault,” Liara says firmly. She takes his hand in hers and squeezes gently. “It’s not.”
He doesn’t deserve the kindness in that simple touch. He hates himself that he can’t bear to take his hand away.
Liara doesn’t let go, squeezing his hand more insistently. “I have not known the Commander as long as you have, but I do not get the sense he is one who blames his friends unfairly. Ashley’s death was not your fault. Any more than Benezia’s was mine.” She says this last with less conviction, as if she’s said it to herself before, as if it in the repetition it might become true.
“It’s not,” he says shakily. He clears his throat, then says again, more emphatically, “It’s not.”
“No,” she replies, “it is Saren’s. And I know he knows that.” She glances back at the door across the way. “Shepard knows that.”
Kaidan turns back to watch the flicker of the candle’s flame. “I can’t face him. Not…not yet.” There’s a wealth of meaning buried in those spare, halting words.
“So then…we wait,” she says quietly.
“‘We’?”
She nods. “We.”
He takes another shuddering breath, then nods back. She just squeezes his hand once more.
They sit in companionable silence for a long while, lost in their own thoughts and memories, bathed in the warm glow of a friend’s contraband candle.
Waiting for the light.