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“What’s going on? Is there something else?”
He laid his head back on the flat, plain hospital pillow and stared up at the ceiling for a moment before replying. “Yeah. Maybe.” Kaidan let out a sigh, lifted his head and turned to look her in the eye. “Was there something between you and Garrus?”
Shepard broke eye contact and dropped her gaze to her hands, folded around Kaidan’s bruised palm, her stomach sinking. She let go of his hand, leaned her elbows on the edge of the sterile, hard bed and folded her face in her hands.
“Can I explain?”
The major nodded, leaning his head back onto the pillow and squeezing his eyes shut.
“Three years ago, when the Normandy...when I got spaced…” Shepard swallowed, “When I died. It wasn’t...it wasn’t fast, Kaidan. The air was leaking out of my suit and everything was going numb and cold, and all I could think about was...was how it was okay.”
Kaidan’s eyes flicked open, widened to stare at her. He opened his mouth as if he was going to speak, but she cut him off. “I don’t mean I wanted to die, just that...in the end, I knew it was going to be okay. The crew was safe. Joker was safe. You...you were in that escape pod, and I knew you were strong enough to take care of them.”
Jane lifted her head from her hands and raised her eyes to meet Kaidan’s. “You survived. I protected my people. It wasn’t going to be another Akuze. I knew I was dying, but it was okay because in the end I’d kept my promise - I said never again, remember?”
Kaidan slid a hand onto hers, squeezing it gently. “I remember. That’s what you said to me, after we lost Ash.” She stared down at his hand. It was probably the first time he had willingly touched her since Horizon. On Mars he’d looked at her like she was some Cerberus monster, like she would turn on him any moment. That look had hurt more than the burning in her lungs as her oxygen leaked out of her suit.
“So I died, and then...and then I woke up, and everything hurt, and the people who had me were the same ones who killed my squad on Akuze. I didn’t know what had happened, if I was really me or if I was some clone or if they’d stuck anything in my head or...or changed me. Hell, for a moment I seriously considered if all that stuff Ash used to say about god and judgement and afterlives was true and I was in some sort of hell. I didn’t know if I could trust myself.”
Jane lifted her eyes back to Kaidan’s. “Then they told me about the collectors. About the colonies. About people, civilians, being taken. Just like...just like…” Her throat tightened and the word caught in her throat, and for a moment she felt like she was suffocating, like she couldn’t breathe the word without reliving it, without going back to being that scared little girl shoved in the back of the closet whose father told her not to move, not to make a sound, looking past him to see her mom pull the shotgun off the wall…
Kaidan’s voice brought her back, calm and even like always, like everything was under control. “Like Mindoir. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I didn’t know what to think, Kaidan. I knew I hated Cerberus for what they did, and that colonists were dying. I didn’t know if I was going crazy, or if I could trust myself. All I knew was that I had to protect those people. No matter what Cerberus had done to me.”
“Jane...Jane I’m sorry. What happened on Horizon, I own a lot of that. You were standing right in front of me and I was...I handled it poorly. I’m sorry. I should have believed you.”
She let out a breath that twisted itself into a wry laugh. “I don’t blame you for not believing in me Kaidan. How could I? I didn’t believe in me.”
Shepard stood, sliding her hands out of Kaidan’s with a gentle pat, leaving his folded across his bare stomach. “The thing is though, Kaidan...Kaidan, I needed you. I needed your certainty. Your moral compass. I needed you to hold me in your arms and tell me I was doing the right thing. Or...fuck, if you’d even just held me and told me what the right thing was. I needed you, and you shut me down.”
She turned, took a step towards the door and paused with her hands resting on the doorknob. “When I found Garrus, he was every bit as fucked up as I was. But he believed in me. He never questioned who I was, what kind of person I was. He never looked at me like I was some freakish science experiment. He kept me sane. We...we kept each other sane. Kept each other from doing things we might regret.”
She didn’t turn around. She wasn’t sure she could say it if she looked him in the eye, so she stared blankly at the door and let the words fall out. “I love you, Kaidan. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving you. But I don’t know that I can move past Horizon. I’m sorry.”
The door clicked closed, and before Kaidan could lift his head and respond, she was gone.