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The fur is the color of a thundercloud. The body is soft, and no larger than a hand. Eyes are squeezed shut as paws clutch at the air.
“So vulnerable,” Irikah whispers, her gaze still fixed on the creature in the vid. She’s breathless, amused, skeptical. “Yet it grows into Earth’s most famous predator? I want to see that planet for myself…”
Shepard’s cough drags Thane back to the present. He stares at the cloud-colored strands in her hair that had evoked the memory of the young wolf. She coughs again—a wrenching, drawn-out sound—her torso curling inward, both hands covering her mouth.
He can almost see her soul straining out of her body, unsure of which world it belongs to.
“You’re unwell.” He half-rises from the couch. He wants to reach across the table and touch her, but stops himself. “Do you need the doctor?”
She shakes her head. The cough subsides, but her hands remain over her face. In the dim light of the cabin, her eyes glow like embers dying at the bottom of a well. “This is nothing new,” she says in a voice gritty with blood.
He sighs and leans back. He knows that Shepard is selective about which comforts she does and doesn’t want. She has to be reminded and cajoled and threatened—usually by Miranda—to take medications to ease the pain of inhabiting a body that was recently dead: joints that don’t bend as freely as she remembers, hands that aren’t as steady as she expects, skin that’s stretched too taut over synthetically-reinforced muscles.
But she untiringly seeks comfort through distraction. She asks to hear every story, and she clings to every word as though it’s a desperately-needed handhold on a cliff. Perhaps, for her, it is. She usually seeks him out in the Life Support room, but today the strain of the last mission—chasing mercenaries over rocky terrain—has caught up with her, turning her body into an aching, huddled mass. So he has come to her cabin instead.
“So,” she says, finally lowering her hands from her mouth to her lap. “What reminded you of a baby wolf, exactly?”
“Ah.” He’s still unused to lapsing into memory in another person’s presence, and fielding the questions that inevitably follow. “Your hair. The way the silver glittered in the light for a moment.”
She narrows her eyes. And then laughs, but stops when the coughing begins again. “I’m glad it was only that.” She tucks a lock of hair behind an ear—such a quintessentially human gesture—and stares at her knees. “I was worried that it was my… uselessness.”
Thane steeples his fingers. “The wolf was hardly useless.”
“Irikah said it was.”
“She said it was vulnerable. But is that not the remarkable thing about mammals? Who could imagine that something so delicate, given time and opportunity, would grow into such an indomitable creature?”
Shepard stands and begins pacing the small room, hugging herself tightly. “I don’t think it works that way the second time around,” she mutters. “There’s not supposed to be a second time around.”
Thane observes the slight wobble of her gait. “Shepard, I… had always believed that body and soul are irrevocably separated at death, never to be joined again. There would be little use for assassins otherwise. But you have endured what I thought was impossible." He takes a deep breath. "I've never been happier to be proven wrong.”
There it is again, that desire to reach out and touch her, to tell her with his hands what he dares not say with his voice. But he knows that he shouldn’t. They don’t have time and they don’t have a reason. They’re just brushing past each other, a chance meeting as Shepard is on her way out of the grave, and Thane is on his way into it.
And yet, he rises anyway. He closes the distance between them.“Shepard, I know that illness is a loyal and unyielding companion.” She frowns at him. Even without touching her, he can feel the warmth radiating off her smooth, flushed skin. “But with every day that I've been on this mission, I see a little more of your strength return. Even on days like this. Especially on days like this.”
She takes a step back. Her frown is deep and her eyes are wide. “I—I think you’d better leave.” Her voice is as hard and small and inscrutable as a pebble.
His heart plummets, but he knows that he should be grateful. She’s sparing both of them from a vast and inevitable grief. He bows his head. “I understand.”
The cabin door has scarcely closed behind him before he hears her voice again from the other side. “EDI? I’ve just realized that my cabin conditions aren’t quite right. Could you please reduce the humidity for me?”
“Certainly, Shepard," says the AI. "For how long?”
The elevator opens in front of Thane, but he pauses before getting in. His heart gallops and aches incomprehensibly, his ears straining to hear her answer.
“For as long as possible.”