Shepard wakes up in a hospital alone.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
In all nearly a hundred ships are unaccounted. Her voice grows feebler as years go by with no contact, no sign, no return. He's alive, she insists, believing she'd know, somehow, if he were not.
Her mother tells her to let it go. He's just a man. She lived, and she's wasting her life away.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Ten years after, she sits in a studio with a reporter on Liberation Day and answers the same tedious questions as all the years before. She tries to avoid blurting out that this is also her anniversary, in a way, by sheer coincidence also fourteen years to the day since she arrived at her X.O. post under Anderson and met the crew. She remembers that first sight of him- quiet, a little too serious for six in the morning and much too handsome for a marine, and her heart crumbles to nothing as it's overlaid by that last glance, bloody, bruised, as their friends hauled him back aboard the ship. Away from her.
At the end, the woman asks, "You've been on Earth a decade now. Is it starting to feel like home?"
Home was a small room on a smaller ship with Kaidan in bed beside her. She smiles blithely and makes some trite excuse for how obviously uneasy she is, even after all this time.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Three months later, a whisper. A rumor. A dream. A merchant freighter logged an anomalous signal in the Traverse. They thought it was a turian signal, they said, but it proved to be forged. And if that isn't exactly the kind of hallmark Joker would use in unknown, possibly dangerous space, she didn't know what was.
Eight months of pleas and threats fall on deaf ears. The galaxy is still in chaos. People still go without food, there's not enough ships as it is to hold off the pirates, and nobody has time or fuel to waste chasing the long dead.
Then an unexpected offer. Shala'Raan, at her office, haunted by ghosts of her own. "I need to know," she says. "I can give you a ship."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Volunteers only. The ship is sparsely crewed. The search is tedious, and risky. A great adventure- and she knows that one way or the other, it will be her last.
Twice they nearly turn back.
Then they hear it- the barest thread of a distress call, almost too faint for the VI to distill from the noise. They find the planet.
They find the ship.
She watches the wreckage on the scanner, dumbfounded, unable to comprehend life signs present. It is too much to hope. Her heart is in her throat. For the first time, doubts come. What if he's angry, the long wait turned to bitterness? What if he gave up on them? He's done it before, after all. What if he'd forgotten the feel of her mouth or the whispers they spoke together, too afraid to raise their voices lest those dreams be given too much life- enough life to kill?
What if he didn't survive?
She's never believed in god, not really, but that one thought chases all the others out- her eyes squeeze shut and she pleads with every atom of her body to let him be alive, he can hate her if he likes, just let her see him when they land…
And then they set down in the grass, lightly as bird, and she tumbles out the hatch. The camp is in an uproar. People crying, hugging- people sitting on the ground and burying heads in hands. People shouting and laughing, barely able to hear each other, not even caring who knows who from one ship to the next. But she barely registers any of it. Her eyes sweep the crowd but she can't find his face. A kernel of panic in her stomach, the beginnings of a nightmare.
Somebody engulfs her in a bone-crushing hug and sets her down again. James. He's saying something, cursing, grinning so wide his face should split in two- but then he finally looks at her, really looks, and the fear is all too plain. He points off to the woods.
"He's out checking traps," he says. "We radioed the team to come in."
And then she hugs him back, fiercely, gratefully, a pressure not unlike tears building up behind her eyes but she can't even speak, much less sob. Twenty tense minutes pass pacing by the ship, running her hands over her arms, rubbing her palm over the hull, impatient and desperate and strangely anxious, until at last a figure breaks through the tree line. Her head jerks up. Her body goes still.
It should be too far for their eyes to meet, but somehow they find each other. A surge of electricity rushes through her and grounds itself in the earth. She can't command her own legs.
He screams her name- her real name, the one she was called by as a child, before she somehow got too big for a first name, more an idea best expressed by a title than a human being- he screams it, this man who is so reserved it's a standing joke. And her knees unlock and she runs toward him, vision too blurry to place her footfalls, drawn onward by the sound of his voice.
They collide in a tangle of limbs and curses and tears and fall into the grass together. Not once in eleven years has she cried but now she's crying so hard she can't breathe, all ugly hiccups and oceans of snot and half-formed words emerging from her mouth as unintelligible grunts. He's softer, her hands too wet to tell his tears from her own, but he kisses her like he can't stop, cheek forehead mouth hair, over and over, a litany of touch, and his arms are so tight that she can hardly shake even though all of her is trying. Several times she tries to stop, pull back and control herself, and every time she sees his face and it starts all over again.
Minutes or hours or, hell, weeks later, she has no way to tell, she finally composes herself enough to speak, and even as her brain sends the impulse to her lips, it hasn't decided- I love you, or I missed you, or something joking to ease the tension- but what comes out is, "You're here!"
He chuckles, and rests his forehead against hers, holding her face between his hands like a relic of a lost age. "I hope so. The only place I've ever wanted to be is where you are."
They sit like that, just a few minutes more, before she hauls him to his feet and they walk slowly back to camp, leaning in on each other. He limps now. Chakwas never could convince his leg to heal right after that final battle. But he gets by, he says. She tucks her arm under him anyway, taking some of his weight, happy to do this small thing- happy that for the first time in so long, she can take care of him in even the slightest of ways.
There's a fire, and food, and celebrating- and drinking, and grief, because even for those who survived there is intangible, pervasive loss. Of time, of friends, of the parts of yourself you thought were true until you spent eleven years doing anything to survive.
For their part, though there's some good-natured ribbing from friends old and new alike, they're in their own world. They talk all night. Fingertips trace the gray strands in his hair and the lines at her eyes. She tells him about how she took his mom on a shuttle tour, to see space, and he tells her how he fed her fish every single day. They started passing away of old age the last few years, but there's still one left- her first, her favorite, and he swears it refuses to die until it sees her again. All these things shared wordlessly over their long separation, things done to build hope, to stay connected, to hold on to each other across a vast and gaping silence, small acts strong enough bridge ten thousand light years and one broken radio.
And it's not becoming whole again. It's coming home.