Authors note: This story was inspired by the first chapter of The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien it's a really great story I highly recommend it.
Shepard sat at her desk in her private cabin staring at her computer. The only message not archived in her inbox was titled About Horizon… She had received the message 15 minutes ago, when she was on the CIC, she passed Yeoman Kelly Chambers and Chamber had thrown her usual line casually over her shoulder. "Commander you have received a new message at your private terminal." Shepard had accessed her email through the terminal on the CIC. She saw the subject and the sender and the rest of the world faded away.
She had forgotten where she was, she had forgotten her crew, she had forgotten her dignity and pride. She just opened the letter immediately, giving no thought to anyone or anything else.
With every, single, word she read she felt heavier and heavier and heavier. The moment she read the last word she regain understanding of who she was, what her position was, and how unprofessional it was to stand on the CIC crying over a guy. Not that she had actually cried of course, years of practice had perfected her poker face. But that letter made her feel heavy, like she could barely hold herself up.
She closed the terminal and turned to the elevator to head up to her room. She stared the space between where she stood and where the elevator was. It seemed to be around a dozen paces, she inhaled and moved forward. She told her left foot to move forward and then her right foot, all of her attention was focused on getting herself to the elevator. The last time she had felt this way was in the beginning of basic training. Her armor (which was ironically supposed to make her stronger) weighed a shit ton. Now it felt like a second skin, but then it had pressed down on her muscles, weighed on her bones, made gravity seem like the enemy.
Eventually she became acclimated to it, to the point where the first half hour after she had taken her armor off felt weird. Like the air around her was too light, but eventually she got used to being in her own skin, just like she had gotten used to her armor, like she needed to get used to this.
Her last thought made her stomach drop. That was her new reality. Kaidan being gone, him being on the other side of the galaxy, far away from her. Only running into each other when the higher ups deemed it beneficial for their own agendas. She finally got into the elevator and pressed the button that would take her to her quarters. She knew, logically, that she still weighed 140 lbs and that the elevator was more than capable of handling her weight, but some small voice in the back of her head told her it wasn't going to move. It whispered that the cables would snap and the brakes would fail and she would die in a pit of metal and fire and she would never have to think about that letter again.
Of course that didn't happen, the elevator glided upwards and the doors open and she had another dozen paces to go before she could collapse in her room.
When she had first started basic training there were days when she would swear that she couldn't keep going, that she couldn't make it, but she always did make it. She always finished, she always accomplished whatever her commanding officer had asked of her. So now, when every step felt impossible, she remembered then. She listed all of her accomplishment, all the times she fell and got back up again until she made it into her cabin and collapsed at her desk.
Now she sat staring at her email account, with only one message in her inbox About Horizon…
The letter was intangible. It existed on a server somewhere. It had no weight. No mass. No volume. It took up 220 bytes of memory, only 21% of a KB, only 2% of a MB. An inconsequential amount of data in the grand scheme of things, but she hadn't deleted it. She hadn't archived it. She kept it under unread messages. This damn email was insubstantial but the density of it made her feel heavy.
Like her heart was made of lead and was pressing itself into her lungs making it difficult to breath, like her blood cells were infused with plutonium and the weight of it would crush her bones into dust.
She opened the email and read it again and again and again until she had it memorized.
A few items are standard issue to new alliance recruits. Armor, omni-tool, and a N7 Valkyrie assault rifle. When you're on the ground you have to carry a bit more. Sniper rifle, shotgun, submachine gun, heavy pistols, heavy weapons, cryo ammo, incendiary ammo disruptor ammo, shedder ammo, power cells. As a biotic Shepard had to carry extra food, extra water, energy drinks, and her L5 implants. Tali had a combat drone, Garrus had proximity mines. Some people had grenades, some had modifications to their ammunition, to their weapons, to their omni-tools. Shepard knew a guy who always carried a compass and a woman who always wore a locket.
Of all the things they had to carry the heaviest of them were the deaths. Nihlus, Jenkins, Ashley. The people of the fifth fleet: Shenyang. Emden. Jakarta. Cairo. Seoul. Cape Town. Warsaw. Madrid. All the people on board this ship were prepared to go through the omega relay and never come back.
She carried all of these things and more. She shut down her personal terminal without archiving the message, knowing that she would see it when she opened her email again. Because she knew she would carry this letter with her up until her very last moment and it would hard at first but her muscles would tear and reform stronger and more capable so that she could carry it along with everything else.