Disclaimer: Bioware and EA own the Mass Effect series, as well as our beloved lady doctor.
Keeping a stiff upper-lip and a high head while she walked through the ship was a breeze. It a the principle rule for doctors that you never panicked in front of your crew, because if you did they would panic. There had already been enough of that for one day.
Shepard had stopped her in the hallways just a moment before, asking her with concern that seemed more like interrogation to her because she knows it's wrong to hide what she feels when she's told Shepard to come to her if the commander needed to have out with any emotion. She has a feeling her CO lets her off easy with the suspicion that she'll come to talk eventually. It will make her happy later. But at the moment the idea is met with nothing but contempt.
Most of the crew is down and out because of the hour, the rest working on repairs and talking about what they'll be doing during their next little shore leave. She doesn't hear any of it. Nor does she care. She doesn't stop once she walks into the medbay, heading straight through the doors of the server room, calling out to see if anyone is working there. When no one answers, she walks to the furthest corner off the room, and her head gingerly meets with the wall, tears fall through the cracks in her expression.
The thought of people in pain or missing or dead has not bothered her before; not to this point at least. The doctor is used to the way the universe works. The mortality of those she heals, the unfairness of it all when she sees a patient in pain and it can't be helped because their bodies betray them, the things her commander and her comrades have always needed to do alone. But these are her children, her friends. Hers.
It has been a good long while since she's sobbed as desperately as she is now. It hurts too, the aching in her chest feeding off of the thoughts of how people she cares about and takes care of are confined to their hospital beds or no longer alive to talk to, and how they are capable of such recklessness and bravery makes her angry and proud, because even if she blamed them they didn't deserve it. How they must go onward in the face of the unknown and perhaps won't make it back.
Having reach a stalemate at which even she cannot "fix it" and can do nothing but wait, she sobs in the face of danger for the first time in years, curled up against the wall of the server room.
Even a doctor is no stranger to fear.
A/N: This takes place after an unspecified mission in which many things go wrong and people on the Normandy are hurt and/or dead. You could pretty much shove this after almost every mission in ME3. Poor Chakwas.
I wonder if I'll ever write something happy for dear Chakwas. Here's to hoping~! *raises of glass of Serrice Ice Brandy*
I think that's what I'll work on that next, though. Little things like how her family was when they were alive, the reasons why she joined, the experiences she went through to get to the present. Yeah, those would be nice~.
Thank you for reading!