After the War
Consciousness returned with the feral viciousness that could only be reality. Her eyes fluttered open, crescents of searing white light flashing apocalyptically and her breath rasped, every movement a gargantuan effort. Blurry colours, bereft of defined shape or sense. She tried to speak and produced nothing but a wet whimper. She was weak, delirious with the sudden vertigo of awareness after so much darkness. A hazy shape appeared, a face as big as the world. Familiarity surfaced somewhere behind the pain and screaming confusion. She knew this person, whoever they were.
She reached for the face, felt a cool hand against the burning skin of her wrist.
"It's okay Shepard. Don't move. You're okay." The voice shocked her, sent her reeling back, away as the person pushed her hand back down to the bed.
"K-Kaidan?" She rasped. Couldn't be. Kaidan was dead.
No sound. No Pain. No light.
More darkness.
Then, dreams.
She knew they were dreams because Ash was there, gun over her shoulder. She didn't speak, even as Shepard called out. She tried to run, to reach the woman but she never seemed to get any closer. Ash didn't seem to notice her, just continued grinning and laughing. Blasts from Geth guns tore holes in her armour. Blood spurted and poured, pooled around her feet. Ash didn't seem to notice, just kept grinning before she promptly turned to stone. Shepard finally reached her, brushed her fingers against the stone and felt the floor suddenly give way beneath her feet. She fell.
There were faces here, huge faces that hung in the air as she tumbled down into infinite darkness. Ash with her cocky smile. Joker, solemn and monstrous with his red beard scorched and smoldering. The Council that she had doomed, a host of crewmen she had fought beside in the ensuing Reaper Wars. And Kaidan.
Shepard fell and fell, Kaidan's face smiling down at her like it had that night, lined in faint blue light. Affection, love that she didn't deserve. Had never deserved. She fell and fell and fell. Eventually even Kaidan faded and it was just oblivion again. Eventually.
The second time was easier, just like waking up. Consciousness swam up through her mind, blurring the lines between sleeping and waking. She opened her eyes and the ocean of blurry colours resolved themselves into shapes. A medical ward. She was not alone.
She tried to push herself up, but her limbs would not respond. She looked down at her arms to find them wasted away from their former glory, muscles atrophied into sinew. She was pale, the overhead lights making her skin almost translucent. An I.V needle rested on the back of her hand like an insect and she moaned with sickness. Too many painkillers, too much pain that needed killing. She had never felt so terrible in her life, so weak and wasted. There was a cry of absolute joy.
"Commander!" Liara appeared suddenly at her bedside table, large eyes underscored by deep bags. Shepard had thought that the asari never aged, that they all stayed young and beautiful while human bodies decayed. But war had accomplished what time couldn't for the young woman, driven deep lines into her forehead with stress and terror, scored a trio of fine scars across one cheekbone with shrapnel, dulled her eyes with shock and apathy. But she smiled now, and some of that lessened in the moment.
"Liara?" Her voice rasped with disuse. "What? Where?"
"You were shot." Liara whispered, covering one of Shepard's hands with her own. "In the back. One of the crew members on the bridge in the final assault was indoctrinated and he tried to kill you. He... he almost succeeded. The shot it-"
"Took out half your liver and most of one lung, as well as shattering about a foot of your spine." Dr Chakwas interupted as she appeared beside Liara, holding a syringe in one hand. "Lucky for you, the salarians brought their best surgeons and doctors with them to help in the aftermath. Bloody optimistic, and it saved your life. They managed to use a prototype medigel to reconstruct your organs, even your spine. You should make a full recovery."
Shepard lay there, not saying anything, trying to absorb all that information. They'd won then, she thought hollowly. They'd won, and she'd almost died. But not died. Instead, found herself shrivelled and sick in a strange hospital.
"Where?" She asked quietly, her voice numb with the insanity of it all.
"You're in the Normandy. It's landside at Menadie-6, at one of the emergency field hospitals set up to handle the wounded. We thought you'd be grateful to wake up somewhere familiar, Commander. Now I think it's time you got a little bit more sleep." The hand holding the syringe reared like a cobra.
"No, no more sleep." Shepard replied, trying to fight her off only to be reminded of the sorry state of her body.
"That wasn't a request. As the only and therefore chief medical personnel on this vessel I am authorized to override your decision for the good of your own health." She injected the sedative into the I.V tube as Shepard shook in helpless rage. There wasn't time to sleep! She needed to... she needed to...
"Liara." She turned back to the alien woman, as the drug began to take hold. "I thought I saw... I thought Kaidan was here."
"He was, Shepard." Liara rested one hand on her forehead soothingly. The drug was building capacity within her system now, making colours blend together, stealing shape and destinction from the world.
"But how? Kaidan's..." Dead, she thought.
Darkness again.
*
"I told you it wasn't a good idea for you to go in there." Doctor Chakwas scolded as she entered the mess hall. Kaidan Alenko was sitting at one of the tables, picking at his food. His normally voracious appetite had waned significantly since Shepard had woken up. Somehow, when she was still unconscious and physically broken it had been less terrible that the woman who lived her fleeting moments of consciousness in the constant grip of morphine. And the Doctors constant verbal assaults where getting hard to tolerate, as much as Kaidan understood that she was just worried and helpless and sleep deprived. The galaxy wanted to see the great Commander Shepard, smiling triumphantly against a backdrop of exploding Reapers. The council wanted to give them that and pressured Chakwas to do anything, ANYTHING to make her better, ignoring the fact that at this point it might be too much to hope that it would ever happen.
He understood this. He felt bad for her. But she was still being a bitch.
"I had to. I've told you this." Kaidan replied quietly. He didn't have the energy to argue. The Normandy had sustained heavy damage in the final battle two weeks ago, and he'd been working double shifts, him and everyone else on the vessel, trying to get it fixed so they could escape the field hospital and get the Commander somewhere that would be able to fix her more thoroughly.
The Doctor merely glared at him. "It's confusing her. She can't figure out where she is. Half the time she thinks she's dreaming, and the other half she's not even making that much sense."
"I'm no doctor ma'am, but maybe it's the obscene amounts of painkillers you keep pumping into her that are confusing her, not me." Kaidan replied, a faint glare cutting into his pale forehead.
"Don't take that tone with me, Alenko. If I didn't give her something to help with the pain she really would be insane. Her body is trying to recover from something it was never supposed to recover from. I'm tempted to say that no human has ever survived a wound like that before. She's in so much shock I... I honestly don't know if she'll be able to come back from it." Kaidan looked up sharply, studying the doctors graying face.
"Are you saying that she's going to stay like that forever?" He asked. "Even without the morphine?"
"I'm saying that it's time the galaxy got used to the idea of life without Commander Shepard, because it's very likely that even if she does make a full recovery she will never be the same woman again."
*
She had been awake almost an hour now, the clock told her, and she was determined that it was going to stay that way. She was so weak she could barely move. Her skin felt tight and hot against the entire right side of her rib cage, where bone had been replaced with steel replica after being pulped by the shotgun blast. Wrex sat beside her, despite Doctor Chakwas stern disapproval.
"Do you think you can do this for me Wrex?" She asked, wrinkling her nose in an attempt to disengage the furious itch that had been nagging her for the past two hours. Wrex nodded his heavy head, the scarred scales glinting in the dull light.
"We're both warriors Shepard, I've always said that. What they're doing to you right now is not the way warriors should be treated." The krogan's gravelly voice was oddly soothing to the wounded commander. It was familiar. Wrex still treated her with the odd mixture of warriors respect, army friendship and krogan detachment. Nothing had changed in the way he regarded her.
The Doctor appeared, wrinkling her nose at the krogan's continued presence and went to retrieve her trusty syringe.
"I think it's time you left Wrex." She said in her gentle, medical way. "The Commander needs to rest."
"No she doesn't." Wrex replied, not budging from where he sat, crouched on his heels. "And I think it's time you stopped forcing those needles on her."
The Doctor stopped, stiffening with anger. "I think I have the ability to judge my patients needs far more accurately than you, Wrex." She replied sternly. She tried to side step the krogan only to have him shift, so he stood directly between her and the Commanders I.V bag. A look passed between them.
Shepard interjected, her voice coming out clear and concise for the first time since she'd woken up. "Obviously you're mistaken, Doctor. Since you have repeatedly pulled rank on me during the course of this mission. You have no rank to pull. I am a Spectre and therefore my authority exceeds even your medical assessments. I will not be drugged back into a coma. Despite my... condition, I am fully capable of facing reality with the rest of you."
The Doctor turned to her, studied her face tentatively.
"That sounded almost like you, Commander." She conceded, setting the syringe aside. "It's good to hear your voice again."
Shepard calmed herself, letting her anger go. The Doctor was just doing her job. There was no reason to be so angry about someone just doing their job.
"I'm glad. Now please," she settled back against her pillows, "get a physical therapist in here."
"Yes ma'am." The Doctor hesitated. "Is that all?"
"All?"
"Is that all you want? You don't want me to summon... someone else?" The Commander studied her with eyes the colour of slate and shook her head, the only movement truly available to her anymore.
"No, Doctor."
"Aye, aye ma'am."
