All the ghosts in my bones, a mass effect fanfic

one.

Two months after the war against the reapers, Shepard walks out of the makeshift medical wing that has been her home since she was found in the rubble of London.

She hadn't known what to do at first, still doesn't know who to be now that she's stumbled out of death for the second time, brushing off death like a bad dream. That's the problem with suicide missions and hopeless wars – you never have plans for afterwards. For as long as the war lasts, you can forget everything else, escape into its hard structure of loss and victory and pretend it will leave no marks on you, that the colours of war will pass through you in silence.

Until afterwards.

Afterwards is here now as a hollow sound in her own head, a little fraction around the edges of her thoughts.

When you're a ghost in your own life, things are bound to feel off. It had been the same last time, except this time around she actually remembers the hospital stay, the scant supplies and depressingly crowded surroundings. She remembers bed after bed with wounded gasping for air, begging for death and in the middle of it all she had found herself being carefully mended by all the semi-functional cybernetics and the physique of a bloody krogan. It had hardly seemed fair.

"The future isn't what it used to be," Coats mutters as he shoulders past her. They're investigating a possible future Alliance building in a neighbourhood where they've only recently managed to get the reaper stench off the concrete.

"I hadn't planned for one," Shepard answers and it's not until she hears her own words that she realises how miserable they sound.

Five months after Shepard is released from that endless hospital stay, Commander Bailey stands in the Alliance HQ in London and her breath gets caught somewhere in her chest, ragged and aching. At first she cannot understand the feeling, but then she meets his gaze and the echoes run through her, flooding her mind. The artificial light and its stars; sitting on a bench in the garden with Cortez and laughing about something trivial; the chatter rising from the cafés and shops, the long lines of people refusing to fall apart because of the war and her own jealous irritation upon noticing it, wishing herself among them.

Now Bailey stands there like a sliver of a past that she's been trying hard to erase without knowing it, a beforethat seems pointless to hold on to.

"Shepard," he says levelly. "I heard you were alive."

"I didn't realise anyone made it out of the Citadel." She frowns, recalling those dark final days of their war, their inherit hopelessness. They had put up so much struggle, such a furious resistance just to keep the darkness at bay long enough to convince themselves it would be possible to do what they had to do.

"A few did. I was on the last shuttle that left before it all went to shit," Bailey says, giving her a long glance.

He looks tired, she thinks as she's studying him closer. Tired and old. Hell, they all do. These are still dark times and they are all battle-scarred and twitchy, jumping like dogs at loud noises and rumbling thunderstorms, but they're alive - without doubt and without mercy.

"Ended up with an Alliance patrol stationed in Germany. Never thought I'd be fighting reapers up close." His voice is even, but there's wide spaces between his words, lots of room for the unspoken.

"I'm sure you did well."

She nods for emphasis; she's still unused to talking about it and the way it all went down. He doesn't seem to expect anything though, merely gives her a brief and taut smile.

"Well enough, apparently." He sighs, scratching the back of his head and gazing out over the room. She's suddenly struck by a desire to ask him to stay, to ground him here with her, one familiar face in a crowd of strangers. He's a curious little memory at the back of her mind – a few e-mails, a fleeting promise of a drink in exchange for yet another favour or yet another serious breach of protocol; he's a collection of knowing smirks as they had caught each other's gazes in a room full of self-important politicians, a few scattered compliments and reassuring lies as the war drew closer, the ease with which they had come to trust each other. There's no appropriate word for it – friend, perhaps, though she's careful to use such terms – but it's thereall the same.

"It's good to see you again," she says because that, at least, she can express.

"You too, Shepard." Bailey takes a few steps inside the newly restored building where the only thing missing is new doors. He looks oddly clean in these dirty surroundings. "So. Need any help around here?"

The asari are planning their departure and the matriarchs argue about it with a fury that tears through the forced calm of the streets and the consensus of their mutual news channels. Half the fleet wants to stay, the other half wants to go and Shepard watches, thinking about how Thessia had burned and crumbled. The death of a race, she had thought back then. How do you endure something like that?

If they've learned anything from this war it's that organic beings can endure absolutely anything. That, and how death truly feels as it takes hold of a civilisation: the slow grind of it, the limitless cruelty of war like small gasps in between breaths, breaking you unless you find a way to escape it.

"... irresponsible to leave the delatress alone in the seat of power..."

"Hardly any power left to speak of..."

"Wish the bloody krogan would pack up and leave instead."

The news channel bleeds into the chatter outside the building and the group of soldiers spread out around a table across the room, sharing a meal.

Shepard half-sits, half-leans into an open window, a glass of mercifully strong scotch in one hand.

"Hell of a thing you pulled off, Shepard." Bailey sits back in his seat, juggling a bottle in one hand, a glass in the other. It seems all people do with their free time these days is to sit like this, drinking and talking. Or mating, if she's to believe the scenes outside her bedroom window at night, the sounds and desperation of it breaking through the badly isolated houses. War certainly has a way of removing all finesse from a society.

"That's one way of putting it."

Bailey studies her for a moment longer, his gaze lingering on her as though he wishes to evaluate something. Her guilt, perhaps. It seeps through her skin sometimes, regardless of what she tells herself.

"You did put an end to the war." He raises an eyebrow. "Far as I know, that's what Admiral Hackett hired you to do."

The jury's still out on that one, she thinks, but doesn't say. Underneath everything else she's still a battleship commander and she doesn't wallow, not even when the state of the galaxy presents excellent opportunities for it. Still, there's a trace of something in Bailey's face, a glint in his eyes that speaks to a different part of her, dragging her admissions and doubts into the light. With a sigh, she rakes her free hand through her hair.

"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't hoped to be catching some rest after all this." She leans against the window, taking a mouthful of scotch. "There's only so much fight in a person, you know."

He's downing the rest of his drink; their eyes meet as he puts down the glass and refills it.

"Yeah," he says and she believes him. "I do."

Perhaps that's why she's always around him as of late. Because in this horrible, stranded world she believes him. Perhaps it's the mutuality of that pain she can see buried deep in his gaze and the many ways he has of covering it up, bottling it like a proper military. We all lie to ourselves to deal with horror.

"Nice scotch, by the way," she says, raising what's left of it in a toast.

"Yeah." Bailey shoots her a quick half-grin. "Got a full supply of bottles back in Germany. A few smaller cities there were mostly unscathed. Guess I've always been the kind of man to focus on what's really important."

She gives a small laugh and the unexpected sound of it rips through her body like a memory. A different life, she thinks, a different set of moves and thoughts, another way of coping with the same thing. She hasn't laughed since the war ended. The room seems warmer because of it now, less confining.

"I'm glad you came here," she says.

He nods, the corners of his mouth twitching. "Always safer with you around, Shepard."

And even if it's a lie, she believes that, too.

two.

He had intended to go to New York.

When the chaos had faded out slightly and the future begun to look less like a cruel hallucination and more like an actual possibility, he'd been ready to grab what little he would need and get going.

It had seemed like the logical thing to do. To trace anyone he can trace, work out some plan, help out where it's needed – or retreat into some dark fucking hole and die in anonymity which seems to be the most tempting option some days.

But then word came from London saying Commander Shepard had survived and plans got unravelled. Not just for him, he suspects, but for a lot of the stray Alliance and ex-Alliance soldiers scattered around the planet. With most of the loud voices orchestrating the war silenced, the aftermath of war has been too damn quiet. Nobody likes quiet.

If there's one thing they need right now it's unity. Even more than before when there was a mutual enemy to blame, those trapped in the Sol system need a common goal, some resemblance of guidance - or they'll tear each other apart like animals.

He's not the man for the job, not even on a small scale. He can whip up some motivation among the poor bastards that are stuck here with him, organise a decent little resistance, but he's never been much of a leader. If you could just stop questioning every damn thing, including yourself, Linda snaps in his head. She had always humoured the idea that she could solve everyone's issues.

His career in C-Sec had all boiled down to creating the illusion of safety but back then they had figureheads to pin those promises on: the Council, the military, and - more frequently than she'll ever know - Shepard. And that's how you do it: you talk fast, name-drop someone important enough and hope that nobody catches you lying through your damn teeth.

He has no clue how the hell Shepard does it.

"Who put her in charge here?" a woman hisses through gritted teeth as Shepard commands over the intercom, her voice made raspy and raw by the surroundings. Around them people shake their heads or roll their eyes.

"You did," Bailey retorts, pushing forward into the building they're ordered to clear from husks and stray Cerberus forces. "It's a simple job, no need to throw fits."

"I thought I got my orders from Alliance command," another marine says, but his words fall flat to the ground as they run into a group of husks and Bailey never gets a chance to tell them he'll shoot their asses off if they don't shut up and carry out their mission.

"They're ungrateful sons of bitches," he tells her one afternoon as she's hunched over a pile of various complaints and requests. The humans are being held responsible for London, for Earth, for the entire Sol system and as far as Bailey can tell, Shepard has shouldered the weight of most of it. The Alliance brass is decimated, she says in his head. As long as I'm not dead, Bailey, I need to keep at it.

She looks up, disoriented for a moment, as though she's so damn used to it that she no longer cares. It makes him angry for reasons he can't properly understand and feels certain he doesn't want to decode any further.

"Human beings and all the other organic races?" she says and then with a nod. "Yes. They are. But I can't blame them."

"Why the hell not?"

The question seems to catch her off-guard for a split-second. Then she gives a fraction of a smile, shaking her head. "Because I'd probably be out there doing the same thing myself. Finding someone to be angry with."

He slumps down on a chair opposite her. Maybe he's just getting too old, maybe the reasons for the distractions have morphed into something worse, but burying himself in work no longer seems to do the trick. Every escape strategy wears down from too much use and he's used this for the past thirty years now. Placate the fury with duty and put out the fires with a double scotch; it's the way he's spent all of his downtime on the Citadel, occasionally in combination with a bad movie or some female company, though the latter is so damn rare it can hardly be called a habit. Shepard is a reminder of someone he once was, her worry-wrinkles and exhaustion mirroring his own and he can't suppress a flash of concern. He never did know how to take care of himself. Or so Linda had claimed, at least.

"Leave that pile for tomorrow," he says, his voice harsher that he intended.

"I don't have-"

"Shepard." He tilts his head, leaning back to observe her. "You need to take a break."

Eventually she throws her hands up in defeat, her teeth sinking into her lower lip as she looks at him and her expression is caught half-way between irritation and amusement. He figures she isn't used to being interrupted. Something in his chest rumbles.

"Bailey." She leans forward. "All right. What kind of distractions did you have in mind then? Please tell me it involves guns or alcohol?"

Long ago, he thought he'd die fighting.

It's what all young marines think, of course, their heads full of stupidity and honour and leftover hormones and the only options are heroism, death or both. But he can still recall the sensation of that thought through the layers of time and experience; still remembers the quiet comfort of it, like a mantra against reality. When he retired to C-Sec, he'd abandoned the idea entirely in favour of complacency – and the notion that he did it for the best of reasons. Raising a family, doing right by his wife and kids, thinking about the future - if there was one to be had.

Not even in the most delusional fantasies of his youth could he have expected to survive this long, outliving so many people. And for no good reason other than the fact that death seems to elude him.

This is a second chance, a little voice mutters inside his head as they move around in the city, getting the salarians and the turians in the refugee camps organised before their departure for Mars. A clean slate.

It feels cheap to answer that inner voice that he's never asked for it, that he was perfectly determined to see his previous slate through, mediocre as it had turned out to be. It feels cheap to reason like this in a galaxy so littered with destruction and losses and a hopeless attempt at rebuilding a structure never meant for them in the first place. While it's never exactly a great way to feel like a good person, it seems particularly awful to be an ungrateful asshole after the war to end all wars. He doesn't intend to admit it to anybody.

"I know," Shepard says softly when it slips out of him anyway.

And he isn't sure whether it's her sincerity or the uncharacteristically vulnerable expression on her face that leaves him at a loss for words.

For all his experience working in security, it takes him over two months to realise Shepard isn't exactly safewhere she is.

First, she shows him a few messages from various sources that all tell her in badly phrased sentences that she's to blame for this mess, that she ought to sleep with a machine gun under her pillow, that she's a traitor and an alien-lover - standard bullshit from faceless cowards. He's seen it a million times in C-Sec and it's rarely something to worry about. The real threats of the galaxy don't bother to write you a damn note beforehand. Even so, this unearths something in him, upsets him and he's surprised to learn it. He reads the messages with his jaw clenched so hard around a string of curses that his head aches; Shepard gives him a searching glance and they don't speak any more of it.

A few days later he walks into the HQ as she's closing a deal with the bounty hunter, Massani.

"I'll keep them off your back, Shepard," he says, before glancing at Bailey, a grim look on his face. "Just try not to piss anyone else off, you crazy bitch. I'll run out of ammo."

"Noted." She folds her arms across her chest. "No promises, though."

Massani shakes his head as he leaves.

Against the backdrop of the situation Shepard looks weary where she stands. Her shoulders are tense, he can tell even from a distance. Bailey walks up to her; there's a flurry of thoughts and unrest in his mind and for the first time since the war ended, he misses the regs and protocol of the Zakera Ward. It used to drive him crazy until he worked out enough schemes to go around it, but that red tape also served a clear purpose – to delay the mess until someone had a chance to deal with it. These days they have no such luxuries at their disposal.

"What was that about?" he asks needlessly.

"Same old," she replies without looking at him. "Zaeed's looking into some leads. There's a rumour of a terrorist group out there with a bounty on my head. Probably Terra Firma."

No blood for aliens, Bailey thinks. It seems almost unbelievably idiotic after a war like this one, but humans have never been famous for being clever.

Outside the window an Alliance shuttle passes in the air, followed by a few tanks on the ground. Even after all these months of war, these scenes are so foreign in his mind, so very alien for all their connection to human history. War and destruction like a thread through the decades and centuries. So much for those sentimental old vids about galactic peace and prosperity and a society driven by something grander. Not that he'd ever believed in it, but it had been nice for as long as the façade remained intact – and got pasted on again after the turians had slaughtered them out there in deep space.

"You shouldn't sleep here," he says, standing beside her now.

"I'll be fine, Bailey." She turns her head, frowning at his visible irritation, he supposes. He sighs. "It will blow over soon."

But she doesn't protest when he stays and judging by the heavy snoring emerging from the sofa where she eventually crashes she catches up on some hard-earned sleep. He puts a blanket over her before he leaves, notifying a group of marines to keep watch outside the entrance until he returns.

three.

He never asks her to talk about it; in a sense they always are.

"Got my implants checked again," she says and means how can I still live.Some days when the sun isn't even breaking through the grey clouds and the lack of everything she used to know jars against the bleak new world she means how many times must I die.

"They updated the list of survivors today," he reveals over a double shot of whiskey and tells her they weren't on it.

They are never on it.

Eleven months after the Reaper War they declare SSV Normandy and its crew missing in action and the remains of the Alliance brass hold a ceremony for the lost heroes of their war.

Shepard makes a speech – a sentimental, god-awful one about bravery and friendship and sacrifice – and then she sits in the crowd counting. That's what she's always done to drive out the ghosts of the dead. Basic mathematics to stay sane; after Torfan she had refined the method to perfection and learned that the human brain is simple to trick if you're consistent. So she counts. She counts speeches, familiar faces, strangers, cracks in the ceiling, the number of glasses on the table; she counts her own breaths to remind herself that she still breathes and when it's all over, she sits like a statue within the HQ building, suddenly unsure of her own sense of direction.

The apartment she calls her own is five minutes away but it seems impossibly far.

The makeshift bar is just a few feet to her left but she can't muster up enough willpower to go grab herself a drink.

Feels like years since I just sat down.

Shepard rests her elbows on the chair in front of her, leans forward and closes her eyes momentarily. Breathes.This is the end, she knows. This has dissolved the past eleven months in a way that leaves no room for hope; they are gone and it's over. In a horrible, definitive way, it's almost a blessing.

I will do better for you, all of you, she vows in her head the way she always does, her oaths running like veins across her body at this point, covering her up. It's all she can do; it has to be enough.

She vows and she counts; she doesn't cry.

A small group of admirals walk by, nodding their greetings and she gives a nod back.

"Who do you dislike most in that self-important crowd?" Bailey's voice is low and even beside her; she doesn't have to turn her head or open her eyes to know he's a few steps away.

"Admiral Lance," she admits after some consideration. "He's sloppy and unprofessional. Yet he was always five steps ahead of everyone else in the pecking order and still is, apparently."

The truth is that admiral Hackett and Anderson aside, she's never really forged any bonds with the brass and apart from the Normandy crew, her relationship with her fellow soldiers and officers have remained sparse and strictly professional. Anderson had always warned her about letting the mission swallow everything else. She had never truly listened, of course.

There's a soft, scraping noise as Bailey pulls up a chair and sits down, too. She looks sideways at him, as usual struck by how everything goes without saying between them. For someone who has spent her entire life working her ass off not to turn into the caricature of herself she still fears she actually is, simplicity is a treasure and her gratefulness gets stuck in her throat, stings in her eyes.

"Did I ever tell you how we used to torment officers like Lance with red tape down in C-Sec?" he asks when they've sat together in comfortable silence for a while.

"No." She shakes her head, thinking about how Bailey once saved her an immense amount of time. You look like a busy woman. It makes her smile a little, now. "But please tell me."

He does.

Leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed, Shepard listens. She won't remember what he tells her, doesn't even try, but it's not important because right now the air has enough words to fill the voids and she can relent, finally allowing herself the rest she had promised Anderson.

And somewhere mid-story, as Bailey explains the long-winded procedures of tracing systems and its creative uses, she realises she has stopped counting.

Thirteen months after the Reaper War, both of Bailey's kids are confirmed dead.

Shepard sits beside him in a dirty pub when he shares the news and for half an hour, neither of them has anything more to say. They sit side by side, their shoulders touching, their bodies like sturdy shields against the rest of the world and they're not speaking. When his glass is empty, she orders another round; as he shifts position, she moves in turn, as though breaking their physical contact would break something else in the process.

Bailey lowers his head slightly, staring into his drink before downing it.

"Theresa had a family," he says eventually. His face is turned away; his fingers tap restlessly on the empty glass in front of him, a quiet rhythm around them both. There's a scar running from his wrist and up along the veins of his upper arm and it appears to move, almost invisibly, in the dim lights from the windows. War-paintings across muscle and bone, she thinks, history's way of marking them all. "I didn't even know she was seeing someone. Her wife... she told they got married when the war broke out."

"Bailey-" she begins but cuts herself off.

"Yeah," he shrugs. She can feel the tremble against her own body. "I really don't want to talk about it."

Then he does anyway.

Talking.

It's all they can do; it has to be enough.

Some days it feels like everything is goodbye.

Their walks through London, the words they exchange with strangers, the chatter of the news channels, the way that everything seems so final and yet somehow isn't.

Some days it feels like the war never ended.

They still tend to their wounded, their dead and badly forgotten, close the books. They still hold memorial services and minutes of silence and perform whatever rituals they need to perform to break the patterns of belonging to another person.

Some days are crisp, bright autumn skies and frost-breath in the streets.

Those are the days when she stands by her window with a mug of coffee in her hands, reminding herself how to smile, re-learning the value of everything that cannot be measured. And she knows then, with a fervor that surprises her, that it's not a punishment to live.

"I grew up in a place like this," she tells Bailey conversationally one day as they're patrolling the back alleys in southern London. Crowds of homeless aliens everywhere, even with all their efforts, street after street full of soldiers and civilians trying to bargain with fate. "A real pisshole even back then."

"Yeah." Bailey nods. "That's the pay-off when you move all the rich and famous off-world."

Shepard lets her gaze linger on him for a while; times like these, it feels like she's known him for her entire life, as though their existences have been running in parallel loops. Men and women like him have saved her ass more than once. Cops of Bailey's sort, ignoring black market dealers and simple thieves to focus on the rapists and slavers, leaving the streets somewhat safer and giving people like her enough room to get around without having to spend too much time behind bars. That's how she survived for so long, learning the difference between the idealists and the ones willing to bend the rules.

"Most people I hung out with ended up with the idiots in Terra Firma. Or, you know, dead." She grimaces, wondering how long before that particular cycle repeats itself. If it ever left at all. "The Alliance couldn't have found a more willing candidate when they finally got around to draft me."

He makes an amused sound.

"You must have been the wildest dream of any recruiting officer," he says and then clears his throat when she can't help but raise an eyebrow at the odd phrasing. "You know what I mean, Shepard."

"Right." She chuckles, strangely pleased. "I think I was an angry, confused and undetected biotic dream at that point."

"Most kids clean up well enough," he says. "The recruiters and the instructors know what they sign up for. Not that I would volunteer to do their job, but there you go."

I'm not giving up on you, child, Anderson had said over and over. It had taken a full year of constant struggle before she believed him.

"I can think of worse instructors than you," Shepard says, remembering that Kolyat had spoken well of 'the human captain down in C-Sec'.

Bailey shrugs.

They're stopping at a street corner where he checks a couple of irregularities coming from a terminal and Shepard watches him do it, thinking there are moments when she can see so much of Anderson in him, a resemblance flickering through his gaze or crossing his features. Stubborn hard-asses both of them, unorthodox but undeniably decent, regardless. It makes her feel less alone.

"You think Earth will ever recover?" he asks her later when they sit on a bench with the datapads full of half-written reports in need of work and coffee that quickly cools in the chilly breeze.

Shepard takes a mouthful of coffee, looking out over the neighbourhood.

"I have no idea," she admits eventually. "Maybe. Maybe not. It won't be the same, at least. But I think we have a chance."

He nods, checks something on the datapad in his lap. When he looks up again, there's a shift in his gaze, something warmer seeping into it. If she didn't know better, she'd almost mistake it for hope.

four.

London lives.

That's the word on the street at least, the message carried across the slowly recovering stretches of land. London has persevered, bounced back from the brink of destruction.

This emergent civilisation is different from the one they all but lost yet similar enough for him to almost confuse the scenes with those in his memory. Children run in clusters here, too, screaming and dirty but reasonably well-fed and looked after, judging by their faces and season-appropriate clothes. This city has room for the same kind of street vendors and preachers showing and swarming; food carts that look dishearteningly empty but not entirely without hope any more.

"I wonder what it says about the galaxy that we still don't have a proper infrastructure but hundreds of dancers running around in London," Shepard comments as they pass a bar advertising just that: exotic entertainment.

"Nothing flattering, that's for sure." Bailey avoids being pulled into a seat by an asari wearing very little except for glittering full-body make-up. "But there's a market for self-delusion. And people are willing to believe anything, especially where Asari dancers are concerned."

Shepard snorts. "Speaking from experience?"

She has that tone he never knows how to respond to, teasing him with a straight face. With most women he'd consider it flirting, but Shepard's a different creature altogether, playing in a league that is entirely her own. If she's even playing. It's hard to say. Besides, the odds are hardly in his favour here, he thinks with an inward sneer.

"Not really, no," he answers, pushing through another crowd while trying to glance over at Shepard who looks back at him. "I prefer women who don't flay me with their minds. Call me old-fashioned."

"You're old-fashioned," Shepard retorts, but she's grinning and the undercurrents of her voice unsettles something hastily buried in him.

They walk for a while longer, until they reach a calmer area of the city from which there have been no less then five different reports of reaper presence the past week. Husks and stragglers, most likely. Their enemies had made sure to leave a trail of gifts behind as they were conquered. A whole city full of Trojan horses.

"Huh." She frowns. "The readings have disappeared. We're chasing ghosts again."

"What else is new?" He's starting to freeze, longing for a warm room and a strong drink.

There's a pause, a beat, where they watch a group of turians followed by a small gang of human soldiers pass them by, all of them seemingly focused on some important matter that requires their undivided attention – most like some unresolved issue. Shepard looks at him and shakes her head.

"God, when I think about the political future here... " she trails off. "The elections, the political mess."

Bailey has seen the consequences of humanity's most recent political agenda up, close and personal on the Citadel and if he had any illusions left before accepting his position there, they had been shattered within seconds. Imagining the same future here for Earth and its new population nearly leaves him speechless with distaste. It's going to be damn ugly. War always speaks to the lowest common denominators, appealing to the unthinking, unfeeling scum in all of them. He can't say he's thrilled to see those sides of the other alien races stuck here.

Shepard leans against the wall of a building, firing up her omni-tool. She looks restful but her eyebrows are knit in a worried manner all the same, forming a permanent furrow upon her brow.

Bailey looks at her at times like these and wonders if she knows how important sheis. How much gravitas she actually possesses, how much respect she has earned – so much in fact that those who do not see her as the second coming want her dead for her sheer impact on the council races and beyond. He wonders if she knows that even the most grumbling, whining assholes under her command would die for her without blinking, even now.

It almost seems cruel to remind her.

"As long as a few us are still around to remind this galaxy of what the war was about," he says and hears how strange the words sound, tinged with an uncharacteristic idealism. Shepard eyes him with something close to mock-suspicion. "Not that the political vultures will care, but that's a so-called democracy for you."

"I was worried for a while there." Her voice is warm, like a puff of hot breath against the fucked up city around them. And it's such a contrast to what he's just been thinking about her. Or perhaps it isn't. It's not solely for her battlefield bravado and tactical superiority people follow her, he has understood as much. It's because she's Shepard. "Can't have you stealing my idealistic high ground."

"It's lonely at the top," he says, feeling out of practice. And damned old. Of all the directions he can see his life going in this brave new world, he intends to avoid the one marked 'dirty old man with self-delusions'. For sanity's sake, if nothing else.

"I never said you couldn't join me." She flips through some text on her omni-tool but glances up at him as she speaks and he can't help but thinking that he doesn't give a fuck about the odds.

Bailey tracks Linda down to a refugee camp outside Boston, almost four months after he learns about the death of their daughter. It seems she finally wants to be found so he goes to see her after leaving a brief message for Shepard and Coats at the HQ. Nothing about his employment is official or conventional, but there are agreements all the same. Back in a while, he writes, as though he's just leaving to buy coffee. He doesn't know how to tell them what it is that he's really doing.

Meeting Linda, after all these years of curt e-mails and even curter vid-calls.

She's still damned beautiful, he concludes as she approaches him. His estranged, infuriating ex-wife with the endlessly long lists of accusations and disappointments. Tall, striking, strangely confident even in her grief.

"Owen," she says quietly now, leaning in to give him a hug. The memory of her touch sinks into him like a ghost. For years after the divorce, he had unfavourably compared every woman to her, damning them all for not measuring up to his ideals. He had never loved her more than after she left him, never valued her more highly or thought better of her. Typical male bullshit, Linda had labelled it and he's sure she's right on that account.

It's odd to learn that he's stopped. That they have stopped.

"Linda." He allows himself to breathe in her scent the way he used to. In his mind, she smells of soap, expensive perfume and lotions. Clean, fresh, civilian smells. Now her skin bears a trace of war.

When they met she had been a loud-mouthed, irresistible engineer on the ship he was stationed on. An independent and competitive type, always showing off or challenging him, hitting all the right spots in his ego. She never had to do much to get him going, he thinks. He had been crazy about her, counted himself beyond lucky to have her in his life. During a shore leave five months after that first shooting competition she had orchestrated – that he had won easily and celebrated by breaking a handful of regs and protocol down in Engineering - they got married in a run-down little chapel in New York.

They hadn't been married for more than a year when Jeremy was born and Linda insisted on leaving the Alliance to stay at home with him - and then with his sister a few years later. It will bore you to death, Bailey had protested. It will make you boring as hell he had thought, too, picturing his hot, self-sufficient wife buried in trival nonsense groundside. And even if his conscience - or self-preservation - had prevented him from voicing these opinions even during their bitterest fights, she had known how he felt about it anyway.

I'm sorry I didn't become the woman you wanted, Owen, she had told him icily several years later. But one of us had to be there for the kids.

His transfer to C-Sec had been a last effort on his part but as with everything else, it had been too little too late. Too late for their marriage, too late for the kids, too late for repairs.

"I'm sorry," he says, because at the end of things, this is what it all comes down to, everything he has thought he wanted to tell her summed up in a few words: "I'm really sorry."

"I know," Linda replies, her arms still wrapped tightly around him; it sounds like forgiveness.

The world might have gone to hell, but some days it's relatively easy to forget.

Some days they have messages of success clouding up the news channels: Asari ships reporting about found resources and habitable colonies, turians making progress on the cross-species scouting teams they're about to send out to the outskirts of the system, salarians noting new breakthroughs in their research.

Some days the overseas shipments or trains from the rest of Europe reach them and interrupt the habits of their lives. When a goods delivery from Northern Europe arrives, Shepard returns to the HQ with a box full of food like a character straight out of some old vid about the old wars on Earth. Her face is flushed from the spring heat and she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand as she holds up a package of meat.

"There's still deer in Scandinavia, apparently." Something crosses her face. "At least let me pretend this is deer and not husk steak."

That night they pretend they know the first thing about domestic matters and cook dinner in the HQ kitchen. Even with their pooled resources - and a bottle of Batarian shard wine to numb their taste buds - the meat doesn't really taste anything like meat.

"Close enough," Shepard deems, raising a spoonful of the painstakingly home-made dish to his mouth, urging him to taste it. Her eyes are dark and close, glittering with wine and the heat and subdued amusement.

As Bailey leans forward the entire room seems to shift around them, pushing back to a different time. A different life when he was young and married and spent every shore leave with Linda in a haze of badly made and quickly forgotten meals, too much wine and fucking– everywhere and in every manner they could think of because they were still not constricted to any sort of rules in their relationship, taking everything at face value, taking every chance with each other.

It suddenly embarrasses him to stand here with his memories bleeding into the present and he straightens up, reassembling his composure.

Shepard eyes him intently. "Close enough?" she asks.

Too damn close, he thinks and takes a step back.

"Yeah." He nods.

"You don't sound convinced." Shepard smirks as she pushes back hair from her face; he follows the movements of her hand from the curve of her forehead to the curve of her waist where it settles. When she notices his gaze her mouth opens slightly, as though she's about to speak. He feels caught, cards forced up on the table, and he isn't sure what she'll make of it at all. And he's not sure he wants to know.

"We've got twenty hungry marines out here," Major Coats announces from the doorway before anything else gets said, however.

"Bring them in then," Bailey retorts, torn between disappointment and relief.

Twenty-one months after the Reaper War, Shepard kisses Bailey for the first time.

It's a sudden decision, quick like instinct and blurry as that fourth drink she shouldn't have had.

She doesn't know why she wraps one hand around the back of his head and the other around his waist and ties him to her, or why her voice goes dark and harsh as he responds to her initiative by kissing her back, holding her so hard she's certain there will be bruises somewhere; but she's thinking please, go ahead because she needs new marks, new blotches of life on her skin.

She doesn't know why it suddenly seems so logical, this pull into him.

All she knows is that for the moment it dissolves everything else. Bailey's breath against the empty skies, his callous hands against the soreness in her chest, his lips colliding with the metal in her veins, her fingers ghosting over his back, clutching at his broad shoulders instead of all the hollow lies of her past.

"God," she says when she feels his stomach press hard against her own, his chest heaving against her breasts that strain under her shirt; his hands that come up to the sides of her body, then slide down again.

He groans something incoherent as she reaches for his belt, impatient and clumsy and almost frustrated. Then he lifts her up and she wraps her legs around his waist, muttering her approval into the skin on his throat, his neck, the salt-tasting softness of the most sensitive, undefended spots of his body.

A moment later they're on her bed, still wearing most of their clothes but with Bailey deep inside her, her legs closing around him like a cage, her teeth leaving marks on his shoulder. Struggling out of her shirt she tries to tear his own off but fails, caught in seams and fabric; he raises his arms to assist her and she rewards him with a deep-throated groan as her mouth can roam over hot skin. He's taut and muscular, tall and lean and towering, even as they lay down and she arches up against him, thinking yes and please. He rolls her over, she flips them back until she's on top of him and his hands come up to grab her hips and their gazes lock for a moment. She draws a sharp breath, a jolt of familiarity running through her, suddenly reminding her body of something. Someone, she thinks. Another someone, another time, another world. Perhaps that's all there is. Perhaps-

"Shepard," he says, breaking her train of thought, sending back her doubts. When she looks at him, his eyes are open and there's something at the bottom of his gaze that cracks in her, breaks her open.

"Shepard," he says again and she can't remember her name with all its heavy titles and meanings sounding so right before as it does now, rolling off his tongue.

His hands are firm, rocking her back and forth and she comes quickly, gracelessly, her breath caught in her throat. His own release is as abrupt as her own, a groan into her mouth, a desperate shudder through them both.

The morning after she wakes to a low sun dressing the room in shadows and a flickering, fleeting light.

It's been a long time since she woke up beside someone and she can tell from his eyes as they open – the momentary confusion – that it's the same for him. A few seconds pass. She shoots him a glance and notices that he seems to wait.

She knows that wait better than she might like to – and he may call himself old-fashioned but he's certainly no stranger to this routine, she thinks with a little smirk. The five minutes of regret, someone had referred to it once. It's the courteous pause during which the one waking up in someone else's bed get the chance to scramble to their feet, get dressed and slip out of sight before any awkward conversation has to ensue.

"Morning," she says, realising that this is the first time she hasn'tleft.

Bailey's mouth twitches. "Hey."

She stretches out in the warm rays from the sun. He rolls over to his side, propping himself up on his elbow to look at her and there's something questioning in his gaze when it follows the shape of her body.

"Not much time for fancy surgery these days," she says as his eyes – and his free hand, soft and exploring – fall on the large remains of battle on her body. Her recent victories and losses, untouched by the medical advances they have grown used to. Once upon a time soldiers got proper scars, one of the older officers had taunted them back when Shepard was a gangly new recruit. She had large, broad lines in criss-cross formations all over her face and arms and Shepard had always been caught between admiration and horror at the sight.

Bailey looks at her for a long time without speaking. Then his thumb rubs over her largest scar, beginning or ending right under her left breast. She's grateful for it, for not having to search through her mind for appropriate things to talk about. Grateful for skin on skin, for the way he seems to know precisely how to distract her.

"You'll always been damned well out of my league, Shepard, even if you're scarred like a krogan battlemaster." His hand slips along her hip. It's a surprisingly tender touch and her entire body responds to it; she is almost afraid to speak, to disrupt the moment. "Not that I'm complaining."

"You could-" she pauses, draws a sharp breath when his fingers thread from her knee, up along the inner of her thigh "-h-have had me before, too, you know."

"Yeah?" He sounds amused but unconvinced; she struggles to remain in control even with fingertips travelling over her legs, slipping in between them and out again. "Before the war took care of the competition, you mean?"

"Hell yes." She falls back against her pillow. He stops his exploring for a second and just looks at her. She's studying him in return, following the lines of his face, of his scars and history that swirls in patterns across his body; she strokes the hollows and heights of his collarbones, the greying hair on his chest. "It's probably the uniform."

He gives a low grunt of laughter and the sound of it, the intimacy, cuts deep into her composure.

"You're the one wearing the uniform, Shepard."

"Right." Her hands move over his back, come up to his shoulders and arms. "Then I'm all out of ideas."

"Is that so?" He draws a path from her breasts to her belly and then further down, his hand steady and decisive to the point where she loses all coherence, grappling for control before giving it up completely. Instead she relaxes into his embrace and his weight settles into her, heavy and reassuring and entirely different from last night.

"Uh-huh," she manages, in a voice that makes him smile.

They kiss – open-mouthed and hungry - and this time, she thinks as his hand come up to her face and her hair, pulling her closer, the ghosts in their bodies are nowhere to be seen.

five.

One week later, Shepard's past surfaces and Miranda Lawson comes for a visit.

If he searches his memory, Bailey can conjure up the image of this too-perfect woman popping by the Citadel on occasion; he can't recall anything else about her than her past with Cerberus and with the commander, however. But he has the distinct impression he is about to find out more.

"They need you in Vancouver, Shepard," she says simply when she steps into the HQ.

Twenty minutes after her arrival, Lawson has explained the whole situation, declined a cup of coffee and booked a shuttle for the two of them. He's got to admit that she's almost as efficient as Shepard.

They leave the same afternoon and he pretends to work while the two women pack up their things. It's calm today, he reflects briefly, adding a few new reports to his to-do list and authorizing a couple of requests coming from the human refugee camps.

Things havecalmed down. It's the way things go, the pattern all wars follow. Eventually there's no significant rise or decline in deaths, no new outbreaks of inter-species conflicts beyond the usual pettiness and prejudices. Cities report in to the HQ in regular intervals and they have enough people to spare to send them to other countries and continents, a trail of them across the battlegrounds and wastelands.

Vancouver has reportedly recovered well.

"Keep an eye on General Pretor while I'm gone," Shepard says, looking up from the task of pressing down a datapad on top of everything else in her bag. "His little squad is shifty at best."

"They're turians," Bailey replies, half-heartedly.

She mutters something in reply to that; he can't make out the words in the general noise from the open windows and it doesn't seem to matter.

Then she stands in front of him, shouldering a bag and wearing an unreadable expression on her face. The tip of the spear, he thinks, remembering someone calling her just that during the war. The vanguard of their entire war effort: a ruthless idealist who knows the price of everything. Those images have almost been washed away entirely over the past months, irrevocably replaced with ones that aren't as easy to handle. Ideals are hollow, human beings are not.

He has always admired her strength and skill, lately also her sense of humour, her vast collection of vices and how confidently she wears them, her intelligence, her filthy mouth, her humanity; he has never told her.

"Ready, Shepard?" Lawson calls from the hallway.

"Two seconds, Miranda."

She turns to Bailey. He thinks about the past week and the way they haven't ever spoken of it, this brand new and entirely silent contract between them. He's hardly the type to talk about these things and neither is she, as it turns out. It's probably for the best anyway.

"See you soon," Shepard says. He doesn't believe her but he nods.

"I'll be here if you need me," he says and wonders, as Shepard looks in his direction again, if he's going to go to New York after all. There's something sour in that thought, a trace of something far deeper than annoyance but he can't afford to indulge himself. This war has stripped them of so much he can't lose what little that still remains of his dignity, too.

Shepard has been a parenthesis. When he puts it like that, he can almost believe himself.

"Hey, Shepard?" She pauses in the doorway, waiting. The words are at the back of his tongue, beating against the restraints he puts up, his habitual defences that are just as stubborn as he is. For all the good it does him.

"Yes?"

"Be careful."

You never learn anything, do you? Linda asks in his head and Bailey leans against the wall of the cramped office, a groan escaping from his mouth.

"Why didn't you ask him to come with us?"

Miranda looks at her from behind a datapad, her gaze as unreadable as always, but her mouth is definitely forming a little smile that she tries half-heartedly to hide.

"What?" Shepard puts her feet up on the empty seat in front of her as she shuttle makes a jerking take-off. "Bailey? Why?"

Miranda shakes her head, the smile appearing in full now. "You didn't even think about that, did you?"

Shepard doesn't answer; she has always loathed when Miranda is right.

Vancouver is as hot as she remembers it, but decidedly less of a war zone than she had feared.

She has been there for a couple of weeks before Jacob has time to see her, but there's enough to do even with him away. The HQ needs organising, the soldiers need rallying, the lingering war effort requires a hell of a lot of everyday attention and it feels a bit like being back in London more than a year ago. There's something redemptive in starting these things over and over again, she thinks. Rebuilding. Recovering. Reforming. It's practical and important, it gets her hands dirty and it rewards her with results – actual, visible results.

When they get together, Jacob suggests they make up for the bar round on Omega they never got around to do before the Alpha relay changed their plans.

"So, when can I meet little Shepard Taylor then?" she asks as they find a somewhat isolated table in the busiest pub in a part of town that definitely could do with some more polish. And buildings.

Jacob laughs. "Well. It isJane actually. So Brynn got her way."

"Of course she did." Shepard reaches for her beer. Bottled beer, no less. At the back of her memory, Bailey tells her how rare it used to be in the galaxy and how the dealers on the Citadel would charge astronomical sums for a cart. She looks down at her hands.

"Yeah," Jacob says. It's hard to deny that he looks entirely satisfied with that deal.

Suddenly Shepard feels a sting of annoyance with herself for the way she's handled the past few weeks, for her fervent attempts at trying to distinguish need from desire and desire from something far more unknown. For slipping back beneath her own defences as soon as she allows anyone to getto her, for turning away her head and clenching her fists and hoping for the best.

You've got to leave the job behind when you step out of that ship,Anderson had said to her once, back when she was his most troublesome but undeniably talented lieutenant. She had never taken him seriously, figured that he didn't live up to his own advice. Now she knows that's precisely why she should have believed him in the first place.

"So, Shepard." Jacob spins the half-full bottle around, observing its contents swirl. Then he looks up at her. "Are you staying here now? We sure could need a hand."

She doesn't have to think about her answer for long; she does anyway, for good measure.

"No," she says then, and the word leaves a trail of relief in her bones. No, I'm not running away again.

"No?" His voice betrays both surprise and a faint hint of disappointment.

It's not a strange thought, not at all. She couldmove here, she supposes. In this place, tonight, with this crowd and this comfortable leather seat and with Jacob across the table, it's simple to see it. Moving. A flight, compensating for all the flights she's lost now, all the travels she will never have.

There was a way of reasoning that had stuck in her mind before, back when she had the feeling of space lingering in the hollow of her chest, the rumbling of light years and stardust beneath her skin. Every time she had stepped aboard a starship she had thought this is home and I will never be able to do anything elseand it had been a conviction that shaped her in far more important ways than all the creeds and protocols ever could. Now she thinks of Anderson who never stopped to rest anywhere, thinks of Hackett as he had appeared before her by the end of their war – a solitary creature fighting to stand upright under the weight of the whole galaxy.

She thinks about little Jane Taylor and about London and that unsent message in her outbox.

"I've settled down, I think. At least for now. I don't know, it's... there's a lot to do but we've got a good thing going." She pushes away the images of the dead as she reaches for her bottle. "It's hard work but we get results, you know?"

"Yeah." Jacob drinks, sits back and looks over his shoulder at something on the dance floor. "I know what that's like. London it is then?"

It sounds so simple when he puts it like that. Perhaps it is that simple. She's never claimed to be good at anything else than commanding soldiers in war but she's a quick learner, she thinks, with a little grin.

"Yeah. I've got an apartment and everything."

Jacob gives her a knowing look. "An apartment, huh?"

Damn Miranda. She shakes her head.

"Shut up and drink your beer, Taylor."

He didn't think she would return.

She can tell by the way he looks at her as she steps into the afternoon sun that spills in large squares in front of his desk. The heat is tangible in the small room – as usual, he hasn't bothered with the blinds. He prefers working in sunlight, she recalls, just as she knows that he likes black coffee and salmon and old vids about old wars and that he would pick poker over any online entertainment in the galaxy and suddenly she is overwhelmed by a ridiculous longing for him even though he's only a few inches away.

"They're doing okay in Vancouver," she says when he doesn't speak. "There's talk about a colony on Jupiter, if they can get the resources. The turians are looking into it. Overall, the fighting has stopped, at least for the time being. Took a lot of credits and some politics and... you know the drill."

Bailey nods; he puts down the datapad he's been reading, lifts his gaze. "Shepard, look, I-"

"You didn't think I'd come back," she interrupts before she regrets the decision.

"No," he admits after a beat.

"Of course I came back." Shepard takes a deep breath. "I missed you."

She closes the distance between them in a quick stride. Bailey gets to his feet.

"Don't go anywhere, then. Stay with me," he says and it sounds possessive and proprietary but she knows it's not – at least not much, or perhaps just about enough to mirror her own stubborn emotions. I'm not good at this she protests silently. I need practice. And he's got twice her experience and at least half her share of flaws but perhaps that's the best thing about him, she reflects as she watches him here in the sunlight that seems to soften everything, wash away their mistakes. His eyes are on her now, then his hands, his mouth, all of him pressing her up against the desk and she spreads her legs, falling forward into his embrace.

I'm in love with you, you idiot she thinks and he kisses her until the words spill out and when they do, they no longer seem as frightening as they did in her head.

Later they're reduced to a breathless shape in the dark of her bedroom, an ellipse across her bedspread. Bailey rests his head on top of hers, her arms entwined with his, her fingers curved around his wrist. She can smell him on her skin, his hands carry the scent of her.

"Welcome home, Shepard," he mutters into her hair; her face is pressed into the warm skin on his chest and she takes a deep, slow breath, shedding the habits of two lifetimes of running.