Rated for mostly for language.
Andromeda
Prologue
The first time she'd died, it sucked balls. Being spaced was not a fun way to go and it was made even worse because part of growing up on a space ship meant sitting through KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: THE DANGERS OF SPACE TRAVEL vid a billion times since she started primary school. Then in basic training they were forced to watch the effects of being spaced in order to scare them all into triple checking their suits and CO2 lines. Inevitably, in Zero G training, there was some bafoon who forgot to check his shit and got quarter-decked and forced the entire group to endure another viewing of the effects of spacing. So for three agonizingly long minutes, Shepard had fought desperately to get her hands on the leak in her CO2 line while the gruesome images of vids ran through her mind. She had to force herself to breath the little oxygen that remained, because holding her breath in a vacuum would bust her lungs. And then the pain had been too bad and she'd spent the last half minute of her life staring out into the empty blackness of space, helpless. And that was how she'd died.
When she'd woken up in the Cerberus lab, the sound of muffled gunfire and Miranda Lawson's grating voice telling her to get up off her ass, Shepard could only think one thing:
Oh for fuck's sake.
And just like that she was up and at em. Because being dead for two years was clearly no excuse to sit out a firefight. Not that it had felt like two years, more like two minutes. She'd spent a good five hours thinking that Cerberus had been the ones to swoop in and save her before she'd died. But that notion was quickly crushed beneath Miranda's impractical high heeled boot. And who the fuck wore heels in combat? Shepard didn't actually think that level of stupid existed outside of the holo vids. But then she met Miranda and Shepard accepted the fact that if there was one person in the entire galaxy that could actually get away with wearing heeled boots in combat: it was Miranda super bitch Lawson.
Shepard was about to die for the second time, and that too, would suck. The lesson of this story, Shepard decided as she stared at the glowing blue metal rungs that were about to kill her, was that dying just fucking sucked.
Shepard took a deep breath, her last, she realized with morbid humor. In those last few moments before she did the heroic thing and offed her self (she supposed sacrificed was the more polite term), she tried to recall all of the faces of the people she loved. Which amounted to everyone who had ever served on the Normandy. Except Jenkins. Fuck that kid, Shepard had only pretended to be sympathetic about him getting himself killed. Over-eager always got a person over-dead. Ok, she'd been a little bummed that he had died on her first mission abroad the Normandy. But he was an idiot, and Shepard had never done well with that breed.
So she thought of everyone's face and grudgingly, even Jenkins was included. But she saved Kaiden's face for last. Because it would always be Kaiden. Even though saving him on Virmire was tactically the right choice, she'd already been running back to get him when she'd realized the tactical benefits. It wasn't some love at first sight thing with Kaiden. It was the slow build up from all their serious late night conversations, their witty banter on missions, how much she enjoyed flustering him, and eventually all the nights they'd spent in bed just wrapped in each other's arms. Cause yeah, deep down beneath all the sarcasm, badass N7 skills, superb dancing ability, and general kickassness-Shepard actually had a kind heart. Of course she told people it was wrapped in barbwire and rigged to blow and put them in the center of a super massive black hole of hurt if anyone but Liara tried to point it out.
But considering she was forfeiting her life for the rest of the galaxy, she guessed people might have figured out her secret. She choked out a small laugh at that and knew that, under different circumstances, Kaiden would have also found that funny. Ok, maybe not. Ever since she'd died, he had lost the ability to joke about death with her. It physically hurt her to think about how much this was going to break him. It was selfish of her to work so hard to get him back after the Collectors. Even worse was the fact that she would do it again. He was the love of her life, or something equally as cliche and sappy. She'd never needed anyone before Kaiden came into her life. But somehow he'd wound himself so tightly around her heart that he'd managed to permanently fuze himself to it. She hadn't even realized it until they were on Horizon and he'd nearly ripped it straight out of her chest with his word. His words. She was Commander Fucking Shepard: Savior of the Citadel, Destroyer of Collectors, Scourge of the Reapers. She'd been punched, kicked, shot, blown up, stabbed, sat on by a krogan (long story), survived the threshermaw attacked that wiped out her entire platoon of marines, and had been spaced. And Kaiden's words had been more painful than all of that. She'd spent a solid week after Horizon trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with her. And then it occurred to her: love. That was what was wrong with her.
But she wouldn't trade that for anything. Not even a few more moment to live. Because her relationship was comprised of a thousand little moments, a thousand little moments that made her chest constrict painfully as she stared into the blue glow that would be her demise. She loved him more than she'd ever thought possible and he knew it. And that was what she needed to grab onto those rungs, to endure the pain of being disintegrated. And that was how she'd died.
When she woke up again, this time in what felt like an ocean of jelly, with the sound of alarms blaring and the sudden rush of fucking freezing air as the jelly was flushed away, Shepard had only one thought:
Oh for fuck's sake.