1.
She's not very good at flirting.
That's the first thing he notices, when she comes to talk to him after the mining laser on Therum nearly kills them all. After she has to chastise him for snapping at the new asari crewmember in the follow-up debriefing. And though he doesn't want to admit it – not to anyone, least of all himself – the asari's mind-melding thing with Shepard might have rubbed him the wrong way.
Just a little bit. It's not a big deal.
And then she comes downstairs and her skin looks too pale in the harsh lighting of the Normandy and she's not very good at flirting but damn is she trying.
You a career man? she'd asked him, after the disaster on Eden Prime. He'd shrugged and nodded, explaining that the whole biotic thing meant that he was well-documented anyway – might as well get paid for it. And then she goes and pulls something that might get him court-martialed. A lieutenant and a commander? And not just a commander – a Spectre. The first human Spectre.
Forget it.
It's easy to tell when she blushes because the lights are so bright. Her eyes are dark and serious and for some reason he finds himself letting go a little bit and just talking – talking like he would with a friend. He reigns himself in. Asks if she makes a habit of getting to know all her crewmembers this well.
She flushes. No, she says, no, she doesn't.
He doesn't know how to respond to that. But he smiles, because for the first time in a long time – for the first time since joining the military – he's looking forward to the next mission. To the conversation that would follow.
2.
It's not that he's inexperienced – honest! – it's that, for some reason, she makes him nervous as all hell. Even after she'd wheedled those stories out of him, even after she'd smiled and laughed and nodded and leaned in, he still couldn't quite believe it.
Or maybe it's because she's closer than he'd let anyone get in a long, long while.
Either way, he didn't think he'd ever get used to the feel of her skin against his, to the way she sighed in her sleep, to the way her lips felt when they mouthed his name against his chest. Each time, whether it be in her bunk or his; in the mess hall, when everyone else was sleeping; in the closet next to the observation deck; wherever they could get their hands on each other without fear of reprisal, they were reduced to breathless giggles and tousled hair and kiss-swollen lips.
He hadn't been this happy since … well. He'd never been this happy.
The whole crew knew. Garrus smirked (as much as a turian can) about it. Liara hid her blushes behind her hands. Joker shook his head, but his smile betrayed his approval. They gossiped. It went on for weeks.
And then the attack hit.
And the Normandy fell.
And Joker was the last one groundside. Alone.
And the universe was empty without Shepard.
3.
He threw himself into his work. He didn't know what else to do. Drowning his sorrows in alcohol wasn't exactly his M.O., though he definitely considered a brief shore leave on Omega.
Two years passed. Slowly.
He was promoted. His friends set him up with a girl – a doctor, on the Citadel. She was pretty. Thought his bumbling attempts at conversation were cute. Didn't know much about the military, which suited him just fine.
Then the Alliance received a tip. Shepard was alive. Alive, and working with the enemy.
Horizon was the culmination of weeks of sleepless nights and half-written messages. There were too many questions, and too many answers that he already thought he knew – he chided himself for thinking back on those days so often, for thinking that she loved him back.
She acted like she'd never left. Garrus stood at her side, scarred, still blindly loyal to her.
All Kaidan felt was betrayed. He'd mourned her. Mourned their love, as cheesy as it sounds. And it hurt. It hurt to think – to know – that he'd been wrong. That as much as he'd wanted it to be real, as much as he'd wanted to just let go for once and trust someone wholly, she'd left. And she'd let him rot. For two years.
Her voice is apologetic. Her face is crisscrossed with a variety of scars that hadn't been there before. She asks him to come with her.
He says no.
4.
The months pass surprisingly quickly, considering. She doesn't send a reply to his (admittedly tonally indecisive) message, but he feels better for having sent it.
When she turned herself in, it was easy to put off seeing her. He had a job to do, after all – promotion to Major wasn't just handed to him. And she was under house arrest. Sure, technically, as an Alliance officer, he could get in to see her. But he was busy. There were always reports to be filed, messages to draft and edit and send, hands to shake, missions to oversee. Cerberus getting real quiet was a plus, but that didn't mean that Batarian slavers and red sand smugglers and all the other criminals in the galaxy had stopped their illegal activities. So he told himself he'd see her next week, but then a meeting would come up. I'll send her a message at least, he'd promised himself, only to sit down and stare at the screen for an hour before getting called away.
It was only six months. Six months of relative peace, of moderate normalcy. Sure, the fact that she was only a half-hour train ride away kept him awake sometimes, but it was so easy to accept the Alliance's denial of Shepard's proclamation. To dismiss it as Cerberus brainwashing or just her inclination for volatility.
And then Hackett radioed in.
Shepard's name was the first thing out of Anderson's mouth.
5.
She hadn't changed. He didn't know why he'd thought she would – it had only been six months. But her smirk was exactly as he remembered it, and the sincerity in her eyes when she told him it was good to see him made it hard enough to choke out that it was good to see her, too. Because it was. And that surprised him.
The burly chunk of marine that followed her like a puppy made him uneasy, too. The way Vega looked at Shepard, like there was something she had that he needed, reminded Kaidan a little too much of himself, back when the commander was little more than a bad flirt. Shepard didn't discourage it, either, and once Kaidan found out that Vega's presence was not new, that in fact he had been there those six months when Kaidan was happily distracted, there was no stopping the jealousy that flared up in the center of his chest.
"That's not fair," she said, when he asked her point-blank. Her voice was low and angry. "That's not fair at all. You can't ignore me for six months and then tell me you're jealous of my lieutenant."
He sputters out something about being busy and Cerberus but she's turned away, and he knows that he fucked up. That it's on him to fix this, because she could be the one that got away or she could be the one that he lost.
It didn't help that in those two years since she had died, Garrus and her… It was obvious. He had been there, been a friend, become more than a friend. And his absence during those six months was more easily explained away, because he hadn't ignored her warnings: he had taken them back to the turians and at least tried to do something about it.
Kaidan had done nothing. Less than nothing.
6.
It was so odd, being on the ship again. Now a Major and a Spectre, he felt no different from the days of the SR1. Everything else had changed – Liara, holed up in the old CO quarters, was now the goddamn Shadow Broker; Vega was Shepard's go-to lieutenant for post-mission-debrief advice and conversation; Garrus was up there in the turian hierarchy and also somehow with Shepard – and here Kaidan was, feeling like the same uptight lieutenant who had Shepard to thank for learning how to talk to people again. Who had Shepard to thank for most everything that had happened in his career, actually.
He'd thought his near-death would give him time to think about how to go about apologizing. Weeks in the hospital with nothing to do but think.
It didn't. It made it harder, actually, because he had time to rehearse and revise his apology speech, and by the time it seemed perfect Shepard was bringing him nice bottles of whiskey and acting like nothing had ever happened. It was weeks before Kaidan could even bring himself to ask about Garrus, and even though he already knew the answer it was better to hear it from Shepard herself.
It felt good. Being back on the Normandy. Everything was different, fancier, upgraded past all sense, but the starboard observation deck still looked out into the terrifying infinity of space.
Kaidan had a feeling that even after all they'd been through, all the shit they'd pulled on each other, he and Shepard belonged exactly where they were. Two Spectres against the infinite void.
He'd invite her for drinks. Apologise. And then to Liara, too, and maybe he'd even have a friendly chat with Garrus. Shepard would be furious, but he wanted to know that he and Garrus were good. Because he felt good. Better.
Better than he had since she died. For the first time in two years and six months, Kaidan felt like the future wouldn't actually be that bad. Funny how it takes the end of the world to bring things into perspective like that.