I should be dead.
Shepard dragged in an experimental breath. Her chest was tight as her lungs expanded; her throat was coated with dust… but it felt good. Good in spite of the fact that she couldn't seem to locate her legs, that her pelvis was numb and there was a pain in her ribs that made stars explode behind her eyelids when she tried to move. In pain, there was life.
She tried to relax, to ration her respiration, but the rubble pinning her down was feeling less and less like a blanket and more like a tomb. The fogginess of her thoughts was setting off alarms, surging adrenaline, igniting that primitive spark that urged her to claw her way to consciousness and sink her nails into it. To do what she'd always done. To fight.
But it was raining. She focused on the patter of each cool raindrop striking her face, finding it much favorable to the familiar, slow ache of suffocation. She followed the path of one as it beaded on her brow, sliding down alongside the bridge of her nose, her lips. It mingled with crusted blood, tasted like the remnants of a firefight. A breeze stirred, ash and gunpowder, threading through her hair like the ghost of Kaidan's fingers.
Kaidan.
She inhaled sharply, having forgotten to breathe for a moment, and clenched her teeth as lightning arced through her midsection, branching out, crackling to her extremities. Her wracking sob dissolved into a coughing fit, her coughs then becoming desperate gulps for air.
She could almost feel it hemming in, drowning out the rain and the wind: the biting cold, the weightlessness of space. Her head was spinning and there was no foothold, nothing to hold fast to-
Not until a warm hand pressed to her face and a husky voice warred with the ringing in her ears. Female.
The stranger wasn't talking to her, rather barking orders. Finally, there was a sound that Shepard recognized. Someone was ripping open a packet of medigel. Her eyes shot open through the grit and locked immediately with Jack's wide brown ones. She looked… afraid. The cosmetics on her left eye were a winged smear up towards her hairline and her shirt was coated in blood, but otherwise, she seemed untouched by conflict.
"Need a hand, princess?" Her grin was forced, all teeth.
Shepard wet her lips, croaking, "Jack?"
The biotic rocked back on her heels. "Nah. Your fairy godmother." Her glance drifted behind Shepard. "Rodriguez, get this rubble off of the Commander. Slowly."
"Yes, ma'am."
The fine hairs on the back of Shepard's neck rose as the student's biotic signature washed over her and seized the slab of concrete that obscured her lower half. And suddenly, its crushing weight was gone. She raised head and gasped, instantly nauseous as sensation flooded her legs, her pelvis.
"I said slowly," Jack growled. There was a murmured apology and an impact to Shepard's right as the wreckage was tossed aside; she'd barely swallowed the crest of bile at the back of her throat before Jack began working at the battered seals on her chestpiece. "Hold still."
Don't have much of a choice. Jack's face blurred and darkened and Shepard allowed her eyes to droop shut as her armor was lifted away. Her breaths came much easier now, but the lingering ache in her lungs made her savor each one, in and out, tracking the rise and fall of her chest. Jack's hands were a gentle pressure down her side as she tested her ribs for fractures, prompting a hiss.
Jack must have glanced to her face in that moment because she cleared her throat, trying to chase away the inevitable waver as she reminded Shepard to keep breathing, to stay awake, to open her eyes.
But the Commander didn't have the strength. She trusted Jack. She was safe.