I'd been around for a while. Long enough to have brushed shoulders with death a few times, either through my own stupidity or sheer dumb chance. Once you've had enough close calls, you get used to them. You stop counting.

I hadn't woken up to it yet, but in my gut I knew this one was probably the last.

Wilson was dead, and T'Terek was choking out wet, ugly gasps through her mangled jaw. A store display had shielded me from the worst of the shrapnel, but the big geth that had gotten the others was already turning towards me.

The comm crackled and buzzed in my ear, but whatever the operator was saying was lost as a ship streaked overhead, low enough in the Citadel's atmosphere to hear the engines scream. The geth and I both looked up, and I saw the ship's starboard wing start to tip, primary thruster trailing smoke. Her secondaries fired hard as the pilot tried to correct, and she rolled. Her wing sheared through the building behind me with a shriek, and then everything flared white as an engine overloaded with a deafening roar. Something crashed into my shoulders and the world went dark.

There was a long period of murky, indistinct consciousness. My head and knee hurt, and there was something pressing down hard on my shoulders. I would have dropped three tiers for a drink of water.

Sometimes, noises filtered in. Metallic groans and the dry scrape of ceramic. Faint voices.

And then, abruptly, the weight was gone and the world was blindingly bright and shockingly loud.

"...got a pulse?"

"...still alive! Get the EMTs over here!"

Something covered my nose and mouth and things went blessedly quiet again.

I woke up in a stiff bed in a small, clean room with the sterile smell and inoffensive décor of a hospital. Everything hurt, but it all seemed to be there. I tried to sit up. It was a mistake. An alarm went off at the motion, and a rumpled-looking salarian in a nurse's uniform hurried in and silenced it.

"Executor Pallin. Welcome back. How do you feel?"

A stab of pain went through my knee, and something in my shoulder grated as I eased myself back down. "Stiff," I conceded.

The salarian shot me a disapproving glare. "You're very lucky. The emergency crews found you yesterday, four days after you went out of contact. You're concussed, and you sustained moderate damage to your knee and shoulder, but you should make a full recovery. Provided you don't stress the joints prematurely."

I ignored the jab as the memories trickled back in. "T'Terek? Did she make it?"

The nurse paused in checking the machinery at the bedside. "Two bodies were found with you. Both had been dead since the attack."

I closed my eyes. T'Terek had been one of the best. Senseless. "What about the geth?"

He hummed and ticked off something on his datapad. "The fighting is mostly over. There are still scattered conflicts in Tayseri and Kithoi, but they're under control. There was a great deal of collateral damage and loss of life, but reconstruction is already underway."

So the crisis was over. Resolved while I'd been crushed under a ton of debris. I should have been relieved, but there was a perversely bitter taste to the news, as if I had somehow shirked my duty by missing it.

The nurse cleared his throat. "If I may run some quick tests?"

I dropped that line of thought and nodded to him. "Go ahead."

When I woke the next day, Octavia was waiting.

She looked the same as she always had—fine dark plates, graceful hands, strongly hooked mandibles. She was reading a datapad, expression calm and collected as ever.

"Hey," I said. It came out rougher than I meant it to.

She froze a moment, then set the datapad down. "Venari. You never could stay out of trouble."

The sound of her voice, warm and throaty, made me remember all at once what it had been like to fall in love with her.

With an effort, I shook my thoughts out of the past. "I suppose not."

"How are you feeling?"

"As well as can be expected, all things considered."

She flicked a mandible skeptically. I cleared my throat. "Not that I mind, but last I'd heard you were in Cipritine."

She examined me carefully, expression inscrutable. "You were MIA for four days, presumed dead. I came here to plan your funeral."

It hit me all at once, like a punch to the gut. Four days underneath the rubble of that building, fading out little by little while Octavia wrote my memorial and the rest of the world rolled past me.

"I'm sorry," I said. It felt painfully inadequate.

Her subvocals hummed, and she nodded sharply. She relaxed after a moment, smiled faintly, and reached out to clasp my hand. "I was very glad not to have to write your eulogy."

I squeezed back. "Thank you."

For a minute, we just sat there. I stared at our hands together on the hospital sheets, warm in the false sunlight coming through the window.

"Listen..."

"No, Venari." She removed her hand, and leaned back into her chair, composed again. "We separated for good reasons."

She was right. We were both ambitious, stubborn, and unwilling to compromise. Our marriage hadn't lasted long. We'd loved each other, but in the end, we'd both loved our work more.

I glanced away. "You're right."

"I am." She said it gently, but the truth of it still ached a little.

She stayed with me for a while. We tried to talk, but we'd already said the important things. Soon Octavia got up.

"I have to go. I'll be back to see you again tomorrow."

"Thank you."

She paused, and then leaned down, briefly brushing her hand against my shoulder and her forehead against mine. "Take care of yourself."

"You too."

She left, and I was alone. I thought about the person I'd been ten years ago and the person I was now and whether there was any improvement.

After a while, I closed my eyes and let the world roll past me again.

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AN: For Velasa, who asked me what the hell happened to Pallin. Special thanks to anonymous-moose for heroic editing despite technical difficulties.