Title: The Stars Apart
Author: Jade Sabre
Author's Note: This is…my Shepard, I suppose. I will probably write more fics about her, but this is the touchstone. The title and epigraph comes from e.e. cummings.
As usual, FFN's formatting leaves something to be desired; you can also read this on my livejournal or on AO3.
As always, thanks to my dearest darlingest beta Quark for her patience with my ill-timed interruptions and her dedication to making my fics—and therefore my writing—the best they can be.
Disclaimer: If I had made ME3, I would have at least tried to let the ending maintain some artistic integrity.
The Stars Apart
1.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
Shepard fell in love with him.
She wasn't the kind of girl who fell in love with subordinates. She was the kind of girl who earned straight As and five appointments to the Alliance Naval Academy, who graduated at the top of her class with her pick of assignments, who enrolled in the N7 program out of familial duty as much as military pride. She held the door at the Skyllian Blitz with two pistols and the occasional biotic pulse, a shotgun near at hand. She obeyed orders promptly and filed reports by next morning's watch. Every CO she'd ever served under had nothing but praise for her quiet respect, her strength in cultivating relationships with the enlisted, her cool head under fire. She knew every reg in the book and could tell you where on the page it was found. She certainly knew the regs on fraternization—she'd recited them at overly friendly commanders and classmates alike. She didn't even date, much to her mother's chagrin. She was a soldier, and the mission came first.
And then Alenko came along and shot it all to hell. She'd read his file—biotic, tech specialist, better at hacking and hanging back than managing the front lines, latecomer but highly commended—but someone had somehow left out the warmth in his eyes, the wry twist of his smile, the hint of happiness when he said her name. They forgot to mention that in every battle he'd be there, guarding her back, slapping medi-gel on her burns, smiling at a frightened civilian, pinching the bridge of his nose when he thought she wasn't looking; they didn't record how a tired lonely drifting hero would feel, watching him be effortlessly good in the midst of a galaxy of hurt and harm.
And there wasn't a reg in the damn book that covered how it felt to fall, and fall hard, for the kind of balanced strength that came from years of searching and making peace with himself and everyone else. And she fell, yes, too, for the way his surety fumbled in the face of—well, her, the way he tripped over his words as he would never trip on the field as he tried to say-without-saying all the things better left unsaid. She loved that she'd met someone as familiar with the regs as she, who followed them not only because they were on the book but because they were about people; she loved that he loved her crew as much as she did.
She loved him and it made her want to scream with frustration, and she wasn't the kind of girl who screamed. She was a soldier, and action was better than words.
So she took him with her nearly everywhere, because she felt safer knowing she had his back, and sometimes she stayed in the mess long after the cooks had gone to bed, watching him not-watch her as he fiddled with the Normandy's systems and made small talk. Once she took him and Liara to Chasca and they had a picnic and watched the young asari run all over a Prothean pyramid, their gloved hands resting casually close to the unyielding lines keeping them apart. He never complained about helping people, as Wrex might, and he didn't suffer from Garrus's uncertainty or Tali's naïveté. He was steady calm and constant support at her six, except for those moments in the Mako when her driving overcame his sense of hierarchy and he shouted directions from the back seat. But there was something normal about that, arguing about routes, though highways differed greatly from sheer cliffs and carsick children were nothing compared to a nauseous quarian's pleading, and she treasured it as much as the quiet confidence with which he told her of Jump Zero.
Scuttlebutt held rumors about them, of course, but Williams did a good job of mis- or redirecting people who got too interested in the commander's affairs. Mostly, Ashley reported, anything mentioning the commander and lieutenant's well-guarded fondness for each other carried notes of approval for their focus and their character. She told herself that this was why she allowed it to continue at all, as though she had a choice; she thought Alenko felt the same, although where he got his information she didn't know. She and Ashley exchanged news while cleaning their guns. She'd rarely had the chance to serve with women in the marines, let alone have one in her squad, and Ashley seemed just as determined to milk it for all it was worth. Both had friends in the service, yes, but there was something different about having someone who was almost-but-not-quite an equal, unafraid to giggle together about men and missed targets in the same breath, a fellow professional who also liked poetry and gossip and reading up on the gun specs in the latest requisitions. When Tali or Liara joined in it felt downright adolescent, but Shepard had spent her adolescence preparing for war; having achieved the one, it was a kindness to seek the other.
And then Virmire happened and the soldier and the girl collided on a bridge looking at an idyllic sky over peaceful waters, untouched by the horror of choice. It wasn't a choice; the decisive operation was the bomb, and stopping Saren, and Williams knew that as well as she did, but she hated it, cursed every step until she saw Kaidan Alenko and her heart started beating again. She was in the medbay when the Normandy sped away from the blast; she turned her back as Chakwas did her tests, and cried to the wall. For a moment, she thought she'd lost him—he asked about Ashley, not as a lover or a friend, but as a junior officer seeking reassurance from command. She almost didn't know how to do it, despite the long list of commendations for her leadership, because she'd never had to lead him; he'd always been simply there. So she kept him there, for lack of being able to let him go, and his anger on her behalf helped; having her simmering frustrations voiced aloud reminded her that he did know her, and had her back, and that lessened the looming presence of Ashley's absence.
And then he came and found her, when she'd released everyone on shore leave until she figured out a solution, found her sitting on the deck of the Normandy with hopelessness between her hands, and she looked up at him and wanted nothing else. But she didn't know how to say it; she stumbled and wheeled and cajoled and the same caution that kept him alive kept him just beyond arm's reach, until suddenly he reached down and took her hand and closed the gap—
But of course they couldn't seal it, because they were soldiers and there was a galaxy to save. But the memory of his arm around her fueled her steps, her reckless enthusiasm for Anderson's plan, her belief that they could pull this off even if the galaxy refused to cooperate. With a single blow Anderson flicked a switch and sent the Normandy sailing into a dark ocean of stars beyond the Council, beyond the relays, beyond the books; and for the first time Shepard, who'd spent her whole life following the regs, writing them around the neat and tidy corners of her thoughts and actions—Shepard was free.
He came to her room, and Shepard—Shepard, who had enforced a strict open-door policy as a brigade commander her firstie year—locked the door behind him. She stood and listened as he spoke caution for the sake of the crew, for the sake of the people who had abandoned their drinks and their dice and their dames and their sworn oaths in order to follow her where no Alliance ship went, and she loved him for worrying. She loved him for leaving the regs in the books so she could close them and put them on a shelf, and she loved him for loving her for doing it. She'd never let a man become the air she breathed or the bones in her skin; it was pointless to pretend he was anything else.
2.
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
She died loving him and she came back with his name on her lips.
She took the Illusive Man's ship and flew it straight to the Citadel, but the SPECTREs were no home and Anderson wouldn't take her back. She asked after the lieutenant—the commander, she heard, but beyond that Anderson wouldn't say. She didn't want to press too hard—didn't want to jeopardize his career or lose the shreds of hers—so she gathered was remained of her pride and her loyalty and left, locking them away as Anderson's regretful expression cut her adrift amidst a sea of stars.
Cerberus was a private corporation, serving its own interests and leaving its employees to pursue theirs so long as they didn't conflict. She'd spent her life aboard ships and stations, raised by the people and trained to die for them; the only thing she had for herself was one night behind a locked door. Unable to trust her own crew and eager to escape the unregulated chaos, she kept to her cabin and fed her fish and fell asleep watching pinpricks of light smear above her head, the promises of so many people and so many worlds left unfulfilled as they passed. She dreamed of death and inexorable darkness and woke with no one to remind her she was alive, and so she lay and fingered her pulse and counted her breaths, striving to hear the silent hum of the machinery in her bones. The nightmares were nothing new; the loneliness was.
The faces surrounding her were familiar or strange, but all save Miranda were at least sympathetic. They all had their reasons for being there: Joker wanted to fly, and Chakwas wanted to ensure that he could; others wanted to save humanity, or stop the Collectors, or protect their families, and while every military ethics class and seminar she'd ever sat through made her want to shake them all silly, she owed them the completion of their mission. So she gathered her followers—first a clever thief, then a krogan as engineered for perfection as she was, a biotic broken for it, a scientist obsessed with it—and Garrus, the first real relief she knew. She even let the mercenary onboard, though she knew that unlike the turian Zaeed's utilitarianism could not be turned. But with Garrus she finally had a friend in the confusion, someone who at least knew order and protocol even if he fought it whenever he could. It was nice to fight those battles again, nicer to have him at her back, to have someone to trust when all around her were twisted whispers of half-truths and the constant presence of the Illusive Man trying to turn her principles into mockeries of themselves. She couldn't count on Garrus to hold her to her own standard, but she could at least know he would support her when she did.
And then—
And then she was sent to Horizon with nothing but the barest suggestion, a tantalizing clue dangled like a lure before her eyes, and she knew it was too much for coincidence, knew it had to be a trap but still she went because she wanted—she hoped—
And the Collectors were everywhere, Reaper-equipped and Reaper-possessed, and everywhere innocent people were frozen in fear, flying though the sky as she cursed the galaxy and fought to save the ones she could. She forced her way through the battle with some big damn flying thing, and as the GARDIAN towers chased the Collectors away she looked up and Kaidan Alenko was there, and her heart started beating again only to find itself in his hands, slowly crushed as he squeezed out the truth of her situation. She fumbled the explanations—she was dead, she was desperate, this was the only way—but to deny options was to deny human ingenuity, to deny hope, to deny everything she'd stood for as she held the breach on Elysium or left Ashley to die for the sake of the mission. She was an Alliance soldier. She followed orders and stayed within the regs, and she didn't cut corners and she didn't believe the ends justified the means—but she had a crew, and without her they would be lost.
She was selling herself short and she knew it and he knew it and it was a relief, his anger, a relief to finally have someone call her out on the hypocrisy in her soul. It was a relief, his refusal to join her crew, a relief watching him walk away, knowing that he was right and that he was willing to sacrifice her for it, knowing that he left and took her bleeding heart with him to where it longed to be, knowing that someone in the whole damn galaxy could still be trusted to be good even if for once that person wasn't her.
She loved him and he turned his back on her and left nothing but the mission in his place, and that too was a relief; she was a soldier, and the mission came first.
3.
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
Six months of house arrest seemed a small price to pay for six months of service to a criminal organization and the deaths of three hundred thousand batarians. She had no messages and no visitors, but Vega was a good-looking, good-natured guard, and there were worse things. She tried to relax—changed her haircut, watched all the Blasto movies that had come out since her death, imagining Garrus's and Tali's commentaries in her head—tried to treat it as a vacation, knowing it was likely to be her last respite, knowing that underneath her calm she was a coil wound ever tighter, waiting to be sprung.
When Anderson came for her she knew the time was at hand, and bumping into a newly-minted Major seemed just that—a coincidence, a happy last glimpse back in spite of everything that had happened and was coming even as she kept going. Because once she started going, it didn't stop—the Defense Committee's pointless questions, the shadows of Reapers falling across the sky, that noise, the horrible electronic pulse that had chased her dreams since—well, in the time since Saren she'd been able to dream, anyway. There was something horrible, too, in the exhilaration she felt at finally being able to run again, ducking and dodging and taking cover with a pistol in hand and husks coming from every angle. She was built for this, for unleashing biotics and abandoning her gun for cybernetic punches when all else failed, and she wondered if the silent machinery would ever let her find a moment's true peace. Lucky for her, it didn't matter; lucky for Earth, it kept her alive.
She left Anderson behind with the terrible feeling she'd never see him again, but he was one among millions gone before and trillions yet to come and he'd given her orders and a mission to complete—he'd given her a home in the Alliance again, and that was all she needed to get the job done. No matter that the major was there watching her with equal distrust and longing, no matter that she needed him at her back as much as he wanted to be there even if neither of them knew how he felt anymore. She had a ship and a destination and her orders, no matter who came along.
(It mattered.)
And then a damn robot, of all things, broke his face and maybe his skull, and just as she had two years earlier she spent a trip to the Citadel in the medbay but this time she didn't care if the crew saw her holding his unconscious hand; she bowed her head and thought of Ashley and said a prayer as selfish as they came: so many were dying, but please Lord, not this one.
She left him in the hospital under strict orders not to die because there was a galaxy to save and nothing else she could do. Palaven gave her a real taste for what the Reapers could do—what they were doing—not that she'd had any doubts, not that she'd thought a baby human Reaper would be the end of the horrors, or even the worst of them, but putting her boots on the ground and going head-to-head with her first brute left a bitter taste in her mouth that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with—death, and the fact that the rest of her life before it would be spent doing—this.
So she brought Garrus back aboard, and Chakwas, and even Daniels and Donnelly, and she encouraged Joker and EDI, and she made friends with James and Samantha and she listened to her crewmembers as they worked, on and off duty, around her ship, and she ran back to Huerta at the first opportunity. Thane was there, offering his own sort of peace in the face of mortality, and glad though she was to sit with him in his stillness she found she didn't envy his inaction. It wasn't her peace; she stood nervously on one side of a hospital room door and thought maybe she was looking in vain, but she squared her shoulders and walked in with a bottle of whiskey and a smile she couldn't quite shake on seeing his eyes open and alert and watching her, even in the midst of his mottled face. He took the whiskey and he smiled back and even though the conversation never really strayed from the polite catchings-up of two old soldiers there was friendship and the ragged edges of her ripped-out heart thought about knitting together again, maybe—
But there was a galaxy to save, a scientist salarian to rescue from his own research and a krogan people to redeem with it, and in the meantime the galaxy moved on, so she shouldn't have been surprised that he took the SPECTRE job—she was proud of him, so proud, glad that someone could see him beyond merely a shadow at her back—but she hadn't thought he'd have his own assignments, hadn't thought he wouldn't come as soon as he could. Her missing heart skipped a beat and she replaced it with Tuchanka, taking the guarded hope in Eve's eyes and turning it into a reality. And in the end she lost Mordin, hearing in his final words an uncomfortable echo of the force that drove her every step, and so for once she tried to flee and instead found a Citadel in flames, Bailey bleeding and Thane gutted on the end of a Cerberus sword and no time to mourn because the Council was walking into a trap and Kaidan was on the wrong end of her gun. The noise and the rush and the friction of battle, the silent pounding in her ears and the steady finger on her trigger crashed together in a single moment of need, and for a moment Shepard who never panicked didn't know what to do—
And then she looked down her sights and met the major's eyes, and the same trained understanding that saved them on Eden Prime and Feros and Virmire and all the worlds in between, the hard steel links shackling them together from too many battles and too few words—or maybe simply the thin steady cord reminding her she had a heart—pulled him aside so she could take the shot.
He took the Council to safety and she sent Thane to his final rest and they met beside the Normandy, a little uncomfortable, a little awkward, neither one wanting to reveal how desperately they wanted the other to say yes—and they both knew it, both a little sheepish, both letting hope get the better of their sense. But she loved him, and as she followed Kaidan Alenko onto her ship, her heart started beating again.
She couldn't hide it, either, and she knew it was an utter failure of discipline, a breakdown of the military order she'd so carefully reconstructed aboard her ship—Liara grinned at her, and Garrus cast dark threatening looks whenever he thought Alenko wasn't looking, and James put on a good show of not rolling his eyes, and even the privates guarding the security check raised their eyebrows knowingly. Diana Allers was clearly desperate to ask, and the only thing stopping Daniels and Donnelly was the very real threat that she might return the question. Never mind that this wasn't the SR-1, that he hadn't technically been assigned to her chain of command—what mattered was that that she was CO in her own right even if he outranked her, and they were at war, when the regs were at once the most vulnerable and the most necessary. She berated herself every time she stopped by the observation deck or put off finishing a report just for the sight of him talking to the crew—though half the time she did that she'd discovered the completed report waiting for her, unobtrusively, in her inbox—tried to remind herself that her feet were planted on the deck and people were looking to her to keep them there and lead them out of their hells—
And then Samantha pulled her aside from her terminal and told her, with a look that said her entire crew had discussed this and nominated her to say it, that it was okay—it was okay, to be happy.
So she met him for a drink on the Citadel and told him she loved him and found she still had his heart—had always had his heart beating in her chest, even as he had hers—and for a moment they were—happy. A long moment, compared to others in her life, though too short by the standards of most—but as the Reapers closed in around them she treasured those moments all the more. She stood with Tali on Rannoch and felt the breeze blow on both their faces, outshot Garrus and let him blame her cybernetics as the Presidium whizzed by beneath them, sat with Liara as the asari inscribed her name among the stars, and wished away the whispers of goodbye in all her words. She woke each morning in her bed warm and safe, loved and loving, and all the horrors on Horizon could not withstand that strength nor break that shield.
Their last night together—of the war, at least, because she refused fatalism and why not? she'd died once before—was fraught with familiarity, with memories, filling in the gaps of space and time and years lost and found, the comfort of nightmares displaced, however momentarily, with a kiss. And then they were flying, flying to Kai Leng's death, to the Catalyst, to Earth, racing back to the place of beginnings and ends, hitting the ground hard, seeking momentary shelter amidst the most brutal fighting they'd ever known. Anderson was there, waiting, as if he'd known shoving her out of the nest would only bring her back to him, and she was glad to see him, if only because she hadn't made a proper farewell the last time, couldn't have without seeing what he'd been seeing for six months. She did her best to make her proper farewells now, though it was too late for Legion, for Mordin and Thane, for so many nameless, faceless dead—but she tried anyway, to set her affairs and her people in order before whatever voiceless whispers following her steps found her—
But Kaidan was there, and Kaidan had her back, and in the face of endless waves of brutes and banshees, blood and twisted metal and shrieks and roars and survival, she thrived, because she was built for it, because he was there, because if he was there then she was safe.
And then a blast from Harbinger blew a tank blew it all apart, and she ordered them back to the ship, all of them, even him, and he protested and she loved him; the world exploded around them again and again and she ordered the others away and they went, bleeding and limping and alive and she touched him and captured the moment in all its brevity, burning it in the places Cerberus had left untouched when they brought her back; this was how she would remember him, though she did not beg him to let it be so. It was an order. They were old soldiers, and the mission came first.
She left him behind—not alone, for she left her heart with him, and as long as he held it she could achieve the impossible—she refused to die when Harbinger wanted her to, when the Illusive Man pulled her trigger and left Anderson in a pool of his own blood, when the forces of the galaxy danced their own silent deaths across her vision; she kept breathing because somewhere, she knew, her heart was still beating. And because she was breathing she had a grip on her gun, and though the Catalyst tried to persuade her otherwise, warned her of the difficulties of her choice, offered her easier options—life was difficult; the joy was finding the peace amidst the struggles, the smiles, the choice to shoulder another's burden and walk with them, to trust in the face of confusion and chaos, to see, in the contrast of the shadows, how brilliantly the light could shine. With assimilation came monotony; compromise and understanding required work, effort, strain, but she would headbutt a thousand krogan if it meant allowing Eve's children to rebuild their world in their image, rather than hers. She'd proved it could be done; she trusted the others to carry on; her heart was safe with him. With all of them.
Shepard fell, to Earth, in love.