"Do you think we will see them again?" Miranda asks. Her eyes are on the night sky, though the smoke is thick and hides the stars she knows where each and every one are, and not the dying embers of a city he feels a plaguing loyalty to. It is like a rope around his neck and the other end is wrapped around a stone, and a child not possibly understanding the weight of a chipped and mud-spattered rock tosses it out of the tallest story building and he goes sailing after it — too weary to even sigh.
There are broken families in the streets. They sing for their dead until they lose their voice. He is not the savior or destroyer of entire solar systems. He is a man as scared and lost as any other — capable of bad, good, and love. She holds him together — even as his arms wrap around her, as she lays her head on his shoulder and the want to collapse under the weight of never seeing her sister again is crushing — it is her voice that shelters him. When he was lying on the operating table, with his last heroics and the most darling of stars surrounding him as he gasped for air dashing in and out of view like memories do, he thought she was an angel haloed by bright lights and a headache.
Shepard answers, "I hope so." It is all he can say. He hates to be at the mercy of hope, but the days of lying and being the one everyone looked to, breathing courage into soldiers who could barely handle a gun are over. The war is won and they close their eyes to a sleepless sleep.