There's a gap in their lives. A gap of unlived, missing moments. She'd want to know all about it, but he doesn't like to talk about these two years of their lives they were robbed of. He's got two years' worth of memories she isn't in, and he's picked up a few new scars along the way.
Two years aren't exactly a long time, and yet it's an eternity. It's hundreds of days not spent together, hundreds of days he thought she was dead, hundreds of days he tried to grieve and couldn't.
They both still have nightmares about it. Sometimes he snaps awake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat and breathless, and the one thing able to calm him down is to hear her breathing as she lies beside him. She's alive. He still sees her dying almost every night, still feels guilty about it, still feels guilty about the moments he nearly screwed it all up after learning she was, in fact, undead; but she's alive. And at other times she is the one waking up crying, and he simply holds her until she goes back to sleep, not saying a word, waiting for the memories to fade away, for her to stop thinking back about the moment she realized she was about to die a terrible death in space, alone and out of oxygen, slowly suffocating to death.
There have been some bumps on the road. He's been a jerk, and he knows it, but Mars changed everything. His own near-death experience scared the shit out of her, while it helped him realize what he already knew: he's lost her once already, and they'd wasted enough time as it was. So when the time came to choose, he made the right decision without really hesitating, putting his trust blindly into her, hoping it wouldn't all go to hell, knowing it wouldn't.
After he was back, it didn't take long for them to find each other again. It started as harmless flirting at first, but then quickly grew into something more. It was proof that old habits do die hard. Proof, also, that they belonged together, no matter what life would throw their way. No matter what, in fact.
He's still afraid of losing her. She's still scared of losing him. They're fighting a war where they're out-gunned, outmatched, outnumbered. It doesn't mean they're going to stop fighting though, because even if they'll never get those two years of life back, they still hope they'll get a future. And it's not like they have a choice, anyway. Not because they're heroes, since they don't see themselves that way, but because surrendering is impossible and dying simply unacceptable. So they keep fighting and bleeding, and they'll keep doing it until there's not a single breath of air left in their lungs.
The road's hard. They lose some more people along the way, which is both unfair and so painful it physically hurts. Right after Legion dies, he finds her sitting in the shower under a stream of cold water. She's simply sitting here, freezing and trembling and crying, and his heart breaks seeing her pain. And because he knows her as well as he knows himself, he steps into the shower without even bothering to take his clothes off, sits down beside her and holds her until her sobs stop and she hasn't a tear left in her body. They're a mess alright. But it's what they do. So he doesn't care about the cold water still running and soaking his uniform, and she doesn't give a fuck about him not talking, because she doesn't even want him to. They just need to be here for each other. It's the only way they know to get through this, the only way they won't break, the only way they'll get their shit together by the end of the day.
He remembers the day he met her so clearly he forgets it's been years. They've both changed since that time, a time when things appeared much easier than they are now, a time when dead friends were still alive and Reapers weren't invading the galaxy – well, that is, not yet they weren't. It was simpler times, yes, although fear, pain, and death were only lurking away in the shadows, getting ready to come and disrupt their lives, and he misses those times. But not entirely though. He doesn't miss her not sleeping in his arms every night, doesn't miss that he was too scared to admit his feelings out loud – stupid, stupid regulations and stupid, stupid him for thinking they mattered more than Love. He's a different man now. Not just because time has passed, but because of the hardships, of her death, his grief, the comrades he's lost along the way, the fear they won't come out of this alive, the war, the injuries, the nightmares. She's different too. But at night, when they're all alone in her quarters, the old Commander Shepard slips through the cracks, and she's back to her former self. She's still that confident, beautiful, funny woman who took his breath away the first time she deigned to talk to him. God, he loves her.
They'll be in London tomorrow. They're going to step foot on Earth for the first time since the Reapers took their world away from them. They've finally stopped running. This time, they're taking the fight to the enemy.
Earlier in the evening, she took the time to talk with each crew member. She spent a few minutes with each one of them, chatting away their fears and bringing their hopes up. And now she lies curled up in his arms, her breathing already heavy but not enough for her to be asleep already, so he guesses she's still floating in the limbo between being awake and real sleep. He likes watching her sleep. Deep down he has always been quite the romantic, and he finds something fascinating about the way she rests so peacefully. Nights are the one moment he feels like she needs him to protect her. During the day she's her usual badass self, but at night she allows him to see something wholly different about her, something he's the only one privy to, and he sure is grateful for that. Especially since he always had a need to protect people, and she's managed to disrupt that right at the beginning. She came barging into his life and turned his world upside down, which might have been only right considering he was on a ship in freaking space. Now the world doesn't even have a meaning anymore anyway: it's everything and everywhere around them – and obviously, they are trying their hardest to save it. So yeah, that, and the fact that there's something comforting and calming about the silence in the room, the closeness of their bodies, the tender contact of their skins, and their matching breathing.
And yet.
It's night, and they won't get up for a few hours. London, Earth, are still hours away. He still doesn't know. They both don't.
He doesn't know what awaits them. Doesn't know that tomorrow, he'll kiss her goodbye for the last time. Tomorrow, he'll get aboard the Normandy without her for the first time since they met. Oh, yes, she is going to save the galaxy, because that's what she does. But she won't come back, not this time. And for the second time, he will have to learn to carry on without her, he'll have to pick up the pieces of himself. He doesn't know he won't be able to. He could probably guess if he knew what's going to happen tomorrow, but he doesn't, and so he can't. He has no idea. No idea about the incoming nightmares, the incoming depression, the incoming hours of useless therapy that won't ever, ever, make up for the loss of her. No idea about his early retirement, no idea about how he's just going to drift away from his own life, from his friends, from his future, all because he can't forget about the past. Can't forget about her.
For now, he's slowly falling asleep, with her wrapped up in his arms, and it's only a shadow looming on the horizon. For now, time has stopped. For now, and for a few more hours, they still have a future, still have a whole life ahead of them; they still believe they can win this thing; they can still make plans about their future together. And tomorrow, they'll rush blindly, unknowingly, to their fates.
Then there's a sudden ring. The alarm of an omnitool somewhere in the room wakes him up, although he doesn't even remember falling asleep.
-Get up, lazy ass, she purrs in his ear.
Her hair tickles his neck when she does, and he can feel her breath against his skin. He keeps his eyes closed.
-Five more minutes, he grumbles.
She chuckles and presses a kiss to his temple.
-We've got a galaxy to save, K.
He hasn't forgotten. It's not even sleep he wants, it's a few more minutes with her, just like this, two people waking up without any damn war raging on outside. She nudges him in the ribs with her pointy elbow, and he catches her wrist in his hand. She laughs. He loves her laugh – it's the most beautiful sound ever. Oh, how he will miss it after she's gone, how he will miss moments like this one, simple and yet beautiful. In the grand scheme of things that is an ongoing galactic war against the Reapers, moments like this one seem unimportant. They are fleeting minutes no one but them will remember. To them, they are everything though, a way to forget about the mess they are currently in, a way to escape reality. Because as she sometimes puts in her ever so poetic words: « Reality sucks ass. »
Boy, how true that is.
-Come on, Kaidan.
She's serious now, and his stomach knots. The last hint of laugh is gone and he suddenly feels pure dread, utter terror at the idea of what awaits them today. Doom, that's the exact word he's searching for: he fills with intense doom.
-What if… he starts.
-Kaidan, she interrupts him. We don't exactly have a choice.
-I know that. It's just… If you… We…
-What? Don't make it back?
-I guess, yeah.
She smiles. She's so beautiful right now. He wants the world to stop turning, the galaxy to stop dying, the freaking Reapers to pack up and leave, and he wants to spend the rest of his life loving her.
-Weren't you all about duty and stuff once? she jokes.
-I was. Until I met you.
Shepard rolls her eyes but there's another smile on her lips.
-Smooth, K. Doesn't mean we don't have a job to do, though.
-I know. Strange as it is, I do love our job.
-So what?
-I don't know. Bad feeling is all.
It's more than that, although he won't ever admit it. He doesn't want to go. More than anything, he doesn't want her to go.
But they still go. Of course they do. They're soldiers, they're Marines, they're fighters all the way. And there's a war raging on. A war they don't know they can win, but hell, they are soldiers still, soldiers first and foremost, soldiers before anything else, so they simply keep fighting and hoping for better tomorrows. So they get up with a pang of regret, they put their armor on, they say their goodbyes, and finally, just like that, like it's nothing, like it's every other day in their lives, they leave the ship.
And march to her death.