Miscommunications

If they lived, she was going to give him a long, grueling lecture on how not to be an incompetent moron.

Granted, it wasn't entirely Kaidan's fault; she could admit that. Shepard... the real Shepard, not the half-cocked Cerberus knockoff, wouldn't have been careless enough to fall into such an obvious trap. Hell, the real Shepard would have better covered her tracks, and they would never have found themselves in this situation to begin with.

She was not the real Shepard.

She'd have to tell him that, too.

If they lived.

She was fairly optimistic that they would... at least, Kaidan would. If whoever attacked them wanted him dead, he would have been dead by now, rather than merely drooling and unconscious. Getting his amp ripped out looked unpleasant, but he wasn't awake for it and being divested of his gear was at best an indignity; neither were fatal, to her knowledge.

Besides, it was his own damn fault for not running when he had the chance. The enemy – hired guns? No one she knew by sight, at any rate – apparently didn't know what to do with him. Not like her – one EMP blast or whatever and all her implants overloaded, dropping her out before the fight even started.

Being paralyzed was certainly giving her a lot of time to mull things over, although she could have done without being hardly able to breathe, and having a mouth full of grit. Idly, Shepard wondered what part of not answering his email and disappearing into parts unknown was unclear to Kaidan; she supposed she could have been clearer, and explained how she was quite literally not the woman he had fallen in love with, but then he probably would have wanted specifics and hell if she knew.

She had expected him to respect her silence, and instead he had tracked her down. In doing so, he had either tipped someone off or led them straight to her. Someone who might have wanted her alive, or had just handed her a slow death with plenty of time to think attached to it.

And beyond everything else, her nose itched.

Yep. They were going to have a long talk about this one once she got her motor functions back. ...rather, if she got her motor functions back.

Working Title: Prompt 1

Prompt: "The reunion after Horizon and the Collectors defeat of Shepard and Kaidan. The catch; it must be silent NO DIALOG (or text or emails)! The set up or reason there is no talking is Artist or Author choice."

Noteworthy: I still wonder whether Shepard would be susceptible to EMP-type weapons, being a total cyborg and all.

Disambiguation: My Main Shepard considers the Lazarus project to be skeezy science at best, so she suspects it is a smokescreen. Whether or not she's right... I have no idea.

Published: November 7th, 2011, on the KAAS Prompt Project.

Derivative work of material © BioWare, Mass Effect.