Category: Mass Effect
Rating: PG13
Genre: General
Summary: Kaidan mulls over his meeting with Shepard.
Recalculation
Two days later and you're still reeling.
You've heard more than enough consolations and assurances that it wasn't your fault that half of Horizon's colonists are missing. Though you have conditioned yourself to keep your frustration in check, you're reasonably sure that if one more person comes up and tells you not to blame yourself, you are just going to send them careening across the gently rolling plains of this godforsaken planet with a biotic throw that would be the envy of asari commandos. You know it's not your fault, and having it rehashed every few minutes is not helping.
But not everyone is so considerate of your inner turmoil. In fact, if you thought Horizon colony was hostile towards you before, now the remaining inhabitants are an inch away from stringing you up in one of those thick, gnarled trees and watching you dangle from a noose. Many of them blame you for the attack. They didn't want the Alliance meddling in their affairs in the first place, and they see it as the defense turrets the military provided welcomed the Collector invasion. And lucky you, you're the only Alliance soldier around to take the heat for it. The survivors have been merciless, throwing rocks and garbage at you, calling you every name in the book and then some. You returned to your prefab after a long day of repairing damage done in the assault – because you are determined to assist these stubborn people whether they like it or not – only to find your quarters had been trashed and vandalized in your absence.
It's a trial of your thinning patience, but you endure. The Alliance's investigative team will be here in a few days, and after their business is done they're going to take you back to the Citadel. You've already sent your report back at great expense to the Navy by using top priority bandwidth on the communication buoys, but you knew even then that it wasn't going to be enough. They're is going to probe you for every detail personally. They want it straight out of the horse's mouth that the colonies aren't being attacked by batarian slavers or marauding pirates, but by the Collectors. And most of all, they have to hear you recant the events that led to the Collectors' failure to snatch the entire population. Everyone suspected Cerberus was involved, but nobody was expecting this.
The idea of revisiting the entire attack in front of the admiralty makes you restless. Not the speaking in front of your superior officers part – no, that will be a cakewalk after what you've been through. The hard part is getting what you recall into a comprehensible order, then making that transition into spoken words without seeming like a head case. The implant already makes the ignorant predisposed to think you're batshit crazy without you rambling about paralytic bug drones and a hive-like dreadnought even bigger than Sovereign. You're going to have to approach it delicately if you don't want them to dismiss your claims like they did with Shepard two years ago.
Now that thought is enough to get you off your cot, and you pace the unimpressive length of your temp housing anxiously. The vandals shot out all the lights, so all you've got is the milky blue luminescence of Horizon's four moons to keep you from bumping into anything. But it's not enough to soothe the burning frustration, the anger and disbelief and depression that are pressing down on your insides all at once. You suspect nothing will until you get the hell off this colony. You just need to get away from the epicenter of your troubles and then you'll be able to sort it all out in your head, but not before.
After BAaT you vowed to never, never again allow your emotions to become so unbridled that it caused you to lash out. Not with your biotics, not with your fists, not with your words. When you saw Shepard donning the Cerberus banner you could only hold yourself to two of the three, and even then just barely. You wanted to pummel his face in for everything that was going on, but you settled for spitting out the vilest thoughts you could come up with in the heat of the moment. You were so wrapped up in your self-righteous tirade against Cerberus that you forgot to be happy that your best friend wasn't dead.
Even now, two days later, you still get pissed off thinking about that meeting. Pissed at Shepard, at yourself, Cerberus, the Alliance, the Collectors, the Council… You're so full of rage that pretty soon you're going to cave in. You feel the gentle tingle in the base of your skull that's so familiar it's almost unnoticeable, and you know that this is the exact thing you've spent your life trying to avoid. Your mind is flashing through a thousand thoughts and emotions a second and is unconsciously triggering your powers. The faintest wisps of your corona shuffle the datapads on the desk and that's when you stop and try to gather yourself.
Wrex commented on this once. Questioned you with a distinct lack of finesse about why you held yourself back when using your biotics, and then he tried to get you angry enough to tap into that well of primal strength you've always sworn to never use. You didn't. You sure wanted to, particularly after his remark calling you a simpering coward, but you refused to be baited. Looking back you still don't know if Wrex respected you more or less for it.
But this is different. You've spent your entire life fending off hurtful comments and insults, and those are easy enough to brush aside. But what happened with Shepard is something of a different magnitude. You can't shake it off no matter what you try to occupy yourself with. It haunts you in the farthest fringes of your mind like an evanescent ghost, pulling the most obscure trains of thought back to it for you to dwell on all over again. You're surrounded by little reminders, and that's why this colony is keeping you from fixing yourself. This whole place is one big catastrophe replaying itself the repertory theatre that is your head; a script that is impossible to break until you get some distance. Space.
Space, because you can't bring yourself to go back to Earth while the Reapers are out there. After the crash you even squared yourself with the realization that you'd probably never go back. But two days ago you saw the one person who had a half a chance to save this pathetic, swirling ball of dust, and you've had hope reinstated by the fact Shepard is alive.
And then you called him a traitor.
It was a stupid, petty thing. But after the Normandy went down and Shepard was pronounced KIA, some higher-ups in Intelligence chalked up the attack as Cerberus' doing. You were the only member of the Normandy crew kept on the investigation because you knew too much for the Alliance to discard you. You helped Shepard take down a lot of Cerberus bases, so you were a natural choice. And over time as you dug deeper and poked around, you started to think that they were responsible too. It made sense. Cerberus took down the Normandy, killed the commander, and thus cleared the way to abduct entire colonies for their sick experiments. You've spent the last couple of years looking for evidence against the organization, further demonizing them in your head beyond all redemption, hunting them down in the name of… revenge.
There's no point in denying it. You aren't some benevolent, perfect marvel of forgiveness. You're human, and you wanted revenge. Twenty-two of your crewmates went down with the ship: Shepard, Pressly, and most everyone who'd been trapped on the lower deck. But then there was you. The crash had invoked some animalistic fear akin to what Vyrnnus put you through with that knife pressed against your throat all those years ago, and you wanted somebody to pay. You wanted to be the one who made sure they did.
And two years later, there stands your old commanding officer. He's a little worse for wear, sweaty, scarred up, but in one piece. He's got Garrus Vakarian at his back no less, along with some woman you don't know. But on her clothes there it is, plain as day: the Cerberus logo you've been cursing for months on end. In your mind this was the ultimate betrayal.
"I betrayed you?" Shepard had echoed after you finished your exhaustive rant. You struggled to catch your breath; catch your tongue before it got too far away from you. "I betrayed you?" the former Spectre said more forcefully. "How… dare you. How dare you, of all people, talk to me about betrayal! After everything I have done; everything I went through! I fought tooth and nail and gave everything to save us from the Reapers, only to be dragged back after all this time and find myself in the exact same fucking place I started!"
You remember starting to say something right then, but Shepard shut you up with a devastatingly harsh stare that was normally reserved for his most hated adversaries. And Ambassador Udina, as Ashley Williams had once pointed out.
"The Council covers up the Reaper threat, Anderson's political influence is slipping through his fingers faster than water, and the Alliance decides it's easier to slap a court martial on anyone who stands up in support of me than acknowledge the looming apocalypse!" Shepard's focus then came down hard on you, and though your temper could have matched his right then, you still knew what was coming would be a hard blow to take.
"And you, Commander," he hissed your new rank as he would a direct insult, "You want to know something? I have two engineers on my ship, former Alliance personnel I have never even met, who both jumped the service to help me fight the Reapers. They didn't have half a reason to believe in me and they still came. But you? You were with me when we talked to Sovereign and to Vigil, and you can't even be bothered."
The two of you argued for a while longer, both sides determined not to budge on his stance. Even Garrus gave his two cents in an effort to put you in your place, but you wouldn't hear it. You were so bound and ready to dismiss Cerberus as an unforgivable evil, pleasantly able to overlook how two of your shipmates on the Normandy were given dishonorable discharges for standing up in Shepard's defense. At the time you kept your peace, not seeing the benefit in being kicked from the service while there was still good you could do. Without Shepard to spearhead the fight against the Reapers things went stagnant, but you hoped that maybe somebody the Alliance would wake up some day. When they did you would be there to give them all the information that you knew.
You wouldn't accept until later, long after Shepard and his team had left and the fires across the colony has smoldered themselves out, that in your inaction you had become just as much a traitor in his eyes as he was in yours.
Now you're skulking about in your dark quarters and you can barely think. You feel like you should be angry at him for joining up with Cerberus, but now you know Cerberus isn't involved in the attacks. They're trying to fight the Collectors, and apparently they know more about the situation than you do. They have Commander John motherfucking Shepard working on their behalf, so now you have to embrace a concept that's more alien to you than hanar social etiquette: you're going to have to pray that Cerberus succeeds, because if they don't… well. If Shepard unrestrained by politics and red tape isn't enough to save the galaxy, the galaxy just isn't going to be saved.
As aggravated as you were though, at least you managed to send Shepard off with some semblance of a farewell. You told him to be careful. The part of you that had missed your friend for so long had managed to push its way past the over-zealous drive to extinguish Cerberus and let him know that you still worry about him. You do want him to be safe. You've buried him once already and you're pretty sure that it's not in you to do it again. You always wondered if things would have been different if you had gone with him up to the cockpit to drag Joker's ass into an escape pod, or maybe just went ahead and did it yourself. If Shepard was killed on this mission by the Collectors and you weren't there helping him… That would be two times you've left him to his fate, then, and you're not sure you can live with that.
Either way, you know you can't let him die with this bad blood between you. In the argument Shepard had mentioned Councilor Anderson, and you realize if anyone knows how to reach Shepard it would be his former captain. So in the dark Horizon night you begin drafting a letter in your head to your best friend, saying in it all the things you should have said to his face when you had the chance. Not the least of these is your own wonderment of why God decided this ungrateful galaxy should be blessed with somebody like Shepard to watch over it.