I was… dissatisfied with Mass Effect 3's ending. But since it's been made a thousand times over, I won't belabor that point. I grew up alongside this series, which is to say, a lot of growing up happens in the 15-18 range, and for that reason, um, MY FEEELINGS WERE HURT at the way they brought it to a close. My current method of coping is denial.
But this is a piece I actually outlined very vaguely pre-game and just needed to get written out, and in keeping with my decision to post more than .1% of the stuff I write, am putting it up here. For the purposes of this story, the final five minutes have been politely booted out the door. And yeah, okay. The hopeless fangirl in me really thinks the ending should have had MOAR KAIDAN so there is that.
And: I haven't read any of the other post-game ending-change stuff yet. I know there's a whole heck of a lot of it, so I'm sure something at least vaguely along these lines has been done, and for that I apologize in advance.
There's blood dripping, tapping the tile.
On her hands and knees, Shepard touches her fingers to her side and finds the sharp, wet edges of broken armor. There's no real pain, yet; just a blistering heat running through her abdomen, curling itself around her organs and nestling snugly up under her ribcage. It's too hot, everywhere, even though the tile under her hands is bitter cold to the touch.
I'm dying.
The thought creeps in behind the heat, behind the dizziness. All the times she's evaded death, cheated it, and now it has her. This is what dying is – not the quick, silent suffocation in space, but heat and blood and viscera. A gunshot to the belly. And her job done.
Her arms give way. She doesn't even feel it when her chin cracks against the tile, just the welcome relief of easing.
-n-
She lies on the floor, in and out of a stuporous fog.
The Illusive Man lies on the floor opposite her, sprawled and still. Starlight glows hauntingly off the spread of cybernetics etched into his face, highlighting his frozen expression of shock – and maybe he really did believe himself immortal, but he's every inch an old man now and he's stopped breathing.
She'd put a second bullet in his skull, just to be certain.
It was all too late, anyway: Anderson is gone. She watched him bleed out, watched that familiar haze slacken his features. Those agonal last few chokes for breath, his body desperately compensating, and then the gaping silence that followed. She couldn't bring herself to check for a pulse, to touch her fingers to his neck and find nothing, not again, not when this war has taken so much already. She'd closed his eyes, instead, and tossed the pistol aside, letting it clatter across the floor. No more killing.
Now, it's just her, and it's getting hard to breathe.
-n-
Admiral Hackett's familiar voice cuts the quiet, rasping and rough, choked with static.
"Shepard. Shepard!"
She blinks awake. Her field of vision swims, gray at all the edges. "Admiral?" she hears herself say, the syllables rough and disconnected; she pushes herself up on one arm, looks up at the light of the control console, a blinking red beacon in the fog.
"Shepard, something's wrong. The Crucible isn't firing."
She has to get up. She has to get up.
Shepard tries to get her hands and knees under her, but her arms tremble and give way, muscles failing her. She rolls onto her back instead, gingerly tries to sit up. White hot pain bursts from the wound in her side, makes her eyes sting, but she manages to grab the edge of the console, pull herself up onto her knees. She fumbles for the comm, leaving smears of red on the panel.
"I'm… here, Admiral." Her voice sounds strange, far away. "What do you need me to do?"
-n-
The machine needs its Catalyst to fire. Their Crucible, their desperate last hope, will take the Citadel down with it.
From up here, Earth looks almost beautiful, haunting – the surface flecked with bright points of light, and streaks of gray swarming the planet like darting insects. Except the points of light are cities burning and the insects are Reaper ships, and every moment people are dying by the thousands. The Crucible has to fire. It has to do it now.
There is nowhere to go and nowhere off the station, and Hackett knows it. It's in his voice, the apology and the goodbye, when he gives her the sequence to link the station, and when he says, "It's been an honor serving with you, Commander."
"Hold the line out there," Shepard says softly. Then she keys in the sequence and the comm signal dies, leaving her kneeling alone in the starlight with what's left of one of the best men she ever knew, and one of the worst.
No regrets. She's a Spectre. Embodiment of courage, self-reliance, determination. The Council's first and last line of defense.
The Council is probably dead and her courage has been flickering for a good while, but what is this if not the last line?
-n-
The station shudders.
The first rumble she feels in her teeth, a subtle thing, a tremor of dark energy that slithers along her flickering corona. The second is a violent shockwave that shakes her free of the death grip she has on the control console, tosses her ragdoll-limp across the floor.
Her bloodied fingers scrabble for purchase, but she can't get a grip on the slick flooring; she slides to a stop near the window. She's too tired to sit up again, so she just lays there, cheek pressed against the cold tile, and watches the battle outside. There's nothing left to do but watch.
The spread of the Crucible's energy has a pleasant glow, like candlelight. It's soothing somehow, like a nightlight she might have had on a colony that might have been home.
She never went back to Mindoir. Now she never will.
"Had to be me," she reasons out loud, to the universe and to no one in particular. "Someone else would've…"
She leaves the thought unfinished. The fog is getting thicker, slurring her thoughts, makes it hard to think. She shuts her eyes.
"Shepard!"
It's not Hackett, this time. The familiar voice cuts straight through her, and time stops.
-n-
She'd said goodbye to him, just hours ago, standing in the crumbling rubble of London.
"I can't lose you again," Kaidan had said, hand against her jawline and forehead pressed to hers and the phantom warmth of him bleeding through their armor, and for just a second there was just them, there, and the sounds of gunfire dulled to a distant unimportant chatter.
And then he kissed her, and it tasted like desperation, like penance, and the echoes of Ilos and Horizon and Eden Prime, the sun setting over a world on fire. It was I love you, and I'm sorry, and mostly it was goodbye.
I can't lose you again. She was afraid he already had.
Though he followed her into battle, they parted ways right there; and for once she found herself resenting their uncompromising separation of what was personal and what was their duty, because though he was at her side all the way down to the beam, she had a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach that she would never see him again.
-n-
It takes a minute, his silhouette coming into focus, and for half a second she thinks she's hallucinating, but no. He's limping and bloodied, missing part of his armor, but he's alive.
She watches him take inventory, his eyes skimming the bodies of Anderson and the Illusive Man on the floor, then settling on her, and they go impossibly soft, that tender fierce way he looks at her.
"Shepard," he breathes, closing the short distance and dropping to his knees beside her. He's missing his helmet, and a gash scores the space over his left eyebrow, dripping dark shadows down the side of his face. His arms are bare to the elbows, and his hands touch everywhere at once – her forehead, the pulse point of her neck, her side where the armor is torn open.
"Do I… look that bad?" she manages, the faint inflection of humor.
Kaidan makes a noise that might be a laugh, though it's bordering on hysteria and he isn't smiling. He sags back onto his bent knees, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes.
"I don't- I don't have anything," he says hoarsely, "Medi gel, or…"
"Kaidan." He stops at the sound of her voice, looks at her. "This place is going down. We have nowhere to go. Just… help me sit up."
His frown persists, but he complies, easing an arm around her shoulders and helping her sit up until she's propped against the low wall formed by the platform's ledge. And oh, damn, it hurts, but he's steady and warm and as he settles onto the floor beside her he puts an arm around her, pulls her close it him. She lays her head on his shoulder; his battered armor is hard and rough under her cheek, but she can't be anywhere but right here.
He doesn't question it – the fact that they are on a doomed space station. She thinks maybe he already knew.
"Some kind of view," Kaidan murmurs against the top of her head, as the room floods with ethereal gold light from the Crucible's glow. "Think it'll work?"
"Guess we'll see in a minute," Shepard sighs. "I don't-… Yes. My gut tells me yes."
He makes a soft sound of agreement.
Moments later, the Crucible fires, a bright hot beam.
-n-
They'd had their last drink, the night before – the night the universe always seems to grant her just before everything goes to hell. Its own sort of penitence, she supposes, for everything it's put her through.
Kaidan had pried a datapad from her hand and put a glass of whiskey in its place, and their quick drink turned into his mouth over hers, his hands skimming up her sides. There was so much to be done, but with his hands on her she could almost forget all of it. She'd traced the lines of his old scars, the ones she knew by heart, and mapped the new ones with her hands, her mouth – a small line over his upper lip; a deeper, still-healing one over his shoulder blade that made her wince a little, remembering Mars.
But he just kissed her, slow and soft, open-mouthed, his hands cradling her face. She let herself be distracted by the warm heavy weight of him, by his mouth on her collarbone and his hands skimming her frame. He touched his forehead to hers, held her eyes and told her, fiercely, tenderly, that he loved her, he loved her.
He didn't have to; she knew.
After, she curled up in the crook of his arm, laid her head on his chest and listened to the steady, grounding beat of his heart in the dark until she fell asleep, faster than she had in days, weeks.
The nightmares came as they always did – she jerked awake sometime in the night, gulping air and heart racing, cold sweat along the back of her neck. But Kaidan was there, soft fingertips on her spine, lips at her ear murmuring, it's all right. It's all right.
It'll be all right.
She'd said it so many times to so many people that the promise had lost its impact; but when he said it, cradling her close to him in the dark, she could almost believe it.
-n-
She asks him why he followed her up.
"Made a promise," he says. His hand is cradling the back of her head, the pressure of his palm light over her powered-down amp. "I said I'd be here."
"You should have run," Shepard sighs. She coughs, tastes metal, sharp and hot; Kaidan tightens his grip around her.
"I did," he replies shortly. She feels his body tense. "On the SR-1."
Shepard says nothing, just closes her eyes.
"Never again," Kaidan clarifies, nearly inaudible.
The station is beginning to break apart, caught up in the intractable entropy of the Crucible's energy draw. She can feel it, the foundations cracking and splintering like bone, shearing apart like the SR-1 all those years ago. Except that this time it's over, she's finished, she's done her job. No more work to do.
Kaidan seems to sense it, too, because he shifts suddenly, puts his fingers under her jaw and tilts her face up so he can look at her. He presses a soft, lingering kiss to her mouth, the corner of her mouth, the curve of her cheekbone, her forehead.
"I love you," he says simply, and he's looking at her like he's trying to memorize every detail, his eyes warm brown in the firelight. He takes her hand between his own and kisses her palm, her wrist, his lips at her pulse point.
"I love you," she murmurs. She touches his face, stubble scraping under her fingertips, and he closes his eyes, tips his face into the contact.
The candlelight has spread to cover everything, and the station is trembling, dying, with them on it, but she's not afraid.
"Hold the line out there," she says, to the specter of her army.
"Embrace eternity," Kaidan quips, to no-one in particular.
-n-
Memory is getting hard to keep aligned, but there are some things she refuses to lose. Wrex painted into arcane silhouette by the dark lines of his armor, standing in the rubble of Tuchanka. Earth (not burning, not yet) over the horizon as she stood on the moon. Ashley's parting words, Thane's prayer for her. A Salarian song and bottles shattering high above the Presidium.
And. I've always loved you. His lips against the palm of her hand, brief and tender. The spectral wash of a biotic corona that mirrors hers in the dark.
She's never been the sentimental type, but she thinks she's earned a bit of romanticism.
You'll dream of a warm place. And when you wake up, you'll be in it. It's what she told the girl, the former-slave survivor of Mindoir, on this same station three years ago. And now, it's all she wants. A warm place and no nightmares.
-n-
His hand traces small circles on the skin of her neck. "Are you hurting?"
"Tolerable," she says, though the deflection is somewhat unconvincing since it comes out through gritted teeth. Her body finally seems to have realized that it's been shot, and pain is uncoiling through her midsection, but the hazy grasp she has on consciousness dulls it, a little. She twists her head to look at him, touches his jaw. He is deathly pale, sweating despite the cold. "You?"
"Don't worry about me," Kaidan says. "I've never felt better."
They are quiet – for a minute, or maybe an hour, or maybe just a second; time is getting hard to track. Through the viewport they watch Reapers break apart, speared by bursts of bright white light.
"We did it," Shepard murmurs into the dark.
"You did it," Kaidan corrects, then adds softly, "I'm so proud of you."
But. "We," she insists. "Kaidan, you… made me feel like I could take on the galaxy. And I kind of had to," she jokes, weakly. She feels him laugh, though his cheek has gone damp under her palm. "Without you, I couldn't have…" she grapples for the words to articulate it, settles for: "I just couldn't."
They are quiet again.
"Wherever we end up," she says, after an eternity, "we're… meeting Garrus. At the bar. Made a… a promise."
Kaidan's breath catches. "Wherever we end up," he counters, and something in his voice breaks her, a little, "I'll be waiting for you."
"You'd better be."
-n-
The world is getting dark around the edges.
Shepard whispers with her eyes closed, "I'm so tired, Kaidan."
"I know," he says. "Go to sleep. I've got you."
So she does.
-n-
There are no nightmares, this time.