"…multiple abrasions, sublexation of the patella, pneumothorax of the left lung, fracture of the tibia and clavicle, eight broken phalanges, compound fracture of the humerus, retroperitoneal bleeding as well as breaks in costals two, three, and four…"
The room was spinning, spinning in shades of luminescent whites and murky grays, faces obscured by blue masks blurred by the black spots floating at the edges of her vision. She did not understand most of the jargon that the masked faces spoke with; she had never had any more than the most rudimentary training in being a field medic, but what little she was able to glean from their words was not good. But she knew most of it already. It had been hell limping on a leg she'd known was broken; wrapping swollen, purple fingers around her gun had made her teeth grit in pain. And then later, when she lay trapped beneath the rubble of the citadel, there had been a rattle in her chest, the strange, gurgling sound every time she'd sucked in a breath, to let her know that something was wrong with her lungs.
"…a fracture at L2…" the voice continued as gloved hands poked and prodded at her injuries, cataloguing them, causing a fresh wave of agony to rush over her and her vision to erupt in stars. And through the stars came a light, hot, blinding, making her wince and blink and try to escape it. She remembered another light, searing, consuming, as the ground had crumbled to pieces beneath her feet.
"Ocular reflexes are good," the voice added, and Shepard swallowed, the action causing her throat to erupt into flames. Oh; so that's what the light was from. There was a beat of silence, followed by a "Yes, sir." Shepard tried to focus more of her attention on her surroundings as an attempt to escape the all consuming pain, and quickly realized that the only sounds she could hear were coming from her right side. There was silence to her left. She turned her head to look in that direction, and her neck screamed in protest, causing her to bite her tongue so hard that it bled in an attempt to keep from crying out. But she had achieved her goal. There were nurses standing there, the blue masks on their face changing shape as their jaws worked in speech, but there was no sound. Deaf. She was deaf in her left ear.
Fixable, she attempted to remind herself, and trivial in the scheme of things. She'd been pinned underneath the citadel for what seemed like years, and God only knew what her crew… Her crew… What had happened to them? The last time she'd seen Garrus he had lain still in the shadow of the twisted metal of the Mako the reaper's eye had torn apart; Liara had lain not far away, her body sprawled over the ground, her limbs bent at unnatural angles. And Kaidan… she hadn't seen him at all. Sudden panic seized her, overwhelming the pain and drowning out all thoughts besides whiskey eyes and hollow promises.
"Kai…" she attempted, but the word gurgled out of her throat, the sound distorted. She reached up a hand, gritting her teeth against the pain, and tried to catch the sleeve of one of the nurses. "K…Kai…" she tried again, but for the life of her she couldn't get the word to form. She had to know that he was alright, that he'd made it. She didn't want to survive to rebuild the world she had sacrificed so much to save if he wasn't going to be a part of it. If he was dead, she wanted to tell the doctors to let her go, to let her slip away and simply be with him. "Kai…"
"Put her out, dammit!" came a harsh order from her right, and Shepard remembered a similar command from a different time; a dark haired Australian woman shouting at a traitor to put her under before taking her hand and soothing her back into the darkness. And now, just like then, her vision blurred further, everything dimming, dimming, dimming, down to nothing but black.