He thought it cruel that there was no weather on Arcturus, because the day they said their last goodbyes to Commander Shepard ought to have been a rainy day. It ought to have poured, heavy and thick, the skies dark and foreboding the way the future now looked without her. It ought to have been storming, and irrationally he felt himself hating Arcturus for not providing the proper backdrop for his grieving.

His jaw clenched, fists tightly balled at his sides as the half circle gathered around the memorial wall, smooth and dark and heavy the way he wished the sky was, but much too final, too cold, to represent the woman whose name was etched there in sharp relief. How cruel that the woman herself, all warm flesh and teasing grins, must be represented now by the sharp lines of a serif font carved into stone. Her name was exactly the same as every other listed on the long black wall and he felt another stab of fury at whoever had thought this was a fitting way to remember her.

Anderson was still speaking. He seemed like he had experience at this sort of thing. His voice barely even wavered as he talked about soldiers and heroes and the ones that we lose. He hadn't wanted to do the talking, but Kaidan was glad that he had asked him.

"She would want you to," he'd said, unable to meet the Captain's gaze.

To say what Shepard 'would have done' or 'had done' felt like the cruelest thing in the world, because she wasn't here anymore to do them.

The captain looked his way and he unclenched his fists, feeling numb but prepared for what was to come next. He stepped up, but stiffened when the younger man at the other end of the half circle also moved. Kaidan set his jaw, took another step, and moved to the side of the funeral airlock in the wall that was between them and the great beyond of space.

It was tradition. If an Alliance serviceman died on board a vessel there was a hierarchy deciding just who was responsible for sending their body to be one with space in ceremony. With Pressly gone, Shepard gone, and him occupying the place of next-of-kin, the pilot stepped in. He could have kicked up more of a ruckus. He could have demanded the pilot be refused, but part of him thought the little shit could use a reminder of what they had all lost.

He tried to keep his face neutral as he and Joker moved in unison toward the polished metal door that would separate them from their commander forever. The younger man glanced up at him, perhaps hopefully, perhaps for guidance, but Kaidan's dark eyes stayed focused on his task, lest he find himself sneering. The least the little shit could have done was taken off that ridiculous hat for the funeral. The pilot shrank, his expression darkening as he and the Normandy's former marine detachment leader worked together to close the polished metal door and turn the manual lock to pressurize the chamber.

They stepped back into their places in the circle. His fists clenched harder now, knuckles white, as he knew the end of it was coming. Anderson was saying something, but he couldn't hear it over the struggle he was having to keep his breathing even, to keep from choking up right here in front of everyone. Out of grief? Out of rage. He couldn't even tell. He might well have lost it, if he hadn't felt a gentle touch wrap two hands around his shaking fist, and Liara rest her cheek against the shoulder of his suit.

"How can it feel so final?" she whispered. "When it's not even really her?"

There was no body in the airlock as the hydraulics engaged to shunt the contents out into space. They had nothing to recover, so they were shooting off a set of her old dog tags, and as the hiss of the chamber's pressure chambered echoed, the dog tags careened slowly out into the black of space.

His breath whooshed out of him and he stepped away from Liara's grip. Whether he ran or walked to the nearest window he didn't know. The tall, floor to ceiling windows gave a clear view of her name slipping away from them, nothing to be done, no way to get her back from the speckled blackness beyond. It wasn't fair. A heavy breath broke through the ironclad grip he had been keeping on it. He placed his hand against the chilled glass of the window, willing the dogtags back to him, willing their wearer back to him, but no amount of wishing would change their inevitable, slow progress away from him.

It wasn't me. Why wasn't it me?

He took a shuddering breath as he felt someone step up to his right, composing himself, reigning himself in. He glanced over to see the familiar brown eyes beside him that watched the dog tags drifting away. He sniffed, took his arm down from the window. He shouldn't claim the space this way, as though he was the only one who could grieve her. He was just the only one who had more of her to grieve than anyone else – unless there was something she and Ashley hadn't been telling him.

"What do you think she was thinking?" he asked, just to have something to say, just because it was on his mind. The dog tags were drifting through space, just as Shepard's body had, and it was slow – so dreadfully slow. God, he hoped like hell she wasn't conscious for reentry.

Ashley thought for a moment, watching the Shepard's tags floating in serene movement away from the space station, and then she shrugged.

"Hell, she was probably thinking," she lifted her arms out to either side of herself in uncanny mimic of Shepard's swagger, "'Ha! First again, assholes.'"

In spite of himself, Kaidan snorted, and then when that was done he snickered again, until the laughter just wouldn't stop coming. One minute he was sane – the next, he and Ashley were cackling their fool heads off like they were in a comedy house instead of a funeral. He had never heard Ashley laugh like that, a laugh that was all through her nose and completely involuntary. The sound of it made him laugh even harder. It took minutes, full minutes of laughing so hard tears sprang to his eyes, for him to realize the tears weren't necessarily ones of laughter, and the laughs were sharp enough to constitute sobs.

He swore. Ashley laid a hand on his arm, and before he knew quite what he was doing, he was holding onto her tight, tighter than he should have been with his strength and his biotics. He might've felt bad if she wasn't holding on just as tight.

The show of solidarity was brief even so, and he sniffed savagely as he pulled away. He wasn't losing control like this – not here – not with all these people around.

"Hang in there, LT."

"Thanks, Chief."

He looked back out into space, taking and releasing a deep breath. The dog tags were far away now, so far away that he could barely make them out. He watched them in silence, pretending stoicism, pretending that his breath didn't come faster and harder when he could no longer tell whether he was looking at a star or the dog tags until they moved a hair and then he could spot them once more. Until he couldn't. Until they were gone.

He looked around him, half expecting to see the others, Garrus, Anderson, Hackett. But it was just him. Just little old him.

He looked down into his hand, the one that he hadn't opened since he had been at the airlock. The one that was supposed to be empty. The one he had been holding onto so tight that red marks were left in his wake when he opened it up.

See, he didn't want to let go of the extra set of dog tags they had found in Shepard's lockers. The ones with the scrapes across her name from who knew what battle, the ones that made them unusable. He hadn't wanted to shoot her out of that airlock, watch her drift away from him again, the last remaining remnant of the woman who had been a kind of savior to them all.

So he had only given them one of her dog tags, and the other had been his.

And in his hand was the matching set.

—

He stood at the window, leaning heavily on his crutches, his green eyes focused on the middle distance instead of out into space. He glanced over when the blue-armored turian stepped up next to him and crossed his arms in front of his carapace, his weight cocked onto one leg.

"You gonna blame me for this, too?" asked the pilot, with a gesture at the window.

"No," replied Garrus in his usual careful, slow flange. "Shepard could have left you to die, but she didn't. She was stubborn that way. Never leave a man behind." He shrugged. "Wouldn't be fair to give you credit for that."

Joker turned his searching gaze from the turian out into the big black expanse of space. "Yeah," he said, shortly, tightly. "Yeah, I guess you're right."

And the two watched her dog tags drift out into space, in silence with their thoughts.