Chapter 1: The Treatment (Part One - Kaidan)
Summary: Kaidan wakes up in a medical facility at Rio after an ill-fated military operation.
Kaidan lay in his bed in that rigid white ward and stared out the giant floor-to-ceiling window. At least he had a sea view. A nice view to the Atlantic Ocean and the Sugarloaf Mountains. Rio was quite pleasant in springtime with those always sunny beaches and promenades. There was no trace of the Reaper War anymore. People moved on, began to forget. A few decades and that year of war, when the galaxy was almost wiped out, will be only a chapter in the history books.
Don't leave me behind. He pleaded to her on the battlefield. He wanted to be beside her until the end. He replayed their last moment in his mind for a thousand times. He had nightmares about it almost every night. Two bloody years and he still couldn't escape from it. He should have been on the Citadel with her… maybe he could have saved her.
Nobody knew what exactly happened on the Citadel. The Crucible fired and as if by magic the Reapers collapsed. And thanks to the mass relays this happened everywhere in the galaxy.
They never found her body, just Anderson's and the Illusive Man's. At first they tried to move everything to find her, they clung to that slight glimmer of hope that she might be still alive. They sought for her, searched the galaxy, but they found nothing. And as the days became weeks and the weeks months they gave up one by one. At first Miranda and Jacob, lastly Garrus and Liara. They buried her, gave her a final goodbye. She got a nice and empty tomb in the cemetery of the Alliance war heroes. Kaidan couldn't go to the ceremony despite all the persuasion of his friends. He drunk himself into unconsciousness that day, like being blissfully intoxicated would solve anything.
Hackett's assignment was a convenient solution. A high-risk operation to eliminate the remained Cerberus cells. It was more elegant than taking meds and drinking some bourbon on it. He practically waited for something going off badly. And an explosion… a falling concrete block… and darkness… It was finally over.
But he woke up in that Alliance facility with broken bones and the traces of countless surgeries which saved his life. He didn't ask them to save him. He wanted to die, wanted to fall in battle to meet with her again at the other side, if there is an afterlife. But despite his every effort the life didn't give him what he wanted. Just a white ward and stringent medical staff with antiseptic odor.
He heard the cling and the slide of the metal door. It was time for the daily medical visit. He heard the sounds of boots on the floor. And soon a woman in red and white medical uniform appeared at his bed.
"How are you feeling today, Major Alenko?" he heard the usual question. Dr. E. Cannigan, Head Physician of the Biotic Division. That was on her name plate. Kaidan could recognize her monotone and analytical voice everywhere.
She had a pleasant, almost tinkling cadence, but she spoke without any nuance or tone, like she was an AI or a VI and not a human being. Kaidan sometimes wondered that she is whether a living being or a robot who was a spitting image of a woman, like EDI once was.
Her auburn hair was strictly combed into a ponytail, and her steel-blue eye glittered through her thick-framed glasses. It was uncommon. Nowadays almost everybody went through the eye surgery as soon as possible. Kaidan did not know the time when he saw anybody wearing it. Maybe his grandfather. He always kept one on his desk in the study for reading. The doctor in that glasses looked like a memento of a bygone era, like she didn't belonged to this age, just for some reason she stuck here.
"Hell of a headache, doc." he answered. Those bloody migraines became more frequent after Mars. Sometimes they were so intensive that even his nose began to bleed. The doctors didn't tell him, but he knew that those L2 implants slowly but steady will kill him. Another reason to die young. He won't let it to cripple him.
"Would you like some anodyne?" the doctor inquired. He feebly nodded. Cannigan took a syringe and injected some meds into his infusion. A couple of moments and the throbbing pain in his temple faded and made his mind a bit fuzzy. He didn't know what kind of drug they used but it was damn effective. It not just eased his agony, but kept his mind in a mist of semi-consiousness. But it wasn't effective to hush away his memories, which burned into his mind and haunted him.
The doctor ran her scanner through his body, read the results hummed thoughtfully, not saying anything. After she finished went to the desk next to his bed and recorded the results in her tablet.
"You're lucky, Major." She stated after a couple of minutes. Her voice was analytical without any compassion or even emotion. "Your body has totally adopted the synthetic tissues. Only your broken bones haven't knitted and it seems your regeneration will take time."
"How much time?" Kaidan asked as looked to the physician. She had a slender figure, the bookworm type, not the athletic. Her skin was pale, like she spent most of her life in a laboratory. She was too young to be a head physician; she was at the beginning of her thirties, maybe. Despite her cold and stringent appearance Kaidan found her pretty and began to wonder how she might look when she smiles or when she is not so official.
"At least two weeks, plus rehabilitation." Kaidan released a resigned sigh. He wanted to get the hell out of there. He was fed up with those white walls, the odor of antiseptic and disease and the indifferent doctors like Cannigan, for who he was just a bunch of data.
"Meanwhile you should consider a psychological treatment." he frowned to this. Cannigan didn't look up from her tablet, just typed the test results and ran analyses on it. "You got over many traumas in the past years. It would be beneficial." Her cadence was monotone, like she read out a public announcement.
"I don't need a shrink, doc" he murmured under his nose and turned his gaze to the ceiling.
"Major, you have shown several symptoms of PTSD since London. You have rejected the treatment so far, but I truly believe…"
"I DON'T NEED A SHRINK, DOC" He yelled as looked to the doctor again. She didn't even react on him. Kaidan suspected that he wasn't the first and wasn't the last patient who shouted with her. She just registered it with a nod and turned back to her notes.
Heavy silence pestered on the ward. Kaidan gazed out the window to the beach with glassy eyes, while the doctor recorded her daily report. He stole some glances on her, tried to read something, anything from her face, but she was like a marble statue.
"According to your military file you served on the SSV Normandy." Cannigan said eventually. "You are a biotic specialist, the second human Spectre."
"And?" Kaidan asked in impatient cadence. Cannigan looked up from her tablet straightly into his eyes. That was the first time he noticed that brown line in her left iris.
"My brother was a biotic specialist. In fact, he fought in your company, Major." she responded. "He died in London." Her voice trembled a bit and her eyes glistened in the unshed tears. This was the first time since she treated him that he saw any sign of any emotion of her. She took a deep sigh and returned to her tablet, wiping out those tears.
"I'm sorry" Kaidan replied in low voice, not louder than a whisper. He began to wonder who could have been her brother. He didn't know any Cannigan in his company; in fact, he didn't know anybody in his company too well. He did not have much time to fraternize with them. Right after the division formed, the Reapers attacked, he returned to the Normandy and became a Spectre.
"It's not your fault, Major. It's nobody's fault. In war people die." Her answer was cold, more likely bitter. It was like he lost more in that war than just her brother. Almost everybody lost somebody in the Reaper War, and some people lost everything.
After she ran the last test on her tablet she stood up from the desk. "That would be all for today, Major." that slight nuance of emotion disappeared from her voice once again, the impersonal and professional doctor has returned.
Kaidan nodded as an acknowledgement and she headed to the exit, but before she reached the panel of the metal door turned back to him."Can I do anything to make your dwelling here more comfortable?" she inquired "Some vids? Music? Reading?"
"I think a good Canadian ale is out of question." Kaidan responded but not looked at her, just stared the foaming sea and the golden sand of the beach. He heard her chuckling. It was pleasant like a sweet melody.
"My superiors wouldn't appreciate it." she replied "But I can lend you my favorite book... classical literature.. if you would like." Kaidan turned to her and tried to force a bland smile on himself. As their eyes met, he saw that she smiled either. She seemed much prettier, much nicer when she smiled, like she was a completely different person, not that cold and analytical physician.
"Thanks, doc, but I'll be all right." Cannigan registered it with a nod and exited.
The following few days other doctors visited him for the daily inspection. And as the days passed he realized that he missed Cannigan's voice, as she asks him those usual routine questions. He inquired about the doctor's whereabouts from her colleagues, but they only gave him evasive answers as injected tranquilizer or anodyne into his infusion, making his mind fuzzy, his perception blunt, but kept his pain low. He couldn't imagine how great his agony would be without these meds.
He spent his time with sleeping or staring out the window. Eventually he regretted rejecting Cannigan's offer for some entertainment. The sound proofing made the ward agonizingly silent. He could give anything to hear the voices of the other side of the window, to hear the rustling of the wind or the roaring of the sea. Or to feel the caressing sand under his feet. That ward without any stimulus slowly drove him to madness.
Nobody knew he was in that facility, nobody knew about his last assignment. It was highly classified. So there was nobody to visit him, only that well-oiled, impersonal staff of the hospital. And this state of solace made him to miss even that cold and stern physician.
The current dose of meds made him to fall asleep and relive those last moments with Shepard in London once again.
When this is over I'm going to be waiting for you. You'd better show up. But she was the one who didn't show up. And he cursed himself for a thousand times letting her to evacuate him from the battlefield.
I can't lose you again. But he did, letting her to run to the Citadel without him. After those years he still felt the taste of their last kiss in his mouth, the taste of desperation and hope.
No matter what happens… know that I love you. Always. Her last words in the chaos of the battle as she walked to him, like nobody else was there just them. And then she vanished and the Citadel blew up with her on board.
He startled from his nightmare, swam in cold sweat, battled for breath. The ward was pitch dark, just as the whole facility, only a few room breathed light. He always woke up from these dreams in the middle of the night and he could never sleep back, just stared to the void and tried to recall Shepard's face, her ebony-black hair and deep brown eyes, but her image became more and more vague every time.
He blindly reached out his bedside table for some water, when he touched something on it. Something hard with a strange feeling on his fingertips. He switched on the light to see what it is.
It was a book. An actual book.
Kaidan hasn't seen one since his childhood. His grandfather collected them. They had soul he said. In the Reaper War most of the archives which preserved these things destroyed. Only private collections remained. But nowadays nobody read an actual printed book.
He took it into his hands and leafed it through, sniffed the smell of the yellowed pages, when a scrap of paper fell from it.
Just in case. Cannigan.
Her handwrite was elegant with well-curved letters, anacronistic, just like her in that glasses.
Kaidan hummed as read the spine of the book. It wasn't a long one; he could read it in one night. It was better than staring into the void and driving himself to madness. So he opened it at the first chapter. And when the sun appeared on the horizon he finished it.
And strangely he felt himself better that not spent another night with self-loathing or recalling his memories about Shepard. As he finished the last word of the book and shut it reached out for his tablet on the bedside table and began to browse the database of the physicians in the facility. And he finally found her:
Elisabeth Mary Cannigan, MD., Biotic Physiology Researcher.