Day 1: August 1st-Family. (Normandy Crew, past and present)

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When Kaidan had joined the military, he had never expected to find a family; not to find comrades he could not only trust to have his back, but who would also kick back with a beer or a game of cards.

He loves his space family, loves that it's made up of a ragtag group of humans, krogans, an asari, a turian, a quarian, an AI and a prothean. Trusting Garrus had even been easier than Kaidan had expected, and the turian had become his first non-human friend.

Kaidan misses his blood-family, of course he does, but he's glad to find family doesn't mean blood or even the same species.

Normandy is home, and everyone on board can be counted as a big family, whether they were there on the original Normandy or joined after the attack on Earth. The ones lost are never forgotten, the ones no longer with them for whatever reason is always welcomed aboard.

He finds he sometimes starts to consider the idea of the ones who worked with Shepard against the Collectors, and since left Cerberus, can one day be counted as family, even by him. The thought takes Kaidan by surprise every time it shows up, but they seem honourable enough; they stayed with Shepard until they had no choice, fought with him until the very end of the mission, knowing the most likely outcome would be death for all of them.

Kaidan will sometimes overhear Shepard talk to others about those squad mates, or Shepard will find himself talking about them to Kaidan, stopping only when he remember that Kaidan wasn't there then, and sometimes that makes Kaidan's heart skip a beat.

Maybe he should have given them a chance, joined Shepard when he could, trusted Shepard knew what he was doing, trusted the people Shepard trusted and accepted them, too, as family.

Then again, sometimes a smaller family means fewer losses. Fewer incidents like Ashley and all the crew lost when the Collectors attacked the first Normandy.
Not that it's necessarily a good thing.

And just because it's bigger now, doesn't mean they're any less close than the original crew and squad. More so, in many cases. Liara, Garrus and Tali in particular; the ones who have been with Shepard from the very start and never doubted him, never denied him help with anything.

The original family. Kaidan doesn't want to admit to it, but he feels left out of the loop, sometimes, listening to the tales about the would-be-might-be family members and what they would get in to when trying to save the world.
It makes him feel as though he left the family, not realising how alone it made him feel.

Kaidan doesn't think he's ever been as alone as he was after he thought Shepard died, but then he didn't die and came back and Kaidan walked away, doing only what he thought was right, stuck by what he had been taught, what he felt was right, as a good solider does, but the loneliness and yearning for the family that had been and would never again truly be had been so much worse after turning down Shepard's offer.

Because despite what Kaidan claimed to himself, there was a part of him that had thought it wrong to deny Shepard, to deny himself the possibility of a family that was kinda-the-same, kinda-not, but could be more, bigger, than the original had been.

He's back now, though, with a family not too different from the first one, but different and bigger in the ways that mattered, that showed the power of Shepard and his convictions and abilities as a leader and head of a family.

More than any one of them, Shepard deserves a family, unofficial and mixed as it is, and Kaidan could not be happier to be a part of it again.

And maybe one day, Shepard and Kaidan will begin a family of their own, and neither of them will have any qualms about raising a family put together like the rag-tag group of family that inhabits the Normandy.