Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.
Author's Note: This is Part One in a series called "Absolutes" that revolves around Mackenzie Shepard - a telling of the events that shaped her. The series will link in to my main story "Sheparding Men", though they will all work as stand-alones.
They Dry Themselves, Eventually
"She screams when the nurses try to raise the shutters. She screams at many things, they tell him." - Shepard and Anderson after Akuze. Survival was never a sure, solid thing.
"Hey kiddo."
Mackenzie Shepard is lying on her stomach in a hospital bed, fingers curled tight in the sheets, eyes boring into the far wall, when she hears him.
Anderson enters Shepard's room like a shadow, lingering at the edge of her vision. The door is too far left and she can't shift her position without searing pain. She tenses in reaction.
Shepard has never been comfortable with anything on her peripheral. Line of sight. Steady focus. Aim where you can see.
The most dangerous place to be is in the corner of her eye.
Anderson recognizes her reaction, because he has been there when it used to be a full-on flinch and a sharp-pitched scream – because he knows how she treats fear and it is never anything less than bloody.
And maybe also because he has learned to pay attention to the things he loves.
He steps farther into the room, closer to the bed, making sure to sound his footsteps loudly enough for her to trace. He comes around into her field of vision as she lies with her cheek against the sheets. Their eyes lock. Her shoulders loosen minutely, her furrowed brow quaking. She blinks furiously at him, the soft gleam of wetness over her eyes barely noticeable in the dim light. The windows are tinted closed, only the soft orange cone of a lamplight spreading across the floor from the bedside table.
She screams when the nurses try to raise the shutters.
She screams at many things, they tell him.
Anderson swallows thickly and pulls the nearby chair closer to her bed so he can take a seat. He threads his fingers together with his elbows resting on his knees, and he sighs. He sighs so deep and so long he thinks he might have wasted any breath he had in him for words.
"Sir," she manages to croak in greeting.
Anderson feels the sting of tears at his eyes already. He blinks them away stoically. "How you doing, Shepard?"
She watches as his face falls with the words, his gaze flicking off to the side, as though in shame, and she doesn't know how to tell him it's okay. It's okay to ask that. Because how else does this begin?
She offers a rueful chuckle that send s a burning streak along her throat and so she ends it with a cough, and it is all she can answer with for the moment. She tries to smile. She fails miserably.
Anderson nods, quickly and awkwardly, brows creased in concern. "I read…I read the report about Akuze, Shepard, but there's…a lot missing. About what happened after, in the IFV…" He trails off aimlessly, fingers shaking.
Well, she thinks darkly, that saves a lot of time at least.
It certainly doesn't save anything – or anyone – else.
Anderson's eyes shift over to her bandaged back, where beneath, he knows the skin is burned raw – nearly to the bone – from thresher maw acid. He can just make out the bright burst of red and purple along her swollen neck – from what he isn't sure yet – but he can already tell how painful it must be to speak. Her broken femur is set and braced, and a steady stream of pain-killers and fluids flood into her system through the IV attached to her right hand. The dark bloom of a bruise spreads over her temple and her bottom lip is slit cleanly through, the thin gash curling back along her jaw bone.
Somehow, she looks worse than when he found her – those many years ago.
He was supposed to save her.
Anderson's hand comes up over his face and he heaves a labored breath into his palm. "Oh, kiddo."
It is all that can be said between them for many long moments. Her ragged breathing and the light staccato of the beeping machines fills the room. And then Shepard unfurls her fingers in the sheets, lighting her gaze on his slumped form in the chair.
"What is it you need from me, sir?"
He looks at her through his fingers, at her steady stare, her slow, even breathing. He straightens up in his seat and braces his hands along his thighs.
They both know there are too many questions needing answers.
Shepard has her fair share, though she has a rock in her gut that tells her it will be many years – if at all – before she could ever begin to understand…this.
Whatever this is.
'Survivor's guilt' they tell her but she knows it's more. She knows because she didn't survive.
Not really.
"The logs we were able to recover," Anderson begins, voice rough, "say that you were out there for ten days before an Alliance patrol came through the sector."
Shepard nods, just slightly.
"And the maws came on the fourth day?"
Another nod.
"And the attacks lasted for how many hours?"
Shepard licks her chapped lips. "Can't say for certain, sir. More than six. I know that much."
Anderson takes a beat, pulling his shoulders back and clearing his throat. "Do you need some water? A blanket maybe?"
"I'm fine, sir." She's not really. And she won't be for a long, long time, she knows – but what else do you say?
Her lids flutter softly as her gaze falls to his knee, a fixed point she can focus on. A sure, solid thing.
There have not been many sure things these last six days – least of all her survival.
"Okay," Anderson continues, nodding, fingers threading back together in his lap. "Okay."
She keeps her steady gaze on his knee.
A sure, solid thing.
Her chest is tight with air she doesn't know how to release.
"The rescue team logged that you were trapped in the IFV for almost six days."
"Yes, sir. We were flipped at least twice – three times maybe. And my leg was crushed between the steering column and the gunnery seat coming out of the last roll."
Anderson grunts his affirmation. Somehow, they each find the steadiness they need to continue. "None of the other M-080s were answering the call radio?"
Shepard manages a minute shake of her head. "Personal comms were down, too, sir. We had no idea whether the others made it at all."
A dry cough leaves her and Anderson straightens, hands raised unsurely toward her. "Can I get you something?"
Shepard sighs – a ragged, breathless sound. "I said I'm fine, sir."
Anderson doesn't press. He settles back in his seat and lets the silence build between them a moment before he licks his lips and goes on. "Rescuers say they found two bodies in the IFV with you."
"Yes, sir." Here, her throat constricts, fingers bunching in the sheets.
"Can you recall their names?" he asks softly, almost too softly. Carefully.
She hates the sound of it.
"Once we came out of the last roll, that's when the attacks stopped. But Ensign Wilkerson…he bled out an hour later." Still, her gaze is locked on his knee, and when he shifts slightly in his chair she nearly starts at the sudden movement. She sucks in a sharp breath, the warm salt sting of tears already at her lids.
Anderson notices and stills. He lets her take a moment to breathe before he continues. "You were trapped in the IFV with Wilkerson's dead body for nearly six days?"
The slow even motion of her nod does things to him he isn't ready for.
If she would only look at him, if she could only lift her gaze she would see. She would see how she has broken him.
But she knows – surely and terribly – that to take her eyes from that fixed point now would mean never coming back. And she still thinks she has some bit of sanity left that's worth keeping. So she doesn't look.
"And…and the other body?"
The first tear slides silently and unobtrusively across the bridge of her nose and into the white sheet beneath her. Her broken lip begins to tremble. "Lieutenant…Santiago," she whispers, voice hoarse. She instinctively wants to reach for her throat – wants to feel the weight of her own breath beneath her palms and the steady thrum of her heartbeat. But she can't move without pain and she is just so tired of being trapped.
She had been trapped then, too. When Wilkerson was already bloated and rotting in the cramped space of the IFV and Santiago's eyes had gone wild. When the acid-burned flesh along Santiago's neck and shoulder began to pus with infection and his forehead gleamed with feverish sweat. When his red-rimmed eyes had locked on her in his delirium and he had reached for her, fingers closing around her throat in a panicked fever state, spittle flying from his mouth to her bloody cheeks and he had laughed.
A shrieking, terror-filled thing.
Her skin had burst red with his strangling, her hands clawing at his face, his gaunt, wide-eyed face – a pale, veined visage in the sunken shadow of their mutual tomb.
And when the sharp twist of her waist as she struggled dug her broken femur against the metal side of the vehicle, and when the blistered, burned flesh of her back was pressed painfully against the gunnery seat, and when her ragged, agonized scream was choked off with a blood-splattered gasp, and when the edges of her vision began to ink black for a terrifying, certain instant – she made a choice.
Shepard had buried her standard-issue combat knife into the pale, vulnerable flesh of his throat and watched him gurgle out one last bloody, confused cry. She pulled out, dug back in. Again. Again. A final time.
She doesn't know where she found the strength to push his fever-hot corpse off of her.
An Alliance rescue crew found them not three hours later.
"Shepard…do you need…"
She doesn't even realize she's crying until she blinks back into the room and finds Anderson leaning toward her hesitantly, a tissue in his hand, ready to wipe the tears from her cheeks with but a word.
"Stop asking to do things for me!" she yells, short and sharp. And then she clamps her mouth closed tight, her heated gaze locked onto his as she watches him drop back into his seat, hand held limply in the air.
Nothing passes between them for several moments but the heavy lull of her breathing and the brittle quake of air that tells them each –
There were no survivors on Akuze.
Shepard finally cries – well and truly cries – silently and steadily, her eyes fluttered closed, split lip sucked painfully into her mouth. She cries and she cries and she cries.
No sound is heard.
And then finally, when she thinks she has cried all she can – at least for today because tomorrow is a fresh sea of tears and she begins to think maybe there are worse things than drowning – she opens her eyes and looks at him.
Anderson is watching her with downcast eyes, the tissue bunched in his shaking fist. The brim of his hat casts a shadow over his face and she wonders if he knows how sad he looks, how heart-broken.
She'd be lying if she said she didn't blame him. Some part of her always will. Because he recommended her for the mission, for this life really, and even though she knows she'd be face-down in a gutter otherwise, she can't help but resent this new life – and even him a little.
The Alliance found her because he found her and Shepard isn't ready to accept that she needed that.
Needs it even now.
She swallows back the bile on her tongue and shifts her gaze to the crumpled tissue in his hand.
She knows he blames himself too, and the part of her that had loved him hates herself for that blame.
She sniffs back the tears and finds her voice, shaky and hoarse as it is. "They dry themselves, eventually," she breathes. And when he glances up, a sheen of wetness over his own eyes, face a sunken hope, she discovers that she still loves him – pitifully and dearly. "They always do."
Anderson's eyes flick to the marks on her neck, the even rings that look suspiciously like fingers, and things begin to shift into place. The condition of Santiago's corpse when they discovered the demolished IFV. The reports of Shepard's blood-caked hands as they pulled her unconscious body from the wreckage. The blossom of ruptured blood vessels in the perfect form of hands along her throat.
The way she cried more than he's ever seen her cry before, than he ever thought her capable of.
His hand curls over hers before he knows he has moved to her. "You did what you had to do, soldier." He is surprised by how even his voice comes out, how sure.
She opens her mouth as though to speak but only air comes out.
He squeezes her hand tighter. "You did what you had to do."
She starts to nod, slowly at first, hesitantly.
He doesn't let her tear her gaze away. He keeps his eyes unblinking on hers. "You did what you had to do."
Her face begins to crumble once more. She holds it, her brows crinkling sharply, her features pinched tight. It doesn't last for long.
"You did what you had to do."
Shepard breaks – silently and completely.
It doesn't matter how many times he says it. She will never believe it. And he knows that too.
But it's all he can say. And it's all she can hear. And it's all they are ready to bear.
"You did what you had to do."
His voice is the only sure, solid thing in the room.
Everything else – her guilt, her grief, her life – is transient.
There are six things Commander Shepard believes to be absolute.