A/N: My take on the much-written-about Horizon episode. This functions as a prequel for "Horizon's End"
Disclaimer: Bioware owns Mass Effect and all associated characters. I only own my imagination.
Horizon.
She doesn't think of it as a colony, or even as a planet. It's combat and adrenal terror, and a nightmare enemy, not dirt and an ecosystem held together by gravity. Her team fights the enemy, fights the seekers. Shepard fires her gun, ducks in and out of cover, and wishes she could put a bullet in the fear, because he's supposed to be here. He is here. She can feel it, like a subsonic shiver in her blood. Kaidan.
The Collector ship is large, ungainly and ugly, and it's leaving. It's pushing out of atmo, away from the defense towers, away from her, and she still hasn't found him - he must be aboard the ship, and for the first time since waking up, Shepard feels defeated. Old. She's failed everyone; it's Virmire all over again, except there is no half-assed happy ending, there is nothing that's good about this. Not even seeing the dockworker that's inexplicably made it.
And then she hears his voice. That beautiful voice, with its raspy texture that smooths against her ears and settles that shiver in her blood.
He's walking toward her, toward her team, and Shepard has a few shocked seconds to look at him; there are new lines around his eyes, a tightness around his mouth that she's never seen before. There's the barest touch of silver at his temples, and his shoulders seem broader beneath the unfamiliar hardsuit. He calls her a ghost, and she feels like one, hollowed out and intangiable, shivering in the wind.
Until he reaches out to her. Until he holds her so tightly that her new bones creak. Until she can wrap her arms around his comforting reality and feel his skin against hers, cheek to cheek. He smells of smoke and death, of musky sweat, the acrid bite of spent heat sinks and the sharp, bitter metallic tinge of eezo. He smells like Kaidan, and suddenly, the world that's been slightly out of focus ever since the Lazarus Station snaps sharply into focus, and that subharmonic of longing that's been electrifying her blood resolves into a high, humming grace note.
It only lasts a few heartbeats. The world skews hard to port again when he pulls back from her. It's Kaidan, but he's looking at her in a way she doesn't recognize. Mistrust. Fear. And it's only because she knew him so well that she sees the rage building in him.
It throws Shepard off balance. There's so much she wants to say, so much she doesn't dare say, not with Cerberus listening in. Not with colonists' lives on the line. She honestly never remembers what she does say to him, but is pretty sure it was something banal and completely inappropriate, like "It's been a long time."
Had it? She's been told it's been two years. For her, it's been a few weeks.
She sees the anger building in him, simmering over into rage; she's seen him angry before, but never at her. She knows what his answer will be, but she offers anyway. "Come with us, Kaidan."
In retrospect, it isn't the best thing to have said. Kaidan hates Cerberus. His reaction is so extreme that she wonders what, exactly, more "rogue cells" of Cerberus have been up to since she's been incapacitated.
She wonders if she'll ever get the chance to find out.
In the end, Kaidan refuses to rejoin the Normandy. He refuses her. Shepard tells herself it's better this way. She's gearing up for a suicide mission; it's not somewhere she really wants Kaidan. If he hates her, then he's not with her. She already bears the burden of Garrus' and Tali's and Joker's lives. Kaidan is the one person she can't give up.
She knows this, but when he walks away from her, fury in every line of his body, rage crackling around his clenched fists in shades of blue static, she still feels hollow, like he's ripped the pieces Cerberus hasn't tainted out of her and is taking her with him, leaving the bought and paid for shell of Shepard behind. That longing thrum starts sliding through her blood again, pumping through her new veins with the echoes of an old song.