There are better, saner ways of grieving for your missing and presumed dead husband than scampering to the Memorial Wall at 1 a.m. Citadel time; but Sarah doesn't know of any, and she doesn't have Ash to tell her what they are. It's as quiet and dark as it ever gets on the station, which isn't very. A few armed turian and human guards patrol the corridors, but they let her be, having evidently decided that if Cerberus tries to take the station again, it won't be from here. Ash would have a dozen comments about how careless they're being. So would Thomas.
She isn't alone. A man sits on one of the chairs facing the mass of photographs. His head is bowed, and Sarah sees the glint of auburn hair in the slightly softened light. He's wearing a leather jacket, but what get and keeps her attention is the unmistakable click of rosary beads. "Hail Mary, full of grace…" he murmurs, barely audible. Six hundred years ago Williams ancestors would have stabbed him through the heart for that, but believing in any kind of God is rare enough in this world of aliens that she takes what allies she can get. She sits next to him and mouths a silent prayer of her own. Let Thomas somehow not be dead. Watch over him. Watch over all of us.
The man's prayer falters. He tries a few times to start again, but even she can tell it's not working. "Sarah?" he whispers. "Sarah Williams?"
She looks at him staring at her in the half light. He's younger than she thought, maybe thirty. His eyes are blue, searching and intelligent. His nose is long and straight, if a little too big for him. A wedding band gleams on his left hand. A knife twists into Sarah's chest when she sees it. She tries to ignore it; it doesn't work. He also looks really familiar, so she focuses on that. "I'm sorry. I feel like I should know you, but…"
"You could say that." There's humor in his smile, but it's mostly sad. "My name's Matt. Mathias Shepard, if you want to get specific."
Shepard. A great, black void opens up beneath her, wanting nothing more than to pull her in. He doesn't look at all like he did in the holos or Ash's vid-mails. Commander Shepard should've been a hulking monstrosity of death, always commanding, not looking like a grad student and certainly not holding rosary beads. But then, Ash wouldn't have liked a guy who was all gun. And she had liked him. Really liked him. And if it sounded like the feeling was mutual, and she was going to get to tease her big sister mercilessly the next time she was home on leave.
Except Ash had never come home. She had died on some forgotten speck of nothing in the Terminus. Every alien government had given her a medal. The Alliance had even bumped her up to Lieutenant. The Williams curse, broken at last. Sarah would rather have her sister, thanks. She must have seen Shepard once or twice when the Alliance was handing out all those medals, but those weeks had been a blur. She's thought about what she would say to him if she ever had the chance, but face-to-face they all seem inadequate and irrelevant.
"I'm sorry," he says at last and he manages to sound even less like the badass Spectre. "About Ash. Not sure I got a chance to say that in person before I, um died."
"Thank y—what?" It takes Sarah a second to process what he said. Of course, everybody knew that Commander Shepard had been killed on the far fringes of space and come back two years later. Deep cover, Abby had assured her. Except apparently not. "You actually died?"
"That's what I'm told." He coughs, embarrassed. "But enough about me. I'm sorry about Ash. She was really great." He shakes his head. "No, not enough. She was amazing. I loved her."
"Me too." But Sarah's mind is racing as two thousand years of belief about the finality of death crashes around her ears. Shepard was dead and now he's not. If he can be brought back, maybe she can see Ash again this side of paradise. Maybe hoping for Thomas to hold her in his arms again isn't just the fever dream of a desperate widow. "Whatever it was that made you not dead, was that just a one-time thing or can it work for other people?"
"My wi—the woman who brought me back says no. I was literally a one in six billion miracle. I'm sorry. Again."
The void beneath Sarah grows deeper and darker. A miracle, a one-off. Why him? Why not Ash? Why not Thomas? Why not the parents of the little girl who wanders the corridors alone? She looks at the wedding band again. And he's moved on. He had almost called someone his wife. There's a rational part of her that realizes that Ash wouldn't want either of them to drown in grief, but most of her is howling. "Why you?" she whispers. "Why do you get all this? You blew up a whole star system! You let Ash die!"
"I know. I don't know why a megalomaniac thought I was the only one who could stop the Reapers." He sounds as miserable as she does. "I wish I could bring her back. I've seen enough death for one lifetime. So have you."
And just as quickly as it came, the anger leaves Sarah, and she is once more sitting on solid ground. She remembers other things about Commander Shepard. He lost his parents when he was sixteen. His entire squad had died. And he had loved Ash. "How do you deal with it? Watching so many people die?"
He's silent for a long time. "This helped." He holds up the rosary. "And the poetry. I did pick up a few things from your big sister." His smile is a little less sad, and she can see echoes of the man who charmed Ash. "It's not Tennyson but, 'Ah, love, let us be true to one another!'"
"'For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,'" she finishes for him. "That's your idea of consolation? I never liked Arnold."
"Well, I prefer to focus on the first part. What I have left in a world where there are giant machine monsters that want to kill everyone and I had to send the woman I loved off to die." He looked down at his wedding ring. "And I was lucky. More than you'll ever know."
Well, he's right about being lucky in the world making no sense. What she has left. Abby and Lynne, her mother. Her faith, even if she doesn't have his smells and bells. It seems like it isn't much, but people have soldiered on with less. Shepard has soldiered on with less.
She rises and goes to the photographs and feels rather than sees Shepard join her. Maybe...maybe Thomas is out there somewhere. And even if he isn't, even if the Reapers kill them all, this isn't the end. She will see them again. Maybe that hope has to be enough.
"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death," he says.
It has to be enough.