Chapter 1:
Hurt
Miranda had been searching through the rubble that had become of the Citadel with no luck. No Shepard. Just piles of dead and dismembered bodies. "Have you found him yet?" She and her SAR team had been looking for over an hour. Between the dark and the bodies though, it was difficult to see much.
"You know, if I found him, I'm pretty fucking sure I'd have said something you walking titjob." Of course she'd had to have been paired with Jack.
The two had met thanks to Shepard nearly a year earlier on the Normandy SR-2 when he recruited the former convict. The two had barely gotten along. At one point they nearly smashed the window in Miranda's quarters as a biotic brawl was about to erupt. Luckily for the both of them, Shepard had intervened.
The last few weeks they had become rather... intimate. Though it was pretty much a love-hate relationship where they would randomly bounce between wanting to use the furniture to kill each other and moving the furniture around with their pants around their ankles, legs wrapped around their waists. Right now they were in a "kill each other" state.
This was also a bit of Shepard's doing. He made a mildly snide comment during a party about how the reason the two of them were at each others throats was due to sexual tension. Imagine his surprise that he was right.
"Urgh. I really don't need to hear this." The raspy voice came from Wrex, another former squad member that joined up with Shepard to fight the Reapers a year ago. He had since been working to kill his former employers, an organization known as Cerberus. The same group that Miranda used to work for.
"Hey, I think I found him!" Jack called out.
The Commander was buried under more than a ton and a half of metal. Jack and Miranda used their biotics to throw the debris off of him, most of it falling over the walkway. "Shepard? Shepard are you in there?"
The dark blond haired man didn't respond. "Shepard! I swear if you're dead I'm going to kill you."
Miranda ran a bio-scan of him with her omni-tool. "Shit. He's barely alive. Wrex go get a doctor! Now!" The massive Krogan ran back to the makeshift landing bay.
The little armor the commander had left was badly burned and melted with his skin. The little bit of him that they could see under the armor was coated in blood. Lots of it and all his own. He probably would have been luckier if he had died, but something in him refused to let him. He had always had been described as "the most stubborn son of a bitch in human history". Miranda knew his file from the two years she spent re-building him almost from scratch, plus the so called "suicide mission" to the galactic core where he brought back his entire crew alive.
"You'll be alright Shepard. Wrex is getting a doctor. Just hang in there for a bit longer."
Tali sighed heavily, looking at her boyfriend's name. His name on a metal plate to be added to the memorial wall on Deck Three of the Normandy just off the elevator. So many of her friends names had been added in recent months. This was wrong. Everything about it was just wrong. No. He's not dead. He can't be. She dropped the plate and began crying.
"Hey, hey. It's okay." Garrus stepped forward from the group that had put the names of their former crew on the wall. He hugged her for comfort. "We'll get back. We'll find him. I promise."
"He left me." She said crying.
Samantha stepped forward and hugged her along with Garrus, the rest of the team following suite.
"I... I'll be in... in our room." She stammered out. The group made way for her as she went to the elevator but Ashley stayed with her.
"I know what you're going through." Her own eyes watering as she remembered what it felt like when she thought Shepard had died. The two had been intimate on the original Normandy, the SR-1. It took her months to put herself back together. The least she could do is help the woman she regarded as her forth sister.
"Come here." She said re-embracing the trembling quarian. "I'll stay with you as long as you need."
Ash practically carried Tali into Shepard's quarters on Deck One, setting her down on the couch he had. "Don't worry, we'll find him when we get back."
"What if... what if he... he didn't..." Tali couldn't finish before breaking down again.
All Ashley could do was hug her tighter. "You know he's the toughest, most stubborn bastard in all of human history right? I mean he came back from the dead, pulled off two suicide missions and survived them. If anyone, and I do mean anyone could have made it back it's him. Hell he's probably searching through the rubble looking for something to use as a wedding ring."
Ash stayed with the crying woman all night, falling asleep still holding her. She refused to leave her side. It was the least she could do for her.
ABLE/NOVEMBER:
So this is another story that I'll be writing in parallel with Rubble & Ruin. It's not a continuation but rather a separate entity entirely. I will warn you, this will get darker in later chapters but for now it'll be fluffy. I'll give you a warning before we join the dark side. (begins breathing in Vader's voice)