Notes:
Expect the obvious spoilers for the beginning of ME2.
This story assumes: Paragon Jane Shepard, Soldier/Colonist/War Hero, completion of ME1 per cannon, with selection of Kaiden as Romantic pursuit. It follows Kaiden throughout the events of the time between Shepard's death and resurrection, in a very bare-bones sort of way. Time does skip forward between the numbered divisions, but the events are linear and should be quite easy to follow.
Enjoy.
Kaiden sat straight and still, his hands gripping his knees hard enough to turn his knuckles white. A thin line of sweat formed where his back pressed against the hard plastic of the seat, causing his dress blues to stick to him uncomfortably. This memorial ceremony was bullshit; it was anything other than what Shepard would have actually wanted. Thousands of people were present. Representatives of nearly every alien race (namely, those tolerated within Citadel space) looked on with perverse interest. Kaiden felt a pang of bitterness. These people weren't mourners, they were there for the show.
Mouth pressed in a thin, grim line, Kaiden did his best to block out Admiral Hackett's droning speech. Here and there, a few sentences about bravery, strength, service, and loyalty would break through his mental barrier. Small blue sparks threatened to flicker at his fingertips as Kaiden seethed, feeling as though Shepard's memory were being exploited as a recruitment tool. Kaiden focused instead on picturing the sort of service he imagined Shepard would have wanted. Small, quiet. Certainly no media would be present. Maybe just her crew, standing guard over Shepard one last time.
Kaiden's mental image collapsed when a hand wrapped itself around his wrist; startled, Kaiden gripped it hard and twisted. The owner gasped softly. Kaiden snapped back to his senses and released, looking at Liara's pained expression. "It's over," she whispered. Looking around, Kaiden noted that the crowds were quietly filing away. Tali and Garrus stood nearby, waiting and watching him with exhaustion written in every line of their bodies. "Let's go," Liara urged him.
2.
Kaiden knelt in front of Shepard's locker, breathing with forced steadiness. This duty seemed so familiar. He'd done it for Jenkins after Eden Prime. He'd done it for Ashley after Virmire. He could do it for Shepard now. Hands just barely steady, Kaiden opened up the locker and the smell of stale sweat and weapons grease greeted him. Inside the locker was Shepard's helmet, staring up at him sadly.
Kaiden sat up, breathing hard and covered in a sheen of sweat. The image of Shepard's helmet glistening up at him, still well polished under the scorch marks, burned in his mind. Just a nightmare. No locker left for him to clean out; the Normandy was just as dead as its Commander.
He would have this nightmare for months to come.
3.
Eventually, the nightmares ceased. Kaiden carried on. Assignments came and went. He approached each dutifully and skillfully, but did not ever mingle with the crews. Perhaps this was why he continued to rotate from ship to ship, job to job. Hackett seemed to have something new for him every few weeks. Messages from Liara and Tali went unanswered; Garrus seemed to know better than to bother, and Wrex wouldn't have tried regardless. Everything was gray and bland. The knowledge that the Reapers were yet to come left him cold. The knowledge that nobody was preparing for them left him unfeeling. At first, he had tried to be vocal about it, but he wasn't as talented at screaming at stone walls as Shepard had seemed to be; they never did budge for him.
4.
The messages from Tali and Liara stopped coming after a while, too.
5.
Kaiden was drunk and desperate to feel anything other than the stark emptiness he'd employed to keep the grief at bay. He approached the front desk at whatever shithole strip club had cropped up to fill the hole Chora's Den had left. It had a reputation for offering more than just dances for people who had the credits to spare; turns out being a sort of war hero leaves one with a fat enough account that expenditures like these wouldn't matter. The asari receptionist threw him a predatory smile.
"What'll it be tonight, handsome?" She looked him up and down, putting on a show for him. In the back of his mind, Kaiden wondered if anyone ever actually believed her act.
"I like redheads," he responded, voice husky and thick from alcohol and disuse. He didn't seem to have much to say anymore.
"Not a problem," she leered at him before leading him to a back room. "Your… dancer… will be with you shortly."
Kaiden dimmed the lights in the room; calling the woman who would be attending him "dancer" was a weak joke. The room was scantily furnished, with a rickety bed in one corner and a couch against the far wall. He sat on the bed, not bothering with pretenses. When the woman walked in, all he could see was how wrong the shade of red her hair seemed.
Later, he kept his eyes closed while he fucked her. The sounds she made seemed hollow and the pitch was all wrong, but he had to pretend… When he came, his corona flared, lighting the room briefly with the release. The woman flinched, afraid, and crawled away from him. Whatever threads of his illusion remained snapped, and Kaiden felt sick to his stomach. Shepard had never run away from him.
6.
Kaiden sat at the bar of some nameless, faceless club, hand wrapped absently around an empty shot glass. Shore leave was his least favorite time, anymore. Having nothing to keep him occupied seemed to make the ocean of that vast emptiness swell closer.
"You humans mourn pitifully," grunted a familiar, gravelly voice. Kaiden blinked a few times before slowing looking over at the newcomer.
"Wrex."
"Alenko." Silence stretched out between them. They hadn't been close on board the Normandy, but the experiences they had there had bound them together anyway. All these months later, those ties seemed awfully loose. Kaiden glanced up at a vid monitor. Her face was plastered across it, looking as stern and somehow sincere as she ever did when posing for the camera.
It was hard to believe a year had already gone by. When he looked back over, the krogan had gone.
7.
Kaiden sat across from Ambassador Udina, idly ignoring him as he droned on and on about "candidacy for the next human SPECTRE" and it being "high time you've had a promotion." Udina brought him in every few weeks to have the same conversation, and Kaiden always responded with professional, polite disinterest.
This time, Anderson sat next to Udina, fixing Kaiden with an appraising expression. At the close of the meeting, following the routine "maybe someday, Ambassador, but not now," Anderson pulled Kaiden aside.
"Son," he began, looking for the right words. "I understand you have been taking Shepard's death harder than most. Your relationship with the Commander was… complex. But allowing yourself to stagnate here is just as much as a disservice to her memory and her hopes for you as the Alliance using her portrait to lure in recruits is."
Kaiden saluted Anderson, but turned and walked away from him without comment, rage boiling in his heart where he typically fostered coldness.
8.
Two weeks later, when Udina called him back, Kaiden accepted the offered promotion.
9.
When he first heard the rumors, Kaiden felt that same anger bubbling up again. Surely, it was just another recruitment tool, another plot to get Alliance ranks filled.
And when it wasn't, Kaiden didn't think he felt anything at all.
10.
His draft box was almost full with emails that he had started to her. Some asked questions, some screamed, others wept, others still asked for forgiveness. Each was left unsent. Eventually, he chose to send her one word: "Why?"
Two days later, an Alliance mailbot sent the message back to him. Of course her Alliance account had been deactivated. Idiot.
Kaiden decided to wait instead for her to come seek him out; he had heard she was building a team. Revulsion at the thought of working for her under Cerberus gave him the beginnings of a migraine; the knowledge that if she asked him to join her immediately, he would go, breathed life into it, crippling him with the worst pain he had felt in months.
11.
The invitation never came. Nothing did.
12.
When he saw her on Horizon, Kaiden nearly threw up, he was dizzy with so many emotions. Relief that it was her, that she was alive and real. Feelings of bitter rejection tainted his joy, and the fear and anger he'd been nursing over the last weeks bloomed into life. When she turned her back and left, his hands itched to reach out for her. Instead, he turned his back, too.
13.
Kaiden thinks he may have liked it better when Shepard was dead.