The first time Kaidan saw her after Horizon made him fear he'd lost her again. He'd tucked himself near the back of the courtroom, unable to stand the thought of not being there to support her whether she knew of his presence or not. The Batarian next to him was calling for blood, and Kaidan wanted to make the alien feel its own blood, spurting from a broken face caused by his biotic fist. Those were not the thoughts of a Spectre. He willed himself to breathe.
The Shepard he knew would never have purposefully obliterated that system. It was some accident-it simply had to be. When she stepped into the courtroom; he could tell the way she held herself up was a front.
Her bottom lip quavered ever so slightly; Kaidan was sure he was the only one who noticed. A lot of the light in her eyes that he'd fallen in love with two years ago was gone. Who was this shell of the woman he'd loved so fiercely that thoughts of it still made him ache?
She was calm under fire, as always, insisting with vehemence that the destruction of the system was a horrible accident. With each denial of willful destruction the Batarian next to Kaidan shrieked louder. In the confusion of the beginning of the Reaper attack, he'd made sure to "accidentally" tread heavily on the Batarian's foot.
And now, approximately a day later, Kaidan sat across from her as she nursed a glass of brandy under Dr. Chakwas's direct orders. They'd done the thing he'd sworn never to do and left Earth in its time of greatest need. Liara had assured them she had information of the utmost importance on Mars.
They had said very little to one another in the past 24 hours. Kaidan could tell the news of their former relationship had leaked out in some ways. Tali, who was normally quite bubbly, was cold and distant with him as she hovered protectively around Shepard. Joker responded to him in curt, short sentences, and Garrus had literally scoffed and walked away at the sight of him aboard the Normandy.
Now, as he surveyed her across the table, she looked more like the Shepard he had once known, only broken. The brandy had not returned the light to her eyes, and she sat heavily, almost draped, upon the table as though she could not find the strength to support herself anymore. He wanted to reach out and take her hand.
He would not admit it to himself on Horizon, but he'd never once stopped loving her in their two years apart. When he'd been convinced to go out for drinks with that doctor, he could only think of how Shepard would respond to his obligatory conversation starters.
Now, she was sitting across from him, and he was torn between weeping openly that she was there and beautifully alive and touching her face.
"So, I guess you still hate me," she finally prompted, looking up at him.
"I've never hated you," he told her. "I could never…"
"Okay."
She took another swig of brandy, never once taking her eyes off of him over the rim of the glass.
"What I said on Horizon..." he began futilely. "I'd been grieving you for two years. I should have been more tactful-"
"No," she interjected. "I deserved every word you said on that colony. But that didn't make them sting any less."
He could find nothing to say to that, so he leaned back awkwardly in his seat. She still did not tear her gaze from him.
"That night when I was back on board the Normandy, I kept thinking of all the things I wished I'd said…that I should have said down on Horizon," she continued after a moment of silence. "And it won't change anything, but I want to say them to you now."
"I'm listening."
"I should have told you that my first thought when I woke up from Project Lazarus was of you. And that the first thing I asked the Illusive Man was not what had happened to me or how I was back among the living or even the status of the war against the Reapers, but about you. Or that I kept a photo of you in my quarters aboard the new Normandy and every time I felt like giving up I looked at it and thought about how my dad always said each person has to have something they're fighting for."
Her voice broke, and she had to take a few deep breaths to steady herself. Kaidan wanted to scream; scream that he didn't care, that he'd never cared she had gone as long as she was back now.
"And I knew that I was fighting for Tali and Garrus and Joker and my family but mostly importantly for you. And, more than anything, I should have told you that when you talked about that night before Ilos on Horizon and said you'd loved me…I should have let you know that that love isn't just in the past for me."
Somehow, without thinking and without effort, he'd jumped up from his chair and noticed she had too. They practically dove into one another: she threw her arms around him and pressed her face into the nape of his neck and he pulled her in close to him, unsure if he would ever be able to let go.
"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," she kept repeating. "I would have contacted you if I had any way of doing so."
"I know," he said. "I know."
He placed two fingers her chin and tilted her face up toward him. He realized, with deep amusement, they were both doing something the Alliance tried to stamp out of its soldiers: crying.
"It isn't just in the past for me either," Kaidan said. "Not at all. But you have to promise me something this time."
"What's that?"
"Don't you dare leave me again, temporarily or permanently."
She smiled.
"I won't if you don't."
"Then it's a deal."
"Also, after the Reapers are gone, you owe me a dinner date."
"How about, in the mean time, I give you a personal tour of the commander's quarters?" she said, slyly. "They're much more spacious now. Excellent lighting."
"Is that an order, Commander?" he asked, tracing the curve of her waist to her hipbone with his thumb.
"No," she replied, pressing into him. "Just a privilege of being a human Spectre."
Later that evening, as she lay curled up sleeping against him and he surveyed the damage to the room with amusement (he was particularly proud of how his shirt had somehow ended up hanging from a lamp), he thought if these were the perks the job came with, he should thank the Council again for appointing him.