Author's Note:

Howdy folks. Been a while. Before I posted this story, I had 3 fics on this site. After posting it, that number has jumped up to six-five of them still in-progress, and all of them based on BioWare games.

I regret nothing.

I admit this story fell on the backburner for a while in the onslaught of new ideas, and my motivation to go back and play the game after that ending was very slim. I still have yet to play it a second time, though the new extended cut dlc is a good motivator (I still haven't played it yet-no spoilers please). The only problem is, I have to go back in the meantime and raise my galactic readiness so I can get the "good" ending. I refuse to play the EC for the first time without that ending.

Anyways, it's the long weekend for us Canadians, and I figured now is a good a time as any to update a bunch of stories, and I was struck with inspiration on the ending to this fic after struggling with it for several months.

Hope you enjoy.

-BB

Stream of Consciousness
Thessia

She needed to get out of her quarters. She didn't care where, she just needed to find someplace where she didn't feel like the walls were closing in on her. So she ended up in the observatory with a bottle of whiskey.

That was (unsurprisingly) where Kaidan found her. It was abundantly clear that she was having one of those days, and it was understandable, after what had happened on Thessia. Who could have imagined things would turn out like that? Hearing the screams of the asari troops over the comm as the reapers descended on them was one of the most heartbreaking things he'd ever bear witness to, and the look on Shepard's face was one he hoped he'd never see again.

She was painstakingly silent on the return trip. That was what worried Kaidan the most. Shepard was never silent about anything. She always had something to say. She could string words together into a speech that made morale shoot through the roof, and it would even be eloquent. But more often than not, every second word out of her mouth was an expletive, and that was the Shepard he'd come to know and love. Not the quiet, solemn woman he watched stare unblinkingly at the shuttle floor for the entire duration of the trip back to the Normandy.

The same woman he was watching right now. He entered the room and sat beside her on the couch, just studying her for a moment. Her eyes were bloodshot, and though the redness of her cheeks could be blamed on the alcohol, it was still pretty obvious that she'd been crying.

Shepard didn't cry. He'd watched her tear up once before, watching Corporal Toombs take his own life barely four feet in front of her while she helplessly looked on. She'd picked up the pieces and pulled herself back together after Akuze only to discover that she was, in fact, not the only survivor. Hope, answered with... death. She saw a once good, decent man, turn on everything they believed in and embrace the utter hopelessness that he knew she had been so close to embracing herself. It seemed so long ago, now. "If it weren't for Anderson," she'd told Kaidan afterwards in private, "I never would have taken up command again. He always gives me a good boot in the ass when I need it." That was the closest he'd ever seen her come to crying.

Things were... well, awkward. But there were times like this where she just needed a drink and to sit with someone she trusted. He knew for a fact that he was the only person other than Garrus she was comfortable talking to about this stuff. Tali and Liara tended to get upset with her when she lost her temper, but Garrus and Kaidan both knew how to handle her when she went off on a tangent.

So, he just sat, letting the silence linger until she was ready to break it. When she offered him the bottle, he accepted it and took a swig straight from the bottle, elbows on knees, just reflecting on the battle. He knew full well she was analysing the mission over, and over, and over, finding mistakes and rectifying them, wondering how they could have been prevented. How it all could have been prevented.

Eventually, she did break the silence, leaning back on the couch and tilting her head back to meet the wall, "I just broke up a fight between Liara and Javik," She paused for a moment, "God, if you could have seen the look in her eyes." She moved again, balancing her elbows on her knees and letting the bottle dangle from her fingers, "I let them down, Kaidan. I let Liara down."

"No, Liara was there, Shepard." He protested, "She knows you did everything you could."

"She lost her fucking homeworld. She watched it go up in flames. I wanted to save her from that."

"They'll rebuild." He said, scooting forward and placing a hand on her back, "Same as us."

"Javik can be a right bastard at times, but other times he knows exactly what to say." She said, changing the subject slightly, "He talked about how the protheans thought the asari had the most potential in his cycle. Told her to be strong. He chose a mighty cold way to say it, but still, I didn't expect that from him." She shrugged, "I guess it's understandable. He watched his entire species, everything he knew and loved reduced to ashes. I can't imagine how it must feel to be the last of your species in a galaxy that thought you were extinct."

He said nothing, took the bottle from her loose fingers, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and settled back onto the couch beside her, waiting for her to continue.

"You ever wonder what might have happened if we never found that beacon on Eden Prime?"

The question took him by surprise, but he answered honestly, leaning back to match her position as she did the same, looking at her from the corner of his eye, "We'd probably all be dead by now."

"Yeah." She replied with a shrug, "Maybe."

Silence fell again for a moment before she turned her face towards him and opened her eyes, "Sometimes I wonder, why me? It could just as easily have been you, you know. Why did fate, or God, or whatever higher power there is in the universe decide that I was the one to shoulder the weight of the entire galaxy?"

He chuckled lightly, "I doubt my L2 implant could have taken that kind of punishment."

"Mm," she said, nodding her head slightly, "I could barely take it. I still remember waking up in the medbay, trying to make sense of it all. I couldn't figure out what was dream and what was reality. I suddenly had all these memories in my head with no knowledge of how they got there, of things I knew for a fact I'd never seen before. Faces of people that I had never met. War. Destruction. So much death."

He didn't know what to say. What could he say? An entire galaxy of civilization, completely eradicated. He couldn't possibly imagine bearing witness to that. Anything he could have said just seemed... inadequate.

He felt her hand settle on his, and her fingers entwined with his own. He looked at her as she turned to face him again, "Thank you for being there. I needed that." Her smile turned wry, "I barely knew you, but it was nice to see the face of someone who was there when it happened, to tell me that it wasn't all just a dream, and that I wasn't going crazy."

He gave her hand a squeeze, "Chakwas never would have been able to keep me out of that medbay."

She chuckled softly, and the smile was a welcome sight on her tired, worn face. It faded all too quickly as she spoke again, "I just can't shake the feeling that we could have been better prepared if they had just fucking listened to me—shit it was like Akuze all over again." She sighed, shrugging with a shake of her head, "Yeah, it sounds crazy, I know. A race of sentient machines hell-bent on wiping us all out. All that 'salvation through destruction' bullshit. I get it." She raised the glass to her lips and downed the whiskey in a single gulp, "But I've done a lot for this galaxy. Both me andmy crew. We've risked everything to keep it safe. Shouldn't that have counted for something?"

"They were scared, Shepard. They feared the unknown, and even when everything started to point to your claims being accurate, they thought they had more time."

"Oh, fuck that!" She spat, her brows knitted together in a sudden onset of temper, "That is bullshit, Kaidan, and you know it! You don't think I'm scared? I'm fucking terrified, and I'm only just barely holding myself together for the sake of my crew. Fear's just an excuse, and a lame-ass one at that! I sent three hundred thousand batarians to their deaths to give them more time, and they wasted it! I spent six months rotting in a detention cell, when I could have been doing something useful, like—oh, I dunno—stopping the reapers before they got here!"

Ah. There it was. The root of the problem.

"You turned yourself in, Shepard."

"Yeah, I did." She said, "But like an idiot, I thought, after everything that happened in the Bahak system, they would use that time to prepare. I thought that the Alliance and the galaxy could, at the very least, prepare for the invasion and keep itself alive without my help. God only knows what they did before I came around. I'm not hiding behind all the good that I've done. I destroyed an entire system, Kaidan. Granted, it was that or let the reapers come through our back door, but that doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands of batarians died in the process, because of me. That's why I turned myself in."

In a fit of frustration, she leapt to her feet, pacing back and forth with the whiskey bottle dangling from her fingers, "I am so fucking stupid sometimes. They had never listened to me before. Why would it have been any different?"

Before he knew it, the whiskey bottle had left her hand and smashed into the opposite wall in an explosion of glass and amber liquid, "If they had just listened to me in the beginning, we might have been able to stop the reapers before they came! If we had taken action to prepare sooner, maybe Thessia would have been saved. Maybe Palaven wouldn't be razed to smoking hole in the ground! Maybe Earth wouldn't be wiped to nothing more than a shell of what it once was!"

His brows furrowing, he was behind her in seconds, his arms wrapped around her and his chin hooking over her left shoulder. He felt the tension leave her body with a sigh, and her hands came up to settle on his forearms, "Listen, Shepard. I know you want to cast blame for what happened. On yourself, on the council. But the fact is, nobody could have prepared for this. For a fleet of that size. Thessia was already doomed by the time we got there."

"I know." She said, sighing, "It's just... frustrating to know that everything I've done, everything we've sacrificed to stop the reapers from coming has done nothing. I don't like this feeling, Kaidan." Her voice cracked with emotion as she said his name, and he tightened his arms around her in an attempt at comforting her, "I don't like feeling helpless."

"You're not." He argued, his voice confidently strong to battle with the wavering uncertainty that was her own voice, "Shepard, you managed to get krogan and salarians to work together. You helped cure the genophage, and single-handedly brokered peace between the quarians and the geth. If anyone can do this, it's you."

Her face fell, and he could see the muscles in her jaw working as she clenched her teeth, and her voice wavered pathetically as she asked him, barely above a whisper, "What if I can't?"

No. No way. No way I'm letting her doubt herself. Shaking his head, he turned her in his arms and bent his neck, nudging her head up and meeting her forehead with his own, forcing her to look at him through her glassy eyed gaze, "You will." His hands moved to frame her face, "Do you hear me, Dana? You will."

You will, because you're the most stubborn, pig-headed woman I've ever met.

She blinked, and two traitorous tears fell as she lowered her gaze again and he pulled her close. Burying her head in his chest, her silent tears soaked through his shirt and his heart dropped into the pit of his stomach.

Tightening his arms around her, he lowered his face and rested his cheek on the top of her head. He had never seen her like this. This tired, hopeless woman was not Shepard. Not his Dana.

The weight of the galaxy had fallen mercilessly onto her battered, weary shoulders, and she was finally beginning to crumble under its crushing pressure.

But he was here now. He would be her strength—her soft place to land.

And he wasn't going anywhere.