2.
accusation
If there was only one good thing that Kaidan took away from his hellish experience with Biotic Acclimation and Temperance Training, it was the knowledge that there was no power worth trading your humanity for.
The potential for biotics to become a blessing or a curse all depends on the individual's willingness to invest in harnessing that natural power.That was the constant refrain at Brain Camp. Pure propaganda, all of it. Kaidan knew that biotics were, at best, a curse to be managed; at worst, a corrupting influence. You could harness the power, but at what cost? All that testing came to was a handful of powerful but unstable kids and the forfeiting of countless individuals' humanity and consciousness. Nothing requiring such harsh methods is worth the cost.
Yet sixteen years later, other groups were quietly following in the BAaT's footsteps, using any means necessary to cultivate new sources of potential might for humanity. Most prominent among them was, of course, Cerberus, the perpetual thorn in the Alliance's side. Kaidan had heard his fair share of stories about the extremes of the group's pro-humanity ideology and the methods they employed to implement that end. And he also knew that Cerberus posed a much greater threat to galactic security, with their seemingly unlimited coffers and capacity for ruthless efficiency, than a mismanaged government project like the BAaT program.
For Kaidan, Cerberus remained a merely disturbing blight on humanity's progress until very recently. Now it had proven itself to be perhaps the most incredible evil this side of the Reaper threat.
It had taken Shepard.
It was hard enough losing the one thing that had inspired real, genuine hope, not just for humanity, but for himself. It was worse seeing her being molded into a tool by the same kind of group that had twisted and manipulated so many others in the name of power.
He had no doubt that it really was Shepard: that blazing look, her firm grasp, her stilted but passionate demeanor - none of that could be manufactured in any kind of lab. Yet that was what made everything so much worse.
She wasn't defending Cerberus -she, like Kaidan, despised the extremes of the pro-humanity movement for her own reasons. She hadn't been brainwashed, because such work could easily be undone; besides, her conviction was too strong to be broken, and Cerberus was too smart to even try it. Cerberus had instead used the things she loved the most to bend her to its will. It had appealed to her innate need to protect, to fight the fights that others were too blind to see or unwilling to do.
Walking away from the woman he loved, the woman who was offering him a chance to start over with her again, was all that much harder because of that. Had she been a VI, Kaidan could have turned his back on her, knowing that the Shepard he loved was truly dead and gone. Had she been brainwashed, he could have made her see the light and brought her back to him.
He cannot compromise who he is, not even for the woman who was instrumental in making him into that man. Shepard, the one he knew and loved, would never do that.
If Shepard had changed, it would all have been so simple! He could have finally lain the woman he loved to rest after two long years and work toward building the kind of future for humanity that they had envisioned. But Kaidan was not so cruel so as to let himself believe so little of Shepard. He knew damn well that she was too strong-willed for that.
All he could do now was keep on loving her.