The applied net force on an object is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration.

- Isaac Newton's Second Law of Motion

-ard.

The unsettling sensation that she was forgetting something plagued her even on the edge of oblivion. Something was wrong. She fought to order her thoughts, but her mind felt sluggish and unresponsive. Something important.

Shepard.

What was it-

"Shepard!"

Her eyes snapped open and she jerked forward reflexively. Restraining hands forced her back as a familiar face swam into view. "You..." she said thickly. "F... figures..." Despite all that had happened, somehow it made perfect sense that he'd be here now.

As her vision reluctantly returned, so did the rest of her senses. In fact they were rather insistent; she wasn't exactly sure if hair could ache, but hers was certainly giving it a go. "How-" The words caught in her throat as searing pain shot up her side.

"Don't try to talk," came the voice. "Even your luck has its limits and I'd rather we not explore them right now." In answer to her unfinished question, he explained, "When you didn't report back after two days, Hackett sent me after you." He smiled faintly as he resumed his careful application of medi-gel to her lacerated side. "Finding you was easy. I just looked for the stupidest, most dangerous place in sight and after that it was simply a matter of following the path of destruction." Discarding the empty tube, he frowned down at his handiwork.

Willing her pain addled mind to cooperate, she watched with detached fascination as he mended her torn flesh. The rushing in her ears resolved itself into low drone and she became aware of a growing sensation of urgency tightening like a vise in her chest. Something was very wrong. How long had she been out? Come on brain, work.

Something... the relay.

"No..." the world spun as she lurched forward again, "no time. You shouldn't – be here. You – have to go. Now." She caught passing hand.

"Don't be ridiculous, I'm not going anywhere. Now sit still." The hand extricated itself and guided her back to the wall, pinning her there.

"Kaidan – please," she huffed, "We're out of time – just go."

"Not going to happen, Shepard," he said flatly.

"You're not – hearing me. You don't – have time for this – leave me." Why didn't he have an emergency manual override?

"Tell me," he said softly, his voice dangerously neutral, "is there some particular reason you insist on going down with every doomed ship you can find, or are you just naturally suicidal?"

The flat, empty tone stopped her cold. "Kaidan -"

"I'm still collating data here," he continued, refusing to meet her gaze, "but maybe you can save me some effort. If you're just going to run off and find some other pointless and spectacularly stupid way to get yourself killed, I'd like to know now if I'm just wasting my time."

She tried feebly to push his hands away. "Just go, goddammit!" she hissed around the increasingly large lump in her throat.

He ignored her clumsy attempts. "With all due respect, Lieutenant Commander, I don't take orders from you."

"Damnit Kaidan-"

"No." He stilled her hands, expression grim. "I'm not leaving you again. Not ever." The harsh, bitter edge in his voice was unlike any she had heard from him. Finally meeting her eyes, his own bore mercilessly into hers. She flinched away from what she saw there. Coward.

The anger and bitterness she had expected, the resentment and disappointment she deserved, but the hollow anguish, the tangled mesh of accusation and self-loathing – that was more than she could bear. Goddamn coward.

The fight drained out of her, replaced by a cavernous void. Dread echoed faintly in the depths as she sagged once more against the bulkhead, letting her eyes drift closed as he resumed his ministrations. None of the rebuke in his tone transferred into his efforts. Painstakingly gentle as they had always been, she barely felt the brush of his hands as they swathed her side in antiseptic and gauze.

"Half your ribs are cracked, the other half are bruised, and I'm not going to attempt to count the bullet wounds," he reprimanded. "Not bothering to dodge today, I see."

"That's what... the suit is for," she quipped faintly.

He gave her a hard look. "Your suit is fried, Shepard. It looks like you tried to catch a warhead with your bare hands."

"My... gloved hands, actually," she countered, retreating behind a wall of flippancy. She offered her palms as evidence. Here too the protective plating had cracked away, revealing scorched and shredded skin.

Her jest went over about as well as she had expected. He scowled. Taking a proffered hand, he continued remonstrating. "Whatever happened here, you're lucky it didn't set off the reactor core while you were still inside. We need to get to a control terminal so we can reactivate the meltdown before it's too late." He finished with her hands and began gather his supplies. She noticed for the first time the area around them was littered with crushed tubes, discarded gauze and an empty syringe. That probably explained the dancing lights in her peripheral vision. "I'm out of 'gel," he continued. "We'll have to try to find some more somewhere; I doubt this will hold until we can get back to the ship."

Wait, back up, what did he just say? Damn this morphine haze. She looked at him blankly. "Restart the meltdown?"

He regarded her as though she had brain damage. Perhaps she did, she was pretty sure she'd slammed her head into several things that day. Leaning in to check her pupils, he explained, "Yeah, to destroy this asteroid before it hits the relay. Remember?"

Destroy the — oh shit. She caught his arm, ignoring the stab of pain the contact sent careening up her own limb. "Kaidan, listen to me. The Reapers are coming. As in, right here - right now. With that relay they can reach anywhere in the galaxy in hours. They're going to orchestrate a massive coordinated attack on the entire galaxy all at once; we can't let that happen. That relay must be destroyed." She felt her voice steady with each fervent word, desperation and opiates giving her new strength.

"That," he struggled to keep up, "that could destroy this entire system. Shepard, there are hundreds of thousands of people here. There has to be another way."

"There isn't. Maybe if I had been faster, maybe if I had stopped Kenson and her cronies from sedating me for two days, maybe if I could have talked her out of suicide, maybe then there might have been time to figured out a another way, but I wasn't, I didn't, I couldn't, and there isn't. It's an unthinkable to reduce it to cold, impersonal math, but there it is. This system for the galaxy."

He shook his head in disbelief. "How can you be so certain they're coming here?"

"That artifact, Object Rho. It's Reaper tech, it spoke to me like Harbinger. Like Sovereign. It's counting down to their arrival." She gestured to the glowing digits. "We have to act before that timer runs out."

He tried to pull away. "And you believed it? Shepard, do you have any idea how crazy this sounds?" About as crazy as the Beacon visions, which is to say fairly crazy.

As he attempted to free his arm she took advantage of his instability to pull him closer, forcing him down to her eye-level. "I'm talking about the lives of everyone." She offered him her omni-tool. "It can't pick up the vision, but audio works just fine." Activating it, the sounds of gunfire filled the room, but beneath that was a voice like one they had heard before. Even the recorded version caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. "I made the call. It's done. All you have to do now is walk away."

"And just who gave you the right to make that call?" he demanded.

She finally lost her temper. "You see anyone else here?" she snapped. She tightened her grip on his arm. "I would gladly let someone else make this decision. Someone more qualified, someone more informed. Someone better. But in the end there's just me, and I will do what I have to and not even you get to stand in my way."

"Shepard, this isn't right."

"No, it isn't. But right now I'll settle for less wrong."

She released him and he leaned back, his gaze never leaving hers. The silence stretched on for an eternity as he knelt there, eyes intent on her face, searching for something known only to him. There had been a time, once long ago, when his face had been so open, when the unguarded play of emotions had broadcast every thought that skittered across his mind. A time when there was nothing he could keep hidden from her, when there was nothing he had wanted to. But in the intervening years he'd built up a barrier between himself and the world, and now his face was as impenetrable as a cold concrete beneath her. I did this. She felt her chest constrict as she spent a wholly self-indulgent moment mourning the past. She wondered if she was going to have to shoot him just to get him to leave.

At last he looked away. "Alright, Shepard. If Hackett and the Council still have faith in you, I will trust their judgment." But not yours. "But you can damn well be sure that I want to see that recording when we get out of here."

She smiled sadly. "I'd expect nothing less."

The proximity warning chimed in the background, urging them to evacuate to the escape pods. "I think we've overstayed our welcome," he observed. "Let me call in the cavalry." He fired up the display on his 'tool, but attempts to hail his ship netted him only static; he sighed and rose, crossing the distance to the nearest console. "Adams. Do you read me?" Static. The VI took that moment to pipe up helpfully, "The communications system has been taken offline. All personnel are to report to the escape shuttles."

Alenko grit his teeth. "Damnit Shepard, is nothing ever simple with you?"

"It's a gift," she murmured. Brandishing her arm like a banner she added, "I do, however, have a map. Or is that cheating?"

He linked their 'tools with a few keystrokes and transferred the file. "I'll take what I can get," he conceded. He eyed her prone state somewhat dubiously. "So, can you walk, or do I have to drag you out of here?"

"Well, I did say you should leave me."

Suppressing a small smile, he took hold of her wavering hand and hauled her to her feet, one hand guiding the arm around his shoulders, the other snaking around her waist, careful to avoid her injuries. The movement sent pain lancing up her side, but it was a dull pain, wrapped in cotton and easily dismissed. Ah the miracle of modern drugs. Leaning on him only slightly more than was necessary, she let his proximity distract her from everything but putting one foot in front of the other. He was here. He had come. She tightened her grip around his shoulders. Here in this moment, nothing else mattered. Not even the Reapers.

After a few tentative steps, they managed to find a rhythm in their ungainly gait, and together they set off down the corridor.

He was right; it did weigh a ton. Having bodily hauled his then commanding officer out of more than a few situations - she of course returning the favor twice over - he could say with no small authority that Commander Shepard's new augmentations quite rather heavy. Though she was doing her best to keep up, with every second her steps became more and more sluggish and she leaned more and more heavily on his shoulder. Her labored breathing rasped in his ear and her head drooped forward, chin resting on her chest. It was becoming clear to him they were going to need some external help. Or a vat of medi-gel. Or both. Readjusting his grip to bear more of her weight, they continued on.

Their progress was halted by the looming bulk of a set of reinforced doors. To an airlock. Glancing at the map, Alenko mentally kicked himself. Of course. The escape shuttles were mounted on the exterior of the base. Because that made sense. But airlocks meant outside access. And outside access meant envirosuits. Hard suits, if they were very, very lucky. He glanced back the way they had come. Marking their path like something out of a perverse fairy tale was a small trail of breadcrumbs of shattered bits from the spectre's armor. The damage was far beyond the capabilities of his patch kit; Shepard needed a completely new suit if they were to have any hope of reaching the shuttles. Leaving her to catch her breath on a nearby bench, he went to investigate the antechamber.

Though the room proved to be tragically devoid of the medium armor of which Shepard was so fond, shoved into the farthest locker he discovered something better in the form of a discarded mass of light armor in familiar hue. Oh, Shepard's going to love this.

"You're loving this, aren't you?" the former commander muttered ungraciously as Alenko helped her into the replacement suit. She leaned against the bulkhead as the latter eased her foot into a boot slightly too small. They'd foregone replacing her shredded body suit in the hopes of disturbing her injuries as little as possible, but the new, unfamiliar plating was proving highly resistant to meshing with the mismatched underarmor.

Deciding discretion was the better part of valor the commander refrained from comment, tilting his head away from the irate spectre to hide a grin. The universe's sense of humor certainly didn't need any assistance from him, he reasoned as he silently reveled in the karmatic justice. The Sirta Foundation really did make quality equipment; they certainly didn't deserve the stigma most marines attached to their products, unfortunate color scheme aside.

"It's very, um… pink," Alenko observed. Joker snickered into his coffee.

Williams shot them both a withering look. "Laugh it up, El Tee."

When they had met up with her on Eden Prime the chief's hard-suit had been so slime- and gore-encrusted he hadn't taken note of the underlying shade and between the subsequent fight to reach the beacon, the explosion of said beacon and the desperate evac of his unconscious XO, all unrelated thought had been quite effectively driven from his mind.

In the tense intervening hours she had scraped, scratched and scrubbed the suit clean as they waited for news of the commander. He recalled her in the cargo bay attacking the plating with perhaps more force than was absolutely required, but if anyone had noticed her assault they didn't remark, no doubt assuming it to be a coping mechanism, or at the very least excess adrenalin. Now as they prepared to disembark onto the Citadel, he noticed for the first time Williams' rather unconventional choice of armor and he wondered if she had in fact been trying to scrape off the paint.

Shepard chose that moment to enter the bridge, stopping short as she caught sight of her ground team. "Whoa..."

The smirk that had been threatening since the chief had stomped up blossomed into a full-on grin as Kaidan busied himself with the console before him and Joker turned his guffaw into an unconvincing cough.

Snapping to perfect attention, Williams executed a flawless salute and bellowed, "SIR, CAREER SOLDIER BARBIE™ REPORTING FOR DUTY, SIR!"

There was a moment of stunned silence as everyone on deck turned to stare at the magenta swathed marine. The silence was finally broken by a strangled choking noise coming from the pilot. Tearing his attention away from the scene before him, Alenko turned to see tears pouring down the helmsman's face as he doubled over, convulsing with silent mirth. As one, the rest of the crew dissolved into hoots and peals of laughter as Williams' face split into a toothy grin.

Shepard, stone-faced aside from the ever-so-slight upturn at the corner of her mouth, solemnly returned the gesture. "Welcome aboard, soldier."

If he recalled correctly, that particular set had been rather short-lived anyway, though through no fault of the chief's. The next stop on their tour of the galaxy had been Feros, with its rather acidic brand of fauna. Or was it flora? Regardless, when it came to Commander Shepard, the life of essential equipment tended to be nasty, brutish and short. Now that he thought about it, he realized that he'd not seen anyone in Phoenix Armor since his own suit had been trashed on Alchera. And with that thought his smirk melted into a scowl. Best to save that line of thought for another time, when I can afford the luxury of a fowl temper.

He finished sealing her into the suit, tightening the last plate in place with perhaps more force than was absolutely required, though if Shepard noticed she didn't remark. Whether she sensed his change in mood, was quietly sulking to herself, or just conserving her strength, the former commander had fallen mercifully silent.

The YMIR nearly got the drop on them.

Space being what it was, the only sounds for Shepard to hear were her own labored breathing and the reverberation of the engines through the rock beneath her feet. It was sheer chance that turned her gaze at the precise moment to catch the flicker in her periphery. Shoving with both hands she sent Alenko and herself flying in the lowered gravity as hail of gunfire tore through the space they had only recently occupied.

Letting her momentum carry her to the ground she dropped to cover behind a nearby packing crate, crying out as the impact sent fire up her injured side, the movement drawing the mech's full attention. The flimsy protection of the metal crate shuddered and buckled under its attentions as she clung desperately to consciousness. Stupid stupid stupid, she berated herself. You let a giant mech catch you with your pants down. You're on fucking point today. From her prone state she was dimly aware that Alenko had regained his feet and was busy hurling all available boxes, and anything else he could get his biotic grip on, in the direction approaching machine. That seemed to do the job of distracting it from her, but now it was his turn to duck behind a canister while barrage after barrage slowly whittled away at the scant cover. As she watched a stray round punched completely through the thin metal, ricocheting across the commander's armor.

Unacceptable. Rolling painfully to her feet, she readied a grenade with one hand while dialing up her new suit's medi-gel and stims with the other. The grenade had barely left her fingers before she had hurled herself behind a column as the YMIR's attention swung back towards her.

Using the opportunity to launch her now abandoned and quite holey canister mech-wards, Alenko swore at her. "Damnit, Shepard, stay put! If you tear open your side that suit won't be able to handle it."

"Are you out of your mind?" she countered incredulously. "These boxes are shit for cover. Besides, you just threw all the good ones away."

As if to prove her point, the far side of Alenko's crate gave way, the perforated metal shearing off like paper. She loosed the last few rounds from her assault rifle, then ran a quick inventory. One grenade, a handful of pistol rounds and half a dozen shotgun shells. Wait, when did I use the Cain? A rocket impacted against her pillar, dusting her helmet with debris. Oh yeah. Other YMIR.

Motioning for him to prep an Overload, she unholstered her shotgun and readied the last grenade. "That crate's not long for this world; get ready to move."

He eyed her close-range weapon suspiciously. "What are you-"

"Now!" Pivoting around the other side of the column, she chucked the grenade and made a beeline directly for the approaching machine. Cursing, Kaidan activated the attack and sprinted to the next crate as she covered him.

As she ran, it registered in the back of her mind that the last of the bulky shapes in the background were forcefully ejecting themselves from the surface of the asteroid. The shuttles. Well Hell. The communications tower was their only hope now. To do what? Call the Normandy? I hope Kaidan has a plan, I'm all tapped out. She ducked behind another pillar, narrowly avoiding taking a round to the face, then popped around the other side to fire off a volley. Alenko's overload had taken out most of the shielding and her previous efforts had scratched the armor. It was just a matter of whittling away at the thing until it stopped moving. With a shotgun and eight pistol rounds. This is the best day ever.

Glancing over, she saw Alenko was fairing better. He'd found shelter behind a concrete wall and was currently unloading his assault rifle into the beast. As she watched, he prepped yet another throw and hurled yet another canister. Did the man ever tire? She shook herself. Focus Shepard.

The relay loomed ever closer in the background. We're not going to make it, she realized. Not at this rate. Another round whizzed by. Focus, damnit! Her hands began to tremble and she became aware of a warm liquid pooling in the heel of her right boot. Glancing down she affirmed that she hadn't been tagged by a stay round. No suit breaches. Oh. Fantastic.

Chambering the last two incendiary rounds into her pistol she gestured at Kaidan again. Stasis. He gave her a questioning look, but prepared the mnemonic as requested. Going to have to make this quick.

As the dark energy left his hand she was moving again. Twelve, eleven, ten … The mech had time to target her in its sights before it was immobilized, awash with blue fire. Nine, eight, seven. Not close enough. She brought the gun up to bear, braced with both hands against the trembling. Three, Two- "Clear!" Out of the corner of her eye she noted Alenko taking cover as the curtain of dark energy fell away, and as motion began to return to the machine she placed two neat holes side by side in its optical unit.

The resulting blast lifted her off her feet and flung her back. Close enough after all, she thought as she sailed through the air. She clenched her eyes shut in anticipation of the landing, but it never came. Tentatively opening her eyes she found herself suspended in midair, held fast in a biotic field and face to face with a livid marine.

"That was your plan?" He flung out an arm to encompass the blackened patch of concrete that was all that remained of the YMIR. "Are you out of your tiny little mind? In what bizarro fucking universe is charging a goddamned heavy mech with a pistol considered a viable plan? You could have been killed! If there was any rhyme or reason to the universe you would have been! What the hell were you thinking?"

"It worked didn't it?" she pointed out reasonably.

"Only because you have some kind of insane, reality warping mutant power!" The gesturing hand moved up as if to rake through his hair in agitation, but stopped short as he appeared to realize there was a helmet in the way.

She leveled her gaze at him. "Are you done?"

"You know what? No. I'm not done." He made to jab her in the chest with an accusing finger, but was prevented by his own field. Heedless, he plowed on. "It's time someone beat some sense into that magnificently thick skull of yours before you not only get yourself killed, but all those around you for good measure. Because one of these days the laws of physics are going to catch up with you when your merry band of terrorists and murderers aren't there to break your fall and not even Command Fucking Shepard will be able to walk away from ground zero." He turned abruptly, stalking a few steps away before turning back to point disparagingly at her once more.

"This - this self-destructive impulse that urges you to run straight into danger instead of away from it like any sane person would do may make you a great marine, but certainly not a long-lived one. How you've managed to survive this long I will never understand." He waved his hand at her dismissively. "I'd guess you'd sold your soul to the devil if I didn't already know for a fact it belonged to Cerberus, along with the rest of you," he added scathingly.

"But not even you can keep this up, Shepard. Can you really not see that? Look at you! That hard-suit is all that's holding you together, but does that stop you? You nearly get blown up in a reactor core, then before the medi-gel is even dry you're facing down a heavy mech with nothing more than a sidearm. This is pushing, even for you!"

She let the tidal wave of words wash over her, the torrent of emotion that was three long years overdue. She let him rage against her for as long as she dared, but eventually she had to interrupt.

"I know," she said simply.

He paused mid-rant, derailed. "You... know?"

"I do, I really do. But this is a race against time, and we are losing. Badly. Today we bought some back, but who knows how much? I thought we had years to prepare, but I get brought back only to find that for two years the races of the galaxy have had their thumbs up their collective asses the whole time and we are no closer to being ready than we were when I was forced to take a long walk out a short airlock. Does the galaxy need me around just to hold its fucking hand?"

"That's not what I -"

"I know I can't keep this up," she interrupted. "I'm not stupid Kaidan, I know I can't run from the universe forever. I thought today it might finally catch up with me, but I guess I get to keep running a little while longer. But it already got me once and eventually it's going to check its books and realize it already has my name crossed off, and then it's only a matter of time until it corrects its mistake. And if there's one thing the universe is fucking good at, it's getting its way in the end."

"You're not a clerical error, Shepard," Alenko snapped. "The universe doesn't make mistakes, people don't just spring back to life. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you were dead? That some Cerberus scientists have managed to do in two years what the rest of the human race has been trying for thousands?"

"I don't expect you to believe anything, Kaidan. Least of all me. I have my mission and I will complete it on my terms. I will fight, fight as hard as I can, as long as I can, and with all that I have and pray that it's all somehow, somehow enough and that the universe at least has the common decency to let me drag the Reapers back down to hell with me."

"Shepard..."

"And if I don't make it that far, well, I've trained a good team; I'll have to trust them to mop up the rest."

"Your team isn't here, Shepard," he pointed out wearily.

She eyed him appraisingly. "You are."

"You…" he said finally, "you make it really hard to win an argument, you know that?

"It's a gift."

Sighing once more, he turned away from her again to regard their most recent battlefield. "I swear, sometimes you need a keeper."

"Well," she said mildly, "that position has been vacant for some time."

He turned his attention back to her. She couldn't read his expression through the opaque visor, but she could imagine the weary look behind it. She imagined that it matched her own. "You only have yourself to blame for that."

"There are many people to blame, not the least of whom being myself," she sighed. "Now if we're done stating the obvious, we really should be going. I have little desire to play chicken with a mass relay."

He shot a look at the offending object. It was looming larger and larger by the moment. "Right."

Setting her gently back on solid ground, he hooked an arm around her and draped hers over his shoulders once more. "I suppose it's too much to hope that you didn't just reopen your wounds, isn't it?" he asked with resignation.

She gave him a lopsided grin she knew he couldn't see. "Maybe a little."

He let out an exasperated breath. "Come on then. You've only got so much blood to lose." He half dragged her the rest of the way to the communications tower, where he hurriedly called up the interface. "External comm channel open," chirped the VI.

"Thermopylae, do you read me? Adams!"

Instead of connecting with his helmsman, the holographic display activated and the two were confronted with a familiar squid-like shape. "You have got to be kid-"

"Shepard," intoned the display. The spectre stiffened. "You have become an annoyance. You fight against inevitability. Dust struggling against cosmic winds. This seems a victory to you. A star system sacrificed. But even now, your greatest civilizations are doomed to fall. Your leaders will beg to serve us."

She straightened, moving to stand squarely in front of the projection. "Maybe you're right. Maybe we can't win this. But I don't fucking care." She jabbed a finger through the holograph's center. "We will fight you regardless," she declared, "just like we did Sovereign. Just like we're doing now. Every inch we deny you is an inch you lost to 'insignificant dust'. Every inch is a crack in your bullshit 'inevitability'. Every inch proves that you are fallible, just like everyone else. However insignificant we might be, we will fight, we will sacrifice, and we will find a way. That's what humans do."

"Know this as you die in vain. Your time will come. Your species will fall. Prepare yourselves for the Arrival." The display flickered out as the comm tower came online.

Bracing herself against the console, she raised an eyebrow at him. "How's that for proof?"

"Commander? Commander, are you there?"

Cupping his hand to his ear, he responded, "Adams! We need a pick-up, it's going to be close!" His gaze flicking to the faltering spectre, he added, "have the med team standing by."

"On it, Sir! On the bright side, the longer you take to get here the less distance we have to travel to get to the relay."

Alenko grimaced. "Hilarious, lieutenant."

"I do what I can, Sir," she responded, her tone droll. Smart ass pilots.

The bulk of the Thermopylae swung into view as the commanders turned from the tower. Together they lurched for the open bay, one all but carrying the other. Heaving his charge the last few feet into the entry, Alenko jammed the hatch lock with his elbow in the same motion. "Adams! Get us out of here!"

"Aye aye, Sir!"

He staggered under the combined force of acceleration and Shepard's knees buckling. He caught her as she slumped against him, head lolling forward to thud softly against his armor.

"Hey, stay with me," he pleaded as he eased her to the deck.

"Sorry," she mumbled into his shoulder. Her free hand was pressing something into his. Her omni-tool. "Take this... to Anderson. And tell that... turian councilor to eat a dick."

He closed his hand around hers as the decon cycle concluded and his crew swarmed in around them, shifting the spectre on to the waiting stretcher. "Tell him yourself."