The darkness was suffocating.
She wasn't sure what it was, the weight that she was feeling. It was black as an inkwell all around her. The air she was breathing, (if she was breathing,) was thick and rich with heat. Numbness overwhelmed her. The feeling of lifelessness slipped around her arms and legs and wound up around into her chest. It was a slow process. Destroy, destroy, destroy. The word was cycling through her mind, a chant, a song, like the only thing she could keep a grip on.
The last thing she remembered was their faces. She'd walked to her death with the poise she'd always promised she would have. But it didn't make her silent goodbye any easier. In the fire and impact she'd felt them there with her, the only people she would've ever wanted to experience it with. All of them. Her comrades, her sidekicks, her squad, her partners in crime. Her best friends. Joker's tip of his cap from his chair. Liara's blue eyes, full of kindness and mischief. Kaidan's lips, curled into her favorite crooked smile. She felt the echo of sadness in her chest and considered the sensation for a moment. Maybe she was alive.
Or maybe this was death. The darkness, the numbness, the suffocating warmth. Was this heaven? Was this hell? Was she somewhere in between? It felt familiar, almost. Nothing above her, nothing below her, darkness as far as she could tell. Suffocating. Silence. Nothingness. Maybe she was floating out in space somewhere. Would Miranda find her this time? What a sick thought. She wanted to laugh. It was over. She'd destroyed the Reapers, but it was over. Nothing left in her to keep going, anyway. She didn't dare open her eyes to see her surroundings. She didn't want to know. Her body started to drain away, all feeling gone, her thoughts growing dimmer by the moment. Was this the end? The beginning? Where was the light? A sharp pain in her midsection cut through her numbness with lightning-like precision. Heat was sticking to her. The dizzying blackness was too much.
Don't leave me behind.
His voice was crystal clear in her mind. Without her permission, a burst of energy brought a sharp breath into her lungs. Her chest expanded and took in the thick air, full of ash and dust and the remains of the Citadel. Breathing. She was breathing and there was oxygen in her lungs. Her blood pumped in her veins and her heart started hammering back to life. The air came in and out of her in hitched gasps, but she was doing it. She was alive. Her eyes shot open against her will and she took in the scene around her. Rubble was everywhere. Black ash and dust stood almost suspended in the air. The heat was overwhelming; small pockets of fire blazed at random through the scraps of metal and rock. The Citadel stood in ruins, broken, but alive. Just like her.
Feeling came trickling back into her, slowly but steadily. Toes first, then her legs, her thighs… By the time the sensation came back to her hips she could barely breathe. The pain was stifling, the crushing and the weight, the burning of her singed flesh. She could barely take it. She opened her mouth to cry out but found her throat swollen shut. She gasped again and it brought a heaving cough through her lungs. It made hardly any sound but the gesture nearly tore the burnt insides of her airway to pieces. The numbness retreated from her fingers, which she tried to bend to test their strength but found she couldn't move them at all. Feeling returned to her arms and then her shoulders, spreading like literal wildfire over her back and chest. The burning was overpowering. It consumed all of her senses, swallowing her up and pushing any effort she could've made to move back down to stillness.
The rubble was pressing on top of her, crushing her, becoming harder and harder to bear by the moment. It forced down on one of her legs, another huge piece on her stomach and one on her arm and part of her chest. She couldn't move. She realized then that sure, she was alive, but she was trapped. Any movement in the area was far away, and she couldn't make a sound. She could tell from the blurriness of her vision and the way her head was becoming lighter that it she was losing blood from the wounds she knew were there. She'd bleed out soon without help.
Any hope she had from her breathing before was crushed swiftly by the ruins around her. There was really no chance of surviving. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a jagged metal spiral standing vertically where she assumed the center of pain was in her leg. She cringed and tried to regulate the hard spike in her breathing. Every breath was precious, and she needed to save her energy for surviving as long as she possibly could.
She'd thought she was ready to die. She wasn't.
Her goodbye to Kaidan was temporary. She'd let him go in her mind, but not in her heart, not in her soul. They were in too deep to give up. She never allowed herself to want a future, a life after the war with the man that she loved, but as she walked to her death and riddled her final decision with bullet holes she saw his face. His smile. His eyes. The promise she'd made him on the ground in London, saying she'd come back safe, saying she'd never leave him behind. She had to fight. He was out there somewhere. He had to be.
She forced another breath into her lungs, pushing back the pain that it brought to her chest. The muscles in her back burned and strained under the weight of her small movement. She heard the voices calling to each other, calling to survivors, in the distance. No noise came from her mouth. She shut her eyes and let out a little moan. It was the best she could manage.
She didn't want to die. But she was probably going to.
"Hey, hey, hey… Where are you going?" His voice was at her ear like he was sitting in the rubble next to her. Inher mind, he took her hands in his and put them flat against his chest. He held her wrists tenderly. The look in his eye was a rare one, but she recognized it. It was a mix of concern and pity, of love and anxiety. She was cutting past his defenses. And he already had hers torn down.
"Alright, Kaidan…" The smile that so forcefully took her lips was uncontrollable. She loved him. In the ruins of the Citadel, she stirred a small bit. The pain was terrible, but it kept her awake. In her cabin that night, she kissed him. He wrapped his arms around her back and carried her to her bed, their bed, and pulled her close. She shared herself with him that night in a way she never had before. It was by no means their first time, but in all her efforts to say goodbye to him, she let him in deep. He got down into the cracks of her heart and soul and solidified himself there. Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of them together. So prepared to die. So unprepared to let go of each other.
She wasn't going to let go now. She was alive, and the Reapers were not. She had to live. For his sake.
She opened her eyes and grunted aloud, trying to keep herself awake. The blackness was creeping into her vision slowly but surely; it wasn't the first time she'd encountered unconsciousness. If she wanted to live, she couldn't let it take her. But her lids were heavy, her body was succumbing back to numbness, and the short breaths coming in and out of her chest were becoming harder and harder to keep up.
"Kaidan." She wanted to say his name more than anything. It was trapped on her tongue, set to stay there wrapped up behind her lips forever. Her eyes fluttered shut once again and the warm dark took her under.
