Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

Shepard was dead. She was gasping, wasting precious oxygen. Her blood rushed uselessly in her ears as she floated away, helpless. The Normandy looked impossibly huge and breathtakingly beautiful as she fell into flaming pieces.

She saw the escape pods speeding away, taking the rest of the crew to safety. Good.

Her vision blurred. Stars surrounded her. It was sublime, and quiet. This was the end. She found herself accepting it, her mind flashing back through the faces of those she'd loved.

Kaidan. She saw his gentle brown eyes, heard his voice in her head. I love you.

Then she was gone.

Blue eyes. Rising panic. Where was she? What was going on?

"Give her the sedative!"

Sedative?

A cold, strong hand grasped her wrist gently. "Shepard, don't try to move." It was a woman's voice, unfamiliar. "Just lie still. Try to stay calm."

Yeah, because that's going to happen.

She heard beeping and machinery as she struggled to wake up. Everything was hurting.

"It's not working!" A man's voice, panicked.

"Another dose. Now!"

The world blurred once more. Shepard felt her body relax despite willing it to keep moving. A woman's face appeared above her. She was beautiful, and her deep blue eyes were the last things that Shepard saw before the darkness embraced her once more.

Alarms were going off. Faint explosions in the distance. Something was going wrong.

Shepard opened her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath which made her lungs ache. Where was she? She was staring at a stark white ceiling. Unfamiliar. She tried to focus over the roar of the alarms. How had she ended up here? What had happened? Where was Kaidan?

She had died. She remembered with a horrible jolt in her stomach. The Normandy getting destroyed. Ordering Kaidan to go, hearing the anger in his voice. Dragging Joker to the evac shuttle. The explosion and floating helplessly out into space.

I'm going to kill Joker. She was alive. Somehow she was fine, if a little tender. It felt like the morning after shore leave. Her face was a stinging. She reached up to touch her skin and felt long ridges on her cheeks. What the hell?

"Shepard, your scars aren't healed, but I need you to get moving. This facility's under attack." She remembered that cool, collected voice. She started to sit up automatically, but something was wrong. She only had one scar on her face, a long thin thing that streaked down through her eyebrow. She went to rub it automatically only to find that it was gone.

This isn't my face.

She thought she would black out from the panic, bile rising up her throat with a sickening burn.

Then she saw the firing going on outside the window. Years of Alliance training kicked in, and she forced herself to focus. She was in some sort of med bay, although she didn't recognise it. As she sat up, she took a mental note of her injuries. Legs stiff, sore, like they hadn't been used for some time. A crippling pain in her side, as though she had been shot. But she would be fine. She had fought with worse injuries before and survived.

"There's a pistol in the locker on the other side of the room. Hurry!" The woman speaking was not in the room with her. Shepard remembered big blue eyes and decided to trust the voice. Not that she had a hell of a lot of choice.

She staggered over to the locker, pulling it open with stiff fingers to reveal the armour and pistol inside. She didn't recognise either. Pulling the armour on quickly, she allowed herself a few seconds to try to figure out where she was and what had happened. She'd been saved, that much was obvious, although she couldn't figure out how. There had been nothing around her as she had floated off. Nobody to save her.

Why was she here? Where was here? Had the geth somehow found the hospital she was in and decided to try to finish her off? She knew instinctively that this wasn't a hospital.

She held the gun and stared at it, her mind wandering. How long had she been here? Where was Kaidan? He would be here if he knew she was here, wouldn't he? I love you. She heard his voice in her head. Yes. If he knew she was safe he'd be at her side.

I'm going to find him the second I get out of here.

"Two years?" She breathed the words, unable to take them in. The sickening bile was back, burning her throat. "I can't... I don't..."

Opposite her in the shuttle, the woman with the blue eyes- Miranda Lawson- frowned slightly. She shot a glance at Jacob Taylor, the friendly biotic who had helped Shepard escape the station. Jacob leaned forward and touched Shepard's knee briefly, a gesture that was intended to be comforting.

"Shepard, there was a lot of work to be done. As far as we know, nobody has ever attempted anything like this before," he said gently.

"Let me get this straight," she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. "I've been gone for two years. The universe thinks I'm dead. Cerberus has had my body the whole time- freaking Cerberus, for god's sake- and told nobody."

Jacob sighed. "That pretty much sums it up, Commander."

"Look, I can understand why you're upset, Commander." Miranda Lawson shifted her weight and crossed her legs, resting a casual hand on her thigh. It was a practised movement, a movement that showed that she was in control and that the situation was fine. "There really was no other choice. What we've done is... unethical, to say the least. There's a lot of people who would be quite happy if Commander Shepard stayed dead, too."

"I would have thought Cerberus fell into that group." Shepard reached up again to her foreign face in frustration.

"The Illusive Man has an offer for you. We need your help, Shepard." It was Jacob who had spoken, his voice gentle and persuasive.

Shepard covered her face briefly with her hands. Her fingers were cool. She took a deep, calming breath. "My crew. What happened to the Normandy crew?"

"Just about everybody survived," Jacob replied. His brown eyes were kind. If she hadn't known, she would have never pegged him as Cerberus. "A few servicemen from the lower decks didn't get out. Navigator Pressly was killed by an explosion. But everyone else, including the non-Alliance crew- the asari, Liara, and the quarian- they all made it out alive."

Two years. "Do you know what any of them are doing now?" Unbidden, Kaidan's face swam into her mind's eye. Two years. He would have grieved. He had probably moved on. Yet she felt that she had seen him only yesterday- because it was only yesterday to her. She felt sick.

"I don't know, Commander. It's been two years. They've moved on. Left the Alliance."

I doubt Kaidan has. "They were my team," she heard herself saying automatically. "If they knew I was alive, they'd come back." She believed that. She had to.