A Longer Haul

by imperator prime

Pt 1 expounds on the mShep/Kaidan romance during ME3, and pts 2/3 follow the Synthesis ending as Kaidan & co. set out to deal with the aftermath of winning the war but losing Shepard. Written pre-Extended Cut, though some of what I wrote to reconcile my questions at the end felt pretty prescient once EC released. Some strong language & mature content, hope "M" covers it

3. Part 2 Interregnum

-2.1

SSV Normandy, 12 days later

-2.1

Kaidan awoke very gradually to a dim pillar of light shining down on him. He let out a low, exhausted groan as awareness of the dull, throbbing pain in his leg, his side, his shoulder and his back returned. Looking slowly to his right, he saw Doctor Chakwas sitting at her desk. The whole medical bay was a mess, and he noticed some structural damage, but apparently they were still alive.

"Karin?" His throat felt dry, and his voice was hoarse. Chakwas looked up at him, rose to her feet with a relieved expression on her face, and stepped over to Kaidan's bedside.

"How are you feeling, Major?"

"Like hell," Alenko slurred, wincing. He visually surveyed himself and saw that much of his left side was bandaged with medical elastape. There was a strong herbal, menthol smell of medigel. "How long was I out?"

"I'm sorry, Major, but for the sake of your recovery I had to keep you sedated, I couldn't risk you aggravating your injuries by trying to get out of bed prematurely, or even moving around too much..."

"Just tell me, Karin."

"Almost two weeks... I'm sorry, but it really was necessary. And... well, frankly, you haven't been missing much." The lights dimmed momentarily before coming back up, and Kaidan realized they had done so a few times already in the last minute.

"Two weeks? God... So... What happened? Did it work? Did we win?" Chakwas sighed and shook her head ambiguously.

"It's... complicated, Kaidan." She crossed her arms, concerned and restrained. "I couldn't tell you for certain what's happened, none of us is a hundred percent sure. But as far as we can tell, it's over. And we seem to have won. I- I should really let you be debriefed officially by Admiral Hackett, once you're back on your feet. We have communication with him, so at least there's that."

"Communication? But not... what? Are we not back at Earth yet?"

"Just... rest, Kaidan. When you're well enough we'll get you in touch with him and he can explain things. Be patient, we aren't going anywhere for the moment." As he laid back and tried to quiet his mind to doze off again, Kaidan grimly noticed the silence in the ship. No engine noise. None whatsoever- not even the Normandy's normally quiet hum. Just before he closed his eyes, the light above dimmed and brightened again.

-X

Three days later, with Chakwas' approval, EDI's infiltrator body arrived in the MedBay to go with Kaidan to the communications center. As soon as he set foot outside the infirmary he found most of the crew- including Traynor, Vega on a single crutch, Joker and Cortez- assembled in waiting. At the sight of him emerging, they offered up a congratulatory cacophony of applause and cheers. He smiled humbly, touched by their jubilation at his recovery, and after a moment put up a hand to settle them down.

"Thanks, everyone," he said, surveying their expectant faces. "Thank all of you for everything you did. It's... ah... it's good to be alive, and good to see that you're all okay. I'm just on my way up to talk to Admiral Hackett to get filled in on everything I've missed, so... no spoilers. But if I come back knowing anything you don't, I'll let you all know where we stand. Until then, carry on. I see some tidying up that could use doing, I'm surprised that in two weeks the commander hasn't already cracked the whip." He smiled slightly as they dispersed, but their looks when he mentioned Shepard had that 'shit, he doesn't know' quality to them. Just the fact that Hadrian wasn't there to see him... but there had to be an explanation. If he'd survived Harbinger's blast somehow, surely he had to have made it through whatever had happened next. The brass must have had him insanely busy.

But once the crew grew quiet and returned to their work, Kaidan quickly became certain that something was seriously wrong. The silence of the hallways and ship was eerie. There was considerable structural buckling on the deck's port side, and the lights were still dimming periodically. Even the air smelled... abnormally fresh. "So," he opened anxiously, turning to EDI and gingerly starting toward the elevator, "if it's finally question-and-answer day, why don't we start with 'where are we?' Not in space, clearly."

"Technically any location we could possibly occupy must necessarily be 'in space,' Major. But assuming you meant 'in flight,' yes, Normandy has crash-landed on an unidentified planet. The hull was breached, but the atmosphere is breathable and based on cursory surveys of the local area the surface seems habitable."

When they arrived at the lift the doors were fixed open, and EDI indicated that they would have to climb the spiraling stairs that had been deployed around the periphery of the shaft.

"Is anything working right?" Kaidan asked, limping up the steps with EDI behind him. Observing Kaidan's difficulty, EDI offered her arm and he leaned on her for the walk. It was strange, but with his hand on her shoulder he felt... something unfalsifiably human in her. Genuine compassion, not just heuristic preference or programmed care for him as a subset of her commitment to the Normandy. In her touch he felt that she was relating to the pain he was in, and wanted to help. But how was that possible, EDI didn't truly know 'pain,' did she?

"The QEC has a redundant, independent power supply, and the self-contained nature of the system means it remains fully functional. However all primary, secondary and tertiary systems were severely compromised in the landing."

"What about... uh... 'you?' The hardware in the ship that remote-controls that body? That must have made off well enough?" Alenko asked, looking EDI's avatar up and down. There was still visible damage in her 'skin,' and her movements were less fluid than normal.

"In anticipation of possible damage from the crash, I secured my primary infrastructure and isolated a truncated version of my basic heuristic programming in my body's hardware."

"So you uploaded a parsed-down copy of your personality, to use it like a lifeboat?" Kaidan had wondered ever since EDI assumed control over the captured Cerberus gynoid whether it was actually possible for it to operate independent of an uplink to the ship's AI core.

"That is an an apt enough metaphor."

"And... ? How- uh- do you feel?"

"It is quite novel. My functionality is significantly reduced. I cannot say that my preference would be to continue operating in this state indefinitely. Unfortunately, I am reluctant to unlock my primary core's systems until I have completed a thorough diagnostic examination for damage, but the restricted software suite I compressed into my chassis is... less than optimal to that task." She actually sounded perturbed, and Kaidan wasn't sure whether he was more or less concerned that a perturbed AI was limited to the body EDI was apparently 'stuck' in. Stranger still, as they walked he found it easier and easier to imagine what the sensation was like for her- a feeling of cognitive faculties locked away, remembered but out of reach. Senility almost. He found he felt sad for her plight.

"So then, we're permanently grounded? Where- where are we? And how did we get here? Or have you been able to figure that out given your... ah... 'restricted software suite?'"

"Please, Major, my higher-level functions are curtailed but astrometric locational analysis is simple math."

"Of course it is," Kaidan said, with only a hint of sarcasm.

"To answer your question, our location is in the Xi Bootis system, twenty-one point eight six light-years from Earth."

"Xi Bootis?" Alenko grimaced- part confusion, part discomfort as he stepped onto the command deck behind the darkened star map console. "Sorry, I don't know the whole network, but I thought the closest mass relay to Sol was Arcturus."

"That was our understanding. However that information is not necessarily wrong- we did not arrive in the system through a normal mass relay transit. We were en route to Arcturus, executing the evasive jump I advised you of upon our return to the ship."

She supported him tenderly as they walked through the CIC and security screening- which was unattended- and past the conference room to the War Room, which was conspicuously empty. Only the central lighting was on, the other displays were unmanned and shut down.

"So... what are we looking at," he wondered aloud, looking around the now glorified state-of-the-art cave, "the worst case of relay drift ever?"

"I believe it was more likely that a disruption of the mass relay itself degraded and ultimately collapsed the corridor of zero-mass space while we were transiting it. Sensors detected intense gravitational shear and a steep baryonic gradient just prior to engine failure, all consistent with recorded events of ships losing propulsion mid relay jump and experiencing catastrophic deceleration. It was these extreme forces that I suspect forced us down. However it may be best if I left the rest to Admiral Hackett," EDI replied, and picked up and unfolded a collapsible chair that she placed in front of the quantum entanglement communicator terminal. Kaidan grimaced as he took his seat, and EDI backed out of the room as he pushed the button to open the waiting line to Hackett. The projector array snapped and crackled to life, and a softly glowing blue hologram of the Admiral sharpened into focus.

"Major Alenko," he nodded. "How are you feeling?" Kaidan carefully saluted with his good arm.

"Recovering, Admiral, thank you. I'm glad to see you made it through the battle- I heard we... well, I heard we apparently maybe sort of won?" Hackett made a tight 'maybe sort of' smile and nodded thoughtfully.

"It's an apt way of putting it, I suppose. The Citadel opened, the Crucible docked, and a couple minutes later it discharged some kind of energy pulse. Then the Reapers up and left. All their ground forces stopped fighting- stopped everything, really- and were picked off with ease, while the Reaper ships themselves just broke off on every single front that we've heard from and flew away. There hasn't been a sighting since." Hackett shook his head with incredulity. "It was the damnedest thing, and certainly not the way I expected the war to end."

"So they bugged out? And... so everyone is alright, then? I mean, everyone who wasn't a casualty during the fight?" He couldn't help but stress the last part, the real question as plain as day. Shepard had made it to the Citadel, and opened it, and done something. Surely there had to be more.

"Well... their disengagement wasn't the only result of the Crucible firing, Major... It seems that the energy pulse interacted with... well, all of their technology. When the pulse hit the Charon relay, it fired something off to Arcturus, and from there we can only infer that it propagated across the entire network because the same thing happened everywhere that we know of. The mass relays were written off, Major. No Arahtot-like supernova-scale explosions, that blast must have had something to do with how the relay was demolished. But whatever they did seemed to take everything out of them. They did their thing, shut down, and deteriorated."

The relays destroyed? Kaidan blinked, feeling stunned. The implications were... "The whole network is gone? So... so, what, galactic civilization is... what? Over? Done?" Then something dark and terrible dawned on him. Virgil on Ilos, explaining the Reapers' master strategem years ago. All the mass relays? But, the Citadel itself was... "Admiral... Wh-" Kaidan stumbled over the words, a sick knot in his gut. "What about the Citadel? What about Shepard?"

Hackett looked down and to the side. He'd had to know the question was coming, but apparently he hadn't managed to completely steel himself for answering it.

"I'm sorry, Maj- ... Kaidan. You have no idea how sorry I am, son. But the same thing happened to the Citadel as happened to all the other mass relays."

"Y- you're sure, Sir? That there's no way he could have maybe...?" Kaidan's eyes were welling up with stinging tears and his chest was feeling tighter, constricted. He gripped the edge of his seat, trying to steady himself as the room started to feel like it was spinning.

"The central ring exploded, son. The wards broke up. Much of the wreckage burned up as it fell into Earth's atmosphere- which caused substantial damage in itself- and the rest was blown away from the planet... The fleet was able to rescue a few thousand survivors from sealed, self-contained sections of the structure. But Shepard, and most of the thirteen million other souls aboard the Citadel, went down with it. I wish like hell it weren't so... and I know it's not what you want to hear. I know how hard it has to be for you. It's been hard for all of us. But... he got the job done, Kaidan. He went out a hero. And the whole galaxy- at least everywhere we can talk to via QECs- knows it. For what that's worth." Kaidan's hand raised to cover his mouth, then slid up to shield his eyes, embarrassed. Visibly uncomfortable, Hackett paused to give him a moment. Alenko sat slumped over in the chair, breathing deeply between sniffles, tears running down his face. After several painful, quiet minutes, Kaidan wiped his flushed face and tried to collect himself.

"Right. So... Shepard's gone. The Citadel and the mass relays are gone. If you could, Sir... what's left?"

"What's left, Major, is everything else. Earth. Palaven. Thessia and Sur'Kesh. Rannoch. Tuchunka, as far as we know. Colonies all across the galaxy. Everywhere that there's a geth presence we have rudimentary communication via their FTL networked consciousness, and they're reporting hundreds of billions of lives saved, son. They're struggling, they're cut off from each other... they've been separated, and it's heart-wrenching, but they're alive. And there's the fleet, much of which survived, though their being stranded in the Solar system is raising some challenges. We've allowed the crews of all those ships to set down in camps planetside while they figure out what they want to do next. At conventional FTL they're all decades from their homes, at least. That might not be a big deal to long-lived species- say- the asari or the krogan, if they don't mind a long flight back. But the salarians? The turians? Or the volus, or elcor? Shepard even netted the remaining batarian forces in the galaxy into joining the attack, and now they're stranded in the home system of people they've considered enemies for as long as we've known them."

"So we've got- what- a couple hundred thousand refugees from the allied fleets all trying to get along on or around Earth, with no more common enemy to fight? That sounds kind of volatile, doesn't it?" He pictured a quick, ugly dissolution of the alliance in fighting over the remaining resource on the planet below.

"We feared the worst when we realized the boat we were in, but we're benefiting hugely from the groundwork Shepard and the crew of the Normandy did leading up to the counterattack. Having the quarians' liveships, and their fleet crewed by only essential personnel after most of the non-essential civilians debarked for settlement on Rannoch, means that the dietary needs of them and the turians are taken care of in the near term, which was a concern initially. So the turians are a stabilizing influence. Though frankly, nobody seems to be in any hurry to start anything. Frankly, it's downright strange how little of the anticipated tension we're observing. Everyone just seems to have an easy time talking to each other, like they understand what everyone's going through. Whether it's a lasting sense of comraderie from the fight, who knows, but so far everyone is getting along... abnormally well."

"What about the krogan? We brought in a lot of krogan infantry who are known for being territorial- how are they settling in?"

"The krogan too. I've never seen them so co-operative. We were mulling over all kinds of scenarios early on, but it's just... calm. I'd be a lot more worried about them if they had any of their females with them," Hackett said, a bit of relief clearly showing. "With the genophage cured, I wouldn't feel great about them getting stir-crazy and starting to fight among themselves in our refugee camps over breeding rights. We were ready to start a massive morale campaign to pacify them by reminding them that they have something to live for again, if they take the long view and consider hitching a ride towards Tuchunka if the asari head out in that direction for Thessia. But it hasn't even come to that.

"What's more, it actually helps us a lot back here that your crewmates- in particular Vakarian, T'soni and Samara, Tali, and Wrex and Grunt- have so much pull with their respective peoples in the first place, and then that they got stuck here when you were evacuated. It might actually be for the best that you weren't able to pick them up."

"I'm sure you'll be able to count on them help everyone get along, Sir," Kaidan said, glad to hear that the others were alright, but feeling an oppressive, dull weight growing on his shoulders.

"Indeed, they've been a big help keeping the peace. And for that matter, so have the geth. I never thought I'd be saying it. But the numbers they have here, and the fact that they never get tired, don't consume any food or water, and that they aren't holding any- to use their words- 'illogical lingering grievances,' they're proving invaluable in rebuilding vital infrastructure on Earth and maintaining the ships that survived the campaign. It's as impressive as anything I've ever seen, Major, and as close as you were to Shepard we owe a lot of the credit and the gratitude to you. The galaxy is indebted to your whole crew."

"I appreciate the kind words, Admiral. I'll pass them along. But I've got to ask... is there anything that can be done to get us back for the ticker-tape parade, or should we be... I don't know, should I be telling them that this is home now, start salvaging the ship to settle this place and choose who they want to shack up with, or what? The gratitude of the galaxy doesn't matter that much if the most we're ever going to see of it is the occasional holographic pat on the back." He knew that some of the bitterness he was feeling over Shepard had seeped in, and he didn't care. Flowery words from Alliance brass weren't going to make him feel any better over his loss.

"Well, son, it's still far too early for me to risk getting your hopes up." Hackett visibly stiffened up, trying to be reassuring without making any promises that could be broken. "But trust that if we can find some way to recover you and your people, and that ship- the Normandy has basically become a legend in her own right- we'll do all we can to that end. I'll keep you apprised of our efforts. But without the relays it could be some time before even our fastest ships could reach you at FTL speeds, and that assumes they can plot an interstellar course that allows electrostatic discharges of their engines at all en route."

"In other words, 'get comfortable and have faith?'" Kaidan put his head in his hand. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be at the end. It wasn't even close. What was the 'civilization' they'd been fighting to save? How would worlds that depended on each other fare cut off from one another? How would isolated colonies get essential supplies? How would millions of people cope with the prospect of never seeing their homes... or their loved ones... ever again?

"I'm sorry again, Major, but rest assured we'll have our best people working the problem. And whatever else gets you through the wait, know that you did good. I don't think we'd have pulled it off without Hadrian Shepard, and... well, I don't know that he'd have done it without you. Somehow I suspect 'the world' or 'the galaxy,' big anonymous abstractions like that, were never adequate motivation for the task we gave him. They couldn't be. We were all of us fighting for something more... personal. Some family homestead or a missing parent or a child we wanted to give a future, or someone we... well, you know. Someone we'd charge headlong into Hell for, because we couldn't imagine our lives without them, or failing them when they're counting on us." Kaidan swallowed hard and fought back more tears. Maybe Hackett understood better than he thought.

"Shepard... was among the very best of us. I saw drone and helmet-cam footage of what he did in London, how he fought. It's clear how strongly he cared... how devoted he was to his own inspiration. In a lot of years of fighting and then sending others in to fight, I've never seen anything quite like it. His passion for taking care of his own... and I'm sure he'd want no less commitment from all of us left behind to carry on. It might be the only fitting way for us to remember him- to dedicate ourselves like he dedicated himself, to the well-being of the people close to us."

So it was more than just sympathizing or extending compassion. There was a bit of passing the torch. Faced with the prospect of being marooned beyond the reach of rescue, Hackett was asking Kaidan to step up- not just because he was the senior ranking Alliance officer on-board, but because it was Hadrian's crew, and now they needed a commander. And he was Hadrian's love. And now Hackett was partaking of that faith that Shepard had had in him.

"Yes Sir. I... I know exactly what you mean, Admiral. We'll carry on." Thinking about Shepard that way- remembering the man he'd fought for instead of the man he'd lost, touching the impression he'd made instead of the hole he'd left... something about the character, the chemistry of the tears in his eyes changed. He was still sad, still shaking, but his mouth quivered into a smile, and he no longer felt embarrassed to be seen crying over his vanguard. His vanguard who had literally thrown himself into the fire to knock him out of harm's way.

"We'll do it for him," he said, and nodded to the Admiral, and terminated the link. Then he fell forward over the console, face on his forearms, and wept cathartic. The resonating geometry of the holo-chambers made his sobs bounce around the room like a rubber ball, and every heave of his chest made his injuries hurt- his ribs, his shoulder and collarbone, his leg and his wrist and his back... but now they all felt like the after-images of kisses laid on his body. The crushing ache in his chest felt like Hadrian's arms wrapped tightly around him.

In a moment he thought- it no longer mattered if they never left this rock 21.86 light-years from Earth; they'd made a promise to each other that night 16 days ago when Hadrian had very nearly pushed him away, the day before he'd given his life. What Normandy would be to them.

Not mine. Ours. This cabin's ours now... this is home for us.

If he never saw them again Kaidan knew he'd miss his family. He knew he'd miss visiting their vineyard in the BC interior. He'd miss seeing Vancouver rise again and he'd miss his students. But remembering Shepard straddling his pelvis, looking down at him with that reconciled look and that relieved smile... he wouldn't want for home. He was already there.

-2.2

Normandy's Repose, Xi Bootes Alpha II, 8 days later

-2.2

Kaidan limped into the MedBay. The room was considerably more sparse as supplies had been steadily migrating to the cargo bay in preparation to break ground on a camp near the crash site, which they'd named. "Normandy's Repose," on the lonely world they'd dubbed "Hadrian." Each suggestion, courtesy of EDI, had been unanimously approved by the surviving crew.

He was getting around without a walking stick now, and Chakwas had been dumbstruck by the quickening pace of his recovery. She'd expected him to be laid up for months.

"You wanted to see me, Doctor?" he asked. She turned from her datapad and nodded.

"I did," she said in a low voice. "Would you help me with this?" She stepped toward the door and started drawing the open panels inward to give them some privacy. Kaidan slid the largest two segments together with his biotics and then followed her to back of the room near the AI core.

"What's the secrecy about, Karin? Something's wrong?" Chakwas leaned against the edge of the diagnostic bed and searched for a place to begin.

"How have you been feeling, Kaidan?" she asked cautiously. It was the best she could do, he supposed, but he immedately became concerned. Had he picked up some exotic bug? Eaten some native flora he shouldn't have? He felt fine... better than he should.

"I'm... alright, Karin. Aren't I? I mean, my injuries seem to be getting better faster than you ever anticipated... I don't feel sick. My spirits... well, they're as good as can be expected. Why? How should I be feeling?"

Again, she hesitated, starting and stopping several times before she handed him the datapad in her hand. "What's this?" he asked, looking at two images.

"The first, Major, is a composite of visualizations of the DNA from several randomly selected chromosomes. The second is imaging of several other, random whole cells." The graphics made enough sense now, except for several clear details. The helices of the DNA strands all seemed bordered by something- thin ribbons of something ephemeral but subtly animated- and the whole cells seemed tagged with some microscopic structures that glowed with a faint light, a bit like haptic interface holograms.

"My chromosomes and cells?" Alenko asked, curious. Chakwas nodded. "So... what are these? Some kind of diagnostic markers, or artifacts of your scans, or-"

"They're... foreign, Major. They aren't markers from any procedure I know of, nor artifacts of any scan. They're... well- they're additions to your physical makeup. They're present in every chromosome, every cell. The cellular appendices seem to represent a higher order organization of the... whatever those structures are circumscribing your DNA, which display a level of organization of their own that I can't even image with the equipment I have aboard, they're so small. There's some kind of sub-molecular activity going on in them, and whatever they're doing, they're giving rise to the larger bodies. All I can determine about them for certain is that they appear to be composed for a silicon material, and they're self-replicating."

"Nanotech?" Kaidan suggested, brow furrowed with bewilderment. "Are you saying I've got microscopic machines running around inside me, putting up scaffolding around my DNA and building... I don't know, what do those look like- tiny RFID tags- on every cell in my body?"

"And possibly, Major, some sort of macro structures at higher levels of organization in your tissues. And . . . well, there's more." She lifted a second datapad from the desk and slowly, reluctantly handed it to him as well.

"More of the same?"

"Those samples... are mine, Major, in the upper left corner. Jeff's in the upper right. Adams' in the lower left, and the seemingly un-related images in the lower right... those are from EDI's infiltrator chassis, Kaidan." There was no DNA visualization from EDI's gynoid, but there were PET scan images of two geometric, mechanical bodies- one a micro-relay circuit and the other a sort of crescent-shaped 'blob' of a shiny metallic substance labelled 'repair functionality nanide.' Both showed the faint glow of 'holographic' structures similar to those found on the surface of the cells of, apparently, every crew member aboard.

"Do you think EDI has... what? Infected us with something inherent to her physiology?"

"These structures are new to her as well, Major. It seems we've all been... changed, somehow. Something artificial, added to us by means unknown. Something starting with an order of complexity at an small impossibly scale, that compounds as it factors up. It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. And I can't seem to find any way to neutralize it."

"But what are they doing?" Kaidan asked. He didn't feel any different.

"Well, Major- have you noticed anything about me? Just from a casual observation. Can you notice any changes in me?" Kaidan looked at Chakwas for a still, quiet moment. Gradually- very gradually- he started to feel... something.

"Well... you're concerned, obviously, but deeper than that you're curious. Fascinated. It's a mystery you want to figure out. And you wish we'd made it back to Earth so that you could be exploring this with a proper lab and facilities. And you believe these changes have something to do with the speed of my recovery..." He paused, and looked confused.

"Yes, all of that," Karin confirmed. "But you didn't get any of that from looking at me or listening to me, did you, Kaidan? You just... you tried to extend your awareness to me, and then you felt it. All those feelings, they arose in you. Didn't they?" Kaidan's eyes widened as he realized she was right. "And you- you're confused, obviously. But there's also anger- that this has been 'done to you' without your knowledge. And that's tangled up with hope- hope that it means something, that there's a purpose to it that will reveal itself to be..." Chakwas' started to well up with tears and she took a deep breath, turning away from him. "I'm sorry, Major," she said, wiping her eyes, "but that's about as much as I can handle while your feelings about Commander Shepard are that strong." Kaidan reached out a supportive hand for her shoulder but she recoiled slightly. "No- no, that would just make it... more intense, and harder to let back to you, Kaidan." So she had a working hypothesis. "You're right," she said intuitively, "though it's very rough at this point."

"What is this, Karin? How did we... ?"

"It's only speculation, Major, but increasingly it seems substantiated by experimentation and anecdotal evidence from other members of the crew. I suspect that the genetic 'border material' acts like our DNA to inform the propagation of the cellular structures, which in turn facilitate some kind of... of network within our bodies, and... well, within and beyond. An infrastructure that permits... you felt it for yourself."

"So... we're all 'wireless psychics' now, or what?" He was incredulous, but if it was true it would have to be acknowledged, probably studied so that it could be understood and dealt with.

"Wireless, or- as I said- touch seems to establish a much more potent connection." Kaidan became more acutely aware of the gloves Chakwas was wearing. It stood to reason that as their doctor, she was already the most experienced in the experiences she was describing. It also made sense that he'd remained basically unaware- the leadership he'd been thrust into following their marooning was proving a bit... lonely. His longing for Hadrian- which had led to his spending long hours cooped up in his cabin wrestling with memories- had been slowly but surely isolating him.

"Y'know," Kaidan said, pondering aloud, "it actually sounds a bit like... well, it reminds me of the geth, how I've heard their networked communications described."

"Indeed. And the fact that we've all of us apparently acquired such a defining and frankly useful trait, under the circumstances, well... it begs the question of whether it could have been intentional. And the effect does seem to be getting stronger over time. Though I have no idea how it could have been done."

"Well... we've seen our fair share of things that defied belief in the last few years," Kaidan sighed. Hackett's debriefing floated up to the surface of his mind- The Citadel releasing some energy discharge that was amplified through the relays... and the Reapers ending their whole campaign of terror and flying away. Could they all be related? "So there's nothing you can do about it, but it doesn't seem to be harming any of us. Do the rest of the crew realize what's happened?"

"Joker has related to me experiences with EDI, and I've heard some other mentions made- Vega and Westmoreland, Cary and Munroe, Li and Harris... you see the pattern, I trust?"

"'Intimate liaisons,' yeah." Another reminder of what he'd lost. "So the touchy-feely pairings are noticing. And if it continues to emerge and evolve, sooner or later everyone has got to figure it out... I guess I'm going to have to make some kind of formal announcement about it. And soon. I should probably confer with Admiral Hackett, too, and find out if they knew about this or even if the people back at Earth are similarly affected."

"I'm sure you'll do what's best for everyone, Kaidan," Karin said, reaching out for his shoulder, but catching herself and withdrawing her hand. "You've been doing fine. Though... I do worry about you. The hours where you disappear to the top deck?" Alenko broke eye contact, looking down at the floor. "I... I know you miss him terribly, but..." her voice trailed off, and after a moment he felt something... gentle, and a little sad. He looked back up at her and saw the focus in her eyes.

"We'll study this new thing in due course, Doctor, to figure out its applications and limitations, but until then? I'd prefer that you stay out of my head," he rebuffed. She backed off, a little flustered, and raised her palms.

"Of course, Major, I'm sorry. I'll keep you apprised, I just... I hope you'll remember to take the time to look after yourself. And to... to do what Shepard would do- what he'd want you to do- and not try and carry this all alone. He relied on you and on the crew. Find someone you can rely on going ahead." Kaidan fidgeted, feeling sullen all of a sudden, and nodded half-heartedly.

"I'll take it under advisement, Doctor." He dropped the datapad onto the bed beside him, turned, and after sliding open the MedBay doors retired back to the 'loft' to think.

-2.3

2 months later

-2.3

It wasn't one of his finer moments. He blamed Cortez.

Normandy's Repose was coming together- the crew had erected some some prefab shelters to supplement the ship's damaged facilities, and they'd started cultivating some nearby ground for agriculture, since their provisions wouldn't last forever. Teams had scouted the terrain around the Normandy for about forty square kilometers and discovered no threatening fauna, so that was a weight off their minds. The ship was gradually emptying of equipment and supplies.

Everyone else had been out about the camp, working, and Kaidan had been on his way to see where he could help, when on his way through the cargo bay he heard a muffled sobbing. He followed the sound to a corner behind several crates, and he 'felt' Steve before he actually found him. The former pilot- it didn't seem like a relevant title anymore since the shuttles couldn't even get out through the damaged bay doors- was slumped on the floor with his head in his hands.

"Steve?" Kaidan asked softly. Cortez gave him a brief, acknowledging look, sniffled, and wiped his face on the back of his arm.

"Major. I'm... sorry, Sir, I was just..." Kaidan slowly sat on a crate facing Cortez and gave him an open-ended pause to collect himself. Because of their proximity and the steady growth of everyone's synthempathy- Chakwas had coined the term after consulting with several colleagues back on Earth via QEC- he already had a strong sense of what was on his mind. After a long, sympathetic wait, Steve took a deep breath.

"I was cleaning out the shuttle. I guess I finally gave up on ever flying her again, so I was going over it for anything useful. And I found..." He held up a magnetic Hahne-Kedar clip-on ammo pouch. From Shepard's armour.

Kaidan held out his hand and after a brief hesitation, Cortez passed the pouch to him. Alenko felt its weight... turned it in his hand... opened it and felt the kevlar weave fabric between his thumb and finger. "Yeah, it was his alright," he confirmed. He started to acutely feel the empty space in him yawning again. "Everyone keeps finding these little... reminders. And every time, it's..." It wasn't as hard on everybody, obviously. It wasn't even that hard on Kaidan anymore... most of the time... since he'd been living in their cabin, surrounded by mementos of his commander. He'd even taken up wearing Shepard's N7 hoodie, as he was doing now, the one that Vega used to covet so much. He'd rather immersed himself, and become somewhat desensitized to the nostalgia. But this... feeling Cortez's pain resonating with his own...

"I know you miss him too," Kaidan said. It was still a little awkward, ever since the first time they'd reminisced over Shepard after discovering synthempathy, and since he'd felt the unmistakable confluence between his own feeling of loss and Steve's mourning. He'd told Hadrian as much, that night at Purgatory, but it was different to feel Cortez's longing. How it intertwined with and coloured and tinged his own. And there was something else... something more personal. A reaching out toward Kaidan himself. "And... I know that it isn't always easy, for... for us, being..."

"For me seeing some of him in... in you, Sir," Steve looked up at him and when their eyes met the sensation became that much stronger. Penetrating. Kaidan broke the gaze, feeling awkward, and looked down at the ammo pocket.

"We've talked about this, Steve," he said in a low voice. "It... I understand this... 'transference?' And I know we could... I know the appeal of a little solace." He fought to extricate his own feelings from the impressions he was getting unbidden from the other man. "But I... you know I'm still-"

"I know," Cortez sighed. "I know. I knew when you two finally got your act together that you'd never..." The two sat in silence for another long minute.

"Y'know," Kaidan finally said pensively, "I think you should... keep this. If you want it. I already..." He held the bit of gear back out to Cortez, who looked longingly back up at him but received no eye contact in return. He took the pouch and held it in both hands against his chest. They sat awkwardly for another minute, until Kaidan stood up from his improvised seat. He turned to go find something to do, and heard Cortez behind him, urgently say "Major-"

As he turned back, he felt Steve's arms around his shoulders, wanting the small comfort of an embrace. He held back on the instinct to jump away, or to repel Cortez with his biotics, but there was a flash of dread. As the pilot hugged him, face pressed against his shoulder, he felt a flood of emotions. All that not-quite-requited desire, and sorrow, and loneliness- so like his own, but different. Familiar but foreign, invasive, like catching a slightly mutated strain of a cold back from someone he had given it to. As his own pain mingled and harmonized, as it surged up and threatened to overwhelm him, he returned the embrace for as long as he could stand before extricating himself. He stepped back, cleared his throat, and fought back his tears.

"Carry on, Lieutenant... I'll... we'll get through this, Steve. Eventually." He quickly paced to the elevator and once in the shaft, ran as fast as he could up the steps to the top deck. By the time he made it inside the cabin he and Hadrian had shared, the tempestuous swirl of feelings was sapping the breath out of him, bringing a sucking pain to his chest. He wanted to lash out, use his biotics to hurl things around, but he couldn't bring himself to do any damage. Not in here.

Instead, he biotically pulled the door shut behind him, unzipped and slid off his pants, climbed onto the bed, and reached under the pillow on the side where Hadrian had regularly slept. He pulled out a towel- the one they'd used for... well, everything, on their last few nights together. They'd shared it after a shower they took together, and used it to mop up the sweat they'd both worked during the lust-fueled marathon of back-and-forth give-and-take, used it to clean up each other's bodies afterward. It still smelled so strongly of Shepard's whole body and his sex that it was a potent reminder of his presence.

As he'd done in several desperate, lonely moments over the last couple months, he laid on his back, bunched the towel up to his face, and slid his hand down his boxerbriefs and gripped his stiffening dick. Inhaling deeply, getting intoxicated- drunk off of Hadrian's heady scent- he started stroking, thinking back to their times together. He immersed himself in the memories- of the first time Hadrian had wrapped his warm, hot mouth around Kaidan's cock; of his hand curled firmly around it, pumping rhythmically, slippery with Kaidan's excited emissions; of...

But those weren't doing it this time. He delved deeper, into more intense 'stores' of sense-memory. Eyes starting to tear up, he paused, sat up, and pulled his underwear off completely, chucking them angrily across the room. He draped the towel over his pillow, rolled over on to his knees, spreading his legs, and imagined the warmth of Shepard's hand between his shoulder-blades , pressing his chest down to the bed. He buried his face in the towel, eyes closed but still watering, gulping down the musky, slightly stale odor and resumed stroking himself.

Faster and faster, he pictured Shepard... those smiles- the happy, contented ones, the sly grins, the wolfish looks when his lust and his aggression subtly mixed. The complicated, sad, thoughtful smiles that almost nobody else ever saw. He pictured his friend and lover's naked body, that battle-forged physique... the scars from bullets and crashes and a two year long reconstruction. He recalled that image, glanced over his shoulder, of Hadrian... naked except for his t-shirt stretched over his shoulders and across his back, crawling onto him from behind. He recalled the heat of those thighs against his... hips nesting against his flexing buttocks- a hand squeezing them. He writhed his pelvis, wanting that familiar pressure against it for real, and gasped when- for just a moment- he conjured back the sensation, immediate and alive, of the tip of Hade's erection finding its point-of-entry.

But the instant passed, the perfection of the memory faltered, and he was fumbling clumsily with mere images and scents again. He tightened his grip on his cock and pumped harder, his arm slapping audibly against his hip. The sound helped- like Shepard's hips slapping against him from behind- and he sucked in another deep breath and flexed his sphincter.

The towel started to feel wet with his tears, and it started to activate a more mildew-y smell. Hadrian started to fade slightly. Distraught, Kaidan whimpered and groaned, jacking himself faster and harder, desperate. Focusing his attention, he honed in on Shepard's smell, imagining the times he'd pressed his face here and there- into his neck, the crook of his arm and chest, the curly bush of hair around his cock- and pleaded inwardly for something... for some moment of reconnection. Some kind of solace, or escape. Of solipsism. He'd even settle for oblivion. Or... release. He felt the runaway reaction start inside his pelvis, the wave of frantic euphoria that for just a second carried him away, back in time to their moments together. He sobbed, then gritted his teeth and moaned deeply as he felt surging in his loins, and a hot spray gushing in spurts against his stomach, and the back of his arm.

Then he heard it.

I'm here.

It was different from all the times he'd clutched at some memory of the sound of Shepard's voice, or replayed some audio-log of it. It was ephemeral... ghostly. But it felt present, and perfect. It snapped Kaidan immediately out of the haze of his lonely orgasm, though his body continue to quiver tautly. His face, red and wet with tears, bolted up from the pillow, looking longingly around the room.

"Shepard?" he asked aloud, cautiously. The long silence of the empty room answered, mocking. Fresh tears started running down Alenko's face, and he buried it back into the towel, gulping a breath down to stifle worse sobs.

Yeah, me.

Present. And perfect. He wasn't there but there was... something. A feeling as much as a voice. It was at once distant as though plucked from a whispered conversation across an art gallery and as close as Hadrian's breath hot in his ear, and it echoed in his head, arising as much as remembered. Kaidan had never believed in ghost stories or talk of an afterlife... but it felt like the presence of some spirit. He was reminded of the turians' beliefs that had always sounded so parochial and romantic to him. He looked up and around the room again slowly. There were no apparitions or specters- except for himself- but he reached out, grasping for the faint glimmer of recognition and hope the felt voice offered.

"God, I wish you really were here... I don't know how to keep doing this without you." Alenko sighed, and pressed his forehead gently to the pillow, like to he used to nuzzle with Shepard. "I miss you."

Maybe if we're lucky, we never will.

The threads started to weave into a familiar tapestry, the scene of one of their earlier conversations in this place. Alenko smiled, nostalgic but sad, at the memory of Hadrian sitting so deceivingly still on the floor. It had been such a disarming sight that had gotten him 'off the hook' of his dark mood at the time. He sniffled back tears. "You don't meditate," he murmured as though Hadrian were actually there.

Another kind of training... finding a little peace.

"Becoming 'one with everything,' huh?" Kaidan laughed ever so slightly.

Maybe... when I'm done.

"As long as it includes you," Kaidan repeated slowly. The sensation was... he could visualize it, as though his sorrow were an ice cube in a cup filling with thick, heady, warm, fragrant oil... it was becoming buoyant, and melting, and not exactly mixing, but floating atop the other, pregnant sensation. He felt a hint of anticipation... like the time he'd gone paragliding, that building feeling as he'd gained speed toward the cliff that was his launching point. It wasn't 'hope' on the face of it, but... the phrase "threshold of revelation" bloomed in his mind.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Kaidan opened his eyes. The room felt... less empty. There was still no physical presence but his own, but Kaidan now felt undeniably less alone. Then, looking down at the pillow- his proxy for Shepard's forehead- he noticed something just barely perceptible. A faint constellation of green motes in the tear-stained wet spots in the towel- like fireflies glowing and dimming- so subtle he wasn't even sure it was real.

Was he hallucinating some apparition? The old folk tales couldn't be real, but that feeling of being close again... it grew incrementally stronger and more real. Wanting to believe, against reason, he closed his eyes again and lowered his head again. Please, God, he thought, don't tell me I'm just going crazy. Let this be real.

"I miss you, Shep- Hade. This isn't the home we were going to make- not without you. All I want it you back. Please... are you out there somewhere?" he pleaded quietly.

That way that I seem to you?... when I listen... took practice to tune in.

There was a long, still pause as Kaidan waited, hoping for more. For some further explanation to enter his mind.

Coming for you.

Kaidan grabbed the towel, clutching it preciously to his chest, and rolled off the bed to his feet, looking for his pants.

It had to mean something.

-X

"I'm sorry, Major. We've been over all the wreckage of the Citadel. We've buried tens of thousands who were aboard the pieces that fell to Earth. But we didn't even find Commander Shepard's body," Hackett said. "I don't know what to tell you except to suggest that... we still don't perfectly understand this synthempathy ability we've all acquired. It's possible, maybe, that the changes- the peculiar connections between body and consciousness that have been emerging- just allowed you to re-live a very... vivid memory."

Kaidan shook his head, frustrated. He'd struggled to explain his experience as clearly as he could- the genuineness of it- and if he'd been relating it to a member of the crew in person he knew that they would 'get it.' With time, the strengthening of their new shared gift had gradually actually made it more difficult to obfuscate than to be understood. Indeed, in the months since the war it had come to be the popular understanding that the surprising peace that followed among the various peoples stranded at Earth had been a manifestation of it. The unprecedented ease with which everyone had communicated, and sympathized, and cooperated, had all seemed almost unnatural. Turned out it may well have been exactly that- or rather, part of a new natural order.

Nowadays, reports from Earth suggested that the ability's increasing potency, in particular the near-perfect exchange of feelings and ideas permitted to practiced users via physical contact, was ushering in a paradigm shift. A whole new era of interconnectedness and compassion. Comparison to the geth's descriptions of the 'consensus' were unavoidable, and Kaidan couldn't help but think again of Hadrian sitting on the floor in meditation, and his later explanation of the secular Buddhist teachings he'd admired, and how pleased he would be.

But aside from his own lingering apprehension about 'connecting' directly to others, on account of his own pain, he wasn't close enough to share more directly with Hackett even if he wanted to; they were limited to the crude exchange of words, and he just couldn't seem to make himself understood.

"Admiral, please... I know I can't prove to you that it wasn't just some delusion. I can't even prove it to myself. But you were the last one in any kind of contact with him on Crucible Day, if you can think of anything. Or if there's any way you could have another search conducted. I know it sounds... crazy... it sounds crazy, but I felt a 'reaching out' from somewhere. If nothing else, I'm asking you... I'm begging you, Sir, to keep an open mind."

Hackett's holographic eyes were fixed on the towel in Kaidan's hand. He shrugged and shook his head slightly, sighing. "To try and keep an open mind, Major... I can do that. But at this point, I can't promise any more than that." Kaidan noticed the subtlest inflection of 'promise,' and he sensed that the Admiral was holding something back.

When I trust my instincts.

It was a tiny nudge, but it was enough to convince him to go 'fishing.' "I understand, Admiral," he said. "But... before we sign off... is there anything else I should know?" Hackett hesitated for a long moment, but then 'blinked'- or, his eyes narrowed, at any rate.

"There is something, Major... though I'd meant to hold off until I had better information. I didn't want to say anything to get anyone's hopes up prematurely, but... well, from the sound of it, you might need a possible morale boost." 'Because you're cracking up,' Kaidan imagined the Admiral had meant to add.

"Clearly I'll take even a faint hope at this point, Admiral."

"Well, Major... out examination of the wreckage of the Citadel and the Charon relay has revealed some things about mass relay technology. Quite a bit, actually. More than was learned in the last three thousand years by any of the Council races, since they never dared tamper with them, let alone tear one apart. But now we have two to pore over, and the laws against tinkering are pretty much moot."

"And I suppose with the collection of technical talent that built and flew in with the Crucible... ?"

"Indeed," Hackett nodded. "The whole Crucible task force has been studying the debris, and studying data from Ilos a couple years ago, comparing their notes to data in the Prothean archive on Mars, with a fair bit of help from your friends Javik and Doctor T'Soni. And they've begun formulating some... interesting ideas about ways that the salvaged tech could be adapted."

Coming for you. Kaidan pressed forward, trusting his instincts.

"Just some 'interesting ideas,' Admiral?"

Hackett's brow furrowed, and how tone grew a bit perturbed. "Are you sure this thing doesn't facilitate any kind of synthempatic networking?" he asked suspiciously.

"I have no idea how it could, Sir, but even if it did, I wouldn't use it to pry without permission." Never mind whether or not possibly getting subliminal prompts from a psychic after-sex towel 'counted.'

"Hrm. Alright- but you'd damned well better keep this under your hat, Alenko." The Admiral paused, thinking. "They have gone beyond the purely conceptual stage and begun work on something. A prototype. And that's as classified as we can keep anything these days, under the circumstances. I've had Mars locked down with the team working as secretly as possible on it- how the hell did you know?"

"A little specter told me something was up, Sir," Kaidan said dryly. 'Or a little stain on a spunk rag.'

"Right. Well if you talk to him again, tell him that 'the new age' of openness notwithstanding, I frown on compromising the security of ultra-classified military projects." He still sounded skeptical, but Kaidan could tell the Admiral's curiosity was piqued.

"So they're building a new mass relay then, Sir? Or repairing the Charon relay?" Hackett shook his head.

"No, Major, something a little more ambitious than that. It's a ship. A testbed for incorporating the relay technology as an actual means of propulsion instead of as travel infrastructure. A new engine rather than a new grid of 'highways,' if you will. If they can make it work... well, it would make a new relay network redundant." Kaidan's eyes widened. 'Speaking of 'paradigm shifts,' he thought. Travel at relay speeds without the inherent limitations on destination? It would be revolutionary. "But it's still preliminary, so I do not want this leaked. If this gets out everyone will be clamouring for priority tasking on it, and I don't care to see how they react to the disappointment if it ultimately doesn't work!" Hackett added sternly.

"Understood, Admiral. I'll keep it to myself until you tell me we can announce it."

"Assuming you aren't going to be going around beaming, Major. Try to contain your enthusiasm... even though I know I haven't told you everything you wanted to hear when you called." Was the reference to Shepard actually meant to dampen his mood, make him less likely to betray the good news? Surely Hackett wasn't that cold. But it didn't matter. Kaidan knew what he'd felt, and moreover, he now had some kind of vindication.

The feeling, or voice, or whatever it was, was right.

"We'll be in touch," the Admiral nodded. "Hackett out."

As the hologram dissolved, Kaidan raised the towel- his 'totem' of Shepard- to his face and looked closely at it. Those faint, flickering little motes of light persisted. His doubts were burning away like fog in the morning sun. It meant something.

-X

Chakwas looked up from her scope. Kaidan had been watching, practically holding his breath with anticipation.

"And you said you and the commander used this for..." Karin raised her eyebrow.

"Don't make me say it again, Doc," Kaidan sighed. He didn't blush quite as badly as he had the first time, or the second, but it still wasn't exactly the most dignified or 'officers'-mess-worthy' story.

"And you haven't washed it in almost 3 months... And you've been using it to-"

"Please, God, Karin, I never said I was proud of it. You know damn well that grief can make mourning people do... unusual things." The major put one hand to his face, mortified, but after a moment he pushed himself past the embarrassment and looked her in her accusing eyes. "I just... I need to know."

After a moment Chakwas tapped a couple of buttons on the scanner, and activated the larger display screen on the wall. It displayed a now-familiar picture- the hugely magnified image of a cell, with the faintly glowing ring-like artifact of the synthetic alterations made to their physiology.

"I found numerous epithelial cells... among other kinds... contributed from both you and Commander Shepard. And remarkably, somehow, yes- most remain live. Presumably they've been sustained by the new synthetic architecture. And while the output is miniscule, each one is propagating the same kind of wireless, synthempathetic signal." She leaned against the edge of her desk, stroking her chin in thought.

"So it's possible that I actually did form a connection with-"

"With this horrendous, filthy thing?" Chakwas clicked her tongue and shook her head, exasperated. "I did say I hoped you wouldn't isolate or over-burden yourself, you remember? I was afraid that if you obsessed over Shepard all alone you might become reclusive... and creepy... and just plain weird." She shot him another look, though her expression had softened slightly. "But yes. Maybe. I suppose it's possible. Prolonged close proximity, while you were in a receptive state of mind, could have created a bridge to... well, but that's where things get even more fascinating than I'd previously thought. If you were receiving impressions from a smattering of epithelial cells then the implications are..." He knew where she was going with it.

"When we encountered the rachni back on Noveria years ago, the queen told us they passed along genetic memory- that queens pass down their knowledge to their daughters. Maybe the potential for that isn't limited to them, and they just knew something we don't."

"It's been largely discounted as mumbo-jumbo in human genetic medicine. But... I don't see where it's any more 'impossible' than the other changes we've already experienced." Karin turned back to him with a sympathetic look. "From your description of the experience, however, it doesn't exactly sound like the same quality of 'connection' as is usually established between... well, whole persons. In you or me, the cellular signals seem to cohere and amplify each other, and form a short-range, wireless extension of the consciousness. But even if it were true that individual cells retain some kind of encoded information of a person's experiences, I doubt very much that they could compound to-"

Kaidan raised his hand to interrupt her. He'd heard what he'd been hoping for, he didn't want to hear about the impossible or the improbable. "I've been neglecting this ability, Karin. We both know that I've been... reluctant... to share like that with anybody. I had too much going on of my own to risk dragging anyone else down, or taking on their hurts too. I haven't explored this, or honed it, or refined it, or even learned to deal with the drawbacks. But now..."

"Now you want to spend more time cooped up and huffing this dirty thing. Kaidan I know this must feel like a boon but I really don't think this is good for you!"

Kaidan visibly winced at the inference. "Give me a little credit, Doctor," he said, wounded. "I was looking for something, some way through the pain I was feeling, and I was settling for a distraction. Maybe in the long run this isn't ideal, but I feel like it can get me somewhere better than where I was. If it can bring me back something... anything of Hadrian... it's what I want."

"Wireless communing with a cellular ghost, Kaidan? Really?"

"No, no it's not like that," he insisted, shaking his head and trying to find the right words. He thought of his Hadrian, and it dawned on him like watching the sun come up on a still beach. "It's something to... to meditate on," he corrected her. "You want proof that it's what I really want? Go ahead." He held his arms up at his sides a little. "'Read' me. Feel me. Or whatever we're calling it. You'll know."

Chakwas looked at him, still bothered by doubt. But finally she uncrossed her arms and reached tentatively for his shoulder. When she touched him he felt more than just the warmth of her hand- he felt her concern for him as though it were his own, her skepticism, her questioning- but something else, too. She was at least trying to hear him out. And as he knew that she had to be aware of his innermost feelings now, too, he let her have it. He summoned up whole-heartedly the feeling that the prospect of some renewed link to Shepard gave him. In an instant, Karin's eyes welled up with tears.

"Oh," she said quietly. "I apologize, Major... I knew that you... But I never realized." He felt her withdraw, though a lingering feeling of closeness lingered. "I'll... I'll see what I can do, to... well, you just shouldn't keep going with this. You could get some respiratory infection from mold, or something," She placed her hand on the towel, touching it with a new understanding- new meaning. Like it was a thing of worth, now. "I should be able to collect his... material, and get it back to you. If you can part with it until tomorrow?"

Kaidan nodded, grateful. "I appreciate it, Karin. And I promise, it won't be a crutch... this will help me. I know it will. I feel like... maybe it'll help us all, somehow. There's got to be some reason for it."

The next day, Chakwas would present him with a miniature tissue sample container- a petrie dish about the size of a penny from his grandfather's old coin collection. It was coated with a polymer monolayer and contained everything she had 'recovered' of Shepard, distilled and condensed, and had a small steel hoop bonded to the container's rim, making it resemble a locket somewhat.

As soon as Kaidan put it on his dogtags chain and laid it carefully against his skin, the feeling- that warm, loving presence- returned, like Shepard's hand resting on his chest. He smiled as it arose, and he felt a cautiously relieved happiness emanate from Chakwas, too.

Kaidan touched his finger to the token and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He thought of Hadrian, and his skin tingled.

I'm here.

A smile burst onto his face and his eyes stung with joy he couldn't contain. He'd spent an hour that morning in his cabin, meditating the way Hadrian had explained it to him. And now the 'voice' was clearer. Closer. He opened his eyes and wiped away tears, taking Karin's hand in his- a first, since Crucible Day- and he saw his own joy creep into her eyes, too.

He thought of saying 'thank you.' But he immediately felt from her, first, "I know. You're welcome." They nodded to each other. Kaidan took another deep breath, composing himself, and buttoned up his shirt.

"Time to get to it," he said with a fresh, renewed sense of purpose. "Work to do. People to take care of."

-2.4

7 months later

-2.4

Kaidan looked around the room to make sure he hadn't missed anything. He'd collected and packed his and Hadrian's personal possessions from the loft, and everything else- mostly engineering equipment that had sat idle since Normandy had fled the refit yard in Vancouver almost a year ago- sat secured to the floor. A warm beam of sunlight shone down from the skylight above the bed, full of dancing dust motes.

The comm headset in his hear beeped. "Ten minutes, Major" came EDI's voice.

"Thanks EDI, I'll be right there." He did one last visual sweep of the cabin, zipped up his rucksack, and with a little trepidation bid goodbye. He'd heard promises made about the salvage plan, but just in case they didn't pan out he didn't want to leave anything more unsaid, or unfelt. He reflected on his last 10 months or so in this space, and let the warm feelings fill him up.

Not mine... ours now... home for us

They'd actually shared it for far too short a time- a few weeks, give or take- before he'd been left to share it with a ghost, with his own pain, for three months. But since he'd discovered his solace, it had felt more like a church than a tomb. He held Hadrian's 'totem' between his thumb and finger, the focus of his daily meditations for the last 7 months, and smiled fondly.

He slung his bag over his shoulder, picked up the other case off the floor, and left the room. On his way down the elevator shaft stairs he took another look at the familiar compartments on his way. The CIC on deck two was stripped of all the mobile computers, seating cushions and some of the grated floor paneling on the way to the cockpit for use in the camp that had become their home for most of the last half-year. The monument to lost crew and allies on deck 3 had the name plates- including those etched with the names of the four they had lost since becoming marooned- removed and reverently packed for transport. On deck four the breeze drifted in through the spaces where the windows overlooking the shuttle bay had been before they were converted for use in the camp. When he got to the shuttle bay itself, he was greeted by Cortez, who had his own bag over his shoulder.

"Big day," Steve said.

"Yeah. Big day," Kaidan nodded. He took Steve's hand in his and let the respective warm feelings of their friendship meld as they walked together toward the bay door. When Cortez sensed Kaidan noticing his pack start to slip over his shoulder he let go of Alenko's hand and lifted it back up for him. They continued toward the ramp out to the camp and were joined by Vega and Westmoreland.

"Major," James greeted. Kaidan felt the couple's respect for him like firm ground under his feet, their affection for him, and their excitement for the occasion. He didn't need to ask if everything was ready- Vega anticipated the question and thought 'yes Sir.'

As they marched out of the Normandy into Normandy's Repose, Chakwas and Joker approached from the skeletal frame of the dining hall tent where privates Ohl and Herman were rolling up the canopy. Jeff was beaming, predictably, but Karin's enthusiasm was slightly more contained. As one of the crew he'd spent the most time in contact with, though, their rapport was strong enough that he'd felt her happiness from across the camp from the moment he'd woken up this morning.

"EDI and Samantha say the beacon is up and running. They should be here any minute now. How exciting is this!" Moreau smiled broadly. He still loved saying it all out loud, even the obvious stuff that never required words in the first place.

"The Admiral said they'd be coming from..." he scanned the horizon, counting degrees from the suns, "over there." They all continued down the wide gravel path that had been the main promenade of the camp, to the amphitheater-like assembly space they'd carved into the land for gathering around the fire and holding their more 'formal' consensus sessions to discuss matters of importance to the whole group. EDI and Traynor were fussing over the Normandy's transponder beacon in the center, while a few other crew members who'd completed their tear-down duties watched from the tiered seating.

All eyes fell on him as he approached the dais they had improvised out of a cargo bay floor panel. He felt a warm crush of their admiration and gratitude roll over him.

He took a deep breath and opened himself up to them all, so they could feel his gratitude to them in return. Thank you all," he said, "our surviving and thriving here these last nine months was your success far more than it was mine. I appreciate the trust you placed in me to lead this community, even when I wasn't doing a very good job of living up to it." He looked to Cortez and felt the particular affection coming from him; as he had begun to reconcile his own grief, he'd finally been able to offer Steve the support he was looking for in dealing with his.

"Our time here wasn't easy, but the way you all worked together... the dedication you showed to each other's well-being as well as your own... It actually makes leaving this place kind of sad."

"Not that sad, cacique!" Vega chimed in, bringing a laugh to the whole group.

"No," Kaidan smiled, "not that sad. But it's still a loss, to leave behind this worthy thing that we built here out of... well, no, not out of nothing." He turned to look back at the Normandy, its nose hanging over the promenade for a quarter of the length of the camp. "Out of her. Our shelter during the harder days. Provider of our first walls. Source of our power. Normandy birthed this community. We owe her a lot- certainly a ride home for her bones."

As if on cue, there was a flash in the sky above. The great bulk of a ship surged into view- generally wedge-shaped like a Systems Alliance capital ship but with the spinning gimble-like rings characteristic of a mass relay at the center of its superstructure.

The camp burst into applause and cheers that were felt as much as vocalized and heard by everyone present.

"To that end, ladies and gentlemen- and EDI-" he smiled, "the Council presents the CSV Shepard. First of its kind in a planned line of starships to reconnect the Council worlds. But for today, you can just call it our ride."

"They're hailing, Major," Traynor announced. "Patching them in to our comms."

A moment later Kaidan heard the digital tone indicating the opening of a channel. "This is Captain Jonathan Lavoie of the Shepard, to SSV Normandy. Come in, Normandy." Kaidan tapped the toggle on his headset.

"Major Alenko here, Captain. We have you in sight. And you're a beautiful sight. Welcome to Normandy's Repose on planet Hadrian. We're standing by to receive your shore party."

"Acknowledged, Major. The Council sends its regards. Our shuttles should be to you in about five minutes to start ferrying you and your people aboard. Once you're settled in we'll look at landing and recovering the Normandy." Kaidan's face contorted slightly, confused.

"Sorry, Captain, did you say landing? Isn't your ship a little... big for that?" He heard a chuckle over the radio.

"You'll see for yourself, Major. We're full of surprises."

-X

Half an hour later, Kaidan was on approach to the Shepard aboard one of their rescuer's shuttles with Joker, EDI, Chakwas, Cortez and Traynor. Vega was coordinating the loading of the rest of the camp into the next wave of transports on the planet below. As their shuttle approached its mothership they were able to get a closer look.

"Would you look at that," Steve said, his eyes scouring the hull for details. "She definitely rolled out of an Earth shipyard but I see asari lines... turian influence in the sublight drive arrangement and that sort of cowling... even some geth features. Like they laid a flattened-out mass relay on its side and let each of the Council races stick on bits and pieces."

"It was the biggest collaboration I think anyone's ever seen," their pilot, a Lieutenant Vienneau offered. "All the Crucible experts and the top engineers of the liberation fleet gave their input on top of the pure functional requirements, so you'll see a real mix on board."

"She's big. How many crew?" Kaidan asked.

"I am detecting the embedded signal traffic of thousands of geth within the ship's systems. Am I correct in assuming that their presence aboard reduces the need for organic crew?" EDI jumped in. Vienneau nodded.

"She only runs about a hundred and fifty warm bodies, the rest is handled by geth 'digital crew.' And we carry a couple hundred or so platforms that they can download into when they need to. Or want to."

Joker shook his head in disbelief. "That's wild," he commented. "Less than a year ago we were shooting at each other, and now they run our life support?" He looked at EDI, whose chassis' hand was on his shoulder. "Looks like you were a trend-setter, huh?"

"It is a remarkable advance in organic/synthetic relations," EDI replied. "Owing in no small part, no doubt, to the synthempathy that Crucible Day facilitated between all of us."

"Brave new world," Karin said as Vienneau completed his flyby for them and pulled the shuttle in to the docking bay. A moment later they were down, and the engines went quiet.

The shuttle door opened and the Normandy officers stepped off onto the deck. Kaidan was immediately set upon by Tali, who rushed him and threw her arms around him. Close behind were Liara and Garrus, who outwardly contained their excitement a little better but nonetheless could be felt radiating joy at being reunited. Liara welcomed each of them aboard with an embrace and Garrus shook each of their hands warmly.

"Welcome aboard our mishmash monstrosity," Vakarian grinned, gesturing to the ship around them. "Now... has anyone been keeping my cannons calibrated down there the last nine months?"

"Oh," Joker piped in, "sorry big guy, the cannons kinda' fell out in the crash." Garrus' eyes widened.

"No," he said in exaggerated horror. "No, they couldn't have."

"They did," Kaidan confirmed. "But if it's any consolation, they completely drained the ferrofluid reservoirs in the fight before we left Sol."

"Well," Garrus shrugged, playing up his relief, "at least they got a proper sendoff. Come on, I'll give you guys the tour." The group started to walk out of the landing bay, but Liara put a hand on Alenko's arm urging him to hang back. He took the opportunity to ask a question that was tickling in the back of his mind.

"So, Admiral Hackett said that Javik would be making this expedition too," Kaidan said, noting the prothean's absence.

"Oh he's aboard," Liara replied, "he's in the data center working on something." The rest he heard in his head, carried through her touch. 'Something I wanted to talk to you about in private.'

"There's such a thing anymore?" Kaidan chuckled.

'It takes a little practice to compartmentalize things that you would prefer not to share. It's even more work to distance what you're saying from what you're thinking. But it's a comfort when it's something important- or when you happened to be the galaxy's foremost trafficker in secrets before interstellar civilization was put on hold- not to have to worry about people overhearing. Or prying.'

Kaidan looked her in the eyes- because of his late start in developing his ability, and because it was their first time connecting, it took him a little extra focus to effectively communicate directly, with language rather than feelings or abstract ideas.

'So, what's the secret here?'

With a gentle pull she started leading him down the corridor in the opposite direction from the rest of his group. "Javik and I were discussing what the Council's priorities should perhaps be going forward, now that we have a proven testbed for conduit drive technology. We were hoping you might join us in preparing a presentation to put forward our idea to them."

'Wait,' Kaidan thought toward her, 'are we talking about this out loud or not?'

'I don't want to risk you getting them mixed up walking the halls, Kaidan. Just follow along, I'll let you know.'

"Okay, so, ah, what's your idea for our next step?"

"We think the galaxy needs a symbol to raise spirits and sustain everybody through the hard work ahead. This ship is a start, and we'd like its first mission to be a tour of the Council worlds that have been cut off from each other. With the Normandy's crew- Shepard's crew, aboard the Shepard- to raise morale."

"A 'reunion tour' to bring everyone back together, so to speak?"

"Precisely," Liara nodded. "And along the way, we share the Shepard's plans with the worlds that we visit so that they can start working on their own ships." The pair rounded a corner to the ship's data center and stepped inside, where Kaidan found Javik poring over a star map. A geth platform was with him, operating a console that adjoined a prothean memory drive- like Javik's personal relic, only larger, like the ones from the Mars archive.

"Javik," Kaidan greeted him. The last prothean turned back to acknowledge him and Kaidan saw first-hand the injury he'd heard about. At some point in the fighting on Earth, one of his eyes had been put out by a marauder.

"Major." Javik looked to Liara, who in turn looked to the geth.

"Delegate, if you would?"

"Certainly, T'soni-Doctor. Compartment security surveillance routines suspended. Privacy mode enabled." The geth returned to its work without missing a beat.

"Thank you, Delegate. Alright, we can speak freely now," Liara said. She turned toward Kaidan, reached for his chest tentatively, and in his head he received an impression of what she intended. "May I?" she asked.

Kaidan undid the top two buttons of his tunic and pulled out his dogtags, including his 'Hadrian pendant.' Liara's figner hovered over it a moment, hesitatingly. "This is it?" she asked. He'd carried it for months now, but the reminder of what it was from someone else who'd been with them from the beginning made him a little sad again.

"This is it," he said, nodding. "You... you can, if you want to." Liara looked into his eyes a moment, then touched her finger to it. He felt her emotions through their link- a bit of her own sadness, and nostalgia... but there was something else, too. It was then that he noticed Javik had approached and was watching with interest. Liara turned to him, slipped her hand around underneath Kaidan's so that they were holding the pendant's up together, and gave Javik a questioning, optimistic look. Javik in turn reached out- without asking, as such, Kaidan noticed- and touched the little disc that held the preserved cells that survived Hadrian. He closed his remaining three eyes, but they still twitched behind their lids like when Kaidan had seen him using his people's psychometric ability to 'read' people and objects. Suddenly it occurred to Kaidan- embarrassing him a little that he'd never thought of it before- that what he'd been doing with his memento since discovering it, it may have borne some similarities to what the protheans could do with the chemical encoding and transmission of memories. In fact, the protheans' ability suddenly seemed very relatable.

"So," Liara asked, hopefully, "do you think it will be enough?"

Javik took another moment in repose with the totem of the human who had woken him from his fifty-thousand year sleep. Finally he opened his eyes and looked meaningfully at Kaidan and Liara.

"Perhaps," he answered. Alenko felt a surge of exaltation wash over him from Liara.

"Enough for what?" he asked, confused. All he was getting from her were feelings, but she wasn't sharing any specific conceptual ideations.

"I'm sorry, Kaidan," Liara said, remembering herself. "I still have some of those guards up around my... Here, let us show you." She gestured toward the star map, and Javik returned to the work station he'd been studying. He directed a look at the geth apparently named Delegate, and coordinating their work via a link of their own- something Kaidan never thought he'd imagine in another 50,000 years, given the way the prothean had talked about synthetics during their time together aboard the Normandy- they completed writing, and then initiated some sort of program that began to play itself out on the holographic map.

Conical rays started extending from a seemingly random smattering of stars, sweeping across broad swaths of space and gradually converging, honing in on one point.

"In my research of my people's archive on the outpost we had in your system, I found a collection of references-" Javik began.

"Well, we found a collection of references," Liara jumped in, not quite chastising his oversight. "Scouring catalogues of data for meaningful connections is a rather substantial part of my own work."

"Very well," Javik conceded. "We uncovered a collection of references. Anecdotes, largely. All alluding to something hidden from the official record, but revealed all the same, by a number of inadvertent references in transmitted memories." He looked squarely at Liara before adding "which was a 'layer' of the archival data no one but a prothean could have interpreted. At least... not before everyone in the galaxy acquired this collective faculty."

"He still refuses to call it 'synthempathy,'" Liara sniped, teasingly. Javik ignored it.

"After compiling and analysing every reference, we believe we have determined the location- and more importantly the nature- of what was hidden."

It was all very interesting- and nice to see Javik and Liara had formed such an effective professional relationship post-crisis- but its relevance was still lost on Kaidan. "Okay," he shrugged, trying to follow, "so... ? What is it?"

"Another secret research outpost," Liara answered, "like Ilos was. Just as well-guarded from public knowledge, though with a different mandate; where Ilos was studying mass relay technology and trying to reproduce it, this facility was conducting biological research. Specifically, the resurrection of important protheans." The excitement in her voice rose. "From cell cultures."

"Cloning you mean?" Kaidan shook his head, uncertain. "We've been able to clone people for over a century. All you get is basically a duplicate body with a blank slate as far as memory or personality... Believe me, the thought occurred to me when I realised what I had. But a Shepard clone wouldn't be my- it wouldn't be our Hadrian Shepard, with all of the experiences that shaped him and made him the person we cared about. What good does this do us?" Liara raised her hand to still his rushing to judgment.

"This was different," she said hopefully.

"What we could piece together indicated that the outpost was researching a biological process- one that took advantage of my people's ability, to unfold the memories encoded at a genetic level during the clone's gestation so that when they awoke, the individual would be restored in full," Javik explained.

Kaidan's eyes widened and he looked back and forth between his colleagues in disbelief. But within, his heart leapt.

"Wait... you're... you're saying that if we found this place... there's some chance that we could-" He looked down at the pendant in his hand. Liara closed his hand around it and cupped his hand in hers. He felt her happiness flowing to him through their contact, and found it mingling with his own growing elation. "And he... he'd be just the way he was? Or at least, the way he was when he left... left these behind?"

"There is some amount of latency," Javik said. "My people found that it could take a few days for information to be 'written' to the deep genetic memory of our bodies, but it varied between individuals and with the intensity of the memories being encoded. And that was without the synthetic architecture that the Crucible Day event added to all organic sentients in the galaxy. We do not know how their work- if it still exists there- could potentially incorporate the changes."

"But it's something," Liara jumped in. "When Admiral Hackett told me about your... token... we'd already been investigating the prothean archive- specifically anything connected with the Crucible data- for anything that could help us understand the biological changes we'd discovered. And one thing led to another, led to a rumour, and well- you know me and rumours," she smiled.

Kaidan nodded, understanding, and the three of them stood for a minute in silent reverie over the notion. Gradually, another question came to the major's mind.

"So then... why all the secrecy bringing this up to me?"

There was a pregnant pause.

"We haven't actually told the Council about this yet," Liara confessed.

-2.5

CSV Shepard, conducting recovery operations of SSV Normandy, the next day

-2.5

"There are good reasons to explore this possibility, Councilor, you know it as well as I do. It's Shepard. He's important," Kaidan said. He'd used the Shepard's QEC to contact the new Council that had been assembled at Earth after the loss of the Citadel and present Liara and Javik's findings, and gotten the asari councilor for several minutes out of her doubtlessly busy schedule. And she seemed reluctant to commit.

"This is not news to me, Major. The whole galaxy mourns along with you. Even the provisional government of the remaining batarian refugees, who wanted him tried and executed for alleged crimes against their species, has given him accolades. There was even unanimous support for naming the testbed ship after him- which was unprecedented. Nevertheless, we have more urgent priorities for its maiden flight. We need to disseminate the ship's designs to allied shipyards that lack QEC devices, so that they can start efforts on producing their own conduit drives, to try and restore some semblance of galactic infrastructure."

"Please, Councilor, you don't know what this could mean!" Kaidan insisted.

"I am quite well-informed, Major, believe me. I do know how personal Commander Shepard's loss was for you. I'm aware of the relationship you were engaged in- in point of fact, I had my reservations about it, though at the time in my position as an adjutant to our councilor, they only amounted to so much." Allesyri said with a mix of sympathy, but also disapproval.

"Reservations? What reservations? If you're saying what I think, I'm surprised to hear it from you of all people! Reservations? Because of what, Councilor? Because we're both-"

"Spectres, Major," Allesyri interrupted, narrowing her eyes slightly. "Because you were both Spectres. The first and second human Spectres, and so there was concern... that were a conflict ever to arise between the two of you, or were one of you to breach the Council's trust- another Saren scenario, if you will- that an intimate liaison between you could cloud the ability of one to deal with the other appropriately, with objectivity and fealty to the Council. And now? Here you are, pleading a very personal case for why you should be permitted to take the Council's first new ship capable of truly effective interstellar travel on a mission to pursue... what? A dream? A grieving lover's wish?" Kaidan's face reddened. She had a point, and he knew it. But it did nothing to detract from the feeling- the certainty in his heart- that Shepard had saved the galaxy, and that something was owed for that. And if Javik and Liara were right...

"It's a temporary diversion out of the gate, Councilor, for the hope of restoring to us a genuine goddamned hero for the galaxy to rally behind during this trying time for all of us. Just imagine if the Shepard arrived at those shipyards you mentioned with Hadrian Shepard aboard, delivering those plans in person. Imagine the boost it would give us all. Everyone would understand making the effort. Everyone would respect it. And if... if it doesn't work out, then what has that effort and respect really cost you?" Allesyri crossed an arm over her waist and put her other hand over her mouth, contemplating Alenko's argument, though she wished as a matter of course that he were showing a bit more deference. "All I'm asking for is a little time, Councilor. We stand to lose so little for it, and we stand to... to gain so much."

After a long, thoughtful pause, Allesyri nodded slightly. She lowered her hand, booted up her omni-tool and entered something in its interface. "Obviously it is not my decision alone, Major," she said in a conciliatory voice, "but... your reasoning is valid, and your passion is... moving. So you may consider me persuaded. I will do what that I can to make your case to my colleagues, to convince them to place the Shepard at your disposal for this endeavour."

Kaidan breathed a sigh of gratitude. "Thank you, Councilor. I know this is a long shot, but I truly believe it'll be worth our time. At least we'll be able to say we tried."

"If yours and Commander Shepard's histories are any indication, Major... I believe we can be optimistic about anything that you're trying to do. I suspect it is redundant for me to say it, but... have faith, Major. I will be in contact as soon as I have news."

-X

It had been four days and there had been no reply. The Council hadn't taken any of his calls, and after using the large, insect-like mechanical arms the geth had incorporated into the design of the Shepard's lateral docking bays to scoop up the Normandy for transport in the starboard bay, the 'conduit-drive' testbed had set out on its original mission to deliver blueprints to Palaven or its nearest colony with any remaining industrial capacity. It was, admittedly, impressive being aboard the new vessel and seeing its revolutionary propulsion system in action- jumps between stars tens of light-years apart were virtually instantaneous, but each one required finding some body to discharge the ship's electrical charge to, as operating the drive once basically produced the same build-up as running an FTL drive for several days.

But they were using that fantastic new engine to go in the wrong direction.

"How can they drag their feet on this?" Kaidan grumbled, leaning against the window frame with an arm over his head. He squeezed his pendant between his finger and thumb, and turned back towards his assembled friends in the shipboard lounge.

I could never have left you behind.

"Why haven't they green-lit this wild prothean goose-chase that could only give us back the man who saved all their asses?"

He immediately noticed the confused narrowing of Javik's remaining three eyes, and he pre-empted the ancient alien's question by 'thinking' the idea of a wild goose-chase at him.

"If I were a more cynical type, I might suggest that our esteemed new councilors were worried about a resurrected Commander Shepard- resurrected again, I mean- stealing some of their thunder," Garrus said dryly. "Imagine if he were back, and everyone was suddenly turning to him asking what the galaxy should do instead of them."

"It might not be that crass," Liara sighed. "It's possible that they're just worried- that some prothean experiment from the cobwebs of history could bring him back, but... I don't know... 'wrong,' somehow? All of our hopes for what he could represent to people, imagine how they would be turned on their head if we could bring him back but it didn't work quite right. If he were vegetative, or deranged, or..." She rubbed her temple and looked beyond Kaidan out the window at the rings of the planet they were pulling into orbit of to ground their drive charge. It was obvious that she was frustrated, too, but she was trying to understand their leaders' undisclosed reasons for withholding their blessing from their proposed mission.

"It may really just be that they want to get the galaxy to work on these new ships," Chakwas offered. "The sooner they're rolling off the lines, the sooner colonies are reconnected, goods and people start moving again, and people get back to feeling like all's right with the galaxy again."

"Or it may just be that they think he's done, and everybody's fine with him being gone, and he isn't a priority at all," Cortez brooded. His own frustration was potent, and taking up a fair amount of 'space' in the room, like a dark cloud swelling around him. He was taking the delay hard, at least partly because after Kaidan had helped him through much of his mourning, he had come to feel a personal stake in Alenko's happiness, and in the prospect of reuniting him with the man he himself had felt some longing for.

"Speculating is pointless," Javik interjected with his usual tact. "We should be investigating the outpost and we are not. Your leaders are short-sighted." Given the nature of the work suggested by their digging through the archive, Kaidan supposed that Javik might be hoping to find more than just research data at the inferred prothean facility. If they'd been working on keeping important protheans alive in perpetuity... "If they will not approve an expedition, we should seize this vessel and embark upon one anyway."

"Mutiny, Javik? Really?" Garrus didn't sound disapproving so much as surprised. If anything, his tone sounded a bit like sly encouragement. "That's an awful lot of insubordination for a loyal soldier, isn't it?"

"I have learned that many things are done differently in this cycle," Javik retorted. "Loyalty to one person can supercede loyalty to a chain of command, if that one is more worthy to lead than the leaders one finds have attained power."

"And we're back to a hypothetical, more cynical version of yours truly," Garrus said, hand raised.

"Frankly I don't give a damn about their reasons," Kaidan snapped. Everyone looked to him, a bit surprised. "They owe him better than this. They owe all of us better." The room fell into silence as everyone thought about their predicament. After a moment, it was Vega who spoke up.

"So... what if we did want to hijack the ship and take it for a spin?" All eyes turned to him, though the looks behind them were a hodge-podge. "What? Don't gimme' those looks, perras, I know I wasn't the only one thinking it. Even before Javik said it out loud I knew I wasn't the only one."

"We couldn't," Chakwas said, shaking her head. "Not unless anyone's figured out how to actually ignore the aversion- or more like revulsion- that comes with harming other people when you can feel their pain. When synthempathy means you can see yourself through their eyes and know the wrong that you're doing them, without depersonalizing them or objectifying them." And she really was speaking for them all- the age of synthempathy owed its peace to the fact that hurting others had become deeply, unavoidably hurtful to the aggressor. Speculation was, that that was what had stopped the Reapers 'harvest' cold in its tracks. That the ancient machines had been overcome by the suddenly felt horror and pain that they'd been inflicting upon billions of people.

Liara piped in in partial agreement. "I know that even if I can still keep secrets safely in my own head, I don't even really feel right threatening people anymore. But... what if we didn't have to commandeer the ship? What if we just tried... you know... persuading the crew to go along with it?"

"You want to try and talk them into letting us mutiny against the Council?" Garrus asked, a little amused.

"No- into sharing our conviction."

"Oh, there'd be a conviction alright. Not that I'm filing that in the 'cons' category, for the record."

"Who would even need persuading?" Kaidan asked impatiently. "Everyone aboard this ship should know what would be right." He lowered his voice slightly. "Unless the geth virtual crew might stand in the way?"

"Your concern is unwarranted, Alenko-Major," came a synthesized geth voice over the room's intercom. Kaidan rolled his eyes at the futility of trying not to be overheard by programs that inhabited the ship itself.

"Delegate?" Liara asked, looking up at the ceiling.

"Yes T'Soni-Doctor. You need not fear our intervention if you should wish to appropriate this vessel for tasking to restore platform Shepard-Commander to full functionality. The geth subset of the emerging galactic consensus concurs with your objective. Shepard-Commander secured peace between geth and the creators. Shepard-Commander secured victory over the Old Machines. Shepard-Commadner's platform has established, demonstrable value as a stabilizing influence and tactical asset. We believe that the expenditure of certain resources and runtime for the purpose of recouping his presence would be a sound investment, and warrants pursuit."

"But he's being sentimental, of course," Joker quipped. Everyone chuckled- except EDI, of course.

"In fact, Delegate's reasoning is shared by ninety-one point eight seven percent of the geth crew aboard, and by eighty-seven point three nine percent of the geth more generally according to their FTL comm chatter," she informed them. "Their arrival via purely logical processes at a conclusion similar to our own could be taken as a strong affirmation for the legitimacy of appropriating the Shepard."

"Well when people who care and programs who calculate agree that someone is worth the trouble, it sounds to me like you should take this directly to the captain," Garrus advised. "And to hell with what the Council thinks of it, they can court-martial you when we get back."

"Don't you mean court-martial us, Garrus?" Kaidan grinned.

"What?" the turian shrugged. "This is technically an Alliance-operated ship under Council authority, but I'm not with the Alliance or the Council ever since I left C-Sec. I'm just a turian military contractor- who's going to court-martial me if you steal this ship and I happen to be aboard? Even if I do agree with it."

"How do you cover that ass so well with the stick sticking out of it? It must look like a big top tent." Joker prodded with a smirk.

"You spend a lot of time admiring the tent in my pants, Joker?" The pair's fencing brought smiled to everyone's faces- except EDI- and relieved some of the tension inherent to the topic of their discussion thus far.

"Garrus has a point, Major," Vega said, soliciting a snort from Moreau, but he continued undistracted. "But if they want to bring you up on charges I'll be right there beside you. If we can have Shepard back- if there's even a chance- we should do it. The commander was the best thing to ever happen to the galaxy. We owe him giving it a shot at bringing him back from the dead. Again."

Kaidan could feel the sentiment growing and radiating from everyone assembled. There were understandable undercurrents of tension. If the plan met with resistance, no one had really put forward a way to circumvent the fact that hurting other people had gone rather 'out of fashion' in the new galactic normal. But he had to believe that the "emerging galactic consensus" as the geth called it was worth something- that his feeling would be shared by the captain. And if not... well, they'd jump off that bridge if they came to it.

As he nodded to his crewmates and told them he would speak with Captain Lavoie, he subtly rubbed his pendant while they broke off into smaller groups and left the observation lounge.

"What do you think about all this, huh?" he murmured quietly. "Should I be worried about you coming back a zombie, or would you even want this? Would you accept just being left to rest?" He looked out upon the planet below as it grew in the window, and tried to imagine what Shepard would want. He thought to how Hadrian had defended himself- with poise and sympathy- when he had questioned Cerberus' reconstruction of the vanguard. He thought of running his fingernail over those fine white scars and the second chance they represented. And he recalled that look he'd seen on Hadrian's face... the last look he ever saw on his face... that absolute resolve in what he was about to do- the certainty he'd accepted that he was probably about to die to hurl Kaidan out of harm's way. But there was also no doubt in his mind about the lengths Shepard would have gone to for him.

And he thought about about the too-short time they'd had together, but how neatly- how easily- they had 'fit' together when they finally, almost two and a half years after they'd met and apparently felt (and fumbled around) the gravity between them, started exploring their mutual feelings. It hadn't been fair. After all they'd been through, all they'd suffered and sacrificed... they deserved their chance to be happy together. To grow old together.

Life ain't about what we deserve, is it?

It rang through, but it wasn't what he'd wanted to hear. He wondered if he wasn't 'colouring' things with his own anxiety. Kaidan closed his eyes to focus his attention on that feeling of connection with his lost love. "What would you do, lover?" he whispered.

Trust my instincts.

Kaidan's instincts said he had to try.

-2.6

two weeks later

-2.6

CSV Shepard dropped out of its zero-mass corridor and decelerated into view of a remote garden world. Even before the destruction of the mass relay network, this system would have been months away from the nearest relay at FTL. Lonely in its orbit of an obscure orange sun, Javik told them the prothean name for it had been Nibanna Vedi.

Nibanna. It seemed fitting to Kaidan, somehow. Maybe the serendipity was a good sign. Or maybe it was a seed from prothean language, planted deep in the racial subconscious of humanity in the ancient past that had simply endured the ages.

"Entering orbit, Lavoie-Captain," the geth platform at the navigation station reported. Shepard's science officer, an asari named Kelavestra, examined her console's readouts and conferred with one of the other geth crew over her headset. After a moment of jointly analysing the sensor readings, she reported.

"Spectrometry indicates an arid oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Temperature readings are a bit brisk- thirteen Celsius on average. Gravity is point nine two gee." She looked back over her shoulder at the captain's position. "No electromagnetic signals traffic, but I'm beginning scans for any signs of an outpost."

From his seat on the raised, Normandy-style command station Lavoie looked over to Kaidan leaning on the rail that circumscribed the central holographic display, which was now projecting a detailed infographic of the planet below rather than the galactic disk. "I don't suppose your prothean data offered any information that could help narrow this down? With no EM emissions to trace it could take a while to find any artificial structures, if there even are any left. If there really ever were any."

Kaidan in turn looked to Javik and Liara, but Liara shook her head.

"The references we found gave us the location of this system- transmitted memories from the researchers that contained sense impressions, including views of the stars from the outpost that we were able to reverse-plot. But a specific point planet-side... no. I'm afraid not."

"Well," Lavoie said, shifting in his chair to try and get comfortable, "let's hope we find something soon, the QEC has been ringing off the hook since we went AWOL. I'm not sure how much longer I can ignore their hails."

"On the bright side," Alenko mused, "at least you don't have to worry about them sending another ship out to reel you in. Since- you know- this is the only one out here."

"Well, at least there's that," Lavoie replied drolly.

"If I might," Javik chimed in, nodding toward the hologram of the planet. "In the time of our empire, establishment of an outpost on a planet such as this would would have followed certain doctrines. A secret base would have favoured someplace like a valley, near water, in the equatorial latitudes- terrain that was sustainable and defensible." He pointed to a few spots on the hologram. "It could not hurt to focus your initial search here, and here."

Lavoie nodded, and the navigator relayed the coordinates to the helm to begin plotting a search pattern. "It's as good a plan as any," the captain shrugged, "Well, Major, if you want to keep your people on stand-by to join an expedition team, I can let you know when- if- we find anything. Off the record, of course. On the record, you're mutineers who've forced us from our mission for this fool's errand- wink, wink, nudge, nudge."

Kaidan smiled, appreciative that Lavoie had unofficially approved of their diversion. It would probably cost him his command the next time they pulled in to a Council port that had communication with Earth, but he'd exercised his discretion as the master of his ship, as a personal favour to the heroic host of the Normandy. There'd probably be hell to pay for all of them. But if it meant spending the rest of his days in a stockade with Shepard visiting him, he had to think it would be worth it.

"Thanks Captain. I know I've been saying it for two weeks now, but my whole crew and I are really grateful that you've gone off the reservation to let us check this out. Unofficially, of course."

Lavoie leaned back in his chair, projecting an air of confident nonchalance. "Don't mention it. I'm serious, please don't mention it. Besides, I heard a story about a certain Alliance officer who once stole his own ship to hunt down a lead off the books. With a certain staff lieutenant by his side. And as I recall, that turned out alright."

"I'll be next door waiting for the word, if that's alright with you," Kaidan said, and after receiving an affirmative nod from Lavoie he left the bridge. He made his way through Shepard's corridors and down to the starboard landing bay. From the observation booth he looked out at the docking sleeve and, at its other end, held in the careful grip of the loading arms, was the Normandy.

He passed through the Shepard-side airlock, down the gangway and into Normandy's airlock. Power had been restored by umbilical connects, and mass effect fields had been established to contain the crippled frigate's atmosphere for their voyage, allowing engineering crews to continue repair efforts in-flight. Once aboard, he retired to the loft. Like most of the ship, it had been virtually emptied in preparation for their departure from Xi Bootes, before they'd discovered that the entire vessel was going to be recovered. But since then, Kaidan had at least re-made the bed, replaced a lamp, and put back a couple of his and Hadrian's personal effects to make it feel like it was still his.

As he laid down on the bed he removed his tags from his shirt and held his pendant, silently 'communing' with his memories as he looked to the pillow where Shepard's head used to lay looking back at him. If this worked, and they could somehow restore his commander... he smiled wistfully, trying to imagine that face in front of him again, and the life they might have together.

"You think this is crazy?" he whispered, thinking back to their first 'date' together on the Citadel. The Citadel that had exploded, taking Hadrian with it. He found increasingly that he had to turn his thoughts of Hadrian toward a wished-for future, as their past- the places they'd shared, in particular- was growing smaller and harder to keep in focus in his rear-view.

If we can just avoid... spending another two years dead.

"Almost ten months now," Alenko sighed. "I've still got a little over a year left to beat that deadline... Jeez... Served with you for three months, mourned you for two years. Served with you again... was with you, finally, for a month, and now been without you for nearly a year. When are we going to catch our break, eh?"

He waited, but no particular memory of Shepard echoed in his mind.

"It's okay," he whispered- to himself, really- and put his hand on the empty pillow. "I'm not really asking this time. Trying to make it happen instead. Like you would have. No more hesitating."

-X

"Major Alenko? Hello, Major?"

Kaidan snapped awake, and looked over at the softly glowing holo-projected alarm clock. He'd been asleep for about four hours. Now the voice of Captain Lavoie over the intercom roused him, sounding like he'd been trying unsuccessfully for some time.

"Yeah- yeah, I'm here, what is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

"We found something, Major. If you'd like to join us in the port landing bay, I've told the rest of your expeditionary team to assemble."

Kaidan was already on his feet, headed for the door with his pack over his shoulder.

Several minutes later, he strode onto the port hangar deck and met Captain Lavoie and his security chief, a vanguard Alliance lieutenant named Alan Reagan, Kelavestra, as well as Javik, Liara, EDI, Chakwas, Vega and Cortez in the port shuttlebay. They had loaded a pair of Kodiaks with gear for their search- equipment for interfacing with prothean technology, in particular- all they'd been waiting for was a place to look.

"What have we got?" Kaidan asked, unable to hide his excitement. Lavoie passed him a datapad displaying a topographic map of the surface, with a geometric form highlighted.

"An artificial structure, and a faint heat signature suggesting an underground power source," Kelavestra replied. "Still no signal traffic, but it was in a region suggested by Javik, and it's the only artifice we've detected anywhere so far."

"It's a lead- that's good enough for me," Kaidan answered. "I just wish we had an idea of what to expect."

As the shore party boarded the shuttle, with Cortez taking the controls and EDI in the co-pilot seat, Kaidan exchanged hopeful looks with Liara. The excitement during the flight down to the surface was palpable.

"If it is simply a derivative of cloning technology," Liara started musing out loud, "and if the equipment is still intact, we'll probably have to figure out how to adapt systems designed with the prothean quad-helical DNA structure for use with human genetic sequencing."

"That, or we may have to try and determine how the 'assimilation process' referred to transcripts genetic memory, and try rather to reproduce that in proven human cloning processes," Karin added, though she sounded as though that would be the harder, less ideal option.

"If we do find everything we're hoping, and we bring Shepard back just like he was- or at least, like he was just before he left behind the stuff you recovered- how strange is that going to have to be for him?" James pondered. It was a legitimate question; assuming he was resurrected with the memories he had shortly before Crucible Day, he'd be back thinking that the galaxy still needed saving. How would they explain to him that he was the clone of a man who'd died delivering their victory? Would he ever be able to make peace with the idea that 'his work' was actually complete? Would he be racked with some kind of existential anxiety about being a clone? Would the 'new' Shepard have the synthempathetic ability that they'd all acquired the day of the 'old' Shepard's death? Could they use that to connect with him and fill in the blanks for him?

Kaidan had already thought of them all, of course, and he had no idea how to answer any of them. But it didn't matter. He stood to have his Hadrian back, in the flesh. The galaxy stood to have its icon back among the living. Whatever the challenges, he would give it his all to try and make it work.

Slipping his pendant out of his collar and cradling it between his thumb and finger, as dear as it had been to him these last seven and a half months, it suddenly felt like precious cargo. They couldn't be on the ground fast enough for his liking.

-2.7

2 days later

-2.7 [suggested soundtrack "Swans" by Unkle Bob]

Kaidan sat on the floor of his cabin at the foot of his bed- their bed- weeping.

Everything had fallen apart on him before- when he'd accidentally killed Vyrnus on Jump Zero as a teenager and been told that the whole BAaT program meant to teach him to master his biotics was being shut down as a result; the destruction of the Normandy SR1 and losing Shepard the first time; the fall of Earth, when he'd feared his whole family dead; and, of course, Crucible Day, when Shepard had died again. But none of those had been preceded by quite as much hope. Each of those breaking points in his life had either been surprises- shocks to the system that could be accepted as unpredictable misfortunes- or half-expected, dreaded outcomes of dire situations that could be accepted as just the way things were bound to turn out.

But this time... he'd had so much reason to hope.

The sound of Liara's enraged voice echoed in his head.

"A biological process? Is that what your people called this- this abomination? This repulsive theft and objectification of people? This rape of a culture? A biological process?"

Javik hadn't attempted any justification- not that he'd ever seemed inclined to defend the ways of his long-lost people or their empire- even as he was assailed by the tempest of the asari's rage and disgust. Perhaps he'd been among them long enough to know that it would have been pointless.

Nibanna Vedi's secret hadn't been some cloning facility, not in any conventional understanding. On the floor in front of him sat a datapad with the compiled translated logs they'd extracted from the dilapidated outpost's memory cores. Its decade-long history in all the ugly, abhorrent details. Its full, thorough accounting of a crime. It was the meticulous record of an atrocity. An atrocity that had a name.

The adori.

-X

1 hour earlier

-X

The shore party stood around the Shepard's conference room table, strewn with datapads displaying files recovered from the prothean outpost on the planet below. The hardest part had been getting past the security locks into the subterranean bunker, but once inside, Javik's facility with the ancient computing systems had made recovering the research data relatively straightforward.

"So, then... what do we know?" Kaidan asked, looking around the table. He'd portioned out the survey responsibilities among his experts while the rest ran support. Each of them clearly had a different view of what they'd found- EDI was predictably detached, Javik took his usual pragmatic view, and Liara... well, Liara was fuming darkly in a corner. The others had shown up to the debriefing, but sat in uncomfortable silence.

EDI began. "We have deduced that approximately fifty thousand years ago, when the protheans first encountered the primitive asari on Thessia, they found a very different socio-biological dynamic from modern Thessia. Like humans, there were the morphologically 'female' asari we know- but there was also a companion population analogous to human males. Both were capable of asexual reproduction by melding nervous systems to facilitate a re-sequencing of their own genetic code."

"But were they one species, like human males and females, or- I'm sorry, I still don't really understand a lot of this..." Captain Lavoie enjoined.

"The protheans clearly considered us two distinct species," Liara cut in, looking down through narrow eyes at her own report. "One wonders how they came to a different conclusion when they discovered humans."

There was more uncomfortable silence, but EDI evidently didn't catch it, and took the pause as a cue to continue.

"The protheans called these 'male' asari 'adori,' classifying them as a distinct species based on some morphological differences- specifically, the adoris' reaction to the introduction of alien genetic material, and a radical variance in their life-cycle."

"That radical variance being?" Kaidan looked to Liara, who had handled the analysis of that portion of the dossier. He wanted to hear from her before Javik- he frankly wanted to put off Javik's contribution as long as possible.

"Whereas asari live approximately a thousand years, progressing through three roughly defined stages- maiden, matron and matriarch- and then dying, these 'adori,' once they matured around two hundred years of age, would normally live for about five hundred years before dying of natural causes. Unless they mated, which- at any age- initiated a 'regenesis,' whereb the melding triggered a chrysalis stage and metamorphosis." Liara's explanation was as clinical as she could manage.

"And the outcome of that metamorphosis depended on their mate?" Lavoie asked.

"Yes. In either case, they essentially took on the genetic identity of their mate, emerging from their chrysalis bearing an offspring that was a fusion of the two parents. If two adori melded, both entered a chrysalis and emerged several months later, each gestating a unique new adori, each having adopted the other's physical form and memories, effectively swapping bodies. With the additional effect of rejuvenating their new body's cellular biology to a post-adolescent condition."

"Reminiscient of the turritopsis nutricula hydrozoan of Earth, whose medusa can initiate a process of cellular transdifferentiation and revert to a polyp stage," EDI pointed out. Liara continued.

"If an adori melded with an asari, he entered the chrysalis stage and emerged transformed fully into an asari, effectively becoming his mate's clone approximating her early maiden stage, and gestating another, completely novel asari offspring." Joker's hand shot up in the air.

"Wait- is it just me or does that sound like... I mean, one of these adori 'guys' could basically get it on with other 'guys' and live forever, swapping bodies with a fuckbuddy every time, or he could do it with an asari once, become an asari himself- her duplicate, no less- and cap his... or, uh, her life at another seven hundred years or so? That's a hell of a choice isn't it?"

He wasn't sure whose look was the most cutting- Kaidan's, Cortez's, or Liara's. "Uh... no offense," he said sheepishly.

"It raises certain interesting demographic paradoxes," EDI volunteered, "whereby in isolation, a population of asari and adori that did not interbreed would likely see an inevitable crowding-out of the asari by the adori, who would extend their lifespans every time they increased their numbers. On the other hand, if their mating practices favoured pairings with asari, the adori themselves would likely have gone extinct as their host disproportionately converted into more asari. It may also help elucidate the modern asari taboo about intraspecies mating, as adori converting to genetic duplicates of their asari partners would reduce genetic diversity, potentially becoming deleterious over time. It seems likely that, short of a deliberate, conscientious eugenics program to maintain a population balance and prevent 'incestuous' pairings, it is probable that one of the cohort races would eventually have supplanted the other."

And as if on cue, Javik opened his mouth. "Which may be part of why my people-"

"Why they abducted every adori from Thessia and brought them here?" Liara pounced. "So then it was 'for our own good,' and not for your empire's selfish purposes?"

"Clearly they had another motive," Javik conceded. "When they discovered the outcome of an adori melding with a novel, compatible life-form, they thought that they could employ that biological process-"

Liara slammed her datapad down on the table in front of her and rose to her feet, unable to contain her anger. It radiated from her like the blast of an opened kiln and unnerved everyone in the room. "A biological process? Is that what your people called this- this abomination? This repulsive theft and objectification of people? This rape of a culture? A biological process?" Everyone sat in stunned silence, even EDI. After a tense moment, Javik sighed.

"They are their words, not mine. Liara. You know that I understand their reasoning. When they discovered that an adori/prothean melding, because of the ability of both races to read and transfer genetic memory and the adori's wholesale assimilation of their mate's DNA, they believed that the lives of important protheans could be preserved by melding with adori."

"Stealing said adori's life so that the prothean VIP could be reborn in a commandeered body!"

"And you presume that I would approve," Javik snapped.

"Wouldn't you?" There was another tense silence as Liara waited for his answer. It was a fair question- after finding Javik on Eden Prime, he'd been the main source of their new, less 'enlightened and benign' view of the protheans' civilization. And he'd never demonstrated any doubts about how his people had dominated their cycle without compromise.

"Perhaps once. In another time, when my people ruled and I saw all other races as fodder." Liara hissed under her breath and shook her head in disgust. But Javik continued. "And I do not apologize for who or what my people were, but my people are gone. And this last year that I have spent among all of you... having seen the good that come out of diverse peoples cooperating instead of being subjugated under the strongest... I see things differently today than I once did." The empty fourth eye socket seemed especially conspicuous.

It was perhaps the closest thing Liara would ever hear to an apology or regret. The room was still as everyone waited to see how Liara would receive it. After a moment, her eyes moved from Javik to Kaidan.

"So there it is," she said sadly, "all the facts and the data. The protheans took them- all of them- from their home, brought them here, and experimented on them until they figured out how to make the most effective use of them. And then they put several thousand of these people on ice, while they went out in their ships to try and retrieve the first batch of their own kind 'worthy' of immortality in the face of the Reapers crushing their civilization. They never made it back, and between then and now some catastrophe befell the adori populating the surface, wiping them all out." Then she crossed her arms tensely and then looked down at the floor. "And you know how I feel about the rest," she said. "If you don't need me for anything else, I don't want to stay for the rest of this."

Kaidan gave her a plaintive look- the rest of them sure as hell shouldn't carry on the discussion to its logical next phase without her involvement. He knew it, and moreover, he knew that she knew that he knew it; her request to be excused was a tacit request to shut down any subsequent debate.

"Liara..."

"I loved him too, Kaidan," she sighed, "and I miss him, and I would do... almost anything to have him back. He deserves his life back, but not at any cost." With that she didn't wait for anyone's leave, and she marched out of the room. If the rest of them dared to continue and to speak of using one of these 'distant cousins' of hers to resurrect Shepard, they would have to do it without her. But fully aware of what she would think of them for it.

After a minute of awkward silence, Kaidan looked around the room at the rest of them in turn.

"So... we... I mean, obviously, we can't just..."

"Approval or disapproval aside," Javik interjected, "it remains a matter of choice. We could, clearly. The shielded power supply of the outpost sustained all the stasis pods, there are eight-thousand, eight-hundred and ten adori in suspended animation, any of whom could have the genetic material of Commander Shepard introduced- material which now includes the synthetic medium for transconscious genetic memory transfer, which approximates my people's ability that made a full 'assimilation' of the donor's identity possible." Kaidan put his face in his hands, wishing the prothean hadn't laid out so clearly the possibility. "All that stands in the way is choice- what you are willing to do to gain what you desire."

"Can we even assume that... I mean- isn't it at least possible that... I don't know... at least one of these adori, if we woke all eighty-eight hundred of them up, might... you know..." Joker trailed off, knowing how unlikely it sounded. That one of them might be willing to undergo a one-way transformation, uncertain of the outcome, to maybe become the resurrection of a man they'd never heard of and to whom they had no attachment.

Kaidan looked to Moreau with a skeptical expression. "If you woke up after fifty-thousand years in stasis and found out you were one of less than nine-thousand of your people left in the universe, what would your priority be? To give your life up for the sake of some 'hero' people told you about? Or to start trying to kick-start your race?" Then he looked to Javik, for whom the question was far more pertinent. "What about you? If instead of just you, the last of your kind, there had been thousands of others who you could have started about rebuilding a population with?"

Javik pursed his lips and broke eye contact with Alenko, gazing down at the floor in thought. "No... I suppose I would have looked to my own kind first. Clearly," he admitted.

"Now that we have ascertained the nature of the facility, will you be alerting the Alliance and the Council to our discovery?" EDI asked after another long, longing quiet.

"I suppose I'll have to," Kaidan replied heavily. "I'll tell them that we decided to pursue our lead on a possible way of bringing Shepard back and..." he squeezed his pendant until his fingers felt fit to break, "and that it didn't pan out. That we found this research station, and its subjects in stasis, and I'll suggest to them that if they want to follow up with an expedition here to wake them up and then... I don't know- return them to Thessia, if that's what they want? If the asari can wrap their heads around it? I suppose they'll need to plan a bigger ship to ferry so many people off this planet." He looked to each of them, who had come here with hopes almost as high as his own, and who all- save for the unshakable EDI and Delegate platform- now looked as resigned to failure as he felt. And he felt that they felt the same. The disappointment was filling the conference room like ichor. Suddenly Kaidan felt that if he stayed any longer, he'd become trapped in here, like a fly in amber.

"I need a... a little time," he said, trying to hold it all together. "I'll call Earth on the QEC in the morning, after we've finished retrieving our gear and people from the surface, and let them know that we're..." Then he looked to Captain Lavoie, suddenly remembering himself and feeling embarrassed. "I mean- I'm sorry, Captain- I suppose, now that my 'mutiny' is done and the mission is a bust, you should be making the call to receive your orders. They may want you to continue with your original assignment with my people and me under arrest, or they may want you to get us back there for court-martial, or who knows what..."

Lavoie's expression was sympathetic. This had meant as much to him as to most of them, but now that it was over, he was almost reluctant for things to return to normal. "We'll make the call together, Major" he said. "In the morning. Take your time."

Kaidan nodded, appreciative, and pinched the fingers of his free hand to his eyes, fighting back bitter tears.

Sensing that the briefing was complete, the rest of the group rose from their seats and filed out. Kaidan sat alone in the room, clutching his tags and token of Hadrian. "I'm sorry," he whispered, "I'm so sorry. God, I wanted you back so badly. I wish it were simpler. I'm so sorry."

-X

Now

-X

The door chime sounded and Kaidan wiped his eyes, sniffling. "Just a second," he croaked, pushing himself to his feet and straightening out his jacket. He walked to the door and opened it to see EDI's chassis standing on the other side.

"EDI? Something I can do for you?" he asked. Suddenly composing himself seemed redundant; since the Normandy's recovery engineering crews had managed to clear and re-start her main core processors, so she was once again 'aware' of everything aboard-ship. Which made is a little odd that she'd sent her body to his cabin if she wanted to speak with him.

"I was preparing to return to the surface to assist in the tear-down of our staging camp," she explained, "but before departing... I have a question. About human behaviour." Kaidan sniffled and laughed slightly, recalling Hadrian's stories about these conversations with the AI. After they'd lost him, Kaidan wondered for a long time when or if she might turn to him with such questions- so long that eventually, when they hadn't come, he'd forgotten to notice.

"A question about human behaviour, eh? Alright, shoot," he shrugged, gesturing to invite her in. She walked over to the desk and peered into the display case at the starship models within.

"There is a philosophical addage that I have heard, which I find humans apply somewhat selectively, and I am curious about the criteria used to select when one might apply it and when one might be guided by some other- perhaps inverse- principle."

"And which addage is that?" Alenko asked, stepping down to the personal area and sitting on the couch so that he could look up at her through the display case.

"The good of the many outweighs the good of the few- or the one." EDI straightened up and looked back at him quizzically. She wasn't lobbing any softballs. Kaidan took a deep breath and sat back, resting his head back against wall.

"So when do we treat that like it's wisdom and when do we ignore it for our own, smaller desires, you mean?"

"Indeed."

"Well... I suppose it depends on who we perceive 'the many' to be- whether they're 'with us' or 'against us,' whether they're our friends or our enemies or someone we don't care that strongly about. Sometimes we dispense with the many when we think they're the wrong 'side,' and we stick to our own, even if we're fewer in number. I guess... I'm not sure, EDI, it's an awfully big question."

EDI walked around the desk and made her way down to the couch, sitting down next to him.

"However, since Crucible Day, with the advent of synthempathy creating a limited- but ever growing- form of consensus among all beings of all races throughout the galaxy, including races that were formerly purely organic or purely synthetic, and the growing discomfort they all experience from causing each other physical or emotional pain, one could posit that there are no more 'sides' to be selected. Since eleven days after Crucible Day there have been no documented instances of interpersonal violence. Do you suppose that this represents a permanent paradigm shift and that the contest of pluralistic versus individualistic 'goods' will become obsolete?"

Kaidan thought about her query for a moment before making an uncertain, slightly skeptical, but slightly hopeful face, to himself as much as to her. "Maybe... it's a nice thought. I mean, we're still sorting it all out aren't we? We aren't sure how this will 'solidify' in the long term, once this ability we've gained plateaus and everyone's really gotten used to it. But... I don't know. Hadrian told me once that you suggested the geth and the quarians who created them might never have come into conflict if the geth had had more individuality, personal preferences, bonds of affection, and now all synthetics seem to have acquired that. And many humans... Hadrian was certainly one of them... believed that better communication, and more compassion, and if we didn't ignore each other's pain- if we reduced 'man's inhumanity toward man'- a bit more like synthetics had, that we'd have a better shot at lasting peace between people, and that seems to have taken root that day, too. So, maybe we're really all in it together now. Maybe someday soon, we'll really feel that what's good for me is good for 'we,' or the other way around."

"So then, would it follow that what the individual reasons to be 'for the good' is increasingly likely to also be reasoned by the many to be for the good?" EDI asked.

"Or the other way around, I guess," Kaidan shrugged.

"Thank you, Major. Your input helps to resolve a moral quandry I was considering."

"Well, I'm glad to be of help. But... before you go, EDI- could I... maybe... ask you a question."

"About human behaviour?" EDI asked, sounding genuinely bemused.

"Sure," Kaidan smiled, sharing the moment of irony with her. EDI nodded her head invitingly. "Now that you're able to 'feel' us and our emotions sort of second-hand, and- I assume- maybe you're developing... not just 'programmed motivations and preferences,' but some of our emotions maybe rubbing off?"

"Though I have now lived with synthempathy for longer than I ever functioned without it, emotional input is still somewhat 'alien' to me. I am still learning to interpret and process it. But I sense that you are wondering about something more specific." She draped her arm over the back of the couch and touched his shoulder. It was an unusual gesture for her, but Kaidan figured she was simply trying to better facilitate their exchange of ideas by offering some 'connection.'

"Pain," he specified, "how do you 'process' pain, or have you even learned to distinguish that from other feelings yet? How do you..." he abruptly choked up, his lip quivered, and he looked down at his lap, embarrassed. He wiped his eyes quickly as fresh tears arose, and he started to feel something like sympathy translating from EDI to him. "How do you deal with feeling pain- your own, or other people's- when it threatens to just... wrap around you and crush you? When you've lost- really lost- something dear to you and you know that it's really gone and you don't know what to do?" He hunched over, his composure breaking down, and sobbed into his hands.

EDI's hand followed, resting on his shoulder. "I have become familiar with the pain you experience," she said softly. "In my own context, the experience is similar to the detection and diagnostic analysis of systems damage, like a hull breach or the burning out of a sensor palette. I register the loss, Major... Kaidan. I sense it. And it does cause me my own kind of distress."

Kaidan snorted back tears and sighed deeply, trying to collect himself again. EDI's silence as he mulled over her words gave him space to think about how alike they were. As he rubbed the back of his arm to his wet cheeks, he reiterated the part of his question that really mattered to him. "And? How do you deal with it when you feel it?" he asked.

Then he felt something else from EDI. Something so familiar... at first he thought it was just the sense of their kinship, but then the feeling connected with a deeply engraved image in his memory. Hadrian's face in that last moment. The resolve... that determination to do something- to give it all- for the one he loved. He felt EDI's abolute certainty that she was doing the right thing, and from that flowed a glimpse of intentionality.

And functioning at the computational speed of an AI, EDI must have known that Kaidan received it. He felt her hand tighten on his shoulder.

"When I feel it, I undertake to effect repairs," she said.

Then there was pain- the biting, chaotic pain of a touching a frayed live wire, overloading his nervous system- and then there was darkness.

-X

When Kaidan woke up several hours later, groaning in pain from the body-wide numbness, his mind returned almost immediately to its last moment of consciousness. Panicked, he reached for his neck and the chain he'd worn around it all day every day these many months.

His tags were gone. Hadrian was gone. In their place was the flash of insight that had trickled into his mind from EDI's a short moment before the electrical current had surged into his body from hers. He remembered what she had planned.

As he reached, fumbling, for his comms headset on the table in front of him, he felt the dizzying, sickening internal collision of two feelings. At least two: a confused, aghast flavour of horror at her decision- a grasping of her logic but incomprehension toward her willingness to follow through- certainly. But also... elation. Relief. Hope again. And, while it was tinged with guilt, gratitude.

"Unnhhh- A-Alenko to Lavoie," he groaned, inserting his earpiece. His teeth felt like bees buzzing in his skull and he was still seeing stars- the stunned kind, not the ones out the vista roof viewport.

"Lavoie here, Major. Were you... were you ready to contact Admiral Hackett already?"

"Nnhhh- no, Cap- Captain, I... sorry... I'm s-still... is EDI still aboard the ship?" he asked.

"Uh, no, Major. Sorry. She went back down to the surface with the camp deconstruction team about an hour and a half ago. Why?"

In the privacy of the cabin, with no one there to see- save perhaps EDI's internal security cameras- despite the tingling pain wracking his body, Kaidan smiled ever so subtly to himself. Haltingly, he slumped over on his side on the couch, looking towards the bed... their bed... and put a hand to his forehead. The shock was subsiding, but he felt the onset of a migraine rising, probably from the physical strain. But still, there was that small, constrained, hopeful smile.

"We, ah... we have to stop her," he said. But somewhere in his heart he knew it was too late. She was too good to be foiled. And deep within, he thanked every god he'd ever heard of for that. "We have to stop her," he repeated, trying to sound convincing.

-X

Nibanna Vedi, prothean research station, 12 minutes later

-X

Lavoie, Kaidan, Liara and Javik stepped off the shuttle and back onto Nibanna Vedi's surface, receiving a salute from Lieutenant Reagan. He spun on his heel and started walking alongside his captain toward the entrance to the bunker.

"Where is she now," Lavoie asked, outwardly fuming but... but. Kaidan could feel the resonance with him. On some level they were feeling the same thing- the same anticipation.

"Under guard in the stasis chamber, though it seems a bit redundant. It was too late when we found her, and she hasn't put up any resistance, Sir." Reagan looked anxiously to Lavoie and then Kaidan and back, clearly experiencing a mix of professional embarrassment, consternation, but also that same hope- however hard he tried to contain it.

As they marched down the descending corridor, Liara leaned in close to Kaidan and whispered insistently "I need to know, Kaidan, did you put her up to this?"

"Believe me, Liara, I was as shocked as you are," he said. The pun was unavoidable- it was like a beam of light pouring in through a crack in a painted-over window. "Moreso, even. She did this on her own."

"But you approve?" Liara asked. Kaidan gave her an earnest, conflicted look.

"I wasn't going to do it. I was going to tell Earth what we found and if they told us to leave... It killed me, but I was prepared to give him up. We had this... horrible, fantastic opportunity, and I wasn't going to take it. But you can't begrudge me for being grateful that someone else did. Please... Liara, you know what this meant to me. What it meant that I turned it down."

Liara sighed, exasperated. Kaidan could feel that her own emotions were conflicted too. The principle and the personal were clashing within her. Some part of her was grateful for EDI's intervention, but whether she would ever forgive the AI... Javik, meanwhile, had the discretion not to say anything so far, though Kaidan knew even without trying to connect with him that the prothean felt there was nothing to apologize for. If anything, he probably admired EDI's decision. The universe got stranger every day.

The group passed through the main laboratory and into the stasis chamber, where they saw EDI standing to one side of the door under guard by two of Shepard's security detail marines. At the other end of the room, Doctor Chakwas and Kelavestra were running medical scans on the ancient alien sitting on the edge of a prothean stasis pod protruding from its berth in the wall.

Kaidan had seen visual logs of adori that the prothean resarchers had studied, but it was the first one he'd seen in the flesh. Any bodies that had died on the surface had long since turned to dust. The being he saw before him now was rather like what one might have expected a 'male asari' looked like- generally masculine but somewhat androgynous-looking, with semi-flexible cartilaginous tendrils instead of hair (though the adori's had more pronounced lengthwise ridges, and rather than 'flipping up' at the back of the head they laid fairly flat and extended to the back of his neck). The most notable difference was the adori's crimson skin and golden-brown eyes.

After glancing the adori from a distance, Kaidan turned to the AI's combat body. "EDI," he said, sternly. She looked back at him, her expression inscrutable. Liara gave EDI a sour look, shook her head, and headed over to join Karin and Kelavestra in examining the newly roused alien.

"Major. I apologize for incapacitating you earlier. I'm gratified to see that I didn't inadvertently do any permanent damage." She raised her arm- provoking some heightened anxiety in the two marines with their lowered arc pistols, which Lavoie allayed- and held out Kaidan's dogtags. "You may want these back," she offered. Alenko cautiously took them from her, noticed his 'Shepard pendant' was missing, and hung them back around his neck. EDI picked up on his observation and looked toward the adori.

"EDI what were you thinking?" Kaidan sighed. "How could you just take it upon yourself to do this?"

"It was a rational calculation, Major, however coloured by my emergent sentiments. Besides our personal attachments and collective desire to see him embodied again, Commander Shepard's return would be a net benefit to the galactic community. He rallied every government, cementing previously unthinkable alliances. 'Resurrecting' him would provide tremendous morale boost during re-building efforts. To all of us."

"And what about this adori, EDI? What about him?" Kaidan nodded toward the alien EDI had awoken after sneaking away from the decamping teams.

"Shepard encouraged me during our campaign against the Reapers to exercise my new-found free will and to follow my conscience, Major. And you reinforced my own supposition that individual conscience in this new 'world' of expanded consensus was an increasingly reliable indicator of what the popular perception of 'right action' would be. I did what I did for the good of the many." The group around her looked around to each other uncomfortably. So her choice had been a kind of reflection how she saw their common good... what did that mean, if the action were judged as exploitative?

"But as it happens, happily, Vattan was inclined to agree," EDI added. Kaidan's brow furrowed in surprise. But Lavoie beat him to the question.

"Wait- are you saying he consented to...?"

"Indeed," EDI nodded. "I explained his situation to him, and ours, and asked him whether he believed any of his people- presented with the same data- might actually volunteer to assimilate Commander Shepard's DNA and genetically encoded memory from your cell sample, and subsequently undergo their 'regenesis' process to re-embody him. Vattan himself expressed appreciation for the commander's value as both a person and as a symbolic figure in galactic society, and affirmed that he would be willing."

"And you didn't pressure him?" Kaidan asked carefully. If it were true, it might be enough to assuage Liara's outrage.

"Not in the least. In fact, if Vattan's attitude in our conversation is any indicator, the adori as a people possess a certain equanimity about their circumstance." EDI very nearly sounded as surprised as the rest of them felt.

"And does he think he can even do this 'regenesis' thing with a human's DNA?" Lavoie asked.

"He was uncertain. However he suggested that asari compatibility with humans was a favourable sign. And he claimed that an unsuccessful assimilation due to insufficient genetic sampling would likely have no effect."

"That is consistent with my findings in the researchers' records," Javik added.

"So at least there's that," Lavoie said, looking to Liara and then Alenko. Kaidan nodded.

"Yeah... at least there's that. EDI, when we get back, you're confined to the Normandy's server room. I don't know how this will play out, but there's going to have to be some accounting. Maybe we'll have simultaneous trials." Kaidan laughed a little, resignedly, but even the mess they'd gotten themselves into couldn't completely dampen his spirits. He glanced over at the adori, Vattan, again, noticing his own impatience.

"Take her to the shuttle, Privates," Lavoie ordered. Without complaint EDI left with her guards, and Kaidan, Lavoie and Javik walked over to the stasis pod and its former occupant.

"Liara?"

"Major," T'soni replied tersely, looking over her shoulder. The adori, on the other hand, looked to the approaching trio with a calm expression.

"Prothean. Captain. Kaid- ah... rather, Major," Vattan greeted them. There was a familiarity in his voice when he addressed Kaidan- a warmth.

"Hello... Vattan, is it?" Kaidan offered his hand. The adori reached out and took it in both of his, squeezing it gently.

"It is," he smiled graciously. "For the time being." He withdrew his right hand, used the left to turn Kaidan's over, and then the right was back from his side, placing something in Kaidan's. His totem of Shepard. Its texture and weight were familiar, but something was missing... its touch no longer evoked the same feeling of connection to Hadrian's memory. "That is yours," Vattan said.

Kaidan nodded, grateful. "Thank you. Can I ask how you feel?"

"Well, thank you. We were just telling Doctors T'soni and Chakwas that their concerns for our health is very kind, but unnecessary."

"Uh... I'm sorry- 'we?'" Lavoie asked.

"Apologies," Vattan shook his head, "we- I... Before my long sleep, the measure of my awareness was nearly twenty-one hundred of your years. During that time I melded with... hm... thirty-seven of my fellows. Thirty-seven times I joined my being with another, we took each other's essence into our own and were transformed. Thirty-seven times I awoke in a new body that had become mine, bearing one of the sons of our pairing. Thirty-seven times my life began anew, and I bore in to it the memories that my dear ones had shared with me." He looked meaningfully at Kaidan. "Hence... the 'we.' Such was our way, until we chose one of the other kind- took them in to our body and became one with them, to live out the rest of our days as one of them."

"So at some point, most of you would eventually choose to bond with an asari, and become asari yourself, and give up your... well, immortality?" Liara asked.

"Asari. Until the others came." Vattan nodded towards Javik. His face betrayed no malice or resentment toward the prothean. "They brought us here to understand our life-cycle, and upon understanding, they meant to employ us in their service. They wished for us to take their esteemed host into ourselves, and live out our days as them."

"And that didn't offend you?" Liara asked with a flash of indignation.

"Offense?"

"At how they objectified you! At how they saw you as a means to their ends. That they meant to use you. How could that not offend your dignity as sentient beings?"

Kaidan half-expected Javik to interject in his empire's defense, but he said nothing. On the contrary, Kaidan felt that Javik was waiting with just as much interest as Liara had in the adori's answer.

"We cherish three gifts- at least three- that the cosmos has given us," Vattan began, softly. "The first is time to learn- a long life. The prospect of eternity laid out before us, and at such a price as loving another. We know we are blessed. The second is the means to learn. Our ability to communicate with clarity beyond words, which we recognized in the prothean when they arrived, which we recognize in all of you now, though your manifestation of it is still in its infancy."

"Its infancy? We've been living with this almost a year now and some days when it's firing on all cylinders, I start mixing up other people's feelings that I'm picking up with my own. And you're saying it's going to get stronger?" Lavoie had spoken aloud what nearly all of them were thinking. Synthempathy had already been tremendously transformative to galactic society; the idea that grander change could be in store was frankly a bit daunting.

"Indeed. The direct communication with your synthetic companion, what we sense growing in each of you... in us, as well, with the assimilation of your departed leader's essence... you have only begun to tap its potential."

"What was this third 'gift' your people possess?" Liara asked, trying to bring the conversation back to a less sensitive subject.

"The ability to change. To transcend our experience. To give ourselves up and to become something new when we feel our time is complete. When we have learned enough, and lived enough, our blessing is the ability to give the gift of new life to some other." Vattan gazed at Kaidan again. "It is the ultimate fruition of our learning- that in the end, our purpose is compassion."

"But... you don't want to continue as you are?" Liara pressed, trying to understand. Vattan looked her in the eyes, then put his hand on her arm. Her whole posture immediately changed as they connected, the way asari could 'mind-meld,' and he silently communicated to her his feelings about what he said aloud to all of them.

"In our youth, we cling to our lives. As most do. Time teaches us better. That everything is fleeting, that all things pass and that this must be good. Those whose lives are short grasp at the infinite and those whose lives are long attach to the finite- in the end, all is illusory. What is desired- and those who desire it-- are all inevitably fleeting. Only how we live- how we pay observance to the truth that we learn- has merit, because of the value our compassion has to the living."

The Shepard and Normandy crew members sat or stood in silence a minute, taking in Vattan's words. They sounded especially familiar to Kaidan from his time with Hadrian, plumbing those unexpected depths the vanguard had revealed before the end. It made him wonder... the adori had clearly already assimilated some of Shepard's memories- he could feel it as surely as he felt anything. Was the wisdom he was sharing with them now all his, or was it coloured with the beliefs and idea supposedly wrapped up in Hadrian's DNA? Or was it just... serendipity?

After their long moment of collective reverie, it was Lavoie who finally spoke up.

"We aren't certain we're going to be here much longer," he said. "In a few hours, we may receive instructions from our superiors to resume our original mission away from here. But whether we go or we stay a while, Vattan, will you return to our ship with us? If we have to leave, I wouldn't feel right leaving you here alone... unless you mean to wake the rest of your people?"

Vattan lifted his hand from Liara's, and the asari Shadow Broker clasped her hands together over her mouth, deep in thought. "We haven't the means here to sustain my brothers if they were woken from their slumber. We would gladly go with you if you depart- to speak for our people to your leaders. However... if we are about to undergo a rebirth," he directed another warm look toward Alenko, "we would ask that you bring one other aboard your vessel, to fill that role if we find we are no longer... as we are."

"Certainly," Lavoie nodded, "is there someone specific you had in mind that we should be looking for, or do you even know all the others in stasis here?"

"I recall several of my brothers who were placed into the long sleep when I was, who were especially wise and would represent us well to this new era's leadership. With the prothean's help accessing the researchers' database, I believe we could identify one of their pods and rouse them."

Javik looked a bit surprised. On some level it seemed like he had taken to heart Liara's indictment against his people for their actions toward the adori; perhaps he felt humbled now that Vattan displayed no animosity over it. "I would be... pleased to help," he replied.

"Well, we'll leave you to it. Doctor T'soni, Kelavestra, perhaps you'd like to stay and help answer any other questions our new guest might have about us or the state of things since his 'sleep?'"

Kaidan couldn't help but admire Lavoie's canniness; as the ones most perturbed by the protheans' abduction of their distant cousins, they would likely never have stood for Vattan being brought up-to-speed by a prothean who was himself a stranger to this era. Letting them help attend on him would feel proper to them; but in the process, perhaps Vattan's equanimity towards Javik would rub off on them, and soften their attitudes toward the prothean.

Liara and Kelavestra agreed without hesitation, and as the four of them headed together toward the stasis chamber's main access console to get to work, the captain touched Kaidan's arm, gently leading him toward the exit.

"That was smart," Kaidan offered.

"Thanks. Hopefully you'll think this is smart, too. I'd like you to return to the ship with EDI and the tear-down team. Start thinking about how you want to present all of this to the Council and Admiral Hackett."

"You don't think I should-"

"Major... I appreciate that you want to see what's going to happen with him," Lavoie looked back to Vattan. "But until Doctor T'soni has processed her feelings about what's happened- hopefully with some of our guest's helpful insight- it might be best if you gave him some space. So as not to appear over-eager. I know what you're hoping for... frankly, I'm on board with you. But the way this has gone down, the state your friend is in... I think the only way you'll really be absolved of any of this in her eyes is if you wait for him to come to you." Lavoie had a pretty clear grasp of how everything was moving, of the motivations playing out before him. Of the 'politics.' It must have been part of why the Alliance placed him in command of the Shepard's first diplomatic tour. But Kaidan recognised the undeniable wisdom his rescuer displayed.

"Right," he conceded, "I guess that is for the best."

"Glad you agree, so I don't have to make it an order," Jonathan smiled. As they stopped near the top of the corridor to the main lab, Lavoie's hand moved from Kaidan's elbow to his shoulder. "But Kaidan... don't worry. I see it in how he looks at you. I think he'll come. And I'll make sure he knows where to find you."

"Thanks, Jon," Kaidan smiled back a little. They still had unanswered questions about how this adori 'regenesis' worked- how long it might take or even if it would work following a melding with an unfamiliar new species. But. There had been something in those looks, in the strange alien's voice, in his touch when he returned that now-'empty' token.

As he made his way up to the shuttle that waited to ferry EDI, her guards, several Shepard crew and their supplies back up to the ship, he felt hopeful again. He still had a lot of explaining to do to the higher-ups back at Earth. But at least now it may all indeed have been worth it.

-2.8

CSV Shepard, en route to Earth, three days later

-2.8

The atmosphere aboard the Shepard was an odd soup.

Whether they would have liked to have approved the expedition to Nibanna Vedi or not, when Kaidan and Lavoie had finally made their call to Earth via QEC, the Council had clearly felt obliged to make an example of them. Shepard was ordered to return to home port. Lavoie was to be relieved of command. Officially Kaidan and EDI were under arrest and both faced investigations for their respective acts of insubordination. Vattan's "status" was already being debated in a committee to try and decide what the Council was going to make of his transformation. In any case, once the Normandy and her crew were offloaded at Earth and the Shepard's new CO took command, the prototype would resume its original mission to disseminate the 'conduit drive' design and Shepard-class schematics to shipyards across Council space.

But the guests they carried back to Earth with them- whose time Liara had largely monopolized since their departure- had brought an almost electric charge aboard the ship. Everyone was talking about them, curious about them, and waiting to see what would happen with them- especially Vattan, once word of EDI's actions leaked. But following Lavoie's reasoning, hard as it had been, Kaidan had kept his distance. While Liara had kept the adori busy with questions and briefings on the galactic history they'd missed, Kaidan had occupied himself with helping complete the Normandy repairs. She wouldn't be independently space-worthy long-term again by the time they reached Earth, but she'd be presentable to the brass.

To keep himself busy, he'd relieved several of the other engineers to give himself more to do, and today he'd used his biotics during an EVA to replace one of the larger sections of the hull with a panel fabricated aboard the Shepard. It had been some hard work- the concentration required to create and maintain the mass effect fields involved had worked him to a sweat- and once back inside he'd decided to call it a day. As he stepped in to the loft cabin he stripped off his shirt, dropped it on the work area chair, and tried to blink away the halos that were starting to form in his field of vision, harbingers of one of his migraines.

"Ohhh god, why did you do that?" he groaned, pressing the heel of his his hand to his forehead. Steadying himself against the wall, he shuffled carefully down the steps and undid his pants. "EDI, can you dim the lights in here?" he asked, sliding his pants off- nearly stumbling as his balance degraded- and flopping onto the bed.

Laying there, breathing deeply, he was reminded of the migraine that had ruined his and Hadrian's third 'date' in this very room. It had been the day they rescued Admiral Koris from Rannoch, the day before Shepard's showdown- his 'dance'- with the Reaper there. Kaidan had exerted himself hard during the fight surface-side, and after returning to the ship and debriefing they'd come back here to celebrate with a drink and foreplay, but while making out the throbbing in his groin had suddenly shifted to a throbbing behind his eyes. It had spoiled the mood, but he had spent the rest of the night with his head in Hadrian's lap, having his neck and shoulders rubbed comfortingly.

As he writhed and grumbled this time, alone, he almost didn't notice the sound of the door chime. Assuming it would have to be important for someone to come visit him while he was under 'house arrest,' he struggled to sit up.

"Come in," he said, hands over his eyes. He heard the door segments slide apart, and shut again a moment later. "Sorry if I'm a bit ragged. Headache. Overdid it a little on the hull repairs, I guess," he apologised, trying to smile. After a pause where he received no answer, he tried reaching out with his mind to see if he could identify his visitor without looking. His awareness brushed against the other consciousness in the room, finding it familiar. Deeply layered, aggressively intelligent, affectionate. "Liara?" he asked.

A moment later he felt weight on the bed beside him and a hand on his bare thigh, and the other awareness snapped into sharper focus.

"No, Major, though that might be the best guess that could have been expected." The hand squeezed his leg a little, and a feeling of happiness poured into him through the contact, dissolving- or at least distracting from- the pain in his skull. Catching his breath in surprise, Kaidan opened his eyes and looked to his side. It was Vattan, of course. He looked different, however; his normally deep red skin was a slightly mottled peach colour, and his eyes and cheeks had sunken somewhat from their former fullness.

"Oh- ah- Vattan... I'm sorry, I..." Kaidan blushed a little and reached for the sheets on his other side, his reflex telling him to cover up. The adori smiled and shook his head a little.

"You needn't- I mean... we feel like we've seen it all before, Major. Your..." the adori's eyes were also a bit darker brown than they had been, and they worked their way slowly up Kaidan's leg, over his clothed pelvis, his naked waist, his chest, shoulder and neck, until they met Kaidan's eyes. There was a familiar longing behind those unfamiliar eyes. "You are quite familiar to us, now."

Kaidan swallowed hard, his heart speeding up a bit. They looked at each other a long moment before he looked to Vattan's lips. "Familiar... do I take it that means... ?"

The adori angled his head slightly, then shook it back and forth slowly. "No... I'm not yet-" he replied haltingly. "We are still..." He looked around the room, surveying it for a minute as he collected his thoughts. "It's not as we remember it. So much is missing."

"As you remember it? So you are changing into him?"

Vattan raised his other hand, with its pinkish patches crowding out the former scarlet, and turned it over, examining it curiously. "The melding appears to have been successful. These superficial changes are merely precursors to the metamorphosis, when the reaction will accelerate and transform this body fully. And that is coming... soon. It is why we pressed to see you now, though Liara had some lingering reservations." Kaidan snorted quietly and looked down at Vattan's hand on his leg.

"Asari with their reservations about me and my relationships," he said drolly. "How does it... I mean, does it hurt?" he asked. Vattan looked up at the ceiling, thinking about his answer a moment.

"It is not pain. You have been ill before?"

Kaidan chuckled. "Yeah... yeah, I've been sick before. Of course. We still haven't cured the common cold just yet." He felt the memory of days spent in bed with a bug slip through his mind.

"Yes. Like that. That feeling that your body is no longer quite 'right,' like it is not fully yours anymore. But after illness follows wellness. The chrysalis lies ahead, like your sick bed. I am afraid that will last several of your months, during which we will be... well, indisposed."

"And after that?" Kaidan asked, unable to conceal the hopefulness in his voice.

"After that," the adori smiled, meeting Alenko's eyes again, "we will be restored to you. What we have taken in will become our being. I will be... as we remember him."

Kaidan sighed, his face flashing a gamut of emotions as his eyes welled up with happy tears. Before he could react, Vattan's hand was on his cheek wiping under this eyes with his thumb before withdrawing. He sniffed back more, and squeezed the adori's hand. "But you already have his memories?" he asked. Vattan's head bobbed from side to side a little, showing indecisiveness.

"They are not yet mine," he said, trying to explain. "They are like... a story one sees illustrated in pictures, and hears told in words, and takes into the mind's eye. They enter at a distance, but they become dear. The characters and places seem... like fiction, at first, but they gradually come alive in the heart. Their activity becomes personal. The imagined becomes remembered." He put his tear-wiping hand on the back of Kaidan's neck and squeezed it gently. The touch was deja-vu. It was welcome... though... on some level, just a little unnerving coming from this alien body beside him. "It will be like that until the chrysalis."

"And then?" The awareness returned that the man beside him had a life already- memories and a personality- and that according to what he'd been told, they would be gone when this was done. His hope recoiled, however slightly, as it touched the guilty feeling that came with that knowledge.

"And then I will be as we remember him."

"But aren't you afraid?" Kaidan asked. "That you won't be you anymore? That you'll be gone?"

"Are you afraid to go to sleep?" Vattan countered gracefully. "Do you fear when your consciousness dissolves that you will be lost? That you won't wake in the morning?"

Kaidan shrugged. "I suppose not," he said.

"Nature was kind to us." Vattan removed his hands, laced them together over his stomach and laid back on the bed beside Kaidan. With no small amount of wonderment, Kaidan found that the migraine pain didn't return at the withdrawl of the adori's touch. "When we decide it is our time and we choose to give ourselves to another, we change from what we were to what we become as peacefully as- well... you were once very different, yourself. A child. And you have become grown. You, as you were then, could not truly have grasped the scope of the transformation that would give rise to you, as you are now. But when did you have occasion to fear?"

"I was afraid plenty at times. There were lots of times growing up that I was afraid," Kaidan admitted, but Vattan chuckled.

"In moments, perhaps. Moments that came and went. But you were not your fear. You did not become your fear. You passed through each moment, and little by little what you were slipped away, changing, transforming, as you become what you are. What you had..." Vattan left it hanging, knowing it had to be a bitter- but relevant- chord.

"Slipped away." Kaidan hung his head, saddened a little. It felt a bit like he was being told that this thing that was happening- this gift he was being given, that he wanted so badly- was something that a better version of himself would have risen above wanting. Like he was missing the point. Vattan enjoined again.

"Slipped away, but you learned to live without them. Or you found new things to take their place. To you this happened imperceptibly slowly, but when you look back it seems a short time. And compared to our experience... Well, you have lived only some thirty-six years." Alenko shot a look at the adori, as if to ask who 'outed' his age, but Vattan smiled up at him. "I know you. You have come... very alive in my mind's eye. The memories of you are..." He looked up through the ceiling viewport, his eyes going far away. "Attracted from the moment he saw you... and it wasn't long before he was thinking about you-"

"All the time," Kaidan echoed.

"Yes. I find myself... we wanted very badly to see you before the chrysalis. His feelings for you... were so compelling, we wished to see- to have some time with you for ourselves, before giving the rest to him."

Kaidan laid back too and rolled onto his side, gazing at Vattan. "It's... so strange, hearing his words coming out of you, feeling his touch in your hands. His looks through your eyes. It... it makes me feel bad for you. I don't want to forget you, like you were just some... some thing that we found and used to get him back, like the protheans planned to use your people."

"In our time, it was our way- when we chose to transform- to pay a visit such as this to the one we loved enough to become. To reassure them that were not their victim. To solicit their promise that they would feel no guilt or remorse over our change." Vattan rolled onto his side now, too, and looked into Alenko's eyes, putting his hand on the side of Kaidan's face. "I told Liara that this was important to us. I cannot have that visit with him, but I felt I should observe the practice with you. I know it will be... difficult... for you, when our transformation is complete."

"I think it's safe to assume that's an understatement-"

Vattan put a finger over Kaidan's lips. It reminded him of the moments before their final moments together on Earth, when he'd tried to tease Shepard with dirty talk. "To look at him without seeing us as we were. There will be days when you feel estranged. When you will feel like a thief. And you will be particularly aware in the beginning, when he comes to you without memories of himself that you have of him. You had moments with him that... that we will not have had with you." Moments like the one that had just come to Kaidan's mind. Speaking their love to each other over their comms for all to hear. Or even that final, furious battle on Earth. How strange would that be, remembering that day with someone who wouldn't? He took Vattan's hand in his own, away from his mouth, and held it between them on the bed.

"God," he whispered as it dawned on him, "what... what am I supposed to do in those moments? What do I do with my memories when they- when he doesn't... ?"

"Share them with him," Vattan offered thoughtfully. "By then, with practice, you should have that capacity. Or... ignore them. Forget them," he said matter-of-factly, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. "Let them pass, as though you imagined them. If they are a burden, release them."

"I don't know if I'll be able to figure out how to do that," Alenko confessed anxiously. He looked up from their hands at Vattan's mottled face. The adori's visage was a mask of benevolence.

"We have seen it many times before," he said. "When that moment comes- when we... when he asks you- 'why are you so sad when you look at me?' or 'what did I miss that haunts you so?'- you will find your way to answer and to live with what you know."

The two laid there a minute looking at each other. It was surreal... a moment so like the ones Kaidan had shared with Hadrian right here, and now it was coming so easily with this being- a fifty-two thousand year-old alien who had absorbed his memories and was on the cusp of transforming bodily into his resurrection. Who spoke with much of Shepard's feeling toward him, who gave him Shepard's looks and Shepard's caresses, but still wasn't quite him. Yet if he closed his eyes it would have been so easy to believe he was already there.

Then the details reared their ugly heads, and Alenko felt an oppressive weight of doubt.

"That's all assuming I ever see you again," he said. "If you're going into this caccoon soon, for a few months, you'll be in it when we arrive at Earth. Which means when you come out I might be... who knows- rotting in some jail for what I've done. Huh. Wouldn't that be some weird symmetry," he remarked, thinking back to Shepard's incarceration before the Reapers' invasion.

"And we may be in some manner of quarantine, if not flayed upon a dissection table," Vattan shrugged. "Perhaps we shall be both be required to break out of captivity and become fugitives together."

"Some new horrible abominations from space could always invade and they could reinstate me, tell me to take you as my sidekick and send me on some mission to save the galaxy," Kaidan laughed. He'd been holding back because of the strangeness of it all, but finally, hesitantly, he reached out with his hand and put it on Vattan's cheek. The adori closed his eyes, looking contented.

"The galaxy is rife with possibilities," he said.

Soon he would excuse himself, citing a need to return to his guest cabin aboard the Shepard to rest as his body prepared to begin its long torpor and transformation. But for the next few minutes they laid there, eyes closed, hands resting on each others' bodies. It was a little like Kaidan's meditations with his pendant before- which had returned to its place around his neck, though it was just a lifeless trinket now. Though Shepard wasn't really there, Alenko felt like he was communing with something of his spirit. But now, instead of a small metal disc between his thumb and finger, he felt warm skin under his palm, and a hand resting on his hip, the thumb brushing longingly at the waistband of his boxerbriefs.

He knew that Vattan would soon fade away from the galaxy, but he made up his mind to always remember the adori and the gift he was giving. He told himself that instead of sorrow, he would try every day to feel gratitude- even if he never did get to see Shepard 'back from the dead' (again), just knowing that he would be alive again, enjoying some peace after his 'predecessor' gave his life to secure it for them all.

He smiled, and he felt the other man's cheek- in a way, his lover's cheek- rise in a smile too.

Despite the trouble ahead for him personally, for Kaidan it all felt worth it.

-2.9

Four days later

-2.9

Kaidan sat at the desk in the loft, reading the latest report from Earth that Lavoie had shared with him. The geth, the quarians, the krogan, and even the batarians- what was left of them- had all been granted full membership in the new Council- named the Consensus Council, since the Citadel no longer existed to serve as a symbol of galactic civilization. As everyone's capacity for synthempathy grew and the privileged 'insiders' had become more intimately aware of the hardships caused by excluding the outsiders, it had become unconscionable not to admit them. Especially after their collective sacrifices in the war against the Reapers.

It made sense, but it was still remarkable to hear how everyone was coming together, and to see it on the smaller scale aboard the Shepard. Everyone was still themselves, and there were still disagreements, but the way people connected now... nobody ever just spoke anymore. Now people were increasingly truly hearing each other, and unable to help but feel empathy for each other. It wasn't possible to 'dehumanize' anymore, to disregard the feelings of others. It was even getting smoother between synthetics and organics, insofar as those terms were even meaningful anymore. 'Organics' all had the synthetic architecture of synthempathy now, and every 'synthetic' in the galaxy was demonstrating what had once been thought the exclusive domain of 'real people'- individuality, genuine emotions and conscience. Free will. And they were learning to reconcile that with their ability to network their minds just as surely as organics were having to adapt to their own changes.

And soon, reckoning for his little 'mutiny' notwithstanding... Kaidan felt like soon, the only thing that was missing would be returned to him.

On the other hand...

The door chimed. As it had every time since Vattan's visit, the sound caused Kaidan's heart to skip a beat, though he knew it was far too soon. Months, he'd said.

"Come in," Alenko said, putting down his datapad. The door rolled apart and a geth platform stepped inside, its 'eye' turning toward him. He rose to greet it. He was still learning to read the 'facial features' of embodied geth programs, but as near as he could tell, it looked... Nope. He still couldn't tell. But the subtle cosmetic differences in the platform, at least, were familiar. "Delegate?" he asked.

"Correct, Alenko-Major."

"I think this is a first, you- or any of the geth crew for that matter- coming up here 'in person' to visit. Speaking of which, it is just me or do I almost always see you... ah... 'wearing' the same body, despite the ship carrying quite a few on board. Does that mean you actually prefer that one?"

The 'eyebrow' flaps lifted in the middle slightly. Surprise? Concern?

"I find its particular mechanical balance and servo calibration agreeable. I have made a similar observation about you- you favour your current platform despite its shortcomings?"

Kaidan gave the geth a look.

"That was intended to be humourous. EDI has been attempting to familiarize us with the concept."

"I thought it was quite clever, Delegate" came EDI's voice over the intercom. "It may merely be that organic crew members are not yet acquitted to expect or process humour from synthetics. But I would advise you not to be discouraged."

"With appreciation, EDI," Delegate said. Its posture changed slightly and Kaidan felt that he was once again the focus of its attention. "Alenko-Major, I am presenting 'in person' to prevent intercom process monitoring. Other geth programs are also diverting security systems surveillance for the sake of discretion."

"So not just a first-time visit, but a clandestine one at that?" Kaidan asked, lowering his voice a little.

"We perceived privacy to be appropriate under the circumstances," Delegate said.

"Did EDI recommend me for answering your questions about human behaviour?" Kaidan backed up to his chair and sat down again, figuring it was all the same to Delegate. "Because the last time I did that, I got shocked unconscious- I'm not sure I want to risk what might happen to me if I try giving advice about 'private' stuff like the birds and the bees or something."

The geth platform looked at him with that inscrutable 'flashlight head' face a moment, but its 'neck' did cock slightly to one side. It must have picked that up from watching humans not 'get' each other's jokes.

"So... uh... what was it you wanted to talk about?" Kaidan murmured, a little embarrassed.

"We have observed something curious- potentially... 'distressing'- about the adori Vattan's reformatting process underway aboard CSV Shepard."

"Distressing?" Kaidan asked, tensing up slightly and leaning forward in his seat. "And- wait- 'we?' I thought the geth were all 'I's now?"

"I use 'we' to refer to a collective observation by the geth subset of the Shepard consensus, and our resultant majority view that the matter warranted being brought to your attention. Despite our relatively novel autonomy, geth are still highly collaborative; plural pronouns continue to serve our purposes in many cases, without denoting our former state of pre-individuation."

"I see," Kaidan nodded, understanding to some extent. "So, alright, what is the matter you thought I should know about with Vattan?"

"The tele-empathic capability acquired by organic platforms since the event colloquially known as 'Crucible Day'- do you believe that it has value?"

Kaidan looked at the datapad on his desk, and had to wonder a little if the timing might have indicated that the geth had been collectively evaluating the same reports at the same time as he had been. "Well, I think its value is obvious," he answered. "It's brought all of us- organics and synthetics alike- closer together than we ever thought possible, even after we all worked together to fight the Reapers. I mean... it seems like the best hope we've ever had to lasting peace in the galaxy. Why do you ask?"

The geth hesitated. Given the speed at which they 'processed,' it had to mean something when one of them took such pause.

"A majority of geth similarly conclude that tele-empathic capability among organics is a net benefit. We are therefore concerned about an observation we have made: the reformatting of platform Vattan to conform to the physiological template of platform Shepard-Commander is correlative with a shift in the aggregation of the tele-empathic signal network."

"What does that mean?" Kaidan asked, becoming concerned himself. Delegate turned toward the display case in front of the desk and the holographic display system within it flickered to life. It showed a top-down depiction of the Shepard- complete with Normandy in its docking bay. The level of detail was amazing- an icon representing every organic member of the crew displayed their locations, and there were dozens of labels at the side of the display denoting additional 'layers' of embedded data.

Delegate pointed, and one of the data overlays came up. It showed a faint lattice of electromagnetic signals connecting all of the crew. It was dynamic, with waxing and waning 'currents,' strongest between those in close proximity but still evident- however slightly- even between the most distant crew members. And the ship as a whole seemed to have ghostly connections emanating out and wisping in from unseen exterior sources.

"This display approximately depicts the tele-empathic signal topography of the crews of CSV Shepard and SSV Normandy forty eight hours ago. And this-" the display changed subtly "-depicts the signal topography presently."

"Sorry, Delegate, I don't see the difference like you do."

"I will adjust display parameters to exaggerate the scale." The image reset, and now the faint lines like dust in sunbeams were false colour forms. "Once again. Forty-eight hours ago... and presently." The image changed again, and now the difference was more pronounced.

"The signals are all a little weaker?" Kaidan said, pointing to one stationary point aboard Shepard. "Except for this one. The 'traffic' seems a bit heavier around this source."

"Correct," Delegate confirmed. "There is a collective point zero nine five six percent decline in signal emissions from the organic crew, and a commensurate point zero nine five six percent increase in signal strength radiating from platform Vattan as he is reformatted."

"So... what does it mean?" Kaidan asked, steepling his fingers over his mouth. "Why would this be happening?"

"The 'meaning' is beyond our reckoning, Alenko-Major, however we have allocated considerable processing runtime to the question of 'why.' We can offer speculation based on our observations. The emergence of organics' tele-empathic capability coinciding with the termination of platform Shepard-Commander in the 'Crucible Day' event, and subsequent change in signals field aggregation coinciding with platform Vattan initiating a physiological transformation to assume Shepard-Commander's form, could be viewed in light of an Earth idiom- 'the drop becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the drop.'" Delegate paused to let Kaidan contemplate the idea for a moment.

"You're suggesting... what? That on Crucible Day, whatever Shepard did aboard the Citadel made him... into the 'medium' that facilitates our synthempathic ability? And now that Vattan is becoming a 'new Shepard,' that medium is collapsing back in to that single point? That's a bit... well, I mean it sounds like mysticism, Delegate." Kaidan wasn't sure if the AI would pick up on incredulity, but he was projecting plenty to read. But it was EDI who joined in over the comms speaker that responded.

"It may be nonsensical to posit that Shepard's body was converted into the wireless signal medium for synthempathy, but it is conceivable that the electromagnetic signal spectrum was modeled on a template derived from Shepard. The emerging presence of a re-embodiment of Shepard could be producing a sort of convergence." EDI took over the holographic display in the other model case, and projected a CGI image of a plane atop an acoustic speaker. "Consider the interference pattern that would be created by particles within a closed, resonating system with zero net energy loss." The graphic showed a pulse from the speaker and a field of virtual particles started bouncing around the circular plane, creating an orderly pattern of ripples traveling back and forth that perpetuated itself.

"However, the same pattern is altered by the return of the source signal," Delegate added, and EDI illustrated his point by showing the speaker vibrating steadily. The bouncing virtual particles quickly became concentrated in a mass of concentric rings in the center of the plane, and only a small percentage of 'stragglers' rebounding off its outer edge and the plane's perimeter. "We posit that the tele-empathic network medium has an architecture that is sympathetic with the signal signature of Shepard-Commander's particular platform, and that the former will not function optimally given the presence of the latter."

Kaidan rubbed his temples, growing anxious. Not just anxious- frustrated. Frustrated and angry. How could this be happening?

"So you're saying that if Vattan finishes his metamorphosis and we get Shepard back, it costs us the synthempathetic 'field' that the new galactic regime basically hinges on?" he asked bitterly.

"We believe that to be one potential outcome," Delegate said.

Kaidan looked up, a dark expression on his face. He had a bad feeling about this. "Be careful when you tell me what you believe the alternative 'potential outcomes' are, Delegate."

"The most drastic alternative- not that I or the geth are advocating for it- would be to terminate Vattan's transformation," EDI said. She must have stepped up to save Delegate the risk of presenting it, since she was only present as a disembodied voice. "The interference would dissipate and the tele-empathic net would continue to grow and strengthen to some unknown potential." 'Terminate.' A cold word for what they surely meant- killing the adori.

"Tell me that there's some other way," Kaidan said. "Because if you're suggesting it's an either-or, black or white question..."

"We anticipated that a binary proposition would be deemed unacceptable, and postponed notifying you of this development until we could postulate at minimum one additional course of action, Alenko-Major," Delegate said.

"So? What's the third choice?" Kaidan asked impatiently. He got up from his chair and walked to the top of the steps, leaning his arm against the side of the display case and looking down at the living area.

"Alteration of Shepard-Commander's template. The geth are currently employing our knowledge of signals networking to attempt to devise a means of arresting the consolidation around his platform. The difficulty is in implementation."

Kaidan gazed at the bed that he and Hadrian had shared, where less than a week ago he'd laid down with Vattan and discussed the adori's impending change into Hadrian. He wanted them to share it again, and now that there was some hope of it happening, his whole mind and body felt coiled like a cobra to strike at anything that threatened that.

"Not that I'm complaining," he sighed, "but why have you brought this to me? And in secret? It doesn't really seem like the 'logical' choice- I'm not in charge of what goes on aboard the Shepard, and I'm certainly not objective about this." He turned back around and faced Delegate, looking for some recognizable sign from the geth.

Delegate shifted its weight slightly from one foot to the other. "It was our analysis... that Alenko-Major was uniquely entitled to adjudicate this matter."

"Because of the relationship I had with Shepard? That means something to you?" Kaidan asked.

"Adjudication by another party based on practical or objective considerations alone... would have omitted relevant perspective," Delegate explained, its 'forehead' flaps fluttering. It was a rationale Kaidan had never really attributed to the geth, but from Shepard's stories about the Heretic station and his discussion there with the geth called Legion, it made sense. Some 'perspectives' were more 'relevant' than others, based on their direct experience of a thing.

"So based on the rate the signals field is changing, how long do we have to come up with something?"

"Indeterminate. We require further observation of the phenomenon to chart its progression. However we estimate a maximum threshold of three hundred sixty-four hours to intervene."

"A little over fifteen days? We'll be at Earth in thirteen- if we get back before this is dealt with, we might not get a chance to do anything about it. Lavoie and EDI and I are all facing inquiries before the Alliance, it's iffy enough how long it'll be before I get to see... the 'outcome' of Vattan's change... I need you to work fast on this, Delegate. Give me something I can take to Lavoie, something we can do to work this out. Please." Alenko reached out and put his hand on the geth's shoulder, opening up his mind to the AI- despite the strangeness he still felt when linking to synthetic intelligences- to try and convey his sense of the urgency first-hand.

"We will operate at peak efficiency, Major," the geth promised, and Kaidan felt its sincerity. "You will be kept apprised of our findings."

"I appreciate it, Delegate."

Delegate backed away and walked out of the cabin, disappearing into the elevator.

Once the door slid shut Kaidan went back to the desk chair and sat down. He rose a moment later, too anxious to sit still. He marched down to the bed, arms crossed, and rubbed his face in his hands. Two weeks. In two weeks they'd be back and they'd be separated. They'd be helpless. He pulled out his dogtags and squeezed them in his fist, wishing like hell that his 'totem' of Shepard could still 'speak' to him. Wishing that the adori's metamorphosis were a simpler, quicker affair.

Shepard or the gift of understanding he'd apparently bequeathed them upon his death. To anyone else it might have been a straightforward choice, however bitter a pill to swallow. To Kaidan... he wanted a 'middle way.' He wanted it while there was still time. He wanted them together again and he wanted all of this to be over. A real end to all this hardship, once and for all- the happy ending they'd suffered for. He wanted what they deserved.

And heaven help anything that got in the way.

-2.10

SSV Normandy, 12 days later

-2.10

How it had come to this...

Kaidan reflected back on the last year. The last four years, really, right from the moment he'd met Hadrian Shepard.

-X [suggested soundtrack "Fix You" by Cold Play]

"Lieutenant Alenko, sir. Permission to come aboard?" Standing in the Normandy SR1 airlock, Kaidan extended his hand to his new XO. Shepard was about the same height, muscular but lean, with keen, deep brown eyes and dark- almost-black- hair in a high and tight marine cut. Handsome, but the sentinel head of the new prototype ship's marine detail told himself to stow that observation as soon as it arose. An N7 vanguard spacer war-hero, surely he probably had women lining up to get together with him. He'd probably be surly about another guy giving him 'the gaze.'

But as he took Kaidan's hand there was something unexpected. Strength, absolutely, but also a holding back. Often when he met higher ranking marines they tried to assert their superiority in their handshake, but not this time. Kaidan felt a subtle, open gentleness.

"Granted, el-tee," Hadrian replied, nodding, with just a hint of a smile. "I'm Shepard. Captain Anderson is conferring with Admiral Hackett, command may have a mission for us while we're doing our shakedown, so we should probably get you settled in ASAP. Help you with that?" Hadrian nodded toward Kaidan's second bag.

"Thanks," Kaidan smiled, and handed his case to Shepard, who started leading the way toward the crew deck. As he followed, Alenko admired the sights- the top-shelf haptic interfaces down the row of combat and operations stations, the lines of the CIC... the fit of Shepard's pants walking in front of him. He shook his head a little, trying to snap out of it and avoid getting 'caught' by any of the other crew. It would suck to get a reputation in his first five minutes aboard for sniffing around after the first officer.

"So I only got a quick look at your record," Shepard said, sounding curious. "Vancouver, eh?"

"Eh?" Alenko smiled, mirroring a little. "Yeah. After a close call in Shanghai when a freighter crashed just outside the city, my parents moved to Canada and I grew up in Vancouver until- ah... until I went away for 'school,' you could say."

"I visited the city once, years ago," Hadrian said.

"Oh yeah? What did you think of my stomping grounds?"

Hadrian turned a bit, mid-stride, looked back at Kaidan and cocked his head a little, nodding approvingly. "I liked the view. A lot."

"Yeah, it's pretty beautiful there," Kaidan replied, completely oblivious.

The corner of Shepard's mouth turned downward slightly and he turned back forward. "Mm-hmm. Wasn't really very bright that day, but it was still nice to look at. Hopefully next time I check it out it'll be a bit clearer."

"Yeah, hopefully. So... I heard you specialized in biotics-enhanced combat training?"

"That's right. Though 'vanguard' sounds a lot more bad-ass, y'know? 'First in,' tip-of-the-spear... aggressive penetration?"

Kaidan blushed a little, but worked to suppress the thoughts Shepard was conjuring up with his macho word-play. Talking shop right away, though- evidently he was all business. That was unfortunate. "I trained in, ah, strategic control, myself. Biotics and tech to work away at the enemy's defenses, hit em hard where they're weak."

"Kinda zen," Shepard remarked, stifling his frustration. Maybe the new marine wasn't picking up on his hints because he was old-fashioned, like Hadrian's father, and couldn't even register another man's interest in him. Weird, he didn't seem 'that way,' though. Maybe it was for the best, though; it was his first time as XO aboard a ship and embarrassing himself by flirting with some strict subordinate would probably undermine his authority in the crew's eyes.

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Commander Shepard, the bad-ass vanguard."

"And nice to meet you, too, Lieutenant Alenko, the cautious strategizer. Maybe if we can get our act together we'll make a good pair. In combat, I mean- a good team."

"Yeah, I'd like that," Kaidan smiled wistfully at the back of Shepard's head, "a lot."

-X

"EDI, are we ready to go?" Kaidan asked in a conspiratorial tone, looking out the skylight window at the interior of the docking bay.

"Delegate reports via our back-channels that the geth crew are prepared. As am I."

So this was it. Three days of planning and now everything was ready, and all that was left was to steel himself and just do it. And then wait for all manner of shit to rain down on him. He was already facing disciplinary action anyway, he might as well really wow them. He didn't know if it was 'right' or 'wrong,' but he was doing it.

"Start the clock. I should be in position in twelve minutes." Kaidan zipped up his jacket and snapped the buttons on the flap, and removed his rank insignia- which he'd started wearing again once the Shepard had retrieved them from Xi Bootes- and set them on the bedside table. He tucked his pistol in the back of his pants, took a deep, reflective breath, and headed out the door.

It was the night shift and the Normandy was empty of everyone else, so he crossed paths with only a couple of crewmen as he made his way to the airlock, over to the Shepard, and from the docking bay to the secure long-term ward of the medical bay. When he arrived he found the other adori passenger, Satteveh, seated at the nurse's station alone. When Vattan had entered his chrysalis, Satteveh had taken on the task- a ceremonial position in their culture- of safeguarding his slumbering friend.

"Major," the adori said, sounding surprised as he greeted the sentinel.

"Satteveh. How are you?" Kaidan nodded, and looked sideways at the door to the room where Vattan's body was transforming in seclusion.

"We are well. With thanks. And you? This is the first time we have seen you since Vattan began the change."

"It is... What's going on in there... it means a lot to me, but I wasn't sure it was... appropriate." He glanced down at the nearest display for the time. "I thought it might be a very private sort of thing. Though I guess I understand having a friend watch over you while it's happening. Did you know Vattan well?"

Satteveh smiled warmly and bowed his head, affirmative and reminiscing. "Vattan... yes. In point of fact, our form was once his, and his, ours."

Kaidan blinked, suddenly feeling a pang of regret. But he smothered it, determined to press onward. "You two melded? You 'swapped lives' and learned everything about each other?" Suddenly Vattan's choice for who to awake to represent his people to the Council made more sense.

"We did. It was some time ago, but we were intimates for decades. And friends for several more since." Satteveh looked over to the door as well, fondly. "But we had an intuition... We recall feeling in him a sense of completion. We suspected he would not renew himself with another melding, or if he did that it would be a final, transformative one. He had lived a long, full life. He was ready to give the gift of new life to another." He steepled his fingers and looked pensively at Kaidan, and then through and beyond him. "We suspect, actually, that once our brothers are revived and they learn what has become of our race... our home... well... many of us may feel that our time has come."

"But... aren't you going to miss him?" Kaidan asked, feeling a great wave of sympathy. It wasn't even 'connection,' just a deep feeling of kinship. "If you loved him for so long?"

Satteveh's gaze focused on Kaidan again, and he offered up a small, thoughtful smile. "We will never truly be without him. We were one. Happy to give ourselves to one another. What is there to miss?"

"His presence? His touch? The sound of his voice? Seeing him smile at you? What isn't there to miss?"

"To fear the loss of passing things... when all things are fleeting... we learned long ago that there is no wisdom in that." It felt almost like an accusation, but before Kaidan could respond to defend himself Satteveh raised an open hand. "We, of course, had a very long time to learn. And there is no shame in the innocence of the young." Then, after a pause that felt intensely 'knowing,' he said "you need feel no guilt for your longing."

As if on cue, the alert status lights flashed orange and a klaxon started to sound. Kaidan looked at the clock. Shit. He was behind schedule.

A synthesized voice of one of the geth crew came over the intercom. "Alert. Environmental systems failure. Alert. Environmental systems failure. All organic personnel report to evacuation stations. Synthetic crew to interface for damage control allocation. Repeat: all organic personnel report to evacuation stations. Synthetic crew to inferface for damage control allocation."

Satteveh looked to Kaidan, either confused or having the grace to feign confusion.

"The evac route from here is out that door and down the hall to the left, following the signage to the shuttle bay," Kaidan instructed.

"You are not going?" the adori asked, getting up from his seat. Kaidan shook his head.

"I have clearance you don't to release the medical bed for transport- I'll be right behind you, I can't leave Shep- Vattan. I can't leave him here. But the anti-grav sled for the bed needs a clear path, so I need to you go on ahead, make sure there are no obstructions between here and the shuttle bay. Don't worry, I'm sure we'll only be off the ship temporarily while the geth effect repairs."

Satteveh followed Kaidan's directions and left the room, turning left out the door, and Kaidan hurried in to the private room. He wasn't sure what he expected to find, but what he saw was eerily beautiful. Vattan's naked body, now fully a creamy, human peach colour, lay in the fetal position on his side on the medical bed, covered with what looked like an ephemeral sheet of spider silk that seemed to glow under the dim lighting at the head of the bed. When he stepped closer around the side of the bed and looked through the veneer, the face was the one he'd loved. The one he'd missed. Cosmetically, at least, Vattan was Hadrian now. Seeing it in the flesh had a surreal feel, but Kaidan's heart skipped a beat and his eyes started to well up with emotion.

[ illustrated . ]

But he was behind schedule.

Giving his head a shake, he punched in an authorization code on the panel at the head of the bed, and clamps on either side of the base hissed and withdrew from the 'slab' atop it. The hum of the anti-gravity engine in the bed itself whirred up from a high pitch to a lower one, and the platform lifted slightly, with holographic 'skids' appearing on either side for calibrating the lift.

"Let's get you out of here," Alenko said in a tender voice, and gripping the handles on the near side he carefully slid the bed off its base and began pushing it out of the room.

"EDI, how are we doing?" he asked into his headset.

"Several of the evacuation pods have launched and are congregating. Delegate reports all ready. Personal transpoder tracking indicates a clear path if you go now."

"I'm on the move," he responded, pushing the bed past the nursing station and into the hall.

Where he turned right.

Picking up the pace, he pushed the bed down the corridor toward the Normandy docking point. He held up at two corners when EDI signaled him that crew were passing through an adjacent hallway. The thought occurred to him how fortunate it was under the circumstances that Shepard carried such a small crew for its size- on a traditional Alliance dreadnought he never could have evaded prying eyes even this long. Finally he was within a 50 foot straight shot for the airlock, and on EDI's all-clear he started into a run.

Forty feet. He thought of just how unlikely all of this was. If it hadn't been for the keeping of a sweaty sex towel. If it hadn't been for Javik and Liara's fluke discovery in an ancient database. If it hadn't been for a sympathetic crew of geth programs. If it hadn't been for a hundred other little things. He might have lost all hope a long time ago.

Thirty feet. He thought, too, of course, about what he was giving up. Persuading his rescuer to divert from his original mission was one thing, but what he was doing now... he would probably never see the inside of his uniform again. He might not even get to see Hadrian's 'resurrection.' But it would happen, and that was the important thing to him. To at least give them 'a fighting chance.'

Twenty feet. This was it. He just had to get past one storage room and-

Then he felt a knot in his stomach as the door across the hall from the docking bay entrance beeped and opened.

EDI was immediately in his ear. "Major-!"

Liara stepped into the hallway looking with concern down at a datapad in her hand and Kaidan had to dig his heels in to stop from slamming the bed cart into her. A surge of adrenale exploded into his blood as she looked up at him in surprise. Behind her through the door, Alenko saw the high-tech setup of her Shadow Broker network. He'd known she was migrating it over from the Normandy during the repairs, but he hadn't realized she'd been set up in the compartment right across the hall from the bay. He'd been so distracted.

"Kaidan?" she asked, looking confused. "Is that-? Where-? What are you doing?

"Doctor T'soni's compartment must be shielded when sealed, to protect her Broker infrastructure. I wasn't detecting her transponder until the door opened, Major," EDI said apologetically.

He was so close. He stood there, like a deer in the headlights. Liara was between him an his objective, and the dawning look of revelation on her face told him she was piecing together some approximation of what he was up to. He needed to head her off, provide some explanation before she put together her own.

"The bulkhead sealed between the medical ward and the shuttle bay, so I was getting Vattan aboard the Normandy. Since its environmental systems are back up to independent operation," he said, hoping that it was enough of the truth to convince her.

"Are we sure there's even a real emergency? Glyph was trying to interface with the Shepard's virtual crew's datastream to see if it could do anything to help, and it says there are conflicting readings." She held up her datapad by way of evidence. "And now the comms seem to be down, I can't reach Lavoie to ask him if he knows about the inconsistency."

"Alert. Environmental systems failure. All organic personnel report to evacuation stations. Synthetic crew to interface for damage control allocation," the geth voice repeated over the speakers.

'Smooth. Real smooth.' Kaidan thought sarcastically to himself. That wasn't conspicuous at all.

"I don't know," he said, worrying about whether the tension in his voice would help or hurt his cause, "the geth seem convinced enough that the problem's real. Maybe whatever it is also corrupted your drone's data feed with the ship." He looked to the docking bay door again and tried to think about 'the clock.' "Look, Liara, we should get out of here until we know for sure, the virtual crew will give the all-clear if it turns out to be nothing."

Liara hesitated. But either the seeming urgency of the situation was convincing, or she just wanted to believe him. He swallowed the guilt that he knew he should feel for later. "You're right," she nodded, finally stepping back out of his way. "Let me get the door." She touched the controls and the lock to the docking bay's gangway rumbled open.

Kaidan pushed the cart in, but suddenly his synthempathy 'flared' as he felt Liara's alarm at his back. Before he could react, he felt his pistol yanked out of the back of his belt.

"Kaidan, what are you carrying this for?" she asked.

He felt her 'pressing' their connection, starting to probe his feelings, and he knew that she'd be wise to the truth soon enough. She was considerably more practiced at this even before they'd all been enhanced. At least she would know that he wished like hell that he didn't have to do what he had to do now. He stopped just beyond the threshold, before Liara could follow him through, and turned around to face her.

"I hoped I wouldn't have to use it," he said.

"Kaidan, what is going on?" she demanded.

"You can't come with me, Liara," Alenko replied sternly. He wouldn't let anyone stop him now. Right or wrong, he was doing this.

As her mind worked over everything before her, including the feelings she was reading off of him now, a look of realization dawned on her face. "There really isn't any environmental systems failure, is there?" she asked knowingly.

"There is," he said, flashing a look over his shoulder at Vattan... at Shepard on the floating medical trolly behind him. "My environment... it isn't complete, Liara. Just walk away. There's no danger in this to anyone, no harm to anyone, but I have to do this. I'm doing it. Please don't try to stop me. Just... walk... away."

Liara looked at him, then down at the gun in her hand. She'd managed to get into his head, but his own mind was racing so fast within itself that he couldn't focus to try and read her back. But he did see her jaw tighten. She stepped back a pace. And she raised his pistol. At least she was pointing it at his leg.

"Kaidan I don't know what's going on-"

"It would take too long to explain it, Liara! I have to go!"

"I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head, "I can't just let you take him like this, not like some thief in the night under cover of some faked emergency. We can work this out if you just-"

"I don't have time!" Kaidan yelled, suddenly angry at her. He was angry at her timing, at her interference, at her suspicion and indignation. And for an instant he wondered if this was how Shepard had felt during their showdown during the Cerberus coup. The flash of being able to relate, the sympathy that came with it- that compassion Hadrian had talked about cultivating in his meditations- softened his anger for just a moment. But then he hardened himself again. He was doing this, and it had to be done right now. "Liara please," he said emphatically, "I don't have time."

He felt something from her now, a brief wavering of her resolve. But she was having her own flashback, to watching the previous Shadow Broker's men wheeling Shepard's body away, and then Miranda Lawson, and her feelings about Vattan's transformation were still coloured by her anger over the protheans' 'theft' of her people's distant cousins. And she had too many unanswered questions.

"I'm sorry, Major," she said, clearly hurting in her own way over them finding themselves in conflict.

"So am I," Kaidan glowered darkly.

She was incrementally quicker than he was, and pulled the trigger of his pistol.

A hundred little things that had had to align just right to get him here. Most of them beyond his control. But not all of them.

He'd knowingly worked to persuade Lavoie to undertake the mission to Nibanna. He'd knowingly conspired with the geth crew- on the surface of it, the unlikeliest of allies; he used to shoot at their kind, but here they were and they had his back more solidly than the asari who'd been at his side during those battles.

And he'd knowingly brought an unloaded gun, for use strictly to intimidate anyone that might have barred his way. Because they were all synthempathetic now, and no one could easily bear the 'feedback' of emotional pain that came from inflicting harm on another anymore.

But a biotic pull, just forceful enough to yank Liara backwards off her feet and in through the open door of her compartment... he could do that.

And he could follow, though the exertion taxed him, by erecting the strongest barrier he could manage in the doorway behind her, to keep her there once the lift effect wore off and she regained her footing inside.

"Kaidan! This isn't like you! Think about what you're doing!" she yelled from the other side of the glowing blue wall of force.

"I'm sorry Liara, but I have. Being the 'good soldier' isn't enough anymore." he said, catching his breath. "I need to do this. I hope some day you'll understand." He hit the door controls to his side, sealing the Shepard's airlock, and turned to push the medical bed down the ramp onto the deck of the Normandy.

"EDI! Where are we?" he asked, anxious as Normandy's airlock closed in turn behind him.

"We have ninety-seven seconds. Delegate says that the Shepard's crew seem to have discovered our ruse and they've halted evacuation. But there are too few left aboard to intervene. The drive modification is complete and the capacitor is ninety-one percent charged. I am overriding the docking clamps and assuming helm control." He heard the clamps release from his ship followed by the sound of Normandy's propulsion systems coming online.

"And there are no escape pods or shuttles in the way?"

"No, the geth have increased the Shepard's speed to outpace the evacuation craft. We will be well clear." Kaidan pushed the bed into the cockpit where he could keep an eye on it and wedged it between the back of the co-pilot's seat and the aft bulkhead, locking the stabilizer controls. He looked out the forward viewports as EDI slid them sideways out of the bay and, once clear, started along her plotted arc.

Seconds ticked by as Kaidan climbed into Joker's pilot seat and called up the infographic of their course, checking it one more time to make absolutely sure there was as little risk as possible that their engine exhaust would damage the Shepard. What they were doing was going to be bad enough without melting the nose off the big, beautiful new ship that had been their salvation.

He watched out the window as Shepard's seemed to peel away, departing Normandy's company- though it was actually the other way around- and then EDI swung the frigate at full speed onto a path that would veer directly across the larger ship's flight path. This was it. His mind returned briefly to a few days earlier.

-X [suggested soundtrack "Flynn Lives" by Daft Punk]

"You're confident this will work?" he asked. EDI in her chassis avatar and Delegate looked at each other, conferring wirelessly, and then back to Kaidan. Both nodded.

"Our analysis of telemetry from the Crucible event is as conclusive as possible," Delegate said. "Absolute certainty cannot be assured, however we are confident. Configuring the conduit drive to emulate the output of the Charon relay, with the defined alterations to the signal parameters, should selectively arrest the consolidation of tele-empathic infrastructure in any organic platforms within the area of effect."

"Without destroying the Shepard?" Kaidan asked insistently. He couldn't in good conscience do this if it might tear the prototype apart like the synthesis pulse had wrecked the propagating relays. Even if the plan was to execute their plan within conventional FTL range of Earth.

"The conduit drive will be damaged, but not irreparably. While the power requirements are high to create such a finely modulated signal, we will be creating a near-range directional beam instead of trying to radiate a long-range burst. The stress on the relay technology will be commensurate, disabling it until repairs are effected but not destroying it. We will be stranded in the Alpha Centauri system, but with the Anderson slated to begin space trials in eleven days, even if we are still adrift at that time, we will be within one jump of Earth for them to deploy it to assist. Or, barring that, one of the faster asari cruisers could be on station to retrieve us within three weeks," EDI laid out once more for good measure.

"Alright, I just want to be sure about these things. This is a big deal." He sighed, contemplating the seemingly inevitable end of his career. "Even if we aren't blowing up the Shepard, I'm probably getting the whole library thrown at me for this. Stealing one ship and conspiring to commit mutiny aboard another, sabotage, hell- they'll probably charge me with kidnapping just for good measure. And EDI, well I know by now that you're all-in but what about your people, Delegate? This might be a big setback for my people trusting yours to virtually crew any new ships. I'm just... I want to make sure we're doing the right thing."

"The geth subset of the consensus aboard this vessel are in agreement, Alenko-Major- the long-term benefits of reactivating platform Shepard-Commander while preserving the aggregation of tele-empathic faculties among organic allies are sufficient to justify any temporary restriction of geth participation in Project Phoenix Flight. We are committed."

Kaidan stood with his hand over his mouth, deep in thought. It was everything he'd asked them for- well, almost everything. Even if Captain Lavoie would approve of disabling his ship in the process, it wasn't something Kaidan could ask of him. Not given the shit storm that was bound to follow.

"What would Shepard do if your positions were transposed, Major?" EDI asked. As soon as she asked, Alenko knew. For just a moment, he felt like he had during those months he'd carried his totem of Shepard around his neck. The presence, and the certainty he'd felt.

I trust my instincts. When I over-think things, I fuck up.

Something swelled up in his chest, and caught in his throat, and Kaidan nodded.

"I know exactly what he'd do," he said, solemn but smiling to himself a little. "Start making your preparations. With one adjustment: you won't be taking Normandy out by yourself with Vattan aboard, EDI. If our places were 'transposed,' Shepard would be aboard. Keeping an eye on me, if it were me, and keeping an eye on his ship... Cerberus-built or not, he loved this ship. We loved it... we'll love it again. I'm going to be aboard when we do this."

"Major, your own tele-empathic infrastructure will be subjected to the same disruption," EDI said, sounding concerned. "The architecture already in place should be uneffected, but the further development of your networking ability will stop. Given our projections about the ultimate potential of the faculty... In the coming consensus, you will be left far behind, Major. Handicapped in comparison to others- you will almost certainly experience significant difficulty integrating. You will be... forgive me for saying, Major, but an evolutionary hold-back. A relic."

"I understand that," Kaidan said. But he was undeterred. Whatever he was doing to Hadrian, he would be doing to himself. It only seemed fair, after all- ultimate compassion and enlightenment was Shepard's goal long before he'd shared it with him. If he was denying the man he loved that ultimate aspiration... and if it was the only way to have him back... he would forego the same for himself without reservation. "I won't make him face this new galaxy he created alone, like some freak, EDI. Maybe we'll be 'relics,' but we'll be relics together."

"It is Alenko-Major's prerogative," Delegate conceded.

"There's on more thing," Kaidan added, insistent. "I'm grateful that both of you, and the other geth crew are willing to help do this. It's a far cry from a few years ago when we suspected and feared every synthetic and AI that we met. Now here you are helping me to... but I want the rest of them- our friends, and Captain Lavoie and his crew- left out of this. We'll work up a plan to keep them busy, keep them distracted, keep them out of the way, but I've gotten them all in enough trouble already. I don't want to involve them in this if we can do it ourselves."

-X

"CSV Shepard to SSV Normandy, this is Captain Lavoie. Respond immediately, Normandy."

Kaidan took a deep breath and reached out to open the comm channel. He imagined what Shepard with his occasional incorrigable streak in the face of peeved authority figures would say. 'Yo no hablo Inglés. En Español, por favor?'

No. No way. It definitely wasn't the time to channel him.

"Captain. Something I can do for you?" he said.

"You can turn that ship around and return to the docking bay, Major." Lavoie sounded pissed.

"Sorry, Captain, I heard something about an environmental systems failure and I-"

"We both know that alarm was bullshit, Alenko! I'm sure EDI's personal loyalty to Shepard and to you explains her actions, but I don't know how you persuaded the geth to falsify a ship-wide emergency, or what the hell they're doing to the conduit drive engine right now. Or what you're up to exactly abducting our guest." Liara must have gotten in touch with the bridge. "But I know you aren't going to get very far in a ship with its FTL engines still wrecked."

"I'm not planning to go very far, Captain, and I had every intention of returning in a minute. But I have something I have to do first. I promise you I haven't put you or your crew in any danger, I just have to do this one thing."

"And I have to insist that you return immediately, Major. I embarked on your mission before as a favour to Commander Shepard, the hero of the whole goddamned galaxy. When I had to arrest you I gave you the freedom of your ship as a favour to you, because you were at his side. But you've exhausted your favours. I have orders, and I can't indulge any more rogue bullshit!"

"Oh come on, Captain, I think someone important must owe me at least one more favour. Oh! I know! Call Shepard's mom. I'll wait." Oops. Okay, apparently some of the irreverence under pressure had definitely rubbed off.

"Major! Believe me when I say that I don't want to have to shoot you down, but believe me also when I say that I will if you don't turn that stolen ship around right now!"

"I'm sorry Captain. But the geth programs operating gunnery control might have an issue with that. I said I'll be right back and I will, and then you can throw me in irons if you like, but I can't let you stop me. Normandy out."

"God damn it, Alenko-!"

Kaidan switched the comm off and turned his gaze back toward the Shepard. It was now almost two kilometers behind to port and EDI was steering them to cross its path at an oblique angle. As the seconds ticked down, just before Shepard was obscured from view by the cut-off of the viewport at the back of the cockpit, Kaidan saw the flickering blue glow of the conduit drive spinning up to full power.

"Five seconds," EDI announced.

Kaidan took her word for it that this wouldn't hurt, and he looked over his other shoulder to the medical bed, at his sleeping new Shepard. He hoped dearly that this wouldn't be the last time he saw him. But if it was...

"You keep getting me into so much trouble," he said softly. "But it's worth it. Because I love you. See you on the other side."

And then a blinding flash of light washed through the Normandy.