After the War Chapter Five

After Kaidan had left, Shepard sat on her bed, hands balled into fists so tight the knuckles turned white. Tears streaked down her face and she fought desperately to stop them, with no success. She couldn't remember the last time she'd cried. It might have been Mindoir, and that had to have been over a dozen lifetimes ago. A million. She started doing her exercises compulsively, anything to get a handle on her raging emotions. The methodical flexing and unflexing of muscles calmed her and eventually the tears relented and stopped entirely. The rage remained, however, and underneath that a thick and abiding hurt.

Shepard had never been able to face how terribly Kaidan had hurt her with his sudden disappearance. It was unlike anything she'd ever known.

There had been the first big loss, her parents, but she'd hated them. Hated her mother for keeping her head down and bearing all life's sorrows with her long suffering prayers and pointless proverbs, and hated her father for creating those sorrows with his heavy hand and biblical temper. She'd prayed and prayed for him to die, even though the priest assured her it meant she would go to hell. The vindication she had felt when she stood over his body, trying to look sad for the gathered mourners had been like cold steel, making her stronger. She had left her home, the beautiful hot summers and elegant icy winters for the stars soon after that and rarely looked back. It was Mindoir she missed, the pass of seasons, the rain and snow and heat of the sun, not her parents.

After that, there had been friends. Mentors. Lost to time, or distance, or the many jagged deaths of war. There had been losses and she had felt them and grieved. There was nothing weak in grieving, no matter what the most loud and arrogant of testosterone-charged cannon-fodder might think. But the pain of Kaidan leaving had cut her to the bone, right down to the very marrow. She'd shut that part of herself off, left it behind in the face of the greater needs of the time. There had been many. It had been so much easier to let herself be numb.

His return had undone all of that. There was no greater need she could bury herself in, no towering emergency that needed her personal attention. Bed-ridden she had rolled in the pain she felt, the betrayal. Tried to hate him, and failed and hated herself for failing. Her anguish bloomed like a bloody flower at his untimely return.

Her breath was coming fast and she felt a deep burn in her legs. She had been furiously doing her exercises as she thought back to what was happening and lost track of her own body. She eased down abruptly, rubbing the over-exerted muscles as she laid back down on the bed.

The worst part was, even with all this anger, this hurt and distrust boiling within her, raising her temper any time he drew near she still ached for him. Her skin burned with the aftermath of his touch. She ran her tongue over her chapped lips, tasting him there. Growling with frustration she crawled under the blankets, all thoughts of going anywhere banished with this new development. Between the burn in her muscles and the fire wakened by Kaidan's touch it felt like she was running a fever.

For the first time she faced the fact that she might not be able to avoid this any longer. There would have to be some sort of action taken, one way or another, to decide how things were ultimately going to stand. Either they both needed to figure out this strange bond that still existed, mutated and ugly but unerringly present, and find a way to cope or Kaidan would have to find some other ship to haunt. Against all rational thought, the idea of his leaving made her sad. She didn't want him to go, even though it would make so much more sense. She sighed miserably. Nothing in life had ever felt so utterly stupid.

She tried to sleep for a while, but there was no hope of banishing thoughts of Kaidan. She thought about getting up but couldn't find a point to it. What would she do? Hobble about on her crutches? Her legs were so sore, she wouldn't last more than fifteen minutes. Go down and try to shoot the shit with Liberdade and Pierce? She wasn't a part of their world and her presence would only make them uncomfortable. Her guns were clean, her armour was in good repair. Everything in the world just kept on ticking by, and she felt like she had fallen out of existance. There was no where to go, there was nothing to do. All she had ever known was how to be a soldier.

Utterly alone, Shepard pulled a pillow over her face and cried again, for what seemed like a very long time.

*

Kaidan couldn't stay on the Normandy.

Not stopping to grab anything he stormed directly to the airlock and out into the wide boulevards of the Citadel, seeking something, anything that could distract him. He almost bowled over Private Liberdade, who had been leaning over vomiting loudly into a garbage can. She looked up at him and her eyes brightened.

"Pierce! It's Alenko!" The mans bearded face appeared from around the corner and offered a cheerful smile. His greeting was lost in another bout of noisy heaving from the small Brazilian trooper. She stood up with a sigh, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand and gave him a look that was hazy with alcohol.

"What are you two doing?" He asked. Pierce wasn't half as drunk as Liberdade, but the man had a legendary alcohol tolerance and was nearly twice her size so that was understandable. Liberdade shrugged. They were both dressed civilian, Liberdade in the slinky dresses barely stretched over the most important areas of modesty, Pierce in a three piece suit of Earth design.

"We just got kicked out of Flux." She replied. "We look for a new bar, yes?"

"You got us kicked out, I think you mean." Pierce's thick Ukrainian accent was a start to Kaidan. The man talked so infrequently around him that he had barely noticed it before. Now he spoke with a thick blurring of syllables that even Kaidan found somewhat difficult to follow. "You should listen when I tell you things. If you listened to me we wouldn't be barred from the place."

"If I listened to you, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere with the asari." Liberdade replied, grinning wolfishly at him. She tapped at her omni-tool, which appeared above her arm and clashed horrendously with her casual dress and demeanor. A phone number projected itself in the air. "Doing it my way, I get her phone number."

"I don't even know why you like the asari so much." Pierce grunted.

"Oh that's easy." Liberdade replied, flipping her hand dismissively. "Because they put out."

Pierce grunted in a way he recognized. It was a common sound that meant there was no longer any point in pursuing the topic at hand with the small blond Brazilian woman. Most everyone had some variation of what Troll had taken to calling the Liberdade Grunt. She recognized it to, and made a rude gesture in his direction. Kaidan laughed lightly.

"Going to head down to Chora's Den then?" He asked. Pierce sighed, as though he wished that he had mentioned any bar other than that one.

"We SHOULD. But Pierce, he is to pure for it." Liberdade sighed, flipping her hand in its familiar dismissal of his weirdness. Kaidan shook his head.

"I think a new one opened up in the Presidium. Though that's more of a lounge then a bar." He turned to leave, raising a hand to wave goodbye. Liberdade looked sad to see him going, but raised a hand in response.

"Tchau, Lieutenant."

"Tchau, Private." He was careful to pronounce it properly. Like everyone else on that ship, he'd learnt that it wasn't worth it to ignore the careful nuances of Portuguese pronunciation around the Private.

As Kaidan headed up, through the markets that offered nothing of particular interest and into the Presidium his thoughts wandered. He could have identified with Shepard's reluctance to attempt to integrate herself with her younger crew members. They were young military, still fresh with habits from boot-camp. Even Pierce was new, a Lieutenant because of talent, not experience. He felt nothing in common with them, despite the nearly identical fashion they lived most of their lives. They were navy friends. Shoreleave was their time to get away from him and the nuances of strict military life. He had no place among them.

He wandered for hours, up and down and in circles around the wide artificial lake. He longed to be away from here. The Citadel was huge, a city that floated through space, but Kaidan felt utterly alone. There was not a person in the world who wanted him around, and the only person he wanted was the least likely to call him up for a drink. He missed Ash. He longed for Shepard. Memories came and went as he travelled familiar stretches of the station. Even with the constant fear, the horror and pressure of those times chasing Saren across the galaxy those had been the good days. He sighed, leaning against the railing that skirted the elevated boulevard he had been exploring. His head hung. He was utterly alone, he realized for the first time. There was no place for him in this world, nowhere he belonged outside of a suit of armour and the battle field. And his joints had started aching, his bones creaking as he got on in life.

Soon he wouldn't be a soldier anymore, and he feared that day more than he let anyone know. It would be the end of him. There was nothing more.

He didn't cry, but he came close. His father would be ashamed of him, ashamed to see how thoroughly he had managed to poison everything good in his life. Then again, parents were usually proud to see their children follow in their footsteps weren't they? So maybe dad would have been proud after all. Kaidan had learnt how to screw up from the best of them. Caught in melancholy thought and speculation Kaidan lingered in the Presidium for hours, until he was so tired there was no option but to return to the Normandy for sleep. It was a temporary distraction, but that was all distractions really. Eventually the face of reality loomed. It always did.

*

"I hope you can understand our position." The asari councillor looked down at her with the kind of soft-eyed sympathy that Shepard was tired of getting angry over. Nothing she did would get people to stop looking at her with that sour cocktail of pity and reverence so she might as well ignore it. She did.

"Of course I do." She replied, her voice strong. "It was nice of you to hold out on it this long. What happens now?"

"The Normandy will be retired, and probably enshrined in some museum somewhere." The turian councillor replied briskly. "The crew will be reassigned, to excellent positions like all of your former crew members I'm sure. As for you, I'm sure any position in the Council or the Alliance would be open to you. The possibilities are endless."

Shepard nodded. Any position except active duty, the only thing she knew, the only thing she was any damn good at. The Councillors discussed when a formal statement would be issued, but Shepard didn't bother to listen. She was no longer important to their discussions. She had dreamt of the day that they would finally get off her back, stop ringing her up every time they needed something cleaned up and squared away with her particular skill set. Now that it had come...

She left, quickly and discreetly. Standing at the base of the stairs, one hand braced against the hand rail her breath came hot and furious. Her mind reeled under the implications.

She had known it would happen. Two months of flirting with death, unmoving in a hospital bed had made her body useless. It was nearing the six month mark of her injury and she couldn't walk two feet without her crutches. It could take years before she could meet the physical standards of an average soldier, let alone retake her former excellence. Her aim was shot, her respiratory system hastily rebuilt into a machine half as effective as before, her joints groaned with the effort of moving. After twenty years she suddenly wasn't a soldier anymore.

"Shepard, I'm sorry." Anderson had followed her, leaving the other Councillors to their trivial scheduling concerns. "I fought to keep you with the Spectre's, to make them wait for you to heal. But..."

But she might never heal. Not completely. She might never be what she used to be.

"I understand." She replied quietly. "I really do... I... I..."

Anderson put a hand on her shoulder, his dark face gentle and comforting. "I know, it's hard to have it taken away from you. I remember. It's natural to be angry."

"I'm not angry." Shepard said, and laughed. "If you want the truth, I've never felt more relieved."

She looked up at his puzzled face, laughed again. His expression was priceless. He had obviously expected her to wilt under the onslaught of her sudden uselessness, to give up and surrender to her own uselessness. But she felt vindicated, freed. Her chains had been cast off. The galaxy could depend on someone else now, could hang their concerns on someone else's shoulders while she stood tall and strong on her own.

She smiled. "In those books of my mothers there is a poem by some ancient earth poet that goes, 'for many a time I have been half in love with easeful death, called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath. Now more than ever it seems rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.'*" She laughed. "I never thought I'd find some six hundred years dead old man to speak for me, but there you go. I've been in love with death for so long, it's been my purpose, my function. And now it makes me sick. I've fought enough wars, seen enough. I want my time to rest now."

Anderson put his arm around her, hugged her close. She could see the tears making his eyes wet, but didn't draw attention to it. She smiled at him, an unburdened smile that bloomed across her lips.

"You've earned that rest, Shepard. You more than anyone." He paused. "But what are you going to do about Alenko?"

That was a shock, though she supposed it shouldn't have been. What wasn't a shock, was her complete lack of a legitimate answer.

What would she do? What could she do? There was one more battle she had to fight before she could lay down, take the weight off her bones and finally rest. She squared her shoulders.

"Whatever I can." She said finally.

*= The poem is 'Ode to a Nightingale' by John Keats. If you haven't read it, you should.