This chapter includes spoilers from Mass Effect 3.


"So, the Reapers will come?" Kaidan asked me, his voice husky.

I picked the skin around my finger nails and lifted my head to stare at the ceiling. "Yeah, they do. It's just I don't know after..." I sighed. "The game was a trilogy: on the first game, you guys defeated Saren and the Sovereign; the second part starts from the moment Shepard dies, and ends at the destruction of the Collector base. I never played the third game myself, I only know what was shown on the video that had all love scenes you and Shepard had..."

He choked. "-Had what scenes?"

"Oh. Uh. Well, on each game, Shepard had multiple persons he or she could show her affection to-"

"She?" Kaidan was bewildered.

"Yes, you could decide if you wanted to play as a man or a woman. You could also decide if you wanted to have hair or not, or some scars on your face."

"And, me and him, we ended up-"

"If it gives you any consolation, only femShep managed to grab you in her gabin in the games." As far as I knew, but he didn't need to know any more of the third game may-be's. Kaidan managed to look embarassed and I continued. "What I was trying to say is, I don't know what's going to happen a year from now. Months from now. I haven't got a faintest of the timeline, or what can be done to stop the Reapers. Josh propably does, but he ain't here."

So I told him what I knew. The canon, from the starting point to the day of the Horizon's attack. After talking for a little while we went for a walk around the colony, me stopping my speaking every time someone got close enough to hear. The people weren't smiling. They didn't give me much attention, but some of them stared at Kaidan with hate. I remembered some of them blamed him for the attack.

I skipped Virmire because I didn't want him to interrupt me (I also kept the romance stuff out) before I had finished, and trying to figure out how to tell him about the future. Or possible future.

We were walking up a grassy hill then, both thinking what to say next.

"A lot of things kinda make sense now, now that I know they really were more than met the eye." Kaidan said.

"Josh must have had a plan, with that other guy. They wouldn't have come here otherwise. They must know how things are supposed to end, and there must be something they came here for."

Kaidan scrathed at his ear.

"Walter - Josh, he, uh, sent me this message, maybe week ago. He told me he had found Shepard, alive and well, and that they needed my help. I thought he had lost it, or played a prank on me.

"When we had drifted apart, I know he tried to stay in touch with everyone, but, it was just too..." He shook his head.

"He knew the Collectors would attack the Normandy, right? Why didn't he stop it?"

I took a sidestep to avoid stepping on a patch of grass that looked slippery. The shoes I had didn't fit me that well, and I had trouble walking without falling over the place.

"He knew if he stopped one attack, there would have been another. The Collectors wanted Shepard gone. The old Normandy had no chance. The SR2 has no chance as she is. They wouldn't have stopped hunting him until he was dead. Next time, nobody might have survived. Because he went the way he did, his remains stayed in the ice. Cerberus was able to resurrect him. If he had intefered, too many things would have changed." I squinted my eyes at the sun. It was weird to think it wasn't the same one that was warming the Earth.

"I wish he would have told me-"

"I know."

"Yeah. I get it, but..." He shook his head. "What does he wish to change?"

"I wonder." We had reached the top of the hill and stopped to have a break. "You remember Virmire, right?"

"Yeah. All those Krogans, and Wrex almost blew Shepard's head off." He chuckled lightly, which I found little weird, before I remembered Ash didn't die there.

"Yeah, about that." I tried to kick my schoes in place. "You were supposed to die there."

He stopped his chuckling and turned to look at me. Now he had to slit his eyes against the rays of the sun, too. "What?"

I held my empty palms at him before letting them fall to my sides. "In canon, Shepard has to send someone with that Salarian bloke, Kirrahe, and another someone with the bomb. You and Ashley. Because you have some tech expertice it's only smart to have you go with the bomb. Then, when Shepard is halfway to the frontlines when things are looking bad there, you get attacked at the bomb site. Shepard will be able to save only one. So, if you play it how it's smart, you with the bomb and Ash with the distraction team, you have to choose. You can save the remaining Salarian forces and your gunnery chief, or save the only survivor at the bomb site, someone important to you. One or many." I shrugged at him, helplessly. "In game, there was no way around it. Someone had to die. Whatever you chose, you always felt bad about it." I hated that part.

Besides looking a little pale, I couldn't tell how Kaidan felt about what I had just told him. "So, Valt- Josh and Jan, they saved us."

"But one of you died later anyway. With Jan." I walked up to him, and looked around. I could see the vastness of the colony, and how empty it looked with so many of them gone. "What was he like? I don't think Josh ever mentioned him before his stunt."

"Jan?" Kaidan took a deep breath and gazed at the container village. "Well, they both were always kinda weird. That made them hard to trust at times. It was like, they were some spies or something, because they seemed to know what was happening from the start.

"They approached us right after the Council had decided that Saren was more trustworthy than our testimonies and eyewitnesses, acted all cryptic and told us some nameless quarter had taken interest in Saren's activities, and if they managed to find anything useful, they'd let us know. They left before we managed to get anything else out of them. We ran into them again soon enough, when we were chasing down a lead - that was Tali - who we knew was heading for a trap. When we got there the trap had already been released by them. The thugs were dead, Tali was bewildered and the two guys were arguing about which one of them had been supposed to capture one of the assailants alive for interrogation. Shepard didn't really like them, but somehow they just stuck along, and when the Normandy left the Citadel, they were on board.

"They were always together, talking in the shadows, and would fall silent or change topic whenever someone approached them. Valter - Joshua kept talking with everyone, while Jan remained to himself, and smirked at everything. He threw sidemarks at everything, and was almost as good with electronics as Tali is. He was always fiddling with something, never staying still. In a way, he was like Joshua's shadow, standing behind him, unless he was needed. I got the impression they didn't feel comfortable if one of them had to stay on the ship while the other went with Shepard."

"And then he died."

"Yeah. We had to drag Joshua after us from the wreckage. He was shocked, Hell, we all were, but with Saren and the geth invading we didn't have time to process it. Joshua kind of... rebooted. After a minute he started running on his own, but it was almost like he lost more than any of us did. Now... I guess it took him that long to realize he wasn't in a game." He glanced at me with something in his eyes that told me he was being dead serious.

"Don't take too long adjusting."

I said nothing, just kept switching my weight from one foot to another. We started our way back.

"We need to find a way to communicate with Josh." I picked off the dried skin around my nails while we walked. Kaidan jerked his head to my direction, he had been deep in thought. "He knows how this will end. They wouldn't have come here without it all planned out, there must be a way we can save everyone."

Kaidan traced his fingers from his neck to his jaw. "Yeah... If we won't be flying in blind, we might just be able to pull it through."

"We can't contact him while he's on the ship before EDI is unshackled, and we can't wait that long, not if we could save the crew from the Collectors."

Kaidan gave me a little glare. "Who is this Edi? Is she Cerberus, too?"

"Would Cerberus keep one of their own in shackles?" Actually, never mind. "No, she's an AI. Right now, she is under Illusive Man's control, but it will change." So I gave him a quick run-through who everyone on the new Normandy was (or would be, if they weren't recruited yet); I told him how things would go if they went according the canon; I confessed I knew hardly nothing about Zaeed and the other DLC character, and I left out the romance possibilities. The sun was setting, and only few people were out anymore: those who were carried guns.

"He's hiring criminals now?" Kaidan asked with disbelief. "Thieves and murderers?"

"Wrex was a merc, in case you've forgotten. And you might not be a murderer yourself, but you know you are all killers."

His shoulders stiffened and I wondered if I should apologize, but seconds went by in silence until I didn't dare to break it with one anymore. The silence stretched on until I couldn't take it anymore, and I continued the earlier conversation. "They will all be loyal to him - if he plays his cards right, that is, and with Josh there I'd be surprised if he didn't. Their reason to join him might at first be revenge, money, or redemption, or something, but Shepard kinda grows on them."

Kaidan remained silent. He was looking slightly to another direction, as if not wanting me to see his face. He looked somewhat angry, and I wondered if I had really managed to insult him earlier.

"I can't go with him," he finally huffed. "I can't. I'm an Alliance marine, I can't go touring around on Cerberus ships, he shouldn't be either, he should..." I understood that he probably wasn't feeling anger, but many different emotions at once. "So I can't help him at all, can I?"

"He's still dead, officially. He's not forgetting Alliance, he'll help when he gets missions from Hackett. And, well... I have no idea how we could help them. Okay, this is a fact, we need a way to talk to Josh ASAP. I don't know, maybe his masterplan was to get you aboard the Normandy, but me popping in fucked his plans to Hell.

"The Alliance won't be able to help Shepard. The Council certainly won't be helping him, and neither will anyone else. Cerberus has given Shepard tools to save humans, and he will use them. The Illusive Man has and will WITHHOLD information from him, and send him to danger. For example, I believe he knew all along where you and Garrus were, but chose not to tell him."

"Shepard must have known I would talk him out of it."

At first I felt like arguing, but decided I didn't feel like it. "Could be." I tried to remember what Josh had said earlier. "...What is Shepard like?"

Kaidan lifted his eyebrows. "Don't you know?"

I waved my hand at him. "Humour me. In the end, I worked with ones and zeroes. What is the real man like?"

Kaidan rubbed his palms together, stared at something I couldn't see. "He is tough. Toughen by hardships. Lost his family to slavers, got in bad company, lived in the streets. He enlisted when he turned 18, I dunno, to honor his parents, or to be able to get revenge... He was always a good soldier, we heard stories of him in the military. Great commanding officer. He has fought some hard battles, lost his whole unit once, but saved lives of others more times than he can probably remember." His face was serious, and I almost missed the little nod he gave to himself. "He does what is needed to get the job done. He often has trouble seeing the shades of grey, but..." A small smile colored Kaidan's face. "Others often help him with that."

I nodded. "I think... He remembers what Cerberus has done. When the time comes, he will hold them accountable for their actions. I have this impression - Josh said something about it, too. When we are done with the Collectors, Cerberus is going to be more dangerous than ever. The Illusive Man, he is going to do something horrible. He says that he fights for humanity, whatever it takes, but it will be something like a betrayal."

We were silent for a while.

"The Reapers will come. And in the future, you will go somewhere with Shepard, that is filled with Cerberus troops. And in canon, you ask him why Cerberus is there, if he really doesn't know what they are doing, if he really is Shepard, and not just a clone... You get almost killed, and he saves you." That's about all I could remember from the video. I also rememered the restaurant scene, but Kaidan didn't need that in his head. "You can't probably trust me much, either, but I can tell you this. That man is 100 percent Shepard. He has cybernetics in him, he heals faster, but he is nothing more, or nothing less, than he was two years ago."

Kaidan was about to answer when his omnitool binged and drew his attention. He read the message he had received, and snapped his head to the direction of the landing zone.

"Alliance forces have arrived." He started a light jog and signed me to follow. "Took them long enough."

"What happens now?" I asked, trying to keep up with him.

"I'm not sure... We came here to stop the disappearances, and a load of good we were. Now we know what we are up against, but the enemy has already left. They had to come, and yet they came for nothing." Kaidan slowed his pace into fast strides when he noticed I had difficulties to keep up (try running braless yourself, or imagine your jewels were the size of honey melons). "I suppose they have read my report, and want to talk to me in person. Soon they will either assign me with another mission, or call me back to Earth to sort this-"

"Altun!"

I halted my rushed pace when I noticed a bunch of Salarians, Turians and one Elcor nearby, guarded by armed men. Most of them turned at the sound of my voice to stare at us while I jogged to the group. The guards stiffened and I halted my advance. They relaxed when they realized I was with Kaidan, but I didn't dare to push my luck. The prisoners eyed at me, and the massive alien stepped forth.

"Human, I am glad to see you well," he said while swaying lightly on his feet. "Delighted: you have learned my name."

I nodded. "Yes, one of your... friends, called you that. How are you feeling?"

"Reassuringly: I am feeling fine. The doctor of this colony has fixed me well enough until someone with more experience of treating my species can be found. Proudly: we Elcor are made strong. Curiously: What was your business in the woods you were found?"

I glanced quickly at the guards before I could stop myself. "It's classified," I replied. I didn't know how well the Elcor knew other species' body language and added: "I'm sorry I can't tell you more. But I was glad to be found, honestly."

"I need to go," Kaidan said, and turned to one of the guards. "Escort her back to the CC, into one of the conference rooms." He turned back to me. "I guess we will be finding out what happens next the way it's supposed to be."

I let out a silent "yeah," glanced at the prisoners (the chocolatey Salarian waved a good-bye) and allowed the guard to guide me away. The future would be full of surprises, and I was afraid I wouldn't like them.


Author's note:

From now on you can find my notes on my profile. I won't add them to the story (it just increases word count, duh) anymore, only warnings at the beginning of the chapters if needed.