NB. Since I'm a teensy bit fed up with the way mucks up the formatting constantly, I'm reposting this at my LJ (link in my profile). It'll still get updated here, but bear in mind the way it's supposed to look is on LJ.

Part Ten: Progression

"Those records are classified, Commander, as you aware."

Kaidan shifted on the spot. "I'm aware of that, Councilman."

The communications setup on the Normandy was pretty impressive. This sort of full-room holography was generally reserved for major corporations, who liked to be able to show off exactly how much bandwidth they could afford to waste, and how much money they could spend on outfitting whole rooms with projectors. Even the Council stuck to the single-user projection plates. Kaidan could look around and see a fairly decent simulation of Anderson's office, and the man himself pacing back and forth before the communications units.

He could also see Shepard, leaning against the wall, outside of the pickup range. Anderson couldn't see her, and she couldn't see him, but she could hear everything that either party was saying. She hadn't asked if she could observe, simply walking in with him after informing him that they were in range of a buoy, and taking up her position against the bulkhead.

It was the first time he'd seen her for the better part of the last two days. She'd been engrossed in dealing with the matter of the repairs, he was told, when he found someone to ask. It was for the best, perhaps. It let Kaidan concentrate on matters in his quarters, allowing him to distract himself from the encounter with Joker that could only be labelled 'frigid' in hindsight.

It could have gone worse. He could have punched the son of a bitch like he'd been so desperately tempted to.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me why you need said records?"

Kaidan pointedly didn't glance at Shepard as he spoke. "I'm afraid I can't, sir. It is, however, directly relevant to my mission."

His mission to find Shepard, that was. Kaidan was sure that the significance of the phrase had not been lost upon his superior. Anderson would know two things now: that Shepard was indeed alive, and that Kaidan was with her. It was a simple codephrase, the word 'relevant' being assigned the meaning of 'successful mission', the caveat being that since he was speaking in code that there were additional issues to deal with.

Kaidan felt no need to try and convey them to Anderson. He knew the man trusted him to get the job done, as he'd once trusted Shepard.

"I see," Anderson said after a long, significant pause. "Then I will get those records forwarded to you immediately, Commander."

"Thank you, sir. The receiver address is on a subcarrier."

"Keep up the good work, Commander." Another code phrase. Report back soon.

"As always, sir."

The hologram faded from existence, the room's main lighting coming back up to full, and Kaidan turned to see Shepard looking at him with an odd expression he couldn't interpret.

"What grade?" she said, abruptly.

"Excuse me?" He pretended not to understand, but could take a pretty good guess at what she was talking about.

"What. Grade."

Kaidan decided not to push her patience. "Three," he said, putting his hands behind his back in an at-ease stance. "Though supposedly I get the fourth grade assessment in the next two months."

"Four's easy," Shepard said, and ran a hand through her hair. "N5's really where it starts to become a bitch."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Was it because of me?" Shepard looked like she hadn't been planning on speaking, if her sudden embarrassment was any indication. "Did you… because of me?"

Kaidan opened and closed his mouth for a moment, trying to decide whether to lie to her or not. Eventually, he opted for the truth. What harm was there in being honest in this one small thing, after all? "Yes," he said, bluntly, "But that only got me into the programme. One of my trainers threatened to cut my balls off if I was only going to stay in there to live up to some ideal memory of an old CO. At that point I figured pretty quickly that I was really there for myself."

Shepard didn't seem to know quite how to respond to that, just thinned her lips and made a noise of acknowledgement.

"How'd you guess?"

Shepard shrugged slightly. "Not everyone gets classified records sent to them so easily."

He was frankly surprised she hadn't learnt of his status already, given the rumours Kaidan had heard about Cerberus's high level contacts within the Alliance itself. "I'm sure Anderson would have offered if you'd asked nicely," he told her.

Shepard laughed. "That's sweet. A lie, but sweet nevertheless. N-rating, secret missions for Anderson; anyone would think you were itching for Spectre candidacy."

Kaidan shrugged slightly, rolling his shoulders under the plain black shirt. He still refused to wear the overtunic he had been provided, but the shirt wasn't intended to be worn on its own. It was a little too cool on board to be wearing the thinner material. "I don't think I'm a likely choice. Anderson's last protégé supposedly went crazy, talking about ancient alien invaders before getting herself killed and her ship destroyed." He pointedly looked away from her, turning to step away from the holographic plate. The table rose back into position as he moved aside. "And then she resurfaces after two years, working for terrorists."

"If you think I was working with Cerberus through choice-" Shepard checked herself mid-sentence, biting off the words. He turned back in time to see her visibly clamping down on her emotions, her face returning to the cool professional mask that he didn't remember seeing on her quite so often back in the old days.

"Oh?" He tilted his head. "Care to explain it to me?"

Shepard stared at him for a long moment, hesitantly opened her mouth, perhaps to answer, to explain-

"We have received the forwarded intelligence reports from Councilman Anderson." EDI's voice ran out loudly. Clearly the AI either didn't notice or didn't care that she was interrupting an important conversation. Kaidan could have cursed.

"Thank you, EDI," Shepard said. "Please ask Jacob, Garrus and Miranda to report to communications at once."

"Yes, Shepard."

Kaidan wanted to shout, to stomp forward and shake her shoulders and demand answers from her. "You told me we'd talk," he reminded her, tightly, trying to clamp down on his own emotions the way she was. He was sure he wasn't succeeding as well. "I'm going to hold you to that."

Shepard, just for an instant, looked uncertain, but before the exchange could progress further, the door slid open to allow Jacob Taylor entrance.

"Where's the fire?" he asked, with plain amusement.

Shepard smirked and leaned forward, calling up the files, browsing through the headers and instructing EDI to provide them with a holographic representation of this particular arm of the galaxy. By the time Miranda Lawson and Garrus arrived, Shepard had her omnitool open, and a determined expression on her face.

"We're going to go through these records," she told them all, including Kaidan in her statement by the way she looked him in the eye while she spoke, "And we're going to find some sort of pattern, some sort of hint to explain why a heavily armed asari cruiser is going around stealing crews. If you had any lunch plans, I suggest you cancel them."

There were no chairs in the Normandy's communications room. Clearly it had never been intended for lengthy conferences. Shepard was used to staying on her feet for long periods thanks to years of military service, but that didn't mean she enjoyed it. The cybernetic implants that riddled her body made it simultaneously easier and harder to deal with; they increased her endurance, her raw physical strength, meaning that she didn't actively tire easily, but they also meant her mass had increased fairly substantially, and there was more of her to keep upright.

There might have been a psychological element to her weariness as well, but Shepard had no intention of confronting that until she was found passed out on the deck and had to be hauled into Doctor Chakwas. And since she had no intention of allowing that to happen, she had no reason to be concerned.

The others looked similarly tired. Even Miranda looked wilted, and periodically massaged her temple, no doubt feeling the effects of a lingering headache. Shepard would have preferred if Miranda were resting, but her second in command's genetics had given her an excellent brain that made her an asset in any sort of strategic or tactical assessment.

A picture was starting to emerge from the raw data, and it was an unpleasant one.

"So, we can definitely pin the start of the attacks to within the last year," Jacob said as he leant heavily on the table, squinting at the neon lines of the hologram. "Several dozen attacks, all apparently random at a first glance, easily dismissed as pirate activity."

"But with a heavy weighting towards hitting colony transports. Large numbers of people, with no corresponding increase at the same time of slaves on the market." Garrus had pulled some of his old files from Omega, which included details of slave trafficking that he'd been careful to keep an eye on. "No particular targeting of species. If you'd asked me a month ago, I would have said it was a prime candidate for the Collector's being responsible."

"Except we know they were only interested in humans," Miranda said.

Shepard rotated her shoulder absently, trying to loosen the muscle before it started aching. She saw Kaidan frowning slightly as Miranda spoke. She had instructed EDI to give him records of their assault on the Collector base, but she had no idea if he had availed himself of them. She did know that he'd spent the last two days in his makeshift quarters attempting to hack into EDI's databanks. The AI had been quite irritated by the attempts, but Shepard had just told her to keep quiet about it. She was curious to see what Kaidan was going after.

She had been equally curious to know what his reaction was to seeing Joker again, but after the two had run into each other at the elevator, Kaidan had simply said nothing and, as far as Shepard knew, hadn't tried to talk to his former comrade. Shepard had even broached the subject with Joker himself, only to be snippily shot down.

"No offence, Commander," he'd said, not looking up at her, instead tapping out do-nothing commands on his console, "But since we're not in the military anymore, I don't have to answer questions I don't want to."

EDI's avatar had pulsed once, but the AI had stayed silent. Shepard knew when to take a hint, and hadn't pushed the topic. Whatever had happened between them had no doubt caused some deep rift between the former friends, and she suspicions that it was over her death. She wondered if it had been the reason why Joker had quit the Alliance to join Cerberus.

Shepard could understand Joker's reluctance to talk, especially about Kaidan. She would have been lying if she said she hadn't been avoiding him. She had been hiding in her quarters, doing little more than going through damage reports and grabbing the few hours sleep she needed to keep going when the need became overwhelming. She'd turned the photo of Kaidan she kept in her quarters face down, feeling like he was looking out at her and making her feel guilty for not going down two levels and having a grown up conversation with him.

Commander Shepard, big bad Spectre, afraid of a frank discussion with a former lover. Her enemies would wet themselves laughing.

"All the attacks were within this region," she said, pointing out a roughly ovoid shape EDI had drawn on the map. "So why? What's there?"

"According to the records, nothing," Miranda said. She had her own omnitool open and was paging through datafiles with sharp stabs of her fingers. "Nothing much in the way of resources that anyone would stake a claim to. No habitable worlds."

"But there is a mass relay," Kaidan pointed out. His arms were folded and his body language spoke to his reluctance to work with Cerberus. But for whatever reason, he hadn't argued with Shepard's edict that he participate. "Any probe data?"

Miranda shook her head, scowling. "According to this, no one's ever sent a probe through that relay."

"That's nonsense," Garrus said, sharply. "Someone must have, or else how would it be known to be an uninhabitable region of space?"

"Someone's tampered with the records," Jacob said, voicing the conclusion that Shepard had already reached.

"How very suspicious," Miranda's voice was dry as she flicked her omnitool closed.

"We're going. Unless anyone can think of anything better for us to be investigating?" Shepard said, raising an eyebrow and looking at her assembled crew.

Jacob smirked and rolled his shoulders in a shrug. "Well, as long as the Reapers don't put in an appearance in the next few hours, I think we've got time."

Shepard smiled and looked to Miranda. "Have Joker set course for the relay. Make sure the stealth system's fully operational."

"Aye, Commander," Miranda said, nodding sharply and sashaying from the room.

"Jacob, Garrus, I have no idea what we'll find on the other side…"

"We'll get to work preparing our weapons," Jacob said.

"Mine are bigger," Garrus said, eyeing Jacob.

Shepard tried not to laugh. "I'll leave you boys to your toys," she said.

Then she was alone with Kaidan, who gave her a speculative look.

"I have to go check on my tank," she said, the first thing that came to mind, and strode past him. When she didn't hear his footsteps on the deckplates following her, she allowed herself to breathe again.

"When you said 'tank', I actually thought you were kidding."

Shepard, who had come down in part to do as she had said and check on the status of the Hammerhead whilst also seeing what the newly repaired hull looked like, realised that her thoughts of escape had been too good to be true. Apparently Kaidan had just decided to give her a fifteen minute head start.

"Every girl should have her own tank," she said, turning slightly to face him. "It's the little black dress of ground assaults."

Kaidan looked up at the underbelly of the Hammerhead as he crossed the cargo bay, and frowned. "I don't recognise the configuration."

"Experimental technology, courtesy of Cerberus."

"Ah." Kaidan looked directly at her. He'd stepped close. There was less than an arms length between them. "If I'd known that was all it took to win your loyalty was a bit of experimental hardware, my report to Anderson wouldn't have been quite so damning."

She looked tired. He'd spent most of the day around her, ever since the call to Anderson, and he could see the strain that was fraying her at the edges, making the corners of her eyes tight. She had never been so tightly closed off when he'd first known her, and he had every intention of poking at her until she cracked and showed some genuine emotion.

"Damning huh?" She shifted her weight to one foot and folded her arms, jerking her chin upwards as she spoke. "You figure the Alliance is better off without me then?"

"You come back two years after you supposedly died, working with a known terrorist organisation." He stepped closer. Shepard stiffened, like she wanted to back away, but held her ground. "I have to wonder when exactly they contacted you, when they made you their ally. Was it when we while we were still looking for Saren? Before we found Admiral Kahoku's body? After?"

"Fuck you," she said, her voice a low growl, her façade shifting for the first time. "You don't know anything."

"I know that the Alliance wasn't good enough for you anymore," he said. "I thought you were a soldier, I thought you were loyal, like me. I was wrong about that, wasn't I? I have to wonder what else I was wrong about." He deliberately softened his tone. "Like my feelings for you."

"You made your feelings quite clear on Horizon," she said. There was bitterness there, close to the surface.

"You think it didn't kill me to find out that instead of having died, you just faked your death and-"

"I didn't fake my death, you son of a bitch!" Shepard was an experienced soldier, a quantifiable expert at hand to hand combat. Most people, when she threw a punch, would be down before they saw it coming. But Kaidan had served alongside her. He knew exactly how she moved, and, honestly, he'd been expecting it.

He ducked as her fist drove forward, leaving an impressive dent in the cargo container behind him, and loosed a biotic slam purely out of reflex. It caught her in her centre of mass, sending her flying backwards into a pile of discarded scrap metal. He winced as he saw her land heavily, instantly regretting his actions, but she didn't make a noise of pain, nor was there any blood. Instead, she lay there, staring at the ceiling, making no move to retaliate.

He stepped over cautiously, fingers curled loosely into fists that crackled with slowly dissipating dark energy. Her eyes were clear, focussed, so she wasn't stunned or unconscious. She simply seemed to have no inclination to stand up. He let himself relax, releasing the mass field he'd been building about himself.

"You really did a number on that crate," he said, lightly.

"You should see me headbutt a krogan," she replied. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply. "And I didn't fake my death."

"Shepard-"

"Kaidan, shut up."

Shepard picked herself up out of the debris, but made no move to dust herself off, rearrange her hair or otherwise straighten herself out. It gave her a slightly wild look. "I haven't been hiding for two years," she said, staring at him with wide open eyes that had a slightly unsettling look behind them. "I was dead. In the non metaphorical sense. No heart rate, breathing or brain activity."

Kaidan looked at her, thinned his lips and narrowed his eyes. "I don't believe you." He heard the uncertainty in his own voice, and wondered if she did too.

Shepard made a sound of pure frustration and buried her head in her hands. "Do you want to know what it took to bring me back? Surgery. Cybernetics. God knows what I'm riddled with. I probably have more tech lining my bones than Saren had before Sovereign burned off the fleshy bits it didn't need. Technically, of course, I don't have what you would define as 'bones' anymore. And you know something? It hurts. Not as much as it used to, that's for sure, but then they hadn't quite finished putting me back together when I got woken up."

As she spoke, she reached up, plucking at the fastenings of her tunic. Kaidan almost asked her what the hell she was doing, but the way she couldn't bring herself to look at him told him to keep his mouth shut this once. Eventually, the jacket slid from her shoulders, and she let it slip to the floor in a puddle of dark fabric. She had the same black undershirt on that he did now, but she was pulling the hem out of from where it was tucked into her trousers. "Mostly I'm healed," she said, "But some scars go away faster than others."

She pulled off her undershirt and stood before him. A functional black bra remained, but it wasn't enough to obscure the ragged lines that ran across her chest and body. Some were lines of lighter tissue, but some were thin enough to reveal something glowing underneath. Starting just under her collarbone, stretching diagonally down to her sternum, a good three or four inches in length, her skin didn't seem to quite meet up in a line, revealing something… artificial.

He forced his eyes up to her face. She was looking away. Once she had been unselfconscious about her body. "What is-"

"A dermal weave," she said, interrupting him. "It anchors the skin. Technically, I don't need this fleshy pink… stuff…" she ran her fingers over her cheek, "To survive. It's an aesthetic nod. When they found me, I didn't have any skin."

The bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Looking at her, he could see lines in the flesh, like someone had taken a living jigsaw and not quite matched the pieces up perfectly. He honestly, truly, had no idea what to say. The tightness behind her eyes, the lack of sleep, that single minded focus and determination... Kaidan, for one moment, tried to imagine waking up two years in the future, in pain and with a job to do, and realised that Shepard was probably the only one who could do it and stay sane.

"I remember, you know," she was rambling now, talking without any apparently aim. "Suffocating to death isn't quick. You lose consciousness after ten or fifteen seconds, but the worst is that you know exactly what's happening. They put us through all those drills, tell us exactly what was happens when a body gets exposed to vacuum, all in the name of scaring us into checking suit seals properly. And then it happens and it feels like an eternity, and you're breathing, and there's nothing there and all I could think was 'shit, shit'." She laughed, but it was hollow, and he could hear tears buried in her voice. "I suppose I should be grateful I was unconscious. I was probably still alive when I started to burn up in the atmosphere."

"Stop." He didn't want to hear that. Never wanted to hear that, and he thought if she was forced to tell him that he wouldn't be able to handle it.

Shepard lapsed into silence, and started to pull her shirt back on. "One cyborg sin against God, as Ash would have said. Can't blame you for not wanting to have anything to do with me."

"That's not-" He took a deep breath, trying to stop himself from being so lightheaded. "I never-" The words wouldn't come. He'd gotten good at turning a phrase to his advantage, after he'd carried out so many missions for Anderson, after he'd spent all that time watching Shepard talk around the most unreasonably sorts, but now he had no idea what to say.

So why say anything at all?

He strode across the deck. She looked at him, her arm halfway through the sleeve of her vest, and opened her mouth to say something. What she might have said, he didn't know, but he didn't give her the chance to speak. He cupped her face in his hands, and pulled her lips towards his. Her skin was unnaturally warm, almost feverish, and if he'd been paying attention he might have wondered if that anything to do with the augmentation she'd received. But then she made a muffled, incoherent noise, and dropped her undershirt, reaching up to press her hands against his back and draw him closer.

Eventually, he pulled away, just enough that he could speak to her. Her eyes were close enough that he could see a glimmer of red behind them. "I couldn't stop wanting you," he said, voice low. "I miss you."

"Prove it," she said.

There were several very good and valid reasons why that would be a bad idea. And Kaidan decided that he would give them all due consideration some other time, such as tomorrow. At that moment, all he could do was tilt her head just slightly so as to make it easier to kiss her, and lose himself for a little while in her, his hands travelling down her body, stroking her breasts, her stomach, before moving to her back to pull her closer, her body flush against his.

She made a noise, a wanton moan that went straight to his groin, and he used her moment of distraction to push her a few steps backwards, raising her up the few inches necessary to perch her on the edge of one of the knocked over cargo containers. Her legs came up about his waist and she tilted her head back to give his lips access to her throat.

He was rediscovering how sensitive she was just behind her ear when she stiffened, fingers tightening on his shoulders.

"We're not alone," she said, and raised her head to look behind and above him.

Kaidan turned as much as his position allowed him to follow her gaze, looking up at the observation window that overlooked the cargo bay. There a young krogan and a bald human woman were staring down at them. There was a long moment where the four stared across the intervening space, before the bald woman leant forward and pressed the intercom button.

"Please," her voice said, filling the cargo bay, "Don't mind us. Continue."

Shepard's forehead thudded down against his shoulder, and he thought he heard her mutter 'damn it, Jack' in an undertone.

"What are they doing?" was the krogan's contribution, overheard before the woman let go of the intercom. Kaidan saw her turn to him and start to describe something with a lot of illustrative hand gestures.

"The advantage of commanding a civilian ship," Shepard said, drawing his attention back to her, "Is that no one cares who I sleep with."

"Is that so," he murmured.

"But unless you want explicit surveillance footage posted to the extranet, we should probably take this elsewhere," she said. Her expression had become guarded as she pulled back from him slightly. "If you're still interested."

It didn't solve anything between them, but he honestly, at that moment, didn't care. "Always."

The tension around her eyes eased slightly and she slipped off the cargo box as he stood back. As she bent down to pick up her discarded clothing, Kaidan glanced up at the woman, Jack, presumably, and the krogan. Jack made a lewd gesture, and grinned at him.

Fingers went around his wrist, and Kaidan didn't resist as Shepard gave him a tug, leading him towards the elevator. "EDI," she said, "No calls in the next hour unless the ship's under attack."

"Yes, Shepard."