What the hell just happened?
Shepard was sitting against a wall, a deep throbbing in her left shoulder and hip. There was a flurry of anxious nurses around her, all whispering to themselves as a turian C-sec officer dashed down the hallway with a determined (but rather concerned) look in his eye. Shepard looked around, still somewhat dazed, and tried to get one of the nurses' attention.
"Excuse me," she said quietly, but no one turned to look down at her. She cleared her throat and tried again, louder this time. "Excuse me!" Still, no one paid her any mind. Her shoulder and bad hip were pretty sore, but she slowly pushed herself up anyways until she was standing, leaning on the wall for support.
"Excuse me!" This time, the cerulean-skinned asari nurse that was standing right in front of her nearly jumped out of her pants before turning to see Shepard behind her.
"Oh, oh Goddess, Councilor Shepard!" She held up both hands to Shepard's shoulder, before calling out to one of her coworkers for a stitch kit. Huh, what do you know, Shepard thought as she looked down at the crimson seeping between the asari's fingers. I'm bleeding. Profusely. "I'm so sorry," the asari gushed. "My name is Jenyx Dasan and I'm a nurse, can I get you anything?"
"First, you can tell me what the hell just happened. Then, you can get me some of the pain meds - the good ones." The asari glanced nervously back and forth between Shepard and the hospital room about ten feet away. They couldn't hear what was being said inside, but there was a lot of tension in the murmurs that they were getting. As another nurse, a salarian this time, rolled a cart up next to Jenyx, Shepard felt suddenly cold as someone unzipped her jumpsuit halfway and peeled her arms out of the sleeves. Jenyx lowered her carefully to the floor, and Shepard was glad that there was so much commotion around to distract from the fact that she, a Councilor, was sitting half-naked on the floor of a very public hospital with three huge scratches down her shoulder, and she still had no idea what was going on.
There was a brief sting on her shoulder, and Shepard hissed in surprise. Jenyx muttered apologetically but remained focused, pulling the needle through the skin over and over. Shepard cringed and clenched the fist of her right hand, breathing in and out slowly to distract herself from the pain. It took a long time to close up the three long gashes, but finally it was over. Jenyx helped her stand back up, slowly, and then she tried to explain what happened.
"Councilor, ma'am, we're not sure exactly why but that angry turian you were walking down the hall with? Mr. Vakarian, I think? He, well, got very agitated all of a sudden and he sort of pushed you out of the way. His talons scraped your shoulder."
Shepard tried to remember why Garrus would have... Oh.
"Shit," she muttered as she pushed Jenyx's arms away and limped painfully to Kaidan's room. To her great relief, there was no blood spattered across the wall or anything, and Kaidan was still in his hospital bed. The C-sec officer that had passed her a moment ago in the hallway had backed Garrus into a corner and was speaking to him very, very calmly. Garrus looked more terrified than angry, his face half-covered by his hand. He noticed her when she came in, and immediately he began to shake his head. The C-Sec officer moved aside just slightly, still far enough in front of Garrus to keep him at bay should he get agitated again.
"Shepard, Posey I... I'm so, so sorry. I don't know what happened, I just blanked out for a sec and -"His eyes broke away from hers to glance at her bandaged shoulder. "Oh Spirits, no... No, I didn't... Did I?" She didn't have to answer; from the sadness in his eyes, he already knew that the gashes on her shoulder were from his talons, long unfiled.
"Garrus, you don't... Are you okay?"
He looked down at the ground in shame. "Honestly, I... I have no idea."
"You don't remember any of what just happened?"
"I remember you said that Kaidan still... had feelings for you or whatever, and then I was standing over Kaidan and..."
"And then, Councilor, I pulled him away from the other patient's bed and restrained him," said the C-Sec officer over his shoulder. Shepard nodded gratefully at him.
"Thank you, Officer...?"
"Prosis, ma'am. Aetrinus Prosis."
"Officer Prosis, thank you again. I think I have the situation under control for now. If you could give us a few moments?" The young, muscular turian nodded calmly and backed away from Garrus, his tawny eyes steady on Shepard's own.
"I'll be right outside the door, Councilor. Let me know if you need me, okay?" Shepard nodded at him again and Prosis left the room, sliding the door shut behind him. She took in a deep breath and turned her gaze from the door back to Kaidan, sitting upright in his bed and still looking half-terrified. Walking towards him slowly, she held out a hand.
"Kaidan? Are you okay?" He didn't speak, only nodded in answer. "He didn't... hurt you, did he?" Shepard heard Garrus's sharp intake of breath from the corner and she couldn't help but wince. Of course he didn't want to hear this, but he had to face what he had just done (whether he understood what he was doing at the time or not). Kaidan shook his head slowly, still mute. She took another few steps towards him, until she was right beside him. The fear in his eyes made her stomach turn, and she had to look away from his face. "I'm sorry, Kaidan. This is my fault."
"W-what... What do you mean, Shepard?"
"This... Damn it, this is all my fault. Everything." Shepard could feel her lungs growing smaller and smaller, her breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps. A sob escaped her throat and hot tears pricked at her eyes, as every bad decision she'd made regarding her crew came hurtling back to the forefront of her mind. As she slumped into the chair beside Kaidan's bed, she let the tears flow, knowing that there was no way to stop this sudden flood of emotion. It had been building up for far too long - she had only voiced her guilt to one other person in this galaxy, and that was Tali. No one else knew how hard she had fought to push the guilt away all these years.
It was her fault that the galaxy wasn't ready for the Reapers when they came. She should've worked harder, found more evidence, never let up until they believed every word she said. If she hadn't been so nervous about Spectre candidacy on the hunt for Saren, with the pressure of humanity's reputation resting solely on her, maybe she could have spared more time to go to those uninhabited worlds and dig up the artifacts that Liara periodically sent her the coordinates for. Maybe, just maybe, if she had been able to kill Saren on Virmire instead of him getting away and nearly destroying the Citadel, Sovereign would have been disabled or something and they could've taken it down then and there. If they'd managed to get a good study on Sovereign's technology that long ago, surely everyone would have realized what was coming. And then, they would have been prepared. Then, there wouldn't be billions of unmarked mass graves all over the galaxy.
It really was her fault, also, that the crew of the Normandy had been missing so long. Not Liara's, not the Council's, not even the fucking Reapers. She herself, Commander Posey Shepard, had forced her crew off-planet - too late. She should have sent them earlier. Maybe she shouldn't have sent them at all - after all, if her body had been recovered and salvaged from the Citadel wreckage, surely theirs could have been too. And if she hadn't done all that, then they wouldn't be here in this situation now - Kaidan having forgotten half a decade of his life, Garrus facing amputation within the next day or so, and Joker getting surgery on literally every bone in his body to make sure he didn't just collapse in a pile of shattered bones one day.
"it's all my fault," she whispered again, her face in her hands. Kaidan and Garrus were both staring at her, beyond concerned and beyond baffled.
"Posey," Kaidan said softly, reaching out for her hand. She stood up suddenly, shaking her head, and crossed to the other side of the room, at the corner opposite from Garrus. As she sank down to sit on the floor, back against the wall, Kaidan pleaded with her again. "Posey please, tell me what you think is your fault."
Garrus's eyes held the same question, but he said nothing. Shepard raised an eyebrow, a silent question of whether or not she should really explain everything to Kaidan. The turian - her turian - nodded. She sighed.
"All right, Kaidan. Before I say all of this, I just want you to know..." Posey cleared her throat hesitantly, and Garrus looked away at the door. "You should know that what we had was real, okay? I felt every bit of it as much as you did... And that makes all of what I'm about to tell you especially difficult. So be patient with me, and let me tell the whole story before you start asking questions, okay?" Kaidan nodded, his brows furrowing anxiously.
"Okay. So, you're aware that we defeated Saren, and you remember that I elected Admiral Anderson to the Council as a human representative. Well, a lot has happened since then. It's been almost ten years since we got rid of Saren." The biotic's tired eyes narrowed, and Shepard could practically hear his brain grinding at full capacity to handle this new information. "I know you don't remember anything from those ten years right now, but it'll come back to you. After the Council was sent back to the Citadel and all the cleanup started, Admiral Hackett sent us out on a routine patrol mission in the Omega Nebula to look for geth. But while we were scanning Alchera for any signals, a massive ship belonging to the Collectors showed up and attacked the Normandy. Before you say anything, yes they were actually Collectors. But we eventually figured out that they were being controlled by the Reapers, and that the Collectors were actually Protheans that had been harvested before, and... Okay, sorry, that's all things we can discuss later. Anyways, when we were attacked you got most of the crew out of the Normandy, and I stayed behind to help Joker. I ordered you to leave. I got Joker into an escape pod, but then..." How was she supposed to sit here and tell him that she had already died once? Almost twice? His expression hadn't changed, still that same wrinkled forehead and sad, confused eyes.
She took another deep breath in through her nose, out through her mouth, like her therapist had taught her. "I got spaced, Kaidan. My oxygen line busted, and I fell down with the ship through Alchera's atmosphere."
An unpleasant silence seeped into the room, sending goosebumps up Shepard's arms. Kaidan looked incredulously at her, eyes wide. "You survived a fall through an atmosphere? Damn, that's -"
"Not exactly what she meant, Kaidan," Garrus murmured, just barely loud enough to be heard. The confusion returned to the young man's face.
"What did you mean then, Shepard?"
Well, here goes nothing. "I died."
He didn't say a word in response. Instead, he fought to contain a chuckle. "Okay, Posey, you had me up until there." Shepard shook her head solemnly, and the wide grin slid off of Kaidan's face as fast as it had come.
"I'm serious, Kaidan. My body, what was left of it at least, was found in the Normandy wreckage, and they rebuilt it with a lot of cybernetics and a lot of recovery time. I was basically in a coma for two year."
"They? Who is 'they'?"
"Don't be mad, Kaidan, okay? I know you don't remember it, but we've had this fight before and we both lost. Cerberus is the group that found me, that reconstructed me." As predicted, a hot flash of anger and fury ran through Kaidan, tensing his body from head to foot. The lack of biotic charge around him was more than noticeable to Shepard, but Kaidan didn't seem to pay any mind just then.
"You can't be serious Shepard, you know what they -"
"Yes, Kaidan, I know. Like I said, we've had this fight before. We ran into each other on a mission when I came back, and you weren't happy with me for disappearing. To be quite frank, you were furious with me. You said a lot of things that really hurt me, and I know that I hurt you too. But that's... that's where we sort of ended. If that makes sense."
"So wait, you mean... We haven't been... For eight years? Really?"
Shepard nodded sadly, looking down at her hands. There were still the faintest scars on the backs of her hands, where the cybernetics had never been able to return to their full functioning power to clear her skin of all imperfections. "Yeah. We... We eventually moved on from each other, and you, understandably, didn't want to get involved with Cerberus so you didn't join the mission to destroy the Collector base. We went through the Omega-4 Relay, blew up the Collectors, and made it back through. Then the Reapers hit Earth, and then they hit everywhere else... And then, I guess, we defeated them. But destroying the Reapers also destroyed the geth and EDI, the Normandy SR-2's AI. And before you comment on EDI, she came to be a vital part of our crew, and... Well, we miss her. A lot. Don't mention it around Joker."
Kaidan's eyes were wide, his mouth hanging open slightly as he tried to process everything. Shepard reached out to take one of his hands in her own, but he pulled away. She took a step back.
"If you have any questions, I'm here Kaidan. I want to help you through this."
He looked up at her, icy blue eyes locking with her own. "Could you... I'm sorry, Shepard, but could I have some time to think about all this? This changes..." He took a deep, almost shuddering breath and stared down at his feet on the bed. "Actually, it changes everything." Posey nodded solemnly, giving Kaidan a weak smile.
"I'll be here, whenever you're ready."
"We're all here for you, Kaidan," came a quiet dual-toned voice from the corner. Garrus was still hunched up, looking small and almost fragile in his thin hospital gown, his arms wrapped around himself. "Whatever you need." Kaidan didn't look at Garrus, but he nodded. Shepard took that as their cue to go, and she walked over to Garrus, gently took hold of his elbow, and supported him as they limped out the door.