Kaidan wished he could contact some of the old squad, ask them if they'd heard anything, if they thought the rumors could possibly be true, just to hear them say no. Because if the rumors were true... Shepard would have contacted him. First and foremost. He would know.

But what he knew...

was that the rumors just couldn't be true.

They couldn't be.

It was absolutely impossible.

Shepard had been spaced. Unequivocally.

Joker had watched it happen from less than four feet away. Kaidan had seen his face, seen his eyes, seen the odd, hunched, wounded way in which he'd huddled into himself all through the days after the crash, the days leading up to the stilted surreality of the memorial service... Joker wasn't lying.

Even if he'd been able to doubt that, Liara claimed to have felt it firsthand.

What stung, really stung, more than anything was that he'd been expecting this. For so long... so long... after she'd... died... he'd known she was alive, felt it with every fiber of his being. He'd looked for her behind every open door, stepping off every arriving ship, expected her words, her voice in every message ping that drifted in from the extranet... until... he didn't even know when he'd begun to accept her death... maybe he never really had... he'd just been forced to admit that-dead or not-

Liara was absolutely and exactly right. Shepard was gone. She was gone... and she wasn't coming back.

When the Alliance ships arrived before she did, he'd started to doubt.

The doubt began congealing into fear, creeping around his throat and squeezing like the cold, dead hand of a husk, when the Alliance troops had combed the planet and the Alliance ships had combed the atmosphere and nearby space as well as they could... without so much as a faint bleep on the LADAR.

The fear had started to solidify and take root in his stomach like a block of tentacled icy grief in the fortnight they'd spent at Arcturus and then at the Citadel, going over those last moments again and again... reliving the death of the Normandy... without Shepard ever busting in to set the record straight.

And at the end of the month, when Anderson began to speak to the squad about tentative arrangements for a memorial service, the tentacled block of ice still lodged in Kaidan's gut had seized his spine, pulling and constricting until ice crackled along his biotic jack, through his temples and down into his jaw.

That service... it was all a blank, black smoking hole of memory. Even at the time, he couldn't see, couldn't feel. He was just sitting there... stiff, unmoving... dead.

He couldn't remember that day, not a minute of it... but...

He'd never forgotten.

And he never would.

Not only was Shepard gone, but there was nothing of her left. Not so much as a word. He'd never thought about it, but... well.. he couldn't help but feel betrayed. Forgotten. Ignored. He'd been carrying a letter for her about on his omni-tool, carefully backed up with Alliance Command and his banker, too, for good measure... for longer than he cared to admit, even now... when it couldn't possibly begin to matter. He'd thought...

It wasn't like her.

Shepard was prepared. She was always prepared.

So she was silent...

but could he bring himself to admit he'd already finished that thought?

She had left no word to anyone on the squad, not even Garrus or Liara... as far as he could tell from what little he'd seen and heard... not even to her parents...

It was as if she'd believed the myth of her own invulnerability even further than he or Garrus ever had... believed it to the point of allowing into to evolve into insensitivity to those she loved... those who loved her most. And if she'd done that...

it was like losing the woman he'd loved all over again to believe she could ever be so blind... she'd always seemed so acutely aware of his feelings... of the feelings of people she'd never even met... the woman he'd loved was sympathetic, empathetic...and she was gone... gone without a trace.

Grief howled through him like the void, endless and unfilled.