Zero

As the red-glowing number hovering in Kaidan's HUD counted down, it spoke in plain terms. The thought went through his head again.

This is as long as I have to live.

Splashing through the murky water of the geothermal sink, he didn't have time to seriously contemplate the implications of that thought, and what fear he felt was surprisingly remote and unimportant. The task was easy; Saren could not be allowed to have an army of krogan warriors. The thing that would take that army away squatted in the ankle-deep water behind him, ominous in its stark simplicity. A drive core re-purposed as a bomb, the timer in his HUD linked to its detonation countdown.

Hold the line.

Captain Kirrahe's speech had been impressive to listen to. Up until meeting the salarian STG unit, Kaidan's exposure to the fast-talking aliens had been limited to Citadel merchants and a few individuals of questionable motives. But the Special Task Group on Virmire had a lot more to recommend them- courage, experience and cunning.

Off to Kaidan's right, Commander Rentola was pressed up against the concrete pedestal of a transformer block, scanning the approaching geth with wide amphibian eyes. The salarian commander's skepticism about this whole assault irked Kaidan, but absolutely no argument could be leveled against Rentola's execution of Kirrahe's orders.

Two other STG agents waited to the left. Madar, the quick-witted engineer, readied several ECM grenades. The quiet and meticulous sniper, Anatore, sighted down his long rifle laid along a concrete pier. Kirrahe's team was a reminder that Shepard's team weren't the only ones fighting Saren. The half-insane salarians they'd found imprisoned in the extensive lab areas bore witness to the heretofore unknown depths of Saren's depredations.

Virmire was a case study in the old proverb about plans never surviving first contact with the enemy. That enemy had bought their diversion for a time, but now the beast was stirring.

The geth drop-ship cast a long shadow over the sun-drenched power plant. Not for the first time, Kaidan wondered at the wisdom of mounting the geth's single, glowing optical sensor in the center of their heads. It only made picking them out as targets that much easier. The months of fighting them had given him a clear picture of which ones to prioritize as the synthetics poured down the gently sloping geothermal stills.

The bomb is set... hold the line.

Everything became noise and mayhem. Had the whole team been there, things might have been different, but Kaidan could feel immediately the tide was against them. The salarians were skilled, but a stand-up fight wasn't the kind of conflict their unit was meant for. The geth's hexagonal energy shields bloomed as they advanced, laying down a hail of gunfire. Anatore's sniper rifle cracked rhythmically as Kaidan and Madar fired ECM grenades as fast as they could charge them, Rentola finally gunning down any synthetics that got too close.

For a brief time it seemed Kaidan's small team might regain the advantage, but then one of the towering geth Juggernauts came striding down the concrete spillway. Red armor gleaming in the sun, it ignored the nearby explosion of an ECM grenade as it raised its huge gun-arm. Kaidan tried to take cover, but the blast of the huge synthetic's rocket lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the wall beside him, dropping him to his knees with the wind knocked from his lungs.

Dazed, he pulled himself back to his feet, feeling knives of pain in his side. His powerful shields and biotic barrier had taken the worst of the concussion, but Madar hadn't been so lucky. Even through the roar of adrenaline, Kaidan felt a pang of regret seeing the salarian's broken body as he pushed himself back toward the bomb with fatalistic determination. He could hear Rentola's rifle chattering as the salarian captain finally managed to fell the blood-red Juggernaut.

Suddenly Kaidan's left leg punched out from under him. He landed hard on his side in the shallow water, the jolt of pain from his hurt ribs forced the air out of his lungs. He got a mouthful of murky water as he tried to draw breath, leaving him coughing and choking.

Everything narrowed to the space between seconds as he expected every moment to be his last. The comm channel was alive with noise even as the battle raged, and Kaidan heard the voices of his friends calling out to each other. He wasn't sure how he was still alive, but there wasn't time to contemplate it. The water around him danced as an explosion shook the facility, and the wind blew dark, greasy smoke around him, bringing with it the cloying smell of burning fuel.

A geth shock trooper bore down on him with pulse rifle raised. Gritting his teeth, Kaidan shoved himself up on one elbow and hit the synthetic as hard as he could with a biotic push, concentrating the brunt of the gravitational force at the geth's head. The white-armored geth flew head over heels, its neck bent too far backwards. Brief, bitter amusement drifted through Kaidan's head.

Right in the teeth.

He pushed himself up to to sitting position, groping in the shallow water for his pistol. He fired several times at the twitching shock trooper for good measure, then finally looked down at his leg. The detached part of his mind noted the messy exit wound in his thigh and the blood running freely from it; probably the result of a sniper shot from one of the Stalkers. Clinically, he assessed that bleeding like he was, he probably only had a few minutes left to live, even with the enhanced clotting factors from his military-issue gene therapy.

But it was irrelevant, as the number Kaidan came up with was greater than the hot, red countdown floating in his field of view. Seeing the bomb safely intact, he forced a grim smile as he pulled himself up next to it, fighting the vertigo of shock and blood loss and doggedly gripping his pistol.

A figure appeared suddenly out of the smoke, jogging toward him. He was raising his gun when he recognized the dark green armor. The fear hit him hard then, but not for himself. The number floating in his HUD was terrifyingly small.

He raised a hand to wave Shepard away, desperately calling for her to go, run, get away from the bomb. He caught her eye for the briefest moment, and seeing the grim determination there, he knew with sick certainty she wasn't going to listen to him.

The world swam away from awareness, dulling to distant sounds and movement as she bodily hauled him up. An unknown amount of time later, Kaidan slowly became aware that he was lying on his back. A shudder ran through the ground beneath him, jolting his consciousness. He forced his eyes open and blinked a few times to bring the red numbers into focus.

It can't be long-

00:00

... what?

There was no oblivion. The bright sun of Virmire had been replaced with a dim blue light. Reality slowly began to come back into focus as he realized the harsh sound he heard was his own breathing; needle-sharp jabs of pain penetrated the fog in his head with every inhalation.

Figures moved around in the dim light. He gingerly turned his head to one side, following the familiar voice among the many that bounced around the cavernous space he finally recognized as the cargo bay of the Normandy.

That unmistakable figure stood next to him, her voice clear and hard as she crisply delivered orders. With the recognition came a powerful rush of relief, but on its heels a terrible realization- if he was alive and Shepard was here, then it meant only one thing.

A numbing cold coiled around his heart as unseen hands pulled him onto a stretcher.

Ash...

Lying on a bed in the med-bay, Kaidan drifted in a half-doze, images and memories rolling and warring through the fog of medication in his mind. The tissue regeneration drug was potent, accelerating the body's natural healing processes and shaving many days off natural recovery time, but it wasn't any fun to be on. Speeding up the body's healing meant constant exhaustion, and coupled with recent events, made for restless, dream-filled sleep- when sleep came at all.

Those empty zeros still hovered behind his eyes, hot and red.

On top of everything else, a mix of curiosity and worry lingered in his mind. In the short time since he and Garrus had shown Shepard the Cerberus files, the commander hadn't spoken any more about it. Mostly he was worried- even her careful mask didn't conceal the fact the revelation about her training bothered her a lot.

The worry had only gotten worse when, before they had dropped onto Virmire, Joker had offhandedly informed him that when they reached the Sentry Omega comm buoy, Shepard had received a transmission from someone claiming to be an agent of the Shadow Broker. Given the nature of that enigmatic figure's trade, Kaidan could only gather that it hadn't been a social call.

There just hadn't been time. There was too much to do between researching Virmire, repairing the Mako, and tuning up his gear for the coming mission. He'd only gotten to speak to the commander during team briefings, and her demeanor had been crisply business-like. Kaidan couldn't help but feel shut out, even if it was a petulant and unprofessional sentiment.

Just another day... just another day and maybe he could have stolen a few minutes somewhere. Just a few words, a reassurance that things were okay.

But then suddenly Ash was dead. It didn't seem possible, it didn't seem real. Even knowing death could come for any of them on any mission still hadn't prepared Kaidan for the stark emptiness of it.

And this war against Saren had suddenly turned into a battle for existence as anyone knew it. Sovereign's sepulchral words still rang in his head, a voice like two gravestones rubbing together.

Your words are as empty as your future. I am the vanguard of your destruction.

It felt so stupid and petty now, to have been wrapped up in his little navel-gazing world of fretting about a relationship he wasn't supposed to have. After the debriefing, Garrus had told him about how Saren himself had appeared at the power station, how the rogue Spectre had almost killed Shepard.

There was horror living in every thought he could muster.

Kaidan exhaled and opened his eyes, deciding sleep wasn't going to happen right now. He glanced around the room and was startled to see Shepard sitting on the bed next to his, chin resting on arms thrown around her knees. She remained still, staring at the far bulkhead of the med-bay.

He coughed lightly, his throat still raw from the exploding fuel tank's oily smoke. The noise had the desired effect, Shepard looked over at him. She appeared drawn and tired, her eyes slightly red.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Drugged to the eyeballs," he answered, his voice surly with weariness.

She shifted her weight. "I can leave you alone if you prefer..."

"No..." Kaidan rubbed his eyes, trying to banish the welter of images still crowding his mind. Part of him did want her to leave so he could stew in his misery alone, but from past experiences, he knew that never did any good.

Shepard sat back against the scanning ring terminal behind her. "You looked like you had something to say after the mission debrief."

Too much to say and not enough breath to say it in. Kaidan gingerly pulled himself up into a sitting position, ignoring the protests of his ribs and leg.

"Doctor Chakwas is going to chew you out if she catches you," Shepard said with forced mildness. "I had a hard enough time getting her to let you come to the comm room at all."

Kaidan grunted, biting off a waspish answer. Every thought brought with it another one, all of them laden with grief and guilt, and the turmoil just built.

"I... we had it taken care of," he said finally, looking off toward the far wall as he forced the words out. "The bomb would have gone off, no matter what." Ash didn't have to die, you could have saved her!

There were any number of answers she could have given to his statement, some Kaidan had already heard, many he'd already tried to convince himself of. But he wasn't expecting what she actually said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!" he flared angrily.

"How would you have done it?" Shepard asked.

He blinked. "What?" The anger sputtered, but he clung to it stubbornly. Even forced, it felt better than the guilt- the tension pushed for somewhere to go.

"If you'd had to, how would you have disarmed it?" she said.

Kaidan opened his mouth, then closed it, clenching his jaw. He could feel her gaze boring into him when she spoke.

"You just thought of at least a half-dozen ways."

He frowned, wishing she was wrong. "That's... that's not a fair test," he objected in consternation. "I helped put it together, I know how it worked. Anyway, none of the ways to disarm it were easy or fast. They wouldn't have had time."

Shepard continued evenly, relentlessly. "Kaidan, in that mine on Agebinium I watched you and Garrus disarm a strange nuke that was specifically designed to kill me in what... forty seconds?"

He closed his eyes, running a hand over his face and exhaling.

"I couldn't risk it, not if there was even the slightest chance," she said quietly, "because then all those lives would have been for nothing."

He just nodded, trying to let her logic penetrate the storm, to force the knot around his heart to unwind. He wanted to think the geth weren't as smart or as intuitive as organics, wanted to think he'd set it all up perfectly and would have defended it until detonation. A proper last stand.

"I just... I wasn't looking for death, Shepard," he said at length, staring down at his hands. "I've never looked for it. But down there I was... I knew it was coming, and I was okay with it, more than okay... I..." He sighed. "I know that probably sounds completely nuts."

She let out a small laugh. "No. I know what you mean, but I've never had a lot of luck trying to explain it, either. I don't think you really get it until you've been there yourself, and not many people have. And when it happens, it always takes a little while to come back from, mentally."

Kaidan finally looked over at her. She was sitting back, a faraway look in her eyes, reliving some past incident. Just above the collar of her fatigues, the dark skin of her neck was slightly discolored with bruising. Garrus' words came back to him, along with the glitter of the turian's pale eyes as his mandibles flared with anger. Saren almost ended everything right there.

The sense of relief to have her just sitting there, alive, was palpable, but even that was still haunted by the shadow of the friend who didn't come back. "It's just that... every time I let myself be happy to be alive, all I feel is guilt."

"Survivor guilt is a monster I'm well acquainted with," she said softly.

Kaidan shifted, trying to ease the sullen ache in his side. "How do you deal with it?"

"It takes time. I promised myself I'd never forget the people I left behind," she said, running her fingers over the scar on her forearm. "And I try to do better, to do them justice with the time that was given to me."

Her voice hardened. "I was going back for her, Kaidan. In my head I saw it, no matter what she thought, it was going to happen. If Saren hadn't... Saren." She said the last word between her teeth, fists clenching.

"Goddamn him... I..." She laughed shortly, a humorless, brittle sound. "I could have been him," she said quietly, wrapping her arms around herself and staring vacantly at the wall.

Her words made Kaidan's skin crawl. Then something in his head clicked into place. "You're... talking about the whole Cerberus thing, aren't you?" he said carefully. "That's why it bothered you so much."

"I am a weapon, that's what they trained me to be. For a long time I followed orders, I got the job done, no matter what it cost. I didn't fully realize that until you brought me that file... But they tried to recruit directly at least twice. I was offered transfers, pay raises… to go work for their secret branch."

"So what? You didn't go."

"I wanted to..." she said quietly. "But after Akuze... my confidence was shattered. I couldn't do it. And then things started to penetrate... me, my head. Affect me. I don't know why... at first I hated it, every inch of it. It made me falter, mess up. It destroyed everything I thought was important to being a good soldier."

Shepard fell silent, staring past the bulkhead to the depths of space beyond.

"What changed?" he prompted, terribly curious but afraid of breaking the trance, afraid she would shut down again.

"Little things," she answered at length. "Always little things, fragments. People... people thanking me for doing something, helping them. I realized I liked it, actually feeling good about doing something, instead of feeling nothing. It took a while, but I found new ways to do things, handle things, to just... be. I'm still working on it, really. When Captain Anderson dropped the whole Spectre thing on me I nearly laughed in his face. Me? Represent humanity? I'm still trying to figure out what that word means."

"Maybe Anderson chose you because not very many people even bother to try to figure out what that word means," Kaidan said.

She rubbed her temples. "I sure as hell wasn't going to say no to someone like him. But I wonder... if he'd known..."

"Shepard." Kaidan waited until she looked at him before continuing. "It doesn't change anything," he said with stubborn conviction. "I know somewhere you internalized that stuff about being good for nothing but killing, but you have to realize that's not what everyone around you sees. Measured with a slightly different morality, we're all murderers, following someone else's orders and hoping in the long run it amounts to being the right thing.

"But I've watched you have to deal with some of the hardest things anyone could have to deal with, ever, and come away with an answer that... well, even if it wasn't perfect, always carried the hope for something better. I don't think... I've met anyone else who could do what you do. Cerberus doesn't change all the lives you've saved, or the lives you're fighting for now."

He dropped his gaze self-consciously. "And it doesn't change how I feel." In all the horror and turmoil, there was a certain relief to realize that was true.

In the silence that followed, he listened to her breathe, and to his own too-rapid heartbeat. He glanced up when he heard her shift and then slide off the bed. She stepped toward him, then reached out and slid her hand into his.

"I don't know why I needed to hear you say that," she murmured, "but I guess I did."

He moved his other hand to cover hers, relishing the simple warmth and contact that made his heart run even faster. He longed to see that unguarded smile again, that rare and devastatingly beautiful expression he'd taken to trying to coax out in those moments when they talked and flirted. He liked to think he was one of a privileged few to see it, that in those moments it was only for him. It never failed to warm him down to his toes.

But even the slight smile she wore now was weighed down by a leaden shroud of grief. For a dizzying moment the urge to just reach out and pull her close was appallingly strong.

"I better go," she said quietly. "Get some rest." He saw the regret in her eyes as she slid her hand free and turned to go.

Alone again, Kaidan rubbed his eyes, then lay back down and tried to find a position that didn't make his damaged ribs ache.

Shepard's logic seemed sound. All he could really do was trust her judgment, trust that she'd made her decision with a clear head. He wondered with a sinking feeling if he could have stayed objective if he'd been forced to choose between Shepard and someone else.

She would trust me to make the objective choice, to do what had to be done.

So that's what it would come down to, her life or her trust.

That hardly made the thought more palatable. And Joker...

Oh God, how the hell do I explain to a friend that I came home because she didn't?

Sick at heart, he turned everything over in his head until at length, exhaustion pushed him into sleep.