A/N: Thank you all for reading, favoriting, following and reviewing.
Tuffet37, Yoruki Hiiragizawa, CyanB, Detective-Mason, DandereGoneFishing, Shootingstar7123, Mei-chiri, Suilven, TrueBlackRoses, Guest and Tamy2323: thank you so much for leaving a review and letting me know that you liked the last chapter! That always makes me happy. :)
Thanks to KabiViolet for beta reading.
BioWare owns Mass Effect and its characters.
It was hard to believe that these were the same quiet, boring hallways Shepard had walked through so many times before, going to the gym or the library, or, if the brass felt like it, to another round of interrogations—then back to her room again.
There was nothing left of the subdued and serene atmosphere that had always made her so uncomfortable. Instead, the entire place had turned into a beehive of frantic activity, with assorted Alliance personnel rushing about, their shoulders stiff and their expressions sullen, as they hurried to their unknown destinations.
Something big was happening, she just knew it. Despite her forced inactivity that had lasted much longer than she would have preferred, her soldier's instincts immediately kicked into high gear and put her senses on alert as she did her best to dodge all those bodies and follow James to the Defense Committee's chambers.
Meeting up with Admiral Anderson and hearing about something ominous heading their way did more than just validate the dread she'd started to feel in the pit of her stomach: it set her heart racing and twisted her gut into an aching knot.
The Reapers. It had to be the Reapers.
Of course, she'd been well aware, more than anybody else, that this day was coming. After all, this was what she'd been trying to warn the Council and the Alliance about, and preparing herself for the invasion was all she'd been able to do these last six months. Still, this wasn't exactly how she'd expected her day to go when she'd woken up this morning.
What she had anticipated even less was to hear a familiar voice call out her name when they finally reached the courtroom lobby and James offered her a good-luck handshake, which she took gratefully.
She turned around and let out a startled gasp when she found herself face-to-face with a ghost from her past.
"Kaidan."
Ten months ago her knees would have gone weak and her heart would have fluttered wildly to see him standing there, handsome as always, looking a bit more muscular in his new uniform than she'd remembered. A lot had happened since then, however, and right now the only emotion she felt as their eyes locked onto each other was a mild shock at her sudden realization that she hadn't thought about this man in a very, very long time.
"How'd it go in there, Major?" Anderson's query interrupted the surge of memories, both good and bad, that had started to resurface in her brain, and she snapped her attention back to her former lover.
"I can never tell with them. I'm just waiting for orders now," Kaidan said, but Shepard barely heard a word he uttered. He'd been promoted? When did that happen?
"Major?" she blurted out, unable to contain her surprise at this new piece of information.
"You haven't heard?" Anderson asked.
She had to bite the inside of her cheeks to suppress the blind irritation bubbling up in her throat. Where exactly would she have heard? "No. I've been a bit out of the loop these days."
"Sorry, Shepard." Kaidan rubbed his forehead with the back of a hand, and she wondered if he was getting a migraine. "Didn't mean to keep it a secret."
'It's not like you came to visit me and didn't tell,' she wanted to say, but she found that she didn't quite give a damn that he'd never come to see her while she was under lockdown. It was probably for the best, anyway; what would they have talked about? Her supposed betrayal of the Alliance? Her mass killing of three hundred thousand batarians?
Whatever he thought of her, it didn't really matter anymore. There was somebody else out there who had given her all the support, friendship and affection Kaidan had withdrawn from her, and she wouldn't give that up for him or anybody else in this universe.
Still, she couldn't resist the temptation to needle him at least a little bit with an "I told you so."
"That's all right. It's not like the Collectors were working with the Reapers and you didn't tell me."
His eyebrows pulled into a frown and there was a slight hint of a blush on his cheeks as his mind flashed back to their conversation on Horizon. "I suppose that's true," was all he got to say before an assistant waved Anderson and Shepard towards the door.
"The Defense Committee is ready to see you."
Kaidan gave Shepard a nod and a small smile, which she reciprocated with a half smirk and a steady gaze as she followed the admiral into the courtroom.
It felt good to be right. She just wished it wasn't about the Reapers.
Forty minutes later it was abundantly clear just how right she had been. Every single member of the Committee was dead, Vancouver lay in ruins, and the entire planet was under attack.
Leaving Earth and all that devastation behind, no matter how much she agreed with the need to gather support from the Council for their fight, was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.
At least she had the Normandy back, even if it had been sprung from dry dock on short notice and lacked the full crew complement, as well as all the supplies they were going to need. Joker was on board, however, which was a welcome surprise, and it was no doubt due to his unparalleled flying skills that they managed to avoid all the Reapers in orbit and make their escape.
The Citadel, though, had to wait for now. They headed to Mars on Admiral Hackett's orders to locate some Prothean data that he hoped would be the key to winning this war. It sounded too good to be true, but Shepard decided to ignore that nagging little doubt in her mind. If there was even the slightest chance that whatever the Alliance had found on the red planet would actually help them stop this insanity, then that was where they needed to go.
Her team consisted of James and Kaidan. Vega had apparently settled down after his initial outburst at leaving Earth, and Kaidan appeared to be cool and collected as they readied themselves for their mission. Shepard was looking forward to working with him again; he was a good soldier and a talented biotic, and she hoped that he was going to have a calming effect on the hotheaded lieutenant.
Once they landed on the surface, however, it didn't take long for her to realize that it was Kaidan, not James, that she should have been worried about.
The mission started out well enough. The formidable dust storm looming over the horizon and their failed attempts at contacting the facility added to the urgency of the situation, but they weren't about to be intimidated by such small obstacles. They were going to get in, grab the data and hightail it out of there as quickly as they could.
It all sounded good in theory, but the reality, as usual, turned out to be vastly different.
An hour later Kaidan lay unconscious in the med bay, barely alive, Liara was setting up shop in Miranda's old room, and they had a robot... thing on their hands, its burned and battered body crumpled up in the AI core. The shuttle had been severely damaged, thanks to Vega's spectacular ramming of the Cerberus vessel, but at least they got back the plans for the Prothean device that the Illusive Man's cybernetic lackey had managed to steal from right under their noses.
Shepard hadn't eaten all day and she was so exhausted that she could barely stand, but once she'd talked to Hackett and they'd set course for the Citadel, she refused to leave Kaidan's side.
Liara found her sitting on a chair by his bed, her elbows propped up on her knees and her head cradled in her hands.
She walked over to her old friend and nudged her shoulder with the water bottle she'd scavenged from the storage unit in the mess hall. "Here, I found some water and a few nutrition bars."
Shepard looked up and attempted a small smile. "Thanks."
Liara nodded and pulled up a chair to sit beside her. "Are you all right?"
The commander stared at the items in her hands for a moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper. "Was I too rough on him?"
"On whom?"
"Kaidan. At the tram station, when we found that trooper and removed his helmet."
Liara's forehead crinkled with concentration as she thought back to the scene she'd observed through the window of the control room. There used to be a time, back on the old Normandy, when she would have given anything to trade places with Kaidan and receive as much attention from the commander as he did. At that moment, though, on Mars, she definitely did not want to be in his shoes.
"I couldn't hear everything that was being said, but you appeared to be very angry. What happened?"
Shepard let out a deep sigh and shook her head, as if trying to shake off the dark thoughts crowding her brain.
"It all started when we encountered the first group of Cerberus soldiers. Everything went so well up to that point. After all the time we'd spent apart and those ugly things he'd said on Horizon, it felt like we were finally on the same team again, you know?"
Liara gave an understanding nod and picked up one of the ration bars, abandoned on the commander's lap. She peeled back the silver foil and shoved the dehydrated, unappetizing stick of food into Shepard's hand. "Eat."
"Yes, ma'am." The smile curling up the corners of her lips was a little more genuine now. She dutifully took a few bites and washed them down with some water before she continued. "Unfortunately, I soon found out that the fact that I'd been right about the Collectors and the Reapers or that I'd surrendered myself to the Alliance willingly hadn't changed his mind about me at all. He's still convinced that I could be working with Cerberus."
"No, he can't... You must be wrong. He can't possibly think that."
Shepard let out a bitter snort. "Oh, yes, he can. He said so several times. First he asked me what Cerberus was doing on Mars. I told him I had no idea; I wasn't with them anymore. He made a snide remark about how convenient it all was, but I ignored him. I wasn't about to get into a petty argument—especially not when we had more Cerberus troops in our sights. I hoped that he was going to save it all for after the mission, or better yet, maybe, just maybe he was actually going to trust me again once we'd defeated those assholes and accomplished our goal. Together."
She took a few deep breaths to prevent herself from throwing the bottle across the room, and eventually settled on running her fingers through her hair instead. "Boy, was I wrong. Once we'd disposed of all the enemy outside, then got in the building and onto the elevator, he marched up to me, shook an angry finger in my face, and demanded to know, again, why they were there. He refused to believe, just because they'd rebuilt me and had given me a ship, that I'd only used their resources to defeat the Collectors."
Liara gave her friend a sympathetic look. It must have been incredibly hurtful to be questioned like that about your loyalties—especially by someone you used to care about.
"No wonder you were so upset."
"Yeah, I was getting a bit irritated, but actually, at this point I was still trying to stay calm. I told him that I had had no contact with Cerberus since my team and I had defeated the Collectors, and I didn't know why they were on Mars and what their plans were. James backed me up, and it seemed like Kaidan finally accepted that I was saying the truth, because he said he was sorry and that he trusted me."
"So, what was the problem then?"
"Well, that wasn't the end of it. Not by a long shot." Shepard seemed to get lost in thought for a moment as she stared at the floor underneath her feet. Liara cleared her throat and fidgeted on her chair until she raised her eyes to look at her. "Remember Kaidan's idea to use the short-range communication device built into the helmet of one of the dead Cerberus soldiers? Well, when we opened up the visor on one of those, we found that Cerberus had done something to the man inside. It seemed like they'd added some kind of Reaper technology. It wasn't a husk, but it was similar."
"Goddess! That's terrible."
"Yeah. It looked pretty gruesome. And guess what Kaidan said?"
"What?"
"Is this what they did to you?"
Liara's eyes went wide. "I'm so sorry."
She started to reach for her friend's hand, but Shepard couldn't sit still anymore. She got up, tossed the empty wrappers and the water bottle into the trash, then walked over to the med bay window overlooking the mess hall. She grabbed its ledge for support and hung her head as her chest constricted with the memories of that awful conversation. That was the part that had upset her the most; the last straw before she'd lost her cool and started to yell.
"How can you compare me to him?" she'd demanded. "Do I look like that to you?"
Kaidan had turned his amber eyes, still full of mistrust, at her. "Shepard, I don't know what you are. Or who—not since Cerberus rebuilt you. For all I know, you could be a puppet, controlled by the Illusive Man himself."
She tried to say something, but he cut her off. "Don't try to explain it. I don't think I'd understand it anyway. I just want to know, is the person I followed to hell and back—the person that I loved—are you still in there... somewhere?"
Something snapped inside her then. All the frustration, all the anger that she'd tried to control until now burst through her carefully constructed barriers and she let loose the barrage of words that had been stuck in her throat ever since their disastrous encounter on Horizon.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, get over your self-righteous self, Kaidan! You followed me to hell and back? Sure, as long as it didn't endanger your Alliance career too much and it coincided with your narrow little view of the world. But where were you when I needed you? I told you what was happening to the colonists; I told you about the Collectors working with the Reapers. Did you listen? Did you follow me? The hell you did! You turned your back on me and walked away."
He tried to interrupt, but it was her turn to ignore his attempt now. "And as for who—or what—I am, have you even tried to find that out for yourself? Did you see all the data that I was sending to the Alliance while I was with Cerberus? Did you read my reports about the Collectors' base and the Reapers? Did you ever visit me while I was in fucking lockdown because I had done a favor for Hackett and prevented the Reapers from coming through the Alpha Relay in the process? No, you didn't. It's easier to sit back and judge from your high horse than to actually make the effort to learn all the facts firsthand."
Kaidan's face turned pale and he rubbed his forehead with his right hand. This time Shepard couldn't give a damn if he was getting a migraine or not. She was on a roll, and there was nothing, short of a battalion of Cerberus soldiers or the Reapers themselves coming through the doors, to prevent her from finishing the tirade she'd been holding back for so long.
"Everybody else knows who I am, Kaidan. Anderson, Hackett, Garrus, Wrex, Tali—they all trust me and believe in me. Even the Council upheld my Spectre status. You of all people should have known in your heart that I'm the same person I was before I died. If you had joined me, or at least had had an open mind and actually talked to me instead of at me, you could have seen it, too."
She took the communicator and walked over to the railing, but before making the call to the Cerberus troops at the other end, she turned back to Kaidan. Her voice had lost the blazing heat that had burned through every word before and turned to ice now as she hissed through clenched teeth, "Look, you don't trust Cerberus—fine. I don't trust them either. But I have bigger, much more important issues to worry about than your paranoia. If you can't trust me, we can't work together. I won't jeopardize my mission by being questioned like this every step of the way. So make up your mind if you want to follow me or not. If you can't put aside your mistrust, I can drop you off at the Citadel. But right now we have a mission to complete."
And that was it. She'd made that call and they'd fought through several more enemy groups before they'd finally arrived at the Archives. Afterwards everything had happened so quickly, and now here he was, injured and barely breathing, and she couldn't stand the thought that that conversation at the tram station might have been the last thing they'd ever said to each other. Even though what they'd had once was gone and her affections lay elsewhere now, she still considered him her friend and she'd always imagined that they'd eventually patch things up enough to be able to work together again. Now... she wasn't sure if they'd ever get that chance.
She pressed the backs of her fists into her eyes to prevent the tears from erupting and asked without turning around, "Will he be all right? When he said all those things I was ready to strangle him, but now... I'm afraid we might lose him, Liara."
The asari got up and walked over to the window. She stopped by Shepard's side and put a hand on her shoulder. "I'm sure he'll be fine. Some of the best medical minds work on the Citadel, and we're almost there. He's tough; he's going to make it."
"Yeah," Shepard squeezed her friend's hand and gave her a small smile. "He's too stubborn to die, right?"
"That's right. Though," Liara continued, casting a pointed look at the commander, "some people are even more stubborn than he is."
Shepard seemed to accept her assessment with a sad little nod. "Yeah, I know. Garrus can be pretty pigheaded, too." Her lips pulled into a mischievous grin and she gave a wink when Liara shook her head and rolled her eyes.
"True. But not what I meant."
"Well, you can't possibly be talking about me. I'm not stubborn; I'm merely persistent. Big difference."
"Riiight."
They shared a chuckle and stood in silence for a while until Shepard asked, trying to sound as casual as she could, "Speaking of Garrus, do you have any information about him?"
"Last I heard he was on Palaven, but we haven't talked in a while."
The commander nodded in acknowledgement and turned her attention back to Kaidan's bed. "Joker," she called out, "how much longer?"
His voice came crackling on the comm system, this time without any smartass comments. "We're almost there. ETA five minutes."
With all the refugee ships lining up for admittance, it took a little longer for the Normandy to dock than usual, but when they finally made it, Kaidan was rushed to Huerta Memorial and Shepard was directed to Udina's office for her talk with the Council.
The place looked much more crowded now, and there was a quiet desperation in the air, but the Citadel was still a peaceful haven from all the devastation that the Reapers had brought upon the galaxy. The news broadcasts continuously looping on the monitors that were scattered throughout the station made it clear that Earth was not the only planet under attack.
The one piece of news, however, that caused the commander to stop dead in her tracks and made her heart drop down into her stomach was the one about Palaven. She stared at the man on the screen, listening numbly to his account of the planet's bombardment, but after a while the only thing she could hear was her own mind screaming.
Garrus.
A/N: We're almost there! Just one more chapter (I think) and we can wrap up this story. Thank you to all of you who have stuck around and I hope to see you next time. :)