Chapter Twenty-Six
Shepard slept fitfully, unable to find a comfortable position to lie in due to the ache in her collarbone. It was a dull ache, muted by the painkillers Dr Chakwas had given her, but whenever she lay in one position for too long it began throbbing. On top of that there were the regular bi-hourly checkups conducted by Chakwas and Second Lieutenant Brigham, a shy but skilled navigator's assistant who doubled as the night-shift medic. And of course, whenever she did manage to drift off, there were the nightmares.
She didn't recall any of them, but when she woke up she was always left with a feeling of darkness, suffocation and foreboding. Deep, resonating voices speaking of salvation and destruction. A baseball cap and a coat left carelessly on chairs in a waiting room. The sound of oxygen escaping a torn hose.
It was after one of these indistinct maelstroms of blackness and despair that she struggled awake, breathless and fighting panic, to find Nathan standing by her bedside. He was watching her grimly, holding tightly to one of her hands while his other gently smoothed the hair away from her forehead. It was only when the monitor beside her bed beeped that she realised she hadn't taken a breath in a while.
She breathed in deeply but raggedly, struggling for calm. Nathan stroked her hair quietly, waiting until she was once again breathing normally before speaking. "Bad dreams?" he asked.
His hands were warm and reassuring. She focussed on that, rather than how troubled he sounded. He had never seen her after one of her dreams before. She had never wanted him to have to see that. She was well aware how irrational that was now that they were… whatever they were… but it was true all the same. "Yeah. Bad dreams," she admitted reluctantly.
"Want to talk about it?"
The serious question sounded incongruous coming from teasing, wise-cracking Nathan Briggs but it was all the more sincere for it. Still… she really didn't want to talk about it. With him, or anyone. Chakwas had told her to stop treating him like he needed to be protected but this was different. It was private, something she felt she had to deal with on her own. She couldn't lay such a huge burden on him. She forced a weak smile. "No."
He glanced around. The medbay shutters were closed to the early morning crowd in the mess and Chakwas hadn't arrived for her shift yet, so they had some measure of privacy. He leaned down and planted his elbows on either side of her head, then pressed a gentle kiss to her dry lips. Touching his nose to hers he said, "You look like shit. You sure you don't want to talk about it?"
The touch of his nose was so intimate and affectionate, she almost spilled everything right there. Instead she gave him an amused smile. "Thanks, but still no."
"All right." He kissed her again, seemingly unoffended by her reticence. "Did you get any sleep?"
She sighed tiredly. "Not really. They've been checking on me every two hours." She couldn't bring herself to tell him about the pain, nor the revelation that Cerberus had done something to her as part of the Lazarus project that even Miranda didn't know about. Chakwas had run numerous tests, but so far nothing out of the ordinary had turned up.
He grimaced. "When will the doc let you out of here?"
"Later today I hope." She knew she was being short with him and she wasn't intending to be, but she was so tired.
He pulled back, sitting on the side of her bed and taking one of her hands again. "So," he began hesitantly, "why didn't you tell anyone you were hurt?"
She sighed again, closing her eyes, feeling them burn and her head throb. She had hoped to have a little longer before they had this conversation, and she had wanted to be far more recuperated than she was now. "I'm sorry," she said, dodging the question. "I should have said something."
"No kidding. Why didn't you?" he persisted, not to be so easily dodged.
She struggled with how to put her reasoning into words that wouldn't end up hurting him. "I know how this is going to sound coming after the conversation we had yesterday, but… I felt like I needed to protect you," she finally admitted with a bluntness born of exhaustion.
He frowned. "Really? Why? I don't understand."
"I didn't think you could handle knowing I was seriously hurt. I thought your performance would suffer enough to affect the team," she explained. "It was a command decision." That was… partially true. There had been elements of the personal in it too.
She expected him to get angry, to blow up at her or get frustrated and leave, but he didn't do any of that. Instead he sat back, taking his hand away from hers, frown deepening as understanding dawned. "I see." He planted his hands on his thighs, bracing his arms. His face fell in dejected realisation. "Shepard, I'm sorry," he said quietly.
It was her turn to frown in confusion. "Sorry for what? You don't have anything to be sorry for," she argued.
When he met her eyes it was with an intensity that caught her off guard. "Yes, I do. You wouldn't have been trying to protect me if you didn't think I needed protecting. I know I've given you plenty of reasons to think that I do."
Oh. He was blaming himself for the whole thing. She knew he was perceptive, she should have known he would have at least some peripheral knowledge of his own capabilities relative to the rest of the team and that he might feel a bit self-conscious about it. She hadn't realised it would have been eating at him quite so much, though. "Nathan, no. You don't—"
"You know that shield harmonisation trick?" he interrupted her, standing up, steeling his jaw and seemingly unconsciously shifting into parade rest as if he was reporting to her for a dressing down. He was slipping into the role of the rookie soldier again, and she thought it might be on purpose. As if he thought that was where he belonged. She had to crane her head to the side to see him. "It had never been field-tested. Not once," he admitted. "Sporritt and I set it up on a couple of dummies and shot a few rounds into it, but that's about all. It could have blown up in our faces back there. I should have told you that, but I didn't."
Shepard grimaced. If that was true, he was right, he damn well should have told her. But that didn't mean she wouldn't have still chosen to use it. "Okay. Yes, you should have told me. But I still would have—"
"And the shuttle on Mars," he interrupted her again. "That was a really stupid idea. I—I almost killed you when it came down, it was lucky you managed to duck out of the way. And on Menae, you had to drag me around so I wouldn't get hit by that goddamn Reaper." He shook his head and met her eyes. The resignation in them made her heart fall. "You need to stop taking me on ground missions, Shepard. I think I'm more of a liability than an asset."
"Briggs," she said softly. She had to cut that train of thought off quickly. He was wrong, and she knew that was entirely a leadership decision rather than a personal one. Chakwas was right; he was no expert, and he knew that very well. But that didn't make him useless, and it certainly didn't make him a liability. She beckoned to him. She wanted him out of that raw recruit mentality. "Come here, help me sit up."
He reluctantly did as she asked, raising the head of the bed and slipping an arm behind her back to help her shuffle upright. She stifled a wince as her surgical wound pulled and the bone beneath protested the movement, then sat back, trapping his arm and forcing him to either sit on the bed beside her or remain awkwardly stooped over. Despite his obvious unhappiness he still saw what she was doing and managed a small smile as he sat. He didn't put his arms around her properly, though, just left the arm behind her back where it was.
"Nathan, you are a good soldier," she told him firmly. "I'm not just telling you that to try and make you feel better. You are. You're not Vega, and you're not me, but you haven't been through what we've been through either. Until this war started you had never been in a situation where you had no choice but to pull off the impossible. Vega has been there, and I seem to live there these days." She looked up at him intently. "We all do, now. Sooner or later you're going to start pulling off the impossible too. You are not some raw recruit just out of basic, comparatively or otherwise. You already have the ideas and the basic skills, you just need the judgement and presence of mind to go along with them."
He was silent for a moment, shifting to lean his chin gently on her un-bandaged shoulder from behind as he took in what she had said. She took that as a good sign. "Judgement and presence of mind. Those things are hard to come by," he muttered into her neck, his breath tickling her skin as he spoke. "I'll… do my best to find them."
"Good. And I'm still sorry," she added. "I have been coddling you, and I think it has been contributing to the problem. I won't do it anymore."
He looked up and there was a fierce light in his eyes when he met hers. "That I agree with. Unless it's going to get me or someone else killed, I need to be able to fuck things up. I need to own my mistakes and use them to get better. Better yet, let me the hell know when I did something wrong. Teach me to do better."
She was surprised at the vehemence in his voice. She wanted to ask where it came from, but now was not the time. She nodded. "All right. I will."
He kissed the line of her jaw. "And you'll tell me if you're hurt."
She smiled. "Yes, sir."
He chuckled and a lazy grin spread across his face. There was her Nathan again. "Damn, I like the sound of that," he drawled.
She laughed, then winced and made a face as the muscles near her collarbone tensed. Okay, laughing was probably not the best idea right now. She leaned her head back against his shoulder and murmured, "Don't get used to it."
He chuckled, drawing his arms around her carefully, but tightly, and pulling her close.
Chakwas agreed to let her return to her quarters later that afternoon, provided she remain on strict bed rest. Of course, she took that to mean sitting up would be okay as long as she stayed in her quarters… which was likely what the doctor had intended for her to think in the first place. If she really wanted to enforce bed rest, Dr Chakwas knew quite well that the only way she could manage that would be to keep Shepard in the medbay.
It was a dance they had been performing for years now, and also one of the reasons Shepard refused to play chess against the doctor.
When she was released, Miranda was on hand to accompany her, having chosen just that moment to visit. Despite Shepard's protests, the taller woman kept a hand firmly on her elbow as she gingerly made her way from the medbay to the elevator and up to her quarters. When they arrived, the disapproving stare she directed Shepard's way was enough to guilt her into climbing into bed rather than taking a seat on the couch.
"How are you feeling?" Miranda asked briskly as she arranged the pillows efficiently behind Shepard's back.
"Better," Shepard replied honestly. The intensity of the painkillers she had been taking had been reduced and they were still doing their job. The surgical wound had already knitted itself shut, thanks to medigel and her Cerberus implants. Nathan's visit had relaxed her somewhat, and she had managed to sleep for a couple of hours after he left.
"I checked your scans. Your cybernetics are functioning as they should. I believe the doctor's estimate of your recovery time is accurate." Miranda turned Shepard's desk chair around and sat, crossing her legs neatly and folding her hands in her lap.
"Good. We can't afford to delay Palaven and I don't want to sit it out. I don't know if the Reapers will be able to eventually eliminate the weakness we found but I don't see any reason not to assume they'll try. We can't give them the time to do that."
"Agreed. Although, bear in mind that we do have evidence suggesting that even if they have the ability to eliminate the weakness, they may not do so. All our dealings with them in the past suggest they may be too arrogant to believe we will be able to successfully exploit it."
Shepard huffed dubiously. "I hope you're right. I don't like relying on that but we don't have much choice. We have that, secrecy and time. We need to get the drop on them for this to work."
Miranda shifted in her seat. "We clearly did not get the drop on Cerberus. Shepard… I apologise. It was my fault."
Shepard frowned. Too many people were apologising to her for things they didn't need to today. "How was it your fault?"
"The information came from my source. It was bad… again. I led us into a trap again. I'm… sorry."
"Miranda, we wouldn't even have known about the place if it wasn't for your information, and we did a lot of good there," Shepard argued. "How do you know your source betrayed you? They could easily have been fed the wrong information, or been discovered and broken by Cerberus after they had passed the intel to you in good faith."
Miranda was almost defiant in her desire to take responsibility. "That's unlikely."
"I disagree. Don't assume you messed up until you know you actually did," Shepard chided her. "Surely you have other sources in Cerberus who can find out what happened."
Miranda nodded reluctantly. "Yes. All right. I'll find out."
Shepard nodded, satisfied. She gingerly flexed her shoulders just a little, pleased when all she felt was a dull ache. "While you're there, see what else you can find out about what they're keeping from you in regards to the Lazarus project."
"I'm already on that," Miranda said decisively. "I've been in contact with Liara T'Soni. We're coordinating our efforts, but so far we haven't found anything."
Shepard grimaced, frustrated. The last thing she needed was to start getting paranoid about her own body again. She had felt this way after first being resurrected, walking around the Presidium, into the Council's inner sanctum and the human embassy and wondering if the Illusive Man was somewhere watching live playback from her ocular implants. Wondering if somehow she had been rigged with enough sensors and bugs to make her Cerberus' unwitting window into the Alliance. The only reason she had finally been able to put those fears behind her – aside from the numerous scans and tests she had had Dr Chakwas run – was the fact that there were plenty of much easier ways for Cerberus to get any information she could bring them. It also helped that the Illusive Man always seemed to know exactly what was going on before she even stumbled across it.
"Keep on it," she grumbled. "They wanted me alive. I want to know why, and I bet this has something to do with it."
Miranda nodded firmly. "Don't worry, Shepard, we'll figure this out."
"Thanks," Shepard replied, feeling a sudden pang of affection for the woman who in the most unlikely of circumstances had become one of her closest friends. She held out her hand, beckoning to her.
With a theatrical sigh and a roll of her eyes Miranda sat gingerly on the bed facing Shepard and took the hand she offered.
"Thank you for joining me again, Miranda," Shepard said sincerely.
Miranda snorted. "That's a bit sentimental for you, Shepard. I thought Chakwas took you off the hard drugs."
"Mostly." Shepard quirked a smile, but let it fade a moment later. "I'm serious, though." For some reason she felt like it was important Miranda knew how grateful she was to have her back and how glad she was to have her as a friend. She remembered letting Liara go without much more than a 'see you later' because she couldn't think of anything better to say at the time. If Miranda had to leave or the worst happened, she wanted to make sure she did a better job with her. "I don't know what I'd do if you hadn't agreed to come back on board."
"Well, you'd probably have had to make do with a sub-par XO. Although, you would have a much better chance at cleaning up at poker." Miranda sighed at Shepard's exasperated look. "Oh, all right. I'm glad to be here too. And… I suppose you're the best friend I've ever had and I'm grateful for that."
Shepard, knowing Miranda, realised just how much it took for her to say that. She smiled, squeezing her hand. Miranda would have fidgeted if she were anybody else. Shepard took pity on her. "Go on, XO. You've got better things to do than babysit me. Get back to work."
Miranda gave her a sardonic smile as she got to her feet. "Aye aye, ma'am."
Nathan stood outside Shepard's door, hesitating. It was approaching 2100 ship's time and she hadn't come down for dinner; no doubt she was working. He was still a bit taken aback by how much research and planning Shepard seemed to do before each mission. He hadn't done nearly as much for the missions he had conducted with his team, but then, he hadn't had anywhere near as much autonomy as she did. Nor was as much riding on their success. He had received pre-prepared comprehensive briefings on almost every deployment they undertook, whereas Shepard seemed often to be flying by the seat of her pants, the fate of millions resting on her success.
Regardless, she had been sequestered in her quarters ever since she had left the medbay earlier that day, and he hadn't seen her since that morning. He wanted to look in on her, see how she was doing. And all right, he had missed her too, so maybe his visit was partially selfish. He hoped she was looking for a distraction.
He pressed the door chime and waited. It took her perhaps a little longer than usual to answer, but the door slid open at her verbal invitation.
She was pacing the sunken area of the room, datapad in hand, dressed in standard blue fatigues and a green shirt he had never seen before that hung loosely against the visible bandages covering her shoulder. It was strange seeing her in anything other than a military uniform, but he liked it. Of course, she could be wearing a sack and he would still think she was beautiful, so he wasn't sure he was the best judge of these things. "Hey Shepard," he said in greeting, heading for the steps. "Am I interrupting?"
She sighed, glancing up at him. The tension in her eyes was obvious. "Honestly, yes. But it's all right."
He stopped at her sharp response. Lines were creasing her forehead and the corners of her eyes. He noticed she was holding the datapad in her left hand, lightly but noticeably keeping her right clutched to her waist. All the pacing she had been doing had probably aggravated her injury. He didn't think she'd be too receptive if he started telling her she should sit down, though. Maybe he had misjudged his timing in coming to see her. "Don't worry about it. I'll go," he decided, moving to leave the room.
"Wait," she called quickly, and when he turned back she had set the datapad down and come over to meet him, brows drawn in apology. "Sorry. I didn't mean it to sound like that." She craned her head up for a kiss and immediately winced, raising her left hand to her bandaged shoulder.
He flinched in commiseration. "Christ, Shepard, I'll come down to you." He jogged down the stairs and ran careful palms over her neck and un-bandaged shoulder. "You all right?"
She made an exasperated noise, twitching under his hands. "I'm fine. I… forgot about it for a moment," she admitted. She did seem distracted, and not in a good way. They were approaching the rendezvous for the battle on Palaven, and would be there in under forty-eight hours. That probably had a lot to do with it. He wanted to do something to help, but wasn't really sure what.
In the absence of any useful ideas, he went with his first instinct, wrapping his arms around her waist, gathering her in close and lifting her off her feet so his eyes were level with hers. Her eyebrows flew up in surprise as she braced her arms on his. "Still good?" he asked. "Now you don't have to crane your neck so much."
She blinked as she dangled in his arms. "Still good, I think," she replied. A reluctant smile crept across her lips. "This is… convenient." She leaned forward and captured his lips with hers.
He breathed in, letting her scent fill his nose as he kissed her. It was still such a novelty being able to kiss her and touch her that he found himself wanting to spend a hell of a lot of time doing nothing but that. He knew she wouldn't be capable of anything more while still getting over her injury but he was a little surprised to realise it didn't bother him. There were so many other things they could do together. Even if all she felt able to do was sit and talk, he would love it.
Now that was substantially different to his previous relationships, if you could call them that. The longest time he had ever spent with one woman was the six months he had been part of a friends-with-benefits slash stress relief arrangement in basic. Anya had been a good friend, but the only thing he could think of that would have been worse than spending hours just kissingher was spending hours talking to her.
Now was not the time to be thinking about Anya though. He pushed her from his mind without a second thought, returning his attention to the woman in his arms. "Even better now?" he asked as they finally parted lips for a moment.
Shepard's laughter was music to his ears. "Yes, even better now," she replied. "Put me down."
He set her down gently, careful not to jostle her. "How's the planning going?"
She took a seat on the couch, putting some effort into keeping her posture straight as she sat back. "Good," she told him as he moved to join her. He sat beside her and picked up the datapad she had been holding, partly because he was curious and partly because if he had it she couldn't start stressing over it again. "I've gone over the plan so many times now that I can recite the exact distances between our drop point and each landmark on the way to our target." Her tone was a mixture of wry humour and sheer exhaustion.
He glanced at her, turning the datapad over in his hands but hesitant to unlock the screen. He was well aware sleeping with the Commander didn't give him the same security clearance as her. "So we have a target on Palaven now? Can you tell me anything?"
She nodded at the pad in his hands. "Have a look if you like."
"Really?" He stared at her in surprise. "Isn't this ultra high-level top secret or something?"
Her lip quirked with the hint of a grin. "You're getting briefed tomorrow morning anyway, along with the rest of the ground team. Go on."
He didn't have to be told twice. He keyed the pad on and lost himself in an intriguing new world of structured typing, neat drawings and careful hand-written notes entered into the document by haptic stylus. Shepard's ideal version of the upcoming battle on Palaven played out in his mind's eye as he read, followed by numerous different permutations of contingency plans. There was even a section of notes signed by Admiral Hackett himself. The contingency plans in particular were interesting; Shepard had included many highly unlikely scenarios, all fleshed out and fully accounted for. It made him wonder just how much of their escape from the recruitment station had been planned – at least in part – in advance.
"Shepard… you've got a plan here for what we would do if a Reaper took out a high-rise building while we were on the top floor. Do you always plan this… extensively?" he asked, curious.
She nodded thoughtfully. "I try to. If I have time. If the mission is as important as this one, I make the time."
"What about the mission to the recruitment station? Had you planned to blow a hole in its hull to get us out?"
She tossed him a wry smile that seemed part-grimace. "No. I hadn't."
He remembered the look on her face as he had pulled her in after she had jumped, after her suit had ruptured and the emergency seals had engaged. She had done a masterful job at keeping her distress hidden from the rest of the crew, but her wide eyes had betrayed her fear. She had clearly had a hell of a scare. He didn't blame her for being affected by it. How could she not be, after what she had told him about her death?
He leaned over and kissed her temple, then went back to reading.
After a while his head was swimming with the sheer magnitude of what they were about to try and do. Thousands of krogan with turian tech and biotic support, as well as the team from the Normandy, would be deployed at various key locations across the entire planet. In space the turian and human fleets would be baiting Reapers – baiting Reapers – in an attempt to get them to aim and fire in such a way that the thanix-equipped turian frigates and the Normandy could take them out via the weakness in their weapons ports. It would be a huge battle, a multi-species event. He had never thought he would ever see something like this in his entire life.
He looked over at Shepard, who had switched on a holoscreen in front of her armour cabinet and stretched her legs out, feet on the low coffee table, watching what looked like ANN News. Her brow was drawn as the news anchor talked about cities that had been lost and related death tolls on Earth, but she didn't change the channel. She watched almost studiously, as if committing it to memory.
It dawned on him that she had gone straight from a difficult mission where she had been injured, to pain and recuperation in the medbay, to being confined to quarters on bed-rest with nothing to do but plan and worry. She hadn't had a break for over twenty-four hours. The closer he got to her, the more he began to understand about what it was like to be Commander Shepard. The weight on her shoulders was massive. A whole galaxy full of people were watching and depending on her. Were it him in her place, he wasn't sure he would be able to deal with it.
"This is going to be big," he muttered.
She didn't look away from the news broadcast. "Yeah," she agreed.
"We could die tomorrow."
She glanced sharply in his direction. "Nathan—"
Before she could start to try and make him feel better, like he knew she would, he cut her off, assuming a pseudo-solemn expression. "I don't want to die without having seen Volus Wars Five."
The protest froze on her lips as she blinked in confusion for a moment. Then she burst into laughter, expression morphing into a mixture of mirth and chagrined pain as her hand wavered near her injured shoulder. When she had stopped laughing enough to take a breath, she gave him an incredulous stare. "Volus Wars Five? Four wasn't bad enough for you? It had a talking pyjak!"
"I need to know if Bol Vendar survived the explosion at the stock exchange," he insisted. "Chila vas'Krevesh was right outside, she totally could have pulled him out."
"I don't think so," Shepard protested. "Matriarch Harana had that troop of elcor infiltrators on standby the next building over, they would have been able to stop her before she could get to him."
"No way, Shepard, they're elcor!" Nathan shook his head and gestured at the holoscreen. "Put it on. Let's find out."
They spent the next two hours laughing and groaning and shouting at the screen while Bol Vendar and Chila vas'Krevesh fought the evil Matriarch Harana and her mind-controlled hanar minions. There was no mention of Reapers, nor of Cerberus. When the ending finally rolled around – an improbable cliffhanger involving a human swimming instructor whose skills came in very handy, an asari accountant, Bol, Chila, a shuttle engineering plant and a set of mechanised wire clippers that ended up saving the day – Nathan was sitting with his legs stretched out along the long side of the corner couch, Shepard comfortably encircled in his arms. She was snuggled up against his side, angled so she could keep her upper body as straight and level as possible, but nevertheless the tension seemed to have almost entirely fled her body. He was kind of proud of his handiwork.
Her hair was improbably soft against his cheek. He leaned down to kiss her tenderly as the credits rolled, noting with satisfaction the happy gleam in her eyes. It was a marked difference from earlier.
"I can die fulfilled now," he commented with a lop-sided grin.
She rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to respond.
"Commander, I apologise for the interruption," came Specialist Traynor's voice over the bulkhead speaker.
Seriously? Nathan sighed inwardly as he felt Shepard tense up again. He rubbed her uninjured shoulder.
"What is it, Traynor?" she asked.
"The Council have requested to speak with you via vid-com."
Nathan glanced at Shepard, raising an eyebrow. It was approaching 2330 – very late for an official vid call.
"Give me five minutes then patch it through to my desk screen." Shepard threw him a resigned look and extricated herself from his embrace.
He got to his feet. If Shepard had to take a call from the Council, that was his cue to leave. He followed her up to her work area and waited while she slipped her BDU jacket on over the green shirt, favouring her shoulder only slightly. "Do you always get calls this late?" he asked as she fastened her buttons.
She made an irritated noise, fumbling with a button. "Sometimes. The Council is particularly notorious for it. They've woken me up at 0200 a couple of times. They probably just want a last minute briefing."
"Nice of them," he muttered, reaching out to tuck a particularly noticeable bit of green shirt back under her collar, fingers brushing regretfully against the skin of her neck. "I'll leave you to it then."
She took hold of his shirt front and pulled him down for a final kiss. When she moved back she held on for a moment, gazing fiercely into his eyes. "No one is going to die tomorrow," she told him firmly.
He had only really suggested it as a way to get her off-balance and set up the joke. But that didn't make it any less possible. He could only nod in reply. "Night, Shepard," he said, and left for his own bunk.