Random Letters
"Permission to speak freely, sir?"
Kaidan suppressed a sigh, eyeing Odell. He bit off a curt no with some difficulty. The COs he'd respected the most had always let their marines speak their mind, and despite the weight of several nights of poor sleep, he couldn't bring himself to not live up to that. Instead, he nodded.
"You kind of checked out since Horizon, Commander," Odell said.
The rank title nagged at Kaidan more than usual. He regarded the chief with a flat stare.
The shaven-headed man shrugged. "I mean, we all kind of did for a while. But, the rest of us came back. You're still..." he gestured vaguely.
"I've had a lot to deal with."
"Yeah, I dunno what you're dealing with, sir. But we're headed back out there, and when our boots hit the dirt, I need to know that your head's in the field. Sir." He stood stiffly, arms behind his back.
"Have I given you any reason to think I won't do my job?"
Odell shifted his weight, but remained unbowed. "No, sir. But I don't want to find one, either."
"You won't," Kaidan said curtly. "Anything else, Chief?"
"No, sir." Odell turned and strode away, his shoulders set in time with his usual rolling gait. He walked like someone who had spent too much time riding a horse.
Not for the first time, Kaidan wondered if he hadn't been saddled with this particular Operations Chief in a misguided attempt to counterbalance whatever ego he might develop out of the Star of Terra. It smacked of something a psychologist had come up with while reading the tea leaves of Alliance-wide performance indicators.
Kaidan re-read the requisitions order in front of him, trying to think if he'd left anything out. It took extra effort to make himself focus and think through each line. He never imagined he'd miss the claustrophobic confines of a frigate, sleeping in a pod each night and sharing every living space with several other people. He liked having his own quarters, but at the same time, there was something oppressive in the sheer number of people on a larger ship, people he didn't know very well. Hadn't there been a time when he trusted all those strangers? He shook himself and punched through the order before logging off the terminal. What if Odell had a point? The undertone of weary resentment lurking in his head couldn't be any good.
For two years he'd fought hard to banish the wandering thoughts that tried to drag him back to the days of the Normandy. But as he left the vehicle hold, he found it impossible not to wonder where Shepard was right now. What was this new, Cerberus-built Normandy like? Just who was that strange drell, and how had Garrus-
Kaidan stopped dead in the center of the hallway.
Garrus.
After a quick glance over his shoulder, Kaidan popped open his omni-tool and rooted through his recent batch of mail. It was mostly dry Alliance reports, but a few messages were forwarded from outside, personal accounts. He'd started checking those accounts more often. The strangest of the new messages was an incomprehensible mess of random letters, an encrypted text file he'd assumed was either a forwarding bug or a weird bit of spam. He switched to the metadata block attached to the message. The subject line was another unhelpful mess. He stared at it in consternation. After a moment, the prefix jogged something in his head, something from two years ago.
Is it possible?
He closed his omni-tool with an impatient grunt, then let his feet take him aft, along the cruiser's hallways toward the officers' quarters. An itch was developing between his shoulders, a nervous tension that anticipated a new interruption. Just before Garrus had disappeared into the Terminus systems, he'd given Kaidan a short series of single-use encryption keys. Since the keys were only held by the two of them and never repeated, anyone intercepting messages using them would have to fall back on brute-force decryption, a process that would take even the most powerful computers several years to accomplish. At the time, Kaidan had considered it an act of excessive paranoia, but stored the key codes away among his personal files.
Despite his fears, he managed to get back to his quarters unmolested. Without bothering to turn up the main lights, he knelt and pulled his trunk out from under his narrow bunk. He fished around under the short stacks of clothes and his neatly folded dress blues for the heavy-duty OSD he kept stored there. The sense of foreboding increased.
His hand finally closed over the hard casing, and he pulled it free. Contained on the heavily shielded disk were all the personal files accumulated over his years of service, anything from mail, vids and images to bits of code, personal notes, and old login information. A repository of fragments of his life all the way back to when he'd joined up. The original OSD had gone down with the SR-1, and was probably still lying frozen on Alchera, but he'd retrieved everything from a redundant backup stored on a cloud server on Earth. It was one of those times he'd been grateful for the cautious tendencies instilled in him by his constant exposure to issues of computer security.
That everything included a lot of data from the time of Normandy's mission against Saren. Kaidan stood and turned to his desk. His terminal display opened on demand, and he dropped into the stiff-backed chair facing the holodisplay. A few quick commands logged him off the ship's internal network, isolating the terminal. He plugged in the OSD.
It took longer than he liked to dig Garrus' key codes out of the banks of files, and longer still to dig the extra password lock out of his own memory. The bane of computer users anywhere was the profusion of security data, combined with the stubbornness to never re-use the same passkeys.
His heart thudded. The strange message's subject string matched one of the identifiers linked to a key in the list.
The memory of his wayward turian friend as he'd seen him on Horizon came back to Kaidan. His battered face under a protective dressing, armor scored and scraped from unknown battles. But the turian's gaze held the same determination, his blue clan markings still adorning the plates of his face.
Kaidan's mouth went dry. It took under a second to process the small block of text and translate it, but a few seconds longer for him to work up the nerve to open it. There was a very loud voice in the back of his head that didn't want to deal with this, wanted to keep pushing it all aside. But the first line was blunt and unequivocal, drawing him in.
[[trans. note; High Nasahl, second simplified] Message starts:]
We're losing Shepard.
Kaidan's blood ran cold.
Not to Cerberus, she hates them more than ever. I asked a lot of the same questions you had when I came on board, the 'why' and the 'are you sure of this'. The answer to the latter is always no.
The spirit of the Normandy is dying. The ground team she's assembled is strong- they're some of the most skilled and downright scary people I've ever met. But there's something missing. Something? So many things. Things that were never there in the first place- trust, loyalty... People who care about why we're doing this and not just how much they're being paid or how many kills they get to notch onto their weapon. People who look out for each other as much as the mission.
No one was looking out for Shepard. Oh sure, Cerberus is watching her every move, every moment of every day. But no one paid any damn attention to the person. I think she just retreated into herself. Not that she ever talks about herself much in the first place, but what are you going to say when your hated enemies are listening to your every breath? What about when a bunch of antagonistic people are watching you, looking for that sign of weakness to exploit?
I should have seen it. I should have noticed something was wrong, realized she was drowning. But it's Shepard, right? She can deal with anything. [trans. note; archaic non-literal form "Patriarch Spirit"] forgive me, I made the same mistake on Omega. I should have been paying attention, not just assumed everything was how I wanted it to be.
Cerberus is a taint spreading into every spirit it touches. They put Shepard's body back together and tossed her into this mess without giving her spirit the slightest chance to recover from having her whole life taken away. Maybe... maybe when we all assumed she'd be fine, she did too. Or maybe she just put her [trans. note; noble form "face-paint"] on every morning and pretended, just to keep the Normandy going, because that's what everyone expected of her. Because not doing it meant people would die.
I'm not as good as she is. It's almost too late, and I can't find that thing to say. You know what I mean, that thing that she says that even if it doesn't convince you right away, it gets under your plates and itches until it forces you to think. I can't find that perfect thing to say that'll convince her not to do this. She just talks circles around me until I'm convinced she's right. [trans. note; core form "Palaven"], I'm still half-convinced. How can I take that away from her, her last bit of control over her own fate? It's so terribly... turian of her, to take this final responsibility-
Kaidan stood up, tearing himself away from the terminal and turning his back on it. He stood trembling in the center of the darkened room, trying to find his breath. Final... responsibility. It couldn't possibly mean...
The cool blue light of the terminal wavered on the edges of his vision, skewing in the shimmer of dark energy crawling up his limbs. He reached out and gripped the handle of his armor locker, trying to clamp down the biotic swell. He shuddered, twisting and forcing the pressure through his arms, letting the blood pound in his ears. He wanted to be in that back room of the Dark Star again, where he could let everything out at once in one explosive burst. But he couldn't let go, not here on board an Alliance ship. Gravitic field sensors would send MPs running within moments.
The handle came off with a sharp crack. He flung his arm sideways, hurling the broken plastic against the wall, only just stopping short from following it with a burst of dark energy. He drew several steadying breaths and turned slowly back to the terminal display, edging close enough to see the words again.
She wants this. How can I betray her?
I don't know how humans deal with this kind of thing. We don't intrude into our peers' personal lives unless it's a serious situation. But this qualifies. Your military has all those ridiculous rules about how you conduct your private lives, but you weren't just colleagues in arms. I don't even know what or how you define it. I guess specifics don't matter. What I do know is that you knew her, the real person under the armor, better than any of us ever did.
I know you don't want to hear this, but she was completely dead. A 'carbonized popsicle'. Cerberus paid staggering amounts of money to bring her back. It took years, the years you think she spent away? She was dead, or in a coma, on Cerberus' operating slab full of machines. None of that time even exists to her. She died above Alchera-
Kaidan turned away again, pushing the heel of his hand into his eye as if he could wipe away the intrusion. His stomach slithered and writhed. Because the person you knew is dead-
Instead of throwing the whole desk against the wall like his implant so eagerly wanted to, Kaidan followed a different impulse and tottered across the room. He wedged his fingers against the broken handle of the armor locker and forced it open, ignoring the bite of the ragged plastic in his palm. The door clicked and cycled wide. His armor glowered back at him from the rack where it was plugged into the ship's power systems. He fumbled along the side to find the external cable and switched the armor's systems on. He had to pull the torso section half off its mount to get at the belt compartment and get it open.
Its contents dropped out, landing on the floor of the locker with a dull thud. He'd been avoiding the datapad, telling himself any number of excuses to put off looking at it. After a final hesitation, he reached out with a shaking hand and picked it up. Though he'd seen the palm-sized device several times before, he'd never handled it before the day he woke up to see it sitting next to his pistol in the warehouse on Horizon. As the weight of it settled in his hand, his heart constricted so hard he stumbled back against the wall. It had been hers, an old personal pad, full of music and who knows what else. A fixture in Shepard's personal space, its importance to her evidenced by her own words. One of her few personal possessions that had nothing to do with her job. Kaidan's thumb found the power switch and pressed it. For a moment he thought he heard something, but the device remained dark. There was a quiet click from inside when he moved it. Something had broken loose inside that battered shell.
Why the geth had left this thing was far beyond Kaidan's understanding. The alien AI probably had no idea what it was, or what it meant to him, but there it was, the remains of Shepard's private music box. Dead as she'd been.
He could feel his throat constricting. He slid down the wall to the floor, his desire to keep the bulwarks in place warring with a feeling of terrible weariness. For a moment he stayed there, fighting with himself, his nerves dancing on a razor-thin edge. At length the need to finish the message won out, and, one hand still wrapped around the datapad, he forwarded his terminal display to his omni-tool.
She died above Alchera... and woke up to Cerberus and the Collectors.
Kaidan shuddered. Waking up in the arms of your enemies.
I'm not going to tell you what to feel about Cerberus. They're still as awful as you imagine, but they're the only ones fighting the Collectors. Maybe the fact that we even worked with them at all should tell you the scale of the threat. They're the Reapers' engineered cronies, and they're after all humans. The inside of their ship is just a huge prison. They came after Shepard specifically above Alchera. They tried to buy her corpse from the Shadow Broker.
She called herself 'Frankenstein'. A walking corpse full of computers. She thinks she's a threat to everyone around her. She says... she doesn't know why she's doing this anymore. It's terrible to listen to.
The words blurred as the horror in his chest heaved outward, filling him up. That someone he-
He blinked in the darkness. Love. That word had suffered so much ignominy, so many wildly different definitions, in humanity's long history that it was hard to consider it with a clear head. If Kaidan had settled on any conclusion in his adulthood, it was that he would save saying it for when he meant it. Keep it simple, guarded, uncluttered by a lot of baggage and possible misinterpretations.
Or maybe that was a lot of rationalization for almost never saying it. The roiling seas of his thoughts exposed the leaden stone of guilt laying at the bottom of his gut, overgrown from sitting unmoved for two years. It was only in the daze of retrospect that he'd been able to admit that what he felt for Kye was love... but the revelation came far past the time when it would be of any use. There was always something- it was too fast, too much of an imposition, the time wasn't right. Their responsibilities to their job had to take precedence. It was the professional thing to do.
On the floor of his quarters, he slumped into the wall next to him, squeezing his eyes shut. The roughened casing of her datapad bit into his hand. He'd done his best to figure out what was the right thing to do, between Shepard and himself, and spent so long thinking and not doing that the opportunity vanished out from under him, so fast to leave him breathless and stunned.
Instead of that word being used as it should have, it had been fired like a weapon on Horizon, and the echoes of the canon shot still resounded in his head. And that leaden stone sat heavier, feeding itself from that few minutes. A lodestone that tried to siphon away even his will to face up to it all.
Did you ever mourn her death?
Kaidan dropped the datapad beside him and wrapped his arms around himself as his head swam. His memories of Shepard's funeral were vague, viewed as if from a great distance. He couldn't remember who exactly had been there or anything of what was said, only that at the time he couldn't wait for it to end. But there hadn't been any relief afterward once he'd stumbled back to his quarters, either. And none in the slog of days and weeks that followed. A choked sob escaped him. The spectre of that numbing pain, more intense even than the aftermath of Vyrnnus' death, slithered up from the depths and soaked through through the cracks of his mental walls.
The person you knew is dead-
The image of Shepard in that Cerberus-made armor, her face scarred, her eyes flashing an unnatural light, marched through his skull, a raging force that tumbled the final wall of resistance. Unbidden, the memory of the geth's recording forced its way into his thoughts. A terrible, crystallized moment of humanity that penetrated his guts like barbed knives. Rage, guilt and helplessness flowed together into a torrent and the world around him dissolved as the tears flowed.
Congealing out of the muck of those raw minutes on the floor of his cabin, a realization formed itself.
The person you were then is gone too.
It wasn't that she was dead, but that that time was dead, and everything that had gone with it. A time so steeped in such incredible highs, lows and impossibilities that it no longer seemed real. It had been hard, and sometimes even terrifying, and it had pushed him well past the limits he'd always assumed he had. And through it all, orbiting the possibility of a real relationship with someone... amazing. And all of it was gone, pushing him back into a void he didn't know existed, to be supported only by the thin skeleton of stubborn duty that got him out of bed every morning, shoving everything else out of the way. Out of stubborness he'd kept going, building his life back up, but never trying to move the guilt still lurking down in the depths. Healing in some ways, but not in others.
No one was looking out for Shepard... under the armor...
He made a bitter noise through the tears. Because of all the things me missed about her, the sharpest was the sense that she would come to listen to Kaidan, not Commander Alenko, L2 biotic commendation etcetera ad nauseaum.
There were only a few lines left in Garrus' message. He had to fight to focus on them, afraid of what they might describe.
I don't know if you ever tried to contact Shepard yourself, but from what I know, until a few hours ago Cerberus was filtering any messages for her, so she probably never got it.
We're jumping the Omega-4 relay in three hours. You're too far way to do anything, I know that. So maybe this message is only for myself. Just so someone knows that if we don't come back, I tried.
I haven't given up yet. I won't.
Clear flame guide you, my [trans. note; equal-rank/peer form "friend"].
Garrus
[MESSAGE END]
The display clicked off. Kaidan spent a few long minutes orbiting the steadying thought. He scrubbed a free hand over his eyes. Maybe...
There were so many maybes, too many to count. That ridiculous, idiotic little flame of hope was back, a light in a vast darkness flickering out of reach of the grasping hands of his rational cynicism. The parts of him still quivering in horror to what Garrus had said. Everything balanced on a knife's edge.
Kaidan gingerly picked up the dead datapad and turned it over in his hands. The light from his terminal display glittered in the dents where the paint had chipped off the casing. He tipped it back and forth, listening to the quiet click of the loose parts. Unbidden, the stubborn fixer's voice in his head wondered if there wasn't a deep drive scanner somewhere on board.
He dared to imagine something in his chest felt lighter than it had in a long time.
"It's a start," he whispered aloud, as if he could push the pain out of himself and address it directly.
Garrus hasn't given up. How can I? Deep, bitter helplessness still crawled in his stomach. He closed his eyes and tried to think, his thoughts still raw, but calmer now. If I let this destroy me now, then I make everything even worse. I have to... focus on what I can do. My squad... myself. The future might just bring me a chance to...
Kaidan opened the message again. He avoided the words themselves, instead searching the metadata block. Garrus was cautious, but hidden in that information was a trail that would lead, if not back to the Normandy, then a protected dropbox of some kind. The turian liked to play the security game as much as he did. Maybe I can still do... something. Anything.
A shot in the dark.
