Beta: pixelatrix
Thanks for the review :)
Bioware owns all.
When Kate finally regained consciousness, she knew before opening her eyes who was in the room with her. On one side, her father held one of her hands in both of his. His head must have been on his arm because she could just feel the end of his beard tickling her hand. The fingers of her other hand were tightly entwined with Zaeed's and she could feel the pressure further down the bed where, as was his way, he sat with his feet propped on the edge.
She gently squeezed both of their hands and said quietly, "If I open my eyes and acknowledge that I'm not dead, do you both promise not to yell at me for doing stupid, dangerous shit for at least an hour?"
"No promises" said one; "abso-bloody-lutely not" said the other. Both seemed to realized at the same time what she'd said as Hackett raised his head to look at her and then leaned up to gently kiss her forehead as Zaeed's boots crashed to the floor and he got up to sit on the edge of the bed.
"How do you feel, kitten?" Zaeed asked.
Kate winced as he and Hackett gently helped her sit up more fully against the pillows. "Let me put it this way," she said. "Remember after Aratoht how I said it felt like I'd gotten run over by the ghost of the Mako?"
"Yes..." Zaeed smiled at the memory.
"Well, this time, Wrex and Grunt were driving the fucking thing. How long was I out?" Both men looked thoroughly exhausted, as if neither one had left her bedside since she was brought in, and she had a feeling neither had.
"Five days."
"What... happened?" she asked. "The last thing I remember is getting James and Kaidan to the Normandy and then Anderson and me making a run for the beam."
Her father and Zaeed exchanged a worried look.
The look wasn't lost on Kate. She turned from one man to the other. "What? What's wrong?"
"The good news is the Reapers are gone and the Illusive Man is dead," Hackett said.
"Well obviously the Reapers are gone. Otherwise, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. What's the bad news?" she asked apprehensively.
He hesitated a moment. "Anderson's dead."
Her eyes filled with tears. "Dead? How?"
"I could hear what was going on through your comm channel," Hackett said. "He was shot, by the Illusive Man."
There was a deafening silence that stretched between them for several minutes.
"Fuck," Kate muttered after awhile. "I remember that part now. But... it wasn't the Illusive Man, it was me."
"What was you, Katie?"
She looked down at her lap instead of at her father. "I was the one who shot Anderson. Or at least I was the one holding the gun."
"It wasn't your fault, sweetheart," he said gently. "From what I could hear on the comm, it sounded like the Illusive Man was indoctrinated."
She shook her head. "That doesn't make it better. Whether I was in control of it or not, it was still my finger that pulled the trigger, it was a bullet from my gun that killed him."
The doctors kept Kate in the hospital for another week. While Zaeed flat-out refused to leave, her father was finally forced to do so by urgent meetings regarding the rebuilding of the galaxy. But he came back as often as he could.
She had a steady stream of other visitors as well. Having crashed on some unknown planet while outrunning the beam from the Crucible, the Normandy finally docked at the Citadel two days after she woke up and she was relieved to see everyone was safe. Surprisingly, the rest of her former crew, those who had been in various parts of London instead of on ships, had also survived and had been among her first visitors.
It was Cortez who finally convinced Zaeed that he needed to get some proper sleep in an actual bed. Not wanting Kate to be left alone while the mercenary was away, the rest of the Normandy crew took shifts sitting with her. When she tried to protest against it, citing that they should be with their families, Joker reminded her that she was family.
A few days after Kate woke up, Miranda came to see her. Above all else, there was one thing that still bothered the Commander: the gunshot to her abdomen. After everything she'd been through, finding out that she could have children had been the one thing she'd clung to in order to get through that final battle, the details of which had all but completely come back to her now. She didn't know what she was going to do, how she was going to tell Zaeed, if that had all been a pipe dream.
Miranda, however, had spoken to Dr. Chakwas, seen the scans of Kate's body from after the battle and reassured her that this time, the gunshot had been much higher. No permanent internal damage had been done. She would still be able to have children. Then Miranda told her the rest of the news: the beam from the Crucible had messed with Kate's cybernetic implants a bit, hence the reason for the over-long hospital stay, including (Miranda was grinning now) the birth control chip. It was no longer functioning.
And now Kate had a whole new problem, one that she wouldn't give up for anything: how to finally break the news to her father that he was going to have to get used to the idea of being a grandfather.