He was running again.
The sun was high. The sky was cloudless. It was dry and hot. His mouth felt parched. He slung his bundled load on his back, and under his calloused feet ran the endless ground. His limbs felt sluggish - like every step required all his concentration to move forward and down. The plain seemed to stretch on in front of him unendingly, and he struggled to push himself onwards, not knowing where he was going or why.
He beat the ground in a daze until he could feel moisture under his feet cooling him. The awareness transformed into a realization that he was running through marshes beside a river. The water amplified his want for relief, and his dry throat gave a new ache, pleading to be moistened. When he stopped to bend down and cup some of the quenching water to his face, he saw in its reflection his own heavily weathered visage, and the reason for his plight came to him suddenly like a strike of lightning: He needed to warn them before it was too late.
Now aware of the urgency, he drank deeply from the water, and although his face felt wet, the cool waters did not quench him. He gasped at the running water at his feet for another drink, greedily sucking at the liquid to cool himself, but relief remained beyond his reach despite his efforts. His repeated drinks proved futile, and he wailed into the sky with frustration, not understanding what was happening to him or why… when suddenly his eyes opened, for real this time, and he found himself in a room he didn't recognize. He blinked rapidly, and it was a moment before he remembered that he was on the Normandy, lying on the bed in the starboard cargo hold. He had been dreaming.
He swallowed dryly, and Arius discovered that his mouth had felt dry because he had been sleeping with it open. His face felt wet, so he touched it, then discerned that he had been drooling on himself and his pillow. Annoyed, he rose from the bed to a sitting position in a haze. The dream had been unusually vivid, and he felt disoriented by it. Usually, he would have tried to shut his eyes and replay as much as he could recall to better remember the details, but this was not the first time he had dreamt of running along that river, nor, he mulled, would it be the last.
Thirsty, he got up to drink from the canister he kept by his desk. While unscrewing the lid, he glanced over some project materials he had left open. Seeing the work inadvertently filled his head with a plethora of worries and ideas, quickly destroying any chance of him easily returning to sleep. When he looked at the clock on his desk to see the time, its illuminated digits silently mocked him. Begrudgingly resigning himself to his state, he turned on the light. Even though it was his own doing, the sudden burst of brightness stung his eyes, and he groaned in uncomfortable irritation before hastily fumbling the switch to turn it back off. Vexed, he lurched out of the hold toward the mess with barely-open eyes, knowing he could not easily fall back asleep but also disallowing himself to wake up fully to spite himself in some deranged logic that only made sense in his sleep-deprived mind.
Once in the mess, his hands reached for a mug without looking, threw in a teabag of something he hoped wasn't toxic to him, then somehow added hot water without burning himself. He heard a grunt from behind him, and he turned slightly, not wanting to expend the effort to open his eyes or turn his entire body around fully. It was Shepard, and she was looking just as dishevelled and disgruntled as he was. He lifted his mug and gave the slightest mumble of a question, and she responded with the same enthusiasm in the form of a guttural acknowledgement. He made another, handed it to her, and they both stood there, barely conscious, both having been disturbed in the middle of the night in a most unwelcome fashion.
Eventually, she must have woken up enough to say, "You look… like hell."
"So do you."
"Fair." She lifted her mug. "What is this?"
"Don't know. Didn't see. Don't care," he said shortly, but a whiff of warm spices in the tea gently rose and tickled his nose. "... Chai."
Shepard began to raise it to her face to smell too but found the endeavour warranted more effort than she wanted to expend, and she let her arm fall back down. "Bad night?"
"Mhm. Dreams. You?"
"Same."
They both stood there in a sort of asinine way, hands-on scalding mugs, eyes partially closed, not saying anything and not really thinking. Shepard yawned, and she looked more annoyed after than before. Seeing her yawn involuntarily triggered one from Arius as well, and he grumbled to himself.
"I think I'm going to… read," he eventually slurred, still not clear-headed enough to speak coherently. "Join… me?"
She shrugged. "Sure."
They staggered back to the starboard cargo hold like zombies. The lights were turned low. Once there, Shepard moved to sit in one of the chairs, but Arius interrupted her with a grumble and directed her to continue walking further back. A two-seater sofa was hidden in a sheltered nook next to his bed with a large, brightly-coloured, patterned blanket thrown over it, hidden away from the front of the hold by a partition of ship hardware. It faced the starboard windows that looked out into space, and the stars floated by silently. Not bothering to bend down, Arius pushed a wide crate with his leg toward the foot of the couch so that they could jointly use it as a footrest. There was a small table in the corner, sandwiched between the wall and the sofa's left-hand side, and on it rested a reading lamp and a small collection of antique books. He switched on the lamp, which emitted a soft, warm glow, and plopped himself onto one side of the sofa. Shepard did the same next to him.
"Mmm, what's your pick?" he asked softly, gesturing to the book spines. "All non-fiction and nothing from the last century, I'm afraid."
"Surprise me."
"Alright."
Arius took a particularly thick one from the middle of the bookends and handed it to her. It was an honest hardcover book, with pages made of paper. Although the cover was worn and faded, she recognized the title: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.
"I recognize this one. It's a classic."
"One of my favourites," he whispered. "Marvelous adventure. Delicious revenge. Satisfying redemption. I think you'll like it."
He selected another book from the bookends, crossed one leg under him on the sofa to get comfortable, and began silently reading to himself.
Tending to the book in her hands, Shepard used her left hand to cradle the novel while she used her right thumb and forefinger to quickly flip the pages from front to back in one neat motion. From out of the shuffling pages wafted the scent she had silently hoped for: the much sought-after old book smell. In more modern times, datapads had nearly replaced traditional reading material, and books made of paper were an endangered species; They had become a collector's item more often than not. Good times from her youth stirred from paper books, and the smell grabbed ahold and yanked her backwards into memories of quiet, simple evenings spent in her childhood bedroom - sun-drenched days that had seemed endless before everything had changed. The profound nostalgia washed over her, and a rare feeling of warm, snug comfort remained when it retreated. As far as she felt, they sat in a quiet corner nestled away from the rest of the universe.
She began reading, and some time passed in silence, only briefly interrupted by shifting limbs into more comfortable positions or sips from the mugs before the contents got cold. Eventually, after many pages had been flipped, she took a break and watched some of the stars pass to rest her eyes. While she did so, she absentmindedly began stroking the soft fabric of the wide blanket she sat on, tracing the colourful threads of the old-world patterns on it with her fingers.
"This might just be the coziest corner on the Normandy."
"I'm glad you think so," Arius responded, with a slight smile playing on his lips. "I think it is, too, though I have yet seen your quarters, so I'll have to take your word for it."
"You haven't? Oh, I should invite you up soon, or you should come visit. I've got a pretty sweet model ship collection I think you'd appreciate… and some pet fish. Finally got around to getting an automatic feeder; I'm ashamed to admit how many times I've had to re-populate my tank."
He chuckled. "There's an aquarium in the captain's cabin? Was that a Cerberus addition? I wouldn't imagine the Alliance would have deemed that an essential feature."
"Yeah, it was. The Illusive man told me he 'spared no expense' in its construction. I got an aquarium, Joker got a leather chair, and the mess got a full kitchen."
"Now that's an addition I can get behind."
There was a natural pause in the conversation, and Shepard looked down at the book in her hands, thinking. "Have you ever thought about writing a book of your own?" she asked him.
"About… starship kitchen recipes?"
"Ha! No," she laughed, "about your life! You have a lot of stories to tell, Arius, maybe the longest one ever. God forbid if something were to happen to you, they would all just… be lost to us."
Arius raised his eyes from the printed page and turned his head to meet hers. He noted a genuine wistfulness in them, and he lowered his book. "It…. It would take ages to write," he reasoned, "and with no way to corroborate, it would only be considered a fanciful work of fiction. Even if I somehow managed to write it, I would only allow it to be published posthumously. And now, we're in a war… and I certainly don't have any time to do so."
"After the war, then."
He laughed quietly at her suggestion. "I appreciate your confidence, Eden. Fine, how's this: If we somehow win, I'll make a serious attempt at it, but under one condition."
"And what's that?" she asked him, smirking, expecting some outlandish stipulation.
"That you be my editor. Writing it will be no small task, so I'll need help. That means you need to survive the war too, by the way; You won't be able to edit any stories if you're dead."
The odds of their joint survival sat soberingly close to nil, but the hopeful thought in her present blissful state was enough that she couldn't help but play along and imagine a future. "You drive a tough bargain, but I think I can live with that."
"Good," he said, reopening his book, "expect a hefty manuscript in your future." His eyes returned to the page but got only a few words in before putting the book down again. "On that thought, maybe you should. Write a book, I mean."
She vehemently shook her head. "No, not happening."
"I'm serious, Eden. Think about it - you've led a pretty interesting life. You've been to places and done things most people haven't. The first human Spectre, tangled in the Reapers' arrival, leading a diverse and legendary group of individuals across the galaxy. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that? I can see it now," he exclaimed, semi-serious and semi-jesting while gesticulating with his hands in the air, "Limited edition steelbook cover. On it is a close-up shot of your armour's shoulder, deeply worn and with the N7 insignia stamped into it…. And maybe… blood and… rain dripping down the side." He paused for effect. "How's that sounding?"
"Not bad, not bad at all, but..." she chuckled, tilted her head slightly to the side and shaking it, "I'm not much of a writer."
"Nonsense, everyone is their own author."
She shrugged. "Another problem - this story doesn't have an ending yet."
"Ah, you're just not finished living it yet, and with any hope, far from it."
She nodded and smiled warmly, but then Arius noticed it falter slightly, like the initial purity of the expression had been soured somehow by a secondary thought. It was not the first time he had seen the change in her, and he recalled to himself previous times when he had caught her expressions of joy get shut down by some internal force. This time he immediately lept after it, needing to know what was causing the turmoil.
"I know this is an odd and brazen request, but I could sense a thought fly through your head just now. What was it?"
"What do you mean?" she asked him, and he could sense his question had somewhat unsettled her, provoking a slight defensive reaction. He knew that it was a daring ask on his part, and even in trust, he hadn't expected a straightforward answer.
Arius closed his eyes briefly as he recalled past conversations with the Commander, trying to find the root of it. She had proclaimed to him on more than one occasion that nothing ever came for free, and that line had been delivered not with a lighthearted countenance but with a deep, weighty cognizance.
"I… hmm," he muttered, searching himself for the best way to proceed. "Forgive my detour, but please humour me; Would you consider yourself a… consequentialist?"
His deviating line of interrogation provoked a raised eyebrow from her, but he saw her eyes shift to the side in serious thought before she responded to him. "Yes," she answered him, nodding steadily. "Yes, that's one way of putting it."
He sensed he was getting closer to it, and he grew pensive. "Do you believe that nothing good happens without an equivalent measure of work, of suffering? That your joy always comes at some eventual cost?"
His follow-up question didn't faze her, and she responded earnestly and without delay. "Yes," she answered. Then added, "Doesn't it always?"
It was the manner of her response that Arius realized that he may have uncovered it - the internal code of hers that tempered her moods - but its discovery brought him little satisfaction. As much as her outlook seemed fair in all regards, it saddened him, but he wasn't sure why. "Hmm. Maybe you're right," he supposed, leaning back into the sofa, "and maybe I'm just too much of a romantic to think otherwise."
"Well, that much is obvious," she teased.
He shot her a wounded look, and she grinned.
"Thinking about it now, I guess that's why I never liked fairy tales, even as a kid," Shepard admitted. "Some part of me always realized such things were impossible. There's no such thing as a perfect finale. The story doesn't end after you ride off into the distance. Something always changes. Someone always loses something."
Shepard's words carried with them a sombre reminder of the sacrifices each had made upon their respective paths. The mythological hero saved the day but, in doing so, traded something irreplaceable: innocence, a companion, or even life itself. It was the ultimate destiny of heroes to look back at their transformation with their own eyes and cry.
"I suppose that's the nature of all tragedies," he offered. "The hero dies, but the story lives on forever."
Arius gently closed the book in his hands, then turned down the reading lamp. In the dim lighting, the sea of stars seemed a bit brighter, and if one imagined hard enough, the ever-present background hum of the ship sounded like the crashing of distant water. Shepard, leaning onto the right armrest, propped her head up with her hand. "Your dream," she asked him, "can you tell me what it was about?"
"Yes. I was… running," he told her, "on Earth. Sun was high. It was dry and hot. I thought I was dying of thirst before I woke up and realized my mouth had been hanging open."
Shepard snorted with amusement.
"What about yours?" he asked her.
"Weirdly enough, I was running too. It was through a forest. It was dark." Then after a minute asked, "Were you running towards or away from something?"
"Towards. You?"
"Away… sort of. Any sage wisdom you want to share with me about its possible meaning?"
"That depends; the feeling you had when you awoke, was it closer to misery or elation?"
"Definitely misery."
"Then I would say your subconscious may be showing you decisions or fears you've been avoiding, a reality you are trying to escape."
"That… makes sense, I think. How about yours? How did you feel?"
"Selfsame."
Shepard was silent while she thought for a moment. "Were you afraid of losing something?" she asked him.
Her insight surprised him. "Yes," he responded, "I was."
The hum of the ship returned.
"Do you often remember your dreams?" he asked her.
"Not like I used to."
"Not like you used to?" he repeated, curious. "When did it change?"
"A long time ago… It's a long story."
"Lucky for us, I've got all night."
Shepard didn't protest, and he didn't press further. The moment passed and he was about to open his book again when she began speaking, and what she told him was a story she had never shared with anyone before.
"When I was a kid," she began, "I used to dream a lot. Every night, I would sleep and fall into the most fantastic dreams. They were always very vivid, almost incredibly so, and when I woke up, I would be able to recall them almost perfectly. Sometimes I would dream of flying high up in the sky above the farm, sometimes of running barefoot through our fields, and sometimes of living in the stars as a bad-ass space marine - those were always my favourite." She shook her head in bittersweet recollection. "In those space marine dreams, I would somehow always have the coolest weapons and the neatest gadgets. I would meet never-before-seen creatures and go on adventures. I mentioned to you before that my peers sometimes ridiculed me for having biotics, but in my dreams, I always had a group of friends at my side, even though I could not remember their faces when I woke. Every night I saved the day, and every morning I woke up excited for what the next would bring."
Emotion began eating away at her, and Shepard's voice began wavering.
"My mother," she told him, giving a half-suppressed laugh, "thought your dreams were either manifestations of your desires or a crystal ball that looked into the future, maybe both. She told me that every morning I remembered my dreams, I should write them down while they were fresh to see if they came true one day. I did, and I kept that journal for years. Then, one day, right after my sixteenth birthday..."
Shepard cleared her throat to pause and collect herself, and Arius understood what had come to pass.
"I remember it like it was yesterday. One night I went to sleep, and I just… woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. There had been no dreams, no awareness of time passing. It was like I hit the pillow, closed my eyes, and opened them again." She shook her head in disbelief. "This may sound normal enough to most people, but it wasn't to me. I remember laying there in my bed, thinking hard and unable to recall the last time I hadn't dreamed. Right then, I started hearing the gunfire and then the screams."
Mindoir. A human farming colony in the Attican Traverse, Mindoir was raided in 2170 by batarian slavers, who slaughtered most of the colonists. Eden Shepard was sixteen when the raid came. Shepard's friends and relatives were all killed, but Shepard managed to survive and was rescued by an Alliance patrol.
"Before the Alliance troops got me off the planet, I ran back to the house to look for my journal. I searched it high and low, hoping to read it and carry my mind away from the hell that was reality, but I couldn't find it, and I never did. And from that night on," she revealed, "I never really dreamed those dreams again."
Her voice began breaking up, and her words made him lose his breath.
"And ever since then, I've wondered if I really woke up. 'What if I am still dreaming?' I've thought to myself. 'What if I wake up soon and I find myself in my bed again?', 'What if my family is asleep in another room and I have nothing to worry about?', 'What if this was just another one of my vivid space marine dreams?'"
Silent tears had fallen from her eyes, forming dark blotches where they had landed on her clothes.
"I joined the Alliance. Graduated with top marks at the Alliance military academy. Worked up to N7. Got command of one of the most advanced starships in the galaxy. Became a Spectre. Discovered the Reapers. Saved the Citadel. Saved the galaxy. Heck, I even died and came back! I'm surrounded by and leading the most talented, most amazing, loyal group of good fucking people that exist in this forsaken galaxy - and it's as good, no, it's better than any space marine dream I ever had as a girl. And the worst part is... the worst part is… sometimes I'm not sure if I want to wake up or not!"
Arius had long learned that there were things soldiers did not say, and one of them was just what their battlefields had been like. Battle was more private than sex because witnessing someone's torment was more intimate than witnessing their joy. She had revealed to him the secret thoughts that tormented her under the seemingly invincible shell of her armour, and it haunted him.
He reached over, wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and held her close while ragged breaths shook her body. No words were needed.
Some time passed, and eventually, her steady breathing returned. He felt her give a deep, full-bodied sigh, and her voice had returned to its usual timbre when she spoke. "Thanks," she muttered. "I'm sorry if I put you in an uncomfortable position. Usually, I'm the one acting as the ship's therapist," she said, giving a half-joking, half-serious chuckle. "I'm not used to having it be the other way around."
"Not at all. Thank you for sharing that with me," Arius responded quietly, grateful to have been trusted. "Although, my arm does seem to have fallen asleep," he commented, removing it from behind her and shaking feeling back into it.
The release had drained her, and Shepard's eyes felt heavy enough that she wanted nothing more than to close them again. She gave a deep yawn. "Do you mind if I… doze here for a bit? I'm perfectly comfortable now, and I know that if I get up and return to my cabin, I'll be wide awake."
"Take all the time you need," he said, opening the book in his lap again. "The morning is still far off, and we've got a long way yet to go."
The coziness of her surroundings and Arius' comforting words stirred that nostalgic feeling within her again. She suddenly recalled childhood memories of falling asleep in the backseat of her parent's car during long drives, innocent of the world and oblivious to all cares. The sleepy feeling weighed upon every part of her like a heavy blanket, and Shepard leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and let the distant mechanical hum of the ship slowly lull her back to peace.