Light broke the imposing blackness as an eye opened blearily, drawing Shepard into consciousness with only the gift of his nerves cloaked in pain to welcome him, barely making out the jutting ventilation and smooth arch of the ceiling beyond the sterile light. He dragged a deep breath through his nose and immediately knew by the too clean air what the blurred, hazy shapes meant: he was in a med bay. Where, how, and who was responsible were facts far beyond his grasp at that moment, but he gained a bit of comfort from simply knowing he was aboard a human vessel.
And good gods, he was alive.
Barely an inch of him was free from pain, searing, aching, or otherwise, but each heavy breath he took into lungs surrounded by a still healing ribcage that glowed with agony each time he inhaled reminded him that he had lived through the end of the galaxy. His head swam with watery vertigo and more than a little deja vu. Twice now, for fuck's sake, twice he had woken up like this, in more pain than he cared to admit and with no idea where he was. This time, though, the silence was thick around him. No blaring intercom barking orders at him, no tumultuous eruptions nearby, no emergency alarms, and no fire. Just quiet.
He slowly sat up despite the fractures in the majority of his body demanding him not to and a significant portion of his skin igniting at the slightest movement. Steadying himself, blinking away the delirium, trying to pry cognizance from the fog overlaying the tranquil medical bay around him, Shepard pivoted to set his feet on the cold floor. He had nearly convinced himself to try standing when the wisp of a door opening claimed his attention.
"Have you not seen enough movies to know exactly how this is going to end?" The rich, crisp alto voice belonged to a woman, shorter statured than average, but well built and powerful of both body and persona. Her garb was unmistakably military, explaining the strength in her posture and toned physique, but a few parts of her stood against regulations: tank top in place of an officer's jacket, black hair short on the right and swept to the left in feathered spikes that draped almost to her collar bone at their longest point, touched with bits of blue and purple here and there on the fringe, and a distinct lack of what would be considered proper military mannerism. Her face was smooth and silken, skin touched with a faint pigmentation that suggested perhaps Brazilian origin, though her jaw was surprisingly strong and angular. Most striking were the lavender eyes peering beneath a single crooked brow at the commander, beneath which settled a smirk on delicate lips.
Shepard eyed the woman curiously in her slightly too baggy military pants tucked into a tightly secured pair of boots. She had an assault rifle hanging from a crooked belt across her lower back and an interesting mechanism strapped to her left forearm, and the more he considered her, the more he wondered how she got away with being so loose with the regulations on garb.
"Who are you?" he finally croaked out with a painful breath.
"Captain Erika Liles of the SSV Bethesda," the woman announced with mixed pride and practice. "We're the ones that saved you from the wreckage in London."
Captain. That at least explained some of how the woman carried herself, but Shepard hadn't seen many captains with such a disregard for military convention. His brows furrowed a little, head tilting to accommodate his lacking sight. Missing an eye would take some getting used to.
"London? How did I end up back on Earth?"
"No idea," she shrugged, crossing the distance between them and propping herself on an empty counter top. "We found you in a sweep of the area about three weeks after the Citadel exploded."
"Wait, three weeks? I remember the shuttle landing just after I woke up." Confusion pulled his sight to the silvery floor as he struggled to discern what had actually happened, and when.
"Yeah, three weeks, just about. Commander, estimates say that you hit the ground after at least an eighty meter fall. Your memory isn't going to be great after that."
"How did I make it out of that?"
"Implants. Cybernetics. A bit more luck than I'd like to think anyone has. Honestly, if it wasn't for all of the enhancements and whatnot, and apparently your biotics generating enough of a mass effect field to fry your implant, the doctor says you probably would have been mulch." Erika laughed a bit dryly at that.
"Seems like luck won't be leaving me alone any time soon," quipped the commander, echoing the wry chuckle as he accepted the truth to the captain's previous words, settling himself back into the bed after adjusting the incline to sit up a bit. Erika smiled approvingly.
"Good, we won't have to go through the motions of every generic hospital scene with a badass in it."
"How long have I been down?"
"Over all, counting the time you must have been laying in the rubble, about two months or so. The doctor's kept you under for your sake."
"How bad is it?"
"Well, let's see," she began, stepping to a nearby desk and lifting a datapad, flicking through the information. "Fractures through most of your skeletal system, burns on sixty-eight percent of your body, rounded down, plenty of ruptured blood vessels, lots of nerve damage. Even your spinal cord took some punishment." She flipped through a few more caches of notes dismissively. "Muscles and tendons torn, swelling, blah blah blah... Oh, and you're missing an eye, in case you couldn't tell."
"Yeah, I gathered as much."
Erika dropped the pad to the desk again and made her way to the bed next to Shepard, sitting down with her elbows on her knees, fingers steepled.
"I'm dead serious, commander. The only thing that kept you alive was the sheer amount of work that Cerberus did on you and a biotic field that you probably created reflexively. It stopped you from taking enough damage to put you down while the cybernetics managed to heal you some before they shorted out."
Shepard took a moment, laying his head back against the pillow and staring at the arcing ceiling above him, letting the information settle on his still groggy awareness. He tried to play through the memories of how everything finally ended, but he found large tracts that he couldn't pull together, couldn't pry from the smog of dreamy, disjointed bits any solid series of events. Just pieces that still didn't answer how he had survived when the Citadel shattered. While he wanted to dwell on the questions until he dredged some answer from the mire, he knew full well that he couldn't. It didn't matter. He was alive, he was safe, and he would move on just the same as he always had.
"I'm glad you made it out though," Erika added, filling the silence that had hung longer than anticipated. "Commander Tyran Shepard, the best damn thing the Alliance has ever been responsible for, shouldn't die in a pile of wreckage after saving everyone's asses." At that, the commander slid a curious eye to the woman.
"That's the first time I've heard my name in years," he retorted with a breathy laugh. "Alright, that might be an exaggeration, but I can count the occasions on one hand."
"Military propriety and habit, neither of which I'm fond of."
"I can see that."
"Not as well, I bet."
Tyran shut up at that, scoffing a bit at the young woman, though with enough genuine humor to avoid being misconstrued.
"I'll leave you to rest." Erika rose with that and made for the door at a bit of a saunter. "Feel free to use one of the screens for vids or anything, now that you're awake. Control's beside the bed, and if you need anything, just say so."
"Does anyone know where I am?" Tyran shot after her. Some bit of him wanted her to say yes, but frankly, with the way he felt, he'd would have rather not had anyone know how to get in touch with him. Aside from his crew, he had no interest in dealing with the masses, and he seriously contemplated staying dead to the galaxy and falling into obscurity.
"Not yet. We figured it'd be better to get you put back together before letting anyone know that you're alive. Too many questions, too many people wanting to bother you." At that, Tyran breathed a bit easier. "We'll keep it quiet until you're ready."
"Thanks, captain." A hand raised in a weak salute, something the commander hadn't found himself doing in a long time. Erika cut her eyes at him a little, expression flattening.
"Knock that off."
"You're a superior officer."
"And I said to knock it off. Anyone else, sure, they can salute me until their arm pops out of the socket for all I care, but you're a god damned hero. And frankly, I think the least we can do is drop the rigid nonsense."
Shepard nodded slightly at that and let his hand drop to his lap. The door behind Erika whirred open, a tall young man of Asian descent stepping through the entryway, omni-tool glowing over his right hand. Unlike the captain, he was the image of proper naval attire. He stopped short of running into the woman completely as he lifted his eyes from the omni-tool. Realizing that the commander was awake, he offered the infirm hero a warm smile, though his attention returned to Erika in short order.
"We'll be reaching Arcturus station within ten minutes. We've received signals from at least four asteroids indicating survivors are holding out still."
"Good. Have Thomas get the shuttles ready, and tell Walters, Chandler, and Gibraltar they're taking their teams to extract the survivors as soon as we get to the ruins." The captain turned back to Tyran, taking the new arrival's hand in hers. "This is my husband, Lieutenant Jackie Xia Liang. He's a hell of a navigator and a damn fine soldier, and he has a way of scaring the ever living shit out of the crew. It's funny as hell."
Jackie gave a bit of a nod, which Shepard reciprocated.
"Pleasure to meet you commander. Hopefully you're feeling better?" His tone was soft and a bit quiet, almost uncertain, without being terribly meek.
"I'm not entirely sure how I was feeling before, but from what I hear, this has to be better."
"You took a hell of a beating, that's for sure." The lieutenant's omni-tool faded as he turned his dark eyes back to Erika. "I'll get the teams ready."
"Thanks. I'm heading back to the bridge to keep an eye on things." She turned and inclined her head in a departing farewell to Shepard. "Rest well, commander."
Tyran laid his head back again, eye drifting closed, ready to let sleep claim him once more before a distant echo slipped into his thoughts. An echo from a time before the chaos came to a close, before the madness of the Reapers came to a sudden, crashing halt. Simple words nestled in a gentle, pleasant memory of respite among endless battle. A recollection of a moment shared before a flickering fire in a beautiful apartment.
'What would I do without you?'
'You'll never find out."
"Captain!" he jolted from his recollections. Erika turned on her heel, poking back through the open door.
"Yeah?"
"You haven't happened to hear anything about Major Kaidan Alenko, have you?"
"Kaidan?" She crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing the commander curiously, something lurking in her eyes that seemed to know. "Sure, we hear about him every now and then. Only human Spectre tends to get attention. Why?"
"I'd like to get in in touch with him." Kaidan was alive and well. Of all things weighing on Tyran's shoulders, the greatest had just been lifted, and the worry finally melted away into calm peace that the man he had grown attached to was alright. Erika nodded a bit tentatively.
"He's usually kept pretty busy by the Council. You could use the extranet, but we both know the second anything with your name or identification surfaces, they'll be on it faster than you can blink."
Shepard considered this for a brief moment. As much as he wanted nothing more than to see Kaidan, see those gorgeous eyes and that warm smile, hear that dusky voice promise he'd be alright, knowing that the botic was fine would have to be enough for the moment. They'd see each other again in time.
"Thanks Erika." He nestled back into the bed, clenching his eyes against the pain rippling along his body.
"Of course, Shepard. Let us know if you need anything." The woman departed, the door humming closed behind her, leaving the commander in peaceful silence through which his mind could race at whim. He couldn't pull himself from the mindset he had locked himself into during the war. Every consideration that drifted through the still groggy discord was something to do with the battle, question surmounted by yet another question, each picking apart the integrity of a militant force that he no longer had. He found himself pondering what the mercenaries under Aria's command would do now, how the krogan would handle their species continuing to degrade, whether the turian's would be able to salvage their homeworld from the wreckage.
Inevitably, this brought to his attention the poignant, bitter truth that, at the end of all of this madness, the weight of death on his shoulders could probably kill him. His decisions had wiped out four species, saying nothing of the numerous lives that had touched his before flickering into darkness to pay for his failures. How many had devoted themselves to his lead and died for it? How many that had relied upon him now disappeared into the void because of their foolish thought to follow a mad man on a nihilistic mission? The worst sting of it was the doubt, the question, the regret, begging to know if it could have been done better, if he could have still succeeded without sacrificing so many, and the certainty that he could have managed to prevail with a less devastating price exacted for it.
And most terrifying of all was the coldness that numbed him. The icy grasp from which he could pry no deeper feeling. He rued their loss, but distantly, as if watching a massacre through a screen. He knew those he had lost and scorned the anguish stringently, but the others... He couldn't bring himself to feel anything more for them than he would any other number on a casualty report. They were the price of victory, after all. He accomplished what he had to do.
But, could the cost have been negotiated?
Chased into sleep by such troublesome contemplations, Tyran once again found himself lost in a sea of ghosts, their hunger for penance staining his dreams, the hissing whispers of doubt speaking the dreadful truth infinitely: his success was one bought with more blood than it should have been. In those dark moments, he knew he would never escape the haunting geist of that fact.
