Warning: Spoilers for all the Mass Effect games.
Pairing: Male Shepard/Kaidan Alenko
Notes: Originally a fill for the kink meme. Updated 04/20/2014, because I can't leave things alone.

II. DISSONANCE

He notices two or three weeks after they start living together, and it fits Shepard so well it's amusing in its own way; soon, Kaidan can't help but tease him. He says, sometimes smiling, sometimes half-laughing, "That food's not going anywhere, you know?" or "These fries are not running away from you, Shepard" and when John answers, more often than not, with a smile of his own, it feels as if there's something right in the world, at last, after everything they saw, all they did and more.

Watching his lover eat as if death was at the door makes him think of the first time they went grocery shopping together, some days before: actual grocery shopping, not "pick-up allocated rations", in the little store that had just reopened near the complex. It was an... enlightening experience; the way Commander John Shepard, Spectre extraordinary, looks when he's torn between two particulars (and perplexing, if the raised eyebrows are anything to go by) particular brands of rice is not something Kaidan is going to forget anytime soon, much to said Spectre's dismay. It's too important, too real. It's part of what makes Kaidan feels incredibly lucky; to be able to live like this to be with the man, to love him and be loved back, this is more than he has ever hoped for, more than he has ever allowed himself to dream about.

He remembers how it was back on the SR-1, how he was, miserable and desperately trying to ban these thoughts. After that, he had struggled, to forget them altogether, to move on and carve himself a life in a world where John Shepard was no more. It hurt still, a memory of misery he felt etched on his heart to this day, a phantom pain awoken anew in the light of what transpired after the final push. Red lights in the sky and embers like snow as behemoths fell from the sky (Vega had been the one to find him, broken but breathing). Further away, he recalls the gripping of his lungs when he heard the rumors, received the messages, Anderson, the Alliance, Cerberus, Horizon. Almost one year and a war since then, but some mornings, when the light of dawn crept under the shutters, he wondered still about what he could have done differently, and if he should have. Was it justified? Understandable, at least, and he thinks John thinks that, too. It didn't come up, not since Huerta, and had closure really been achieved? Kaidan settles himself the same way every time, with the knowledge that if his lover had anything to add, anything to say, he would have. There was time.

And then one day, their friends are here, sitting around the big table in the living-room, eating and drinking and laughing and sniping at each other. It's happiness, and he thinks of the gem he found by chance, of the clever retorts they're all going to come up with and how he's going to tell the story with them laughing at his expense, kind because they love him. "Love, you do realize that nobody here is going to try and steal your food?" he says to the man currently inhaling his food (there is no other word for it) and he's not wrong, either, because soon enough, there's laughing and taunting, naked joy and elation. Until a moment later, when he looks up from his pasta and meets Vega's eyes, and it feels like the first clue of daybreak, an uncompromising parting of shadows; but the man is smiling, like everyone else, and when Kaidan blinks, it has disappeared, as surely as if it never existed to begin with, and maybe that's it, a trick of the light, a bad memory. Later in the evening, it will creep on him again, that look as he watched John, when he spies the two of them together on their little balcony, the window closed behind them.

He sits with the others as they drink and talk and exchange stories of mending and repairs, but out of the corner of his eye, he searches the dark where they stand, to no avail until Vega turns to his lover, tells him something he can't decipher (how could he?), and there's a harshness in his expression when he does, something savage, fierce, ferocious. Ferocity. He almost gets up and join them then, but the appeasing hand John puts on Vega's shoulder snuffs the desire out of him, and the breath out of his lungs. He tells himself that it's nothing, or Shepard trying to solve everyone's issues, as usual. After that, they both turn to watch the horizon, or the forest, he doesn't know, and he resolves to simply ask John, when they'll be in bed later, tangled together, what it was all about, if anything was wrong.

"We just talked about Earth," John answers, already half-asleep, "Old things," like it doesn't matter.