James did good that day, even if it might've been by accident.
Problem was, he didn't do so well when it came to positive reinforcement.
Most guys like James Vega didn't actually need the gold stars, the pats on the back, the recommendations of their friends and the commendations of their superiors. Sometimes the feedback was exactly what they didn't want, and Steve got the feeling—walking back in the darkness, every other lamp dimly lit except for the ones that were snapped in two or just plain missing—that this was one of those times. Pointing it out was bound to make Vega feel like he was caught in civvies two sizes too small for him.
Or worse—it'd make him feel like he didn't deserve the praise.
The last time Steve offered Vega a credit for his thoughts, he'd bought himself nothing more articulate than a grunt and a shrug: Vega's big shoulders rolling, his eyes unfocusing on a distant zone. He was seeing something Steve couldn't guess at and knew he shouldn't bother trying, something deep and personal and buried under too much muscle, buried for a reason.
Steve glanced over, the space between them minimal but deceptively easy to close. Vega's expression was just as dusky as the dark. And Steve was starting to realize Vega was right about one thing—the cerveza—because while some guys only waxed poetic when they were too drunk, Steve did the opposite, when he was too sober.
Those little distances, man. They'd get you every time.
'Huh,' Vega said. He had good instincts; Steve'd always suspected that.
'Couldn't've said it better myself, Mr. Vega,' Steve replied.
'Sure couldn't've. That's why you didn't even try.' Vega stopped in the shelter of a wall and Steve stopped with him; when he asked himself how things would've gone if they hadn't had each other, a decent support group, familiar faces, something to connect before with after so now could make some goddamn sense, he didn't have any answers.
He had fewer of those than he pretended, looking into strangers' eyes and saying, Hey, I get it.
But compassion didn't mean understanding. And Vega, wherever he was inside his head, wasn't trying to put two and two together. He was just standing in the shadows, stretching his arms out in front of his chest, fingers locked through fingers, snapping his head from one side to the other and cracking loose all the tension he'd been carrying in the base of his neck.
It'd been one hell of a day.
'It's been one hell of a day,' Steve added.
'Sure has,' Vega said.
'I knew this guy once who might've called the whole thing loco.' Steve maintained the little distance; space was something he got, knowing when something was too close to call or just close enough. This seemed right. Maybe if they'd had a deck of cards, some thermoses between them, a late night snack of proteins and somewhere to sit, things could've worked out differently.
But this was the hand they'd been given.
'Figure I'll visit him until they let him out for good behavior, just like you said.' Steve rubbed the back of his neck. It got sore whenever he thought about the knots in Vega's muscles—and his hands needed to rub something out whenever he thought about them, too. 'You could always drop by, visit your Asari…friend.'
'Don't even know her name,' Vega said.
'She have a nickname, then?' Steve asked.
'Nope.' Vega followed that up with another vertebral pop, the last one. Some of the fugees taking up impermanent residence in the shelter passed by; they were even laughing over somebody's joke. It was a familiar sound, but quieter than Vega's joints. 'Gonna go work out.'
'You do your dinosaur thing,' Steve told him. 'Have fun. Don't come back too late. Hey, Vega—just remember curfew.'
Vega lifted his hand in the old wave—not a salute but an over-the-shoulder thing, already on his way between beams of muted lamplight.
Steve thought about him that night.
He thought about him the next morning, too, through breakfast, catching sight of him at work—helping Turians again, doing his rebuilding thing instead of his dinosaur thing, all the heavy lifting he didn't, apparently, count as real exercise—and some more at lunch, when they shared a couple of proteins together without saying much. After that Steve just had to follow the laughter, kids racing through the halls, dodging them as they pinged off the walls and underfoot, and Vega lumbering by behind them with a Yo, Esteban, but not looking up.
Steve didn't want to suffocate anybody. But Kaidan Alenko was alone in that temp ICU and by now, he'd know all the stories, hear all the theories, all the times people said Commander Shepard like they were praying, not like they were remembering. It was an honor. It was incredible for Steve to think that he'd served with that guy, that he'd even called him a friend. And Shepard…
Commander Shepard had helped Steve through his fair share of stuff he didn't know how to process, shit he hadn't known how to fly through at the time.
So there was that. Steve showed up at Piccadilly in the early afternoon when Alenko was eating lunch, dutiful, the kind of soldier Vega wasn't.
He didn't look hungry.
Considering how the food tasted, Steve didn't blame him.
'Hey,' he said. All the thoughts, all the extra cargo, got docked before he sat, body folding as easily as the first time. They were lucky if it was that simple, even luckier if they could recognize when it was, and Steve had some experience with cultivating these skills in particular.
Alenko fought his way through some protein one-handed. Steve didn't offer to help because offering help to a soldier when he hadn't called for reinforcements was like offering praise to a marine when all he wanted was something to drink. Right place, right time. Wrong place, big problem. Figuring that out was even harder than being a good judge of simplicity, which some people had trouble with.
Then again, those people didn't seem to have any difficulty being dinosaurs. Not everyone could do that, now could they?
It took all kinds.
'Hey,' Alenko said.
'Looks like Vega was right,' Steve said. 'Here I am already. He sure called it. Better not tell him that, though. His head's big enough as-is—although maybe it's the other stuff that's too big, come to think of it.'
'Yeah,' Alenko agreed. '…Yeah.'
'…And I figured maybe the food they're having you eat might go down better if you had someone to suffer with,' Steve added. He took a thermos out of the pack he'd brought, nothing special, lunch he was putting off until the right company made it bearable. He didn't mind sharing the thermos of carbonated water that almost, almost tasted like something, but only if you closed your eyes and held your breath. 'It's not much, but it washes the other stuff down. Even helps you digest it after. You don't want to know how many war credits it took me to get some of this in the first place—and I guess I should've saved it up for something a little stronger, huh?'
Steve unscrewed the top and poured some out into it, liquid fizzling. He handed it off to Alenko for the first drink; Alenko took it, still one-handed and still unsteady, while Steve pretended he didn't see the way it shook, the way some of it spilled clear and wet onto Alenko's thigh.
It wouldn't stain because it wasn't much more than fancy, decontaminated water. Once it dried, nobody else would know it'd happened.
Alenko stared down at the splatter. To his credit, he brought the cup to his lips pretty quickly after that, and drank most of it in one gulp.
Maybe he wasn't hungry, but he was definitely thirsty.
'Hits the spot, doesn't it?' Steve asked. Alenko nodded. 'I mean, I know it's not the cerveza Vega's always after me to use my connections for—because the way I see it is, if he wants it badly enough, he'll figure out a way to get his hands on it himself—but it actually feels like drinking something.'
'Got a rations program in place?' Alenko asked.
'Something like that,' Steve replied. 'Most days it even works the way it's supposed to.'
'Everything's really efficient.' Alenko finished off the drink. The empty cup looked easier to hold, carefully circled down to cover up the damp spots on the blanket. 'It's pretty impressive for… How long did you say it's been? A little over a month? It's definitely impressive.'
'We've done all right. Considering everything that's still not accounted for, maybe we could do even better.' Steve wondered if he was starting to sound like Vega—they'd practically been living together, or right on top of each other. It was almost the same thing, only one implied conscious effort and the other suggested a lack of other, viable options. Either way, they saw each other regularly, every day, morning and night, a part of the bigger London crew that'd formed: doctors to look after the wounded, soldiers to keep the peace and rebuild the worst of the damage, even a few scientists to figure out what they could use, how they were going to use it.
And, Vega liked to say, no fuckin' council, either. No jumping through any more of their hoops.
Whatever came up to replace the old system was going to slap them all with so many regulations they'd be reeling for days, more like weeks, afterward. They wouldn't be able to trade extra work for extra light or cash in on a few later curfews here and there—not once things did get organized back into bureaucracy. And the second that happened, maybe the second before it happened, when all the rules got sorted out and they made a hierarchy from the rubble, Vega was going to grab his stuff and head out of town, saying something like, 'Screw this, Esteban. I'm not playing this game no more. Now it's New York or bust.'
Bust, Steve thought. He drank straight from the thermos, cool water sparkling all the way down, despite the faintly chemical aftertaste it carried with it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand after, thumb under his lower lip.
'Don't undersell it,' Alenko said, softening. 'Really. It's incredible, how people—how everyone just…heals. Hell, I've done it enough times; I guess I shouldn't be so surprised anymore.'
'I've been there,' Steve said.
'And I'm there right now,' Alenko replied. 'Again. Crazy, isn't it? Just…crazy.'
His fingers tightened around the cup. Steve knew that look; he also knew that this wasn't what they were really talking about: that Alenko knew the story—the stories, which Steve tried to listen to and which Vega pretended not to listen to.
One of them had to pick up all the pieces, keep an open mind instead of just a clear head. Steve realized pretty fast that someone was him.
At least it didn't hurt the way he'd thought it would. He mourned the passing of a friend, not the death of an ideal. And there wasn't a body, nothing anyone could point to, just a bunch of memorials set up all over the city to the same guy. Special ones, without any flowers.
Nobody had any flowers. It wasn't the right season.
But there was no way—there was just no way. Nobody could've survived that blast on Citadel when the Mass Relays blew and everything stopped, and then everything started again, changing again. Life as they knew it stripped of synthetic life as they knew it; everything was so crazy Steve remembered thinking, You know what, we're probably all dead, and this is what it looks like. A hallucination before the end, not even a dream, just a couple of random neural firings, the what-if scenarios we never drilled.
There was no way Alenko didn't know about Shepard.
He was alive and okay without Shepard, alive but not okay. That didn't mean he wouldn't be, but it would take time, longer than his bruises, even if those things were looking mean.
They were already starting to fade. And Alenko already knew not to pick at them, to draw attention to them, to let them be.
'You know, if I ever find the butcher in charge of making these proteins,' Steve said, 'I'm going to tell him he might as well sell us all Turian food and stop acting like he gives a damn. Anything's better than this.'
'Anything's better than this,' Alenko agreed. He sighed, sounding like an airlock being decompressed.
And that was how—somewhere between arriving and leaving, less than a full hour—Steve offered to take him back to his place at the shelter when he had clearance to get out of there. Just as a stopover, something to look forward to, but the offer was there on the table.
'That is, if you don't mind Vega snoring all the time,' Steve added. 'Which you will, but if I could get used to it, you'll have no problem.'
'Yeah,' Kaidan said in that way of his, slow leaching into even slower. 'Yeah… If you're sure you two wouldn't mind having me. You know, if…'
'You wouldn't be interrupting anything, if that's what you're thinking.' Steve almost laughed. 'Wow, no, we're just—sticking together. Like old times. For old times.'
'Seems like those are the only ones we've got,' Kaidan said, and rubbed the spot on his thigh where the spilled drink was already dried up.