A/N: Taking a reviewers advice and trying a slightly less Shepard-centric narrative for this chapter. Not sure if I'll stick with it, let me know what you think.
"Is she going to be alright?" Garrus' voice was gruff, almost brittle, as the doctor exited the medical bay looking absolutely exhausted. It had been almost impossible to keep Shepard conscious the entire shuttle ride back to the Normandy, her words becoming steadily less and less lucid as she jerked in and out of awareness. Getting her to the med bay had been a harrowing experience, full of swearing about slow elevators and even slapping the commanders cheeks to keep her from nodding off while cradled in Thane's arms.
"She'll be fine. I had to give her a blood thinner and cranial anticoagulant to take the swelling down, but she'll be fine. She's obviously had concussions before." The doctor rubbed at her eyes and put a hand on her hip. "God, it was almost a relief when her voice finally broke entirely. She was talking about frogs having sex while I was sticking a needle in her temple. Then she started crying because her belly button was so cute and fell asleep half way through a garbled serenade."
Garrus laughed, a dull sound without any joy and relaxed a little bit. One hand rubbed fiercely at the base of his neck and he grimaced visibly. In the minutes when they had not been sure if there was permanent damage the three of them, Tali, Thane and Garrus had done nothing but sit silently in the mess hall or pace past the covered windows lost in dark thoughts. The thought of losing Shepard, really losing her, was horrifying. No one on board knew what would happen if they did.
"I'm going to change." He said finally, looking down at his armour that was still smeared with vomit and grass. "And take a shower. Let me know if her condition changes."
"Of course." Doctor Chakwas nodded, as though it were natural that she would refer to him in Shepard's absence. Miranda had been second in command when the ship was Cerberus, and Shepard had technically never demoted her, but it was clear who was really in charge until the commander was back on her feet. Garrus had obviously not fully realized it until that moment and his face grew suddenly dark, crowded with emotions that no one there really knew how to read. When he finally turned and walked away, toward the forward battery, they all watched him go.
"He'll do fine." The doctor said, sounding only a little nervous.
"Of course he will." Tali replied, her voice much more confident. After a moment, she went after him, ignoring the cheeky looks the two engineers were giving her from the mess table. With the two of them gone, there was only Thane and the doctor left, and she stepped aside before he even had to ask. Nodding his thanks he passed her and entered the closely furnished room.
Only one bed was occupied, the figure curled under the blankets almost completely motionless. Only the slight rise and fall of her chest revealed that she was alive at all. As he came up beside her he knew that she was sleeping, her face so smooth he could not help but run his fingers lightly over her forehead, down her cheeks. Where stress normally gouged deep creases and frown lines there was now nothing to suggest she was a day older than twenty, untouched by the ravages of life only when she was entirely gone from the world. He ran his fingers through her strange, silky hair and sighed, pulling a chair up beside her. If he was going to meditate, he might as well do it here, with her. Waking up alone from an injury was always jarring, confusing, and painful.
He did not meditate though, not as he had intended at least. Her breathing whistled and hitched until he pulled the blankets down a little bit to look at her throat. The ring of heavy purple bruises made him wish that it had been his bullet that pounded through that batarians chest, sinking him into the tall grass where he had still been sputtering and gasping even as they bent over their commander. When Tali had put the final, merciful, bullet in him, Thane had barely noticed. All his attention had been on her, on making sure that she was alright, on what he would do to everyone responsible if she was not. Even now, a cold chill slid down his spine as he thought of how close they had been. A few more minutes, a few more seconds, and they might well have been zipping her up in a body bag to bring her back here.
He touched her bruises, very lightly, with one hand, then traced the pale, golden line of her neck. He was shocked, as he always was at some level, by the contrast between them. His scales looked almost metallic against her, the sheen of them so different from the soft valleys of light and shadow of her soft human skin. The sensitive pads of his fingers could feel the burning heat of her, she always felt so hot to him without scales to diffuse her inner furnace. It was something that attracted him far more powerfully than her appearance, and he found his hand lingering on her neck, soaking in the warmth of her skin as he watched her sleep. When they had first met he had been beyond thoughts of beauty or ugliness for years; while his body had needs, his mind was dead to the idea that someone could be attractive. Her eyes had brought him out of that, they had been the first thing in years that had sparked any reaction in him. The ring of orange around black, the glow of what he now understood to be refracting lenses and microscopic implanted lights he had thought to be pure fire, a popular physical manifestation of the spirit of Arashu in drell lore. It was those eternally eclipsing eyes, and the opportunity that she had offered him, that had woken him from his battle sleep.
"Do you make a habit of feeling up head-trauma patients?" The scratchy, whispery voice, drew him out of memory and he looked up to find those lovely eyes half open, still slightly dopey and glowing in the dim light. She yawned and moved to sit up before hissing and clutching at the shoulder that had been torn apart by the bullet with one hand. Although the flesh and muscle had been patched with medigel, the phantom pains remained and would for a couple days. The body had trouble keeping pace with technology sometimes.
"Only the ones as attractive as you." He said softly, dropping back into the seat he had pulled up as she made a face he could not read. She rolled onto her side and studied him, looking for emotion in his stoic face, his unmoving lips and finally settling on his troubled eyes. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I got hit by a car." She replied, flipping one hand casually. "And then choked out by it. About what you would expect I guess." She tried to laugh, but instead made a wet hacking sound that quickly dissolved into a cough that wrenched her entire body. Gritting her teeth, she blinked tears out of her eyes and gave him a smile that was mostly a grimace.
He said nothing for a long moment, and then shook his head. "That was not exactly what I was asking."
"I know goddamnit." She snapped back, her voice grinding harshly. "Sorry. I know you're just worried, that everyone is just worried. But fuck, I don't know. It turns out that I don't know much of anything when it comes right down to it. At least not much more that how to point a gun at things and pull the trigger." She made a self-deprecating face. "I was stupid, and I won't let it happen again. That's how I feel. Stupid, and wiser."
"You almost died." Thane replied bluntly. "And that's all it was? A life lesson?"
"I actually died." Shepard shot back, just as bluntly. "And it was a fuck of a lot worse that time. What happened down there on Mindoir? That was gentle compared to the first one. Like the difference between a tender kiss and a kick in the teeth." She hacked again and looked around for something to wet her throat. Thane found a glass of water left for that very purpose, no doubt, and handed it to her. She sipped it in the silence that followed, wincing every time she swallowed.
"I am worried. I'm worried that we're losing you." Thane said finally. "That I'm losing you. I'm worried about how scared that makes me."
She slumped back against the pillows, staring up at the ceiling with its dimly lit tile lights and chewed her lip, as was her way when she was struggling to find something to say. It was not an expression he saw very often, he had to search his many perfect memories of her to call an exact instance to mind. "You aren't losing me." She said finally. "I'm right here, where I always will be, at the helm of the Normandy steering her toward great things. But things have changed. Things always change, and we change with them."
"All your changes lately seem to end with scars and stress lines." Thane argued. Her gaze flicked from the ceiling to him as she fought her annoyance, the instinctual hatred she had for talking about her emotions. If he saw how uncomfortable she was, he did not acknowledge it. "You're distracted. Your thoughts wander. I fear you are becoming detached from your body."
"I'm not-" She choked back the anger in her voice, swallowed it and took a deep breath. "I… look. What do you want me to say? Yes, I'm incredibly fucking stressed out. Fighting the Reapers with guns and cannons and daring base assaults is one thing. If I slip up I get a bullet hole, or some burns or something, and I find a way through. Because I'm a soldier, it's what I'm meant to do. But this Terminus stuff… if I slip up here I could get an entire colony murdered by pirates as an example. Or I could start a civil war, or fuck even a war between the Alliance and the Terminus. And I'm not a politician. If I set something off I can't fix it with some strategic retreat and a grenade. Everything I do or say has the potential to change countless lives. And at the end of the day the Reapers are still coming, the ultimate and thus far unstoppable annihilation of the galaxy. So how am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to handle this pressure? Do you have an answer for me? Because I'm still trying to figure it out."
He was quiet for a long moment and then he shook his head. "I don't have an answer for you." He admitted finally, disappointment infusing his voice. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be! Don't be fucking sorry all the time." She did not sound angry, at least not at him specifically. She fought her way to a sitting position and he half rose from his chair to help her before she waved him off, gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder. "At least not because you don't have all the answers. If anyone else did, I wouldn't be asking you, putting the weight of my responsibilities on your shoulders. That's why I don't like talking about it, about how I feel, because every time I do it just makes people uncomfortable and then they eventually start giving me that PITY look. I hate it. And I hate it when people apologize to me all the time for things they have no control over. So stop it."
"I'm upsetting you." Thane said softly, standing. "I should go."
"No, fuck, please don't." She said, putting her head in her hand. Her shoulders deflated and for a moment there was no Commander Jane Shepard in the med lab, just a tired woman who might look young, with her Cerberus facelift and strong, capable body, but was in truth just another aging soldier. In the close stillness of the air one could almost sense the unbelievable pressure bearing down on her from all sides. "I don't… I don't want to be alone. Sometimes I need to be, but I… I never want to send you away."
He seemed to hesitate for a moment and Shepard slumped back against her pillows, closing her eyes. She was so tired all of a sudden, always so tired, always longing for peaceful rest in a world where that did not exist anymore. When she was awake, all the horrors of the world hung on her shoulders, scrabbling and scratching for purchase while she battled her inner demons with one hand and the outer demons with her other. When she slept, ghosts of the past assailed her or the heavy chemical compounds obliterated all consciousness and she woke heavy-eyed and rested only in the physical sense. The only time she ever felt really at peace, the only escape she had, the only thing that was just for her and not tainted by the constant demands of everything and everyone else in the universe was her relationship with him.
And here she was, concussed and rambling, getting angry, messing everything up. Like she always did.
"This time, it is I that needs to be alone." He said finally, his voice strangely quiet, distant and emotionless. "I need to think."
She nodded without looking at him. "As you wish."
He hesitated again, she could feel it in the air even with her eyes closed, and then he was gone and she was alone. She took two sleeping pills and rolled onto her side. Sleep came, as it always did, not to melt away her exhaustion or ease her aching body, but as a distraction from everything she was not ready to face. When Chakwas shook her awake, forcing food into her hands and lecturing her on over-sleeping now, she ate without argument, without any words at all really.
They pegged it to her concussion, when she mentioned it to Garrus later, but neither of them could remember when an injury had ever been enough to shut Shepard up. When the doctor left her terminal and went to check on her patient again, she found that she was asleep once more. After a moment, she took the pills from her bedside table and locked them in the medicine cabinet, reasoning that it was probably for the best. When her patient awoke, hours later, and immediately reached for them again, she knew that she was right.
"I think you've slept enough, don't you?" She asked, coming over to her bedside and taking the chair that Thane had pulled up hours ago. Shepard made an absolutely disgusted face, and slumped back against the pillows with her arms spread to either side.
"What else am I supposed to do?" She asked miserably. "Count ceiling tiles?" At least her voice sounded better, if still slightly rough, and she raised one hand to the necklace of mottled bruising under her jaw bone. It was still tender, and she winced slightly as she probed the purpled flesh.
"I took the liberty of collecting some personal items from your quarters for you." Chakwas replied, motioning to the pile of data pads and the single, rolled piece of paper tied with its blue ribbon. Shepard picked the Bhagavad up, trailing her fingers over the fraying edges and managed to smile. "But first, we need to run some tests. Make sure everything is working properly up there."
Shepard rolled her eyes, but complied without argument. Her complacency with the entire process was so complete and so silent that it was almost depressing, and when the doctor had finally finished the reflex tests and put away her instruments Shepard was still just sitting on the edge of the bed staring down at her toes with a blank, distant look on her face. When the door swished open and Garrus entered the room, clean and no longer smelling quite so viciously of stomach acid and half-digested food, it was a relief to see her smile.
"Garrus, don't tell me you messed up already. I had such high hopes for you." She joked. The tall turian hesitated, his mandibles flaring slightly as he looked at her. Doctor Chakwas was no turian expert, but she could understand the situation well enough, and excused herself silently, sliding out into the mess hall. Shepard quirked an eyebrow at him as he silently advanced on the bed and sat down, readjusting himself in the uncomfortably tiny seat designed for humans.
"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you- I'm not- I…" His voice trailed off and he frowned, his mandibles flaring wider as his hands balled into fists on his knees. "I'm not sure I'm ready for this, Shepard. Leading the second squad in our ground assaults is one thing, but everyone seems to think I'm an executive officer all of a sudden. Even you."
"Garrus, you've been an executive officer since the day I cut the cord with the Illusive Man. You've always had all the privileged access codes, and I formalized it in the ships VI protocols and everything. I even told EDI that you were ranking officer if I was ever incapacitated for any reason. The only reason you never had a real rank is because we were never really a military ship and 'first mate' makes us sound like pirates." She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You didn't really think I'd leave Miranda in charge did you? She's great at keeping the ship running on a day to day basis, but can you imagine her as commanding officer of the Normandy?" She shook her head. "No, it was always you."
"I can't imagine ME as commanding officer of the Normandy." Garrus insisted. "I don't know what you all think you see in me but-"
"No, you can't refuse." Shepard replied bluntly. "I need you to do this. I need to know that if something happens to me, I've left someone who has a hope of stopping the Reapers in charge, someone I can trust to do the right thing and succeed at the same time."
Garrus blinked at her and then stood up, beginning to pace around her bed. "You can't force me to take this responsibility Shepard. And besides, why do you have so much faith in me? I let my whole team die on Omega, what's to say it won't happen again here?"
"I can force you, and I will." She replied. "I know you Garrus, better than you know yourself. You failed on Omega, and it cost lives. I won't deny that. But that doesn't mean you can't still amount to something, that you can't do great things. You know who else failed? I did. I failed on Torfan, I let my emotions get in the way of my better judgement. In my case, I only got two people killed. But two bodies following you around still makes it pretty hard to sleep at night."
She looked down at her feet again, the delicate bones standing out under the golden skin. "I know what it's like to lose all faith in yourself, to feel like you can never shoulder that responsibility again. But we all do what we have to. I have to fight this war, I have to lead people into hellish situations where they could all be horribly killed or maimed. And you have to do it with me, because without you…" Her voice trailed off and she did not finish, but she did not really have to.
Sighing heavily, Garrus sank onto the bed beside her, forsaking the chair. After a moment she curled her legs up against her chest and put her head on his shoulder. "I'm sorry." She said. "But I can't do it all alone, not anymore. I need you."
"I know." He sounded absolutely exhausted and she sighed unhappily. Being the bearer of such terrible pressure and responsibility was not something she had wanted to be. It was her job to remove problems, to help people have the normal lives they would otherwise be denied. That was her purpose.
"You'll do fine. Better than fine." She assured him. "I believe in you."
He looked over at her, and put an arm across her shoulders after a moment. She could feel him inhale, draw himself up and set his shoulders. All it took was a little encouragement, and a little time to adjust to the new circumstances, and he would be fine. He was a natural leader, just like her. The responsibilities that came with realizing it would eventually make him stronger, focus his mind and empower him. She hoped so at least, there was no way to really be certain how command would affect people once they accepted it.
"So does this mean I get a promotion?" He asked. "And a raise maybe?"
"Sure, I'll raise your pay from nothing to LOTS of nothing." She replied. "And we can start calling you Lieutenant Vakarian if you like."
He rolled his dark eyes and shook his head no. "I'd prefer something flashier."
"Grand vizier?"
"I'll think about it." He grinned. She relaxed slightly, seeing the tension easing already. Garrus adapted fast, like most good soldiers did. He stood as the doctor re-entered the room, snatching up a data pad from the desk. She looked up at them and a warm smile of relief broke across her face. "So how long is observation for human head-wounds anyway. I know on turian ships it's twelve hours."
Doctor Chakwas laughed quietly. "Nice try, Vakarian. But humans aren't turians. Each concussion significantly raises the potency and chance of long-standing side effects, and the commander has had her skull knocked around more times then I care to recount. Mandatory observation period is thirty hours." She glared at the two of them as they made surprisingly identical faces of disgust and horror. "Thirty hours in bed, and a further thirty barred from active duty."
"That's almost three days!" Shepard exclaimed. "I feel fine! I could take on Eclipse right now if I had to." She should have known better than to argue, but she could not help it. The thought of spending thirty hours staring at the ceiling, without sleeping pills now, was a prospect too horrific to imagine. She would probably go completely insane around fourteen. The expression on the doctors face said more than words ever could and she turned away, taking a seat at her work station without bothering. Shepard sighed, a gust of warm air that blew her bangs out of her eyes.
"Great." She sighed theatrically. "I'm on lockdown."
"Sorry." Garrus sighed. "But I've got to go. Poker in engineering."
Shepard made a mournful face, but said nothing, and he hesitantly inched his way out. She rolled onto her side, staring at the wall as she wondered how she could possibly fill so many empty hours. As always, when faced with recovery time, she was reminded of how painfully empty her life was. Maybe she should pick up a hobby. Something calming that did not require a firing range or a sparring ring. That would probably do her good, though she was not sure exactly what kind of hobby one picked up in the middle of space at thirty-two. She was a bit old for paint-by-numbers.
Just as she was considering attempting to pull a Thane and sneak out through the vents when the doctors back was turned the door opened again, and four determined people marched into the med lab. Well, Tali and Garrus looked determined, the engineers really just did their best to hide behind them when the doctor stood, meeting them with stony blue eyes.
"I told you, thirty hours is mandatory! It's the least amount of time I can allow." She growled, sounding stressed to her limit. Soldiers were undoubtedly the worst kind of patient, head-strong, overly independent and mostly convinced of their own physical superiority. Especially Shepard. Garrus raised one hand in a peaceful gesture.
"I know. But we can just play here right?" The engineers held up the card table hopefully and she looked between the four of them with narrowed eyes.
"Alright. But you can't drink." She turned on Shepard. "Or smoke."
"Doctor! I'm surprised at how little faith you have in me. I don't do those kind of things." She raised both hands defensively and attempted to look innocent.
"I know what you're like Shepard. In fact, I better just sit in to keep an eye on you." Her face broke into a smile for the first time and she looked between the five of them as though daring them to call her out on it. None of them bothered, they just began pushing beds and tables out of the way to clear a space.
"You'll probably win all my money." Shepard said, trying to sound mournful as she worked her way out of bed, still wincing at the stabbing pains in her smooth, unblemished shoulder. "I'm just awful at Skyllian Five."
"If you believe that, I've got a statue on the Citadel I'd like to sell you." Daniels commented, as she began unfolding the card table. She rolled her eyes as Shepard shrugged helplessly.
"You just can't bluff, Daniels." She teased, kicking her feet into her boots and not bothering to fasten them as she tramped over to the hastily erected station.
"It doesn't matter. I've been practising' my poker face all week. You're goin' down, Shepard." Donnely took the seat directly across from her, his bright eyes twinkling at her as she settled down and schooled her features instantly into a blank slate. His cocky grin wavered only a little bit, and she twitched one eyebrow. After a moment he broke eye contact and she smiled inwardly.
"We'll see." She said, no hint of her amusement showing itself on her lips. She won enough by the end of the night to promise everyone dinner next time they had a moment for shore leave. When everyone filed out, Donnely looking dejected yet still determined to best her some day, she settled back into the pillows resigned to a long night of staring out through the windows into the mess hall. Closing her eyes, she wondered what Thane was thinking about over in life support, if she should go see him or not.
She fell asleep thinking about it, and did not dream.