"Alenko..."
Kaidan could still hear her voice; remembering it ringing in the cell block like a quiet whisper even after all those years.
Shepard had walked towards him in an eerily calm fashion out of her prison cell. Her steps were languid, but measured. Precise, and at the same time, alluring. It was almost enough to put him in a calm trance. Yet in her eyes he could see a hunger. An inhumane thirst. The way her eyes burned ever so slightly made his skin crawl.
Stillness had filled the prison. The sounds of combat and battle had become muted. No longer could Kaidan smell the scent of chard flesh mixed with fire. Gone was the static of the radio feed that had been in his ear. Considering the past few days, that moment had been paradise. For in that moment, the Reapers seemed a thing that was far off and away. For that moment he had found a modicum of quiet.
But then he was pulled backwards in to reality. He felt something latch on to his back, and the entire scene changed back to reality. A nightmarish scream shattered his ears as he felt arms trying to tear savagely at his armor. He panicked as he saw the grayish black arms and hands of a husk claw away at him, its legs strapped around his torso as he felt the thing chew on the back collar of his armor. He twisted and turned trying to throw it off, but it warped and writhed to be just outside of his reach on his back. He wheeled backwards hitting a wall. The husk only screamed louder and lashed out even more furiously at him. He tried to hit it off with his elbows; but every time he tried to reach around, the creature shifted just out of grasp.
He felt armored plates start to give way under the creature's teeth and fingers. If the husk wasn't killed soon, he knew it would finish him. Then his body was jerked and he felt the creature ripped away off him. Its howls even more nightmarish as Kaidan looked up and saw the husk flailing away at the air with it limbs as it was held by its neck.
The creature was the result of a Reaper twisting a little girl in to a machine of Hell. She must have been no older than eight or ten. Sickening circuitry mixed with half decayed flesh made his stomach twist. What broke his heart was still seeing patches and strands of golden blond hair streaking from the husk's head. Its eyes glowing a cruel lifeless blue.
The small creature continued to wail away with limbs and 'voice' as Kaidan saw Shepard simply hold it suspended in the air by the nape of its neck. He looked on as Shepard seemed to dissect the creature with her eyes, treating it as if the husk was a weapon, or a laboratory experiment. Her expression was again unfeelingly neutral and remorseless as the creature struggled under her grip, and not once did Shepard's hold fail. Once her curiosity had been satisfied, she twisted her hand and the husk let out a small shriek. Then it went deathly limp as Shepard let the body go. It crumpled like an empty drink container at her feet.
How could she just do that? Kaidan asked himself silently as he continued to stare up at her, his eyes fixed on the standing, towering being before him.
"Stay down." She ordered as Kaidan started to rise.
He turned his head in the direction of Shepard's gaze.
Dozens of husks stood between them and the exit of the incarceration block. Like the little girl who had attacked him, and like all of the others he had seen over the past years; these creatures contained the same emotionless visage of direction on their faces. They held utter undead contempt for all of life in their eyes. He heard shuttering hisses and growls emanate from the mass before him, and he could see that they were ready to pounce.
Oh God. Why didn't I hear them come... his mind spoke in horror.
His reply came in the form of a biotic shockwave that Shepard sent out into the left of the crowd, and then she lashed out with one to the right. Husks were bowled over, while others torn apart and vaporized by the pure biotic energy that had been sent crashing in to them.
They had been given no time to react, no chance to attack.
The hair on the back of Kaidan's neck began to rise was when he saw tendrils of biotic energy slither from Shepard in to the now compact ball of husks. He saw each of the remaining reaper thralls tense up. They started to scream, and Kaidan clutched his hands to his ears at the tortured wail ripped through the hallways as he watch the lifeless dead simply whither and crumble before his very eyes. But what shocked him even more was the energy he saw flow back and into Shepard.
Once the bodies had been spent, they fell like dust to the prison floor.
He looked up as Shepard breathed deeply, and her eyes seemed to flash a little brighter. As if to say that she was sated, For the moment. She turned her head and looked down at him.
"Get up. Let's go." She said in a sterile voice as she held a pistol comfortably in her hand.
How the hell... Kaidan's mind started as he quickly reached for his and found it missing. He momentary shook off the thought as he rose and then they both stole in to the smoke and carnage filled night before anymore Reaper forces could converge on the prison.
That was nearly ten years ago. He didn't know what to think then.
But he had the answer now.
Reaper...his mind whispered.
It seemed to answer so much to him. It seemed to finally be the linchpin that he had been looking for over the past decade.
Though the Tribunal had become a mad house, the flight back to the docking bays and the 'walk' back to the Ardennes was one of extreme silence. He had led the party back. His Miranda trailed respectively behind him with Liara and her father, Atheta followed at an even longer distance behind. He hadn't looked at any of their faces as he stormed through the CIC and took the elevator up to the Captain's Loft. He needed to be away, but Miranda had followed.
Kaidan splashed the cold water on his face as he tried to find some relief for the pounding headache he was dealing with. But it wasn't anything he hadn't had to deal with before on a regular basis. His L2 implants had flared up from the emotion roller-coaster of the day. Mostly he just wanted to wash that oily memory of the prison away.
He gripped the water basin as he looked back in to his reflection in the mirror as he ground through his thoughts. Water dripped down his tan skin, slipping through the black goatee around his face.
For years he had silently gone along with Shepard's statements, the Alliance's statements...and Miranda's...
"Kaidan...it's not what you think..."
Kaidan turned his head and saw Miranda standing in the doorway. She was still dressed in the same uniform, but with her hair down.
He gruffly refocused on the water basin and away from his wife.
"Really Miri? Because right now I wish that I had been right. That Shepard had survived and worked for Cerberus. But that would be wishing for a simple answer. I guess that still wouldn't explain everything."
Miranda was silent.
"So why did Cerberus choose to create their own Reaper? Was the Illusive Man that power hungry? Why use Shepard's likeness?" He growled gripping the basin, his arms quaking. "Was it to insult the Reapers, to the Alliance, or the Council? Her old crew? Why did you lie to me? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I've never lied to you Kaidan! She is not one of those...things." Miranda hissed. "Why won't you believe me?"
"Because Reaper is the only explanation that makes any sense! You can't bring the dead back from the grave Miranda! You can't!" Kaidan howled. "I watched Shepard get spaced! I was at her grave! I spent weeks with Liara trying to help her..."
He fell back in to his memory of the funeral at Brookwood in England. The location had been Anderson's choice. Not Shepard's. Kaidan had hated him for it. He knew that Shepard would never have wanted to have had any kind of ceremony for her passing. No grave for those who hated her to deface, which happened. She may have been the Hero of the Citadel, and Humanity's first Specter; she was also the Butcher of Torfan. Plenty of people still remembered.
The day had been characteristically depressing for an English fall. It was cold, and the rain did not let up. The remaining crew of the SSV Normandy SR1 had assembled on a small plot of land on one of the cemetery's small hills. It had been a fight from the beginning to even allow the crew, and only the crew, to participate. The Alliance also hadn't wanted Aliens at all in the cemetery, much less even participating with the proceedings. Again, Anderson had stepped in. That was one thing Kaidan was grateful to the man for.
Tali had worn a black environmental suite with gold trim. Her face had been impossible to read, which was perhaps a good thing for Kaidan. He couldn't have looked the young Quarian woman in the eye. Not when he was grieving too. Garrus had matched the human tradition in a firmly pressed C-Sec uniform. His face was military stoic. Anyone not of a military background would have thought that Shepard's loss meant nothing to the Turian. But Kaidan had known better. He knew that in the depths of Garrus's eyes, he had lost a mentor and a friend. Wrex had uncharacteristically polished and reworked his armor making it almost new. His reflection was indeed one of steel. He didn't miss Shepard. It wasn't in his nature to mourn the dead. But Kaidan could tell that it was then, as Wrex heard the twenty one gun salute, that the Krogan formed a promise. A promise that he made good on a few days later when he left for his home-world of Tuchanka.
Yet the most cruel aspect was that all they had buried was an empty casket.
Everyone had been there as the flag was removed from the casket, as it was lowered and the earth was pushed in to the gapping maw. The hole seemed to take forever to fill. As if the only way it would ever have been complete as if the rent in the ground had never been torn open in the first place.
If Shepard hadn't been taken in the first place.
Losing her was like losing a limb.
Through out the entire ordeal, Kaidan had been at Liara's side trying to help keep her together. It had been an insurmountable task. She had done her best to keep herself calm through the entire experience. From the paparazzi barrages to the political red tape; to say that the murmurs of her relationship with the Commander was welcomed amongst most humans was laughable. Yet when Admiral Hackett presented Shepard's flag to her, the Asari lost it. She had fallen to the rain soaked grass and mud on her knees sobbing uncontrollably as she possessively clutched the folded flag to her chest.
It was then that Liara finally broke down. She was sent to a local hospital for help. Unfortunately very little to none of the medical staff were well versed in how to help a grieving and emotionally traumatized Asari. Kaidan again was thankful that Chalkwas had been there. He had spent the better part of a month visiting Liara. Trying to help. But it quickly became evident that his own grieving was causing more harm then good.
More than once he had woken up with a foggy memory of the night before, a raging headache and an empty bottle a little too close within reach.
Losing Shepard had been like losing a limb.
Soon after he had stopped visiting Liara. Soon after that, he heard that she had vanished and Dr. Chalkwas had moved to a medical facility on Mars.
He didn't even know that the Asari was really even alive till that night on Earth when the Reapers invaded, and the Six Year War began. When he saw Liara again as the Normandy SR2 quickly swooped in and took Shepard away in to the crying rain of the Vancouver night.
"...And then I saw Shepard just magically appear out of thin air on Horizon two years later, TWO FUCKING YEARS later with a Cerberus frigate under her command. Yet it just wasn't that. She was different. Changed. So how did you do it Miri? How did you convince the Council, the Alliance to take in a Reaper as one of their own? To convince them that it was actually Shepard?" He snapped as he turned to face her.
The question was answered with a snarl in turn and a searing strike of a hand across his face.
"I said don't call her that!" Miranda hissed with tears running down her face.
Kaidan gruffly pushed past Miranda as he strode towards the elevator.
"Where are you going?" Miranda asked in a near terrified voice.
"To the only person who will give me an honest answer." Kaidan said before the elevator doors closed shut.
[][][][][][]
"You seem awfully calm and quiet after today." Atheyta said carefully as she helped her daughter pack. The two of them had been busy gathering things ever since they had returned to the Ardennes.
Liara's throat constricted. In truth she was shaken by the day's events. She was still trying to process everything that had happened, all of the dark and contrasting revelations. She had seen glimpses of them during her melds with El'Jaid, yet she had never known the details. She had never asked, and El'Jaid had offered very little to shed light to her past. Yet for all the information that had been put forth that day, so very little ground had been made.
...It's not going to get any better... She thought as she grasped El'Jaid's cane holding it close.
"What you think of all this?" Atheta asked honestly.
Liara tossed her sire a curious look. "What do you want me to say Da'ma? What can I say after I have seen Shepard treated like that?" She said wistfully.
"Going somewhere Dr. T'Soni?" Kaidan asked softly but darkly. He walked in to the observation cabin letting the doors close behind him.
The two Asari turned and took notice of a third person in their midst.
Liara noted how ragged and tired he looked. The wince he held in his eyes told her that he was dealing with a migraine. Liara turned her back to him and continued to finish fitting the clasps to the packing cases.
"Yes Captain. I am taking my leave of the Ardennes. After today, I feel that it would be the most prudent thing to do." Liara said coldly with her back turned to him. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Atheta move away, but still remain within a protective distance.
"So it is true. Shepard is nothing more then a Reaper..." Kaidan leveled.
Liara slammed the last case down on the other and her biotics flared. "Careful before you make such statements Captain." Her tone warned, as she turned to face him, her arms crossed over her chest with a hip canted to one side. "But it sounds as if you already made up your mind."
"And you continue to believe in something...someone that doesn't exist." He surged forward and grabbed a hold of her left arm. "That thing isn't Shepard!"
Liara's snatch her arm away from his grasp her face twisting in disgust. "Typical Human." She hissed. "Tenacious in your beliefs. Always quick to judge. Your kind never seems to let go of an idea once you have latched on to it. You will fight to your very death believing, hoping, that it is true; even if it is wrong. Never once do you entertain that the idea could be nothing more then a twist of a reflection. An illusion. A lie of the mind you tell yourself to keep you safe from the truth."
Liara could tell that Kaidan was slightly taken back by her words, or rather the way she said them. She could read in his eyes that they perhaps sounded very racial to him. But they weren't, not really. Her spoken words were nothing more then observations she had collected.
"What truth? That somehow Shepard was resurrected from the dead?" He snorted in disgust. "Next you will tell me that it was you who set up the prison break."
Liara just flashed him a wickedly cruel smile.
Kaidan paled slightly.
"Wait. What? I thought that was entirely a Specter operation." Atheta spoke up casting a curious eye towards her daughter.
"The Specter operation that was given...a little push. Tell me Kaidan. What do you know of Shepard; really? Is thinking of her as a Reaper more comfortable for you then perhaps thinking of her as a Traitor to the Alliance? If, of course either is how you really want to see her." Liara baited. "Is either more comfortable for you then to see her for what she really is?"
Kaidan shook his head in frustration. "Look I understand that you cared for Shepard a lot. I do, but don't think that I didn't care! Damn it Lara! Why can't you see that it was not Shepard in that court room? It's a Reaper! How else can you explain what happened during the Six Year War or even before that?"
Anger boiled up from Liara, and she calmly brushed the emotion aside. But she continued to glower at Kaidan.
"You don't know her. You didn't even try to find her after the first Normandy went down."
"There was nothing to find. The wreck of the Normandy, sure, but Shepard was dead. IS dead."
"You just let the Alliance use her, then you stood silently on by as they tore apart everything she worked for. Everything she fought for! Like they are now..." Liara retorted sharply.
"I answered the best I could in there! What was I supposed to do? Lie? Paint her image as a damn saint? You and I both know she wasn't that. I kept the pressure on the Alliance, on the Council they best I could about the Reapers..."
"Then why didn't you say why you left the Specters? Why didn't you try to find her Kaidan? Why didn't you?" Liara screamed fighting back tears; her emotions had started to show through. "You turned your back on her at Horizon Kaidan. Be grateful that she considers you a friend; even if not a close one. You don't deserve her generosity in the least."
She hefted the case and started to move to the door, El'Jaid's cane in hand, but Kaidan didn't budge as he blocked her path.
"Move Kaidan. I won't ask you again." Liara hissed.
"Then prove it to me. Prove to me that it was really Shepard in the Tribunal today. That it has been Shepard ever since Horizon. Prove to me that the Prosecutor isn't right. Prove me to me that I'm wrong." Kaidan said serenely.
Liara looked him in the eye. They held a deep conflict. One so long guarded that it had became part of him. It was different from El'Jaid's. His was an illusion he clung so tightly to. We wanted to believe that staying with the Alliance had been the best option. That it had been right. But at the same time his eyes whispered to her that he had to know the truth. That he had to be certain.
"What do you want Kaidan? You have already made up your mind..."
"What drove her? What still drives her? I know it has something to do with those beacons! What did she see in those beacons?" Kaidan grabbed a hold of her arm again and she pulled away from him. Her expression was as if something grotesque had touched her.
Liara looked at him with distain. "You don't want to know what torments her at night. What she has seen, and sees every at waking moment."
"Is it any different from what we all experienced during the war Liara? I think I can handle mere memories and dreams." He said solidly.
Liara closed her eyes and barked out a cruel laugh. Then she opened them again and they were as hard and cold as frozen steel in winter. "No. No you won't."
She flung her mind at him, casting her consciousness out towards him like a battering ram against a stack of paper. Usually when Asari established mind melds to transfer knowledge they would say a few words to calm and make the other person more receptive. But it didn't always need to be the case. All it did was to make the transfer easier, and less tiresome. But that didn't mean that such kind acts were a necessity. An Asari could break into another persons mind by sheer force of will.
As Liara cut her way into Kaidan mind she poured all the imagery, the smells, the sounds, and feelings of touch that had been in the Prothean beacons. Kiadan twisted and jerked as the information came crashing into him.
This is what was in the Eden Prime beacon, but it is not what Shepard experienced Kaidan. Liara whispered through the connection. You would have never survived the experience. This is just her interpretation of it.
Liara knew that El'Jaid's mind had nearly been...overloaded...from the experience. That her mind had tried to compensate by taking the raw information from the Beacon and translating it into images and ideas she could comprehend. Yet that did not mean that her interpretation of the information had blunted the power of it.
Kaidan trembled and jerked as he saw beings, people, being outright butchered in a street he thought he knew. In a city he could have sworn he lived in. He saw husks tear into civilians and drag living people away to be impaled on dragons teeth. He saw Reaper troops that had once been human repurposed to be killing machines.
Liara knew that what she was feeding into him, pouring into him like a maelstrom, made his real life experiences pale by comparison. He shook as he saw the butchering continue. It was an endless, worthless, insatiable slaughter of uncountable people.
During the Six Year War, the entire Galaxy had united against the Reapers. They had hope during the war. They had known that the Reapers could be defeated, beaten, and killed.
But there, standing in that cabin on the Ardennes he only knew fear and terror. The Reapers and their minions were unstoppable. No matter how many abominations and monsters were felled, a wave of tens of thousands followed in their gruesome trail like locusts. Cities were swallowed. Planets laid bare. What made it worse was that as the imagery continued to course into his mind, the people he saw being torn apart were Human, Asari, Turian, and every other Species in the Galaxy. People he knew.
And the Reapers just continued coming.
You wanted to see what kept her going? Are you having a good look? Liara hissed as she changed the imagery to the bits and pieces that had leaked into Liara's mind from her melds with El'Jaid.
The location change to one that was completely alien, and completely devoid of anything resembling a society, a culture, and life. Yet Kaidan's knew that the denizens had a purpose. A horrible purpose. He saw his Mother and Father, trapped in pods, being boiled to death. He heard them screaming, smelled the terrible scent, saw them reduced to nothing familiar. Not even ash. Kaidan was locked. He couldn't react. He didn't speak. Liara saw his mouth open, and his lips peel away in fits of agony, but nothing came out.
In his mind he saw where he was given a choice. Was it really a choice he saw? A switch that would delay. A chance to buy more time. But at what price? He saw that he was riding an asteroid going straight towards a relay. He had sent it there, and he was trapped there. He had no escape. As explosions rang around him, Kaidan felt himself thrown wheeling in to space horrified as he saw the hulking piece of rock barrel towards the whirling galactic gyroscope.
His hands went for his throat, his eyes went stark wide from shock to fear, then outright terror. He couldn't breathe. He felt that the air was being sucked from his lungs by vacuum. He toppled to his knees on the floor and acted as if his body was slowly being crushed by the void.
Liara simply watched as his mind was screaming at him, telling him that there was nothing he could do about it as he was ejected out in to the cold black of space; as he watched the relay be torn apart and momentary collapse in onto itself. As his end drew near his mind whispered of a terrible deal made to a person he thought he had trusted, and to people he had protected...
He wanted to scream out as his body was set on fire by cosmic inferno, knowing that it would soon engulf the Earth behind him, and burn all that he held dear. He wanted to scream knowing that the delay had been so utterly useless. He wanted to scream, but his air had run out. His lungs were crushed. Yet he still saw everything...
Then abruptly Liara pulled the connection. Kaidan jolted forward landing on his hands. The doors to the cabin rushed open and Miranda pushed in kneeling to her husband's side. He rolled over to a haphazard sitting position and as Miranda tried to grasp one of his shoulders he back peddled in to the wall in fright. He let out a suffocated yelp of pain and Liara saw him shiver uncontrollably as his mind tried to understand where it was, where he really was. Tears began to pour down his face as his mouth opened to scream, but nothing came out. His face only held the look of silent horror as he heaved in air.
Miranda didn't ask what had happened as she kneeled beside him holding him to her. She looked up at Liara and Liara didn't return Miranda's gaze as she looked unfeelingly upon Kaidan as he was racked by inconsolable sobbing. He looked like nothing more then a devastated and tormented being on the floor, no longer the picturesque vision of an Alliance Officer.
"I hope now that you and I have somewhat of an understanding Captain." Liara said simply as she gathered the last case in one hand, and still holding El'Jaid's cane in the other. "Please send my kind regards to your mother and father."
The two Asari then slipped out of the observation deck, and Kaidan still did not comprehend where he was, or what had happened to him.
Author's Note: Someone asked why I kept Kaidan alive.
Well...he has his uses...
PS. Don't make an Asari angry. They can be a huge headache.