Author's Note: Thank you for the people who have favorited, followed, and commented. That always makes my day and makes me smile. :D

This is chapter is going to be a little bit different, and I hope you all like it.

I do not own Mass Effect; I am merely playing with Bioware's pretty, pretty toys.

Waking up was painful. Being a marine- as well (okay, specifically) as a L2-, he was used to pain.

...

Maybe pain wasn't quite the right word to use.

Whatever the word was (and he was leaning heavily towards torture), he wished he had stayed asleep. The problem was that he had smelled something painfully familiar and he needed to see her. But he was unsure whether it was a dream or a memory.

Opening his eyes, there was no one in the room with him- nothing but the hum of the machines was there to greet him. He had been sure that she was there. Of course, the scent had been faint, so, perhaps, it was nothing more than a memory. He shuddered away from the thought (there was a part of him that needed it to be real- if it wasn't, than he fought to wake up for nothing) and tried to sit up- gritting his teeth from screaming.

He had been in more pain before- of course, it had been a few years...and not all of it had been physical pain.

He needed to focus on something- anything- besides the pain. The smell of her shampoo- the smell that had awoken him- was a good thing to focus on. It was one that would be forever imprinted on his mind because it was a part of her.

Ash and Kaidan sat at a table in the mess, laughing about the mission they had just been on. It was easy to laugh with Ash- much easier to call her a friend. They had a shared understanding that Kaidan was crushing on the CO and was terribly embarrassed about it. And he knew that Ashley hated aliens (not really a secret) and she was crushing on their snarky, pain in the ass pilot (which was a huge secret).

"You should have seen your face," Ash laughed, "when I shot that husk and it fell into your back!"

A chuckle that he would have recognized anywhere sounded from around the corner. When she made herself seen, her blue eyes were alight with laughter and her hair was still wet from a recent shower. "If there was ever a moment when I wished that I carried a camera, it was right then!" She pulled a face of sheer horror and surprise that had Ash practically falling off the bench and Kaidan chuckling. "Don't mock it, Kaidan, that's what you looked like."

Kaidan cocked an eyebrow. "Anything to keep you two entertained, I suppose." While there was nothing technically wrong with his words, he had (accidentally, of course) made them sound a bit more seductive than he should have. Shepard cocked an eyebrow and gave him a half smile, but otherwise didn't acknowledge the inappropriate tone of his words.

Shepard walked to the fridge (it wasn't his fault that he watched her every step) and began pulling out some food. "You're doing a good job, keep up the good work." She glanced out of the fridge and asked, "You two want anything?" Ashley and Kaidan raised their own sandwiches and she disappeared back into the fridge.

Ash leaned across the table and whispered, "How interesting do you find it that she's able to do an exact replication of your face when we were in the middle of a pretty intense battle?"

It took all of his effort not to curse Ashley for making his face a horrid shade of crimson. Thankfully (or maybe not), Shepard chose that moment to join them at the table- sitting a little closer to Kaidan than was necessary- with a sandwich of her own and a cup of hot chocolate. It was in that moment that he was able to truly tell what he had smelled all those times on the battlefield and on board when she made her daily rounds.

Vanilla and mint.

"Well, I need to get back to checking on everyone's guns. The Tur-" she glanced fleetingly at Shepard and said, "Garrus said he thought his trigger was sticking."

After Ash had made her retreat, Shepard looked over at him and gave him another half-smile. "I would love to play poker with her."

"Why is that?" he asked, practically yanking his eyes from her mouth.

She leaned into him with a glimmer of a dare across her face and whispered, "Because her poker face is horrible."

It wasn't a particularly feminine scent, but neither was it masculine. It could be described in no other way than delightful to him. It was at that point that he decided that he would always associate her with the scent.

Not overly feminine, nor overly masculine.

Something of an anomaly.

How better to describe the woman he was falling in love with?

Kaidan swallowed hard as he contemplated her dare and then looked serious- but a hint of a smile played on his face. "Yours isn't always as great as you like to think."

Shepard raised her cup with a real smile- something that was rare-, and nodded, "Point for Alenko," and took a drink.

"Kaidan," a voice (which seemed overly shrill after remembering the warm alto of another's voice) greeted him and checked on of the screens by his bed. "It's good to see you awake."

"How long was I out?" He almost smiled. The last time those words had been murmured in his presence was by a certain commander that wouldn't leave his thoughts.

"A couple of days, actually," Adria informed him, scrolling down her datapad. "You missed a visitor- she came in about an hour after you were brought in. She was really worried."

It hadn't been a dream. She had come to see him.

"Commander Lia." His hopes crashed down...hard. "Said you guys served together a few years back."

Before the original Normandy, he hadn't ever really bothered to learn the names of the crew of the ships he served on. He only really bothered with the CO and the XO (and the pilot if he was on a ship for an extended amount of time or if he was flying co-pilot). But, even so, after a few months or a year, the names of those he had bothered to learn faded away. Until the Normandy. "She happen to mention a ship name?"

"Nope." She looked at him with a small smile. "She looked really worried though- acted really worried too. She even had an information broker check out my credentials."

Well that sounded like Shepard. Of course, she wouldn't use an information broker, she'd use Liara.

As it was, Kaidan was losing interest in the topic. "Anything else, Adria?"

"Just that Doctor Michel will be in in a few to check on you."

Another reminder of the SR-1- of Shepard. He and Ash had helped Shepard save the doctor in order to get Garrus' support. Of course, that had been after Chora's Den...after wanting to punch Harkin's teeth out for leering at Shepard as though she were nothing more than a stripper...after being too forward while viewing the Citadel from the observation point. It...they had already begun the long dance that ended in their romance.

Hearing a door open, he looked up to see Doctor Michel (he obviously hadn't noticed Adria leaving). "Hey, Doc, glad to see you're still doing well," he greeted her with a grimace as she began touching his very sensitive- very bruised- face.

"Commander Shepard said the same thing when she came to visit you," she noted off-handedly as she made a note on her datapad.

With that, his crashed hopes began to quiver with renewed life. She had visited him. The smell hadn't been a complete delusion.

"Mmm," was all Kaidan could think to say.

After finishing her assessment, she glanced towards the door. "She gave me something for you," she whispered, picking up his (thankfully) unbroken omni-tool and transferred a file from her own.

Kaidan opened the file and groaned. It was encrypted- heavily. It would take him days to decrypt it- possibly longer. He found himself impressed- perhaps a bit skeptical- that Shepard had been able to do such a good job- she was just a soldier, barely efficient with tech…and that was him being generous about her skills. "At least I'll have something to keep me busy."

As Kaidan set to work, Doctor Michel began to leave. She stopped suddenly and turned around. "Oh, one other thing, Major Alenko."

"Hmm?" he asked, only paying half-attention to the doc.

"She told me to tell you Code Ash," she informed him before walking out of the room.

Code Ash was something they had used as an encryption code after Virmire. It was something between just the two of them. Only Shepard- the real Shepard- would have known about that. He realized that he had been wrong all that time- she wasn't a clone or an AI.

She was real.

Inputting the code configuration into his omni-tool, he began to read the newly decrypted file.

Day One: Project Lazarus

...

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