I don't own Mass Effect or anything else connected to it. Thank you for reading!
"Should we wake her?" An ironic bass rumble, tinged with that metallic turian tone. If Garrus was amused then either everything was on fire or everything was completely fine.
"Nuh-uh. Absolutely not." Kaidan's voice rumbled out from under her cheek. She took a deep breath, floating up toward consciousness out of this soft warmth. "I'll just carry her to bed. She's a lot lighter without the armor. Should be easy."
Waking up, her neck and back started to twinge. Whatever she'd done, wherever she'd fallen asleep, it was a super bad idea. She was going to pay for it. It was easier to shrug off bullet wounds than these skeletal and muscle aches. At least, it was with medi-gel. But there was no such thing as medi-gel for a strained spine or twinging muscles, or pinched nerves.
"You want to leave us all alone with your mother?" Garrus's voice got even quieter and more ironic.
"Hell, Vakarian, you navigated half the planets in the galaxy on our first tour looking for pirates and crazies," Kaidan said. "You should be able to find a spare bedroom to crash."
"Liara navigated," Shepard muttered. She took a deep breath, stretching, and sitting up. Several of the twinging knots in her neck popped when she moved, but that didn't really make her feel better. Kaidan let her sit up without impediment, which was good, because if he'd tried to keep her snuggled in close she would have snarled at him. "You two bickered."
"Hey, now," Kaidan said, watching her closely. "You feeling okay, Shepard?"
"Yup," she said, rolling her neck and stretching out her shoulders. "Feeling good. What's up?"
"You slept through a small kitchen fire," Garrus said. "The oven temperature gauge isn't very well calibrated."
"An extra ten degrees doesn't make a difference when you put wax paper in the oven," Kaidan muttered.
"And your boy here just sat there trying not to wake you up while the rest of us scrambled around trying not to burn down his ancestral home," Garrus continued. "I'm shocked that anything on this planet survives your human, erm, mating rituals."
"What was I supposed to do, use cryofreeze on it?" Kaidan asked. "You try to freeze something ceramic that's on fire and it'll just explode. Tali had it covered. She's great at putting out little fires."
"Is that where everyone is?" Shepard asked. The kitchen was empty. Not clean, though. The residue of a lot of food preparation was scattered throughout the kitchen. And, she saw, the aftermath of a fairly big kitchen fire. The wall behind the oven was scorched.
"Ma isn't happy with any of us," Kaidan admitted, "but she's decided that the best revenge is to make us do repairs until our omni-tools break. Meantime she's taken everybody to the main kitchen to try and salvage what food she can. Not, uh, not all of it survived the fire."
"Wait," Shepard said, her sleepy brain catching up to the implication. "Garrus started the fire?"
"Laugh it up, Shepard," Garrus said.
"What was it you had to do to prove you were a better cook than me?" Shepard said, ignoring this. "Something about those eggs I made that smoked up the mess. Something about fire?"
"Technically, the dish I was making was still edible after it burned," Garrus said. "Just, erm, not after Tali put that fire suppressant on it."
"An engineer's work is never done," Kaidan said, in tones similar to Tali's. Sounded like a recent quote. Shepard laughed. Then she started stretching in preparation of getting up. Everything was a lot stiffer than it used to be, but she was getting used to it.
"So what kinds of repairs are we supposed to do? I'm not sure how long we're staying, but it wasn't supposed to be more than a few days," Shepard said. She rocked up off the couch, and caught herself against the table when she started to lose her balance. But there, she could straighten up just fine. She had a lot of twinges but the cure for that was walking around.
Kaidan and Garrus were staring at her in shock.
"What?" she said.
"I've just never seen you do that," Kaidan said. Garrus cleared his throat.
"Not a surprise, after how they found you. I just hadn't thought it through."
Right. The last time they'd seen her she was leaping across chasms and hopping up after being dropped thirty feet right on her ass. No wonder they were surprised. Well, they'd deal with it. She took a few steps, adjusted her balance around the twinges in her leg and then turned to stand with her hands on her hips.
"Well?" She said. "I don't know where your other kitchen is. And while we're talking about it, who has two kitchens anyway?"
"Ha," Kaidan said. He got up too and started leading them off, deeper into the house. "When this place was built the assumption was that there would be staff to do the cooking. Before the war, that was actually still true. This place sucked down a good forty or fifty workers. Keeping them all fed is a job for a good quartermaster, just on the civilian side. The summer kitchen was something my grandmother insisted on putting in. She said she wanted to bake pies sometimes without worrying about disrupting the whole orchard's supper. When me and my cousins came along they put in all the couches and tables."
"I'm having a hard time picturing a young you wandering around this pile," Shepard admitted. Kaidan led them through dim halls. The floors were heavy real wood, cut and placed in pretty patterns. The walls held photos and paintings in heavy wooden frames. If she could have named a place less like the place she grew up, this would be it.
"So how typical is this of human dwellings?" Garrus broke in. "Most of the ones I've been in so far are burnt up and full of husks. Are they always so. . . organic?"
"On Earth a lot of them are," Kaidan said. "Plaster walls, wood floors. Older homes especially. Out on the colonies it's all polymers, of course."
"What about where you grew up, Shepard?" Garrus said.
"I'm not exactly representative. You want the desert human experience you might need to ask James," Shepard said. "I grew up maybe two thousand miles south of here. Fifteen hundred? Doesn't matter. It was a different world."
And a very different place in the world. She'd known people back on Earth who lived in big sprawling houses and had staff. The Mayor of the city, the Police Chief, people like that. She'd never thought about Kaidan being more like them than like her.
Well, his parents being more like them than like hers. She studied his profile in the dim light, as covertly as possible. Nothing had changed. Nothing was different. Wherever they'd come from, they were here now.
Hell, Garrus, two steps behind them, was an actual alien from another world. And he was her best friend. Kaidan coming from money wasn't even important.
It was just surprising.
"Well, we actually just came from where I grew up," Kaidan reminded them both, "out on Jump Zero. This place is more where my parents live. What are turian homes like, Garrus?"
"A little bit like a barracks," Garrus said, "if a barracks had an extensive garden. My people like to give over more space to our food growth than our people. Makes sense. A lot of turians serve in the military. Almost all of us. The manufacturing plants tend to have extensive housing built right in. But mostly our homes are made of metals and polymers. The light is harsher on Palaven."
Kaidan led them down a narrow, plain hallway that branched off the main passage between two of the large cozy front rooms. After a sharp turn the hall opened up into a bright, cramped kitchen. There were several bright metal appliances bigger than any Shepard had seen in a civilian kitchen before, they looked like maybe they belonged in a restaurant or a military ship. Shiny pots and pans hung from a metal hoop attached to the ceiling. On the other side of the room a massive wooden table surrounded by fifteen chairs took up most of the space. Even the squared off hunks of wood the thing was made of were massive. It had to have been built in this room.
Everyone but Joker was bustling around the kitchen doing something to some dish or another. He was watching the dance from the table with an abstracted smile on his face. Shepard patted Kaidan's arm to let him know she was moving off and went to sit next to Joker.
"Hey Commander," Joker said. "You missed Garrus's culinary debut."
"I heard it was incendiary," Shepard said. He grinned at her. That was good to see. "You don't want to help cook? Are you, uh, bad at it? Like me?"
"No, I can cook," Joker said. "Not fancy stuff, but enough. I just figure that someone bumping into me and smashing all my ribs would be a bad end to the evening."
Garrus came and sat on her other side. She was pretty good at translating turian facial expressions by now. And this turian was incredibly embarrassed.
"They don't want you to set fire to this kitchen too?" Joker guessed. Garrus sighed and rubbed his forehead.
"It's a good thing I have simple tastes," he said after a long moment. "Not much chance of lighting things on fire if you're just making a quick cold meal."
"So why were you trying to push the limits?" Joker said. Garrus coughed and looked down. But he didn't answer. Shepard was pretty sure she knew why. And the reason why was sorting through a kitchen utensil drawer with one hand while balancing a dish on her hip, muttering quarian curses.
"I understand we're supposed to help with some repairs around here now?" Shepard said. No reason to just let Garrus stew in his embarrassment until the silence got thick. James brought over a huge platter full of something that smelled heavenly, and set it down in the middle of the table. Liara followed with two large pitchers.
"Yes, you are!" Elizabeth said. She sat down a heavy ceramic dish full of apples and sweet potatoes in some kind of sauce, and she pointed at Garrus. "And you're going to fix my stove."
"Yes, ma'am," Garrus said. Shepard had to grin at that. Garrus wasn't easily cowed by anyone, and she didn't think that Kaidan's feisty mom had done it. He must really feel guilty. Tali sat several completely unidentifiable dishes down in front of Garrus, and then sat across from him.
"Watch out for the edges of this table," Kaidan cautioned the quarian. He was balancing two big platters. How were they supposed to eat all this stuff? "Sometimes it splinters. Normally it's not a big deal. Just like a little pin prick. But I don't know if a wood splinter can pierce your suit."
"I'll be careful," Tali promised. Liara sat down next to her. She ran a blue hand lightly over the wood grain.
"This is a fascinating piece," she said. "But I imagine that the practice of building major features of your home out of organic materials provides several challenges to your archaeologists."
"Let them work for it," James said. His plate already looked like a tiny mountain. And he wasn't even a biotic. She picked a few things off the platters and took a bite of one. As soon as she did she realized how hungry she was.
Dinner took several hours, because no one wanted to stop talking. In particular no one wanted to stop talking to her. Their long separation had built up a lot of conversational backlog. Liara in particular had updates on people they'd met in their long journey together. She told them stories about Wrex and Bakara and little Mordin, about Primarch Victus and Admiral Koris, about Jack's students. The people who couldn't be there, who hadn't made it, weren't mentioned. Grief was for another time. This night was just about celebration.
By the time everyone wound down and found a spare bedroom, Shepard was exhausted. Exhausted and full of food. Kaidan led her by the hand out to the nearest barn. It was full of old automobiles, ground cars in the old style with real wheels that rolled along the earth. It smelled like dry grass and engine oil. He led her up the stairs in the back of the barn into the loft, where his old rooms were. It was like a little apartment. There was a bathroom, and a tiny kitchenette with cold storage and a hot plate. As many books as there were now crowding the walls of her cabin there were more here. There were blank spots in the dust on the shelves where pictures had recently been taken to her cabin.
His desk was piled high with papers, the lower levels of which were dusty around the edges. She drifted over to the desk while he bustled around putting fresh sheets on the bed. The top papers were all letters from Anderson dated back to a few months before the Reaper invasion. Probably the last time he'd been here. She noted with amusement that a lot of the letters were about her. Keeping tabs on her, was he? He could have come to visit instead. Or. . . maybe not. One of the letters was about half apology and half stern orders. It seemed Anderson was trying to keep at least one of his wunderkind out of the political firestorm and he'd ordered Kaidan to stay the hell away.
She leafed through to the deeper levels. He needed a filing system in the worst way.
No, wait, these weren't files at all. These were drawings.
They weren't great, but they were all clearly his. He'd dated them. And, as she got deeper into the older ones, there was a clear trend of improvement. Mostly the drawings were apple trees and old cars, things that would have been to hand. But she stopped at one of them. It looked abstract, but it wasn't exactly. It might have looked like random lines to anyone else. But it was the pattern of her old scars. The scars she'd lost when Cerberus pulled her back from the underworld.
"Hey, you're not supposed to see those," Kaidan said, noticing what she was holding. His tone was teasing. "If word gets out that I'm an artist, and a bad artist, I'll never hear the end of it."
"This one," Shepard said, ignoring this concern, "is dated to when I was incarcerated on Earth. Why would you draw my scars then?"
"Ah," Kaidan said. He took it from her, gently, and frowned at it for a moment. "I had about a week of home leave, two months after you came in. I wanted to go see you but Anderson insisted I stay clear. I wanted to remind myself that you weren't really you."
"Well, I've got new scars now," Shepard said, dryly. "That doesn't make me any less me, either. Why draw them though?"
"I drew a lot that week," Kaidan said. He put the diagram of her old scars on the top of the stack of papers. "Keeps my hands busy while my mind wanders. I fixed up a lot of the old cars below us, too, for the same reason. You were right there in Vancouver. And I had this new rank, I could have gone to see you for myself. But I wasn't sure I could trust anything you said. I wasn't sure, you know, that you were you. Anderson promised to let me know what you were up to. So I was torn. Between doing the one thing I wanted most to do, and doing the smart thing."
"You always do the smart thing," Shepard said. Kaidan's lips twisted up in a wry smile.
"Not, ah, not always. There was that time I seduced my commanding officer," he said. She laughed.
"Is that what happened? I thought it was the other way around," she said. He reached for her with hesitant hands. Like he wasn't sure he was welcome, or wasn't sure she was real. She stepped into the circle of his arms and pulled him hard to her. The feel of him, solid and warm and alive against her chest, was the most comforting thing in the world. His arms wrapped around her, his big hands pulling her in close.
"When you went into that beam," he whispered into her hair, "I thought I'd never get to do this again."
"Yeah," she said, "Me too. But you have to admit, I did wait for you. And you did show up."
"Heh." His breath puffed out on a laugh. "I know you already said it, but. . ."
"Never again," she promised. He pulled her in tighter. A shudder ran through him on a sigh, and he pulled away enough to lean his forehead against hers. His hand came up to touch the curve of her cheek, gently, and trace the edge of her mouth. Gently, he kissed her, holding her in his hands like a sacrament. She was the one who deepened the kiss, who pulled his hips to hers. He broke away with a laugh.
"I had all these plans for what I'd do when I first got you alone," he said. "But I never figured I'd be coming down off a feast like that. Or the rest of it. I was in cryofreeze this morning."
"I know," she said, smiling back at him. She thought about the burn scars making ridges all along her right side. What would Kaidan think? Would he care? Would he be horrified? Would he treat her like spun glass? He was already so gentle, so cautious of her.
She wasn't sure she could deal with finding out tonight.
"I'm pretty tired myself," she said. She glanced at the narrow bed. "But are you sure there's room for two people on that thing?"
"Never tried it before," Kaidan said. He pulled her back for another kiss. "But I'm eager to find out. Before that, though, I want to have a look at you. You've been kind of stiff all night."
"Oh, I'm fine," she said, smiling. But Kaidan shook his head.
"You never refuse medical attention unless you're really hurt and you don't think I can help," he said. Well, crap, he knew her too well. "I was your medic the whole time we were chasing Saren. I know when you're rhino-hiding."
"How could I be hurt when all I've done is eat and sit?" Shepard said. Kaidan raised an ironic eyebrow at her and said nothing. After a long, long moment she sighed and gave in. "Fine. Fine, fine fine. You want to see? Fine."
She skinned out of her tight, long sleeved uniform shirt. The undershirt didn't have any sleeves, it was just a basic black tank top. She heard Kaidan's sharp intake of breath when he saw the scars. But she wasn't done. She unhooked her belt with stiff fingers and let her uniform pants fall to the floor. Standing there in just her undershirt and underwear, she felt more exposed than nude. The burn scars and the surgery scars marked most of her skin. Her leg was misshapen now, where muscle tissue had been damaged and removed and replaced with tech. She set her jaw and stared at him, defiantly.
Kaidan's lips were thin, his eyes dark. But what he said, when he raised his omnitool to scan her, was "Thank you."
Then, softly, when he got his readings, "Jesus."
"Are you happy now?" she asked. He ignored this in favor of typing out some code on his omnitool and scanning her again. Whatever he saw made him raise his eyebrows. Then he put his tool away.
"Yes," he said. She blinked at him. So he repeated himself. "I'm very happy. You're standing here in my old room, mostly naked, and you still trust me to scan you after everything you've been through. After me doubting you on Horizon and on Mars. So yeah. I'm happy."
"I don't. . ." She trailed off. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You thought I'd be freaked out about the scar tissue?" he said. "Please. None of this is anywhere near as creepy as the first time I went to undress you on the new Normandy and found your old scars missing. That was a problem. This is, well. You're you, Shepard. And you're here with me. That's all I care about."
"It's not going to get better," she said. "Miranda tried. My eyes aren't actually the same color anymore, did you know? This is a contact."
"That's going to take some getting used to," Kaidan admitted. "But for tonight. . . I noticed that you've got some muscular discomfort in a lot of different places. Would you like some help with that?"
"What?" she said. She hadn't though any of this was going to go this way. She was still trying to catch up. Kaidan grinned.
"I'm asking if you want a massage, Shepard. Just strip down and lay on the bed. It'll help," Kaidan said. She stared at him for a long moment. Wind whistled around the building. Insects chirped and buzzed in the summer night. And Kaidan just stood there watching her, his brown eyes warm. Waiting for an answer.
Well, why not?
She pulled off her undershirt and bra and lay facedown on the bed. It was strange, to be so close to naked and just walk right past him. Especially after so many months apart. He knelt above her on the bed. His hands, warm and firm, pressed into the muscles on either side of her spine. And he chuckled.
"What?" she said, muffled against the pillow.
"Oh, I used to have this fantasy. Years ago. Before we started dating," Kaidan said. His hands worked down her back. He was careful of the scars, gentle, but he didn't shy away from touching them. Maybe he really meant it. Maybe he really didn't mind. "I thought about it a lot when I was scanning you toward the end of missions. This little daydream."
"Oh?" she said. He was right. It was helping. She felt more relaxed already.
"I'd scan you, when you were standing in your combat armor about to hit the showers. Just like I scanned everybody, you know. And you'd be bruised and sore from biotically charging half a platoon of pirates and then beating them to death with the butt of your shotgun. In reality, I just advised you to take a hot shower and take some anti-inflammatories. But in my daydream you invited me to, uh, help work out your tension. And it always started like this."
"With you giving me a back rub?" she said.
"Yeah." He kissed the back of her neck. "Always."
"Seems like in a day dream you might want something a little more selfish." She seemed to be melting down into the bed. He started working on her sore leg. It twinged for a moment, but then started feeling much better.
"Well, this wasn't where the daydreams ended," he admitted. "Maybe later I'll show you some of the other things I used to fantasize about. Now that we have time, and the world isn't ending."
"We made time," she muttered, her voice slurred with sleep. He laughed again, warm and low.
"More time," he said. "Now we have all the time in the world."