I do not own Mass Effect or any of it's characters. Thank you for reading! This chapter is just a bit of morning fluff. More serious plotlines to come!
Trapped.
But not cold this time, stifling hot.
She couldn't breathe. Her oxygen was running out.
Oh god where's my helmet?
Her eyes popped open, the first panicked yelp gasping out of her mouth. The light was dazzling, disorienting, she gulped air. Shouldn't, there couldn't be much of it, but she couldn't stop.
Except, there was plenty.
The heaviness on her chest wasn't rubble, but Kaidan's shoulder and arm. His head was tucked down against her neck, his leg thrown over hers. And any other time she would think it was cute but she had to move now.
"Wha?" he muttered, sleepily. She slid out from under his arm and found herself at the edge of the bed too quickly. She fell, flat on her butt, and had to stifle another yelp of surprise. By now, Kaidan was fully awake, looking around in alarm. His biotics crackled blue over his skin.
Sunlight slanted in through the barn slats. The air was stifling hot, but fresher than anything she'd ever breathed off Earth.
"Bad, uh, bad dreams," she said, her voice gruff with sleep and suppressed reaction. Kaidan's biotics faded and he rubbed his face with his hands. She noticed for the first time that he was practically naked. It was odd the way adrenaline could re-order one's priorities.
"I thought we were under attack," he said, through his hands. Yeah she didn't have a monopoly on disproportionate panic. "Good thing no one came to get us. They might have gotten reaved."
"Give yourself a little credit," Shepard said. "You've never killed a civilian yet. I thought I was back on the Citadel. For a moment. Have I mentioned how much I love the air on your farm?"
"God, Shepard," Kaidan said, lowering his hands to look at her. "That's not just a bad dream. That's, that's a waking nightmare."
"Yeah." Shepard sighed, and stretched. Come to that, she was nearly naked too. What an incredibly bizarre waste of the good Lord's gifts, that she should be here in this loft with this man under these conditions and still completely unable to focus on enjoying the moment.
"I dream about that too," Kaidan said. Very quietly. He was looking at her and through her. "I dream that the team never finds you but we do. Too late. Months too late. But not too late to pretend to ourselves that you died in the explosion."
"It didn't happen," Shepard said. She rolled to her knees and gripped his hand. "That isn't what happened. I'm here. You're here. We get to just start again."
"Yeah, we're lucky." Kaidan took a deep breath and blew it out slow. Then he finally gripped her hand back. "Shepard I, I don't want to start again. I want to build on what we had. I want to go forward. I don't know what, but, I want things to change. For the better. To grow."
"Okay," Shepard said. "Does that. . . does that have anything to do with what your mom said last night? About kids?"
"Huh." Kaidan frowned down at their hands. "Kind of? But it seems wrong to take this many sharp turns in a conversation before having coffee."
"True." She squeezed his hand and let go. She turned her back on him, ostensibly to look for clothes, really to hide her face. She was absolutely not ready for a talk that big about their relationship. Couldn't they wait a year or two to talk about that? Or ten?
The bed creaked, and she heard Kaidan's bare feet pad across the wood floor. His arms wrapped around her bare stomach. The skin of her back pressed against his bare chest.
"I love you, Shepard," he said, his breath hot on her neck. "I always have. I just want to try new things with you. Good new things, not horrifying challenges that determine the fate of the whole damn galaxy. And yeah, someday, kids. But not today. So you don't have to freak out, okay?"
"I wasn't freaking out," she protested. His laugh gusted warm across her neck.
"Sure," he said. "You can lie to yourself, Shepard, but you can't lie to me."
Historically, she reflected, that was usually true.
"Okay," she said. Light slanted golden across the back of his hands, covering her stomach. "Talking about having kids freaks me out. I'm a soldier."
"Soldiers have kids," he pointed out. "Wrex has kids. A lot of kids by now."
"Wrex has indestructible baby krogan," Shepard said. Not tiny pink squishy things that can't even walk for a year. "Look, you don't want me to freak out, let's drop this. Okay?"
"Okay," Kaidan said. He kissed the back of her ear and let her go. "You aren't planning on skinning back into that dress uniform, are you?"
That was one of the beautiful things about Kaidan. He could drop a painful topic like it was a spent heat sink. But he never, ever forgot. If she started talking about this again two, five, ten years from now he'd just pick right back up where they left off.
"Actually, I was hoping to borrow some clothes off you," she said. He frowned, thoughtfully, and started digging through his drawers. He came up with a pair of draw-string shorts and a t-shirt that hung loosely from her shoulders. It wasn't the prettiest she'd ever looked, but it was sure comfy. They climbed down from the loft and went to the kitchen. The summer kitchen was where most of the breakfast food was located, Kaidan said, but the oven was still out of commission. Most traces of the fire had been scrubbed from the walls and from the equipment, though there were some bubbles in the paint on the cupboards remaining. Garrus and Tali were bent over the open oven.
"You two got stuck on clean-up duty?" Kaidan asked them. Garrus grimaced, his mandibles clicking.
"Your mother has a way with words," Garrus said. He did not elaborate further. "I think we can fix this thing up without needing to order any spare parts. I might even be able to calibrate the temperature gauge so this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
Shepard's eyes widened but she managed to keep from smiling or laughing at him. Her turian friend had a simple religion- accurate calibrations save lives. She wasn't sure it corresponded to any actual faith or creed but it surely seemed sacred to him. Tali muttered something under her breath.
"I'm not going to be the one to scrub these heating coils, Vakarian," she warned. She straightened, taking a step back as if to emphasize the point. Garrus sighed and leaned in to the oven. "Coated in melted wax and paper bits. And food. What a mess."
"Is everyone else still asleep?" Shepard asked. Kaidan handed her a fresh apple and some rolls with jam. Good fresh farm fare. That didn't, she noticed, require any kind of oven. He busied himself by the coffee maker.
"Hardly," Tali said. "You two are the last, I think. Joker hasn't come down out of the Normandy, but then he wouldn't. James and Steve are out in the burned fields. Something about salvaging transportation equipment. Liara is with your mother, Kaidan."
"Nope, can't hear you, making coffee," Kaidan said. Shepard grinned at that. She tried to imagine what the Shadow Broker would want with the widow of a retired Alliance officer. Not much. So it must have something to do with the farm, or with Kaidan. Or maybe Liara just liked Elizabeth.
"I wanted to talk to you two about your plans, actually," Shepard said. Tali stiffened. She waved her down. "We haven't gotten our orders from Hackett yet, but the Normandy has been through a lot. I think she needs to be checked over by Alliance engineers before we take her out through the new Relays. That being said, even if you wait for us to get through all of our checks and refitting, the Normandy is probably your fastest ticket to wherever you want to go. Transport is kind of at a premium these days."
"It's true," Tali said. "Booking passage anywhere is a nightmare. I looked at it this morning."
"Did you, now," Garrus said, quietly. Tali shifted her weight from one foot to another.
"You could wait for us to take you home, and maybe not lose too much time," Shepard said. She tried to ignore the byplay between them. If there was a potentially more damaging place to stick her nose, she couldn't think of it. "To be honest I could use both of you on the Normandy for a little while. You're both very high-profile. You both have a lot of influence with your governments. And I'm not what you'd call an experienced Ambassador. I can use all the help I can get. Think about it?"
"Of course, Shepard," Tali said. Garrus cleared his throat.
"It would only be temporary, you understand. Palaven needs its children to rebuild it. Even the ones who are more comfortable holding a sniper rifle than a hammer. But I'll think about it," Garrus said. Shepard nodded thanks. Kaidan set a mug of hot coffee in front of her, and smiled.
"What do you say we take our breakfast outside?" he suggested. "It's a beautiful morning."
Shepard grabbed her food and coffee, said goodbye to her suddenly quieter friends, and followed Kaidan back out into the summer sunshine. He paused when they were properly outside and looked around. Finally his eye settled on a low stone wall ringing the herb garden. He sat his mug down on it and hooked his leg over the side. Shepard, amused, just leaned.
"I thought we should give them some space to talk that over," he said, nodding back toward the kitchen. "You had a good idea. I'm just not that sure how they'll take it."
"I think they want an excuse to be together," Shepard said. Kaidan smiled, and gave her an odd look. "What?"
"You're a romantic after all. Who knew?" Kaidan teased. She grinned.
"If you're just noticing that now, I've got some catching up to do," she said. He snorted.
"You can't imagine what it was like sitting in a ship with them for six months without even a mission to distract them. I thought I was going to have to shoot the both of them," Kaidan said. He took a big bite of his apple. "The more I find myself in command, the more sense those anti-fraternization regs make to me. It's not just about the pressure a commanding officer can bring to bear, or the way that it distracts you in combat. People in love are a pain in the ass."
"Cynic," Shepard said. He rolled his eyes. "I never noticed you being much distracted in combat."
"Like hell," Kaidan said. "It helped that I was your Sentinel, that first time around, and that I had more years of hard training under my belt by the time you came back. Helped me watch your back without dying. But I was never as good at keeping myself in one piece when I was on your squad."
"Good thing I was watching your back," Shepard said. Then she sighed. "We're lucky we didn't both die, huh?"
"It helps that we're the best," Kaidan said. He stated it as a fact, without pride or conceit. "But yes. Very lucky."
"It's all over now, anyway," Shepard said. Her smile fell a little flat. "I'm never going to be a soldier again."
That hung between them, in silence. The fields were alive with the sounds of insects. The air smelled sweeter than ship air ever could. Kaidan looked out over the fields for a long time. She watched the sunlight play in the gray hairs at his temple, and tried to be grateful that the two of them were there at all. Instead of angry that it wasn't the way she'd wanted it to be.
"I want to say thank God, you know. That I'm glad you'll be out of the line of fire," Kaidan said. He met her eyes. "And I am. But I'm not. You're my Commander, you're a soldier all the way down. I'm scared what not being a soldier will do to you. But. . . you're alive. That's a miracle. That's not a little miracle, that's a huge miracle. It's shocking enough that any of us made it through. But you. . . you were right in the center of the storm the whole time. I can't even count all the ways you should be dead. But you're not. And no matter what happens next every day I get to wake up with you in my arms is a gift."
There wasn't anything to say to that, so she kissed him. His skin was warm from sunshine, and so was hers, and he was right. It was a miracle.