Chapter 1

The dregs of Alenko's coffee sat cold in the bottom of his chipped mug that he clutched in both hands. He sat at the long table with the other military brass for their morning sitrep meeting, in one of the only remaining rooms of the small office building with four walls still standing. The blown-out windows had been shored up with generator shields to block out the cold. He stared at the coffee cup, wondering who it had belonged to, before. If they were still alive. His migraine was so all-consuming that his vision was starting to tunnel, his peripherals fading to nothing but murky shadow. His entire body felt electrified, like he was gripping a live wire, and the electrical current was making his muscles lock up and his nerve endings scream.

"Commander? Any updates to share today?" Kaidan drew his attention away from the nearly empty coffee mug and up to Admiral Hackett, the Alliance officer in charge of picking up the remnants of the military left on Earth after the Reaper attacks. Kaidan took a shuddering breath in, then pushed his chair back with a scrape and stood.

"All of our assigned quadrants have been searched and cleared, Admiral. We're still tallying our findings for survivors and remains. The eastern square has been cleaned up and leveled for incoming and outgoing hovercraft landing, as requested, sir," Kaidan reported. Hackett nodded at him, then shifted his attention to the man to Kaidan's left, the meeting continuing. With his information relayed, Kaidan plunked back down and drifted inwards again, his mind focusing on keeping his back straight and his eyes open. He hadn't slept in four days.

The Normany had limped back to Earth two days ago, after emergency repairs to the hull and a quick patch to the FTL drives by the engineering crew. Adams, Daniels and Donnelly had made as quick a recovery as they could when the Normany had crash landed on a small, unnamed planet after the atom shockwave had sent their systems scrambling and mysteriously put EDI out of commission. Rallying Joker and the remaining crew had been a herculean task. Kaidan had nearly been forced to lock Joker in the medical bay for Doctor Chakwas to sedate him when they realized EDI's metal body had collapsed in the copilot seat, and she wasn't responding in the ship itself.

Somehow, they had made it back to London. He had been promoted as soon as he had stepped back onto Earth. The chain of command was shrinking fast, these days.

His first order as the new commander of the Normandy was to release all the non-human crew. They had their own broken planets to help, their own families to track down or mourn. Garrus had left quickly and brusquely, Tali at his side. He had placed a clawed hand on Kaidan's shoulder as he boarded the shuttle off world to make his way back to Palaven.

"I'll send you a message when I find my family," Garrus had said roughly. "Let me know if…," he coughed, his mandibles twitching as he looked away and cleared his throat, "let me know if you hear anything."

Kaidan nodded. His gaze was fixed yards away, his eyes finding a point on a nearby Reaper corpse, cold and motionless amidst the rubble of an old skyscraper.

"I will, Garrus. Take care."

Tali, her small hand wrapped around the handle of a ruck sack, stood quietly next to Garrus. Kaidan thought he heard a small sniffle, muffled by her suit mask. She placed her small hand on Kaidan's bicep.

"Goodbye, Kaidan," she murmured, then stepped onto the shuttle behind Garrus. Kaidan nodded at her, his throat suddenly closed up like a bad allergic reaction. He couldn't squeeze any words out around it. Their shuttle door breezed shut with a hiss, and the jets powered up and a wave of heat crashed over Kaidan as he stepped back a step, watching his old crewmates lift off and away from Earth.

Liara had left with a promise to return, as soon as she was able to reestablish her network of Shadow Broker agents and truly uncover the depths of the destruction to her system of information across the galaxy. She was returning to Hagalaz, to the Shadow Broker ship that traveled through its volatile atmosphere, so that she could begin determining the extent of the damage the Reaper invasion had caused.

She had hugged Kaidan tightly, the slight blue glow of Glyph bouncing behind her cast her face in jagged shadows. For a moment, he had felt a flash of someone else's arms wrapped around him, a different head pressed into his shoulder, and he had nearly crumbled. He had gripped Liara back, partly in a true display of affection but also to keep himself upright.

As the morning meeting adjourned, Kaidan stood again, abandoning his mug at the table as he strode out of the dilapidated building and back into the ruined streets of London. A noxious cloud of dust and disintegrated things still hung in the air, even after nearly a week since the Reapers had been destroyed and the destruction had stopped. The sun tried its best to filter through, turning the world an eerie tint of red. Kaidan kept his breaths shallow, horribly aware of the dust in the air and what, or who, he was breathing in. Millions of people had died during the invasion of Earth, many vaporized by the Reaper beams.

His team of biotics, assigned under his command by Hackett, were tasked with clearing and cataloguing London in the aftermath. As Ground Zero, and Earth's FOB for their attack with the Crucible, the Reapers had focused their efforts on the city and the destruction was unlike anything Kaidan had ever seen. It felt like the entire metropolitan hub had been razed. The corpses of Reapers littered the landscape, some with their spindly legs curled up towards their bodies like dead spiders. The nearest one was collapsed only a few blocks away. It rose over the nearby structures, its shiny metal carcass seemed to loom over the FOB even after death.

It still made Kaidan tense up to look at them, his brain was unable to let go of the fear that it would groan and creak and stand back up at any moment, and the fighting and death would begin all over again. After years of fighting tooth and nail against their threat, he still couldn't trust that it was truly over.

The Normandy was grounded at the nearest functioning drydock while the engineers onboard continued to diagnose the ship's functionality without EDI. When she had gone offline, her software had been ripped out of every system onboard. Kaidan wasn't entirely sure how it all worked, but from the way that Engineer Adams described the damage, it was like the human equivalent of a biotic implant being forcibly removed from someone's brain. He had flinched at the analogy.

Kaidan made his way through the Alliance barricade around the shipyard and towards the Normandy's airlock, keeping his head down so his pinprick vision could focus on keeping his feet from tripping. The airlock door whooshed open, and he boarded. The chemical smell of amine hit his nostrils immediately, overpowering the smell of ash and soot from outside. It took some of the tightness out of his shoulders with its familiarity.

The ship was quiet. Most of the nonessential crew had been transferred to other duty stations while the Normandy was grounded, so there wasn't a soul in the CIC when Kaidan boarded. He passed his omnitool over the lock to the cockpit and saw Joker sitting in the pilot seat when the door opened, staring at nothing. His portable display was powered off, and the observation windows were shuttered. The cockpit was dark.

Without a word, Kaidan slid into the copilot chair with a small groan. A rush of nostalgia hit him. He had spent a lot of time in this seat back on the SR1, when he had been just a Staff Lieutenant. His biggest concern back in those days had been making sure the marines under his command didn't embarrass him in front of their newly posted Executive Officer. Thinking back to how small his world had been, how minor his frustrations were only three years ago, made him dizzy. Or maybe that was the migraine.

"How's our ship, Joker?" Kaidan asked. He squeezed his temples between his fingers and thumb, hoping the pressure would distract him from the vibrant pain lancing through his skull. It didn't. The cold, dark and quiet of the cockpit was a immediate relief to his senses, but the reason for those conditions made him nervous.

Joker didn't say anything, his head stayed leaned back against the seat with his hat pulled low over his eyes. His hands rested on the dashboard, fingers limp, just… sitting. Kaidan felt like the pilot was waiting for something, but neither of them seemed to know what he was waiting for. Joker was his responsibility. This ship was his responsibility. Everyone assigned to it were his responsibility. His biotic student division, currently finalizing cleanup of the Eastern London landing square, were his responsibility. All of the dead and wounded they had found during initial searches were his responsibility. Sitting in the copilot seat of the Normandy, squinting past his fingers and his hazy vision at Joker, trying to force his body to hold together with sheer force of will, the weight of all of his responsibilities weighed down on his shoulders so heavily that he thought he was drowning.

"Joker, look at me," he said, dropping his hand away from his brow. Joker rolled his head along the chair rest until his eyes met Kaidan's. There was a storm in them, and even through the riot of emotions and pains in his own mind, Kaidan could see it.

"Ship systems are still crippled, Major," he refused to call him Commander, which Kaidan had decided was a battle he didn't want to fight. "Traynor is working with the engineers, and they've restored about fifty percent of systems to their pre-EDI programming. Combat suite and navigation systems are still a black hole," his voice was flat, with only a small hitch when he mentioned the AI. Kaidan nodded, but didn't say anything in response. He had asked, but now he wasn't entirely sure what to say in response. He had never been that good at shoring up other's emotions and resolve.

Shepard had always been the one to rally the troops. Not him.