Someone had once called Kaidan Alenko boring.
Of course, there’d been more words than that, some diplomatic expression spoken on board the Citadel in hushed tones, something that Shepard had overheard while looking for thermal clips. The rattle of the galactic news played over the hum of voices, some over-blown story about her ground team succeeding on some mission or another (again). And then she’d heard it; the slight hiss of a salarian tongue, a voice riddled with that particular amphibian rattle, followed by a quiet laugh.
Shepard dropped her heat clips.
The salarian caught sight of the gaze she threw over her shoulder, the violent red gleam of her pupils, the way the fissures in her skin flickered. Blood drained from the salarian’s face as recognition set in, and he fled, followed closely by his compatriot.
Boring, Shepard thought. She picked up her thermal clips with fingers flushed from anger.
“Is something wrong?” Kaidan asked when she met with him outside the embassies, and Shepard shook her head, ignoring the way Kaidan’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe her, not for a second.
Kaidan always presented himself well to the media. He appeared in vids either in the middle of battle or in the midst of a diplomatic situation, dressed in his blues rather than armour. When his face wasn’t covered by his helmet his expression was always perfectly neutral; he was curiously tempered for an experienced marine, especially considering he’d been to the equivalent of a biotic torture camp in his youth. Despite his trauma his eyes remained kind and his voice remained gentle. He was handsome, certainly, in a gravelly kind of way. Shepard supposed it was possible to mistake his temperament for him being boring.
Despite being taken from his family at an early age and inducted into a program that sought to extort his biotics by any means necessary (often resulting in broken bones or snapped necks), Kaidan had remained kind. Selfless. He wasn’t angry or filled with fire the way Ashley had been; the way Shepard had been. Where they turned red he remained blue and put a stopper in the bottleneck of pain; Shepard admired him for that, truly she did. His sensibility, Ashley had said once, was boring. You need to start taking some risks, LT! she’d laughed. I’d prefer not to get myself killed, if it’s all the same to you, Ash, had been his reply. Sensibility was a rare thing to see in the Alliance, these days, what with the chaos of war taking the galaxy by the throat and throttling it for all it was worth.
And Shepard knew what the vids didn’t show, what the audiences didn’t see. She knew the way Kaidan’s face looked when it was smeared with blood, when his teeth were bared and his fingers trembling and glowing blue. She’d seen his power, the way he could blast an entire squadron off their feet with a single pulse of biotics. His ability to hide that power was so perfect that Shepard found herself forgetting he was one of the most powerful human biotics in the history of the galaxy. Though after what happened at Jump Zero, she didn’t blame him for wanting to keep a cap on it.
The vids didn’t show despair, either. They didn’t show the way he’d been nearly crippled with grief after Ashley’s death on Virmire, when Shepard had cradled his head in her lap as he’d cried and cried and cried, blaming himself, always blaming himself. They’d grieved together, then, and somehow they’d made it, though the image of Kaidan’s entire body warped with despair wasn’t something she wasn’t likely to forget. They didn’t show the tenderness in his face - the fear - when he told her he loved her, that he’d always loved her, and that losing her frightened him more than anything in the galaxy. And they certainly didn’t show the way his eyes had shone and his smile had lit up her life when she told him that she loved him too.
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