plotted starter for @encontrole ;
It felt... strange, being back on the Citadel. After what happened on Horizon, she just felt... lost, really. Even as Bailey talked about how their DNA scanners weren't wrong, that she was in fact who she believed she was, she didn't feel like it. She felt like... some kind of impostor. Like this was all some wild fever dream, that everything she'd been through--Mindoir, Akuze, Virmire, Ilos, even Alchera--hadn't really happened to her. None of it had been real.
Like her memories were false in some way. Like Cerberus had stolen them from whoever Katrina Shepard really was, only to put them in her head, recreate her face... hell, she didn't even know if that much was right. What she did know was that apparently... few of her friends believed it was her. Hell, she wouldn't be surprised if they were pretending, just to keep her from going off the rails.
It was that fact that had made her deeply reticent to meet Kaidan on the Citadel as he'd requested. He'd said he wanted to talk, but... did she want to? After the fiasco that was Horizon... she felt shut out. Forgotten, in a way. Her friends talked about how it had been two years, about how they'd suffered, how they'd grieved her--but what about her? If she really was herself... what about the fact that she had gone through that?
Not like she didn't remember. At least they had the passage of time to heal wounds a little, but her? Alchera was like a fresh wound. She woke up feeling like it had been just the day before, only to find out it had been two years. And in that, there was a sense of lingering guilt; she felt like she'd abandoned them, in some twisted way. She knew what that feeling was like; she'd felt the same things after Mindoir, when she'd realized she was alone. And unfortunately... there was no one around to share her pain with. There was no one there that understood what she'd seen, how she felt, none of it.
Better to just get it over with, she chided herself, swallowing her nerves and entering the small apartment he'd asked her to meet him in. It wasn't uncommon for someone to rent them for a day or two; she suspected he must have done so, just to maintain privacy for their meeting. That, or perhaps he was staying on the Citadel; she'd heard a few rumours about his career as of late.
Greeting him with a nod, the corners of her lips twitched, threatening to bring on a smile. She was genuinely happy to see him. "Kai--Commander Alenko," she corrected herself, the hesitation in her voice evident. Was she right to just call him by his first name so casually? If it'd been before Horizon... she might have without hesitation, but now? Now she didn't know what was okay. She didn't know what to do or how to act, or what was proper.
