Setting: ME2, right after Priority: Horizon
Characters: Rani Shepard, Garrus Vakarian
Content: F!Shepard x Kaidan / SFW / 99% written to get one stupid joke out of my system
Shepard didn’t deal well with failure. Turned out she wasn’t great with disappointment either.
Also on AO3
Horizon had been a nightmare.
Oh, Mordin’s upgrades had protected them from the swarm, just as he’d said they would. They’d taken down everything the Collectors could throw at them and driven them away with their harvest incomplete. But ultimately they’d been too late for most of the colony, and that counted as mission failure in Shepard’s eyes.
Shepard did not deal well with failure.
And then there was seeing Kaidan again… nothing could have prepared her for that. He’d always been in a corner of her mind, ever since she awoke. She’d quietly imagined countless scenes of their reunion: Part of her kept an eye out for him every time they went to the Citadel, hoping happenstance would see them brought together. They’d laugh, they’d kiss, they’d cry, and they'd pick up right where they'd left off, as if it had been nothing but a few weeks apart. It was soppy and ridiculous, and all that was missing was the swelling soundtrack.
None of her idle imaginings had included the sweat, the blood, the stink of eezo, or the look of confusion that had turned to utter wounded betrayal when they finally stood face-to-face. She hadn’t imagined the clipped accusative tone of his voice, the hardness in what had always been such soft warm eyes. She hadn’t imagined how much it would hurt. They couldn’t have left the colony quickly enough after that and she’d refused to meet anyone’s eyes in the shuttle, lest they see how hard she was struggling to build a dam against her welling emotions.
Turned out Shepard didn’t deal particularly well with disappointment either.
-
She’d been fending off call-me-Kelly ever since they’d returned to the ship. No, she didn’t want to talk about the mission; no, not about seeing Kaidan either; no, definitely not about her attitude to failure; NO. She did not want the interfering naive busybody taking notes and reporting back any more than she already did. What she wanted was to take a hot shower, cry for about an hour, eat dinner, go to bed, and maybe cry some more. Maybe hit something, should a target present itself.
She’d managed step one of that plan. Hot water had washed away the dirt and sweat of the mission and eased her tense muscles, but not her mood. She’d dried off and wrapped up in her dressing gown–warm and soft and totally devoid of Cerberus emblems, courtesy of their last trip to the Citadel–and was squeezing the moisture out of her hair when someone tapped at the door.
“I told you it’s none of your fucking business, Chambers!” Rani snapped.
“Shepard, it’s me.” Garrus’s drawl was unmistakable even through the bulkhead. She paused in towelling her hair for a moment but then went on with renewed intensity, resolutely ignoring him.
A minute later: “Still here, Shepard.”
Rani let out an exasperated sigh. She went to the door and glared at the interface for a moment, then opened it to transfer the glare to the persistent turian on the other side.
“Not now, Vakarian. It’s been a long day.”
“I know. I thought you might want to talk about it.”
“Nothing to talk about,” she said, with a shrug that wasn’t convincing anyone.
Garrus slipped past her and sauntered into the cabin while she made ineffectual protesting noises. He noted the photo frame face down on her desk. Though it was his first time in her cabin it didn’t take any great leap of deductive reasoning to guess whose face had been slammed into the desktop. He picked up the frame, which lit up at the contact, and found exactly the portrait he’d expected on the other side.
“You know,” he began casually. “I went to your memorial. Nice ceremony, if a little pompous. Everyone was very complimentary, especially the people who’d never met you. No-one who had could have said such nice things, not with a straight face.” Shepard couldn’t help but smile a little at that, despite her determination to stay disgruntled. “Anderson was more realistic, said you were a pain in the ass but you knew how to get the job done and we’d all be a little weaker for your loss, though he may have said it more politely than that. He asked Alenko if he’d say something too, but I don’t think he had the words. Not for that crowd anyway. Now, I don’t know much about human mourning rituals but getting extremely drunk seems to be important, so as soon as we found a bar that could serve a dextro beer, I obliged. You know Kaidan starts to glow when he’s drunk a lot? At least I think that part was real, hard to tell in hindsight, there really was a lot of alcohol…” Garrus shook his head. “In any case: we talked, the way men who are very drunk and very sad do.” He carefully placed the frame back on Shepard’s desk with Kaidan’s shy smile pointed right at her, the sniper’s precise shot to the heart as unerring as ever. “He’s angry now, but I don’t think he could hate you even if he tried.”
Rani regarded the portrait for a moment, her eyes downcast, before speaking. “I know.”
“You do?” Garrus’s mandibles did the thing Shepard had always interpreted as turian eyebrow raising. “Damn, I was all prepared to talk you round. I had a speech ready and everything.”
Shepard shrugged. “I suppose I should have expected his reaction. If our roles were reversed it… would not have been so dignified. There’d be yelling and broken things. Probably no colony left at all.” She hugged her arms close to her chest. “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. I hoped he’d be glad to see me, that he’d understand and everything would go back to how it was but it’s… more complicated than that. And after you and Tali took it all in your stride, I guess I–” She stopped and shook her head, dismayed at the insane unlikelihood of her situation. No-one was equipped for the dead coming back to life, not the bereft nor the departed themselves. Kaidan had called her a ghost, and that didn’t seem far off. It should be a wonder that anyone was coping.
“Oh, there was some processing to be done, believe me,” said Garrus. “But it had to wait until after the siege and the rocket to the face and the lifesaving surgery, after which Commander Shepard being not so dead didn’t seem like such a stretch.” He paused. “Also I’d had a message from Tali right before that all went down, the gist of which was ‘What And How The Fuck’.”
Shepard huffed a half-hearted laugh. “Good question.” She flopped back against the illuminated glass of the fishtank and slid down until she sat on the floor. After a moment Garrus hunched down next to her.
“I guess he told you all about us then?” asked Rani, looking down at her hands as she absently picked at her fingernails. “Our illicit affair.” That sounded dramatic, but it was true enough. They’d both known how much trouble there’d be if they were found out, but that had seemed less and less important as time went on.
“Didn’t really need to, Shepard.” Garrus sounded apologetic, but also slightly amused.
“Oh.” She winced, not sure if she wanted the answer to her next question: “Did everyone know?”
“Not everyone. But I think most of us realised there was a little more going on than you wanted us to see.”
She shook her head ruefully. “We thought we were so discreet.”
“Oh, no, you were pretty good. No-one ever caught him sneaking out of your cabin or anything. But you couldn’t hide some things: The way you looked at each other, or stood a touch closer together than normal, the way he’d help you with your armour, or all those little wordless agreements. Anyone who spent much time with the two of you could tell how close you were. And you forget- I was a detective. May not have found anything solid on Saren but you two were a much easier case to crack.”
“I’m not sure that comforts me… Who knows, maybe there’s a court martial waiting for me if I ever get back to the Alliance. Though I suppose fraternizing with a fellow officer might be quite low on the list of my offenses. Did kind of mutiny and steal a ship even before I was a traitor.”
“You saved a colony from being totally wiped out. You’ve saved a lot of people. As far as I can see you’re doing the same job you always did, how’s that make you a traitor?”
“Oh, maybe because it’s Cerberus paying the bills? They’re the enemy, and here I am working for them. With them,” she quickly corrected herself. She grew quiet again. “Kaidan certainly thought it did.”
“He’ll come around. Right now he doesn’t have all the facts.”
“I’m not sure that I do either. I just wish we’d had more time to talk. Explain, in as much as I can.”
“Think you could have talked him into coming along?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know... Maybe it’s best that he’s not involved. They’d only find a way to use him to manipulate me. Again.” The last word was bitter in her mouth. Clearly her old crew weren’t the only ones to put two and two together. They’d known exactly how to invest her in Horizon. No, the further away Kaidan was the better it was for both of them. Not that all of her was on board with that conclusion. “I just wanted more time to talk. For him it's been years but for me it feels like only a few months. He's worked through it all and gotten over me, while I'm still- I’m still newly in love.” Her voice wavered and tears suddenly welled up, the carefully constructed floodgates of her composure finally bursting open with the admission. She buried her face in her arms. “It's so stupid.” Her shoulders shook and her words were muffled as they were forced out between sobs. “I’m a goddamned marine. N7. The first human Spectre. I won the Star of Terra when I was twenty-two. I’ve come back from the dead, faced geth and collectors and husks and reapers and rogue Spectres and- and I'm sitting here in my dressing gown crying over fucking Kaidan Alenko.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
Turians could not, technically, smirk. They didn't have the mouths for it. You needed lips and different cheek muscles. But there was a way that they tilted their heads and did a thing with their mandibles that was close, and Garrus had a voice that was basically an aural smirk anyway. So when he spoke next Rani assumed that his words were delivered with a smirk.
“Isn't this about… not fucking Kaidan Alenko?”
Her mouth formed an indignant O as she looked up, red eyed, at Garrus and smacked him on the arm. It wasn't hard and he probably couldn’t feel it through the armour and carapace, but it certainly made her feel better. “I am heartbroken and in tears, Vakarian, and you're making shitty jokes!”
“Oh come on, Shepard, I couldn't leave that there. And now you're laughing and crying, that's an improvement, right?” Shepard knew a shit-eating-grin when she saw it no matter the shape of the face it was on.
“I saved your life and this is the treatment I get?” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, a small grudging smile fighting the urge to resume crying. “I can’t believe I let you back on my crew, you’re terrible.”
“True enough.”
“Of all the people I could have had back I had to get the smart-arse turian.”
“Humans tell me that beggars can’t be choosers. Also something about the use of projectiles in glass structures that I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly.” Garrus looked down at her very seriously. “I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but you’re kind of a smart-ass yourself.”
“You’re just trying to rile me up so I’m not miserable anymore.”
“Well, I know how to deal with you when you’re angry, I’m… I’m not sure what to do with sad,” he admitted. “I’m not very good at this.”
The fight went out of her in one breath. “Me either.” She wiped her nose again and pressed her lips together as the tears threatened to well up once more. “I miss everyone. Not just Kaidan- Wrex, Tali, Liara–” she paused and sniffed “–Ash. She’d have some things to say right now, I’m sure.”
Garrus chuckled. “Spirits, can you imagine? She’d be even more pissed with you than Kaidan was.”
“No doubt. Maybe if I’d had both of them glaring at me I’d have stayed right there and given Cerberus the finger.”
“I have no idea what that means but it sounds extremely intimate.”
Rani snorted. “I’m really glad you’re here Garrus.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Terrible as you are.”
“Hey, someone’s got to watch your back. And without the rest of the old crew around, I guess it had better be the smart-ass turian. Now, what does giving someone a finger mean?”
“With those talons, I think it’s best you don’t know.”
“Tennyson?” asked James, craning his neck to read the spine of the hard-copy book Shepard was reading. She sat curled in a chair by the window, her knees drawn up to her chest and the book leant against them as she read.
“Nineteenth century British poet,” said Shepard. She turned a page as she spoke, her gaze barely flicking up from the book.
James leant against the bookcase, his arms crossed and a wry smile on his face. “Huh. Guess you learn something new every day,” he said.
Now she looked up, an eyebrow raised. “You never heard of Tennyson, lieutenant?”
James scoffed. “Nah, I’ve heard of Tennyson. I’m talking about Commander Shepard being a poetry nerd. That’s news.”
Shepard carefully closed the book. She regarded the gilt spine for a moment before laying it down on the table next to her chair, then stood and crossed to the window. She stared through the glass, not really seeing. The view might have been considered good, for a prison cell, but she'd been stuck in there for three months already and the view across the bay had begun to pall around day four. She hadn't had much else to do at that point, other than look out the window and wait for the next shiny uniform in the queue to show up and harangue her. Lieutenant Vega had turned up on day eight with a handwritten note from Admiral Anderson (“Don't go too crazy in there”) attached to a box of books- paper editions, not digital: she wasn't allowed anything that might be persuaded to give her extranet access- and she'd just reached the elderly volume of poetry around half way down. The Admiral couldn't have known when he sent it to her, but it had felt like a rebuke. More than being stripped of rank, more than the confinement. More than the accusations and interrogations. More than the trial that was dragging on and on as everyone who had ever wanted a piece of her ripped off their strip. This slim block of paper and glue with its thin pages and delicately gilt covers might as well have been a brick dropped through her chest. She'd flipped through the pages until she found a line she recognised, and the brick had sunk further still.
‘I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees’. Ulysses. Ashley’s favourite.
Shepard sighed, and finally she spoke; “I’m not. Truth be told, I never read it before today.” She turned her back on the window and faced the young lieutenant. “But an old friend was a fan.”
I need to share a post-war headcanon for my Shep that’s been buzzing around my head this cold snowy sunday morning.
The Alliance was pretty ready to let Shepard die. They dressed it up in words like "let her rest", “she did her duty” and "she's suffered enough" but really she's just kind of... awkward to have around now. What do you do with a galactic saviour after the galaxy's been saved? Too many people owe her too much. She's much more useful as a fallen hero.
Alive, she's a problem.
It's not that she can't be saved. Rani's in terrible shape but Miranda's there, ready and willing to get to work on her. Sure, she doesn't have the near limitless resources she had before, but Shepard's not actually dead this time so she reckons she’s already ahead of the game. But the Alliance brass still don't trust an ex-Cerberus officer, and they decide it'd be the kindest thing to take Shepard off life support and let her slip away quietly.
Which is when Miranda and Jack (who's been helping with clear up and rescue efforts along with her students) break a comatose Shepard out of her hospital bed and spirit her away to an old Cerberus-run facility that was involved in the Lazarus research. Most of the building’s been pretty thoroughly gutted but the high security labs are still intact and full of prototypes and data, and Miranda has the access codes.
When the Normandy finally limps home, six or more months later, the crew are told that Shepard was kidnapped by Cerberus remnants, her status and whereabouts unknown. Kaidan and Liara immediately join the search operation, and when her location is finally found the rest of the crew are with them on the front line of the assault.
But it's not what they expected. The Cerberus facility is now an open hospital and refuge, full of people with nothing and nowhere else to go. Jacob’s joined them and has been scrounging equipment and food and recruiting more volunteers. It’s Jack that meets them at the doors and it’s Miranda who leads them through the hallways and wards to a private room...
She’s in a wheelchair (Miranda’s still looking for a specialist to help get her back on her feet, but it’s not like she can just get a referral, so they’re doing what they can), she’s covered in burns, her cybernetic scars are worse than ever and she’s never looked so tired, but it’s Shepard; alive and awake, and clearly things are not as they’ve been told.
It’s a really long time since I last wrote seriously. I asked for prompts a while back and then totally failed to write anything coherent for them. Apparently that’s because none of them made my heart hurt enough since this came relatively easily, even if I’ve been fussing over it for four days now.
it’s probably utter clumsy tripe but i tried honestly it’s been SO long and I’ve lost all of my critical skill
(Mass Effect, Rani Shepard, Kaidan Alenko, SFW, Post-ME1/Beginning of ME2)
Also on AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/10035323
A Little Breath
“Do you remember what I said before, about shared shore leave?” said Kaidan. The lights in the cabin were dimmed, still on the night cycle, but there was enough illumination for him to see Shepard’s face. She lay on her side, head propped up by her arm, watching with a faint smile as he pulled his pants on.
“I think you mentioned it,” said Rani. She yawned, stretched beneath the blankets then pushed them back and swung her legs over the side. “Remind me?” She stretched again, rolling her shoulders and enjoying the slight pull of her muscles. She crossed the cold floor to her locker on bare feet and began to dress.
“Well, I just thought it’d be nice. We could spend some time together. Away from all-” Kaidan waved a hand vaguely as he stood and fished a shirt from the floor- “All this. Duty. Work. Rank. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love that we’re able to work together and I wouldn’t want it any other way, but… sometimes it’s hard. And I hate all this sneaking around. This-” He paused and looked down his chest at the t-shirt that stretched awkwardly across his shoulders and was not nearly long enough “- this is not my shirt.” Rani stifled a snort at the sight.
“Not a good look for you,” she said, laughter barely contained. While he wriggled out of what was very definitely her uniform she hunted around for his shirt, which she found casually draped over the back of a chair. She held it up for inspection and turned out the collar for him to see the tag that clearly read "ALENKO", then they exchanged shirts, bundling the fabric up and throwing them across the bed to each other. He caught his gratefully and pulled it on, smoothing the creases as he tucked it into his belt. “Much better. So, shore leave? Where identical uniforms aren’t a problem?” Rani teased. Kaidan shook his head, but with a smile on his face.
“Right. Shore leave. I don’t know about you but I’ve got a couple of weeks owed. We could go someplace nice, make a real vacation of it.” He slipped his arms around her and held her close, and she placed her warm hands on his chest. “Check into a swanky hotel, take in the sights, go for walks on the beach, get all dressed up and have dinner somewhere fancy-” he would have gone on, but Rani interrupted him.
“You mean like a normal couple?” Her brows creased with skepticism. It sounded lovely, but unlikely.
“Yeah, sure. Why not?” He shrugged. “We’ve earned that much haven’t we?”
“It’d certainly be a change of pace. So far our relationship’s been heavy on the getting shot at, light on the candlelit dinners.”
“Hey, with our lifestyle we’ll wind up ditching the main course for an armed stand-off.” Rani chuckled and dropped her forehead to his chest. He probably wasn’t wrong. Kaidan traced a finger along her jaw and tipped her chin up to face him. “So how about it? You, me, shore leave, totally normal romantic getaway?”
Rani regarded him silently for a moment with serious eyes, before a smile pricked at the corner of her lips and she nodded. “All right. It’s a date,” she said. “But if anyone points a gun at me, I’m blaming you.”
“It’s a date,” he agreed, grinning. They parted and he fetched his boots, and perched on the edge of the desk as he pulled them on. “We’d better get out there, we must be coming up on the Amada system by now.” He sighed. “Plus, y’know, the shift changes soon and the mess’ll start filling up. I really oughta be gone before that happens.”
Rani nodded. She’d opened her armour locker and was pulling out the protective plates and arranging them on the bed ready to strap them on in order. “Grab some chow then you should go get suited up. I think we’ll take Tali along today, never seen anyone who could hack Geth like she does. See you in the CIC?”
“Yes ma’am.” Fully dressed now, Kaidan’s tone was back in uniform too, the professional facade in place despite his commander still being largely in her underwear. He dropped the formality for just one more moment to dart back to her side - “Love you-” he whispered by her ear, a little breath, warm on her neck. He placed a quick peck on her cheek and then he was out of the door and gone.
Now she was in the back of a shuttle, two strangers sat opposite her and a mess of confusion sat heavily in her head. She was groggy, her skin burned all over like she’d taken an acid bath, her head ached- scratch that: everything ached- and she was failing to process any of her present situation.
The dark haired woman before her was saying something, but Rani could only watch her perfect lips move and heard nothing. The man, she was sure she’d been told names but couldn’t now recall them, started to speak instead.
Something finally made an impression and Rani stopped him short. She blinked and shook her head. “Did you say two years?” He gave her an odd look. Maybe she’d already asked that…
“Yeah. Something wrong, Shepard?”
Oh, what a question. How about everything? Every single aspect of this absurd impossible scenario. But she didn’t say that. She looked away, out of the small window, where she barely saw the stars streaming by.
Two years…
It felt like moments since she’d been gasping over Alchera, unable to respond to the desperate voice coming over her comm and begging her, please God please, to hold on. Her memory was pretty fuzzy, her thoughts firing oddly, but she remembered dying. The creeping cold taking hold of her, the rasping emptiness in her chest as she tried to fill it with oxygen that simply wasn’t there, the shadows at the edge of her vision that had soon swallowed her whole. Something wrong? That wasn’t a question to ask someone who was two years a corpse.
Two years.
Where was her crew now? How many had survived? What the hell had even happened? They’d been after Geth but that sure as hell hadn’t been any Geth ship she knew of.
And where was Kaidan? She’d been trying to keep the thought at bay, tried to keep him from her mind, but it came all the same. He’d listened to her die, helpless to intervene, stuck in a pod that he couldn’t control and could only listen as she suffocated alone in empty space. Had he made it OK? What was he doing now? Did he know that her body had been recovered, that she’d been revived? Surely if he did he’d be here now. With everything they’d wanted, everything they’d been risking for each other; He’d be here. Suddenly, of all the aches throughout her body, her heart ached the most. They’d had so little time and been so freshly in love. And now-
Two years.
A lot could change in two years.
“Shepard?” Jacob asked again. Right. Jacob, that was it. Rani sighed, a little breath that clouded on the cold glass.
