mass effect writetober || day eleven
prompt list ► CHAOS: a distinctive area of broken ground
[dedicating this one to @biotictrash and @renlyslittlerose <3]
Kaidan has never met anybody quite like Shepard.
He thinks about that more often than he might like to admit. He thinks about it over his morning coffee with Shepard’s bark of loud laughter rattling the table, filling him with a warmth he can’t explain. He thinks about it before getting to work on his afternoon reports, Shepard sprawled out on the seats in the starboard observation lounge where Kaidan likes to linger. He thinks about it on the shuttle ride to their mission, Shepard’s gaze boring into him across the cabin but always drifting just as Kaidan looks up.
Most of all, he thinks about it when Shepard’s not around.
Because when Shepard’s not around, Kaidan can see the chaos in Shepard’s wake, clear as day. Broken ground where his boots have tread, and Kaidan always seems to be following these trodden paths like he has nowhere else to go.
And Kaidan knows that isn’t true. He could have left the Normandy behind, gone to work with Hackett and stowed away the best part of three years to some forgotten corner of his mind. He could’ve gone silent, underground, fully within his newfound Spectre capabilities, and hunted for his biotics division to aid the war effort in his own way.
He didn’t have to follow Shepard.
Kaidan tells himself that every day, as if it’s an essential part to an equation he can’t quite solve. He runs the same algorithm, the same sequence of logic, always to an answer that doesn’t make sense. Not at first.
Slowly, though, Kaidan manages to find reason in the places he never thought to look.
It’s in the way Shepard always fixes him with a smile after his laughter dies out, as if to make sure he got the joke. It’s in the way Shepard always seeks him out, deliberately spending time in that quiet observation lounge to be with him. It’s in the way Shepard, for all his bravado and his bluster, won’t look at him before they touch down on a mission that could go so badly wrong.
Kaidan follows sequences, reason, rhyme; things that make sense. Shepard chases after the unknown with a ferocity that shakes a galaxy to its core.
For every neutral ground, there must be chaos. Kaidan understands that.
But Kaidan never quite considered that it applied to people, too.