Chapter Text
When Shepard had heard that one Kaidan Alenko would be on Horizon, her heart pitter-pattered in her chest; it thumped noisily, an uneven meter in the thick vein of her neck on the shuttle down to the planet’s surface, throbbing in her ears under the open sky, even the concern over whether Mordin’s seeker swarm solution would work bantering over their comms just background noise. She felt shielded, though not safe--whether for good or bad, she wasn’t sure--in full N7 armor, her breather helmet both claustrophobic and comforting. Miranda had been pissed when Shepard had picked Jack for the ground team; she’d told the Cerberus operative in no uncertain terms that she would not be leaving them together on the Normandy until they were less likely to blow it up nor bringing them both on a ground team for more or less the same reasons, and frankly, she trusted Jack more than she trusted Miranda.
Which was quite possibly a more accurate insight into her state of mind than anything else.
And, of course, there was no one else to have her six but Garrus. She wouldn’t have it any other way, and no one argued, not in sideways glances nor backward looks; there was a deeply built trust there, one that she needed in the tenuous days of the beginning of her second life, in a way that the turian understood perhaps in more ways than she could have guessed.
They moved through the devastated colony, dispatching husks, Collectors, sighing over frozen colonists, and all the while, the acid knot in Shepard’s stomach wound tighter around the Illusive Man’s voice; Kaidan, Kaidan, Kaidan.
“You! Hey, I know who you are, right? Some fancy Captain or something--”
Shepard had more or less tuned out the mechanic at this point, focusing on categorizing the nastiness of enemies they’d met, the effects of the interrupted attack on the colonists, extrapolating that data to the galaxy at large. Then there was another voice, one that made her heart stutter, even though she’d told it not to, told it to beat evenly, smoothly, strong, something it had decidedly failed to do.
She didn’t fail to notice that it wasn’t the first time it had done so.
“Commander Shepard. Captain of the Normandy. The first human Spectre. Savior of the Citadel.” The footsteps stopped, and she forced herself to look at the soldier in front of her, the black armor, the assault rifle, the heavy pistol, the tingle of the biotics that felt almost as familiar as her own, that familiar spark when their fields inevitably brushed together. “You're in the presence of a legend, Delan. And a ghost.”
“All the good people we lost, and you get left behind. Figures. Screw this. I'm done with you Alliance types.” The mechanic spat on the ground and left, grumbling in his wake.
They watched him go; then Shepard had the eerie feeling of eyes on her, and she turned her head to look straight at someone she desperately wanted--and dreaded--to see.
“I thought you were dead, Shepard. We all did.”
After an awkward moment, he stepped towards her, one arm held out, as if needing a handshake to see if she was even real. She obliged, almost warily, forcing herself to grasp his hand firmly, reeling as her pounding heartbeat chased the flood of adrenaline through her veins.
“Alenko,” Garrus said in greeting, his helmet tucked under his elbow.
“Vakarian,” he replied, nodding. “And...”
“Fuck off.”
Shepard’s mouth twitched; leave it to Jack to provide entirely inappropriate levity.
“Interesting company you keep, Shepard.” Kaidan glanced between the tattooed, barely-clad biotic and his former CO.
“You know my tastes, Kaidan.” The attempt at banter failed, miserably.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. At least I thought I did.” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“How... how have you been?” Fuck. Could this be going any worse?
Kaidan blinked, opened his mouth for a moment before he spoke. “Is that all you have to say? You show up after two years and just act like nothing happened? With Cerberus?”
Shepard’s mouth tightened. Her heart made itself known, again, except not in any sort of way she could rely on, racing and complaining about a lack of breath, knocking on her eardrums to alert her of the dangers of not breathing not breathing not breath--
“I thought we had something, Shepard. Something real. I... I loved you. Thinking you were dead tore me apart. How could you put me through that? Why didn't you try to contact me? Why didn't you let me know you were alive?”
Shepard swallowed, hard, trying to fight her facial expressions before remembering full breather, Shep, whoops. Realizing she still hadn’t holstered her weapon and that her hands were tensing dangerously, she compressed the SMG and clipped it to her thigh, took her helmet in her hands and turned; it came loose, and she removed it, habitually tilting her head so the base would clear her bun--except, well, she didn’t have one anymore.
Kaidan’s hurt, angry expression went very carefully blank as her new face was exposed. It wasn’t all that different from how Garrus had responded, really, except there had been a hell of a lot more relief in the turian’s gaze, like his prayers had been answered, almost. Maybe they had; without their rather timely intervention, he’d be very, very dead. But Kaidan? Kaidan had no idea what to do with what cards he’d been dealt.
The Amy Shepard he had known had thick, glorious black hair, one pale cheek pitted from a spray of maw acid on Akuze, a scar through the opposite eyebrow and along the upper cheek below, against-regulation piercings along both ears, the bridge of her nose crooked from some long-ago fistfight. The one before him bore exactly none of these untold tales. Her skull--and what had happened to it--stood in stark relief against the sunshine, the barest fuzz of growth coming in after the bit of repair work Chakwas and Miranda had done the week before; something with how the new plates in her neck were lining up with bone had been interfering with her amp port. Scars shined flat-smooth or glowed, depending where they were and what had been repaired and how; her nose was proud and straight, flaring too flawlessly where it met her lips, the once-rippled eyebrow and lower lid returned to smoothness. An overall youth to her skin didn’t help, either: it wasn’t a face that had years of weather against it, only days and weeks.
The foreign spheres that had replaced her eyes, the great betrayers in her face--they actually looked real, like the old Shepard’s--didn’t miss the subtle shifting of his features, something so slight that she might not have seen it, had she not known his face so well.
“I wasn’t,” was all she said, softly, and blamed the dampness on sweat and sunshine.