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I will walk with frost and fire
and death and snow,
and my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping,
but I will stay alive,
because more than anything else
you wanted me unconquerable
-- Pablo Neruda, The Dead Woman
* * *
Jag har varit med om dig
Jag kan aldrig förlora dig.
-- Jacques Werup
(I have experienced you
I can never lose you.)
1.
“Don’t leave me behind,” he says, begs, his voice cracking over the broken city.
There’s fire around her when she answers, piles of rubble beneath their feet and he remembers kissing her before they headed out, remembers how she had tasted, the salty warmth of her skin, the slight tremble to her mouth as she pushes back sorrow with bravado and sheer force. Shepard. It’s always been her, it will always be her; he can see no other way.
"Whatever happens, know that I love you, always," she replies, her commanding, charismatic voice softer than he’s ever heard it.
---
In his life there are a few moments, torn out of the ordinary passage of time:
Discovering his biotics, the pull from within, the sharp jolt of fear. The way he’s staring into the mirror afterwards, blinking and turning, going after something intangible; he never quite looked the same in his own eyes again after the discovery, certainly not after Jump Zero. As if the boy he used to be was the price that had to be paid.
Vyrnus dying and then dead, more painful than it had to be and even that he can’t grieve so he knows he’s a monster.
The look on Rahna's face, equal parts fear and disgust as something breaks between them, brittle as glass.
The night before Ilos, snapping out of every boundary he’s set, completely terrified and human and the most vulnerable and the most himself, each kiss a damn revolution. Shepard’s gaze, wide-open and full of love and he thinks oh, so this is how it's meant to be.
Watching Normandy blow up with her still on board.
Becoming the second human Spectre in the middle of an ongoing extinction, the subdued pomp and his own questionable pride.
Telling her, finally telling her, that he loves her and always has, always will. Her gaze on him then, catching hold of him, matching him. Her laughter, low and dark and glittering like something you find at the bottom of a lake, a treasure caught in the sunbeams.
The minute - 2208, local time - when the Reapers stop as the fighting just ends - followed by a suspicious silence that can be felt everywhere. Kaidan blinks through blood and grit and too much medigel in the crowded medbay. She won, he thinks and tries not to assume that also means he's lost her.
The moment - a drawn-out echo, sharp and relentless - when he realizes he has.
2.
He's not dead so he keeps living.
Hackett gives him a month off.
He doesn’t know what to do with it; he works wherever they need a hand, afraid to even stop and breathe. They search for survivors, quenching their own hope by turning the stones and finding only corpses. They sort out logistics and update their rosters, trying in vain to bridge all the gaps; the vastness of their losses like staring into an abyss.
Two months and they hold their ceremonies, pull out their memorial plaques and speeches. There’s talk about a massive monument where the Crucible had been that night when they won, there’s talk about re-naming the place to Shepard Square. There’s talk about a lot of things. Occasionally he’s being asked for his opinion and answers that he doesn’t know.
He doesn't know.
He’s hurting. Even in the face of all this abundance of death, in a galaxy where no one has been spared, he nurses his own pain like a wound and hates how ferociously he grieves her, how small-minded it makes him, how it narrows his vision.
Hackett gives him another month, firmer this time, putting the weight of his authority behind every word.
“I promised her I would look after you, Major,” he says. "Keeping that promise is the least I can do, don’t you think?"
Kaidan can’t argue with that so he goes home, all of his uncried tears forming a headache that feels like a storm.
Outside his window, the Reapers reconstruct Big Ben; he pulls the curtains shut and turns away.
3.
The entirety of Liv Shepard’s life can fit in fifty boxes.
Kaidan looks at the strange clutter of model ships and medals, books he doubts she's read and gun mods she hadn’t got around to use. Never will now. She once told him she used to possess nothing but a patched-up backpack with her belongings, moving from one shitty place to another down on Earth. That she’s compensating for it, gathering stuff around, walling herself in like an old fortress. She picks up things everywhere, buys the most ridiculous items and upgrades and pretends they’re for someone else.
(He ought to start correcting his own grammar, he knows, but if anyone is made for present tense, it’s Shepard.)
"Lola was a hoarder, no other way to put it," James says, nodding towards a stack of old N7 manuals and what looks like recipes. Did she ever cook?
Don’t touch anything, Kaidan replies, or thinks he replies, not lifting his gaze from the boxes. Nothing is labelled or sorted, the boxes mirroring the chaotic pattern of belongings scattered around her cabin, and whenever he picks something up, he has to put it back down again, the sense of disturbing the peace so overwhelming that it makes him sick. Except there is no peace, not for the one who has earned it more than anyone else.
He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with these things, with her, with the remains that pop up wherever he goes. He moves through all the stages of grief he knows about with a sense of shattering, unresolved fury in his bones, comes to a halt somewhere around a mild depression and then someone finds her N7 helmet - again, all of it happens again and he just can’t accept that this loss never ends - which sends him spiraling back to the beginning. To all of this.
At this point she’s been a ghost longer than he got to hold her in his arms and it exhausts him.
---
An hour or so later, Cortez stands in the doorway. Not exactly hesitating, but waiting.
It’s blatantly obvious that James unofficially has appointed him as Kaidan's personal grief counselor. He can easily picture it, even hear it: I'm out of my depth here, Esteban. What if he starts crying? (Rich coming from a guy who cries to sports.)
Maybe he should be annoyed with the arrangement but he’s not, it's almost touching.
"James said you could use a hand."
“Only if you brought whiskey,” Kaidan says, actually not that serious, but Cortez takes a step forward, two bottles in hand.
“Sure thing.”
---
“I’m not ungrateful that the war is over,” Kaidan announces, more than halfway through the cheap-tasting swill that burns through his system. “I mean - this is, this is-
“Hell?” Cortez fills in, raising an eyebrow. He knows the mechanics of this, Kaidan realizes, knows abrupt loss and the patched-up existence that follows, because something has to follow.
“It’s a lot."
“You don’t have to be grateful.”
“Yeah?” It feels like he has to. Hell, it feels like they all have to. Make the sacrifices count. What he really feels beneath it, bone-deep and harrowing, is that they owe her all this.
“Yeah.” Cortez takes another mouthful from his bottle, unable to suppress a slight grimace as he swallows. Somehow the sight of it, the little notion, makes Kaidan want to laugh, despite it all. It’s an aspect of grief he desperately hates, the way it breaks his self-control, all those tight lines drawn between emotions and reactions.
He doesn’t laugh.
“Thank you,” he says instead.
The grimace returns as Cortez holds up the whiskey again, swirls it around. “No need to thank me for this.”
“I meant for -'' Kaidan gestures vaguely towards the walls in the room that spins somewhat. “You know, babysitting me.”
There are soft wrinkles in the corners of Cortez’s eyes - Steve’s, he thinks, it probably ought to be Steve when you’ve spent an evening drinking yourself to oblivion like this - when he grins.
“I don’t mind.”
“Yeah?”
The grin widens. “Yeah.”
4.
They keep living.
The official Alliance records state it was the Crucible, activated by Systems Alliance Commander Liv Shepard, that stopped the war and forced all enemy forces to fall back, reprogramming the Reapers in the process.
It’s a good story, a compelling narrative.
It’s a good story; only a handful of them know the real truth.
Kaidan wishes more than almost anything that he didn’t.
---
“Are they really, I mean-”
“Can she-”
“Even if their motivations fundamentally differ, all my data indicates that the human that once was Commander Shepard might be doing what the Illusive Man tried to do but ultimately failed at. It is admirable.” EDI picks up their broken threads, offering a shade of pragmatic comfort Kaidan can’t stomach so he stays away. There is nothing pragmatic about his grief, it cannot be reduced to form or function.
"I think perhaps the scale of this war always called for something greater," Liara says. "She learned that on Ilos."
Something greater, Kaidan thinks.
They miss their hero, their immovable center, the vanguard that refused to be defeated and saved them all.
But he never wanted to be saved.
He remembers Ilos and what came after, remembers the people they had been then, how they took in everything and sorted it out, how she led them without flinching. And the doubts she kept for him, shedding the burden of command under his touch. Tell me everything will be okay?
Commander Shepard was absolutely magnificent, fearless and indomitable; Liv was a sloppy, impatient, overcompensating human who snored loudly and forgot everybody's birthdays and he loved her. Not because she saved their asses, but because she occasionally didn’t want to.
So he steers away from EDI's logic and Liara’s grand scheme of things as he carries the boxes with her belongings off the Normandy and into his temporary apartment in London where the Reapers still soar in the air, picking up roofs from the ground and constructing new bridges.
After Horizon, he saw her in every Cerberus operative he came across, his mind doing a double-take at the black-and-white coloring, the signature armor.
Now he habitually lowers his gaze as the gigantic black shapes appear in the sky. They're the most prominent change to the cityscape and he can't acknowledge it, can’t look. Out of fear he’d recognize her in them, out of fear he wouldn’t.
5.
They keep living.
They bury their dead and count their victories. The ones that can endure it draw up plans for a future that waits around the corner, the ones that can’t sift through the pieces of their past.
As some kind of warm autumn turns into a much colder winter, they make up a little galaxy of their own in the ruins of the one they lost. Most of the Normandy crew remain in London, a few scatter elsewhere, travel back to long lost homes or go in search of relatives and work that needs to be done. The humans and the turians form alliances, having become used to working together and Kaidan watches Hackett and Victus deep in conversation with an odd sort of pride.
She did that.
Some days are good days. The Biotics Division stumbles over salvageable eezo; a mother finds her son alive in a hospital and they get to witness it; a fleet of Geth rebuilds all the power stations in Europe in a couple of weeks; there is enough food to feed the population of London and the same status is reported in from Hanoi, Amsterdam, Moskow.
At the Alliance Headquarters they fix their broken roofs and gather around the tables for dinner, leaning into each other’s existences for shelter and company. Kaidan is reminded of his time at Basic, of the particular kinds of friendships formed through close proximity and shared prerequisites.
Some days are torments that just don't let up. New body counts and previously unearthed secrets of the Reaper occupation; another scouting shuttle gone missing in the Terminus system; marines dying in slow, painful manners; civilians succumbing to previously unknown or previously curable diseases. One day their scout team comes across a whole building full of dead human children. Starved to death, not a scratch on their bodies.
"Stupid kids were too good at hiding," Zaeed says, voice thick with badly suppressed despair.
"They were huddled together.” Steve throws the reports aside and looks at Kaidan across the table in their makeshift headquarters, later, past nightfall. There’s a crack in his gaze, a breathless kind of pain. “The kids. Held each other's hands. I wish I had never seen that."
"I'm sorry you had to," Kaidan says; he is.
Putting down his own stack of reports and Spectre business, he moves a little closer. The room suddenly feels too big for them to be in two different corners of it and Steve’s gaze follows him. He has the bluest eyes and a way of looking at you like he’s really seeing you and it does things, it does, even if this is not the time, even if no time is now, not after the world ended. In another life, perhaps.
“Man, I hate war,” Steve says in this one, restlessly tapping his fingers against the table.
And before he’s stopped himself, Kaidan reaches out, soothing the nervous rhythm with his palm. Steve’s hand is warm and calloused, a solid reminder of what the Reapers couldn’t destroy - their humanity, their connection, the million ways in which they are the same.
They remain there for a long while, just sitting together in silence, and it’s liberating, nothing short of a damn revelation to mourn something else for a change.
---
For the next scouting mission Kaidan comes with them; he sits in the front as Steve takes them through war-torn passages and up among the Reapers that still haven’t finished rebuilding. The shape of them against the sky, the silhouettes of a past that hasn’t faded away and he swallows, looks at the screen instead, studies the back of Steve’s neck, the muscles and sinews moving gently.
Don’t be afraid, Shepard urges in his head but he is.
He recalls countless scenarios just like this: briefings and debriefings in the Kodiak, drawing up increasingly desperate plans when the first three had failed, Steve defying all odds to get them out of assorted death traps.
He remembers waiting on the shore as Shepard went to the depths of the ocean to investigate the Leviathan, remembers his own sense of insignificance as they stood there, shoulder to shoulder beneath a wide-open sky, waiting for their commander - larger than her own role, much more amazing than anything she might find down there - to ascend. And Steve had been there, full of the technical solutions that momentarily eluded Kaidan, had offered a pat on his back, a discreet nod to the worst kept secret in the Systems Alliance.
We'll get her back, sir.
“I’m trying to remember how London looked without them,” Chavez says, in the back of the shuttle.
“Yeah, they still creep me the fuck out.”
"I don't know," a lieutenant from the First fleet cuts in. "Saw a Reaper get blown to pieces when it wedged itself between a bomb and a Turian garrison. I'd say that merits some trust."
(Please, trust me.
I’ll never doubt you again.)
Maybe it’s time.
Kaidan inhales as he looks sideways, through the shuttle window opening up. Geth and Reaper forces greet him, transporting large blocks of stone between them.
"Looks like they’ve almost finished this part of town," Steve says. "Even cleared out the rubble in the water."
"Yeah," one of the soldiers in the back agrees. "Hard to see how we'd be where we are now without that help."
Kaidan runs a hand across his forehead.
He remembers Shepard raging over the Illusive Man's vain mission to control the enemy, to dominate the indomitable for the wrong reasons, raging about the fickle motivations and twisted ambitions, the goddamn injustice of Cerberus and he holds the memory of her like a shield as he looks up, straight into the red beams and dark matter. Don't be afraid. For a beat, brief and shivering, he imagines there’s something familiar gleaming there, the imprint remains a quiet fire in his mind
"Approaching landing zone in five, Major." Steve’s voice slices through the slight haze and he adds, in a different note altogether, a quick glance outside of protocol: "Everything alright there?"
And Kaidan nods, thinking it might not even be a lie this time.
6.
One year draws to a close and for the first anniversary, Steve takes him out for beer. Kaidan talks too much, talks all the time, drinks six beers and more whiskey than he should and rambles on about Reapers and the Council and Shepard until his throat itches. They sit all night in one of the pubs that first re-opened and the stock and range is beyond bad but it’s still a pub so people gather and they both crave people.
“You won’t get over her,” Steve says softly, when Kaidan places two new beers between them. “Doesn’t really work like that. But you’ll find ways around it, you know?”
“Have you?”
“I think so.” He looks down at his hands. Kaidan observes fresh cuts there, a narrow burn. A mechanic’s hands - or a map of his recent vehicle finds - he’s eager like a child every time they carry something new home from their scavenger hunts and it makes Kaidan feel a little jolt of affection. He likes that he knows this. “Shepard helped me a great deal.”
“Of course she did.” Kaidan runs his thumb over the label on his beer, tracing the letters. When he looks up, he sees that Steve is giving him a searching glance, his expression shifting slightly.
They share a smile that feels like the night itself - wobbly and full of a painfully fragile hope.
After Alchera he mourned in private, mourned alone and it did dark things to his mind. This time around the pain is harsher, a precision blade to his heart, but it’s also more clear-cut and the burden, he realizes, is shared, the grief fundamental for their brave new world.
Perhaps it makes them all bolder, gentler.
"Tell me about Robert," Kaidan looks at the man beside him, tries to picture him with someone else, tries to ignore the slight discomfort in that thought. "I mean - I mean, if you want to."
A warm glint in his eyes. "I always wanna talk about Robert."
Then he does, balancing out Kaidan’s long monologues with stories about their wedding, the house they only lived in for short bursts of time - I built a porch, old-fashioned style - the garden Robert wanted and the way he had asked Steve not to hide behind him, not let him become an anchor.
“Easier said than done,” he says.
“He’s the love of my life,” he says. “But I’ve got a lot of life left.”
“He would have liked you,” he says.
And Kaidan nods, smiles, listens.
It’s the first time they truly speak of it, the conditions of grief, the way it dislodges everything.
It’s the first time he thinks that maybe, maybe, there is something afterwards.
7.
They keep living.
The winter is freezing cold at first, hitting new records every day, then all the snow and ice melts in a strange heatwave and there’s a sense of unrest to the weather, mirroring the rushed and patched-up way they’re continuing their lives. Kaidan splits his time and attention between the Alliance and the Council, both parties deeply changed but hopefully for the better; he cooks dinner for the Biotics Division and for Steve when he can get his hands on ingredients; he checks in with Coats and he calls Hackett; every once in a while Kenneth and Gabby invade his privacy, demanding beer while watching Blasto and sometimes they invite Joker.
Spring comes and he remembers caring about those things as a kid, remembers the seasons and their inherent expectation, all the hope for change.
It’s the second spring after the war and the first he spends without holding his breath, clenching around his own grief like a fist.
It’s a life full of absences but it’s life.
He meets with old friends from Vancouver as he spends a month at the HQ there, assisting a general in restoring the biotics training division. They’ve all lost someone - parents (they stood no chance), partners (he fought in New York, they lasted two days), even children (she was four, she got scared and ran out of our shelter). He feels at once completely raw and oddly free talking about the war with people that lived through it in a different way; he thinks about Shepard and talks about Shepard and in his mind she’s bright and brilliant and she doesn’t hurt.
On the way back to London, he stops by the N7 recruits and gets roped into having tequila with James which feels like an almost provokingly normal thing to do. And it is. They get drunk, reminisce about all the brutes they’ve killed - remember Lola and her biotic charges, fucking loco - until dawn.
“After that party at the Citadel - she sent me everything she had on Torfan,” James says, looking into his last tequila shot. “All her notes, reports, her psych evaluations - all of it. I told her once I didn’t want to lead again after - after I lost a lot of men. That I couldn’t. Guess she really wanted to prove me wrong, huh.”
“She was the fucking best,” James says, clearing his throat.
"She was," Kaidan agrees, with a smile that rises from the depths of him.
I always wanna talk about Robert.
In London, when he returns, Steve looks up from behind a half-finished repair of the Kodiak as Kaidan walks by. He’s wiping oil from his palms and picks up a mug of coffee - black, with sugar, his hands could arrange it in his sleep - and it’s such a weird sense of relief, watching it. The image of him, the domesticity breaking through even in these war-torn surroundings where the air still whispers about destruction but the people are warm and alive, pushing forward.
“Hey,” Steve says; he hasn’t shaved, the rough beard framing his face makes something click in Kaidan’s chest. “Long time no see, Major. Welcome home."
Home, Kaidan thinks.
Home.
Spring comes and there aren’t nearly enough trees or flowers around for it yet to look like a proper spring but he tells himself to close his eyes and turn his head up towards the sun and when he does, it still feels the same.
8.
The megaregion of London finishes the construction of the Shepard Square - an idea which Kaidan ultimately dismissed - and calls its brand new hospital Liv Memorial - a name he ultimately ended up approving, mostly because he was worn down - and the surviving Normandy crew is invited to its grand opening.
He hasn’t worn his dress blues since Shepard’s funeral, back when the universe was darker and he was still in pieces. It strikes him that he isn’t, anymore.
“Between the three of you, who’s the most eligible bachelor in London? You’ll have to battle it out, ‘cause I don’t know.” Joker gives him a quick glance and nods towards Steve and James, both of whom are wearing suits. Suits .
(He’s never seen Steve in a suit, with a beard and the desire is gut-deep and instant, his brain and body finally connecting, putting the pieces together.)
“Don’t look at me, Flyboy, I’ve got options,” James retorts. "Weren't you dating some scientist, Esteban?"
“I don’t kiss and tell, Mr Vega.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
“Well,” Joker turns his gaze back to Kaidan who’s too warm in his formal wear, scrambling for lost momentum. “These two gentlemen accounted for - that leaves you, then.”
Kaidan snorts, softly, rubbing the bridge of his nose. There’s something about the word ‘eligible’, and the word ‘bachelor’ - and yeah, there is definitely something about the word ‘dating’ that creeps up on him, dark and heavy.
“Leave him alone, you old snitches,” Steve swoops in, a note of seriousness in his amusement and Kaidan can’t help but smile as they leave the Headquarters side by side, slipping out beneath the star-lit sky.
---
He has a glass of mediocre wine and a pretty terrible drink before it’s his turn to speak; Hackett briefly pats his back as he walks up to the centre of Shepard Square.
Shepard goddamn Square.
It’s exactly the sort of thing she always claimed she hated but secretly adored - the pomp, the glitter, the over-dramatic venue - and he’s suddenly glad the admiral got the last say in this matter and allowed them to make it happen.
He’s glad for a lot of things these days.
Kaidan holds a speech about how her real name wasn’t Liv, but when they found her outdoors, by a dumpster, the staff at the orphanage in Ottawa had guessed she was of Nordic descent with her blonde hair and pale skin and in the end, he says, it really doesn’t matter where she was from, because she dedicated her life to fighting for them all.
“Her name means life,” he says. “And nothing could have suited her better.”
In the buzz of the crowd with the blue and gold blurring together in his vision, he thinks he can see her, briefly. See her like he remembers her on the Normandy, war lighting her up from the inside. She’d told him she had been given so many chances and taken them all, that she had no regrets, held no grudges.
And you, she’d said. I’ve had you. We happened. Nothing erases that.
He'd held her tighter then, his mouth in her hair and tears in his eyes.
Now, he lets her go.
---
“Hell of a speech.” Steve walks up to him, hands in his pockets; and he has that way of looking at him that makes Kaidan want to reach out and trace the outlines of his face. “You look well. I haven’t seen you in-”
“Two months.”
Something moves around them, a subtle thing but Kaidan can feel it, the way he feels the closeness of their bodies and how Steve fills out the empty space beside him.
“I don’t blame you, you’re a busy Spectre.” And that smile, pulling at strings deep inside.
“Well, I’ve - so, you’re dating, huh?”
Now Steve chuckles, but not unfriendly - never unfriendly - and his gaze is suddenly wide-open, warm, amused. He looks so damn good.
“Was,” he corrects. “Nothing serious." Then his voice drops to a note that lands somewhere south, makes Kaidan want to grind up against Steve's body. "Why, are you jealous, Major?”
Kaidan nods. “Yeah.”
He wants to ask him things, wants to tell him things, wants to explain how terribly, frustratingly slow he is and how he still hopes that -
He feels Steve’s fingers on his wrist, his knuckles brushing over Kaidan’s skin and there’s that desire again, coiling down his spine. He senses his own breathing like storms building up when they’re suddenly turning, chests angled against each other as Steve holds his gaze. Kaidan presses one hand against Steve’s chest, the other one trails dark curls at the nape of his neck and he thinks very briefly that everyone can see them, thinks so let them talk and then, eventually, he doesn’t think at all because Steve closes the last distance between them.
And their kiss, when it finally comes, is calm, certain, a breathless promise of more.
9.
They're not dead so they keep living.
It’s the only promise they can make to the ones that went before them, the loved ones that carry them into the future. That they’ll live.
They’ll plant trees, grow gardens, make babies, clean up the oceans and let the dead rest.
This planet was once a home, it’ll be again.
It is what it is; they are what they are.
They’re not the love of each others lives and maybe that’s sad but part of him thinks thank the fuck.
They’re two men fast approaching forty, full of rough patches and broken faiths; they’re leftovers from a war that has made them both incredibly lonely and one night under the stars, Steve tells him they don’t have to be, that there’s a little life in them yet.
And Kaidan, in turn, lets most of the model ships finally get auctioned off on the extranet to benefit a huge post-war fundraiser while Shepard’s collection of old music and videos fall into the eager hands of an Alliance archivist who promises to treat it with the utmost respect.
"She would have liked that," Steve says.
"It would have gone to her head," Kaidan jokes and the edges of it bear the trace of longing, always longing for her, but in his memory she smiles back at him and that’s all he can ask for.
"Sure would have."
Nobody can compete with the dead, Steve had told him once during those terrible first months after the war. Kaidan hadn’t wanted to listen then, hadn’t seen the point. Nobody could compete with Shepard even when she was alive.
He sees it better today, out in the warm summer afternoon. There’s a hope of rain in the air and a bite to each breath as they walk down the street, side by side. Just around the corner from the little dextro-food shop that’s struggled to stay open lately, Steve grabs his hand and squeezes it.
Kaidan doesn’t let go.
Soon there will be a new season, a winter followed by a third spring, maybe the trees will bloom; he thinks that he wants to see it.