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"You miss it?"
Shepard's question had been playing on James' mind all day. She'd asked about his previous life, but he hadn't asked about hers - too busy denying that there was anyone waiting for him back home.
It was a strange concept. His home was here for now: the Normandy. But even though Earth was where he'd come from, he couldn't say that any one city pulled his sense of belonging any more. He wanted to save all of it, but his place was now at Shepard's side. Yet for all that he knew about her - all the things he'd read and vids he'd seen before meeting her, and everything since - he didn't know her answer to that question. Any idiot could assume they knew how she felt.
James didn't want to be that idiot.
Shepard's cabin door opened, and she showed mild surprise that he was there leaning against the wall. "Hey. You waiting for me? You could have just knocked."
"Sorry. Just thinking."
"What about?" She leaned against the same wall next to him. "You need my help."
"Ah, not so much. Nothing like that. You feel like talking?"
"Sure. Are you comfy out here, or would you like to come in?" Her lips quirked with the hint of the tease in her voice.
"Heh. Last time..." Last time he'd ended up flirting about the bed. Not what he wanted to be thinking about right now. He wouldn't dance around the subject. "Tell me about where you came from."
The Normandy hummed low in the silence before she spoke. "That's a big question." Shepard shifted her weight, looking into his eyes. "What brought this on?"
"I just wanna know, ya know?" James scoffed at how that came out. "I mean, I get that you're the Commander, but when you listen to your crew you should have someone that listens to you."
She smiled. "How do you know I don't?"
James put his hands up. "If I'm steppin' on any toes..."
"You're not." Shepard sighed, her lingering smile fading as she looked up at the lights. "I don't talk about it because it's all on record."
"I don't give a shit what's on the record, Shep." James pushed off the wall. "Hell, anyone lookin' at mine wouldn't be able to tell you the first thing about how I felt."
James thought he might have crossed the line then, but Shepard just closed her eyes.
Shepard found the stark environment of the hallway easier to open up in than in her cabin - the cabin where she'd had nightmares about everything from the fate of her squadmates in Akuze to the destruction of the first Normandy. But James wanted her to go further back, so earnest in his wish to have her talk. Her thoughts turned to complying rather than resisting, but she couldn't go back to Mindoir without unsticking herself from the day that formed a blood red barrier to her past. Even though she had no reason to reveal her feelings now, the simple act of asking for them had already started to unearth them. What did he want them for? To know he wasn't the only one who suffered?
"What's off the record isn't any big mystery. It's not gonna be some big psychological revelation. People died; I was horrified. And that feeling... to put into words... you know how-"
Shepard stopped herself. She wasn't here to try to imagine what James had gone through and ask him to recall that. She had to describe it in her own words.
"I had to fight so hard to live after that. I could have just stopped. I wish I had, to stop having to be the one carrying it around. The people who died, they were never numbers. You can't just wipe out family after family like that. And I... couldn't do a thing." Her voice thickened. "When I fight now, I'm doing what I couldn't do then. I don't care if I'm walking into hell, because honestly, I've already seen it. I've already lived it."
James watched her.
"It was a long time before that darkness stopped hanging over me. I'd walk past the other recruits and couldn't imagine that any of them knew the first thing about how to help me breathe again." She let in a little gasp. Caught back in that place, on the brink of falling to where she could have opened up, and changing the story, telling it now.
James' hand reached out to hers and slid around it, gentle, warm.
Shepard decided to fall.
It was too late to regret it when the tears sprang so easily from her eyes. She was trying to find words, dammit. That's what he wanted, to know where she came from, what her family was like. But nothing came.
James put his arms around her and pulled her close, tightening the hold. All it did was make her cry more. His warm body held her and she sank into the embrace. It couldn't change any of it. It couldn't change the scars she bore as Shepard. But it gave her something else to hold onto. She pressed her face against his big shoulder and let the fabric there take her grief.
After a few minutes, the outpour eased off, but he held her just as tightly, and she realised she had not stopped holding him. Finally the words came.
"I miss it. And I know I can never get it back. That's why I have to make the most of now, to make the most of what's precious to me." Shepard tilted her face up, looking at those warm hazel eyes.
"Yeah," James said. "I know what you mean."
He kissed her.
The past was always in her, but her future was right here, and she would fight as hard as she could to stop it from slipping away.