Chapter Text
“So by that point, Williams is so pissed off she can’t even get out a ‘yes, ma’am’ so she storms off and punches the sensor for the airlock so she can go back to Flux to get her money back. Except…”
Kaidan is laughing into his glass as Garrus pauses in the telling of his story, as they both look over at Joker.
The haze of alcohol is settling over them, like a bandaid slapped over a cut that’s just a little too big and a little too fresh. As they have no where to go other than the Normandy’s bar, they’re drinking, and reverting to the standby script of many old soldiers in the wake of loss: trying to shut out the horror with alcohol and old stories.
James raises his eyebrows, waiting for the punchline. He’s three drinks ahead of everyone else, on top of sitting in the awkward place of being the only person in the room who hasn’t heard a well-loved and oft-told story.
“Well, on the SR-1, someone thought it would be a laugh-riot if the controls for the pilot’s sleeper pod and the ones for the airlock were on the same panel,” Kaidan explains.
James pauses, processing, before bursting out laughing.
“Yeah, yeah. Hilarious,” Joker says, “She hit the damned thing so hard three of my ribs broke as it came down.”
“Hey, no one makes you sleep right on top of the cockpit.”
They all quiet a bit, the way all soldiers do whenever a commanding officer speaks, no matter how informal the setting, all of them looking to her even just to finish a story ninety percent of them had witnessed first hand anyway.
The one exception to this being Joker, who—not being one to look to anyone for anything—says, “Oh sure, so when we’re on fire and hurtling through open space, I’ll leave it to one of you to crash into the nearest planet while I hobble up from a cushy bed on the crew deck.”
“Jeff seems to have forgotten that were he to take up in more comfortable quarters—or take some time off to socialize with his shipmates—I would be able to take the helm in an emergency.”
EDI’s voice comes from everywhere and echoes in the ensuing moment of silence.
“Wait, is that not where you are right now?”
“Why no, I was just on my way down to visit Engineer Adams. I was under the impression you were on duty right now.”
Joker opens his mouth, closes it again.
“EDI…”
“Shepard, please tell Jeff that he must work on being less gullible. This is the third time since our last visit to the Citadel that I’ve been able to alarm him enough to elevate his heart-rate.”
“You and I are going to have a talk about personal boundaries when I get back up there” he mutters, and answers Kaidan, Garrus and Shepard’s grins with an eyeroll. But still manages to smirk as he takes a sip from his glass.
“Wait the crew didn’t have cabins on the SR-1?”
They all look back at Vega with a playful combination of amusement and pity.
“The Alliance didn’t used to spring for cushions and coffee tables back when we were just fighting Geth, LT,” Joker says, motioning for Tali to top off his drink with the Turian liquor she’d pouring into Garrus’ glass. She’s had enough to drink herself that she’s about to do it before Kaidan reaches over and puts his hand over hers, stands on the rungs of his barstool to reach one of the beers behind the bar puts it in front of Joker instead. No one acknowledges that he just saved Joker’s digestive system from being shredded, even though they all notice. It’s just Kaidan being Kaidan.
It’s all a part of their script. When people are swimming in corpses and despair and the choice is either to laugh or drown, it makes things easier; the exciting stories, with near misses with no casualties; the bawdy stories where people walked in on other people with various articles of clothing around their ankles—a thing bound to happen with this many people crammed together in a tiny ship rocketing toward the end of existence; the funny stories about fallen comrades. But only the funny ones.
“I’m glad they took design input from someone other than the people who designed the N7 recruit barracks,” Shepard is saying, “Probably realized they could get more people to stick around if there were some comfy chairs and a poker table.”
She raises her glass to Kaidan, and the rest follow suit, all glad to have him aboard again.
He nods, smiles, drinks a sip of his whiskey that's already almost gone.
Yes, they're following a script. But theirs is a bit more dog-eared, a bit more rehearsed and revised than most. They know each other’s lines along with their own, know when going off book is a good idea. Most of the time.
“Shit, it sounds like Williams was something else,” Vega says, and they all look over at Shepard again. Force of habit.
Instead of speaking, she sits straighter in her seat, and they all follow. Fifteen or twenty breaths of quiet later, they all drink again. An impromptu memorial for a fallen comrade. And a moment of silence for an entire crumbling galaxy.
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He knew what she was doing. The last shot she’d taken confirming the course of the evening. Mariah Shepard had a remarkable amount of both alcohol tolerance and self control, and purposefully putting the latter aside and pushing the former to its limit was her way of screaming in the middle of a crowded room for help.
Years ago, before they’d been together, she’d done this now and again when missions went bad, either unable or unwilling to reach out to him or anyone. She was a good person. A person who helped. A saver of lives. Most people in her position would have learned to cope with the ugliness and the loss, to say ‘fuck it,’ that this was the way of the Universe, that people, sometimes, were twisted beyond repair and where battles were sometimes just lost.
But not her.
With her…every loss, every betrayal was felt more fiercely than the one before. On the battlefield, it pissed her off, made her move faster, fight harder. In the council chambers, it made her able to stand her ground, to hold the line for herself, her crew and humanity itself. It made her able to stand between a galaxy and a swarm of giant machines. But when all of the armor was stripped away, the medals removed and put back into their velvet boxes on her nightstand, it bowed her good, honest soul to the point of splintering into tiny little pieces.
Of course, if you thought about it for more than a second, he supposed that was what made her the one person who was able to do what she did.
So she drank a bit too much every now and again. Not so much for the sake of being drunk as to chuck the reigns out the airlock for a few hours.
Everyone needed help sometimes. And most people were trying to do a whole lot less than she was. So he’d sat with her during those times years ago, making sure she got to bed without breaking her neck, making sure she didn’t do anything stupid or say anything she might regret. Every time she’d thanked him, and every time he’d smiled and shaken his head, gently rolling his eyes and walking away. Because she had no idea how small and easy a thing it really was to him to help her.
Because the truth of the matter was, he just loved her.
Sure, he loved her in all those ways that make poets and writers get their warm fuzzies on, and and write sonnets and all of that. But, other times, particularly now, he felt for her in a way that made the words “I love you” as insignificant as Earth was to the rest of the universe.
When he’d lacked the words, he usually just settled on showing her what she meant to him in the tiniest bits and pieces, trying at first to spread them out and not make it too painfully obvious.
Officially, their relationship had been inappropriate in a thousand different ways, after all.
Later, after Ashley Williams had died on Virmire, when they’d said fuck the regs, because what was the point when they were probably going to die in a couple of hours anyway, he’d settled on simply using words, however silly they felt at the time.
Like an idiot, he’d thought the words would be sufficient at that Cafe on the Citadel. He’d hoped all the things they used to mean would come back to her, even after almost three years.
“I still love you.”
He knew she hadn’t forgotten. In that moment he knew, but then he’d royally fucked it up.
“I undestand why you cheated…”
Where the hell had that come from?
He downed the whiskey still sitting in front of him, a bizarre quirk of age-old sensory memory making his fingertips expect condensation to wet them, like it would have done if he’d been drinking at that bar on Alexander Street in Vancouver. It would be July or August on that little piece of Earth, and…
Jesus, he said to himself. You need to get. A. Grip.
Replaying the conversation in his head—and feeling like kicking himself—he longed to go back, to do the whole thing over again; To tell her her that he meant that he understood why she’d had to put her old life—the one she’d shared with him for a short time—on complete lockdown to get through being ripped apart and put back together again; to tell her he understood that she’d been paying off a life-debt to a guy who turned out to be a monster, and hadn’t known she’d turn out to be simply a cog in a machine that they’d all seen grind whatever was in its path to dust. He understood why she hadn’t come looking for him.
But of course he’d led with the words of a jealous asshat, making it about her and Thane Krios, not even a month after the guy had put himself between a Council member and a knifeblade.
A month after he’d been unable to pull the trigger on Udina, still letting that thread of doubt…
Stop.
But there was no stoping the replay of the afternoon in his mind at this point.
She’d taken her hand away from his, her face—so much more open than it used to be—visibly flushing. At first, he’d been arrogant enough to think it was embarrassment, but then he’d realized, as her eyes had flashed like pale blue glints practically blinding him like unfettered sunlight on ancient ice floes, she was pissed.
“How nice of you.”
“What?” he’d asked, knowing exactly what.
She’d shaken her head, paid the check, and started to stand up. He still thought he might have been been imagining it, but it had seemed like she was fighting tears when she’d paused, looking down at the table, “Kaidan, there are a lot of things I should be begging your forgiveness for. Thane isn’t of them.”
That had been four hours ago, and no more had been said about it.
Things had been civil. Friendly. Professional. It was a very rarely-seen stretch of down time, waiting for the traffic on the relays to lighten up so they could get clearance for Ilium. For the past two hours or so. since everyone had gone over their work a thousand times over, re-dotting I’s and re-crossing T’s before finally giving up to the notion that the busy work that had once occupied their ship-bound hours just didn’t fucking matter anymore. Since Shepard had found out it would be 48 hours before the traffic would clear and ordered a little stint of R&R, they had been trickling into the lounge. There had been a lot of reminiscing about the old days with Garrus and Tali and Joker, with Kaidan and Shepard avoiding mentioning each other unless they were absolutely essential to a particular story.
Shaking his head faintly, he almost asked Tali to pour him another—what would have been his fourth—but bit the inside of his cheek and stopped himself.
Don’t leave her alone tonight. Especially since his careless words were probably a pretty decent-sized hunk of the reason she was drinking too much. But that could have just been his ego talking.
When they’d been together, in the comparatively blissful six months before the first Normandy had been blown away and she’d died and him right along with her for a time, she’d slowly started trusting him enough to start telling him when she’d hit her limit on being Commander Shepard. Not that anyone could really take that burden from her. But in their off-duty hours, he tried to make sure she knew it was safe to be frustrated, to be vulnerable; to not be the one who had the answers to everything.
It had to be on her terms, of course. Being a person who’d kept things to himself since forever out of necessity, he’d known trying to make her trust him or confide in him before she was ready would have pushed her farther away.
But that had been centuries ago. Or might as well have been. He’d lost the privilege of her trust.
He wondered—and hated himself for the absurd pettiness of it—if she’d been able to let Krios see when she needed help…
“Fuck it,” he whispered, and gave into the inevitable. “Barkeep, top me off.”
Tali’s graceful three-taloned hands closed around the bottle as she poured a few inches of amber liquid into his glass, giving a sad little sigh.
He raised his eyebrows at her, and if he’d been in a better mood, would have made a smart comment about having words with the guy who’d done her wrong, and she would have not understood the joke and they would have all had a big laugh.
“All of the Quarian Spirits are gone,” she said, and the tilt of her head said she was longingly looking at the whiskey.
“Because you drank them,” Garrus said, his voice full of gentle teasing, still nursing his own glass of bright blue liquor.
Vega stopped short and narrowed his eyes. The expression, exaggerated by the half-bottle he’d polished off made Kaidan give a little snort of laughter in spite of himself.
“Tali drunk…” he said, clearly painting a very slow, very thorough picture in his mind, the smile broadening with every passing second. “Please tell me someone will take vids if I miss anything.”
"I second that," Joker tacked on, the slur in his voice definitely getting worse. Kaidan hoped Garrus would be sober enough to get him to his bed in one piece.
It went on like this for a bit. Tali, Joker, Garrus and Vega all growing more and more exuberant in their joking and storytelling, Shepard growing quieter with each passing second. Eventually, Mariah was the one standing behind the bar, Tali having taken her seat next to Garrus as the three allowed themselves the rare treat that laughter, real laugher, had become.
Kaidan sipped his whiskey for a little while longer, jumping into the conversation when invited, or when he had something to add. His laughter was dutiful, not forced but not entirely real either.
He was, of course, genuinely glad to be back on the Normandy, even though it wasn’t the same Normandy.
In a universe where rank, ambition, prestige and opportunity still mattered, he would have boarded that ship that was still, probably in an effort to maintain some semblance of business-as-usual, due to set off for training from the bruised Citadel in a couple of days and never looked back.
But now…he pictured living out his last days—and there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that these were the last days—at the head of a team of strangers. He pictured being Major Alenko, only the second Human SPECTRE, the voice of reason, always putting new recruits at their ease, always making the sound calls, from the time he woke up to the time he crashed, spending the few work-free minutes he might have in his own company.
Suddenly the picture was so vivid, so real, so achingly lonely in his mind that he stood up, feeling his eyes sting like they were coated with sand and his heart jump to his throat.
“One for the road?”
“Hm…what?”
“Do you want another drink before you leave?”
She had punctuated each word like he was on the other side of a door and was having trouble understanding her. She was smiling. Here eyes were full of teasing and had the same slightly syrupy glaze as Vega. Not sloppy, just…lanquid, content.
“Am I leaving?” he asked.
“You’re standing and holding your jacket, so...all the signs point to you leaving.” she said, her voice light.
Maybe she was forcing it, maybe she wasn’t, but he found himself smiling as she moved to fill his glass.
“I’m all set,” he said. “Somebody’s got to be sober enough to pay the tab.”
She poured another half an inch into his glass. “Eh, I know the owner of this dive and she might be willing to comp you a few.”
Again, Kaidan envisioned their past lives —had the Alliance sprung for a bar on the first Normandy—where he would have made some remark about what she wanted in exchange, and she would have whispered something explicit and delicious in his ear.
Oh, super, that's all you need to be thinking about right now, Alenko.
Vega, who had ditched the glass and was drinking straight out of a bottle now, chose that moment to knock over a shaker resting on the edge of the bar. The clang that echoed through the small Lounge was impressive, and hilarious to Vega, but it shot a bolt of pain through Kaidan’s optic nerve. It clawed its way down the inside of his skull and seemed to rattle through his implant and shake little bits of the damned thing loose as it settled.
“Son of a—“ he brought his finger up, let it sink between his eyeball and eye socket, wishing he could hook it through the thin membrane of his eyelid and wrench pain out before it started to fester into the inevitable migraine.
“You good?” she asked, leaning in as the other three continued laughing. Her voice was quiet, concerned, and her arm touched his where she rested it on the bar.
“Ah…yeah…damned thing has been acting up since…”
And he trailed off then…because he knew she blamed herself for what the Cerberus AI had done to him…
“Mars,” she finished, her voice still low, and he wasn’t sure the softness he heard was the alcohol or not.
He opened the eye that wasn’t aching and looked at her. It was true, of course. But it’s not like it was actually her fault. Her forehead was knotted with concern, but as he opened his other eye and let his vision clear, she smoothed it over, clapping his arm and teased, “Don’t be such a baby, Alenko.”
He smiled, and it felt remarkably real and warm as she turned away to join in with the others who were getting way more milage out of Vega’s clumsiness than it really deserved. The small things were what mattered now. Since all of the big things were falling apart.
He threw back the rest of the whiskey, stood, stretched and bantered with the others for a few minutes about making sure Vega had a ride home and making good decisions (which Vega very cheerfully parried with a string of “Thanks Dad” remarks) and started towards the door. He was through the vestibule and almost within reach of the sensors before he felt a light touch on his shoulder.