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Kaidan looks.
He stumbles, over rubble or bodies he doesn't know, doesn't care. He doesn't care when his hands are cut and bleeding, when his legs and heart ache with the weight of himself and his thoughts. He fears he will fall, and that when he does, he'll never be able to get back up. Yet still he searches, until his eyes are wet and the ground becomes blurred.
As the darkness of the past months clears and the sky is once again blue (a familiar sort of blue – light, he remembers it brings both anguish and joy), as the sun shines on ashes to reveal the cracked and charred remains of a world he no longer recognizes, he doesn't stop. Even as he slows, his body fatigued and mind aching, he doesn't – can't – stop.
There's hope, Kaidan thinks. He has to be alive. All this, and now he decides to quit? That's not like him. He has to be waiting.
Another step, another suit of charred armor, another body that isn't his.
Kaidan walks on.
Liara eventually finds him, herself covered in dirt and blood and God knows what, and she places a hand on his shoulder, forces Kaidan to look at her. Her eyes, the truest blue Kaidan's ever seen, search his face, minute movements he focuses on to stay calm. She knows what he's doing, what he's going through, who he's looking for.
“There has to be something.” His voice is rough, dry, like the ground he walks on and the air he breathes. “There has to be.”
Liara places a hand to his cheek, and of course her hand is still soft after all this time. No amount of pain or weapon grips could change that.
“Kaidan,” her voice is soft, too. Gentle. She doesn't look in his eyes. “Shepard, he...” She pauses.
Kaidan says nothing.
“EDI ran a scan of the area, searching for his vitals, a comm signal, anything we know that could be him.” Another pause, an inhale and a slow sigh. “Kaidan, she found nothing. He's... he's not here.”
There is silence, silence as he stands, surrounded by destruction and death and the ruins of everything he has known. Silence as his legs finally give out, his resolve washed away like sand on the shores of English Bay.
He had hoped to take Shepard there, one day. Stand with him on his parent's balcony, holding him again with the quiet voice of the ocean, a cold lager and a warm feeling in his chest that everything was right in his life, for once.
As Liara kneels and cradles his head to her chest there is silence, still, and Kaidan knows that he will never be able to get back up.