#broke my own rule to wait 24 hours before posting something i've written

[pigeontheoneandonly]

Once More, With Feeling

I thought about waiting for Kaidan Week’s LI theme day ( @spectrekaidanalenko ), but I liked this one too much not to share.  Inspired by @estalfaed’s post about Kaidan leaving for the Andromeda galaxy (with their permission).

Kaidan Alenko hunched over the bar in Kadara Port, picking at the label on his bottle. Nine years.  2194, in his bones, 2828 by the calendar, as much as calendars meant anything anymore.  Certainly it meant nothing here in this bar, halfway through three days of mandated shore leave.  His new C.O., some angara woman, took a certain delight in fussing over him.  

“No family,” she’d cluck.  “You need to live.”

Family was everything to angara, and he’d left his two and a half million light years away, to face a highly uncertain future.   Kaidan got out of cryo early, in the first wave of military reinforcements ordered up by Pathfinder Ryder, and was stationed at Eos until they figured out he actually knew how to fight, at which point he was shipped here.  

Kadara was a mess.  He welcomed it, work, distractions.  At least after the recent arrival of Ark Endymion, he could stop worrying about what happened back in the Milky Way.  There’d been a massive war— even with the careful way he filtered news that much was unavoidable.  And once he heard that, he couldn’t help but investigate the outcome.  Reapers defeated.  A little of his guilt lifted.

Not all of it.  His mother wept when he told them he’d joined the Initiative. Begged him not to go.  He didn’t know whether either of his parents survived, but for certain they’d died alone, at the hands of the reapers or age or something else entirely, while their only child traveled ever further away, lost in a dreamless dark.

Fear didn’t drive him from the fight.  It was John. Of course it was.  Because after almost two years of trying to get back to okay, nothing sounded better than a nice long sleep, and waking up someplace far away from every possible reminder of what he’d lost.  

Sure. He picked up the bottle and drank. At least the beer was getting better, as less essential crops started coming in.  Nothing like back home.  But palatable.

Six centuries and for what?  Maybe nothing here brought back old memories of his might-have-been life.  But every moment, every fantastical sight, every novel experience, tasted just a little sour from his absence.  John would’ve loved this. Exploring new worlds.  Finding new fights, new friends.  Forging a path on a real frontier.  

The beer was more than a little sour itself, especially as it warmed.  Kadara was hot as hell.  And nothing obfuscated the persistent stench of sulfur.

Kaidan was so deep in his own morose brooding that he jumped ten centimeters when the six pack thumped down on the counter beside him.  “You would not believe how much baggage allowance this cost me.”

The cardboard carrier read Molson Canadian Lager.  

“And in stasis, too,” its owner went on.  “That’s extra.”

Kaidan’s heart had physically stopped in his chest.  A stabbing ache that left him breathless.  He barely managed to raise his head.

John Shepard leaned against the bar, looking down at him with a smirk.  “Miss me?”

So it had finally come to this.  Enough pain and booze and loneliness, and he’d finally slipped over that last edge of insanity, and here was the hallucinatory proof.  John was eleven years dead.  Kaidan watched it happen, as the ship went to pieces over Alchera.

“What’s the matter?” the apparition asked, grin widening, as if pleased by his shock. “Cat got your tongue?”

Kaidan’s mouth moved.  Nothing came out.  Hand spastically gripping his warm beer bottle.

The bartender came over, and gave the six pack a very pointed look.  “Anything for you, sir?”

John glanced away, distracted.  “Uh, sure. Whiskey, neat.”

“You can see him?” Kaidan blurted out, garnering several odd looks.  

The bartender huffed.  “They’re really running you hard out there, huh.  You haven’t had nearly that many.”

Then she took herself off to fix the drink.  John slid into the next stool.  Reached over and tentatively took his hand, solid and real as the simulwood beneath his grasp.  “Kaidan, it’s me.  I wanted to surprise you, not… I didn’t think it through.”

His hand closed on his fingers without thinking.  Clinging so tightly the tips went white.  He suddenly couldn’t look at him.  Burying his eyes in his palm.

The barstool scraped along the floor.  And then John’s arm was around his waist, warm and strong and exactly how he remembered. His chin on his shoulder.  “Kaidan, it’s going to be okay.”

That broke him.  Because nothing had been okay, not once. “How?”

Then, as John opened his mouth to answer, Kaidan turned into him and put his face in his shoulder, his own arms sliding around the man he knew he’d never touch again. “Never mind.  I don’t care.”

“It’s a long story, anyway.  Not a particularly happy one.”  John’s voice muffled in his hair.  “I destroyed the reapers.  Then I got the Ark put together.”

“You—”

“How do you think it got done so quickly after the war?”  Kaidan could feel John’s grin against his head.  

It was infectious, cutting across his stunned disbelief. That cockiness was John all over. “And they didn’t make you their pathfinder?”

A chuckle. His chest tightened again at the sound. “I told them I had a different mission.”

Kaidan pulled back, searching John’s face, seeing it clearly for the first time. The flesh was cut here and there by orange cybernetic scars, their glow muddying his blue eyes.  His hair still buzzed close to his scalp.  He hardly looked a day older than Kaidan’s memories, but there was a heaviness in his expression, a weariness, an age, that spoke of things that could not be unseen.  He stroked John’s cheek.  “And how’s that going?”

“I think I’ll be able to report success.”  He leaned forward and kissed him.

That was the last clear memory Kaidan had of the next several hours.  John’s lips meeting his.  Shepard was a hard man, but his touch was so gentle, and that above all else convinced Kaidan this was really happening.  His whiskey went ignored.  As did Kaidan’s next beer, and the small parade of drinks they continued ordering to justify their seats.  They talked. Kaidan barely cognizant of what about even as they spoke, too caught up in a single circular line of thought: John is here, John’s alive, John survived Alchera and somehow he crossed dark space to find me again.  

Somewhere in there he apologized.  For leaving, for running so very far.  John hadn’t said anything to that.  Just kissed his cheek and held him a long moment. 

But even on Kadara, bars closed eventually.  They needed a few hours to mop up and restock.  The pair of them staggered out into the street, drunk on each other, the only six pack of Canadian lager in twenty-four quintillion kilometers banging against his leg.  Then John paused, leaning into him.

“There’s something else.”  He cleared his throat.  “I brought someone with me.”

All Kaidan could do was stare.  John rambled on.  “I didn’t want to wake her until I found you.  I needed to know… well, there was a chance you’d died somewhere along the way, or something just as horrible, what with the rough entry your wave had to Heleus, and I had to know what to tell her before she came out of cryo.”

He couldn’t believe it.  This was outrageous.  “You brought a back-up plan?”

“What?” And John’s confusion was so genuine it took him several blinking moments to figure it out.  “No.  Goddamn it. What do you take me for?”

“Then what—”

“I brought your mother, Kaidan.”

Kaidan was still as a stone.  Too stunned to move, his throat slowly closing up. John said, “Your father died in the war.  I’m sorry.  I found her afterward, told her what I was doing.  She insisted.  I thought she might.  You told me she’d never been to space, and well, this was one hell of an introduction.”

He took John’s head in his free hand and pulled him down into a long kiss.  “I can’t believe you.  I honestly can’t believe you.”

“I couldn’t believe you just left.  I know how important your family is to you.”

Kaidan rested his forehead against John’s.  “I know, I know.  I just… I missed you so much, I couldn’t stand it.”

John kissed him again.  Light, lingering.  “You won’t ever have to miss me again. Just maybe, this time, let’s skip the cryo?”

He laughed. He couldn’t believe he was laughing.  “Deal.”