fadewalk | RP: Shepard

He'd been unconscious long enough that blood was a thick, tacky halo about his body and his limbs felt as if they belonged to someone else. At first, Kaidan had tried making his way down to the infirmary. It was slow and painful going--especially when it turned out the elevator was down and the power off, meaning he had to make it the long way around.

In the end, he stumbled, fell, crawled, and dragged his way along with more determination than real strength, leaving a trail of garish red in his wake. He paused now and again to catch his breath and flip through the strange journal that had been there when he'd woken up. He wasn't sure what he made of all of this, but since there seemed to be a castle visible just outside the Normandy--and since the guy he was talking to kept mentioning some kind of Inquisition--he figured...

...what? Blood loss? Hallucinations? Or was the afterlife a hell of a lot weirder than he'd ever figured?

Whatever it was, he wasn't the kind to just give up and die, no matter how drifty he was starting to feel. There was medigel in the infirmary. He just had to get there.

Kaidan managed to half-crawl, half-drag himself all the way to its (closed) doors after God-knew-how-long. The whole ship seemed to be spinning, and he felt peaceful enough to really be getting scared. He propped himself against the door and reached up to wave it open, breath coming in labored pants.

The door didn't open.

Shit. The power was off. Of course the door didn't open.

Kaidan dropped his forehead against the closed medbay door. "Well," he said, voice gone low and husky. "Fuck me."

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"Yeah and you're bleeding out." Shepard could have shouted for joy when he finally found the medigel, hidden behind machines and supplies he couldn't name. He turned back to the bed and found Kaidan struggling to get back up. "Fuck, Kaidan. Stop moving. You're going to increase the blood flow."

John quickly spread the salve on the worst of Kaidan's injuries. He put aside only one application for himself. He was in pain and his armor felt like it had melted onto his skin, but he wasn't bleeding to death. Kaidan needed it more than he did.

Through all of the blood, Shepard struggled to find all of the spots that needed to be sealed. "Is that it?" he asked and his heart raced. He was running low on medigel. "Is that all of it?" If it came down to wasting time searching the medbay for more and using the medigel he'd set aside for himself, Shepard wouldn't hesitate. Kaidan's life was more important than his easing his own pain.

Kaidan tried to catch at John's hands to still him. Stop him. "I'm good, Shepard," he said. Then, putting all the earnest weight he could manage behind it: "I'm good. Now sit down before you fall down, okay? I know that look in your eye."

He'd gotten damn good at recognizing it over the years, seeing how John liked to literally fling himself head-first into battle with krogan.

Kaidan swung his legs over the edge of the bed, still a little woozy, but already much stronger. The medigel was an icy relief, closing up the deep gashes that had sliced through his shields and armor during that last run toward the reapers. He tugged John closer, trying to use momentum to tug him down next to him on the bed--reaching for the medigel. "Your turn, okay? Let me look at you." He'd been the team medic from almost the word go, spending extra hours in the medbay picking up tips from Karin. He was never more relieved of that than now. "Jesus, Shepard. All this from just a few minutes?"

It had, after all, not been long since John had pushed him into the Normandy and took off.

Shepard let Kaidan tug him down onto the bed. It was difficult to tell where charred skin ended and charred skin began. He hissed and winced as he struggled to take his armor off, piece by piece. By the time he was finished, Shpeard's was wearing nothing more than his singed shirt and underwear. His armor was a pile on the floor. He was panting and in pain from where he'd had to pull at skin to separate it from metal, but it felt damn good to get it all off.

"Caught the edge of a Reaper blast," he told Kaidan, trying to catch his breath. Now that he sat down the adrenalin was draining out of him fast. Kaidan was a strong, steady presence at his side and he leaned against him without thinking. "Got... teleported or something. Up to the Citadel. Anderson," Shepard's voice caught in his throat and his stopped. He wasn't ready to talk about Anderson.

He shook his head and started again. "I've been dreaming about this kid I watched die in Vancouver. He was there. Or, a projection that looked like him was. Called itself the Catalyst. A lot of what it said didn't make sense. Said I had three choices. Destroy the Reapers, control them as some kind of... I donno, Reaper king? Or integrate all organic life with synthetics. Heh, some choice."

"I blew it the hell up and... then I woke up here. Kaidan, there's a damn castle outside, did you know that?" Shepard was babbling, but he seemed lucid, even if everything he was saying sounded nuts.

"All due respect, Shepard," Kaidan said with a husky laugh, hands gently (gently gently) working medigel into the worst of the burns, "but it sounds like you took a few blows to the head. You had a five minute head start on me at the most. No way all that could have happened."

He paused, looking John over.

"Okay, the blast I'll buy. Hell. Hold still; I know where Karin keeps backups." Kaidan was hesitant to step away--now that the adrenaline had worn off, John looked unsteady--but he forced himself to let go and hunt through Chawkwas' stash of medigel and ointments. "What would that even mean?" he continued, more to fill the silence than anything. "Synthesis?"

Shepard hissed and flinched away. He forced himself to take a long breath and moved back over so Kaidan could see to the burns. It was one thing to endure pain when you knew you had to. It was quite another to sit in the medbay and let someone poke at you. Even if it was for your own good.

"Maybe more time passed than you thought?"

Thinking about the Catalyst's choices just made Shepard angry all over again, but Kaidan asked. "I guess? It said it would be a new form of life. I'm not about to make that choice for the entire galaxy, Kaidan. That's life changing. Literately. It said that synthetics and organics would never be able to work together. Like we hadn't just reunited the Quarians and the Geth." Shepard growled. He'd doomed EDI and the Geth to death because some kid shaped computer program couldn't believe that they all got along. Joker was never going to forgive him. If he was even still alive to give forgiveness.

"Whoa, hey," Kaidan said, straightening (a little too quickly if the sudden whirling medbay was anything to go on, but he was an expert at ignoring that kind of pain by now). He set the packets of mediget aside and carefully reached up to touch John's shoulder. If he dared, he would have done more.

(But he never, never dared.)

"No one with any sense is ever going to say you didn't do right by all of us. The entire galaxy, Jo- Shepard. You're right. Whatever that was about, it didn't understand everything you'd already accomplished. You did everything you could."

Shepard rubbed at his eyes and took a deep breath. "Sorry, Kaidan. Let's just say I'm exhausted and forget it, okay? Feel like I haven't stopped moving since I woke up on a Cerberus operating table." Again, John leaned into Kaidan. He was definitely suffering from a bit of blood loss. He'd long since decided his feelings for Kaidan were a lost cause, but right now he couldn't muster the willpower to pull away.

"I was serious about the castle outside, though. Looks like the Normandy crashed in some kind of courtyard. Definitely breathable air; I woke up outside. I've never seen anything like it. A damn castle, can you believe it?"

"Well," Kaidan said. He had a very hard time believing there was a castle out there, but he'd promised himself he wouldn't let his own constantly moving thoughts get in the way of trusting Shepard again. "All right. Perhaps now that we've beaten the Reapers, the galaxy has decided to reward us both with a nice themed vacation."

He offered a crooked grin. "Could be nice."

Shepard laughed and was struck by how good it felt. He hadn't laughed since the party on the Citadel and that seemed like years ago. "If there isn't jousting and a feast with a whole pig on a platter, I am going to be very disappointed." Shepard's idea of what a castle should contain was built largely by the hundreds of movies he'd watched as a kid to pass the long house cooped up in a spaceship. Hopefully, this castle would be able to live up to Hollywood.

"I don't think either of us has ever gotten that lucky in our lives," he said though he grinned while he was saying it. Gallows humor. Possibly literately, if it turned out they were dead, afterall.

Kaidan impulsively laid his hand on John's shoulder, eyes meeting his. "I'm sorry to contradict you, sir," he said in a low rasp, "but I think you're wrong there."

It sounded far, far too romantic--and hell, that's how he meant it too. But he tried to take away some of the weight with a crooked grin and a very gentle squeeze. "I mean, Sovreign, the Relay, surviving this long at all..."

Damn Kaidan.

He had a way of digging up every bit of longing John tried valiantly to keep buried and hidden. There was definitely something masochistic about Shepard's inability to stay away from him or give up on these feelings. He just couldn't help himself. Shepard's eyes flicked to his mouth and back up to his eyes. Both were too intimate but he couldn't look away.

He laughed weakly and gave Kaidan a crooked kind of grin. "If that's good luck, I don't want to know what you would consider bad luck. Yeah, we made it through, but that wasn't luck. My team... you were all brilliant. It was skill and determination, not luck."

Kaidan wet his lips.

"A little bit of luck maybe helped us along now and again," he said. "But you're right. There's no denying you gather good people."

If they were dead, Kaidan couldn't help but think, did that mean he should say something? Or should he hold his peace?