RP: Shepard, Kaiden & Ashley

[keelah_selai]

Down the stairs to the lower deck. Around the base of the drive core to the maintenance shaft entrance. Up a ladder, and into the duct tunnel. Up a second ladder and turn to the left. Crawl for a sixth of the ship's body and another left turn. Up a short ladder, and out into the room housing the AI Core...

The AI Core was dark and silent, just like the Engineering deck. Tali had never spent much time here - both Legion and EDI frightened Tali a little. She'd been trying to make amends, for Shepard's sake, ever since her argument with Legion, but it was hard work, overcoming years of ingrained prejudice. There was something...off about the room, though. Tali couldn't quite put her finger on what was wrong or different. It must be the lack of noise, she thought, and moved quickly to the electrical panel on the doors.

Just a few moments, and the doors to the Medbay sparked and slid open with a metallic groan.

Comments

[kaidanmod]

They were both healed--more or less--the blood smeared across their faces and suits drying. It was an awkward scene Tali stumbled into, but Kaidan was immediately on his feet, expression cracking open on a grin. "Tali. It's good to see you."


(OOC: Suggested posting order of Tali, Kaidan, Shepard. When Ashley joins in, she can slot in after whomever went last and start a new posting order. Sound good?)

[keelah_selai]

(OOC: Posting order sounds good! *waits patiently for Shepard*)

[itsinmyblood]

[OOC: I can wait until Shepherd posts ^^. It doesn't matter to me!]

[cmdr_shepard]

"Tali!" Shepard said with Kaidan. He stood as well but shoved Kaidan back down onto the bed. "Come on Kaidan, you've lost a lot of blood." He turned back to Tali and grinned as wide as Kaidan did. "God, it is good to see you, though. I don't know who else made it but..." Shepard breathed deeply and shook his head. "I'm glad you're here."

[keelah_selai]

(OOC: Ashley, you are welcome to jump in whenever!)

Tali rushed forwards, but slowed her steps after a moment. That feeling of something being wrong, being off, just got stronger as she looked back and forth between Shepard and Kaiden.

"You two look awful!" Tali realized how rude that must have sounded, and ducked her head in embarrassment, before looking back up at the two humans. She shook her head, and walked closer, arms reaching out for comfort.

"Kaiden, how did you get here? Keelah, Shepard, what happened? Did I sleep through the Relay?"

[kaidanmod]

"Thanks, Tali," Kaidan said dryly. "Can you make him sit down, please? He-- Wait. Relay?" Kaidan repeated, blinking. He rose again slowly. "What do you mean?"

[cmdr_shepard]

Shepard clasped arms with Tali, but he was frowning. "The Relay?" There was only ever one relay they talked about like that, all capital letters. "The Omega 4 Relay? Tali, that was over a year ago. Almost two, now."

[keelah_selai]

"What? No...no, you'd just told us to our gear prepared, I'd gone down to Engineering to finish cleaning up the output on the multicore shielding, and..." Tali's grip on Shepard's arms tightened, and she trembled slightly.

There was a frightened note to Tali's voice. "It's all gone belly-up, hasn't it. I slept through the Relay entry and whatever happened to all those other ships that never made it back happened to us."

[itsinmyblood]

When she same to it was in a place she didn't recognize. One thing she did was the Normandy, parked right beside where she had landed. Which made no sense, seeing as she had watched it fly off a moment before she was hit.

Then the pain hit her, her muscles screaming as she forced them to move, to stand up and take a few unstable steps toward the ship. The docking bay door was down, which was weird. Actually this entire situation was weird because where in the galaxy was she?

And where was everyone else?

Ashley slowly made her way up to the elevator, relieved to find that it still worked. But the ship was far too quiet. There was no humming of anything except for the cables drawing the elevator to the third level. If anyone was here, surely they would be in the mess hall right?

The doors opened, and sure enough she heard voices coming from the medical bay. Ashley recognized Tali's voice, but there was one voice, a male's she didn't recognize and...

"Kaiden?" Ashley stopped by the medbay doors, not believing her eyes. Kaiden couldn't be here. He was dead, he had died back on Virmire. She took an uneasy step into the room, her hand still on the door frame for balance. "What are you doing here? How are you here?"

[cmdr_shepard]

(OOC: Here there! I'm going to stick my nose in here and make the new posting order Ashley, Shepard, Kaidan, Tali, if that's okay with you guys?)

[keelah_selai]

(OOC: Good with me! *vibrates with barely contained excitement*)

[cmdr_shepard]

"No, Tali... we made it through the Relay and we all go out again. You were brilliant! Do you not remember the Reaper War? Or Rannoch?" He laughed a little and tried to search her face like he would a human. As with all Quarian, it was next to impossible. He only ever could see the faint impression of her face. "Something is seriously wrong if you don't remember Rannoch. You claimed land on your homeworld, Tali." Shepard looked around the room, trying to see if there was anything still working he could use to prove to her what he was saying was true.

Then Ashley walked in the door.

"Ash?" Shepard whispered, pulling away from Tali. "Oh god, now I know I'm dead. I was starting to think... But Ash, I know you're dead. So this has to be the afterlife."

Shepard was haunted by the team members, the family that he'd lost and no one haunted him more than Ashle Williams did. Of all Shepard's ghosts, she was the one that he felt most personally responsible for. It'd had been his choice to send her on that mission, his choice not to give her backup.

She didn't look like he remembered. She seemed older, more dignified. But there was no doubt it was Ashley. He took a step towards her, but stopped almost immediately. She was looking at him like she didn't know him and she was looking at Kaidan like she'd seen a ghost.

[itsinmyblood]

[ooc: Good for me too!]

[kaidanmod]

Kaidan was not a particularly religious man. Of the two of them, Ashley had been the believer. Ashley had been the impetuous heart and he had always been held back by his own stupid brain. He overthought everything. He planned, he tinkered, he obsessed.

He took freaking years and a death to admit to himself that he was in love with his commander...and he still hadn't talked himself into saying anything about it.

He was deliberate and thoughtful to a fault, the logic to Ashley's emotion--but right now, he didn't care that nothing made sense in his word. Not when Ashley was standing right there.

Kaidan didn't say anything. He didn't even think for once. Instead, he pushed past the others and pulled her into a sudden, fierce hug.

[keelah_selai]

Tali practically vibrated with frightened tremors as she watched Kaiden dash across the Medbay and hug someone...someone whose grave she'd left flowers from all different planets, and quarian poetry books, once a year for close to three years now.

Tali looked from Ashley to Kaiden to Shepard, and then visibly shook herself. All of them were or had been severely injured - Ashley included. "Doctor Chakwas would being pulling her hair out in frustration right now. All of you, sit down!"

Time dilation or after life or whatever shenagians could wait until they weren't likely to...well, it could wait.

[itsinmyblood]

Ashley didn't care that she was in pain. That Kaiden's arms were hurting more than they were helping. None of that mattered because Kaiden was here. He was alive. By some miracle he was alive and nothing else mattered.

"I watched you die." Ashley whispered into his shoulder, hugging back as hard as her arms would allow. To this day, the guilt plagued her. That she should have been the one to die and not Kaiden. Because Kaiden had deserved so much more than to die on a foreign planet surrounded by aliens, by people who didn't even know him. They had made a promise, to all go home together, and not a day went by where Ashley wished that she could have taken his place. She would have, in a heart beat. If there was a way for her to go back and convince Shepherd to let her go in Kaiden's stead, she would have taken it a long time ago.

Tali's comment went ignored for the moment, simply because Ashley still couldn't wrap her head around what was happening. Maybe the random stranger was right... Maybe they were all dead. That was the only real explanation.

"How are you here?" She pulled back just enough to look into his eyes, and also to relieve the searing pain that pulsed against her left side.

[cmdr_shepard]

Ashley ignored him. Shepard sat down hard on the bed that Tali had indicated. "Kaidan," he called and nodded his head back at the bed. It didn't occur to him to encourage Kaidan to claim his own bed. "Come on, Tali's right. And you," he said to Ashley,"should get some medigel on those wounds. Tearful reunions can happen when we aren't all about to fall over from fatigue or blood loss or both."

There was something going on here that they didn't totally understand. Kaidan was missing time, Tali couldn't remember the Reaper War, Ashley was dead, there was a fucking castle outside...

"Ashley," he asked suddenly, "Do you...know me? Do you know who I am?"

[kaidanmod]

"There's no one in the universe that doesn't know Commander John Shepard," Kaidan said with a breathless, still-shocky laugh. He obeyed because, well, because this was John giving him a command. Of course he obeyed. But it was so hard to let go of his friend and move to sit.

[keelah_selai]

Tali busied herself gather medical supplies - medi-gel, sanitized towelettes, antispectic spray, and other necessary supplies - before grabbing the armor clippers that Chakwas had kept on hand. She moved slowly and obvious towards Ashley, ready to help the human woman out of her decimated armor if she needed the help.

"I don't know - there was that guard on the Citadel who tried to arrest us..." Tali's tone was absent-minded.

[itsinmyblood]

Ashley shook her head at the man's question. She had never seen the man before. Nothing about him was familiar to her at all.

"I'm sorry, but no. Should I know you?" She felt guilty, the look on the man's face was heartbreaking. But there wasn't much that she could do. Ashley rarely forgot a face, and one that was as attractive as his? There was no way she would forget a face like that.

It was hard to let Kaiden go, but he seemed real enough and her injuries did need to be tended to. It was shocking that Tali seemed unharmed, seeing as she had been in the midst of the fighting the last time Ashley had seen the Quarian. But all that faded away when Kaiden said what appeared to be the unknown man's name.

"Shepard?" No, that couldn't be right. Commander Shepherd was a female, one who lost her entire family to the Batarian attack on Mindoir. It was a story that most people knew. Not to mention that if the Commander had a brother, Ashley was sure she would have mentioned it to someone, Garrus at least.

"No, that's- I mean...." Why wasn't Kaiden as confused about this as she was? If anything, Kaiden looked like he had known the man beside him for years.

"I'm sorry but the Commander Shepard I know is a woman. Thanks, Tali." Ashley smiled when Tali helped her ease her armor off before continuing, sending Kaiden and the supposed Shepard a confused look.

"Right, LT?"

[kaidanmod]

"I...no," Kaidan said slowly, looking between the three of them. "Shepard has always been Shepard. I know I had some doubts on Horizon, but... No, this is Shepard. We joined him to fight Sovreign. Ash, don't you remember?"

[cmdr_shepard]

Shepard stared at Ashley. For once in his entire life, speechless. A thousand different thoughts ran through his head. Were they dead? Was this some kind of strange hallucination? The entire thing was too bizarre. Possibly more bizarre than anything Shepard had seen to date and that was saying a lot.

"... What happened on Virmire? What do you remember?" Was it possible that this wasn't his Ashley? That this woman was from... Some other universe, maybe? Where he was a woman and she'd survived Virmire? It didn't explain how she'd ended up here or where here was, but....

[keelah_selai]

Tali listened with half an ear as she began organizing the necessary medical supplies and applying them to Ashley's impressive array of injuries. She paused at the question of Shepard's gender, and starred at Ashley. With a note of horror in her voice, Tali spoke. "This is like one of those strange fantasy stories you humans tell, with clones and changes in the timelines..."

[itsinmyblood]

This was all so confusing, made even more so as the medi-gel began to ease the pain, giving her a new sense of clarity. Ashley knew she wasn't imagining this. This wasn't a dream. This was real, and yet none of it made sense. She glanced toward Kaiden, then Shepard.

Virmire. The one place she wished more than anything she could forget.

"Captain Kirrahe had come up with a plan for his forces to cause the distraction while the Commander slipped into the base. Kaiden, you went with her to disarm the bomb, and I was helping out the Salarians." Ashley looked down at her lap before running a hand through her hair.

"We were over run, the Salarians were dropping like flies. Shepard managed to get inside the facility and disable the AA guns. You were setting the Nuke," Ashley glanced toward Kaiden. "Things seemed to be going well, I guess but after that.... Well, the Geth had the troop I was with surrounded. I couldn't make it to the rendezvous point. I told Shepard that. Some part of me knew that I wasn't going to make it. And when the Commander told me she was coming for me..." Ashley sighed, shaking her head before continuing.

"Not a moment later, you, Kaiden were calling out that the Geth were swarming the bomb sight. The Commander could only save one of us. We all knew it." She glanced up to Shepard. The pain, regret, the guilt that had been eating her for years. She couldn't hide it anymore. Not when everything felt like it had happened a few hours ago.

"The commander chose to save me. Why, I will never know. But she did. Kaiden... you set the nuke and you blew that facility off the damn map." Ashley met Kaiden's gaze. "I could see the explosion from space, LT. I watched it burn a crater into the planet as the Normandy flew off. I watched you die, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do to stop it."

She ran a hand over her face, trying to push the images back into the back of her mind where they belonged. There were altogether too many bad memories and not enough good ones. A thought hit her then, and she straightened up before looking into her armor.

"I actually have a picture. Now where did, Ah!" She pulled out a creased photograph out of her pocket, sliding off the bed and walking over to where Kaiden and Shepard were sitting.

"This is the picture of the party we had. Right before we headed out to the Illusive Man's base." Everyone was there. Grunt, Liara, James, Javic and Wrex in the back. Jack, Tali, Miranda, Steve, Jacob, Samara Kasumi and Herself in the middle. And in the front, Samantha, Garrus, Shepard, EDI and Joker.

They were all there. Everyone but Kaiden and Legion.

"You see? That is the Shepard I know."

{{OOC: the picture that Ashley's looking at can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/W0BBUqJ.png }}

{{OOC: also, sorry for all the long winded replies! >.> }}

[itsinmyblood]

[[OOC: did I scare everyone away? o.O]]