Author's Note: I swore I would never write fanfic. I have quite enough time-wasting habits already, including reading fanfic. (That, and playing with other people's characters makes me very nervous. I'm always afraid I'll break them.) Damn you, Mass Effect, for being so addictive I broke my resolution! *shakes fist* If you're curious, my Shepard, Meg, is a Colonist/Sole Survivor Infiltrator who leans Paragon. Yes, I had to pick the angsty background choices.

A few months back on the ME forums, someone asked why Shepard is always awake and dressed before their love interest wakes up. This is my answer.

Disclaimer: Not mine. Bioware's.

Helpless

She always woke up before him. She always had, from the very beginning, from the first night they had spent together before Ilos, when she had slipped out of the tangled military-issue sheets, and dressed while he slept.

If Kaidan had asked, Shepard would have told him that she knew she might be called up to the bridge at any moment, and wanted to be ready just in case. It was the truth, but only a small part of the truth. If he had pressed, she might have admitted she liked to watch him sleep. This was true, too--to her complete surprise, watching his chest rise and fall with his breaths gave her a sort of peace she'd rarely felt--but it was not something she really cared to admit.

It wasn't the whole truth either.

He hadn't asked, and she had been grateful.

She awoke before him here, too. After what the vids liked to call the 'siege of the Citadel' (usually accompanied by dramatic music to impress on people that, yes, this was Exciting and Important), it had been rather strongly implied by Alliance Command she and her crew might want to drop out of sight while they sorted out the official story--and not tell anyone a damn thing about anything they might have done or seen. Shepard was pretty certain that was not an invitation for her to whisk one of her officers off to a remote and second rate vacation planet after giving the rest of the crew shore leave. However, she ignored that conviction. She had just saved the goddamn galaxy, after all, and she deserved it. Besides, what was the point in being a bloody Spectre if you couldn't abuse your power once in a while?

Careful, Shepard, she had warned herself. That way lies badness. She wasn't used to being selfish, and it made her feel guilty. Still, she went ahead. Maybe it was what she needed to work him out of her system at last. That thought was preferable to admitting to anything she might actually be feeling.

Here, too, she took great pains to wake before him. It was easy at first. He was a sound sleeper, and she added to that her mental list of his good qualities, next to 'does not ask awkward questions' and 'has cute ass.'

The first night, when he awoke to find her sitting on the couch, reviewing her mission reports on her datapad, he said nothing.

The second night, when he found her doing stomach crunches when he had just rolled out of bed, he said nothing.

The third night, when he awoke just after two in the morning (or, rather, the local equivalent thereof) only to find her sitting on the balcony of their suite, fully-dressed, he said "You know, I don't think the Reapers are going to attack here for at least a year or two."

"You never know," she said, squinting at the horizon far beyond. The ocean was orange, and the night sky was dark turquoise. Alien planets could throw you for a loop sometimes. "I have to be ready."

"Is that why you never sleep?" he asked. "To be ready, just in case?"

She could not answer for a moment. He had come too close. That wasn't the main reason, either...but it was coming too close. She never wore skirts because she couldn't move in them. She always had a pistol within arm's reach, just in case. She didn't like the thought of being helpless, just in case the world fell apart about her ears again, but it was something she'd never admitted to anyone.

He kept coming too close. It scared her. He wasn't even her type, not really. She had developed an habit of picking up men who were strong, handsome, and stupid, good for working off some steam and nothing much else. Ones easily dropped without guilt or regret. He had sort of snuck up on her, it seemed. One time she reflecting his fumbling admissions of attraction were irritating but oddly cute, and the next it seemed she was talking to him. Like a person. This was a greater trespass than the flirting, which she couldn't really blame on him anyway. The more he fumbled and skirted around things, and stammered, the harder she flirted at him. It was some inner perversity on her part.

She had her own rules, and she was breaking them all over the place. Never cry, never laugh unless everyone else is, only smile when someone deserves it. Show as little emotion as possible, just enough to not to appear a robot. Don't talk about personal matters. Never let on that you might be just a mere mortal after all and therefore fallible. Remain larger than life. Soldiers had been willing to die for Shepard the Commander. They might not follow Shepard the Mere Woman a step.

Don't come to care about anyone. Especially if they're soldiers. Don't think of them as people. Because chances were they would die anyway.

She was mad at him for somehow wriggling through her defenses. And she was mad at herself for letting him.

He was a little like her, other than in all the ways he was being completely unlike her. They both somehow managed to be both perfectly functional, and yet fundamentally fucked up. She was familiar with the sweet rush of attraction, with the violence of lust, of heartbeats and breaths coming faster, of the electricity in a single touch. That was here. And yet he also could make her feel safe, and he could make her feel at peace. That was completely new to her. There was something so steady in him.

It terrified her. And it was no excuse for weakness.

"The thresher maws on Akuze didn't care if you were asleep," she said. He had no answer to that.

The fourth night, she fell asleep beside him. There was a pleasant heaviness in her limbs, the breeze off the orange sea was pleasant, and he was warm and solid beside her. The night was peaceful, and she was safe.

The dream came.

It reeked. Was she the only one who dreamt smells? Was that weird? She had never asked. It reeked of blood and charred flesh. Blood seeped out from beneath the front door, dripping down the front steps and pooling in the grass at the bottom; or what they called grass, delicate strands of a pale purple plant with roots that stretched for miles. Her mother, her neck broken, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Bodies everywhere, her family, her friends, even people that were never there, who died later, but it all made sense in the dream. Her unit from Akuze, half melting into pools of fat and blood from thresher venow; Jenkins, broken like a rag doll. Ashley, or rather a glimpse of the ridiculous pink and white armour she knew instinctively was Ashley. Even here she could not bring herself to look at her face.

Batarians stunk, too. They stunk of acrid slime, a stink like milk left in the sun. One grabbed her by her braid. She was sixteen, a skinny farm girl with hair down to her waist, and a pretty but utterly useless floral skirt she'd worn to school that day. She flung herself forward in an attempt to escape, but her legs tangled in her skirt and she slipped.

The world swirled and dissolved about her. She swung blindly and hit yielding flesh. One punch, then another, and then another...

There was a very human cry of pain.

"Shepard!" someone called out, and a strong grip encircled both her wrists, pinning her down. Panic fluttered in her throat. With a gun, she could kick anyone's ass. Even without one, with her wits about her, she had a good chance of coming up on top against most. Mostly asleep, at a disadvantage, she had to face the fact that, despite all training and gene therapy, she was still no match for a male's strength.

She kicked and flailed, fighting desperately.

"Sssh...Shepard." It was Kaidan's voice, a bit breathless and raspy. "Shepard. Come back to me. Shepard. Meg."

It was the sound of her name that got through to her; the old-fashioned nickname that her Father had given her. She and Kaidan had a system of names. He called her Commander on duty, and Shepard the rest of the time. He only broke down and called her by her first name in very rare moments, when both their guards were down, and he needed to say it. Or she needed to hear it. It was their own sort of code.

It didn't quite work the other way around. In fact, she was beginning to fall into the habit of calling him by his first name even when, strictly speaking, she shouldn't. She suspects that might get her in trouble someday.

She took a deep breath, willing herself to stop fighting, which was rather like telling the tide not to come in. It seemed a short eternity until her heartbeat began to slow, and a longer onte until she trusted herself to open her eyes. He had turned the lights on, but only halfway, low enough to not jar sleepy eyesight--but quite light enough for her to see the dark stain of the bruise beginning to appear across his jaw.

He was stroking her hair gently with his free hand. "That must have been some dream," he remarked, and his voice was very gentle.

Oh God, I don't deserve him, was her first thought. "The worst," she replied. "Did I--" The question was hard to get out, and she had to moisten her lips with her tongue to force it out. "Did I hurt you?"

"Nothing that can't be fixed." He released her wrists, and asked, "Have you had that one before?"

"Yes," she admitted.

He looked at her, and stood up. "Where are you going?" she asked, half-expecting him to walk out then and there. Truth was always ugly.

"To get you a cup of tea," he replied. He disappeared into the suite's small kitchen. She stared at the ceiling, counting heartbeats until he returned.

The tea was strange-tasting, sharp and a touch bitter, but not unpleasantly so, and it chased away the rank taste that seemed to have settled in her mouth, like the stink of Batarian slime. Perhaps the tea was simply a variety she wasn't familiar with—the hobby of tea fancier was not particularly compatible with being a marine—or perhaps it was alien tea. The more races and worlds she saw, the less she was astonished by the strangeness--and more by the familiarity, the things that carried across galaxies. Two legs, verbal communication, opposable thumbs, love, sex, writing, politics, the idea of putting leaves in hot water to make a beverage...

They sat in silence, sipping tea. Just the two of them and the breeze off that damnable orange sea.

"It's a Mindoir dream," she admitted finally, to fill the silence. "Everyone's dead. Even people who weren't there. And the Batarians are trying to capture me."

"And you fight back."

"Yeah." Glancing down she realized she had clenched her free hand into a fist, and with an effort, she relaxed it, letting her fingers lie on her thigh.

He said, awkwardly, "Must be a painful dream to have in a sleeping pod."

She didn't even want to think about that. "It normally only happens when someone else's in bed with me," she explained. She could think of a few reasons why, but she didn't want to delve even deeper into her psyche than she already was. This was difficult enough. "I had a serious boyfriend once," she told the surface of her tea. Only one ever, really. If anyone asked, she claimed it was because of her career. "This was years ago. He was a doctor. He left because he told me he couldn't believe my beating him up in my sleep didn't mean I subconsciously hated him." Richard had been from Mindoir, too--he had left the colony the year before the massacre to go to med school. His family had lived three farms from hers. She had thought he would understand.

"Shepard..." he whispered, but she wasn't done. The words, kept too long dammed, kept pouring out.

"There was a man after Akuze...when I just really needed someone. He ran out of the room in the middle of the night and called me a freak." She set her jaw firmly and watched him, just daring him to do the same.

"Have you talked to anyone about this?" he asked. "I mean like a doctor, or a therapist?"

Damn him for being level-headed and practical. "No," she said flatly. "Why? So they can talk about PTSD, and put me on drugs or pull me off active duty or make alarming little notes in my permanent file? A history of disturbed sleep can be enough to ruin a career. If you sneeze, no one thinks you have the plague, but if you do one thing that is just a little odd, psychologically speaking, the whispers start. About your stress level, your mental toughness, your competency. But everyone does it. Everyone has really bad dreams, or needs everything on their desk to be the same size, or thinks of their mother every time they smell mint. It's the ways the mind quietly manages stress, to keep us sane, but we're all going crazy hiding whatever it is we do that's odd, because heaven forbid anyone else find out we're not normal. Because that means not be quite right..." Her voice trailed off. She could not read his face in the dim light, and tried to summarize. "It's a small thing, and I'm perfectly functional. Everyone's broken in some way, Kaidan. This just happens to be mine."

Her hands were shaking. Godamnit. She'd shown enough weakness for one night.

He did not get up and walk out. He did not call her crazy. Instead he said, "It doesn't matter." She blinked at him in the dimness. "We'll deal," he said. "Maybe it'll get better. Or I can sleep on the couch. In any case, you're worth a few bruises, Shepard."

It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to her. It also terrified her. For a moment she thought she might cry, and that was the worst breach of her rules imaginable. Crying was not only a weakness, but it made you look weak, which was worse.

She could end this now. Right now. Explain it obviously wasn't going to work out. That she didn't need the distraction at this time. There was a galaxy that needed saving and it needed Commander Shepard to save it. Shepard the Spectre, Shepard the Legend, the dashing hero from the news vids, strong and competent and always swooping down to save the day. Not a woman with too much baggage she was keeping very tightly bottled up, bad dreams, and a thing for her cute lieutenant that was either romantic or squalid depending on how you looked at it. Not a woman at all.

Not a woman in love.

That was the problem, when it all came down to it. Of all things she hated being helpless. Needed her gun, needed her armour, needed a way to fight. His need to leave a way out had frustrated her once, but when it came down to it…she was just the same. Letting someone in meant being helpless in front of them. Knowing there would be bruises.

And knowing sometimes you would be the one inflicting them.

She wasn't sure if she could do that. She wasn't good at relationships. She should stick to what she was good at, like shooting things.

He stood up, extending a hand towards her. "Coming back to bed?" he asked, voice soft and a little hesitant. His voice was dangerous when he softened it like that. It made her knees just a little weaker.

This was her last chance to run.

She reached out and took his hand.

She slept pressed beside him, in the breeze from that orange sea, and, for that night at least, dreamt no dreams.