Fallout

A Mass Effect Fan Fiction Story by Elle Kitty

…

"It doesn't bother you that I believe in God, does it?"

"You know that saying, that there are no atheists in a foxhole? I've been in a lot of foxholes."

"Some people I've served with thought I was crazy to believe that there's something out there, like because there's something out in space, that's the end of any kind of spirituality. But I always think: how can you look out there and not believe in something?"

If Katherine Shepard believed in anything, she believed that Ashley was somewhere beautiful.

She didn't believe in many things, but she liked to think that there was somewhere beautiful out there. She'd seen her share of death and destruction and her childhood hadn't exactly been a model of the "good life." Back on Earth, beauty was looking up between the skyscrapers and catching a glimpse of the stars. Of course, you couldn't always see the stars because of the glare from the city lights but you always knew they were there. When she was a child, she used to think that her future was written up there in lights.

"You're an idiot, kid," Finch used to tell her. She hadn't always disagreed.

…

Jeff heard her before she came in. "What's up, babe?" he asked in a brief moment of levity.

He heard her scowl in her tone. "Don't call me 'babe.'"

"Oh, I see. That's Alenko's job." Glancing into the reflection of his silver lighter, he saw that color had flooded into her pale face.

"It's against regs to carry pocket lighters," Katherine told him.

"Let a poor cripple have his pleasures." Jeff winced at his own words. He hated pulling the disease card but he wanted to bring a smile to his commanding officer's face. Unfortunately, Katherine was as grim as ever. "When'd you become such a stickler, Kate?"

"I'm not a stickler."

"Right. That's Udina's area of expertise. I'm sorry they're grounding us," he said a little more quietly.

"Udina's a prig." To his delight, she seated herself at the console to his right. Not to his delight, she put her feet up on the dashboard. However, Jeff was willing to forgive her, considering the circumstances. They sat together in silence for a few moments with not even the engine's slight hum to distract them. "Why are you still up here, Joker? It's not like there's anything to fly."

"Yeah, right. I've grown so attached to this chair that I can't bear to pull myself away. Why are you here, Commander?"

"You were calling me 'Kate' a minute ago."

"Yeah, and I was calling you 'babe' the minute before that. Is something up?"

"Why do you think there's anything between me and the Lieutenant?"

"Well, that came out of the blue, didn't it? Look, I never said there was anything. I just said that he could probably get away with calling you 'babe.' What, do you think there's something?"

"No, it was something Ash said a few weeks ago –oh." She fell silent.

Jeff observed her for a few moments, the way her long lashes veiled her blue eyes, her coppery hair falling forward to hide her quivering lips. Inspired, he reached out his arm to tousle her cropped red locks. "S'okay," he said gently, "sometimes I forget too."

She didn't reply but stared at her hands instead. There was a long scrape running up the underside of her forearm… The bolt from the drone grazed the length of her arm. She resisted the urge to drop her pistol and wince in pain but the bolts were coming down faster now like the rain that was beginning to shroud Saren's base. Drizzle from the clouds was splattering across her visor. She could hear Ashley yelling out for cover…

"So… you and Alenko…"

Katherine blinked twice, broken out of her reverie. "What me and Alenko?"

"You and Alenko!"

"Joker," her voice grew softer, "I can't talk about Kaidan with you. You're my best friend, but…"

"Too close?"

"Too close." She smiled grimly.

He reached out to her again, this time to place his cap on her head. She raised her blue eyes to look at the brim and then smiled. He flicked the bill of the hat. "All good. I'll be here if you need me."

She nodded almost automatically and abruptly got to her feet. "See you soon, Joker."

Jeff watched her walk down the bridge and then yelled out, "Wait! Give me my hat back!" He heard her ripple of addictive laughter and then his hat flew into his lap. He smiled as she went down the stairs to the mess, hoping that Alenko wouldn't screw up the good mood Jeff had tried to put her in.

…

"Grounded" sounded exactly like the kind of punishment an adult would inflict upon an unruly child. Back on Earth, no one had reprimanded Katherine Shepard. Except the cops. But they had always dismissed poor Kitty Shepard as an innocent that had fallen in with the wrong crowd due to a tragic childhood. She had looked the part, all big eyes and skinny arms. Finch had always made her stand lookout. She was far from innocent when it came down to it but she never did anything to correct the police's view of her situation.

She shut off the water valve, wrapped herself in a towel, and tried to wring the water out of her hair. Forced habit. She would never get used to short hair… Saren snatching up a handful of her hair and dragging her up off of the floor and then several inches into the air, his hand closing around her neck, her feet dangling like the shoes of a hanged corpse, until Kaidan's shot found its mark in the tender flesh of the alien's neck and then her fist, finding its mark in Saren's face.

Katherine shook her head twice before fastening her bra and shrugging into her casual clothing. She rolled up the sleeves until they rested above her elbows and then activated the door into her quarters. She glanced around once before drying her hair with the towel and tossing the cloth onto her bed. The room still didn't feel as though it belonged to her, it never would, not when Captain Anderson had done what he did, stepped aside only so she could fail…

The ship seemed silent so she unlocked the door out into the mess and slipped out. Infiltration training and experience had given her a lithe and silent step, a skill she employed as she moved towards her locker. Walking was like a dance; Katherine took pride in her movements. Grace was a scare commodity in a soldier's life, save for the eternal grace of death… Jenkins, a star shaped wound where his eye was supposed to be… and when there was so little beauty in the galaxy it seemed… blood painting the skies of Eden Prime… she looked for contentment with what she had… "We'll see that he receives a proper burial I need you to stay focused." No burial for Ashley Williams; there'd be no body to find…

"Kate."

Suddenly she was at her locker, having danced her way across the mess, fiddling with the combination. Numbers blinked before her eyes as she tried to forget that he was there behind her. Of all of the faces she would meet… she could laugh with Joker, have Tali pat her on the back, but Kaidan… she pushed down the lump in her throat. "Yeah," she said without turning around, "I'm here."

"Good. Because sometimes I have my doubts. When I look at you, especially when I can't see your face, I have my doubts whether you're really here, in the present, or whether you're somewhere else, in your past."

"Do you have a problem with that, Lieutenant?" Still, she did not look at him.

"I'd feel a lot better about it if I could see you."

Slowly, she turned. If anything, Katherine Shepard was no coward; she could look a comrade in the eye. So she turned and sat, leaning against the lockers and yet not entirely leaning against them, as though she was worried that they could not hold her up. "There," she told him. "Satisfied?"

"Very." And yet when her blue eyes rose to meet his, he spoke to the decal above her head. "There's been something I've been meaning to ask you ever since we left–"

"Virmire. Do you dream of it?" she asked him.

Kaidan shook his head. "I'm not the one with the visions."

Since he did not look her in the eye, she traced the contours of his brow with her gaze. His forehead was furrowed, which meant he was in pain. "How bad?" she asked.

"Bad," he admitted.

"I'll talk to you later then." She made no motion to leave.

"It doesn't matter."

"If you're having a migraine, Lieutenant–"

"This might be my only chance to get you alone." …Alone, kneeling behind the crate, begging Saren to listen to her. The metal platform painfully hard against her kneecap, other kneecap bent up by her chest, the green bruise revealed by the tear in the mesh of her armor. There are all kinds of bruises and one was her failure to save… No.

"There you go again." Kaidan's voice broke into her thoughts, grounding her just as the Council had… No. "Your eyes… They go places where I can't reach you."

"I have a lot to think about, Kaidan."

"And I'm asking that you think about me. Just for a moment." Now his dark eyes finally met hers, dark eyes like the vision of Ilos framed by light… No. "And I'm asking that you think of Ashley. Just for a moment. I know it's painful, Kate, but I need to know something."

"Ask me whatever, Kaidan. I've never lied to you."

"And I believe you, Kate. You're my commanding officer; it's not my place to question anything you say."

"But you don't call me 'Commander.' Not anymore. You call me 'Kate;' you call me my name like I'm a fellow human being and I'm speaking to you as a fellow human being. I've never lied to you."

The corners of his mouth twisted. "I don't always feel like a human being."

She cast her gaze downward, wanting to get to her feet and meet him but not finding the strength to do so. "You think I always do?" Jenkins lying on the ground, a star shaped hole in his visor… Time to move on. "Ask me whatever."

"Alright then. You know that, before Feros even, we talked about… you know, what's between us."

"What we can't seem to control."

"What we see in each other."

"What we're going to do when we have some downtime."

"Yeah." He smiled but the warmth of the expression wasn't in his eyes. "We also… We swore… that we'd never allow our –I don't know what to call them, feelings? –you swore they wouldn't get in the way. And now let me ask you something: you expect me to believe that that didn't factor into any of your decisions back on Virmire?"

She let out a noise of disbelief. "So you're complaining that I blew up a couple of fuel tanks, that I fought a couple of extra guards in order to keep you and Kirrahe's team safe? Really?"

"Kate, you know what I'm talking about. You're dancing around the elephant in the room: Ashley."

"We Williams woman see things through to the end." Kate winced at the memory. "Yeah, I know."

"You can't dance around it forever, Kate."

"Yes, I know!" she said in a voice close to a shout and then immediately regretted it. For his part, Kaidan rose to meet the challenge.

"I swore, you swore, that our feelings for each other wouldn't get in the way of anything, that we'd hold it together if we lost one of us, that we wouldn't necessarily put the other one first of another teammate. You swore that and now see what's happened? This is why there are regs against fraternization."

Katherine scrambled to her feet. "So what?" she snapped. "So what if it got in the way? I'll admit it; so what? Are you really going to bitch and moan at me, Alenko, because I saved your life? Because that's what I did, you know. I saved your life and now you're trying to screw up mine?"

"What I am trying to say is why did you save me? Why didn't you go for her like I told you to?"

"Because you would have died, Alenko! Because you would have died. That's why I did what I did. Because you would have died down there just as she did and I couldn't handle it. What, would you have done differently if it had been me back at the bomb site? Tell me, Kaidan, would you?"

Now he met her eyes. "I wouldn't have done differently, Kate. You already know that."

She breathed out a little sigh of relief as though that was the confirmation she had been dying to hear and sank back down onto the floor, resting her head against her locker again. "Then why would you even ask me why I chose you?" she asked the door to her room, her face turned away from his. "Why do you expect me to be stronger than you?"

Even though she had sat down again, Katherine regretted her decision to have done so. She wanted to get back up again, to meet him again eye to eye, but her knees didn't seem to obey her. Instead, he knelt down to her level, to meet her eyes. "I don't expect you to be stronger than me," he told her quietly, "and it's not because you can't lift heavy objects the way I can."

She stared at him for a moment and then her eyes twinkled. "I can disable a bomb."

"I can resist large amounts of pain."

"I'm a woman. Everyone knows that I'm built to resist more pain than any man." Pain: the long fall from Saren's hovercraft to the platform. Even worse: Ashley's voice, her last words. She shook her head to clear her mind. "I understand, Commander. See you on the other side."

She took a deep shuddering breath and Kaidan got to his feet. He reached his hand out to help her up and she took it. He hoisted her to her feet. There was a spark of something at the physical contact… She stood on the bridge, looking down at Virmire. She almost thought if she looked closely enough, she might be able to see Ashley, still fighting, still holding out. She heard her heart beating out a countdown. She knew it had to be any minute now.

"Kiss me," she begged him and his eyes filled with a mixture of confusion and understanding.

"Any minute now," he heard Joker say in a voice like death. Katherine blinked twice and tried to focus on Kaidan's face. She closed her eyes… She closed her eyes… only to be blinded by the explosion inside of her.

When she was a child, Kitty thought she could look up and see her future in the stairs. Now Katherine Shepard looked up and her eyes connected the dots to form the names of those she had lost.

…

A/N: My first Mass Effect story. Wow. I'm not used to writing in this style, where it's somewhat omniscient; I'm used to only knowing the thoughts of one character. But I'm proud of myself for experimenting with a new style. Please leave feedback as it may influence whether or not I continue to write ME stories. Thank you for taking the time to read –EK