After the War

A/N: The poems are both by John Keats. The first is 'Ode to a Nightingale' and the second is 'To Sleep'. Please drop a review if you have the time, it's very encouraging.


After the War Chapter One

Through dreams, delirium and distorted visions half-remembered consciousness returned. Smashing through the warm hollow she had made in the darkness, blissful in her unawareness it came, brutal in its intensity, vicious and insistent. Her eyes fluttered open, burning and unfocused they saw nothing but light, light everywhere, flashing and heaving until she felt ill. She was too weak to heave, she only gagged, a sick, wet sound from a throat thick with disuse. Delirious she tried to move, but just inhaling was a torment, a gargantuan feat, almost impossible. Colour washed senselessly before her, invisible machinery whined and buzzed. Footsteps, the distant rumble of voices like thunder in the mountains of Mindoir. She moaned.

A shape appeared, featureless at first it slowly resolved itself before her. A face, big as the world and terrible, distorted with pain and the sudden extreme vertigo of consciousness after so much darkness. Eyes, dark and full of familiar warmth. A kind hand on her forehead, cool against her burning skin.

“It's alright Shepard. Everything is going to be fine.” That voice. It couldn't be. Her mind reeled at the implication. Was this death? Was she dying? She moaned with fear, sobbed, vomited a bit of bile down her chin. She couldn't feel anything, her body was a wooden and numb under the blankets. “Go to sleep now. It's alright, I promise.”

“K-Kaidan?” It couldn't be. Kaidan was... Kaidan was...

No sound. No light. No pain.

More darkness.

Then, dreams.

*

“I can't believe you.” Liara whispered furiously, after the salarian surgeons had finally forced the two of them out, demanding to be left alone while they performed the deeper intricacies of their art of medicine. Questions had been answered with tight lipped, indistinct words that made him frantic. As of this moment, he had no idea whether there was any point in hoping for Shepard to be alive ten minutes from now. He turned to face the furious asari, his temper flaring in response to her accusatory tone. “What do you think you are doing here?”

“I applied for a transfer. Until the commanding officer officially rejects it I have every right-” Kaidan began, having prepared this speech ahead of time, if not for this particular situation. Everything had gone wrong so rapidly, one moment he was almost high on the victory won over the Reapers, the next she was almost dead and he didn't know what to do.

“Don't pull your Alliance nonsense with me, Alenko.” Kaidan was taken aback. The Liara T'Soni he remembered would never have said anything like that, would never have even thought it. But the woman standing before him now was no more similar to his memories than he was to the man he'd been when they knew each other. She wore battle-scarred armour, and carried scars of her own, three thin lines over her right cheekbone and up, across her forehead. A decade of war had aged her in ways that time never would, putting deep circles under her eyes, wrinkles of persistent worry down her forehead and the hardness of apathy underneath every thing, an undertone that warned of a previously untapped potential for extreme violence. “I know it inside and out by now. I want to know why you would transfer back to THIS ship. Why you would in any situation, but especially this one, think it was anything less than the worst idea in the world.”

“I didn't know.” He replied. “What had happened. I only found out when I got onboard. A little blond woman with a shotgun told me that one of the crew members was indoctrinated...”

“Corporal Friedricks. He was a friend, once. He was... dealt with. Promptly.” He hand went to her pistol, rested there lightly, almost unconsciously. A soldiers habit, out of place on a scientist. She snapped back to the present and fixed him with an unhappy look.

“I'm not Alliance, I can't kick you off this ship. But if I have my way,” her voice trembled, thick with emotion as she made this promise, “you'll be on the other side of the galaxy before she wakes up.”

She turned to leave, doubtlessly hoping to go rage at the office that controlled crew transfers among the high level Alliance star ships. He knew she wouldn't get anywhere, no matter how vicious she might have become in his absence. He was operating perfectly within the rules and conditions of the Alliance. Plus, the guy in charge down there still owed him six hundred credits of poker money and had green-lighted his transfer without any questions, as a personal favour. Unless the commander kicked him off the ship herself, he wasn't going anywhere. She hesitated at the door, glanced back at him.

“I thought you were supposed to be dead anyway.” She said, frowning slightly as though she had just remembered.

He shrugged. “Didn't take.”

She snorted, shook her head and left, the door sliding closed behind her with a sedated click that was lost in the lingering echoes of her angry footsteps. Kaidan stood alone, looking across the familiar mess hall with its low orange light, heard the far off murmur of soldiers talking, the quiet vibrations of the fantastic engine purring through the floor and up his legs. It was like standing in a dream for him, he knew the shapes and shadows of the space but all the things that had made it what it was when he was there were gone now. It was nothing like the Normandy he remembered.

Sighing, he ran his fingers through his hair and headed to take his turn on the bunk rotation. He hadn't slept since he set foot on the Normandy, almost twenty four hours ago now. He was suddenly immensely tired, in addition to his worries and anxiety. When he hit the hard, military bed he fell asleep instantly, and dreamt of better times.

*

She slept for a long time. Almost a month and a half. Sometimes she got close to waking, but the surgeons or Doctor Chakwas were always there to add another dose of some soothing painkillers to her IV tube and she always slipped back into the endless darkness. Newly constructed organs laboured within her. Her body rejected the new liver they had built her. They filled her full of tubes and pumped life into her while they built another one. More surgery, more painkillers. Her body slowly began to knit itself back together more completely. The treatment to her spinal column went well. Feeling returned to her limbs, her brain retook control of her body. They scanned her, x-rayed her, switched her medication and through all this, there were dreams.

She knew they were dreams, because Ash was there, and her parents with their obscene rosaries clutched in bony fingers. They stood together, laughing, conversing, unaware that they were dead. She tried to run, to get closer to them, but they always seemed to stay the same distance away from her. Eventually, the earth gave way underneath her and she fell, endlessly though the darkness. Faces loomed over her, full of blood and broken teeth and laser burns. Ash's cocky smile dripped thick, clotted blood. Joker's solemn face looked down at her before his beard smoldered and caught fire, consuming his flesh. Her parents appeared with bullet holes in their foreheads, leaking brain. Terrible images, horrifying, she screamed and screamed, so silently. And there was Kaidan, immaculate and pale with his dark eyes full of blinding light. He stared down at her and she shrivelled, broke apart and scattered into the darkness. She kept falling though, even as she broke apart. She fell and fell. One by one the faces dissolved, were lost to the realms of her memory once more. Even Kaidan faded away eventually, and there was just oblivion again. Eventually.

*

“My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute past.” The voice was clear, it caught her consciousness like a hook and she felt drawn up toward it despite her suspicion. What was this? Some new aberrant nightmare? Some new torment of death? Her mother had read that poem, sitting by the small spacial heater they ran during the long winter nights on Mindoir. She had not heard it in years. Her lips formed the words in synchrony with the voice, soundlessly.

“O for a draught of vintage! That hath been cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, tasting of flora and the country green, dance and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth! Full of the true, blushful Hippocrene with beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth; that I might drink and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim.” She recognized the voice now, it was Liara. Her eyes opened, crusty with the yellow grains of long sleep. The world blurred, seethed. She closed her eyes again, swallowing the bad jolt of nausea that she had felt. She stirred slightly, became suddenly aware of how painfully weak she was, how wizen and dry she felt. Liara kept reading, oblivious.

“Fade away, dissolve and quite forget what thou among the leaves hast never known, the weariness, the fever, and the fret here, where men sit and hear each other groan; where palsy shakes a few, sad, grey hairs, where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin and dies; where but to think is to be full of sorrows and leaden-eyed despairs.” She dared to open her eyes again, and this time it was easier. The world resolved itself from a sea of shapeless, blurry colours and became something real, something that could be recognized. The medical bay of the Normandy, and by her side Liara, reading from her mothers old book. She said nothing, could not speak. When she opened her mouth a puff of air wheezed out, silently, like the sigh of a ghost.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take to the air my quiet breath; now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Liara struggled there, her voice growing thick. Shepard would have laughed, had it been funny at all. Reading a poem about wishing for death to a coma patient. Very sloppy, Liara. You'll make yourself cry. But she didn't. There were no more tears left in the asari, or at least no more than what was left in any of them now. She finished the poem, her voice a scrape of pain oddly suitable to the flowery words.

“Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows, over the still stream, up the hill-side; and now tis buried deep in the next valley-glades: was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music-”

“Do I wake or sleep?” Shepard's own voice surprised her, it was so unlike the voice she'd heard her entire life. Weak, it shook with every syllable and trembled faintly. There was no authority, no cocksure, brazen assurance that all would be right with the universe, if she did her job right. It was the voice of the sick, and she hated it instantly. But she smiled anyway, a grimace creased with pain.

“Shepard! You're awake!” Liara tossed the book aside, forgetting for a moment that it was a treasured personal possession in her shock and excitement.

“Well, that answers that question.” She tried to move and was shocked at the painful impossibility of it. Every movement made her body scream. She could feel the pain deep in her marrow, sharp and bewildering. She tried to look around, her head rolling from side to side, almost too heavy for her neck. “Next order of business: what the hell happened?”

Liara gaped, shut her mouth quickly and retrieved the book from the floor. Shepard could already hear foot steps and a moment later Doctor Chakwas appeared at the door, looking almost as shocked as the asari. A look passed between them, as they silently decided how much they were going to tell her. She frowned. Neither of them had ever held back on her before, even through other injuries. She was their commander, and they had never thought to treat her otherwise. She cleared her throat, and they both looked back at her then down at the floor. She waited.

“It was Corporal Friedricks.” Liara spoke quietly, and did not look up. Shepard frowned, looked away herself, trying to glean any information from her surroundings. She looked at her own body and nearly screamed. She was almost skeletal, muscles atrophied down into sinew that clung tightly to her bones under pale, almost translucent skin. She looked to the side and caught a glimpse of her gaunt face in the chrome of the bed post. Her head had been shaved, and a long, thin line of baldness told the story of a wound treated with medigel. The miracle cream could remove all traces of scarring, but couldn't regrow the hair follicles that had been destroyed. She could see her skull through her own skin, the gaunt grin of it underneath her sunken eyes. It was a ghastly sight. She looked back at Liara as she finished her explanation.

“He shot you in the back.” She was saying. “With a Tornado. It... blew out one of your lungs, and most of your liver. And shattered your spine.”

It took Shepard a moment to absorb that, the idea of that much damage. She continued looking down at the ruined remains of her body, her mind turning thoughtless cartwheels of shock. She looked back up at Liara, tremors making her arms and legs twitch and tingle under the sheets.

“Why am I alive?” She asked. No one could survive a wound like that, there was no medicine she had ever heard of that could fix something like that, outside of organ transplant, but there weren't a lot of high-tech hospitals floating around the war-torn ruins of the worlds beyond the Veil. She should be dead right now. Was this really another dream, another torment of the dark limbo she'd drifted through for so long. It was hard to say.

“The salarians brought their best surgeons to set up field hospitals for the wounded.” Liara replied, as the Doctor leaned over and began scanning the various screens that outlined the most minute functions of Shepard's living corpse. “It was bloody optimistic and it saved your life. They used a prototype medigel to reconstruct the organs while you were on life support. They even managed to repair the severed nerves in your spinal column.” She paused, as though wondering if she should say more. Shepard leaned back, suddenly to exhausted to even be angry. So this was what a miracle felt like. She managed to get to life support before she died. There happened to be a crack team of expert salarian surgeons and a prototype medigel at hand to save her. They happened to glue her back together the right way so that she could wake up after... after...

“How long have I been out?” She asked numbly, staring up at the ceiling, the functional lines of the steel panels with their dull blue undertones. Their serenity felt like a coffin to her now, for this useless body and doped mind, this casualty of war that should have died but hadn't.

“Six and a half weeks.” Liara whispered. That woke her up, if only a little. Her head snapped over and she stared blankly at her asari companion, her mouth forming a silent 'o' of dismay.

“Then... the battle!” She couldn't believe she'd waited this long to ask, been so obsessed with her own fate that she'd all but forgotten what they'd been fighting for in the first place. Liara smiled, really smiled, for the first time. There was a smoldering energy in her eyes that Shepard recognized as victory. It had been so long since anyone felt victorious. She could barely remember the sensation, for her the last time had been before the Blitz. Before Elysium.

“We won, Shepard.” Liara clutched her hand, eyes shining. “We really won. Your ambush worked perfectly, the Device trapped all the Reapers in the mass effect field. The battle after was hard, there were... casualties. But we won! We won!”

Shepard, laying in her bed, motionless and drunk with morphine could think of nothing to say in response for a long moment. She didn't have the energy to pretend she was capable of feeling anything right now, with her arms to paralysed with weakness to hug, eyes to dry to cry happy tears, a body to sick to feel the swell of joy. Finally, she asked the only question with any real meaning to her. “How many casualties?”

Doctor Chakwas stepped in then, a syringe in one hand. “I think that's enough. You'll have time to be debriefed and get back to commanding when you've had a little more time to heal. Your body is still in shock from the wounds you sustained. You need some time.” She shook her head, the last, fiercest motion available to her and cringed away as the hand with the syringe reared like a viper over her IV tube.

“I've slept for six and half weeks. I'm sick from sleep. I have the right to be informed of the results of the battle.” Her eyes blazed at the dismissive look she received, the look a doctor gives a hysterical patient who is being unreasonable, not the look an officer gives her commander. “I don't know if you understand, Doctor. That was MY plan. Those people formed their strategies based on the information I provided and my directions. The ones that died are...” She didn't have to say it, didn't have to force the painful truth over her lips. The meaning was clear enough: they are my fault. I was supposed to lead them, and I wasn't there. I'm responsible.

“Commander, no.” Liara breathed. “It wasn't your fault.” She ignored that.

“I want to know how many. I want to know where we are, what's been going on with the Council and the Citadel for the past month and a half, and I want to know who's been commanding my ship and what they've been doing.” Before her injury, an order like that would have been followed immediately. Liara at least, straightened in her chair, assuming a less casual posture and looked apologetic. The doctor didn't even blink.

“You've been relieved of duty for medical reasons,” she said flatly, “and placed under my authority. Now, I know how to practise medicine, Commander, and I mean it when I say you need to rest now not deliberately pile as much stress as possible on to yourself during the healing process. Now,” she took hold of the IV tube, injected the drug and ignored the cry of anger from her commanding officer, her grey eyes narrow and business-like. She turned to Liara. “It's time to let the commander rest. You can come back tomorrow.”

“No. Let her stay.” Shepard was beginning to feel the effects of the drug already, numbing the pain in her wasted arms and legs, making the hard edges of the room bleed together. “Just... just read me another poem. I don't want to fall asleep alone.”

Chakwas opened her mouth, as if to protest, but Liara had already picked up the book again and it was open on a random page. She started reading and the doctor sighed with irritation, but let it be. She left quietly as Liara read and the drug plunged Shepard deeper and deeper into the artificial sleep of painkillers.

“O soft embalmer of the still midnight! Shutting with careful fingers and benign, our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light, enshaded in forgetfulness divine; o soothest Sleep! If it so pleases thee, close, in midst of thy hymn, my willing eyes.” She had been slipping backward, into the dark oblivion of falling faces and could feel them blooming, a hundred thousand dead soldiers adding themselves to the ranks of her tormenters, victims of her inadequacy. And the thought came, smashing temporarily through the haze.

“Liara.” She whispered, the asari's eyes flickered up off the page to her.

“I thought... I thought Kaidan was here. When I was awake the last time.” She studied the woman's face, trying to glean some truth from her face. She shook her head, dismissing it, a vision of pain on the surgery bed. But it had been ten years of them together, and Shepard knew better. She knew the tells. She knew the lies. Even Liara, it seemed, was not above treating her like a delicate flower with a bent stem, doing nothing that might disturb or upset her. She continued to read as Shepard sank deeper into the bed, sleep beginning to overtake her once more.

“Or wait Amen, ere thy poppy throws around the bed its lulling charities, then save me, or the passed day will shine upon my pillow, breeding many woes; save me from curious conscience, that still hoards its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole; turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, and seal the casket of my soul.” Her eyes were closed, sleep was almost upon her. Liara put the book aside. Her footsteps retreated, growing dim and echoing in the deep oblivion of sleep she was sinking backwards into. At the door there were voices, shapeless and indecipherable. But loud. She was suddenly gone, and all the new forms of her nameless, numberless victims rushed up to meet her, to enfold her in their arms and whisper accusations like a legion of possessive lovers. Nightmares. Dreams. For her, there was no longer any difference.

End Chapter One