Ao3: veil_dagger
Title: [null]
From: Dr. Liara T’soni
Kaidan,
I thought you deserved to know.
—Liara
When the attached image opens, Kaidan’s hand flies to switch off the display. It’s in the ungodly hours of the morning, and the room he’s in is pitch dark without the light of his terminal.
No.
His pulse is in his ears and his heart is in his throat. All at once, old wounds tear themselves back open, stinging as freshly as each of the days he’d been dealt them.
It’s not possible.
It’s not a sick joke, either, coming from someone like Dr. T’soni, who he hadn’t heard from in ages.
Taking a deep, shaking breath, Kaidan activates the display again. Alone, in the quiet and in the dark, he forces himself to take the image in.
“Shit…” he rasps aloud.
It’s a still image taken from security footage, grainy, blurry, and cast in orange. He heard about Freedom’s Progress being hit in the recent series of mass-abductions—
—and this particular ‘coincidence’ makes him utterly sick to his stomach.
The still focuses on the exit of a trailer, the doors wide open for the trio passing through it: two women, and a man, all armed to the teeth. They’re positioned cautiously, as if they expect to be ambushed at any moment, even if the image of the colony around them is still and devoid of the life it should have.
Two of them, the man and one of the women, wear uniforms of black and white. While the image isn’t clear, that particular color combination, alongside the patches of blurry orange is enough for him to piece together who they work for.
Then, there’s the other woman.
Her.
No matter the image quality, he sees it, plain as day: the tied-up dark hair, the angles at which she holds herself, the pale face partially-hidden behind a transparent breather. He’d know her anywhere. It’s her, and he knows it as factually as he knows his own name.
Or a clone.
Or something else that has the audacity to be wearing her guise.
Kaidan switches the display off again, leans back in his chair, and runs his hands down both sides of his face. A million things run through his mind all at once, most of it driven by the pain and hurt and woundedness flooding through him.
Is it really her?
Why is Cerberus there?
Why, and how, does Liara know?
What the Hell am I supposed to do?
If she’s alive, why didn’t she reach out to me?
He sighs. That last part is purely driven by emotion. Not many people know where and how to find or contact him right now.
And that’s assuming it’s really her.
Shepard. Mari. Memories wash over him, as acute as the old wounds. The press of their warm bodies against one another in the captain’s quarters of the original Normandy, when the two of them were half-convinced they wouldn’t make it back from Ilos. Having his arms wrapped around her in the few nights they spent at her apartment, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her shoulders as she slept.
The last look she gave him on the burning ruins of the Normandy, sharp enough that he ran to do as he was told.
He ran.
Kaidan shakes his head at himself. He was supposed to have dealt with this by now, but this is different than a step back. This is an event that takes all the scabbing, rips it clean off, and demands attention.
Someone like Shepard being ripped from the universe, and then hastily pasted back into it, isn’t going to result in a clean reversal of what was torn out with her.
If it is her.
The display comes back on. Kaidan pulls the image up again, and—feeling fully exhausted and half-crazy—he gently runs a finger down the section of the hologram showing Shepard’s visage. Imitation or no.
If she’s somehow not dead, he’ll find out why. Especially if she’s with Cerberus, who he knows for a fact she despised.
If Cerberus had the audacity to find her genes somewhere and then use that to clone her, then he’ll kill them.
Eventually.
He can’t drop everything and abandon his own work for the sake of this, as drastic and life-altering as it feels, as much as it has him sensing the ground beneath him giving way for the second time in two years. The mission takes priority.
And none of what he’s mentally mulled over so far has touched the fact this image was taken at one of the recently-vanished human colonies in the Terminus. He can’t even begin to fathom what that means, but none of it settles in his stomach well.
Kaidan’s fingers tap on the keyboard, the only sound in the empty room.
Title: RE: [null]
From: Staff Commander Alenko
Unless you plan on explaining everything you know, don’t contact me again.
