Midnight Doubts (ME2, T, F!Shepard/Thane, F!Shepard/Ashley)

[wallwalker]

Title: Midnight Doubts
Author: Wallwalker
Fandom: Mass Effect
Rating: Teen and up
Characters: F!Shepard/Thane, F!Shepard/Ashley
Word Count: 1421
Content Notes: Discussion of terminal illness. That might be triggering, right?
Other Notes: Written for fic_promptly. Same universe as Learning Curve, Missing Variables, and possibly Predator. (Repentant Shepard, in other words.) I probably need to go ahead and make an AO3 series for this Shepard so that I can group these together in order.

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The clock said it was the middle of the night cycle when Shepard opened her eyes. Her body ached; no amount of cybernetics could completely stop her muscles from reacting to the stress that her biotic charges put them through on almost a daily basis. Little wonder that she'd woken up, she thought, stretching.

Thane was still asleep beside her, no doubt exhausted by their last mission. He's been sleeping longer since their assault on the base. It was a symptom of his worsening condition, Chakwas says. Not a severe one - not enough to cause a real impact on his physical condition for the moment, as long as he's able to get the rest that he needs. But it was a clear enough sign that the end is on its way.

She let him sleep, slipped quietly onto her feet and walked to her workstation. She has reports that she needs to finish reading, messages from all over that she hasn't acknowledged. It's been days since she'd received them - weeks, in some cases.

They're a clear sign that people are starting to believe her. The new Council might have been able to downplay the Reaper threat once she was dead, but now she was alive again, and the threat was staring them in the face. Two of the most influential humans in the galaxy were standing behind her, backing her up; between the two of them, people who had swallowed Udina's official line about Saren and the geth were starting to reconsider.

Granted, Udina's sudden drop in credibility had helped, thanks to an arrangement with the new Shadow Broker to leak footage of his visit to Omega to Ms. Wong's office. Shepard had recommended him to lead the new council; at the time it had seemed necessary to have someone who wouldn't fold when the other races pushed back, and she hadn't been sure that Anderson could handle the political bullshit. But he'd still screwed her over back then, and she'd still owed him one. He wasn't the only person who could abandon his allies when he didn't need them anymore.

She shook her head. She was procrastinating again, she told herself sternly. She'd gotten up to deal with some of this backlog, not to reminisce. Dealing with this sort of thing had never been her favorite, but honestly, she'd never had this much trouble. She'd never been so tempted to walk back to her bed, slip back under the covers with Thane and try to sleep, or at least listen to him breathe for a bit longer. However long they had, before someone needed her for the next emergency.

Although maybe an emergency would be nice, she thinks, idly poking at a datapad by the terminal. Especially if it wasn't another solo rescue attempt, another reason to have to leave her crew behind. She always felt that pang of guilt when she had to leave Thane behind for a mission, especially now that his illness was somewhat more visible. She knew that he would never complain - he trusted her judgment absolutely, in a way that still humbled her - and she had never left him behind without very good reason. And she knew how selfish her motivation was, how foolish.

She'd accepted his death the first time she'd met him; she'd known that she couldn't save him before she'd taken him to bed. But she hated to leave him behind when she went on missions, even if it meant putting him in danger. She wanted to be beside him when he died, couldn't stand the thought of coming back to find that he was gone. It wouldn't be the first time that someone she'd loved had died alone.

What had it been like for Ashley, she found herself thinking, during her last moments on Virmire? Had she been afraid? It was hard to imagine that - Ashley had almost never shown any fear, for all the time that Shepard had known her. She hoped that she hadn't been afraid. She wanted to believe that Ashley had died a warrior's death, that she'd kicked the geth's asses right up to the end.

When she thought about it too hard, it seemed odd that she could possibly care about them both, when they were so different. And not only in the most obvious ways - Thane was so quiet and respectful, so submissive. Ashley had always been loud and brash, and she didn't easily back down, even to her commanding officers. The only thing that the two of them had in common was their belief in religions that others thought were archaic and backwards - or in their gods, at least. She didn't know how far Ashley's beliefs went. She wished that she'd asked, but she never had.

They'd have a second thing in common soon enough, though.

Shepard shut down the terminal display and leaned back in her chair. It all came back to that, didn't it? She'd lost Ashley before anything could have started; she hadn't been willing to stop being Commander Shepard long enough to be herself. And so Ashley had died alone on Virmire, fighting off an army, knowing that she was going to be left behind. She'd died because she'd believed in Shepard, and what they'd fought for.

Thane believed in her, too. He was staying with her because he wanted to be with her to the end. She could have ordered him to go to the hanar, to accept the chance at the lung transplant - she had no doubt that he would've done it, if she'd told him to. But then she'd be leaving him behind again, and there weren't any guarantees - especially now that he'd waited so long. He was weaker now than he had been then. The transplant could easily kill him outright.

No - this was all bullshit. She made so many excuses, when the truth was that she didn't want to leave him behind any more than he wanted to leave her. There was something wrong with her head, she was sure of it. The first person she'd loved had died alone, without her. And then she'd fallen in love with someone that she knew was going to die, and she was clinging to him as hard as she could. She was lucky that Cerberus didn't share the Alliance's love for regular psych evaluations; she was pretty sure this situation would raise a few red flags.

It might be petty of her to think about this, considering what was coming. But that didn't make thinking about it any less disturbing, or less painful. Maybe she was making a mistake, but even if she was, she couldn't bring herself to regret it, or to let it go.

This was pointless, she thought, turning the terminal back on. She wasn't going to get any work done. One last look, and she was going to call it a night, go back to her bunk and rest for a while longer.

The terminal came to life, refreshing itself. A new message had appeared on top of the stack, from Yeoman Chambers. She looked at it, scanning it quickly and then reading it a bit more closely.

She was smiling when she stood up and walked back to bed. She'd known that Kelly wouldn't let her down.

Thane stirred as she climbed in beside him, and turned to face her. One cool, rough-scaled arm wrapped around her waist. "Siha," he said, his voice lower and raspier than usual, no doubt from the sleep. "Are you well?"

"Yeah," she said, moving in closer. "Got some good news. You told me you wanted to visit a desert world, right?"

"I would," he said. "Although I had assumed that it would be prohibitively difficult, under the circumstances."

"Not so much. Kelly found a colony world that's primarily desert. She's handling the details right now. We should be able to land there tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" He opened his eyes, looked at her. "I had not hoped for it to happen so soon."

She leaned over and kissed him briefly. "Surprise."

"Indeed." He nestled closer to her, leaning his head against her chest. "Thank you."

"Don't mention it," she said, doing her best to smile. Liara had been right. She needed to enjoy whatever time she had with him. She wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

She drifted off to sleep again in his arms, listening to the reassuring sound of his breathing, as slow and gentle as waves upon a sandy shore.