Chapter Text
It turns out there are perks to saving the Citadel. Ashley's not the one being called the Savior of the Citadel in the media (that would be Shepard), but she's being put up in a fancy hotel room compliments of the grateful Citadel Council, who have booked rooms for the entire crew of the Normandy. Between the military beds (even the one in the captain's quarters isn't great) and the sleeper pods on the ship, she'd almost forgotten what a real bed feels like.
Of course, she's not spending much time in her own room. Once everyone else is occupied, she slips down the hallway to Shepard's and gives the knock they'd agreed on.
Shepard opens the door, already bundled up in a hotel bathrobe. "You're the first here," she says with a grin, and Ashley chuckles, stepping inside.
"Always had to be faster than everyone else," she explains. Faster, stronger, smarter, just to avoid the suspicion that her surname cast on her.
"Hm," Shepard says, backing her against the door. "That hasn't been my experience with you lately."
Ashley blushes, thinking of some of the tag teaming that she's been subject to, and Shepard leans in and kisses her, her fingers finding her hair. Shepard's lips (and the rest of her) are becoming much more familiar to her now, but this is definitely the most relaxed they've been together, none of the desperation of the night before Ilos nor the adrenaline of the afterparty for saving the Citadel. She skims a hand down the side of that fluffy bathrobe, then back up the front, settling on Shepard's breast to realize she's not wearing a bra. Pointedly, Shepard presses closer, then as Ashley takes the hint, starts unpinning her hair, yet somehow nothing feels rushed, it just feels right.
She almost misses it, but, being the one pinned to the door, hears the second secret knock. Gently pushing Shepard off of her, she opens the door to let in Kaidan, who raises an eyebrow at her loosening bun and Shepard's loosening bathrobe.
"Are you two getting started without me?"
"A little bit," Shepard says, not bothering to close up her bathrobe, and Ashley chuckles as she goes to kiss Kaidan on the cheek in greeting. "But, uh, hey, now that you're both here..."
Shepard takes a moment to root around in her foot locker before emerging with two small presents in crumpled giftwrap and too much tape.
"It's not even Christmas," Ashley says, looking between them and trying to figure out which one's hers.
"I know we've barely scratched the surface of this and the Reapers are still out there in dark space," says Shepard. "But I wanted to get you two something, because it's not fair that I've been getting all the glory for saving the Citadel, and to say thank you, and, I..."
"And?" Kaidan prompts her, when she falls silent, but Ashley can guess what it was.
"It's not anything you can use in the field," she says instead, a little apologetic. "I didn't want things to look... you know."
Ashley does know, probably the best of any of them, how the power imbalance makes this all more dangerous, how special guns or armor or mods might make it look like she or Kaidan are trading sex for favors.
"And I thought you two deserve something that's just for you," Shepard adds. "Not for the Alliance."
"We do have something," Kaidan says, cupping her cheek in his hand. "We have you."
Ashley smiles as Kaidan kisses Shepard, watches them lean into each other (carefully leaving space for the gifts). Seeing them flirting in front of her had used to hurt, back when she'd thought she didn't stand a chance with either of them and the two of them getting together was much more likely; seeing them together now just makes her happy for the two people she loves.
"You're wrapped about as well as the presents," she points out, tugging at the belt of Shepard's bathrobe, and though they disengage to laugh, she does have a more serious gift to add. "But we also have each other - that's thanks to you too."
Shepard saved her life on Eden Prime, then promptly passed out there, leading Kaidan to recommend her to Anderson, and then later Shepard saved them both on Virmire - if just one step had been missed, they wouldn't be here, together, tentatively feeling out a relationship of three.
"Shut up and accept your presents," says Shepard. "Ladies first."
She passes Ashley the gift in deep blue paper. Ashley rips into it to find a digital projector - when she turns it on, a model of the Milky Way glows in the air, and she quickly discovers it's touch sensitive.
"That first time we went to the Citadel, you were looking at the nebula, too," Shepard says eventually, and Ashley blinks. She didn't think anyone had noticed. "I only figured it out when I kept catching you up in the CIC, just looking out the windows at the stars. I thought you might still want to see them."
This, with its ability to zoom in and focus on different systems, is much more convenient than trying to find a space in the CIC. "Thank you," she breathes, moving between systems with an ease impossible in actual space flight. "Thank you so, so much."
"Do you have a favorite system?" Kaidan asks.
It's hard to tell whether he's teasing or the question's genuine, but she finds the system anyway. "Alpha Centauri. It's the closest system to Sol, so there's actually a small human colony out there, independent of the Alliance and the Council and galactic politics. And it has three suns."
Shepard smirks. "Three suns, humans, and close to Earth, huh?"
"Go, Team Milky Way," Kaidan adds, grinning.
Ashley scrunches up her nose. "Shut up. I liked it before I even met you two."
"Okay, okay," says Kaidan, always the first to back down and soothe instead. "Why do you like it?"
"It's three interesting suns really close to Sol," she says. Even before the rediscovery of the Manswell colony, she'd been fascinated. "Proxima Centauri's a red dwarf; Alpha Centauri A and B are a binary star, which means it's two stars that orbit each other, like Vamshi A and B."
"I had no idea you were such an astronomy nerd," Kaidan says in wonder.
Sheepish, because it's true she hasn't talked to either of them about this the way she's talked about poetry, she shrugs. "I always wanted to be out there," she says. On every colony her family lived on, she'd look up, and on the way to each one, her nose would be pressed against the glass. The first star systems she learned were the ones with humans, in case her family would be sent there; it had come in handy when she enlisted.
Shepard's eyes are alight with amusement. "So which star's which of us?"
"I'm not answering that," Ashley says, rolling her eyes.
As Shepard slowly suffocates in their earpieces, she looks at Kaidan by her side in the escape shuttle, and she knows that either Shepard was the red dwarf, or the three of them were an unstable system anyway.
She doesn't turn off her feed, because that would mean losing Kaidan's voice too, and Tali and Liara in another pod, and everyone else still alive on this channel, and the part of her desperately trying to find some small measure of control still needs to keep in radio contact with any survivors, but keeping it on means listening to one lover running out of air and the other one running out of hope.
They drift. When Shepard finally falls silent forever, Tali speaks up so she and Kaidan can talk each other through putting out and amplifying the shuttles' distress signals. Ashley pops her own restraint even though she can't help with Kaidan's tech work, and by the time the Alliance picks them up hungry and thirsty (there are pods unaccounted for), they're holding each other tighter than gravity. They only let their rescuers pull them apart because otherwise they won't fit through the shuttle door.
When the 212 had been killed, Anderson had offered her leave. She hadn't taken it then, too eager to do something about the geth, but she takes the offer now, because though fewer people had died on the Normandy, Shepard alone meant more to her than anyone in the 212, and the Normandy itself had been another life for her which she also needs to grieve. Rather than go home to her family in that house on Amaterasu she only sees on her mandatory week of leave every year, she stays on the Citadel with Kaidan, who's also taking leave and is the only thing that feels remotely right in the galaxy. It's only remote, because she'd been so used to their trinary system and now they're a binary, but everything else feels wrong.
Garrus, back in his C-Sec armor, catches them holding hands in the Academy on their way to what used to be the Normandy's dock, but only asks, "Are you here on shore leave, or just resupplying?"
Ashley bites her lip as tears suddenly well up - not here, not in public - and when neither of them answer, Garrus adds, "Where's Shepard? I'd love to catch up."
"Garrus," Kaidan says, his voice hoarse. "Do you have a minute?"
They end up breaking the news to him in one of C-Sec's interview rooms. Garrus looks at them, at the tension in Kaidan's jaw, at the tears still in her eyes, and says nothing for a long moment, and then eventually says they can stay at his place while they're on leave. He takes the couch and doesn't blink an eye when they share the bed.
Three moody days later, he hands her the keys and asks if they can housesit. Neither of them can get where or how long he's going out of him. An internal memo about the Alliance declaring Shepard missing in action does not lift their spirits after his sudden departure.
"How can they do this?" Kaidan demands, pacing Garrus's tiny studio. "Just give up?"
"I don't know," she says, looking out the dingy window. The view's awful. Garrus couldn't have been making much with C-Sec. Idly, she wonders if he was getting paid on the Normandy. "Maybe they're too broke trying to replace the Normandy and the First and Third Fleets to look for one missing, suffocated Lieutenant Commander."
Kaidan comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. "She wasn't just a Commander."
"I know," she says. "They don't know that."
"We should go look for her," he says, impulse heating his voice. "How long do you think it'll take us to catch up to Liara? Or Garrus - maybe that's where he went so quickly."
He's looking up shuttle rentals and she's packing their meager replacement belongings when Anderson shows up with new assignments that take them out of each other's orbit. It's more notice than she usually gets but it's still too short to join Liara's search for Shepard even if only for a little while.
They make love that night for the first time since the attack, and while the sex itself is fine, Shepard's absence is so strong that without discussion, they don't try again until their last day together.
"I love you," he says, the morning of his flight to somewhere she doesn't have the clearance to know. "It wasn't just the two of you together; I love you for just you, even without her."
Ashley shifts in his arms, studying him in the light that made it through Garrus's blinds. "I let myself love you first."
"You 'let yourself'?" he echoes, amused. "What, I wasn't your CO, so it was okay?"
"You're a guy, so it was okay," she says, and his eyes grow serious. "I wasn't into girls before meeting Shepard - it still might just be her, it's not like I've found any other women attractive. It took me a long time to figure out if I wanted to be with her or be her, and then figure out what that meant for... me."
As if to soothe her, he starts stroking her hair, his fingers gentle. "I had no idea," he murmurs. "I mean, I noticed you seemed a little unsure of things with her those first few times we slept together, but I thought it was just the fraternization and maybe less experience with women, not no experience with women."
"Now you know," she says, and he kisses her forehead. "Point was, I love you separately too."
"I don't want this to be over," he says. "I don't want to lose you too."
She pauses. "Are you trying to break up with me?"
He shakes his head. "The opposite: I promise to keep in touch, to come see you if we're on leave at the same time in the same system."
"Long distance." Sarah's trying this with a military boy, and it seems hard enough with one person staying in one place.
"If you want," he amends it.
"I want it," she says, and she kisses him slow and thorough, to prove it. "I want you, Kaidan."
His eyes are dark in the Citadel lights. No matter what he promises, she can't help but feel like this is the last time she'll touch him like this; the last time his hands, his mouth will be on her body; the last time they'll be together.
Kaidan keeps his promise and writes to her every day, but she doesn't know how to write back. His e-mails start off fairly ordinary, with a sketch of his new assignment (all he can give) and anecdotes of his new unit, but they spiral quickly into the same survivor's guilt she carries in her veins, the same grief she carries in her skin, the same ache she carries in her heart.
I miss Shepard. I miss you. I miss us.
His Chief does not answer him, her fingers pale and still. Shepard had pointed out the Captain dies in that poem when Ashley had referenced it the night before Ilos and now she can't help but wonder if that was a mistake. Kaidan would only feel worse if he knew this wasn't the only way she thinks this might somehow be her fault: The 212 had died, and most of Aeghor Team. She should have known it was only a matter of time before she lost the Normandy. She should have known she didn't deserve to have a relationship with two people instead of one.
Ash, I haven't heard from you. Are you okay? I worry about you.
The only way she can help him is to ask a higher power. She prays that he'll find peace, both from his mourning and from his worrying about her. She prays for Shepard. She prays every day, and wonders if she'd let the regularity of her prayers lapse before the Normandy went down.
I've put a read receipt request on this so I know if you're even getting these e-mails.
The receipt is all she can send. All the Tennyson she reads (thinking of Shepard, thinking of him, thinking of how she'd done this after her dad died) can't give her the words to reply, and the stars in her projector are silent and sure where she is silent because she's speechless.
Okay. I can't pretend that I'm not confused, not hurt. I still love you, Ash. But if you don't want to or can't reply, I'll respect that. You have my comm address if you ever change your mind.
She's not sure if this is a breakup, and can't figure out how to ask.
He's not the only one writing. It is easier, somehow, to deal with this complete stranger offering sympathies about the Council's lack of action on the Reapers and for humanity, about the atrocities she saw at Eden Prime, about her grandfather and the attempts to exonerate him. Maybe it's the lack of emotional attachment to someone who saw her name in the news vids and guessed her e-mail address from Alliance standards.
She does not expect the stranger to be from Cerberus and she certainly does not expect a job offer. Ashley says no. She's seen their work, their experimentation on humans. She's seen Shepard wake in the middle of the night and frantically check her pulse and Kaidan's, making sure she's not the only one who made it out of a thresher maw attack. She's seen the needle marks in Kahoku's arm. The Alliance is as much a part of her blood as brown eyes and a love for poetry, and she won't - can't - betray that.
You can contact me at this comm address if you ever change your mind, writes the would-be recruiter, and she promises herself she never will.
Instead, she reports it to the Alliance. It's so ridiculous that she finds the words to tell Kaidan, and is halfway through an apologetic e-mail when orders from higher than she should be getting as a Gunnery Chief tell her to say yes.
We need someone on the inside. This is an opportunity we've been working for, dropped into your lap. Infiltrate Cerberus. Learn as much as you can about their plans.
The orders come with a training schedule for deep cover operations and a potential promotion. She never wanted to be a spy and with her honesty which both Kaidan and Shepard have called "occasionally brutal", part of her suspects she's not going to be very good at it, but the look on Shepard's face seeing Corporal Toombs alive and unwell keeps replaying in her head.
"I love the Alliance," she tells the recruiter, on a vidchat with a voice distorter and an ever changing human face. "But they've never loved me. And I want to make a difference."
She couldn't make a promise to her lover who's still alive, but she can promise the dead one she's going to try and make sure no one goes through what she or her old squadmate faced.