Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

There's a lot to take in after Minuteman Station. Freedom's Progress looks so much like the colonies she grew up on, except that it's empty save an anxious quarian on pilgrimage. Shepard moves and fights exactly the way she remembers. Tali's running around human colonies with an adult name, a squad who barely listens to her, and a grudge against Cerberus too venomous to only be about their general human supremacist stance. Cerberus built a bigger Normandy with a true AI, and hired Joker to pilot her ("Shit, Ash, I didn't know you were here too!") and Chakwas as her CMO.

Ashley hides away in the starboard observation deck (an extravagance that would never see the light of day on an Alliance ship) to write up her report. She's reviewing her helmet cam footage when the door opens, and she hurriedly closes her omni-tool windows.

"Hey, Ash," Shepard says, coming around the couch to join her. "Everything's been crazy - we haven't really had a chance to talk."

They'd become friends and later, she'd developed a crush because Shepard kept coming to talk to her after missions. She should have seen this coming. Still, Ashley tries to stall. "Not just talk."

She stands up to embrace her the way she didn't dare in front of Lawson and Jacob. With a contented sigh, Shepard hugs her back tighter than she'd started. It feels so familiar, but not perfectly: Shepard's a little more solid in a way that says cybernetics and tech rather than muscle, and her skin feels hotter against hers than she remembers, too hot to just be her own skin flushing with shame as she analyzes her old lover for a damn report.

"This is so fucked up," Shepard murmurs, and she withdraws from the hug, but keeps her hands on Ashley's side and shoulder. "What the hell are you doing here? You were the last person I would have expected to join Cerberus after everything we saw."

I am spying on them and now I am spying on you, gets stuck in her throat. What comes out is so well rehearsed that she finds she can say it even with Shepard touching her like she used to: "After you died, the Alliance, the Council, weren't doing anything about the Reapers - I couldn't just let your work die with you. And the Alliance were hamstringing me like they always did before you came along. I wanted to make a difference, and Cerberus is out there."

The worst part, and the part that makes it easiest to say, even to Shepard, is that it's half true. Cerberus is trying to help the colonies; she didn't see any trace of an Alliance team on Freedom's Progress.

Shepard shakes her head. "'Cerberus is out there.' The Ash I knew wouldn't have given them that much."

"The Ash you knew grew up," she says softly. Spy or not, she's closer now to Shepard's age on the first Normandy - Shepard's age now, if one doesn't count the years she was dead.

"I hate that I missed that." Shepard draws closer to her face, either to kiss her or to touch her forehead to hers like they sometimes did, and Ashley can't help flinching. "Sorry - was that too much?" She pauses. "God, you probably found someone else -"

"No," she says quickly. "There's no one else."

"What happened to Kaidan?"

Every day, she wonders that herself and feels like more of a coward than she ever has for her field work. "We... kind of drifted apart after you died. We were grieving, you know? And we never drifted back together."

Her eyes solemn, Shepard nods. "I keep forgetting it's been two years for you." She pauses, and lets her hands drop; it comes as both a relief and a disappointment. "We don't have to go back to us if you don't want to, but I do want to get to know you again. Having someone I trust here, someone who's coming out in the field with me - that means everything to me."

She doesn't deserve her trust. Ashley swallows, but smiles. "I'd like that."

The more Shepard gets to know the parts of her she can show while undercover, the more Ashley finds Shepard hasn't changed at all. Lawson and her team did good work. Working with the organization that killed most of her squad is clearly a struggle, but she still has that charisma that pulls the most disparate people into her orbit, she still talks to everyone after missions and tries to make new squadmates feel welcome (especially Mordin, Ashley notices; she hadn't tried this hard with the aliens on the SR-1), she still nerds out with Garrus (finally, an answer to where he went when he left the Citadel) about programming, she still loves explosions, she still argues with Ashley that Tupari's superior to Paragade.

It's hard not to notice that she's still interested. Shepard still gives her those soft looks and smiles she used to, she still takes her ashore more than anyone else to the point where Ashley has to ask for rest, she still gives her first dibs on rifle mods (Garrus has second), and she still occasionally checks her out and smirks only half-embarrassed when Ashley catches her. Ashley finds herself thinking of her in her bunk and double checking Cerberus's (surprising lack of) rules on fraternization. As much as both of them still want it, rekindling part of their relationship would be risky to her investigation and just plain unfair, both to Shepard, who doesn't know the real reason she watches her so closely, and to Kaidan, who'd been part of their relationship on the SR-1 and as far as she can tell, had never broken up with either of them.

When they see Anderson on the Citadel, Shepard asks about Kaidan, gets a "classified" non-answer (Ashley's interested to learn that he's been promoted to Staff Commander), and then asks if she can come back. The answer has her face crumpling in an elevator while Lawson inspects armor upgrades in a store.

"Hey," Ashley says gently, pulling Shepard into a hug on instinct. "I've got you."

Shepard buries her face in her neck as she wraps her arms around her waist in turn. "I hate this," she murmurs. "They won't help us or tell me anything because I'm with Cerberus, but I wouldn't be with Cerberus if they'd just reinstate me!"

Ashley makes soothing noises, though she's wondering about that herself. She'd understand the Alliance's distance from Shepard if she wasn't here with her sending reports about how she's not at all being controlled by Cerberus, but as things stand, she has to wonder if the Alliance is making Shepard stay put so they don't have to use their own resources on Terminus colonies that don't want them around.

They hold each other in silence until the elevator doors open again, and then they hurriedly step apart when Lawson enters, surprised that they didn't get very far ahead of her. But Shepard holds her gaze in the shuttle back to the Normandy, and it's all she can do to not take her hand.

Three new squadmates later, the Illusive Man sends them to the Iera system, a familiar name from her memorized list of star systems inhabited by humans. As Garrus goes to get ready, Shepard catches Ashley by the wrist.

"Kaidan's there."

The idea of seeing him again after two years where she went silent on him and then, to all appearances, turned traitor, is both exciting and terrifying. "You think this is that classified mission Anderson mentioned?"

"I don't know," Shepard says. "All the Illusive Man said about him was that he's around."

She can't stop thinking about him once they land on Horizon. It's hard to see these civilians in stasis and not think the next person she'll see frozen is Kaidan, hard to see the Collector pods and not fear that they've already taken him away. The latter seems more and more likely as they don't see him, until they defeat the Praetorian and Kaidan appears from behind some tall crates at the sound of Shepard's name.

"Commander Shepard: Captain of the Normandy. The first human Spectre. Savior of the Citadel." Kaidan's gaze slips sideways to land on her, and he adds, "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams - on Shepard's squad when she saved the Citadel."

(She received her commission recently, but no one here can know.)

"You're in the presence of legends, Delan," he goes on. She'd personally count Kaidan as a legend too. "And a ghost."

As Delan leaves in disgust, Kaidan steps forward with his arms open. Ashley can't help but follow Shepard into them for one of their old three-way hugs, but this is tighter than any they had back in 2183, shock and relief (and at least in Ashley's case, the knowledge that they're not in front of Lawson or Jacob who could almost certainly read this correctly and would report it) tangling them together, and she realizes then that like Shepard, she hasn't fallen out of love with Kaidan yet; it's just twisted up by their lack of contact and her undercover work. They don't loosen until Garrus puts his arms around Shepard and Kaidan, commenting, "I hope this wasn't a humans only group hug."

Laughing, Kaidan brings him into the circle, but when they draw apart, it's not Garrus's hands he's holding onto.

"I heard you die, Shepard," he says. "We all did. And Ash, I didn't know what happened to you."

"I'm sorry," Ashley says, squeezing his hand. "I didn't know what to say."

"For two years?" Kaidan asks. "I thought we had something, the three of us. Something real. I... I loved you."

Loved, in the past tense. Her heart suddenly feels blocked, and it's hard to say anything in the subsequent argument over Cerberus and the colonies and who's a traitor (everyone, apparently: Kaidan can't seem to decide whether he's in more disbelief over Shepard appearing to fake her death, her radio silence leading to their work with Cerberus, or Garrus joining up when he's an alien). Even her usual excuses for joining Cerberus which she's been saying for over a year feel flat and inadequate when she tries to give them to the man she loves who no longer loves her back.

With one last barb about where his loyalties lie, Kaidan declines Shepard's desperate offer to join the Normandy. Never before has Ashley wanted so badly to tell someone that she's still Alliance. But she holds her tongue like a good Alliance soldier in deep cover, adding to the silence in the shuttle as they leave. She's thankful for Garrus's lack of comment, at least. She doesn't think she or Shepard could answer questions about their relationship right now.

"Did you really hear me die?" Shepard asks eventually, her voice small.

The only answer Ashley can muster is a nod.

Kaidan e-mails her.

Ashley reads it, then retreats to the ship's elevator with one hand on the door close button to read it again. She rests her forehead on the cold metal of the door, holding in the tears in case someone hacks in and catches her.

When the doors open, she almost falls over into Shepard's arms, but Shepard catches her and closes the elevator again, and Ashley allows her to hold her.

"Hey."

"How'd you get in here?"

"Asked EDI nicely," Shepard says, and Ashley realizes what ratted her out. "Is there a reason you're hiding?"

Waving her hand at her omni-tool window (off to the side of their embrace), all she can get out is, "Kaidan."

"Mind if I...?"

Once she nods, Shepard draws away and moves the window in the air so she can read it: He's sorry. He's disappointed. He doesn't know who she is any more. He's thinking about the night before Ilos, about their private afterparty, about the hotel. He wants her to be careful. He wants something when things settle down, but doesn't know what.

"He sent me something similar," says Shepard.

"We really hurt him," says Ashley. "Being here, not telling him."

Shepard studies her, and she tries not to squirm. "Why didn't you tell him you were here?"

I was under orders not to. She shrugs helplessly. "I didn't know how to tell him, especially when we hadn't talked in so long. 'Hey, babe, I defected'?"

"He'd be more suspicious of you calling him 'babe'," Shepard says, so seriously that Ashley has to smile. She pulls up an e-mail on her omni-tool and angles it for her to read. "Here. 's only fair."

It is similar to the one he'd sent her, but talks about his grief and survivor's guilt where he told her about how confused he'd been when she didn't write back. Like in her e-mail, he mentions drinks with a doctor on the Citadel.

"'Pulled hard to port'," Shepard says, pointing out the phrase. "That's your thing. I don't think he got anything from me."

Ashley taps both e-mails closed, then leans into Shepard's waiting arms again. "I know it's for the colonies, but I hate doing this to him."

Shepard's lips brush the top of her forehead in a gesture Kaidan had liked, being only barely the tallest of the three of them. "So do I."

Their faces are too close together when Ashley turns her head to look at her because she hadn't expected that forehead kiss. Her eyes go to Shepard's mouth, and she can't guess later whether either of them moved first but it doesn't matter while Shepard's lips are on hers; the only thing that does is the give and take, the sureness of Shepard's hands on her, the way her body sings at the most intimate touch she's had since the morning Kaidan left, the way the gravitational pull between them suddenly asserts itself the way a mass effect field takes hold in battle.

By the time they draw apart, Shepard's unpinned Ashley's hair from its bun and is flushed and looking apologetic.

"I'm sorry," Shepard says. "I shouldn't have done that; you haven't said anything about getting back together and I meant to respect that, and you deserve more than post combat, post Kaidan -" She waves a hand, which Ashley interprets as something between 'tension' and 'bullshit'. "Look, do you want to have a coffee in the mess, or - something?"

She hadn't meant to start anything either, too wary of her undercover status; the close quarters in private and high emotions had started things for her. The mess is public and therefore far safer than the elevator. Ashley nods, and bends down to start gathering hairpins and hairties, because Shepard apparently hasn't lost her bad habit of just dropping them after taking them out of her hair.

"Like we used to." They don't normally take their coffee the same way, but they'd shared a mug, sometimes with Kaidan, after missions like Feros (fighting human colonists had been hard for Ashley), the biotic commune (Kaidan felt he'd had a glimpse of what he could have been), and the time they'd met Corporal Toombs.

Shepard joins her, and when their hands brush as they reach for the same hairpin, Ashley pulls her hand away and lets her pick it up.

They manage to keep their hands off of each other for several weeks, more assignments around the Terminus systems, and the recruitment of three more squadmates (having Tali back means not just another old friend she has to lie to, but also finding out what Cerberus did to the quarians). It isn't until they help Liara chase down the Shadow Broker and the Broker throws a desk at her (she's pretty miffed to miss out on the fight) that Shepard helps her limp onto the shuttle and then to the medbay, and though the touch itself is strictly professional, the look of relief on Shepard's face when she came to spoke volumes.

After Liara leaves the next morning (she'd slept in Shepard's cabin, which Ashley justified to herself with Shepard reportedly having couches up there and the bunks and sleeper pods being pretty full), Shepard drops in on Ashley while she's working on her report for the Alliance. "Hey. You okay?"

"Still a little sore, but yeah," says Ashley.

"You'll heal," Shepard says, patting her knee. "But that wasn't the kind of okay I meant."

"I'm okay emotionally too," she says, puzzled. She is fairly certain Liara didn't sleep with Shepard, and even if they did, Shepard can do whom she likes. Her claim on her is relinquished.

"You sure?" asks Shepard. "Nothing you need to get squared away? Family problems? Walk your sister to school one last time?"

"Sarah's in her second year of university," she points out. "And a shodan in aikido, and engaged."

"Oh," says Shepard, backhanded by the passage of time as she occasionally is, but she recovers quickly. "Anyone you want revenge on? Exoneration for your grandfather?"

Ashley stares. (Shepard's facial scars have healed now; she looks much more like her old self.) "Where are you going with this, skipper?"

"Everyone's been asking me if they can clean up some unfinished business so they can concentrate on the mission," she says, and it clicks. "Everyone except you, when you always seem to have something on your mind."

Damn, damn, damn, she's noticed. "Shepard -"

"I'm okay with you not sharing everything," Shepard says, with the kind of effort that says she isn't as okay as she wants to be. "I just want to make sure your head's straight when we go through that relay."

She needs to be sure as well, but Shepard is part of the problem and if Ashley told her, it would break her heart, and then Shepard's head wouldn't be straight for the mission, and she'd probably bring her rage down on the Alliance, and then the Alliance and Cerberus would probably fight over who got to fire and kill Ashley. She's been down this road of terrible likely consequences in her head many times before.

On the other hand, maybe part of the problem is Shepard's problem too, seeing as the sexual tension between them since the elevator has so thick that Tali asked about it during one of their little catchup chats in engineering. Shepard's not the only one who still wants what they once had. It's stupid, and risky, but maybe this is unfinished business she can clean up for Shepard as well as herself.

Ashley takes a deep breath and asks, "What if my head's bi?"

Shepard snorts, but follows it up with, "Ash, seriously."

"You're what's on my mind all the time," she says, and watches Shepard's breath catch. "I was lost without you, Shepard - kind of how I found myself here, of all places. And then you made it back, and I've been trying to figure out if it's still you ever since. But it is you. The woman I care about. The woman I..."

The way Shepard's face was steadily lighting up while she spoke makes her heart soar at the same time as it makes her stomach twist, because so much of it is true, but the unspoken truth beneath will make this all seem like a lie. She can't bring herself to finish the sentence.

"The woman you what?" Shepard prompts her eventually.

"I'm not telling you," Ashley decides, and Shepard chuckles, shaking her head. It's not like Shepard can't guess, and it doesn't feel right to say it with her secret between them. Good thing she has an excuse to recycle. "You'll have to come back again. Sorry, skipper, I don't make the rules."

"I love you too, Ash," she says, taking her hands with a tentative smile. "But, um... Last time we tried this, it wasn't just us."

"Kaidan." Shepard nods, biting her lip, and Ashley sighs. "I still care for him too, but I'm pretty sure he dumped us."

"That was how I read it too. I just wanted to make sure -" Shepard shrugs. "Maybe you were only in it for both of us, or maybe your unfinished business is actually tracking Kaidan down for one last -"

"Shepard!"

"Which, I can't lie, I'd be down for if he was, the two of you together were the best in bed, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't be, and it'd be even harder to justify to Cerberus than these other side trips."

Maybe it's a good thing she hadn't seen herself as that great in bed, because it means being called half of the best someone's slept with isn't going to shoot her confidence dangerously high, but: "We'd also get him into huge trouble."

"Or he'd try to bring us into custody and it wouldn't just be roleplay."

Ashley pauses. "Are you into that?"

Shepard gives her a smirk she'd always found sexy for its slowness but hasn't seen in a long time. "I bet you'd be good at it."

She laughs, but shakes her head. You have no idea. "Not my thing." It's too, too close to real life.

"Okay," Shepard says with a grin, and when she leans over to kiss her, this time no one tries to apologize for it. "I'm so glad we're together again - we're in this together. Things are more bearable already."

"Yeah," Ashley says, and hopes the pain in her smile looks like it was caused by having a desk thrown at her yesterday. "They really are."

She's surprised to find that rekindling her relationship with Shepard actually does make things a little more bearable. Sure, she's strengthened her old friendships with Tali and Garrus, and she's befriended some of the crew, but she'd forgotten what it was like to have someone put her first, someone who makes her feel stronger, someone who sees her faults and loves her anyway. The tension between them melts into affection given without restraint, and they orbit each other like a binary system.

Of course, where Shepard's breathing easier and smiling more, she's working twice as hard to hide her true mission at the same time as the traitorous side of her brain takes this as an opportunity to keep an even closer watch on Shepard, but the scales narrowly tilt towards this all being worth it.

Even after Shepard destroys a geth base, Ashley's too furious that she put a geth on the team to speak to her in the shuttle. She's not buying this sob story about the geth that followed Sovereign being a splinter faction, and Shepard's compromise of not making her work with Legion isn't enough.

And then they get back to the Normandy to find that the crew's gone, and her fury finds a new target. She hadn't expected she would end up feeling so strongly about the Cerberus crew, but the people here have been far more down to Earth than those on the Lazarus Research Station, and many of them are from colonies like she is, giving them a more personal stake in their mission than the scientists contemplating the science of bringing a person back to life. Plus, there's something about being on a ship that regularly goes into danger zones that brings people together the way being on a relatively stationary space station doesn't.

When Shepard announces they're going through the Omega-4 Relay immediately, Ashley prepares her guns with Garrus, Jacob, and Thane, and then heads to Shepard's cabin. She's been sleeping elsewhere in silent protest of recruiting Legion, but Shepard needs to know that she supports her in this suicide mission.

It's not even her first suicide mission with Shepard, she reflects, catching sight of a framed photo of her and Kaidan laughing together in that Citadel hotel so long ago. They'd thought they either weren't coming back from Ilos, or would come back to an Alliance firing squad. Even trying to start a relationship of three people, life had seemed simpler back then. They weren't working with terrorists or geth; no one was undercover and hiding it.

Ashley brushes her thumb across Kaidan's face in the frame, then awakens her omni-tool.

From: Ashley Williams <[email protected]>
To: Kaidan Alenko <[email protected]>
Subject: Goodbye

Kaidan,

I'm sorry. For everything.

We're heading through the Omega-4 relay tonight and I don't want to die without you knowing that. I never meant to hurt you. I still love you. Can't help thinking of our night with Shepard before Ilos.

If we make it back, I'll try to explain it all.

- Ash

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

"Hey," says Shepard, and Ashley looks up after sending the e-mail. "What are you writing?"

It's become a frequent question between them, usually when Ashley's reporting in because her luck is that terrible. She's been pretending she's keeping a personal log, inspired by the way the Council had always demanded proof of everything. In this case, though, she can tell the truth.

"I just finished an e-mail to Kaidan," she says, and Shepard nods, expression flickering more serious. "And before that, I set up a few e-mails to automatically send to my family if I don't log back in within a week - I'm assuming the Collectors don't have galactic standard comm beacons."

"Look at you, getting all technical," Shepard says, moving to straddle her in the chair; Ashley belatedly realizes she should have sat on the couch or the bed instead of staying in the office. "You would've asked me or Kaidan to do this for you a couple of years ago."

"I had to ask Miranda how," she admits. It's funny: When this had started, she hadn't liked Miranda; the Cerberus officer had rubbed her the wrong way on Lazarus Station and she was the personification of all her problems with Cerberus and with this mission. But after they rescued her sister, she had a new respect for their XO, and they'd found more common ground than she had with anyone else on the ship whom she hadn't known from the SR-1. Apparently that respect was returned, if Miranda had found time in their preparations for the Collector Base to talk her through setting delays and conditions on e-mails.

"Ah. I guess some things don't change." Shepard drapes her arms around her shoulders, which Ashley takes as a cue to put her hands on Shepard's waist. "So, am I out of the doghouse?"

"There are more important things," Ashley says. "The Relay, the Base. And you -"

She uses Shepard's first name, and watches as a smile melts across her face.

"I love it when you call me that."

Ashley smiles back, brushing Shepard's hair back from her face. Getting to see her like this, finding a moment of happiness before she leads them to their probable deaths, is a goddamn privilege and a bright spot on this stressful undercover mission. Maybe the last bright spot.

"Remind me to thank Miranda if we make it back," she says.

"You didn't thank her?"

"For bringing you back to me," she clarifies. "I'm glad I'm here, saving our people, back by your side."

"Having you at my side has made all the difference," Shepard says, her eyes warm, and then mischief tilts her smile. "Or under me."

Raising an eyebrow, Ashley rolls her hips. "Don't lie, you like it when I'm on top too."

Shepard hums in mock skepticism. "Remind me?"

As they dress again later, thoroughly reminded of where Shepard likes her (everywhere), Ashley kisses her cheek. "I believe in you," she says. "Let's go get our people and give the Collectors hell."

From: Kaidan Alenko <[email protected]>
To: Ashley Williams <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Goodbye

Come back to me, Ash. And bring Shepard with you.

--Kaidan