Kaidan

Kaidan sat down on his bed and placed his head into his hands. After a moment, he let out a frustrated sigh and jerked to his feet, before he started pacing. He had just seen Shepard again after two years of thinking her dead and now he couldn’t get a hold of his emotions. She was with Cerberus! Why hadn’t she come to him? This had to be all his fault! If he had only…only.

With a yell, he turned and punched the wall, his biotics causing a large dent to appear in the metal. Hearing something hit the floor; he looked down and saw a holopic lying on the ground. Kaidan feel to his knees and after staring at it for a few moments, he reached down and picked it up. Turning to lean against the wall, he softly ran his hand over the image as a deep regret and sadness entered his eyes.

In the picture he stood two years younger, his arm around Shepard’s shoulders, while her arm rest around his waist, her other hand showing a peace sign, smiles showing on both their faces. It had been taken just after Feros and they had been ridding high, both from saving all the colonists and from coming one step closer to stopping Saren. They had been happy and he had decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to get to know his commanding officer better. Only then Virmire had happened and Kaidan feared that he was compromising Shepard by allowing himself to try for more. So he had pulled himself back and became more professional in their interactions. He told himself that once Saren and Sovereign were destroyed, he would confess everything to her, only he never had the opportunity.

At first it was the council meetings that Shepard was called to, then it was the missions to root out the last of several Geth cells, and then the Collectors attacked their ship and he lost everything he had ever cared for. After that he had buried himself in his work, so he wouldn't have to remember, so he wouldn't have to feel. He had done nothing while the Council slandered Shepard's name, when they separated the crew, or as they had covered up any mention of the Reapers. It was no wonder that Shepard never tried to contact him, she probably thought he didn't care, or maybe that he even agreed with what the Council had done. Something Kaidan was sure he had cemented in her mind by walking away from her on Horizon.

Kaidan's eyes once more fell on the picture, and he could feel the regret and heartbreak rise up to choke him. It wasn't meant to be this way; they should have been happy by now, should have been together. Not on the opposite sides of a fight they had started together. He ought to have never pulled away from her, should have allowed himself to take the chance that she had given him, should have...

Pulling the picture to his chest he curled up and finally allowed the tears, which had been building for the last two years, fall as he realized just how much of an idiot he had truly been.