fandomtownies | The Beach, Early Sunday Morning

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The Beach, Early Sunday Morning

He'd been right - it had not been a good night. Still wasn't, actually.

Kaidan had spent most of the night in his room, on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. His body felt tired, but his mind was racing; every time he turned to sleep thinking he'd silenced his mind, the thoughts crept back in and put a stranglehold on his brain. He needed sleep - if he stressed himself out and combined that with sleeplessness, he was going to wind up having migraines for most of next week. He knew that.

But it didn't calm his mind.

Eventually, he gave up. It was still dark out, but on the new day's side of the night - just a couple of hours and the sun would come up. He'd already tried doing push-ups, a voice in the back of his mind urging him to finally start picking up the slack, become better, faster, stronger, until he'd slid back into bed thinking I'm tired now, but not sleeping.

Now? Now he was giving up. Getting dressed.

Walking out the front door and jogging down the road. Down a few flights of stairs. A few laps around the inner city. When that didn't help, he took the path downwards to the beach.

It was the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks that finally drove him out of numbness. He remembered that sound, the way the waves did the same thing on Virmire, over and over against the coastline. The water washing up the legs of his armor as he leaned heavily against the bomb, firing rounds at the geth as they kept coming at him.

He sat down on one of those rocks, right next to the patch of sand where just yesterday Ash had, in a streak of poetic inspiration, written lines in the sand. They were all gone now, of course, and he couldn't remember most of it. 'We gave our lives to Normandy', and then something, something.

He released a breath and dropped his face into his hands. He listened to the waves.

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After saying good-bye to Tracy, Allie had spent the night like she usually did, walking the streets of town and the paths through the Preserve. Occasionally she paused to look through the pictures on her phone to remind herself that the past two days had been real and not some elaborate dream.

Eventually her wanderings took her to the beach. It took half a second to realize who was already there, and another half second before Allie was on her way to join him.

She perched on the rock and directed her gaze out to sea, still awed by the waves and the endless horizon even after all her time in Fandom.

Kaidan's eyes darted briefly her way to identify who it was, though at this time of the morning, the list was kind of short.

Then he looked back at the surf.

"Hey."

"Morning," Allie said, turning her head to watch him. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Kaidan said. "I'm fine."

That, or he was just as stoic a brick wall. One of the two.

Allie favored the brick wall theory.

Lips quirked in fond exasperation, she shook her head. "Liar."

"Fine, maybe I'm a little restless," he admitted a moment later. "But it's been a weird couple of days. I'm sure I'm not the only one."

"No, I'm pretty sure that having dead friends and family turn up on your doorstep is enough to make anyone a little twitchy," Allie observed.

"How about you?" Kaidan asked, finally turning his head back in her direction. "See your mom off?"

"I did," she nodded. "It was good to see her, yet hard at the same time. But I'm sure you get that."

"Yeah, I do."

He was just... not terribly predisposed towards talking about his own problems when someone else had their own shit to deal with. "How long has she been...?"

He could have a problem, because Allie was dealing surprisingly well.

"Almost seven years." Which fortunately was enough time to accept the fact that someone was dead. Especially when you had to focus on surviving.

"She feels guilty for leaving me alone when I was so young," Allie replied. "And she's not happy that I'm planning on going back. But she understands. At least as much as she could."

"That's a good thing," Kaidan said, after a short pause. "Must be a load off both your chests."

"Honestly it wasn't something I'd really thought about all that much before," she admitted. "I never thought I'd get a chance to ask her opinion. I just had to get by and focus on surviving. Now? Knowing she's proud of me? It feels good."

Kaidan's mouth quirked. "Parents, huh?" he asked.

At least one of them had gotten some kind of relief out of this whole situation. He couldn't be unhappy about that.

"Go figure." The things you didn't realize that mattered.

"I'm glad you got a chance to meet her." Allie let out a short laugh. "Even that dinner wasn't quite what you planned for Friday night."

Kaidan's smile thinned slightly, but his voice came out normal enough. "She seemed like a thoughtful, smart lady," he said. "Weird circumstances or not."

"Very weird circumstances. But I'm still grateful for them," she said. "How about you?"

"Getting another chance to see old friends?" Kaidan asked. "I'm grateful for that."

Ashley's insistence that Shepard wasn't dead kept bugging him. Among many other things. But that, he was grateful for.

"Did you serve together for a long time?" Allie asked curiously.

"Just a couple of months," Kaidan admitted. "We picked her up after the geth razed the colony she was serving on. But it was an... intense... couple of months."

"I can only imagine. Still probably not all that well." But she remembered those weeks with Zeke, trusting him, fighting with him. Taking turns saving each other. Maybe she did understand, at least a little. "What happened?"

Kaidan blew out a breath. "We were on a mission," he said. "A group of salarian STG-- well, let's call them soldiers... got stuck on a planet called Virmire. Turns out there was this huge compound there that Saren - the guy we'd been chasing - was using to pump out an army of cloned krogan."

He paused. Partly to get his own bearings. Partly to give Allie some time to catch up with all the terminology.

Allie recognized the name Saren - hard not to when it when it was so similar to her own personal demon - and remembered that they'd discussed him as being one of the bad guys. The rest she parsed as soldiers in trouble, need help.

It wasn't hard to figure out what happened. "So you got sent on the rescue mission."

"Actually, it turned more into a 'helping the salarians complete their mission' mission," Kaidan said ruefully. Talking about it now... it wasn't easy, but it felt natural - the sea kept dragging him back to Virmire anyway. "Ashley took off with the salarians to help them stage a distraction on the other side of the complex. Commander Shepard would do the real assault. I came with him. The plan was to set off a bomb in the center of the complex once we'd gotten all the intel we needed, and I was the resident tech expert..."

Chin resting on her drawn up knees, Allie listened quietly.

"What happened?"

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