Chapter Text
Time goes on without us really thinking about it.
Decisive moments become distant memories. Childhood friends become grown-up strangers. Big dreams become small realities.
And life keeps marching along to the rhythm of the ticking clock.
Kaidan’s hands froze, fingertips hovering just above the keys. This was supposed to be his break from the world. Or at least a step back, far enough to watch from a distance for a while.
He looked up from the screen, dark eyes peering over the black rim of his glasses.
Three days ago, he’d fallen asleep in the airport terminal. The elderly woman sitting next to him in the gate’s waiting area had gently shaken his arm to jostle him awake when it was time to board, her smile kind and her eyes sympathetic when he’d stretched and yawned and then thanked her. He’d helped get her luggage into the overhead storage and then took his seat, watching the ocean fade into the distance and the cities diminish into small towns until he fell asleep with his cheek pressed against the window.
Two days ago, he’d spent an hour perusing the supermarket his mother had favored when he was a child, scouring the shelves and bins for ingredients she’d used in her famous hamburger noodle hotdish. He tried not to appear as lost as he felt.
One day ago, he’d spent the majority of the sweltering afternoon sitting alone on the wicker loveseat on the front porch, one leg crossed over the other to support the laptop he’d previously promised himself he wouldn’t use for the next two months.
That was how he ended up here.
Apollo’s Café was a nondescript coffee shop at the tail end of a nondescript strip mall in a nondescript midwestern city. The decaled letters had begun to peel off of the street-facing window, the early morning sun casting misshapen shadows across the floor. The humid summer air crept in through the worn weatherstripping around the entryway. The entire space felt small, even cramped, with its dark wood flooring and off-white counters and tabletops, the occasional chip in the surfaces revealing glimpses of the pearly color they had once been.
But he remembered passing by this place every day on his way to Citadel High School, and the fact that he recalled it by name even now had to mean something.
His eyes fell back to the nearby paper cup, a cappuccino he’d ordered to-go before he’d stopped in his tracks, turned halfway on one heel, and decided to stay for a while, typing out whatever thoughts came to mind as he listened: the sounds of ceramic cups clinking against one another, accidentally or otherwise, the occasional sputtering of the espresso machine, and the dull echo of conversations too distant to understand and too close to ignore. As a college student who spent too many study hours in whichever local café was open, he’d gotten used to that kind of background noise.
And scrawled in black marker across one side of the cup was the word Caden – an honest mistake from a stranger who had no way of knowing better. He’d gotten used to that a long time ago.
He looked up at the young woman behind the counter – Ashley, her nametag had read – and watched her glance over her shoulder before retrieving her phone from her back pocket. Her eyes scanned the screen and then a smile spread across her face as she tapped away with both thumbs.
He watched her then: the way her lips parted to let out a tiny huff when her thumbs finally stilled, the way her smile stretched into a smirk when she returned her phone to her pocket, the way she rolled her shoulders as she stepped away from the cash register. Her hands disappeared behind the clutter that lined the counter, and when her gaze flicked upward for a split-second, he swore she was looking back at him.
He decided to watch the little vertical bar flicker at the end of his last sentence instead.
His hands fell slightly, fingertips finally resting atop the keys. He bit his lip, glasses shifting the slightest bit as his nose wrinkled with the motion. The words burned in his fingertips, and he took a deep breath to start again, only to have his thoughts drowned out by the sound of the bell ringing just above the entryway. With a quiet sigh he looked up and—
And then the clock stopped ticking and time stood still.
All the background noise went silent and there was nothing left but the sight of him.
John Shepard was once a childhood friend, a kid he’d left behind in his teenage years as they drifted apart, though Kaidan carried the memories with him through the last legs of high school and into his first lonely semesters at university. He’d find himself absentmindedly scanning over his notes, gaze wandering aimlessly over metabolic pathways or synthesis mechanisms while his mind wandered off into memories of home, of family, of friends… of Shepard.
For a long time, Shepard had been a distant memory.
But there he was, with a few more wrinkles in his brow, slightly longer creases at the corners of his eyes, stubble upon his jaw and a lopsided grin tugging at his lips – and eyes too soft for the sharp angles of his face, just like they had always been.
Kaidan was staring, and he knew it, too; but he was stuck, hands positioned awkwardly over the keyboard, frozen mid-thought, and eyes fixed on the man who’d so casually walked back into his life without even knowing it.
He swallowed the lump in his throat and watched Shepard approach the counter, where Ashley greeted him with an amused smirk and a cocked eyebrow. Shepard returned it when she set a paper cup next to the register, the word Shep scrawled in huge black letters across the brown holder.
“Hey, Ash.” Shepard fished a few crumpled bills from his pocket and offered them her way, paper hanging limply from between two outstretched fingers. “Thanks for getting me set up here.”
“No problem,” she replied, opening the register with one hand and nudging the cup toward him with the other. “Running late again, are we?”
He let out a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, a tiny breath hanging off the end of the word. “Turned off the alarm instead of hitting ‘snooze.’”
Ashley looked up at him. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“Not to worry, though,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. With a shrug she drew the change from the till, closed the register, and added, “My expertly-crafted black coffee will knock the sleep right out of your eyes.”
Shepard shook his head. “Don’t oversell it, Ash. I just prefer my coffee black, without all that other crap in it.”
“What, ‘crap’ like milk? Why don’t I just give you a cup of grounds?”
Shepard chuckled as Ashley dropped change into the palm of his hand. “Why don’t you at least try to look like a responsible adult and get back to work?” he quipped.
“Look who’s talking,” she shot back.
Shepard dropped his change into the tip jar – an old mason jar with a piece of paper taped to it, torn at the edges where it’d been affixed, Thank you! scribbled over it with a happy face at the end, the handwriting itself much too neat to be Ashley’s and the paper much too old and adorned with the occasional stain to be new. She kept her eyes fixed on his until the last nickel clattered to a halt atop the change already sitting at the bottom of the jar: the seventy-six cents that Kaidan had left behind earlier.
“Thanks, big tipper,” she said, and Shepard picked up his coffee without another word.
Kaidan watched him.
Shepard had one foot partially turned, already halfway into his first step out the door when he gave Ashley a mock-salute, and she waved him off. He jammed his hand into his pocket as he fully turned away, a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment where he’d begun to disappear, leaving behind only the back of a broad set of shoulders and the rustle of dark jeans. Shepard was walking out just as quickly as he had walked in, and time began stumbling back into its slow march behind him.
And Kaidan couldn’t just sit and watch from a distance any longer.
“Hey.”
Shepard turned on his heel and peered over his shoulder, and then he stopped in his tracks. The instant his eyes met Kaidan’s, the last remnants of a smile faded from his face. He drew his hand from his pocket but left it hanging at his side, like he’d abandoned an idea halfway through the motion. Whatever he was thinking was sealed behind lips pressed into a thin line.
His gaze fell to the floor, drifting aimlessly over the grainy floorboards for a single moment’s hesitation before finally picking itself back up. Kaidan swallowed hard, feeling every bit like he’d made a mistake, when the realization suddenly hit him like a deadfall.
Shepard was looking at him like he was a stranger.
“Kaidan.” The word fell awkwardly from his lips, like he hadn’t said it in years. He turned to face Kaidan properly, his well-worn boots audibly dragging over the floor as he took a few steps toward him. “What are you doing here?”
Kaidan stood from his chair, but then he hesitated, needing to occupy his hands somehow once his fingers had left the keyboard behind. He stuffed one hand into his pocket and began to scratch at the back of his neck with the other, a nervous habit he’d developed somewhere along the line between anxious kid and insecure adult.
Shepard pushed a hand back through his messily-coiffed hair, tilting his head down slightly as he watched Kaidan open his mouth, only to stutter on a few fragmented sounds and finally shut it again in surrender. Kaidan held his breath. There were a dozen questions he could’ve asked, a hundred things he could’ve said – should’ve said – but they’d left him the moment Shepard looked at him like he expected him to disappear, to again become the distant memory he’d probably been for several years now.
The small café suddenly felt even smaller.
But then he saw Shepard’s hand fall from his temple and wedge itself into a pocket, thumb poking through a belt loop. Shepard himself had never been particularly easy to read, but he had a knack for reading other people, stranger or otherwise; he knew people better than they knew themselves, and sometimes words weren’t necessary to make that known. Something in Shepard’s expression gave him away.
And finally Kaidan remembered how to breathe.
“I, uh… I’m home for a couple months,” he said. “Visiting, I guess… from school, I mean.”
A faint smile traced over Shepard’s face, soft, tentative – brittle, like it could’ve shattered at any moment.
“Yeah?” he said, brow arching with what Kaidan could only guess was pleasant surprise. “That’s— that’s good.” He gestured his head toward the laptop that’d been abandoned on the table between them. “What’re you working on there?”
Kaidan let out a nervous chuckle. “O-Oh…” he stuttered, and then mentally chastised himself for it, “nothing of any real importance. Just thoughts, really.”
One corner of Shepard’s mouth quirked a little higher, threatening to return to the proper smile it’d been just minutes ago. “So you’re a writer or something?”
“Well, not really,” Kaidan answered. “It’s more of a hobby. Gives me something other than schoolwork to do, I suppose.”
Shepard let out a hum of acknowledgement, and a barely audible one at that. He set his coffee cup down on the table, letting his gaze linger a moment too long, and finally looked back up at Kaidan, stark blue eyes softer around the edges.
Apparently, Shepard wasn’t going to volunteer anything about himself, but Kaidan could be content with that. He could be content with merely watching that smile finally make its return to Shepard’s face: the tiniest hint of teeth shining through, the creases at the corners of his eyes stretching just a bit further – an honest smile that took years off his appearance and gave a new light to his eyes.
“Well, you look good.”
That caught him entirely off-guard.
“Thanks,” Kaidan said. “You, too— uh, that is, you look like you’re doing well.”
“Well enough.”
Kaidan glanced over Shepard’s shoulder. This time he definitely saw Ashley looking back at him, so he looked away just as quickly. He decided to focus only on Shepard: on the slight arch of his brow, on the way his unevenly-shaped fingernails dug into the plaid fabric of his shirt when he folded his arms, on the tiny scuffing sound his boots made as he shifted his weight back and forth between his feet.
“So, uh… how’ve you been?” he finally asked. “What’ve you been up to?”
Shepard shrugged his shoulders. “Not much,” he said, shaking his head slightly as if for emphasis. “Sounds like you’ve been doing pretty well, though.”
“Yeah. All things considered, I…”
The sentence trailed off into silence when Shepard drew his phone from his pocket. Kaidan watched him click the power button, grimace at the screen – at its digital clock, presumably – and then click the button once more. Shepard held the phone tightly, eyes downcast toward the floor even as his hand dropped to his side and out of sight, but Kaidan could read the unease on his face. Even if he’d never heard Shepard’s conversation with Ashley, the new lines etched into his brow and the stubble across his jawline would’ve said quite clearly that he had plenty of bad habits.
“I’m sorry,” Kaidan said, “surely you have somewhere to be.”
“Yeah.” Shepard stayed quiet for a moment, then cleared his throat. “But, hey…”
He offered the phone to Kaidan.
“Here,” he said. “Put your number in.”
Kaidan took it in hand, gently, like something he should’ve been afraid to touch. The screen was cracked, spiderweb patterns zigzagging across the surface from one corner, and yet it felt like a prized possession he’d been given the privilege of holding in his own two hands.
And maybe it was. In all the years he’d known Shepard – or at least in the years he’d grown up with him, prior to his becoming a stranger once more – Shepard had never had a phone of his own. Whether it was due to cost or apathy, Kaidan had never dared to ask.
So he looked up and said, “This is new.”
“Heh… not exactly,” Shepard replied. “I bought it off a friend a while ago.”
“And the screen?”
“Custom design.”
Kaidan let out the breathy laugh he’d been holding in, an appreciative sound that filled the space between them, and yet the little café no longer felt so confined. He almost felt like it’d been too easy to bridge the gap between them, but he tamped down those thoughts the moment they’d begun peeking out from the dark, apprehensive corner of his mind. He tapped his name and number into a new contact entry, the capital ‘A’ refracting ever so slightly beneath a crack in the screen, and handed the phone back to Shepard without another word.
Maybe it really could be that easy for them to become the friends they’d once been.
Shepard slipped the phone into his pocket, gaze dropping to the floor before picking up again, slowly, something like regret newly outlining his eyes and dulling their shine.
“Listen, I’ve, uh… I’ve got to catch my bus, but it’s— it’s good to see you.”
“Yeah.” Kaidan hesitated there, merely feeling himself breathe. “You too.”
Shepard had already begun to turn on his heel, one hand stuffed into a pocket and the other making a vague gesture toward him. Not quite a wave, but too far away from anything else Kaidan knew how to describe so simply. “I’ll text you and maybe we can hang out, I guess,” Shepard added, and Kaidan simply nodded.
“Yeah.”
Shepard stopped halfway through his first step and turned back to grab the to-go coffee he’d forgotten on the table. Kaidan caught only a glimpse of that awkward grin before Shepard again turned away, smile fading behind a strong jawline.
Ashley had long since given up on trying to pretend she’d not been watching; the counter had been cleared and her phone tucked away in her back pocket for a solid five minutes by this point. She turned her head as her eyes tracked Shepard’s hurried departure, gaze slowly drifting back toward Kaidan when the same bell that’d announced Shepard’s arrival finally died after he’d disappeared around the street corner. A split-second glance in her direction was enough.
That ridiculous smile on Kaidan’s face was impossible to hide, anyway.
He returned to his chair and took a sip of his own coffee, which had already gone lukewarm. Long hours in the cafés littering the city surrounding campus had trained his palate to make the most of it, but the bitter, unfulfilling taste of hour-old coffee was hardly a pressing thought. Especially now that he could put his hands to the keyboard and actually feel the thoughts break through the blockade.
But maybe, given enough time, those distant memories can again become the moments we thought we’d lost. Maybe those strangers can again become the friends they’d always been. Maybe reality doesn’t have to be so far off from the dreams we’d started with.
Maybe only time will tell.
He closed the lid on his laptop and didn’t bother trying to hide that lingering smile from Ashley as he made his way out the door. The tiny, charming ring of that little bell above the entryway was the only thing he left behind.