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Snow explodes on Ashley’s neck and she cringes as the icy remnants of a perfectly-packed snowball fall down the back of her jacket. She bends down and quickly packs her own - it’s falling apart in her hands, her father would scoff at the poor craftsmanship, but this is war and it’ll hold together long enough - and winds up as she stands and turns. Her small purple target moves quickly, but Ashley’s not a sniper for nothing, and she launches her snowball.
She hits Tali perfectly in the chest and cries out in triumph.
Her triumph’s shortlived, and she really ought to know better by now not to challenge engineers to anything. Not even quarian engineers who’ve only seen snow twice before.
She purses her lips and can’t decide whether to smile or frown as Chatika drops two snowballs directly on her head.
“You know,” Ashley wipes the snow out of her eyes and decides on smiling, “using your combat drone is cheating.”
The falling snow muffles Tali’s laughter, and Chatika beeps as it flies back to her. “We never specified.”
Shaking her head, Ashley walks across the snow and meets Tali near the shoveled path. She looks upward and opens her mouth, letting the snowflakes fall and melt on her tongue. There’s probably Reaper dust in them, but she survived a Collector abduction relatively unscathed, her system can handle a few vaporized banshee particles.
She takes Tali's hand in hers, and they walk out of the calm of the park and back into the chaos of post-Reaper London.
(She remembers blue. She remembers the hologram yelling at her as she walked to her left and she remembers the pain while she gripped the interface. But mostly, she remembers the glowing blue surrounding her as she took control.
And after the blue, there isn't a whole lot.
She's alive, sort of. She knows that much. She can't hear or see or feel anything - or, more accurately, she hears and sees and feels everything to the extent that her brain can't process all of it and so she hears and sees and feels nothing - but she knows she's alive.
She knows she's alive because somewhere in the back of her mind, something itches at the base of her skull.
Her body's down there, underneath the rubble, and it wants to be found.)
Vega's stopped telling them that they haven't found her yet. They know he'd call them first if there was even a hint of Shepard; he'd call them before he even called for help with the concrete lying on top of the familiar armor. Telling them that there's no sign of her just makes them look at each other sadly, and add to the slump in their shoulders that's becoming more defeated by the day.
So he’s stopped telling. They’re smart women. They know the score: Shepard coming back from whatever she did at the beam was the least likely thing to happen to them during this war. Not like that makes it hurt any less, Vega knows.
Hell, he's barely known the three of them a year and a half and still it kills him a little to watch only two walk into their apartment each day. It's meant to be three, that's been obvious since the day Tali came back on board and everything shifted a little to the right and fell perfectly into place. There’s an empty shadow where Shepard’s supposed to be.
On particularly bad days, he thinks he actually sees a shadow standing a bit behind the two of them, instead of being just a metaphor in his head.
If nothing else, he keeps digging every day so he can at least find them a body. He’d prefer the body to be alive - they’d all prefer the body to be alive, though at this point he doubts even Cerberus could bring her back - but a body is solid fact, proof that she isn’t coming back.
A body would let them grieve. A body would let them move out of their holding pattern.
(She stretches, and knocks over a fruit cart.
“Sorry,” she apologizes, but it comes out in a low bwom of the reaper horn, and sends the entire neighborhood into a panic for two hours.
She sighs and barely manages to avoid toppling one of Bakara’s settlement structures on Tuchanka. “I am very bad at this.” Maybe she should’ve gone right, picked red. She redirects three ships to the Charon Relay to help the repair teams.
She’s found her eyes again - she has more now - and started searching. She finds Vega, digging in the rubble next to Jack, and sends one of her hands to help them.
They’re looking for her. She doesn’t need ears to know that.
Her skull itches again, and she follows. The itch is like a beacon now that she’s not ignoring it, and she carefully moves a cornerstone out of the way. James looks up at the reaper standing between him and the rare sun and tilts his head, like he knows she’s there.
“Keep looking,” she says, and manages to keep it internal this time.)
Ashley’s paid vague attention to the calendar (everything’s split into Before Reapers and After Reapers now, actual dates don’t seem to matter much), but Christmas still catches her off guard when she sees lighted wreaths and garland start to spring up in shops and apartment windows. There are days when all she does is break up fights and she doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in humanity, and then there are days when she sees people cobbling together decorations and cheer from the remnants they can find and she thinks humanity’s doing okay.
A week before Christmas, she and Tali spend the night decorating the tiny little tree they found in the apartment’s storage closet (borrowing dead people’s stuff hasn’t stopped being weird, which she’s pretty sure is a good sign). When they’re done, it twinkles in a way Ashley hasn’t seen in a few years. She wonders if the twinkling lights are a product of an actual atmosphere, instead of a recycled air system.
She’d give up the twinkle in a heartbeat if it meant they were back on the Normandy, Shepard standing beside them. Ashley’s too old to believe in Christmas miracles, and she’s too old to believe that simply praying to God is enough to bring Shepard back, but it can’t hurt. She sends up a wish and a prayer.
Tali leans in and Ashley wraps her arm around her shoulder. The tree’s nice, and they’re both alive, but it’s a far cry from last year when they had mistletoe hanging from everything that could possibly be interpreted as a doorway in the loft, and Shepard scoured the Citadel to find an atrociously bright pink pre-lit Christmas tree to put on her desk and they all stuck far more presents than they’d agreed upon underneath it. She presses a kiss to Tali’s helmet.
“I miss her,” Ashley says. They usually let Shepard’s absence float in the air, unspoken for fear that someday soon they’ll find it’s permanent. It’s Christmas, seems like a safe time to mention her.
“Me too,” Tali sighs, and tightens her arm around Ashley’s waist. They’ve been here before, just the two of them, and it’s hard not to draw parallels. At least this time they’re together more than they’re apart.
The pink tree is still in Shepard’s storage locker on the Normandy, and it was by silent agreement that neither of them even brought up going to get it. It was Shepard’s tree.
Shepard isn’t here.
(It’s Christmas, she figures that much out from the lights on the skeletal trees and a sudden wave of red and green. Time flows differently when you’re everywhere at once. Some brave children have even twined garland around her legs, undoubtedly on a dare. She’s not sure how she feels about that, but expressing her potential displeasure seems like a bad idea.
She’s getting better at this whole being-in-charge-of-the-Reapers thing.
Vega and Jack still haven’t found her body, though she’s been leading them right to it. If they wait much longer, her armor’s medical interface will finally give out and she will actually die. And though she’s becoming better at being a reaper, she has no intention of existing only in reaper form for the rest of eternity.
She moves the final pile of rubble and stands right over her body. She’ll bring out the lasers if she has to.)
Tali’s hacked together a vibration program for her suit’s gloves and is two fingers into testing it out on Ashley (who’s energetically and vocally supporting Tali’s programming efforts) when there’s a knock on their apartment door. Ashley bites her lip, muffling a moan as Tali does something incredible with her thumb. Maybe if they’re quiet enough, whoever’s there will assume they’re not home and leave.
Another knock. More insistent this time, followed by Vega’s voice. “I saw the tree in the window, I know you’re in there. Open up.”
Ashley throws her head back on the pillow and groans, and not with pleasure. With a sigh of regret, Tali bumps her forehead against Ashley’s in silent apology and promise to continue later, and slides off the bed to answer the door. “Yes?” She clicks off the program.
The apartment’s a studio and if Vega cranes his neck around Tali, he’ll get an eyeful of naked Ashley spread on the bed. She rolls off the mattress before he can look, and brings the sheet with her; when she stands up, the light thin sheet wrapped around her in a failing attempt at modesty, she at least doesn’t trip. She runs her fingers through her hair.
Vega knows perfectly well what he interrupted, and normally he wouldn’t. But this isn’t normal. This is important. He ignores the annoyed raised eyebrow he’s pretty sure is behind the mask, and says, “We found her.”
“Just now?” Tali asks in disbelief. The sun set over four hours ago, and they’ve long stopped digging after dark.
That that’s the first thing Tali asks tells him just how much she hadn’t expected this news. “You were ignoring your omnitools,” he says with a grin.
Tali swats his arm.
“Where is she?” Ashley shouts from around the corner. She hops out into the main area on one foot, trying to put on her socks and button her jeans at the same time.
“Hospital,” Vega says, as if she’d be anywhere else after being missing in the rubble for a month and a half.
It’s only when they’re out in the street, walking the three blocks to the hospital, that Tali realizes Vega never said Shepard was alive. She grips Ashley’s hand harder than she needs to, convinced Vega would lead with that information if she wasn’t.
(The hospital room is overbearingly bright, and she closes her eyes.
It’s the wrong set of eyes, and she loses track of her trajectory through the Rannoch ruins.
She switches and closes the right set of eyes this time, but barely misses crashing into a wall.
That’s going to take some getting used to.)
They move the bright pink tree and themselves in the next day. The doctor on call looks like he’s going to protest - the lights are a fire hazard, too many people to trip over, this is a hospital not a dormitory - but neither Ashley nor Tali have any intention of going anywhere. Vega’s not moved from his spot guarding the door since he brought them here, and Doctor Chakwas fixes him with a glare that could freeze Therum. He wisely backs down.
Cortez procures them a mattress and a blanket that’s actually worthy of the name, and Sam makes sure they eat. Samara and Wrex alternate guard duty with Vega and Jack, and Shepard’s unconscious body has no shortage of visitors.
By the time Shepard wakes up, three days after Christmas, most of her crew has made themselves at home within shouting distance of her bed.
(The lights aren’t any less bright for having ignored them, but her body - the original one, the one in the bed on Earth - is healed enough that she really ought to open her eyes again. She ought to wake up and exist again. She thinks about it this time, confident she has a grasp on the right set in case she needs to close them quickly.
She opens her eyes and instantly regrets it. She holds firm, making sure the rest of her doesn’t react to the sudden lights and the noise and accidentally destroy an asari temple.
The brightness slowly calms and the noise isn’t unbearable, just unexpected. Her eyes focus and her ears pick out fragments of conversation.
Vega and Joker in the corner, playing Skyllian Five and getting their asses handed to them by Traynor and Jack. EDI, watching the game and running statistics in a hopeless attempt to save Joker a few credits.
Chakwas and Cortez by the door, talking in hushed tones that mean an exchange of alcohol is imminent. Wrex growling at someone in the hallway, with words that sounds suspiciously like a threat to be tossed through a fish tank.
Miranda beside her, frowning at a machine’s display.
She blinks.)
Shepard’s gaze settles on Ashley and Tali, lost in their own world, like the crew isn’t even there. Like they’re just sitting on the couch in their cabin on the Normandy, waiting patiently for her to wake up from a nap. Ashley’s sitting on the floor in front of Tali, carefully brushing out Ashley’s hair from its braid.
She exhales and reaches out, touching Tali’s shoulder. The room goes silent at Tali’s gasp. Ashley stands up, joining Tali at the side of Shepard’s bed.
“Don’t,” her voice is hoarse from disuse, and she gratefully takes the cup of ice from Miranda. “Don’t stop on my account. It’s not like I haven’t come back from the dead before.”
She means it to be funny and light, but it falls far short, even to her ears. Ashley grips her fingers tighter as Tali looks away. The room clears out except for the three of them, and Miranda shuts the door behind her.
Without words, the other two climb onto the bed with her. There’s not nearly enough room for all three of them, but they’re two engineers and a soldier: they know how to make things work that shouldn’t. They’ll talk later, right now they need touch.
Tali on one side and Ashley on the other, and it’s been too long since she felt someone else, someone holding and touching her. She’d nearly forgotten. They’re warm and soft and curl themselves around her, tangling arms and legs across the bed until the three of them are a comfortable, solid mass of each other.
Shepard has a lot to tell them. About the blue light and how there’s more of her now and that she occasionally forgets where she is or moves the wrong leg. Later, though. After she’s soaked up enough of Ashley and Tali to last another two lifetimes, after she’s had her fill of hugs, after she can walk again. After she’s had her fill of running her fingers through Ashley’s hair and tracing the pattern on Tali’s scarves.
She breaks their silence when she can no longer hold back the question. “What the hell’s that tree doing in here?”
Their laughter is the most perfect sound she’s ever heard.
(Across the galaxy, the Reapers sigh and settle, finally content.)