Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Agony.  It’s the only word that comes to mind, the only thought that registers as coherent, followed promptly by a profound, Shit.

It’s dark.  Wren can’t be sure if her eyes are open or closed, but they’re the only thing she can move right now, so she forces them open until her vision begins to adjust.  There’s something in her chest, or on it, causing distressing pressure.  She coughs once and it immediately steals her breath from pain so that she can’t even cry out.  Would anyone even hear her if she could?

Then it hits her: she’s alive.

The explosion.  The concussive blast that sent her flying into smoldering oblivion.  How could anyone survive that?  But she survived Akuze.  She survived Sovereign.  She survived her own death at the Collectors’ hands.  So what the hell, sure, why not survive this too?  Though through short, sharp breaths and every bone, muscle, and nerve ending screaming at her amidst the otherwise pervasive silence, Wren is beginning to find all this surviving quite tiresome.

In fact, maybe she could just close her eyes for another moment.  The lids are still quite heavy, and they flutter, but an alarm rings in the back of her bleary mind, old scrappy survival instincts dying hard: Concussion, likely severe, keep awake.

How long has it been? she then wonders.  The Crucible… Did it work?

In order to find out, she is going to have to move—a Herculean task to consider in her current state.  She thinks of Chakwas’s expertise: start with fingers and toes.  Her mind floods alongside the effort: Chakwas.  The Normandy.  Did they make it out?  Kaidan… It’s hard to breathe again.  Oh, Kaidan.  I died on you again, didn’t I?  Shit.

One thing at a time.  Fingers and toes: left foot is unresponsive, Wren notes, and a sharp twinge shoots through her left arm with the attempt—her left side either took the worst of the blast or the worst of the landing… or both.  But her right foot and hand react normally, albeit so imperceptibly that she could just be imagining it, but she decides to go with the former.

The rest of her self-examination is slow and likely unreliable; she’s no physician, and she’s still barely conscious.  In fact, the effort of trying to remain conscious is almost enough to knock her back out.  She’s fighting, but she doesn’t even know yet if she has anything left to fight for.  All she has is the need to find out.

Optimism, right.  She tries to take stock of the positives: head injury, but lucid.  All things considered, she should be more delirious.  Or perhaps she is, but to her own mind it all makes sense.  There’s no one else to talk to to ensure she’s actually coherent.  But as far as she can tell, cognition is sluggish but otherwise unimpaired.  Good news: I remember everything.  Bad news: I remember everything.

Kaidan’s face flashes through her mind like a reverse photograph: Don’t leave me behind.  Wren’s not sure how much of the pain in her chest is medical.

Her vision flickers for a second, and even lying down she feels like she’s about to fall.  God, does everything hurt, and she’s sure she’s only feeling half of the pain, that shock is suppressing the rest.  Yet she knows she has to get up, albeit very carefully.  Otherwise they’ll never find her.

That is, if they come back.  If anyone is left to come back, or if there is anything left to come back to.

On that line of thought, she throws a Hail Mary and decides to start small by trying the comm connection in her ear.  Move one arm, that’s all she has to do.  Her right arm feels leaden and she can barely control it, as if it’s one end of a magnet pushing against its polar opposite.  But the elbow bends, and her fingers come to her ear to activate the unit.

“This is Commander Shepard,” she croaks through a throat caked with dust and blood.  “Is anyone…”  She trails off with a grimace; it’s the best she can do.  The effort steals the breath from her once more, and she realizes her voice is hardly distinguishable from the comm connection’s static.  She brings her hand away from her ear and sees her fingertips are coated in blood.  She’s not even sure the comm line is still there in the first place.

The threat of despair rears its head in the back of her mind, and she feels clammy in her ravaged armor.  Keep it together.  Wren musters the strength and bravery required to lift her head just enough to try and look down at her broken form.  What’s left of cobalt blue armor is now scorched and scuffed black, the metal dimpled and dented.   Burns and melted fabric plaster her blistered skin where the armor was blasted off completely.  Things are definitely bruised and broken inside her, but she’ll be damned if the Alliance armor isn’t top of the line and seemed to mostly have insulated her vulnerable torso against the worst of the blast, though something in her abdomen is protesting with increasing strength.  The armor crushed inward must be what’s making it hard to breathe, but she can’t do anything about that herself, so she does her best to work with it and keep her breathing under control.

Most notable to her, however, is how her left leg twists at an uncanny angle, grime and shredded armor almost masking the weeping burns and shrapnel jutting from her shin… Or is that bone?  She can’t feel a thing from her mid-thigh down.  She likely won’t be using that leg for a while, if ever again.  This might complicate her efforts to search for help, but she can’t let it stop her from trying.

That’s all the information she’s able to take in before her head falls back against the rubble underneath her.  Such a minor impact still reverberates through her tender skull, and she groans.  Don’t do that again.  If she’s going to get up, she’s going to need to keep a stiff neck about it.

She has determined that one arm is functional at least, so she decides to test the other only to realize it’s half-buried under a slab of material.  That likely broke something, hence the pain from earlier, but she can still sort of wiggle a couple of fingers, so maybe just a hairline fracture or two.  A stroke of luck, she thinks, followed immediately by a stroke of guilt: how am I the only one who gets to keep cheating death?

One by one, the rest of her crewmates’ faces pass through her mind: Joker, Liara, Garrus, Tali, James, EDI… 

Wren’s heart stalls.

EDI.

The Catalyst’s voice echoes: All synthetic life.

Wren screws her eyes shut.  Shit.  Shit, shit, shit.  Oh, God, Joker, I’m so sorry.

Lastly, Anderson’s slumped form appears in her memory.  She can almost feel the weight of him next to her.  I’m proud of you, he said.  No one ever said those words to her before, and until she heard them, she never thought they needed to.  She had no parents with expectations to live up to; a gang whose respect she commanded because she had to survive, not because she had something to prove; and a leadership role in the military where it was her duty to encourage and inspire others, not the other way around.  And now, she’s not even sure she deserves it.  Maybe she did stop the war, or maybe the Reapers have simply finished here and moved on.  At this rate, she’ll never know.  She doesn’t know yet just how much else she has to grieve.

Get up, get up, get up.

But willpower and a whim aren’t enough.  She’s broken all over.  She’s cold where her burns seethe.  Her head is light and leaden all at once.  The world is grey and spinning, her breath coming in ragged gasps despite her best efforts to control it.  She’s not dead, but she’s dying.  Blood loss, trauma—the works, she’s sure.  She brings her fingers to her ear once more, forgetting that she tried that already.  “Normandy… Kaidan?”

She thinks she hears a response, a hum at the edge of her fading consciousness.  Maybe he heard.  Or maybe no one heard.  She’ll never know about them, and they’ll never know about her.  She’s too tired to feel despair.  Her last thought is a less profound, Shit.  Then it’s all gone in a blink.

Chapter Text

A garden planet, somewhere on the far side of Arcturus… Maybe.  The Normandy took a hit and only managed to make one relay jump before the Charon Relay was destroyed behind them, so Arcturus would be the closest they could have ended up in their escape from the Crucible’s blast.  But with the unpredictability and chaos of the Crucible’s effects—until it detonated, no one even knew what it was going to do—Kaidan considers there’s always a chance they ended up anywhere else, which is seeming increasingly likely due to the fact no one can tell where exactly they are in the galaxy.

It was a crash landing, but Joker wouldn’t be Joker if he hadn’t navigated his way through it so that everyone still survived; there are injuries of varying degrees, but Doctor Chakwas assessed none appear immediately critical, and she’s already set to work tending to the cuts and bruises and sprains and concussions while the rest of the crew has emerged from the dented doors one by one.  They look out at the lush and humid expanse around them, at the two strange moons looming in the foreign atmosphere before looking at each other with the unspoken questions of Did we do it? followed immediately by Now what?

Kaidan turns to evaluate the Normandy, and while he’s no ship maintenance mechanic, the crumpled and smoking hull tells him she’s going to be grounded for a while until the engineers can make repairs, which he’s not even sure they’re supplied enough for this level of damage.  Maybe he should look into that, but his priorities haven’t shifted yet.  His body is stranded on a new planet, but his mind is still on the ground back in London.  His eyes aren’t taking in the sight of the thriving ecosystem around him because his vision is clouded with the image of Shepard running away from him toward the Conduit.  The image of the Normandy speeding away from the carnelian explosion.

Someone made it to the Citadel, echoes Hackett’s voice in his mind.

Shepard…

The Citadel has been destroyed.

Wren.

Kaidan isn’t sure how long he’s been standing staring at nothing in front of him, but an itch in the corner of his mind brings his attention back to the present, and he notices that the crew members not gaping at the planet around them are looking at him with uncertainty.  He realizes he’s the highest ranking officer on the ship without Shepard; he’s in charge now.  They’re looking to him for guidance, for instruction.

“Is everyone alright?” Kaidan asks, finally finding his voice.  It comes out stronger than he anticipated, for whatever that’s worth.

“EDI’s offline,” Joker says as he turns to face Kaidan, his own voice sounding faraway.  “It happened as soon as we jumped.”

Kaidan guesses he and the pilot are feeling something very similar.  He hesitates; the one most equipped to examine and repair EDI would have been EDI herself.  He considers who the next best might be.

“Tali?” he asks.

The quarian stands to attention.  Her expression is largely concealed behind the violet glow of her visor, but her body language portrays an eagerness to be of use, to do something.

“You’re familiar with geth AI.  Obviously, EDI is not geth, but do you think you could still take a look?”

“I’ll run some tests,” she says with a decisive nod, a gesture Kaidan returns as she heads past him back onto the Normandy.  He too realizes doing something, anything, is better than nothing, that standing still would be the fastest track to shutting down completely, and as his sense of duty kicks in, he knows that’s something he can’t afford to do.  He’s a soldier, and people still need him.

And if Shepard is still back there, she needs him.

A renewed sense of purpose takes hold of Kaidan, and delivering orders begins to come ever easier.  Chakwas continues tending to the injured with some lower ranking officers assisting her; Kaidan’s nearly forgotten he’s still wounded from earlier combat, what feels like either moments or centuries ago.  He grimaces, resenting the injury that pulled him from Shepard’s side.  He takes an experimental breath and places a hand over the tender spot on his abdomen.  The sutures should hold so long as he doesn’t overdo it.  A shame, because exerting himself to his physical capacity would probably do wonders for his nerves right now.

He organizes the engineering crew and orders them to do a full evaluation of the Normandy’s condition as well as take stock of available materials for necessary repairs.  He delivers instructions to check food and water rations, organizes a scouting team led by James to investigate the surrounding area to try and determine what natural resources might be available to them or if there is any hostile wildlife to deal with.  Various other duties are assigned, and soon the crew is back to its anthill-esque levels of activity.  Joker is the last one standing without an assigned task, but as Kaidan approaches him the pilot stiffens.  He sets his jaw but he doesn’t meet Kaidan’s eye.  “I’ll look into network connection consoles,” Joker says, “see if I can make some repairs to send out an SOS to the nearest comm buoy.”

“Joker,” Kaidan asks, trying to keep his tone casual yet delicate, “Did EDI say anything before she—before we crashed?”

Joker doesn’t answer right away, and after a while Kaidan begins to think he’s not going to answer at all, but when he finally looks Kaidan in the eye, Kaidan almost regrets asking.  “She said, ‘You will be fine, Jeff.’”

Kaidan’s brow furrows.  “Did she know what was going to happen?”

Joker’s shrug is as detached as his gaze as he steps past Kaidan back onto the Normandy.

Kaidan stands alone, and alone isn’t exactly where he wants to be right now, but rather than make his rounds to check on everyone’s status, a different impulse takes hold of him.  An unseen force herds him onto the ship to climb his way back to the captain’s cabin.  The ship’s backup power flickers, the door stuttering before finally sliding open to allow Kaidan inside.  The room feels emptier than ever, but then he remembers there is one tenant still occupying the space.

The damn hamster.

Kaidan almost laughs, though he’s not sure why it’s funny.  He steps toward the corner shelf of Shepard’s desk by the bathroom and peers into the glass cage; Shepard had ensured it was bolted down securely to make it through the Normandy’s myriad travels.  A twitching whitish-brown nose is visible from the plastic hut inside the cage, and the little furball comes out to investigate, beady eyes meeting Kaidan’s with such clueless innocence it sends a pang through him.  It’s not quite like, say, a dog who would have a keener perception of its owner’s presence or lack thereof, but the lack of awareness from the hamster is almost worse somehow.  Something about it being even more at the mercy of whoever is left to take care of it.

Or maybe he’s just projecting his own sense of helplessness.  But he isn’t going to think too hard about that one.

“Hey, little guy,” Kaidan says, disregarding the thought in the back of his mind that he sounds ridiculous.

Louis blinks then noses his way over to nurse the water bottle.  Kaidan notices the food bowl is empty.  He’s reaching for the cupboard he remembers Shepard keeping the bag of pellets in without even thinking.  She’d want to know the hamster is being taken care of.  Maybe he couldn’t have done anything to protect her in the final fight, but at least he can do this.  At least he can help keep someone alive.

No, he can’t think of it like that.  He’s doing this for her, to make sure this silly little creature is here for her when she gets back.  When.

Chapter Text

When Wren opens her eyes again, it’s brighter than before.  Much brighter.  She shuts her eyes.  Then she realizes the pain from before is gone, or at least feels separate from her as if in a distant memory.  So, she’s dead then—finally—and this must be that white light she’s heard so much about.  Well, best to get it over with.  She works to open her eyes once more, and the world slowly swims into view around her, a voice somewhere nearby coming to her as if from underwater: She’s waking up.

This strikes Wren as strange.  Gradually, her vision and hearing clear; the sounds of machines beeping and hissing begin to surface in a room full of cold, fluorescent lighting, and she concludes the afterlife looks suspiciously like a hospital room.  As she strives to come to terms with this unfortunate discovery, another voice comes from her side: “Welcome back, Commander.”

Wren’s head lolls to the side, and two white-robed figures come into view.  Angels?  Not that she’s ever believed in such things, but when her eyes focus, she sees the figures are wearing white medical uniforms.  Angels look a lot like doctors.  Another regrettable revelation.

“Are…?” is Wren’s first attempt at translating her thoughts from the thick soup in her mind and relearning how to use the useless lump of muscle that is her tongue, but that’s as far as she gets before she has to redirect her energy toward not passing back out.

“Shepard,” comes another voice, this one more familiar as a uniformed silhouette comes into view.  She blinks herself further awake.  “Admiral Hackett,” Wren says, her voice stronger but still groggy and bewildered.  She works to sit up in bed—for she realizes she is in fact in a bed—but her body hardly responds, and she groans as some of that old pain reawakens, albeit much duller than before.  A twinge in her left arm as she shifts—it’s in a cast.  A tug in her right arm—an IV, probably easing the rest of her pain with the good stuff.  New conclusion: she’s actually in a hospital, very much not dead.  Again.  The heart rate monitor broadcasting the fluctuations in her return to consciousness only further confirms this.

“At ease, Commander,” says Hackett as he comes to stand at the foot of her bed, arms clasped behind his back.

Stubborn, Wren pushes through the heaviness in her body to reposition herself, and she feels the top half of the bed press against her back until she’s mostly sitting up.  One of the first two figures she saw upon waking—a nurse—is at her side operating the button that adjusts the mattress.  Wren nods her thanks, feeling needlessly embarrassed as the nurse steps back and looks to who must be the attending physician beside her.

“Commander Shepard,” the doctor begins, but before he can continue Wren’s gaze drops to the lower half of her body covered by the hospital sheet without thinking.  The sheet falls strangely over her legs.  Dazed, she tries to move the limbs in an attempt to shatter what must be an optical illusion.  The right foot responds perfectly fine, but the left one does not.  Something feels wrong.

Wren tears the sheet off of her to reveal her lower half, bracing herself, but it doesn’t make the sight less jarring.  She has trouble tearing her eyes away from the bandages around her thigh; the rest of the leg is gone, cut from just above the knee.  She remembers in a flash the sight of the mangled limb when she had woken up in the wreckage before… However long ago that was.

Shock and pain medication make it hard for Wren to determine where to start her line of questioning.  “Commander—” the doctor tries again, but she looks instead to Hackett in a silent plea.

The admiral doesn’t flinch.  He raises a hand to stay the doctor’s attempts and takes over. He speaks to Wren as he always has, as a soldier.  “It’s been about a month since you ended the war with the Reapers,” he begins.  “They’re dead, Shepard.”  He emphasizes this with an intentional pause, holding her gaze.  “You did it.”

That’s good news, she thinks.  That was the goal, after all, but all Wren can respond with is a blink as she waits for him to continue, which he does.  “As far as the collateral: Reaper corpses alongside the members of the fleets lost in the fighting litter the space above our atmosphere, the mass relays have all been heavily damaged, and most of the Citadel is near ruins.  We lost a lot of good people, every one of them a hero.

“As far as yourself, a few days after the initial blast from the Crucible, Major Coats organized a team to examine the wreckage of the Citadel to search for resources to salvage.  They found what they thought were your remains, and then their bio-scanners picked up a damn pulse.”  He laughs without smiling and shakes his head.  “Your ability to survive, Shepard.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The doctor chimes in to inform Wren of the details of her physical condition, the other injuries she’s suffered and treatments she’s undergone while in their care: dehydration causing impaired but now mostly recovered kidney function; severe concussion with contained swelling; internal bleeding that required transfusions; myriad burns and lacerations treated with skin grafts from her own genetic material; organs that had taken damage from the superheated air and noxious fumes that had gone down her throat were mended with cloned tissue; a fractured radius; a lung punctured by broken ribs; and of course, as the Catalyst had warned her, damage to her cybernetic implants.

The stress and trauma of going in and out of surgery to tend to all of her injuries had begun to place a strain on her failing systems, so she had been placed into a medically-induced coma to allow her body to use its own energy to work on healing at its own pace until she was stable enough to undergo further treatment.  At Hackett’s request, once Wren began to show steady signs of improvement, he was summoned to attend as they pushed the medication to wake her so he could perform the duty of informing her of the post-war situation personally before her treatment continued; the medical staff agreed on the basis that having a familiar face to wake up to in the aftermath would hopefully ease her return to reality.

The admiral indicates the amputated appendage.  “Between the shrapnel and shattered bone, infection spread from the injury.  The salvage team hadn’t been fully prepared to find survivors, so only rudimentary first-aid barely kept you stable while they called for an emergency medical shuttle.  They had to act fast on-site in order to purge it from your bloodstream just to make sure you survived long enough to get you to a proper facility.  The urgency required removal of the limb.  There was no other way to keep you alive.”

“I’m sorry, Commander,” the doctor says with practiced sympathy.  “But we have had remarkable advancements in the prosthesis industry.  With time and rehab, you should be able to walk again.  However, with the damage to your cybernetics you should still expect some permanent impairment to overall mobility.”

There’s a pause, Hackett and the doctor allowing Wren a chance to process this bit of information.  She does so, or at least tries to, while nodding slowly.  “No Cerberus to put me back together this time,” she mutters.

The doctor offers, “It is possible we can recruit our scientists and seek funding to pursue the effort of replacing your implants—”

“No,” she cuts him off harshly.  “Too much has gone into saving me as it is.  How many other survivors out there won’t even get a fraction of this care to recover?”  Silence is her answer.  “Save the resources for them.”  Wren takes a breath, gradually regaining her composure and wits.  “What do the recovery efforts look like?”

“It’s a hell of a mess to clean up, Commander,” Hackett replies with a quick scrub of his jaw before quickly regaining posture, a brief glimpse into what is likely a crushing amount of exasperation.  “It’s going to take years to rebuild.  But we’ll get there.  So far, the races are staying united in a concerted effort to prioritize emergency amenities: independent search and recovery teams, shelters for the displaced, medical facilities, food banks, even a cobbled-together foster care system for the kids who lost their families in the war.”

“How long will that last, I wonder,” Wren can’t help but muse cynically.

Hackett concedes with his own noncommittal head bob.  “It’s one thing to bring the races together to face a common threat.  It’s another to keep the races together to uphold the peace.  But you proved the former to be possible, so for now I’ll hold out hope the latter holds true as well, at least for as long as it takes for the majority to find their own footing to hold their own should more discord break out.”

There’s so much information, and yet she doesn’t have nearly enough.  “If the Citadel was destroyed, what hospital is this?”

“You’re back on Earth,” says Hackett, “in a makeshift clinic near Chicago.  Once you’d been stabilized on the emergency shuttle, transport was arranged to bring you back to Earth for further treatment.  Most of the primary hospitals took damage from the war, but enough was salvaged from each to construct a placeholder facility stable enough to serve as an effective hospital until we can fully rebuild.”  He nods meaningfully, an ironic twinkle in his eye.  “Welcome home, Commander.”

So, she’s back where she started.  Wren could almost laugh, but the bitter mirth is dampened by renewed panic.  “The Normandy,” Wren follows up with sudden urgency that tears open the gaping hole in her chest.  “My crew, where are they?  Did anyone survive?”

Hackett doesn’t answer right away, which makes Wren wonder now if she even wants him to, but the not knowing would be enough to kill her even if her injuries didn’t.  Please.

“With the relays and communication networks damaged, there’s been no radio contact,” the admiral says carefully.  Wren clutches the sheets in her trembling fist—distantly, from outside herself, she notes her reduced grip strength.  “But there’s been no wreckage identified as the Normandy either.  We believe she escaped the initial blast with an excellently timed jump.”

If anyone could do it, Joker could, Wren thinks, almost smiling.

“We’re still searching the debris fields, but you’ll understand most of our efforts and resources are being directed toward the survivors that are accounted for.  But,” he adds upon seeing what is likely a pitiful expression on Wren’s face, “they’re your crew, Commander.  That’s enough to make me believe there’s a chance they’ll find a way to survive and make it back home.”

She appreciates his attempt at giving her hope, but it’s not quite what she wanted to hear.  But it’s all she has to go on, so she clings to it like driftwood in the ocean during a raging storm.

Hackett pauses once more to give Wren another moment to process before sympathizing, “I know this is a hell of a report to wake up to, Shepard, but I knew you’d want to be back in the loop as soon as possible.”  She concedes with a grateful, dour nod.  “But you did it,” he repeats.  “You defeated the Reapers.  The war is over.”

It rings hollow.  “And the casualties?”

The admiral’s sharp mouth curves downward.  “We knew the cost was going to be high from the moment the Reapers launched their first attack.  But that shouldn’t negate how many people were saved, how the future of our galaxy was saved.”

“The other synthetics,” she clarifies.  “Were there any survivors?”

Hackett catches the wistful note in her voice, perhaps recognizing there’s more she isn’t saying.  She aches from the shred of hope that there’s an off-chance the Catalyst was mistaken or maybe even lying.  The admiral’s steely expression answers her before his grave words.  “We’ve been examining all the fleets we can in the aftermath, including the geth; all units are disabled.  Whatever you unleashed from the Citadel seems to have neutralized all other identifiable AI bodies alongside the Reapers.”

Wren closes her eyes, her last bulwark against reality, but it’s too late.  It settles like a stone in her gut, and she knows this is a weight she will carry with her until the end of time.

“There is a lot of work to be done in the post-war efforts, but Shepard,” he adds, waiting until she meets his gaze once more, “with your injuries, I’m afraid you’d no longer be able to return to active service.”

Wren could have guessed as much, but the confirmation is a second stone that settles in her gut.  Being a soldier is the only thing she’s ever been good at—well, that and ferrying narcotics as her role in the Reds on Earth, but she isn’t particularly keen on returning to that line of work.  What the hell is she supposed to do now?

“But you of all people deserve a rest,” the admiral consoles.  “You would receive the highest of honorable discharges, which in my opinion could never be high enough to properly recognize what you’ve done for the galaxy.”

“I don’t want…”  Wren trails off, eyes looking away and back as she shakes her head slightly.  “It was never about honor.”  She scoffs.  “Where’s the honor in committing genocide against all synthetic life?  I betrayed the geth after giving them a chance at a new future.”  Her mouth presses into a firm line as if that might be enough to restrain the grief threatening to spill from her.  “I betrayed EDI.”

“There was never going to be an easy way out.”  Hackett’s voice is softer with sympathy.  He has no way of knowing yet the full extent of the decision Wren had to make, but he’s not Admiral for nothing; his sharp mind is likely putting two and two together well enough.  His flinty blue stare pierces her with its intensity.  “You could never have saved everyone, but I think those that you did save could never fault you for it.  All we can do now is honor the ones we’ve lost by resolving to rebuild.”

You could never have saved everyone.  It joins into the chorus in her head of all the times others told her the same.  You won’t save everyone.  Garrus’s voice rises above the rest: We won’t save everyone, Shepard.  I know you know that, but I know you’ll still try.

She was going to try.  She was.  She really was.  But…

Wren rests her head back against the pillow and takes a slow breath as she takes in the ceiling tiles.  She misses Anderson.  Not that Hackett’s words don’t resonate, and not that the man’s stolid posture and assertion don’t offer a certain comfort in their own way, but she just…

You did good, child.  I’m proud of you.

It’s hard to breathe.  There’s so much loss to process: Anderson, the synthetics, the fleets, her career, her leg… And then she decides it’s simply too much to process, so Wren finds that old familiar switch and flips it off for now.

“Thank you, Admiral.”  She offers a feeble, ironic salute, mindful of her IV line.

Hackett returns the gesture in sincerity.  “You did well, Commander.”

“I thought I was relieved of my position,” she drawls, her tone wry, bordering on petulant.

“You’ve earned a rest,” Hackett repeats, “but I think the galaxy will always remember you as Commander Shepard.  However, we’ll keep your survival classified for now for the sake of your recovery.”

She makes a noncommittal sound, then asks, “Please, if you learn anything about the Normandy…”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Hackett assures her.

She nods in wordless thanks, and with another meaningful look, the admiral exits Wren’s hospital room, leaving her with the nurse to tend to her IV and wound dressings.  The doctor says something that Wren tunes out, probably about some kind of treatment before both doctor and nurse realize she’s not listening and they leave her to herself.

The recovery process begins now, she supposes, for her and the entire galaxy.  Such a unity should fill her with a sense of camaraderie, but without her crew, without her friends—no, her family—she’s never felt more alone in the universe.

I told you I’d be waiting, Kaidan, Wren thinks grimly to herself, and she swallows hard.  So you’d damn well better make it back to me.