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Shepard was feeling confident about not burning the grilled cheese sandwiches he’d decided to make for lunch.

It was supposed to be easy. When Kaidan did it, it was. You put some butter on two slices of bread and you put cheese between them and flopped the whole thing into a hot pan for a while, and tada. Grilled cheese sandwiches. The kids loved them and so did Shepard, but whenever he tried to do it they tended to come out a little blackened.

“If you didn’t wander off to answer messages while you were cooking, you might get better results,” Kaidan said to him the last time. “Just...a thought,” he’d added while he opened all the kitchen windows to let the smoke out.

Even Mako had refused the end product of Shepard’s efforts that day. “Well fine,” he’d said. “I save the galaxy and this is the thanks I get, huh?” The dog licked her wet nose and walked away.

With enough ketchup, Shepard had learned he could eat just about anything.

Today was going to be different. Today, he was going to stand in front of the pan, spatula at the ready, and he was going to cook the grilled cheese sandwiches perfectly. He would focus and ignore all outside interruptions, and it would go off without a hitch.

Then he heard footsteps banging up the back stairs. The door creaked opened and he turned to see David standing there, tears streaked across his round cheeks.

“Hey,” Shepard said. He put down the spatula. “Everything okay kiddo?”

“When’s Papa coming home?” David asked. His voice was high and weak, and he was cradling his left arm with his right one. Shepard recognized that maneuver.

Kaidan was teaching at the biotics institute, a full day of classes. “Not ‘til dinnertime,” Shepard said. He walked over and crouched down in front of his son. “David, what happened?”  

David rubbed his wet cheeks against either shoulder and didn’t answer.

More footsteps, louder ones, stomping up the back stairs. Ashley barged in, breathless. “It wasn’t my fault!” she blurted in a rush.

“Nobody said anything was your fault, Crash,” Shepard said. “What happened out there?”

“He fell,” Ash said.

“Shut up!” David turned away from her, trying to hide his face.

“You did!” Ash never let that kind of tactic fly. “I was in the tree and he climbed up but he slipped and fell. Dad, I didn’t push him or anything. I swear.”

She looked like she was about to cry too. Shepard knew his eyebrows were doing one of the somethings Kaidan was always trying to tell him about.

“Right,” Shepard said. “Okay. Ash, run and grab the first aid kit from under the sink.”

She nodded and sprinted out of the room. Good with directions. Good soldier.

“Can we call Papa?” David asked.

Shepard reached out and rubbed the side of David’s head. “First we need to get some ice on that arm.” He stood up, knees creaking, and went to take a cold pack out of the freezer. Ash charged back into the room with the medkit and plunked it on the counter.

“What’re my orders?” she asked.

“That’s all for now, LT,” Shepard said. “Stand by.”

He held the ice pack out to David. “Rest your arm on that, okay?”

He opened the kit up and dug out the universal splint. It had never been used, so he had to tear it out of its packaging.  

“It’s too cold,” David said. His little face was all crumpled with pain and it made Shepard’s heart knock in his chest.

“I know it hurts, but if we don’t ice it then Papa’ll give us both hel— heck, he’ll give us heck, when he gets home.”

Ashley was fidgeting. She’d pulled the elastic out of one of her pigtails and she was going glassy eyed. Big sister guilt. Half krogan, when you looked at it sideways, during one of the few times they actually hadn’t meant to break something by charging into it.

Shepard glanced out across the backyard and into their neighbor’s. He could see two kids on a swingset and an adult working in the garden.

“Ash, I need you to run across the lane for a while, alright? Tell Kat’s aunt that I had to take David to the clinic.”

Ashley bowed her head and darted out the back door.

“Hey, hey, take Mako’s leash!” he shouted after her.

She doubled back and grabbed it from its hanger on the porch. Sometimes, being the LT meant you followed orders you didn’t like.

Shepard knelt back down in front of David, who was still crying. “We just need to put your arm in the splint and then go see the docs at the clinic. They’ll fix you up.”

“I don’t want to go,” David said.

Shepard stroked the shell of David’s ear with his thumb, just once. It was something that Kaidan used to do when David was a baby, one of the few things that helped him stop crying. Shepard wasn’t trying to get him to stop crying; the arm hurt and the tears were ones he understood. But he was trying to distract him.

“I know, buddy,” Shepard said. “Believe me, I know.”

He coaxed the arm into the splint and then rubbed David’s back.

“Think you can walk two blocks?”

Having a clinic nearby had been on Kaidan’s must-have checklist back when they were house hunting. A clinic, a grocery store, a school, and a park. They’d managed three of the four, but the school was a short shuttle trip away.

David was still cradling his arm, but he nodded.

Sometimes walking took your mind off the hurt—if it was an arm, anyway. Walking never did much for Shepard’s bum knee, but that was just common sense. And he’d been told a few times by a few different people that common sense was something he lacked.

Especially when it came to which of Kaidan’s sweaters could and couldn’t go in the laundry.

There’d always be other sweaters—even the ones that were handmade or imported from off-world or had a fancy label in the collar, the name of which Shepard had quit trying to pronounce. And elbows got rebuilt all the time; Shepard knew that better than anyone. But there was only one David, even if common sense never so much factored into fatherhood as much as Shepard wished it did.

Ash took orders, while the back of David’s head was small, fair hair just starting to darken from pale baby blonde, just the right size to fit against a bigger hand’s palm. Shepard flexed his fingers and the voice of an old TO came back to him from beyond time and space and, arguably, death.

Now’s not the time to freeze up, soldier.

“The sandwiches,” David said, under a sniffle.

The smell of burning cheese—not burning rubber, tires squealing, all-terrain vehicles flipping, fire raging in the distance, incendiary rounds popping and sizzling—filled Shepard’s mouth and nose. Black bread in the pan by now. And he’d used extra butter this time, just like Kaidan, because butter made even an amateur’s grilled cheese sandwich taste better.

“On it,” Shepard replied. His elbow twinged from the old urge to salute.

He managed to hold back on it, David peeking over his shoulder while Shepard turned off the stove and shook the lost sandwiches straight into the trash. Part of being a commander meant knowing when to give up on destroyed resources—but also not knowing when to retire.

“Everything’s ship-shape now,” Shepard said, tossing a singed dishtowel onto the counter and stepping into his shoes. “Hey, you need help with those laces? Even I couldn’t do them one-handed.”

“They’re velcro,” David said, quiet, after a long pause.

The instinct to pick him up and carry him all the way was right there—a different set of muscles from the ones that urged Shepard to salute at inappropriate times, after chatting on the phone or over a dinner out with civilian friends. But as long as Shepard thought of David like a young krogan, even if the experience he’d racked up with Grunt didn’t quite count these days, he managed to work past the urge.

Kids were tough. Proud. Hard-headed. Stubborn. Way too much like krogan, in fact, only they came without the armored exterior. Even David, tear streaks catching the sunlight, had that sense of...

Well, for lack of a better word, Shepard had to go with integrity.

“How’s it feeling, buddy?” Not going to lose the arm, are you? Shepard’s brain supplied, but that was soldier-to-soldier stuff, suicide mission humor. Not appropriate for ages five and under. “You know, that’s the same elbow I broke once upon a time—back when thresher maws still roamed Tuchanka.”

Maybe bringing up the thresher maws hadn’t been the best idea, considering the expression David turned to Shepard with. Those big eyes were killer. No wonder Kaidan was so soft on him.

Shepard sighed. Keeping pace with a kid’s short legs was harder than jogging after Garrus when he thought Shepard was ‘taking it too easy’ and ‘needed a reminder of what living life on the edge was like.’ Badass lessons, essentially. Because moving fast kept you from thinking about how slow you were; moving slow meant adrenaline never kicked in, and that’d kill you if you let it.

But the clinic was close and, if they were lucky, they wouldn’t have to wait in the sitting room too long—or Shepard wouldn’t have to pull the I-saved-the-galaxy card on a receptionist, a tactic that usually made him feel dirtier than a tabloid journalist, but as far as his kids were concerned, that wouldn’t stop him from getting the job done.

“It’s a long story,” Shepard said. “You know, I could tell it to you while we’re waiting. Pass the time. ...It’s not too scary, either.”

They were in the lot—Shepard eyeballing the number of vehicles parked outside, scanning the waiting room through the glass to check on the crowd—when he realized David was crying again, the soft kind of crying, private and hurt and missing Kaidan.

That was something Shepard got, anyway. Not the crying bit, but...the other thing. The kid had good taste.

Shepard bent down and scooped him up, careful not to jostle the bad arm. Kids didn’t need to be held like fallen soldiers. They were light-weight, for one thing, but what they lacked in size, they made up for in wriggling around a hell of a lot more.

Today David held still. He’d always been a little better about that than his sister, who squirmed harder than a batarian eel whenever you tried to put your arms around her. She’d been a biter, too, something Mrs. Alenko had warned Shepard tended to run in the family.

“Oh, I’ve noticed,” he’d answered, before he realized what he was saying. Kaidan could only shake his head at that one.

The thing about Ash was that she always managed to cooperate if you were picking her up to spin her around or lift her onto your shoulders, making her taller than a turian. She’d hold still if the payoff was speed or a better vantage point. “Are you sure she’s not mine?” Garrus would ask sometimes when they took Ash out together, never within earshot of her, and especially never within earshot of Kaidan. “Because you know, we did have some wild times together, Shepard. You can tell me the truth.” Shepard would laugh and Ashley would come crashing back to them in a hail of shouted gunfire sound effects, her freckles filthy and her knees scuffed and every kid in the park following faithfully on her heels.  

She was easier to understand. When Shepard picked her up and she wriggled, he knew it wasn’t personal.

But David... It was safe to say Shepard had an easier time understanding the untranslated asari operas Kaidan sometimes got them tickets to, and he sure as hell never came away from those much the wiser.

At least David was holding still, the way he had once in a blue moon when he was little and finally, finally all cried out, babyish face squished against Shepard’s throat.

Shepard walked through the sliding glass doors and into the clinic. The nurse behind the counter reminded him of a younger Steve Cortez, bright-eyed and with a well-groomed goatee.

“Have you been in before?” the nurse asked.

So many times, thought Shepard. “Yeah,” he said. “It’ll be under Shepard.”

The man typed away at his console. "As in Commander John Shepard?”

“That’s me.” At least the I-saved-the-galaxy card sometimes pulled itself. “It’s actually the tyke who needs a doc, though. David Shepard.”  

“He’s on file as David Shepard-Alenko?”

Right. They’d gone there, with the hyphens and everything. Sometimes Shepard wished they could take a cue from the tabloids and just be the Sheplenkos. It was shorter—and, in the case of the kids, more accurate.

“That’s him,” Shepard said.

“That’s me,” David echoed, tiny voice warm on Shepard’s sternum.

“And what seems to be the trouble today?”

Shepard felt David tense up. He knew he had to choose his words carefully because the kid was sensitive and he was already embarrassed. The dumb dad in Shepard wanted to make a joke about a raw recruit trying to keep pace with a more experienced soldier and paying the price, but he had to do his damndest not to be a dumb dad with David.

Thank god for Kaidan, anyway. Without his intervention David would probably still be a tearful, silent mess with undiagnosed biotic migraines. But this time it was on Shepard.

“Had a bit of a fall. There’s a pretty big tree in our backyard. Think he might have hyper-extended his elbow.”

“Just the arm?” The nurse was entering something into a datapad.

Shepard felt like an even dumber dad. He cupped the back of David’s small skull, not feeling any lumps. “You didn’t hit your head or anything, did you buddy?”

“No,” David squeaked.

Kaidan would never have glossed over something so important.

“It’ll be a few minutes wait today,” the nurse said. He passed the datapad to a woman in a lab coat, who hurried off down a long hall. “Please have a seat, and we’ll call you as soon as a doctor is available.”  

Shepard thanked him and carried David into the waiting area. There were a few people milling around, a couple other kids who looked like the worst they were suffering was runny noses. He didn’t know whether to sit down with David in his lap or if he should set him in his own chair.

With Ash, the answer would have been obvious. She would never have let him carry her this far and she’d barely tolerated the indignity of sitting in someone’s lap before she could even sit up. After she’d learned to walk, it was a lost cause, save for one turian in particular who seemed to be the exception to every rule.

If it had been Kaidan carrying David, the answer would have been clear for him too: hold on. The kid was always holding on to him.

Again—common ground with David didn’t necessarily make for an appropriate topic of conversation. Once upon a time, I couldn’t let go of him, either. Called it a sanity check back then. That must be what you’re looking for—and he’s good at it, maybe even the best. But I’m betting you already knew all that, didn’t you?

Shepard cleared his throat. His knee creaked again as it bent and he settled on the dip in the seat, David’s face still pressed in the space between Shepard’s throat and shoulder. Shepard stretched his leg out and shifted in the plastic seat. Best health care in the neighborhood and they still couldn’t buy chairs that didn’t feel more like batarian torture devices than furniture.

If David’s cheeks hadn’t been so wet, Shepard would’ve smiled at the thought.

“How’s the arm holding up?” Shepard asked. “Elbows... They can be tricky. Maybe not as tricky as knees—but don’t tell Papa I said that.”

David’s breath, trapped on Shepard’s skin, didn’t feel claustrophobic. And Shepard wasn’t much for the feeling of breath trapped on skin in the first place, like it was being bounced back off a mouthpiece, stuck inside a helmet rapidly running out of oxygen.

Shepard took a deep breath too. He could feel David’s eyelashes, slow, tear-sticky blinks.

Kaidan would’ve had a tissue somewhere on him, pulling it out, wiping David’s cheeks. Shepard shielded David’s bad arm as he settled him on one thigh.

“But between knees and elbows,” Shepard continued, “I’d say it’s elbows that hurt more. Chakwas—that was my doctor back then, wouldn’t even give me a lollipop when we were finished—she never let me live that fracture down. You know, I’ve still got the scar.”

Sometimes, talking was what took the mind off the hurt. Shepard didn’t know who he was trying to distract more: the kid with the busted arm that’d make Kaidan’s mouth go hard and his gray look grayer, or the dad who kept stealing looks at it, wondering when they were going to get on the technology for pain transference already. Shepard would’ve taken it, taken it a hundred times over, even if it wouldn’t have done David any favors. He would’ve taken it all.

Garrus was right.

He was going soft.

“Here.” Shepard rolled the edges of his sleeves up, arm tight around David’s back. “There’s the one. You know, I always thought I was going to be a soldier about it. A real CO. Set a good example for the crew, tough the whole thing out. I was all set to be brave but it hurt like h...eck.” He had to get better at that. He had to get better at a lot of things. “Sometimes, that’s just how it is. And sometimes, being brave isn’t about pretending a thing doesn’t hurt in the first place.”

Shepard brushed his fingers over the old ache—where a pin held his arm together and gave it the shoring to bend. The scar was a half-moon right over the joint and Shepard had to lift his hand to his ear to show it off under the hem of his sleeve.

David stared. Wide-eyed, too cute for his own good, chewing his bottom lip.

“Looks like it’s right where yours is, too,” Shepard said.

“Did it hurt?” David asked.

“If I said it didn’t, I’d be a liar. And I wouldn’t lie to you.”

David didn’t smile—or shove him in the side like Ash would’ve done, or disappear under the chairs pretending they were tunnels on Tuchanka and she was leading a recon mission. David observed. And every crew needed an observer. Shepard couldn’t play thresher maw all the time.

“Truth is,” he continued, “I was always falling off of things. Busting myself up. Kaidan... Papa didn’t like that too much, but if you take the risk, you can get hurt. Not all the time. Just...some of the time.”

Too abstract, Kaidan would’ve said. As though Shepard didn’t know how to be concrete.

He cleared his throat again, lowering his arm. “You’ve seen the scar on my knee, right?” David nodded. “Well, I tell you what—that knee hurts, too. Not every day. Just now and then. Got that one...” They didn’t talk about the stuff Shepard could only half remember anyway, colored with blood, making the pulse in his throat jump with the old fight-or-flight—but mostly fight—instincts. “...before Papa asked me to marry him.”

“When the thresher maws were still on Tuchanka,” David said.

He remembered.

“Ask any krogan,” Shepard said. “They’ll tell you, those were the days.”

But krogan made David shy, even Grunt, who liked the kid. Thought he was soft and squishy as a grape—and he was right—but Grunt was one of those new-wave krogan that knew about poetry, and not just Wrex’s perennial favorite Mars storms are red, bruises are blue, if I want you dead, I’m gonna crush you.

“What about this one?” David was gently touching a spot on Shepard’s belly where he had an ugly incision mark—one of the newer scars. It was a surprise that the kid had the spot pinpointed, though it shouldn’t have been. David observed, after all. Even as a baby he’d kept an eye on the action, always watching Ash, usually from the safety of Kaidan’s arms.

The scar he was asking about had a lousy story behind it. Nothing worth telling. There’d been a tube in there for a while during Shepard’s hospital stay after the war to keep him nourished before he relearned how to swallow. Something his kids wouldn’t know about firsthand, so they didn’t have to know about it second-hand, either.

“That one...” Shepard remembered bright lights in hospital ceilings, kind of like the ones above them now. Long days and long nights sliding in and out of time, Kaidan there whenever he opened his eyes, sitting vigil next to him with varying stages of beard growth. Shepard swallowed. “That one’s from when I was really sick, before you were born. Before your sister was born, even.”

“Oh,” David said. Before you, before your sister. Might as well say before time began. Before there were thresher maws on Tuchanka.

David’s big eyes stayed big. They were the same deep brown as Kaidan’s but softer because of all the things they hadn’t seen, hopefully would never have to see. Shepard still remembered a time when a year felt like an eternity, when adults all seemed ancient and worn down as mountains. Incomprehensible and capable, sometimes dangerous. Now that he was older—old, even, if he was being cynical about it—he knew everybody was flying blind, same as he was.

Except maybe Joker.

Had to maintain the illusion, though. For the sake of the kids. Let them believe their parents were the strongest people in the galaxy, that they would protect them no matter the cost. That they would live forever.

“For Shepard-Alenko, David?” The woman in the lab coat was back.

Shepard hefted David—careful not to bump his arm—and stood up. His knee popped and he had to bite down on a wince. “That’s us.”

“This way, please.”

Down one of the long hallways and into an exam room.

“Doctor Gill will be with you shortly.”

“Thanks.”

David wiggled, probably tired of having his sticky cheek caught on the cotton of Shepard’s shirt, so Shepard set him down on the exam table and started to step back. He would have sat in the extra chair a couple feet away, but there was a little balled up fist in the neck of his t-shirt tethering them together. So instead he stayed close, rubbing the back of David’s head.

He could use a haircut. Shepard could too, but Kaidan liked them shaggy. He liked all three of them shaggy. He’d come close to crying the first time Ash had insisted on a regulation buzz to match Shepard’s. “I don’t mean to stifle anyone’s self-expression, but... you’re never buzzing your hair off again,” he’d whispered into the base of Shepard’s neck that night.

Shepard thought Ash looked cute with no hair. It made her huge blue eyes look even bigger, the gap where she’d lost another baby tooth more obvious when she grinned. And if he was really honest, he was chuffed she looked up to him so damn much.

But Kaidan was a hair person. Obviously.

“What are you gonna do if I go bald, anyway?” Shepard asked him sometimes.

“You’re not gonna go bald, Shepard,” he’d say, right before kissing him on the mouth. Ever since Shepard had come back from the dead a second time Kaidan seemed to have this idea he could make things happen just by believing in them hard enough.

Maybe he could. Who was Shepard to argue one way or another?  

The door slid open and another woman in a lab coat stepped inside. “Hello there,” she said. “I hear we’ve got a bad elbow to tend to.”

There were scans. Those were quick, pretty painless. A little bit of poking and prodding, which hurt enough that new tears sprung up on David’s cheeks and Shepard ached somewhere deep in his ribs watching it. Those faded with the wait time between scans and data output, but they were right there below the surface, waiting to spring up again if somebody breathed the wrong way.

Shepard held still. No jostling, no bumping. He had to think like a Prothean in cryostasis.

The doctor was examining her scan results, tapping notes into the omnitool. “Looks like we’re dealing with a hyperextended elbow and a mild greenstick fracture of the forearm.”

At least that didn’t sound serious. Any time the word mild was used, that was generally a good thing. David was looking up at Shepard, anxious for translation Shepard wished he could give.

“That’s not so bad, right doc?”

She smiled. “No. It might hurt quite a lot, but it’s far from serious. You’ll be just fine, David. We’ll patch you up like new.” She was addressing David, but Shepard could tell the reassurance was for dumb old dad.

He let out a long, relieved breath.

“So what kind of treatment are we talking here?”

Shepard’s answer came in the form of them being led to another area of the clinic, where a freckled tech helped David put his arm into a medigel immersion tank.

“This’ll sting a little bit,” the tech said, “but you can let me know if it hurts too much. Just lift your other hand like this,” she raised her hand like she had the answer in class, “and I’ll stop the treatment right away.”

David nodded. He made a face when the tank powered up but his free hand stayed down, gripping Shepard’s.

“You’re doing good, buddy,” Shepard said to him. “Really good.”

“Did you ever have to...?” That was the beginning and the end of the question.

“Sure,” Shepard said. He kept his voice low, steady, relaxed despite the way his jaw was threatening to crack. Sometimes, all his crew needed to see was a steady gaze and straight shoulders. There was no such thing as false hope—just false belief. Hope was always real. It was just that you could run out of it like fuel if you didn’t have enough reserves. “Sure I did. Plenty of times. Think they even named a model after me, considering how often I was around the place. Like I said, I wasn’t always the best patient, myself.” He stroked the tops of David’s knuckles with his thumb. They weren’t stained with paint—that stuff scrubbed off without soap—but Shepard knew what’d been there. He could tell David’s favorite colors by which of the markers were running out of ink. “In fact, this looks pretty close to the setup that we used to have on the old ship. ...That stuff tingles, doesn’t it?”

David nodded.

“That’s fine,” Shepard said. “That’s how you know it’s working. Pretty sure one of these days they’ll figure out a way so you can’t even feel it, but until then, we’ll have to get through it as it is.”

David was getting through it. Kids had sharp little fingernails and they were digging crescents into Shepard’s palms, but it was the least Shepard could do.

“About halfway done, I’d say,” Shepard said. “You can raise your hand anytime you need—you know that, right?”

David nodded again.

“Still, it’s always the quiet ones like you that end up taking it on the chin,” Shepard continued. “...Or elbow. Worst thing you can do, though, is pretend something doesn’t hurt when it does. I guess you could say I used to do that, and there wasn’t much that’d make Papa frown like that did.”

“Before,” David said.

Shepard nodded. “Yeah. Before. A long time ago—and the way I remember it, the house was way too empty without you and Ash in there to fill it up. We had to have people over all the time, and they made more of a mess than Ash, if you can believe it.”

David almost smiled. Maybe they were both thinking about the same thing: Ash spilling David’s paints or leaving his markers scattered across the floor. Granted, she’d set them up as a training course—to see how fast she could run from one end of the room to the other without slipping and sliding on those little plastic landmines—but they’d been David’s markers first, and he never left the caps off, always putting them back where they belonged. That right there was something special. Not in a way Shepard could praise or even explain, but he knew special when he saw it. He recruited special.

“Almost done,” Shepard said. “Still doing okay?”

The death grip made ‘okay’ seem like a relative concept. Well, it always was.

“I know,” Shepard said. “I’ve been there. More times than either of us can count. I even wanted— I asked for Papa, too. And you know what happened?”

David shook his head, staring up at Shepard’s face, making him feel big and clumsy as a thresher maw. The krogan in the room, Garrus called it, then looked pointedly at the actual krogan in the room. Little privacy, Wrex?

The medigel tank was close to beeping. Shepard knew the signs.

“Papa always came when he could,” Shepard replied. “That’s what happened.”

“...And you’re all finished, David,” the tech said, glancing up from her datapad while the tank powered down. “You did very well. Was that your first time with a medigel tank?”

She had the materials for drying him off at the ready. David was moving like the bone was still fractured but Shepard could see it wasn’t, the skin flushed pink after the blood had rushed to the area. The tech patted him down and did a few more tests of his flexibility; David tensed up when she bent his elbow, expecting it to hurt, then started to relax when he realized it didn’t.

“You feeling better?” Shepard asked.

Another nod. “...Mm.”

“I can tell. Listen, uh...” Shepard scanned the nametag on the front of the tech’s jacket, “Terry, thanks for the calm head and steady hand today.”

“It’s my job, Co... Mr. Shepard.” The tech cleared her throat, but Shepard was beyond the usual awkwardness. Relief would do that to a person. “If you’ll wait for the test results by the front desk...?”

Shepard knew all about waiting for the test results by the front desk. Waiting For The Test Results By The Front Desk: First Human Spectre Commander Shepard Returns was the name of his movie. Not exactly as catchy as Blasto Strikes Back.

“You ready?” Shepard asked. On the field, there was no time to wonder what came next; you had to act without thinking, and leave the wondering for after the ceasefire. But kids were wonder before and wonder after—maybe even wonder all the way through. And Shepard didn’t realize he was hoping for David to grab onto the front of his shirt again until he did, Shepard sliding him up into his arms, feeling an answering twinge in the small of his back. “Hey,” Shepard said, “you’re getting heavier, aren’t you?”

Granted, not saying something specific about his  lower-back pain might’ve contradicted his advice about always mentioning when you were hurt rather than playing it off and suffering the consequences. But David was small and heavy in his arms, and Shepard carried him out to the front desk. He swiped his Alliance ID card when prompted to take care of the clinic fees, then waited for the data stick with David’s test results so he could prove to Kaidan—later—that everything was fine.

The same nurse that had checked them in checked them out. He handed Shepard the data stick and David a packet of bandages with Blasto on them.

“You’re gonna have to hide those from your sister,” Shepard said. “...And me.”

David almost cracked a smile, but he buried his face before Shepard could see for sure.

Outside, Shepard realized they’d lost most of the afternoon. Between the accident, the walk, the wait, and the treatment, the sun was headed well into the west. He felt a bit bad about leaving Ash for so long, but he knew the neighbors would feed her, if she remembered to be hungry. He’d have to give them a basket of tomatoes as a thank you.

He had a good crop this year.

Shepard carried David the two blocks home, where Kaidan was standing in the front hallway waiting. Always waiting.

“I got a call from across the lane,” Kaidan said. “So I left class a little early.” He had that look, his trademark ‘worrying about David’ look, which he’d perfected mere hours after the kid was born. It deepened the furrow in his brow and took him dangerously close to resembling Mako when you dashed her hopes of getting any handouts at the kitchen table. As soon as Kaidan saw David’s face, still puffy and pink from crying, the look intensified and he reached out and put a hand on David’s back. “Aw, Vivi... What happened?”

Shepard hefted David, trying to keep him from sliding out of his grasp. He really was getting heavy. “Took a spill, but he’s okay.”

“M’ok,” David repeated. He had the freshly healed injury tucked against his chest. It would probably be tender for a few days. Science looked miraculous from a surface perspective and there was no denying that it was, but the full heal still took time.

Shepard was expecting David to lurch for Kaidan any second, a maneuver he’d been practicing for years. The goal was always to throw himself out of any set of arms holding him—especially if they were Shepard’s arms—and into Kaidan’s. It was hard to keep count of the times he’d nearly been dropped pulling that stunt, since Shepard’s bad elbow tended to fail him at the worst moments. Lucky for all of them, Kaidan had a sixth sense for David. He was there every time to gather him up and clutch him close, hold him until he calmed down and fell asleep.   

When David stayed limp in Shepard’s arms, cheek resting heavy on his collarbone, Shepard had to think about his next move.

“He was really brave today,” Shepard said to Kaidan. “Really brave.” He planted a kiss on the top of David’s head. “Heavy though. Part krogan, maybe. Have to get that checked out eventually.”

David wriggled to be put down, but he was smiling. Sort of. He’d inherited Kaidan’s mouth, along with the funny twisty ways it could smile and not smile at the same time. It was a confusing mouth to interpret.

Probably an even more confusing mouth to have.  

David hugged Kaidan and then disappeared into the living room.

“Ashley?” Shepard asked.

“Still with the Wilsons. She’s been invited to sleep over.”

“Their funeral.” Shepard rubbed his lower back where it was pinching. He tried not to make a face, but touching his back inevitably pulled his lips sideways.

“You could have called me,” Kaidan said. “I could’ve come to take him or— Or I could have met you there.”

“It was under control.” Shepard arched his spine, dug his fingers into the knot of scar tissue where they’d gone in to replace one of his shattered vertebrae. He’d be paying for doing the stand-up dad thing, but he’d have done it again in a heartbeat. He’d do it every day until it killed him, if he had to.

“Yeah, actually I... I noticed that,” Kaidan said. He was smiling too, just seconds here and there.

David reappeared, clutching something in his fists. He circled behind Shepard and pushed the hem of his t-shirt up. Shepard moved his hand aside, wondering what was in store for him this time. He’d been used as a human canvas before—more than once—which was probably how David had known where his scars were.

Instead of the nib of a felt marker, he felt an adhesive catch and pressure over the old scar. When his shirt fell back into place, David darted away again.

Kaidan looked puzzled.

Shepard tricked his shirt up and did a half turn so he could see his back in the hall mirror.

There was a Blasto bandage stuck over the spot he’d been rubbing, the same spot that made David seem heavier than he should for someone so small.

“What was that all about?” Kaidan asked.  

Kids were peculiar. David was especially peculiar, but it was because he was wise beyond his years. An old soul, as the saying went. Bakara had called it the first time she’d held him. David knew how fragile things were, how fragile he was. Somehow, he knew about consequences before he knew about taking chances. Memory passed down in the bones.

Shepard let his shirt fall back into place and pressed the bandage harder to make sure it’d stay. At least for a while. For as long as they could stretch it out.  

“For being brave,” he said.

END