log; shepard & kaidan WHO: Shepard & Kaidan WHEN: Monday, January 1st, midday-ish? Whenever the hallucinations are happening WHERE: Near 601 WHAT: Shepard and Kaidan go to investigate the power outage in 601, but Shepard has unknowingly been dosed with Pixie's hallucinogenic dust and gets distracted. WARNING(S): None, actually. Shepard doesn't freak out because he's been hallucinating for months. Maybe some mild blood? Tiny bit. It's short and not very scary.
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Shepard was having an off-day, he could tell, but not so off he couldn't go to work. He thought.
The power had gone off somewhere on level 6. It probably wasn't dangerous, but with all the crowds crammed into the mountain, it might have been, so they armed themselves and made their way to the elevator.
Though he hadn't admitted it to anyone, he wasn't unusual for Shepard to see a stray hallucination. Whatever had happened to him up on the Citadel had stuck in his mind, rewired something so that even without the Reapers exacerbating it, some part of his brain would always be influenced by them. It was usually obvious and harmless: dark trees or translucent bushes from his nightmares, clinging to the walls or the floors and rustling silently in nonexistent wind. Sometimes he heard whispers that he knew weren't real, stray lights or bits and pieces of how the Citadel had looked last time he'd been on it. Nothing big, nothing bombastic, but they were still there on unpredictable days. It was worse when he slept less.
So it did strike him as odd when one wall of the elevator appeared to be missing, revealing the open space and bizarre machinery that had flanked the long hallway Shepard had stumbled down while he was on the Citadel. Maybe he was getting sick? Still, the vision was quiet, even if it had him staring off into space for a second, missing whatever Kaidan had just said.
"Shepard?"
Kaidan frowned, reaching out and laying a heavy hand on Shepard's shoulder. "You there?"
Shepard turned back, trying to shake it off. "Yeah, I'm here. Sorry."
Kaidan had noticed Shepard's unusual behavior before. Shepard didn't sleep, and Kaidan tried to let it go, tried not to talk to him about it, because Shepard didn't want to talk. He'd noticed Shepard glance at things that weren't there, or check out of a conversation.
He rubbed circles against Shepard's back. "What's in your head right now?" he asked.
"Nothing," Shepard lied. "I just didn't sleep last night. I'm here."
"Don't lie to me," said Kaidan, lowering his voice even though they weren't in danger of being overheard. "You don't like it when I keep things from you."
"I'm fine, Kaidan."
The elevator stopped, letting them out near the gym and commons that took up 602. Shepard let Kaidan take point into the common area; it would lead to the library, where it turned into 601. Hopefully the outages were contained.
"Are you getting enough sleep?" Kaidan asked. Now that they shared a bed, it was impossible not to notice that Shepard didn't actually spend a lot of time in it. "I don't want you with your weapon if you're not getting sleep."
It wasn't a silly thing to say, but it was hypocritical: Kaidan's pain often blurred his vision, and that made his use of a firearm just as problematic.
"I can shoot tired. We're just down here to fix a fuse." Shepard shrugged it off, not even sounding irritated enough to start any kind of confrontation.
When they stepped through the door into the darkened library, it wasn't the library that Shepard saw, but the Citadel again, in the room where the Illusive Man and Anderson had died. The rest of his surroundings melted away, leaving nothing but the faint grinding of gears and the peaceful vacuum of space in Shepard's head, the coppery smell of blood and stink of burned metal in his nose.
His side stung faintly, more like the memory of an injury than a real wound, but when Shepard touched his hand to it and looked down, his hand came away slick with blood. He caught sight of Admiral Anderson, sitting by his feet and staring up, the black tendrils of sickness and faint glow of the Reapers' invasive implants on his face and hands. (It hadn't gone like that, Anderson had just died, but it was convincing enough that Shepard had to stare to think about it.)
"Maybe you really are crazy," Anderson said.
"Maybe," Shepard agreed, reality a vague ringing in his ears. His face hurt. His limbs hurt. When he sat down to take his old place next to Anderson, his joints groaned.
"You're dying, son. Your brain can have a million dreams in a minute. None of this is real. You're just drifting."
Shepard looked down again at his bloodied hand. "I don't remember who shot me."
"You did, Shepard." Anderson sounded more alive in this moment than he remembered. More insistent. "You killed all of us. What did you do, Shepard? Shepard? Shepard—"
"Shepard!"
Kaidan had been trying to get Shepard's attention for the last several seconds, and now he grabbed his shoulder and shook him hard. "Hey. Look at me, right now."
It jolted him out of whatever he was seeing, and Kaidan was suddenly very there, making Shepard jump in surprise. "Kaidan? Jesus Christ."
Shepard looked back down, pressing his hand to his side to check it. Nothing. "I don't think I should be using a gun right now. You go on, I'll…" Go back upstairs? No, that was going to go badly. "Wait here. Go figure out what's up with the power. And take this." Drawing his gun out, he offered it to Kaidan.
Kaidan took it easily and tucked it away. He watched Shepard carefully before leaning in and giving him a quick kiss. "I love you. Wait here. Don't move. I'll be right back."