Chapter Text
He'd been waiting for this moment for years. Since Shepard had been found, unconscious in the hallways of parliament on Mars, and whispered her quiet revelation through guilt ridden tears.
She sat on her knees atop the sofa, her arms crossed over its back, her bottom lip neatly caught between her teeth, her eyes fixed on him half way across the room.
But he'd been waiting for some distant point in the future, after Kelly Chambers would give them a stamp of approval, and the galaxy was rebuilt, and somehow the world was different,
ready
.
Shepard lowered her head slightly, staring up at him through long eyelashes.
In the four years since the
Agincourt
had reunited them, he wasn't sure they'd spent more than a few days apart. At first it was walking on eggshells. She hadn't been alone since her recovery from Earth, her old crew with her through her unconscious screaming, a fleet of counsellors and doctors trying to repair whatever had happened to her on the Citadel.
And even they were reunited, sometime he saw her staring into nothing, her lips mouthing words he couldn't hear.
It was a year before the marines stopped guarding her, another before the Parliament gave in to the clammering of the public and anointed her humanity's Ambassador to the Council. And now she was Councillor herself, and almost the woman she once was. After all, he was the only one who saw the nightmares.
"Kaidan?" she whispered.
He cross the floor towards her and cupped her face in his hands, bowing to kiss her forehead. "That's great news," he said warmly, as warmly as he could.
She didn't hear the reservation, her face breaking into a radiant smile as she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself up so she could kiss him. Her body pressed against his, strong, solid, real. Her smell and taste were a grounding current. Years of this and it was nowhere near enough.
How had they come out of it together, when so few else had?
His arms circled her waist, his body responding to hers eagerly and thoughtlessly.
"Do you want a boy or a girl?" she murmured into his ear as they fell back to the cushions. She had already divested him of pants and shirt, her fingers making quick work of his wits as they danced over his skin.
"I don't think it makes a difference," he replied, honestly, and lost himself inside her.
***
Even by their standards it was a marathon. They ended up in bed, but only because most other surfaces had been sampled. Lowell City glittered out the window, not quite a field of stars, but better than nothing. He'd seen the plans for their quarters on Bastion, but for now, Mars was still the defacto capital of the galaxy.
Not bad for a backwater.
He sat on the edge of their bed, listening to the gentle snore of his wife, feeling the pleasant ache in his very core that came from their exhausting activities.
The lights of Lowell City played across her bare shoulder, glittered in her hair. He couldn't help turning to brush strands from her face, to press a kiss into her shoulder, curling up beside her and cradling her body closer. He could never deny her anything.
How could they think about a baby, when the asari were grumbling and the quarians threatening to split and the krogans proving their numbers accurate. It was the wrong time.