Mass Effect Fortification

This is for Libbabink, who contributed so much to this headcanon and who always makes me sob over tiny sweaters.

References events throughout _Set Free_ and _Changeling_, but isn't necessary to read those first. Experimental style, comments appreciated.

* * *

**One: birth. (beginnings aren't easy)**

The doctors had asked her if she wanted to abort, after the Singapore accident. It would be kinder, they had said, to end it rather than have a deformed baby born. She could have another. Her mother and sisters had sat with her for very long hours; the men shut out, while they sobbed, made too much green tea, read articles and looked at the pictures of what eezo could do to a foetus. They had been shopping in the markets for baby booties and making fun of her mother's nagging only hours before the transport crash had showered her in that strange dust.

But Ami didn't want to try for _another_. She wanted _this_ one.

So she keeps him. Even if he might be imperfect. He would be _her_ perfect.

She wanted the baby that made little flutters dance in her belly, that she and Casimir had been so surprised with. He was an accident; they had always said they weren't going to have children and they weren't exactly young anymore. Casimir was going to retire in a year or two from the Alliance so they could spend more time at the orchard and with each other. A baby would get in the way of that, demand attention and time and commitment. He would ruin their comfortable plans.

But she knew as soon as she first missed her period, as soon as those pink little lines appeared on the pregnancy test that she wanted _that_ baby more than anything. It was so sudden and the love so fierce that she had sat gasping on the bathroom floor for long minutes, gently touching her stomach and the little miracle that grew there. How could this happen? They were careful. Life was laid all before her. The little cluster of cells would change all that.

It wasn't a good time at all. She didn't know how her husband would feel. She didn't know how she would be a mother, her work had always came first and so had her painting. She liked that they had money, enough so she didn't have to work but did so anyway because she liked the challenge. A baby would eat into their disposable income, it would come between their lazy Sundays in bed and long breakfasts at expensive cafes. She would have to quit smoking.

But it felt right. It felt like love. It felt like potential, a little person who would call her 'Mommy', and lazy Sundays in bed with a baby pressed between them.

So when she first finds out in their bathroom, she gets up off the floor, makes a doctor's appointment and buys her husband a card that says 'Congratulations, Daddy.'

She cooks dinner that night with a firm expression, roughly chops the carrots the way Casimir likes them and when he gets home she plops him into a chair with the card and says that they're having steak and vegetables for dinner and by the way they're also having a baby and hopes that he is happy.

His face is blank for very long moments, and she corrects, no they are not actually going to eat a baby - she's fucking pregnant, you idiot. She hoists a defiantly calm expression on her face, begging inside that he's ok with it.

Casimir leaps up from the chair the moment it sinks in and falls to his knees before her to babble to her stomach and then kiss her mouth, pulling her to her knees too, hugging her so tightly. They're both laughing so hard she can't see straight. That moment is one of the happiest of her life, when she got to tell the man she loved that they had made something great and his famous calm broke for once.

She thinks that it's the first time she's ever seen tears in his eyes in all the years they've been married.

When Kaidan is born, Ami Alenko makes him a promise: she'll take care of him, she'll keep him safe and he'll live to grow into a strong man. She names him Kaidan after her Japanese grandfather, long dead but fondly remembered by her mother.

Kaidan's a squalling newborn, fussy and fretful. He has a shock of black hair and grey-blue eyes that she knows will darken to match hers exactly. His father helped deliver him and she is sure, in the seconds he has ducked out of the room, that he's calling all his Alliance buddies to tell them he's got a son. She thinks with a fond roll of her eyes, that they will be having poker night soon and Casimir will drive them crazy with talk about the baby.

The baby looks like her husband; the curly, thick hair, his nose. She can even see he has his chin, only in miniature.

She kisses his red, scrunched up face.

Ami Alenko promises to keep him safe, as she puts him to her breast. She promises to build walls around him to protect him as best she can.

She can't fight off the cancer that the doctors say might develop and she can't make those mutant nodules go away. She can't fight the uncontrollable division of cells that might eat into his brain or cause strokes. Or all the doctor's appointments in the future. And she can't go back six months and stop the baby in her womb being showered with dust-form eezo. But she can do her best from now on. And she will. Ami will face whatever comes.

She knows she loves him more than anything in this world, more than her husband and more than her own life.

Ami knows her husband is a protector, a soldier. He's gruff and strong and unshakeable.

But, she thinks; now _she's_ the stronger one. Ami would tear down the sky for her little boy and there wasn't a force in the galaxy that could stop her.

* * *

**Two: orchard. (protect what's yours)**

One day when Kaidan is fourteen, his father builds a wall in one of the orchard's fields. Its summer, they've come to the Okanagan orchard for vacation. His mother is glad to get away from the bustling Vancouver crowds and so is Kaidan. He spends time swimming, climbing tress and skinning his knees and having his mother yell at him for spending too much time on the extranet.

Kaidan isn't sure what the wall is for, he thinks maybe Pa is thinking of making a greenhouse.

He asks, "Pa, why don't you just get someone else to do it?" as the sweat falls down his father's tanned face.

Casimir Alenko replies, "Son, sometimes the best work is the work you do yourself. Sure, I could get some of those fancy VI mechs in to build me a damn wall or get some of the orchard workers to help. But it'll never be as good as one you make yourself with blood and sweat and tears."

"What's it for?"

"To keep the fields safe."

"From what?"

"Vermin, moose, deer. Anything that tries to eat the fruit."

"Can I help?"

His Pa looks at him appraisingly. Kaidan stands a little straighter and tries to make his hair lay flat. His wishes he was taller. Ma said he was shooting straight up and would be a handsome, tall man soon but Kaidan knows he looks gangly and weedy. Pa never seems happy with him. He got a D on his last English test. He had a bad headache last night and had to miss dinner to lie in his room with the lights off for a long time. Ma had come in and bathed his face with a cool facecloth, and whispered gently to him like he was a child again but he had still felt so sick he had thrown up on her pretty floral dress.

The doctors hadn't said that getting that thing in the back of his neck would make him feel so bad.

Kaidan wishes he was like his dad. Pa is tall and towers over Ma. He's strong, with a straight nose and a square jaw and never lets anyone walk over him. Kaidan knows he used to go on missions for the Alliance; that he's killed people and he has muscles because he trains them still, even retired. He was a Major and sometimes when they see some of his old Alliance friends, they still salute him. He's not afraid of anything.

Pa always says that Kaidan is too soft.

Casimir finally nods and Kaidan happily starts lugging bricks. That summer they work on that wall in the blinding son. His skin darkens and he starts to get some muscles in his thin arms.

One day, it's so hot. Usually so. Pa is in a bad mood. Kaidan had heard him and Ma arguing last night. He thinks it might have been about his biotics again, they had been getting a lot of letters from that company, Conatix. Ma is worried that they won't take 'no' for an answer. Kaidan tries to ignore it, and just focuses on building that wall, playing on the extranet and tweaking his 'tool. He's writing his own program and he thinks it's going pretty well, even with his shoddy coding skills.

He's hot and tired and starting to wish he had never made Pa let him help. So he does something he never usually does.

He uses his biotics to lift some bricks that need moving. It's sloppy and some of the bricks drop. Pa catches him and explodes, and Kaidan drops all the bricks, his power fading away like fire doused with water.

"Kaidan! I thought we told you not to use that nonsense!" Pa stalks over to him, his face red. "This is why your mother and I are worried half to death."

"I'm...I'm sorry, Dad. They were just heavy and-"

"So you use your arms! I've had enough of you. Go back inside with your mother. I'll finish the wall myself. You can't build walls with biotics. You can only tear them down."

Kaidan's father's shoulders are straight and strong and his face stonier than any wall.

* * *

**Three(zero): training.**

At Brain Camp he builds another wall. But this one is not made of bricks, but promises and protection. Rahna is special, her dark straight hair, heart-shaped face, and darker eyes. They sometimes sneak out after lights-out to talk and whisper and he tells her all his secrets. That he always wished he had a brother, that he's a bit geeky and likes silly books, that he loves his mother even when she nags, that he thinks his father is disappointed or afraid of him.

He tells her he hates biotics; that he's so homesick it makes his heart ache when he lays in bed at night and wonders if he looks hard enough at the darkness, maybe it will look back. They sneak into a utility closet and sit on the floor playing cards in the dim light and Rahna flares accidentally. Her eyes aren't dark anymore and he thinks that biotics look very beautiful on her. Kaidan wonders if she flared because her heart was pounding as hard as his.

He decides when Rahna kisses him on the mouth and then uses her tongue that he will build a wall around her.

It will be one that no one can get by or tear down. She can be his princess in a tower and he will be her prince to protect her.

She's special and when she lets him crawl into her bunk one night and he discovers naked skin and the feel of a woman's body he decides he's found the person he'll love for a lifetime.

He feels special too, and not in the bad way that he does with his biotics.

She's the first boy-not-quite-a-man that she lets touch her like that and he understands what it's like to want to do anything for someone. She's so pretty, sweet and kind. Everyone is jealous of him, that Rahna likes _him_ best because everyone loves her. He's her best friend and secretly more.

Kaidan's chest swells with pride. He carries around the memory of her during the day, through the biotic drills and yelling and the pounding headaches that rip through him. She's his talisman, something safe and soft and untouchable in his mind.

The turian breaks her arm.

He hears it so clearly, that _snap, _the bone just cracking in two. She sobs with the pain, great loud ugly wails and Kaidan's heart stops. He tastes metal in his mouth and a heat surges through him.

Vyrnnus has hurt her, that one special person who called him 'Kai' sometimes and was so soft and lovely. She wouldn't hurt a fly.

Kaidan's wall has failed but he can shore it up, he can be the wall on which the waves break, the wall that saves her from harm. He's her boyfriend, her protector.

He stands up and he has never felt so angry. It bubbles in him, his heart is now a jackhammer and there's the color of blood in his eyes. Rahna keeps sobbing in the hushed silence. No one ever stands up to Vyrnnus.

"She only wanted a glass of water! You're nothing but a bully."

Kaidan sees him raise the knife. He's going to stab Kaidan, to cut him again like he did his lips. This time, he's going to kill him. The turian is going to jump on him and hold him to the ground and he's going to stab him until he bleeds the goodness out.

His Pa wouldn't let someone bully him. His Pa wouldn't let someone hurt his mother.

Rage explodes out of him, and it's not red-hot but cold blue fire.

After they have taken Vyrnnus' body away, Kaidan sits in the hallway. There are two Conatix employees on either side of him, like they're not sure what he'll do. Like he'll snap and kill again. He's waiting for his parents, for _someone_ to come and make sense of things. Pa is going to be so angry and his mother was crying on the comm when she demanded to speak to him. There are dried tears on his cheeks, but he doesn't remember when he let them fall. There's a sickness in his heart and so much darkness.

The turian pissed himself when he fell, he thinks. It smelt so weird. Like there was even metal in their urine.

He didn't mean to kill him. He honestly didn't. He wants to take it all back. He's so sorry.

Rahna walks by and her eyes widen to see him there. There's an older man with her, her father. He knows who it is because Rahna showed him a picture she smuggled in even if they weren't allowed personal effects. She had told him that her father had a very big business in Turkey, and had modestly admitted that they had money. Rahna's dad must have come to pick her up, remove her from the scandal. Kaidan thinks that her dad is very angry and he almost wishes that this hallway wasn't the only path to the transport area.

Kaidan never did take the easy way out, though.

"Rahna!" he calls. He wants to talk to her, to explain. To say sorry, to make sure her arm is ok. He doesn't know really, what he'll say. He just doesn't want to leave it this way.

She glances back at him for a moment and there is nothing but terror and disgust in her eyes. Her father tells him to back off, that a murderer isn't going to speak to his daughter. He stands in front of Rahna as if Kaidan will hurt her.

And Rahna's frightened eyes are guided away.

Kaidan was wrong. He should have built a containing wall, to protect others from _himself_.

Romance wasn't like the stories that Ma used to buy for him. He has a whole bookcase at home packed with them. But he never read one, that at the end of the tale, the prince turned out to be the dragon that needed slaying.

* * *

**Four: messed up kid. (that he was. owes it to you)**

He takes time to completely fall apart and it's almost...addictive. It's freedom from expectations, from schedules, from biotic drills and all the questions about his implant. He grows his hair nice and long to cover the amp port and he hops on a transport to the first colony on the list.

His mother is frantic when she calls but he tells her that he's not a child anymore, he's a man and there are just some things he needs to do. Earth is stifling. He hates it there. There's nothing for him.

He refuses the money she sends him. His father isn't speaking to him.

He gets a job in a tech store, tweaking omni-tools and repairing people's consoles or sound systems. It pays enough to let him have a small apartment in the city, but he has to eat ramen most nights. Still, his head feels a little less crowded out of Earth space. The aliens are a comfort almost, in their strangeness.

Kaidan works on that fragile little wall around his heart. He builds it day by day. He builds it when he eats breakfast at the small rickety table as the twin sun's orange glow shines upon him. He builds it when he makes a friend from one of the regular customers in the store and learns far more tech than he ever learned from extranet tutorials or school. He builds it when Jakes shows him how to crack a safe in ten seconds flat and how to disable a mass effect shield. He builds it when he smokes that strange plant that Jake introduces him to and discovers just how the world spins exactly right to forget about Rahna.

He even builds it when he drinks too much beer and wakes up next to a woman who he is sure was rather pretty last night but looks tired and far too young the next day.

But that neat little wall holds him together and he moves onto the next planet when he loses his job. He smokes some more things, and finds some more women and a little bit of clarity comes back into his brain. He starts to try and forget the color of Rahna's eyes. And it works.

This time Jake comes with him when he moves and they rent together. Kaidan knows what Jakes does with his tech genius; he knows where the money comes from to be able to afford the new console and food every night.

Jake can crack a safe far quicker than Kaidan and knows a lot of interesting people. He goes out some nights and doesn't return until the sun is already rising, wearing gloves and with his omni-tool so tweaked Kaidan wouldn't be able to make sense of half the programs.

Sometimes Jake asks him about his biotics, if maybe Kaidan would like to come on a job with him. They could use a man like him. Biotics could be used in self-defense, for getting to hard to reach places.

Kaidan refuses. He's no thief.

But, Kaidan thinks, who is he to judge? It's not like Jake murdered someone in a fit of rage.

When he places the final lovingly crafted brick of self-reproach and self-loathing in his wall, he realizes that he's been spinning his wheels and going nowhere.

His heart is mostly mended and protected but as he wakes up in a dirty bed with bottles of beer leaking onto his thigh and another woman whose name he doesn't remember next to him, his mouth sour and a two week old beard on his face, he decides it's time to find some purpose. His mother would be ashamed of him.

Kaidan sees the Alliance recruitment officer the next day, still struggling with a hangover. He doesn't keep in contact with Jake but shakes his hand and says thanks for everything.

Earth is waiting for him.

* * *

**Five: Rio. (maybe we'll meet again someday)**

Sun, sand, and a new assignment that would be the making of him.

"Excuse me, could you tell me _Normandy's_ docking bay? I've forgotten the number."

There's a small, grumpy woman in Rio. And when he first looks at her he doesn't see his future. He doesn't see the future mother of his children, his wife or even his best friend. There are no bells. No strikes of lightning. No love at first sight. Just her wrinkled nose, sunglasses, abrupt attitude and sun-kissed skin.

"I want to introduce you to our new XO, Commander Shepard. I'm sure you'll serve well together."

And then the woman was Shepard and there was the _Normandy_. Their new home. Her quasi-father is introducing them and she shocks his hand when she shakes it and laughs, loud and brash and there are stars in her eyes. And they aren't Rahna's dark eyes; they are the color of a hazy sky.

There's a strange twist in his chest. And he knows he's in trouble.

What's a wall to a woman who challenges the stars?

She makes him laugh. She distracts him so easily, that he never even notices when he gradually starts dismantling his own wall with so little effort.

Rio takes a special place in his heart.

* * *

**Six: Normandy. (the making and breaking)**

Kaidan doesn't know what to do.

He's fallen in love with her. He's told her about Rahna. Shepard has taken his fear and self-loathing and crushed it to dust. He feels like a new man.

He feels bright and young and she kisses him secretly. They are dangerous and forbidden and he wants to kiss every inch of her, spend days touching her.

Kaidan can't stop talking to her, can't stop seeking her eyes across crowded rooms, watching her back in battle. He fusses over her, worries when she lets a wound bleed too long without medi-gel. She tells him things, glimpses of her past and it feels like he lives it too and his heart breaks for her.

He feels fully human. Shepard shows him how to love again, even when she doesn't know how either.

He holds the last brick of his wall with a quizzical expression, the ruins of self-control around him. Shepard takes him to her bed.

They sleep together but it's not like the fumbling in the dark with Rahna or all the meaningless sex he had when he was young. It feels like a give and take of equals, of tender experience and raw emotion. It's also a secret and wrong. It's the best thing he's ever had.

Shore leave and there's a hot planet. Red dust, bay windows and setting suns. And a mistake they can't take back. He can't unlove her, unlearn her. He can't make a distance.

And then she dies and he lets her. Joker says he saw her thrown into a wall. It was probably what cut her airline and let the vacuum creep into her lungs.

* * *

**Seven: grief. (harden your heart, don't be soft)**

Shepard is dead.

Kaidan doesn't know how to deal. He doesn't know how to move on. He can't. It's impossible.

How could she leave him? He thinks sitting in the bar on the Citadel.

How could she think that he could keep breathing without her? The pain won't stop in his chest and his mind is so blank that he can barely get out of bed in the mornings. Why did she go get Joker? Why couldn't she have left him?

Why hadn't he saved her? He could have saved her. He knows it.

Kaidan drinks in the Citadel bar, stumbles home and only makes it halfway before painfully vomiting on an alleyway wall. He trips and falls in it and spends all next day scrubbing his casual uniform and drinking too much coffee so Anderson won't smell the alcohol on him.

He hates Anderson. He hates the galaxy. He wishes Anderson would just put him back on duty so he could find an assignment dangerous enough to let him join her.

That night he calls his Ma and tells her that he's had a hard time lately. He leaves it at that but she sends him some cookies and a knitted sweater and he thinks Shepard would have liked her.

Shepard never had a proper mother. He would have liked his mother to take care of her like she did for Kaidan.

When he gets his assignment he tells himself that the stupid grieving is over. He's an adult. He can handle life without her.

It's a lie, but he keeps going on and the days get easier.

Or maybe he just gets used to how hard they are.

* * *

**Eight: conflict. (so much hate for the ones we love)**

He wishes he could hate her. Just wipe her from his mind, write her off as an old girlfriend, as a mistake in his career.

He could say they were just consumed by lust, by the excitement of breaking regs.

But Kaidan doesn't lie and that would be lying. He had loved her until the love had become a part of him.

And that love rushes back into his heart and fills the empty spaces her absence made there.

She's with Cerberus and he's an Alliance man, through and through. She asks him to throw away everything for her, to leave it all behind and follow her into hell when all he wants to do is pull her away from the devil. She's catching fire and she can't even see it.

There are secrets and lies all around them, poisoning what they once had.

The _Normandy_ SR2 is a metal walled garden of Eden. It's carefully crafted for perfection, an echo of the old place they made love and laughed and got to know each other. She's Eve, so beautiful, so tempting and lovely and all he has to do is bite the apple and he can be with her again.

But he can't. So he breaks himself and breaks her and walks away.

He loves her. He would do anything for her. But he wouldn't do something that would lead her down a path that he knows will destroy her.

He can't watch her kill herself slowly, in spirit, if not in body. The woman mired in corruption isn't his Shepard.

* * *

**Nine: son. (you look like ruin and salvation)**

The first time Kaidan holds his son, smells his soft skin, and brushes a reverent hand over his dark hair, he thinks that he would tear down the sky to protect him. His hands are too big and blood-stained to hold him but Shepard bundles him into his arms with a look on her face that says, "Silly, of course you should hold him."

Kaidan would charge a Reaper, hold all the lines, and wrestle Death itself. Death cannot have him again, he belongs to Kaidan and Shepard and no one else.

The baby has Shepard's eyes. The eyes that he would build not just a wall for, but a citadel, a tower, a castle. Kaidan would die for him; kill for him, as he would do for his mother.

The love that rushes through him reaches heights he hadn't know he could feel for anyone but Shepard.

He shouldn't have this chance. The boy shouldn't exist. Shepard would have been told she should abort him, for reason, for logic, for practicality. He's their secret mutiny, their illegality, their proof of life and love.

The baby is everything that Kaidan would ever fight for.

The little boy with the chubby legs that likes his duckie blanket and his blue pacifier and who squalls so hard when Shepard bathes him in the crew deck bathroom sinks, that even Garrus begs Shepard to shut him up. He is Kaidan's little boy that was made and born in the stars and he thinks that the stars shine just for him and no one else. There are galaxies in his big, blue eyes and Kaidan loves so hard he fears in dark nights what he would ever do if he lost him.

Kaidan lies on the bed with him in Shepard's cabin, and Pulls a model ship over from Shepard's display racks. It's the _Normandy_ and he makes it twirl around the baby's head with a gentle puff of biotics. The boy squeals in glee, amazed by the pretty blue color and the zooming ship. Kaidan is sure the blue reminds the baby of his mother; Shepard is always using biotics around him, just to reach for stuff or just to amuse him by making his building blocks (Auntie Liara gives the best presents) float. Kaidan doesn't use his powers so casually but he would do it to make the baby giggle. He adds sound effects to the zooming ship that he is sure Joker would prissily correct him on and the boy babbles in that baby language only he knows.

"You like that, tough guy? Huh? My little soldier," he coos to the baby, (glad Shepard is busy with EDI on the bridge and isn't around to hear him talk like a big sap) and then tickles his baby fat belly covered in the soft blue singlet Shepard hastily dressed him in this morning. He squeals again and rolls over, grabbing for Kaidan's fingers and crawls onto his stomach to pat Kaidan's cheeks, grinning gummily and drools on his chin.

Kaidan puts a hand on his little back, feels his small spine, his small breaths. He smells the baby powder on his skin and a faint scent of flowers that suggests Shepard ran out of baby shampoo again and just used her own on him. Kaidan grins at the fact that the baby now smells like Shepard and nuzzles his fat little cheek with his nose. The baby gurgles and imitates him, rubbing his snub nose on his father's cheek.

Every day is a discovery and Kaidan can't stop the wonder in his voice, the painful thumping of his heart, overburdened with love and fear. He just wants to spend his days with Shepard and their son and ignore everything else. But they can't and he dreams of what could happen to them.

He dreams of the _Normandy_ in flames again and Shepard twisting in space. The baby is always there too, his lips blue and his eyes shut.

He's getting so big now; Kaidan can see it even day to day. He can feel it when he lifts him, when James makes funny faces and bounces him on his knee saying, "_Este tipo duro poco. Estás loco como tu mama,_" and he reacts like he knows what they're saying, giggling and trying to pull James' dog tags off.

Shepard says he used to be undersized, but with careful care and checkups with Chakwas, he's meeting his milestones. She swears she heard him say 'Ma' the other day, and she pranced around the ship like the kid just grabbed a gun and took down a Reaper but Kaidan thinks it's just wishful thinking.

Kaidan Alenko makes his son a silent promise: he'll take care of him, he'll keep him safe and he'll live to grow into a strong man.

He starts work on a new wall, brick by brick and thinks this one will be built to last. His Shepard and his son are ones that he needs to be safe.

Sometimes the best work is something you build for yourself. And he and Shepard built their tiny family and it's the best thing Kaidan has ever made.

He knows he loves him more than anything, more than his own life.

Kaidan won't make him need walls. Kaidan will be his wall for the waves to break on.

You can build a wall with biotics after all. Kaidan knows. He's seen Shepard do it a thousand times.


End file.
