Chapter Text
The world was silent.
She stumbled through the wreckage, dragging her stolen boots through the broken pavement and sending small pieces of concrete skittering, just so she could hear something other than her ragged breath. Her thoughts... half formed and confused... slipping through her fingers like the dust and ash raining down gently around her. Her mind wrapped in fog but for the static silence echoing.
She isn't sure how long she wandered for, one foot dragging along before the other, listening to the scrapping, before her thoughts slowly returned and the static seemed to recede. She looked up from her feet and recoiled, her mind shying away and trying to forget, though it was too late.
The dead were everywhere.
Their bodies appeared scattered throughout the streets, broken and decaying. Destruction and devastation evident everywhere she turned her gaze. Her nose wrinkled as the stench came to her, cloying and sickly sweet, the still figures rotting under the hot sun that was barely visible above through the blanket of pollution. Ash drifted softly through the stillness, settling on lifeless faces and bodies, like a mother tucking in their beloved child. They looked almost like discarded dolls—broken and twisted, limbs akimbo where they had been hastily abandoned by their owners. But when she looked closer, she saw that some were contorted and deformed. Men, women and children were in crumbled heaps and pieces, lying next to husks, shrieks and the Reaper dead indiscriminate. Indistinguishable.
She shivered in the warm sun.
Her mind whispered to her: London. She was in London... she had been somewhere else at the end of the battle though, hadn't she? On... on the Catalyst? With... How did she get here?
It made no sense! Nothing made sense!
Scraaaaape. Scraaaaaape.
She focused back on her boots. The noise they made dragging through the dirt was simple. It made sense to her. Her logic was failing her right now... because where was everyone? How could it be so silent... didn't they win? Didn't she make the right choice?
Where’s the celebrations? The clean-up crews burying the dead? Where's... anybody?
Why is she alone?
The silence was like a heavy blanket over the city, thick and insulating. Her grief, just as suffocating. She'd continued to walk, her mind slowly continuing its wake from the haze but the world around her still made no sense. Perhaps she was still dreaming? As she climbed a small hill of rubble and debris, her breath harsh in her ears, she focused on the feel of dirt and steel and concrete under her hands. The harsh, scraping sensation against her palms. The taste of ash on her tongue. When she reached the top, she dragged herself to stand and looked out across what she could see of the street. With the silence and the soot and the dust filtering down from the heavens, she felt like she was intruding... or disturbing, something sacred. She paused and listened: it was the same hush that permeates through old Prothean ruins and abandoned churches alike. What Shepard felt staring up at the ancient stone faces on Ilos. It was heavy upon the city and the city felt like a tomb.
As she stood there, she could remember talking to the child-like AI of the catalyst and making a decision that would surely kill her but would guarantee the end of the Reapers. Remembers pain and falling and the certainty that this time, when she shut her eyes, that’s how they’d remain. There would be no Cerberus to drag her back from death’s embrace a second time.
This was not what Shepard had planned. When forced to make an impossible choice, she had never thought she’d have to live long enough to see the consequences. Never expected that through a fluke of her own implants, she’d wake up in another facility only halfway back to rights. Never thought that destroying the Reapers would have such devastating consequences.
She'd chosen destruction to save the galaxy, to save the earth– and this isn’t saved! But her eyes had opened again to a once white ceiling in a half-destroyed clinic. Just this time there was no voice over the PA system to guide her to safety and no one left alive to fight in the corridors, just the dead laying in their makeshift cots and everyone else long gone. Across her improvised patient gown, ‘Jane Doe’ was scrawled in old reliable marker. Shepard remembers stripping it off and changing into her half-destroyed inner armour she’d found near her cot. It certainly wouldn’t protect her from much, but it at least had more coverage, and it felt a little like home. She remembers a female soldier in the cot next to her, staring lifeless up at the sky, her raven hair burnt and shorn short from fire, a bullet through her throat like a bloody smile. She remembers taking her boots.
Shepard had stumbled around the clinic like a colt on shaky new legs and tried her best to work out what was going on. Confused and disorientated with her implants burning through her reserves to patch up her extensive damage, she’d practically fallen out of the crumbled doorway into the streets beyond only to see the extent of the destruction extending out before her. The city was in ruins, dust and ash choking the sky and the dead rotting and bloated in the streets, oft no longer distinct from their enemy. Everywhere she turned, more and more unveiled itself to her. Her brain furiously worked to take it all in, to comprehend, to understand something her heart was already screaming an answer to - that everyone… that everything, was dead. Before her mind had shut down, she'd had one last thought:
'I am alone'.
She continued to walk.
Shepard wondered if this was her own personal hell. A place created just for her. The price for all her failures in life, the people she’d loved and lost and all those she’d sacrificed to save organic life. She reflected bitterly that she’d preached how artificial life like EDI and the Geth were still beings, that they had souls, but then when forced to make an impossible choice, she had sacrificed them in a heartbeat to save organic life. She was such a hypocrite.
She stopped and stared into the eyes of a fat, bloated, fly-riddled Banshee and tried to see the Asari woman that was underneath. It could have been but a moment, or perhaps a small eternity, before she gave up and the stench drove her away, eyes watering. Shepard was used to the sweet rot of death, had seen more than her share of it over the years. Even before Saren, back when she was just another N7 sent out to do the heavily redacted dirty work of the Alliance. But she’d never had to wander through a city of the dead before, not like this. Idly she wondered if she smelt like the dead. She knew she felt like she was one of them, and probably looked like it, but she studiously refused to look, not wanting to see the blackened mess of torn flesh and the bright red glow of cybernetics, not wanting to think about how she could still be alive and what it could all mean. Not wanting to think if this was her penance. She wondered if she laid down in the rubble if she’d die too… if she even could.
Eventually, Shepard stumbled across an overrun military blockade, rubble and cars stacked defensively and draped with the dead. A young private, his fingers still curled around a pistol reminded her that she was unarmed. For a moment, she contemplated leaving the weapon behind – what use was a gun against ghosts? But instincts honed over more than a decade of service could not so easily be ignored.
She continued to walk.
Eventually, she looked up. The sky above was a dirty brown, with only the odd ray of sunlight able to fight it's way through. Shepard squinted, startled to be able to make out the distant shapes of the looming, dead Reapers in the distance. Some of the carcasses had toppled heavily to the ground – either shot down or crashed when their power supplies were cut. She felt a trickle of sweat trip down her neck from her hair. Nearby, she could hear metal creaking and the hauntingly eerie sounds of the giant behemoths tilting. A quiet dread trickled into her stomach and sat heavy in her gut. What she would do if the nearest one came crashing down? Probably best not to think about that, she thought with a slow and hesitant acceptance. She peered through the hot haze at the nearest one and kept walking.
Another wave of numbness clung to her, dragging down her mind and limbs. The horror and disbelief and denial that had lingered since she woke up, slowly ebbs and fades over the hours spent navigating the destroyed city and a cold, detached acceptance takes hold. She doesn’t know whether this is Ash's hell or Thane's purgatory or some other religious punishment for her sins. All she knows is that there’s no dearly missed friends, no beaches with seashells, no bar or great ocean to cross. No giant void or endless eternal rest. She is a silent ghost haunting a dead city, perpetually searching for things long lost.
Shepard continues to pick her way through the area, no destination in mind when she hears the loud metallic SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! She looks up and instinct has her running before her minds catches up to what it sees. Dodging and weaving and suddenly very aware of every ache and pain and sharp knifing agony in her body, she finds her legs pumping faster and faster before she just manages in time to fling herself down an old subway staircase and into the dark, abandoned London underground. Above her, a Reaper comes crashing down and crushes everything in its path. A plume of dust and debris rockets up and comes raining back down. Just before the entrance is closed shut, the sun finally loses its fight with the dirty atmosphere completely. The world darkens, becomes pitch... and Shepard's tomb is sealed.
-
She doesn’t know how long it’s been, but she continues to lay in the rubble, taking stock of herself. She’s starving and dehydrated, and the soft, so very faint glow of her cybernetics shows her body was not yet healed enough for the inelegant stunt of being flung down the stairs. She notes with all the extra particles in the air, it’s harder to breathe and with her cybernetics prioritising her wounds, especially what appears to be a nasty wound to her leg judging by the blood and pain, they can’t assist with filtering her air. Shepard refuses to look at her leg, isn’t interested in seeing the damage. Doesn’t really care, honestly. It makes no difference in the end.
She’s coughing severely and the pain jars her, bones aching, into rising and gingerly putting weight on her screaming leg. The pain focuses her as she gropes around for the wall for both support and direction. With nowhere to go - no plan - she follows the wall.
Eventually, her hand slides along the wall into thin air and Shepard nearly finds herself falling through a doorway and into a dusty office. The air is stale and its dark but the advanced optics in her eyes have adjusted just enough that she can make out vague shapes in the different shades of black. A chill ran down her spine as she stepped into the office, the air cooler than the warmth of the world outside. Feeling her way through the room and dragging her useless leg that she can barely put any weight on, she comes across an old-fashioned desk. As she rifled through the drawers, her fingertips brushed against the cold metal edges, a stark contrast to the warmth of her skin. Dust swirled into the air, a reminder of how long it had been abandoned. With luck, she finds a protein bar and an old water flask with maybe a cup of stale water. It’s not enough, but it’s something to tide over the high energy demands of the cybernetics working furiously to rebuild her.
She finds an old omnitool bracelet, battered and seen better days, on one of the shelves. It boots up slowly and the programming is obviously corrupted - probably why it was sitting on the shelf to begin with. Its weak flickering light helps her peer around the room and see the chaotic mess that has been left behind. Shelves precariously angled or fallen; their contents strewn across the room. Chairs tipped over and there's something in the corner that Shepard doesn’t care to look too closely at. She wonders if maybe someone was living or hiding down here at some point during the invasion and then dismisses it for how close it is to the underground entrance and how indefensible the room is. Regardless, she spies a lumpy shape which turns out to be a jacket left discarded by the entry and carefully limping to it, she wraps it around her shoulders. It's rough where it scratches her neck, but warm. She stands there and considers.
-
The forest is dark, and the trees more tightly knit then she remembers. The leaf litter is deep, the trees bare. The falling leaves and ash have long settled, and her boots sink deeply into the loamy carpet with each step. Her breath fogs out before her and the mist clings so heavily she can see it curling around her feet and her outstretched fingers. She strains her ears for the whispering, her eyes for the child and the shades of her failed dead… but nothing is there.
She is alone.
Startled awake, she can hear something rummaging and moving around outside the office. She grips her pistol tight. When the door opens, she swings it around to face the intruder. It's human, a man, she thinks. He startles and lets out a filthy curse as he spots her, and her weapon trained on him. Lifting his hands in a universal sign of goodwill, his right clutching a flash light, his swearing cuts off as he takes stock of his situation.
“I – I swear I don’t want trouble!”, the older man pleads in a rough, West Country accent, “I didn’t expect anyone to be hanging around down here and I was just looking for food!”
Shepard doesn’t know how to respond, she’s too busy trying to decide if the man before her is a ghost sent to haunt her, or if she really has stumbled across another human managing to survive in this eternal hell hole. Belatedly, she realises that she’s still staring at the poor guy. Her gun trained on him, finger still poised on the trigger. She lowers the weapon a fraction, finger sliding to the side and the man exhales a shaky breath of relief.
“The name’s Benjamin, Benny to most.” He said warily, as if giving a name might stop her from shooting him. "I've been scavenging around this section of the underground for a while trying to find food or any kind of supplies. It's mostly been picked clean ages ago but it never hurts to do another sweep!"
She stares at him dumbly and he smiles.
"I didn’t expect to run into anyone on account of how close this area is to the streets and the worst of the city! Its 'No Man's Land' in this area, too much rubble and dead." His face shutters. "We don't have the man power to move them. A sky funeral is the best we can do."
Shepard doesn’t say a word or even offer up a name as she lets the man prattle on. She shifts her weight from one foot to another, her fingers tapping lightly against her thigh, a small attempt to ground herself. Her mind is turning over and over again, struggling to accept the living human in front of her was real… and what that could possibly mean.
He guides her through the subterranean ruins of the underground, talking about getting her back to his camp and getting some food into her. As his runs a hand through his dirty greying mane, his gaze lingers on her damaged leg, watching as she limps along behind him. She clenches and unclenches her fists, uncomfortable with his stare. Thankfully her cybernetics have regenerated enough during her rest, that the eerie glow of them has covered itself again; she’s grateful not to completely terrify her new companion. As it is, he avoids asking her questions, eyeing her tattered uniform with an unreadable expression.
“The local grunts insisted that those Reaper machines were monsters, some kind of artificial intelligence gone rogue like those Geth robots.” He glances again at her uniform, focusing high on her left breast where she realises an N7 insignia is faintly embossed.
She nods as she realises, he’s fishing for confirmation from someone he has guessed to be ranked high enough to have been afforded some intel.
“But when the politicians started going on about peace talks, lots of high-ranking big wig military folk, vidstars and even the damn clergy backed them. So, most of the people left flocked to the refugee camps.” His gaze is heavy as he pauses in climbing over another pile of rubble, bits of concrete and rebar skittering down. “I studied history myself, up at King’s; 20 th century Europe to be specific. I know what happens in camps.”
Shepard felt her stomach churn and bile rise in her throat. Her mind’s eye conjuring her final push to the beam, and where she’d landed on the citadel. The screams of the woman she failed to save on the Collector's ship, the sounds from the pod. She knew too well what happened to those in camps. History didn't need to tell her that there is rarely kindness to be found in dark places.
A grim silence descended.
Benny seemed to warm up to Shepard as they continued to traverse the ruins of the old subway system. He maintained some small weariness but whatever he’d managed to glean from Shepard seemed to set him at ease. Shepard, meanwhile, remained his quiet shadow. He talked about life at the camp the survivors had cobbled together and the people there. About how after everything, people had started coming together to survive, humans and aliens alike. But when resources had started to dwindle, well, it was best not to think hard on that.
It wasn’t too long before they started making their way down some stairs that appeared to have been cleared and swept free, towards an underground shelter. Shepard listened as Benny talked about the history of the place whilst carefully watching and cataloguing everything she saw.
“These shelters were originally built around 250 years ago back during the second World War to protect the London public from air raids by Germany. This was of course before the UNIN was created, or the UN I think it was originally called.” Shepard nodded at him at this, to let him know she was still listening. “The government built eight of these but sold them all back in the 1990s. When the First Contact War happened, the Systems Alliance bought them all back and expanded and refurbished them to survive 22 nd century warfare. The war was only 3 months long but the Alliance and other governments didn’t know if they could trust the Council species and the rest after the Turians so it quietly kept on building these bunkers and safe zones across our colonies. It's been thirty years since then and most people didn’t know that the government had been constructing them cause the Government didn’t want to sow panic in the public. Especially considering the Turians never even got close to Sol, but I was part of the construction effort on account of my knowledge of the old bunkers. When shit hit the fan, I made my way down here.”
“And how did the others come to be down here?” Shepard asked him, wondering how on Earth Benny had managed to not only gather other people to safety but avoid having anyone indoctrinated in the group.
“It was pure chaos,” he murmured, both of them coming to a stop on the stairs. Benny stared unseeingly at the wall, his focus turned inwards to old memories. “People were screaming and dying in the streets. I grabbed everyone I could, and we ran for safety. There were monsters everywhere! My neighbour, knew him for a good forty years, he was gunned down in front of me.”
“I’m sorry.” She tells him with feeling. She thought then of.... of Anderson, the grief fresh and cloying, as her mind finally unearthed the memory, leaving her breathless and aching. His final words replaying in her mind, set her heart beating rapidly. The world got a bit more hazy and she nearly missed a step. She paused and she shakily managed to say, “I'm so sorry.” She couldn't tell if her apology was meant for Benny, for Anderson– the weight of failure heavy in her heart, or for herself. With a shaky breath, she pressed on, each step weighed down by the burden of her guilt.
“It’s not your fault.” He tells her almost intuitively, with a sad smile, kindly not commenting on her heartbreak. “S’not like you knew they were coming.” She's drowning in her guilt. Her mind adrift from her body in a sea of anguish. “I blame the Alliance honestly," Benny continued, oblivious to his audience's pain. "And the Council. They should have listened to the Commander instead of calling her crazy. Maybe then we could have been spared all this.” He says, his arms swinging out, hands up as if to encompass everything.
“Maybe.” She says softly. It echoes in the quiet.
They continue down the stairs in silence and come towards a set of massive steel doors that are partially open. There’s men and women, armed and armoured in mismatched gear, scavenged, likely from the dead. They eye her warily but on spotting Benny, let her through and inside. Over the course of their long trek, she’d become suspicious that the man she’d first dismissed as possibly simple was actually someone important in this little band of survivors. He’d first come across as dim-witted and then maybe just senile but their latest conversation and the display at the entrance tells a different story. Shepard thinks she really should stop being surprised by now.
As they make their way inside, her eyes rapidly flick around, taking in the layout. The ceiling is low and the space enclosed by solid steel and concrete but it's very large and she can't see how far back it goes from where she is. There's prefabs everywhere being used for storage and housing– some small and obviously used as dwellings, and some larger ones used as cooking spaces and storage. Rigging runs across the prefabs, stuffed with junk and boxes. The area is crowded with people and equipment, her eyes darting around to clock everything from bottlenecks to potential crush zones and possible spots to ambush. She hears a child laughing somewhere in the distance and the din of many voices talking. The camp is overcrowded but still at a reasonable level, unlike what the refugee camps on the Citadel docks had been by the end. Her mind shies away from those thoughts, switches tracks. For the most part, everyone looks relatively clean and fed and although it has the same ripe smell any area with people packed in like sardines in a can does, it’s not overwhelming. All in all, these people appear to be surviving and judging by the grim and determined expressions and the odd suspicious glances thrown her way, they know it too, and are prepared to do anything necessary to keep it that way.
-
Shepard hadn’t always been good at routines. Long before she signed up to the Alliance military, back when she was just another punk kid running around with London’s gangs, having any kind of routine could easily mean your death. But military life had beat routines into Shepard’s head and beat them hard. After basic, came her long years of service, N-school and her specialisation for infiltration. Shepard could now follow routines with her eyes shut. It was probably this ability that helped the other occupants of the camp to warm up to her. She never once complained about taking her turn cooking, cleaning or helping out around camp. She wasn’t trusted enough to watch over the children without supervision and definitely never allowed to do watch duty or leave the camp on supply runs. As someone obviously military and high-ranking at that (though nobody had seemed to yet work out how high or who she was), she suspected that the others were anticipating her complaints, but she had none to give. Sure, she felt useless helping cook up whatever nutrient paste sludge the supply teams found when she’s an N7 Infiltrator…. But, she is an N7 Infiltrator. So, she could do patient. She could bide her time until she was trusted before she asks about having her duties switched.
She finds that her chores leave her with a lot of time to think, or, as her crew would have called it: brood. Shepard had always kept her problems close to her chest, and despite how close she was to her crew, they’d always respected her or the chain of command too much to pry.
Lying awake at night on a thin bed roll, squashed between the wall of the prefab room designated to her and a family of five she shares it with, she lets her tight grip on her emotions go. She bites back a small sob, eyes stinging, throat burning and nose going stuffy, and she thinks about her crew and allows herself to feel self-pity about her situation. Allows herself to hate her crew for leaving her to be the Lone Survivor all over again, irrational as that hate may be. They didn't choose to leave her, she just went where they couldn't follow... like always. She’s alone and scared and she can’t help but think this is all her fault. She bites her lip and tastes blood as she tries to muffle her sobs. She has accepted that this is her reality in so much as she knows this is real… but she can’t accept– no, won’t accept that this is her life now! She was supposed to die! Her chest burned with a furious rage. She was ready to die! She's still ready to die! She's ready to see Ash and Mordin and Thane! To just fucking rest! Just one fucking day where she doesn’t have to shoulder any burdens or guilt! She doesn’t even care if there is no after life and it all just stops! She wonders bitterly, angrily, if this is what Prometheus felt like. She immediately flushes in shame; what good has she ever done? She failed everyone and everything important to her. She destroyed the Reapers but did it too late, and now all that’s left of humanity are these small scraps struggling to get by. She cries silently into her blanket, anger, humiliation, self-loathing and a bone weary, heart breaking sadness her only companions.
-
She hadn’t dared ask anyone about what happened after the Catalyst had fired, but she still had working ears. Still heard snippets of conversation around the camp:
“You think they’ll make it?” Whispers one of the men on the scavenger team.
“Who?” Comes the tired reply of a woman.
“The Turians and Quarians… do you think enough of them will survive before they can get back to the nearest dextro-safe system?”
“Who knows… with the relays destroyed, it’s gonna take at least twenty years for them to get back, let alone factoring in that you can’t be in FTL for years on end, needing to stop for supplies and whether or not the Quarian live ships can handle their numbers.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a point. I mostly feel bad for those that volunteered to stay behind though… barely enough supplies to survive a month.”
“Yeah, but if all of them had gone, no matter the rationing, some of them would still have starved.”
“Still a rough way to go.”
“You’re not wrong.”
-
“George says that the air’s gonna keep getting worse… that the Reapers keep getting wrapped up in our gravity and come crashing down, which is kicking up more shit into the atmosphere.” Says an young woman dishing out nutrient paste.
“It’s like a goddamn nuclear winter. I bet the Krogans fucking love it. They’re used to this shit and got their fifty million spare fucking organs.” Comes the gruff reply of what looks like her father.
“Nah, Krogan are resistant to radiation and can handle much higher amounts of atmosphere contaminants but even they won’t be able to survive this. The Reapers wiped out so much of the planet and now with the constant dust and dirt blocking the atmosphere and chunks of those machines raining down, nothing is growing, and everything is dying. They might have long lives and extra lungs, but even they can’t survive this. They only survived their own nuclear winter cause the Salarians saved them, and nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of those slippery little buggers since this all went down.”
-
“Do you think the mass relays could ever be repaired?” Asks a teenager.
“Who knows dude," Replies another. "Ain’t nobody got the tech or supplies to fix it. We’re all just trying not to starve! But I heard the Quarians looked at the relays and said that they were fucked. If those suit rats couldn’t fix ‘em, I doubt anyone else could’ve done it. Besides, most of our scientists were probably on the Citadel or hiding out in secret bases whilst we were all fucking dying down here.”
“Hey man, I’m sure they were too busy helping build that big Reaper killer in the sky and the military probably kept them safe so they could do it. I reckon if they could have, they’d be here helping if they could.”
“As if man! Whatever .”
-
Life goes on and Shepard doesn’t bother keeping track of the days as they slip like sand through her fingers. That sort of thing doesn’t seem important any more. What does it matter what day of the week it is or how long long she's been here? She’s now trusted enough to join the watch group and occasionally gets a child thrust towards her by harried parents, but she still feels like an outsider. Adrift and without purpose. Shepard throws herself into work every chance she has and signs up for as many watch shifts as Richard, the man in charge of the security around the camp, allows. It keeps her mind busy during the day, but nothing stops her mind from wandering of a night– from dwelling.
The family she shares the small prefab with are a kind one: a couple, an elderly woman and two kids. Their laughter at dinner each night rings through the cramped space, even when the distant sound of muffled voices outside reveal the camp's underlying tension. They never once comment on her damp cheeks and red eyes in the mornings, just encourage her to join them for breakfast before someone inevitably bundles her up and shuffles her off to one of her shifts. All in all, though, Shepard does her best to keep to herself. The guilt of her choices weighing heavy in her breast and her reluctance to get attached again stunting any desire to really get to know her fellow camp members. She makes a valiant attempt at this and is mostly successful until the first break in her routine happens.
She’s just finished a watch shift, monitoring the nearest London Underground entrance to the camp, and is heading back when she hears people whispering about a convoy returning. Dylan, her least favourite of the motley security group, is waxing lyrical about all the new supplies the convoy should be bringing back from the 'dumb turtles', as he calls the Krogan.
"Man I don't know why we don't just kill those stupid fuckers! All the other species fucked off - and good riddance!" He angrily says to the glares of everyone around him. "Earth belongs to humans and we shouldn't be letting those fucking turtles mooch off us!"
Shepard has always staunchly shut down this sort of talk before. Hates racism in all its many forms... but she's tired, exhausted down to the marrow of her bones and doesn't need to draw attention to herself. So she bites her tongue and she still bristles and glares at Dylan who continues to rant about human supremacy or some bullshit. Thankfully, before he gets going too much, Richard smacks Dylan round the back of the head.
"Any more talk like that and I'll have you confined to the camp for the next two weeks! The Krogan are doing us a favour by being willing to trade in the first place!" Richard says sternly. His eyes move from person to person, the other members of the security group shuffle their feet nervously. He glances at her briefly but doesn't otherwise acknowledge her so she moves on.
As she continues to head back to camp, the sounds of Richard continuing to berate Dylan growing distant, she sinks back into her thoughts and considers everything she’s learnt over the last couple of weeks. The Crucible had fired over two, nearly three months ago – the beam bright and red and seen likely by every single soul in the galaxy as it tore apart the Citadel and the Reapers, and then headed through the Mass Relays, shredding them in the process. The Alliance’s biggest and most closely guarded open secret, now commonly discussed by its civilians and dubbed ‘The Reaper Killing Weapon’. Almost everyone had known, of course, that the Alliance was building a Hail Mary Weapon to stop the Reapers, something that required astronomical amounts of resources and needed all the brightest scientists and Prothean experts involved, but the details and the location had always been kept secret. Even Shepard herself hadn’t been privy to the exact location or technical details, though she likely knew more than anyone else who had never been actively brought to the Crucible to work on it.
With the mass relays practically destroyed, space flight had been reduced to FTL only and communications reduced to radio based, short distanced or the select few QECs scattered around the universe. The Normandy, her crew, were all presumed dead after they failed to check in after escaping through the relays. What was left of the Alliance, after the destruction of Arcturus station and the majority of it's higher ups being lost on the other side of Charon Relay, had tried to assert and maintain order but with their numbers being so little, the Earth already stripped of most it's resources and now completely cut off from exports from other systems and it's many colony worlds, bedlam soon followed. The Quarians had attempted, with the help of the Turians and a few Salarians, to fix the relays but after a month they had to acknowledge that there simply wasn't enough Dextro-based rations for them to remain and continue working on technology that honestly nobody knew enough about to fix. It was a glaring oversight in hindsight that nobody have ever tried to truly work out how the relays worked or how to fix them if something happened. It was agreed by all that the Quarians and Turians would attempt to limp back to Dextro-safe zones on their way back to their home systems, together. The Quarians providing the rations with their agriculture and knowledge of long term survival on board, and the Turians providing the protection detail and newer ships that might better last the trip. Unfortunately, based off the calculations performed and checked by multiple species, they still would not make it to even the first safe zone before their supplies ran out. The Turians had made a hard choice and left many of their number behind without rations, now some two months ago. A sacrifice that shook many to the core, and haunted Shepard at every turn. She didn't know whether to be grateful that Garrus had been sent off onto the Normandy or not. They'd both had enough of ruthless calculus to last them for years.
The Salarians and Asari eventually slunk off too, the former with nary a whisper but already turning their gaze to the new puzzle of returning home before their short life spans gave out, the later content they would return home in their own lifetimes but terrified by what they'd find left on Thessia. The Krogan, by the large, had not all been present on Earth for that last fight, most of them protecting their home world or deployed to other colonies and the Turian home world, but a small number in the thousands had still been present on Earth and had remained, with no ships to take them home of their own, and no space on the other species' ships nor enough rations, they'd been left behind, willing or not.
Things remained civil for a short while, people pitching in and distributing supplies but soon the inhabitants of Earth came to a shocking realisation - with the Reapers destroyed, their mass effect fields were too and they were quickly drifting into the Earth's atmosphere and raining down in fiery pieces. As the monolithic hulking corpses rained down onto the Earth, they were kicking up metric tonnes of dust and debris into the atmosphere creating an artificial volcanic winter. The few leading geologists left said that the scale and destruction was so large and so far reaching that it would put the Year Without Summer in 1819, wildly regarded as one of the worst years in human history, to shame. Similar to other geological events, the severe and sudden drop in temperature globally as the air pollution became bad enough to block out the sun almost completely, would ensure that what few crops and animals were still alive, would die, and large scale famine would see global suffering. But with the sheer number of dilapidated Reapers left in the Earth's gravitational field, they would continue to steadily enter the Earth's gravitational pull and come crashing through it's atmosphere for years - with the sizes of them just getting steadily larger and larger as the behemoth like carcasses drifted closer.
In short, without a sudden miracle, the Earth and it's people were dying and its expiration date fast approaching, she mused. It now made sense why she was alive, she thought to herself: to witness first hand the costs of her mistakes and watch every last thing turn to dust and ash. What better punishment? What better hell for her, than one of her own making?
-
The second break in Shepard's routine came two days later after the supplies have been unloaded and halfway through them being catalogued and stored. She finds herself, once again, eating breakfast– some unappetising protein sludge that makes MREs seem like a dream. She's sitting with the small family she shares her prefab with, one of the children staring at her in quiet fascination. Turning her arm over, her beat up omnitool lights up. After the tears ran dry, she began spending her restless nights fixing the programming until she'd managed to find the code causing the corruption and fix it. Looking closer at the time, she notes her watch shift is in another hour. As she spoons the last mouthful of unappetising goop into her mouth with a grimace, she prepares to awkwardly make a run for it through the open prefab door before the grandmother of the family unit tries to draw her into conversation again. As she opens her mouth and starts to stand, she looks out the door and makes eye contact with a ghost.
“ Dios mío! Holy fuck ! Commander Shepard as I live and breathe! Lola is that really you?!”
Her mouth dry, hands shaking and stomach roiling, Shepard drops her bowl. She finishes standing with enough time for James to come barrelling inside and scoop her up into a massive, back breaking bear hug. Her host family gaping and one of the kids burst into loud tears from the surprise. Shepard feels her ribs protesting the squeeze but she hugs back fiercely. She had almost forgotten how much her crew towered over her, James especially. As he enveloped her in a tight hug, warmth spread through her chest, momentarily slicing through the cold numbness that had settled in.
"Shepard!", James' voice cracks as he gives her one last squeeze and steps back, hands resting on her shoulders. Shepard doesn't comment as he quickly darts a hand up to swipe at his eyes.
"Fuck Lola, I know the crew used to love telling stories about you always returning from the dead but nobody would have expected it this time! What the fuck happened?" He stares at her intently, his voice tight, betraying both relief and fear, as if afraid the answer would shatter her. Shepard sees flashes of fire and blood, the cold vacuum of space.
"You know me, Vega, can't keep me down for long." She grinned at him weakly. She forced a smile, but saw that he caught the tightness of her lips, the slight tremor in her hands as she clenched them into fists at her sides– James was always good like that, she thought fondly. He'd push a little, but he still respected his hero way too much to poke too deeply at her hurts. He always respected her privacy too much, something the old SR1 crew had long since stopped caring for, she mused feeling a deep pang of hurt and numbness at their loss.
"When did you get here?!" James says with a wet laugh and clears his throat. Looking around at the startled family in the middle of breakfast, he draws her outside where he spots some of the security team lingering. They are all staring at her with gob smacked looks on their faces, like floundering fish. He drags her towards them, his long stride forcing her to hurry. "Hey Richard when the fuck were you going to tell me my CO and the universe's biggest bad ass was here!"
Richard, standing amongst the team, is staring with his mouth gaping. Around them, other survivors have all paused in their routine to stare at her in a shock. Shepard looks around at the star struck gazes of the camp, exhaustion and tiredness creeping past the persistent numbness to make itself known again. Everyone looks at her like she can suddenly solve all their issues. Like she will single-handedly drag the earth back from the brink once more and solve world hunger, famine and the extinction event looming before them before dinner. Like she didn't cause this. Like she didn't fail them. Like this isn't all her fault.
"Commander Shepard?" Comes a soft voice as Benny starts picking his way through the crowd towards them. Someone must have run to go find him. "Are you really her?"
She glances at James who seems to realise what he's done and gives her a sheepish but expectant look. She knows her gaze must be heavy with the weight of her burdens and everyone's expectations with the way he shrinks a little. Her crew, especially the young ones like James, Steve and even Tali knew that the war against the Reapers was taking it's toll on her. But truly only Liara, Garrus and Kaidan knew the true extent of it. God she wishes one of them were here right now, someone to help her share the load.
"Yes." She said finally, turning to Benny and the other survivors. "I'm Commander Shepard. How can I help?"