Author's Note:

This is my first story. I hated how Mass Effect 3 ended, so I altered the ending slightly and this story continues on from there. It follows the original ending of the game pretty closely, with a touch of indoctrination theory to make everything fit. This story has already been completed, so I plan on publishing a chapter a week unless someone talks me into uploading them more often. I had no beta reader, so any mistakes are purely my own. I'm looking to improve my writing so any constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

These characters and the world of Mass Effect are the property of Electronic Arts and Bioware.

Legs burning. Chest heaving. Arms pumping. Shepard crested the hill and took in the view of the Pacific Ocean.

Vancouver.

Or what was left of it anyways.

Of what few tall buildings remained, most were burned-out husks. The Alliance had already done some pre-emptive demolition of the ones deemed unsafe. A precursory search for survivors and usable supplies, a few hours to clear the ground and a precision air strike and the building came crashing down.

It seemed humanity had taken over where the Reapers left off.

Reapers.

Shepard could see the carcases of three from where she was running. That was without bothering to try. Many of them had been towed out of atmo and dumped on the moon. Not one had shown any sign of life since the Catalyst had been fired. The Alliance refused to take any risks though.

She was glad they finally caught on to the danger. Far too late, in her opinion. She still remembered the logs of the Cerberus employees who'd died on the 'derelict' Reaper she'd scabbed that IFF beacon from. The way they couldn't remember what memories belonged to whom. One of them had asked, "Does a dead god dream?" Still remembered the overwhelming sense of oppression, of being watched the entire time she'd been on that godawful heap. It had been dead for millions of years. Yet it still had power over people's minds.

Fire every last fucking one into the sun. That's what Shepard would do, if it were up to her. When they had supply chains set up properly, that was the plan. But now the priority was to keep what survivors there were, alive. So they set any Reaper-related debris down on Luna, where it couldn't do any more damage, until it could be dealt with.

Luna. Shepard shook her head. Where she'd first met EDI. She and the Normandy had been MIA since the Catalyst fired. They never appeared at the Alliance rendezvous. No one had seen or heard from the ship in six weeks.

Shepard pushed herself faster, hoping to outscream the pain in her heart with the pain in her legs and lungs.

That ship was her home.

That crew was her family.

She'd done it; she'd saved the goddamn galaxy. The earth was intact. Humanity was saved. It seemed infinitely unfair that they should win, that she should save them against all odds and still lose many of those closest to her.

She'd left them on the Normandy as they made the final ground push, so that they'd be safe.

What a joke.

It wasn't the first time Shepard had lost everything. Hell, it wasn't even the second.

Third time's the charm, huh? Maybe next time the universe will let you keep what you've built.

Or maybe not.

Commander Frieda Shepard was uniquely qualified to lead at the end of the world. Her world had ended 16 years ago. And again 8 years later.

When Mindoir fell to Batarian raiders, she'd been the only survivor of her colony. Her parents, friends, boyfriend… all dead. Along with thousands of others. She'd stopped using her first name after that. It was too painful to use the name she'd grown up with. Frieda died on that planet with everyone else.

She'd taken to going by her last name in an effort to emulate the Alliance military personnel who'd rescued her. Armed, trained military officers don't have to survive by hiding in a cattle barn to hide their heat signature. They survive by fighting back. The soldiers who'd rescued her had told her how smart that was. She hadn't cared at the time.

She'd enlisted on her eighteenth birthday, already having trained for two years, trying to be strong enough and fast enough to join the Alliance Navy. They'd been concerned about her psychological well-being, what with her keeping a shaved head and refusing to acknowledge her first name since the attack, but they gave her a chance and found her to be an exemplary soldier.

Then six years into her military career, her unit was hit by a thresher maw attack. Every single person died there that day. Everyone but her. The irony is that she survived once again by hiding. She'd found rocky ground and hid behind an outcropping of rock as the monstrous creature spat acid at her.

That unit had become her life. Her family.

They gave her a fucking promotion for surviving. And Shepard came to thrive on working alone. On not letting anyone in. On moving forward as her world crumbled.

She'd been the perfect leader, uniting the races to fight the Reaper threat. They'd held up long enough to build a giant machine that she still didn't understand, that had deactivated every electronic device in the galaxy.

Other electronics had started re-activating a few hours later. For some reason the Reapers did not.

Within a couple of weeks, even the Mass Relays were working again.

By the time Shepard had awoken from her coma, much of the world was the same as the last time she'd seen it. Which is to say fucking destroyed, but at least it was still there.

Two weeks. She'd lain there for two weeks with tubes sticking out of her, broken and bleeding and just a hair's-breadth this side of death.

When she'd woken up, she was informed that it was Miranda that saved her life. Something to do with nano-bots that were specifically designed to work with her implants to reconstruct tissue and repair any damaged implants. The former Cerberus operative kept a stash of them for emergencies.

They'd found Shepard at the base of the beam. She never even made it off of Earth. She'd been shocked and confused to find that Anderson was still alive. She remembered watching him die.

The psychologists helped her reconcile her memory with reality. Sovereign had attempted a massive mind-fuck on Shepard as she lay dying. She still had no idea what purpose that would have served. And was damn glad she would never know the answer.

Anderson had made it to the beam, and fired the Catalyst from the Citadel. He said the Keepers helped him to reach the panel.

Weird.

The creepy little alien-bug-cyborgs were apparently hard at work rebuilding the Citadel. It was being restored faster than anything else in the galaxy. They still didn't seem particularly sentient, but they'd turned out to be very, very helpful.

And here Shepard was, running alone through the streets of Vancouver. She'd been sent there for recuperation after the doctors had cleared her to leave hospital in London. Much of the city aside from the skyscrapers was still intact and the Alliance had re-established a base here. Having been incarcerated here for six months, it was the closest to home she had left.

The doctors in Vancouver had only allowed her to run again starting this morning.

After six weeks of inactivity, she'd been ready to climb the walls.

She was pushing too hard. She knew that. Her doctors were going to be pissed. But it had been so long since she'd been planet-side long enough to actually go for a run. Besides, she had nothing better to do. Here she could work off the energy and emotion. She had no idea when they'd clear her for duty.

Or if.

She ached to have a gun in her hand. To throw up a singularity, wait for it to raise a few bad guys into the air, then 'pop' it with a warp field and send them all flying.

Not only had the Alliance not given her a gun, the doctors still hadn't given her biotic amp back. Fuckers. Some bullshit about overtaxing her implants before she was fully healed. She felt naked and defenseless without them. And angry.

She'd been fighting almost constantly for three years. Minus the six months in the clink. The only thing that had kept her sane during that time was her assigned smartass bodyguard-slash-jailer.

Vega.

The insubordinate little shit. Well… big shit. His shoulders were almost as broad as she was tall. The man was a brick wall. Helluva tank, to boot. Great at running into the fray and distracting the enemy so she could pick them off from behind cover. They made a damn good team.

He'd been on the Normandy.

Bloody pissed that she hadn't taken him on the final ground run to the beam on Earth. But he'd been injured in fighting their way to the main base and he was liable to get himself killed. She'd ordered him to stay on the Normandy, then begged him to keep her people aboard safe.

She'd trusted him to do that, and he'd understood.

She wondered if he'd kept his promise.

Or if her crew was floating cold in space somewhere.

It was likely she'd never know. They were gone.

She'd never get to put their names up on the memorial board hanging on the crew deck of the Normandy. For some reason that really bothered her. If they fell in battle, their names should be there, next to Pressley, Williams, Solus, and so many more.

She'd never get to put Jack's name there. Jack that covered her insecurities with tattoos and profanity, the self-proclaimed 'Dangerous Biotic Bitch.' She'd given her life to save one of her students. They'd had the memorial while Shepard was still in a coma. She'd still taken the time to call Rodriguez after her release from hospital.

"I'm so sorry, Commander," tears poured down the young woman's face as she spoke in the static-y video feed. "It's all my fault. She died because of me."

"That is the last time you say that," Shepard had replied harshly. "To me, or to yourself. Jack was a messed up, psychotic little girl in a woman's body when I met her. She wasn't much more than that when we parted ways after we took out the Collectors."

Rodriguez blinked, startled by the Commander's words.

"But there at Grissom Academy, I got to see that messed up little girl as a respectable adult." Shepard shook her head with a wry grin. "I never in my wildest dreams expected that. She loved her students. She would have done anything for you. You saved her. If it weren't for you, she'd have died in a gutter somewhere of an overdose or worse in under two years. She gave her life for yours because she thought you were worth it." She paused, meeting the girl's eyes through the holo-feed. "So your job is to make damn sure you're worth it. You live, and live well, because she can't."

It was a responsibility Shepard knew all too well. Hundreds of people had given their lives in some way so she could live. She'd taken the life they'd given her and saved billions.

It still didn't feel like enough.

It would never feel like enough.

Rodriguez had taken their brief conversation to heart; having begun the call with eyes rank with guilt, she'd finished it brimming with determination and purpose. She'd have a rough go of it for a while, but she'd be fine.

Jack's death was one of few that didn't weigh on Shepard's conscience. She knew it was her influence that altered the direction of the broken, angry woman's life. Jack had turned her life around and had gone down swinging protecting the people she loved. It was how she would have wanted it.

Hell, it was how Shepard would have wanted it for herself.

She'd thought she was dead. Again. When that awful little ghost-boy had given her the choice, she'd hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. For the barest hint of a second she'd forgotten what her only goal was for the past three years: destroy the Reapers. At any cost.

So she'd pulled her sidearm and blasted the fuck out of that pipe, convinced that she was destroying all electronics in the galaxy, the implants that helped sustain her life after she'd died included. She finished the job. Died a hero. Finally. In the end, that knowledge was a relief. She'd finally earned her rest.

And then the universe had decided to fuck her again.

She'd woken in pain with tubes and wires sticking out of her, keeping her alive. She was missing the skin on most of one leg and the opposite arm. Her face had fared little better. Broken right femur. Severe burns over 40% of her body.

Miranda was standing over her when she opened her eyes, an impatient smile on her face. "Welcome back to the living, Shepard. Took you long enough," she'd said in her clipped Australian accent.

The woman had never been one for sentiment. Shepard got to find out slowly over the next weeks that once she'd been hit by the Reaper beam she was down for the count. If it weren't for her implants and the nano-bots, she'd have died for sure. As it was, the myriad 'improvements' Cerberus had made under Miranda's instruction after Shepard's first death had not only kept her alive, but were rapidly healing her burns and her broken leg. They'd released her from the infirmary only a week later.

It had felt like forever.

And now, three weeks after that her skin was almost completely healed. She wouldn't even have a scar. Her femur was whole and strong enough for her to run again.

So run she did. It was the first freedom she felt since the last time she'd held a gun.

Her footfalls echoed through the mostly-deserted, rubble-strewn streets of Vancouver. The Alliance had re-established a base down by the docks and moved the city's survivors into an area nearby, where the buildings were stable enough to house people and close enough together to get electricity and running water to as many as possible without straining the jury-rigged system.

Shepard's omni-tool pinged again. She ignored it for the third time in ten minutes. I've been gone for all of half an hour. You can survive without me for another fifteen minutes.

She had two kilometers left to her run, and one more for the cool-down. After over a month of inactivity the last thing she wanted was leg cramps.

She slowed back to a leisurely pace, having taxed her body enough for this run. There would be time to push harder and farther when her body was more used to the movement.

This wasn't her first rodeo.

She heard it before she saw it: the whine of a ship's engine. She could tell from the sound it was too big to be a shuttle. It was odd that they'd bring a ship down to atmo. Must be someone important.

It circled around over the ocean to land at the docks, dropping into sight through the cloud cover.

Shepard's heart dropped through her stomach.

She stopped cold.

She blinked, slowly, hard.

Sometimes when you want something so badly, you can convince yourself that it's real when it's not.

Her omni-tool pinged. She looked down at it, then back up at the sloped lines of the ship, the white-with-black-and-blue trim. She really does look better in blue, Shepard thought absently. She read the large black letters that graced the long curved body of the ship:

NORMANDY SR-2

She was home. She was intact.

Shepard broke into a full-out sprint.