Zero Hour
"Shepard, don't go."
Slender fingers enclosed around Shepard's, as if holding on tightly enough would somehow keep her from actually leaving. From disappearing. From sacrificing herself. Time was an enemy, and no matter how hard she tried to strike the hours dead, they were winning the war, ticking away toward the inevitable.
"Jane..."
Shepard couldn't even remember the last time someone had called her by her first name. For as long she remembered, she'd been Shepard, the Savior, the Commander. The woman who'd done everything from deranged and desperate to the impossible... and actually pulled it all off. But this... This wasn't something she knew how to just live through.
She'd given herself away, sacrificed herself in every possible way, watched herself get burned, cut into pieces in every way imaginable... and she'd come back like nothing ever happened, but this... Saying goodbye... she didn't know how. A part of her didn't believe that this was it.
She was prepared for it to be, she didn't have a damn clue what she was getting herself into, and she had no reason to expect she'd walk away from this with a few bruises and broken bones, and still... That one tiny shard of life that was the very essence of Commander Jane Shepard insisted she'd live through this... or that she'd come back from the dead if she didn't. She'd accepted the inevitability of her mortality a long time ago, she was fearless now. It was everyone else who should've been afraid, because when you made an enemy of someone who had nothing to lose, and everything to lose at the same time... Hell hath no fury.
"You don't have to do this."
Shepard closed her eyes, taking a moment to think of the lives sacrificed, their courage, their words, their faith in her. Together, they were stronger than any known force in the universe. Shepard smiled, and repeated her own version of a dear friend's last words.
"It has to be me. Someone else would get it all wrong."