Death becomes you
Her people were no strangers to loss. Sometimes there were bad days, with an illness sweeping from ship to ship like wildfire, closing doors and hearts both in its wake. Then there were the really bad days. Any small malfunction could shut down an entire ship in the blink of an eye, and none would know better until it was already too late.
Tali felt she should have known by now that it never really got any easier, but apparently even the pilgrimage could not completely take the child out of her.
She had thought she knew death. She had been wrong.
The Neema was little like the Rayya and even less like the Normandy. For the first few weeks since returning from her pilgrimage, Tali barely slept. The whir of air filters, a lullaby in her childhood, now kept her eyes from closing and her thoughts from calming.
During the small moments of sleep she could find, she dreamed. She saw silence, fire, and herself—alone in an empty escape pod.
For months, she wished she had never left at all. She had seen what the world looked like up close, had learned just how many things she could never truly touch or taste. Where before the suit had been her safety, now it was her cage.
Where before loss had been a part of life, it was now a nightmare.
She signed up for any away mission that would take her. Many did: there were few quarians who had fought as many geth as she had. In fact, she probably had more actual experience than most of the marines escorting her.
That fact reared its head time and time again. It was just an annoyance more often than not, though sometimes it was enough to make her throat clench; hearing bad orders barked at shaking recruits barely out of adolescence, and knowing that failing to move in time would mean something terrible.
Despite all of it, she persevered. She had learned vigilance, how to see a field from end to end with just one glance. She always made sure to offer her thoughts to the squad leaders ostensibly in charge of her safety. When some inevitably failed to care for the words of "barely an adult", there were still other things she had learned that she could put to use. She knew, now, how sometimes only a few words could turn the strangest of situations right on its head; how—when all else failed—just about anything could be solved by the subtle threat of a large enough an explosion. Well, except when you were dealing with krogan.
It took Tali a while to admit the true shape of her thoughts. She wasn't sure the giant explosions were quite what her old commander would have liked for her to learn, but there it was anyway. Shepard had taught her the importance of caution as well as strength. It was from watching Shepard that she knew how the right word could be worth a thousand bullets all at once.
In some rare and rather sentimental moments, she could see the outline of that familiar armored back, still guiding her steps.
No man is an island
Maybe he wasn't exactly the easiest man in the galaxy to get in touch with. Still, hearing about the death of your old commander from a sedated batarian on some glorified space-buggy? It was very nearly insulting.
He really needed to wire up some kind of news feed to Urdnot. Otherwise they'd wind up missing the damn Reaper invasion itself.
The public terminal he had dragged himself to out of curiosity had not been very helpful. No official story, no more than rumors confirming the batarian's version of events. Wrex had been a mercenary too long to be surprised either way. The most you ever heard from former cohorts was when they finally managed to get themselves killed. Even then you could never be sure which parts were true and which just convenient fiction. Especially if they owed you, but that was neither here or there.
Wrex was a mercenary no longer and had last been a proper krogan far too long ago. He couldn't remember the right words, or the right way to line up his thoughts.
Still, he had the age and the experience to know what was needed – and where to get it. One thing you could find on board any ship in the known galaxy was alcohol. Sometimes you had to shake a few people to get to it, but it always materialized itself for the thorough and the persistent enough.
Wrex had witnessed the human tradition once aboard the Normandy. He had thought it a waste at the time, some ultimately purposeless gesture performed out of convention. He only understood now, half a galaxy away and in the bowels of some ancient tin clunker, gripping a bottle that was never meant for one man alone.
Wrex looked out across the empty cargo bay and saw nothing in particular. He brought the bottle to his mouth and took one long drag. The rest he poured into the grating at his feet.
The razor's edge
"Alone" was an illusion. In a universe such as theirs, one could never truly be lost. She understood. All their experiences were transitory, a stopgap within a much greater state of existence.
What one might call death was, in reality, simply a certain state of change.
Benezia was among the many dead. Benezia had been her mother; her passing would always have come before hers. She still had the memories of her youth, of better years. She would always have them. Just because something was past, did not mean it was lost to you. It had been. It would always have been.
Grief, of course, had its place. Simply because a fate was inevitable did not mean it could not be a lamentable one. Benezia – the matriarch on Noveria had not been the same woman as her mother had once been. Who knew how long ago her mother had truly been lost? Perhaps decades since: with her ensconced within dusty ruins on an unsung planet, a distant loved one passed on to gentle memory in the wake of the fervor of discovery.
Death was, simply–
Shepard was–
The Protheans were dead. They had been long before she had been born, they would be long after she had lost her form. She should have always known this. It was not just the Protheans – every being to ever rise high enough to reach the stars had lost their lives to an ancient and deadly cycle. All gone long before her, all would remain gone even long after her. Their absence did not diminish them. Every small step in history, false and true, was a part of what had led to the here and now.
She had sought for so long and so hard. Though she knew the truth now, it could not take away meaning from her life's work. Just because the answers were not exactly what she had hoped to find, did not mean they were any lesser for it. Even if her perception had been somehow altered by the truth, it could not invalidate the years and years of study and discovery.
She had not–
Death – true death... it had to be an illusion. There was only change; things done differently from how they had gone before.
It was not much longer until they reached Omega. Liara closed her eyes, and let the hum of the engine grow to a roar in her skull.
Fragile as a dream
He never officially handed in his resignation. It almost felt like a favor: let C-Sec deal with, they were the ones so in love with paperwork anyway.
The Citadel didn't need him. It didn't even want him.
The dark of space was full of bad, bad things.
He cleared out his place, sold what he could, and left the Citadel with only the armor on his back. He wound up on Illium, though he only stayed there long enough to get his bearings. Omega was the obvious choice; his mind was made up scant seconds after the thought had surfaced.
For a long time, he did nothing but watch and build. No one ended up dead by his hands in nearly half a year. He really held back, roughed up only the few dumb enough to cross his path and not back down in time. Even Pallin would have been proud. Omega had no shortage of criminal bastards and by the law of the place—hell, he probably had every "right" to do a lot worse.
He never did. Every death he eventually delivered was clean and always deserved. It was the first and only rule he set for himself and, later, for those who chose to follow him. He wasn't Shepard—he couldn't even imagine making things right just by the nebulous power of understanding. He wasn't Pallin, or his father—he would never understand the point of a rule when it caused more harm than good. He couldn't really imagine ever becoming like Saren, either, not for as long as he knew he was fighting injustice. But one of the things his time aboard the Normandy had taught him was, that at some point, maybe Saren had thought the same thing.
It wasn't an easy rule to work by, but at least he understood the need for this one.
Fall from grace
She had tried blaming herself in the beginning, but Ashley had been a soldier too long to really believe it. It would have been the easy way out, but not the right one. Shepard had died for duty; Ashley had lived for it. That was the reason given, and they all had to build it up to reason enough—even when it so very blatantly just wasn't.
Shepard had been a hero. Shepard had been her friend... and in some nameless and intangible capacity, so much more. Every great and good thing she would do from here on out would be in the Commander's honor, and in the name of every comrade lost.
"You have heard the rumors, I trust it."
Major Zimmer was pacing in front of an ugly gray desk. The major had never been a very subdued person, but there was something wrong about the way he couldn't quite look her in the eye.
"I've heard a lot of rumors, sir," Ashley said, keeping her voice slow and level—she just knew she wasn't going to like whatever was coming next.
"The ones about Commander Shepard."
Ashley swallowed and spoke quickly. "You'll have to specify, sir. There's been a lot of those lately."
The second anniversary of the Normandy's destruction had been only a month ago. It had been all very carefully downplayed since day one—nothing confirmed or denied, so of course every possible kind of insane theory had repeatedly circulated the extranet by now.
Major Zimmer stopped, a calculating glance thrown from the corner of his eye. "The rumors about Shepard working for Cerberus."
Ashley laughed. She had to. "Sorry, but there's just no way that's true."
A PDA from the edge of the desk was thrust toward her. "You would know. Either way, we can't ignore this. You're taking off in two days."
There was no real reason to distrust the information she had in her hands. But above and beyond all else, Ashley still trusted her Commander.
Note: Written for "Mass Effect Challenge Community" on livejournal, challenge #10: Drabble it! The word goal was around 500 for each drabble, but I'm very apparently a perpetual underachiever, fnerr fnerr.)