It was Elysium all over again.
She could hear them screaming. Their desperate pleads for mercy; for anything. Among the sporatic bursts of gunfire, she could hear them dying.
Despite the afternoon Thessian sun spilling through the foliage she could see the broken bodies through her squinted eyes. She watched them die. Their bodies shaking with fear, their desperate hands groping the air for something to hold onto, something they would never find. Hope.
There was no helping them.
"Commander," Javik said from behind her, his voice startlingly close. "We must leave."
But of course. She had a mission. She had a purpose. Not everything was lost. Not yet. She couldn't afford to care about these people; she could do nothing other than leave them to die - and she'd become quite good at that over the past few weeks.
It was the person she'd become. She was cold, hard ice.
She shot a glance back to Liara, who was crouching on the ground, her head in her hands. The screams of her own people penetrating her mind, impossible to ignore. She peered up and met her commander's gaze. Though her eyes were dark and empty, the corners of her mouth pulled down into a grimace, she nodded her agreement.
They had to leave Thessia.
It struck her, as they readied their weapons, that Javik would be finding this hard, too. It was common knowledge that the prothean shared no great love for the asari, but this was a familiar scene to him. Born into chaos and Reaper war, this was all Javik had ever known. He was a hardened soldier, but that did not negate him from the effects of seeing such carnage.
This was not the case with her. She'd seen so much over her short life. She felt old beyond her years. Exhausted. Drained. But she had not yet reached her point of breaking. Not even after seeing the Reapers engulf Earth. She was still here; still fighting. She had become more familiar with death than any person should have to be. Now, it was all she knew. It was all she needed to know.
Hitching her rifle over her shoulder, she peered around the corner of the broken wall they had taken shelter behind. The remaining Reaper squad had retreated, leaving only a few scattered batarian husks. Fortunately they paid Shepard no mind, too busy feeding off the corpses that littered the field.
There was a time when the sight of that would have turned her stomach.
"Cannibals," she muttered to Javik, who had taken position beneath her, crouching low. The atmosphere around him rippled, sending shivers down her spine. She'd always felt uneasy around biotics - and Javik's were especially eerie.
With a few precise shots and a punch of biotics, the field was clear. They ran cautiously over the bodies and piles of rubble, Liara dragging behind. When they hit flat ground, the three of them broke into a sprint.
Shepard was exhausted to the point of collapse; her legs numb under her chunky armor. She didn't know how long she had before giving up. To spur her body onward, she shouted mental orders to herself. Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.
Just like her N7 days. Except this was real in a way that N7 hadn't been. She'd been thrown into all kinds of chaotic situations, but this was different. This was, potentially, the end of everything. It all weighed on her.
That's what kept her running.
The miles they ran blurred into nothingness. It was simply her, her gun, and her burning legs. Left, right, left, right, left, right. She flew past the piles of dead bodies; husks and humans, asari and creatures she's scarcely seen before. Twisted, melted metal and the remainders of the city. Gone. Nothing but burning debris.
Left, right, left, right, left, right, le-
"There," Javik said, sucking in a shallow breath. "The ship."
The Normandy had never seemed so beautiful. Behind her, Liara made a choking sound that was somewhere between a cry of joy and a sob. Javik kept running. So did she.
By the time she cleared the ramp, her face was damp with tears and sweat. She was shaking uncontrollably, her grip on her weapon loosening as it crashed to the floor. Her boots, her armor - they seemed to triple in weight. She fell forward, feeling her grasp on her own consciousness slip.
And then it was gone.