Some notes:
We all hate the ME3 endings. Good? Good. Now that's off our chests, this is post-Reaper-whupping. In this ME Universe AU, everything in the game up until the Shepard runs for the beam is "canon".
This universe diverts from there. The Crucible still existed, the "Intelligence" existed, but… well, you'll see. Retconning this game can't do anything but make it better.
All quotes that preface chapter headings, are scattered about, are from the various works of H.P. Lovecraft. Anything else will be credited appropriately.
I also gave Jack a last name, after some thought I picked one that, to me, rolled off the tongue and felt natural. It certainly isn't canon, but in this little section of the universe I'm playing with, it is. Also, the political situations seemed like natural outgrowths as well, but again, I'm just riffing, and I have no idea if the ME folks would go this route. Don't really care. It just made sense to me. To avoid too many conflicts with established lore, I am using very few game characters to any great extent – many will have cameos, some will even drive the plot, but this story mostly focuses on Jack and Shepard, and a few OC's of my own. I also gave this Shepard a first name, since he's my 'canon' Shepard, and has remained unaltered for all three games. He's the one I "know" best.
Javik also has a much longer name in this, but whether it's a title or his actual full name… doesn't really matter. Maybe it's both.
You might notice Jack's personality is a smidge different in this. Well, my explanation is that she's not remotely stupid, and experience changes one. She's still has issues, but she's more comfortable in her skin now, and she's matured. She's in love and she likes the idea. She's working on it. I've tried to reflect that.
Some Talimancers reading this might not like my take on Tali. Can't be helped. I figured at this stage in the ME timeline, she'd long since needed to grow up and make her own choices.
The short piece I wrote called "Where We Are, There We Are", would also fit into this piece, so it might be worth reading first to get slightly more background on the relationship of this Jack and Shepard, it's not necessary, of course, but it couldn't hurt.
PROLOGUE
DARKNESS.
An asari poet once described the universe as "candles floating in an ocean of ink", Galaxies as "light islands of life". To her the black gulfs between her 'islands' deserved nothing more than a cursory glance, the implications being that her 'ink ocean' while deep, was empty.
Yet, that deep and intense darkness has density, has weight, can be felt, can be experienced as a presence all its own, as if it were not the eye but the glare itself, the stare, the leer of contempt for the tiny lives lost within it. It is the direct repository of all primal fear, in it the screams of a billion years of terror echo like ephemeral ebbing tides, felt more flicking nerve endings like static electricity than heard. It is the feeling of a presence behind you, infinitely omnipresent.
In this darkness, things move. They wait, they watch with senses that don't require sight, only knowledge of their own power. Some are deliberate denizens. Some are castoffs, exiles, traitors and betrayers.
With the patience of ancient spiders they simply wait. Every living sentient thing knows them instinctively, every myth contains some drop of their presence, every tale, every offspring's fear, every hushed tale by flickering ancient fires.
Many call them "malevolent" or "evil", but these makers and keepers of darkness are beyond such meaningless labels. They are not gods, they are not devils, they make such concepts mockery.
They simply are. They simply do.
When they move it is as if they had always been in motion.
When they stop, it is if they had been birthed frozen.
Time is conceived through the hot metal stink of space not as a line but a sphere, a radius of experience, moments of cold objective reality joined by screaming voids.
They do not judge. They do not condemn, they do not elevate, they know nothing of compassion or mercy or hatred, greed or desire. They are the generators of fear, yet know nothing of it. They are, save for the simple fact of their existence, almost beyond the conception of themselves.
They simply are.
They are aware of us.
SSV NORMANDY
APPROACHING AMADA SYSTEM
OCTOBER 2183
COMMANDER VICTOR SHEPARD snapped the last piece of his armor into place, hopped in place to settle it, checked the onboards. All good. He nodded to himself, satisfied.
He sat at his desk, checked his correspondence. Ship manifests and engineering reports, a request from Tali for access to the stores for spare parts which he granted and a requisition for a games room from Joker which he denied. He also took away Joker's Extranet access for another week, adding a warning that ignoring it this time would result in an actual reprimand on his service record.
A note from the asari Councillor Tevos, apologizing for what she called "superfluous make-work", wasted on a man of his talents. A civilian survey ship had reported a sizable geth presence in the system they were currently approaching, and Shepard frankly was looking forward to some "superfluous" combat. Something was jangling on the edge of his nerves, making him touchy and distracted.
A quick shot of scotch from his reserves made him feel better, and he made his way to the hanger, pulling his weapons from his locker on the way. Alenko nodded to him as he passed and Shepard retuned it.
A scuff on the side of his customized HMWA X Master Assault rifle occupied his attention on the elevator ride down and he made his way to the weapon bench. The rifle went down and he swapped in the new thermal clip adaptation with reasonable ease, although he didn't particularly like the idea of hot-swapping the clips, he admitted that waiting for his weapon to cool on its own had definite disadvantages. Granted, removing the ability to do just that if one ran out of clips was just stupid, but it was one or the other.
He ran through all his weapons, pulling all apart, cleaning each meticulously, his Zen, his therapy.
Click-tock, one – precise – two – cold – three - just the way it is.
Thumb on the button – flick – a snick of metal and the hot sink ejects sparking into the cool air of the hanger, steaming as if the weapon had just released a breath. Another in, straight-smooth, hand professional, almost a caress - click-snick, ready. This weapon exists for its precision, it is perfect for its purpose. There is no pretence to a gun, there is only one reason it exists, it makes no excuses, requires none. It simply does. A gun has no other purpose than to be a gun.
It is something he respects.
ON MINDOIR his mother, to hide him and his sister from the batarians, directed them into a pit with the real dead and the slowly-dying. His mother bashed in the head of a batarian raider and was thrown into a varren pit, his father flash-cooked for resisting.
His sister Anne had come to rest on top of him and he had obeyed her and dug deep through the bodies as she burned. All around him, he could hear them die, scream, the batarians laughing and taunting and roaring.
The batarians hadn't noticed him because of her. One had come by as the sun had come up, thrown an incendiary capsule into his pit, and he'd had to dig himself deeper through the corpses to avoid being boiled alive. Bubbling human fat had seared his back, and he could only hear them popping and sizzling after that. At some point, the batarians had accomplished their raid and left. He'd dug himself out before he'd suffocated and spent the night watching the town burn, listening to his people cook in the pit with the sound of popcorn popping, and something in him, something that had believed in "justice" and "good" and "mercy" ran shrieking from him in utter betrayed disbelief.
His whole community had been harvested, raped, burned. Long bloody smears of flesh and blood left a gruesome mosaic across almost every surface. Rot and blood and stink.
Home.
Eventually, the Alliance came. He'd been covered in ash and blood and boiled fat, and the Alliance soldiers who found him at first though he was a corpse himself, sitting stolidly still on the blackened remains of the stoop of his house. He didn't remember – not to this day – how he made it to the skeleton of his home.
He'd spent three weeks in a hospital bed after that. He only slept when they drugged it into him. Slowly, faces became clean. Voices didn't scream or plead or defy. He took pleasure in breathing again, eventually, no longer smelled stink and viscera and murder.
The Alliance psychologists put him on suicide watchlists, until Torfan and probably even after, but he was never that disposed.
How could he have been? It was one simple fact that they never understood:
Victor Shepard died on Mindoir, he was no more. 2170. Sixteen years old. Ashes to ashes.
The "Butcher" was born that night - someone else entirely.
Torfan came later.
HE'D GAINED HIS N7 STATUS by being relentless. It's what he did. He never allowed fatigue or injury or pain stop him. He never quit. He had comrades but no friends. He was driven but not single-minded. He would sit and listen and never judge unfairly. Somewhere in all that brutal training, he'd taken to black armor.
His comrades had chided him for the affectation, but they didn't know.
It was ash and night and the bottom of the pit, and it was the only place safe.
When they rooted out the batarians on Torfan, when they crawled through reeking tunnels and fought in darkness lit only by muzzle fire, when Shepard ordered comrades to their deaths, he was there with them. Torfan was supposed to have been impenetrable. The batarians had spent a year reinforcing that underground complex against anything short of an orbital kinetic impact, and had equipment for digging themselves out if they were simply sealed in. They planned "honour attacks" on human colonies and even Earth itself, with bioweapons, with kinetic bombs, with "every horror they could muster", and Shepard had known they'd meant it. He saw what they called a "recreational slave run", and what they did on Mindoir – "horror" was mild in comparison. They'd resisted every attack, every weapon and tactic. They boasted they could not be defeated.
The Alliance sent their best – a team of N7's lead by the legendary Naomi Conner. When she was felled, command passed to her S-I-C. They said he was green and untried.
He proved them wrong.
They knew the odds, and he knew the odds. He had earned their respect because he got as dirty and as bloody as they. He never wavered, never relented, never complained of wounds or fatigue. He would not give the batarians the dignity of his hatred, but he would show them he had learned what they had taught him on Mindoir.
The Butcher of Torfan – how he despised the title, not because it dishonoured him, but because it dishonoured the people he had fought with on Torfan. It hadn't been given because he'd rooted out and destroyed every last batarian, because he hadn't. It had been bestowed because he'd ordered human troops into those corridors and tunnels, knowing full well the odds.
How conveniently they forgot that he was also in those corridors and tunnels, prepared fully to fight and die beside his comrades. His death would have suited him just fine.
"Someone should know," Mulholland had said, her grin fierce and primordial in the red-yellow light of the flames approaching. "They'll never understand, Shepard. But we do."
Once again he had to bear the burden, to fulfill his role, to live empty and alone, to live for the dead. He had saluted them and without hesitation armed the heavy HVK ordinance in that tunnel and turned the most impenetrable base in half a galaxy into a tomb of people he had respected above all others and led with a fierce pride.
Mulholland and her wicked, twisted sense of humour. That crazy asshole Arakaki, who stuffed a live timed thermal grenade into his mouth and bet everyone he wouldn't flinch. Silly bastard pulled it with a single second to go – made himself three hundred creds. The huge, silent Kuznetsov with hands the size of Shepard's head, but who did the most amazing and intricate origami sculpture he'd ever seen. The wiry Mitzi "Anything but Ditzi" as she liked to say, nerveless explosive expert and best driver he'd ever even heard of; solemn Chaturvedi, who could pop the eye out of a fly at 2000 metres, Vaughn "The Gun" Grimaldi - who liked them the bigger the better, and who liked to call him everything except Shepard, and when he did always alluded it to sheep somehow – people of commitment and excellence and he'd been proud of and killed every last one of them.
No, not all of them. Not the whole squad. Flynn, Shizuka, Black – they'd survived. The team never reformed, but he wouldn't have accepted the command of them if it had.
That was the day he'd begun his internal exile. They didn't care that what he and his squad had done had made human expansion into the Terminus safer and easier than before. That the simple mention of "sending the Butcher in", deterred half the attacks that would've been made therein. No. He was their manufactured killer who did what they didn't have the guts or stomach for – necessary, but not welcome; a walking dead man that dealt death because he'd not been allowed to die when he'd wanted.
He gave it as much a chance to take him as anyone. Yet it always passed him by.
It took him a good while to understand why this was so.
ON TORFAN, his night-black armour served its purpose - his tribute to the darkness and silence that had preserved his shell to gain vengeance on the batarians, his memorial in steel to their victims, to his comrades, to his brothers and sisters in arms. The N7 with its splash of red, bone-white letters, they fit.
He was a walking cenotaph, and it was fitting that it be thus.
He existed to bear witness. He lived when all around him died because he had to bear witness. Others could not recount what only he knew so well.
He was an engine of war, an instrument of the dead, the Hohj-Makhojh in batarian, the "Moment of Death", the Beskdekkar - "Bloodseeker", their nightmare fuel.
Batarian children were frightened into obedience with his name. Batarian teenagers painted bright blue dots on their upper eyelids as signs of defiance – "the Stare", it was called, bland representation of the ice-glare of their boogeyman.
The asari called him "Mir-Hajja" – 'Cry of Vengeance', the turians "!Edk'tekk'dechakkar" – literally 'Steel-Fisted Darkness'. There were many names, many 'titles'.
Labels. Meaningless. He was only Shepard.
When he became a Spectre, his armor remained black, for black was the colour of finality, of endings, of grief and night and shadows and places pain hid when the light turned ugly.
One did not, could not ignore that baleful, powerful figure sheathed in space-dark armor - the Spectre who destroyed Spectres - it was if night had formed a man-like shape and demanded answers, left fire and broken things in its wake, the final futile red drip-drip-drip of malevolent dreams.
He heard them whisper on the Citadel – 'perfect' Spectre, soulless, pitiless, perfect to protect and destroy, a ruthlessly manufactured monster, allowed let and leave and unleashed, loosed on the dark underbelly, a ruthless steel shadow feeding on darkness.
They didn't understand anything.
Click-tock, one-two-three, precise, cold, just the way it is. This weapon exists for only become it must, perfect in its purpose. There is no pretence here, there is only one reason he exists, what he is for, he makes no excuses, for he requires none – he simply is. He simply does. In his cold certainty of singular determination, he exists to be nothing more than that.
The Butcher understands this perfectly well. He is its paragon.
He feels neither mercy nor pity, nor does he love, he has nothing but his darkness and needed nothing else. Surrounded by hate and fear and necessity, he existed only to meet hate and fear head on, to destroy it for one more day. His ghosts lived in his heart and they were heavy indeed, but he never flinched, never wavered. His grave would be his rest and his sigh of relief.
When he burns over Alchera, he has not a single regret.