Let it be known that I do not own Mass Effect, its characters, or any of the song quotations at the beginning of chapters.

Mass Effect: Redemption

Chapter One: The Bottom of the Bottle

Only the good die young...all the evil seems to live forever- Iron Maiden

You know when I drink alone, I prefer to be by myself- George Thorogood

"Why?"

It was a simple question, a question he had asked himself many times in the wake of the Geth War, as the short conflict was now called. Now she was asking him, and he was at a loss for words. What could he say that would in any way improve the situation? What could he say to justify what had happened?

She asked again. "Why did you kill me?"

He began to speak, to tell her that it hadn't been his fault, but the words died in his throat. He had already killed her. There was no need to add lying to his list of transgressions. "I don't know, Chief. I'm so sorry," was all he could manage.

She glowered angrily at him, eyes narrowing and arms folding across her chest. She was exactly as he remembered her, clad in the casual short-sleeved shirt and pants of an Alliance crewman. "Sorry? Sorry? That's gonna cut it? You kill me and apologize and suddenly everything's fine? It should have been you, Alenko! You killed me and then you happily took Shepard to bed and carried on like your relationship wasn't the reason Shepard went back for you!"

"Not a day goes by when I don't wish it was me, Chief. Not a goddamn day."

"Well, it wasn't you. You and Shepard go on to make intergalactic whoopee and who gives a damn about ol' Ashley Williams? Didn't she get nuked? Y'know, I can't remember for the life of me!" The same old Williams sarcasm remained, even in death. Kaiden Alenko fondly remembered such sarcasm, from an Ashley Williams who had not yet been incinerated on a backwater planet by a bomb that he had armed.

"Chief…I'm sorry. I was the one who had to tell your family. I chose to do it, actually. Thought it might bring me some closure. I even presented your Star of Terra posthumously to your little sister. Sarah, was it? She's strong. Didn't cry, just kept her composure. Stronger than me. I cried. Damn it, Ashley. I'm sorry."

He felt tears coming, and hated himself for it. The logical, reasoning side of Kaiden Alenko knew that Shepard had made the right tactical decision. He was a Lieutenant. She was a Gunnery Chief. She was a diversion. He was with the nuke that the entire operation depended on. Tactically, Rebecca Shepard had done everything right. Why did it feel so wrong?

"Enough, Alenko. Enough. Nothing you say to me is going to change the fact that you're alive and well and I'm so much dust on Virmire. I hope that keeps you up at night, you son of a bitch." He was about to reply, when all of a sudden gunshot wounds began to blossom in her chest at an alarming rate, spilling the woman's blood. She lurched backwards and sneered at him, finally disintegrating into a pile of ashes at his feet.

"Ashley!" he shouted in anguish. "Ashleeeyyy!!"

Kaidan Alenko woke with the scream on his lips. He ran a hand across his sweat- drenched forehead and reached over to turn on the lamp by his bunk. The sheets were in tattered disarray about him, just as sweaty as he was. Alenko shuddered with the memory of the nightmare. He has had that nightmare far too many times. It was always the same, and it always left him shaken.

He climbed out of the bed and pulled on the pair of pants that had been lying on the floor next to it. Closure. Bullshit. He walked into his kitchen and rummaged through the dirty dishes in the sink for a glass that looked tolerable. Satisfied, he popped the top from a bottle of scotch and poured a shot. It was good scotch. He received enough credits for his exploits during the Geth War that if he wanted a little escapism, there was no need to settle for cheap Turian booze. His liquor was imported from Earth and Earth alone. He downed the shot and didn't even bother to fill the glass again, instead setting it down on the counter and bringing the bottle with him to the bathroom.

Alenko stopped at the bathroom counter and gazed into the mirror. "You're letting yourself go," he told his reflection before taking another swig. That was an understatement. Two years ago, Kaidan had been the type to pay meticulous attention to his appearance. With the nightmares and the drinking had come the apathy. Kaidan hadn't shaved in several days, hadn't had a haircut in several months, and had a permanent crook in his nose from a bar fight almost a year prior.

Why the hell was he alive? Why did he get to live when that thoroughly principled and decent young woman was dead? He scowled at the man in the mirror with narrowed eyes, breaking eye contact for a moment only to down the entire bottle, more than half-full, in one gulp. He tossed it into the living room and resumed glaring at his reflection.

"You piece of shit!" he roared, throwing a hard right hook at the mirror and breaking it, leaving a bloody impression where his fist collided with the glass. He roared again, this time with physical pain. Alenko pulled back on the window and went into the medicine cabinet behind it. "Do not take with alcohol," he thought ironically as he swallowed three of the tranquilizers dry. If his liver failed, it failed. He needed the alcohol to calm his nerves and he needed the pills for the same reason. Neither ever did the job entirely, but sometimes with both in his system he almost felt good.

Kaidan would be the first to admit the sorry state he was in. He knew he drank too much and he knew that he was slowly killing himself, but the alternative was dealing with Ashley's death sober, and that scared him a hell of a lot more than death.

He moved to put the pills back but thought better of it and took one more. Setting the meds down on the counter, he ran cold water over his bloody hand and wrapped a bandage from the cabinet around it. Alenko went back into the bedroom and put a shirt on. Back in the living room, he plopped down on the couch, new bottle of scotch in hand, and flicked on the news. The monitor lit up the darkened chamber as he took a gulp.

The blessed alcohol was beginning to take its numbing effect on him, and the edge of both his mental anguish and the wound on his hand began to blur. The news anchor was a Salarian, wide eyed and slender like the rest of his species. He recited from his teleprompter in a nasally voice. Kaidan let the words pass by him. He didn't care what was happening, but the background noise allowed him to space out. He smiled faintly at the pun as he looked out the living room window into the nebula. His apartment on the wards gave him a great view of the Citadel and the space surrounding it, but Kaidan was usually too drunk to appreciate it.

A pain emerged behind his eyes and he swore aloud. The L2 implants that powered the biotic abilities that he no longer had a use for had always caused migraines. Since he had begun abusing himself with booze and pills, the migraines had intensified. They weren't constant, but when they decided to make themselves known it was a hell of a thing. They emerged sporadically and the pain was immediate and intense.

Alenko had recently been considering going under the knife and having the L2s either removed or retrofitted to L3s. If he was no longer a soldier there was no need for such pain. It had been a long while since he had tried, but he doubted that his biotic ability had much of a kick anymore anyway.

"Screw it," he muttered through gritted teeth, taking a shot of liquor as the ache blossomed into a raging bastard of a migraine that felt as if it were going to rip its way out of his head.

Yes, life was not good for Kaidan Alenko. Migraines, substance abuse, and unemployment were a terrible combination for anyone to have to endure. The fact that they all stemmed from that one moment back in the tropics of Virmire tore him apart. Whether she knew it or not, Shepard had damned him by saving him. He would have rather died fighting the Geth, for a cause, than to live another day like this.

Suicide was technically an option of course, but it wasn't really one that appealed to him. He had been close once, his service pistol pressed to his temple and a bottle of whiskey in his hand not unlike the bottle of scotch he clutched so tightly now. It hadn't been fear that stayed his hand. The easy way out seemed like an unfair choice. Ashley hadn't had a choice, had died thousands of light-years from home on a pissant little backwater of a world while goddamned noble Rebecca Shepard raced to Kaidan's rescue.

Shepard. He wondered faintly what she was up to. Was she on an assignment even now, as he drank himself into a stupor on the couch of a cluttered apartment? He decided that he didn't care. Shepard wasn't part of his life any longer, as far as actual interaction was concerned. The fact that she had ruined him, however, stuck around where her physical being had not.

His head pounded with fierce intensity as he mulled over his existance. Setting the bottle down on the coffee table in front of the sofa, Kaidan climbed to his feet and walked back into the bedroom. He lowered himself back onto the bed, felt it creak a bit under the new strain, and tried to purge his mind of Rebecca Shepard and Ashley Williams. His mind, being a fickle bitch, refused to oblige him, even as sleep overcame him.

Garret Keller gave a final glance over his shoulder before entering the nightclub. Job like this, you couldn't be too careful, and it wouldn't do to pick up a tail this close to zero hour. The reassuring weight of his pistol bolstered his confidence as he brushed by an asari stripper's advance and approached the bar. The bar was circular, wrapping all the way around an elevated platform where another stripper was currently hanging upside down on a pole.

His server was a middle aged human male. "Can I get you something?"

Garret nodded consent, running a hand through his short red hair. "I'll have a beer. It doesn't matter which." He took the glass and the barkeep used an omni-tool to recieve the electronically transmitted credits.

Stepping back from the bar, his eyes roamed the club for what he was looking for. At a booth in the corner sat an odd trio. A large Krogan was hunched over a Salarian ale. Across from him sat a severe looking Turian and adjacent to the Turian was a badly scarred human male. Keller strode to the table and took the remaining seat next to the Krogan. The big alien glanced sideways at him and grunted derisively, turning back to his liquor.

The three wore combat armor not unlike Garret's own. The other human wore a black armor bodysuit. It wasn't thin and flimsly like Keller's own, but it probably made moving around a bit difficult for his taste. The Turian's armor was even bulkier, with large shoulderpads and thick plating. The lurking beast of an alien next to Garret wore armor similar to this, also heavy and probably a great deterrent to gunshots.

"Are you Keller?" the Turian asked skeptically. The severity Garret had sensed in him from afar was more apparent in close proximity. The alien carried himself rigidly, and his tone of voice suggested profound animosity towards the human. Keller didn't know a hell of a lot about Turian physiology, so he supposed it might be possible that the sentient across from him was a veteran of the First Contact War, but it was equally likely that Turian was far too young. Either way, it made sense that he might not be a fan of humanity. Not many E.T's were.

"Yeah. You're Vargan. So we're on for tonight, eh? What pushed up the timetable?" When Keller had recieved the order to move on the target on this very night, it had been with a healthy measure of caution and skepticism. He'd been in the game too long to make the mistake of ignoring any variables.

"Dunno," the scarred man, Ken Moss, replied. Moss had been in the game for a long time, and had the wounds to show it. His left eye was dead, a deep scar running down above it, through it, and down to just below his lip. Another scar ran across his right cheek. Even with these disfigurements, he seemed to be the most laid back of the men at the table. Ken Moss had been around the block a few times and it probably took a lot to knock him out of his good humor. "The boss is getting antsy, whoever the fuck he is. Hell, I don't even know what he wants this guy for."

Vargan shrugged his indifference. "It doesn't matter. I've already recieved the deposit. If that was a taste, I'm ready for the main course."

Moss grinned widely at the remark. "I hear that," he replied heartily. "So how do we wanna do this?"

Garret got a bad vibe from the whole operation. Information was on an uncomfortably tight leash, and not a single factor was in his control. Their mystery employer had revealed himself to them individually, four high priced freelancers, and hired them for what was ostensibly a simple kidnapping. The whole thing reeked of complications.

"Taking him alive is going to be a real bitch," Moss remarked off-handedly. "The Citadel's not an easy place to pull something like that off to begin with. Getting him off the station is going to be tight."

"There was a time when I wouldn't even consider a job like this ," the Turian replied. "Things are just easier when you're free to kill."

"I'm thinking riot slugs," Keller remarked, not acknowledging Vargan's comment but taking note that the alien was a possible dissenter. "They should take him down without taking him out."

The mercenaries planned the operation down to a tee over several drinks and three quarters of an hour. The krogan remained sedantary the entire time, reptilian eyes casting back and forth on his compatriots in an almost lazy complacency. It was decided that they would go straight from the diner. It was late at night and the target would probably be asleep. If they were lucky they could potentially get in and extract the subject without so much as a ruckus. This was all fine and dandy, Keller thought as they rose from the booth. Why did he get the feeling nothing was going to go as planned?

"Is everyone ready?" Vargan asked pointedly.

"Keller and I will do our jobs," Moss replied as he stretched his limbs. "You just focus on yours." An unspoken agreement between the two humans had developed during the conversation. They were of the same species and if the shit were to hit the proverbial fan, they'd have each other's backs. The Turian, however, was in all likelihood another story. As for the Krogan, Keller had no idea.

"Krogan?" Vargan asked, seeming to hear Garret's thoughts and echo them verbally. "Ready?"

"Yeah," the Krogan drawled in a gravelly voice. "I've been ready for the last hour."

"Didn't catch your name," the Turian said haughtily. Keller had nearly forgotten the animosity between the two races, but now the animosity in Vargan's voice made even more sense as he recalled the Krogan Rebellion.

The Krogan climbed out of the booth and stretched. "It's Wrex," he replied. "Urdnot Wrex."

Author's Note: This is my first ever fanfiction, but if it does happen to suck I actually want to hear constructive criticism. I'm hoping that its a pretty decent first effort.