I don't own anything, Mass Effect is owned by Bioware, and Harry Potter and subsequent characters and settings are owned by J.K. Rowling.
Prologue
"What about Shepard? Born on Earth, survived the Skyllian Blitz. She's done more for the Alliance than anyone else."
"Unfortunately, her record after Saren and Sovereign leaves a lot to be desired. She's pretty much responsible for the entire Batarian genocide, she's responsible for leaving the footholds open for the Reapers to get through. She's not worthy enough to be even considered for this."
"Are you certain? Why should we not trust her with the future of our entire race?"
"Because she would take the entire galaxy to hell and back just to survive the Reapers. She doesn't care what happens to the other races, just what happens to her. She left her entire team aboard the Harvester Ship to die, and she was the only one who made it back. That's not the kind of leader we want."
"Very well, she'll appear before the Alliance Tribunal and her fate will be decided there. If anything comes from these proceedings, the Almighty have mercy on us all."
Veronica Shepard was sitting in her cell waiting for the approaching hour. She'd been going over her defense for nearly seven hours after her arrest. It was certain that she was going to be court-martialed and dismissed with a dishonorable discharge, or worse, shipped to the States to be housed in either Leavenworth, or Alcatraz, which had reopened after the First Contact War.
She didn't need to justify herself to these good-for-nothing bureaucrats who claimed to be the brass of Alliance High Command. Her record spoke for itself. She exhibited ruthless efficiency in her dealings with Sovereign and also with Saren. She'd also personally led the assault on the Collector base during her time with Cerberus, which now that she thought about it, was probably the best thing that happened to her. She was given free rein to pick her own crew and also to conduct the missions as she saw fit. The first thing that she did was kill Miranda Lawson aboard the station where she awoke after being spaced on the Normandy SR-1. She kept Jacob around since he was a bit of eye-candy, but she managed to pull the majority of her old crew together. Sadly though, she had to leave everyone behind on the collector base. While everyone had been loyal to her. She knew what they had been thinking. Incapacitate her, leave her on the collector base, and return to the Alliance controlled space with a victory parade on their individual home planets for single-handedly defeating the Collector threat. When it had become apparent that this was what they were planning, she purposely left her crew to face the collectors alone while she headed back to the SR-2 and flew it with Joker back to Earth.
Upon landing in the Alliance Spaceport, she was immediately placed under arrest by Admiral Anderson and the Citadel Council. That had been six months ago, and now the decision had been made to proceed with charges in a court-martial.
The door to her cell opened and four armed escorts, including one Jimmy Vega, came to escort her to the court-room. They all had anti-biotic weapons and biotic suppressor cuffs and leg-irons. They were making absolutely certain that Veronica Shepard made it to the courtroom without having launching a single biotic attack.
"Well, Commander, time for you to face justice," said Vega.
"You know nothing of justice," said Shepard with ice in her voice and eyes. It was often said among Alliance Navy and Marines that Commander Shepard was the Ice Queen when it came to her personality. Vega experienced it first hand at that moment. He wanted nothing more than to curl up beside a roaring fire with two beautiful women and a few bottles of Cerveza lying around the area. Oddly enough, the entire focal point of his fantasy was drawn to an abrupt halt when they arrived at the courtroom. Vega and his detail ushered Commander Shepard to the prisoner's stand, where she was placed in a modified Prothean containment sphere. The Prothean sphere cut off access to all biotic implants and systems within a prisoner's body. That was why the Asari had supported the human effort to reverse engineer it when the first human biotics were showing signs of degeneration and rebellion.
Suffice to say, the evidence presented to the Tribunal was overwhelming and all of it was fact and personal testimony from all who witnessed Shepard's fall from grace, as it were. It didn't take long for the Tribunal to declare her guilty of all charges and to sentence her to immediate discharge. The Citadel Council also revoked her Spectre status and banned her from all citadel space.
Now, Veronica was left with little option but to proceed with Plan B. She slowly, calculatingly, put her body into a very agonizing bout of pain until her containment sphere was shut off for medical personnel to attend to her. Once they had arrived on the scene, Shepard opened up with nearly everything she had and totally decimated her surroundings. No matter how much the bullets and other biotic attacks hurt, there was only one thought going through her brain. Do what you must to survive and damn the consequences. This had been her mantra since the days after the Skyllian Blitz. She didn't care if she left a body count, she didn't care if anything happened to those around her. All she cared about was her own personal survival. If she was the last human left in the entire galaxy and the reapers left her alone because of her brutal, efficient method of dealing with those around her, then so be it, at least the human race would die with her.
Meanwhile just outside of the Arcturus relay, the Reapers had made their presence known. Arcturus station fell within a matter of minutes and their next target was Earth, among the other planets that housed the advanced, space-traversing species. When they hit Vancouver, Admiral Anderson had tried to rally the remaining citizens on Earth into a resistance, and the newly promoted Commander Ashley Williams had tried to rally the citizens of the galaxy into fighting, but without Commander Shepard at the tip of the spear, the galaxy became a lost cause.
The now Miss Veronica Shepard now walked through the streets of Vancouver and didn't feel a thing, no emotion, no remorse, nothing whatsoever. The last remaining thought before she perished in an explosion of glass, plasma and other sundry debris was They never understood why I did what I did. Can't they understand that there is only one human life worth fighting for and that's your own, any other lives around you are merely cannon-fodder? If you alone survive after the battle and you live to see another day, then leaving your comrades behind to face certain death, and routing whatever consequences you have coming, makes the effort to come out on top entirely worth it.
Little did she know that a few reapers heard her thoughts and remembered encountering a similar line of thought some hundred years ago, coming from a fairly densely populated island near the Northwestern bit of the Eastern Hemisphere. They remembered the greybeard and how if they could, they would've taken the chance to send someone to either straighten him out, or help the very person he was targeting. Ironically enough, though the Reapers harvested many species at the end of 50,000 year cycles. They left children alone, if they weren't actively fighting. There was a child-like being controlling the Reapers aboard the Citadel, and it was this being that they took their orders from. Now, a couple Sovereign-class Reapers pulled the trailing consciousness of the late Veronica Shepard away from all the chaos, and sent it to the Citadel to "meet her maker"
((O))
"Wake up," said a child-like voice in the midst of the darkness. To Veronica Shepard, it was like waking up from a very prolific and horrific nightmare only to find that the nightmare you thought you had actually came true. She stared down at her body, or lack of one, and straight ahead into the chamber that was not a chamber, but merely an amalgam of parts floating across a vast existence of non-space. A bridge formed, and a being of pure energy walked toward the particles that were Veronica Shepard.
"Whatever you want, I'm not interested," said Shepard in her usual non-committal, condescending voice.
"You care for nobody but yourself, don't you?"
"Why should I care for others? They will only end up betraying you in the end. My family did that on Earth, they left me to face Alliance justice when a botched robbery went pear-shaped. The entire galaxy did the same thing after I saved them from Saren and Sovereign. Only Cerberus believed me, and what did they do, put me back together after they spaced me, and made it seem like I was hiring my own crew, but really what they were doing was making it so that I was expendable to them. They made me fly through the Omega relay and try to destroy a Collector Ship, but what does my crew do when we've accomplished the mission, they decide to leave me behind, so I turned the tables on them. I don't really care what happens to others around me, as long as I survive. I've lived in this world for too long and have experienced too many betrayals to even give much of a damn about whether honoring the sacrifice of the dead is worth it in the end. The only person you can look out for is yourself. Friendship is for the weak, and relying on others makes you inherently weak as well. You yourself need to survive if you plan to make it anywhere in the traverse, and if that means betraying those who betrayed you to begin with, then so be it."
"You became indoctrinated after you spoke with Sovereign on Virmire."
"If I became indoctrinated, why would I have cared to stop the Reapers when they tried attacking with Sovereign and later with Harbinger? I have little love for the Reapers and I have little love for all those who betrayed me. If my living to see another dawn in the face of terrible war and conflict means that the entire traverse disappears and ends today, so be it. I've come out ahead and the entire traverse can kiss my backside!"
You wouldn't be saying that if you had someone you desperately had to protect, thought the child-like entity. I think you need to be taught a massive lesson about learning what is important in life.
"If you're some kind of being that guards the passage of the dead to the afterlife, then send me on my way to hell. I know I'm dead, I felt the shrapnel from the explosion kill me, on top of my other wounds from destroying the Tribunal."
"What I have in mind for you is something a little more interesting than your own personal hell. What if you actually had someone that you could protect, even at the cost of your own life, would you actually find your humanity again, or would you continue to be apathetic to the world around you and think that the universe revolves around you? You seem to forget that there was a little boy in your street gang that actually looked up to you. You were the big sister he never had and he also counted on you to be there for him."
Veronica knew the boy that this being was talking about. He had gone by the name of Jack and was always trying to be like Big Sis Nikki. Sadly, when he followed Veronica and the older boys out to rob a convoy of Alliance weapons that would've even up the turf war they fought with a rival gang, he had been caught in the cross-fire between gang and military police. He was hardly more than 10 years old, and Veronica, at the time was 12. She had stayed behind to try and carry the kid to safety, since he had only been wounded, but the leader of the gang had personally shot Jack straight through the head, saying that those who didn't listen to orders were unfit to survive. Veronica had fought with her leader over the moral implications over what he had done. She knew that his word was law in the gang, and that as the leader, it was a hard lot for him to do that to a 10 year old, but then again, they were all children who had grown up without parents due to the First Contact War.
He had purposely left her in the middle of the street holding Jack's body when Alliance MPs finally caught up with them. She had surrendered peacefully, but a small bit of her humanity had died that day and she had sought revenge against the boy who had killed the one person who had brought her humanity to the surface. She had fought hard through the ranks of Alliance Military upon enlisting at 18, after serving her sentence. At the ripe age of 20, she personally opened the case again her old gang leader, who was now the de facto "Rogue King" of the underworld of Vancouver. So far, he had managed to elude capture by the military enforcement in the city for well over eight and a half years. So it was on a rather unrelated charge that he was finally caught. Somewhere along the lines, he had accumulated a rather hefty speeding ticket library and a few outstanding warrants for traffic violations. Almost every year, he would pay the fines and would resume his merry life in the Vancouver underworld, but sadly, one year, he didn't pay his fines, and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Veronica, acting in conjunction with both civilian and military police squads, pursued him on the warrants, and managed to catch him just before he hit the Canadian/United States border. If he had crossed the boundary, there would've been little they could do to catch him. The States had, at least after the First Contact War, had adopted a policy of non-extradition, so that they could get the dwindling population back up. Unfortunately, many outlaws and escaped convicts from, not only Earth, but Palaven, Thessia, and Sur'Kesh, had made quite a few cities in the United States home, due the non-extradition policy. The alliance had tried to get the Americans to listen to reason, but the US government had finally had enough and withdrew from the Alliance, but still maintained diplomatic ties with the Citadel, citing that they would operate as their own embassy aboard the Citadel, and that their ambassador was going to be chosen by the majority consensus of the Free Peoples of the United States. Right now, the US Ambassador to the Citadel was a naturalized Salarian citizen who originally been living on the lam from Sur'Kesh and Spectre forces for nigh on three years. He did his dealings with the Citadel via proxy while he maintained QE communication with his colleagues aboard the citadel and also via the Council, who had recognized the US as a separate governing body of people from Earth.
Luckily, he had been apprehended just before the border with BC and Washington State. Nearly two kilometers from the border to be precise. Veronica made certain that it was her that read him his rights and managed to get at least one hit on him before her colleagues transported him back to Vancouver for trial. It wasn't the justice she had hoped for, but at least he was no running the underworld of Vancouver. However, her victory was short lived. Her quarry had so much dirt on all the politicians that with a little blackmail and a small bit of bribery, he had gotten off scot-free and even with a pardon and authorization to run the Vancouver underworld from Alliance High Command, signed personally by the Prime Minster of Earth.
Finally, Veronica had had enough, and took matters into her own hands. Her quarry had headed off-world to visit some long lost family in the colonies within the Terminus Systems, and She had followed with her battalion, which was headed to border patrol and to ensure that Batarian slavers would think twice before attacking an Earth Colony, sadly, the Skyllian Blitz happened, and she had seen the atrocities of the Batarians first hand, but little had prepared her for what happened later. She saw that her quarry had actually sold his own family to the Batarian Slavers and he had a business deal with the leader of the slavers to sell off some of the girls he had acquired in Vancouver into the alien slave-trade. Veronica was incensed when she heard what type of slavery was going to happen to these girls. Immediately, she and her team moved, and what happened afterward was what solidified her reputation as a ruthless killer. She had rescued the girls from the Batarian clutches, and then pointed her gun at her quarry.
She uttered two words that sent a very strong chill down the spine of her quarry. "For Jack!" and she filled him with buckshot from her Eviscerator. He died after the first shot, but Veronica kept firing until her magazine clip had emptied itself. Her team had been killed by the Batarians how managed to survive the initial onslaught. Now, she was the sole-survivor of a mission gone pear-shaped, but also satisfied that Jack finally got the justice he deserved. With that behind her, she finally could let her past die for good, and focus on her present career. After the death of her quarry, she gave up on all humanity and decided to focus only on her own survival.
"You carried your humanity with you until you killed your old gang boss, and when you did that, you sealed away the last vestiges of humanity you had within you and turned into this apathetic shell of your former self," said the entity. "Your humanity is still there, but sadly, you need a bit of a refresher in what it means to protect someone. As such, you are given a chance for a new existence. This will be your only second chance. No knowledge will be imparted to you about where you're headed. You just have to figure stuff out as you go. Some abilities that you have, such as your biotics, will remain with you, but in an entirely different fashion."
With that, the child-like entity walked forward and focused his hand onto where Veronica's heart would be, if she were flesh and blood. There was a blinding flash, and almost instantly, the rest of the galaxy disappeared, never to be seen again, at least in the way that Veronica Shepard knew.
Just an idea I'm running with. Hope you like it. Elements of Mass Effect will only be brought up in Shepard's memories, but other than that, it will mostly take place in the Harry Potter universe. Follow Veronica "Nikki" Shepard as she tries to understand her humanity and understand the world of Magical Britain while helping Harry Potter struggle through his own pain and loss.