THE LEGEND OF A DEAD MAN
by moondusted
Shepard had always known that he was dead man walking. He had been back on earth as that lanky, swaggering, foul-mouthed teenager and as an equally foul-mouthed, impatient, brazen cadet all those years ago with the Alliance. It had stood like a solid fact, one of the few certainties in his existence.
He was a dead man. One day, he knew it would catch up with him, payback doubled and tripled every time he thwarted it all in the last moment.
Memories of his first death were a bit hazy. It was background drumming in his mind, like the sensory imprint of asphyxia and cold, written somewhere deep within his genes where even the resurrection had failed to eradicate it. Most of the time, he paid it no heed, but it was clear enough, obvious enough, riding on waves of adrenaline and combat nerves, to know that he was dying again.
At least it looked like it wasn't going to be suffocation this time, just for the variety.
He had never feared death, however. Not at Torfan, not at the Citadel and all the battlefields before or since. Why would a dead man fear death, anyway?
He recalled an old Alliance instructor calling him a fool for it, or at least an utter imbecile, because only either of those felt no fear at all.
Which one are you, kid? The instructor had asked in that unpleasant, grating bark of his.
Mad? Possibly. But he didn't discriminate against anyone.
Not afraid, though, never afraid, but sometimes at least a little cautious - no need to go out in a blaze of blathering idiocy, after all. Cautious, when the situation called for it, but suicide runs weren't the type.
In falling, he could see the Normandy move away; still sleek and powerful for all the damage she had taken, still strong enough to make it back. It was out of his hand, but Joker had a few tricks of his own still up his sleeve, enough to at least give them a fighting chance, which was more than they had ever needed or hoped for.
The ground - or whatever - whirred toward him, slower than it should. Who knew what kind of gravitational or Mass Effect fields existed outside the Collector base.
Shepard cranked the Geth shielding up as far as it would go, just in case there was a snowballs' chance in hell and curled himself together against the imminent impact.
At this point in his life, he had already been fried, frozen, beaten, stabbed, punched, blown up, shot and poisoned. He had fallen from lethal heights once or twice, too, and never mind that one time when he had taken a trip into deep space in a spacesuit with more holes than a goddamned sieve.
He hit the ground like a bullet and felt it give way more than he could have hoped for. The material under him - metal or rock, he lacked the time for contemplation - bent and scattered and flew away with the force of his impact.
Edges crashed through the armour, mashed flesh and bone as it did. Fierce pain shot up his spine and exploded in his head. Something like a blade sliced past his thigh, clean through the armour as if it was nothing. He felt a shoulder joint snap and bent until he didn't think his arm was still attached. He slipped past another rock and fell again, but nothing compared to the first time, nothing compared to from where he had come. Uncontrolled now, he rolled further, rocks and edges battering away at him, tearing lose parts of a glove and chinking most of his visor away sending it whirring and sliced open his cheek where the Cerberus scars already were.
When he finally lay still, he supposed he looked like a disfigured array of randomly assorted limbs and cracked armour. The suit, what remained of it, pumped Medi-Gel, for whatever use that still was, for where it could still reach in a piece of armour this damaged.
Curiously, a little light-headed perhaps, he noticed the almost disappointing absence of much pain.
Check functionality, the memory of another instructor growled in his ear.
Right. He thought he should start small on that one and tried opening his eyes.
The visor was splintered, hanging crookedly over one eye, filtering the view through a mosaic's distortion. The Collector base hung above him, still intact, still oblivious to the annihilation it would soon enough find. How much time was left of the ten minutes? Not much, considering, but he was far enough away to get a chance at enjoying the show before its shockwave fried what remained of him.
It was a pity he wouldn't get a chance to confront the Illusive Man after ruining his game like that, but no doubt Joker would give him just as good.
Check functionality, you idiot. What? Couldn't he just lie here in a heap of broken bones and watch his enemies burn?
It didn't do, of course.
The pain was nothing but dull white noise, at least right until he tried to move his hand, gasped for air at the sudden searing pain and choked on the blood in his mouth, throat and lungs. But his hand had moved and with more strength than he could justifiably expect of it. At the edge of the visor, writing flickered to uncertain life.
[Please do not move. Emergency beacon activated. Please wait for extraction.]
Fat chance of that, beyond the Omega-4 relay. But his head must have taken a worse hit, for it processed the information sluggishly, dwelling for far too long on the absurdity of waiting for help.
Whoever made it through would need all the help they could get for themselves.
Wait a second. Emergency beacon?
He struggled, hoping to sit up, but the taste of copper swamped his mouth and his right arm didn't move at all. Nausea washed over him and unconsciousness threatened to take him under.
He took a few breaths, shallow against all the blood and tried again, brazed this time for whatever rebellion his body would throw at him.
It felt like his spine was being pushed out by his neck and his head refused to straighten, remaining locked in an odd tilt. Wincing, hissing and cursing, he hoisted his lifeless arm into his lap, resting it against a completely crooked thigh. The Omni-Tool didn't respond immediately and his vision kept skipping sideways as his mind wanted to retreat into coma and death. He snarled the urge down.
[Deactivating beacon may be hazardous for your health.]
"You don't know the half of it," he muttered in a voice that had gone strange, full of fresh blood, splinters and shards.
Functionality then.
One partially functioning arm, something wrong with his neck, his other arm deadweight and one leg bent an interesting zigzag. Internal injuries were difficult to pinpoint, but also most likely too numerous to bother counting. Broken rips, for sure and a punctured lung, as much he was sure of, drowning him in his own blood. An excruciating experiment revealed that his other leg was unlikely to support him for more than a few seconds. He could work with a few seconds, though, considering that he had mere minutes left to go anyway.
He dragged himself - substituting cursing for screaming - onto a boulder.
It was a nice vantage point to take in his surroundings. He seemed to have landed on a small piece of rock, an asteroid caught in the Collector base's gravity.
Through some miracle he neither deserved nor believed in his pistol was still strapped to his hip. His fingers proved clumsy, sprained and over bent, but some of the practised ease still remained, memory in his muscles pulled and strained beyond the limits of biology.
Few clips remained, hardly enough to hold off the horde of Collectors he saw landing on both edges of his little island in a sea of soon-to-be inferno.
The clips would last longer if he lined them up, taking two or three out at once. He needed them to get close for that and for now the Collectors took their sweet time. Thought they had all the time in the world to get to him, the poor bastards.
"Hey!" he yelled roughly. He would have given them an encouraging wave, but he didn't think his body was up to so much movement. "I haven't got all day!" And added, a little quieter, "And neither have you."
They could easily have shot him from the boulder. He sat there like some fat, stupid, pigeon after all, but Harbinger seemed to have other ideas.
Ah well, gift horses and all. Harbinger had no idea what was going to hit him. Shepard couldn't get back to the Illusive Man about all this, but Harbinger just might get a moment of epiphany before the end.
The Collectors kept moving, faster now, skipping to and fro as they did, fucking pendulum motion intended to hypnotise him or something.
He raised his arm, expecting it to sink right back down, but while muscle and pressured bone screamed in agony, his aim was steady.
He brought the gun around - a strange shiver in his shoulder that did bode well- and fired twice. Four Collectors less right there.
They were catching on to what was happening and took cover.
He laughed. Just one dead man right here and they didn't dare approach him openly. A pretty weak show for one of the more dangerous races in the galaxy, their pathetic origin notwithstanding.
The Normandy was going to make it.
Most of the crew and the team were going to make it.
The rest was just set decoration.
Enough to give the Reapers hell should they be dumb enough to go to war against them.
He aimed and fired. Blew a Collector's head right off. He loved those new projectiles Mordin had cobbled together during the approach on Omega-4. It was a pity he wouldn't be getting to play with them some more.
He had always been dead man walking.
He fired the last clip, a hole in one, so to speak, and three Collectors down.
Give them as much, at least, they were not slow to take a hint. When he stopped firing, they left their cover, cautiously at first but then began a fast, solid advance on his position from all sides.
Somehow, Shepard was still waiting for the pain, but he felt barely more than numbness, at least as long as he didn't move or breathed too deeply. Consuming cold travelled up his broken legs, wrapping around his battered spine and weighting his eyes closed.
The last thing he remembered from his first death was his mind slipping away into nothingness as he desperately tried to take another breath - just one, just one more, running like a mantra through his head. Then there was unbearable cold. And then there was darkness and a silence so deep space seemed like a cacophony of sound in comparison.
Not far away, Harbinger decided to join his followers on the retrieval mission.
Shepard breathed again, felt the air flow into his body on twisted paths, hard pressed to find its destination through his chaotic insides. There was an odd smell in the air, sweetly, like something rotting away in a corner of months.
So he was dying. Again. And the thought scared him less every time.
"At least it's not asphyxia," he muttered past his bleeding throat and gargling breath. "I want my next death to be by Ardat-Yakshi."
It would make for a nice change in pace.
Not long now. The display in his visor had died, but he had enough wits still about, enough combat-experience and hard-wired battlefield habits, so he continued to count subconsciously.
The Collectors surrounded him, but kept their distance, perhaps expecting him to pull some new trick at them. Indeed he would have, but the Cain was both empty and gone. It was nice to have left an impression, nevertheless.
Harbinger advanced through the ranks, looking menacing this close, too big and too surreal.
The vertebrae in Shepard's neck cracked in protest when he had to put his head back, looking upwards.
There was nothing to read in the creature's face, or else whatever passed for expression was too alien for him to comprehend.
It's voice, on the other hand, was nothing if not triumphant.
"You lost, Shepard," Harbinger announced with that far-away machine echo. "You sacrificed everything and still I have you now."
This, Shepard thought idly, was going to hurt like a bitch. He whipped his gun up, right at the centre of Harbinger's head.
"Maybe," Shepard conceded. A vicious smirk cut itself across his carved-up face, leaving flares in his eyes as it did. "But you still can't handle me."
"Look up," Shepard added in a merciless croon.
[3... 2... 1... 0 seconds]
Above them, the explosion ripped down the sides of the Collector's base. It split at the seams, coming apart in blazing, blinding white and blue and purple. Shards and fragments reached them ahead of the blast, driven before the shockwave, hailing molten death around him.
"You..." Harbinger began. There was no noticeable change in inflection, but Shepard had faced enough defeated opponents to know precisely what Harbinger was not showing.
The smirk on Shepard's face spread into a grin.
"The Reapers have just become an endangered species," he said and pulled the trigger just as the fallout from the exploding station reached them, annihilating everything in its path, without leaving anything at all behind but silent, dead empty space.
"I win," Shepard whispered as he began fading into nuclear fire and memories.
Once, not so long ago, Nazara had relied impressions back to its brethren, carved deep enough in its consciousness to leave dents and scratches across the impeccable minds of the Reapers.
Now there was another echo, quieter than static, but irresistible, travelling back through Harbinger's connection to the Reapers, where they gathered in the voids of dark space. For the first time in all their untold, uncounted eternities of existence they were whispering to each other in what might have been hushed voices, had they been anything like living beings. Myths shared between cavemen at their precious fires, bogeymen tales told to children, the sounds made by minds as they drag themselves from the mud of their humble beginnings.
Involuntarily, accidentally, legends began to form within the Reapers' minds. And the nature of these stories was a source of what, in lesser races, would have been fear - in the Reapers, who were not a lesser race at all, it was more like... anxiety.
The legends quickly took a life of their own, as these things tend to, evolved and rewrote themselves, multiplied within the myriad machine minds. But all the stories begin like this:
I win.
End
Author's Note: I usually don't post when I think anyhing is as weak as this. I'm not sure where it all goes wrong, though, and I genuinely like the idea of it.
I realise that this type of outcome is not possible. Also, the timing is a bit off, too, but it was in the game as well.
On the other hand, I think inaccuracies are faint enough to be covered by artistic license.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: Oh my! I forgot to give credit where credit is due. The 'check functionality' part isn't mine. It's taken from Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books.