Shepard inhaled sharply.

She could not feel anything. She couldn't even think, at first. Her first thought, staggering through her mind half-formed, was to wonder whether she was alive. It took her what felt like an incredibly long time to realize that if she was thinking at all, she must be alive. That realization was almost amusing, but relief and confusion took over.

The last thing she remembered was...light. Beam. If there was such a thing as a sickly shade of blue, that beam had been it. Now she realized that this was the second time she'd made that observation; the first time, she had been limping across the Catalyst platform. The beam and its promise of true peace had been tempting, and she had looked back at it on her way to the...whatever it was she had shot to trigger the Reapers' destruction. Ever a sniper at heart, even with one hand shaking and the other holding her guts in, she had taken the shots from the right-hand ramp. If there was any chance for her to survive whatever came next, she was damn well going to maximize that chance. Generally, in her experience as a fancy-ass soldier, shooting conduits resulted in explosions and explosions were bad.

Okay, she thought. So where the hell am I now? Her eyes were still closed, so she opened them. It was painful to do even that much, and her effort was rewarded by a trickle of blood getting into her left eye. Blinking reflexively and trying to turn her head, she gradually became aware of more of her body. With awareness came pain and an involuntary groan, but she welcomed every raw sensation as a sign that she really wasn't dead. Not dead yet, anyway. Depending on where she was, air might soon be in short supply, and that was if her injuries didn't get the better of her.

All she could see was rubble, and through vision blurry and bloody she couldn't even tell what kind of rubble it was. There was a dim, cold light coming from somewhere, but she could still only move her head bit by tiny bit, so searching for the source was slow, strenuous work.

Wherever I am, there's no exposure to vacuum. No way I'd still have any air if... Good news then. I'll take any good news.

It was just as well that she couldn't find the strength to move any more than her head. Movement might disturb the rubble and bring it down. Then again, being able to grab a pack of medigel would be nice right about now.

Finally she saw the source of the light. It was coming through a gap in the rubble above her and to her left, and she couldn't see into the gap itself without being able to lean in that direction. A large piece of metal twisted beyond recognition lay beside her in such a way that she couldn't just scoot her head to the side: she'd have to raise her whole torso and then lean over the metal to get a proper look at the gap. So, one of the only visual clues to her location was a bust for now.

Shepard turned her attention to sound. There was an odd lack of it. A possible reason for that floated at the edge of her thoughts for a moment—something about the explosion—but she couldn't quite focus. She was starting to feel faint.

Not good...

There were sounds now, far away and almost inaudible. Light suddenly flooded in, stabbing at her nerves even though her eyes were once again closed. The light wavered and flickered as if—

She remembered sitting under a tree, the sun winking between the leaves as they swayed in a breeze. It had been a scrappy streetside tree in a poorer part of Mumbai, but it looked good that spring.

Instincts brought her back to the present and urged her to open her eyes, to see what was going on. She complied, though the light hurt even more when her eyelids parted. A figure gradually came somewhat into focus, silhouetted. Turian, she recognized after a long moment.

Garrus. He'd been evac'd onto the Normandy just a few minutes ago. Or was it hours? The more she tried to think, tried to pin down a timeframe, the more it felt like a lifetime had passed since anything real had happened. Everything after she had last seen Garrus was dreamlike, swimming around in the back of her mind like a half-recalled nightmare.

Suddenly Garrus was right next to her, examining her, and she tried to speak to him but her lips were stuck together and she wasn't getting enough air anymore.

When she woke up again, there was overwhelming pain. She was only awake long enough to notice that she was being carried by—a turian she didn't know. Garrus was nowhere to be seen, at least not within her limited field of view. Most of what she could see was the night sky, Earth's night sky, clouded with so much smoke that only a few stars were visible. Actually, it didn't look all that different from the pollution-choked sky she'd been used to in childhood. The resemblance was only noticed subconsciously; just before blackness returned she remembered climbing buildings in search of a spot where she could see more stars through the smog.