Author's Note: This here is a crossover idea that I'd been entertaining doing for a while now. Since learning a great deal more about Dante's Inferno, both the original poem and the video game adaptation, I decided that the time had come to finally do this crossover. Now first off I'm going to stress that this story has elements of both the Dante's Inferno video game and the epic poem. It does not fully adhere to either one but rather takes information from both, with some of my own ideas thrown in for good measure. With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy my crossover.

Prologue: The Deal

So slow and agonizingly painful was Shepard's demise that in all truth he wasn't sure when exactly his end finally came. Was it five minutes after being ejected out of the Normandy as it was destroyed? Ten? Twenty? Shepard didn't know. What he did know however was that the pain did eventually come to an end along with his life, but what followed next was a lot harder to describe and also to recollect.

The first thing Shepard remembered seeing was a bright light, brighter than any other he had ever seen but as he was dead he could now no longer be blinded by the flare. What followed after that was impossible for him to describe even if he tried, as for a few brief moments he experienced a different state of being that could not be compared to a mortal life in the physical world. The closest word to describe it would be bliss. Just pure, unadulterated bliss that would never end but was also no more immortality as most thought of it than infinite nothingness would be. No, it was something else entirely, beyond mortal comprehension.

But then as quickly as it had come the feeling disappeared and Shepard felt mortal once more.

Only he still wasn't alive.

Instead he found himself alone in a seemingly empty, never-ending expanse of blackness that made the vast space of the cosmos look like the brightest place ever by comparisn. For here there were no stars, or planets, no incredible sights to be seen. Just a vast, empty void of infinite nothingness. Oblivion.

"Not much to see here is there?" came a voice from beyond the blackness. Shepard instinctively turned to where he thought the voice was but quickly realized that it was a pointless gesture on his part. The voice, he soon found, was coming from everywhere at once, echoing as if they were in an enclosed space rather than a void.

"Who are you?" Shepard asked. The words sounded flat and lifeless and his jaw felt heavy and tired just uttering them.

Nevertheless, his basic question had gotten a response, namely a small column of fire appearing in the center of the blackness but also doing nothing to provide illumination to the surroundings. Once the flames cleared there stood a man with skin the color of bronze and hair the color of gold. His lips were stretched into a smile and his blue eyes seemed to have lit up with excitement for whatever reason. He dressed modestly enough, wearing a white suit not unlike what Ambassador Udina always wore, at least whenever Shepard had seen him.

"Hello there. Just thought I'd pull you in here so we could talk"

"I'm...dead aren't I?" Again, the words sounded flat, lacking the usual things that made Shepard's voice his own. Instead it sounded like one of the VIs on the Citadel giving out basic instructions to passerby.

"Oh yes very much so. Dead as dead can possibly be in point of fact. Those Reapers really weren't messing around where they?" the man chuckled.

"The Reapers? They attacked the Normandy?"

"Well, not exactly no. Friends of theirs did. Either way, you've got enemies in high places (but you didn't hear that from me)"

"What do you want? What is this place?"

"This place? This is a sort of 'getaway' spot of mine whenever I want some peace and quiet. Things can get kind of tedious where I am you see. To answer your first question, what I want is to offer a...proposal. A sort of deal"

"Proposal..." the man's words were cryptic, but almost instinctively Shepard was able to discern their meaning, and his eyes widened when the truth dawned on him. "Wait a minute...are you…?"

"The Devil?" The man's grin grew even wider than before. "How did you guess?" he outstretched a hand. "I am Lucifer the Morningstar, once Archangel now ruler of the Inferno"

Shepard didn't take the hand being offered to him, and if Lucifer was at all upset or offended by this he didn't show it. Instead he lowered his hand and said slyly: "And of course I know who you are: the great Commander Virgil Shepard, first human SPECTRE, savior of the Citadel, and slayer of the Reaper Sovereign. Quite a resume if I do say so myself. Pity it got you killed, especially when the galaxy is in desperate need of your continued presence"

"The Reapers you mean. They'll come back won't they?"

Lucifer's grin and expression became markedly more wicked as he replied in a tone that matched it: "Oh yes they'll come back alright. In such force you can't even begin to comprehend. And without a certain iconic figure who could convince the species of the universe to work together well...let's just say the realms above and below will be getting quite a few new arrivals in one sitting"

"And what do you have to offer that can prevent that?" Shepard asked.

"Isn't it obvious? I can bring you back from the dead"

"Just like that?"

"Well, here's the thing: there are certain...'interested parties' in your world who even as we speak have recovered your body and are now trying to bring you back. They'll fail of course. Their science may have come far in the past few centuries but you just can't change nature...barring a few exceptions of course" again Lucifer's lips formed into a grin, this one the kind of look a fox had right before devouring a hapless flock of chickens.

"So you could bring me back from the dead instead?"

"Yes, and to those who are trying to revive you right now it will seem that they succeeded. No one will ever be the wiser and you'll be able to save the galaxy from those nasty oversized cephalopods. Whaddya say?"

"I'm not an idiot. There's a catch isn't there?"

"Heh, heh, good. You're not as dumb as the last thirty people I did this with" With a snap of his bronze colored fingers Lucifer produced a parchment and quill. He handed both to Shepard. "Read it through if you want. The contract basically says that if you die in battle after being resurrected I claim your soul."

"I figured as much" Shepard said, reading over the contract and finding that it reiterated what Lucifer had just said. "Sounds like I run quite the risk"

"Oh true, but if you don't take it the whole galaxy burns. And would you, the great and noble Commander Shepard really allow that to happen? I always took you as more the...messianic type" Lucifer chuckled at his own poor joke before taking back the contract and quill. "So what do you say? Is it a deal?"

"I don't know...if I die the galaxy is doomed anyway and all I get out of it is a trip to hell...but if I do take you up on your offer there's at least the chance I can save everyone...or I can take a third option: and that's let the people trying to revive me try their hand at bringing me back without your help"

Lucifer burst out laughing. "Oh come now do you really think they'll be able to bring you back? Your physical body's just meat and tubes now. There's hardly anything left to bring back. And even if they reconstruct your body they can't put your soul back in...only I can do that. Without that you'll be little more than an automaton, completely bereft of the charm, charisma, nobility, and all those other insipid things that make you who you are. Oh certainly you'll be able to fight for them, but that will be about it. And those scientists who tried and failed to revive you? Heh, they'll be cut loose...along with their throats. A shame really. One of them's quite a pretty thing. Would be sad to see her die for you…"

"You're trying to guilt me into taking your offer" Shepard noted before adding: "Playing off of my sense of ethics and desire to protect people to convince me that I have to take the risk...you're good"

Lucifer smiled. "I've been doing this since before the first early Protheans crawled out of their caves. I know my way around. So: deal or no deal?"

Shepard considered. He knew that no deal with the devil he could make could possibly end in any way that would be to his benefit. The devil had no doubt inserted some kind of loophole or technicality into his contract to allow him to get the better of Shepard, either immediately after he signed it or somewhere later down the line.

But if he didn't take that risk he took another, namely that the people in his world would indeed fail to bring him back, and then without him the galaxy would never be able to adequately unite itself against the Reaper threat, at which point the Repaers would do what they had done several times before: cleanse the galaxy of all life they deemed to be too advanced to continue living. And that was something Shepard simply could not allow.

But that didn't mean he was going to just jump blindly into an obviously bad deal.

"Can you show me what's happening in the world right now? I want to see them try to bring me back before I sign your contract"

Lucifer frowned as Shepard said this. "You really do know how to take all the risk out of a gamble. Shame on you. But I suppose if you're so desperate to see your own corpse, why don't you just take a peek over here…"

And as he said this the Devil stepped to the side, as he did revealing a window-sized circular hole in the void through which Shepard was able to see what was currently transpiring, and also what had already happened following his death.

He saw what had happened to those of his crew that had survived: Liara had set herself up as some kind of information broker on Illium, and seemed to be absorbed completely into work of some unknown nature but clearly high importance.

Wrex had returned to his homeworld to try and at last unite the Krogans under one banner as all the while he fought tooth and nail to give his people a future. Tali too had returned to her people, being hailed as a hero before being sent off to another planet before she had spent hardly any time back home.

But it was Garrus whose fate was of the most note to Shepard. Apparently the Turian had gone to Omega and was waging some kind of war with the criminals who resided there. And along the way he gathered allies from all walks of life to help him, much as Shepard himself had done in his hunt for Saren.

The fates of Kaidan and the rest of the crew were of no surprise to Shepard: they had simply been reassigned by the Alliance and carried on as was, no doubt trying to put what had happened behind them to the best of their ability. The only noteworthy things Shepard saw was how apparently Kaidan was being sent out to the outer colonies beyond Alliance borders, and how Joker was the one Alliance man who was nowhere to be found...

And then there was Shepard himself.

Lucifer had not been exaggerating when he said Shepard was now just meat and tubes. So repulsive was the sight of what his body had been reduced to that Shepard could only look at it for a second before turning away in disgust. From the other side of the beyond he could hear various voices frantically shouting out orders and status reports, none of which sounded good.

Then the scene begin to shift and to change before Shepard's eyes, and slowly but surely his body began to look like a body again. Skin returned to cover the flesh, limbs were regrown, bones repaired. Soon Shepard's body looked in many respects like it had never been through any kind of harm at all.

And yet the final parts of the procedure lagged behind. Shepard could see that for all of their reconstructing him cell by cell, bone by bone, their attempts to bring life back into him were simply not working. Like Frankenstein if the beast had never awoken from it's operating table.

And if Shepard did awake, he had the deep fear that Lucifer's prediction was correct: that if Shepard was revived successfully he would not be himself. Merely an empty shell that could do nothing more than follow basic commands like any synthetic but lacking in the things that made him who he was. And of course that would be a waste. In the time it was taking to bring him back, they could have raised a dozen armies. But they already had soldiers. They needed a leader. And a re-animated corpse without a soul was no leader.

Shepard turned back to face Lucifer, who bore a proud grin of superiority on his bronze face as he held out the contract and quill. "Tick-tock commander. Time is running out. What is your decision?"

Shepard stared at the contract and then at Lucifer. "Can you promise that when I come back I'll be me as I was? No demonic presence or any other sign that you were involved?"

"Of course. When you wake up it will be as if you had never left the mortal world. Guarantee it. In fact, I'll shake on it." Again, Lucifer outstretched a hand. Shepard eyed it with a wary look before at last taking it. To his surprise it felt not burning hot as he would have imagined but rather the very opposite. Cold as ice.

"Excellent. So yes, you'll come back free of my influence, not a devil's mark to be had. Assuming of course you sign your name here"

"In blood I take it?" Shepard asked.

"Of course. But I'll make it simple for you: just take the quill and write. No cutting necessary"

Skeptical but nevertheless complying, Shepard took the quill and wrote his name on it. As he did he felt his other hand cry out in pain as if a knife blade had slashed across it. And sure enough, the letters that showed up were blood red.

"Excellent. The deal is sealed" And then with a chuckle and a snap of his fingers, Lucifer disappeared along with the void and Shepard again was assailed with a bright light, but this time it was not the light of eternal bliss but rather the first light of waking up.

And it was then that Commander Shepard returned at last.