"I'm a coward," Tom Shepard said to Admiral Shala'Raan vas Rannoch.

She turned to look at where he was, somehow, slumped in a folding chair and tilted her head quizzically.

"Did I just hear," she said deliberately, "the man who drove an armored car through a gauntlet of Geth fire into a tiny mass effect relay to save the Citadel, the man who went through the Omega-314 relay without a second thought, the man who made peace between us and the Geth by putting himself between the two fleets, say that he is a coward?"

"I guess you wouldn't think it to look at me," he said with a sigh. "But I am," he continued as he took another pull on the bottle of Guinness he'd stashed for this occasion.

"Why?" the admiral said as she somehow managed to give Tom a piercing gaze despite her helmet.

He thought about for a minute, then sighed. "Ah, I need to tell someone. It's a long story, though."

"I have time," Shala replied as she turned her chair to face him.

"Okay," he said. "You know that I was born a colonist on Mindoir, right?"

"Yes."

"I was sixteen when the batarians hit the place. My entire extended family was there, out to the first cousins. There was also this girl named Emily, who I was dating at the time."

"Did you love her?"

"I was planning on asking her to marry me," he said flatly, and he could feel himself beginning to detach slightly as he continued. "I was with Emily when it happened—we split up to get back to our families, defend the homesteads. I got to mine just in time to see a batarian blow up the gas tanks. I killed him right after that, but…" he shook himself, then continued. "I tried to get to her house right after that, but there were too many of them."

He stopped for a moment, then started again in a harsher tone, "So I ran for the hills, along with a few others. We came back down when the batarians left and the Alliance marines finally showed up."

"What happened to Emily?"

"I didn't find out for years, not 'til the Alliance captured the ship that hit Mindoir, but she died taking down one of the slavers that tried to subdue her."

"Impressive for one so young."

"She always was a fighter," Tom said in the same distant tone he'd been speaking in before reverting back to normal as he returned to the tale. "After that, I knew I didn't want to have that happen to anyone else, so I joined the Alliance the day I turned eighteen."

"Were you an officer?"

"No. I came in as a private, and I worked my way up from there. I was a sergeant on shore leave when the Skyllian Blitz hit."

"What happened?"

Tom's voice grew distant again. "I'd had nightmares about Mindoir more than once, and initially it played like one. Alarms going off, warnings of hostile spaceships coming in, and for a moment I froze," his voice became hard, "but then I remembered that I had a gun, and backup. So I rallied everyone I could find with a weapon and headed off to go save some humans and kill some criminals."

His voice went soft. "I got my vengeance for Mindoir that day. Oh, how I did. There wasn't a single human taken from Elysium to be enslaved and tortured, and there wasn't a single one of the scum who landed that day who left alive. That burned away what had consumed me for years, and I was glad of it."

He took a quick pull from the Guinness before he continued with his voice back to normal, "Anyway, the Alliance noticed, and I got the Star of Terra and a commission. I won't bore you with the details, but I ended up going through N7 training while fast-tracking to the rank of commander.

Then I was assigned to the Normandy, and, well, you know what happened after—well, most of it, anyway."

"Most of it?"

"Not everything makes it into the reports, Admiral. You should know that," he said with a grin, which faded a little bit as he kept going. "It really shouldn't have worked. Just on the regular ship's crew, I had a slightly xenophobic navigator, a completely relaxed engineer, a veteran doctor who was somehow also a romantic, and a pilot who refused to stop joking 'til things hit the fan. And the squad," he shook his head a bit, chuckling to himself as he did so, "was even worse. A biotic lieutenant with a chip on his shoulder from incompetent training, a gunnery sergeant with a vaguely xenophobic streak that came from the chip on her shoulder regarding the Alliance's treatment of her family, a turian would-be cowboy cop, an old krogan mercenary battlemaster, a naïve asari archeologist whose mother was allied to the man we were hunting down, and a quarian admiral's daughter out on her pilgrimage. It really shouldn't have worked—and we certainly shouldn't have become friends!—but both of those things happened."

He paused for a minute and leaned forward in his chair. "Everyone just all fit somehow. Kaidan kept to himself, mostly, although he was sociable enough—especially with Garrus, somehow those two bonded over combat tech and computer programming. Liara and Dr. Chakwas became friends, which was a good thing, as far as I was concerned, especially after I had to tell her that I wasn't interested romantically in her, and then her mother died in front of her. Chakwas was like a mother to her, which she needed.

Tali tended to stick around in the engine room a lot—she and Adams really hit it off, but she could talk with Garrus and Kaidan about tech and programming when they could draw her out." He chuckled briefly. "For some reason, Garrus, Wrex, and Ashley, of all people, managed to bond over weaponry. Don't ask me how it happened, but somehow it did. I suspect all that time down in the hold had something to do with it." He paused for a minute. "Ash…" he said softly as he looked at the admiral. "Do you know how we met?"

"Not the details, but Tali told me the broad strokes."

"She reminded me of me after Mindoir and before Elysium, in a lot of ways," he said, voice still soft. "Survivor's guilt coming out her ears because everyone else died while she ran away. She couldn't have done anything else, but…guilt's still there."

"You became romantically attached," Shala stated.

"I did. Not because of that, but that's how it started. I was trying to help her get out of the funk she was in, but then as I got to know her..." he chuckled a bit. "It was strange. Since I was sixteen, I'd never gotten interested in a woman that way. There was never time for that. Then I start chasing a rogue Spectre allied with omnicidal machines and I fall in love—and, to top it off, I fall in love with someone who's technically my subordinate. And she fell in love with me as well." He paused. "So many regs broken with that relationship. Only way I could justify it was that we'd go our separate ways once it was all done."

He paused.

"Then Virmire happened. When it came time to choose who was going where, I knew who was going with Kirrahe's group and who was going to guard the bomb the moment the choice was presented to me."

"How did you know?"

"Kaidan was a good soldier then, same as now, but he was better at support than anything else. Putting him on the bomb meant getting him killed to no good purpose. Ash was also a good soldier, but if I'd put her with Kirrahe's team, she would have gotten herself killed trying to protect them, which would've kept her from acting as communications liaison."

He shook himself, then continued. "Virmire was bad. Tali told you about it, I imagine."

"She did."

"Yeah. When it came time to choose…" he paused and sighed. "I knew which was the right call to make. Saren was gunning for me, and wherever I went, he would go. If he got to the bomb and took it out, we would fail. But…"

"You hesitated, didn't you, Captain?"

"Yes, I did, Admiral. For two seconds I paused before going to get Kaiden and Kirrahe out of the mess they were in. Because I loved the woman I'd left to guard the bomb." He took another pull from the Guinness.

"I kept it out of my mind 'til we killed Saren. I spent the rest of the next few months in a deep blue funk over the whole thing. I'd botched things badly, and I knew it. Definitely a reminder of why you don't develop relationships with your subordinates, even if they're reciprocating.

When the Normandy got hit by the Collectors, and I went hurtling out into space…I was okay with that. I thought maybe I'd see Ash again.

Instead, well," he shrugged, "I didn't. Instead, I woke up in a Cerberus facility to a woman named Miranda Lawson telling me to get moving or die.

Then I set to gathering a team. Again, shouldn't have worked. The ship's crew—some were survivors from the Old Normandy, including, again, Joker and Chakwas, some were Cerberus loyalists, and some were hired. Heh. The engineers bickered like an old married couple, I'm pretty sure the yeoman was a nymphomaniac, and ship was half-run by an AI. The squad started with two Cerberus members with a romantic history, one of which was a genetic experiment who joined to keep her sister safe, while the other was former Alliance and hated bureaucracy. As to the others…I picked up a turian cowboy cop turned vigilante, a salarian doctor with ties to their intel community and involvement with the genophage, a psychotic biotic caused by Cerberus, a morally conflicted Drell assassin, an asari legal vigilante, a Krogan genengineered to be perfect, a super-thief, an old warhorse of a mercenary, and, unexpectedly, a Geth."

"Somehow it all worked. Tali, Garrus, Joker and Chakwas took up like it was old times. Thane kept to himself, mostly, although he, Garrus, and Zaeed could talk for hours about sniper rifles and jobs. Kasumi ran all over the ship while cloaked, Miranda and Mordin got along for reasons I still don't quite understand, Grunt and Jack talked a lot, Jacob and Garrus bonded over their insistence on having everything just so, Samara mostly stayed on the starboard observation deck…it reminded me a bit of the old Normandy, just a bit more rushed."
Shepard paused. "Would've been nice if Kaiden hadn't just blown me off on Horizon, though. Would've been good to have him along for the ride." He sighed, took another swig, then continued.

"After the Collectors took the crew, and we went through the Omega Relay…well, I'll not lie, finishing them left a good feeling inside. Taking out the Shadow Broker and putting Liara in his place? Awesome. Forestalling the arrival of the Reapers by crashing an asteroid into a mass relay and killing 300,000 people? Not awesome."

"Then the Reapers came, and everything went to pieces." He paused, then kept going.

"Some old faces, some new. Tali, Liara, Garrus and Kaidan are back with me. Feels like the hunt for Saren, sometimes. Then I'll look around for Ashley and realize she isn't there, and neither is Wrex, although at least he's still alive. I'd never met Vega before the attack, but he's pulled his weight with the rest—and having EDI as a squad member is—interesting. The bickering engineers are back, and so are Joker and Chakwas. The comms specialist is a wargame addict, and the shuttle pilot is angst-riddled over the loss of his…spouse.

It's been a bit of a ride—having to deal with letting guys down gently instead of girls, EDI getting a body, watching Garrus finally come into his own, repairing my friendship with Kaiden, seeing Mordin and Wrex's dreams realized…not worth the cost, but at least there's some good."

"Captain," Shala said softly, "there's someone you haven't mentioned in there."

"Yes," Tom said after he took another pull. "Tali. I know." He paused. "It started at Freedom's Progress. Well, it had sort of started back during the hunt for Saren. I was impressed by her then, but…she was twenty-two, I was twenty-nine, and she reminded me of my little sister more than anything else.

Well, when I saw her at Freedom's Progress two years later, I realized that she'd grown. Then, on Haestrom, I realized just how much she'd grown. Then, after going after her father during that trial…I realized that I'd still underestimated her.

"But I couldn't tell her then. Couldn't tell it to myself. Couldn't let what happened on Virmire happen again. Not when the chances for survival for all of us were so low already. Then, after we hit the Collector base…well, there wasn't time. She had to get back to the fleet—where she's done an amaing job, by the way, she's come a long way—and I had to go on trial for killing 300,000 batarians."

"Why not now?"

"Why, Admiral?" Shepard said. "Because I'm going to die."

"You're going to die. Didn't you already die?"

"I'm not sure if I actually died or not after the Normandy went down. All I know is this. When I was going after Saren, for some reason I knew I'd make it. I didn't know who else would, but somehow I knew I would, that there was something more for me to do. When it came time to hunt down the Collectors, I had that same feeling. But now…" he paused.

"What?"

"I keep thinking about something my father said to me, that a good shepherd dies for the sheep. And I don't have that feeling like I'm going to live through this. I have a debt to pay, Admiral, for Mindoir, for Ash, for all the victims of the Collectors I arrived too late for and the batarians I killed and all the many, many dead I couldn't save."

He stopped for a moment, then started again.

"When I go to Earth, Admiral, I won't be coming back. And I am not going to do to Tali what's been done to me. Twice. Besides," he smiled a bit, "I think Garrus and Tali are reaching an understanding." He then took a final swig of beer and sighed. "I can't even get drunk on anything except Ryncol anymore. And drunkenness is the only excuse to be this maudlin and self-pitying."

Shala found herself shaking her head. "Quarians know something about loss, Shepard," she said softly. "And we know something about sacrificing our own happiness for others, and about finding it again in theirs. You've done all of that, by all accounts. Again, and again, and again. There's nothing here to ashamed of, Shepard."

"Thanks, Shala," Shepard said softly. "That means a lot. More than you know. But I should go. There's more work to be done," he said as he turned and got up to leave. "I'll see you at the Citadel. I wish you and yours all the best. And please, don't tell Tali about this."

"I would not even have considered it," Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay replied. "Every captain needs someone to unburden to. You will do the right thing, Shepard. Of that I am certain."

"I hope you're right. Thank you," he said, and left.

As he stood, floating above Earth, watching stars flare briefly before dying away, he remembered her words. What to do? Destroy, and possibly cause catastrophe and wipe out the geth he'd fought so hard to save, and EDI? Control, and possibly lose himself to the Reapers and finish what they'd started? Or synthesis, which would be done by…magic, he supposed, and which presented the possibility of a galaxy controllable by the Reapers, populated entirely by hackable beings. Refusal was not an option, they'd fought too hard for that. No sacrifice in vain.

Perhaps the Catalyst lied, or was mistaken. He hoped so.

Forgive me, Tali, he thought as he staggered forward and raised his pistol, visions of his loves and his friends flashing through his mind. This ends now, he thought, and fired, emptying his pistol into the device.

And he stood there as the Citadel fell to pieces around him, and he felt a girder swat him aside, and as he lost consciousness he fell again, falling through the vacuum of space. But this time…he'd won. It was over. Nothing incomplete. Wish I'd got to see the afterparty, he thought, before all was obliterated in white light.

Ashley?

Emily?

Is that you?

Seems weird for this to break my hiatus from writing, I know, but I've been playing Mass Effect recently, and this offered the chance to do some commentary, and provide an example of what I suspect is a little-done path in-game.