"What hath night to do with sleep?"
John Milton, Paradise Lost


Commander Shepard dies a hundred times.

Geth shoot her, husks maul her and she is full of holes. She looks down at her stomach and can see out the other side. Blood, red and viscous, drips sluggishly against grey armor and pale skin.

Water closes over her head, space envelopes her completely. Her vision narrows to a pinprick, smaller and more distant than the stars pulsing far overhead. Silence presses against her and steals the air from her lungs.

Commander Shepard dies a hundred times more. Each time, the blackness of oblivion is waiting to greet her.

She wakes up, impossibly twisted in sweat-soaked sheets. She breathes deep gasping breaths of air that smells faintly of ozone and puts her head in her hands. She knots her fingers in her hair and pulls so hard it hurts.

Pain is good. Pain means she is still alive.

She turns on the light beside her bed and flinches away from the sudden flare of brightness. Her eyes adjust quicker than they used, the cybernetics that make her up compensating for the inherent weaknesses of her organic body.

Commander Shepard was brought back from the void less than a month ago. Each night in her dreams, she returns to it.

Fire licks at her limbs, scorching away flesh so the whiteness of bone and the silver of cybernetics are visible. The pain is impossibly intense as her body dissolves into ashes and smoke. The smell of burning hair makes her gag.

A shot rings out and she falls back, feeling blood spill from her throat and down the front of her armor. It coats her in an oil slick of black and red. Her eyes roll back and the word turns sideways, tinted in varying shades of scarlet. She parts her lips in a grotesque parody of a smile. Her teeth are red.

Commander Shepard cannot stop dying. This suicide mission they're on...the only death she's sure of is her own.

She isn't cheating death. Cerberus hasn't defeated the reaper...they've merely delayed him for a while. She lies in her cabin towards the end of the night shift, cybernetic eyes seeing better in the dark than purely human ones ever could.

Below her, the sheets are still damp with sweat. She remembers very little about dying, but when she closes her eyes, the dark embrace of oblivion is waiting for her.

She lets it catch her. Sometimes, it is easier to fall than to fight.

Commander Shepard dies a hundred times without waking. There is no end.


A/N: Yeah for angst! Review and all that.