Greetings readers.
This isn't my first fanfiction, but I decided to actually post something, instead of keeping it for myself.
For context, this is right after the events of the opening cinematic of Mass Effect 2, from Ashley Williams' point of view.
For those who dig details, the Shepard in this fic is based off of the default (in terms of looks) male Shepard: Spacer kid and Akuze survivor.
I love making cross-franchise references! But this is NOT a crossover! If you catch the references, put them in a comment so I can spot some fellow fans. This will include RL people who work at game studios, game/show/movie character names, sayings, etc.
At the end of each chapter, I'll try to include the name of a song I listened to while writing. Songs are a lovely source of inspiration and energy when putting ideas into words!
With love,
The Seraph
P.S.
I suppose I have to make that silly note about how all Mass Effect content in this belongs to Bioware. Well, duh.
One.
~Phoenix is Dead~
I was planetside again, back on Amaterasu with my mother, who had the demeanor of an over-enthusiastic Catholic New Jersey housewife.
I showed up on my family's doorstep on a snowy afternoon, with my duffel bag and tired eyes. It was a blooming spring, but a layer of snow had managed to cover everything. Amaterasu never ceased to surprise me. Our house was in a charming neighborhood of old colonist homes, mere miles away from the ultra-contemporary high-rise downtown part of the city, that so desperately wanted to mimic the horizons of Illium.
I straightened up my posture as I held in every broken piece of my being before ringing the bell. Mom's eyes lit up as she found her daughter at the door. I was greeted with overzealous hugs and kisses once it registered in Mom's head that it was me at her door.
"Ashley Madeline Williams!" she exclaimed. In my family, full names were used when we were in trouble, but I couldn't quite tell if Mom was mad or not. "You were in the vids! You were on the Citadel during the...thing!"
"I know Mom, I was there," I mumbled with a meek smile, not quite sure if that was a suitable answer, as she locked me in a smothering hug. I looked behind her towards the house as Mom exclaimed how much she missed me. It was a typical overgrown old colonist home with a well-kept garden of exotic flowers and domestic vegetables, covered in an atypical layer of snow. It hadn't changed a bit since I'd left it years ago. She finally let go and held me by my shoulders at arm's-length to inspect me.
"Of course you'd forget to change out of your darn military garb before coming home," she complained as I looked down at the clothes I left the Normandy in-minus the armor. Mom squinted as she found a new scar along my collarbone. "How did this happen? Do your sisters know about this?" she began to rant as she touched it. "Your father always called to tell me how he was. Why haven't you sent me a thing? It's been two months! Where have you been? How have you been?" she rambled on. I stopped listening as her mouth ran at about a mile a minute through a vast array of emotions. One second she was on the brink of tears as she talked about how worried she was, then her eyes lit up with a sense of pride when she mentioned the interview of Shepard she saw with me in the background.
Shepard. Commander Jethro Lehto Shepard of the SSV Normandy. The thought of him was fresh and painful; my heart ached at his name.
"Oh, your father would be so proud!" Mom continued in a squeal. "The man who survived Akuze and saved the Citadel as the first human Spectre! My daughter fought alongside that Commander Shepard! I bet you saved his ass several times, too!" She talked with a grin from ear-to-ear and her hands up, as though she were making jazz-hands.
"Mom..." I tried meekly to interrupt.
"Did you know that your grandfather-"
"Mother, he's-" I tried again with crossed arms and an equally cross expression on my face.
She didn't notice. "-taught Hannah Shepard? She's an admiral, you know." At this point, I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and scream. Mother had a hard time shutting up sometimes. I wonder if I have the same problem. "Now don't think that just because I'm the head of the house now means that I don't keep up with Alliance news. I'm always looking out for you, darling."
"Mom, you don't-"
"You're right, I'm rambling!" she assumed. "Anyways, dear, isn't it just a small world, after all? I bet that Shepard boy talks to his mother more often! She must be worried sick."
You have no idea, I retorted back in my mind. She started moving my head around, looking for more scars to freak out over as she continued to ramble on about Hannah Shepard and her son Jethro.
"Mom!" I shouted as I stomped my foot and dropped my bag to the snowy ground. Snow flew away from the ground as my bag landed, leaving us in a moment of muted snowfall.
"What, dear?" she gasped, holding up her hand to her heart in one elegant motion.
"Shepard is dead," I let out with tears welling up in my eyes. I hung my head, fighting back the tears in the quiet snowfall of Amaterasu. For a minute, we just stood silently. The only sounds emanating around us were cars flying past the rows of houses around us and accumulated piles of snow falling off the still-green vegetation.
My struggles proved futile when a tear slipped away from my tired eye, noiselessly falling into the snow below. She lifted my head up, framing my face with her hands, forcing me to face her.
"We've mourned before, and we'll have to mourn again, Ashley," she said, her voice low with a wise tone of understanding.
My mother was a devout military wife. Despite her worrisome, emotionally-charged rants about the military members of our extended family, she knew when to jump into action. She knew what to do when soldiers showed up at her door with bad news, and I suppose that this was no different. Her eyes turned into a soft expression of understanding, from the previous wide-eyed excitement, and ushered me into the house; out of the cold.
The cold bite that engrossed the air outside quickly changed to a soothing warmth that smelled of the synthetic pine candles that mom was so fond of. She kept everything immaculate after dad died; I assumed that it was a coping mechanism and, seeing how perfect the living room was, a sign that she still hadn't finished mourning. I hadn't either.
The decor was earthy and neutral with green accents everywhere. It was a place where you'd half-expect a bubbling fountain in the corner of the room and a gong on the wall. I landed on our old oversized sofa that was covered in green pillows. I hugged an armful of them and screamed between sobs.
In one fell swoop, I had lost so many people. Their names were written in stone on my heart: Corporal Lucia Stillman- she'd always turn our nasty military food into delicacies. She was the MacGyver of military food; Private 1st Class Dustin Echoes- he was kind of a nerd and hung out in engineering, even though he wasn't assigned there, and he always managed to fix everything that we couldn't. I thought of him as the human version of Tali; and then there was Service Chief Nathan Bitner- he was about as thick-headed and stubborn as I am, and we clicked immediately over a disturbing fascination with weapons.
I kept listing them off. One through twenty I eulogized them in my mind. I stopped before going on to twenty-one.
As I cried, I felt the sofa sink on the other side, indicating that Mom had sat down next to me, listening to every sob and cry that left me-taking it all to heart.
"We were attacked by-" I thought for a moment, trying to compile my memories into words. "-not the Geth. I don't know what it was." I sat up to continue debriefing my mother on my experience. "We were sitting in the garage."
"You and Shepard?" she inquired. I nodded. I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue; if going through it again would help or hinder my mental state. Whether or not I even wanted to help myself at this point was a mystery. I wondered how easy it would be to just hide forever and never think of what happened ever again. I didn't want to accept it.
"Just chatting away as we cleaned out weapons and gear," I finished, leaving out the scandalous details. The knowing expression on my mother's face told me that she knew what I had left out.
I recalled how Shepard and I sat on the floor, like children in a sandbox, reminiscing over what we did over our month-long shore leave after we'd defeated Saren.
He was in and out of award ceremonies and conferences, while I opted to crash on couches throughout the galaxy. We ran into each other on occasion, and he asked me to keep him company during boring political events that the Alliance dragged him to. But not the kind of company we gave each other on the night before Ilos. We weren't stupid, after all.
As we sat, the awkward doe-eyed looks we gave each other became more frequent, and less subtle. Eventually, the garage cleared out as it was announced that it was chow time. Neither of us gave food any care, though.
The absence of others around us left us in dangerous waters, if you know what I mean. I looked up from the rifle I was cleaning with a smirk, finding him gaping at me with a devilish gleam in his eyes. I rolled my eyes, keeping my smirk, trying to keep us both from passing a point of no return. We both let out an uneasy laugh, wordlessly agreeing not to go any further with the flirtatious staring contest.
"We were interrupted by Joker over the comm. system," I recalled, letting my heart race the same way it did when I heard Joker's panicked voice.
"Joker?" Mom asked.
"The pilot," I smiled through the tears as I recalled Joker. "He preferred it to Flight Lieutenant Jeff Moreau. I don't blame him. The guy is rather... informal." She nodded in understanding, and I continued. "I've never heard Joker sound so afraid before," I added. Mom let her jaw drop a little, as though she wanted to say something, but decided against it at the last second.
"He shouted out, 'brace for evasive maneuvers!' after saying something about how our pursuers weren't the Geth." When I finished talking, I was gasping softly, staring at the floor and found my hands up in front of me, as if I were bracing myself for something headed my way. I paused to fight a sob for a moment, bringing back to mind how Shepard and I jumped up in alarm.
He wordlessly pulled me towards our armor lockers by my arm. Keeping our balance was getting harder to do as the ship's gravity systems were trying to cope with Joker's flying. Upon tearing open the lockers in a rush, we dressed faster than a minuteman, helping each other suit up at a lightning pace, and headed towards the elevator, our helmets still in hand.
As we waited for the elevator to move up, I stared up at his face, which was frozen in stoic thought; his eyes narrowing as we gathered in the sounds of collected panic emanating from the ship. Before he could put his helmet on, I left a brief kiss on his cheek, but neither of us smiled or felt the usual comforting warmth that came with such expressions of affection. A loud blast emanated from behind us; from, where we hoped, was the empty garage. He looked down at me, lacking any glimmer of comfort in his eyes, and returned a brief kiss to my cheek. We put on our helmets just as the elevator let us out, and we entered the chaos.
"Shepard ordered us to evacuate the ship. We'd already lost people from whatever hit us. I insisted that I stay to help Shepard get Joker off of the ship," I continued.
"He ushered me into one of the escape pods before he stuffed Joker into another."
The pod dethatched from the fiery Normandyas I kept my face glued to the window, scanning the devastation in front of me for any sign of survival. The last pod dethatched, leaving me with nothing left to do but hope that both Shepard and Joker escaped.
"I saw him, Mom," I choked out. She held me close, trying to protect me from the demons that spawned from what I'd seen. "Floating in space above the Normandy, writhing in pain as the air escaped..." I couldn't continue further. She cradled me for a long while until I couldn't cry anymore.
"We didn't even say good-bye..." I trailed on in a whisper. She put me at arms' length to send me a tired smile.
"Have we ever been given such a luxury?" she asked, referring to dad, the twin cousins who lost their lives in the Kepler Verge, and an aunt who is still considered missing in action.
"He stuffed me into an escape pod and left m- us," I quickly corrected.
"I caught that," Mom countered, with that motherly tone of humor in her voice. She quickly dropped my slip-up, though. "You know how it goes," she began.
Ever since Dad died, we'd always quote the poems that suckered him in. When we lost the twins and Aunt Halsey, we'd recite Ulysses.
"Yeah, I remember," I sighed, sinking into the pile of pillows even more.
Mom started, "Death closes all: but something ere the end..."
I closed my eyes tightly, praying that I could recite the poem aloud without erupting into tears again. "...Some work of noble note..."
A floodgate of memories opened, letting the last year flash past me. The Spectres, Saren, the Citadel, Akuze ,Virmire... My memories started to scream as I continued to list his noble work. He saved me,as I thought of how he left Kaidan. Ilos, the conduit, Sovereign. That night.
"...may yet be done." I shut my eyes when the poem ended, forcing myself to watch him die in the cold vacuum of space as I screamed his name from the safety of the escape pod.
"And noble work was certainly something he managed to do before he... departed," she pointed out. "I hope that you opt to do the same, Ash." She stood and went into the study in silence. I completely buried myself in pillows, trying to mute my sobs again.
Tears eventually ceased. My head buzzed with such mental fatigue as I fought sleep, out of fear of what my dreams would have in store for me.
I lost the fight when I slipped under the siren's call of rest.
I woke up to the sound of a high-pitched squeal that followed the sound of the front door opening and a backpack hitting the floor.
Sarah, I thought, sitting up to greet her.
"Sis!" she screamed, hugging me while I was still sitting down. I returned the hug, legitimately happy to see her again. By now she was getting ready to finish high school within a month or two, and I ended up missing a good chunk of those years. Before I could dig deeper into my laundry list of regrets, Sarah interrupted my sorrowful train of thought.
"You look like hell," she said, as her expression dropped into a sincere look of empathy. I wasn't sure what to say to her. I was convinced that I'd start choking on my words through tears if I tried to explain the whole thing again. The idea of crying in front of my little sister was painful; better I tell her, though, than the news vids telling her first about what happened.
"Sit down, Sarah." I moved the pillows aside to make room for her. Sarah didn't relinquish her gaze towards me; her expression was painted with fear and wide-eyed dread.
I explained to her what happened, with as little detail as possible. She stayed quiet after I wiped away the only tear that escaped while I talked. I was unsure if Sarah realized what gravity this whole thing had over my heart. As far I could tell, Sarah understood this as being a close-call, and the commander that she oogled over in the news vids months earlier had died in the process. In essence, that's what happened.
However, this was so much more than a casualty count. I heard that reaper on Virmire had to say, and I knew what was coming. Nobody believed Shepard, thus absolutely nobody would heed my warning.
Sarah and I sat on the sofa in silence, watching the news vids, waiting for the news to break. It didn't come. The Alliance managed to keep this quiet, surprisingly enough. It'll come out eventually. It's not like we could pretend this never happened, although I wish I could.
The news vids dropped his name once in a while, as did my heart whenever they did.
I cried, "Shepard is dead," while the world was still chanting, "Long live Shepard."
Writing Soundtrack:
"Dust in the Wind" (Cover) by Melanie Safka
"Not Dark Yet" by Bob Dylan
"Mint" by Dunderpatrullen
