Hello everyone! And welcome to 'I need an outlet for all my Mass Effect feels', aka 'All That Comes After'! As of right now, I have no definite plans to continue this, but I do have some ideas and some drabbles written that can easily turn into other chapters. (Let's be honest, I just started another play through and will be once again overcome with feels, so expect more at some point.)

Anyways, if I do continue, expect the rating to change, characters to make some appearance, love interests to come back, and a tirade on wacky situations that I truly wish to happen.

Enjoy!

(Oh and for the sake of saying it Bioware owns literally everything included a huge amount of my income and at least half my soul.)

When you wake up, the first thing you notice is a severe lack of pain - the last thing you remember is pain, an abhorrent amount, down to the very fiber of your being, so the lack thereof is welcomed. But concerning. Too afraid to open your eyes, afraid of what this whole 'afterlife' is really going to be (you hope Kaiden and Mordin are there, Thane too, but your ears feel full of cotton and you can't seem to get your mouth to work, so you lay in the familiar darkness without calling out to them), you try to take stock of what you know for certain:

The reapers are gone. So are the Mass Relays, The Citadel, the geth.

And Legion. And EDI. You hope to see them here too. (Do machines go to an afterlife?, you ponder. Hopefully they do, at least these two machines do - they were innocents in this, fighting to the very end to rid the universe of this threat only to succumb to the same twisted game that ended up being the only way to do so. You feel guilty, which is the first feeling you have in the afterlife. You decide you don't want to, not right now, and push it down for later.)

(You wonder, for a second, if Anderson made it too. You quickly decide that he has to have gone to somewhere better than where you ended up; he was a hero, he was your idol and from day one he believed in you. He is what legends are really made of - yeah, you stopped the reapers. And the Collectors. Saren. Various other threats ranging from mild to 'the fate of the galaxy is resting on your shoulders'. But without David Anderson you would have been just another grunt, without so much as an opportunity to prove yourself that way. Everything you are and everything you had, you owe to him.)

Slowly, as you lay there wondering who and what you'll meet here (you hope, pray, that you ended up in a place a million kilometers away from the likes of Kai Lang and The Illusive Man - you then wonder if it is possible to kill someone again in the afterlife, and decide that an eternity of putting your gun to either of their heads over and over definitely isn't the worst way this place could turn out), a tingling starts. It's low, in your toes you think, so you wiggle them slowly without opening your eyes. The tingling intensifies, spreads like wildfire up your legs, over your hips, your chest, down your arms, then over your face. You feel it everywhere, like a pack of swarmers is flying around just under your skin, but before you can really take stock of it the tingling turns to discomfort. And then burning, red fire all over you with no indication (not that you've opened your eyes, of course) of an actual fire. And then pain, white hot in contrast to the burning just a second ago - it's everywhere, blinding, intense, crushing you yet tearing you apart at the same time. A scream is ripped from your throat before you know what's happening, and even through the cotton in your ears you hear it.

As soon as the pain was there, it's gone. Breathing heavily, you welcome the numbness that was at first so terrifying. It washes over you, systematically easing the pain in the same way it came to you. (You note that, next time this happens, you are not going to wiggle your toes.)

'Shepard', you say to yourself in your best Commander voice, the last inkling of pain in your throat from the scream dissipating, 'you need to open your eyes. You need to know where you are. You need to know what happened - people imagine this moment their entire lives.'

'Not me', you retort. You don't even bother to question why on earth you're allowing your first conversation in all of this to be with yourself. 'I've been too busy fighting for the past 5 years to even consider what happens next.'

'Well you're here now. You might as well just do it.'

You have your tongue wrapped around a snide reply, still clinging to the notion that this darkness is safety and you've been in enough danger for one lifetime - for two, even. But you are pulled from your thoughts by a sensation, cool in contrast to the burning earlier, somewhere near what you think is your wrist (Do I even have a body here?, you think, remembering all the beliefs that peg you as some floating intangible spirit or something of the sort when you die - for comfort's sake, for being able to hug all those people you hope to meet here's sake, you hope you still have your body). It feels familiar, comforting, and you feel the corner of your mouth twitch in a weak attempt to smile at the first pleasant feeling since you woke up.

'Now or never.'

Slowly (not slowly by choice though - it turns out to be much more difficult than you imagined it to be, your eyelids feeling like 50 pound weights) you open your eyes. Everything is hazy, too hazy to make out, but you notice a lot of white. Which you think is cliche, far too cliche to accept as fact, so you painfully blink your eyes a few more times. The image clears, slowly, faint shades of blues and purples become visible. There's movement, blurs of color moving around you excitedly. And then things have shapes, shapes you recognize but can't seem to name, not just yet. By the time your vision has cleared (you still can't hear a thing, mind you), the place you are is not at all what you were expecting to find after you died. No old friends, no big greeting party, not even a big man with a billowy white beard.

Nope. It turns out that the afterlife actually just looks a lot like a hospital room.