Author's Note: This is a nonspecific male Commander Shepard, and an AU why the heck not ending to Mass Effect 3 that may or may not make sense, but... frankly, neither did the ending the game actually gave us.
Bioware and EA own Mass Effect and all trademarks. I'm just playing in their sandbox. No infringement or disrespect offered or intended.
London
Earth
At the foot of the beam
He's bleeding out. Shepard turns off his HUD alarm with numb fingers. He doesn't care to know the numbers. He knows the truth.
"I can't do this alone."
You're not alone, skipper. The whisper slides into his mind, touched with a faint, paradoxical warm/cold sensation that skips along his spine like ice-edged feathers. It's warm because it's Ash, and Ash has always had his back, even though she's been dead for years. Which explains the cold.
Never alone, Shepard. Thane appears from the shadows around the beam site, his form half substantial, but as lethal as ever.
Shepard blinks, because he's long since grown used to seeing Ashley, but Thane has never shown so much as a ghostly scale before. "Thane? Why are you - ?"
He's here for you. We're all here for you. Kaidan crouches down next to him, looking whole and calm as he ever was, and entirely unlike the man whose head had been bashed into a pulp on Mars.
Come on, dumbass. Jack - God, he'd last seen her as a Cerberus Phantom! - ripples into existence and shifts from foot to foot, one hip cocked defiantly and her Avenger cradled in one arm. You gotta get moving. Galaxy's not gonna save itself.
Yeah. Grunt kicks at some chunked masonry; Shepard thinks somewhat wildly that he looks good for someone who'd gone down fighting Reaperized rachni swarms. Unfinished business, Shepard. Come on, don't make me regret taking you as my battlemaster.
Shepard ignores the sensation of growing cold, the sticky collection of blood in what remains of his scorched and melted armor. He has so many dead, there are so many names written against his side of the ledger., so very many regrets. "Why….? Why now?"
One last battle. Even as a ghost, Wrex is a behemoth of shifting armor and massive plates, shotgun in hand. One last charge. The old krogan's laugh rattles in his chest. One last stand. It'll be glorious, Shepard.
We're all here, Commander. Cortez, looking a great deal more comfortable than Shepard ever remembered seeing him in field armor and cradling a gun with easy familiarity, materializes out of the smoke that drifts across the battlefield.
"Steve. No. You…" He coughs, tastes blood.
Got shot down? Yeah. It happens. But I plan on using that. Cortez' blue eyes gleam. At least I can back you up now, at the end of things.
"The end… of all things." Shepard closes his eyes, knows he shouldn't. Knows there's a very real possibility that he won't open them again if he does.
All things end, Shepard. Samara's voice comes very close to his ear. It is up to you to decide if this ends well.
Shepard opens his eyes, sees the pale gleam of Samara's inches away, ice-gray and full of calm conviction. In the middle distance, he can hear the electronic feedback scream of a Reaper, and the shuffling and muted moans of husks. He smells blood and charred flesh, and knows it's his own. If he fights now, he will die, and he knows it.
Shepard looks around, sees the ghostly shapes of almost everyone he's ever loved, ever lost to this godforsaken war, and he drags himself upright. "Let's do this."
He shuffles for the beam on broken limbs, ribs grating against each other with every jarring step. Husks stagger toward him like a pack of hunting hounds, but it's not the gun that's somehow still in Shepard's bleeding hands that stops them. Garrus appears from nowhere with a turian war cry, and a barrage of spectral bullets mow the husks down like so much grain.
The beam is bright, like entering the light everyone tells you not to go toward when you're dying. The irony twists Shepard's mouth into something of a rictus grin as the beam takes him, attenuates him, shoots him skyward like a spear from the gods. He reforms in the Citadel, or thinks he does.
Somehow, he finds the Illusive Man, and Anderson. He'll have to be dead a hundred years before he wants to think about what happens to Anderson. The Illusive Man, thankfully, does not appear once he's finally dead. Maybe Harbinger corrupted enough of him that he has no soul. Maybe he never had one to begin with. Doesn't matter. It's a relief.
He and Anderson are not alone as they watch the battle outside the Citadel, his squad, his ghosts, his friends standing respectfully silent until Anderson's chest just… stops rising. He isn't alone when the floor rises, when a Reaper in the form of a child tells him that organic life is futile, that he has to choose who lives and who dies.
"No," Shepard whispers through cracked and broken lips. "No, I don't. Not anymore." He closes his eyes, just for a moment. This time it'll be just for a moment. He just doesn't have many moments left.
Do it. Anderson is there, Alliance blues gleaming with ghostly light. Give the order, Shepard.
Shepard smiles, very faintly. "Now."
Kaidan and Mordin and Tali - sweet, brilliant Tali, dead on Rannoch - insinuate themselves into the Reaper child's avatar, transforming into ghostly coding that moves with cold, cutting brilliance through the Old Machine's systems. They don't need art or hacking brilliance, although they have it. They simply disrupt and destroy. Jack and Samara unleash waves of biotics that glow like ice and phosphorous and hit like nuclear blasts. Grunt and Wrex, Cortez, Thane and Garrus and Ashley, Ashley, whom he'd loved… they're all maelstroms of ghostlight and gunfire, spectral explosions and destruction of everything in the room. Through the noise of the Old Machine's screaming, Shepard can hear laughter. It might be Jack's. The roar of how d'you like that, you sonofabitch! is definitely James.
The Reaper howls, Harbinger's familiar electronic feedback scream ripping through the chamber on fresh shockwaves. The sonic booms of explosions rock the deckplates. Shepard hopes it's the Reaper armada exploding and not more of the Alliance's capital ships. "Ash… Did…." His seconds are trickling like sand through his fingers. He can feel them.
You got it done, Shepard.
"No. You. All of you…."
We're marines. He can't see Kaidan, not even the glow of him, but he can hear him. We stick together.
Shepard wants to salute, to pay tribute to the finest people he's ever known, but his limbs are no longer his to control, and conciousness is only a fast-fading memory.
Your job is done, son. Anderson's bass rumble can be heard, even over the explosions and the slowing thud of his own heartbeat. Stand down. You've earned your rest.
It's been an honor, he wants to say, but he can't. It doesn't matter. Shepard knows his squad can read the words in the faint smile that curves his mouth. And then the sands run out for him, and in the gleaming white light that follows, they're waiting for him.
They're all waiting for him.