Author's Note: This story was completed for the Mass Effect Fanfiction Writer's Facebook group October drabble challenge, inspired by music and featuring Shepard and another character. I chose Lindsey Stirling's song "Brave Enough" as my inspiration. Enjoy!
It should have be me, Commander. You know that.
She's wrong.
The choice had been procedurally, pragmatically and morally right amid the circumstances.
Alenko was the officer. He was the senior. He understood and accepted the risk of command.
He was pinned in the AA tower. She was priming the drive core. The mission had to succeed, no matter the cost.
His condition had been worsening over the years, as his implant rotted his brain. He had preserved the maximum years of life by saving her.
Shepard had calculated none of it in the moment.
It was his racing heart, not his head, that had chosen to save her.
You're worried about the crew, aren't you?
He is because he isn't.
He is worried because he wants to know the taste of her mouth, he wants to smell the fragrance of her breath, he wants to memorize the feeling of his palm along every curve of her body.
He is beginning to understand more intimately why there are regulations against this.
Ashley's promise to "blow his mind" is what he worries about most. She is already constantly in his thoughts. It was luck and only luck that had concealed his folly before.
She is want, could and may.
He has always been need, should and shall.
I'm not leaving either
Amid the boughs steel and the plumage of flame that wreaths them, he watches the small, silver pods.
Unlike the twisting, jagged, broken bones of the Normandy bending and twisting and falling through the empty, the pods move in slow, serene, straight lines.
The glow of the small engines are like fireflies upon the night sky.
He wonders which one is hers as he watches them skim the orbit of Alchera.
Shepard feels the heavy hand of gravity wrap around his body as he accelerates into the atmosphere.
The crew will honor his sacrifice.
Maybe someday, she will forgive him.
I spent the last two years believing you were dead
He spent the last two years being put back together, cell by cell.
He spent the last two months rebuilding a crew capable of the mission.
He spent the last two weeks chasing whispers of Collectors around the galaxy.
He spent the last two days preparing for Horizon, studying every detail.
He spent the last two hours failing to save the colony, despite the preparation.
He spent the last two minutes forgetting how to breathe as every memory of Ashley Williams rushed back into the forefront of his mind.
He spent the last two seconds watching her walk away.
Alone.
I read a lot of Tennyson, thinking about you, just like I did when my dad passed
He blinks, the lines of text on the page all seeming to blur into one as he sips the burning Canadian rye, diluted by ice long melted.
He remembered the verses at the end of her letter.
Did she think of him as ill-fated Odysseus, an errant plaything of cruel gods?
Did that then make her Penelope, ever faithful, ever waiting for him to return home to her?
It is the closing verse of Ulysses that draws his eye most
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.