I hobble forward.

Control is possible, it had said. But that's madness. The Illusive Man had been wrong. Nobody should wield that much power, not even me.

Destruction... It's everything I had worked for, but at what cost? Annihilation of all AI? Just when the geth have reached a new dawn of sentience? And EDI...

No. Not destruction. Not genocide... But there is another way. The only other way. Strength finds me, coming from nowhere. Maybe it's acceptance. Maybe it's belief that I'm on the right path.

But I'm not on the right path. That's in the other direction, back into warm blue arms and a soft bed.

I'm running now. Running in the wrong direction. Running towards the end. It's not my end. I didn't choose it. There should have been another way. Sacrifice is one thing, but this...

I'm off the edge. I should be thinking about all the good I'm doing. All the lives I'm saving. The big picture. But I don't care. I can't. I think about the small picture. My picture. The one I've been denied by this war and this false choice.


-~oO* Part 1 - Awakening *Oo~-


I feel warm. That's strange. The beam hadn't been warm. It hadn't been anything. Just bright. And then... nothing.

But now I feel warm. Maybe the sun? And I can hear things. I hear the sound of waves crashing. It's such a comforting sound. Reminds me of the beaches in Los Angeles when I was a kid.

"Mmh..." Huh... I made that noise. Strange. I would have figured that... Well... I don't know. I can feel and hear. Why wouldn't I be able to make a sound?

I open my eyes and immediately have to close them again. That's definitely the sun. Or a sun. Or a star. I can never remember if it's just Earth's star that's named "sun" or if we call all stars "suns". Am I even on Earth? Who cares, now?

I feel a million tiny grains of sand underneath my body. So I'm on a beach. I'm on a beach, in the sun, listening to the waves break. I shift a little bit, feeling the sand rub against my backside. And apparently I'm naked.

Naked on a beach in the sun. So this must be heaven. Certainly my heaven, at least.

I open my eyes a little wider this time. Blue skies greet me, along with the sun's light. I'm gonna call it the sun, since it's my heaven. And if it's my heaven... I resist the urge to roll my head to the side and look. Why bother? She's not gonna be there. She's not gonna be there because I did my job. Because I saved the damn galaxy and her all at once, and I didn't have to choose between them. Because if did, if I'd had to choose between saving her and saving everything else, it would have been just me and her alone in the galaxy. Instead it's just me. Alone. On a beach. In the sun.

Naked.

Waiting.

I close my eyes again and stretch my arms over my head. If I have to wait, and I will, then I can't think of a better place to do it. I'm gonna be here a while. Asari live a long time, she'll probably make it well into her matriarch years before she gets here. That's close to a thousand years that I'll be waiting for her, naked on this beach. That's a lot of life that she's going to live before she gets here. She's going to be so beautiful and powerful when she gets older. It's ridiculous to think about how incredible she is at her age, and how much more life she's going to have and how much more incredible she's going to become.

It's a long time to wait. She might, in that time, find someone else to share her life with. It hurts to think about, but I guess I can understand. It's a thousand years. Without me. But I'm the great Commander Shepard. Who else is gonna be able to compare to me? So when her time comes, I'm sure she'll find me. I can wait. Naked. On this beach.

Lust. I feel lust all of a sudden. I was thinking about Liara, so some lust makes sense. But this is different. Like it's coming from outside of me. Like it's not my lust. The feeling grows. My toes actually begin to curl from it. I lick my lips. It feels good, and the lust swells around me. I accept it. My back arches slightly. This feeling is almost overwhelming. I still can't shake the sense that it's not my own lust I'm feeling, but who the hell cares? I dust my hands free of sand and run my fingers over my stomach. I'm so glad heaven lets me feel these things. One hand trails up to my breast. I pinch the nipple enough to feel a twinge of pain. I'm really glad heaven lets me feel pain. This kind of pain is good. What kind of heaven would this be without this kind of pain? My other hand drifts between my legs. Apparently in heaven it's been a few weeks since I've trimmed. It doesn't matter. I'm alone. I lace my fingers through the coarse hair above my slit. I gently push a fingertip between my lips. I moan again.

Nervous fear rolls over me.

Someone coughs. "Ah... Okay, I'm going to go ahead and stop you before you go any further..."

My heart is pounding. My eyes snap open and I bolt upright in the sand, gasping for breath. I whip around and see a man with short, blonde hair, standing twenty meters away.

"Sorry," he says. "I, uh..."

He has green eyes. No... Oh my god! His eyes are glowing green! I blink hard, sure that my eyes are playing tricks on me. Playing tricks on me... in heaven...

"I didn't mean to watch," the man continues. "Well... I-I did," he chuckles, raising an arm to scratch the back of his head. Veins of pulsating green light line his thin forearm. The same on his neck. This can't be real. Why the hell do I think any of this is real? "I mean, I was... I-I didn't realize I was going to get a show..." He chuckles again.

I can feel awkward nervousness radiating off of him. And I still can't take my eyes off of his face. Off of those eyes. Does he know his eyes are glowing? That his skin has veins of light? Or is that kind of thing normal for... heaven?

"I mean, I just figured you were, ah..."

I look down at my own arms and see the same geometric veins of green light. Nervousness again, redoubled. Mine mixed with something else.

"I'm really sorry," he continues babbling. "I just thought you were catching some sun, and... not that that makes the staring any better. I just..."

I shouldn't feel this much anxiety. I'm not in any danger. Not like the kind I'm used to. I clamp my eyes shut and focus on the pounding in my chest, willing my heart to calm itself.

"You probably just wanted to... uhm... wanted to be alone..."

I hear the sound of my own breathing in my ears. The sound of the waves lapping against the sand. I find calm. I feel calm. Calmer at least. There's still a faint echo of nerves, but it's like a comm signal that's been muted or cut off.

"S-sorry... miss, are you alright?"

I open my eyes again. The green light is gone from my arms. I glance over at the intruder. He's... normal. Pasty white skin. Green eyes that aren't radiating their own light.

"What are you doing here?" I finally ask him.

He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. "I was fishing when, ah... Well, it's hard to ignore a beautiful naked woman lying on my beach." His beach. I guess we're getting somewhere. "And, speaking of naked, you don't seem to have any clothes whatsoever. Like, anywhere." He gestures at the empty sand around me. "So how-"

"Where am I?"

He laughs. "Tie one on last night, eh? You're not too far from the city. Though I suppose in your state 'far' might be-"

"What city?"

His face scrunches up. "Uh... Los Angeles? 'City of Angels?' Heh... Founders must've been having a bit of a laugh when they came up with that one."

For a moment I worry that my heart's going to stop. If, in fact, it can stop and I am in Los Angeles and not in heaven and I'm actually... I scan the skies. No Alliance ships. No turian fleet. No geth cruisers.

No Reapers.

No smoldering wreckage, either. Even if the Reapers had hit Los Angeles a tenth as hard as they had London, there should have been some signs of it from this distance. Some smoke or ash or something in the air. But there aren't any Reapers. Why aren't there any Reapers?

I'm about to sound very stupid, but... "What year is it?"

He laughs, louder than before. "Wow. Must have really found your drink, eh?"

My mind races. He says it's Los Angeles and on some level I trust him. It feels like he's being honest, for lack of a better word. The Reapers hit all the major cities, and LA is about as major as they come. But here he is, fishing. And trying not to ogle me. If the Reapers were still about, there's no way he'd be out in the open like this. No way that the skies would be as clear as they are. So that must mean I succeeded, right?

So why the hell is there a pasty British man on my beach in heaven?

I bury my face in my hands, hoping that it makes one or both of us disappear or that I wake up or something. For a moment I actually wish I had seen a Reaper flying about. Because then the world would have made some kind of sense. Then I could call up the Normandy and have Joker pick me up, have someone bring me some clothes, and I...

The Normandy...

I call up my omni-tool and begin to signal my ship. Nothing happens. No orange hardlight interface appears around my forearm. No twitter of sound from it flickering to life. I had modded my personal omni-tool to give it a "dark" mode for stealth missions, so maybe... My fingers feel around for the location of the command keys. Nothing. No haptic feedback when I touch where they keys should have been. No subtle change in temperature from the IR light of the dark mode. Nothing.

"Ah... Is there someone you can call?"

Oh, right. You're still here. I glance back at the intruder and get to my feet. "I need a comm link to Alliance command."

"Oh!" He stands up straighter, averting his eyes. "You're Alliance?"

I'm suddenly very aware just how out of uniform I am and cover up the more important parts. "Yes, I'm Commander Shepard of the Normandy."

His eyes narrow. "Ah... Commander Shepard, was it?"

I begin feeling an odd sense of distrust emanating from the intruder. Not odd in that it's unexpected. I can hear distrust in his voice. Can see it in his body language. But there's something else there, something that's not encompassed by my other senses. "Yes, Commander Alice Shep-"

"The... same Commander Shepard who died twenty-five years ago at the end of the Reaper war?"

My heart stops.


A/N: As far as my headcanon is concerned, this story is entirely AU. Neither I nor Alice care much for the idea of Synthesis, but it did pose an interesting concept for a story.

Several weeks ago I was in the middle of my first playthrough of ME3. I had, up to that point, managed to avoid any and all spoilers. It had meant taking a 5-month hiatus from BSN, but I had done it. Unfortunately I wasn't so diligent about deviantArt, and soon came to realize what the ending(s) would mean for Alice. Distraught, I turned to a writer friend of mine, and asked her how she had persevered when she, who had not avoided spoilers, had known what was coming. She told me that the messianic imagery with Synthesis was rather blatant, and that they had effectively given her 'Good Friday'. All she had to do was write Easter. From that, this story sprang forth, nearly fully-formed. This is my Easter. So thank you for that, jtav.

I'll probably be interspersing chapters of this with more fluffy one-shots (which will be FAR more in-line with my headcanon).