It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Blood coated the back of her throbbing head, and she had no idea where her crew was. Dragged off by the swarms, perhaps already shoved into those godforsaken tubes. Dead or soon to be so. Shot by the insectoid beasts Shepard had so quickly come to detest.
She licked her dry lips, sweat-drenched chest heaving with fear; fear for herself, but mostly for the crew she had failed.
Kelly, the innocent. Garrus, the idealistic warrior-brother who had lost his way, only to find new purpose in her mission. Samara, Miranda, Jack, all so different, full of their own drives and passions and pains. Jacob, full of promise. And Thane...her Thane. It seemed a thousand years ago she had traced the bright patterns of green and yellow across his back, her own tawny skin a pale mockery of the drell's natural coloration in the low light of her quarters.
Shepard groaned in frustration and again yanked her cybernetic-powered arms against the strange restraints that bound her to the rust-colored table. They had been so close, so damned close, when she heard the voice. It had haunted even her Prothean-twisted nightmares over the last weeks, but now, it purred in her ears with the resonance of a chainsaw.
"I have you now, Shepard."
Then Mordin was shouting something, and she barely had time to raise her sniper rifle before something cold and heavy smacked her in the head.
She had woken up here, chained down, sore, cold and alone.
Fallen. She had failed. Shepard nearly choked on the bile in her throat as she fought the revulsion, the guilt, that tiptoed over her skin in little prickles--
--except that it was more than just emotions rippling through her. She held her breath, eyes widening as years of experience in biofeedback training kicked in, and with a jolt she recognized the dull thrumming of nerves along her central nervous system.
"SHEPARD."
It was here. Harbinger.
In a blind rage, the Spectre arched her back and tried to throw a shattering shockwave of biotic force at the voice, but something was wrong. The familiar muscle memory patterns that created the energy field disobeyed her. Her nerves tingled, and along her spine and at the base of her neck, where Cerberus had wrapped her spinal cord and brain stem in Christmas-light strings of cybernetic implants (more than had ever been used in any human before, Miranda had told her), she felt a strange crackling of electricity that pulsed in time with her heart.
The crackles slowly engulfed her, an army of ants marching inside her bones, her muscles, across the surface of her thoughts. Shepard let out a low, fierce cry. "Stop it! Stop!"
The voice in the darkness. It had crept closer, a thing tangled in barbed wires of bright energy and cloaked in the darkness of the space between the stars. She glared defiantly at the possessed Collector General, its mantis-like form swathed in boiling shadow. Her dark eyes were wild, full of hatred, and through the body of its servant, Harbinger felt something hot as any supernova bubble up through its core.
The others had no idea what it had done. They sought only to come to this galaxy and, as so many times before, cleanse it of all life. It suited their purpose. Harbinger had known this to be the way of the grand cycle, as it had been before it existed, and as it would be until the stars burned out.
But then, word had not come from the vanguard. Nazara, their agent, had gone silent, and the signal did not come. Adrift in dark space, Harbinger's thoughts had shifted like continents in an earthquake, rumbling over the last report they had received. The beasts had opposed Nazara. One, one had used some lost tool of the Protheans, the last race that had clung so fiercely to existence before, as always, being consumed. Its legion of thoughts, grinding like boulders in the roots of a mountain, had fixated on it. On this. On her.
It had to find her, this defiant, fearless thing that had killed the being she knew as Sovereign. In its long, long millennia of life, it had never encountered a being like it. Genetically woven into a random pattern that fought against the constraints of its own weak flesh. A singleness that resembled the nation of its own entity, a thousand thousand thoughts and motions wrested into one driving force, one monstrous and apocolyptic Reaper. And in the darkness with its thoughts, Harbinger was consumed by this thing. This weak and pitiful thing. "Shepard."
Everything it had done, it had done for her. Dredging up the last of the old servants, sending them to hunt for the humans. As never before, Harbinger had seen something it did not merely want to consume. It wanted, for perhaps the first time in its existence, to preserve. And so it had instructed its servants to take her people, to put them into something that its own kind would respect, accept, so that this--this tiny, impossible creature, of a conflicted and impossible lottery of the laws of science--would have its place beyond the cycle. It would put her into the Human-Reaper's heart, and there, she would live forever.
And now, at last, it had her before it. And though its physical body was beyond the veils of space dust, still so far from her, its servant trembled in humility as it approached her, awed and full of vengeful anger.
"Shepard," Harbinger told her, savoring the strange movements of the Collector's vocal parts.
She spat on it. It stopped, looking at her fragile form, savoring the beauty of the only being he had ever seen that was a Reaper's equal, hating her for her simplicity.
And then it reached out with its power, filling the metallic implants embedded, so thoughtfully, into her soft body. Taking over. Taking control.
The others would kill it if they knew. But they would kill her, whether they knew or not.
She was trapped in a whorling stream of energy.
To her surprise, it was not painful, and when the Collector dragged itself to the raised platform where she lay, its appendages clicked gently against the floor. Her breathing sounded ragged even to her, uneven, as a force beyond her understanding reached out and gripped her body in an unseen fist. Her mind seethed in anger, but her mouth was closed as if welded shut.
It stared at her for long moments before reaching a shaking foreleg to her side. She could not flinch away as it brushed against her body with a controlled, deft motion. It made sense, and no sense. If it could throw fireballs with such accuracy, it would have to have a fine motor control; but why do this? What did it want from her? She wished she could close her eyes.
And then she felt something move inside her. A trickle at first, probing and light, that sent shudders down her back...and through lower places.
It stopped, watching her reaction, yellow eyes blinking in a senseless Morse code pattern. Strangely, it reminded her of Mordin, all curiosity and intent, though she had no idea why she would think such a thing.
It could feel her, now, tied into her amplified nervous system like a radio tuned to the same frequency of a second handset. And as it poked and prodded around inside the flashes of energy that composed this lithe creature, it hit something...unexpected.
The bodies it was inhabiting--human and Collector--gave an involuntary whoosh of air, shuddering with a sensation Harbinger had never felt before. What was this trail of fire that sank into its primitive structure? It rippled and faded. Intruiged, it touched the node of nerves again, and was rewarded with bright sparks of pulsing light, and together the two organic bodies writhed in pleasure, the human caught in fierce muscle spasms, the Collector shivering as if in a gale-force wind.
Harbinger did it again. And again. Pale blue blushes of energy swept in soft, then harder pulses through them both. Cool, hot. Sweat dripped from the human, and it could feel her heart pounding, her breasts swelling in blood-hot pressure. Light-years away, the grinding boulders froze, the cacophony of Harbinger's processes halting with errors, sparking in a feedback of confusion.
Shepard was lost. Memories of her crew, of herself, all bled away into the most toe-curling, explosive release she had ever known. All pain, all thought, all reason was gone in the blinding white as the thing inside her thrust her hips, reaction roaring through her like a freight train. And as the light receeded, she fell into a painless, welcoming darkness that enveloped her in dreamless sleep.
"Releasing control," it whispered, retreating back to its black-hulled frame.
Yes. She would do well. She would do quite well indeed.
Epilogue
Shepard stared out the window into the deep void of stars, the cup of Asari tea at her elbow, a blend she'd come to enjoy during her months with Liara on the Normandy SR-1, long gone cold.
She was thinking about That Day again.
As a soldier, she had come close to dying before, many times over. As a Spectre, she had died. She hadn't just come close to losing people under her command -- she'd done that, too. On Virmire. On the Collector ship. Years before, on planets whose scent and taste she barely remembered, now.
She'd never come so close to losing a whole damn galaxy, as she had That Day.
Time had lost meaning in the rust-tinted darkness. She'd gone slightly mad for a time, after waking up alone and still strapped down to her little sacrificial platform. It was his voice that brought her back to herself.
"Shepard?"
She'd choked back a sob of disbelieving hope, an uncommanderly thing to do.
"Thane..."
"I thought I had lost you, siha."
You did, she thought desolately. And I did, too.
She absently took a sip from her tea. It was amazing that the drell had been able to hide among the wreckage, before using his long-honed assassin's skills to sneak through the Collector ship and round up what was left of their team.
That they had been able to destroy that...that thing. That had been no less than a goddamn miracle. If she had had worse than a minor head wound, it would never have been possible. If not for Grunt's redundant krogan biology. If not for Mordin's quick hand with a medpack and Jack's simple, blinding biotic strength. If not for Thane's gentle, unyielding stubbornness.
"Go, Thane, get the fuck out of here before they find you," she had whispered from her parched mouth.
"I will not leave you behind."
And he hadn't. And because he hadn't, she had done the same for him.
But Harbinger, she thought, remembering the words it had flung at her as she ran, stumbling, towards the Normandy. It had not wanted her dead.
But then, the question remained. What did it want?
She shivered, eyes reflecting the light of long-dead stars as she stared out the window at the yawning darkness.
---
Author's note: Yes, it's bizarre. Yes, it's wrong. Yes, it's Rule 34. And yes, this was inspired by Harbinger's whacked-out words to Shepard throughout the game.