Introduction

This is my headcanon ending to Mass Effect 3, and my personal love letter to the game series and its characters. Off the bat, I want to say that the Mass Effect team did an awesome job, and their ending was epic and legendary. This is just how I would have done it.

I added some details for those who've never played the game, but really, most of this won't make sense if you haven't. So, apologies on that.

Our story picks up from Shepard and Anderson sitting next to each other just after Shepard opens the Citadel's arms. The Crucible is about to dock.

Some essential information:

Miranda is Shepard's love interest.

The quarians and geth make peace.

The beam run team is Miranda and Tali. Wounded during the battle, they're currently in the Normandy's medical bay.

Miranda is the Normandy's first officer. Ashley is the second officer. Garrus is on the guns. The rest of the squad are doing their thing wherever they are.

The squad from Mass Effect 2 is on the Normandy as well as those from Mass Effect 3. The team also has two new members: Randall Ezno and Inali Renata, whom we meet in Mass Effect: Infiltrator. Inali was saved and fully recovered from her transformation by Cerberus.

This story contains actual dialogue from the games that I wove in. Needless to say, those words are the property of Bioware, I own none of it, and this story was written and provided for free solely for entertainment purposes.

On with the story!

. . .

"...I'm proud of you."

"Thank you, sir."

The room became more silent, if that were even possible. Shepard realized why. He couldn't hear Anderson breathing.

"Anderson?"

Anderson's chest had stopped moving. Tears rolled down Shepard's face. His parents had died while he was just a boy. Shepard remembered when the polite man in the uniform had come to his aunt's house to let her and young John know that his mommy and daddy wouldn't be coming home. Anderson had been the closest he'd had to a father figure. Not that he'd ever told him that. He'd seen so many people die that he couldn't even count them anymore. He'd cried for many of them, but not like this.

A dreadnought exploded like a star near Earth's horizon. Passing over the glow, the Reaper that had fired the shot opened its tendrils as it turned to look for more.

Shepard looked up at the ceiling and screamed, "Damn it, end it already!" His voice echoed off the walls. No one had spoken inside this room in thousands of years. The way things were going, no one would in thousands more, either. His body, Anderson's and the Illusive Man's would be the only testament left that humans had ever existed at all.

Shepard felt the deck bump as the Crucible docked. A puzzle unspooled in the holographic instrument panel. Shepard stood. He didn't want to leave his friend, but he realized his work wasn't done yet.

Shepard faced the panel. He felt the tingle in the back of his neck that he always got when his prothean neurology kicked in. It wasn't a puzzle. It was the final sequence to activate the Crucible, prepared by a prothean.

Without knowing how, he knew what he had to do. Shepard began tapping glyphs on the interface. Superstrings of dark energy began unwinding. Connecting. Synchronizing. Simultaneously he saw subatomic particles combining with each other, while the mass relays sang radioactive music, a coherent pulse of energy the likes of which hadn't been seen since creation.

"Stop," a child's voice said.

His world flashed white. Outside, his eyes flickered gold like they did on the colony where they met Javik. Shepard froze.

Shepard stood on the top of a hill overlooking a burned-out wasteland. Twisted bones of ancient temples reached toward a blackened sky. The boy from his dreams stood next to him. In the strange way that dreams have, Shepard didn't ask why.

. . .

Hackett grabbed hold of his station as the Iowa shuddered under a Reaper weapon hit.

"Shield failure! Overload, starboard capacitors!"

"Engineering, shut down engine four!" the Iowa's captain cried. "Shut it down, now!"

The Saratoga's fighter wing wove through the Reaper's fire and let go with a volley of missiles that targeted its maw. Half of the missiles made it through. The Reaper bucked with explosive indigestion. The Iowa's shields came back on line and it returned fire with a blast that knocked it in the head. Every ship within sight of it could feel it growl as it turned to face the dreadnought again.

The Iowa, Yamato, Vanguard and Churchill opened fire with their main batteries as the Saratoga's wing hit the Reaper again. One of its limbs blew off. The rest of the Fifth fleet's combined fire took off another.

As the bridge officers tried to keep them alive, Hackett leaned over the communications officer. "Shepard! Shepard, this is Hackett. The Crucible isn't firing."

"The channel is open, sir, but that doesn't mean he can hear us."

"Keep trying."

He brought up the communications feed and patched in the Normandy. "Normandy, this is Hackett."

"Normandy here. This is Lieutenant Commander Williams." A burst of static. "Damn it! Adams, get a team down there to seal that breach! Sorry, admiral, we're a bit busy."

"Lieutenant Commander, there's something wrong at the Citadel. Shepard made it but the Crucible isn't firing. I need you to get a team ready in case he fails."

"Do we even know where Shepard is?"

EDI interrupted, "I have been trying to locate Commander Shepard's position. I detected movement at the base of the Citadel beneath the tower—"

"Keep on it, EDI. Let me know when you find something. We'll do what we can, admiral."

. . .

Joker shimmied the Normandy between razor slices of beam fire from a handful of oculi, the killer satellites they encountered when they had attacked the Collector base. A squadron of turian fighter craft scratched their back for them with a quick burst of cannon fire. Ashley issued a quick thanks. She watched the battle, listening to com traffic and looking for new targets.

Behind her, the elevator opened. Miranda limped into the CIC. Her armor had seen better days. Ashley said, "I thought you were in the medical bay."

"Bandages and medigel are all that's holding me together. What's our status?"

"We've got a hole in the lower deck. Engineering's on it. Shepard made it to the Citadel, but the Crucible isn't firing."

She smiled. She knew he'd make it! "All right. Get a team together. You, Jack, Grunt, Vega, and Tali. Get to the shuttle bay and stand by. I'll be there as soon as we've pinpointed his location." If there was even a chance John was alive, there was no way she would stay away.

"Isn't Tali wounded too?"

"Her suit's healing her faster than anything we have. We'll need our best tech in case we need to bypass any internal systems."

"Got it." Ashley hurried off.

Miranda toggled the internal com line. "EDI, scan the Citadel for Reaper com traffic using the code fragment we found on Rannoch as a template. If Shepard's encountering resistance, that might tell us where the trouble is."