I'm back! I don't know how many of you will even remember my existence after these eighteen months, but this little ditty marks the beginning of my return to fanfiction. It's good to be back!
I have three options before me, three different colored beams, but no matter what I pick, it's all going to end the same for me. Falling.
The boys I grew up with on Earth would probably laugh at me now—pausing not in indecision, but pausing out of fear. They'd call me a sissy, just like they always did when I told them I didn't want to jump from wherever we'd climbed to. It didn't matter if they'd be there to catch me or not. It was the falling, not the landing, that scared me.
Eventually I got passed it, at least somewhat. I had to, if I wanted to survive. Jumping across ravines, scrambling up cliffs, it became second nature to me. And though my heart was in my throat each time, I was invincible. There was nothing I couldn't do.
Until I lost the Normandy. Garrus asked me once, while we were doing "war buddy" talk, what it had felt like to fall like that. He's one of the few people in my life now, including Tali and Kaiden, who know me well enough to know what a nightmare that was. The truth to his question slipped out, that the dying had come as a mercy after the falling. I was still having nightmares then of being in a dark place and simply falling forever, never hitting the ground.
Then almost falling while escaping Earth, only the hand of an old friend saving me from the most awful of deaths, started the nightmares again. I started to wake screaming. Soon though, other nightmares filled my dreams. Fire, children, the voices of those I had lost. I discovered something worse than falling.
By now I've hobble to my light of choice. Part of me wants to run away and hide somewhere, but I'm Shepard, and Shepard has a job to do.
And then I'm falling.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that. It basically just ended up being a stream of consciousness for what the end of the Mass Effect series might have been like if Shepard was afraid of falling. It's pretty short, but it's the beginning of my return.
