"I'm moving...higher," Shepard thought as she attempted to ground her thoughts. She had never remembered being quite so fragile as to be almost put out of commission by Harbinger. This thought succeeded in bringing a smile to her face and pushed her to her feet, where she was greeted by an astonishingly familiar child.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. Lucy struggled to make sense of his words, or his being.
"Who...are you?" she responded though not as demanding.
"I am the Catalyst, the Citadel."
Lucy would've rolled her eyes had she not been so astonished. This was the boy in her dream...the boy from earth...what was he doing here? Explaining to her the order of the galaxy, the inability for synthetics and organics to live together? Ultimate destruction as an inevitable conclusion? The creator of the reapers? "Well, Harbinger never mentioned you as he was casually assuming direct control," Lucy thought bitterly.
"But you're taking away our hope! Without hope, we are no better than machines taking orders!" Lucy exclaimed, in response to his allegations.
"You don't need hope."
"Simple enough response when you don't have a good one..." Lucy again thought bitterly, but kept her mouth shut as she had so seldom done before.
The Catalyst continued his rant of seemingly omnipotent wisdom. Claiming to know the outcome that every species would eventually fall victim too. Knowing each species better than they knew themselves.
"You were young before, that's why we left you alone during the last extinction. You needed time to grow. Now you need to move aside."
"This is all very convenient thinking for an entity that has massive droves of reapers at their disposal," but again...she kept her mouth shut. The desperation of her situation, and every advanced species' situation, was growing rapidly higher. Climbing to almost insurmountably high levels.
Lucy listened with rapt attention when the entity explained to her her options. Somewhere during his speech Lucy lost her pain. Lost her injuries. She became numb with anticipation, knowing the inevitable outcome.
Instantly upon his completed explanation Lucy began her perilous limp. She came to the fork of three options that would end the war, though none would allow her to keep herself. Selfishly as this thought erupted Lucy began to again desire the comforts of succumbing to her injuries, though that was not one of the options the entity had given her...
No, instead her eyes flickered left, middle, right. Left, middle, right. Control, merge with, destroy. Control, merge, destroy. Control.
