Act One

Part One: Command Decision

Virmire, September 10th, 2183

It's her decision this time. On Akuze it was out of her hands and in the hands of whatever deity that runs this crazy show. But here, in this almost should be paradise of palm trees and blue waters, Shepard has to choose. And if she'd only known what was coming, if she'd been wiser she would not have gotten herself into this position.

It's the tactical choice; Lieutenant Alenko is closer and he's the officer and he has the technical skills - his even exceed her own, as do his biotics though she's loathe to admit either one. But no one will remember that. Shepard is horrified no one will believe that she chose with tactics and with pragmatism. He's not her lover, he's maybe just her friend that she looks at just a little too long and stands a little too close to...and...no one, not even Keeley really believes that. Just like Toombs', just like the haggard prince charming from her childhood; no one really believes that she didn't love them. No one could look into Keeley's eyes and be anything but certain. No matter how well she thinks she wears a mask, no matter how strong she thinks she is her heart has gone super nova yet again.

"It's the right choice and you know it L-T," Williams' voice crackled through the radio. And it was the right choice, the tactical choice, the commander's choice. Shepard wondered then why it felt like tearing her heart out instead.

No matter what she feels or doesn't feel about Alenko, Ash is her responsibility, her crew, her reluctant friend, but she chooses anyway. Ashley Williams dies on her watch and it's just one more name for the list of the dead, along with the other 48 that died on Akuze and poor naive Jenkins.

Ash will take Toombs place, bringing the total to 50.

Keeley was able to take Toombs off the list. Found him alive, though the term was probably relative after years being trapped in a Cerberus lab and then years hunting down the scientists like animals. And they were animals, those Cerberus bastards and Keeley is a little sad she didn't have the heart to let Toombs just shoot that pig. But her training and her memory of the man she once loved (something she could only admit now that she was busy trying to hide feelings for someone else instead) just wouldn't let it happen, and she talked him down. Maybe he can get help now for what they did to him. It takes the edge off the guilt a little.

Now that it's over, now that the dust and the blood have settled and Saren is lost again, Shepard hid in her cabin trying to wrap her head around her new world. Keeley didn't totally understand Ashley and her fears and her wariness of aliens, yet that didn't make her suddenly missing presence any easier to bear. To Keeley, alien or human didn't matter. She could trust Garrus with her life, Turian or not. She could trust Wrex in all his lumbering anger. Nothing foreign or alien to his pain - his people being kept knocked down by powers greater with bigger guns and more funding. He sounded no different than the street kids she grew up with. Keeley couldn't agree there was no way out and no way to defeat the genophage - Krogan ought to train their own scientists if they want a cure - but either way, he was hardly as menacing as he tries to be. 800 pound Krogan and he's one of the saddest creatures she's ever met.

Despite it all, Wrex backed down even as she stole away what he saw as his last shred of hope. Somehow he believed her, and maybe it's because she believes it herself. It is the wrong time, Saren will only use his people, just like all the other Turians did before him. It breaks Keeley's heart to say it, knowing Garrus wouldn't do such a thing, but it's the only language the Krogan understand and it's the music she has to sing it with.

The Rachni queen gave her a lesson in singing. Keeley could never have imagined she could feel a sudden kinship for a giant...well, bug, but she loved the poetic idea of songs - of a person or a people singing their song out into the universe. She imagine the Asari were naturally blue and cool, but with an undertone of childlike violet, although maybe that was just Liara. Turians sang in practical grey with standards of red and humans sang in green with threads of silver and gold. All such beautiful songs, weaving their way into the blackness of space and decorating invisibly between the stars like garlands. But the reapers sang a sour yellow note, a disjointed and flawed song despite their seemingly perfect technology; she heard it in Saren's voice and in the strange unnatural mottling of his skin.

Unlike the Rachni queen, Keeley's other senses were just as keen and her hearing and her imagination, she supposed and she could smell that she still wore the perfume of Virmire on her skin despite scrubbing; sulfur and seawater and gunpowder. She left a piece of her crew there and a piece of herself. She forgave herself, certainly. Keeley was strong. Keeley survived.

But Keeley had a bigger vulnerable spot than she wanted to admit, and she was hurt too.

Part Two: Feeling Human

Ilos, September 25th, 2183

Before Shepard left earth, before she'd ever gone into space, she'd often wondered if when you traveled faster-than-light, especially through the Mass Relays, if you would feel lighter. That was the backwards public school explanation of the Mass Effect after all.

She wondered while on route to the Mu Relay is she hadn't been right. When Alenko...Kaidan appeared at her cabin door under all the right pretenses Keeley felt a little like her feet weren't entire touching the deck plates. Nothing could change, and no promises were made. Nothing needed to be said - and Keeley still wasn't sure how to say anything anyway. It was a moment, a minute, and a brief heartbeat in time as the Normandy raced toward oblivion.

For a blink Shepard was just Keeley for the first time in as long as she could remember. Skin on skin and month of feeling like a rubber band twisted too tightly released into pleasure and something more than physical sensation that she's never experienced before. Her life before evaporated and became so much smoke. Afterward, Kaidan slept and she watched, branding that image over all the others. The abandoned swing creaking in the cold air as the sirens raged in the distance, the eerie silence on the sand, the ozone tinged waves in the wake of the Mako...all burned away with only a clear path forward. Saren needed to be stopped but for once there was something beyond it, something more than her next assignment. God only knew what it might, if there was a god. But Keeley hoped there was. She hoped there was something more for her than being a soldier for the first time. Before it had been enough. It was so much more than she's had, so much more than a cold life in the ghettos of the city that it was a triumph just to be a soldier, a weapon. But there was more, and she saw a glimpse of it on the smooth caramel roundness of Kaidan's skin.

Maybe there was more to aspire to than utopia and universal peace. Nice ideas, those, but oddly empty for sustaining a life.

Then there were Geth. Always more Geth and gunpowder and the overwhelming staleness of air not tasted by mortal tongues for millennia. The Protheans left enough behind, just enough to give one inevitable direction. Just enough disjointed images, sorted by the cipher rattling in her skull to send them, my god, through a Mass Relay in the bowels of the planet.

Keeley didn't want to try to wrap her head around the physics of the thing as the Mako tore through the fabric of space, Vakarian and Alenko were like memories more than physical beings beside her; breath was too hard to catch for the disorienting moments of sheer speed. It was nothing like space travel and everything like being born and spat out into the Citadel, expecting to be wet.

In the end, Saren ended his own life, the horror of his indoctrination finally clear to him. It hurt Keeley to see his face, the so familiar and so surprisingly human pain in his eyes. Maybe it was a sort of bigotry to call his pain human, but it was the only word she knew. Raw, real, familiar, human pain. But even then, the reaper wouldn't allow him rest, and Shepard had to end the life of his mechanical self. It brought the horror to a new level.

The Geth, the reapers...they could never understand the humanity of life and of pain, the horror in Saren's eyes as he put his pistol to his head. They could never comprehend hope and desire; the urge of pleasure and the arch of parting. Most of all, they couldn't understand love. Machines couldn't know, couldn't understand. Whatever Sovereign claimed to be, whatever ancient memories he carried before his destruction, his wisdom could never take that next step. They could never respect or value life beyond its resources, beyond usefulness into the place where it was important just to be. Whatever their plan was, they would burn through the galaxies like fire through dry grass with no more emotion than the flame has.

And they were coming.