With a shuddering gasp, John Shepard swirled into consciousness in pure darkness. The first thought was simply "How?" but it lasted only a moment before the pain avalanched through his rebuilt nervous system. The laser melted armor bonded to his skin, the hole in his abdomen, the blood dripping down his arms… those were what he remembered. The searing ache in his ribs, the swiftly cooling left arm, and…

oh god, where are my legs, I can't feel my legs!

In his panic he tried to move, to sit up – but only his right arm obeyed his commands. There was… an immense weight, a solid and unyielding mass cutting across his hips and left side. That much he could feel. He was pinned to… whatever he was lying on. Not that paralyzed legs would help him move much anyway. Finally he tried to open his eyes: one of them popped free after fighting through the clotted blood that glued it shut. The left one remained stubbornly closed, from impact or being missing entirely, he wasn't sure – the darkness he was in left everything to his imagination.

I can feel the blood pouring out of my left arm, he thought. My hand must be crushed, and it's going numb too fast.

Shepard reached across his body with his right arm, eliciting a sharp his from his fire ravaged lungs, which labored mightily to bring him oxygen when half the alveoli were scorched into non-functionality. His ribs burned, his right shoulder felt out of socket – but he was able to tuck his right hand close enough to his left to finger the haptic key for first aid. There was a brief orange flash from his omni tool, and then medi-gel leaked out of his armor where his hardsuit computers still functioned. Enough of it trickled down to his inner elbow, where his veins were torn open, to begin to heal the vicious tear that was leaking his lifeblood onto the ground. Painkillers flooded into his system, although the immensity of Shepard's injuries meant it did little to ease his pain.

His right eye caught the concrete slabs lying a couple feet over head in the flash of his omni-tool. He realized, though, that the cuts on his face through which his implants shone dimly out of, gave him the minutest of light to see.

To see what, he thought. There's nothing here to see. Just the final resting spot of the galaxies' "savior"

Shepard then began to wonder why he triggered his First Aid at all – now he was just going to suffocate and run out of air, or die from starvation – there was a terrific finality and depth to the rubble over his head. He felt as if he was a mile underground – as well buried as a Prothean relic.

But then, hope had always been John Shepard's most potent weapon. Hope and his connections to others, the people he met and helped during his fight. There was one person in particular he wished he could return to – but it was more demoralizing to think about her than hopeful. Being a warmer than normal fossil somewhere in the depths of wreckage only hurt more when it put her further away – and Shepard was prepared to sacrifice himself to let her live on. Entertaining those thoughts made his heart ache, his stomach twist: he broke a promise to her, and he wasn't going to see Tali again.

Shepard then felt something entirely new: a sudden shock, a buzzing pain like sticking his finger into a fuse box while running in the sewers as a child. It was everywhere in his body, but there were hotspots; at his heart, at his lower back and spine, deep in his pelvis on the left side, across the shoulder blade on his right and his neck to the left. It lasted but a moment, but then repeated again, 5 times. The fifth time he could suddenly feel his legs again. He wasn't terribly glad that he could, as he was certain that at least the left one was crushed, and the pain from it momentarily blacked him out.

Shepard came to instantly, with two thoughts in his head: that Cerberus did one hell of a job on him, and that they had stitched together his spine with an implant. Both thoughts were simultaneously gratifying and terrifying.

Now that he focused on it, Shepard could almost feel little pro-human nanites creeping through his blood stream, trying to repair damage far beyond their real ability to fix.

"Great, now my own body won't let me go quickly," he tried to say, but it came out as barely a rasp.

Shepard then just lay back, feeling his breaths slowly become more effective, his lungs functioning better as the nanites labored in his system.

It then occurred to him, that if he couldn't go quickly, at least he could find out what was happening on the radio. He lifted his right hand to his ear, wincing as the shoulder torqued uncomfortably and the side of his face screamed as his fingers clumsily bumped into it. He wasn't expecting anything, and as much as was possible with half a building on top of him, jumped when he almost instantly not just any chatter, but the voice of someone he knew.