Sometime later, he felt a presence by his cot, though when he first opened his eyes, only a blurry shape in the semi-gloom met his curiosity.
The pink oval of its face flexed into what he kind of hoped was a smile. It spoke, "Hey, Skip."
A memory stirred. Timbre, inflection, tone, they all added up to equal only one being. Plus, she called him 'Skip'. "Ash?"
"Right on the money. Good to see time hasn't addled your brain. Well, not much anyway."
"Did I die?"
"Nearly." She laughed. He felt that laugh yank at all the bits of him that missed her. "Don't you know terrorists always have a contingency plan?"
"Yeah, well. What'd I lose anyway?" He struggled to sit up and assess himself now that his vision cleared. His left side didn't seem to want to cooperate. In fact, past the shoulder, he lacked any sign of an arm. "What? The left one again?"
"That's the third one you've wasted so far."
"Good thing I bought the warranty." He blinked up at her, sitting there like she hadn't been blasted to hell on distant Virmire. "You look good."
"Thanks, Skipper." Ashley watched him with a warm smile on her face. Her eyes gleamed too bright in the dark, otherworldly in aspect. When he reached out with a hand, she grasped it, tight and warm. He swallowed back the sudden welling of feeling that rose in him.
"I missed you, Ash. So much. I didn't-"
"You made the hard choice, Skip. Stronger men have balked when faced with the same decision." She brought his hand to her cheek. He stroked it with his thumb, wondering at how solid she felt. "I've come to show you something."
Alarm filled him. "Does this have anything to do with EDI visiting me the other night?"
"Yes."
"What if I don't want to see?"
"I can't make you see if you don't want to." She leaned over the bed, filling his whole field of vision with her shining eyes. "You trust me, don't you, Skip?"
"Of course."
"Come with me." She stood and tried to pull him with her.
He froze. "I-Ash, I don't-"
"Don't be afraid," she chided, a playful smile ghosting around her lips.
Finally, his feet got moving. First to swing off the side of the bed, then to push him upright. He felt a mild surprise for the complete lack of pain. Or maybe he was dreaming this whole thing. "Where are we going?"
"Your past." She palmed the lock to the Ascension's medbay's door, but instead of a hallway painted in serene blues, it opened on a blinding white light.
Digging in his heels, he tried to shout, "No!" But it only came out as a weak and tremulous plea for mercy.
"You must."
The hand holding his pulled with gentle insistence and he could no more deny it than fly. Stepping into that brilliance, he whimpered as a sensation flew over every nerve in his body. Tingling, pulling, up and down ceased to have meaning as he tumbled through and into . . . an alleyway. Crumbling brick lay under his hands, the side of a building he hadn't been aware of stumbling into.
It stank, wherever he was now. Smelled like rotten garbage and feces. He wrinkled his nose as he peered up and down the narrow corridor. A sudden dropping of his guts heralded the realization that he knew this place. This place had once meant home to him. A hand landed on his shoulder and he jumped, swinging around to see Ash still at his side.
Shouting drew both of their attention upwards, to the fire escapes that still clung to the ancient brownstone even in this modern age. A small boy leapt from landing to landing, with the lazy hipshot grace of the young. A look of fear stamped on his face. On his heels, a large hairy man chased, shouting obscenities, swinging a belt over his head, promising the boy pain neverending as soon as he caught him.
"That's me!" Shepard pointed at the boy, who jumped the last few floors into a dumpster.
"You fucking abortion! Stealing from me! Don't you ever come back!" The boy's pursuer howled.
The pair watched the boy, no older than six, shoot past them and away. Shepard felt the urge to stop him, hold him, tell him that his mother's current client/boyfriend would soon leave as all the others did. "I only took half a can of spam."
Ash said, "You were hungry."
"I was always hungry."
"Didn't your mother ever feed you?"
Shepard sighed. He didn't like remembering those days. "When they shut down the last of the old fossil-fuel refineries and switched to the new tech, my mother was laid off. So were thousands of others. She . . . did what she had to. To survive."
"Whoring." She said this without rancor or judgement. A mere statement of fact. "And that man, is he your father?"
"God, I hope not, but it's not like I know for certain. Mom named me after my father, you see. 'John'. Her idea of a joke. She didn't know any more than I did." Shepard chuckled a sour little chuckle. "When she remembered to feed me those few times she wasn't all doped out on whatever bargain-basement drug she was currently in love with, she'd grouse about every bite. About how she was the way she was because of me. And when she got angry . . .."
He shuddered at the memory of her towering over him with that damn lighter in her hands. The way the fire reflected in her eyes became the very definition of hell to him.
Ash took his one hand and squeezed it. "It's a wonder you survived."
"Nine whole years. That's when I took my act on the road. Left for good."
The dead woman beside him waved her hand and the scenery went all runny. When it hardened again, they stood in a park. Snow blanketed the ground. Before them, there sat a boy on a bench, a little older, a lot angrier. Shepard remembered well what made him quit his 'loving' home. A client of his mother's got a little too friendly with him. At first, John accepted the little gifts and morsels of precious food with enthusiasm, but when the touching and petting became unbearable, he'd stopped accepting them. Then one night the man pinned him in a corner and-
He cut the memory off with a shake of his head. He turned his gaze back to the younger him. The boy stared straight through him with an intensity that confused him. "What am I looking at?" He turned to look as well.
"He's watching them." Ash pointed out a family making snow angels nearby. Three kids with their mom and dad. All had ridiculously happy smiles on their faces.
"I remember thinking that they wouldn't be doing that if they knew how many dog doings there were under there."
"What else do you remember?" Ash prompted, watching him with an expectant tilt of her head.
Shepard thought hard and watched the boy watching them. He felt a memory of longing tug at him. "I . . . wanted to join them. I envied them."
"Always the outsider looking in. Invisible. Disregarded. Look at them. They were just as poor as you, but they had something in each other you'd never known in your whole short life." Ash sat next to the boy, who clearly didn't know of their presence. She reached out and brushed a dark curl over one ear. The boy swatted at what he probably thought was an insect. "Family."
"Family," echoed Shepard. He looked for the hole in his adult self and found what had filled it. "Then I found the gangs."
"And when you'd had enough of their conditional and often unsteady allegiances, when you'd been stabbed in the back once too often by the 'family' you'd made of them-"
"I joined the military."
"And there was the attachment you'd been starved of." With a magic wave of her hand, they transported through the highlights of his military career. The highs, the lows, the assaults, the last stands. That him seemed so happy to be surrounded on all sides by his fellow soldiers. "You gave them everything of yourself, down to the marrow and they loved you. And you, who had never felt such warmth, loved them so much in return. All of them."
The images grew bolder and more recent. One by one, his friends swept by, a smile of welcome on their faces, each one saying, "Shepard." He felt filled to the brim with love and hope and longing and fear, but it was shared among all of them. A dark time fell upon them all and while he despaired of ever finishing the daunting task of casting down the Reapers, he felt a fierce gladness that they stood with him. He never doubted them, ever, even when ideologies clashed and old hatreds came to the surface like a shallow cut will bring pus from a septic wound.
And he found love. Tali's face, unmasked, turned toward the him of the past in the light of Rannoch's two moons. He remembered thinking how her ethereal beauty smote him like a shotgun to the chest, no matter how often he saw it. In his periphery, he could just see Raan and a couple geth primes hashing out re-colonization strategies. Never had his heart soared as it had on that day. How he'd prayed then to the powers that be. Just this one time, let it happen. Let it work.
For in the success of what came of this one moment of peace, he could finally see the breaking of the cycle. Forever.
Then, the lights of his new family started winking out. Some left to fight their own demons. Others had already. . . died. For him. Like her. He turned eyes stinging with emotion to Ashley. She nodded in perfect and compassionate understanding. The flying glimpses into his life stilled on a scene he never wanted to remember, never wanted to relive.
A Shepard from not too long ago walked on unsteady legs along the wide surface of the Citadel's stigma-like center. The specter of a child stood near, speaking to him, cajoling him with choices that not a single one seemed a good idea. He remembered ruling out control and synthesis almost immediately. Shepard never wanted to have the kind of power that controlling a race of immortal squid-machines would endow him with. He wasn't strong enough. Or good enough for that to turn out well.
And synthesis seemed far too complicated and over-reaching. Who was he to determine the future of all life from this point forward should be a hybridized one? On every planet. Everywhere. What was left of choice there?
That left destroying them all. Shepard could still feel how heavy the gun seemed then. He watched his younger self rage in shock when the Catalyst told him of the consequences. EDI gone. The geth, who Legion sacrificed his soul for, gone.
Broken, bleeding Shepard stumbled on legs present-Shepard knew to be shaking from more than just anger. The despair had nearly killed him then, as the memory of it struck him with a deep pain now. Shepard felt a tear slide down his cheek as his ragged husk of a younger self moved toward the right. The only decision he could make. The Catalyst must have been laughing on the inside. Though all the Reapers would die, the galaxy would lose. Maybe not that day, but someday it would all start again, untempered by a compassionate AI's guidance or the proven possibility of peaceful coexistence.
He held his breath as the final shots rang out. The chaos that ensued did not touch them. Ash came up beside him and he leaned on her, scrubbing his cheek to wipe the moisture away. "So I remembered it, so it was done. What the hell does me watching it all again change?"
She did that waving thing again and they stood in a sea of rubble. Snow drifted down from the sky to gather on the fallen Citadel. From under one large chunk, Shepard heard a chuffing laugh. He swallowed hard. "No. I don't want to remember this part either. Can't we just skip it?"
Ash shook her head in solemn pity. "No, we cannot. This is where the fear began. You must see it."
"Since when do you get off giving me orders, huh, Gunnery Chief?" He loomed over her. "EDI said the fear leads to me doing something. What do I do, Ash? What terrible thing do I do?"
"I am only here to show you the past. The rest is up to the others." Her tranquility started to rankle him.
"The others? Yeah? Who? Legion? Mordin? My third-grade math teacher? Who?" A scrabbling noise drew his eyes back to the fallen masonry and the person he knew who lay trapped under it. "God, this is sick. It's cruel. Maybe I am dead and this is hell!"
Shepard sprinted to the stone and threw his weight against it, tried to shift it with his one arm and what leverage he could get. He nearly bit his tongue in two when a wispy little off-key singsong dribbled out of the tiny opening at its base. A couple bruised and bent fingers emerged to catch snow on their fingertips. He shot a glare at Ash. "Help me!"
"You can't change what happened."
"You don't understand! I'm dying under there!"
"Yes."
"N-no, I mean, I'm-I'm-" Terror made his thoughts fly away like little birds. Shepard clawed at his face and tried not to remember the hopelessness. The helplessness. The terrible burden that should have lightened, but only got heavier once he'd realized he was still alive. He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming the next words. "I'm not just dying under there, I-I'm . . . disappearing! Bits of me breaking off and just swirling away into the big nothing. I need-I need-"
Suddenly it felt as though he were back in that moment, those long days trapped under that immovable bit of stone and metal, pinned by its mass. How every breath lit a fire in his lungs. How he'd cursed his implants for forcing him to stay alive by metabolizing the rest of his flesh. His body was eating itself. Lost, in the dark, crying out like a child for mercy, for an end. A slim crack of light his only window on a world he'd never expected to see again.
Where were the others? Were they safe? Did they think he died? Were they even looking for him? Didn't they know how alone he was? Weren't they supposed to care?
How he'd shouted their names for hours on end, as much as his crushed ribcage would allow.
"Skip." Ash put her arms around him and feeling her, he threw himself into the embrace with a sharp cry, grabbing at the cloth of the back of her shirt with the one hand left to him, the same one that had sought water in the snow falling from the sky. "What do you need, Skip?"
'Why didn't they come? I waited and waited. Why didn't they come?" He sobbed into her shoulder.
"They did come. Remember?" Ash pulled his forehead to hers and looked into his eyes, forcing a rapport, though his just kept wanting to dart and seek a way out. "Your family came for you."
Shepard nodded tentatively, his mind still reeling from the memory he'd tried to kill, or at least leave in that dark crevice under that rubble. He'd been near catatonic by the time the rescue team found him. Weeks until he learned to speak again. Months until the new arm and leg stopped itching. Nearly a year passed since they'd pulled him out of that hole and it took him almost that long to truly leave it. When he did find a way to relieve the constant fear, he remembered feeling happy, for the solution seemed easy. Keep busy. Don't think. Hold on.
He blinked and realized they'd gone somewhere else. His relief was short-lived as he recognized the 'when' they'd traveled to. He clung to Ash. "No more, please."
"Just this last vision. Then my task is complete."
The Shepard of two years prior sat in his bunk and fiddled with a mod. He cursed as the screwdriver in his new hand slipped and scored a deep line in the black paint. John watched himself whistle a happy tune out of a face that still showed scars from his recent trauma. The door swished open to admit Tali, who stepped in with an air of uncertainty. The past him barely paused in his work. She sat in a chair at his bedside, as she had throughout his long recovery and said, "Shepard."
"Oh, hey, Tali. How was dinner?"
"It would have been better if you'd come with me. You should get out of this stuffy room more often."
"You know I hate it when they stare."
"They're just curious." Tali waved one graceful hand. Present-Shepard felt his heart thud to see her so near. He'd forgotten the small things, how she sat so neatly balanced with hands folded in her lap primly, how she could say so much with a nod or tilt of her masked and hooded head. Her mystery had been one he'd relished solving.
"Hey, check it out." Past-Shepard handed Tali the mod he'd been working on. "I adjusted it so the heat exchange wouldn't skew the sight after every few overheats."
"Uh, nice, I guess?" She turned it this way and that. "Won't this make it weigh more?"
"Meh, it might. But think of the damage I'll do now that I won't have to stop every few minutes and re-calibrate." His past self did a passable imitation of Garrus' voice for that last word, minus the buzzing subharmonics.
"Shepard, I don't think there's any large predators on Rannoch that need a rifle to scare them off. Seems like overkill."
"Rannoch? Who said anything about Rannoch?" Distracted, past-Shepard missed the sudden movement Tali made, a start combined with a hand flying to her throat. But his stupid, stupid younger self kept blundering on. "I've got it all planned out. Early release for this jailbird and then out into the galaxy to do what we do best."
"A-and what's that, Shepard?"
"Putting down bad guys. What else?" He hummed to himself with satisfaction as he put the mod in a drawer.
"I didn't think you'd been cleared for release yet." Tali's voice trembled, though how his past self failed to hear it, present-Shepard couldn't fathom. He ached to step in and put it right. He'd known then how important the plans they'd made were, he just didn't want to face them, face peace with those memories squatting in the back of his mind. That feeling of dwindling into nothing.
"Well, you can't keep a good guy down, sweetheart. This Spectre's gonna fly the coop. It's already arranged." He made a swooping motion with his hand as he gazed into the middle distance. "First, we'll get the Normandy back. Then we'll go pick up everyone and then-" The shaking of Tali's shoulders finally grabbed his younger self's attention. "What's the matter, Tali?"
A hitching noise filtered through her mask and she exploded, "You promised! We're supposed to go to Rannoch and live there, make a life there!"
He watched himself jerk forward and take her hands. "I know I did, but there's still stuff to do. Things to put right-"
"You've done enough! Let others take up where you left off!"
"C'mon, Tali, be reasonable. We'll mop up the mess the Reapers made of the galaxy, and then in a few years-"
"You can't expect me to just abandon my people now that we don't have any help at all to help revitalize our homeworld!"
Past-Shepard winced at the unintentional barb. It cut deep. It even cut present-Shepard. "Tali, I'm just trying to-"
"Do it all? Haven't you been doing that this whole time? Lay down your burden and come with me. I can make you happy, give you a good life." She pleaded with such elegance, her whole body involved in the act. "Please, they almost took you away from me this time. Let the future take care of itself. Build me that house on Rannoch."
Shepard watched his fool of a younger self swallow and stammer, "I-I just can't, Tali . . .."
The quarian took a deep and shaking breath and pulled her hands out of his. "Well, neither can I."
She left then, pausing at the door to say, "Goodbye, John."
And thus did something he'd meant to hold onto forever slip through his fingers. Present-Shepard looked at himself and swore, "Stubborn jackass. Go after her!"
"But you didn't, did you, Skip?" He'd almost forgotten about Ash, who came forward again to put her arms around his shoulders. Just a comfort, nothing more.
"No, I didn't. I thought the galaxy still needed me to fight its battles for it. Turns out I just wasted a year doing busy-work."
"The galaxy does still need you, Skip. It's the arena that's changed. A new kind of battle where shooting first isn't the only option. You might not have to kill anyone at all."
"I find it difficult to imagine such a thing. I've always solved all my problems with bigger and bigger guns." Shepard sighed, feeling heavy and weary. He touched Ash's forearm where it curled around his front and rasped, "Are we done?"
"Skip, don't let this pass into a dream to be forgotten. When the others come, and they will come, Skip, remember this: You couldn't be alone even if you wanted to be. I'll always be near. Just as the crew of the Normandy that searched those days never lost sight of you in their thoughts."
With that, she faded and he found himself back in the Ascension's medbay, laying on his cot. "Ash?"
"Keep it down over*gasp* there. I swear, all your *gasp* mumbling will drive me insane." A familiar weaselly voice made Shepard lift his head and look. He had a bunkmate. Braca, bandages all over his chest, holding clear tubes in place, lay not two beds away.
Now the pain he'd expected on first waking assailed him and he hissed as he took in the stump of his left shoulder. So, that happened. As for the rest, as implausible as it seemed, he felt fairly sure it had actually happened. Strange. To his roomie, he said, "Ah, Braca. How you doin', buddy?"
"I can't believe *gasp* you shot me."
"I can't believe you got taken hostage."
"I'll have you stripped of your *gasp* authority!"
"No, you won't. They'll probably give me another medal for saving all your butts. Probably look at the 'shooting you' as a bonus." He really wished he could still do 'quoties.'
"How *gasp* dare you?!"
"You find you get a lot of wiggle room when you know fifty ways to kill a man with just a P-38. Plus the whole saving the galaxy thing, I guess." He shot a look over to where Braca's face grew redder and more splotchy by the second. "Calm down. You'll blow a gasket and I'm not getting up to press the comms if you do. Be glad you survived. Most don't. Hell, I lost an arm."
"You'll lose more *gasp* than that-"
"You know you sound kind of like a volus right now?" He waved off any rejoinders. "Listen, my shoulder hurts plenty awful, so I'm going to hit this morphine drip a bit. Probably going to take a lot to put me out, but I won't be out for long, thanks to my super-metabolism. Don't fuck with me while I'm sleeping, okay? And if you hear me talk, just ignore me. Or if you hear anyone talking to me, just ignore them, too."
"Shepard, what the *gasp* hell-"
"Shh, now. Talky time is over. Nap time is now." He felt the first teasing whispers of the narcotic hitting his bloodstream before the rest blindsided him and dropped his consciousness like a one hit wonder. He fell deeper and deeper into the black, and found another dead friend there.