In Love and War
Chapter Four – Elysium
Shepard woke up with her heart racing and her breath short. She hadn't had a nightmare about the battle on Elysium in a very long time. She took a deep breath to calm her heart, and then got up and walked to the closet where her formal dress blues hung, and fished the breast pocket to take out a folded postcard with a drawing on it. It was the only thing she took back from Elysium, that and her life. She had just finished the basic training and her bunkmate Tasha asked her to come to Elysium for their shore leave before moving on to different assignments. "Come on, Alan is coming and 7 others." Tasha and Alan were getting serious in their relationship but the whole squad wanted to vacation together?
"I'll be too busy." Shepard had plans. She wanted to visit both the Propulsion Academy campus and to meet with an N7 recruiter after the boot camp.
"You can spare a week, Shepard!" Tasha wouldn't let her off easily. "The day you become an Admiral, you'll remember who showed you a good time on Elysium! You'll come with us or we'll drag your ass there and make you have a good time." Shepard finally gave in and agreed to have a nice week of relaxation and sight seeing with her friends.
Nobody saw them coming. The batarians came in at night and killed everyone in sight as they advanced street by street on the human colony. Shepard and her friends joined the fight with only small pistols issued for Alliance personnel on leave. They could hear the shouting and explosions ringing in the distance. A small Marine squad got in contact with them and shared some heavier weapons with the group. There were no other options, the batarians were slaughtering civilians, kids, women, and unarmed men; nobody escaped, they had to join the fight. Shepard and her friends followed the Marine squad to a riverbank that curved around a large park. They could hear screaming coming from a sprawling structure across a bridge, and they knew there were people trapped in there behind the enemy line.
The batarians had set up barricades on the bridge and outside the building. The Marine squad took the central path while Shepard and her friends tried to sneak pass the defense on a catwalk just below the bridge. By the time the two groups met up on the other side, half of the Marine squad was dead. Screaming hadn't stopped in the building. They finally pushed back the batarians and entered the structure. The sight of bodies littering in the building was sickening. The Marines took to the windows to snipe the remaining batarians while Shepard and her friends searched the rooms for survivors.
Shepard teamed up with Tasha and Alan. As they stepped in pools of blood trying to avoid tripping on bodies that had been shot, hacked and shredded by grenades, Shepard and her friends threw up one after another at gruesome scenes room after room. But they kept pressing on, hoping you'd find survivors somewhere. Shepard went into a two-story apartment with Tasha behind her and Alan protecting their rear. The first floor was on fire, Tasha found a fire extinguisher in the kitchen and put out the small fire, as Shepard was still checking the rest of the first floor. No bodies.
Alan shouted from the second floor, "Over here!"
On the second floor, they found a man with dozens of knife wounds dead outside a bedroom door, his blood soaking the floor. The door had been kicked down, and a woman and a boy were shot in bed holding each other. Shepard turned her head away, feeling sick in her stomach again. She signaled Tasha to check another room while turning to check the remaining room. She walked in to the small bedroom with her pistol in front of her, more blood and a girl's body lying across the room. Shepard heard a whimper when she entered the room and as she bent down to check the girl's pulse. A voice came from a collapsible closet. Shepard moved slowly toward the closet with pistol aiming straight at it. "Is anybody in there? "
A girl's voice came out, "Is it safe to come out?"
Shepard lowered her gun, "Yes, come out slowly. I won't hurt you. I'm with the Alliance, I'm here to help."
A girl about 8 or 10 climbed out of the closet slowly, tears on her face. Her eyes locked on Shepard's face and her hands clenching her skirt. Shepard docked her gun and stepped in between the girl and whom she suspected was the girl's dead sister on the floor. "Sweetheart, are you hurt?" The girl shook her head. "You hid in there? You are a very smart girl."
"My sister hid me there before, before…" Shepard took the girl's hand and walked her out of the room all the while blocking her view of her sister's body.
Gunfire intensified outside again. Shepard and her friends heard the Marines shouting, "Incoming reinforcements! We've got to go!"
Shepard led the girl downstairs, away from the bodies and blood pools of her family. She walked her over to the kitchen pantry and took out everything in the tiny room, and she put the girl in there. "You hide in here. I'm going to stop those monsters outside. And I'm going to come back for you. Don't come out by yourself. You wait here for me, okay?" The girl nodded but didn't let go of Shepard's hand. Shepard waited for a moment. She saw a box of crackers lying on the floor, so she took it and gave it to the girl, "You eat this box of crackers and wait for me. I promise I will come back for you. Can you trust me?" The girl nodded again and let Shepard's hand go and took the crackers. Shepard lightly squeezed the girl's shoulder. "Stay."
An armored car had dropped off more batarians a block down the street. One of the Marines took out the armored car, but not before its large gun landed a devastating shell on the spot where the Marines were and took out every single one of them. Two members from Shepard's party made their way to the spot and checked for survivors and useable weapons and ammo. Shepard, Alan and Tasha were the only ones on this side of the barricade. Shepard shouted across the street, "What's the situation?"
Her friends shouted back, "No survivors, two rifles and some grenades left." The batarians fired at her friends' location.
Shepard turned to Tasha, "We can't fight them with our pistols. I'm going to get us some grenades and see what else I can find. When I lay down the cover fire, you two come over to that side, OK?" Her friends nodded. Shepard started running and diving into the cover on the other side of the street.
Shepard and her friends tossed several grenades at the batarians behind their barricade, after the grenades exploded, Shepard got up and fired her rifle. The batarians returned fire at her location while Tasha and Alan ran across the street to join them. "This isn't working, we can't see them and we don't have sniper rifles left. They are smart and they don't stand up or show their vulnerabilities. We'll be sitting ducks soon if we don't cut them through somehow." Shepard was getting frustrated.
Alan gave his pistol to Tasha, "I've got an idea. I'm going to run back into the building while making noise. Hopefully it will get their attention and get you guys an opening."
"No, everyone stays together." Shepard tried to stop him.
"We don't have other options." Alan looked at Tasha and gave her a big kiss on the lips, and he took off running. The song they hated so much at the boot camp rang in the streets of Elysium, "We are the space Marines, with our rifles and shields, we travel the galaxy, we stand in the front and center, straightly and honorably."
Both the humans and the batarians were shocked by Alan's action. A few batarians got up and watched the human running while singing at the top of his lungs. Shepard yelled loudly, "Fire, fire!" Her friends opened fire simultaneously. "Go, go, go!" As they moved forward ducking behind building debris and parts of barricades, they pushed back the closest batarians. At the same time, the batarians opened fired on Alan's position. Alan's voice went on for a little while, and then it went silent. Tasha jumped up and charged the enemy hiding behind the last line of a long barricade. "No, Tash!" Shepard saw her friend vaulting over their cover and she followed after her, firing everything she had in her hands at the enemy. When they both reached a stack of barricade blocks, Tasha fell down. Shepard's eyes popped when she saw two holes in Tasha's chest. They were just holes at first, then blood started to trickle down. "No!" Shepard searched her pockets for Medi-gel and bent down to Tasha.
"Alan!" Tasha coughed.
Shepard quickly ripped opened the gel pack and squeezed the content on Tasha's wounds. "Stay with me, Tash, don't leave me."
"Shepard," Tasha's breathing was ragged, "Don't forget to call me when you make Admiral." Her breathing stopped.
"No, no, no! Tash, you open your eyes and you look at me! I'm not going to carry you sorry ass back to the spaceport. You are going to walk out of here, you hear me?" Tasha didn't hear her. More gunfire rang. Shepard didn't want to hide any more.
With a bloody knife in one hand and a pistol in another, Shepard charged the batarian barricade, darting from one cover to another, like a malfunctioning robot that was executing precise movements with maddening reasons behind the action. As she plowed through the stunned batarian fighters, a trail of bodies laid waste behind her. By the time she stopped her bone chilling cries that companied her maddening dash, she was covered in blood, her voice was gone, and she could barely hold herself upright. It took her a long time to walk back to Tasha's body. She dropped down to her knees and took Tasha's dog tags and whispered, "I got them, Tash. I got them all."
When the Alliance reinforcements arrived, they found the young soldier sitting next to her friend's body, neck full of dog tags and body covered in blood. As they tried to get her on a stretcher, she shook them off. "Take your hands off me, I'm not injured." But she couldn't stand up on her feet, so she just sat there, until she suddenly remembered something. She got up and ran into the building with two field medics chasing after her. She went into one of the apartments and into the pantry. There, she found the girl sleeping against the wall. She picked up the girl and carried her outside toward the field vans.
Shepard spent two days in the field hospital for two bullet wounds, and the girl she found never left her side. When she could get up and walk around again, they had found the girl's relatives off world and arranged for transport. The day they said goodbye, the girl gave Shepard a postcard. On it, she drew an Alliance soldier with amber red hair and a pistol in her hand.
A/N: Thanks for the reviews and PMs. All comments, reviews, suggestions and PMs are welcome.