***king author's note. I hate myself already.
Worth noting: slight Mass Effect crossover in that my OC is FemShep living to fight another day in another universe. I endeavor to explain it all well enough in my characterization so that the games are not a prerequisite. If I don't, tell me. If I do, tell me. If you have no idea either way, well you can tell me that too. Always happy to help.
Also, you know what this is. I own nothing. I profit from nothing. Read it here. Read it once.
Read on.
…
There was a moment. A tiny fleeting little flash of time when she opened her eyes and remembered nothing.
And then came the pain, surging up her left leg like flame, licking along her side, knee to waist, shoulder to wrist, frayed nerves exposed to searing air. After that came the memories, all screams and panic and death, empty eyes lifeless and unseeing, scarlet sprays staining everything they touched.
She couldn't run anymore. Could barely move. Honestly hadn't expected to wake up ever again. Through luck and desperation she'd somehow managed to kill one but there'd been so many…more than anyone had ever reported seeing in one place before. More than an entire unit of trained marines could handle. She shivered at the thought, the area around her shifting from reality to illusion and back again. Shapes appearing like bodies before flickering back to their true foreign forms. Green swirling with red, dripping fat drops onto pale, fleshy dirt.
How many days had she pulled herself through this damn forest? Passing out from pain anytime something even grazed the oozing wound on her side and perhaps once from exhaustion. She was starving, dehydrated, hallucinating. Dying…
She was feverish and in pain. Half mad from fear at this point. Jenn was quite sure she was going to die.
She wakes up gasping for air, hands clenching at the sides of her bed, the material hard and cold. Her head fuzzy, body numb, the pain along her side dulled despite suddenly sitting up. Drugs. She was drugged and something was wrong. She couldn't breathe.
"Easy there, ma'am. You need to calm down."
Hands gently hold her wrists, keeping them from her throat. An aged man smiling sympathetically above her, the distant rumbling of gunfire ringing her ears. He was certainly not what she needed. "W-we have to go!" Her breath become even more erratic, panic amplifying her need to move. To run. To get away. "I don't… have to... They're c-coming."
She couldn't understand why he was so calm, staring down at her with patience and empathy. Couldn't he hear the… All she could hear was her own breathing. Deep gasping breathes. Sobs. When had she started crying? The man's face starts to blur, another women at his side holding a syringe and a plastic line. A line connected to her arm. Did they not understand the danger they were in?
"They're dead. They're all dead." Her words were slurred even to her own ears. A quiet desperate warning. Before it all faded away. Sleep overtaking her once more, a different setting playing out behind closed eyes. A small house, obsessively clean. A closed door she knew better than to open but opened all the same.
"Momma. Wake up, momma."
She shook the thin shoulder. Once. Twice. Three times. The bed bouncing erratically under her knees.
"I fixed the radio, momma. It works now. You've got to see it."
And at last her mother moves, sitting up with a dark expression coloring her pretty face, dashing any trace of excitement she'd been foolish enough to entertain just moments before. "How many times have I told you not to bother momma when the doors closed?" Her question is punctuated with a smack, hard and loud in the small dimmed room, followed then only by silence.
She was too afraid to so much as move let alone speak the apology on the tip of her tongue but she could feel the weight of her mom's eyes, staring at her with some collection of emotion splashed plainly in the pale blue of her eyes. Emotion she can only guess at with her own burning gaze locked steadily on the smooth white comforter between them.
Embarrassment. Regret. Fear. It was hard to tell what her own expression would read but the blur of tears was obvious.
"Oh, Jennifer. Don't cry, darling." Smooth hands caress the tears away, gentle as her voice, desperately apologetic. "Mommy's just tired is all. What was it you wanted?"
But the moment had passed, all the excitement gone. Only regret was left and what a bitter taste it was. "Nothing Momma. I'm sorry Momma." Learned responses. Tentative and placating. Just enough to cover her retreat.
The door clicks closed behind her. As it should have stayed all along.
In a swirl of blurred colors, the setting changed again. Whispered words filtering through a thick layer of disconcerting fog. A man's voice. Agitated, perhaps. Another man, thickly accented skepticism. A woman, calm and reassuring.
"Perhaps we should take this somewhere else."
The rest faded to a dimly lit room.
Light from a setting sun trickling prettily through multicolored glass. Phantom pain shot up the left side of her body. Scar tissue tight and itchy, a barely there limp the only visible evidence of the trauma she'd not so recently endured. The rest carefully concealed behind layers of clothing, a hat pulled low in hopes of concealing her identity from any who might recognize her on the street. Recognize the person she'd successfully buried, not the tragic survivor she was now.
It wasn't right. Wasn't real. They were all dead and she was alive. Left to move on and pick up the pieces and wonder every single day why it was her that made it off that damn planet. Regardless…
Jennifer was home the second Frank's wrinkled face lights up with recognition. Home hadn't been a place till she'd stumbled upon the burly preacher, freezing and half starved, homeless and hopeless. A friendly face in a lifetime of uncertainty. He'd given her kindness and salvation. Now she hoped he'd give her peace.
"Oh my girl, I wasn't expecting you."
It is said without condemnation, only pleasant surprise. She falls into his embrace, fingers clenched in the fabric at his back. The comfort slipping gradually through desperately clutching fingers.
The warmth of his fatherly embrace replaced with an unwanted reality. Bright lights and metallic smells. Steel and blood and pain. Her entire body radiated pain. Agonizing, hot pain that only barely parted for the gentle voice surrounding her. Disembodied. Coming from above and beside. It was too bright to see. It hurt too much to focus on much of anything.
'…Shepard… advanced…unknown…' The ringing was too loud. The pain. Christ the fucking pain. The ringing got louder. The voice did too. Was it the same one? 'Commander…hydra…American.'
A wave of numb crashes violently against the pain, valiantly fighting it away. Fighting with a ferocity she couldn't seem to conjure up herself.
"Let it be over." Her voice is rough. Dry and searing through her throat. Not much more than a whisper for all the effort it took. "Please, God just let it end."
God was neither cruel nor particularly kind. He gave nothing more than could be handled. Or so the saying went.
Welcome back, Commander. The world was mocking her. Had to be.
It wasn't the end. This story was only just beginning.
…
It took her no time at all to decide this Earth was just as fucked up as the one she remembered. They thought she was some kind of threat which was…reasonable but made information woefully hard to come by. The handcuffs were laughable but she was beginning to doubt she had anywhere else to go free of them. Thus far the basics of this Earth and its time as she had come to understand it: women are not soldier's and do not curse like them, the rate of her recovery is unprecedented, and the world is at war.
She laughs so hard she cries when she learns that last one. It was just what she needed. Another fucking war. The war to end all wars if her nurse, a woman because they could be trusted to do that if nothing else, was to be believed.
She'd been hysterical. They'd had to sedate her.
When she's well enough to be discharged they drag her handcuffed to a wheeled vehicle and through the streets of a primitive war-torn London. She cries again as her escort watches, calculating, but Jenn hasn't cared about much since she'd woken up in this strange new time. Hasn't cared about anything until now. Her hands clench into fists, shaking with an emotion so complicated she couldn't have named it. "What was the point?"
Her escort doesn't respond to the whispered question. Has no hope of even understanding the entire meaning of it. How was he to know she'd died over one London to wake up in another? Sacrificed everything to simply start anew. New war, new rules. Never ending conflict. Jennifer Shepard was so tired of fighting and damned enough to be faced with the inevitability of more. Was there any hope she wouldn't get pulled into this one? People had dragged her back from death for the sake of fighting their war for them before. Or perhaps it had always been death. This just an eternal cycle of misery she'd been condemned to suffer.
Please God. Just let it end.
When she opens her eyes it's all the same. Brick instead of steel but that didn't matter. It held the touches of war just as solemnly.
She dreams of London that night. Her London. The final desperate charge, flanked by Garrus and Liara and hundreds of others that stumble and fight and fall. This time she just lets it all burn.
…tbc…
"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost."
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front