"And I'm going to blow you and your Reapers straight to hell," she snarled, tears not of pain stinging her eyes. With a grunt, she swiped out at the child, the vicious dispelling gesture no more effective than lashing out at steam in a shower would be.
It dispersed and reformed, frowning at her, expression darkly solemn…but it didn't say a word. It simply regarded her, a dangerous thing that apparently couldn't actually force her to do anything.
She didn't waste her breath with a snide, sneering comment about it being about as effectual as real smoke. She had bigger problems and taunting that thing—whatever it really was—was a waste of time and energy.
She had to make it to the generator.
She had to blow the damn thing up.
She could make snide comments to the thing's corpse…or the empty space where it used to be.
Shepard forced herself to her feet, muscles screaming in agony. Blood leaked from her, dripping onto the immaculate floor as her head began to spin. Each step was a penance…except that it wasn't. She wouldn't let it be.
Each step was a labor of love.
Each step brought her people—the people she'd been fighting for, the people she loved and people she didn't even know, known and faceless sapients all across the galaxy—a future. Future free from Reapers and that was enough to keep her moving until she'd been utterly dismembered.
Each step was…
Agony.
Each step was…
Excruciating.
But anger was there to push her when idealism began to flag. Anger was there, hot and surging, like the white-hot rage that had pushed her through the Omega-4 Relay and back out of it again.
The child had tried to get—succeeded in getting—into her head, use her family against her. Bad enough the Reapers used people that way. Profaning the memories of her dead…?
That was just insulting.
The Reapers had hounded, hunted and harried her for too long. They'd done the same to sapient life across countless Cycles. Everything had a beginning. Now, the Reapers were going to know what it was to end.
EDI said that synthetics didn't understand death the same way organics did. She hoped the concept scared the shit out of the Reapers. She didn't think they'd try to run away, but she wished they would. Let them know in some small measure before it stopped being important what it was to fear, to feel that primal gut-wrenching sense of finality rushing up to meet them.
For organics, whatever came next would come. For the machines…a big, dark, scary wall of nothing. Surely nothing could be so frightening to the supposedly unbeatable, infallible, unstoppable menace that had had so much time to find no evidence of being beatable, of being fallible, of being stopped.
Sons of bitches.
Pain continued to increase, until she thought she could define every muscle group in her body by the way it twinged. Her head throbbed, splitting, bursting…but her pain now was only something that could slow her down. Because her pain meant an ending of it for countless others. It was worth the price; it had always been worth the price. It had been her reason for joining the Alliance: let her hurt and suffer so that others didn't have to. Let her fight the darkness and the unknown so others could remain blissfully ignorant.
Slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity, she struggled forward, breaths coming in short jerks, lips pulled tight against her teeth in a grimace of pain. It seemed such a long, long way to walk.
But she hadn't come here to try to tell the Reapers what to do. She'd come to blow them up, atomize their superstructures so someone could dance on their ashes.
She hadn't come to 'synthesize' with anyone: it was repellant, disgusting. The Reapers couldn't win, so they thought they could bond with organics? Cowardice. They should be shot for cowardice…and that was exactly what she was going to do!
She gained the walkway, caught a momentary glance at the blood trail she'd left, scarlet in the grey brightness. Levelling her pistol was an act of sheer will, the pain so bad she thought she might shatter her body if she pulled the trigger. Her arm screamed in pain but her aim remained steady relative to her level of discomfort.
She hadn't let Sovereign make her trade a killing blow for the lives of three 'integral' organics.
She hadn't let the Collectors stop her by taking her crew.
She wasn't going to let a little pain—however not little it actually was—stop her now. Not when she was so close.
Her heartbeat racked her, rocking her aim, but she continued to move, fighting as though through water or against high gravity. She hadn't come this far to stop. She would never stop, not until she knew the others would be safe. She could feel an ugly expression, the purest most mulish determination, etching her features, the very stubbornness of it shoving aside the knowledge that the people who cared about her were about to lose her all over again…assuming she hadn't lost them already.
Shepard stopped walking, sighted along the barrel of her pistol. She couldn't walk and shoot at the same time by this point. She could almost feel herself unraveling. She didn't hear the rapport of the weapon, only names of the lost in each bark of the weapon.
Williams.
Pakto.
Dubyansky.
Grenado.
Barret.
Emerson.
Bakari.
Grieco.
Tanaka.
Telawa.
Crosby.
Chase.
Waaberi.
Tucks.
Pressly.
Glastone.
Lowe.
Rahman.
Negulesco.
Laflamme.
Jenkins.
The Draven sisters.
And the ones she cared most for…
Garrus.
Javik.
Mordin.
Samara.
Tali.
Liara.
Kaidan.
Thane.
Legion.
Grunt.
Kasumi.
Forbes.
Anderson.
How many of the others hadn't made it? Far too many.
Shepard knew she was too close to the explosion, but knew she needed only one more shot. Just one…
…and that one was for the little boy who never was.