Sephiroth lingered before the window in the Normandy port observatory, studying the distant relay and the vast array of stars. It looked so still. Peaceful.
"You know what will happen when I kill the last of the Reapers," he said, his deep voice rumbling with multiple layers like Turian subharmonics.
"Assuming you last that long," Shepard said, not looking up from the report on the damage the Normandy had taken in the last fight. "They're learning and adjusting their strategy. Are you?
He turned his head to look at her sidelong. She wondered why he bothered. He didn't need to look in order to see.
"I will initiate a different strategy when the current one ceases to be effective."
"What's your backup plan?"
He put a hand on her wrist, interrupting the Omni-tool's projection.
"Have you made peace with it?" he asked, his voice low.
She met his gaze. Burning green eyes that cast his face in a harrowing light. How many dead planets looked back at her from behind the monster's face? Her jaw locked. She knew exactly how many Reapers he had claimed in the same way. Tens of thousands, in less than a month since she found him drifting in dark space. More than all their forces had managed to kill in the eight long years since the war started. Since the Crucible failed.
"I don't trade in peace," she hissed.
His eyes mocked her with their gentleness. Her armoured gauntlet creaked under the pressure of his grip on her arm. "I will gift it to you."
"It's not what you're selling either."
"Is it not?" He cocked his head. "Is that not why you called me? You would rather your worlds burn under my hand than that of your enemy." He loomed over her. His next words sighed through her mind. "You would rather become me then become what has already taken root within you."
She bared her teeth and a constellation of scar tissue across the right side of her face pulled tight.
"I am not the Reapers," she said in place of a denial. He could kill her enemy when nobody else could. The price… She swallowed harshly. She'd pay whatever price that came at.
He smiled and looked back to the relay. He couldn't travel through them. He needed her and the Normandy's IFF if he wanted to consume the Reapers before they finished what they came for and retreated back to dark space.
"No," he drawled, "you, human, are something else. It was not your message that drew my eye."
She closed her eyes. Then she straightened her spine. "Perhaps it was it my rank, general."
He didn't move, inhuman in his perfect stillness. "Your rank means nothing to me. I am not a soldier."
"I didn't call you one," she said.
"You cannot comprehend my existence."
She smiled, exposing her canines. "I can comprehend the empty patch on your belt where an insignia should be. The stars missing from your shoulders, and the instinctive march of a land based serviceman." His human body wasn't real, it was just an avatar he inhabited, but it had to have been real, once.
"These things mean nothing to me."
She crossed her arms. "You feel strongly about being indifferent."
He turned back to her. The bands of green energy of his real form hummed around her, upsetting the ship's sensors.
"Do you think I will spare you," he asked, quiet and curious, and his ice cold hand trailing up her cheek, "because I once wore a uniform?"
"You're still wearing a uniform, and no," she ground out, straining to hold her ground. Everything in her screamed to run away, throw a punch, fall to her knees, something. She locked her muscles and forced herself to look up at him. "I have no delusions of receiving mercy." She knew what she'd done.
He tilted her head up and she hated him.
"Good," he said, with no trace of the feigned gentleness from before.
She wrenched her head out of his grasp.
"There." She point out toward the window, where the relay was beginning to glow and rotate. It opened and ships flooded through it, filling the star system. "I brought you more Reapers."
He turned his attention to the fleet and she felt like a taut rope suddenly cut as the pressure in her mind eased.
Sephiroth walked calmly through the sealed and reinforced windows into the void of space. His body gave way to a shapeless form of pure energy, magnificent as a star going supernova.
The Reapers converged on them.
Sephiroth killed them all.
Shepard watched the Reaper signals die out, one by one by one, from the screens in the command room.
His signal looked so harmless on the display, a little green dot passing through the red ones and turning them off on his way by. They were faster than him, much faster, and more manoeuvrable with astronomical numbers. He was simply unstoppable.
She didn't let herself watch from the windows anymore. Dreadnoughts sliced in two, kilometres-long capital ships collapsing into dust like poorly made sandcastles. It was… it was too much.
She focused on the blue dots instead, allied vessels fleeing the Reapers. She and the strategists in her crew co-ordinated their escape and the fighter ships that guarded them. Later she would use the Normandy to hold the relay open so they could escape the system. The Reapers controlled the relay network. Without the Normandy they either couldn't get through or they would be funnelled directly into ambushes. Without a ship, Sephiroth couldn't get through them at all.
A certain pressure on the back of her mind rose and fell, seemingly at random. Perhaps he had left some fragment of himself in the room to get a birds eye view of the battlefield. None of their strategies ever took him by surprise.
It lasted nearly an hour, as more vessels came through and zipped about the star system. Two Reapers chasing a small Alliance frigate arrived. Red dots and a blue dot, landing nearly on top of the green dot.
The two red blinked out. The blue dot did too.
Miranda looked up at her from across the table. A hush fell across the room, crew members looking to her from the harsh light of their consoles. They all saw.
"Maybe it was an accident," Miranda offered with a grimace. "They did all but crash into him."
Shepard kept her expression fixed, staring at the display. The innocent green dot glowing back up at her.
He was too precise for something so careless. And he enjoyed toying with them too much to do any such thing by accident.
The pressure on her mind never really lifted fully anymore. It leaned heavily on her now.
She dragged in a breath. He was watching.
The green dot didn't move from the mouth of the relay, waiting.
"That's a shame," she said quietly, pointedly. "I enjoyed working together."
She felt a presence at her back. She gripped the edge of the table, leaning heavily on it. She glanced behind her. Nothing.
"EDI," she called.
"Yes, Commander?" the AI that controlled the ship replied.
"The next time he moves on an allied vessel, I want you to delete our IFF."
The green dot didn't move.
The hush became a silence. Every head in the control room snapped to her.
The weight of a hand rested at the small of her back. She wasn't wearing her armour. Icy coldness seeped through her abdomen.
"Could you please verify that order for me, Shepard?" EDI asked, her tone steady.
She caught sight of silver drifting in the air out the corner of her eyes. She didn't look. It wouldn't be there if she looked. The presence at her back drifted until it felt like a freezing arm draped around her back and resting on her hip. A mocking gesture of support. Daring her to do it.
If she did nothing then he would freely harvest them alongside the Reapers.
Her mind shuttered around that thought.
'What difference does it make if you are mine today…' a deep voice whispered in her ear, 'or tomorrow?'
She locked her jaw. They couldn't die before the Reapers were defeated. They couldn't, or what was the point of it all? What was she holding on for if she couldn't outlast them?
Cold air sighed at her ear. 'How will you defeat them if you are trapped in this star system with me?'
"How will you get to the promised land if the Reapers take all the spirit energy and go home before you even get to the next star cluster?" she hissed under her breath. "Will you wait fifty thousand years until they come back for the next cycle?"
The cold seeping up her spine slid into her chest.
"Shepard?" Miranda asked, blinking at her with green eyes.
She lifted her chin.
"If Sephiroth moves on us or our allies," she said, loud and clear, "please delete our one-of-a-kind Reaper IFF."
"That's-" Miranda started.
"The only reason we can travel through the relays." She turned suddenly, leaning her back against the table and crossing her arms. "Yes, it is." She stared with narrowed eyes through the empty space where nobody stood and no silver hair drifted like rotting seaweed in a stagnant pond.
"Understood," EDI replied. "Orders lodged."
She held her breath and waited for the retaliation.
Her back felt naked and exposed with the false contact torn away. A shiver of cold ran up her spine to her scalp. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
The pressure on her mind seemed to stretch out, warping.
Goosebumps broke out on her skin.
And… nothing. Nothing happened.
She let out a strained breath.
The room returned to its usual state of quiet murmuring. She looked over her shoulder. Heads were turned to their consoles again, the battle ongoing and her crew doing their duty. They were accustomed to drastic orders and horrific risk. They trusted her.
Her head froze, captured in an iron grip. The room moved on at its normal pace, Javik barking instructions to a cruiser that had just entered the system, Miranda receiving information from the fleet and adjusting their strategy with EDI's input. She couldn't look away from them.
'Do not fear,' he whispered, gentle and amused. 'You will outlast everyone on this ship.'
He released her, and all the red dots on the display blinked out.
She lead the way across the surface of a dying world. Her breath hissed inside her helmet.
Javik walked next to her, tense and silent ever since they had stepped off the shuttle. Dust swirled in their wake and dull rock crumbled under their boots.
Overhead Sephiroth floated some hundred meters in the air, unshielded in the low atmosphere world, studying the barren wasteland. His hair and coat whipped about in the wind, making him a black and silver smear in the skies. She didn't often seem him against the backdrop of a world. In her mind he was a creature purely of the emptiness of space, not the quiet mundanity of earth and sky. Today he carried a sword.
"This was a metropolis in the last cycle. Heavily fortified against the Reapers," Javik said quietly. "We held it for… years."
Strange, scraggly plants peeked out between the stone here and there, but nothing crawled and nothing flew save for dust catching on the seams of their armour.
She kicked at the dirt. "There aren't even any ruins." Some of the Prothean cities had survived as skeletons of themselves, crumbling testament to those who had come before. Not even the foundations had survived here.
They found the emergency beacon that drew them, a crashed old Turian vessel perched on the edge of a cliff. The crew had run out of food and then oxygen shortly after. Shepard turned off the broadcast.
"He would have made a good Prothean," Javik said while they walked through the dark corridors, torches on their armour lighting the way. He didn't have to specify who he was talking about.
"I think he would say that the Protheans would have made good spirit energy," she replied darkly.
Would that have been kinder than what the Reapers did to them?
Javik didn't reply.
He was the only member of the crew who had looked her in the eye when she welcomed Sephiroth aboard. When she cut a deal.
"He's getting more powerful," she whispered. He could hear them, of course. He could always hear them now.
"How many has he taken?"
"Twelve thousand now."
"I would have given my homeworld for such a number," Javik replied plainly.
"What about the Prothean homeworld?" she asked the defeated general of the last war against the Reapers.
"Will you give the human homeworld?" he asked back.
She didn't look at him, and he didn't ask again. He knew the answer anyway.
Sephiroth had landed when they came back out into the dusty rays of the red sun.
"This planet is old and weak," he said, looking out over the plains below. "It lacks even the strength to flee."
The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She stepped forward, a hand lifted and an objection in her throat.
He crouched down and placed a gentle hand to the soil, in the most human gesture she had ever seen from him.
His brow lowered over his eyes, heavy with anger. "They have stolen too much."
The words died in her throat.
He lifted his hand, drawing something back up with it, something her eyes couldn't make sense of or focus on. It was vaguely green, though she felt instinctively that the colour was simply something her mind had conjured for her to latch onto.
He drew the ethereal glowing presence up from the ground, cradling it in his hands. Streams of it rushed across the plains below in willing surrender, rising up to him. With near tenderness he let the battered life sink into himself, where there was no weakness or defeat.
"Enemies incoming, Shepard," EDI warned through the radios.
The shadows of Reaper ships entering the atmosphere drifted overhead.
At her feet, the scraggly plants wilted and collapsed into brittle dust. The texture of the planet itself changed, losing what little vibrancy it had.
Her Omni-tool blared alarms. Earthquakes were deep within the crust and would soon tear through the crumbling surface before collapsing into the magma of the core.
Had civilisation moved in different directions in this cycle, things been ever so slightly different, it could have been terraformed. It could have been colonised. It could have been saved, life slowly nursed back to health. Life could have returned.
Now it never would.
She wasn't a spiritual person. Never had been.
The ships were descending swiftly. She sent a hand signal to Javik and sent him running back to the shuttle.
"Sephiroth," she yelled. "Incoming!"
She reached for her rifle and backed away, but couldn't stop starring at Sephiroth's back. He was a dark silhouette shrouded in the surging, roaring light. It swept passed her boots, rushing around her and tugging against her skin.
He closed his outstretched hand in a blinding fist.
She turned and ran. The rivers of life slowed and then died away entirely. A silent shadow crept over her, covering the ground for miles.
A flash of light, and the shadow split in two. She didn't look back, didn't need to need to see Sephiroth rising up between the sliced open Reaper, like a burning meteor in reverse.
She couldn't watch, or she'd never stop.
A bullet tore through her torso.
She stumbled, and threw herself against a rocky outcrop. Husks screamed in the distance. Where was the marauder? She pressed a hand against her ribs and stifled a cough. Bullets buried itself in the rock face next to her. She threw up a biotic shield and lifted her rifle.
Her chest ached. Blood trickled into her lungs. She bared her teeth and fired. Her breathing hitched and she coughed and coughed. The husks ran at her. She threw a blast, tearing them open.
Her Omni-tool bleeped out a desperate warning, signalling her allies. Javik called over the radio, too far away to help.
The husks screamed. The ground shook and the red light dimmed.
She fired and fired and fired. Her shield wavered. She staggered, collapsing to her knees. She hacked up blood. The marauder's bullets threw up red mud and dirt
She couldn't breathe.
Light surged to life before her, liquid silver tinged green.
Sephiroth hauled her up and slammed her against the wall. Bullets warped away from him, leaving them in a quiet bubble where she was gasping under burning eyes.
The hole in her chest healed up, torn, burnt, and cauterised flesh reknitting together. She hissed and ground her teeth against the pain.
"You will have death when I grant it to you," Sephiroth said, his arm pressed against her throat. "Not before."
He dropped her and evaporated again.
On her knees again she heaved and hacked up the blood still sealed inside her lungs. She vomited it up, her hands fisting in the dirt. The husks charged her. She lifted her gun with bloodied hands and took aim.
He could have made it painless. He just didn't deign to extend her that mercy. She snarled, throwing a biotic warp, red dripping from her lips. Good. She didn't want his mercy.
She held her ground.
Reaper ships exploded silently in the stratosphere. The shredded debris reigned down around her. She made it to the shuttle and they fled up into space before the tectonic plate cracked in two.
The dying planet crumbled far below. Its murderer fought in a brilliant display that outshone its death rattle.