Post-War AU, the central alteration being that the Normandy simply never left the Sol system... oh, and also it's Fem!Shep/Tali, deal with it, it's what's happening. Tali is my favorite LI but I detest playing M!Shep, so... this. Story picks up following the destroy ending as presented in the Extended Cut DLC. Mass Effect and canonical characters are the property of EA Games and BioWare.
/Elin
Space really was beautiful, she mused feverishly as she stared out into the void, the broken and mangled part of the citadel where she found herself half immersed in rubble was open to space yet something was clearly keeping the cold vacuum at bay. At least for now. She'd been born in space, it seemed only fitting, she thought, that she would die there as well, she had before after all. To join Dad there amongst the stars, and probably Mum now as well. It would be easier that way, she'd been broken the last time she died. She never said so outright, but she could tell the first time they'd spoken after her return that the older woman had been reborn in that moment when her daughter, back from the dead, materialized in front of her. She could hear nothing but her own heartbeat, a slow rhythm in her ears, and her own laboured breathing getting steadily slower. It wasn't like last time, no panic and fear as she drifted away from her broken ship, no suit that pumped her full of stims in a vain attempt to keep her fighting, only to ensure she reamin conscious and aware of every second of her inevitable end. This was ok, wasn't it?
'God... it feels like it's been years since I just... sat down.'
Her eyelids felt so heavy, and she was tired, so very tired. Tired of fighting. Surely fighting to the death, literally, only to come back to fight again another day; and judging by the Reaper corpses now drifting idly by outside the jagged hole in the Citadel, win, was enough for any lifetime? She'd earned a rest, hadn't she? And so her heavy lids closed for what Sarah Shepard was certain was the last time, and, in that brief moment, she welcomed it.
'Come back to me."
The words felt as if they'd been spoken aloud rather than in her mind, a broken, desperate pleading that in the middle of the fray had shattered her heart into countless pieces, and now sent a wrenching through it that made her physically jolt. It had taken everything she had to let Tali go, everything she had to fight the desperate urge to go with her, to hell with the galaxy. Painfully she came back to the world, her eyes fluttered open again and she shook the fog from her mind and the world came crashing back with the sounds of shifting rubble, fires, distant alerts and the acrid smell of electrical fires and blood filled her nostrils. Images of Tali's beautiful face flashed through her mind, velvety purple skin, the cutest button nose she'd ever seen, those impossible large eyes that shone in silver like twin moons and held so much love for her. A deep, ragged sob rent through her mangled chest and she inhaled sharply, fire spread throughout her body and she screamed out in agony, a dry hoarse sound that she couldn't believe was coming from her.
'... I want more time..."
With great effort, she managed to slow her breathing. She had to survive, she knew that now. She couldn't die, she couldn't do that to her, not again. She'd told Tali to go, to build a home, to be happy. But how often had Tali told her that, for her, home was where Sarah was, happiness was where they were, together?
Groaning, she pushed herself off the the flat slab of debris her back was pinned against. She winced as a new wave of sharp pain tore through her body. When she managed to get to what resembled a sitting position, she was able to survey her surroundings for the first time, but making any guess as to her actual location was impossible. Though from the arch of the large chamber she'd guess somewhere on the central ring. Looking down on her own body, she noticed she was buried up to her pelvis in debris. Most of it seemed to be fairly small, but a large beam lay square over where she knew her legs must be.
With determination and a stubbornness matched by few, alive or dead, she set out clearing the rubble from her body. She couldn't tell how long it took, it could have been hours or even days, but eventually she'd chipped away at the pile until only the thick beam and her legs remained. As she'd feared, her legs were pinned, and she could literally see one of them looked... flattened, under the weight. 'Explains why I can't feel them, I guess.' she thought despondently.
No solutions came to her at first, her head pounded both from what was likely a severe concussion, blood loss and good old dehydration.' Just sitting here bleeding on the damn thing won't solve anything...'
Then, it came to her. The slab. She wasn't sitting on the actual floor, she was perched on a slab. She couldn't tell from the top how thick it was, but clearly since it had fallen down here, it was breakable. If she could break the slab, it should free her enoug to offer a split second of movement to get free. 'Or crush them alltogether' she thought..
Still, there was no way to move the beam. Just as she started looking around for a tool of some kind, a rock to smash at the slab or at least something harder than her bare fists, the problem was solved for her. A massive groaning sound of tortured metal and crumbling stone came from above her, she whipped her head up, neck screaming in protest, and her eyes widened. What was left of the ceiling swayed, groaned, and finally crumbled. A rain of metal and mortar fell over her. Raising her aching arms over her head, she hunkered down as best she could. She winced as mall pieces slammed into her back and bruised arms, and she could hear much larger debris hitting the floor all around her. Then, with a mighty thud right beside her to the right made her cry out in alarm. To her amazement, however, she felt herself shift downwards. A large piece had fallen on the slab and, while it hadn't cracked it completely, broken enough to curve downard, creatign a small crevice between her and the beam. It wasn't much, but with great effort, she could start to wiggle herself free.
Several hours later, an exhausted Sarah Shepard slid off of the slab and crashed painfully onto the floor. Her legs were, to put it mildly, broken. More pulverized really, wet pasta made of human tissue. And now that they were free from under the weight of the beam, feeling had returned to them. This was, as it turned out, not a good thing under the circumstances. Steeling herself against the onslaught of pain, Sarah began dragging herself away towards one of the arching sides, figuring there would be some kind of access point somewhere.
After a while, she started seeing bodies. A lot of them. Even now, with all she had seen throughout her career and this war in particular, the smell of death and decay still turned her stomach. She vaguely remembered seeing piles of mostly human corpses when she first arrived on the citadel from London, but these piles, while predominantly made up of humans, also held some aliens, and some were dressed in what she was certain were bloodied C-SEC uniforms. This, at least, confirmed for her she was out of the keeper tunnels where she'd first arrived, and for the first time since waking up she felt somewhat optimistic. She ought to be close to the Presidium, and the Presidium meant people. Or at least it used to. Steeling herself once more, she hefted herself forward again, and again, and again. There was only one thing on her mind, keeping her promise, getting back to Tali.
'Build a home.'
"What a god damn mess." Commander Armando Bailey said as he looked out over what had once been them focal point of the Citadel, and indeed, galactic civilization as a whole. The Presidium was in ruins, bodies littered the entire space and instead of the greenery, water and artificial sky, the place now lay dark and had a reddish tint to it from the soot, ash and fires still burning coupled with what few emergency lights still functioning.
"Sure is" the flanged voice of his second in command, Valeria Thanius, answered. "It's pretty shocking, to be honest. Wasn't this bad even after Sovreign's attack, reminds me of it but it's... worse. A lot worse."
Bailey nodded. Over his years at C-SEC he'd gotten pretty good at discerning Turian subvocals even through the translators, and the Turian womans vibrated with a deep seated sadness. He could relate. They'd done their best, they'd even done well all things considered. But all in all, he and the officers under his command had managed to save just short of 500,000 of the Citadels over 13 million strong population in their reinforced shelters and ad-hoc bunkers. It had been more, but one after the other they had fallen to the Reaper ground forces. And, if he was honest with himself, had the fighting gone on much longer, they would all have perished. It had been a matter of hours, not days.
The worst blow had come when Tayseri ward had, effectively, blown loose and drifted off during the final battle. He didn't even want to think of how many people had died in that moment when, in a split second, the mass effect fields must have gone down and opened the entire ward to hard vacuum. The only comfort was that, as things went, it was a gentler fate than falling into the hands of the Reapers.
The day following the battle had been spent linking up with the other remaining shelters and attempting to establish contact with the battered remnants of the fleet hovering outside. The latter they'd managed fairly quickly, as the fleet was adamant to find out what had happened to the Citadel and, more importantly, if anyone was left alive on board. They had been directed to sweep the central ring to make sure it was clear and that docking, or at least the repairs needed to make docking possible, could begin. They'd just broken through the rubble and barricades half an hour earlier and were now planning the sweep of the Presidium and docking ring. They'd come in through the Zakera Ward access shaft, close to where the embassies, and his own office, had once been and Bailey could see the tall spire of the Council chambers still standing, though the fate of the chamber itself was unknown, and he couldn't make anything out through the smoke drifting through the top of the giant torus.
"So, how you figure we do this? Grids?" he asked her.
Valeria pondered for a moment before nodding "Yeah, we'll probably need to conduct some repairs on the ground level anyway before moving on to the docks, so best be thorough." she paused briefly and lowered her voice mounrfully "We'll need to deal with... the bodies, too, somehow."
Bailey set his jaw and turned around to face his people. A group comprising about 200 individuals, made up largely of C-SEC officers and what was left of the newly minted Citadel Militia, along with a few civilians with military, law enforcement or medical experience that had found themselves drafter or volunteered in the chaos. "Right you lot" he called "We've a lot of station to sift through and not a lot of time to do it. Fleet Command wants the Presidium and the docking rings cleared ASAP. I don't need to tell you that there are a lot of injured soldiers and sailors out there needing to get off their ships so lets snap to it."
There was a murmur of assent and he and Valeria began designating search parties and assigning search grids. He deliberately kept a contingent of about 50 back, however. A group of people he knew had combat experience and, above all, field medical expertise.
"As for you" he said, addressing the group "I have a special task... I won't lie, it's not pretty and I won't make it an order, but we need someone to deal with the casualties." He paused, looking them each in the eye in turn.
When they all said nothing, but rather fixed a determined look on their faces, he continued "Now, obviously we don't have facilities to deal with them yet, but we need them away from the docking ring access and other areas where we need to make emergency repairs."
Nods met him all around "It's a long shot, but I also need you to check for life signs, if anyone in here managed to not snuff it, we don't want to miss them. Other than that, try to give them some dignity, we'll put them according to species or by identifiable uniforms to make identification easier later when their relevant governments and organizations, hopefully, show up to claim them."
With that, he dismissed them and he and Valeria set out to join the search parties as well. She hefted her rifle and came up to him "Hell of a day, huh?" she asked.
"Yeah," he replied "hell of a day."
The Citadel was, Sarah decided as she dragged herself forward, entirely too big. The wards were one thing, but this, there had to be wildernesses on Earth more densely populated than the Presidium. Still, the destruction was less severe now. It was still pretty damn bad, but she actually started to recognize some features now. She appeared to be somewhere higher up in the ring, not at the very bottom or even some secret sublevel as she'd first suspected. She spotted the open central torus through gaps in the walls and rubble now and then, but had yet to find a way through. It was, she decided, her best chance though. Any search parties would have to move through there, and even if everyone on the Citadel were dead the remaining ships of the fleet would want to use the ring for docking. And she was sure now that they'd won, she'd seen tugs towing reaper corpses when she glanced the space outside the station during her laborious journet, and even an Alliance cruiser, heavily damaged but sailing calmly and unmolested through the void.
She came upon a small mound of rubble and what seemed to be a large gash in the side of a balcony overlooking the torus. She heaved herself up. Just as she was going over the summit however, she caught sight of what looked like flashlights and, to her amazement, what sounded like voices. This distraction made her unthinking of where she was putting her hands, and she put the weight of her upper body on a loose piece of debris. As if in slow motion, she felt the world tilt, and her empty stomach lodged itself in her throat. She slid down a short slope of debris and then, she fell. She hit the ground below with a low thud that belied the wave of white hot pain shot through her body. The impact pushed all the air from her lungs, and a wet cough of blood shot from her mouth. She tried to refill her lungs, but found that she couldn't, her vision that had gone bright white as she hit the ground, was now narrowing, blackness creeping in at the edges. Her heart beat laboriously in her hears, even as she heard shouting all around her. It seemed to be growing distant. Did someone say her name? No, it couldn't be... she couldn't be here.
'Come back to me."
Sarah's last thought before the darkness claimed her at last was 'I'm sorry.'
It had been slow going. So far not a single survivor had been found. Not that he'd expected to find any. The Reapers only took prisoners if they needed raw materials, and it seemed that on the Citadel they hadn't bothered. Bailey supposed he should thank the gods for small mercies. The sweep had gone well though, all things considered. The piles of bodies were now neat, dignified rows, and the technicians and engineers among the stations survivors had been called in to start work in the airlocks and lifts to gain them access to the upper floors and lower and upper docking areas.
He was with a group doing a final sweep of one of the outlying areas they'd designated as accessible when he heard it. A scraping sounds, from above, gravel falling along the wall and then, a body slammed into the ground 100 meters away.
Everyone stood motionless for a moment, thinking some debris had come loose and expecting, understandably so, more to come tumblign down from the upper levels. But then they heard something else, a wet cough, a groan followed by a wheezing sound. As if he'd given a verbal order, the entire group moved as one towards the body, or person, that had fallen virtually on top of them.
As he approached his breath caught in his throat. No matter how matted with dirt and blood, how singed or how damaged, there was no mistaking that hair. Fire and brimstone. The nearly unreadable N7 logo on the mangled chest plate sealed it with unquestionable finality.
"... Shepard?" he whispered, disbelievingly, even as the medics in the team began working on the commander, calling out to her but receiving no response.
"What, really?" Valeria asked, looking up at him from her crouched positioned next to Shepards head where she was helping to stabilize the neck with a makeshift brace.
Bailey simply nodded, pointed at all of them "She doesn't die, you hear me?" and stalked off. Tapping his headset to get a signal.
"This is Commander Armando Bailey, C-SEC. Put me through to Fleet Command, immediately." he called frantically into his headset.
"FLEETCOM SSV Hastings receiving, state the purpose of your transmission." a bored sounding operator responded after a few seconds, slightly garbled by interferance.
"We have Commander Shepard." he nearly shouted "And she's alive, but not for long, we need and medevac shuttle ASAP."
The operator was silent for a minute, though he thought he could hear chatter and even shouting in the background. "Hold for Fleet Admiral Hackett." came the response at last, the operators voice caught slightly.
Not even half a minute later, the gravely, familiar voice of Admiral Stephen Hackett came through the other end "Commander. What is your location?"
Breathing a sigh of relief, Bailey tapped the send button and relayed his coordinates.
Exactly 38 minutes later, an Alliance Kodiak set down outside a London hospital that had, miraculously enough, been spared much of the destruction, carrying a patient that was very much on the knife's edge. Trailing after the stretcher and medical team with determined steps and a grim, pained expression walked the man who was, for all intents and purposes, the current leader of the Human species, Stephen Hackett.