The Reapers fought Sephiroth with everything they had, until they suddenly didn't.
He hung on the edge of a star system, surrounded by a ring of Reapers that kept position, stubbornly out of range. They dodged and retreated and dodged and retreated until he stopped chasing them, and simply waited. More reapers joined the ring as the hours stretched by, entering through the distant relay.
The Normandy floated next to him.
Shepard's fingers hovered over the keys of her Omni-tool, her request only half typed. She sat in her quarters in her fatigues, one leg pulled up under her on her bed.
There was nothing else to be done until the stalemate broke. Whatever the Reapers were playing at she wasn't sure and she didn't like it, but they hadn't landed a single hit on Sephiroth yet. Sheers numbers alone were not going to make the difference.
The dappled blue light from the fish tank lit the room, filling it with dim shadows. She let her head fall back to gaze up at the swirl of stars through the window overhead.
The numbers from the last month of battles had been very good. Maybe she had grown too used to crushing defeat and constant, catastrophic loses as the war dragged on, but even counting the allied ship Sephiroth destroyed to test her, the recent casualties were… acceptable.
She snapped her head back down and kept typing.
No loses were acceptable. Inescapable, perhaps, in a war of this scale, but not acceptable.
She finished her message and sent it before she could think better of it.
What was left of High Command were trying to invent something to fight Sephiroth with, if he should actually succeed and defeat the Reapers. She wished them luck, but she couldn't know any part of it.
Garrus had looked at her knowingly when she brought it up with him. The years since he'd left the Normandy and taken up a Primarch's role had left them with too much in common and too little left to say. Long silences ruled their conversations now.
"You know if you're compromised or not," was all he said.
She sighed and stood, peering into the tank. It housed only fake coral and the rusty feeding apparatus now.
The light in the room took on a green tinge.
Her guest sat on the couch, watching her. She watched his reflection in the glass, hair pooling around him like liquid mercury floating in a vacuum. He looked comfortable and entirely incongruous with his legs crossed on her old leather couch.
He didn't come inside the ship often unless they were jumping through a relay. He tended just to float out in the vast emptiness, alone with the cosmos.
"They haven't broken formation?" she asked. He wouldn't be here if he didn't have something to say.
"A star is missing," he said, conversationally.
"What?"
He studied her in the glass.
He always looked slightly off but his reflection was… worse, somehow. As if he wore only the memory of a human body, partially forgotten over time and reliant on the viewer to fill in the gaps. Flipped, the unnatural angles and details suddenly stood out.
"Your crew think on it sometimes, but they will not name it, not even in their own minds." He turned his head away from the light, casting himself in harsh shadows with the glow of his own eyes. "They cannot face themselves."
She looked down at her hands. She knew what he was talking about.
"We have more pressing priorities," she said.
He rose.
"There is an emptiness in the cosmos where I did not create one… and a missing relay in your system." He loomed behind her, looking down at her through the reflection. "Why?"
Her gaze wandered into the empty water, filtered and oxygenated for nothing. "I pulled an alpha relay trick on it."
He put a hand over her shoulder and flat on the glass. The blue light died.
"What did you do?" Two green beacons peered down at her, refracting in the glass.
She couldn't meet his eyes. "Why ask? You're already in my mind. Look and see."
"I am asking," he said, a deep and rumbling threat.
She whirled on him, suddenly furious. At him, at the Reapers, at the damned Asari who didn't defend their own borders and thought everyone else would bleed to save them.
"I threw a meteor at the relay. I destroyed it. The explosion took the sun, the planets, the moons, the asteroids. Everything in the star system."
The carefully calculated disdain of his expression faded away. She thought she might have actually shocked him.
"There was life circling that star," he said with more voices than one, looming over her. "It was not yours to take."
She refused to lean back. "Fifty-seven Reapers too."
"You scattered their energy to the void. Reduced to dust."
"The planet had already fallen. They made two new Reaper capital ships from the population and had enough prisoners to make even more. It was a chokepoint. I closed it."
He cocked his head, regarding her with a curious, malignant gaze.
"Your crew call me an abomination. Do you know what they call you?"
"I don't care," she whispered. "We are not losing this war."
He smiled. "You are a wretched thing." He ran his fingers through her hair until he was cradling her scalp.
Her skin crawled. She tried to pull back, but he gave her no slack.
"If I break your legs, will you crawl?" he mused. "If I refuse to slay your enemies, will you beg?"
She stopped struggling. Dread sat like a brick in her stomach.
He turned her head and brought his face up to hers, his lips brushing her temple, ever so gentle. "If I take you, will you fight me, even after you have forgotten your own name?"
Silver hair caressed her. It stung and pulled at her skin.
She swallowed and looked the world killer in the eye. Her skull felt like it was going to crack under his grip.
"You're just pissed I destroyed them before you could," she ground out.
He frowned at her. "I destroy nothing. I cherish the energy, pure and radiant in its raw form."
She sneered "Go cherish Illium's ashes then."
He lifted her by the neck until she was eye level.
She bared her teeth. "Go on. Kill me."
The emergency lighting clicked on.
"Commander, the Reapers are moving again," EDI called.
He disappeared. She landed on her feet and ran to the command floor.
"Where are they running to, EDI?"
"To the relay."
"Track where they're going, but keep our distance," she called. She reached the cockpit.
"They're not fleeing," Joker said from the pilot's chair. His hands froze for a moment over his display. "They're firing on the relay."
She swore. "Get us out of here!"
Sephiroth was hedged in by thousands of them. He tore through them easily enough but for each one that fell another hurled itself at him, slowing him down with numbers alone and the debris of their sparking carcases.
"The enemy ships are too close to the relay," EDI said. "They'll detonate in the explosion."
Shepard stiffened. There were thousands in the star system. The amount of energy caught in the chain reaction-
"Sephiroth, get back on the ship," she said, quiet and calm.
The Normandy sped towards the relay. Sephiroth fought through the throng of enemies, falling behind.
"Commander?" Joker called.
She looked at the display. The readout of the relay's falling defences, and the sheer number of enemy vessels between them and it.
They weren't going to make it.
Anger burned, cold and futile inside of her. She fell still.
"Take us to light speed, Joker," she said. "Get us out of range of the explosion."
"Yes, Commander."
The relay was turning, igniting. The same process as flinging ships thousands of light-years across the galaxy just a million times more powerful and without connecting to any other relay in the system.
The drive core hummed to life and the mass effect fields enveloped the ship.
Light exploded. Tinged with green.
She tasted copper in the back of her mouth and her blood stilling in her veins with the vertigo of movement too quick, unsupported by the mass effect fields.
The ship rocketed forward. The relay, still in the infancy of its explosion, caught them and sent them onwards.
The feeling of being stretched subsided. The emergency lights blinked orange for a relay jump, some two seconds too late.
"What." Joker's hands were still held up over his display, unmoving over controls that had moved without him.
"We are in the relay system, Shepard," EDI filled the silence.
Joker clenched his hands. "That motherf-"
Shepard put a heavy hand on his shoulder.
Behind her, the airlock opened and Sephiroth walked in. She glanced at him over her shoulder.
He had controlled the relay. He had warped- what, time? Space itself? The element zero and energy stores of the relay to delay just long enough to force one last jump out of it?
"Shepard," he drawled, not one hair out of place or a scratch on his coat. He wasn't floating on invisible currents for once, but uncomfortably present. Her crew couldn't take their eyes off him.
She turned back to Joker and the glowing displays. "I'll see you in the war room in a moment, Sephiroth."
His boots thudded against the floor as he walked away. How kind of him to play along, like she had any authority or leverage over him at all.
"What the shit?" Joker hissed after the elevator doors on him.
She'd never seen him actually use a door before, let alone an elevator. He didn't move about the ship much mid-jump either, he set up camp in one area of the ship and made everyone work around him. She had assumed he couldn't access some of his stranger powers when being flung about at those speeds. She had assumed much.
"Where are we?" she asked.
He pulled his cap off and gripped his head.
"On the way to Turian space," he mumbled.
"It's the course I plotted before you ordered us to jump," EDI said. "I didn't activate the relay."
She sighed. "Run diagnostics."
She stood outside the war room, bracing herself.
She was so tired. They hadn't even resolved their previous… discussion. Where did they stand? What games was he playing with them now?
There had been some seven thousand Reapers in that system. Not anymore. The relay was gone, the passageway collapsing behind them, in what she could have sworn was an utterly impossible manoeuvre.
A more effective version of the Alpha relay trick than she'd ever managed. A seething vindication bubbled up inside her.
The Reapers had wasted so many of their forces in the attempt. Forces they must have deemed expendable, but the numbers they had willing sacrificed to get him out of the picture were telling on their own.
They were getting desperate.
She glowered at the door. See how they liked it.
She pulled herself up and walked in.
Sephiroth was sitting at the table's side, still playing at obeying the laws of physics.
She sat opposite him, leaning forward on her elbows and clasping her hands.
He leaned back, his arms loosely crossed.
"So, what happens now?" she asked.
"Nothing has changed," he said. "You will continue to bring me Reapers."
"You don't need us."
He looked down at her, amused. "I have never needed you. I will accept you, nonetheless."
She sucked her teeth. "Why humour us?"
"You have utility."
She shook her head and looked away.
"You wish to withdraw from our agreement?" he asked.
As though he would ever let that be an option. As though she had any alternatives. He had changed the game, but they still weren't winning. There were millions of Reapers.
She glanced up at him. His expression was idly curious, like she was an intriguing beetle he had spotted while waiting for the bus.
She needed him, but he didn't need her. He had his own reasons for wanting the Reapers dead, she could just give him a ship and go report to the teams trying to uncover a way to kill him. Leave him in the Reapers hands and check back when he ran out of enemies.
She laid her hands flat on the table. She couldn't do that.
"No," she said, leaden and dull.
He tilted his head.
"Have you made peace with it, Shepard?" he asked again.
"I don't trade in peace," she replied, easy habit now.
He put a hand on hers. "I will gift it to you."
She resisting the bone deep urge to pull her hand back. "You demand a lot for a man talking of gifts."
"No less than you demand. Only total victory."
"Why do you keep asking?" She scoffed. "Will you delay your plans if I'm not at peace with it?"
"There is no accomplishment to be found in ending your life." He withdrew his hand. "You are a single crack in the hull away from death at any moment. Your delicate frame begs to relinquish its spirit, whether it be to the Reapers or weaponry or simple misfortune."
She clenched her jaw. "I've lasted this long."
He smiled and saw right through her. "No, you haven't."
The artificial tendons in her heart missed a beat.
"And yet, for all your frailty, they have failed to break you. The enemy pushes against your being, searching for weakness in your resolve, to draw fruit from the seed planted within you." He tilted his head and she felt like the beetle was pinned to a card under a lamp. "Eight years and they have wrought nothing but failure."
She swallowed. Why was he bringing it up? "Did you stop their attempts at indoctrinating me?"
"No."
"Of course not."
"You resist on your own strength… and you will give up on your own strength."
"No, I won't."
"You will volunteer for my peace because it is not theirs." He leaned forward, his hair falling forward to shadow his face. "Your surrender will be their final failure."
She sneered. "You think defeat will look more palatable if you dress it up like a victory?"
His smiled, his eyes so cold. "If it were palatable then there would be no triumph in making you swallow it."
She refused to let her eyes drop, while her stomach plummeted. "And if I refuse?" she rasped.
"Can you afford to?" he asked, gentle and refusing to give her anywhere to hide. "None of your decisions were made in ignorance or by accident. You knew what you were doing, turning yourself into. Continue on the path you have set for yourself, Shepard, with your eyes wide open."
A muscle in her jaw ticked.
"Did you know?" she asked. "Did you know what you were turning yourself into?"
The intensity in his expression sharpened. "I am what I was always destined to be."
She found it in herself to smile. "So you didn't know. And someone chose for you."
"No." His hair floated around him, and the roiling void behind his eyes grinned back at her. "I knew."
She pulled back. There was nowhere left to go.
"You're no better than the Reapers," she said. It sounded hollow even to her.
He laughed, quiet and reprimanding.
"So tell me to leave."
She opened her mouth. Closed it again. She couldn't.
No.
She could. But she wouldn't.
He smiled. He knew.
A/N: Thanks for reading guys, I know this one is a bit more angsty than my normal stuff. Some times I just gotta burn the world down.
Next Time: At Peace
