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Joker's voice crackled over the comm. "Shepard? You might want to get up here. Now."
She looked up in alarm from the sniper rifle she was fitting with a new sight.
"Go ahead," Jacob told her. "I got this."
"Thanks." Shepard hurried from the weapons locker. As she came into the main command center, the elevator doors slid open and Garrus and Tali both got out, looking concerned.
"Shepard, Joker called us up. You know what's going on?"
She shook her head and led the way into the cockpit. "Joker? What's up?"
"Something I think you should all see." He looked over Shepard's shoulder as Dr. Chakwas came up behind her. "Doc, you, too."
"What is it, Jeffrey?"
"I think …" He cleared his throat. "I think it's the Normandy."
"What?" Garrus leaned over Joker's shoulder, looking at the scanner screen.
"I was scanning this planet and I thought … well, I found some debris, which isn't uncommon, but then I remembered where we were. It's—it's her." The pilot swallowed hard. He had loved the original Normandy with a devotion most people reserved for family members. He had very nearly given his life for her.
Shepard looked at the hazy images on the screen, a lump coming to her throat. So this was the place, the very airspace, where she had died. Shouldn't it feel—strange? Familiar? Different? But it didn't.
"We should go down there," Tali said abruptly.
"Nearly two dozen people died down there. The Alliance command would like to have some way to report their final resting place to their families," Joker said.
Shepard looked down at the top of his ballcap. That comment had come awfully quickly. "Tali, Garrus, suit up. We're going in. Doctor, you coming?"
"No." Dr. Chakwas' voice was a pale shadow of its usual crispness. "No, I was there once. I don't feel any need to go again. I—I do have a plaque that I have carried, in case this day should arrive. Perhaps you could take it, place it somewhere in the wreckage?"
"Of course. Meet me in the shuttle bay with it and we'll take it down." Shepard waited until the others had all left the cockpit, and then she leaned over Joker's shoulder. "You could have warned me."
"Commander, I—" he began to protest, but Shepard pinned him with a stern look and he thought better of it. "I wasn't sure how you would react. I … wish I could go down there with you. But I don't, either."
"I know exactly what you mean," she told him, patting him lightly on the shoulder. "I'll say good-bye to her for you."
"You do that." He reached up and tugged the bill of his ballcap down farther over his forehead, clearing his throat, and Shepard went to suit up in preparation for the trip down to the surface.
Garrus brought the shuttle gently to a stop in the middle of a field of snow, surrounded by tall, spiky formations that had once been their ship.
"It wasn't winter when we landed," Tali said. "It looks different."
Shepard climbed out of the shuttle, looking around her. She had never seen this planet—wherever she had landed after the crash, she still didn't know, but wherever it was, she had already been dead. She never saw the wreckage. She almost wished she wasn't seeing it now, her mind's eye filling in the missing details of every recognizable piece of the ship. The sleeping compartments; the gunnery station where Ashley used to spend so much time; the cockpit.
Something shifted in the snow beneath her boot and she bent to pick it up. It was a set of dog tags. She turned them over, brushing the snow off the back. "Rosamund Draven."
"I remember her," Tali said. "She worked in the engine room. She always had perfectly manicured nails. I used to ask her how she worked on machinery all day and still kept her hands so beautiful, and she would smile and say 'very carefully'. She never did tell me her secret."
The bodies had largely been removed, but hastily, as far as Shepard could tell, because pieces of uniforms and spacesuits were strewn around. They managed to find something to send home for every one of the missing crew members, a grisly task that none of them enjoyed. Shepard kept thinking about where to place the plaque, but nothing seemed quite right.
They found the shattered remnants of the bridge. Shepard couldn't help thinking about that night, about the flames all around as she fought her way to Joker's side and pulled him forcefully out of his chair. He would have gone down with the ship if she had let him. Even at the cost of her own life, if she had it to do again, she would, she told herself. She hadn't hesitated then—she had done her duty by her crew, done her best to get everyone safely off the ship. In many ways, it was the proudest moment of her life, drifting through space to certain death, knowing she had done everything she could for the people under her command.
She nodded to herself, glad to have come if only to be certain of that one last question—that if she had it to do again she would do everything exactly the same, even knowing what the outcome would be.
"Shepard." Tali was holding out a cracked datapad. "You should look at this."
"You mean it still works?" Garrus asked, leaning over Tali's shoulder to look. "This is Pressly's."
Pressly had been the first one killed in the attack. Shepard took the datapad, scrolling through the corrupted data. "Can you make heads or tails of this?" she asked Tali.
"That's the best I can do."
Shepard nodded, squinting at the cracked screen. "He … you know he didn't mean any of this, don't you?"
"Keep reading."
The earlier entries, what was still readable, talked of his distrust for the aliens aboard the ship, particularly Tali, whose people were considered to be something of a nuisance. The quarian lifestyle, aboard a flotilla of ships constantly in need of repair with whatever they could scrounge, led many to think of them as thieves. Pressly had initially subscribed to that view, it appeared, but had slowly come to accept Tali and the other aliens aboard the Normandy. The last entry ended with Pressly's assertion that he would be willing to die for any member of the ship's crew, "regardless of what world they were born on."
Shepard blinked back tears and cleared her throat. "We'll put the plaque here," she said. "Where Pressly died. And we'll leave his words next to it, to symbolize what we tried to do on the Normandy, and how close we came to succeeding."
The three of them stood there looking down at the plaque and the datapad next to it for a long time.
At last Garrus stirred. "This place … I'm glad I came, but I think I'm ready to go now."
"I agree." Tali turned away.
Shepard took another moment, the reality of her own death lying heavily on her, but at last she turned to follow them.
Garrus, in the lead, nearly tripped over something half-buried in the snow, and he bent down to pick it up. His voice, as he held the object out to Shepard, was hoarse with emotion. "Is this what I think it is?"
She took it from plastic was cracked and blackened, the lining singed, the face-plate shattered, but it was recognizably hers. Her N7 helmet. Shepard looked down at the snow at their feet. "So I landed here, too? And … Cerberus found me amid the wreckage?"
"Looks like it."
"This would have been my grave. As it should have been, the captain going down with the ship."
"Hey. Shepard. You're still alive. You're here with us." Garrus put his hands on her shoulders. "This is not your grave."
"It's okay, Garrus." And it really was. Maybe later it would hit her, but for the moment it was all just … surreal. Too big to grasp. "Let's go home."
"Please," Tali said, hurrying on ahead of them to the shuttle.
Only once she was on the shuttle, watching Garrus's capable hands at the controls, did Shepard realize she was still carrying her old helmet. She should have left it there, she thought, to symbolize whatever part of her had died there on that ground. What could it be but a reminder of her death? It would have been nice to have found something of her own, some part of her belongings lost in the crash, the only things she had owned other than a few items left behind with Anderson, nearly everything she had left from her life on Mindoir, but instead here she had this damaged piece of plastic left behind by Cerberus … why? Because they had taken it off her to be certain she was dead? To make sure it really was her body? She supposed she could ask Miranda, but she didn't think Miranda would tell her the truth, not all of it, anyway, and maybe it didn't matter. Maybe the important thing to take away was that she was alive, however impossibly, and Garrus and Tali, having a friendly argument over the best power cells to add a boost to the shuttle's engines, were alive, as were Dr. Chakwas and Joker and Wrex … and Kaidan … and so many others.
Those lost would never be forgotten; but those who had survived were going on to continue the work that had been interrupted.
Satisfied, Shepard looked up from the singed helmet, out the window at the new Normandy, glad to be going home.