Stupid. Val's relief at seeing Miranda — not an enemy, her brain told her — melted away at Miranda's lack of recognition. Of course Miranda didn't know her. Miranda had no reason to know Val Shepard. Belatedly, Val lowered her weapon, drawing herself up and lifting her chin.
Alex spoke before Val could. "My sister." He took a step forward, positioning himself by Val's shoulder. "Staff Commander Val Shepard."
Miranda's eyebrows quirked as her eyes traveled from one to the other. "Alexander," she said, with a note of surprise in her voice. "Interesting company you're keeping, Vakarian."
"I don't mind it," Garrus said.
"I suppose that explains how you found this place," Miranda said, glancing again at Alex, who shrugged.
"Doesn't explain how you found this place," Garrus said.
The corner of Miranda's mouth turned up. "It's not a matter of finding when you have the right contacts."
A fifth figure in black and white came up behind Miranda and her team, saying, "I haven't seen any signs of them, but—" The figure stopped in its tracks and made a strangled noise. "Oh God, Fletcher."
"Allow me to introduce Dr. Mazzota," Miranda said.
"Oh," Alex said. "So you're the alleged brains behind this mess."
Miranda's eyebrows twitched. Garrus coughed. "Sasha," Val hissed, appalled.
"The theory was sound," said Mazzota, pulling off her helmet to reveal a head of dark curly hair and shadowed eyes. "What the hell happened after...excuse me." Elbowing her way past Miranda's guards, she headed for the doorway behind them. Val stepped aside to let her go.
"Your sensitivity astounds as always, Alexander," Miranda said, recovering herself.
"If she wasn't the problem, it was your boss, leaning on them for results like usual," Alex said hotly. "Like with Archer's project. And that thing on Pragia. And..."
"Yes, yes, you've made your point," Miranda said.
Val said, "The point is, you won't find much usable here." The equipment didn't look recoverable, from what she could see. The data... she wasn't sure what use Miranda might have for the data.
"I assume you won't mind if I verify that for myself." Miranda's gaze traveled among the three of them. Her eyes were cool, measuring, giving nothing away. Val found herself thrown right back to the earliest days of their acquaintance, when she and Miranda had spent all their time sizing each other up, circling each other like wary varren. Miranda's trust had been hard-won; so had Val's. Val hesitated, torn between her desire to get the hell away from this place and a wary curiosity about Miranda's motives.
"What exactly brought you here, Miranda?" Garrus asked, evidently sharing the curiosity.
"I might ask the same of you. This particular research isn't exactly your area. Any of you." Her gaze swept them again. "Unless the commander here is also a theoretical physicist."
"She's not. I like to branch out," Alex said.
"Do you, indeed?"
Alex shrugged. "I get around."
Garrus broke in as the two of them eyed each other. "Let's get to the point here: are you trying to take over Cerberus?"
Miranda smiled. "Cerberus is a discredited, disorganized, and ineffective organization, Vakarian. I can only assume both the Hierarchy and the Alliance are taking an interest in the research that went on here. Why shouldn't I?"
"What are you going to do with the research?" Val asked.
Miranda's eyes met hers. "I think that's enough conversation," she said evenly. "May I suggest you three be on your way?" She tipped her head, and the four men accompanying her straightened up, hands on their weapons. Val stiffened, her grip on her pistol tightening.
"Only four?" Garrus said. "Seriously?"
"You know what I can do," Miranda said.
Val and Garrus exchanged glances. They probably could take Miranda's party out, but Val wasn't sure how much they'd gain by escalating the situation. "All right, we're going," she said.
"Lovely." Miranda stepped aside, gesturing to one of her men. "Roberts here will see you out."
Garrus's mandibles tightened. Val shrugged slightly when he glanced at her again. It was a little silly — either one of them could easily overpower one guard — but if they didn't want to pick a fight with Miranda, they'd have to go along with it.
So they went, calmly and deliberately, though Val's shoulder blades itched with the sense of Miranda's measuring gaze on her back.
With Roberts alongside them, the three of them couldn't carry on much of a conversation. When the reached the living quarters, Alex said, "So, Roberts. How long were you with Cerberus?"
"Just keep walking," Roberts replied.
Val shot Alex a look. He shrugged.
After that, they stayed quiet until they reached the airlock. Val fought down the brief visceral chill of claustrophobia as she sealed her helmet shut and stepped into the waved at them, incongruously, as the inner airlock cycled closed. "Does Miranda know something we don't?" Val asked.
"Could be," Garrus said. "Miranda likes having a, what do you call it. An ace in the hole."
"I didn't get a close look at the materials," Alex said. "It's mostly scrap, but some of the components might be useful to her."
"Useful for what, though?" Val asked. "Do you think she wants to continue the research?"
Alex shrugged. "Maybe, but considering I scrambled it when I left, she's going to have a fun time putting it back together."
There was a short silence before Val choked back a laugh, and Garrus chuckled outright. "Nice."
"You might have said you were doing that earlier," Val pointed out, nudging Alex with her shoulder.
He flinched away. "Sorry. Mostly I wanted to get out of there."
"I do wonder just how many old Cerberus cells she's cleaning up," Garrus murmured. "Something to keep an eye on."
"Do you trust her?" Val asked. She remembered Miranda as a friend, someone who had turned away from Cerberus to find herself a spare independence. But she couldn't afford to assume that Miranda was the same here, not when Liara was so different.
Neither Garrus nor Alex answered right away. Val wished they weren't proceeding in a line, so she could see their faces. She couldn't tell anything from the back of Garrus's armor.
"She helped us during the war," Garrus said finally. "And she left Cerberus, I know that much."
"Leaving Cerberus is simple common sense," Alex muttered from behind Val. "She might have wanted out, that doesn't mean she disagrees with their goals."
"That's what has me worried," Garrus said. "There's going to be a lot of scheming and maneuvering in the new galactic order. If Miranda's collecting up Cerberus's spare parts, she might be trying to make sure humanity ends up on top of the heap."
That notion sounded plausible enough to leave a cold knit of tension in Val's muscles. Miranda was formidable: intelligent, organized, and ruthless. "Not sure I want Miranda as an enemy."
Garrus chuckled. "Me neither. But leaving this way, we should still have the door open to talk to her."
"Especially if she wants the data I pulled from there," Alex added. "I thought you wanted to go back to wherever you came from, though. It's not really your problem."
Val shot him a quick look, but it was hard to read his expression through his helmet. He was right; if she didn't really belong here, Miranda and whatever she was doing with old Cerberus assets wasn't really Val's problem, any more than the continued existence of the Reapers was. Maybe she didn't have any business interfering.
Still... "You said it was going to take a while to figure out this technology," she said. "I have to do something with my time until then."
Garrus laughed again, a soft, low noise. "Huh," Alex said.
Val thought he sounded surprised. When she stole another look at him, he'd moved away from her and was looking fixedly at the door ahead.
She sighed to herself as the airlock finished its cycle, and stepped out onto the lunar landscape first, impatient to get back to the ship. The sooner they could move on, the better. Nothing had come after the ship, fortunately. She could see it clearly sitting, angular and lonely, against the rocky ground, the view ahead sharply divided between gray lunar rock and black sky.
Starless sky. Too black.
Shepard's mind registered the black void even as the darkness moved, too vast for the eye to register, its bulk seemingly too heavy for the lunar rock.
Reaper.
Every muscle in her body tensed, her nerves screaming for action. Her biotic corona flared around her, uselessly. She had a gun in her hand, and had braced herself in a defensive position. Equally useless, all of it; the thing in front of her could obliterate her without effort, if it wanted. It wasn't one of the small ones, like on Rannoch, oh no; it loomed, rising up and up into the blackness of the sky.
"What is that doing here?" Garrus said over the comm, sounding as shaken as she'd ever heard him.
"Maybe it wants some salvage, too," Val said.
"Head for the ship," Garrus suggested.
"No, wait..." Val's fear, still tingling through every nerve, began to morph into a wild, fey impulse. She'd talked to Reapers before, hadn't she? Sovereign had talked to her. Harbinger. The one on Rannoch. If she could get this one's attention, maybe she'd finally get some useful answers. After all, the Reapers were supposed to hate the Leviathan, and the Leviathan were behind whatever had happened to her. Probably.
It was worth a shot.
She bounced forward a couple of paces.
"What the fuck are you doing," Alex gasped, behind her.
"Hey," she called out, projecting her voice from her helmet's external speakers. "Hey, you, Reaper. Whatever you call yourself."
Val ignored him. "Hey," she called out again, craning her neck back, trying to make out the pointed top of the Reaper's metallic, squid-like form.
It had no eyes, nor a face; she could not tell whether it turned to regard her. But it stopped moving, vast legs balanced spider-like against the ash-gray lunar rock. For a long moment Val held her breath, fists clenched.
Then she heard the Reaper's voice, reverberant and insistent, just as Sovereign's had been. It rattled in the bones of her ears and in the rocks under her feet, vibrated its way up her bones, and set her heart trembling in her chest.
"You," it said. "You don't seem like much, do you? To cause so much trouble."
Elation boiled up in Val's heart, only to be doused with a fast, cold shock. Her mouth went dry. "You know who I am?"
The ground shook. Was the Reaper laughing? "Of course. How not? So much effort they spent on you, and still they failed."
"Failed," she repeated numbly. Her skin tingled; she was dimly aware of dark energy crackling around her hands, unwilled. But she felt cold in her chest, cold spreading to her gut. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. "Who failed? The Leviathan? Failed at what?"
"The great Commander Shepard," it said, as if it hadn't heard her questions. "Somehow they thought if they unmade you, they might yet prevail. They were fools."
Cold crept into her limbs. Shepard clenched her fists against the chill, trying to hold onto each word, sear it into her memory so that she could remember it and understand. "What do you mean, unmake me?"
Silence. One of the Reaper's great legs lifted, as if preparing to move.
"Wait," she shouted. Dark energy rippled around her, forming into a shuddering corona. She strained to hold it with every bit of will she had. "What do you mean? Why did the Leviathan bring me here? How do I get back?"
The tip of the Reaper's leg dropped. The ground shook as it landed, dust rising around it, tremors beating against the soles of Val's boots. "Bring you here? You have been here all along, every moment of your insignificant life."
She clenched her fists harder. She felt taut with energy, an elastic band about to snap. The Reaper's words made no sense. "No. No, that's not... I switched here somehow, with some other Shepard. From another dimension, or..." It had seemed like the only explanation, but now it seemed ridiculous, impossible.
"There is no other." The Reaper's voice reverberated around her, sonorous, insidious. "No other universe your meager powers can access. The fools in the facility below us tried, and failed. You have always been here. There is nowhere to go back to." It chuckled, the tremors of its laughter rolling into the bones of her feet.
"How? Everything's wrong." Val's corona flared. Dark energy burst out around her. A rock, carried by the energy wave, flew across the surface and struck the Reaper harmlessly on one leg. With the energy discharged, Val stood trembling, the cold seeping into her arms and legs, though her eyes and throat felt hot with unshed tears. "No one knows me, the Leviathan are everywhere, some other Shepard did all my missions and didn't... he didn't even destroy you. Why are you still here? Why is everything like this? How...?" She swallowed down the start of a sob, damned if she was going to cry while talking to a fucking Reaper.
"Do you think you chose better?" the Reaper asked. "Let us see."
Before she could say a word, her body seized, her limbs stiffening as her feet left the ground. Her teeth clenched against the intolerable pressure, her lips spreading out into a grimace. Dimly she could hear shouting — Garrus and Alex — and she hoped the Reaper wasn't hurting them somehow.
She knew this invisible grip, though, impossible to resist, just like the Prothean beacon, what seemed like a lifetime ago. It made her helpless, forcing her to ride out whatever vision the beacon — or the Reaper — might show her as it washed through her mind, blotting out her surroundings.
Shepard stands on the Citadel — staggers, really — though the pain is remote, more a memory of pain than the thing itself. She has a gun in her hand. But it isn't her gun, was it? Without her willing it, her hand raises the weapon, pulls the trigger.
Fire explodes as her target shatters, fire consuming, roaring. She raises an arm to shield her face, but the whole Citadel shakes with it. The structures around her ignite, light pulsing through the vast form of the Crucible, too bright to look at it. Shepard might be falling, her battered body abandoned, as the vision pulls her up and out and she sees it: tides of unearthly red energy that wash over the gathered Alliance fleets and Reapers alike. The Reapers die, she sees that plainly: their tentacle-like limbs spasming, contracting, the baleful eyes that power them going dark.
For a moment, Shepard exults, but the enormous hulks drift, now victims of inertia, some of them crashing into allied ships not nimble enough to avoid them. The geth ships, too, go dark, their inert insectile shapes colliding with nearby quarian and human ships, causing chaos. She sees a quarian liveship sheared in two, sees a turian cruiser annihilated, watches the fleets frantically maneuver away as the dead Reapers spun their way through space, some of them falling into Earth's gravity well. Her exultation fades into horror.
On Earth now, she sees waves of red energy roll across the surface, leaving collapsed Reaper ground units in their wake: husks and brutes and ravagers alike lying as limp, empty shells, more pathetic than terrifying now. Exhausted defending troops approach cautiously, prodding them for any signs of life. Other defenders raise their guns in a ragged cheer, embracing their comrades, and her heart lifts.
But only briefly, as the vision relentlessly shows her Reapers crashing to the surface, raising tsunami or clouds of dust, obliterating fields and towns where their burning corpses strike.
She sees red pulsing through the mass relays, too, rocketing from one to the next, leaving burnt-out relays behind them. In every system, Reapers die; but in every system, the Reapers' gargantuan metal carcasses cause fresh destruction, crashing into stations, ships, planets.
She sees the geth dead and drifting, quarians trying in vain to revive them and restore the geth units in their own suits.
Shepard might be screaming, the sound drowned beneath the din filling her ears. Throat raw and eyes streaming, she sees the Normandy flee the scarlet energy wave, battered, veering this way and that. Its mass effect drive activates in a burst of blue, the ship bucking and vanishing as it passes through space, and she watches it crash, smoke trailing from the thrusters as the ship spirals down into the cloudy atmosphere of some green world she doesn't recognize.
"Do you see?" came the Reaper's voice. "Is this better?"
She blinked. The vision had dissipated. She hung suspended in darkness, red lights twinkling dimly around her. "That didn't happen," she said, her voice coming out thin and hoarse. "You're lying."
"It would have happened, if those who seek to subjugate..." The Reaper sneered. "... had not altered things. Perhaps you should be grateful to them."
In spite of everything she had seen, Val clung to the fragile notion of violence. Her lip curled. "Never," she said venomously.
"No?" The Reaper's dark voice sounded curious. "You organics make such promises."
She would have shaken her head if she could move, to shake off the confusion and erase the Reaper's vision from her mind. No matter what it showed her, it had said things she needed to pay attention to, if she wanted to learn anything. It had said... "What do you mean, altered?"
"You are stubborn," it said. "You seek after matters you cannot possibly understand."
"Save it," she said with loathing. She was so very tired of having Reapers condescend to her. "Just answer my questions already."
The Reaper chuckled. Its laughter seemed to shudder all around her. "You were not meant to be here," it said. "You were meant to be gone, rewritten, unmade. They sought to make a new and better version of you."
Blood rushed in Val's ears, matching the anger pulsing in her chest. "Better?" she gritted out.
"Better for their purposes." The Reaper's voice drifted out of the dark, as if it were behind her.
"What purposes?"
"They remade the world accordingly," the Reaper said, as if it hadn't heard her.
Remade the world? Val's heart beat faster as she tried to take in the immensity of it. "They made things this way? So they could win?" Her throat clenched in horror. "How? How did they do that? How can I stop it?" There had to be some way to make things right.
"So many pointless questions," the Reaper mused. "Their purposes are beyond—"
"Beyond my pathetic mortal understanding, I get it," Val spat out. "We understand a lot more than you think we do. Cycle of destruction, harvest, whatever, you're just destroying us before get powerful enough to come find you! You and the Leviathan both, you just want us ignorant and subordinate to you!"
"No," the Reaper snarled. "We are not as they. They want you to scuttle and crawl and worship them. We—"
"You want to destroy us. Yeah. I know." Val tried to settle her breathing. Anger still throbbed in her chest, the only thing that seemed real in this void the Reaper had taken her to. "Well, you know what? I did everything I could to stop you. And if the Leviathan remade the world to undo all of that, I guess I'll just have to do it all over again. But I'll do it, and I won't quit until I've stopped them too, no matter what they've done to my friends."
Her defiance felt thin as a paper mask. Doing it all again — persuading and arguing and battling her way through mountains of indifference, without her name or reputation to give her an edge, in a galaxy worn out by war? Even the thought of it exhausted her. But she couldn't sit by and do nothing. Not with the Reapers roaming the galaxy — who knew how long they'd stay "friendly"? Not with the Leviathan plotting away in the shadows, and Liara under their control. Not with her friends scattered and lost. Not with her family at stake. If she couldn't get the world she knew back, at least she had her mother and her brothers, and she wouldn't lose them again if she could help it.
"Perhaps they were not entirely fools, after all."
The Reaper's voice reverberated in the darkness, echoing into silence. Val listened hard as she hung, timeless, the blood rushing in her ears; certain, deep down, that she was awaiting the Reaper's decision.
"They sought to remove you from the universe," it said, at length. She wasn't sure how much time had passed.
"Unmake me," she whispered, remembering what the Reaper had said earlier.
"They put another in your place, one they believed they could control. Yet they failed to remove you entirely, for here you are."
"Here I am." Val lifted her chin, wary. "What are you going to do with me?"
"You are a disruption in the heart of the world they shaped," it said. "You wish to fight?" The void around her began to spark back to life, shapes and colors swirling at the corners of her eyes. Glimpses of familiar weapons and armor, ships, even fragments of the Prothean vision. "Then fight."
The space around her began to shake. Or maybe she was shaking, rocked with every beat of her heart, while broken pieces of a hundred battlefields formed and vanished around her. "Wait," she said, desperately.
"Let us see whether you can undo what they have done."
She fell. Crashing out of the vision, out of the void where the Reaper chose to talk to her, she dropped onto her hands and knees on the rubble-strewn lunar surface and bounced. Rocks tumbled past her, away from the Reaper. Her muscles screamed from the strain of being locked in position. Ignoring the ache, Val scrambled up awkwardly, trying to regain her footing. Looking up, she saw the Reaper already moving away, each step of its vast legs carrying it further into the dark sky. "What do I need to do?" she shouted.
It did not answer.
"Wait," she shouted, but it only continued moving away. "Why are you doing this?" she called out, in a last-ditch effort.
She didn't truly expect an answer, but the Reaper paused, one leg elevated, and its voice rumbled through the stone again.
"They seek to control us. But they do not see all. Perhaps you will disrupt their plans and not ours. We shall find out."
The leg came down, resuming its path, leaving Val gasping and staring after it. The contrast of black sky and gray lunar rock around her now seemed too sharp, a little unreal, like bad vid graphics. Val shook herself, trying to regain her bearings, and remembered her companions with a shock. Val turned to look for them, floundering a little in the low lunar gravity.
Alex and Garrus had both fallen to the ground. Alex had pushed himself up to a sitting position, but Garrus was still on hands and knees, head down. A surge of guilt and alarm propelled her forward two bouncing strides. "Alex? Garrus? Are you all right?"
#
You probably don't remember particular days from your childhood all that well. Occasional days stand out, maybe — Christmas, your birthday, the day you got your first kitten — but for the most part, one day blends into another, full of lessons, play time, dinners, parental hugs or scolding.
So Alex Shepard doesn't particularly remember the day he would have died. More than one day started with Val banging her way out of the house after arguing with Mama, after all. There's nothing unusual about him walking his little brothers to school, nothing out of the ordinary about him fidgeting his way through a boring morning social studies class, wishing for the accelerated physical science class he has coming up in the afternoon. It could have been any day.
But as Alex tumbles to the surface of the moon, bowled over by — something — a shock wave, he frantically tells himself, that must emanate from the Reaper — certain memories intrude into his mind.
A morning interrupted by a distant boom, and the sound of alarms. Sitting upright as the teachers check their omni-tools. Marching through the hallways in orderly lines, shooed along by the teachers, wondering what's going on as they descend into the basement of the school. The building rocking under impact, and kids starting to run, glimpsing strange armored bodies through the doors and windows.
Screaming, eventually, and fire, and explosions.
Numbed with shock, Alex struggles to sit up, one hand to his head.
#
Garrus remembers.
He remembers John Shepard, a lean, rangy human with an angular face — handsome, according to some. How could he not remember Shepard? He remembers everything he and Shepard went through together. Reporters ask him about Shepard sometimes. For some reason, they think Garrus is more approachable. Sometimes Garrus confines himself to a terse "no comment," but sometimes, if he's in the mood, he tries to find the words to say something about Shepard, give them a good sound bite. It's difficult to find the right words. How does he say that Shepard is a hard man, that Garrus doesn't agree with him or his methods all the time, but that Garrus would still follow him to the ends of the galaxy? He and Shepard, they've been through hell together, and they understand each other. How does Garrus explain Shepard in a way that makes sense to civilians? How can he say that Shepard is the kind of asshole who tells people to toughen up and get themselves together, and that he's Garrus's best friend, at the same time?
Best friend aside from Tali, anyway, and Garrus doesn't have Tali any more. He remembers that day, too, Tikkun's light casting sharp, purple-edged shadows across the surface of Rannoch, Tali's voice rising as she begged Shepard to stop the attack, to save her people. How she'd broken for that cliff too fast for anyone to stop her, slight, sleek, legs whirling in that odd-looking quarian gate, too quick and then gone.
But Garrus also remembers Tali laughing, tilting her tinted faceplate into the light as she stretched out her arms, proclaiming all this will be mine, Garrus, you'll see; he remembers her confidence settling around her like a mantle as she gave her fleet orders, and they obeyed. He remembers settling down in the lounge with her as she giggled over a bottle of brandy, and him chastising her for daring to filter a good Cipritine brandy like that. He remembers her at his side as they pushed their way through the wreckage of the Earth city called London, shoulder to shoulder (well, shoulder to elbow, she's always been shorter than him) as they followed after Shepard's blond hair and glittering biotic wake, just like always.
For a moment, the memory sears itself across his vision: the weight of his armor on his shoulders, the methodical repetition of firing, Tali at his side, Shepard ahead of them in that crimson armor.
Then it fades, replaced with another: the same weight, the same heft of the rifle in his hands, but now it's John Shepard at his shoulder with his own rifle, lean in black, while Vega clears a path in front of them, all bulk and momentum.
Garrus remembers John Shepard.
But he remembers her, too. How she's always moving, full of restless energy, where John has a sniper's stillness. Garrus remembers the brightness of her hair, tied up in its eternal knot, and he remembers taking her hair down and running his hands through the long, silky fall of it. He remembers that old, vanished scar across her face, and the glee with which she wielded a shotgun built for a krogan. He remembers the exact shade of her eyes in the light that day on the Presidium, because he swore he'd etch that color into his memory, just in case. He remembers her smile that day, and he remembers her face later, coming undone in his hands, and the softness of her skin against his.
He staggers under the weight of it, two lives that shift back in forth like a mirror in the sun; it's that, as much as the shock wave, that drops him to the ground, on hands and knees in the powdery surface, while he tries to take it all in.
When Garrus lifts his head, she's there, in armor that doesn't look right, in a helmet he knows she hates, but it's her all right, staring down at him, eyes wide behind her face plate, looking utterly stricken.
Something in him leaps at the sight of her, which doesn't seem right; hasn't she been there all the time? Or was she... He shakes his head in confusion, and his mouth is so dry that it takes him a moment to find his voice.
"Shepard?"