Wicked Ink : A Mass Effect Tale

by GrimJack21502

In London, Shepard has fallen on his way to his destiny and the Crucible remains inert. Dying and alone, he rests in the very heart of the Reaper horde. But where strength can fail, Love endures forever. This is the story of such love. This is the story of eternity. This is the story of Jack.

15. Hurry

(The Present)

Absent the traditional 'fourth', the three Reapers, like the horsemen of the Apocalypse, spread out across the shattered street, guarding its intersection with the beam. Each step of their massive legs shook the very history of London, cascading tremors into the past and threatening the very memory of the fabled city. The three titans, Goliaths all, represented the focused annihilation of the threat the races faced. Sovereign Class, massive, capable of decimating armadas and armies.

Death, in point of fact, and far greater and darker than anything St. Peter foretold in Revelations.

However, once the Reapers cleared the broken buildings and the street splayed before them, no armadas or armies stood against the murderous machines; no great force with numbers infinite enough to give them pause or powerful enough to slow them. When Harbinger and its companions took to the lane, they faced not another suicidal charge of desperate soldiers or a phalanx of craft descending from the heavens; instead, they found just two heroes in defiance, two champions standing together, two lovers bent on felling the invincible.

Jack and Shepard stood alone against the end of the universe.

Harbinger's voice seemed to come from everywhere, rumbling over the stones of London and vibrating the bones and brains of the two heroes.

'SHEPARD, YOUR GIFT IS AT HAND.'

However, before the bestowing of any presents could proceed, an exchange of pleasantries was required.

'Fuck you!'

The base insult came not from Shepard but from the singular being standing in front of him, protecting the severely wounded man with her own body. With power surging around her upheld, tattooed arm, Jack's biotic bubble flared in a brilliant white might; an energy mixed and measured with the love and faith of students, comrades and friends. Inside the bubble and partially hidden by a toppled column, Shepard wobbled awkwardly, unable to keep his balance but standing none-the-less. His head slumped in pain but rose to regard the nightmares before them.

'SHEPARD'S CONSORT, YOUR WORDS ARE POINTLESS. THESE WORLDS WILL BE OUR LABORATORIES. THIS CYCLE IS OVER.'

A sneer crawled across Jack's face, while her other hand slowly rose, the middle finger extended upward.

'Prove it.'

Jack's words rang with a strength and command few could generate in the face of likely oblivion, yet her voice did not falter and was not reinforced with an unfelt bravado. She meant every word, and nary a syllable left her tongue that wasn't wholly absent fear.

'YOUR SHEPARD IS HOBBLED. YOU WILL SUCCUMB AND ASCEND.'

'Run!' Shepard screamed in her ear, 'You have to run! Get out of there! Live!'

Jack drew herself tall and with hushed whispers responded to the pleas of her love,

''Afraid I can't do that.'

While they spoke, great shielded panels retracted along the teardrop bodies of the Reapers, revealing the charged and brilliant red 'eyes' of the vast creatures.

'No, Jack,' Shepard's voice cracked. 'They're readying to fire…please…just run.'

A tear, created not out of fear or self-preservation but birthed from the anguish in the man's voice, rolled down her cheek,

'That's your part of the plan. This is mine. I'll meet you back at the Normandy…don't be late.'

'No, Jack! Don't!', Shepard's seemingly infinite resolve began to crumble.

Jack looked over her shoulder, where 'Shepard' seemed to stumble while standing still.

'With all my heart, with all my love, I won't let them get you.'

Before any response could be given, the concentrated Hellfire of the three Reapers blasted against Jack, obliterating her from view.

'JAAACK!', a grief stricken Shepard wailed.

But he did not scream alone. In a city where Bards had bandied phrases of love and loss and Blitzkriegs had made memory of man, no sound, based in heart or hate, ever matched the wail of the being known as Jack.

Harbinger's beam melted the flagstones around her into superheated clouds, turned sand particles into razors of glass, and robbed the oxygen from the very air, yet in the middle of it, like a bit of diamond, stood the biotic field of Subject Zero. Blood poured from her nose and ears, as all that she had been and all she would ever be fed her defenses.

Like an aged and fallen boxer, Jack absorbed the might of the Reapers and was slammed to her knees with enough force to split and bloody each. However, her hand remained over her head, and her biotic shell held. The child robbed from her mother, and made a monster by monsters, fought with a strength so unique even the eternal Reapers recognized it.

Over and over, the death machines blasted her with their beams of strapped and honed purpose, and over and over, Jack took their shots…and held.

In her ear, Shepard screamed.

No longer did he plead with her to run; he knew that she wouldn't. Now his words gave her what she needed, what they both needed.

'Hold, Jack! Hold! Those bastards can't beat you!'

With her whole body shaking in spasms and her throat raw with howls of pain, she couldn't immediately respond but Jack focused on his words and with a might equal to the Reapers own…she held fast. Whether appalled by her defiance or embarrassed by their own failure to snuff out two insignificant humans, the massive entities redoubled their efforts, splashing a near constant wave of murder against Jack's barrier.

'garrus,' her choked voice gasped. 'Hurry.'

'We've got to do something!', Shepard screamed. 'Goddammitt, Garrus, let me g…!'

'Hurry,' Jack whispered again.

'Jack!,' Shepard screamed in her ear. 'Jack! I'm comi…'

'No,' she breathed, while the scarlet energy battered her barrier. 'Garrus…following…the plan…now…please, hurry.'

'JAAACK!', Shepard cried, his voice and heart broken. 'Let me go, Garrus! My place is with her! Let me g…'

The Turian's voice, nearly as heartbroken as Shepard's, materialized in Jack's ear.

'Don't let it be for nothing, my friend.'

'No,' Shepard's voice continued to debate but his shattered soul knew the truth in Vakarian's words.

Again, Jack's weak pleas manifested in one whispered word.

'Hurry.'

With the heat and weight of the assault, Jack's arm slowly started to fall and the shell around her bowed and wobbled. Unable to even lift her head, her eyes fell to the ground beneath her…where once more her shattered and distorted reflection met her gaze from inside the fused and mirrored ground.

Again she stared at the broken woman, the creature shattered in Teltin, the creature that had never known Shepard or his love.

Eerily, her blood again dripped against her image, as it had done earlier. Shepard's cries slipped into the background, a white noise of unfettered love. Spittle and sweat joined the blood beneath her, abandoning the sinking ship.

'THIS ENDS NOW, CHILD'

Harbinger's words like all of the engine's prophesies were meant to frighten and beat the listener into submission with a lethal combination of despair and certainty. Cycles upon cycles proved its voice as potent a weapon as the others at its disposal, and it may have had the same desired effect on Jack had Harbinger been wiser with its word selection.

THIS ENDS NOW…CHILD

CHILD

CHILD

'Isn't like she'll ever have kids.'

'What you have done…is impossible.'

'Tell our story.'

In her mind Jack again saw the tiny hand wrap and curl around her's and Shepard's.

'So this is my 'protection'?'

'Remember it all.'

'Tell our story.'

Jack's arm lifted higher and her biotic shell rounded and reformed.

'one…of us…has…to make…it'

'One of us will, I made sure of it.'

'Tell our story.'

Shepard's voice, pulled from the depths, reformed in a hushed whisper, one filled with equal parts pride, awe and love.

'My God, Garrus…look.'

The Turian's voice bled into her ear, his smirk a part of the statement's sound,

'Go get 'em, Jack.'

'Tell our story.'

Where moments before Subject Zero had been crumpled on the ground, Jack now stood against the Reaper onslaught.

Above her biotic shell, the red hellish energy disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, causing Jack to stumble with the relief of pressure against her field. Locking 'eyes' with Harbinger, she ran the back of her hand under her nose in a feeble attempt to wipe away the river of blood dripping from her chin. Spitting out a mouthful of the fluid, Jack grinned; her teeth the same color as the Reapers' beams.

No longer whispered, she repeated her earlier command.

'Hurry.'

Despite her Herculean reserves and her defiant display, Jack knew her defenses had precious little left.

She need to buy more time…she needed her own show of force.

'I'll give you as long as I can,' she panted.

'I love you, Jack,' Shepard choked. 'For as long as my heart beats…its beats for you.'

'YOUR DISPLAY, LIKE YOUR SPECIES, WILL FADE, MORTAL'

Harbinger's interruption reaped the moment, a sickle sharpened for happiness instead of wheat.

Jack narrowed her gaze at the nightmare, but where even the bravest of souls would feel the grip of dread, she held only two things in her heart: love and rage, the deadliest of human emotions when wielded in tandem and with purpose.

'You think yourself immortal?', she spat, 'We'll see, fucker.'

With a speed that shocked even her, Jack's amped biotics turned from defensive to offensive. For a beat, her bubble disappeared, and in its place a thin beam of pure white-hot rage razored from her hand into the London air until it knifed into the smallest of the Reapers. Tethered to Jack's hand like some ancient whaling harpoon, the 'rope' of biotic energy pulsed with light and power, as she sent specialized fields through the line...and into her enemy. The great machine listed first left than right, as several, rapid 'popping' sounds echoed from deep inside it. Around its 'eye', its armored shell cracked, allowing the last of Jack's biotic flares to blister forth from the wound.

Refuting Harbinger's earlier claim of immortality, the ground rushed up and met the smaller Reaper, as the 'immortal' giant simply ceased to be.

Despite having used the majority of her housed energy in the attack, she allowed more of her white-hot energy to linger, hoping to bluff her enemies into thinking she could duplicate the feat...which she could not.

Raw power flared from Jack making her nova against the backdrop of fallen fiends and heroes. Driven by a force unknown and underestimated by the Reapers, the super-human woman recreated her defensive shell, as if daring the surviving Reapers to strike.

Jack's skull shook with the power of Harbinger's response,

'PREPARE FOR ANNIHILATION.'

Though nothing had changed in the Reaper's inflection or delivery, she felt its words seemed...toothless.

With her macabre smile, Jack bellowed at Harbinger…and unlike eons come and gone, it was the hunted and not the hunter's words that elicited fear.

'I'LL KILL YOU ALL!'