WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ME3. The spoilers are for the end. There are also some spoilers for the From Ashes DLC character, very minor ones.
Notes: Like everyone else, I think the dialogue, characters, and gameplay for ME3 are amazing, but I'm pretty damn conflicted about the endings. As for the upcoming announcement, I think it was planned for one month after game release, to coincide with PAX East. I'll be disappointed but not injured in my loyalty to BioWare if this isn't the case...
Updates will continue to be slow, but I hope my readers will stick with me for the ride.
All standard disclaimers still apply. Although I don't own the characters or universe, I do work hard on my little stories. Please don't print or repost without my knowledge. Thanks.
And thanks again to all the people who've taken time to encourage me by adding me or my story to favorites or alerts. And, most especially, thanks to those few who've written reviews. I welcome your interest, thoughts, and ideas-even constructive criticism. Your support is always appreciated, and often instrumental to maintaining the inspiration necessary to develop a story.
Synthesis...
Integration...
Evolution.
Javik had called it the cosmic imperative.
All she had to do was yield to the inevitable and there would be peace.
Peace. It sounded so right. It sounded so perfect. Every cell, every breath, every impulse in her body yearned for it with abandon, consuming and complete. That it should come only at the cost of her death was no real detriment. It might have bothered her if she thought there was the slightest chance that Garrus was back on Earth... alive. He'd ordered her to survive... she hated not to do as he'd asked, but, then, he hadn't exactly managed to duck. She didn't want to live without him. Not for anyone, not for anything. Not for earth. Not for the galaxy. Not even for him. Sometimes death was a relief. A comfort. A release. She felt so trapped... she was so tired...
Tired to death. Tired of death. Tired of destruction. Tired of war.
Life is war. Her own voice. Her own thought.
She remembered.
She remembered so clearly, felt overwhelmed again by loneliness and confusion, swamped even more deeply than she had been then, that night aboard the Normandy, the night she...
but what did it matter? If life was war, it only stood to reason that death... only death could bring peace.
And if her death brought peace not only to her, but to the entire galaxy...
then she had fulfilled her purpose.
Garrus was waiting. And she was sure that when she greeted him there in that bar, he would understand.
But...
she couldn't bring herself to lift her foot, to take so much as that first step -and she realized, muddily, as if from far away, that it was just too easy. Nothing was ever easy. Nothing. It was the hardest, most bedrock truth of her life, the foundation on which everything she knew and believed about reality, about life, about death, about herself rested.
A voice echoed in her ears again, or even more faintly than that, more a physical reflex like the jerk of knee or the twitch of an eyelid than a memory or a sound. We all want. We all give to get what we want. Mordin's voice, brisk, controlled, subtly amused. His response to her exasperated exclamation that life ought to be easy. His own truth. And one that had struck her as undeniable. Sensible. Fundamental.
Shepard wanted peace. More than anything. More than life. But... but... there was something... something... bothering her...
and then, faintly, still muffled by mud and water, it clicked into place. She was willing to give her life to get peace... but why were the reapers-or their representative, or their controller, or their creator, or whatever the hell it was she was speaking with, whatever was watching here now, like a hawk, why were they willing to subsume themselves into a new existence? A new creation? What did they get? What did they want? Somehow, she had a very hard time believing it was peace...
"I... I don't know..." she said, the words thin and wavering and alien to her ears.
"You must choose," the glowing blue child, the avatar of the Catalyst, her salvation and her nemesis, said inexorably.
She looked again toward the central column of bright, white light. Death. Rest. Peace.
Synthesis.
an involuntary shiver ran up her spine. She felt the strangest urge to laugh at the familiarity of it... suddenly, she was there again, in the unexpected vastness of an unfamiliar bed, staring at the eerie blue glow of an empty fish tank, thinking of Saren.
Thinking of him because of something she'd heard in a Cerberus lab. A phrase she'd remembered him using in those last fevered days before he'd rallied his will and shot himself... before he'd done what he could to help her stop Sovereign. Bio-synthetic fusion. A mixture of man and machine...
She'd heard the words applied to herself on that Cerberus station, and she'd feared...
that she didn't know what she'd become.
Shepard... you don't honestly think... Cerberus rigged you up so you could be overtaken as the indoctrinated servant of a reaper... do you? Garrus. Humor and exasperation covering fear like the ceramic veneer on plated armor. His hands on her shoulders, anchoring her.
She still didn't know.
Evolution.
The cosmic imperative.
Legion. Standing on a cliff, looking out over the horizon, apologizing to her for sacrificing himself.
Legion, standing in the AI Core on the Normandy, regarding her with detachment and something akin to affection. Nazara told you this itself: "by using our technology you develop along the lines we desire." The geth do not wish to have the future given to us.
She turned slightly to the right. And took a step. Not a big one, just a tiny shuffling little lurch.
Maybe, after all, even peace was not a gift, not if it was something imposed from outside instead of earned from within. Maybe it wasn't worth anything unless it was hard-won.
We can't beat them, Shepard. We have to think like them. Convince them we're too useful to be destroyed.
No, I'd rather live free than die a slave.
All she'd ever wanted, her entire adult life, was to be in control of her own fate.
She'd tried to live her life to achieve that, the power of choice, not just for herself, but for everyone she cared about, for everyone. For her, that was what it meant, to protect and serve.
How, then, could she take the choice to fight or to make peace away from the fleet, away from their children, away from anyone? She couldn't. She didn't have the right.
More steps.
One.
And one more.
Integration...
A stranger's face inside a Cerberus helmet, withered and gray. Kaidan's shocked face and accusing eyes. Ever since Cerberus rebuilt you, I don't know who you are anymore. I don't know what you are.
Words on a datapad: they call it integration.
I am not with Cerberus. You brought me back to save humanity, and that's what I'm going to do, without sacrificing the soul of our species to do it.
She didn't want to kill the geth... they had such potential for peace... She didn't want to sacrifice the quarians... but... life is war. Maybe that is the Cosmic Imperative. And war...
You still cling to hope that this war will end with your honor intact.
And suddenly it came flooding back in a rush, the outraged disbelief she'd felt in the Citadel, catching sight of Saren trying to open the station for Sovereign.
The hard, brutal, burning knot of rage in her stomach as she'd knelt to affix the detonator to the heart of the Collector Base, graveyard of thousands-hundreds of thousands and more-of colonists, colonists she'd been trying to save.
The frantic disbelief driving her through the asteroid base of Kenson's damned project A colony sacrificed, the balance of life in the galaxy temporarily maintained... The guilt, the grief, the relief.
She was gaining momentum, and in that weird trick of battlefield adrenaline, it was sweeping the pain up in the current, carrying it away.
Her honor had been lost, lost and regained, a dozen times.
Her unit for herself on Akuze. Ashley for the STG team on Virmire. The hostages on Terra Nova and Zorya to prevent any further hostage-taking incidents. Toombs' vengeance-and her own-denied in the hopes of hobbling some of the atrocities committed by Cerberus. A cure for the krogan, delayed-though that, at least, was one injustice she'd had the opportunity to correct in person. She hoped it didn't prove to be a mistake. The rachni had.
War was ruthless calculus. She knew that. She always had.
Every N7 did. Hadn't she told James as much?
You're real. A little crazy, but real. Calm. Affectionate. Amused. Garrus and Garrus and Garrus. Garrus her wingman. Garrus who'd always backed her up. Garrus who'd always stood by her side. Garrus her partner. Garrus the shoulder she'd always needed to lean on. Garrus, who'd always believed in her, even when she didn't-and couldn't believe in herself. Garrus, the turian she loved. I think we're going to kick the reapers back into whatever black hole they came out of... you were born to do this... get out there and give them hell.
She smiled and raised the pistol in her hand. It felt heavy, a little off-balance, but her hand was steady. She was going to do Garrus proud. She could do nothing less.