Prologue
Five years have passed since the fight in London, during the battle for Earth and all-out war for the survival of the galaxy. Not a day passes where I don't have images of intermittent glowing red lights through the brown haze. And that noise. The spine-tingling horn of mass death, a sound that brought us closer to losing everything each time and being unable to do anything but watch or die in its wake. That is until the noises stopped, and the giant skeletal structures fell to the ground while others floated into the sky never to be seen again.
Commander Shepard is who we have to thank for this, he gave his life to stop the Reapers from decimating all in their path. We all knew that we had to destroy the Reapers or be destroyed ourselves but we just didn't know how, Shepard accomplished this but nobody knows quite what happened, it seemed like an impossible task. Then again, that was Commander Shepard all over. His body was never recovered through all the wreckage and rubble, or what would have been left of it, I suppose. Some claimed to have discovered it on a section of the Citadel business sector – fell from a ship and collided straight into a building apparently. But those of us who were there know better than to believe those rumours.
The victory was pure relief, after the initial celebrations at not being dead or wiped out completely we were hit with the sombre facts; Earth was in disarray, hundreds of millions had been lost across the galaxy and people were still suffering. However the real gut-wrenching reality was that not all of these atrocities were committed by those devil machines, Cerberus had played its part in the most unimaginable crimes against humanity too. God, it still gets me angry thinking about it now. The woman who was in my position aboard the Normandy SR-2 before me back then was tracked down and executed in the middle of all of this on the Citadel. It makes me even more thankful for my position with the Alliance during that time, and the amazing people I had to work with.
I was involved with the rebuilding and clean-up but shortly after Admiral Hackett demanded that all of us take extended leave to get our heads straight. I'm not sure I could have enough time to recover from what I saw though. During that time I met someone who had been in the thick of it in London when everything was happening and we became close. Very close. Her name is Jane and she became a medic after the battle for London after saving a man's life with no training whatsoever, other than an Alliance soldier giving her instructions over a radio. Fast-forward a couple of years and I was still with the Alliance and virtually settled down. Not something I imagined for a communication officer who liked make-up, spa treatments and chess.
We had also been helping with the victims of the Cerberus experiments when we found you and your brother; we helped a lot of people whose lives had been ruined by the "pro-human" group. There was just something about you two which we grew to love – strength, a will to survive and a feeling of loneliness, two boys cast adrift and betrayed in this intergalactic war. And you were both as cute as a pair of buttons, too! When Jane said she wanted us to take you on as legal guardians I was shocked, didn't know what to think. Every part of me told me that it was a crazy idea, "No way! Are you serious?" I remember telling her and then she asked me again. She asked me in a way that I knew I had to say yes, if we didn't take you two on you would continue to be two lost souls in the vastness of space; there was no telling what would become of you. So I said yes – for the time being anyway. And now here we are 5 years later…
Samantha Traynor