I'm gonna lose control…

Here's something radical,

I must confess that I feel like a monster…

- Skillet, Monster

Fumbling around in the dark, with only the soft, orange glow of her omni-tool to aid her, Shepard counted the minutes as they dragged on sluggishly. One minute became two, which became three… four… five… before it seemed as if time itself had ceased to exist. The gunfire from the hangar could be heard clearly from her spot in the medbay, thundering and rapid at first, followed by the occasional screaming shout until only silence remained. She waited with bated breath until she heard a familiar flanging voice in her ear.

"Shepard, we're done here," Archangel hailed, sounding breathless and quite furious. "All hostiles terminated."

"Oh, thank God," she exhaled. She'd be lying if she had said she wasn't worried. Hell, ever since Garrus nearly got his face blown off from that rocket, she always worried, and it wasn't necessarily a good thing. She couldn't count the times she had almost been shot because she chose an inopportune moment to cast a sideways glance in his direction to make sure he was unharmed. She knew he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, but still, if anything ever happened to him... She shook the thought from her mind... She couldn't think like that... She wouldn't subjugate herself to contemplating of the possibility of life without him...

"Alright," she continued, pushing away the lingering feeling of dread it had left in her. "The next order of business here is, we need to jump start the Normandy. Now I've already repaired the power supply from my end that EDI told me to cut, but-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Tali interrupted. "What do you mean 'jump start the Normandy'?"

"I mean: we need to restore power to the ship," said Shepard impatiently. What else did would she have meant? EDI had gone silent, and the ship wasn't going to restart itself, and the clone certainly wasn't going to be of any help.

"And how do you propose we do that?!" the quarian asked, bewilderment echoing through her voice. Shepard could picture her friend cocking her helmeted head to one side and placing both hands squarely on her hips.

Shepard took a moment to consider this. She had no idea either… She had been hoping Tali would have known what to do… being the quarian engineer that she was…

Joker cleared his throat obnoxiously and let out an exaggerated cough which sounded a lot like, "Biotics".

"What is it, Joker?!" Shepard snapped irritably. Now was not the time to be cracking jokes and feigning hilarity.

"Ohhh," Tali said with quiet realization.

"Joker?!" Shepard asked again forcefully, having no indication as to what her crew was silently conceiving.

"Is four going to be enough though?" Tali said.

"It only took three the last time, and we were planetside…," replied Joker.

"Yea but Jupiter's gravitational pull is two and a half times more than that planet. To make a clean break, we're going to need all the power we can get, and hope it doesn't overload the drive core,"

"That's gonna have to be a risk we're willing to take then," Joker said reluctantly.

Shepard had had enough. She exclaimed, nearly shouting over the comms, "Will the two of you cut it out and tell me what the hell is going on?!"

"I was hoping this could wait," sighed Joker. "When you fired the Crucible, it didn't just take out the Reapers. It disabled any and all ships, comms electronics and AI scattered throughout the galaxy."

"The pulse it generated was like a massive EMP," Tali began. "It slingshotted through the Relays, immobilizing any and all tech in its wake… Including the Normandy…"

"Okay…," Shepard said slowly. She knew it was bound to happen… The Crucible had advised against all this, yet her objective had remained the same: destroy the Reapers… end the damn cycle once and for all. She had had no desire to control the Reapers like the Illusive Man, no matter how much power it would grant her. The thought of her becoming a "Reaper god" was a terrifying notion in itself. And she sure as hell didn't even consider the other option… Synthesis… She wasn't going to rewrite the genetic makeup of every being in the galaxy without their consensus simply to achieve galactic peace… It wasn't the natural order of things. If synthesis was to become an advanced stage in evolution, then so be it, but let it proceed naturally, over time… the way everything else progressed. Annihilating the Reapers had been her goal… their goal from the very beginning. Any other choice would have allowed the Reapers to continue on with their existence, with there always being a chance of someone or something attempting to reactivate and reprogram them, and she would never have let that happen. No matter the cost.

Nothing is written in the stars… Shouldn't every individual, in all of existence be in charge of their own destiny? Not have some sentient nightmare harvest all advanced life every 50,000 years because of some predetermined programming?

On the other hand… didn't destroying the Reapers force her to become like them? Hell bent on the destruction of an advanced machine?

You chose wrong, organic…

Joker spoke up once more, jolting her from her bleak thoughts, "Commander… we were stranded on an unknown planet for a month…,"

Wrong…

"A month?" she said, attempting to push past the voices that had suddenly begun to echo in her mind once more.

"Keelah, Shepard… It took us that long to figure out how to fix the Normandy and make the repairs… and that was with me being sick…," Tali whispered somberly.

"Sick?" Shepard questioned, frowning. The quarian hadn't been on the ground after the FOB. She had remained on the Normandy. She couldn't have been shot.

"Shepard…," Liara interjected darkly over the comm. "The shockwave shut down Tali's suit and all its life functions… She nearly died…"

Shepard whirled around and shot a questioning look at Chakwas. The orange light from her omni-tool cast grim shadows upon the doctor's tired features.

"Is that true?" she whispered quietly.

"Yes, Commander. Unfortunately it is…," Chakwas nodded solemnly. "It took three weeks for the fever to break and get her well enough to sit up in bed. And that was only after the long nights of hallucinations and screaming incoherently… Tali was in bad shape."

Unfortunately, almost losing a friend was minor in comparison to ending the Reapers, a small price to pay in the grander scheme of things.

Damnit! She regretted the thought nearly as soon as it had formed. Garrus' own words raced through her mind, It's so much easier to see the world in black and white. Grey? I don't know what to do with grey… When had her priorities become so muddled, her sense of ethics compromised? Was she really saying it was worth losing her friends over?

These doubts left an unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach. At the moment, the only thing she was actually certain of was she was losing a grip on reality… losing a grip on herself.

"I'm so sorry…," she whispered to no one in particular as tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, turning her gaze away from Chakwas.

Silence was the only friend that greeted her.

Wiping the tears from her face, she regained her composure and cleared her throat in an attempt to break the uneasiness, "So what do we do now?"

It was Liara who replied first, "Well… when Tali was recuperating in the medbay, she came up with a theory on how to restart the drive core…"

"It was quite brilliant, really," Traynor chimed in.

"It's a bit crazy…," Tali replied sheepishly.

"But it works," Joker responded.

"To put it simply," Tali continued. "We use biotics to charge the Tantalus."

Shepard scowled. She was a bit unclear of the concept, "And how will that work?"

"Because biotic abilities are really just electrical charges being sent through eezo nodules in the body that warp and control the dark energy that surrounds everything in the universe, we're able to manipulate the dark energy contained within the Tantalus to power it up. Then, at the exact moment when the power is sufficiently built up, we hit the reset button, for lack of a better word."

Already guessing the answer, and dreading it, Shepard asked anyway, "So where's this reset button?"

Joker sighed heavily, "That's the kicker isn't it? It's in the cockpit…"

"Of course it is…," Shepard groaned wearily. "Okay Tali… I'm not going to pretend I understand what any of that means, but I suppose you need to get up to engineering to do it… Liara, Javik, Wrex and Kaidan… I want you to go with her, being biotics and all. Do whatever it is she tells you to do. And chances are very good that you'll have some resistance stationed on that deck, so be careful."

"There's a maintenance tube down here that leads to the Port Cargo Area. It might be a tight squeeze for Wrex, but they can go through there," Joker said.

"Did I ever tell you how much I hate crawling around in tin shafts?" Tali retorted grumpily.

"While they take care of the engineering level, Mom, Garrus, James and Cortez… You're gonna have to find a way up to me…," Shepard ordered. "With no power to the elevator though, it may prove to be a bit… problematic…"

"Shouldn't be too difficult, Lola," Vega stated. "We can pry open the doors easily enough and there's a ladder in the elevator shaft that we can climb up."

"Im coming too," Tychus Vakarian announced. "You need all the help you can get."

"Great!" exclaimed Shepard. "Joker? Traynor? Keep Hackett and the engineers safe until we pull this off… And while I'm waiting, I'll deal with the Cerberus assholes on this level."

"Catch you on the flip side," said Joker.

"Shepard out," she said, tapping her earpiece and glancing down at her omni-tool.

Chakwas arched an eyebrow, "You sure you're up for this Commander?"

She nodded, averting her eyes from the doctor's concerned gaze. With a flick of her wrist, Shepard's omni-tool lit up once more, and her omni-blade unsheathed itself, searing heat emanating from it. It was the same blade that dealt the final blow to Lieutenant Bastard Kai Leng. It would be this blade that would severe the remaining Cerberus' heads: the guards, her clone, and eventually her own father. She would watch with great pleasure as they fell to the ground and rolled away…

"All I need you to do Karin, is open this door and stay the hell out of my way."

Updated 6/7/14