A/N: Split up for pacing. Part II will come soon. Follow me on Twitter flyawayn0w if you're so inclined to keep up with me!
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The Battle of Virmire - Part I of II - All In Your Name (A New Future)
In that galaxy, the idea of television, a digital medium meant for entertainment, is a uniquely common concept. The bridge of the Ardent Prayer and most of the Covenant's represented species there had been introduced to the novel concept of war on TV, so removed from themselves. The mere observation of an event that was far and away getting out of hand, with historical and galactic repercussions, plainly seen in holographs and screens depicting the battle as it progressed, rising to a pitch with the similar rise of the leviathan from the deep.
Commander Shepard's Reaper has finally manifested, the so-called destroyer of worlds.
"I hope you know what you're doing." The Prelate had been on her side looking at the situation progressing, the battle brewing into something larger. A single Human had been left behind with what was presumed to be bomb, and with as much resolution as the Ardent Prayer could muster from its hidden probes, their analytics systems had confirmed who that Human was: an Imp. The last one, and if he had been there, so would the Demon.
Closer, ever closer, there was a moment coming, she could see it along the imperceptible lines that she had known as a military commander of her stripes. Her claws momentarily gripped along her half-cape, divots there from a habit: moments when those decisions from her career had made victory an assured prospect for the sake of the Great Journey.
"If this, Shepard, hero of Humanity, and her Demon cannot finish this nuisance of Saren and the Reapers here, we shall rise to the task. That is what I see here for the Covenant." Karonee declared.
And so the Ardent Prayer waits, watches, and sees as the main group of Humans makes its way across the facility to relieve another group, all while leaving the one behind, a Geth transport steaming over them all toward him.
Shepard would have to account for the dead today, running across the facility with her fireteam in tow. Above them, the Geth had brought as much heat as they gave. Distantly, the concussive pops of the Normandy's railguns going off in the atmosphere had been only puffs in context with the rest of the battle, shooting down Geth transports as they came.
Names over the air had been in Shepard's ear, followed by statuses:
Marcos. Down.
Black. Down.
Omar. Bleeding out.
O'Neill. Dead.
Hitman was taking losses, and she had rushed over with a haste born of battle. It was rage, cutting through Geth as if she had been Mai. For once, she wished, punching through enemy resistance to her men and women assigned to the frontal assault, that Mai would get there first. The Spartan herself was having trouble however. Not mortal, but simply in distraction. The Geth had been coming hard and fast, and now, even Krogan, emerging out of the holes of the facility. With the pressure of the attack turned into a drawback, that's when the facility's defenders had pushed back.
She spoke only in hand signals, and her team's noises had only been exertions and gunfire. The noose around them from enemy's unseen had been tightening. Had it not been for kinetic barriers or biotic shiels with every angle the Geth had been taking them from, they would've been shot already.
This was war.
Barreling towards Hitman, pinned down at an AA tower, there was no time for anything sane or remotely cautious.
"Spirits why the hell did they make us Turians so big!" Garrus had scrambled and yelled out his misgivings and he tumbled behind the cover of one of the giant water pumps that lined the water canals of the facility, his armor smoking and ridden with impacts.
"You're the one wearing blue! You stand out!" Tali had replied as she let loose one volley of shotgun bursts out to the enemies that had come in behind them, the crunch of Geth taking her slugs acting as punctuation.
Garrus had only vented his rifle and himself as he panted. "What do Geth care about colors?!"
Bright red Wrex hadn't seemed to care all that much as his massive form drew fire, and he ignores any that got cut through his kinetic barrier. Just another scar for the pile, and it matters not. He has a team behind him as Liara throws up a biotic wall for him to take cover behind momentarily before throwing himself behind solid cover. Shepard up front, her wall of fire is absolute, Geth coming from their front no-issue.
Two orchestras of gunfire and explosions quickly converge: Shepard's and Hitman's.
Her singular focus on getting to the rest of her men and women to get them out had only been broken as a Geth transport flew over them inbound for where they had just come from. For all Joker could do in his attempts to shoot down incoming transports, one slipped through.
"JD! You've got incoming!" She screamed out over the radio, her team colliding into an elevator door that would take them up to where the AA tower where Hitman had been. She hadn't anticipated this much resistance getting to her men, leaving JD alone. Combat effectiveness had made her complacent.
"Copy all." She could hear his steel behind the radio. He would hold.
Pepper of Geth plasma fire singed where they just stood as the elevator door was open, and all of them threw themselves in as Garrus emptied the rest of his effective heat capacity out the door until it ran hot and red, he dropping to the ground of the elevator they all barely fit into. His armor smokes from plasma fire and from smoke catching from his rifle when he vents.
Tali had in momentary exhaustion found herself leaning against Wrex, as the rest found either each other or the walls as the elevator departed and moved up.
"What the Hell is this?!" Liara had screamed to the floor in combat franticness. Why had the Geth suddenly come on so strong? Shepard had an answer in her head, one that came from another galaxy: It was because God was watching. This was the ferocity that the Covenant fought with in the name of the Forerunners, and even in brutal fighting, she thought of this discovery that held her down.
Shepard would know her answer if she were among her troops: Another day on the job!
But this hadn't been the place or the people to say, even as she took in deep breaths and vented her weapons in the moment of downtime as the elevator had raised itself from the lower levels of the facility.
"Part of the deal." Is what Shepard says instead. "The only easy day was yesterday."
At the end of the day, in some strand of things, she was a Marine. Not so had been Liara, or Tali, or Garrus even. This was an intensity beyond what they knew. Maybe Mai had desensitized them to war, and how easy it had been for her to send Mai out and take the brunt of combat oh so easily. Here is where that proposition fails.
"Shepard," Liara breaths, almost keeled over to her knees. "Tell me," she looks right into her commander's eyes. "What did you see?!"
Where could she start, and where should she? Not now, not in that elevator. If Liara wants to know, if Shepard could bare to divulge further the secret of another galaxy to her, it wouldn't be right now. Liara's mystery weren't the ones that floated in Shepard's head.
More than that, she can feel it as a storm, oncoming. Those that knew had tried to hide it, but the truth always turned inside out for Shepard. She needed answers herself.
"After this." She answers instead to Liara, but Liara needs more. She needs so much that she lunges at Shepard, taking her arms, into her arms.
"Shepard, something is wrong-! With all of this!" Battle madness manifested in so many different ways in different people. Shepard sees it in Liara now, so close, she can smell it, see it in her eyes. "There is a poison, spooling out. A poison!"
A man turned into a Helljumper.
A child, created into a Spartan.
A Covenant, unholy.
What would this mission be if the Covenant, if the UNSC, if Mai and JD never came into her life and her galaxy? Liara must know too, in her way, grasping away at the dark and seeing the taint of beings not of this world. She sees them because there is a darkness that had cloaked them until now.
The elevator makes it to the top, the door opens, warfare just beyond it, but all in there look frozen at Liara and Shepard. "You feel it to, don't you?" Liara begs Shepard to understand, but the horror of it is that she already does.
An explosion rocks closer to the elevator shaft, barely shaking the frozen undone, Garrus is out first, gun up, Wrex after, followed by Tali. Shepard shakes her arms, and Liara's grip on her falls. There's no time for this, not now. There's no more time to explain entire histories while her men and women die, and Liara forgets where she is until she is alone in the elevator.
Hitman is backed into a corner, literally and figuratively, an AA tower that Shepard's internal antics has powered down inside Saren's base. Boxes have been hastily put up as cover, but it's never enough, not as they have been cut down and only at the very furthest back, the still standing alone between them and enemy fire, are the wounded, dying, or dead.
As was the fortunes of war.
An inevitability of the trade.
People lived, and people died, and all Shepard could do was fight so hard to minimize the loss, and to vindicate those that did die for a better tomorrow.
She sees Hitman battered and near beaten as she and her fireteam round around the corner of the elevator guns smoking, armor battered, and continuing to fight as Geth lay between them and her.
"Friendlies!" One of the Hitmen yell out, still fighting. A few Geth get the message and snap around, but Wrex and Garrus are already on it, angling themselves to shoot the Geth without crossing fire into collateral on the other side.
Sandwiched between, they don't last, metal cut into metal and Shepard swears she can hear one of her squad's assault rifle's coils pop from overheating by the time. The divide of several dozen yards is like miles between her and her men, and when she thinks the way is clear, she feels it: the darkness again. A biotic weight on her shoulders that even she as a non-practicing biotic feels.
Saren is here.
All eyes are up as they hear the sound of some hovering machine, and their target is at last.
Silhouetted against a sky quickly turning dreary from the smoke of the battle, Saren's eyes find hers, and she looks up with her gun barrel.
Today was not the day however for the promised confrontation.
Today had been far beyond what was supposed to happen.
In the veil of the battle, no one hears the rapid stomping from across an elevated pipe until it's on them, and even after that, no one knows what it is until it is given form: right behind Saren.
From on high, half a ton of metal and flesh in the form of Spartan Mai. Saren doesn't quite know how to process when the man-shaped object that is the Spartan flies at him, and then collides with a force equivalent to a head-on collision, bringing him to the ground below in a thrash, crash, and then an imprinted crater. It was an attack that would've killed regular Turians, but he had been far beyond that veil now, his right-hand balling moments after they made impact with the ground, palm up and out against this metal Demon. His hover platform remains in the air without user, stagnant.
She was sent flying back as a biotic blast, almost back up the sky where they had started, landing in a hard thud feet away from him as flesh burned, but metal worked on his form. His right arm- appendage- had gone to where she had put a dent into his metal chest, but no fingers had been left there to prod and feel. He had risen despite what pain he felt now.
His left arm was no longer anything that could be described as one from a Turian. It had been worse, the limb in the shape, all too familiar, just seen on that holographic apparition of the machine from the deep. A black, metal tentacle, no fingers, save for the claws at the very end that were shells of metal.
It had been revealed to all as they saw the opening Mai had provided them and ran up to surrounded Saren in his mini-crater. The language that had come out and arose out of everyone there had been a slur of orders and commands and shouts: Shepard, yelling at the top of her lungs to get right on him, Emerson, still in charge of what was left of Hitman, yelling at those still up and ready to go close the circle, while to get the rest to safety and to med up while they could. For everyone else, it's a battle chorus, anger, rage, made into language, save one: Mai.
She curls her fist, from on her back, blasting back out to a sprint, and she is again barreling toward Saren.
He sees this, even through the concussions of impact, raising his arm to blast her back again, but before he can send it out a biotic blast hits him in return:
It's from Shepard, her fingers flaring in unused power as the distance is closed, one more time, biotic blast negates biotic blast, and the second after that, over a dozen are on Saren, surrounding, guns on or aimed down at him.
In the distance, the Geth wail in synthetic cries. More are coming.
"Vile demon." Saren spits out, just before Wrex and Mai throw him both to the ground, both of them laying on him. Any words after that are unheard, Mai throwing back her arm before sending it forward into his face. She feels more metal than bone.
It's a dogpile. Easily almost a ton is on Saren, but it's one that even he can fight up and off of. A power there in his muscles that seems to challenge both Wrex and Mai combined.
"Shepard!" Emerson comes first, a gauze wrap against his neck and a tourniquet around his leg. He's perhaps the most put together Hitman, and still yet he does his job and is guns up for her with what's left of Hitman. "We've got five dead. All wounded- We gotta ice this fucker and go-!"
"No!" She bites back. "Standfast, secure the area!" She snaps her comm on. "Joker I need evac on my position, NOW!"
Saren struggles, but it's not a fight he can win as Mai shimmies one of her knives out and against his midsection. Wrex is breathing on him, daring him to do more, to justify the shotgun shell in his head.
Emerson swears, Shepard pointing out to Tali and Liara, signaling out for them to point their weapons outward rather than inward, joined by the rest of Hitman who are covering them. When it comes to Garrus however, Garrus pauses, looking down on another Turian. The Turian.
"You've brought shame to Turians everywhere! What are you doing?!"
"Hah!" Saren's chest raises as he barks. "Vakarian," Of course he would know who he is. "This goes far beyond mere reputation or anything our galaxy politically tribbles over."
Shepard glances over and sees them dead: her men and women, on the floor, bleeding out, those surviving trying not to look at them, to not be captivated by the tragedy. Anger, rage. She knows these emotions well and beats them back down as she sees the reality, the objective image before her: Saren Arterius subjected, held down, and accountable to her.
He deserves the bullet, but there's so much more in his head. She knows, because the same storm floats in both of their minds. Her eyes scan his body, like shed snake skin, it contains him, yet keeps him. He is barely alive.
"These are, implants. Saren," Shepard had ground through her teeth as she walks down the crater, reaching out, her gun rattling onto the floor, her hands on his chest, holding at anything she could grab. "What did you do?!"
Wrex and Mai keep both his arms pinned, Wrex has to deal with the tentacle, but it alone was crushed beneath him for now.
"Let me go. I can't let you disrupt what I have accomplished here. You can't possibly understand-"
"What's at stake?" Shepard throws off her helmet and talks to him, face to face, even as she is so close to ripping his neck out from itself. "I've seen what you seen, Saren! Sovereign, that Reaper! It destroyed the Protheans! What else is there to understand?!"
"That what is to come is a solution- and we know the alternative now." For what little he can move his head, he lands on looking at Mai. "There is place for us, Shepard. In the new order. For all of us." His head shifted just over to the Spartan above. "Even you, Demon."
Demon.
In the beady eyes that glow blue, it is there that Shepard discovers that Saren knows too what he means. That word holds greater depth now, crossing time and space itself. Angels and Demons and Gods above were never supposed to come down to the level of where they lived. Two worlds colliding, and no one survives.
"What are you talking about?" She grits through her teeth. She hears Doc inject more and more blood filler and solutions into those injured by the Geth in the distance, the groans of pain filling the air over the sound of distant battle.
"We know about her. Don't we?" Saren asks, and Mai barely moves. "We know about all of them. Another galaxy, and yet they are on the verge of destroying themselves. The Reapers are the final solution to this thing that we organics and synthetics do to ourselves." It's a whisper that Shepard hears, and those on him as well, but they do not care as much as they care about how he seems to want to be repelled off the ground.
Shepard blinks several times as her sweat drenched hair drifts to stick on her face. "That's not a solution at all. Whatever you think it is."
"Neither is fighting a useless battle. The Protheans fought like you did: trillions dead. I'm working for the alternative. Is submission not preferable to extinction? I fight for the Reapers because it is the only logical way for all life to survive." He pauses, he hadn't realized he was breathing still, or rather, that he still needed to breath as three beings are on him, almost crushing him. "I answer to the Reapers for the good of us all."
"You're answering to me now!"
Saren would never admit to being surprised by Shepard. Admit that is. For she has surprised him, time and time again, in catching him off guard with Liara's acquisition, the breakdown of his network on Noveria, and then following the lead of the Thorian on Feros. She surprises him again, because what she just said sounded like a sob. She sobbed for him. Her hands curl at his collar, her words filled with rage and regret.
Men and women groan and die in the background as those on the lookout are ever antsy, weapons being reloaded and the dripping of blood and synthetic oil rolls onto stone.
"You're like every other poor bastard in this place. A tool for the Reapers! One that they will cast asides as soon as you're done being useful!" She screams at him to understand. "You can't really believe that the Reapers will let us live?"
In another galaxy, John-117 wages war against the Covenant, and the Insurrection, one more time. In another version of that galaxy, he is hunted down after that war ends. In most of those galaxies, Noble Six dies after fulfilling her purpose. The same story, again and again: used by the powers that be for greater purposes, but discarded in the end.
"Why would the Reapers discard us if we are useful to them? Think of the innocent!" She always did, and her hands go to his neck and squeeze, staying his words, coughing up dry breaths.
"Don't you dare talk to me about the innocent!"
A Geth dropship had appeared and dropped off its cargo, its synthetic cargo, far too cleanly for his liking. In another life, all gunfire available would always pepper Phantoms and Spirits as they came down, making sure that those unloading would be dazed or dead on hitting the deck, but he was only one man, expecting something far less intense.
"Shepard…" Was his only word on the comms, getting his SMG ready, stock extended, and ducking behind what cover there was. There was no time for talk.
Now was the time that paid to be the strong but silent type.
"You've killed so many of the innocent." Saren undid the world, and it only swallowed people whole. Those she couldn't save. That was his mass effect. "All in service to nothing."
"I will save far more lives that have ever been, and will ever be, Shepard." He bites out from her grip.
"Keep telling yourself these lies. I'm sure the dead will tell you it was worth it."
"Well. Kill me and I'll find out."
Mai moves finally, glancing at Shepard. One nod and that was it for him by Mai's blade.
Shepard doesn't give that order. Not yet. She has to try.
"It's not over yet, Saren. There's still a chance to redeem yourself. Can't you see that? Some part of you must realize this is wrong. You can fight them!" It's a surreal thing that puts those surviving, those of her fireteam, who had galivanted across the galaxy in the name of stopping Saren, hear their commander beg him to save himself. "Please." She says to his face. "Please."
"I'm not doing this for myself!" He screams back at her, casting away her pity, her empathy, who she is. "The Reapers have won. They always will! I'd rather them than the galaxy that this demon forbodes!"
"There is another way! Don't you see that?!"
"This is your way!" He has no more spit to send at her, and his form quakes so much that Wrex and Mai struggle to keep him down. "Cooperation, synthesis!" An Asari tries to tend to aid where she can among Humans as a Quarian watches the skyline for more Geth, a Turian covering what sectors no one else does beneath his rifle. All of them commanded by a Human. "My future is yours, whether you like it or not. The unions between us will one day transcend flesh and steel, just as it did with this demon, and our bonds will be stronger for it. The Reapers offer this now, instead of the untold years it will take us otherwise. It is EXTINCTION otherwise, Shepard. We can't stop it!"
Shepard knows fear. It's a constant across all life. Even, as proven on Luna, synthetic life can fear its demise and fight against the dark. Saren is afraid. And he fights still. That's enough. It should be enough for Shepard, but Saren can no longer listen.
"The nightmares." He says instead. Eyes closed, they glow beneath his lids. The battle around them is silenced. Hitman yells contact, gunfire flies over them, and gunfire is sent back. It doesn't matter. "You get them too, don't you? You see them all. All of them? How we're helpless to save them all."
"Yeah." Shepard understands completely, nodding once. She understood Saren. She really did. "Yeah. The nightmares."
"Shepard!" It's JD over the radio that brings her back. "I'm about to be overrun!"
The second that Mai goes slack, hearing JD in trouble, it's enough for Saren as once again people go flying, his arm jutting out with biotic power and freeing him. The concussive burst washes over those still looking down into the crater, unnoticed by those that have to account for the Geth reinforcements. It's not clean however. Not as those able to stand their ground open fire right into him before even Wrex has stopped falling. His kinetic barriers don't last, but as gunfire breaks it, they cut into his skin, his metal, right through, and nothing happens as he stumbles away. Concentrated fire drills into him, evaporating his form, but nothing changes of his pace until he's at the edge of the ledge that AA-tower is on, walking past and through wounded and dead Hitmen, and then promptly off of it. Every step he took pieces of himself, of blood and fluid, tracks it all the way as Shepard simply looks at where it goes: nowhere.
She barely feels the gunfire impact her kinetic barriers before Garrus drags her right back into the crater for cover, only to return to fighting positions.
"Commander!" One of her Hitmen yells, she can hardly recognize voices right now, face to face with Saren, realizing what it was all for. "We have to go!"
The Normandy answers for her, the ship burning its path above them, first as a shadow, and then itself, Geth gunfire peppering its belly as Joker does a u-turn in atmosphere, the mouth of it open as it comes as close as it can.
It was time to go. The Mako was left behind, but it was no matter, Kaiden himself appearing on the ramp with his rifle and some of the Normandy's crew, giving covering fire for those to get back.
Mai does not budge, her rifle up, aiming at the Geth as they come, ever closer from her position.
"Shepard! They're- they're getting too close-"JD, fighting for his life.
"Shepard. We have to go!" It's Kaiden, screaming at the top of his lungs as bodies are dragged into the Normandy, blood smears on its lip.
"Shepard!" It's Mai, and Shepard had never known what desperation sounded like from her until now.
"Commander!" An explosion drowns out Garrus as he ushers for Liara and Tali to go and move back to the Normandy, Geth continuing to put pressure on them all. Wrex, defiant, shotgun at his hip, fights as he had all his life. He laughs at them in between pulls of the trigger. Garrus is thrown asides from that grenade however, right into a crate turned over as cover, left to crawl back to the Normandy for his life.
If she wanted to go back to JD, she could not. Too many more lives need to leave to survive, and to fight on. "JD." She presses on her comm, and gives her killing words.
"I'm sorry." He's heard those words before, from the last positions he was supposed to hold down. Miracles before kept him alive as Covenant came down hot on him, but now, he feels no magic from Shepard's words, no miracles. "For everything."
All he feels is his hands on their own drift to the arming mechanism of this bomb, just as she was instructed by Shepard and Kirrahe, and activate it.
JD knows that this is how he dies.
He had always anticipated that it was going to be against the Covenant however, not a firefight against a synthetic menace that he had only known for several months, serving at the behest of a horror beyond time and space. Then again, hadn't he been the bigger cosmic mystery now?
He couldn't even use the bomb itself for cover, endangering the objective.
"Sorry this is the way it turns out. You deserved better than this." It's strange to think that the last words he might hear are from an AI, given the situation. But he appreciates Cash all the same. "Last words Chief?" Cash asks of him. The AI cannot cry for him, nor would he drop even more drama on top of him, drowning him further. But he knows where the road ends.
JD knows what to say without a doubt, from the bottom of his heart. "Take care of Mai for me."
Nothing else comes in his radio before the plasma fire from the Geth rain down, his kinetic barriers flaring as he immediately bit back, SMG in the crook of his shoulder and firing up toward the source of fire. Supporting concrete blocks along the left and right had been the best he could do for cover as he dashed for it, the sizzle of missed fire beneath his feet as water runs between them steaming up, pricking him.
His motion tracker had been alight, slowly yellow smears approaching him, but he was a shock trooper. Close encounters were his forte, his training, his reasoning to be an ODST.
Ten meters out what he presumed to be Geth had been coming down the downward slope of the water canal, and that had been his call: SMG brought to his shoulder, pre-aiming before he stepped back and swung out, finger depressed on the trigger before he had rounded the corner at all. Three Geth regulars had been monolithically approaching, two of them immediately chewed through by the SMG and going down as the third, last to take fire, had erupted a burst of fire and then rushing toward him.
His kinetic barriers flickered, trigger held all the way down as the Geth was made swiss cheese, collapsing, shoulder checking the man as he dipped back into cover, gun smoking hot. Sticking the barrel into the water hadn't helped much, but it gave him time as more and more he could hear Geth come down at him.
Again and again he would do this a second each time: rips of gunfire from him being sent out as more and more concentrated fire was sent back and finding their marks. The kinetic barrier had been doing its job, but each time the enemy had been getting fire on him faster.
There had been only one real solution then: grenade puck in his hand and thrown around the corner and up, metal screaming in response as he moved off of their X to the next piece of cover.
Move, shoot, repeat. Move, shoot, repeat.
A hundred battles and it came down to the same thing for him, all leading up to this.
He didn't feel bad, didn't feel sad. He didn't feel much of anything at all. In the thick of it, his body had never allowed him to feel anything that didn't keep him alive, but nothing had changed even when death was likely, if not promised. The eeking feeling that this was how he was always supposed to die crawling up to him like the half-Geth torso doing exactly that, grabbing his leg around the corner and almost pulling him out, dragged him to the floor. He didn't know if he shrieked or cursed, but he drew his gun down and at them as he laid on his back, keeping his head barely above the water as the Geth's monocular was chewed up.
He hadn't the time to stand back up as another Geth rounded the corner, looking down on him. The burst that had taken out the half-body only held down and moved up to the Geth, a game of chicken made as kinetic barriers on both of their parts were held for seconds until, at last, JD's gun had overheated painfully, his body automatically ejecting it from his hands to somewhere beyond him, but in that span of time in that traded flurry of blows his barriers had broke.
He had been nearly spotless in combat in this galaxy, but this Geth above him had been making up for lost time. Super-heated plasma had beat into his armor, at first the kit protecting him, only to melt as shots finally punched through to flesh below through heat conduction. In the second it took JD to draw his sidearm, he had been shot half a dozen times as his pistol raised and, in a hazy flurry, unloaded into the Geth.
The vitals bar on the top of his HUD had gone red, and he had nearly forgotten it was there. Not that he needed it. He had been feeling the damage just well enough as he groaned aloud, spit in his mouth swallowed that tasted more of iron.
More enemies were approaching, and a half glance around for his SMG yielded nothing. His kinetic barriers hadn't recharged when he felt another plasma bolt slam into his right shoulder, his arm going limp as he crawled, scrambled around the concrete support. He couldn't will himself to his feet as if gravity itself was his enemy, so he chose to slide down the slope instead of leaving red in his wake.
The bomb beeped on, red lights ticking down.
Any regrets? Of course. But he felt nothing for it. He had been down this road so many times that the one surprise he had that day was that he was finally going to get to its end.
Using the support behind him, he had risen painfully, legs and arms barely there as he avoided looking at his chest below. He smelled his flesh cooking. He knew what that smell was, and why it didn't bode well, though soon as he knew his senses would start burning out as only the bare minimum remained. Adrenaline through his system and maybe, perhaps, he knew now what Mai felt.
This nothingness feeling, traded for the sake of combat effectiveness. It might've been intoxicating, but his combat high wasn't for his satisfaction. The package needed protection.
The yellow blips on his HUD's radar wouldn't go away, but that was alright. His left arm, fumbling in his battle belt, had taken the first three syringes of combat medicine he had, all of them stabbed into his thigh below as the piercing feeling was replaced with the cool fire. Ice cold wind over his skin felt good even as he fought for his life.
Pure clarity. A step to his right: Another Geth about to round the corner, and his pistol had been up and ready to blow it away within its kinetic barrier as it came up and around.
For all he could do, Cash looked on alone within JD's systems, watching him fight the last fight of his life. Another Marine against impossible odds, for the sake of all life. This was how he was supposed to die. Back and forth, the ebb and flow of a man who was done with rush drugs, bringing all of his combat experience to bare was a spectacle without equal as he fought for something more than his life: the mission.
With nothing but his pistol, Jonathan-Jameson Durante pushed back, even as superheated plasma tore down his armor and body. Geth bits and pieces began to cloud the water below him, drifting around him, creating a surface onto themselves as they continued down to the water runoff.
He didn't fight like a Spartan.
He fought like an ODST.
He would fall like a man.
Eventually, the Geth would be too much, eventually, flesh and blood would come for him too. A Krogan Battlemaster had emerged from their hole, awoken by battle, and it had found JD. Why one puny Human had given scores of Geth so much trouble, they wouldn't know, but it justified one thing about flesh and blood over synthetic bodies. It knew war better.
It thrashed through the crowd of Geth marching toward JD, sending the units astray as JD had heard the roar before he saw the Krogan. It had been too late for him to do anything about it as he was caught out in the open in front of the bomb.
It had happened so hard, so fast, that he didn't feel the pain until it hit him at once, slammed against the bomb itself and crumpling to the floor against it. The Krogan was quiet, backing up from him to get the clearance that was coming next
JD saw the gun barrel from the Krogan raising his right arm to try and stop this fate by Human instinct alone. After that however:
Nothing.
Nothing stops Mai cold. Not enemy fire, not an opposing force. Not words or distractions. Nothing could until now as she sees, in the bottom left of her HUD, JD's long-standing IFF counter go red. His vitals: gone.
The Normandy loiters for no more than another two minutes as people fight to get into it, but even then gunfire reaches inside and splinters a crewman in two. Krogan and Geth both are proceeding to close, ever tighter that noose.
Mai does not care.
She alone buys the evac time, for she pushes toward the enemy as they pour over the walls. She is on them, jumping, back and forth, smacking them down with her strength, killing them with gunfire and grenades. She lives in between the ticks of a second. Spartan time has taken her as her heart beats outside of its limits. She screams for every strike. She doesn't know why.
"Chief." Cash is calm but stern in her head as she beats a Krogan to death, supporting gunfire from the Normandy blending into all the fire that comes toward her. "Durante's last words were asking me to- "
"Shut up!" It's a yell that almost breaks her visor from within. "Just shut up!" Anger that matches her aggressiveness. It matches the way she breaks the face of a Krogan into parts by the stock of her rifle.
"We gotta go. It ain't no use-"
"Shut up!" Again, she screams as she kills.
Those calling out to her however come from outside her head now.
One of the Hitmen yells at her as she is dragged away.
"Chief! Get aboard! We gotta get the hell outta here!"
"Mai!" Shepard cries out to her, even as she has yet to board, running her assault rifle to ruins, waiting for her. "He'll be remembered! But we have to go!"
An opening: a choice. A lull in the fight- between her and the Normandy is a dozen meter dash. She takes only a glance at Shepard before she turns away.
"Negative." She had never said a word more strongly in her life. "I'm going back for JD."
"Chief…" Cash spoke into her mind. "What are you doing? You know there's two of us in here now right?!" He knows what she just said, but he needed more. He wasn't about to die for a lost cause, tragic as it was. Distantly, Wrex could feel Shepard's biotics flair. She, however, did not need to explain to anyone, and no one could stop her. She could drag her back if she wanted to, but the weight of her, the weight that hadn't been just physical, would weigh them all down. She would fight them.
"Good luck, ma'am." Mai meant it. She really did. This was a fight however that was hers to make.
"Hell's bells." Cash curses in her mind. He was an AI. He had no choice in the end.
Kaiden is on her shoulders, gripping, dragging Shepard back to safety as Joker is screaming for them to hurry up. Her goodbye can only be a response: "Good luck to you too, Spartan."
It's a blur to Mai how she fights, runs, sprints, tears her way back through the facility. A short blur. She punches through walls, doors, living and synthetic, but she fights, charges, and is drawn to Jonathan-Jameson Durante.
"He's dead!" Cash tells her, yells at her, the squad indicator that had nearly been burned into her HUD due to how constant he was there for her says the same. "He did what he had to do! And you're gonna kill us both!"
"We're both already dead."
Mai doesn't know why she says that as she mechanically vents her rifle after a small squad of Geth try to meet her in the halls leading to JD. But they are. Cash has died once, and she was due to die in the war. If they are dead then what does it matter? But she cannot believe that of JD. He had been so alive that he had made her feel so too. If he was dead, so was she, and even then. She didn't care if she died. She just wanted JD to live. As long as there was a chance, as long as he could be kept whole, she would do it. Systems could be wrong. Hardware could fail. With those possibilities, she devotes herself to a battle she believes in far more than the Covenant or Insurrection would ever draw her to.
For the first time she can remember in years, MJOLNIR strains beneath her, the shields are being used beneath the kinetic barrier as she brutes through enemy fire alone, paint and surface area being chipped away at every time she throws herself upon the enemy all in the name of getting to JD.
The Normandy has left. It's just them now. A Spartan and an AI.
He died, and was reborn, to serve. Just like her. Cash makes his peace and stays silent, offering his processes, opening doors for her to run forward. Nothing he does matters, but that doesn't mean he can't do it for himself.
The Ardent Prayer tracks on slowly three things: The Reaper, the Normandy, and finally, once again, a Spartan. The Reaper is slowly leaving the planet's atmosphere on the other end, having seen what it needed. The Normandy too is at escape velocity, leaving in their direction. The Spartan however, the Spartan has stayed, quickly finding herself barreling toward an immensely growing energy source at a infrastructurally crucial point on the base, toward a fallen ally.
The base is alive with hundreds, synthetic or otherwise, converging on the same point.
"I've seen these demons take on similar numbers before." The demons that are the Spartans have earned their name after so long. And, if not Mercaius himself having witnessed it, then the stories that get through the ranks despite the Covenant censoring.
"I've seen them sacrifice themselves in similar places as well." Karonee speaks out, more than drawn, as all the crew is to the holographic display showing off the demon's progress. "Things will be different this time however."
The coil, the wind up, the preparation and surveillance. All of it was leading to now, and here. "That facility must have evidence to where our missing Jackals have went." Karonee starts, standing from her grav chair before a tactical map made. "More than that. A battle here is about to reach its end. A tragedy that we can stop. I declare here that if we have left behind our war, we shall instead be saviors. The enemies of Humanity, that Demon, will be ours to bare."
The Prelate gives one last notice over her shoulder, looking down on her. "Are you sure this is the path which you want to take us down?"
She is more than sure. She is defiant, her arm sliced toward the picture before them, her cape billowing in movement. "Look and see. This world is paradise, and yet Hell is brought here by this inevitable conflict. Humanity, even without us, is embroiled. Nay, all those who are without the light of our Gods find themselves in this morass. The light of salvation shall be lit here."
Hell followed the shepherd.
The saviors have finally arrived.
"The Demon means to fight another menace." The Prelate warned.
But it was not a warning. It was reassurance. "Then we shall too." She answered.
"Aiding a Demon?" It is Usze now, watching this transpire, protests. Yet he is the one that knows best. He has done it before.
"Fighting the better Devils." So that was the decision. Karonee nodded to herself, back and shoulders straight, ready to give the order. "Disengage active camouflage. We will fight." Far above Virmire, the shadow of the Covenant emerged in a shimmer. She whipped out a hand to her communications officer, and suddenly, the Ardent Prayer was broadcasting. In a single voice, Karonee declared war. "The Great Journey continues!"
Karonee with a sweeping arm, her half-cape fluttering, had directed to Usze as the communication was sent out. "Deploy all forces possible, we will be securing the facility. Mercaius, you go with them." She gestured for the Brute as well. The red alert siren of the Ardent Prayer went off: combat stations. Usze had pressed off of his station at the bridge. Orders were orders.
With a salute over their hearts, the Jiralhanae and the Sangheili were in unison, even coming eye to eye. It was Mercaius that approached Usze as they walked toward the exit of the bridge, and he that offered:
"I will handle support." Strange for a Brute to be so tactically docile. Usze appreciated it.
"I will handle infantry." It was Usze's forte after all. It left Mercaius with the vehicles, and the Brute affirmed, gripping his hammer as the two ran for the hanger bays where, what felt like a war ago now, the Demons came.
Karonee had settled back into her chair as her mouth ran through her command instincts. "I want the wings one and two for direct support with the ground operations. The rest will be our fighter screen."
"Aye shipmistress!"
"Bring us to geosynchronous orbit over the facility for our pods. If we need to, we will breach the atmosphere for direct support."
"And of that…Beast?" One her crew asked of the Reaper.
Karonee had scowled at the thought. "We shall see what it does."
She finds him where he was left, but more than that, she finds him as everyone and everything reports: dead. Slumped against the bomb, a hole on the upper right side of his helmet, cracking the visor across. His body is only one of dozens and dozens he has left behind, and dozens more join him as she clears the area around the bomb, Geth and Krogan trying to disarm it. They can't, it continuing to beep on in closing intervals.
Irony overtakes her, the memory of Operation Uppercut returning. From one jury rigged bomb to another. This time she is the sole survivor.
When all drop dead but her, only then she is given time to cry, taking in his body utterly and completely. Around him the water streams red and down, his right arm having a substantial hole in it, only matched by the red that drains down from his neck and out the visor's crack.
She can't bring himself to take off his helmet. Too see him. Her body betrays her however as she kneels in front of him, on autopilot, her medical provisions on her kit all out at her feet, in his lap, as she does everything but accept that JD is dead. Biogel is injected into his BDU around the area, bandages and tourniquets out and wrapped as fast as she can kill, but it's nothing. It's meaningless, as she avoids, so, so hard to look at his head.
His hands are limp at his sides, and she wants to see them move into language.
Nothing.
She doesn't hear herself, but Cash does. He hears her mouth move into an infinite line of 'no no no no please no', as rapid and frantic as her breath, but eventually that collapses too as all her effort, all of her first aid cannot deal with what has been done.
She cannot bear to look him in the eye and see what has been done to him.
All she can do is put her helmet against his, her hands, her fingers, tracing that lower line of his visor again and again.
What made war tragic was something that had betrayed Mai again and again as a Spartan. Her duty was absolute, and her competency was ultimate with the fight. Men and women would die beneath her always, not able to survive what she can, and their losses were losses but that was the inevitability of war. She accepted those losses. She would fight hard to minimize, but against the Covenant it was an impossibility. The losses became routine. It was never personal. Inhumanity had shielded her from knowing what loss was, but she knew, she felt, she was different now.
Mai Gul knew loss. Mai Gul became Human.
She would trade it all if it meant that JD was okay.
She would accept none of this.
The bomb was ticking down to her death, and more importantly, the finality of JD's fate. It wouldn't take several more seconds now based on its pace. There was nothing more real to her than those coming moments. She had sacrificed herself for a bomb once. She would do it again.
For Cash, seeing her thoughts, feeling her convictions, there's a sick idea implanted and proven that breaks Halsey's design. He knows why she's doing it. She might not know, but he does. He's not dead yet so it takes all of his processing power right into their shared mind space to give her the time to do this as the bomb rounds ten seconds to detonation.
As long as there was a chance, a chance made of denial or of an infinitesimal luck, she would give it to JD.
With a force that could break empires, she gives it all in his name, despite herself as a Spartan, for the love of him.
The sound of metal, bone, and circuitry had rung across the world as the Spartan reeled back her fist and reached into that bomb with all her might through steel and pure energy.
In one fell swoop, she changed history.