"Oh, Delia cursed Tony,
On a Saturday night.
Cursed him such a wicked curse,
He swore he'd take her life.
Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone."
She lets her fingers lovingly linger across the pitted surface of the music player, pausing for a moment as she realizes it would be the last time she ever turned it on. The last time she would listen to this song.
Commander Cordelia Shepard (Systems Alliance, Retired) can't help but smile to herself; the first genuine smile she allows to play across her lips in...God. She can't even remember how long.
The song - an old folk standard, at least two hundred-fifty years - was a favorite. This particular arrangement especially. Part of a folk-revival movement back in the mid twenty-first century. A woman with a deep, bluesy voice leading a soft chorus of men and women, as they strummed guitars in the background. A good beat, without the brightness of say, The Kingston Trio, when they sang it.
The old story in her family growing up was that both her Mother and Father had independently selected the same name for her before she was born. Hannah Shepard, ever the prim and proper rising military star, took it from King Lear; Jake, ever more the rapscallion by comparison, picked it from the ballad currently playing.
Looking into the full length mirror in her bedroom, she finishes smoothing out her dress blues. The uniform hangs limply off her gaunt, rail thin form. But it's replete with any number of pins, medals and ribbons. Not all of them, just the ones she was most proud of. The ones from her early days: back when her service was about defending civilians and working alongside them as Humanity pushed out further and further into the stars. Back when it was primarily about the exploration.
She finishes fiddling with the cap on top of her thinning red locks, and takes comfort that the moment has finally arrived. Time to bring it all to an end. Time to put an end to a great wrong that had been committed. True justice at last, for the great crime she aided and abetted. For the countless billions who paid with their lives.
"There's a natural order to the universe..." she whispers out to her reflection. A statement that brings just a glimmer of relief and inspiration. Not to keep going, keep living; quite the opposite.
They should have let her stay dead. Left her to rot in orbit around Alchera
"There's a natural order to the universe..." she repeats.
"The first time Tony shot her,
He shot her in the side.
The second time he shot her,
She laid down her head and died"
Her death was a natural thing. She wasn't so important, so vital, so critical to the whole of the Universe that it could not do without her. No one was. Her time had come, just as it had for so many others, before that day and every day after.
They had no right. HE...had no right to do this...
The Illusive Man. A twisted freak with Godlike delusions of grandeur. On his own, he was dangerous enough. At the helm of the seemingly limitless resources Cerberus had at its command, he had become more like a force of nature.
No...worse. A force OUTSIDE of it.
"They called for a Doctor,
He came dressed in black,
Did every damn thing a Doctor could,
But he couldn't bring Delia back.
Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone"
She still wakes up, each and every night, with the memory of those first few horrific moments of chaotic confusion.
How she got off the station, how she escaped and made her way with Jacob and Miranda, that was still jumbled and hazy. But she still recalls, with perfect clarity, the first feeling, the first instinct to pass through her.
Something is terribly wrong! I was dead. I should be DEAD.
All the mandatory training, starting from her days in boot, on how to deal with trauma and mental stress...how could they possibly prepare her for something like this? The black swan that suddenly bursts into existence. The wrong no man or woman had ever endured before.
She's never had a chance to tell Miranda how much she still despises her. Not personally, but for what she represents. The eager Frankenstein to her Nameless Monster. The brilliant doctor, so full of hubris, so taken up with her own cleverness, ready, willing and able to spit in the eye of nature. To think that Death can be so easily cheated, without a price to pay, without a balance to be restored.
Cordelia didn't see things so clearly, during the war. Not like she does now. But even then, she could feel, even if just down deep in her subconscious, what a terrible perversion she was. Couldn't stand the sight of herself, those evil, glowing scars, where the metal stretched out the skin and held it up, as it protested against this mockery.
She didn't consciously acknowledge it back then...but that didn't stop her from acting on it in her own ways.
Didn't stop her from having Karin heal the scars as soon as possible.
Didn't stop her from holding old friends at arms length, lest they see her for the horror she'd now become. Or from keeping new potential friends from getting too close.
When she found out Liara was the one who had ensured that her body ended up in Cerberus custody, it almost became violent. The love still blossoming between them immediately turned poisonous.
As the blows in her life struck with increasing frequency, Cordelia made time only for achieving the end goal, in the most direct fashion possible. Put aside, demurred, or even outright denied all of the requests of side missions and diversions made of her. All she could focus on...all she wanted to focus on during those days, was finishing the mission. Putting an end to the Collectors. They called it a suicide mission, and maybe she was hoping that if there was any decency left in existence, her death would be the only one required. That everyone else...
Because I could not stop for Death, Death kindly stopped for me.
The assault went wrong. So...so horribly...
Jacob and Miranda survived. Of course they did. Frankenstein and Igor. And the Monster lived as well, on stolen time and the blood of the innocent.
Tali. Garrus. Jack. Grunt. Mordin. Samara...
She thought she might have been able to save them all, protect them from whatever dark fate clung sickly to her living corpse. Everyone made it alive to the station, despite the odds. She thought, maybe from there...
Oh God...ohgodohgodohgod. Please...please forgive me.
She was still in shock when she had to make the call at the Alpha Relay.
Bahak's hundreds of thousands dead.
It had been such a relief to finally turn herself in.
"Monday he was arrested,
Tuesday he was tried.
The jury found him guilty,
And the judge said ninety-nine.
Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone"
Even then, Cordelia still persisted in actively finding meaning in her life - or trying to, at any rate. In "making the sacrifice count". Even after six months, left largely alone with her thoughts. And with the headshrinkers who helped her try to make sense of it all, move past it. As if that were ever possible.
As if what had been done to her had ever happened to anyone else in Human history?
Still, the Reapers came, at last. Come to...
...had it been her fault?
When the clarity finally overtook her, after the end of the War, she always wondered: Would it have happened, if she had just stayed dead, like she was supposed to? It sounded mad on the surface, but maybe the Reapers were the ultimate punishment. For her. For refusing to do what she should have from the start, and ending it. Putting a stop to this farce, this mockery of existence.
The only good part about the war - as far as Cordelia was concerned - was that it left her with little time to rail against the wrongness of her continued existence. She couldn't allow self-pity and loathing to put any more innocent civilians at risk. She was here, now, so she might as well get on with it. And if she went down in the fighting...no great loss.
Can't kill a dead woman.
There was little time for socializing now. Most of her off hours were spent with a bottle of whiskey, alone.
...the cutting came later, after Thessia. Doing what she had to to hold the broken pieces inside her together.
Ninety-nine years in prison,
Judge that aint no time.
I've got a brother in New Orleans,
With nine-hundred and ninety-nine."
Again, Death hounded her. Demanded that she bear witness to the lives it took, the charnel it craved, filling its gut with it. Laughed as it proceeded to make Bahak a drop in the bucket. To drive the price of potential victory exponentially higher.
Casualty reports for 2085.205: Three billion reported dead or missing on Palaven...Six billion on Terpsichore...Thirty billion across the entire system cluster...
She watched helplessly as every day that she was unable to end the war decisively visited fresh horrors upon those who least deserved it.
She bore witness as fate made her the instrument of genocide, in one terrible moment on Rannoch.
Choked on her own indignation as she came across her own clone, and wondered at how much more violation and humiliation Cerberus would visit upon her. Upon the nature of Humanity itself.
"Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone"
She almost wept with joy when she was told by the Catalyst that her attempt to destroy the Reapers would take her along with them. She didn't even have to ask what the other options open to her were. Marched, practically ran to the conduits, firing her gun and screaming out with a primal rage, free at last.
I'm coming home! I'm coming home!
But Cerberus had done its job too well. Like a butterfly pinned down, set neatly in a display box, her cybernetic systems refused to allow her to slip away. They forced her to stay alive. Stuck fast in this existence, like a wolf with its leg in a trap.
F-fuck you, Miranda Lawson! Damn you and Cerberus to Hell!
They gathered the pieces of her broken body, propped it up, and declared her the Savior of All Lifekind. Sanctified her name. Buried her under more medals and heaps of effuse praise than any person ever deserved. Forgot...forgot all those that she had seen ground beneath her boot heel in an effort to save the Galaxy. After all...a hundred billion or more? Just a statistic.
"Now Tony, he's in the jailhouse,
Drinking from a silver cup.
Delia's out in the graveyard,
Trying her best to get up."All the while, the Galaxy refused to see her for what she truly was.
The one least worthy of survival. Used up, hollow. The one who escaped Death, who brought it with her while he chased down the prize he had been constantly denied.
She tried. She did try, in the beginning. To make the best of her time in physical therapy. Hoped that with the war gone, with everything she had endured, that she might find a way to carry on. Seek a new purpose. A reason for being.
But every night, it's still the same thing. She wakes up, and wonders why she's still alive. What's keeping her going? Beyond the mere, dry science of what was done to her. Realizes the answer: Nothing. She's little more than a cybernetic revenant. An old graveyard ghost. A fallen soul dragged out from her grave, made into a weapon, and told to save the Galaxy.
Well...she'd done all of that, hadn't she? What was left?
"Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone"
There was no great moment of transformation, no sudden epiphany. Just one day, she woke up, maybe about a year after the war had ended, in her isolated cabin in Nebraska, and realized:
Nothing's left. Nothing's stopping me. Not anymore.
Granted, there were preparations to make. Simple ones. A letter to her Mother, hoping she'd understand how it had come to this. Why it needed to be this way.
A last will and testament, directing that her pension and any other number of honorariums and prizes made to her by grateful governments be directed to aid efforts to help recover. Especially to widows and orphans.
A chance to write her own epitaph.
Remember me not as a warrior, but as an explorer. Judge me not by my prowess in battle, but by the achievements of the future peace.
Twenty-four hours from now, a message would be automatically transmitted from her house computer to the SAAF. Just...seemed like a shame. It was a nice cabin. The thought that her lingering corpse might somehow taint it, if no one had come to check on her for days...or weeks...
She asks that they bury her on Alchera. Properly this time, in the ground.
"Well then. No sense in...in lingering about, right?"
She laughs; it sounds brittle and reedy, but honest. Thinks to salute herself in the mirror, one last time, but can't bring herself to do it.
You've been dead for so long already. No sense in making a long process of finishing it up.
She walks slowly, able to make the short trip to the middle of her living room without her cane, at least; impressed that she manages to maintain enough strength and dexterity to climb the chair. Hang the rope. Letting her hands work the end into a noose.
Jailor, Jailor,
How can I sleep?
When all around my bedside,
My dear darling Delia creeps?"
She fits it around her neck, tightening it, pulling the cord through the loops, as if she were securing her ascot.
She's smiling when she kicks the chair away, and surrenders at last to the peace of inevitability.
"Delia's gone,
one more round
Delia's gone"
A/N: I want to thank Corentin IV for her edits and feedback, and RED78910 for additional beta reading and suggestions.