The first breath is fire, the second settles into just being shards of broken glass.

Shepard wants to laugh, to cry, to throw up. The pain is glorious; it means that she is alive. She has kept her promise. But something is wrong.

Twitching her fingers is exhausting. Slowly, she is able to move enough to trigger her radio. The crackling white noise is comforting. She listens to the disjointed voices overlapping in broken celebration. The single word she is able to utter is barely a whisper, a plea, a groan. It is lost amongst all the others.

"Kaidan?"

The metal of the gun is cold as she presses it against her chin. Not against the bone, but deeper where the flesh is softer. She has earned the right to be selfish.

It has been two months since they found her broken body in the rubble of London. Her injuries are healing, but the wound in her soul grows larger and more ragged every day. The hero the galaxy needed spends her days in bed blankly watching news vids and planning her own death.

All she wants is to see his slow smile once again.

The gun jams.

As the human governments worked on stabilizing their planet, the other races worked on finding a way home. They send unmanned drones to navigate the wreckage of the Charon Relay. It is shattered and more alien than ever before. Most assume that they could unlock the secrets of the mass relays from the wreckage. But not even the asari believe that this will occur within their lifetime. And definitely not before the turians and quarians suffer from mass starvation.

It is only after weeks of exploration that they do find something. A swirling, purple anomaly—the first known wormhole.

It is as the initial images of the wormhole appear that Shepard makes her first public appearance. If going to buy more cheap alcohol is considered a public appearance. People stare as she staggers past them.

She ignores them. The pain had been replaced with numbness. The only thing that she can think about is finding the next drink. But she knows why they gawk.

Her cheeks are hollow. Dark circle surround her eyes. A dark red half healed scar runs across her face, from cheekbone to cheekbone.

Let them stare. Only idiots believed in heroes and happy endings.

The relays are forgotten as scientists turn their attention towards the wormhole. It is something new. Something that inspires hope. The asari send a VI probe through. It is programmed to fly straight for a standard week before turning around.

It never returns.

Remote controlled drones are sent. Their cameras revel that the wormhole twists and turns, but after a few hours the signal becomes too weak for them to control the drone. It is inevitable; a living crew will have to be sent if they are ever to know what is on the other side.

A suicide mission.

Shepard volunteers immediately. She and a million others.

But everything falls apart as the various races bicker about who should go. They each want to lead the expedition, to have first claim on the other side. They also want to know who to blame if everything goes wrong.

It becomes heated enough that small skirmish erupts between the krogans and turians. The remnants of the Citadel Fleet construct a blockade preventing anyone from accessing the wormhole.

Not even three months have passed since the Reapers had been destroyed, and already the Sol System is on the brink of war.

Just as things are about to ignite, the asari probe returns home. Its memory banks full of video recordings of another solar system. In the middle of the footage, there is also part a distress signal.

Hackett calls Shepard to his office to share the finding. The recording is nothing special, just a general distress call given off by any Alliance ship. The only thing of interest was the timestamp, the same day as the final assault, hours after the explosion.

She accepts the mission out of obligation to the Admiral, and then helps herself to his liquor cabinet.

For the first time in a long time, Shepard feels like she has a purpose.

The distress call changes things. Exploring the wormhole is no longer about science, it is a rescue mission. The Alliance scrambles to assembly a crew and Shepard uses every bit of political clout she has. She bludgeons through the political BS with little grace, cashing in on favors and a few less than subtle threats.

A small scouting frigate is assigned to her with a mixed crew from all the races.

She has not had a drink in days.

Her hands won't stop shaking.

For almost two days the ship travels through the wormhole. The crew spends almost all of that time sick from a constant sense of vertigo. Other than that there seems to be no harm from traveling this way. No sudden and lethal doses of radiation, no technical abnormalities, no monsters from the Id. Much to the disgust of the science team, the marines started a friendly betting pool on whether or not they were traveling backwards or forwards in time.

Shepard joins in on the joke, arguing for parallel universes. She thinks about sleeping with one of the navigators.

When they come out the other side there is moment of dropping weightlessness, like being on a rollercoaster. They open all channels, but find no sign of the distress call. There are thousands of reasons why the beacon is not longer active. She takes over working with the VI in scanning the planets. It is a mindless task that she enjoys. There is a planet in the sun's life zone that has patches of blue and green, but is mostly a dark red. The planet is silent. But it has a small moon where something blips on the sensors.

Shepard is in the head throwing up.

The blip is a downed ship. Though the picture is blurry, she immediately recognizes the blue and white design and that unique shape. She has seen her ship, her home, destroyed before. This time it is different. The Normandy is mostly intact, gently resting amongst the trees. Nightmarish images wrack her mind. She could barely function knowing that Kaidan was gone. The thought of seeing his corpse makes her want to drink herself oblivious.

The computer announces that it is finished enhancing the image, revealing that there are people around the ship.

They stare at each other. Each heartbeat lasting a lifetime.

She has the new scar. Kaidan has grown a beard.

He breaks the silence, his voice cracking, "Maddie?"

Torrents of words become stuck in her throat. She can only nod, her eyes burning. She wants say something, anything. I love you. I couldn't live without you. You look horrible with a beard.

Instead she launches herself at him, pulling his mouth hard against her own. His fingers tangle in her hair, bringing them closer.

The world could end that very moment and she wouldn't care. They finally were together.

Author's Rant.

So like so many others, I hate, loath, despise, detest, etcetera the endings. Truth be told I'm okay with the God-Child and color-coded endings. I can live with those, it is the Normandy crashing and lack of explanation on what happens next that bug me. Scratch that. I'm fine with Joker and EDI crashing, that's kind of cute. It is the fact that in my ending, Kaidan and James are seen walking out of the ship. Neither one of them would leave Earth behind. James (who I love by the way) spends the whole game wanting to get back home and fight. And Kaidan…well damn it, he would not leave Shepard behind ever.

That scene even makes me want to embrace the whole Indoctrination theory, which I have a love/hate relationship with. I love that it explains away a lot of my problems with the ending, but hate that it leaves an even bigger cliff-hanger.

Yeah, I'm not happy with Bioware right now. I'm actually mad enough that I cannot even get myself interested in replaying the first Mass Effect again. Sigh. Hopefully, the "closure" Bioware is promising us will help, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm also pretty much retired from writing fanfic. Thanks for all the support!