There's fingers in her head, sinking strange talons into the soft meat of her brain, prying apart the dense tissue and thumbing through her memories like pages in a book. It's visceral, gut-wrenching: not memory but experience, not recollection but reliving, and it's like she's a passenger in her own life, watching helplessly from the back seat as this thing sorts through her soul like it's so much chaff.

It passes over her childhood, it lingers on moments she'd rather let lie, it forces her through the experiences again. It's like a bored child, pulling legs off a bug: thoughtless cruelty just to watch it squirm. She wants to cry, she wants to scream - she wants to die, but more and more she's forgetting why and where and how and everything that matters. The context. It's slipping away in a haze of green-tinged fog and devouring her with her own existence. Played back.

In a shaken hand, the course of her life changes. She is at a reception, after the concluding talk of the week-long symposium. All around her is a sea of uniforms and reflective medals, suits and ties and hor d'oeuvres. She is sipping from a flute of champagne, indulging one of the rare times she could be both in uniform and drink. The final day of a endless talks and presentations, all focusing on the future of biotics in the military, with an emphasis on special forces and the elite N7 group. Which, of course, was why she is here. She runs a finger down the N7 stripe on her dress jacket, red piping looping around her left shoulder. One of the few things in her life she is truly proud of, after enough time had tempered the memories of the grueling months of near-starvation and endless physical strain from 'hellish' to 'respectable'. The crowd of admirals and generals, businessmen and attachés moves and pulses around her, but she is undisturbed. Perhaps one of the lowest ranked officers there, even her fame is overlooked in this assemblage of the movers and shakers of the Alliance.

'Commander Shepard?' The voice is familiar. A man emerges from the crowd: brown hair cropped short matched by bright brown eyes surrounded by the now-familiar wrinkles and hollows that picked out a biotic. Kaidan. He snaps a salute, crisp and professional. Shifting the flute to her left, she returns it, and he joins her at the standing table, a smile breaking the plane of his face. He's the kind of person where it lights up his eyes, like his body forgets for a second the parasite implant crouching at the base of his brainstem. In another life, she might just have found it cute, but he is a Lieutenant and she a Commander. In his wake is another man, and she notices the rank insignia on his dress coat.

'Captain!'. This time she is the one to come to attention, but the dark-skinned officer waves it away.

'At ease, Commander. I'm David Anderson.' He pauses, and looks her up and down. For the briefest of moments she is like a specimen under scrutiny, but the Captain nods nearly imperceptibly and holds out a hand. Whatever it was he was looking for, he found it. She takes it, feeling the time-weathered skin, the calloused fingers.

'How would you like to make history?'

It's seeing and it's watching and it's learning so it pushes deeper, eases into her more, stirs the pot and watches the bloom of mud burst up from the stagnant pool of memory as

she eyes the leaves, trying to figure out if they'd kill her or not. Like everything else on this godforsaken rock, it's definitely Earth-stock, because thirty short years ago the dense moon was only a dust ball, but at this point, she's fairly certain everything is a test.

The fact that not a single fruit or nut bearing plant was introduced here adds to her paranoia.

If they were on Earth, maybe she could rustle up a handful of half-ripe blackberries, tart and bitter and enough to pinch her eyes shut for a second, but something to eat nonetheless. Walnuts maybe, pecans. Or maybe even kill a squirrel and eat that raw. But this is not Earth, and there are no fruit, and no animals here. Just basic vegetation and enough insect life to keep it struggling along.

Fuck it, she thinks, and strips off a handful of the pulpy leaves, wads them up, and stuffs the mushy ball in her mouth. It tastes like chlorophyll and watery dirt and it sticks into her molars and the fuzzy undersides rake her gums.

But it scratches that primal part of her brain and it's something in the stomach, something that holds off the constant, ravenous gnaw. She'd heard stories about a guy eating the leather straps off his pack, and at this point, it sounds pretty likely.

She works another fistful of leaves into her mouth, knowing it probably will do nothing and also give her the shits, before rolling onto her back and looking up at the sky. Lying like this, spread eagle, as limp as possible, it was almost possible to forget the gravity-and-a-half of this fucking place. Every second that feels like she has asthma: always out of breath, always tired. Like there is a demon on her back, and she has to give it a horsie ride around for weeks. Always being pulled down, drawn down by exhaustion and hunger and shaking arms and legs and barely able to focus.

There are seventeen of them left, each one of them mean enough to chew bullets and piss fire, and she'll be goddamned if she flunks out now. N7 is so close. So close! N7, not N1, not N2, not even N5 where most people plateaued, but N7.

There's more batarians than she can count, more than she can imagine - it's like the fucking Hegemony emptied itself all over Elysium. The irony of the paradise world's name is cruel, at this moment. On every street there's a slaver, above every house there's a gunship, it seems. There's even a cruiser, hanging in the sky above the city, ugly and patchwork compared to the sleek lines she knows in the Alliance. Everywhere there's scream, shouts, howls of pain and the snap-crack discharge of stun webs.

Shepard has her Predator. She had her Predator, a loose blue blouse, tan slacks, a leather belt and military issue underwear. That's all she has. That's all there is, and she's hiding behind the counter in a cafe, surrounded by pebbles of glass, pools of warming smoothies and slushies. It wouldn't be hard to vanish. It wouldn't be. It's been a year since N certification, but it's like it was yesterday. She can vanish, melt away into the urban warrens and bunker down and wait for the Alliance to show. A day, at most. A day. A city like this? Even before N, even before the Alliance, she could read a place like this like the back of her hand, and guess out nooks and crannies and the best places to skip out where the heat couldn't find her, the best places to stash, the best places to drop a body.

But she's hearing her voice. She's hearing the words she spoke so recently, the words she spoke with her hands on her gun.

I swear to uphold the Articles of Alliance, to protect and defend every innocent life with even the sacrifice of my own.

Now it is seeing her, moving through her and around her, observing and experiencing and shaping, its rippling through her life and she's feeling things change behind it, watching confused because hey, wait, it didn't happen that way, I don't remember -

The rain leaves little runnels as it cascades down the glass. It is a strange rain, a rain without wind or thunder, just a gentle darkening of the 'sky' and a sudden downpour. Weather aboard Arcturus station, within the torus, is always odd.

She's letting it distract her, give her time to consider an answer. David Anderson is sitting next to her, hands folded calmly in his lap. The other occupant is Admiral Steven Hackett, perhaps the most decorated and well-known man in the Alliance, if not all of human space.

'It's a lot to think about, Shepard. You don't need to make a decision immediately. This right here-' Hackett holds up a folded sheet of paper between two fingers, and slides it across the polished surface of his desk. Real wood. Only the best for Arcturus.

'This is a pass for seven days of paid leave. There's also a note in there from me, giving you free passage on any Alliance vessel. Go back to Earth if you want, go to Bekenstein, go to Eden Prime. There's another note in there with a number on it. Give it to any hotel and the Alliance foots the bill. And I mean any, Shepard.' The admiral leans back in his ergonomic chair, a weird design of panels and crossbars that flexes and moves with him like a living creature.

'In case it's not obvious, we're very serious about this. I've got authorization from the highest levels to give you pretty much anything. Leasing out a dreadnought might be a bit too much, but I think I could swing a cruiser.' He's got a half-grin, strange on his scarred face. Shepard knows his story - he's as famous as she. Moreso: because he's a name that was made and has stayed. A spacer from birth, working his way up the ranks in the fledgling Alliance. Nearly dying in the act of saving a crashing mass conveyor, saving all three thousand souls on board at the cost of his own picket ship and half his crew. From enlisted to the man at the top, Hackett was already a legend before she was born, one that even Alice Shepard might never compare to.

So it's a little unsettling to have him offering her the world on a platter.

'That's not really necessary, Admiral. I wouldn't know what to do with myself with a week off.'

'I've heard the rumors, Shepard. That your COs have trouble enough getting rid of you just for the weekends.'

Anderson laughs, shaking his head. 'Shepard, if you don't take the offer, I'll order you to. The Navy is giving you an all expenses paid vacation anywhere. Go see Olympus Mons, or rent a low-orbit condo over Bekenstein.' The Captain and the Admiral share a look. 'It's like God himself offering you heaven and Earth and you say 'Can't I just get back to work?' She forces a smile to go along with the sort of easy camaraderie Anderson and Hackett clearly enjoy. It's distinctly a third-wheel feeling, sitting in a chair in front of living legend and his close associate.

'That's not what I meant, Captain. I mean, I won't need the week. I'll do it, Admiral.' In one motion she leans forward, propelling herself out of the chair with her hands on the armrests, feeling the two men's eyes on her as she paces. Inside, she's jumpy, twitching behind the collarbone with anxiety that's almost a stranger to feel. She has to pace, or she might forget how to talk.

'The Alliance has given me a life, and if this is how I can repay it...then it's not a question.'

'It's not a question of payment, Shepard. Taking on the role of Council Spectre will change your life in ways I can't even imagine. You'd be the only human in the organization. I want to know that you want this, not that you feel obligated to take it.'

She's at the window, and she presses palms to the chrome railing that runs at waist length, almost touching her nose to the window. Runnels of water course down the glass, obscuring and revealing the horizon that bends upwards. Hackett's not wrong; taking this on means leaving everything behind. Even her commission would be suspended indefinitely, officially making her no longer part of the Systems Alliance Navy. Only her citizenship would still pick her out as a member of the fast growing multinational organization, but that is tiny in the face of everything she would be giving up. Everything she had earned and clawed for in the past decade, from Akuze to Elysium to Torfan. Through the weeks of N qualification, as she watched her own body slowly consume itself, skin drawing tight over bones.

More than that - it was leaving behind the security that the Alliance gave her. The security of certainty, of a clear-cut set of rules she could order her life by. When to wake up, when to sleep, where to go, how to talk, how to dress. How to hold herself and salute and speak and nod and command and listen and how to become a cog inside of a much, much larger machine where she became just one of many. She would be leaving that order, that guidance all behind her.

Shepard just wasn't sure what she would be without it. She knew what she was before it, but what could come after?

Once before had she changed everything in her life, because in that moment the choice was change or die.

Without such a black and white choice…

But what did she have, really? What was there to remain for? A continual holding pattern of waiting for some kind of point to living to show up and punch her in the face, and say 'Hey, here I was, all along'?

'I want this, Admiral.' Her body is still betraying the calmness she feels, or tries to convince herself she feels; muscles in her chest twitching and jumping and clenching, hands shaking even as she clasps them behind her back and turns to face the room again. She can't tell him why she wants it, so she tells him what he'll accept.

'I can do more good for the Alliance as a Spectre than I can as a Commander. And I want that, sir. I grew up on Earth, I know what the Alliance is doing for humanity. So don't make me have to think about this. I know already.'

Hackett is nodding, slow, thoughtfully. He knows her history, or he thinks he does, and she knows her words will mesh with his expectations. It's part of the mythology of Shepard, the girl from Earth, the orphan from the streets who just wants to make the world a better place.

Maybe it's not really true. Maybe if enough people believe it, it can find it's own kind of truth.

Either way, Hackett accepts it, and she sees Anderson does too.

The Admiral stands, and again, a smile pulls at the unscarred half of his face. She's never seen Hackett smile before in any holos, and she thinks he's probably doing it on purpose. To make this all seem more personable and intimate. Anderson stays seated, and she notices. There's a lot of history between the Captain and the Admiral.

'Then, Commander, thank you for your service. And you're still going on that leave.'

'Lieutenant Shepard! We are cut off from the shuttles, and they're blowing the airlocks behind us! I've got men with suit ruptures - we have got to pull back-!' She hears gunfire through the open channel, but it's drowned out by that around her. He's got men with suit ruptures? Half her platoon was open-A too but the only way out was through.

'Captain, I can't leave this position. They're filling in behind us faster than we can kill them. We've got to keep going.'

'Shepard, there is nothing for us here! This goddamn moon is a deathtrap!'

'Sir, God himself could order me to retreat but I can't follow an order that isn't possible! There's at least two hundred batarians behind us and more keep coming. If they want us deeper in this rock, then they're going to get that wish.'

The ship dominates the graving dock at Arcturus like no other she has ever seen. It actually makes her pause in her step, slowing just a fraction, enough that Anderson outpaces her and looks back.

'She has that effect on people, Shepard.' There's mirth in his tone, and Shepard gets the feeling he was waiting for this.

It's not that it's a fine looking vessel. She's never had a particular interest in the aesthetics of spacecraft, as long as they were a: Alliance and b: tough enough to get here where she needed to be.

It's that it has intention.

It is hanging in an electromagnetic cradle, enormous clamps locked onto its wings, holding it aloft against the artificial gravity of the torus station. From it's razor nose to the flared engine casings and swept wings, the ship screams it's purpose to the world. It's a hunter, a killer, a ruthless shark in the pelagic expanse of the void. It's finish is black, matte black, and the overhead lights are swallowed by it. There is no reflection, no soft glow of illumination bouncing back off of its curved hull. All is pulled in and swallowed by this ship, miserly in revealing any secret.

It devours her gaze, sucking in her attention like it swallows up the light, and it reminds her of no other ship she has seen.

It's because she sees herself in the nonreflective surfaces.

She's a hunter too.

Anderson clears his throat and brings her back to the world.

'Sorry, Captain. It's impressive. She doesn't look like any other ship I've ever served on.' With the pride of a man talking about his child or that of a Commander speaking of his ship (which is to say, one and the same) Anderson tells her about it's birth.

'It's because she's not like any other ship in the Alliance. She's the Normandy, the first ship designed and built by human and aliens working together. Half of her is from the Turian Hierarchy, the other half from the Alliance. But she's all parts deadly and like nothing else. A stealth ship, Shepard. That's not paint, it's a composite compound made just for the Normandy. Absorbs about eighty-five percent of all visible light, and closer to ninety-five percent of radiation. It means she's got heatsinks bigger than a dreadnought's, but when she goes silent...she's a ghost. And only God can find her.'

'Your command, sir?'

'For now. I think Steven - Admiral Hackett - doesn't want me that far from Arcturus. We'll see.'

'You two are close.' She's feeling out her newfound status, as not-quite Navy and not-quite civilian. For the duration of her Spectre evaluation, her rank is suspended and officially, she's no longer part of the Alliance Navy. Now she's a kind of private citizen/political appointee. So she asks questions she'd never ask, thinks things she normally would put away.

Like how Anderson and Hackett are on a first name basis.

'We go pretty far back. And, well, I was you, once.' For the second time in as many minutes, Shepard is thrown for a moment.

'Like me - you were going to be a Spectre?'

'Went through everything you did. Well, I didn't get the all expense paid offer to tour the Alliance. You'll have to tell me how that went.' She waves it away, but she knows Anderson is joking. 'I didn't pass the evaluation, but that's not important. Admiral Hackett put himself on the line for me, to bring me back into the Navy after. I owe him a lot.'

'I think we all do, sir.'

'Call me David, Shepard. I'm not your Captain anymore, and you're not a Commander.'

'How about 'Anderson'?' There's only so much she can take, and a first name basis with Captain Anderson, best buds with Admiral Hackett, is far beyond that.

'I can live with that,' he says, shrugging.

'Show me your ship then, Anderson.' He gestures toward the long gangway, a standard stamped metal walkway supported by thin wires that is entirely at odds with the sleek design of the ship it nestles up to.

'Right this way.'

Her Vindicator is still blaring it's overheat alarm, and it probably will stay that way forever. The damn thing just can't cool down, not anymore, not in the hot tunnels and not after she'd slammed it against the rocky walls hard enough to dent the casing. She's down to her Predator, standard issue sidearm and, of course, her combat knife. Matte black and razor edged, virtually unchanged over the centuries of war. Already it had proven itself, jamming in between plates of batarian armor, puncturing clean through their hardsuits to dig for the person inside. Her right thigh is decorated with horizontal streaks of blue blood, now starting to overlap as she wipes the blade clean and clean again -

and Lazy wipes across her chest again, top to bottom, clavicle to belly-button and she clenches her toes. The buzzing changes pitch every time he pulls back to admire his handiwork, comparing it to the sketches she gave him. There's a mirror, chipped about the edges, rust working into the finish, and she can look up at it and see her chest reflected back in it, swiped with ink and some blood.

'It's looking good, yeah?' He asks, and looks up at her, grins, two teeth shining in the hissing, naked wire light.

'Yeah, good. I'm liking.' And she is - it's just like she imagined, right there, big and proud and spreading from clavicle to sternum and creeping a little onto each breast. Big and wide and bright and it's something no one else in the Reds has. Lazy Lazi has the steadiest hand of anyone in the Reds and he's done probably everyone to pass through the cornerhouse. Usually his fare is skulls and wings and crucifixes and the occasional thick red '5' when new blood gets marked for life.

She doesn't have that five, curling atop her bicep like some venomous snake. She has something altogether different, and it's growing with every buzzing stroke along her skin. It's a single playing card, a glaring monarch doubled, above and below, with that strange, knowing smirk. She's watching it come to life with every pass of Lazy and his gun, she's watching it and feeling it too, as Lazi strokes out the curve of the Q, but it doesn't really hurt, it's hurting in a way that's got her tingling in all the right places because it's not just the pain but the symbolism of it all too. He rubs down her chest again, wiping excess ink away and streaking some blood. It clips a nipple, already hard, but Lazi doesn't even notice, he's so focused. Not that he ever would, not with the boss herself.

She stretches her arms, up above her head and clenches them underneath the headrest of the chair as the gun touches skin and the needle bangs away at her flesh, electric.

God, it's good to be queen.

'Move, you animals, fucking move!' She's hitting each of them in the back as they pull back, two by two, filtering through the jammed open airlock. One to one it's not even a fair fight, Alliance marines against Batarian raiders is about as unfair as bringing a gun to a bumfight: Batarians stay stuck to the 'floor', moving like they're going through some planet-surface city, but Alliance marines are always on the move. Bouncing up and skimming upside down alongside ceilings, reflecting off walls and sliding along floors and popping around corners from every possible angle. The microgravity of the 'moon' plays this up to an insane degree, and they're leaving dead blinks in their wake, tethered to the floors by their still-active magnetic boots.

They remind her of bodies thrown into the river, ankles weighted down by cinderblocks and left to wave like macabre kelp in the depths. The blood is washing through the corridors, globules of it only slowly drifting down toward the ground, catching and splattering on woven fiber and nanocarbon armors.

She's lost half her guys, but she can't help the broad smile under her helmet. It's probably a good thing that Alliance rebreather helmets cover everything up. It's so familiar though - the room-to-room, hall-to-hall grind, cracking heads and gutting with knives, close and personal. Her Predator hasn't been fired in more than hour, her KABAR doing more than enough work on it's own.

And speak of the devil - she snaps her Predator up and puts a round through the eye lens of a batarian as it peeks out of the end of the corridor, fifty meters back. The thing atmosphere whines with a bang of released pressure and chips of bone and glass crackle off the walls.

'I said move! I want this corridor blown as soon as possible.' Her wrist flicks and her omnitool is there, sketchy map hovering in the air before her, and she's seeing the swaths of suspected enemy movement. They're closing hard on her and her platoon, but this chokepoint can cut them off. Next nearest access to this sector of the asteroid is almost a kilometer westward, and that'll bring any batarians hoping to head her off into contact with her CO and his command group, where they're holding the fort at a damage control nexus.

And the best part: those goddamn blinks still haven't guessed what two of her men are carrying strapped to their backs. She's remembering Elysium, and frankly, she wishes she had three of the devices.

The recruiting office looks kind of like a bomb went off in it.

Considering the neighborhood, that wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

She's trying to keep from twitching every time her shirt grazes her chest - she's had to go braless because just putting one on earlier nearly made her sob from the pain. It's like someone flayed off her entire chest, a dry crackle that beats in time her heart.

And it's racing.

She's trying not to gasp with every inhale, or groan at every exhale, trying to get her mind off the pain, so she looks at the TVs. They're all on and the local news is insane. She knows if she looked out the windows, if she tugged aside the battered plastic blinds, she could see the smoke rising from a hundred fires.

Riots, real riots, like there hasn't been in fifty years are ripping New York apart.

And she's sitting in an Alliance recruiting office in the upper West side, fidgeting and trying to look calm.

So she's counting the tufts of the carpet underfoot, working outward from her boots. Anything to keep her thoughts occupied, anything to push away everything that she was and could have been and might have been. She's deciding if she should count the bits of paper wedged in the carpet too, fighting for calm, when the door opens and the duty official sticks his head out. He's reedy and wearing metal rimmed glasses, rumpled Alliance fatigues hanging on him like a tent. He's a scrawny little nerd, but he looks at her, bored and uninterested.

'Next.'

There's no one else in the office. No one but Shepard, so she follows him and he holds the door for her, pointing down a short hallway.

'Can you read?' he asks, as the door swings shut. Her fists ball but she manages to keep her voice light.

'Yes, of course.'

It comes to the last, to the latest, the one where it entered, the one where it started, and it plays it again, and now she's seeing it from another side, she's watching herself

sigh and swing her arms, back muscles creaking, before she weaves her fingers together and pushes out her chest and groans and pop and sighs again. Alenko is sitting square on his ass, elbows on his knees and head hanging. He's tapped to the max and more, and she vaguely recalls him mentioning something about cleaning up the blood inside his helmet. Nasty shit, those L2 implants.

Williams is pacing, back and forth, right in front of the beacon. The shuttle is ten minutes out, en route to pick up the beacon, them, and boogie. The sky is about to be full of Alliance Navy, and the Normandy's new cargo of a Spectre with a gunshot wound to the head was demanding to be elsewhere when that happened. Elsewhere like a place that knew how to treat penetrative cranial injuries in a dextro-.

Jenkins, though, Jenkins really turned things around. He's alert, ready, calm and confident, standing back near the feet of the stairs that led down to the loading dock. She'd known he'd lock it in, settle down when it mattered. She's happy to see it, really – he had the makings of a decent soldier, and he was a good kid.

Williams started another circuit, fists clenching and opening, clenching and opening, and she's definitely going to shoot a request up the chain for Williams to see a shrink. Losing one's entire company, everyone they knew, all in a split second like that – that's bound to knock some things loose. It was one thing when it was during a campaign, something like, say, Torfan, and quite something else when you're supposed to be on one of the safest planets in the galaxy and then poof, all your friends are dead.

'Look, Williams…' she's trying to think of what to say, something inspiring and maybe calming: something that a guy like Steven Hackett would come up with.

Ashley stops, short, helmet jerking as she looks over at Shepard.

That's when the beacon wakes up.

New York is burning, it's fires reach from horizon to horizon, an ember-glow under iron clouds but there's no smoke, just fire as far as the eye can see and she's standing on the denuded ruins of buildings, high above and looking down, and she can hear the screaming, hear the screaming of a million million people cooking alive and clawing and scrabbling and trying to escape but the fire is everywhere, building and growing and this is nothing like the riots, she remembers the riots, this is nothing like them this is apocalyptic, this is biblical, this isn't her memory but it is, it's two memories overlaid - one of hers and one whose origin she can't imagine.

She is seeing New York as she left it, grey and infinite and full of life but there's the filter of another, and she can feel it, pushing into her thoughts, alien, intrusive, external: it wraps it's metaphorical fingers around her city and now it's burning eternally and full of the dying and dead.

It's wrong, so wrong, so vivid and offensively clear when it isn't even hers, and she shuts her eyes and her stomach heaves and heaves and she falls to hands and knees, ripping gashes down her arms in ice-knife slashes on blade edged rubble and the blood falls free in perfect droplets, perfect droplets, perfect round droplets hanging in the air/in space and turning, turning in the bright sunlight and clouds whorl across the red surfaces as green blooms like algae and she looks down on Earth, looks down on a thousand planets packed together like billiard balls, rubbing shoulders and turning and she wants to weep, to sob because it's so beautiful.

There's so many and they're so bright and she can feel - feel - life pulsing from each one, a trillion whispers into her ears and it's like she knows every single person in every single home on every single world. She's a mother with a billion children, a sister with ten thousand brothers. Tears are gouging streaks down her cheeks, acid etching her face, and the bright light is gone, a sweeping dark cutting across the vision of worlds, grasping hand darkness with fingers outspread, five enormous fingers, equidistant and the darkness takes on form and shape and metal edges and tubing and hammered plates and it's five fingers of obsidian metal, reaching down from the heaven as the whispers all stop, and she's a mother wailing over a billion graves, empty of bodies but not of sorrow, the fingers of metal from heaven close in a cage around her world, encircling behind the horizon as a red eye glares, down from above, howling incarnadine and stripping away her flesh, layer by layer, peeling back the lids of her eyes and reaching inside, making play of her body, pinning back her muscles and cracking her ribs, digging in and plucking out her heart, holding it up, beating, beating, before the red eye is all there is, inside and out, eternal and infinite.

She's out of the bed before she even wakes, trays flying silver in the air, tools exploding to flight like flocks of birds. There's too much going on, all around, so she strikes out and lashes out and sends furniture flying, upending a table, flipping a cart.

And with everything she lays hands upon, there's a sharp knife to the eye, a punch of memory and thought and person into her already too crowded head: she grips the rim of a portable scanner and heaves but the second fingers touch metal -

'No change today. Brain scan is showing she's as active as if she was awake, but we're also getting REM sleep patterns at the same time. Keep her on the drip and we'll revisit the possibility of a medical coma. I don't agree, that could leave her a vegetable we'll contact the Alliance Arcturus is already sending us specialists I've never treated a human before They'll want updates What am I supposed to tell them, that she's been here for a month and I haven't done anything-'

There's other people, other minds, other lives filling the room but she can't tell if they're real or not, clustering around her and shouting and reaching but there's afterimages placing IVs she's flipped and replaces bedding on a bed that she's lying in but looking at and hands find her shoulders, firm, controlling hands and her fists hit something that's there, something that yields and shouts and is soft and gives but that sparks images and flashes and more people fill the room, more and more blending over and atop and through each other, a madness of turians and salarians and asari and a few humans that morph and twist and walk through and into each other -

'Stop! Stop! Stop! You're killing me! Stop!' There's a woman shouting, a woman with a voice ragged with disuse, hoarse from thirst, a woman that's shouting way too close to her, right by her ears and she wants to ask them to stop until she realizes that woman is her, she's shouting, she's screaming really, folding back into a corner, defensive, ready to strike, stuffing hands into her armpits, clenched into fists.

Her rear touches tile floor, cold through thin papery fabric, and she squeezes sandpaper eyes shut, shut tight, anything to block out the rippling insanity around her.

The voices slowly die out, no longer talking over and through and around each other, fading away into silence until a single quiet tone remains, vibrating and odd.

A turian, a single turian, speaking. Speaking nonsense, speaking words over and over again, quiet and soft, words like 'safe' and 'hospital' and 'friends'.

'I can hear you.' she whispers, but even that is loud enough she winces.

'Good. Good. Hi. Can you remember your name?' Dry lips part, but she pauses, because what was her name, there's a doubling of them in her head, overlapping each other, similar but distinct. Two names orbiting a neutron star, faster and faster, blurring together.

Hang on, she thinks. Hang on. I'm Shepard. No matter what.

'Shepard,' she whispers. 'I'm Shepard.'

'Hi, Shepard. I'm Doctor Novus. Do you know what that means?' Does she - ?

'What hospital am I in?'

'Huerta Memorial, Commander. We've all been very worried about you.' The turian is still whispering, but the uncertainty is gone from his voice. 'Do you want some water?'

Water. Yes, fuck yes, she wanted water -

'God, yes.' She hears some footsteps, water splashing on plastic.

'Can I bring this to you?'

'Yes. Yes.' -even whispering leaves echoes bouncing around the hollowed out chamber of her skull- 'Just put it down. Don't-don't touch me. Don't-I don't know-' The air moves, there's a presence closer, plastic on tile. She gropes, blindly, eyes still shut, but as soon as a fingertip touches the plastic, it's like touching a live wire and she jerks back, not fast enough before

'It's ok. You're safe. Commander? Shepard? Can you hear me? You're safe. You're in a hospital. It's ok. There's a woman in the corner, fading blue/green bruises across the entire side of her face, clad in a thin hospital gown, tall but folded up into the corner, back to the wall and facing everything all at once-

And as fast as the images and thoughts come they are gone, vanishing as suddenly and forcefully as they arrived, leaving only whispers and hints. She pokes out a finger again, feeling the plastic, and again she sees herself, from the outside, from above and across the room, moving in closer, from the eyes of, from the eyes -

Oh.

Oh.

From the eyes of the doctor.

Original author's note, for new readers:

And thus concludes Chapter Zero of 'Echo'

First things first – this story is not a standard 'Let me play Mass Effect and serialize what happened.' Not only because I will not a: be playing mass effect (which I honestly haven't done in years, now), but because b: there will be significant deviation from not only the plot, but also the characters. The broad strokes will remain the same, but much of the minutiae will be different.

Echo is the actual full story version of the little bits that are in another work of mine, 'Moments and Memories'. If you have read that, then you at least have a mild inkling of what is to come.

I will be posting an author's note in similar format at the end of each chapter, provided there's reason to. I have the intention of continuing this story - albeit it will be a slow process and prone to significant gaps. I am a very busy man, and on top of both professional/personal projects I am also actively writing with the intent to publish. This is but one of about a dozen of ongoing writing projects I currently have - and you must understand, as much as I love(d) Mass Effect, a fanfiction is quite low on my list of priorities. Rest assured, should this project die, I WILL let you know, rather than vanish forever. I have been on the other end of that many times with stories I was into, and I've no intention of becoming that which I spurn.

New update:

Sup nerds. Fooled you! So I redid the whole Chapter Zero. I super wasn't happy with the original stuff, and I'm still a bit unsure about the overall quality of this, but I've decided to break the chains and post the fucking thing and stop hand-wringing over 'if it is up to par with what I know I can do' and also to free myself from the bounds of trying to perfectly recreate Mass Effect. That was never the plan anyway, so out with the standard 'Let's begin on the Normandy as it flies to the Relay' kind of half-baked opening. This is in media res and I shall treat this like it's not an established IP that presumes much knowledge from the reader, but like a proper story that must needs begin and explain and tell an internally coherent tale.

Despite the rewrite of this chapter, nothing is truly changed. This is the same Shepard as in the first iteration of Echo, and my vision for the story remains unaltered. You may notice that this is super off the path, and that there's a lot of crap going on. Canny readers may pick up what is occuring, but it will be made clear in time.

Spent a while sketching out future ideas with my friend, planning a lot for the far future into ME2 and 3. Some really, really exciting stuff and it's honestly helping me stay motivated on this, because I want to get there. Have no fear, I still want to do the best I can on this and won't be rushing along. Andromeda also has helped revive my interest in Mass Effect, though not the way you think. I am highly disappointed in it (and honestly have been since the initial reveal), but as I've been reminded more and more of ME1 I'm remember just how much I loved it. I might actually do that replay now. As such, by the way, don't get your hopes up for any Andromeda related content here or anywhere. It may as well not exist for all I'm concerned.

This story is not dead. I have decided that while the quality may vary, and indeed dip outside of what I would consider acceptable by the standards I hold myself too, I shall ignore it and push on. This is an exercise in actually writing longform beyond vignettes and half-begun tales, so pitfalls are to be welcomed as learning experiences.

As always, thanks you reading, I hope you enjoyed it, and let me know with a review! Until next time, I'll be spinning wraithbone and hunting mon'keigh;

the bonesinger of yme-loc