IIML: Beyond - Chapter 19: Shepard's Story

If It Meant Living: Beyond - Chapter 19

“Shepard’s Story”

“Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

– Dylan Thomas

She was confused for a long time. She couldn’t say how long…but it seemed like a long time.

She couldn’t make sense of what her eyes were showing her; or perhaps it was that her eyes couldn’t make sense of the images they were receiving. Every so often she would catch a glimpse of a whisper of something – something that seemed familiar, or at least recognizable – but when she turned to it, it was gone.

She had tried moving early on, taking a tentative step, then another – but nothing changed. Not the perspective, nor relative distance, nor anything whatsoever about her surroundings. It seemed she wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Occasionally she wondered if she was in Purgatory; she’d never given much – or really any – thought to what Purgatory would look like if it existed, but now she thought it would look like this. Amorphous. Nebulous. Like sitting within the clouds at sunrise.

If it was Purgatory, she was pleased to have died in a state of grace, though somewhat uncomfortable with the thought of what sins she would need to be purified of. There was of course carnal knowledge outside of marriage – lots and lots of carnal knowledge, though in her defense the vast majority of it with one person; surely that counted in her favor, right? Also, she had killed a great many people – but without fail in defense of the innocent.

Almost without fail. The sins of Terra Nova would never completely leave her – nor should they.

Her first clue that something wasn’t right here – other than the obvious – was when she didn’t starve. She was somewhat hungry and somewhat thirsty, though not particularly more so than she had been when she had gone to Trafero. But she never got more hungry, nor more thirsty. At some point she became quite certain that days had passed; they must have. Yet she wasn’t starving. She wasn’t even dehydrated.

The only possible conclusion she could draw was that she was either dead, or something was wrong with the flow of time here. She chose to go with the latter.

Maybe time had stopped, or was going backward…or maybe it had gotten all jumbled up…

That thought unlocked – a key? – in her mind, or her eyes, or the world around her – and suddenly she could see. She still wasn’t quite sure what she was seeing, but she was definitely seeing something.

In one direction was a barrier. It was foggy and insubstantial, but it was unquestionably a barrier. If she reached forward into it, she was met with progressively greater resistance until it felt as though she was pushing through heavy sludge, or a solidifying muck. She yanked her hand back in a panic before it became stuck forever.

But the barrier was translucent at best, and she could see beyond it. What she saw was at first little more than a tremendous source of light – perhaps the light she had seen on waking here, before her brain had caught up and filtered out what it couldn’t process.

Studying it, she realized that it was moving; flowing like water around a drain – and the drain was a yawning blackness. Not just blackness; the absence of all light.

She began to notice flickers of movement within the movement. Discrete sources of light separate from the larger brightness moved within the rotation; in fact, they seemed to be traveling rather deliberately toward the blackness. They looked almost like…

Aduri.

But how could that be possible? It didn’t make any sense. Nothing made any sense.

In a fit of frustration she spun away from the barrier and what was unreachable beyond it. And suddenly saw the rest of…

…her head spun wildly; she stumbled in the misty nothingness.

She stood in the midst of…what? Globby filaments of bright plasma undulated in long, slow waves that stretched into forever. They rippled and moved all around her; it was as though she was standing in the center of one of those retro lava lamps that never failed to briefly become a fad every forty years or so.

Yet there was something more going on. She struggled to see past the plasma to what it was rippling through. But her brain refused for quite some time to accept what she saw, because it was impossible.

Eventually in desperation she decided that she would, for the sake of argument, accept at face value what she was seeing, and go from there. She slowly, deliberately blinked.

It was as though if she focused on any particular point in space, she could see a slice of existence playing out in front of her, like a three-dimensional holo-vid set in a frame that blurred away at the edges.

Whose existence? Anyone’s. Everyone’s.

She spun around and focused there – she saw dinosaurs stampeding on Earth. She turned the slightest bit and looked – and saw the Protheans playing Goddess to the Asari. She found a point behind that – and saw the ancestors of the Escena create their first bio-synthetic body. Focusing to the side revealed beings and civilizations in far off galaxies she had never known.

She turned again, tilted her head to the side, focused through several layers of plasma, and saw…

She saw them all die.

Not her team, not the Normandy, not Kaidan…their fate she dared not think about just yet. What she saw most clearly was the Citadel breaking apart into a million pieces as it was sucked into a void.

She didn’t understand – was this a possible future that she had avoided by defeating the Reapers? No, that didn’t make any sense – the Reapers would preserve the Citadel for future cycles; it was their modus operandi.

She shifted the focus of her gaze the slightest bit to the left; the scene spun backward until it was suddenly bathed in a sea of Aduri fathoms wide and eons deep.

She gasped in air, though she couldn’t escape the strangest thought – that she wasn’t actually breathing at all. Was this a nightmare? She quickly pinched herself.

“Owwww…”

It was like talking in a soundproof room, her voice immediately absorbed by the surrounding fog.

Okay, not a nightmare. But this horror she was seeing couldn’t have happened; there was no way this had happened…yet.

Then she knew. With terrifying clarity, she knew.

She was witnessing future events; a future at least, though if she was seeing it then it had arguably already come to pass.

She closed her eyes against the visual onslaught and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply, not caring whether it was real or imagined air she breathed in.

She knew a thing or two about multiple timelines and shifting pasts and possible futures. She had seen visions of a past tens of thousands of years gone, had nightmares forced upon her of a future threatened but ultimately escaped.

She had experienced two versions of reality; eleven years lived twice – almost identical yet different in a thousand ways – in the blink of an eye, each moment as viscerally real as its alternative. Yet one was gone, erased from existence in all but her mind.

The past had once been the future – and it had been changed. All pasts were first futures – and thus could be changed.

Well, she always did enjoy a challenge.

But first she needed to understand what had happened.

She looked, here, there, behind, beyond, until she found the earliest moment that she imagined could matter for her purposes. She took a deep breath and imagined a blue ribbon of light emerging from it. Its origin she secured firmly to that point; she let the other end of the ribbon float freely in space. Then she sat down in the mist with nothing beneath her, crossed her legs lotus-style, and began searching for the next linear point in time.

Thank you, Thane.

***

The weaving wasn’t always easy. She longed to linger over moments of joy, of celebration, of ecstasy; dear gods how she wanted to linger there… She cringed at moments of pain, of anguish, though she knew their resolution – and sometimes because she knew their resolution.

She found Mindoir, and watched her parents in moments she had never known of…her dad wrapping his arms around her mom from behind while she cooked dinner, her giggling and leaning into him; the obvious love between them bled through the barrier to touch her soul. Another time, worrying over whether to tell her that she was likely biotic; they had heard the stories of biotic kids being taken away from their parents and sent to distant, mysterious schools. They decided to wait until she was eighteen to tell her, wishing her to have a normal childhood but also selfishly not wanting to lose her.

Her hand came to her mouth as she choked back a cry. For the first time in many years, she wanted nothing so much as to embrace her parents and hug them for everything she was worth. It was with tears in her eyes and a heavy heart in her chest that she reluctantly turned away and resumed her task.

For her own sanity she had to pull back, to visit the moments only briefly and at the maximum distance from which she could secure them to her ribbon of light.

It only became much, much harder once she reached the future – at least, the future in the sense that it followed the accident at Trafero. Horror turned to despair as events unfolded in front of her. She wanted to scream, to rage, she wanted to reach out and stop it all –

– holy fucking shit.

She froze, not daring to breathe, or move, or whatever else she might otherwise do in this strange ethereal place.

In her rage and agony, she had lost control and flared brightly – and breached the invisible wall between her and the scene playing out in front of her. For the briefest moment, she had been in the world again, though she physically hadn’t moved. It was…she couldn’t explain it, nor hardly comprehend it. But some part of her had been there; she knew it. And she had done it with biotics.

She turned to her ribbon of time with renewed vigor, knowing now without a doubt that she would find a way to change the very events that she was weaving together. Somehow, someway.

She continued forward as best she could. Eventually it became difficult for her to discern the precise order of events; she had never experienced them, after all. She was certain she didn’t get the order exactly right, but it felt close enough, and it was quite clear when the story ended.

For the ending was here.

Now that she could see all that had occurred, she realized the origin point of her ribbon wasn’t nearly far back enough. As anxious as she was to get on with what she wanted to do, she suspected that she would never get it right until she knew how the series of events that ended here had begun.

So she went back to the beginning of the thread, created a new ribbon from the unbreakable stone that was her starting point, and wove it backward.

She ignored her own history; she ignored the history of her people, of the other peoples she now thought of as her brothers and sisters; she instead steadfastly focused on the history of this galaxy she had come to for a visit.

And eventually – hours, weeks, years later – she watched as the enemy was born. She saw the Escena, then a dynamic, driven, brilliant people, learn to harness the power of space and time and begin to utilize wormholes. They cut through the fabric of the visible universe, traversing a dimension that could not be seen but was clearly there. Flows of exotic energy danced along the outer walls of the wormholes like dolphins racing playfully along the bow of a boat as it sped through the water. The energy held the wormholes together, kept them on their path, then faded into the unknown.

Except one time, it didn’t. As a random wormhole traveled to a random destination, the flow of exotic energy birthed something new.

What she thought she saw was previously nonexistent particles spray forth out of the energy forming the wall of the wormhole, vibrating to their own wavelength as they turned and began trailing behind the wormhole.

When the wormhole disappeared, they vanished as well – but then reappeared near another wormhole in another “place,” to the extent such a concept existed here. There were more of them, she thought, and they seemed to dance across the wormhole, not flowing with it but rather moving of their own volition, vibrating until they became less particle and more wave.

Satisfied that she had at last found the beginning, she wound the end of her ribbon around the image of creation then reversed course.

She paid greater attention this time now that she was confident of the path. She watched with some interest as the Aduri grew, ever so slowly. At some point she realized that they weren’t actually disappearing and reappearing. They lived in the dimension that was the purview of wormholes and time travel, only becoming visible to her against the glow of a wormhole that straddled what she knew as space-time and this hidden world.

It took what she estimated as nearly a hundred thousand years before they appeared in normal space the first time, separate and apart from a wormhole’s trail. They were suddenly simply there. They danced around in an uninhabited star system for a few moments, sucking up the scattered particles of dark matter, then vanished.

She moved forward in time, watching for them to appear again; perhaps a century later, they did.

This time when they disappeared, she followed them.

At least, that’s the only way she could describe it. For the split-second that they vanished, there was a…gap, a hole in the fabric of space-time. She focused utterly and completely on that pinpoint opening – then she was on the other side of it.

Interestingly, it looked rather a lot like where she had spent the last…she had no idea how long. There was no up or down, no left or right that she could discern. Images popped dizzyingly into and out of existence, magnifying the sensation of vertigo. She felt like she was falling – like she would fall forever – yet nothing rushed past her.

She knew there was no way her brain could accurately process this…place; like in the Geth Consensus, her mind was creating a construct via which she could perceive what was by definition unperceivable.

The Aduri swam all around her, through her. Because she of course wasn’t really there, instead only a remote observer of a distant past.

In this place, in their dimension, they were so much more. Intricately complex, bound together with a mesh of tiny filaments, they moved with purpose and direction.

They lived.

It seemed to her that they must have a kind of thought, of sentience, if not of a sort she could hope to comprehend. They didn’t build houses or ships or skyscrapers – for what would they need with those? The universe was theirs.

She couldn’t know if they felt emotion, if they understood the destruction their very existence caused – and if they did, whether they cared.

She pulled back, a wave of nausea crashing over her as she suddenly found herself exactly where she had been. She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in deep breaths until it eased.

Understanding a good deal more now, she moved forward along her ribbon more quickly.

The Aduri moved more quickly as well. They were as a stone rolling downhill, gaining speed, acceleration and size – slowly at first, then with greater and greater force and momentum.

This ribbon reached the point at which it had started; she continued it forward, parallel to the thread she had already created.

It weaved in and out, intersecting the primary ribbon at points that killed those she knew, then those she loved, and eventually everyone that was.

She was sobbing by the time this ribbon too reached the end and wound itself tightly around her original one, joining together at the end of time and space.

Tears streamed down her face unhindered; the torment of watching trillions die was almost unbearable. She thought for some time that her heart, though it was stronger and stouter than most, would surely break into a thousand pieces and shatter on the ground that wasn’t. It was only through sheer force of will that she held it together with the most tenuous grasp.

She gazed around at what she had created. Two brilliant ribbons of light spun all around her, for as far as she could see. They circled again and again, dipped and rippled, yet held to a single path across untold eons. They gleamed and sparkled, slivers of the history of life in this universe…until its abrupt, violent end.

She understood now why this place looked a lot like the space the Aduri inhabited.

The Aduri had grown more and more numerous and forceful until finally their forays into the physical world could no longer be contained. With the fabric of space already weakened in a number of regions due to the tachyonic fields they left in their wake, they had ripped a permanent rupture in the wall between the visible universe and the dimensions that lay within it.

But the universe wasn’t designed to work that way; it followed very strict rules. With one of those rules now irreparably broken, the rest had fallen apart in an avalanching cascade. Spreading outward from the rupture like spider web cracks in glass, the three spatial dimensions then the temporal dimension had fractured and splintered apart.

The tremendous light rotating around the darkness beyond the barrier was the accretion disk of a black hole – a naked singularity that had been created at the point of the rupture, and into which the universe was eternally falling. She didn’t know why the Aduri appeared to be moving toward it of their own volition. They were intrinsically multi-dimensional creatures; perhaps they were traveling to whatever lay on the other side.

She suspected the translucent barrier between she and the black hole represented the end of time. It had stopped here, at the edge of the accretion disk.

Maybe she was actually also falling into the blackness, and would be for eternity. Or maybe something about her, or how she had gotten here, or the fact that she hadn’t been here when the end had begun, had resulted in her being frozen at the precipice, protected from oblivion by the last tock of the clock.

She swallowed hard and wiped away yet more tears, but fire burned brightly in her eyes. It didn’t matter what was happening to her, because she was going to change it.

By all the gods, old and new, singular and multitudes, real and imagined, she would not let this come to be.

***

She practiced. At first in unimportant, unnoticed areas and times. She concentrated – with her biotics, then her mind, then her biotics again – until she could reliably reach into the world. At least in a sense.

She couldn’t physically appear in the world, though god knows she tried. But biotics manipulated dark energy – and dark energy, it turned out, was one of the elements that existed in more dimensions than just the spatial ones. That was probably why it was food, or fuel, for the Aduri.

And if she focused hard enough, channeling every ounce of biotic power she had…she could send a ripple of dark energy across the dimensions into physical space, with biotic effects hitching a ride.

For the crucial fact she had ultimately grasped was that everything was broken here. Not just time, though it was in many ways the most important. But time was, in the scientific sense, merely another dimension that lay atop the manifold of depth, width and height that made up the physical universe.

Here, at the end of everything, all the dimensions were broken – and since they were broken, untethered and wrent apart of their moorings, they could all be accessed.

Any where.

Any time.

They were all hers to see, and if she had the strength, to affect.

Dear god, it was all so tempting. A few hours or weeks or years of concentration, and her parents would not have died so many years ago. A little more work than that, and the First Contact War would not have cost so many thousands of lives, on both sides.

A whisper in an ear, and The War would have lasted days instead of months.

But life in its purest form was equal part pain and pleasure. Without pain, we didn't grow; without pleasure, we didn't care if we grew. She wasn’t a god, and she couldn’t tweak the universe to her liking.

But she did have to save the universe.

She laughed aloud, keenly aware of how unbelievably arrogant and grandiose that sounded. Not content with saving the galaxy, she was now going to save the entire universe!

It was also the truth. Her travels through history in constructing her ribbons of time had given her an even broader perspective on the wondrous life that prospered, faltered, and rose again across the universe. It was beautiful and miraculous and precious; it couldn't be extinguished now, not when it was at last on the verge of reaching a level of maturity and wisdom that would allow it to see the wonder of what it truly was.

No. She wouldn’t let it happen.

Unfortunately she was woefully limited in what she could do from here. She couldn’t touch anything, she couldn’t talk to anyone. In fact, pretty much all she could do was make a glowy wave for a few seconds.

Searching for a way to begin, she turned to the section of ribbon that encompassed the weeks immediately following the accident that had sent her here. The consequences of the accident had been catastrophic, scattering members of her team across time and space. Separated and lost, all of them had perished within days if not hours – she didn’t look too closely, she couldn’t bear to see it a second time – followed not terribly long thereafter by the Normandy and its entire crew as space had fallen apart beneath them.

But what if they didn’t perish?

She recalled a saying attributed to the legendary World War II General, Douglas MacArthur; it had been used at ICT to drill home the very point he had been making. “In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.”

She thought maybe she could move a few eyelashes.

She watched Kaidan sleeping under the sheltering branches in the cold night air of Apérta.

She wanted more than anything in the world to be able to reach out and run her fingertips along the stubble of his chiseled jaw, to place a feather-light kiss at the hollow of his throat.

That was what she wanted; but what she needed was for him to wake up. If he didn’t wake up and see the ships overhead, the next morning he and Andrew would hike in the wrong direction, never find the Diramae city just to their southeast, and eventually…she shut off that train of thought. That wasn’t going to happen – because she was going to get him to wake up, dammit.

It was the most difficult act she would execute – which was why she had saved it for last, after she had gotten lots of practice and honed her skills. Well, next to last anyway; she suspected there would be one more to follow. But first she had to succeed here.

***

James had been the first, and easiest – which wasn’t to say it was easy. In many ways it was the most precarious; there were only seconds between when he regained consciousness and when the animal pounced, and there was nothing she could do to extend that time. She had to get him to look, then to look beyond what he saw and recognize the threat, all in the space of a breath.

She failed the first two times, had to watch him be mauled; she chose not to watch him be eaten. Finally on the third attempt she was able to make the energy glow brightly and pulse rapidly enough to get his attention in time.

Even so, it was close. She had never been so glad for the hours upon hours he had spent conditioning his body as when she watched him hold off a hundred-fifty kilo monster with nothing but his arm.

Invigorated by a life saved and a past once again changed, she watched his story unfold. She smiled at his earnestness as the Venatri utterly flummoxed him time and again. He had such a good heart. And they truly were a vibrant and energetic people; though she knew they would ultimately be happy enough when they were absorbed into the Escena, she wished she could save them. But to do so would cost a far greater number of lives one day.

With that thought, a reminder of the infinite stakes involved, she turned away from James and to her next task.

After years of practice and study, she was no longer bad at tech. She was now average at tech. She knew from watching Kaidan once or twice or a thousand times that dark energy could fuck up electrical signals if properly directed. But she would need a deft touch, as she didn’t want to permanently fry the electronics in question; that would defeat the purpose. The good news was, the amount of energy required was significantly less than it took to make a bush-sized wave; it just needed to be directed a bit more precisely.

She took a moment to watch Ash. She was so strong, so determined. It must be difficult for her, one who believed with all her heart that life was more than DNA packaged into a physical vessel, that life was higher and more, to come face to face with the apparent opposite. But she just rolled with it and kept pushing forward, focused on getting back home.

Oh, Ash, if you could only see what I now see.

She shook her head roughly, breaking her reverie. She could wax poetic while she was resting. Right now she had to work.

Woah! She jumped in surprise at the wild surge of power she had created in the space station. Sparks flew everywhere, the holo-displays blinked furiously – shit, they were in danger of shorting out completely. She hurriedly pulled back, withdrawing through the dimensional walls, then exhaled in relief as the one display that mattered returned to normal and showed precisely what it needed to.

She beamed with pride as Ashley’s survival and rescue rippled forward and events unfolded anew, the members of her team working and analyzing and devising solutions and driving forward. She couldn’t have done any better.

With no further interference on her part, EDI and Ash took the initiative and followed their instincts and wound their way toward Kaidan and Andrew. Only…she frowned. The timing was wrong.

It was easy to get confused when standing at a vantage point from which everything was happening all the time. She hadn’t realized the guys had moved so far ahead in time during their journey through the wormhole. And now the Normandy was early. Dammit.

 She watched in dismay as the Normandy searched, then searched again, then moved on – just as Kaidan and Andrew arrived on Apérta. The first thought she had was gratitude for the closeness of the timing; she could work with that. The second thought she had was that she really didn’t want to fuck with the Normandy. No one in their right mind would let her anywhere near the internal tech of the ship, and they would be right not to do so.

She couldn’t risk damaging the Normandy. Nuh-uh; not her ship. Properly chastised by the out-of-control power display at the Renasca Facility, she found unimportant terminals in unimportant locations and practiced.

The timing had to be exact – a moment too early or too brief, and they would leave anyway; a moment too late or too lengthy, and they would already be out of range of Apérta. Finally, she decided she was as ready as she was going to be.

She took a deep breath, prayed that she was up to the challenge, and pushed outward. Focus…focus…pull back! All the air left her lungs as she released the tension coiled in every muscle of her body and flopped to her knees. She grinned in relief as she watched Joker turn around…it had worked, thank gods it had worked.

Relief turned to horror as the Normandy roiled and bucked violently in the space above Apérta. Her hand came to her mouth, a gasp lodging in her throat.

There was no way, even with thousands of years of practice, that she would be able to create a surge of energy large and strong enough to somehow warn them of the repulsor field. She hadn’t even realized it was there, though she supposed its creation was buried somewhere in the legion of seconds of history surrounding her.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that she turned to the Normandy to witness the aftermath. Grateful beyond measure that the ship had survived with only relatively minor damage and casualties, she mourned the sacrifice of two lives, but knew she had to move on. For the moment at least, there was nothing more she could do for the Normandy.

She was bone tired; it was a profound weariness borne of isolation and endless tragedy as much as physical exertion. Cognizant she would be of no help to anyone for a while, she watched events unfold on Apérta – and only found more tragedy as the rescue team was too late. Too late to save them, she watched Ashley collapse over her husband’s body in despair, beating her fists into the snow much as Shepard had once done on Alchera. She didn’t dare watch any further; she simply could not endure what the remainder of the scene would hold.

A cursory scan at the course of the future of this now-altered past showed her that this moment, the last moment of the universe, had been pushed back as a result of her actions thus far…by fifty, maybe a hundred years. But in the end she still sat impotently here, unable to prevent it as the world came crashing to an end.

It hadn’t been enough; she would have to do more.

She studied the Diramae; watched as they utilized their unmatched intellect and ingenuity to forestall their demise until the very end – yet in their hubris and unmatched pride refusing to share the tools of their survival with the Escena.

That one simple act would have delayed the end for many hundreds of years. The combined might of the Escena and the Diramae, now protected from immediate death, could have healed the tachyonic fields left behind by the Aduri as soon as they occurred and held the fabric of space together with sheer persistence and determination.

Her eyes darted to her ribbon. Of course!

She quickly moved along the ribbon, back…back…she watched Kaidan and Andrew trekking through the snow against the brilliant, golden-hued night sky. If they found the Diramae, they would live long enough to be rescued for certain. If they found the Diramae…

She leapt up, newly energized. She scanned up and down the events that transpired…how could she set them on the right path? They were so close.

There. One moment; one chance. But how? It wasn’t going to be easy.

She needed to think; and whatever she came up with, she suspected she wasn’t ready for it yet. Despite the incredible sense of urgency, despite the adrenaline coursing through her body…it could keep. She had forever, if that’s what it took.

With a reluctant sigh, she assigned the puzzle to her subconscious and turned to Liara…and found another thorny problem. She took the opportunity to remind herself that she did always enjoy a challenge; she almost believed it.

Liara was alone, in the dark, aboard a dead space station filled with the dead, plummeting toward a dead planet. She could feel Liara’s terror, she who had overcome all her insecurities and weaknesses to become powerful, calculating, resourceful, deadly and seemingly fearless.

Liara had spent years studying the dead; Shepard watched as she died among the dead. Though grateful that they had at least somewhat patched things up before the accident, her heart wrenched painfully as the station burnt up in the planet’s atmosphere, scattered wreckage surviving to crash to the surface and splinter.

How was she going to get her off that station? It had only hours left when Liara arrived there; in a system torn apart by the Aduri, hundreds of thousands of Escena killed in their path, there was no one alive for a hundred AUs and no way for her to get herself out, for the Escena’s equipment no longer functioned…

She turned back to the Normandy, and back in time a bit, brow furrowing thoughtfully. A tiny smile pulled at her lips as she found Keenon up late into the night, holo-displays lighting the space around him as he worked doggedly in what everyone else thought was a hopeless quest to bring life back to the equipment rendered inoperable by the Aduri. The smile widened when, some five days later, a spark lit and the small probe flared with light.

How could he have known, she wondered, that this would be the one thing that could save the woman he had fallen for? Even more so…her brow furrowed quizzically; the endless circles of logic were giving her a headache. How was it that he, likely the only person on the Normandy with the precise set of skills and knowledge necessary to figure out how to turn the Escena equipment back on, had been the one that had fallen for Liara and thus, feeling despondent at her loss, had turned to such endeavor as a way to escape the misery of lonely nights?

Was it just luck? Chance? Low odds were not zero odds; across the entirety of time and space anything was possible. She had cavalierly invoked “fate” on more than one occasion, even claimed to bend it to her will a time or two. But was something far more powerful than she had ever imagined at work? Was Liara meant to live through this, and so a precise, complex sequence of events had been set in motion many years before?

She couldn’t accept that…not exactly. She believed in free will, in personal responsibility, and with good reason. She believed that everyone had a choice, always, and that those choices mattered. She had seen them matter, time and time and again. No one’s fate was predetermined and unalterable. She should know, she was busy altering people’s fate all over the place this very moment.

But she couldn’t deny that, if she pulled back from the individual moments to a perspective of years, decades, even centuries…there was a pattern to Life. Currents flowed through the universe, connecting people, events and decisions across time and space. If there was such a thing as fate, this is what it would look like. From her vantage point, the universe was making a fairly convincing argument that it had purpose. Meaning.

And that purpose was not to die an early death. Not if she could help it – which it so happened she could. She willfully put aside the philosophical musings and turned back to the rather complicated task at hand.

This piece’s attention directed there, a diversion to cause the Kodiak sending out reconnaissance probes to linger in the system – and almost like it was fate, Keenon was on a direct trajectory to his love. Now all she had to do was get Liara to the shuttle bay, and pray that she would put aside her stubborn willfulness and trust him to save her.

She watched Liara run through the pitch-black labyrinth; at what point could she intercept her and get her headed in the right direction? Fuck – there was no direct route; she was going to have to keep her headed in the right direction. It wasn’t going to be enough to get her attention with an energy flare; she was going to have to move the energy flare, and for quite a bit longer than anything she had done thus far.

On the plus side, since it was pitch-black in the station, at least it wouldn’t need to be a terribly bright or large flare. She rolled her eyes, then her shoulders, then sucked in a deep breath and began.

She wasn’t going to lie – it was hard as shit. Moving a wave of dark energy through a labyrinth of hallways required a deft touch and a level of finesse that she never would have been able to pull off if she hadn’t been manipulating biotic fields for more than twenty years. She was exhausted by the time Liara reached the shuttle bay…but the payoff was totally worth it. She grinned with joy, giggling like a teenager at Keenon and Liara’s flirtatious banter and tender confessions.

She lingered, watching beyond what she needed to…avoiding the next task she had set before herself for as long as she could. It was the only thing left before she would need to return to Apérta, and she really should do it to strengthen her skills further.

She didn’t want to do it. In fact, she didn’t need to do it. This alone was an optional act; its resolution would not change the fate of the universe.

But Kasumi would want her to do it. She would want to be given the opportunity, to be offered the choice. And it would be Kasumi’s choice, she reminded herself; she was only making the choice possible. With a heavy heart she turned away from Auranta and to Nadtuor.

Kasumi did as she had known she would, of course. Shepard comforted herself with the knowledge that she had been smiling as she did so. Still, it broke her heart to see her friend lying crumpled and broken upon the ground. Utterly alone in this place that wasn’t and with the entirety of life circling endlessly around her, she pulled her legs to her chest, dropped her forehead to her knees, and wept.

It was some time before she was able to focus on anything productive. Though she longed to rush to Apérta, she would need all her focus for that and she just didn’t have it.

But eventually – she had given up all attempts to assign minutes or hours or days to what felt like the passage of time here – she again found her resolve, and then her determination.

***

She watched him sleeping a moment longer.

She was glad she had rescued Liara first; after spending time with the Diramae she had a sneaking suspicion she was going to need all her skills and then some in order to make sure Kaidan learned of their crucial shield technology. But she couldn’t do that until after she got him to wake up, because if he didn’t wake up he would never even meet the Diramae, and all that she had done elsewhere would have been for naught.

I’m going to need you to wake up now, my love.

She couldn’t truly explain how she did it. It should have been impossible.

Maybe she somehow accessed his tele-comm, just the slightest bit – maybe they shared a cosmic connection that transcended space and time dimensions. Maybe she just loved him enough that it bled out through her biotics as they rippled around him in a protective embrace.

Maybe she simply refused to fail. Miranda had told her once that she had the power to move the very galaxy; maybe that was power enough to do this one impossible act.

From her perspective, what she did was push all her biotic energy into the world – then direct a single thought with every ounce of strength and will she had and a bit more she dug up.

Wake up

Wake up

Wake up

And then he did. She loved him.

As she had with the others, she watched to see what followed. She was looking for the opportunity she would need, the chance to truly change the trajectory of events…but she was also watching because it brought her a measure of comfort. Though she couldn’t be there, when she watched she felt close to him…and she had been so very lonely in this strange place.

But then the opportunity did come, clear as a blaring neon sign. She took it.

It was without a doubt the most blatant display of power she had heretofore engaged in. She felt invigorated, renewed; she believed she was going to be able to change the fate of the universe, and it fed her power.

It was almost fun.

When her wave of energy reached him, she tried to…she knew he was troubled, terrified even – not for himself, but for her – and she tried to somehow tell him that she thought maybe it was going to be okay.

Abruptly she reached the end of the last of her reserves of power, and collapsed in a heap on the nothingness that was beneath her. But that was okay; more than okay. She had done it.

It was a wondrous thing to witness, as the events pinned along her ribbon rippled and changed, one after another like dominoes standing instead of falling, and new stories and paths spawned and multiplied. She would need to rearrange and extend her ribbon considerably to capture the many moments that now followed. She squeed with delight when she saw one of them in particular – she didn’t look too closely though; didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Actually, beyond a certain point she didn’t look too closely at anything – it would be no fun if she knew ahead of time what would happen, after all. The important thing was that the ribbon now spun and wove for so very much farther.

She had never been more proud in her life than she was now of her team, her crew, her friends and comrades, her love. The day they had won The War had come close; they had excelled beyond all expectations that day. Now they did the same, in spite of or maybe just irrespective of the fact that they believed her lost. No matter what the obstacles, they continued to fight, to persevere, and to triumph.

Yes, in a sense everything that occurred was because of her. She had reached out from the void and intervened at the few precise moments that enabled them to live, and thus to have a chance. But in truth, they had done all the hard work. All she had done was move a few eyelashes.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Not quite.

Though the ribbons now stretched for quite an additional distance, they nevertheless eventually arrived at this point. The last point.

There was still one thing left to do, one tragic but necessary act to perform; an act that she now would have the opportunity, and time, to do – but she couldn’t do it from here.

Flush with endorphins from success but completely and utterly spent, she took a slow, deep breath, and sat down to wait.

Kaidan slammed with incredible force into something; his head swam, reeling from the concussive shock. He stumbled backward and was about to fall to his knees when a pair of arms gently caught him. Soft yet strong, tender yet sturdy and certain, they were oh-so-familiar –

– his eyes flew open. She was grinning spectacularly at him, though he immediately noticed that her eyes carried within them a complex swirl of emotions he couldn’t decipher. He did know one thing – she was the singularly most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

“Hi, baby,” she whispered, her voice cracking and hoarse from disuse.

“Dear god, Graceyn…” His arms wound tightly around her in an embrace he never intended on leaving. “You’re alive. Of course you’re alive. You had to be alive. If you – ”

She shut him up with the crush of her lips against his –

– and was awestruck at how overwhelming the feel of something real was. Had she been in this ethereal place for so long she had forgotten that this was what life truly felt like?

The roughness of skin.

The rush of blood through arteries.

The heat of breath.

The pliability of lips.

The scrape of calloused fingertips against a cheek.

The cool dampness of tears.

The softness of hair curling around fingers.

The pressure of a palm against the small of her back.

Against the curve of her head, pulling her closer until there was no closer.

Had it always been like this?

Oh dear lord was the sex going to be good…

She pulled back fractionally, just enough to catch her breath. “You came for me.”

He sighed desperately against her lips. “I told you before – I’ll always come for you.”

They didn’t talk again for quite some time.

When he finally did pull away, it was to run fingertips along her temple and stare at her in wonder, almost as if he still couldn’t accept that she was real. “I’ve missed you,” he murmured softly.

“I – ” a grin broke across her face as she mimicked his caress “ – oh my gods, you grew a beard!”

His lips pursed together; he looked almost chagrined. “I, uh, didn’t have access to a razor for a few days, and then…well, I guess I had other things on my mind than shaving…”

She trailed teasing kisses along his jaw. “I like it…” When she reached his earlobe she pulled back. “But…how long have I been gone?”

“Fifteen days, twelve hours, sixty-seven minutes…give or take a few seconds.” His eyes creased slightly at the odd expression on her face. “How long did you think you had been gone?”

Her eyes took on a faraway look, and she suddenly seemed…he couldn’t put his finger on it. Haunted?

Her voice was barely a whisper. “Longer.”

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t get to you sooner, I did everything I could – ”

“I know you did. You’re here now, and that’s the only thing in the world that matters.”

She was smiling at him now, but the sorrowful, weighty look in her eyes…he frowned in concern. “Are you okay?”

She touched the tip of her nose to his. “I will be. I promise.”

“Okay.” He tilted her head to place a soft kiss on her forehead…and for the first time actually looked at their surroundings. Or tried to; it was confusing, and all he could really discern was a foggy glow and vague flashes of light.

“What is this place? There’s…nothing here.”

She glanced around at the ribbons of light winding among the waves of plasma, at the glimpses of a trillion moments circling around her. “There’s more than nothing here, but it takes time to see. I don’t think we were really meant to see.”

He looked over her shoulder, unwilling to increase the distance between them even a centimeter. “Is this what the world looks like millions of years from now? What could cause this?”

Her head shook slowly. “This isn’t millions of years from now. It’s twelve hundred years in the future, at most.”

“What? No, the force of energy driving the wormhole that sent you here – and the one that sent me – was strong enough to propel us millions of years ahead.”

“Hmm…that probably explains why you hit the barrier so hard. It may very well have been enough energy to go that far, but no amount of force in the universe is getting beyond this point.” She looked around again. “It was only a hundred or so years in the future when I got here. But I – you – pushed this moment back more than a thousand years.”

She ran a hand softly along his jaw, reveling in the roughness and the warmth. “I watched you, you know. You were spectacular.”

“I…thank you, but…” His eyes narrowed suddenly. “It was you, wasn’t it? In the woods that first night? At the shipyard on Apérta? It was always you…”

She just grinned at him.

“I thought I was going crazy when I stood in the middle of that wave of energy and all I could feel was you. But it was you. How?”

She swallowed and looked around again. “I’ll try to explain, if I can. But not now; it would take…time.”

He nodded, accepting her response for the moment. “So what is this place, then?”

“The end. Of everything. The last moment of the universe.”

His brow furrowed thoughtfully; at this point little could shock him. “Because of the Aduri?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how to stop them?”

She smiled, a hint of her usual mirth sneaking back into it. “Of course I do. Do you have a way for us to get back home?”

He smiled then, too, as his hand wound tenderly through her hair. “Of course I do.”