The Ash Tree: ME2

7.14.2008

ME2 - Prologue

The italics and stuff aren't there due to formatting errors on the blog. Sorries!

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

--Robert Frost

.01 - FROM THE WRECKAGE

----

Citadel Tower

Auron Shepard stood in what should have been a triumphant moment, staring down at the blackened grass where the avatar of Sovereign had gone up in flames not a foot away. Breathing heavily, a SpectreStock pistil humming faintly in her hand alongside a rather large shotgun, she focused on the tiny rivulets of sweat running lightly down her face and finding their way down her back, the throbbing pain in her left shoulder, the cauterized wound on the same arm, the way her leg seemed to pulse with her heartbeat. Anything and everything other than the spectacle before her.

She imagined she could still see Saren’s mutilated body there, meatless bones reaching for her ankle as if he could bring her down to the abyss with him. As if he could forcibly make her rot in hell with him.

Shepard had seen death by multitudes in her life, but the sight of Saren’s--Sovereign’s--corpse unnerved her for reasons she didn’t even want to consider. Hands trembling, she collapsed the pistil and hung it in its holster, where it would stay, conceivably, for the next five minutes until the geth led a suicidal follow-up attack. She wondered if she’d even have the strength to fight back. The room was swimming.

A curious wave of emotions washed over her, tangling themselves around her in a web. Relief, regret, anger, sorrow... pity? Saren had been her nemesis, enemy, antagonist. Manipulator. A normal person, she reflected distantly, would’ve been happy for the death of somebody like that, but since when did she ever have normal human reactions? She was only beginning to fully grasp the fear, indecision, and pain the turian must’ve been going through during their tireless hunt. He’d fallen for the Reaper’s indoctrination like everybody else in his army. Like the salarians at Virmire. Only now did she understand that she didn’t hate Saren the person--she’d never known the person--but that she hated Saren the tool. She hated his weakness. His lack of strength. If he’d held out, if he’d known... maybe Ashley would still be alive. Maybe a lot of people would still be alive.

Two days ago, if somebody had asked her who she wanted to kill more, she wouldn’t have hesitated. But now... Somehow, she’d never imagined the turian to be somebody who would kill himself to save the galaxy. It was... scary. Very, very scary. And it forced her to take a look back to see just exactly how much Saren might’ve cared. After Sovereign and Saren found each other... maybe Saren was misguided at first, but Anderson had told her how cruel he had been even as a Spectre, so it was a misguided hope. But hate and savagery were easy enough to control once the manipulator knew the trigger points. The humans had been a strong one.

‘Together we can stop Sovereign!’ Shepard had said, a lifetime ago, on Virmire. ‘We don’t have to submit to the Reapers--we can beat them!’

‘I no longer believe that Shepard,’ he’d replied. ‘The visions cannot be denied. The Reapers are too powerful. The only hope of survival is to join with them. Sovereign is a machine. It thinks like a machine. If I can prove my value, I become a resource, worth maintaining. There is no other logical conclusion.’

Anger. She remembered the ice cold anger freezing the blood in her veins as she spat, ‘You were a Spectre. You swore to protect the galaxy. Then you broke that vow to save yourself.’ Disgust.

‘I'm not doing this for myself. Don't you see, Sovereign will succeed. It is inevitable. My way is the only way any of us will survive. I'm forging an alliance between us and the Reapers, between organics and machines, and in doing so, I will save more lives than have ever existed. But you would undo my work. You would doom our entire civilization to complete annihilation, and for that, you must die.’

She reached down and brushed her fingers over the charred, blackened grass. You can sleep now, Saren. Thank you. Drawing a long, shaky breath, she stood and hooked the pistil on her side, and swapped the shotgun to her right hand.

...save more lives than have ever existed...

The ache returned, twisting oddly in her chest, accompanied by an unwanted vision in her mind. Wrex. She found him, bloodied and mutilated, literally shredded to pieces by a grenade he’d stood too close to. He was barely recognizable, but still alive when she had gone to him. Her mind had been unable to process the sight at first - I told him to fan left! - but the reddish-yellow hue of his skin set him apart from the other krogan mercs.

Immediately she had taken out her MediGel, pooling it together with Garrus’ stock to smear it all over his wounds. She had begged, pleaded for him to hang on. ‘If you die I can’t bring you Saren’s head’, she’d said, trying to keep her voice level and calm. She wanted to scream. He hadn’t responded, which was the most worrying of all. Could krogans fall unconscious? Finally, she ordered Vakarian to take him to Doctor Chloe Michelle’s office in the Wards. She still remembered the incredulous expression on his face, but he had taken one look at the fire smouldering in her eyes and had complied without question. Perhaps he knew that she would forsake the mission in order to save the krogan’s life. She’d certainly never leave him when there was a good chance he’d survive.

If I left him to die when there was a chance to save him... what would that make me? She didn’t know.

‘If I die,’ she told Garrus firmly, not bothering to add that she probably wouldn’t make it anyway, ‘then I need you to carry on the search. Don’t let the Reapers through.’

‘I won’t,’ he’d promised. ‘Commander...’

‘Take care of him!’ She had already been running, determined to double Wrex’s marks on Saren’s worthless turian hide.

And then finally finding Saren. The epiphany as she realized how pathetically far he had come. All for nothing. She’d talked and reasoned with him, urging the seeds of doubts that had grown in his mind to sprout into thorn bushes. But she hadn’t expected the indoctrination to run so strongly. But why was I surprised? was her question. She should have expected it. Benezia had chosen the same route. Why should Saren had lived? What made him so special.

‘Goodbye, Shepard. Thank you.’

Saren - dead.

Watching him put his pistil to life and pull the trigger didn’t have the satisfying tenor it might have when Wrex was injured. It had... shocked her, to say the least. Mortified her. She had taken no pleasure in popping another round in his skull, just to make sure it wasn’t an act. The awful squashing sound it made...

She shook her head as if to clear the dark images away--plenty of time to look at it in hindsight later, when she was sure Wrex was okay--and started to turn towards the small maitnence ladder, intending to climb up and fight her way to the Wards as quickly as possible. She wondered, distantly, if Garrus could manage carrying the turian in normal gravity. It was another two seconds before she realized that something was very wrong.

She turned around, pistil raised without conscious thought, and glanced around quickly for any sign of double cross. Had Sovereign faked Saren’s final death?

Her eyes were immediately drawn to the window overlooking the dogfight between the Reaper and the Systems Alliance. Sovereign could be seen now, claw-arms frantically searching for something to hold on to and finding nothing. He looked like a beetle on its back, and she wondered if killing Saren had some effect on the giant of a ship. The concentrated effort of the entire Arcturus Fleet finally seemed to be taking some effect, it seemed, and Shepard unconsciously walked closer to the large window, eyes widening in anticipation. He’s almost down! she realized, a faint hope beginning to brimmer on the edges of her mind. “Come on - come on - come on!” she whispered, hands tightening unconsciously into fists at her side.

---------

The Normandy

“It’s shields are down, now’s our chance. Hit it with everything we got.”

Admiral Hackett’s command was music to the ears of every trigger-happy Alliance pilot out there. Suddenly there wasn’t a lot of moving, but a lot more shooting. And it was taking damage!

Joker felt a feral grin widen his face as he cut power to the auxillery thrusters and charged up the latest and greatest tear-jerker the Normandy packed. “Hard on my flank, I’m going in!” he snapped, trying--and succeeding--to keep his voice light and military style. He brought her around hard and hit the power, thrusters burning at maximum. Alliance ships flashed by him, totally focused on destroying the Reaper below.

Beside him, Kaiden Alenko hit the release button.

The blast-tinting helped the eyes take in the bright blue ball of element zero energy, but Joker would’ve preferred it without. He was sure he could’ve maneuvered around the Reaper blindfolded with the adrenaline rush he was feeling now. The missile cut through the Reaper’s underside like jelly, and Joker let out a single ‘HA!’ in triumph as he brought the ship down and around.

“Think we hit something critical!” Kaiden crowed. “Ha ha!”

Joker chuckled, swinging the Normandy around to get a good view at the damage. The entire underbelly of the Reaper had exploded with the stress, spewing debris and wiring into the empty space around it. The second explosion only followed a millisecond later, erupting from the inside of the command matrix and finishing the thing off for good. Behind him, the crew cheered. High fives were exchanged over tech consoles, dry, joyful sobs from others. Joker would’ve joined in, if he hadn’t noticed something a bit wrong with his plan.

Oh, no.

“I think we hit something critical,” he muttered, horror struck.

---------

Citadel Tower

Shepard’s whooping screams echoed strangely in Citadel Tower, but she didn’t care. Tears spilled over the corners of her eyes, misting her vision, but she clapped anyway. You did it! she thought. She laughed hysterically, leaning against a tree for support. She punched the air with her good arm. “Woo!” she yelled, a seven-year-old cheering for her favorite football star.

And then she noticed the danger, and her grin completely faded. Uh oh.

Outside, propelled by the blast, a third of Sovereign’s claw-arm had filled up the entire visual area. She lost sight of the fleet completely before she realized that nothing was going to push it away any time soon.

So stupid. She shouldn’t have gone foreword like that. She should’ve gotten up the maitenence ladder first before watching. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Can’t fix stupid. Right. She turned tail and began to run for the ladder, but it was closer than she’d realized. She never even got a quarter of the way there.

It crashed through the Tower wall with a deafening collision of metal-on-metal, and she was thrown face down on the floor, landing painfully on a few rocks in the artificial pond. Something hit her really, really hard, and the darkness was sudden... and absolute.

---------

Now what, Auron?

Somebody asked you, once, about the logic of breaking an oath to keep it, but you’re not sure whom. Maybe it was one of your men. Maybe it was Ashley. Maybe it was your own question to your mother, as you sit next to her on Mindoir and hand her the ammunition rounds your father used to hunt wild gdaan up the trails. You don’t remember what your answer was, if you had one at all.

What does that make you, then, if you betray everybody you’ve known, trusted, and loved? Even if it’s for their own good? You’re still a traitor. A fancy medal wouldn’t change that. You deserve death. Maybe you have it here, under the wreckage of the thing you fought so hard to destroy. You’re a soldier, you expect to die fighting. It’s how the game is played. Death scares you now. But it shouldn’t. You know you never want to fight again. You can’t. You can still hear them screaming from last time. How can you fight with the screams?

Still screaming. Screaming your name, torturing you with their cries of despair. You can even make out some of the words. You shy away. “I found her!” you hear them yell. You’re under water, you can’t yell back. Shut up! you want to scream, but the words won’t come out. They stay locked in your throat. You know even if you tell the voices to stay quiet, they won’t stop. They never stop. They’d just pester you more. So you stay quiet, come what may. You’ll take your torture like a soldier.

Some of the pressure is removed from your back, sparking a thousand different sensations of pain along your spine and ribs. A high keening sound catches your ear, coupled with air moving out of damaged airways and a slight tickling in the back of your throat. You’re screaming. The sound trails off into a whimper, only because it hurts too much to scream anymore.

You can’t be dead. Death wasn’t supposed to hurt.

“Auron! Can you hear me? Say something!” The voices have hands. They turn you onto your back. That just hurts more. “Commander!”

Stop. Please stop.

“Medic!” Strange. Why is the voice worried for you? You haven’t done anything to earn anybody’s respect. You’re a traitor.

Hands on your face now, wiping away hot, sticky liquid clinging to your bare skin. It hurts there, too. Wrex, you try to whisper. You don’t know if you did or not. Somebody is sticking something down your throat. A tube? Fresh air pumps through your lungs, and you take it in gratefully. Your chest hurts as your lungs expand, but you can’t stop the flow of air. You can’t even slow it down. And it feels so good. Why wouldn’t you?

Somebody opens your eye and shines a light in it. You force it closed, and they don’t do it again. You don’t want them to.

“Bad concussion, Captain. We need to move her now.”

Somebody replied, indistinct. You force yourself to open your eyes, but even the low lighting shoots pain darts into the back of your head. You don’t care. You don’t want them to move you. You know if they move you it’ll only hurt more. No, you try to croak out. They heard. You can feel their eyes focusing on yours. You can’t see them.

You realize you can hear what they’re thinking.

And it scares you.

“Auron? I’m here, Red, hold on. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

This voice you could have picked out among thousands. You roll your eyes blindly to seek it out, but your lids are too heavy. They drop, and all sense of coherancy leaves you.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: How'd you guys like it? Hate it, love it? Tell me what you think! :D

Labels: fanfiction, Mass Effect

posted by Ashton @ 2:54 PM

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