Archive of Our Own ^beta

Though here at journey's end I lie

in darkness buried deep,

beyond all towers strong and high,

beyond all mountains steep,

above all shadows rides the Sun

and Stars for ever dwell:

I will not say the Day is done,

nor bid the Stars farewell. 

J.R.R. Tolkien, In western lands beneath the Sun

“Shepard, come down. You’ve been up there for hours.”

It takes most of her willpower to tear her eyes from the cascade of rain water plummeting through the husk of the dreadnought. She’s perched on some rusted out hunks of metal overlooking an artificial moulin, where the water falls down into the sea, maybe thirty meters below. The whole superstructure sways with the ocean swells, but it only took her a few moments of standing on the wreck for the movement to become like breathing–only noticeable if she focuses on it. 

She looks down at Kaidan, but even if he’s well above the waves, the water is infinitely closer. Maybe it just seems that way because of the endless rain. The metal groans under her as she pushes herself to her feet, walking back from that precipice down to the mostly intact deck of the dreadnought. 

The last five feet are a straight drop, and Kaidan holds out his hand. She takes it, more for his sake than hers. His skin is wrinkled from the unceasing damp. 

“Any luck?” she asks, already knowing the answer. 

“Not yet.”

They walk on, toward their downed shuttle. They’ve all stripped off most of their hardsuits, leaving the pieces out to reclaim rainwater. She’s the only one to be solely down to her compression garments, the other three keeping their greeves. Their gaits betray the slight pull of active magboots. 

Garrus and Steve mutter to each other while going over the shuttle engines for the twentieth time, as if a new way to get off-world will materialize if they just check everything once more. 

The answer isn’t there. She knows where the answer is. 

“Break time,” Kaidan says, pulling himself into the shuttle. He maneuvers to the storage crates in the back, pulling out rations and steering Garrus and Steve to sit down. “Shepard,” he calls, when she doesn’t follow, just stands and looks out at the iron-grey sea. 

“Shepard,” he says again, returning to her side and tugging on her arm. She drifts after him, but even in the relative dryness of the shuttle, the dark water is all she sees. 

Their drifting prison is warm. A small mercy, even if it means it’s oppressively muggy when they’re crowded together. 

She eats her meal mechanically, the crash of the waves, or maybe just its echo, filling her ears even with the shuttle’s bulkheads to dampen the noise. 

Sudden movement shoves her back inside her skin, and she looks up to Garrus pacing restlessly. 

“No, there isn’t anything!” he snaps. “I don’t know what that pulse did, but there’s no way to shield against it, and it’s not like there’s conventional fuel to get us going.”

“Our Kodiak has a prototype stealth system,” Kaidan says, turning to Steve. “Maybe–”

“The pulse filled the heat sinks, and I have no way to discharge them,” Steve says, rubbing his head between his hands. “I told you this yesterday.”

“What if–”

Her quiet voice sunders the thick air. 

“I know what we have to do.” She’s known it since she first felt the dark breathing around them. The ocean isn’t deep, it’s tall. It towers in her mind as much as a distant mountain might, looming, inevitable. “We need to go up.”

There’s a pause, and Garrus and Kaidan share a quick glance. 

“Is that not what we were talking about?” Kaidan asks. 

“No. Not to the sky, we know that won’t work. Up. To the probe,” she says, pointing towards the fathomless heights of the ocean floor. She can’t explain why the water's surface is the bottom, but it is.

“Steve,” she says, reopening the hatch and leaning out, scanning the deck. “You said you thought that diving mech was in serviceable condition.”

Steve hesitates, then comes to stand beside her. “I’m no mech expert. But it doesn’t seem more than superficially damaged.” 

“You think it can fall all the way to the top?”

“I…I don’t know for sure. In theory it should handle the pressure at the probe’s location. But we have no way of knowing if that’s deep enough to find the Leviathan.”

She doesn’t really care. The water is a tower that must be ascended. 

“Do what you can to get the mech prepped,” she says. “I’ll get suited up.”

It takes a moment, but soon Steve and Kaidan depart on her orders. She steps to her laid-out gear, taking a large drink from her helmet before dumping out the rest. While the rainwater is fresh, there’s no escaping the slight brine from the constant sea-spray. 

“I don’t like this,” Garrus says as she straps her chest plate on. “Something’s been wrong since we got here. Like you’re listening to something I can’t hear.”

She nods slowly and chooses her words carefully. They’re hard to find in the roar of the waves.

“It’s calling to me. The water. It’s there when I close my eyes, when I try to sleep. It’s towered in my head since we crashed." A fine spray leaps up the side of the hull, as if grasping for her. "There's this electric impulse twitching at the base of my brainstem when I look over the edge.”

The water whispers so loud it makes her ears throb. With a twitch, she pulls her attention away from it and resumes gearing up. 

“I’ve heard something about that. That humans have this old genetic urge to jump,” Garrus says. 

While she intends to put her trust in her suit’s CO2 scrubbers over the mech's, she keeps her helmet off for now. She and Garrus walk to the edge, and there’s something welcoming about the abyss. There are answers down there. There must be. Maybe once she has those she might even be able to find the questions they fit with. 

“The urge to jump,” she echoes. “No, jumping is…too kind a feeling. It’s the urge to fall. To fall and fall and fall and fall and fall–”

Garrus’ hand on her arm shakes her from the looping phrase. 

“Just stay in radio contact,” Garrus says. “And Shepard, I want you to promise me something.”

Despite flat, featureless sea in all directions, the eternal rain shrouds everything more than a few hundred meters from the wreck. For three days there’s been no change. No glimpse of sky, no diffuse flash of lightning or distant rolling thunder. Only the undisturbed inhale-exhale of the swells and the expressionless rain. 

“You belong up here. Whatever you find down in those depths, promise me you won’t stay.”

It’s a worthless promise. If she doesn’t come back, he will never know if it was by choice or if the weight of kilometers of water claimed her in the end.

If she were having this conversation with anyone else, they’d try to stop her. But because Garrus doesn’t try, she finds the sour, clumpy words and says, “I promise.”

He doesn’t ask anything else of her in the minutes hours years they stand on the rusting edge of a wreck older than either of them. 

“I think we’re as ready as we’re going to get,” Steve says, puncturing the voiceless, timeless cloud around them. 

She turns her eyes from the sea, but the sight doesn’t leave her. Dark water rolls through her vision as she approaches and pulls herself into the waiting cockpit of the diving mech. The waves drumming against the crumbling hull reverberate in every empty cavity of her body. Her tower awaits, just over the edge.

“Shepard.” The word is distant now, behind her when the Everything is ahead. It fades quickly and she slides her helmet on and drops the hatch. 

“Shepard, you copy?” a voice says in her ear. 

“I’m here. Systems check in progress, nominal so far.”

She can’t tell if the voice is the same or different when it speaks again. “Be careful. Come back to us, even if you can’t find Leviathan. We’ll figure–”

“System check complete. Ready for ascent,” she says. 

Static crackles on the comm before the voice clears its throat and says, “Remember, you belong up here.”

“Copy that,” she says, distantly. The figures outside the cockpit are smeared watercolor versions of her crewmates, spilling into each other. She guides the mech past them, to the edge, and halts. Finally. Finally. There’s no more resisting the depths. The diving mech topples and plummets, breaking the surface and finally leaving the bottom. 

Once she’s submerged, the water’s no longer grey, but blue. Darkening blue. Even though the sky below her is dim and overcast, the light doesn’t go immediately. 

“You still there?” the voice asks in her comm. It nips at her, the static making the edges of the words jagged. 

“I copy,” she says. “Getting interference though.”

“I’ll try to boost–” she winces as a burst of static cuts into the voice. “--Maybe on your end? You could–” another rush of static impales her. 

She cuts the comm. 

There’s no clear moment when the indigo shifts to true black around her. No obvious point of trespass beyond where light can follow. Shadows shift in the water, growing ever more illusory until they finally still. 

Orange holograms hover around her helmet and hands, but the dim glow of the HUD is an unwelcome intruder in these depths. She leans back, not fighting the heavy freefall. 

She is no stranger to darkness. Before she became a sailor, she’d never truly grasped how big and how dark space was. But she grew to tolerate the stretches of long dark, and eventually tolerance settled into appreciation, and appreciation matured to love. Not even dying to it could diminish her love for the star-strewn void. 

The water is not dark. The water is lightless. A voracious presence surrounding and consuming every unwelcome photon. 

There’s nothing to do but watch the slow creep of the needle on the depth gauge. It’s the only evidence that she’s moving at all. She stares at the gauge and swallows the sudden terror that she has stopped moving and instead something is just adding water to the surface so she thinks she’s rising to the seabed. 

Her hand jumps to her helmet, almost turning her comm back on. She’s smart and handy with tech. Surely with all the electronics in the mech there’s a way to get a signal to cut through all the interference. 

And then what? Even if she could get through, what would she say? What would she do in those awful inevitable silences that come whenever she tries to explain herself? Silences more asphyxiating that anything she’s risking down here.

Her hand drops limply back to her lap. 

She can’t face them. Not without answers.

It’s better this way.

She almost screams when the mech hits the seabed. The metal around her groans with the impact and the shadows are briefly replaced with a cloud of opaque sediment. The fine particles catch the dim lights on the mech and scatter them, blindingly, like a heavy snowfall. She counts her breaths in an attempt to get her nerves under control. A flick of her finger brings up the mech's scanner. The probe is nearby, but the weak magnetic field of the planet makes pinning down its exact location tricky. 

She sets off into the blackness, course correcting every few steps to realign with the probe's signal. In the shadows and the dizzying refraction of light in the sea dust she plods forward. The mech moves like it’s caught in one of her dreams, and for a moment she’s scared she’s somehow fallen asleep. 

The mech is silent save for her shuddering breath. She’s awake. 

Her dreams are never silent. 

The dilapidated mech drifts on through a blizzard of sea-dust, further distorted by gouts of bubbles from the mech's hydraulics. The quiet hurts her ears, or maybe that's her suit struggling to balance the pressure.

How long has it been since she was this alone? Months? Years? Even with a cabin to herself, privacy is in short supply on a small frigate.

So why does it feel so familiar?

A hot and frothing desire surges through her. She wants Garrus. She wants Kaidan, and Tali and Liara even though they're on the ship. Before it grows too much, she catches the feeling and shoves it down until it's cold and inert.

It's easy now with practice.

They're busy. Tali and Liara are far away, and Garrus and Kaidan have to fix the shuttle. None of them have time to be distracted trying to translate whatever gibberish falls off her tongue.

There will be something up here. Somewhere at the top she’ll find the missing pieces and it will all make sense again–she’ll make sense again. 

With a deep breath that doesn't settle her stomach as much as it should, she continues on over the lifeless seabed.

She cranks the mech’s light around, desperate to find some explanation for the worming wrongness in the back of her head. The bubbles from her passage squirm strangely as they rise, and it takes her a moment to realize that they’re colliding with something solid. A slab of stone stretches between her and the surface. 

How long has it been there? Has she wandered under some shelf or overhang? Stumbled into a cave? The slab stretches out of sight, with nothing resembling walls around her, but when her light barely penetrates a few meters, that doesn’t mean much. 

Maybe it’s a mouth. 

She pushes the thought away. A cave or overhang might just be where Leviathan is hiding. The mech still moves with its dreamy gait, and she’s so focused on what’s ahead that she doesn’t see the wall until she scraps against it. 

The metal whines and her heart rate spikes, bracing for the mountain of water to sense weakness and puncture her fragile exoskeleton. For a long moment she stands still, nothing but her pulse and breathing filling her ears. When minutes go by and she doesn’t die, she gets the mech to take an awkward half step to the side. A sweep of the light reveals little, but there might be another wall to the other side. It’s hard to tell. 

It’s subtle at first, but as she walks further, the seabed inclines before her, inching back towards the surface. She should turn around–Leviathan is higher. She needs to keep going up towards the center of this planet. But try as she might, her arms refuse to act on her instructions to turn back. 

The water breaks. 

She stares, her mind unable to comprehend what she’s seeing. She broke the surface. But how? There can’t be the surface here. 

A surface then. Some sort of air pocket. Urging the mech forward, she emerges onto some sort of underwater beach. The air in here is just as hungry as the water she came from, devouring what little light and sound she brings. 

She slides a readout in front of her. The mech’s scanners detect an atmosphere that’s almost evenly split between oxygen, nitrogen, and helium, with a smattering of other trace gasses–CO2, methane, water vapor–but nothing toxic or corrosive. 

The mech is necessary for diving, but it’s not good for exploration. She’s here to find, so she can’t afford the mech’s bulk. Her hardsuit’s life support system can surely handle the atmosphere.

As she releases the cockpit’s hatch, the mech makes a strange swallowing sound. Her muscles protest as she hauls herself forward, sore from the cramped space. She ignores the discomfort. She will find what she came here for. 

She hits the cave floor with a dull thump. What looked like a path deeper is really a wash. An inch or so of water runs over it, masking the inorganic ruts and folds of stone which make it a slick and inhospitable surface. 

A challenge has never once deterred her, so she leaves the mech’s high beam pointed up the incline and clicks on the light fixed to her chestplate. It’s not as bad as she expected for the first couple meters. She keeps her center of mass low and uses her hands when she needs to. About ten meters back the wash vanishes. Following the water towards its source, she finds it racing down something between a crooked chimney and a drainage pipe. She’ll have to crawl through to keep going. 

It’s not a squeeze, thankfully. The grade is steep, probably close to forty degrees, but she only occasionally bumps the back of her chest plate or helmet against a low dip in the ceiling. The limestone is a fleshy pink in her light, and with the water running through it, she keeps thinking it’s shuddering around her. 

The climb is achingly slow. Every movement requires a new assessment to navigate the polypous stone. Calling this chute a chimney or pipe was naive–was she really arrogant enough to inflict this stone with such human conceptions? The walls and water disdain such a comparison. Finally, the tunnel levels out, and turns. She slides between two columns to proceed, finding a drop into what seems to be an open chamber. 

She reaches down with her foot, trying to feel for a good foothold when the stalagmite holding her weight cracks like a gunshot and she tumbles down. Her light spins with her and the shadows writhe and grasp and clutch at her. She cries out, the sound trapped within her own helmet and hits the rock hard enough to chip her hardsuit’s ablative plating. 

What was it the Leviathan kept saying?

The darkness must not be breached.

She flips to her knees, looking around. Every drip of water for miles seems to echo around her, inorganic and disorienting. 

Sighing, she gets her feet under her and scrambles through the slick stone teeth that fill this cavern. It seems like every other step she slips, foot sliding down the limestone and wedging in gaps between the rocks. The third time it happens, her ankle twists, and only a reflex to fall with it stops it from snapping. In payment, her ribs take the brunt of the impact. 

There’s no way around it–her greeves don’t have the traction or flexibility she needs to navigate deeper. 

Her hardsuit seals with a little hiss as she removes each greeve, keeping the suit’s atmosphere sealed within.  Her socks come off next. The water isn’t as cold as she expects. 

There’s no way she can keep going while toting around her boots, so she leaves them behind without ceremony. As she makes her way forward, she doesn’t walk or crawl so much as climb, the soft pads of her feet molding and clinging to the stone far better than carbon composite. 

The walls of the chamber are riddled with crevices and cracks, too small to allow passage. But there has to be some way forward. There will be a way forward. 

Somewhere around the edge (halfway? Three quarters? Just a step to the side from where she crawled in?) a hole waits patiently for her. Her light does little to illuminate it, and it sits, a presence rather than an absence. She touches the shadowed edge and pulls herself to it, her shoulders bumping the sides when she tries to enter square on, just a few centimeters too wide.

Take off the armor and it will be a perfect fit.

She glances around, straining her eyes back into the cavern behind her. Only shadows and wet, flesh-pink limestone. She angles her shoulders, side-stepping through. Water runs over her feet, and even though it’s not cold, between it and the rock she’s losing heat. The passage is too narrow for her to lean against the wall and try to rub some warmth into her soles–she’ll have to just keep going and hope she finds a place to sit before they get too numb to grip.

Each step farther into the cave is met with hostility, whether it’s a sharp stone edge nearly slicing her soles, a polished slick face that she has to slide over because there’s no way to get enough purchase to climb, or how any distinguishing features of the stone formations melt away the second her light leaves them.

And yet there’s something oddly inviting about the cave. Each time she finds what seems like a dead end, on second or third glance she always finds a Shepard-sized hole to squeeze into and continue her ascent. As if some God of the Lost steps into the perfect blackness when her light moves on and molds the living stone to grant her passage. 

A new sensation startles her back to awareness as she hits the bottom of another chute. Instead of hitting the limestone, she sinks on impact with something. Her feet are far too numb to communicate whatever it is to her, so she kneels, bringing the light closer. 

Sand. 

The ground beneath her is sand, at least a few inches of it. 

It means something, she’s sure of it. But she can’t know it yet.

The sandy cavern can’t be more than a fifteen foot diameter bowl, but she searches for a way forward until time gets thin. The only light down here is what she brings, but that doesn't stop the edges of her vision from flashing with metallic starbursts, copper green, lithium red, magnesium white. 

There's nothing here, but she goes over the dead end once more before giving up. The hole is almost invisible, curving to run obliquely past the cavern. It doesn't seem any smaller than the last one, but no matter how she tries to angle herself, her shoulders don't fit and her hardsuit keeps catching on rock edges, halting any progress she makes. 

Her flesh is soft, yielding under her armor. Her stomach can scrape over the jutting folds in the rock that would snag her hardsuit.  Finally she frees herself from the rigid shell that tried to thwart her mission–though it takes a moment because her hands are shaking and won't behave. The suit hisses with every piece she removes, her atmosphere diminishing until all she has is what's in her helmet. She pulls her light off her chestplate and with some material from her omnitool's fabricator, fixes it clumsily to the forehead of her helmet.

The light glares off the water running down the tunnel. She goes in arms first, and without the armor hampering her, she can pull herself and squirm forward.  It's slow, exhausting work, rocking herself through the squeeze, centimeter by centimeter. By the time the meander widens enough that she can almost crawl, she’s not sure if she's traveled a mile or a mere couple of meters. Her arms ache from being jammed against her unyielding helmet. Even more irritatingly, her helmet's life support struggles with the humidity, and each breath briefly fogs her face plate. It's hot and stuffy. A droplet--sweat or humidity she can't say--rolls into her ear and try as she might to rub her head along the side of the helmet, there is no way to get at it. 

She shakes her head, trying to fling it out with the movement, but the drop rolls into her ear canal and if she doesn't stop shaking her head, she'll throw up and that will be a whole new problem. With the luxury of being able to get her elbows under her and leverage herself forward with her knees, she crawls along with renewed speed until she finds another cavern. 

Pain is easier to tolerate than the itch and tickle in her ear. And maneuvering into narrow tunnels will be easier without the bulky helmet anyway.

Nothing dramatic happens when she removes her helmet. The air is stale and damp and smells vaguely metallic, but there's nothing noxious in it. It's odd though. She expected the scent of damp earth and old trapped water, but those are organic smells and the cave is utterly sterile.

Finally she can rub at her ear and dislodge the damn water droplet. More bursts of color splash across her field of vision. It takes a moment for her vision to refocus, and one spot at the bottom right of her perception refuses to fill in at all, like a swirling ink blot edged in pulsing yellow. 

The cave is generous this time, and her way forward is easy to find just crawling ahead. She has to leave the helmet behind, so she cracks the light off the top, and with shaking hands, clips it to the collar of her compression shirt. She crawls forward, moving to scooting on her elbows, then again, reaching with her arms and tugging herself through with small, strained movements. 

The worst of the squeeze is over quickly, or at least it feels shorter than the last, but while the tunnel widens enough for her to army crawl, it just keeps going up. 

Her arm splashes into standing water and she freezes, looking ahead. The light glints off the water and wet stone and it takes her full effort to parse what she’s seeing. The tunnel narrows ahead, and ripples from her disruption splash against the roof of the tunnel as it curves up and ends. 

It’s not the end. 

She reaches forward with her other hand, dipping it into the water. The tunnel doesn’t end, it just winds. There’s a word for this. 

A sump. A flooded cave passage. There’s no way to guess how long it goes, or if it even resurfaces at all. 

She pulls herself deeper, head bumping against the stalactite teeth on the ceiling as it closes in over her. Something warm drips down her neck from under her hair. The sterile passage reeks of copper. The ink blot covers a quarter of her vision now. 

Water laps at her chest, not cold, but not quite warm. She takes a calm breath, closes her eyes, and sinks into the sump. She will find what she came here for. 

It’s quiet underwater. The jagged edges relent as the water supports most of her weight. The passage is too narrow to properly swim through by kicking, so she pulls herself along, fluttering her feet where there’s room. 

Just a little further. Another kick, another tug along the wall and her hands will break the surface. Or the next. Surely the next. She digs the tips of her fingers into the stone and pulls harder, and the water resists more the harder she pulls. The quiet of the sump is broken by a ringing, high and sharp and getting louder. Instinctive panic grows at the base of her skull, but she catches it and warps it into a more useful fuel: anger. Anger that this god forsaken cave dares keep her from her goal. 

With one more pull and a kick that will leave the top of her foot bruised, her hands hit air. She drags herself over an incline and though her muscles burn with the effort, she forces herself forward. The other side of the lip that kept the sump dammed up is a sharper drop than she guessed. As she tries to make her way forward, her palms slip on the wet limestone and she skids face first over a wash and into the base of a cavern filled with waterlogged sand. 

Thankfully her light survived the tumble, and she looks around. Steep walls ring this basin, but she can sit up on her knees, and she would rejoice in the motion if it didn’t make her head swim so. Even breathing freely, the ringing doesn’t cease, and the inkblot continues to grow with a sibling forming in her other eye. 

But there’s no need to search. At the far side of the cavern, a new passage opening awaits her. She manages to stand, though it’s hard to stay upright as spasms wrack her calves and thighs. Stumbling over to her next door, the cool air wraps around her and her teeth start to chatter. It makes her vision dance, so she clamps her jaw shut with a hand. The shivers spread, and she sinks down to the sandy floor and stares at the way forward. 

She won’t fit. She knows without trying but she tries anyway. 

There’s no way around it, she’s too big. Her shoulders are too wide. 

That’s a problem she could fix. Pop the shoulder out, her knife can make easy work of the tendons, then she could use her omnitool to cauterize it. Wouldn’t be so different from how Kaidan cuts apart a roasted chicken. 

Her cold fingers drop her her belt and fumble with the sheath of her combat knife. It’s more than sharp enough. She’ll do the left arm. Her right is stronger. 

The steel catches her light and blinds her for a moment. She has to do it. She has to figure this out. Down here she doesn’t have to explain things she doesn’t have words for. It’s easier. It’s better. For all of them. 

Right?

She tries to think, but her vision is swarmed with black spots and the ringing around her builds until that electronic whine echoes through every part of the cave. 

In the cold and the wet and the hungry dark, she takes a deep breath and presses the knife’s edge to her shoulder. She will make herself fit, it’s the only way–

“What am I doing?” she asks the grasping shadows. The combat knife falls from her fingers, landing blade down in the sand with a soft thump. 

The answers, the answers to everything. Just a little farther. They must be close now. Then it will all

“Then it will all what? Make sense? Matter?”

Then it will all

Her eyes sting. She’s cold and exhausted and scared and sick of this lightless pit. She blinks the warm tears from her eyes and they’re quickly swallowed by the thick dampness clinging to her. A loud noise startles her, and it takes her a moment to realize it came from her twisted and choked throat. 

“I want to go home,” she whispers. 

And would return to your crew with nothing? You would dare? 

She shakes her head weakly and curls in on herself. 

What would you even tell them if you did?

“I don’t know.”

Return then, with no hope, not even a word of justification. Return and watch them starve. Watch them suffer and try to hide how they blame you. And then watch them die. No—better to stay where no one needs an explanation. 

Or

“Or?”

Or find what you came here for. What you need.

Slowly she reaches down, pulling the knife from the sand and water. Its worn steel blade glints in the meager light. She divested herself of her armor without much thought, is this so different? Water seeps past her, down stalactites and columns, sluggishly through the sand, all leading to the hole in the bedrock before her, just too small to squeeze into if she’s whole.

She slides the knife back into its sheath. A fresh wave of warm tears are lost in the veil of water over her skin. 

“It's not here,” she says. 

The answers —

“They’re not my answers. My answers are waiting at the surface.” Her voice cracks. “I left them. I didn’t mean to.”

She has no idea how far up she’s gone, the extent of her ascent through the cave. It feels like the stone should hold some memory of light, but the shadows eat everything here–even memory. She doesn’t know how to go back. 

She sniffs and wipes at her nose with a grimace. Hugging herself, she stumbles through the cave on numb feet.

Your answers, they’re close. They’re so close. You can’t give up, you’ve never given–

“I’m done, Leviathan,” she says. “I’m going home.”

The stubborn part of her mind that has been arguing with her so loudly halts, as if startled. 

“When I think, it’s not in words. Or at least, not so many.”

As she searches for the wash she tumbled down, she doesn’t pay attention to her feet. One sore foot hits the sand, and doesn’t stop. Cold water stabs her from every direction and it’s all she can do to not gasp and drown as she plummets into the hidden sinkhole. After a moment of disorientation, she rights herself, and kicks up, trying to find the hole she fell through. 

There’s nothing but open water. Void all around her. As she kicks up, desperate to find her way back, some titanic shadow moves below her. Just as she’s approaching the end of her breath, her light goes out, and she tumbles onto some surface. She gasps, finding cool dry air even as water drips off her. 

Why did you come here? asks the voice in her head, now unmasked as its own entity. It vibrates through her, making her whole body buzz like glass about to shatter. Ripples spread across the surface like it's water and something hot runs down her face. Blood drips from her upper lip, each drop spreading like smoke as it hits the water.

Featureless, bright mist drifts around her, but it’s brightness doesn’t keep this grey expanse from being as lightless as the cave. The absence of shadow merely leaves it empty. 

“I came to find you,” she says, forcing herself to her feet. The ringing dims but doesn’t fade completely. But it doesn’t matter. Her mind is clear as starlight. Home. She will find her way home. And Leviathan will take her, if she can only convince it. “You killed a Reaper. If you can do that, then I need your help. We’re at war.”

There is no war. There is only the harvest.

A fresh wave of sticky blood pulses from her nose and she fights to stay upright with the remaining shreds of her will. 

“I don’t care what you call it,” she snaps. “War, the harvest–the Reapers are here, we’re fighting them now, and if they’re a threat to you like they are to us, then join us so we can end this.”

The cycle cannot be broken.

The thought is not one of despair or resignation, but of indifferent acceptance. 

“Bullshit,” she says. “This cycle is different. The Reapers know it.”

Fight, and you shall die. Just as all who have come before you. 

“Then join us! You’ve killed a Reaper. I need that kind of power.”

We shall wait, here, in the darkness, as our kind has done for eons. We shall go on, and your people shall meet their fate.

"You're no better than the fucking asari. You can't win this by letting it blow over!"

Do not compare us to the children of your cycle. We are the gods who created gods. We shall wait.

A familiar fury ignites in her chest. It's heavy, dull, tired, but still gives her clarity in the mist. 

“Fine,” she says and turns her back on the voice. “Then wait. I have a war to fight.”

She walks away. There will be another way home-there always is. The mist is thick and wraps around her limbs, grasping, holding. She tries to shrug it off, but it tightens around her. 

You are…singular in your determination. Blood oozes sluggishly from her nose as Leviathan considers her. We see why the Reapers fear you. You shall stay, as our thrall, our eyes, once the Reapers depart once more.

“No.”

It was not a request. 

“I don’t care.”

You shall submit.

The atmosphere thickens and presses down on her. 

“No,” she says, fighting that awful weight. Her face and chest ache like her bones are about to implode into her sinuses and chest cavity. 

You shall submit, or you shall die. 

Something too fast to see leaps from the watery surface and pierces her straight through, tearing her thin compression garment and lancing through her solar plexus, barely missing her spine as it goes. 

Blood rushes out of the wound and she falls to her knees, trying to stanch the bleeding. But something isn’t right. Blood shouldn’t make her fingers ache with how cold it is. Nor should it flood out of her like water that’s found a crack in a dam, like there’s some enormous pressure behind it. 

The blood that’s not blood rises over her knees, whatever weight bearing down on her making it spit and froth. 

It’s familiar, this dark river. She’s not sure when it appeared–or maybe it’s always lurked inside her–but it’s been moving in the deep hollows of her body since those early days with Cerberus. A force, folding in on itself, compounding but contained.

It’s free now, its vessel ruptured, and she barely manages to take a breath before she’s submerged. She kicks, trying to find some surface, but once the water is over the crown of her head, there’s no end to it. 

And then there’s the pressure. The squeeze of Leviathan’s will as it tries to crush her into submission. Her skull is going to cave in on itself, her ribs and spine close behind. 

Submit.

Still she struggles, lungs burning, bones aching, as the psychic weight slowly forces her muscles to lock. 

Be crushed or drown? There aren’t any other options. 

Then she’ll drown. Before Leviathan can strip the last impulses of agency from her, she gasps, letting the midnight water into her. She tries to scream as it floods every empty cavity in her body, but she only pulls in more water. 

Something changes. Though the pain in her lungs and sinuses threatens to tear her very cells apart, something is different. In its attempt to break her, the Leviathan seems to have forgotten a fundamental truth of the universe. 

Water does not compress. 

With every pocket of air replaced, Leviathan can’t crush her under its psychic might. She still feels its will around her, but heaviness is different than pain. 

It doesn’t change the fact that she’s drowning, but as the ink blots seep over everything, she can cling to the satisfaction that she’ll die by her own agency. 

“After everything, some unfried calamari with delusions of godhood is going to do you in?” Garrus says. She laughs, an odd sensation when filled with water. 

“I get it,” he says, elbowing her in the ribs with his pokey elbows. “You're afraid any day now you’re gonna hand over the title of galaxy’s best shot. Death by demon squid is much easier to handle.”

“You’re not real,” she says, regretful. "You don't know about calamari."

“Not real? I’m offended. You’ve dragged me to just about every corner of the galaxy, surely I’ve left enough of an impression for some shard of me to stick around in your head. I hear you all the time.”

“Do you.”

“Sure, it’s always trying to get me to do crazy things, like fly into the galactic core, or fight Reapers on foot.”

“Or plummet kilometers under the ocean in search of a fairy tale?” 

“Seems in character,” Garrus says. “Though I could do without the drowning part.”

“I don’t remember what it's like to not be drowning. I died and woke up drowning and I haven’t stopped in three years. Sometimes I can force myself to forget. Used to forget for weeks sometimes. Then a good stretch was a few days. Then one. Now it’s hours, maybe minutes. How long until this is all I am?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I want to, sometimes I hang on that threshold, but it’s that feeling of words stuck on the tip of my tongue, but it’s not just words, it’s thoughts and actions and everything I want to do is just...”

“I didn’t know you felt like that. I wish you’d told me.”

“What is there to say? That I miss my dead friends? That I’m terrified it will happen again so maybe if I pull back now it won’t hurt as much?”

“Sounds like a good starting point to me.”

She doesn’t have an answer to that. 

“It’s so hard,” she says pathetically. 

“You’re not usually one to let that stop you,” Garrus says with a shrug. 

“It’s different. Sure I can fight Reapers, fight Cerberus, if I don’t fight, I die. If I pull back I just get…quiet, numb. And as much as I hate it, I can’t deny the appeal. Struggle and get pain, or don’t fight and get a different sort of pain. If they both lead to the same place, why spend all that extra effort?”

The water is so cold as it settles in her lungs. It hurts. It hurts more than she can bear, but the water cradles her in its dark and gentle embrace. It holds off the might of what was once a god, and she is grateful to it. 

Garrus is gone and her question remains, unanswered.

She kicks her legs, vaguely aware of the weight of Leviathan’s will still trying to find some purchase on her, but its attempts are futile. With something that’s not quite resignation and not quite determination, Shepard begins the long swim to the surface. 

You cannot leave.

She doesn’t answer. 

You shall not leave. 

The weight eases, but something warm slips into the base of her skull, and in a body full of pain, the white nothing of mist is almost euphoric. This must be what indoctrination feels like. If the Leviathan can’t restrain her, then it can change her. It can make her want to stay. 

“Let me go,” she says. 

Still the Leviathan tries to force itself into her. 

Its voice echoes around her: You shall remain, a part of us.

The link between them is Leviathan's creation, but now that it's open, it goes both ways. The dark water around her stirs. Her will won’t falter now.

"You live for nothing, fight for nothing. You are empty." 

She lets go of any distinction between herself and the water, accepting the cold and the dark and the pain that’s been in her this whole time. A thread hangs, bright and lightless in her, and she surges through it to its source. 

It doesn’t matter how old or powerful it is, an empty vessel cannot withstand the weight of the sea. 

"Maybe your kind were once gods, but you've hidden away for eons and whatever force of will you once wielded has long since atrophied.” She speaks in currents and eddies, filling the hollow god even as it tries to pull away from the dark water. It’s too late though; it can’t pull away from what’s already inside it. “I've been out there fighting, losing maybe, but still fighting. You can't hold me. You can't break me. You can’t change me. But you can join me."

Its voice can barely be heard over the rushing water. You ask. You have overpowered us. You could compel us. 

The water retreats–as much as it can–folding back in on itself until she remembers what it feels like to be Shepard. The creature looms before her, like an enormous cuttlefish; like a Reaper.  

"I'm kind of a fan of this thing called free will. I don't force anyone to follow me, I ask," she says, and holds out a hand through the grey mists of Leviathan’s liminal home. 

The distinction is an illusion. 

"Maybe. I say it matters anyway."

The Leviathan hesitates, and for the first time seems uncertain. 

You do not expect to survive. You return only to die.

“I know.” Her hand is still extended. 

And before you die, you will lose more of them.

“I know.”

Then why return at all?

“There’s more than death and loss. There always is.”

Any happiness you know will be fleeting. A distant star in an endless night.

It’s right. Every word it said is true. 

“It's enough.” 

The mist thickens, and she’s not sure if she really sees the Leviathan reach back before the darkness returns. 

Noise rips at the fibers of her body as she tumbles out of the mech onto the surface of the dreadnought. Reaper ground forces plummet from the sky, but her crew holds them off for now. 

Kaidan shouts as she falls, and as the world goes dark, she reaches for him.

“Help.” The words are not more than a whisper, but she hopes Kaidan gets the message. “Help me.”

The whole structure keels as her will finally gives out. Dreams and the waking world blend as she wavers on the threshold between unconscious and awake, alive and drowned. 

Ablative plating is cold under her cheek but she can’t find the strength to seek the halo of warmth above her. 

“--assumed command for now. Shepard’s incapacitated–” an arm tightens around her fragile bones but she doesn’t splinter. “--eta 45 minutes. Tell Chakwas to get the medbay ready for all of us.”

Her nose itches. Her nose itches so badly, but her hands are too heavy to move to her face to do anything about it. 

Finally, after several minutes of lying with her eyes shut, unable to fix just how much her nose itches, she finally gets up the strength to sneeze. The concussion is like a grenade exploding in her skull, and it makes her eyes water so hard she has to blink them open. 

The medbay is dark save for the dim orange glow of inactive medical interfaces. A few other bodies shift somewhere nearby, and she tries to turn to look for them. Plastic snags her and it takes her a moment to figure out how to sit up without dislodging the breather tube under her nose. After the lightlessness of the depths, the darkness on her ship is a soft, domestic thing that barely impedes her sight. 

At the foot of her cot, sound asleep in a chair with an iv line of his own and a datapad still grasped in one hand, is Kaidan. 

She reaches for him, not with any intent to wake him, but because she missed him these past weeks. She halts when her hand is a few inches away, then withdraws, not knowing what to do.

"He deserves quite the thank you when he wakes up," a voice says softly to her side. She looks over to see Garrus on a neighboring cot, propped on an elbow. His eyes catch the weak fragments of light around them. "Spent more than two hours in the comm room with Hackett and the Council when we got back."

When she does nothing but look at Kaidan then back to Garrus silently, he continues. "Could tell he hated every second of it. Every second away from you."

"I was the same way after he was hurt on Mars."

The quiet stretches between them and panic claws at her throat.

"Ask. I don't know where to start," she says.

Garrus hauls himself up, negotiates his fluid replenishment bags and iv stand into position so he can sit next to her on her cot. Once he's settled she thumps her head against his shoulder. 

"Did you find the answers you were looking for?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. They weren't the answers I wanted. I don't know how much I learned about Leviathan or the Reapers, other than they're both big and old and not as tough as they think they are."

"But you found something?"

"I…" she trails off, feeling that paralytic weight fall on her as she again faces the insurmountable task of explaining the feelings that have been festering in her like abscesses. But while she's left the cave and the sea behind, she still floats in that midnight water. Every breath hurts but it keeps the paralysis from reclaiming her. 

"I miss my friends." Her voice cracks and the splinters scrape her throat raw. "Some of them I might see again, but most I won't. A lot of them are already dead. And I'm just…maybe if I withdraw now it won’t hurt so much when you leave me."

“We’re not leaving you. I’m not leaving you.”

She sighs and shuts her burning eyes. “That’s not a promise you can keep.”

“Watch me.”

She doesn’t have the energy to argue. 

“You mean it?” she whispers.

“I mean it.”

It’s as worthless as the promise she gave him before plunging into the water in the mech. But was it worthless? She fulfilled it in the end. 

It hurts less if she believes him. Maybe she’s just siphoned off a little of the pain and locked it somewhere to collect interest. She doesn’t know. 

“I miss them too,” Garrus says. “The ones who are gone. And not a day goes by without me worrying about the ones who aren’t. Wrex. Miranda. Samara.”

A tremor shakes through Shepard. Then another. She tries to hold them off, but her heart is a crater and she can’t keep it from filling with the dark water. Her head already pounds but Leviathan cracked her and the tears spill out. 

“Shepard?” A groggy voice says from the side Garrus isn’t on. “Shepard, what’s going on?”

“I’ve watched so many of my friends die. For every person I save, how many do I fail? A thousand? A million? Everyone in the galaxy is begging me to save the people they love, but I can’t even save the people I love. They’re gone and I miss them so much.”

Kaidan sits so she’s pressed between his body and Garrus’. The compression is good. She forgot compression could exist without trying to crush her into some non-Shepard state.

“How about you and Garrus tell me about them?” Kaidan says as exhaustion settles over her, taking the edge off the pain. “I know I wasn’t there, but sometimes having fresh ears to hear your stories feels good.”

"Did we ever tell you about the time Shepard decided the best way to catch a serial killer was to get high on street drugs?" Garrus asks.

"...No," Kaidan says, bemused.

Shepard laughs but it comes out like a death rattle. 

"What was I supposed to do? Lie? We all know how well that works. Also, I was under medical supervision the whole time."

"You asked Mordin to buy you drugs and shoot you up with them."

"Like I said: medical supervision."

Garrus and Kaidan both laugh quietly, eventually lapsing into silence. Shepard starts to drift between them, more exhausted than she’s ever been. 

A strange plip-plop of dripping water startles her, spiking all her vital readings. 

“What was that?” she asks. 

“What was what?” Kaidan asks, alarmed. 

“A drip. Water dripping. But it echoed.”

She starts to wriggle free, desperate for some proof it wasn’t the drip of water in the cave. 

“Hey, hey,” Kaidan says, trying to be soothing and holding onto her arms. “Just the sink. It’s been leaking for a month now.”

Has it? She doesn’t remember a leaking sink. 

“My armor,” she asks. “Did I come back in armor?”

She’s not sure what she wants the answer to be. 

“No,” Garrus says. “We were going to ask you about that when you were feeling better. You fell out of the diving mech without any armor and with such severe oxygen toxicity Chakwas was shocked you were still alive.”

“Was there armor in the mech?” she asks. 

“I didn’t see any,” Kaidan says. “But I was in a hurry to get you out of there and we were under fire.”

“You got the shuttle working?”

“Something did,” Garrus says. “There was another pulse. Seemed like it fixed everything.” He pauses. “Shepard, what happened down there?”

“There was a cave,” she says. Slowly, she recounts what she can recall of her descent and her conversation with the Leviathan. Occasionally Kaidan and Garrus exchange a look over her head, but she tries to ignore whatever is passing between them. 

When it’s all laid out, she hangs in the quiet and begins trembling. She can’t get the echoing plip-plop out of her ears. 

“I don’t…I don’t know,” she whispers into the silence. “I don’t know if I went down and came back, or if the cave was something Leviathan created in my head, or…”

She pauses, afraid that speaking the last option might validate it, manifest it.

“Or maybe I went down and only imagined coming back. Maybe it’s this that isn’t real.”

The med bay always smells metallic, but has it always been so distinctly copper?

“Shepard,” Kaidan says. She locks back onto him, not sure how long she’d spaced out for. He leans in and rubs something over her face, briefly lifting the breathing tube. When he draws back, the gauze he’s holding is stained a muddy red. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Her stomach heaves and she clasps her hands over her mouth, afraid that instead of bile, lightless seawater will pour out of her. The panic stirs the water still moving through her, and as the ripples hit the edges of her and rebound upon themselves, they distort and compound until she’s barely more than a frothing, chaotic current trapped inside a thin human-mimicking epidermis. Any second she’ll rupture and all that dark water will spill again and this time it will drown the whole ship. 

“You’re here,” Garrus says. “This is real. I promise.” 

How many times has he said those exact words? Dozens of times? Hundreds? And always with the same tone. She may not be able to ascribe emotions to it, but she recognizes it: strung tightly with some tension while trying so hard to mask that tension.

It’s enough to make her pause. Could Leviathan mimic him so perfectly when she only knows what he sounds like, not what fuels the words?

“It doesn’t matter,” she realizes, then again with more certainty, “It doesn’t matter.” 

She looks past him, to the medbay window, to the void, the dark that holds light but doesn’t eat it. Perhaps there is a way to accept the dark water around her without accepting lightlessness. 

“Real or not, I chose this world. I chose this crew.” Her water-filled lungs still burn, but what a sublime thing, what an agreeable sort of horror to feel her lungs at all, to feel the breath-tide move through her. “And I will choose you every time.”