Work Text:
This is the one where you die at the middle.
You’ve done this a dozen times before, jumped from the crumbling platform and grappled for the edge of the shuttle, felt a hand encircle your wrist and pull you up into a crowd of bodies.
Sometimes it’s a three-fingered hand, sometimes it’s five. Sometimes you’re a man, broad shoulders and trim waist, and other times you’re a woman, all lithe muscles and curves. But you’ve always made it, always felt that slick metal under your gauntlets, always felt the uncomfortable press of too many armored bodies, all laboring for breath in that tiny shuttle.
You won’t make it back this time.
You fall short of the shuttle, arms windmilling as you try, helplessly, to keep yourself aloft. Maybe Samara or Jack will surround you with a biotic field and pull you to safety, you think, but they don’t, and all you can hear is a roaring in your ears as you start falling, and Garrus and Tali are calling out your name, low subharmonics and tinny vocals melding together as they scream.
You remember just what it’s like to kiss both of them, hard, unyielding mouthplates and soft, vaguely antiseptic lips. They don’t remember, though. Not this time around.
All the air rushes from your lungs and you’re gasping for breath, just like you were last time you died--or was it the first time you died? You hazily remember the burn of a reaper’s beam against your skin and the crucible exploding around you, but that’s not right, because you jumped into the catalyst, no, you took control of the reapers.
You would laugh if you could, laugh until you cried because how stupid is it, how stupid are you, to keep doing this? How many times have you died for the galaxy, only to come back again and again, be screamed at by people you trusted and by everyone who had ever praised you. How many times have they ordered you around and incarcerated you and trodden upon you, called you a traitor and spat at you, only to then claim that it was always you, the last hope of the galaxy, and they knew it?
No, you think. Not anymore.
You always die in the beginning. There’s no way around that, no way to keep yourself from death in the silent vacuum of space. Most of the time you die at the end, but sometimes you live, drawing a shuddering breath as you lay, crippled, in the burning rubble.
This time you die in the middle.