An End, Once and for All

She lays her cutting board flat on the kitchen counter. the cutting board an old, simple one, made out of old wood, covered in knife marks. She places a peeled onion on top while she goes to fetch a knife. The one she gets isn’t one of the newer ones that use mass effect fields for the blades, special sensors that ensure that it doesn’t go through human flesh. It’s pale steel, faded with time and use, and the handle fits comfortably in the palm of her hand. Sunlight pours in through the window above the sink, a bright, clean yellow. Outside, a tree stands alone in a field of green grass, casting shadows over a dirt road. The air is warm, a little stick, midsummer heat and humidity.

Slicing into the onion is nothing like using an omniblade to cut through flesh, and she likes that, making sloppy, uneven chops with the knife the way one of her ex-boyfriends taught her. Your mouth doesn’t care if you cut them neatly, Alec used to say. He was a civilian, lived in Vancouver while she was stationed there, and she hadn’t learned how to cook before they started living together. She was raised in crowded mess halls, after all, protein gruel and limp vegetables while they traveled from station to station, planet to planet. Alec loved to cook, loved the smell of garlic sizzling on a pan, the sound of boiling, bubbling water, the feel of peeling vegetables with his bare hands.

This is the home he grew up in, she knows. He used to tell her about it, the small rural town in Kansas that sometimes doesn’t look as though the last two hundred years ever happened, still trapped in time. She’s always imagined it like the old 2D holomovies she’d watched as a kid, ancient wood covered over with a fresh coat of paint. Old fashioned solar panels on the roof for electricity, mechanical toilets, linoleum tile on the floor. All the kids on the ship used to watch those old vids together, pooling together their meager collections and arguing over them until they decided on one they liked. They’d watch with wide-eyed rapture, surrounded by the darkness of space, dreaming of the planet they’d all left behind.

There’s a knock on the door, a heavy fist on wood. It’s different from the ringing chimes of her comm, more ominous, somehow.

It’s Anderson on the other side of the door. He doesn’t look the way she last saw him, bleeding out in the remnants of the Citadel, eyes looking out over the stars. He looks the way she first saw him, the sharp, hardass captain, the one she liked almost immediately.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and her voice sounds strange, hollow. There’s a patch of light on the floor where she’s letting the light in, warm and pale green.

Anderson smiles, kind and wistful and sad. “Time to go, kiddo,” he says. “Can’t stay much longer.”

“I’m not done,” she says. Her dinner’s unfinished. The onions are half-chopped. There’s oil heating up on a pan on the stove. She wants to stay here in this place, soak it in until it rests underneath her skin, cling to it like a lifeline. She’s been selfless enough as it is. Doesn’t she deserve this much?

He steps back, and the wooden boards of the porch squeak under his feet. “You can’t finish everything,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to leave some things undone.”

Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth. “Except for this,” she says. “I can’t leave this undone.” She knows she’s not talking about the food.

“Except for this,” he says, and his voice is kind.

She steps outside, onto the porch, and the sky is perfectly blue, and the grass is perfectly green, and she’s never really been here, in this place. She’s only imagined it, a patch of Earth so remote it could be untouched by the war. But nothing is ever untouched by war. “Kaidan was going to coming over for dinner,” she says, and it’s tough talking around the ache in her chest. They were going to sit out here afterwards, watch the stars in the sky, point out all the ones they’d visited. Maybe he would have kissed her here, with the crickets chirping all around them. Maybe she could have laughed against his lips, tasted the inside of his mouth with her tongue.

“No, he wasn’t,” Anderson says. Tough but fair. That’s the way she remembers him. “You have to go,” he says. “They’re all counting on you.”

She remembers what London looked like, the scattered corpses, the piles of rubble, the hollowed out buildings. She remembers the way they’d all looked at her, like she had all the answers, even though all she had was platitudes and a half-assed plan. “I know,” she says. “Will there be peace?”

“Perhaps,” Anderson says. “At some point, all things must change or die. What comes afterwards isn’t up to you.”

She closes her eyes, clenches her fists. “They deserve peace.”

“Who knows what the future will bring?” Anderson says. “You’ve given them a chance--”

“-- and that’s more than the Reapers ever gave anyone,” she says. “I know.” Her hands still smell like onion, and her skin is still sticky with sweat, and Anderson’s voice is still as soothing as it ever was, and none of it is real. He’s right. She can’t stay.

The horizon is waiting for her, so she steps off the porch into the brilliant glare of the sun and starts walking, one foot in front of the other, picking up speed with each step until she’s running full tilt. The wind is warm against her face, and her legs burn with the exertion. The grass is green all around her, green like the slopes of Eden Prime, like the glow of a Prothean console. It fills her vision until it’s all she can see.

She opens her eyes, and she’s still falling, falling so fast, and her skin is burning, and she can feel herself coming apart. She thinks of the Reapers, the Geth, EDI. She thinks of her crew, still stranded on the ground without her. She thinks of the places she’ll never go, things she’ll never get to do. She thinks about what the galaxy might become, what new things they’ll create, the new cycles they can start. She won’t be around to see it.

She takes one final breath. “Live,” she whispers, and everything becomes pure light.

FIN.