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The first time she dies, it’s completely on accident, a chance encounter with a faulty socket in the dingy Earth orphanage that is all that she can remember. She goes by Jane then, the only name she knows, and comes to on the floor of a medical clinic that barely deserves the name, run by relief workers in the slum city of Indianapolis, engulfed in the smell of burnt hair and hot blood.
The second time she dies, it’s not exactly on purpose, but at least she knew what she was getting into. Sixteen years old is plenty adult for the Reds, even for a girl. Especially for a girl. But she’s big for her age, tall, bald, the tattooed X on the back of her neck like a big fat bull’s-eye. It’s not her fault that she runs fast – and it’s not her fault that they missed. At this point she’s J, just J, because how many Janes can there possibly be in the land of forgotten children that nobody wanted. She wakes up handcuffed to a bed in the medical ward of a prison; it’s only after her bones are knit that anyone bothers to tell her that she died.
The third time she accepts that she’s Sisyphus perpetually pushing a rock uphill, only it’s a transport filled with the mutilated corpses of her friends that she’s too delirious to know are already past saving. Akuze is hot like hell and she never really leaves, not even when she wakes up screaming under bright lights in the middle of the surgery that saves her life. They call her a sole survivor in the news, and only Hackett sees her for what she really is: a mistake of fate, scissors inexplicably blunted on the thread of her life. Lost girl as she is, she dances well on strings.
N-school tries to kill her, and fails.
The geth try to kill her, and fail as well.
Saren tries to kill her and fails in the most spectacular fashion, but he costs her just the same. The Protheans and their beacon live inside her head, screaming and dying on a five second loop. Sisyphus and his rock. Jane Shepard and her ghosts.
The fourth time she dies, it’s actually a relief. Of all the stupid things to finally take Commander Shepard down, it’s space. The big inky black swallows her up, chokes off her air, and as she plummets to the planet’s icy surface far down below she feels almost free; a star falling, burning, soon to be nothing but dust.
They drag her back. Fucking Cerberus. This is Tartarus and she’s in a pit of sand up to her neck, and the only hands to pull her out are clockwork, cogs in the Illusive Man’s great machine. The SR2 is a facsimile of life, her very own terrarium, and what Liara really wants to hear is thank you, not why why why.
The last time she dies is the only time she regrets. The Normandy roars away on the wind of all the words she’s never said but meant with her entire heart. But there is no time; the beacon is waiting, Harbinger is waiting, Anderson is waiting, Hackett and the Alliance, the Turians, the Quarians, the Krogan, the Asari, Salarians, Drell, Hanar, Elcor, Geth, Volus, they’re all waiting, and she didn’t rip out Kai Leng’s heart to fail now at a beam of light.
In the end the choice is simple.
It isn’t that she doesn’t want to live – she does, God how she does, now that it’s too late. But there can be no war without casualties, no victory without sacrifice, and the longest walk of her short, charmed life is the one down a gangplank with a gun in her hand.
She hopes it’s worth it, all the lives she’ll take with her. She hopes that he’ll live, the man she could have loved. She hopes they’ll forgive her, all the ones she’ll leave behind, but if Shepard was ever good at anything, it was at knowing how to die.