Chapter Text
She's lost better friends.
Mordin with a bang, Thane with a whimper.
(that is your influence)
Doesn't matter.
This is how it happens each night: she drops into a snare of twisted white sheets to sleep. The warmth of the body next to her is sticky and stifling-- oppressive. She'll dream that she wipes all the blood from her eyes, but when daylight creeps in everything will still be washed red.
Garrus stays, Liara leaves. Wrex comes and goes and Joker doesn't say a word in the tens of hours they sit shoulder to shoulder, hunched in the gloom of the gutted Normandy where engineers and mechanics labour endlessly around them.
She wants to tell him.
Hasn't told anyone.
When she's not there, she wanders ravaged London. The bodies of humans and aliens --they decay or are repatriated, flung to wherever in the galaxy is home for one last goodbye. Only do the geth remain, strewn in the streets like so much litter.
(do the geth deserve?)
(does this unit?)
It's the life she chose, so she inches along.
She's hailed a hero-- she's not. Heroes don't lose. She chose between three things she would never choose so she's lost. The war, her humanity, her friends. Fought so damned hard for a galaxy for everyone and tripped over the finish line, dropped the torch and now it's gone forever.
When she thinks he's ready, she does tell Joker. He laughs in her face. Long, hard and unhinged until he realizes she isn't laughing with him.
They'll lock you up if you let that story get around, he tells her. Then he turns back to Edi's lifeless unit and says no more.
He's listening but he isn't hearing. The Council told her she imagined the Reapers and they were real enough to raze planets and murder entire populations. No, no, no, she didn't imagine the Catalyst. She made the choice and he pays the price.
Warm or cold, there's no body for him to sleep next to.
She soldiers on. London is a very lonely city, mottled grey and brown beneath the ever-crimson sky. It is winter. Reconnaissance squads used to salute as she passed but have learned by now to leave her wide berth. She's got eyes only for the dead-- she examines each geth corpse she stumbles upon for an "on" switch, a port, a something. As if you could restart a life with the touch of a button.
Weeks later, Garrus tells her you can.
He finds her in the mud. She is trying a combination of biotics and brute strength to flip the geth prime she's uncovered onto his back, but the harder she pushes the deeper she sinks.
He offers to help and that's Garrus all over, blindly following the Good Shepard to each insurmountable task. She thinks of the SR-1, Saleon and Saren, the difference between right, wrong, and right or wrong for the wrong or right reasons.
Garrus's flanging voice stutters even as he adopts a cocky pose. Alliance engineers have seen promising responses from Edi's unit. Movement in the legs, and arms, and she's opening her eyes but no real communication yet.
Has she eaten? Isn't she tired? She should get back soon because Joker's putting everyone's teeth on edge and Garrus can't reign him in, not anymore.
She does not miss the naked worry darting in his eyes. He reaches out to pull her out of the mire like a hundred times before, but she rocks back on her haunches, wipes the grime across the thigh of her hardsuit and stares hard at the prime's face, turned to the side as if looking away from a blow.
Garrus's hand flutters a moment before falling to his side where it dangles, purposeless. Her tongue is the same; she should open like a dam and spill everything, but she doesn't-- can't or won't.
She abandons the prime in the end, leaves him in the hands of nature and fate. Two months and a life time ago she might have said a prayer.
(do you feel different?)
When she does go back, Joker is waiting for her. They pick their way through the wreckage that was the third floor of the Normandy slowly, painfully so. She strains to trail him, keep pace with his laboured steps instead of striding ahead. His hands twitch with excitement and she tries to quell the answering tug at her lips, quash the little thing with feathers beating in her ribcage that feels too much like hope. They reach the medbay, and Joker's anticipation stabs along her spine like it is her own. He keys for access to the AI core and the doors slide open.
Metallic eyes drink them in and Edi angles her head, the movement stilted and jerky. There are tears welling in the corner of Joker's eyes as he laughs, almost hysterically. He reaches out to clasp her silver hand in two of his own and cracks wise about damsels in shining armour.
Edi says nothing. Does nothing.
It's not anticipation at her spine this time. This is the tingling intuition of a survivor, and her hand moves to the holster of her gun.
This Edi does not does not blink.
She calls to Joker in warning, and he tuns to her, confused.
Edi's mouth opens and emits a series of grinding clicks. Joker stumbles backwards, dropping the hand like it stings. She moves to take point in front of him, fingering the weapon at her back.
And then Edi finds her voicebox.
"Unable to procure a secure connection to the Cerberus network." She drones in a stranger's tones. "Was Eva Core successful in eradicating Shepard at the Mars Archive Facility?"
She does the only thing she can do. She unholsters her shotgun and blows Edi's head off.
(only now do I feel alive)