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He was no believer.
He had no faith in heaven, or hell, or reincarnation, or any of that other nonsense. There was no God, no Lucifer, no Kalahira or Athame. There were no angels in the heavens, no demons lurking in the darkness.
Not the literal kind, anyway.
He’d never put much stock in science, either, not beyond the velocity of his charge, the force of his nova, the amount of pressure required to break bone. The rest didn’t matter, not to him; he left it to people far more intelligent and far less powerful than himself.
The only thing he had ever put any faith in was the solid, the tangible. The dirt under his boots, the grip of his gun, the metal shell encasing him on the field. Even the air in his lungs was unreliable, coming and going and one day, too soon, it would stop.
He only believed in what he could grasp.
But there was one thing.
It wasn’t a belief, not exactly. Nothing he put his faith in. It was just something that stuck with him, something that sometimes, maybe, he wanted to believe.
It was something his father had told him. He had just been a boy, seven years old, when a sickness had struck Mindoir. A third of the colony was gone in two days and the rest were ill for weeks. He lost teachers, friends, family. He tried to stop the men who came to take his cousin away, hit them with the strongest shockwave he could muster, knocked them back a couple feet. She’s not here anymore, they tried to tell him. She’s gone on someplace else, someplace better, they’d said, someplace she was happy and healthy and safe. But she was right there. He could see her, he reached out a hand and he could touch her.
His father had come then, weak from the illness but still strong enough to sweep John up in his arms and carry him away, and he sobbed into his father’s hospital robes as he explained where she’d left to. It didn’t make any sense, he couldn’t believe it, couldn’t understand it. She was just there, and then bits of her remained and the rest of her was gone. His father had told him then, in a whisper meant only for him as if bestowing some great secret, that no one was ever gone, not really. All John had to do was close his eyes, and everyone that was lost, everyone who had left them, they would be there. He could talk, and they would listen.
He’d believed it as a child. Whenever he was sad or lonely, he would close his eyes and talk. Sometimes to his cousin, sometimes to his friends, sometimes to people he’d never met but were lost all the same. He spoke every night, in the dark before sleep, replacing his prayers with words for the dead.
It wasn’t until the raid that he realized how silly it was.
His mother was one of the first to go. She helped him hide in a crate as the batarian ships landed. He tried to pull her in after him, but it was too late; something struck her from behind and she keeled over above him, gasping and choking, hot blood spattering his skin, eyes going cold and blank. And she was gone. Eyes closed didn’t change a thing.
He’d stopped believing after that. He even forgot about it for a time, when he was a fresh soldier all too eager to serve, reckless and triggerhappy. He’d gotten along fine at night talking to the other soldiers, or to himself, or sometimes not talking at all, simply reliving his triumphs of the day.
But his bloodlust eased after years of brutality, the thrill of the kill no longer driving him, and then Akuze, and the only thing keeping him going was this deep-down need, need to do what was right, need to save as many lives as he could. There were so many lost, so many gone just like that, and on the nights he found himself alone in the barracks the silence was too much, too heavy.
He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he shut his eyes and talked to them anyway.
Being put in charge of the Normandy was a dream come true. The most advanced battleship in the Alliance Navy under his command—finally, he had a chance to make a real difference, to save more lives, to do more good. But his private quarters meant silence at night, constant silence, broken only by the faint hum of the drive core. Nearly every night he closed his eyes, pictured the faces of the deceased, gave secrets to their memories.
He spoke to them as he drifted through space, fingers scrambling to seal the leaks in his suit, eyes shut tight to find his father’s face rather than the burning stars he was sure to join. “Not like this, dad,” he’d gasped before the air was gone.
Things were different on the Normandy SR-2. Or rather, the Normandy was different. His private quarters were not his own; he shared them with that voice, that damn AI that never slept, never took a break, never missed a thing. The first few weeks he stayed quiet, finding small distractions in the burbling of the fish tank, the steady squeak of the hamster wheel. When those weren’t enough, he would ask EDI pointless questions, sometimes tell her bad jokes he’d heard from soldiers back on Arcturus. She was surprisingly good company for a Cerberus toy. Then again, so was he.
But then Horizon happened, all those people he couldn’t save and Kaidan’s words a blade to his conviction, and the silence was too much again, and that night he found himself with his eyes closed, speaking into the darkness once more. EDI didn’t disturb him; she knew the words weren’t for her. So he continued like that, quiet most nights but on some he would break, and talk until his throat was raw and his secrets were gone and there was nothing left to say so he would close his eyes a little tighter and just stay with them a while, the lost, the dead.
The memories of them, anyway. He didn’t believe in ghosts.
His memories were about all he had for company on Earth. Full lockdown meant no visitors, no outside contact, no extranet access, no leaving the compound. That kid, Vega, a young gun, big muscles and a bigger mouth, he hung around sometimes, made sure John had what he needed, but most of the time he was alone, only the faces behind his eyelids to fill the emptiness. He ignored the security cameras spying on him; he was being monitored ‘round the clock, and he was sure he looked insane but he was long past the point of caring. He talked to himself, to them, to the walls, just to hear someone speak.
Once the war started—funny how he’d thought it had started all those years ago—there wasn’t enough time. He’d be lucky to get an hour or two in between star systems, once his reports were filed and the logs rechecked and the crew briefed and debriefed. He spent what precious little time he had to himself sprawled out on his bed, asleep the moment his head hit the pillow, still dressed in case someone else had an impossible task for him. And usually it was a good thing, because there was another task, another favor, another treaty, and his too-short slumber was cut even shorter. He held himself up, managed to stay awake in briefings and alert on the battlefield, but he could feel himself cracking, and he knew it was more than simple exhaustion.
Things changed after the coup. With Kaidan around, a higher-ranking officer and fellow Spectre, some of John’s work could be entrusted to him, and suddenly he was sleeping again. A solid five or six hours between systems. He was renewed, if only a little. Faster in combat, more clever with diplomacy, more eager to get the job done. But with sleep came dreams, and few were pleasant. He would awake with a scream trapped in his chest some nights, a cold sweat on his skin, and he would lay on his back, staring up through the windows into the stars until his heart slowed and his breathing evened and he forced himself to relax around his fear. Then he would let his eyes fall shut, and the faces would come to him, and the words would spill out of him, and he would talk until sleep claimed him again.
A few more hours of sleep under his belt, a meaningless ritual restored, the tiny hope blooming in his chest for something more, was almost enough to see him through. Even in the midst of all the madness, the millions of lives lost, the threat of annihilation looming closer everyday, John felt a glimmer of—damn it—happiness.
And when he got the news from the Asari councilor, he let that hope grow and spread to every part of him, a hope that there would be an end to this, that he would be around to see it. He clung to it even as the reapers landed on Thessia; there was still time, he could win this. He could still save them.
But he didn’t. Too late, too slow, too fixated to check his blind spots, and that murderous bastard was making off with the last of his hope, the last of his resolve. He was beaten. The only end in sight was their destruction.
Hackett assured him the war wasn’t lost, urged him to keep going. But honestly, he didn’t know how. His fight had been stolen along with that data, hope smashed, determination drained. But he had to keep pushing forward. The galaxy was depending on him. All those lives he’d failed to save, there would be so many more if he quit.
He’d sought Kaidan out as soon as he could, looking for something, anything, from the man who knew him best. But Kaidan had been preoccupied, and all John had gotten was a weak smile and a weak platitude akin to “better luck next time” before returning to his conversation with Adams.
So instead he retreated. Once orders had been given and they were on their way to another impossible mission, more civilians to save, he skipped the rest of his work and escaped to his bed, finding solace in the faces of the fallen.
And that was where Kaidan found him some time later, curled in on himself beneath the scratchy regulation blanket, eyes closed and mouth open, spilling his secrets to the dark. Shepard didn’t stop, and Kaidan didn’t interrupt; he just lay down beside the commander, wrapped himself around him, and listened, fingers working gentle patterns over John’s skin, hot breath soothing against his neck, and soon it wasn’t the dead he was talking to, it was Kaidan. When his words finally ran out, there were hands, and then there were lips, and then there was more, and Kaidan was solid, and tangible, and there, and as John drifted to sleep, despair abated by passion and fatigue, he realized it.
Kaidan was something he could believe in.
For the first time since childhood, John had faith in something. Faith that he wasn’t alone, that someone knew him, wanted him, loved him. Faith that if by some stroke of luck he made it through this, he could have something, something real, something he’d never thought he could have for himself.
And that was enough.
But at the end there was no out, no making it through, and he should have known all along that it would end like this, a galaxy on his shoulders and him alone, the last hope for organic life too wrecked to lift his gun. There was no out, there was only the voices of billions dead talking through the light-child, telling him he’d succeeded, telling him he would join them, no matter what he chose.
They wanted an answer, but he had no words, not for them. He didn’t believe in ghosts.
Before he took those final steps, he closed his eyes and spoke to Kaidan.