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Ashley had decided early on that spending time with her sisters was the only good thing about being put on leave. Sitting around with nothing to do drove her crazy. On top of that, Shepard and the rest of the Normandy crew were still out there hunting down the remaining geth, and that was where she ought to be, too.
Shepard messaged her every day, but she still missed him, and she would never feel completely confident with anyone but her on his six. When the moment of truth arrived, anyone but her might not be good enough. The only way she could be sure someone truly had his back was to be there doing it herself.
But after Sovereign, after Saren, she'd been a bit of a mess — no critical injuries, but enough serious and minor ones that they added up to something significant. When the dust had settled, she'd put forth her best persuasive argument that she could handle recuperating and staying on duty at the same time. Anderson had listened patiently to what she had to say, thanked her for her input, and signed the medical leave paperwork anyway.
So here she was, back home on Sirona instead of on the Normandy where she belonged, sitting in Abby's tiny living room and flanked on the couch by Sarah and Lynn. Sarah had heard that a documentary about their bid to stop Saren would be airing, and despite Ashley's reluctance, had insisted they get together to watch.
Even when she was among her sisters it was strange for Ashley to watch a retelling of events she'd lived through. It had them looking at her differently, especially Sarah, and she didn't like the feeling that she was somehow an outsider to the people she loved the most.
But the four of them were together, a rare occurrence these days. Abby was in the kitchen pulling cookies out of the oven, their grandmother's secret recipe, and Lynn had brought some of Ashley's favorite beer which was damn near impossible to get off-world. She supposed she could manage to console herself with that.
"What was it like?" Sarah sounded more subdued than usual. "Did you know? I mean, could you... feel what was about to happen?"
Ashley hadn't been listening closely to the documentary, so she glanced up at the vidscreen and saw rocky cliffs thick with greenery. They crowded up against the shore of a blue-green sea, leaving only a strip of white sand beach between. Virmire.
She took a deep breath before answering. "Yes. And no. We knew there might be trouble going in, but the longer we were there... it was eerie, somehow. It felt like something was coming, yeah." She looked down at her beer bottle, picking at the label with her fingernails.
"But we had no idea how bad it was going to be. Or that we wouldn't all be coming back."
Almost on cue, she heard Kaidan's name, and when Ashley looked up she saw his picture had appeared on the screen to accompany the narration. She smiled fondly, but still, she must have looked sad, because Lynn reached over and squeezed her shoulder.
"You miss him?" she asked.
"Yeah," Ashley nodded. "We didn't serve together long, but we became friends in the time we had. He was a good man; you would have liked him, Lynn." Her smile changed, now a little more mischievous, and she bumped Sarah with her shoulder.
"I bet he would have liked you, Sar." To Ashley's left, Lynn smiled and made a teasing ooooh sound. She reached over the back of the couch to give Sarah's hair a gentle tug. Meanwhile, to the right, Sarah blushed fiercely and scrunched up her nose.
"Shut up," she said, embarrassed but still a bit tickled at the thought. Ashley and Lynn gave each other nearly identical grins.
The documentary had gone on without them, and was now showing poor-quality footage of Liara giving some kind of presentation. Ashley gestured towards the screen with the long neck of her beer bottle.
"Now that's a fun story," she said, "Liara. When we finally found her, she'd gone completely off the deep end. Swore that we were a hallucination right up until Shepard got her out of that bubble she was in. Even then, I'm not sure she was really convinced."
Sarah and Lynn laughed, and Ashley tipped her bottle back only to find it was empty of all but a few last drops. She stood up and headed for the kitchen. "I'll be right back. Just wait til you hear the part about the krogan battlemaster," she called over her shoulder.
Once in the kitchen, she grabbed another beer out of the fridge and pressed it to the back of Abby's neck. Abby gasped and swore at the sudden cold. "Brat," she declared, smacking at Ashley with a dish towel.
"Are you going to watch with us or what, Abbs?" Ashley grabbed a cookie and took a huge bite. From the other room she heard Sarah calling out: Ashley!
She hollered back into the living room. "I said I'll be right back! Geez," she complained with an exasperated smile. "No patience, that one," and Abby laughed.
But then she heard her name again, this time from Lynn, who sounded like she was standing in the kitchen doorway. "Ash."
Ashley's stomach dropped. She knew that tone. It was the same tone she'd heard when she'd got the call that her father had passed away. The same one Shepard had used when he'd gathered the crew to tell them Kaidan had been killed in action.
It was a tone that could mean only one thing: something was very, very wrong.
She turned and found Lynn was indeed just behind them, breathless and wide-eyed, hanging onto the door frame almost as if she needed it for support. Ashley's eyes locked with hers, and that was enough — neither of them said anything else, but they both hurried back into the living room, Abby hot on their heels.
Sarah was turning up the volume on the vidscreen, confused and scared and white as a sheet. There was a still frame of the Normandy displayed in the upper left corner. A handsome and sleekly styled news anchor sat at his desk, fiddling with the earpiece he was half-listening to as he spoke.
"...at this time. For those of you just joining, we are bringing you live coverage of an apparent attack on the SSV Normandy. Just moments ago, a distress signal was broadcast on a wide range of channels indicating that the Normandy has encountered a hostile vessel." Ashley heard bursts of static on another sound feed, interspersed with garbled voices and what sounded to her like alarms in the background.
"We don't have all the details on this, but—" The anchor was interrupted by a voice now cutting clearly through the static: Joker's, which meant the second feed was a broadcast of the voice channel from the Normandy itself.
"....mayday, mayday, this is SSV Normandy. We are under attack by an unknown enemy and taking heavy fire. We have multiple hull breaches and we've suffered major damage to all systems. Any vessels in range please resp—"
Ashley sank down onto the couch as Joker's voice was drowned out by a series of rapid explosions. They quickly died out and were replaced by fire alarms, depressurization warnings, and the far-away screams and shouts of unidentifiable voices.
Her thoughts were whirling, and yet frozen at the same time. She stared at the screen, seeing nothing but what was in her mind's eye: the Normandy's interior being shredded by high-velocity shrapnel, fire raging through the CIC, her fellow crewmates scrambling past it to escape shuttles.
And Shepard. Where was he right now, what was he doing? Surely not evacuating, not yet — she knew him well enough to know that he'd go down with the ship unless he was sure he was leaving no one behind. But if things were as bad as they sounded — was he even still alive? Icy fear surged through her veins just at the thought.
The news anchor kept up a stream of patter that Ashley couldn't concentrate on — not until she heard Shepard's name. She looked back up, dazed, refocusing on the newscast. A disconnected part of her noted that Lynn was sitting next to her, holding her hand.
A photo of a grinning Shepard had appeared on screen in place of the Normandy, and Ashley flashed back to the day of the publicity shoot he'd been forced into by the Alliance brass. The cameras had captured him smiling at her when she'd teased him mercilessly about his sudden celebrity.
"We haven't confirmed yet whether Commander Shepard is on board, we're working on getting that information—"
Sarah looked at Ashley, horrified, as though it had just dawned on her that the catastrophe they were listening to was real, that it meant harm and even death to real people, people that Ashley knew and loved.
"Is he?" she asked in a shaky whisper.
"Yeah," Ashley croaked, and Lynn's hand gripped hers even harder.
The news anchor paused, listening to his earpiece. He blinked hard, then reassumed his mask of professional neutrality. "...all right, we just received word from the Alliance Navy that Commander John Shepard, Savior of the Citadel, is currently on board the Normandy. No word yet on the Commander's condition or situation, we'll continue to bring you details as soon as we have them..."
Then there was another loud burst of static on the Normandy's feed, and the news anchor trailed off to listen. Whether he'd meant to or not, Joker had somehow spliced the ship's internal communications channel into the distress signal he was sending, because there was a cacophony of noise for a few seconds before Garrus's commanding voice cut through all of it.
"Escape shuttle two to all other escape shuttles. Confirm launch and personnel on board."
Somehow Garrus was still solid and in control, and a tiny bit of hope rose in Ashley's heart. Maybe Garrus sounding okay meant everything was okay — maybe the situation wasn't as bad as it seemed, or at the very least everyone had made it to a shuttle safely.
"Shuttle one to shuttle two." Liara this time. "Launch confirmed. I have Tali and Adams with me, and..." she trailed off, voice muffled for a moment before continuing, "Fredericks, Olisa, and Marinescu. Bakari and Chase are dead, I saw them... Garrus, what in Goddess's name just happened?"
"I don't know," Garrus answered grimly. "Worry about that later. We need a headcount. Emerson was down too, and Joker refused to evac. Shuttles three through six, report."
Shuttle four chimed in next, and after that Garrus confirmed his own roster. Every name Ashley heard reported safe was a blessed relief, but still, she fought down a lump in her throat. There were so many names not yet reported, so many people still unaccounted for. Crosby. Gladstone. Tucks, Laflamme, Lowe. Pressly. Joker.
Shepard.
More screams rang out over the Normandy's communications channel, and Sarah covered her mouth with one hand. Ashley's jaw clenched so tightly that she thought her teeth might crack. Liara shouted over the din: "They're coming around for another pass!"
Then there was an ear-splitting racket that could only have been a massive explosion. From the sound of it, Ashley imagined a blast powerful enough to easily destroy the entire ship. The four sisters all made the same sounds of distress as the Normandy crew that were watching the disaster unfold right in front of their eyes.
"Damn!" she heard Garrus swear. "Where's Shepard? Any other shuttles out there, report! Does anyone have Shepard?"
No one answered; suddenly the channel was nothing but low, whispering static and the sound of someone breathing. Even the news anchor was speechless, frozen in place with a datapad in one hand and his eyes looking skyward as he listened hard.
After a few seconds, she heard the soft click of a comm link being activated.
"This is shuttle six," Joker said, and Ashley's heart stopped. Her ears were ringing and she felt like she might throw up — Joker sounded like he was only barely able to hold back tears. His voice was cracked and broken.
"Launch confirmed. I... Shepard came back for me... but he was still..."
Before Joker could go on, before he could say the words Ashley was certain would come, there was a new sound — a loud beeping, some kind of alarm she'd never heard before. Then an electronic voice sounded.
"Suit breach detected."
Ashley went utterly still, staring blankly at the screen, her mind recoiling from what it couldn't bear to acknowledge it was hearing. "Oh my god," she breathed.
And a voice answered her, unmistakably Shepard's, echoing back across the infinite empty black of space. He sounded strained and desperate as he came to the same realization she just had.
"Oh god, no. No, no, please no." He exhaled sharply, then began panting as he started to panic.
Lynn and Sarah clasped hands and began to whisper a prayer. Ashley wrapped her arms around her stomach as though holding herself together. She was rocking back and forth slightly, not even aware of the movement — or of her own prayer, four words she was whimpering over and over as if using any more would make it too much to ask.
"Please, God. Please help him. Please."
She covered her face with her hands and curled up into herself, forehead resting on her knees. More than anything, she didn't want to listen to this, didn't want to hear what was about to happen. But at the same time, there was nothing in the world but this, this broadcast and its hideous sounds.
The sounds of Shepard dying.
First it was Shepard grunting, like he was struggling bodily in the hope that he could somehow find a way to escape this. Shepard hyperventilating, his terror escalating, as his suit told him and the entire galaxy: oxygen level critical. Hollow whistling breaths fading into choking sounds and finally ghastly hiccuping noises as he tried to pull in air that had fled into the void around him.
Then it all stopped... and as intolerable as it had been to hear the sounds of Shepard's last desperate efforts to breathe, it was infinitely worse without them. Ashley choked out a muffled sob and kept praying, hunched over with Lynn rubbing slow circles across her back. Her ears strained hard to hear a word or gasp, a sigh, any sound that might mean this nightmare wasn't real.
But there was only silence.
After half a minute that felt like an eternity, there was a jarring squelch of static over the channel and it finally went dead. The news anchor stammered back to life, working hard to string together words of reassurance that even he seemed to find completely meaningless.
After a while, Ashley sat up, feeling like she was underwater, or maybe the world was moving in slow motion. She couldn't even hear the newscast now, though it played on like nothing had happened. Like reality hadn't become some kind of horror show, completely unfamiliar from anything it had been only a few minutes ago.
Sarah turned to Ashley, fidgeting. "Maybe he's... I mean, maybe that was actually someone else. Or maybe an emergency air supply kicked in, right?" she said, her voice timid. Ashley nodded vacantly. She understood why her sister was making the attempt, but it was clear as day that she was grasping at the very thinnest of straws. Without a doubt, it was Shepard they'd heard, and there had been no emergency air, nothing to pull him through when the worst had happened.
And that was when it hit her — a stab in the chest that left her unable to breathe, a punch in the gut, and she doubled over again. "I should've been there."
Lynn and Abby objected immediately, saying all the right things, that it wasn't her fault and there was nothing she could have done even if she had been there. But there was no point — certainty had settled in and turned her to stone the instant she'd realized the truth.
"I could have backed him up. Saved him. I should've been there for him. And I wasn't." Ashley already knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that her part in Shepard's death was something she would never forgive herself for. She didn't deserve forgiveness, not after she'd failed him when he'd needed her the most.
She stared at the floor, dimly aware that her sisters were all looking at each other over the top of her head. Eventually Abby came over and gently helped her up off the couch, walking her into the bedroom and settling her down on the worn quilt. She heard murmured discussion in the other room as they teamed up to call their father's old military contacts in hopes of getting more information.
She sat back against the pillows, listless, and fired up her omni tool. As she'd expected, the news feeds were inundated with stories of what had just happened. More often than not they were full of what Ashley knew must be baseless speculation: that the Normandy's attackers had been geth, or perhaps it was Cerberus, or maybe some powerful alien race no one had seen before. Wild theories presented as truth claimed that Alliance ships were under threat or even already being attacked galaxy-wide.
And then there were the rumors, page after page of rumors that Shepard had somehow survived, that he was gravely injured but alive, that someone had made contact with him. Those made her heart skip a beat in hope, then sink again when she remembered they couldn't possibly be true. She had just heard Shepard die with her own ears.
At some point, one of her sisters — she wasn't even aware which one — came in and left a cup of tea on the nightstand. After a time that Ashley had no measure of — was it a few minutes? an hour? more? — her omni-tool chimed with a notification. With dread, she opened it and found it was an incoming call. Anderson.
She answered it, permitting the voice channel only; she had no desire to allow Anderson or anyone else to see her reaction to this.
"Williams?" he asked.
Tears finally came and she squeezed her eyes shut against them. Though she had known this was coming and had tried to prepare herself for it, her stomach still dropped the way it always did when she heard that tone in someone's voice. She swallowed hard.
"Yes, sir." Anderson hesitated, and she braced herself just in time for the devastating final blow.
"Ashley... I'm afraid I have some bad news."