A/N: This is a story based on the events of Mass Effect 3 with the parameters of having had romanced Thane, choosing the Destroy ending, and not having high enough EMS to save Shepard. Aside from that I left details like Shepard's appearances and first name out, since most people have their own Shepard characters they have designed themselves. Note that there is hardly any dialogue- I wanted to experiment with relying almost entirely on descriptions to write a love story. I'd greatly appreciate any feedback anyone has to offer!

First there was suffocation.

Shepard gasped for air as flames engulfed her body. Her gun fell from her hand as everything collapsed around her. She couldn't see anything but fire, and yet at the same time she could see everything.

The cliché of your life flashing before your eyes didn't hold true for Shepard- she didn't want to remember her life in her last moments anyway, her life hadn't been important. Not to her anyway.

What had been important were the faces she saw as her body grew numb and it became harder to breathe as the Citadel collapsed around her. Her friends and her team, people she had helped and people she had lost. Everyone who had ever mattered to her, so many faces…

And one voice… one unmistakable voice that had haunted and soothed her since the moment she had first heard it, calling out to her from far away as she gasped one more time…

And then there was air.

Every thing around her was quiet, and Shepard's body felt impossibly weightless. She opened her eyes for a moment and panicked briefly, she was most definitely underwater. Yet the panic passed quickly when she realized she could still breathe, better than before even. Suddenly it seemed completely natural, despite the fact that she knew it shouldn't.

Shepard let herself suspend in the water for a few moments, taking everything in, piecing everything from the last few minutes together to try and figure out how she had gotten there. It then occurred to her that she should swim to the surface, and she nearly effortlessly began to swim towards the light above her. She must have had been fairly far down, because it took her quite a while to finally break above the waters surface and breathe in the air, the real fresh air which was infinitely more satisfying from whatever she had been breathing moments before.

She looked around her, soaking in her surroundings. For the most part the was only ocean and sky, but about a mile away she could see the shore of what looked like an island or peninsula. There was plenty of foliage and rocks and sand, but other than that it looked otherwise abandoned, at least what she could see of it. Still, it seemed like a better place to be than the middle of the ocean, so Shepard started to swim towards the shore.

Shepard's head was still blurry and disoriented, but she knew she needed to wait until she was on land to try and sort out how she had ended up underwater in the middle of nowhere. Everything was blurry, she couldn't remember what she had been doing before she got here, but she knew that something was very wrong, but her head was spinning and it was hard enough swimming this distance as is without so many thoughts swirling in her head.

She was maybe about twenty feet out from shore now, close enough that she could feel seaweed and other ocean life tickling at her legs, meaning she was close to be able to stand on solid ground.

That's when she saw him.

He hadn't noticed her as of yet, he was sitting on the beach alone in a meditative state. From far away his green tinted skin had helped him blend in with the plant life sprouting up about a yard behind him where the beach's sand started to end. Shepard froze when she saw his soft, familiar features come into sight, and she was almost knocked beneath the surface by the waves.

Suddenly everything came rushing back. The Citadel, destroying the Reapers, the explosion… everything clicked and she understood where she was and how she got there.

Shepard was dead.

She wasn't sure how it had happened; whether it had been from the impact of the explosion or if she had simply bled out from her previous wounds. But whatever had happened, she hadn't survived. And this, this ocean and this island and everything around her, this is what came after. This is where he said he would be waiting for her when the same thing had happened to him. And there he was, just as he had said.

Shepard had never thought much on a heaven or an afterlife. She had grown up never knowing if she believed in that sort of thing, and even as an adult, facing death everyday of her career, she never really dwelled on what would happen when her luck finally ran out and she died. And after having her brush with death before the Lazarus Project reviving her, after actually having been dead and not remembering a thing between her being blown out of her ship and waking up in a cold Cerberus lab- she had just assumed that when you died that was the end.

But in the moments she realized that she had actually gone somewhere after death, somewhere where she could be with the only man she had ever loved, she realized how much she needed to know that there was something waiting for her on the other side, someone waiting for her. The fact that she was dead didn't even phase her in the slightest, because if this was what had been waiting for her on the other side, then she could never be upset about dying.

Shepard wanted to scream out to the figure on the shore, but she couldn't find her voice, so instead she kept swimming towards the land. Eventually she found her footing on the sand beneath her and started running- which proved counter productive seeing as trying to run while chest deep in water and being knocked about by waves is nearly as possible. More than a few times she lost her footing and was knocked about by the waves, ending up with lungs full of seawater (which unfortunately didn't appear to be offering her the same oxygen as when she first found herself submerged in it).

When she was about ten feet away from the edge of the water she was knocked down by a large wave that she had failed to hear coming up behind her. The waves washed over her one more time and she choked up the water that had found it's way into her mouth and nose. She stumbled back to her feet and wiped the tears from her eyes caused by the mixture of salt and sand. She then looked towards the beach once more, and could see the figure was no longer in his meditative state, but had seemed to jolt upright onto his feet upon noticing someone being pushed about in the water.

The two stared at each other for amount, taking each other in. It was the man on the beach who spoke first, in a whisper so low that Shepard should not have been able to hear it from where she was standing, yet seemed to resonate past her and across the entire length of the ocean.

"Siha," was all he said. And then Thane was running from the shore and into the ocean towards Shepard.

Thane was much more graceful than Shepard in the water, he didn't stumble or even seemed phased by the decent sized waves that pushed him back towards the shore. He just kept wading towards Shepard, who was doing her best to struggle to meet him. When they reached each other another wave came up behind Shepard and broke right behind her knees, making her lose her footing once more. She stumbled and fell into Thane's arms, as if the sea had been trying to push them together.

There were no words, only salty kisses that tasted like seawater and tears that made Shepard's head dizzy. There was the strong embrace of Thane's arms around Shepard's waist that occasionally lifted her feet off of the sand. Just two souls who had never loved like they had loved each other, who had saved each other and been the end of each other, and who never thought they would never meet again.

The two refused to part from each other or from that spot, as if fearing the sea would rip them away again if they did. They were content to let themselves become an unmovable force, just another part of the landscape around them. They could melt away into the sea foam and they would have neither cared nor noticed.

Thane was everything solid and real for Shepard. He was the sand on the beach and sky and the feel of the waves the crashed around them. And Thane knew that Shepard was everything that made those things beautiful, the warmth of the sun baked sand and the blue in the sky and the life in the sea. Neither could exist without the other. And if everything was over, if they were to spend an eternity in this ocean away from the world and never to see anyone from their lives again, then at least they were together. Because being together meant being alive, no matter what the reality of the situation may be.