Nobody knows. Nobody understands. Nobody can understand – they're not like him. They've never lived the way he has, never stepped from a cycle of abuse to a xenophobic slasher movie to an airport horror novel and come out alive. Let alone lived through three years of the greatest war in fifty thousand years. Truth be told, neither had he; his body walks and talks and eats but his mind is never really there. He's gone… elsewhere, a place where good is as much of a lie as evil, where light and dark blur into shadows and all that's left is the husk of what he used to be. All that's left are the lessons learned in blood.

He was so young, once. Bright and alive and full of promise, and then everything went to hell faster than you could say gangland warfare. He'd lost something that once had value beyond his life – innocence. Innocence and a future. They'd only kept him because he was useful, in so very many ways. That had been his first lesson, the first step in breaking the boy before he ever became a man, taking something before anything could ever grow to replace it. Be useful.

He'd left, of course, left as soon as he could, as soon as the mighty Alliance could whisk away the young man he was pretending to be, the young man who was strangely good at killing and never spoke unless he was spoken to. It was in the military he'd learned his second lesson: nobody looks at no-one. Nobody there noticed him for who he was—or rather, who he wasn't and who he could never be—only what he could do. He was no-one, and so they saw him as a tool, and in many ways that was true. His own body was a tool, a slave to the consciousness that commanded it.

It was at Torfan he'd learned his third lesson. Everyone dies like everyone else. Soldier, civilian, alien, child, when you cut something, it bled. When you put a bullet in the brainpan, everyone goes squish. Dying was so… easy. Humanity was weak, bags of flesh and blood and meat and bone; the only difference between them and a batarian were the two less eyes and the smaller head. The void was always hungry, so easily fed and never, ever sated.

He'd killed so many that day, soldiers by orders, civilians by collateral damage and aliens with whatever he could get his hands on, and by the end he found out he didn't care. He'd retreated beyond his body, entered the battle sleep from which he'd never truly awaken. He'd passed the psych evals so well he'd been forced to retake them twice; they never realised it was just another test. There was always a right answer, and in this one they never asked for working.

So he'd stayed in, more from habit than any desire to be a soldier. More because he killed and he was good at it, because in the military they gave him a gun and a knife and pointed him in the right direction and nobody really cared how the job got done. Not the ones he was doing. N-school had passed in a breeze, in a trained killer and out a trained killer; nothing really changed except for a little badge that somehow meant the fact he could kill everyone in the room before the first one hit the floor was now nothing more than what was expected of him.

He'd returned to Earth once, to a life he'd left behind. When his leave ended and he was called for service again, he'd left seven bodies with bloody slasher smiles—his old calling card—on their chests, carved with the bones he'd sawn off while they were still alive. He'd felt… nothing. Their deaths didn't mean anything; what they'd done had been to someone who no longer existed, and death was such a petty thing – too easy to find, too easy to bring.

He'd learned his fourth lesson at Akuze. The mind broke too easily. It was an ironic lesson—after all, he was already broken—but a lesson all the same. The screams of the dying, the screams of the living, the screams of the beast, burning flesh and acid and dismembered bodies. They never haunted him; there was nothing left to haunt. Nothing left to see.

But even those who had never been there, only heard the mission reports and his flat, emotionless testimony (they'd never asked why he was so monotonous, they'd assumed and they'd all been wrong), even they bore scars and nightmares simply from the monsters in their dreams. Nobody noticed it didn't affect him because he'd never slept well anyway – his body betrayed him even when his mind had left the shell long behind.

Then they'd told him they needed him as a Spectre. That they wanted to take the shattered wreck held up only because it didn't care enough to die, and set it loose with carte blanche across the galaxy as a symbol for humanity. He'd have laughed if he'd found anything funny.

It was in the hunt for Saren that he'd learned his fifth lesson. Always be in control. The turian Spectre had lost his to a faceless, ageless machine god, but Sovereign had lost its to him, lost its minion to a dead man's words and its body to upstart armies. They existed because it allowed them, but it had ended because they'd demanded it.

Then they'd sent him to fight geth, kill the fake enemy while the real one hid in the shadows. He'd have been enraged if he'd particularly cared. Life had no real meaning to him, not his nor anybody else's; the only reason he didn't kill himself was because he was too apathetic to die. Then the universe took care of it for him.

He'd learned his sixth lesson on the suicide mission. Even the dead can feel. He'd looked at her and she'd looked at him and they both knew, knew they were as close to kindred spirits as those without souls can ever be. Her childhood had been worse than his, for she'd been beautiful in ways he could never be. The only difference between them is that, in oh so many ways, her childhood had never left her like he'd left the bodies of his behind.

She'd traded one master for another, had learned to be useful but never learned to be in control. He'd been innocence lost, but nobody had ever given her the chance to be innocent in the first place. And in the darkness they'd hadn't found each other, because found would imply they were looking, that they knew it existed in the first place. In the darkness they were each other, cracked mirrors reflecting the same side of the same coin.

Those who knew what lay under their surfaces hoped that they'd rescue one another, that they'd bring each other back to life. But for those who'd come closest to their own shadows, the turian and the convict and the assassin, they knew the truth. They could tell how this story was going to end. They knew it had never begun.

For all that it lacked a beginning, it had ended at the Collector Base. They'd just defied the Reaper, destroyed an abomination of metal and flesh, synthetics and souls, sent it crashing into the abyss from whence it came. Her omni-tool flashed, revealing the face and voice of her master, the man who wanted to salvage rather than destroy; but the soldier in him was all that was left, and all that soldier knew how to do was kill. So he'd elected to continue with the bomb regardless, and then it happened.

Her master ordered her to stop him. Stockholm overcame saviour. His first and only shot ripped through her chest, reflexes ingrained to never, ever miss.

She collapsed, falling to the floor with none of the grace she'd possessed in life, blood streaming from the hole in her heart like the tears that should have been streaming down his face, except he'd forgotten how to cry long, long ago. But that didn't mean it didn't hurt.

He'd learned the seventh lesson at Bahak, in the melancholy blankness that he'd drifted through ever since that day: revenge is all-consuming. The Reapers had tried to get through, to start their invasion early, and he'd killed three hundred thousand—not that numbers mattered to him, not any more—to deny them that chance. And it hadn't been because he cared for the galaxy, or really anyone (not any more). It had been because they were somebody to blame.

He'd learned the eight lesson, a lesson he thought he'd learned long ago, at the Crucible, speaking to the first true child of the stars. In the end, nothing really matters.

Four choices. Destroy, control, synthesise or abandon.

There'd only really been one choice for him, after all he'd been through, after all the lessons he'd learned and the loss he'd suffered.

Commander Shepard sat back and watched the galaxy burn.