A/N: This was written for the ME Kink Meme, with the prompt requesting a story to go with this picture: i dot imgur dot com/OlGlR dot jpg

Thank you to the incredibly quick Josie Lange for the super speedy beta extraordinaire! You're the best!

He should have been the one to find her first.

It should have been his hands, sore and battered and cramping; his gloves worn through from digging his fingers into the jagged crevices of stone and metal.

Instead, it had been a troop of Alliance soldiers that had found her, that had seen the unmistakable bands of red and white on the forearm that had protruded through a gap in the debris like a flag raised in victory or surrender. They had unburied her, dismantled her tomb, before he'd even been told she'd been found. He suspected it was Hackett's doing that he was even here now.

They picked their way through the twisted wreckage of buildings and vehicles, bodies of every race still unclaimed and scattered in the streets, as another band of nameless soldiers led him unknowingly through the same route he and Shepard and Liara had taken; fitting, for a pilgrimage. The stench of blood and eezo, smoke and scorched electronics permeated the humid air; a rank dampness that clung in his nostrils and he could taste on his tongue.

They stopped, not far from the place where he'd limped from the shuttle, disobeying her orders as she must have known he would. As a unit, they fell silent—all eyes fixed on the same place just ahead—and he acknowledged their presence with the barest of nods.

He would go on alone from here.

The sound of his own breathing was loud in his ears—amplified by the respiration masks they all wore to protect their lungs from the dust and chemical fires that were still raging in other parts of the city—and it was broken only by crunch of spent heat sinks and grit beneath his boots. The rubble in this area was unassuming; another wound on the battered landscape. It took him a moment to spot where some of the rock had been heaved aside.

Each step he took was more hollow than the last; the sound of his footsteps thundering in counterpoint to the shallow rasp of his breathing.

He didn't falter, didn't hesitate. A good turian in some things after all.

He'd known there was no chance that the Alliance had been mistaken, but the sight of her body, curled up and seeming smaller than he remembered, drove a sharp stab of despair through him all the same. Her armour was dented, twisted, even charred in places. Her left arm was missing below the elbow. One of her boots was gone, her leg splayed at an unnatural angle. He catalogued each injury with a detachment he hadn't known he'd possessed; standing outside himself as his spirit roared with grief.

Crouching down, he tried to carefully brush the hair away from her eyes—they were mercifully closed; had they been open and lifeless when the soldiers had found her?—but the strands had adhered to her cheek and they didn't move. He stripped off his gloves and ran a talon over the wrongness of her skin; too cold, too grey.

She was gone, to a place he couldn't follow.

Again.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. They'd won. The Reapers were destroyed, enough of the galaxy had survived; they—asari, turians, humans, quarians, and all the others— were already beginning to assess and plan, to rebuild… shaping the future he and Shepard were supposed to have. Together.

With a painstaking slowness, he lifted her in his arms and gathered her to his chest; cradling the cool, heavy stiffness of her body to his warm, living one. He held her close, letting his forehead drop down to rest against her matted hair as his subharmonics finally broke in a sharp keening cry that shattered the stillness. It would have been easier if he'd been angry, if he'd wanted an enemy to fight, but there was nothing inside him but emptiness; a ruined landscape where his heart should have been.

They'd won, he tried to tell himself as wet drops of rain, tinged black with soot and ash, began to fall from the Reaper-less sky.

They'd won.

Love is not a victory march

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

~ Leonard Cohen