When Shepard was Twenty-Two, he made a mistake.

And it was a mistake, regardless of how much it was necessary at the time. Regardless of how much he regretted it and how well he knew that, if he were able to turn back the clock and stand there again, he would make the same exact mistake, every single time.

He was young, and foolish, and idealistic. He was ruthless and patriotic and, truthfully, a little insane. He was perfect, the perfect pawn and the most dangerous enemy. If he were to make it to adulthood, he would undoubtably become a hero, a paragon of humanity, and one who would join the ranks of those who made their mark on history.

If.

Now he is laying on the rubble of a destroyed building on Elysium, four eyed aliens hurting and pillaging and enslaving and destroying—

He takes a breath, wondering if it would be his last, a wet cough escaping his lips, and a hand clutching at his bloody chest. He is dying, and everyone is dying, and it is just so goddamn unfair—

He blinks, and reality shifts, and in front of him is a goddess.

She offers him a deal.

And, like a fool, he accepts.

-(-)-

They call him a hero. A one-man army that saved countless lives on Elysium. They sing his praises, and erect statues, and give him the greatest awards a soldier can receive.

Not long after, they call him a villain. A cruel man, who used humans like pawns and slaughtered innocents. They spit on his name and tear down his statues.

He finds it curious and strange how quickly their views shift, how fast they are to call him a hero and a villain in the same breath. Some say he has gone insane, that Elysium broke him. They aren't right, but they aren't completely wrong either.

They send him to therapy, and then he is taken out, as the therapists find nothing wrong. He is not psychotic or broken or any form of insane. And then they send him back, and he is released again. And again, and again, desperate to find something, for something to come up and prove that he is twisted and tortured, so they can prop him up as a fallen hero, taking him off of active service and letting him fade away, a local legend that never really got anywhere.

He doesn't, of course. She wouldn't have chosen a madman as her champion, as her guardian, and no matter how tedious and annoying and terrifyingly accurate it gets, he takes to heart his new duty, his new job as humanity's protector, and doesn't allow himself to break.

Eventually they give up, handing his psychological reports off to the ship's medic and letting him return to active service full time.

-(-)-

He has a perfect service record, as if he would let himself have anything less, and soon enough he finds himself a Commander of a ship and a Spectre for the Citadel.

He finds that he can't bring himself to care about the Spectre assignment, about being under the thumb of an alien government.

Still, it is good that he now has free reign over the galaxy, immune to any law so long as he can justify his actions. It will definitely help him in hunting down Saren.

There are many things that happen in his journey, many twists and turns and annoying plant creatures, but what he feels is most surprising are the aliens.

He was not xenophobic, despite what the media liked to make out, but he also wasn't exactly the biggest fan of aliens either. He was a champion of humanity, a guardian of humanity, and before that aliens had only been involved in that deal when he had to kill them. As such, why should he care about them?

But it is when he is staring down the enraged Krogan, talking Wrex down before either of them make a mistake they would regret, that he realizes that he doesn't want these aliens to die. That he wants to keep Wrex and Liara and Tali and Garrus alive and his mind nearly breaks then and there as he realizes that guardian of humanity does not equal enemy of everything else.

So when he tells Wrex that he will do everything in his power to undo the Genophage, he is surprised to find himself telling the truth.

-(-)-

He is dying, again.

His suit is pierced, leaking air, and he finds himself drifting closer and closer to the planet behind him. Above (beside? Near? Directions are so very confusing in space) is the remnants of the Normandy, torn apart from the alien craft.

He will not die, though. Not permanently. He will die and then he will live again, an eternal guardian angel of humanity, protecting it from those that would harm it. He would live again, forever.

None of that crosses his mind, panicking and screaming and shuddering. The only thing that repeats in his mind is—

I don't want to die!

Unfortunately, the world isn't as kind a second time, and in the black void of space, Commander John Shepard dies.

-(-)-

He wonders if he should have questioned, more, when the world offered him a deal. If he should have asked what he would be doing as guardian of humanity, what he would be doing as a Counter Guardian.

A dozen people die, their corpses fall in front of him as he guns them down, slaver and slave alike. They don't fight back, not after they see their bullets bounce off his skin, the mortal weapons unable to harm him. He chases after them, his immortal body faster than even the biotics can warp away.

It's not that he didn't understand he would have to kill people. He was a soldier, and before that a street urchin gang member. There wasn't any point in his life that he believed he could get away from the death and violence.

A young girl can't even cry before the bullet pierces through her head, the girl who had been enslaved not a month ago cut down by Counter Guardian SHEPARD.

But, still, even if he had never been overly concerned with killing enemies before…

He stepped over more bodies, his own feet careless of how they squished beneath his boots.

It hurt a lot more than he thought it would.

-(-)-

He met his coworkers, occasionally, the others who had accepted their own deal with the world.

He met EMIYA, a grouchy old man who seemed to both hate and resign himself to his duties with equal measure, and yet was the most talkative of them all.

He met KIRITSUGU, a silent man(?) who never spoke, to the point SHEPARD wondered if the man had long since broken. He didn't dwell on that, much, because he feared that he might one day be the same.

He met OKITA, a tired woman who always seemed to be sleeping, before jerking awake once she realized she was being watched.

He met ARC, the most hopeful woman he had ever met, who still tried to be a hero even with the grisly nature of their existence. (They were like white blood cells, EMIYA had once argued, beings which existed only to purge harmful bacteria, but with no way to tell the good from the bad. There was no room for 'Heroism' in such a line of work).

He met ALTER, who reminded him of a broken and run down EMIYA, and who seemed to take a bit too much pleasure in his job.

And he met PENDRAGON, a truly broken woman, who spent most of her time leaning on EMIYA in his world, as if his presence was the only thing left that gave her comfort.

There were seven of them in this reality, he had been told, seven GUARDIANs and seven BEASTs. It was an unspoken rule, between Gaia and Alaya. Anymore would risk destroying the world they attempted to save.

Still, the conflict between Humanity and the Earth (which, while not something he expected, wasn't to terribly surprising either), had long simmered down to a cold war as humanity began taking better care of their planet, and the world in kind stopped trying to obliterate them.

(He was incredibly glad for this. While he did find apostle hunts the most pleasing part of his job, he had no desire to battle a BEAST any time soon).

-(-)-

SHEPARD found himself on a small human colony, slaughtering some of the ugliest aliens he had ever laid eyes on. And he had led a team with a Krogan.

Oh, he was pretty sure they were the Collectors, though he wasn't certain about that. He had never seen a Collector, after all, but he felt it was a fair assumption. Another him was purging a slaver's den across the galaxy, while another him was burning through the Shadow Broker's contacts, searching for the illusive alien.

Alaya had gotten a lot more active, recently, and that worried him. It worried all of them.

Somewhere (32 meters at 42 degrees from his front) was ARC, protecting the frozen humans from the bug-like aliens, while he slaughtered them by the dozens.

He turned his rifle to the ship, the weapon a pseudo-Noble Phantasm in its own right, and fired. The ship was gone before the bullet reached, leaving the planet with enough force to glass the colony if ARC hadn't raised her flag.

He knew that would happen. No matter how many times they reset, retried, and tried on a different colony, they could never destroy the ship. The moment they showed up it already began to leave, abandoning its Collectors on the planet below, and if they tried to get there early and wait for it, it wouldn't even land in the first place.

It was as if they were aware of the GUARDIAN's existence, and went out of their way to avoid it.

And he pondered that, even as he set off the colony's distress beacon, and ARC and SHEPARD were returned to the Throne.

-(-)-

Alaya used each GUARDIAN in a different way, depending on the situation. It was rare for her to need to summon more than one at a time, and even rarer to have to pull from other worlds to fight any threat. So hypothetically speaking, each different GUARDIAN was used against different threats.

SHEPARD was used mostly against aliens, deploying during and after the First Contact War. Alaya was humanity, all of it, from the worst to the best. It knew everything and was, in a sense, omnipotent. Sort of. It knew everything a human knew, but if no humans knew about it, then it could not plan against it. Humanity barely knew anything about the TYPES, which was an endless blind spot, but at least SHEPARD was good to counter the more modern, weaker aliens.

PENDRAGON was a panic button, more or less. She was only deployed when pure destruction was needed, to blow something away in an instant. There was nothing righteous about her use, and the [DATA CORRUPTED] King knew that well.

KIRITSUGU was an assassin. He was mostly used against a single person. A genocidal maniac, a too corrupt politician, an average joe who might become president and nuke a foreign country. He killed them swiftly and efficiently and moved on to the next job.

ARC was used for protection, which was probably how she could keep smiling. She raised her flag to protect the important people, those who absolutely could not die, and kept them alive, even if they didn't know it. Apparently, her flag had protected him until it couldn't anymore, when he suffocated in the empty void.

OKITA was used as a scout, finding problems Alaya didn't know of and assessing its strength. If it was too strong for her or couldn't be beaten by brute force, the timeline was reset, and a more appropriate GUARDIAN would be sent.

EMIYA and ALTER were more general use, killing everyone and everything Alaya thought needed killing. EMIYA had apparently been remembered as Mt. Vesuvius when he destroyed Pompeii, and ALTER had ended the Bronze Age before humanity could kill Gaia early.

(Still, even with their different uses and ideals, he found it somewhat funny all of the Guardians wore the same color scheme. Black and red, the colors of humanity's guardians. EMIYA hadn't found it nearly as funny, but he was generally considered to be a wet blanket amongst wet blankets, so his opinion didn't count.)

-(-)-

SHEPARD shuddered, his eyes snapping open as he was knocked out of his brooding. (All Counter Guardians brooded; it was essentially their national pastime). He was laying on the blank screen of the galaxy map on the deck of the empty Normandy, the world created by his conscious for him to reside in.

It felt like he was being summoned. But… not. A summoning was quick, instant even, and efficient. This was long, and drawn out, and honestly rather painful.

So, this was not a summoning. But what else could it be?

Alaya was possessive of her GUARDIANs. There was no retirement, and no being could steal one without facing the wrath of all the others.

So, what was this?

It turned out he had quite a while to wonder, as the 'summoning' continued, dragging on so long that even his messed-up timeframe understood it had been a very long time.

And then the pain increased ten-fold, and Alaya was in front of him, her tendrils digging into him.

But he did not feel rage or possessiveness from the World. No, he only felt smug satisfaction, as if a hundred thousand years of planning had just paid off.

And then the summoning completed, and SHEPARD knew no more.

-(-)-

John Shepard gasped, waking up as if from a fever dream, his body covered in sweat and his mind everywhere at once.

And even as he was once more sedated and blacked out, Alaya's smug satisfaction echoed through him.