Aut Veniam Viam Aut Faciam
Title: Aut Veniam Viam Aut Faciam
Summary: Left behind on Earth when the Alliance fled, Reynolds is left without an exit strategy, without any idea of how to fight Reapers and, worst of all, without his team. Fortunately, N7s are good at making do with whatever they can find.
Fandom: Mass Effect
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Death, violence, some swearing, mild spoilers and shameless reinterpretation of canon.
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Captain Cole Reynolds, formerly of the N7 31st Assault Unit, had never expected to ride out the apocalypse 90ft under ground in a bunker just south of Bath.
Mind you, he'd never been all that good at the whole planning ahead thing. He'd always been meaning to work on that, but he supposed that now it would have to wait until after the apocalypse.
Assuming there was an after, of course.
And he should have known better than to volunteer for this sort of operation. A Scott Freeman operation. Not that he had anything against Freeman, far from it, but the man was almost as crazy as Shepard and that was saying something these days. Freeman had been convinced - which really meant that Shepard had been convinced, they all knew that - that the Reapers would hit Earth. And they’d all known that there would be no help for Earth before the Reapers were already there, before the death count was the highest it had ever been in the history of their race.
So someone, somewhere, had allowed Freeman to convince them to embed N7 operatives over all Earth. Not all the N7s, not even half; there would be a war to fight out there in the black as well, and Reynolds could understand that even as he hated and loathed the idea of being the only N7 operative in all of Great Britain. All over the world, so far apart that they’d never meet, N7 operatives sealed themselves away and waited for the Reapers to roll across Earth.
Reynolds spent almost a month in his bunker. It wasn’t on any official plans, didn’t feature on any maps. No civilians came to the entrance to escape the initial scorching of England and Reynolds was stupidly grateful for that. Hearing the desperation over the radio was bad enough; hearing people beating on a door he couldn’t open would have been so much worse. For days, all he could do was listen to the radio, recording all the intel that seemed at all useful. He noted when cities stopped transmitting anything at all, which cities had gone dark. It wasn’t the N7 way, to sit in the dark and listen as a civilisation burnt, to take notes while Alliance civilians fought and died for their homes, their families, their lives. He trashed the room that was really his prison when the radio finally went dead. A thousand channels of static and silence was somehow so much worse than the screams had been.
When the door finally rolled open again, Reynolds allowed himself a whole two minutes to think about the reality of what he was about to do. It was commonly thought that any N7 operative could start, fight and win a war single-handed, but this was different. This, when you came right down to it, wasn’t a war. This was the eradication of the entirety of galactic civilisation, starting right here on the human homeworld. He had no backup and no exit strategy. He didn’t even have a plan beyond the basic idea of keeping himself alive and maybe finding a way to kick a Reaper in the teeth.
Did Reapers even have teeth?
Well, there was one way to find out, he supposed. And so Reynolds strapped his guns to his back, around the hefty survival pack he’d spent the last four week packing and repacking, and headed out into whatever remained of England.
“They are definitely not paying me enough for this,” he muttered when he stepped out of his little shelter and first saw the smoking ruins of Bath.
And then he settled his rifle in his arms and headed out, trying not to be too concerned about the whole talking-to-himself thing. The easiest way to solve it would be to find someone to talk to, and finding a new team was top of the list.
Admittedly, the task of building a team would have been a lot easier if the Reapers hadn't been quite so good at wiping military bases off the map. Or if the marines not initially killed hadn't been quite so eager to fight to the last man long before Reynolds was able to recruit them. It wasn't as if Earth had been overflowing with potential candidates for a crash-course in N7 insanity before the apparent decimation of the population.
The first humans he found after leaving the bunker were very nearly perfect. Two women, clearly survivors as shown by their continued existence, both grim-faced and suitably distrusting when they first met. But they'd already found a mission of their own. Well, eight missions, really. Eight kids, not one of them old enough to hold their own gun, probably all from different families.
Reynolds couldn't make himself take them away from that. He sure as hell couldn't have made either woman leave. And, fortunately for everyone involved, he was smart enough not to try.
The first soldier he found bled out in his arms, caught firmly in delirium and begging to see his wife again. Reynolds lied as best he could, recorded the man’s ID codes when he passed and headed on. He could tell himself that there had been no way to bury the poor bastard, but he'd never been all that great at lying to himself.
He didn't find the second, third or fourth soldier; he heard them over a shortwave radio. Transmissions were dangerous these days, more likely to bring a Reaper down on top of the broadcaster than to reach a friendly ear. People were still risking it, on and off through the long hours. The pleas for help had mostly stopped after the first week, once those still standing had come to the harsh realisation that there was no one left to help them, and now almost all of the transmissions were more focused on helping others. Some of the messages were warnings, places to avoid, tactics that didn't work. There had been others, some attempts to rally survivors, but after three safehavens were crushed mere hours after being mentioned on the airwaves, almost all such transmissions had stopped. Reynolds' mystery soldiers had been reporting the loss of all weapons' caches along England's east coast; Reynolds adjusted his plans accordingly and kept walking.
Fighting Reapers was the main goal, that was never going to change, but Reynolds had long since decided that discretion was the better part of valour when it came to dealing with sentient ships large enough to rival Asari Dreadnoughts. But Reapers weren't the only problem. Their groundtroops were numerous, unpredictable and creepy as hell.
(Assuming he survived this long enough to tell anyone about it, Reynolds wasn't sure he'd ever admit that he was taking most of his cues from old zombie survival games. He couldn't deny that the basic principles worked; slow, steady, hoard supplies, try not to draw the attention of one in case you drew the attention of them all.)
And in the end, his first recruit found him.
There'd been some unholy mix of husks and civilians, followed by a gut wound that he should have been able to avoid, would’ve been able to avoid easily if he’d had just one half-way decent person at his back. Reynolds still wasn't entirely sure how Rob had found him, but he wasn't about to complain about a GP with surprising survival skills who'd been in just the right place at more or less the right time to stop him dying of infection.
Of course, there were probably better ways to make friends than by punching them, but Reynolds had never reacted well to people looming over him. Fortunately, Rob didn't seem to hold grudges over silly little things like black eyes. And, just like that, Reynolds had his very own medic.
There were plenty of days when it was weird and awkward, Reynolds too used to silence and Rob too used to never seeing the same person twice, but they finally settled into something, some arrangement that worked and even, on occasion, worked well. Reynolds never asked Rob how he’d survived, and Rob seemed too glad of any military presence - even a singular military presence - to question it.
Rob solved plenty of problems, most of them medicinal, but there were always more problems. And there were some problems that you really needed to solve with marines.
Mark and Jackson were a pair long before Reynolds found them; he could tell by the easy way they worked together, how they seemingly communicated without words. Later, he'd learn that Jackson rarely spoke, not mute or traumatized, but very selective in his speech, almost as if he could run out of words if he used them too carelessly. Mark had the look of a boy who'd had to grow up far too fast, barely out of basic when the Reapers hit and totally unprepared for the realities of war, let alone a war on Earth which was really the extinction of their own race.
Reynolds wondered, sometimes, if Mark had ever frozen up. If maybe Jackson didn't talk much because for a while there had been no response. It happened to some recruits, after all. Psych profiles and training could weed out some of those who were totally unsuited to warfare, but ultimately the only way to know was to throw a kid into their first real battle and see what they did. If it had ever happened, Mark had been well over it by the time he’d calmly shot the husk trying to eat Rob’s face.
That little incident had been more than enough for Reynolds to accept the two marines. They fell into place a lot easier than Rob. The shared military training and experience got them pretty far; Jackson’s respect for the red stripe on Reynolds’ arm got them slightly further.
And finally they found Addie.
He knew exactly how they’d met Addie; her attempt to claw out Jackson’s eyes was almost a fond memory. The reasons for keeping her were slightly murkier. There had been very clear reasons for keeping Rob, for keeping Jackson and Mark. But Addie had been a student before all this had started, some sort of arts’ or literature course, nothing practical, had no military training or medical skills, no computer skills beyond whatever you needed to find ebooks in this day and age.
But she’d survived, which was perhaps the only qualification that mattered anymore. She could fight well enough and she was hands-down one of the most inventive fighters Reynolds had ever seen outside of special-forces group. Clearly the gun had been a late acquisition, if the way she used a shovel to damn-near decapitate a husk was anything to go by.
And so Reynolds found himself a team.
The next step was figuring out what the fuck to do with them.