"Is this the end of yesterday?"

It ends like this:

"Security status red."

Detonations of explosives. The Geoscape flickering wildly as the power goes out. Bradford's face ashen on the other side of the room. Red lights tinging everything the exact color of blood. Delta Section's terrified radio calls before all communications cease. Shen's lab goes dark. Vahlen's lab goes dark.

Orbital bombardment. Consoles sparking, falling, breaking. Doors crumpling under an onslaught of things you don't have a name for yet. ("Mutons," Bradford tells you twenty years and a lifetime later.) You, swept aside like a ragdoll in a dog's jaws. Steel bulkhead cold against the small of your back. The world goes dark.

Cold metal on your tongue and an alien face smiling cruelly down at you and a ringing pain in your head and blood in your throat and

welcome home commander

we have need of you

you will help us

they surrender. you see it through a pair of eyes in the crowd that are not your own. you see the years go by through countless eyes in skulls that are not human, will never be human, will never be yours.

they celebrate every time it passes and you watch it. you are there. it slips through you like sand through a sieve but you see it.

you serve.

you serve your purpose. nothing more.

until one too many goes by.

you will-

You wake to faces you don't know, voices you can barely recognize. You bury the memories below a uniform and a layer of liquor and the sting of cordite on the air. You bury it with the memory of new faces. You bury it with every autopsy Tygan performs, with every Resistance haven you shield, with every glass knocked back with Bradford, with every name on the Wall.

It begins like this:

"Welcome back, Commander."