theherocomplex:

Xeranthemum- eternity, immortality

********** 

He promises himself that he will not rule the galaxy. He will watch, he will remember, but he will not control. Enough of the man remains to remember life, and all its fleeting joys, and he will not let the god steal those things from anyone else, if they reach for them. 

***

After ten years, he forgets the sound of his own laugh. He barely notices; he did so little of it while he was alive (the memory of Jacob calling him a humorless bastard lasts almost fifty years). 

A century later, assassins catch Liara unshielded in her bedroom. Her death is a messy, agonized one, blood on her lips, a hand pressed to the open artery in her thigh. A perverse end, a wrong end, for someone so organized, and the last word she speaks is his name (the thought that she let them shoot her takes three years to cross his mind, and by then, he cannot remember what Liara looked like). 

A thousand years go by, the space between one breath and the next, and Tuchanka dies. No one knows why or how the mountains cracked open and vomited melted stone and fire onto the cities. A few krogan survive, but this is not the genophage. There is no cure, there is no hope (he does not remember Wrex, or Grunt; he does not remember that once krogan filled the valleys and waited to see if their children would live). 

Twenty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand years pass, and he sheds his memories like a snake sheds an old, outgrown skin. There is nowhere he cannot go, nothing he cannot do, and yet he holds to his inaction, watching, waiting, keeping a promise made by someone he does not know. 

Two hundred seventy thousand and ninety-three years later, long after Commander Shepard and all who knew him are dust and dreams, long after the worlds he walked have been abandoned and rebuilt, the god sees, and feels displeasure. 

No, it says, and stretches out its hand.