Pehesse wrote...
Original post from the topic "Shepard vs Harbinger"
Well, this took way longer than I expected. I could play forever with those colour settings...
So, in celebration of the newly annouced "extended endings", here's a little take on what I thought (hoped ?) would happen at the end of my Shepard's journey.

This picture fits my personal alternate ending pretty well: instead of allowing Harbinger to play shooting ducks with soldiers who stupidly charge at the conduit beam across a wide open plane, I'd have Shepard and her crew engage in a wild cat-and-mouse chase with Harbinger that takes them all across the ruined city, always barely one step ahead of the Reaper's deadly rays.
It'd still be a gradual losing battle for Shepard and her companions, especially when Harbinger finally manages to overwhelm the minds of the team mates and has them pin the commander to the wall, mouthing: "It's over, Shepard."
It's in this moment of seeming despair that Shepard starts to laugh, at first inexplicably - but then we hear a muffled voice in her earpiece, repeating: "Mission accomplished, repeat: mission accomplished. The crucible is docked and armed. Firing in three, two,one..."
The whole chase was a diversion for a covert infiltration team (headed by Kasumi, maybe?), and as Harbinger was so obsessed with Shepard, she was the perfect bait. The Crucible (more akin to a huge anti-reaper emp employing the citadel and the relay network to broadcast its pulse in this version) incapacitates the Reapers and disables their shields, allowing the Alliance to take them down and sowing confusion in the ranks of the enemy. Joker has the special honour of taking down a dazed Harbinger with the Normandy's thanix cannon while Shepard and her friends watch from the ruins.