Chapter Text
The war was over and Garrus desperately wanted his rifle.
London’s skeletal remains gnawed on the red maw of sunset and without the towering buildings bisecting the open spaces around him Garrus felt dangerously exposed. His trigger finger jittered and he clenched his hand so tight over it, his untrimmed talons nicked into the unplated flesh of his palm, re-opening barely healed scars.
Kilometers of squat makeshift and pre-fab temporary shelters clustered in the shadows cast by the ribs of shattered skyscrapers, already forming a new, diminutive city beneath the bones of the old. Closer, ringing out from the spaceport, a graveyard of gutted ships had also been repurposed into homes, the smoke of cookfires dissolving into the haze from the hollowed-out cockpits. A group of human children darted around in the winding paths formed by the ships in the thick haze and he wondered darkly if they knew their lives would be lost to this dark gap in civilization, all their future decades spent reconstructing what was lost in victory.
Humans had a phrase for victories that looked like this: pyrrhic. Turians didn't bother with the distinction. To a good turian, victories always came with the expectation of great sacrifice. Only fools expected to win without loss. Only ungrateful fools lingered on the cost.
But he wasn't a good turian. Even in this.
Garrus shuddered, spasms tight-gripped around his throat like a fist, dust clotting on his teeth and tongue. It tasted like death and char— like a pyre.
But the huddled crowds squatting in London's broken corpse weren't mourning. The city brimmed with the sharp, electric crackle of life. Voices bubbled up from the tents and the faint bass of music thumped an insistent tempo in the distance. The children with the lost futures laughed and shrieked gleefully, chasing a black and white ball through jagged chunks of concrete.
She'd smile to see it— a little pained maybe, but still... a smile. He hated the thought as soon as it came to him, nearly as much as he hated these people celebrating her victory as if it didn't cost anything. As if the devastation was over for good instead of still looming, biding its time out in dark space with most of the relays still down from the Crucible's blast.
He'd feel better if he had his Mantis. All the blithe denial of the galaxy's brush with extinction would just be easier to handle with a gun in his hand. An 'illusion of control' was what his recently failed psych eval had called it. Well, he called it damn common sense. Two months since the last Reaper sighting was too soon, much too soon, to be celebrating.
Too bad the Mantis was long gone by now— buried beneath the ruined remains of an upside-down IFV somewhere in the far reaches of this very city. He had a standard issue rifle now, still new in its case, packed away with the rest of his equipment and locked to his psych VI progress.
“Scars! Don't you have your own messed-up planet to fix?” A meaty hand clapped him on the shoulder. “Man, when I was ordered to rendezvous with the turian VIP, I thought they were talking about someone important at least.”
A flicker of his mandibles twisted his mouth into an involuntary grimace. Garrus wrangled it into the weary flatness of the severely put-upon.
“The feeling's mutual. I take it you are the Alliance liaison?”
“Sure am, straight off the Normandy and into a cushy diplomatic gig. Wonder who I impressed when I helped save the galaxy?”
Something about Vega's tone and the way his gaze shifted abruptly said that 'impressed' wasn't the right word. Last Garrus knew, the marine was supposed to begin N7 training after the war. A far cry from escorting washed-up turian military advisors around London.
Vega cleared his throat, awkwardly, and after a beat, asked, “So...do you just want to stand here and enjoy the view or do you want me to show you to your luxurious accommodations?"
The grimace wouldn't smooth out all the way and Garrus stopped trying to help it along. It was a tic with a mind of his own, like the twitch in his trigger finger that wouldn't go away.
Doctors said nerve damage and they might be right, but he had his own theory. He'd known soldiers with amputations and while they waited for their vat-grown limbs or prosthetics to finish developing, they'd described phantom pains and sensations where their missing limbs used to be. That was the closest description to what the tics felt like to Garrus: phantom. Like they were happening to a part of him that wasn't actually there anymore.
After a terse nod from Garrus, Vega started forward and gestured for him to follow. As they walked, he launched into a rundown of the situation in London that Garrus could've just as easily read in the Alliance dossier but saved them both the trouble of talking about something else. Or specifically…someone else.
“The Alliance is running the show here. European Union civil leadership got taken out early in the war and it'll take another year before they sort that mess out and hold elections. While they sit with their thumbs up their asses, these crazy bastards start staking out claims in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Couldn’t let them just sleep in the rubble, anything still structurally sound has been repurposed for military defense operations until we know for sure the Reapers aren’t just taking a breather. So we're doing our best with makeshift shelters."
They drew closer to a vast bridge of an ornate stone architecture: a relic of history juxtaposed against the decimation of humanity. The smoke-stained stone was surprisingly intact, flanked on each side by rubble. A sole survivor. On either side of its carved edifices, water churned in sluggish brown currents and he glimpsed the remains of a burned-out shuttle partially submerged, an Alliance logo bisected by a charred gash through the metal.
Vega stopped to give him a grin.
“You up for a swim or something Scars?” He joked, then paused, brow furrowing. “Can turians even swim?”
Garrus saw her then, clear as day. Eyes bright and her hair mussed as she searched the floor of the skycar for a piece of clothing. Beyond the dark tint of the windows behind her, the distant blue of the Presidium reservoir glinted bright.
"I'd say we should take a dip, but I think I prefer you without water in your lungs."
He didn’t say it, never got the chance, but he loved her best that way—hair matted and messy, the metallic gleam of strands sticking out in odd directions, ruffled by her shirt. Maybe it was a streak of possessiveness on his part. This was the Shepard only he saw: the flush on her neck and face, the moisture dotting her skin between freckles, laughter dancing in the gold flecks of her eyes. Not the hero, just the woman.
He closed his eyes, the wind knocking out of him in a crush so painful it nearly sent him staggering. It was all he could do to stay standing. Couldn't think — couldn't breathe through it or the invisible fist cinching closed over his throat and chest. He just had to let it pass on or let it kill him. Whichever came first.
“No,” Garrus finally said, his subharmonics a strangled croak as he dragged his eyes from the murky water. “No we can’t.”
"Just as well, you'd probably come out glowing." Vega nudged towards the line of the horizon with his chin where a film of blue light radiated off the edge of the city. Straddling the water edge, far in the distance, black smoke billowed. At the base of the smoke, Garrus glimpsed a massive slope of concrete made smaller by the distance: an old nuclear power plant cooling tower, cracked open and spewing out irradiated ash. He flinched, the taste of the pyre still lingering on his tongue.
Vega smiled grimly. "This place will look like Tuchanka if we don't get our act together soon. Don't worry though," he said, eying what was left of Garrus's flinch, "I got some dextro anti-radiation med rations for you."
The London on the other side of the bridge was in much better shape than the London they had just left. The ground had been completely cleared of rubble and a hastily constructed wall stretched far to the left and right of the military checkpoint. Powerful kinetic barriers hummed, low and loud.
Vega waved at the soldier slouching in the armored view box and a second later the massive metal doors before them opened with a bellowing creek.
Identical rows of portable field bunkers formed perfect lines extending off into the far distance. To his immediate left hulked a host of IFVs reflecting the red cast of sunset. The space swarmed with soldiers, platoons of marines performing drills in the vast dirt fields, the expanse of graveled road before them packed with people hustling from one side of the base to the other, puffs of dirt kicked up to thicken the haze.
The air held none of the celebratory energy from the rubble of London. Here it was taut with anticipation, caught in the weighted moment of tension when hell is just about to break loose. It was a balm against the frayed ends of his nerves, stilling the frenetic tics pulling at his fingers and jaw.
This was the way it was supposed to be.
Vega led him the way to a bunker indistinguishable from the others but relatively easy to locate being that it was closest to the wall. It was meant to fit in a few rows of cots, packing a whole unit into a single space. When they stepped inside, there was only his footlocker and gun cases set at the foot of a single cot and a workbench and a terminal.
His browplate shifted upwards, a human expression he picked up at C-Sec and never got rid of.
Vega caught the inquisitive look, gesturing to the vast open space.
“Higher ups figured you'd want the executive suite,” he joked, big white teeth a stark contrast to his tan. When Garrus failed to respond in kind, the smile faltered.
“Jeez Scars, take a joke. Probably thought you didn’t want to be bothered by a bunch of marines while you were calibrating or whatever you do with your free time.”
The dark line of his eyebrows furrowed deeply and Garrus realized that the grating show of humor thus far had all been for his benefit, not Vega's own attempt at normalcy. Embarrassment and anger fused together into a lump of sinking metal in his gut. He nearly snarled for Vega to take the damn jokes elsewhere and find him a new liaison while he was at it. As he opened his mouth a new sensation smothered the rancor in his throat and caught his breath.
Vega, of all people. With the perpetual grin, stupid nicknames, the naïve enthusiasm not yet twisted by war and death into practiced cynicism. The eagerness made him seem younger than he actually was, despite his combat prowess. Garrus had always found himself checking his pessimism whenever Vega was around. And now here was Vega doling out the same protective kid glove treatment to him.
Garrus took a deep breath and it helped but his voice was still jagged. “I could use a drink. You?”
“Technically I’m on duty.”
“Consider hitting up a bar with the ‘turian advisor’ to fall under mission parameters,” Garrus said.
“I’m pretty sure the only bar around here doesn’t have turian beer.”
Garrus strode over to the footlocker, snapping it open to pull out a half-filled bottle of turian liquor. The bottle glowed soft aquamarine, deceptively pretty. It was potent stuff, he sometimes used it in a pinch to dissolve industrial-grade sealant.
“I’ve got that covered.”
The bar was close at least, just outside the wall. But to call the place a bar was like calling the pyjak an intelligent species: it only fit in the loosest of definitions. Rows of bright vending machines formed the walls and the roof was a quilted tarp of silver emergency blankets. A portable generator hummed in a dark corner, providing the energy to power the garish fluorescent designs on the machine walls.
It was packed.
Vega approached the two dented metal bookshelves placed on their sides and covered with a sheet of equally scarred metal, and shouted his two drink order above the din. The crowd shifted, allowing the bartender to open up a vivid panel on the machine and withdraw two dark bottles from the refrigerated racks. Garrus pushed against the surge, finally making his way to the marine.
“Not really what I had in mind,” Garrus shouted.
This was the opposite of taking the edge off. Serving on freighters during his time in the military cured him long ago of any discomfort in closed spaces, but this place was stifling, thick with the scent of unwashed humans and warm, sour beer.
“Just wait,” Vega shouted back, setting one of the drinks— a chipped glass with a finger of whiskey— on the bar top beside him. He clinked the lip of his beer bottle against it ritualistically. A toast with the dead.
Garrus eyed the whiskey as if it were a venomous animal and settled in as far from it as possible before the temptation to snatch it off the bar top and hurl it into the nearest machine won out.
Someone had hooked up a cracked but functional vid screen and perched it on top of two toppled-over vending machines in the corner of the space so that it loomed over the patrons. The sound was off and captioned, the screen showing an Alliance News Network broadcast update. A burly man spoke to screaming crowds packed into a half-crumbling stadium. The humans in the stands were waving handmade signs his heads up display translated as 'No blood for aliens' and various other anti-Council, anti-alien slogans.
"The time for bending over backwards for the Council is over. This is our system. Our food. Our fuel. If they don't like it, they can get the hell out!"
[Thunderous applause] read the caption, and a handful of sideways glances and narrowed eyes from the crowded bar corners drifted from the screen to Garrus and back again.
Garrus ignored them, glancing at the untouched whiskey is if it had the capacity to remark. And then, stupidly, he searched the crowd for her. As if she'd just stepped away from her drink. As if she was coming back any minute, ready to throw nasty glances and probably fists right back at all the side-eyes. He caught himself too late, pain already clamping down on his ribs, his breath a choked sputter against the lip of the bottle as he tipped it back for one long, punishing draw.
After ten agonizing minutes, the place emptied out.
“Curfew,” Vega explained, searching the caches in his armor before finding a silvery blister pack of pills stamped with signs for dextro-chirality and sliding them across the dented bar top towards him. Garrus popped one free and chased it with a swig from the bottle. It burned all the way down.
With the crowds gone, he was able to hear the faint notes of a woman’s husky voice crooning out melancholy lyrics over the sound of mournful instruments spilling from a pair of speakers duct taped to machines nearby. Garrus found the song oddly fitting for a salvaged bar in the ruins of London. Another shot of aquamarine disappeared down his throat, searing the lining of his esophagus and creating a false warmth in his stomach.
He noticed Vega avoided asking what he was doing here, what he was supposed to be advising exactly. Apparently, he'd already assumed Garrus couldn't say. Garrus filed the observation away and tried to get what news he could about the rest of the planetside Normandy crew. Reliable information was hard to come by, given the scant handful of functional comm buoys and a lot had changed in the past month.
“Alenko is busy coordinating colonist refugee evacuations. Lots of people still stranded but it's the same story here as it is everywhere: supply shortages. We're scrambling to find them a place on whatever we can reach by FTL but H3's getting scarce. "
Garrus nodded. Much the same as it was on Palaven. The Trebia, Aralakh, and Parnitha relays were operational days after Sol’s, allowing the fleets to retreat back to their respective home systems. But the Reapers were cunningly efficient in the careful destruction of supply centers and supply lines during the war. What wasn’t already destroyed was now feasibly unobtainable without relay travel. Fuel, food, and raw material shortages abounded; asteroid and planet mining brought to a near standstill; productive colonies cut off in systems with dark relays.
The political clashes occurring over the devastating shortages were only increasing in tenor over the past month and diplomacy was wearing thin. Already, the quarians were threatening to cut off all aid to Palaven without concessions for an embassy and a Council ambassador as a reward for their efforts against the Reapers. Meanwhile, the humans weren't even bothering to fill Udina's Council vacancy, preferring to make relief coordination as difficult as possible.
“Got family in Elysium myself,” The bartender spoke up, looking up at them. “Can’t wait for that damn relay to self-repair.”
Garrus maintained a carefully neutral expression. Not that it mattered, humans generally couldn't read turian expressions well enough to tell neutral from anything else.
Vega just drained the rest of his beer in a long, gulping draw. “This isn’t bad Malone, where’d you find this stuff?”
“Alliance still hasn’t tracked where those radiation spikes in the sensor data came from?” Garrus asked the bartender. In his experience, bartenders were always good intel sources and old C-Sec habits died hard.
“They're saying it was a burst of energy from the relay itself and not ships like the data first suggested.”
Garrus leaned forward on the scratched metal bar top. “Really,” he said, catching Vega's skeptical glance. “That’s interesting.”
He had a hunch that whatever Hackett’s request to meet was for, it had something to do with the shroud of mystery surrounding the ‘self-repairing’ relays and the ghostly echo of radiation along with the last known Reaper sighting, right here in Sol. By EDI’s and the hierarchy's analysis, the thermal signatures indicated multiple sources. Dreadnought-class drive core sources. Reaper cores. Which shot to hell whatever information the Alliance was publicly propagating about miraculous self-repairing relays.
“We should head back Scars. Some of us have to be up at the crack of dawn" Vega downed the rest of his beer and gave the untouched whiskey a solemn nod before turning away. "Cheers, Lola.”
The grimace cut across Garrus's mandibles like a serrated knife.
They walked back in silence. The acidic burn of the alcohol lingered with none of its relaxing haziness. This was a disturbing revelation given that he'd finished off the bottle. He'd never been one to fall into drinking. Too much of a stereotype: the washed-up C-Sec officer hanging around seedy clubs and staring blearily into the bottom of an empty glass. Any minute now, a human soldier would march up and tell him to get his act together and stop moping—he'd been too hard on Oraka in hindsight.
Vega stopped without warning, chin tipped up, eyes on the distant object fixed in the night sky. Through the haze, pinpoints of light bloomed into a pattern too regular to be natural. Earth’s newest satellite.
The Citadel.
Another thing stranded in the Sol system. Another thing reaped, another corpse heaped up onto London's desolate horizon.
Garrus looked away almost immediately, blinking back afterimages of red and heat.
"Heard repairs were going well. Better than here. Wish we had some keepers planetside." Vega said.
Garrus heard more than half of the station's occupants were missing, presumed dead, and the other half was dealing with radiation sickness so bad, they'd be on meds for the rest of their shortened lives. Garrus kept walking. Fast.
“So we going to talk about what you're doing here, Scars?” Vega asked his back. "What about Palaven? Heard the food shortages are getting bad."
Garrus stopped. Truth was, he didn’t have a good answer. The last place he wanted to be was on Earth with the Citadel looming in the sky. Getting the relays up and running again to save his species from starvation— that was the objective and the answer to the question of what to do with a washed-up, newly alcoholic Reaper advisor with dismal psych evals and nerve damage. But that was the question Victus was asking, not him, and he wasn’t about to tell anyone the truth about what questions he was asking himself.
The truth was something he hid deep in his bones, away from the scrutiny of reality and better judgement. The truth was hope that only a fool could entertain, buried in his marrow with the vehement denial of that metal plaque fixed on the memorial wall on the Normandy and that untouched whiskey glass back at the bar.
Was it possible? A victory without sacrifice. At least— a victory without her sacrifice. It didn’t make any sense, but…a galaxy without Shepard made even less sense. Denial, his psych VI would call it. And maybe he was a fool but what the hell did that thing know anyway? What did a few shoddy lines of code know about Commander Shepard?
He knew her. He knew the freckle at the base of her thumb, her crooked smile, her terrible dancing, her bad jokes, the way she liked her coffee, the way she muttered in her sleep, and a hundred other small, mundane things that piled up into Shepard. The woman who returned from the dead and stormed in with those mercs on Omega to save his life and then save the galaxy. Again.
She always made him ask impossible things. She was the kind of person who could change the definition of what victory meant to a turian.
“Just can’t shake the feeling that there’s more left to do,” he finally said, glancing back at Vega over his cowl.
“Still stuck trying to save the galaxy huh?”
The tic snared in his mandibles. Saving the galaxy: a routine of heroism ingrained by habit. Ex-C-Sec, former military, failed vigilante, an advisor to an enemy that had vanished into dark space. There was a time when he'd talked about an early retirement after the war was over. But those plans were always dependent on her and now she was gone and they'd gone with her.
Besides being a fool, what was left of him except habit? What was left outside of a collective of severed nerve bundles pantomiming the last action they remembered before an explosive blast seared through his hardsuit?
It was the kind of question he avoided asking himself lately. Introspection left him in the same dark tunnels of his mind and it was harder and harder to find his way out the more he wandered down them.
"Well hey, Scars, its good to see you here...because I'm pretty sure you're right."
Once he was alone in the bunker, Garrus set himself to the task of checking the private messages that awaited him. With comm buoys down, communication with Palaven would be spotty, arriving sporadically with whatever courier ship would take on the data to ferry through the relays before transmitting on lightspeed tightbeam. Not that there would be any messages from Palaven worth couriering—just missed appointment reminders with his doctors, and a thousand requests for help that he lacked the expertise and the ability to give. But nothing from Solana, nothing from his dad or anyone else stranded in a system gone dark.
Garrus did, however, already have a few messages from people in Sol system. Most were from the new turian councilor begging him to use some of connections with the quarian admiralty board to negotiate more dextro rations. He scowled, deleting the message. He had no intention of entangling himself further within trade politics no matter how far he had moved up through the gaping vacancies in the meritocracy. Besides, Tali had was already doing everything she could for them. Him harassing her for more wouldn't change that.
Garrus,
Won’t be able to make it. Salarian delegation tracked in some new contaminant. Spiked a fever. Nothing serious.
Eat something,
Tali
His frown deepened. There was no doubt in his mind that it was, in fact, more serious than Tali let on. Anything really minor and she would already be on Earth, sniffles and all.
On his wrist, his omni-tool blinked, a flickering appointment reminder with his grief counseling VI program. Not a voluntary install.
"Good evening Mr. Vakarian. How is your progress on what we discussed before on modulating your alcohol intake?"
He glanced at the empty bottle, still where he left it by the edge of his footlocker. "Well enough."
"That is excellent news. Do you feel that you are ready to continue our discussion about the last moments with--"
He groaned and powered off his omni-tool and flicked the terminal back on to read over the forensic report again. It was detached and clinical, incongruous phrases like ‘incineration thresholds’ and 'inconclusive scorching patterns' attempting to apply logic to something that belonged more in the realm of mystical. Vanished, without a trace, the recording of her last known words on the comm trailing off into pained breaths—an ellipses where a period should be.
This morning he had looked out at the wreckage of London framed by the shuttle door and turned on instinct to say something to her, something comforting and reassuring, to the spot where Shepard should be but wasn’t. No wry twist of lips, no flutter of cropped hair, just a gap in the universe that swallowed him whole.
Mud squelches into the spaces between her toes as she wriggles them deeper into the cool earth. Star-bright air glows between the gaps in the trees, crescents of silver forming intricate patterns on the shadowed ground. It smells like fading summer, the sharp green notes of warm grass and melting cherry popsicles mellowing into the promise of crisp leaves underfoot and the start of the new school year. She senses these moments are slipping out of her fingertips faster and faster: nights sneaking into the reservoir after 10:00 when it finally got dark, dares and games, bare knees scabbed over.
A pebble bites into her heel but she doesn’t stop. Air streams around her body and she can almost feel it lift her off the ground, she’s running so fast.
Her lungs expand and fill with wind-whipped oxygen, it circulates through her veins, effervescent and heady like soda fizz.
A vista of soy fields meets the edge of blue, two hemispheres welded together in the distance. Grass pillows her fall and she gulps down huge drafts of summer sky.
Underneath her back, she imagines she feels the vast movement of the planet, Mindoir’s tectonic plates shifting below, muffled and rumbling echoes dwarfing her very existence. Above her, the dome of sky and stars stretches on forever.
The world tips and she falls into an infinite sea of stars.
She falls and dissolves into ripples of spacetime.