Mass Effect 1. Prologue: Exiled

**A/N:**

So. Just a few things you should probably know...

1) *Here there be spoilers!* for all three ME games and all DLC. Ye have been warned! Also, Rated T for violence, some adult themes, etc.

2) The plan is for regular updates (most weekdays). The final story will be 23 chapters, plus the prologue and epilogue. Sequels are entirely dependent on the interest level from all you fine folks, so do let me know. Reviews are always greatly appreciated!

3) This follows the Synthesis ending of ME3. It is my earnest attempt to make some sense of what kind of galaxy Shepard may have left behind...

4) Finally, I don't own anything from the Mass Effect universe. That privilege belongs to Bioware/EA. Obviously.

* * *

**Prologue: Exiled**

_"The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage." – Garrison Keillor_

Liara wasn't usually one to let go of her inhibitions, but she knew that she would only be able to indulge for a few more weeks before her condition would require her to stop.

Some day soon, there would be a funeral.

Tonight, at least, she couldn't face that thought sober. So she had matched him, drink for drink—which was impressive, considering how much dextro-friendly alcohol he was tilting back between his mandibles. They weren't sure what to do with themselves now that they were the only two left. The other non-humans had managed to catch their convoys before they left, but it had taken them too long to repair the Normandy, too long to travel back to the Sol system without the relays. Once they had returned, the humans had been quickly pressed back into the service of the smoldering remains of the Alliance. Then there had been just the three of them: Tali, Garrus, Liara.

And, now, two.

Tali had left this morning. The only reason Tali had managed to catch her convoy back to Rannoch was because the quarian sense of community meant that their convoy was the last to leave. The philosophy that even one of their people left behind was a waste was embedded into their culture, so they had stayed on Earth longer than the asari, turian, and salarian fleets. The quarians had held out as long as their dextro food supplies could last, hoping that every last member of their species would make it to the designated launch sites before they left Earth for Rannoch. Liara and Garrus…neither of them had been so lucky, since both the asari and turian fleets had left weeks before their return to Earth in the Normandy.

They would be able to communicate with her as she travelled at least, since the secondary purpose of the convoy system was to create a chain of short-range comm buoys across the galaxy so that galactic communication could be re-established. None of them would know what had happened to their homeworlds until each of the convoys reached them: the asari for Thessia, the turians for Palaven. The fleets had been stranded with the unexpected destruction of the mass relays, leaving their home planets essentially unprotected against an ongoing Reaper investation of the galaxy. So it didn't look good. But they wouldn't know anything until communications could be re-established. And that would be decades away without the relays. And even then communication would be unreliable, since, although each species had tried to build in as many redundant buoys as resources would allow, there was always the risk that if more than a dozen buoys malfunctioned, the entire chain would be broken. And, without the relays, the journey back out to fix them would take years.

The three of them had stood awkwardly on the docking platform, not sure what to do. There had never been a goodbye as final as this. Before, Liara had always felt a connection to her fellow crew members: the knowledge that, whatever the galaxy would throw at them, they would always be able to find their ways back to each other in times of galactic crisis. But, without the relays, it was entirely possible that they would never see Tali again. They all knew this. She had expected Garrus to find something witty to say, something to lighten the mood. She had waited for this. But he had just stood there, his eyes dark and glowering and refusing to meet Tali's lost gaze.

Finally, Tali had burst out into broken sobs. And no one said anything as she embraced them both, and then walked up the ramp into the shuttle. It was terrible, letting her go like that, but what comfort was there to be found? The only sure thing any of them knew was this: this galaxy had not been worth saving. And there was no comfort in that.

Either of them could have gone with her to Rannoch, they knew, but Liara had wanted to stay because several of her contacts were also trapped here on Earth. And, as the comm buoys were being built out from here, this would make Earth the central communications hub for the next few decades. It only made sense for her to remain. For now, at least. She, of course, dreamed of going back to Thessia someday, but Rannoch would not place her any closer to her homeworld than Earth. It only made sense to remain here as one of the "left-behinds," as the humans had nicknamed those handfuls of aliens that had, for whatever reason, hadn't gone home with their convoys.

She wasn't sure why Garrus stayed. Though she had her suspicions. And they were all the wrong reasons.

So after Tali had left, Liara had found an exquisitely run-down club—"pubs" as they learned they were called in this part of Earth—in which to get exquisitely drunk. Liara marvelled at how the clubs and bars had been the first things to re-open after the attack. There was a need for this collective spoonful of medicine to numb the pain that was etched on everyone's hearts as brokenly as it was etched into the surface of their planet. The faces of the humans were changing to mirror this freshly-scarred face of Earth. And they were both ugly.

It took them a good long while before their throats had been moistened enough that they could find words they could speak aloud.

"It's my fault," Garrus muttered into the bottle between his talons.

"Of course it is," she said, dryly.

The alcohol had a kind of distancing effect on Liara, almost like she was watching herself in conversation. She knew what she would ordinarily do: she would feel sad for him, her eyes glistening with sympathy. But tonight she was upset. And drunk. And it made her mean, made the Shadow Broker part of her come out to play, while the archeologist just wrung her hands cowardly in the back of her mind.

His eyes, bleared with drink, flicked over to her in mild surprise at the venom in her response, but then migrated back over to the bottom of his bottle.

"She didn't take me with her, you know."

"Of course I know. I was there. She took me instead. And Javik, She always had to take Javik. This was his fight long before it was ours. And it was probably for the best anyhow. Did you hear those awful things he said about going back to Kahje and getting the hanar to worship him?"

He snorted into his glass.

"Not that his death changed much…" she continued. "Did you hear what the hanar are doing now? They claim that Javik was one of the Enkindlers made flesh, that he was resurrected from the past in order to save them from the Reapers and that he died on Earth to save them all from their sins?"

"Crazy stuff," he muttered.

"Maybe," she shrugged, "but why not? I wish I had better answers than that…but look at us."

He shrugged and sloshed his drink around. She grabbed him by the shoulder, more violently than she meant.

"No. I mean really look."

They stared back into each other's faces: the right half of Garrus's face seemed normal—or what would have been normal once, for of course there were the scars that made his chitinous exoskeleton rough and raw and broken. But those had been there for a while. The other half…the visor (which, she admitted, she'd never seen him without even prior to The Synthesis) had become merged into his face, blanketing a strip of his face plate a pulsating blue. His left eye burned the same color, vastly outshining his dark, sunken right eye.

And Liara knew what he was seeing in her own features. Her transformation had been less distinct than his with the visor, because, for whatever reason—probably their common gift with biotics, she theorized—there had been less variation in the asari response to The Synthesis than with some of the other species. Liara's eyes shimmered with a biotic blue, an outward manifestation of her newfound ability to see the pulsating aura of an eezo-related activity. Sweeping away from her eyes, up along her fringe and down the back of her neck, freckles of blue biotic energy glowed faintly, like an entire galaxy worth of stars had fallen from the heavens and splattered across her skull.

She secretly liked her new appearance, but the effects of The Synthesis also frightened her as much as they frightened any species: the humans, with their pale green eyes and the green circuits along their skin that blinked on and off with no discernible reason, those turians and humans who had become merged with their omnitools and now found themselves both disabled and enabled in ways to which they were still growing accustomed, the quarians whose suits had burned their ornate tapestry patterns into their skin even while repairing their immune systems, the krogan with their eerily glowing humps…

And then there were the advanced ships and the VIs, all those technologies that had suddenly awoken to a newfound consciousness. The crew of the Normandy had been fortunate, in a way, that EDI was already the Normandy's conscious—that she had already been awakened. But some of the other ships and their VIs, confused, had reacted violently to the sudden awareness of what they were. The losses of those crews were negligible, Liara knew, compared to the total losses of the Reaper War (Was that what they were calling it? Hadn't it really been a Massacre?), but, still, it was what those losses represented that frightened her more than anything else. The convoys needed to trust these ships with their lives. And now that those ships could think for themselves—now that they needed to be respected and treated less like tools and more like comrades—that would be a difficult task for the crews. She feared for her people who had left Earth for Thessia. She trusted EDI, so she knew that ships could be trusted, but this also meant that she understood them each to be individuals. Just because EDI had sympathized with organics—enough to even take Joker as her mate—didn't mean that all the ships would be the same. The remains of the asari fleet had seemed agreeable, as eager to see their homeworld as the asari themselves, but…sometimes she woke to nightmares that the ships had decided to buck their organic cargo off into space and raced away to start civilizations of their own.

Liara realized that they had both drifted back into their own thoughts. She glanced at Garrus as he threw back yet another drink…how many had they had?...and noticed that his brow plates were furrowed and his eyes had grown dark. Her thoughts were avoiding the one subject too painful to analyze, but his, clearly, were not.

"She wouldn't let me go with her," he said, flanging voice cracking at the edges. "After she picked you and Javik as the squad for that last mission…We had said our goodbyes, I realized then, and I hadn't meant…hmm…" he sighed, brokenly. "I hadn't meant that to be goodbye at all. Do you understand? If she had given me that chance to go with her on that one last mission…I could have watched her back. She wouldn't have been alone. Damn it!"

He slammed his fist down on the bar. She jumped, but they were the only patrons in the bar. And the bartender was drunk himself, so he just took the sound to be a signal for a refill. He pulled himself up from where he was slumped against the wall and pulled another box of dextro-safe bottles up from the floor and set it on the bar. Now that was service.

Garrus had collapsed in on himself, holding his head with his six fingers. His voice was barely more than a whisper. And he was making Liara angry.

"I would have had her back. She never would have gone up there alone. Never."

That was enough for Liara. She'd had it with his moaning. And to imply that Shepard's death was…Well, she'd had enough of this damn turian. She staggered to her feet and was surprised by how much she swayed.

"Oh? Are you saying that it's my fault?" she said, voice rising. "That because that blast took us out, we failed her? Javik died! And I barely made it back to the ship. Maybe you would have died, too, if you'd been there! What could you have done anyhow? Scoped and dropped Harbinger? Huh? At least with my biotics I had a chance to get out of here alive. Javik and I...we shielded her from the blast so that she was able to carry on and get to the Citadel, even if…even if we couldn't do any more than that. You wouldn't have done as much."

She wasn't usually genuinely mean, so she was surprised by how good she was at it. She leaned in close to him, aware that even a whiff of the non-dextro alcohol on her breath would make him nauseous for hours afterwards.

"You would have been a blue smear at the feet of Harbinger," she hissed. "'Here lies The Great Garrus Vakarian, killed for no damn reason.'"

He blinked, but did not look away from her seething blue face: the biotics were burning so intensely that they stung her eyes and she felt a tear slide down her face from the pain. For a moment, some dark clarity crossed his face, breaking through the numbness imposed by the drinks.

"Maybe I would have been killed," he mumbled.

And she could tell by his tone that he thought that would have been infinitely preferable to where they were now: stranded on Earth and, worst of all, without Shepard. She sank back down onto her stool. What could she say to that?

"The problem," he said, raising his voice after a brief silence, speaking now in an analytical tone as if this were just some small thing that could be worked out with the right application of reason, "is that she…cared too much about me."

When she didn't respond except to widen her eyes, he continued, waving his drink around and addressing everyone in the room. Which was now just her, since the bartender had dozed off.

"She left me behind because she knew that none of her last squad would be coming back, and she wouldn't give me the damn courtesy of dying with her. That was all I really wanted…why couldn't she…"

"Are you really saying that you wished she didn't love you?" she muttered wearily.

He didn't hesitate.

"Yes, yes I am. That is exactly what I'm saying. Then we could have gone out together. Maybe the galaxy would have been saved…Is this what a 'saved' galaxy looks like? I don't even know anymore. Maybe we would have failed. But at least we could have been together."

She shook her head at him, disgusted.

"You…you damn selfish…You'd prefer that the galaxy had been destroyed than Shepard dying without you?"

"No. Yes. I mean…hmm…Listen." And he leaned in close to her, slurring his words. "You have to listen to me. This…this is important. I've it all figured out. She understood that I wasn't worth it. That, in the end, she couldn't sacrifice me to save the galaxy. She would die for it, but, damn it, she wouldn't let me die for it. That's why she condemned me to this Hell…"

"You need to shut up now," Liara whispered to him.

He was raving drunkenly and she hated it. She hated that he was wasting the life that Shepard had given him on wild ramblings and baseless speculations. She hated that he truly believed everything he was saying, and that for all her ability to talk her way out of anything she would never be able to talk him out of this strange belief that, somehow, Shepard's death had been his fault. That, if he had been there, he could have saved her. His stupidity was making Liara's head hurt—literally, since her anger had enraged the eezo particles into fireworking their blue sparks across her forehead.

His mandibles flared and he was about to continue.

"Shut up," she said again.

"Why?" he roared at her, too drunk on booze and self-pity to be fazed at her uncharacteristic anger anymore. "I'm sorry if this truth hurts. It hurts me way too damn much. I need…I need another drink…"

He staggered up from the bar and grabbed a handful of bottles. Liara was furious now, drawing breath in and out of her so quickly that her lungs burned from the rage…and the biotics coursing across her blue skin.

When he was halfway back to the bar, the singularity building around her exploded, a blue circle spiralling outwards. It slammed him against the wall, the bottles shattering around him and leaving marks of foam on the wall that stuck there like blood stains. She marched over to him. He looked up her brokenly. She had no idea what she saw in those sunken eyes anymore—deep sadness, suicidal desire, dark anger, fear for what would become of them, all these things at once—but she simply didn't care anymore.

That distant part of her—the archeologist, the one still trying to rationally analyze the situation—told her that they were all mad: they had gone insane from the grief of losing so many. But, most of all, from losing her: Shepard. Their Shepard.

"You listen to me, Garrus," Liara said, looming over him as he slumped against the wall, "You have to stop this. What you had was ordinary. Brutally ordinary…and maybe that's your problem? Your loss is no different from the billions of others that happened in this war. Every man, woman, and child alive today feels the same as you do. Telling yourself—deluding yourself—that she somehow meant more to you just because she meant more to the galaxy….it's not only stupid, it demeans every other sacrifice that's been made along the way."

He pulled himself up from the wall and turned away, swatting her away with his three talons.

"You can't seriously expect me to listen to this," he said.

"But don't you see?" she continued, ignoring him while her blue eyes shone like twin singularities. "What you two had…it was because it was so ordinary that it was so important. You reminded her what the galaxy was worth: you and her. But 'you and her' multiplied by billions for each person that has ever felt the same way about any other person in the galaxy. That's the real ruthlessness of your calculus. You had to stay behind for all of us. She gave up bringing you with her: to Harbinger, to the Catalyst, to death, to what lies beyond. She gave up facing that last journey with you at her side. And you gave up death. So that the galaxy might live."

Garrus stared at her, mandibles flickering against his jawline. Liara turned away and started to make her way back across the bar. But she turned around when she was at the door. Now, finally, the real tears had come and she felt like herself again: the anger bred from her own worn grief was all gone, replaced by the deepest of pity for the broken turian staring at her from across the room with drunken bewilderment glowing from his mismatched eyes.

"For what it's worth…I'm sorry. You…you have been left with so much less than me."

Then, Liara tried to smile at Garrus, to tell him that she truly meant those words. Well, she had meant everything she had said, but what mattered most was that he knew she was truly sorry. For everything: that Shepard had chosen her and Javik, that they couldn't have done more to save her, that they had never recovered her body, that Garrus had been forced onto the Normandy, that they had been forced to leave Shepard behind, that they had both been left behind. And Liara was sorry for what she had done—for what she had now, when he had nothing.

But those last words she had spoken seemed to turn a switch behind his eyes. His mouth gaped open for a moment in sudden revelation. And then his face turned hard with rage.

"What…did…you…do…?" he hissed out at her.

She stepped back, cursing herself. She hadn't meant for him—for anyone—to know. She had been careless. Damn her for her poor, drunken choice of words. Damn him for being able to figure it all out from so little.

"What did you do!" he screamed, barrelling at her from across the bar. She didn't resist when he grabbed her arm, eyes flicking down to her stomach.

"Did she know?" he raged at her.

Liara could only shake her head.

He dropped her arm and stepped away from her.

"That's repulsive."

"No, you have to understand. In asari culture…if you meet someone from another species that you admire and they do not necessarily return those same feelings…it's not that uncommon. You'd be surprised by how often it happens. She basically agreed. I asked if I could give her a gift…"

"I doubt that she realized that 'gift' involved her fathering an asari child."

There. He had said aloud what she couldn't admit to herself: her final goodbye to Shepard, what that last joining had truly meant…

"No…I may have been…deceptive…" Liara stuttered over her words and felt her face turn warm. She wasn't so stupid about human practises that she didn't understand what the human equivalent would be to what she had done. But other species—the humans, turians—they were so short-lived they couldn't possibly understand asari customs. Liara knew that something of Shepard needed to survive. The best of humanity in asari form. Their child would be strong and beautiful and everything she knew Shepard would have wanted.

If Shepard had wanted it.

"Disgusting," Garrus said. "I can't…Liara, how could you do something like this?"

"Please," and suddenly Liara was struck by the very un-asari desire to have him, of anyone, to understand. "Please…don't…don't look at me like that…" She reached out to him.

He threw her hand off his shoulder.

"Get away from me."

As the door to the bar slammed shut behind him, she knew that she was never going to see him again. That, for the first time, she was now truly alone on this strange planet with the child of the galaxy's savior growing within her womb: this unborn child her only companion in the dark.


	2. Chapter 1: Cast Down to Earth

**Chapter 1: Cast Down to Earth**

The small alien wailing in his arms was soft: too soft, like it would dissolve between his talons if he clutched it any closer to his armor. It—no, she?—even smelled soft: this soft smell leaking into his nostrils beneath the metallic tang of the blood of its parents. Or at least he presumed they were the small alien's parents. The two humans lay in a tangled, bloodied mess at his feet. Maybe they resembled the small human in his arms? So many humans looked alike. How was he supposed to know?

Another shot rang across the street. Damn it. They were gunning for the child as well. Garrus activated his shields and turn his back to the street, shielding the child from the shots. They were coming from the same skycar that had hovered in the street for only a few seconds before gunning down the two humans: black, darkened windows, no identification plate, shielded. He glanced over his shoulder as he ducked behind the cover of a broken crate. The tip of a sniper rifle was peeking out from the window, but the interior of the skycar was too dark: he couldn't see a face attached to it. And he couldn't get an interior with his other eye—his new eye, what had once been his visor—so the skycar had to be lined with something. The shooter could have been a mech, anyhow. Not that there was much of a difference between mechs and people now, but it was still a hell of a lot easier to memorize an organic's features than the expressionless face of a mech. Didn't matter anyhow.

The human in his arms didn't seem hurt, but it was crying and wailing. It was easy for the sniper to pick out what crate they were hidden behind: it remained in the car, firing out round after round at them, waiting for Garrus to slip up and poke his head out from around the crate. Then the child would be easy prey.

Who would try to kill a human baby? Was this the galaxy Shepard died to save? Garrus knew, all too well, that it was.

He didn't know what to do. His head was muggy from the day's early morning round of drinks. He'd been on his way from his morning round of drinks to his noontime round of drinks, having picked up a few extra credits from a hacking job last week and therefore able to afford such a luxury. He had rounded the corner onto this street and heard two shots ring out: precise, lethal. A woman had screamed. Two figures had slumped to the ground. He never knew when to get involved anymore, but this was easily the most overt display of violence he had seen since the Battle of the Catalyst and it awoke something in his blue turian blood that had been dormant for years. He had rushed forward, heedless of the danger, while the sniper was reloading. The sniper was slow. Adequate aim—not that it was difficult at that distance—but really slow on the reload. He considered checking the vitals of the two humans, but saw immediately that it was useless: it would be hard to survive without their heads. But the stirring and thrashing of something in the arms of the woman had caught his attention and he had just enough time to grab it before the shots rang out again.

And now he was trapped behind this crate. Stupid. He only had his pistol on him. His Mantis sniper rifle he'd traded away a long time ago in exchange for a long tab at a local club. He regretted it now, of course. But he wasn't sure what to do with the human in his arms. Could he hold it with one arm? Would he drop it? Damn it, why wouldn't it stop crying? Well, that was obvious, really, but how was he supposed to shoot, with a pistol and a miniscule target nonetheless, while this thing thrashed against his chest?

A shot grazed his shoulder, bouncing off his shields. He could hear the dim sound of sirens—someone had alerted the authorities. He needed to end this.

He let the child slip out of his talons and laid it, as gently as he could, on the cold pavement against the edge of the box. Startled by the sudden loss of contact, its face smoothed over for a moment. Then, it started wailing even louder than before.

But Garrus had become deaf to the alien's cries. He pulled his pistol from his back. He shot a burst of electricity from his omnitool at the skycar: it snaked along the surface and he heard a satisfactory cry of alarm from the driver's seat. Human. Male. Good. The driver, at least, was organic, so the shooter probably was too. Killing mechs had so little satisfaction, though maybe a little more since they had become so cheerfully sentient.

He steadied the pistol along the top of the crate and fired at the end of the rifle, the only thing he could see. He missed. By a lot. His slugs peppered the side of the skycar, scuffing the paint but not penetrating any deeper than that. Damn it. He really was drunk. Or inept. Though, weren't those two things really one and the same? But it was enough to scar them off. He heard the driver yell again and the skycar took off, barrelling down the street and out of sight.

There would be authorities here soon, but he really didn't want to encounter them. Even with his face tattoos removed, even with the lines the years of aimless wandering had etched upon his face plates, he was still paranoid that he would be recognized. The old scars didn't help. Neither did the visor becoming merged with his face. Would Alliance MP be able to find the child behind the crate when they hauled their incompetent asses here? Certainly. It was making enough noise. With barely a backwards glance at the wailing thing, he got up from behind the crate and, as nonchalantly as possible, tried to sidle away from the numerous curious and terrified glances being shot his way from the humans gathering in the street.

An Alliance MP skycar pulled up. A few wearied officials got out, shooing people back into their shops and homes, leaning over the bodies of the two humans. Garrus used his visor—his eye, really, but once it had been his visor and he had to keep reminding himself it was now a permanent part of him—to watch them work from the other side of the wall by the alley. Curious. There were heat signatures on the bodies of the humans. The bodies were still warm, but rapidly cooling in the chill air. Obviously, they were very dead, but he expected at least the bright-hot glow of identification tags on their chest. Weren't those mandatory for all humans now? And, technically, for all registered alien landed immigrants? (He himself was unregistered and had been lucky enough to avoid questioning…so far, at least…)

His suspicions were confirmed as the agents shook their heads to each other after probing at the bodies with their omni-arms. No identification.

Damn it. No identification meant submission to DNA processing and, with how long that would take, they would send the human child to The Tanks in the meantime. It was small. It wouldn't last long. Then, it would be processed down into fertilizer. It disgusted Garrus just thinking about it. But an abundance of orphans and a shortage of food had meant that the humans had resorted to despicable means to keep themselves alive. It wasn't that the unclaimed children were killed, exactly…more that an inadequacy of medical care meant that vast majority of them usually died. And then they were recycled.

Shepard never would have stood for any of it. This sort of thing was exactly what they would have fought against. Together. Once. A very long time ago.

This was the humanity she had died to save. This.

Garrus looked back down at the child on the ground. This time, he really looked. Etched along its arms and forehead were the green circuitry possessed by most humans now. The circuits flashed and flickered—was it trying to establish a short-range network? With its mother, probably, but she was now a headless corpse, bleeding into the gutters. The child's hair was dark, its eyes bright blue. And around its neck was a tiny image attached to a chain around its neck. He didn't have to look any closer to know what it was. He had seen them on many of the humans around Earth, especially children. And every time he caught sight of one, it would usually send him back into the nearest bar and asking for another round of expensive dextro-safe drinks.

The image on the child's chain was a picture of Shepard: her face was oddly stylized, her hair surrounded by a strange circle. It was etched out of plain metal: technology-less to remind the humans that wore them of their organic roots. The shape of the metal was like old human currency, he'd heard someone say once. Someone. It had been James, shortly after the Catalyst. After the War. After they'd limped the Normandy back to Earth. When they'd caught sight of one on a young boy's neck, James had called the kid over and asked to see the necklace. The boy had handed it over to James reluctantly, obviously intimidated by the bulk of the human marine. James had looked it over, shaking his head sadly, and muttered that Shepard was a new _saint_. Garrus didn't know what that human word meant, only that it had something to do with one of the many human religions. In a post-Reaper galaxy, humans, especially children, were now wearing her around their necks as a way to protect themselves. James had translated the human etchings on the back of the medallion for him: May The Shepard Always Watch Over You.

A bystander was pointing to the alleyway, to the crate where the child continued to cry. Garrus had to move. Quickly, he bent down and scooped up the human child into his arms. Its tiny fists opened and closed. Was that normal? Was it broken, somehow, with the death of its parents? Maybe they had been networked at the time. Maybe this child felt its parents die. Maybe that was what had broken it.

There was a ladder at the back of the alley. Cradling the child in one arm, he pulled them both up it and onto the rooftops—away from the sirens, away from the death.


	3. Chapter 2: Left Behind

**Chapter 2: Left Behind**

Garrus didn't know where to go. It wasn't like he had been staying anywhere, exactly. Sleeping—never really sleeping though—in the dark corners of alleyways, at tables in bars. He had no friends. Not anymore. That fact never seemed to matter until this moment. He wished he was a little less drunk: just enough that he could think clearly, but not enough that he could start feeling again.

He dropped back down onto street level once he was sure that Alliance MP hadn't pursued them. What was there to pursue anyhow? A lone gunman? The sound of a crying child? None of these things meant anything without the identification of the dead humans. He had spent enough time in C-Sec to know what parts of the witness statements would be ignored. They'd go after the skycar and try to identify the bodies, not chasing down some stranger who started firing back at the skycar. He hadn't exactly been subtle, but everyone had been crying and shouting, so maybe the child's wailing hadn't even been noticed by the bystanders. And the child was so bundled up in layers of clothing (humans really were such fragile things), he suspected that it probably looked more like a package than a living thing.

Maybe that's what it was: a package. The shooter had kept firing even after the two humans were dead, that was what was truly strange about all this. If it had been so important to kill the child…maybe those humans weren't its parents after all, but kidnappers? Had he stepped into some strange battle between mysterious parties over this small human? There were too many unknowns. And Alliance MP had bigger things to worry about than unsolvable murders, though the fact that two humans were gunned down in broad daylight would surely put some pressure on them to figure it out. It wasn't the safest of neighbourhoods but, still, humans had some expectations of safety. He had spent enough time on Earth now to realize that the humans demanding for some resolution to the killings would not be concerned about the lives that had been taken, but the safety of their own lives as they walked down the street. On Earth, no one cared about anyone else but themselves.

He had to think. No, he had to get this child back to the authorities. It didn't really matter what would happen to it. He was beyond ill-equipped to deal with it: an old, drunk, illegally unregistered turian that migrated from bar to bar. He didn't even know what human city he was in. They all looked the same to him. On Palaven, it was easy to navigate, but here, on Earth, all the micro-climates meant that he felt disoriented, never knowing where exactly he was. And what year was it? Ah, yes. He could remember that. Ten years. Ten years to the day, in fact, since the Battle of the Catalyst. The turian fleet would be halfway home to Palaven by now. The quarians had made it to Rannoch only three years ago, though how they had made it there so quickly without the relays remained a mystery—and had the rest of the galaxy mildly concerned at what new technology the quarians had scrounged up this time. How ironic that his people were now living on ships while Tali had already shed her suit. Built her house on Rannoch. Had a husband. Had her three beautiful children.

While he had nothing.

Ten years. There were celebrations and ceremonies all over the globe today, with the primary events taking place in Vancouver, at Alliance HQ, and in London, at the site of Shepard's demise. Was there going to be a statue of her this time? No, that had happened at the five year mark. He had tried his best to ignore the news vids, but sometimes he would catch glimpses of footage on the screens in the bars or overhear loud conversations from other patrons. He had learned early on that seedy human bars were not the best places to avoid news. But they were also the only places that would let him in for a drink, so, what the hell, he just did his best to drink himself into oblivion while the news vids and news from the patrons played on in the background.

No, he definitely needed to get this child out of his talons and into the hands of someone that could be responsible for it, even if it was only to give it a comfortable bed until it was to be melted down into fertilizer.

But he kept going through the streets, not stopping…and turning around. The thing was sleeping so quietly in his arms that no one even gave them a second glance. He tried holding it gently, pulling a piece of the cloth it was wrapped in over its tear-streaked face. He didn't want to think about what would happen if someone noticed a turian stealing through the streets with a human child. But no one spared him even a look. He was just another deadbeat alien out on some unknown errand.

He told himself to turn around, to ask someone directions to the nearest Alliance MP station, so that he could deposit the child there. But he kept going.

Because it was hard to ignore the dream. He had tried thinking about other things, but now, in the cold darkening of these human streets, the memory of the dream came flooding back into his thoughts.

At first, Garrus hadn't realized that it was a dream. He was in a human bar, like he always was, but then a woman had walked in. No. Hadn't walked. Had suddenly simply been at his side, sitting beside him on a stool. She had gestured the barkeeper for a drink.

"Hey. How's it going?" she said to him.

He should have known it was a dream by how normal it felt to be in her presence again. People only felt like that in dreams. He had lied to her once, had said that he never had bad dreams. "Waste of good sleep," he'd told her, believing himself to be clever, to be saying the right things—the things that she needed to hear on the eve of battle. On the eve of her death.

Now, he didn't looked at her when she sat down beside him at the bar. He'd done that once before, after she'd come back from the dead. The second time. Not the first time when she had crawled out of the pile of Sovereign's rubble that would have killed a lesser soldier. A lesser human. Most people didn't count that first time. He did. Because he had shaken his head miserably at Anderson's unspoken inquiry and, in that moment, she had died: the only damn thing left in the galaxy that he had any respect for. But then she hadn't been dead. She'd limped out of the rubble and smiled.

The second time, she had come back to life when he had been sure he was going to die. Garrus had been prepared to join her in death. He had been Archangel then. She hadn't known it was him, but he knew from the moment she stepped into his scope. He had taken a few shots at her shields. To confirm that it was her. That she wasn't an hallucination from the soon-to-be-deadly combination of sleepless nights and exhaustion and stims and foul-tasting dextro rations. Her scowl in his direction had confirmed it. She hadn't known it was him, not yet, but she had been sent there to help him and was irritated that he hadn't figured that out yet, what with her shooting the rent-a-mercs in their backs.

But once she'd made it up the bridge….he'd had to compose himself. He waited to take off his helmet. He needed that pause to regain control. He had taken out one more merc, confirmed the kill, and then, slowly, when he felt like he was in control again, walked towards her and pulled off the helmet. The look on her face when she realized that it was him…beautiful. Simply beautiful.

Earlier today, in the bar—in the dream—he'd needed that same pause, but, this time, he didn't have a helmet to hide behind. So he had simply avoided her eyes, sipping from the bottle of stale dextro-safe alcohol in front of him, unsure of whether it was really her or what was really happening: the slow logic of dreams, he realized now.

"Hey," she said again, "Garrus?"

She touched his shoulder and he turned to look at her. He couldn't really see her. Her face was indistinct, shifting. Not really there.

"Oh, you know," he'd responded, casually, "same old, same old. Fighting the good fight."

"Hmm," she said, raising an eyebrow towards the drink in front of him.

He turned back to his drink and, somewhere in the back of his mind, he began to realize that she was dead: that this was all a dream. That, because the next day would be ten years since her death, his mind had decided to screw with him and give him this nightmare, this terrible dream that would let him hear her voice, let her touch him, but never let him see her face again.

His mandibles flared. How dare she give him these nightmares? He turned to her.

"Look at the mess you left, damn it," he growled at her, satisfied by the way her indistinct face drew back. "You didn't save anything. You could have at least given me the chance to die with you. Didn't I deserve that? Didn't I? There's no Vakarian without Shepard. You knew that. But you left me to rot on Earth…" The subtonals in his voice broke and he turned away, even as she reached her hand up to touch the scarred side of his face, "…alone. You left me alone."

"Never," she said, barely more than a whisper. Then, she laughed and it sounded strange. Too real—for a dream. "Do you remember what Liara said to you, after the battle?"

He nodded.

"How could I forget," he mumbled.

Shepard ignored the bitterness in his tone, shaking her head.

"She was right," she said to him, slowly. "You…you needed to stay alive. For everyone. For me. And now you need to be here. She'll need you."

"What? Who? Liara?"

"No…well, yes. Eventually. But right now, someone else needs you. You've lost your way, Garrus. Again."

And, for some reason, that seemed to be almost funny to her. Shepard always had a strange sense of humour.

"And you know what? So has humanity," he shot back. "Look at them. Look at all of them."

Rather than devastating her, she nodded.

"Exactly. You can both find your way back together. You and humanity."

She turned away from him for a moment, as if she had caught sight of something at the edge of her vision. When she looked back at him, he could finally see the outline of her eyes. He could suddenly remember what they looked like: their brightness, their sheen.

"Did I tell you about the child, Garrus?"

He looked at her, quizzically. Did she mean what Liara had done? No, he could tell by her tone she didn't mean that child. Then he remembered, back on the Normandy, after both Earth and Palaven had fallen to the Reapers. After the two of them had drawn together in their mutual grief. Maybe there had been a discussion, once, about a child…he couldn't quite remember…

"He was a little boy. Six or seven years old," Shepard continued, her eyes staring intently at his face. "I saw him playing outside when the Reapers first hit Alliance HQ. Then, again, inside a vent, where he must have crawled to escape the blast…I tried to help him. And do you know what he said to me?"

Garrus marvelled at the details his dream was conjuring up. Even if he and Shepard had talked about this child, he was sure that it hadn't been quite like this. Where was this coming from?

"What?" he asked wearily, uncertain. "What did the kid say to you?"

Shepard smiled sadly.

" 'You can't help me.' "

Garrus snorted.

"Really. Did he have any idea that he was talking to the Great Commander Shepard? When have you ever not helped someone?" Garrus said, putting on a wheezing voice. "'Excuse me, Commander, I appear to have lost my credit chit.' 'Oh yes, Mr. Volus, let me put my galaxy-saving plans on hold to find your credit chit!'"

Shepard smirked, so Garrus switched into a human woman's voice with a drawling accent.

"'Shepard, my daddy doesn't love me!' 'Don't worry, we'll help you!'"

Then, a whispery drell's.

"'Shepard, my son doesn't love me!' 'We'll help you! No problem! I'm the Great Commander Shepard! I help everyone!'"

Despite herself, Shepard smiled again, but that was all. She hadn't found his impersonations of a hanar poetry reading that amusing either, he now recalled. Maybe he should give up on the inter-species impersonations. She reached out and placed her soft human hand on his talons.

"You know," she said, staring into his eyes, "I don't think that child was real. I never saw any other children at Alliance HQ. Anderson didn't seem to see or even hear him when we spoke. And no one helped him onto that shuttle. The shuttle that was shot down by a Reaper. Why wouldn't anyone help him? A little boy like that. No one even reached out a hand. I thought about that. A lot. And then…when I got to the Catalyst…it was that child…that boy…he was there again…"

She trailed off again. It was like she was watching shadows flit around the room. Memories, maybe, Garrus wondered. Maybe that was what it was like being dead.

"What do you mean, he was there? There was a child at the Catalyst? That doesn't make any sense. Shepard?"

But she ignored his question and instead reached out and gripped his talons harder in her hand. There was a desperation in her voice, an aching sadness that cut to his very core.

"I don't know exactly what he meant, that child. But he was important. The children, Garrus, don't you see? They're all that matter, in the end. They are the little things that matter."

"Little things multiplied by billions," he muttered, these ghosts of words long-dead coming unbidden into his mind. Shepard nodded, urgently, but he couldn't look her in the eye.

"That's why she'll need you soon," Shepard said, breaking the silence. "And, hey, I know that you don't believe me," she said, clearly not expecting any response. "You think that this is just a dream. So I'll do this for you. For you both. I'll mark her, so that you know who I'm talking about. One last order, Vakarian. Find her. Take care of her. Got it?"

"Shepard, I—"

But, with that, he had been jerked awake by the barkeeper.

"Hey, turian scum, whaddaya think this is? Find yourself somewhere else to snooze. And you better be able to pay for all the dextro-rations you used from my stocks today."

Disoriented, he had thrown a credit chit towards the barkeeper and staggered out to murmurs of "damned alien left-behinds" thrown towards his receding back by the barkeeper and affirmed by grunts from the other patrons. He pretended not to hear. He wasn't looking for a fight. At least, not today. He was too addled by the dream. Nightmare. Whatever it had been.

Left-behinds. It's what the humans called those aliens who hadn't made it onto the convoys before they left for their home planets. Garrus didn't turn around or dispute this with the barkeeper because, really, what was there to argue about? Obviously, that was exactly what he was: left behind, an alien, and most certainly damned. Instead, he had just staggered out into the street, determined to make his way from his morning round of drinks for a noon round of drinks at another bar. After the dream, he certainly needed it. And he wasn't out of credits, yet.

Then, he had turned the corner. And heard the twin gunshots.

Now, he was fleeing through the streets, a human child in his arms, with nowhere to go, no one to help him. He really needed to take the child to Alliance MP, but he was haunted by the words from the dream: "I'll mark her." And this human child had no identification tags, only a metal necklace around its neck with Shepard's image carved into its surface.

So, he supposed, Shepard had given him a clear order. And, damn it, he would carry it out.


	4. Chapter 3: Old Friends, Faraway Places

**Chapter 3: Old Friends, Faraway Places**

Garrus had bartered his way into a room at a seedy-looking hotel, near one of the transport stations at the edge of this particular city. He'd managed to conceal the child while it was sleeping. Then, out of desperation, he had offered the hotel's rough-looking owner any of his limited technical skills for a room with a comm link. As it had happened, the owner said his links were down, so he had told Garrus he could stay if he managed to get the terminals up and running again.

It had taken him five minutes with the terminal in his own room. He figured he'd attend to the ones in the other rooms more slowly, so that it looked like the effort was worth…hmm…maybe a weeks' worth of lodging? The owner had put him in a room on the far end of the hotel from the front office, and it looked like Garrus was only a handful of guests. His visor told him that there were a few humans scattered in rooms throughout the two-storey building and, curiously, an asari in one of the rooms close to the hotel's office. A fellow alien left-behind, he presumed.

He'd made a bed for the child in one of the drawers of the room's dresser, using sheets from the bed and laying it gently down into them. He hoped that the deepness of the child's sleep was only from exhaustion, not because something was wrong with it. Maybe it would die. And, like everything else, it would be his fault. But, he tried to reason, the child would be no worse off than if it had been taken to the Tanks by Alliance MP.

And Shepard had told him that this child would need him. He didn't trust in dreams. He wasn't stupid. But it always been hard to say 'no' to Shepard, even an imaginary one conjured up by his grieving, deranged, and (not to mention) perpetually-drunk brain.

He had a shower to try to sober up. It didn't seem to help. So he proceeded to lie down on the bed, surprised at how good it felt. When was the last time he'd slept in a real bed? Even if this one was too soft—clearly intended for human and asari. His eyes had just begun to close when a sniffle from the child jerked him awake. He waited a few moments. Then, another sniffle. And another. And then a full-out wail.

He was sure that everyone in the hotel could hear it. Damn, damn, damn, damn.

He leapt over to the drawer where the child lay. Its face was so red that its blue eyes had disappeared. And there was a smell. A terrible smell. Damn. What was he supposed to do? He could remember cradling a turian baby in his arms once, the child of a former CO who had settled for civilian life. Turian children liked to have their fringes stroked. He tried tugging on the child's hair. That was like a fringe, wasn't it? But it only wailed louder.

He picked it up, held it close to his chest. He was surprised that he was shaking. There was such an urgency to this child's cries that he knew it wanted something desperately—and it infuriated him that he couldn't figure out what the hell that was.

"Damn it, Junior," he hissed at it, "what do you want?"

They were going to kick him out for sure. Maybe report him to the authorities. What would a turian be doing with a human baby anyhow?

He couldn't think of anything else, so he fired up on the comm link and dialed the (illegal) clearance codes for Rannoch.

"Garrus, you _boshtet_, what on the homeworld is that?"

Every time he saw her image on the comm link without her suit, he was surprised. It had been years, now, since her immune system had adapted completely to Rannoch's environment. Years. But Tali was so startlingly beautiful every time she answered the link—even now, with her dark hair tousled and her glowing eyes furrowed. She wore a loose-fitting dress and had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Everything about her was beautiful, even—no, especially—the intricate swirling pattern that had once been on her suit, but was now burned into her lavender skin. Obviously, he had woken her up. Again. Garrus could hear her husband stirring in the background, probably saying unforgivable things about him. He knew, even though Tali never said so, that his occasional, usually desperate, always middle-of-the-night calls to their household were never appreciated. But, tonight, he was even more desperate than usual.

"Is that a human baby? Garrus, really?" she trailed off into a series of mumbled quarian curses.

"Please, Tali, I need it to be quiet. How do I get it to be quiet? Help me. Please."

"I know nothing about human children. Why are you calling me? I'm lightyears away. Call Liara."

Garrus ignored that last part, as he knew that she expected him to do.

"You have children," he pleaded.

"Yes. _Quarian _children. My children," and, on queue, he saw her turn away from the comm and gesture to some invisible presence behind the folds of her dress. "Shh…no, everything's alright. Go back to bed." Then, she turned back to the screen.

Garrus felt terrible disrupting her like this, but she'd never refused help in the past… for old times' sake, he knew, not because she approved of what he had become. How could anyone approve of what he had become? For the first time, he was glad that communication with Palaven remained impossible…imagine if his father could see him now…

But the child was still wailing in his arms.

"Do you have any vids?" she asked him. "On human babies?"

"Oh, yes, because vids are so helpful for figuring out humans…" Garrus snorted, knowing that Tali wouldn't understand why this was amusing. He coughed. "Anyhow, how am I supposed to afford vids?"

"By not drinking away your credits…here…"

Once, Tali would have tapped briskly on her omnitool. Now, she could simply close her eyes and wave her hands over the terminal. Ironically, the quarians—those who had warred with the synthetics for generations—had adapted the fastest to their newfound synthetic abilities. Garrus winced as a series of human child-rearing vids appeared in his omnitools database. And then a significant number of credits in his account.

"Tali…"

"It's late. I'm tired. I don't want to argue with you about this."

He started scrolling rapidly through the vids in his visor-eye while keeping his other fixed on Tali. The child kept crying even though its voice was becoming hoarse and its little sobs had ragged ends to them.

"Is it hungry?"

"What?"

"Is it hungry?" Tali repeated. "Or wet? Those are usually the first two things any young creature needs. A universal law."

"Probably not hanar."

She smiled.

"No, probably not."

"And…" Garrus hesitated, "I think 'it' is a 'she.'"

"Ah. Is it—ah, a 'she'? It's so hard to tell with human children…"

Yes, the child was wet and smelled terrible. Now what was he supposed to do? The vids. He scrolled through the vids. He didn't have any of the _diapers _mentioned in the vid, but, hell, he could improvise.

"Hold on," he said to Tali, and he proceeded to rip up the sheets from the bed into roughly triangular shapes. "I'll call you back."

"You always say that."

"And I always do."

"…sure…eventually…"

He used his omnitool to dispose of the…contents…of the child's _diaper_. He tied the sheets around the child's legs, roughly how it was depicted in the vids. And the child stopped crying…finally. Exhausted, her eyelids fell shut over her eyes once again. He hoped she would always sleep this much. But he noticed that she lifted up a tiny fist and started chewing on it. She was hungry, too, he guessed. He would have to find her something to eat. What did humans eat, anyhow? There were those things called _nachos_ he occasionally saw humans eating in the bars now and again. Maybe Junior could eat those.

The child stirred when he tried to place her back in the drawer and, terrified that she might wake up and start crying again, he cradled her in one arm. And then he called Tali back. She frowned in surprise as she answered the call.

"You…you actually called me back…."

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I think I have a right to be. Garrus, you had better tell me the whole story."

"Isn't much to tell. Her parents—I don't even know if they were her parents, actually. Two humans were with her and a skycar drove up and blew their heads off. I went to go and check if they were dead. Wasn't much point to that, I guess…but she was there…"

"And why did you take her? Why didn't you just leave her for whatever authorities Earth has running the place at the moment?"

"Her parents…they didn't have any identification chips on them…I…Have you heard what they've been doing to unclaimed children here?"

She narrowed her eyes.

"No."

He told her. And she looked like she was going to be sick. It was strange growing accustomed to actually seeing Tali's expressions, not just trying to read her emotions from the tone of her voice and the flickering of her glowing eyes through her mask.

"Ah, so clearly that is not an option. This time, Garrus, you will really have to do it."

"Do what?"

"Contact Liara, of course."

He burst out into bitter laughter. Junior stirred in his arms though, so he immediately subdued himself, instead fixing Tali with a steely, dark look.

"No. Not after what she did to Shepard."

"I don't agree with what she did either but, Garrus, you're in trouble. You don't have a choice. She's the only one left on Earth that can help you. James…the others from the Alliance…they'll be forced to report you. Which maybe wouldn't be such a bad thing, after all, since then they could give you a ship…get you home…" When Garrus didn't respond, she continued, looking around her. "A home is a wonderful thing to have. A place to belong."

"They wouldn't send a ship just for me."

"They might. For you. After Victus died, you were next in line to be primarch."

"You don't need to remind me how I abandoned my people, Tali. I would be ten years behind them. It wouldn't make any sense to go back now."

"Then why are you so afraid that someone will figure out who you are? I see that you've gone barefaced now…"

"We've both had our share of enemies in our time. Cerebrus. All the mercs in the entire galaxy."

"Uh-huh."

Both their gazes settled on the tiny alien nestled in his arms.

"Garrus," said Tali, shaking her head, "listen to me: you cannot do this alone."

He thought about telling her about the dream, but decided against it. Quarians were far too practical a race to put too much stock in dreams. The asari, well, they were another matter: half of their ancient religion had been based on visions seen while dreaming or mind-melding. And turians...his own people considered them possible omens, but only because they tended to reveal underlying anxieties in the Spirits that needed to be dealt with and purged before entering a state of battle-readiness. He was sure that was all that dream-Shepard had been. A unfortunately lucid expression of his own drunken misery.

Tali stared at him for a moment. Opened her mouth, then closed it. He wondered how many times she had done that beneath her mask on the Normandy without any of them realizing it. She shook her head, but then spoke, softly.

"Have you seen her, Garrus? Their daughter? I know that asari don't technically use the genes from the other species but, _keelah_, I swear that she looks so much like Shepard—"

He switched off the link, cutting Tali off. His mandibles flicked back and forth. A few moments later, his omnitool informed him that yet another significant amount of credits had been transferred into his account. By way of apology, maybe? No, he realized, looking at the human child in his arms…for her. Tali knew that he wasn't going to go to Liara and thought that he was going to screw this up, like he had screwed up everything else. But it didn't matter. Because she was giving him the means to succeed. Ordinarily, when she did this, Garrus would refuse to touch the credits…at least until his desperation for another drink, a way to forget, hit him hard…but, this time, he understood that these weren't really for him. They were for her, this tiny alien cradled in his arms.

He could do this. For Shepard. For himself.

"Come on, Junior," he said, lifting the child gently back into the drawer. "We can do this."

* * *

**A/N:**

****So there's going to be a brief hiatus on the updating front...it's a holiday weekend here, but updates will resume on Tuesday and will continue regularly after that.

Many thanks to those submitting reviews! It's very much appreciated. Most have commented on how this is a rather dark take on the Synthesis ending, so I thought I would provide some brief commentary on that front. I'm trying to be logical about the Synthesis ending...but that logic seems to lead to some dark places. I don't think any of the ME3 endings are uncomplicated, so I'm interested in exploring those consequences.

The ME games depict a dark future, but it's the moments of redemption within those dark times that make it such a powerful story to play through (especially with regards to Garrus's character development within the games). Which is to say, the end of this chapter is marking a turn-around point for everyone's favorite turian. Things won't necessarily get easier...but there may some bright points ahead in the darkness of this future.

Thanks for reading! More to come on Tuesday!


	5. Chapter 4: The Right Thing

**Chapter 4: The Right Thing**

Garrus bought himself transport to Vancouver for the end of the week. He had decided to head there mostly for a lack of a better plan, but also because it was still Alliance HQ. He didn't understand most of Earth, but a city full off military personnel…that would be more like home. Maybe he could make sense of a city like that. He had also heard that alcohol that was dextro-safe was particularly rare there (apparently citizens frowned on non-local food products), and, the way he figured it, could use all the help he could get in getting sober…or soberer, at least.

Tali's credits began to run low quickly, as he knew they would. He didn't want to run out of stuff for Junior, so he bought a ridiculous amount over the extranet: formula, _diapers_, a carrying contraption that he hoped would fit over his non-human chest. When he was forced to go out to pick up dextro food, he sprang for the money for a taxi so that they would draw less attention to themselves.

This was only temporary anyhow, so he tried to fight the panic rising in his gut every time the credits dwindled down. He was a former cop. He had given himself the week to figure out who the child's rightful guardians were. Then he would get the hell out of this damn city and head for Vancouver. Human children, it turned out, weren't that different from turians—once you figured out how to feed them, when to feed them, how to change them. Junior wasn't proving to be that difficult. She slept a lot. He counted himself lucky that he didn't have what the vids called a _colicky _infant. And, so far, none of the patrons had caught sight of Junior. And no one had asked about the crying. Humans. At least they knew when to mind their own business. Not that Shepard ever did. Not that Shepard still did….Garrus tried not to think about the dream.

He wasn't sure how to begin his investigation (that was what he called it) until three days after the attack. He had kept an eye on the news vids. While the vids had mentioned the shooting, they said nothing about a missing child, let alone a mysterious turian kidnapper.

He was shocked when, on the third day after the shooting, the humans were identified: Callum and Irene Devlon. Garrus recognized the name: Devlon Industries manufactured his Mantis sniper rifle. Irene Devlon's distraught sister was shown on the vids, weeping, begging for the return of her missing niece.

Junior had a name: Melissa Devlon. And was apparently the heir to a substantial fortune. This was a relief. It meant that Junior had a future. Shepard had been right. The child had needed him. Garrus felt a glimmer of hope flutter in his guts. For the first time since the Catalyst, he could do something right. Had done something right. Junior's safe return to her family was as certain as a comm link away. He wasn't going to call the hotline number advertised on the news vids though. He didn't want to go through Alliance MP for this, since they'd require identification chips and word of his location would inevitably reach back to the last person in the galaxy he wanted it to: Liara T'Soni. But a quick extranet search revealed a private number for the aunt and uncle. He set about making the call untraceable.

He wanted to make sure that Junior was out of sight for the call, in case he'd somehow gotten the wrong number. He was having difficulties putting her down back into her drawer, however. Every time his talons started to release her, her face would start to scrunch up in the telltale sign that she was about to weep again. Every time he lifted her up again so that she was looking over his shoulder, she would grabbed a tendril of his fringe and yank. Hard. He wondered if this was some sort of infant revenge for his pulling on her hair that first night.

So he had to wait until she dozed off in his arms to make the call. When he answered, the woman on the other end looked startled. Well, he was a turian calling from an untraceable location. He had considered distorting his voice and face but figured that, since he was going to have to drop Junior off himself anyhow, it would be better to surprise the humans over the comm link than in person.

"…you….you what?" the woman stammered, after Garrus had explained as best he could.

"I didn't want her to end up in the Tanks. So I took her. I'm sorry…if I had known that she had family looking for her…"

"But…but you're a left behind. Why would you even do that? Do you want some sort of ransom? Because we can pay. We'll pay anything for her. We're the only family she has left now…Please, don't hurt her."

Mildly irritated, he tried to be as patient as possible. Clearly, this human was a little dense.

"No, no I do not want a ransom. And I'm not going to hurt her. The only thing I request is a certain amount of discretion. Can I meet you somewhere?"

"Bring her to the house."

"Really? That's not exactly what I had—"

"With…with everything that's happened…with Irene…" The woman stopped. She looked frightened. Who wouldn't be, with someone shooting her sister dead in the streets for some unknown reason? "The house would be safest. There's been a lot of people coming and going —even aliens, because so many are involved with the company. Having a turian show up on our doorstep is hardly unusual. And of course we'll respect your preference not to deal with the authorities. It's a small price to pay to get the baby back."

Garrus furrowed his brow plates at the way she said "the baby"—it was utterly devoid of affection. Still, he supposed any family was better than none. And he was probably just being judgemental. And protective. He hadn't realized how much getting Junior back safely to her family had mattered to him.

"I'll be there in an hour," he said.

She nodded and ended the call.

Garrus bundled Junior, still sleeping, into the carrier and strapped her to his chest. He supposed that the humans would have all the things they needed, so he didn't bother bringing along any extra food or supplies. She opened her eyes blearily, once, as he was climbing into the taxi he'd ordered.

"Go back to sleep, Jun—er, Melissa."

And she obliged.

The house was the biggest Garrus had seen on Earth. Though, since it seemed to be surrounded by other houses equally as large, he decided that was more likely his particular choice of frequented neighbourhoods rather than houses this size actually being unusual. Its size reminded him of the few glimpses he had occasionally gotten of Tali's house on Rannoch. Once, when she had been unusually friendly, Tali had sent him the blueprints for it. An engineering marvel, he had told her, even though he himself didn't know the first thing about designing or building houses. And she had beamed. That had been one of the first times he had seen her without her mask. The sight of her so happy for a moment…it had been breathtaking.

The woman who answered the door looked even more frazzled than she had on the news vids or on the comm link. Garrus didn't even open his mouth before she reached out her arms and—almost greedily—snatched Junior up. Junior stirred uneasily, but fell promptly back asleep.

"Let me get you something," the woman said, promptly cueing up her omnitool. "For your troubles."

"Not necessary. Just…take good care of her."

The woman smiled. The sight of such a bright array of teeth in such a haggard face threw him off guard for a moment.

"We will. Thank you. You have no idea what you've done."

Garrus nodded and, with one last glance at Junior, retreated down the front steps.

As he walked down the driveway, back to the waiting taxi, he wondered where the closest bar might be. He knew that he should be elated at having returned the baby safely, but he felt uneasy. He felt it, as the humans said, in his gut. The woman—she had been so strange. But Junior would be better off with the Devlon aunt than with him. He knew that. He was crazy to begin to think otherwise.

Maybe if Shepard had lived...but she hadn't really wanted to talk about children. He'd brought up the prospect of children half-jokingly—but only half—and she had brushed it off with a joke of her own. He realized now what had been wrong with that. He had believed in her. Shepard had done the impossible: made Garrus Vakarian into an optimist. He had truly believed that she was going to find some way out of the War alive. They could have adopted a turian or a human child or maybe even a krogan. There were plenty of orphans after the War. They could have done it together.

But alone, he was no father. There was no Vakarian without Shepard.

As he climbed into the taxi, a black skycar pulled up into the driveway. A dark-haired man emerged. Garrus supposed this was the woman's husband, Junior's uncle. Melissa's uncle. Garrus leaned out of the window to try and get a closer look. Maybe an assessment of this human's character would yield something more reassuring than the woman's.

As he looked out at the man striding up the driveway, Garrus noticed that the paint on the man's skycar had been chipped away around the window...almost like it had been scuffed by bullets...

Garrus's own bullets.

And then Garrus Vakarian realized he had made a terrible mistake. Like he always did.


	6. Chapter 5: What It Takes

**Chapter 5: What it Takes**

Garrus waited in the taxi until the man had gone inside the house. Waiting was the hardest thing he had ever done. All of his instincts were roaring at him to burst in, pistol blazing, but he needed to do this right. Once he was sure the man was inside, he crept out of the taxi. He made his way carefully and quietly around the side of the house. Then, he pulled himself up to look into the window of the main room.

He wished he'd still had his Mantis, not just a sidearm. He had a good line of sight.

The man walked into the room. The aunt reached out for him and kissed him lightly on the cheek, but the man brushed her off. He stared past her to Junior. She was still sleeping. The woman had laid her down on an expensive-looking couch in the corner. The woman's hand shook as she pointed to the child.

Garrus tested the window. Locked, of course. And, judging by the wires he could see running through the pane, definitely alarmed. Not that the alarms would matter. Unless they had mechs stored somewhere…but, since the mechs had become sentient, so few had chosen to remain with their former owners—"slavers," he'd heard a group of them chirp sinisterly to each other in the corner of a bar once—he would be surprised if there were any resistance other than the inevitable arrival of Alliance MP. And Garrus knew, from personal experience, that their response time wasn't worth crap.

The man…he was approaching Junior now. Garrus couldn't see the man's face, since his dark hair fell down and obscured his expression, but the man reached out a finger and gently stroked Junior's sleeping cheek. She sighed, wistfully, in her sleep. For a moment, Garrus almost believed that it was all going to be okay. Maybe his paranoia—fueled by years of dealing with criminals and mercenaries and damn Reapers—was just getting to him. He was sure that the black skycar was the same as the one at the murder Junior's parents…but that didn't necessarily mean that this aunt and uncle had any sinister intent towards the child. Maybe it had been stolen from them. Maybe someone was trying to set up these two humans. Garrus would figure out who and why, of course. But, as the man gently stroked Junior's cheek, Garrus wanted to believe that, for now, the little human was safe.

Then, the man picked up an ornate pillow off the couch and, almost lovingly, held it over Junior's small, sleeping form. The man pressed down.

Garrus slammed his pistol into the glass, but it didn't shatter. The man and the woman looked up, startled. They stared at the turian trying to break through their living room window. The aunt's jaw fell open, but the man turned and screamed something at her. Garrus couldn't hear through the unyielding glass. Damn it. Why wouldn't it break? Now, the woman was running across the room. There had to be a weapons locker or a comm link there, around the corner and out of Garrus's line of sight.

But the man didn't take the pillow off Junior's face. He pressed down harder. Junior's little fists, sticking out from the edges, began to twitch violently.

As Garrus slammed his pistol into the window again and again, he couldn't help but think about how much sense this made. There had been parts of the human-rearing vids that had terrified him. Humans seemed so fragile. It was a miracle any of them made it to adulthood, really. Sometimes, they simply just died. Smothering Junior…would MP even be able to figure it out? Or, given how fragile human children were, would it look like an accident? And Garrus had been stupid: his anonymity, his insistence on avoiding the authorities meant that there was no way to trace where the child had come from. Perhaps the mysterious turian would be blamed for Melissa Devlon's murder? And then, Garrus presumed, the aunt would be left as the sole heir to Devlon Industries.

Simple. Cruel. Effective.

Junior's little hands were turning blue. The woman was still out of sight. The man was still yelling in her direction, keeping one eye on the child struggling beneath the pillow and one eye watching Garrus, helpless behind the window.

Garrus tried again with the pistol, but the glass held. So he hit the pane with the only other thing he could think of: his forehead.

The glass shattered. Wrex would have been proud.

Garrus pulled himself up and over the frame. He pulled down on his pistol's trigger. Blood blossomed on the man's chest and he fell, slumping onto the couch. The woman came running into the room, screaming something at Garrus and firing wildly with a shotgun that was clearly too heavy for her. He didn't know what she was yelling at him and he didn't give a damn. He fired again. Headshot.

He pulled the man off the couch, flinging the body to the floor. The man was still alive. Blood gurgled up from his throat as he tried to say something. But Garrus ignored him. Yanking up the pillow, Garrus noticed that its underside was covered in milk-coloured vomit. He stared at the tiny human underneath.

And she stared back up at him, her blue eyes wide. For a moment, Junior was too shocked to cry. Then, she started to hiccough in gasping breaths.

He scooped her up into his arms. She was warm and alive against his chest. She was crying, but he couldn't really hear her over the sound of the alarms. No sign of any mechs. Good. It bought him a little more time.

He had no idea what to protect Junior from anymore. Were these humans the only ones trying to kill her? Were the Alliance MP officers that had sent out the call for Melissa Devlon's return a part of it? Whom could he trust?

Garrus knew that if he even had to ask that question, the answer was obvious: no one.

Hopefully, the woman had kept her word and hadn't informed anyone else that a scarred and barefaced turian was bringing the child here. He couldn't imagine why she would have any motivation to let anyone else know. Unless they had been planning on setting him up. Either way, he had to erase that the child had even been here. He set Junior down again, even though she cried even louder, and got to work, purging the vomit and all DNA traces off the couch and pillow with his omnitool. Garrus had never been on this side of a crime scene before. Omega didn't really count, since that was hiding from mercs and mercs weren't exactly legitimate authorities. His days in C-Sec meant he knew all the tricks and how beautifully easy they were.

But the window…and the bodies…what would he do about that? Make it look like a robbery. It was a rich enough family in a rich enough house in a rich enough neighbourhood that it was more than feasible. He ran around the corner to where the woman had retrieved the shotgun, hoping to find something worth stealing.

It was an office: scattered with datapads and weapons and heat sinks. And on the desk sat the most beautiful rifle Garrus had ever seen in his life. It had be a prototype of some sort, maybe for the next generation of Mantis? He lifted it gingerly into his hands and checked. No serial code and definitely a Mantis. And definitely something worth stealing. Perfect.

"May I ask you for a dance, little lady?" he said to the rifle, chuckling to himself. The rifle, naturally, didn't respond. He clipped it onto his shoulder. Then, for good measure, he scattered the datapads onto the lush carpet, smashed open a few of the nearby cabinets, swiped a handful of credits, and, as a final touch, heaved the desk over onto its side.

By the time he came back into the living room, Junior had almost cried herself out: her full, terrified wails had been reduced to small, shuddering sobs. He was almost grateful for the alarms. Any neighbours wouldn't be able to hear her. He swept her back into his arms and crawled back out the broken window. He crept around the side of the house, but his visor didn't show any movement or heat signatures between them and the waiting taxi.

He didn't know if any of the neighbours might be watching, though, so he sprinted as quickly and as quietly as he could to the taxi. He let out a breath as he pulled the door closed and gunned up the engine. They were close. So close to being safe. He held Junior in one arm and he steered the taxi with the other, out of the neighbourhood and onto the main skyway. Junior was shaking.

"Sorry," he said to her softly, running a talon across the top of her head. "I'm sorry."

Her blue eyes were crinkled shut as she wept, but, at the sound of his voice, she opened them for a moment and looked up at him, as if she understood. Garrus accelerated and didn't look back at the monstrous house as it receded behind them.

On their way out of the neighbourhood, they passed a trio of Alliance MP skycars, sirens blazing and lights flashing. Garrus tensed as they passed his taxi. He had a human infant. And a very big and very stolen rifle beside him on the seat. If they stopped him…well, he didn't think it got more suspicious than that. But they seemed to be heading towards the house, no doubt responding to the alarms.

And, as he wiped a dribble of dried vomit off Junior's cheek with his talon, he realized how lucky that they both had been. He could have walked away. And Junior could have been dead. The Shepard medallion glinted around her neck and he understood, suddenly, what the dream had meant: this human child in his arms was not going to be a temporary thing.


	7. Chapter 6: Sea and Sky

**Chapter 6: Sea and Sky**

As the transport landed in Vancouver, Garrus saw the Normandy. It was perched on the edge of the harbour, the old girl's front windows facing towards Sol as it sank into the harbour. He then remembered how the humans had decided to mark the ten year anniversary of the Reaper War: they had grounded the Normandy, this time for good, and had turned her into a museum.

Maybe it was stupid, but Garrus's confidence had returned after he had successfully forged identification chips for both himself and Junior. All it had taken was a quick scan of a passing Alliance MP's omni-tool, and he had been able to duplicate the authorization signature very easily. If he had known how easy it was, he would have done it years ago. Though, until very recently, he had little reason to care.

She had needed a name, then. Not her real one, obviously. And he couldn't very well put "Junior" into her identification chip, though he'd certainly met humans with stranger names. There seemed to be no agreed upon human naming customs, unlike with his own people, who had a very clear understanding that a new child was always to be named after someone that the parents had respected, but was now deceased. Names in the Hierarchy were recycled through generations in this way. He himself had been named after his mother's father. For turians, it was extremely bad form to name a child after someone that was still living. It was like speaking about them in the past tense. He'd only heard of that happening once before, and it was all due to a misunderstanding about a soldier who had been MIA for years before returning to his wife and children.

Garrus contemplated what to put on Junior's chip for a long time. But the answer, really, was obvious.

Adrienna. After Primarch Victus.

The last name was a little trickier. He couldn't very well use his own. He had gathered enough false papers to support the cover story that Adrienna was the daughter of a human solider that Garrus had met at the Battle of the Catalyst. The last words this fictitious marine had told him was to look after his daughter if the War ever ended. And so, stranded on Earth, his alter-ego (a good turian soldier, unlike himself) had fulfilled his promise. This fabricated story was unusual enough that it would probably never be questioned. But not so unusual it would get them both into trouble…like the truth. The truth that he had once been Garrus Vakarian and that he had murdered this human child's rightful guardians.

Adrienna.

And, for himself, he would keep his first name. No one would identify him by that alone, especially now that he was barefaced. And even with the scars. Anyone who had lived through the Reaper War had scars. And the surname?

Garrus Arterius.

There were a million Arterius running around, (he heard once that the human equivalent was _Smith_)but Garrus had re-named himself after one very special Arterius. The name felt like he was pissing the face of his dead enemy. That gave him a certain measure of satisfaction. But it also gave him a name that was unlikely to be questioned. Even if they were a large family, most humans would be able to recognize that Arterius family members were not to be messed with.

They got off the transport at the harbour. A turian with a human baby. It had earned Garrus more than a few odd looks, but, so far, none of the humans had directly questioned him. The walk from the transport platform took them past where the Normandy sat on the waterfront. Garrus considered, for one crazy moment, stopping and paying the old girl a visit. For old times' sake. There was a long line-up for the access booth that had been set up at its opened airlock. The line was full of young families, children who were young enough that they would have been born after Shepard had died.

The thought made him feel old.

Ten years, he was realizing, was a long time to be lost. It hadn't felt like ten years. It hadn't felt like time had passed at all, really. Wandering from bar to bar, city to city, running out of credits on a daily basis…it had become routine. And routine had a way of blasting apart all sense of time. His time on Omega had been only two years and it had felt so much longer than this. Maybe because, as Archangel, he had deluded himself into having a purpose. This last time—the third and final time Shepard had died on him—he had no such delusions. Though maybe now…Junior had given him a kind of purpose, he supposed.

Junior watched Vancouver with wide eyes as he walked away from the harbour and into the city. He thought about how many times Shepard had died on him. The first time had been on the Citadel. That human commander—Anderson—had just pulled a chunk of Sovereign off Garrus's chestplates. The man had looked at Garrus with expectation. Garrus had seen the arm come down and break through the glass. He had seen Shepard push them all forward. And he had seen the debris fall on her. Garrus couldn't trust himself to speak, to destroy that glimmer of hope in Anderson's eyes. So he had simply shook his head: Anderson's hero was dead. That was all there was to know.

Then, she had crawled up from the wreckage, clutching her ribs. Tough. Unbelievably tough, for a human. That moment had triggered something in Garrus, had made him realize what Shepard was: the only thing in the whole damn galaxy worth respecting.

The second time she had died…well, that really should have been it. He'd seen the footage of her getting spaced: some graverobber had pulled it from the Normandy's black box illegally and then he had beat it off a merc informer. The vid was fuzzy, but Garrus could see the air slipping out through the ruptures in her suit. He could see Shepard struggling—a corpse that didn't yet know it was one—as she had drifted down into the gravitational embrace of the planet below.

He watched the footage over and over again to try and find some clue that it had been faked. All he could remember feeling was cold.

That second time…well, Liara had contacted him and told him that she was going after Shepard's body. Garrus didn't think there would be much left to find, but he didn't tell Liara that: he would respect her need for that kind of closure. And, by the time he spoke to Liara, he had figured out what his own closure needed to be. He was going to stop wasting time. He needed to do something that was finally worth doing. And so he had gone to Omega, done everything he could, followed Shepard's example…and still screwed up.

But he hadn't been the only one that realized her importance to the galaxy. And she had come back.

That was why her supposed death on the Catalyst—the third and final time she had died on him—was so difficult to believe. They never did find a body, though the Alliance investigators theorized that it had been vaporized in The Synthesis explosion. But Garrus felt that no body meant that she couldn't be dead. She could come walking into his scope at any moment, alive again, just like the last time. He was still waiting for her. It had been ten years already, but he was prepared to wait a little longer. That's why he hadn't left Earth with Tali: because he needed to be here when Shepard came back again.

It only took Garrus a few hours in Vancouver to track down a suitable residence for him and Junior. It was a fully-furnished, two-bedroom, two-storey house that had been built shortly after the devastation of the War was over. The house was small, by Earth standards, but compared to living aboard ship and even living on the Citadel, it seemed unbelievably spacious to Garrus.

He also liked that the view from the roof gave him a clear shot at the front door. But he didn't tell the earnest asari maiden who had shown him the house that. She had asked, hesitantly, about Junior and it was Garrus's first practise at the lie he had invented. The asari bought it, nodding earnestly with just a touch of admiration in her eyes that he, a turian, would take care of a human marine's orphan. That was the hardest part: painting himself as some noble soldier and watching the lie take root so comfortably in this gullible asari's mind.

Junior had settled comfortably and quickly into the house. Much to Garrus's relief, there didn't seem to be any lasting effects from the damage her aunt and uncle had done. Once she'd fallen asleep, he pulled up the comm link.

Tali answered more quickly than she usually did. She was wearing a pale blue dress that danced around her ankles, mirroring her dark hair in its motions. She must have been outside. Which meant it was a reasonable hour, for once. Garrus was proud of himself for finally figuring out the time delay between here and Rannoch. Tali was clearly as surprised as he was.

As he told her what had happened over the past few days, she stared at him. He realized, as he told her about shooting Junior's aunt in the head, that he couldn't even remember the names of the man and woman. He knew that he had used the aunt's name…something Devlon, obviously…to track down their private comm channel address, but he had forgotten it almost immediately afterwards. Some forgettable human name. He wasn't sorry he had killed them. But he was sorry that he couldn't recall their names.

The residence had taken up the last of the credits Tali had sent him. He wasn't going to ask for more. He would have to find a job. But all Garrus knew how to do was kill.

"I guess I could contract you out to calibrate the comm buoy chain between here and Rannoch," Tali said, thoughtfully. "The Admiralty Board is looking for someone on Earth, and I know you enjoy that kind of work…"

"Guns, Tali. Really big guns. I don't enjoy calibrating comm buoys."

"Fine," she sniffed. "Try to find something on your own, then. Something that I'm sure will involve blowing peoples' heads off."

"No, sorry," Garrus rubbed his talons against his scars. "I'm sorry. I'm grateful that you're trying to help. I'm just…not used to this."

Her bright eyes narrowed.

"To what?"

"I don't know…civilian life, I suppose."

She smiled.

"You'll get used to it. It's not all bad, you know."

His thoughts were interrupted by a bright blur running in front of Tali's legs.

"What was that?"

She laughed.

"That was Kal. Hey!" she shouted back over her shoulder. "What did I tell you?"

She turned back to Garrus.

"Sorry, he just wants me to come and play. It's strange. Father…he never did things like 'play' with me. It was harder, in the Flotilla, I guess. To do those sorts of things. Father was always so busy. But here, now that we have a real home for our people….well, I think that there's something…precious in being able to fix our parents' mistakes."

"Hmm." Garrus couldn't say much to that. All the mistakes he had ever made—and there had been many—had been his own. Unlike so many of his squadmates, he couldn't blame any of them on his parents. Sure, his relationship with his father had been rough at times, but that had been nothing compared to his other squadmates. Hell, Tali's own father had come damn close to destroying the entire Flotilla. Garrus didn't have anything on that.

"Anyhow," Tali continued, "so you need some way to make a few credits?"

Garrus snorted.

"I'm not sure that's something you can help with, Tali. Though I do appreciate—"

Tali smiled.

"Hold on."

She disappeared. Garrus wondered, nervously, what she was doing. He tinkered with the trigger's threshold point on the Mantis prototype while he waited. After a few minutes, she returned.

"How does this sound?" she asked, cheerfully. On his omnitool, Garrus cued up the file she had sent him. He raised his browplates at her when he was finished.

"…and Alliance MP won't deal with this because…?"

Tali shrugged.

"It's all in the file, Garrus."

He scrolled down a little further.

"Oh. Because one of the officer's son is involved. Tali, where did you learn so much about Earth's criminal gangs?"

"I'm still an Admiral, Garrus," she said, wringing her hands together and looking at him a little too intently. "Aside from the convoys…Earth is really our only other ally in the entire galaxy. The Board likes to keep an eye on it. I mean, the asari are still years away from Thessia…and the latest word from your convoy is that Wrex is trying to…umm…convince…the turians to go to Tuchanka and drop off the krogan before heading to Palaven… "

"Right…" Garrus muttered, while Tali continued to babble about galactic politics.

The thing about Tali living the majority of her life under a mask, Garrus realized, was that she had to be the worst liar he had ever seen. Quarian politics post-Reaper War must have gotten rather interesting, he realized, if all the quarians had failed to master the subtle art of deception as spectacularly as Tali had. It was painfully obvious that this information could only be coming from one person: the Shadow Broker.

Garrus had no interest in working for Liara. She was the last person in the galaxy he wanted to have any dealings with. He wondered how much information Tali was feeding back to her. He wanted to believe that Tali wouldn't do that…well, she wouldn't do it intentionally….but Liara was smart and he was sure that the intervening years had only made her smarter.

He scrolled through the file again. What this gang was doing to these kids, though…Maybe he could just pretend that he believed Tali's clumsy lie. For her sake. For Junior's sake.

"Alright," he said, sighing. "I'll deal with this."

Tali smiled.

"Thank you. I'm sure…Well, let me know when it's finished and I'll get you the credits. Should be a walk in the park after…after what we went through with Shepard."

Garrus nodded. He was sure the credits would come via Tali from Liara, but they probably weren't ultimately originating from Liara. Someone was probably paying the Broker to find someone to clean up this gang problem. "The dance of the credits," Zaeed, that old human merc, had described it as, once: the convoluted loops of transactions that needed to take place to get anything done. On Omega, it had been simpler. But, on Omega, things hadn't exactly ended well.

"Bloodless," Garrus said. "These humans just need to be scared. And I can do that." He grinned at her. Then, he decided to see just how bad a liar Tali really was. "So you're not going to tell me how the Flotilla made it home so quickly?"

She shrugged again, the hint of a smile playing at the edges of her lips. She wasn't even trying to pretend that they the Flotilla had made it to Rannoch with conventional means. But she wasn't telling either.

"Tali, you're a quarian to the last," Garrus teased, deciding not to push her, not today.

She let her smile break loose.

"Of course."

There was a moment of awkward silence. They hadn't spoken…casually…like this in a long time. Maybe not since those first few messages after the quarians had departed Earth, before Garrus had given himself fully to the hopelessness of it all.

"Well," she said, "I should get back to Kal…take care of yourself and that little human, okay?"

"Will do."

"And…" She looked down at her hands, churning restlessly beneath the sleeves of her dress. Garrus thought maybe there was a flash of tears at the edges of her eyes. "…maybe when those boshtet humans get their relay built, you'll use it to come and visit? You should meet the children. And Zaar, of course."

"I would love to see the house. Some day."

"Some day. _Keelah se'lai_, Garrus."

"Goodbye, Tali."


	8. Chapter 7: Hearts are Earned

**Chapter 7: Hearts Are Earned**

Through the Mantis's scope, Garrus watched the usual procession of expressions march across the human's face. First, confusion at the red dot that had suddenly appeared on his shoulder. Next, the realization of what the red dot meant, accompanied by that satisfying flicker of fear. And, finally, that hard edge of rage as the human's eyes traced the origin of the laser up the wall to where the armored turian waited in the shadows of the stairs. The Mantis prototype rested comfortably between his talons and was aimed, precisely, at the trio of humans moving the crate out of the building below.

Garrus could tell the recent recruits into the gangs by whether or not they moved onto stage three: the really new ones would just remain locked in perpetual fear at the realization that there was a sniper. The ones who had been with the gangs the longest—maybe had ended up in a few firefights before—would usually find their anger and corresponding courage. Though, of course, if Garrus had meant them any real harm, none of them would have made it past stage one, let alone to the point where they could actually pick out the blue and silver of his old armor against the darkness of the street's shadows.

Bloodless, he'd told Tali. That had been four years ago now. "No killing" hadn't exactly been a requirement of these little neighbourhood clean-up operations, but Garrus had taken it as a personal challenge to minimize fatalities. Most of the gang members were young humans, usually between fifteen and twenty-five years old. They could have entire lives ahead of themselves if they changed their ways now. It was easy to remember—especially with the new recruits—that these kids were just as much victims of these gangs' crimes as they were perpetrators.

The humans below him had paused and were looking up at him, stunned and unsure. The two carrying the crate set it down. The one Garrus had in his scope reached for a pistol strapped to his boot, but none of the others seemed to know what to do. Just kids, really, running drugs or some other illegal substance for forces that weren't afraid to use them and then throw them away. All part of that lost generation: the ones who had been children during the Reaper Wars, who had been orphaned and left with no one to take care of them. And then, sometimes, had been sent to the Tanks and had been lucky or strong enough to come out of them without catching some fatal disease in the overcrowded halls.

Just kids. But just because he'd tried to avoid killing them didn't mean he had always succeeded. There had been a few who simply couldn't be dissuaded: always some of the older ones, not that it was much consolation. They had come at Garrus in a way that meant either his death or theirs. There had been the one who had snuck up him from behind with the knife. Garrus still had the scar along his shoulder from that encounter. Then there was the other one who decided to try and gut him with a stolen Alliance-issue omniblade. And that biotic who had taken out half the street in her rage before Garrus had been forced to put her down with a bullet between the eyes.

But that he could remember all the ones he'd killed…well, his past work with Shepard usually resulted in countless lives snuffed out every time they stepped off the Normandy. Not that they hadn't all deserved it and not that he regretted any shot he'd ever taken. Well, maybe that wasn't entirely true. But believing it helped him to sleep at night, so that was all that mattered. And, with such a small body count over the past four years, it was easy to convince himself that he was doing more good than harm for this human city.

The human who was going for his gun was angry, but it would have been smarter to try and find some cover. He pulled out the pistol and started firing up at Garrus. Garrus let him fire until the heat sink was fried: most of the bullets hit the wall and the handful that didn't bounced harmlessly off his shields. The other two humans had ducked behind the crate. Garrus could tell by the way the pistol-wielding human's eyes widened that the kid didn't actually have any spare heat sinks. He held the pistol up anyhow as Garrus swung down from his perch and walked towards the cowering trio.

"Good evening," he said conversationally.

The human with the pistol rushed towards him, raising the butt towards Garrus's face. But the human had obviously overcommitted his body's momentum, so Garrus just stepped out of the way. If he didn't have his helmet concealing his face, the humans would have seen the grin from his flared mandibles. Ignoring the crash behind him as the human ran himself into a pile of garbage, Garrus approached the two behind the crate: a young boy, no more than sixteen, and a girl of about the same age. They stared at him in terror. The girl's green cybernetics flared and flickered in the dim light. She had hair as dark as Junior's. Garrus could hear the kid with the pistol cursing and pulling himself out of the garbage. Breathlessly, the two behind the crate waited. The boy closed his eyes.

Then, Garrus bent down and offered the girl his three-taloned hand. She stared at it. Then, he said his usual line.

"You're done here."

The teenager grabbed his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She immediately dropped it, stared at him for a moment, and then took off down the alley. Garrus watched her sprint away, the boy that had been hiding with her close on her heels.

This left only the first human. He still held his pistol in his hands, albeit with less conviction.

"Kid," said Garrus, tilting his head. "I suggest you drop the gun and join your friends for whatever pressing engagement they've suddenly remembered."

The human hesitated.

"Hmm," Garrus said, shrugging and pointing the Mantis downwards. "Well, if you'd prefer trying to run with a bullet in your foot…"

That did it. The kid dropped the pistol and sprinted off down the alley. Garrus watched him go, smiling beneath his helmet. They'd probably be at it again the next night—somewhere else in the city—but it was always his hope that maybe they'd consider trying to find a way out of the gang. There had been something in the girl's eyes…maybe this encounter had been the last push she needed to try and get out. Garrus knew it was hard to escape the gangs. But, unlike the kids, he also knew that things would go harder for them if they stayed.

He bent down and opened the crate they had been moving. Cheap weapon mods. Hardly even worth smuggling. He left it there, but put in an encrypted transmission to Alliance MP as he left the scene. It wouldn't do any good for some unknown party to come along and find these.

It had been shamefully easy. Like it always was. But Garrus had come to terms with the low-risk nature of these operations. They were still more interesting and more useful than sitting around calibrating quarian comm buoys. He was sure that more high-risk and more morally-ambiguous jobs crossed the Shadow Broker's desk, but he would never ask for anything more than this: knocking down pockets of criminal activity, trying to scare these kids into doing something else with their short lives. And always working alone. This was what he wanted. This was what made sense, because it couldn't be like Omega: this time, he had a…reason…for staying alive.

Garrus could see Junior in the front window as he landed the skycar on the driveway. She was waiting for him. She was supposed to be in bed. He wondered—and not for the first time—whether he was paying Emma, the young human who lived with her parents across the street, too much to watch Junior while he was at…work. But Junior seemed to like Emma. And her parents were both Alliance, so he assumed that the teenager could handle herself in a fight. Not that he'd ever want it to come to that. And not that Emma's seeming inability to get Junior into bed at a reasonable hour was encouraging.

But Garrus could tell, as he approached the house, that something was wrong. Not desperately wrong. Just…off. Although her eyes brightened as he reached the front door, he could see even through the front window that something was worrying Junior. Her dark eyebrows were knit together. Her forehead was furrowed beneath the line of her black bangs. Her brown eyes—ringed with the green Synthesis light—were a little duller than they usually were.

"Hey," said Emma in that breathless, clipped tone that so many of the humans her age seemed to use. "Sorry that she's not in bed. She says she can't sleep. So I let her wait up for you. That okay?"

Garrus grumbled and, for some reason, Emma seemed to think that signaled an answer in the affirmative.

"Great! Let me know when you need me again. We went to the park and Adrienna played with those twins—you know, the adorable twin boys from down the street? I babysit them sometimes too. Great kids. Anyhow, see you later. Bye Adrienna!"

This world was so very different from the one that Garrus had just left.

As Emma swept out the front door, Junior came creeping around the corner.

"You," Garrus mumbled, "are supposed to be in bed."

She ignored him and instead wrapped her small, soft human arms around his nearest leg. He bent down and picked her up, looking into her face, trying to figure out what was bothering her. She didn't seem hurt. Emma probably would have mentioned something if she'd fallen at the park again. The first time that had happened…Garrus shuddered thinking about how bright human blood was, and how especially bright and unnatural it looked spouting from Junior's knee. He had panicked, slapping some medi-gel on the wound before it occurred to him that was probably excessive…and earning more than a fair share of stares from the other parents at the park.

And so maybe there hadn't been that much blood after all. Why did blood matter so much when it was coming out of thishuman? It hadn't bothered him with any of the other humans he had worked with, or even with the humans he had come to care about. But they had all been soldiers. Soldiers were meant to bleed. Children, he decided, were not. But right now, physically, Junior looked fine. Damn, this child made him paranoid. He flared his mandibles out in annoyance at himself.

"Garrus?" she said, softly.

"What is it?" he asked her, quietly. He set her back down on the floor, but crouched beside her so that they were at the same eye level. She looked down at her hands and mumbled something.

"Hmm?"

"I just…" she said a little louder, though not by much, "I just want to know why we're different."

Garrus's brow plates creased and his voice tightened.

"Why? Did someone say something to you?"

"No…"

She shifted her brown eyes down to her feet again. He touched her gently on the shoulder.

"It's okay. I just want to know what you mean."

She looked at him sideways.

"I mean…we're not the same. Other kids at the park, they all have a mommy or a daddy or even a blue mommy, if they're blue kids but…but I've never see any kids with….with a Garrus."

He sank back onto his spurs. He supposed he should have been expecting this question. But not now. She was only four years old, dammit. Why would she start wondering about these things now? Garrus considered telling her not to worry about it, that it didn't matter. But Junior must have seen the hesitation in his eyes because she suddenly fixed him with a steely glance that looked remarkably, well, turian in her soft human face.

"Tell me. I wanna know why!" she said, stubbornness edging her voice.

And Garrus suddenly realized that the child in front of him was more than that now. Until now, it had been sleeping and eating and walking and talking…skills that needed to be imparted to it so that it could survive in this world. But now that the big question was here, out in the open, he realized that she was more than a child. Junior was becoming a person.

He scooped her up into his arms. She reached around and tugged at his fringe, absently, but still watched him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

"We're not like the others," Garrus said slowly, "because…because your parents are dead. They were shot because someone wanted their money. And then they tried to kill you."

Her eyes widened. Whatever she had expected, this hadn't been it. Obviously. What four-year-old would expect this. But he could also tell that she didn't entirely understand what this meant. Her eyebrows narrowed as she tried to puzzle it out: the same squint Garrus had seen etched across her face as she struggled to her feet for the first time, as she struggled to pronounce his name out of her gurgling baby noises.

"They're dead? Why?"

"Because someone shot them."

"Why?"

"Because someone wanted their money."

"Why?"

"Because some people are evil."

"Why?"

He laughed. It wasn't funny. But it was a good question.

"I don't know. No one knows. But they wanted to hurt you, when you were a baby. That's why this has to stay a secret, okay?"

"Why?"

"So no one finds out and tries to hurt you again."

"No! I mean, why didn't they hurt me? If they wanted to?"

Garrus remembered the underside of that ornate pillow: remembered how soft it felt in his talons and he had lifted it up off Junior's face.

"Because I saved you," he told her.

She frowned, still trying to puzzle it all out. Her eyes searched his. Then, she seemed to have decided something, because the frown broke into a smile. She threw her small arms around him.

"If you saved me, that means I'm pretty lucky to have a Garrus, right?"

He smiled as he set her back down onto the floor, but she grabbed his talons and looked up into his eyes.

"Maybe…" she said quietly, "can I call you Daddy sometimes?"

The human word felt strange in his ears. Garrus had been forced to learn the local human dialect after realizing, after a few garbled confusions at the park, human children didn't come pre-equipped with translators and every word she had absorbed from him had been in the Imperial tongue. But now Junior was teaching him human words. He ran his talons along the back of her hair.

"Of course."

* * *

**A/N**

I'm glad that people are enjoying the story so far. :-) Unless something goes drastically wrong, there should be chapters every day this week. For those who are curious, the chapter title comes from Yeats's poem, "A Prayer for My Daughter" : "Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned / By those that are not entirely beautiful."


	9. Chapter 8: The Ones Who Survived

**Chapter 8: The Ones Who Survived**

Five. That was the year that humans were sent to school. And it was coming up fast. Garrus was determined to make Junior's life as normal as possible. He had seen that in her eyes when she had asked why they were so different from each other: this small human child craved normalcy, wanted only to fit in with the other children she played with at the park, wanted to be human. And he promised himself he would do everything he could to give her that.

He'd never paid much attention to human female clothing before. Once, for a mission, the human thief Kasumi had…encouraged…Shepard to wear this tight black dress. Given the looks that some of the other human males (mostly Jacob, that creepy bastard) kept throwing towards their CO as she huffed her way to the shuttle, Garrus presumed that this outfit was supposed to be particularly attractive to other humans. Personally, all he could think about was how difficult it must be to move. And how there was nowhere to conceal a weapon. At least, no where that he really should be thinking about, considering Shepard had been just his CO at the time. Well, she'd never been just his CO, but that was before…Anyhow, human clothing had always perplexed him.

Now, suddenly, he found himself terrified of buying Junior the wrong clothes. The last thing in the world he wanted was to make her a target . When they went to the park, he observed the other parents, especially the asari mothers, whose blue-skinned children always garnered the most positive attention. It occurred to him, watching these parents and their children, that his human crewmates aboard the Normandy had been less than conventional in their attire. He hadn't realized at the time, but he was fairly certain that what Jack had run around in probably wasn't actually legal on Earth. He remembered how, after gaining some kind of trust from Jack by helping her blow up her old Cerberus facility, Shepard had ordered Jack to put on a shirt. He thought he understood why now.

He had faced down geth and mercenaries and Cerberus monsters and Reapers, but, somehow, the possibility of making a mistake dressing his little human daughter terrified him more than all these threats combined. It was utterly ridiculous.

And then there was the hair.

He didn't understand hair. It took a while for him to realize that it needed to be cut regularly or it would grow into ragged clumps that would leave Junior in tears as he tried to use his talons to untangle them. Garrus couldn't understand how there could be an evolutionary advantage to such a stupid piece of biology. What bothered him most were those asari mothers though. There were more asari still on Earth than any other left behinds, since many of them had human mates. And, perhaps a result of the high fatality count of the War, many of these asari he saw at the parks had human stepchildren as well. Like turians, asari had fringes rather than hair, so Garrus should have been able to take comfort in the fact that these elegant blue beauties were as hopeless at figuring the stuff out as he was. But he couldn't. Because they all did their childrens' hair up in the most elaborate ways: braided and tied with bows and ribbons. It drove Garrus insane. If they could learn it, why couldn't he? Maybe you needed five fingers on each hand.

He'd tried to do something with Junior's black hair, once. He'd set her down in a chair and tried, desperately, to follow along with the vid he had downloaded. But Junior had squirmed at his tugging and frowned at the messy result (it didn't look anything like the vid). She pouted and then told him that she wanted her hair short ("like a soldier!" she demanded). And Garrus had to admit that her insistence on practicality made him proud. And he thought that, maybe, his inability to do his daughter's hair didn't make him a failure after all.

Five. That was when school started. Human customs. He was trying so hard to learn them all, but it frustrated him how many mistakes he continued to make. Not for his own sake, but for Junior's. Kids were cruel. He was worried that when she started school, she would be tormented for being so different.

So he needed to teach her to fight, obviously. But he wanted her to be a normal human, so he didn't want to start training her before it was customary for humans to do so. The extranet was no help because, while it was clear that military recruitment didn't start until the age of eighteen for humans (three years later than turians), he could find nothing about how old a child should be before basic martial skills could be taught. He'd tried asking Emma, but she must have thought it was a joke, because she just barked out her high-pitched giggles in response.

In desperation, he approached one of the asari mothers at the park. Junior got along particularly well with her azure daughter. So, although they had exchanged little beyond endearing smiles at their childrens' antics (well, she had smiled, he had nodded), Garrus walked up to her and stammered out his question one day while their daughters were pushing each other on the swings.

"So…" he coughed, "have you started teaching your daughter basic yet?"

The asari stared back at him.

"What?" she said, coldly.

"Training, I mean. I'm…hmm…" Garrus shifted on his feet, "wondering when it's usual to start teaching human children how to fight. I know that you asari do everything slower than the rest of us, but…"

Her blue eyes narrowed at him.

"And just what do you mean by that?"

"Nothing!" he said, coughing again. "Just that…I mean, maybe your child will develop slower than the others, but I assume that you're trying to raise her with at least some human customs, since we're all stuck here anyhow….and I wanted to know if…"

The asari continued to narrow her gaze, so Garrus gave up.

"Nevermind" he sighed.

The asari sidled away from him, but Garrus was distracted by a peal of laughter coming from a nearby human woman. When he gave her a dark stare, she didn't stop. If anything, she only laughed harder.

"You turians," she said, walking closer to him, "you always think it's all about violence."

Garrus had seen this woman at the park before with her twin boys, but now that he was seeing her up close for the first time, he realized there was something disturbingly familiar in the human's keen eyes and the weight of her voice. He couldn't help but feel like the long dark hair that danced loosely around the woman's shoulders should have been tucked up tightly around her scalp. Why would he think that? Garrus had a sharp memory for names and faces, but he was sure that he had never seen this woman before.

"To answer your question," she said, giving the asari a grin, "humans have this strange belief in childhood innocence. It would be weird to give your child military-grade training at any age."

Garrus, once again, marvelled at how humans ever made it to adulthood.

"But," she said, shrugging, "my father made sure all his girls learned to fight when we were young. It was a pain, but I was glad he did. Came in handy for my sister once, when a touchy-feely boyfriend wouldn't take 'no' for an answer," she laughed, like it was funny, though Garrus was fairly certain by the way her eyes shifted that it had not been funny at all when it had happened.

"Hmm," he grunted, walking over to her. "Seems like your father was smarter than most humans."

She punched him lightly on the arm and Garrus jerked, startled by the familiarity in the gesture from a woman he had only really just met.

"Oh, we're not all that bad…" Her sharp eyes shifted over to Junior. "I mean, your kid is wearing a Shepard around her neck, I see."

"So?"

"So I kinda thought that was, you know, a human thing."

Garrus bristled.

"She…erm, the Shepard, I mean…didn't just save humans, you know."

"I know. But she was human," and she grinned at him again when he raised his brow plates at her. "That's got to count for something. Besides, you can't think humans are too bad if you're raising one. What's your story, anyhow, bareface?"

Garrus was a little taken aback by the boldness of the question. And that she noticed the significance of his lack of face markings. The other parents at the park…they'd given him looks of course, wondering behind their eyes about why he was with Junior…but no one had dared to ask him directly whether or not he had any right to her. It occurred to him that this could be some kind of setup, that this woman was in the employ of any number of people trying to find him out.

But all he could do was stick to his story.

"I was at London," he said, eyes growing dark. He didn't enjoy recounting the parts of his story that were true. "Made friends with a human marine while we were mowing down husks. Surprisingly, both of us made us out alive, but he and his wife died four years ago, some horrible disease related to the radiation blasts from the Reapers. There was no one left to take care of their kid. No one but me."

She nodded, believing every word of his lie.

"So why'd you go bareface? And why didn't you take the convoys back to Palaven?"

Garrus shrugged. The question about his face would have been the height of rudeness in turian culture, but he assumed that this human simply didn't know any better. Or maybe this human was assuming that he would assume that, just to see if she could get away with asking. The thought amused him rather than insulted him.

"The face markings…" he said thoughtfully, scratching at the scars. "Well, they don't have any significance here on Earth. The colonies don't exist here. They mean nothing to humans and even less to those few of us turians that are left. There was no point in keeping them, not even"—he chuckled and pointed to the maimed side of his face—"to cover up taking a brute's claw to the face. And I missed the convoys because I was in a coma for weeks as they patched this up and the docs decided I was too fragile for space travel. Shoulda thanked them, I guess, though I didn't at the time…I mean, if I'd gone on that convoy, I wouldn't have Junior."

"She's like your daughter then?" the woman asked.

Garrus nodded.

She smiled, but the expression didn't feel as honest as it had before. Her eyes searched up and down his face and then, with a sigh, she looked away.

"I was at London too," she said.

And then he saw it: a vicious scar that wrapped around her neck that had to have been from a husk…Garrus had seen many old wounds like these on the humans, especially in Vancouver where it seemed like half the population was military or ex-military. What surprised him was how few seemed to have chosen to get them removed. Oddly, she laughed.

"I wasn't supposed to be there," she said, dropping her voice to conspiratol tones, "but I signed with the Alliance just before the War struck. Lied to my family. After what I had happened to my older sister…well, she was military. Like all the men in the family. But if they were to find out that I had signed up too…Anyhow, I gave the recruiters a fake name, and that was before these," she pulled up her identification chips, "so it was easy to get away with."

"I was deployed to London for the last push from the Resistance, for that last push to the Catalyst. But I was caught in a Reaper blast early on. I was buried in this rubble…along with a squad of turians."

She nodded to him.

"We were trapped under the rubble for days. They had only dextro rations. I begged them to give me a gun, to let me end it all, but they wouldn't let me. I guess the easy way out is even less acceptable to turians than to humans…But I guess I'm glad that they didn't. It was hell for the first few days because we didn't even have water. But then the floods came. You remember that, right?"

Garrus nodded, even though he didn't. He had actually been off-world at the time, crashlanded on some garden world in a nearby system. They had repaired the Normandy as quickly as they could. He was furious at Joker and EDI for running away, but his rage gave him focus: allowed to work with Tali on getting the Normandy's drivecore back online so they could get back to Earth as soon as they could. So that he could find Shepard again.

It had taken them months.

And, when they landed on Earth, there had been no Shepard. Just devastation.

"The floods…" the woman continued. "It was like the heavens had opened up. Like _Noah _all over again. But the water brought something to drink, at least."

Garrus didn't know what a _Noah_ was, but he nodded along as if he did.

"I swear…I didn't think I was going to get out of there alive. But one of the clean-up squads found us and pulled the whole lot of us out. The turians that were with me…Well, I gotta admit, I wasn't that big a…fan…of aliens before. Made me nervous. I always thought that we should put humanity first. The turian are all on their way back to Palaven now. Kinda wished they stuck around though," she said, smiling again. "I owed them my life."

"Here," she said, sticking out a hand, "my name is Lynn. Lynn Williams."

Williams.

Garrus suddenly knew why she was so familiar. His mandibles flicked back and forth, but she didn't seem to notice his sudden nervousness. Of all the ex-soldiers to run into…He'd never met her before, of course, but, still, there seemed to be some indistinct danger in speaking to this woman. If other eyes had tabs on her…because of her sister…though why they would do that, he didn't know. Still, it wasn't like he had a choice but to play it straight. He grabbed her hand with his talons and shook it.

"Garrus Arterius."

And here she raised her eyebrows.

"That's…quite the name you've got."

"Saren Arterius is my second cousin, once removed. I never met him. I promise you I'm not going to try and sell our souls to the Reapers in exchange for immortality."

She laughed.

"Huh, well, it looks like someone already did."

He tilted his head, confused.

"Well," she said, gesturing to the green circuitry flickering along the side of her face, "doesn't this sometimes feel like that's exactly what happened? I know that the Reapers were going to kill us all…but we're machines now. Couldn't that be what they always wanted?"

Of course the thought had occurred to him too: that Shepard hadn't really won, but had lost. That becoming part synthetic was the Reapers' grand plan. That Shepard had died in vain. But, today, at the park with Ashley William's younger sister staring at him uncertainly, he suddenly couldn't afford to be pessimistic.

"I'm sure that, whatever this is, it was the only choice we had," he said, trying to convince himself as much as convince her. "And besides, isn't the fact that our children can live these…well…normal lives…doesn't that make it all worth it, regardless of how it came about?"

She nodded.

"I guess you're right," she said, trailing off uncertainly. Like Garrus, she would force herself to believe this because the alternative was too catastrophic, too far out of anyone's reach to fix now. "So…you're a turian with a human daughter. And you named her Junior?"

He laughed.

"Well, no. Her name is Adrienna."

"Ah. That's…reassuring. I mean, if you'd called her Garrus Arterius Junior, I might have to call the MP's Social Services division."

"That…would be unfortunate."

She laughed.

"My boys are Alex and John. Good kids, but trouble. I grew up in a house full of sisters, so I was a little bewildered when I ended up with two boys, to be honest. It's kinda amazing, these kids. I mean, we're all…uncertain as to what to do with these new synthetic abilities abilities, but my boys have barely turned five and they'll reach out their hands and do that weird network thing with other kids. Crazy stuff."

"Hmm. Do you ever do it? The networking?"

She shook her head.

"Well, sometimes. Mostly with the kids, if there's something really important I need to tell them and they aren't understanding the words I'm using. It's really hard to get used to. And, to be honest, I don't know many people who weren't born with it who use it a lot. These new abilities…well, whether it was the Reapers winning or losing, our generation sure isn't making much use of them. I read that they're predicting non-binary language will be obsolete in only a few generations, with everyone communicating via networking." She shivered. "Freaks me out, to be honest with you."

"Me too," Garrus noded. "I was wearing my visor when The Synthesis happened," he gestured to the streak of pulsating blue along his faceplate, "so I've got a bunch of its abilities organically woven into my brain now. It's strange, but I've gotten used to it. We'll get to used to it all, eventually."

"Nope," she said, smiling, "not me. I'm glad that I'll be dead by the time that language is too. Think of everything that we'll have lost. Poetry…my dad loved poetry, you know. So did—"

Something beeped and Lynn pulled up her omnitool.

"Ah, Jay's got supper ready. Boys!" she called across the park, and the two twins came running. She smiled again at Garrus.

"Hey, we'll see you around, Arterius."

He nodded. Junior came over and said goodbye to the twins, her small fingers brushing lightly over theirs: networking, again. Like Lynn, Garrus wished he could understand what had happened exactly during The Synthesis.

And he wondered how much Lynn knew about what had happened to her sister. But he also knew that he could never be the one to tell her.

* * *

**A/N**

To answer the geth question (which is a very good one!), I haven't forgotten about them. They'll have a very crucial role to play before the story is over... Again, thanks everyone for reading!


	10. Chapter 9: Playing at Soldiers

**Chapter 9: Playing at Soldiers**

Five was also fifteen: Junior was five years old now and it had been fifteen years since the Battle of the Catalyst. Fifteen was an important number in turian culture, but seemingly unremarkable for humans. There had been a statue of Shepard commissioned in London for the five year mark. The Normandy had been turned into a museum in Vancouver for the ten year mark. But the news vids said very little about the fifteenth anniversary, save for brief reminder that it was exactly that and an official quote from the retired Admiral Hackett reminding everyone to remember the sacrifices of the War, never forget those who lost their lives in the fight against the Reapers, etc.

It was also Junior's first day of school. Garrus had dropped her off apprehensively and waited out the entire day at his workbench, fiddling with the mantis prototype to keep his mind distracted. It had occurred to him that the Devlons were affluent enough that they had probably paid for some in-vitro genetic manipulations on Junior, but he had no idea what genes, exactly, they may have changed. Well, he was fairly certain her intelligence was above average, but he preferred to believe that was nurture rather than nature. Still, he was eager to see what her aptitude scores were like nonetheless.

When he picked her up from the school, he assumed that the crumpled piece of paper she thrust into his talons would be her test results. A little strange, he thought, but maybe it was customary to print the results on traditional paper rather than transmit them via datapad? But what was even stranger was that the paper did not appear to have any test scores on it at all. Instead, Garrus found himself staring at a frowning blue pointy thing standing tall over a smaller brown thing. Someone—it must have been a teacher—had written "My Family by Adrienna, age 5" along the top of the page.

"That's you," said Junior, pointing at the blue thing. "And then that's me."

"Well, obviously," Garrus said, ruffling her (now) short black hair with his talons. She grinned at him and bounded off to catch a few more minutes on the swings.

Lynn Williams was there picking up sons as well. He wandered over to her with the paper in his talons.

"So…" he tried to ask casually, "when do they send us the aptitude test results?"

She turned to him and laughed…again.

"It's just kindergarten, Arterius. Geez."

"There's no aptitude tests then?" he said, frowning. Then, he remembered that was exactly how Junior had drawn him, so he tried to relax his mandibles a little into more of a smile-ish shape.

"Nope," said Lynn. "There'll be report cards in later grades, but I think the aptitude tests you're talking about aren't until high school."

"Oh. Hmm."

When he fell into silence as he tried to comprehend the strangeness of the humans' so-called education system, Lynn watched him for a moment. Then, she muttered something.

"Sorry, what?" asked Garrus.

She grinned at him.

"'The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage.' It's…something Dad used to say. You know, since he was surrounded by daughters all the time. I think he got it from one of those twentieth-century _radio _shows he used to listen to," she smiled warmly at Garrus. "_Radio _and poetry…yup, Dad was a bit old-fashioned."

Garrus didn't know what _radio _was—some kind of human art form he guessed.

"What does it mean?"

"Hmm?"

"What you said. About hostages. What do you mean?"

"Oh, well…I was just thinking that Dad used to say it all the time, but I don't think even he embodied it quite as much as you do."

He raised his brow plates at her, which made her burst out laughing.

"That kid has you totally wrapped around her finger."

He frowned.

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Lynn shrugged.

"Oh, a good thing. I didn't mean to imply that Adrienna is spoiled or anything…just that, well, you'd do anything for her, right?" She turned to watch the children. "Wow. Look at them go."

He followed Lynn's gaze over to where Junior and twins were playing. They ran up to each other and touched the pads of their fingers together lightly: networking to exchange basic "how are yous?"

Alex, the more commanding of the boys, was pointing at his brother John.

"John'll be Vega, okay?"

"Yeah!" said John, flexing. The sum-total of John was probably smaller than one of Vega's arms, at least when Garrus had known him.

"I get to be Wrex!" shouted Junior.

"No," said Alex. "You gotta be Shepard."

Junior frowned. And so did Garrus.

"Why?" she demanded. "I don't wanna be Shepard. I wanna be Wrex!"

"You gotta be Shepard 'cause you're the only girl!"

"I don't care! I'm the best at headbutting. Roooooaaarrr!" Junior yelled, charging across the park with her chin bent down to her chest.

Garrus was fairly certain Junior had never met a krogan before. Along with the quarians, they were some of the rarer left-behinds. Garrus had no idea where she had heard of krogans, let alone Wrex specifically. School? Vids? But, as she play-rammed her forehead into Alex, he couldn't help but chuckled to himself, thinking that Wrex would have admired her form.

"Fine!" said Alex, caving under the pressure of her forehead against his chest. "You be Wrex. I'll be the Shepard." Then, he pointed across the playground to where that little asari girl was waiting for her mother to arrive. "Look! It's a Reaper! Attack!"

"Get it!" shouted John, with Junior roaring not far behind as the three of them charged across the grass.

There was something perverse in watching these children play at something that had once been so real for him. Lynn must have seen the look on his face because she smiled apologetically.

"They went to that museum in the harbour over the weekend. So all Alex has talked about since is Shepard this and Shepard that."

It took a moment for Garrus to realize that by "museum in the harbour," she meant the Normandy.

"How was it?" he asked conversationally.

"Huh?"

"The museum? What was it like?"

"Oh! Well, uh, I didn't go. Jay took them. I couldn't, really…" She dropped her voice. "My oldest sister…she served on the Normandy, you know. Under Shepard, even. Not for as long as some of the others, but, still…I just couldn't handle seeing it, you know?"

Garrus knew what was supposed to happen next. He was supposed to feign shock and admiration for her sister's prestigious career. He was supposed to ask her what had happened to her sister. But he knew exactly what had happened to Ashley Williams. He had been there. And he didn't feel much like reliving those moments through the grief of Ash's sister. So instead he looked away and called out to Junior that it was time to walk home.

"I understand what you mean," he said softly, barely glancing at Lynn.

Junior came skidding up to him.

"Daddy Garrus! I wanna go see the Normandy too! Please! John and Alex got to see it! They sat in the pilot's seat and everything! Please!"

The urgency of her request took him by surprise, since Junior so rarely demanded much of anything. She was usually so quiet and thoughtful, thinking over everything before she decided to speak. Clearly, she must have really wanted this. Garrus glanced over at Lynn's face: she tried to smile, but he could tell by how it didn't touch her eyes that she was still thinking about her sister. Fifteen years was a long time. It ought to be long enough. He realized that he needed to prove to himself that he could do this.

"Hmm. Okay. We'll go check it out."


	11. Chapter 10: Clipped Wings

**Chapter 10: Clipped Wings**

They entered through the shuttle bay. It cost Garrus seven credits. Junior was free because she was under six years old. He was told by the weary attendant wearing an old Alliance uniform as a costume to keep within an arm's reach of his child at all times. The attendant did a double-take when he realized that Garrus's child was human, but the entertainment value of that expression on his face was hardly worth the price of admission.

There were a lot of people at the museum. A lot of Alliance families, near as Garrus could tell. Most of the children were reacting like Junior: racing around, looking at everything, thrilled to be actually touching the Normandy. Some of the older people walked more slowly. Those with the obvious battle scars walked the slowest of all.

They started in engineering. There were placards along the wall explaining the technical specifications of the Normandy. The SR-1 had been a joint turian-human venture—a fact that was merely mentioned in a footnote on one of the smaller placards. Though Garrus noticed that the fact that the SR-2 had been rebuilt by terrorists was completely absent.

And most of the specs on the placards were wrong. Well, not wrong exactly, but he knew for a fact that Tali had managed to squeeze a bit more…what was the human word?... _oomph_ out of the engines than that. And he had personally ensured that the Normandy's firepower was significantly more than stated. It amused him to think that Shepard had neglected to send the Alliance updated specs in the middle of the Reaper War, though it seemed equally as likely that the Alliance simply didn't want to advertise how powerful the ship really was.

Or had been, at least. Walking through the Normandy again felt like an autopsy on a long-dead corpse. The silence didn't help. After The Synthesis, EDI had been trapped in her mobile platform, unable to access the Normandy's systems. They had to re-route around…well…everything. EDI had been the Normandy. One night—one of the few that Garrus had left the bowels of the ship to join the others—EDI described the agony of being separated from the ship as an amputation, like all of her limbs had been sliced from her body. She'd spoken about it with a wide-eyed, pained expression that seemed foreign to her usually impassive face.

They'd flown the old girl back to Earth without so much as a guidance system. It had taken months. Months of not knowing what had happened. Months of having that small, flickering hope that Shepard would still be alive. Months of walking through her empty cabin, feeding all of her fish (something Shepard herself had never been particularly good at herself). Just listening. Sometimes, he would sit at her desk and close his eyes and imagine that he could still hear her sleepy, deep breathing coming from the bed just over his shoulder. And he would tell himself that it would all be like that again. Once they made it back to Earth.

Of course it wasn't like that at all.

The Normandy was a museum now, but it could have been Garrus's empty tomb, waiting for the years to finally catch up with him. Having events he lived relegated to the realm of "history" made him feel supremely old. Not that he was young anymore.

Unlike someone else. Junior pulled him through the decks, staring at everything with wide eyes. Again, Garrus was astounded by the fervor with which she tried to take everything in. It was like she was a completely different child from the one who would walk quietly through the house, asking questions only when she was sure that she couldn't figure out the answer for herself.

Their first stop on the crew deck was Liara's office—well, Garrus preferred to think of it as Liara's office, rather than Miranda's. As much as he hated thinking about what Liara had done, Liara had deserved this space more than The Illusive Man's lackey. As the office doors slid open, it was immediately apparent that it had been stripped bare and converted into a room that hosted an educational vid.

Junior pulled Garrus into a chair beside her as the vid started. It seemed to be some kind of documentary on those who had been closest to Shepard. Whatever had been reading their identification chips was clearly confused: the subtitles were trying to run both Imperial and human scripts simultaneously, resulting in a garbled mess at the bottom of the screen. Garrus was mildly amused but, as the vid started, he began wishing the audio was just as incomprehensible.

"Commander Shepard!" the vid said. "Humanity's hero! Star System Savior! But did she do it alone? No! The Systems Alliance would like to recognize the many individuals—both human and alien—who contributed to the victory of the Reaper War!"

Garrus felt a little nauseous, but Junior had slid to the very front edge of her seat. She was completely enraptured with the images flashing across the screen. Garrus had to admit that there was a strange fascination in watching these familiar people and places transformed for public consumption. He found it curious which of Shepard's team made it into the history books and which did not. He already knew that he himself was, thankfully, of the latter category, which was maybe a little odd, considering just how close they had been. That was partially his own fault, he knew. He had disappeared after the War, had done his best to ensure that he would be forgotten by everyone: even, or perhaps especially, by those he would have once considered friends.

But there was also barely any mention of Tali in the vid and she was still a fairly prestigious Admiral on Rannoch. He knew that the quarians would tell a different version of the story than this human vid did. Wrex was everywhere as being Shepard's constant companion, which wasn't true, exactly. All the humans were lauded, obviously. Schoolchildren could recite all of their names with nigh-religious fervor. He often still saw his former human allies touted out for news vids and official appearances. Some of them (Joker) looked more comfortable about it than others (James).

Just as he was congratulating himself on his ability to disappear from the history books, the vid ended with a spiel about how Shepard had "many other non-human allies as well!". And an old photo of his own face flashed up on the screen. It had be from his old C-Sec ID badge, because there were no scars and a particular…brightness…to his eyes that Garrus found difficult to comprehend now.

Junior's eyes widened. Then, she turned to Garrus and stared at him. He felt a surge of panic flicker in his gut.

"Hey! That was another Garrus!"

Oh. Another Garrus. He understood. He sighed in relief.

"Junior…Garrus is my name. The type of…erm…person I am is called a turian."

"Oh, okay," she said. "It's another…tur-ian. Is he your friend?"

Garrus snorted.

"No, he most certainly is not."

Junior looked confused for a moment, but then her attention was drawn back to the screen because the vid was now going through the exploits of the Mighty Krogan Battlemaster Urdnot Wrex.

When the vid was over, Junior raced straight to the front of the ship. Garrus followed, slowly.

"This is where the biggest gun is," she said, lecturing him. "That's what Alex told me."

"Hmm," said Garrus, glancing around the main battery and grinning. "That's a…big gun. Someone must have worked pretty hard to keep it working, eh?"

Junior ran her fingers along where the virtual interface would have once popped up, making thoughtful "booping" sounds.

"No, I don't think so," she said, not even looking up. "It was probably pretty easy for EDI to keep the guns working."

EDI? EDI. Really. He flexed his mandibles as he tried to think of something to say, but, as Junior was racing out of the room again, all he could do was take one last glance around the main battery. It didn't feel like his anymore, so he was surprised how easy it was to leave, to let the doors slide shut behind him one last time.

Junior raced through the command deck, plopping herself into Joker's pilot chair and making engine noises. Garrus stood where Shepard had used to stand. Instead of the blurred blanket of stars racing above them, Sol's rays reflected brightly off the harbour's waters and through the skylights. He had never seen the cockpit in such bright light before. It was disorienting. It made everything seem dusty.

He felt a glimmer of a sad kind of pride. He had been afraid to come back here: afraid that there would be too many ghosts. But this museum was barely the Normandy anymore. It was startlingly easy to walk through the corridors because it simply didn't feel like it once did. Maybe that meant he had moved on. In the glow of this confidence, he sat in the co-pilot's chair—EDI's chair—and joined Junior in pretending to fly the ship. Junior seemed surprised, but then told him she was pulling the ship into a nosedive. Garrus faked being plastered to his seat by the G-forces…which, of course, would never have happened. But Junior laughed so hard that her cheeks turned red. And Garrus couldn't help but chuckle as well.

"Come on," Junior said, climbing out of the seat. "Let's go see the last floor."

The last floor was Shepard's cabin. Garrus wasn't sure what to expect as the elevator crawled to the top floor. When the doors opened and they stepped into the room, Garrus could only stare around in shock.

They had turned Shepard's quarters into a gift shop.

All the furniture was gone: the desks, the bed. Instead, there were shelves and displays. There were fish still floating in their tank, but these fish had prices listed in the automated purchasing interface nearby. And the ship models were surrounded by signs advertising a special on the replicas of Shepard's replicas. It was surreal. And it was filled with humans, all whipping out credit chits at the automated kiosks.

Garrus realized then he had been lying to himself. Everything else he had handled. This was too much. This had been Shepard's sanctuary, her only relief from the carnage of the galaxy. And it had been his sanctuary, too, for a while. Too short a while. Damn it. He felt cold. They should have left everything where it was. This had been where she had lived. And obliterating it like this made it feel like she was no longer living. Didn't these damn humans understand? She could come back at any time. But she couldn't come back to this.

He realized he'd been standing still in the middle of the room when Junior tugged on his arm.

"I want this!"

Garrus stared down at the monstrosity Junior was hugging to her chest. It was…damn. Garrus could barely believe his eyes. It was a stuffed krogan. And not just any stuffed krogan: it had scars running down its faceplate. It was a stuffed Wrex.

He snatched it out of her arms. Startled, she just frowned at him.

"No!" he snapped.

Her brown eyes widened. Garrus sighed. He tried to breath. He tried to ignore everything around him and focus on Junior. It didn't matter what this meant to him. He just needed to explain to her why there was no way in hell he was buying her this…travesty. He tried to imagine what Wrex would think. And he found that the thought of Wrex rampaging through the store made him feel infinitely better.

"Look," he said, crouching down and softening his tone. "Krogan…Well, in real life, they are much bigger than this. And much meaner. They are not…" he stared at the thing he held in his talons, "…cuddly."

Junior stared at him and her voice was barely a whisper of awe.

"You've…you've met a real live krogan?"

"Uh…well…yeah."

She gasped.

"I wanna be a krogan when I grow up! Where did you meet a krogan? I wanna meet a krogan. Krogans can't get hurt, you know. And they can save anyone they want. Nothing can kill a krogan."

Garrus shook his head. This was all too much right now.

"Look, Junior, can we—"

The comm link by the elevator crackled to life. The face of the same bored attendant who had been at the entrance booth flickered into view.

"Attention everyone. I would like to announce that a member of the original Normandy crew will be here shortly to answer any questions you might have. This is a very special"—the attendant didn't make it sound particularly special—"opportunity, since she is here for tomorrow's medal ceremony, but has graciously offered to answer any questions you might have. Please welcome Dr. Karin Chakwas, hero of the Normandy."

Damn.

Garrus grabbed Junior's hand. She dropped the Wrex on the floor.

"We have to go."

To her credit, she must have read the urgency in his voice, because all Junior did was nod as he pulled her towards the elevator. But, before they could reach it, the elevator doors opened.

Dr. Chakwas stepped out, flanked by two Alliance MP guards in dress uniform.

She was finally starting to show her age: her straight back had started to curve over itself. She had a brace installed along her right leg and her face was more furrowed than the last time Garrus had seen her. Her grey hair was thinner. She was thinner. Too thin, for a human. And she was definitely older. Though he himself was older too, he supposed. And now they were face-to-face. Maybe, since it had been so long and he had gotten his facial markings removed, she wouldn't recognize him. Maybe.

Dr. Chakwas stared at him, eyes widening. And Garrus realized how stupid it was to expect the woman who had stitched his face back together to forget it anytime soon. Garrus prayed that Chakwas was still as observant as she had once been. As she opened her mouth to speak, Garrus gave a sharp but nearly imperceptible shake of his head.

He couldn't read the expression that crossed her face. Her grey eyes narrowed at him, but she didn't say anything as she stepped out of the elevator. She walked into the gift store and humans started crowding around her, calling her name, asking about Shepard. Garrus and Junior stepped into the elevator. The doors began to close…

"Wait!" Dr. Chakwas called out, turning around.

One of the officers stepped forward and grabbed the elevator's door. Dr. Chakwas limped towards him. Garrus's grip on Junior's hand tightened.

Chakwas stared at him for a moment. Garrus didn't know what to say. Then, she stepped forward.

"Here, you…turian," she said carefully. "I think that you dropped this."

She slipped something into his other talon, the one that wasn't squeezing Junior's hand. It was cold and metallic. He couldn't trust himself to speak, so he just nodded at her. The smallest of smiles played at the corner of her lips. Then, the elevator doors closed, and she was gone.

He opened his talons.

It was Shepard's dog tags. Garrus stared at them.

"Daddy Garrus?"

Junior pulled on his hand.

"These other people want to use the elevator now."

Garrus shook his head, apologized to the group of humans who had been waiting. As soon as they were out of the shuttle bay, he scooped Junior up into his arms. He needed to stop and think. He walked out towards the harbour, leaning on the railing and staring at the fragile pieces of metal in his talons. How typical of humans that they would believe an entire person could be encapsulated into just two small fragments of metal.

For a moment, he thought that this was Chakwas telling him that they had finally recovered Shepard's body. Then he realized that wasn't true: these were Shepard's first dog tags, from the SR-1. The ones that Liara had framed, that Shepard had kept on her desk. How Chakwas had gotten a hold of them, he had no idea. And, by rights, they should have been Liara's…Why would Chakwas give them to him?

He realized that he hadn't seen the doctor since they had disembarked from the Normandy that last time, after limping back to Earth on solely manual systems. Garrus had months to imagine it: walking out into the docking bay, Shepard waiting there for him. He'd told himself that, when he saw her again, he would be the one to kiss her first. For once. No prompting, no teasing from her. That had been the plan.

But there had been no Shepard: only Hackett and a group of Alliance soldiers dressed in uniforms Garrus had never seen before. Now, of course, they were the familiar uniforms of the Military Police. But, at the time, he could only process that Shepard had not been there. Which meant she was either severely injured or…

Hackett had been speaking to them, to all of them. Whatever he was saying, it made Tali start to weep. And Liara's biotics were making the air around them sting. Oddly, Garrus remembered noticing that Liara was resting a blue hand on her lower stomach. Garrus hadn't known what that meant yet. And so many of the other crew members were looking at him and he didn't understand why because none of what Hackett was saying made any sense.

Finally, Dr. Chakwas had grabbed him and pulled him aside. It took her explaining everything again for Garrus to finally get it. It was something about how her stern voice held its calm, even though it wavered at the edges, and how her grey eyes refused to let him look away. It was something about how Chakwas explained it that allowed Garrus to finally hear the words: the Reapers were gone. The mass relays were gone. The turian and other alien fleets were gone.

Shepard was gone.

And then Chakwas had been rushed in one direction with the Alliance personnel. Garrus and the other non-humans had been rushed in the other. And that had been the last time he had seen her, save for a single glimpse of her face on the news vids as the cameras panned over the crowd at Shepard's funeral.

Junior stirred in Garrus's arms.

"Look!" she said, pulling out her own Shepard necklace. She turned it around and pointed to the words on the back. "Shepard…" And then she shifted her finger over to the dog tags in Garrus's talons, "…and Shepard! Now you have one too!"

Garrus smiled at her. Smart kid. Already learning how to read that runic human script. And, because he didn't know what else to do, he slipped the tags over his neck. They were cold against his chest plate. Junior pulled her necklace back under her shirt.

"Everything's okay, Daddy Garrus?" she asked.

Garrus glanced back to where the Normandy crouched beside the harbour, but it was really no longer the Normandy—just an empty shell now. Nothing more than metal.

He sucked his mandibles tight into his face, ruffling Junior's dark hair.

"Yes. Everything's okay."

He wasn't sure if it was a lie or not. He hoisted Junior up higher in his arms. Then, as Sol sank into the ocean, he turned away from the Normandy and carried her home.


	12. Chapter 11: Twilight Realm

**Chapter 11: Twilight Realm**

He was in a bar again. He hadn't been in a bar for years, not since Junior had so unceremoniously arrived in his life. The barkeeper threw a drink in front of him. Garrus shook his head, but the human shrugged and pointed down the bar to where an indistinct shape sat.

When Shepard saw him glance her way, she smiled. It was her sad smile though.

Leaving the drink, Garrus got up and sat beside her.

"You again?"

"Hi yourself, Vakarian."

The features on her face were covered in a strange sort of smoky film that meant that Garrus couldn't quite see her clearly. This was familiar, he realized. Then he remembered.

"Ah. You're just another dream." He reached underneath his armor and pulled up the dog tags Dr. Chakwas had given him today. "And I'm sure you're here because of these. Because I visited the Normandy today and…" He trailed off, unsure of how to continue.

She looked at him.

"How is she? The old girl still flying?"

The way she said this made Garrus realize that she already knew the answer.

"Oh, yes," he said quietly. "The old girl's still got it. I think she even did a nosedive into the harbor."

Shepard grinned.

"Well, that's my ship for you. You can't ever keep her down."

"Mmm," he said, "she takes after her commander like that."

"Oh?"

In response, Garrus simply held up three talons. She leaned back a little on the bar stool, crossing her arms and giving him a smile that was half-amused, half-confused.

"What's that?" she asked.

"The number of times," he said slowly, still keeping his talons up, "that you've died on me and come back."

She snorted.

"I think that your math could use some work. By my count, that's only happened once."

"No, I don't think so. First, there was the Citadel, after Sovereign…"

"That doesn't count. I wasn't really dead."

"But we all thought you were. It counts."

"Fine. Then we have to count your attempt to catch a rocket in your teeth."

"You never thought I was dead."

"Yeah," she said quietly, looking away for a moment, "I did."

When she turned back to look at him, her eyes had come into focus: they shone out of the shifting colors around her face like twin beacons through the fog. Garrus tilted his head at her, but, when she didn't continue, he coughed.

"Well," he shrugged, "you should have known what lengths I would go to in order to get your attention. And, I gotta say…the scars seemed to do the trick."

She snorted at this, raising an eyebrow.

"Right…"

"Anyhow," he said, "the second time was that encounter with the Collectors…"

"The only time I actually died. The only time that should count," her brow furrowed. "What's the last time then?"

Garrus watched her intensely with his cold blue eyes. He spoke his next words very carefully, watching her indistinct face.

"This time. You've died again, but I know that you're coming back. You wouldn't disobey the only order I ever gave you."

She turned away, but not before Garrus could see the pain flutter through her eyes.

"Garrus," she said, after a long moment. Her tone was as broken as it had been when they had said goodbye—the only other time he had ever heard her voice catch like that. "I'm not coming back. I'm dead. This time, I really am. I promise you."

He shrugged and looked away.

"This is a dream. It doesn't matter what you're telling me here, because none of it is real."

Shepard reached out and touched the dog tags still lying in his talons, glinting in the strange twilight of this dream world.

"I'm dead," she said. "Or maybe I should say that Shepard's dead. I'm…she's not coming back."

And, finally, Garrus found himself believing her. There was some truth that was so intricately bound up into her words that he suddenly doubted he could deny it anymore. Denying it in the face of how this Shepard looked at him, at how convinced this dream seemed to be that Shepard wasn't coming back, was suddenly an exhausting task. Pretending that she was still alive now seemed as futile as it would have been to pretend she was still dead when Shepard had walked into his scope on Omega. Then, he had known it was her, against all sense, because of how real she had felt. Now, in this moment, this dream felt just as real.

If Shepard was truly dead, then he was too. There was no Vakarian without Shepard. He turned his face away from her, but she lifted up a hand and pulled his gaze back into her bright eyes.

"I'm so sorry," she said in a small voice. Then, she looked away again. "But something happened when she…when I…was at the Catalyst. It needed Shepard to seal the link between organics and synthetics. Part of her essence became the glue that bound the synthetic and organic components of the galaxy together. Became me. The Catalyst wanted a new DNA…Garrus, I am that DNA. I'm all that's left of Shepard now. I'm like…I'm like her ghost. Not exactly what she was but…I'm made from her."

Garrus's mandibles flicked against the side of his face.

"So…you're trying to tell me that this isn't just a dream? You're some kind of…of program…inside the synthetic parts of us? Inside everyone?"

"No…well, yes. But I wouldn't say 'program'—no more than you would call your thoughts a 'program.' I'm just…well, I'm Shepard. Or the part of her that was left behind. I had to be left behind in order to save the galaxy."

Suddenly, she burst out into a bark of laughter.

"What's so funny?" he asked, cautiously.

"I dunno if you know this," she chuckled, "but SPECTRE...well, the way the acronym works out in English makes it sound like another word, one of the many human words for 'ghost.' It makes a nice bit of sense for the role I played: being everywhere all at once, completely untouchable by the rules everyone else has to play by."

"I remember," Garrus said, nodding. Once, the no-rules aspect of SPECTRE-status had made him bitter, especially when it came to his C-Sec investigation into Saren. But, when he worked with Shepard, he began to understand the advantages of having no rules…though that wasn't strictly true either, since they had still hauled her back to Earth after she blew up that Batarian relay. Saving the galaxy…again…but getting punished for it.

"Once a SPECTRE, always a spectre," Shepard chuckled. "Maybe I…I mean, maybe Shepard was always supposed to be like this."

Garrus thought about that for a moment, but it was crazy. He refused to believe that the galaxy had destinies mapped out for each of them. And he refused to believe that, in all possible futures, Shepard had to end up as some strange synthetic-organic fusion energy. This was definitely a dream. Alright, he could play along with this crazy dream-logic for a while.

"So…do you, hmm, talk to everyone through their dreams like this?" he asked casually.

She chuckled.

"No. Why would I want to talk to you anyone beside you?"

"Well, I thought Tali or Liara or Joker…or…" He left the other name unsaid. Did this Shepard even know about the child Liara had? He pushed the thought away, focusing instead on Shepard. "But I suppose I can't argue with that. I am excellent company."

For some reason, she looked up at the ceiling, like she was watching something that he couldn't see. She acted like she hadn't heard him at all.

"It took me a long time to figure out that I could do this," she said, so quietly that Garrus wasn't sure she was even talking to him anymore. "To figure out what I was: Shepard but not-Shepard, something made from her essence after she leapt into that beam of light on the Citadel. No, I haven't spoken to anyone beside you, except…"

"Except what?"

"Except once. That kid you've got. What are you calling her again?"

"Junior. Adrienna, I mean."

"Yeah, well, she…she was having a nightmare. About her parents getting shot. Then her parents…well, her father had your face. And her mother had mine. It was disturbing. So I interfered. Told her it would be okay. I couldn't do that for the other kid, the one on the Catalyst…"

Garrus was confused now. What was with this kid on the Catalyst that she kept mentioning? And Junior…was she really dreaming those terrible things? Why wouldn't she tell him, if she was? He tried to remind himself that this was only a dream, that these were details simply conjured by his mind. But it was getting harder and harder to convince himself of this.

Suddenly, Shepard turned to him, anger flashing in her glowing eyes.

"God, Garrus," she snapped at him. "Why would you even tell her that? She's just a kid."

He blinked.

"I didn't tell her exactly how they had died…just…just that they had been shot. And she asked. I wasn't going to lie to her."

Shepard's ghost turned away from him.

"Maybe you should have."

Garrus reached out for her.

"I'm sorry."

"She's the one you should be apologizing to. She has such nightmares, Garrus, and you have no idea…"

Suddenly, the bar blinked out of existence and he was lying on his bed, in the house. He lay there, startled. The dream hadn't even let him say a proper goodbye…but he couldn't shake the feeling that Shepard had been angry enough at him that she had…ended the dream. Cut the transmission, so to speak.

Shepard's dog tags felt cold against his chestplates. He leaped out of the bed and started to pace. He didn't know what to think about what the dream had been. Maybe he should tell Tali…to see if the things that Shepard had spoken of were even possible. But would Tali even know? Although there was a lot of speculation, no one had any more of an idea of what had happened during The Synthesis than they did fifteen years ago. If what this Shepard said was true…but what difference would it make? Other than causing Tali to believe that he was some kind of lunatic. And wouldn't it be lunacy? To even consider that the things whispered to him by his dream reflected some semblance of reality?

Garrus gave up his pacing and walked down the hallway to Junior's room. She stirred restlessly in her sleep, so he sat on the bed and set his talon on the top of her head. The green circuitry along Junior's temples flickered and glowed as she slept. It was impossible to believe that some leftover part of Shepard existed within those glowing green lights. And within the brightness of the blue strip of electronics along his own face. His dreams had been strange and vivid, but that did not make them real.

But he wondered about Junior's dreams. Krogan. Junior wanted to meet a krogan, to be a krogan, because she thought they were invulnerable. Unlike her parents—unlike him—who were dying every night in her nightmares.

After a few moments, Junior's eyelids fluttered open blearily. She was still asleep, but some part of her conscious still registered his presence. She smiled as his talons stroked her hair. Then, her eyes closed again. She stilled and her breathing slowed.

Shepard. Dream Shepard. Ghost Shepard. Whatever it had been. It was wrong. He couldn't lie to his daughter about how her parents had died. The galaxy was a dangerous place, made only a little less dangerous by the elimination of the Reaper threat. To tell Junior that she would always be safe would be a lie. And a lie that could get her killed one day.

He thought of the Mantis prototype sitting upstairs on the workbench: it was Junior's rifle, really. Her legacy. A leftover part of the life she never led. And then Garrus smiled. Maybe he couldn't tell her that the galaxy was a safe place, but he could sure as hell teach her how to make it a safer one.

And Shepard…she really was dead. Whether the dream was real or not didn't matter: for the first time in fifteen years, he felt a cold certainty in his gut that Shepard was gone. This time, she wasn't coming back. Not ever. Maybe, someday, they would be together again, but not today. He was alone in the galaxy.

He looked down at Junior, sleeping peacefully now.

No. Not entirely alone.

* * *

**A/N**

****Thanks for the enthusiastic reading and reviewing! Just a reminder that the plan is for the story to be 23 chapters (plus prologue and epilogue). So, as hard as it is to believe, we're almost halfway through. Updates will resume on Monday, so I hope that everyone has a great weekend.


	13. Chapter 12: Interlude: Rooftop Dances

**A/N:**

Just to give you a heads-up...there's a POV shift for this chapter. But it WILL only be for this chapter, which marks the halfway(ish) point of the story. Tomorrow we'll be back to our favorite turian's take on the situation...

* * *

**Chapter 12: Interlude: Rooftop Dances**

Adrienna could remember the first time she held the gun.

She knew something was up when her father picked her up from school. He didn't let her stay and play with Alex and John on the playground. He barely gave a nod to Mrs. Williams, who had greeted them both warmly. He scratched the scars on the side of his face as he called Adrienna over, his steady gaze fixed entirely on her. He barely spoke as they walked home quickly. He seemed to have forgotten how small she was. She remembered having to run to keep up with his long strides.

When they got home, he took her up to the roof. Adrienna remembered climbing the ladder on the side of the house ahead of him—the feel of his three talons along her back to steady her as she climbed. She remembered feeling a little annoyed at this. She was five now, after all, and didn't need his help for everything anymore. But, when she climbed over the edge and pulled herself up onto the roof, all her protests were forgotten.

She remembered that distinct moment of confusion: she didn't know what she was looking at. So she looked up at her father as he stood beside her. He was looking at with such expectation glowing in his eyes that she didn't want to admit to him that she had no idea why he had set up boxes and bottles on the far side of the roof. And it wasn't just their roof, she realized: he had set up rows of boxes all the way down the street, on the roofs of the neighbours: getting further and further away until Adrienna had to squint to see the smallest ones.

"Daddy…?" she asked him quietly, worried that her confusion had somehow let him down.

Instead, he smiled at her.

"Come over here," he said. She followed him as he strode over to the corner, to the workbench where he would sometimes stay for hours, fiddling at the tools and pieces of metal. "This is yours. Hold out your arms."

And she held her gun for the first time. She felt the weight not just through her arms, but all the way across her chest.

"It's heavy," she gasped.

"Well," he said, ruffling her hair and looking immensely pleased, "you'll just have to get stronger, won't you?"

Adrienna thought about this for a moment and decided that it made sense.

"I'm going to teach you how to use it," her father told her.

She frowned. She was pretty sure that none of the other kids at school knew how to shoot. It didn't seem very safe to Adrienna. Maybe he read this in her face, because he waved at how the boxes were arranged.

"Practise slugs," he said. "For when you miss."

Adrienna narrowed her eyes at him.

"I won't miss," she said.

He laughed.

"Yes. You will. You'll miss lots. And that's okay. This…" and he began to look worried. "…this is probably pretty unusual. I don't think you should talk about this too much to other people. Except for maybe Lynn—erm, Mrs. Williams. She knows because she helped me ask the other neighbours for permission to set up the boxes…they just think it's me up here, though. Lynn convinced them that rifle ranges on roofs is some kind of turian religious practise…" he chuckled. Then, he crouched down and stared right into Adrienna's eyes. "If you don't want to do this…I'll understand. But I think it will be a good thing to learn. And I think…I think it will help with the nightmares."

Adrienna fixed her father with a steely glance to match his own, trying to figure out how he could possibly have known about the nightmares. She hadn't told him because she had been afraid that telling him would make him sad. He always seemed so sad. She didn't want to make him sadder.

But now she thought that maybe she had been a little silly. Obviously, her father could fix everything. And now he was going to fix the nightmares.

"I'll try," she promised him.

Adrienna couldn't remember much more of that first lesson: only that she had been very bad. She didn't hit any of the bottles—not for a very long time. Her father never got angry at her, but on days where she didn't even get close, he would watch her anxiously and ask her if she wanted to wait a few years. She always said "no" : she wanted to keep going.

"Why?" he asked her, one time.

"Because…because the nightmares are different," Adrienna confessed. "Now…I…I always save you. Before the bad guys can get you. It's still scary. But it's…it's better."

And that had been been the last time he had asked her if she wanted to quit. After that, they both knew that it wasn't about actually hitting the bottles that tantilizingly stood guard on the crates: it was about how the gun felt less and less heavy in her arms, how good it felt to be able to hold it steadier when the kickback punched backwards, how she was getting faster and faster at reloading the heat sinks when they burnt out with that metallic smell and sharp hiss.

* * *

Adrienna could remember the first time she hit a bottle.

It wasn't one of the closer ones, but one on the house next door. She could remember how, for one breath, everything aligned perfectly: eye and mind and finger and gun. She could remember being startled by the sound of the bottle shattering, not sure what had happened, since she'd never actually heard the sound before—even though she had been practising for over a year at that point. It was the day her father gave the lecture: the day he explained what it really meant to be able to shoot.

"Dancing," she could remember him telling her, watching her intently, making sure that she really was listening. "You're not shooting a gun, Junior. You're dancing. It's an intricate dance done between the talon and the trigger. There's a rhythm to it. Here…"

He stepped over to the workbench and Adrienna couldn't help but laugh, because he had turned on music. It was silly, schmaltzy music—like the kind that she sometimes heard in old vids. And she knew it wasn't her father's music, because it was definitely human music.

Then, for the first time, he took the gun from her hands. She knew that he used it for his work, because once she'd snuck up onto the roof here when Mrs. Williams was looking after her. Adrienna and Alex had been playing hide-and-seek, and, when she'd crawled under the workbench, she had noticed that the rifle was gone. But she'd never actually seen him use it before.

And the silly old human music suddenly seemed less silly. Because, in time with the music, her father took the rifle and fired six times: an entire line of bottles disappeared in a shattering of glass. There was something beautiful in how easy he made it look, like he wasn't trying at all. Only his eyes gave him away: Adrienna could see how his gaze sharpened on each bottle, just before he pulled the trigger. She remembered feeling so very proud of her father in a way that she hadn't before. She'd always loved him, of course. But, suddenly, she understood that he was more than just her father: he was some kind of hero. And, in that moment, she wanted, more than anything else on Earth, to be just like him someday.

* * *

Adrienna could remember the first time the gun spoke back to her.

It had been their usual practise routine: they were up on the roof and Adrienna knew that she was getting better and better. She could (almost) always take out all the bottles in the first and second lines now. It was something she was very proud of, but her father seemed to think that she needed to be better. Adrienna was seven years old now. It had been over a year since she'd taken out that first line of bottles, over a year since she'd seen her father take the gun from her hands, and some of the glamor was starting to fade. She could remember starting to feel annoyed that her father wanted her to be better than this. Wasn't this good enough? She didn't have to be the best. The nightmares were gone, so why would she need to do this anymore?

Besides, she'd tried doing some extranet research on the gun, like they were learning to do in school for their history reports and stuff. It was weird that she couldn't really find anything that matched her rifle. It seemed almost like a Mantis…but it was different. She knew. And when she had looked up other Mantis rifles, models that were less common or customized, she'd found a newspaper report about how a prototype had been stolen years ago. And that the Devlon family were now all dead…except for a daughter that had gone missing…after her parents had been shot in the street…

Adrienna didn't really want to think or read about these things, so she had closed down her extranet terminal at school and refused to look up anything else. But she was beginning to think about how guns weren't really made only to shoot bottles. And she was beginning to wonder why her father would need to take the gun with him whenever he went to work.

So maybe she'd been a little angry when he told her that she could get the third line of bottles if she just tried harder. She wanted to tell him that she was trying. And that she wanted to know what he did at work. And where the Mantis had come from. And who she really was. But, instead, she had bit her tongue, channelling her anger through the green circuitry that extended down her arm and onto the tips of her fingers. She could remember feeling it spark as she touched the trigger on the gun…

…and the gun had spoken to her.

It wasn't like it was fully alive. It was more like it had suddenly become part of her, an extension of her arm. She wasn't pulling a trigger anymore—not really—but throwing that slug as far as she could. She fired again and again until that third line of bottles was down, but then, instead of reaching for a new heat sink, she felt her own skin prickle, the green circuitry burning brightly. And then she felt her skin almost…pull…the heat away from the weapon and send it steaming off from the circuitry as it lit up. It burned a little, but she knew, as the gun kept going through the fourth line and then the fifth, that this Mantis was telling her that it liked to dance.

But she still couldn't quite get anything past that fifth line. Her shots were too unfocused. So she had disconnected from the gun, only to find her father staring at her with the most ridiculous expression on his face: his bottom jaw had dropped, his mandibles were flared to the side. And she suddenly realized that, while her father wasn't easily surprised, the effect when it did happen was all kinds of magnificent.

Then, she remembered how he had swept over to her: staring at her, pulling at her arms, asking if she was okay with worry flooding the subtonals in his voice. She assured him that she felt fine, that she wasn't sure what had happened, exactly. Her father had snatched the gun out of her hands. As his talons probed the casing, he began cursing himself for not realizing sooner what the gun could do, muttering about how it must have been an experiment in using the human networking abilities to make weapons more efficient.

She had asked him if he wanted to try, but he had only shook his head. She knew that her father didn't like the idea of networking.

"Well," he said, when he was finally convinced that this was how the gun was supposed to function, "this has proven one thing: this really is your rifle."

Adrienna could remember going to bed that night feeling that she had discovered something special about herself, could remember how it felt like to do something that no one else could do.

* * *

And Adrienna could remember what had happened that afternoon.

"Dad!" she had hissed at him. "I'm trying!"

"Try better."

She stuck her tongue out at him, a weird human gesture that Adrienna knew her father found particularly revolting. Which was why she did it.

But, now, she secretly loved these lessons, bragging about them at school to Alex and any of the other kids that would listen. Now, she had graduated beyond bottles: her father had set up new targets that were vaguely person-shaped. She was getting to be very good. And she knew it. Of course, that may have been because there probably wasn't another nine-year old whose father had been teaching her to shoot a sniper rifle since she was five, but that was okay. It still felt good to be the best at something.

Well, almost the best.

Out of frustration, her father snatched the rifle out of her hands. He shot the target—right in the head—that she had missed several times now.

"Headshot," he said, quietly. "There. Now don't you dare tell me it can't be done."

She tried again. Missed.

"It's too far away! You got lucky," she complained.

He raised his brow plates at her, grabbed the rifle again, and hit the target square in the face again.

"Still a lucky shot," Adrienna said, but now she was starting to smile. "Do it again."

Her father obliged. Again and again. When he was finished, the target now had a face punched through it: two eyes, one nose, and one severely frowning mouth.

"Looks like you!" she said, laughing, and she could tell by the way that he sighed and shook his head that the shooting lesson was over for the day. She popped the last heat sink and took the rifle over to the workbench.

"Dad? Coming?"

But he had stopped, staring down off the edge of the roof and towards where the front door was. Suddenly, Adrienna jumped as someone knocked at the front door with such force that it reverberated throughout the entire structure.

"Someone's here," Adrienna said. "Probably Alex or something. Do you want me to get—?"

Her father motioned for her to be quiet, so she closed her mouth and tried to listen. The knocking came again. And again. And then someone was yelling something. A name? A name that she didn't recognize.

"Vakarian!"

Her father tensed. His mandibles flared wider than she'd ever see them do so before. Something was truly wrong.

"Vakarian!" the voice called again.

Then, faster than she could blink, her father was over at her side again. She remembered how he grabbed the rifle out of her hands.

"Listen. You need to hide."

"What?"

He grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Go into your room and hide under the bed. Don't come out. Do not come out, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Got it?"

She nodded.

"When everything is quiet, you need to come back out onto the roof and climb down the ladder on the side of house. Don't use the front door. Then…then go straight to Alex and John's house, okay? If I don't find you."

"What do you mean?" she asked, confused.

"Vakarian!"

He tensed again.

"You'll find me, right?" Adrienna said.

Her father looked back towards the edge of the roof, towards whatever was at the front door. Then, he looked back into her eyes.

"Junior. Go."

She pulled herself down the ladder, back into the house. She saw her father filling the rifle with real rounds. Then, he was swinging the sniper rifle into position: over the edge of the roof, aiming towards the front door. The knocking wasn't stopping. And neither was the yelling.

She ran and pulled herself under her bed, stuffing pillows around herself so that she wouldn't be seen with a cursory glance under the bed. She was breathing hard.

Adrienna curled up into a ball and tried to remember everything she knew about the gun: holding it for the first time, shooting that first bottle, the first time the gun spoke back to her…She thought about all these things. And she waited for the reassuring sound of her gun, dancing in her father's talons, to echo through the house.

But it never came.


	14. Chapter 13: Falling Shadows

**Chapter 13: Falling Shadows**

Junior was putting the Mantis prototype back on the workbench when Garrus caught sight of movement at the front of the house. He peered over the edge of the roof.

There was a drell at his front door.

Garrus hadn't seen a drell in years, since Thane on the Citadel. He hadn't heard of any that had fought in the Battle of the Catalyst, let alone any that had stayed on Earth. Garrus wondered what this drell could want with him? He watched as the drell raised a webbed fist and rapped loudly on the door.

Junior was talking to Garrus, but he hushed her. Seeing the look on his face, she fell silent instantly. Then, in a gurgling voice that broke at its edges, the drell started to yell something.

Garrus's name. His real name. Damn it.

Junior stood on the roof, head tilted to one side as she listened. Garrus pulled the rifle from her hands and told her to hide. He knew that he could trust her to listen, so he turned back to the drell and soundlessly loaded the rifle with concussive rounds and a heat sink.

He heard Junior's footsteps on the ladder as she raced back down into the house.

He sighted the drell in his scope. He hadn't seen Garrus yet, but all it would take was a glance towards the roof to see the rifle. But Garrus was fairly confident that he could get a shot off before the drell could do much of anything. Maybe even before the drell could throw up a barrier or activate his shields.

The drell shifted and yelled his name again and, suddenly, Garrus could see its scaled face. And he realized he did know this drell after all

Feron.

Which meant that Liara had found him.

He had never liked Feron. No one had asked Garrus for his opinion on the drell, of course, but he thought Liara was an idiot for placing so much trust in someone who had betrayed her—not just once, but several times. The fact that Feron had come through for her in the end…well, in Garrus's opinion, that did very little to balance out the scales.

Still, it would have been easier to kill a nameless drell. His talon quivered over the trigger, torn between the instinct to keep himself and Junior safe and a burning curiousity to find out what the Shadow Broker could possibly want from him.

The hesitation was enough. Feron looked up, straight into Garrus's scope. The Synthesis had done strange things to the drell's eyes: there was a greenish glint across their black surfaces. The green lights lit up as Feron stared at Garrus through the scope. And then the drell smiled.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Vakarian!" he yelled, mockingly.

Garrus knew that he had to pull the trigger now. It didn't matter why Feron was here. All that mattered was keeping Junior safe. And that meant keeping himself safe. He had to do it. His talon tightened on the trigger, Feron's mocking face still in the scope.

Then, the drell stepped aside. The crosshairs were now clearly situated on an asari, who had been shielded from Garrus's vision by the bulkiness of Feron's trenchcoat.

For a moment, Garrus thought it was Liara and, as much as he despised her for what she had done to Shepard, he knew that he would never be able to kill her. His talon dropped away from the trigger, but he kept his gaze fixed through the scope.

No. It wasn't Liara. She was too young: her long arms and legs had the strange ungainliness of an asari teenager, the curve of her hips too straight and boyish to have yet reached full maidenhood. She had Liara's smattering of glowing freckles across her cheeks, the same sky-blue colour to her skin but…but there was something in how she furrowed her brow markings and clenched her jaw that reminded Garrus of someone else entirely.

No. It wasn't Liara. It was much worse. It was her daughter: the daughter that had been produced with Shepard's DNA and without Shepard's true consent.

Feron danced back into the scope, blocking the asari from Garrus's view once again.

"Look," he called, raspy voice singing out through the street, "you can let us in. Or I can stand here all day, shouting out your name. Garrus! Garrus Vakarian! Hero of the Citadel! One of Shepard's—"

"Shut up, damn it!" Garrus growled.

Feron smiled at the reaction, inner eyelids blinking in satisfaction. Garrus pulled the mantis away from the edge and climbed down the ladder back into the house. He kept the Mantis in his talons as he opened the front door.

Feron pushed his way inside without even waiting for an invitation from Garrus. He pulled the girl in after him, looking up and down the street before closing the door behind him. Garrus growled again.

"If you tell that you think you've been followed…"

Feron blinked his inner lids at him.

"No, I don't. Because I've been checking."

Garrus stomped into the kitchen, indifferent if Feron followed him or not. He did. But the asari girl…She just stood there, in the entryway, rocking back and forth on her heels. Garrus realized now, as her jaw clenched and unclenched, that she was on the verge of tears. Her biotics made the air around her crackle with blue static. Feron saw immediately that she was just standing there, so he walked back to her and swept a supportive arm around her shoulders. Gently, he led her forward into the kitchen.

"It's okay, Tiersa" Feron said, voice rasping softly in a tone utterly unlike the one he had use with Garrus. "We're safe now. I promise."

One look at the asari's terrified eyes told Garrus that she believed that as much as he himself did.

Damn. Tali had been right. This girl…she looked so much like Shepard. She sank wearily into one of the chairs at the table, folding her arms across her chest and looking down at the floor. He tried to figure out how old she would be now. He realized that the calculations were easy: she had been alive for as long as Shepard had been dead. She was nineteen, but the asari aging process was already slowing down her growth. Maturity-wise, she was probably the equivalent of a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old human, if you could make such comparisons. Almost twenty years. Damn, that was a long time. How had he gotten so old?

Garrus turned his attention to Feron.

"What the Hell do you think you're doing here? I though you were in the Terminus Systems. Do you have any idea— "

"Shut up Vakarian. Liara's dead."

The words had barely sunk in when Feron's eyes rolled back into his head and he started to chant, slipping into his memories.

"I'm outside in the hallway when I hear the shooting start. I had told Liara that I didn't want to leave her alone with the matriarch, but she didn't listen. Insisted that I wait outside. I run into her office. Liara is on the far side. The windows are smashed. I realize that a squad of asari commandos must have swung down from the roof. The matriarch and Liara are throwing singularities as each other. The commandos start shooting at me when I burst through the doors.

"Liara sees me. Looks up from behind her desk. There is purple blood flowing from her nose. One arm hangs limply at her side. She tells me to keep the package safe. I know that she means Tiersa. I tell her I won't leave her. She takes another bullet in the shoulder from one of the commandos. She tells me to go. Then, she throws a singularity at the doors, pulling them closed. I have no choice.

"I find Tiersa upstairs. She wants to go back. Help her mother. But the commandos reach us when we reach the lobby. Tiersa's barrier deflects the shots as we run into the street. She is in too much shock to cry yet. I tell her not to look back. We have to leave Liara. We have to leave."

Feron shook his head, clearing it of the fog of memories.

"I'm sorry…I…I can't control the memories like I once could."

A heavy silence settled over the kitchen. The last time Garrus had seen Liara had been in that bar in London, the day that Tali had left for Rannoch. He hadn't gone to the funeral. It felt wrong, burying an empty coffin. At that point, he had been sure that Shepard was still out there, somewhere.

So instead of going to the funeral, Garrus had pulled himself into a bar. But he couldn't escape it: the news vids above the counter—above all the counters in all the bars—were broadcasting the funeral. Everyone in the bar had their eyes fixed upon the screen. He tried to ignore it, but the camera panned over the crowd. And there, in the front row, he could see Liara. She was the only one not looking at the empty coffin being lowered into the ground. Instead, her eyes were fixed on the empty chair beside her. The chair, he realized suddenly, that had been meant for him.

He had left the bar at that moment, deciding that he needed to hurt something. There had been enough looters in the chaos that followed the War that he was sure he would be able to find someone worthy of beating to a pulp. But there was no one on the streets. It was eerie. Then, as he passed by shops and homes, he realized that everyone—perhaps every single breathing thing left on Earth—was watching the funeral. He even passed a group of security mechs clustered at the end of an alley, gathered around one of them who was bootlegging the audio from the funeral's transmission.

Everyone on Earth was attending Shepard's funeral. Except for him.

Garrus tried to shake off the shock of Liara's death, and tried to focus on what exactly Feron had said.

"…You…you never actually saw her die?" he asked.

Feron glanced over to the asari girl—Tiersa—and Garrus realized that she must have brought up the same objection.

"If the commandos made it down to the lobby, they would have gone through Liara first," he said quietly.

"They could have incapacitated her," Garrus said, frowning. "She could just be captured."

"I…I went back. Later. After I got Tiersa into the first safe house. I couldn't find a body, but…but there was blood. Lots of blood."

Garrus was still unconvinced.

"All asari blood looks alike. How could you tell it was hers?"

"Look," Feron hissed. "If she were alive…even if she were incapacitated…Liara thought of these things, you know. She had a tracker installed. Very difficult to remove. The tracker went dark even before we got out of the building. She's gone." The green light in Feron's eyes flickered on and off for a second. "Not that you would care," he snapped at Garrus.

Garrus tried to ignore the hatred burning in Feron's murky eyes. Of course he cared. As furious as he had been at her, he'd never wanted Liara dead. Feron's grief seemed real enough that Garrus knew that he truly did believe that she was dead. But he also felt like there was something missing from the picture. He watched the asari girl for a moment. She looked shaken and lost. Surely Liara wouldn't abandon this child? Her child. Shepard's child. The child she had been willing to do anything for, even betray Shepard's trust in order to…force…this child's existence upon the world, all out of some archeological impetus to preserve—and to preserve at any moral cost.

If Liara wasn't dead, she was certainly incapacitated beyond help at the moment. She would never leave the asari child.

"Who did it?" Garrus asked calmly.

Feron shook his head.

"A matriarch Liara was…pressuring…with regards to something about asari politics. I don't know why it was worth killing her. Yet. But I will find out. And then I will kill them. Slowly."

"Yes," said the asari girl, speaking for the first time, "we will."

Her voice was hard and so unlike Liara's. Even when she was acting the part of the Broker, Liara's voice had never lost that soft drop to her words. This girl…she was different. It was Shepard's voice, really—nuanced by asari genetics, but Shepard's voice nonetheless. And the way she lowered her eyes…Garrus realized just how much fury this young asari was struggling to contain.

But Feron laid a webbed hand on her shoulder.

"No. Tiersa, you're staying here."

She stood up, her biotics flaring and pushing the chair to the floor.

"I'm not staying here! With him!" She pointed, disgustedly, to Garrus. "I'm coming with you. I'm going to kill whatever bastards killed my mother. I'm going to squeeze the life from them with my bare hands. I'm—"

Feron stood up as well. He was shouting, his voice crackling at the edges.

"Little idiot! You can't stay with me. I've got less than a month before the Keplar's reaches its terminal stage. Do you understand? This is the last thing I can do—for your mother, for you—and then I will be dead. And then you will have no future."

"I don't care!"

"But I do. And so did your mother. You will stay here until you are old enough. And then you will take your mother's place as the Broker. But you need to stay alive for that to happen. Liara knew there was no safer place in the galaxy than with this turian here. So this is where you'll stay. Understand?"

"No! I won't. I'll blow this house to shreds! I'll follow you! You can't make me stay here!"

Feron reached through her burning biotics and grabbed her by the shoulders.

"Tiersa! Listen."

The tears that had been welling at the edge of her eyes started to fall.

Feron held by the shoulders and stared into her eyes, not letting her look away or even wipe away the tears the were streaming down her face, sizzling as they reached the burning freckles of biotics on her cheeks.

"You know that, more than anything, your mother would want you to be safe," he said, almost whispering now. "I will be the one seeking justice. Seeking revenge. That the last gift I can give you before the eternal ocean takes me into its arms. But you…the greatest gift you can give your mother now is to stay alive. It's what she cared about more than anything else."

Tiersa's knees buckled and she sank to the floor. She threw her face into her hands and started to weep. Feron crouched beside her, holding her shoulders, whispering something into her ears that Garrus could not hear.

He coughed. Feron looked up at him.

"Look," Garrus said, "I'm really glad you're taking into consideration my feelings on this matter, but she can't stay here."

Feron's inner eyelids flickered.

"I don't believe you have a choice. She has nowhere else to go. Liara planned for this moment. She knew that her life was always in danger, that someday it would end like this. She needed to know that Tiersa would be safe. You know how important she is—"

"Quite frankly, I don't give a damn what Liara wanted," Garrus said evenly.

Tiersa pulled herself up from the floor.

"Don't you dare talk about my mother like that!" she screamed.

Garrus ignored her, fixing his gaze on Feron.

"I have my own to take care of. I don't have time to deal with the product of Liara's—"

Feron grabbed his arm.

"She just lost her mother, you heartless bastard. And you owe Liara. You've owed her for years. Did you really think it was that easy to disappear from the public eye? You? A prominent turian and Shepard's…companion?" Feron's face broke into a joyless smile. "Liara kept you safe. Found ways to keep the Alliance off your trail. To keep your name and image out of documentary vids and news vids and even Enkindler-damned school textbooks. And I hope you aren't so stupid as to think that those little neighbourhood clean-up operations were really coming from Tali—"

Garrus shoved Feron away.

"I don't care," he said slowly, staring into Feron's unnerving eyes. "I won't have the Broker's child in my house. She's too dangerous. The last thing I need is this kind of attention."

"She's not just the Broker's child, as you well know," Feron said, staring back.

Garrus looked away, mandibles flicking against the side of his jaw. And, as he turned his head, he saw that Junior was sitting on the stairs. She had a pistol in her small hands. And she was aiming at the back of Feron's head. Her hands were not shaking. He wondered, briefly, where the hell she had gotten the pistol from, but he realized that it was the one he kept beside his own bed. Even here, in this moment (even though she was doing exactly what he had told her not to do), he couldn't help but feel a flicker of pride. Junior's brown eyes met his gaze. She tilted her head, slightly, towards Feron—silently asking if she should pull the trigger.

For a moment, Garrus was overcome with the insanity of it all: Liara was dead or captured, Shepard and Liara's daughter in his house, and Garrus's own nine-year-old daughter was offering to kill without the slightest hesitation. Garrus sighed.

"Junior, come here."

Both Feron and Tiersa jerked, surprised at the small human girl creeping into the kitchen with the pistol in her hands. Neither of them had known she was there. Feron's eyes shone with a glimmer of recognition. Then they rolled back into his head again.

"I enter her office. Liara is standing at the monitors. Watching security footage with a wry smile playing across her lips. I look at the screen. A turian. Scars along one side of his face. One eye glows blue. There are two bodies on the floor beside him. A tiny human in his arms. He stops. Looks around the room. Pulls himself out of a shattered window. Disappears. I realize that I know him. Knew him. Once."

Feron pulled himself out of the memory with visible effort. Junior walked slowly over to stand beside Garrus, but her eyes never left Feron and she didn't lower the pistol.

"I think…that moment…that was when Liara decided that Tiersa would come to you if anything were to happen to her," Feron said, watching Garrus. "It was easy to keep tabs on you after she found that security footage. A turian with a human child stands out."

Junior's eyes were wide, flicking back and forth between Garrus and Feron. Garrus suddenly realized what she had to be thinking.

"No…Junior, listen," he said, crouching down. "I didn't kill your parents. Those were the people who were trying to hurt you."

She wrinkled her face, puzzling it out for a moment, but then nodded, accepting what he had said. Garrus knew he owed her more explanation than that, for it had still been Junior's own aunt and uncle he had gunned down, but…but that would come later. For now, there was still the blue-skinned problem sitting at his kitchen table.

Junior looked around the room, frowning. Her gaze lingered a long time on Tiersa's tear-streaked face, but then she turned to Feron.

"What are you?" she asked him. "What were you doing?"

He blinked at her.

"I am a drell. We can re-live our memories."

"What other memories do you have?" she asked, almost suspiously.

He smiled sadly.

"Too many."

"Oh."

Feron glanced down at the pistol she still held between her hands.

"I don't suppose that I need to ask the daughter of Archangel whether she's a decent shot with that thing?" Feron said.

She looked confused for a moment. And Garrus coughed, giving Feron a dark look. Feron shrugged, but Junior had now shifted her gaze over to Tiersa.

"My name is Adrienna. What's your name?" she asked quietly, letting the pistol fall back to her side.

"Tiersa," the asari responded, a little confused that the intensity of the conversation had now shifted to introductions.

"Is she going to stay with us, Dad?" Junior asked Garrus.

"No," said Tiersa. "I'm not."

And that was it. Garrus knew that Feron was right: he never really had any choice in the matter. Garrus couldn't leave this child in danger. And, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, someone needed to go after Liara, and Feron was in a better position than himself to do so. Feron couldn't do that if he still had Tiersa with him. She needed somewhere safe to stay.

"Damn you, Liara," Garrus growled. He took the pistol out of Junior's hands. Then, he stared at Tiersa for a moment.

Finally, he sighed.

"Tiersa…you can stay upstairs. In Junior's bedroom. You'll have to share."

Tiersa stared him. Her eyebrows narrowed. She looked too much like Shepard when she did that.

"I don't really want to stay here," she said quietly.

"I know. And I don't really want you here," Garrus said, since they were being honest. "But do either of us really have a choice?"

The asari looked down at her feet for a moment. Then, swallowing, she slowly shook her head.

"Okay then," Feron visibly relaxed, releasing a raspy breath through his mouth. "I guess…this is goodbye."

He looked pointedly at Garrus. Taking the hint, Garrus took Junior upstairs to give Feron and Tiersa a few minutes alone. Junior stood beside Garrus, obviously trying to think everything through. He owed her so many explanations it was starting to make his head hurt keeping track of all the secrets he had been keeping from his own daughter. He opened his mouth to speak, though he really had no idea what he could say to make any of this clear to her. She was still only nine years old, damn it. He had hoped that…well, honestly, that his past life could remain unknown to Junior perpetually, for her own safety. But, even so, he had assumed that any of these conversations would happen once she was much older. Before he could say anything though, he heard the front door slam as Feron left the house, setting out to find Liara's killers or kidnappers.

Tiersa appeared at the bottom of the stairs a moment later.

"He's…he's gone," she said brokenly. She wrapped her arms around herself, like she was trying to keep herself from splitting into pieces. "Feron…Mother….they're all gone…"

Junior broke away from Garrus's side and ran down to the bottom of the stairs. Tiersa's eyes widened in surprise as Junior wrapped her arms around her, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"It's okay," Junior said carefully. Then, she frowned. "No, it's not okay. But we'll keep you safe here. I promise. I'm a very good shot with my gun. And my father…he saved me when I was a baby. So I know that we can keep you safe."

When Tiersa didn't respond—except to stare at her—Junior kept going. She grabbed the asari's blue hand in her own. Junior was trying so hard to comfort the young asari.

"Come on. I'll show you the house. It's…it's not very big, but that's okay. You can use the bed. I don't mind sleeping on the floor. I'm sorry about your mother. I've never had a mother. Well, my parents died when I was a baby. But that's all I'm allowed to tell people, because the rest has to stay a secret. You can keep secrets, right?"

Tiersa smiled sadly.

"Yes. I'm very good at keeping secrets," she said as Junior pulled her up the stairs.

She stopped as they passed Garrus at the top of the stairs. Junior still clutched her hand. Tiersa stared at him and Garrus was surprised to see her biotics flicker in the darkness of her eyes.

"I know what I am," Tiersa said to him. Her voice didn't waver. "I know who my…father…was. And I know how it happened. I hated my mother for a long time because of it. So, for what it's worth, I'm sorry that I...am. I'm sorry that I exist, I mean. I'm sorry that I'm here."

Garrus stared at her and remembered Liara. Not Liara as they had parted, but Liara as they had once been. She had been a friend, once. And he remembered Shepard. As much as he hated it, Feron was right. He owed it to both her parents to keep Tiersa safe. He supposed that he should be flattered that Liara considered him the only person on Earth capable of doing so. It didn't feel like flattery, though. It felt dangerous to have this asari anywhere near him and Junior.

But Tiersa really was still only a child by asari standards. And none of this was her fault. Garrus realized that, as Junior clutched Tiersa's hand in a futile effort to console her, that—of the two of them—only his daughter was doing the right thing.

"For what it's worth, I'm sorry about your mother," he said. "I…I really am."

Something in Tiersa's eyes shifted at his words. But she turned away, following Junior down the hall, before Garrus could figure out what it meant.

* * *

**A/N:**

For those of you wondering about Feron's characterization, it's mainly from the Redemption comic (which explains how Liara finds Shepard's body). He's a little different in the Shadow Broker DLC (a year or two of torture will do that to a guy), but I've decided that it's been long enough that he's probably recovered his customary snarkiness by this point in history. This is probably the only time I'll take non-game lore into account, so I thought I should probably make note of it.

Thanks for reading!


	15. Chapter 14: Terminal Negotiations

**Chapter 14: Terminal Negotiations**

Garrus retreated up to the roof. He hauled the Mantis onto the workbench and started fiddling. He needed something to keep his mind off everything that had happened. Liara's death or disappearance or whatever it was. And Tiersa. He knew her name now. And she was here. He simply didn't want to think about any of it.

So instead he thought about what adjustments he could make to the Mantis. The scope was too far out. He needed to fix that. And the trigger—it could be adjusted to require nothing more than the slightest tightening of his talon. He'd have to warn Junior about the modifications next time they used it for target practise.

Liara was gone. He remembered how vulnerable she'd been when they'd first found her…What planet had it been again? There had been so many. Liara had been just a young asari, trapped in a prothean device she had activated without really knowing what it would do. Reckless and stupid, really. Liara had always seemed so cautious, so hesitant to get involved, but actually thinking about all she had done—even just in the time he had known her—made Garrus realize that Liara's apparent caution was deceptive. He had been knocked cold at the time, but he remembering blearily regaining consciousness in the Shadow Broker's base just in time to see Liara step forward towards the Broker's monitors and resume control. Just like that. Without really thinking how it would change her life. And then the way she had just…taken…Shepard, without telling Shepard what she'd really done…

Garrus shook his head. The idea was not to think. He tried to re-focus on the Mantis. The heat sink efficiency was low. Well, lower than it could be. He pulled out his omnitool and fiddled with the wiring, avoiding the circuit board that seemed to be the source of the weapon's unique networking properties. Only he needed to use the heat sinks, so Junior probably wouldn't care about this adjustment.

It was hard to reconcile that Liara—the one who took risks, who did things without really thinking, who made hard decisions on split-second feelings—to the one who would stand in the background of discussions, listening without participating and rubbing her fringe when she'd say something awkward. It was almost like Liara had two different personas that she moved in and out of, but with no particular ease.

He didn't have a higher calibre barrel than the one already on the Mantis. Maybe he could order one from the extranet? Since it was a prototype that had never gone into production, he wasn't sure if he could find any new parts that would actually be compatible.

"Dad?" Junior said from behind, hesitation at interrupting his work obvious in her voice.

"Hmm?" he said, without turning around.

"Dad…there's someone trying to reach your comm terminal. It keeps beeping. I tried to tell them you're busy but…it's Tali. And she said to tell you were a…umm…_boshtet_…if you didn't get down there right away."

He shook his head.

"Junior, I don't want you saying that word ever again."

"Oh. Okay. It's a bad word?"

"Yes. The worst."

It had amused Garrus to no end that Tali had really been just as foul-mouthed as Jack had been. Shepard had never seemed to realize that there was a reason the translators glitched over that particular word…

"Okay. I won't say it," Junior said. Then, her eyes narrowed as she realized that he was trying to deflect the conversation. "You are…are going to answer, right? Tali seemed upset. I think she really needs—"

Sighing, Garrus replaced the Mantis on the rack, setting it down harder than he intended.

"Yes. I'll be right there."

He climbed wearily down off the roof. Junior looked at him askance.

"Are…are you okay?"

When he didn't answer immediately, she looked down the hallway.

"I showed Tiersa around the house. I think that she'll like it here. She's…she's going to be here for a while, isn't she?"

He nodded absently, dreading the conversation with Tali that awaited him. She had remained in contact with Liara for all the years he himself had avoided her. He knew that she would take the news of Liara's death hard. He walked into his bedroom, closing the door behind him. He heard Junior stand at the door for a moment. Then she apparently thought better of eavesdropping, because he heard her scamper off down the hallway.

He activated the terminal.

Tali was visibly distressed. She was wringing her hands. Her face was pale. There were dark lines running down her face—were they from tears? He'd never seen Tali cry without her mask off, he realized.

"Garrus, you _bosh_—"

"I don't appreciate you teaching Junior new words," he growled.

"I'm not here to joke around, Garrus. Something terrible has happened. You…you should sit down."

Tali obviously thought that he didn't know about Liara—that she had to be the one to tell him. He shook his head.

"Tali, I already know."

Her bright eyes widened.

"How did you…? I thought you two weren't speaking…"

"We're not. We…weren't. Feron showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. Screaming my name—my real name, mind you—at the top of his watery lungs. And…and he brought the girl with him."

Tali's lips gaped open. She clasped her hands to her mouth and tears welled up in her eyes.

"Oh, Garrus…"

They stood there awkwardly.

"What…what are you going to do?" she asked quietly.

"Hell if I know. Feron left. He's gone to find who killed her. Some matriarch. Well, he thinks that they killed her, but I'm not convinced. No one actually saw her die. I hope…" he sighed. "I hope that he finds her alive."

Tali shook her head.

"Garrus, I don't know…She wouldn't just abandon Tiersa like that. If she is still alive…I think we'd know by now. And she…she had a message for me. Something that was supposed to be sent automatically after she died, linked to that monitor she had on her vital signs. Unless they managed to disable it somehow, but I encoded it personally. It would take nothing less than surgery and physical removal to stop it from transmitting…"

Tali shuddered and let her voice trail off, unwilling to explore that line of thought any further.

"What about Tiersa?" she asked.

"The girl…she's staying here, I suppose."

"Is…is she okay?"

"What do you think?"

"_Keelah…_" Tail said. Then, her glowing eyes flicked back to Garrus's face, suddenly sharp and focused. "Why you?"

"Excuse me?"

She turned away, wringing her hands.

"I didn't mean…It's just…you weren't even speaking. You couldn't even stand me bringing up Liara's name. Did you even know their daughter's name before today? Did you?"

Garrus looked down. Of course he hadn't known Tiersa's name before. He hadn't wanted to know her name. He hadn't thought of the dreams in a while, but he found himself wondering, suddenly, whether the ghost he had met in his dreams knew about the asari daughter? That whatever the dream creation had been wasn't the only part of Shepard that had been left behind?

He felt anger flare at Tali's questioning.

"And you?" he growled. "You obviously knew that Liara…helped…me to disappear. How much did you tell her? Why didn't you tell me that she was so involved? I wanted nothing to do with her," he hissed, mandibles flaring. "Nothing! I thought you understood that."

Tali folded her arms, tilting her head—and a edge of anger creeping into her voice as well.

"I promise you, Garrus, I never told Liara anything beyond what she had figured out for herself. Or…beyond what she needed to know to keep you safe." She shook her head. "_Keelah_, I was stuck in the middle between you two. And you…you were such a mess for such a long time. We both wanted to keep you safe. I knew that you'd never accept help from Liara directly…but she did what she could. And I hope that you realize now that it was her that arranged the gang work for you, too, right? I guess that's all over now. Poor Liara…This is…this is insane."

And she looked so lost for a moment, staring down at her feet, that Garrus felt his anger cool. When Tali looked up at him again, there was a dark terror at the edges of her glowing eyes.

"Do you think it's someone from the old days?" she asked Garrus nervously. "That we could all be in danger?"

"No. Definitely not," Garrus said, shaking his head. "Liara chose to remain the Broker. She was courting more danger than the rest of us could hope to in a lifetime. I think that the odds that it's someone gunning for Shepard's old colleagues is unlikely. Besides…Feron didn't look like he was going to rest until he put bullets in the skulls of whomever did this. When…if…he gets back, we'll have more answers."

"Okay. Okay," she said, talking a deep breath. "I just…I had assumed we were safe."

"You are."

"But…but what if something were to happen to me?"

"Zaar would take care of your kids, Tali. You know that."

"I mean, to both of us. What would we do? _Keelah_, Garrus, if something happens to you? You're completely alone on Earth now. You need to think of someplace safe for Junior and Tiersa. There's no one else, is there? Now that Liara's gone…"

Garrus stared at Tali. He would have thought that the answer was obvious.

"I'd send them to you."

Tali stared back at him.

"Garrus, Rannoch…it's still too far away. And after the first mass relay…"

Tali didn't even have to say it. The first mass relay the humans had tried to construct had exploded three years ago, taking out one of Sol's other planets—Neptune, was it?—in the process. Massive loss of life. And the demoralization of having to begin the process all over again. The salarians were the closest to having a working relay. The portion of the salarian forces that had been at the Battle of the Catalyst made it home to Sur'Kesh six years ago to discover that work had already begun constructing a new mass relay around their homeworld. But only one relay didn't do anyone any good. The salarians had been the only fleet to make it home, aside from the quarians—and the geth, though they didn't really count, since their "return" to Rannoch had consisted of transmitting as many programs as possible through the relays ahead of the green Synthesis light.

And his own people? Garrus didn't like to think too much about the monumental disaster that had been the turian convoy's journey back to Palaven. They should have arrived on Palaven shortly after the salarians reached Sur'Kesh, but some idiots had allowed Clan Urdnot to take the current Primarch hostage, in demand for the fleet taking the krogan to Tuchanka first. The Hierarchy ordinarily wouldn't have tolerated such a demand (and from the krogan nonetheless), but there was a significant portion of the turian fleet that actually wanted to go to Tuchanka first. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to label them as krogan sympathizers-it was only because some turians feared that if the krogan came anywhere near Palaven, they would never leave. Some news vids even claimed that the Primarch was a willing hostage of Urdnot Wrex…It astounded Garrus to think that, had he made different choices, he would be in the middle of that mess.

Instead of this one. He thought briefly of Lynn, but knew that-as good a friend as she had been-she would be woefully unequipped to deal with getting the girls to a safe place, if something violent happened to himself. Garrus knew exactly what he needed from Tali in order to keep Junior and Tiersa, now, safe.

"Tali," Garrus said conversationally, keeping his tone deceptively light. "we both know that the quarians have…something…that has let them travel faster than the other convoys. I'm guessing some FTL tech your new best friends, the geth, gave you? I understand you wanting to play that close to your chest, but, if the worse were to happen…"

He fixed her with a steely gaze. He wondered if this was selfish, using her fresh grief to try and guarantee some measure of safety for the girls. Tali turned away, biting her bottom lip: struggling between loyalities. This wasn't fair to her, Garrus knew, and he felt a sharp pang of guilt. But Tali was right: he needed to have some kind of plan in case something happened to him. He should have had one before now.

"Alright," Tali finally sighed. She turned away, fingers flying over some console that was just out of his sightline. "if…if something were to happen to you, tell them both to get to these coordinates on Earth."

His omnitool flashed as she uploaded the coordinates. They were located somewhere in the mountains: a reasonable distance from Vancouver, probably a few hours via skycar.

"I…They'll need to say both your name—your real name—and mine in order to be let onboard, but that should be enough," said Tali. "I've authorized them both for transit under emergency circumstances."

"Thank you," Garrus said quietly.

She looked straight into his eyes, dark tears starting to trail down along her cheeks again.

"Please. Don't let something happen to you."

He shrugged.

"I'll do my best. I assure you, Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, that my days of looking for trouble are behind me. We're both too old for that anymore."

"Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch, you mean," she said, smiling sadly.

"No," he said softly. "I don't."


	16. Chapter 15: Sparks to Flames

**Chapter 15: Sparks to Flames**

It took Feron four days. Garrus walked down into the kitchen on that morning to see Tiersa watching a ghostly image of Feron on the main floor comm link. She didn't see him enter, but Garrus figured he needed to hear this as much as she did, so he stood quietly in the corner of the room and listened.

"Tiersa, if you're getting this…then I'm dead," Feron's voice rasped. "But I also took out the bastards who killed your mother. They won't be a problem anymore. They were an asari commando unit, hired by some matriarch who was…displeased with Liara's methods regarding some information. Something about how asari culture really came about. Stupid, really. A stupid reason for her to die. But they're gone now. I killed all of them. And I killed them slowly. Especially the matriarch. And I whispered to each of them your name, so that they'd remember all the way into the abyss why I was there."

Tiersa reached out to touch Feron, but the image fizzled around her blue fingertips. Garrus didn't recognize which part of Earth he was on: there was snow blowing around the drell. The flakes were melting in the torrent of warm blood pooling around his body.

"I don't have much time," he gasped. "I don't know what they did with your mother's body. I'm sorry, Tiersa. They said that they killed her, but I couldn't find out what they did with her. I'm sorry. Remember that I loved you like a father and that your mother loved you and…and that I'm sorry to leave you with that blue-blooded turian bastard. But he really is the best chance you've got. Just…remember who he once was. And stay alive, little Tiersa. Please. Please, I—"

Feron broke off and his eyes glazed over. The tone in his voice shifted: he was whispering now.

"I'm standing on a beach. Looking out over the ocean. It sings to me. I long to feel the peace the waters will bring me. I hurt. I want the hurt to stop. I want…to…drown…"

The image of Feron fell silent and still. Tiersa stared at it, confused. Garrus walked over and switched off the comm link. The drell hadn't thought to end the transmission before he died, leaving the poor kid to stare at his blank, dead face: his unclaimed body in some remote part of Earth beyond any hope of retrieval.

Tiersa looked up at Garrus with wide, unseeing eyes. Then, she collapsed against his chest. Garrus stood there, stunned at the weeping asari clinging to him. He didn't know what to do or what to say. He didn't know how to comfort her. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, that could fix the hurt of losing so much all at once. Garrus knew this as much as anyone.

Feron had even taken away the cold comfort of revenge from her. Garrus wondered now if it had been a mistake to offer his house as a sanctuary to Tiersa. If Feron had been forced to take her with him, she could have at least had her revenge: could have seen the last light leave the eyes of her mother's killers. Garrus knew what comfort there could be in that, too. But now Tiersa never would. So he just held her for a moment, letting her grieve.

Junior came down the stairs, ready for school. She started when she saw them. Her brown eyes met Garrus's mismatched ones. She begged him, silently, for some kind of explanation. He just shook his head and said two words:

"It's over."

That evening, Garrus and Junior were up on the roof for target practise. Junior was more focused than usual. All this business with Tiersa had made this more real for her. This was now a skill she might have to use one day, rather than just a thing they did in the evenings to kill time.

"Junior," he said, after one of her shots hit a standing target, "you should know who you really are."

"I'm really Adrienna Vakarian," she said, not looking at him and taking another shot. "I know that now."

"I mean—wait, what?"

Her gaze flicked over to him for a second, but then she refocusd on a target.

"I know that I was…that I used to be someone called Melissa Devlon."

Garrus sighed, reconsidering the wisdom of having his daughter share a room with the Shadow Broker 2.0. Junior read his thoughts, but she smiled a little as she shook her head.

"I figured it out by myself….a while ago. I wanted to look up stuff about the gun. But all I found were things about Devlon Industries. And how its founders died under mysterious circumstances. And how their kid disappeared. And how the only other surviving family members were killed in a robbery. Where a valuable prototype for a new kind of weapon was stolen."

"Hmm…I'm impressed," Garrus said. "Why didn't you say anything? Once you knew?"

She shrugged, like her entire turbulent and violent life history now meant very little to her.

"I guess…I guess it bothered me for a while," she confessed. "But I decided that it didn't really matter what I was. I'm not really Melissa Devlon anymore. I don't care about that life and those parents. You're my father. And I'm a Vakarian."

To punctuate that fact, she pulled the trigger of the Mantis and sent a bullet through the eye of one of the farther targets. Garrus chuckled, but he had a hard time believing that she was really so okay with all this. He felt like he owed her more.

"They were your aunt and uncle," he explained. "After I saw your parents get shot and I found you, I tried to take you back to your family. But I realized…almost too late…that they were the ones who had killed your parents. And then they tried to kill you too. I saved you, but…but it was close."

She nodded, like it all made sense. Here they were, discussing the murder of her family, like it was an ordinary father-daugther conversation to be having while shooting down targets off the neighbours' roofs. Junior pulled the rifle off the stand she used, setting it down beside her for a moment. She fixed Garrus with a stare.

"What about you?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

Then, she couldn't help it: her lips broke out into a shy, secretive smile.

"After Feron used your real name…I looked you up." Her eyes shone. "You actually…you worked with Shepard. Just like Tali! You should have told me. All this time. I didn't know…"

Then, her gaze darkened and she frowned.

"And…and you were supposed to be the next leader of the turians. Everything I found said that you were killed in the Wars. It was really hard to find stuff on you. Tiersa's mom did all that? Why? And why…why didn't you become the next leader? Why did you let everyone think that you were dead?"

Garrus watched her for a moment. To hear the questions that had haunted him for years spoken so clearly and so naively from the human child beside him…it was unnerving. He looked away from her. How was he supposed to explain to her, of all people, why he had abandoned his duty to his people and his loyalities to his friends? How was he supposed to explain the crippling weight of grief to someone so young? To someone who reacted to her own dark history with only a strange disconnectedness?

He realized, suddenly, that he had explained things to Junior all wrong. He hadn't saved her life when she was an infant. She had saved his. He opened his mouth to begin to tell her this, but was interrupted by a sound by the ladder.

"You know, that's a really good question, Adrienna" said Tiersa, pulling herself onto the roof. "Why did you run away? From everything and everyone?"

How long she'd been listening to their conversation? She strode over to where Garrus and Junior were crouched behind the first boxes. The biotics in her eyes seethed.

Garrus stared at her, taken aback by her sudden appearance and the unprovoked fury in her tone. Junior narrowed her eyes at Tiersa, just as confused. Neither of them had seen Tiersa since that morning's news about Feron. Garrus had left her alone in the bedroom, giving her space to grieve as she saw fit. He realized, now, that she must have spent the last few hours building herself into this rage. Which she was now deciding, irrationally, to direct at him. But there was something venomous in her voice that made Garrus think that her question had a history to it.

His mandibles flicked against his jaw.

"What…exactly…did your mother tell you about me?" he said, the edge of his voice hard.

Tiersa matched his gaze, refusing to look away.

"Nothing. That's why I thought it was strange. Mother told me that you would be my safehouse if something ever happened to her, but that was all. I knew you had to be someone from Shepard's crew, but I couldn't figure out why she wouldn't talk about you. Not even a little. But I snuck into her files and…and I found out why. You…you've never done anything right, have you?"

Garrus's eyes flicked over to Junior, who was still standing at his side and staring at Tiersa in shock and confusion. If Tiersa wanted to take her anger and grief out on him…then fine. Just not here, in front of Junior.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," Garrus said to her coldly. "But this isn't exactly—"

Tiersa ignored him and began to pace. The biotics sprang up around her, paralleling her blue skin with a crackling blue aura.

"C-Sec," she listed. "Your family. The Hierarchy. And…and my mother. I watched the funeral footage. It didn't take much to figure out that you were supposed to be in that empty seat she stared at the entire time…" She looked at him. "I guess that means you left Shepard too, in the end."

"Hey!" said Junior, suddenly stepping forward. "You…you weren't there. You don't know anything! You can't talk to my dad like that!"

Garrus lay a hand on Junior's shoulder, holding her back. He watched Tiersa.

Garrus knew that he should be furious at her. He hadn't realized quite how extensive the Broker's files must have been, for her to find all that. For her to lay the sum total of his sins out before him. This was not her place: to judge him, to call him out on all of the things he had done. But whatever spark of anger he felt died quickly. Instead, he only felt a dull exhaustion at all of this: at these games of guilt and regrets.

"Never," he said softly, looking away. "I never left Shepard. She left me."

And, for a breath, there was silence.

When she didn't say anything else, Garrus turned to look back at Tiersa. She was standing perfectly still, her biotics completely extinguished. She had clasped both her hands over her mouth and her blue eyes were wide in shock. Garrus realized that they were fixed on Shepard's dog tags that lay against his shirt.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her tone was utterly changed: broken and sad. "I…I didn't know. About you and Shepard…I always thought that you were just…It wasn't in the files."

She shook her head, dropping her hands, but too ashamed to meet his gaze anymore.

"Me. Having me here must be hell for you," she gasped. "I'm so sorry."

"You look like her," he confessed quietly. "Like both of them, really. But sometimes it's your mother I see and sometimes…sometimes it's her."

"I could leave," she offered pitifully, miserably. "I certainly don't deserve—"

Garrus shook his head.

"Not an option."

"I'm sorry for what I said," she continued, babbling now into explanation—like Liara woud do, Garrus thought. "I just…I just wanted to find something wrong with you. Some reason why you would…hate me so much that you didn't want anything to do with us. I could understand why you'd be upset about…me…about what I am. I think Tali was. Goddess, I know I was when I found out."

She smiled sadly.

"But the fact that Mother could barely speak your name without that…that cold look in her eyes…" She shuddered. "I never saw her look like that, except that one time when she was forced to say your name. It made me think that you had to utterly despise us, beyond what Mother had done. That maybe you were just wrong and a coward and…and I wanted to blame you. For something. For everything."

She stared at Garrus, but he didn't know what to say. Shepard's daughter had just gone from attacking him to begging him for…for what? Forgiveness? He wasn't sure what there was to forgive. The truth was that Tiersa had voiced some of his own darkest thoughts about his choices. He couldn't understand how Tiersa realizing that he had loved Shepard suddenly changed everything she had thought about him.

But then he thought about all the things she had said. C-Sec. His family. The Hierarchy. All of these things he had left behind for that one simple reason: Shepard. And Shepard was a damn good reason. Maybe Tiersa understood that.

Staring at the young asari watching him with broken eyes, he realized that there was one thing Tiersa forgot to mention: herself. And the reason for that was the same as all the others. Maybe she realized this at the same time as he did, because she turned away.

"I mean, the files said that you were Archangel, for goddess's sake," Tiersa said, grimacing. "I worshipped you. I couldn't get enough of that extranet series. To have my hero hate me so much…I just wanted another reason for it. Cowardice seemed as good as any. But this…you and Shepard….it makes sense."

"I never hated you," Garrus said quietly. "I was furious at your mother's choices. That was never your fault."

Tiersa looked at him.

"You should hate me. I'm sorry for saying all those things."

"I'm glad you are. Sorry, that is." he said, watching her closely. He sighed, suddenly tired. "Can we just be…be done with this now? With all of this?"

"I think…I think I'd like that," she said, nodding.

She wrapped her arms around her chest, looking out across the rooftops. Garrus wondered about Feron, about Liara, about Shepard: about all the people that were gone from her life without giving this child so much as a single body to bury. And he swore to himself, in that moment, that he wouldn't be one of those people to her as well.

The three of them stood there, watching Sol sink behind the jagged horizon line of the city. Junior even walked over to Tiersa and grabbed her hand, looking up at her: telling her that she, too, forgave her for talking to her father like that—even if Junior hadn't understood most of the conversation that followed. Garrus watched them for a moment, astounded by the three of them: a turian, an asari, and a human. All inextricably bound together.

Then, he realized what she had said about Archangel.

"Wait. What extranet series?" he asked.

Tiersa gave a small smile at how his question punctured the silence. Junior's face suddenly brightened as she bounded back over to his side.

"Archangel! Dad, were you really him too? I didn't really believe Feron when he said it…I thought he was just messing with me…but really? That extranet series is Alex's favorite."

"There's…a…what?"

"Yeah," said Tiersa, actually smiling now. Garrus realized that he'd never seen her do so before. And it was Shepard's smile—her amused one, that one that was little more than a small quirk of her lips. "They've got some turian left-behind playing Archangel. I think the tagline is something like 'Archangel: beating up bad guys and bedding beautiful babes.'"

Garrus started to cough.

"Did…did you really do all these things?" Junior asked, wide-eyed with awe.

"No," Garrus said, not even considering asking what part of that statement to which she was referring.

"But you were Archangel?" she asked, refusing to let it go without a fight.

"Junior, it's really best…" he coughed again. "It's best if you don't know any of these things."

"Okay. Fine," she said, sulking and picking up her rifle again, taking the arm off one of the targets. "I don't know any of these things," she mimicked, sticking out her tongue at him.

Garrus smirked and ruffled her hair.

"That's my girl."

There was a slight sound behind them. Garrus turned to see Tiersa's eyes widening as Junior shot the next target in the chest. It occurred to him that Tiersa had probably assumed he had been up here practising—not the nine-year-old human girl.

"Can you teach me how to do that?" Tiersa asked, gesturing at Junior as she stared intently throught the scope at her next target.

Garrus raised his brow plates at her.

"I want to learn how to kill things," she said casually, as if it were the most natural request in the world. "Mother wouldn't teach me. Not really. She let me learn how to make a barrier, but that was it. It was all science and xenoanthropology and languages and history with her. Nothing useful. Please, can you teach me how to shoot?"

Garrus shook his head. Tiersa's jaw clenched. But he could still see a phantom of guilt flutter in her eyes, so she kept the tone of her voice perfectly even.

"Why not?" she demanded.

"I'm not going to teach you how to shoot," he said simply. "There would be no point."

"Why not! I'd be good at it. Mother used to say that Shepard was an even better shot than you."

"That," he said, waving a talon at her, "is not definitely not true. Obviously, the Shadow Broker needed to check some of her facts, because I believe the record would prove otherwise."

Tiersa raised her eyebrows at him and crossed her arms.

"Anyhow, it doesn't matter." He gestured to the biotics that were beginning to flicker around her in irritation at his refusal. "You are clearly talented in different ways. I'll teach you how to use a pistol, but…"—he plucked the sniper rifle out of Junior's hands and tossed it into Tiersa's blue ones, her shoulders buckling under the unexpected weight—"…try to imagine carrying that beast around and concentrating on your biotics. Hmm?"

She flushed, knowing that he was right.

"But I do agree," he continued. "You should learn how to fight. Just not like this. Okay?"

She nodded.

"Okay. Garrus…thanks."

He nodded back and, for a moment, something of an understanding passed between them.

"Anyhow," he coughed. "I have an idea. Someone who might be able to teach you how to use your biotics properly. I happen to know that an old…aquintence…has set up a biotic academy that's not far from here."

The thought hadn't occurred to Garrus before that he might actually have need to contact this particular squadmate again, but now that Tiersa was here…it made a perfect kind of sense. Garrus knew that he wasn't going to send Tiersa to a human school like Junior's. She was already too old by human standards, anyhow. But what she obviously needed—and wanted—was some serious biotic training.

And Garrus decided that he wouldn't mind giving her something—or someone—else to focus her rage on. Besides himself.

"The deal is," he continued, "that you can't tell say who you are…"

"Obviously," she snorted.

"…and she can't ever…ever…see me. Or hear my name associated with you. Or even know that I'm turian. That might be enough for her to figure it out."

"I thought you said the teacher was a friend?"

Garrus shrugged.

"Not a friend, exactly. And keeping her in the dark is more for the sake of her safety, rather than yours. I'm here to protect you. And if I didn't happen to know this teacher personally, I wouldn't even be sending you to her at all. But the less she knows, the less likely any of your mother's unfinished business will go through her to get to you. Though," and here Garrus smirked, "I'd pay a good amount of credits to see them try."

"The teacher…" Tiersa said, a glimmer of excitement in her voice for the first time. "What's her name? Is she asari?"

Garrus struggled to keep a straight face—but it occurred to him that Tiersa hadn't been here long enough to read turian facial expressions yet, and therefore probably wouldn't even know that he was grinning from mandible to mandible. Junior looked at him a little suspiciously, though—wondering what was suddenly so funny.

"No. She's human. I believe that she's calling herself Miss Jacqueline Nought nowadays."

* * *

**A/N:**

Apologies for the updating delay on this chapter...I got it up eventually, see! This will be the last chapter for this week, but updates will resume on Monday!


	17. Chapter 16: The Fine Art of Education

**Chapter 16: The Fine Art of Education**

Garrus could have sworn that, as he dropped Tiersa off at the transport station, the young asari almost looked nervous. She kept chewing her bottom lip. He considered asking her if she was sure that she wanted to do this, but he figured that she would probably just snap at him. She was certainly a gifted biotic. Even if Tiersa didn't know it, Garrus knew that she would be perfectly fine.

Jack's program ran on alternating weeks: one week at the facility, one week for the students to practise at their own homes. Garrus couldn't help but wonder if this unusual teaching technique had something to do with Jack being raised in a Cerberus lab where there was literally no escape or rest from the brutal biotic training. But he kept this thought to himself.

A few hours after he'd returned home, Tiersa sent him a quick message, but it was no more than a text stating that she'd made it to the facility in one piece and was going to be receiving her room assignment shortly. Then, for the rest of the week, there was nothing. Every night, as they were up on the roof practising, Junior asked him whether he'd heard from Tiersa. And every night he had to shake his head. He told himself to give the young asari her space: that she was, technically, an adult according to human standards—though she was at least twenty years away from full maturity according to asari biology. And the asari didn't even really consider themselves "adults" until much, much later than that. But Tiersa wasn't really a child, either…and Garrus tried to convince himself that, if she needed to send a message, she would have.

After two days of silence from Tiersa—and, worse, two days of Junior looking worried—he finally called the facility. A man with a crisp voice and trimmed facial hair informed him that Tiersa was, indeed, still at the academy. He asked Garrus if he wanted to speak with her, but he shook his head and promptly ended the call. He wanted to know how things were going, but he also felt that he needed to let her do this on her own.

Junior insisted on going with him to pick Tiersa up at the transport station at the end of the week. Tiersa was easy to spot among the crowd: a blue haze of biotic rage flickered around her. The humans gave her a wide berth, throwing her nervous looks that she seemed not to notice as she stared straight ahead. Garrus landed the skycar beside her. The door opened upwards, revealing, inch by inch, the face of a very angry young asari glaring at him from beneath furrowed brow markings. Not exactly a welcoming sight.

Tiersa threw her pack into the car and climbed into the backseat, saying nothing—not even to Junior, whose face light up excitedly at her return. Tiersa folded her arms across her chest and stared out the window as Garrus steered the skycar back into a lane. He caught Junior's eye in the rearview mirror; she tilted her head nervously in Tiersa's direction. He could tell that Junior was thinking the same thing as he was: they had dropped off an apprehensive young asari and had, somehow, managed to pick up a biotic grenade that was going to explode at any point. Unless one of them had the courage to threw themselves on it. Junior twitched her head in Tiersa's direction again, giving Garrus a significant look.

He coughed.

"Hmm…so…how was it?" he asked, struggling—and failing—to keep his tone neutral.

Tiersa's biotics flared. Junior, beside her in the back seat, scrambled out of the way.

"You said she was human," Tiersa said, staring at Garrus now.

Garrus blinked at her quizzically.

"She's not," Tiersa said. She took a deep breath. "She's a monster."

Garrus chuckled, even though it made Tiersa glare harder.

"Jack's been called worse," he said.

"Why is this funny?" Tiersa said, bewildered by his response. "She…she just doesn't stop. I'm at my limits and then she pushes me even harder. Even…even when she's not the one teaching the class, all I can hear is her voice in my head telling me that I'm not doing everything I can. That I can go farther. It's…it's hell, Garrus. Please don't make me go back there."

He fixed her with a level stare. He considered what she was saying. He'd seen Jack teach before, albeit only briefly and during a Cerberus attack at Grissom Academy. He knew exactly what Tiersa was talking about though: Jack had pushed those kids to their limits and then beyond. But, damn, she had cared about those kids. Something that, had he not witnessed it himself, he would not have believed.

Maybe Tiersa was right. Maybe Cerberus had created a monster. They had certainly tried to. And Shepard had, he supposed, made Jack even more dangerous by giving her something to fight for. Something to care about again. Without Shepard's influence, Garrus knew that Jack would never had made the decision to teach at Grissom. A monster with something to fight for. The most dangerous thing in the world.

It had been twenty years. Maybe Jack had changed, had started adopting some of the brutal techniques used in her own creation, but Garrus seriously doubted it. He guessed that what Tiersa didn't seem to understand, yet, was that Jack was fighting for her, not against her.

He chuckled again.

"This isn't funny," Tiersa snapped.

"Sorry," he said, rearranging his face into a more sober expression he hoped Tiersa would find less insulting. "I'm not making you go anywhere. You certainly don't have to go back. But…are you learning?"

"I—"

"Is Miss Nought doing anything that actually hurts you?"

"No, but—"

"If you're learning, if you really want to maximize your biotics to their fullest potential, this is how you do it. Jack—erm, Miss Nought, I mean—is the best. I'm sure it will be damn difficult. If this isn't what you want…that's fine. I have no problem with that. I'm certainly not going to make you go back to that school if it's not something you want to do."

"Oh," she said mockingly, "but I'm sure you'll be so very disappointed in me."

Garrus shrugged.

"No. Jack's academy…it was just a…hmm…suggestion. Take it or leave it."

He glanced at her in the mirror. Tiersa's biotics had cooled to only a dull simmer in her eyes. She stared out the window for the moment, watching the tops of the cedars whip by the skycar. She shook her head and, even, smiled a little.

"I guess…I guess learning how to fight like a monster isn't such a bad thing," she said. She was quiet for a moment. Then: "She…she said that I had potential."

"That's true," said Garrus, nodding.

"She said that could get me in trouble."

"That's also true."

"And she said that I reminded her of someone she once knew."

When Garrus didn't respond to that one, Tiersa leaned forward in her seat.

"Which one do you think she meant?" she asked quietly.

Liara and Jack hadn't spent much time together, but Tiersa—at first glance—certainly resembled her mother. And Tiersa shared both her mother's race and talent for biotics. But there were moments where Tiersa seemed so Shepard-like that it made Garrus regret allowing her to stay. It hurt too damn much to see that one particular kind of smile: the one where Tiersa quirked just the edge of her lips. Jack had known Shepard much better than she had known Liara. Maybe Jack had seen that same smile, the same way that Tiersa furrowed her brow...all those little things that Garrus noticed every day.

"I don't know," he said to Tiersa finally, pulling himself out of those thoughts. "Be careful about that though. Remember, we don't want her to know who you actually are."

"I know, I know. I will be."

Junior stirred a little in her seat, looking down at her hands. Tiersa noticed and gave her a searching gaze.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I…I kinda wanted you to stay with us. I don't really want you to go back to your school," Junior confessed, looking very guilty. Garrus saw Tiersa wrap a blue arm around Junior's shoulders.

"Don't worry. I'll be at home half of the time. Adrienna, I would never…and I mean never… abandon you to just the company of cranky old Garrus all of the time."

Junior giggled.

"I'm right here, you know," he shouted to the back seat. But that only made Junior laugh harder. And Tiersa even managed a grin.

When he landed the skycar on the driveway, he was a little surprised to see Lynn and her two boys waiting at their front door. Only a little though, because Lynn had left several messages over the past few days that he'd ignored, unsure of how exactly to explain Tiersa's sudden appearance in their lives. He wasn't sure what Junior would have told Alex and John at school. He wasn't sure if she would have said anything. Apparently, a few days of unanswered messages earned you a Williams Family Stakeout at your home. As all three of them exited the skycar, Garrus did his best to look nonchalant.

"Arterius!" Lynn called out. "Something wrong with your comm?"

"No…" he said, walking towards her. "Things have just been…complicated…"

"Ah," she said. She walked past Garrus and towards Tiersa.

"Hi. I'm Lynn. This is Alex and John. And you are…?"

"Tiersa," Garrus supplied. And Tiersa smiled and shook Lynn's hand.

"You three make quite the collection, don't you think?" Lynn called back over her shoulder towards Garrus. "How'd you manage this one? Some other war buddy from another race leave you her kid to look after?"

"Yeah. Something like that."

"Oh," said Lynn, suddenly subdued. Obviously, she had expected a less depressing answer. Suddenly, she reached forward and pulled Tiersa into a hug. Startled, Tiersa looked at Garrus, but he could only shrug.

"It…it's okay," said Tiersa, disentangling herself. "Mother…she's sick. I don't know how long I'll have to stay here, but…I think it'll be okay."

Garrus tried to help. He coughed.

"Erm, Tiersa's going to that biotic academy—the one just up the coast?"

Lynn nodded. The kids—all four of them—filed inside the house. Garrus could hear Junior talking excitedly to the two boys: something about a project at school. He invited Lynn inside, but she lingered on the front step, waiting until the kids were all out of earshot.

"Is she going to be okay?" she asked Garrus, watching him.

He nodded.

"I think so."

"Good. I mean, she seems like a good kid. Damn shame about her mother."

"Yes," Garrus said, looking away and thinking that Lynn really had no idea how true that was.

Lynn cleared her throat and then she smiled at him.

"I actually wanted to cash in a favor, if that's okay with you?"

Garrus raised his brow plates.

"A favor?"

"Yeah…It's the boys. They've finally broken me," she raised a hand to her forehead in what Garrus presumed to be mock-despair. "It took them nine years, but they finally did it. The nagging day and night, night and day…I just couldn't do it anymore. So I promised them I'd ask: can you teach them to shoot?"

Garrus stared at her.

"I mean," she said, "you do owe me. 'Oh, Mrs. Chalmers, do you think it would be any trouble for us to set up some targets on your roof? That turian…you know the one I'm talking about…well, you know how violent they can get. I'm worried that if we concerned neighbours don't give him some way to release his aggression…Well, who knows what could happen? Shanxi all over again, you know.' "

Lynn grinned. Garrus remembered that it had been her own grandfather that had surrendered to the turians at Shanxi. He remembered overhearing Ashley talk to Shepard about how it had destroyed both her and her father's careers. It astounded him that Lynn could make light of it like that.

"Wait…you actually told her that?" he said. "That explains so much about the strange looks that old human next door has been giving me for years…."

She laughed.

"So you'll teach the boys? They've always been really jealous of Adrienna."

"I...I don't know. This isn't exactly what I had in mind for that target range. They're still only nine. Are you sure?"

"I'll admit, I couldn't understand why you started teaching Adrienna so early," she said, shrugging. "You turians and your violence, right? But I feel like they're old enough now that they'd understand and take it seriously. Plus, I was only half-kidding about the relentless nagging…"

Garrus sighed. At this rate, he'd have Junior's entire class on the roof learning how to remove a target's head from its shoulders. This was not something he particularly wanted to do. He'd rather leave the fine art of education to more stable individuals.

Right. Like Jack, he thought glumly. Garrus shook his head. And Lynn was unfortunately right: he did owe her.

"Alright, we can try," he said. "I promised Tiersa I'd teach her how to use a pistol anyhow. Alex and John can try at the same time."

Lynn smiled. As the boys came out of the house with Junior, they both glanced at their mother expectantly. She just nodded. Both boys stared at her, then stared at Garrus. He shifted his feet.

"Really?" John asked.

"Really what?" asked Junior, out of the loop.

"Mom was going to ask your dad to teach us how to shoot!" Alex said.

"You said you would? Really?" said Junior, looking up at Garrus. She looked both surprised and ecstatic.

"Sure," Garrus said, shrugging. He turned his gaze upon the boys. "You just have to be able to follow orders. You can do that, right?"

Alex gave a salute—a not half-bad one at that. Though his parents were both ex-Alliance, so Garrus supposed he should have expected no less.

"Yes sir!" Alex said, grinning.

Lynn shook her head and, calling both the boys over, thanked Garrus once again. As they walked back down the street, the twins running ahead of their mother, he wondered what kinds of trouble he had just agreed to.

* * *

**A/N**

Hey everyone! I just wanted to give a HUGE thanks to all the suggestions from my reviewers! I really do try my best to incorporate feedback into the story. I think that's the real advantage of posting it chapter-by-chapter: I get the chance to improve as the story progresses. Please, continue to be the astute and helpful folks that you are. :-)


	18. Chapter 17: Fresh Ruins

**Chapter 17: Fresh Ruins**

"Not bad," muttered Garrus, as John actually hit one of the targets. "No worse than last week, anyhow."

The boy nodded, then reloaded the pistol. They'd been at this for months now, and Garrus was finally starting to feel confident that, had he given them something more than practise rounds, neither of the Williams twins would shoot off their own feet. That wasn't…exactly…how he phrased it to Lynn whenever she asked how her sons were doing, of course.

Junior stood on the other side of the firing point. She knelt next to Alex and tugged on his elbow, straightening it, before he pulled on the trigger and missed. John had been a better shot than Alex from the start. The same energy and enthusiasm that made Alex the natural leader also made it difficult to get him to focus: to slow him down long enough for him to stop and think about what he was doing, instead of just plunging in.

It hadn't taken Tiersa very long at all to get the hang of it. Now, she would still come up and practise with them, but she would alternate shots from her pistol with firing off singularities and shockwaves down the line of targets. Homework from Miss Nought, she called it. This was one of her weeks at home, but she hadn't stepped up to the firing point yet—content to just watch for a while. She caught Garrus's eye and, tilting her head to where Junior was helping Alex, smiled at him.

One of the more astounding things to watch had been Junior's transformation. She wasn't about to sit downstairs while the rest of them were out on the roof, so she had taken it upon herself to help. It made Garrus realize just how good his daughter was to see her correct others' mistakes—mistakes that she herself had been making not that long ago. Garrus thought he sensed Alex found it a little strange that the girl who usually followed his lead in, well, just about everything, was suddenly the one instructing him on what to do. But this was so obviously Junior's domain. The boys were only working on pistols at the moment. Honestly, it was all Garrus could imagine teaching them at this age. Still, both would widen their eyes anytime Junior pulled her Mantis prototype off the workbench, networking in a shower of green sparks, and then fire a precise line all the way down to the furthest target.

"Hey, my turn!" Tiersa said, pushing forward to the firing point.

Both of the boys stepped back. Last week, Tiersa's singularity had veered left and landed in the neighbours' backyard. They'd all watched in horror as the singularity ripped up one of the neighbours' garden statues and flung it into pieces against the side of the house. Before Tiersa's biotics had rendered it into pieces, the statue had been a short human with a long, white beard and a pointed hat. Garrus assumed that it was a human religious icon of some kind. Thanks to Lynn, that neighbour apparently already thought he was some kind of turian psychopath...this probably wouldn't help.

But since that statue incident last week, the boys, not wanting to suffer the same fate, had given Tiersa a wide berth. She picked up a pistol and ducked behind the crate. She stood up to throw a shockwave down the length of the roofs, but Lynn's voice suddenly called up from the bottom of the outside ladder. Garrus walked over to the edge.

"Did you want to see what your kids can do?" he yelled down.

"I…no," she said. "Garrus, you need to turn on the news vids. Tiersa…Tiersa should see this too."

He'd never heard Lynn call him by his first name before. There was definitely something wrong. He and all the kids filed down the inside ladder and into the living room. Lynn switched on the console and quickly found what she was looking for: an image of a desolated planet. The image disappeared and switched to a reporter announcing that the rumours had just been confirmed by Alliance HQ.

The asari convoy had made it home to Thessia. And there had been nothing left. Except for corpses.

The asari were still trying to figure out what had happened to their homeworld. The only good news the reporter could confirm was that messages had been left on the planet from expeditions from Illium, Noveria and other worlds. All these worlds had apparently sent ships towards Thessia, but, upon seeing the devastation, most had turned around and proceeded back to the planets from which they had travelled. It was clear what the convoy needed to do next: seek out these colonies and re-establish communications across asari-controlled space. Yet it wasn't the homecoming that so many had hoped for.

Garrus tore his eyes away from the news vids to glance over at Tiersa. He noticed that Lynn was watching the young asari as well. But Tiersa didn't look particularly sad or devastated. Just….bewildered at the news footage of the demolished cities trickling through the long line of comm buoys back to Earth. Thessia had never been her home. She had been born and raised on Earth.

"That's…that's Thessia?" Tiersa said slowly. "Mother…Mother used to show me vids of it. I can't believe that the Reapers could make it into…into that."

Lynn set her hand on Tiersa's shoulder, but Tiersa didn't seem to notice. She kept staring as more images of the broken planet flashed before her eyes.

Garrus couldn't help but wonder what Thessia's fate meant for Palaven, for his own home. Obviously, the asari fleet's decision to move so many of its forces to Earth had cost them their homeworld. Of course, it was entirely possible that, without that sacrifice, they would have never been able to beat back the Reapers. But Garrus hoped that this didn't mean the same fate had befallen Palaven. The asari had always suffered from a lack of political unity; the turians, since the Unification Wars, had presented a single-minded front through the Hierarchy. Maybe that had made the difference. If Palaven was gone…he didn't want to think about what that meant for the family he had left behind: his father and his sister.

Maybe Lynn had seen his expression grow dark, because she opened her mouth to say something, but Garrus's omnitool suddenly beeped. He glanced down at it: there was an incoming message from Tali.

"I…I should take this," he offered apologetically to Lynn. She nodded, and then motioned for Alex and John to follow her out the front door.

Garrus left Tiersa and Junior watching the news footage and went upstairs to the comm link in his bedroom. He was expecting that Tali would want to talk about Thessia, about what it could mean for Tiersa. He wasn't particularly looking forward to that conversation.

But the expression on Tali's face as he answered was a strange one—not the miserable, fretting one he expected. Her eyes glowed even more brightly than usual and her hands, rather than in their usual state of constant busyness, were still at her side. She looked…she looked the way she had before the supposed suicide mission through the Omega 4 relay. When they were on the Collector base, listening to Shepard speak to them for what they all presumed would be the last time.

He remembered noticing Tali's expression and thinking how, of all of them, she should have been ordered by Shepard to leave. It would have taken exactly that—an order—for Tali to abandon them before crossing the Omega 4 relay, but Garrus felt that, unlike so many of the other members of the squad, there was no point in Tali sacrificing herself to beat the Collectors. She was young. Her people could use her brilliance to guide them through the dark times ahead. Of all of them, Garrus thought bringing her along to the base had been the biggest mistake—the biggest waste to the galaxy. But Garrus had also believed that Tali was now wise enough to make her own decisions in that regard, and he respected her enough to know that she, just like the rest of them, had earned the right to die in this final mission.

They hadn't died, of course. But Garrus now understood what the expression currently on Tali's face meant and why it echoed the one she had worn into the suicide mission. This was the face of a Tali who had made up her mind to do something and was trying, desperately, not to let herself regret it.

"Tali? What is it?"

"You heard about Thessia."

He nodded, even though it hadn't really been a question.

"I…" she faltered. "I'm not supposed to be telling you this. This has the highest level of classification from the Admiralty Board…"

"Well, we better hope that you didn't do your usual sloppy job securing this channel, hmm?"

She let a slip of a smile play across her lips at that. They both knew that Tali was the best. She never made mistakes.

"Garrus…" Tali took a deep breath, serious again. "We sent out a convoy from Rannoch to Palaven two years ago."

"Yes?"

This didn't particularly surprise Garrus. It would make sense that the quarians, being the first to arrive back on their homeworld, would begin sending out smaller ships to try and figure out what state the rest of the galaxy was in.

"They arrived. Last week."

Garrus stared at her. This was unfathomable. The turian fleets from Earth were still at least six years away from Palaven, because of the stupid choice to take the krogan to Tuchanka first. But, even without that krogan-induced detour, it would have taken more than a decade to reach Earth. And Earth and Palaven were relatively close, galactically speaking. Rannoch was located on the other side of the galaxy. Not even the Reapers had been able to travel that quickly.

When he didn't respond, Tali started babbling.

"I'm sorry that I didn't tell you at the time, but no one is really supposed to know just how powerful the new FTL drives are. But I heard about Thessia and…and I knew I couldn't leave you in the dark, wondering if Palaven was the same way. Garrus? Garrus, are you alright?"

His feet…they suddenly felt untrustworthy. He leaned forward against the edge of the console. But he what he really wanted desperately was something…no, someone…to hold on to. He stared down at his talons: they were digging into the metal edge of the console, leaving small dimples.

"Garrus?"

He stood up straight again. Tali was staring at him with such alarm in her eyes that he couldn't help but cough.

"I'm fine. What…"

He couldn't do it. He couldn't ask, because if the answer was the same as Thessia's had been…His mandibles beat against the sides of her face. There wasn't enough oxygen in the room.

"Garrus, Palaven…it survived. The turians there are thriving. Well, as much as you can thrive after the Reapers. There's still a lot of rebuilding left to be done obviously, but the Hierarchy never fell apart like the asari did. They've even got communication between some of the major colonies up and running. In many ways, they're ahead of Earth."

He breathed a sigh of relief. He wished she hadn't waited until after the news about Thessia to tell him. But he also knew how much she was risking by telling him now. He was now the only soul on Earth to know Palaven's fate.

"…and…there's more," she said. "After we made contact…I received a call. He'd gotten my name from some of the turian officials. Though he must have some friends in pretty high places to be able to get my comm link address. I never realized—"

"Tali. Who is it?"

She was babbling again. She stopped, looked down at her hands, and when she looked back up she had such a brilliant smile playing across her lips that Garrus knew instantly who her mysterious turian caller had been. She didn't even have to say it. Though, of course, he wanted to hear it.

"Your father," she said softly. "And your sister. They both made it through the War."

Garrus suddenly couldn't face the brightness in her eyes. But all the air in his body left in a sigh. He'd never felt such relief in his life. Nearly twenty years of tension. Gone. He had tried not to think about the family he had left behind, because it felt like a wasted emotion: they were so far away and there would be no answers for decades. But there had always been something out of place without knowing if his father and Sol lived or died. With only those words, Tali had mended all that.

"I wasn't sure what to tell him about you, though," she continued nervously. "I didn't want to tell him more than you wanted him to know. But I couldn't exactly…well, your father is a very difficult man to keep secrets from."

Garrus nodded. That had been the truth ever since he had been young. Lying to his father…it simply never occurred to him the way it did to other children, since getting away with it had always been such an impossibility. There was a reason his father had been one of the best investigators to grace the ranks of C-Sec.

"So I said that you were alive," Tali said, watching Garrus keenly for any reaction. "I told him that you were living on Earth…that…" she swallowed "…you had a family now. I didn't want to say anything more than that. And I'm worried that even that may have been too much?"

She looked at him questioningly.

All Garrus could imagine was the future expression on his father's face when he met Garrus's "family." Garrus tried to age him twenty years, to give his straight-spined father that funny stoop in the shoulders that venerable turians tended to develop. He chuckled at the thought of his aging father seeing Junior and Tiersa for the first time. Family. Tali's choice of words couldn't have been more comedic if Garrus had tried. Though, he thought more soberly, it also couldn't have been more apt.

"Thank you," he said, clearing his throat. "For telling me."

"I think it was worth it," she said, smiling. "If you want, I can set up a call…it would be tricky to bypass security protocols and we'd have to bounce the signal from the Rannoch-Palaven buoy chain to the Rannoch-Earth chain, so the quality wouldn't be great."

Garrus shook his head.

"Tali, you've already compromised your position by telling me this. Are you sure you want to do this? I can understand if you don't want to arrange—"

"Garrus," she said, shaking her head. "Don't be stupid. I'm not going to tell you that your father and sister are alive and then not let you speak to them."

Garrus didn't know what to say. The risks she was taking…the risks she had already taken…

"I owe you one," he said quietly.

She smiled.

"By my count, it's way more than one. You can make it up to me by visiting Rannoch when the humans manage to get a relay up and running. I want to meet the girls. In person. Junior's getting so tall now."

"I know. And we'll be there. First ship through the relay."

When Tali's image flickered out, Garrus sat a moment on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his talons. He wasn't really surprised that his father and sister had made it out…and yet he was. So many others had died. So many others who should have lived. He had imagined the worse for them.

When they were small, growing up on Palaven, he and his sister had used to spend time out in the temperate forests around the city, camping out for days at time, hunting the occasional pyjak for the bounty that they could get for them at the local magistrate's office. He had always been the better shot, but Solana…she had been the one with the survival skills. Sol could track the pyjaks through the woods, could plan out the best place to ambush them, could build overnight shelters from scratch.

Their adventures only happened when their father was on the Citadel, which became more and more frequent as they grew older. Their mother…well, she'd let them scamper off for days at a time and wouldn't worry about it, but their father would never stand for such a lack of discipline under his own roof. His mother and his father were like day and night: his mother, full of such energy, teasing them about how she was sure they could catch more pyjaks next time if they really tried, brightening their house with her very presence. And then his father would come home for a few weeks, on leave from his C-Sec duties, and it would be like night had fallen: the house would become quieter, their conversations softer, and, suddenly, all that mattered was finding some way to impress his father. And he definitely wasn't impressed by hunting pyjaks.

Garrus didn't feel like his mother was any better than his father…well, maybe he thought that at the time, but only because his father—like the night—was so much more difficult to navigate through, while his mother made them feel comfortable and safe. He had only ever wanted to impress his father—which his sister was so much better at doing, in her own way—while his mother never asked for much of anything.

He hadn't been there when his mother had died. She had been sick before they had gone through the Omega 4 relay. He'd been so…ashamed…of how his sister had been left caring for their mother. And he still didn't know how to explain the scars. So, when their suicide mission had proved to be less suicidal than anticipated, he had delayed his return to Palaven as long as he could, helping Shepard with some of her unfinished business before the Alliance finally detained her and grounded the Normandy on Earth. Like a good soldier, she had gone without protest. And Garrus had been left with few options but to return to Palaven…to home…for the first time in years.

And it turned out that he arrived just in time for his mother's funeral. The treatments he'd help bargained for her with Mordin's help…well, he tried to take comfort in the fact that they had made her last days easier, but the truth that Sol had left out of their last communication was that their mother had been so far gone at that point that, really, nothing was going to save her. Just make her more comfortable.

He'd managed to patch things up with his father: helped, in no small part, by the fact that he was the only turian on Palaven to actually listen to Garrus about the Reapers. But, even when Garrus was deployed to defend Menae against the oncoming Reaper hordes and they had said goodbye, for what they both knew could have been the last time, Sol still held bitterness in her eyes.

"Take care of Dad, okay?" Garrus had said.

"Right. Because apparently taking care of our parents is only my responsibility. Menae is just another 'pleasure cruise', right?"

"Damn it, Sol…"

"Damn yourself, Garrus."

Then, mockingly, she had given him a salute before storming back into the evacuation shelter.

The truth was that he hoped Tali didn't rush to arrange the call. Garrus figured he would need all the time he could manage to figure out what the hell he was going to say to his sister.


	19. Chapter 18: The Same Blue Blood

**Chapter 18: The Same Blue Blood**

"Would you stop that?" snapped Tiersa as her singularity fizzled out morosely. "I'm trying to do my homework!"

Garrus looked up from the couch, startled.

"Stop what?"

She placed a hand on her hip and gave him a look.

"That."

He looked down at the datapad in his talons. Apparently, he'd been unconsciously rapping it against the arm of the couch.

"It's very annoying and I'm trying to concentrate."

"Sorry," Garrus mumbled. He tried to re-focus on the datapad, but instead found himself concentrating very hard on not tapping it on the edge of the couch again. Normally, when he was anxious like this, he would find things to do. On the Normandy, that had meant tinkering with the main battery. Or, occasionally, modifying weapons. But currently he'd run out of things to do. He'd already adjusted Tiersa's pistol past the point of the usual protocols. And the right parts simply didn't exist to do anything more with Junior's Mantis prototype. If Junior hadn't been at school, they could have done some target practise.

He still had an hour to go before the call. He still didn't know what he was going to tell Sol. Tali had given him nearly a month—it had taken that long for her to fabricate the right security clearances—but he had given up trying to think of anything that would actually be sufficient for his sister.

Tiersa let out an exasperated sigh as her singularity fizzled out again. She gave Garrus a dark look. He realized he'd been tapping again.

"Sorry."

But now, Tiersa just looked bemused. It was a Shepard-y kind of look…until it was demolished by Tiersa rolling her eyes.

"Come on," she said, surprising Garrus by grabbing his hand and pulling him off the couch. "I just hope that you're prepared to write a note to Miss Nought about why I didn't get my homework done. I really don't want her take me out with a shockwave like that kid last week…"

Garrus genuinely couldn't tell if it was a joke or not. It was Jack, after all.

But Tiersa was already pulling him out of the house, keying the lock as they went.

"We're going for a walk. You're just driving both of us crazy by moping around the house. We'll go to the park, okay?"

It did feel good to be out in the summer air. It wasn't raining which, in Vancouver, was something of a miracle. The air was humid and fresh. They walked through the park. The greenness of the trees and the grass reminded Garrus of Palaven, of those nights spent hunting pyjaks with Sol. The park seemed to bring back memories for Tiersa too.

"Mother used to take me for walks in the park near our old house," Tiersa said. "She said it was…one of the few things she could remember doing with her own mother. She was always so sad, I think. My mother. Always looking backwards instead of forward," she said, frowning. "I think…I think that's what I was. Her attempt to think about the future. To be honest, I don't think it worked."

Garrus was slightly startled by the sudden outpouring of thoughts from Tiersa. He didn't quite know what to say, what the right response was to the things she was telling him. Fortunately, he didn't have to think of anything to say because Tiersa suddenly turned and smiled at him.

"Thank you," she said softly.

He tilted his head and stared at her for a moment, confused.

"I just…I wanted to thank you," she continued. "For letting me stay with you. For arranging for me to learn from Miss Nought. For letting me get to know Adrienna. I really do appreciate it."

Garrus wasn't quite sure what to say. Her words…well, they were familiar ones. He'd told Shepard something similar many, many years ago now. What had she said to him in response? He couldn't remember. He'd just have to find his own words. Something that he, Garrus Vakarian, hadn't always been so good at. He coughed.

"Tiersa, it's…it's been good to have you here. And I'm sorry for…things…I may have said."

She shrugged.

"You've never been anything but fair to me."

He stared at her a moment, then shook his head.

"No. That's not true. I blamed you for things that your mother did. And…and maybe I blamed you for who your father was. That's not fair to you. It never was."

"I think it's fair. I mean, that's what I am."

Garrus stopped walking. He stared at her. She stared back. Had he made her feel this way, about herself? About her existence?

Probably. And that simple truth chilled him.

He reached his hand forward and placed it on her shoulder. She stared at his hand, surprised. When her eyes flicked back to his, he was a little surprised at himself, because he knew that he had found the words.

"What you are…is a brilliant, talented young asari who has already had to deal with more than her fair share of hardship. Where you came from…I'd be lying if I told you it doesn't matter. It does."

Tiersa nodded, but still looked confused.

"But your mother's choices weren't ever yours. I…I'm proud of who you are. And I know that I will be proud of whatever you choose to become—whether that's the Broker or something else entirely," he grimaced. "Preferably the latter, I suppose. But it doesn't matter. Because, whatever you choose, I can trust that you'll make the right choice."

Her eyes were suddenly shining. She touched her blue hand to his talons for a moment, then pulled away.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Garrus's omnitool beeped, informing him that he had an incoming call. He took a deep breath. Tiersa raised her brow markings at him.

"You're actually nervous about this, aren't you?"

Garrus turned away to walk back to the house and did his best to avoid her question.

"You know," Tiersa said, shoving him with her shoulder as she jogged to keep up with his long stride. "I don't think I've ever seen you nervous before. It's a little…humourous."

Garrus gave her a dark look.

"Sure," Tiersa continued, only encouraged by his consternation, "throw Mr. Vakarian in front of a neverending wave of mercs, against Cerberus troops, against hordes of Reapers, and he's just fine. But one little call from his folks..."

"If this is your attempt to make me feel better by putting things in perspective," Garrus growled, "then it is most definitely not appreciated."

"Nah," Tiersa said, "I'm just enjoying this. I'll go pick Junior up from school, if you'd like? That way, you'll have lots of time to talk."

"That would be significantly more helpful than this."

"Well, good luck!" she called out cheerfully, veering off in the direction of Junior's school. Garrus continued onto the house, then up the stairs to the comm terminal in his bedroom. The incoming message light flashed. His talon hovered over the console for the length of one long sigh. Then, he answered.

There, in flickering yellow, stood his father and his sister.

His father looked like he hadn't aged a day. Garrus had been wrong about imagining the stooped shoulders. Even at over eighty years old, his father was as straight-backed as ever. It was like time had frozen for him.

But Sol…she looked older. Her omnitool had fused with her left arm, but although it looked strange to Garrus to see the yellow lines permanently flickering across her plates, she seemed to have adapted to it. It had been twenty years since he had last seen her, and every one of those years seemed to be etched into her faceplates. But then she smiled at him. And it was like they were kids again, hunting in the woods.

"Garrus, damn you…" Sol whispered. "We thought you were dead."

"Why?" he said, his voice deceptively casual. "You didn't think I'd manage without you to watch my back?"

"No," said his father flatly. "We didn't."

"Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad."

His father cleared his throat.

"Your quarian friend…she said that you're still on Earth? That you missed the turian fleet setting out for Palaven?"

"Dumbass," muttered Sol.

"So I risk my life, battling Reapers on some alien world, and the best I get from you is 'dumbass'? Thanks Sol. I'm really glad that all my hard work is appreciated by noble turian civilians like yourself."

She shrugged.

"You know me. I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't meant it."

His father cleared his throat again.

"Your face? What happened to your facial markings?"

And it was then they really talked. They talked about what had happened since they lost contact during the Wars: how Sol and his father had ended up stranded on a nearby colony, but managed to barter transport back to Palaven with some volus merchants. They'd spent two years on that ship as it limped back to turian space. They'd known he went to Earth, with Shepard and the Catalyst, but that was it. Then the relays had blown out with that strange green light. Everyone had changed. And that was it. For years.

They didn't talk about how, due to the many casualties, Garrus had been next in line to be Primarch after Victus's death. Sol probably didn't know—she never had much of a head for military history, though she'd served her fifteen years along with the rest of them. But the way his father kept appraising him out of the corner of his eye as Garrus spoke and explained what had happened to him on Earth (with only the occasional lie of omission), made Garrus think that maybe his father knew what a coward his son had become, hiding from an appointment to the most important position in the Hierarchy.

Still, his father didn't say anything aloud. It was…unusual..for him. Garrus wondered if maybe this was his father's way of saying that he had missed him and had worried about him. Or maybe his father was simply too ashamed to speak about the subject and had chosen to pretend it had never happened. Either option suited Garrus just fine.

He heard the front door open and Tiersa and Junior arrive home. They both came up the stairs and stood in his bedroom's doorway. Junior's eyes widened at the two turians flickering in the comm terminal. Garrus cleared his throat.

"Tali mentioned to you that I have a family now?"

Sol and his father exchanged a look that Garrus didn't like.

"What?" he asked irritated.

"I was…skeptical," Sol admitted. "You really found yourself some other turian who managed to miss the fleet's departure and who wanted to settle down on Earth to have little turians with you? Really?"

"No," Garrus admitted. "It's…complicated…"

"Really."

"It's…it's more a single parent situation…"

"Really."

Garrus wasn't sure how else to explain it. So he just gestured to Junior, in the doorway. She approached tentatively, frowning a little.

"This…" he said softly, "…is Adrienna."

She stepped into the comm link area. She stood close to Garrus.

His sister started to laugh. Junior looked uncertain as to what to think about that, so she just looked up at Garrus. Garrus could only shrug at her.

But his father…he tilted his head to one side and grunted.

"Good name," he said quietly. "I hope that you live up to it, eh?"

Junior stood up a little taller.

"I try, sir. You should see me shoot. I'm very good, you know."

He nodded.

"I'm sure."

And the look he fixed Garrus with…well…Garrus wondered if maybe his disagreements with his father had arisen solely from misinterpreting the man all these years. For the first time, he felt like maybe there was the smallest flicker of pride deep within his father's cold, dark eyes. Garrus looked to the doorway, where Tiersa stood leaning against the doorframe. He gestured for her to come towards the comm. Her blue eyes widened in surprise, but she came over, stepped into the circle of light.

"And this is Tiersa," he announced.

This sent Sol over the edge. One glance of the young asari doubled her over into hysterics.

"You know…I had no idea what to expect from you…" Garrus caught the Sol's words between heaves of flanging laughter. "…But this…this is definitely not it…You got a baby krogan hanging around there too somewhere?"

Now, Garrus laughed too. And even Tiersa could not keep a small smile from breaking across her lips. Only Junior, for whom the strangeness of their little family had always been normal, didn't understand the joke.


	20. Chapter 19: Old Friends, Nearby Places

**Chapter 19: Old Friends, Nearby Places**

"I think you should show him," Junior said to Tiersa.

It was fairly obvious who the "him" was. It had been almost two months since the call from Palaven and they had just sat down for an evening meal. Tiersa had fixed herself and Junior some food—noodles that were covered in some kind of orange goo—while Garrus went about grabbing some of his simpler dextro rations. At Junior's remark, though, he stopped chewing and looked at Tiersa. The young asari just stared down at her plate, stirring her food with her fork and pretending that she hadn't heard.

"Show me what?" asked Garrus, mildly. He spoke to Junior, but continued to throw a significant stare in Tiersa's direction. In response, she blushed purple.

"Nothing," she mumbled, continuing to find the food in front of her absolutely riveting. Garrus did notice Junior's shoulders suddenly jerk though—as if she had been prodded underneath the table by a fork-wielding asari.

He raised his brow plate at them both. Tiersa sighed, throwing Junior a dark look. She just shrugged in response. Tiersa cued up her omnitool and a fuzzy vid appeared on the console in the living room. They all got up from the table and walked over to it.

"Tiersa showed me this last week from her Broker files," Junior said conversationally. "She says this was you."

"Me?"

It looked like old security footage: it was the wrong ID stamp to be C-Sec files, but it was of decent quality, which meant that it had be someplace that was generously (if privately) funded. If this was supposed to be linked to him somehow, then that meant either Noveria or Omega. And, given where he'd spent the most time proportionally, that would indicate the latter.

There was a group of uniformly-armored figures on the screen. They were moving across an open area, towards some stairs at the far end of the room. Then, the first one fell: neatly, precisely. Then another. And another. There was no audio, but Garrus didn't need it to know that there was an established rhythm to the shootings. Boom. Drop. Boom. Drop. Over and over again. The shooter was nowhere to be seen.

He recognized it now, of course. He'd spent days in that apartment. No sleep. Not that he could have slept, even if he hadn't had waves of mercs crawling down his neck. All of his squad dead. Sidonis's fault. A traitor. But Garrus knew his men were all dead because of himself as well: it was as much his own fault for trusting that damn coward as it was Sidonis's fault for being one. Thinking of how he had included the young turian in his cause, thinking about how he'd missed all the signs of Sidonis's betrayal until it was too late, still made Garrus's mandibles flare.

Once he'd returned to the apartment and found the remains of his men, Garrus knew that he should have run. He'd figured out the ruse earlier than the mercs had expected. He could have had time to get out of there if he had simply booked it as fast as he could to the nearest off-world transport. But he didn't. Instead, he waited for the mercs to come. He collected the bits of his dead comrades from around the apartment and laid them all out: each member of his team. He realized, once he had finished, that there wasn't anywhere he could bury them. So instead he had retreated back up to the balconey, where he had carved each of their names into the edge of his visor.

Erash. Monteague. Mierin. Grundan Krul. Melanis. Ripper. Sensat. Vortash. Butler. Weaver. And Sidonis.

Because hadn't he failed Sidonis as well? Failed to see that the kid was no vigilante and couldn't handle it? No. Sidonis was a coward and that was all there was to it. He scratched out the name. Then, for good measure, he fired up his omnitool and burnt it, the visor's coating buckling under the heat. But Sidonis's name was still visible.

He had stayed and he had waited for them to come. He could have run. Could have made it out of there in time. But he wanted them to come. He was going to kill them all and remember the faces of each of his men with each clean shot to a merc's neck.

And then the mercs had arrived: wave after wave that simply didn't seem to stop.

Erash. Monteague. Mierin. Grundan Krul. Melanis. Ripper. Sensat. Vortash. Butler. Weaver.

Their names were the song. And he was dancing. There, in that apartment, he had needed that rhythm to keep him going: told himself that it was nothing more than a dance. If he didn't miss a beat, he'd get through it. Boom. Drop. Boom. Drop. And if he couldn't keep it up…well, at least he'd have the chance to see Shepard again.

The camera started to pan across the room. It must have been on a timer. There was one brief shot of a helmeted figure standing on the balcony, looking over the open ground and pressed flush against the wall. Then, the rifle in the figures' talons pointed directly at the camera. There was blur. And then the feed cut out.

He stared at the snow on the screen.

"That was you?" said Junior.

The admiration shining in her eyes made him feel ill. She didn't understand any of it: all she was seeing was him taking out targets methodically and precisely. It was just a vid to her. But he had lived it. He didn't regret taking the mercs out: they were scum, all of them, that deserved to die for what they had done to his squad and probably more besides. But Junior didn't understand that. She didn't understand any of it.

He hesitated to answer her question. To say "no"…it wouldn't exactly have been a lie. Garrus felt like the turian in the footage was dead. The figure in that security feed had died the moment he had stepped off the Normandy that final time and received the news that Shepard was gone.

"Yes," he said, not looking at her. "That was me. Once. A very long time ago."

Junior stared at him.

"What happened? How did you get out?"

He reached forward and pulled on Junior's metal necklace. She looked down at it as he tapped one talon on the image of Shepard. This was the one part of that memory he didn't mind thinking about.

"She came. And…helped a bit with finishing off the mercs. Though that little…encounter…still left its scars."

He dropped Junior's Shepard necklace and then gestured to the torn half of his face. And, for the first time, something flickered in Junior's green-flecked brown eyes that made Garrus think she realized it wasn't just a game. She stood up on her tiptoes, reaching up and brushing her soft human hands along the scars. He ignored her and instead flicked his gaze over to where Tiersa stood.

"What else have you been showing her?" he asked coldly.

She drew back a little.

"I…nothing. I just…I found this while I was going through Mother's old files on the Normandy crew members. And I thought Adrienna ought to know."

"Know what?"

"What you were, once. How…how good you were. I'm sorry if…I didn't mean to upset you. I really didn't. I just wanted her to know."

"That," he said sternly, "was not for you to decide."

"Sorry. I'm sorry," Tiersa said.

And she looked so much like she actually meant it that Garrus just sighed and turned away. Instead, he thought about what Tiersa had said.

"That file…does it have anything else?"

"No," said Tiersa, a little too quickly.

Her eyes seemed to work extra hard to hold his gaze. She was obviously lying. But he decided to let it go, for now. In some ways, he didn't actually want to know what was in that file.

Garrus's omnitool beeped, informing him that a message had been left at the comm terminal. He turned back to Tiersa, but then suddenly glanced back down at his omnitool again. It was an Alliance communication. And it was coded with an N7 designation.

"What is it?" asked Junior, eyebrows furrowing.

"Nothing," he said, also a little too quickly.

It was probably obvious to Tiersa that he, too, was lying. To avoid her questioning glance, he retreated up to his bedroom and pulled up the message on the comm terminal. He waited a moment before activating it though.

There was no real reason for the Alliance to contact him. He hadn't realized it then, but it had been a defining moment when they had stepped off the Normandy that last time: the humans had been rushed in one direction and the "aliens" like himself in the other. After the Wars were over, Alliance Military Police had become the sole authority with any power on Earth. This was an organization that had been originally formed to only keep tabs on the military—a strange concept to Garrus, since in turian society there was not much of a distinction between military personnel and civilians, since everyone was the former for at least fifteen years. Garrus remembered the MP uniforms with some bitterness because it was they that had seized the Normandy and taken Shepard back to Earth. Post-War, they had somehow managed to expand that power into an authority over every being on Earth.

Garrus hadn't approved of many of their choices. He could understand how some of them may have been justified during the Reapers' attack, but after? Martial law being enacted to curb the post-Invasion riots and looting. The insistence of everyone—human and non-human—wearing identity chips at all times. And then there was the whole "recycling" thing, using corpses as fertilizer. He understood that there was a human saying about "desperate times calling for desperate measures" better than most, but there were some lines that he thought never should be crossed. And Alliance MP had crossed several.

And Garrus had watched, bitterly from over the tops of bottles, as the men and women he had once counted as friends were touted out for the news vids, labeled as "heroes," and generally used by the Alliance to justify these extreme measures. Joker would limp in front of the cameras and happily ham it up for the audiences—although Garrus caught the dark edge to his jokes that made him think that Joker knew exactly that he had been pulled out there to perform like a trained varren. Vega seemed only to be summoned for military ceremonies and broadcasts as a token warrior of the Catalyst, rather than for the talk shows and interviews that seemed to be Joker's domain. Then there had been Dr. Chakwas. And even those engineers whose names Garrus could never remember. Any human who'd ever been within Shepard's close proximity. He didn't even want to think about Alenko.

No, Garrus didn't trust the Alliance. But he knew that he had to at least listen to the message. If he didn't, he'd wonder forever what it had been about, since there was really only one common interest between him and the Alliance: the deceased woman whose dog tags still hung around his neck.

An image of a human flickered to life in the orange light of the comm. It was a large, male human with arms thicker than Garrus's torso: James Vega.

"Garrus," said the message, "I'm sorry to call you here, but a…umm…mutual acquaintance gave me your number."

Tali? Possibly, though Garrus had thought he was her only contact on Earth. A naïve thought, because obviously she had been in communication with Liara before her death, but she had never mentioned any of the human members of the Normandy's former crew before. She'd mentioned once, years ago, how she'd tried contacting some of the old Alliance crewmates and was shut down by human government bureaucrats.

He turned his attention back to the screen. Vega looked nervous, like he always was in his news vid appearances. James had always been so relaxed on the Normandy that Garrus had just assumed that the cameras made him nervous, but maybe his anxieties really had amplified with age. His hands flexed beside him while his spoke and he kept flicking his eyes around, like he'd rather be looking anywhere else but at the screen. Vega's muscles had become more sinewy, the skin on his face hanging loosely on his skull, his crew-cut hair now more grey than black. A veteran now. To think that, when Garrus knew him, he had been the Normandy's resident rookie.

"I know," Vega continued, "that it's been a while. I'm sorry I haven't kept in touch. I was…heh…kinda under the impression that you wanted to be left alone. But something's come up. It's about Shepard. And I need to meet with you. I'll be in Vancouver next Tuesday. Got a nice little restaurant I think you'll enjoy. Nineteen hundred hours. Got it? I'll see you there. Or I won't, I guess. Your call. I think you'll want to hear this from me though."

Coordinates for a restaurant on the other side of the city flickered across the base of the console. Garrus had never heard of the place, but that didn't mean much, considering he was restricted to places that served dextro-safe food. And places with a kid's menu.

"Oh, and Garrus?" said the image of Vega, "You'll want to come alone for this one. I'd love to meet the kiddo sometime, but…not this time. See you then."

The message was more than odd. Why now? He trusted Vega…or, rather, he had trusted Vega under Shepard's command. He was good kid, albeit with a slightly overinflated ego (not that Garrus was in any place to judge that particular character flaw). Yet he'd always avoided the Alliance contacts because whatever respect he may have once had for the human military had died with Shepard.

Maybe that's why James had been so uncharacteristically nervous? Was Garrus about to become the confidante of yet another old friend telling him things that he was not supposed to know? Garrus knew that he might be better off ignoring James's message.

But it was about Shepard. So he had to go. It simply came down to that. He thought…well, he knew that she was dead. He felt like he had accepted that. She hadn't appeared in his dreams for a while now, not since that night when she—or Shepard's ghost or whatever it was—had appeared after their visit to the Normandy.

He had a feeling that he knew what this was about: they had finally recovered her body. It would make sense that James would know if they did, considering how far up he must be in the Alliance's ranks by now. It would make sense that James would want to tell him this personally.

Garrus pulled the dog tags out from under his tunic. He knew instantly what he had to do. If they had found her body, he would return the tags.

He would finally say goodbye.

* * *

**A/N:**

And that's it for this week, folks! Updates will resume on Monday with the last...let's see...four chapters + epilogue. Which means everything should all be wrapped up by Thursday of next week. Exciting, right? The ending...well, it's probably not at all what you're expecting. So I guess the only real question is this: what color would you like the last few chapters posted in? Red? Blue? I'd go for a lovely green, personally...

(It's too soon, isn't it? Yeah, too soon. Now I've even gone and upset myself.)

Once again, thanks for all of the reads and reviews!


	21. Chapter 20:The Thing About Past Mistakes

**Chapter 20: The Thing About Past Mistakes**

"I'm…going out this evening. Meeting a friend," Garrus said. "You'll be…okay watching Junior?"

Tiersa looked up from her biotic homework. She raised her brow markings at Garrus.

"A friend?"

"…yeah."

She stared at him a moment longer. She wanted to ask more questions: Garrus could see it in her eyes. It was the Broker in her, he supposed. He had considered telling both Junior and Tiersa about Vega's message, but he knew that they would have too many questions—like the ones he saw threatening from behind Tiersa's eyes now. Or, worse, that they would try to argue their way into coming along. Tiersa had a right, he supposed, to know what happened to Shepard, but he wanted to know what this was about first. He still didn't trust the Alliance and he was worried that James was dragging Garrus into some kind of conspiracy. And the last thing Garrus wanted was to drag the girls in with him. Hadn't James warned him as much?

To his infinite relief, Tiersa finally shrugged.

"Sure. No problem."

To be honest, Garrus appreciated this newfound respect for his privacy. It reminded him that Tiersa was growing older and wiser. When her training with Jack was finished in the spring, there would be little to justify her staying with them any longer. She wouldn't need his protection anymore. He knew that he should be pleased with this. He knew that he should be proud of her for coming so far in less than a year since Liara's death. And he was proud, of course. But he also found himself trying to avoid thinking about the inevitable day when Tiersa would leave them for the last time: stepping out the front door and embarking for her future.

Traffic was light by this late in the evening, so Garrus had no difficulties piloting the skycar through the city and landing it just down the street from the restaurant. Garrus glanced inside the restaurant, but couldn't see anyone of Vega's girth and height. The massive human would stand out in a crowd. Garrus walked back out onto the patio, choosing a table under the small awning. They could move inside later, if James insisted, but for now, Garrus preferred to be out where he could watch the street. He glanced around, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. It was a quiet street, away from the traffic on the main skyway a few blocks away. A few humans, a couple of asari, and even one fellow turian walked by, but none of them spared Garrus a second glance.

When he opened the menu, Garrus noticed very quickly that there wasn't anything listed that he could actually eat. James was either trying to be funny or had spent so much time on Earth dealing with only humans that he had forgotten that, as a turian, Garrus had very particular dietary restrictions. The waitress approached his table awkwardly and recommended another restaurant that had a dextro-friendly menu that was only a few blocks away.

"I'm…hmm…supposed to be meeting a friend here," Garrus said, trying to explain. The waitress looked surprised. "Sorry," he added.

She stood there a moment longer, shifting back and forth on her feet. She was very thin for a human and probably in her mid-twenties. Her golden hair was done up in elaborate braids that were wrapped around her head.

"I promise you, he's human," Garrus said hastily.

"Oh no, sir. It's no problem with me if you want to wait," she smiled. "Can I bring you a water, at least?"

"Thanks. Oh, and thanks for the tip on that other restaurant…though I'd sure like to find a restaurant here that serves only dextro meals. So that I can return my friend the same courtesy he's apparently given me."

She laughed.

"Oh, I'm sure he just forgot. Or didn't realize. Either way, you can ask him when he gets here, right?"

Garrus settled back into his chair. The waitress returned a moment later with a glass of water. There was a straw.

"Heh. Emergency induction port," he muttered, thinking of Tali. Shepard had chuckled about it once and then Garrus had teased her into recounting her brief encounter with an exquisitely drunk Tali.

"Sorry?" asked the waitress.

"Oh, nothing. Thank you."

Garrus sipped on the water, checking the time on his omnitool. James was late. Garrus would be sure to point that out to him, whenever he decided to show up. He checked the coordinates, but he was sure this was the right restaurant—despite James's little joke with the lack of dextro-safe food.

The second time the waitress came by his table to re-fill his water glass, Garrus checked the coordinates and the time from the message again. Now James really was late. He wondered about the waitress's hair. Had she done those braids herself? Was it painful for humans to have their hair bound together? Just the thought of twisting his fringe around like that made Garrus wince.

The third time the waitress came by, Garrus started glancing around the patio. He didn't like this. Something must have gone wrong. Had the Alliance intercepted the message? He used his omnitool to check remotely for any other messages, in case James had sent anything, but there was nothing. There wasn't really any decent cover in the area. He should have chosen a table inside the restaurant.

The fourth time she refilled his glass, the waitress waited a moment beside his table, swaying slightly from side to side. She seemed to be working up the courage to say something. Her mouth opened and closed a few times. Garrus waited patiently. If she was some kind of contact or operative that James had sent to lead him on a…what did the humans call it?… a "_goose_ chase" around the city, James could have picked someone with a little more confidence.

"I just…I wanted to thank you," the waitress finally stammered in a soft voice.

Garrus raised his brow plate at her.

"Do I know you?"

"No! I mean, I don't think so…but…you're still here. On Earth. And you're obviously old enough that you must have fought here during the Reaper Wars."

Wait, what did she mean by "obviously"? Garrus glanced around again for James, but there was still no sign of him. The young woman's voice drew him back in, though. It seemed that, now that she'd started talking, she couldn't stop. And there was compelling urgency laced into her voice—like this was a story she had to tell.

"I…I was only three when they came," she said, staring at Garrus intently. She wound and unwound her fingers. "I lived with my parents on their farm in the interior. I was outside…just fooling around in our sunflower fields…when the sky got dark and suddenly there was one of… them. I remember thinking that it was staring at me. Watching me."

She lowered her voice.

"I had…I had this toy. An Alliance frigate. I used to play out in the fields and pretend I was a human Spectre, flying through the galaxy. Killing geth. But when I stared up at that…that thing as it stared down at me, I remember realizing how stupid and small I was. So I dropped my toy. And I ran. I remember the flowers whipping against my face and hearing that sound…"

She shivered.

"I didn't look back, but I know that the sunflowers were being torn up behind me. All of them falling face down into the dirt. I don't know how I made it into the trees. Maybe because I was so small and stupid…it just didn't care if I made it or not. I climbed into the trees and stayed there for days, drinking water off the leaves and…"

"Your parents?" Garrus asked quietly. He was disturbed by this girl's story. He couldn't help but think of Junior.

The waitress shook her head, her blonde braids catching Sol's rays.

"I'm sorry" he told her.

She stared off into the distance for a moment, towards the mountains. On the other side of them would have been her family's farm. Garrus could almost still see the memory of the Reaper reflected in the sheen of her green eyes. She shook her head again.

"I am too. But…you know what? You came. You and all the other aliens. You came here. To Earth. You saved us. I know that…well, it's been a long time now, right? And there's all this anti-alien and pro-human talk from the Alliance. But I wanted you to know that I…that I remember what you did for us. For humans. And I'll never forget it."

She looked down at her hands.

"Crap," she said, shaking her head. "I really wish we had a dextro menu. You saved us all and I can't even serve you something you can actually eat."

Garrus couldn't help but laugh. She looked up and he could tell by the way that she smiled now that the memory of the Reaper was gone again, retreating into the back of her mind.

"Well," he said casually, "I'm sure you tell this story to all the turians who only order water. Looking for a big tip, I presume?"

She nodded mock-seriously, playing along.

"Absolutely, sir,"

Then, she looked around.

"Hey, is your friend ever going to show? I mean, you're welcome to stay as long as you need to…but…?"

Garrus shrugged.

"I don't know where the hell he is. I think I've given him enough a chance to get here. If he really wanted to talk to me, you'd think he would make more of an effort."

Garrus tried to keep his tone light, but Vega's failed appearance prickled the edges of his instincts. He felt like something was wrong. He tried appraising the waitress again, wondering if she had been deliberately trying to distract him, but she seemed honest enough. Garrus had gotten accomplished at picking out liars and spies over the years.

"I think…I think I'll just give up," he said, rising from his chair. "Thank you, again."

"No," said the young woman. "Thank you."

Garrus left the patio and decided to walk through the adjoining side streets—just in case he had missed something. But there was no sign of James or anything out of the ordinary. He thought back to the message and decided to take an inventory of everything that was odd about it. James's stiff, awkward posture. Maybe James just didn't like any recording device? No, that couldn't be it. They had exchanged messages before, shortly after the Catalyst, and James had been perfectly relaxed in those. Those had been the last time he had seen James, outside of news vids. In fact, there had been a news vid fairly recently. Garrus recalled that James had given a speech about the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the Battle of the Catalyst.

And then he realized what he should have noticed the first time he had played the message.

Scars.

His name. James had used his name. He had never heard James use anyone's real name. It had always been nicknames. Garrus had been "Scars." Always. And even Shepard had been "_Lola_," whatever a _Lola_ was…

Garrus rushed back to the restaurant, almost running into the waitress.

"Sorry…sorry…but do you have a news vid console I could use? Just for a moment?"

"Sure, it's in the back of the bar. Is…is everything okay with your friend?"

"I'm not sure," he called over his shoulder, storming through to the back of the restaurant.

He scrolled through the archives and pulled up the broadcast of Vega's twentieth-anniversary speech. Garrus tried to ignore the words about "Shepard's great sacrifice" etc. and instead focused on his movements. They were the same stiff, nervous motions that Vega had made in the message to Garrus.

In fact, they were exactly the same.

Heart pounding against his chest plates, Garrus pulled up James's message on his omnitool and played it in parallel to the news vid. It was the same video. Only the audio had been swapped out. And, now that he listened closely, Garrus could hear a strange buzz in the background of the message that he had never noticed before. Voice manipulation and reduplication, perhaps? Once, that human thief, Kasumi, had given Garrus a lecture about how easy it was to do with a voice sample. And James was now such a public figure…there had be hundreds of samples of recorded speeches and interviews to draw from.

Damn it.

Obviously, the message had been faked. Why?

He needed to get home.

He sprinted for the door of the restaurant, praying for the click of weapons or the cold tingle of biotics to come hurtling towards him. Because if he was ambushed at the restaurant, then that meant whomever had sent the message wasn't targeting the house. But he had waited here too long. Surely, if the restaurant had been the trap, they would have struck before now.

Garrus cued up his omnitool, desperately calling the house. There was no answer, but that wasn't necessarily unusual. The girls never answered the comm link, since the calls were always for him. He thought of calling Lynn. But that could possibly mean sending her into danger. She was ex-Alliance, but if whomever had done this was sophisticated enough to hack a message from Vega and fake N7 credentials, it seemed unlikely that Lynn would be able to deal with it. Would he even be able to deal with it? All he had was his usual pistol. A sidearm.

It didn't matter. Whatever happened, they were his daughters, damn it. It wasn't a matter of whether or not he could deal with it: he simply would.

The skycar barely touched the driveway before Garrus threw himself out of it. Garrus stopped at the front door and listened, but there was only a cold silence. He drew his pistol. The front door slid open, but the lights didn't come on automatically. Garrus groped alongside the door and found the manual switch.

The couch was upside down, the table shattered. Even the fridge was pulled over on its side—and speckled with bullet points. Heat sinks littered the ground.

It took every tendon of self-control to not start roaring their names at the top of his lungs. But there was a possibility that the attackers were still inside. Surprise might be his only advantage at this point. He crept quietly through the main floor, but there was no sign of any living being. There were some small blood splatters in the kitchen: red. Human blood. He cautiously slid around the stairs. Nothing in his bedroom, the bathroom. He snuck along the wall of the hallway, peering around the edge of the door frame into the girls' bedroom.

Tiersa was lying face down on the floor. She looked like she had been thrown into the wall. There was purple blood pooling beneath her. Garrus flew into the room, turning her over. She was still breathing, her pulse fluttering beneath her neck. There was blood seeping from wounds across her body and a smear of purple trailing from her nostrils. Biotic nosebleed.

Garrus ran back down the hall to the bathroom, pulling out some medi-gel from the cabinet. He returned to Tiersa, pulling her head into his arms and slapping the medi-gel onto the wounds that seemed the worse. After a moment, Tiersa's eyelids fluttered open.

"Garrus!" she gasped.

She pulled herself out of his arms and onto her feet. She staggered and Garrus grabbed her elbow to steady her. She pulled away from him, muttering.

"I…I don't know who they are. I need to find out."

She limped over to the drawer beside her bed. She started pulling out datapad after datapad, flipping through them and then tossing them beside her on the floor, shaking her head.

"Mother had all the answers. She has to have them somewhere."

"Tiersa," he said, grabbing her arm. "Slow down. What happened? Where's Junior?"

"Who were they? They had…I can't remember any distinct markings. Mostly humans. Some batarians. I haven't met a batarian before. But that is what they were. Four eyes. Had to be. And two salarians. And an asari with strong biotics. Obviously. Obviously! But who were they?"

"Tiersa!" Garrus roared.

She stopped, staring up at him from the latest datapad. It slipped out of his hands and clattered on the floor. Her face was coated in purple blood and tears.

"We…we were upstairs. I heard someone come through the front door. I heard voices. It...it was strange. I told Adrienna to hide under her bed, to sneak out to the roof if she had the chance. There were so many of them. I asked them what they were doing in our house. I told them they were dead. I tried shielding her. I tried everything I learned…I…I tried so hard to protect her. And it wasn't enough."

She wiped the blood away from under her nose and stared at it for a moment uncomprehendingly. She rubbed it off onto her shirt, leaving yet another purple stain in the fabric.

"They just tossed me aside. I could hear her screaming as they dragged her down the hall. And everything was going black, but…but I saw them take her away."

She stared down at the floor, her fists curling and uncurling.

"One of them…one of the humans…he grabbed my face and held it up as everything was going dark. He said to tell you that you'd be hearing from them soon. And…"

Her tone suddenly darkened. As she raised her head and stared at Garrus, her biotics began to sparkle in her blue irises.

"…and they said to tell you that this is a message. For Archangel."


	22. Chapter 21: Blood and Breath

**Chapter 21: Blood and Breath**

Panic. It was something that Garrus genuinely didn't know how to do. He'd watched others succumb to it: other turians in his military days and other C-Sec officers on the Citadel. Many of his fellow crewmates from the Normandy—the best of the galaxy—had reached their breaking points on the more difficult missions. Even Shepard, on that night before they assaulted the Illusive Man's base, had been on the precipice of panic. Garrus had pulled her back from the edge of it—perhaps his most important contribution to the Reaper Wars, in retrospect. And he'd been able to do so because, even in the face of the galaxy's complete annihilation, he found himself simply unable to panic.

But what Garrus had to fight now was a different impulse entirely: rage. It burned through his blood, sparking at his muscles, urging him to do something rash, something unforgivable. He thought about the Mantis prototype upstairs and how easy—how ruthlessly easy—it would be to rush out into the street and start shooting things until he got someone's attention. Of course, the rational part of his mind told him that would be stupid, but he had to struggle not to throw his fist into a wall.

And Tiersa's reaction, her attempt to make sense of everything rationally, reminded Garrus so much of Liara that it hurt to think about it. Sometimes, it was very obvious who Tiersa's parents had been.

It was all his fault. If he hadn't been so stupid…

"It's all my fault," said Tiersa softly, staring out the window. "I let them take her. They just walked in. It was my responsibility to protect her. And I failed."

Yes, sometimes it really was obvious who Tiersa's parents had been. Garrus took two deep breaths to try and clear his head of the storm of unhelpful thoughts flooding into it.

"It's not your fault," he said to her. "Obviously, you didn't just let them take her. Look at you. We need to get you to a clinic."

She shook her head.

"I'm fine. The medi-gel did the trick. They needed me alive so that I could pass on that message. We don't have time to go to a clinic or anything and they'd just ask questions. Garrus," Tiersa said quietly, staring at him. "we have to kill them. We have to find her and then we have to kill them all."

Hearing these words come from Tiersa…He'd underestimated her.

A part of him knew that he should do this alone. This wasn't Tiersa's fight. They had come for him, had taken Junior to get something from him. To put Tiersa at risk after losing Junior…well, Junior would never forgive him, that was certain. But he also knew that he couldn't do this alone. And that Tiersa had a right to put these bastards in the ground as much as he did. Feron hadn't let her avenge her mother and Garrus wasn't going to make her go through the same thing again. He looked at Tiersa and he nodded.

"Yes. That is exactly what we have to do."

Find Junior. Kill them. He could channel his rage into these twin purposes. Shepard had said something to him, once, a long time ago. It had been one of the last things she said to him, when he'd only half-jokingly brought up the possibility of children: "I think that two cold-blooded killers are enough for one family." Tiersa would come with him and maybe she would kill, take another's life, for the first time in her life. But, damn it, that was the world she was living in now. The galaxy had become a place where children needed to take lives in order to save their own. He realized that now.

"Come on," he said.

Tiersa followed him to the console as he cued up the houses's security feed from two hours ago. He watched a group of armored figures get out of unmarked transports and approach the front door. There were five humans, three batarians, two salarians, and an asari, who seemed to be in charge. An excessive number for kidnapping a child, so maybe they had doubted whether or not Garrus would be stupid enough to take the bait. The asari had to be commando, though not even that would have saved her and her team if Garrus had been there. He watched them as they all clustered around the front door, waiting while one of the salarians hacked the lock, and he thought about how it would have been so easy to take them all out from the roof with the Mantis. If he had been there.

But he hadn't.

They hacked the front door. Garrus switched the feed to the living room, watched them debate for a while, and then saw Tiersa come down the stairs and start yelling at them. They pulled out weapons and started to fire. Tiersa leapt around the corner of the kitchen, heaving the fridge down onto the floor with a cleverly-placed singularity. She leapt behind it while they opened fire. She threw shockwaves out onto the floor: the table exploded into splinters and the couch flipped over onto one of the humans. After a matter of seconds, three of the humans and one of the batarians were incapacitated on the floor.

Tiersa watched the footage with wide eyes and wouldn't look at Garrus.

"I'm sorry. I left the stairs wide open. I was hoping to distract them, that they wouldn't realize Adrienna was here too…but they must have guessed…I'm sorry."

Garrus saw the past version of Tiersa in the vid realize the same thing, as the asari commando adjusted her visor and then started shouting for the remaining mercs to head upstairs. Tiersa was fast, though, and she leapt out from behind the fridge, sprinting up the stairs after them. He switched the feed to the upper levels and saw Tiersa throw herself in front of their bedroom doors and pull up a barrier. Garrus couldn't see into the bedroom, but a moment later, Tiersa staggered back as blood blossomed on her shirt.

Junior was being dragged out of the room by one of the humans: she was screaming and kicking. She threw her small fist into the back of the human's knee and he dropped her. She ran behind Tiersa again, back into the bedroom. Tiersa instantly threw up another barrier, but she was getting tired: Garrus could see the nosebleed starting and the barrier crackled at its edges.

The commando and the remaining mercs approached. The commando smiled. Then, before Tiersa could even react, the commando stepped forward into the barrier, wrapped her fingers around Tiersa's neck, lifted her up until her feet dangled, and then threw her into the bedroom. Garrus couldn't see Tiersa anymore, but Junior's mouth flew open in a scream of rage and she threw herself at the asari, practically into her arms.

One of the remaining humans stepped into the room, and then, after a moment, stepped out again. He was wiping purple blood off onto his armor. Garrus switched back into the feed from the front door just in time to see the salarian use the butt of his pistol on Junior's small head. She fell limp in the asari's arms. They threw her into the back of one of the skycars, along with the bodies of their incapacitated comrades. And then the skycars were gone. Garrus quickly scanned through the rest of the footage to see if any of them returned, but there was nothing. Not until he saw the image of himself step into the house. Too late.

He turned off the console.

"Do you know who they are? Why they did this?" Tiersa asked shakily.

"Blue Suns. And Eclipse."

"Mercs? They're not wearing uniforms…"

"They don't need to. They were using merc tactics. The humans and the batarians are Blue Suns. The asari and the salarians are probably ex-Eclipse."

Garrus shook his head, trying to make sense of it. He'd found out, after the War was over and she was gone, that Shepard had made some sort of fiendish deal with Aria to unite the galaxy's three major merc organizations in aiding Earth against the Reapers. Garrus had a pretty good idea why Shepard hadn't mentioned it to him: the only other time all three merc groups had united was on Omega to kill Archangel. He recalled seeing Shepard running around the Citadel and talking to some of the shadier characters, but he had just assumed that was part of her usual round of random Citadel errands—not that she was planning on making a pact with the three organizations that hated him more than anything else in the galaxy.

That feeling was, of course, mutual. Killing mercenaries: for a time in his life, that had been the one thing Garrus had been very, very good at.

He started drawing up some extranet files. Aria's fleet had been stranded here on Earth along with all the other races. He remembered hearing that the salarian convoy had offered asylum to ex-mercs, but he doubted that anyone beyond some of the salarian Eclipse members would have taken them up on the offer. Eclipse had been essentially finished after The Synthesis, since so much of their firepower was mech-based and most mechs weren't too keen on taking orders from organics anymore. Probably what was left of Eclipse had merged with the Blue Suns after the War.

The other major group, the Blood Pack, had been mainly krogan and vorcha. Although the turian fleet wasn't particularly enthusiastic about taking ex-mercs on board, the reality of the situation was that most krogan were ex-mercs, in one capacity or another. And the vorcha that had been left behind? Well, there didn't seem to be any record of what had happened to them, though Garrus was sure that none of the convoys had offered to take them back to their own homeworlds. He suspected, vorcha being as undesirable as they were, that their disappearance could have had something to do with Alliance MP again: more fertilizer, perhaps.

Which left the Blue Suns. Garrus pulled up a few advertisements and recruiting posters: they still seemed to have a strong presence on Earth, though they certainly weren't the galactic powerhouse they had once been. Or ever would be again.

It had been over twenty years since he had tangled with them, but there had to be more than a few asari mercs stranded on Earth. And asari had very long memories. He wouldn't put it past them to still want to capture Archangel. It wasn't just that he had taken out a good portion of their resources on Omega, a fact that Garrus was immensely proud of, but that he had embarrassed them: one lone turian that they couldn't defeat. At least, not until a good portion of their forces, including many of their leaders, had died in Garrus's scope. With maybe a little bit of help from Shepard.

But how had they found him? Last he knew, everyone assumed that the gunship had killed Archangel. And how had they figured out that he had two…liabilities...now, Junior and Tiersa? No one had made even the remotest connection between Vakarian and Archangel until now.

Except…it had been common knowledge among all the Normandy's crews what he had been doing when they picked him up on Omega. He didn't want to believe that any of the Alliance crew members had given a merc organization that special fact about Vakarian's recreational activities, so he chose to believe it was a typical Cerberus screw-up, probably even before the War was finished. It didn't matter anyhow. There were a thousand ways Archangel's identity could have become public knowledge. He had been careless, he could see that now.

But once they knew the Archangel and Vakarian were one and the same, how would that have helped them? In the public's eye, thanks to Liara, Vakarian was as dead as Archangel. And why now? There were too many unanswered questions.

"Look" said Tiersa suddenly, looking up from the datapads she was scrolling through.

On the console, she cued up the old footage from Omega that, not so long ago, all three of them had watched together. This time, Tiersa sped through most of it, but froze it on one particular frame. An asari merc was falling backwards as Archangel fired a round through her shoulder.

"It's her," Tiersa said quietly. "She was there."

"Wish it had been a headshot," Garrus growled, turning away from the screen.

It was useful to know that the asari had a personal vendetta against him. (A commando like that getting taken out by a lone turian sniper? Very, very embarrassing.) The salarians were a lost cause, since they were clearly too young to have been anywhere near Omega at the time Archangel was around: probably just in it for the credits. And any of the helmeted humans or batarians could have been there as well. Garrus had shot so many that day. How was he suppose to remember them all? Besides, at the time, all their faces had looked the same: to Garrus, they had all been Sidonis. Every last damn one of them.

In C-Sec, he would have had contacts he could have asked about the mercs. Well, "asked" is what he would have done pre-Shepard. Post-Shepard, very few lawyers would call Garrus's interrogation techniques "asking." He considered seriously for the first time contacting some of the old Normandy crew. Chakwas would help him. Vega, too, if he could get a hold of him. But involving Alliance would also mean involving regulations. It would mean revealing his identity and revealing Tiersa's identity. But, most of all, it would mean no killing: the mercs would be taken in for questioning. And they didn't deserve that. They deserved to die slowly and painfully. No, contacting the Alliance would mean following rules and sitting on the sidelines while the MP inevitably screwed up and got Junior killed. And that simply wasn't an option.

Garrus left Tiersa pouring over datapads, searching desperately through her mother's legacy for anything else that could help them. He went upstairs to the roof and grabbed the Mantis prototype. He tried not to look at the line of targets, spreading across the rooftops of the neighbourhood. He tried not to think about the odds of him and Junior ever standing up here together again, firing practise rounds off down the line.

"Time to dance," he told the Mantis quietly, before shouldering it and grabbing a variety of deadly ammunitions.

But he hesitated over the weapons locker before returning downstairs. He kept his old armour up here as well. He hadn't had cause to wear it since Liara's death had put an end to the gang clean-up operations. For a while…well, for ten years, the blue and silver armor had been the only thing he hadn't traded away for a drink. That and his now antiquated pistol. It wasn't the same as the blue and black set he'd worn when he had been Archangel, but it was similar enough that he was sure that the asari commando would remember it. For those two years, no one on Omega had seen his face except for his dead team. Archangel wasn't the aging turian hesitating over this weapons locker now. Archangel had been this armor.

He grabbed the armor and headed back down the ladder. Tiersa was waiting for him in the hallway.

"Where the hell were you anyhow?" she hissed. "We needed you. I couldn't…I couldn't save her by myself. Where were you?"

"I got a message," he growled. "I thought it was…from an old friend, but it was just a lure. I should have realized."

Tiersa looked away.

"Why…why couldn't you have just been here? And why did they take her? Why didn't they take me?"

Garrus suddenly realized what she meant and realized why that was a good question.

"They must not have known who you were."

"Then I should have told them," she said. "I should have told them and then they would have taken me instead of her." She didn't wait for him to confirm or deny it, but glanced at the armor he was carrying. "What's that?"

"It's Archangel," Garrus said, tilting his head back over to the armor.

She nodded, and then went back down the hallway, doubtlessly to continue to scour the Broker's files. Garrus watched her go and then went into the bedroom. He sat down at the edge of the bed, watching the light on the comm terminal that would signal an incoming message. When it finally came, he would be ready.


	23. Chapter 22: Underneath the Skin

**Chapter 22: Underneath the Skin**

The waiting was excruciating. Garrus knew from a couple of diplomatic hostage-taking situations on the Citadel that, most of the time, all you could do was wait until the kidnappers made contact with their demands. But having done it before for faceless diplomats didn't make it any easier to do it for his daughter. It had been over three hours since they had taken Junior. He knew that the call would come soon. It had to come soon.

He paced around the bedroom, unwilling to leave the terminal in case something came through. Occasionally, he pulled out the Mantis and adjusted the scope. Then, a few mintues later, he would inevitably adjust it back to where it was.

He had the armor laid out on the bed. It was waiting for him, just as he was waiting for the call. He had worn that armor for years, but now it seemed so old, so much like a relic, that he found that he did not look forward to wearing it once again. Lying there, spread out in pieces like that, the armor looked like a lifeless corpse, like an empty coffin that was waiting for him to get inside of it. The thought unnerved him. He pulled the helmet away from the neck piece, trying to ruin the effect. But now it just looked like a headless and lifeless corpse. And that certainly wasn't any better.

Growling, Garrus grabbed the helment and threw it across the room. He heard something break, but he didn't look to see where it had landed.

Tiersa came rushing into the room, panic etched into her face. Garrus looked away, but she spotted the helmet lying across the room. She gave him a searching look. Then, she walked over and picked up the helmet. She stared into the dark visor as if there were a pair of eyes behind it. Then, she set it carefully back onto the bed. Without saying a word, she disappeared back down the hallway. She did glance nervously at the comm terminal before she left though. And Garrus remembered that he wasn't waiting for this call alone.

He pulled out the Mantis and adjusted the scope. Then, a few mintues later, he adjusted it back to where it had been. Again.

Down the hallway, he could hear Tiersa continue shuffling through datapads: scrolling through them and tossing them aside as more and more leads came up empty. She had started tracing the histories of various Alliance and Cerberus crew members from the Normandy, but so many of them were now dead: killed in the Reapers Wars or, for some, simply by the ravages of time. But not enough of them were dead to narrow down the list of people who knew that Garrus and Archangel were one and the same to any obvious suspects. And, really, the list of those that had known both the two key facts of who he was and where he lived was small: Tali, Liara, Feron. Two of those three were dead. And the other—well, even an unintentional betrayal by Tali was inconceivable. She was too careful.

Tiersa had a theory that the mercs had made the Vakarian-Archangel connection and then had traced the call from his family on Palaven. Tracing a call through two lines of comm buoys (one of them still a secret to Earth) and bypassing Tali's encryptions seemed too difficult a feat to believe, but Garrus supposed it was a possibility. It would certainly explain why this had happened now, decades after Omega. For now, though, it didn't matter how the mercs had found him. There would be time enough to figure that out later. After they had Junior back.

The only part that mattered immediately was why the mercs had found him and why they had taken Junior. Inevitably, they would make contact. That was how hostage situations worked. There was nothing else they could do in the meantime. But Garrus told himself that, if they didn't hear anything within the next hour, he would leave Tiersa here and he'd hit the streets. Maybe re-visit some of the old gangs he had worked on and see if he could beat anything out of them that could lead him to where an unofficial Blue Suns operation might be stationed.

Just as Garrus was beginning to think that might be the best course of action, the comm link beeped. Garrus answered without even checking the source, assuming it would be blocked. Tiersa came tearing down the hall and into the bedroom at the sound of the comm, but Garrus was momentarily stunned when Tali flickered into life.

"Garrus, I'm sorry that I haven't been in contact lately—"

"Not a good time, Tali," he growled at her.

She blinked, startled.

"What's going on?" she asked, concerned. "Is everything okay?"

"Not even remotely. It's—"

The comm started flashing again, signalling another incoming call. Garrus didn't even glance at Tali before cutting her off and switching over to the next call. Behind him, he could hear Tiersa stir.

The asari's coolly smiling face appeared. It was covered in flecks of blood. In the orange glow of the transmission, Garrus couldn't tell if it was her own purple blood…or Junior's red.

"Archangel," she said in ice cold tones.

"Have we met?" Garrus asked.

Her eyes narrowed.

"You shot me from that goddess-damned bridge."

"I shot a lot of people that day. I'm sorry that you survived. Next time, I'll make sure it doesn't happen."

She blinked her purple eyes at him.

"There are a lot of us that haven't forgotten what you did on Omega."

"I'm sure. Embarrassing for you, wasn't it?"

"If I were you," she said softly, "I would want to listen very…very…carefully to what I have to say."

Garrus's mandibles tightened against his jaw.

"That's better," she smiled. "We have your human here. She's alive, obviously. She's no good to us dead. But she will be soon, if you don't agree to our terms."

"And those would be…?"

"A simple trade. Your life for the girl's. Clear enough?"

Garrus nodded. It made sense. They didn't really want Junior. They wanted some way to humiliate Archangel as severely as he had humiliated them.

"Where?"

"I'll send you the coordinates. And, Vakarian, I know your reputation. I'll be honest with you: I'm sure it's well within your capabilities to find some way to squirm your way out of this. Perhaps call in some old friends?" she smirked. "But, in case you try anything, we've found a way to…guarantee…that we won't lose track of you again. Now, everyone will know who and what you are, you barefaced coward."

She made a motion to someone standing behind her. Junior was pulled into the transmission range. Behind him, Garrus heard Tiersa violently pull a breath between her teeth.

Junior was tied to the chair, but she was leaning forward sickeningly, like she no longer had the strength to hold herself up. Her black hair was damp. There were biotic burn marks running up and down her bare arms: they were raw and red and ugly.

Garrus quietly contemplated how many different ways he could open the asari's skull.

As if reading his thoughts, the asari smiled at him. Then, she yanked on Junior's hair, pulling her head up so that they could see her face. Junior's bottom lip was cut and blood seeped down from her crushed nose. Her eyes were already bruising. But her face…there was a strange pattern of red, swollen skin that ran along her cheeks and across her nose, flaring out to the sides at the ends and stretching down to her jawline. Garrus couldn't understand what they had done. And then he noticed the blue was more than just bruising.

They had tattooed Junior with his facial markings.

She was conscious. He could see her brown eyes just barely through the swelling. She wasn't screaming or crying…just staring at Garrus with an expression he couldn't understand. There was something wrong with her, he realized: she was ten years old, damn it. She was supposed to be crying or calling for him or something, but she wasn't doing anything—just slouching forward in the chair and staring at him.

They had broken her.

And he remembered, suddenly, how small she had been once: how he had been able to cradle her in his talons. How afraid he'd been to even set her down, unsure of just how fragile she was.

Garrus felt himself shoved aside as Tiersa stepped into the transmission circle. The asari let Junior's head fall forward again.

"Oh? You again?" she said, but Tiersa ignored her. She only had eyes for Junior.

"Adrienna," she said, and Garrus saw Junior stir briefly, trying to lift up her chin to look at Tiersa. "Listen to me, okay. We're coming to find you. We're going to get you out of there, got it? Do you understand?"

There. Just barely, Junior's head nodded.

"Enough!" hissed the asari, and another set of hands grabbed the edges of the chair and pulled Junior out of the transmission range. "If you don't want us to finish her off, you'll be at the coordinates in two hours. And Archangel?"

She smiled.

"I assume that you're smart enough that I don't have to tell you to come alone? If any of your old friends show up, I can promise you this: she's dead."

Garrus cut the transmission.

"No," said Tiersa softly to the space where the asari had been, "you're dead."

She looked at Garrus and there was a glow in the young asari's eyes that Garrus recognized. For once, he didn't turn away. Instead, Vakarian found the Shepard burning in Tiersa's eyes. And he nodded.


	24. Chapter 23: Somewhere Beyond Here

**A/N:**

Tah-dah! So here we are...finally at the end. Well, almost: there's an epilogue as well, so make sure that you don't miss that. I just wanted to thank everyone for their generous reviews. There have been some extremely helpful suggestions. This story would be half of what it is without y'all. :-)

And, in anticipation of the sequel question, I do have plans for one...but I'm not going to post anything unless I'm sure that it doesn't suffer from a bad case of sequel-itis. I'll update on my profile how things are going with regards to the sequel, so check there for any of the latest news on that front.

Again, thanks to everyone. It's been fun!

* * *

**Chapter 23: Somewhere Beyond Here**

The coordinates for the meet were in a part of Vancouver that had been abandoned after the Wars. Over the past twenty years, the forest had reclaimed this area: the few remaining cedars providing shelter for the smaller plants to grow up between the abandoned houses and stores, vines wrapping passionately around the concrete and metal. Archangel was supposed to meet the mercenaries at one of the taller remaining structures: a four-storey office building that was now nothing more than skeletal steel beams and shattered windows that whistled with the wind.

The skycar drove slowly along the street, the autopilot doing its best to avoid juts of rubble that littered the pavement. It hummed softly as it stopped just down the street from the building. A figure in blue and silver armor stepped out from the vehicle and started to stride purposefully towards the office building.

The instant Archangel's helmet emerged from the skycar, nearly two dozen mercs swarmed out of the building, taking up positions along the rubble in front of the building. The asari commando strode out of their midst and made her way down the street towards Archangel, smiling quietly. It was obvious, even from a distance, that Archangel had only brought a pistol. There was no concealing a sniper rifle and the asari was smiling like she considered the irksome turian practically neutered without one. She seemed to take the lack of a rifle as confirmation that he was truly committed to giving himself up.

Archangel stopped a good twenty meters from the front of the building and waited. With a sigh, the asari waved for one of the batarians to bring out the human girl. The girl stumbled out of the darkness of the office building, blinking in the golden glow of Sol sinking into the west. The girl took one look at Archangel and started to run. But the asari reached out and grabbed her on her bruised arm before the human could get very far.

"Come on now," she hissed mockingly. "I thought we were friends? Why so eager to leave?"

The girl said nothing, but frowned and looked expectantly towards the armored figure at the end of the street. Archangel heard the commando's words and started forward: silently striding towards where the commando held the girl. The asari raised a biotically-charged fist to the girl's head.

"Stop. I'll bring her over to you. Then she'll get in that skycar and you'll come with us. Understood?"

Archangel stepped back and nodded. The asari pulled the girl forward into the street. Once they reached Archangel, the girl rushed forward into his arms, clinging to the blue armor. Then, as Archangel return her embrace, a strange look passed over the human's face and she stared into the visor for a moment. Archangel said something softly to the girl that the asari couldn't hear. The commando tensed, biotics springing into her fists. But then the girl nodded and started to walk towards the skycar. And Archangel turned to face the commando.

The commando smiled and she quickly closed the remaining distance between the two of them.

"Now," said the asari, taking a hold of his left arm, "you'll be coming with us."

The armored figure suddenly reached forward, five fingers clasping around the asari's neck. When the commando opened her lips to scream an order to the mercs, Archangel rammed a blue fist into her opened mouth. The commando's eyes flicked around in panic as she felt the sting of biotics crawl along the roof of her mouth and shiver across the surface of her tongue.

"No, I won't." said Tiersa, her glowing eyes just visible inside the dark visor of Archangel's armor.

Then, she sent a shockwave through the back of the commando's skull. Purple blood splattered against the pavement. The other mercs started to shoot as Tiersa dropped what remained of the commando onto the pavement, and then turned and ran back down the street. Junior hadn't quite reached the skycar, but she dove towards a nearby piece of rubble. Tiersa skidded behind it as well. After only a couple of heartbeats, the shock of the commando's death wore off and the mercs crouched at the front of the building started sprinting down the street towards Junior and Tiersa, raising their weapons. But as they left the safety of their cover and moved towards the girls, they started to fall…

Boom.

Drop.

Boom.

Drop.

Boom.

Too late, the remaining mercs turned to see that Garrus Vakarian was crouched in the shadows of a nearby doorway, the Mantis prototype in his talons. He aimed, fired, and before that headless corpse even hit the pavement, the next merc was in his sights.

Dancing. That was why, as good as she was, Shepard had never been a better shot than Garrus.

One of the batarians, who must have been the lucky merc to receive a promotion when the asari commando became a purple smear of brain matter, shouted for reinforcements from the building. Garrus tried not to count the mercs pouring from the doorway and windows: all he processed was that there were too many for this to end well. He wouldn't be able to take them all down before they reached his current position. He needed to move.

Boom.

Drop.

Boom.

Drop.

Tiersa was still crouched behind that piece of rubble, Junior safe by her side. Well, safer than she had been. They were still only about halfway to the skycar. Tiersa had a biotic barrier up and was firing out shockwaves and detonating singularities. Wearing his old armor slowed her down considerably though: her biotics wavered at the edges as she struggled to maintain her concentration.

One of the mercs fell with a scream of agony from a gunshot that wasn't his own. Garrus suddenly noticed, as Junior ducked her head back behind cover, that Tiersa had given Junior her pistol. That hadn't been part of the plan. But, somehow, he wasn't surprised that Tiersa had handed her pistol over to Junior. It was also possible that Junior had just taken it. But there was a strange kind of comfort in knowing that, despite the swelling and bruises still visible on her face, Junior was well enough to be able to shoot.

He needed to get them to the skycar.

"Go!" he yelled to them.

"We're waiting for you!" Tiersa screamed back, pulling a merc into the air that had almost reached Garrus's sniper's nest. "We're good to go anytime now!"

"I'm right behind you," he lied. "Go!

Tiersa detonated her barrier, flinging it forward into the front line of mercs. Garrus covered them as they both sprinted for the skycar.

Boom.

Headshot.

Boom.

Missed.

Damn it.

The mercs were almost on top of him, but Tiersa was pulling Junior into the skycar. Safe. They would be able to gun the engines and get out of there before the mercs reached them.

That just left himself. How many were left now? There were more in the building that kept firing from the broken windows, but his shields and this new armor could handle any of those stray bullets that were lucky enough to come close. But there were still a dozen in the street, moving from cover to cover now, getting closer and closer to his position. He couldn't take them all out before they got to him.

If he was going, it needed to be now.

He waited until the closest ones were forced to eject their heat sinks. Then he dove out of the doorway and started to run. Tiersa threw another shockwave down the right flank. She'd climbed back out of the skycar and was trying to cover him. He opened his mouth to scream for her to get back in, but a bullet flew faster than his words. Tiersa fell back as the bullet found a chink in the ill-fitting armor, blood spurting from her shoulder.

Junior leaned out of the car and fired off a few rounds with the pistol, allowing Tiersa the time to pull herself back up. She grimaced, but threw out another shockwave.

Garrus dropped behind another bit of rubble, still metres away from the skycar. He needed to get them out of here. He got off a few more shots, helping Junior to cover Tiersa. And drawing the mercs towards his position and away from the skycar. Bullets rained down on him. He felt his shields give way.

Then the first of the mercs reached the edge of his cover. Garrus saw him coming. He pulled him down to the ground, generating his omniblade and heaving it through the batarian's chest. But then there was another, right on top of him. Garrus didn't have time for the scope. He just pulled the trigger. Missed. And he felt a bullet ripped through his unshielded left shoulder.

Didn't matter. He fired again. Hit. But there was another human on his left. He rammed the butt of the Mantis into his face, but the human got a shot off anyhow. Garrus felt it tear through his hip. That leg collapsed uselessly beneath him. Garrus fell onto one knee. Re-adjusted the Mantis against his shoulder. And fired again. And again. And again.

He could hear Tiersa and Junior calling for him.

One of the salarians—the one that had hacked Garrus's front door open—stood only a few metres away, sending a combat drone towards him. Garrus's trigger talon twitched and the salarian's head exploded in a shower of green blood. But there were more mercs coming up on his left again. That arm took another bullet. Garrus gave up on trying to use it anymore and propped the Mantis against the rubble. He was surprised to see how much blue blood there was gushing onto the ground. His own, he thought distantly. But it still didn't really matter. He just needed to keep shooting. He needed to get Tiersa and Junior to safety. Nothing else mattered.

This was just dancing. He could still dance. Hell, only half of his limbs were still functional and he could still dance better than Shepard. He'd have to tell her that when he saw her again. He found himself grinning at that thought as he took off another mercs' head.

The mercs' shots started going too far over his head to be just bad aim. He whipped his head around as best he could. Junior and Tiersa were running towards him.

"No," he roared, "go back!"

Junior paused a moment. But Tiersa, shoulder still bleeding, ignored him completely and charged forward, bullets springing off the barrier she kept up around her and Junior: moving it with them as they ran. Where had she learned that trick? But the effort was obviously wearing on her. Garrus could see that a trickle of blood flowing from her nose.

"Garrus!" Tiersa screamed.

Garrus turned back and was startled to find a merc less than five metres away from his cover. Where they hell had she come from?

The merc had a missile launcher.

"Oh, you've got to be joking," he said.

The merc didn't look like she was joking though.

Garrus swung the Mantis around. But he was too slow. He felt the missile rip through him, but then he was surprised at how painless it was. Actually, he couldn't feel much of anything anymore.

Before he hit the ground, he saw the human merc's head explode: a bullet from Junior's pistol. Then Junior was beside him, pulling on him, trying to drag him away as the mercs were still getting closer and closer.

Garrus thought that Junior was calling for him, but her voice sounded far away. He tried to focus on her face, the blue tattoos still distorted by the swelling. Junior grabbed the Mantis out of his talons, standing over him and firing. But even the familiar boom of the rifle sounded like it was coming from altogether elsewhere. Tiersa started to pull at him now, dragging him across the pavement.

They both looked so small in that moment, like they were fading away into the distance. When Junior held that rifle expertly in her deft human hands or when Tiersa sprang a pulsing barrier into existence out of nothing but sheer will, it was easy to forget how young they both truly were. But, as they stared down at him with wide, terrified eyes, Garrus remembered that they were only children. They needed his protection.

"Garrus."

It was neither Junior nor Tiersa that said his name though.

The stars were falling. He could see them descending down from the sky, bringing down the blackness of space onto his broken body. The street, the skycar, the mercenaries were all gone now, replaced by this nothingness that surrounded him and stretched away into the distance, towards some unknowable eternity. Here was the most total of vacuums, broken only by those distant flickers of white light that burned so dimly it was easier to believe that they were not stars, but only their echoes—only the voices of stars calling from the other side of the void.

Shepard appeared out of the stars: at first, she was just a shadow, but then she grew clearer and brighter with each step. For once, he could see her face clearly: it wasn't distorted and murky like it had been in those dreams. She softly said his name again as she strode up to him, her lips quirked in that smile he loved so much but, this time, it was tinged with sadness. She stood over him, looking down.

"I see you're bleeding out onto the pavement as usual, Vakarian. Just like old times," she said, reaching her hand down towards him.

He took her hand and let her pull him to her feet.

"You know it's what I'm best at," he said grinning.

It felt so damn good just to stand at her side again. Shepard and the stars. There was really nothing else that mattered. He realized that now. And he remembered.

"Come on," he said casually. "I believe I owe you a drink."

And he walked off into the field of stars.

Yet he stopped when he noticed that Shepard wasn't following. He gave her a questioning gaze, but she looked away, refusing to meet his eyes. Suddenly, Garrus could hear the dim sounds of gunfire coming as if from a great distance: lightyears away from…wherever this was. Then, he could hear them screaming his name. And he remembered them.

"Junior. Tiersa." he whispered, as if they might hear him too.

Shepard watched him for a moment, her eyebrows furrowed together. She was obviously deciding something. Finally, she opened her mouth.

"You know," she said slowly, "I've explained to you before that I'm not really Shepard. Somewhere beyond here, she's probably waiting for you. At that bar. Maybe…maybe I've been selfish. Maybe I found that child for you because I wanted you to have something worth living for."

She stared at Garrus.

"Because," she continued, "once you're gone, I feel like the last parts of me that were the Shepard will be gone too. And then I'll be nothing but a…a ghost in the machine."

Garrus didn't know what to say. He thought he could hear Junior's voice still screaming among the gunfire, but it was growing more and more distant the longer he waited here amongst the stars.

As he watched the Shepard standing in front of him, her face dissolved again into a shimmering light. And even her eyes—the one constant that Garrus had been able to navigate by—were becoming clouded with a glowing green light that seemed to erupt from inside her.

"Yeah," she said quietly in that broken, ragged voice that scared him more than anything else in the galaxy, "I know that she's waiting for you somewhere beyond here. But she's just going to have to wait a little longer. They need you. And…and I need you."

She stepped towards Garrus, running her fingers along the scarred side of his face. Garrus closed his eyes. He opened them just in time to see the blackness and the stars suddenly pull away from him: dissolving in a burst of green that burned away into white.

Then the pain began.

He'd never felt anything like it before, not even when that rocket hit the side of his face on Omega. His lungs were filling, his heart beating, but it no longer felt natural. Each small motion of his body was exaggerated and grotesque. It was an unimaginable pain that screamed through every cell in a staccato pulsing that raked across his body in waves. He was burning and drowning and bleeding. He was dying.

No, he realized with a cold certainty. It was the opposite of that.

He could feel a brightness running across and through his skin, pulling at the points where the synthetic components had become integrated into his body: re-animating every cell in his body through brute force. His eyelids were wrenched open. His mandibles flared as he gasped, breath entering his body once again.

Was this what it had been like for Shepard?

And then he was back, lying on the pavement and staring up at a grey sky framed by the ruined skeletons of buildings on either side of the street. There was complete silence. He reached for the Mantis, but it was gone. He remembered that Junior had pulled it away from him, had stood over him and fired it again and again at the oncoming waves of mercenaries.

He sat up, staring around desperately for Junior, for Tiersa. But he was alone in the street. Except for the corpses littered around him. Not all of them looked like they had died from gun wounds or biotics. He wondered what, exactly, had been the cost of what Shepard's ghost had done to him. Then, for a terrified moment, he thought that perhaps Junior and Tiersa had been included in that cost. But they were no where to be seen, alive or dead. And the skycar was gone.

They had escaped.

Instantly, he knew where they were going: both Tiersa and Junior knew Tali's coordinates. They knew that if anything were to happen to him they were to go there, no matter what. He smiled as he looked around the street. He had been dead. And they had left him. It had been the right thing to do. Tiersa's doing, he imagined, and—once again—he found himself strangely grateful that the young asari had stayed with them.

But they were gone. He didn't know how long he'd been out. They'd go to Tali's coordinates and then…and then to Rannoch. Garrus shook his head, trying to clear it of the green fog that kept creeping in at the edges of his vision. He needed to get there before they left. If they left Earth, believing he was dead….

He pulled himself to his feet.

But Garrus staggered forward and fell. The blackness took him. But, this time, there was no stars, no Shepard. This time, he knew that he would wake again.

And when he did, he would find them.


	25. Epilogue: Embraced

**Epilogue: Embraced**

Tiersa slapped another round of medi-gel onto her shoulder as the ship lifted off from the Earth. Her parents…all three of them…had spent half their lives on spaceships, but she had never been on one until now. Adrienna stared out the window as the ship blasted upwards, breaching the atmosphere and leaping into the black canvas.

Soon, the engines died down to a steady hum. Adrienna watched Tiersa apply the medi-gel to the bullet wound on her shoulder. She frowned at the crusted scab of purple blood on Tiersa's shoulder.

"Do you need any more?" Tiersa asked, but Adrienna shook her head, turning away to look outside the small window as Earth drifted away behind them, becoming smaller and smaller. Tiersa knew exactly what Adrienna had to be thinking.

That's where he was. Where they had left him. What was left of him.

Tiersa had known that they wouldn't be able to bring him: a ten-year-old human and an adolescent asari dragging a six-foot-tall turian back into the skycar while a flood of mercs rained bullets upon them. Adrienna wouldn't leave him, though—even after they both saw his eyes go cold and glazed. Adrienna blew the head off the merc with the missile launcher and raced to his side. The other mercs held back for a moment.

And Adrienna started tugging on Garrus, screaming at him to wake up, to get up. Then falling back into a whimper, telling him it was safe—even as Tiersa could see the mercs regrouping in the building. That it was all going to be okay. The child parenting the father. Tiersa knew that he was already gone. The street was slick with his blue blood. She knew he had to be dead, but she still reached forward with Adrienna, shaking his shoulder, pulling his scarred face towards her and screaming into it that he couldn't be dead. Because they still needed him.

Then, another wave of mercs had rushed from the buildings. Tiersa threw a shockwave down and toppled the first line. And then she watched as Adrienna pulled the Mantis from Garrus's talons. She stood over him, firing the Mantis over and over again—wincing as the kickback punched back into her small shoulder without her usual stand to support it. Tiersa had pulled up a barrier, had grabbed Adrienna's shoulder and told her that they needed to leave. That if they both died now, his death would have been for nothing.

Adrienna had fired off another shot at an oncoming merc before sprinting behind Tiersa's barrier and throwing herself into the skycar. Only when she was in, Tiersa dropped her barrier, pulled the hatch on the skycar closed, and gunned the engine, taking them away from there.

Bullets still rang against the back of the skycar as they raced away.

Tiersa hated that the mercs had won. They'd wanted him dead. And now he was.

There was no returning to the house, not after this. Tiersa had already gathered all of her mother's Broker files into a few disks that she'd stowed carefully under the seat. As the skycar sped away through the streets of Vancouver, she set the skycar to cruising speed and then started to pull Archangel's armor off, piece by piece. It had been so heavy: throwing out even those barriers had been difficult. She and Garrus knew that it would hamper her abilities, of course, but it had never been the plan for her to do much more than provide a stunning biotic distraction while Garrus took out the majority of the mercs. It had been her responsibility to get Adrienna out of there; his responsibility to deal with the mercs. Her stunt with the commando…well, that hadn't really been part of the plan. But Tiersa didn't regret it, either. She felt like Miss Nought would have been proud of her for that one.

After she had pulled off the armor and slapped some medi-gel on her shoulder wound, Tiersa placed her hands back on the wheel. Then, as she steered the skycar out onto a main skyway, she keyed Tali's coordinates into the console.

"What are you doing?" Adrienna asked.

"We're going to those coordinates that Garrus got from Tali. The ones he said to use if we were ever in trouble."

"What?"

"We can't stay here, on Earth," Tiersa said slowly, calmly: convincing herself even as she tried to convince Adrienna. "We need to get off-world. Rannoch will be safe for us. And Tali…she'll need to know that he's…" Tiersa couldn't bring herself to say aloud that he was dead.

Tiersa pulled Adrienna against her. The small human buried her swollen face in the asari's shoulders and wept in shuddering gasps so violent that they seemed too large for her small lungs. Tiersa felt too stunned to cry. Garrus Vakarian was dead. And they had left his body behind—probably to be found by Alliance MP and thrown into some incinerator with a "John Turian" toetag tied his feet…It was a horrible thought. And it was yet another loved ones' body that she wouldn't get to bury. Keeping one hand on the wheel, Tiersa stroked the back of Adrienna's head with the other, letting her weep for both of them.

When Adrienna had exhausted herself, she dozed fitfully against Tiersa's shoulder. The skycar took them out of Vancouver: north along the coast and then east into the mountains. The skycar turned off the main skyways and into the dark, only the occasional guidance light illuminating the way through the cedars and rocks.

Finally, after several hours, they descended into what seemed to be a valley. Here, again, there were lights: pale blue lights that shone into the sky. They could see a docking platform with a spaceship settled comfortably beside it. White figures moved silently around the platform, like ghosts in the twilight: the single lights in each of their faces floating eerily across the ground.

Tiersa had never seen a geth before, except in the vids, but she pulled Adrienna from the skycar and tried to stand as straight as she could as one of them approached. The flaps above its light—was it an eye?—flicked at her. The motion made it look almost surprised. Could geth be surprised?

"What is your purpose here?" it asked them.

"My name is Tiersa T'Soni. This is Adrienna—"

"—Vakarian," Adrienna burst in, before Tiersa could say anything different. "My name is Adrienna Vakarian."

Tiersa shot her a look.

"Or Arterius. She has been known as Adrienna Arterius as well. We're…we're with Garrus Vakarian. We need to get to Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch. She said you could help us."

The geth flicked its eye flaps at her for a moment. She had no idea what to make of the expression on its face. It occurred to her that it could kill them right there and no one would know what had happened. They were alone, out here in the wilderness. They were completely at its mercy.

"Please," she begged to the unit's impassive face. "Please, help us."

"Where is Garrus Vakarian?" the geth asked.

Tiersa didn't know what to say. She opened her mouth, then closed it. The geth tilted its head at her, shining its eye from her face and then onto Adrienna's. When it spoke next, its tone had shifted slightly…Tiersa may have imagined it, but she was sure that she heard sympathy braided into its digital tones.

"Is Garrus Vakarian's mobile platform no longer functioning?" it said to Adrienna.

The human only blinked in response. Tiersa bent down.

"I think… I think it's trying to ask you if he's dead."

"I know that," Adrienna said, turning away. "I just…I don't want that to be true. This is some nightmare. We'll wake up and everything will be okay again, just like it was before. That's what's going to happen." She dropped her voice to a whisper, no longer speaking to the geth or to Tiersa. "I've had nightmares like this before. I'll just wake up and everything will be okay. Like it always is."

Tiersa didn't know what to say, but Adrienna didn't seem to expect an answer. She just turned back to the geth beside them.

"Yes," she said to it, "he's dead."

The geth had apparently heard what it needed to hear. Several other units broke off from their activities on the platform, marching towards them. One of the taller units reached into the skycar and pulled out the armor that Tiersa had disgarded. Carrying the armor in its arms as if it were nothing more than empty rags, it started to walk down the slope, towards the platform.

"Stop!" screamed Adrienna, rushing forward. "Don't take it away! Please!"

The geth they had been speaking to whirred at her, seemingly confused by her reaction. The unit carrying the armor simply kept going, without stopping.

"We are taking it to the ship. You will be going there too. It will leave for Rannoch shortly. This unit was to depart in approximately seven-point-seven-one Earth days. But your arrival means that we will prepare for an emergency departure as per the instructions of Creator Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch." It whirred at them, still watching Adrienna's tear-streaked face with an expression that could have been fascination or concern. Tiersa couldn't tell which. "Please follow me."

They walked with the geth down to the ship. Tiersa realized that they had nothing more than her pistol, Adrienna's rifle, Garrus's armor, and the precious Broker datapads she clutched tightly to her chest. She glanced behind them and saw the geth swarm over the skycar. Even before Tiersa and Adrienna reached the platform, the geth had dismantled the skycar, reducing it to a pile of parts. Then, Tiersa watched over her shoulder as the geth walked away in perfect synchronicity just before a charge exploded, reducing the skycar to dust. She and Adrienna now had no way back out of the mountains: they had to wholly place their trust in these geth.

The ship was unlike anything Tiersa had seen before, not even in the history vids. It was smooth and white from a distance. Yet, as they approached, she realized that it wasn't made of metal at all, but of some almost chitinuous substance that almost resembled a polished version of turian plates. And now, looking closer, she realized that the geth themselves were composed of the same substance. It reminded her of a trip to the seashore with her mother, when she had been very young. She could remember discovering the beauty that could be found in the underside of a shell: the geth and the ship almost had the same sheen to their exoskeletons. She wondered if they'd always looked like that, but she thought that it was probably the work of The Synthesis.

The geth placed one of its hands up against the ship. As it stared at them with its one eye, tilting its head towards the ship, Tiersa realized it wanted them to do the same. She reached up and Adrienna followed suit. The familiar prick of a network being established crawled through Tiersa's fingers and up her arm. Suddenly, she could sense the ship's personality, but it was vast and fractured, as if there was more than one mind at work within it.

Whatever the ship needed, it must have gotten, because the door slid open. The geth unit accompanying them entered, then gestured with spidery fingers that they should follow it. The interior of the ship was dim, stuffed with wires and tubes: more like the innards of a living thing than the polished, comfortable interior of a vehicle.

"Wait…how long will it take to get to Rannoch?" Tiersa asked, her foot poised over the threshold.

The unit's flaps flipped up at her.

"Approximately one-point-eight Earth Years, Tiersa T'Soni."

Adrienna stopped and stared at Tiersa with her brown eyes. Tiersa felt her stomach drop. Almost two years inside this ship until they reached Rannoch. She knew that, out of her own lifespan, that was a trivial amount of time, but for Adrienna…and she was human and only a child at that. Two years might as well have been forever.

"We don't have a choice," Tiersa said, more decisively than she felt.

But she waited a moment before stepping into the ship. She looked around. They were deep into the mountains now: only the top edges glittered with the faintest dusting of the dawn's coming light. In Vancouver, though, she could imagine that the sun was already beginning to lighten the fogginess of the night. She thought about how they had just left him there, lying the street. She wondered if the sunlight would find him too.

Then, breathing Earth's air out of her lungs for the last time, she stepped into the ship.

Tiersa watched the geth outside the ship busy around it and, in what seemed an astonishingly short amount of time, she felt a low rumble under her feet. The geth who had spoken to them was seated across from them. Tiersa wondered who was piloting the ship. Although the answer, she supposed, should have been obvious: it was piloting itself.

She felt the ship leap away from the surface of the Earth, shooting upwards through the atmosphere and then shrugging off the last of Earth's gravitational pull.

Tiersa asked the geth if there was any medi-gel. Her shoulder was starting to sting again. The geth had nodded, gotten up from its seat, and then disappeared around a corner that Tiersa hadn't realized actually led to more of the ship. It was all so close and packed with shadows and wires. And she and Adrienna were stuck on it for two years. The geth returned with the medi-gel and she spread it gratefully onto her shoulder.

Tiersa followed Adrienna's gaze as she stared out the window as the vastness of space swallowed up Earth: the only home either of them had ever known. And where he still was, lying in the street.

The blue tattoos across Adrienna's still-swollen face made Tiersa's stomach churn. The mercenaries…it was disgusting to do that to a little girl. She wished they had managed to kill more of them. But she didn't tell Adrienna that. Instead, she leaned forward and placed her blue hand on Adrienna's shoulder.

"We'll find someone…a doctor or something…who can get that tattoo off your face, okay? It will be easy. They've got loads of different surgeries for fixing stuff like that."

Adrienna pulled away, her eyes wide and staring.

"It's okay," Tiersa continued. "We'll take the markings off. It'll be like it never happened."

"No!" Adrienna burst out suddenly, her voice sharp and raw.

Tiersa drew back, shocked at the ferocity in her voice. The geth sat up suddenly, whirring in alarm.

"Don't you dare try to get rid of them!" Adrienna screamed. "I'm keeping them! I—"

She'd never heard Adrienna yell like this before. It was unnerving.

"Adrienna, please," Tiersa said, shaking her head. "What they did…it's appalling. You don't need to be reminded of that every time you look in a mirror. Goddess, I don't want to be reminded of it every time I look at you. We'll get rid of them."

"I don't…" Tears started streaming down Adrienna's face, her breath coming in ragged gasps. "…I don't want to get rid of them. I earned these."

Tiersa stared at her, confused.

"They…they kept asking me questions," Adrienna said, looking away. "About Dad. About me. Even about you, Tiersa. Where you had come from. What you were doing here. Who your parents were. I didn't tell them anything. And…and it hurt so much. Every time I wouldn't say anything they stuck another needle of blue ink into my face and—"

Tiersa grabbed her and pulled her close.

"Adrienna…I'm so sorry…"

But Adrienna looked up into Tiersa's face, her brown eyes shining.

"But I still didn't say anything. If I had, maybe the pain would have stopped, but then…then I wouldn't be this."

"Be what?"

Adrienna pulled herself up in her seat and reached for the folded Mantis beside her, drawing it close.

"I wouldn't be Vakarian."

Tiersa watched her for a moment, but Adrienna stared back, her gaze cold and determined. Tiersa knew that this was a stupid idea. The tattoos would make Adrienna instantly recognizable. If there were any turians on Rannoch, Tiersa was fairly certain that a non-turian wearing facial markings would be considered the worst kind of insult. And it wasn't exactly psychologically healthy for a ten-year-old to wear the trama she had suffered so clearly on her face. Tiersa knew that she needed to convince Adrienna that the tattoos needed to go. But, as she looked back into the young humans' dark gaze, she knew that simply wasn't going to be possible.

Besides, Tiersa knew that Adrienna was right.

"Okay," she sighed. "Okay. I promise I won't make you get them removed."

Adrienna nodded. Then, she smiled.

"It's not like you could make me even if you tried," she said softly.

Tiersa smiled sadly as Adrienna leaned against her. The ship's FTL drive rumbled to life beneath their feet. They both watched out the window as Earth disappeared in a blur of motion and as the stars were suddenly smeared into sparkling streaks. Tiersa had never been in space before, but she was surprised to find there was a cold comfort in the emptiness of it all: out here, there was no one who could hurt the people she cared about. A list which had now been whittled away to one. Tiersa looked down at Adrienna again.

"I promise," she said quietly, "that I'll keep you safe."

Adrienna didn't say anything, but continued to stare out the window as Earth disappeared and the stars welcomed them into their sparkling embrace.


End file.

Mass Effect