Archive of Our Own

Shepard was dead.

She wasn’t.

The Alliance never found his body. Either they had given up too soon or they had never tried. Liara had tried calling up Admiral Hackett, but none of her calls ever got through to the man. The one time someone had picked up, it was a comms officer who cut the connection before she could say “Dr. Liara T’Soni.”

She’d waited outside Anderson’s office for hours and hours before security dragged her away. She’d tried calling him, but his assistant had refused to put her through. It was like everyone in the galaxy worked against her now.

She didn’t try asking for Tevos’ help. The last time she had been in touch, the Councillor had made it quite clear what she thought of her. This time around? What would the conversation be like?

Tevos didn’t care. All she cared about was remaining in her position as councillor, and she loved it enough to forget whatever duty she had towards Shepard and the humans. Then again, the humans had given up on Shepard before the Council even put forth any messages.

There was nobody who cared but the Normandy crew. Or perhaps they all did care in their own way, but didn’t want an Asari to share that sentiment with them.

In her moment of doubt, Liara had looked to the Athame codex for guidance, but it didn’t give her the guidance she was looking for. Not by a long shot. It had been hollowing. Another blow to her fragile heart.

Liara didn’t remember what the exact wording had been. She was too defeated and too exhausted, it was probably something about how Athame taught the Asari to forget their lovers but remember the time they had spent with them.

The scientist in her saw logic in that. Even before the spacefaring age, the Asari people had already been long lived, just the mortality rate tended to be a lot higher. It made sense to move on and love again.

She was a hundred and six years old, and had possibly another seven hundred to nine hundred years to live. Would she forget Shepard one day? Would she too move on and love again? Would she think of her pain as nothing but the lovesick pining of a foolish maiden?

Garrus solemnly poured out another glass of the Turian brandy and knocked it back. He didn’t speak much at all these days, just sat in a corner drinking. Sometimes with her, mostly without her.
She didn’t know if it was possible or if she should even have made the comparison, but she guessed Garrus was taking Shepard’s death even worse than she was.

How many drinks did he have by now? Seven? Eight? Even more? She couldn’t sit there and watch a friend kill himself like that. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Garrus, stop.”

Her own voice sounded so distant, so hoarse out of disuse. It was as if it wasn’t even hers anymore.

Garrus didn’t even acknowledge her with a reply. It hurt her for a moment, but she was used to being ignored, at least, before she had met Shepard she was used to it.. In all her hundred and six years of life, no one had ever taken her seriously, Shepard was the first and only person to listen to what she had to say.

She should stop, she shouldn’t bother anymore because what did it matter if a friend was effectively killing himself when he didn’t even want to stop and-

But Shepard would stop him. Shepard wouldn’t let Garrus, his friend, drink himself to death.

Her voice was firmer now, and her fingers clutched the glass with surprising strength. She looked him in the eyes, and implored him to stop.

Garrus laughed his rough turian bark, but there was hurt in his voice.

“What’s the point Liara? We’re all going to die soon anyway, the Reapers are coming, and no one wants to fight.”, Garrus moped.

True, the Reapers were coming, and like all her life, no one believed them. The Alliance crew had quietened down, Joker had been grounded and Doctor Chakwas was similarly out of touch. Only Wrex, good old Wrex, had not moved on entirely.

Wrex had decided to follow Shepard’s example and fight. He’d nodded soberly on the vidcall. If the Reapers were coming, he’d said, and the council had their heads up their unmentionables, then the galaxy would need the Krogan to solve their problems.

But he was needed on Tuchanka, he couldn’t come back, not for a long, long time. The connection between the Citadel and the comm arrays near the Krogan DMZ was spotty, but Wrex made sure to call her every once in a while.

Tali had left soon after Wrex, and she seemed reluctant to keep in touch. Maybe it was easier on her world view, her own experiences with the Geth to believe that Sovereign wasn’t a Geth creation. Liara couldn’t be upset with her.

Ashley Williams… That was another story entirely. Ashley had told her that she was the reason Shepard was dead. That she shouldn’t have left without him, she should have stayed behind, she should’ve been the one to go after Joker. And then she had called her some very unpleasant things to her face.

Much as she’d like, Liara couldn’t disagree. It was her fault Shepard was dead. And maybe that was the reason she was ignored collectively by the Alliance brass.

A single teardrop rolled down her cheek. No, there really wasn’t anything left to do but die. Maybe she should make the Reaper’s work easier for them. One less person to kill.

She tried to soothe Garrus, laid her palm on his forearm. Garrus slumped on the table, defeated. They stayed like that for a while.

“I- I asked them if I could go to Alchera, look for Shepard’s body. It’d be just me and you, or just me if they’d prefer that. I said I’d finance the whole thing. They refused me. Said that it was an Alliance matter, a human matter.” Garrus spoke suddenly, his flanging metallic voice was choppy with rage. “I just don’t get it, Liara. What’s even the point anymore? Human, nonhuman. We were his friends, we risked our lives for him and he for us. Why?”

Liara and Garrus received their answers in a moment. The screen in the bar flared to life, and it was the Council’s official statement on the death of Commander Shepard and the attack on the Citadel.

According to the Citadel, Commander Shepard had been killed in action following a pirate raid due to his actions against them, specifically Torfan. The Citadel had allegedly been attacked by the geth, led by the rogue Spectre Saren, whose family name, honours and awards were posthumously stripped and Matriarch Benezia T’Soni, whose trustees had handed over her assets to be used in service of the Asari republics and for the greater good-

Liara couldn’t listen anymore. She was frozen, glued to the faux leather seat in the bar. A vein throbbed at her temple and her palms were sweaty. A few hours ago she thought she had lost the light in her life, now she felt like she’d also lost the ground under her feet.

She was glued to the spot, but other people in the bar weren’t. They had omnitools. Omnitools had great connective capability. It took them a few seconds to make the connection, and then she felt their glares burning holes into the back of her jacket.

A few of them had decided it was time to do something about it. Bar management was suddenly very lenient. Liara tried to move, but she was still glued to her seat. Lucky for her, Garrus had broken out of his torpor, and stood up in a flash.

Garrus was very tall, even for a Turian. And right now, with all fifty four of his long sharp teeth bared, he looked very intimidating. Indeed, the Turians were a very fearsome race, and Garrus had been a loose cannon police officer and SpecOps sniper for a long time. Now he was in Spectre training.

There was no flanging hurt in his voice, it was all pure bass. A rumble, a warning from a predator and arm raised to display the carnifex in its shoulder holster.

“Back off, all of you.”

Liara tried to summon her strength, but she felt unable to summon even the faintest amount of will to even move a single rock with her biotics. No, it would be all Garrus on this one.

And then they did slowly back off, every single one of them. Garrus took her by the wrist and dragged her out of there. She was in a stupor.The glares and the hurt tore up her soul from inside. A wet spot formed on the front of her shirt from the tears that ran down her cheeks, and the stinging headache didn’t make it any easier to form cohesive thoughts..

Garrus gently but firmly put her into his skycar and then took her to his apartment. The last time she had been here had been with Shepard. Thinking about that made it worse. She so wished it had been her getting spaced instead of him. If only-

No. She couldn’t, not like this. Liara T’Soni was only a hundred and six years old. She could barely vote, she still needed a trusteeship for her inheritance, which was gone now, and she couldn’t buy Red Sand on Illium and couldn’t do a million other things, but she felt that in just one evening, she had aged half a millenium.

When she woke up the following day, her Omnitool informed her that it was Shepard’s funeral. Garrus had already left, she didn’t even try anymore. She knew she’d be refused. It was Shepard’s funeral. A military funeral, and only human military and human press were allowed.

Liara knew that if she turned on the vidscreen, she could catch the solemn speeches, she could catch Ashley Williams crying. But she wasn’t willing to. She used this time instead to delete all her social media and private messages. She didn’t need any ‘help’ or any sympathy. Not right now.

But one message couldn’t be deleted. Chalking it up to a glitch in the software liara let out an annoyed huff, but if the goddess willed it, she’d have to read this one, at the very least.

There was no sender, just one single line that sent a cold shiver down her spine.

I have information about Commander Shepard. You can have it. Come alone to Omega. Look for a drell in the Afterlife bar.

It was signed ‘A friend’.

Liara read and reread the message. She realised how futile it was to go on reading the same twenty four words over and over, so she tried to do something else. But she came back to it eventually. Three hours later Garrus was back, and he found Liara hunched over the terminal. He had brought food that she couldn’t taste. Liara couldn’t feel the air she breathed, the voices she heard. All her existence was now two words, ‘Shepard’ and ‘Omega’.

Garrus felt a little lighter. There was a chance they’d get some closure now. As much as he felt bad about letting her go alone, it was all he could do. He was a Detective. He knew that if she turned up with him somewhere close, there would be no drell.

Liara T’Soni left her friend’s apartment later that evening, and booked a shuttle to Illium. During her shuttle ride, she attended a private vidcall with the Council of Matriarchs and Councillor Tevos. Liara was no longer afraid, because she was just as dead Shepard was. All that left was a little closure.

Garrus Vakarian felt stifled on the Citadel.  The massive arms, the artificial sky, the millions of people, the incessant droning on of advertisements, its voices and its crowds that once had felt welcoming had become unbearable to him. The Alliance’s refusal to let him attend Shepard’s funeral even more, and Liara leaving the most.

As long as she had stayed, Garrus had felt that he had one friend left in this world, and somehow, a little piece of Shepard too. Turians didn’t believe in spirits or dead friends looking after alive ones, but he was a horrible Turian.

Then again, sometimes he was a very good Turian.

They rarely spoke about it, but Turian discipline and meritocracy was a more recent development, dating back perhaps only two or three centuries before first contact with the outside. Before that, the Turians were a lawless people. A species of Apex Predators where might made right and those who lost didn’t matter.

And for all his father’s advice, all his education, all his proud heritage, Garrus felt closer to his primal ancestors than his contemporaries.

It was gradual, but Garrus had noticed the slow split between Garrus the easygoing jokester, and Garrus the Turian who punched dents into the shooting range when he missed and brutalised his sparring partners.

He felt trapped on the Citadel, but he stayed. He waited for Liara to return with information about Shepard, and he waited because Liara had nowhere else to go. She had nothing now, no friends, no family and no place to stay other than his cramped apartment which had a small weapons workbench larger than the kitchen area.

But even then, it slowly became unbearable. Nothing worked. Slowly but surely all he was left with was a pining for the good old days, where he and Shepard hunted down the scum of the universe and there were no laws, no politics and no lies to get in the way.

Garrus couldn’t forget the futility of it all anymore. The Reapers were coming and everyone had just chalked him up to be a crackpot who was hitting the sauce too hard. His vidcalls with Solana had turned into hours of bickering and even shouting more and more. He hadn’t talked to his father in over four months and everyone, the Alliance, The Turian Hierarchy, C-Sec, the Council thought he’d gone mad.

Maybe he had. Slowly his pining after Shepard and the good old days grew to be a bitterness. Even Liara, who he was willing to protect with his life was adding to that bitterness. Like Shepard, she too had abandoned him.

When the Council overturned Councilor Anderson 3-1 and announced that there would be no honours for Commander Shepard due to budget constraints, his bitterness grew to a rage. How dare they sip their wine and brandy and live in luxurious apartments they got subsidised for and sit on their spire overlooking their domain and so soon forget the man who died for it? How dare they?

Garrus cleared out his apartment the next day. He left whatever stuff Liara had brought and sealed the rooms and transferred the digital key to her omnitool, with a simple ‘I’m leaving, the apartment is yours now.’

He called Solana, and turned over his savings account to her. He was going to drop off the grid, live alone in the woods with a sniper rifle hunting for food. He had turned his Omni tool over to look over lush dextro compatible garden worlds. But then something caught his eye. A very old file. Kishpaugh.

While he was still in C-Sec, he had had the express misfortune to work under his father, Castis Vakarian, to bust a drug dealer called Kishpaugh. He had meticulously turned over every leaf for every detail, he had taken care of due process, he had cleared every record of his interrogations with the IA. But then some data intern had messed up his files. That meant he could build the case again, but it would take a long time. And in that time, two children were brought in to Dr. Michel’s clinic in the wards. Two children who had OD’d on Red Sand. Garrus had chosen to arrest before another child turned up dead. But Sr. Detective Castis Vakarian cut him loose the moment Detective Garrus Vakarian entered the interrogation chamber.

His own father had cut a drug dealer who sold to children loose, because apparently the only way to do things was doing them the right way or not doing them at all.

A drug dealer who peddled Red Sand to children in the wards, and his father cut him loose. Everyone clapped, what a solid victory for morality and red tape bullshit, what a glowing example of Turian ethics. At the time, there had been nothing he could have done about it. Now though? Now he didn’t work for C-Sec, and it didn’t matter if he roughed up a known drug dealer.

Garrus slipped in silently into the warehouse, later that night. He had always been strong and fast, and Spectre training was especially suited to the Turian physique. He had his Carnifex pistol, but that was a last resort.

He waited until every last one of the lackeys had left, and that left him alone with his old friend, Kishpaugh.

There were no cameras inside the warehouse. Smart move. The product was also offsite, which was a shame, but another smart move.

He leapt, took to the shadows and smashed his fist against Kishpaugh’s face. Then another, and another. He wore armored gloves, the kind that didn’t let talons out. There’d be DNA evidence against him otherwise.

Kishpaugh groaned and cried. “You can’t do this to me, Vakarian, you’re C-SEC.”

Garrus laughed. This was liberating. Five months ago he couldn’t. Now he could. And he said as much.

“I quit, Kishpaugh. Now tell me where you got the poison push or I get the talons out. And believe me, I want to. I sharpened them just for you.”

To make a point, Garrus bared his fifty four teeth again and snarled. It was a very good intimidation tactic on anything smaller than a Krogan.

Kishpaugh wouldn’t budge. Garrus had expected as much. He started choking him. In just a few seconds Kishpaugh croaked.

“OMEGA! It all comes from Omega!”

Garrus nodded, and got off him. He had gotten what he needed. Normally this would take months. First a case, then evidence his father would deem acceptable, and then hours in an interrogation room. But doing this, just coercing him to give up the information- so, so much easier.

Garrus Vakarian walked. He felt good for the first time in a long time. And normally, some other people didn’t. He did think it was funny though, the elevator he was waiting for to come down had C-SEC officers who had orders to bring him in for questioning. He laughed and asked them if he could buy them a drink first.

The law sure worked fast enough on the Citadel. For the criminals.

It did feel odd to walk into Central station again This time without a badge and his Carnifex with the reception desk. It was just a chat, they had assured him. His father wanted to talk to him.

A little bit later, after getting as comfortable as he could in the interrogation chamber, Castis Vakarian entered wearing a very solemn expression.

“Garrus.” Garrus felt a little pang of guilt at just how disappointed his father sounded, but he drowned that feeling under a familiar resentment and bubbling anger.

“Senior Detective Vakarian, to what do I owe the pleasure sir?”

Castis was taken aback. He had expected anger and resentment perhaps, but not cool detachment. It was for a moment and too subtle for a non Turian to detect, but his features twisted in the sharp agony only a father can feel when his own son refused to acknowledge him. Garrus felt another pang of guilt at that, but ignored it again.

“Listen, Garrus…”, Castis broke off, took a breath and steeled himself, “ I understand you are angry at the world but that’s not how things are done. There have been no formal charges, but if you keep at it I will have no choice but to lock you up. The rule of law applies equally for everyone.”

Now Garrus felt angry. Angry at his father, angry at the system, angry at the strictures of his society that made his father think like that and angry at the whole Universe.

“Lock me up? For what exactly? Do you have any evidence Detective Vakarian? How do you plan to build a case? Moral superiority and sympathy?”

Castis looked visibly hurt now. He’d been aware of the growing disconnect between him and his son but he’d never known what level it had reached.

“Garrus I-”

“I would call my lawyer but we both know my mother is in too bad a condition for either of us to waste any money on Citadel courts.” Garrus stood, his head high and his eyes full of a fire that filled his father with dread. Castis had seen that kind of fire before, and it had never ended well. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a shuttle to catch.”

Garrus Vakarian left the C-SEC Central offices after collecting his firearm from the reception desk. He took a taxi back to his apartment and picked up his luggage, then he boarded a shuttle leaving for Illium. Citadel Security logged that his entire luggage consisted of a set of Aldrin Labs’ Agent Armor, a custom Kuwashii visor, an M-97 Mantis Marksman’s Rifle, a Vindicator Battle Rifle, an M-6 Carnifex Pistol, Dextro MREs and two bottles of Turian Brandy. That was the last time for two years that Citadel Security heard of him.

Omega. The place where the Galaxy’s broken things came to die.

There was an unshakable shadow of death all over the place, from the dirty streets to the maze of a million alleys reeking of sweat and piss.

Garrus hadn’t really come here to sit out the rest of his days. He had come here to clean house.

Omega. The end of all things.

Garrus had found exactly what he wanted in Omega, and some more. Slowly but surely the legend of an Archangel grew. The Archangel that looked after the little people with nothing left and nowhere left to go.

His killcount grew astronomically. The stories around him grew too wild to point him down to a specific style. Blue Suns, Eclipse, Blood Pack, Batarian Hegemony, a million ragtag pirate gangs all came to fear Archangel.

Loudly, at muzzle velocity, Garrus Vakarian declared war. His war was against crime, against corruption, against the pipeline of narcotics that infected the core worlds and colonies alike, against slavers who relished in taking away freedom, against dictators, against those that fed on the helpless, against the very universe that had taken Shepard from him.

Liara T’Soni steadied herself. She didn’t know how long she had spent in this apartment in Illium, but she didn’t care.

She had killed people and she had backstabbed and abandoned the one person who in the end seemed to be on her side. Then when she had found Shepard’s body, she had handed it over to the very people he hated with every fibre of his being because the only thing she had wanted more than closure was a chance to get him back.

Now she had her wish.

The Athame Codex did not believe in resurrection. Those who claimed to bring back the dead were cheaters. She was already a very bad Asari, clinging to one human lover whose lifespan was one tenth that of hers and now she was an even worse scientist, handing over the body of a galactic hero to human supremacist terrorists he despised, knowing it wasn’t scientifically possible to resurrect a dead man. Who knew what kind of trap this was? Whether they’d use it to politicize events, whether they’d use it for unethical research.

She realised that she couldn’t care less about what happened to anyone else in the entire universe if she could get Shepard back. And she knew that unless there was Shepard to lead them, there would be no universe.

On her way to Illium, she had gotten in touch with the council of Matriarchs and Councilor Tevos. They had already convinced her trusteeship board, all supposed friends of her mother, to hand over her inheritance to them and refused acknowledgement when she brought up Indoctrination.

The saddest thing in her opinion was Tevos’ adamancy. Tevos chose to believe in her own lies. And Tevos forgot what she, Shepard and humanity had risked to save her. For that she would pay.

But for now, she had to bide her time. The council had ‘graciously’ agreed to clear charges of terrorism from her mother’s name, make it appear that she had been coerced into being Saren’s accomplice. They were also willing to part with a tenth of her mother’s inheritance, a ‘favour’ by Tevos, for which she indeed expected to have her feet kissed.

In return, she was to never set foot on Thessia ever again, and forfeit her researcher position for Serrice.

That stung. Armali and its memories were all she had left of her mother. And her position at Serrice was after decades of study and achievement. It was her very identity. And she guessed that the Matriarchs knew that. It wouldn’t have been too hard to guess. Liara T’Soni had demurely accepted their will. She had willingly taken exile and thanked them for it.

So here she was, on Illium. The most unique and dangerous place on the galaxy. Where wars on the streets were just as prominent as the wars of the mind.

Quietly, hiding her fangs, Liara T’Soni declared war. Her war was a lot more personal and yet spanned a lot more ground. Her war was against the Shadow Broker, the Collectors, the Council of Matriarchs and the Citadel Council. Her war was a war fought with secrets. She would beat them all at their own game.

She couldn’t wait to get to work.