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There’s a new voice in her nightmares tonight. “Had to be me, Shepard. Someone else might have gotten it wrong.” Mordin briefly cuts through the choir of the dead before joining them in their terrible harmony. Shepard wants to scream, to run, but here in nightmare world everything moves slowly. So she sits down and holds her head trying to drown out the sounds. She can’t, of course and she knows it.
-
Garrus shoots her a concerned look when she walks into the main battery and sits down on his workbench. He doesn’t even tell her to not move his tools, which is a sure sign he’s worried.
“How are you doing?”
Her first instinct is to lie, but he knows her too well. He would immediately catch it. “Bad.”
“Mordin?”
“Mordin, Kaidan, everything.”, she buries her head in her hands and Garrus immediately walks over and pulls her down from the workbench into a hug. His hugs involve more bones and are way warmer than if she would hug a human. Over the last few months they have become Shepard’s personal way of comfort. Garrus has become her comfort.
“It will be okay”, he mumbles into her hair. “Everything will be okay”
“You don’t know that”, Shepard replies. “Platitudes, Garrus.”
“I know”, he bends down to rest his forehead against hers. “But I need to believe it right now.”
Shepard wishes she could.
-
Garrus gets wounded on the next ground mission. Nothing big, just a bullet to the arm, but Shepard knows it was her fault. She didn’t pay proper attention. It was her fault he’s hurt. On some level she knows beating herself up isn’t going to help anyone, but at night she finds herself sitting on her bed arms wrapped around her knees going over every mistakes she’s made. Every life she could have saved, all the pain she’s caused. Garrus is sleeping next to her, blissfully unaware.
Shepard lies down and presses her forehead to his. She’s afraid that if she closes her eyes or falls asleep again she will find herself back in that grey forest, where the dead call her name. Sometimes the living are down there too . All the paniced or pained screams she has heard from Garrus, Tali and Liara over the years and the fear of losing them mixes in with the pain over the ones who’ve died .
-
“Do you ever notice that we never manage to get anything, quite right?”, she asks one evening.
Garrus turns his head from something he is studying on his padd to look at her, lying on her bed, looking through the ceiling window into space. She used to hate that window, it reminded her of suffocating, now the endless void is oddly calming. Space doesn’t care. About her or the reapers or her mistakes. Space just is.
“What do you mean?”, he replies.
“We...or I at least always make some mistake. Someone always dies. Or gets hurt.”
“Shepard if this is about my arm again, I’m fine.”
She sighs. “It’s not just your arm. I...I just never get it perfect. I never get anything right.”
“Now that’s just not true”, Garrus walks over to the bed and sits down next to her. “You are brilliant. You have saved me and everyone else on this ship more times than I can count.”
“You keep saying that but…”, she looks at him and her heart breaks at the worry and sadness in his eyes “I’m afraid, Garrus. I’m always afraid that I will make another mistake and that that time it won’t be just a little wound. That that time you will die. We keep narrowly escaping death and….at some point death will catch up.”
“Maybe, but you can’t blame yourself for that in advance.”, he lies down next to her and pulls her close. “All we can do is keep going.”
-
“Joker. Evac. NOW!”
The Normandy pulls in and Shepard pushes Garrus into safety. She did it, he’s safe. He’s going to be okay.
When she turns around to run at the beacon she can hear him yelling. Telling her to stop, to get back, but she has to get this right.
-
The A.I. that was once Commander Shepard feels no pain, no sadness, no guilt. All she knows is the mission to protect, to keep the galaxy safe. The tiny slither of her that still exists knows she did right. She saved everyone. She got it right.
At least that’s what it wants to believe, but it knows. The tiny piece of Commander Shepard that’s still in there knows she broke Garrus heart and it wonders if he will ever recover, if he will ever be fine or if she has doomed him to the same agony she once felt.
The A.I. that was once Commander Shepard watches over a new and better galaxy, fueled by the hope that in this universe she has created the one she loves will finally be safe.