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1.
When Anderson found the broken squad in the rubble of the Citadel, Garrus didn’t share the stinging wash of relief that had clearly overcome the human soldier. The man slung Tali’s arms over his shoulder, towing her out of the ruins, as the subordinate accompanying him extended a hand to the turian. Something slugged in Garrus’ insides when he took it, as if it was a mistake to. He wasn’t sure he deserved to touch another Alliance soldier as long as he lived.
It didn’t take long for the captain to notice the unmistakable absence, and his inquiry for her fired from his mouth and pierced Garrus’ flesh--whether it hit his heart or his head, he didn’t know. He was still too numb to be sure. The shotgun shell of Anderson’s words landed between them, sounding so loud that he could feel its vibrations coursing through his guilt-ridden veins. Nothing seemed like the right thing to say. How could he explain that he had messed up--that he had lost Shepard’s six in the meteor shower of terror as Sovereign rained down on their heads. Cursing himself silently for being such a poor excuse for a turian, Garrus could only respond with a small shake of his head. Something splayed then across the captain’s face that, despite his intensive C-Sec dealings with humans, he couldn’t quite recognize.
It seemed everyone’s jaws were wired shut as he and Tali were hastily shuffled away from the scene. It was as if words would stifle the magnitude of the galaxy’s loss that day. Or maybe it was just that there was nothing that could be said--that should be.
Garrus tossed a guilty glance at Anderson, who was not so subtly directing his attention at anything but the aliens in the room. The turian in him couldn’t help but wonder if the captain thought that humans would’ve been able to save her. If he thought that Shepard had made a mistake putting her trust in a naive Quarian kid, and a worn out turian cop.
He clenched his mandibles as he searched his diluted mind for anything he could say, anything that would make amends for his failures. For the entire galaxy’s failure of ever doubting the lost commander in the first place.
Garrus found himself caught off guard as Anderson’s head suddenly whipped around, eyes bright as a charging thanix cannon as they caught something behind their evacuating group. Garrus’ own dull bulbs were pulled in that direction, and his heart flickered rapidly against his ribs.
Thin wisps of red solar flares flit in the spaces between the Reaper’s parts, accompanying a dark figure moving with a determined passion not unfamiliar to him. It swept between bursts of flame, narrowly avoiding the carnage as they climbed atop a dismantled synthetic leg. The figure stood slowly, legs clearly shaking despite the thorough and stern composure, and there she was. Crisp and clear, and with a stance so proud that it almost brought Garrus to his knees, framed underneath a wildfire of red hair and streaks of soot stood the bloody Commander.
For a moment, it all seemed like a vision, perpetrated by the sick and twisted Spirits who refused to let those who had survived move on without suffering. Garrus knew that if they had only been paying attention, they would’ve noticed he was already broken. They would see Tali refusing to look anywhere but the ground, and how Anderson wore it plainly on his face that he felt it should have been him. It should’ve been anyone but her. Yet still, the dead stood proud in the mist of smoke and flame, right before his eyes. He wanted to curse the Spirits, to write them off for good after this final injustice.
But then, she smiled. That signature grin she would wear after a battle when she felt an ache in her very core but her heart still burst with the vibration of victory. Her eyes were dark, but wild, reflecting in the wreckage that she had lent a hand in creating.
And then Garrus realized. She was alive. Commander Shepard was alive.
2.
Garrus shouldn’t have been so surprised to see her in his final moments. He was no stranger to the Spirits playing cruel jokes on him.
But the minute her red hair pierced the scope of his sniper rifle, whipping around her face in abandon as she ran, eyes bright and fierce, he couldn’t suppress the gasp that shot out of him. He knew instantly then that he was dead; He must’ve taken one shot too many and grown too numb to have even noticed. Not that it really mattered to him that it was the end--he had been dead for two years already.
Seeing her though, that wasn’t something he hadn’t expected. That didn’t stop it from making an evil sort of sense for the one woman he trusted above all else-the one woman he had ever loved (and Spirits did it hurt to admit it now)-to come barreling into his hallucinations. A ghost of things past, but never really gone.
As the world turned around him, Garrus couldn’t help but feel a fierceness churning in his stomach, as wild as it had been the day he learned Shepard had died.
Anderson had showed up personally to the C-Sec Headquarters to tell him, all clenched teeth and narrow eyed in his mechanical delivery. It was one that he had probably already made to twenty other people. Garrus knew it wasn’t right, but it still stung him to know he wasn’t the first to be told. She had staked her flag in his heart and claimed his blue veins for her own, and he felt it was only fair for him to be told as soon as possible, so that the blood could drain his system, emptying as quickly as she had filled him. Garrus had to continuously remind himself that it wasn’t Anderson’s fault. Nobody knew the extent of what he felt for Shepard. Hell, Shepard didn’t even know how head over heels he was, and maybe that was what had made it so hard. He had never told her. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was reciprocated or not, the only regret he bore was that he had never told her everything that he needed to say. He often fantasized that maybe she would’ve loved him too, and she would’ve come with him. Or he with her. Both of them following the other to the ends of the universe. He had wanted to tell her eventually, maybe after a few drinks.
Then she died, and for the second time in his life he was alone, broken and guilty. He should’ve been there, he should’ve saved her.
But here she was now, gun unholstered and working the battlefield below him methodically. It was something so familiar, so beloved and dear that his heart swelled with an overwhelming desire to pick up his sniper rifle and join her, for old times sake. He didn’t know to what extent this vision could go, how long he had before he bled out or moved on, or whatever happened when it was all over. But in that moment, he didn’t care. The ghost of Shepard fueled something in him that he thought he had lost two years ago: a carnal need to keep going, to reach the end--to reach Shepard.
Slinging his rifle over the railing, Garrus set to work once more. They worked in tandem, Spectre and Archangel, in ways that were old and little out of practice, but still fluid and thorough. It took very little time for the soldiers to pick off every merc in the room, and the red-headed human wasted no time in darting up the stairs, inching closer to him every second that passed.
When she tore across the hall to stand firm in his path, Garrus’ breath hitched and his talons shook against his rifle. This must be it. She stood so strongly before him, an angel sent by the Spirits to guide him into whatever was beyond the pain he felt in this universe. He turned to face her finally, movements paced but sure.
“Archangel?” Shepard lifted her chin, her voice chiming through Garrus’ translators so loud that he could barely keep himself sane.
Something immediately felt off. She had turned his body into a live wire when he had caught her battle hardened swagger in his scope, but now as the pulse dissipated in his bones, it was slowly replaced by an aching pain reminiscent of bullets raging against his armor and pounding at his body. This didn’t seem like death.
Slowly, like the orbital cycle of Menae, Garrus pulled off his helmet, and no amount of aching in the world could keep him from detecting the unmistakable surprise in the commander’s eyes as she took him in.
This wasn’t death.
The turian couldn’t even keeps his legs from wobbling underneath the weight of his confusion, and he swooped down to perch on a cargo box so he could thoroughly scan every inch of the ghost before him. His head felt watered down by shock, and he was drowning in the aura of her.
“Shepard,” he breathed, and not for the first time in his life, couldn’t even begin to find the right words. “I thought you were dead.”
“Garrus!” Shepard cried, throwing her arms out in unmistakable human glee.
She looked well for being dead for two years, but she still looked different. The little scar that tore through her eyebrow-that Garrus used to examine so studiously during their more serious talks back on the Normandy-was gone, but her face wasn’t left without its marks. A new set of lacerations laced through her skin, with the unmistakable glow of cybernetics pulsing under the flesh. She looked tired, with softly drooped shoulders and a dim look in her eyes that anyone but Garrus wouldn’t have picked up under the red glow of synthetics.
She was different, he could tell. But nothing mattered to him in that moment. The woman he loved, the one he had mourned and sought death to rejoin, was back for another round.
3.
“Here, take him,” Shepard gave Tali a square look as she shifted Garrus into the quarian’s arms, eyes glaring everything that needed to be said. Tali didn’t hesitate to nod back, returning a knowing look to her commander-her friend-as she took the scarred turian’s weight onto her shoulders. The two women had always been so good at that, saying things with their bodies so clearly that words would’ve just warped the meaning.
“Shepard,” Garrus protested in disbelief, voice pierced with defiance that his body was too weak to act upon.
“You’ve gotta get out of here,” she commanded, a look unmistakable to the two aliens before her.
This wasn’t the way Garrus thought it would be. The three of them had entered every final battle together, from Saren, to the Collectors, to now. The Final Assault. They had stood behind cover together, rifles and shotguns peeking over walls and working in tandem to keep the other alive. It was a bond that was hard to dismantle, and Garrus had always pictured it ending the way it began: the three of them standing bloody and bruised in the midst of carnage, alive. But this time, his hands would be clasped in Shepard’s. Truly together. And he’d be damned if he would ever let Shepard face death again without him.
“And you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Don’t argue Garrus,” she shook her head, voice stern but with a pleading harmonic beneath it that only a turian could recognize.
“We’re in this till the end!” he demanded, hoping for once she’d be selfish. For once that she won’t gather the universe from everyone else and balance it on her shoulders. For once, that she’ll let him help. He knew by the way she looked at him, drinking him in like she did the first night they shared together, that she wasn’t going to do that.
“No matter what happens here,” she took a step forward, placing her soft digits on his scarred mandible. She had done this a thousand times before; as they made love, as she comforted him, as he comforted her, as they joked--never had it seemed so dire, so meaningful as it did now. “You know I love you. I always will.”
“Shepard...I…” the battle had frozen, bullets and lasers hanging in the grey skies around them as everything stopped. Leaving just them, Shepard and Vakarian. His mind had frozen too, his thoughts stumbled over everything he needed to say to her, to ensure that she knew. He wanted her to know about the minute he realized he was in love with her: when she kept him from killing Dr. Saleon and showed him a world he had closed himself so vigorously off from. How it had hit him like an overload charge, and he was so afraid that she had noticed so he masked it with an awe-struck “I’ve never met anyone like you”. He wanted her to know how nervous she had made him when she first propositioned him, the way he could feel the heat creep up his neck when she commented on her flexibility. He wanted her to know how he was so struck by her strange beauty the first night they made love, the way her skin looked under the observation window, surrounded by stars that skidded to a halt as they dusted the freckles on her face. How he was struck by it again and again every day, every moment since. He wanted to tell her--but he didn’t know how, his words lost to him as they so often were when he needed them most. There was only one thing he knew how to say to her, the only thing he had ever been sure of, had ever repeated endlessly in the back of his mind whenever she was around (and even when she was not). “I...love you too.”
His hand clasped around hers in earnest, his heart clenching as he spoke. He didn’t think it was enough, that those words couldn’t begin to hold the complexity of his feelings for her. But to Shepard, they were everything.
She smiled at him, and then the universe whipped her away from his grasp and suddenly his body was limp and cold and empty and he was just watching her run, on the home stretch of her final journey.
As he watched her biotics flare around her in a rush of her energy, he was struck for the first time how truly alien she was. The way that the world curled around her glow and the Reaper’s laser always just missed her nimble body made Garrus wonder if maybe she had always been a spirit after all.
Before he could see her reach the beam, the cargo doors of the Normandy slipped shut between them, and Garrus just had to trust that he would see Shepard again. After all, he always did.
4.
When Garrus’ time came, he was 147 years old and sleeping. It wasn’t the way he had always expected-being a seasoned soldier allows one zero qualms about an unavoidable death on the battlefield-but when did things ever go the way he planned?
Before he felt even a minute pass, so many familiar faces had greeted him fondly. Mordin was the first, and Garrus found himself more surprised than he had been in years that the salarian had very little to say. He supposed more time had passed since their last meeting for him than it had for Mordin. He was grateful for the briefness though, and although he had missed the doctor, he had a far bigger task ahead. Thane was next to seek him out, and the kind drell gave him a respectful nod with a knowing smile before moving to let the turian pass. It seemed that everyone was parting like waves for Garrus, and he supposed that after waiting so long for this, he must have had his mission written all over his face.
He moved quickly towards his destination, knowing exactly where to go to reach it, and though he moved quickly, it seemed like another hundred years had passed before he finally arrived.
The bar wasn’t what he had expected, after all, the few that he had seen before were usually neon and pulsing with the vibration of club music. This one, however, was simple, it felt more like a home than a place you go to drink away your sorrows. It was clearly very old, made of deep brown wood and surrounded by seats with soft green cushions. There were many people who sat there, some species he didn’t even recognize, all presumably waiting for their own loved ones to show up. Though he respectfully nodded to those who looked at him, Garrus had no interest in them. He scanned the area thoroughly, searching for any sign of her.
An unfamiliar face turned in her stool to greet him first, and though Garrus had never seen it before, he could tell who she was by the delicate and detailed purple hood that framed her features.
Tali grinned at him, unmasked but still letting her body say everything for her. She had always been good at that, Garrus remembered. It had been a long time since he’d seen his old friend, and he smiled back at her softly.
Then the quarian leaned back, no pretenses over why Garrus had come. Beside the quarian sat the familiar angel, with fiery hair and fierce green eyes that Garrus hadn’t seen in a very long time.
She looked no different from the last day he saw her, the day she defeated the reapers--the day she saved the universe (as she so often was prone to do), and Garrus’ mandibles widened as a choked noise freed itself from his throat.
Shepard wasted no time in latching onto him, throwing her arms around his neck, and running her nimble fingers across his face earnestly as she buried her own into his chest. Garrus could have stood there with her for eternity, nestled into each other, and in that moment it was so easy to forget that it had been over a hundred years since they had last held each other. She still fit so firmly in his arms, skin soft and pliable under his grasp. So much time had passed, but nothing had really changed.
Reluctantly, she pried herself away from him, eyes unreadable as she mimicked the old habit of placing a hand on his scarred mandible. She could barely fathom the emotions building up inside of her, it had been so long since she had truly felt anything. She had waited for him so long, watched him live on while she sat at the bar, patient but empty. She had never truly been alone there, she had Thane and Mordin, and eventually Tali had joined her as well. But she couldn't remember what is was like to feel alive again, until now.
“I don’t...I don’t even know what to say,” she choked out a laughter, eyes stinging and damp as she pressed her freckled forehead to his.
For the first time in Garrus’ existence, he did.
“Shepard,” he breathed, cupping her face in his hands. “Spirits, I’ve missed you.”
He kissed her with a fierce passion he thought he had lost long ago with her, and she smiled against his mouth as she returned it hungrily, the fire reigniting in their hearts.
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