Chapter Text
My duty, he tells his children, is not to make your lives easy. He could do so with ease – he has friends in the right places, the right kind of career, married into the right kind of family – but he does not. Instead, Tiberius Vakarian has etched duty, honor, and responsibility into the fabric of his children’s bones. He has never coddled them but has always supported them. He has never paved their way, but has taken pride in their status in the Hierarchy, statuses fully earned by their own merits. He has never once cashed in his political favors for his children, has never once bailed them out of trouble they have created; instead, he has taken pride in their accomplishments, their commitments. And he is very proud of his children.
His daughter, Solana, is one of the top operatives in Blackwatch, he knows, even if he can’t find much information on her classified missions. He sees the way she moves - careful, graceful - and his heart sings as he thinks of her putting her skills to use for the Hierarchy. She is beautiful and smart and swift, like her mother, and he knows the ancestors have blessed her path.
And then, there is his son, Garrus, whose path may have been ever thornier than his sister’s, but whose heart he loves no less.
Granted, his relationship with his son has always been more turbulent than he’d like, and the boy hasn’t always made decisions Tiberius has understood, but…
The war has, perhaps, reminded them both of what is important.
There were times when he has had doubts on whether he has succeeded in raising his eldest.
Garrus has always been so full of promise, and so frustratingly prone to throwing it away on a whim. He has struggled for years to forgive Garrus for tossing away a promising career with C-SEC merely to run around the Terminus playing spectre. Pallin thought Garrus mad, or at least foolish - and he shared the Executor’s opinion of the boy.
But Garrus, against all odds, succeeded, and in doing so became a hero on the Citadel. While he might not have approved of his son’s methods, he admired the results. When Garrus went back to C-SEC with a promotion in tow, he couldn't have been happier. Even Pallin begrudgingly admitted that perhaps Garrus had been right after all.
Then abruptly and completely without any warning, Garrus threw away his promising career again and disappeared for two years.
In the beginning, Tiberius was furious.
But then, there was only two years of cold, hard silence, and Tiberius found his anger fading in the face of overwhelming worry. Worry that gnaws at his gizzard with large, serrated teeth, driving him mad.
When Garrus returns home to him at last, both broken and scarred, Tiberius finds himself willing to listen to Garrus' story.
Garrus tells him of Shepard, of their travels, and of fantastical threads that he can just almost believe in. It's a difficult to believe the story, but Garrus does not lie.
Garrus does not discuss his injuries and Tiberius does not ask. He knows that whatever has happened, it has tempered the steel of his son’s fire, burnt the violence from his bones as it burnt the skin of his flesh.
The Garrus who disappeared was a boy - the Garrus who reappeared, a man.
And this new, adult Garrus is not nearly as selfish as he had once feared the boy to be.
While Garrus’ may have traveled in a human spectre’s ship for three years, his son has used the time well. He has compiled exhaustive evidence about the reapers, evidence which he has used to support the Hierarchy.
It's no secret the turians were best prepared, and that is due entirely to the efforts of his child.
Yes, he is proud of his son. He may not have always taken the road he wanted his son to walk, but Garrus has become a proper turian all the same.
And for the first time in a long time, he suspects Garrus is proud of him, too. They work as a team convincing Fedorian to allocate funds against the reapers and it feels right, to work side by side with his son. When they are separated by the war, they continue the good fight. He fights and takes pride in the fact that clan Vakarian is one of the many clans retaking Cipritine.
It has been a long time since they have had the same goal, his children and him.
In the days following the war, he is made Primarch as Victus moves on, and Garrus is there, smiling, as he takes the ceremonial vows.
He smiles back.
For the first time since his wife has died, he feels the pride that comes from something going right.
Sapientia would be proud of them, he thinks. It had always bothered her, he knew - the distance between her husband and her son.
He just wishes she had lived long enough to see it for herself.
Their family, he thinks, is growing too small.