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1.
Garrus Vakarian has a dream. It starts with a cascade of supernova explosions and ends with a planet, green and verdant with a red undergrowth, a lake that gleams with silver-scaled fish. The air is heavy in his lungs, ashy almost, and he imagines a volcano nearby, dirt and hard rock and the slow-churning birth of diamonds. He does not know why he is here. He does not know if they have won. He only knows —
Shepard.
But that's what Garrus Vakarian has always known, from the first moment he saw her on the Citadel, walking down the metallic paths with her elbows loose and swinging. The first time he saw her, he'd catalogued her human faults, her loose strands of hair and easily torn skin. Not Turian, he had thought, and that's still true. Shepard was not Turian, but as he learned, she could move like a Turian in a fight, dropping looseness for tight, guarded circles, flanking enemies with him, holding down the vanguard. Shepard might have been human, but she could —
James slides him an uneasy look. "Hey, we just crash landed on a foreign planet after an epic battle. We don't know anything about what happened to the commander."
"Was I talking? You need to get your ears checked," Garrus replies tightly. He is leading the exploratory team, heading towards the volcano and searching for any possible inhabitants. The rest of the crew are back at the crash site, setting up camp and waiting.
"No, but for a hard-shooting scarface Turian, your face is kind of an open book."
EDI is less sanguine. "If the Citadel and the mass relays were indeed exterminated, then the probability of Commander Shepard's survival approaches infinitesimal levels."
"If," James retorts, smacking aside a tenacious plant with a broken branch. "If, if, if. Face it, we're like goddamn babies out here. No intel at all!"
"For now," Garrus says. "We'll get intel. Tali will fix our communications systems, Joker and Cortez will get the ship running, and we'll be out of here in a week, tops."
"The likelihood—"
"EDI, don't," James interrupts.
She looks at him, and then at the sky. "Very well," she says. "Shall we continue?"
No other choice, Garrus thinks. They can either continue or they can drop dead right here and turn into bones for the animals to find, and Garrus will be damned if he finishes his days wandering lost in some kind of jungle like some bad Turian black ops training video. If he's going to die, he'll die with a rifle in his hand and a drink in the other. He'd do a lot for a good drink right now, followed by a nap and then some answers.
They don't get very many of those in the days to come: no drinks, no naps, no answers. After they explore the volcano, the three of them return to the camp where the others are waiting, and Tali shakes her head. No luck with the comms. Garrus goes to help her, but if their wunderkind Quarian can't do it, he's not going to be of much help. What Garrus does instead is mobilize the survivors, setting Dr. Chakwas to tend the wounded and the rest of the teams to assess the most pressing needs: food, water, shelter. This is supposed to be Shepard's job, but she isn't around, is she, and for a moment there's a horrible anger inside Garrus' chest, he is choking on it. But then Liara comes up to him and tells him they should move the camp out west, to be by the water, and he nods.
"Yeah, okay," he says, adjusting his visor. "We'll make the preparations. Move out."
They survive. In the heat of the day and the cold of the night. They survive, what's left of them, and some people do die, but they have to think of themselves like an organism, like a cell with multiple components, not individuals. As long as some of them survive, then it's a victory. It's fuck you to the Reapers, fuck you to the end of life in the galaxy — and that's what they do. They move their camp closer to the water, they bury their dead, they ration their sealed packets of preserved food, they go hunting and foraging and build tents out of moist, leafy canopies.
"Shepard would have been proud of us," Tali says, coming up to him one day. Garrus is sharpening some of the camp's rusty knives. He looks up at her when she approaches. She sits down by him.
"I don't want to talk about it," he says.
Tali folds her arms around her knees. It makes her look very young. "This must have been what it was like in the very beginning. Before the mass relays. Before we knew everything that was out there. Just each planet alone, quiet, in the dark."
"Tali," he says patiently, "are you drunk?"
"What? No, why would you think that?" she says. "Maybe you're drunk."
"I'm not drunk," says Garrus. There's nothing to drink. "I'm tired. I don't think I was this tired even when we were fighting Reapers. Strange, isn't it?"
"But we are fighting Reapers," Tali says quietly. "We're fighting what they did to us."
Garrus says nothing. The air moves through the camp, thick with mosquitoes, and he kills one in between two fingers, reptile-quick. The heat is getting hotter with each day; this was clearly not a planet designed for Turians and their armour. Quarians neither. Tali presses the curve of her mask against the crook of her elbow and sighs. "What do you think will be for dinner tonight?"
"Who's on cooking duty?"
"EDI, probably."
They both shudder.
Tali rises to her feet. "Maybe I should go help her." She peers at him. "But are you sure you're all right, Garrus? I know that's a silly question to ask because none of us are really — but is there — do you need?" She looks at a loss for words. "You were tossing and turning in your sleep last night," she finishes.
"Oh, that," Garrus says, raspy. "I was dreaming."
2.
Garrus Vakarian has a dream.
There is a planet with three moons, and there is a house by the water. He built it himself, every board in its place, and its wide, wide patio that wraps around the blue-painted door. His fingers smell of salt and beach, and all around them, beyond the house and the water, there are forests jagged with life. The locals don't go into the forest much. They're too afraid of the beasts that wait within. Better yet to stay by the water, they say, where it's safe.
Well. He's motherfucking Garrus Vakarian. He isn't afraid of the animals that dream in the woods. But he stays by the water most of the time, to keep his eye on the children playing in the sand, and their anxious parents grilling meat and fruit for their evening meal. It's sunset and he sits on his porch, in front of his house, which he built raised above all the rest — best vantage point on the beach. He sits there, relaxes, and guards the village like an old time Earth sheriff.
Sometimes, he remembers that there was another planet with tangled trees and long-fanged carnivores. It slips from his head more and more as the days go on, a ribbon unraveling as fast as little Juha's dress as she wades out into the water. But he remembers it, still: there was an uninhabited planet, they crashed, and Shepard was dead.
He curls his fingers into fists, reflexively. He changed that future. It no longer exists. Salt water rushes into his lungs, and it's only when he hears the footsteps to his right and sees Shepard coming in with her rifle slung over her shoulder that he relaxes.
"Where's my tiki drink?" she says. "You promised me a tiki drink when I got back." Her eyes flash dark with amusement.
Garrus leans back and looks at her, at the sweat in her hair and the bruise on her forearm. She's in a tank top with torn shorts, so completely different from the military uniforms she's worn over the years. He's not sure which he likes better. As a Turian, he has no personal investment in frivolous human clothing, no matter how many articles Citadel Vogue runs on the saviour of the galaxy's sartorial style. When they have to go off-planet and attend one of those nauseating galas Shepard keeps getting invited to, they both wear armour.
Her civilian style, he could tell them, is eau de freshly spilled blood, and on some days, popcorn.
Shepard lowers the rifle from her shoulder and props it up against the patio railing.
"You want me to pour you a fruity drink with an umbrella?" Garrus finally says. "Look at you. Not even three years into retirement and you're getting soft."
Quick as a flash, she's behind him. She has him in a headlock. "Say that again."
"Soft," Garrus says. She loosens her arms around him, but he leans back further, following the lingering smell of her skin. "Your response time to the flat tire yesterday was at least two minutes longer than it was four months ago. Your mechanical awareness is at least one of your abilities that's slipping."
Her eyes settle on him, sharp and commanding. "Mr. Vakarian," she says, "don't lie to your superior officer."
"A liar and an outlaw," he replies. "Good thing we're a matched set."
"Negative," Shepard says, crossing her arms. "You know, there are some places in this galaxy where they consider me mildly impressive."
"Like where?" Now he is laughing right in her face, laughing with a tickle that starts into his throat and turns into a growl. Shepard rolls her eyes at him before coming around to sit at his side, taking off her boots slowly and peeling off her wet socks. "Any luck with the hunt?" he asks her once his laughter's faded somewhat and Shepard's looking at him crookedly, waiting it out.
"Killed two ferranbeasts. I'll go back out tomorrow," she confirms.
It's Garrus who stays and provides security for the waterfront village in this newly colonized planet, but it's Shepard who goes into the wilds and takes on what they don't yet know. The villagers are a motley bunch of humans, Turians, Krogans, and Quarians looking for a new home after the destruction of the war. If they're intimidated by Garrus, who has become the de facto village chief, they're scared shitless in awe of Shepard. She's their lone ranger, out there with her gun, the watcher in the night. It's funny how Shepard used to inspire and lead, but these days she lets Garrus take care of the interpersonal stuff. The perks of retirement, she reminds him.
It works against her, sometimes. No one has yet to invite Shepard to the weekly poker game, while Garrus has managed to clean out half the colonists' pockets. They assume someone like Shepard has no interest in such banal things, whereas Garrus could inform them that just last week she got hooked on an Asari soap opera broadcast through their patchy satellites, and he found her in bed ready to make a very convincing argument about why Kenara was a fool to double-cross her wife's matriarch aunt. When she doesn't have the entire universe to save, Shepard's interests are rather expanded.
There's a part of him that's glad, though. Commander Shepard is everyone's hero, but she's his housemate, his wingman, and his bed partner. Some guys get all the luck in the world, and Garrus counts himself as one of them.
"Tell me at least you made dinner," Shepard says. "Tell me our neighbours won't find us digging in the garbage again for food we threw away yesterday."
Garrus groans. "Your fault, entirely."
"They think we're hopeless," Shepard says. She casts her eye down at the beach, where the children have stopped constructing elaborate sand castles and have started planning mutually assured destruction.
"If it doesn't come in a ration box, we are hopeless," Garrus points out.
"And this is how we're going to leave our legacies?" Shepard says. "You and me after the war, poorly domesticated, sewing ugly curtains and begging fellow colonists for scraps. No wonder they wouldn't let us adopt those Krogan babies."
"You got a problem with that?"
Shepard smiles. Garrus remembers why he has developed such a fascination with the structure of human facial muscles. "We could always commandeer the Normandy and kidnap a baby or two," she says with a straight face, and leans over to brush her thumb over his scars. They've finally learned how to make their bodies work together, to where Garrus no longer thinks twice about the hitch of her pulse pressed under his eye, but even so, this right now an unusually gentle touch for her. Then she smirks right into his eyes. "I'll teach them how to shoot. You can be in charge of the potty training."
"Best two out of three," Garrus challenges, and she is very much not impressed, which means they're kissing, right on the porch where everybody can see them. Some of the village children look up and squeal in horror. Ewwwww, they shout, but Shepard slants her mouth over his and he curls his fingers into the bulk of her shoulder, pulling her closer so they can kiss like adolescents, like survivors, like the best goddamn victors in the world.
3.
Garrus Vakarian has a dream, and he knows that Shepard is dead.
The planet drips water from leaves as thick as engines, and Tali counts the number of days they spend here, which is also the same as the number of days they've been trying to fix the ship. No luck on that front. The damage to the thrusters was too extensive, and it's not as if shiny replacement supplies grow on trees — Garrus would gladly swap any one of the planet's nectar-sweet tree-hanging fruit for a silver ticket out.
"I thought we were supposed to be a bunch of geniuses," Joker grouches as he wipes the sweat from his forehead.
"No one is doubting our intelligence," Liara says softly. "Only our ability to procure technological resources when we have no contact with the outside world."
"Limited contact," Tali amends. She's technically correct. They've managed to get the radio to pick up signals a handful of times, so they know there are probably passing ships with open frequencies. Garrus isn't sure if this gives them hope, or makes it worse.
"This is what we know." He ticks them off one by one. "The mass relays are gone. We're in an unidentified galaxy with a few other fleet members trapped with us, but even if their ships are operational, we still don't have the means for interstellar FTL travel. So we're stuck in this one patch of space."
"It's that simple, huh?" Kaiden says.
"It's that simple," Garrus replies, and they are all quiet for a long time. In the distance, the rest of the camp is waking up for a new morning; the sun grows swollen over the lip of the faraway volcano. EDI examines their crew impassively.
She speaks. "We must remember the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. No matter what happens to us now, on this planet, as far as we can ascertain, we are the fittest."
"Survival of the fittest?" Kaiden explodes. "How does that explain all those people who died? How does it explain Ashley? How does it explain Wrex? How does it explain Shepard?"
"You are mistaking my objective. My statement was meant as a—"
Kaiden doesn't care. "Where is Shepard?"
"She's gone." Garrus' voice cuts through them, deep and flat. "Shepard's gone and we're never getting her back. Forget it. Move on. The camp's hungry and there's no one to feed them."
Between the stranded crew, they have enough knowledge and expertise among them to build a nuclear bomb, to wipe out entire networks of planets, but these are the things they learn to focus on: make a fire, gut a fish, forage for herbs. The first year is hard. The second year is harder. The third year is hellish, and diseases from the jungle leave them haggard and feverish, cutting into the remaining crew's numbers like a fanged beast. Garrus is quickly acknowledged as their leader, even if Kaiden constantly disagrees. Well, let him. It's Garrus who leads the eulogies at funerals, Garrus who spearheads the raids into venomous spiders' dens.
In the fourth year, two of the crew members have a baby. The camp has a feast that day, and then they all promptly start fighting each other for the chance to hold the little human girl in their arms. Her parents name her Jane.
Jane cries at night, and then learns to walk, and then learns how to talk. There are other babies born not long after, more mouths to feed, but somehow no one resents them for it. It's a relief, for both the exhausted parents and the entire camp — a relief to have something else to live for. They take turns babysitting, telling stories, braiding hair, carving toys. Dr. Chakwas is crash-educated into pediatric medicine. Garrus learns to give piggyback rides without kids sliding off his armour.
There is a fifth year, a sixth, a seventh.
In all this time, they don't say her name around him. When Garrus approaches, voices fall hushed and apologetic.
"I don't even remember that much about her," he says when he can no longer stand it, a strange compulsion overcoming his tongue, if only to wipe off his crewmates' looks of uncomfortable pity. "It seems like a long time ago, now."
This is a lie. He remembers everything about her: the sharp cut of her hair, the stub of her fingernails, the way she switched guns. He remembers the smell of her, the musk of her sweat, the sinews of her thighs on white sheets. He remembers the way she stood, the way she walked, every last physicality — he remembers the sound of her laughter like an unexpected needle. Garrus could live as long as the Asari. He'll still remember.
The eighth year, the planet no longer seems strange to them. It opens up like a belly on an operating table. They launch bolder expeditions through the jungles, circumnavigating the stretch of humidity to see what else there is to discover on the other side. Liara goes with him one autumn afternoon, her own belly huge and soft. They think the child is James', though none of them are certain and Liara admits nothing. "It's no one's business," she had stated, and James at the time shrugged. Most of them take comfort in someone's tent at night; it's hardly the first time it will happen.
So they are in the jungle, and Liara is pointing out a particular species of bird she's undertaken to study, when they reach an uncharted lake. "There's a structure poking out from underneath," Garrus observes. "Might be a rock, might be something else." He wishes he had the hard data that his visor could provide him, but they don't have the battery power for that anymore. "I'll go take a look."
Turians don't swim well, but they can if they have to, and eight years on this planet means Garrus is pretty good at 'have to.' His trusty armour can shift and adjust to water density. He'll probably have a mental breakdown the day it finally gets scrapped.
The water is cool against his leathery skin. He can see a glimmer underneath, a beacon. His blood freezes. There is a moment of deep disorientation, and a strange thing happens.
—he is a child again, on Palaven. His grandfather is taking him to see the parade to honour fallen heroes.
—he is on Omega, and there are enemies battering down at his walls.
—he is C-Spec, and there is Saren Arterius speaking to the Council, and he knows, he just knows, that there is something wrong with that man, only he has no proof, not yet.
—he is holding Shepard's hand.
"It's tech," he says when he resurfaces.
Liara blossoms with excitement. "Let me see," she says. He hesitates, and she shoves him aside. He manually adjusts his internal files on pregnant Asari.
"It's Prothean tech," she says later. Her voice comes out fast with amazement. "What is Prothean tech doing in the middle of the lake?"
"They must have colonized this planet in the past," Garrus says. They're too far from the base camp, so they unroll their packs by the lake and Garrus starts a fire. He waits for the flicker of heat and then straightens. "What do you think it is?" he asks when he's ready. "Will it help us?"
"I don't know," Liara says. She drums her fingers absently against her huge belly. "I don't even want to make any assumptions without running tests, but just between you and me, Garrus — and this is the strangest part, I wouldn't believe it unless I had seen it..."
"What?" he asks impatiently.
"It looks like a mass relay."
Garrus twists his head around, fast. "You're joking."
"I must be," Liara says. "A mass relay in the middle of a lake? A mass relay that condensed in size? And none of us sensed it here? Impossible. And yet," she muses, "there is much about Prothean tech that we still don't know about, especially their experimentations right before the days of their extinction. When they knew the Reapers were coming for them... the things they must have tried."
Suddenly, Garrus knows. Liara must see his expression change; she knows better than to be fooled by his stoic Turian ways by now, but Garrus doesn't tell her. He knows, and he doesn't tell her. When they wake up the following morning and make their way back to base camp to share the news, he mulls over his newfound knowledge until it threatens to go feral in his brain. He's not sure, he doesn't have solid evidence — but he knows.
Space and time exist on the same continuum, a rough and serrated edge, and Garrus thinks of the crumbling universe around them. He thinks of the space between Shepard's toes.
He'll spend the rest of his life getting the relay to work. Every moment that he's not at camp, he's in the water. Liara, EDI, and Tali join him, and the others too. They work on the relay until their fingers are numb and they don't know their right from their left, except they do know that somewhere along the way the world got very, very messed up. This is their last chance to fix it.
They grow old. The children become toddlers, teenagers, and then adults. Tali dies of sickness. Joker dies of a fall. EDI loses power and shuts down. Kaiden kills himself. Liara goes missing. James has heart failure.
"We're going to win this war," Shepard said. "We don't have a choice."
"Uncle Garrus, you're pushing yourself too hard," Jane finally tells him. "You're older than most Turians ever live to. You've earned your rest."
"Soldiers don't rest," he says.
"A good soldier does when he's ready," Jane replies waspishly.
"Right, but I knew the best soldier of them all," he tells her. He goes right on doing his own damn thing, pushing on when everyone else is gone, because Garrus Vakarian has a dream, and this is what he sees: an unfurling of light, a pressure like air rising, sparks and engines and mass effect fields, and one day, it comes. Just like he imagined, just like he knew it would. The machine shifts. Water drains beneath his feet, the land bucks, and the stars come to roost closer than he has seen them in a long, long time. Actually, he has never seen the stars like this, even in the midst of war. There is an implosion; his old, grizzled body falls apart.
And Garrus is in the Citadel once more, hearing the noises of the bazaars and the marketplaces around him, as he struggles to relearn how to breathe. He is wearing his visor again and it is broadcasting a stream of intel: a date that makes his circulatory system jump. His skin is stretched piecemeal over his bones, his ears buzzing, and then there is a sound louder than all the rest. Footsteps, sharp and certain on the floor, when Commander Shepard turns the corner and comes down the hall.