Author's Note: This is a dark little drama/action tale presented in five vignettes. For those who want Garrus fluff and cuddles, please check out "Where Angels Fear To Tread." This story is not a romance. It is rated T for cussing and some disturbing content.

This story is NOT set in the same universe as "Where Angels Fear To Tread." This story presumes a female Shepard with both Paragon and Renegade tendencies, but other than that, leaves Shepard open to the imagination. This story also presumes, in effect, a Renegade!Garrus, in which I took a much darker interpretation of the character than I did in "Angels." There is, in fact, a great deal of darkness in Mr. Vakarian and I feel it sometimes gets overlooked in favour of a Paragon!Garrus interpretation.

Morgan of Salerone did a wonderful job proofreading this for me. Thanks very much—the story is stronger because of it. Thanks also to MitisVenatrix for a content and theme review.

The inspiration for this story, as well as the story and chapter titles, were taken from the poem "How to Kill" by Second World War soldier Keith Douglas, and I'd strongly suggest everyone here put (Douglas "How To Kill") into Google. For those of you who don't have a background in literary analysis, the poem is about a sniper, and an examination of how he depersonalizes his target in order to take the shot. The sniper describes his job using metaphors such as a child's game of ball and a kind of sorcery—but it is a sorcery that damns him. In the end, the ease at which he takes life has robbed him of some of his own humanity.

This story is dedicated to all the real-world soldiers who've come home with wounds that don't show on the outside.

*

Man of Dust

Chapter the First: To Make A Ghost

There's a world where nothing matters, and it's not so far away.

On every street in Omega you can see at least one person who's used some kind of drug to take them there. They're all ages, all genders and all species, and they sit with their backs against cold steel walls because they're so far beyond caring that their bodies are suffering in the dirt. Whatever drove them to sample whatever it is they're on—be it curiosity or a pressure to fit in or some earlier ache in their soul—their lives belong to the crave now, and they cycle rapidly between heaven and hell, their fixes an exultation that burns them out like fireworks, their withdrawals a torment as their bodies decay while they still breathe. They burn hard and bright and then their ashes crumble into nothingness.

Alcohol is also a drug. For many it is a temporary visit to the Other Side, to that world behind this one where past and future collapse into an eternal and singular present. They consider their day-trip to be a release, a brief break from the pressures of their real lives. But for some the trips become constant, a coping mechanism for those who cannot survive in a world of genuine feeling. These are the ones who crawl into the bottle, and when the clubs kick them out they join the druggies on the street corners, begging for money and drinking what they can.

It's not just drugs that can punch your ticket. Gambling. Sex. Dancing. Violence. All of them can tear the permeable barrier between this world and the other. Any of them can open an escape hatch.

Omega is a world of trapdoors with a thousand ways to fall.

Garrus Vakarian has never known whether to call these people—the thralls of the crave—victims or criminals. They are trapped in prisons of their own making, or so he used to think, but now he realizes that some of them have been delivered to the gutters by events beyond their control. In a cold and vast universe there have to exist horrors that would bring any sane person to this state. Garrus even knows some of those horrors by name.

But inevitably too many of these victims become perpetrators themselves, driven by their crave to commit unspeakable acts in search of their next release, because the ticket to the world where nothing matters isn't a one way trip. That world is so close to this one that they fall back across the border when they sober up, when their buzz wears off, when they wake up in the hospital with a broken jaw. When the gambler runs out of money and the sex addict's wife finds him in bed with another woman. When the music stops.

That's when some of them see the edge of the razor digging into their own flesh, and they step back from the brink and face the world where things matter.

Others don't. Or can't.

For those who don't or can't, is it justice to end their lives, or is it wrong—or is it mercy? What is it when your need becomes so great that you would commit any atrocity to yourself or others to open a trap door just one more time?

They fall into that cycle, all of them who feel the crave. They're less drawn to it than they are shoved towards it by the monsters that loom behind them. Sometimes it's worth whatever you have to do to breathe another day.

When you hurt for things you did and can't undo. When you hurt for things you failed to do in time. When you hurt for things that were done unto you. When you hurt because you are. Perhaps because someone else is not.

That's when you need a break, just a moment, just a breath. Just a single inhalation without pain—just one good night's sleep.

Just the numbness of a world where nothing matters.